William Parker,[3] the son and heir of Lord Morley, whose barony had been
created by King Edward I. in 1299, was called to the House of Lords as the
fourth Baron Mounteagle, in right of his mother the Honourable Elizabeth
Stanley, the only child and heiress of the third Baron Mounteagle, whose
wife was a Leybourne of Westmoreland.
At the time of the Plot (1605) the fourth Lord Mounteagle was thirty years
of age. His principal country residence appears to have been at Great
Hallingbury, near Bishop Stortford, in the County of Essex. His chief
town-house seems to have been in the Strand. He married before he was
eighteen years of age, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Thomas Tresham of
Rushton, Northamptonshire, a high-minded, scholarly Roman Catholic
gentleman of great wealth, who had been knighted at Kenilworth by Queen
Elizabeth in 1577.
Mounteagle was connected through his mother alone, to say nothing of his
father, with some of the noblest families in the land. Besides the then
well-nigh princely Lancashire House, the Stanleys Earls of Derby, to whom
he was related in both the paternal and maternal lines, through his mother
Elizabeth Stanley, Mounteagle was related, as cousin once removed, to
those twain gracious, beautiful souls, Anne Dacres Countess of Arundel and
Surrey, widow of the sainted Philip Howard Earl of Arundel and Surrey, and
to her sister the Lady Elizabeth Howard, wife of “Belted Will Howard”[4]
of Naworth Castle, the ancient home of the Lords Dacres of Gilsland, near
Carlisle, commonly called the Lords Dacres of the North, in
contradistinction to the Lords Dacres of the South, of Hurstmonceaux
Castle in the County of Sussex.
Mounteagle was, therefore, through his mother, a near kinsman to the
remarkable Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, who married Aletheia, the only
child and heiress of Gilbert, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, and god-daughter
of Queen Elizabeth.
This Earl of Arundel eventually became the well-known patron of the fine
arts. But in the year 1605 the young peer had not yet quite attained his
majority.
Mounteagle, again, through his mother’s relationship with the gifted
Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel just mentioned, would be also connected with
a nobleman who at that epoch was counted a very model of “the pomp, pride,
and circumstance of ancient nobility,” with John Lord Lumley[5] of Lumley
Castle in the County Palatine of Durham, whose wife was Jane, daughter of
Henry Fitzalan Earl of Arundel, a nobleman “exceeding magnifical,” who
indeed in his day had even cherished aspirations to the hand of the last
representative of the Royal House of Tudor herself.
Lord Mounteagle consorted much with English Roman Catholics, and, in some
sense, prior to the year 1605, was of that religion himself. He had been
present with his wife’s brother Francis Tresham a little after the
Midsummer of 1605 at Fremland in Essex, on the occasion of the celebrated
meeting when Father Henry Garnet, the head of the Jesuits in England, took
occasion to have special warning speech with Catesby respecting a general
question propounded by Catesby to Garnet about a month or six weeks
previously (_i.e._, the beginning of Trinity Term, 1605), and from the
answer to which general question Catesby shamefully drew that particular
conclusion which the promptings of his evil will desired, in order that
the enormity he had purposed might be made acceptable to the wavering
conscience of any dubious fellow-plotter against whose resurgent sense of
right and wrong he thought he might have to strive.
Lord Mounteagle is a difficult man accurately to reckon up, either
intellectually, morally, or religiously. For he seems in all three aspects
to have been a slightly ambiguous person.[A] Yet certainly he was no mere
titled fool, with a head-piece like a windmill. Far from it: he was
probably a man of sufficient, though not, I think, of the very highest
intelligence, good-natured, easy-going, and of very engaging manners.[B]
[Footnote A: It is curious and amusing to hear that the following was the
opinion of Robert Catesby concerning the peerage of his day:——“He made
account of the nobility as of atheists, fools, and cowards; and that lusty
bodies would be better for the commonwealth than they.”——See “_Keyes’
Examination_,” Record Office.]
[Footnote B: A certain English periodical, a few years ago, spoke
admiringly of Lord Mounteagle’s twentieth century connection, the present
Duke of Devonshire, as being one’s _beau-ideal_ of the “you-be-damned”
type of Englishman. Probably the same periodical would have found, had it
been in existence in the seventeenth century, a similar contentment in the
contemplation of the fourth Lord Mounteagle.]
By his contemporaries, it is evident that even prior to 1605 Mounteagle
was made much of and greatly courted. But less, I opine, on account of the
intellectual and moral qualities wherewith he was endowed, than on account
of the exalted station of his kith and kin and the general excellency and
eminency of his own external graces and gifts of fortune.
So much, then, for the present, concerning the now famous William Parker
fourth Baron Mounteagle, whom History has crowned with a wreath of
immortals.