We have now considered the Evidence leading up to the commission of the
respective acts that this Inquiry, at an earlier part, has attributed
severally to Christopher Wright and Father Oldcorne, who stand, as it
were, at the angular points in the base of that triangular movement of
revelation, at whose vertex is Thomas Ward (or Warde), the entirely
trustworthy friend and diplomatic intermediary common to both the
repentant conspirator and the beneficent Priest of the Society of Jesus.
But before proceeding with the Evidence and the deductions and suggestions
therefrom, which tend to prove that, _subsequent_ to the dictating of the
Letter by Christopher Wright and the penning of the same by Father
Oldcorne, these two Yorkshiremen were conscious of having performed the
several parts attributed unto them, let us deal with certain _objections_
that may be put forward as preliminary objections fatal to the contentions
of this Inquiry.
Now, there is an objection which, with a _primâ facie_ plausibleness, may
be advanced against the hypothesis that Christopher Wright was the
dictating, repentant, revealing conspirator, through whom primarily the
Plot was frustrated and overthrown.
And there is also a second objection that may be urged against the
hypothesis, with even still greater _primâ facie_ plausibleness, that
Father Edward Oldcorne, Priest and Jesuit, was the meritorious Penman of
the dictated Letter.
Each objection must be dealt with separately.
Let us take the objection in the case of Christopher Wright first, and,
having laid that one, proceed to the objection in the case of Edward
Oldcorne.
Now, a certain William Handy, servant to Sir Everard Digby, on the 27th
day of November, 1605, before (among others) Sir Julius Cæsar, Kt., Sir
Francis Bacon, Kt.,[110] and Sir George More, Kt., High Sheriff of Surrey
and Sussex, deposed (among other things) the following:——
That early on Wednesday morning, the 6th of November, as the fugitives
were proceeding from Norbrook to Alcester, he (Handy) heard the younger
Wright say, “That if they had had good luck they had made those in the
Parliament House fly with their heels upward to the sky;” and that “he
spake these words openly in the hearing of those which were with him,
which were commonly Mr. John Grant, the younger Grant, and Ambrose
Rookwood.”[111]
Now, Christopher Wright _may_ have used these words in the early part of
that November day, and every candid mind must allow that they are _not_
the words that one would expect to find in a sincerely repentant criminal.
But the philosopher knows that there is “a great deal of human nature in
Man.” While the experienced citizen of the world who knows men
practically, as the philosopher knows Man theoretically, will not be
literally amazed, or even unduly startled, at finding these words recorded
against Christopher Wright, even after (_ex hypothesi_) he had become as
one morally resurrected from the dead.
For it is to be remembered that Christopher Wright was the brother of John
Wright, and the brother-in-law of Thomas Percy, Thomas Percy having
married Martha Wright, of Plowland Hall. Now, concerning John Wright and
his brother-in-law, Thomas Percy, the following traits of character are
chronicled by their contemporary, Father John Gerard.[112]
“It was noted in him [_i.e._, Thomas Percy] and in Mr. John Wright (whose
sister he afterwards married) that if they had heard of any man in the
country to be esteemed more valiant and resolute than others, one or the
other of them would surely have picked some quarrel against him and fought
with him to have made trial of his valour.”
On the march then, with such relatives as these close at hand, there is no
antecedent improbability, but the contrary, in the supposal that
Christopher Wright used these words by way of a feint, to the end that he
might, peradventure, draw his companions away from those scaring
suspicions, by the haunting fear of which Wright’s self-consciousness
would be sure to be continually visited.
For “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
Truly, “The guilty suffer.” And it was part of the awful temporal
punishment wherewith severe, just Nemesis, the dread executioner of
Destiny, visited this——I still hold, all outward shows to the contrary
notwithstanding——repentant wrong-doer, that he should be fast bound to one
of the spiked, lacerating wheels of a flying chariot that he desired, “to
the finest fibre” of his tortured, writhing being, to have no part nor lot
in driving: fast bound, for the residue of that all too brief mortal
career, which, on that chill November morning, was rapidly drawing to its
shattered close.