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A History of the Gunpowder Plot, the Conspiracy and Its Agents
A History of the Gunpowder Plot the Conspiracy and Its Agents Author:Philip Sidney Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE FOUNDER OF THE PLOT The name of Guy Faukes has, by reason of the all-important part assigned to him in the conspiracy, become so closely ide... more »ntified with its formation and its direction, that we are apt nowadays to look upon him as the principal plotter, whereas he was really subordinate to another, whose name is not quite so familiar to the man in the street. This, the principal plotter, was Robert Catesby. It was, ab initio, Catesby's Conspiracy. It was from his restless brain that the idea of blowing up the House of Peers with gunpowder first emanated.1 Having laid his plans, Catesby looked round for confederates, upon whom he could implicitly rely, to help him ; and, on his solicitation, they one after another promised to assist and obey him. He was from beginning to end the captain of the band. He hesitated at nothing to gain his own ends. Promises that he could not fulfil, statements about others that could not be true,he made from time to time with the utmost assurance. A lie was not a lie, if told in the interests of the plot. ' Master Catesby,' complained Garnet, 'did me much wrong, and hath confessed that he told them he asked me a question in Queen Elizabeth's time of the powder action, and that I said it was lawful. All which is most untrue. He did it to draw in others.' A man of great courage and resolution, he possessed a wonderful power of making his friends both like and serve him. Utterly unscrupulous, he never repented. He never lost heart, and was always sanguine of success. Even when all was up, and his atrocious plans had utterly failed, he died game, falling in a desperate fight with the officers of the Crown, being determined that he should never be taken alive. He expired from his severe wounds, with his arms clasped round the feet of...« less