Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/127

Rh this he appears to have become too ill to be frequently examined; but before dying he committed (in order to help Father Garnet) one of the most astounding acts of perjury on record, for he swore 'upon his salvation' that what he had previously said about Garnet and the Spanish treason was untrue, and that he had not seen Father Garnet for sixteen years.

This impudent perjury, instead of helping Garnet, only tended to hurt him, for Cecil had ample proofs that, so far from Tresham not having met Garnet for sixteen years, he had actually met him often during the last sixteen months, and even weeks. In the form of an official rejoinder to this death-bed declaration was produced a copy of a 'Treatise of Equivocation,' found in Tresham's lodgings, in which notes of approval of the doctrine of 'mental reservation' were written in Garnet's own handwriting. It was thus clear to all that Tresham was an able pupil of that past-master in the art of equivocation and dissimulation, Father Henry Garnet, S.J.

Let us now return to Guy Faukes, who had been all this time lodged in the Tower in very much less comfortable quarters than Tresham;