Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/226

 CHAPTER XVIII LASTING EFFECTS OF THE GUNPOWDER TREASON

F the vast importance of the Gunpowder Treason, considered as an historical event, there can be no doubt. The consequences of its conception and failure are felt by English Roman Catholics even to this day. It determined for ever the question whether they could possibly recover the ground they had lost since the death of Queen Mary. The complete exposure of the conspirators' schemes was the one thing needed by the Protestant Government to serve as an excuse to crush, not a section only, but the whole of the Romanist party in England. Loyal Romanists, and disloyal, one and all had to suffer for the sins of a desperate gang of fanatics belonging to the Jesuit section; and the terror excited by the revelation of Catesby's plans lived on so forcibly in the public mind that when Titus Gates appeared, in the reign of James' grandson, with his improbable story, the fear that what had been attempted in the autumn of 1605 was being attempted again in London in the autumn of