Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/236

206 have been the author, and her handwriting, to my mind, is by no means unlike that of the actual document, but when examined in the Tower she seems to have been treated, to a certain extent, as one who did not clearly know what had been secretly going on at Westminster, although she had been living for the last two years on terms of close friendship with nearly all the conspirators.

The claims of Francis Tresham to the authorship are very much stronger. 'That the writer of the letter,' says Dr. Gardiner, 'was Tresham there can be no reasonable doubt. The character of Tresham, the suspicions of his confederates, his own account of his proceedings, all point to him as the betrayer of the secret. If any doubt still remained, there is the additional evidence in the confidence which was after his death expressed by his friends, that if he survived the disease of which he died, he would have been safe from all fear of the confidences of the crime with which he was charged. This confidence they could only have derived from himself, and it could only have been founded on one ground.'

Dr. Gardiner's opinion is also shared by Lingard, who states, 'I will relate what seems, from Greenway's manuscript, to have been the opinion of the conspirators themselves. They attributed it to Tresham, and suspected a