Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/270

240 destined to help the Spanish forces in the Netherlands.

Liberated from the Tower early in August, 1606, Anne Vaux, although little is known of her subsequent career, maintained all her old devotion to her religion, and as late as the year 1635 we find her keeping a Jesuitical school in Derbyshire for Roman Catholic children, which was broken up by order of the Privy Council.

That Anne Vaux was a willing accessory before the fact to the Gunpowder Plot I refuse to believe. She was so much under the influence of the Jesuits that she may have been desirous of aiding in any mild scheme for helping her co-religionists, but she was too honest to have joined in so sanguinary a business as the Gunpowder Treason. According to her evidence in the Tower (where nothing material was proved against her), she professed to have been much shocked at Garnet's connection with the plotters. Most of her letters to Garnet in the Tower were intercepted by the gaoler, and her handwriting is, as I have hinted, by no means unlike that of the Lord Mounteagle's anonymous correspondent. She seems also to have known that 'a plot was hatching' some weeks before the 'Powder' Plot was discovered.

—This Jesuit lay-brother,