Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/283

Rh down a rope swinging over the moat. On several occasions he had to take refuge in one of the priest-holes in some old country house, and was often within an inch of recapture. In 1603 he (with Garnet) betrayed Father Watson to the Government, but reaped no personal benefit by this action. After the failure of the Plot, he baffled all the efforts of the Government to discover his whereabouts, and eventually, disguised as a footman in the service of the Spanish Ambassador, succeeded in crossing the channel on the very day of Father Garnet's execution. He never returned to England, and died at Rome, 1637.

The most pleasant feature in Gerard's English career was his friendship with Sir Everard Digby. Had Gerard known of the Plot, he might have prevented Digby from joining it. Digby, on the other hand, seems to have thought that Gerard both knew and approved of the Plot. Although an innocent man, had Gerard been captured he would, almost certainly, have shared the fate of Garnet, for the Government was determined to stop at nothing in order to implicate him in the conspiracy. The circumstance of his having given the Sacrament to some of the conspirators at the house behind Clement's Inn was magnified into a story that he had given them the Sacrament