Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/298

268 'If it may please your Majesty, can you remember that the Lord Chief Justice Popham, and Sir Thomas Challoner, Kt., had a hand in the discovery of the practices of the Jesuits in the Powder Plot, and did reveal the same to your Majesty, for two years' space almost before the said Treason burst forth by an obscure letter sent to the Lord Mounteagle, which your Majesty, like an angel of God, interpreted touching the House, then intended to be given by powder? The man who informed Sir Thomas Challoner and Lord Popham of the said Jesuitical practices, their meetings, and traitorous designs in that matter, whereof from time to time they informed your Majesty, was one Wright, who hath your Majesty's hand for his so doing, and never received any reward for his pains and charges laid out concerning the same.'

This Henry Wright, it should be remarked en passant, was not the only notable agent employed by the Government to discover 'the practices in the Powder Plot' of the Jesuits and others. Among those employed to procure information likely to incriminate the priests was no less a person than Ben Jonson, the poet, who was for some years a Papist. He totally failed, however, to procure any information against the priests, but expressed his opinion that the discovery of Catesby's conspiracy would cast so great an odium upon the Roman Church in England that a great number of the Roman Catholic gentry would become Protestants.