Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/302

272 that they would have rashly awaited hopeless ruin by staying on at their posts, as they did. Perhaps both he and Mounteagle were frightened at what Winter and Catesby might divulge, if caught; and, up to the date of Tresham's death, this astute pair must have spent many a mauvais quart d'heure. Tresham's boasts that, conspirator though he was, his neck was safe, must have borne reference to the fact that influential parties would suffer if he were injured, and those others must have included Mounteagle and Warde.

The identity of the nameless messenger who delivered the letter at Mounteagle's house is also an unsolved mystery. No effort seems to have been made to discover who he was. By whom was he sent? Whence did he come? What was he like? 'A tall man, wrapped in a cloak' is all we are told about him, and nothing more. He appears suddenly on the scene at night, presses a letter into the hands of Mounteagle's footman, and disappears again, and for ever, into the darkness! This individual may, of course, merely have been an illiterate man, simply hired to deliver a letter to Lord Mounteagle, and ignorant all the while of the letter's contents; or he may have been a trusted person in the service of Mounteagle, Warde, and Tresham. Had he been, however, a mere ordinary messenger, he would have come forward, after the discovery of the plot, and claimed a reward from the State for performing