Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/305

Rh which took place between the pair after Garnet's incarceration in the Tower. One of the first questions asked by him, in a letter, which Garnet hoped would be smuggled safely out of the Tower, was, 'Where is Mrs. Anne? 'In reply to Garnet, she signs herself, 'Yours, and not my own.'

I have said above that Francis Tresham and Company, when arranging for the delivery of the anonymous letter at Hoxton, were probably helped by some other party whose name has not come down to us. This person, as I have hinted, may have been a Jesuit priest. But there may also have been a woman in the case. That Mrs. Abington could have materially helped in the matter, I cannot as I have already stated believe. That she wrote the letter is a theory unsupported by proof or probability, and seems to have originated with some silly story told by one of her Worcestershire neighbours, after her death. If there was a woman in the case, it is almost certain to have been none other than Anne Vaux. From the curiosity displayed by her a few weeks before the fatal Fifth, it is clear that she was anxious to know what was going on, and evidently did get eventually to know, for she arranged where to 'bestow herself till the burst was past in the beginning of the Parliament.'

This leads us back again to the question, Could Anne Vaux have written the letter to Lord Mounteagle? To this query I will now tack on