Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/31

Rh he made from time to time with the utmost assurance. A lie was not a lie, if told in the interests of the plot. 'Master Catesby' complained Garnet, 'did me much wrong, and hath confessed that he told them he asked me a question in Queen Elizabeth's time of the powder action, and that I said it was lawful. All which is most untrue. He did it to draw in others.' A man of great courage and resolution, he possessed a wonderful power of making his friends both like and serve him. Utterly unscrupulous, he never repented. He never lost heart, and was always sanguine of success. Even when all was up, and his atrocious plans had utterly failed, he died game, falling in a desperate fight with the officers of the Crown, being determined that he should never be taken alive. He expired from his severe wounds, with his arms clasped round the feet of an image of the Virgin, to whose protection he had commended his sinful soul.

Robert Catesby was, as we have just shown, well fitted to be the promoter of so desperate an enterprise; and, indeed, he actually laid his plans with consummate skill; but his chances of success, nevertheless, were handicapped by one serious drawback, for the dangerous importance of which he did not make sufficient allowance, and on which I have already commented, namely, that in the ever open eyes of the Government he was a 'marked man.' His movements, as a fact, were watched constantly by spies, and a careful