Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/312

282 fighting the inquisitors he seems (to the very last) to have been buoyed up with some strange hope that he would not be put to death. All the time he seems to have been labouring like a man who possessed some great secret, which, if he could only divulge it, would demonstrate to the world that he was not quite so guilty as external evidences tended to indicate.

If Garnet induced Anne Vaux to communicate with Mounteagle and Tresham, we may be sure that he went about his work with sufficient craft to cover up his tracks, so that he could never be suspected by his co-religionists of having had a hand in the business. As soon as he discovered that Anne Vaux had obtained an insight into what was going on, he had wit enough to discern that, woman-like, she could not keep the secret to herself, and that, terrified at what she had heard, she would do her best to prevent the explosion, if only in order to save the innocent Roman Catholic peers in Parliament, such as the Lords Stourton, Mordaunt, Mounteagle, and Montague. That they were to be prevented from going to the Parliament by the conspirators she did not, of course, know, the final deliberations of the plotters to that end having only been taken at a very late date, and, of course, in secret. Garnet's task, therefore, in advising Anne Vaux to consult with Tresham or Mounteagle may have been a very easy one. Probably, if not almost certainly, Anne consulted him in confession