Page:A history of the gunpowder plot-The conspiracy and its agents (1904).djvu/8

6 monograph dealing with the Plot, except the admirable volume of David Jardine, has the story of the conspiracy ever been told with anything like fidelity; and the ignorance of writers concerning the characters and careers of the conspirators themselves is surprising. It is this common ignorance that has helped Jesuits, and other interested persons, in their task of trying to obscure the history of the Plot as much as possible, with the view of inducing the modern world to call into question the accuracy of the facts, and by hook or by crook trying to clear the name and fame of Father Henry Garnet, and other Jesuit priests, from the imputation of the possession of a guilty knowledge of Robert Catesby's proceedings. All these ingenious attempts, however, to question the authenticity of the traditional story have ignominiously failed; and with more original evidence before us to-day than has hitherto been the case, we are able, at last, to form a fairly comprehensive view of the whole of the conspiracy concocted to blow up the Parliament House, and those in it, with gunpowder, on November 5, 1605, and to plunge the country, at the same time, into a state of civil war.

The vexed question as to Father Garnet's complicity in the Plot—about which a furious controversy has raged ever since the time of his