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 which he was implicated (1601), and after that a change came over him. He became ‘staid and of good sober carriage.’ He kept much in the company of Catesby, who esteemed him for his valour and secrecy. His house at Twigmore in Lincolnshire, where he now chiefly resided, became the resort of priests, who went to him for his spiritual and their own corporal comfort (, Narrative, p. 59). John was one of the first initiated into the plot by his friend Catesby, probably at the same time as Thomas Winter [q. v.], i.e. January 1604. He now removed his family from Twigmore to a house belonging to Catesby at Lapworth in Warwickshire. He took an active part in all the operations of the conspirators, and on the eve of the actual discovery of the plot (on the afternoon of 4 Nov.) he fled from London with Catesby. At Holbeche on the morning of the 8th, when an accident took place with some gunpowder, he wished in his despair to ignite the rest so as to blow up the house and all. In the fight which followed with Sir Richard Walsh's men he and his brother fell mortally wounded. Sir Thomas Lawley, who was in this affair assisting the sheriff of Worcester, wrote to Salisbury: ‘I hasted to revive Catesby and Percy and the two Wrights, who lay deadly wounded on the ground, thinking by the recovery of these to have done unto his majesty better service than by suffering them to die,’ but the people standing by roughly stripped the bodies naked, and, no surgeon being at hand, they soon died (Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 617, p. 565, quoted in ‘Life of a Conspirator,’ 1895, p. 230).

(1570?–1605), the younger brother, before the plot was projected had been sent into Spain in March 1603, in accordance with the arrangement made with Thomas Winter, to inform Philip of the queen's death and to solicit the aid of the Spanish forces. He was, like Winter, furnished with letters of recommendation by Garnet to Creswell, and was followed two months later by Fawkes, who came into Spain from Brussels on a similar errand (, iv. 8, liii). Christopher was not called upon to take part in the powder conspiracy till Lent 1605, when the five workers at the mine, finding ‘the stone wall very hard to beat through,’ needed fresh hands. His fortunes were thenceforward linked with those of his brother, and he was mortally wounded with him on 8 Nov. 1605.

[Jardine's Narrative; Condition of Catholics in the Reign of James I; Father Gerard's Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris, S.J., 1871; Traditional History and the Spanish Treason, articles in the Month, May and June 1896, by the Rev. John Gerard, S.J.; What was the Gunpowder Plot? by Father Gerard, 1897; What Gunpowder Plot was, by S. R. Gardiner, 1897.] 

WRIGHT, JOHN (1805–1843?), Scots poet, born on 1 Sept. 1805, at the farmhouse of Auchencloigh in the parish of Sorn, Ayrshire, was the fourth child of James Wright of Galston in the same county, a coal-driver, by his wife, Grizzle Taylor (d. December 1842) of Mauchline. While he was still a child his parents removed to Galston, where he received a few months' schooling and learned to read, but not to write. He gave evidence of powers of memory by reciting the whole of the 119th Psalm in the Sabbath school to the discomfort of his audience. From the age of seven he assisted his father in driving coals, and at thirteen he was apprenticed to George Brown, a Galston weaver, a man of cultivated mind, who assisted his education and placed books at his disposal. While still a youth Wright composed fifteen hundred lines of a tragedy entitled ‘Mahomet, or the Hegira,’ which he was forced to retain in his memory until he learned to write at the age of seventeen. In 1824 he proceeded to Glasgow, carrying with him ‘The Retrospect’ and some smaller poems. On his arrival he saw John Struthers [q. v.] and Dugald Moore [q. v.], who approved his work and assisted him to go to Edinburgh. There he found patrons in ‘Christopher North’ and Henry Glassford Bell [q. v.], who helped him to obtain a publisher. ‘The Retrospect’ appeared in 1825, and was lauded by the ‘Quarterly Review’ and the ‘Monthly Review,’ as well as by Scottish journals. Some shorter poems which were published with it had the higher honour of being praised by Sir Walter Scott. Wright settled at Cambuslang, near Glasgow, where he married Margaret Chalmers, granddaughter of the parish schoolmaster, and worked as a weaver. Finding his means scanty he printed a second edition of the ‘Retrospect’ two or three years later, and made a tour through Scotland selling copies. He found that his fame was extensive, and the discovery was his ruin. The hospitality he received encouraged habits of intemperance which, a few months after his return to Cambuslang, completely mastered him. He was separated from his wife, and lived in poverty and wretchedness. In 1843 he made a determined effort to regulate his life. His friends assisted him by publishing at Ayr ‘The Whole Poetical Works of John Wright.’ Unfortunately, his reformation was either transient or too late, for he died