[19] The portion printed in italics was underlined by Coke for omission when the statement was read at the trial. The "4 besides himself," having reference to Monteagle, was therefore suppressed; the other suppressions in the statement were made for obvious and unfair reasons.

[20] "Walley" was one of Father Garnet's aliases.

[21] This is very suggestive of a law-writer's spelling of "message" (messuage and tenement).

[22] When Garnet returned from Rome in 1585, as Superior of the Jesuits in England, he made the Treshams' acquaintance, being a prominent Roman Catholic family, when Francis was eighteen. Garnet was not their confessor, and the acquaintance had dropped for at least sixteen years before the Spanish Treason in 1602. Garnet's statement, made (March 23, 1605-6) after Tresham's death, is: "I knew him about 18 years ago, but since discontinued my acquaintance until the time between his trouble in my lord of Essex's tumult and the Queen's death" (1602-3). Garnet would have neither motive nor inclination to shield Tresham, whose betrayal of the plot had brought Garnet to the Tower. He might otherwise have discerned Tresham's real meaning in his statement of "sixteen years before," which the contemporary Jesuit Father Gerard correctly interprets as before 1602 in his narrative of the plot. It was not Garnet's complicity in the Spanish Treason in the previous reign (for which he had his pardon) that the Government cared about, and that so shook Salisbury, but simply Tresham's dying statement being misunderstood to mean that he had not seen Garnet for the past sixteen years, which is all that the present writer is concerned with.

[23] "State Papers, Domestic," James I., xvi. 62.

[24] So he said at the trial: "She came to see me, but I spared either to speak with her or hear her." But Mrs. Tresham in her examination said that, "in respect of her sorrow and heaviness," she "was enforced to send it"; and in her note enclosing the dying statement to Sir Walter Cope for delivery, she wrote: "My sorrows are such that I am altogether unfit to come abroad; wherefore I would entreat you to deliver it yourself unto my lord, that I may have my husband's desire fulfilled therein" ("State Papers, Domestic," James I., ccxvi. 211).

[25] Examination of Mrs. Tresham (ibid., ccxvi. 209).

[26] Examination of William Vavasour (ibid., ccxvi. 207).

[27] Vavasour, in his authentic and ordinary writing, used flat-topped "g's," as seen in the anonymous letter, as well as in No. 2, ascribed to him.

[28] The deed of Robert Catesby's marriage settlement with Katherine, eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh, of Stoneleigh (1592), in the possession of T.W. Whitmore-Jones; Esq., of Chastleton House, Oxon, is in a similar legal hand, with precisely the same peculiarities of "s," "g," "w," "h," etc. A law-writer's hand to-day is in a "copper-plate" style, which, although most suitable for the purpose, is not the kind of hand that an educated person would write whose business was not copying, and there was then a similar distinction between them.

[29] Apparently owing to restrictions of space and paper.

[30] The original letter is framed and exhibited upon a pedestal in the Museum of the Public Record Office. The facsimile has, therefore, had to be made from a negative taken of the letter as seen through glass, while the other facsimiles have the advantage of being made from negatives taken of documents unglazed.