the Winters, Grant, Tresham,
Keyes, and the Littletons were all members of good families, and some of
them of very high families,--as Percy, Digby, Rookwood, and Catesby.
Some of them had been Protestants,--as Catesby and Percy; and Digby had
been brought up in a Protestant house. Fawkes was of respectable
parentage and of good education. Father Garnet, on his trial, was spoken
of by Sir Edward Coke as having "many excellent gifts and endowments of
nature: by birth a gentleman, by education a scholar, by art learned,
and a good linguist." He was brought up a Protestant. That Catholics of
such standing, and with such training as should have taught them better,
should have engaged in so wicked a conspiracy, was one of the chief
reasons why adherents of the ancient religion were treated so cruelly in
England for more than two centuries. Titus Oates's invention, the Popish
Plot, never would have found believers, had not men remembered the
Gunpowder Plot. In Cromwell's time, and during the civil war that
preceded it, assassination plots were common, and some succeeded. The
Cavaliers had very loose notions on the subject. They killed an English
envoy in Holland and another in Spain. Cromwell was almost as much a
target as Louis Philippe became after he was converted, for his sins,
into a Citizen King. It is even asserted that he feared assassination,
and he was not in the habit of fearing many things. The court of the
exiled Stuarts teemed with assassins; and projects for murdering the
Protector were there formed, as well as in England. Nothing but the good
intelligence which Cromwell purchased saved his life. Charles II., in
his turn, became the object of assassins' attentions. Some of those who
meant to kill him were superior men,--as Richard Rumbold, who was able,
brave, honest, and pious. True, Rumbold in dying expressed his
abhorrence of assassination, and denied that he ever had countenanced
it; but the distinction which he made, and on which his dying
expressions were founded, can deceive no one, and we find it difficult
to believe that they deceived Rumbold himself. To have killed the King
and the Duke of York after the manner spoken of by the Rye-House
plotters would have been to assassinate them, and no amount of sophistry
could have given to the conspiracy any other character than that of an
assassination plot. William III. lived in almost as great danger of
dying by the hand of an assassin as his immortal ancestor