, Catesby, and Tresham
sent Thomas Winter into Spain, with a view to obtaining assistance from
the Spanish monarch against England. It was always found in the
projected invasions of England, that one of the chief difficulties was
the transportation of horses. To obviate this difficulty, therefore, the
Roman Catholics of England, or Winter in their name, engaged to provide
1500 or 2000 horses for the use of the Spanish troops on their landing
on our shores. At this time one of the English Jesuits was resident in
Madrid; and by this man Winter was introduced to one of the secretaries
of state, by whom he was assured that the king was anxious to undertake
any enterprise against England. The king of Spain further promised the
sum of one hundred thousand crowns, to be devoted to this special
service, and that he would effect a landing on the shores of England
during the next spring. Winter returned home at the end of the year, and
communicated his intelligence to Garnet, Catesby, and Tresham. The death
of the queen took place soon after, when Christopher Wright was sent
over into Spain by Garnet, for the purpose of conveying intelligence of
the queen's death, and also for the furtherance of the negotiation,
which had been already entered into during the previous year. Fawkes
also arrived in Spain soon after Wright. He had been sent from Brussels
by Sir William Stanley and Hugh Owen, two Englishmen, who had been
concerned in most of the treasons against Elizabeth.

Some of the Jesuits were concerned in all the treasons to which I have
already alluded; and the gunpowder treason was managed by the same
party, the actors being either Jesuits, or the disciples of Jesuits.
Jesuits were their directors, their confessors, and their governors. "I
never yet knew a treason without a Romish priest," said Sir Edward Coke,
at the trial of the conspirators; and on Garnet's trial he declares,
"Since the Jesuits set foot in this land, there never passed four years
without a most pestilent and pernicious treason, tending to the
subversion of the whole state." Shortly before the death of Elizabeth,
and while the negotiations just mentioned were going forward in Spain,
the pope, Clement VIII., addressed to the English Romanists the bulls to
which I have already referred in a former chapter; by which they were
instructed to oppose any one who should claim the crown after
Elizabeth's death, unless he would promise not merely to tolerate the
Roman