nce and another family,
who, besides their hatred to our religion, would be animated with
revenge for the tragical death of their predecessors. To serve any good
purpose, we must destroy, at one blow, the king, the royal family,
the lords, the commons; and bury all our enemies in one common ruin.
Happily, they are all assembled on the first meeting of the parliament,
and afford us the opportunity of glorious and useful vengeance. Great
preparations will not be requisite. A few of us, combining, may run a
mine below the hall in which they meet; and choosing the very moment
when the king harangues both houses, consign over to destruction these
determined foes to all piety and religion. Meanwhile, we ourselves
standing aloof, safe and unsuspected, shall triumph in being the
instruments of divine wrath, and shall behold with pleasure those
sacrilegious walls, in which were passed the edicts for proscribing our
church and butchering her children, tossed into a thousand fragments;
while their impious inhabitants, meditating, perhaps, still new
persecutions against us, pass from flames above to flames below, there
forever to endure the torments due to their offences."[*]

Piercy was charmed with this project of Catesby; and they agreed to
communicate the matter to a few more, and among the rest to Thomas
Winter, whom they sent over to Flanders in quest of Fawkes, an officer
in the Spanish service, with whose zeal and courage they were all
thoroughly acquainted. When they enlisted any new conspirator, in order
to bind him to secrecy, they always, together with an oath, employed
the communion, the most sacred rite of their religion.[**] And it is
remarkable, that no one of these pious devotees ever entertained
the least compunction with regard to the cruel massacre which they
projected, of whatever was great and eminent in the nation. Some of them
only were startled by the reflection, that of necessity many Catholics
must be present, as spectators or attendants on the king, or as having
seats in the house of peers: but Tesmond, a Jesuit, and Garnet, superior
of that order in England, removed these scruples, and showed them how
the interests of religion required that the innocent should here be
sacrificed with the guilty.

* History of the Gunpowder Treason.

** State Trials, vol. i. p. 190, 198, 210.

All this passed in the spring and summer of the year 1604; when the
conspirators also hired a house in Piercy's nam