esby was
careful to impose the oath and engage the faith of the conspirator,
before disclosing the plot; and Tresham, the thirteenth and last, sworn
conspirator, on hearing the particulars, entirely disapproved of the
conspiracy, from which he tried to dissuade Catesby, offering him the
use of his own purse if he would even defer it.[8] Tresham could indeed
have desired nothing less than to become involved in such a matter. His
father had recently died, and he had succeeded to a considerable
property,[9] which alone induced his first cousin Catesby to bring him
into the plot. As Tresham wrote when in the Tower:[10] "I thank God I am
owner of such a fortune as is able to afford me what I desire, the
comfort whereof is so much the sweeter unto me, as I have spent most of
my time overburthened with debts and wants, and had resolved within
myself to spend my days quietly."[11] He acknowledged that his
intentions with regard to the other conspirators were "to ship them away
that they might have no means left them to contrive any more ... then to
have taken a course to have given the State advertisement by some
unknown means."[11] He was consequently the only conspirator who
remained behind and at large after Fawkes was taken and the others had
fled. There can be no reasonable doubt that Tresham, though not the
writer, was the sender of the letter; and upon this hypothesis all
investigators must go, as there is none other at all likely.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Salisbury, in his letter to Sir Charles Cornwallis,
Ambassador at Madrid (November 9), gives the hour as six o'clock.]

[Footnote 3: This was his secretary, Thomas Ward, who was known to
Monteagle as a friend of some of the conspirators (as Monteagle himself
was), and one of whom, Ward, the next morning told of the receipt of the
letter. "As a plan concocted by Monteagle and Tresham to stop the plot,
and at the same time to secure the escape of their guilty friends, the
little comedy at Hoxton was admirably concocted" ("What Gunpowder Plot
was," by S.R. Gardiner, D.C.L., 1897, p. 124).]

[Footnote 4: Father John Gerard (1564-1637) gives particulars of the
delivery of the letter at Hoxton in his contemporary "Narrative of the
Gunpowder Plot," published in 1872.]

[Footnote 5: "Calendar of Tresham Papers," p. 132.]

[Footnote 6: The word "yowe" (you), here cancelled in the original,
indicates the writer's first thoughts, and, no doubt, his real meaning.]

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