commanded all Jesuits, Seminarists, and other priests, to depart the realm before the 19th of March following, and not to return, under the penalty of being left to the rigour of the laws. These repeated threats were practically enforced by proceedings in Parliament, and generally throughout the country, which distinctly indicated to the dismayed Catholics a return to the persecutions and indignities of the reign of Elizabeth.
Though all were alike disappointed and discontented, it is clear that the general body of the English Catholics did not at this time contemplate forcible measures for the removal of their grievances. Many, however, and, in particular, those who were attached to the Jesuits’ party, now wholly despairing of obtaining from the justice of the King, or by peaceable means, any alleviation of their degradation and misery, and despising and rejecting the counsel of the more moderate, readily lent an ear to any scheme of vengeance however desperate and sanguinary.
The design of blowing up the House of Lords with gunpowder at the opening of Parliament, and thus destroying, at a single blow, the King, the Lords, and the Commons, was formed about the summer of 1604. The conceiver of this desperate and bloody vengeance was Robert Catesby, a Catholic, the son of Sir William Catesby, who had been several times imprisoned for recusancy, It is uncertain whether, in order of time, Catesby first disclosed his scheme to John Wright or to Thomas Winter, the former descended from a respectable family in Yorkshire, the Wrights of Plowland, in Holderness; the latter, from the Winters in
