land, and had
then been the medium for forming a connexion between this prince and
the Catholics. He was enraged because the assurances which he then
thought that he might make to the Catholics in the name of the King,
had not been fulfilled by the latter. In the spring of 1604, just at
the time when the peace between England and Spain was concluded, by
which no stipulations were made for the Catholics, they met one day in
a lonely house near S. Clement's Inn, and bound themselves by a sacred
and solemn oath to inviolable secrecy. It had been their intention
once more to submit to the assembled Parliament an urgent petition in
the name of the Catholics: but the resolutions of the House had
sufficed to convince them that nothing could be gained by this step.
Quite the contrary: it was apparent that the next session would impose
far heavier conditions on them. An attack on the person of the King,
or of his ministers, in the shape in which it had so often been
resolved upon, could not do much even if it were successful: for the
Parliament was always in reserve with its Protestant majority to
establish anti-Catholic statutes, and the judges to execute them.
Catesby now disclosed a plan which comprehended all their opponents at
once. The King himself and his eldest son, the officers of state and
of the court, the lords spiritual and temporal, the members of the
House of Commons, one and all at the moment when they were collected
to reopen Parliament, were to be blown into the air with gunpowder in
the hall where they assembled--there where they issued the detested
laws were they to be annihilated; vengeance was to be taken on them at
the same time that room was to be made for another order of things in
Church and State.

This project was not altogether new. Already under Elizabeth there had
been a talk of doing again to her what Bothwell had done or attempted
to do to Henry Darnley: but men had perceived even at that time that
this would not conduce to their purpose, and had hit upon a plan of
blowing the Queen and her Parliament into the air together. Henry
Garnet, the superior of the Jesuits, had been consulted on the
subject; and he had declared the enterprise lawful, and had only
advised them to spare as many of the innocent as possible in its
execution.[335] The scheme which had been started under Elizabeth was
resumed under King James, when men saw that his accession to the
throne did not produce the hoped-for change.