ambitious and inoffensive. He was almost always of a good
old family. He was always a Cavalier. His peculiar notions were not
obtruded, and caused no annoyance. He did not, like a Puritan, torment
himself and others with scruples about everything that was pleasant. On
the contrary, he was as keen a sportsman, and as jolly a boon companion,
as any man who had taken the oath of supremacy and the declaration
against transubstantiation. He met his brother squires at the cover, was
in with them at the death, and, when the sport was over, took them home
with him to a venison pasty and to October four years in bottle. The
oppressions which he had undergone had not been such as to impel him
to any desperate resolution. Even when his Church was barbarously
persecuted, his life and property were in little danger. The most
impudent false witnesses could hardly venture to shock the common sense
of mankind by accusing him of being a conspirator. The Papists whom
Oates selected for attack were peers, prelates, Jesuits, Benedictines, a
busy political agent, a lawyer in high practice, a court physician. The
Roman Catholic country gentleman, protected by his obscurity, by his
peaceable demeanour, and by the good will of those among whom he lived,
carted his hay or filled his bag with game unmolested, while Coleman
and Langhorne, Whitbread and Pickering, Archbishop Plunkett and Lord
Stafford, died by the halter or the axe. An attempt was indeed made by
a knot of villains to bring home a charge of treason to Sir Thomas
Gascoigne, an aged Roman Catholic baronet of Yorkshire: but twelve of
the best gentlemen of the West Riding, who knew his way of life, could
not be convinced that their honest old acquaintance had hired cutthroats
to murder the King, and, in spite of charges which did very little
honour to the bench, found a verdict of Not Guilty. Sometimes, indeed,
the head of an old and respectable provincial family might reflect with
bitterness that he was excluded, on account of his religion, from places
of honour and authority which men of humbler descent and less ample
estate were thought competent to fill: but he was little disposed to
risk land and life in a struggle against overwhelming odds; and his
honest English spirit would have shrunk with horror from means such as
were contemplated by the Petres and Tyrconnels. Indeed he would have
been as ready as any of his Protestant neighbours to gird on his sword,
and to put pistols in his