s conspiracy against
Elizabeth, Fawkes's conspiracy against James, Gerard's conspiracy
against Cromwell, the Rye House conspiracy, the Cato Street conspiracy,
were all discovered, frustrated and punished. In truth such a conspiracy
is here exposed to equal danger from the good and from the bad qualities
of the conspirators. Scarcely any Englishman, not utterly destitute of
conscience and honour, will engage in a plot for slaying an unsuspecting
fellow creature; and a wretch who has neither conscience nor honour is
likely to think much on the danger which he incurs by being true to his
associates, and on the rewards which he may obtain by betraying them.
There are, it is true, persons in whom religious or political fanaticism
has destroyed all moral sensibility on one particular point, and yet has
left that sensibility generally unimpaired. Such a person was Digby. He
had no scruple about blowing King, Lords and Commons into the air. Yet
to his accomplices he was religiously and chivalrously faithful; nor
could even the fear of the rack extort from him one word to their
prejudice. But this union of depravity and heroism is very rare. The
vast majority of men are either not vicious enough or not virtuous
enough to be loyal and devoted members of treacherous and cruel
confederacies; and, if a single member should want either the necessary
vice or the necessary virtue, the whole confederacy is in danger. To
bring together in one body forty Englishmen, all hardened cutthroats,
and yet all so upright and generous that neither the hope of opulence
nor the dread of the gallows can tempt any one of them to be false to
the rest, has hitherto been found, and will, it is to be hoped, always
be found impossible.

There were among Barclay's followers both men too bad and men too good
to be trusted with such a secret as his. The first whose heart failed
him was Fisher. Even before the time and place of the crime had been
fixed, he obtained an audience of Portland, and told that lord that a
design was forming against the King's life. Some days later Fisher came
again with more precise intelligence. But his character was not such
as entitled him to much credit; and the knavery of Fuller, of Young, of
Whitney and of Taffe, had made men of sense slow to believe stories of
plots. Portland, therefore, though in general very easily alarmed where
the safety of his master and friend was concerned, seems to have thought
little about the matter.