Protestantism in Scotland - James Aitken Wylie

themselves with profound peace and quiet. Garnet
sent Fawkes to Rome with a letter to Clement,
supplicating that "commandment might come from
his Holiness, or else from Aquaviva, the General of
the Jesuits, for staying of all commotions of the
Catholics in England." So anxious were they not to
hurt a Protestant, or disturb the peace of the
kingdom, or shake his Majesty's throne. The sky is
clearing, said the Protestants, deceived by these
arts; the winter of Catholic discontent is past, and
all the clouds that lowered upon the land in the
days of Elizabeth are buried in the "deep sea" of
mutual conciliation. They knew not that the men
from whom those loud protestations of loyalty and
brotherly concord came were all the while storing
gunpowder in the vault underneath the House of
Lords, laying the train, and counting the hours
when they should fire it, and shake down the pillars
of the State, and dissolve the whole frame of the
realm. The way in which this hideous crime was
prevented, and England saved -- namely, by a letter
addressed to Lord Monteagle by one of the
conspirators, whose heart would seem to have
failed him at the last moment, leading to a search
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