were cognisant of its existence and its plans, such as Lord Mounteagle, Father Greenway, and Father Garnet.
As to the actual oath used by the conspirators, the ensuing is the official and generally received version of the text, but whether it is a strictly accurate version I rather venture to question—
'You shall swear by the Blessed Trinity, and by the Sacrament you now propose to receive, never to disclose directly or indirectly, by word or circumstance, the matter that shall be proposed to you to keep secret, nor desist from the execution thereof until the rest shall give you leave.'
From the terms of this oath it is plain, as additional evidence reveals, that it was the custom of the plotters to hear Mass and receive the Host on joining the conspiracy. The officiating priests seem always to have been Jesuits, but the best of them, Father John Gerard,[1] was ignorant of the actual existence of the plot. A man of rather more scrupulous character than his colleagues—Garnet, Hart, Baldwin, Oldcorne, or Greenway—it would not (as Sir Everard Digby confessed) have been prudent to inform him of this diabolical measure's being. In common with others of his Order employed on the English Mission, Father Gerard was a man of many pseudonyms, it not
- ↑ This Father Gerard, S.J., must not be confused with the Father John Gerard, S.J., author of What was the Gunpowder Plot? (published in 1897).
