46 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



found anything approaching even to a complete account 

 of an event so important as the Gunpowder Treason ? 

 Who wrote the letter to Monteagle ? and at whose 

 instigation ? Was the Government cognizant before 

 that letter was written of the exact nature of the con- 

 spiracy ? Where are the documents which should 

 point most clearly to the complicity of the Provincial 

 of the English Jesuits? Echo answers "Where?" 

 and will continue to answer so to the end of the 

 chapter. 



It is from this point of view, though not from this 

 point of view only, that Mr. Hall's defence of Darrell 

 seems to me inconclusive. The Darrell papers, or rather 

 such as are now in the Record Office, are all that he 

 relies upon ; and the Darrell papers really have little to 

 do with anything but farm accounts. Mr. Hall, in 

 truth, has only got hold of one end of the stick. There 

 is a lack of cause for effect, as a consequence, at the 

 very basis of his argument. And the same flaw, if I 

 may say so, runs through it. We are shown at the 

 outset, a man at feud with all his neighbours, accused of 

 one murder, suspected of another, his name a by-word 

 for profligacy and something worse, and we are told 

 that the only reason for this notorious reputation was 

 that he was a wealthy landowner, and that his neigh- 

 bours wanted to grab his farms ! As if the whole 

 energies of an Elizabethan country gentleman— the 

 contemporary of Raleigh, Sidney, Essex, be it remem- 

 bered — were devoted to this pastoral pursuit ! Mr. 

 Hall indeed would have us believe that they were ; as 

 he would have us believe, as an excuse for Darrell's 

 amour with Lady Hungerford, " that it was as common 

 for men of his class to debauch their neighbours' wives, 

 as for two yeomen to draw on each other at a country 

 fair ; " but surely Mr. Hall is thinking of times when 

 carving-knives were made of flint-stones and authors 

 lived in caves and ate each other. And the arguments 

 that he adduces to prove that his hero was not the 



