THE HOLYHEAD ROAD 34 i 



closed so far as the directest route is concerned, the 

 earlier route by Chester has another link to add to its 

 story. A short distance from Newport Pagnell (fifty- 

 one miles from London), stands Gayhurst, — the fine 

 Elizabethan house once the home of Sir Everard Digby. 

 Of him a sympathetic historian writes, " His youth, his 

 personal graces, the constancy which he had exhibited 

 whilst he believed himself a martyr in a good cause, the 

 deep sorrow which he testified on becoming sensible of 

 his error, seem to have moved all hearts with pity and 

 even admiration ; and if so detestable a villainy as the 

 Gunpowder Plot may be permitted to have its hero 

 Everard Digby was undoubtedly the man." 



The gray walls of his beautiful Buckinghamshire home 

 were indeed witnesses at all events of some of the most 

 suggestive incidents in the heart-quaking scheme. 

 Fawkes was a frequent guest here — meditating through 

 the prolonged rains which heralded the approach of the 

 destined day, on the state of the powder, by now safely 

 placed under the Parliament House ; riding to and fro 

 frequently from London ; often an unexpected, always a 

 welcome guest. From Gayhurst, besides, set out that 

 Pilgrimage to St. Winifred's well, in Flintshire, the 

 motive of which was so much discussed after the 

 discovery of the Conspiracy. Motives apart however, 

 what is more important from my point of view is that 

 the company of about thirty persons — all relations of 

 the conspirators ; some of the actual conspirators among 

 these, travelled in coaches — proceeded by Daventry to 

 John Grant's house at Norbrook, a fine, melancholy, 

 moated manor once (where is it now ? ), thence to 

 Robert Winter's, at Huddington, and so to Flintshire 

 by Shrewsbury. 



The fact that the pilgrims travelled in coaches brings 

 me by quite a natural stage from the historical to the 

 coaching side of the Holyhead Road. And it was from 

 all I can learn the coaching road par excellence. Cele- 

 brated, thanks to the immortal Telford, for its 260 miles 

 of superb surface, so masterfully laid down that, though 



