V Francis Tresham’s Confidence When in the Tower
Upon Tresham’s death in the Tower (December 23, 1605), the Lieutenant wrote to Salisbury: “I find his friends were marvellous confident if he had escaped this sickness, and have given out in this place that they feared not the course of justice.”43 As the late Dr. Gardiner observed: “This confidence they could only have derived from himself, and it could only have been founded on one ground.”
Had Tresham’s committal to the Tower been otherwise than a mere formality, or “a farce,” neither his wife nor his servants would under any circumstances have been permitted to attend or even see him whatever the state of his health might have been; and had he survived, nothing serious would have been done to him,44 any more than was done to his “deeply guilty” servant Vavasour.
Tresham, though dreading, as he said, “the infamous brand of an accuser,”45 was as evidently the Informer to the Government, either directly or indirectly through Monteagle, as his servant Vavasour was the writer of the letter.
Footnotes
43 “State Papers, Domestic,” James I., xvii. 58.
44 He left no male issue, and was succeeded in the family property by his next brother Lewis, who was created a baronet June 29, 1611, one of the second batch of baronets made on the institution of that Order the previous May 22 by James I.
45 “State Papers, Domestic,” James I., xvi. 63.