To serve any good purpose, we must destroy, at one blow, the king, the royal family, the lords, the commons; and bury all our enemies in one common ruin.
Happily, they are all assembled on the first meeting of the parliament, and afford us the opportunity of glorious and useful vengeance.

Great preparations will not be requisite.

A few of us, combining, may run a mine below the hall in which they meet; and choosing the very moment when the king harangues both houses, consign over to destruction these determined foes to all piety and religion.

Meanwhile, we ourselves standing aloof, safe and unsuspected, shall triumph in being the instruments of divine wrath, and shall behold with pleasure those sacrilegious walls, in which were passed the edicts for proscribing our church and butchering her children, tossed into a thousand fragments; while their impious inhabitants, meditating, perhaps, still new persecutions against us, pass from flames above to flames below, there forever to endure the torments due to their offences."[*] Piercy was charmed with this project of Catesby; and they agreed to communicate the matter to a few more, and among the rest to Thomas Winter, whom they sent over to Flanders in quest of Fawkes, an officer in the Spanish service, with whose zeal and courage they were all thoroughly acquainted.

When they enlisted any new conspirator, in order to bind him to secrecy, they always, together with an oath, employed the communion, the most sacred rite of their religion.[**] And it is remarkable, that no one of these pious devotees ever entertained the least compunction with regard to the cruel massacre which they projected, of whatever was great and eminent in the nation.