Kenelm, his elder son, born July 11, 1603, was barely
three years old when his father, the most guileless and the most obstinate
of the Gunpowder Plotters, died on the scaffold. The main part of the
family wealth, as the family mansion Gothurst--now Gayhurst--in
Buckinghamshire, came from Sir Everard's wife, Mary Mulsho; and probably
that is one reason why James I acceded to the doomed man's appeal that his
widow and children should not be reduced to beggary. Kenelm, in fact,
entered on his active career with an income of L3000 a year; but even its
value in those days did not furnish a youth of such varied ambitions and
such magnificent exterior over handsomely for his journey through the
world. His childhood was spent under a cloud. He was bred by a mother whose
life was broken and darkened, and whose faith, barely tolerated, would
naturally keep her apart from the more favoured persons of the kingdom.
Kenelm might have seemed destined to obscurity; but there was that about
the youth that roused interest; and even the timid King James was attracted
by him into a magnanimous forgetfulness of his father's offence.
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