Rookwood (novel) of "Rookwood" and many more added in later editions. Of the other songs, some were sung by gypsies about love, some were hymns, and some were used to further the gothic setting. The name Rookwood alludes to the old Recusant (Roman Catholic) family of that name, most famous of whom was Ambrose Rookwood, executed in 1606 for his part in the Gunpowder Plot (the conspiracy which forms the theme of Ainsworth's 1841 novel "Guy Fawkes"). Ainsworth, perhaps consciously, paid a double homage to this family, in that his later historical romance "The Spendthrift" concerns an eighteenth-century heir of the Gage
Robert and Thomas Wintour Thomas was the first to mount the scaffold. It was customary to grant the condemned a speech, but Thomas, "a very pale and dead colour", said it was "no time to discourse: he was come to die". He absolved the Jesuits of any involvement in the plot, asked for Catholics to pray for him, and declared his adherence to the Roman religion. He was hanged for only a few seconds, and then taken to the block for the remainder of his grim sentence. Their half-brother John was executed at Red Hill near Worcester, on 7 April. Robert and Thomas Wintour