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
Rookwood (novel) family of Hengrave Hall in Suffolk. John Gage of Hengrave, a descendant in his maternal line from Ambrose Rookwood, was Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London from 1829 to 1842. Gage, also a prominent Catholic, was therefore one of the most distinguished English Antiquaries at the time when Ainsworth published his historical romance of "Rookwood" in 1834. When Gage inherited the Rookwood estates in 1838 he assumed for himself the surname 'Rokewode', and he died in 1842 at the Fitzherbert family seat of Claughton Hall in Lancashire. "The Spendthrift" appeared in print some years later. The character Dick