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
Ambrose Rookwood (Jacobite) or assassinate William III. In February Thomas Prendergast, one of the conspirators, turned king's evidence, and the plot was revealed. On 27 March Rookwood was found in bed in a Jacobite alehouse, and committed to Newgate Prison. On 7 April a true bill of high treason was found against Rookwood at the Middlesex county sessions. He was brought before the King's Bench on 21 April. His case, tried with those of Robert Lowick and Charles Cranburn who was a Jacobite quartermaster, was the first treason trial to use the new system of procedure brought in by the Treason Act 1695,