religion was found to be very unagreeable to their fortune, and very many exercised their thoughts most how to get handsomely from it. . . . Many made little doubt but that it would shortly be very manifest to the king that his restoration depended wholly upon a conjunction of Catholic princes, who could never be united but on the behalf of Catholic religion."[1] Digby, Clifford, and Bennet became Catholics, and proved their sincerity at their deaths ; but they all agreed that it would be dangerous for Charles to imitate them. Clarendon, whose purpose it was to divert from his master the suspicion of popery, wished it to be believed that no religious scruples, no doubts in the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church, had ever invaded the exiled court, and that the Catholic inclinations or professions of some of its members were the effects of political design. He had argued with great force that even though Charles should give no cause for suspicion, the fact of his residence in a Catholic country would be a pretext for his enemies to accuse him. It would not be hard, he wrote to Jermyn, to persuade them who believed the king a papist when he was seen every day at Church in England, to believe the prince a papist when he had no church in France to go to.[2] But the other advisers, who were less sturdy Protestants than the Chancellor, knew that nothing was to be expected for their cause from a change of religion. In the period of the administration of Mazarin and the peace of Westphalia, no reasonable man could believe that any State would incur the expense and the risk of war for the establishment of a Catholic dynasty in England ; and even those who believed that Charles leaned from conviction towards Rome, and whose sympathies were on the same side, were careful to conceal the fact.[3]
A rumour reached their friends in England, and caused an extreme alarm. "There is a report," wrote Mordaunt to Ormond, in November 1659, "so hot of your master's
- ↑ Clarendon, xvi. 74.
- ↑ Lister, Life of Clarendon, i. 284. He would not allow the prince to attend the service of the French Calvinists at Charenton (History, xiii. 133).
- ↑ The testimony of Ormond and Burnet, and the worthless reports to the same effect in Kennet and Echard, are collected in the Biographia Britannica, ii. 1770, 2nd ed.
