serious convictions; and his attendance upon the Queen, who was a Roman Catholic, and possibly the belief that the maintenance of the Established Church in its integrity would prove an insuperable obstacle to any reconciliation between the King, and the faction who were now obtaining the ascendancy, might have induced him to desert what he deemed a hopeless cause. "His private opinion," says Aubrey, "was, that religion at last (e.g., a hundred years hence) would come to a settlement, and that in a kind of ingeniose Quakerisme." Why, if such was his private opinion, he should desert to so opposite a system as the papal one, is not very apparent.
The Queen, who, as Lord Clarendon observes, "was never advised by those who either understood or valued his (the King's) true interest," was induced about this time to send an embassy to the King, to entreat him to consult his own safety by sacrificing the Church; and Sir William Davenant was selected, on account of his recent conversion, to conduct this delicate negotiation. The choice was as injudicious as the failure was signal, and we read that, on Davenant urging his reasons for the unpalatable course he was suggesting, "the King was transported with so much passion and indignation, that he gave him more reproachful terms and a sharper reprehension than he did ever towards any other man, and forbade him to presume to come again into his presence," whereupon he returned, "exceedingly dejected and afflicted."
Feeling much chagrined at the ill success of his diplomacy, he returned to France, and settled at Paris, where the Prince of Wales was then staying. He here began his much talked-of metrical romance, or epic, "Gondibert," which Pope justly characterizes as "not a good poem, if you take it in the whole, though there are many good things in it." The first two books, which he wrote at the Louvre while staying with Lord Jermyn, were published
