chment, and quicken the efforts of their followers.
Scarcely a day occurred in which some order or ordinance, local or general,
was not issued by the two houses; and very few of these, even on the most
indifferent subjects, were permitted to pass without the assertion that the
war had been originally provoked, and was still continued by the papists,
for the sole purpose of the establishment of popery on the ruins of
Protestantism. The constant repetition acted on the minds of the people as
a sufficient proof of the charge; and the denials, the protestations, the
appeals to heaven made by the king, were disregarded and condemned as
unworthy artifices, adopted to deceive

[Footnote 1: Journals, Feb. 25, March 21; of Lords, 287, 303.]

the credulous and unwary. Under such circumstances, the Catholics found
themselves exposed to insult and persecution wherever the influence of the
parliament extended: for protection they were compelled to flee to the
quarters of the royalists, and to fight under their banners; and this
again confirmed the prejudice against them, and exposed them to additional
obloquy and punishment.

But the chiefs of the patriots, while for political purposes they pointed
the hatred of their followers against the Catholics, appear not to have
delighted unnecessarily in blood. They ordered, indeed, searches to be
made for Catholic clergymen; they offered and paid rewards for their
apprehension, and they occasionally gratified the zealots with the
spectacle of an execution. The priests who suffered death in the course of
the war amounted on an average to three for each year, a small number, if
we consider the agitated state of the public mind during that period.[1]
But it was the property of the lay Catholics which they chiefly sought,
pretending that, as the war had been caused by their intrigues, its
expenses ought to be defrayed by their forfeitures. It was ordained that
two-thirds of the whole estate, both real and personal, of every papist,
should be seized and sold for

[Footnote 1: Journals, vi. 133, 254. See their Memoirs in Challoner, ii.
209-319. In 1643, after a solemn fast, the five chaplains of the queen were
apprehended and sent to France, their native country, and the furniture
of her chapel at Somerset House was publicly burnt. The citizens were so
edified with the sight that they requested and obtained permission to
destroy the gilt cross in Cheapside. The lord mayor and aldermen graced th