bout this time Digby professed himself a Protestant, but by
October 1635, while in France, he had already returned to the Roman
Catholic faith.[3] In a letter dated the 27th of March 1636 Laud
remonstrates with him, but assures him of the continuance of his
friendship.[4] In 1638 he published _A Conference with a Lady about
choice of a Religion_, in which he argues that the Roman Church,
possessing alone the qualifications of universality, unity of doctrine
and uninterrupted apostolic succession, is the only true church, and
that the intrusion of error into it is impossible. The same subject is
treated in letters to George Digby, afterwards 2nd earl of Bristol,
dated the 2nd of November 1638 and the 29th of November 1639, which were
published in 1651, as well as in a further _Discourse concerning
Infallibility in Religion_ in 1652. Returning to England he associated
himself with the queen and her Roman Catholic friends, and joined in the
appeal to the English Romanists for money to support the king's Scottish
expedition.[5] In consequence he was summoned to the bar of the House of
Commons on the 27th of January 1641, and the king was petitioned to
remove him with other recusants from his councils. He left England, and
while at Paris killed in a duel a French lord who had insulted Charles
I. in his presence. Louis XIII. took his part, and furnished him with a
military escort into Flanders. Returning home he was imprisoned, by
order of the House of Commons, early in 1642, successively in the "Three
Tobacco Pipes nigh Charing Cross," where his delightful conversation is
said to have transformed the prison into "a place of delight,"[6] and at
Winchester House. He was finally released and allowed to go to France on
the 30th of July 1643, through the intervention of the queen of France,
Anne of Austria, on condition that he would neither promote nor conceal
any plots abroad against the English government.

Before leaving England an attempt was made to draw from him an admission
that Laud, with whom he had been intimate, had desired to be made a
cardinal, but Digby denied that the archbishop had any leanings towards
Rome. On the 1st of November 1643 it was resolved by the Commons to
confiscate his property. He published in London the same year
_Observations on the 22nd stanza in the 9th canto of the 2nd book of
Spenser's "Faerie Queene,"_ the MS. of which is in the Egerton
collection (British Museum, No. 2725 f. 117 b), and _Ob