l Bassompierre, preserved in the
history of his embassy; this marshal had been hastily despatched as an
extraordinary ambassador when the French party were dismissed. This
state-document, rather a remonstrance than a reply, states that the
French household had formed a little republic within themselves,
combining with the French resident ambassador, and inciting the
opposition members in parliament; a practice usual with that intriguing
court, even from the days of Elizabeth, as the original letters of the
French ambassador of the time, which will be found in the third volume,
amply show; and those of La Boderie in James the First's time, who
raised a French party about Prince Henry; and the correspondence of
Barillon in Charles the Second's reign, so fully exposed in his entire
correspondence published by Fox. The French domestics of the queen were
engaged in lower intrigues; they lent their names to hire houses in the
suburbs of London, where, under their protection, the English Catholics
found a secure retreat to hold their illegal assemblies, and where the
youth of both sexes were educated and prepared to be sent abroad to
Catholic seminaries. But the queen's priests, by those well-known means
which the Catholic religion sanctions, were drawing from the queen the
minutest circumstances which passed in privacy between her and the king;
indisposed her mind towards her royal consort, impressed on her a
contempt of the English nation, and a disgust of our customs, and
particularly, as has been usual with the French, made her neglect the
English language, as if the queen of England held no common interest
with the nation. They had made her residence a place of security for the
persons and papers of the discontented. Yet all this was hardly more
offensive than the humiliating state to which they had reduced an
English queen by their monastic obedience: inflicting the most degrading
penances. One of the most flagrant is alluded to in our history. This
was a barefoot pilgrimage to Tyburn, where, one morning, under the
gallows on which so many Jesuits had been executed as traitors to
Elizabeth and James the First, she knelt and prayed to them as martyrs
and saints who had shed their blood in defence of the Catholic
cause.[212] A manuscript letter of the times mentions that "the priests
had also made her dabble in the dirt in a foul morning from
Somerset-house to St. James's, her Luciferian confessor riding along by
her in his