ties on those who professed his religion.
But, if he attempted to subdue the Protestant feeling of England by rude
means, it was easy to see that the violent compression of so powerful
and elastic a spring would be followed by as violent a recoil. The Roman
Catholic peers, by prematurely attempting to force their way into the
Privy Council and the House of Lords, might lose their mansions and
their ample estates, and might end their lives as traitors on Tower
Hill, or as beggars at the porches of Italian convents.

Such was the feeling of William Herbert, Earl of Powis, who was
generally regarded as the chief of the Roman Catholic aristocracy, and
who, according to Oates, was to have been prime minister if the Popish
plot had succeeded. John Lord Bellasyse took the same view of the state
of affairs. In his youth he had fought gallantly for Charles the First,
had been rewarded after the Restoration with high honours and
commands, and had quitted them when the Test Act was passed. With these
distinguished leaders all the noblest and most opulent members of their
church concurred, except Lord Arundell of Wardour, an old man fast
sinking into second childhood.

But there was at the court a small knot of Roman Catholics whose hearts
had been ulcerated by old injuries, whose heads had been turned by
recent elevation, who were impatient to climb to the highest honours of
the state, and who, having little to lose, were not troubled by
thoughts of the day of reckoning. One of these was Roger Palmer, Earl
of Castelmaine in Ireland, and husband of the Duchess of Cleveland. His
title had notoriously been purchased by his wife's dishonour and his
own. His fortune was small. His temper, naturally ungentle, had been
exasperated by his domestic vexations, by the public reproaches, and by
what he had undergone in the days of the Popish plot. He had been long a
prisoner, and had at length been tried for his life. Happily for him,
he was not put to the bar till the first burst of popular rage had spent
itself, and till the credit of the false witnesses had been blown upon.
He had therefore escaped, though very narrowly. [49] With Castelmaine
was allied one of the most favoured of his wife's hundred lovers, Henry
Jermyn, whom James had lately created a peer by the title of Lord Dover.
Jermyn had been distinguished more than twenty years before by his
vagrant amours and his desperate duels. He was now ruined by play, and
was eager to retri