It is an amusing and characteristic picture which Parsons draws of his journey to London. He was a big, burly man of thirty-four, and wore the uniform of an officer returning from the wars in the Low Countries. The befeathered hat and gold-laced coat and military swagger fitted him so nicely that the officers not only passed him, but got a horse for "the captain" and promised to pay every attention to his friend the jewel-merchant (Campion), who was to follow him in a few days. By the end of June they were together in the house that had been taken for them in Chancery Lane. At Rome, Parsons had met an enthusiastic and wealthy young Englishman named George Gilbert, and, instead of making a Jesuit of him, had sent him on in advance to prepare the way for them. He had boldly taken rooms for them under the nose of the chief official charged to arrest them--who was probably searching for them in the warrens by the river or the villages beyond the gates--and had formed a secret association of Catholics throughout the country to help them in their travels. The news soon spread through the Catholic world that two Jesuits were in England, and the secular priests, whom they met and endeavoured to conciliate, urged them to return to the Continent. It is difficult to look back and not see that they would best have served the cause of Catholicism in England by quitting it at once; the few thousand converts they made, or waverers whom they strengthened, were a small service in comparison with the fierce hostility they brought on the faithful, the political conspiracies in which they involved them, and the bitter dissensions they caused amongst the clergy. But for the coming of the Jesuits and the plots of foreign Catholics, Catholicism might have lived on in England as a considerable sect, overlooked by the authorities, until the Pope's blunder was forgotten and the penal spirit abandoned.