Parsons was now recalled from Spain and political intrigue to deal with this new menace. He had spent several years in Spain, founding new English colleges (at Valladolid, Seville, and Madrid) under his own control and working out his learned theory that the crown of England belonged of strict right to Spain. He failed to induce Philip to send a second Armada, and now devoted himself to proving that the Infanta was the heir to the crown of England. That is the idea of the book, _A Conference on the Succession_, which he published, anonymously, in 1594: a year after the fifth General Congregation of his Society had once more sternly decreed that no Jesuit must meddle with politics. In 1597 he reached Rome and quickly pacified the students of the college. Some of them, it seems, thought that he ought to be made a cardinal for his great services, and he hastened, with tearful eyes, to ask the Pope to spare him that dignity; and we will trust that he was relieved when the Pope coldly observed that he had not had the least idea of imposing it on him. They then turned to the great question of Wisbeach, and the settlement of it doubly interests us; partly because a Jesuit supremacy in Wisbeach might be a good precedent for the time when a Catholic monarch succeeded Elizabeth, and partly because it throws a very singular light on Jesuit procedure. The Jesuits submitted that the clerical prisoners in England desired some kind of canonical leader. Clement VIII., who had, like his great predecessor Sixtus V., had some alarming experience of the state of the Jesuits (as we shall see later), required proof of this. They brought before him certain English priests, friendly to themselves, who assured the Pope that there was no discord in their ranks in England; the largeness of their "mental reservation" may be judged from the fact that a later inquiry showed that 343 out of the 400 priests in England were against the Jesuit proposal. The Pope was deceived, and he yielded to Parsons's suggestion to make George Blackwell, a former student under the Jesuits, "Archpriest" of the English clergy. Blackwell went to England to exercise this newly invented authority, and Parsons returned to his plots. He had then several secretaries to conduct his enormous correspondence, and he was so sure of a Catholic succession to the throne that he marked out various houses in London for use as Jesuit colleges.