The historian who realises that this was to be the last chance which the fates would offer to the Catholic Church of obtaining power and majority in England reads the story of those three years of triumph and ineptitude with strange reflections. Never was a great opportunity more tragically wasted. The overwhelming majority of the nation, the officials, and the Parliament were not merely Protestant, but feverishly vigilant and intensely suspicious of the Jesuits. It was a time for infinite patience and restrained diplomacy, and, so far as we can ascertain, the Vatican itself, and Cardinal Howard who advised the Papacy at Rome, fully realised the need. But the Jesuits were in command, and they gave the most flagrant exhibition in their annals of the unwisdom and mischief of their distinctive methods. Although a Protestant prince grimly smiled on their blunders in Holland, and his agents in England eagerly magnified every indiscretion, they proceeded with the most imprudent defiance of Protestant feeling. Within two years they were spreading schools and churches over London, talking of the speedy capture of the universities and the magistracy, and placing one of their own number among the Privy Councillors. And in less than four years James II. was flying ignominiously for France, with the Jesuits in his train. This romantic episode has inspired one of the finest chapters of Macaulay's _History of England_, and, whatever blame be laid on the shoulders of Sunderland, there is no question but that the Jesuits were very largely responsible for the unhappy counsels of James II. One of his first acts was to lodge Father Edward Petre in the princely chambers of St. James's Palace, and put the Chapel Royal under his charge; and in a short time he made Petre Clerk of the Closet. The prisons were opened, the recusants now emerged boldly from their secluded homes, and the Jesuits summoned their continental colleagues to come and share the work of harvesting. New chapels were opened in London; and in more than one case, when other priests proposed to open chapels, royal influence cut short their design and secured the buildings for the Jesuits. Free "undenominational" schools were opened, and hundreds of Protestant, as well as Catholic, boys were attracted to these insidious nurseries of the faith by the unwonted absence of fees.