Crétineau-Joly is shocked; Father Taunton opines that the whole policy is directed by the Jesuit authorities at Rome. In later years, when the Jesuits and courtiers gathered about the fallen monarch in his pleasant exile, the entire blame for the folly was naturally laid upon the wicked Earl of Sunderland, and historians have, perhaps, paid unnecessarily serious attention to this charge. We need not stay to analyse the possible motives of Sunderland, who assuredly had no sincere wish to see England return to its old creed. Like Louis XIV., Pedro I., and Charles II., who then ruled in France, Portugal, and Spain, James II. was surrounded by a junta of Jesuits, and he was even more docile than his fellow-monarchs to their suggestions. Those who find it possible may believe that these Jesuits were so reluctant to interfere in politics that they silently permitted an unscrupulous minister to blast the prospects of their Society and Church. We have, on the contrary, sufficient documentary evidence that they applauded, if they did not inspire, every rash step taken by the King, and we recognise their familiar maxims in his whole policy. They were, no doubt, well acquainted with the political principles advocated by their colleague, Adam Contzen, a Jesuit professor at Munich. In a work which he published in 1620 (_Politicorum libri decem_), Father Contzen, incidentally, proposed some effective devices by which a Catholic monarch might lead his heretical country back to the faith. After very properly condemning "the impious doctrine of Machiavelli," Father Contzen enumerates a number of measures that should be taken, and he expressly mentions England as a field of experiment. Violence is recommended as an obvious course; the leaders of the heretics must be expelled, and they must be forbidden to hold either public or private meetings. But the distinctive suggestions of the learned Jesuit are, that the prince must cover his initial efforts with a profession of toleration, he must first choose for attack those heresiarchs who are unpopular, he must ingeniously set the rival sects to rend each other and "take care that they often dispute together," he must enact that no marriage shall take place unless it be preceded by a profession of the true faith, and he must transfer all the offices and dignities of the State to Catholics.