Lord Conway was a mere official, devoted rather to pleasure than business; and Sir Leoline Jenkins was an assiduous Secretary and a good lawyer. According to Burnet’s report, he was “set on every punctilio of the Church of England to superstition, and was a great asserter of the Divine right of monarchy, and was for carrying the prerogative high.”[68] Nonconformists could not expect any mercy or much justice from men like these. A fiery zeal for Protestantism continued in the month of September, 1681, when an address was presented to the Lord Mayor of London from 20,000 apprentices, touching the “devilish plots carried on by the Papists.”[69] But before that time, the excitement which had been produced by Oates’ informations, and which had promoted the progress of Exclusion measures, began to subside, and a reaction in many quarters set in against the supporters of both.[70] [Sidenote: 1681.] Burnet speaks of “a great heat raised against the clergy” in 1679: of Nonconformists behaving very indecently, and of the press, in which they had a great hand, becoming licentious against the Court and the clergy; but he does not specify what publications are meant. The only remarkable one mentioned by Calamy as appearing that year, is “A short and true account of the several advances the Church of England hath made towards Rome--or a model of the grounds upon which the Papists for these hundred years have built their hopes and expectations, that England would e’er long return to Popery, by Dr. Du Moulin, sometime History Professor of Oxford.”[71] Upon reading this book, it strikes me, that the sting is stronger in the title-page, than in the contents; it makes out a case as to Romanist tendencies against Laud and his party, rather than against contemporary Churchmen. At all events, alarm existed at the time--although a book like Du Moulin’s will not account for it--lest a new revolution should break out resembling that which occurred at the beginning of the Long Parliament. “The Bishops and clergy, apprehending that a rebellion, and with it the pulling the Church to pieces, was designed, set themselves, on the other hand, to write against the late times, and to draw a parallel between the present times and them; which was not decently enough managed by those who undertook the argument, and who were believed to be set on and paid by the Court.” Burnet’s statement is very loose, for without mentioning any book on the subject, by any Bishop,--although he might have cited what Morley, Bishop of Winchester, wrote soon afterwards,--he alludes to the writings of a layman, Roger L’Estrange, who richly deserves his severest condemnation. That man did more than any one to turn the tide of indignation into a new channel. People “seemed now to lay down all fears and apprehensions of Popery, and nothing was so common in their mouths, as the year ’41, in which the late Wars begun” (they did not begin till ’42,) “and which seemed now