The Queen was indeed already beginning to repent of her overtures to the Confederate Catholics,[338] for in the early part of the year some letters of O'Hartegan had fallen into the hands of the Roundheads, who caused them to be printed. These letters spoke disrespectfully of her, and showed how cheaply the Jesuit held the advantage of the King, so that Charles, who was wont to feel great indignation at every one's self-seeking and shiftiness except his own, wrote to his wife that the agent was "an arrant knave."[339] Rinuccini's arrival in Paris made matters worse. Henrietta was a Catholic, but she was a queen also, and it was an insult to which she could not tamely submit that the Pope should send an envoy to those who, after all, were rebels in arms against her husband. She wrote a dignified letter of remonstrance to Innocent, and she refused to receive Rinuccini except as a private person, a condition which the ambassador, one of whose strongest characteristics was his personal vanity, declined to accept. The poor Queen was indeed in a mesh from which there was no escape, and she knew not how to carry out the task of so settling the affairs of Ireland that the King might be able to draw troops therefrom. She desired to make peace between Ormonde, her husband's Viceroy, and the Catholics, and her difficulties were such as attend all persons who, being in authority, are obliged to seek at one and the same time the help of representatives of opposing interests. Rinuccini, seeing her under the influence of Protestants, concluded, not unjustly on his own premises, that the duty of the Holy Father was to turn a deaf ear to her entreaties for aid, and to send such moneys as he could afford to the Confederate Catholics, whose loyalty to the Holy See was not compromised by any inconvenient devotion to a heretic Prince. Out in Rome Sir Kenelm was begging and praying for help, unconscious of the fact that the envoy was warning the Pope against him, and asserting, probably with some truth, that the rosy pictures which he drew of the intentions of the King of England with regard to the Catholics were greatly over-coloured. The Confederate Catholics in Ireland were waiting eagerly for the coming of Rinuccini, and had little desire to help the King of England, except in so far as such help would conduce to the realization of their chief object, the emancipation of Ireland from the hated foreigner. Rinuccini, after a considerable delay in Paris, whence he wrote many letters to Rome expressing his views with great frankness upon the Queen of England and her advisers, pushed on to Ireland, where, far from making peace with Ormonde or with any one else, he set everybody by the ears--not a difficult task, it is true, in that island--and ended by excommunicating most of the Confederate Catholics themselves. Steps were taken by some of the victims to find out the opinion of the Sorbonne as to the validity of this sweeping ecclesiastical censure.