To all these virtues she added a zeal for her faith which, if still checked by the girlish levity which easily turned from religious as from political matters, was sufficiently urgent both to champion her faith in Protestant circles and to plead for her oppressed co-religionists, so that with the growth of her influence over her husband grew their peace and prosperity. It is true that for a year or two after the expulsion of the French the persecution continued, and was, particularly in Scotland, at one time very fierce,[129] so that it was noted with malicious satisfaction that the Queen fell into her premature travail on the very day that her husband had signed a decree against the Catholics of his northern kingdom; but it so quickly and thoroughly abated that in 1633 a Roman correspondent in London was able to declare that never before had Catholics been less molested.[130] Not only were priests permitted to live undisturbed in the capital, but English Catholics were allowed to attend the chapels of the Queen and the ambassadors, a privilege which Richelieu had vainly endeavoured to win for them at the time of the royal marriage, and which the King had angrily refused to the Queen's entreaties only a year or two before. "I permit you your religion," he had said to her on that occasion, "with your Capuchins and others. I permit ambassadors and their retinue, but the rest of my subjects I will have them live that I profess and my father before me." The Catholics were so encouraged by the lenity now shown that in the course of this same year, on the occasion of Charles' coronation in Scotland, they presented to him a petition pleading for toleration and urging him to follow the example of his father-in-law, Henry the Great, who, by granting religious liberty, had won for himself the title of Pater Patriæ et Pacis Restitutor.[131]