The recklessness with which the King gave colour to the suspicions of the Puritans is indeed remarkable. The husband of a Catholic Queen, the son of a lady whose Protestantism was far from unimpeachable, he had recognized in early life the necessity of caution; he had no belief in the claims of the Church of Rome, and probably felt its attraction less strongly than his father, whose grandiose imagination was struck by its great claims and long history. Yet he showed marked favour to Roman ecclesiastics such as Du Perron, he allowed the triumphant ceremonies of Somerset House, and he sanctioned the almost open exercise of Catholic worship, only from time to time showing a feeble concession to the feeling of the country by such measures as forbidding the English Catholics to frequent the chapels of the ambassadors, and by issuing a proclamation which at the Queen's prayers he deprived of most of its force. There is, of course, only one sufficient explanation of his conduct. He was, it is true, like others of his family, a believer in a certain kind of toleration. He thought it a base thing for a man to change his religion, and he considered that any Christian might be saved. He was also, except when actuated by feelings of revenge, a merciful man to whom persecution was distasteful, and there were probably moods in which he imagined himself a second Henry IV, under whose paternal sway the rival religions could live at peace; but the real reason of his tenderness to the Catholics was his love for his wife. As in the old days Buckingham could make him do anything, so in later times could Henrietta Maria. Her tears, her smiles, her caresses won boon after boon for her co-religionists, until she wrung from him the last, the most disastrous concession of all. No single act was more fatal to his throne or more prejudicial to the ultimate interests of the Catholics than the establishment of the agency which brought into England Panzani, Con, and later Rosetti; as these worthy men rolled about London in their fine carriages, secure in the royal favour, and none daring to make them afraid, they believed that they were helping forward the conversion of England. In reality, they were riveting for more than a century longer the chains of the English Catholics.