This allusion was accepted by Des Louvres with eager manifestations of approval. Once more the Secretary of State felt an obscure uneasiness as he compared these mocking utterances with the recent experience of his own department, and he began to ask himself if he was indeed listening to the first whispers of a coming storm. Hero Vanbrugh’s question about the Legitimist Guild had not fallen on deaf ears. He had had the curiosity to ask his permanent staff if they knew anything of the Legitimists, and he found they knew very little. There is nothing Government Departments dislike so much as information, except the trouble of acting on it. No one in the Home Office could say exactly who the Legitimists were, or how they had come into existence as a guild. Their very number was unknown, but it was believed to be insignificant. They were wholly without influence or following, and would never have been heard of but for the fact that the newspapers regarded their proceedings as a good joke. Every sensible person put them down as a clique of vain and foolish young men who made themselves supremely ridiculous by trying to revive a cause which had been dead for a hundred and fifty years. Such was the official view. Sixty or seventy years before a similar view had been taken of the action of a little clique of Oxford men who were setting themselves to undo the work of the Protestant Reformation. That little clique had undertaken to break up a settlement which had taken root for two hundred and fifty years, and had survived twelve reigns and six rebellions. In the course of a single reign they had come within sight of their goal. They had driven the word “Protestant” out of polite conversation, and made it a synonym for everything base, ignorant and malicious. They had made it dangerous for a Protestant to object publicly to Catholic practices which were still forbidden by the letter of the law. They had sent an informal embassy to the Vatican to negotiate the re-entry of England into the Roman obedience; and they had delivered the first open attack on the legislative bars which still hindered that consummation. Fresh from the assurances of the Home Office, it was a shock to the Minister to find himself for the second time that day confronted with this ridiculous but offensive movement. It was true that Mr. St. John’s remarks bordered on satire, but the serious-minded are apt to resent satire at the expense of what they fear, as much as at the expense of what they revere; the only notes they wish to hear are the snap of cavil and the rumble of denunciation.