In his country home, at Gothurst, he brooded, with much impatience, over the wrongs of his co-religionists, nor can it have been a pleasant reflection that at any moment his beautiful house might be broken into by pursuivants, who would hunt every recess and cupboard in it, in search of a priest, or of what Anglicans then denominated "massing-stuff." Should they suspect that the most richly carved pieces of oak-work concealed a hiding-place, the "officers of justice" would ruthlessly shatter them to pieces with axe or crowbar; his wife's private rooms would not be safe from the intrusion of the pursuivants, or the bevy of rough followers who might accompany them; and, if his house were filled with guests, even were they Protestants, it would none the less necessarily be given up to the intruders for so long a time as they might choose to remain. The invasion would be as likely to be made by night as by day; no notice would be given of its approach, and, as its result, not only might the domestic chaplain be carried off a prisoner, with his face to a horse's tail and his legs tied together beneath its girths, but Sir Everard himself would be liable to be taken away in the same humiliating position, on a charge of High Treason. The fine which Catholics had to pay must have been sufficiently annoying even to a rich man like Sir Everard Digby, and this annoyance would be greatly increased by the knowledge that to poorer men it meant ruin, as well as by the remarks of his less wealthy Catholic friends that "after all, to him it was a mere nothing." The present was bad enough, and worse things were expected in the future. Most of us know the fears with which we hear that a Prime Minister of opposite politics to our own is going to bring in a bill, in the coming session, directed against our personal interests; even the coming budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer on our own side of the House, in a very bad year, is anticipated with serious misgivings. Imagine, therefore, the terrors of the Catholics whose lives would already have been rendered unendurable, had the laws existing against them been put into full force, when they not only observed a rapidly increasing zeal among magistrates and judges in their proceedings against Romish recusants, but heard, on what appeared to be excellent authority, that additional, and most cruel, legislation against them was to be enacted in the Parliament shortly to be opened.