Harcourt, rector of the Jesuit College in London, went to make a public bonfire. Wild House, the residence of the Weld family near the Strand, and a noted resort of Roman Catholics, was ransacked and twenty-seven chests of goods haled from a grotto in the garden. Houses of eminent Catholics all over the kingdom were searched and searched again, and sometimes almost destroyed by the efforts of officers to find hidden priests. Catholic merchants found themselves bankrupt. Everywhere Catholics were driven from home and livelihood, reduced to beggary. Only the Penderels, Huddlestone the priest, and others who had helped the king in his flight from Worcester escaped the general fate. Charles’ gratitude procured for them exemption from the action of the laws.[352] For the rest only good fortune could mitigate the horrors of that time. Those in prison had nothing on which to subsist but the charity of friends. Seized at inns, in secret retreats, on beds of sickness, they were hurried through rain or snow to dreadful cells without money or a sufficient supply of clothes. The Duke and Duchess of York, Lord Castlemaine, and other noble Catholics made great efforts for their fellows in religion. Yet to relieve the vast mass of suffering no private aid could suffice. Many were reduced to the greatest distress. Some even died of want. Priests, hunted from one to another more painful hiding-place, were put to every shift to evade capture. For days they lay, cramped and hungry, in holes within walls, behind chimneys, even fastened up beneath tables, while their pursuers tore up the floors, broke down the walls, dug up the garden walks within a few yards of them. When they ventured forth to escape, it was in the depth of winter, through ice and mud, and in the teeth of midnight storms. Nor were the pious alone objects of attack. The most irreligious of their religion were not spared. Long-stored enmity and an insatiable desire for novelty caught at victims of whatever character. The Duchesse Mazarin, who lived only for play and her light loves, was accused of being a party to the Plot. Where the end would come no man could say. All the Catholics in the service of the royal family who could took ship for the continent. The Duchess of York wrote to her brother that she could not describe the hundredth part of the trouble into which they were plunged. Many abjured their faith or at least took the condemned oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Pilate and Herod, wrote the Jesuit Warner to his general, were banded with the heretic priests against his society and the Catholics. A few weeks later he added: “Hope itself is scarce left us.”[353]