accounts are perhaps not irreconcilable. At least he was a convert and had preached. Thereupon St. Germain, as he said, threatened him and forced a recantation. Before resorting to this extreme the Jesuit had tried persuasion. The Duke of York, he told Luzancy, was a confessed Roman Catholic. At heart the king himself belonged to the same faith and would approve of all he did. Schemes were afoot to procure an act for liberty of conscience for the Catholics. That granted, within two years most of the nation would acknowledge the Pope. It was sometimes good to force people to heaven; and there were in London many priests and Jesuits doing God very great service. Others besides Luzancy had been threatened with tales of Protestant blood flowing in the London streets; and these, being summoned to the council, attested that the fact was so. Lord Halifax rose and told the king that, if his Majesty would allow that course to Protestants for the conversion of Papists, he did not question but in a very short time it should be effected.[28] Two days later a proclamation was issued signifying that Luzancy was taken into the royal protection, and St. Germain, with a price of £200 on his head, fled to France, there to become one of the most active of Jesuit intriguers.[29] Though the brandished dagger was likely enough an embellishment of Luzancy’s invention, it is probable that his story was in substance true. In December St. Germain found himself in Paris and in close correspondence with Edward Coleman, the Duchess of York’s secretary. Such a man writing within a month from the catastrophe would certainly, had he been falsely charged, be loud in vindication of his innocence and denunciation of the villain who had worked his ruin. St. Germain merely wrote that his leaving London in this fashion troubled him much. He had done all that a man of honesty and honour could; an ambiguous phrase. It was absolutely necessary, more for his companions and the Catholics’ sake than for his own, that his conduct should be justified.[30] Evidently St. Germain was less troubled at the injustice of the charge against him than incensed at its results. What he wanted was not that his character might be cleared from a false accusation, but that the tables might be turned on his accuser.[31] The conduct of St. Germain illustrates well the aims of the Roman Catholic party in England about the year 1675. Their policy, already undergoing modification, had root deep in the history of the times.