Three years later a still more remarkable embassy than Bellings’ took place. It is not even in our own day commonly known that the Duke of Monmouth, reputed the eldest of the sons of Charles II, had an elder brother. So well was the secret kept, that during the long struggle to save the Protestant succession and to exclude the Duke of York from the throne, no man ever discovered that there was another whose claims were better than those of the popular favourite, and who had of his free will preferred the gown of an obscure clerk to the brilliant prospect of favour at court and the chance of wearing the English crown. For this son, born to the king in the Isle of Jersey at the age of sixteen or seventeen years, the child of a lady of one of the noblest families in his dominions, was named by his father James Stuart, and urged to be at hand to maintain his rights should both the royal brothers die without male heirs. He set the dazzling fortune aside and resolved to live and die a Jesuit. In the year 1668, then being some four and twenty years old, he entered the house of novices of the Jesuits at Rome under the name of James de la Cloche. Towards the end of the same year Charles wrote to Johannes Oliva, the general, desiring that his son might be sent to England to discuss matters of religion. Assuming the name of Henri de Rohan, La Cloche made for England. He was received by the queen and the queen mother, and by them secretly taken to the king. What passed between father and son has never transpired. La Cloche was sent back to Rome by the king as his “secret ambassador to the Father General,” charged with an oral commission and orders to return to England as soon as it was fulfilled. The nature of that mission is unknown, and whether or no the young man returned to England. Trace of embassy and ambassador alike is lost, and the young prince disappears from history. Yet it may be that his figure can be descried again, flitting mysteriously across the life of his father. At the height of the turmoil of the Popish Plot a certain gentleman was employed to bring privately from beyond seas a Roman Catholic priest, with whom the king had secret business to transact. The king and the priest stayed long closeted together. At length the priest came out with signs of horror and fear on his face. Charles had been seized with a fit and, when the priest would have called for help, to preserve their secret summoned strength to hold him till the attack had passed. On Charles’ death two papers on religion were found in his cabinet and published in a translation by his brother. The originals were in French, in the form of an argument addressed by one person to another, and it is suggested, not without reason, that their author was the same man as the king’s questionable visitor, and none other than his own son, who had forgotten his native tongue and had surrendered fame and country for the good of his soul and of the Catholic Church.[42]