The significance of this is beyond doubt. It has been the custom of historians, quoting the last passage alone, to belittle its importance as the exaggerated outpouring of a zealot’s fancy. Taken with the context it is seen to be something very different. The words only express more clearly what was often hinted at and half outspoken in the correspondence which led up to this point. Jesuit agents and the Duke of York’s confidential secretary, for such in fact Coleman was, had something more to do than to entertain themselves by writing at length and in cipher to all parts of Europe with no other intention than to express their hopes for the propagation of the Catholic faith in a manner quite detached from politics, or to discuss political schemes as matters of speculative interest; such things are not done for amusement. Coleman’s phrases are pregnant with real meaning. They are to be understood literally. The design which his letters sketch was in substance the same as that afterwards put into practice when the Duke of York ascended the throne as James II. Under the guise of a demand for liberty of worship, it was a design to turn England into a Roman Catholic state in the interest of France and the Jesuits, and by the aid of French money. The remark of Halifax that dissenters only plead for conscience to obtain power was eminently true of his own time. No less true was it that those who separated themselves from the religion of the state aimed at the subversion of it.[75] High treason, be it remarked, is the only crime known to the law in which the intention and not the act constitutes the offence. The famous statute of Edward III had defined as the most important treasons the compassing or imagining of the king’s death, the levying of war against the king, and adherence to the king’s enemies within the realm or without.[76] An act passed at the height of power of one of the most powerful monarchs who have reigned in England was insufficient for the needs of those whose position was less secure. The severity of repeated enactments under Henry VIII to create new treasons, and perhaps the difficulty of meeting attempts against the crown by statutory definition, rendered this method of supplying the want unpopular and unsatisfactory. So in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the extension of the statute of Edward III by construction became the settled mode of procedure. With the lapse of time the scope of constructive treason was extended. Coke laid down that an overt act witnessing the intention to depose or imprison the king or to place him in the power of another was sufficient to prove the compassing and imagining his death. Conspiracy with a foreign prince to invade the realm by open hostility, declared by an overt act, is evidence of the same.[77] Hale held conspiracy, the logical end of which must be the death or deposition of the king, even though this were not the direct intention, to be an act of high treason. To levy war against the king