The great conspiracy of 1569-70 against Elizabeth had failed, owing to lack of complete co-operation of the various Catholic elements: the present attempt seemed to promise an organisation of greater ramifications and more intimate combination. This was owing in great part to a new feature now first introduced. Those who watched the debarkation at Dover of the passengers from a skiff that had arrived from Calais on the 12th June, 1580, saw leap upon the shore a swashbuckling young captain, such as many who came from the Flemish war. He was a man of five-and-thirty, clad in a buff military coat covered with gold lace, and had a great, clanking rapier hung upon his hip, whilst a fine feather flaunted in his wide-brimmed hat. With him came a soldier-servant of humbler mien, and, after being duly searched and coming through the ordeal successfully, the two travellers swaggered upon their way.[230] The captain told the searcher who kindly procured him a horse that a friend of his, an English jeweller living at St. Omer, would follow him to England in a day or two. The jeweller, Mr. Edmunds, duly came, and also went on his road to Gravesend, and so by tilt-boat to London, there to be lost like his military forerunner in the crowds of the capital. The captain came not to rest from the wars against the Spaniards in Flanders, but to conquer England again for the Faith, for he was Father Robert Parsons the Jesuit, and the jeweller Edmunds, who followed, sold, not jewels alone, but his own life for the task to which he had been dedicated by the Church, for he was Edmund Campion. These three young men were but the advance guard of an army of Jesuit missionaries who soon flocked over from the seminaries of Rheims and Rome to strengthen the resistance of the sorely tried Catholics of England and Scotland. Wherever these zealous clerics reached, the power of Elizabeth over her subjects was weakened. There were many Catholics who had grown tired of persecution, and were willing to purchase peace by open compliance with the Queen’s laws. More there were who would have been fully content with even limited toleration for their observance. But to these fiery young spirits toleration was a more deadly blow than persecution, and although up to this time the secular priests had been willing to concede to Catholics some appearance of outward conformity, the attendance at Protestant service was now forbidden to those of the old Faith. The result was almost at once a recrudescence of the persecutions against Catholics in a crueller form than ever, with the inevitable result of raising a stronger and more fanatical religious spirit than had existed amongst the Catholics in England since the early days of Elizabeth’s reign. [Illustration: ROBERT PARSONS, S.J. 1546-1610]