Whatever may have been the feelings with which the Welsh people regarded the religious innovations, there can be no doubt at all that they readily acquiesced in them. In Wales there was no Pilgrimage of Grace, nor any plots against the English Government. The old religion lingered on, no doubt, in obscure corners, just as it did in the remote valleys of Cumberland; but it was abroad, and not in Wales, that the Welsh defenders of Romanism distinguished themselves. At Douai, and after its foundation in 1578 at the English College at Rome as well, scholarly and devout Welsh Catholics like Morgan Phillips, Owen Lewis, and Dr. Morris of Clynog, were busy training priests for the English mission field. So great became their influence at Rome that the peace of the College there was troubled by perennial feuds between English and Welsh. It was the great age of the Society of Jesus. Those devoted, able, daring and unscrupulous missionaries were winning fame for themselves in every corner of the world; and they were at work in England and Wales. But in the Welsh Catholics they met, from the outset, with strenuous opponents, and a long battle raged between them. Two other Welsh Catholics, belonging to a younger generation, {152} were John Roberts of Trawsfynydd, and John Jones of Llanfynach, better known as Father Leander. These two had been contemporaries at St. John's College, Oxford, another contemporary and friend of theirs being Archbishop Laud. At that time they were Protestants, at least in name; but subsequently were converted by the Jesuits. A natural antipathy seems to have existed in the sixteenth century between all Welshmen and the Jesuits; and it was not long before Roberts and Leander went over to the Benedictines. Roberts founded a Benedictine seminary at Douai; and in 1605 the Benedictine College of St. Gregory was opened there, an institution which for many years was to wield immense influence within the Catholic Church. At the time the Benedictine Order was represented in England by only a single monk; and the reinforcement which came from the Welshmen Roberts, Leander, and David Barker of Abergavenny, was both timely and decisive. But although ardent Catholics, these Welsh exiles remained always loyal to the Tudors. With conspirators and assassins they would have no dealings. They believed in the restoration of Catholicism in England, not by murder, not by foreign invasion, but by peaceful {153} propaganda and by that alone. They are an interesting and an amiable circle; and time has clothed them with that fascination with which it appears to be the special and inalienable privilege of leaders of lost causes to be endued.