For the time James--pushed hard by his councillors,[242] as he was--might fancy that he had found a compromise. There was to be no enforcement of the recusancy laws against the laity, but on February 22, 1604, a proclamation was issued ordering the banishment of the priests[243]. It was not a compromise likely to be of long endurance. For our purposes the most important of its results was that it produced the Gunpowder Plot. A few days after its issue that meeting of the five conspirators took place behind St. Clement's, at which they received the sacrament in confirmation of their mutual promise of secrecy. All that has been said of the tyranny of the penal laws upon the laity, as affording a motive for the plot, is so much misplaced rhetoric. Moreover, if we accept Fawkes's evidence[244] of the date at which he first heard of the plot as being about Easter, 1604, _i.e._ about April 8, the communication of the design to Winter must have taken place towards the end of March, that is to say after the issue of the proclamation and before any other step had been taken to enforce the penal laws. Consequently all arguments, attributing the invention of the plot to Cecil for the sake of gaining greater influence with the King fall to the ground. He had just achieved a triumph of no common order, the prelude, as he must have been keen enough to discern, of greater triumphs to come. Granted, for argument's sake, that Cecil was capable of any wickedness--we at least require some motive for the crime which Father Gerard attributes to him by innuendo. As time went on, there was even less cause for the powerful minister to invent or to foster a false plot. It is unnecessary to tell again in detail the story which I have told elsewhere of the way in which James fell back upon the Elizabethan position, and put in force once more the penal laws against the laity. On November 28, 1604, he decided on requiring the 20_l._ fines from the thirteen wealthy recusants who were liable to pay them, and on February 10, 1605[245]--a few days after the plotters had got half through the wall of the House of Lords--he announced his resolution that the penal laws should be put in execution. On May 4, 1605, Cecil, who in August, 1604, had been made Viscount Cranborne, was raised to the Earldom of Salisbury. Yet this is the politician who is supposed by Father Gerard to have been necessitated to keep himself in favour by the atrocious wickedness he is pleased to ascribe to him. In plain truth, Salisbury did not need to gain favour and power. He had both already. A policy of intolerance is so opposed to the instincts of the present day, that it is worth while to hear a persecutor in his own defence. On March 7, 1605, less than a month after the King's pronouncement, Nicolo Molin, the Venetian ambassador, writes, that he had lately spoken to Cranborne on the recent treatment of the Catholics.