Sovereign. We may be of opinion that those statesmen who attempted to meet the danger with persecution were men of little faith, who might have trusted to the strength of their religious and political creed--the two could not in those days be separated from one another; but there can be no doubt that the danger was there. We may hold Salisbury to have been but a commonplace man for meeting it as he did, but he had on his side nearly the whole of the official class which had stood by the throne of Elizabeth, and which now stood by the throne of James. At all events, Salisbury's doctrine that there was to be no personal understanding with the Pope was the doctrine which prevailed then and in subsequent generations. James's attempt came to nothing through its insuperable difficulties, as well as through his own defects of character. A pleading, from a Roman Catholic point of view, in favour of such an understanding may be found in a letter written by Sir Everard Digby to Salisbury, which Father Gerard has shown to have been written, not in December, as Mrs. Everett Green suggested, but between May 4 and September, 1605, and which I ascribe to May, or as soon after May as is possible. The letter, after a reference to a conversation recently held between Digby himself and Salisbury, proceeds as follows:-- "One part of your Lordship's speech, as I remember, was that the King could not get so much from the Pope (even then, when his Majesty had done nothing against the Catholics) as a promise that he would not excommunicate him, wherefore it gave occasion to suspect that, if Catholics were suffered to increase, the Pope might afterwards proceed to excommunication if the King would not change his religion.[255] But to take away that doubt, I do assure myself that his Holiness may be drawn to manifest so contrary a disposition of excommunicating the King, that he will proceed with the same course against all as shall go about to disturb the King's quiet and happy reign[256]; and the willingness of Catholics, especially of priests and Jesuits, is such as I dare undertake to procure any priest in England (though it were the Superior of the Jesuits) to go himself to Rome to negotiate this business, and that both he and all other religious men (till the Pope's pleasure be known) shall take any spiritual course to stop the effect that may proceed from any discontented or despairing Catholic.