The slumber would at least appear not to have been dreamless. On the one hand, the secretary was evidently much exercised by a threatened _rapprochement_ between his royal master and Pope Clement VIII., who, through a Scotch Catholic gentleman, Sir James Lindsay, had sent a friendly message to King James, which had elicited a courteous and almost cordial reply.[224] The significance of this Cecil strenuously endeavoured, in a letter to the Duke of Lenox,[225] to explain away, and in February, 1604-5, we find him assuring the Archbishop of York with an earnestness somewhat suspicious,[226] "I love not to procure or yield any toleration; a matter which I well know no creature living durst propound to our religious Sovereign." For himself, he thus declares: "I will be much less than I am, or rather nothing at all, before I shall become an instrument of such a miserable change." Nevertheless, on the 17th of April following, he was fain to acknowledge, in writing to Parry,[227] that the news of Pope Clement's death had much eased him in his mind. It would, however, appear that the spectre of possible toleration still haunted him, and that he felt it necessary to commit the king to a course of severity. In a minute of September 12th, 1605, addressed to the same ambassador, which has been corrected and amended with an amount of care sufficiently testifying to the importance of the subject,[228] after speaking of "the plots and business of the priests," and the tendency of Englishmen going abroad "in this time of peace" to become Catholics, he thus continues: "Only this is it wherein my own heart receiveth comfort, that we live under a most religious and understanding Prince, who sticketh not to publish, as well in his own particular, as in the form of his government, how contrary that religion is to his resolution, and how far he will be from ever gracing [it]." He goes on to declare that nothing will so avail to make his Majesty withdraw his countenance from any man as such "falling away." About the same time as this was written, we are told by a writer, almost a contemporary,[229] that a dependent of Cecil's warned a Catholic gentleman, by name Buck, of a "wicked design" which his master had in hand against the papists. On the 17th of October, more than a week before the first hint of danger is said to have been breathed, we find the minister writing to Sir Thomas Edmondes, at Brussels,[230] in terms which certainly appear to couple together the growing danger of conversions to Catholicism, of which we have heard above, and the remedy soon to be supplied by the new policy which the discovery of the Plot so effectively established. He speaks of the "insolencies" of the priests and Jesuits, who are doing much injury by infecting with their poison "every youth that cometh amongst them;" ominously adding, "which liberty must, for one cause or another, be retrenched."