Side by side with the Jesuits, Creighton, Persons, and Holt, who were employed in the political movement, were others who had been sent to England and were intended purely for spiritual work. They had been extremely successful in their propaganda, and had once more infused spirit into the English Catholic party. This could not be done without the printing and dissemination of books, as well as preaching, and the spies of the Council were directed to track to earth the priests who were at the bottom of the movement. Nearly every writer upon the subject has taken for granted that Lord Burghley was at the bottom of the persecution which followed. Such, however, does not appear to have been the case. As we have seen, the Lord Treasurer insisted upon some uniformity in the practice of the Anglican Church, but he must have known that many of his closest friends, and the colleagues upon whom he depended in the Council, were Catholics, and his lifelong tendency was to a political union with Spain, the champion of Catholic Christendom. He was determined, it is true, to crush treason to the Queen and the institutions of the country, no matter who suffered; and when Catholicism meant revolution he harried it fiercely; but he was no persecutor for the sake of religion itself,[463] and the cruel torture and execution of Campion, Sherwin, and Briant,[464] during Alençon’s visit to England (1st December 1581), for denying the Queen’s supremacy, were almost certainly prompted in the main by Walsingham, Knollys, and the Puritans, who were in a fever of apprehension lest the marriage with Alençon would lead to toleration of the Catholic faith. The men actually executed were not in fact employed in the political portion of the propaganda at all, but were honest religious missionaries; but they, and the scores of other Catholics who were swept into prison at the time, were useful object lessons for Walsingham and Leicester, whose aims, as we have seen, were in direct opposition to those of Burghley.[465] The latter, indeed, was at the very time of the execution approaching Mendoza with suggestions for an alliance with Spain, which were coldly received for the reasons already explained.