Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/408

 392 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 66. Walsmgham had apostate priests in his service, who had saved themselves from the Tower rack by selling their souls. Some of them were in the seminary at Rheims, some were still prisoners in English dungeons, sharing the confidence of their comrades by seemingly partaking of their sufferings. Others were flitting in the usual disguises about country houses, saying mass, hearing confessions, and all on the watch for informa- tion ; and a number of curious notes from unknown hands, written or signed in cipher, survive as evidence of the hundred eyes with which Elizabeth's secretary was peering into the secrets of the enemy. It was not for nothing that de Tassis and Guise had recommended haste. So furnished, and with such instruments, it was scarcely possible that a secret of so much magnitude could for many months escape Walsingham's knowledge. Among the Catholics themselves too there were dif- ferences of opinion, which were indicated rather than openly expressed in the conference of the conspirators at Paris. Some were for James, some for Mary ; some had looked to Henry III. and Alencon ; some considered the Yalois King to have inherited a poison from the English King after whom he was named, and ' to have been ap- pointed of God to be a scourge to religion in other countries as King Henry VIII. had been in England.' Allen, Parsons, and the Jesuits were intensely Spanish, while still more curiously the English layman's con- tempt: of the clergy survived in the Catholic camp. Charles Paget and Thomas Throgmorton had set them- selves to thwart and contradict Parsons, ' liking not