Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/263

 of the well-devised scheme of the French negotiators at Dover, which sooner or later was to culminate in the public adoption of the Roman Catholic religion by the King, and the admission of the professors of the true faith to a predominant share of power. Something of all this the public mind more than suspected.

How far the King and his brother were cognisant, how far they consented, and how far, below the high-placed political conspirators, a baser set of men may have existed, ready to use the doctrines of Mariana and the weapons of Jacques Clément and Ravaillac, and thereby to make up for the more cautious and dilatory methods of their superiors, is one of the unsolved problems of history.

The theology of the Roman Catholic Church was the theology of the Tridentine Council; and the period was that of the Jesuit reaction, which was in full command at the Court of Vienna and in the affairs of the Empire; which in Italy had stamped out Protestantism, philosophic doubt, and political liberty; and in France had been successfully directed to inducing the youthful King to reverse the policy of his immediate predecessors and to enter on a career of aggression against Holland, the representative Protestant State of the Continent. The liberties of the French Protestants, supposed to have been secured by the express terms of the Edict of Nantes, were meanwhile being cunningly sapped and mined by the action of the Assemblies of the Church, which, whenever the necessities of the Royal Exchequer compelled the King to seek financial aid from their wealthy treasury, made the limitation of those liberties the unfailing condition of their grants. The root of the troubles of Ireland, as in the days of the Cardinal of Fermo, still lay in the intrigues of the Roman Curia, which simply regarded that island as a counter in the great political game being played on the Continent, and was determined never to allow the country to be quiet as long as it suited the exigencies of the struggle.

Sir William Petty, like his master Hobbes, distinguished between the Roman Catholic religion considered as an abstract