[1]
There was another class of men on whose services the king might rely with
confidence,--the Catholics,--who, alarmed by the fierce intolerance and the
severe menaces of the parliament, saw that their own safety depended on the
ascendancy of the sovereign. But Charles hesitated to avail himself of
this resource. His adversaries had allured the zealots to their party, by
representing the king as the dupe of a popish faction, which laboured to
subvert the Protestant, and to establish on its ruins the popish worship.
It was in vain that he called on them to name the members of this invisible
faction, that he publicly asserted his attachment to the reformed faith,
and that, to prove his orthodoxy, he ordered two priests to be put to death
at Tyburn, before his departure from the capital, and two others at York,
soon after his arrival in that city.[2] The houses still persisted in the
charge; and in all their votes and remonstrances attributed the measures
adopted by the king to the advice and influence of the papists
[Footnote 1: Thus Sir Edward Varney, the standard-bearer, told Hyde, that
he followed the king because honour obliged him; but the object of the war
was against his conscience, for he had no reverence for the bishops, whose
quarrel it was.
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