confessor thought, standing by the queen, to have been before Mr. Hacket, but Mr. Hacket again got the start.  The confessor, nevertheless, begins his grace as loud as Mr. Hacket, with such a confusion, that the king in great passion instantly rose from the table, and, taking the queen by the hand, retired into the bedchamber."[211] It is with difficulty we conceive how such a scene of priestly indiscretion should have been suffered at the table of an English sovereign.

Such are the domestic accounts I have gleaned from MS. letters of the times; but particulars of a deeper nature may be discovered in the answer of the king’s council to Marshal Bassompierre, preserved in the history of his embassy; this marshal had been hastily despatched as an extraordinary ambassador when the French party were dismissed.  This state-document, rather a remonstrance than a reply, states that the French household had formed a little republic within themselves, combining with the French resident ambassador, and inciting the opposition members in parliament; a practice usual with that intriguing court, even from the days of Elizabeth, as the original letters of the French ambassador of the time, which will be found in the third volume, amply show; and those of La Boderie in James the First’s time, who raised a French party about Prince Henry; and the correspondence of Barillon in Charles the Second’s reign, so fully exposed in his entire correspondence published by Fox.  The French domestics of the queen were engaged in lower intrigues; they lent their names to hire houses in the suburbs of London, where, under their protection, the English Catholics found a secure retreat to hold their illegal assemblies, and where the youth of both sexes were educated and prepared to be sent abroad to Catholic seminaries.  But the queen’s priests, by those well-known means which the Catholic religion sanctions, were drawing from the queen the minutest circumstances which passed in privacy between her and the king; indisposed her mind towards her royal consort, impressed on her a contempt of the English nation, and a disgust of our customs, and particularly, as has been usual with the French, made her neglect the English language, as if the queen of England held no common interest with the nation.  They had made her residence a place of security for the persons and papers of the discontented.  Yet all this was hardly more offensive than the humiliating state to which they had reduced an English queen by their monastic obedience:  inflicting the most degrading penances.  One of the most flagrant is alluded to in our history.  This was a barefoot pilgrimage to Tyburn, where, one morning, under the gallows on which so many Jesuits had been executed as traitors to Elizabeth and James the First, she knelt and prayed to them as martyrs and saints who had shed their blood in defence of the Catholic cause.[212] A manuscript letter of the times mentions that “the priests had also made her