274 TWO CHAPTERS ILLUSTRATIVE OF 



offended that formidable champion of the Roman Catholic cause, 

 Bellarmine, his letter to the pope would, in all probability, have 

 been forgotten ; but, under the name of Olatthceus Tortus, the ex- 

 asperated cardinal published it, and, further to annoy his royal an- 

 tagonist, accused him of abandoning the good policy of toleration 

 which he had professed to Clement VIII., and of disappointing the 

 hopes which he had held out of speedily relinquishing the protestant 

 religion. Sir Ralph Winwood positively asserts that, in the year 

 1596, James despatched a Scottish baron of the name of Ogilvie to 

 Spain, to assure his catholic majesty he was then ready to turn pa- 

 pist, and to propose an alliance with that king and the pope against 

 the queen of England; but, for reasons of state, the affair, he adds, 

 was hushed up.* Elizabeth must have found it difficult to stifle her 

 suspicions of his vacillating spirit in his religious creed, when she 

 enjoins Sir Richard Wigmore, among other topics of instruction, to 

 "induce the king resolutely to profess himself a protestant,t and to 

 relie and depend upon the amitie of Queen Elizabeth and England, 

 rather than that of any other potentate." 



To make a safe passage through the perils of this direct and un- 

 expected attack — to get rid of the high moral and political misde- 

 meanour of a protestant monarch carrying on a correspondence with 

 him, who was then deemed the very personification of the Anti- 

 christ, the Man of Sin — and in that correspondence not only solicit- 

 ing the dignity of cardinal for a Scottish papist, Drummond, Bishop 

 of Vaison, but even subscribing himself "Beatitudinis vestrse obse- 

 quentissimus filius,| J. R." — the king had no alternative but that of 

 throwing the odium of the letter upon his secretary, Elphinston, 



• See Winwood, vol. iii., p. 55, 56. 



+ " It appears," says Burnett, " that Walsingham thought that the king 

 was either incHned to turn Papist, or to be of no religion." Hist, of his own 

 Time, vol. i. p. 13. 



:j: See Rushworth's Hist. Collec. vol. 1, p. 166. And yet we have him 

 afterwards parading forth his consistency of religious belief to Buckingham, 

 who had no religion at all, telling him, " I am not a Monsieur who can shift 

 his religion as easily a ; he can shift his shirt when he cometh from Tennis." 

 See Hardwick's Slate Papers, vol. i., p. 412. To the same effect did bis son 

 afterwards express himself. And yet he too wrote a letter to the Pope, 

 which so scandalized the protestantism of Clarendon, that he openly hints 

 his feelings of dissatisfaction at it to his confidential friend, Secretary 

 Nicholas. " The letter to the Pope is by your favour more than compli- 

 mentary, and may be a warning that nothing is to be said or done in that 

 nice argument but what will bear the light." See Clarendon's Stale Papers, 

 vol. ii., p. 337. 



