Note 489 — Chapter X · (continued 2)

Clarendon Papers, 425, 427, 458, 462, 475, 526, 579. It is evident that the catholics had greater hopes from the duke than from the king, and considered the former as already their own. A remarkable letter of Morley to Hyde, April 24, 1659, p. 458, shows the suspicions already entertained of him by the writer in point of religion; and Hyde is plainly not free from apprehension that he might favour the scheme of supplanting his brother. The intrigue might have gone a great way, though we may now think it probable that their alarm magnified the danger. "Let me tell you," says Sir Antony Ashley Cooper in a letter to Hyde, "that Wildman is as much an enemy now to the king as he was before a seeming friend; yet not upon the account of a commonwealth, for his ambition meets with every day repulses and affronts from that party; but upon a finer spun design of setting up the interest of the Duke of York against the king; in which design I fear you will find confederated the Duke of Bucks, who perhaps may draw away with him Lord Fairfax, the presbyterians, levellers, and many catholics. I am apt to think these things are not transacted without the privity of the queen; and I pray God that they have not an ill influence upon your affairs in France."—475. Buckingham was surmised to have been formally reconciled to the church of Rome. 427. Some supposed that he, with his friend Wildman, were for a republic. But such men are for nothing but the intrigue of the moment. These projects of Buckingham to set up the Duke of York are hinted at in a pamphlet by Shaftesbury or one of his party, written about 1680. Somers Tracts, viii. 342.