Note 224 — Chapter V

The slumber would at least appear not to have been dreamless. On the one hand, the secretary was evidently much exercised by a threatened rapprochement between his royal master and Pope Clement VIII., who, through a Scotch Catholic gentleman, Sir James Lindsay, had sent a friendly message to King James, which had elicited a courteous and almost cordial reply.[224] The significance of this Cecil strenuously endeavoured, in a letter to the Duke of Lenox,[225] to explain away, and in February, 1604-5, we find him assuring the Archbishop of York with an earnestness somewhat suspicious,[226] "I love not to procure or yield any toleration; a matter which I well know no creature living durst propound to our religious Sovereign." For himself, he thus declares: "I will be much less than I am, or rather nothing at all, before I shall become an instrument of such a miserable change." Nevertheless, on the 17th of April following, he was fain to acknowledge, in writing to Parry,[227] that the news of Pope Clement's death had much eased him in his mind.