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But everything had been changed by the Papal Bull excommunicating the Queen and the acts of retaliation that followed it. Mass was no longer said in Leasan Church, even behind locked doors, and the Catholic religion, which till then had been no worse than an expensive luxury, had now become High Treason—not only his purse was threatened, but his land and his life. The Burdetts could no longer protect him. It was too much for his easy allegiance, and he conformed, as his wife had long been praying him to do.

Only his children reproached him. He had expected them to conform with him, and it had been a shock to find them so set in the ways he had abandoned. But he was a kindly, easy soul, and after a few efforts at coercion, time wasted in beatings, starvings and tears, he had left them alone. After all, they were nearly of age, and he could not be held responsible for their recusancy. But it had been hard, bitterly hard, for him, when Simon, his only son and Alard's heir, slipped out of the country to be trained for a priest in Rome, thereby forfeiting for ever his inheritance of English land, even life itself should he return.