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Also, he soon became aware that the movement was largely going Jacobite. If any new Church were built up—and it was difficult to think of this small, scattered handful as the true Phoenix Church he had once dreamed of—it would be a political Church, a Jacobite Church, bound to recall King James. Gervase had no fancy for King James, though he knew that all the village took him for a Jacobite, and he thought that his fellow clergy lost what small hope they had of capturing the nation by thus dallying with the Irish menace—against which Conster Furnace worked by day as well as by night, forging pike and ordnance. He wrote long, illegible letters to a Mr. Wagstaffe at Oxford—the only prominent non-Juror that he knew—and once even travelled as far as London to meet him: but the meeting was not a success. Wagstaffe thought Alard merely obstinate because he would not see the difference between Jacobitism as a religious principle and as a political force, and Gervase thought Wagstaffe a hair-splitting enthusiast for insisting on what was, after all, not very unlike his own attitude to the movement before he grew disgusted with its small beginnings. He returned to Conster feeling sure that the day would be lost for want of his generalship, and almost—though not for long—wishing himself back at Leasan.