chaplain. "Were God
pleased that onlie young and weak ones did waver, it were more
tollerable," he laments, "but I am put in some doubte of my Chaplaine
himself." He had given the chaplain--one Wadesworth, a good Cambridge
Protestant--leave of absence to visit the University of Salamanca. In a
week the chaplain wrote for a prolongation of his stay, making discourse
of "a strange Tempest that came upon him in the way, of visible Fire
that fell both before and behind him, of an Expectation of present
Death, and of a Vowe he made in that time of Danger." This manner of
writing, and reports from others that he has been a secret visitor to
the College of the Jesuits, make Cornwallis fear the worst. "I should
think him borne in a most unfortunate hower," he wails, "to become the
occasion of such a Scandall."[174] But his fears were realized. The
chaplain never came back. He had turned Romanist.

The reasons for the headway of Catholicism in the reign of James I. do
not concern us here. To explain the agitated mood of our Precepts for
Travellers, it is necessary only to call attention to the fact that
Protestantism was just then losing ground, through the devoted energy of
the Jesuits. Even in England, they were able to strike admiration into
the mind of youth, and to turn its ardour to their own purposes. But in
Spain and in Italy, backed by their impressive environment and
surrounded by the visible power of the Roman Church, they were much more
potent. The English Jesuits in Rome--Oxford scholars, many of
them--engaged the attentions of such of their university friends or
their countrymen who came to see Italy, offering to show them the
antiquities, to be guides and interpreters.[175] By some such means the
traveller was lured into the company of these winning companions, till
their spiritual and intellectual power made an indelible impression on
him.[176]

How much the English Government feared the influence of the Jesuits upon
young men abroad may be seen by the increasing strictness of licences
for travellers. The ordinary licence which everyone but a known merchant
was obliged to obtain from a magistrate before he could leave England,
in 1595 gave permission with the condition that the traveller "do not
haunte or resorte unto the territories or dominions of any foreine
prince or potentate not being with us in league or amitie, nor yet
wittinglie kepe companie with any parson or parsons evell affected to
our State."[177