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THE CAPUCHIN MISSION TO ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 237 when orders arrived from Paris that they were to leave the country. The spirited protests of Scottish nobles wrung from Friar Joseph the concession that Lindsay might return to his work. Archangel Leslie, his heart gnawed by the thought of his deserted Catholics in Scotland, made his way to Italy. He did not conceal his ire with _Friar Joseph's policy of exclusionn°. It was only complete ignorance of the desperate condition of Catholicism in Scotland which could have made Friar Joseph include Scotland in his draconian decree. Thomas Dease, rector of the Irish college at Paris, had written to Nugent on 7 February 1618 pleading that the occasion of the general chapter in Rome should be made the opportunity of explaining to the pope how perilous was the state of Scottish Catholicism 111 • The lack of priests there meant that Catholicism was languishing at death's door from spiritual starvation. The Irish Capuchins, he insisted, by their zeal, heroic lives and facility in the Gaelic tongue were the ideal missionaries for the work. In a further letter of the same year he returned to this theme 112 • He summed up the condition of the Scottish Catholics with the moving sentence from Jeremias: « The little ones have asked for bread, and there was no one to break it unto them» (Lam. 4, 4). Dease mentioned that the Irish Franciscan Observants at Louvain had been asked to undertake a Mission to the Highlands, but had given no sign that they were anxious to begin the work. He was unaware of the serious difficulties the Irish Franciscans had to overcome, nor could he foresee that they would write some of the most moving pages in the history of the Missions to Scotland 113 • When The MacDonald of Clanranald wrote to Nugent from Naples in April 1618 appealing for missionaries to the Highlands he corroborated Dease's statements 1 1-1. He declared that as far as he knew there were then only six priests to serve the needs of these Catholics 115 • It was in response to such heart-rending appeals that 110 Archangel Leslie to Colonel Semphill, 30 Jan. 1630 - partly cited in FREDEGAND CALLAEY, Essai critique sur la vie du P. Archange Leslie, in Etudes Franc. 31(1914) 512. 111 Cited in O'CONNELL, Hist.Miss., 182-183. 112 Dated « 5 Idus Intercalares » - cited ibid., 185-191. See also the letter from Baron Maitland to Nugent, Antwerp 23 Feb. 1618, making a similar appeal - cited ibid., 193-195. See supra n.49. 113 See C. GIBLIN, O.F.M., The Irish [Franciscan] Mission to Scotland in the seventeenth century [1619-47], in Franciscan College Annual (Multyfarnham) 1952, 7-24; Idem, The Mission to the Highlands and the Isles c.1670, ibid. 1954, 7-20; Idem, The Irish Franciscan Mission ..to Scotland, 1619-1646: documents from the Roman archives, Dublin 1964. 114 Cited in O'CONNELL, Hist.Miss., 195-196. 115 « In illis enim partibus non nisi sex ecclesiasticos viros, partim sacerdotes saecula-