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218 F. X. MARTIN more transported to the Tower of London. After he had spent two years under lock and key French influence again interceded for him. On this occasion he was released due to the intervention of Vitri, a Frenchman and an intimate friend of James I, and after the French ambassador in England had given a guarantee that Campbell would not return 22 • James I took a frank pride in what came out of Scotland, and the fact that Campbell was a relation of the earl of Argyll was an added inducement to royal clemency. 4. - Foundation of the Mission to Great Britain, 1608 Nugent arrived in Rome for the general chapter of May 1608 as a delegate of the Belgian province, acutely aware that this was the moment and the place to gain official approval for a Mission to Great Britain 23 • It cannot be pretended that he was equally interested in the three kingdoms of James I; a Mission to Ireland was his main object. He was genuinely concerned, however, for the persecuted Catholics of England and Scotland. Moreover, he was hard-headed enough to accept the fact that Ireland, for all its unswerving loyalty to Rome, was regarded as of minor importance when the interests of the Church in England were also under consideration. Nugent's opening gambit at the chapter had all the measured subtlety of Italian diplomacy. The question was raised - almost casually - whether Campbell was entitled to work in England and Scotland now that the cardinal of Lorraine, who granted him the missionary faculties, had died the previous November. The case was discussed, and the body of official Capuchin opinion was obviously weighted against any of the friars being allowed to continue working in a country where it was forbidden to wear the religious habit in public, and where a normal conventual life could not be followed. The situation was critical, but for Nugent who was thoroughly acquainted with the mentality of the continental Capuchins the events were happening just as expected. He realized that if an adverse decision were taken it would remain a formidable obstacle, to be quoted by Capuchin authorities as a precedent whenever permission for a Mission to the British Isles might again be sought even in more favourable circumstances. Any such self-denying ordinance would retain its force as long as anti-Catholic laws held sway in the three kingdoms. And in the year 1608 that meant the forseeable future. Not for the first time Nugent went over the heads of his superiors. 22 BENEDICT OF BOLTON, art. cit., in Coll.Franc. 4(1934) 580; Bentivoglio to Rome, Brussels 17 Sept. 1611, ed. R. Belvederi, Guido Bentivoglio, diplomatico II, Rovigo 1948, 215. 23 For the events at the general chapter of 1608 concerning the Mission to the British Isles see MARTIN, Nugent, 86-94.