The period 1636-39 during which George Con served as
papal agent at the court of Henrietta Maria coincided
with the rise and decline of the French alliance project
and with the development of the Scottish prayer-book
crisis. There is no evidence that Con influenced the de-
velopment of foreign policy, but to those who feared
and exaggerated the power of Spain at court, his friendship with Spanish
diplomats and his dealings with the exiled Marie de Medici and other
anti-Richelieu partisans put him in the enemy camp and triggered their
obsessive concern about the relation between Spanish and Catholic
ambitions.

There was more justification for associating Con with the Scottish
crisis, not with its origins, as the shriller Covenant propaganda insisted,
but with the king's response to the challenge of Scottish resistance. That
George Con was a Scot was from one point of view a mere coincidence; it
had nothing to do with the program for church uniformity that the king
and Archbishop Laud were pursuing. But the role of Scottish Catholics in
initiating the Anglo-Roman agency and the presence of Con at court
when the new prayer book was introduced looked anything but coin-
cidental to the more fearful Scottish spirits. Con's influence on Scottish
policy as the crisis developed lent some credibility to allegations of a link
between Rome and the prayer book that might otherwise have been
dismissed as fantastic by cooler heads.

Fears about Con's nefarious influence on policy were heightened by his
successful interference on behalf of individual English Catholics, by his
attempts to make a Catholic party out of the unstructured court Catholic
milieu he entered, and by the contrast between his attitudes and those of
his predecessor Gregorio Panzani. During his residence in England from
1634 to 1636, Panzani did little to discourage speculation (some hopeful,
some horrified) about possibilities of reunion between the Church of
England and Rome. He was unrealistically optimistic about Rome's will-
ingness to compromise; Con was less sanguine. Panzani was ecumenical
in spirit and tolerated a bit of vagueness about doctrine; Con took a
more orthodox line on doctrine and a less flexible stance on the crucial
issue of the 1606 oath of allegiance. The combination of Con's success at

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