to William Chisholm, a kinsman of James Elphinstone, 1st Lord Balmerino, and expressing high regard for the Pope and the Catholic faith. Originally, it had been dismissed as a forgery. When the matter was brought up again in 1608, severe pressure was put by Dunbar and Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury on Balmerino to induce him to take the whole blame on himself, and on the promise that his life and estates should be secured to him he consented to exculpate the king. The account he then gave was that he had written the letter, and had surreptitiously passed it in among papers awaiting the king's signature. Balmerino was disgraced and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out, and he later retired to his estates. According to a second account of Bellarmine, James was well aware of the letter's contents and had signed without hesitation. Besides the main disputants, a number of secondary writers joined the fray. On the Catholic side were Cardinal Duperron, Leonard Lessius, Jacob Gretser, Thomas Fitzherbert, Martin Becan, Gaspar Scioppi, Adolph Schulckenius, Nicolas Coeffeteau, and Andreas Eudaemon Joannes. Robert Persons wrote his Treatise tending to Mitigation (1608). No one was more closely identified with the Jesuit role in the English mission than Parsons, and he was already a central figure in the polemics around it. William Barlow made mischief by suggesting Parsons in any case was second fiddle to Robert Bellarmine. Opposed to them were: Lancelot Andrewes, William Barlow, Robert Burhill, Pierre du Moulin, the poet John Donne (in his Pseudo-Martyr of 1610) and the Benedictine Thomas Preston, who wrote in defence of the oath. James' response Andrewes replied to Bellarmine in Tortura Torti (1609). James insisted that Andrewes included in Tortura Torti references to the idea that if a Pope meddled with the temporal allegiances of Catholics, this was with indication of an identification of the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. James politicised the whole debate with his Premonition in the same year, dedicated to the Emperor Rudolph II and all the monarchs of Christendom. In it James now dropped his anonymity, and posed as the defender of primitive and true Christianity. In the Premonition James shifted to a more equivocal position. His view was that the identification could not be required as a matter of faith. He spoke of it as conjectural; but as a belief to which he