four other Catholic peers, Henry Arundell, 3rd Baron Arundell of Wardour, William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, William Herbert, 1st Marquis of Powis and William Petre, 4th Baron Petre, was denounced as a conspirator and formally impeached in Parliament. Belasyse was said to have been designated Commander-in-Chief of a supposed "Popish army" by the Jesuit Superior-General, Giovanni Paolo Oliva, but Charles II, according to Von Ranke, burst out laughing at the idea that this infirm old man, who could hardly stand on his feet due to gout, would be able even to hold a pistol. He was a friend of the senior civil servant Edward Colman, an ardent and politically active Catholic, who was executed for his supposed part in the Plot in December 1678, and that Colman had visited Belasyse the night before he gave himself up to the authorities. However, Colman in fact seems to have been guilty of nothing more than indiscreet correspondence with the French Court in which he outlined his wildly impractical schemes for the advancement of the Catholic faith in England. Despite his frequent references to his old age and infirmity, Lord Belasyse lived on for another ten years. The impeached Catholic peers, though they endured a long imprisonment in the Tower, where Lord Petre died in 1683, were never brought to trial, apart from Stafford, who was executed in December 1680. James II Following the accession of king James II, Belasyse returned to favour and in July 1686 was appointed a Privy Counsellor and in 1687 was appointed as First Lord Commissioner of the Treasury which, on account of his Catholicism, caused political problems for the king, although in a Court dominated by extremists, he was regarded as moderate. He and the king had always been on friendly terms: after the death of his first wife Anne Hyde, James had informally promised to marry Susan Belasyse, Belasyse's widowed daughter-in-law, "a lady of much life and vivacity", despite the fact that she was a staunch Protestant while he was a Catholic convert. The marriage was forbidden by Charles II, who told his younger brother that "it was too much that he had played the fool once (i.e. by marrying Anne Hyde, another commoner) and that it was not to be done a second time and at such an age". Susan was forced to surrender the written proofs of the engagement although she kept a secret