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Others have pointed to Byrd’s protracted organ playing, which was described as “popish.”

What really worries the royal advisers in London is that James may be a covert Catholic — a tool of Rome playing the long game to wrest England back to popish abomination.

In the Renaissance, some Protestant denominations, such as Scotland’s austere Kirk, high-mindedly “declared all of Christmas a nasty popish invention and banned the holidays entirely.”

Then he was "atheistical, popish, heathenish, tyrannical, bloodthirsty;" now the country turned to him as a true patriot, the staunch upholder of the Anglican Church, the defender of the rights of Parliament.

The lover of the “popish clergywoman” is simply perfect, with a not much less good heart and a much better head than his master’s, and in his own degree hardly less of a gentleman.