Patrick and Nicola's discussions about religion read wonderfully and hilariously to me: they're almost never entirely serious, I think, or seriousness gets deflected at crucial points, and yet they are about things that both hold deeply and dear. I grew up in a not very religious, but "mixed" household; my mother is a Catholic (not anciently, like the Merricks, but working-class late-nineteenth-century converts who were Very Impresseed by Cardinal Manning. How I envied him his "yes, penal times and all" throwaway lines!) and my father CofE. Which cathedrals "we'll let you keep" were the sort of jokey discussions I grew up with. I was so delighted to find them, at the age of 9 or 10, in fiction, and I still adore them. Patrick is a prig, of course, but I think his priggishness is ably characterised as temporary and adolescent: it results from deep conviction, not superfical piety. As for his dealings with Ginty and Nicola, why on earth should a character who is meant to be likeable not do unlikeable things? Moreover, I think Patrick provides an extremely useful character for AF to think through her own religious conviction and its possible conflicts with her equally strong attraction to subversives and madcaps. The way in which monarchism tangles up with Catholicism in England is odder than you suggest - it usually means Jacobite sympathies, which are subversive in the most basic sense (though not progressive...)