indignity. The commission, however, was perfectly legal under the recent statute.

But while we can hardly pronounce Mary's execution to have been so wholly iniquitous and unwarrantable as it has been represented, it may be admitted that a more generous nature than that of Elizabeth would not have exacted the law's full penalty. The queen of Scots' detention in England was in violation of all natural, public, and municipal law; and if reasons of state policy or precedents from the custom of princes are allowed to extenuate this injustice, it is to be asked whether such reasons and such precedents might not palliate the crime of assassination imputed to her. Some might perhaps allege, as was so frequently urged at the time, that, if her life could be taken with justice, it could not be spared in prudence; and that Elizabeth's higher duty to preserve her people from the risks of civil commotion must silence every feeling that could plead for mercy. Of this necessity different judgments may perhaps be formed. It is evident that Mary's death extinguished the best hope of popery in England: but the relative force of the two religions was greatly changed since Norfolk's conspiracy; and it appears to me that an act of parliament explicitly cutting her off from the crown, and at the same time entailing it on her son, would have afforded a very reasonable prospect of securing the succession against all serious disturbance. But this neither suited the inclination of Elizabeth nor of some among those who surrounded her.

§ 19. As the catholics endured without any open murmuring the execution of her on whom their fond hopes had so long rested, so for the remainder of the queen's reign they by no means appear, when considered as a body, to have furnished any specious pretexts for severity. In that memorable year, when the dark cloud gathered around our coasts, when Europe stood by in fearful suspense to behold what should be the result of that great cast in the game of human politics, what the craft of Rome, the power of Philip, the genius of Farnese, could achieve against the islandqueen with her Drakes and Cecils,—in that agony of the protestant faith and English name, they stood the trial of their spirit; without swerving from their allegiance. It was then that the catholics in every county repaired to the standard of the lord-lieutenant, imploring that they might not be suspected of bartering the national independence for their religion itself. It was then that the venerable lord Montague brought a troop of horse to the queen at Tilbury, commanded by himself, his son, and grandson. It would have been a sign of gratitude if the laws depriving them of the free exercise of their religion had been, if not repealed, yet suffered to sleep, after these proofs of loyalty. But the execution of priests and of other'

84

NUMBER OF CATHOLIC MARTYRS.

CHAP. III. catholics became on the contrary more frequent, and the fines for recusancy were exacted as rigorously as before. A statute was enacted, restraining popish recusants, a distinctive name now first imposed by law, to particular places of residence, and subjecting them to other vexatious provisions. All persons were forbidden by proclamation to harbour any of whose conformity they were not assured. Some indulgence was doubtless shown during all Elizabeth's reign to particular persons, and it was not unusual to release priests from confinement; but such precarious and irregular connivance gave more scandal to the puritans than comfort to the opposite party.

§ 20. The catholic martyrs under Elizabeth amount to no inconsiderable number. Dodd reckons them at 191; Milner has raised the list to 204. Fifteen of these, according to him, suffered for denying the queen's supremacy, 126 for exercising their ministry, and the rest for being reconciled to the Romish church. Many others died of hardships in prison, and many were deprived of their property. There seems nevertheless to be good reason for doubting whether any one who was executed might not have saved his life by explicitly denying the pope's power to depose the queen. It was constantly maintained by her ministers that no one had been executed for his religion. This would be an odious and hypocritical subterfuge if it rested on the letter of these statutes, which adjudge the mere manifestation of a belief in the Roman catholic religion, under certain circumstances, to be an act of treason. But both lord Burleigh, in his Execution of Justice, and Walsingham, in a letter published by Burnet, positively assert the contrary; and I am not aware that their assertion has been disproved. This certainly furnishes a distinction between the persecution under Elizabeth (which, unjust as it was in its operation, yet, as far as it extended to capital inflictions, had in view the security of the government) and that which the protestants had sustained in her sister's reign, springing from mere bigotry and vindictive rancour, and not even shielding itself at the time with those shallow pretexts of policy which it has of late been attempted to set up in its extenuation. But that which renders these condemnations of popish priests so iniquitous is, that the belief in, or rather the refusal to disclaim, a speculative tenet, dangerous indeed, and incompatible with loyalty, but not coupled with any overt act, was construed into treason; nor can any one affect to justify these sentences who is not prepared to maintain that a refusal of the oath of abjuration, while the pretensions of the house of Stuart subsisted, might lawfully or justly have incurred the same penalty.

An apology was always deduced for these measures, whether of restriction or punishment, adopted against all adherents to the

Roman church, from the restless activity of that new militia which the Holy See had lately organised. The mendicant orders established in the thirteenth century had lent former popes a powerful aid towards subjecting both the laity and the secular priesthood, by their superior learning and ability, their emulous zeal, their systematic concert, their implicit obedience. But, in all these requisites for good and faithful janissaries of the church, they were far excelled by the new order of Ignatius Loyola. Rome, I believe, found in their services what has stayed her fall. They contributed in a very material degree to check the tide of the Reformation. Subtle alike and intrepid, pliant in their direction, unshaken in their aim, the sworn, implacable, unscrupulous enemies of protestant governments, the jesuits were a legitimate object of jealousy and restraint. As every member of that society enters into an engagement of absolute, unhesitating obedience to its superior, no one could justly complain that he was presumed capable at least of committing any crimes that the policy of his monarch might enjoin. But if the jesuits by their abilities and busy spirit of intrigue promoted the interests of Rome, they raised up enemies by the same means to themselves within the bosom of the church; and became little less obnoxious to the secular clergy, and to a great proportion of the laity, than to the protestants whom they were commissioned to oppose. Their intermeddling character was shown in the very prisons occupied by catholic recusants, where a schism broke out between the two parties, and the secular priests loudly complained of their usurping associates. This was manifestly connected with the great problem of allegiance to the queen, which the one side being always ready to pay, did not relish the sharp usage it endured on account of the other's disaffection. The council indeed gave some signs of attending to this distinction, by a proclamation issued in 1602, ordering all priests to depart from the kingdom, unless they should come in and acknowledge their allegiance, with whom the queen would take further order. Thirteen priests came forward on this, with a declaration of allegiance as full as could be devised. Some of the more violent papists blamed them for this; and the Louvain divines concurred in the censure. There were now two parties among the English catholics; and those who, goaded by the sense of long persecution, and inflamed by obstinate bigotry, regarded every heretical government as unlawful or unworthy of obedience, used every machination to deter the rest from giving any test of their loyalty. These were the more busy, but by much the less numerous class; and their influence was mainly derived from the laws of severity, which they had braved or endured with fortitude. It is equally candid and reasonable to believe that, if a fair and legal toleration, or even a general connivance at the exercise of their

86

LENITY OF SIR C. HATTON.

CHAP. III. worship, had been conceded in the first part of Elizabeth's reign, she would have spared herself those perpetual terrors of rebellion which occupied all her later years. Rome would not indeed have been appeased, and some desperate fanatic might have sought her life; but the English catholics collectively would have repaid her protection by an attachment which even her rigour seems not wholly to have prevented.

It is not to be imagined that an entire unanimity prevailed in the councils of this reign as to the best mode of dealing with the adherents of Rome. Those temporary connivances or remissions of punishment which, though to our present view they hardly lighten the shadows of this persecution, excited loud complaints from bigoted men, were owing to the queen's personal humour, or the influence of some advisers more liberal than the rest. Elizabeth herself seems always to have inclined rather to indulgence than extreme severity. Sir Christopher Hatton, for some years her chief favourite, incurred odium for his lenity towards papists, and was, in their own opinion, secretly inclined to them. Whitgift found enough to do with an opposite party. And that too noble and highminded spirit, so ill fitted for a servile and dissembling court, the earl of Essex, was the consistent friend of religious liberty, whether the catholic or the puritan were to enjoy it. But those councillors, on the other hand, who favoured the more precise reformers, and looked coldly on the established church, never failed to demonstrate their protestantism by excessive harshness towards the old religion's adherents. That bold bad man, whose favour is the great reproach of Elizabeth's reign, the earl of Leicester, and the sagacious, disinterested, inexorable Walsingham, were deemed the chief advisers of sanguinary punishments. But, after their deaths, the catholics were mortified to discover that lord Burleigh, from whom they had hoped for more moderation, persisted in the same severities.

NOTE TO CHAPTER III.