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thrown into the water in order to ascertain whether she would sink or swim, and who had perished during the trial, was pronounced by Chief Justice Parker to be murder.' It is one of the great glories of the early Hanoverian period that it witnessed the abrogation of the sanguinary enactment by which so many innocent victims had perished. Chief Justice Holt did good service to humanity in exposing the imposture which lay at the root of some cases he was obliged to try,2 and in 1736 the law making witchcraft punishable by death was repealed. The superstition long smouldered among the poorer classes; there were several instances of the murder of suspected witches; and Methodism did something to strengthen the belief, but as it had no longer the sanction of the law, and as diseased imaginations were no longer excited by the executions, it sank speedily into insignificance. It is a curious fact that the Irish law against witchcraft, though long wholly obsolete, remained on the Statute Book till 1818.

Another measure of a very different kind, but also in some degree dependent upon the theological temperature, belonging to the period I am considering, was the reform of the calendar. The New Style, as is well known, had been first brought into use by Pope Gregory XIII., in 1582, and had gradually been adopted by all the Continental nations, except Russia and Sweden, but England, partly from natural conservatism, and partly from antipathy to the Pope, still resisted, and had at last got eleven days wrong. The change was carried on the motion of Lord Chesterfield, and with the assistance of the eminent mathematicians, Lord Macclesfield and Mr. Bradley, under the Pelham Ministry in 1751. The year was henceforth to begin on January 1 instead of on March 25; and in order to rectify the errors of the old calendar it was ordered that the day following September 2, 1752, should be denominated the 14th. The old Duke of Newcastle, whose timid and

'Ibid. pp. 175, 176. Hutchinson, who wrote in 1718, says, Our country people are still as fond of this custom of swimming as they are of baiting a

VOL. I.

20

bear or a bull.'

2 Campbell's Chief Justices-Life of Holt.

time-serving nature dreaded beyond all things an explosion of popular feeling, entreated Chesterfield not to 'stir matters that had long been quiet,' or to meddle. with new-fangled things,' and although the reform was ultimately carried without difficulty, these apprehensions were not wholly groundless. A widespread irritation was for a time aroused. Much was said about the profanity of altering saint-days and immovable feasts. At the next election one of the most popular cries against Lord Macclesfield's son was, 'Give us back our eleven days!' When, many years later, Mr. Bradley died of a lingering disease, his sufferings were supposed by the populace to be a judgment due to the part he had taken in the transaction; and the feelings of many were probably expressed in a saying that was quoted during the debate on the naturalisation of the Jews, It is no wonder he should be for naturalising the devil who was one of those that banished old Christmas.'1

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There were, however, still two classes of laws upon the Statute Book which were grossly persecuting, and which, during the early Hanoverian period, were entirely unmitigated. I mean, of course, those against the Catholics and the disbelievers in the Trinity. The measures against the former class may no doubt derive a very considerable palliation from the atrocious persecutions of which Catholicism had been guilty in almost every country in which she triumphed, from the incessant plots against the life and power of Elizabeth, and from the intimate connection, both before and after the Revolution, between the Catholicism of the Stuarts and their political conduct and prospects. Catholicism, indeed, never can be looked upon merely as a religion. It is a great and highly organised kingdom, recognising no geographical frontiers, governed by a foreign sovereign, pervading temporal politics with its manifold influence, and attracting to itself much of the enthusiasm which

Parl. Hist. xv. 136. So, too, a ballad against the Jew Bill begins.

In seventeen hundred and fifty three
The style it was changed to Popery.
-Political Ballads, ii. 311.

See, on this subject, Lord Stanhope's
Hist. of England, iii. 340; Maty's
Life of Chesterfield, pp. 320-323;
Coxe's Pelham, ii. 178-179; and
Hogarth's picture of an Election.

would otherwise flow in national channels. The intimate correspondence between its priests in many lands, the disciplined unity of their political action, the almost absolute authority they exercise over large classes, and their usually almost complete detachment from purely national and patriotic interests have often in critical times proved a most serious political danger, and they have sometimes pursued a temporal policy eminently aggressive, sanguinary, unscrupulous, and ambitious. Nor should it be forgotten that, in the closing years of the seventeenth and in the first half of the eighteenth century, the spirit of Romish persecution, though gradually subsiding, was still far from extinct. Thus we find Stanhope writing from Majorca in 1691 Tuesday last there were burnt here twenty-seven Jews and heretics, and to-morrow I shall see executed above twenty more, and Tuesday next, if I stay here so long, is to be another fiesta, for so they entitle a day dedicated to so execrable an act.' In 1706 Wilcox, who was afterwards Bishop of Rochester, but who was at this time minister of the English factory at Lisbon, wrote a letter to Burnet describing an auto-da-fé in that city, in which four persons were burnt in the presence of the King, and of these one woman remained alive for half-an-hour, and one man for more than an hour in the flames, vainly imploring their executioners to heap fresh fagots on the fire in order to terminate their agony.2 Every considerable town in England, Holland, and Protestant Germany, contained a colony of Frenchmen, who, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had been driven from their homes by a persecution of extreme ferocity; a long course of the most atrocious cruelties had kindled the flame of rebellion in the Cevennes, and at the time of the Peace of Utrecht 188 French Protestants were released by English intercession from the galleys.3 In 1717, an assembly of seventy-four Protestants being surprised at

1 Lord Stanhope's Hist. of England,

i. 107.

2 See this letter in full in Chandler's Hist. of Persecution (1736), p. 287. See too some curious particu

lars on persecutions in Portugal in Geddes' tracts, i. 385-443.

Bolingbroke's Letters, iv. 121. See, too, Burnet's Own Times, ii. 484.

Andure, the men were sent to the galleys and the women to prison. In 1724, in the corrupt and generally sceptical period of the Regency, a new law was made against the Protestants of France which aggravated even the atrocious enactments of Lewis XIV. By one clause all who assembled for the exercise of the Protestant worship, even in their own homes, became liable to lifelong servitude in the galleys, and to the confiscation of all their goods. Another condemned to death any Protestant minister exercising any religious function whatever, and to the galleys any witness who failed to denounce him. A third enjoined all physicians to inform the priest of the condition of every dying patient, in order that, whether he desired it or not, a Catholic priest should be present at his deathbed. A fourth, with a rare refinement of ingenious malice, rendered any Protestant who, by his religious exhortations, strengthened a dying relative in his faith, liable to the galleys and to the confiscation of his goods. A Protestant pastor was hung at Montpellier in 1728; another would have suffered the same fate in 1732 had he not succeeded in escaping from his prison;3 and 277 Protestants in Dauphiny were condemned to the galleys in 1745 and 1746. As late as the Peace of Paris, a Protestant minister at Nismes wrote to the Duke of Bedford imploring the intercession of the English Government in favour of thirty-three men, who were in the galleys of Toulon, and of sixteen women, who were imprisoned in Languedoc, for no other offence than that of having attended Protestant assemblies. Many of them, he added, had remained in captivity for more than thirty years.5

Similar complaints came from Hungary, where the interference of the Emperor with the religious liberty of the Protestants contributed largely to the insurrection of Rákóczy ; from Silesia, where the same interference prepared the way for the ultimate severance of the province from the Austrian rule; from Poland, where the persecution fomented in 1724 by the

1 Taine's Ancien Régime, p. 80. 2 Sismondi's Hist. des Français, xix. 241-244.

Ibid. p. 302.

4 Taine's Ancien Régime, p. 80. Bedford Correspondence, iii. 155.

Jesuits at Thorn aroused the indignation of all Protestant Europe, and where the complete exclusion of religious dissidents from political power in 1733 was sowing dissensions that were the sure precursors of the approaching ruin. In the course of 1732 and the two following years about 17,000 German Protestants were compelled by the persecution of the Archbishop of Salzburg to abandon their homes, and to seek a refuge in Prussia or in Georgia. Ten persons were burnt for their religious opinions in Spain between 1746 and 1759. Two persons were executed, and many others condemned to less severe penalties by the Inquisition in Portugal in 1756.1

These things will not be forgotten by a candid judge in estimating the policy of the English Government towards Catholics. On the other hand, he will remember that the English Catholics were so few and so inconsiderable that it was absurd to regard them as a serious danger to the State; that they had in general shown themselves under the most trying circumstances eminently moderate and loyal, and that although the Catholic priests, whenever they were in the ascendant, were then, as ever, a persecuting body, Catholicism, as a whole, had ceased, since the Peace of Westphalia, to divide the interests of Europe. In Switzerland, it is true, a war that was essentially religious broke out between the Protestant and Catholic cantons as late as 1712, but in general theology had very little influence upon the politics of Christendom. They turned mainly on the rivalry between the Catholic Emperor and the Catholic King of France. The Popes, who, as spiritual heads of Christendom, had employed all their temporal and spiritual weapons against Elizabeth, had never acted in this manner against her successors. During the struggle of the Revolution a great part of Catholic Europe was on the side of William, and, as we have seen, the Pope himself was in his favour. It may be added,

1 See Carlyle's Frederick the Great, bk. ix. ch. 3, and the curious collection of lists of Portuguese autos-da-fé in the eighteenth century, in the British

Buckle's Hist. ii. 109.

Museum. The disturbances at Thorn were made the subject of a special article in the treaty of Hanover be. tween England and Prussia in 1725.

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