those who use any form of prayer but that contained in the liturgy; and increased the penalty, even to imprisonment for life, in case of a repetition of the offence. * These statutes were opposed by lord Montague and Mr. Atkinson† in their respective houses, on principles of liberty so large as to be of suspicious sincerity from any statesmen in that age, and to seem not becoming in the mouths of those ministers or partisans of queen Mary who now employed them. A circular letter of the primate, written by the queen's command, and to which Cecil added a paragraph of earnest exhortation to mildness, tempered and almost suspended the harshest part of these bad laws. He takes it for granted that nothing but the wilfulness of "some of that sort" could "compel " a bishop to tender the oath to them, and enjoins him in that extreme case not to offer the oath a second time without consulting the archbishop himself; a direction not so consonant to first principles as the professions of the opponents of the law, but, on account of its very limitations, a much more conclusive proof of the sincerity of the writer. During the period now under consideration, no other change in the laws occurred. There can be no doubt that the administration of Bacon and Cecil far surpassed in approaches towards toleration all contemporary governments. Their prudence and temper probably led them often to connive at a degree of religious liberty, from which as a general principle they would themselves have recoiled. Some stains of their age may, however, be traced in the policy of these excellent ministers. In 1568, a notable mark of the queen's displeasure was fixed on the ancient religion, by the exclusion of catholics from court. Shortly after they were excluded from the bar by an order in council, which directed the benchers or governors of the inns of court, the places of * 1 Eliz. cap. + Robert Atkinson, burgess for Applehy, styled by Strype a student of law in the Inner Temple; perhaps a barrister. Browne Willis, iii. 76. Strype's Parker, i, 59. legal education, to enforce the oath of supremacy upon all candidates for the bar or the bench.* Sir Edward Waldegrave, a catholic gentleman who held high office under Mary, was, with his lady, committed to the Tower for hearing mass; a committal which, under the largest construction of the act of uniformity, was of doubtful legality.t Some other unnamed persons were committed at the same time with Waldegrave, and probably for the same offence. We find a complaint from Grindal and another bishop to the privy council, breathing no humane spirit against the contumacy of lady Carew's servants, who refused to make oath to answer interrogatories where they apprehended that the answers might criminate themselves.+ Where such facts are still extant and accessible, it is certain that the madness of fanaticism, and the officious servility of petty tyrants in many cases unknown to us, must have employed bad laws for objects beyond their detestable purpose. Yet some monument must have remained of a persecution, if it had extended to capital punishment, or had comprehended very numerous victims. It was not till 1568 that the extensive and open prevalence of the catholic worship in Lancashire began to awaken the alarms of the court. A commission was granted to the bishop of Chester to examine and reform the state of his diocese.§ Information was given of extensive confederacies, of secret meetings, of absolution from the oaths of allegiance, and of unlawful oaths of obedience to the pope, which seemed so much to portend commotion, if not rebellion, that they deterred the bishop from visiting the most disaffected parts of his diocese, where his presence was most necessary. The catholics, however, escaped the consequences of these imprudences without any more harsh conditions than an acknowledgment of their offences against the *Strype's Grindal, 203. April 22. 1561. Strype, Ann. i. 400. Oxford edition, 1824. (old edition, 267.). They must have been committed as accessories to the offence against the act of uniformity, which their chaplain had committed by using the mass. September 15. 1562. Haynes, 395. Il Id. 260. act of uniformity, and a solemn promise to obey the laws; which, though they were infringements of the rights of conscience, will presently appear to be palliated, or, according to the standard of that age, justified, by the events which followed in the north of England. It The protestants who fled to England before the destroying sword of the duke of Alva, and from the religious wars of France, had so much increased, that it was thought prudent to ascertain their numbers, at least in the capital, where the enumeration was more easy, and considered to be more necessary. The whole number of aliens in the city of London and the adjoining parishes was found to be nearly 5000; of whom about 4000 inhabited the city of London, and little more than 1000 dwelt in the suburban districts. Of the number in the city 1200 were new-comers. In the city, 3400 were French or Dutch; which last term comprehended Germans and Flemings. In the suburbs almost the whole of the foreigners were of these classes.* is not improbable that the body of aliens was not less than a twentieth part of the dwellers in the capital at that period. A very large portion of them appear, from the countries of which they were natives, and from the circumstances of the Continent at the time of their arrival, to have been refugees for religion, who spread alarm and horror by the narratives of their sufferings. Among them lurked many individuals who had been carried along by the flood of speculation which the reformation excited, into opinions which, though false, and indeed monstrous, were yet so alluring to the inexperienced philanthropist, as well as to the ravenous plunderer, that they might become dangerous to the order and safety of human society. A smaller number, either inflamed by fanaticism or stimulated by rapacity, had perpetrated atrocities which rendered them objects of suspicion to every watchful government. The name of anabaptist was applied by undistinguishing enemies to persons of both these classes; though the majority of those who * Grindal's Return, 1567. Haynes, 445. were so called had then nothing in common with the furious enthusiasts to whom the appellation was first given, except an opinion perfectly inoffensive to society, that the religious ceremony of baptism should, like other sacred rites, be limited to those who had reached an age when they might possibly comprehend its meaning. The visionary was confounded with the criminal. The pacific opponent of infant baptism was regarded as inheriting the atrocity of the anabaptists of Munster; and therefore excluded from that indulgence which began to be felt towards other protestants. In the further progress of injustice, the odium, though not the punishment, extended to all the reformed. The effects of this immigration of foreigners were various. All protestants were inflamed by a more bitter animosity against the persecutors of their brethren. The mixture of many men of obnoxious opinions, and of some of ambiguous character, among the refugees, contributed to that disfavour with the church of England in which foreign protestants were held for a century and a half. The far greater number of the fugitives were followers of Calvin, who, feeling as well as knowing that the seat of religion was the heart, desired a more purely spiritual worship, delivered from those outward ceremonies which, in their opinion, did not so much promote as they debased and perverted devotion. The ardent affection which marked the piety of these men was not friendly to rites and forms, which they considered as having been too much used towards human creatures to be a fit mode of mani. festing our reverence for God. On this occasion, and about this time, arose into more notice the party called puritans, from their professed purpose of purifying the church from those remains of Roman catholic discipline and worship which the moderation of the earlier reformers had respected. They disliked rather than at first rejected episcopal superiority; but they more decisively blamed the use of the cross in baptism, of the ring in marriage, of instrumental or hired music in public worship, and of sacer dotal vestments, polluted in their eyes by Romish adoption; they objected to episcopal courts, and to the repetitions and responses of the liturgy; they protested against the lessons appointed to be read from the apocryphal books, which the catholics retained as a portion of the Vulgate, but of which it is not known that there ever was a Hebrew original. These scruples borrowed that vast power which they afterwards exercised, and which now appears so disproportioned to their intrinsic importance, from the disposition awakened by the reformation to receive nothing on merely human authority; and to bring every 'true Christian into that state of constant intercourse with the Supreme Mind, which allows no authority and little peculiar sacredness in priests, and is displeased with the outward badges of their high pretensions. The devotional spirit of these extreme reformers was offended by those who appeared to them to claim a right of standing between them and their God; and their jealousy was naturally fixed on bishops, on whom splendour and opulence had stamped a worldly character, and whose jurisdiction maintained order and discipline in the adverse army. Those called bishops in the reformed churches they charged with peculiar inconsistencies; because, having visibly no warrant from the New Testament, they confessedly derived authority through the channel of the church of Rome, which they at the same time taught to be a body of idolaters. The protestants, inconsistently with the spirit of their doctrines, but advantageously to their policy as a faction, made war principally against the external symbols of the ancient religion; a course, perhaps, rendered inevitable by the direction in which the passions of the multitude never fail to run. But the cross and the surplice were assailed as the ensigns of a ritual and dictatorial system, against which a more pure and lofty spirit struggled among the puritans, long before those who were impelled by it became conscious of its true nature. Its Puritanism had appeared under Edward VI. numbers were recruited, and their zeal inflamed, by the return of so many exiles from the seats of Calvinism in |