dom; diverted his course from Ireland to Africa, with don Sebastian, and perished in the memorable battle of the three kings. The seminary priests expelled from Douay by the Spanish governor Requesens, out of complaisance to Elizabeth, found an asylum at Reims. There was a similar establishment at Rome; and both were endowed as nurseries to supply missionary priests for England. It is obvious that, as already observed, none but zealots the most desperate would enter upon a mission so perilous. The queen's marriage with the duke of Anjou, then pending, caused a new access of the fear of popery; and all who had sent their children to be educated abroad were commanded by proclamation to give in their names forthwith, and recall them within a short specified period. It would appear that the catholics were disposed to use all means of disarming the suspicions of the queen. They obtained from Gregory XIII. a relaxation of the bull against Elizabeth, which, however, he declared to be still binding upon her, though not upon the catholics; and they suppressed an obnoxious book written by Parsons the jesuit. The modification of the bull was brought over by the jesuits Campion and Parsons, both Englishmen, and educated at Oxford. Campion appears to have been a man of mild character and accomplished talents; Parsons, a fierce bigot. They were the first jesuits who had trodden the soil of England, and they lived there above a year, travelling secretly or in disguise from the house of one catholic to another. The catholics, "to speak it," says Camden, " upon their own assurance, repudiated the tenets and the turbulence of Parsons, whom they threatened to denounce." This fact, of which there can be no doubt, proves that the catholic laity sought only the exercise of their worship, and wished not to meddle with the pope's pretensions to the power of deposing the queen. Campion published a book, described by his adversaries as ingenious and polite, the latter a rare merit in religious contro versy at any time,-under the title of "Ten Reasons in Defence of the Church of Rome." He was taken some months after, put to the rack, called upon to defend his book in a public disputation, and, it was observed with something like triumph, failed to maintain the renown which he had obtained as a disputant by his book. Where one party argued with the rack in the background and the executioner within call, the disputation can hardly be said to have taken place on equal terms; and the inferiority of Campion to his opponents may be accounted for without detracting from his capacity. Campion was executed, with three priests, named Sherwood, Kirby, and Briant, in the year following his arrest, torture, and disputation (1581). They inculcated obnoxious and dangerous tenets in religion; they offended against a sanguinary statute which should never have been passed; but there was no evidence of their having conspired or instigated conspiracy to destroy or depose the queen. Some of them denied, and others equivocated respecting, the legitimacy of the queen's title as affected by the pope's bull; but it was assuredly as illegal as it was inhuman to hang men, even jesuits as they were, upon mere tenets extorted from their secret consciences by the rack.* It would appear from the delay of their trials and execution, that the ministers of Elizabeth hesitated to sacrifice them. But they lost the grace of this humane hesitation by sacrificing them at last to state policy and popular fanaticism. Campion and his accomplices were executed to satisfy the people that Elizabeth, in receiving the addresses of the duke of Anjou, did not cease to be a zealous protestant. Several other victims of the same class, discovered lurking or disguised through the country, were offered up to the unhappy barbarism and bigotry of the laws and of the age; though Elizabeth herself," says the honest though prejudiced author of the Annals, "believed the greater See the whole proceeding in the State Trials, vol. i. taken from a MS. in the Cotton library. part of those foolish priests guiltless of any designs against her or their country.' Familiar as the people were with cruelty, and relentless as adverse religionists were to each other, the extent to which the use of the rack was carried, even when the objects were jesuits and popish priests, shocked the natural humanity of the nation. Burleigh was put upon his defence before the public. His vindication mainly consisted in alleging, that Campion was tortured so mildly as to be able soon after to walk and sign his confession. The genius of the reign of Elizabeth, and of the age, is exhibited by a single trait, and a fearful glimpse, in this association of the rack with mildness. Elizabeth, to render her ministers more odious by the contrast of her own clemency, proclaimed that torture should be discontinued; and after the false glory thus gained by her, shut her eyes to the resumed or continued use of the horrid engine with renewed activity by her ministers. To her eternal honour, however, she ordered seventy popish priests, either under sentence of death or awaiting it, to be released from prison, the rack, and the scaffold.‡ Had the catholics frankly acknowledged the validity of Elizabeth's title, she would have been easily reconciled to them. Had they disclaimed the deposing power of the pope, she would have freely tolerated, as she perhaps shared, the tenets of transubstantiation and the invocation of saints, - those bugbears which faction and hypocrisy, bigotry and credulity, have invested with vain terrors and ridiculous importance down to the first quarter of the 19th century. In reference to the puritans, her antipathies were more numerous and her aversion stronger. The blood of sectaries, it has been observed in the preceding pages, was shed; but the victims were eccentric unrecognised fanatics, not members of the great puritan community. The puritans were too highly patronised, powerful, and independent, they had too many favourers in the house + Somers' Tracts, 209. + Cam. Ann. Cam. Ann. of commons, and even at court, to be proscribed, tortured, and hanged, like the Roman catholics: but she lost no opportunity to search their consciences, restrict their liberty, and cause their deprivation of benefices which they would have gladly and unscrupulously retained under a church which they pronounced unscriptural. Archbishop Grindall died blind, old, and in disgrace with Elizabeth, in 1582. Whether from the want of energy, or a leaning to the puritans, he tolerated prophesyings and preachings in private houses: he allowed an absolute schism in the church.* In a letter to Burleigh, he vehemently repudiates being a favourer of puritans+: his toleration therefore may be imputed to imbecility. The queen, to restore unity in the church, appointed as his successor Whitgift, a stern inquisitor, irritated by previous controversy; and placed in his hands a commission, comparable only to that celebrated tribunal which, in England, has been regarded as the most odious in the world. She placed at the disposal of the new archbishop forty-four commissioners, of whom twelve were ecclesiastics, with a jurisdiction over the kingdom, and authority to reform all heresies, schisms, errors, vices, sins, misbehaviours,-in short, all acts and opinions,by fine and imprisonment at their discretion. The ecclesiastical commission had the power of demanding the subscription of the clergy to new articles, and of scrutinising the conscience of a suspected person by ad Cam. Ann. + Letter from the Bishop of London (Ed. Grindall) to the Lord Treasurer. June 26th, 1574. "My Lord, No man sustaineth more wrongs than I do. I well hoped that no devil had been so impudent to have charged me with so great and manifest an untruth. 'Sed aliquis incarnatus Diabolus, et qui non dormit,' hath wrought me this wrong. 'Spiritus ille mendax revelabitur suo tempore.' I am too well acquainted with these calumniations, and God will have me still live under the cross. If I should openly preach, write, and publicly proceed against these innovators, disturbers of the state, and notwithstanding privily consent with them, maintain them, and aid them, truly no punishment were too hard for me; for I would think myself unworthy to live in any commonwealth. But being most untruly charged herewithal, while I remain unpurged I remain blotted and defaced; my office is slandered, and the Gospel which I preach 'male audit.'"-Murdin, State Papers, 275. ministering an oath. Proceedings so tyrannical excited general indignation; but Elizabeth and the archbishop did not the less succeed in restoring unity in the church.* The commons offered a gentle suggestion of their disapproval. Elizabeth rebuked them in a tone of spiritual supremacy not exceeded by the pope. She said, that by censuring the church they slandered her whom God had appointed supreme ruler over it; that nothing was exempt from abuse; that the prelates must be vigilant in correcting and preventing abuse and error, or she would deprive them of their office; that she was deeply read in religious science, for which she had more leisure than most other persons; that she would not tolerate the licentiousness and presumption with which many people, she perceived, canvassed scripture, and started innovations; that she was resolved to guide her people by God's rule in the mean between Romish corruptions and sectarian licentiousness; that the papists were enemies of her person, but the sectaries were hostile to all kingly government; and, under colour of preaching the word of God, presumed to exercise their private judgments, and to censure the acts of the prince.† The only legal ground for this monstrous tribunal, in a country pretending to law or liberty, was a clause in the act of supremacy of the first year of Elizabeth. If such power were conferred by it, the sovereign was absolute; if it was not conferred, Elizabeth set herself above the laws. Sir Edward Coke pronounces the commission against law ‡, and says, that, from a secret distrust or consciousness of its illegality, it was not enrolled in chancery as other commissions, to prevent its validity from being questioned. This appears to be the reason of a stunted lawyer who identified substance with formality. The commissioners were exercising their jurisdiction by fines and imprisonments, ransacking the houses of the people by their pursuivants, and their + L'Ewes, Journ. *Camd. Ann. |