>>w;iW«i>ii>»ut re5tored in 1561. 26 they attempt it, that it was the Christian rehgion as prac-- tised at Rome; that it was the Roman Catholic rehgion that was introduced into England in the year 596, with all its dogmas, rites, ceremonies and observances, just as they all continued to exist at the time of the " Reformation," and as they continue to exist in that Church even unto this day. Whence it clearly follows, that if the Catholic Church were corrupt at the time of the " Reformation," or be corrupt now, be radically bad now, it was so in 596 ; and then comes the impious and horrid inference, men tioned in paragraph 12, that " All our fathers who first built our churches, and whose bones and flesh form the earth for many feet deep in all the churchyards, are now howling in the region of the damned." 47. " The tree is known by its fruit." Bear in mind, that it was the Catholic faith, as now held, that was intro duced into England' by Pope Gregory the Great; and bearing this in mind, let us see what were the effects of that introduction, let us see how that faith worked its way, in spite of wars, invasions, tyrannies, and political revolu tions. 48. Saint Austin, upon his arrival, applied to the Saxon king within whose dominions the county of Kent lay. He obtained leave to preach to the people, and his success was great and immediate. He converted the king himself, who was very gracious to him and his brethren, and who provided dwellings and other necessaries for them at Can terbury. Saint Austin and his brethren, being monks, lived together in common, and from this common home went fortli over the countr3f, preaching the Gospel. As the community was diminished by death, new members were ordained to keep up the supply ; and besides this, the number wsls in time greatly augmented. A church was built at Canterbury. Saint Austin was of course, the Bishop, or Plead Priest. He was succeeded by other bishops. As Christianity spread over the island, other 27 communities, Hke that at Canterbury, were founded in other cities; as at London, Winchester, Exeter, Worces ter, Norwich, York, and so of all the other places, where there are now Cathedrals, or Bishops' churches. Hence, in process of time arose those majestic and venerable edifices, of the possession of which we boast as the work of our forefathers, while we have the folly, and injustice, and inconsistency to brand the memory of those very forefathers with the charge of grovelling ignorance, super stition and idolatry ; and while we show our own mean ness of mind in disfiguring and dishonouring those noble buildings by plastering them about with our childish and gingerbread " monuments," nine times out of ten the offspring of vanity or corruption. 49. As to the mode of supporting the clergy in those times, it was by oblations or free gifts, and sometimes by tithes, which land -owners paid themselves, or ordered their tenants to pay, though there was no general obligation to yield tithes for many years after the arrival of St. Austin. In this collective or collegiate state the clergy remained for many years. But, in time, as the land-owners became converted to Christianity, they were desirous of having priests settled near to them, and always upon the spot ready to perform the offices of religion. The land was then owned by comparatively few persons. The rest of the people were vassals, or tenants, of the land-owners. The land-owners, therefore, built churches on their estates, and generally near their own houses, for the benefit of themselves, their vassals, and tenants. And to this day we see, in numerous instances, the country church close by the gentleman's house. When they built the churches, they also built a house for the priest, which we now call the parsonage-house ; and, in most cases, they attached some plough-land, or meadow-land, or both, to the priest's house, for his use ; and this was called his glebe, which word, literally taken, means the top earth, which is turned 28 over by the plough. Besides these, the land-owners, in conformity with the custom then prevalent in other Chris tian countries, endowed the churches with the tithe of the produce of their estates. 50. Hence parishes arose. Parish means a priestship, as the land on which a town stands is a township. So that the great man's estate now became a parish. He retained the right of appointing the priest, whenever a vacancy happened ; but he could not displace a priest, when once appointed ; and the whole of the endowment became the property of the Church, independent of his control. It was a long while, even two centuries, or more, before this became the settled law of the whole kingdom ; but at last it did become such. But to this possession of so much property by the Church certain important con^ ditions were attached ; and to these conditions it behoves us of the present day to pay particular attention ; for we are, at this time, more than ever feeling the want of the performance of those conditions. 51. There never can have existed a state of society; that is to say, a state of things in which proprietorship in land was acknowledged, and in which it was maintained by law ; there never can have existed such a state without an obligation on the land-owners to take care of the neces- \ sitous and to prevent them from perishing for want. The land-owners in England took care of their vassals and dependents. But when Christianity, the very basis of which is charity, became established, the taking care of the necessitous was deposited in the hands of the clergy. Upon the very face of it, it appears monstrous that a house, a small farm, and the tenth part of the produce of a large estate, should have been given to a priest who could have no wife and, of course, no family. But, the fact is that the grants were for other purposes as well as for the sup port of the priests. The produce of the benefice was to be 29 employed thus : " Let the priests receive the tithes of the people and keep a written account of all that have paid them ; and divide them in the presence of such as fear God, according to canonical authority. Let them set apart the first share for the repairs and ornaments of the church ; let them distribute the second to the poor and the stranger, with their own hands, in mercy and humility ; and reserve the third part for themselves."^ These were the orders contained in a canon issued by a Bishop of York. At different times, and under different bishops, regulations somewhat different were adopted ; but there were always two-fourths, at the least, of the annual produce of the benefice to be given to the necessitous, and to be employed in the repairing or in the ornamenting of the church. 52. Thus the providing for the poor became one of the great duties and uses of the Church. This duty rested before on the land-owners. It must have rested on them ; for, as Blackstone observes, a right in the indigent " to demand a supply sufficient to all the necessities of life from the more opulent part of the community is dictated by the principles of society." This duty could be lodged in no hands so fitly as in those of the clergy ; for thus the work of charity, the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, the administering to the sick, the comforting of the widow, the fostering of the fatherless, came always in company with the performance of services to God. For the uncertain disposition of the rich, for their occasional and sometimes capricious charity, was substituted the certain, the steady, the impartial hand of a constantly resident and unmarried administrator of bodily as well as of spiritual comfort to the poor, the unfortunate, and the stranger. * See Excerptioues Ecgberti Arch. Ebor., No. 5 (in Thorpe's Ancient Laws of England, ii., p. 98 : (/• i-. 342; ii., 256, note d„ and 352). 30 53- We shall see, by-and-by, the condition that the poor were placed in, we shall see how all the labouring classes were impoverished and degraded, the moment the tithes and other revenues of the Church were transferred to a Protestant and married clergy ; and we shall have to take a full view of the unparalleled barbarity with which the Irish people were treated at that time ; but I have not yet noticed another great branch or constituent part of the Cathohc Church : namely, the monasteries, which form a subject full of interest and worthy of our best attention. The choicest and most highly empoisoned shafts in the quiver of the malice of Protestant writers seem always to be selected when they have to rail against monks, friars, and nuns. We have seen Blackstone talking about " monkish ignorance and superstition ; " and we hear, every day, Protestant bishops and parsons railing against what they call "monkery," talking of the "drones" in monasteries, and indeed, abusing the whole of these ancient institutions as something degrading to human nature, in which work of abuse they are most heartily joined by the thirty or forty mongrel sects, whose bawling- tubs are erected in every corner of the country. 54. When I come to speak of the measures by which the monasteries were robbed, devastated, and destroyed in England and Ireland, I shall show how unjust, base, and ungrateful this railing against them is; and how foolish it is besides. I shall show the various ways in which they were greatly useful to the community ; and I shall espe cially show how they operated in behalf of the labouring and poorer classes of the people. But in this place I shall merely describe, in the shortest manner possible, the origin and nature of those institutions and the extent to which they existed in England. 55. Monastery means a place of residence for monks ; and the word monk comes from a Greek word, which nieans a lonely person, or a person in solitude. There 31 were monks, friars, and nuns. The word friar comes from the French word freve, which, in English, is brother ; and the word nun comes from the French word nonne, which means a sister in religion, a virgin separated from the world. The persons, whether male or female, composing one of these religious communities, were called a convent, and that name was sometimes also given to the buildings and enclosures in which the community lived. The place where monks lived was called a monastery ; that where friars lived, a friary; and that where nuns lived, a nunnery. As, however, we are not in this case inquiring into the differences in the rules, orders and habits of the persons belonging to these institutions, I shall speak of them all as monasteries. 56. Then, again, some of these were abbeys, and some priories ; of the difference between which it will be suffi cient to say that the former were of a rank superior to the latter, and had various privileges of a higher value. An abbey had an abbot, or an abbess ; a priory, a prior, or a prioress. Then there were different orders of monks, friars, and nuns ; and these orders had different rules for their government and mode of life, and were distinguished by different dresses. With these distinctions we have here, however, little to do ; for we shall, by-and-by, see them all involved in one common devastation. 57. The persons belonging to a monastery lived in common ; they lived in one and the same building ; they could possess no property individually ; when they entered the walls of the monastery, they left the world wholly be hind them ; they made a solemn vow of celibacy ; they could devise nothing by will ; each had a life-interest, but nothing more, in the revenues belonging to the community; some of the monks and friars were also priests, but this was not always the case ; and the business of the whole was to say masses and prayers, and to do deeds of hospi tality and charity. 32 58. This mode of life ijegan by single persons separating themselves from the world and living in complete solitude, passing all their days in prayer, and dedicating themselves wholly to the serving of God. These were called hermits, and their conduct drew towards them great respect. In time, such men, or men having a similar propensity, formed themselves into societies, and agreed to live together in one house and to possess things in common. Women did the same. And hence came those places called monasteries. The piety, the austerities, and particularly the works of kindness and of charity performed by those persons, made them objects of great veneration ; and the rich made them, in time, the channels of their benevolence to the poor. Kings, queens, princes, princesses, nobles, and gentlemen founded monasteries ; that is to say, erected the buildings and endowed them with estates for their maintenance. Others, some in the way of atonement for their sins and some from a pious disposition, gave while alive, or bequeathed at their death, lands, houses, or money, to monasteries already erected. So that in time the monasteries became the owners of great landed estates ; they had the lordship over innumerable manors, and had a tenantry of prodigious extent, especially in England, where the monastic orders were always held in great esteem, in consequence of Christianity having been in troduced into the kingdom by a community of monks. 59. To give you as clear a notion as I can of what a monastery was, I will describe to you, with as much exactness as my memory will enable me, a monastery which I saw in France, in 1792, just after the monks had been turned out of it, and when it was about to be put up for sale ! The whole of the space enclosed was about eight English acres, which was fenced in by a wall about twenty feet high. It was an oblong square, and at one end of one of the sides was a gate- way, with gates as high as the wall, and with a little door in one of the great gates for 33 the ingress and egress of foot-passengers. This gate opened into a spacious courtyard, very nicely paved. On one side, and. at one end of this yard, were the kitchen, lodging-rooms for servants, a dining or eating place for them and for strangers and poor people ; stables, coach houses, and other outbuildings. On the other side of the courtyard, we entered in at a doorway to the place of residence of the monks. Here was about half an acre of ground of a square form, for a burying-ground. On the four sides of this square there was a cloister or piazza, the roof of which was on the side of the burying-ground, supported by pillars, and at the back supported by a low building which went round the four sides. This building contained the several dormitories, or sleeping-rooms of the monks, each of whom had two little rooms, one for his bed, and one for his books and to sit in. Out of the hinder room a door opened into a little garden about thirty feet wide and forty long. On one side of the cloister there was a door opening into their dining room, in one corner of which there was a pulpit for the monk who read while the rest were eating in silence, which was according to the rules of the Carthusians, to which Order these monks belonged. On the other side of the cloister a door opened into the kitchen garden, which was laid out in the nicest manner and was well-stocked with fruit trees of all sorts. On another side of the cloister a door opened and led to the church, which, though not large, was one of the most beautiful that I had ever seen. I believe that these monks were, by their rules, confined within their walls. The country people spoke of them with great reverence, and most grievously deplored the loss of them. They had large estates, were easy landlords, and they wholly provided for aU the indigent within miles of their monastery. 60. England, more, perhaps, than any other country in Europe, abounded in such institutions, and these mors 34 richly endowed than anywhere else. In England there was, on an average, more than twetity (we shall see the exact number by-and-by) of those establishments to a county ! Here was a prize for an unjust and cruel tyrant to lay his lawless hands upon, a:nd for "Reformation" gentry to share amongst them ! Here was eilougli, indeed, to make robbers on a grand scale cry out against " monkish ignorance and superstition " ! No wonder that the bowels of Cranmer, Knox, atid all the rest, yearned so piteously as they did, when fhey cast their pious eyes on all the farms and manors, and on all the silver and gold ornaments, belonging to these communities ! We shall see by-and- by with what alacrity they ousted, plundered, and pulled down : we shall see them robbing, under the baSest pre tences, even the altars of the country parish churches, down to the very smallest of those churches, and down to the value' of five shillings. But we must first take a view of themotives'which led the tyrant, Henry VIIL, to set their devastating and plundering facilities in motion. 6i. This king succeeded his father, Henry VII., in the year 1509. He succeeded to a great and prosperous king dom, a full treasury, and a happy and contented people, who expected in him the wisdom of his father without his avarice, which seems to have been that father's only fault. Henry VIII. was eighteen years old when his father died. He had had an elder brother, named Arthur, who, at the early age of twelve years, had been betrothed to Catherine, fourth daughter of Ferdinand, King of Castile and Arra- gon." When Arthur was fourteen years old, the Princess " The legal age of marriage was fourt-een in the case of youths, but the marriage treaty had provided that when Arthur had completed his twelfth year the parents might obtain a dispensation. This was asked for and given, and Catherine was formally betrothed by proxy to Prince Arthur on Whit Sunday, May 19, 1499, and a second time on November 23, 1501, when the prince reached the full age of fourteen (Bergenroth, Spanish State Papers, i., pp. 16S, 209, 340). 35 came to England, and the matriage ceremony was per formed ;' but Arthur, who was a weak and sickly boy, died before the year was out, and the marriage never was consummated ; and, indeed, who will believe that it could be ? ^ Henry wished to marry Catherine, and the marriage was agreed to bj' the parents on both sides ; but it did not take place until after the death of Henry VIL' The moment the young King came to the throne, he took m-easures for his marriage." Catherine being, though only nominally, the widow of his deceased brother, it was necessary to have from the Pope, as supreme head of the Ghnrch, a dispensation in order to render the marriage lawful in the eye of the canon law. The dispensation, to which there could be no valid objection, was obtained, and the marriage was, amidst the rejoicings of the Whole nation, celebrated in June, 1509, in less than two months after the King's accession." 62. With this lady, who was beautiful in her youth, and whose virtues of all sorts seem scarcely ever to have been ' Arthur and Catherine were married at St. Paul's, on November 14, 1501 (ibid., p. 264). ' Arthur died April 2, 1502. On the question as to the consummation of the marriage, see Mrs. Hope, The First Divorce of Henry VIIL, p. 11, notes. " Upon the death of the English Queen, Elizabeth of York, on Feb ruary ir, 1503, Henry VII. proposed himself to marry Catherine. Her mother Isabella, would not hear of it, and a betrothal between Prince Henry and Catherine took place on June 25, 1503 (ibid., -p. 13). For the reasons why the actual marriage was delayed see ibid., p. 17. '" Henry VII. died April 21, 1509, and Henry VIII. at once made arrangements for his marriage with Catherine, which took place publicly at St. Paul's on June 3, 1509. " The dispensation had been already granted by Pope Julius in December, 1503- 36 exceeded, he lived in the married state seventeen years, before the end of which he had had three sons and two daughters by her, one of whom only, a daughter, was still alive, who afterwards was Mary, Queen of England. But now, at the end of seventeen years, he being thirty-five years of age, and eight years younger than the queen, and having cast his eyes on a young lady, an attendant on the queen, named Anne Boleyn, he, all of a sudden, affected to believe^'* that he was living in sin because he was married to the widow of his brother, though, as we have seen, the marriage between Catherine and the brother had never been consummated, and though the parents of both the parties, together with his own Council, unanimously and unhesitatingly approved of his marriage, which had, moreover, been sanctioned by the Pope, the head of the Church, of the faith and observances of which Henry himself had, as we shall hereafter see, been, long since his marriage, a zealous defender. 63. But the tyrant's passions were now in motion, and he resolved to gratify them, cost what it might in reputa tion, in treasure, and in blood. He first applied to the Pope to divorce him from his queen. ^^ He was a great favourite of the Pope, he was very powerful, there were many strong motives for yielding to his request ; but that request was so full of injustice, it would have been so cruel towards the virtuous queen to accede to it, that the Pope could not and did not grant it. He, however, in hopes that time might induce the tyrant to relent, ordered a court '^ Although the question of Henry's divorce from Catherine had been apparently mooted in 1526, when Anne was still in France, her return to England the following year seems to have determined Henry to prose cute the suggested suit. (cf. Mrs. Hope, The First Divorce of Henry F7//.,pp. 47, 48). " The first notice of any application to the Pope is apparently about September, 1526 (Mrs. Hope, The First Divorce of Henry VIIL, p. 44). ¦ 37 to be held by his Legate and Wolsey, in England, to hear and determine the case. Before this court the Queen disdained to plead, and the Legate, dissolving the court referred the matter back to the Pope, who stih refused to take any step towards the granting of the divorce. The tyrant now became furious, resolved upon overthrowing the power of the Pope in England, upon making himself the head of the Church in this country, and upon doing whatever else might be necessary to insure the gratifica tion of his desires and the glutting of his vengeance." 64. By making himself the supreme head of the Church, he made himself, he having the sword and the gibbet at his command, master of all the property of that Church, including that of the monasteries ! His counsellors and ¦courtiers knew this ; and as it was soon discovered that a sweeping confiscation would take place, the parliament was by no means backward in aiding his designs, everyone hoping to share in the plunder. The first step was to pass acts taking from the Pope all authority and power over the Church in England, and giving to the King all authority whatever as to ecclesiastical matters. His chief adviser and abettor was Thomas Cranmer, a name which deserves to be held in everlasting execration ; a name which we could not pronounce without almost doubting of the justice of God, were it not for our knowledge of the fact, that the cold-blooded, most perfidious man expired at last amidst those flames which he himself had been the chief cause of kindling. 65. The tyrant, being now both Pope and King, made " From the first commencement of the divorce proceedings to the time when Henry solved the question by casting off the Pope's authority, some six years were occupied in fruitless endeavours to force the Pope to grant the royal will. The history of the last three years makes it clear that Henry was at heart most reluctant to get rid of the Supremacy of the Holy See, 38 Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury, a dignity just then become vacant.'^ Of course, this adviser and ready tool now became chief judge in all ecclesiastical matters. But here was a difficulty ; for the tyrant still professed to be a Catholic ; so that his new Archbishop was to be conse crated according to the usual pontifical form, which required of him to swear obedience to the Pope. And here a transaction took place that will at once show us of what sort of stuff the " Reformation " gentry were made. Cranmer, before he went to the altar to be consecrated, went into a chapel, and there made a declaration on oath, that by the oath that he was about to take, and which, for the sake of form, he was obliged to take, he did not intend to bind himself to anything that tended to prevent him from assisting the King in making any such "reforms ""as he '* Archbishop 'Warham died August 23, 1532. Cranmer was away from England on an embas.'^y to the Emperor Charles V. He was recalled about a month afterwards for the purpose of being made Archbishop of Canterbury. It was proved at Cranmer's trial in the reign of Mary that the King's intention was known to him directly after Warham's death (Cranmer's Remains, ed. Parker Society, ii.,206), and the haste with which the post was filled up is capable of but one explanation, namely, Henry's desire to place in the office one who would be willing to grant him a divorce from Catherine and allow him to marry Anne. This intention was also suggested to Cranmer at his trial (ibid, p. 217). It must be remembered that by marrying a wife, against the existing laws, Cranmer had put himself into Henry's power, as it is impossible to suppose that the King was ignorant of the circumstance. Cf. for the suggested compact between Henry and Cranmer, Jenkyns' Crajimer's Works, iv., 92 ; also a letter from Pole to Cranmer in Le Grand, Hisloire du Divorce, i., p. 302. '° Ilarpsfield (The Pretended Divorce, ed. Camden Society, p. 191) records the fact of the protest taken by Cranmer on the morning of his consecration, March 30, 1533, "to certain of his friends," that he did not intend to be bound by the oaths of obedience to the Pope he was about to take at his consecration and investiture with the archiepiscopal pall. The Bulls for his appointment had been obtained in the usual way, his 39 might think useful in the Church of England I I .once knew a corrupt Cornish knave, who, having sworn to a direct falsehood (and that he, in private, acknowledged to be such) before an Election Committee of the House of Commons, being asked how he could possibly give such evidence, actually declared, in so many words, " that he had, before he left his lodging in the morning, taken an oath that he would swear falsely that day." He, perhaps, imbibed his principles from this very Archbishop, who occupies the highest place in lying Fox's lying book on Protestant Martyrs. 66. Having provided himself with so famous a judge in ecclesiastical matters, the King lost, of course, no time in bringing his. hard case before him and demanding justice at his hands ! Hard case, indeed ; to be compelled to live with a wife of forty-three, when he could have, for next to nothing, and only for asking for, a young one of eighteen or twenty ! A really hard case ; and he sought relief, now that he had got such an upright and impartial judge, with all imaginable despatch. What I am now going to relate of the conduct of this Archbishop and of the other parties concerned in the transaction is calculated to make us shudder with horror, to make our very bowels heave with loathing, to make us turn our eyes from the paper and resolve to read no further. But we must not give way to these feelings if we have a mind to know the true history of the Protestant " Reformation." We must keep our selves cool ; we must reason ourselves out of our ordinary impulses ; we must beseech nature to .be quiet within us for a while : for, from first to last, we have to contemplate proctor taking the required oaths in his name in Rome. The reservation made by Cranmer in England that he would not be bound by promises made in his behalf (Jenkyns' Cranmet^s Works, iv., Ii6) was of course unknown to the Roman officials. There is no evidence to show that the consecrating prelates had any knowledge of the protest privately made. 40 nothing that is not of a kind to fill us with horror and disgust. 67. It was now four or five years since the King and Cranmer had begun to hatch the project of the divorce"; but, in the meanwhile, the King had kept Anne Boleyn, or, in more modern phrase, she had been " under his protec tion," for about three years. ^' And here let me state that in Dr. Bayley's Life of Bishop Fisher it is positively asserted, that Anne Boleyn was the King's daughter, and that Lady Boleyn, her mother, said to the King, when he was about to marry Anne, " Sir, for the reverence of God, take heed what you do in marrying my daughter, for, if you record your own conscience well, she is your own daughter as weU as mine." To which the King replied, " Whose daughter soever she is, she shall be my wife." Now, though I beheve this fact, I do not give it as a thing the truth of which is undeniable. I find it in the writings of a man who was the eulogist (and justly) of the excellent Bishop Fisher, who suffered death because he stood firmly on the side of Queen Catherine. I believe it ; but I do not give it, as I do the other facts that I state, as what is " This is unjust to Cranmer. There is no evidence to show that Cranmer had anything to do with "the project." It was already deter mined upon in the King's mind long before he was in a position to act as even counsellor in the matter. '" This was well known to all, and Henry had been warned by the Pope under pain of excommunication to send away Anne and take back the Queen. The reformer, Simon Grynoeus, writing in 1531 to Martin Bucer, speaks of Anne's relations with Henry in the following plain terms : "whether she (Anne Boleyn) has children by the King, I do not know. She has not any acknowledged as such : they may probably be brought up in private (which if I am not mistaken, I have heard more than once), though there are those who positively deny that the King has any inter course with her, which in luy opinion is not at all likely." Original Letters, Parker Soc, No. 256; cf. Gayangos, Spanish State Papers, iii., Introduction, p. cxiii, 41 undeniably true." God knows, it is unnecessary to make the parties blacker than they are made by the Protestant historians themselves, in even a favourable record of their horrid deeds. 68. The King had had Anne about three years " under his protection," when she became, for the first time, with child. There was, now, therefore, no time to be lost in order to " make an honest woman of her." A private marriage took place in January, 1533.™ As Anne's preg nancy could not be long disguised, it became necessary to avow her marriage, and therefore it was also necessary to press onward the trial for the divorce, for it might have seemed rather awkward, even amongst " Reformation " people, for the King to have two wives at a time ! Now, " The terrible suggestion here given is not without a certain amount of evidence to support it. The curious reader may consult the examination of the matter made by Mr. D. Lewis in his Introduction to Sander's Anglican Schism, pp. xxxi-xliv. The result is given in the following words: " We have now the confession of Cranmer, of the two Houses of Parliament, and of the King, that the impediments (sc. to his union with Anne) were not only diriment, but also unknown. Admitting, then, that the impediment was unknown, we must shut out from the question the relations of Henry with Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, and with her daughter Mary, for they were not unknown — nothing remains but to accept the fearful story told not by Dr. Sander only, nor by him before all others, and say that, at least by the confession of the King and both Houses of Parliament, Anne Boleyn was Henry's child " (p. xliv.). The learned Bollandist, Father Van Ortroy (Vie du B. Martyr fean Fisher, p. 268-9, note), has upon examination of the evidence come to the same conclusion, although he says he can fully understand how it is that every argument has been brought to bear against so unwelcome a theory. He points out how as early as 1536 this very charge was made in the street songs of Paris (p. 10, note I). ™ The marriage ceremony was apparently performed by Roland Lee, very early in the morning of January 25, 1533 (cf. Archceologia, xviii., p. 81 ; Harpsfield, The Pretended Divorce, pp. 234, 235 ; Mrs. Hope, The First Divorce of Henry VIIL, pp. 294-6). As Elizabeth was born >yithin eight months, the date was subsequently falsified, 42 then, the famous ecclesiastical, judge, Cranmer, had to, play. his part,; and if; his hypocrisy did not make the devil blush, he could have no blushing faculties in him. Cranmer, in April, 1533, wrote a letter to the King, begging him, for the good of the nation and for the safety of his own soul, to grant his permission to try the question of the divorce, and beseeching him no longer to live in the peril attending an "incestuous intercourse! "^^ Matchless, astonishing hypo crite ! He knew, and the King knew that he knew, and he knew that the King knew that he knew it, that the King had been actually married to Anne three months before, she being with child at the time when he married her. 69. The King graciously condescended to listen to this ghostly advice of his pious primate, who was so anxious about the safety of his royal soul, and, without delay, he, as head of the Church, granted the ghostly father, Cranmer, who in violation of his clerical vows, had, in private,, a woman of his own ; to this ghostly father the King granted a licence to hold a spiritual court for the trial of the divorce.^ Queen Catherine, who had been ordered to retire from the court, resided at this time at Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, at a little distance from Dunstable.^ At this latter place Cranmer opened his court, and sent a citation to the Queen to appear before him, which citation she treated with the scorn that it deserved. When he had kept his "court" open the number of days required by the law, he pro nounced sentence against the Queen, declaring her marriage ^' Cranmer knew that Henry was actually married to Anne a fortnight after the ceremony had taken place (Archaologia, xviii., p. 81). The secret, however, was still kept until the Bulls for Cranmer's consecration should have been granted by the Pope. The marriage of Anne of course took place some months before Henry was divorced by Cranmer from Catherine. For Cranmer's letter see State Papers, i., pp. 390, 391. ^ Gairdner, Calendar, vi., p. 219. *" The court was opened on Saturday, May 10, 1533. 43 with the King null from the beginning ; and having done this, he closed his farcical court.^^ We shall see him doing more jobs in the divorcing line ; but thus he finished the first. 70. The result of this trial was, by this incomparable judge, made known to the King, whom this wonderful hypocrite gravely besought to submit himself with resigna tion to the will of God, as declared to him in this decision of the spiritual court, acting according to the laws of holy Church !^ The pious and resigned King yielded to the admonition ; and then Cranmer held another court at Lambeth, at which he declared that the King had been lawfully married to Anne Boleyn, and that he now con firmed the marriage by his pastoral and judicial authority, which he derived from the successors of the Apostles !^° We shall see him, by-and-by, exercising the same authority to declare this new marriage null and void from the begin ning, and see him assist in bastardizing the fruit of it ; but we must now follow Anne Boleyn (whom the Protestant \yriters strain hard to whitewash) till we have seen the end of her. 71. She was delivered of a daughter (who was afterwards Queen Elizabeth) at the end of eight months from the date of her marriage.^' This did not please the King, who wanted a son, and who was quite monster enough to be displeased with her on this account.^ The couple jogged on apparently without quarrelling for about three years ; a pretty long time, if we duly consider the many obstacles 2' Cranmer's sentence was given on Friday, May 23. ^ The terms of this letter had been agreed upon between the King and his Archbishop. For the document, see Wilkins' Concilia, iii., p. 759; Gairdner, Calendar, vi., p. 230, et seq. ="¦ This sentence was delivered May 28, 1533. (Gairdner, «? ra/., p. 330- ) " Elizabeth was born on Sunday, September 7, 1533. '» Mrs. Hope, The First Divorce of Henry VIIL, p. 332, 44 which vice opposes to peace and happiness. The husband, however, had plenty of occupation, for being now "head of the Church," he had a deal to manage ; he had, poor man, to labour hard at making a new religion, new articles of faith, new rules of discipline, and he had new things of all sorts to prepare. Besides which, he had, as we shall see in the next number, some of the best men in his king dom, and that ever lived in any kingdom or country, to behead, hang, rip up, and cut into quarters. He had, moreover, as we shall see, begun the grand work of con fiscation, plunder and devastation. So that he could not have a great deal of time for family squabbles. 72. If, however, he had no time to jar with Anne, he had no time to look after her, which is a thing to be thought of when a man marries a woman half his own age ; and that this " great female reformer," as some of the Protestant writers call her, wanted a little of husband like vigilance, we are now going to see.^ The freedom, or rather the looseness, of her manners, so very different from those of that virtuous queen whom the English court and nation had had before them as an example for so many years, gave offence to the more sober, and excited the mirth and set a-going the chat of persons of another description. In January, 1536, Queen Catherine died. She had been banished from the court. She had seen her marriage annulled by Cranmer, and her daughter and only surviving child bastardized by act of parliament ; and the husband, who had had five children by her, that " Reforma tion " husband, had had the barbarity to keep her separated from, and never to suffer her, after her banishment, to set =» Burnet (ed. Pocock), i., 280. " Their (i.e., the English Reformers), chief encouragement was from the Queen Anne who . . . was a known favourer of them. . . She used her most effectual endeavours with the King to promote the Reformation," 45 her eyes on that only child ! She died, as she had lived, beloved and revered by every good man and woman in the kingdom, and was buried, amidst the sobbings and tears of a vast assemblage of the people, in the Abbey-church of Peterborough. 73. The King, whose iron heart seems to have been softened, for a moment, by a most affecting letter, which she dictated to him from her death-bed, ordered the persons about him to wear mourning on the day of her burial.®" But our famous "great female reformer" not only did not wear mourning, but dressed herself out in the gayest and gaudiest attire ; expressed her unbounded joy ; and said that she was now in reality a queen ! Alas, for our " great female reformer ! " in just three months and sixteen days- from this day of her exultation, she died herself ; not, however, as the real queen had died, in her bed, deeply lamented by all the good, and without a soul on earth to impute to her a single fault, but on a scaffold, under a death-warrant signed by her husband, and charged with treason, adultery, and incest ! 74. In the month of May, 1536, she was along with the King, amongst the spectators at a tilting-match at Green- ¦wich,'^ when, being incautious, she gave to one of the combatants, who was also one of her paramours, a sign of her attachment, which seems only to have confirmed the King in suspicions which he before entertained. He instantly quitted the place, returned to Westminster, ordered her to be confined at Greenwich that night, and to be brought by water to Westminster the next day. But she was met, by his order, on the river, and conveyed ™ Ibid., p. 309 : " Queen Anne did not carry her death so decently, for she expressed too much joy at it, both in her carriage and dress." Hall, The Union of the Houses of iMncaster and Yorke, p. 818, says, "Queen Anne wore yellow for the mourning." 3' Burnet ut sup., p. 316. This was on May r, 1536. 46 to the Tower; and, as if it were to remind her of the injustice which she had so mainly assisted in committing against the late virtuous queen ; as it were to say to her, "see, after all, God is just," she was imprisoned in the very room in which she had slept the night before hfer coronation ! 75. From the moment of her imprisonment her be haviour indicated anything but conscious innocence. She was charged with adultery committed with four gentlemen of the King's household, and with incest with her brother. Lord Rochford, and she was, of course, charged with treason, those being acts of treason by law.^ They were all found guilty, and all put to death. But, before Anne was executed, our friend, Thomas Cranmer, had another tough job to perform. The King, who never did things by halves, ordered, as " head of the Church," the Archbishop to hold his " spiritual court," and to divorce him from Anne ! One would think it impossible that a man, that anything bearing the name of man, should have consented to do such a thing, should not have perished before a slow fire rather than do it. What ! he had, as we have seen in paragraph 70, pronounced the marriage with Anne " to be lawful, and had confirmed it by his authority, judicial and pastoral, which he derived from the successors of the Apostles." How was he now, then, to annul this marriage ? How was he to declare it unlawful ?*' ^^ Among the judges of those charged as Anne's accomplices, was Thomas, Earl of Wiltshire, Anne's father, and the verdict of guilty was given May 12, 1537- Although he only sat as judge on the supposed accom plices, by condemning them he tacitly condemned his own daughter. Stow, p. 573. " May 17, the Lord Rochford, brother of the Queen, Henry Norrice, Mark Smeton, William Brierton and Francis Weston, . . . were beheaded on Tower Hill." ^ Cranmer had an interview with Anne in the Tower the day after the sentence of death had been passed upon her (Gairdner, Calender, No. 890) What transpired is unknown ; but it seems probable that the Archbishop's 47 '76. He cited the King and Queen to appear in his "court"! (Oh! that court!) His citation stated that their marriage had been unlavirful, that they were living in adultery,^ and that, for the " salvation of their souls," they should come and show cause why they should not be separated. They were just going to be separated most effectually ; for this was on May 17, and Anne, who had been condemned to death on the 15th, was to be, and was, executed on the 19th ! They both obeyed this citation, and appeared before him by their proctors ; and, after having heard these, Cranmer, who, observe, afterwards drew up the Book of Common Prayer, wound up the blas phemous farce by pronouncing, " in the name of Christ and for the honour of God," that the marriage " was, and always had been, null and void " I^'^ Good' God! Btit we must not give way to exclamations, or they will interrupt us at every step. Thus was the daughter, Elizabeth, bastardized*' by the decision of the very man who had not only pronounced her mother's marriage lawful, but who visit was in preparation for the ecclesiastical court to be held the next day, (cf. Stevenson, Cranmer and Anne Boleyn, p. 33). ^' At the Archbishop's court held at Lambeth on May iS, Dr. Richard Sampson represented Henry, and Nicholas Wotton and Dr. John Barbor the Queen. Cranmer gave judgment that the marriage between Henry and Anne "was and always had been null and invalid." This sentence was signed by both Houses of Convocation on June 28 (Wilkins' Concilia, iii., p. 804, where the document is wrongly said to relate to the divorce of Anne of Cleves). The Parliament subsequently (28 Henry VIIL, c. 7) declared the grounds of the judgment to be "certain just and lawful impediments unknown " when the marriage took place, " which were con fessed by the said Lady Anne " to the Archbishop " sitting judicially." ^' Burnet, ut sup., 326. " The two sentences that were passea upon the Queen, the one of attainder for adultery, the other of divorce because of a pre-contract, did so contradict one another, that it was apparent one, if not both of them, must be unjust." ^ By the same act of Parliament (28 Henry VIIL, c. 7) both Mary and Elizabeth are declared bastards, and the crown settled upon the issue of 48 had been the contriver of that marriage ! And yet Burnet has the impudence to say that Cranmer "appears to have done every thing with a good conscience " ! 77. On the 19th Anne was beheaded in the Tower, put into an elm coffin, and buried there. At the place of execution she did not pretend that she was innocent ; °' and there appears to me to be very little doubt of her having done some at least of the things imputed to her : but, if her marriage with the King had " always been null and void " ; that is to say, if she had never been married to him, how could she, by her commerce with other men, have been guilty of treason ? On the 15th she is con demned as the wife of the King, and on the 17th she is pronounced never to have been his wife, and on the 19th she is executed for having been his unfaithful wife ! How ever, as to the effect which this event has upon the charac ter of the " Reformation," it signifies not a straw whether she were guilty or innocent of the crimes now laid to her charge ; for, if she were innocent, how are we to describe the monsters who brought her to the block ? How are we to describe that " head of the Church " and that Arch bishop, who had now the management of the religious affairs of England ? It is said that the evening before her execution, she begged the lady of the lieutenant of the Tower to go to the Princess Mary, and to beg her to pardon her for the many wrongs she had done her. There Jane Seymour, and the people released from the oath they had taken to Anne. (cf. Sander, The Anglican Schism, ed. Lewis, pp. 230-1.) " At the scaffold Anne appears to have made no confession. On the contrary, she is described by a foreigner who was present, as saying, " Everything they have accused me of is false, and the principal reason I am to die is Jane Seymour, as I was the cause of the ill that befell my mistress," Queen Catherine (Chronicle of King Henry VIIL, ed. M. A. Sharp Hume, p. 70). A study of the documents now brought lo light makes it appear unlikely that Anne was guilty of the crimes charged against her. 49 were others to whom she had done wrongs. She had been the cause, and the guilty cause, of breaking the heart of the rightful queen ; she had caused the blood of More and of Fisher to be shed ; and she had been the promoter of Cranmer, and his aider and abettor in all those crafty and pernicious councils, by acting upon which an obstinate and hard-hearted King had plunged the kingdom into confusion and blood. The King, in order to show his total disregard for her, and, as it were, to repay her for her con duct on the day of the funeral of Catherine, dressed himself in white on the day of her execution ; ^ and, the very next day, was married to Jane Seymour, at Marevell Hall, in Hampshire. 78. Thus, then my friends, we have seen that the thing called the " Reformation " was engendered in lust, and brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy. How it pro ceeded in devastating and shedding innocent blood we have yet to see. ^ Anne Boleyn was put to death May 19, 1536, and Jane Seymour was married on May 20, the day after Anne was executed. Cranmer granted Henry a dispensation to marry Janr Seymour. CHAPTER III. 79. No Englishman worthy of that name, worthy of a name which carries along with it sincerity and a love of justice ; no real Englishman can have contemplated the foul deeds, the base hypocrisy, the flagrant injustice, ex posed in the foregoing pages, without blushing for his country. What man with an honourable sentiment in his mind is there who does not almost wish to be a foreigner, rather than be the countryman of Cranmer and of Henry VIII. ? If, then, such be our feelings already, what are they to be bj' the time that we have got through those scenes of tyranny, blood, and robbery, to which the deeds which we have already witnessed were merely a prelude ? 80. Sunk, however, as the country was by the mem bers of the Parliament, hoping to share, as they finally did, in the plunder of the Church and the poor ; selfish and servile as was the conduct of the courtiers, the king's councillors, and the people's representatives ; still there were some men to raise their voices against the illegality and cruelty of the divorce of Catherine, as well as against that great preparatory measure of plunder, the taking of the spiritual supremacy from the Pope and giving it to the King. The bishops, all but one, which one we shall pre sently see dying on the scaffold rather than abandon his integrity, were terrified into acquiescence, or, at least, into silence. But there were many of the parochial clergy, and 51 a large part of the monks and friars, who were not thus acquiescent or silent. These, by their sermons and by their conversations, made the truth pretty generally known to the people at large ; and though they did not succeed in preventing the calamities which they saw approaching, they rescued the character of their country from the in- iumy of silent submission. 8i. Of all the duties of the historian, the most sacred is that of recording the conduct of those who have stood for ward to defend helpless innocence against the attacks of powerful guilt. This duty calls on me to make particular mention of the conduct of the two friars, Peyto and Elstow. The former, preaching before the King at Green. wich,^ just previous to his marriage with Anne, and taking for his text the passage in the first book of Kings, where Micaiah prophecies against Ahab, who was surrounded with flatterers and lying prophets, said, "I am that Micaiah, whom you will hate because I must tell you truly that this marriage is unlawful ; and I know that I shall eat the bread of affliction and drink the water of sorrow ; yet, because the Lord hath put it in my mouth I must speak it. Your flatterers are the four hundred prophets, who, in the spirit of lying, seek to deceive you. But take good heed lest you, being seduced, find Ahab's punishment, which was to have his blood licked up by dogs. It is one of the greatest miseries in princes to be iaily abused by flatterers." The King took this reproof n silence ; but the next Sunday a Dr. Curwin preached in the same place before the King, and having called Peyto dog, slanderer, base beggarly friar, rebel and traitor, and ' Peyto preached, apparently, on May 1 1, 1533. This was, of cour.se, after the King's marriage with Anne, which took place in the previous January; but it was prior to the declaration of his divorce from Catherine, which was given by Cranmer on Friday, May 23. In fact the Archbishop's court for the trial of Henry's marriage question had been opened at Dunstable on Salurday, May 10, Ihe dpv before Peyto's sermon. 52 having said that he had fled for fear and shame, Elstow, who was present and who was a fellow-friar of Peyto, called out aloud to Curwin and said, " Good sir, you know that Father Peyto is now gone to a provincial council at Canterbury, and not fled for fear of you ; for to-morrow he will return. In the meanwhile I am here as another Micaiah, and will lay down my life to prove all those things true which he hath taught out of Holy Scripture ; and to this combat I challenge thee before God and all equal judges; even unto thee, Curwin, I say, which art one of the four hundred false prophets into whom the spirit of lying is entered, and seekest by adultery to establish a succession, betraying the King into endless perdition." 82. Stowe, who relates this in his Chronicle, says that Elstow " waxed hot, so that they could not make him cease his speech until the King himself bade him hold his peace."'' The two friars were brought the next day before the King's council, who rebuked them and told them that they deserved to be put into a sack and thrown into the Thames. Whereupon Elstow said smiling, "Threaten these things to rich and dainty persons, who are clothed in purple, fare deliciously, and have their chiefest hope in this world ; for we esteem them not, but are joyful that, for the discharge of our duty, we are driven hence : and, with thanks to God, we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as by land."'' 83. It is impossible to speak with sufficient admiration of the conduct of these men. Ten thousand victories by land or sea would not bespeak so much heroism in the winners of those victories as was shown by these friars. ^ Stowe, Chronicle, p. 562. ' Stowe puts this threat into the mouth of Henry Eourchier, Earl of Essex. Harpsfield (The Pretended Divorce, ed. Camden Society, p. 205) says, " of this sermon and answer myself have heard the said Fathei; Elstowe report." 53 If the bishops, or only a fourth part of them, had shown equal courage, the tyrant would have stopped in that career whic'n was now on the eve of producing so many horrors. The stand made against him by these two poor friars was the only instance of bold and open resistance until he had actually got into his murders and robberies ; and, seeing that there never was yet found even a Protes tant pen, except the vile pen of Burnet, to offer so much as an apology for the deeds of this tyrant, one would think that the heroic virtue of Peyto and Elstow ought to be sufficient to make us hesitate before we talk of " monkish ignorance and superstition." Recollect, that there was no wild fanaticism in the conduct of those men, that they could not be actuated by any selfish motive, that they stood forward in the cause of morality, and in defence of a person whom they had never personally known, and that, too with the certainty of incurring the most severe punish ments, if not death itself. Before their conduct how the heroism of the Hampdens and the Russells sinks from our sight ! 84. We now come to the consideration of that copious source of blood, the suppression of the Pope's supremacy. To deny the King's supremacy was made high treason, and to refuse to take an oath acknowledging that supremacy was deemed a denial of it. Sir Thomas More, who was the Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, who was Bishop of ^ Rochester, were put to death for refusing to take this oath.* Of all the men in England these were the two most famed for learning, for integrity, for piety, and for ' The effect of the indictment of Bishop Fisher was " that he mali ciously, traitorously, and falsely had said these words, ' The Kinge, our soveraigne lord, is not supreame head in earth of the Church of England' " (Vie da Bienheureux Martyr Jean Fisher, ed. Fr. Van Ortroy, S. J., p. 319). The cause of Sir Thomas More's death was the same. Bishop Fisher suffered on Tuesday, June 22, 1535, and Sir Thomas More upon July 6 of the same year. 54 long and faithful services to the King and his father. It is no weak presumption in favour of the Pope's supremacy that these two men, who had exerted their talents to pre vent its suppression, laid their heads on the block rather than sanction that suppression. But knowing, as we do, that it is the refusal of our Catholic fellow subjects to take this same oath rather than take which More and Fisher died ; knowing that this is the cause of all that cruel treat ment which the Irish people have so long endured, and to put an end to which ill treatment they are now so arduously struggling; knowing that it is on this very point that the fate of England herself may rest in case of another war ; knowing these things, it becomes us to inquire with care what is the nature and what are the effects of this papal supremacy, in order to ascertain whether it be favourable or otherwise to true religion and to civil liberty. 85. The Scripture tells us that Christ's Church was to be one. We, in repeating the Apostles' Creed, say, " I believe in the Holy Catholic Church." Catholic, as we have seen in paragraph 3, means universal. And how can we believe in a universal Church without believing that that Church is one, and under the direction of one head ? In the Gospel of St. John, chap, x., v. i5, Christ says, that He is the good shepherd, and that "there shall be one fold and one shepherd." He afterwards deputes Peter to be the shepherd in His stead. In the same Gospel, chap, xvii., V. 10 and II, Christ says, "And all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are." Saint Paul, in his second Epistle to the Corinthians, says, "Finally, brethren, farewell: be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind." The same Apostle, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, chap, iv., v. 3, says, " Endeavouring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond 55 of peace. There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your caUing ; one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all." Again, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, chap, i., v. lo, " Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions amongst you ; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and the same judgment." 86. But, besides these evidences of Scripture, besides our own creed, which we say we have from the Apostles, there is the reasonableness of the thing. It is perfectly monstrous to suppose that there can be two true faiths. It cannot be : one of the two must be false. And will any man say, that we ought to applaud a measure which, of necessity, must produce an indefinite number of faiths ? If our eternal salvation depend upon our believing the truth, can it be good to place people in a state of necessity to have different beliefs ? And does not that which takes away the head of the Church inevitably produce such a state of necessity ? How is the faith of all nations to continue to be one, if there be in every nation a head of the Church, who is to be appealed to, in the last resort, as to all questions, as to all points of dispute, which may arise ? How, if this be the case, is there to be " one fold and one shepherd " ? How is there to be " one faith and one baptism " ? How are the " unity of the spirit and the bond of peace " to be preserved ? We shall presently see what unity and what peace there were in England, the moment the King became thejhead of the Church. 87. To give this supremacy to a King, is, in our case, to give it occasionally to a woman ; and still more frequently to a child, even to a baby. We shall very soon see it de volve on a boy, nine years of age, and we shall see the monstrous effects that it produced. 88. As to the Pope's interference with the authority of the King or State, the sham plea set up was, and is, that he 56 divided the government with the King, to whom belonged the sole supremacy with regard to everything within his realm. This doctrine, pushed home, would shut out Jesus Christ Himself, and make the King an object of adoration. Spiritual and temporal authority are perfectly distinct in their nature, and ought so to be kept in their exercise ; and that too, not only for the sake of religion, but also for the sake of civil liberty. It is curious enough that the Pro testant sectarians, while they most cordially unite with the established clergy in crying out against the Pope for " usurping " the King's authority, and against the Catho lics for countenancing that " usurpation," take special care to deny that this same King has any spiritual supremacy over themselves ! The Presbyterians have their Synod, the Methodists their Conference, and all the other motley mongrels some head or other of their own. All these heads exercise an absolute power over their members. They give or refuse their sanction to the appointm.ent of the bawlers ; they remove them, or break them, at pleasure. Strange enough, or rather impudent enough, is it, in these sects, to refuse to acknowledge any spiritual supremacy in the King, while they declaim against the Cathohcs because they will not take an oath acknowledg ing that supremacy : and is it not, then, monstrous, that persons belonging to these sects can sit in Parliament, can sit in the King's Council, can be generals, or admirals, or judges, while from all these posts, and many others, the Catholics are excluded, and that, too, only because their consciences, their honourable adherence to the religion of their fathers, will not allow them to acknowledge this supremacy ; but bids them to belong to the " one fold and the one shepherd," and to know none other than " one Lord, one faith, and one baptism " ? 89. But the Pope was a foreigner exercising spiritual power in England ; and this the hypocrites pretended was a degradation to the Iving and country. This was some- 57 thing to tickle John Bull, who has, and I dare say always has had, an instinctive dislike to foreigners. But, in the first place, the Pope might be an Englishman, and we have, in paragraph 42, seen one instance of this. Then, how could it be a thing degrading to this nation, when the same thing existed with regard to all other nations ? Was King Alfred, and were all the long line of kings, for 900 years, degraded beings ? Did those who really conquered France, not by subsidies and bribes but by arms ; did they not understand what was degrading and what was not ? Do not the present French people understand this matter ? Are the sovereignty of the former and the freedom of the latter less perfect because the papal supremacy is distinctly acknowledged and has full effect in France ? And if the Synod in Scotland can exercise its supremacy in England, and the Conference in England exercise its supremacy in Scotland, in Ireland, and in the Colonies ; if this can be without any degradation of king or people, why are we to look upon the exercise of the papal supremacy as degrad ing to either ? go. Aye ; but there was the money. The money of England went to the Pope. Popes cannot live, and keep courts and ambassadors, and maintain great state, without money, any more than other people. A part of the money of England went to the Pope ; but a part also of that of every other Christian nation took the same direction. This money was not, however, thrown away. It was so much given for the preservation of unity of faith, peace, good will, and charity and morality. We shall, in the broils that ensued, and in the consequent subsidies and bribes to foreigners, soon see that the money which went to the Pope was extremely well laid out. But how we Protestants strain at a gnat, while we swallow camels by whole caravans ! We have since given more to foreigners in one single year than the Popes ever received from our ancestors in four centuries. We have bowed, for years, to a Dutchman, who was no heir to the crown any more than one of our workhouse paupers, and who had not one drop of English blood in his veins ; and we have sent annually to Hanoverians and other foreigners, under the name of half-pay, more money than was ever sent to the Pope in twenty years. From the time of the " Glorious Revolution " we have been paying two thousand pounds a year to the heirs of " Marshal Schomberg," who came over to help the Dutchman f and this is, mind, to be paid as long as there are such heirs of Marshal Schomberg, which, to use the elegant, and logical, and philosophical phrase of our great " Reformation " poet, will, I dare say, be "for ever and a day." And have we forgotten the Bentincks, and all the rest of the Dutch tribe, who had estates of the crown heaped upon them ? and do we talk, then, of the degradation and the loss of money occasioned by the supremacy of the Pope ? It is a notorious fact, that not a German soldier would have been wanted in this king dom, during the last war, had it not been for the disturbed and dangerous state of Ireland, in which the German troops were very much employed. We have long been paying, and have now to pay, and shall long have to pay, upwards of a hundred thousand pounds a year, to the half-pay officers of these troops, one single penny of which we now should not have had to pay if we had dispensed with the oath of supremacy from the Catholics. Every one to his taste ; but, for my part, if I must pay foreigners for keeping me in order, I would rather pay " pence to Peter " than pounds to Hessian Grenadiers. Alien Priories, the estab lishment of which was for the purpose of inducing learned persons to come and live in England, have been a copious '¦> Schomberg came over with William of Orange as second in com mand. The following year, 16S9, he was made a Knight of the Garter, and created successively baron, marquis and duke, receiving from the House of Commons a vote of ;^ 1 00, 000. 59 source of declamatory complaint. But, leaving their utility out of the question, I, for my particular part, prefer Alien Priories to Alien Armies, from which latter this country has never been, except for very short intervals, wholly free, from the day that the former were suppressed. I wish not to set myself up as a dictator in matters of taste ; but I must take leave to say, that I prefer the cloister to the barrack ; the chanting of matins to the reveille by the drum ; the cowl to the brass-fronted hairy cap ; the shaven crown to the moustache, though the latter be stiffened with black-ball ; the rosary, with the cross appendant, to the belt with its box of bullets ; and, beyond all measure, I prefer the penance to the point of the bayonet. One or the other of these sets of things, it would seem, we must have ; for, before the " Reformation," England never knew and never dreamed of such a thing as a standing soldier; since that event she has never, in reality, known what it was to be without such soldiers ; till at last, a thundering standing army, even in time of profound peace, is openly avowed to be necessary to the " preservation of our happy constitution in Church and State " ! 91. However, this money part of the affair is now over with regard to the Pope. No one proposes to give him any money at all, in any shape whatever. The Catholics believe that the unity of their Church would be destroyed, that they would, in short, cease to be Catholics if they were to abjure his supremacy ; and, therefore, they will not abjure it : they insist that their teachers shall receive their authority from him ; and ¦what do they, with regard to the Pope, insist upon more than is insisted upon and acted upon by the Presbyterians, with regard to their Synod ? 92. Lastly, as to this supremacy of the Pope, what was its effect with regard to civil liberty ; that is to say, with regard to the security, the rightful enjoyment, of men's property and lives ? We shall, by-and-by, see that civil 6o liberty fell by the same tyrannical hands that suppressed the Pope's supremacy. But whence came our civil liberty ? Whence came those laws of England which Lord Coke calls "the birth-right " of Englishmen, and which each of the States of America declare, in their constitutions, to be " the birth-right of the people thereof ? " Whence came these laws ? Are they of Protestant origin ? The bare question ought to make the revilers of the CathoHcs hang their heads for shame. Did Protestants establish the three courts and the twelve judges, to which establishment, though, like all other human institutions, it has sometimes worked evil, England owes so large a portion of her fame and her greatness ? Oh no ! This institution arose when the Pope's supremacy was in full vigour. It was not a gift from Scotchmen, or Dutchmen, or Hessians, from Lutherans, Calvinists, or Huguenots, but was the work of our own brave and wise English Catholic ancestors ; and the present Chief Justice is the heir, in an unbroken line of succession, to that Bench which was erected by Alfred, who was, at the very same time, most zealously engaged in the founding of churches and of monasteries. 93. If, however, we still insist that the Pope's supremacy and its accompanying circumstances produced ignorance, superstition and slavery, let us act the part of sincere, consistent and honest men. Let us knock down, or blow up, the cathedrals and colleges and old churches : let us sweep away the three courts, the twelve judges, the cir cuits, and the jury boxes ; let us demolish all that we inherit from those whose religion we denounce, and whose memory we affect so heartily to despise ; let us demolish all this, and we shall have left — all our own — the capacious jails and penitentiaries, the stock-exchange, the hot, ankle and knee-swelhng and lung-destroying cotton-factories ; the whiskered standing army and its splendid barracks ; the parson-captains, parson-lieutenants, parson-ensigns and parson-justices, the poor-rates and the pauper-houses ; 6i and, by no means forgetting that blessing which is pecu- harly and doubly and "gloriously" Protestant, — the National Debt. Ah ! people of England, how have you been deceived ! 94. But, for argument's sake, counting the experience of antiquity for nothing, let us ask ourselves what a chance civil liberty can stand if all power, spiritual and lay, be lodged in the hands of the same man ? That man must be a despot, or his power must be undermined by an oligarchy or by something. If the President or the Con gress of the United States had a spiritual supremacy ; if they appointed the bishops and ministers, though they have no benefices to give and would have no tenths and first fruits to receive, their government would be a tyranny in a very short time. Montesquieu qbserves that the people of Spain and Portugal would have been absolute slaves without the power of the Church, which is, in such a case, " the only check to arbitrary sway." Yet how long have we had " papal usurpation and tyranny " dinned in our ears ! This charge against the Pope surpasseth all understanding. How was the Pope to be a usurper or tyrant in England ? He had no fleet, no army, no judge, no sheriff, no justice of the peace, not even a single constable or beadle at his command. We have been told of "the thunders of the Vatican" till we have almost believed that the Pope's residence was in the skies ; and, if we had believed it quite, the belief would not have sur passed in folly our belief in numerous other stories hatched by the gentry of the " Reformation." The truth is, that the Pope had no power but that which he derived from the free will of the people. The people were frequently on his side in his contests with kings ; and by this means, they, in numerous instances, preserved their rights against the attempts of tyrants. If the Pope had had no power there must have sprung up an oligarchy, or a something else, to check the power of the king; or every king might have 62 been a Nero, if he would. We shall soon see a worse than Nero in Henry VIII. ; we shall soon see him laying all law prostrate at his feet ; and plundering his people, down even to the patrimony of the poor. But reason says that it must be so ; and though this spiritual power be now nominally lodged in the hands of the King, to how many tricks and contrivances have we resorted, and some of them most disgraceful and fatal ones, in order to prevent him from possessing the reality of this power ? We are obliged to effect by influence and by faction — that is to say, by means indirect, disguised, and frequently flagiti ously immoral, not to say almost seditious into the bargain — that which was effected by means direct, avovvred, frank, honest and loyal. It is curious enough that, while all Protestant ministers are everlastingly talking about " papal usurpation and tyranny," all of them, except those who profit from the establishment, talk not less incessantly about what they have no scruple to call " that two-headed monster. Church and State." What a monster would it have been then, if the Catholics had submitted to the " Veto ; " — that is to say, to give the king a rejecting voice in the appointment of Catholic bishops, and thus to make him, who is already "the Defender of the Faith" against which he protests, an associate with the Sovereign Pontiff in carrying on the affairs of that Church to which the law strictly forbids him to belong. 95. Thus, then, this so much abused ipapal supremacy was a most salutary thing : it was the pnly check, then existing, on despotic power, besides being absolutely necessary to that unity of faith without which there could be nothing worthy of the name of a Catholic Church. To abjure this supremacy was an act of apostacy, and also an act of base abandonment of the rights of the people. To require it of any man was to violate Magna Charta and all the laws of the land ; and to put men to death for refusinc- to comply with the request was to commit unqualified 63 murder. Yet without such murder, without shedding innocent blood, it was impossible to effect the object. Blood must flow. Amongst the victims to this act of out rageous tyranny were Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher. The former had been the Lord High Chancellor for many years.^ The character given of him by his contemporaries, and by every one to the present day, is that of as great perfection for learning, integrity, and piety, as it is possible for a human being to possess. He was the greatest lawyer of his age, a long-tried and most faithful servant of the King and his father, and was, besides, so highly distin guished beyond men in general for his gentleness and humility of manners, as well as for his talents and abilities, that his murder gave a shock to all Europe. Fisher was equally eminent in point of learning, piety, and integrity. He was the only surviving privy-councillor of the late King, whose mother (the grandmother of Henry VIIL), having outlived her son and daughter, besought, with her dying breath, the young king to listen particularly to the advice of this learned, pious, and venerable prelate ; and, until that advice thwarted his brutal passions, he was in the habit of saying that no other prince could boast of a sub ject to be compared with Fisher. He used, at the council- board, to take him by the hand and call him his father ; marks of favour and affection which the bishop repaid by zeal and devotion which knew no bounds other than those prescribed by his duty to God, his king, and his country. But that sacred duty bade him object to the divorce and to the King's supremacy ; and then the tyrant, forgetting, at once, all his services, all his devotion, all his unparalleled attachment, sent him to the block, after fifteen months of imprisonment, during which he lay, worse than a common felon, buried in filth and almost destitute of food ; sent Sir Thomas More became Chancellor in 1529. 64 him, who had been his boast, and whom he had called his father, to perish under the axe ; dragged him forth, with limbs tottering under him, his venerable face and hoary locks begrimed, and his nakedness scarcely covered with the rags left on his body ;' dragged him thus forth to the scaffold, and, even when the life was gone, left him to lie on that scaffold like a dead dog !" Savage monster ! Rage stems the torrent of our tears, hurries us back to the horrid scene, and bids us look about us for a dagger to plunge into the heart of the tyrant. 96. And yet, the calculating, cold-blooded, and brazen Burnet has the audacity to say that " such a man as Henry VIII. was necessary to bring about the Reforma tion ! " He means, of course, that such measures as those of Henry were necessary ; and, if they were necessary, what must be the nature and tendency of that " Reforma tion" ? 97. The work of blood was now begun, and it proceeded with steady pace. All who refused to take the oath of ' The earliest account of Blessed John Fisher states that on preparation for his death he dressed hiinself "in a clean white shirt and all the best apparel he had, as cleanly brusht as might be" and then put on "his furred typpet " (Van Ortroy, Vie du B.fean Fisher, pp. 338-9). Of course the account given in the text was not intended to be anything but rhetorical. It is true that he was so weak that " he was scant able to goe downe the stayres " and had then to be carried on a chair to the scaffold (ibid., 340-2). ' " Then was his gowne and typpet taken from him, and he stood in his dooblet and hose in sight of all the people. . . . There was to be seen a longe, leane, and slender body, having on it little other substance besides the skynn and bones" (ibid., p. 343). The same account says that the "headless carcass was left naked upon the scaffold" all day guarded by soldiers. In the evening two of the guards carried it upon a halbert and tumbled it into .1 grave just as it was " without either sheete or other accustomed thinge belonging to a Christian man's buryall" (ibid., p. 348). The same account of the way the body was left naked all day on the scaffold is given by the Bishop of Faenza writing from Paris (Gairdner, Calendar, viii.. No. 985), and by Cardinal Pole (Apologia, § 20). See also Father Bridgett's Life of B. John Fisher, p. 400. 6s supremacy,^that is to say, all who refused to become apostates, — were considered and treated as traitors, and made to suffer death accompanied with every possible cruelty and indignity. As a specimen of the works of Burnet's necessary reformer, and to spare the reader repe tition on the subject, let us take the treatment of John Houghton, prior of the Charterhouse in London, which was then a convent of Carthusian monks. This prior, for having refused to take the oath, which, observe, he could not take without committing perjury, was dragged to Tyburn. He was scarcely suspended when the rope was cut, and he fell alive on the ground. His clothes were then stripped off; his bowels were ripped up ; his heart and entrails were torn from his body and flung into a fire ; his head was cut from his body ; the body was divided into quarters and parboiled ; the quarters were then subdivided, and hung up in different parts of the city ; and one arm was nailed to the wall over the entrance into the monastery ! ' 98. Such were the means which Burnet said were necessary to introduce the Protestant religion into England ! How different, alas ! from the means by which the Catholic religion had been introduced by Pope Gregory and Saint Austin ! These horrid butcheries were perpetrated, mind, under the primacy of Fox's great martyr, Cranmer, and with the active agency of another ruffian, named Thomas Cromwell, whom we shall soon see sharing with Cranmer the work of plunder, and finally sharing, too, in his dis graceful end. 99. Before we enter on the grand subject of plunder, which was the mainspring of the " Reformation," we must follow the King and his primate through their murders of Protestants as well as Catholics. But first, we must see ' May 4, 1535. For the account of this see Gairdner, Calendar viii. , No. 726. Cf. Froude, History, ii., p. 358. seqq. 5 66 how the Protestant religion arose, and how it stood at this juncture. Whence the term Protestant came, we have seen in paragraph 3. It was a name given to those who declared, or protested, against the Catholic or univer sal Church. This work of protesting was begun in Germany, in the year 15 17, by a friar whose name was Martin Luther, and who belonged to a convent of Augustin friars in the electorate of Saxony. At this time the Pope had authorised the preaching of certain indulgences, and this business was entrusted to the order of Dominicans, and not to the order to which Luther belonged." 100. All accounts agree that Luther was a profligate man.^^ To change his religion he might have thought himself called by his conscience ; but conscience could not cah upon him to be guilty of all the abominable deeds of which he stands convicted even by his own confessions ; of which I shall speak more fully when I come to the proper place for giving an account of the numerous sects into which the Protestants were soon divided, and of the fatal change which was by this innovation of religion produced, even according to the declaration of the Protestant leaders themselves, in the morals of the people and the state of society. But, just observing that the Protestant sects had, at the time we are speaking of, spread themselves over a part of Germany, and had got into Switzerland and some other states of the Continent, we must now, before we state more particulars relating to Luther and the sects that he gave rise to, see how the King of England dealt with those of his subjects who had adopted the heresy. " The publication in 1517 of the indulgences granted to such as con tributed to the building of St. Peter's in Rome was given to John Tetzel of Leipzig, a Dominican friar, by the Archbishop of Mentz. Luther took the lead in the opposition, but evidently at first without any intention of proceeding to the lengths to which he afterwards went. " Erasmus wrote of him : "It was thought that Luther was the hero of the tragedy, but for my part I regard him as playing the chief part in a comedy, that has ended, like all comedies, in a marriage." 67 101. The Protestants immediately began to disagree amongst themselves ; but they all maintained that faith alone was sufficient to secure salvation, while the Catholics maintained that good works were also necessary. The most profligate of men, the most brutal and bloody of tyrants, may be a staunch believer ; for the devils them selves believe ; and therefore we naturally, at first thought, think it strange that Henry VIII. did not instantly become a zealous Protestant, did not become one of the most devoted disciples of Luther. He would, certainly ; but Luther began his " Reformation " a few years too soon for the King. In 1517, when Luther began his works, the King had been married to his first wife only eight years ; and he had not then conceived any project of divorce. If Luther had begun twelve years later the King would have been a Protestant at once, especially after seeing that this new religion allowed Luther and seven other of his brother leaders in the " Reformation " to grant, under their hands, a licence to the Landgrave of Hesse to have two wives at one and the same time ! '^'^ So complaisant a religion would have been, and doubtless was, at the time of the divorce, precisely to the King's taste ; but, as I have just observed, it came twelve years too soon for him ; for, not only had he not adopted this religion, but had opposed it as a sovereign ; and, which was a still more serious affair, had opposed it as an author ! He had, in 152 1, written a book against it. His vanity and his pride were engaged in the contest ; to which may be added, that Luther, in answering his book, had called him "a pig, an ass, a '^ Philip of Hesse, who had been married sixteen years and with his wife still living, asked Luther to authorise him to marry a second wife. This the Reformer permitted "in order to provide for the welfare of his body and soul, and to bring greater glory to God." Both Luther and Melanchthon would have permitted the same to Henry VIII. (cf. Mrs. Hope, The First Divorce of Henry VIIL, p. 194). 68 dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon dressed in a king's robes, a mad fool with a frothy mouth and a whorish face ; " and had afterwards said to him, " you lie, you stupid and sacrilegious king." I02. Therefore, though the tyirant was bent on destroy ing the Catholic Church, he was not less bent on the extirpation of the followers of Luther and his tribe of new sects. Always under the influence of some selfish and base motive or other, he was, with regard to the Pro testants, set to work by revenge, as, in the case of the Catholics, he had been set to work by lust. To follow him, step by step, and in minute detail, through all his butcheries and all his burnings would be to familiarise one's mind to a human slaughter-house and a cookery of cannibals. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a general view of his Works in this way. 103. His book against Luther had acquired him the title of " Defender of the Faith," of which we shall see more by-and-by. He could not, therefore, without recan tation, be a Protestant ; and, indeed, his pride would not suffer him to become the proselyte of a man who had, in print too, proclaimed him to be a pig, an ass, a fool, and a liar. Yet he could not pretend to be a Catholic. He was therefore compelled to make a religion of his own. This was doing nothing, unless he enforced its adoption by what he called law. Laws were made by him and by his servile and plundering parliament, condemning to the flames as heretics all who did not expressly conform, by acts as well as by declarations, to the faith and worship which, as head of the Church, he invented and ordained. Amongst his tenets there were such as neither CathoHcs nor Protestants could, consistently with their creeds, adopt. He therefore sent both to the stake, and some times, in order to add mental pangs to those of the body, he dragged them to the fire on the same hurdle, tied together in pairs, back to back, each pair containing a 69 Catholic and a Protestant." Was this the way that Saint Austin and Saint Patrick propagated their religion ? Yet, such is the malignity of Burnet, and of many, many others, called Protestant " divines," that they apologize for, if they do not absolutely applaud, this execrable tyrant, at the very moment that they are compelled to confess that he soaked the earth with Protestant blood and filled the air with the fumes of their roasting flesh. 104. Throughout the whole of this bloody work, Cranmer, who was the primate of the King's religion, was consenting to, sanctioning, and aiding and abetting in, the murdering of Protestants as well as Catholics ; though, and I pray you mark it well, Hume, Tillotson, Burnet, and all his long lists of eulogists, say, and make it matter of merit in him, that all this while he was himself a sincere Protes tant in his heart ! " And, indeed, we shall, by-and-by see him openly avowing those very tenets, for the holding " Sander, (Schism, ed. Lewis, p. 149) says, " On the 30th day of July (1540), six persons were put to death, three of whom were Catholics and, three were heretics. They were carried to the place of execution through the streets upon hurdles, two and two together, a Catholic and a heretic upon the same hurdle." The Catholics were Thomas Able, Richard Fetherston and Edward Powell, priests condemned for their denial of the royal supremacy. The three condemned as heretics were also priests, named Barnes, Gerard and Jerome. Richard Hilles, a "reformer," writing from London about these execu tions, adds : "In the week following the burning of these preachers were executed many others . . . It is now no novelty among us to see men slain, hung, quartered, or beheaded : some for trifling expressions which were explained or interpreted as having b'een spoken against the King ; others for the Pope's supremacy; some for one thing and some for another." (Original Letters, Parker Society, No. 105.) " In 1533, for example, Cranmer condemned of heresy John Frith and Andrew Hewet for denying the doctrine of the real presence (see his account, Archceologia, xviii., 81). Of the three men who brought Lambert to the stake in 1538, two, Barnes and Cranmer, certainly professed later the very doctrine of their victim, and both like him subsequently perished in the fiames. 70 of which he had been instrumental in sending, without regard to age or sex, others to perish in the flames. The progress of this man in the paths of infamy needed incon testable proof to reconcile the human mind to a belief in it. Before he became a priest he had married; after he became a priest, and had taken the oath of celibacy, he, being then in Germany and having become a Protestant, married another wife.'* Being the primate of Henry's Church, which still forbade the clergy to have wives, and which held them to their oath of celibacy, he had his wife brought to England in a chest, with holes bored in it to. give her air ! As the cargo was destined for Canterbury, it was landed at Gravesend, where the sailors, not apprised of the contents of the chest, set it up on the end, and the wrong end downwards, and had nearly broken the neck of the poor frow ! '" Here was a pretty scene ! A German wife and children, kept in hugger-mugger on that spot which had been the cradle of English Christianity ; that spot where St. Austin had inhabited, and where Thomas a-Becket had sealed with his blood his opposition to a '° Cranmer, whilst a student at Cambridge, and before he entered into Holy Orders, married " one Joan. . . dwelling at the sign of the Dolphin " there. She dying he became a priest ; but during his embassy to Germany about the beginning of 1532, he was married to Margaret, the niece of Osiander of Nuremberg. This marriage being altogether unlawful, according to the law of England, he, as he acknowledged at his trial, " in the time of King Henry VIIL, kept the said wife secretly, and had children of her." (Cranmer's Remains, Parker Society, p. 219.) '" The story as given in the text may be seen in Parsons' The Three Conversions of England, II., chap, vii., p. 371; the author adding, " This is a most certain story, and testified at this day by Cranmer's son's widow, yet living, to divers gentlemen, her friends, from whom myself had it." Harpsfield, The Pretended Divorce (Camden Society, p. 275), and Sander, The Anglican Schism (ed. Lewis, p. 181), both speak to the Archbishop being obliged to carry about his wife in a chest full of holes. Ilarpsfield says that Edmund Cranmer, the Archbishop's brother, "was likewise married, and kept privily his woman." 71 tyrant who aimed at the destruction of the Church and at the pillage of the people ! Here is quite enough to fill us with disgust : but when we reflect that this same primate, while he had under his roof his wife and her children, was engaged in assisting to send Protestants to the flames because they dissented from a system that forbade the clergy to have wives," we swell with indigna tion; — not against Cranmer, for, though there are so many of his atrocious deeds yet to come, he has exhausted our store ; not against Hume, for he professed no regard for any religion at all ; but against those who are called " divines," and who are the eulogists of Cranmer ; against Burnet, who says that Cranmer " did all with a good conscience ; " and against Dr. Sturges, or, rather, the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, who clubbed their "talents" in getting up the Reflections on Popery, wlio talk of the "respectable Cranmer," and who have the audacity to put him, in point of integritj', upon a level with Sir Thomas More ! ^ As Dr. Milner, in his answer to Sturges, observes, they resembled each other in that the name of both was Thomas ; but, in all other things, the dissimilarity was as great as that which the most vivid imagination can ascribe to the dissimilarity between hell and heaven. 105. The infamy of Cranmer in assisting in sending people to the flames for entertaining opinions which he afterwards confessed that he himself entertained at the time he was so sending them, can be surpassed by nothing of which human depravity is capable ; and it can be equalled by nothing but that of the King, who, while he was as, he hoped and thought laying the axe to the root " Cranmer at his trial admitted that he continued to live with his wife although the canons forbade it. When questioned by Henry " whether his bed-chamber would stand the test of the six articles," he declared he had sent his wife home to Germany. (Collier, History, ii., p. 200.) " J. Sturges, Refections on Popery (2nd ed.), p. 145. 72 of the Catholic faith, still styled himself its defender ! He was not, let it be borne in mind, defender of what he might, as others have since his day, and in his day, called the Christian Faith. He received the title from the Pope, as a reward for his written defence of the Catholic faith against Luther. The Pope conferred on him this title, which was to descend to his posterity. The title was given by Pope Leo X., in a bull or edict, beginning with these words : " Leo, servant of the servants of the Lord, to his most dear son, Henry, King of England, Defender of the Faith, all health and happiness." The bull then goes on to say, that the king having in defence of the faith of the Catholic Church written a book against Martin Luther, the Pope and his Council had determined to confer on him and his successors the title of Defender of the Faith. " We," says the bull, " sitting in this Holy See, having with mature deliberation considered the business with our brethren, do with their unanimous counsel and consent grant unto your Majesty, your heirs and successors, the title of Defender of the Faith ; which we do by these presents, confirm unto you ; commanding all the faithful to give your Majesty this title." '^ io6. What are we to think, then, of the man who could continue to wear this title while he was causing to be acted before him a farce in which the Pope and his Council were exposed to derision, and was burning and ripping up the bowels of people by scores, only because they remained firm in that faith of which he had still the odious effrontery to call himself the Defender ? All justice, everything like law, every moral thought must have been banished before such monstrous enormity could have been '" The grant was made October II, 1521. In this title " the king took great pleasure ; affecting it always beyond all his other titles." Clement VIL, the successor of Leo X., on March 5, 1524, "granted the title to his successors." (Burnet, ed. Pocock, i., p. 50.) 73 suffered to exist. They were all banished from the seat of power. An iron despotism had, as we shall see in the next number, come to supply the place of the papal supre macy. Civil liberty was wholly gone : no man had any thing that he could call property ; and no one could look upon his life as safe for twenty-four hours. 107. But there is a little more to be said about this title of Defender of the Faith, which, for some reason or other that one can hardly discover, seems to have been, down to our time, a singularly great favourite. Edward VI. , — though his two " Protectors," v/ho succeeded each other in that office, and whose guilty heads we shall gladly see succeeding each other on the block, abolished the Catholic faith by law ; though the Protestant faith was, with the help of foreign troops, established in its stead ; and though the greedy ruffians of his time robbed the very altars, under the pretext of extirpating that very faith of which his title called him the Defender ; — continued to wear this title throughout his reign. Elizabeth continued to wear this title during her long reign of " mischief and of misery," as Whitaker justly calls it, though during the whole of that reign she was busily engaged in persecuting, in ruining, in ripping up the bowels of those who entertained that faith of which she styled herself the Defender, in which she herself had been born, in which she had lived for many years, and to which she adhered openly and privately till her self-interest called upon her to abandon it. She con tinued to wear this title while she was tearing the bowels out of her subjects for hearing mass, while she was refus ing the last comforts of the Catholic religion to her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scotland, whom she put to death by a mockery of law and justice, after, as Whitaker has fully proved, having long endeavoured in vain to find amongst her subjects a man base and bloody enough to take her victim off by assassination. This title was worn by that piean creature, James I., who took as his chief councillor 74 the right worthy son of that father who had been the chief contriver of the murder of his innocent mother, and whose reign was one unbroken series of base plots and cruel persecutions of all who professed the Catholic faith. But, not to anticipate further matter which will, hereafter, find a more suitable place, we may observe that amongst all our sovereigns the only real Defenders of the Faith, since the reign of Mary, have been King George III. and his son ; the former, by assenting to a repeal of a part of the penal code, and by his appointing a special commission to try, condemn, and execute the leaders of the ferocious mob who set fire to, and who wished to sack London, in 1780, with the cry of "no popery" in their mouths and from pretended zeal for the Protestant religion, and the latter, by his sending, in 1814, a body of English troops to assist as a guard of honour at the re-instalment of the Pope. Let us hope that his defence of the faith is not to stop here ; but that unto him is reserved the real glory of being the Defender of the Faith of all his subjects, and of healing for ever those deep and festering wounds which, for more than two centuries, have been inflicted on so large and so loyal a part of his people. 108. From the sectarian host no man can say what ought to be expected ; but from the " divines " of the established Church, even supposing them dead to the voice of justice, one would think that, when they reflect on the origin of this title of their sovereign, common decency would restrain their revihngs. It is beyond all dispute that the King holds this title from the Pope, and from nobody else. His divine right to the crown is daily disputed, and he himself has disclaimed it. But as to Defender of the Faith, he owes it entirely to the Pope. Will, then, the Protestant divines boldly tell us that their and our sovereign wears a title which, observe, finds its way not only into every treaty, but into every municipal act, deed, or covenant ; will they tell us that he holds this 75 title from the " Man of Sin, Antichrist, and the scarlet whore " ? Will they thus defame that sovereign, whom they, at the same time, call on us to honour and obey ? Yet this they must do, or they must confess that their revihngs, their foul abuse of the Catholic Church, have all been detestably false. 109. The King's predecessors had another title. They were called Kings of France ; a title of much longer standing than that of Defender of the Faith. That title, a title of great glory, and one of which we were very proud, was not won by " Gospellers " or Presbyterians. It was, along with the Three Feathers, which the King so long wore, won by our brave Catholic ancestors. It was won while the Pope's supremacy, while confessions to priests, while absolutions, indulgences, masses, and monas teries existed in England. It was won by Catholics in " the dark ages of monkish ignorance and superstition." It was surrendered in an age enlightened by " a heaven- born " Protestant and pledge-breaking minister. It was won by valour and surrendered by fear. no. It would be time now, after giving a rapid sketch of the progress which the tyrant had made in prostrating the Hberties of his people, and in despatching more of his wives, to enter on the grand scene of plunder, and to recount the miseries which immediately followed ; but these must be the subject of the next chapter. 76 CHAPTER IV. III. We have seen, then, how the "Reformation," was brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and we have had some specimens of the acts by which it caused innocent blood to be shed. We shall now in this chapter and the next see how ' it devastated and plundered the country, what poverty and misery it produced, and how it laid the sure foundation for that pauperism, that disgraceful immorality, that fearful prevalence of crimes of all sorts, which now so strongly mark the character of this nation which was formerly the land of virtue and of plenty. 112. When, in paragraph 97, we left the King and Cranmer at their bloody work, we had come to the year 1536, and to the 27th year of the King's reign. In the year 1528 an act had been passed to exempt the King from paying any sum of money that he might have borrowed ; another act followed this for a similar purpose, and thus thousands of persons were ruined. His new Queen, Jane Seymour, brought him, in 1537, a son, who was afterwards king, under the title of Edward VI. ; but the mother died in childbirth and, according to Sir Richard Baker, " had her body ripped up to preserve the child " ! ^ In this great " Reformation " man all was of a ' Edward VI. was born October 12, 1537, and Jane Seymour died two days after. Burnet (ed. Pocock, iv., p. 572) declares that the report as to her death "is false." Heylin (History of Reformation, p. 7) speaks to the general belief that a surgical operation took place which resulted in the Queen's death. Harpsfield, to the general accuracy of whose work. The 77 piece, all was consistent ; he seemed never to have any compassion for the sufferings of any human being ; and _ this is a characteristic which Whitaker gives to his daughter Elizabeth. 113. Having a son for a successor, he with his Parlia ment enacted in 1537 that Mary and Elizabeth, his two daughters, were illegitimate, and that in case of a want of lawful issue the king should be enabled, by letters patent or by his last will, to give the crown to whomsoever he pleased !^ To cap the whole, to complete a series of acts of tyranny such as were never before heard of, it was enacted in 1537, and in the 28th year of his reign, that except in cases of mere private right " the King's proclama tion should be of the same force as Acts of Parliament " ! ° Pretended Divorce, Mr. Pocock bears testimony, states it as a fact ; and in this Sander (Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, ed. Lewis, p. 138) corroborates the account, as also does the contemporary Spanish Chronicle (ed. M. A. Sharp Hume), p. 73, and the account of Fisher and More printed by Pocock (Records, ii., 564). As Lingard has shown (History, vi., 3rd ed., p. 389), Henry's grief at Jane Seymour's death, if he felt any, was absorbed in his pleasure at the birth of a son. The very next month he proposed himself as a husband for Marie, the duchess dowager of Longueville. '^ Lingard, History of England (fii\\ ed.), vi., p. 371, says: "The suc cession to the crown was repeatedly altered, and at length left to the King's private judgment or affection. The right was first taken from Mary and given to Elizabeth ; then transferred from Elizabeth to the King's issue by Jane Seymour or any future Queen ; next restored, on the failure of issue by Prince Edward, to both Mary and Elizabeth ; and lastly, failing issue by them, secured to any person or persons to whom it should please him to assure it in remainder by his last will." (25 Hen. VIIL, 22.) ^ "The King was made in a great measure independent of Parliament by two statutes, one of which gave to his proclamations the force of laws, the other appointed a tribunal, consisting of nine privy councillors, with power to punish all transgressors of such proclamations." (31 Hen. VIIL, 8, and 34 Hen. VIIL, 23.) The reason assigned by the Parlia ment for passing those Acts was "that the King might not be driven to extend his royal supremacy." (Lingard, tit supra.) 78 Thus, then, all law and justice were laid prostrate at the , feet of a single man, and that man a man with whom law was a mockery, on whom the name of justice was a libel, and to whom mercy was wholly unknown. 114. It is easy to imagine that no man's property or life could have security with power like this in the hands of such a man. Magna Charta had been trampled under foot from the moment that the Pope's supremacy was assailed. The famous act of Edward the Third, for the security of the people against unfounded charges of high treason, was wholly set aside. Numerous things were made high treason which were never before thought criminal at all.* The trials were for a long while a mere mockery, and at last they were altogether, in many cases, laid aside and the accused were condemned to death, not only without being arraigned and heard in their defence, but in numerous cases without being apprised of the crimes or pretended crimes for which they were executed.' We have read of Deys of Algiers and Beys of Tunis, but never have heard of them, even in the most exaggerated accounts, any deeds to be, in point of injustice and cruelty, compared with those of this man, whom Burnet calls " the first-born son of the English Reformation." The objects of his cruelty generahy were, as they most naturahy would be, chosen from amongst the most virtuous of his subjects, because from them such a man had the most to dread. Of these his axe hewed down whole families and circles of friends. He spared neither sex nor age if the parties possessed, or were suspected of possessing, that integrity which made them disapprove of his deeds. To look awry excited his suspicion, and his suspicion was death. Eng- ' Cf. Lingard, ibid., p. 371. '^ Ibid., p. 374. "The unfortunate pi isoner found himself condemned to the scaffold or ihe gallows, without the opportunity of opening his moulh in his own vindication." 79 land, before his reign so happy, so free, knowing so little of crime as to present to the judges of assize scarcely three criminals in a county in a year, now saw upwards of sixty thousand persons shut up in her jails at one and the same time. The purlieus of the court of this " first-born son of the Reformation " were a great human slaughter-house ; his people, deserted by their natural leaders, who had been bribed by plunder or the hope of plunder, were the terrified and trembling flock ; while he, the master-butcher, fat and jocose, sat in his palace issuing orders for the slaughter, while his high priest, Cranmer, stood ready to sanction and to sanctify all his deeds. 115. A detail of these butcheries could only disgust and weary the reader. One instance, however, must not be omitted ; namely, the slaughtering of the relations and particularly the mother of Cardinal Pole. The Cardinal, who had, when very young and before the King's first divorce had been agitated, been a great favourite with the King, and had pursued his studies and travels on the Con tinent at the King's expense, disapproved of the divorce and of all the acts that followed it ; and though called home by the King he refused to obey. He was a man of great learning, talent and virtue, and his opinions had great weight in England. His mother, the Countess of Salisbury, was descended from the Plantagenets, and was the last living descendant of that long race of EngHsh kings. Margaret, Countess of SaHsbury, was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV. So that the Cardinal, who had been by the Pope raised to that dignity on account of his great learning and eminent virtues, was thus a relation of the King, as his mother was of course, and she was, too, the nearest of all his relations. But the Cardinal was opposed to the King's proceedings ; and that was enough to excite and put in motion the deadly vengeance of the latter. Many were the arts that he made use of, and great in amount was the treasure of his people that he expended, in order to bring the Cardinal's 8o person within his grasp ; ° and these having failed, he resolved to wreak his ruthless vengeance on his kindred and his aged mother. She was charged by the base Thomas Cromwell (of whom we shall soon see enough) with having persuaded her tenants not to read the new translations of the Bible, and also with having received bulls from Rome,' which the accuser said were found at Cowdray House, her seat in Sussex. Cromwell also showed a banner which had, he said, been used by certain rebels in the north, and which he said he found in her house. All this was, however, so very barefaced that it was impossible to think of a trial. The judges were then asked whether the Parliament could not attaint her ; that is to say, condemn her without giving her a hearing. The judges said that it was a dangerous matter ; that they could not in their courts act in this manner,* and that they ' Cardinal Pole writing to Cromwell, May 2, 1537, says that Henry had asked the king of France to deliver him up into his hands when he had come to the French Court as Legate. " Betray thine ambassador, betray the Legate, and give him to my ambassador's hands to be brought unto me ! This was the dishonourable request, as I understand, of the King." Burnet (ed. Pocock), vi., p. l86. ' Lord Herbert saw in the records that Bulls from the Pope were found in her house, that she kept correspondence with her son, and that she for bade her tenants to have the New Testament in English, or any other of the books that had been published by the King's authority (cf. in Burnet, i., p. 565). She was attainted in 1539, and kept in prison till May 27, 1 54 1, when she was executed. ' Burnet (ed. Pocock, i., p. 564) says: "After these executions (i.e., those of the Marquis of Exeter and Sir Nicholas Carew) followed the Par liament in the year 1539 ; in which not only those attainders that were already passed were confirmed, but new ones of a strange and unheard-of nature were enacted. It is a blemish never to be washed off and which cannot be enough condemned, and was a breach of the most sacred and unalterable rules of justice, which is capable of no excuse ; it was the at tainting of some persons whom they held in custody without bringing them to trial." Ilallam, in his Constitutional History (lOth ed.), i., p. 39, says, " These parliamentary attainders . . . were violations of reason and justice in the application of the law. But many general enactments of this reign hear the same character of servility." 8i thought the Parliament never would. But being asked whether, if the Parliament were to do it, it would remain good in law, they answered in the affirmative. That was enough. A bill was brought in, and thus was the Countess, together with the Marchioness of Exeter and two gentle men,' relations of the Cardinal, condemned to death. The two latter were executed, the Marchioness was pardoned, and the Countess shut up in prison as a sort of hostage for the conduct of her son. In a few months, however, an insurrection having broken out on account of his tyrannical acts, the King chose to suspect that the rebels had been instigated by Cardinal Pole, and forth he dragged his mother to the scaffold. She, who was upwards of seventy years of age, though worn down in body by her imprison ment, maintained to the last a true sense, of her character and noble descent. When bidden to lay her head upon the block : " No," answered she, " my head shall never bow to tyranny : it never committed treason ; and if you will have it, you must get it as you can." The executioner struck at her neck with his axe, and as she ran about the scaffold with her gray locks hanging down her shoulders and breast, he pursued, giving her repeated chops, till at last he brought her down ! ^'' ii6. Is it a scene in Turkey or in Tripoli that we are con templating ? No ; but in England, where Magna Charta had been so lately in force, where nothing could have been ' Lingard, History, vi., p. 289, "In the bill of attainder, containing the names of several individuals who had been condemned in the lower courts, were introduced those of Pole's mother, the Countess, of his nephew, the son of Lord Montague, and of Gertrude, relict of the Marquess of Exeter, though none of them had confessed any crime, nor been heard in their own defence." Stowe, p. 581, says, " Being never arraigned nor tried before, but condemned by Act of Parhament." '" The Countess of .Salisbury's execution was upon May 27, 15 tl. The account given in the text is taken from Lord Herbert's Life of Henry VIIL, P- 532- 6 82 done contrary to law; but where all power ecclesiastical as well as lay being placed in the hands of one man, bloody butcheries like this, which would have roused even a Turkish populace to resistance, could be perpetrated without the smallest danger to the perpetrator. Hume, in his remarks upon the state of the people in this reign, pretends that the people never hated the King, and " that he seems even in some degree to have possessed to the last their love and affection."" He adds that it maybe said with truth that the " English in that age were so thoroughly subdued that, like Eastern slaves, they were inclined to admire even those acts of violence and tyranny which were exercised over themselves and at their own expense."'^ This unreliable historian everywhere en deavours to gloss over the deeds of those who destroyed the Catholic Church both in England and Scotland. Too cunning, however, to applaud Henry himself, he would have us believe that, after all, there was something amiable in him, and this belief he would have us found on the fact of his having been to the last seemingly beloved by his people. 117. Nothing can be more false than this assertion, if repeated insurrections against him, accompanied with the most bitter complaints and reproaches, be not to be taken as marks of popular affection. And as to the remark that the English " in that age were so thoroughly subdued," while it seems to refute the assertion as to their affection for the tyrant, it is a slander which the envious Scotch writers all delight to put forth and repeat." One object " This estimate Hume gives from Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (ed. 1822), i., p. 601. '- Hume, History of England {yiviXi&y'?,xt^x\r£), ii., p. 226. " The verdict of modern Scotch writers is not too favourable to Henry VIII. Mr. J. Bain, the able editor of 7",^^ .S^aw«7/oH Pff/^-j-, writes : "We are not concerned here to discuss it (i.e. the character of Henry) in relation to his dealings with Europe or his own people; but it will, we think, 83 always uppermost with Hume is to malign the Catholic religion : it therefore did not occur to him that this san guinary tyrant was not effectually resisted, as King John and other bad kings had been, because this tyrant had the means of bribing the natural leaders of the people to take part against them, or, at the least, to neutralise those leaders. It did not occur to him to tell us that Henry VIII. found the English as gallant and just a people as his ancestors had found them, but that having divided them by holding out to the great an enormous mass of plunder as a reward for abandoning the rights of the people, the people became, as every people without leaders must become, a mere flock or herd to be dealt with at pleasure. The malignity and envy of this Scotchman blinded him to this view of the matter, and induced him to ascribe to the people's admiration of tyranny that submission which, after repeated struggles, they yielded merely from the want of those leaders of whom they were now for the first time wholly deprived. What ? have we never known any country consisting of several millions of people, oppressed and insulted, even for ages, by a mere handful of men ? And are we to conclude that such a country submits from admiration of the tyranny under which they groan ? Did the EngHsh submit to Cromwell from ad miration ; and was it from admiration that the French submitted to Robespierre ? The latter was punished, but Cromwell was not, — he, Hke Henry, died in his bed ; but to what mind, except to that of the most malignant and perverse, would it occur that Cromwell's impunity arose appear to those who study the following papers that his policy towards Scotland, whether in peace or war, was, when not treacherous and under hand, much too dictatorial to be tamely endured by an independent nation. During peace, while professing his love for his nephew, he fomented rebellion among the Scottish borderers against their king, tampered with his nobles and maintained a system of espionage in his country '" (Hamil ton Papers, i.. Introduction, xiii.) 84 from the willing submission and the admiration of the people ? ii8. Of the means by which the natural leaders of the people were seduced from them, of the kind and the amount of the prize of plunder, we are now going to take a view. In paragraph 4 I have said that the " Re formation " was cherished and fed by plunder and devas tation. In paragraph 37 I have said that it was not a reformation but a devastation of England, and that this devastation impoverished and degraded the main body of the people. These statements I am now about to prove to be true. 119. In paragraphs from 55 to 60 inclusive, we have seen how monasteries arose and what sort of institutions they were. There were in England at the time we are speaking of 645 of these institutions, besides 90 colleges, no hospitals, and 2,374 chantries ^^'^ f'^^e chapels. The whole were seized on, first and last, taken into the hands of the King, and by him granted to those who aided and abetted him in the work of plunder." 120. I pray you, my friends, sensible and just English men, to observe here that this was a great mass of landed property, that this property was not by any means used for the sole benefit of monks, friars and nuns, that for the far greater part its rents flowed immediately back amongst the people at large, and that if it had never been an object of plunder England never would, and never could, have heard the hideous sound of the words pauper and poor- rate. You have seen in paragraph 52 in what manner the tithes arose and how they were disposed of, and you are, by-and-by, to see how the rents of the monasteries were distributed. " For a rough calculation of the money value of the monastic houses and their effects, taken from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Court of Aug mentation, see Gasquet, Henry VIIL and the English Monasteries, ii., pp. 534-5. 85 121. You have, without doubt, fresh in your recollection all the censures, sarcasms, and ridicule which we have from our very infancy heard against the monastic life. What drones the monks and friars and nuns were, how uselessly they lived, how much they consumed to no good purpose whatever, and particularly how ridiculous and even how wicked it was to compel men and women to live unmarried, to lead a life of celibacy, and thus either to deprive them of a great natural pleasure, or to expose them to the double sin of breach of chastity and breach of oath. 122. Now this is a very important matter. It is a great moral question, and therefore we ought to endeavour to settle this question ; to make up our minds completely upon it before we proceed any further. The monastic state necessarily was accompanied with vows of celibacy ; and therefore it is, before we give an account of the putting down of these institutions in England, necessary to speak of the tendency and, indeed, of the natural and inevitable consequences of those vows. 123. It has been represented as " unnatural" to compel men and women to live in the unmarried state, and as tend ing to produce propensities to which it is hardly proper even to allude. In the first place, the Catholic Church compels nobody to make such vow. It only says that it will admit no one to be a priest, monk, friar, or nun, who rejects such vow. Saint Paul strongly recommends to all Christian teachers an unmarried life. The Church has founded a rule on this recommendation, and that, too, for the same reason that the recommendation was given ; namely, that those who have flocks to watch over, or, in the language of our own Protestant Church, who have the care of souls, should have as few as possible of other cares, and should by all means be free from those inces sant and sometimes racking cares which are inseparable from a wife and family. What priest who has a wife and 86 family will not think more about them than about his flock ? Will he, when any part of that family is in dis tress from illness or other cause, be wholly devoted, body and mind, to his flock ? Will he be as ready to give alms . or aid of any sort to the poor as he would be if he had no family to provide for ? Will he never be tempted to swerve from his duty in order to provide patronage for sons and for the husbands of daughters ? Will he always as boldly stand up and reprove the lord or the squire for their oppressions and vices as he would do if he had no son for whom to get a benefice, a commission, or a sinecure ? Will his wife never have her partialities, her tattlings, her bicker ings, amongst his flock, and never on any account induce him to act towards any part of that flock contrary to the strict dictates of his sacred duty ? And to omit hundreds ^yes, hundreds — of reasons that might in addition be sug gested, will the married priest be as ready as the unmarried one to appear at the bedside of sickness and contagion ? Here it is that the calls on him are most imperative, and here it is that the married priest will — and with nature on his side — be deaf to those calls. From amongst many instances that I could cite, let me take one. During the war of 1776, the king's house at Winchester was used as a prison for French prisoners of war. A dreadfully con tagious fever broke out amongst them. Many of them died. They were chiefly Catholics, and were attended in their last moments by two or three Catholic priests residing in that city ; but amongst the sick prisoners there were many Protestants, and these requested the attendance of Pro testant parsons. There were the parsons of all the parishes at Winchester. There were the dean and all the prebendaries ; but not a man of them went to console the dying Protestants, in consequence of which several of them desired the assistance of the priests and, of course, died CathoHcs. Doctor Milner, in his letters to Doctor Sturges, mentions this matter, and he says, " the answer 87 (of the Protestant parsons) I understand to have been this : — ' We are not more afraid, as individuals, to face death than the priests are ; but we must not carry poison ous contagion into the bosoms of our famihes.' " '* No ; to be sure ! But then — not to call this the cassock's taking shelter behind the petticoat — in what a dilemma does this place the dean and chapter ! Either they neglected their most sacred duty, and left Protestants to flee in their last moments into the arms of " popery"; or that clerical celibacy, against which they have declaimed all their lives and still declaim, and still hold up to us, their flocks, as something both contemptible and wicked, is, after all, necessary to that " care of souls " to which they profess themselves to have been " called " and for which they receive such munificent reward. 124. But conclusive, perfectly satisfactory, as these reasons are, we should not, if we were to stop here, do anything like justice to our subject ; for as to the parochial clergy, do we not see — aye, and feel too — that they, if with families or intending to have families, find little to spare to the poor of their flocks ? In short, do we not know that a married priesthood and pauperism and poor-rates all came upon this country at one and the same moment ? And what was the effect of clerical celibacy with regard to the higher orders of the clergy ? A bishop, for instance, having neither wife nor child, naturally expended his revenues amongst the people in his diocese. He expended a part of them on his cathedral church, or in some other way sent his revenues back to the people. If William of Wykham'^ had been a married man, the parsons would not now have had a college at Winchester ; nor would there have been a college either at Eton, Westminster, Oxford, or Cambridge, if the bishops " Milner, Letters to a Prebendary, p. 56. "William of Wykham was Bishop of Winchester from 1367 to 1398. 88 in those days had been married men. Besides, who is to expect of human nature that a bishop with a wife and family will, in his distribution of church preferment, consider nothing but the interest of religion ? We are not to expect of man more than that of which we, from ex perience, know that man is capable. It is for the law giver to interpose, and to take care that the community suffer not from the frailty of the nature of individuals, whose private virtues even may, in some cases, and those not a few, not have a tendency to produce public good. I do not say that married bishops ever do wrong, because I am not acquainted with them well enough to ascertain the fact ; but, in speaking of the diocese in which I was born, and with which I am best acquainted, I may say that it is certain that if the late bishop of Winchester" had lived in Catholic times, he could not have had a wife, and that he could not have had a wife's sister to marry Mr. Edmund Poulter, in which case I may be allowed to think it possible that Mr. Poulter would not have quitted the bar for the pulpit, and that he would not have had the two livings of Meon-Stoke 'and Soberton, and a prebend besides ; that his son, Brownlow Poulter, would not have had the two livings of Buriton and Petersfield ; that his son, Charles Poulter, would not have had the three livings of Alton, Binstead, and Kingsley ; that his son-in-law Ogle would not have had the living of Bishop's Waltham ; and that his son-in-law Haygarth would not have had the two livings of Upham and Durley. If the bishop had lived in Catholic times, he could not have had a son, Charles Augustus North, to have the two livings of Alver- stoke and Havant, and to be a prebend ; that he could not have had another son, Francis North, to have the four "Bishop Brownlow North was translated in 1781 from the See of Coventry and Lichfield, which he had held for ten years, to Winchester. 89 livings of Old Alresford, Medstead, New Alresford, and St. Mary's, Southampton, and to be, moreover, a prebend and Master of Saint Cross ; that he could not have had a daughter to marry Mr. William Gamier, to have the two li-vings of Droxford and Brightwell Baldwin, and to be a prebend and a chancellor besides ; that he could not have had Mr. William Garnier's brother, Thomas Gamier, for a relation, and this latter might not then have had the two livings of Aldingbourne and Bishop's Stoke ; that he could not have had another daughter to marry Mr. Thomas de Grey, to have the four livings of Calboume, Fawley, Mer ton, and Rounton, and to be a prebend and also an arch deacon besides ! In short, if the late bishop had lived in Catholic times, it is a little too much to believe that these twenty-four livings, five prebends, one chancellorship, one archdeaconship, and one mastership, worth, perhaps, all together, more than twenty thousand pounds a year, would have fallen to the ten persons above named. And may v/e not reasonably suppose that the bishop, instead of leaving behind him (as the newspapers told us he did) savings to nearly the amount of three hundred thousand pounds in money, would, if he had had no children nor grandchildren, have expended a part of this money on that ancient and magnificent cathedral, the roof of which has recently been in danger of falling in ; or would have been the founder of something for the public good and national honour ; or would have been a most munificent friend and protector of the poor, and would never, at any rate, have suffered small beer to be sold out of his episcopal palace at Farnham ? With an excise licence, mind you ? I do not say or insinuate that there was any smuggHng carried on at the palace. Nor do I pretend to censure the act. A man who has a large family to provide for must be allowed to be the best judge of his means ; and if he happen to have an overstock of small beer, it is natural enough for him to sell it in order to get money to buy 90 meat, bread, groceries, or other necessaries. What I say is, that I do not think that William of Wykham ever sold sm.all beer, either by wholesale or retail ; and I most dis tinctly assert that this was done during the late bishop's life-time, from his episcopal palace of Farnham ! William of Wykham (who took his surname from a little village in Hampshire) was not bishop of Winchester nearly so long as the late bishop ; but out of his revenues he built and endowed one of the colleges at Oxford, the College of Winchester, and did numerous other most munificent things, in some of which, however, he was not without examples in his predecessors nor without imitators in his successors as long as the Catholic Church remained ; but when a married clergy came, then ended all that was munificent in the bishops of this once famous city. 125. It is impossible to talk of the smaU beer and of the Master of Saint Cross, without thinking of the melancholy change which the " Reformation " has produced in this ancient establishment. Saint Cross, or Holy Cross, situated in a meadow about half a mile from Winchester, is a hospital, or place for hospitality, founded and endowed by a bishop of Winchester about seven hundred years ago. Succeeding bishops added to its endowment, till at last it provided a residence and suitable maintenance for forty-eight decayed gentlemen, .with priests, nurses, and other servants and attendants ; and, besides this, it made provision for a dinner every day for a hundred of the most indigent men in the city. These met daily in a hall called the " hundred men's hall." Each had a loaf of bread, three quarts of small beer, and " two messes," for bis dinner ; and they were allowed to carry home that which they did not consume upon the spot. What is seen at the hospital of Holy Cross now ?'^ Alas ! ten poor '= Though the present state of the hospital is very different from the in tentions of its Catholic founders, much has been done of late years to repair the breach of trust which was so long a scandal. 91 creatures creeping about in this noble building, and three out-pensioners ; and to those an attorney from Winchester carries or sends, weekly, the few pence, whatever they may be, that are allowed them ! But the place of the " Master " is, as I have heard, worth a round sum annually. I do not know exactly what it is ; but, the post being a thing given to a son of the bishop, the reader will easily imagine that it is not a trifle. There exists, however, here that which, as Dr. Milner observes, is probably the last remaining vestige of " old English hospitality" ; for here any traveller who goes and knocks at the gate and asks for relief receives gratis a pint of good beer and a hunch of good bread. 126. But (and I had really nearly forgotten it) there is a bishop of Winchester now 1 ^^ And what is he doing ? I have not heard that he has founded, or is about to found, any colleges or hospitals. All that I have heard of him in the education way is that in his first charge to his clergy (which he published) he urged them to circulate amongst their flocks the pamphlets of a Society in London, and all I have heard of him in the charity way, is that he is Vice- Patron of a self-created body called the " Hampshire Friendly Society," the object of which is to raise the subscriptions amongst the poor, for " their mutual relief and maintenance " ; or in other words, to induce the poor labourers to save out of their earnings the means of sup porting themselves in sickness or in old age, without coming for relief to the poor rates ! Good God ! Why, William of Wykham, Bishop Fox, Bishop Waynfleet, Cardinal Beaufort, Henry de Blois, and if you take in all the bishops of Winchester, even back to Saint Swithun himself ; never would they have thought of a scheme like this for relieving the poor ! Their way of promoting '" Bishop George Pretyman held the See of Winchester from 1820 to 1827. 92 learning was to found and endow colleges and schools ; their way of teaching religion was to build and endow churches and chapels ; their way of relieving the poor and the ailing was to found and endow hospitals ; and all these at their own expense ; — out of their own revenues. Never did one of them, in order to obtain an interpretation of " Evangelical truth " for their flocks, dream of referring his clergy to a society. Never did there come into the head of any one of them a thought so bright as that of causing the necessitous to relieve themselves ! Ah ! but they alas I lived in the " dark ages of monkish ignorance and superstition." No wonder that they could not see that the poor were the fittest persons in the world to relieve the poor. And besides, they had no wives and children ! No sweet babes to smile on to soften their hearts. If they had, their conjugal and paternal feelings would have taught them that true charity begins at home; and that it teaches men to sell small beer and not give it away. 127. Enough now about the celibacy of the clergy ; but it is impossible to quit the subject without one word to Parson Malthus. This man is not only a Protestant, but a parson of our Church. Now, he wants to compel the labouring classes to refrain to a great extent from marriage ; and Mr. Scarlett actually brought a bill into Parhament, having in one part of it this object avowedly in view ; the great end proposed by both being to cause a diminution of the poor-rates. Parson Malthus does not call this recommending celibacy, but " moral restraint." And what is celibacy but moral restraint ? So that here are these people revihng the Catholic Church for insisting on vows of celibacy on the part of those who choose to be priests or nuns, and at the same time proposing to compel the labouring classes to live in a state of celibacy or to run the manifest risk of perishing (they and their children) from starvation ! Is all this sheer impudence 93 or is it sheer folly ? One or the other it is, greater than ever was before heard from the lips of mortal man. They affect to believe that the clerical vow of celibacy must be nugatory. Like all the other wild schemes and cruel projects relative to the poor, we trace this at once back to the " Reformation," that great source of the poverty and misery and degradation of the main body of the people of this kingdom."" The " Reformation " despoiled the working classes of their patrimony ; it tore from them that which nature and reason had assigned them ; it robbed them of that relief for the necessitous which was theirs by right imprescriptible, and which had been con firmed to them by the law of God and the law of the land. It brought a compulsory, a grudging, an unnatural mode of relief, calculated to make the poor and rich hate each other instead of binding them together as the Catholic mode did, by the bonds of Christian charity. But of all its consequences, that of introducing a married clergy has perhaps been the most prolific in mischief. This '" The effect of the dissolution of the Religious Houses in London is thus described by Dr. Sharpe (London and the Kingdom, i., p. 404). " The sudden closing of these institutions caused the streets to be thronged with the sick and poor, and the small parish churches to be so crowded with those who had been accustomed to frequent the larger and more com modious churches of the friars that there was scarce room left for the parishioners themselves. The city authorities saw at once that something would have to be done, if they wished to keep their streets clear of beggars and of invalids and not invite the spread of sickness by allowing infected persons to wander at large. As a means of affording temporary relief, collections for the poor were made every Sunday at Paul's Cross, after the sermon, and the proceeds were distributed weekly among the most neces sitous." After petitioning the king in vain to grant the city some of the dissolved houses and their revenues, in order that provision might be made for the sick and needy, the authorities resolved in 1540 to make an offer to purchase some of them for 1000 marks, " yf thei can be gotten no better chepe." Henry only upbraided them for being " pynch pence " or stingy in their offer, and so nothing was done in the matter for four years (p. 406.). 94 has absolutely created an order for the procreation of dependants on the state ; for the bringing into the world thousands of persons annually who have no fortunes of their own, and who must be, somehow or other, main tained by burdens imposed upon the people. Places, commissions, sinecures, pensions ; something or other must be found for them, some sort of living out of the fruit of the rents of the rich and the wages of labour. If no excuse can be found, no pretence of public service, no corner of the pension list open, then they must come as a direct burden upon the people ; and thus it is that we have, within the last twenty years, seen sixteen hundred thousand pounds voted by the parliament out of the taxes, for the " relief of the poor clergy of the Church of England;" and at the very time that this premium on the procreation of idlers was annually being granted, parliament was pestered with projects for compelling the working part of the community to lead a life of celibacy ! What that is evil, what that is monstrous, has not grown out of this Protestant " Reformation " ! 128. Thus then, my friends, we have, I think, settled this great question ; and after all that we have, during our whole lives, heard against that rule of the Catholic Church which imposed a vow of celibacy on those who chose the clerical or monastic life, we find, whether we look at this rule in a religious, in a moral, in a civil, or in a political point of view, that it was founded in wisdom, that it was a great blessing to the people at large, and that its abolition is a thing to be deeply deplored. 129. So much then, for this topic of everlasting railing against the Catholic Church. We must, before we come to an account of the deeds of the ruffian, Thomas Cromwell, who conducted the work of plunder, say something in answer to the general charge which Protestant writers have preferred against the monasteries ; for, if what they say were true, we might be disposed to think (as indeed we 95 have been taught to think), that there was not so much harm in the plunderings that we are about to witness. We will take this general charge from the pen of Hume, who, speaking of the reports made by Thomas Cromwell and his myrmidons, says, "It is safest to credit the existence of vices naturally connected with the very institution of the monastic life. The cruel and inveterate factions and quarrels^ therefore, which the commissioners mentioned, are very credible among men who, being confined together within the same walls, can never forget their mutual animosities, and who, being cut off from all the most en dearing connections of nature, are commonly cursed with hearts more selfish and tempers more unrelenting than fall to the share of other men. The pious frauds practised to increase the devotion and liberality of the people may be regarded as certain, in an order founded on illusion, lies, and superstition. The supine idleness also and its attendant, profound ignorance, with which the convents were reproached, admit of no question. No manly or elegant knowledge could be expected among men whose life, condemned to a tedious uniformity and deprived of all emulation, afforded nothing to raise the mind or cultivate the genius." ^ 130. I question whether monk ever wrote sentences con taining worse grammar than these contain : but as to the facts, these " very credible," these "certain," these "un questionable " facts are, almost upon the face of them, a tissue of malignant lies. What should there be " factions" and " quarrels " about, amongst men living so " idle " and "unambitious" a life? How much harder are the hearts of unmarried than those of married ecclesiastics we have seen above, in the contrast between the charities of ^' It may be useful to note that these were not among the charges made against the members of the religious houses by Henry's inquisitors. '^ Hume, History, iv., p. 160. 96 Cathohc and those of Protestant bishops. It is quite " credible " that men lost in " supine idleness," should practise frauds to get money, which their very state pre vented them from either keeping or bequeathing, and who were totally destitute of all "emulation." The maHgnity of this writer exceeded his cunning, and made him not per ceive that he was in one sentence furnishing strong pre sumptive proof against the truth of another sentence. Yet, as his history has been, and is, much read, and as it has deceived me along with so many thousands of others, I shall upon this subject appeal to several authorities, all Protes tants, mind, in contradiction to these his false and base assertions; just remarking by the way, that he himself never had a family or a wife, and that he was a great fat fellow, fed in considerable part out of public money without having merited it by any real public services. 131. In his History of England he refers not less than two hundred times to Bishop Tanner, who was bishop of St. Asaph in the reign of George the Second. Let us hear, then, what Bishop Tanner, let us hear what this Protestant bishop says of the character and effects of the monasteries which the savages under Henry VIII. destroyed. Let us see how this high authority of Hume agrees with him on this, one of the most interesting and important points in our history. We are about to witness a greater act of plunder, a more daring contempt of law and justice and humanity, than ever was in any other case witnessed in the whole world. We are going to see thousands upon thousands of persons stripped in an instant of all their property, torn from their dwellings and turned out into the wide world to beg or starve ; and all this, too, in viola tion not only of natural justice but of every law of the country, written and unwritten. Let us, then, see what was the character of the persons thus treated, and what were the effects of the institutions to which they belonged. And let us see this, not in the description given by an 97 avowed enemy not only of the Catholic but of the Chris tian religion, but in that description which has been given us by a Protestant bishop, and in a book written expressly to give "an account of all the abbeys, priories, and friaries, formerly existing in England and Wales" ; bearing in mind as we go along, that Hume has, in his History of England, referred to this very work upwards of two hundred times, taking care, however, not to refer to a word of it relating to the imiportant question now before us. 132. Bishop Tanner, before entering on his laborious account of the several monastic institutions, gives us in pages 19, 20 and 21 of his preface the following general description of the character and pursuits of the monasteries, and of the effects of their establishments. I beg you, my friends, to keep, as you read Bishop Tanner's descrip tion, the description of Hume constantly in your minds. Remember, and look now and then back at his charges of " supine idleness," " profound ignorance," want of all " emulation and all manly and elegant knowledge ; " and above all things remember his charge of selfishness, his charge of " frauds " to get money from the people. The bishop speaks thus upon the subject. 133. "In every great abbey there was a large room called the Scriptorium, where several writers made it their whole business to transcribe books for the use of the library. They sometimes, indeed, wrote the leiger books of the house, and the missals, and other books used in Divine service, but they were generally upon other works, viz., the Fathers, Classics, Histories, &c., &c. John Whethamsted, abbot of St. Albans, caused above eighty books to be thus transcribed (there was then no printing during his abbacy. Fifty-eight were transcribed by the care of one abbot at Glastonbury ; and so zealous were the monks in general for this work, that they often got lands given and churches appropriated for the carrying of it on. In all the greater abbeys, there were also persons 98 appointed to take notice of the principal occurrences of the kingdom, and at the end of every year to digest them into annals. In these records they particularly preserved the memoirs of their "founders and benefactors, the years and days of their births and deaths, their marriages, children and successors ; so that recourse was sometimes had to them for proving persons' ages and genealogies ; though it is to be feared that some of those pedigrees were drawn up from tradition only, and that in most of their accounts they were favourable to their friends and severe upon their enemies. The constitutions of the clergy in their national and provincial synods, and (after the Conquest) even acts of parliament, were sent to the abbeys to be recorded ; which leads me to mention the use and advan tage of these religious houses. For, first, the choicest records and treasures in the kingdom were preserved trs them. An exempHfication of the charter of liberties granted by King Henry I. (Magna Charta) was sent to some abbey in every county to be preserved. Charters and Inquisitions relating to the County of Cornwall were deposited in the Priory of Bodmin ; a great many rolls were lodged in the Abbey of Leicester and Priory of Kenilworth, till taken from thence by King Henry III. King Edward I. sent to the religious houses to search for his title to the kingdom of Scotland, in their leigers and chronicles, as the most authentic records for proof of his right to that crown. When his sovereignty was acknow ledged in Scotland, he sent letters to have it inserted in the chronicles of the Abbey of Winchcomb and the Priory of Norwich, and probably of many other such-like places. And when he decided the controversy relating to the crown of Scotland, between Robert Brus and John Baliol, he wrote to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's, London, requiring them to enter into their chronicles the exempH fication therewith sent of that decir.ion. The learned Mr. Selden hath his greatest evidences for the dominion of the 99 narrow seas belonging to the King of Great Britain from Monastic records. The evidences and money of private families were oftentimes sent to these houses to be pre served. The seals of noblemen were deposited there upon their deaths. And even the King's money was sometimes lodged in them. Secondly, they were schools of learning and education ; for every convent had one person or more appointed for this purpose ; and all the neighbours that desired it might have their children taught grammar and church music without any expense to them.' In the nunneries also young women were taught to work and to read English and sometimes Latin also. So that not only the lower rank of people who could not pay for their learning, but most of the noblemen's and gentlemen's daughters were educated in those places. Thirdly, all the monasteries were, in effect, great hospitals, and were most of them obliged to relieve many poor people every day. There were likewise houses of entertainment for almost all travellers. Even the nobility and gentry, when they were upon the road, lodged at one religious house and dined at another, and seldom or never went to inns. In short, their hospitality was such, that in the Priory of Norwich one thousand five hundred quarters of malt and above eight hundred quarters of wheat, and all other things in proportion, were generally spent every year. Fourthly, the nobility and gentry provided not only for their old servants in these houses by corrodies, but for their younger children and impoverished friends, by making them first monks and nuns, and in time priors and prioresses, abbots and abbesses. Fifthly, they were of considerable advantage to the Crown : (i) By the profits received from the death of one abbot or prior to the election, or rather confirmation, of another. (2) By great fines paid for the confirmation of their liberties. (3) By many corrodies granted to old servants of the Crown, and pensions to the king's clerks and chaplains. 100 till they got preferment. Sixthly, they were likewise of considerable advantage to the places where they had their sites and estates: .(i) By causing great resort to them, and getting grants of fairs and markets for them. (2) By freeing them from the forest laws. (3) By letting their lands at easy rates. Lastly, they were great orna ments to the country : many of them were really noble buildings, and though not actually so grand and neat, yet perhaps as much admired in their times as Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals are now. Many of the abbey churches were equal, if not superior, to our present cathedrals ; and they must have been as much an orna ment to the country, and employed as many workmen in building and keeping them in repair, as noblemen's and gentlemen's seats now do."'^ 134. Now, then, malignant Hume, come up and face this Protestant bishop, whose work you have quoted more than two hundred times, and who here gives the lie direct to all and to every part of your description. Instead of your " supine idleness " we have industry the most patient and persevering ; instead of " your profound ignorance," we have in every convent a school for teaching, gratis, all useful sciences ; instead of your want of all " manly and elegant knowledge," we have the study, the teaching, the transcribing, the preserving of the classics ; instead of your " selfishness " and your pious " frauds " to get money from the people, we have hospitals for the sick, doctors and nurses to attend them, and the most disinterested, the most kind, the most noble hospitality ; instead of that " slavery " which, in fifty parts of your history, you assert to have been taught by the monks, we have the freeing of people from the forest laws, and the preservation of the Great Charter of English liberty; and you know as well as I, that when this Charter was renewed by King John, the renewal ^ Tanner, Notitia Monastica (ed. Nasmith), Preface, pp. xix., xx. lOI was in fact the work of Archbishop Langton, who roused the barons to demand it, he having, as Tanner observes, found the Charter deposited in an abbey ! 135. Want of room compels me to stop; but here, in this one authority, we have ten thousand times more than enough to answer that malignant Hume and all the revilers of monastic life, which revihngs it was necessary to silence before proceeding, as I shall in the next chapter, to describe the base, the cruel, the bloody means by which these institutions were devastated and destroyed. 102 CHAPTER V. 136. When, at the close of the foregoing chapter, I appeared to content myself with the authority of the Protestant Bishop Tanner, as a defender of monastic institutions against the attacks of Hume, I had in reserve other authorities in abundance, some of which I should then have cited if I had had room. Bishop Tanner goes, indeed, quite home to every point ; but the matter is of such great importance, when we are about to view the destruction of these institutions, that out of fifty authori ties that I might refer to I will select four or five. I will take one foreign and four English ; and, observe, they are all Protestant authorities. 137. Mallet, History of the Swiss, vol. i., p. 105. "The monks softened by their instructions the ferocious manners of the people, and opposed their credit to the tyranny of the nobility, who knew no other occupation than war and grievously oppressed their neighbours. On this account the government of monks was preferred to theirs. The people sought them for judges. It was an usual saying, that it was better to be governed by the bishop's crosier than the monarch's sceptre." 138. Drake, Literary Hours, vol. ii., p. 435. " The monks of Cassins," observes Wharton, " were distinguished not only for their knowledge of sciences, but their attention to polite learning and an acquaintance with the classics. Their learned abbot Desiderius collected the best Greek I03 and Roman authors. The fraternity not only composed learned treatises on music, logic, astronomy, and the Vitruvian architecture, but likewise employed a portion of their time in transcribing Tacitus, &c. This laudable example was, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, fol lowed with great spirit and emulation by many English monasteries." 139. Turner, History of England, vol. ii., p. 332 and 361. "No tyranny was ever established that was more unequivocally the creature of popular will, or longer main tained by popular support ; in no point did personal in terest and public welfare more cordially unite than in the encouragement of monasteries." 140. Bates, Rural Philosophy, p. 322. " It is to be lamented that while the Papists are industriously planting nunneries and other religious societies in this kingdom, some good Protestants are not so far excited to imitate their example as to form establishments for the education and protection of young women of serious disposition, or who are otherwise unprovided, where they might enjoy at least a temporary refuge, be instructed in the principles of religion, and in all such useful and domestic arts as might qualify them who were inclined to return into the world for a pious and laudable discharge of the duties of common life. Thus might the comfort and welfare of many indivi duals be promoted to the great benefit of society at large ; and the interests of Popery, by improving on its own principles, be considerably counteracted." ,141. Quarterly Review, December, 1811. "The world has never been so indebted to any body of men as to the illustrious order of the Benedictine monks ; but historians, in relating the evil of which they were the occasion, too frequently forget the good which they produced. Even the commonest readers are acquainted with the arch miracle-monger, St. Dunstan, whilst the most learned of our countrymen scarcely remember the names of those 104 admirable men who went from England and became the Apostles of the North. Tinian and Juan Fernandez are not more beautiful spots on the ocean than Malmesbury, Lindisfarne and Jarrow were in the ages of our heptarchy. A community of pious men, devoted to literature and to the useful arts as well as to religion, seems in those days like a green oasis amid the desert. Like stars on a moonless night, they shine upon us with a tranquil ray. If ever there was a man who could truly be called venerable, it was he to whom the appellation is constantly fixed, Bede, whose life was passed in instructing his own genera tion and preparing records for posterity. In those days, the Church offered the only asylum from the evils to which every country was exposed — amidst continual wars the Church enjoyed peace — it was regarded as a sacred realm by men who, though they hated one another, believed and feared the same God. Abused as it was by the worldly-minded and ambitious, and disgraced by the artifices of the designing and the follies of the fanatic, it afforded a shelter to those who were better than the world in their youth or weary of it in their age. The wise as well as the timid and gentle fled to this Goshen of God, which enjoyed its own light and calm amidst darkness and storms." 142. This is a very elegant passage; but as Turner's Protestantism impels him to apply the term "tyranny" to that which honest feeling bids him say was " the crea ture of the popular will," and was produced and upheld by " a cordial union of personal interest and public welfare,". so the Protestantism of the reviewers leads them to talk about "evil" occasioned by an Order to whom "the world is more indebted than to any other body of men ; " and it also leads them to repeat the hackneyed charge against St. Dunstan, forgetting, I dare say, that he is one of the saints in our Protestant Church calendar! How ever, here is more than enough to serve as an answer to los the whole herd of writers who have put forth their venom against the monastic Orders. 143. Can we refer to these authorities, can we see all the indubitable proofs of the real Christian charity and benevolence which were essentially connected v/ith the religion of our forefathers, without feeling indignation against those who, from our infancy to our manhood, have been labouring to persuade us that the Catholic Church produced selfishness, hardness of heart, greediness in the clergy, and particularly a want of feeling for the poor ? Undeniable as is the fact that the " Reformation '\ robbed the poor of their patrimony, clear as we shall by-and-by see the proofs of its power in creating paupers and in taking from the higher all compassion for the lower classes, how incessant have been the efforts, how crafty the schemes, to make us believe precisely the contrary ! If the salvation of their souls had been the object they had in view, the deceivers could not have laboured with more pains and anxiety. They have particularly bent their attention to the implanting of their falsehoods in the minds of children. The press has teemed for two centuries and more with cheap books having this object principally in view. Of one instance of this sort I cannot refrain from making particular mention, namely, a Fable in a Spelling Book, by one Penning, which has been in use in England for more than half a century. The fable is called " The Priest and the Jester.'' A man, as the fable says, went to a " Romish Priest," and asked charity of him. He began by asking for a guinea, but lowered the sum till it came to a farthing, and still the priest refused. Then the beggar asked for " a blessing," which the priest readily consented to give him. " No," said the beggar, " if it were worth but one single farthing you would not give it me." How indefatigable must have been these deceivers, when they could resort to means like these ! What multi tudes of children, how many millions of people, have by io6 this book alone, had falsehood, the most base and wicked, engraven upon their minds ! 144. To proceed now with our inquiry relative to the effects of the monastic institutions, we may observe that authorities in this case seemed necessary. The lies were of long standing ; hypocritical selfishness, backed by every species of violence, tyranny and cruelty, had been at work for ages to delude the people of England. Those who had fattened upon the spoils of the Church and the poor, and who wished still to enjoy the fatness in quiet, naturally laboured to persuade the people that those who had been despoiled were unworthy people ; that the institutions which gave them so much property were at least useless ; that the possessors were lazy, ignorant and base creatures, spreading darkness over the country instead of light, devouring that which ought to have sustained worthy persons. When the whole press and all the pulpits of a country are leagued for such a purpose, and supported in that purpose by the State ; and when the reviled party is, by terrors hardly to be described, reduced to silence ; in such a case the assailants must prevail ; the mass of the people must believe what they say. Reason, in such a state of things, is out of the question. But truth is immortal ; and though she may be silenced for a while, there always, at last, comes some thing to cause her to claim her due and to triumph over falsehood. 145. There is now come that which is calculated to give our reasoning faculties fair play. We see the land covered at last with pauperism, fanaticism, and crime. In short, we are now arrived at a point which compels us to inquire into the cause of this monstrous state of things. The immediate cause we find to be the poverty and degradation of the main body of the people ; and these, through many stages, we trace back to the " Reformation," one of the effects of which was to destroy those monastic institutions I07 which, as we shall now see, retained the produce of labour in the proper places, and distributed it in a way naturally tending to make the lives of the people easy and happy. 146. The authorities that I have cited ought to be of great weight in the question ; but, supposing there to be no authorities on the side of these institutions, of what more do they stand in need than the unfettered exercise of our reason ? Reason, in such a case, is still better than authorities ; but who is to resist both ? Let us ask, then, whether reason does not reject with disdain the slander that has been heaped on the monastic institutions. They flourished in England for nine hundred years ; they were beloved by the people ; they were destroyed by violence, by the plunderer's grasp, and the murderer's knife. Was there ever any thing vicious in itself, or evil in its effects, held in veneration by a whole people for so long a time ? Even in our own time, we see the people of Spain rising in defence of their monasteries. 147. If the monasteries had been the cause of evil, would they have been protected with such care by so many wise and virtuous kings, legislators, and judges ? Perhaps Alfred was the greatest man that ever lived. What writer of eminence, whether poet, lawyer, or his torian, has not selected him as the object of his highest praises ? As king, as soldier, as patriot, as lawgiver, in all his characters he is by all regarded as having been the greatest, wisest, most virtuous of men. And is it reason able, then, for us to suppose that he, whose whole soul was wrapped up in the hope of making his people free, honest, virtuous, and happy, — ^is it reasonable to suppose that he would have been, as he was, one of the most munificent founders of monasteries, if those institutions had been vicious in themselves or had tended to evil ? We have not these institutions and their effects imme diately before our eyes. We do not actually see the monasteries. But we know of them two things ; namely. io8 that they were most anxiously cherished by Alfred and his tutor Saint Swithun, and that they were destroyed by the tyrant, Henry the Eighth, and the ruffian, Thomas CromweU. Upon these two facts alone we might pretty safely decide on the merits of these institutions. 148. And what answer do we ever obtain to this argument ? Mr. Mervyn Archdall, in the preface to his History of the Irish Monasteries, says : " When we con template the universality of that religious zeal which drew thousands from the elegance and comforts of society to sequestered solitude and austere maceration ; when we behold the greatest and wisest of mankind the dupes of a fatal delusion, and even the miser expending his store to partake in the felicity of mortified ascetics ; again, wheii we find the tide of enthusiasm subsided and sober reason recovered from her delirium and endeavouring, as it were, to demolish every vestige of her former frenzy, we have a concise sketch of the history of monachism, and no common instance of that mental weakness and versatility which stamp the character of frailty on the human species. We investigate these phenomena in the moral world with a pride arising from assumed superiority in intellectual powers or higher degrees of civilisation ; our vanity and pursuit are kept alive by a comparison so decidedly in favour of modern times. "^ Indeed, Mr. Archdall! and where are we to look for the proofs or signs of this " assumed superiority," this " comparison so decidedly in favour of modern times ? '\ Are we to find them in the ruins of those noble edifices, of the plunder and demolition of which you give us an account ? Are we to find them in the total absence of even an attempt to ornament your country with any thing to equal them in grandeur or in taste ? Are modern times proved to be " decidedly superior " to former times by the law that shuts Irishmen ' Mervyn Archdall, Monasticon Hibernicuin, Introduction, p. ix. I09 up in their houses from sunset to sunrise ? Are the people's living upon pig-diet, their nakedness, their hunger, their dying by hundreds from starvation, while their ports were crowded with ships carrying provisions from their shores, and while an army was fed in the country, the business of which army was to keep the starving people quiet; are these amongst the facts on which you found your " comparison so decidedly in favour of modern times ? " What, then, do you look with " pride " to the ball at the Opera house, for the relief of the starving people of Ireland, the ball room " decorated with a trans parency exhibiting an Irishman, as large as life, expiring from hunger ? " And do you call the " greatest and wisest of mankind " dupes, do you call them the " dupes of a fata] delusion," when they founded institutions which rendered a thought of Opera-house relief impossible ? Look at the present wretched and horrible state of your country, then look again at your list of ruins, and then (for you are a church parson, I see,) you will, I have no doubt, say that, though the former have evidently come from the latter, it was " sober reason " and not thirst for plunder that pro duced those ruins, and that it was "frenzy and mental weakness " in the " greatest and wisest of mankind " that produced the foundations of which those ruins are the melancholy memorials ! 149. The hospitality and other good things proceeding from the monasteries, as mentioned by the Protestant Bishop Tanner, are not to be forgotten ; but we must take a closer view of the subject, in order to do full justice to these calumniated institutions. It is our duty to show that they were founded in great political wisdom as well as in real piety and charity ; that they were not, as the malignant and selfish Hume has described them, mere dolers out of bread and meat and beer, but that they were great diffusers of general prosperity, happiness and con tent ; and that one of their natural and necessary effects no was to prevent that state of things which sees but two classes of people in a community, masters and slaves, a very few enjoying the extreme of luxury, and millions doomed to the extreme of misery. 150. From the land all the good things come. Some body must own the land. Those who own it must have the distribution of its revenues. If these revenues be chiefly distributed amongst the people, from whose labour they arise, and in such a way as to afford to them a good maintenance on easy terms, the community must be happy. If the revenues be alienated in very great part, if they be carried away to a great distance, and expended amongst those from whose labour no part of them arises, the main body of the community must be miserable ; poor-houses, jails and barracks must arise. Now, one of the greatest advantages attending the monasteries was that they, of necessity, caused the revenues of a large part of the lands of the country to be spent on the spot whence those revenues arose. The hospitals and all the other establish ments of the kind had the same tendency. There were of the whole, great and small, not less, on an average, than fifty in each county; so that the revenues of the land diffused themselves in great part immediately amongst the people at large. We ail well know how the state of a parish becomes instantly changed for the worse, when a noble or other great landowner quits the mansion in it and leaves that mansion shut up. Every one knows the effect which such a shutting up has upon the poor-rates of a parish. It is notorious, that the non-residence of the clergy and of the nobleman and gentlemen is universally complained of as a source of evil to the country. One of the arguments, and a great one it is, in favour of severe game laws, is that the game causes noblemen and gentle men to reside. What then must have been the effect of twenty rich monasteries in every county, expending con stantly a large part of their incomes on the spot ? The great cause of the miseries of Ireland is " absenteeship," Ill that is to say, the absence of the landowners, who draw away the revenues of the country and expend them in other countries. If Ireland had still her seven or eight hundred monastic institutions, great and small, she would be as she formerly was, prosperous and happy. There would be no periodical famines and typhus fevers ; no need of sunset and sunrise laws ; no schemes for getting rid of a " surplus population " ; none of that poverty and degradation that threaten to make a desert of the country, or to make it the means of destroying the greatness of England herself. 151. Somebody must own the lands ; and the question is, whether it be best for them to be owned by those who con stantly live — and constantly must live — in the country and in the midst of their estates, or by those who always may, and who frequently will and do, live at a great distance from their lands and draw away the revenues of them to be spent elsewhere. The monastics are by many called drones. Bishop Tanner has shown us that this charge is very false ; but if it were true, is not a drone in a cowl as good as a drone in a hat and top-boots ? By drones are meant those who do not work ; and do landowners usually work ? The lay landowner and his family spend more of their revenues in a way not useful to the people than the monastics possibly could. But besides this, besides the hospitality and charity of the monastics, and besides, more over, the lien — the legal lien— which the main body of the people had in many cases to a share, directly or indirectly, in the revenues of the monasteries, we are to look at the monks and nuns in the very important capacity of land lords and landladies. All historians, however Protestant or malignant, agree that they were " easy landlords " ; that they let their lands at low rents, and on leases of long terms of years ; so that, says even Hume, " the farmers regarded themselves as a species of proprietors, always taking care to renew their leases before they expired." 112 And was there no good in a class of landlords of this sort ? Did not they naturally and necessarily create, by slow degrees, men of property ? Did they not thus cause a class of yeomen to exist — real yeomen, independent of the aristocracy ? And was not this class destroyed by the '" Reformation," which made the farmers rack-renters and absolute dependants, as we see them to this day ? And was this change favourable, then, to political liberty ? Monastics could possess no private property, they could save no money, they could bequeath nothing. They had a life interest in their estate, and no more. They lived, received and expended in common. Historians need not have told us that they were " easy landlords." They must have been such, unless human nature had taken a retrograde march expressly for their accommodation. And was it not happy for the nation that there was such a class of landlords ? What a jump for joy would the farmers of England now give, if such a class were to return to-morrow to get them out of the hands of the squandering and needy lord and his grinding land- valuer ! 152. Then look at the monastics as causing, in some of the most important of human affairs, that fixedness which is so much the friend of rectitude in morals, and which so powerfully conduces to prosperity, private and public. The monastery was a proprietor that never died ; its ten antry had to do with a deathless landlord ; its lands and houses never changed owners ; its tenants were liable to none of the many of the uncertainties that other tenants were ; its oaks had never to tremble at the axe of the squandering heir ; its manors had not to dread a change of lords ; its villagers had aU been born and bred up under its eye and care ; their character was of necessity a thing of great value, and, as such, would naturaUy be an object of great attention. A monastery was the centre of a circle in the country, naturally drawing to it aU that were in need of reHef, advice and protection, and containing a body of "3 men or of women having no cares of their own, and having wisdom to guide the inexperienced and wealth to relieve the distressed. And was it a good thing then, to plunder ,and devastate these establishments : was it a reformation to squander estates thus employed upon lay persons, who would not, who could not, and did not, do any part or par ticle of those benevolent facts and acts of public utility which naturally arose out of the monastic institutions ? 153. Lastly, let us look at the monasteries as a resource for the younger sons and daughters of the aristocracy, and as the means of protecting the government against the in jurious effects of their clamorous wants. There cannot exist an aristocracy or body of nobility without the means, in the hands of the government, of preventing that body from falling into that contempt which is, and always must be, inseparable from noble poverty. " Well," some will say, " why need there be any such body ? " That is quite another question : for we have it, and have had it for more than a thousand years ; except during a very short interval, at the end of which our ancestors eagerly took it back again. I must, too, though it really has nothing to do with the question before us, repeat my opinion, many times expressed, that we should lose more than we should gain by getting rid of our aristocracy. 154. However, this has nothing at all to do with the present question : we have the aristocracy, and we must, by a public provision of some sort for the younger branches of it, prevent it from falling into the degradation inseparable from poverty. This provision was, in the times of which we are speaking, made by the monasteries, which received a great number of its monks and nuns from the families of the nobles. This rendered those odious and burdensome things, pensions and sinecures, unnecessary. It of course spared the taxes. It was a provision that was not degrading to the receivers, and it created no grudging and discontent amongst the people, from whom the 8 114 receivers took nothing. Another great advantage arising from this mode of providing for the younger branches of the nobihty was, that it secured the government against the temptation to give offices and to lodge power in unfit hands. Look at our pension and sinecure list ; look at the list bf those who have commands, and who fill other offices of emolument, and you will at once see the great benefit which must have been derived from institutions which left the government quite free to choose com manders, ambassadors, governors and other persons to exercise power and to be entrusted in the carrying on of the public affairs. These institutions, too, tended to check the increase of the race of nobles ; to prevent the persons connected with that order from being multiplied to the extent to which they naturally would otherwise be multi plied. They tended also to make the nobles not so dependent on the Crown, a provision being made for their poor relations without the Crown's assistance ; and at the same time they tended to make the people less dependent on the nobles than they otherwise would have been. The monasteries set the example as masters and landlords, an example that others were, in a great degree, compelled to follow. And thus all ranks and degrees were benefited by these institutions which, with malignant his torians, have been a subject of endless abuse, and the destruction of which they have recorded with so much delight as being one of the brightest features in the " Reformation " ! 155. Nor must we by any means overlook the effects of those institutions on the mere face of the country. Tiiat soul must be low and mean indeed which is insensible to ah feeling of pride in the noble edifices of its country. Love of country, that variety of feeHngs which aU together constitute what we properly call patriotism, consists in part of the admiration of and veneration for ancient and mag nificent proofs of skill and of opulence. The monastics "5 built as well as wrote for posterity. The never-dying nature of their institutions set aside, in all their under takings, every calculation as to time and age. Whether they built or planted, they set the generous example of providing for the pleasure, the honour, the wealth and greatness of generations upon generations yet unborn. They executed everything in the very best manner : their gardens, fishponds, farms, in all, in the whole of their economjf, they set an example tending to make the country beautiful, to make it an object of pride with the people, and to make the nation truly and permanently great. Go into any county, and survey, even at this day, the ruins of its perhaps twenty abbeys and priories, and then ask yourself, " what have we in exchange for these ? " Go to the site of some once opulent convent. Look at the cloister, now become in the hands of a rack-renter the receptacle for dung, fodder and faggot-wood ; see the hall, where for ages the widow, the orphan, the aged and the stranger found a table ready spread ; see a bit of its walls now helping to make a cattle-shed, the rest having been hauled away to build a workhouse ; recognise in the side of a barn a part of the once magnificent chapel ; and if, chained to the spot by your melancholy musings, you be admonished of the approach of night by the voice of the screech-owl issuing from those arches which once at the same hour resounded with the vespers of the monk, and which have for seven hundred years been assailed by storms and tempests in vain, — if thus admonished of the necessity of seeking food, shelter and a bed, lift your eyes and look at the white-washed and dry-rotten shell on the hill, called the " gentleman's house," and apprised of the " board wages " and the " spring guns," suddenly turn your head ; jog away from the scene of devastation ; with " old English hospitality " in your mind reach the nearest inn, and there, in room half-warmed and half-lighted, and with reception precisely proportioned to the presumed no length of your purse, sit down and listen to an account of the hypiocritical pretences, the base motives, the tyrannical and bloody means under which, from which, and by which that devastation was effected and that hospitality banished for ever from the land. 156. We have already seen something of these pre tences, motives, and acts of tyranny and barbarity ; we have seen that the lust of the chief tyrant was the groundwork of what is called the " Reformation " ; we have seen that he could not have proceeded in his • course without the concurrence of the Parliament ; we have seen that to obtain that concurrence he held out to those who composed it a participation in the spoils of the monasteries ; and when we look at the magnitude of their possessions, when we consider the beauty and fertihty of the spots on which they in general were situated, when we think of the envy which the love borne them by the people must have excited in the hearts of a great many of the noblemen and gentlemen ; when we thus reflect, we are not surprised that these were eager for a " Reformation " that promised to transfer the envied possessions to them. 157. When men have power to commit and are resolved to commit acts of injustice, they are never at a loss for pretences. We shall presently see what were the pre tences under which this devastation of England was begun : but to do the work there required a workman, as to slaughter an ox there requires a butcher. To turn the possessors of so large a part of the estates out of those estates, to destroy establishments venerated by the people from their childhood, to set all law, divine as well as human, at defiance, to violate every principle on which property rested, to rob the poor and helpless of the means of sustenance, to deface the beauty of the country and make it HteraHy a heap of ruins ; to do those things there required a suitable agent, and that agent the tyrant found in Thomas Cromwell, whose name, along with that of 117 Cranmer, ought " to stand for aye accursed in the calendar." This Cromwell was the son of a blacksmith of Putney, in Surrey.- He had been an underling of some sort in the family of Cardinal Wolsey, and had recommended himself to the King by his sycophancy to him and his treachery to his old master. The King now became head of the Church, and having the supremacy to exercise had very judiciously provided himself with Cran mer as a primate, and to match him he provided himself, withlCromwell, who was equal to Cranmer in impiousness ] and baseness, rather surpassed him in dastardliness, and exceeded him decidedly in quality of ruffian. All nature could not perhaps have afforded another man so fit to be the "Royal Vicegerent and Vicar-general" of the new head of the English Church.' 158. Accordingly, with this character he was invested. He was to exercise " all the spiritual authority belong ing to the king, for the due administration of justice in all cases touching the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the godly reformation and redress of errors, heresies and abuses in the said church." We shall very soon see proofs enough of the baseness of this man, for whom ruf&an is too gentle a term. What chance, then, did the monasteries stand in his hands ? He was created a peer. He sat before the primate in Parliament, he sat above all ^ The first certain date in the career of Thomas Cromwell is 1512, when he seems to have been settled as a merchant at Middelborough. In 1523 he entered Parliament, and two years later he was settled in London, en gaged in the occupations of a merchant, lawyer and money-lender. For an account of his career as the chief instrument in the destruction of the religious houses, see Gasquet, Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, i., chap. X. ' Upon the acquisition, by Henry, of the supremacy over the Church, Cromwell was appointed the King's vicar in matters spiritual. In this capacity he took the first place in all meetings of the clergy, sitting even before the Archbishop of Canterbury. 1x8 the bishops in assemblies of the clergy, he took precedence of all the nobles, whether in office or out of office, and, as in character so in place, he was second only to the chief tyrant himself. 159. In order to begin the " godly reformation," that is to say, the work of plunder, the " Vicegerent " set on foot a visitation of the monasteries ! * Dreadful visitation ! He, active as he was in wickedness, could not do all the work himself. He, therefore, appointed deputies to assist in making this visitation.^ The kingdom was divided into districts for this purpose, and two deputies were appointed to visit each district. The object was to obtain grounds of accusation against the monks and nuns. When we consider what the object was, and what was the character of the man to whom the work was committed, we may easily imagine what sort of men these deputies were. They were, in fact, fit to be the subalterns of such a chief.* Think of a respectable, peaceful, harmless, and pious family, broken in upon, all of a sudden, by a brace of burglars, with murder written on their scowling brows, demanding an instant production of their title-deeds, money, and jewels : imagine such a scene as this, and you have then some idea of the visitations of these monsters, * Hallam (The Constitutional History of England, i., loth ed., p. 70) says: — "The King indeed was abundantly willing to replenish his ex chequer by violent means, and to avenge himself on those who gainsaid his supremacy ; but it was this able statesman (Thomas Cromwell) who, prompted both by the natural appetite of ministers for the subjects' money and, as has been generally surmised, by a secret partiality towards the Reformation, devised and carried on with complete success, if not with the utmost prudence, a measure of no inconsiderable hazard and difficulty." * This visitation was conducted in the autumn of 1535 and the beginning of 1536, by Cromwell's agents. For an account of their methods see Gasquet, Henry VIIL and the English Monasteries, i., chap. vii. ' It is very generally allowed that nothing could well be worse than the character of the instruments chosen for the work of blackening the charac ter of the monastic establishments. See ibid., chap. xi. 119 who came with the threat of the tyrant on their lips, who menaced the victims with charges of high treason, who wrote in their reports, not what was, but what their merci less employers wanted them to write.' 1 60. The monks and nuns, who had never dreamed of the possibility of such proceedings, who had never had an idea that Magna Charta and all the laws of the land could be set aside in a moment, and whose recluse and peaceful lives rendered them wholly unfit to cope with at once crafty and desperate villainy, fell before these ruffians as chickens fall before the kite. The reports made by these villains met with no contradiction ; ^ the accused parties had no means of making a defence ; there was no court for them to appear in ; they dared not, even if they had had the means, to offer a defence or make a complaint ; for they had seen the horrible consequences, the burnings, the rippings up, of all those of their brethren who had ven tured to whisper their dissent from any dogma or decree of the tyrant. The project was to despoil people of their property ; and yet the parties from whom the property ' The reports furnished to Cromwell by his instruments are contained in their letters and the documents known as the Comperta Monastica. For an examination of these see ibid., chap. ix. Fuller, the Protestant his torian, remarks that " the Inquisitors were men who well understood the message they were sent on, and would not come back without a satisfactory answer to him who sent them, knowing themselves to be no losers thereby." ° This is true only of the time before the meeting of Parliament in March, 1536, at which the lesser houses were granted to the King. Sub sequent visitors, appointed by the king from the county gentry, sent in formal reports distinctly contradicting many of the facts alleged by Cromwell's agents. Mr. Gairdner (Calendar, vol. a., p. xlvi.) says that in these returns " the characters given of the inmates (of the houses visited) are almost uniformly good;" and it is .significant that "the country gentlemen who sat on the commission somehow came to a very different conclusion from that of Drs. Layton and Legh," two ef Cromwell's instru ments. (Cf. Dublin Review, April, 1894, "Overlooked Testimonies to the character of the English monasteries on the eve of their suppression.") I20 was to be taken were to have no court in which to plead their cause, no means of obtaining a hearing, could make even no complaint but at the peril of their lives. They and those who depended on them were to be at once stripped of this great mass of property, without any other ground than that of reports made by men sent, as the malignant Hume himself confesses, for the express purpose of finding a pretence for the dissolution of the monasteries and for the King's taking to himself property that had never belonged to him or his predecessors. i6i. Hume dares nut, in the face of such a multitude of facts that are upon record to the contrary, pretend that these reports were true, but he does his best to put a gloss'; upon them, as we have seen in paragraph 129. He says, in order to effect by insinuation that which he does not venture to assert, that "it is, indeed, probable that the blind submission of the people during those ages rendered the friars and nuns more unguarded and more dissolute than they are in any Roman Catholic country at present." Oh ! say you so ? And why more blind than now ? It is just the same religion, there are the same rules, the people, if blind then, are blind now ; and it would be singular!" indeed, that when dissoluteness is become more common in the world the "friars and nuns" should have become more guarded ! However, we have here his accquittal of the monasteries of the present day, and that is no small matter. It will be difficult, I believe, to make it appear " probable " that they were more unguarded or more dissolute in the sixteenth century, unless we believe that the profound piety (which Hume calls superstition) of the people was not partaken of by the inhabitants of convents,; Before we can listen to his insinuations in favour of these reports, we must believe that the persons belonging to the rehgious communities were a body of cunning creatures, believing in no part of that religion which they professed,, and we must extend this our belief even to those numerous 121 communities of women who devoted their whole lives to the nursing of the sick poor ! 162. However, upon reports thus obtained, an Act of Parhament was passed in March, 1536 — the same year that saw the end of Anne Boleyn — for the suppression, that is to say, confiscation, of three hundred and seventy-six monas teries, and for granting their estates, real and personal, to the King and his heirs ! ' He took plate, jewels, gold and silver images, and ornaments. This act of monstrous tyranny was, however, base as the Parliament was and full as it was of greedy plunderers, not passed without some opposition. Hume says that " it does not appear that any opposition was made to this important law." '° He frequently quotes Spelman as an historical authority, but it did not suit him to quote Spelman's History of Sacrilege, in which this Protestant historian says that " the bill stuck long in the Lower House and could get no pas sage, when the king commanded the Commons to attend him in the forenoon in his gallery, where he let them wait till late in the afternoon, and then, coming out of his chamber, walking a turn or two amongst them and looking angrily on them, first on one side and then on the other, at last, ' I hear (saith he) that my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I will have some of your heads,' and wit] tout other rhetoric returned to his chamber. Enough was said, the bill passed, and all was given him as he desired." " ' Parliament expressly declared that it acted on the strength of the royal declaration that the charges made against the good name of the religious houses were true. There was almost certainly no attempt to enquire into or verify the statements of Cromwell's agents, and it is extremely unlikely that their reports were ever exhibited in the Parliament House. For this see Gasquet, Henry VLII. and the English Monasteries, i., chap. viii. '° Hume, History (Murray's reprint), ii., p. 360. " Spelman, History of Sacrilege (ed. 1853), p. 206. Spelman was horn in 1562, less than thirty years after the event. 122 163. Thus, then, it was an act of sheer tyranny ; it was a pure Algerine proceeding at-iast. The pretences availed nothing, the reports of Cromwell's myrmidons were not credited, every artifice had failed ; resort was had to the halter and the axe to accomplish that " Reformation," of which the Scotch historian, Burnet, has called this monster the first-born son ! Some such man, he says, was neces sary to bring about this " great and glorious event." What 1 was ever good yet produced by wiclcedness so atrocious ? Did any man but this Burnet and his country man, Hume, ever affect to believe that such barefaced injustice and tyranny were justified on the ground of their tending to good consequences ? 164. In the next chapter, when I shall have given an account of the whole of that devastation and sacking of which we have, as yet, only seen a mere beginning, I shall come to the consequences, not only to the monks and nuns, but to the people at large ; and shall show how a founda tion was, in this very Act of Parliament, laid for that pauperism, misery, degradation and crime, which are now proposed to be checked by laws to export the people to foreign lands. 123 CHAPTER VI. 165. At the close of the foregoing chapter we saw the beginning only of the devastation of England. In the present chapter we shall see its horrible progress, as far as there was time for that progress during the reign of the remorseless tyrant Henry VIII. We have seen in what manner was obtained the first act for the suppression of monasteries, that is to say, in reality, for robbing the proprietors of estates and also the poor and the stranger. But I must give a more full and particular account of the Act of Parliament itself, before I proceed to the deeds committed in consequence of it. 166. The Act was passed in the year 1536, and in the 27th year of the King's reign. The preamble of the Act contains the reasons for its- enactments ; and as this Act really began the ruin and degradation of the main body of the people of England and Ireland, as it was the first step taken in legal form for robbing the people under pre tence of reforming their religion, as it was the precedent on which the future plunderers proceeded until they had completely impoverished the country, as it was the first of that series of deeds of rapine by which this formerly well-fed and well-clothed people have, in the end, been reduced to rags and to a worse than jail-allowance of food, I will insert the lying and villainous preamble at full length. Englishmen in general suppose that there were always poor-laws and paupers in England. They ought to re member that for nine hundred years, under the Catholic 124 religion, there were neither. They ought, when they hear the parson cry " no-popery," to answer him by the cry of "no-pauperism." They ought above all things to en deavour to ascertain how it came to pass that this land of roast beef was changed, all of a sudden, into a land of dry bread or of oatmeal porridge. Let them attend, then, to the base and hypocritical pretences that they will find in the following preamble to this atrocious act of pillage. 167. " Forasmuch as manifest synne, vicious, carnal and abominable living is dayly used and committed commonly in such little and small Abbeys, Priories, and other Reh gious Houses of monks, canons and, nuns, where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons, whereby the governors of such Religious Houses, and their Convent, spoyle, de- stroye, consume, and utterly waste, as well as their churches, monasteries, priories, principal farms, granges, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, as the ornaments of their churches, and their goods and chattels, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, slander of good reli gion, and to the great infamy of the King's Highness and the realm, if redress should not be had thereof. And albeit that many continual Visitations hath been heretofore had by the space of two hundred years and more, for an honest and charitable reformation of Such unthrifty, car nal, and abominable living, yet nevertheless little or none amendment is hitherto had, but their vicious living shamelessly increaseth and augmenteth, and by a cursed custom so rooted and infected, that a great multitude of the religious persons in such smaU Houses do rather choose to rove abroad in apostacy, than to conform them selves to the observation of good rehgion ; so that without such small Houses be utterly suppressed, and the religious persons therein committed to great and honourable Monas teries of religion in this realm where they may be com pelled to live religiously, for reformation of their lives, 125 the same else be no redress nor reformation in that behalf. In consideration whereof the King's most royal Majesty, being supreme Head on Earth, under God, of the Church of England, dayly studying and devysing the in crease, advancement and exaltation of true doctrine and virtue in the said Church, to the only glory and honour of God, and the total extirping and destruction of vice and sin, having knowledge that the premises be true, as well as the accompts of his late Visitations, as by sundry credible informations, considering also that divers and great solemn Monasteries of this realm, wherein (thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed, be destitute of such full number of religious persons as they ought and may keep, hath thought good that a plain declaration should be made of the premises, as well to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, as to other his loving subjects the Commons in this present Parhament assem bled : Whereupon the said Lords and Commons, by a great deliberation, finally be resolved that it is and shall be much more to the pleasure of Almighty God, and for the honour of this his realm, that the possessions of such small Religious Houses, now being spent, spoiled, and wasted for increase and maintenance of sin, should be used and committed to better uses, and the unthrifty religious persons so spending the same, to be compelled to reform their lives. "^ i68. This preamble was followed by enactments giving the whole of the property to the King, his heirs and assigns, " to do and use therewith according to their own wills, to the pleasure of Almighty God, and to the honour ' The Bill was in all probability brought up to the Commons by the King in person. A letter written from London on March 13 seems to refer to this measure as having been presented to the House for considera tion by Henry, on Saturday, March 11, 1536, "and on 'Wednesday next he will be there again to hear their minds" (Wright, Letters on the Sup pression of the Monasteries, Camden Society, p. 36). 126 and profit of this realm." Besides the lands and houses and stock, this tyrannical act gave him the household goods, and the gold, silver, jewels, and every other thing belonging to those monasteries. Here was a breach of Magna Charta in the first place, a robbery of the monks and nuns in the next place, and, in the third place, a robbery of the indigent, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. The parties robbed, even the actual possessors of the property, were never heard in their defence ; there was no charge against any particular convent ; the charges were loose and general, and levelled against all convents whose revenues did not exceed a certain sum. This alone was sufficient to show that the charges were false ; for who will believe that the alleged wickedness extended to all whose revenues did not exceed a certain sum, and that, when those revenues got above that point, the wickedness stopped ?^ It is clear that the reason for stopping at that point was that there was yet something to be done with the nobles and gentry before a seizure of the great monas teries cotfld be safely attempted. The weak were first attacked, but means were very soon found for attacking and sacking the remainder. 169. The moment the tyrant got possession of this class of the Church estates he began to grant them away to his " assigns," as the act calls them. Great promises had been held out that the King, when in possession pf these estates, would never more want taxes from the people;' ' For an examination into the charges made against the monks by Crom well's visitors, see Gasquet, Henry VLLL. and the English Monasteries, ii., chap. ix. * Marillac, the French Ambassador, in 1540 writes that " Henry em ployed preachers and ministers who went about to preach and persuade the people that he could employ the ecclesiastical revenues in hospitals, colleges and other foundations for the public good, which would be a much better use than that they should support lazy and useless monks " (/«»«>¦ taire Avalylique, No. 242). Nicholas Harpsfield also declares that he was 127 and it is possible that he thought that he should be able to do without taxes ; but he soon found that he was not destined to keep the.plunder to himself, and that, in short, he must^make a sudden stop, if not actually undo all that he had done, unless he divided the spoil with others, who instantly poured in upon him for their share, and they so beset him that he had not a moment's peace. They knew that he had good things ; they had fallen care to enable him to have " assigns " ; and they, as they intended from the first, would give him no rest until he, " to the pleasure of Almighty God and the honour and profit of the realm," made them those " assigns." 170. Before four years had passed over his head he found himself as poor as if he had never confiscated a single convent, so sharp set were the pious reformers and so eager to " please Almighty God." When complaining to Cromwell of the rapacity of the applicants for grants he exclaimed, " By our Lady ! the cormorants, v\rhen they have got the garbage, will devour the dish." Cromwell reminded him that there was much more yet to come. "Tut, man," said the King, "my whole realm, would not staunch their maws." However, he attempted this very soon after by a seizure of the larger monasteries. 171. We have seen, in paragraph 167, that the parlia ment, when they enabled him to confiscate the smaller monasteries, declared that in the " great and solemn monasteries (thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed." It seemed, therefore, to be a work of some difficulty to discover (in so short a time after this declaration was made) reasons for the confiscation of these larger monasteries. But tyranny stands in need of no present at a sermon preached by Archbishop Cranmer at St. Paul's Cross in which he told them that with the revenues of the abbeys Henry would not " from that time . . have need to put people to any manner of pay ment or charge for his or the realm's affairs" (The Pretended Divorce, ed. N. Pocock, Camden Society, p. 292). 128 reasons, and in this case no reasons were alleged. Crom well and his myrmidons beset the heads of these great establishments ; they threatened, they promised, they lied, and they bullied. By means the most base that can be conceived they obtained from some few what they called a " voluntary surrender." However, where these unjust and sanguinary men met with sturdy opposition they resorted to false accusations, and procured the murder of the parties under pretence of their having committed high treason. It was under this infamous pretence that the tyrant hanged and ripped up and quartered the abbot of the famous abbey of Glastonbury, whose body was mangled by the executioner, and whose head and limbs were hung up on what is called the Tor, which overlooks the abbey.* So that the surrender, wherever it did take place, was precisely of the nature of those " voluntary surrenders '' which men make of their purses when the robber's pistol is at their temple or his blood-stained knife at their throat. 172. After all, however, even to obtain a pretence of voluntary surrender was a work too troublesome for Cromwell and his ruffian visitors, and much too slow for the cormorants who waited for the plunder. Without more ceremony, therefore, an act was passed (31 Henry VIIL, chapter 13) giving all these " surrendered " monasteries to the King, his heirs and assigns, and also all other monas teries, and all hospitals and colleges into the bargain!^ * Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, was hanged November 15> 1539- For an account of the proceedings in his case, as well as in the process of attainder and execution of the Abbots of Reading and Colchester, see Gasquet, Hcjiry VIII. and the English Monasteries, ii., chap. ix. = This Act, passed on May 19, 1539, merely secured to the King any property which " by any means had come into his hands by supercession, dissolution or surrender since the 4th of February, 1536." It was in no sense an act of suppression, as is often taken for granted, and the last declaration of the Parliament as to the state of the greater monastic houses 129 It is useless to waste our time in uttering exclamations or iu venting curses on the memory of the monsters who thus made a general sacking of this then fine, rich, and beautiful country, which, until now, had been for nine hundred years the happiest country, and the greatest country too, that Europe had ever seen. 173. The carcass being thus laid prostrate, the rapacious vultures who had assisted in the work flew on it and began to tear it in pieces. The people here and there rose in insurrection against the tyrant's satellites ; but deprived of their natural leaders, who had for the most part placed themselves on the side of tyranny and plun der, what were the mere common people to do ? Hume affects to pity the ignorance of the people (as writers now affect to pity the ignorance of the country people in Spain) in showing their attachment to the monks. Gross ignor ance, to be sure, to prefer easy landlords, leases for life, hospitality and plenty ; " gross ignorance and supersti tion " to prefer these to grinding rack-rents, buying small beer at bishop's palaces, and living on parish pay! We shall see shortly how soon horrid misery followed these tyrannical proceedings : but we must trace Cromwell and his ruffians in their work of confiscating, plundering, pillaging and devastating. 174. Tyrants have often committed robberies on their people; but in all cases but this, in England at least, there was always something of legal process observed. In this case there was no such thing. The base parliament who were to share, and who did most largely share, in the plunder, had given not only the lands and houses to the tyrant, or rather, had taken them to themselves, but had disposed, in the same short way, of all the moveable goods, stock on farms, crops and, which was of more con- is that they were in an excellent state. No general measure of compulsory dissolution was passed at this or any subsequent time. 130 sequence, of the gold, silver and jewels. Let the reader judge of the ransackings that now took place. The poorest of the convents had some images, vases, and other things of gold or silver. Many of them possessed a great deal in this way. The altars of their churches were generally enriched with the precious metals, if not with costly jewels ; and, which is not to be overlooked, the people in those days were honest enough to suffer all these things to remain in their places without a standing army and with out police officers. 175. Never in all probability since the world began was there so rich a harvest of plunder. The ruffians of Cromwell entered the convents, they tore down the altars to get away the gold and silver, ransacked the chests and drawers of the monks and nuns, tore off the covers of books that were ornamented with the precious metals. These books were all in manuscript. Single books had taken in many cases half a long life-time to compose and to copy out fair. Whole libraries, the getting of which together had taken ages upon ages and had cost immense sums of money, were scattered abroad by these hellish ruffians when they had robbed the covers of their rich ornaments. The ready money in the convents down to the last shilHng was seized. In short, the most rapacious and unfeeling soldiery never, in town delivered up to be sacked, pro ceeded with greediness, shamelessness, and brutality to be at all compared with those of these heroes of the Protestant Reformation ; and this, observe, towards persons, women as well as men, who had committed no crime known to the laws, who had had no crime regularly laid to their charge, who had had no hearing in their defence, a large part of whom had within a year been declared by this same parliament to lead most godly and useful lives, the whole of whose possessions were guaranteed to them by the Great Charter as much as the King's crown was to him, and whose estates were enjoyed for the benefit of the 131 poor as well as for that of these plundered possessors themselves. 176. The tyrant was, of course, the great pocketer of this species of plunder. Cromwell carried, or sent it to him in parcels, twenty ounces of gold at one time, fifty ounces at another ; now a parcel of precious stones of one sort, then a parcel of another. Hume, whose main object is to blacken the Catholic religion, takes every possible occa sion for saying something or other in praise of its des troyers. He could not, he was too cunning to ascribe justice or humanity to a monster whose very name signifies injustice and cruelty. He therefore speaks of his high spirit, his magnificence and generosity. It was a high- spirited, magnificent and generous King, to be sure, who sat in his palace in London to receive with his own hands the gold, silver, jewels and pieces of money of which his unoffending subjects had been robbed by ruffians sent by himself to commit the robbery. One of the items runs in these words : " Item, Delivered unto the King's royal Majesty, the same day, of the same stuffe, foure chalices of golde, with foure patens of golde to the same, and a spoon of golde, weighing altogether an hundred and six ounces. Received : Henry Rex." 177. There are high-spirit, magnificence and generosity ! Amongst the stock of this "generous prince's" pawn broker's shop — or rather, his store-house of stolen goods — were images of all sorts, candlesticks, sockets, cruets, cups, pixes, goblets, basins, spoons, diamonds, sapphires, pearls, finger-rings, ear-rings, pieces of money of all values, even down to shillings, bits of gold and silver torn from the covers of books, or cut and beaten out of the altars. In cases where the woodwork, either of altars, crosses or images, was inlaid with precious metal, the wood was frequently burnt to get at the metal. Even the Jew- thieves of the present day are not more expert at their trade than the myrmidons of Cromwell were. And, with 132 these facts before us — these facts, undenied and undeni able ; with these facts before us, must we not be the most profound hypocrites that the world ever saw, must we not be the precise contrary of that which Englishmen have always been thought to be, if we still affect to believe that the destruction of the shrines of our forefathers arose from motives of conscience ? 178. The parcel of plunder mentioned in the last para graph but one, brought into this royal Peachum, was equal in value to about eight thousand pounds of money of the present day ; and that parcel was, perhaps, not a hundredth part of what he received in this way. Then who is to suppose that the plunderers did not keep a large share to themselves ? Did subaltern plunderers ever give in just accounts ? It is manifest that from this specimen the whole amount of the goods of which the convents were plundered must have been enormous. The reforming gentry ransacked the cathedral churches as well as the convents and their churches. Whatever pile contained the greatest quantity of " the same stuffe " seemed to be the object of their most keen rapacity. Therefore it is by no means surprising that they directed, at a very early stage of their pious and honest progress, their hasty steps towards Canterbury, which, above all other places, had been dipped in the " manifeste synne " of possessing rich altars, tombs, gold and silver images, together with " manifestly synneful" diamonds and other precious stones. The whole of this city, famed as the cradle of English Christianity, was prize ; and the " Reformation " people hastened to it with that alacrity and that noise of antici pated enjoyment which we observe in the crows and mag pies when fl3'ing to the spot where a horse or an ox has accidentally met with its death. 179. But there were at Canterbury two objects by which the " Reformation " birds of prey were particularly attracted ; namely, the monastery of Saint Austin and the 133 tomb of Thomas a Becket. The former of these renowned men, to whose preaching and whose long life of incessant and most disinterested labour England owed the establish ment of Christianity in the land, had for eight or nine centuries been regarded as the Apostle of England. His shrine was in the monastery dedicated to him ; and as it as in all respects a work of great magnificence, it offered a plenteous booty to the plunderers, who, if they could have got at the tomb of Jesus Christ Himself, and had found it equally rich, would beyond all question have torn it to pieces. But rich as this prize was, there was a greater in the shrine of Thomas a Becket, in the cathedral church. Becket, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Henry II. , who resisted that King when the latter was manifestly preparing to rob the Church and to enslave and pillage the people, had been held in the highest veneration all over Christendom for more than three hun dred years when the Reformation plunderers assailed his tomb ; but especially was his name venerated in England, where the people looked upon him as a martyr to their liberties as well as their religion, he having been bar barously murdered by ruffians sent from the king, and for no other cause than that he persevered in resisting an attempt to violate the Great Charter. Pilgrimages were continually made to his tomb ; offerings incessantly poured into it ; churches and hospitals and other establishments of piety and charity were dedicated to him, as, for instance, the church of St. Thomas, in the City of London, the monastery of Sende, in Surrey, the hospital of St. Thomas, in the borough of Southwark, and things of this sort, in great numbers, all over the country. The offerings at his shrine had made it exceedingly rich and magnificent. A king of France had given it a diamond supposed to be the most valuable then in Europe. Hume, never losing sight of the double object of maligning the Catholic religion and degrading the English nation, ascribes this sort of half- 134 adoration of Becket to the craft of the priests and to the folly and superstition of the people. He is vexed to death to have to relate that more than a hundred thousand pil grims to Becket's shrine have been assembled at one time in Canterbury. Indeed ! why, then, there must have been some people living in England even in those old times ; and those people must have had some wealth too ; though, according to the whole tenor of the lying book, which the •Scotch call our history, this was, at the time I am now speaking of, a poor, beggarly, scarcely inhabited country. How could they find lodging and entertainment for a hun dred thousand grown persons ? And this too, observe, at one corner of the island. None but persons of some sub stance could have performed such a journey. Here is a fact that just slips out sideways, which is of itself much more than enough to make us reflect and inquire before we swallow what the Scotch philosophers are now presenting to us on the subjects of national wealth and population. And then as to the craft and superstition which Hume says produced this concourse of pilgrims. Just as if either were necessary to produce unbounded veneration for the name of a man of whom it was undeniably true that he had sacrificed his life, and that, too, in the most signal manner, for the rights and liberties and religion of his country. Was it " folly and superstition," or was it wis dom and gratitude and real piety to show, by overt acts, veneration for such a man ? The bloody tyrant, who had sent More and Fisher to the block, and who of course hated the name of Becket, caused his ashes to be dug up and scattered in the air, and forbade the future insertion of his name in the calendar.^ We do not, therefore, find it in " St. Thomas was declared a traitor in the autumn of 1538, and his name was ordered to be erased from all church calendars and his statues to be destroyed. Fr. Morris, in The Relics of Si. Thomas, thinks it almost certain that the ashes of the saint were burned. 135 the calendar in the Common Prayer Book ; but, and it is a most curious fact, we find it in Moore's Almanack ; in that almanack it is for this very year 1825 ; and thus, in spite of the ruthless tyrant and in spite of all the liars of the " Reformation," the English nation has always continued to be just and grateful to the memory of this celebrated man. 180. But to return to the Reformation robbers : here was a, prize ! This tomb of Becket was of wood, most ex quisitely wrought, inlaid abundantly with the precious metals, and thickly set with precious stones of all sorts.' Here was an object for " Reformation " piety to fix its godly eyes upon ! Were such a shrine to be found in one of our churches now, how the swaddlers would cry out for another " Reformation ! " The gold, silver and jewels filled two chests, each of which required six or eight men of that day (when the labourers used to have plenty of meat) to move them to the door of the cathedral."^ How the eyes of Hume's " high-minded, magnificent, and generous prince " must have glistened when the chests were opened ! They vied, I dare say, with the diamonds themselves. No robbers of which we have ever had an account equalled these robbers in rapacity, in profligacy, and in insolence. But where is the wonder ? The tyrant's proclamations had now the force of laws ; he had bribed the people's natural leaders to his side ; his will was law ; and that will constantly sought plunder and blood. ' A French lady who visited Canterbury in 1538 describes the shrine as a marvel of riches, which, " had she not seen, all the men in the world could never have made her believe it " (Ellis, Original Letters, first series, ii., 107). For some account of the riches of the shrine, " the least valuable portion of which was the gold," according to Erasmus, see Gasquet, Henry VIIL and the English Monasteries, ii., pp. 405-407. ' Nicholls, Erasmus' Pilgrimages, p. igo, quoting the account in Cott. MS., Tiberius E. viii. f. 269, from which Stowe derived his information. See also Gasquet, ut sup., ii., p. 408. 136 i8i. The monasteries were now plundered, sacked,, gutted ; for this last is the proper word whereby to de scribe the deed. As some comfort, and to encourage us to endure the horrid relation, we may here bear in mind that we shall, by-and-by, see the base ruffian, Cromwell, after being the chief instrument in the plunder, laying his mis creant head on the block. But to seize the estates and to pillage the churches and apartments of the monasteries was not all. The noble buildings, raised in the view of lasting for countless ages ; the beautiful gardens ; these ornaments of the country must not be suffered to stand, for they con tinually reminded the people of the rapacity and cruelty of their tyrant and his fellow-plunderers and partakers in the plunder. How the property in the estates was dis posed of we shall see further on, but the buildings must come down . To go to work in the usual way would have been a labour without end, so that in most instances gunpowder was resorted to, and thus, in a few hours, the most magnificent structures, which it had required ages upon ages to bring to perfection, were made heaps of ruins, pretty much such as many of them remain even unto this day. In many cases those who got the estates were bound to destroy the buildings, or to knock them partly down, so that the people should at once be deprived of all hope of seeing a revival of what they bad lost, and in order to give them encouragement to take leases under the new owners.' 182. The whole country was thus disfigured ; it had the appearance of a land recently invaded by the most brutal barbarians; and this appearance, if we look well into it, it has even to this day. Nothing has ever yet come to supply the place of what was then destroyed. This is the view for us to take of the matter. It is not a mere matter of religion, but a matter of rights, Hberties, real " See many examples of the destruction of monastic buildings, in Gas quet, ut sup., ii. , chapters viii. and x. 137 wealth, happiness, and national greatness. If all these have been strengthened or augmented by the " Reforma tion," even then he must not approve of the horrible means ; but if they have all been weakened or lessened by that " Reformation," what an outrageous abuse of words is it to call the event by that name ! And if I do not prove that this latter has been the case, if I do not prove, clear as the day-light, that b.efore the " Reforma tion " England was greater, more wealthy, more moral, and more happy than she has ever been since, if I do not make this appear as clearly as any fact ever was made to appear, I will be content to pass for the rest of my life for a vain pretender. 183. If I look at the county of Surrey, in which I myself was born, and behold the devastation of that county, I am filled with indignation against the ruffian devastators. Surrey has very little of natural wealth in it. A very con siderable part of it is mere heath-land. Yet this county was, from one end of it to the other, ornamented and bene fited by the establishments which grew out of the Catholic Church. At Bermondsey there was an abbey ; at St. Mary Overy there was a priory, and this convent founded that very St. Thomas's Hospital which now exists in Southwark. This hospital also was seized by the ruffians, but the building was afterwards given to the City of London. At Newington there was a hospital, and after its revenues were seized the master obtained a licence to beg ! At Merton there was a priory. Then, going across to the Sussex side, there was another priory at Reigate. Coming again near the Thames, and more to the west, there was a priory at Shene. Still more to the west there was an abbey at Chertsey. At Tandridge there was a priory. Near Guildford, at Sende, there was a priory ; and at the lower end of the county, at Waverley, in the parish of Farnham, was an abbey. To these belonged cells and chapels at a distance from the convents them- 138 selves ; so that it would have been a work of some difH- culty for a man so to place himself, even in this poor heathy county, at six miles distance from a place where the door of hospitality was always open to the poor, to the aged, the orphan, the widow and the stranger. Can any man now place himself, in that whole county, within any number of miles of any such door ? No, nor in any other county. All is wholly changed, and all is changed for the worse. There is now no hospitality in England. Words have changed their meaning. We now give entertainment to those who entertain us in return. We entertain people because we like them personally, and very seldom because they stand in need of entertainment. A hospital, in those days, meant a place of free entertainment, and not a place merely for the lame, the sick, and the blind ; and the very sound of the words "Old English Hospitality" ought to raise a blush on every Protestant cheek. But besides this hospitality exercised invariably in the monasteries, the weight of their example was great with all the opulent classes of the community, and thus to be generous and kind was the character of the nation at large ; a niggardly, a base, a money-loving disp,osition could not be in fashion, when those institutions to which all men looked with reverence set an example which condemned such a dispo sition. 184. And if I am asked why the thirteen monks of Wa verley, for instance, should have had ;£ 196 13s. iid. a year to spend, making about ;^4,ooo a year of the money of the present day," I may answer by asking why they should not '" Tlie clear annual value of Waverley was /'174 8s. 3Jd. It conse quently came into the King's hands, together with the other religious houses with an income of less than ;if200 yearly, in 1536. The inmates were transferred to other houses of the Cistercian Order, only to be again dis- jjersed on the dissolulion of the greater houses three years later. On July 20, 1536, Henry VIII. granted the site of the abbey, its buildings, and 139 have had it ? And I may go on and ask why anybody should have any property at all ? Aye, but they never worked ; they did nothing to increase the nation's store. Let us see how this is. They possessed the lands of Wa verley, — a few hundred acres of very poor land, with a mill, and perhaps about twenty acres of very indifferent meadow land, on one part of which, sheltered by a semicircle of sand-hills, their abbey stood, the river Wey (about twenty feet wide) running close by the outer wall of the convent. Besides this they possessed the impropriated tithes of the parish of Farnham, and a pond or two on the commons adjoining. This estate in land belongs to a Mr. Thomp son, who lives on the spot, and the estate in tithes to a Mr. Halsey, who lives at a distance from the parish. Now, without any disparagement to these gentlemen, did not the monks work as much as they do ? Did not their revenue go to augment the nation's store as much as the rents of Mr. Thompson or the tithes of Mr. Halsey ? Aye, and which is of vast importance, the poor of the parish of Farnham, having this monastery to apply to and having for their neighbour a bishop of Winchester who did not sell small beer out of his palace, stood in no need of poor rates, and had never heard the horrid word pauper pro nounced. Come, my townsmen of Farnham ; you who as well as I have, when we were boys, climbed the ivy-covered ruins of this venerable abbey (the first of its order in Eng land") ; you who as well as I have, when looking at those all the lands and rents belonging to it, to Sir William Fitzwilliam, the treasurer of his household, and afterwards Earl of Southampton. The grant included all com, grain, chattels, lead, bells, &c. " The Cistercian Abbey of Waverley was founded on November 24, 1 128, by William Giffard, the second bishop of Winchester after the Con quest, and at that time the chancellor of King Henry I. With the assent of the king and the cathedral chapter of Winchester, he bestowed certain lands on an abbot and twelve rnonks, whom he brought over from the Cistercian abbey of Aumone, in Normandy. 140 walls which have outlived the memory of the devastators, but not the malice of those who still taste the sweets of the devastation ; you who, as well as I, have many times won dered what an abbey was, and how and why this one came to be devastated ; you shall be the judge in this matter. You know what poor-rates are, and you know what church-rates are. Very well then, there were no poor-rates and no church-rates as long as Waverley Abbey existed and as long as bishops had no wives. This is a fact wholly un deniable. There was no need of either. The Church shared its property with the poor and the stranger, and left the people at large to possess their own earnings; and as to matters of faith and worship, look at that immense heap of earth round the church where your parents and my parents and where our progenitors for twelve hun dred years lie buried ; then bear in mind that for nine hundred years out of the twelve they were all of the faith and worship of the monks of Waverley, and with that thought in your mind find, if you can, the heart to say that the monks of Waverley, by whose hospitality your fathers and my fathers were for so many ages preserved from bear ing the hateful name of pauper, taught an idolatrous and damnable religion. 185. That which took place in Surrey took place in every other county, only to a greater extent in proportion to the greater wealth and resources of the spot. Defacing followed closely upon the heels of confiscation and plunder. If buildings could have been murdered, the tyrant and his plunderers would have made short work of it. As it was they did all they could; they knocked down, they blew up, they annihilated as far as they could. Nothing, indeed, short of diabolical malice was to be expected from such men ; but there were two abbeys in England which one might have hoped that even these monsters woidd have spared, — that which contained the tomb of St. Austin, and that which had been founded by and contained the 141 emains of Alfred. We have seen how they rifled the tomb of St. Austin at Canterbury. They tore down the church and the abbey, and with the materials built a menagerie for wild beasts and a palace for the tyrant himself. The tomb of Alfred was in an abbey at Win-- chester, founded by that king himself.''* The abbey and its estates were given by the tyrant to Wriothesley, who was afterwards made Earl of Southampton, and who got a pretty good share of the confiscations in Hampshire. One almost sickens at the thought of a man capable of a deed like the destruction of this abbey. Where is there one amongst us who has read any thing at all who has not read of the fame of Alfred ? What book can we open, even for our boyish days, that does not sound his praise ? Poets, moralists, divines, historians, philosophers, lawyers, legislators, not only of our own country but of all Europe, have cited him, and still cite him, as a model of virtue, piety, wisdom, valour and patriotism, as possessing every excellence without a single fault. He, in spite of diffi culties such as no other human being on record ever encountered, cleared his harassed and half-barbarized country of horde after horde of cruel invaders, who at one time had wholly subdued it and compelled him, in order to escape destruction, to resort to the habit and the life of a herdsman. From this state of depression he, during a not long life, raised himself and his people to the highest point of happiness and of fame. He fought, with his armies and fleets, more than fifty battles against the enemies of England. He taught his people by his ex ample as well as by his precepts, to be sober, industrious, brave and just. He promoted learning in all the sciences ; he planted the University of Oxford ; to him, and not to a late Scotch lawyer, belongs " Trial by Jury." Blackstone calls him the founder of the Common Law ; the counties, " This was Hyde Abbey, Winchester. 142 the hundreds, the tithings, the courts of justice, were the work of Alfred. He, in fact, was the founder of all those rights, liberties and laws which made England to be what England has been, which gave her a character above that of other nations, which made her rich and great and happy beyond all her neighbours, *and which still give her whatever she possesses of that pre-eminence. If there be a name under heaven to which Englishmen ought to bow with reverence approaching towards adoration it is the name of Alfred. And we are not unjust and ungrateful in this respect at any rate, for, whether Catholics or Pro testants, where is there an Englishman to be found who would not gladly make a pilgrimage of a thousand miles to take off his hat at the tomb of this maker of the English name ? Alas ! that tomb is nowhere to be found. The barbarians spared not even that. It was in the abbey before mentioned, called Hyde Abbey, which had been founded by Alfred himself and intended as the place of his burial. Besides the remains of Alfred this abbej' con tained those of St. Grimbald, the Benedictine monk, whom Alfred brought into England to begin the teaching at Oxford. But what cared the plunderers for remains of public benefactors? The abbey was knocked down or blown up, the tombs were demolished, the very lead of the coffins was sold," and, which fills one with more indignation than all the rest, the estates were so disposed " The Abbey of Hyde was surrendered some time apparently in the spring of 1538. John Capon or Salcot, the last abbot, although made bishop of Bangor in 1534, had been allowed to remain commendatory abbot of the monastery, and upon his surrender of the house and revenues to Henry he was rewarded by a translation to the richer see of Salisbury. The extensive buildings, church and monastery of Hyde Abbey quickly disappeared. One Richard Bethel had a lease of the site for the express purpose of destroying them ; and so thoroughly did he do his work that a few years only after the dissolulion, when Leiand the antiquary visited the place, ihcy had app.irently ahtady 10 a great extern vanished. 143 of as to make the loan-makers, the Barings, at this day the successors of Alfred the Great ! 1 86. Wriothesley got the manors of Micheldever and Stratton, which by marriage came into the hands of the family of Russell ; and from that family, about thirty years ago, they were bought by the Barings, and are now in possession of Sir Thomas Baring. It is curious to observe how this Protestant " Reformation " has worked. If it had not been there would have been no paupers at Micheldever and Stratton, but then the Russells would not have had the estates, and they could not have sold them to the Barings : aye, but then there would have been, too, no national debt as well as no paupers, and there would have been no loan-makers to buy the estates of the Russells. Besides this there would have been no bridewell erected upon the precise spot where the abbey church stood ; no tread-mill, perhaps over the very place where the ashes of Alfred lay; and, what is more, there would have been no need of bridewell or tread-mill. It is related of Alfred that he made his people so honest that he could hang bracelets up by the way side without danger of their being touched. Alas ! that the descendants of that same people should need a tread-mill ! Aye, but in the days of Alfred there were no paupers, no miserable creatures compelled to labour from month's end to month's end without seeing meat, no thousands upon thousands made thieves by that hunger which acknowledges no law, human or divine. 187. Thus then was the country devastated, sacked and defaced ; and I should now proceed to give an account of the commencement of that poverty and degradation which were, as I have pledged myself to show, the consequences of this devastation, and which I shall show, not by bare assertion, nor from Vv^hat are called " Histories of Eng land," but from Acts of Parliament, and from other sources vv'liich every one can refer to, and the correctness 144 of which is beyond aH dispute. But before we come to this important matter we must see the end of the ruffian " Vice-gerent," and also the end of the tyrant himself, who was, during the events that we have been speaking of, going on marrying and divorcing or killing his wives, but whose career was, after all, not very long. 1 88. After the death of Jane Seymour, who was the mother of Edward VI., and who was the only one of all the tyrant's wives who had the good luck to die a queen and to die in her bed ; — after her death, which took place in 1537, he was nearly two years hunting up another wife. None certainly but some very gross and unfeeling woman could be expected to have voluntarily anything to do with a man whose hands were continually steeped in blood. In 1539 he found, however, a mate in Anne, the sister of the Duke of Cleves. When she arrived in England he ex pressed his dislike of her person ; but he found it prudent to marry her." In 1540, about six or seven months after the marriage, he was divorced from her, not daring in this case to set his myrmidons to work to bring her to the block. There was no lawful pretence for the divorce. The husband did not like his wife ; that was all, and this was alleged, too, as the ground of the divorce.'^ Cranmer, " The day after Henry had seen his new wife a council was summoned, and Cromwell was ordered to find some pretext to prevent the marriage. The Princess was required to swear that there had been no pre-engagement, and her suit was subjected to repeated interrogatories ; but as no reason able excuse could be found the King was persuaded by Cromwell to submit to the ceremony of marriage (Lingard, History, vi., p. 299). '" The convocation headed by Cranmer pronounced the King's marriage with Anne null, on the ground that he had not given inward consent when publicly married (Wilkins, Concilia, iii., p. 854). The Reformer, Richard Hilles, writing to Bullinger from London, gives as the true reason that Henry was " much taken with another young lady of very diminutive stature, whom he now has " ; and he adds that " no nobleman or citizen would have dared to utter a single word about the business, either openly or in secret, until they had perceived that the King's affections were 145 ¦vho had divorced him from two wives before, put his irons irto the fire again for this occasion, and produced in a little time as neat a piece of work as ever had come from the shop of the famous " Reformation." Thus the King and Queen were single people again ; but the former had another young and handsome wife in his eye. This lady's name Was Catherine Howard, a niece of the Duke of Nor folk. pThis Duke, as well as most of the old nobility, hated Crom-well, and now was an opportunity of inflicting ven geance bn him. Cromwell had been the chief cause of the King's (narriage with Anne of Cleves ; but the fact is his plundering talent was no longer wanted, and it was con venient to the tyrant to get rid of him. 189. Cromwell had obtained enormous wealth froni his several cfiices, as well as from the plunder of the Church and the poor. He had got about thirty of the estates belonging to the monasteries • his house, or rather palace, was gorged with the fruits of the sacking ; he had been made Earl of Essex ; he had precedence over every one but the King ; and, he, in fact, represented the King in the Parliament, where he introduced and defended all his con fiscating and murdering laws. He had been barbarous beyond all description towards the unfortunate and un offending monks and nuns ; without such an instrument the plunder nevei? could have been effected : but he was no longer wanted ; the ruffian had already lived too long ; the very walls of the devastated convents seemed to call for public vengeance on his head. On the morning of the loth of June, 1540, he was all-powerful; in the evening of the same day he was in prison as a traitor. He lay in prison only a few days before he had to experience the benefit of his own way of administering justice. He had, alienated from the lady Anne to that young girl, Catherine, the cousin of the Duke of Norfolk, whom he married immediately upon Anne's divorce " (Original Letters, Parker Society, No. 105). 10 146 as we have seen in the last chapter, invented a way a bringing people to the block or the gallows without giviig them any form of trial, without giving them even a hear ing, but merely by passing a law to put them to deaih. This was what he had brought about in the case of the Countess of Salisbury ; and this was what was now to fall on his own head. He lived only about forty-eight days after his arrest ; not half long enough to enable him to expiate, barely to enumerate, the robberies and murders committed under his orders. His time seems, however, to have been spent, not in praying God to forgive him for these robberies and murders, but in praying to the tyrant to spare his life.'^ Perhaps of all the mean and dastardly wretches that ever died, this was the most n:ean and dastardly. He who had been the most insolent and cruel of ruffians when he had power, was now the most dis gustingly slavish and base. He had, in fact, committed no crime against the King ; though charged with heresy and treason, he was no more a heretic than the King was, and as to the charge of treason there was not a shadow of foundation for it. But he was just as guilty of treason as the abbots of Reading, Colchester and Glastonbury, all of whom and many more he had been the chief instrument in putting to death. He put them to death in order to get possession of their property ; and I dare say to get at his property, to get the plunder back from him, was one of the motives for bringing him to the block." This very ruffian had superintended the digging up of the ashes of Thomas a Becket and scattering them in the air; and now the '" Cranmer alone interposed at first to save the fallen minister's life, and wrote a letter to the King ; but a day or two later he deemed it more prudent to give his vote for the bill of attainder (Lingard, vi., 304). "A very large sum of money and a great mass of monastic treasures were found in his possession. Probably the total value was hardly less than a quarter of a million of our money (v. Gasquet, Henty VIII. ami the English Monasteries, i., p. 431). 147 people who had witnessed that had to witness the letting of the blood out of his dirty body, to run upon the pave ment to be licked up by hogs or dogs. The cowardly creature seems to have had, from the moment of his arrest, no thought about anything but saving his life. He wrote repeatedly to the King in the hope of getting par doned; but all to no purpose ; he had done what was wanted of him, the work of plunder was nearly over, he had, too, got a large share of the plunder which it was not corlvenient to leave in his hands ; and therefore, upon true "Reformation" principles, it was time to take away his life. He in his letters to the King most vehemently protested his innocence. Aye, no doubt of that ; but he was not more innocent than were the butchered abbots and monks, he was not more innocent than any one out of those thousands upon thousands whom he had quar tered, hanged, burned, or plundered ; and amongst all those thousands upon thousands there never was seen one, female or male, so complete a dastard as himself. In these letters to the tyrant he fawned on him in the most disgusting manner ; compared his smiles and frowns to those of God ; besought him to suffer him " to kiss his balmy hand once more that the fragrance thereof might make him fit for heaven ! " The base creature deserved his death, if it had only been for writing these letters. Fox, the " martyr " man, calls this Cromwell the " valiant soldier of the Reformation." Yes, there have been few soldiers to understand sacking better ; he was full of valour on foraging parties, and when he had to rifle monks and nuns and to rob altars ; a brave fellow when he had to stretch monks and nuns on the rack to make them confess treasonable words or thoughts ; but when death began to stare him in the face he was, assuredly, the most cowardly caitiff that ever died. It is hardly necessary to say that this man is a great favourite of Hume, who deeply laments Cromwell's fate, though he 148 has not a word of compassion to bestow upon all the, thousands that had been murdered or ruined by him/ He, as well as other historians, quotes from the concli^- sion of one of Cromwell's letters to the King these abject expressions : " I, a most woful prisoner, am ready to sub mit to death when it shall please God and your Majesty ; and yet the frail flesh incites me to call to your grace for mercy and pardon of mine offences. — Written at the Tower with the heavy heart and trembling hand of your High- ness's most miserable prisoner and poor slave, Thomas Cromwell. Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy 1 " That is the language of Fox's " valiant soldier." Fox meant valiant, not in the field or on the scaffold, but in the convent, pulling the rings from women's fingers and tearing the gold clasps from books : that was the Protestant valour of the " Reformation.'' Hume says that Cromwell "deserved a better fate." Never was fate more just or more appropriate. He had been the willing, the officious, the zealous, the eager agent in the execution of all the tyrannical, sacrilegious, and bloody deeds of his master, and had amongst other things been the very man who first suggested the condemning of people to death without trial. What could be more just than that he should die in the same way ? Not a tear was shed at his death, which produced on the spectators an effect such as is produced when the foulest of murderers expiate their crimes on the gallows. 190. During the seven years that the tyrant himself sur vived this bis cruel and dastardly vice-gerent, he was beset with disappointments, vexations, and torments of all sorts. He discovered at the end of a few months that his new queen had been, and still was, much such another as Anne Boleyn. He with very little ceremony sent her to the block, together with a-whole posse of her relations, lovers, and cronies. He raged and foamed like a wild beast, passed laws most bloody to protect himself against 149 lewdness and infidelity in his future wives, and got for his pains the ridicule of the nation and of all Europe. He for the last time took another wife ; but this time none would face his laws but a widow, and she very narrowly escaped the fate of the rest.^' He for some years before he died became, from his gluttony and debaucheries, an unwieldy and disgusting mass of flesh, moved about by means of mechanical inventions. But still he retained all the ferocity and bloody-mindedness of his former days. The principal business of his life was the ordering of accusations, executions, and confiscations. When on his death-bed every Cine was afraid to intimate his danger to him, lest death to the intimator should be the consequence ; and he died before he was well aware of his condition, leaving more than one death-warrant unsigned for want of time.^^ 191. Thus expired, in the year 1547, in the fifty-sixth year of his age and the thirty-eighth of his reign, \the most unjust, hard-hearted, meanest and most sanguinary tyrant that the world had ever beheld, whether Christian or heathen. That England which he found in peace, unity, plenty and happiness, he left torn by factions and schisms, her people wandering about in beggary and misery. He laid the foundations of immorality, dishonesty and pauperism, all which produced an abundant harvest '* This was Catharine Parr, widow of Lord Latimer, who with her brother, now created Earl of Essex in place of Cromwell, was an eager supporter of the reformed doctrines. Henry was married to her by Bishop Gardiner on July 12, 1543. Her zeal for the Reformation nearly brought about herJownfall, and upon her presuming to argue with her husband on theology, the Chancellor and the Bishop of Winchester received orders to prepare articles against her, but the order was countermanded (Lingard, History, vi., p. 351). " Henry died on January 28, 1547, at two o'clock in the morning. Parliament was then sitting, but the secret of the King's death was kept for three days. ISO in the reigns of his unhappy, barren, mischievous and miserable children, with whom, at the end of a few years, his house and his name were extinguished for evenj How he disposed of the plunder of the Church and tfie poor ; how his successors completed that work of confiscation which he had carried on so long ; how the nation sunk in point of character and of wealth ; how pauperism first arose in England ; and how were sown the seeds of that system of which we now behold the effects in the im poverishment and degradation of the main body of the people of England and Ireland ; all these will be shown in the next chapter, and shown, I trust, in a manner which will leave in the mind of every man of sense no doubt that, of all the scourges that ever afflicted this country, none is to be put in comparison with the Protestant " Reformation." 2" '".This account is somewhat exaggerated. Of the King's conduct during his sickness very little is known for certain, and still less about his statements on his death-bed. One of his last acts was to order the execution of the Earl of Surrey, and the King's death saved the Duke of Norfolk from a similar fate, to which he had given his assent the night previously (Lingard, History, vi., pp. 360-364). 151 CHAPTER VII. 192. Having shown that the thing impudently called the " Reformation " was begun in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood, I intended to show in the present chapter how the main body of the people were by these doings impoverished and degraded up to this time ; that is to say, I intended to trace the impoverish ment and degradation down to the end of the reign of the tyrant, Henry VIII. But upon reviewing my matter I think it best first to go through the whole of my account of the plunderings, persecutings and murderings of the " Reformation " people ; and when we have seen all the robberies and barbarities that they committed under the hypocritical pretence of religious zeal, or rather, when we have seen such of those robberies and barbarities as we can find room for, then I shah conclude with showing how enormously the nation lost by the change, and how that change made the main part of the people poor and wretched and degraded. By pursuing this plan I shall in one con cluding chapter give, or at east endeavour to give, a clear and satisfactory history of this impoverishment. I shaU take the present Protestant labourer and show him how his Catholic fcrefathers lived; and if cold potatoes and water, if this poorer than pig-diet, have not quite taken away ah the natural qualities of English blood, I shall make him execrate the plunderers and hypocrites by whom IS2 was produced that change which has finally led to his present misery and to nine-tenths of that mass of corrup tion and crime, public and private, which now threatens to uproot society itself. 193. In pursuance of this plan, and in conformity with my promise to conclude my little work in ten chapters, I shall distribute my matter thus : — in chapter VII. (the present) the deeds and events of the reign of Edward VI. In chapter VIIL, those of the reign of Queen Mary. In chapter IX., those of the reign of Queen Elizabeth ; and in chapter X., the facts and arguments to establish my main point, namely, that the thing impudently called the " Reformation " impoverished and degraded the main body of the people. In the course of the first three of these chapters I shall not touch, except incidentally, upon the impoverishing and degrading effects of the change, but shall reserve these for the last chapters, when, having witnessed the horrid means, we will take an undivided-view of the consequences, tracing those consequences down to the present day. 194. One of Henry's last acts was a will by which he made his infant son his immediate successor, with remain der, in case he died without issue, to his daughter Mary first, and then in default of issue again, to his daughter Elizabeth, though, observe, both the daughters had been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament, and though the latter was born of Anne Boleyn while the king's first wife, the mother of Mary, was ahve. Parhament had given the king the right to determine the succession by will. 195. To carry this will into execution, and to govern the kingdom until Edward, who was then ten years of age, should be eighteen years of age, there were sixteen execu tors appointed, amongst whom was Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and the "honest Cranmer."^ These sixteen " Hertford, whilst keeping the death of the King secret, had the will in his private keeping. " The fact," writes Tytler, "increases the suspicion 153 worthies began by taking, in the most solemn manner, an oath to stand to and maintain the last will of their master. Their second act was to break that oath by making Hertford, who was a brother of Jane Seymour, the King's mother, " protector," though the will gave equal powers to all the executors.^ Their next step was to give new peer ages to some of themselves. The fourth, to award to the new peers grants of the pubhc money. The fifth was to lay aside at the coronation the ancient English custom of asking the people if they were wilHng to have and obey the King. The sixth was " to attend at a solemn high mass."' And the seventh was to begin a series of acts for the total subversion of all that remained of the Catholic religion in England, and for the effecting of all that Old Harry had left uneffected in the way of plunder. 196. The monasteries were gone ; the cream had been taken off; but there remained the skimmed milk of church altars, chantries and guilds. Old Harry would doubtless, if he had lived much longer, have plundered these ; but he had not done it, and he could not do it without openly be coming Protestant, which, for the reasons stated in para graph loi, he would not do. But Hertford and his fifteen brother worthies had in their way no such obstacle as the ruffian king had had. The church altars, the chantries which hangs over this extraordinary document. They (the Earl and his associates) opened it before the King or the Parliament were made ac quainted with the late king's death ; they held a consultation what portions of this deed were proper to be communicated to the great council of the nation" (England under the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, i.,p. rg). ^ Before the will was made public, Hertford adopts the position of superior and already assumes the tone and authority of Protector, " another proof that all had been privately arranged" (ibid.). On February i, 1547, Hertford was nominated Protector by the Council, and on February 15 was made Duke of Somerset. " The solemn obsequies of Henry VIIL, conducted with all the usual Catholic rites, commenced with Vespers of the Dead on February 2, 1547- 15 + and the guilds contained something valuable, and they longed to be at it. The power of the Pope was gotten rid of, the country had been sacked, the poor had been, despoiled; but still there were some pickings left. The piety of ages had made every church, however small, con tain some gold and silver appertaining to the altar. The' altars in the parish churches, and generally in the cathe drals, had been left as yet untouched ; for though the wife-killer had abjured the Pope, whose power he had taken to himself, he still professed to be of the Catholic faith, and he maintained the mass and the sacraments and creeds with fire and faggot. Therefore he had left the church altars unplundered. But they contained gold, silver, and other valuables, and the worthies saw these with longing eyes and itching fingers. 197. To seize them, however, there required a pretext, and what pretext could there be short of declaring at once that the Catholic rehgion was false and wicked, and, of course, that there ought to be no altars, and, of course, no gold and silver things appertaining to them! The sixteen worthies, with Hertford at their head and with Cranmer amongst them, had had the King crowned as a Catholic, he as well as they had taken the oaths as CathoHcs, they had sworn to uphold that reiigion, they had taken him to a high mass after his coronation :* but the altars had good things about them ; there was plunder remaining, and to get at this remaining plunder the Catliolic religion must be wholly put down. There were doubtless some fanatics, some who imagined that the religion of nine hundred years' stand ing ought not to be changed, some who had not plunder and plunder only in view ; but it is impossible for any man ' Edward was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Shrove Tuesday, Feb. 20, 1547. For the form used see Collier, Ecclesiastical History (ed. 1846), ix., p. 227, seqq. The King's oath was taken on the Blessed Sacrament, and after the ceremony the order says : " Then shall the King be led to his travers to hear the high mass." IS5 of common sense, of unperverted mind, to look at the history of this transaction, at this open avowal of Pro testantism, at this change from the religion of England to that of a part of Germany, without being convinced that the principal authors of it had plunder and plunder only in view. 198. The old tyrant died in 1547, and by the end of 1549 Cranmer, who had tied so many Protestants to the stake for not being Catholics, had pretty nearly completed a system of Protestant worship.^ He first prepared a book of homilies" and a catechism,' in order to pave the way. Next came a law to allow the clergy to have wives,^ and then, when all things had been prepared, came the Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments.' Gardiner, who was Bishop of Winchester, reproached Cranmer with his duplicity, reminded him of the zeal with which he had upheld the Catholic worship under the late ' "The really Protestant character of the settlement of 1549, even if it had been taken literally, and not with the relaxation which those who observed it, from Parker to Cosin, permitted themselves, has never been insisted upon as fully or clearly as historical accuracy demands " (A. J. Beresford Hope, Worship in the Church of England, 2nd ed., p. 141). ° The Book of Homilies was published in July, 1547, and their reading enjoined on every Sunday except when a sermon was preached. ' The Catechism was mainly a translation of the Lutheran Catechism designed for Nuremberg, which Justus Jonas had turned into Latin. Cranmer's English version, which contained sundry additions of his own, was issued from the press in August, 1548. " Convocation on December 18, 1547, recorded its vote for permitting the clergy to marry by 53 to 22 (Wilkins, Concilia, iv., p. 17). " The Act of Uniformity which imposed the English Book of Common Prayer, was finally voted on Tuesday, January 15, 1549. Of the bishops ten voted for the measure and eight against it For a discussion upon the character of this service-book, see Gasquet and Bishop, Edward VI. and the Book of Common Prayer, chapters xii., xiii. The Convocation was apparently not consulted in the matter of the proposed changes (see ibid., chapter x. ). 156 king, and would have made him hang himself or cut his throat if he had had the slightest remains of shame in him. 199. This new system did not, however, go far enough for the fanatics, and there instantly appeared arrayed against it whole tribes of new lights on the Continent ; so that Cranmer, cunning as he was, soon found that he had undertaken no easy matter. The proclamations put forth upon this occasion were disgustingly ridiculous, coming as they did in the name of a king only ten years of age, and ex pressed in words so solemnly pompous and full of arrogance. However, the chief object was the plunder, and to get at this nothing was spared. There were other things to attract the grasp, but it will be unnecessary to dwell very particularly on anything but the altars and the churches. This was the real " reformation reign," for it was a reign of robbery and hypocrisy without anything to be compared with them, — anything in any country or in any age. Religion, conscience, was always the pretext ; but in one way or another robbery, plunder, was always the end. The people, once so united and so happy, became divided into innumerable sects, no man knowing hardly what to believe, and, indeed, no one knowing what it was lawful for him to say, for it soon became impossible for the common people to know what was heresy and what was not heresy. 200. That prince of hypocrites, Cranmer, who, during the reign of Henry had condemned people to the flames for not believing in transubstantiation, was now ready to condemn them for believing in it. We have seen that Luther was the beginner of the work of " reformation,'' but he was soon followed by further reformers on the Continent. These had made many attempts to propagate their doctrines in England, but old Henry had kept them down. Now, however, when the churches were to be robbed of what remained in them, and when, to have 157 pretext for that robbery, it was necessary to make a com plete change in the form of worship, these sectarians all flocked to England, which became one great scene of reli gious disputation. Some were for the Common Prayer- Book, others proposed alterations in it, others were for abolishing it altogether ; and there now began that divi sion, that multiplicity of hostile opinions, which has con tinued to the present day. Cranmer employed a part of the resources of the country to feed and fatten those of these religious, or rather impious, adventurers who sided with him and who chose the best market for their doc trines. England was overrun by these foreign traders in religion, and this nation, so jealous of foreign influence, was now compelled to bend its haughty neck, not only to foreigners but to foreigners of the most base and infamous character and description. Cranmer could not find Eng lishmen sufficiently supple to be his tools in executing the work that he had in hand. The Protector, Hertford, whom we must now call Somerset (the child-king having made him Duke of Somerset), was the greatest of all " reformers '' that had yet appeared in the world, and, as we shall soon see, the greatest and most audacious of all the plunderers that this infamous reformation has pro duced, save and except Henry himself. The total aboli tion of the Catholic worship was necessary to his projects of plunder, and therefore he was a great encourager of these greedy and viHainous foreigners. 201. The consequences to the morals of the people were such as were naturally to be expected. All historians agree that vice of all sorts and crimes of every kind were never so great and so numerous before. This was con fessed by the teachers themselves, and yet the Protestants have extolled this reign as the reign of conscience and religion l'" it was so manifest that the change was a bad '° Linr'ard (History, vi., p. 107), after pointing out the poverty and discontent which cuulJ be traced to these changes, adds :— " Nor were the 158 one, that men could not have proceeded in it from error. Its mischiefs were all manifest before the death of the tyrant ; that death afforded an opportunity for returning into the right path, but there was plunder remaining, and the plunderers went on. The " Reformation " was not the work of virtue, of fanaticism, of error, of ambition, but of a love of plunder. This was its great animating prin ciple ; in this it began, and in this it proceeded till there was nothing left for it to work on. 202. Henry had, in certain cases, enabled his minions to rob the bishoprics, but now there was a grand sweep at them. The Protector took the lead, and his example was followed by others. They took so much from one, so much from another, and some they wholly suppressed, as that of Westminster, and took their estates to themselves." There were many chantries (private property to all intents and purposes), free chapels (also private property), alms houses, hospitals, guilds or fraternities, the property of which was as much private property as the funds of any national morals improved, if we may judge from the portraits drawn by the most eminent of the reformed preachers. They assert that the sufferings of the indigent were viewed with indifference by the hard-heartedness of the rich ; that in pursuit of gain the most bare-faced frauds were avowed and justified ; that robbers and murderers escaped punishment by the par tiality of juries and the corruption of judges ; that church livings were given to laymen or converted to the use of patrons ; that marriages were re peatedly dissolved by private authority, and that the haunts of prostitu tion were miUtiplied beyond measure." After warning the reader that perhaps these pulpit declamations may not be the best evidence, the historian concludes that there is ample evidence " that the change of religious polity, by reinoving many of the former restraints on vice and enervating the authority of the spiritual courts, had given a bolder front to licentiousness, and opened a wider scope to the indulgence of criminal passion." " For example, the temporalities of the see of Exeter in the reign of Henry VIII. amounted to ;i^l,566 14s. 6d. per annum, and by the 5th of Edward VI. they had been reduced to ^£'421 (Rymer, xv., 282-289). 159 friendly society now are.''' All these became lawful plunder. And yet there are men who pretend that what is now possessed by the Established Church is of so sacred a nature as not to be touched by Act of Parliament ! This was the reign in which this our present Established Church was founded, for though the fabric was overset by Mary it was raised again by Elizabeth. Now it was that it was made. It was made, and the new worship along with it, by Acts of Parliament. It had its very birth in division, disunion, discord, and its life has been worthy of its birth. The property it possesses was taken nomi nally from the Catholic Church, but in reality from that Church, and also from the widow, the orphan, the indigent and the stranger. The pretext for making it was that it would cause a union of sentiment amongst the people, that it would compose all dissensions. The truth, the obvious truth, that there could be but one true religion, was acknowledged and loudly proclaimed, and it was not to be denied that there were already twenty, the teachers of every one of which declared that all the others were false, and, of course, that they were, at the very least, no better than no religion at aU. Indeed, this is the language of common sense, though it is now so fashionable to disclaim the doctrine of exclusive salvation. I ask the Unitarian parson or prater, for instance, why he takes upon him that office ; why he does not go and follow some trade, or why he does not work in the fields. His answer is that he is more usefully employed in teach ing. If I ask of what use his teaching is, he tells me, he Winchester, which had been ^^3,885 3s. 3jd. under the successor of Gardiner, was only ;£'l,333 6s. 8d. The richer bishoprics had their revenues reduced about two-thirds, the others about one half (see Lingard, History, vol. vii., 3rd ed., note, p. 146). «Dodd (Church History, i., p. 348) says the free chapels and chantries dissolved by this Act (i Edward VI., c. 14) were " 2,374, all endowed with lands, pensions and moveable goods to an immense value." i6o must tell me, that his teaching is necessary to the salvation of souls. Well, say I, but why not leave that business to the Established Church, to which the people all pay tithes ? Oh no, says he, I cannot do that, because the Church does not teach the true religion. Well, say I, but true or false, if it serve for salvation, what signifies it ? Here I have him penned up in a corner. He is compefled to confess that he is a fellow wanting to lead an easy life by pander ing to the passions or whims of conceited persons, or to insist that his sort of belief and teaching are absolutely necessary to salvation ; as he will not confess the former he is obliged to insist on the latter, and here, after all his railing against the intolerance of the Catholics, he main tains the doctrine of exclusive salvation. 203. Two true religions, two true creeds, differing from each other, contradicting each other, present us with an impossibility ; what then are we to think of twenty or forty creeds, each differing from all the rest ? If deism or atheism be something not only wicked in itself, but so mischievous in its effects as to call — in case of the public profession of it — for imprisonment for years and years, if this be the case, what are we to think of laws, the same laws too which inflict that cruel punishment, tolerating and encouraging a multiplicity of creeds, all but one of which must be false ? A code of laws acknowledging and tolerat ing but one religion is consistent in punishing the deist and the atheist, but if it acknowledge or tolerate more than one it acknowledges or tolerates one false one, and let divines say whether a false religion is not as bad as deism or atheism ? Besides, is it just to punish the deist or the atheist for not believing in the Christian religion at all, when he sees the law tolerate so many religions, all but one of which must be false ? What is the natural effect of men seeing constantly before their eyes a score or two of different sects, all calling themselves Christians, all tolerated by the law, and each openly declaring that all i6i the rest are false ? The natural, the necessary effect is, that many men will believe that none of them have truth on their side, and of course that the thing is false alto gether, and invented solely for the benefit of those who teach it and who dispute about it. 204. The law should acknowledge and tolerate but one religion, or it should know nothing at all about the matter. The Catholic code was consistent. It said that there was but one true religion, and it punished as offenders those who dared openly to profess any opinion contrary to that religion. Whether that were the true religion or not we have not now to inquire ; but while its long continuance — and in so many nations too — was a strong presumptive proof of its good moral effects upon the people, the dis agreement amongst the Protestants was and is a presump tive proof not less strong of its truth. If, as I observed upon a former occasion, there be forty persons who — and whose fathers for countless generations — have up to this day entertained a certain belief, and if thirty-nine of these say at last that this belief is erroneous, we may naturally enough suppose, or at least we may think it possible, that the truth so long hidden is, though late, come to light. But if the thirty-nine begin, aye, and instantly begin, to entertain, instead of the one old belief, thirty-nine new beliefs, each differing from all the other thirty-eight, must we not in common justice decide that the old belief must have been the true one? What! shall we hear these thirty-nine protestors against the ancient faith each pro testing against all the other thirty-eight, and still beheve that their joint protest was just ? Thirty-eight of them must now be in error ; this must be : and are we still to believe in the correctness of their former decision, and that, too, relating to the same identical matter ? If in a trial relating to the dimensions of a piece of land, which had been proved to have always been, time without mind, taken for twenty acres, there were one surveyor to swear II l62 that it contained twenty acres, and each of thirty-nine other surveyors to swear each of the other number of acres between one and forty, what judge and jury would hesitate a moment in crediting him who swore to the twenty, and in wholly rejecting the testimony of all the rest ? 205. Thus the argument would stand on the supposition that thirty-nine parts out of forty of all Christendom had protested ; but there were not, and there are not even unto this day, two parts out of fifty. So that here we have thirty-nine persons breaking off from about two thousand, protesting against the faith which the whole, and their fathers, have held ; we have each of these thirty-nine instantly protesting that all the other thirty-eight have protested upon false grounds; and yet we are to believe that their joint protest against the faith of the two thousand, who are backed by all antiquity, was wise and just ! Is this the way in which we decide in other cases ? Did honest men, and men not blinded by passion or by some base motive, ever decide thus before ? Besides, if the Catholic faith were so false as it is by some pretended to be, how comes it not to have been extirpated before now ? When, indeed, the Pope had very great power, when even kings were compelled to bend to him, it might be said, and pretty fairly said, that no one dared use the weapons of reason against the Catholic faith. But we have seen the Pope a prisoner in a foreign land ; we have seen him without scarcely food and raiment ; and we have seen the press of more than half the world at liberty to treat him and his faith as it pleased to treat them. But have we not seen the Protestant sects at work for three hundred years to destroy the Cathohc faith ? Do we not see, at the end of those three hundred years, that that faith is still the reigning faith of Christendom ? Nay, do we not see that it is gaining ground at this very moment, even in this kingdom itself, where a Protestant hierarchy receives eight millions sterling a year, and where Catholics i63 were rigidly excluded from all honour and power and, in some cases, from all political and civil rights under a constitution founded by their Catholic ancestors ? Can it be then that this faith is false ? Can it be that this wor ship is idolatrous ? Can it be that it was necessary to abolish them in England as far as law could do it ? Can it be that it was for our good, our honour, to sack our country, to violate all the rights of property, to deluge the country with blood, in order to change our religion ? 206. But in returning now to the works of the plun derers, we ought to remark that, in discussions of this sort, it is a common but a very great error to keep our eyes so exclusively fixed on mere matters of religion. The Catholic Church included in it a great deal more than the business of teaching religion and of practising worship and administering sacraments. It had a great deal to do with the temporal concerns of the people. It provided, and amply provided, for all the wants of the poor and dis tressed. It received back, in many instances, what the miser and extortioner had taken unfairly, and applied it to works of beneficence. It contained a great body of land proprietors whose revenues were distributed in various ways amongst the people at large, upon terms always singularly advantageous to the latter. It was a great and powerful estate, independent both of the aristocracy and the crown, and naturally siding with the people. But above all things, it was a provider for the poor and a keeper of hospitality. By its charity and by its benevo lence towards its tenants and dependants, it mitigated the rigour of proprietorship, and held society together by the ties of religion rather than by the trammels and terrors of the law. It was the great cause of that description of tenants called life-holders, who formed a most important link in the chain of society, coming after the proprietors in fee and before the tenant at will, participating, in some degree, of the proprietorship of the estate, and yet, not 1 64 wholly without dependence on the proprietor." This race of persons, formerly so numerous in England, has by degrees become almost wholly extinct, their place having been supplied by a comparatively few rack-renters and by swarms of miserable paupers. The Catholic Church held the lending pf money for interest, or gain, to be directly in the face of the Gospel. It considered all such gain as usurious and, of course, criminal. It taught the making of loans without interest ; and thus it prevented the greedy-minded from amassing wealth in that way in which wealth is most easily amassed. Usury amongst Christians was wholly unknown, until the wife-killing tyrant had laid his hands on the property of the Church and the poor. The principles of the Catholic Church all partook of generosity ; it was their great characteristic, as selfishness is the characteristic of that Church which was established in its stead. 207. The plunder which remained after the seizure of the monasteries was comparatively small ; but still, the very leavings of the old tyranny, the mere gleanings of the harvest of plunder, were something ; and these were not suffered to remain. The plunder of the churches, parochial as well as collegiate, was preceded by all sorts of antics played in those churches. Calvin had got an influence opposed to that of Cranmer ; so that there was almost open war amongst these Protestants, which party "Lingard (History, vi., p. 107) says : "Within the realm poverty and discontent generally prevailed. The extension of enclosures, and the new practice of letting lands at rack rents, had driven from their homes numerous families, whose fathers had occupied the same farms for several generations, and the increasing multitudes of the poor began to resort tq the more populous towns in search of that relief which had been formerly distributed at the gates of the monasteries. Thus Lever exclaims : ' 0 merciful Lord ; what a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly, yea, with idle vagabonds and dissembling caitiffs mixed among them, lie and creep, begging in the many streets of London and Westminster.'" i6s should have the teaching of the people. After due pre paration in this way, the robbery was set about in due form. Every church altar had, as I have before observed, more or less of gold and silver. A part consisted of images, a part of censers, candlesticks, and other things used in the celebration of the mass. The mass was, therefore, abolished, and there was no longer to be an altar, but a table in its stead. The fanatical part of the reforiners amused themselves with quarrelling about the part of the church where the table was to stand, about the shape of it, and whether the head of it was to be placed to the north, the east, the west, or the south, and whether the people were to stand, kneel, or sit at it ! The plunderers, however, thought about other things : they thought about the value of the images, censers, and the like. 208. To reconcile the people to these innovations the plunderers had a Bible contrived for the purpose, which Bible was a perversion of the original text wherever it was found to be necessary. Of all the acts of this hypocritical and plundering reign this was, perhaps, the basest. In it we see the true character of the heroes of the " Protestant Reformation " ; and the poor and miserable labourers of England, who now live upon potatoes and water, feel the consequences of the deeds of the infamous times of which I am speaking. . Every preparation being made the rob bery began, and a general plunder of churches took place by royal and parliamentary authority ! The robbers took away everything valuable, even down to the vestments of the priests. Such mean rapacity never was heard of before, and for the honour of human nature let us hope that it will never be heard of again. It seems that Eng land was really become a den of thieves, and of thieves, too, of the lowest and most despicable character. 209. The Protector, Somerset, did not forget himself. Having plundered four or five of the bishoprics he needed 1 66 a palace in London. For the purpose of building this palace, which was erected in the Strand, London, and which was called " Somerset House," as the place is called to this day, he took from three bishops their town houses. He pulled these down, together with a parish church, in order to get a suitable spot for the erection. The materials of these demolished buildings being insuf ficient for his purpose, he pulled down a part of the build ings appertaining to the then cathedral of Saint Paul; the church of Saint John, near Smithfield ; Barking chapel, near the Tower ; the college church of Saint Martin-le-Grand; St. Ewen's church, Newgate ; and the parish church of Saint Nicholas. He, besides these, ordered the pulling down of the parish church of Saint Margaret, Westminster ; but, says Dr. Heylyn, " the workmen had no sooner advanced their scaffolds when the parishioners gathered together in great multitudes with bows and arrows and staves and clubs, which so terrified the workmen that they ran away in great amazement, and never could be brought again upon that employ ment." " Thus arose Somerset House, the present grand seat of the power of fiscal grasping. It was first erected literally with the ruins of churches, and- it now serves, under its old name, as the place from which issue the mandates to us to give up the fruit of our earnings to pay the interest of a debt which is one of the evident and great consequences of the " Protestant Reformation," without which that debt never could have existed. 210. I am, in the last chapter, to give an account of the impoverishment and degradation that these and former Protestant proceedings produced amongst the people at large ; but I must here notice that the people heartily detested these Protestant tyrants and their acts. General discontent prevailed, and this, in some cases, broke out " Ecclesia Restaurata, Edward VI. , p. 72. 167 into open insurrection. It is curious enough to observe the excuses that Hume, in giving an account of these times, attempts to make for the plunderers and their "reformation." It was his constant aim to blacken the Catholic institutions, and particularly the character and conduct of the Catholic clergy. Yet he could not pass over these discontents and risings of the people ; and, as there must have been a cause for these, he is under the necessity of ascribing them to the badness of the change, or to find out some other cause. He therefore goes to work in a very elaborate manner to make his readers believe that the people were in error as to the tendency of the change. He says that " scarce any institution can be imagined less favourable, in the main, to the interests of mankind," than that of the Catholic; yet, says he, "as it was followed by many good effects, which had ceased with the suppression of the monasteries, that suppression was very much regretted by the people." He then pro ceeds to describe the many benefits of the monastic in stitutions ; says that the monks, always residing on their estates, caused a diffusion of good constantly around them ; that, " not having equal motives to avarice with other men, they were the best arid most indulgent land lords " ; that, when the church lands became private pro perty, the rents were raised, the money spent at a distance from the estates, and the tenants exposed to the rapacity of stewards ; that whole estates were laid waste ; that the tenants were expelled, and that even the cottagers were deprived of the commons on which they formerly fed their cattle ; that a great decay of the people, as well as a diminution of former plenty, was remarked in the king dom ; that at the same time the coin had been debased by Henry, and was now further debased ; that the good coin was hoarded or exported ; that the common people were thus robbed of part of their wages ; that " complaints were heard in every part of the kingdom." i68 211. Well, was not this change a bad one then ? And what are the excuses which are offered for it by this calumniator of the Catholic institutions? Why, he says that " their hospitality and charity gave encouragement to idleness and prevented the increase of public wealth ; " and that, "as it was by an addition alone of toil that the people were able to live, this increase of industry was at last the effect of the present situation, an effect very beneficial to society." What does he mean by "the present situation ? " The situation of the country, I sup pose, at the time when he wrote ; and though the "Refor mation " had not then produced pauperism and misery and debt and taxes equal to the present, it was on the way to do it. But what does he mean by " public riches ? '' The Catholic institutions "provided against the pressure of want amongst the people, but prevented the increase of ' public riches ! ' " What, again I ask, is the meaning of the words " public riches ? " What is, or ought to be, the end of all government and of every institution ? Why, the happiness of the people. But this man seems, like Adam Smith, and indeed like almost every Scotch writer, to have a notion that there may be great public good though pro ducing individual misery. They seem always to regard the people as so many cattle working for an indescribable something that they call " the public." The question with them is not whether the people, for whose good all govern ment is instituted, be well off or wretched, but whether the " public " gain or lose money or money's worth. I am able to show, and I shall show, that England was a greater country before the " Reformation " than since ; that it was greater positively and relatively; that its real wealth was greater. But what we have at present to observe is that, thus far at any rate, the Reformation had produced general misery amongst the common people, and that accordingly complaints were heard from one end of the kingdom to the other. 1 69 212. The Book of Common Prayer was to put an end to all dissensions; but its promulgation and the consequent robbery of the churches were followed by open insurrection in many of the counties, by battles, and executions by martial law. The whole kingdom was in commotion, but particularly, to the great honour of those counties, in Devonshire and Norfolk. In the former county the insur gents were superior in force to the hired troops and had besieged Exeter, Lord RusseU was sent against them, and at last, reinforced by German troops, he defeated them, executed many by martial law, and most gallantly hanged a priest on the top of the tower of his church !'° This, I suppose, Mr. Brougham reckons amongst those services of the family of Russell which he tells us England can never repay ! In Norfolk the insurrection was still more formidable, but was finally suppressed by the aid of foreign troops, and was also followed by the most barbarous execu tions. The people of Devonshire complained of the altera tions in religion, " that," as Dr. Heylyn (a Protestant divine) expresses it, " the free-born commonalty was op pressed by a small number of gentry, who glutted them selves with pleasures, while the poor commons, wasted by daily labour like pack-horses, live in extreme slavery ; and that holy rites established by antiquity were abolished and a new form of religion obtruded ; "'° and they demanded that the mass and a part of the monasteries should be restored, and that priests should not be ahowed to marry. '^ The foreign troops were chiefly German mercenaries, but there were also some Italians under Malatesta and Baptista Spinoli. " Most of the raskal rabble were executed by martial law, and the vicar of St. Thomas, one of the principal incendiaries, was hanged on the top of his own tower, apparalled in his popish weeds, with his beads at his girdle " (Heylyn, History of the Reformation, ed. 1670, p. 76). For the orders of Lord Grey for the execution of other priests on the steeples of their own parish churches, see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, p. 20, No. 32. ^ Jieylyn, ut sup., p. 77. 170 Similar were the complaints and the demands everywhere else ; but Cranmer's Prayer Book and the Church "by law established," backed by foreign bayonets, finally triumphed, at least for the present, and during the remainder of this hypocritical, base, corrupt and tyrannical reign. 213. Thus arose the Protestant Church as by law estab lished. Here we see its origin. Thus it was that it commenced its career. How different, alas I from the commencement of that Church of England which arose under St. Austin at Canterbury, which had been cherished so carefully by Alfred the Great, and under the wings of which the people of England had for nine hundred years seen their country the greatest in the world, and had them selves lived in ease and plenty and real freedom, superior to those of all other nations ! " 214. Somerset, who had brought his own brother to the block in 1549, chiefly because he had opposed himself to his usurpations (though both were plunderers), was, not long after the commission of the above cruelties on the people, destined to come to that block himself. Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who was his rival in baseness and in justice and his superior in talent, had out-intrigued him in the Council ; and at last he brought him to that end which he so well merited. On what grounds this was done is wholly uninteresting. It was a set of most wicked men circumventing and, if necessary, destroying each other ; but it is worthy of remark that amongst the crimes alleged against this great culprit was his having brought foreign troops into the kingdom ! This was, to be sure, rather ungrateful in the pious reformers, for it was those troops that established for them their new rehgion. But it Was good to see them putting their leader to death, actually cutting off his head, for having caused their pro jects to succeed. It was, in plain words, a dispute about the plunder. Somerset had got more than his brother plunderers deemed his share. He was building a palace 171 for himself, and if each plunderer could have had a palace it would have been peace amongst them ; but as this could not be the rest called him a " traitor," and as the King, the Protestant Edward, had signed the death-warrant of one uncle at the instigation of another uncle, he now signed the death-warrant of that other, he himself being even now only fifteen years of age ! " " 215. Warwick, who was now become Protector, was made Duke of Northumberland, and got granted to him the immense estates of that ancient house, which had fallen into the hands of the crown. This was, if possible, a more zealous Protestant than the last Protector ; that is to say, still more profligate, rapacious and cruel. The work of plundering the Church went on until there re mained scarcely anything worthy of the name of clergy. Many parishes were in all parts of the kingdom united in one, and having but one priest amongst them. But in deed there were hardly any persons left worthy of the name of clergy. 216. The King, who was a poor sickly lad, seems to have had no distinctive characteristic except that of hatred to the Catholics and their religion, in which hatred Cranmer and others had brought him up. His life was not likely to be long, and Northumberland, who was now his keeper, conceived the project of getting the crown into his own family, a project quite worthy of a hero of the " Reforma tion." In order to carry this project into effect, he mar ried one of his sons. Lord Guilford Dudley, to Lady Jane Grey, who, next after Mary and Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scotland, was heiress to the throne." Having done this, he got Edward to make a will settling the crown on this Lady Jane, to the exclusion of his two sisters. The advocates of the " Reformation," who of course praise this " Somerset was executed January 22, 1552. " Lady Jane Grey was the granddaughter of Mary, sister to Henry VIII. 172 boy-king, in whose reign the new Church was invented, tell us long stories about the way in which Northumberland persuaded Edward to do this act of injustice ; but in all probability there is not a word of truth in the story. How ever, what they say is this : that Lady Jane was a sincere Protestant, that the young King knew this, and that his anxiety for the security of the Protestant religion induced him to consent to Northumberland's proposition. 217. The settlement met with great difficulty when it came to be laid before the lawyers, who somehow or other always contrived to keep their heads out of the halter. Even Henry's judges used, when hard pressed, to refer him to the Parliament for the committing of violations of law. The judges, the lord chancellor, the secretaries of state, the privy council, all were afraid to put their names to this transfer of the crown. The thing was, however, at last accomplished, and with the signature of Cranmer to it ; though he, as one of the late king's executors, and the first upon that list, had sworn in the most solemn manner to maintain his will, according to which will the two sisters, in case of no issue by the brother, were to succeed that brother on the throne. Thus, in addition to his fourth act of notorious perjury, this maker of the Book of Common Prayer became clearly guilty of high treason.^' He now at last, in spite of all his craft, had woven his own halter, and that, too, beyond all doubt for the purpose of preserving his bishopric. The Princess Mary was next heir to the throne. He had divorced her mother, he had been the principal agent in that unjust and most wicked transac tion ; and besides, he knew that Mary was immovably a Catholic, and that of course her accession must be the " The judges, when asked to draw up the deed of settlement, had in formed the lords of the council that such an instrument would subject both those who had drawn it and those who advised it to the punishmeni of traitors. 173 death of his office and his Church. Therefore he now com mitted the greatest crime known to the laws, and that, too, from the basest of motives.^" 218. The King having made this settlement, and being kept wholly in the hands of Northumberlanti, who had placed his creatures about him, would naturally, as was said at the time, not live long ! In short, he died on the 6th of July, 1553, in the sixteenth year of his age and the seventh of his reign, expiring on the same day of the year that his father had brought Sir Thomas More to the block.^ These were seven of the most miserable and most inglorious years that England had ever known. Fanaticism and roguery, hypocrisy and plunder, divided the country between them. The people were wretched beyond all description ; from the plenty of Catholic times they had been reduced to general beggary ; and then, in order to repress this beggary, laws the most ferocious were passed to prevent even starving creatures from ask ing alms. Abroad as well as at home the nation sunk in the eyes of the world. The town of Boulogne in France, which had been won by Catholic Englishmen, the base Protestant rulers now, from sheer cowardice, surrendered ; and from one end of Europe to the other were heard jeer ing and scoffing at this formerly great and lofty nation. Hume, who finds goodness in every one who was hostile to the Catholic institutions, says : " All English historians dwell with pleasure on the excellencies of this young King, ¦° Cranmer, in his letter to Queen Mary, confesses that he acted against his judgment and conscience (Strype, Cranmer, App., No. 74). ^' It was reported at the time that Edward had died from poison ad ministered to him by Northumberland, or in his interests (Original Letters, ed. Parker Society, Nos. 182, 325). The opinion that Edward had been removed to make way for Queen Jane was so general that the Emperor wrote to Queen Mary that she ought to put to death all conspirators who had any hand in " the death " of the late king (cf. Lingard, History, vi., p. 116, note). 174 whom the flattering promises of hope, joined to many real virtues, had made an object of the most tender affections of the public. He possessed mildness of disposition, a capacity to learn and to judge, and attachment to equity and justice." Of his mildness we have, I suppose, a proof in his assenting to the burning of several Protestants who did not protest in his way ; in his signing of the death- warrants of his two uncles, and in his wish to bring his sister Mary to trial for not cofaforming to what she deemed blasphemy, and from doing which he was deterred only by the menaces of the Emperor, her cousin. So much for his mildness. As for his justice, who can doubt of that who thinks of his will to disinherit his two sisters, even after the judges had unanimously declared to him that it was contrary to law ? The " tender affection " that the people had for him was, doubtless, evinced by their rising in insurrection against his ordinances from one end of the kingdom to the other, and by their demanding the restora tion of that religion which all his acts tended wholly to extirpate. But besides these internal proofs of the false hoods of Hume's description, Dr. Heylyn, who is, at least, one of " all the EngHsh historians," and one, too, whom Hume himself refers to no less than twenty-four times in the part of his history relating to this very reign, does not " dwell with pleasure on the excellencies of this young prince," of whom he, in the fourth paragraph of his pre face, speaks thus: "King Edward, whose death I cannot reckon for an infelicity to the Church of England, for, being ill-principled in himself and easily inclined to em brace such counsels as were offered him, it is not to be thought but that the rest of the bishoprics (before suffi ciently impoverished) would have followed that of Durham, and the poor church be left as destitute as when she came into the world in her natural nakedness." ^ Aye, but this '" Heylyn, History of the Reformation, To the Reader, p. 4 (2nd edition, 1670). 175 was his great merit in the eyes of Hume. He should have said so then, and should have left his good character of tyrant in the egg to rest on his own opinion, and not have said that " all EngHsh historians dwelt with pleasure on his excellencies." 219. The settlement of the crown had been kept a secret from the people, and so was the death of the King, for three whole days. In the meanwhile Northumberland, seeing the death of the young King approaching, had, in conjunction, observe, with Cranmer and the rest of his council, ordered the two princesses to come near to London, under pretence that they might be at hand to comfort their brother, but with the real design of putting them into prison the moment the breath should be out of his body. Traitors, foul conspirators, villains of all descriptions have this in common, that they, when necessary to their own interest, are always ready to betray each other. Thus it happened here ; for the Earl of Arundel, who was one of the council, and who went with Dudley and others on the tenth of July to kneel before Lady Jane as Queen, had in the night of the sixth sent a secret messenger to Mary, who was no farther off than Hoddesdon, informing her of the death of her brother and of the whole plot against her. Thus warned she set off on horseback, accompanied by only a few servants, to Kenninghall, in Norfolk, whence she proceeded to Fram lingham, in Suffolk, and thence issued her commands to the council to proclaim her as their sovereign, hinting at but not positively accusing them with their treasonable designs.^' They had on the day before proclaimed Lady Jane to be Queen ! They had taken all sorts of precautions to ensure their success : army, fleet, treasure, all the powers of government were in their hands. They therefore re- ^ Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, vi., p. 385. Mary's letter is dated July 9, 1553. 176 turned her a most insolent answer, and commanded her to submit, as a dutiful subject, to the lawful queen ; at the bottom of which command Cranmer's name stood first. ^ 220. Honesty and sincerity exult to contemplate the misgivings which, in a few hours afterwards, seized this band of almost unparalleled viflains. The nobility and gentry had instantly flocked to the standard of Mary; and the people, even in London, who were most infected with the pestiferous principles of the foreign miscreants that had been brought from the continent to teach them the new religion, had native honesty enough left to make them disapprove, of this last and most daring of robberies.^ Ridley, the Protestant bishop of London, preached at St. Paul's to the Lord Mayor and a numerous assemblage for the purpose of persuading them to take part against Mary, but it was seen that he preached in vain.^ North umberland himself marched from London on the 13th ol July to attack the Queen. But in a few days she was surrounded by twenty or thirty thousand men, all volun teers in her cause and refusing pay. Before Northumber land reached Bury St. Edmunds he, began to despair; he marched to Cambridge and wrote to his brother conspira tors for reinforcements. Amongst these dismay first, and then perfidy, began to appear. In a few days these men, who had been so audacious and who had sworn solemnly to uphold the cause of Queen Jane, sent Northumberland ^ Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, vi., p. 386. ^ Burnet says : " There were a very few that shouted with the acclama tions ordinary on such occasions " (sc. the proclamation of a sovereign). History, ii., p. 380. -° This was on Sunday, July 16, 1553. He maintained that both daughters of Henry VIII. were illegitimate, and consequently excluded from the succession. He declared that Mary was a bigot, and that he had in vain tried to withdraw her from the errors of popery. He conjured those who valued the pure light of the Gospel to support Lady Jane (cf. tingard, vi., p. I iS). 177 an order to disband his army, while they themselves proclaimed Queen Mary amidst the unbounded applause of the people.^' 221. The master-plotter had disbanded his army, or rather, it had deserted him, before the order of the council reached him. This was the age of "reformation" and of baseness. Seeing himself abandoned, he, by the advice of Dr. Sands, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, who only four days before had preached against Mary, went to the market-place of Cambridge and proclaimed her Queen, "tossing," says Stowe, "his cap injto the air in token of his joy and satisfaction." In a few hours afterwards he was arrested by the Queen's order, and that, too, by his brother-conspirator the Earl of Arundel, who had been one of the very first to kneel before Lady Jane ! No reign, no age, no country ever witnessed rapacity, hypocrisy, meanness, baseness, perfidy such as England witnessed in those who were the destroyers of the Catholic and founders of the Protestant Church. This Dudley, who had for years been a plunderer of the Church, who had been a promoter of every ruffian-like measure against those who had adhered to the religion of his fathers ; who had caused a transfer of the crown because, as he alleged, the accession of Mary would endanger the Protestant religion ; this very man, when he came to receive justice on the block, confessed his belief in the Catholic faith ; and which is more, exhorted the nation to return to it. He, according to Dr. Heylyn (a Protestant, mind), exhorted them " to stand to the religion of their ancestors, rejecting that of later date, which had occasioned all the misery of the fore going thirty years; and that if they desired to present their souls unspotted before God, and were truly affected '" A writer at the time says : "Jane was only queen for nine days, and those most turbulent ones " (Original Letters, ed. Parker Society, No, 182). 178 to their country, they should expel the preachers of the reformed religion. For himself," he said, " being blinded by ambition, he had made a rack of his conscience by tem porising, and so acknowledged the justice of his sentence.'' Fox, author of the lying Book of Martyrs, of whose lies we shall see more by-and-by, asserts that Dudley made this confession in consequence of a promise of pardon. But when he came on the scaffold he knew that he was not to be pardoned ; and besides, he himself expressly declared the contrary at his execution, and told the people that he had not been moved by anyone to make it, and had not done it from any hope of saving his life. However, we have yet to see Cranmer himself recant, and to see the whole band of Protestant plunderers on their knees before the Pope's legate, confessing their sins of heresy and sacrilege and receiving absolution for their offences ! 222. Thus ended this reign of " reformation," plunder, wretchedness and disgrace. Three times the form of the new worship was changed, and yet those who adhered to the old worship or who went beyond the new worship were punished with the utmost severity. The nation became every day more and more despised abroad and more and more distracted and miserable at home. The Church " as by law established " arose and was enforced under two protectors or chief ministers, both of whom deservedly suffered death as traitors. Its principal author was a man who had sent both Protestants and Catholics to the stake; who had burnt people for adhering to the Pope, others for not believing in transubstantiation, others for believing in it, and who now burnt others for disbe lieving in it for reasons different from his own ; a man who now openly professed to disbelieve in that for not beheving in which he had burnt many of his feflow-crea- tures, and who after this most solemnly declared that his own behef was that of these very persons ! As this Church " by law established " advanced, all the remains ^79 of Christian charity vanished before it. The indigent, whom the Catholic Church had so tenderly gathered under her wings, were now, merely for asking alms, branded with red-hot irons and made slaves, though no provision was made to prevent them from perishing with hunger and cold; and England, so long famed as the land of hospitality, generosity, ease, plenty, and security to person and pro perty, became under a Protestant Church a scene of repulsive selfishness, of pack-horse toil, of pinching want, and of rapacity and plunder and tyranny that made the very names of law and justice a mockery. ISO CHAPTER VIII. 223. We are now entering upon that reign the punish ments inflicted during which have furnished such a handle to the calumniators of the Catholic Church, who have left no art untried to exaggerate those punishments in the first place, and in the second place to ascribe them to the Catholic religion, keeping out of sight all the while the thousand times greater mass of cruelty occasioned by Protestants in this kingdom. Of all cruelties I disapprove. I disapprove also of all corporal and pecuniary punish ments on the score of religion. Far be it from me, there fore, to defend all the punishments inflicted on this score in the reign of Queen Mary ; but it will be my duty to show, first, that the mass of punishment then inflicted on this account has been monstrously exaggerated ; secondly, that the circumstances under which they were inflicted found more apology for their severity than the circum stances under which the Protestant punishments were inflicted ; thirdly, that they were in amount as a single grain of wheat is to a whole bushel, compared with the iriass of punishments under the Protestant Church " as by law established;" lastly, that be they what they might, it is a base perversion of reason to ascribe them to the principles of the Catholic religion; and that as to the Queen herself, she was one of the most virtuous of human beings, and was rendered miserable, not by her own dis position or misdeeds, but by the misfortune and misery i8i entailed on her by her two immediate predecessors, who had uprooted the institutions of the country, who had plunged the kingdom into confusion, and who had left no choice but that of making severe examples, or of being an encourager of and a participator in heresy, plunder, and sacrilege. Her reign our deceivers have taught us to call the reign of " Bloody Queen Mary, " while they have taught us to call that of her sister the " Golden Days of Good Queen Bess." They have taken good care never to tell us that for every drop of blood that Mary shed Elizabeth shed a pint ; that the former gave up every fragment of the plunder of which the deeds of her prede cessors had put her in possession, and that the latter resumed this plunder again, and took from the poor every pittance which had by oversight been left them ; that the former never changed her religion, and that the latter changed from Catholic to Protestant, then to Catholic again, and then back again to Protestant ; that the former punished people for departing from that religion in which she and they and their fathers had been born, and to which she had always adhered ; and that the latter punished people for not departing from the religion of her and their fathers, and which religion, too, she herself professed and openly lived in even at the time of her coronation. Yet we have been taught to call the former "bloody" and the latter "good!" How have we been deceived ! And is it not time, then, that this deception, so injurious to our Catholic fellow- subjects and so debasing to ourselves, should cease ? It is perhaps too much to hope that I shall be able to make it cease ; but towards accomplishing this great and most desirable object I shall do something at any rate, by a plain and true account of the principal transactions of the reign of Mary. 224. The Queen, who, as we have seen in paragraph 2ig, was at Framlingham, in Suffolk, immediately set off for London, where, having been greeted on the road with the l82 strongest demonstrations of joy at her accession,* she arrived on the 31st of July, 1553. As she approached London the throngs thickened ; Elizabeth, who had kept cautiously silent while the issue was uncertain, went out to meet her, and the two sisters, riding on horseback, entered the city, the houses being decorated, the streets strewed with flowers, and the people dressed in their gayest clothes.'' She was crowned soon afterwards, in the most splendid manner and after the Catholic ritual, by Gardiner, who had, as we have seen, opposed Cranmer's new Church, and whom she found a prisoner in the Tower,' he having been deprived of his bishopric of Winchester, but whom we are to see one of the great actors in restoring the Catholic religion. The joy of the people was boundless. It was a coronation of greater splendour and more universal joy than ever had before been witnessed. This is agreed on all hands. And this fact gives the lie to Hume, who would have us beheve that the people did not like the Queen's principles. This fact has reason on its side as well as historical authority, for was it not natural that the people, who only three years before had actually risen in insurrection in all parts of the kingdom against the new Church and its authors, should be half mad with joy at the accession of a queen* ' In Norfolk, where she was, the people " received and hailed her as Queen. Almost the entire nation rise to her assistance " (Original Letters, No. 182). ''"Thesam day (July 31) rod thrugh London my lade Elssabelh to Algatt, and so to the qwen's grace her sester, with a loco hors and a 100 velvett cotes " (Machyn's Diary, ed. Camden Society, p. 38). The two sisters seemed to have returned through London, the streets of which were gay with banners, on the third of August (ibid.). ' Bishop Gardiner was liberated from the Tower on August 9. Bishop Bonner had been set free from the Marshalsea prison, in which he was confined, on the 4th of the month. * Foxe even declares "God so turned the hearts of the people to her, and against the council, that she overcame them without bloodshed, not- i83 who they were sure would put down that Church, and put down those who had quelled them by the aid of German troops ? 225. Mary began her reign by acts the most just and beneficent. Generously disregarding herself, her ease and her means of splendour, she abolished the debased currency which her father had introduced and her brother had made still baser ; she paid the debts due by the Crown, and she largely remitted taxes at the same time. But that which she had most at heart was the restoration of that religion under the influence of which the kingdom had been so happy and so great for so many ages, and since the aboli tion of which it had known nothing but discord, disgrace and misery. There were in her way great obstacles, for though the pernicious principles of the German and Dutch and Swiss reformers had not even yet made much progress amongst the people, except in London, which was the grand scene of the operations of those hungry and fanatical adventurers, there were the plunderers to deal with, and these plunderers had power. It is easy to imagine — which, indeed, was the undoubted fact — that the English people, who had risen in insurrection in all parts of the kingdom against Cranmer's new Church, who had demanded the restoration of the mass and of part, at least, of the monasteries, and who had been silenced only by German bayonets and halters and gibbets, following martial law ; it is easy to imagine that this same people would, in only three years afterwards, hail with joy inde scribable the prospect of seeing the new Church put down and the ancient one restored, and that, too, under a queen vrithstanding there was made great expedition against her both by sea and land." ..." Mary increased in puissance, the hearts of the people being mightily bent unto her," and " the common multitude did withdraw their hearts from them (the supporters of Lady Jane Grey) to stand with her "( Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, vi., n. 388). 184 on whose constancy and piety and integrity they could so firmly rely. But the plunder had been so immense, the plunderers were so numerous, they were so powerful, and there were so few men of family of any account who had not participated in deeds one way or another hostile to the Catholic Church, that the enterprise of the Queen was full of difficulty. As to Cranmer's Church " by law estab lished," that was easily disposed of. The gold and silver and cups and candlesticks and other things, of which the altar-robbers of young King Edward's reign had despoiled the churches, could not indeed be restored, but the altars themselves could and speedily were ; and the tables which had been put in their stead and the married priests along with them were soon seen no longer to offend the eyes of the people. It is curious to observe how tender-hearted Hume is upon this subject. He says, " Could any notion of law, justice or reason be attended to where superstition predominates, the priests would never have been expelled for their past marriages, which at that time were permitted by the laws of the kingdom." I wonder why it never occurred to him to observe that monks and nuns ought not then to have been expelled ! Were not their institutions " permitted by the laws of the kingdom ? " Aye, and had been permitted by those laws for nine hundred years, and guaranteed, too, by Magna Charta. He applauds the expelling of them ; but this " new thing," though only of three years and a half standing, and though " established" under a boy-king who was under two protectors, each of whom was justly beheaded for high treason, and under a council who were all conspirators against the lawful sovereign, — these married priests, the most of whom had, like Luther, Cranmer, Knox, Hooper, and other great " Reformers," broken their vows of celibacy, and were of course perjurers ; no law was to be repealed, however contrary to pubHc good such law might be, if the repeal injured the interests of such men as these ! The Queen had, 185 however, too much justice to think thus, and these apos tates were expelled, to the great joy of the people, many of whom had been sabred by German troops because they demanded, amongst other things, that priests might not be permitted to marry. The Catholic bishops who had been turned out by Cranmer were restored, and his new bishops were of course turned out. Cranmer himself was in a short time deprived of his ill-gotten see and was in prison, and most justly, as a traitor. The mass was in all parts of the country once more celebrated, the people were no longer burnt with red-hot irons and made slaves merely for asking alms, and they began to hope that England would be England again, and that hospitality and charity would return. 226. But there were the plunderers to deal with ! And now we are about to witness a scene which, were not its existence so well attested, must pass for the wildest of romance. What ? That Parliament, who had declared Cranmer's divorce of Catherine to be lawful, and who had enacted that Mary was a bastard, acknowledge that same Mary to be the lawful heir to the throne ! ° That Parliament, which had abolished the Catholic worship and created the Protestant worship on the ground that the former was idolatrous and damnable and the latter agree able to the will of God, abolish the latter and restore the former ! What ? Do these things ? and that, too, with out any force, without being compelled to do them ? No, not exactly so ; for it had the people to fear, a vast majority of whom were cordially with the Queen so far as related to these matters, respecting which it is surprising what dispatch was made. The late king died only in July, and before the end of the next November all the ° In declaring that Henry and Catherine were lawfully married. Par liament pronounced that the union with Anne was invalid, and Elizabeth consequently illegitimate. This decision was never reversed, even when Elizabeth came to the throne. 1 86 work of Cranmer, as to the divorce as well as to the worship, was completely overset, and that, too, by Acts of the very Parliament who had confirmed the one and " established " the other. The first of these Acts declared that Henry and Catherine had been lawfully married, and it laid all the blame on Cranmer by name ! ^ The second Act called the Protestant Church "as by law estab lished" a "new thing imagined by a few singular opin ions," though the Parliament, when it established it, asserted it to have come from " the Holy Ghost." ' What was now said of it was true enough ; but it might have been added, established by German bayonets. The great inventor, Cranmer, who was at last in a fair way of receiv ing the just reward of his numerous misdeeds, could only hear of the overthrow of his work ; for having, though clearly as guilty of high treason as Dudley himself, been as yet only confined to his palace at Lambeth, and hearing that mass had been celebrated in his cathedral church at Canterbury, he put forth a most inflammatory and abusive declaration (which, mind, he afterwards recanted), for which declaration, as well as for his treason, he was committed to the Tower, where he lay at the time when these Acts were passed.* But the new Church required ° I Mary, sess. 2, cap. I, declared the Queen's highness to have been born in most just and lawful matrimony, and repealed all acts and sen tences of divorce to the contrary. " Against this bill, though it was equiva lent to a statute of bastardy in respect to Elizabeth, not a voice was raised in either house of Parliament" (Lingard, History, vii., p. 140). ' Lingard, ut supra. It restored the services to what they were " in the last year of the reign of our late sovereign lord King Henry VIII." The acts establishing the first and second Books of Common Prayer, the new Ordinal, and the administration of the Sacrament in both kinds, the authorising the marriages of priests and legitimating their children, those abolishing certain feasts and fasts, giving the appointment of bishops to the king, and the regulation of episcopal jurisdiction, were repealed. " Hume, History (Murray's Reprint), ii., 285. The Archbishop asserted that the mass was the device of the father of lies : that it was not he, the Arch- 1 87 no law to abolish it. It was, in fact, abolished by the general feeling of the nation ; " and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it required rivers of blood to re-establish it in the reign of Elizabeth. Hume, following Fox, com plains bitterly of " the court," for " its contempt of the laws in celebrating before the two Houses, at the opening of the Parliament, a mass of Latin, with all the ancient rites and ceremonies, though abolished by Act of Parlia ment." Abolished I Why, so had Cromwell and his canting crew aboUshed the kingly government by Act of Parliament and by the bayonet, and yet this did not induce Charles to wait for a repeal before he called himself king. Nor did the bringers-over of the " deliverer " William wait for an Act of Parliament to authorise them to introduce the said " deliverer.' The " new thing " fell of itself. It had been forced upon the people and they hated it. 227. But when the question came, whether the Parlia ment should restore the Papal Supremacy, the plunder was at stake ; for to take the Church property was sacrilege, and if the Pope regained his power in the kingdom he might insist on restitution. The greater part of this property had been seized on eighteen years before. In many cases it had been divided and subdivided, in many the original grantees were dead. The common bishop, but a false, flattering, lying and deceitful monk who had restored the ancient worship at Canterbury ; that he had never offered to say mass before the Queen, but was willing to show that it contained many horrible blasphemies, &c. (cf. Lingard, History, vi., p. 136). ° Hooper, writing in the reign of Henry VIII. to Bullinger, confesses that the English as a nation are Catholic, and cling to Catholic practices and belief. " The impious mass, the most shameful celibacy of the clergy, the invocation of saints, auricular confession, superstitious abstinence from meats, and purgatory, were never before held by the people in greater esteem than at the present moment " (Original Letters, Parker Society, No. 21). Hume, ut sup., p. 286, allows that the numbers still at heart Catholic on the accession of Mary secured the election of a Parliament ready to solicit reconciliation with Rome. i88 people, too, had in many cases become dependants on the new proprietors ; and besides, they could not so easily trace their connexion between their faith and that su- , premacy, as they could between their faith and the mass and the sacraments. The Queen, therefore, though she most anxiously wished to avoid giving in any way whatever her sanction to the plunder, was reduced to the necessity of risking a civil war for the Pope's supremacy, to leave her kingdom unreconciled to the Church, and to keep to herself the title of Head of the Church, to her so hateful, or to make a compromise with the plunderers. She was induced to prefer the latter ; though it is by no means certain that civil war would not have been better for the country, even if it had ended in the triumph of the plun derers, which, in all human probability, it would not. But observe in how forlorn a state as to this question she was placed. There was scarcely a nobleman or gentleman of any note in her kingdom who had not in one way or another soiled his hands with the plunder." The Catholic bishops, all but Fisher, had assented to the abolition of the Pope's supremacy. Bishop Gardiner, who was now her High ChanceUor, was one of these, though he had been deprived of his bishopric and imprisoned in the Tower because he opposed Cranmer's further projects. These Catholic bishops, and Gardiner especially, must naturally wish to get over this matter as quietly as possible ; for how was he to advise the Queen to risk a civil war for the restoration of that the abolition of which he had so fully assented to and so strenuously supported ? And how was she to do anything without councillors of some sort ? "" " If the spoils of the Church had been at first confined to a few favourites and purchasers, they were now become by sales and bequests divided and subdivided among thousands ; and almost every family of opulence in the kingdom had reason to deprecate a measure which, accord ing to the general opinion, would induce the compulsive surrender of the whole or a part of its possessions " (Lingard, History, vi.. p. 139). 1 89 228. Nevertheless the Queen, whose zeal was equal to her sincerity, was bent on the restoration, and therefore a compromise with the plunderers was adopted." Now then it was fully proved to all the world, and now this plundered nation, who had been reduced to the greatest misery by what had been impudently called the " Refor mation," saw, as clearly as they saw the light of day, that all those who had abetted the " Reformation," that all the railings against the Pope, that all the accusations against the monks and nuns, that all the pretences of abuses in the Catholic Church, that all the confiscations, sackings and bloodshed, that all these, from first to last, had proceeded from the love of plunder; for now the two Houses of Parliament, who had, only about three or four years before, established Cranmer's Church and declared it to be " the work of the Holy Ghost," now these pious " Reformation " men, having Arst made a firm bargain to keep the plunder, confessed (to use the words even of Hume) that they had been guilty of a most horrible defec tion from the true Church, professed their sincere repent ance for their past transgressions, and declared their resolution to repeal all laws enacted in prejudice of the Pope's authority ! "^ Are the people of England aware of this ? No, not one man out of fifty thousand. These, let it be remembered, were the men who made the Protestant religion in England I 229. But this is a matter of too much importance to be dismissed without the mention of some particulars. The Queen had not about her one single man of any eminence "Those who had " shared the plunder of the Church would never con sent to the restoration of that jurisdiction which might call in question their right to their present possessions. Hence Gardiner saw that it was necessary, in the first place, to free them from apprehension, and for that purpose to procure from the Pontiff a bull confirming all past alienation pf ¦ the property of the Church " (Lingard, History, vii., p. 175). ^'^ History, ii., 298. 1 90 who had not in some degree departed from the straight path during one or the other, or both, of the two last reigns. But there was Cardinal Pole, of whom and of the butchery of whose aged and brave mother we have seen an account in paragraph 115. He still remained on the Continent, but now he could with safety return to his native country, on which the fame of his talents and virtues reflected so much honour. The Cardinal was^ ap pointed by the Pope to be his legate or representative in England. The Queen had been married on the 25th of July, 1554, to Philip, Prince of Spain, son and heir of the Emperor Charles V., of which marriage I shall speak more fully by-and-by. 230. In November, the same year, a Parliament was called, and was opened with a most splendid procession of the two Houses, closed by the King and Queen, the first on horseback, the last in a litter, dressed in robes of purple. Their first Act was a repeal of the attainder of Pole, passed in the reign of the cruel Henry VIII." While this was going on, many noblemen and gentlemen had gone to Brussels to conduct Pole to England ; and it is worth observing that amongst these was that Sir William Cecil who was afterwards so bitter and cruel an enemy of the Catholics and their religion in the reign of Elizabeth. Pole was received at Dover with every demon stration of public joy and exultation, arid before he reached Gravesend, where he took water for Westminster, the gentlemen of the country had flocked to his train to the number of nearly two thousand horsemen. Here is a fact which, amongst thousands of others, shows what the populousness and opulence of England then were." "Parliament met on November 12, 1554, and on the 21st the bill for the repeal of the act of attainder was passed, and received the royal assent the next day. " Lingard, History, vii., p. 177. 191 231. On the 29th of November the two Houses pe titioned the King and Queen. In this petition they expressed their deep regret at having been guilty of defection from the Church, and prayed their Majesties, who had not participated in the sin, to intercede with the Holy Father, the Pope, for their forgiveness and for their re-admission into the fold of Christ. The next day, the Queen being seated on the throne, having the King on her left and Pole, the Pope's legate, on her right, the Lord High ChanceHor, Bishop Gardiner, read the petition. The King and Queen then spoke to Pole, and he, at the close of a long speech, gave, in the name of the Pope, to the two Houses and to the whole nation, absolution in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, at which words the members of the two Houses, being on their knees, made the hall resound with Amen !^ 232. Thus was England once more a Catholic country. She was restored to the "fold of Christ;" but the fold had been plundered of its hospitality and charity, and the plunderers before they pronounced the " amen " had taken care that the plunder should not be restored. The Pope had hesitated to consent to this ;^^ Cardinal Pole, who was a man full of justice, had hesitated still longer ; but, as we have seen before, Gardiner, who was now the Queen's prime minister, and indeed all her council were for the '^For the bull of Pope Julius III., giving Pole power to re-unite Eng land to Rome, and the form of absolution, see Wilkins' Concilia, iv., p. 91 and p. III. The motion for reunion was carried in Parliament almost by acclamation. The House of Lords were unanimous in its favour, and in the Commons, out of 300 memberSj only two demurred, and even these the second day desisted from opposition (Lingard, History, vii., p. 178-179). "'" Pole, by the bull of Pope Julius, was empowered "to give, alienate and transfer" to the present possessors property taken from the Church in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. Cardinal Morone in writing about this tells Pole that all v/ho had been consulted thought that under the circumstances alienation was lawful, and hopes that this would end his (Pole's) scruples (Lingard, History, vii., p. 176). 192 compromise, and therefore these "amen" people, while they confessed that they had sinned by that defection, in virtue of which defection, and of that alone, they got the property of the Church and the poor, while they prayed for absolution for that sin, while they rose from their knees to join the Queen in singing Te Deum in thanksgiving for that absolution, while they were doing these things they enacted that all the holders of Church property should keep it, and that any person who should attempt to molest or disturb them therein should be guilty of praemunire and be punished accordingly ! " 233. It doubtless went to the heart of the Queen to assent to this act, which was the very worst deed of her whole reign, the monstrously exaggerated fires of Smith- field not excepted. We have seen how she was situated as to her councillors, and particularly as to Gardiner, who, besides being a most zealous and active minister, was a man of the greatest talents. We have seen that there was scarcely a man of any note who had not first or last par taken of the plunder; but still, great as her difficulty certainly was, she would have done better to follow the dictates of her own mind, insisting upon doing what was right and leaving the consequences to God, as she had so nobly done when Cranmer and the rest of the base council of Edward VI. commanded her to desist from hearing mass and most cruelly took her chaplains from her.'^ 234. However, she was resolved to keep none of the plunder herself. Henry, as " Head of the Church," had " This was included in the Act which passed in the Commons to restore the papal supremacy and canon law, and " the whole system of religious polity which had prevailed for so many centuries before Henry VIII." (cf. Collier, vi., pp. 96-98). " Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, vi., pp. 7-21. A series of letters between the Princess Mary and the Council. On August 19, 1551, Mary wrote to the king that she had already told him " rather than you should constrain me to leave mass, to take away my life " (p. 21). 193 taken to himself the tenths and first fruits, that is to say, the tenth part of the annual worth of each church benefice and the first whole year's income of each. These had of course been kept by King Edward. Then there were some of the Church estates, some of the hospitals and other things, and these amounting to a large sum altogether, that still belonged to the Crown, and of which the Queen was of course the possessor. In November, 1555, she gave up to the Church the tenths and first fruits, which, together with the tithes, which her two immediate predecessors had seized on and kept, were worth about ;^63,ooo a year in money of that day, and were equal to about a million a year of our present money ! Have we ever heard of any other sovereign doing the like?'" "Good Queen Bess" we shall find taking them back again to herself ; and though we shall find Queen Anne giving them up to the Church, we are to bear in mind that in Mary's days the Crown and its officers, ambassadors, judges, pensioners and all employed by it, were supported out of the landed estate of the Crown itself, the remains of which estate we now see in the pitiful rest of " Crown-lands.'' Taxes were never in those days called for but for wars and other really national purposes, and Mary was queen two years and a-half before she imposed upon her people a single farthing of tax in any shape whatever !^ So that this act of surrendering the tenths and first fruits was the effect of her generosity and piety ; and of hers alone, too, for it was done against the remonstrances of her council, and it was not without great opposition that the bill passed in Parliament, where it was naturally feared that this just act of the Queen would awaken the people's hatred of the plunderers.^ But the '° Lingard, History, vii., p. 212. '^ November, 1555. "' In the Lords the bill passed with only two dissentient voices, bul in the Commons it was carried only by 193 to 126 (Lingard, p. 215). In 13 194 Queen persevered, saying that she would be " Defender of the Faith " in reality and not merely in name. This was the woman whom we have been taught to caU " the Bloody Queen Mary " ! 235. The Queen did not stop here, but proceeded to restore all the church and abbey lands which were in her possession, being, whatever might be the consequence to her, firmly resolved not to be a possessor of the plunder. Having called some members of her council together she declared her resolution to them, and bade them prepare an account of those lands and possessions, that she might know what measures to adopt for the putting of her inten tion in execution. Her intention was to apply the revenues, as nearly as possible, to their ancient purposes. She began with- Westminster Abbey, which had, in the year 1610, been the site of a church immediately after the intro duction of Christianity by St. Austin, which church had been destroyed by the Danes, and in 958 restored by King Edgar and St. Dunstan, who placed twelve Benedictine monks in it, and which became, under Edward the Con fessor, in 1049, a noble and richly endowed abbey, which, when plundered and suppressed by Henry, had revenues to the amount of ;^3,977 a year of good' old rent in money of that day, and therefore equal to about eighty thousand pounds a year of money of this day ! Little of this, how ever, remained in all probability to the Queen, the estates having in great part been parcelled out amongst the plunderers of the two last reigns. But whatever there remained to her she restored, and Westminster Abbey once more saw a convent of Benedictine monks within its answer to the objections of her ministers that the money was needed to support the dignity of the Crown, Mary replied that "she set more hythe salvation of her soul than by ten such crowns" (ibid., p. 213). In conse quence of this Pole gave orders that the exaction of first fruits should cease, and that the patronage of rectories, &c., previously vested in the Crown, should revert to the bishops of the respective dioceses. 195 walls. She next restored the Friary at Greenwich, to which had belonged friars Peyto and Elstow, whom we have seen in paragraphs 8i and 82 so nobly pleading before the tyrant's face the cause of her injured mother, for which they had felt the fury of that ferocious tyrant. She re-established the Black Friars in London. She restored the Nunnery at Sion, near Brentford, on the spot where Sion House now stands. At Sheen she restored the Priory. She restored and liberally endowed the Hospital of St. John, Smithfield.™ She re-established the hospital in the Savoy for the benefit of the poor, and allotted to it a suitable yearly revenue out of her own purse ; and as her example would naturally have great effect, it is, as Dr. Heylyn (a Protestant and a great enemy of her memory) observes, " hard to say how far the nobility and gentry might have done the like if the queen had lived for some few years longer."^ 236. These acts were so laudable, so unequivocally good, so clearly the effect of justice, generosity, and charity in the Queen, that coming before us as they do in company with great zeal for the Catholic religion, we are naturally curious to hear what remarks they bring from the unfeel ing and malignant Hume. Of her own free will, and even against the wish of very powerful men, she gave up in this way a yearly revenue of probably not less than a million and a half of pounds of our present money. And for what ? Because she held it unjustly ; because it was plunder ; be cause it had been taken to the Crown in violation of Magna Charta and all the laws and usages of the realm ; because she hoped to be able to make a beginning in the restoring of that hospitality and charity which her predecessors had banished from the land ; and because her conscience, as she herself declared, forbade her to retain these ill-gotten ''^ Lingard, History, vii., pp. 215, 216. ** Ecclesia Restaurata, Queen Mary, p. 67. 196 possessions, valuing, as she did (she told her council), " her conscience more than ten kingdoms." Was there ever a more praiseworthy act ? And were there ever motives more excellent ? Yet Hume, who exults in the act which the plunderers insisted on to secure their plunder, calls this noble act of the Queen an " impudent " one, and ascribes it solely to the influence of the new Pope, who, he tells us, told her ambassadors that the English would never have the doors of Paradise opened to them unless the whole of the Church property was restored. How false this is, in spite of Hume's authorities, is clear from this undeniable fact, namely, that she gave the tenths and first fruits to the bishops and priests of the Church in England, and not to the Pope, to whom they were formerly paid. This, therefore, is a malignant misrepresentation. Then again, he says that the Pope's remonstrances on this score had "little influence with the nation." With the plunderers, he means ; for he has been obliged to confess that in all parts of the country the people, in Edward's reign, demanded a restoration of a part of the monasteries ; and is it not clear, then, that they must have greatly rejoiced to see their sovereign make a beginning in that restoration? But it was his business to lessen as much as possible the merit of these generous and pious acts of this basely calumniated queen. 237. Events soon proved to this just and good but singularly unfortunate queen, that she would have done better to risk a civil war against the plunderers than assent to the Act of Parliament by which was secured to them the quiet possession of their plunder. Her generous example had no effect upon them, but on the contrary made them dislike her, because it exposed them to odium, presenting a contrast with their own conduct so much to their disadvantage. From this cause more than from any other arose those troubles which harassed her during the remainder of her short reign. 197 238. She had not been many months on the throne before a rebellion was raised against her, instigated by the " Reformation " preachers who had bawled in favour of Lady Jane Grey, but who now discovered, amongst other things, that it was contrary to God's word to be governed by a woman. The fighting rebels were defeated and the leaders executed, and at the same time the Lady Jane herself, who had been convicted of high treason, who had been kept in prison, but whose life had hitherto been spared, and would evidently still have been spared if it had not manifestly tended to keep alive the hopes of the traitors and disaffected.^' And as this queen has been called " the bloody," is another instance to be found of so much lenity shown towards one who had been guilty of treason to the extent of actually proclaiming herself the sovereign ? There was another rebellion afterwards, which was quelled in like manner, and was followed by the execution of the principal traitors, w'no had been abetted by a Protestant faction in France if not by the government of that country, which was bitterly hostile towards the Queen on account of her marriage with Philip, the Prince of Spain, which marriage became a great subject of invective and false accusation with the Protestants and disaffected of all sorts.^ 239. The Parliament, almost immediately after her ac cession, advised her to marry, but not to marry a foreigner. How strangely our taste is changed ! The English had always a deep-rooted prejudice against foreigners, till, for pure love of the Protestant religion, they looked out for and ^ Lingard, History, vii., pp. 161-162. ^ Lingard, M^f«^., p. 157. " Wyatt made a sedition in Kent for the purpose of thwarting the marriage " (Sanders, The Anglican Schism, ed. Lewis, p. 223). CoWiet (Eccl. Hist., vol. vi., p. 53) says that "when Wyatt's insurrection broke out in Kent, the Duke of Suffolk with his two brothers, Lord John and Lord Leonard Grey, rode down into Warwickshire and tried to raise the country against the Spaniard." 198 soon felt the sweets of one who began the work of furiding and of making national debts I The Queen, however, after great deliberation, determined to marry Philip, who was son and heir of the Emperor Charles V., and who, though a widower, and having children by his first wife, was still much younger than the Queen, who was now (in July, 1554) in the thirty-ninth year of her age, while Philip was only twenty-seven. Philip arrived at Southampton in July, 1554, escorted by the combined fleets of England, Spain and the Netherlands, and on the 25th of that month the marriage took place in the Cathedral of Winchester, the ceremony being performed by Gardiner, who was the bishop of the see, and being attended by great numbers of nobles frqm all parts of Christendom. To show how little reliance is to be placed on Hume, I will here notice that he says the marriage took place at Westminster, and to this adds many facts equally false."^ His account of the whole of this transaction is a mere romance made up from Protestant writers, even whose accounts he has shamefully distorted to the prejudice of the views and character of the Queen. 240. As things then stood, sound and evident good to England dictated this match. Leaving out Elizabeth, the next heir to the throne was Mary Queen of Scots, and she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France, so that England might fall to the lot of the French king, and as to Ehza beth, even supposing her to survive the Queen, she now stood bastardized by two Acts of Parliament ; for the Act which had just been passed declaring Catherine to be the lawful wife of her father made her mother (what, indeed, Cranmer had declared her) an adulteress in law as she was in fact. Besides, if France and Scotland were evidently likely to become the patrimony of one and the same prince, it was necessary that England should take steps " Hume, History (ed. ut sup. ), ii. , 296. 199 for strengthening herself also in the way of preparation. Such was the policy that dictated this celebrated match, which the historical calumniators of Mary have attributed to the worst and most low and disgusting of motives ; in which, however, they have only followed the example of the malignant traitors of the times we are referring to, it being only to be lamented that they were not then alive to share in their fate. 241. Nothing ever was, nothing could be, more to the honour of England than every part of this transaction ; yet did it form the pretences of the traitors of that day, who, for the obvious reasons mentioned in the last para graph, were constantly encouraged and abetted by France, and as constantly urged on by the disciples of Cranmer and his crew of German and Dutch teachers. When the rebels had, at one time, previous to Mary's marriage, advanced even to London, she went to the Guildhall, where she told the citizens that if she thought the marriage were injurious Jo her people or to the honour of the state she would not assent to it, and that if it should not appear to the Parliament to be for the benefit of the whole kingdom she would never marry at all. " Where fore," said she, " stand fast against these rebels, your enemies and mine ; fear them not, for I assure ye that I fear them nothing at all." Thus she left them, leaving the hall resounding with their acclamations.^' 242. When the marriage articles appeared it was shown that on this occasion, as on all others, the Queen had kept her word most religiously, for even Hume is obliged to confess that these articles were " as favourable as possible for the interest and security and even the grandeur of England." What more was wanted, then ? And if, as Hume says was the case, " these article gave no satisfac tion to the nation," all that we can say is that the nation ""Lingard, History, vii., p. 157. 2O0 Was very unreasonable and ungrateful. This is, however, a great falsehood, for what Hume here ascribes to the whole nation he ought to have confined to the plunderers and the fanatics whom, throughout his romance of this reign, he always caHs the nation. The articles quoted from Rymer by Hume himself were, that though Phihp should have the title of King the administration should be wholly in the Queen ; that no foreigner should hold any office in the kingdom ; that no change should be made in the English laws, customs, and privileges; that sixty thousand pounds a year (a million of our present money) should be settled on the Queen as her jointure, to be paid by Spain if she outlived him ; that the male issue of this marriage should inherit, together with England, both Bur gundy and the Low Countries ; and that if Don Carlos, Philip's son by his former marriage, should die leaving no issue, the Queen's issue, whether male or female, should inherit Spain, Sicily, Milan, and aU the other dominions of Philip. Just before the marriage ceremony was per formed, an envoy from the Emperor, Philip's father, de livered tp the English Chancellor a deed resigning to his son the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan, the Emperor thinking it beneath the dignity of the Queen of England to marry one that was not a king. 243. What transaction was ever more honourable to a nation than this transaction was to England ? What queen, what sovereign, ever took more care of the glory of a people ? Yet the fact appears to be that there was some jealousy in the nation at large as to this foreign con nection, and I am not one of those who are disposed to censure this jealousy. But can I have the conscience to commend, or even to abstain from censuring, this jealousy in our Catholic forefathers, without feeling, as a Protes tant, my cheeks burn with shame at what has taken place in Protestant times, and even in my own time ! When another Mary, a Protestant Mary, was brought to the 201 throne, did the Parliament take care to keep the adminis tration wholly in her and to give her husband the mere title of king ? Did they take care then that no foreigners should hold offices in England ? Oh, no ! That foreign, that Dutch husband, had the administration vested in him; and he brought over whole crowds of foreigners, put them into the highest offices, gave them the highest titles, and heaped upon them large parcels of what was left of the Crown estate, descending to that Crown, in part at least, from the days of Alfred himself! And this transaction is called " glorious," and that, too, by the very men who talk of the " inglorious " reign of Mary ! What, then ; are sense and truth never to reign in England ? Are we to be duped unto all generations ? 244. And if we come down to our own dear Protestant days, do we find the Prince of Saxe-Coburg the heir to mighty dominions? Did he bring into the country, as Philip did, twenty-nine chests of bullion, loading to the Tower twenty-two carts and ninety-nine pack-horses ? Do we find him settling on his wife's issue great states and kingdoms ? Do we find his father making him a king on the eve of the marriage, because a person of lower title would be beneath a queen of England? Do we find him giving his bride as a bridal present jewels to the amount of half a million of our money ? Do we find him settling on the Princess Charlotte a jointure of a million sterling a year if she should outlive him ? No ; but (and come and boast of it, you shameless revilers of this Catholic queen !) we find our Protestant Parliament settling on him fifty thousand pounds a year to come out of taxes raised on us, if he should outlive her ; which sum we now duly and truly pay in full tale, and shaU possibly have to pay it for forty years yet to come.^ How we feel ^ The author refers to the marriagfe settlement of the Princess Charlotte of Wales, daughter of George IV. She married Prince Leopold of Saxe- Coburg in 1816, and died in the following year. Her husband became the first King of the Belgians in 1831, and survived till 1865. 202 ourselves shrink when we thus compare our conduct with that of our Cathohc fathers ! 245. In my relation I have not adhered to the exact chronological order, which would have too much broken my matter into detached parcels ; but I should here observe that the marriage was previous to the reconcilia tion with the Pope, and also previous to the Queen's generous restoration of the property which she held of the Church and the poor. It was also previous to those dread ful punishments which she inflicted upon heretics, of which punishments I am now about to speak, and which, though monstrously exaggerated by the lying Fox and others, though a mere nothing compared with those inflicted after wards on Catholics by Elizabeth, and though hardly to be called cruel when set in comparison with the rivers of Catholic blood that have flowed in Ireland, were neverthe less such as to be deeply deplored by everyone, and by nobody more than the Catholics, whose religion, though these punishments were by no means caused by its principles, has been reproached as the cause, and the sole cause, of the whole of them. 246. We have seen, in paragraphs 200 and 201, what a Babel of opinions and of religions had been introduced by Cranmer and his crew, and we have also seen that immorality, that vice of all sorts, that enmity and strife incessant, had been the consequence. Besides this, it was so natural that the Queen should desire to put down all these sects, and that she should be so anxious on the subject, that we are not at all surprised that, if she saw all other means ineffectual for the purpose, she should resort to means of the utmost severity that the laws of the land allowed of for the accomplishment of that purpose. The traitors and the leading rebels of her reign were all, or affected to be, of the new sects. Though small in number, they made up for that disadvantage by their indefatigable malignity, by their incessant efforts to trouble the state, 203 and indeed, to destroy the Queen herself. But I am for rejecting all apologies for her founded on provocations given to her, and also for rejecting all apologies founded on the disposition and influence of her councillors ; for if she had been opposed to the burning of heretics, that burning would certainly never have taken place. That burning is fairly to be ascribed to her ; but as even the malignant Hume gives her credit for sincerity, is it not just to con clude that her motive was to put an end to the propagation amongst her people of errors which she deemed destructive of their souls, and the permission of the propagation of which she deemed destructive of her own ? And there is this much to be said in defence of her motive at any rate, that these new lights, into however many sects they might be divided, all agreed in teaching the abominable doctrine of salvation by faith alone without regard to v/orks. 247. As a preliminary to the punishment of heretics, there was an Act of Parliament passed in December, 1554 (a year and a half after the Queen came to the throne), to restore the ancient statutes relative to heresy. These statutes were first passed against the Lollards in the reigns of Richard II. and Henry IV., and they provided that heretics who were obstinate should be burnt. These statutes were altered in the reign of Henry VIII. in order that he might get the property of heretics, and in that of Edward they were repealed ; not out of mercy, however, but because heresy was, according to those statutes, to promulgate opinions contrary to the Cathohc faith, and this did, of course, not suit the state of things under the new Church " as by law estabHshed." Therefore it was then held that heresy was punishable by common law, and that, in case of obstinacy, heretics might be burnt ; and accordingly many were punished and some burnt in that reign by process at common law; and these were, too, Protestants dissenting from Cranmer's 204 Church, who himself condemned them to the flames.'® Now, however, the Catholic religion being again the religion of the country, it was thought necessary to return to ancient statutes, which accordingly were re-enacted. That which had been the law during seven reigns, com prising nearly two centuries, and some of which reigns had been amongst the most glorious and most happy that England had ever known, one of the kings having won the title of King of France, and another of them having actually been crowned at Paris ; that which had been the law for so long a period was now the law again, so that here was nothing new at any rate. And observe, though these statutes were again repealed when Ehza- beth's policy induced her to be a Protestant, she enacted others to supply their place, and that both she and her successor, James I., burnt heretics ; though they had, as we shall see, a much more expeditious and less noisy way of putting out of the world those who still had the constancy to adhere to the religion of their fathers. 248. The laws being passed were not likely to remain a dead letter. They were put in execution chiefly in conse quence of condemnations in the spiritual court by Bonner, Bishop of London. The punishment was inflicted in the usual manner, dragging to the place of execution and then burning to death, the sufferer being tied to a stake in the midst of a pile of faggots, which, when set on fire, consumed him. Bishop Gardiner, the Chancellor, has been by Protestant writers charged with being the adviser of this measure. I can find no ground for this charge, while all agree that Pole, who was now become Archbishop of ™ Joan Butcher, or Knell, of Kent, was condemned as a heretic by Cranmer in the reign of Edward VI. for holding peculiar opinions, and when the youthful King hesitated to sign the warrant Cranmer took it upon his conscience. Several others were obliged in the same reign to carry " faggots" on their recantalion. 20S Canterbury in the place of Cranmer, disapproved of it. It is also undeniable that a Spanish friar, the confessor of PhiHp, preaching before the Queen, expressed his disappro bation of it.*" Now, as the Queen was much more likely to be influenced, if at all, by Pole, and especially by Philip, than by Gardiner, the fair presumption is that it was her own measure. And as to Bonner, on whom so much blame has been thrown on this account, he had indeed been most cruelly used by Cranmer and his Protestants, but there was the council continually accusing all the bishops (and he more than any of the rest) of being too slow in the performance of this part of their duty.'^ Indeed, it is manifest that in this respect the council spoke the almost then universal sentiment ; for though the French ceased not to hatch rebellions against the Queen, none of the grounds of the rebels ever were that she punished heretics. Their complaints related almost solely to the connection with Spain, and never to the "flames of Smithfield," though we of later times have been made to believe that nothing else was thought of ; but the fact is, the persons put to death were chiefly of very infamous character, many of them foreigners, almost the whole of them residing in London and called in derision by the people at large the " London Gospellers." Doubtless, out of two hundred and seventy- seven persons (the number stated by Hume on authority of Fox) who were thus punished, some may have been real martyrs to their opinions, and have been sincere and virtuous persons, but in this number of two hundred and seventy- seven many were convicted felons, some clearly traitors, as Ridley and Cranmer. These must be taken from the num- " Lingard, History, vii., p. 193. " Ibid., p. 194! The Lord Treasurer, the Marquess of Winchester, complained to the council and procured a reprimand to be sent to Bonner. Lingard, p. 267, note, says — "I can find no proof that he (Bonner) was a persecutor from choice, or went in search of victims.' 206 ber ; and we may surely take such as were alive when Fox first published his book, and who expressly begged to decline the honour of being enrolled amongst its " Martyrs." As a proof of Fox's total disregard of truth, there was in the next reign a Protestant parson, as Anthony Wood (a Pro testant) tells us, who in a sermon related, on authority of Fox, that a Catholic of the name of Grimwood had been, as Fox said, a great enemy of the Gospellers, had been " punished by a judgment of God," and that " his bowels fell out of his body." Grimwood was not only alive at the time when the sermon was preached, but happened to be present in the church to hear it, and he brought an action of defamation against the preacher ! ^ Another instance of Fox's falseness relates to the death of Bishop Gardiner. Fox and Burnet, and other vile calumniators of the acts and actors in Queen Mary's reign, say that Gardiner, on the day of the execution of Latimer and Ridley, kept dinner waiting till the news of their suffering should arrive, and that the Duke of Norfolk, who was to dine with him, expressed great chagrin at the delay ; that when the news came, " transported with joy " they sat down to table, where Gardiner was suddenly seized with the disury, and died in horrible torments in a fortnight afterwards.^ Now Latimer and Ridley were put to death on the i6th of October, and Collier, in his Ecclesiastical History, p. 386, states that Gardiner opened the Parliament on the 21st of October, that he attended in Parliament twice afterwards, that he died on the 12th of November of the gout, and not of disury, and that as to the Duke of Norfolk, he had been dead a year when this event took place !" What a hypo- ^ Anthony k. Wood, Athence Oxonienses (ed. Bliss), ii., 789. ^ Burnet, History of the Reformation, ed. Pocock, ii., 514. Burnet does not, however, say that it was the Duke of Norfolk who dined with Gardiner. " Bale, as quoted in Pocock's Burnet, ibid., note 23, speaks to Gardiner having been in full possession of his powers of body and mind at the meet ing of Parliament on October 21 and 23. 207 crite, then, must that man be who pretends to believe in this P'ox ! Yet this infamous book has, by the arts of the plunderers and their descendants, been circulated to a boundless extent amongst the people of England, who have been taught to look upon all the thieves, felons and traitors whom Fox calls " Martyrs," as sufferers resem bling St. Stephen, St. Peter knd St. Paul ! 249. The real truth about th.ese " Martyrs " is that they were generally a set of most wicked wretches, who sought to destroy the Queen and her government, and, under the pretence of conscience and superior piety, to obtain the means of again preying upon the people. No mild means could reclaim them ; those mearis had been tried : the Queen had to employ vigorous means, or to suffer her people to continue to be torn by the religious factions, created not by her but by her two immediate predeces sors, who had been aided and abetted by many of those who now were punished, and who were worthy of ten thousand deaths each if ten thousand deaths could have been endured. They were, without a single exception, apostates, perjurers, or plunderers ; and the greater part of them had also been guilty of flagrant high treason against Mary herself, who had spared their lives, but whose lenity they had requited by every effort within their power to overset her authority and her government. To make particular mention of all the ruffians that perished upon this occasion would be a task as irksome as it would be useless ; but there were amongst them three of Cran mer's bishops and himself ! For now justice at last overtook this most mischievous of all villains, who had justly to go to the same stake that he had unjustly caused so many others to be tied to ; the three others were Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, each of whom was, indeed, inferior in villainy to Cranmer, but to few other men that have ever existed. 250. Hooper was a monk ; he broke his vow of celibacy 208 and married a Flandrican ; he, being the ready tool of the Protector Somerset, whom he greatly aided in his plunder of the churches, got two bishoprics,^ though he himself had written against pluralities. He was a co-operator in all the monstrous cruelties inflicted on the people during the reign of Edward, and was particularly active in re commending the use of German troops to bend the necks of the English to' the Protestant yoke. Latimer began his career, not only as a Catholic priest, but as a most furious assailant of the Reformation religion. By this he obtained from Henry VIII. the bishopric of Worcester. He next changed his opinions, but he did not give up his Catholic bishopric ! Being suspected, he made abjuration of Pro testantism ; he thus kept his bishopric for twenty years while he inwardly reprobated the principles of the Church, and which bishopric he held in virtue of an oath to oppose to the utmost of his power all dissenters from the Catholic Church. In the reigns of Henry and Edward he sent to the stake Catholics and Protestants for holding opinions which he himself had before held openly, or that he held secretly at the time of his so sending them. Lastly, he was a chief tool in the hands of the tyrannical Protector Somerset in that black and unnatural act of bringing his brother. Lord Thomas Somerset, to the block. Ridley had been a Catholic bishop in the reign of Henry VIIL, when he sent to the stake Catholics who denied the king's supre macy and Protestants who denied transubstantiation. In Edward's reign he was a Protestant bishop, and denied transubstantiation himself. He in Edward's reign got the bishopric of London by a most roguish agreement to transfer the greater part of its possessions to the rapacious ministers and courtiers of that day. Lastly, he was guilty ^ Hooper was first made bishop of Gloucester, and subsequently on becoming bishop of Worcester he obtained the royal dispensation to hold Iii?. former see in comnieinlaiu. 209 of high treason against the Queen, in openly (as we have seen in paragraph 220) and from the pulpit exhorting the people to stand by the usurper. Lady Jane, and thus endeavouring to produce civil war and the death of his sovereign, in order that he might by treason be enabled to keep that bishopric which he had obtained by simony including perjury. 251. A pretty trio of Protestant " saints ; " quite worthy, however, of Martirt Luther, who says in his own works that it was by the arguments of the devil (who, he says, fre quently ate, drank and slept with him) that he was induced to turn Protestant ; three worthy followers of that Luther who is by his disciple Melancthon called " a brutal man, void of piety and humanity, one more a Jew than a Chris tian ; " three followers altogether worthy of this great founder of that Protestantism which has split the world into contending sects : but black as these are, they bleach the moment Cranriier appears in his true colours. But alas 1 where is the pen or tongue to give us those colours ? Of the sixty-five years that he lived, and of the thirty-five years of his manhood, twenty-nine years were spent in the commission of a series of acts which, for wickedness in their nature and for mischief in their consequences, are abso lutely without anything approaching to a parallel in the annals of human infamy. Being a fellow of a college at Cambridge, and having, of course, made an engagement (as the fellows do to this day) not to marry while he was a fellow, he married secretly and still enjoyed his fellow ship. While a married man he became a priest and took the oath of ceHbacy,^ and going to Germany he married another wife, the daughter of a Protestant " saint," though his oath bound him to have no wife at all. He, as arch bishop, enforced the law of ceHbacy, while he himself " This is incorrect : Cranmer lost his fellowship on his marriage, and recovered it and became a priest upon the death of his first wife. H 210 secretly kept his German wife in the palace at Canterbury having, as we have seen in paragraph 104, imported her in a chest. He, as ecclesiastical judge, divorced Henry VIII. from three wives, the grounds of his decision in two of the cases being directly the contrary of those which he himself had laid down when he declared the marriages to be vahd; and in the case of Anne Boleyn he, as ecclesiastical judge, pronounced that Anne had never been the king's wife; while as a member of the House of Peers he voted for her death, as having been an adulteress and thereby guilty of treason to her husband. As archbishop under Henry (which office he entered upon with a premeditated false oath on his lips) he sent men and women to the stake because they were not CathoHcs, and he sent Catholics to the stake because they would not acknowledge the king's supremacy and thereby perjure themselves as he had so often done. Become openly a Protestant in Edward's reign, and openly professing those very principles for the professing of which he had burnt others, he now punished his fellow Protestants because their grounds for protesting were different from his. As executor of the wiU of his old master, Henry, which gave the crown (after Edward) to his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, he conspired with others to rob those two daughters of their right, and to give the crown to Lady Jane, that queen of nine days, whom he with others ordered to be proclaimed. Confined, notwithstanding his many monstrous crimes, merely to the palace at Lam beth, he, in requital of the Queen's lenity, plotted with traitors in the pay of France to overset her government, Brought at last to trial and to condemnation as a heretic, he professed himself ready to recant. He was respited for six weeks, during which time he signed six different^ forms of recantation, each more ample than the former." He declared that the Protestant religion was false ; that the " Lingard, H'^tory, vii., p. 199. 211 Catholic religion was the only true one ; that he now believed in aH the doctrines of the Catholic Church ; that he had been a horrid blasphemer against the Sacrament ; that he was unworthy of forgiveness ; that he prayed the people, the Queen and the Pope to have pity on and to pray for his wretched soul; and that he hati made and signed this declaration without fear and without hope of favour, and for" the discharge of his conscience, and as a warning to others. It was a question in the Queen's Council whether he should be pardoned, as other recanters had been ; but it was resolved that his crimes were so enormous that it would be unjust to let him escape.^ Brought, therefore, to the public reading of his recanta tion on his way to the stake, seeing the pile ready, now finding that he must die, and carrying in his breast all his malignity undiminished, he recanted his recantation, thrust into the fire the hand that had signed it, and thus expired, protesting against that very religion in which, only nine hours before, he had called God to witness that he firmly believed.'' 252. And Mary is to be called the " Bloody " because she put to death monsters of iniquity like this ! It is surely time to do justice to the memory of this calumniated queen ; and not to do it by halves, I must, contrary to my intention, employ part of the next chapter in giving the remainder of her history. ^ Lingard History, vii., p. 200. His offences required that he should suffer " for ensample sake." ^ Ibid., p. 203. 212 CHAPTER IX. 253. I now, before I proceed to the " Reformation" works in the reign of Elizabeth, must conclude the reign of Mary. " Few and full of sorrow" were the days of her power. She had innumerable difficulties to struggle with, a most inveterate and wicked faction continually plotting against her, and the state of her health, owing partly to her weak frame and partly to the anxieties of her whole life, rendered her life so uncertain that the unprincipled plunderers, though they had again become Catholics, were continually casting an eye towards her successor, who, though she was now a Catholic, was pretty sure to become Protestant whenever she came to the throne, because it was impossible that the Pope should ever acknowledge her legitimacy. 254. In the year 1557 the Queen was at war with France, on account of the endeavours of that court to excite rebellion against her in England. Her husband, Philip, whose father, the Emperor, had now retired to a convent, leaving his son to supply his place and possess all his dominions, was also at war with France, the scene of which war was the Netherlands and the north of France. An English army had joined PhiHp, who penetrated into France and gained a great and important victory over the French. But a French army, under the Duke of Guise, took advantage of the naked state of Calais to possess itself of that important town,' which had been in posses- ' Calais was taken on January 22, 155S. 213 sion of the English for more than two hundred years. It was not Calais alone that England held, but the whole country round for many miles, including Guisnes, Ardres, and other places, together with the whole terri tory called the county of Oye. Edward III. had taken Calais after a siege of nearly a year. It had always been regarded as very valuable for the purposes of trade; it was deemed a great monument of glory to England, and it was a thorn continually rankling in the side of France. Dr. Heylyn tells us that Monsieur de Cordes, a nobleman who lived in the reign of Louis XL, used to say " that he would be content to lie seven years in hell upon condition that this town were regained from the English." 255. The Queen felt this blow most severely. It hastened that death which overtook her a few months afterwards ; and when her end approached she told her attendants that "if they opened her body they would find Calais at the bottom of her heart." This great mis fortune was owing to the neglect if not perfidy of her councillors, joined to the dread of Philip to see Calais and its dependencies in the hands of Mary's successor. Doctor Heylyn (a Protestant, mind) tells us that PhiHp, " seeing that danger might arise to Calais, advised the Queen of it, and freely offered his assistance for the defence of it ; but that the English Council, over-wisely jealous of Philip, neglected both his advice and proffer." They left the place with only five hundred men in it, and that they did this intentionally it is hardly possible to doubt. Still, however, if the Queen had lived but a little longer, Calais would have been restored.^ The war was not yet over. In 1558 Philip and the King ' Philip was conscious that he had led England into the war and deemed himself bound to do what he could to retrieve the loss. He resisted most tempting offers for peace, declaring that the restoration of Calais was an indispensable condition (cf. Lingard, vii., p. 240). 214 of France began negotiations for peace, and one of the conditions of Philip (who was the most powerful, and who had beaten the French) was that Calais should be restored to England ; and this condition would unquestion ably have been adhered to by Philip, but in the midst of these negotiations Mary died ! 256. Thus, then, it is to the " Reformation," which had caused the loss of Boulogne in the plundering and cowardly reign of Edward VL, that we, even to this day, owe that we have to lament the loss of Calais, which was at last irretrievably lost by the selfishness and perfidy of Elizabeth. While all historians agree that the loss of Calais preyed most severely upon the Queen and hastened her death, while they all do this great honour to her memory, none of them attempt to say that the loss of Boulogne had even the smallest effect on the spirits of her " Reformation " brother ! He was too busy in pulling down altars and in confiscating the property of guilds and fraternities to think much about national honour ; or, perhaps, though he, while he was pulling down altars, still called himself " Defender of the Faith," he might think that territory and glory won by Catholics ought not to be retained by Protestants. Be this as it may, we have seen a loss to England much greater than that of Calais ; we have seen the half of a continent cut off from the crown of England, and seen it become a most formid able rival on the seas,' and we have never heard that it preyed much upon the spirits of the sovereign in whose reign the loss took place. 257. With the loss of Calais at the bottom of her heart, and with a well-grounded fear that her successor would undo as to rehgion all that she had done, the unfortunate ' The reference is to the loss of the American colonies and the subsequent rise of the navy of the United States, all which was recent history at the date when Cobbett wrote. 215 Mary expired on November 17, 1558, in the forty-second year of her age and in the sixth year of her reign, leav ing to her sister and successor the example of fidelity, sincerity, patience, resignation, generosity, gratitude and purity in thought, word and deed ; an example, however, which in every particular that sister and successor took special care not to follow. As to those punishments which have served as the ground for all the abuse heaped on the memory of this queen, what were they other than punish ments inflicted on offenders against the religion of the country ? The " fires of Smithfield " have a horrid sound ; but, to say nothing about the persecutions of Edward VI. , Elizabeth and James I., is it more pleasant to have one's- bowels ripped out while the body is alive (as was Eliza beth's favourite way) than to be burnt ? Protestants have even exceeded Catholics in the work of punishing offenders of this sort ; and they have punished, too, with less reason on their side. The Catholics have one faith, the Protestants have fifty faiths, and yet each sect, whenever it gets upper most, punishes in some way or other the rest as offenders. Even at this very time * there are, according to a return recently laid before the House of Commons, no less than fifty-seven persons who have within a few years suffered imprisonment and other punishments added to it as offenders against religion, and this, too, at a time when men are permitted openly to deny the divinity of Christ, and others openly to preach in their synagogues that there never was any Christ at all. A man sees the laws tolerate twenty sorts of Christians (as they all call themselves), each condemning all the rest to eternal flames ; and if, in conse quence of this, he be led to express his belief that they are all wrong, and that the thing they are disputing about is altogether something unreal, he may be punished with six years (or his whole life) of imprisonment in a loathsome • 1825. 2l6 gaol ! Let us think of these things when we are talking of the " bloody Queen Mary."' The punishments now-a-days proceed from the maxim that " Christianity is part and parcel of the law of the land." When did it begin ? Be fore or since the " Reformation ? " And who, amongst all these sects which it would seem this law tolerates, which of them is to tell us, from which of them are we to learn what Christianity is ? 258. As to the mass of suffering, supposing the whole of the 277 persons who suffered in the reign of Mary to have suffered solely for the sake of religion, instead of having been, like Cranmer and Ridley, traitors and felons, as well as offenders on the score of religion ; let us suppose the whole 277 to have suffered for offences against religion : did the mass of suffering surpass the mass of suffering on this same account during the reign of the late king ? And unless Smithfield and burning have any peculiar agony, anything worse than death to impart, did Smithfield ever ' Lingard says : '' The foulest blot on the character of this queen is her long and cruel persecution of the reformers. The sufferings of the victims naturally begat an antipathy to the woman by whose authority they were inflicted. It is, however, but fair to recollect that the extirpation ol erroneous doctrine was inculcated as a duty by the leaders of every religious party. Mary only practised what they taught; it was her misfortune rather than her fault that she was not more enlightened than the wisest of her contemporaries" (History, vii., p. 242), and "if anything could be urged in extenuation of these cruelties, it must have been the provocation given by the reformers. The succession of a Catholic sovereign had deprived them of office and power, had suppressed the English service, ihe idol of their affections, and had re-established the ancient worship, which they deemed anti-Christian and idolatrous. Disappointment embittered their zeal, and enthusiasm sanctified their intemperance. They heaped on the queen, her bishops and her religion, every indecent and irritatiiiR epithet which language could supply. Her clergy could not exercise their functions without danger to their lives ; a dagger was thrown at one priest in the pulpit, a gun was discharged at another, and several wounds were inflicted on a third while he administered the communion in his church' (ibid., p. 207). witness so great a mass of suffering as the Old Bailey has witnessed on account of offences against that purely Pro testant invention, bank-notes? Perhaps this invention, expressly intended to keep out Popery, has cost ten times, if not ten times ten times, the blood that was shed in the reign of her whom we still have the injustice or the folly to call the " bloody Queen Mary," all whose excellent quali ties, all whose exalted virtues, all her piety, charity, generosity, sacred adherence to her faith and her word, all her gratitude, and even those feelings of anxiety for the greatness and honour of England, which feelings hastened her to the grave, — all these, in which she was never equalled by any sovereign that sat on the English throne, Alfred alone excepted, whose religion she sought to re-establish for ever, — all these are to pass for nothing, and we are to call her the " bloody Mary" because it suits the views of those who fatten on the spoils of that Church which never suffered Englishmen to bear the odious and debasing name of pauper. 259. To the pauper and ripping-up reign we now come. This is the reign of " good Queen Bess." We shall in a short time see how good she was. The Act of Parlia ment which is still in force relative to the poor and poor- rates was passed in the forty-third year of this reign : but that was not the only act of the kind ; there were eleven acts passed before that, in consequence of the poverty and misery into which the " Reformation " had plunged the people. However, it is the last number of my work which is to contain the history of the rise and progress of English pauperism from the beginning of the " Reforma tion " down to the present time. At present I have to relate what took place with regard to the affairs of religion. 260. Ehzabeth during the reign of her brother had been a Protestant, and during the reign of her sister a Catholic. At the time of her sister's death she not only went to mass publicly, but she had a Catholic chapel in 2l8 her house, and also a confessor. These appearances had not, however,, deceived her sister, who to the very last doubted her sincerity. On her death-bed, honest and sincere Mary required from her a frank avowal of her opinions as to religion. Elizabeth, in answer, prayed God that the earth might open and swallow her if she were not a true Roman Catholic.^ She made the same declaration to the Duke of Feria, the Spanish envoy, whom she so completely deceived that he wrote to Philip that the accession of Elizabeth would make no alteration in matters of religion in England. In spite of all this, it was not long before she began the persecution of her unhappy subjects because they were Roman Catholics. 261. She was illegitimate by law. The marriage of her mother had been by law, which yet remained unrepealed,' declared to be null and void from the beginning.' Her accession having been in the usual way notified to foreign powers, that is, that " she had succeeded to the throne by hereditary right and the consent of the nation," the Pope answered that he did not understand the hereditary right of a person not born in lawful wedlock,' so that he, of " This is given on the authority of the life of Jane Dormer, one of Mary's maids of honour, afterwards duchess of Feria. Her future husband, the Spanish envoy, was so convinced of Elizabeth's sincerity that he removed the Queen's doubts on the matter (Lingard, History, vii., p. 241). The same account is given by Sander, Schism (ed. Lewis), p. 232. A contem porary letter from Edwin Sandys, afterwards one of Elizabeth's bishops, to Bullinger (December 20, 1558), gives as Elizabeth's reply about religion, "As to religion I promise this much, that I will not change it provided only it can be proved by the word of God, which shall be the only foun dation and rule of my religion " (Zurich Letters, Parker Society, No 2). ' Parliament, on the accession of Elizabeth, passed an act recognizing the Queen's just title to the crown, but said nothing about the validity "' her mother's marriage. " On this Lingard writes: "Came, the resident at Rome, was ordered to acquaint the pontifl^that she (Elizabeth) had succeeded to her sister, and had determined to ofler no violence to the consciences of her subject,! 219 course, could not acknowledge her hereditary right. This was of itself a pretty strong inducement for a lady of so flexible a conscience as she had to resolve to be a Pro testant. But there was another and even a stronger motive. Mary, Queen of Scotland, who had married the Dauphin of France, claimed the crown of England as the nearest legitimate descendant of Henry VII.;" so that Elizabeth ran a manifest risk of losing the crown, unless she became a Protestant and crammed Cranmer's creed down the throats of her people. If she remained a Catho lic she must yield submission to the decrees from Rome ; the Pope could have made it a duty with her people to abandon her, or, at the very least, he could have greatly embarrassed her. In short, she saw clearly that if her people remained Catholics she could never reign in perfect safety. She knew that she had no hereditary right ; she .knew that the law ascribed her birth to adultery. She never could think of reigning quietly over a people the head of whose Church refused to acknowledge her right whatever might be their religious creed. It was the misfortune of Paul, who had passed his eightieth year, that he adopted opinions with the credulity and maintained them with the pertinacity of old age. His ear had been pre-occupied by the diligence of the French ambassador, who suggested that to admit the succession of Elizabeth would be to approve the pretended marriage of her parents Henry VIIL and Anne Boleyn ; to annul the decisions of Clement VII. and Paul III." (History, vii., p. 253). Canon Tierney, in his edition of Dodd's Church History (vol. iv., preface), shows on the authority of Carne's own letters that it is highly prob able the Pope never used the intemperate language usually attributed to him. It seems unlikely that Came was ordered to announce Elizabeth's accession to him, and the story is considered by Canon Tierney to be the outcome of " the inventive powers of Paul Sarpi," by whom it was first published in his History of the Council of Trent, from which it has passed into every history. Catholic and Protestant. ' Mary Stuart, at the command of her father-in-law, assumed the title of Queen of England, and quartered the English arms with those of France and Scotland. 220 to the crown ; and resolving to wear that crown, she resolved, cost what ruin or blood it might, to compel her people to abandon that very religion, her belief in which she had a few months before declared by praying to " God that the earth might open and swallow her alive if she were not a true Roman Catholic." 262. The Pope's answer was honest, but it was impolitic, and most unfortunate it was for the English and Irish people, who had now to prepare for sufferings such as they had never known before. The situation of things was extremely fa vourable to the Protestants. Mary, the Queen of Scots, the real lawful heir to the throne, was, as we have seen, married to the Dauphin of France. If Elizabeth were set aside, or if she died without issue before Mary, England must become an appendage of France. The loss of Calais and of Boulogne had mortified the nation enough, but for England herself to be transferred to France was what no Englishman could think of with patience ; so that she became strong from the dread that the people had of the consequences of her being put down. It was the betroth ing of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin which induced Mary, Queen of England, to marry Philip, and thereby to secure an ally for England in case of Scotland becoming a dependence of France. How much more pressing was the danger now, when the Queen of Scots was actually married to the Dauphin (the heir apparent to the French throne), and when, if she were permitted to possess the crown of Pngland, England, in case of her having a son, must become a province of France ! 263. This state of things was therefore most unfortunate for the Catholics. It made many, very many, of themselves cool in opposition to the change which the new queen soon showed her determination to effect ; for, however faithful as to their religion, they were Englishmen, and abhorred the thought of being the underlings of Frenchmen. They might hate the Queen for her apostasy and tyranny, but ,221 still they could not but desire that England should remain an independent state ; and to keep ber such the uphold ing of Elizabeth seemed absolutely necessary. Those who eulogize Henry IV. of France, who became a Catholic expressly and avowedly for the purpose of possessing and keeping the throne of that country, cannot very con sistently blame Elizabeth for becoming a Protestant for an exactly similar reason. I do not attempt to justify either of them ; but I must confess that if anything would have induced me to uphold Elizabeth, it would have been that she — as far as human foresight could go — was an instrument necessary to preserve England from subjection to France ; and beyond all doubt this was the main reason for which, at the outset at least, she was upheld by many of the eminent and powerful men of that day. 264. But if we admit that she was justified in thus con sulting her preservation as a queen and the nation's inde pendence at the expense of religious considerations, if we admit that she had a right to give a preference to Pro testants, and to use all gentle means for the totally changing of the religion of her people, if we admit this, — and that is admitting a great deal more than justice de mands of us, — who can refrain from being filled with horror at the barbarity which she so unsparingly exercised for the accomplishment of her purpose ? 265. The intention to change the rehgion of the country became in a short time so manifest that all the bishops but one refused to crown her.'" She at last found one to do '° Elizabeth became Queen on November 17, 1558. On December 5, when Queen Mary was buried, Bishop White, who preached, expressed his fear that the Protestant exiles would return. Prior to December 27, direc tions were issued for part of the service to be in English, and forbidding the elevation of the host. Parker was pitched upon as Pole's successor before the close of the year, and in January the great seal was taken from Arch bishop Heath and given to Nicholas Bacon. This and other similar facts made it certain that Elizabeth's intentions as to a new " settlement of 222 it, but even he would not consent to do the thing without her conformity to the Catholic ritual." Very soon, however, a series of acts were passed which, by degrees, put down the Catholic worship and re-introduced the Protestant, and she found the plunderers and possessors of plunder just as ready to conform to her ecclesiastical sway as they had been to receive absolution from Cardinal Pole in the last reign. Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, which had been ascribed by the Parliament to the suggestions of the " Holy Ghost," had been altered and amended even in Edward's reign. It was now revived, and altered and amended again, and still it was ascribed to the " dictates of the Holy Ghost ! "^ 266. If these Acts of Parliament had stopped here they would certainly have been bad and disgraceful enough. But such a change was not to be effected without blood. This Queen was resolved to reign : the blood of her people she deemed necessary to her own safety, and she never religion " had been well known early in her reign. " The refusal of the bishops to officiate at her coronation (January 14, 1559) . . . probiibly arose," says Hallam, " from her order that the host should not be elevated, which in truth was not legally to be justified " (Constitutional History, loth ed., i., p. no, twte). " The ceremony was performed by Oglethorp, bishop of Carlisle, on January 15, 1559. "But if he was prevailed upon to crown the queen, she on her part was compelled to take the accustomed oath and to conform to all the rites of the Catholic pontifical " (Lingard, History, vii., p. 256; cf. Heylyn, Ecclesia Restaurata, Queen Elizabeth, p. 106). '^ The Acts of Uniformity, establishing the Anglican Liturgy, met with considerable opposition among the lords ; nine temporal .peers and all the bishops protested against it. The changes in the Elizabethan Book ot Common Prayer from the Prayer Book of 1552 were very slight. "The words used in distributing the elements," writes Hallam, " were so con trived, by blending the two forms successively used under Edward, as neither to offend the Popish or Lutheran, nor the Zwinglian communicant . . . Burnet owns that the greater part of the nation still adhered to this tenet (of the real or corporal presence), though it was not the opinion ot the rulers of the Church " (Constitutional History, loth ed., i., p. lU,mtt\ 223 scrupled to make it flow. She looked upon the Catholic religion as her mortal enemy ; and cost what it might, she was resolved to destroy it if she could, the means being by her those which best answered her end. 267. With this view statutes the most bloody were passed. All persons were compelled to take the oath of supremacy, on pain of death. To take the oath of su premacy, that is to say, to acknowledge the Queen's supremacy in spiritual matters, was to renounce the Pope and the Catholic religion, or in other words to become an apostate.^' Thus was a very large part of her people at once condemned to death for adhering to the religion of their fathers, and moreover for adhering to that very religion in which she had openly lived till she became queen, and to her firm belief in which she had sworn at her coronation. 268. Besides this act of monstrous barbarity, it was made high treason in a priest to say mass, it was made high treason in a priest to come into the kingdom from abroad, it was made high treason to harbour or to relieve a priest. And on these grounds and others of a like nature, hundreds upon hundreds were butchered in the' most inhuman manner, being first hung up, then cut down alive, their bowels then ripped up and their bodies chopped into quarters ; and this I again beg you, sensible and just Englishmen, to observe, only because the unfortunate persons were too virtuous and sincere to apostatize from that faith which this queen herself had at her coronation, in her coronation oath, solemnly sworn to adhere to and defend ! 269. Having pulled down the altars, set up the tables. " " The oath of supremacy renounced the spiritual as well as the temporal jurisdiction of every foreign prince or prelate. ... It was highly penal, and for the third offence treasonable, to maintain such supremacy by writing or advised speaking " (Hallam, Constitutional History, i., p. 112). 224 having ousted the Catholic priests and worship and put in their stead a set of hungry, beggarly creatures, with Cranmer's Prayer Book amended in their hands," having done this, she compelled her Catholic subjects to attend in the churches under enormous penalties, which rose at last to death itself, in case of perseverance in refusal ! Thus were all the good, all the sincere, all the conscientious people in the kingdom incessantly harrassed, ruined by enormous fines, brought to the gallows, or compelled to flee from their native country."^ Thus was this Protestant religion watered with the tears and the blood of the people of England. Talk of Catholic persecution and cruehy ! Where are you to find persecution and cruelty like this inflicted by Catholic princes ? Elizabeth put, in one way or another, more Catholics to death in one year, for not becoming apostates to the religion which she had sworn to be hers, and to be the only true one, than Mary put to death in her whole reign for having apostatized from the religion of her and their fathers, and to which rehgion she herself had always adhered. Yet the former is called, or has been called, "good Queen Bess," and the latter, "bloody Queen Mary." Even the horrid massacre of St. Bartholomew was nothing when fairly compared with the butcheries and other cruelties of the reign of this Protestant queen of England, — yes, a mere nothing ; and yet she put on mourning upon that occasion, and had the consummate '• The second Prayer Book of Edward VI. , with certain small changes, was ordered to be used by the ministers in all churches under penalty of forfeiture, deprivation and death (Lingard, History, vii., p. 259). " "The statute of Uniformity,'' says Hallam (utsup.,p. 1 1 3) " trenched more on the natural rights of conscience ; prohibiting, under pain of forfeit ing goods and chattels for the first offence, of a year's imprisonment for the second, and of imprisonment during life for the third, the use by a minister, whether beneficed or not, of any but the established liturgy, and imposing a fine of one shilling on all who should absent themselves from church on Sundays and holy days." 22S hypocrisy to affect horror at the cruelties that the King of France had committed. 270. This massacre took place at Paris in the year 1572, and in the fourteenth year of Elizabeth's reign ; and as it belongs to the history of that day, as it was, in fact, in part produced by her own incessant and most mischievous intrigues, and as it has been made a great handle of in the work of calumniating the Catholics, even to this day, it is necessary that I give a true account of it, and that I go back to those civil wars in France which she occasioned, and in which she took so large a part, and which finaHy lost Calais and its territory to England. The " Reformation " which Luther said he was taught by the devil had found its way into France so early as in the year 1530 or there abouts. The " reformers " there were caHed Huguenots. For a long while they were of little consequence ; but they at last, in the reign of Charles IX., became formidable to the government by being taken hold of by those ambitious and rebellious leaders, Conde and Coligny. The faction of which these two were the chiefs wanted to have the governing of France during the minority of Charles, who came to the throne in the year 1561 at ten years of age. His mother, the Queen Dowager, gave the preference to the Duke of Guise and his party. The disappointed nobles, Conde and Coligny, needed no better motive for becoming most zealous Protestants, the Guises being zealous in the Catholic cause ! Hence arose an open rebellion on the part of the former, fomented by the Queen of England, who seemed to think that she never could be safe as long as there was Catholic prince, priest or people, left upon the face of the earth, and who never stuck at means if they were but calculated to effect her end. She was herself an apostate, she wanted to annihilate that from which she had apostatized, and by her endeavours to effect her purpose she made her people bleed at every pore, and made no scruple upon any occasion to sacrifice the national honour. 226 271. At her coming to the throne she found the country at war with France, and Calais in its hands, that fortress and territory having, as we have seen in paragraph 254, been taken by a French army under the Duke of Guise. She almost immediately made peace with France, and that, too, without getting Calais back, as she might have done if she had not preferred her own private interest to the interest and honour of England. The negotiations for peace (England, Spain, and France being the parties) were carried on at Cateau Cambresis, in France. All was soon settled with regard to Spain and France ; but Philip, (Mary's husband, remember,) faithful to his engagements, refused to sign the treaty until the new Queen of England should be satisfied with regard to Calais ; and he even offered to continue the war for six years unless Calais was restored, provided Elizabeth would bind herself not to make a separate peace during that period. She declined this generous offer ; she had begun to rip up her subjects, and was afraid of war, and she therefore clandestinely entered into negotiations with France, and it was agreed that the latter should keep Calais for eight years, or pay to England 500,000 crowns ! Never was there a baser act than this treaty on the part of England. But this vi^as not all ; for the treaty further stipulated that if France committed any act of aggression against England during the eight years, or if England committed any act of aggres sion against France during that time, the treaty should be void, and that the former should lose the right of retaining and the latter the claim to the restoration of this valuable town and territory.'* 272. This treaty was concluded in 1559, and it was a treaty not only of friendship but of affiance between the '° Lingard, History, vii., p. 266. The whole of the facts in the subse quent pages of this chaplcr are practically taken from Dr. Lingard's History, where the authorities for thi; statements may be seen. 227 parties. But before three years out of the eight had passed away, " good Queen Bess," out of pure hatred and fear of the Catholics, from a pure desire to make her tyrannical sway secure, from the sole desire of being still able to fine, imprison, and rip up her unfortunate subjects, forfeited all claim to the restoration of Calais, and that too by a breach of treaty more flagrant and more base than perhaps had ever before been witnessed in the world. 273. Cond6 and Coligny, with their Huguenots, had stirred up a formidable civil war in France. " Good Queen Bess's " ambassador at that court stimulated and assisted the rebels to the utmost of his power. At last Vidame, an agent of Conde and Coligny, came secretly over to England to negotiate for military, naval, and pecuniary assistance. They succeeded with "good Bess," who, wholly disregarding the solemn treaties by which she was bound to Charles IX., King of France, entered into a formal treaty with the French rebels to send them an army and money, for the purpose of carrying on war against their sovereign, of whom she was an ally, having bound herself in that character by a solemn oath on the Evange- Hsts! By this treaty she engaged to furnish men, ships, and money ; and the traitors, on their part, engaged to put Havre de Grace at once into her hands, as a pledge, not only for the repayment of the money to be advanced, but for the restoration of Calais ! This infamous compact richly deserved the consequences that attended it." 274. The French ambassador in London, when he found that an intercourse was going on between the Queen and the agents of the rebels, went to Cecil, the secretary of state, carrying the treaty of Cateau Cambresis in his hand, and demanded, agreeably to the stipulations of that treaty, that the agents of the rebels should be delivered up as traitors to their sovereign, and he warned the English '¦ Lingard, History, vi., pp. 37-38. 228 government that any act of aggression on its part would annihilate its claim to the recovery of Calais at the end of the eight years. But "good Bess" had caused the civil wars in France ; she had, by her bribes and other underhand means, stirred them up, and she believed that the success of the French rebels was necessary to her own security on her throne of doubtful right ; and as she hoped to get Calais in this perfidious way, she saw nothing but gain in the perfidy. 275. The rebels were in possession of Dieppe, Rouen, Havre de Grace, and had extended their power over a con siderable part of Normandy. They at once put Havre and Dieppe into the hands of the English.'^ So infamous and treacherous a proceeding roused the Catholics of France, who now became ashamed of that inactivity which had suf fered a sect less than a hundredth part of the population to sell their country under the blasphemous plea of a love of the Gospel. " Good Bess," with her usual mix ture of hypocrisy and effrontery, sent her proclamations into Normandy, declaring that she meant no hostility against her " good brother," the King of France, but merely to protect his Protestant subjects against the tyranny of the House of Guise; and that her "good brother " ought to be grateful to her for the assistance she was lending ! This cool and hypocritical insolence added fury to the flame. All France could not but recol lect that it was the skilful, the gallant, the patriotic Duke of Guise, who had, only five years before, ejected the English from Calais, their last hold in France ; and they now saw these " sons of the Gospel," as they had the audacity to call themselves, bring those same English back again and put two French seaports into their hands at once ! Are we to wonder at the inextinguishable hatred of the people of France against this traitorous sect ? Are we to wonder " Lingard, History, vi., p. 38. 229 that they felt a desire to extirpate the whole of so infamous a race, who had aheady sold their country to the utmost of their power ? 276. The French ^nobility from every province and corner of France flew to the aid of their sovereign, whose army was commanded by the Constable, Montmorency, with the Duke of Guise under him. Conde was at the head of the rebel army, having Coligny as a sort of partner in the con cern, and having been joined by the English troops under the Earl of Warwick, nephew of " good Bess's " paramour, Dudley, of whom the Protestant clergymen, Heylyn and Whitaker, will tell us more than enough by-and-by. The first movement of the French against this combined mass of hypocrisy, audacity, perfidy and treason, was the besieging of Rouen, into which Sir Edward Poynings, who had preceded Warwick, had thrown an English rein forcement to assist the faithful " sons of the Gospel." In order to encourage the French, the Queen-Mother (Cather ine de Medici), her son the young King Charles (now twelve years of age), and the King of Navarre, were present at the siege. The latter was mortally wounded in the attack, but the Catholics finally took the town by assault and put the whole of the garrison to the sword, including the English reinforcement sent by Elizabeth.'' 277. In the meanwhile the brother of Coligny had, by the money of Elizabeth, collected together a body of German mercenary gospellers and had got them to Orleans, which was then the main hold of the Huguenots, while " good Bess," in order to act her part faithfully, ordered public prayers during three whole days, to implore God's blessing "upon her cause and the cause of the Gospel."-" Thus '° Lingard, History, vi., p. 39. " Two hundred Englishmen . . . perished in the breach." ™ Ibid. " Count Oldenburgh was commissioned to levy i2,oco men in Germany." 230 reinforced by another body of foreigners brought into their country, the base traitors, Cond6 and Coligny, first made a feint on the side of Paris ; but finding themselves too weak on that side, they took their way towards Normandy, in the hope of there having the aid of the English forces. But the Catholics, still under Montmorency and the Duke of Guise, followed the traitors, overtook them at Dreux, com pelled them to fight, took Conde himself prisoner, and though Montmorency was taken prisoner by the rebels, the Duke of Guise took the chief command and drove the rebel Coligny and his army before him, and this too, observe, in spite of " good Bess's " three whole days of prayers.^' 278. Nevertheless, Coligny kept the field and pillaged Normandy pretty severely. Elizabeth sent him some money, and offered to be bound for more if he could get any merchants (that is Jews) to lend it him ; but she sent him no troops, those under the Earl of Warwick being kept safe and sound in the strong fortress of Havre de Grace, which place honest and " good Bess " intended to keep, let things go which way they might, which honest intention, we shall, however, find defeated in the end. Coligny and his ruffians and German mercenary gos pellers cruelly plundered the Normans as far as they could extend their arms. The Catholics, now under the Duke of Guise, laid siege to Orleans. While this siege was going on, one Poltrot, a Huguenot in the pay of Coligny, went under the guise of being a deserter from that in veterate rebel chief, and entered into the service of the army under the Duke of Guise."^ In a short time this miscreant found the means to assassinate that gahant nobleman and distinguished patriot, instigated and indeed employed for the express purpose by Coligny, and urged on by Beza, "the famous preacher," as Hume calls him, but really one of the most infamous of all the " reform- -' Lingard, History, vi., p. 39. -- Ibid., p. 43. 231 ing " preachers, and perhaps second to none but Luther himself. This atrocious deed met afterwards with retalia tion in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, when on Coligny's mangled body there might have been placarded the name of Poltrot. This wretch had been paid by Coligny, and the money had come from honest and sincere " good Queen Bess," whom we shall hereafter find plainly accused by Whitaker (a clergyman of the Church of England) of plot ting the assassination of her own cousin and finding no man in her kingdom base enough to perform the deed. 279. This foul deed seems to have made Conde ashamed of his infamous associate and followers. Ambition had made him a rebel, but he had sense of honour enough left to make him shudder at the thought of being the leader of assassins; and he, with one drop of true blood in him, could not think without horror of such a man as the Duke of Guise, who had rendered such inestimable services to France, being swept from existence by so base a miscreant as that whom his late colleague had hired and paid for that purpose. If the son of the Duke of Guise could have destroyed Coligny and his whole crew, he would have been justified in so doing. And yet the world has been stunned with the Protestant cries of horror at the death of this same Coligny and a small part of his followers. 280. Conde now sought to get rid of his miscreant- asso ciates by proposing, in February, 1563, a pacification, and tendering his submission to his sovereign on condition of an act of oblivion. CoHgny was included in the amnesty. The King granted to the Huguenots permission to practise their worship in one town in e.very bailiwick, and thus were all matters settled between the King and his rebellious subjects.^ Sad tidings for "good Queen Bess," who, as Whitaker well observes, continually sought her safety in the divisions and misery of others. Conde, in his treaty " Lingard, History, vi., p. 43. 232 with her, had stipulated not to conclude any peace without her consent; but had she a right to complain of want of good faith, — she, who had broken her treaty and her oath with Charles IX., and who, in defiance of both, had en tered into a treaty with rebels in open arms against their king ? 281. The French King, wishing to get her troops quietly out of Havre de Grace, and finding that she now pretended to hold it as a pledge for the surrender of Calais, at the end of the eight years offered to renew the treaty of Cateau Cambresis, by which Calais was to be restored to England in 1567. But she rejected this fair and reasonable pro posal. She had got Havre, no matter how ; and she said that " a bird in hand was worth two in the bush." Find ing, however, that all parties in France were .now united for the expulsion of the English, she reluctantly gave way. She authorised her ambassadors to present a new project of treaty ; but by this time the French army, under Mont morency, Conde, Elizabeth's late friend and ally, being serving in the army, was on its way to regain Havre by force of arms, the King of France being well convinced that treaties v/ith Elizabeth were things perfectly vain. 282. Still, it was not a trifling thing to take Havre out of the hands of the English. A great deal of taxes had been imposed upon this nation (to say nothing of the " prayers "), in order to insure the possession of this place. The Earl of Warwick, instead of sending troops to assist the Queen's allies, had kept his army at Havre ; had with six thousand soldiers and seven hundred pioneers rendered the place " impregnable ; " had, as soon as he heard that the rebellion was at an end, expelled all the French people from Havre, to their utter ruin and in direct breach of Eliza beth's treaty with Conde and Coligny.^* But in spite of all this Montmorency was at the end of a short time ready to """ Hume, Histoiy of England (Murray's reprint), ii., p. 36S. 233 enter the place by assault, having made his breaches in preparation. The Queen-mother and the King were pre sent in the camp, where they had the indescribable pleasure to see "good Queen Bess's" general humbly propose to surrender the place to its rightful sovereign, without any mention of Calais and its territory, and on no condition whatever but that of being permitted to return to Englancl with the miserable remnant of his army ; ^ and England, after all the treasure and blood expended to gratify the malignity of Elizabeth, and after all the just imputations of perfidy that she had brought upon it, had to receive that remnant, that ratification of disgrace greater than it had to support from the day when glorious Alfred finally expelled the Danes. And yet this woman is called, or has been called, " Good Queen Bess," and her perfidious and butchering reign has been called glorious ! 283. Great as the mortifications of the Queen now were, and great as were the misfortunes of the country brought upon it by these her proceedings of hitherto unheard-of hypocrisy and breach of faith, we have as yet seen the full measure of neither the one nor the other. For " glorious and good Bess " had now to sue for peace, and with that king with whose rebel subjects she had so recently co-operated. Her ambassadors, goi.ig with due passports, were arrested and imprisoned. She stamped and swore, but she swallowed the affront, and took the regular steps to cause them to be received at the French court, who on their part treated her pressing applications with a contemptuous sneer, and suffered many months to pass away before they would listen to any terms of peace. Smith was one of her envoys, and the other was that same Throckmorton who had been her " ambassador at Paris, and who had been her agent in stirring up Conde and Coligny to their rebellion. The former was imprisoned at * Lingard, History, vi., p. 44. 234 Melun, and the latter at Saint Germain's.^" Smith was released upon her application, but Throckmorton was de tained and was made use of for the following curious and, to " good Bess," most humiliating purpose. The treaty of Cateau Cambresis, which stipulated for the restoration of Calais in eight years or the forfeiture of 500,000 crowns by the French, contained a stipulation that four French noblemen should be held by Elizabeth as hostages for the fulfilment of the treaty on the part of France. " Good Bess," by her aiding of the French rebels, had broken this treaty, had lost all just claim to Calais, and ought to have released the hostages ; but as the Queen very seldom did what she ought to, — as she might, almost every day of her mischievous life, have with perfect truth repeated that part of the Prayer Book " amended " which says, " we have done those things which we ought not to do and have left undone those things which we ought to do," — so this " good " woman had kept the hostages, though she had forfeited all just claim to that for the ful filment of which they had been put into her hands. Now, however, the French had got a " bird in hand " too. They had got Throckmorton, their old enemy, and he had got a large quantity of the Queen's horrible secrets locked up in his breast ! So that, after long discussions, during which Throckmorton gave very significant signs of his determination not to end his days in prison without taking revenge of some sort on his merciless employer, the "good" woman agreed to exchange the four French noblemen for him ; and as a quarter of a loaf was better than no bread, to take 125,000 crowns for the relinquish ment of Calais to France in perpetuity !^' 284. Thus, then, it was " good Queen Bess " after all, glorious and Protestant Bess, that plucked this jewel from the English crown 1 Nor was this the only signal conse- *" Lingard, History, vi., p. 44. '"Ibid., p. 44. 235 quence of her unhallowed and unprincipled treaty and intrigues with the French rebels. The plague, which had got into the garrison of Havre de Grace, and which had left Warwick with only about two thousand out of his seven thousand men, this dreadful disease was brought by that miserable remnant of infected -beings to England, where Hume himself allows that it swept off great mul titudes, "especially in London, where above twentj' thousand persons died of it in one year 1 "^^ Thus was the nation heavily taxed, afflicted with war, afflicted with pestilence ; thus were thousands upon thousands of Eng lish people destroyed or ruined or rendered miserable, merely to gratify this proud and malignant woman, who thought that she could never be safe until all the world joined in her flagrant apostacy. Thus, and merely for this same reason, was Calais surrendered for ever ; Calais, the proudest possession of England ; Calais, one of the two keys to the northern seas ; Calais, that had been won by our Catholic forefathers two hundred years before ; Calais, which they would have no more thought of yield ing to France than they would have thought of yielding Dover ; Calais, the bare idea of a possibility of losing which had broken the heart of the honest, the virtuous, the patriotic and most calumniated Mary ! 285. It is surprising what baseness Hume discovers in treating of the whole of this important series of trans actions ; how he glosses over all the breaches of faith and of oath on the part of Elizabeth ; how he lets pass without censure the flagrant and malignant treason of the rebels, and even how he insinuates apologies for them ; how he skips by the rare fidelity of Philip to his engagements ; how he praises the black-hearted Coligny, while he almost censures Conde for seeking peace after the assassination of the Duke of Guise ; how he wholly suppresses the deep ^ Hume, History, ii., 368. 236 humiliations of England in the case of Smith and Throck morton ; how he makes the last bill of sale 220,000, instead of the fourth part of 500,000 ; ^ how he passes over the- loss of Calais for ever as nothing in " good Bess," though. he had made the temporary loss of it everything in Mary; but, above all the rest, how he constantly aims his maHgnity at that skilful, brave, faithful, and patriotic nobleman, the Duke of Guise, while he extols Conde as long as he was a rebel and a traitor engaged in selling his country, and how he lauds the inveterate and treacherous Coligny to the last hour of that traitor's life. 286. Is there any man who does not see the vast im portance of Calais and its territory ? Is there any man who does not see how desirable it would be to us to have it now ? Is there an Englishman who does not lament the loss of it ? And is it not clear as the sun at noonday that it was lost for ever by "good Bess's" perfidy in joining the rebels of France ? If when those rebels were formidable to their sovereign she had pressed him to restore Calais at once and to take an equivalent for such anticipated restoration, is it not obvious that he would have consented rather than risk her displeasure at such a moment ? And what is the apology that Hume makes for her conduct in joining the rebels ? " Elizabeth, besides the general and essential interest of supporting the Pro testants and opposing the rapid progress of her enemy, the Duke of Guise " (how was he her enemy ?), "had other motives which engaged her to accept this proposal. When she concluded the peace of Cateau Cambresis she had good reason to foresee that France would never volun tarily fulfil the article with regard to the restitution of Calais, and many subsequent incidents tended to confirm this suspicion. Considerable sums of money had been laid out on the fortifications, long leases had been granted of °° Hume, History, ii., p. 368. 237 the lands, and many inhabitants had been encouraged to build and settle there by assurances that Calais would never be restored to the EngHsh. The Queen therefore very wisely concluded that, could she get possession of Havre, a place which commanded the mouth of the Seine, and was of much greater importance than Calais, she should easily constrain the French to execute the treaty, and should have the glory of restoring to the crown that ancient possession which was so much the favourite of the nation." =" 287. Away then go at once all her professions of desire to defend the " cause of the Gospel ; " she is a hypocrite the most profound at once ; she breaks faith with the King of France and with the rebels too. But if she really fore saw that the French would not voluntarily fulfil the treaty of Cateau Cambresis, why did she conclude it, when Philip was ready to aid her in compelling France to restore Calais at once ? And as to the " subsequent incidents " which had confirmed her suspicions, why should not the French government repair the fortifications, and why should they not give " assurances that the territory would never be restored to the English," seeing that she had bargained for the perpetual surrender of 500,000 crowns ? The French meant, doubtless, to pay the money at the end of the eight years. They never, after she had rejected the offer of Philip, intended to give up Calais ; that every body knew, and nobody better than the Queen herself : she had hostages for the payment of the money, and she held those hostages after she had received Havre from the rebels as a security for the payment of that money ! She had, she thought, two birds in the hand ; but though she " concluded very wisely," both birds escaped, she out witted and overreached herself, and the nation has to this day to lament the consequences of her selfishness, bad faith and atrocious perfidy. " Hume, History, ii., p. 363. 238 288. I should now proceed to follow Elizabeth and her worthy friend Coligny down to the date of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, which was a sort of wholesale of the same work that " good Bess " carried on in detail ; but I have filled my paper, and I now see that it will be impos sible for me to do anything like justice to my subject without stretching my little work lurther than I intended. 239 CHAPTER X. 289. Though the massacre of Saint Bartholomew took place in France, yet it has formed .so fertile a source of calumny against the religion of our fathers, it has served as a pretence with Protestant historians to justify or palliate so many atrocities on the part of their divers sects, and the Queen of England and her ministers had so great a hand in first producing it and then in punishing Catholics under pretence of avenging it, that it is necessary for me to give an account of it. 2go. We have seen in the paragraphs from 273 to 281 the treacherous works of Coligny, and in paragraph 278 we have seen that this pretended saint basely caused that gallant and patriotic nobleman, the Dtike of Guise, to be assassinated. But in assassinating this nobleman the wretch did not take off the whole of his family. There was a son left to avenge that father, and the just ven geance of this son the treacherous Coligny had to feel. We have seen that peace had taken place between the French King and his rebeHious subjects, but Coligny had all along discovered that his treacherous designs only slept. The King was making a progress through the kingdom about four years after the pacification :' a plot was formed by Coligny and his associates to kill or seize him ; but by riding fourteen hours without getting off his horse, and without food or drink, he escaped and got safe 'September, 1567. 240 to Paris.' Another civil war soon broke out, followed by another pacification ; but such had been the barbarities committed on both sides that there could be, and there was, no real forgiveness. The Protestants had been full as sanguinary as the Catholics ; and, which has been re marked even by their own historians, their conduct was frequently, not to say uniformly, characterized by plunder ing and by hypocrisy and perfidy unknown to their enemies. 291. During this pacification Coligny had, by the deepest dissimulation, endeavoured to worm himself into favour with the young King ; and upon the occasion of a marriage between the King's sister and the young King of Navarre (afterwards the famous Henry IV.), Coligny, who, Conde being now dead,® was become the chief of his sect, came to Paris with a company of his Protestant adhe'^ents to partake in the celebration, and that, too, at the King's invitation. After he had been there a day or two, some one shot at him in the street with a blunderbuss and wounded him in two or three places, but not dangerously.' His partisans ascribed this to the young Duke of Guise, though no proof has ever been produced to support the assertion.^ They, however, got about their leader and threatened revenge, as was very natural. Taking this for the ground of their justification, the court resolved to '' Lingard, History, vi., p. 113. " The English ambassador, Norris, had been deeply implicated in the arrangement of this atrocious and in reality unprovoked attempt ; but though the queen, as a sovereign, condemned the outrage, Cecil required Norris to ' comfort ' the insurgents and exhort them to persevere." ^Condd fell in the battle of Jarnac, March 14, 1569. ¦¦August 22, 1572. "Lingard, vi., p. 13S, says; — "The public voice attributed the altera jit to the Duke of Guise in revenge of the murder of his father at the siege o( Orleans ; it had proceeded in reality (and was so suspected by Coligni hini- §plf) from Catherine, the Queen-mothef," 241 anticipate the blow, and on Sunday, August 24, 1572, it being Saint Bartholomew's day, they put their design in execution. There was great difficulty in prevailing upon the young King to give his consent ; but at last, by the representations and entreaties of his mother, those of the Duke of Anjou, his brother, and those of the Duke of Guise, he was prevailed upon. The dreadful orders were given, at the appointed moment the signal was made, the Duke of Guise, with a band of followers, rushed to and broke open the house of Coligny, whose dead body was soon thrown out of the window into the street. The people of Paris, who mortally hated the Protestants, and who could not have forgotten Coligny's having put "the English in possession of Dieppe and Havre ; who could not have forgotten that while the old enemy of France was thus again brought into the country by Coligny and his Protestants, this same traitor and his sect had basely assassinated that brave nobleman, the late Duke of Guise, who had driven the English from their last hold, Calais, and who had been assassinated at the very moment when he was endeavouring to drive this old enemy from Havre, into which this Coligny and his sect had brought that enemy ; the people of Paris could not but remember these things, and remembering them they could not but hold Coligny and his sect in detestation indescribable. Besides this there were few of them, some one or more of whose relations had not perished, or suffered in some way or other from the plunderings or butcheries of these maraud ing and murdering Calvinists, whose creed taught them that good works were unavailing, and that no deeds, how ever base or bloody, could bar their way to salvation. These " Protestants " as they were caHed, bore no more resemblance to Protestants of the present day than the wasp bears a resemblance to the bee. That name then was, and it was justly, synonymous with banditti, that is, robber and murderer ; and the persons bearing it had been, 16 242 by becoming the willing tool of every ambitious rebel,' a greater scourge to France than foreign war, pestilence and famine united. 292. Considering these things, and taking into view that the people, always ready to suspect, even beyond the limits of reason, heard the cry of " treason " on all sides, is it any wonder that they fell upon the followers of Coligny, and that they spared none of the sect that they were able to destroy ? When we consider these things, and especially when we see the son of the assassinated Duke of Guise lead the way, is it not a most monstrous violation of truth to ascribe this massacre to the principles of the Catholic religion ? 293. The massacre at Paris very far exceeded the wishes of the court, and orders were instantly despatched to the great towns in the provinces to prevent similar scenes.' Such scenes took place, however, in several places ; but though by some Protestant writers the whole number of persons killed has been made to amount to a hundred thou sand, an account published in 1582, and made up from accounts collected from the ministers in the different towns, made the number, for all France, amount to only 786 per sons 1 Dr. Lingard, with his usual fairness, says : — " If we double this number we shall not be far from the real amount."' The Protestant writers began at 100,000, then fell to 70,000, then to 30,000, then to 20,000, then to 15,000, and at last to 10,000. All in round numbers ! One of them, in an hour of great indiscretion, ventured upon obtaining returns of names from the ministers themselves, and then out came the 786 persons in the whole !* 294. A number truly horrible to think of, but a number "Lingard, vi., p. 138. For a more detailed account of the massacre see note T. in vol. viii. (third edition), pp. 515 seqq. ' History, note T, ut supra. " Martyrologe des Calvinisles, quoted by Ch. Barth^lemy, Mensoi^n flistorijues, lere seiie, p. 220. Lingard, History, note T, tit supra. 243 not half so great as that of those English Catholics whom the " good Queen Bess " had even at this time (the four teenth year of her reign) caused to be ripped up, racked tin the bones came out of their sockets, or caused to be despatched or to die in prison or in exile ; and this, too, observe, not for rebellions, treasons, robberies and assas sinations, like those of Coligny and his followers, but simply and solely for adhering to the religion of their and her fathers, which religion she had openly practised for years, and to which religion she had most solemnly sworn that she sincerely belonged ! The annals of hypocrisy conjoined with impudence afford nothing to equal her behaviour upon the occasion of the St. Bartholomew. She was daily rack ing people nearly to death to get secrets from them, she was daily persecuting women as well as men for saying or hearing that Mass for the celebration of which the churches of England had been erected, she was daily mutilating, racking and butchering her own innocent and conscien tious subjects ; and yet she and her court women, when the French ambassador came with the King of France's explanation of the cause of the massacre, received him in deep mourning and with all the marks of disapprobation. But when she remonstrated with her " good brother,'' the King of France, and added her hope that he would be indulgent to his Protestant subjects, her hypocrisy carried her a little too far ; for the Queen -mother, in her answer, observed that as to this matter her son could not take a safer guide than his " good sister of England," and that, while like her he forced no man's conscience, like her he was resolved to suffer no man to practise any religion but that which he himself practised.' The French Queen- mother was still short of " good Betsy's " mark, for she not only punished the practice of all religion but her own, she, moreover, punished people for not practising her reli- ' Lingard, History, vi., p. 139. 244 gion, though she herself was a notorious apostate, and that, too, from motives as notoriously selfish. 295. But there is a tail-piece which most admirably elucidates " good Betsy's " sincerity upon this memorable occasion, and also that same quality in her which induced her to profess that she wished to live and die a virgin queen. The Parliament and her ministers, anxious for an undisputed succession, and anxious also to keep out the Scotch branch of the royal family, urged her several times to marry. She always rejected their advice. Her amours with Leicester, of whom we shall see enough by-and-by, were open and notorious, and have been most amply detailed by many Protestant historians, some of whom have been clergymen of the Church of England; it is, moreover, well-known that these amours became the subject of a play acted in the reign of Charles II. She was now, at the time of the St. Bartholomew, in the thirty- ninth year of her age, and she was, as she long had been, leading with Leicester the life that I have alluded to. Ten years afterwards, whether from the advanced age of Leicester or from some other cause, she became bent on wedlock ; and being now forty-nine years of age, there was to be sure no time to be lost in providing an hereditary successor to her throne. She had, in the thirteenth year of her reign, assented to an act that was passed, which secured the crown to her " natural issue," by which any offspring that she might have by anybody became heir to the throne ; and it was by the same act made high treason to deny that such issue was heir to it. This act, which is still in the Statute- Book, 13 Eliz., chap, i, sec. 2, is a proof of the most hardened profligacy that ever was witnessed in woman; and it is surprising that such a mark of apparent national abjectness and infamy should have been suffered to remain in black and white to this day. However, at forty-nine the queen resolved to lead a married life ; and as her 245 father, whom she so much resembled, always looked out for a young wife, so Ehzabeth looked out for a young husband; and in order to convince the world of the sincerity of her horror at the massacre of St. Bartholomew, whom should she fix on as a companion for life, whom should she want to take to her arms, but the Duke of Anjou, brother of Charles IX., and one of the perpetrators of those bloody deeds on account of which she and her court ladies had gone into mourning ! The duke was not handsome, but he had what the French call la beaute du didble ; he was young, only twenty-eight years of age. Her ministers and the nation, who saw all the dangers of such a match to the independence of their country, pro tested against it most vehemently, and finally deterred her from it ; "" but a gentleman of Lincoln's Inn, who had written and published a pamphlet against the marriage, was prosecuted and had his right hand chopped off for this public-spirited effort in assisting to save England from the ruin about to be brought upon it for the mere gratifi cation of the appetite of a gross, libidinous, nasty, shame less old woman." It was said of her father, who began the " Reformation," that " he spared no man in his anger and no woman in his lust : " the very same in substance, with a little change of the terms, might be said of his daughter, who completed that " Reformation ; " and something approaching to the same degree of wickedness might be justly ascribed to almost every one who acted a conspicuous '° The lords of the Council were unable to agree, after deliberating the greater part of a week, on the question of this marriage (Lingard, vi., p. ISO). " Lingard, vi., p. 153. "The author, publisher and printer were, in virtue ' of a good and necessarye lawe ' passed in the first year of the Queen, condemned in the court of the King's Bench to lose their right hands and to be imprisoned during the royal pleasure. The printer was pardoned ; the other two, having petitioned in vain for mercy, suffered their punishment in the market-place of Westminster." 246 part in bringing about that, to England, impoverishing and degrading event. 296. Before we come to the three other great trans actions of the long reign of this woman, her foul murder of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, her war with Spain, and her scourging of Ireland, which unhappy country still bears the marks of the scorpion lash ; before we come to these it will be necessary to make ourselves acquainted with the names and characters of some of her principal advisers and co-operators, because, unless we do this, we shall hardly be able to comprehend many things which we ought nevertheless to carry along clearly in our minds. 297. Leicester was her favourite, both in council and in the field. Doctor Heylyn describes him in these words;'* " Sir Robert Dudley, the second son of the Duke of Northumberland " (the odious traitor executed in the last reign), she made, soon after she came to the throne, Lord Denbigh and Earl of Leicester, having before made him her Master of Horse, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and a Knight of the Garter ; and she now gave him the fair manor of Denbigh, with more gentlemen owing suit and service to it than any other in England in the hands of a subject, adding even to this the goodly castle and manor of Kenilworth. Advanced to this height, he engrossed unto himself the disposing of all offices in court and state and of all preferments . in the church ; proving, in fine, so unappeasable in his malice and so insatiable in bis lusts, so sacrilegious in his rapines, so false in promises and so treacherous in point of trust, and finally, so destructive of the lives and properties of parti cular persons, that his little finger lay far heavier on the English subjects than the loins of all the favourites of the two last kings ; " and, mind, those " two kings" were the plundering and confiscating Henry VIII. and Edward VL '' Ecclesia Restaurata, Elizabeth, pp. 167-168. 247 " And that his monstrous vices might either be connived at or not complained of, he cloaks them with a seeming zeal for true religion, and made himself the head of the Puritan faction, who spared no pains in setting forth his praises ; nor was he wanting to caress them after such manner as he found most agreeable to these holy hypo crites, using no other language in his speech and letters than the pure-Scripture phrase, in which he was as dexterous as if he had received the same inspirations as the sacred penman." '^ We must bear in mind that this character is drawn by a Doctor of the Church of England (Elizabeth's own Church) in a work dedicated by permission to King Charles II. She, beyond all doubt, meant to marry Leicester, who had, as all the world believed, murdered his own wife to make way for the match. She was pre vented from marrying him by the reports from her ambassadors of what was said about this odious proceed ing in foreign courts, and also by the remonstrances of her other ministers. Yet, after all these things, this man, or rather this monster, continued to possess all his power and his emoluments and all his favour with the Queen to the last day of his life, which ended in 1588, after thirty years of plundering and oppressing the people of England. This was a " reformer " of religion truly worthy of being enrolled with Henry VIIL, Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell, and " good Queen Bess." 298. Sir William Cecil was her next man. He was her Secretary of State, but she afterwards made him a lord, under the title of Burleigh, and also made him Lord Treasurer. He had been a Protestant in the reign of Edward the Sixth, when he was Secretary, first under the Protector Somerset, who, when Dudley overpowered him, as abandoned by Cecil, who took to the latter and was tlig very man that drew up the treasonable instrument by " Ecclesia Restaurata, Elizabeth, p. 168, 248 which Edward on his death-bed disinherited his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. Pardoned for his treason by Mary he became a most zealous Catholic, and was, amongst others, a volunteer to go over ,to Brussels to conduct Cardinal Pole to England." But the wind having changed, he became Protestant again and Secretary of State to Elizabeth, who never cared anything about the character or principles of those she employed, so that they did but answer her selfish ends. This Cecil, who was a man of extraordinary abilities, and of still greater prudence and cunning, was the chief prop of her throne for nearly forty of the forty-three years of her reign. He died in 1598, in the 77th year of his age; and if success in unprincipled artifice, if fertility in cunning devices, if the obtaining of one's ends without any regard to the means, if in this pursuit sincerity be to be set at nought, and truth, law, justice and mercy to be trampled under foot, if, so that you succeed in your end, apostacy, forgery, perjury, and the shedding of innocent blood be thought nothing of, this Cecil was certainly the greatest statesman that ever lived,"* Above all others he was confided in by the Queen, who, when he grew old and feeble in his limbs, used to make him sit in her presence, saying in her accustomed mas culine and emphatical style : " I have you not for your weak legs, but for your strong head." 299. Francis Walsingham became Secretary of State after Cecil, but he had been employed by the Queen almost from the beginning of her reign. He had been her ambassador at several courts, had negotiated many treaties, was an exceedingly prudent and cunning man, and wholly "Lingard, v., p. 222(1554). "Macaulay (Lord Burleigh and his Times, Essays, ed., 1868, i.i P' 223), says: "The deep stain upon his (Burleigh's) memory is, thaf'fi!' differences of opinion for which he would risk nothing himself, he, in the (lay of his power, took away without scruple the lives of others," 245 destitute of all care about means so that he carried his end. He was said to have fifty-three agents and eighteen real spies in foreign courts. He was a most bitter and inflexible persecutor of the CathoHcs ; but before his death, which took place in 1590, he had to feel himself a little of that tyranny and ingratitude and that want of mercy which he had so long mainly assisted to make so many innocent persons feel. 300. Paulet St. John, Marquis of Winchester. This was not a statesman. He, like many more, was a backer- on. He presided at trials, and did other such-like work. These are unworthy of particular notice here, and Paulet is named merely as a specimen of the character and con duct of the makers and supporters of the famous " Refor mation." This Paulet (the first noble of the family) was, at his outset, steward to the bishop of Winchester in the time of Bishop Fox, in the reigruof Henry VII. He was by Henry VIII. made treasurer of the king's household, and zealously entering into all the views of that famous " Defender of the Faith," he was made Lord St. John. He was one of those famous executors who were to carry into effect the will of Henry VIII. Though the king had enjoined on these men to maintain his sort of half Cathohc religion, Paulet now, in the reign of Edward, became a zealous Protestant and continued to enjoy all his offices and emoluments, besides getting some new grants from the further spoils of the church and poor. Seeing that Dudley was about to supplant Somerset, which he finally did, Paulet joined Dudley, and actually presided at the trial and passed sentence of death on Somerset, " whose very name," says Dr. Milner, " had a little more than two years before caused him to tremble." Dudley made him first Earl of Wiltshire and then Marquis of Winches ter, and gave him the palace of the bishop of Winchester at Bishop's Waltham, together with other spoils of that bishopric. When Mary came, which was almost directly 250 afterwards, he became once more a Catholic, and con tinued to hold and enjoy all his offices and emoluments, Not only a Catholic, but a most furious Catholic, and the most active and vigorous of all the persecutors of those very Protestants with whom he had made it his boast to join in communion only about two years before ! We have heard a great deal about the cruelties of the " bloody Bishop Bonner," but nobody ever tells us that this Mar quis of Winchester, as president of the council, repeatedly reprimanded Bonner in very severe terms for want of zeal and diligence in sending Protestants to the stake ! Fox says that "of the council, the most active in these prosecu tions was the Marquis of Winchester." But now, Mary being dead and Elizabeth being resolved to extirpate the Catholics, Paulet instantly became a Protestant again, a most cruel persecutor of the Catholics, president on several commissions for condemning them to death, and he was in such high favour with " good Bess '' that she said were he not so very old as he was she would prefer him as a husband to any man in her dominions. He died in the thirteenth year of her reign, at the age of 97, having kept in place during the reigns of five sovereigns, and having made four changes in his religion to correspond with the changes made by four out of the five. A French historian says that Paulet, being asked how he had been able to get through so many storms, not only unhurt but rising all the while, answered : " En etant un saule et non pas un chene," " by being a willow and not an oak.'' 301. Such were the tools with which Elizabeth had to work ; and we have now to see in what manner they all worked with regard to Mary Stuart, the celebrated and unfortunate Queen of the Scotch. Without going into her history it is impossible to make it clearly appear how Elizabeth was able to establish the Protestant religion in England in spite of the people of England, for it was, in fact, in spite of almost the whole of the people of all 251 ranks and degrees. She actually butchered some hundreds of them, she put many and many hundreds of them to the rack, she killed in various ways many thousands, and she reduced to absolute beggary as many as made the population of one of the smaller counties of England, to say nothing at present of that great slaughter-house, Ireland. It is impossible for us to see how she came to be able to do this ; how she came to be able to get the Parlia ment to do the many monstrous things that they did ; how they, without any force, indeed, came to do such barefaced things as to provide that any offspring she might have should inherit the throne, and to make it high treason to deny that such offspring was rightful heir to the throne. It is impossible to account for her being able to exist in England after that act of indelible infamy, the murder of Mary Stuart. It is impossible for us to see these things in their causes unless we make ourselves acquainted with the history of Mary, and thereby show how the English were influenced at this most interesting period the transac tions of which were so decisive as to the fate of the Catholic rehgion in England. 302. Mary Stuart, born in 1542 (nine years after the birth of Elizabeth), was daughter of James V., king of Scotland, and of Mary of Lorraine, sister of that brave and patriotic nobleman the Duke of Guise, who, as we have seen, was so basely murdered by the vHe traitor CoHgny. Mary Stuart's father died when she was only eight days old, so that she became the reigning queen of Scotland while in the cradle. Her father (James V.) was the son of James IV. and Margaret, the eldest sister of Henry VIII. This " Defender of the Faith " wished Mary Stuart to be betrothed to his son Edward, and by that means to add Scotland to the dominions of England. The family of Guise were too deep for the old " Defender." Mary Stuart (a regency having been settled in Scotland) was taken to France where she had her education, and where her hearf 252 seemed to remain all her life. The French, in order to secT re Scotland to themselves as a constant ally against England, got Mary to be betrothed to Francis, Dauphin of I" ranee, son and successor of Henry 1 1., King of France. She, at the age of seventeen years, was married to him, who was two years younger than herself, in 1558, the very ye r that Elizabeth mounted the throne of England. 303. That very thing now took place which Henry had b en so much afraid of, and which, indeed, had been the dread of his councillors and his people. Edward was dead, Queen Mary was dead ; and as Elizabeth was a bastard, both in law and in fact, Mary Stuart was the heiress to the throne of England, and she was now the wife of the immediate heir to the king of France. Nothing could be so fortunate for Elizabeth. The nation had no choice but one ; to take her and uphold her, or to become a great province of France. If Elizabeth had died at this time, or had died before her sister Mary, England must have been degraded thus, or it must have created a new dynasty or become a republic. Therefore it was that all men, whether Catholics or Protestants, were for the placing and supporting of Elizabeth on the throne, and for setting aside Mary Stuart, though unquestionably she was the lawful heiress to the crown of England. 304. As if purposely to add to the weight of this motive, of itself weighty enough, Henry II., King of France, died in eight months after Elizabeth's accession ; so that Mary Stuart was now, 1559, Queen-consort of France, Queen of Scotland, and called herself Queen of England ; she and her husband bore the arms of England along with those of France and Scotland, and the Pope had refused to acknowledge the right of Elizabeth to the English throne. Thus, as Henry VIII. had foreseen when he made his will setting aside the Scotch branch of his family, was England actually transferred to the dominion of P'rance, unless the nation set at nought the decision of the Pope and sup ported Elizabeth. 253 305. This was the real cause of Elizabeth's success in her work of extirpating the Catholic religion. According to the decision of the head of the Catholic Church Eliza beth was an usurper ; if she were an usurper she ought to be set aside ; if she were set aside, Mary Stuart and the King of France became Queen and King of England ; if they be came Queen and King of England, England became a mere province ruled by Scotchmen and Frenchmen, the bare idea of which was quite sufficient to put every drop of English blood in motion. All men, therefore, of all ranks in life, whether Protestants or Catholics, were for Elizabeth. To preserve her life became an object dear to all her people ; and though her cruelties did, in one or two instances, arm Catholics against her life as a body, they were as loyal to her as her Protestant subjects, and even when she was executing them they, without a single exception, declared her to be their lawful queen. Therefore, though the deci sion of the Pope was perfectly honest and just in itself, that decision was, in its obvious and inevitable conse quences, rendered, by a combination of circumstances, so hostile to the greatness, the laws, the liberties and the laudable pride of Englishmen, that they were reduced to the absolute necessity of setting his decision at nought or of surrendering their very name as a nation. But observe, by-the-by, this dilemma and all the dangers and sufferings that it produced arose entirely out of the " Reformation." Had Henry VIII. listened to Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, there would have been no obstacle to the marrying of his son with Mary Stuart ; and besides, he would have had no children whose legitimacy could have been disputed, and in all human probability several children to be in lawful succession heirs to the throne of England. 306. Here we have the great, and indeed, the only cause of Elizabeth's success in rooting out the Catholic rehgion. Her people were ninety-nine hundredths of 254 them Catholics.'" They had shown this clearly at the accession of her sister Mary. Elizabeth was as great a tyrant as ever lived, she was the most cruel of women, her disgusting amours were notorious, yet she was the most popular sovereign that had ever reigned since the days of Alfred, and we have thoucands of proofs that her people of all ranks and degrees felt a most anxious interest in every thing affecting her life or her health. Effects like this do not come from ordinary causes. Her treatment of great masses of her people, her almost unparalleled cruelties, her flagrant falsehoods, her haughtiness, her insolence, and her lewd life, were naturally calculated to make her detested and to make her people pray for anything that might rid them of her. But they saw nothing but her between them and subjection to foreigners, a thing which they had always most laudably held in the greatest abhor rence. Hence it was that the Parliament, when they could not prevail upon her to marry, passed an act to make any offspring (" natural issue ") of hers lawful heir to the throne. Whitaker (a clergyman of the Church of England) calls this a most infamous act. It was, in itself, an infamous act ; but that abjectness in the nation which it now, at first sight, appears to denote, disappears when we consider well what I have stated above. To be pre served from Mary Stuart, from the mastership of the " Macaulay, Essays (ed. 1868), i., p. 230, says: "We possess no data which will enable us to compare with exactness the force of the two sects, . . . Dr. Lingard is of opinion that the Catholics were one half of the nation in the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. Rushton says that when Elizabeth came to the throne the Catholics were two-thirds of the nation and the Protestants only one-third. . . . The account which Cardinal Benti- voglio gave of the state of religion in England well deserves consideration. The zealous Catholics he reckoned at one-thirtieth part of the nation. The people who would without the least scruple become Catholics, if the Catholic religion were established, he estimated at four-fifths of the nation. We (i.e., Macaulay) believe this account to have been very near the truth." 255 Scotch and the French, was at that time the great object of anxiety with the English nation. Hume, whose head always runs upon something hostile to the Catholic religion, ascribes Elizabeth's popularity to the dislike that her people had to what he calls the " Roman superstition." Whitaker ascribes the extirpation of the Catholic religion to the choice of her people and not to her. The Catholic writers ascribe it to her cruelties, and they are right so far ; but they do not, as I have endeavoured to do, show how it came to pass that those numerous and unparalleled cruelties came to be perpetrated with impunity to her and her ministers. The question with the nation was, in short, the Protestant religion, Elizabeth, and independence, or the Catholic religion, Mary Stuart, and subjection to foreigners. They decided for the former ; and hence all the calamities and the final tragical end of the latter lady. 307. Mary Stuart was in the year 1559, as we have seen in paragraph 303, on the highest pinnacle of earthly glory. Queen-consort of France, Queen-regnant of Scotland, Queen in lawful right of England, and was besides deemed one of the most beautiful women in the whole world. Never was fall like that of this queen. Her husband, Francis 1 1., died seventeen months after his accession, and was succeeded by Charles IX., then not more than three years old. Her husband's mother, Catherine de Medici, soon convinced her that to be any thing she must return to Scotland. To Scotland she returned with a heavy heart, anticipating very little quiet in a country which was plunged in all the horrors of the " Reformation " even more deeply than England had been. Her long minority, together with her absence from her dominions, had given rise to contending factions of nobles, who alternately triumphed over each other, and who kept the country in a state of almost incessant civil war, accompanied with deeds of perfidy and ferocity of which there is scarcely any parallel to be found in history, ancient or modern. Added 256 to this was the work of the new saints, who carried the work of " reformation" much further than in England. The famous John Knox, an apostate monk, whom Dr. Johnson calls the " Ruffian of the Reformation," was leader of the " holy hypocrites " (as Dr. Heylyn calls them) in Scotland. Mary, who had been bred a Catholic, and who had almost been deified in the court of France, was not likely to lead a happy life amongst people like these. 308. All this, however, Elizabeth and her ministers and (for let us have no disguise) the English people saw with great and ungenerous satisfaction. There was, for the present at least, an end to the danger from the union of Scotland with France. But Mary Stuart might marry again. There were the powerful family of Guise, her near relations ; and she was still a formidable person, especially to Elizabeth. If Mary had been a man Elizabeth would certainly have married her ; but here was a difficulty too great even for Cecil to overcome. The English Queen soon began to stir up factions and rebellions against her cousin ; and, indeed, by her intrigues with the religious factions and with the aspiring nobles, she became in a short time, with the aid of money (a drug of infallible effect with the Scotch reformers), more the real ruler of Scotland than poor Mary was." She had for the greater part of her whole reign always a band of one faction or the other at or about her court. Her object was to keep Mary from possessing any real power, and to destroy her if by any means short of detectable murder she could effect that purpose. " The policy of Cecil in assisting to foment the discontent of the Scotch reforming party is described by Lingard, History (6th ed.), vi., p. 12, !«??• The Commissioners in the Scottish Marches were instructed to urge the Scots to hostilities against their sovereign, " to supply them with money, to promise them every kind of aid which could be furnished without a mani fest breach of the peace between the two queens, and to induce them, i( it were possible, to depose Mary" (ibid., p. 17). 2s; 309. In 1565, about three years after the return of Mary to Scotland, she was married to Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley, her cousin, in which she overreached the Queen of England, who, fearing that a visible heir to her own throne (as it actually happened) might come from this marriage, took desperate measures to prevent it ; but those measures came too late. Darnley, though young and hand some, proved to be a very foolish and disagreeable husband, and he was a Protestant into the bargain. She soon treated him with great contempt, suffered him to have no real authority, and, in fact, as good as banished him from her court and disowned him. Darnley sought revenge. He ascribed his ill-treatment to Mary's being under the advice and control of her Catholic favourites, particularly to the advice of Rizzio, a foreigner, her private secretary. Several malcontent " reformed " nobles joined with Darnley in agreeing to assist him in the assassinating of Rizzio, taking a bond from him to protect them against evil consequences. Mary was sitting at' supper with some ladies of her court, Rizzio • and other servants being in waiting, when the conspirators rushed in.- Darnley went to the back of the Queen's chair ; Rizzio, seeing their object, ran to the Queen for protection ; she, who was in the sixth month of her pregnancy, endeavoured by entreaties and screams to save his life. The ruffians stabbed him at her feet, and then dragged him out and covered his body with wounds.^' 310. This black and bloody transaction, for which not one o£ the assistants of Darnley was ever punished, was in all probability the cause, the chief cause, of the just, though illegal, killing of Darnley himself. The next year after the muirder of Rizzio, 1567, Mary having 'in the meanwhile brought forth a son (afterwards our James I., of half Pope and half Puritanical memory), Darnley was " Lingard, History, vi., p. 61. ¦ j " -- 17 2S8 taken ill at Glasgow. The Queen went to visit him, treated him with great kindness, and, when he became better in health, brought him back to Edinburgh ; but for the sake of better air lodged him in a house at some distance from other houses, out of the town, where she visited him daily, and where in a room immediately under his she slept every night. But on the night of the loth of February (1567) she, having notified it to him, slept at her palace, having promised to be present at the marriage of two of the attendants of her court, which marriage took place and at which she was present: on this very night the king's lodging-house was blown up by powder, and his dead body cast into an adjoining piece of ground 1 ^' If the powder had given this base and bloody man time for thought, he would, perhaps, have reflected on the stabs he had given Rizzio in spite of the screams of a swooning and pregnant wife. 311. Now it was that the great and life-long calamities of this unfortunate queen began. She had been repeatedly insulted, and even imprisoned, by the different factions, who, aided and abetted by the English Queen, alternately oppressed both her and her people ; but she was now to lead the life and die the death of a malefactor. It has been proved beyond all doubt that the Earl of Bothwell, with other associates, bound in a " bloody bond," murdered Darnley. This was openly alleged, and in placards about the streets it was averred that Mary was in the plot." No positive proof has ever been produced to make good this charge, but the subsequent conduct of the Queen was '° Lingard, History, vi., p. 70. '"' The question whether Mary had cognizance of the plot against her husband's life has been keenly discussed. Lingard considers that "there is no credible evidence " to connect her with the design. Rewards were at once offered for the discovery of the author of the placards, and it was subse quently ascertained to be James Murray, a" partisan of the faction hostile to the court" (ibid., pp. 70, 71). 259 of a nature very suspicious. I shall simply state such facts as are admitted on all hands ; namely, that Bothwell had before the murder been in great favour with the Queen and possessed power that his talents and character did not entitle him to ; that after the murder he was acquitted of it by a mock trial, which she might have prevented ; that on the 24th of April (fifty-three days after the murder) she was, on her return from a visit to her infant son, seizeti by Bothwell at the head of 3,000 horsemen and carried to his castle of Dunbar ; that before she left the castle, on the 3rd of May, she agreed to marry him ; that he had a wife then alive ; that a divorce, both Protestant and Catholic, in one court for adultery and in the other for consanguinity, took place between Bothwell and his wife in the space of six days; that on the 12th of May Bothwell led the Queen to the Sessions-house, where, in the presence of the judges, she pardoned him for the violence committed on her person ; that on the 15th of May she openly married him ; that the French ambassador refused to appear at the ceremony, and that Mary refused, in this case, to listen to the entreaties of the family of Guise.^ 312. Scores of volumes have been written, some in support of the assertion that Mary was consenting to the murder of her husband, and others in support of the negative of that proposition. Her enemies brought for ward letters and sonnets which they alleged to have been written by Mary to Bothwell previous to her husband's murder. Her friends deny the authenticity of these ; and I think they make their denial good. Whitaker, an Englishman, a Rector in the Church of England, mind, — a man, too, who has written much against the Catholic religion, — defends Mary against the charge of having con sented or having known of the intention to murder her husband. But nobody can deny the above-stated facts ; " Lingard, History, pp. 71-75. 26o ¦¦-', nobody can deny that she was carried off by Bothwell, that she, being at perfect liberty, pardoned him for that, and that she immediately married him, though it excited horror in the family of Guise, whom she had always theretofore listened to with the docility of a dutiful daughter.^ 313. This gross conduct, almost equal, in power of exciting odium, to the murder of such a wretch as Darnley, was speedily followed by tremendous punishment. A part of her subjects armed against her and defeated Bothwell, who was compelled to flee the country, and who in a few years afterwards died in prison in Denmark. She herself became a prisoner in the hands of her own subjects, and she escaped from their prison walls only to come and end her ife within those of Elizabeth, her wily and deadly enemy. 314. The rebels were headed by the Earl of Murray, a natural son of Mary's father, and to her a most unnatural and cruel brother. He had imprisoned and deposed the Queen, had had her son crowned at thirteen months old, and had had himself elected Regent of the king dom.^ Murray had begun his life of manhood, not only as a Catholic, but as an ecclesiastic. He was prior of St. Andrew's, but finding that he could gain by apostacy, he, like Knox, apostatized, and, of course, broke his oath; and Whitaker says of him, that though " he was guilty of the most monstrous crimes, yet he was denominated a good man by the reformers of those days." His great object was to extirpate the Catholic religion, as the best means of retaining his power ; and being also a " bold liar " and a man that stuck at no forgery, no perjury, no bloody deed that answered his purpose, he was a man after "good Queen Bess's " own heart. " Lingard (History, p. 74), holds that Mary was not free at Dunbar; "she remained a captive for the space of ten days, nor was she suffered to depart till she had consented to become the wife of Bothwell." " Ibid., pp. 77-80. 26 1 315. She, however, at first affected to disapprove of his conduct, threatened to march an army to compel him to restore the Queen, gave the Queen positive assurances of her support, and invited her to take, in case of need, shelter and receive protection in England. In evil hour Mary, confiding in these promises and invitations, took, contrary to the prayers of her faithful friends on their knees, the fatal resolution to throw herself into the jaws of her who had so long thirsted for her blood.^ At the end of three days she found that she had escaped to a prison. Her prison was, indeed, changed two or three times, but a prisoner she remained for nineteen long years, and was at last most savagely murdered for an imputed crime, which she neither did nor could commit. 316. During these nineteen years Elizabeth was in triguing with Mary's rebellious subjects, tearing Scotland to pieces by means of her corruption spread amongst the different bands of traitors, and inflicting on a people who had never offended her every species of evil that a nation can possibly endure. 317. To enumerate, barely to enumerate, all or one half of the acts of hypocrisy, perfidy, meanness and barbarity that Ehzabeth practised against this unfortunate queen, who was little more than twenty-five years of age when she was inveigled within the reach of her harpy claws, — barely to enumerate these would require a space exceeding that of this whole chapter. While she affected to dis approve of Murray, she instigated him to accuse his queen and sister ; while she pretended to assert the inviolability of sovereigns, she appointed a commission to try Mary for her conduct in Scotland ; while she was vowing vengeance against the Scotch traitors for their rebellious acts against her cousin, she received as presents from them a large part of the jewels which Mary had received from her first " Lingard, History, p. 85. 262 husband, the King of France ; and when, at last, she was compelled to declare Mary innocent of having consented to the murder, she not only refused to restore her agreeably to her solemn promise repeatedly made, but refused also to give her her liberty, and, moreover, made her imprison-' ment more close, rigorous and painful than ever. Murray, her associate in perfidy, was killed in 1570 by a man whose estate he had unjustly confiscated ; but traitor after traitor succeeded him, every traitor in her pay, and Scot land bleeding all the while at every pore because her cruel policy taught her that it was necessary to her own security. Whitaker produces a crowd of authorities to prove that she endeavoured to get Mary's infant son into her hands, and that having failed in that she endeavoured to cause him to be taken off by poison. 318. At last, in 1587, she brought her long-suffering victim to the block ! Those means of dividing and des troying which she had all her life long been employing against others, began now to be employed against herself, and she saw her life in constant danger. She thought, and perhaps rightly, that these machinations against her arose from a desire in the Catholics (and a very natural desire it was) to rid the world of her and her horrid barbarities and to make way for her Catholic lawful successor, Mary, so that now nothing short of the death of this queen seemed to her a competent guarantee for her own life. In order to open the way for the foul deed that had been resolved on, an Act of Parhament was passed, making it death for any one who was within the realm to conspire with others for the purpose of invading it or for the purpose of procuring the death of the Queen. A seizure was made of Mary's papers. What was want ing in reality was, as Whitaker has proved, supplied by forgery, "a crime," says he, "which, with shame to us, it must be confessed, belonged peculiarly to the Protestants." But what right had Ehzabeth to complain of any hostile 263 intention on the part of Mary ? She was a queen as well as herself. She was held in prison by force ; not having been made prisoner in war, but having been perfidiously entrapped and forcibly detained. Everything had been done against her, short of spilling her blood ; and, had she not a clear and indisputable right to make war upon and to destroy her remorseless enemy by all the means within her power ? And as to a trial, where was the law or usage that authorised one queen to invite another into her dominions, then imprison her, and then bring her to trial for alleged offences against her ? 319. When the mode of getting rid of Mary was de bated in Elizabeth's council, Leicester was for poison, others were for hardening her imprisonment and killing her in that way; but Walsingham was for death by means of a trial, a legal proceeding being the only one that would silence the tongues of the world.'^ A com mission was accordingly appointed, and Mary was tried and condemned, and that, too, on the evidence of papers, a part, at least, of which were barefaced forgeries, all of which were copies, and the originals of none of which were attempted to be produced ! The sentence of death was pronounced in October. For four months the savage EHzabeth was employed in devising plans for causing her victim to be assassinated, in order to avoid the odium of being herself the murderer ! This is proved by Whitaker beyond all possibility of doubt ; but though she had en trusted the keeping of Mary to two men, mortal enemies of the Catholics, they, though repeatedly applied to for the purpose, perseveringly refused. Having ordered hei secretary, Davison, to write to them on the subject, Sir Amias Paulet, one of the keepers, returned for answer that he " was grieved at the motion made to him, that he offered his life and his property to .ue disposal of her "^ Lingard, H story, p. 211. 264 Majesty, but absolutely refuged to be concerned in the assassination of Mary." The other keeper. Sir Drue Drury, did the same. When she read this answer she broke, out into reproaches against them, complained of the " daintiness of their consciences," talked scornfully of " the niceness of such precise fellows," and swore that she would " have it done without their assistance."'"' At the end, however, of four months of unavailing efforts to find men base and bloody enough to do the deed, she resorted to her last shift, the legal murder, which was committed on her hapless victim on the 8th of February, 1587, a day of everlasting infamy to the memory of the English queen, " who," says Whitaker, " had no sensibilities of tenderness and no sentiments of generosity ; who looked not forward to the awful verdict of history, and who shuddered not at the infinitely more awful doom of God." I blush, as an Englishman, to think that this was done by an English queen, and one whose name I was taught to lisp in my infancy as the honour of her sex and the glory of our isle. 320. Ah ! and thus was I taught, and thus have we all been taught. It is surely, then, our duty to teach our children to know the truth. Talk of "answers" to me, indeed ! Let them deny, if they can, that this Head of the Church, this maker of it, was a murderer, and wished to be an assassin, in cold blood. '¦' Lingard. Elizabeth " was often heard to lament that among the thousands who professed to be attached to her as their sovereign, not one would spate her the necessity of dipping her hands in the blood of a sister queen." 265 CHAPTER XI. 321. Detestably base as was the conduct of "good Queen Bess " in the act of murdering her unfortunate cousin, her subsequent hypocrisy was still more detestable. She affected the deepest sorrow for the act that had been committed, pretended that it had been done against her wish, and had the superlative injustice and baseness to imprison her secretary, Davison, for having despatched the vvarrant for the execution, though she, observe, had signed that warrant,^ and though, as Whitaker has fully proved, she had reviled Davison for not having despatched it after she had in vain used all the means in her power to induce him to employ assassins to do the deed. She had, by a series of perfidies and cruelties wholly without a parallel, brought her hapless victim to the block in that very country to which she had invited her to seek safety ; she had, in the last sad and awful moments of that victim, had the barbarity to refuse her the consolations of a divine of her own communion f she had pursued her with hatred and malice that remained unglutted even when she saw her prostrate under the common hangman, and when she saw the blood gushing from her severed neck ; unsated with the destruction of her body, she, Satan-like, had sought the ' See Whitaker, Ma/y Queen of Scots Vindicated (ed. 1790), iii., p. 544, seqq. (Secretary Davison's apology). * Lingard, History, vi., p. 226, 266 everlasting destruction of her soul ; and yet, the deed being done, she had the hypocrisy to affect to weep for the un timely end of her " dear cousin," and, which was still more diabolical, to make use of her despotic power to crush her humane secretary under pretence that he had been the cause of the sad catastrophe." All expressions of detestation and horror fall short of our feelings, and our only consolation is that we are to see her own end ten thousand times more to be dreaded than that of her victim. 322. Yet such were the peculiar circumstances of the times, that this wicked woman escaped, not only for the present but throughout her long reign, that general hatred from her subjects which her character and deeds so well merited; nay, it perversely happened that immediately after this foul deed there took place an event which rallied all her people round her, and made her life more than ever an object of their soficitude. 323. Philip II., , King of Spain, who was also sovereign of the Low Countries, resolved on an invasion of England, with a fleet from Spain and with an army from Flanders. She had given him quite provocation enough : she had fomented rebellions against him, as she long had in France against the king of that country. Philip was the most powerful monarch in Europe : he had fleets and armies vastly superior to hers ; the danger to England was really great ; but though these dangers had been brought upon it solely by her malignity, bad faith, and perfidy, England was still England to her people, and they unanimously rallied round her. On this occasion, and indeed, on all others where love of country was brought to the test, the Catholics proved that no degree of oppression could make them forget their duty as citizens or as subjects. Even from Hume it is extorted that the Catholic gentlemen, ' Hume, History of England (Murray's reprint), ii., p. 505; Lingar vi-, p- 232- 267 though her laws excluded them from all trust and authority, " entered as volunteers in her fleet or army ; some equipped ships at their own charge and gave the command of them to Protestants ; others were active in animating their tenants and vassals and neighbours to the defence of their country ; and every rank of men, burying for the pre sent all party distinctions, seemed to prepare themselves with order as well as vigour to resist these invaders."* Charles I., James II. , George I., and George II., and even George HI., all saw the time when they might have lamented the want of similar loyalty in Protestants. The first lost his head, the second his throne, the third and fourth were exposed to great danger of a similar loss, and the fifth lost America ; and all by the doings of Pro testants. 324. The intended invasion was prevented by a tremen dous storm, which scattered and half destroyed the Spanish fleet called the Armada ; and in all human probability the invaders would not have succeeded even if no storm had arisen. But at any rate there was great danger ; no one could be certain of the result : the Catholics, had they listened to their just resentment, might have greatly added to the danger, and therefore their generous conduct merited some relaxation of the cruel treatment which they had hitherto endured under her iron sceptre. No such relaxa tion, however, took place; they were still treated with every species of barbarous cruelty, subjected to an inquisi tion infinitely more severe than that of Spain ever had or ever has been, and, even on the bare suspicion of dis affection, imprisoned, racked, and not unfrequently put to death. 325. As to Ireland, where the estates of the convents and where the church property had been confiscated in the same way as in England, and where the greater ' Hume, History of England, p. 575. 268 distance of the people from the focus of power, and apostacy and fanaticism, had rendered it more difficult to effect their " conversion " at the point of the bayonet, or by the halter or the rack, — as to this portion of her dominions, her reign was almost one unbroken series of robberies and butcheries. One greedy and merciless minion after another was sent to goad that devoted people into acts of desperation, and that, too, not only for the obvious purpose, but for the avowed purpose, of obtaining a pretence for new confisca tions. The " Reformation " had from its very outset had plunder written on its front, but as to Ireland it was all plunder from the crown of its head to the sole of its foot. This horrible lynx-like she-tyrant could not watch each movement of the Catholics -there as she did in England; she could not so harass them in detail ; she could fine! there no means of executing her dreadful police ; and therefore she murdered them in masses. She sent over those parsons whose Successors are there to the present day. The ever blood-stained sword secured them the tithes and the church lands ; but even that blood-stained sword could riot then and never did, though at one time wielded by the unsparing and double-distilled Protestant Cromwell, obtain them congregations. However, she planted, she watered with rivers of blood, and her long reign saw take fast root in the land that tree the fruit of which the unfortunate Irish taste to this hour, and which will, unless prevented by more wise and more just measures than appear to have been yet suggested, finally prove the overthrow of England herself. 326. I am to speak further on of the monstrous im moralities produced in England by the " Reformation," and also of the poverty and misery that it produced ; and then I shah have to trace (through Acts of Parliament) this poverty and misery up to the " Reformation : " yes, for therein we shall see, clearly as we see the rivulet bubbhng out of the bed of the spring, the bread and water 269 of England and the potatoes of Ireland ; but even in this place it is necessary to state the cause of the greater poverty and degradation of the Irish people. For ages that ill-treated people have, in point of clothing and food, formed a contrast with the English. Dr. Franklin, in speaking of Ireland, says that " one would think that the cast-off clothes of the working-people of England were sent over to be worn by the working-people here." 327. Whence comes it that this contrast has so long existed ? The soil and the climate of Ireland are as good as those of England. The islands are but a few miles asunder. Both are surrounded by the same sea. The people of the former are as able and as willing to labour as those of the latter ; and of this they have given proof in all parts of the world to which they have migrated, not to carry packs to cheat fools out of their money, not to carry the lash to make others work, but to share themselves, and cheerfully to share, in the hardest labours of those amongst whom they have sought shelter from the rod of unrelenting oppression. Whence comes it, then, that this contrast, so unfavourable to Ireland, has so long existed ? The answer to this interesting question we shall find by attending to the different measures dealt out to the two people during the long and cruel reign of which we are now speaking ; and we at the same time trace all the miseries of Ireland back at once to that " Reformation " the blessings of which have, with such persevering falsehood and hypocrisy, been dinned in our ears for ages. 328. We have seen in Chapter III. of this little work, paragraphs 50, 51 and 52, that the Catholic Church was not and is not an affair of mere abstract faith ; that it was not so very spiritual a concern as to scorn all cares relative to the bodies of the people ; that one part, and that acapital part, of its business was to cause works of charity to be performed ; that this charity was not of so very spiritual a nature as not to be at aU tangible or obvious to the vulgar 270 sense ; that it showed itself in good works done to the needy and suffering; that the tithes and offerings and income from real property of the Catholic Church went in great part to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to lodge and feed the stranger, to sustain the widow and the orphan, and to heal the wounded and the sick ; that, in short, a great part and, indeed, one of the chief parts of the business of this Church was to take care that no person, however low in life, should suffer from want either of sustenance or care ; and that the priests of this Church should have as few selfish cares as possible to withdraw them from this important part of their duty, they were forbidden to marry. Thus, as long as this Church was the national Church there were hospitality and charity in the land, and the horrid word " pauper '' had never been so much as thought of. 329. But when the Protestant religion came, and along with it a married priesthood, the poorer classes were plundered of their birthright and thrown out to prowl about for what they could beg or steal. Luther and his followers wholly rejected the doctrine that good works were necessary to salvation. They held that faith, and faith alone, was necessary. They expunged from their Bible the Epistle of St. James, because it recommends and insists on the necessity of good works, which Epistle Luther called " an Epistle of straw." The " Reformers " differed from each other as widely as the colours of the rainbow in most other things, but they all agreed in this, that good works were unnecessary to salvation, and that the " saints," as they had the modesty to call themselves, could not forfeit their right to heaven by any sins, how ever numerous and enormous. By those amongst whom plunder, sacrilege, adultery, polygamy, incest, perjury, and murder were almost as habitual as sleeping and waking, by those who taught that the way to everlasting bliss could not be obstructed by any of these, nor by all of them 271 put together; — by such persons charity, besides that it was a so well-known Cathohc commodity, would be, as a matter of course, set wholly at nought. 330. Accordingly we see that it is necessarily excluded by the very nature of all Protestant establishments ; that is to say in reality ; for the name of charity is retained by some of these establishments, but the substance nowhere exists. The Catholic establishment interweaves deeds of constant and substantial charity with the faith itself. It makes the two inseparable. The Douay Catechism, which the Protestant parsons so much abuse, says that " the first fruit of the Holy Ghost is charity." And then it tells us what charity is, namely, " to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to visit and ransom captives, to harbour the harbourless, to visit the sick, to bury the dead." Can you guess, my friends, why fat Protestant parsons rail so loudly against this wicked Douay Catechism ? " It is in the nature of man to love all this. This is what " the gates of hell will never prevail against." This is what our fathers believed and what they acted upon, and this it was that produced in them that benevolent disposition which, thank God, has not yet been wholly extirpated from the breasts of their descendants. 331. Returning now to paragraphs 50, 51 and 52, just mentioned, it is there seen that the Catholic Church rendered all municipal laws about the poor wholly unneces sary; but when that Church had been plundered and destroyed, when the greedy leading " Reformers " had sacked the convents and the churches, when those great estates which of right belonged to the poorer classes had been taken from them, when the parsonages had been first well pillaged and the remnant of their revenues given to married men, then the poor (for poor there will and must be in every community) were left destitute of the means of ^xistenc? other thap the fruits of begging, theft and robbery. 272 Accordingly, when Elizabeth had put the finishing hand to the plundering of the Church and poor, once happy and free and hospitable England became a den of famishing robbers and slaves. Strype, a Protestant, and an authority to whom Hume appeals and refers many hundreds of times, tells us of a letter from a Justice of the Peace in Somerset shire to the Lord Chief Justice, saying, "I may justly say that the able men that are abroad seeking the spoil and confusion of the land are able, if they were reduced to good subjection, to give the greatest enemy her Majesty hath a strong battle, and as they are now are so much strength to the enemy. Besides, the generation that daily springeth from them is likely to be most wicked : these spare neither rich nor poor, but, whether it be great gain or small, all is fish that cometh to net with them ; and yet I say both they and the rest are trussed up apace." ^ The same Justice says : " In default of justice many wicked thieves escape ; for most commonly the most simple countrymen and women, looking no farther than to the loss of their own goods, are of opinion that they would not procure any man's death for all the goods in the world." And while Elizabeth complained bitterly of the non-execu tion of her laws, the same Protestant historian tells us that " she executed more than five hundred criminals in a year, and was so little satisfied with that number that she threatened to send private persons to see her penal laws executed ' for profit and gain's sake.' " It appears that she did not threaten in vain, for soon after this a complaint "Strype, Annals of the Reformation (2nd ed.), vii.. Appendix ccxiii. The letter, enclosing a calendar of the assizes, was dated Sept. 25, 1596. " In all executed this year (in Somersetshire) forty." Hume (History, ii., p. 591) says : " The other counties of England were in no better condition than Somersetshire, and many of them were even in a worse ; there were at least 300 or 400 able-bodied vagabonds in every county who lived by theft and rapine, and who sometimes met in troops to the number of sixty and cofnmjtted spoil on the inhabitants." 273 was made in Parliament that the stipendiary magistrate of that day was " a kind of living creature, who for half a dozen of chickens would dispense with a dozen of penal statutes."^ She did not, however, stop with this " liberal " use of the gallows. Such was the degree of beggary, of vagabondage, and of thievishness and robbery, that she resorted, particularly in London and its neighbourhood, to martial law. This fact is so complete a proof of the horrible effects of the " Reformation " upon the moral state of the people, and it is so fully characteristic of the govern ment which the people of England had, in consequence of that Reformation, become so debased as to submit to, that I must take the statement as it stands in Hume, who gives the very words of " good and glorious Bess's " com mission to her head murderer upon this occasion. " The streets of London were very much infested with idle vagabonds and riotous persons ; the Lord Mayor had endeavoured to repress this disorder, the Star-chamber had exerted its authority and inflicted punishment on these rioters ; but the Queen, finding these remedies ineffectual, revived " [revived ? What does he mean by revived ?] " martial law, and gave Sir Thomas Wilford a commission as provost-martial, 'granting him authority and com manding him, upon signification given by the justices of the peace in London or the neighbouring counties of such offenders worthy to be speedily executed by martial law, to take them, and according to the justice of martial law to execute them upon the gallows or gibbet.' "' And yet this is she whom we have been taught to call " good " Hume, ut. sup., p. 591. ' Hume, History, ii., p. 583. " There remains a letter of Queen Eliza beth's to the Earl of Sussex, after the suppression of the northern rebellion, in which she sharply reproves him because she had not heard of his having executed any criminals by martial law, though it is probable that near eight hundred persons suffered, one way or other, on account of that sligh' insurrection " (ibid. ). 274 Queen Bess ; " this is she of the " glories " of whose reign there are men of learning base enough to talk even to this day I 332. But such were the natural consequences of the destruction of the Catholic Church, and of the plundering of the poor which accompanied that destruction, , and particularly of lodging all power, ecclesiastical and civil, in the same hands. However, although this terrible she- tyrant spared neither racks nor halters, though she was continually reproving the executors of her bloody laws fcr their remissness, while they were strewing the country with the carcasses of malefactors or alleged malefactors, all would not do ; that hunger which breaks through stone walls set even her terrors and torments at defiance. At last it was found to be absolutely necessary to make some general and permanent and solid provision for the poor, and in the forty-third year of her reign was passed that act which is in force to this day, and which provides a maintenance for indigent persons, which maintenance is to come from the land, assessed and collected by overseers, and the payment enforced by process the most effectual and most summary. And here we have the great, the prominent, the staring, the horrible and ever durable con sequence of the " Reformation ; " that is to say, pauperism established by law. 333. Yet this was necessary. The choice that the plunderers had in England was this, — legal pauperism or extermination ; and this last they could not effect, and if they could it would not have suited them. They did not possess power sufficient to make the people live in a state of three-fourths starvation, therefore they made a legal provision for the poor ; not, however, till they had tried in vain all other methods of obtaining a something to supply the place of Catholic charity. They attempted at first to cause the object to be effected by voluntary collections at the churches ; but alas ! those who now entered thos^ 275 churches looked upon Luther as the great teacher, and he considered St. James's Epistle as an " epistle of straw." Every attempt of this sort having failed, as it necessarily must when the parsons who were to exhort others to charity had enough to do to rake together all they could for their own wives and children, every act (and there were many passed) short of a compulsory tax, enforced by distraint of goods and imprisonment of person, having failed, to this " glorious Bess " and her " Reformation " Parliament at last came ; and here we have it to this day, filling the country with endless quarrels and litigation, setting parish against parish, man against master, rich against poor, and producing, from a desire of the rich to shuffle out of its provisions, a mass of hypocrisy, idleness, fraud, oppression and cruelty, such as was, except in the deeds of the original " Reformers," never before witnessed in the world. 334. Nevertheless it was, as far as it went, an act of justice. It was taking from the land and giving to the poor a part at least of what they had been robbed of by the "Reformation." It was doing in a hard and odious way a part of that which had been done in the most gentle and amiable way by the Church of our fathers. It was, indeed, feeding the poor like dogs instead of like one's children ; but it was feeding them. Even this, however, Elizabeth and her plundering minions thought too much to do for the savagely treated Irish people : here we come to the real cause of that contrast of which I have spoken in paragraph 325 ; here we come to that which made Dr. Franklin sup pose, or to say that any one might naturally suppose, that " the old clothes of the working classes in England had been sent over to be worn by the same class in Ireland." 335. We have seen how absolute necessity compelled the Queen and her plunderers to make a legal provision for the relief of the indigent in England ; we have seen that it was only restoring to them a part of that of which they had 276 been plundered ; and upon what principle was it that they did not do the same with regard to the people of Ireland ? These had been plundered in precisely the same manner that the former had ; they had been plunged into misery by precisely the same means, used under precisely the same hypocritical pretences ; why were not they to be re lieved from that misery in the same manner, and why was not the poor-law to be extended to Ireland ? 336. Base and cruel plunderers ! They grudged the relief in England, but they had no compulsory means to be obtained out of England, and they found it impossible to make Englishmen compel one another to live in a state of three-fourths starvation. But they had England to raise armies in to send to effect this purpose in Ireland, especially when those English armies were urged on by promise of plunder, and were (consisting as they did of Protestants) stimulated by motives as powerful, or nearly so, as the love of plunder itself. Thus it was that Ireland was pillaged without the smallest chance of even the res toration which the English have obtained ; and thus have they, down unto this our day, beeii a sort of outcasts in their own country, being stripped of all the worldly goods that God and nature allotted them and having received not the smallest pittance in return. 337. Why, there have been " ages of misrule " in Ireland, many, many ages too ; or the landholders of England have during those ages been most unjustly assessed. But they are sensible — or at least the far greater part of them — that a provision for the indigent, a settled, certain, legal provision, coming out of the land, is a right which the indigent pos sess, to use the words of Blackstone, "in the very nature of civil society." Every man of reflection must know that the labours which the affairs of society absolutely demand could never be performed but by persons who work for their bread ; he must see that a very large part of these persons wiH do no more work than is necessary to enable 277 them to supply their immediate wants ; and therefore he must see that there always must be, in every community, a great number of persons who, from sickness, old age, from being orphans, widows, insane, and from other causes, will need relief from some source or other. This is the lot of civil society, exist wherever and however it may. 338. Has it not, then, been a " misrule of ages " in Ire land ? Have not that people been most barbarously treated by England ? An Irishman, who has a thousand times been ready to expire from starvation in his native land, who has been driven to steal sea-weed to save himself from death, goes to America, feels hunger without having the means of relieving it, and there in that foreign land he finds at once, be he where he may, an overseer of the poor ready to give him relief! And is such monstrous, such crying injustice as this, still to be allowed to exist ? The folly here surpasses, if possible, the injustice and the cruelty. The English landholders make the laws, we all know that. They subject — justly subject — their own estates to assess ments for the relief of the poor in England, and while they do this they exonerate the estates of the Irish landholders from a like assessment, and choose rather to tax themselves, and to tax us and tax the Irish besides, for the .purpose of paying an army to keep that starving people from obtain ing relief by force ! Lord Liverpool, when the Scotch lords and others applied to him in 1819 for a grant out of the taxes, to relieve the starving manufacturers in Scotland, very wisely and justly said, " No ; have poor-laws, such as ours, and then your poor will be sure of relief." Why not say the same thing to the Irish landholders ? Why not compel them to give to the people that which is their due ? Why is Ireland to be the only civilised country upon the face of the earth where no sort of settled legal provision is made for the indigent, and where the pastors are at the same time total strangers to the flocks, except in the season of shearing ? Let us at least, as long as this 278 state of things shall be suffered to exist, have the decency not to cry out quite so loudly against the " outrages of the Irish." 339. I must now return from this digression (into which the mention of Elizabeth's barbarous treatment of Ireland has led me) in order to proceed with my account of her "reforming" projects. She was extremely jealous of her prerogatives and powers, but particularly in what regarded her headship of the Church. She would make all her sub jects be of her religion, though she had solemnly sworn at her coronation that she was a Catholic, and though in turning Protestant she had made a change in Cranmer's Prayer Book and in his articles of faith. In order to bend the people's consciences to her tyrannical will, which was the more unjust because she herself had changed her religion and had even changed the Protestant articles, she established an inquisition the most horrible that ever was heard of in the world. She gave what she called a commission to certain bishops and others, whose power extended over the whole kingdom and over all ranks and degrees of the people. They were empowered to have an absolute control over the opinions of all men, and to punish all men according to their discretion, short of death. They might proceed legaHy if they chose, in the obtaining of evidence against parties ; but if they chose they were to employ imprisonment, the rack, or torture of any sort, for this purpose. If their suspicions alighted upon any man, no matter respecting what, and they had no evidence nor any even hearsay against him, they might administer an oath called ex-officio to him, by which he was bound, if called upon, to reveal his thoughts and to accuse himself, his friend, his brother or his father, upon pain of death. These subaltern monsters inflicted what fines they pleased ; they imprisoned men for any length of time that they pleased ; they put forth whatever new articles of faith they pleased ; and in short, this was a commission exercis- 279 ing, in the name and for the purposes of the Queen, an absolute control over the bodies and the minds of that people whom thei base and hypocritical and plundering " reformers " pretended to have delivered from a " slavish subjection to the Pope," but whom they had, without any pretending, actually delivered from freedom, charity and hospitality. 340. When one looks at these deeds, when one sees what abject slavery Elizabeth had reduced the nation to, and especially when one views this commission, it is impossible for us not to reflect with shame on what we have so long been saying against the Spanish Inquisition, which from its first establishment has not committed so much cruelty as this first Protestant queen committed in any one single year of the forty-three years of her reign. And observe again, and never forget, that Catholics, where they inflicted punishments, inflicted them on the grounf" that the offenders had departed from the faith in whicK they had been bred and which they had professed ; whereas the Protestant punishments have been inflicted on men because they refused to depart from the faith in which they had been bred, and which they had professed all their lives.* And in the particular case of this brutal hypocrite, they were punished, and that, too, in the most barbarous manner, for adhering to that very religion which she had openly professed for many years of her life, and to which she, even at her coronation, had sworn that she belonged ! 341. It is hardly necessary to attempt to describe the sufferings that the CathoHcs had to endure during this murderous reign. No tongue, no pen is adequate to the task. To hear mass, to harbour a priest, to admit the » Hallam, Constitutional History (lotb ed.), i., p. 114, writes: "It cannot be truly alleged that any greater provocation had as yet been given by the Catholics than that of pertinaciously continuing to believe and worship as their fathers ha4 done befpre thern," 28o supremacy of the Pope, to deny this horrid virago's spiritual supremacy, and many other things which an honourable Catholic could scarcely avoid, consigned him to the scaffold and to the bowel-ripping knife. But the most cruel of her acts, even more cruel than her butcheries because of far more extensive effect and far more produc tive of suffering in the end, were the penal laws inflicting fines for recusancy, that is to say, for not going to her new-fangled Protestant Church. And was there ever tyranny equal to this ? Not only were men to be punished for not confessing that the new religion was the true one, not only for continuing to practise the religion in which they and their fathers and children had been born and bred, but also punished for not actually going to the new assemblages, and there performing what they must, if they were sincere, necessarily deem an act of open apostasy and blasphemy ! " Never in the whole world was there heard of before tyranny equal to this. 342. The fines were so heavy and were exacted with such unrelenting rigour, and for the offence of recusancy alone the sums were so enormous, that the whole of the conscientious CathoHcs were menaced with utter ruin. The priests who had never been out of England, and who were priests before the reign of this horrible woman, were by the twentieth year of her reign few in number, for the laws forbade the making of any new ones on pain of death, and indeed, none could be made in England, where there was no clerical authority to ordain them, the surviving ' " The act operated as an absolute interdiction of the Catholic rites, however privately celebrated. . . . We find instances of severity towards Catholics even in the first years of the reign, and it is evident that their solemn rites were only performed by stealth and at much hazard. Thus Sir Edward Waldgrave and his lady were sent to the Tower in 1561 for hearing mass and having a priest in their house. Many others about the same time were punished for the like offence " (Hallam, Cqnstitutionfil History, i., p. 1 14), 28l Catholic bishops being forbidden to do it on pain of aeath. Then she harassed the remainder of the old priests in such a way that they were, by the twentieth year of her reign, nearly exterminated ; and as it was death for a priest to come from abroad, death to harbour him, death for him to perform his functions in England, death to confess to him, there appeared to be an impossibility of preventing ber from extirpating, totally extirpating from the land that religion under which England had been so great and so happy for ages so numerous, —that religion of charity and hospitality, that religion which made the name of pauper unknown, that religion which had built the churches and cathedrals, which had planted and reared the Universities, whose professors had made Magna Charta and the Com mon Law, and who had performed all those glorious deeds in legislation and in arms which had made England really " the envy of surrounding nations and the admiration of the world;" there now appeared to be an impossibility, and especially if the termagant tyrant should live for another twenty years (which she did), to prevent her from effecting this total extirpation. From accomplishing this object she was prevented by the zeal and talents of William Allen, an English gentleman, now a priest, and who had before been of the University of Oxford. In order to defeat the she-tyrant's schemes for rooting out the Catholic religion, he formed a seminary at Douay, in Flanders, for the education of English priests.^" He was joined by many other learned men ; and from this depot, though at the manifest hazard of their lives, priests came into England, and thereby the malignity of this inexorable apostate was defeated. There was the sea between her '» The seminary was commenced in 1570. For an account of the difiSculties which attended the undertaking, see Records of English Catholics under the Penal Laws (Douay Diaries, Historical Introduction by Rev. J. F. Knox, D.D.). 282 and Allen, but while he safely defied her death-dealing power she could not defy his, for she could not erect a wall round the island, and into it priests would come and did come ; and in spite of her hundreds of spies and her thousands of "pursuivants," as were called the myrmi dons who executed her tormenting and bloody behests, the race of English priests was kept in existence, and the religion of their fathers along with it." In order to break up the seminary of Allen, who was afterwards made a cardinal, and whose name can never be pronounced but with feelings of admiration, she resorted to all sorts of schemes, and at last, by perfidiously excluding from her ports the fleet of the Dutch a nd Flemish insurgents, to whom she stood pledged to give protection, she obtained from the Spanish Governor a dissolution of Allen's college; but he found protection in France from the House of Guise, by whom he and his college were, in spite of most bitter remonstrances from Elizabeth to the King of France, re-established at Rheims.'* 343. Thus defeated in all her projects for destroying the missionary trunk, she fell with more fury than ever on the branches and on the fruit. To say mass, to hear mass, to make confession, to hear confession, to teach the Catholic religion, to be taught it, to keep from her church service, these were all great crimes, and all punished with a greater or less degree of severity ; so that the gallows and gibbets and racks were in constant use, and the gaols and dungeons choking with the victims. The punishment for keeping away from her church was ;^2o a lunar month, which of money of the present day was about ;^25o. Thousands upon thousands refused to go to her church, and thus she sacked their thousands upon thousands of estates, for, " "In the course of the first five years Dr. Allen sent almost one hundred missionaries into the kingdom " (Lingard, vi., p. 163). '¦¦' Ibid., p. 164. 283 observe, here was, in money of this day, a fine of ;^3,250 a year. And now, sensible and just reader, look at the barbarity of this " Protestant Reformation." See a gentle man of perhaps sixty years of age or more, see him, born and bred a Catholic, compelled to make himself and his children beggars, actual beggars, or to commit what he deemed an act of apostasy and blasphemy. Imagine, if you can, barbarity equal to this ; and yet even this is not seen in its most horrible light, unless we take into view that the tyrant who committed it had for many years of her life openly confessed the Catholic religion, and had at her coronation sworn that she firmly believed in that religion. 344. In the enforcing of these horrible edicts every insult that base minds could devise was resorted to and in constant use. No Catholic or reputed Catholic had a moment's security or peace. At all hours, but generally in the night-time, the ruffians entered his house by breaking it open, rushed in different divisions into the rooms, broke open closets, chests and drawers, rummaged beds and pockets, in short, searched every place and thing for priests, books, crosses, vestments or any person or thing appertain ing to the CathoHc worship.^^ In order to pay the fines gentlemen were compelled to sell their estates piece by piece ; when they were in arrear the tyrant was by law authorised to seize all their personal property, and two- thirds of their real estate every six months, and they were in some cases suffered, as a great indulgence, to pay an '* Cf., Lingard, vi., p. 166. "The names of all the recusants in each parish, amounting to about 50,000, had been returned to the Council. The magistrates were repeatedly blamed for their want of activity and success, and the prisons in every county were filled with persons suspected as priests or harbourers of priests, or delinquents against one or other of the penal laws. No man could enjoy security even in the privacy of his own house; where he was liable at all hours, but generally at night, to be visited by a magistrate at the bead of an armed mob. At a signal given, the doors 284 annual composition for the liberty of abstaining from what they deemed apostasy and blasphemy. Yet whenever she took it into her suspicious head that her life was in danger, from whatever cause and causes, and just cause enough there always was, she had no consideration for them on ac count of the fines or the composition. She imprisoned them either in gaol or in the houses of Protestants^kept them banished from their own homes for years. The Catholic gentleman's own house afforded him no security; the indis cretion of children or friends, the malice of enemies, the dishonesty or revenge of tenants or servants, the hasty conclusions of false suspicion, the deadly wickedness of those ready to commit perjury for gain's sake, the rapacity and corruption of constables, sheriffs and magistrates, the virulent prejudice of fanaticism, — to every passion hostile to justice, happiness and peace, to every evil against which it is the object of just laws to protect a man, the conscien tious Catholic gentleman lived continually exposed, and that, too, in that land which had become renowned throughout the world by those deeds of valour and those laws of freedom which had been performed and framed by his Catholic ancestors. 345. As to the poor conscientious" recusants," that is to say, keepers away from the tyrant's church, they who had no money to pay fines with were crammed into prison until the gaols could (which was very soon) hold no more, and until the counties petitioned to be relieved from the charge of keeping them. They were then discharged, being first were burst open, and the pursuivants in separate divisions hastened to the different apartments, examined the beds, tore the tapestry and wainscotting from the walls, forced open closets, drawers and coffers, and made every search which their ingenuity could suggest to discover either a priest, or books, chalices and vestments appropriated to the Catholic worship. The use of the torture was common to most of the European nations ; in England, during the reign of Elizabeth, it was employed with the most wanton barbarity." 285 publicly whipped, or having their ears bored with a hot iron. This not answering the purpose, an act was passed to compel all " recusants " not worth twenty marks a year to quit the country in three months after conviction, and to punish them with death in case of their return. The old " good Bess " defeated herself here, for it was found impossible to cause the law to be executed, in spite of all her menaces against the justices and sheriffs who could not be brought up to her standard of ferociousness ; and they, therefore, in order to punish the poor Catholics, levied sums on them at their pleasure, as a composition for the crime of abstaining from apostasy and profanation. 346. The Catholics at one time entertained a hope that, by a declaration of their loyalty, they should obtain from the Queen some mitigation, at least, of their sufferings. With this view they drew up a very able and most dutiful petition, containing an expression of their principles, their sufferings and their prayers. Alas 1 they appealed to her to whom truth and justice and mercy were all alike wholly unknown." The petition being prepared, all trembled at the thought of the danger of presenting it to her. At last Richard Shelley, of Michael Grove, Sussex, assumed the perilous charge. She had the (as it would have been in any other human being) incomparable baseness to refer him for an answer to the gloomy echoes of a pestiferous prison, where he expired, a victim to his own virtue and to her implacable cruelty.'' " They declared — ist. That all Catholics, both laity and clergy, held her (Elizabeth) to be their sovereign, as well de jure as de facto. 2ndly, That they beUeved it to be sinful for any person whomsoever to lift up his hand against her, as God's anointed. 3rdly, That it was not in the power of priest or pope to give licence to any man to do that which was sinful, &c. They prayed to be allowed to abstain from the services of the Established Church, " through motives of conscience," and begged that their priests might not be banished (Lingard, ut sup., p. 188). « Ibid. 286 347- Talk of Catholic tyrants ! Talk of the Catholics having propagated their faith by acts of force and cruelty ! I wonder that an English Protestant, even one whose very bread comes from the spoliation of the Catholics, can be found with so little shame as to talk thus. Our Protestant historians tell us that the ships of the Spanish Armada were " loaded with racks,'' to be used upon the bodies of the English, who were preserved from these by the wisdom and valour of " good and glorious Queen Bess." In the first place it was the storm and not the Queen that pre vented an invasion of the country, and in the next place the Spaniards might have saved themselves the trouble of importing racks, seeing that Elizabeth had always plenty of them, which she kept in excellent order and in almost daily use. It is to inflict most painful feelings on Protes tants, to be sure ; but justice demands that I describe one or two of her instruments of torture, because in them we see some of the most powerful of those means which she made use of for establishing her Protestant Church : and here I thank Dr. Lingard for having enabled me to give this description. One kind of torture which was called " the Scavenger's Daughter, was a broad hoop of iron, consisting of two parts fastened by a hinge. The prisoner was made to kneel on the pavement and to contract himself into as small a compass as he could. Then the execu tioner, kneeling on his shoulders, and having introduced the hoop under his legs, compressed the victim close together till he was able to fasten the feet and hands together over the small of the back. The time allotted to - this kind of torture was an hour and a half, during which time the blood gushed from the nostrils, and sometimes from the hands and feet." There were several other kinds of arguments of conversion that gentle Betsy made use of to eradicate the " damnable errors " of popery, but her great argument was the rack. This " was a large open frame of oak raised three feet from the ground. "The 287 prisoner was laid under it on his back on the floor ; his wrists and ankles were attached by cords to two rollers at the ends of the frame ; these were moved by levers in opposite directions, till the body rose to a level with the frame. Questions were then put ; and if the answers did not prove satisfactory, the sufferer was stretched more and more till the bones started from their sockets. "'° 348. There, Protestants ; there, revilers of the Catholic religion ; there are some of the means which " good Queen Bess" made use of to make her Church " established by law!" Compare, oh! compare, if you have one particle of justice left in you, compare these means with the means made use of by those who introduced and established the Catholic Church ! 349. The other deeds and events of the reign of this ferocious woman are now of little interest, and indeed do not belong to my subject ; but seeing that the pensioned poet, Thompson, in that sickly stuff of his which no man of sense ever can endure after he gets to the age of twenty, has told us about "the glories of the maiden reign," it may not be amiss, before I take niy leave of this "good " creature, to observe that her " glories " consisted in having broken innumerable solemn treaties and compacts, in having been continually bribing rebel subjects to annoy their sovereigns, in having had a navy of freebooters, in having had an army of plunderers, in having bartered for a little money the important town of Calais, and in never having added even one single leaf of laurel to that ample branch which had for ages been seated on the brows of England; and that as to her maiden virtues, Whitaker (a Protestant clergyman, mind,) says that " her life was stained with gross licen tiousness, and she had many gallants, while she called '" Lingard. Note 00, p. 343, where a list of other tortures and persons who experienced them is givev. herself a maiden queen."" Her life, as he truly says, was a life of " mischief and of misery," and in her death (which took place in the year 1603, the seventieth of her age and the forty-fifth of her reign) she did all the, mischief that it remained in her power to do by sulkily refusing to name her successor, and thus leaving to a people whom she had been pillaging and scourging for forty-five years a pro bable civil war, as " a legacy of mischief after her death." PHistorians have been divided in opinion as to which was the worst man that England ever produced, her father or Cranmer ; but all mankind must agree that this was the worst woman that ever existed in England, or in the whole world, Jezebel herself not excepted^ " Lingard says : " To her first Parliament she had expressed a wish that on her tomb might be inscribed the title of ' the Virgin Queen.' But the woman who despises the safeguards must be content to forfeit the repu tation of chastity. It was not long before her familiarity with Dudley pro voked dishonourable reports. At first they gave her pain, but her feelings were soon blunted by passion ; in the face of the whole court she assigned to her supposed paramour an apartment contiguous to her own, bed chamber, and by this indecent act proved that she had become regardless of her character and callous to every sense of shame. But Dudley, though the most favoured, was not considered as her only lover ; among his rivals were numbered Hatton, and Raleigh, and Oxford, and Blount, and Simier and Anjou. . . The court imitated the manners of the sovereign. It was a place in which, according to Faunt, 'all enormities reigned in the highest degree ' " (History, vi., p. 322). 289 CHAPTER XII. 350. In the foregoing chapters it has been proved be yond all contradiction how the " Reformation," as it is called, was engendered, how established in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood. Those who pretend to answer these contentions only rail against the personal character of priests and cardinals and popes, and against rites and ceremonies and articles of faith and rules of discipline, matters with which I have never meddled, and which have very little to do with my subject, my object, as the title of my work expresses, being to show that the " Reformation" has impoverished and degraded the main body of the people of England and Ireland. I have shown that this change of religion was brought about by some of the worst, if not the very worst people that ever breathed ; I have shown that the means were such as human nature revolts at. So far I can receive no answer from men not prepared to deny the authenticity of the statute-book. It now reinains for me to show from the same sources the impoverishing and degrading consequences of this change of religion; and that, too, with regard to the nation as a whole, as well as with regard to the main' body of the people. 351. But though we have now seen the Protestant religion established, completely established, by the gibbets, the racks and the ripping-knives, I must, before I come to 19 290 the impoverishing and degrading consequences of which I have just spoken, and of which I shall produce the most incontestable proofs, I must give an account of the proceedings of the Reformation people after they had estabHshed their system. The present number will show us the Reformation producing a second, and that, too (as every generation is wiser than the preceding), with vast improvements, the first being only " a godly Reforma tion," while the second we shall find to be " a thorough godly " one. The next (or thirteenth) chapter will intro duce to us a third Reformation, commonly called the " glorious " Reformation, or revolution. The fourteenth chapter will give us an account of events still greater, namely, the American Reformation, or revolution, and that of the French. All these we shall trace back to the first Reformation as clearly as any man can trace the branches of a tree back to its root. And then we shall, in the remain ing chapter or chapters, see the fruit in the immorality, crimes, poverty, and degradation of the main body of the people. It will be curious to behold the American and French Reformations, or revolutions, playing back the principles of the English Reformation people upon them selves, and — which is not less curious, and much more interesting — -to see them force the' Reformation people to begin to cease to torment the Catholics, whom they had been tormenting without mercy for more than two hundred years. 352. The " good and glorious " Queen Elizabeth, who, amongst her other " gpdly " deeds, granted to her minions, to whom there was no longer church plunder to give, monopolies of almost all the necessaries of life, so that salt, for instance, which used to be about 2d. a bushel was raised to 15s., or about £'] of our present money; the Queen, \yho. had, as Whitaker says, expired in sulky silence as to her successor, and had thus left a probable civil war as a legacy of mischief, was, however, peaceably 291 succeeded by James I., that very child of whom poor Mary Stuart was pregnant when his father, Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley, and associates murdered Rizzio in her pre sence, as we have seen in paragraph 309, and which child, when he came to man's estate, was a Presbyterian, was generally a pensioner of Elizabeth, abandoned his mother to that queen's wrath, and amongst his first acts in Eng land took by the hand, confided in, and promoted that Cecil who was the son of the old Cecil, who did, indeed, inherit the great talents of his father, but who had also been, aS all the world knew, the deadly enemy of this new king's unfortunate mother. 353. James, like all the Stuart's except the last, was at once prodigal and mean, conceited and foolish, tyrannical and weak; but the staring feature of his character was insincerity. It would be useless to dwell in the detail on the measures of this contemptible reign, the prodigalities and debaucheries and silliness of which did, however, prepare the way for that rebellion and that revolution which took place in the next, when the " double-distilled Reformers " did at last provide a " martyr " for the hitherto naked pages of the Protestant calendar. Indeed, this reign would, as far as my purposes extend, be a complete blank, were it not for that "gunpowder plot" which alone has caused this Stuart to be remembered, and of which, seeing that it has been and is yet made a source of great and general delusion, I shall take much more notice than it would otherwise be entitled to. 354. That there was a plot in the year 1605 (the second year after James came to the throne), the object of which was to blow up the King and both Houses of ParUament On the first day of the session, that Catholics and none but Catholics were parties to this plot, that the conspira tors were ready to execute the deed, and that they all avowed this to the last, are facts which no man has ever attempted to deny ; any more than any man has attempted 292 to deny that the parties to the Cato Street plot did really intend to cut off the heads of Sidmouth and Castlereagh, which intention was openly avowed by these parties from first to last, to the officers who took them, to the judge who condemned them, and to the people who saw their heads severed from their bodies. 355. But as the ParHamentary Reformers in general were most falsely and basely accused of instigating to the commission of the last mentioned intended act, so were the Catholics in general, and so are they to this day, not less falsely and less basely accused of instigating to the in tended act of 1605. But as to the conspirators themselves, as to the extent of their crime, are we wholly to leave out of our consideration the provocation they had received ? To strike a man is an assault, to kill a man is murder ; but are striking and killing always assault and murder ? Oh, no ! for we may justifiably assault and kill a robber or a housebreaker. The Protestant writers have asserted two things, first that the Catholics in general instigated to or approved of the gunpowder plot, and secondly that this is a proof of the sanguinary principles of their religion.* As to the first, the contrary was fully and judicially proved to be the fact ; and as to the second, supposing the con- spiratprs to have had no provocation, those of Cato Street were not Catholics at any rate, nor were those Catholics who qualified Charles I. for a post in the calendar, and that, too, observe, after he had acknowledged his errors and had made compensation to the utmost of his power. 356. However, these conspirators had provocation, and now let us see what that prpvocation was. The King, ' " The administration took a sudden turn towards severity ; the prisons were filled, the penalties exacted, several suffered death, and the general helplessness of their condition impelled a few persons (most of whom had belonged to what was called the Spanish party in the last reign) to the gunpowder conspiracy, unjustly imputed to the majority of Catholics " (Hallam, Constitutional History, loth ed., i., 405). 293 before he came to the throne, had promised to mitigate the penal laws which, as we have seen, made their lives a burden. Instead of this those laws were rendered even more severe than they had been in the former reign. Every species of insult as well as injury, which the Catholics had had to endure under the persecutions of the Established Church, was now heightened by that leaven of Presbyterian malignity and ferocity which England had now imported from the north, which had then poured forth upon this devoted country endless hordes of the most greedy and rapacious and insolent wretches that God had ever permitted to infest and scourge the earth. We have seen in paragraphs 341, 342, 343 and 344 how the houses of conscientious Catholic gentlemen were rifled, how they were rummaged, in what constant dread these unhappy men lived, how they were robbed of their estates as a punishment for recusancy and other things called crimes ; we have seen that by the fines imposed on these accounts the ancient gentry of England, whose families had for ages inhabited the same mansions and had been venerated and beloved for their hospitality and charity, we have seen how all these were gradually sinking into absolute beggary in consequence of these exorbitant extor tions : but what was their lot now ? The fines, as had been the practice, had been suffered to fall in arrear in order to make the fined party more completely at the mercy of the crown ; and James, whose prodigality left him not the means of gratifying the greediness of his Scotch minions out of his own exchequer, delivered over the English Catholic gentry to these rapacious minions, who, thus clad with royal authority, fell with all their well-known hard ness of heart upon the devoted victims as the kite falls upon the defenceless dove.^ They entered their mansions, ' " The execution of the penal laws enabled the King, by an ingenious comment, to derive considerable profit from his past forbearance. It was 294 ransacked their closets, drawers and beds, seized their rent- rolls, in numerous instances drove their wives and children from their doors, and with all their native upstart insolence made a mockery of the ruin and misery of the unoffending persons whom they had despoiled.' 357. Human nature gave the lie to all preachings of longer passive obedience, and at last one of these op pressed and insulted English gentlemen, Robert Catesby, of Northamptonshire, resolved on making an attempt to deliver himself and his suffering brethren from this almost infernal scourge. But how was he to obtain the means ? From abroad, such was the state of things, no aid could possibly be hoped for. Internal insurrection was, as long as the makers and executors of the barbarous laws re mained, equally hopeless. Hence he came to the conclu sion, that to destroy the whole of them afforded the only hope of deliverance ; and to effect this there appeared to him no other way than that of blowing up the Parliament House when, on the first day of the session, all should be assembled together. He soon obtained associates ; but in the whole they amounted to only about thirteen, and all except three or four in rather obscure situations in life, amongst whom was Guy Fawkes, a Yorkshireman, who had served as an officer in the Flemish wars. He it was who undertook to set fire to the magazine, consisting of two hogsheads and thirty-two barrels of gunpowder; he it was who, if not pretended that he had never forgiven the penalties of recusancy. . . . The legal fine of ;^20 per lunar month was again demanded, and not only for the time to come but for the whole period of the suspension ; a demand which, by crowding thirteen payments into one, reduced many families of moderate incomes to a state of absolute beggary " (Lingard, History, vii., p. 21). = For the way in which the Catholics were handed over for the Scotch followers of James to prey upon, see ibid, and p. 22, note : cf. also p. 28. In the note Lingard states that the penalties were exacted with such rigour by the bishops of Hereford and Landaff, that in the county of Hereford alone 409 families found themselves reduced to a state of beggary. 295 otherwise to be accomplished, had resolved to blow him self up along with the persecutors of his brethren ; he it was who, on the 5th of November, 1605, a few hours only before the Parliament was to meet, was seized in the vault with two matches in his pocket and a dark lantern by his side, ready to effect his tremendous purpose; he it was who, when brought before the King and Council, replied to all their questions with defiance ; he it was who, when asked by a Scotch Lord of the Council why he had collected so many barrels of gunpowder, answered, " to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains," and in this answer proclaimed to the world the true immediate cause of this memorable conspiracy ; an answer which, in common justice, ought to be put into the mouth of those effigies of him which crafty knaves induce foolish boys still to burn on the 5th of November. James (whose siUy con ceit made him an author) was just in one respect at any rate. In his works he calls Fawkes " the English Scaevola,"* and history tells us that that famous Roman, having missed his mark in endeavouring to kill a tyrant who had doomed his country to slavery, thrust his offending hand into a hot fire, and let it burn while he looked defiance at the tyrant. 358. Catesby and the other conspirators were pursued ; he and three of his associates died with arms in their hands, fighting against their pursuers. The rest of them (except Tresham, who was poisoned in prison) were executed, and also the famous Jesuit, Garnet, who was wholly inno cent of any crime connected with the conspiracy, and who, having come to a knowledge of it through the channel of confession, had, on the contrary, done everything in his power to prevent the perpetrating of its object. He was sacrificed to that unrelenting fanaticism which, encour aged by this and other similar successes, at last, as we are *apud Howell, ii., p. 20J. 296 soon to see, cut off the head of the son and successor of this very king.^ The King and Parliament escaped from feelings of humanity in the conspirators. Amongst the dis abilities imposed on the Catholics, they had not yet been, and were not until the reign of Charles II. , shut out of Par liament. So that if the House were blown up. Catholics, peers and members, would have shared the fate of the Protestants. The conspirators could not give warning to the Catholics without exciting suspicions. They did give such warning where they could, and this led to the timely detection, otherwise the whole of the two Houses, and the King along with them, would have been blown to atoms ; for though Cecil evidently knew of the plot long before the time of intended execution ; though he took care to nurse it till the moment of advantageous discovery arrived ; though he was, in all probability, the author of a warning letter which, being sent anonymously to a Catholic noble man and communicated by him to the government, became the ostensible cause of the timely discovery ; not withstanding these well-attested facts, it by no means appears that the plot originated with him, or, indeed, with anybody but Catesby, of whose conduct men will judge differently according to the difference in their notions about passive obedience and non-resistance. 359. This would be enough of the famous gunpowder plot ; but since it has been ascribed to bloody-mindedness as the natural fruit of the Catholic religion, since in our Common Prayer-Book we are taught, in addressing God, to call all Catholics indiscriminately " our cruel and blood thirsty enemies," let us see a Httle what Protestants have attempted and done in this blowing-up way. This King James, as he himself averred, was nearly being assassinated by his Scotch Protestant subjects. Earl Gowrie and his ' The account here given of the Gunpowder Plot is taken from that given by Lingard, vol. vii., chapter i. 297 associates ; and after that narrowly escaped being blown up with aH his attendants by the furious Protestant burghers of Perth.« Then again, the Protestants in the Netherlands formed a plot to blow up their governor, the Prince of Parma, with all the nobility and magistrates of those countries, when assembled in the city of Antwerp. But the Protestants did not always fail in their plots, nor were those who engaged in them obscure individuals. For, as we have seen in paragraph 310, this very King James's father, the king of Scotland, was, in 1567, blown up by gunpowder and thereby killed. This was doing the thing effectually. Here was no warning given to anybody ; and all the attendants and servants, of whatever religion and of both sexes, except such as escaped by mere accident, were rem^orselessly murdered along with their master. And who was this done by ? " By bloodthirsty CathoHcs ? " No ; but by the lovers of the " Avangel," as the wretches caUed themselves, the followers of that Knox to whom a monu ment has been erected at Glasgow. The conspirators on this occasion were not thirteen obscure men, and those, too, who had received provocation enough to make men mad, but a body of noblemen and gentlemen who really had received no provocation at all from Mary Stuart, to destroy whom was more the object than it was to destroy her husband. Let us take the account of these con spirators in the words of Whitaker; and let the reader recollect that Whitaker, who published his book in 1787, was a parson of the Church of England, rector of Ruhan- Lanyhorne, in Cornwall, and that he was amongst those clergymen who were most strenuously opposed to the rites and ceremonies and tenets of the Catholic Church ; but he was a truly honest man, a most zealous lover of truth and hater of injustice. Hear this staunch Church parson, then, upon the subject of this Protestant gunpowder plot, " Collier, Church History, ii., pp. 663-4. 298 concerning which he had made the fullest inquiry and col lected together the clearest evidence. He says, in speaking of the plot, " The guilt of this wretched woman, Elizabeth, and the guilt of that wretched man, Cecil, appear too evident at last upon the face of the whole. Indeed, as far as we can judge of the matter, the whole disposition of the murderous drama was this : the whole was originally planned and devised between Elizabeth, Cecil, Morton and Murray, and the execution committed to Lethington, Bothwell and Balfour ; and Elizabeth, we may be certain, was to defend the original and more iniquitous part of the conspirators, Morton and Murray, in charging their own murder upon the innocent Mary." ' Did hell itself, did the devil, who was, as Luther himself says, so long the companion and so often the bed-fellow of this first " Reformer," ever devise wickedness equal to this Protestant plot ? Let us hear no more, then, about the blood-thirstiness of the Catholic religion ; and if we must still have our 5th of November, let the " moral " disciples of Knox, the inhabitants of " Modern Athens," have their loth of February. Let them, too (for it was Protestants that did the deed), have their 30th of January, the anni versary of the kilHng of the son of this same King James. Nobody knew better than James himself the history of his father's and his mother's end. He knew that they had both been murdered by Protestants, and that, too, with circumstances of atrocity quite unequalled in the annals of human infamy, and therefore he himself was not for vigorous measures against the Catholics in general on account of the plot ; but love of plunder in his minions prevailed over him, and now began to blaze with fresh fury that Protestant reformation spirit which at last gave him a murdered son and successor, as it had already given him a murdered father and mother. ' Whitaker, Mary Queen of Scots vindicated, ed. 1787, iii., p. 253. 299 360. Charles I., who came to the throne on the death of his father in 1625, with no more sense and with a stronger tincture of haughtiness and tyranny than his father, seemed to wish to go back in church matters towards the Catholic rites and ceremonies, while his parliaments and people were every day becoming more and more puritanical. Divefs were the grounds of quarrel between them, but the great ground was that of religion. The Catholics were suffering all the while, and especiaHy those in Ireland, who were plundered and murdered by whole districts, and especially under Wentworth, who committed more injustice than ever had before been committed even in that unhappy country. But all this was not enough to satisfy the Puritans ; and Laud, the Primate of the Established Church, having done a great many things to exalt that Church in point of power and dignity, the purer Protes tants called for " another Reformation," and what they called a " thorough godly Reformation." 361. Now, then, this Protestant Church and Protestant King had to learn that " Reformations," like comets, have tails. There was no longer the iron police of EHzabeth to watch and to crush all gainsayers. The Puritans artfully connected political grievances, which were real and numer ous, with religious principles and ceremonies, and having the main body of the people with them as to the former, while these were, in consequence of the endless change of creeds, become indifferent as to the latter, they soon became, under the name of " The Parliament,'' the sole rulers of the country ; they abolished the Church and the House of Lords, and finally brought, in 1649, during the progress of their "thorough godly Reformation," the un fortunate King himself to trial and to the block ! 362. All very bad, to be sure ; but all very natural, seeing what had gone before. If " some such man as Henry VIII." were, as Burnet says he was, necessary to begin a " Re formation," why not " some such man " as Cromwell to 300 complete it ? If it were right to put to -^eath More, Fisher, and thousands of others, not forgetting the grand mother of Charles, on a charge of treason, why w s Charles's head to be so very sacred ? If it were right to confiscate the estates of the monasteries and to turn adrift or put to death the abbots, priors, monks, friars and nu s, after having plundered the latter of even the ear-rings and silver thimbles, could it be so very wrong to take away merely the titles of those who possessed the plundered property ? And as to the Protestant Church, if it were right to establish it on the ruins of the ancient Church by German bayonets, by fines, gallows and racks, could it be so very wrong to establish another newer one on its ruins by means a great deal milder ? If, at the time we are now speaking of, one of Elizabeth's parsons, who had ousted a priest of Queen Mary, had been alive, and had been made to fly out of his parsonage-house, not with one of Bess's bayonets at his back, but on the easy toe of one of Crom well's godly Bible-reading soldiers, could that parson have reasonably complained ? 363. Cromwell (whose reign we may consider as having lasted from 1649 to 1659), therefore, though he soon made the Parliament a mere instrument in his hands, though he was tyrannical and bloody, though he ruled with a r d of iron, though he was a real tyrant, was nothing more than the " natural issue," as Elizabeth would have called him, of the "body" of the "Reformation." He was cruel towards the Irish — he kflled them without mercy ; but, except in the act of selling 20,000 of them to the West Indies as slaves, in what did he treat them worse than Charles, to whom and to whose descendants they were loyal from first to last ?^ And certainly even that sale ' For Cromwell's policy in shipping off numbers of the Irish to the est Indies, and other schemes for expatriating them, see Lingard, viii., p. 175 ¦;eq., and not?. 301 did not equal in point of atrociousness many of the acts committed against them during the three last Protestant reigns ; and in point of odiousness and hatefulness it fell far short of the ingratitude of the Established Church in the reign of Charles II. 364. But common justice forbids us to dismiss the Crom welhan reign in this summary way, for we are now to behold " Reformation " the second, which its authors and executors called " a thorough godly Reformation," insist ing that " Reformation " the first was but a half-finished affair, and that the " Church of England as by law estab lished " was only a daughter of the " Old Woman of Babylon." This " Reformation " proceeded just like the former ; its main object was plunder. The remaining property of the Church was now, as far as time and other circumstances would allow, confiscated and shared out amongst the " Reformers," who, if they had had time, would have resumed all the former plunder (as they did part of it) and have shared it out again ! It was really good to see these " godly " persons ousting from the abbey lands the descendants of those who had got them in " Reformation " the first, and it was particularly good to hear the Church bishops and parsons crying " sacri lege " when turned out of their palaces and parsonage- houses ; aye, they who and whose Protestant predecessors had all their lives long been justifying the ousting of the CathoHc bishops and priests, who held them by prescrip tion and expressly by Magna Charta. 365. As if to make " Reformation " the second as much as possible like " Reformation " the first, there was now a change of religion made by laymen only. The Church clergy were calumniated just as the Catholic clergy had been, the bishops were shut out of Parliament as the abbots and Catholic bishops had been, the cathedrals and churches were again ransacked, Cranmer's tables (put in place of the altars) were now knocked to pieces, there was a 302 general crusade against crosses, portraits of Christ, religious pictures, paintings on church windows, images on the out side of cathedrals, tombs in these and the churches.' As the mass-books had been destroyed in " Reformation " the first, the church books were destroyed in " Reformation " the second, and a new book called the " Directory " ordered to be used in its place, a step which was no more than an imitation of Henry VIII.'s " Christian Man " and Cran mer's " Prayer Book." And why not this " Directory " ? If the mass-book, of nine hundred years' standing and approved of by all the people, could be destroyed, surely the Prayer Book, of only one hundred years' standing and never approved of by one half of the people, might also be destroyed ; if it were quite right to put the former down, and that, too, as we have seen in paragraph 212, with the aid of the sword wielded by German troops, it might naturally enough be thought that it could not be very wrong to put the latter down with the aid of the sword wielded by English troops, unless indeed, there were — • which we have not been told — something peculiarly agree able to Englishmen in the cut of German steel. 366. It was a pair of " Reformations," as much alike as any mother and daughter ever were. The mother had a Cromwell (see paragraph 157), as one of the chief agents in her work, and the daughter had a Cromwell, the only difference in the two being that one was a Thomas and the other an Oliver ; the former Cromwell was commissioned to make " a godly reformation of errors, heresies and abuses in the Church," and the latter was commissioned to make " a thorough godly reformation in the Church ; " the former Cromwell confiscated, pillaged and sacked the Church, and just the same did the latter Cromwell, except " See an account of the destruction of church ornaments, &c., at this time in Suffolk, in The fournal of William Dowsing, Parliamentary Visitor, ii) llie years 164^-1644. 303 that the latter did not at the same time rob the poor, as the former had done ; and, which seems a just distinction, the latter died in his bed, and the former, when the tyrant wanted his services no longer, died on a scaffold. 367. The heroes of " Reformation " the second were great Bible-readers, and almost every man became at times a preacher. The soldiers were uncommonly gifted in this way, and they claimed a right to preach as one of the conditions upon which they bore arms against the king. Every one interpreted the Bible in his own way; they were all for the Bible without note or comment. Roger North (a Protestant), in his Examen,^° gives an account of all sorts of blasphemies and of horrors committed by these people, who had poisoned the minds of nearly the whole of the community. Hence all sorts of monstrous crimes. At Dover a woman cut off the head of her child, alleging that, Hke Abraham, she had had a particular command from God. A woman was executed at York for crucifying her mother ; she had at the same time sacri ficed a calf and a cock. These are only amongst the horrors of that " thorough godly Reformation ; " only a specimen. And why not these horrors ? We read of killings in the Bible ; and if every man be to be his own interpreter of that book, who is to say that he acts con trary to his own interpretation ? Why not all these new monstrous sects ? If there could be one new religion, one new creed made, why not a thousand ? What right had Lutlier to make a new religion, and then Calvin another new one, and Cranmer one differing from both these, and then Elizabeth to make an improvement upon Cranmer's? Were all these to make new religions, and were the en lightened soldiers of Cromwell's army to be deprived of this right ? The former all alleged as their authority the " inspiration of the Holy Ghost." What, then? were '" Roger North, Examen, 1740. Cromwell and his soldiers to be deprived of the benefit of this allegation ? Poor " godly " fellows, why were they to be the only people in the world not qualified for choosing a religion for themselves and for those whom they had at the point of their bayonets ? One of Cromwell's "godly" men went, as North relates, into the church of Walton- upon-Thames with a lantern and five candles, telling the people that he had a message to them from God, and that they would be damned if they did not listen to him. He put out one light as a mark of the abolition of the Sabbath, the second as a mark of the abolition of all tithes and church dues, the third as a mark of the abo lition of all ministers and magistrates ; and then the fourth light he applied to setting fire to a Bible, declaring that that also was abolished! These were pretty pranks to play ; but they were the natural, the inevitable consequence of " Reformation " the first. 368. In one respect, however, these new reformers differed from the old ones. They did, indeed, make a new religion and command people to follow it, and they in flicted punishments on the refractory ; but those punish ments were beds of down compared with oak planks, when viewed by the side of those inflicted by Elizabeth and her Church. They forbade the use of the Common Prayer Book in all churches and also in private families ; but they punished the disobedient with a penalty of five pounds for the first offence, ten pounds for the second, and with three years' imprisonment for the third, and did not hang them, as the Church of England sovereigns had done by those who said or heard mass. Bad as these fanatics were, wicked and outrageous as were their deeds, they never persecuted nOr attempted to persecute with a hun dredth part of the cruelty that the Church of England had done, — aye, and that it did again the moment it regained its power after the restoration of Charles II., when it became more cruel to the Catholics even than it had 305 been in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and that, too, not withstanding that the Catholics of all ranks and degrees had signalised themselves during the civil war in every way in which it was possible for them to aid the royal cause. 369. This at first sight seems out of nature ; but if we consider that this Church of England felt conscious that its possessions did once belong to the Catholics, that the cathedrals and churches and the colleges were all the work of Catholic piety, learning and disinterestedness ; when we consider this, can we be surprised that these new possessors, who had got possession by such means, too, as we have seen in the course of this work, — when we consider this are we to be surprised that they should do everything in their power to prevent the people from seeing, hearing, and con tracting a respect for those whom these new possessors had ousted ? Here we have the true cause of all the hostility of the Church of England clergy towards the CathoHcs. Take away the possessions, and the hostility would cease to-morrow; though there is, besides that, a wide and, on their side, a very disadvantageous difference between a married clergy and one not married. The former will never have an influence with the people any thing like approaching that of the latter. There is, too, the well-known superiority of learning on the side of the Catholic clergy, to which may be added the notorious fact that in fair controversy the Catholics have always triumphed. Hence the deep-rooted, the inflexible, the persevering and absolutely implacable hostility of this established Church to the Catholics, not as men, but as Catholics. To what else are we to ascribe that, to this day, the Catholics are forbidden to have steeples or bells to their chapels ? They whose religion gave us our steeples and bells ! To what else are we to ascribe that their priests are, even now, forbidden to appear in the streets, or in private houses, in their clerical habiliments, and even 20 3o6 when performing their functions at funerals ? Why all this anxious pains to keep the Catholic religion out of sight ? / Men may pretend what they will, but these pains argue anything but consciousness of being right on the part of those who take those pains. Why, when the English nuns' came oveir to England during the French Revolution and settled at Winchester, get a bill brought into Parliament (as the Church clergy did) to prevent them from taking Protestant scholars, and give up the bill only upon a promise that they would not take such scholars ? Did this argue a conviction in the minds of the Winchester parsons, that Bishop North's was the true rehgion and that William of Wykham's was the false one ? The Church parsons are tolerant enough towards the sects of all descriptions ; quite love the Quaker, who rejects baptismi and the sacrament ; shake hands with the Unitarian, and allow him openly to impugn that which they tell us in the Prayer Book a man cannot be saved if he do not firmly believe in ; suffer these, aye, and even Jews, to present to church livings, and refuse that right to Catholics, from whose religion all the church livings came ! 370. Who, then, can doubt of the motive of this implac able hostility, this everlasting watchfulness, this rancorous jealousy that never sleeps ? The common enemy being put down by the restoration of Charles, the Church fell upon the Catholics with more fury than ever. This 'sing, who came out of exile to mount the throne in i66c. with still more prodigality than either his father or grandiather, had a great deal more sense than both put together, and in spite of all his well-known profligacy he was, on account of his popular manners, a favourite with his people ; but he was strongly suspected to be a Catholic in his heart, and his more honest brother James, his presumptive heir, was an openly declared Catholic. Hence the reign of Charles II. was one continued series of plots, sham or real, and one unbroken scene of acts of injustice, fraud and false swearing. 307 These were plots ascribed to the CathoHcs', but really plots against them. Even the great fire in London, which took place during this reign, was ascribed to them, and there is the charge to this day going round the base of "the monument," which Pope justly compares to a big, lying bully :— " Where London's column, pointing to the skies, Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies." The words are these : " This monument is erected in memory of the burning of this Protestant city by the Popish faction, in September, a.d. 1666, for the destruction of the Protestant religion and of old English liberty, and for the introduction of Popery and slavery. But the fury of the Papists is not yet satisfied." It is curious enough that this inscription was made by order of Sir Patience Ward, who, as Echard shows, was afterwards convicted of perjury. Burnet (whom we shall find in full tide by-and- by) says that one Hubert, a French Papist, " confessed that he began the fire " ; " but Higgons (a Protestant, mind) proves that Hubert was a Protestant, and Rapin agrees with Higgons. Nobody knew better than the King the monstrousness of this lie, but Charles II. was a lazy, luxurious debauchee ; such men have, always been unfeel ing and ungrateful, and this king, who had twice owed his life to Catholic priests, and who had in fifty^two instances held his life at the mercy of Catholics (some of them very poor) while he was a wandering fugitive, with immense rewards held out for taking him, and dreadful punishments for concealing him, — this profligate king, whose ingratitude to his faithful Irish subjects is without a parallel in the annals of that black sin, had the meanness and injustice to suffer this lying inscription to stand. It was effaced by " Hubert was proved, upon the evidence of the captain of the ship that brought him overj to have landed in England only two days after the fire, Jle was probably insane, but was nevertheless executed. 3o8 his brother and successor, but when the Dutchman and the " glorious revolution " came, it was restored; and there it now stands, all the world except the mere mob knowing it to contain a most malignant lie."' 371. By conduct like this, by thus encouraging the fanatical part of his subjects in their wicked designs, Charles II. prepared the way for those events by which his family were excluded from the throne for ever. To set aside his brother, who was an avowed Catholic, was their great object. This was indeed a monstrous attempt ; but, legally considered, what was it more than to prefer the illegitimate Elizabeth to the legitimate Mary Stuart? What was it more than to enact that any " natural issue " of the former should be heir to the throne ? And how could the Protestant Church complain of it, when its great maker, Cranmer, had done his best to set aside both the daughters of Henry VIIL, and to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne ? In short, there was no precedent for annul ling the rights of inheritance, for setting aside prescrip tion, for disregarding the safety of property and of person, for violating the fundamental laws of the kingdom, that the records of the " Reformation " did not amply furnish: and this daring attempt to set aside James on account of his religion might be truly said, as it was said, to be a Protes tant principle ; and it was, too, a principle most decidedly acted upon in a few years afterwards. 372. James II. was sober, frugal in his expenses, econo mical as to public matters, sparing of the people's purses, pious and sincere, but weak and obstinate, and he was a Catholic; and his piety and sincerity made him not a match for his artful, numerous, and deeply interested foes. If the existence of a few missionary priests in the country, though hidden behind wainscots, had called forth thousands '^ The inscription was finally erased under William IV., in accordance 'vith 3 vote of the City Corporation. 309 of pursuivants in order to protect the Protestant Church, if to hear mass in a private house had been regarded as incompatible with the safety of that Church, what was to be the fate of that Church if a Catholic king continued to sit on the throne ? It was easy to see that the ministry, the army,, the navy, and all the offices under the govern ment would soon contain few besides Catholics, and it was also easy to see that by degrees Catholics would be in the parsonages and in the episcopal palaces, especially as the King was as zealous as he was sincere. The " Reforma tion " had made consciences to be of so pliant a nature, men had changed under it backward and forward so many times, that this last (the filling of the Church with Catholic priests and bishops), would perhaps, amongst the people in general, and particularly amongst the higher classes, have produced but little alarm. But not so with the clergy themselves, who soon saw their danger, and who, " passive " as they were, lost no time in preparing to avert it. 373. James acted, as far as the law would let him, and as far as prerogative would enable him to go beyond the law, on principles of general toleration. By this he obtained the support of the sectaries. But the Church had got the good things, and it resolved if possible to keep them. Besides this, though the abbey lands and the rest of the real property of the Church and the poor had been a long while in the peaceable possession of the then owners and their predecessors, the time was not so very distant but that able lawyers, having their opinions backed by a well- organised army, might still find a flaw in, here and there, a grant of Henry VIII., Edward VI. , and EHzabeth. Be their thoughts what they might, certain it is that the most zealous and most conspicuous and most efficient of the leaders of the " Glorious Revolution," which took place soon afterwards, and which drove James from the throne, together with his heirs and his house, were amongst those 310 whose ancestors had not been out of the way at the time when the sharing of the abbey lands took place. 374. With motives so powerful against him, the King ought to have been uncommonly prudent and wary. He was just the contrary. He was severe towards all who opposed his views, however powerful they might be. Some bishops, who presented a very insolent but artful petition to him, he sent to the Tower, had them prosecuted for a libel, and had the mortification to see them acquitted. As to the behaviour of the Catholics, prudence and modera tion were not to be expected from them. Look at the fines, the burning -irons, the racks, the gibbets, and the ripping-knives of the late reigns, and say if it were not both natural and just that their joy and exultation should now be without bounds. These were, alas ! of short dura tion, for a plan (we must not call it a plot) having been formed for compelling the King to give up his tolerating projects, and " to settle the kingdom," as it was called, the planners, without any act of Parliament, and without con sulting the people in any way whatever, invited William, the Prince of Orange, who was the Stadtholder of the Dutch, to come over with a Dutch army to assist them in " settling " the kingdom. All things having been duly prepared, the Dutch guards (who had been suffered to get from Torbay to London, by perfidy in the English army) having come to the King's palace and thrust out the Eng lish guards, the King, having seen one " settling " of a sovereign, in the reign of his father, and apparently having no relish for another settling of the same sort, fled from his palace and his kingdom and took shelter in France, instead of fleeing to some distant English city and there rallying his people round him, which if he had done, the event would, as the subsequent conduct of the people proved, have been very different from what it was. 375. Now came, then, the "glorious Revolution," or Reformation the third ; apd when we have taken a view 3" of its progress and completion we shall see how it, in its natural consequences, extorted for the long-oppressed Catholics that relief which, by appeals to the justice and humanity of their persecutors, they had sought in vain for more than two hundred years. 3'» CHAPTER XIII. 375. At the close of the last chapter we saw a Dutch man invited over with an army to " settle " the kingdom ; we saw the Dutch guards come to London and thrust out the English guards ; we saw the King of England flee for his life and take refuge in France, after his own army had been seduced to abandon him. The stage being now clear for the actors in this affair, we have now to see how they went to work, the manner of which we shall find as summary and as unceremonious as heart, however Protes tant, could have possibly wished. 377. The King being gone, the Lord Mayor and Alder men of London, with a parcel of Common Councilmen, and such lords and members of the late King Charles's Parliaments as chose to join them, went in February, 1688, without any authority from King, Parliament, or people, and forming themselves into "a Convention," at West minster, gave the crown to William (who was a Dutch man) and his wife (who was a daughter of James, but who had a brother alive), and their posterity for ever ; made new oaths of allegiance for the people to take ; enabled the new king to imprison at pleasure all whom he might suspect ; banished, to ten miles from London, all Papists, or reputed Papists, and disarmed them all over the kingdom ; gave the advowsons of Papists to the Universities ; granted to their new Majesties excise duties, land-taxes, and poll-taxes, for the " necessary defence of 313 the realm ; " declared themselves to be the " two Houses of Parliament as legally as if they had been summoned according to the usual form : " and this they called a " glorious Revolution," as we Protestants call it to this present day. After " Reformation " the second, and upon the restoration of Charles, the palaces and livings, and other indestructible plunder, were restored to those from whom the "thorough godly " had taken it, except however to the Catholic Irish, who had fought for this king's father, who had suffered most cruelly for this king him self, and who were left still to be plundered by the " thorough godly ; " which is an instance of ingratitude such as in no other case has been witnessed in the world. However, there were after the restoration men enough to contend that the episcopal palaces and other property, confiscated and granted away by the "thorough godly," ought not to be touched ; for that if those grants were resumed why not resume those of Henry VIIL? Aye, why not incieed ! Here was a question to put to the Church clergy, and to the abbey land-owners ! If nine hundred years of quiet possession, and Magna Charta at the back of it, — if it were right to set these at nought for the sake of making only "a godly Reformation," why should not one hundred years of unquiet possession be set at nought for the sake of making "a thorough godly Reformation " ? How did the Church clergy answer this question ? Why, Dr. Heylyn, who was Rector of Alres ford, in Hampshire, and afterwards Dean of Westminster, who was a great enemy of the " thorough godly," though not much less an enemy of the Catholics, meets the question in this way, in the address at the head of his History of Reformation the first, where he says, " that there certainly must needs be a vast disproportion between such contracts as were founded upon acts of Parliament, legally passed by the king's authority, with the consent and approbation of the three estates, and those which have 314 no other ground but the bare votes and orders of both Houses only. By the same logic it might be contended, that the two Houses alone have authority to depose a king."' 378. This church doctor died a little too soon, or he would have seen, not two Houses of Parliament, but a Lord Mayor of London, a parcel of Common Councilmen, and such other persons as chose to join them, actually setting aside one king and putting another upon the throne, and without any authority from King, Parliament, or people ; he would have heard this called " a glorious " thing ; and if he had lived to our day, he would have seen other equally " glorious " things grow directly out of it ; and that not withstanding Blackstone had told the Americans that a " glorious " revolution was a thing never to be repeated, Doctor Heylyn would have heard them repeating, as applied to George III., almost word for word the charges which the "glorious" people preferred against James II., though they, naughty Yankees, knew perfectly well that, after the " glorious " affair, a King of England (being a Protestant) could " do no wrong ! " The doctor's book, written to justify the " Reformation," did, as Pierre Orleans tells us,^ convert James II. and his first wife to the Catholic religion, but his preface above quoted did not succeed so well with Protestants. 379. We shall in due time see something of the cost of this "glorious" revolution to the people ; but, first seeing that this revolution and the exclusion acts which followed it ' Ecclesia Restaurata. To the reader, sig. b. ' D'Orleans, P.J. History of the Revolutions in England under the Stuarts (translated), 1722, p. 231, "It was at Brussels, after his leaving France, when having leisure enough to read, he lighted upon Heylyn's History. He read it with attention, and plainly saw through all the pretexts the Protestants use for justifying their schism. . . . By a strange accident the Duchess was converted upon reading the same book that had wrought upon Ihe Dukf," 315 were founded upon the principle that the Catholic religion was incompatible with public freedom and justice, let us see what things this Catholic king had really done, and in what degree they were worse than things that had been and that have been done under Protestant sovereigns. As William and his Dutch army have been called our deliverers, let us see what it really was after all that they delivered the people from ; and here, happily, we have the statute- book to refer to, in which there still stands the list of charges drawn up against this Catholic king. However, before we examine these charges, we ought in common justice to notice certain things that James did not do. He did not, as Protestant Edward VI. had done, bring German troops into the country to enforce a change of religion ; nor did he, like that young saint, burn his starving subjects with a hot iron on the breast or on the forehead, and make them wear chains as slaves, as a punishment for endeavour ing to relieve their hunger by begging. He did not, as Protestant Elizabeth had done, make use of whips, boring irons, racks, gibbets and ripping-knives to convert people to his faith, nor did he impose even any fines for this purpose ; but, on the contrary, put, as far as he was able, an end to all persecution on account of religion. Oh ! but I am forgetting, for this we shall find amongst his Catholic crimes, — yes, amongst the proofs of his being a determined and intolerant popish tyrant! — he did not,' as Protestant Betsy had done, give monopolies to his court minions, so as to make salt, for instance, which in his day was about ' fourpence a bushel, fourteen pounds a bushel, and thus go on till at last the Parliament feared, as they did in the time of "good queen " Elizabeth, that there would be a monopoly even of bread. These were amongst the things which, being purely of Protestant birth, James, no doubt from "Catholic bigotry," did not do. And now let us come to the things which he really did, or at least which he was charged with having done. 3i6 380. ; Indictments do not generally come after judgment and execution, but for some cause or other the charges against James were postponed until the next year, when the crown had been actually given to the Dutchman and his wife. No matter ; they came out at last, and there they stand, twelve in number, in Act, 2 sess. Wm. and M., chap. 2. We will take them one by one, bearing in mind that they contained all that could even be said against this Popish king. Charge I. " That he assumed and exercised a power of dispensing with and suspending laws and the execution of laws without consent of Parliament." That is to say, he did not enforce those cruel laws against conscientious Catholics which had been enacted in former reigns. But did not Elizabeth and her successor, James I,, dispense with or suspend laws when they took a composition from recusants ? Again, have we ourselves never seen any sus pension of or dispensing with laws without consent of Par liament ? Was there, and is there, no dispensing with the law in employing foreign officers in the English army, and in granting pensions from the Crown to foreigners ? And was there no suspension of the law when the bank stopped payment in 1797 ? And did the Parliament give its assent to the causing of that stoppage ? And has it ever given its assent to the putting of foreigners in offices of trust, civil or military, or to the granting of pensions from the Crown to foreigners? But did James ever suspend the Habeas Corpus Act ? Did his secretaries of state ever imprison whom they pleased, in any gaol or dungeon that they pleased, let the captives out when they pleased ? Ah ! but what he and his ministers did in this way (if they did anything) was all done " without consent of Parliament ;" and who is so destitute of discrimination as not to per ceive the astonishing difference between a dungeon with consent of Parliament and a dungeon without consent of Parliament 1 317 Charge II. " That tie committed and prosecuted divers' worthy prelates for humbly petitioning to be excused from concurring to the said assumed powers." He prosecuted them as libellers and they were acquitted. But he com mitted them before trial and conviction ; and why ? Because they refused to give bail, and they contended that it was tyranny in him to demand such bail ! Oh, heavens ! How many scores of persons have been imprisoned, for a similar refusal or for want of ability to give bail, on a charge of libel during the last eight years ? Would not Mr. Clement have been imprisoned the other day only, if he had refused to give bail, not on a charge of libel on a king upon his throne, but on a Protestant professor of humanity ? And do not six acts, passed by a Parliament from which tyrannical Catholics are so effectually excluded, declare to us free Protestants that this has always been the law of the land ? And is that all ? Oh, no ! For we may now be banished for life, not only for libelling a king on his throne, but for uttering anything that has a tendency to bring either House of Parliament into contempt ! Charge III. "That he issued a commission for erecting a court called the Court of Commissioners for Eccle siastical Causes." Bless us ! What ! was this worse than " good Queen " Elizabeth's real inquisition under the same name ? And, good God ! have we no court of this sort now ? And was not (no longer than about nine months ago) Sarah Wallis (a labourer's wife, of Hargrave, in Norfolk), for having " brawled " in the churchyard, sentenced by this court to pay ;^24 os. 5d. costs ; and was she not sent to gaol for non-payment ; and must she not have rotted in gaol, having not a shilling in the world, if humane persons had not stepped forward to enable her to get out by the Insolvent Act ? And cannot this court now, agreeably to those of young Protestant Saint Edward's acts, in virtue of which the above sentence was passed, condemn any one who attempts to fight in a churchyard. 3i8 to have one ear cut off, and if the offender " have no ears " (which speaks volumes as to the state of the people under Protestant Edward), then to be burnt with a hot iron in the cheek, and to be excommunicated besides ? And did not the revolution Protestants, who drew up the charges against James, leave this law in full force for our benefit ? Charge IV. " That he levied money for and to the use of the Crown, by pretence of prerogative, for other time and in other manner than was granted by Parliament." It is not pretended that he levied more money than was granted ; but he was not exact as to the time and manner. Did the Parliament grant Elizabeth the right to raise money by the sale of monopolies, by compositions with offenders, and by various other of her means ? But did we not lately hear of the hop-duty payment being shifted from one year to another ? Doubtless, with wisdom and mercy ; but I very much doubt of James's ever having in this respect deviated from strict law to a greater amount, seeing that his whole revenue did not exceed (taking the difference in the value bf money into account) much above sixteen times the amount of a good year's hop-duty. Charge V. " That he kept a standing army in time of peace without consent of Parliament." Ah ! without consent of Parliament, indeed ! That was very wicked. There were only seven or eight thousand men, to be sure, and such a thing as a barrack had never been heard of. But without consent of Parliament ! Think of the vast difference between the prick of a bayonet coming without consent of a Parliament, and that of one coming with such consent ? This King's father bad been dethroned at:4 his head had been cut off by an army kept up with consant of Parliament : mind that, however. Whether there were in the time of James any such affairs as that at Man chester, on the memorable i6th of August, 1819, history is quite silent ; nor are we told whether any of James's priests enjoyed military half-pay ; nor are we informed whether 319 he gave half-pay or took it away at his pleasure, and without any " consent of Parhament : " so that as to these matters we have no means of making a comparison. We are in the same situation with regard to foreign armies, for we do not find any account whatever of James's having brought any into England, and especially of his having caused foreign generals to command even the English troops, militia, and all, in whole districts of England. Charge VI. " That he caused several good subjects, being Protestants, to be disarmed at the same time that Papists were both armed and employed contrary to law." Six acts disarmed enough of the king's subjects : aye, but then these were not " good " ones, they wanted a reform of the House of Commons ; and besides, there was " law " for this, and if people' will not see what a surprising difference there is between being disarmed by law and disarmed by proclamation, it really is useless to spend valuable Protestant breath upon them. Charge VII. " That he violated the freedom of election of rnembers to serve in Parliament." Oh, monstrous! Aye,^ and " notorious as the sun at noonday ! " Come up, shades of sainted Perceval and Castlereagh ; come, voters of Sarum and Gatton ; assemble, ye sons of purity of elec tion, living and dead, and condemn this wicked king for having " violated the freedom of elections ! " But come, we must not suffer this matter to pass off in the way of joke. Protestant reader, do you think that this " viola ting of the freedom of elections for members to serve in Parliament " was a crime in King James ? He is not accused of having done all these things with his own tongue, pen, or hands, but with having done them with tha aid of " divers wicked ministers and councillors." Well; but do you, my Protestant readers, think that this viola tion of the freedom of elections was a bad thing, and a proof of the wicked principles of Popery ? If you do, take the following facts, which ought to have a place in a work 320 like this, which truth and honour and justice demand to be recorded, and which I state as briefly as I possibly can. Know then, and be it for ever remembered, that Catholics have been excluded from the throne for more than a hundred years, that they have been excluded from the English Parliament ever since the reign of Charles 1 1., and from the Irish Parliament ever since the twenty- second year of George III. ; that, therefore, the throne and the Parliament were filled exclusively with Protes tants in the year 1809; that in 1779, long and long after Catholics had been shut out of the English Parliament, the House of Commons resolved, " that it is highly criminal for any minister or ministers, or any other servant of the crown in Great Britain, directly or indirectly, to make use of the power of his office in order to influence the election of members of Parliament, and that an attempt to exercise that influence is an attack upon the dignity, the honour, and the independence of Parliament, an infringement of the rights and the liberties of the people, and an attempt to sap the basis of our free and happy constitution." That in i8og. Lord Castlereagh, a minister and a privy coun cillor, having been charged before the House with having had something to do about bartering a seat in the House, the House, on the 25th of April of that year, resolved, " that while it was the bounden duty of that House to maintain at all times a jealous guard upon its purity, and not to suffer any attempt upon its privileges to pass un noticed, the attempt in the present instance (that of Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Reding) not having been carried into effect, that House did not think it then necessary to pro ceed to any criminating resolutions respecting the same." That on the nth of May, 1809 (only sixteen days after this last resolution was passed), William Madocks, Mem ber for Boston, made a charge in the following words, to wit : — " I affirm, then, that Mr. Dick purchased a seat in the House of Commons for the borough of Cashel, through 321 the agency of the Honourable Henry Wellesley, who acted for and on behalf of the Treasury ; that upon a recent -question of the last importance, when Mr. Dick had determined to vote according to his conscience, the noble Lord Castlereagh did intimate to that gentleman the necessity of either his voting with the government or the resigning his seat in that House, and that Mr. Dick, sooner than vote against his principles, did make choice of the latter alternative and vacate his seat accordingly, and that, to this transaction I charge the right honourable gentleman, Mr. Perceval, as being privy and having con nived at it. This I engage to prove by witnesses at your bar, if the House will give me leave to call them." That having made his charge, Mr. Madocks made a motion for inquiry into the matter ; that after a debate the question was put to the vote ; that there were three hundred and ninety-five members in the House, — all Protestants, mind ; that (come up and hear it, you accusers of James and the Catholic religion !) there were eighty-five for an inquiry, and three hundred and ten against it ! That this same Protestant Parliament did, in 1819, on the motion of that very same Lord Castlereagh, pass a law by which any of us now may be banished for life for pubHshing any thing having a tendency to bring that very House into contempt ! That this Lord Castlereagh was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs ; that he continued to be the leading minister in the House of Commons (exclusively Protes tant) until the close of the session of 1822, which took place on the 6th of August of that year ; that on the 12th of that same month of August he cut his own throat and kiUed himself at North Cray in Kent ; that a coroner's jury declared him to have been insane, and that the evidence showed that he had been insane for several weeks, though he had been the leader of the House up to the 6th of August, and though he was at the moment when he killed himself Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and also 21 322 temporary Secretary for the Home Department and that of the Colonies; ;that his body was buried in Westminster Abbey. church, mourned over by his colleagues, and that as it was taken out of the hearse a great assemblage of the people gave loud and long-continued cheers of exultation. Charge VIII. " That he promoted prosecutions in the Court of King's Bench for matters and things cognizable only in Parliament, and that he cHd divers other arbitrary and unlawful things." That is to say that he brought before a jury matters which the Parliament wished to keep to itself ! Oh, naughty and arbitrary king. ! to have jury trial for the deeds of Parliament men, instead, of letting them try themselves ! As to the divers other such arbitrary things, they not being specified we cannot say what they were. Charge IX. " That he caused juries to be composed of partial, corrupt and unqualified persons who were not free holders." Very bad if true, of which, however, no proof and no instance is attempted to be given. One thing, at any rate ; there were no special juries in those days. They, which are " appointed " by the Master of the Crown Office, came after Catholic kings were abolished. But not to mention that Protestant Betsy dispensed with juries alto gether when she pleased, and tried and punished even vagabonds and rioters by martial law, do we not now, in our own free and enlightened and liberal Protestant days, see many men transported for seven years without any jury at. all ? Aye, and that, too, in numerous cases only for being. more than fifteen minutes at a time out of their houses (which the law calls their castles) between sunset and sunrise ? Ah ! but this is with consent of Parliament ! Oh ! I had forgotten that. That's an answer. Charge X. " That excessive bail hath " (by the judges, of course) " been required of persons committed in criminal cases, to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the- subject." 323 Charge XI. " That excessive fines have been imposed and illegal and cruel punishments inflicted." Charge XII. " That he had made promises and grants of fines before conviction and judgment on the party." 381. I take these three charges together. As to fines and bail, look at Protestant EHzabeth's and Protestant James I.'s. reign. But coming to our own times, I, for having expressed my indignation at the flogging of English local militia men in the heart of England, under a guard of German troops, was two years imprisoned in a felon's gaol, and at the expiration of the time had to pay a fine of a thousand pounds, and to give bail for seven years, myself in three thousand pounds, with two sureties in two thousand pounds each. Until, therefore, some zealous admirer of the " glorious revolution " will be pleased to furnish us with something specific as to the bail and fines in James's reign, we ought in prudence to abstain from even any mention of this charge against the unfortunate king, for to talk of them in too censorious a strain may possibly receive a no very charitable interpretation. But there had been illegal and cruel punishments in his reign. What punishments ? There had been no people burnt, there had been no racks, as there had been in the reigns of Protestant Elizabeth and James I. Why, Sir John Cox Hippesley, in a petition to Parliament a year or two ago, asserted that the tread-mill was " cruel and illegal." Yet it stands, and that, too, for very trifling offences. Sir John might be wrong, but this shows that there might also be two opinions about punish ments in the time of James, and we have to lament that those who brought in "the deliverer" were so careless as. to specify none of those instances which might have enabled us to make as to this matter a comparison between a' CathoHc king and a Protestant one. But he granted away fines before the conviction of the party. Indeed! What, then, we have in our happy day, under a Protestant king,, 324 no fines granted beforehand to informers of any sort ? Ah ! but this is with consent of Parhament ! I had forgotten that again : I am silenced jJ 382. These were the offences of King James ; these were the grounds, as recorded in the statute-book of the " glorious revolution " made, as the same act expresses, to " deliver this kingdom from Popery and arbitrary power, and to prevent the Protestant religion from being subverted ; " and seeing that this was immediately followed by a per petual exclusion of Catholics, and those who should marry with CathoHcs, from the throne, it is clear that this was a revolution entirely Protestant, and that it was an event directly proceeding from the " Reformation. "° This being the case, I should now proceed to take a view of the conse quences, and particularly of the costs of this grand change, which was " Reformation " the third. But there are still to notice some Jhings which lying history and vulgar prejudice urge against this unfortunate Catholic king, who has been asserted to have been the adviser of his late brother in all those deeds which have been deemed wicked, and especially in the putting of Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney to death for high treason. 383. Alas ! how have we been deluded upon this subject ! I used to look upon these as two murdered men. A com pulsion to look into realities and to discard romance has taught me the contrary. The Protestants were, in the reign of Charles II., continually hatching Popish plots, and, by contrivances the most diabolical, bringing innocent 'The Act of Settlement, passed in 1701, set "aside not only the pre tended Prince of Wales and a younger daughter of James the Second, but the Duchess of Savoy, a daughter of Henrietta of Orleans, and other claimants nearer in blood, as disqualified by their profession of the Catholic religion.'' It " vested the right to the crown in Sophia, Electress- Dowager of Hanover, a child of the Queen of Bohemia and a grand daughter of James the First, and the heirs of her body being Protestants." Green, Short History of the English People, p. 683. 32« Catholics to the scaffold and the gibbet ; and in the Course of these their proceedings they were constantly denying the prerogative of the king to pardon or to mitigate the punishment of their victims. But at last the king got real proof of a Protestant plot ! The king was ill, and a conspiracy was formed for setting aside his brother by force of arms if the king should die. The king recovered, but the Protestant plot went on. The scheme was, to rise in arms against the Government, to pay and bring in an army of Protestants from Scotland, and in short, to make now that sort of " Reformation " the third which did not take place till, as we have seen, some years afterwards. In this Protestant plot Russell and Sidney were two great leaders. Russell did not attempt to deny that he had had a part in the conspiracy, his only complaint was that the indictment was not agreeable to law ; but he was told, which was true, that it was perfectly agreeable to numerous precedents in cases of trials of Popish plotters ! When brought to the place of execution Russell did not deny his guilt, but did not explicitly confess it. That part of his sentence which ordered his bowels to be ripped out while he was yet alive, and his body to be quartered, was, at the intercession of his family, remitted by the king, who, in yielding to their prayer, cuttingly said, " My Lord Russell shall find that I am possessed of that prerogative which, in the case of Lord Strafford, he thought fit to deny me." 384. As to Sidney, he had been one of the leading men in the "thorough godly" work of the last reign, and had even been one of the Commissioners for trying Charles I. and bringing him to the block, though it is said by his friends he did not actually sit at the trial. At the restora tion of Charles II. he had taken refuge abroad. But hav ing confessed the errors of his younger years and promised to be loyal in future, this king, under the guidance of a Popish brother, pardoned him, great as his offences had been. Yet after this he conspired to destroy the govern- 326 ment of that king, or, at the very least, to set aside that brother, and this, too, observe, by force of arms, by open rebellion against the king who had pardoned him, and by plunging into all the horrors of another civil war that country which he had before assisted to desolate. If any man ever deserved an ignominious death this Sidney de served his. He did not deny, he could not deny, that the conspiracy had existed, and that he was one of its chiefs. He had no complaint but one, and that related to the evidence against him. There was only one parole witness to his acts, and in cases of high treason the law of England required two. And here it was that a blush might (if it were possible) have been raised upon the cheeks of these revilers of Popery; for this very law, this law which has saved the lives of so many innocent persons, this law which ought to engrave gratitude to its author on the heart of every Englishman, this law came from that very Popish Queen Mary, whom artful knaves have taught generations of thoughtless people to call " the bloody," while, too, she was the wife of, and had for coadjutor, that Philip II. , whom to hold up as a sanguinary Popish tyrant has been a great object with all our base deluders. 385. Seeing, however, that Sidney had sutih a strong at tachment to this Popish law, and that there really was but one witness against him ; seeing that he could not bear the thought of dying without two witnesses against him, the crown -lawyers (all Protestants, mind, who had adjured the "damnable errors of Popery") contrived to accommodate him with a couple by searching his drawers and making up a second witness out of his own papers. It was in vain that he rested upon this flav/ in the proceedings ; all men knew that hundreds of Catholics had suffered death upon evidence slight indeed compared with that against him ; men were not to be amused with this miserable special plea, and all men of sense and justice concurred in the opinion that he received substantial justice and no more. 327 386. So much for the " good old cause for which Hamp den died in the field and Sidney on the scaffold." What credulous creatures we have been, and who more so than myself ? Aye, but these Protestant patriots only, contem plated insurrection and the introduction of foreign armies. And with what more was O'Quigly charged only about twenty-seven years ago ? With what more were the Shearses and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Watt, and Downie, and Despard, and scores of others charged ? And were Thistlewood, Ings, Brunt and Tidd charged with more ? Oh no ! but with a great deal less ; and they suffered, not for compassing the death of the king, but of his ministers, a crime made high treason for the first time in our own Protestant days and by a Parliament from which tyrannical Popish people are wholly excluded. There was one Keiling, who from a Protestant plotter became an informer ; and he, in order to fortify his own evidence, introduced his brother-in-law to the conspirators in order to betray them and bring them to justice. WeH, but have we not had our Castleses, our Olivers and our Edwardses, and has not Mr. Brougham said in the House of Commons that " while there are such men as Ings in the world there must be such men as Edwards ? " How ever, no historian, Protestant as he may'have been, enemy as he may have been of Charles's and James's memory, ever had the impudence to impute to either of them the having employed people to instigate others to commit acts of high treason, and then bringing those others to the block while they rewarded the instigators. 387. It is said, and I think truly, that Charles II. was at one time in pecuniary treaty with the king of France for the purpose of re-establishing the Catholic Church in England. WeH, had not he as much right to do this as Edward VI. had to bring over German troops to- root -out that ancient Church which had been established for 900 years,, and which was guaranteed to the people by Magna Charta ? 328 And if doing this by means'of French troops were intencjed by Charles, can that be complained of by those who ap prove of the bringing in of Dutch troops to " settle" the kingdom ? After all, however, if it were such a deadly sin for a Popishly advised king of England to be in a pecuniary treaty with the king of France, which treaty neither king nor Catholics ever acted upon, what was it in the Protes tant and Catholic-hating Sidney and the younger Hampden and Armstrong and others to be real and bona fide and money-touching pensioners of that same king of France, which fact has become unquestionable from Dalrymple's Memoirs, page 315 of Appendix ? 388. But now, if James be to be loaded with all those which have been called the bad deeds of his brother's reign, we cannot, with common justice, refuse him the merit of the good deeds of that reign. This reign gave us then, the Act of Habeas Corpus, which Blackstone calls the " second Great Charter of English Liberty." There are many other acts of this reign, tending to secure the liberties and all the rights of the people ; "but if there had been only this one act, ought not it alone to have satisfied the people that they had nothing to apprehend from a Popishly inclined king on the throne ? Here these " Popish tyrants," Charles and James, gave up, at one stroke of the pen, at a single writing of Charles's name, all prerogatives enabling them, as their predecessors had been enabled, to put people into prison and to keep them there in virtue of a mere warrant or order from a minister. And was this a proof of that arbitrary disposition of which we hear them incessantly accused ? We are always boasting about this famous Act of Habeas Corpus, but never have we the gratitude to observe that it came from those against whom Russell and Sidney conspired, and the last of whom was finally driven from his palace by the Dutch guards in 1688. 389. Then again, was this act ever suspended during 329 the reigns of these Popish kings ? Never, not even for a single day. But the moment the " glorious revolution " or Reformation the third cam%, the Dutch " deliverer " was, by the Protestant " Convention," whose grand busi ness it was to get rid of " arbitrary power," — the moment that this " glorious " affair had taken place, that moment was the Dutch "deliverer" authorised to ptlt in prison, and to keep there, any Englishman that he or his ministers might suspect ! But why talk of this ? We ourselves have seen this " second Great Charter of English liberty " suspended for seven years at a time ; and besides this, we have seen the king and his ministers authorised to im prison any one they chose to imprison, in any gaol that they chose, in any dungeon that they chose, to keep the imprisoned person from all communication with friends, wives, husbands, fathers, mothers and children, to prevent them from the use of pen, ink, paper, and books, to deny them the right of being confronted with their accusers, to refuse them a specification of their offence, and the names of their accusers ; to put them out of prison (if alive), when they pleased, without any trial ; and at last, to hold them to bail for good behaviour, and that too, mind, still without stating to them the names of the witnesses against them, or even the nature of their offence ! All this we have seen done in our own dear Protestant times, while our Parlia ment-house and our pulpits ring with praises of the " glorious revolution " that " delivered us from Popery and slavery." 390. There was another great thing, too, done in the reigns of these Popish kings, namely ; the settling of the Provinces (now States) of America. Virginia had been attempted to be settled under Elizabeth, by that unprin cipled minion. Sir Walter Raleigh, who in the next reign lost on the scaffold that life which he ought to have lost thirty years before ; but the attempt wholly failed. A little, and very little, was done in the succeeding reigns. It was not until that of Charles II. that charters and patents Were 330 granted, that property became real, and that consequent population and prosperity came. This was a great event, great in itSelf and greater in its consequences, some of which consequences we have already felt, others we are now feeling, but others, and by far of greater moment, we have yet to feel. 391. All these fine colonies were made by this Popishly inclined king and by his really Popish brother. Two of them, the Carolinas, take their name from the king him self ; another, and now the greatest of all. New York, from the king's brother, who was duke of the city of that name in old England. These were the men who planted these the finest and happiest colonies that the sun ever lighted and warmed. They were planted by these Popish people ; from them, from their " mere motion,'' as the law calls it, came those charters and patents without which those countries might to this hour have been little better than a wilderness. From these Popish kings the colonies came. By whom were they 'lost ? Not by abused and calum niated Papists at any rate. Our Popish' ancestors had at different times made England mistress of different parts of France. Protestant Edward VI. lost Boulogne, and Pro testant Elizabeth bartered away Calais and the county of Oye for 100,000 crowns, and thus put her Protestant seal to England's everlasting expulsion from the continent of Europe. After one more Protestant reign, inglorious beyond all example, came these two Popish kings, whb planted countries which were more than a compensation for the European loss. Then came that " glorious " affair ; and it furnished all those principles by which, at the end of only about seventy years, this compensation was wrested from us, — and not only this, but by which was created a power, a great maritime power, at the very name of which, affect what they may. Englishmen, once so high and daring, now grow pale. 392. We shall before the close of the next number, and after we have taken a view of the torments inflicted on the 331 Catholics (Irish and English) in the reignS of WilHam, Anne, and the Georges, trace this " Reformation " the fourth directly back to " Reformation " the third ; we shall show that, in spite of the fine reasoning of Blackstone, the deeds of the " Convention " were things to be imitated ; we shall find that the list of charges against James, drawn up by the " Lord Mayor of London, Aldermen, Common Councilmen and others," was as handy in 1776 as it had been in 1688 ; we shall find this Reformation the third producing in its progress that monster in legislation, that new and heretofore unheard-of species of tyranny called Bills of Pains and Penalties, which are of pure Protestant origin ; and we shall finally see that this famous and " glorious " affair, all Protestant as it was, did at last bring, though it crossed the Atlantic to fetch it, that dawn of liberty which the Catholics began to behold at the end of a night of cruel slavery which had lasted for more than two hundred years. But I must not even here, lest it should not occur to my mind again, omit to notice, and to request the reader to notice, that of the above-mentioned colonies the only ones that wholly abstained from religious persecution, the only ones that from the first settling proclaimed complete religious liberty, were those granted by patent to the Duke of York (afterwards the Catholic James II. ), to Lord Baltimore, a Catholic noble man, and to William Penn, who suffered long imprison ment for his adherence to this Popish king. We shall, by-and-by, find all the colonies cordially united in declar ing the character of a Protestant king to be " marked by every act that may define a tyrant;." but this much we know, at any rate, — that the colonies granted to and settled by Catholics, and by Penn, an adherent of James, were the only ones that had from first to last proclaimed and strictly adhered lo complete freedom as to matters of religion, and that, too, after the Protestants at home had for more than a hundred years been most cruelly and unremittingly per secuting the Catholics. 3i2 CHAPTER XIV. 393. We have seen in the foregoing chapter that Reforma tion the third, commonly called the "Glorious Revolution," grew directly out of the Reformation the second, and we are now to see Reformation the fourth, commonly caUed "the American Revolution," grow directly out of Reforma tion the third ; and we are, before we get to the end of this present chapter, to see how severely the English people have been scourged, and how much more severely they are likely still to be scourged in consequence of these several " Reformations," which have all proceeded from Reforma tion the first, as naturally as the stem and the branches of the tree proceed from the root. 394. We have seen that King James and his family were set aside because they were Catholics ; and we are to bear that in mind, not forgetting at the same time that Alfred the Great was a Catholic, and that those kings of England who really conquered France and won that title of King of France which George III. gave up, were also Catholics. But we are now particularly to bear in mind that James, an Englishman, was set aside, that William, a Dutchman, was made king in his stead, and that James's heirs were set aside too, because he and they were Catholics. Bear ing these things constantly in mind, we shall now see what took place, and how the "Protestant Reformation" worked till it produced the debt, the banks, the stock-jobbers and the American Revolution. 395. James found faithful adherents in his Irish subjects, 333 who fought and bled in his cause with all that bravery and disregard of life of which so many Irishmen have given proof. But with the aid of Dutch and German armies paid by England the " Deliverer" finally triumphed over James and the Irish, and the whole kingdom submitted to the sway of the former. It is hardly necessary to say that the Catholics were now doomed to suffer punishments heretofore unknown, and that if their faith still existed in the kingdom, it could scarcely be owing to anything short of the immediate superintendence of Providence. The oppressions which they had had to endure under former sovereigns were terrible enough, but now began a series of acts against them such as the world never heard of before. I shall, further on, have to give a sketch at least of these acts, which we shall find going on increasing in number and in severity, and at last presenting a mass of punish ment which but to think of makes one's blood run cold, when all of a sudden, in the eighteenth year of George III., came the American Revolution, which grew out of the English Revolution^ and (mark the justice of God !) which produced the first relaxation in this most dreadfully penal code. 396. But how did the American Revolution grow out of the Dutch Deliverer's or " Glorious " Revolution ? A very pertinent and important question, my friends, and one that it is my duty to answer in the fullest and most satisfactory manner, for this points to the very heart of my subject. We shall by-and-by see the American Revolu tion producing wonderful events, and therefore we must with the greatest possible care trace it to its true source, especially as in all human probability this nation has yet to receive from that quarter blows far heavier than it has ever yet had to sustain. 397. The " Protestant DeHverer " had in the first place brought over a Dutch army for the English nation to support. Next there were the expenses and bloodshed of 334 a civil war to endure for the sake of the "deliverance from Popery." But these, though they produced suffering enough, were a mere nothing compared to what was to follow, for this was destined to scourge the nation for ages and ages yet to come, and to produce in the end effects that the human mind can hardly contemplate with steadiness. 398. King James had, as we have seen, been received in France. Louis XIV. treated him as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. William hated Louis for this, and England had to pay for that hatred. All those who had assisted in a conspicuous mannerto bring in the " De liverer " were now embarked in the same boat with him. They were compelled to humour and to yield to him. They, historians say, wished to give the crown solely to his wife, because, she being James's daughter, there would have been less of revolution in this than in giving the crown to an utter alien. But he flatly told them that he " would not hold his power by the apron strings," and, the dispute having continued for some time, he cut the matter short with them by declaring that if they did not give him the crown he would go back to Holland and leave them to their old sovereign ! This was enough ; they gave him the crown without more hesitation, and they found that they had got not only a " deliverer " but a master at the same time. 399. The same reasons that induced a submission to this conduct in the " Deliverer," induced the same parties to go cordially along with him in his war against France. There was James in France ; a great part of his people were still for him ; if France were at peace with England the com munication could not be cut off. Therefore war with France was dbsolutely necessary to the maintenance of WilHam on the throne; and if he were driven from the throne, what w'as to become of those who had obtained from him, as the price of their services in bringing him in, 335 immense grants of crown lands and various other enor mous emoluments, none of which they could expect to retain for a day if James were restored ? Besides this, there was the danger, and very great danger, too, to their own estates and their lives ; for though that which they did was and is caHed a " glorious revolution," it would, if James had been restored, have been called by a very differ ent name ; and that name would not have been an empty sound, it would have been applied to very practical pur poses, and the chances are that very few of the principal actors would have wholly escaped. And there were, moreover, the possessors of the immense property of the Church founded and endowed by our fathers. The con fiscation of this was not yet of so ancient a date as to have been forgotten. Tradition is very long-lived. Many and many then alive knew all the story well. They had heard their grandfathers say that the Catholic Church kept all the poor, that the people were then better off; and they felt, the whole of the people felt, that England had lost by the change. Therefore, in case of the restoration of James, the possessors of Church property, whether they were lay or clerical, might reasonably have their fears. 400. Thus, all these deeply interested parties, who were also the most powerful parties in the kingdom, were for a war with France, which they rightly regarded as absolutely necessary to the keeping of WHliam on the throne, and to the quiet enjoyment of their great possessions, if not actually to the safety of their lives. This ought therefore to have been called " a war to preserve Church property, crown lands and other great emoluments, to their present possessors." But those who make wars, like those who make confiscations of property belonging to the Church and poor, generally know how to give them a good name, and. accordingly this was called and proclaimed as a war "to preserve the Protestant religion, and to keep out Popery and slavery." It was a real "no-popery" war. 336 and though attended with the most dreadful consequences to the nation, it answered all the purposes of its inventors. The history of this war as an affair of fighting is of little consequence to us. It was, indeed, attended in this re spect with disgrace enough, but it answered the great object of its inventors. It did not hurt France, it did not get rid of James and his son, but it made the English people identify their old king and his son with the foreign enemies of England ! That was what the inventors of the war wanted, and that they completely got. It was in vain that King James protested that he meant no harm to Engla-nd ; it was in vain that he reminded the people that he had been compelled to flee to France ; in vain his de clarations that the French only wanted to assist in restor ing him to his rights. They saw him in France, they saw the French fighting for him and against England, that was quite sufficient. Men do not reason in such a case, and this the inventors of this war knew very well. 401. But though passion muddles the head, though even honest feeling may silence the reasoning faculties, the purse is seldom to be quieted so easily ; and this war, though for " the preservation of the Protestant religion and for keeping out Popery and slavery," soon began to make some most dreadful tugs at this most sensitive part of those accoutrements that almost make part and parcel of the human frame. The expenses of this famous " no- popery " war. . . . Good God ! what has this kingdom not suffered for that horrid and hypocritical cry ! . . . The expenses of this famous " no-popery " war were enormous. The taxes were, of course, in proportion to those expenses, and the people, who already paid more than four times as much as they had paid in the time of James, began not only to murmur but to give no very insignificant signs of sorrow for having been " delivered ! " France was power ful, the French king liberal and zealous, and the state of things was ticklish. Force, as far as law and the suspen- 337 sion of law could go, was pretty fairly put in motion ; but a scheme was at last hit upon to get the money, and yet not to tug so very hard at that tender part, the purse. 402. An Act of Parliament was passed in the year 1694, being the 5th year of William and Mary, chapter 20, the title of which act is in the foUowing words, — words that every man should bear in mind, words fatal to the peace and the happiness of England, words which were the pre cursor of a scourge greater than ever before afflicted any part of God's creation : — " An Act for granting to their Majesties several rates and duties upon tonnage of ships and vessels, and upon beer, ale, and other liquors, for securing certain recompenses and advantages in the said Act mentioned, to such persons as shall voluntarily ad vance the sum of fifteen hundred thousand pounds towards carrying on the war against France." This act lays certain duties, sufficient to pay the interest of this sum of ;£"! ,500,000. Then it points out the manner of sub scribing, the mode of paying the interest, or annuities, and then it provides that, if so much of the whole sum be subscribed by such a time, the subscribers shall have a charter under the title of " The Governor and Company of the Bank of England " ! 403. Thus arose loans, funds, banks, bankers, bank notes, and a national debt ; things that England had never heard or dreamed of before this war " for preserving the Protestant religion as by law established ; " things without which she had had a long and glorious career of many centuries, and had been the greatest and happiest country in the world ; things which she never would and never could have heard of, had it not been for what is audaciously called the " Reformation," seeing that to lend money at interest, that is to say, for. gain, that is to say to receive money for the use of money, seeing that to do this v^as contrary and still is contrary to the principles of the Catholic Church, and amongst Christians or pro- 23 338 fessors of Christianity such a thing was never heard of before that which is impudently called " the Reformation." The Rev. Mr. O'Callaghan, in his excellent little work, which I had the honour to republish last winter,^ and which ought to be read by every man, and especially every young man, in the kingdom, has shown that the ancient philosophers, the Fathers of the Church, both Testaments, the Canons of the Church, and the decisions of Pope and Councils, all agree, all declare that to take money for the use of money is sinful. Indeed, no such thing was ever attempted to be justified until the savage Henry VIII. had cast off the supremacy of the Pope. Jews did it ; but, then, Jews had no civil rights. They existed only by mere sufferance. They could be shut up, or banished, or even sold at the king's pleasure. They were regarded as a sort of monsters, who professed to be the lineal descendants and to hold the opinions of those who had murdered the Son of God and the Saviour of men. They were not permitted to practise their blas phemies openly. If they had synagogues they were unseen by the people. The horrid wretches themselves were compelled to keep out of public view on Sundays and on saints' days. They were not allowed to pollute with their presence the streets or the roads of a Christian country on days set apart for public devotion. In degraded wretches like these usury, that is, receiving money for the use of money; was tolerated just for the same cause that incest is tolerated amongst dogs. 404. How far the base spirit of usury may now have crept in even amongst Catholics themselves I know not, nor is it of importance as to the matter immediately before me. It is certain that before the " Reformation " there ' J. O'Callaghan, Usury, m Lending at Lnterest, 1825. The book was first published in New York in the summer of 1824, and was a second time published in England by Cobbett in 1828. 339 was no such thing known amongst Chiristians as receiving money or profit in any shape, merely for the use of money. It would be easy to show that mischiefs enormous are inseparable from such a practice, but we shall see enough of those mischiefs in the end. Sufiice it for the present, that this national usury, which was now invented for the first time, arose out of the " Reformation." 405. This monstrous thing, the usury or funding system, was not only a Protestant invention, not only arose out of the " Reformation," not only was estabHshed for the express purpose of carrying on a war for the preservation of this Church of England against the efforts of Popery, but the inventor, Burnet, was the most indefatigable advocate for the " Reformation " that had ever existed. So that the thing was not only invented by Protestants to do injury to Catholics, it was not only intended by them for this purpose, it was not only destined by the wisdom and justice of God to be a scourge, to be the most terrible of all scourges to the Protestants themselves, it was not only destined to make, at last, the " Church by law established " look at the usurers with no very quiet feel ings, the thing was not only thus done and thus destined to operate, but the instrument was the fittest, the very fittest, that could have been found in the whole world. 406. Burnet, whose first name, as the Scotch call it, was Gilbert, was in the first place a political church parson, next he was a monstrously lying historian, next he was a Scotchman, and lastly he received the thanks of Parlia ment for his History of the Reformation, that is to say, a mass of the most base falsehoods and misrepresentations that ever were put upon paper; so that the instrument was the very fittest that could have been found on earth. ' This man had, at the accession of James II. , gone to Holland, where he became secretary to William (after wards the " DeHverer "), and where he corresponded with and aided the " Glorious Revolytionizers " in England, 340 and in 1689, the year after the "deliverance," the " Deliverer " made him Bishop of Salisbury as a reward for his " glorious revolution " services. 407. This was the fittest man in the world to invent that which was destined to be a scourge to England. Though become a bishop he was still a most active politician ; and when the difficulty of carrying on the " no- popery " war arose, and when those fears mentioned in paragraph 401 began to be powerful, this bishop of the "law-established Church" it was who invented, who advised, and. who, backed by the " Deliverer," caused to be adopted the schemes of borrowing, of mortgaging the taxes, and of pawning the property and labour of future generations. Pretty " deliverance " ! Besides sparing the purses of the people and quieting their discontents on account of taxes, this scheme had a further and still more important object in view, namely, to make all those who had money to lend wish to see the new king and new dynasty and all the grants and emoluments of the " glorious revolution " folks upheld. That was the per manent object of this " no popery " project. 408. The case was this, and we ought clearly to under stand it, seeing that here is the true origin of all our present alarms, dangers and miseries. James II. and his son had been set aside because they were Catholics, a "glorious revolution " had been made, the great makers of it had immense possessions, which had been public or Church possessions. If James were restored all these would be taken from them, together with all the titles of nobility, all the bishoprics, and in short everything granted by the "DeHverer." And as the "Deliverer" was liable to die, it was necessary to these great possessors and " glorious " actors to take care, if possible, that James or his son should not be the successors of the "Deliverer." Acts of Parliament were passed to provide against this danger ; but still, experience had shown that acts pf 341 Parliament were in some cases of but little avail when the great body of the people, feeling acutely, were opposed to them. Therefore something was wanted to bind great numbers of the people fast to the new dynasty. The cry of " no popery " had some power, but it had not power sufficient to weigh down that • which, in later times, Castlereagh had the insolence to call the " ignorant im patience of taxation," and for which impatience the English were in former times always remarkable. 409. The " Deliverer" and all those who had brought him in, together with all those who had been fattened or ele vated by him, were, as I said before, embarked in the same boat : but the great body of the people were not yet thus embarked. Indeed, very few of them, comparatively, were thus embarked. But if all, or a -great part of those who had money to lend, could by the temptation of great gain be induced to lend their money on interest to the government, if they could be induced to do this, it was easy to see that all this description of persons would then be embarked in the same boat too ; and that they who must necessarily be a class having great influence in the community would be amongst the most zealous supporters of the "Deliverer," and the " glorious" aiders, abettors, and makers of the " revolution" which had just taken place. 410. For these purposes this funding system was in vented. It had the two-fold object of raising money to carry on the " no-popery " war and of binding to the "no- popery " government all those persons who wished to lend money at high interest, and these were, as is always the case, the most greedy, most selfish, least public-spirited, and most base and slavish and unjust part of the people. The scheme, which was quite worthy of the mind of the Protestant Bishop Burnet, answered its purposes : it enabled the " Deliverer " to carry on the " no-popery " war, it bound fast to the " DeHverer " and his bringers-in aH the 342 base and selfish and greedy and unfeeling part of those who had money. The scheme succeeded in effecting its immediate objects, but, good God ! what a scourge did it provide for future generations ! What troubles, what shocks, what sufferings it had in store for a people whose rulers, in an evil hour, reported to such means for the pur pose of causing to be trampled under foot those whose only crime was that of adhering to the faith of their fathers ! 411. The sum at first borrowed was a mere trifle. It (Received by its seeming insignificance. But it was very far from being intended to stop with that trifle. The in ventors knew well what they were about. Their design was to mortgage, by degrees, the whole of the country, all the lands, all the houses, and all other .property, and even all labour, to those who would lend their money to the state. The thing soon began to swell at a great rate, and before the end of the " glorious " no-popery war, the interest alone of the debt, the annual interest, amounted to ;^i,3io,492 a year, which, observe, was a greater gum than the whole of the taxes had yearly amounted to in the reign of the Catholic James II. ! So that here were taxes laid on for ever, mind that ; here were, on account of this grand no-popery affair — merely on ac count of this " glorious revolution," which was expressly made for the purpose of getting rid of a Catholic king ; here were additional taxes laid on for ever to a greater amount than the whole of the taxes raised by that Catholic king! Thus does the justice of God work! The treat ment of the Catholics at this time was truly horrible ; the main body of the English people either approved of this treatment, or winked at it ; this debt scheme was in vented by a Protestant "bishop for the purpose of utterly extirpating the Catholic religion, and that religion still Hves in the kingdom, nay, there are in the kingdom a greater number of Catholics than there are persons of any Qae other rehgion ; while the scheme, the crafty, the cun- 343 ning, the deep scheme, has from its ominous birth beeii breeding swarms of Jews, Quakers, usurers of every de scription, feeding and fattening on the vitals of the country, till at last it has produced what the world never saw before, — starvation in the midst of abundance ! Yea, verily, thi^ is the picture we now exhibit to the world : the Law-Church parsons putting up in all the churches thanksgiving for a plenteous harvest, and the main mass of the labouring people fed and clad worse than the felons in the gaols ! 412. However, we must not anticipate. We shall further on see something of the probable ultimate effects of this dreadful scheme. At present we have to see how. it, together with the " glorious revolution " out of Which it arose, led to and produced, the American revolution, or " Reformation " the fourth, by which two things were accomplished ; first, the lopping off of a large and valu able part of the dominions of England ; secondly, the creating of a new mercantile and naval power, capable of disputing with her that dominion of the sea which has for so many ages been her chief glory, and without possessing which she must become a second-rate power in Europe. These were the things which were accompHshed by the American Revolution, and therefore let us now see what it was that produced that revolution, or rather, let us see how it grew directly out of the " glorious revolution " and its " no-popery " wars and debts. 413. Burnet's contrivance did very well for present use: it made the nation deaf to the voice of all those who fore boded mischief from it, it made all those who were interested in the funds advocates for taxation; the deep scheme set the rich to live upon the poor, and made the former have no feeling for those who bore the burden of the taxes ; in short, it divided the nation into two classes, the tax-payers and the tax-eaters, and these latter had the. government at their back. The great protection of the people of England always had been, that they could not 344 be taxed without their own consent. This was always in Catholic times the great principle of the EngHsh govern ment, and it is expressly and most expHcitly asserted in Magna Charta, which was the work of a Catholic arch bishop of Canterbury more than of anybody else. But how was it to be expected that this grand principle would be maintained, when a large part of the rich people them selves lived upon the taxes; when a man's next-door neighbour received the taxes paid by that man ; when, in short, the community was completely divided, one part having a powerful interest in upholding that which was oppressive and ruinous to the other part ? 414. Taxes, of course, went on increasing, and the debt went on in the same way. The Protestant interest demanded more wars, and brought on a couple of civil wars. Taxation marched on with dreadful strides. The people did not like it. At the " glorious revolution " it had been settled and enacted that there should be a new Parliament called every three years at least, and this had been held forth as one of the great gains of the " glorious revolution." Another " great gain " was that no pensioner and no placeman were to sit in the House of Commons. These things were enacted, they were laws of the land, they were held forth to the people as great things gained by " Glorious." This last act was soon repealed, and placemen and pensioners have sat in the House of Com mons ever since ! But the other act, the act securing the people a fresh choice every three years at least, that was a vital law. That law was in the new state of things, a state of taxes and debts, a state of things which demanded new taxes almost every year ; in such a state of things frequent and new Parliaments, new choosings at short intervals, were absolutely necessary to give the people a chance, even so much as a chance of avoiding oppressive taxation, and oppression, indeed, of every sort. It was, in short, the only means of protection that was left to the people. 345 4I5- Yet to uphold the new system it was necessary to demolish even this barrier of liberty and property ; and in the year 1715, being the first year of the reign of George I., chap, xxxviu., this law, this vital law, this solemn compact between the Protestant dynasty and the people, was repealed and for ever abolished, and the three years ¦ were changed for seven, and that too, observe, by the very men whom the people had chosen to sit only for three years ! Yes, men chosen by the people to sit for three years enacted that they would sit for seven ; that they themselves would sit for seven ; and that those who had chosen them, together with their descendants for ever, should have no choice at all unless they voted for men who might at the king's pleasure sit for seven years ! 416. It is useless for us to feel indignation and rage. They can do us no good. We shall do well to keep our selves cool. But we ought to bear in mind that this thing, which has scourged us so famously, was not done by Catholics, that they had no hand in it ; nay, that it was not only done under the new Protestant dynasty, but that this thing also, this thing the like of which the world never had and never has heard of, that this thing also was done from hostility to the religion of our fathers ! Good God ! What has this nation not suffered, and what has it not yet to suffer for this hostility ? There is hardly one great calamity or disgrace that has befallen England during the last three hundred years which we do not clearly trace to this fatal source. 417. But this Septennial Bill, this measure which is perfectly matchless in its nature, and which has led to such dreadful effects ; — this is a thing which we must have in its original black and white, and we must have every word of it too, for here we have a complete " no-popery " law, and of this law we are tasting the effects to the present hour, and we shall taste them for a long while yet to come. 346 The following are the words, all the words, of this memor able Act : — 418. "Whereas in and by an Act of Parliament made in the sixth year of the reign of their lafe Majesties King William and Queen Mary (of ever blessed memory) in- titulated an Act for the frequent meeting and calling of Parliaments ; It was among other things enacted that from thenceforth no Parliament whatsoever that should at any time thereafter be called, assembled or held, should have any continuance longer than for three years only at the farthest, to be accounted from the day on which by the writ of summons the said. Parliament should be appointed to meet : And whereas it has been found by experience that the said clause hath proved very grievous and burthensome, by occasioning much greater and more eontiniied expenses in order to elections of members to serve in Parliament, and more violent and lasting heats and animosities among the subjects of this realm than were ever known before the said clause was enacted, and the said provision, if it should continue, may probably at this juncture, when a restless and popish faction are designing and endeavouring to renew the rebellion within this kingdom and an invasion from abroad, be destructive to the peace and security of the government." " Be it enacted by the King's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent. of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, that this present Parliament, and all Parliaments that shall at any time hereafter be called, assembled or held, shall and may respectively have continuance for seven years and no longer, to be ac counted from the day on which by the writ of summons this present Parliament hath been or any future Parlia ment shall be appointed to meet, unless this present or ¦any such Parliament hereafter to be summoned, shall be ¦sooner' dissQlved by his Majesty, his heirs or successors," 347 419- So here it is again ! The " restless popish fac-" tion " was at work ! So that the rights, the most precious rights of the whole of the people, were to be taken away merely on account of the designs and wishes of a " popish faction!" What harm could a mere "faction" do at an' election ? The truth is these pretences were false : the people, the great body of the people, smarting under the' lash of enormous taxation, became disaffected towards the' new order of things ; they were strongly disposed to revert- to their former state ; it was suspected, and indeed pretty well known, that they would at the next election have chosen almost everywhere members having the same sentiments, and therefore it was resolved that they should' not have the power of doing it. However, the deed was done ; we have felt the effects of it from that day to this, and we have now to remember that even this terrible curtailment of English liberty we owe to the hostility to the religion of our fathers, that religion during the dominance of which there was always a new House of Commons every time the Parliament was assembled ; that religion, along with which were bound up the people's civil and political rights ; that religion, the followers of which, while it was predominant, never heard of Parlia ments for seven years or for three years, or even for one year, but who, as often as they saw a Parliament called, saw a Commons' House chosen for that one session ' and for no more. 420. After the passing of the Septennial Act the people would, of course, lose nearly all the control that they had ever had with regard to the laying on of taxes and to the ¦ expending of the public money. Accordingly taxes went on increasing prodigiously. The excise system, which had had a Httle beginning in former Protestant reigns, and the very name of which had never been heard of in Catholic times, now assumed somewhat its present form, and the "castles" of Englishmen became thenceforth 348 things to be visited by excisemen. Things went on in this way until the reign of George III., when, by means of " no-popery " wars and other measures for " pre serving the Protestant religion as by law established," the debt from ;^i, 500,000 had sweUed up to £i^6,682,8^i\.. The yearly interest of it had swelled up to ;^4, 840,821, which was about four times as much as the whole annual amount of the taxes in the reign of the popish James II. ! And the whole of the yearly taxes had swelled up to ;^8,744,682. That is to say, about eight times as much as James had raised yearly on this same " no-popery " people ! 421. Now, though men will do much in the way of talk against " popery," or against many other things, they are less zealous and active when it comes to money. The nation most sensibly felt the weight of these burdens, and the burdens received no alleviation from the circumstance of their being most righteously merited. The people looked back with aching hearts to former happy days, and the nobility and gentry began to perceive with shame and fear that already their estates were beginning to pass quietly from them (as Swift had told them they would) into the hands of the Jews, Quakers, and other money changers created by the " no-popery " war, and by the scheme of the Scotchman, Burnet. But it was now too late to look back ; and yet to look forward to this certain and not very slow ruin was dreadful, and especially to men of ancient family and by no means destitute of pride. Fain would they, even at that time, have applied a sponge to the score brought against them by Burnet's tribes. But this desire was effectuaHy counteracted by the same motive which led to the creation of the debt, — the necessity of embarking, and of keeping embarked, great masses of the money owners in the same boat with the government. 422. In this dilemma, namely, the danger of touching the interest of the debt and the danger of continuing to pay that interest, a new scheme was resorted to, which it 349 was hoped would obviate both these dangers. It was to tax the American colonies, and to throw a part first, and perhaps the whole in the end, of the " no-popery " debt upon their shoulders ! Now, then, came " Reformation " the fourth, having for cause the measures necessary to effect the "glorious revolution," taking the principles and the manner of that revolution as its example in these re spects, beginning with a " convention " assembled without authority of King, Parliament or people, proceeding with charges against the king, with making it high treason to adhere to him, and ending with setting aside his authority and extinguishing his rights and those of his family for ever ! Aye, but besides all this, bringing the first dawn of relief to the long-suffering Catholics of England, Scotland and Ireland ! What it was that these our countrymen had to suffer for the crime of adhering to the religion of their and our fathers I shall leave, to state further on ; but I now proceed to show how this " Reformation " the fourth commenced and proceeded. 423. The Septennial gentlemen proceeded at first very slowly in their attempts to shift the pressure of the debt from their own shoulders to that of the Americans. They sent out tea to pay a tax ; they imposed a stamp duty on certain things in the colonies ; but they had a clever, a sharp-sighted and a most cool and resolute and brave people to deal with. The Americans had seen debts, and funds and taxation, and abject submission creep by slow degrees over the people of England, and they resolved to resist at once the complicated curse. The money-people there were not, like those in England, the owners of stock and funds. They were not, as the money-people of England were, embarked in the same boat with the government ; if they had there would have been more hesi tation on the subject of resistance ; if they had been en tangled in Burnet's artful web, the Americans might at this day have been hardly known in the world, might have 3 so been a parcel of bands of poor devils doomed to toil for haughty and insolent masters. Happily for them, the Scotch bishop's deadly trammels had not reached them, and therefore they at once resolved not to submit to the Septennial commands. 424. It is curious enough that they should, as the " glorious " people had done, call themselves Whigs ! But the Septennial people were Whigs too, so that there were now Whigs resisting Whigs. A Whig means, in England, one who approves of the setting of James and his heirs aside. A Whig means, in America, one who approves of the setting of George and his heirs aside. The English Whigs called a convention, so did those of America. The English Whigs published a declaration, containing as we have seen in paragraph 380, charges against James ; so did those of America against George. The charges against James were twelve in number. This is a favourite number with- Whigs, for the American Whigs had twelve charges against George. We have seen in paragraph 380 what Protestants accused a Popish king of, and it is but fair for us to see what Protestants, and Catholics too, accused a Protestant king of. Black stone, in justifying the "glorious" affair, took good care to say that the like was never to take place again, and the Septennial gentlemen declared, and I think enacted, that the king in future (being, of course, ja Protestant) could do no wrong. Now the Americans seemed to think it hard that they should thus be positively forbidden to do what was so " glorious " in Englishmen. Blackstone had told them that to justify another revolution all the same circumstances must exist ; not a part of them, but ths whole of them. The king must not only endeavour to .-jubvert the laws, he must not only commit acts of tyranny, but he must be a Catholic, and must have a design to over throw the Protestant religion, and he must, into the bar gain, have abdicated his authority by going out of the 351 kingdom. So that, according to this lawyer, there never could by any possibility be a "glorious" revolution again, seeing that two essential circumstances must in any future case be wanting, as no Catholic was ever to be king again, and as no king was ever to do wrong any more. 425. But, alas ! these American Whigs did not listen to Blackstone, though he had talked so piously about the " dark ages of monkish ignorance and superstition." They thought, nay they said, that a Protestant king might do wrong and had done wrong. They thought, or at least they said, that a king might abdicate his authority, not only without going out of the country, but also without ever having been in it ! In short, they drew up, a la " glorious," charges against their Protestant king, his late Majesty ; and as the charges against James II. are found in an Act of Parliament, so the charges against George III. are found in an Act of Congress, passed on the memorable 4th of July, 1776. These charges were as follows : — 426. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. " I. He has refused to pass laws for the accommoda tion of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature — a right inestimable to them, and for midable to tyrants only, "II. He has called the legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the repository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. " III, He has dissolved representative houses re peatedly, for opposing with firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. 352 " IV. He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for estabHshing judiciary powers. " V. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries. " VI. He has created a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat their substance. " VII. He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legisla tures. " VIII. He has affected to render the military inde pendent of, and superior to, civil power. " IX. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and un acknowledged by our laws ; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation. - X. He has imposed taxes on us without our consent " XI. He has deprived us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury. •' XII. He has abdicated government here, by de claring us out of his protection and waging war against us. In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms : our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which defines a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." 427. Now, justice to the memory of the late king de mands that we expressly assert that here are some most monstrous exaggerations, and especially at the close ; but does not that same justice demand of us, then, to be cautious how we give full credit to the charges made againot James II. ? However, the question with us at the presen* Ki«!^ent is, not whether the grounds of one of 353 these revolutions were better than those of the other, but whether the last revolution grew directly out of the former ; and of the affirmative of this question no man v?ho has read this chapter can, I think, entertain a doubt. 428. I should now proceed to show that the French Revolution, or " Reformation " the fifth, grew immediately out of the American Revolution, and then to sum up the consequences ; but I am at the end of my paper. 23 354 CHAPTER XV. 429. We have now traced the " Reformation," in its deeds, down from the beginning, in the reign of Henry VIIL, to the American Revolution ; and all that remains is to follow it along through the French Revolution and unto the present day. This is what I propose to do in the present chapter. In the next chapter I shall bring under one view my proofs of this proposition, namely,, that before the event called the " Reformation," England was more powerful and more wealthy, and that the people were more free, more moral, better fed, and better clad, than at any time since that event. 430. The American Revolution, which, as we have seen, grew directly out of those measures which had been adopted in England to crush the Catholics and to extinguish their religion for ever, did, at its very outset, produce good to those same Catholics by inducing the English government to soften, for the sake of its own safety, that penal code by which they had so long been scourged. But now, before we speak of the immediate cause and of the manner and degree of this softening, we must have a sketch of this horrible code,^this monster in legislation, surpassing in violation of the dictates of humanity and justice any thing else that the world has ever seen existing under the name of law. 431. We have seen how cruelly the Catholics were treated under Queen Elizabeth and James I. ; we have seen how they were fined, mulcted, robbed, pillaged, and punished in body ; but though the penal code against 355 them was then such as to make every just man shudder with horror, we think it then gentleness when we look at its subsequent ferocity. We have seen how Catholics were fined, harassed, hunted, robbed, pillaged, in the reign of Elizabeth. We have seen the same in the reign of her immediate successor, with this addition, that English men were then hahded over to be pillaged by Scotchmen. We have seen that Charles I., for whom they afterwards fought against Cromwell, treated them as cruelly as the two former. We have seen Charles II. most unmercifully abandon them to the persecutions of the Church by law established ; and during this reign we have seen that the Protestants had the baseness, and the king the meanness, to suffer tjie lying inscription to be put on the Monument on Fish Street Hill, in the City of London, though Lord Clarendon (whose name the Law-Church holds in so much honour), in that work which the University of Oxford publishes at the " Clarendon Press," expressly says (p. 348, continuation) that a committee of the House of Commons, " who were very diligent and solicitous to make the discovery, never were able to find any probable evidence that there was any other cause of that woeful fire than the displeasure of Almighty God." What infamy then to charge the Catholics with it ; what an infamy to put the lying inscription on the pillar ; what an act of justice in James II. to efface it ; what a sharne to William to suffer it to be restored ; and what is it to ,us, then, who now suffer it to remain without petitioning for its erasure ! 433. But it was after James II. was set aside that the penal code grew really horrible. And here it is of the greatest consequence to the cause of truth that we trace this code to its real authors, namely, the clergy of the Established Church. This is evident enough throughout the whole of this Church's history ; but until the reign of James II. the sovereign was of the Church rehgion, so .556 that the persecutions appeared to come from him or her.. But now, when the king was for softening the penal code, when the king was for toleration, now the world saw who were the real persecutors ; and this is a matter to be fully explained ¦ and understood before we come to a more minute account of the code and to the causes which finally led to its, in great part, abolition. 433. James II. wished to put an end to the penal code, he wished for general toleration ; he issued a proclamation suspending all penal laws relating to religion, and granting a general liberty of conscience to all his subjects. This was his offence. For this he and his family were set aside for ever ! No man can deny this. The clergy of the Church set themselves against him. Six of the bishops presented to him an insolent petition against the exercise of this his prerogative, enjoyed and exercised by all his predecessors. They led the way in that opposition which produced the " glorious revolution," and they were the most active and • most bitter of all the foes of that unfor tunate king, whose only real offence was his wishing to give liberty of conscience to all his subjects, and by showing respect to whose mortal remains (displaced by the French Revolutionists) our present king has done himself very great honour. 434. Now we are going to see a sketch of this terrible code. It must be a mere sketch ; two hundred chapters like this would not contain the whole of it. It went on increasing in bulk and in cruelty from the coronation of Elizabeth till nearly twenty years after that of George III., till events came, as we shall see, and broke it up. It consisted, at last, of more than a hundred acts of Parlia ment, all made for the express purpose of punishing men because, and only because, they continued faithfully to adhere to the religion in which our as well as their fathers had lived and died during a period of nine hundred years I The code differed, in some respects, in its application, with regard to England and Ireland respectively. 357 435- In England 'this code (i) stripped the peers of their hereditary right to sit in Parliament ; (2) it stripped gentlemen of their right to be chosen members of the Commons' House ; (3) it took from all the right to vote at elections, and though Magna Charta says that no man shall be taxed without his own consent, it double-taxed every man who refused to abjure his religion and thus become an apostate ; (4) it shut them out from all offices of power and trust, even the most insignificant ; (5) it took from them the right of presenting to livings in the Church, though that right was given to Quakers and to Jews ; (6) it fined them at the rate of /20 a month for keeping away from that Church to go to which they deemed apostacy ; (7) it disabled them from keeping arms in their houses for their defence, from maintaining suits at law, from being guardians or executors, from practising in law or physic, from travelling five miles from their houses, and all these under heavy penalties in case of disobedience; (8) if a married woman kept away from church, she forfeited two- thirds of her dower, she could not be executrix to her husband, and might, during her husband's lifetime, be im prisoned, unless ransomed by him at £"10 a month ; (9) it enabled any four justices of the peace, in case a man had been convicted of not going to church, to call him before them, to compel him to abjure his religion, or, if he refused; to sentence him to banishment for life (without judge or jury), and if he returned he was to suffer death ; (10) it enabled any two justices of the peace to call before them, without any information, any man that they chose above sixteen years of age, and if such man refused to abjure the Catholic religion and continued in his refusal for six months', he was rendered incapable of possessing land, and any land the possession of which might belong to him came into possession of the next Protestant heir, who was not obliged to account for any profits ; (n) it made such man incapable of purchasing lands, and all contracts made by 358 him or for him were null and void ; (12) it imposed a fine of ;^io a month for employing a Catholic schoolmaster in a private family, and £0. a day on the schoolmaster so em ployed; (13) it imposed ;^ioo fine for sending a child to a Catholic foreign school, and the child so sent was disabled from ever inheriting, purchasing, or enjoying lands or profits, goods, debts, legacies, ot sums of money ; (14) it punished the saying of mass by a fine of /120, and the hearing of mass by a fine of ;^6o ; (15) any Catholic priest who returned from beyond the seas and who did not abjure his religion in three days afterwards, and also any person who returned to the Catholic faith, or procured another to return to it, this merciless, this sanguinary code punished with hanging, ripping out of bowels, and quartering. 436. In Ireland the code was still more ferocious, more hideously bloody, for in the first place all the cruelties of the English code had, as the work of a few hours, a few strokes of the pen, in one single act been' inflicted on unhappy Ireland ; and then, in addition, the Irish code contained, amongst many other violations of all the laws of justice and humanity, the following twenty most savage punishments : — (i) A Catholic schoolmaster, private or public, or even usher to a Protestant, was punished with imprisonment, banishment, and finally as a felon. (2) The Catholic clergy were not allowed to be in the country without being registered and kept as a sort of prisoners at large, and rewards were given (out of the revenue raised in part on the Catholics) for discovering them, £^0 for an archbishop or bishop, ^"20 for a priest, and ;^io for a schoolmaster or usher. (3) Any two justices of the peace might call before them any Catholic, order him to declare on oath where and when he heard mass, who were present, and the name and residence of any priest or schoolmaster that he might know of; and if he refused to obey this inhuman inquisition, they had power to condemn him (without judge or jury) to a year's imprisonment in a 359 felon's gaol or to pay ;^20. (4) No Catholic could pur chase any manors, nor even hold under a lease for more than thirty-one years. (5) Any Protestant, if he suspected any one of holding property in trust for a Catholic, or of being concerned in any sale, lease, mortgage, or other contract for a CathoHc, any Protestant thus suspecting might file a bill against the suspected trustee and take the estate or property from him. (6) Any Protestant seeing a Catholic tenant of a farm, the produce of which farm exceeded the amount of the rent by more than one- third, might dispossess the Catholic and enter on the lease in his stead. (7) Any Protestant seeing a Catholic with a horse worth more than five pounds might take the horse away from him upon tendering him five pounds. (8) In order to prevent the smallest chance of justice in these and similar cases, none but known Protestants were to be jurymen in the trial of any such cases, (g) Horses of Catholics might be seized for the use of the militia, and besides this Catholics were compelled to pay double towards the militia. (10) Merchants whose ships and goods might be taken by privateers during a war with a Cathohc prince were to be compensated for their losses by a levy on the goods and lands of Catholics only, though, mind. Catholics were at the same time impressed and compelled to shed their blood in the war against that same Catholic prince. (11) Property of a Protestant whose heirs at law were Catholics was to go to the nearest Protestant relation, just the same as if the Catholic heirs had been dead, though the property might be entailed on them. (12) If there were no Protestant heir, then, in order to break up all Catholic families, the entail and all heirship were set aside, and the property was divided, share and share alike, amongst all the CathoHc heirs. (13) If a Protestant had an estate in Ireland he was forbidden to marry a Catholic in or out of Ireland. (14) AU marriages between Protestants and 36o Catholics were annulled, though many children might have proceeded from them. (15) Every priest who cele brated a marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant, or between two Protestants, was condemned to be hanged. (16) A Catholic father could not be guardian to, or have the custody of, his own child, if the child, however young, pretended to be a Protestant ; but the child was taken from its own father and put into the custody of a Protestant relation. (17) If any child of a Catholic became a Pro testant, the parent was to be instantly summoned and to be made to declare upon oath the full value of his or her property of all sorts, and then the Chancery was to make such distribution of the property as it thought fit. (18) " Wives, be obedient unto your own husbands," says the great Apostle. " Wives, be disobedient to them," said this horrid code ; for if the wife of a Catholic chose to turn Protestant it set aside the will of the husband and made her a participator in all his possessions in spite of him, however immoral, however bad a wife or bad a mother she might have been. (19) " Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." " Dishonour them," said this savage code ; for if any one of the sons of a Catholic father became a Protestant, this son was to possess all the father had, and the father could not sell, could not mortgage, could not leave legacies or portions out of his estate by whatever title he might hold it, even though it might have been the fruit of his own toil. (20) Lastly (of this score, but this is only a part) " the Church, as by law established " was, in her great indulgence, pleased not only to open her doors, but to award (out of the taxes) thirty pounds a year for life to any CathoHc priest who would abjure his religion and declare his belief in hers ! 437. Englishmen ! is there a man, a single man, bearino- that name, whose blood will not chill at this recital, who when he reflects that these barbarities were inflicted on 36 1 men because and only because they adhered with fidelity to the faith of their and our fathers, to the faith of Alfred, the founder of our nation, to the faith of the authors of Magna Charta and of all those venerable institutions of which we so justly boast, who, when he thus reflects, and when he, being as I am, a Protestant of the Church of England, further reflects that all these cruelties were in flicted for the avowed purpose of giving and preserving predominance to that Church, will not with me not only feel deep sorrow and shame for the past, but heartily join me in best endeavours to cause justice to be done to the sufferers for the time to come ? 438. As to the injustice, as to the barbarity, as to the flagrant immorality of the above code, they call for no comment, being condemned by the spontaneous voice of nature herself ; but in this shocking assemblage there are two things which impel us to ask whether the love of trtith, whether a desire to eradicate religious error, could have formed any part, however small, of the motives of these punishers ? These two things are, the reward offered to Catholic priests to induce them to come over to our Church, and the terrible means made use of to prevent the inter-marriage of Catholics and Protestants. Could these measures ever have suggested themselves to the minds of men who ..incerely believed that the Church rehgion was supported by arguments more cogent than those by which the Catholic religion was supported ? The Law-Church had all the powers, all the honours, all the emoluments, all the naturally worldly allurements. These she continually held out to all who were disposed to the clerical order. And if, in addition to all these, she had felt strong in argument, would she have found it necessary to offer, in direct and barefaced words, a specific sum of money to any one who would join her, and that, too, when the pensioned convert must, as she well knew, break his solemn vow in order to be entitled to the pay ? And 362 as to inter-marriages, why not suffer them, why punish them so severely, why annul them if the Law-Church were sure that the arguments in her favour were the most cogent and convincing. Who has so much power over the mind of woman as her husband ? Who over man as his wife ? Would one persuade the other to a change of religion ? Very likely. One would convert the other in nineteen cases out of twenty. That passion which had subdued religious prejudices would, in almost every case, make both the parties of the same religion. But what had the Law- Church to object to this, if she were sure that hers was the true faith ; if she were sure that the arguments for her were more clear than those for her opponent ; if she were sure that every one who really loved another, who was beloved by that other, and who belonged to her commu nion, would easily persuade that other to join in that com munion ? What, in short, had she, if quite sure of all this, to fear from inter-marriages ? And if not quite sure of all this, what, I ask you, sensible and just Englishmen, what had she to plead in justification of the inhuman penal code ? 439. Talk of the " fires in Smithfield " ! Fires, indeed, which had no justification, and which all Catholics severely condemn : but what, good God ! was the death of about two hundred and seventy-seven persons, however cruel and unmerited that death, to the torments above described, inflicted for more than two hundred years on millions upon mOHons of people, to say nothing about the thousands upon thousands of Catholics who were, during that period, racked to death, killed in prison, hanged, bowelled, and quartered ! Besides, let it never be forgotten that the punishments in Smithfield were for the purpose of reclaim ing, for the purpose of making examples of a few who set at nought the religion of their fathers and that in which they themselves had been born. And if these punishments were unjust and cruel, as all men agree that they were, what shall we say of, how shall we express sufficient abhor- 363 rence of, the above penal code, which was for the punish ment, not of a few, but of millions of people ; or the punishment, not of those who had apostatized from the religion of their fathers, but of those who to their utter worldly ruin adhered to that religion ? If we find no justification — and none, we all say, there was — for the pun ishments of Mary's reign, inflicted, as all men know they were, on very few persons, and those persons not only apostates from the faith of their fathers but also for the most part either notorious traitors or felons, and at the very least conspirators against, or most audacious insulters of, the royal authority and the person of the queen ; if we find no justification, and we all agree that there was none, for these punishments inflicted, as all men know they were, during a few months of furious and unreflecting zeal, just after the quelling of a dangerous rebellion which had clearly proved that apostate and conspirator were one and the same, and had led to the hast};^ conclusion that the apostacy must be extirpated, or that it would destroy the throne ; if we find, even under such circumstances, no justification for these punishments, where are we to look for, not a justification, but for a ground of qualification of our abhorrence of the above-mentioned barbarities of more than two hundred years, inflicted on millions upon millions of people ; barbarities premeditated in the absence of all provocation ; contrived and adopted in all the calmness of legislative deliberation ; executed in cold blood, and per severed in for ages, in defiance of the admonitions of con science ; barbarities inflicted, not on apostates, but on those who refused to apostatize ; not on felons, conspirators, and rebels, but on innocent persons, on those who had under all and every circumstance, even while feeling the cruel lash of persecution, been as faithful to their king as to their God ! — and as if we were never to come to the end of the atrocity, all this done, too, with regard to Ireland, in flagrant breach of a sol^rnn treaty with the English king! 364 440. And is this the "tolerant, the mild, the meek Church as by law estabHshed " ? Have we here the proofs of Protestant faith and good works ? Was it thus that St. Austin and St. Patrick introduced, and that St. Swithun, and Alfred, and William of Wykham inculcated the religion of Christ ? Was it out of works like these that the cathedrals, and the palaces, and the universities, and the laws, and the courts of justice arose ? What ? punish men for retaining the faith of their fathers ; inflict all sorts of insults and cruelties on them for not having become apostates ; put them, because they were Catholics, out of the protection of all the laws that their and our Catholic ancestors had framed for the security of their children ; call their religion "idolatrous and damnable," treat them as obstinate idolaters, while your Church Calendar contains none but saints of that very religion ; boast of your vener able institutions, all of Catholic origin, while you insult, pillage, scourge, hunt from the face of the earth, the true and faithful adherents to the faith of the authors of those institutions ? " Aye," the persecutors seem to have answered, "and hunt them we will." But why, then, if religion be your motive, if your barbarities arise from a desire to convert men from error, why be so lenient to Quakers and Jews ; why not only not punish, but suffer them even to appoint parsons to your churches ? Ah ! my friends, the Law-Church had taken no tithes and lands, and others had taken no abbeys and the like from Quakers and Jews ! Here was the real foundation of the whole of that insatiable rancour which went on from 1558 to 1778, producing, to millions of innocent people, torment added to torment, and which, at the end of that lon'^ period, seemed to have resolved to be satisfied with nothing short of the total extermination of its victims. 441. But now, all of a sudden, in 1778, the face of thino-s began to change ; the Church as by law estabHshed was all at once thought capable of existing in safety with a 36s great relaxation of the penal code ! And without even asking it, the Catholics found the code suddenly softened by divers Acts of Parhament in both countries, and especially in Ireland ! This humanity and generosity will surprise us ; we shall wonder whence it came ; we shall be ready to believe the souls of the parties to have been softened by a sort of miracle, until we look back to para graphs 425 and 426. There we see the real cause of this surprising humanity and generosity ; there we see the Americans unfurling the standard of independence, and having been backed by France, pushing on towards success, and thereby setting an example to every oppressed people in every part of the world, unhappy, trodden-down Ireland not excepted. There was, too, before the end of the war, danger of invasion on the part of France, who was soon joined in the war by Spain and Holland, so that before the close of the contest the Catholics had obtained leave to breathe the air of their native country in safety ; and though, as an Englishman, I deeply lament that this cost England her right arm, I most cordially rejoice in contem plating the event. Thus was fear gratified in a moment, at the very first demand, with a surrender of that which had for ages been refused to the incessant pleadings of justice and humanity ; and thus the American revolution, which, as we have seen, grew immediately out of the " no- popery " or " glorious " revolution in England, which latter was, as we have clearly seen, made for the express purpose of extinguishing the Catholic religion for ever ; thus was this very event the cause of the beginning of a cessation of the horrible persecutions of those who had, with fidehty wholly without a parallel, adhered to that religion ! 442. This great event was soon followed by another still greater, namely, the French Revolution, or "Reformation" the fifth. Humiliation greater than the EngHsh govern ment had to endure in the above event it is difficult to conceive ; but the French Revolution taught the world what 366 " Reformations " can do when pushed to their full and natural extent. In England the " Reformation " contented itself with plundering the convents and the poor of their all, and the secular clergy in part. But in France they took the whole, though we ought to mark well this difference, that in France they applied this whole to the use of the public ; a bad use, perhaps, but to public use they applied the whole of the plunder, while in England the plunder was scrambled for and remained divided amongst indi viduals ! 443. Well, but here was a great triumph for the clergy of the " Church as by law established " ! They, above all men, must have hailed with delight the deeds of the French " Reformation" ! No : but on the contrary were amongst the foremost in calling for war to put down that " Re formation"! What? Not like this "Reformation"? Why, here were convents broken up and monks and nuns dis persed ; here were abbey lands confiscated ; here was the Catholic religion abolished ; here were Catholic priests hunted about and put to death in almost as savage a man ner as those of England had been ; here were laws, seem ingly translated from our own code, 1 against saying or hearing mass, and against priests returning into the king dom ; here was a complete annihilation (as far as legislative provisions could go) of that which our Church clergy called "idolatrous and damnable"; here was a new religion " established by law"; and, that no feature might be de fective in the likeness, here was a royal family set aside by law for ever by what they called a " glorious revolution " ; and there would have been an abdicating king, but he was by mere accident stopped in his flight, brought back and put to death, not, however, without an example to plead in the deeds of the English double-distiHed Protestant " Reformation " people. , 444. What ! Can it be true, that our Church clergy did not like this French " Reformation " ? and that they urged 367 on war against the men who had sacked convents, killed priests, and abolished that which was " idolatrous and damnable " ? Can it be true that they who rose against King James because he wanted to give Catholics liberty of conscience, that they who upheld the horrid penal code in order to put down the Catholic religion in England and Ireland, — can it be true that they wanted war to put down the men who had put down that religion in France ! Aye, aye ! But these men had put down all tithes too ! Aye, and all bishoprics, and deaneries, and prebendaries, and all fat benefices and pluraliti.es ! And if they were permitted to do this with impunity others might be tempted to do the same ! Well, but, gentlemen of the Law-Church, though they were wicked fellows for doing this, still this was better than to suffer to remain that which you always told us was " idolatrous and damnable." " Yes, yes ; but then these men established by law atheism, and not Church of England Christianity." Now in the first place they saw about forty sorts of Protestant religion ; they knew that thirty-nine of them must be false ; they had seen our rulers make a Church by law, just such an one as they pleased ; they had seen them alter it by law ; and if there were no standard of faith, no generally acknowledged authority, if English law-makers were to change the sort of religion at their pleasure, why, pray, were not French law-makers to do the same ? If English law-makers could take the spiritual supremacy from the successor of St. Peter, and give it to Henry the-wife-killer, why might not the French give theirs to Lepeau ? Besides, as to the sort of religion though atheism is bad enough, could it be worse than what you tell us is " idolatrous and damnable" ? It might cause people to be damned, but could it cause them to be more than damned ? Alas ! there remains only the abolition of the tithes and of the fat clerical posts as a valid objection, on your part, against " Reformation" the fifth; and I beg the;nation to remember that the war against it has left us 368 to pay for ever the interest of a debt, created by that war, of seven hundred milHons of pounds sterling, a war which we never should have seen if we had never seen that which is called a " Reformation." 445. The French Revolution, though it caused numerous horrid deeds to be committed, produced, in its progress and in its end, a great triumph for the Catholics. It put the fidelity of the Catholic priests and the Protestant pastors to the test ; and while not one of the former was-ever seen to save his life by giving up his faith, all the latter did it without hesitation. It showed, at last, the people of a great kingdom returning to the Catholic worship by choice, when they might have been, and may now be, Protestants without the loss of any one right, immunity, or advantage; civil or military. But the greatest good that it produced fell to the lot of ill-treated Ireland. The Revolutionists were powerful, they were daring; they, in 1793, cast their eyes on Ireland ; and now, for the second time, a softening of the penal code took place, making a change which no man living ever expected to see ! Those who had been considered as almost beneath dogs, were now made capable of being magistrates ; and now, amongst many other acts of generosity we saw established at the public expense a college for the education of Catholics exclusively, thus doing by law that which the law-givers had before made high treason ! Ah ! But there were the French with an army of four hundred thousand men, and there were the Irish people, who must have been something more or less than men if their breasts did not boil with resent ment. Alas I that it should be said of England that the Irish have never appealed with success but to her fears ! 446. And shall this always be said ? Shall it ever be said again ? Shall we not now, by sweeping away for ever every vestige of this once horrible and still oppressive code, reconcile ourselves to our long ill-treated brethren and to our own consciences ? The code is still a penal code ¦ it is 369 stilla just ground of complaint ; it has stiU disqualifications. tiiat are greatly injurious, and distinctions that are odious aad insulting, (i) It still shuts Catholic peers out of those seits in the House of Lords which are their hereditary riglit, and CathoHc gentlemen out of the House of Com mons. (2) Then, as if caprice were resolved not to be- behindhand with injustice, this code, which allows Catholic freeholders in Ireland to vote at elections for members of Parhament of the now " United -Kingdom," refuses that right to all Catholics in England ! (3) It excludes Catholics. from all corporations. (4) It excludes them from all offices under the government in England, but admits them to inferior offices in Ireland. (5) It ^ takes from them the right of presenting to any ecclesiastical benefice, though Quakers and Jews are allowed to enjoy that right. (6) It prevents them from endowing any school or college for educatiiig children in the Catholic religion ; and this, too, while there is now, by law established, a college for this very- purpose supported out of the taxes ! Here is con sistency, and here is, above all things, sincerity ! What ! maintain out of the taxes a college to teach exclusively that rehgion which you call "idolatrous and damnable"? (7) This code stiU forbids Catholic priests to appear in their canonical habiliments, except in their chapels or in private houses ; and it forbids the Catholic rites to be per formed in any building which has a steeple orbells ! What ! forbid the use of steeples and bells to that religion which created all the steeples and all the bells ; that built and en dowed all the churches, all the magnificent cathedrals, and both the Universities! And why this insulting, this galHng, prohibition ? Why so sedulous to keep the symbols of this worship out of the sight of the people ? Why, gentle Law- Church, if your features be so lovely as you say they are, and if those of your rival present, as you say they do, a mass of disgusting deformity ; why, if this be the case, are you, who are the most gentle, amiable, and beautiful Church 24 370 that law ever created — why, I say, are you so anxious' to keep your rival out of sight ? Nay, and out of hearing, too ! What ! gentle and all-persuasive and only true Law- Church, whose parsons and bishops are such able preachers, and mostly married men into the bargain, what are you afraid of from the steeples and bells if used by Catholics ! One would think that the more people went to witness the " idolatrous " exhibitions the better you would like it. Alas ! gentle and lovely Law-Church, there are not now in the kingdom many men so brutishly ignorant as not to see the real motives for this uncommonly decent prohibition. (8) It forbids a Catholic priest in Ireland to be guardian to any child. (9) It forbids Catholic laymen in Ireland to act in the capacity of guardian to the children, or child, of any Protestant. (10) It forbids every Catholic in Ireland to have arms in his house, unless he have a freehold of ten pounds a year, or ;^300 in personal property. (11) It dis ables Irish Catholics from voting at vestries on questions relating to the repair of the church, though they are com pelled to pay for those repairs. (12) Lastly, in Ireland this code still inflicts. death, or, at least, a ;^5oo penalty on the Catholic priest who celebrates a marriage between two Protestants, or between a Protestant and a Catholic. Some of the judges have decided that it is death ; others that it is the pecuniary penalty. Death or money, however, the pubHc papers have recently announced to us that such a marriage has now been openly celebrated in Dublin be tween the present Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (who must be a Protestant) and a Catholic lady of the late rebellious American States ! So that, all put together, Dublin ex hibits at this moment a tolerably curious scene : — A college established by law for the teaching of that religion which our Church regards as " idolatrous and damnable," and to be guilty of teaching which was, only a few years ago, high treason ! A Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who must belong to our Church and who must have taken an oath 371 protesting against the Catholic supremacy, taking to his arms a Catholic wife, who must adhere to that supremacy I Xhea comes a Catholic priest, marrying this pair in the face of two unrepealed laws, one of which condemns him to death for the act, and the other of which condemns him to pay a fine of five hundred pounds ! And lastly comes, as the public prints tell us, a complimentary letter on the occasion to the bridegroom, on the part and in the hand writing of the King ! 447. Well, then, is this code, is any fragment of it, longer to continue ? Is it to continue now, when all idea of conversion to Protestantism is avowedly abandoned, and when it is notorious that the Catholic faith has, in spite of ages of persecution, done more than maintain its ground ? Are peers still to be cut off from their hereditary rights and honours ; are gentlemen to be shut out of the Commons' House ; are lawyers to be stopped in their way to the bench ; are freeholders and freemen to be deprived of their franchises ; are the whole to lie under a stigma, which it is not in human nature should fail to fill them with resentment ; and all this because they adhere to the rehgion of their and our fathers, and a religion, too, to educate youth in which, exclusively, there is now a college supported out of the ta:!?es ? Is all this great body of men, forming one-third part of the whole of the people of this kingdom, containing men of all ranks, from the peer to the labourer, to continue to be thus insulted, thus injured, thus constantly irritated, constantly impelled to wish for distress, danger, defeat, and disgrace to their native country, as affording the only chance of their obtaining justice ? And are we, merely to gratify the Law-Church by upholding her predominance, still to support, in peace, a numerous and most extensive army ; still to be exposed, in war, to the danger of seeing concession come too late, and to all those consequences the nature and extent of which it makes one shudder tP think of ? 372 448. Here, then, we are, at the end of three hundred years from the day when Henry VIII. began the work of " Reformation " ; here we are, after passing through scenes of plunder and of blood such as the world never beheld before; here we are with these awful questions still before us ; and here we are, too, with forty sorts of Protestant religion, instead of the one fold in which our forefathers lived for nine hundred years ; here we are, divided and split up into sects, each condemning all the rest to eternal flames ; here we are, a motley herd of Church people, Methodists, Calvinists, Quakers, and Jews, chopping and changing with every wind ; while the faith of St. Austin and St. Patrick still remains what it was when it inspired the heart and sanctified the throne of Alfred. 449. Such, as far as religion is concerned, have been the effects of what is called the " Reformation " : what its effects have been in other respects, how it has en feebled and impoverished the nation, how it has corrupted and debased the people, and how it has brought barracks, taxing-houses, poor-houses, mad-houses and gaols, to supply the place of convents, hospitals, guilds, and alms houses, we shall see in the next chapter ; and then we shall have before us the whole of the consequences of tiiis great, memorable and fatal event. 373 CHAPTER XVI. 450. /This chapter is to conclude my task, which task was to make good this assertion, — that the event called the " Reformation " had impoverished and degraded the main body of the people of England and Ireland. In para graph 4 I told you that a fair and honest inquiry would teach us that the word " Reformation " had, in this case, been misapplied ; that there was a change, but a change greatly for the worse ; that the thing called the Reformation " was engendered in lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood ; and that as to its more remote consequences, they are, some of them, now before us in that misery, that beggary, that nakedness, that hunger, that ever lasting wrangling and spite, which now stare us in the face and stun our ears at every turn, and which the ' Reformation ' has given us in exchange for the ease and happiness and harmony and Christian charity enjoyed so abundantly, and for so many ages, by our Catholic fore fathers." 451. All this has been amply proved in the fifteen foregoing chapters, except that I have not yet shown in detail how our Catholic forefathers lived, what sort and what quantity of food and raiment they had, compared 'with those which we have. This I am now about to do. I have made good my charge of lust, hypocrisy, perfidy, plunder, devastation, and bloodshed ; the charge of misery, of beggary, of nakedness and of hunger, remains to be fully establishedr\ 374 45^- But I choose to be better rather than worse than my word : I did not pledge myself to prove anything as to the population, wealth, power, and freedom of the nation; but I will now show not only that the people were better off, better fed and clad, before the " Reformation " than they ever have been since, but that the nation was more populous, wealthy, powerful and free before than it ever has been since that event. Read modern romancers, called historians, every one of whom has written for place or pension ; read the statements about the superiority of the present over former times, about our prodigious increase in population, wealth, power, and, above all things, our superior freedom ; read the monstrous statements of Hume, who unblushingly asserts " that one good county of England is now capable of making a greater effort than the whole kingdom was in the reign of Henry V., when to maintain the garrison of the small town of Calais required more than a third of the ordinary revenues " ; this is the way in which every Scotchman reasons.' He always estimates the wealth of a nation by the money the government squeezes out of it. He forgets that " a poor government makes a rich people." According to this criterion of Hume, America must now be a wretchedly poor country. This same Henry V. could conquer, really conquer, France, and that, too, without beggaring England by hiring a million of Prussians, Austrians, Cossacks, and all sorts of hirelings. But writers have, for ages, been so dependent on the government and the aristocracy, and the people have read and believed so much of what they have said, and especially in praise of the " Reformation" and its effects, that it is no wonder that they should think that in Catholic times England was a poor, beggarly spot, having a very few people on it, and that the " Reforma tion " and the House of Brunswick and the Whigs have ' History (IMurray's reprint), i., 605. 375 given us all we possess of wealth, of power, bf freedom, and have almost created us, or at least, if not actually begotten us, caused nine-tenths of us to be born. These are all monstrous lies, but they have succeeded for ages. Few men dared to attempt to refute them, and if anyone made the attempt he obtained few hearers, and ruin, in some shape or other, was pretty sure to be the reward of his virtuous efforts. Now, however, when we are smart ing under the lash of calamity ; now, when everyone says that no state of things ever was so bad as this, now men may listen to the truth, and therefore I will lay it before them. 453. Populousness is a thing not to be proved by posi tive facts, because there are no records of the numbers of the people in former times, and because those which we have in our own day are notoriously false ; if they be not the EngUsh nation has added a third to its population during the last twenty years ! In short, our modern records I have, over and over again, proved to be false, particu larly in my Register, No. 2 of volume 46. That England was more populous in Catholic times than it is now we must believe, when we know that in the three first Pro testant reigns thousands of parish churches were pulled down, that parishes were united in more than two thousand instances, and when we know from the returns now before Parliament, that out of 11,761 parishes in England and Wales, there are upwards of a thousand which do not contain a hundred persons each, men, women and children. Then, again, the size of the churches. They were mani festly built, in general, to hold three, four, five or ten times the number of their present parishioners, including all the sectarians. What should men have built such large churches for ? We are told of their " piety and zeal ; " yes, but there must have been men to raise the buildings. The Lord might favour the work, but there must have been hands as well as prayers. And what motive could 376 there have been for putting together such .large quantities of stone and mortar, and to make walls four feet thick, and towers and steeples, if there had not been people to fill the buildings ? And how could the labour have been per formed ? There must have been men to perform the labour ; and can anyone believe that this labour would have been performed if there had not been a necessity for it ? We now see large and most costly ancient churches, and these in great numbers too, with only a few mud huts to hold the thirty or a hundred of parishioners. Our fore fathers built for ever, little thinking of the devastation that we were to behold ! Next come the lands, which they cultivated and which we do not, amounting to millions of acres. This anyone may verify who will go into Sussex, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire and Cornwall. They grew corn on the sides of hills which we now never attempt to stir. They made the hill into the form of steps of stairs in order to plough and sow the flat parts. These flats or steps still remain and are, in some cases, still cul tivated ; but in nine cases out of ten they are not. Why should they have performed this prodigious labour if they had not had mouths to eat the corn ? And how could they have performed such labour without numerous hands ? On the high lands of Hampshire and Dorsetshire there are spots of a thousand acres together which still bear the uneffaceable marks of the plough, and which now never feel that implement, The modern writings on the subject of ancient population are mere romances, or they have been put forth with a view of paying court to the government of the day. George Chalmers, a placeman, a pensioner, and a Scotchman, has been one of the most conspicuous in this species of deception. He, in what he calls an " Estimate," states the population of England and Wales in 1377 at 2,092,978. The half of these were, of course, females. The males then were 1,046,486. The children, the a^^ed, the infirm, the sick, made a half of these ; so that there 377 were 523,243 left of able-bodied men in this whole king dom ! Now the churches and the religious houses amounted at that time to upwards of 16,000 in number. There was one priest to every church, and these priests, together with the monks and friars, must have amounted to about 40,000 able men, leaving 483,243 able men. So that, as there were more than 14,000 parish churches, there were not quite twelve able-bodied men to each ! Hume says that Wat Tyler had, in 1381 (four years after Chalmers's date), " a hundred thousand men assembled on Blackheath," ' so that, to say nothing of the numerous bodies of insurgents assembled at the same time " in Hertford, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincoln ; " to say nothing of "the king's army of 40,000;"* and to say nothing of all the nobility, gentry, and rich people, here Wat Tyler had got together on Blackheath more than one-fifth of all the able-bodied men in England and Wales ! And he had, too, collected them together in the space of about six days ! Do we want, can we want, anything more than this in answer, in refutation of these writers on the ancient population of the country ? Let it be observed that in these days there were, as Hume himself relates, and his authorities relate also, frequently 100,000 pilgrims at a time assembled at Canterbury to do penance or make offerings at the shrine of Thomas-a-Becket. There must then have been 50,000 men here at once ; so that, if we were to beheve this pensioned Scotch writer, we must believe that more than a tenth of all the able-bodied men of England and Wales were frequently assembled at one and the same time, in one city, in an extreme corner of the island, to kneel at the tomb of one single saint. Monstrous lie ! And yet it has been sucked down by " enlightened Protes tants " as if it had been part of the Gospel. But if * History, i., p. 540. ' Ibid, 378 Canterbury could give entertainment to 100,000 .strangers at a time, what must Canterbury itself have been ? A grand, a noble, a renowned city it was, venerated and even visited by no small part of the kings, princes, and nobles of all Europe. It is now a beggarly, gloomy-looking town, with about 12,000 inhabitants, and, as the published accounts say, with 3,000 of its inhabitants paupers, and with a part of the site of its ancient and splendid churches, convents, and streets, covered with barracks, the cathedral only remaining for the purpose, as it were, of keeping the people in mind of the height from which they have fallen. The best criterion of the population is, however, to be found in the number and size of the churches, and that of the religious houses. There was one parish church to every four square miles throughout the kingdom ; and one religious house (including all the kinds) to every thirty square miles. That is to say, one parish church to every piece of land two miles each way ; and one religious house to every piece of land five miles long and six miles wide. These are facts that nobody can deny. The geography tells us the number of square miles in the country, and as to the number of parishes and religious houses, it is too well known to admit of dispute, being recorded in books without number. Well then, if the father of lies himself were to come and endeavour to persuade us that England was not more populous before the " Reformation " than it is now, he must fail with all but downright idiots. The same may be said with regard to Ireland, where there were, according to Archdall, 742 religious houses in the reign of Henry VIIL, and, of course, one of these to every piece of land six miles each way ; and where there was a parish church to every piece of land a Httle more than two mUes and a half each way. Why these churches ? What were they built for ? By whom were they built ? And how were all these religious houses maintained ? Alas ! Ireland was in those days a fine, a populous, and a rich country. 379 Her people were not then half-naked and half-starved. There were then no projects for relieving the Irish by sending them out of their native land ! 454. The wealth of the country is a question easUy decided. In the reign of Henry VIIL, just before the "Reformation," the whole of the lands in England and Wales had, according to Hume, been rated, and the annual rental was found to be three mUlions ; and, as to this, Hume quotes undoubted authorities. Now, in order to know what these three millions were worth in our money we must look at the Act of Parliament, 24th year of ^Henry VIIL, chapter 3, which says, that "no person shaU take for beef or pork above a half-penny, and for mutton or veal above three-farthings a pound, avoirdupois weight, and less in those places where they be now sold for less." This is by retail, mind. It is sale in the butchers' shops. So that, in order to compare the then with the present amount of the rental of the country, we must first see what the annual rental of England and Wales now is, and then we must see what the price of meat now is. I wish to speak here of nothing that I have not unquestionable authority for, and I have no such authority with regard to the amount of the rental as it is just at this moment ; but I have that authority for what the rental was in the year 1804. A return, printed by order of the House of Commons, and dated loth July, 1804, states, that "the returns to the Tax-office (property tax) prove the rack- rental of England and Wales to be thirty-eight mUlions a year." Here, then, we have the rental to a certainty ; fdi what was there that could escape the all- searching, taxing eye of Pitt and his understrappers ? King Henry's inex perience must have made him a poor hand, compared with Pitt, at finding out what people got for their land. Pitt's return included the rent of mines, canals, and of every species of real property ; and the rental, the rack-rental, of the whole amounted to thirty-eight millions. This, ob- 38o Serve, was in time of bank restriction, in time of high prices, in time of monstrously high rents, in time of high price of meat : that very year I gave eighteen shillings a score for fat hogs, taking head, feet, and all together ; and for many years before and after, and including 1804, beef, pork, mutton and veal were, taken on the average, more than tenpence a pound by retail. Now, as Henry's Act orders the meat to be sold, in some places, for less than the half-penny and the three-farthings, we may, I think, fairly presume that the general price was a half-penny. So that a half-penny of Henry's money was equal in value to tenpence of Pitt's money ; and, therefore, the three millions of rental in the time of Henry ought to have become sixty millions in 1804 ; and it was, as we have seen, only thirty- eight millions. In 1822, Mr. Curwin said, the rental had fallen to twenty millions. But, then, meat had also fallen in price. It is safer to take 1804, where we have un doubted authority to go on. This proof is of a nature to bid defiance to cavil. No man can dispute any of the facts, and they are conclusive as to the point that the nation was more wealthy before the " Reformation " than it is now. But there are two other Acts of Parliament to which I will refer as corroborating iu a very striking manner this fact of the superior general opulence of Catholic times. The A.ct, i8th year of Henry VI. , chap. II, after setting forth the cause for the enactment, pro vides that no man shall, under a heavy penalty, act as a justice of the peace who has not lands and tenements of the clear yearly value of twenty pounds. This was in 1439, about a hundred years before the above-mentioned act about meat of Henry VIII. The money was of stiU higher value in the reign of Henry VI. However, taking it as before, at twenty times the value of our money, the justice of the peace must then have had four hundred pounds a year of our money ; and we all know that we have justices of the peace of one hundred a year. This 381 Act of Henry VI. shows that the country abounded in gentlemen of good estate ; and, indeed, the Act itself says that the people are not contented with having "men of smaU behaviour set over them." A thousand feUows, calling themselves historians, would never overset such a proof of the superior general opulence and ease and happi ness of the country. The other of the Acts to which I have alluded is ist year Richard III., chap. 4, which fixes the quaUfication of a juror at twenty shillings a year in freehold, or twenty-six and eightpence copyhold, clear of aU charges. That is to say, a clear yearly income from real property of, at least, twenty pounds a year of our money ! And yet the Scotch historians would make us beheve that our ancestors were a set of beggars ! These things prove beyond all dispute that England was, in Catholic times, a really wealthy country ; that wealth was generally diffused ; that every part of the country abounded in men of solid property ; and that, of course, there were always great resources at hand in cases of emergency. If we were now to take it into our heads to dislike to have men of " small behaviour set over us ; " if we were to take a fancy to justices of the peace of four hundred a year, and jurors of twenty pounds a year ; if we were, as in the days of good King Henry, to say that we " would not be governed nor ruled" by men of "small behaviour," how quickly we should see Botany Bay ! When Cardinal Pole landed at Dover, in the reign of Queen Mary, he was met and escorted on his way by two thousand gentlemen of the country on horseback. What ! 2,000 country gentlemen in so beggarly a country as Chalmers describes it ! Aye, and they must have been found in Kent and Surrey too. Can we find such a troop of country gentlemen there now ? In short, everything shows that- England was then a country abounding in men of real wealth, and that it so abounded precisely because the king's revenue was small • yet this is cited by Hume and the rest of the Scotch his- 382 torians as a proof of the nation's poverty I Their notion is that a people are worth what the government can wring out of them, and not a farthing more. And this is the doctrine which has been acted upon ever since the " Refor mation," and which has at last brought us into our present wretched condition. 455. As to the power of the country compared with what it is now, what do we want more than the fact that for many centuries before the " Reformation " England held possession of a considerable part of France ; that the " Reformation " took, as we have seen, the two towns of Boulogne and Calais from her, leaving her nothing but those little specks in the sea, Jersey and Guernsey ? What do we want more than this ? France was never a country that had any pretensions to cope with England until the "Reformation" began. Since the "Reformation" she has not only had such pretensions, but she has shown to all the world that the pretensions are well founded. She even at this moment holds Spain in despite of us, while in its course the " Reformation " has wrested from us a large portion of our dominions, and has erected them into a state more formidable than any we have ever before beheld. We have, indeed, great standing armies, arsenals, and barracks, of which our Catholic forefathers had none ; but they were always ready for war nevertheless. They had the resources in the hour of necessity. They had arms and men ; and those men knew what they were to fight for before they took up arms. It is impossible to look back, to see the respect in which England was held for so many, many ages, to see the deference with which she was treated by aU nations, without blushing at the thought of our present state. None but the greatest potentates presumed to think of marriage aUiances with England. Her kings and queens had kings and princes in their train. Nothing petty ever thought of approaching her. She was held in such high honour, her power was so universally 383 acknowledged, that she had seldom occasion to assert it by war. And what has she been for the last hundred and fifty years ? Above half the time at war ; and with a debt never to be paid, the cost of that war, she now rests her hopes of safety solely on her capacity of persuading her weU-known foes that it is not their interest to assail her. Her warlike exertions have been the effect, not of her resources, but of an anticipation of those resources. She has mortgaged, she has spent beforehand, the resources necessary for future defence. And there she now is, inviting insult and injury by her well-known weakness, and, in case of attack, her choice lies between foreign victory over her or internal convulsion. Power is relative. You may have more strength than you had, but if your .neighbours have gained strength in a greater degree, you are, in effect, weaker than you were. And can we look at France and America, and can we contemplate the inevi table consequences of war, without feeling that we are fast becoming, and indeed that we are already become a low and little nation ? Can we look back to the days of our Catholic ancestors, can we think of their lofty tone and of the submissio'n instantly produced by their threats, without sighing, " Alas ! those days are never to return " ? [456, And as to the freedom of the nation, where is the man who can tell me of any one single advantage that the " Reformation " has brought, except it be freedom to have forty religious creeds instead of one ? Freedom is not an empty sound ; it is not an abstract idea ; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, — and it m.eans nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave. Now, our Catholic forefathers took special care upon this cardinal point. They suffered neither kings nor parliaments to touch their property without cause ; clearly shown. They did not read newspapers, they did 384 not talk about debates, they had no taste for " mental enjoyment ;' " : but they thought hunger and thirst great evils, and they never suffered anybody to put them to board on cold potatoes and water. They looked upon bare bones and rags as indubitable marks of slavery, and they never failed to resist any attempt to affix these marks upon them. You may twist the word freedom as long as you please, but at last it comes to quiet enjoyment of your own property, or it comes to nothing. Why do men want any of " those things that are called political rights and privileges ? Why do they, for instance, want to vote at elections for members of parliament ? Oh ! because they shall then have an- influence over the conduct of those members. And of what use is that ? Oh ! then they will prevent the members from doing wrong. What wrong ? Why, imposing taxes that ought not to be paid. That is all ; that is the use, and the only use, of any right or privilege that men in general can have. Now how stand we in this respect compared with our Catholic ancestors ? They did not perhaps all vote at elections. But do we ? Do a fiftieth part of us ? And have the main body of us any, even the smallest, influence in the making of laws and in the imposing of taxes ? But the main body of the people had the Church to protect them in Catholic times. The Church had great power, and it was naturallj' the guardian of the common people ; neither kings nor parliaments could set its power at defiance : the whole of our history shows that the Church was invariably on the side of the people, and that in all the much and justly boasted triumphs which our forefathers obtained over their kings and nobles the Church took the lead. It did this because it was dependent upon neither kings nor nobles ; because, and only because, it acknowledged another head ; but we have lost the pro tection of the Church, and have got nothing to supply its place ; or rather, whatever there is of its power left has 385 ijoined, or rather been engrossed by, the other branches of the state, leaving the main body of the people to the ^mercy of those other branches. " The liberties of Eng- fland" is a phrase in every mouth, but what are those liberties ? The laws which regulate the descent and possession of property ; the safety from arrest, unless by due and settled process ; the absence of all punishment without trial before duly authorised and well-known judges and magistrates ; the trial by jury; the precautions taken by the divers writs and summonses ; the open trial ; the impartiality in the proceedings. < These are the "liberties of England." And had our Catholic forefathers less of fthese than we have ? Do we not owe them all to them ? Have we one single law that gives security to property or to life which we do not inherit from them ? The tread mill, the law to shut men up in their houses from sunset to sunrise, the law to banish us for life if we utter anything having a tendency to bring our " representatives " into contempt ; these indeed we do not inherit, but may boast of them, and of many others of much about the same character, -as being unquestionably of pure Pro testant origin.^ 457. Poverty, however, is after all the great badge, the never-failing badge of slavery. Bare bones and rags are the true marks of the real slave. What is the object of government ? To cause men to live happily. They can not be happy without a sufficiency of food and of raiment. Good government means a state of things in which the main body are well fed and well clothed. It is the chief business of a government to take care that one part of the people do not cause the other part to live miserable lives. "There can be no morality, no virtue, no sincerity, no'-honesty, amongst a people continually suffering from ¦want ; and it is cruel in the last degree to punish such people for almost any sort of crime, which is in fact, not 25 386 crime of the heart, not crime of the perpetrator, but crime of his all-controlling necessities. 458. To what degree the main body of the people in England are now poor and miserable, how deplorably wretched they now are, this we know but too well ; and now we wiU see what was their state before this vaunted " Reformation." I shaU be very particular to cite my authorities here. I will infer nothing ; I will give no "estimate," but refer to authorities such as no man can call in question, such as no man can deny to be proofs more complete than if founded on oaths of credible witnesses, taken before a judge and jury. I shall begin with the account which Fortescue gives of the state and manner of living of the English in the reign of Henry VI., that is, in the fifteenth century, when the Catholic Church was in the height of its glory. Fortescue was Lord Chief Justice of England for nearly twenty years ; he was appointed Lord High Chancellor by Henry VI. Being in exile in France, in consequence of the wars between the Houses of York and Lancaster, and the King's son, Prince Edward, being also in exile with him, the Chancellor wrote a series of letters addressed to the prince, to explain to him the nature and effect of the laws of England, and to induce him to study them and uphold them. This work, which was written in Latin, is called De Laudibus Legum Anglics : or Praise of the Laws of England. This book was many years ago translated into English, and it is a book of law authority quoted frequently in our courts at this day. No man can doubt the truth of facts relating to such a work. It was a work written by a famous lawyer for a prince. It was intended to be read by other contemporary lawyers, and by all lawyers in future. The passage that I am about to quote, relating to the state of the English, was purely incidental ; it was not intended to answer any temporary purpose. It must have been a true account. 459. The Chancellor, after speaking generally of the 387 •nature of the laws of England, and of the difference be tween them and the laws of France, proceeds to show the difference in their effects by a description of the state of fthe French people, and then by a description of the state of the English. His words,— words that, as I transcribe them, make my cheeks burn with shame, — are as follows ; "Besides all this, the inhabitants of France give every jyear to their king the fourth part of all their wines, the .grovrth of that year ; every vintner gives the fourth penny of what he makes of his wine by sale. And all the towns and boroughs pay to the king yearly great sums of money, which are assessed upon them for the expenses of his men- at-arms. So that the king's troops, which are always considerable, are subsisted and paid yearly by those common people who live in the villages, boroughs, and cities. Another grievance is, every village constantly iinds and maintains two cross-bow-men at the least, — some find more, — well arrayed in all their accoutrements, to serve the king in his wars as often as he pleaseth to call them out, which is frequently done. Without any consideration had of these things, other very heavy taxes are assessed yearly upon every village within the kingdom for the 'king's service ; neither is there ever any intermission or abatement of taxes. Exposed to these and other cala mities, the peasants live in great hardship and misery. Their constant drink is water, neither do they taste throughout the year any other liquor, unless upon some extraordinary times or festival days. Their clothing con sists of frocks or little jerkins made of canvas, no better than common sackcloth ; they do not wear any woollens except of the coarsest sort, and that only in the garments under their frocks ; nor do they wear any trowse but fi:om the knees upwards, their legs being exposed and .n^ked. The women go barefoot except on holidays. They do not eat flesh, except it be the fat of bacon, and that in very small quantities, with which they make a 388 soup. Of other sorts, either boiled or roasted, they do not so much as taste, unless it be of the inwards and offals of sheep and bullocks, and the like, which are kUled for the use of the better sort of people and the merchants, for whom also quails, partridges, hares, and the like, are reserved upon pain of the galleys : as for their poultry, ihe soldiers consume them, so that scarce the eggs, slight as they are, are indulged them by way of a dainty. And if it happen that a man is observed to thrive in the world and become rich, he is presently assessed to the king's tax, proportionably more than his poorer neighbours, whereby he is soon reduced to a level with the rest." * Then comes his description of the English at the same time ; those " priest-ridden " English, whom Chalmers and Hume, and the rest of that tribe, v/ould fain have us believe were a- mere band of wretched beggars. " The king of England cannot alter the laws or make new ones without the ex press consent of the whole people in parliament assembled. Every inhabitant is at his liberty fully to use and enjoy whatever his farm produceth, the fruits of the earth, the increase of his flock, and the Hke ; all the improvements he makes, whether by his own proper industry or of those he retains in his service, are his own to use and to enjoy without the let, interruption, or denial of any. If he be in anywise injured or oppressed, he shall have his amends and satisfactions against the party offending. Hence it is that the inhabitants are rich in gold, silver, and in all the necessaries and conveniences of hfe. They drink no water, unless at certain times upon a religious score, and by way of doing penance. They are fed in great abun dance with all sorts of flesh and fish, of which they have plenty everywhere; they are clothed throughout in good ' Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliis (translated), ed. 1775, P- 124 seqq. The chapter treats of the state of France under the absolute rule of Inputs XI, 389 woollens ; their bedding and other furniture in their houses are of wool, and that in great store. They are also weU provided with all other sorts of household goods and necessary implements for husbandry. Every one accord ing to his rank hath all things which conduce to make life easy and happy."" 460. Go and read this to the poor souls who are now eating sea-Weed in Ireland, who are detected in robbing the pig-troughs in Yorkshire, who are eating horse flesh and grains (draff) in Lancashire and Cheshire, who are harnessed like horses and drawing gravel in Hampshire and Sussex, who have 2d. a day allowed them by the magistrates in Norfolk, who are all over England worse fed than the felons in the gaols. Go and tell them, when they raisfe their hands from the pig-trough or from the grains-tub and with their dirty tongues cry " No Popery," — go, read to the degraded and deluded wretches this account of the state of their Catholic forefathers, who lived under what is impudently called " Popish superstition and tyranny," and in those times which we have the audacity to caU " the dark ages." 461. Look at the then picture of the French ; and, Pro testant Englishmen, if you have the capacity of blushing left, blush at the thought of how precisely that picture fits the English now ! Look at all the parts of the picture, the food, the raiment, the game. Good God ! If anyone had told the old Chancellor that the day would come when this picture, and even a picture more degrading to human nature, would fit his own boasted country, what would he have said ? What would he have said if he had been told that the time was to come when the soldier in England would have more than twice, nay, more than thrice the sum allowed to the day-labouring man; when potatoes would be carried to the field as the only food of the ' Fortescu?, De Laudibus Legum Auglicc, p. 127 seqq. 390 ploughman ; when soup-shops would be opened to feed the English; and when the judges, sitting on that very bench on which he himself had sat for twenty years, would (as in the case last year of the complaint against the magistrates at Northallerton), declare that bread and water were the general food of working-people in England ? What would he have said? Why, if he had been told that there was to be a " Reformation," accompanied by a total devastation of Church and Poor property, upheld by wars, creating an enormous debt and enormous taxes, and requiring a constantly standing army, — if he had been told this he would have foreseen cur present state and would have wept for his country ; but if he had, in addition, been told that even in the midst of all this suffering we should still have the ingratitude and the baseness to cry " No Popery," and the injustice and the cruelty to persecute- those Englishmen and Irishmen who adhered to the faith of their pious, moral, brave, free and happy fathers, he would have said, " God's will be done : let them suffer." 462. But it may be said that it was not, then, the Catholic Church but the laws that made the English so happy, for the French had that Church as well as the English. Aye ! But in England the Church was the very basis of the laws. The very first clause of Magna Charta provided for the stability of its property and rights. A provision for the indigent, an effectual provision, was made by the laws that related to the Church and its property ; and this was not the case in France, and never was the case in any country but this ; so that the English people lost more by a " Reformation " than any other people could have lost. 463. Fortescue's authority would of itself be enough, but I am not to stop with it. White, the late rector of Selborne, in Hampshire, gives, in his history of that once famous viUage, an extract from a record, stating that for disorderly conduct men were punished by being " com- 391 pelled to fast a fortnight on bread and beer! " This was about the year 1380, in the reign of Tlichard II. Oh ! miserable " dark ages " ! This fact must be true. White had no purpose to answer. His mention of the fact, or rather his transcript from the record, is purely incidental ; and trifling as the fact is, it is conclusive as to the general mode of living in those happy days. Go, tell the har nessed gravel-drawers in Hampshire to cry " No Popery," for that if the Pope be not put down he may in time compel them to fast on bread and beer, instead of suffering them to continue to regale themselves on nice potatoes and pure water. 464. But let us come to Acts of Parliament, and first to the Act above quoted, in paragraph 454, which see. That Act fixes the price of meat. After naming the four sorts of meat, beef, pork, mutton and veal, the preamble has these words : " These being the food of the poorer sort." This is conclusive. It is an incidental mention of a fact. It is an Act of Parliament. It must have been true ; and it is a fact that we know well, that even the judges have declared from the bench, that bread alone is now the food of the poorer sort. What do we want more than this to convince us that the main body of the people have been impoverished by the " Reformation " ? 465. But I will prove by other Acts of Parliament this Act of Parliament to have spoken truth. These Acts declare what the wages of workmen shall be. There are several such Acts, but one or two may suffice. The Act of 23rd of Edward III. fixes the wages, without food, as foUows. There are many other things mentioned, but the following will be enough for our purpose : — s. d. A woman hay-making or weeding corn for the day" ... ... o I A man filling dung-cart ... ... ... ... ... o 3J A reaper ... ... ... ... ... ... 0 4 Mowing an acre of grass ... ... ... ... ... o 6 Threshing a quarter of wheat ... ... ... ...04 " Fleetwood, Chronicon Preciosum, ed. 1745, p. 129. 392 The price of shoes, cloth, and of provisions, throughout the time that this law continued in force was as follows : — A pair of shoes ... o o 4 Russet broad -cloth the yard oil A stall-fed ox ...140 A grass-fed ox ... o 16 o A fat sheep unshorn... 018 A fat sheep shorn ... o i 2 £ s. d. £ s. d. A fat hog 2 years old o 3 4 A fat goose... ... 002^ Ale, the gallon, by proclamation ... o o I Wheat the quarter ... o 3 4 White wine the gallon 006 Red wine 004 These prices are taken from the Preciosum of Bishop Fleetwood, who took them from the accounts kept by the bursars of convents. All the world knows that Fleetwood's book is of undoubted authority.' 466. We may, then, easily believe that "beef, pork, mutton and veal were the food of the poorer sort," when a dung-cart filler bad more than the price of a fat goose and a-half for a day's work, and when a woman was allowed for a day's weeding the price of a quart of red wine ! Two yards of the cloth made a coat for the shepherd, and as it cost 2s. 2d., the reaper would earn it in 6 J days ; and the dung-cart man would earn very nearly a pair of shoes every day ! The dung-cart filler would earn a fat shorn sheep in four days ; he would earn a fat hog, two years old, in twelve days ; he would earn a grass-fed ox in twenty days ; so that we may easily believe that " beef, pork, veal and mutton " were " the food of the poorer sort." And, mind, this was "a priest-ridden people," a people "buried in Popish superstition ! " In our days of " Protestant light " and of " mental enjoyment " the " poorer sort " are allowed by the magistrates of Norfolk threepence a day for a- single man able to work. That is to say, a halfpenny less than the Catholic dung-cart man had ; and that threepence will get the " no popery " gentleman about six ounces of old Fleetwood, Chronicon Preciosum, p. 71 seqq. 393 ewe mutton, while the Popish dung-cart man got for his day rather more than the quarter of a fat sheep .^ 467. But the Popish people might work harder than " enlightened Protestants." They might do more work in a day. This is contrary to all the assertions of the " feelosofers," for they insist that the Catholic rehgion made people idle. But, to set this matter at rest, let us look at the price of the job-labour, at the mowing by the acre and at the threshing of wheat by the quarter, and let us see how these wages are now, compared with the price of food. I have no parliamentary authority since the year 1821, when a report was printed by order of the House of Commons, containing the evidence of Mr. EUman of Sussex, as to wages, and of Mr. George, of Norfolk, as to price of wheat. The report was dated i8th June, 1821. The accounts are for twenty years on an average, from 1800 inclusive. We will now proceed to see how the " Popish, priest-ridden " Englishman stands in comparison with the " No-Popery " Englishman : — Popish Man. No-PoPERY Man. s. d. s. d 0 6 3 7f 0 4 4 0 Mowing an acre of grass ... Threshing a quarter of wheat ... Here are " waust improvements, Mau'm ! " But now let us look at the relative price of the wheat which the ' It may pass through the mind of some readers that the picture drawn by Cobbett with such vigour, or even passion, must be an exaggeration, nay, a caricature. Yet the genius of the man had divined and grasped the truth ; and he only anticipated the results arrived at by the exact investigations of the present day. The late Professor Thorold Rogers, who devoted the whole of a laborious life to an enquiry into the economic history of England, comes, so far as this period is concerned, to the same conclusion as Cobbett himself. Indeed, the words in which he. delivers what may be termed a scientific conclusion form almost a heavier indict ment than that framed by Cobbett's indignation. The extract from The Economic Interpretation of History is long and is thrown into an appendix ; but it must not pn that account be overlooked. 394 labourer had to purchase with his wages. We have seen that the "popish superstition slave" had to give 5d. a bushel for his wheat, and the evidence of Mr. George states that the "enlightened Protestant" had to give los. a bushel for his wheat, that is, twenty-four times as much as the "popish fool," who suffered himself to be " priest- ridden." So that the "enlightened" man, in order to make him as well off as the " dark ages " man was, ought to receive 12s. instead of 3s. 7|d. for mowing an acre of grass ; and he in like manner ought to receive, for threshing a quarter of wheat, 8s., instead of the 4s. which he does receive. If we had the records we should doubt less find that Ireland was in the same state. 468. There ! That settles the matter ; and if the Bible Society and the " Education" and the " Christian know ledge" gentry would, as they might, cause this little book to be put into the hands of all their millions of pupils, it would, as far as relates to this kingdom, settle the question of religion for ever and ever. I have now proved that Fortescue's description of the happy life of our Catholic ancestors was correct. There wanted no proof, but I have given it. I could refer to divers other Acts of Parliament, passed during several centuries, all confirming the truth of Fortescue's account. And there are in Bishop Fleet wood's book many things that prove that the labouring people were most kindly treated by their superiors, and particularly by the clergy ; for instance, he has an item in the expenditure of a convent, " 30 pair of autumnal gloves for the servants." This was sad " superstition." In our "enUghtened" and Bible-reading age, who thinks of gloves for ploughmen? We have priests as well as the " dark ages " people had ; ours ride as well as theirs, but, theirs fed at the same time ; both mount, but theirs seem to have used the rein more and spur less. It is curious to observe that the pay of persons in high situations was, as compared with that of the present day, very low when 395 conipared with the pay of the working classes. If you, calculate the year's pay of the dung-cart man, you wiU find it, if multipUed by 20 (which brings it to our money) to amount to 91 pounds a year, while the average pay of the judges did not exceed ;^6o a year of the then money, and, of course, did not exceed ;^i,2oo a year of our money. So that a judge had not so much pay as fourteen dung-cart fillers. To be sure, judges had in those " dark ages," when Littleton and Fortescue lived and wrote, pretty easy hves; for Fortescue says that they led lives of great " leisure and contemplation," and that they never sat in court but three hours in a day, from 8 to 11." Alas ! if they had lived in this " enlightened age " they would have found little time for their " contemplation " ! They would have found plenty of work, they would have found that theirs was no sinecure, at any rate, and that ten times their pay was not adequate to their enormous labour. Here is another indubitable proof of the great and general happi ness and harmony and honesty and innocence that reigned in the country. The judges had lives of leisure ! In that one fact, incidentally stated by a man who had been twenty years Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, we have the true character of the so long calumniated religion of our fathers. 469. As to the bare fact, this most interesting fact, that the main body of the people have been impoverished and degraded since the time of the Catholic sway ; as to this fact, there can be no doubt in the mind of any man who has thus far read this little work. Neither can there, I think, exist in the mind of such a man any doubt that this impoverishment and this degradation have been caused by » De Laudibus Legum Anglice, ed. 1775, pp. 185. "The judges, when they have taken their refreshments, spend the rest of the day in the study of the laws, reading of the Holy Scriptures, and other innocent amuse ments at their pleasure." 390 the event called the " Reformation," seeing that I have in former chapters, and especially in Chapter XIV., clearly traced the debt and the enormous taxes to that event. But I cannot bring myself to conclude without tracing the im poverishment in its horrible progress. The well known fact that no compulsory collections for the poor, that the disgraceful name of pauper, that these were never heard of in England in Catholic times, and that they were heard of the moment the " Reformation " had begun ; this single fact might be enough, and it is enough ; but we will see the progress of this Protestant impoverishment. 470. The Act, 27 Henry VIIL, chap. 25, began the poor laws. The monasteries were not actually seized on till the next year ; but the fabric of the Catholic Church was, in fact, tumbling down, and instantly the country swarmed with necessitous people, and open begging, which the government of England had always held in great horror, began to disgrace this so lately happy land. To put a stop to this the above Act authorised sheriffs, magis trates, and churchwardens to cause voluntary alms to be collected ; and at the same time it punished the persever ing beggar by slicing off part of his ears, and, for a second offence, put him to death as a felon ! This was the dawn of that " Reformation " which we are still called upon to admire and to praise ! 471. "The pious young Saint Edward," as Fox the Martyr-man most impiously calls him, began his Protes tant reign, ist year Edward VI. , chap. 3, by an Act, punishing beggars by burning them with a red-hot iron and by making them slaves for two years, with power in their masters to make them wear an iron collar, and to feed them upon bread and water and refuse meat ! For even in this case still there was meat for those who had to labour : the days of cold potatoes and of bread and water alone were yet to come; they were reserved for our " enlightened " and Bible-reading days, our days of " men- 397 tal enjoyment." And as to horse flesh and draff (grains), they appear never to have been even thought of. If the slave ran away, or were disobedient, he was by this Protestant Act to be a slave for Hfe. This Act came forth as a sort of precursor of the Acts to estabUsh the Church of England. Horrid tyranny! The people had been plundered of the resource which Magna Charta, which justice, which reason, which the law of nature gave them. No other resource had been provided, and they were made actual slaves, branded and chained because they sought by their prayers to allay the cravings of hunger ! 472. Next came " good Queen Bess," who, after trying her hand eight times without success to cause the poor to be relieved by alms, passed that compulsory Act which is in force to the present day. All manner of shifts had been resorted to in order to avoid this provision for the poor. During this and the two former reigns licences to beg had been granted. But at last the compulsory assessment came, that true mark, that indelible mark of the Protestant Church as by law established. This assess ment was put off to the last possible moment, and it was never relished by those who had got the spoils of the Church and the poor. But it was a measure of absolute necessity. All the racks, all the law-martial of this cruel reign could not have kept down the people without this Act, the authors of which seem to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for it has no preamble whatever. The people so happy in former times, the people described by Fortescue, were now. become a nation of ragged wretches. Defoe, in one of his tracts, says that Elizabeth in her progress through the kingdom, upon seeing the miserable looks of the crowds that came to see her, fre quently exclaimed, '^pauper ubique jacet," that is, the poor cover the land. And this was that same country in which Fortescue left a race of people, "having all things which conduce to make life easy and happy " 1 398 473- Things did not mend much during the reigns of the Stuarts, except in as far as the poor-law had effect. This rendered unnecessary the barbarities that had been exercised before the passing of it ; and as long as taxation was light the paupers were comparatively little numerous. But when the taxes began to grow heavy, the projectors were soon at work to find out the means of putting down pauperism. Amongst these was one Child, a merchant and banker, whose name was Josiah, and who had been made a knight or baronet, for he is called Sir Josiah. His project, which was quite worthy of his calling, contained a provision, in his proposed Act, to appoint men to be called " Fathers of the poor ; " and one of the provisions relating to these " Fathers " was to be, " that they may have power to send such poor as they may think fit into any of his Majesty's plantations ! " That is to say, to transport and make slaves of them ! And, gracious God ! this Vi^as in Fortescue's country ! This was in the country of Magna Charta ! And this monster dared to publish this project ! And we cannot learn that any man had the soul to reprobate the conduct of so hard-hearted a wretch. 474. When the " Deliverer " had come, when a " glorious revolution " had taken place, when a war had been carried on and a debt and a bank created, and all for the purpose of putting down Popery for ever, the poor began to in crease at such a frightful rate that the Parliament referred the subject to the Board of Trade, to inquire and to report a remedy. Locke was one of the commissioners, and a passage in the Report of the Board is truly curious. " The multiplicity of the poor, and the increase of the tax for their maintenance, is so general an observation and complaint that it cannot be doubted of; nor has it been only since the last war that this evil has come upon us ; it has been a growing burden on the kingdom this many years, and the last two reigns felt the increase of it as well as the present. If the cause of this evH be looked into, we 399 humbly conceive it will be found to have proceeded, not from the scarcity of provisions, nor want of employment for the poor ; since the goodness of God has blessed these times with plenty no less than the former ; and a long peace during three reigns gave us as plentiful a trade as ever. The growth of the poor must therefore have some other cause, and it can be nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and corruption ; virtue and industry being as constant companions on the one side, as vice and idleness are on the other." " 475. So the fault was in the poor themselves ! It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Locke that there must have been a cause for this cause. He knew very well that there was a time when there were no paupers at all in 'England ; but being a fat placeman under the " Deliverer," he could hardly think of alluding to that interesting fact, "relaxation of discipline"! What discipline? What did he mean by discipline? The taking away of the Church and poor's property, the imposing of heavy taxes, the giving of low wages compared with the price of food and raiment, the drawing away of the earnings of the poor, to be given to paper-harpies and other tax-eaters, these were the causes of the hideous and disgraceful evil ; this he knew very well, and therefore it is no wonder that his , report contained no remedy. 476. After Locke came, in the reign of Queen Anne, Defoe, who seems to have been the father of the present race of projectors, Malthus and Lawyer Scarlett being merely his humble followers. He was for giving no more relief to the poor ; he imputed their poverty to their crimes, and not their crimes to their poverty ; and their crimes he imputed to " their luxury, pride and sloth." He said the English labouring people ate and drank three ^'' Report of the Board of Trade in the year 1697, respecting the relief and employment of the poor. Prawn up by John lyocke, p. z. times as much as foreigners ! How different were the notions of this insolent French Protestant from those of the Chancellor Fortescue, who looked upon the good living of the people as the best possible proof of good laws, and seems to have delighted in relating that the English were " fed in great abundance with all sorts of flesh and fish " ! 477. If Defoe had lived to our " enlightened age " he would, at any rate, have seen no "luxury" amongst the poor, unless he would have grudged them horse-flesh, draff (grains), sea-weed, or the contents of the pig-trough. From his day to the present there have been a hundred projects and more than fifty laws to regulate the affairs of the poor. But still the pauperism remains for the Catholic Church to hold up in the face of the Church of England. " Here," the former may say to the latter, "here, look at this ; here is the result of your efforts to extinguish me ; here, in this one evil, in this never ceasing, this degrading curse, I am more than avenged, if vengeance I were allowed to enjoy ; urge on the deluded potato-crammed creatures to cry, ' No Popery ' still ; and when they retire to their straw, take care not to remind them of the cause of their poverty and degradation." 478. Hume, in speaking of the sufferings of the people in the first Protestant reign, says, that at last those suffer ings " produced good," for that they " led to our present situation." What, then ; he deemed our present situation a better one than that of the days of Fortescue ! To be sure Hume wrote fifty years ago, but he wrote long after Child, Locke, and Defoe. Surely enough the " Reforma tion" has led to "our then present, and our now present situation." It has "at last" produced the bitter fruit of which we are now tasting. Evidence given, by a clergy man too, and pubUshed by the House of Commons in 1824, states the labouring people of Suffolk to be a nest of robbers, too deeply corrupted ever to be reclaimed ; evi dence of a Sheriff of Wiltshire (in 1821) states the common 40I food of the labourers in the field to be cold potatoes ; a scale, published by the magistrates of Norfolk, in 1825, allows threepence a day to a single labouring man ; the judges of the Court of King's Bench (1825) have declared the general food of the labouring people to be bread and water; intelligence from the northern counties (1826), published upon the spot, informs us that great numbers of people are nearly starving, and that some are eating horse flesh and grains, while it is well known that the country abounds in food ; and while the clergy have recently put up from the pulpit the rubrical thanksgiving for times of plenty, a law recently passed, making it felony to take an apple from a tree, tells the world that our characters and lives are thought nothing worth, or that this nation, once the greatest and most moral in the world, is now a nation of incorrigible thieves, and, in either case, the mpst im poverished, the most fallen, the most degraded that ever saw the light of the sun. 479. I have now performed my task. I have made good the positions with which I began. Born and bred a Pro testant of the Church of England, having a wife and numerous family professing the same faith, having the remains of most dearly beloved parents lying in a Pro testant churchyard, and trusting to conjugal or filial piety to place mine by their side, I have in this undertaking had no motive, I can have had no motive, but a sincere and dis interested love of truth and justice. It is not for the rich and the powerful of my countrymen that I have spoken ; but for the poor, the persecuted, the proscribed. I have not been unmindful of the unpopularity and the prejudice that would attend the enterprise ; but when I considered the long, long triumph of calumny over the religion of those to whom we owe all that we possess that is great and renowned ; when I was convinced that I could do much towards the counteracting of that calumny ; when duty so sacred bade me speak, it would have been base- 3$ 402 ness to hold my tongue, and baseness superlative would it have been, if, having the will as well as the power, I had been restrained by fear of the shafts of falsehood and of folly. To be clear of self-reproach is amongst the greatest of human consolations ; and now, amidst aU the dreadful perils which the event that I have treated of has at last surrounded my country, I can, while I pray God to save her from still further devastation and misery, safely say that neither expressly nor tacitly am I guilty of any part of the cause of her ruin. THE ENt>, APPENDIX. The following extracts are taken from lectures on " The Economic Interpretation of History,'' delivered at Oxford in 1S87-8 by Professor Thorold Rogers. The words are here given as a supplement to the note on P- 393- Speaking of a law of 2 Henry VII., cap. 22, Professor Rogers says: "A schedule of wages is given, which, considering the cheapness of the time, is exceedingly liberal. At no time in English history have the earn ings of labourers, interpreted by their purchasing power, been so consider able as those which this Act acknowledges. But the day is twelve hours from March to .September, from daybreak till night for the rest of the year. It is certain that fifty years before the labour day was one of eight hours only, and the wages paid were far in excess of what was the statutable rate at the time " (p. 34). Again : " During all this time' the mass of English labourers, by no means claiming more than the reasonable reward for their services, were thriving under their guilds and trade unions, the peasants gradually acquir ing land, and becoming the numerous small freeholders of the first half of the seventeenth century, the artisans the master hands in their craft, contractors in the same perioa lor consiaerable works, planning the solid and handsome structures in what is known of the Perpendicular style, and withal working with their own hands on the buildings which their shrewd ness and experience had planned. It is true that at the very best age of the workman a ruin was impending, the causes of which I have been able to collect and shall now proceed to expound" (p. 34). He then draws out the extravagance of Henry VIII., and the accom panying dissolution of the monasteries, the confiscation of the guild lands by the Protector Somerset and the other unprincipled guardians of Edward VI., and the iniquity of the issue of base coinage. Of this last fact he writes, " The base money had driven the working classes to beggary, and England, once the most powerful of western states, was of little more account in the policy of Europe than a petty German princedom was." " His (the labourer's) guild lands, the benefit societies of the Middle Ages, ' 13S0-1500. 404 which systematically relieved destitution, were stolen by the greedy leader of the new aristocracy, he had suffered eighteen years' experience of a debased currency, prices rose 150 per cent., and the wages of labour were almost stationary " (p. 37). Elizabeth indeed reformed the currency, but she introduced a new Statute of Labourers, which Professor Rogers styles infamous, and of which he thus speaks :— " In the Statute Book it is known as S Eliz., cap. 4. It began by repealing all the statutes which had regulated labour since 23 Edward III., over two centuries before. It then took all that was most stringent from the statutes which I have already referred to, and put them into a comprehensive enactment, which was hereafter to regulate the relations of employer and labourer. I do not indeed believe that Eliza beth and her councillors intended to deal unjustly by the workmen; some indeed of the clauses of the Act are intended for the working man's protection, but the mischief of the Act was in the machinery by which it would be carried out, and in the terribly depressed condition of the labourer. He was handed over to the mercy of his employer at a time when he was utterly incapable of resisting the grossest tyranny. The government of the day probably remembered the uprisings of Tyler and Cade, certainly that of Ket, and they determined to make use of an in strument, the justices in quarter sessions, who would be able to check any discontent, even the discontent of despair, and might be trusted, if necessary, to starve the people into submission. We shall see how com pletely success attended their efforts " (p. 38). After enumerating many hard provisions from the above statute. Professor Rogers quotes from it that " the justices are to enquire periodically into the execution of the Act, and to revise their rates according to the cheapness or dearness of the neces'saries of life" (p. 40). But " the justices in quarter sessions took no note, as the statute instructed them, of ' the cheapness or dearness of provisions.' Their object was to get labour at starvation wages, and they did their best to effect their object. The law gave them the power, and provided no appeal from their decision " (p. 41). The first extant assessment of the justices (for the rate of wages) is of June 7, 1563. "Altogether I have found thirteen of these assessments between the years 1563 and 1725. I believe that they were discontinued during the eighteenth century, not because the law was neglected, but because the assessment had effectually done the work for which it was designed, the labourers' wages being now reduced to a bare subsistence. The object of this celebrated or infamous statute was threefold — (i) to break up the combinations of labourers, (2) to supply the adequate machinery of con trol, and (3) by limiting the right of apprenticeship, to make the peasant labourer the residuum of all other labour, or, in other words, to forcibly increase the supply " (p. 40). 405 Of the effect of the statute of Elizabeth upon the comfort of the labourer he says, "while the Act of 1495 enabled an artisan, in prices of that time, to procure a certain amount of food and drink with a fortnight's labour, at the rates of the statute, and an agricultural labourer to obtain the same with three weeks' labour, the justices' assessment rarely enabled the peasant to obtain the same quantities with a whole year's labour, and would sometimes have required two years' incessant labour. For it must be remembered that though the law pressed hardly on the artisan, it was intended to press far more hardly on the peasant, cheap agricultural labour, in the absence of any notable, as I shall show hereafter, any possible improvement in the art of agriculture, being, as was seen clearly enough, the best means by which, concurrently with a high price of produce, agricultural rents could be raised. ... It is true that in some particulars the position of the peasant was not so bad as it now is. He was rarely without his patch of land. . . . Again, beyond the plot which he held in severalty, the peasant had more or less extensive rights of common. The common, even if it did not afford herbage for his cow, was a run for his poultry, and assured him the occasional fowl in the pot. . . . These advantages, which one discovers by studying the social legislation and habits of the time, existed to an equal or a greater extent in the time of the first Tudor sovereign. It is the gradual deprivation of them, without any compensation beyond the concession of a bare subsistence, which marks the economical history of the poor as the centuries pass on. It is, I think, most probable that the practice of the quarter sessions assessment ceased in the south of England at the close of the seventeenth century, and in the north at the beginning of the eighteenth. It would be strange if the practice was continued, while agricultural history, now getting full of comments on the situation, is entirely silent on the subject. But in fact the justices had done their work. They had made low wages, famine wages, traditional, and these wages, insufScient by themselves, were supplemented from the poor rate" (pp. 41-43). " Legislation for the relief of the poor, at first by voluntary contributions, began with the year 1541. Between this date and 1601 inclusive, when the first and permanent statute of Elizabeth was enacted, there were twelve Acts of Parliarnent passed with the distinct object of providing relief against destitution " (p. 241). " The fact that laws for the relief of the poor were enacted after the Dissolution of the monasteries has led some writers to connect them with this event Others have pointed out, perhaps to relieve the Reformation from these odious features, that poverty, for which the state was anxious, existed before this action of Henry. I dare say that the Dissolution aggra vated the evil. It is possible that sheep-farming, rent-raising, and attempts to aggregate farms may have increased the mischief. But I am entirely 4o6 convinced that the four causes given above are amply sufficient to aceount ^ for it "(p. 243). The four causes are: — (1) debased coinage; (2) confis cation of the guild lands ; (3) the inevitable rise in prices ; (4) Elizabeth's Statute of Labourers. "The necessity of the English Poor Law can be traced distinctively back to the crimes of rulers and their agents. I do not say that if those four causes which I have recounted had been absent, destitution would never have ensued ; but I am certain that it would have been more manage able, the police which legal relief must in the end administer would have been less harsh, and the relief itself more gently given and more gratefully received. In a vague way the poor know that they have been robbed by the great in past time and are stinted now " (p. 244) . Lastly, in contrast to all this. Professor Rogers gives a calm judgment upon the state of things in the Middle Ages. " In the age which I have attempted to describe," he says, ' ' and in describing which I have accumu lated and condensed a vast mass of unquestionable facts, the rate of production was small, the conditions of health unsatisfactory, and the duration of life short. But, on the whole, there were none of those extremes of poverty and wealth which have excited the astonishment of philanthropists, and are now exciting the indignation of workmen. The age, it is true, had its discontents, and these discontents were expressed forcibly and in a startling manner. But of poverty which perishes un heeded, of a willingness to do honest work and a lack of opportunity, there was little or none. The essence of life in England during the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors was that everyone knew his neighbour, and that everyone was his brother's keeper. My studies lead me to conclude that though there was hardship in this life, the hardship was a common lot, and that there was hope, more hope than superficial historians have con ceived possible, and perhaps more variety than there is in the peasant's lot in our time " (p. 63). INDEX. [The References apply to the paragraphs, and not to the pages of this work.] A Becket, St. Thomas, 179, 453 Abbeys and Priories, 153 — 155, 159. 163. 167, 399 Abbot, the, of Glastonbury, 171 Abdication of James II., 374 Act for bastardising Henry's daughters, 113 Adrian IV., 42 and note Advisers of Elizabeth, 297 — 300, 3<9 Ahab, 8l Ale, the price of, 465 Alfred the Great, 147, 185 Allen, William, 342 Altars, the robbing of, 196 America, 338 ; Revolution of, 396 ; thought of taxing," 422 ; brings charges against George III., 426 ; consequences of its Revolution on the Penal Code, 441 Amours of Elizabeth, 295, 349 Ampthill, 69 Anjou, the Duke of, 295 Anne Boleyn, 62, 71, 75, 77 ; pro motes the Reformation, 72 ; note ; rejoices at the death of Cathe rine, 73 ; note ; her guilt, doubt ful, 77 ; note ; date of her execu tion, 77 ; note Anne, Queen, 476 Answers to this work, 350 Archdall, Mr. Mervyn, 148 Armada, the Spanish, 324 Army, standing, 380 Arthur, the Prince, 61 Arundel, the Earl of, 219 Athanasian Creed, 29 Attainder, iij; note Austin, 45, 48 Bail, excessive, 380, 381 Baker, Sir Richard, 112 Ball, for the sake of the starving Irish, 148 Baltimore, Lord, 392 Bank notes, 258 Bank of England, 402 Baptism, one, 85 Baring, Sir Thomas, 1S6 Bartholomew, Saint, the massacre of, 270 — 294 Bates' Rural Philosophy, 140 Bayley, Life of Fisher, 67 Bede, the venerable, 141 Beggars, 331, 470, 476 Beliefs, 204 Bentincks, the, 90 Beer tax, the first, 403 Beer, small, 124 Bermondsey, 183 Beza, 278 Bible, the new, 208 Bible-readers, 367 Biographical Dictionary, 33 Bishops, the Seven, 374 Blackheath, 453 Blackstone, Sir William, 28, 30, 52. 337. 378 Blowing up of Darnley, 310 Boleyn, Lady, 67 Bonner, Bishop, 248 Boulogne, 256, 391, 455 Bread and Water, the food of th? People, 461, 478 4o8 Brougham, Mr., 386 Burleigh, Lord, 298; note Burnet, 83, 96, 406 Burning of heretics, 257 Calais, taken by the Duke of Guise, 254 ; Elizabeth's base surrender of, 271, 391 ; the importance of, to England, 286 ; loss of, caused by the Reformation, 455 Calendar, the Protestant, 21, 46; 7iote Calvin, 207 Canterbury, 11, 179 Castlereagh, 380 Castles, 386 Catechism, the Douay, 330 Catesby, Robert, 357 Cathedrals, the origin of, 48 Catherine of Arragon, 61, 72 and note Catholic, the meaning of the word, 3 ; Religion, not rooted out of Ireland, 8 ; Religion, motive for the abuse of, 8, 9, 15 ; Religion, again restored, 226, note; 232 ; why Elizabeth renounced the, 26 1 ; rooted out again, 269 ; antiquity of, 10 ; inconsistency of the re vilers of, II, 12, 16, 17, 23; un favourable to liberty, 27, 379, 456 ; unfavourable to genius and talent, 28, 34 ; efforts to destroy it, 204 Catholic Church, took care of the poor, 207 ; kept down usury, 206 ; origin of, 40 Catholic declaration of loyalty, 346 ; note Catholics and Protestants sent to the stake together, 103 ; note Catholics and Protestants, their proporlion in the reign of Eliza beth, 306 ; note Catholics, the, as Citizens, 223 Catholics relieved by the American Revolution, 430 Cato-street Plot, 354 Causes, Ecclesiastical, 380 Cecil, Sir William, 230, 29S Celibacy of Clergy, 122, 198, note; 331. 369 Chalmers, George, 453, 459 Chantries, 202 Chapels seized, 202 ; note Charges against George III., 426 Charges against James II., 380 Charles I., 360 ; II., 22 ; IX., 273, 290 Chertsey, 183 Child, the Banker, 473 Christians of world, nine-tenths are Catholics, 13, 15 Church, history of the, in England, 44 Civil Liberty, the Catholic Religion unfavourable to, 27 Civil Liberty destroyed, 106 Clement, Mr., 380 Clergy, mode of supporting the, 49 ; celibacy of, 122, 198; note; relief to poor, 127 Cloth, price of, 465 Clothing of the Irish, 326, 334 Code, the Penal, 435, 436 ; reflec tions on, 437 — 441 ; relaxation of, 441, 445 Coin, debasing of the, 210 Coke, Lord, 92 Coligny, 270, 290, 291 ; note Colleges at Oxford, 30, 1S5 Colonies, 390, 391 Common-prayer, the Book of, 198, 265 Compromise made by the plun derers of the Church, 228 Confiscation of Monasteries, 162, 172, 17s Conde, 270, 280 Conference of the Methodists, 88 Convention, the American, 422 Cornish knave, 65 Coronation oath, form of, 197, note Cowdray House, 115 Cranmer, 64, 104, 195, 258 ; his dilemma and oath, 65 ; note ; hypocrisy of, 68, 104 ; holds Court, 69 ; divorces H eniy from Catherine of Arragon, 69 ; note; confirms Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn, 70; jiote ; Sentence pf 4og Catherine, 69 ; note ; cites Henry and Anne before him, 76 ; notes ; brings a wife home in a box, 104 ; note ; divorces Henry from Anne of Cleves, 188; Book of Homilies, 198; note; Catechism, 198; note; his Prayer-Book, 198; note; 265, 269, 365 ; weaves his own halter, 217; note; his worship and divorce overset, 226; note; his r character, 251 ; recantations and death, 251 Creeds, the Nicene and Athanasian, 20 Cromwell, Oliver, 117, 363 Cromwell, Thomas, 157 ; note ; his visitation, 159 ; note ; his dog like end, 189 ; note Crown Lands, 399 Crown, the, settled on Lady Jane Grey, 216 Curwen, Mr., 454 Curwin, Dr., 81 Dalrymple, 387 iDarnley, the Earl of, 309, 310 Davison, 321 'Debt, the National, 403, 41 1 Defender of the Faith, 103, 105 ; ' note; 107 Defoe, 476 De Grey, Mr., 124 iPeliverers, the Dutch, 396 •Despard, 386 Devastation of England, 166, 172 Devonshire, 212 Dick, Mr., 380 Dictionary, the Biographical, 33 Dieppe, 275 Directory, the, 365 Divorce of Henry VIII. from ,, Catherine, 67, 70 ; tiote ; from Anne Boleyn, 76 ; from Anne of ¦ Cleves, 188 Douay, 330, 342 ; note Downie, 386 Drake's Literary Hours, 138 Dreux, 277 Drury, Sir Drue, 319 Dudley, 221, 276 Dung-cart, filling, 465 Ecclesiastical causes, 3S0 Echard, 370 Edward III., state of the labourer in the time of, 465 Edward VI., his birth, 112; plun der of his reign, 196 : crowned as a Catholic, 197 ; note ; settles the succession, 216 ; his death, 2l8 ; note; his character, 218; his reign, 222 ; his loss of Bou logne, 256, 391 ; his atrocious cruelty, 471 Elections, 380 Elizabeth, Queen, date of birth, 71; note; declared bastard, 76 ; note ; an apostate, 260 ; her per jury, 260 ; note ; not acknow ledged by the Pope, 261 ; note; why she became a Protestant, 261 ; desires to change the Reli gion again, 265; note; her coronation, by whom performed, 265 ; note ; her bloody Statutes, 267, 343 ; abolishes the Pope's Supremacy, 267 ; Massacre of St. Bartholomew, traced to, 269 ; her base Peace with France, 271 ; treats with the Huguenots, 273, 278 ; accused of plotting assas sination, 278 ; her mortification and loss of Havre, 282 ; im prisonment of her ambassadors, 283 ; her hypocrisy, 294, 321 ; her virginity, 295, 349 ; note ; wishes to marry the Duke of Anjou, 295 ; her advisers, 297 — 300 ; real cause of her success in extirpating the Catholic Reli gion, 305 ; a most popular sove reign, 306 ; sees danger in Mary, Queen of Scots, 308 ; her cruelty to Mary, 315 ; brings her to the block, 318 ;, Whitaker's character of, 319 ; her conduct toward Ireland, 325 ; wretchedness of her people, 331, 472 ; petition of the Catholics to, 346 ; her death and character, 349 EUman, Mr., 467 Elstow, 81, 82 ; note England, converted to Christianity, 410 II, 45 > happy state of, before Reformation, 37; and jiote ; as Henry VIII. found it, 61 ; as the Reformation made it, 331 ; note ; 448 ; foreign troops brought in to settle, 387 ; populousness of, 453 ; wealth of, 454 ;- power of, 455 ; freedom of, 456 ; poverty of, 457 ; the people of, compared with those of France, 459 ; bread and water, the food of the people of, 461, 478 ; wages of the people of, 465 ; swarming with beggars, 470 Estimate, George Chalmers', 453 Evangelists, Protestants swear on the four, 23 Excise, 401, 420 Faith, 85, 328 Farnham, 124 Fawkes, Guy, 357 Fenning's Spelling-book, 143 Fire of London, 370 Fisher, Bishop, 84; note ; 95, note Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 386 Fleetwood, Bishop, 465 Food, price of, in time of Henry VIIL, 454 Foreign troops in England, 387 Fortescue, the Chancellor, 458 Fox, the lying, 248 Framlingham, 224 France, 254 ; England in danger of becoming subject to, 262, 303 ; Elizabeth basely makes peace with, 271 ; war with, 254, 399 ; her revolution, 442 ; tlie people of, compared with English, 459 Franklin, Dr., 326, 334 Freedom of England, 456 Friendly Society of Hants, 126 Gardiner, 198, 224 Garnet, Father, 358 Gamier, Mr., 124 George III., charges against, 426 George, Mr., 467 Glastonbury, 171 Glorious revolution, 377 Gloves, autumnal, 468 Goldsmith, Dr., 38 Goose, the price of a, 465 Gospellers, 277 Gospels authenticated by Catholic church, 18 Grains, the people eating, 460 Grammar, Hume's, 130 Gregory I., 45, 47 , . , Grey, Lady Jane, 216 ; proclaimed Queen, 220 Grimbald, St., 185 Guildford, 183 Guise, the Duke of, 254, 278 Habeas Corpus Act, 388 ; suspen sion of, 389 Halls at Oxford, 30 Halsey, Mr., 184 Hampden, 386 Havre de Grace, 273, 282 Haymaking, pay for, 465 Henry IV., 247 Henry VIL, 61 and note Henry VIIL, 61 ; note ; his brutal passions roused, 62 ; reluctance to get rid of Pope's authority, 63 ; note ; makes himself head of the church, 64 ; makes Cranmer Archbishop, 65 ; note; his hard case, 66 ; relationship with Anne Boleyn, 67 ; note ; keeps Anne Boleyn, 67 ; note ; divorced from Catherine, 70 ; marries Anne Bo leyn, 68 and note; his cruelty to Catherine, 69 ; gets Anne Boleyn beheaded, 77 ; marries Lady Jane Seymour, 77 j rebuked by Peyto and Elstow, 81 ; his atrocious mur ders of More and Fisher, 95 ; his book against Luther's religion, loi ; makes a religion of his own, 103 ; the dishonest act of 27th year of his reign, 112; his brutality to Lady Jane Seymour, 112; note; bastardises his daughters, 1 13; note ; his tyranny, 1 14 ; why sub mitted to, 117; obtains posses sion of church spoil, 168, 176 ; his base Parliament, 174; his marriage with Anse of Cleves, 188; note; his marriage with 411 LadyC. Howard, i88; his death, 190; note; his will, 194: note; his executors, 195; note; his obsequies conducted with Catho lic rites, 195 ; note ; price of food in the time of, 454 Heptarchy, the, 45 Heretics, restoration of the acts against, 247 ; burnt, 247, 257 Hertford, Earl of, 195 ; ?ioie Heylyn, Dr., 209, 21S, 255, 297, 377, 378 ; note Higgons, 370 Hippesley, Sir John Cox, 381 Historians, their duly, 81 Histories, the, of England, 38, 223 Hoddesden, 219 Hog, price of a, 465 Homilies, Book of, 19S ; note Honesty in the time of Alfred, 186 Hooper, 225, 250 Hop-duty, 3S0 Hospitality, 125 Houghton, John, 97 ; note Hubert, 370 ; note Huguenots, 273, 290 Hume, 116, note; 129, 134, 161, 179, 210, 236, 239, 2S5, 452 Hyde Abbey, 1S5 ; note Hypocrisy of Elizabeth, 294, 318 Inconsistency of the revilers of the Cathohc religion, 11, 12, 16, 17, 23 Inquisition, the, 340 Insurrections of the People, 209, 210, 212, 228 Interference in Elections, 380 Ireland, 8, 148, 325, 334, 363, 436, 459 Item, a curious, 176 James I., 310 James II., 372; charges brought against, 380 ; William's triumph over, 395 ; protected by Louis XIV., 398; suspends all penal laws relating to religion, 433 Jarrow, 141 . Jews, 369 Jocelyn, Bishop, 381 Juan Fernandez, 141 Judges, the, their decision as to the food of the poor, 478 ; made independent of the Crown, 24 ; the institution of, 92 Julius II., Pope, dispensation to Henry VIII., 61, note Julius III., Pope, Bull of, for re union of England and Rome, 231 ; notes Jurors, qualification of, 454 Jury, trial by, 185 Keiling, 386 Kent first converted to Christianity, 48 "King of France" the title of English Kings, 109 Knox, 225, 307, 359 Labourer, the ancient condition of the, 466 Land, the, subject to maintain the necessitous; revenues, 150 Landgrave, the, of Hesse, loi ; 7iote Landlords, the best, 151, 152 Latimer, 248, 250 Law-established, church, 13 Laws, the, of England, 92 Lawyers, 217 Leaders, the natural, of the people, 117, 118, 173 Learned men, 34 Leicester, 295, 297, 319 Lepeau, 444 Liberty, civil, the Catholic religion averse to, 27 Licences to beg, 472 Lincoln's Inn, a gentleman of, 295 Lindisfarne, 141 Lingard, Dr., 293 Littleton, 468 Liturgy, the Protestant, 20 Livings, how given away now, 124 Loan-makers, 186 Locke, Mr., 474 Lollards, the, 247 London, fire of, 370 Luther, 99 ; note ; 100, 200, 251 Lyttleton, 29 4X2 Madocks, William, 380 Mallett's History of the Swiss, 137 Malmesbury, 141 Malthus, 127 Margaret's, St, Westminster, 209 Marriage of, Henry VIII. with Catherine, 61 ; with Anne Boleyn, 58 ; with Lady J. Seymour, 77 ; with Anne of Cleves, 188; with Lady C. Howard, 188; of Mary to Philip of Spain, 239 ; policy of the, 240 ; to the good and honour of England, 241 ; compared with Saxe Coburg's, 244 ; Mary Queen of Scots with the Dauphin, 261 ; a Protestant Lord Lieuten ant of Ireland, with a Catholic lady, 446 Married Clergy, 124, 198; note; 331. 369 Martial law, 33 1 ; note " Martyrs," the, 249, 257 Marvell-hall, 77 Mary, Queen, 220 ; character falsely attributed to her, 223 ; enters London as Queen, 224 ; her Parliament, 226 ; bent on restor ing the Pope's supremacy, 228 ; gives up the tenths and first fruits, 234 ; note ; restores church lands in her possession, 235 ; rebellion against, 238 ; note ; marries Philip of Spain, 239; burns here tics, 248 ; her ill health, 253 ; at war with France, 254 ; her sorrows and death, 255, 257 ; her character, 257 ; note Mary, Queen of Scotland, 261 ; her birth and parentage, 302 ; be trothed to the Dauphin, 302 ; heiress to the English throne, 303 ; a. widow, 307 ; returns to Scotland, 307 ; marries Lord Darnley, 309 ; is again a widow, 310 ; marries Lord Bothwell, 311 ; Whitaker's defence of, 312, 319 ; throws herself on England, 315 ; her long imprisonment, 516 ; her death, 318 Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 270, 294 Mass, the, abolished, 207 ; re established, 226 ; made high treason to say the, 268, 343 Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council of London, 377 Merton, 183 Micaiah, 8r Micheldever, 186 Milner, Dr., 104, 123 Monasteries, 53, 57, 59, 119 ; note; revenues of, and how spent, 120 ; abuse of the, 121 ; effect of the dissolution of, in London, 127 ; note ; Hume's charges against, 129 ; note ; Tanner's Account of 133 ; extracts in defence of, 137, 141; as landowner's, 151 — 152; attack upon the, 1 59 — 1 63 ; reports upon, 161 ; note ; confiscation of, 162, 172, 175; in Surrey, 183; consequences of sacking the, 331 Money sent to the Popes from Eng.^ Monkish ignorance and superstition, 28, 34 Monks, II Monopolies, 352 Montmorency, 276 Monument, the, in the city of London, 370, 431 Moore's Almanack, 179 More, Sir Thomas, 84; note; 95, 104 ; note land, 90 Mowing, price of, 465, 467 Murder of the Countess of Salis bury, 115 ; of More and Fisher, 95 ; of John Houghton, 97 ; of the Abbot of Glastonbury, 171; of the Duke of Guise, 278; of Rizzio, 309 Murray, Earl, 314 National debt, origin of, 403, 411 New Testament, came to England from Pope and Catholic Church, 17 Newington, 183 Nicene Creed, 20 No -Popery cries, not eflScient now, 26 North, Roger, 367 413 North, Mr. Charles Augustus, 124 Notes, Bank, 258 Oath of a Cornish knave, 65 ; Cran mer's, 65 ; form of coronation, 197 ; note O'Callaghan, Mr., 403 Old Bailey, the, 258 Oliver, 386 " One Faith," 85 O'Quigly, 386 Origin of the Catholic church, 40 Orleans, 277 Ox, an, the price of, 465 Oxford, the ancient compared with modern, 30 Pains and penalties, bills of, 392 Paramours of Elizabeth, 295 Parishes, origin of, 50 Parliament, Catholics shut out of, 358 Parliament, Henrys, 174; Mary's, 226, 230 Paulet, Sir Amias, 319 Paulet, Sir John, 300 Pauperism, 145, 186, zo6 ; note ; 259, 331 Peachum, the Royal, 178 Penal Code, a sketch of, in Eng land, 435 ; in Ireland, 436 Penalties imposed on Catholics, 343, 431 " Pence to Peter," 90 Penn, William, 392 Perceval, 380 Petition of the Catholics to Eliza beth, 346 Peyto, 81 ; note Philip of Spain, 239, 242, 271, 323 Pilgrims, 179 Plot, the gunpowder, 354, 355 ; note ; the Protestant, 3S3 Plunder, the nation divided by, 117, 169, 162, 175, 180, 196, 202, 227; note; 232, 331, 372, 377 Pole, Cardinal, 229, 454 Poltrot, 278 Poor Clergy, 127 Poor-rates, 127, 259, 332, 470 " Poorer sort," the food of the, 464 Pope, 370 Pope, the, derivation of the word^ 42 ; supremacy of the, 84, 89, 91, 92, 227 ; money sent to, 90; refuses to acknowledge Elizabeth as Queen, 261 Populousness of England, 453 Potatoes, the food of the people, 478 Poulter, Mr. Edmund, 124 Power of England, 455 Prayer, the common, 198, 265 Preamble of the act for suppressing monasteries, 167 Preciosum, 465 Prices in time of Henry VIII., 454 ; Edward III., 465 Priories, 153, 155, 159, 163, 167, 399 Protector, 195, 209, 214 ; national morality und£r the, 20I ; note Protestant, the meaning of the word, 3 ; reformation, how begun, 6. 99, 351 ; Church by Law established, 13; liturgy, 26; calendar, 21; saints, 21; religion, means necessary to the intro ducing of it, 98 ; character of the settlement of 1549, 198; note; reformers hated by the people, 210; rehgion, how forced down the people's throats, 212 ; reli gion abolished by the general feeling of the nation, 226 ; note ; Reformers, baseness towards each other, 221 ; cause of EHzabeth becoming a, 261 ; how circum stances favoured the religion, 263 ; Religion, the real cause of its success, 305 ; Lord Lieutenant of Ireland marries a Catholic lady, 446 ; Protestants and Catholics sent to the stake together ; 103 ; note; reformation, the cause of misery in England and Ireland, 327, 455 ; the second, 360 ; the third, 375 ; the fourth, 393, 396 ; Reformation, the fifth, 442 , Provisions, monopolies of, 352 Purse, the faculties of the, 401 414 Quakers, 41 1 Quarterly Review, 141 Racks, Elizabeth's, 347 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 390 Rapin, 370 Reaping, price of, 465 Rebellion against Queen Mary, 238 Recusants, 269, 342, 344 ; note Reding, Mr., 380 Reformation, the meaning of the word, 3 ; the Protestant, how begun, 6, 99 ; means necessary to making, 98 ; the second, 360 ; the third, 375 ; the fourth, 393, 396 ; the fifth, 442 Reigate, 183 Religion, can't be two true ones, 203 Reports about monasteries, 161 Rescript, the King's, to the bishops, I Revolution, the glorious, 377 ; the American, 395, 441 ; the French, 442 Rheims, 342 Richard II. , 247 Richard III., act of, 455 Riches of England, 459 Ridley, Bishop of London, 220, 248, 250, 258 Rizzio, 309 Robespierre, 117 Rochford, Lord, 75 Rouen, 275 Russell, Lord, 212, 381 Russell, Lord John, 6 Saint Cross, 125 ; note .Saint Margaret's, 209 Saints, the Protestant, 2i Salisbury, Bishop of, 406 Salisbury, Countess of, 115; note Salt, monopoly of, 352 Salvation, Exclusive, Doctrine of, 202 Sands, Dr., 221 Scarlett, Mr., 127 Schomberg, Marshal, 90; note Schools of Oxford, 30, 185 Scotland, 262, 307 Sects, 16, 88, 200, 367, 411 Selborne, 463 Sende, 183 Septennial Bill, 417 Settlement, act of, in 1 701, 3S2 ; note Seymour, Lady Jane, 112; note Shearses, the, 386 Sheep, price of, 465 Shelley, Richard, 346 Shene, 183 Shoes, price of, 465 Sidney, Algernon, 382, 385 Six Acts, 380 Skibbereen, 11 Smith, Adam, 211 Smith, Elizabeth's Envoy, 283 Smithfield, the fires of, 257 Soldier, a Bible-reading, 367 Somerset, the Protector, 209, 214; note Somerset House, 209 Spanish Armada, 324 Spelling-book, Fenning's, 143 Spelman's History of Sacrilege, 162 ; note St. Bartholomew, the Massacre of, 270, 294 St. John, Paulet, 300 St. Peter, 41 ; martyrdom of, 41 ; note Stafford, Lord, 383 Standing Army, 380 Stowe, 82 Stratton, Manor of, 186 Straw, the Epistle of, 333 Sturges, Dr., 104, 123, 127 Succession, the, settled by Edward VL, 2i6 Superstition, 179 Suppression of Monasteries, 166, 172 Supremacy, the, 84 ; why it should be lodged in the Pope, 87 ; sham plea set up against this, 88, 89; effect of the Pope's, on civil liberty, 92 ; effect of it in the hands of one man, 94; question of restoring, 227 ; restored, 231 ; re-abolished, 267 ; note Swithun, Saint, 147 415 Synod of the Presbyterians, 88 Tanbridge, Priory at, 183 Tanner, Bishop, 131 Taxes, increase of, 412 Testament, the New, from whom received, 17 Tetzel, John, publication of indul gences given to, 99 ; note Thistlewood, 386 Thompson, Mr., 184 Thompson, the Poet, 349 Thorough Godly Reformation, 351 Threshing, price of, 465, 467 Throckmorton, Elizabeth's ambas sador, 283 Tilrhes, how collected now, 13, 49, 338 Title of " King of France," 109 Tomb of Saint Thomas a Becket, 179 ; note Tower, the, 374 Trade, Board of, 474 Tradition, 399 Tread-mill, 186 Treason, new laws of, 268 Trial by Jury, 185 Troops, foreign, brought to quell the people, 212, 387 Turner's History of England, 139 Uniformity, acts of, establishing the Anglican Ritual, opposed by the lords, 26s ; note Uniformity, statute of, 269 ; note Unitarian, "the, a question put to, 202 Usury, 206, 403 Veto, the, 94 Vidame, 273 " Virgin Queen,'' the, 295 Virginia, 390 Visitation of Monasteries, 159 Wages of the labourer, 465 Wallis, Sarah, 380 Walsingham, Francis, 299, 319 War, with France, 254, 399 ; a no Popery, 400 ; cost of a, 401 Ward, Sir P., 370 Warham, Archbishop, his death, 65 ; note Warwick, the Earl of, 28 2 Warwick, Duke of Northumber land, 215, 219, 220 Wat Tyler, 453 Watt, 380 " Waust improvements," 467 Waverley, 184 ; note Wealth of England, 454 Weeding, price of, 465 Wellesley, the Marquis, 446 ; Mr. Henry, 380 Wentworth, 360 Wheat, the price of, 465 Whethamsted, John, 133 Whigs, 424 Whitaker, 107, 306, 312, 319, 349, 359 White, Mr., 463 Whiting, Abbot, 171 ; note , Wilford, Sir T., 331 William III., 375 ; triumphs over James, 395 ; insists on having the Crown to himself, 398 ; goes to war with France, 399 ; act of the 5th year of, 401 ; creates the Bank of England, 401 ; why supported in England, 407 ; taxes in his reign, 412 ; his parliament, 41S Wiltshire, 478 Winchester, Bishop of, 126 ; note Wine, the price of, 465 Works, good, 329 Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, i8s Writers of England, France and Italy, number of, 34 Wykham, William of, 124; note Yearly Meeting of the Quakers, '. York, Duke of, 392 YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 9002 02415 0758 YALE BRITISH HISTORY PRESERVATION PROJECT SUPPORT€D BY NEH I