istic opinions, was called the " Hot Gospeller." She not only gave him his release, but restored him to his place in her service, and (as he himself relates) made no deduction in his salary for the time he was in prison, and therefore absent from his duties. Such little acts of kindness are often surer tokens of a person's real disposition than more ostentatious benefactions. But to come to the time of which I have been telling you. I am not denying that Mary gave a general consent to the infliction of capital punishment; but it was to be done with moderation and discretion. Upon her Council advising extreme measures, she said she would have them act "without rashness ;" and though she put in no plea for such as by learning might "deceive the simple," she desired that the rest should be "so used that the people might well perceive them not to be condemned without just occasion." At any rate, no blood-thirstiness of spirit is here displayed; and remember the provocation she had received, and the grounds she had for thinking that mercy was thrown away on those with whom she had to do. She herself had met with neither pity nor common courtesy from the Reformers while they were in power; the privacy of her family worship had been invaded, and her household persecuted; she had been insulted by one of the Protestant Bishops in her palace, and owed her life more to the protection of her kinsman, Charles V., and the fear of her enemies, than to their sense of justice. She had seen the Catholic Bishops confined for years in dungeons; the ancient faith proscribed; attendance at the new service enforced by every penalty short of death; the will of her father, although secured by oath, violated in her despite; the succession changed because she was a Catholic; an armed force resisting her lawful rights; insurrections threatening her throne from the same party; her religion outraged and insulted.* All this should be remembered before we condemn her for listening to her counsellors: but still, in point of fact, what part did she take in the Smithfield fires? Her biographer declares * Lectures on the History of the Reformation, by the Rev. J. Waterworth; to whom the writer acknowledges himself indebted for many of the facts here narrated. that all the time they lasted, she was " a prey to the severest headaches, her head being frightfully swelled; she was likewise subject to perpetual attacks of hysteria, which other women exhale by tears or piercing cries (thus, by the way, implying her extraordinary self-command). Who can believe that a woman in this state of mortal suffering was capable of governing a kingdom, or that she was accountable for any thing done in it?" Fox confirms this view: "sometimes," he reports, "she lay weeks without speaking, as one dead; and more than once the rumour went that she had died in childbed." "For a few afternoons, at times, the Queen struggled to pay the attention to business she had formerly done; but her health gave way in the attempt, and she was seen no more at council." And afterwards, the writer shews that, on particular occasions (she mentions expressly that of Cranmer's execution) the Queen was not present at the council, and that her signature was wanting to warrants of arrest. Finally, let me quote you the opinion of a Protestant historian, "who lived too near the time to be deceived:" "She had been a worthy princess,' he says, "if as little cruelty had been done under her as by her. She hated to equivocate, and always was what she was, without dissembling her judgment or conduct for fear or flattery." ور I may consider it proved, therefore, that the Queen was not the instigator of the persecution against the Protestants. Still, it may be said, there is her government-her ministers and her council; at least they were Catholics. Let us, then, inquire in the last place, how far Mary's government can be called a Catholic government. This is an important inquiry. In the first part of this Tract I told youthat the great mass of the nobles and the gentry cared little for religion in itself; and, in fact, could hardly be considered as better than Catholics in name. And now I must tell you that the government was composed of men of a similar temper. Almost every one of them had conformed to Protestantism in Edward's reign; and even those who disliked the changes in doctrine had helped to separate England from the Apostolic See. Mary had had much trouble with them in the first year of her Peers and Commons were dishonest, indifferent to all religions, and willing to establish the most opposing rituals, so that they might retain their grasp on the accursed thing with which their very souls were corrupted. The Church lands, with which Henry VIII. had bribed his aristocracy, titled and untitled, into co-operation with his enormities, both personal and political, had induced national depravity. . . . Yet all ought not to be included in one sweeping censure; a noble minority of good men, disgusted at the detestable penal laws which lighted the torturing fires for the Protestants, seceded bodily from the House of Commons, after vainly opposing them. This glorious band was composed of Catholics as well as Protestants; it was headed by the great legalist, Sergeant Plowden, a Catholic so firm, as to refuse the chancellorship, when urged to take it by Queen Elizabeth, because he would not change his religion." And now we have tracked the blood-stains home, and found them lying at the door of an unprincipled and an anti-Papal government; a government opposed not only to "Papal aggression," but to Papal interference any way. Strange result! that after all, the Smithfield fires, to which many an English Protestant points as his strongest argument against the Pope's religion, should have been kindled and stirred by those who would have kept the Pope out of England, if they could. Yet so it is; and I will conclude by telling you a truth, which you may take as the moral of this history: That the more people endeavour to set up a merely national religion-that is to say, a religion which is exclusively their own, and therefore leans for its support on the temporal power-the more merciless and sanguinary they become. This is most remarkably exemplified in the reign of which we have next to speak, that of Queen Elizabeth, who hanged and disembowelled Catholic priests simply because they would not acknowledge her religious supremacy. LONDON: PRINTED BY ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN, |