The Jesuits soon obtained the direction of all the others; and the seminaries proved, what they were intended to be, so many nurseries for treason.

The Jesuits had risen up in the sixteenth century to perform for the Papal Church the same service which the Mendicant Orders had rendered in the twelfth. Their founder, like St. Francis, was in a state of religious insanity when he began his career; but he possessed, above all other men, the rare talent of detecting his own deficiencies, and remedying them by the most patient diligence. More politic heads aided him in the construction of his system: and they succeeded in forming a scheme perfectly adapted to the purpose for which it was designed. Under the appearance, and with the efficient unity and strength of an absolute monarchy, the Company was in reality always directed by a few of its ablest members. The most vigilant superintendence was exercised over all its parts, and yet, in acting for the general service, entire liberty was allowed to individual talents. For this reason, the Jesuits were exempted from all the stale and burthensome observances wherein the other religioners consumed so large a portion of their time. They admitted no person into the Society, unless they perceived in him some qualities which might be advantageously employed; and in their admirable economy every one found his appropriate place, except the refractory and the vicious. Such members were immediately expelled, . . . the Company would not be disturbed with the trouble of punishing, or endeavouring to correct them. But where they found that devoted obedience which was the prime qualification of a Jesuit, there was no variety of human character, from the lowest to the loftiest intellect, which they did not know how to employ, and to the best advantage. They had domestic offices for the ignorant and lowly; the task of education was committed to expert and patient scholars; men of learning and research and genius were left to follow the bent of their own happy inclinations; eloquent members were destined for the pulpit; and while their politicians managed the affairs of the society, and by directing the consciences of kings and queens, and statesmen, directed, in fact, the government of popish kingdoms, enthusiasts and fanatics were despatched to preach the gospel among the heathen, or to pervert the Protestants. Some

went to reclaim the savages of America; others, with less success, to civilize the barbarous Abyssinians, by reducing them to the Romish Church. And they who were ambitious of martyrdom, were ordered to Japan, where the slow fire, and the more lingering death of the pit, were to be endured; or they went to England, which they called the European Japan, because, going thither as missionaries of a church which had pronounced the Queen a heretic and an usurper, and forbidden all her papistical subjects to obey her, on pain of excommunication, they went to form conspiracies, and concert plans of rebellion, and therefore exposed themselves to death as traitors.

The founders of this famous Society adapted their institution with excellent wisdom to the circumstances of their age; but they took the principles of the Romish Church as they found them, and thus engaged in the support and furtherance of a bad cause by wicked means. The whole odium of those means fell upon the Jesuits, not because they were the more guilty, but because they were the most conspicuous, . the Protestants, and especially the English, looking only at that order which produced their busiest and ablest enemies; and the Romanists dexterously shifting upon an envied, and therefore a hated, community, the reproach which properly belongs to their Popes, their Councils, and their universal Church. In England, indeed, no other religioners were so active; and this was because the celebrity of the order, as had been the case with every monastic order in its first age, attracted to it the most ardent and ambitious spirits. Young English Papists of this temper eagerly took the fourth and peculiar vow, which placed them as Missionaries, at the absolute disposal of their Old Man of the Mountain; the Popes at that time had richly merited this title. For the principle of assassination was sanctioned by the two most powerful of the Popish Kings, and by the head of the Papal Church. It was acted upon in France and in Holland: rewards were publicly offered for the murder of the Prince of Orange; and the fanatics, who undertook to murder Elizabeth, were encouraged by a plenary remission of sins, granted for this special service.

...

Against the propagandists of such doctrine as was contained in the Bull of Pius V., and inculcated in the seminaries, Eliza

beth was compelled, for self-preservation, to proceed severely. They were sought for and executed, not for believing in transubstantiation, nor for performing Mass, but for teaching that the Queen of England ought to be deposed; that it was lawful to kill her; and that all Popish subjects, who obeyed her commands, were cut off from the communion of their Church for so doing. "The very end and purpose of these Jesuits and seminary men," said the proclamation, "was not only to prepare sundry her Majesty's subjects, inclinable to disloyalty, to give aid to foreign invasions and stir up rebellion, but also (that most perilous is) to deprive her Majesty (under whom, and by whose provident government, with God's assistance, these realms have been so long and so happily kept and continued in great plenty, peace, and security) of her life, crown, and dignity." "As far as concerns our society," said Campian2 the Jesuit, in an oration delivered at Douay, "we, all dispersed in great numbers through the world, have made a league and holy oath, that as long as any of us are alive, all our care and industry, all our deliberations and councils, shall never cease to trouble your calm and safety." The same enthusiast, when from his place of concealment he addressed a letter to the Privy Council, defying the heads of the English Church to a disputation before the Queen and Council, repeated the threat. "Be it known unto you," he said, "that we have made a league, all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England, cheerfully to carry the cross that you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or to be consumed with your prisons. Expenses are reckoned: the enterprise is begun: it is of God: it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted. So it must be restored."

Campian and his fellow-sufferers acted up to the lofty spirit of this declaration. They died as martyrs, according to their own views, and as martyrs they were then regarded, and are still represented, by the Romanists. Certain, however, it is, that they suffered for points of State, and not of Faith; not as Roman Catholics, but as Bull-papists; not for religion, but for

Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop WilStrype's Annals, vol. iii. p. 33. Ditto, Appendix, p. 14.

1 Strype's Annals, iii. p. 85. liams, p. 134.

treason. Some of them are to be admired as men of genius and high endowments, as well as of heroic constancy: all to be lamented, as acting for an injurious purpose, under a mistaken sense of duty; but their sufferings belong to the history of papal politics, not to that of religious persecution. They succeeded in raising one rebellion, which was easily suppressed, for Elizabeth was deservedly popular, and the Protestants had now become the great majority: but repeated conspiracies against the life of the Queen were detected; and such were the avowed principles and intentions of the Papists, wherever they dared avow them, that Walsingham' expressed his fears of a Bartholomew breakfast, or a Florence banquet.

4

66

The object of all these conspiracies was to set the Queen of Scots upon the throne; this, the English Jesuits said was the only means of reforming all Christendom, by reducing it to the Catholic faith; and they boasted that there were more heads occupied upon it than English heads, and more ways to the wood than one." A book was written by a friend of 3 Campian's, wherein the ladies who were about Elizabeth's person, were exhorted, after the example of Judith, to destroy her. Many of the Protestant nobles and gentry deemed the danger so great, that they formed an association, pledging themselves to prosecute to death, as far as lay in their power, all those who should attempt any thing against the Queen; and this was thought so necessary a measure, that Parliament followed the example. Mary was but too well justified in encouraging the plans which were formed for her deliverance and elevation; nor was it by the sense of her own wrongs only that she was excited to this; a religious motive was superadded. She communicated with Alva, urging him, while her son was yet young, to devise means for conveying him out of Scotland into Spain, where he might be bred up in the Romish faith. When it was too late for this, and the scheme of marrying her to the Duke of Norfolk had ended in bringing him to the scaffold, a plan was formed between the Pope and Don John of Austria, that Don John should conquer England by help of the Spaniards, marry her, and become King

6

'Strype's Annals, ii. p. 139. Gregory Martin was the author. Strype's Annals, iii. P. 217. 6 Strada, vol. i. p. 444.

2 Ibid. p. 48. 3 Ibid. vol. iii. p. 247, 281. The printer was executed for this treason. Ibid. ii. p. 50. The letters were intercepted.

Ed. 1640.

of Great Britain in her right. In the early years of her imprisonment, the King of France said of her, "She will never cease till she lose her head. They will put her to death: it is her own fault and folly." Rather it was her misfortune and her fate.

Elizabeth's counsellors had long advised that Mary should be put to death: they had obtained full proof of her connexion with schemes of conspiracy and invasion: the people cried out for this, as necessary for the security of the Queen and of the nation; and Parliament 2 petitioned, when the sentence had been passed, that it might be carried into effect. Yet it is a disgraceful part of English history. Some who had entered into correspondence with her, endeavoured now to hasten her death, as the surest means of averting suspicion from themselves; and Elizabeth's conduct was marked by duplicity, which has left upon her memory a lasting stain. Nor is the act itself to be excused or palliated. It was thought at the time to be required by the strongest circumstances of state necessity; and yet neither the Queen nor the kingdom were more secure when this enemy was removed the practices against Elizabeth's life were still continued, and a title to the crown was vamped up for the royal family of Spain, which the Seminarists supported by their writings and intrigues.

Elizabeth was at this time engaged in open hostilities with the Spaniards, a course to which the circumstances of Europe had compelled her against her will. Probably she long retained a sense of personal good will towards Philip, for the protection that he had afforded her during her sister's reign: when the war in the Netherlands broke out, she was well aware how dangerous to England it would be, if France should obtain possession of those important provinces; and the termination which she endeavoured to bring about, as long as there was the slightest hope of effecting it, was that the inhabitants should have the free exercise of their religion secured to them, and return to their obedience. Had Philip listened to her interference, there was nothing, either in the temper or principles of the English Government, which would have prevented a reciprocal toleration But religious bigotry made the Spaniards resolve upon a 1 Strype's Annals, ii. p. 50. 2 Ibid. iii. p. 369.