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244

DEATH OF ARUNDEL.

In 1595, this victim of the religious dissensions of a fierce and bigoted age, ended in his thirtyninth year an unfortunate life, shortened as well as embittered, by the more than monkish austerities which he imagined it meritorious to inflict upon himself.

From the period of the abortive attempt at insurrection under the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, the whole course of public events had tended to increase the difficulties and aggravate the sufferings in which the catholics of England found themselves inextricably involved. Their situation was thus forcibly depicted by Philip Sidney, in a passage of his celebrated letter to her majesty against the French marriage; which at the present day will probably be read in a spirit very different from that in which it was written.

"The other faction, most rightly indeed to be called a faction, is the papists; men whose spirits are full of anguish; some being infested by others whom they accounted damnable; some having their ambition stopped because they are not in the way of advancement; some in prison and disgrace; some whose best friends are banished practisers; many thinking you an usurper; many thinking also you had disannulled your right because of the pope's excommunication; all burthened with the weight of their consciences. Men of great numbers, of great riches (because the affairs of state have not lain on them), of united minds, as all men that deem themselves oppressed naturally

are."

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WALSINGHAM'S APOLOGY.

245

A further explanation of their situation may be extracted from an apology for the measures of the English government towards both papists and puritans, addressed by Walsingham to M. Critoy the French secretary of state..

"Sir,

"Whereas you desire to be advertised touching the proceedings here in ecclesiastical causes, be-cause you seem to note in them some inconstancy and variation; as if we sometimes inclined to one side, sometimes to another, as if that clemency and lenity were not used of late that was used in the beginning; all which you impute to your own superficial understanding of the affairs of this state, having notwithstanding her majesty's doing in singular reverence, as the real pledges which she hath given unto the world of her sincerity in religion and her wisdom in government well meriteth; I am glad of this occasion to impart that little I know in that matter to you; both for your own satisfaction and to the end you may make use thereof towards any that shall not be so modestly and so reasonably minded as you are. I find therefore her majesty's proceedings to have been grounded upon two principles.

"1. The one, that consciences are not to be forced, but to be won and reduced by the force of truth, with the aid of time and use of all good means of instruction and persuasion.

"2. The other, that the causes of conscience, wherein they exceed their bounds and grow to be matter of faction, lose their nature; and that so

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246

WALSINGHAM'S APOLOGY FOR

vereign princes ought distinctly to punish the practice in contempt, though coloured under the pretence of conscience and religion.

"According to these principles, her majesty, at her coming to the crown, utterly disliking the tyranny of Rome; which had used by terror and rigor to settle commandments of men's faiths and consciences; though, as a prince of great wisdom and magnanimity, she suffered but the exercise of one religion, yet her proceedings towards the papists was with great lenity; expecting the good effects which time might work in them. And therefore her majesty revived not the laws made in the 28 and 35 of her father's reign; whereby the oath of supremacy might have been offered at the king's pleasure to any subject, though he kept his conscience never so modestly to himself, and the refusal to take the same oath without further circumstance was made treason. But contrariwise her majesty, not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts; except the abundance of them did overflow into overt or express acts or affirmations; tempered her laws so as it restraineth every manifest disobedience in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her majesty's supreme power, maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction, And as for the oath, it was altered by her majesty into a more grateful form; the hardness of the name and appellation of supreme head was removed; and the penalty of the refusal thereof turned only into disablement to take any promotion, or to exercise any charge; and yet

THE MEASURES OF GOVERNMENT.

247

any man

with liberty of being reinvested therein if should accept thereof during his life. But when, after Pius Quintus had excommunicated her majesty and the bills of excommunication were published in London, whereby her majesty was in a sort proscribed; and that thereupon, as a principal motive or preparative, followed the rebellion in the North; yet because the ill-humours of the realm were by that rebellion partly purged; and that she feared at that time no foreign invasion and much less the attempt of any within the realm not backed by some potent succour from without; she contented herself to make a law against that special case of bringing and publishing any bulls, or the like instruments; whereunto was added a prohibition, upon pain, not of treason, but of an inferior degree of punishment, against the bringing in of agnus Dei, hallowed bread and such other merchandise of Rome as are well known not to be any essential part of the Romish religion; but only to be used in practice as love-tokens to inchant the people's affections from their allegiance to their natural sovereign. In all other points her majesty continued her former lenity: but when, about the twentieth year of her reign, she had discovered in the king of Spain an intention to invade her dominions; and that a principal part of the plot was, to prepare a party within the realm that might adhere to the foreigner; and after that the seminaries began to blossom and to send forth daily priests and professed men, who should by vow taken at shrift reconcile her subjects from their obedience; yea, and bind many of them to attempt

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WALSINGHAM'S APOLOGY.

against her majesty's sacred person; and that, by the poison which they spread, the humors of papists were altered; and that they were no more papists in conscience and of softness, but papists in faction; then were there new laws made for the punishment. of such as should submit themselves to such reconcilements, or renunciations of obedience. And because it was a treason carried in the clouds and in wonderful secresy and came seldom to light; and that there was no presupposition thereof so great, as the recusants to come to divine service, because it was set down by their decrees, that to come to church before reconcilement was absolutely heretical and damnable: Therefore there were laws added containing punishment pecuniary against such recusants, not to enforce conscience, but to enfeeble and impoverish the means of those of whom it resteth indifferent and ambiguous whether they were reconciled or no. And when, notwithstanding all this provision, this poison was dispersed so secretly, as that there were no means to stay it but by restraining the merchants that brought it in; then, lastly, there was added another law, whereby such seditious priests of new erection were exiled; and those that were at that time within the land shipped over; and so commanded to keep hence on pain of treason.

"This hath been the proceeding, though intermingled not only with sundry examples of her majesty's grace towards such as she knew to be papists in conscience and not in faction and singularity, but also with an ordinary mitigation towards of fenders in the highest degree committed by law,

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