conviction of the Jesuit, 1 heavier than ever before; (3) that all persons over sixteen who should absent themselves from the established church should be fined £20 a month, and in default of payment for three months after judgment should be imprisoned until they should conform; and (4) that in order to prevent the concealment of priests as tutors or schoolmasters in private families, all such should be licensed by the ordinary, and that any one who should teach without a license, or employ a teacher unlicensed, torture and should suffer a heavy penalty. During the year which fol lowed the passage of that act, Campian, who, together with Persons, had been sent into England as a leader of the Jesuit mission, charged with its reconversion, was, after being forced on the rack to reveal the names of several of his co-religionists who had sheltered him, convicted of high treason under an indictment presented against him and others, charging them with a conspiracy, said to have been formed at Rheims and Rome, for the murder of the queen and for the overthrow of association church and state.2 A few years after this it was that a volunthe protec- tary association was formed for the protection of the life of tion of the Elizabeth, who was continually alarmed by reports of conspiraqueen's life; cies against her formed in the interest of the Queen of Scots.3 In the new parliament which met in November, 1584, the association for the queen's protection was legalized by an act, the the associa first to be passed, in which it was originally proposed that in the event of any attempt to injure the royal person, or in the formed for an act legalizing tion passed in 1584; 1 As to the earliest authenticated instance of the use of torture in England, see vol. i. p. 582, and note 3. Theoretically, it was never a part of the law of England. Coke says that the rack in the Tower was introduced by the duke of Exeter in the reign of Henry VI. 3 Inst., p. 35. It was extensively used by the Tudors and by James I. and Charles I., not only to obtain evidence in political cases, but also as to ordinary crimes. For the proof see Jardine's Reading on Torture, with letters taken from the Council Book and running from November, 1551, to May, 1640. The Tudors evidently assumed that the right to inflict torture was a part of the royal prerogative which could be exercised by special license from the crown. See Gardiner, Hist. Eng., vol. i. pp. 265, 266, and notes; Strype's Whitgift, p. 83. The judges, however, expressed a contrary view when consulted on the subject in the time of Charles I. as to the case of Felton. 3 State Trials, pp. 367, 571. As to the gradual introduction of torture on the continent during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and its connection with the revival of the Roman Law, see Lea's Superstition and Force, Philadelphia, 1878, pp. 371-522. 2 State Trials, vol. i. pp. 1049, 1072; Bridgewater, pp. 219, 304. Campian and two other priests were executed in December, 1581. 8 Camden, p. 411. 427 Eliz. C. I, "for the security of the queen's person & continuance of the realm in peace." The second act of this parliament was directed against "Jesuits, seminary priests, & other such like disobedient persons.”—27 Eliz. c. 2. act as tuted the which in condemned event of an invasion or rebellion in behalf of any one claiming title to the crown after the queen's death, the person by whom or in whose behalf such attempt should be made should forfeit all right to the succession, and should with his or her confederates be pursued to death by all the queen's subjects. An amendment1 was, however, made, which provided that no person should be pursued to death by the association until their privity to treason had first been established by a special commission to be constituted by royal authority. Under the under that terms of that statute it was that the commission was consti- amended tuted which in 1586 found Mary guilty of having been privy was constito Babington's conspiracy contemplating an invasion of the commission realm and the queen's death. And yet even after the re- 1586 moval of the chief danger by the execution of Mary in Feb- the Queen ruary, 1587, and after the loyal response made by the English of Scots; catholics to Elizabeth's call in the presence of the peril that arose out of the presence of the Spanish Armada in 1588, they persecution were subjected down to her death to incessant persecution, continued; whose hardships were deepened by the passage, in 1593, of an the act act which increased the penalties of recusancy by providing increasing that all persons convicted of non-attendance at church should the penalnot travel more than five miles from particular places of resi- recusancy; dence; and in the event of an inability to pay the monthly fine of £20 to which such persons were subject, they were to abjure the realm or suffer as felons. It has been estimated result of that, apart from those who died in prison, about two hundred persecution catholics suffered death during Elizabeth's reign under the compared persecuting statutes just enumerated, either for denying the of Mary's. 1 Lingard, vol. vi. p. 374. 2 For a picturesque account of Mary's trial and execution under the commission, see Froude, vol. xii. pp. 169-255; for a legal review, see Hallam, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 158-162. 8 35 Eliz. c. 2: "An act for restraining popish recusants to some certain places of abode." "The result of this legislation was that at the end of the reign of Elizabeth every Roman Catholic priest in England, except the few who might have been ordained in the reign of Queen Mary, was by the very fact of his presence in England guilty of high treason; that to celebrate the mass was an offence in itself punish able with fine and imprisonment, and Sir J. F. Stephen, Hist. of the Crim. 4 Dodd puts the number at 191, of catholics of 1593 ties of Elizabeth's with that Struggle of Elizabeth with the Puritan party : as the only source of of the New Testament; Lollard ideas live on until of Henry VIII. ; royal supremacy, for exercising the functions of the priesthood, or for becoming reconciled to the See of Rome. Thus it appears that while ecclesiastical persecution by burning was suspended at the queen's accession, the number of deaths resulting from what may be called political persecution, carried on under statutes extending the penalties of treason to offences against the state church, closely approximates that which oc curred under the heresy statutes in the reign of Mary.1 4. The fact has heretofore been emphasized that the spirit of restlessness and discontent with the doctrines and practices of the medieval church which Lollardry had left behind it, and which had its root in the idea that each individual should look The Bible to the Bible alone as the source of religious truth, was strengthened and intensified in the ranks of the common people by inspiration; the importation into England, in 1526, of Tyndale's translation Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, which had been made in Lutheran strongholds at Luther's instance and solicitation. The principles of dissent from the ancient ecclesiastical order, which the Lollards had promulgated two centuries before the English Reformation really began, thus lived on until the reign of the reign Henry VIII., when the repudiation of the papal supremacy gave a fresh impulse to the attack long before begun against the whole system of theology which the papacy embodied. The tendency thus manifested by the revived Lollardry to unite itself with the Lutheran movement ceased, however, with the fall of Cromwell,3 and with the rise of a new apostle, who about that time became the great intellectual light of the protestant world. In 1535 Calvin produced at Basle his “Institutes of the Christian Religion;" in the next year he became the spiritual head of the protestant community which had become dominant at Geneva; and from his return to that city in 1541 down to his death in 1564, he reigned as the pontiff of Calvinistic protestant opinion. In the new theology which he promulsystem of gated was embodied an elastic and adaptable system of church goverment; government, which, ignoring the Lutheran theory of national religion, rested upon the assumption that the reformers as a influence of Luther supplanted by that of Calvin; church wealth of governing the source sovereign man; his private Christian authority whole, regardless of nationality, constituted a vast Christian a commoncommonwealth, subdivided into independent and self-governing independ churches, in which the source of all power and authority was ent, selfthe sovereign Christian man, elect of God and predestined churches; to eternal life, whose most sacred duty involved the assertion of authoreven unto death of his private judgment in all matters of con- it the science against any form of religious belief that princes or Christian states might attempt to force upon him. Thus it was that right of the church as embodied in this new Christian democracy was judgment; thrown into hostile relations with the state by virtue of the the new doctrine which claimed that the religious supremacy of kings democracy should yield to the higher sovereignty of the individual con- denied the religious science.1 While the principles of the new system thus assailed supremacy of kings; from without the spiritual supremacy of the state, they still more sharply menaced from within the supremacy of the epis- also the copate through the substitution of a new system of church of the government, in which all power came from below from the episcopate; church members, in whom was vested the right to elect the lay elders and deacons who, with the existing body of pastors, were to elect new ministers.3 The avowed purpose of this reformers school of reform was to substitute in the place of the pomp their and power of the ancient ecclesiastical system a simple and purpose to "pure" form of doctrine and discipline, a claim out of which for the probably arose the later name of "Puritan." The theology simple and of Calvin, which reasserted the right, always maintained by the papacy, of the subject to draw the sword against ungodly doctrine; princes, soon took vigorous hold in Scotland, where the pro- the Scotch testant party led the way in its application by the making of "cove"a covenant" at the close of 1557, in which the members 1557; rior order to presbyters, and claiming the sole right of ordination and the use of the keys." — Neal's Hist. of the Puritans, vol. i. pp. 211, 235-240. 3 Calvin's Inst. 1 "Both the Calvinists and the Papists, widely as they differed in other respects, regarded with extreme jealousy all encroachments of the temporal power on the domain of the spiritual power. Both Calvinists and Papists maintained that subjects might justifiably draw the sword against ungodly rulers. ... The Church of England meantime condemned both Calvinists and Papists, and loudly boasted that no duty was more constantly or earnestly inculcated by her than that of submission to princes." - Macaulay, Hist. Eng., vol. i. p. 29. 2 "Affecting to be thought a supe 4 "It first came into use as the designation of an English church party about the year 1564 [Fuller's Ch. Hist., vol. ix. p. 66], but after a few years it got to be used also as inclusive of many who had separated from the Church of England.". Blount, Reform. of the Church of Eng., vol. ii. p. 391, note I. 5 For John Knox's views upon this subject, see Strype, p. 119. declared substitute ancient a form of nant" of England; exiles sought refuge at Zurich and Geneva. The inevit bound themselves to defy the religion of the state, and to maintain "even unto death" that of the "congregation."1 In Calvinistic a less aggressive form the ideas of Calvin took so firm a hold ideas in in England during the reign of Edward VI. that upon the accession of Mary, when persecution drove many of the rethe Marian formers beyond the sea, they sought a refuge not with the Lutheran churches of North Germany, but with the Calvinistic churches of Zurich and Geneva,2 whence they returned at the accession of Elizabeth, fired with the zeal which personal contact with the leaders of the new movement naturally excited. Nothing could have been more inevitable than the conflict able conflict that ensued between the returning exiles thus pledged to a Calvinistic radical programme which repudiated the religious supremacy of the crown, the episcopacy as a form of church government, together with the ceremonies of the older faith, and that conservative system of church reform reëstablished by the statutes of Elizabeth, which recognized nearly every principle against which the Calvinists protested. Not only was the royal supremacy, the episcopal system, and much of the ancient ritual jealously preserved by law, but the fact was also known that the queen's the queen herself, who never would consent to a legal recognipersonal predilections; between ideas and the state church as reëstablished by Elizabeth; tion of the right of the clergy to marry, possessed a strong personal predilection for many forms of worship which the extreme protestants denounced as the "leavings of idolatry." 5 As the strict enforcement of the Acts of Supremacy prevented for a time the formation of sects outside of the state church, the first opposition to the established system came from within, 1 Keith, p. 66; Knox, pp. 98-100. The subscribers had the earls of Argyle, Morton, and Glencairn at their head. 2 As to some of the eminent divines who went at that time, see Burnet, vol. i. p. 471. See also as to their return from Zurich and Geneva, Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 808, 809. 8 "In the eye of the Presbyterian clergy, the king and the beggar were of equal importance, and ought to be possessed of only equal influence, as soon as they entered the church doors. Noble as this idea was, it may safely be said that this organized ecclesiastical democracy could not flourish upon English soil."-S. R. Gardiner, Hist. Eng., vol. i. p. 23. 4 Permission had been given by 2 & 3 Edw. VI. c. 21, and confirmed by 5 & 6 Edw. VI. c. 12. These acts were repealed by 1 Mary, s. 2, c. 2. While the marriage of bishops and priests was connived at during Elizabeth's reign, the queen would never consent to disturb Mary's act, which was never repealed until the first year of James I. In one diocese it was the custom after Elizabeth's accession to pay the bishop for a license to keep a concubine. Strype's Parker, p. 203. The offspring of all clergymen during that reign were in legal contemplation illegitimate. 5 Elizabeth even went so far as to quiz the Puritans as "brethren in Christ." |