I

Our histories have not, I believe, stated what is untrue of Queen Mary, nor perhaps have they very much exaggerated what is true of her; but our arguers, whose only talk is of Smithfield, are generally very uncandid in what they conceal. It would appear to be little known that the statutes which enabled Mary to burn those who had conformed to the Church of her father and brother were Protestant statutes, declaring the common law against heresy, and framed by her father Henry the Eighth, and confirmed and acted on by Order of Council of her brother Edward the Sixth, enabling that mild and temperate young sovereign to burn divers misbelievers, by sentence of commissioners, (little better, says Neale, than a Protestant Inquisition,) appointed to "examine and search after all Anabaptists, Heretics, or contemners of the Book of Common Prayer." It would appear to be seldom considered that her zeal might very possibly have been warmed by the circumstance of both her chaplains having been imprisoned for their religion, and herself arbitrarily detained, and her safety threa tened, during the short but persecuting reign of her brother.1 The sad evidences of the violence of those days are by no means confined to her acts. The faggots of persecution were not kindled by Papists only, nor did they cease to blaze when the power of using them as instruments of conversion ceased to be in Popish hands. Cranmer himself, in his dreadful death, met with but equal measure for the flames to which he had doomed several who denied the spiritual supremacy of Henry the Eighth; to which he had doomed also a Dutch Arian, in Edward the Sixth's reign; and to which, with great pains and difficulty, he had persuaded that prince to doom another miserable enthusiast, Joan Bocher, for some metaphysical notions of her own on the divine incarnation. "So that on both sides" (says Lord Herbert, of Cherbury,) "it grew a bloody time."4 Calvin burned Servetus at Geneva, for "discoursing concerning the Trinity, contrary to the sense of the whole Church, and thereon set forth a book wherein he giveth an account of his doctrine, and of whatever else had passed in this affair, and teacheth that the sword may be lawfully employed against heretics." Yet Calvin was no Papist. John Knox extolled in his writings, as "the godly fact of James Mel

s

Burnet's History of the Reformation, vol. ii. p. 111; Rymer, vol. xv. p. 181; Neale's History of the Puritans, vol. i. p. 49.

2 Strype, vol. ii. p. 249; Heyward, p. 315.

Burnet's Reformation, vol. ii. p. 111; Neale's History of the Puritans, vol. i. p. 48 et seq.

Life of Henry VIII. p. 420; Burnet, vol. ii. Coll. 35; Strype's Memoirs of Cranmer, p. 181.

5 Sleidan's History of the Reformation, translated by Bohun, p. 594.

vil," the savage murder by which Cardinal Beaton was made to expiate his many and cruel persecutions; a murder to which, by the great popular eloquence of Knox, his fellow-laborers in the vineyard of reformation, Lesly and Melvil, had been excited: and yet John Knox, and Lesly, and Melvil, were no Papists. Henry the Eighth, whose one virtue was impartiality in these matters, (if an impartial and evenly-balanced persecution of all sects be a virtue,) beheaded a Chancellor and a Bishop, because, having admitted his civil supremacy, they doubted his spiritual. Of the latter of them Lord Herbert says, "The Pope, who suspected not, perchance, that the Bishop's end was so near, had, for more testimony of his favor to him as disaffection to our King, sent him a cardinal's hat; but unseasonably, his head being off." He beheaded the Countess of Salisbury, because at upwards of eighty years old she wrote a letter to Cardinal Pole, her own son; and he burned Barton, the "Holy Maid of Kent," for a prophecy of his death. He burned four Anabaptists in one day for opposing the doctrine of infant baptism; and he burned Lambert, and Anne Ascue, and Belerican, and Lassells, and Adams, on another day, for opposing that of transubstantiation; with many others, of lesser note, who refused to subscribe to his Six Bloody Articles, as they were called, or whose opinions fell short of his, or exceeded them, or who abided by opinions after he had abandoned them: and all this after the Reformation. And yet Henry the Eighth was the sovereign who first delivered us from the yoke of Rome.

In later times, thousands of Protestant dissenters of the four great sects were made to languish in loathsome prisons, and hundreds to perish miserably, during the reign of Charles the Second,+ under a Protestant High Church Government, who then first applied, in the prayer for the Parliament, the epithets of "most religious and gracious" to a sovereign whom they knew to be profligate and unprincipled beyond example, and had reason to suspect to be a concealed Papist.

Later still, Archbishop Sharpe was sacrificed by the murderous enthusiasm of certain Scotch Covenanters, who yet appear to have sincerely believed themselves inspired by Heaven to this act of cold-blooded barbarous assassination.

',

On subjects like these, silence on all sides, and a mutual interchange of repentance, forgiveness, and oblivion, is wisdom. But

T

Hume, Edward VI.; Keith's History of the Reformation of Scotland,

p. 43.

Life of Henry VIII p. 420.

Hume's History of England, Henry VIII.; Lord Herbert, id, pp. 404. 419, 420, 528, and 530. See also for the Six Articles, id. p. 508.

+ Neale's History of the Puritans, vol. iv. p. 320 et seq. to p. 447.

to quote grievances on one side only is not honesty. Nor should we, if we eagerly read the story of the massacres of Protestants in Ireland in 1641, turn our eyes from that of the massacres of the Catholics from the time of James the First to that of King William inclusively. We there find, and, alas! much later than King William's time we find,-the details of many a dreadful and savage execution (to the very letter of that dreadful and savage law till of late in force against treason,) on the persons of Roman Catholic priests, the aged, the unoffending, and the pious ;-hanged, but not till they were dead, and then-(but those who are curious for such details may be abundantly gratified by consulting the Statute Book,) for no other crime than the having administered to the sick and dying the last comforts of their persecuted communion. It was not until the reign of George the Third that the laws were repealed by which it was death to officiate at the Mass. Under these dreadful laws many hundreds of priests have been put to a cruel and ignominious death.

one.

The history of massacres on both sides have however, as might have been expected, been strangely exaggerated. For example:Borlace (a writer very zealously quoted by some who are eager to revive the remembrance of outrages long past, and feuds that ought to have been long ago reconciled,) states that in 1641 no less than one hundred thousand Protestants were murdered in the course of a few days in Ireland. Sir John Temple, another historian equally in repute with the same party, and whose authority, in spite of consanguinity, I am constrained to doubt, calculates the proportion of Catholics to Protestants in Ireland as thirty to Now let us suppose that only five Protestants escaped for every one who was murdered, man, woman, and child, throughout the land, (which is the very smallest allowance we can make, considering that the whole massacre lasted but a few days,) and this gives us, on the joint authority of these contemporary historians, a gross population of at least six hundred thousand Protestants and eighteen millions of Catholics in Ireland in 1641. Hume, more moderately, estimates the Catholics as only in the proportion of six to one to the Protestants, but says that by some computations those who perished are supposed to be 150 or 200,000; and yet, with all the powers of multiplication of that fruitful island, I believe that the highest estimate of its population now does not far exceed seven millions. But, leaving what may be termed the fabulous and heroic ages of Protestant and Popish Narrative, what are we to learn from the uncontested facts that remain? Why, that Persecution and Murder do not belong to the tenets of any sect of Christians. That these histories are the histories of bad times and of bad men, such as all ages and all large sects have produced;

but that the laws of the present age, and that manners more powerful than laws, (such as enable the stranger now to approach the fortresses of Arundel, or Wardour, or Stafford, without fear of sling or bow-shot,) may be trusted to restrain the subjects of this realm of whatever sects, in the nineteenth century, from reviving the theological labors of those two ancient co-missionaries, Fire and Sword.

"I will be attacked (says O'Leary) with the council of Lateran, the wars of the Albigenses, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, &c. I am a Christian, and deny the transmigration of souls. I am no wise concerned in past transactions; or, if my religion be charged with them, I have in my hands the cruel arms of retaliation." 1 Then let us be just. Let us remember, whilst we accuse the Roman Catholic religion of the atrocities of Queen Mary, that we should not relish the hearing our own charged with the murderous acts of her father and brother. Henry the Eighth was the first Protestant King of England; yet what Papist is there so wicked or so mad as to maintain that it is a practice sanctioned by our religion to marry six wives, divorce three, and behead two. And yet this would be a mode of reasoning nearly as liberal, as wise, and as true. Far different, however, from the reigns of the three sovereigns of her house immediately preceding her, was, with all its violences, that of Queen Elizabeth. She was seldom a persecutor for mere religion; and she loved her country too well, and was too proud of it, to content herself with being the Queen of only one party in it, in order to become the oppressor of the rest. She was arbitrary by the acclamation of her people; she was cruel from the dangers that surrounded her. Her Parliament, it is true, declared the corresponding with the see of Rome to be high-treason. But the proof that this was not a law against the religion simply was that this law was not extended to Ireland. She burned Papists, it is true, in numbers sufficient, if not to balance, at least to countenance, the persecutions of her sister. But it appears that she seldom burned them from a mere controversial impulse; it was usually when she found one who favored the political views of the Queen of Scots, or the political doctrines of the Jesuits of Spain, that she took the short road to Justice, and destroyed him as a Papist. But the Catholics of England were not even in those days justly chargeable as a body with joining

1 O'Leary's Remarks on Mr. Wesley's Letter. In quoting from the works of this eloquent and patriotic Irishman, of course I am not guilty of the arrogance of changing a word. I would venture, however, to suggest, that by the term of volition printed in italics at the beginning of the sentence is meant only the sign of the future tensc.

either of these parties, or with being disposed to obey the deposing bull of Pius V. And the Spanish admiral, Medina Sidonia, knew it, when he said that "if he had landed he would have made no more distinction between Catholics and Protestants than what the point of his sword would have made between their flesh." And Queen Elizabeth knew it, and acted as one who knew it. For Catholics sat indiscriminately with Protestants in her Parliaments; and she admitted persons of all religious persuasions to her councils and to the highest offices of the state. Lord Pembroke, her Governor of Dover Castle and Keeper of her Great Seal, was a Roman Catholic. Lord Clifford, her Warden of the Scottish Marches, was a Roman Catholic. And there is every reason to believe that Lord Effingham, who commanded her fleet against the Spanish armada, whose banners the Pope himself had blessed, was a Roman Catholic. The history of the causes that led to the severities she practised should be more fully studied than it generally is, before justice can, I think, be done to the memory of this glorious Princess. It tends, however, to establish this fact, that generally these were "acts of signal severity against those who were privily practising for Rome and Spain, and who, to attach the unlearned and meaner sort to their party in the state, made religion a pretence.” '

But if we acquit the Roman Catholic religion of being essentially and uniformly a religion of blood, what remains? That it disturbs the undivided allegiance due to the sovereign, and introduces a foreign and superior jurisdiction. This is at least a milder charge, and one bearing a fairer character of probability; yet, if English history be evidence, a charge equally untenable and untrue. If I am told that there were treasonable negociations between English Catholics and foreign countries whilst their religion was suffering under active and fiery persecution in their own, I protest against the nature of the evidence. It does not touch the charge. While, by the penal system, which lasted for more than a century and a half, the English government pursued them as enemies, of course they were enemies of the English government. The extirpation of the Roman Catholic religion was the avowed object of the Protestant government; the overthrow, then, of the Protestant government I take it for granted was the first, and dearest, and deepest, as it was the most natural, among the secret wishes of the Roman Catholics. But I appeal to their conduct

See Sir Francis Walsingham's Letter; William Lord Burleigh's “ Execution of Justice in England;" also Dr. Birch's "View of the Negocia tions between England, France, and Brussels;" also Lord Bolingbroke's "Essays on English History," Reign of Elizabeth.