1578.]

England was adopted through the instrumentality of an active though secret propaganda, undertaken by a succession of devoted and earnest missionaries, trained in foreign seminaries under the auspices of the recently founded order of Jesus, known as the Jesuits. This world-famous order owed its origin to a young Spanish soldier named Ignatius Loyola, who, after being dangerously wounded at the siege of Pampeluna in 1521, consecrated his life to religion. A few like-minded comrades joined Loyola, and they devoted themselves to the advancement of Christianity, and constituted themselves the vowed servants of the Pope, at whose disposition they placed themselves unreservedly. We hear of them first at Rome in 1537. They offered to come to England in the days of cardinal Pole, but Pole distrusted them, and declined their proffered assistance. The Jesuits were bound by the most solemn vows of obedience, but the rule of their order confined them to no monastic or secluded life. They were, and have ever since been, devoted to the more practical duties of religion-to preaching, to hearing confessions, and especially to the work of education.

The order spread rapidly in continental Europe, and became a most formidable army of supporters of the Papal claims to supremacy. At Douai, and later at Rheims, under the powerful sanction and patronage of Philip of Spain, important seminaries for the training and education. of English Roman Catholics were established. These famous educational centres near England, together with an English college founded by Pope Gregory XIII. at Rome in 1579, became centres of disaffected

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English Romanists. To the men trained in these educational homes the order of Jesus became the object of especial admiration. The Jesuits were the newest of the "orders"; their especial raison d'être was the defence of the Pope, whose lofty claims had been called in question by the daring innovations of the Reformation. The new "order" was the Pope's body-guard. It had its centres in every great city. The most profound learning, the most entire self-devotion, unquestioning obedience, unremitting industry, were its watchwords. The most fervid among the English Romanists were eager to become members of the famous

company.

At the end of 1578 Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, wrote to Philip" that the number of Catholics increases daily, the instruments being missionaries from the seminary which your majesty founded. A hundred of those who went to study there or at Rome have returned in this past year. They travel disguised as laymen, and, young as they are, the fervour with which they throw themselves into the work, and the cheerful fortitude with which they accept martyrdom when occasion offers, are entirely admirable. Some have already

suffered with the utmost calmness.

Till lately there were but few priests left in England, and religion was dying out for want of teachers . . . but now, by means of those who have come over, it has pleased God to provide a remedy."

These words of Mendoza fairly picture the state of things in England in 1578 and the following years, and clearly describe the new danger to which the settlement of religion under the queen, Cecil, Parker,

and their coadjutors, was exposed. The Jesuit missionaries in England became more and more active. We hear of numbers flocking to the secret services of these priests, who, in various disguises, itinerated from place to place. A printing press was set up, which issued pamphlets bearing on controversial points, written by skilled hands, and scattered them among the people. An active propaganda of the old learning was undertaken by these zealous men.

Very reluctantly the queen was at length. induced to adopt severe measures against these disturbers of the public peace. For it must be remembered that the religion so earnestly and effectively preached by these new missionaries meant revolution; meant the queen's dethronement, if not her death; meant a complete disruption of the whole existing machinery of church and state; meant complete submission to the Pope, and a return to the old preReformation mediaval superstitions. Towards the close of 1580 various arrests were made, and in accordance with the unhappy practice of that age-too common, alas! in all countries-torture was had recourse to, to extort confessions. The adoption of this infamous mode of questioning was apologised for somewhat later thus, in a letter addressed to secretary Walsingham: "Nor was any man tormented for matter of religion, nor asked what he believed of any point of religion, but only to understand particular practices against the queen for setting up their religion by treason or force." Alas! not a few of these brave but mistaken men were even put to death under circumstances of revolting cruelty; but those who are

enthusiastic admirers of their earnestness and undoubted fortitude under suffering, must not forget that they suffered as traitors, not as missionaries.

tion.

That the queen's life was again and again in danger from these repeated plots, was firmly believed, and not without reason. The mission of these Jesuits was evidently no evidently no mere innocent evangelisaIt was connected-there is abundant evidence for the assertion—with dark plots for assassination and rebellion. A terrible object-lesson was indeed presented to the English statesmen who were advising Elizabeth, by the assassination of the heroic prince of Orange (William the Silent), the able and successful leader of the Netherlands revolt against the bloody tyranny of Alva and Philip of Spain. The assassination of William the Silent was attempted in 1582, and fatally carried out at Delft in 1584. It was an act which was mainly due to the fanaticism inspired by the fervid preaching of the same great Jesuit order in the Low Countries. stant plots, more or less important in the numbers and organisation of those who shared in them, came to light in these years. One most notable was the conspiracy of Throgmorton, which undoubtedly designed the assassination of Elizabeth and the placing of the captive queen of Scots upon the throne, by the aid of Spain and of Roman well-wishers in France. Throgmorton's papers, which were seized, were found gravely to implicate Mendoza, Philip's ambassador, who was in consequence summarily ordered to quit the realm.

Con

Thus the Roman Catholic reaction gradually became more and more closely

a

associated in the minds of Englishmen with treason, revolution, and even with cowardly assassination. The earnest Roman Catholic-even the law-abiding-as the reign of Elizabeth wore on, gradually appeared in the eyes of the people clad in the dark and sombre livery of a traitor. So widespread was the persuasion that the loved queen's life was in imminent danger from the machinations of traitors, that " voluntary association was formed, the members of which solemnly undertook to prosecute to the death all who should make an attempt against the queen (Elizabeth), and all in whose behalf such an attempt should be made. This was a threat against the imprisoned Mary-a warning to her party that her death would follow on the success of any plot against Elizabeth. The Catholic assassinations were met in England with a stern threat of vengeance. The two parties stood in undisguised hostility the one to the other."

In 1583-4 Mendoza, the ambassador, wrote that as many as 11,000 persons were under surveillance or in strict arrest as suspected of traitorous designs connected with religion. As many as 500 Jesuits or seminary priests were believed to be at work in the realm; a great number of these had at different times, since the adoption of more rigorous measures, been arrested, and batches of them, convicted of traitorous designs, had been executed. But the propaganda went on; the death of each of the martyrs, as they were termed, was celebrated as a victory of the Catholic religion, and each story of

*Bishop Creighton: "Age of Elizabeth," book v., chap. ii.

their sufferings, when told abroad in the seminaries of Rheims and Rome, was a fresh incentive for others to offer themselves for the dangerous English mission. The hour drew near for the culmination of all this. The assassination of the English queen-that "wicked woman," as she was termed—an event earnestly desired, and, if possible, to be compassed, was freely spoken of in the lecture halls of foreign seminaries, where the tools for these dark conspiracies were forged. The two chiefs of Roman Catholicism, the clerical and the lay, had signified their approval of the queen's murder. Pope Gregory XIII. gave his sanction to the carrying out of the murderous deed; and Philip II., king of Spain, the most powerful potentate in the world, had expressed his views in writing. "To kill Elizabeth was an enterprise," wrote the Spanish monarch, "so saintly, and would be of so great a service to Almighty God, that God would prosper it, unless provoked by the backwardness of men."

In 1586 the plot was hatched which brought about the grand catastrophe. It is known in English history as "Babington's Conspiracy," from the chief conspirator, a young English Roman Catholic gentleman. The details were planned in the Rheims seminary, and several of the principal agents were more or less connected with the court of Elizabeth. The great plot included, besides the assassination of the English queen and her chief ministers (of these Cecil and Walsingham, the secretary, were the most prominent), the setting at liberty of Mary, queen of Scots, with, of course, her proclamation as queen in the room of Elizabeth,

1586.]

and an invasion of the Spanish troops from the Netherlands to co-operate with the English Romanists, who were expected to rise and support Mary Stuart. But the ever-watchful minister, Walsingham, Elizabeth's secretary of state, was not to be caught napping. His emissaries were everywhere-in Paris, in Rome, in the very seminaries themselves; and every dark detail of Babington's arrangements was known in London. When the fullest information had been obtained, the ringleaders were arrested. All the private papers of the queen of Scots were seized. Mary, though guarded strictly, lived in semi-royal state, and was allowed the service of waiting women and secretaries. Some of the arrested confessed their guilt freely, but confessions were hardly needed. A mass of damning evidence in the papers seized was in the hands of Elizabeth's council; and England, long conscious that dark deeds were meditated by some of the Romanists, awoke to the full knowledge of the horrors which had been formally agreed upon in this carefully arranged conspiracy. The project of Babington, as we have noted, included the murder of Elizabeth's ministers as well as of the queen herself. The English Romanists, most of them guiltless of all knowledge of such designs, were universally credited with designs of assassination, foreign invasion, and all the terrors of civil war. They stood out in the estimation of the great majority of their fellow-countrymen as at once betrayers and enemies of their country. Babington and his associates were publicly tried and executed, some of them with all the terrible adjuncts which in those day's constituted a traitor's doom;

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hanged by the neck, but only for a moment, these unhappy men were then cut to pieces, with skilful prolongation of their dying torments.

The queen of Scots was shut up in Fotheringay Castle and rigorously guarded, and subsequently subjected to a formal state trial. In the face of the most tremendous proofs of her complicity in the plot, Mary Stuart to the last, with a strange dignity and composure worthy of a nobler life, denied all knowledge of the intended murder of Elizabeth. She was condemned, and refusing to beg her life of the English queen, died on the scaffold in the great hall of Fotheringay, with a splendid courage worthy of her royal and illustrious lineage, calm and queenly to the end. Friends and foes alike of the Scottish queen, who for so long had been so prominent a figure in European history, bear witness to the serene resignation with which Mary met her death. So calm and self-possessed, so queenly in her last words and actions was she, that it would almost seem as though she was deliberately playing a part for the judgment of posterity.

We have already referred to the different estimates which posterity has formed of this great figure which occupied for so long a period so important a place in the gallery of historic personages of the age of Elizabeth. To some she will ever be the consummate skilful actress, the beautiful but selfish woman, the slave now of her ambition, now of her passions, "the fitting tutelary saint for the sentimental Romanism of the modern world," while in the hearts of others the hapless Mary Stuart is enshrined as the fair, suffering woman; the