CHAPTER XXIV.
ROMAN CATHOLICISM.
The state of the Royal family, as it respects religion, at the period which we have now reached, constituted the principal foundation in England, of Roman Catholic hope, and the chief source of Protestant fear. The Queen, who reached this country in 1662, retained the faith of her childhood, and, very naturally, would have been glad to see it restored in the land of her adoption. The King, too careless and profligate to be affected by any really pious considerations, probably preferred the Romish to any other kind of worship, and of such a preference people suspected him at the moment he was declaring the utmost zeal for Protestantism.[635] Their suspicions were too well founded. Certainly, as early as the year 1669, he entertained the idea of uniting himself to the Church of Rome; and in the following year he signed a secret treaty with the King of France, in which he pledged himself to avow his conversion, whenever it should appear to him to be most convenient.[636] The existence and provisions of that compact, in spite of the utmost endeavours to conceal it, oozed out at the time;[637] but now that history has revealed it entirely, with many of its attendant private circumstances, we discover the extreme shamefulness of the whole affair. For, by the terms of the treaty, the King of England became a pensioner of France, and promised to make war upon Holland, with which State, France had entered into friendship and alliance; the negotiator of this scandalous arrangement being no other than Charles' sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, whose reputation is deeply stained, through her being involved in the licentious intrigues of Louis XIV's court. After having visited her brother to accomplish this dishonourable mission, she left behind, as an agent for preserving French influence over his volatile mind, one of the ladies of her train, named Querouaille, who became mistress to the licentious monarch, and is so notorious in the disgraceful history of his reign as the Duchess of Portsmouth.[638]
1662–1673.
ROMAN CATHOLICISM.
The King's brother having, by means of Anglo-Catholic instructors, been imbued with the ideas of Church authority, of apostolical traditions, and of the Real Presence, had, after this effective preparation, taken a further and very natural step, and had been reconciled to Rome; notwithstanding the fact that up to Easter, 1671, he continued outwardly to commune with the Established Church in this country.[639] His first Duchess, Ann Hyde, daughter of Lord Clarendon, had practised secret confession to Dr. Morley from her youth, and, after her marriage, in order to retain or to recover the fickle attachment of her husband, she had entered into close communication with Popish priests, and had expressed a disposition to renounce Protestantism.[640] She, it is said, preferred an unmarried clergy, and excused the Roman Catholic superstitions; and it would appear that, for some months before her death, she ceased to partake of the Lord's Supper as administered by the Anglican clergy. Members of her family sought to re-establish her Protestant belief, but in vain, and in her last illness she received the Eucharist from the hands of a Franciscan friar.[641] James' second Duchess, Mary of Modena, was by descent and education a decided Papist; and his marriage with that lady being extremely unpopular, provoked the opposition of the English Parliament. Thus, at the time of which we speak, the three principal members of the Royal house, next to the King, were Romanists, and he himself was known to sympathize with them in their religious sentiments. Added to these circumstances was the fact that several other persons in high estate were sincerely attached to the same faith; a love to it also lingered amongst the lower ranks in some parts of England; and, as a consequence, the Roman Catholics were "bold and busy" in their endeavours to make converts. What they did they had to do by stealth; persecution met them everywhere, yet, with a heroism which we cannot but respect, they steadily persevered. One advocate and missionary in particular, Abraham Woodhead, who early commenced his work in England, is mentioned with honour even by the Oxford historian, for he remarks, with regard to a later period, that the "calm, temperate, and rational discussion of some of the most weighty and momentous controversies under debate between the Protestants and Romanists rendered him an author much famed, and very considerable in the esteem of both."[642] Hugh Paulin Cressey, one of the Queen's chaplains, was also active in the same cause, and is praised for the candour, plainness, and decency, with which he managed controversy;[643] and John Gother, another zealous polemic on the side of Rome, published, in support of the doctrines of his Church, seventeen controversial, and twelve spiritual tracts.[644] That Church has ever acted most systematically, carrying out a ramified method of operation; and, at the time of which I am now speaking, the priests in England, whether secular or regular, were all under effectual guidance and control. The former received their direction from one whom they called "the head of the clergy," who possessed a kind of Episcopal power, both he and they being subordinated to the Papal nuncio in France, and the internuncio in Flanders, to whom were entrusted the oversight of the missions to England and Ireland. Regular priests, of the order of St. Benedict, of St. Augustine, of St. Dominic, of St. Francis, and of the Society of Jesus, were subject to their superiors respectively, and, in whatever they did, proceeded obsequiously in obedience to command; not, however, without mutual jealousy and strife,—after the manner of the Middle Ages, when seculars and regulars, the two main divisions of the army, kept up a constant rivalry in the spiritual camp.[645] Even in a lukewarm Protestant country, the activity and increase of Romanism could not be regarded without apprehension. But the Protestants of England were not then lukewarm. The antipathy cherished by an earlier generation had descended to the present. Nonconformists, after the Restoration, continued to cherish the old Puritan horror of the Mother of Harlots; they read Foxe's Book of Martyrs; they kept alive the traditions of their ancestors under Queen Mary; and Gunpowder Treason had not yet ceased to awaken in their minds the most terrible recollections. Those persons in the Establishment who cherished Puritan sympathies—and they were not few—thought of Rome in the same way as the Dissenters did; and other persons, on different grounds, felt the greatest alarm at the portents of the times. Even strong Anglican preferences in some cases were connected with an intense dislike of Romanism; in bosoms where no better feeling existed, there arose a fear of its return, as of an enemy which would rob the clergy of their possessions. The prevailing alarm can be easily explained, for the revival of Popery ever appeared to Protestants in those days as fraught with disasters; and in the present instance, to aggravate apprehension, political considerations were suggested respecting the designs of France, then the ally of Rome in the worst phases of its despotism.
1662–1673.
PROTESTANT OPPOSITION.
The feeling against Popery manifested itself in divers ways. Books were published exposing the evils of the system, including translations of Blaise Pascal's Provincial Letters, and, I am sorry to say, that amongst works original, solid, judicious, and convincing, written to defend the principles of the Reformation, were some of a very unscrupulous character, full of the most wretched scurrility and invective.[646] As early as 1667 suggestions were made to His Majesty's Privy Council to issue processes in the Exchequer against Popish recusants, to suppress all masses throughout the country, except those at the chapels of the Queen, and of the foreign ambassadors, to banish all native priests, and to prevent the education of English children in Catholic countries. All this was proposed to be done by means of a Royal declaration, which should "leave some little door of hope to Dissenting Protestants, of a further degree of ease from Parliament, which the King would be glad should be found out."[647]
1662–1673.
In the autumn of 1667, there ran a report that the Presbyterian, Mr. Prynne, in his zeal against Popery, had written to Bath respecting the Papists resident there; but one of Evelyn's correspondents, who sympathized with these sufferers, stated that the suspected were only few—"not above a dozen simple women, and three or four inconsiderable men"—and then strove to turn the tables upon the accuser, by speaking of "dangerous fanatics," who "overwhelm the country," defy the Government, and reproach the King, winding up his communication in the following strain:—"That all the late firebrands should be set on horseback, especially those that horsed themselves to join with the Dutch and French; and that all the late sufferers should complete their martyrdom. Some men were born in a tempest, can see mountains through millstones, take alarm at the creeping of a snail, and throw open the gates to let in the Tartars, and so their end must be like their beginning. But Mr. P[rynne] cannot hear on that ear, and has such accurate skill in the laws, that he can find high treason in a bull-rush, and innocence in a scorpion."[648]
Royal proclamations touching Jesuits and Romanists, extorted from the King by the representations of his Ministers, of the Bishops, and of Parliament, reflect correctly the opinions of the nation and of the Church,[649] but the utter insincerity of them, as proceeding from Charles, is sufficiently manifest. It was felt at the time by Romanists themselves that he who sat upon the throne remained, after all, their fast friend; and, to arguments for the abolition of State penalties against recusants, it was cleverly replied that they formed "a bow strung and bended, and an arrow put into it, but none could shoot but His Majesty."[650]
PROTESTANT OPPOSITION.
The storm of public indignation manifestly increased with the advance of time, and when the Duke of Buckingham traversed Yorkshire, raising recruits for his regiments, so jealous of Popery were the people there, that scarcely a man would enlist until he had gone with the recruiting officer and publicly taken the Holy Sacrament, as an evidence of his Protestantism. In the autumn, as the period returned for commemorating the frustration of Gunpowder Plot, the Pope with great solemnity was burnt in several places within the City of London, a barbarism which the Roman Catholic who reports the circumstance thought no nation but the Hollanders could have been guilty of, yet members of Parliament assisted on the occasion, but whether it proceeded from wine or from zeal the informant could not say. Bonfires blazed on the fifth of November all the way from Charing Cross to Whitechapel with a fury unknown for thirty years.[651]
As the next year opened, Charles consulted with the Bishops touching the subject of this immense excitement, assuring them of his readiness to do all in his power for the suppression of Popery, for which purpose he thought it fit to have the assistance and advice of the Right Reverend Fathers, and he wished them first to debate upon the subject amongst themselves, and then to inform him what best could be done for maintaining the interests of the Church of England, as by law established.[652]
1675.
Towards the close of the year 1675, the Protestant agitation received a new impulse from a debate in Parliament relative to an assault by a priest, named St. Germain, upon one Monsieur Luzancy, who, after being a French Jesuit, had become a minister of the Church of England. This zealous convert, preaching at the Savoy, had bitterly attacked the errors which he had repudiated, and, having printed his controversial sermon, he stated that he was visited by St. Germain, who, with three ruffians, forced him to sign a recantation of his faith. This story was told to Sir John Reresby, who immediately related it to the House of Commons.[653] Luzancy, examined by a Committee, added further particulars, inflaming the House to the last degree, by the statement that two French Protestant merchants, residing in the Metropolis, had received from their Popish neighbours a threat, that soon the streets of the City would flow with torrents of Protestant blood. Some immediate results of the excitement appeared in the House of Lords, where a Bill was introduced for encouraging monks and friars, in foreign parts, to forsake their convents; and in an order from the Commons to the Lord Chief Justice to issue his warrant for the apprehension of all Catholic priests.[654]
PROTESTANT OPPOSITION.
In the following summer, Popish books were seized at Stationers' Hall, by order of the Privy Council; and in the autumn, authority was given to watch the doors of the chapels allowed for the use of the Queen, and of the foreign ambassadors, and to observe such of His Majesty's subjects, not being in the service of those illustrious personages, as attended the service which was there performed. Those who watched were not to stop or question any as they went in, but they were to apprehend them instantly as they came out, and if that could not be accomplished, the names of such delinquents were to be ascertained and returned.[655] It may here be mentioned that, at the time when these measures were employed, Protestants formed the wildest estimates of the numbers of Papists. Some one reported that as many as 20,000 or 30,000 of them were living in the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, yet in a survey, made by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the year 1676, it is affirmed that, in this much-suspected parish, only 600 Papists could be found, and that not more than 11,870 were discovered in the whole province.[656]
1676.
PARLIAMENT.
Parliament, which in 1676 had been sitting fifteen years, at that time laboured under a very bad character. It was commonly said, that one-third of the Commons were dependent upon Government and the Court; that large bribes were paid for votes and speeches; and that the Lord Treasurer declared members came about him like so many jackdaws for cheese at the end of every session. Complaints were rife of the depression of trade, and of the embarrassment of the country, in consequence of the prolonged existence of the same House of Commons, whilst especial stress was laid upon the singular unreasonableness of a number of men being allowed for such a length of time to engross the representation of the people, and upon the advantages which would accrue, both to the Crown and the nation, from the calling of another Parliament. Some of these arguments were eloquently exhibited by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had ends of his own to serve by a dissolution, since he trusted by means of it to be carried back to power; and in addition to political reasonings this clever politician held out to all sorts of religionists, hopes the most inconsistent—and, taken altogether, perfectly absurd—as bribes to secure their support of his policy in the approaching struggle. Careful to throw out a bait to the Church of England, by assuring her that a new Parliament would preserve her honours, her dignities, and her revenues, would make her a great protectrix, and asylum of Protestants throughout Europe, and would increase the maintenance of the Ministry in Corporations and large towns;—Shaftesbury also, strange to say, encouraged the Roman Catholics to expect deliverance from the pressure of penal laws under which they groaned, if they would also be contented, for the sake of their religion, to forego access to Court, promotion to office, and employment in arms.[657] Certainly the existing Parliament had shown an unconquerable hatred to Popery, and perhaps Romanists had more to fear than to hope from its continuance; and for this reason, amongst others, the Duke of York advocated a dissolution, and appeared, to that extent, amongst the supporters of the Earl. The Earl at the same time threw out his nets so very wide as to aim at catching Dissenters, telling them that whereas they had suffered so much of late from persecuting laws, a new House of Commons would procure them "ease, liberty, and protection." He had, ever since he parted with the Great Seal in 1673, professed the utmost love for Protestantism, and had been proclaimed by its zealots as the saviour of the faith; it being profanely said that wherever the Gospel should be preached that which he had done should be told as a memorial of him.[658] And now, influenced by the incredibly high religious reputation of this Protean statesman, also, in all probability moved by his flatterers, certainly bound to him by party ties, the virtuous Lord Wharton took his place amongst the helpers of "the chief engineer," as the Duke of York styled the Ex-Chancellor. Upon a debate respecting an address to His Majesty to dissolve Parliament, His Royal Highness and Lord Wharton joined with the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Shaftesbury in supporting it, the non-contents carrying their point only by a majority of two.[659]
1677.
The Parliament was prorogued on the 22nd of November, for fifteen months; and as soon as it met again, on the 15th of February, 1677, the party in opposition returned to the charge; but now, deserted by the Duke of York, the party was led by the Duke of Buckingham, who delivered a famous speech to prove that Parliament had been virtually dissolved by so long a prorogation. What the Duke said was construed into an insult, for which one of the peers moved that he should be called to the bar, when the motion was resented by the Earl of Salisbury, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Lord Wharton, all three supporting the Duke of Buckingham. The Lords, who thus led the opposition, were told that what they had done was ill-advised; and they were ordered to beg pardon of the House, and of His Majesty. Upon which, refusing to comply, they were committed to the Tower. Buckingham slipped out of the House, but surrendered himself the next day.[660]
The committal produced a great excitement—in which religious people, especially Nonconformists, largely shared, for they looked up to some of these noblemen as particular friends; and a fugitive sheet written at the time, without date or names, has preserved certain memoranda concerning the prisoners, from which it appears that several Quakers were at that time in communication with the Duke of Buckingham.[661]
In the month of June, Buckingham, Wharton, and Salisbury—wearied out with their confinement, and disappointed of their discharge at the end of the Session, by the adjournment of the Houses, recanted what they had spoken,—professed repentance of their error, and sought pardon of His Majesty. They were liberated accordingly; but the Earl of Shaftesbury, because he refused to make any submission, and applied to the King's Bench for a writ of habeas corpus, was doomed to a longer captivity; yet at last he obtained his liberty in the month of February, 1678, only, however, by kneeling down at the bar of the House, and humbly asking their Lordships' pardon.
PARLIAMENT.
1677.
The power of the party, whose leaders had thus for a while been banished from the House, was by no means crushed. Indeed it was but little diminished, and, therefore, Danby, the Lord Treasurer, at the head of the Ministry, wishing to outbid his rival Shaftesbury in a contest for popularity; and also following his own chosen policy, which had throughout been anti-Papal, now introduced—and that with the concurrence of the Bishops—two measures as additional bulwarks against Papal aggression. The first contemplated the possibility of a Catholic prince occupying the throne: it provided, in case of his refusal of a searching test in the form of a denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation, that the Bishops, upon a vacancy occurring in their number, should name three persons, one of whom the Sovereign was at liberty to select for the empty see; but if he did not make the selection within thirty days, the person first named should take possession—that the two Archbishops should present to all livings in the Royal gift—and that the children of the Monarch, from the age of seven to the age of fourteen, should be under the guardianship of the two Archbishops, with the Bishops of London, Durham, and Winchester. The second measure—under title of an Act for the more effectual conviction and prosecution of Popish recusants,—provided that such Popish recusants as might register themselves should pay a yearly fine of the twentieth part of their incomes to a fund for supporting poor converts to Protestantism, and should, on that condition, be exempt from all other penalties, except ineligibility to hold office, civil or military, or to perform the office of guardians or executors. Lay perverters of Protestants should have the option of abjuring the realm; clergymen who had taken Romish orders might, at His Majesty's pleasure, be imprisoned for life, instead of being made to suffer the higher penalty for treason—and the children of deceased Catholics should be brought up in the Reformed Church.[662] But these measures adopted by the Lords, when submitted to the Lower House, so far from satisfying the members, aroused their most determined opposition. With regard to the first measure they affirmed it to be a Bill for Popery, not a Bill against it. They said its face was covered with spots, and, therefore, it wore a vizard. "It is an ill thing," remarked Andrew Marvell, "and let us be rid of it as soon as we can." He compared it to a private Bill brought into the House, for the ballast-shore at Yarrow Sleake, regarding which some one said, "the shore will narrow the river;" another, "it will widen it;" a third observing, people should not play tricks with navigation. Nor ought they to do so with religion, he added. For, as it was clear, the Bill for the ballast-shore would benefit the Dean and Chapter of Durham, so whether this Bill would or would not prevent Popery, he was sure it would increase the power of the Bishops.[663] The second measure was pronounced to be virtually a toleration of Popery, forasmuch as Papists were to have liberty granted them if they would only pay for it. The object was monstrous. The scheme could not be mended. It would remain "an unsavoury thing, stuck with a primrose." They might as well try to "make a good fan out of a pig's tail." "Is there a man in this house," it was asked, "that dares to open his mouth in support of such a measure?" So signal was the defeat of the attempt that we find in the Journals these words, "Upon the reading of the said Bill, and opening the substance thereof to the House, it appeared to be much different from the title, and thereupon the House, nemine contradicente, rejected the same."[664]
PARLIAMENT.
The Commons the same day read a third time a Bill framed to prevent the growth of Popery, enacting that a refusal to repudiate transubstantiation should be deemed a sufficient proof of recusancy, and should entail all its consequences. This contrivance, said its advocates, is "firm, strong, and good," whilst that of the Lords is "slight, and good for nothing,"—it is like David coming out against Goliath;[665] but the Lords would have nothing to do with the David of the Commons. The Lower House urged attention to the Bill, but in vain; the Upper House did not take the slightest notice of what had been sent to them, and the Bill for suppressing the growth of Popery fell to the ground. It is worth observing that, at the same period, a Bill which passed the House of Lords, described on one day as a Bill for "obliging persons to baptize their children"—on another as "an Act concerning baptism and catechizing"[666]—met with a like fate, and fell into the vast limbo of abortive Parliamentary schemes.
But the two Houses during this Session united in three important Acts, which were passed just before the Easter adjournment.
1677.
The first was for the better observance of the Lord's Day; and the reader, who perhaps associates all rigid legislation of that kind with Puritan zealots, will be surprised to find that the Parliament of the Restoration, embodying in many respects the reactionary spirit of the times did, in this particular, actually follow the precedents set by Commonwealth statesmen. The new Statute confirmed existing Acts for requiring attendance at Church, and ordained "that all, and every person and persons whatsoever, should, on every Lord's Day, apply themselves to the observation of the same, by exercising themselves thereon in the duties of piety and true religion, publicly and privately." For exercising their worldly callings everybody above the age of fourteen was to forfeit five shillings; goods cried in the streets or publicly exposed for sale were to be forfeited. No one could travel without special warrant, under a penalty of twenty shillings. The employment of a boat or wherry incurred a fine of five shillings, and those who were not able to pay these fines had to sit in the stocks. No Hundred need answer for a robbery committed on a person who dared to travel on the Lord's Day without license; no writs were then to be served except for treason; but both the dressing of meat in private houses, and the sale of it at inns and cook-shops, were specially excepted from the operation of the law.
It is true the fines were less in amount than they had been under the Commonwealth, and the exceptions with regard to inns and cook-shops, and the dressing of food on the Lord's Day, showed some little relaxation;—but the prohibition of travelling, as well as of trading, proves that zeal for the strict observance of Sunday had been inherited from the Long Parliament by its successor under Charles II.
Acts for uniting parishes, for rebuilding churches, and for the better maintenance of Metropolitan Incumbents, had been passed in 1670; and now a general Act received the Royal assent for the improvement of small livings. Whereas Bishops, Deans, and Chapters, and other ecclesiastical authorities had granted, in obedience to His Majesty, soon after the Restoration, or might yet grant out of their revenues, aid towards the augmentation of poor clerical incomes, this Act confirmed any such grants, and bestowed on Vicars and Curates the means of securing the augmentations thereby accruing to them.[667]
PARLIAMENT.
The last of the three enactments alluded to consisted in the repeal of the law de Hæretico Comburendo, which had kindled so many fires in the Marian age. That form of punishment was regarded by Protestants with a natural and salutary horror; the statutory sanction of it was now swept away, not only with a burst of indignation against it, as a hateful relic of Popish intolerance, but with a prudent fear lest, if the law remained unaltered, it might some day, under a Popish Sovereign—a contingency which was ever looming before the eyes of the nation—be revived for a rekindling of the Smithfield fires. But the repeal did not proceed so far as is generally supposed; for the Lords made some amendments in the Bill, and added a proviso, perpetuating the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Courts, in cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy, or schism; and sanctioning excommunication and other ecclesiastical penalties, extending even to death, in such sort as they might have done before the making of this new Act. In this form it was agreed to by the Commons, and received the Royal assent.
1678.
The Houses were adjourned in the month of May, and again in the month of July; nor did they meet any more for business until the middle of the month of January, 1678. These adjournments produced in the Lower House, as might be expected, long and exciting debates. The state of the nation, the removal of evil counsellors, and an address of advice to His Majesty that he would declare war with France, also occupied considerable attention; but if, under these circumstances, there occurred some little ebb in the tide of opposition to Popery, the flow of the waters soon followed with redoubled force. For, in the month of April, we find the Commons engaged in the consideration of a report,—which it must have taken much time and labour to prepare—a report containing the names of Popish priests, of those by whom they were kept, of the chapels and other places where mass was said, in the County of Monmouth:—also of the names of Justices of the Peace in Wales and Northumberland who were Papists, or suspected to be so,—and, lastly, of proceedings which had been carried on in the Court of Exchequer against Popish recusants. The document whilst, no doubt, reflecting the fears of Protestants respecting Papists, also records facts which show that, in spite of persecuting laws, the Roman Catholic religion retained a strong hold upon many people in certain parts of the country. For one of the witnesses, whose evidence is reported, swore—that she had heard a priest say mass forty times, had received the sacrament from him, had seen him administer it to a hundred people; and that, at a service which she had attended, "the crowd was so great, that the loft was forced to be propped, lest it should fall down under the weight."[668] Immediately afterwards the Commons expressed to the Lords, in confidence, a strong conviction that the growth of Popery arose from a laxity in the administration of laws against it.
PARLIAMENT.
After a prorogation, on the 13th of May, the opening of the sixteenth session of Parliament followed, on the 23rd of the same month, when Lord Chancellor Finch sought to calm public apprehension by observing, that it was a scandal upon the Protestant religion, when men so far distrusted the truth and power of it as to be alarmed about its safety, after so many laws had been enacted for its protection, and after all the miraculous deliverances which it had experienced.[669]
The next month saw the Commons again plunged into the old controversy, whilst they discussed a Bill for the exclusion of Papists from both Houses, unless they would take the Oaths of Allegiance and of Supremacy, and accept the test against transubstantiation—in other words except they would turn Protestants.[670] The usual round of arguments reappeared, and once more revolved through their orbits; but this Bill, like some of its predecessors, fell through, in consequence of further prorogation, after a grant of supplies, upon the 8th of July.