Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) / From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion

by Anonymous

The fury of persecution in England stimulated the Roman Catholics abroad to a corresponding enthusiasm of martyrdom. Gregory XIII. followed the example of William Allen—who had founded an English seminary at Douay—and established a second English seminary in the hospital of Santo Spirito, in Rome, from which emissaries were despatched into the heretical kingdom. First and foremost the general of the Jesuits selected in 1580 two Englishmen of distinguished abilities, and sent them from this college. Robert Parsons and Edmund Campian arrived with a reputation, and with rumours of the dark conspiracy in which they were engaged, which roused all the alarm and the vigilance of the Government. Rewards were offered for their discovery, and menaces of punishment issued for remissness in tracing them out. The queen sent forth a proclamation, calling on every person who had children, wards, or relatives gone abroad for education to make a return of their names to the ordinary, and to recall them within three months; and all persons whatsoever who knew of any Jesuit or seminarist in the kingdom, and failed to give information, were to be punished as abettors of treason.

As soon as Parliament met in January of 1581, still more stringent laws were passed for the punishment of Roman Catholics. It was made high treason merely to possess the power of absolution, or to receive any person into the church of Rome. The fines for hearing or saying Mass were re-enacted. Absence from church was made punishable at the rate of twenty pounds per month, and, if prolonged to a whole year, besides the penalty, the offender must produce two securities for his good behaviour of £200 each. The concealment of Roman Catholic tutors, schoolmasters, or priests entailed a year's imprisonment, a priest or tutor being also amenable to the same punishment, and the employer of them to a fine of ten pounds per month. There was but one step possible beyond this outrageous despotism, and that was to the stake, as in Mary's time; but the very fury of legal punishment defeated its own object.

Parsons and Campian put into the hands of their friends written statements of their objects in coming into the country, which they declared to be solely to exercise their spiritual functions as priests, not to interfere with any worldly concerns or affairs of State; but they declared that all the Jesuits in the world had entered into a league to maintain the Catholic religion at the risk of imprisonment, torture, or death. This announcement excited the greatest alarm, and the most fiery persecution burst forth on the whole body of the Romanists, whilst every means was exerted to discover and secure these missionaries. The names of all the recusants in the kingdom, amounting to 50,000, were returned to Government, and no man included in that number had any longer the least security or privacy in his own house. The doors were broken open without notice given, and the pursuivants, rushing in, spread themselves all over the dwelling. Cabinets, cupboards, drawers, closets were forced and ransacked, beds torn open, tapestry or wainscot was dragged down, and every imaginable place explored, for the purpose of obtaining evidence by vessels, vestments, books, or crosses, of heretical worship. The inmates were put under strict watch, till they had been searched and interrogated; and many were driven nearly or wholly out of their senses by the rudeness and the insults which they received from brutal officers. Lady Neville was frightened to death in Holborn, and Mrs. Vavasour was deprived of her reason at York.

In July, Campian was taken at Lyfford, in Berkshire, and was committed to the Tower; and Parsons, seeing no prospect of long escaping pursuit, contrived to get over again to the Continent. Campian was repeatedly racked, and under the force of torture and the promises that no injury should be done to his entertainers, he related the whole course of his peregrinations in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Denbigh, Northampton, Warwick, Bedford, Buckingham, and elsewhere, and the names of those who had given him hospitality. No sooner, however, had the Council the names than they summoned all those who had harboured him, and fined some and imprisoned others.

In November, Campian and twelve other priests and a layman were put upon their trial, and were charged with a horrible conspiracy to murder the queen and to overturn Church and State. Rome and Rheims were declared to be the places where this direful plot had been hatched. The astonishment of the prisoners, several of whom had never been out of England, was extreme. Not an atom of evidence was produced to authenticate these charges, yet the whole were pronounced guilty. One of them was saved by an alibi established by Lancaster, a Protestant barrister; the rest were executed as traitors, except those who were still kept prisoners. On the scaffold (December 1, 1581), Campian lamented that the weakness of the flesh on the rack had forced him to disclose the names of some of his entertainers, by which they had been brought into trouble.

The Anabaptists, who had created great scandals and disturbance in Germany, made repeated visits to London under pretence of belonging to the Dutch Church. They denied the propriety of infant baptism; they also denied that Christ assumed the flesh of the Virgin; they believed it wrong to take an oath, or to accept the office of a magistrate. In some of these tenets they resembled the Society of Friends which afterwards rose, and their creed did not interfere with the quiet of the State; yet numbers of them were imprisoned, ten of them were sent out of the kingdom, and two, Peters and Turwert, were burnt in Smithfield in July, 1575. Again, in 1579, Matthew Hammond, a ploughman, was burnt at Norwich.

In no quarter had Elizabeth for a long time any security except in Scotland. There Morton was her faithful ally, inasmuch as she held fast the King of Scots, and so guaranteed the chief means of his own tranquil enjoyment of power. But Morton's rule was not such as any country would long tolerate. He was essentially a base and selfish man, and his severity and rapacity alienated the public from him more and more. He debased the coin, multiplied forfeitures to enrich himself, appropriated the estates of the Church, and at the same time was so subservient to Elizabeth, that the national pride resented it. In 1578, Athole and Argyll made their way to the presence of the young king, who was now approaching thirteen years of age, and assured him that it was now quite time that he freed himself from the tutelage of Morton and ruled the country himself. James readily listened to them, and sent Morton an order to resign, and to attend a council at Stirling, where the friends of Athole and Argyll were summoned.

Morton, though taken by surprise, appeared to obey with perfect acquiescence; but he lost no time in intriguing with the Erskines, and in three months had again possessed himself of the person of the king, and resumed his authority in the State. Athole and Argyll mustered their friends to force the reins from the hands of Morton, who boldly met them in the field, when the ambassador of England appeared as a mediator, and persuaded them to a reconciliation. But it was not in the nature of Morton to forget the opponents of his power, although they now appeared as nominal friends. He invited Athole, the chief actor in his late fall, to a banquet, from which he retired, as Mar had done, to die. Like Mar, he was poisoned. Secure as he now seemed, Morton let loose his vengeance on his enemies; and the Hamiltons, the friends of Mary, were compelled, in spite of the treaty of Perth, to fly to England for security; and being freed from their restraint he indulged freely his insatiable avarice at the expense of the country.

But justice reached this minister of evil when it was least expected. Esmé Stuart, the Lord of Aubigny, a son of the younger brother of the Earl of Lennox, who had become naturalised in France, returned to Scotland. With a handsome person and French accomplishments, he soon captivated the young monarch, who could not live at any period of his life without a favourite. He created Aubigny captain of the guard, first lord of the bed-chamber, and finally Duke of Lennox, being the nephew of the late earl, and cousin of Darnley. Associated with Lennox was another and far more deep and designing Stuart—James, commonly called Captain Stuart, the second son of Lord Ochiltree. He was also related to the king, and lent essential aid to Lennox, not only from his genius for intrigue, but because Lennox was suspected of being an emissary of the Duke of Guise. Lennox and his friend Stuart, who was now created by James Earl of Arran, instilled every possible suspicion into the king's mind against Morton, who, they averred, intended to convey him to England and give him up to Elizabeth. To seize Morton, and arraign him for the multitude of illegal acts which he had perpetrated in his position of Regent, might not succeed, for the wily offender had taken care to procure bills of indemnity for whatever he had done. They determined, therefore, to accuse him of Darnley's murder, of which he was notoriously guilty in common with others.