“Nay, I heard no word touching her.”
“Ah, friends!” said Mr Marshall with a sigh, “let me ensure you that England’s mourning is not yet over for Queen Elizabeth, and we may live to lament our loss of her far sorer than now we do. Folks say she was something stingy with money, loving not to part with it sooner than she saw good reason: but some folks will fling their money right and left with no reason at all. The present Court much affecteth masques, plays, and such like, so that now there be twenty where her late Majesty would see one.”
“Mr Marshall,” asked Edith, “is it true, as I have heard say, that King James is somewhat Papistically given?”
“Ay and no,” said he. “He is not at all thus, in the signification of obeying the Pope, or suffering himself to be ridden of priests: in no wise. But he hates a Puritan worse than a Papist. Mind you not that in his speech when he opened his first Parliament, he said that he did acknowledge the Roman Church to be our mother Church, though defiled with some infirmities and corruptions?”
“Yet he said also, if I err not, that he sucked in God’s truth with his nurse’s milk.”
“Ay. But what one calls God’s truth is not what an other doth. All the Papistry in the world is not in the Roman Church; and assuredly she is in no sense our mother.”
“Truly, I thought Saint Austin brought the Gospel hither from Rome.”
“Saint Austin brought a deal from Rome beside the Gospel, and he was not the first to bring that. The Gallican Church had before him brought it to Kent; and long ere that time had the ancient British Church been evangelised from no sister Church at all, but right from the Holy Land itself, and as her own unchanging voice did assert, by the beloved Apostle Saint John.”
“That heard I never afore,” said Lady Louvaine, who seemed greatly interested. “Pray you, Mr Marshall, is this true?”
“I do ensure you it is,” replied he; “that is, so far as the wit of man at this distance of time may discern the same.”