[255] Strype, vols. iii. and iv. passim; Life of Whitgift, 401, 505; Murden, 667; Birch's Memoirs of Elizabeth, Lingard, etc. One hundred and ten catholics suffered death between 1588 and 1603. Lingard, 513.
[256] 33 Eliz. c. 2.
[257] Camden, 566; Strype, iv. 56. This was the declaration of October 1591, which Andreas Philopater answered. Ribadeneira also inveighs against it. According to them, its publication was delayed till after the death of Hatton, when the persecuting part of the queen's council gained the ascendency.
[258] Butler, 178. In Coke's famous speech in opening the case of the Powder-plot, he says that not more than thirty priests and five receivers had been executed in the whole of the queen's reign, and for religion not any one. State Trials, ii. 179.
Dr. Lingard says of those who were executed between 1588, and the queen's death, "The butchery, with a few exceptions, was performed on the victim while he was in full possession of his senses." Vol. viii. p. 356. I should be glad to think that the few exceptions were the other way. Much would depend on the humanity of the sheriff, which one might hope to be stronger in an English gentleman than his zeal against popery. But I cannot help acknowledging that there is reason to believe the disgusting cruelties of the legal sentence to have been frequently inflicted. In an anonymous memorial among Lord Burleigh's papers, written about 1586, it is recommended that priests persisting in their treasonable opinion should be hanged, "and the manner of drawing and quartering forborne." Strype, iii. 620. This seems to imply that it had been usually practised on the living. And Lord Bacon, in his observations on a libel written against Lord Burleigh in 1592, does not deny the "bowellings" of catholics; but makes a sort of apology for it, as "less cruel than the wheel or forcipation, or even simple burning." Bacon's Works, vol. i. p. 534.
[259] Burnet, ii. 418.
[260] "Though no papists were in this reign put to death purely on account of their religion, as numberless protestants had been in the woeful days of Queen Mary, yet many were executed for treason." Churton's Life of Nowell, p. 147. Mr. Southey, whose abandonment of the oppressed side I sincerely regret, holds the same language; and a later writer, Mr. Townsend, in his Accusations of History against the Church of Rome, has laboured to defend the capital, as well as other, punishments of catholics under Elizabeth, on the same pretence of their treason.
Treason, by the law of England, and according to the common use of language, is the crime of rebellion or conspiracy against the government. If a statute is made, by which the celebration of certain religious rites is subjected to the same penalties as rebellion or conspiracy, would any man, free from prejudice, and not designing to impose upon the uninformed, speak of persons convicted on such a statute as guilty of treason, without expressing in what sense he uses the words, or deny that they were as truly punished for their religion, as if they had been convicted of heresy? A man is punished for religion, when he incurs a penalty for its profession or exercise, to which he was not liable on any other account.
This is applicable to the great majority of capital convictions on this score under Elizabeth. The persons convicted could not be traitors in any fair sense of the word, because they were not charged with anything properly denominated treason. It certainly appears that Campian and some other priests about the same time were indicted on the statute of Edward III. for compassing the queen's death, or intending to depose her. But the only evidence, so far as we know or have reason to suspect, that could be brought against them, was their own admission, at least by refusing to abjure it, of the pope's power to depose heretical princes. I suppose it is unnecessary to prove that, without some overt act to show a design of acting upon this principle, it could not fall within the statute.
[261] Watson's Quodlibets. True relation of the faction begun at Wisbech, 1601. These tracts contain rather an uninteresting account of the squabbles in Wisbech castle among the prisoners, but cast heavy reproaches on the jesuits, as the "firebrands of all sedition, seeking by right or wrong simply or absolutely the monarchy of all England, enemies to all secular priests, and the causes of all the discord in the English nation."—P. 74. I have seen several other pamphlets of the time relating to this difference. Some account of it may be found in Camden, 648, and Strype, iv. 194, as well as in the catholic historians, Dodd and Lingard.