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]