It appears from Camden’s Annales of Queen Elizabeth, inserted above, and from contemporary historians, that, although enactments were made (they must not be honoured with the name of laws) against Catholics, imposing penalties and disabilities, and prohibiting altogether the celebration of their peculiar rites supposed to conciliate the Divine favour—yet if masses were performed without ostentation, and under a decent veil of secrecy, or if auricular confessions were made and absolutions received in private, little notice was taken of them, nor were priests eagerly sought after, who divested themselves in public of all peculiar and discriminating habits, and abstained from attempting proselytism. But when the Church of Rome thundered its excommunications against the Queen, when plots became more manifest at home, connected also with the individual nearest to the Crown, if the custom of hereditary succession were preserved; measures of great severity were adopted, on the ever doubtful plea of state necessity: so that more victims to religious opinions are said to have suffered death, banishment, or the loss of liberty, under
this reign, than under that of Mary Tudor, whose very name we have all been taught to associate with an epithet denoting the utmost horror: but her persecutions were conducted without disguise, in the name of religion, and to make forced converts, while Elizabeth professed to act from motives of temporal policy; moreover, the religion of one has been deprived of all its endowments, and been proscribed for two centuries; that of the other, most happily for ourselves, has flourished through the whole period.
It seems this Mr. Tregion and his connections were among the first sufferers under this cruel policy. His father married an Arundell, and himself a daughter of Lord Stourton, both families that have continued up to the present times in the profession of the ancient faith. Mr. Tregion had moreover a very large estate, calculated to excite the zeal of a well-known and detested class of men, who from the time of the Cæsars, and doubtlessly from a period long before, have used all means and all pretences, sacred or profane, to advance their own fortunes by the ruin of others.
Mr. Tregion, it appears, was the first or among the first accused under the inflamed passions and the persecuting spirit of those times, and the sheriff came in person to search his house; but the sheriff is stated to have been a personal friend, or at all events as a countryman and a neighbour, to have made a slight examination, and then to have dined, and unfortunately to have drank with the individual accused: when
——Subita incantum Dementia cepit,
Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes,
which induced him, in the pride and confidence inspired by wine, to reproach his guest with the insufficiency of his search, and to conduct him to a part of the house or premises clearly indicative of his temporary imprudence and contempt. The sheriff, probably heated also by wine, immediately renewed his examination, and finally discovered in a secret hole under a turret, a Catholic clergyman, called Cuthbert Mayne.
On this they were both arrested, and subsequently arraigned at the Assizes, and both convicted of those atrocious crimes: Mr. Mayne of being a Catholic Priest, and found in England; and Mr. Tregion of having received into his house a minister of that religion in which he had been bred, of the religion of his forefathers, of the religion of the father and forefathers of the highly talented Female who then mainly directed the affairs of the state, and of the undisputed and sole religion of the whole country about half a century before. And for these ideal offences, (one scruples to stain the paper with so foul a record!) was Mr. Mayne actually hanged, and Mr. Tregion, under the sentence of a premunire, was deprived of his whole property, and suffered an imprisonment of twenty years.
Whether we contemplate the cold-hearted tyranny of Henry the Seventh, the wild despotic sway of Henry the Eighth, the civil dissensions in the nominal reign of his son, the bigotry and unrelenting persecutions of Mary, or the cruelties, however necessary, exercised by Elizabeth, we may indeed rejoice that the great work of the Reformation has been achieved, at any price, by the House of Tudor; but we must join in the exclamation,
Oh! dearest God, forefend