'I need not urge how much it imports his Holiness to undertake this glorious work. He, supremely wise as he is, knows that from this Jezebel and her supporters come all the perils which disturb the Christian world. He knows that heretical depravity and all other miseries can only end when this woman is chastised. Reverence for his Holiness and love for my afflicted country force me to speak. I submit to his most holy judgment myself and my advice.'
The most ardent Catholic apologist will hardly maintain, in the face of this document, that the English Jesuits and seminary priests were the innocent missionaries of religion which the modern enemies of Elizabeth's Government describe them. Father Parsons, the writer of it, was himself the leader and director of the Jesuit invasion, and cannot be supposed to have misrepresented the purpose for which they had been sent over. The point of special interest is the account which he gives of the state of parties and general feeling in the English people. Was there that wide disposition to welcome an invading army in so large a majority of the nation? The question is supposed to have been triumphantly answered three years later, when it is asserted that the difference of creed was forgotten, and Catholics and Protestants fought side by side for the liberties of England. But, in the first place, the circumstances were changed. The Queen of Scots no longer lived, and the success of the Armada implied a foreign sovereign. But, next, the experiment was not tried. The battle was fought at sea, by a fleet four-fifths of which was composed of Protestant adventurers, fitted out and manned by those zealous Puritans whose fidelity to the Queen Parsons himself admitted. Lord Howard may have been an Anglo-Catholic; Roman Catholic he never was; but he and his brother were the only loyalists in the House of Howard. Arundel and the rest of his kindred were all that Parsons claimed for them. How the country levies would have behaved had Parma landed is still uncertain. It is likely that if the Spanish army had gained a first success, there might have been some who would have behaved as Sir William Stanley did. It is observable that Parsons mentions Leicester and Huntingdon as the only powerful peers on whom the Queen could rely, and Leicester, otherwise the unfittest man in her dominions, she chose to command her land army.
The Duke of Alva and his master Philip, both of them distrusted political priests. Political priests, they said, did not understand the facts of things. Theological enthusiasm made them credulous of what they wished. But Father Parsons's estimate is confirmed in all its parts by the letters of Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London. Mendoza was himself a soldier, and his first duty was to learn the real truth. It may be taken as certain that, with the Queen of Scots still alive to succeed to the throne, at the time of the scene in the House of Commons, with which I began this lecture, the great majority of the country party disliked the Reformers, and were looking forward to the accession of a Catholic sovereign, and as a consequence to a religious revolution.
It explains the difficulty of Elizabeth's position and the inconsistency of her political action. Burghley, Walsingham, Mildmay, Knolles, the elder Bacon, were believing Protestants, and would have had her put herself openly at the head of a Protestant European league. They believed that right and justice were on their side, that their side was God's cause, as they called it, and that God would care for it. Elizabeth had no such complete conviction. She disliked dogmatism, Protestant as well as Catholic. She ridiculed Mr. Cecil and his brothers in Christ. She thought, like Erasmus, that the articles of faith, for which men were so eager to kill one another, were subjects which they knew very little about, and that every man might think what he would on such matters without injury to the commonwealth. To become 'head of the name' would involve open war with the Catholic powers. War meant war taxes, which more than half her subjects would resent or resist. Religion as she understood it was a development of law--the law of moral conduct. You could not have two laws in one country, and you could not have two religions; but the outward form mattered comparatively little. The people she ruled over were divided about these forms. They were mainly fools, and if she let them each have chapels and churches of their own, molehills would become mountains, and the congregations would go from arguing into fighting. With Parliament to help her, therefore, she established a Liturgy, in which those who wished to find the Mass could hear the Mass, while those who wanted predestination and justification by faith could find it in the Articles. Both could meet under a common roof, and use a common service, if they would only be reasonable. If they would not be reasonable, the Catholics might have their own ritual in their own houses, and would not be interfered with.
This system continued for the first eleven years of Elizabeth's reign. No Catholic, she could proudly say, had ever during that time been molested for his belief. There was a small fine for non-attendance at church, but even this was rarely levied, and by the confession of the Jesuits the Queen's policy was succeeding too well. Sensible men began to see that the differences of religion were not things to quarrel over. Faith was growing languid. The elder generation, who had lived through the Edward and Mary revolutions, were satisfied to be left undisturbed; a new generation was growing up, with new ideas; and so the Church of Rome bestirred itself. Elizabeth was excommunicated. The cycle began of intrigue and conspiracy, assassination plots, and Jesuit invasions. Punishments had to follow, and in spite of herself Elizabeth was driven into what the Catholics could call religious persecution. Religious it was not, for the seminary priests were missionaries of treason. But religious it was made to appear. The English gentleman who wished to remain loyal, without forfeiting his faith, was taught to see that a sovereign under the Papal curse had no longer a claim on his allegiance. If he disobeyed the Pope, he had ceased to be a member of the Church of Christ. The Papal party grew in coherence, while, opposed to them as their purpose came in view, the Protestants, who at first had been inclined to Lutheranism, adopted the deeper and sterner creed of Calvin and Geneva. The memories of the Marian cruelties revived again. They saw themselves threatened with a return to stake and fagot. They closed their ranks and resolved to die rather than submit again to Antichrist. They might be inferior in numbers. A _plbiscite_ in England at that moment would have sent Burghley and Walsingham to the scaffold. But the Lord could save by few as well as by many. Judah had but two tribes out of the twelve, but the words of the men of Judah were fiercer than the words of Israel.
One great mistake had been made by Parsons. He could not estimate what he could not understand. He admitted that the inhabitants of the towns were mainly heretic--London, Bristol, Plymouth, and the rest--but he despised them as merchants, craftsmen, mean persons who had no heart to fight in them. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of the sixteenth century than the effect of Calvinism in levelling distinctions of rank and in steeling and ennobling the character of common men. In Scotland, in the Low Countries, in France, there was the same phenomenon. In Scotland, the Kirk was the creation of the preachers and the people, and peasants and workmen dared to stand in the field against belted knights and barons, who had trampled on their fathers for centuries. The artisans of the Low Countries had for twenty years defied the whole power of Spain. The Huguenots were not a fifth part of the French nation, yet defeat could never dishearten them. Again and again they forced Crown and nobles to make terms with them. It was the same in England. The allegiance to their feudal leaders dissolved into a higher obligation to the King of kings, whose elect they believed themselves to be. Election to them was not a theological phantasm, but an enlistment in the army of God. A little flock they might be, but they were a dangerous people to deal with, most of all in the towns on the sea. The sea was the element of the Reformers. The Popes had no jurisdiction over the winds and waves. Rochelle was the citadel of the Huguenots. The English merchants and mariners had wrongs of their own, perpetually renewed, which fed the bitterness of their indignation. Touch where they would in Spanish ports, the inquisitor's hand was on their ships' crews, and the crews, unless they denied their faith, were handed over to the stake or the galleys. The Calvinists are accused of intolerance. I fancy that even in these humane and enlightened days we should not be very tolerant if the King of Dahomey were to burn every European visitor to his dominions who would not worship Mumbo Jumbo. The Duke of Alva was not very merciful to heretics, but he tried to bridle the zeal of the Holy Office in burning the English seamen. Even Philip himself remonstrated. It was to no purpose. The Holy Office said they would think about it, but concluded to go on. I am not the least surprised if the English seamen were intolerant. I should be very much surprised if they had not been. The Queen could not protect them. They had to protect themselves as they could, and make Spanish vessels, when they could catch them, pay for the iniquities of their rulers.