stringent laws and oppressive burdens were inflicted upon
all persons who professed the tenets of the Church of Rome.

In the first years of the virgin Queen's reign all who clung to
the older forms of the Catholic faith were mercifully connived
at, so long as they solemnised their own religious rites within
their private dwelling-houses; but after the Roman Catholic rising
in the north and numerous other Popish plots, the utmost severity
of the law was enforced, particularly against seminarists, whose
chief object was, as was generally believed, to stir up their
disciples in England against the Protestant Queen. An Act was
passed prohibiting a member of the Church of Rome from celebrating
the rites of his religion on pain of forfeiture for the first
offence, a year's imprisonment for the second, and imprisonment
for life for the third.[1] All those who refused to take the
Oath of Supremacy were called "recusants" and were guilty of
high treason. A law was also enacted which provided that if any
Papist should convert a Protestant to the Church of Rome, both
should suffer death, as for high treason.

[Footnote 1: In December, 1591, a priest was hanged before the
door of a house in Gray's Inn Fields for having there said Mass
the month previously.]

The sanguinary laws against seminary priests and "recusants"
were enforced with the greatest severity after the discovery of
the Gunpowder Plot. These were revived for a period in Charles
II.'s reign, when Oates's plot worked up a fanatical hatred against
all professors of the ancient faith. In the mansions of the old
Roman Catholic families we often find an apartment in a secluded
part of the house or garret in the roof named "the chapel," where
religious rites could be performed with the utmost privacy, and
close handy was usually an artfully contrived hiding-place, not
only for the officiating priest to slip into in case of emergency,
but also where the vestments, sacred vessels, and altar furniture
could be put away at a moment's notice.

It appears from the writings of Father Tanner[1] that most of
the hiding-places for priests, usually called "priests' holes,"
were invented and constructed by the Jesuit Nicholas Owen, a
servant of Father Garnet, who devoted the greater part of his
life to constructing these places in the principal Roman Catholic
houses all over England.

[Footnote 1: _Vita et Mors_ (1675), p. 75.]

"With incomparable skill," says an authority,