of the English Catholics. "I cannot refrain," he said, "from placing
before your eyes the terrible persecutions which the Catholics are
suffering in England; the blood of the martyrs flowing in so many kinds
of torments; the groans of the prisoners, of the widows and orphans; the
general oppression and servitude, which is the greatest ever endured by a
people of God, under any tyrant whatever. Your Majesty, into whose hands
God is now pleased to place the means, so long desired, of extirpating
and totally destroying the heresies of our time, can alone liberate them
from their bondage."

The picture of these kings, prime ministers, and ambassadors, thus
plotting treason, stratagem, and massacre, is a dark and dreary one. The
description of English sufferings for conscience' sake, under the
Protestant Elizabeth, is even more painful; for it had unfortunately too
much, of truth, although as wilfully darkened and exaggerated as could be
done by religious hatred and Spanish bombast. The Queen was surrounded by
legions of deadly enemies. Spain, the Pope, the League, were united in
one perpetual conspiracy against her; and they relied on the cooperation
of those subjects of hers whom her own cruelty was converting into
traitors.

We read with a shudder these gloomy secrets of conspiracy and wholesale
murder, which make up the diplomatic history of the sixteenth century,
and we cease to wonder that a woman, feeling herself so continually the
mark at which all the tyrants and assassins of Europe were
aiming--although not possessing perhaps the evidences of her peril so
completely as they have been revealed to us--should come to consider
every English Papist as a traitor and an assassin. It was unfortunate
that she was not able to rise beyond the vile instincts of the age, and
by a magnanimous and sublime toleration, to convert her secret enemies
into loyal subjects.

And now Henry of Valois was to choose between league and counter-league,
between Henry of Guise and Henry of Navarre, between France and Spain.
The whole chivalry of Gascony and Guienne, the vast swarm of industrious
and hardy Huguenot artisans, the Netherland rebels, the great English
Queen, stood ready to support the cause of French nationality, and of all
nationalities, against a threatening world-empire, of religious liberty
against sacerdotal absolutism, and the crown of a King, whose only merit
had hitherto been to acquiesce in a religious toleration dictate