ism became a passion as the refugees of
the Continent brought to shop and market their tale of outrage and
blood. Thousands of Flemish exiles found a refuge in the Cinque Ports, a
third of the Antwerp merchants were seen pacing the new London Exchange,
and a Church of French Huguenots found a home which it still retains in
the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.

[Sidenote: The Seminary Priests.]

But the decay of Catholicism appealed strongly to the new spirit of
Catholic zeal which, in its despair of aid from Catholic princes, was
girding itself for its own bitter struggle with heresy. Pius the Fifth
had now passed away, but the policy of the Papal court remained
unchanged. His successor, Gregory the Thirteenth, showed the same
restless zeal, the same world-wide energy in the work of winning back
the nations to the Catholic Church. Rome was still the centre of the
Catholic crusade. It wielded material as well as spiritual arms. If the
Papacy had ceased to be a military power, it remained a financial power.
Taxes were multiplied, expenses reduced, estates confiscated, free towns
reduced to servitude, with the one aim of enabling Gregory and his
successors to build up a vast system of loans which poured the wealth of
Europe into the treasury of Catholicism. It was the treasure of the
Vatican which financed the Catholic movement. Subsidies from the Papacy
fitted out the fleet that faced the Turk at Lepanto, and gathered round
the Guises their lance-knights from the Rhine. Papal supplies equipped
expeditions against Ireland, and helped Philip to bear the cost of the
Armada. It was the Papal exchequer which supported the world-wide
diplomacy that was carrying on negotiations in Sweden and intrigues in
Poland, goading the lukewarm Emperor to action or quickening the
sluggish movements of Spain, plotting the ruin of Geneva or the
assassination of Orange, stirring up revolt in England and civil war in
France. It was the Papacy that bore the cost of the religious propaganda
that was fighting its stubborn battle with Calvinist and Lutheran on the
Rhine and the Elbe, or sending its missionaries to win back the lost
isle of the west. As early as 1568 Dr. Allen, a scholar who had been
driven from Oxford by the test prescribed in the Act of Uniformity, had
foreseen the results of the dying out of the Marian priests, and had set
up a seminary at Douay to supply their place. The new college was
liberally supported by the Catholic peers,