and supplied with pupils by a
stream of refugees from Oxford and the English grammar schools. Three
years after its opening the college numbered a hundred and fifty
members. It was in these "seminary priests" that Gregory the Thirteenth
saw the means of reviving Catholic zeal in England, and at the Pope's
bidding they began in 1576 to pass over to English shores.

[Sidenote: The English Panic.]

Few as the new-comers were at first, their presence was at once felt in
the check which it gave to the gradual reconciliation of the Catholic
gentry to the English Church. No check could have been more galling to
Elizabeth, and her resentment was quickened by the sense of danger.
Rome had set itself in the forefront of her foes. She had accepted the
issue of the Bull of Deposition as a declaration of war on the part of
the Papacy, and she viewed the Douay priests with some justice as its
political emissaries. The comparative security of the Catholics from
active persecution during the early part of her reign had arisen, partly
from the sympathy and connivance of the gentry who acted as justices of
the peace, and still more from her own religious indifference. But the
Test Act placed the magistracy in Protestant hands; and as Elizabeth
passed from indifference to suspicion and from suspicion to terror she
put less restraint on the bigotry around her. In quitting Euston Hall
which she had visited in one of her pilgrimages the Queen gave its
master, young Rookwood, thanks for his entertainment and her hand to
kiss. "But my Lord Chamberlain nobly and gravely understanding that
Rookwood was excommunicate" for non-attendance at church "called him
before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her royal
presence, he unfit to accompany any Christian person, forthwith said
that he was fitter for a pair of stocks, commanded him out of Court, and
yet to attend the Council's pleasure." The Council's pleasure was seen
in his committal to the town prison at Norwich, while "seven more
gentlemen of worship" were fortunate enough to escape with a simple
sentence of arrest at their own homes. The Queen's terror became a
panic in the nation at large. The few priests who landed from Douay were
multiplied into an army of Papal emissaries despatched to sow treason
and revolt throughout the land. Parliament, which the working of the
Test Act had made a wholly Protestant body, save for the presence of a
few Catholics among the peers, was