. They were headed by two men of remarkable talents
and energy. A large number of the Oxford refugees at Douay had joined
the Order of Jesus, whose members were already famous for their blind
devotion to the will and judgements of Rome; and the two ablest and most
eloquent of these exiles, Campian, once a fellow of St. John's, and
Parsons, once a fellow of Balliol, were despatched in the spring of 1580
as the heads of a Jesuit mission in England. Their special aim was to
win the nobility and gentry to the Church, and for the moment their
success seemed overwhelming. "It is supposed," wrote Allen triumphantly,
"that there are twenty thousand more Catholics this year than last." The
eagerness shown to hear Campian was so great that in spite of the
rewards offered for his arrest by the Government he was able to preach
with hardly a show of concealment to a large audience at Smithfield.
From London the Jesuits wandered in the disguise of captains or
serving-men, sometimes even in the cassocks of the English clergy,
through many of the counties; and wherever they went the zeal of the
Catholic gentry revived. The list of nobles won back to the older faith
by these wandering apostles was headed by the name of Lord Oxford,
Cecil's own son-in-law, and the proudest among English peers.

[Sidenote: The Protestant terror.]

Their success in undoing the Queen's work of compromise was shown in a
more public way by the growing withdrawal of the Catholics from
attendance at the worship of the English Church. It was plain that a
fierce religious struggle was at hand, and men felt that behind this
lay a yet fiercer political struggle. Philip's hosts were looming over
sea, and the horrors of foreign invasion seemed about to be added to the
horrors of civil war. The panic of the Protestants and of the Parliament
outran even the real greatness of the danger. The little group of
missionaries was magnified by popular fancy into a host of disguised
Jesuits; and the invasion of this imaginary host was met by the seizure
and torture of as many priests as the government could lay hands on, the
imprisonment of recusants, the securing of the prominent Catholics
throughout the country, and by the assembling of Parliament at the
opening of 1581. An Act "to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in due
obedience" prohibited the saying of Mass even in private houses,
increased the fine on recusants to twenty pounds a month, and enacted
that "all person