It will also soon be shown that he did his best to carry
these schemes into execution. There is no evidence, however, and no
probability, that he had received the royal commands to perpetrate such a
crime.

The States believed also, that in those secret negotiations with Parma
the Queen was disposed to sacrifice the religious interests of the
Netherlands. In this they were mistaken. But they had reason for their
mistake, because the negotiator De Loo, had expressly said, that, in her
overtures to Farnese, she had abandoned that point altogether. If this
had been so, it would have simply been a consent on the part of
Elizabeth, that the Catholic religion and the inquisition should be
re-established in the Provinces, to the exclusion of every other form of
worship or polity. In truth, however, the position taken by her Majesty
on the subject was as fair as could be reasonably expected. Certainly she
was no advocate for religious liberty. She chose that her own subjects
should be Protestants, because she had chosen to be a Protestant herself,
and because it was an incident of her supremacy, to dictate uniformity of
creed to all beneath her sceptre. No more than her father, who sent to
the stake or gallows heretics to transubstantiation as well as believers
in the Pope, had Elizabeth the faintest idea of religious freedom.
Heretics to the English Church were persecuted, fined, imprisoned,
mutilated, and murdered, by sword, rope, and fire. In some respects, the
practice towards those who dissented from Elizabeth was more immoral and
illogical, even if less cruel, than that to which those were subjected
who rebelled against Sixtus. The Act of Uniformity required Papists to
assist at the Protestant worship, but wealthy Papists could obtain
immunity by an enormous fine. The Roman excuse to destroy bodies in order
to save souls, could scarcely be alleged by a Church which might be
bribed into connivance at heresy, and which derived a revenue from the
very nonconformity for which humbler victims were sent to the gallows. It
would, however, be unjust in the extreme to overlook the enormous
difference in the amount of persecution, exercised respectively by the
Protestant and the Roman Church. It is probable that not many more than
two hundred Catholics were executed as such, in Elizabeth's reign, and
this was ten score too many. But what was this against eight hundred
heretics burned, hanged, and drowned, in one Easter week by Alva,