against
the eighteen thousand two hundred went to stake and scaffold, as he
boasted during his administration, against the vast numbers of
Protestants, whether they be counted by tens or by hundreds of thousands,
who perished by the edicts of Charles V., in the Netherlands, or in the
single Saint Bartholomew Massacre in France? Moreover, it should never be
forgotten--from undue anxiety for impartiality--that most of the
Catholics who were executed in England, suffered as conspirators rather
than as heretics. No foreign potentate, claiming to be vicegerent of
Christ, had denounced Philip as a bastard and, usurper, or had, by means
of a blasphemous fiction, which then was a terrible reality, severed the
bonds of allegiance by which his subjects were held, cut him off from all
communion with his fellow-creatures, and promised temporal rewards and a
crown of glory in heaven to those who should succeed in depriving him of
throne and life. Yet this was the position of Elizabeth. It was war to
the knife between her and Rome, declared by Rome itself; nor was there
any doubt whatever that the Seminary Priests--seedlings transplanted from
foreign nurseries, which were as watered gardens for the growth of
treason--were a perpetually organized band of conspirators and assassins,
with whom it was hardly an act of excessive barbarity to deal in somewhat
summary fashion. Doubtless it would have been a more lofty policy, and a
far more intelligent one, to extend towards the Catholics of England, who
as a body were loyal to their country, an ample toleration. But it could
scarcely be expected that Elizabeth Tudor, as imperious and absolute by
temperament as her father had ever been, would be capable of embodying
that great principle.

When, in the preliminaries to the negotiations of 1587, therefore, it was
urged on the part of Spain, that the Queen was demanding a concession of
religious liberty from Philip to the Netherlanders which she refused to
English heretics, and that he only claimed the same right of dictating a
creed to his subjects which she exercised in regard to her own, Lord
Burghley replied that the statement was correct. The Queen permitted--it
was true--no man to profess any religion but the one which she professed.
At the same time it was declared to be unjust, that those persons in the
Netherlands who had been for years in the habit of practising Protestant
rites, should be suddenly compelled, without instruction, to