, the right could even in imagination be
conceded of controlling the consciences of their fellow-creatures.

But it was progress for the sixteenth century that there were
individuals, and prominent individuals, who dared to proclaim liberty of
conscience for all. William of Orange was a Calvinist, sincere and rigid,
but he denounced all oppression of religion, and opened wide the doors of
the Commonwealth to Papists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists alike. The Earl
of Leicester was a Calvinist, most rigid in tenet, most edifying of
conversation, the acknowledged head of the Puritan party of England, but
he was intolerant and was influenced only by the most intolerant of his
sect. Certainly it would have required great magnanimity upon his part to
assume a friendly demeanour towards the Papists. It is easier for us, in
more favoured ages, to rise to the heights of philosophical abstraction,
than for a man, placed as was Leicester, in the front rank of a mighty
battle, in which the triumph of either religion seemed to require the
bodily annihilation of all its adversaries. He believed that the success
of a Catholic conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth or of a Spanish
invasion of England, would raise Mary to the throne and consign himself
to the scaffold. He believed that the subjugation of the independent
Netherlands would place the Spaniards instantly in England, and he
frequently received information, true or false, of Popish plots that were
ever hatching in various parts of the Provinces against the English
Queen. It was not surprising, therefore, although it was unwise, that he
should incline his ear most seriously to those who counselled severe
measures not only against Papists, but against those who were not
persecutors of Papists, and that he should allow himself to be guided by
adventurers, who wore the mask of religion only that they might plunder
the exchequer and rob upon the highway.

Under the administration of this extreme party, therefore, the Papists
were maltreated, disfranchised, banished, and plundered. The distribution
of the heavy war-taxes, more than two-thirds of which were raised in
Holland only, was confided to foreigners, and regulated mainly at
Utrecht, where not one-tenth part of the same revenue was collected. This
naturally excited the wrath of the merchants and manufacturers of Holland
and the other Provinces, who liked not that these hard-earned and
lavishly-paid subsidies should be meddled w