religious dissensions of a fierce and
bigoted age ended in his thirty-ninth year an unfortunate life,
shortened, as well as embittered, by the more than monkish austerities
which he imagined it meritorious to inflict upon himself.

From the period of the abortive attempt at insurrection under the earls
of Northumberland and Westmorland, the whole course of public events had
tended to increase the difficulties and aggravate the sufferings in
which the catholics of England found themselves inextricably involved.
Their situation was thus forcibly depicted by Philip Sidney, in a
passage of his celebrated letter to her majesty against the French
marriage, which at the present day will probably be read in a spirit
very different from that in which it was written.

"The other faction, most rightly indeed to be called a faction, is the
papists; men whose spirits are full of anguish; some being infested by
others whom they accounted damnable; some having their ambition stopped
because they are not in the way of advancement; some in prison and
disgrace; some whose best friends are banished practisers; many thinking
you an usurper; many thinking also you had disannulled your right
because of the pope's excommunication; all burthened with the weight of
their consciences. Men of great numbers, of great riches (because the
affairs of state have not lain on them), of united minds, as all men
that deem themselves oppressed naturally are."

A further commentary on the hardships of their condition may be
extracted from an apology for the measures of the English government
towards both papists and puritans, addressed by Walsingham to M. Critoy
the French secretary of state.

* * * * *

"Sir,

"Whereas you desire to be advertised touching the proceedings here in
ecclesiastical causes, because you seem to note in them some inconstancy
and variation, as if we sometimes inclined to one side, sometimes to
another, as if that clemency and lenity were not used of late that was
used in the beginning, all which you impute to your own superficial
understanding of the affairs of this state, having notwithstanding her
majesty's doing in singular reverence, as the real pledges which she
hath given unto the world of her sincerity in religion and her wisdom in
government well meriteth; I am glad of this occasion to impart that
little I know in that matter to you, both for your own satisfaction, and
to the end you m