preferred death
to his very sensible advice.

Probably the Family of Love were misunderstood and
misrepresented, both as regards their doctrines and their
practices. Camden says that "under a show of singular integrity
and sanctity they insinuated themselves into the affections of
the ignorant common people"; that they regarded as reprobate all
outside their Family, and deemed it lawful to deny on oath
whatsoever they pleased. Niclas, according to Fuller, "wanted
learning in himself and hated it in others." This is a failing so
common as to be very probable, as it also is, that his disciples
allegorised the Scriptures (like the Alexandrian Fathers before
them), and counterfeited revelations. Fuller adds that they
"grieved the Comforter, charging all their sins on God's Spirit,
for not effectually assisting them against the same . . . sinning
on design that their wickedness might be a foil to God's mercy,
to set it off the brighter." But that they were Communists,
Anarchists, or Libertines, there is no evidence; and the Queen's
menial servant who wrote and presented to Parliament an apology
for the Service of Love probably complained with justice of their
being "defamed with many manner of false reports and lies." This
availed nothing, however, against public opinion; and so the
Queen commanded by proclamation "that the civil magistrate should
be assistant to the ecclesiastical, and that the books should be
publicly burnt." The sect, however, long survived the burning of
its books.

But already it was not enough to burn books of an unpopular
tendency, cruelty against the author being plainly progressive
from this time forward to the atrocious penalties afterwards
associated with the presence of Laud in the Star Chamber. All our
histories tell of John Stubbs, of Lincoln's Inn, who, when his
right hand had been cut off for a literary work, with his left
hand waved his hat from his head and cried, "Long live the
Queen!" The punishment was out of all proportion to the offence.
Men had a right to feel anxious when Elizabeth seemed on the
point of marrying the Catholic Duke of Anjou. They remembered the
days of Mary, and feared, with reason, the return of Catholicism.
Stubbs gave expression to this fear in a work entitled the
_Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be
swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the
banes by letting her Majestie see the sin and punishment thereof_
(1579)