CHAPTER X. TERMINATION OF THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH. CURSORY REVIEW OF ITS TERRORS IN ENGLAND. A.D. 1603. THE 29th of January, 1603, her majesty issued her last proclamation against her Catholic subjects, a few weeks only before her death. In that proclamation she commanded all priests, Jesuits, and others, and their adherents, to quit the kingdom within thirty days, under the capital penalty enjoined by law against those who received ordination by the authority of the pope. This was the crowning act of persecution in the reign of the sanguinary daughter of the brutal king. Cruelty and hypocrisy went hand in hand in this last iniquitous measure. She spoke in it of her clemency to the missionaries, of its being abused by them, and of their having even "adventured to walk the streets at noon-day," and carried themselves so breed a suspicion that she proposed to grant a toleration of two religions; though God knew that she was ignorant of any such imagination, and that no one had ever ventured to suggest it to her."* 66 as to "The golden reign of the good Queen Bess," terminated in a few weeks after the promulgation of her last bloody edict. She reigned forty-five years. "Her glories," we find ample details of in Hume, and all his followers. Her butcheries the historians make little or no account of. She "made great wars" in Ireland to force her new fangled faith on the people of that country, and she expended on * Lingard, vol. 5, p. 607. In the 43rd of Elizabeth, "It was showed by Dr. Bennet," says D'Ewes, "upon occasion of speech of the multitude of recusants, that there were thirteen hundred, nay, fifteen hundred recusants in Yorkshire, which he vouched upon his credit were presented both in the ecclesiastical court and before the council at York." In the seventh of James I., in the dispute touching a petition against Papists, it was, say the Journals of the House of Commons, by occasion delivered, that in England there were "three hundred convicted recusants in a shire, at the queen's death now eight hundred." them in one year (1589) the sum of £.600,000, which in the currency of the present time would be equal to about twelve millions sterling. She made small wars on the coast of Spain and Portugal, entered into on account of the reformed religion, and she expended on these between 1589 and 1593 the sum of £.1,300,000 sterling, equal to about twenty-six millions of our present currency; she made secret wars in the Low Countries, and in France, that is to say, she fomented rebellion in the former to favour the Protestant interest in Holland, and she clandestinely aided and abetted the Huguenots in France, to carry on a civil war against an ally with whom she was at peace, likewise to promote the interest of the Protestant religion. in the French king's dominions. She sent an army into Scotland on a false pretence, but in reality to make enmity between the Catholic Queen of that country and her subjects; and when, by her emissaries, she stirred up those subjects into open revolt by her machination with the Calvinistic firebrands of Scotland, she caused the Catholic Queen to fly into her dominions, imprisoned her, and eventually cut off her head. All this was for the advancement of the reformation. What immense treasures must have been lavished on this object! What immense treasures might not have been spared to England-what shedding of blood might not have been avoided in England and Ireland-how many holocausts of priests and Catholic laymen hanged, drawn, bowelled, and beheaded, might not these countries have been saved the indelible disgrace of how much burning, hate, and religious rancour might they not have escaped, if Elizabeth had left the people of her dominions to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. It is said, that in 1573 "Elizabeth found means by economy, without imposing on her people any additional burdens, to discharge with interest, not only all the debts she had incurred, but those of Edward her brother, and of her sister Mary. But not a word is said of the way she got the means to do this; not one word of the church possession, vested in the crown by her father, which Mary had relinquished, and which she had resumed. These possessions were of im * Hume. mense value, and were not only the property of the church, but the patrimony of the poor. And to the eternal disgrace of her rapacious reign, be it remembered, she completed the impoverishment of the nation commenced by her father, pauperized her people, resumed the plunder of the institutions which afforded the poor, the sick, the lame, the blind, the aged, a provision in their necessities; and in return had eleven poor laws passed in her reign for a compulsory maintenance of the beggared English people. These laws, which abolished charity, which created pauperism, which severed the bonds that united the rich and the poor, which degraded and debased the character of the burley honest independent yeomen of once "Merry England," were passed in "the golden days of the good Queen Bess." It was not only to her Catholic subjects, as Catholics, she was a sanguinary tyrant; she was a monster of cruelty to the poor of her own land. She made her people paupers, and when they were without food and homes, mendicants and vagrants, she inflicted savage punishments on them, branded them, imprisoned them, nay, in her latter days, when her feline nature was infuriated by the mad freaks of her hair-brained paramour, she hanged the poor without judge or jury, gave them the name of vagabonds, and consigned them to the gallows, and the penal settlements. "In 1595, under the pretence that the vagabonds in the neighbourhood of London were not to be restrained by the usual punishments, she ordered Sir Thomas Wyllford to receive from the magistrates the most notorious and incorrigible of these offenders, and to execute them upon the gallows according to the forms of martial law.”* These deeds were done in " the golden days of the good Queen Bess." The glories of her reign are still rung in our ears, but the time will come when her memory will be loathed in the land she pauperized. Justice was never worse administer ed in England than in her reign. The upright and respectable magistrates of the former reign were removed by Cecil, and replaced by men of inferior rank. Numerous complaints were heard of their tyranny, peculation, and rapacity. A justice of peace * D'Ewes, p 661. Ap. Lingard, vol. 5, p. 628. was defined in parliament, "an animal who for half-adozen chickens would dispense with a dozen laws."* The higher tribunals were little better than the lower; the judges were removable at pleasure, "and the queen herself was in the habit of receiving, and permitted her favourites and ladies to receive, bribes as the prices of his or their interferences in the suits of private individuals."+ Elizabeth, in fact, had no reverence for law or justice, and no love of virtue, if her contemporaries are to be believed. Faunt says her court was a place "where all enormities reigned in the highest degree;" and, according to Harrington, "where there was no love but that of the lusty god of gallantry, Asmodeus." In her person she was repulsive and ungraceful. In her old age, when she imagined herself the most beautiful of women, Hentzner describes her at the age of sixty-five, "with false hair of a red colour, surmounted with a crown of gold; her face wrinkled, her eyes small, her teeth black, her nose prominent, and her bosom uncovered, as became a virgin queen." In her manners she was coarse, violent, and unfeminine, brutal in her anger; she swore like a trooper, and stormed like a virago on slight occasions at her courtiers and attendants. Though possessed of natural abilities of a high order, some taste for letters and for music; evidences of great intellectual power, enlarged views, are not to be found in her acts, with the exception of the clearness of perception and the discernment shown in the choice of her public servants. She was greedy of praise, or rather a glutton, who swallowed hyperbolical flattery as fast and as freely as a hungry traveller swallows poached eggs. She came to her paramours for praise with " a most ravenous appetite.' She was arrogant, overbearing, jealous, and ridiculously vain; meanly parsimonious, unprincipled, obstinate to a degree inconsistent often with the interests of the state, but at the same time irresolute to an extent bordering, as her ministers sometimes thought, on folly, and slow in comprehending all the bearings of a subject of great impor tance. Of her morals, the accounts given of them by the foreign ambassadors at her court to their respective sove reigns and friends, present a picture exceedingly prejudicial to the fame of "the virgin queen." Lingard, who deals too gently with her vices, says, that she disgraced herself by her conduct to one of her supposed paramours-Leicester-in assigning an apartment to him contiguous to her own bed-chamber; "by this indecent act she proved that she was become regardless of all sense of shame." 66 Among his rivals," he adds, were numbered Hatton, Raleigh, Oxford, Blount, Simier, and Anjou and it was afterwards believed, that her licentious habits survived even when the fires of wantonness had been quenched by the chill of age.' *יי 66 Such was the person whom the Roman Catholics of England and Ireland were called on to acknowledge as the supreme head of the Church of Christ,-a vain, libidinous, sanguinary woman; and for opposing whose blasphemous pretensions, they were horribly persecuted by her. The following is a summary of the Penal Laws passed in England during the reign of Elizabeth: 66 The 1 Eliz. c. 1, confirmed all the acts levelled by Henry against the see of Rome, which Mary had repealed, and directed that all ecclesiastical persons, or other temporal officers, and all persons taking orders or degrees in a university, shall take the oath of supremacy, under forfeiture of their spiritual and temporal promotions. And all who, in opposition to this oath, maintain the authority of any foreign prince, or do anything for the advancement of his jurisdiction, for the first offence forfeit all their property, real and personal; or suffer imprisonment for one year. All ecclesiastical promotions, also, are void, as if the party were dead; whilst for the second offence they incur the pains of a premunire, and for the third those of high treason. 66 "The 1 Eliz. c. 2, sets aside the repeal of Edward's statutes by Mary, and revives the acts of her brother; altering, however, the punishment of ministers who use other forms of prayer, from forfeiting, for the first offence, the profits of one benefice, to the forfeiture of all their benefices for one year; and doubling the imprisonment for the first offence of those who have no benefices. The forfeiture of those who disparage the Prayer Book is likewise * Lingard, Vol. v. p. 621. |