of ALL.

laity, the high and the highest, the low and the lowest, displayed the same good spirit. Loyalty pure, animated and exulting loyalty, was the spirit Thus every historian describes it.-How was this loyalty, this pure, animated, and exulting loyalty of the Catholics rewarded? By imprisonment, confiscation, torture, hanging and ripping up alive. Between the defeat of the Armada, and the death of Elizabeth, 100 priests were hanged and embowelled.

The cruel inattention of Elizabeth to the loyal spirit which her Catholic subjects thus universally displayed, and the barbarity of her subsequent legislation in their regard, are shocking. I am not apprised of any writer but yoursolf, who has approved them.

2. You say to me, (page 234)," You make a solemn appeal to Mr. Southey, in which You compare the persecutions by Protestants to those "by the Romanists, and again leave us to infer, "that both being once equally guilty, our mutual "reproaches on this head ought to cease." answer "as solemnly as you address us : "We,"-You say,-" have no infallibility to "defend."

I

We,-I say,-have no infallibility, spiritual or temporal to defend, which teaches, or which is authorised to teach, either the duty or the lawfulness of persecution.

If by an impossible supposition, the Pope and a general council should propound to us the

doctrine of religious intolerance, as an article of faith, or the execution of it as a religious or moral duty, we should laugh at their monstrous folly, and say, as our ancestors did to Pope Boniface, when he required Edward the First to abstain from his claim upon the Scottish crown, "We do not, "we will not, we cannot, and we ought not to "do it."

"We,"-You say," have no principle of persecution to resign."

We,—I say,—neither have nor ever had any principle of persecution to resign. We detest and disclaim every such principle absolutely, and with

out any qualification.

You, then say," Unless the decree of the "Council of Lateran, and the article of the "Council of Trent, which sanctions all former

councils, be repealed, the Protestant nation which "confers power on the Romanists, will be guilty "of a direliction of its first duty."

Then,-1 say, the Protestant nation of England may, in this very moment confer power upon the Romanists without any direliction of duty: the canon to which You refer,-if that canon ever existed,―is, I have demonstrated,-gone, to the grave of all the Capulets.

3. In Your last page but one, You accuse me of sophistry and disingenuousness.-Knowing the fallibility of poor human reason, I dare not abso

*Historical Memoirs of tha English, Irish and Scottish Catholics, Ch. VII. Vol. I. p. 46.

lutely affirm, that, I have never been guilty of sophistry: I believe that I have not :-If I have, all who know me, know, that it has been unintentionally. Of disingenuousness I aver myself perfectly innocent. If I felt myself guilty of it, my grey hairs would soon descend with sorrow to the grave.

XV. 7

Conclusion.

I have now reached the close of your fifteenth letter.

In our view of the legislation of queen Elizabeth, in respect to her Roman Catholic subjects, we are completely at issue: You describe the general allegiance of the body of the Roman Catholics to have been unsound;-You think, that their allegiance being thus universally unsound, the laws which treated them all as great delinquents, and which required no other evidence of their delinquency, than proof of their refusal of the oath of supremacy, were founded in morality and justice :You think that, generally speaking, they had fair trials: You do not condemn the inflictions of the torture upon them;-and You approve all the other severities with which they were treated, or, at least the general system of them, as justified by necessity. I think that the allegiance of the body was sound, with a very small exception; that the number of those who composed this exception was in

considerable, and of no real importance; still that it would have justified the queen in adopting strong precautionary measures; but that, she was most unjustifiable in treating the whole body of Roman Catholics as delinquents in allegiance, and in making the mere proof of a refusal of the oath of supremacy, evidence of treason; I also think that the trials of them were wholly irregular; the use of torture execrable; and the other severities, used in their regard, abominably cruel. In my Historical Memoirs,* I have shown the condition of the Roman Catholics under Elizabeth, and at the close of the reign of James I: I shall insert it at the end of my next letter; it will fully show what You approve, and I condemn.

In this place I shall shortly state the number of the Catholics who were hanged and embowelled, and the condition of those who were permitted to live.

1

The total number of those who were hanged and embowelled amounted to 204. In this list no priest is included, who was executed for any plot, real or imaginary, except eleven, who were executed for the pretended plot at Rheims or Rome; a plot which was so daring a forgery, that even Camden, the eulogizing biographer of Elizabeth, allows the sufferers to have been political victims. Of the 204,

15 were executed for denying the queen's supremacy; for the exercise of priestly functions;

126

63

204

for being reconciled to the Catholic

faith, or assisting priests.

*Vol. II. Ch. LII.

All this, you think, was very right; You tell us, (p. 207), "that your ancestors were men of wis"dom, and had sufficient reason to pass their "various enactments,"-under which these unhappy sufferers were hanged and embowelled.

:

Leaving these to what you seem to consider their just fate, let us consider the condition of the Roman Catholics whom the laws permitted to survive.

"I say nothing," says Doctor Milner, "of many, who were whipped, fined or stripped of "their property, to the utter ruin of their families. "In one night, fifty Catholic gentlemen in the

county of Lancaster, was suddenly seized and " and committed to prison, on account of their "non-attendance at church. About the same "time, I find an equal number of Yorkshire gen"tlemen lying prisoners in York castle, on the same account, most of whom perished there. "These were, every week, for a twelvemonth toge"ther, dragged by main force, to hear the esta"blished service performed in the same chapel.".

Doctor Bridgwater, in a table published at the end of his "Concertatio Cartholica," gives the names of about 1,200, who had been deprived of their livings or estates, or who had been imprisoned or banished, or who were otherwise victims of prosecution for their religion, previously to the year 1588, the period when the persecution of the Catholics rose to its height; declaring, at the same time, that he was far from having named all, and