ELDER G BEEBE - HISTORY OF PROTESTANT PRIEST-CRAFT IN AMERICA AND EUROPE part 6

[T Adams]

Dear Brethren and Friends,

Here is the sixth chapter of Beebe's "The History of Protestant Priestcraft in America and Europe."

A Sinner in Hope,
Tom

===========================================


THE HISTORY OF PROTESTANT PRIEST-CRAFT IN AMERICA AND EUROPE
Elder Gilbert Beebe
BANNER OF LIBERTY
1865

CHAPTER VI.
It’s progress in Great Britain under James I.

In the foregoing chapters, it has been proved, beyond all contradiction, that the “Reformation,” as it is called, “was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherished and fed by rivers of innocent English, Irish and German blood.”

But though we have now seen the Church of England established, completely established by the gibbets, the racks and the ripping knives, I must before I come to the impoverishing and degrading consequences, of which I have just spoken, and of which I shall produce the most incontestable proofs, I must given an account of the proceedings of the Reformation people after they had established their system. The present chapter will show us the Reformation producing a second, and that, too, (as every generation is wiser than the preceding,) with vast improvements; the first eing only “a godly Reformation,” while the second we shall list to be “a thorough godly” one. The next chapter will introduce to us a third Reformation, or revolution. The next following chapter will give us an account of events still great, namely, the American Reformation, or Revolution, and that of the French. All these we shall trace back to the first Reformation as clearly as any man can trace the branches of a tree back to its root. And then we shall see the fruit in the immorality, crimes, poverty and degradation of the main body of the people. It will be curious to behold the American and French Reformation, or Revolutions, laying back the principles of the English “Reformation” people upon themselves.

The “good and glorious, and maiden,” and racking and ripping up Betsy, who amongst her other “godly” deeds, granted to her minions, to whom there was no longer church-plunder to give, monopolies of almost all the necessaries of life, so that salt, for instance, which used to be about 2d. a bushel, was raised to 15s., or about seven pounds of English money now; the “maiden” Betsy, who had, as Whitaker says expired in sulky silence as to her successor, and had thus left a probable civil war as a legacy of mischief, was however, peaceably succeeded by James I., that very child of whom poor Mary Stuart was pregnant, when his father Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley, and associates, murdered Rizzio in her presence, as we have seen, and which child when he came to man’s estate, was a Presbyterian, was generally a pensioner of Bess, abandoned his mother to Bess’s wrath, and, amongst his first act in England, took by the hand, confided in and promoted, that Cecil, who was the son of Old Cecil, who did, indeed, inherit the great talents of his father, but who had also been, as all the world knew, the deadly enemy of this new king’s unfortunate mother.

James was at once prodigal and mean, conceited and foolish, tyrannical and weak; but the chief feature of his character was insincerity. It would be useless to dwell in detail on the measure of this contemptible reign, the prodigalities and debaucheries and silliness of which, did, however, prepare the way for that rebellion and that revolution, which took place in the next, when the double-distilled “Reformers” di, at last, provide a “martyr” for the hitherto naked pages of the Protestant Calendar. Indeed, this reign would, as far as my purposes extend, be a complete blank, were it not for that “gunpowder plot,” which alone used this Stuart to be remembered, and of which, seeing that it has been, and is yet, made a source of great general delusion, I shall take much more notice than it would otherwise be entitled to.

That there was a plot in the year 1605 (the second year after James came to that one), the object of which was to blow up the king and both houses of Parliament, on the first day of the session, that Catholics, and none but Catholics, were parties to this plot; that the conspirators were ready to execute the deed, and that they all avowed this to the last; are facts which no man has ever attempted to deny, any more than any man has attempted to deny that the parties to the Cato-street plot did really intend to cut off the heads of Sidmouth and Castlereagh, which intention was openly avowed by these parties from first to last, to the officers who took them, to the judge who condemned them, and to the people who saw their heads severed from their bodies.

However, these conspirators had provocation; and now let us see what that provocation was. The king, before he came to the throne, had promised to mitigate the penal laws, which as we have seen, made their lives a burden. Instead of this, those laws were rendered even more severe than they had been in the former reign. Every species of insult as well as injury which the Catholics and other Dissenters had had to endure under the persecutions of the established church was not heightened by that leaven of Presbyterian malignity and ferocity, which England had not imported from the North, which had then poured forth upon this devoted country endless borders of the most greedy and rapacious and insolent wretches that God had ever permitted to infect and scourge the earth. We have seen how the houses of conscientious Dissenters were rifled, how they were rummaged, in what constant dread these unhappy men lived, how they were robbed of their estates as a punishment for recusancy and other things called crimes; we have seen, that, by the fines, imposed on these accounts, the ancient gentry of England, whose families had, for ages, inhabited the same mansions and had been venerated and beloved for their hospitality and charity; we have seen how all these were gradually sinking into absolute beggary in consequence of these exorbitant extortions: but what was their lot now! The fines, as had been the practice, had been suffered to fall in arrear, in order to make the fined party more completely at the mercy of the crown; and James, whose prodigality left him not the means of gratifying the greediness of his Scotch minions out of his own exchequer, delivered over Dissenters from the English Church to these rapacious minions, who, thus clad with royal authority, fell, with all their well-known hardness of heart, upon the devoted victims; as the kite falls upon the defenseless dove. They entered their mansions, ransacked their closets, drawers and beds, seized their rent-roll, in numerous cases drove their wives and children from their doors, and, with all their native upstart insolence, made a mockery of the ruin and misery of the unoffending persons whom they had despoiled.

Human nature gave the lie to all preachings of longer passive obedience, and, at last, one of these oppressed and insulted English gentlemen, Robert Catesby, of Northamptonshire, resolved on making an attempt to deliver himself and his suffering brethren from this almost infernal scourge. But, how was he to obtain the means? From abroad, such was the state of things, no aid could possibly be hoped for. Internal insurrection was, as long as the makers and executors of the barbarous laws remained, equally hopeless. Hence he came to the conclusion, that to destroy the whole of them afforded the only hope of deliverance; and to effect this there appeared to him no other way than that of blowing up the parliament house when on the first day of session, all should be assembled together. He soon obtained associates; but, in the whole, they amounted to only thirteen; and, all except three or four, in rather obscure situations in life, amongst whom was Guy Fawkes, a Yorkshireman, who had served as an officer in the Flemish wars. He it was, who undertook to set fire to the magazine, consisting of two hogsheads and thirty-two barrels of gunpowder; he it was, who if not otherwise to be accomplished, had resolved to blow himself up along with the persecutors of his brethren; he it was, who, on the 5th of November, 1605, a few hours before the Parliament was to meet, was seized in the vault, with two matches in his pocket and a dark lantern by his side, ready to effect his tremendous purpose; he it was, who, when brought before the King and Council, replied to all their questions with defiance; he it was, who, when asked by a Scotch lord of the Council, why he had collected so many barrels of gunpowder, answered, “to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains,” and, in this answer, proclaimed to the world the true immediate cause of this memorable conspiracy; an answer, which, in common justice, ought to be put into the mouth of those effigies of him, which crafty knaves induce foolish boys still to burn on the 5th of November. James (whose silly conceit had made him an author) was just, in one respect, at any rate. In his works, he calls Fawkes, “the English Scævola”; and history tells us that that famous Roman, having missed his mark in endeavoring to kill a tyrant, who had doomed his country to slavery, thrust his offending hand into a hot fire, and let it burn, while he looked defiance at the tyrant.

Catesby, and the other conspirators, were pursued; he, and three of his associates, died with arms in their hands fighting against their pursuers. The rest of them, (except Thresham, who was poised in prison,) were executed, and also the famous Jesuit, Garnet, who was wholly innocent of any crime connected with the conspiracy, and who, having come to a knowledge of it, through the channel of confession, had, on the contrary, done every thing in his power to prevent the perpetrating of its object. He was sacrificed to that unrelenting fanaticism, which, encouraged by this, and other similar successes, at last, as we are soon to see, cut off the head of the son and successor of this very king. The king and Parliament escaped from feelings of humanity in the conspirators. Amongst the disabilities imposed on the Catholics, they had not yet, and were not, until the reign of Charles II., shut out of Parliament. So that, if the House were blown up, Catholic Peers and members, would have shared the fate of the Protestants. The conspirators could not give warning to the Catholics without exciting suspicions. They did give such warning where they could; and this led to the timely detection; otherwise the whole of the two Houses, and the king along with them, would have been blown to atoms; for, though Cecil evidently knew of the plot long before the time of intended execution, though he took care to nurse it till the moment of advantageous discovery arrived; though he was, in all probability, the author of a warning letter, which, being sent anonymously to a Catholic nobleman, and communicated by him to the Government, became the ostensible cause of the timely discovery; notwithstanding these attested facts, it by no means appears, that the plot originated with him, or, indeed, with anybody but Catesy, of whose conduct men will judge differently according to the difference in their notions about passive obedience and non-resistance.

This king James, as he himself averred, was near being assassinated by his Scotch Protestant subjects, Earl Gowry and his associates; and, after that, narrowly escaped being blown up, with all his attendants, by the furious Protestant burghers of Perth. See Collier’s Church History, vol. ii., p. 663, and 664. Then again, the Protestants in the Netherlands, formed a plot to blow up their governor, the Prince of Parma, with all the nobility and magistrates of those countries, when assembled in the city of Antwerp. But the Protestants did not always fail in their plots, now were those who engaged in them obscure individuals. For,a s we have seen, this very king James’s father, the king of Scotland, was, in 1567, blown up by gunpowder, and thereby killed. This was doing the thing effectually. Here was no warning given to anybody; and all the attendants and servants, of whatever religion, and of both sexes, except such as escaped by mere accident, were remorselessly murdered along with their master. And who was this done by? By the lovers of the “Avangel,” as the wretches called themselves; the followers of that Knox to whom a monument has been erected at Glasgow. The conspirators, on this occasion, were not thirteen obscure men, and those, too, who had received provocation enough to make men mad; but a body of noblemen and gentlemen, who really had received no provocation to all from Mary Stuart, to destroy whom was more the object than it was to destroy her husband. Let us take the account of these conspirators in the words of Whitaker; and, let the reader recollect, that Whitaker, who published his book in 1790, was a parson of the church of England, Rector of Ruhan-Lanyhorne in Cornwall. Hear this staunch English Church parson, then, upon the subject of this Protestant Gunpowder Plot, concerning which he had made the fullest inquiry and collected together the clearest evidence. He, (Vindication of Mary, Queen of Scots, vol. iii., p. 235,) says, in speaking of the Plot, “The guilt of this wretched woman, Elizabeth, and the guilt of that wretched man, Cecil, appear too evident, at last, upon the face of the whole. Indeed, as far as we can judge of the matter, the whole disposition of the murderous drama was this. The whole was originally planned and devised betwixt Elizabeth, Cecil, Morton and Murray; and the execution committed to Lethington, Bothwel and Balfour; and Elizabeth, we may be certain, was to defend the original and more iniquitous of the conspirators, Morton and Murray, in charging their murder upon the innocent Mary.” Did hell itself, did the devil, who was, as Luther himself says, so long the companion, and so often the bed fellow of this first “Reformer,” ever devise wickedness equal to this Protestant plot? Nobody knew better than James himself the history of his father’s and his mother’s end. He knew that they had both been murdered by Protestants, and that, too, with circumstances of atrocity quite unequally in the annals of human infamy; and, therefore, he himself was not for vigorous measures against the Catholics and Dissenters in general, on account of the plot; but love of plunder in his minions prevailed over him; and now began to blaze, with fresh fury, that Protestant reformation spirit, which, at lat, gave him a murdered father and mother and son.

Charles I., who came to the throne on the death of his father, in 1625, with no more sense, and with a stronger tincture of haughtiness and tyranny than his father, seemed to wish to go back, in church matters, towards the Catholic rites and ceremonies, while his Parliaments and people were every day becoming more and more puritanical. Divers were the grounds of quarrel between them, but the great ground was that of religion. The Dissenters were suffering all the while, and especially those in Ireland, who were plundered and murdered by whole districts, and (?) under Wentworth, who (?) injustice than ever had before been committed even in that unhappy country. But all this was not enough to satisfy the Puritans; and Laud, the Primate of the Established Church, having done a great many things to exalt that church in point of power and dignity, the purer Protestants called for “another Reformation,” and what they called “a thorough godly Reformation.”

Now, then, this Protestant church and Protestant king had to learn that “Reformations,” like comets, have tails. There was no longer the iron police of old Bess, to watch and to crush all gainsayers. The Puritans artfully connected political grievances, which were real and numerous, with religious principles and ceremonies; and, having the main body of the people with them as to the former, while they had, in consequence of the endless change of creeds, become indifferent as to the latter, they soon became, under the name of “The Parliament,” the sole rulers of the country; they abolished the Church and the House of Lords, and, finally brought, in 1649, during the progress of their “thorough godly reformation,” the unfortunate king himself to trial, and to the block!

All very bad to be sure; but all very natural, seeing what had gone before. If “some such men as Henry VIII.” were, as Burnet says he was, necessary to begin a “Reformation,” why not “some such man” as Cromwell to complete it? If it were right to put to death, More, Fisher, and thousands of others, not forgetting the grandmother of Charles’s head to be so very sacred?

Cromwell, (whose reign we may consider as having lasted from 1649 to 1659,) therefore, though he soon made the Parliament a mere instrument in his hands: though he was tyrannical and bloody: though he ruled with a rod of iron: though he was a real tyrant, was nothing more than the “natural issue,” as “maiden” Betsy would have called him, of the “body” of the “Reformation.” He was cruel towards the Irish; he killed with without mercy; but, except in the act of selling two hundred thousand of them to the West Indies as slaves, in what did he treat them worse than Charles, to whom, and to whose descendants they were loyal from first to last? And, certainly, even that sale did not equal, in point of atrociousness, many of the acts committed against them during the last three Protestant reigns; and, in point of odiousness and hatefulness, it fell short of the ingratitude of the Established Church in the reign of Charles II.

But, common justice forbids us to dismiss the Cromwellian reign in this summary way; for, we are now to behold “Reformation” the second, which its authors and executors called “a thorough godly Reformation;” insisting that “Reformation” the first was but a half finished affair, and that the “Church of England, as by law established,” was only a daughter of the “Old Whore of Babylon.” This “Reformation” proceeded just like the former; its main object was plunder. The remaining property of the Church was not, as far as time and other circumstances would allow, confiscated and shared out amongst the “Reformers,” who, if they had had time, would have resumed all the former plunder, (as they did part of it,) and have shared it out again! It was really good to see these “godly” persons ousting from the abbey-lands the descendants of those who had got them in “Reformation” the first; and, it was particularly good to hear the Church Bishops and parsons crying “sacrilege,” when turned out of the palaces and parsonage houses; aye, they, who and whose Protestants predecessors had, all their lives long, been justifying the ousting of the Catholic bishops and priests, who held them by prescription and expressly by Magna Charta.

As if to make “Reformation” the second as much as possible like “Reformation” the first, there was now a change of religion made; the Church clergy were caluminated just as the Catholic clergy had been; the Bishops were shut out of Parliament as the Abbots and Catholic Bishops had been; the Cathedrals and Churches were again ransacked; Cranmer’s tables (put in place of the altars) were now knocked to pieces; there was a general crusade against crosses, portraits of Christ, religious pictures, paintings on church windows, images on the outside of Cathedrals, tombs in these and Churches. As the mass books had been destroyed in Reformation the first, the church books were destroyed in Reformation the second, and a new book called the Directory, ordered to be used in its place, a step which was no more than an imitation of Henry VIIIth’s Christian Man, and Cranmer’s Prayer Book.

It was a pair of “Reformations,” as much alike as any mother and daughter ever were. The mother had a Cromwell as one of the chief agents in her work, and the daughter had a Cromwell, the only different in the two being, that one was a Thomas and the other an Oliver; the former Cromwell was commissioned to make “a godly reformation of errors, heresies and abuses in the Church,” and the latter was commission to make “a thoroughly godly reformation in the Church;” the former Cromwell confiscated, pillaged and sacked churches, and just the same di the latter Cromwell, and, which seems a just distinction, the latter died in his bed, and the former, when the tyrant wanted his services no longer, died on a scaffold.

The heroes of “Reformation” the second, alleged, as their authority, the “inspiration of the Holy Ghost.” What, then, were Cromwell and his soldiers to be deprived of the benefit of this allegation? Poor “godly” fellows! why were they to be the only people in the world not qualified for choosing a religion for themselves and for those whom they had at the point of their bayonets? One of Cromwell’s “godly” soldiers went, as North relates, into the church of Walton-upon-Thames, with a lantern and five candles, telling the people that he had a message to them from God, and that they would be damned if they did not listen to him. He put out one light as a mark of the abolition of the Sabbath; the second, as a mark of the abolition of all tithes and church dues; the third, as a mark of the abolition of all ministers and magistrates; and then the fifth light he applied to setting fire to a Bible, declaring that that also was abolished!

When the Puritans obtained full power, they forbade the use of the Common Prayer Book in all churches and also in private families; they punished the disobedient with a penalty of five pounds for the first offence, then pounds for the second, and with three years’ imprisonment for the third.

The reign of Charles II., was one continued series of plots, sham or real; and one unbroken scene of acts of injustice, fraud and false swearing. There were plots ascribed to the Catholics, but really plots against them. Even the great fire in London, which took place during this reign, was ascribed to them, and there is the charge, to this day, going round the base of “The Monument,” which Pope justly compares to a big, lying bully –

“Where London’s columns, pointing to the skies,
Like a tall bully, lifts its head, and lies.”

The words are these: “This monument is erected in memory of the burning of this Protestant city, by the Popish faction, in September, A. D., 1666, for the destruction of the Protestant religion, and of old English liberty, and for the introduction of Popery and slavery. But the fury of the Papists is not yet satisfied.” It is curious enough, that this inscription was made by order of Sir Patience Ward, who, as Echard shows, was afterwards convicted of perjury. Burnet, (whom we shall find in full tide by and bye,) says that one Hubert, a French Papist, “confessed that he began the fire;” but Higgons (a Protestant, mind,) proves that Hubert was a Protestant, and Rapin agrees with Higgons!

By encouraging the fanatical part of his subjects in their wicked designs, Charles II., prepared the way for those events by which his family were excluded from the throne for ever. To set aside his brother, who was an avowed Catholic, was their great object.

James II., was sober, frugal in his expenses, economical as to public matters, sparing of the people’s purses, kind and sincere; but weak and obstinate, and he was a Catholic, and not a match for his artful, numerous and deeply interested foes. If the existence of a few missionary priests in the country, though hidden behind wainscots, had called forth thousands of pursuivants, in order to protect the Protestant Church; if to hear mass in a private house had been regarded as incompatible with the safety of the Church – what was to be the fate of that Church, if a Catholic continued to sit on the throne? It was easy to see that the ministry, the army, the navy, and all the officers under the Government would soon contain few besides Catholics; and it was also easy to see that, by degrees, Catholics would be in the parsonages and in the episcopal palaces, especially as the king was as zealous as he was sincere. The “Reformation” had made consciences to be of so pliant a nature, men had changed, under it, backward and forward so many times, that this last (the filling of the Church with Catholic priests and bishops) would, perhaps, amongst the people in general, and particularly amongst the higher classes, have produced but little alarm. But, not so with the clergy themselves, who soon saw their danger, and who, “passive” as they were, lost no time in preparing to avert it.

James acted, as far as the law would let him, and as far as prerogative would enable him to go beyond the law, on principles of general toleration. By this he obtained the support of the sectaries. But the English Church had got the good things, and it resolved, if possible, to keep them. Besides this, though the abbey lands and the rest of the real property of the church and the poor, had been a long while in the peaceable possession of the then owners and their predecessors, the time was not so very distant but that able lawyers, having their opinions backed by a well-organized army, might still find a flaw in, here and there, a grant of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Old Betsy. Be their thoughts what they might, certain it is, that the most zealous and most conspicuous and most efficient of the leaders of the “Glorious Revolution” which took place soon afterwards, and which drove James from the throne, together with his heirs and his house, were amongst those whose ancestors had not been out of the way at the time when sharing of the abbey lands took place.

With motives so powerful against him, the king ought to have been uncommonly prudent and wary. He was just the contrary. He was severe towards all who opposed his views, however powerful they might be. Some bishops who presented a very insolent but artful, petition to him, he sent to the Tower, had them prosecuted for a libel, and had the mortification to see them acquitted. A plan having been formed for compelling the king to give up his tolerating projects, and “to settle the kingdom,” as it was called, the planners, without any act of parliament, and without consulting the people in any way whatever, invited William, the Prince of Orange, who was the State-holder of the Dutch, to come over with a Dutch army to assist them in “settling” the kingdom. All thing having been duly prepared, the Dutch guards (who had been suffered to get from Torbay to London by perfidy in the English army) having come to the king’s palace and thrusted out the English guards, the king, having seen one “settling” of a sovereign, in the reign of his father, and, apparently, having no relish for another settling of the same sort, fled from his palace and his kingdom, and took shelter in France. Now came, then, the “glorious Revolution,” or Reformation the third.