ELDER G BEEBE - HISTORY OF PROTESTANT PRIEST-CRAFT IN AMERICA AND EUROPE part 5

[T Adams]

Dear Brethren and Friends,

Here is the fifth chapter of Beebe's book "History of Protestant Priestcraft in America and Europe".  I hope and trust that those that have been given to read thus far have been enjoying it. This chapter is a little bit longer than the others so far.

A Sinner in Hope,
Tom

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

CHAPTER V
It’s progress in Great Britain under Elizabeth.

To the pauper and ripping up reign we now come. This is the reign of “good Queen Bess.” We shall, in a short time, see how good she was. The Act of Parliament, which is still in force, relative to the poor and poor rates, was passed in the forty-third year of this reign; but, that was not the only act of the kind: there were eleven acts passed before that, in consequence of the poverty and misery, into which the “Reformation” had plunged the people.

Elizabeth, during the reign of her brother, had been a Protestant, and, during the right of her sister, a Catholic. At the time of her sister’s death, she not only went to mass publicly, but she had a Catholic chapel in her house, and also a confessor. On her death bed, Mary required from her a frank avowal of her opinions as to religion. Elizabeth, in answer, prayed God that open ans swallow her, if she were not a true Roman Catholic. She made the same declaration to the Duke of Feria, the Spanish envoy, whom she was so completely deceived, that he wrote to Philip, that the accession of Elizabeth would make no alteration in matters of religion in England. In spite of all this, it was not long before she began ripping up the bowels of her unhappy subjects, because they were Roman Catholics.

She was a bastard by law. The marriage of her mother had been, by law, which yet remained unrepealed, declared to be null and void from the beginning. Her accession having been, in the usual way, notified to foreign powers, that is, that “she had succeeded to the thron by hereditary right and the consent of the nation,” the Pope answered, that he did not understand the hereditary right of a person not born of lawful wedlock. So that he, of course, could not acknowledge her hereditary right. This was, of itself, a pretty strong inducement for a lady of of so flexible a conscience as she had, to resolve to be a Protestant. But, there was another and even a stronger motive. Mary, Queen of Scotland, who had married the Dauphin of France, claimed the crown of England, as the nearest legitimate descendant of Henry VII.; so that Elizabeth run a manifest risk of losing the crown, unless she became a Protestant, and crammed Cranmer’s creed down the throats of her people. If she remained a Catholic, she must yield submission to the decrees from Rome; the Pope could have made it it a duty with her people, to abandon her; or, at the very least, he could have greatly embarrassed her. In short, she saw clearly, that, if her people remained Catholics, she could never reign in perfect safety. She knew, that she had no hereditary right; she knew that the law ascribed her birth to adultery. She never could think of reigning quietly over a people, the head of whose Church refused to acknowledge her right to the crown, she resolved, cost what ruin or blood it might, to compel her people to abandon that very religion, her belief in which she had, a few months before, declared, by praying to “God that the earth might open and swallow her alive, if she were not a true Roman Catholic.”

The situation of things was extremely favorable to the Protestants. Mary, the Queen of Scots, the real lawful heir to the throne, was, as we have seen, married to the Dauphin of France. If Elizabeth were set aside, or, if she died without issue before Mary, England must become an appendage of France. The lost of Calais and of Boulogne had mortified the nation enough; but, for England herself to be transferred to France, was what no Englishman cold think of with patience. So that she became strong from the dread that the people had of the consequences of her being put down. It was the betrothing of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin, which induced Mary, Queen of England, to marry Philip, and thereby to secure an ally for England in case of Scotland becoming a dependence of France. How much more pressing was the danger now, when the Queen of Scots was actually married to the Dauphin (the heir apparent to the French throne) and when, if she were permitted to possess the crown of England, England, in case of her having a son, must become a province of France!

Those who eulogize Henry IV., of France, who became a Catholic expressly and avowedly for the purpose of possessing and keeping the throne of that country, cannot, very consistently, blame Elizabeth for becoming a Protestant for an exactly similar reason. Her intention to change the state religion of the country became, in a short time, so manifest, that all the Bishops but one refused to crown her. She, at last, found one to do it; but even he would not consent to do the thing without her conformity to the Catholic ritual. Very soon, however, a series of acts were passed, which, by degrees, put down the Catholic worship, and reintroduced the Protestant; and she found the plunderers and possessors of plunder just as ready to conform to her ecclesiastical sway, as they had been to receive absolution from Cardinal Pole, in the last reign. Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, which had been ascribed by the Parliament to the suggestions of the ‘Holy Ghost,’ had been altered and amended even in Edward’s reign. It was now revived, and altered and amended again; and still it was ascribed to the “dictates of the Holy Ghost!”

If these Acts of Parliament had stopped here, they would certainly have been bad and disgraceful enough. But such a change was not to be effected without blood. This Queen was resolved to reign: the blood of her people she deemed necessary to her own safety; and she never scrupled to make it flow. She looked upon the Catholic religion as her mortal enemy; and, cost what it might, she was resolved to destroy it, if she could, the means being, with her, those which best answered her end.

With this view, statutes the most blood were passed. All persons were compelled to take the oath of supremacy, on pain of death. To take the oath of supremacy, that is to say, to acknowledge the Queen’s supremacy in spiritual matters, and to renounce the Pope and the Catholic religion. Thus was a very large part of her people at once condemned to death for adhering to that very religion, in which she had openly lived till she became Queen, and to her firm belief in which, she had sworn at her coronation!

Besides this act of monstrous barbarity, it was made high treason in a priest to say mass; it was made high treason in a priest to come into the kingdom from abroad; it was made high treason to harbor or to relive a priest. And, on these grounds, and others of a like nature, hundreds upon hundreds were butchered in the most inhuman manner, being first hung up, then cut down alive, their bowels then ripped up, and their bodies chopped into quarters; and this, observe, only because the unfortunate persons were too sincere to apostatize from that faith which this Queen herself had, at her coronation, in her coronation oath, solemnly sworn to adhere to and defend!

Having pulled down the altars, set up the tables; having ousted the Catholic priests and worship, and put in their stead a set of hungry, beggarly creatures, the very scum of the earth, with Cranmer’s prayer book amended in their hands; having done this, she compelled her Catholic subjects to attend in the churches under enormous penalties, which rose at last, to death itself, in case of a perseverance in refusal! Thus were all conscientious Catholics in the kingdom incessantly embarrassed, ruined by enormous fines, brought to the gallows, or compelled to flee from their native country. Thus was this Protestant religion watered with the tears and the blood of the people of England. Talk of Catholic persecution and cruelty! Elizabeth put, in one way or another, more Catholics to death, in one year, for not becoming apostates to the religion which she had sworn to be hers, and to be the only true one, than Mary put to death in her whole reign. Yet, the former is called, or has been called “good Queen Bess,” and the latter, “Bloody Queen Mary.” Even the horrid massacre of St. Bartholomew will not compare with the butcheries and other cruelties of the reign of this Protestant Queen of England; and yet she put on mourning upon that occasion, and had the consummate hypocrisy to affect horror at the cruelties that the King of Rance had committed.


This massacre took place at Paris, in the year 1572, and the fourteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign; and, as it belongs to the history of that reign, as it was, in fact, in part produced by her own incessant and most mischievous intrigues, I shall give a true account of it, and shall go back to those civil wars in France which she occasioned, and in which she took so large a part, and which finally lost Calais and its territory to England. The “Reformation,” which Luther had said he was taught by the devil, had found its way in France so early as 1530. For a long while, they were of little consequence; but they, at last in the reign of Charles IX., became formidable to the Government by being taken hold of by those ambitious and rebellious leaders Conde and Coligni. The faction, of which these two were the chiefs, wanted to have the governing of France during the minority of Charles, who came to the throne in the year 1561, at ten years of age. His mother, the Queen Dowager, gave the preference to the Duke of Guise and his party. The disappointed nobles, Conde and Coligni, needed no better motive for becoming most zealous Protestants, the Guises being zealous in the Catholic cause! Hence arose an open rebellion on the part of the former, fomented by the Queen of England, who seemed to think, that she never could be safe as long as there were Catholic Prince, priest or people left upon the face of the earth; and who never stuck at means, if they were but calculated to effect her end.

Conde and Coligni, with their adherents, had stirred up a formidable civil war in France. “Good Queen Bess’s” ambassador at that Court stimulated and aided the rebels at the utmost of his power. At last, Vidame, an agent of Conde and Coligni, came secretly, over to England to negotiate for military, naval and pecuniary assistance. They succeed with “Good Bess,” who, wholly disregarding the solemn treaties by which she was bound to Charles IX., King of France, entered into a formal treaty with the French nobles to send them an army and money, for the purpose of carrying on war against their sovereign, of whom she was an ally, having bound herself, in that character, by a solemn oath on the Evangelists! By this treaty, she engaged to furnish men, ships, and money; and the traitors, on their part, engaged to put Havre de Grace at once in her hands, as a pledge, not only for the repayment of the money to be advanced, but for the restoration of Calais!

The French nobility from every province and corner of France, flew to the aid of their sovereign, whose army was commanded by the Constable, Montmorency, with the Duke of Guise under him. Conde was at the head of the rebel army, having Coligni as a sort of partner in the concern, and having been joined by the English troops, under the Earl of Warwick, nephew of “Good Bess’s” paramour, Dudley, of whom the Protestant clergymen, Heylin and Whitaker, will tell us more than enough by-and-by. The first movement of the French was the besieging of Rouen, into which, Sir Edward Poinings, who had preceded Warwick, had thrown an English reinforcement. In order to encourage the French, the Queen-Mother (Catherine de Modici), her son the young king, Charles (now twelve years of age), and the king of Navarre, were present at the siege. The latter was mortally wounded in the attack; but the Catholics finally took the town by assault, and put the whole of the garrison to the sword, including the English reinforcement.

In the meanwhile, the brother of Coligni had, by the money of “Good Bess,” collected together a body of Germans, and had got them to Orleans, which was then the main hold of the rebellion; while “Good Bess,” in order to act her part faithfully, ordered public prayers, during three whole days, to implore God’s blessing “upon her cause and the cause of the gospel.” Thus reinforced by another body of foreigners brought into their country, Conde and Coligni, first made a feint on the side of Paris; but, finding themselves too weak on that side, they took their way towards Normandy, in the hope of there having the aid of the English forces. But the Catholics, still under Montmorency and the Duke of Guise, followed, overtook them at Dreux, compelled them to fight, took Conde himself prisoner, and, though Montmorency was taken prisoner by the rebels, the Duke of Guise took the chief command, and drove the rebel Coligni and his army before him; and this, too, observe, in spite of “Good Bess’s” three whole days of prayers.

Nevertheless, Coligni kept the field, and pillaged Normandy pretty severely. “Good Bess” sent him some money, and offered to be bound for more, if he could get any merchants (that is, Jews) to lend it him; but she sent him no troops; those, under the Earl of Warwick, being kept safe and wound in the strong fortress of Havre de Grace, which place, honest and “Good Bess” intended to keep, let things go which they might, which honest intention we shall, however, find defeated in the end. Coligni and his German mercenaries cruelly plundered the Normans as far as they could extend their arms. The Catholics, now under the Duke of Guise, laid siege to Orleans. While this was going on, one Poltrot, a fanatic, in the pay of Coligni, went under the guise of being a deserter from tha tinveterate rebel chief, and entered into the service of the army under the Duke of Guise. In a short time, that miscreant found the means to assassinate that gallant nobleman and distinguished patriot, instigated, indeed, employed for the express purpose by Coligni, and urged on by Beza, the “famous Preacher,” as Hume calls him, but really one of the most infamous of all the reforming preachers, and, perhaps, second to none, but Luther himself. This atrocious deed met, afterwards with retaliation in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, when on Coligni’s mangled body there might have been placarded the name of Poltrot. This wretch had been paid by Coligni, and the money had come from honest and sincere “good Queen Bess,” whom we shall hereafter find plainly accused by Whitaker (a clergyman of the Church of England) of plotting the assassination of her own cousin, and finding no man in her kingdom mean enough to perform the deed.

Ambition had made him a rebel; but he had sense enough left to make him shudder at the thought of being the leader of assassins; and he, with one drop of true blood in him, could not think without horror of such a man as the Duke of Guise, who rendered such inestimable services to France, being swept from existence by so base a miscreant as that whom his late colleague had hired and paid for that purpose.

Conde now sought to get rid of his associates by proposing, in February 1563, a pacification, and tendering his submission to his sovereign on condition of an act of oblivion. Coligni was included in the amnesty. The king granted to the Protestants permission to practice their worship in one town in every bailiwick; and thus were all matters settled between the king and his rebellious subjects. Sad tidings for “good Queen Bess,” who, as Whitaker well observes, continually sought her safety in the division and misery of others. Conde, in his treaty with her, had stipulated not to conclude any peace without her consent; but, had she a right to complain of a want of good faith?

The French king, wishing to get her troops quietly out of Havre de Grace, and finding that she now pretended to hold it as a pledge for the surrender of Calais, at the end of the eight years, offered to renew the treaty of Chateau Cambrenis, by which Calais was to be restored to England in 1567. But she rejected this fair and reasonable proposal. She had got Havre; no matter how; and she said, that “a bird in hand was worth two in the bush;” snapping her fingers at the same time, and, as was the common practice with her upon such occasions, confirming her resolution with a thundering oath, so becoming in a “Virgin Queen.” Finding, however, that all parties in France were united for the expulsion of the English, she reluctantly gave way. She authorized her ambassadors to present a new project of treaty, under Montmorency, Conde, “good Bess’s” late friend and ally being serving in the army, was on its way to regain Havre by force of arms, the king of France being well convinced, that treaties with “good Bessy” were things perfectly vain.

Still, it was not a trifling thing to take Havre out of the hands of the English. A great deal of taxes had been imposed upon this nation, (to say nothing of the “prayers”), in order to ensure the possession of this place. The Earl of Warwick, instead of sending troops to assist Bess’s allies, had kept his army at Havre; and, with six thousand soldiers and seven hundred pioneers, rendered the place “impregnable;” had, as soon as he heard that the rebellion was at an end, expelled all the French people from Havre, to their utter ruin, and in direct breach of Bess’s treaty with Conde and Coligni. But, in spite of all this, Montmorency was, at the end of a short time, ready to enter the place by assault, having made his breeches in preparation. The Queen-mother and the king were present in the camp, where they had the indescribable pleasure to see “good Queen Bess’s” General humbly propose to surrender the place to its rightful sovereign, without any mention of Calais and its territory, and on no condition whatever, but that of being permitted to return to England with the miserable remnant of his army; and England, after all the treasure and blood, expended to gratify the malignity of “good Bess,” and after all the just imputations of perfidy that she had brought upon it, had to receive that remnant, that ratification of disgrace, greater than it had to support from the day when glorious Alfred finally expelled the Danes. And, yet, this woman is called, or has been called, “good Queen Bess,” and her perfidious and butchering reign has been called glorious!

Great as the mortifications of “good Bess” now were, and great as were the misfortunes of the country, brought upon it by these her proceedings of hitherto unheard of hypocrisy and breach of faith, we have, as yet, seen the full measure of neither the one nor the other. For, “glorious and good Bess” had now to sue for peace, and with that king, with whose rebel subjects she had so recently co-operated. Her ambassadors, going with the passports, were arrested and imprisoned. She stamped and swore, but she swallowed the affront, and took the regular steps to cause them to be received at the French court, who, on their part, treated her pressing applications with a contemptuous sneer, and suffered many months to pass away, before they would listen to any terms of peace. Smith was one of her envoys, and the other was that same Throckmorton, who had been her ambassador at Paris, and who had been her agent in stirring up Conde and Coligni to their rebellioin. The former was imprisoned at Melun, and the latter at St. Germain’s. Smith was released upon her application; but Throckmorton was detained, and was made use of for the following curious, and, to “good Bess,” most humiliating purpose. The treaty of Chateau Cambrensis, which stipulated for the restoration of Calais in eight years, or the forfeiture of 500,000 crowns by the French, contained a stipulation, that four French noblemen should be held by “good Bess,” as hostages, for the fulfillment of treaty on the part of France. “Good Bess,” by her aiding of the French rebels, had broken this treaty, had lost all just claim to Calais, and ought to have released the hostages; but, as “good Bess” very seldom did what she ought to; as she might, almost every day of her mischievous life, have, with perfect truth, repeated that part of the Prayer-Book “amended,” which says, “we have done those things which we ought not to do, and have left undone those things which we ought to do;” so this “good” woman had kept the hostages, though she had forfeited all just claim to that for the fulfillment of which they had been put into her hands. Now, however, the French had got a “bird in hand” too. They had got Throckmorton, their old enemy, and he had got a large quantity of “good Bess’s” horrible secrets locked up in his breast! So – that, after long discussions, during which Throckmorton gave very significant signs of his determination not to end his days in prison without taking revenge, of some sort, on his merciless employer, the “good” woman agreed to exchange the four French noblemen for him; and, as a quarter of a loaf was better than no bread, to take 125,000 crowns for the relinquishment of Calais to France in perpetuity!

Away, then, goes at once, all her professions of desire to defend the “cause of the gospel;” she is a hypocrite the most profound at once: she breaks faith with the king of France, and with the rebels too.

Though the massacre of Saint Bartholomew took place in France, yet it has served as a pretense with Protestant historians to justify, or palliate so many atrocities on the part of Protestant Priestcraft, and the Queen of England and her ministers had so great a hand in first producing it, and then in punishing Catholics under pretense of avenging it, that it is necessary to give an account of it.

We have seen that Coligni caused, that gallant and patriotic nobleman, the Duke of Guise, to be assassinated. But, in assassinating this nobleman, the wretch did not take off the whole of his family. There was a son left to avenge that father, and the vengeance of this son the treacherous Coligni had yet to feel. We have seen, that peace had taken place between the Fench king and his rebellious subjects; but Coligni had all along discovered that his treacherous designs only slept. The king was making a progress through the kingdom about four years after the pacification; a plot was formed by Coligni and his associates to kill or seize him; but, by riding 14 hours without getting off his horse, and without food or drink, he escaped, and got safe to Paris. Another civil war soon broke out, followed by another pacification: but, such had been the barbarities committed on both sides, that there could be, and there was, no real forgiveness. The Protestants had been full as sanguinary as the Catholics; and, which has been remarked even by their own historians, their conduct was frequently, not to say uniformly, characterized by plundering and by hypocrisy and perfidy, unknown to their enemies.

During this pacification, Coligni had, by the deepest dissimulation, endeavored to worm himself into favor with the young king, and upon the occasion of a marriage between the king’s sister and the young king of Navarre, (afterwards the famous Henry IV.,) Coligni, who, Conde being now dead, was become chief of his sect, came to Paris, with a company of his Protestant adherents, to partake in the celebration, and that too, at the king’s invitation. After he had been there a day or two, some one shot at him, in the street, with a blunderbuss, and wounded him in two or three places, but not dangerously. His partisans ascribed this to the young Duke of Guise, though no proof has ever been produced in support of the assertion. They, however, got about their leader, and threatened revenge, as was very natural. Taking this for the ground of their justification, the Court resolved to anticipate the blow; and, on Sunday the 24th of August, 1572, it being St. Bartholomew’s day, they put their design in execution. There was great difficulty in prevailing upon the young king to give his consent; but, at last, by the representations and entreaties of his mother, those of the Duke of Anjou, his brother and those of the Duke of Guise, he was prevailed upon. The dreadful orders were given; at the appointed moment, the signal was made; the Duke of Guise with a band of followers rushed to and broke open the house of Coligni, whose dead body was soon thrown out of the window into the street.

When we consider these things, and especially when we see the son of the assassinated Duke of Guise leading the way,l is it not a most monstrous violation of truth to ascribe this massacre to the principles of the Catholic religion? With equal justice we might ascribe the act of Bellingham (who sent for his Church Prayer Book the moment he was lodged in Newgate) to the principles of the Church of England. No one has ever been base and impudent enough to do this; why, then are there men so base and impudent as to ascribe this French massacre to Catholic principles?

The massacre at Paris very far exceeded the wishes of the Court; and orders were instantly dispatched to the great towns in the provinces to prevent similar scenes. Such scenes took place, however, in several places; but, though, by some Protestant writers, the whole number of persons killed, has been made to amount to a hundred thousand, an account published in 1582, and made up from accounts collected from the ministers in different towns, made the number, for all France, amount to only seven hundred and eighty-six persons! Dr. Lingard, with his usual fairness, says, “If we double this number, we shall not be far from the real amount.” The Protestant writers began at one hundred thousand; then fell to seventy thousand; then to thirty thousand; then to twenty thousand; then to fifteen thousand; and, at last, to ten thousand! All in round numbers! One of them, in an hour of great indiscretion, ventured upon obtaining returns of names from the ministers themselves; and then, out came the seven hundred and eighty-six persons in the whole!

A number truly horrible to think of; but a number not half so large as that of those English Catholics whom “Good Queen Bess” had, even at this time, (the fourteenth year of her reign,) caused to be ripped up, racked till the bones came out of their sockets, or caused to be dispatched, or to die, in prison, or in exile; and this, too, not for rebellions, treasons, robberies and assassinations, like those of Coligni and his followers; but simply and solely for adhering to their religion, which religion she had openly practiced for years, and to which religion she mad most solemnly sworn that she sincerely belonged! The annals of hypocrisy conjoined with impudence afford nothing to equal her behavior upon the occasion of the St. Bartholomew. She was daily racking people nearly to death to get secrets from them; she was daily ripping the bowels out of women as well as men for saying, or hearing, that mass, for the celebration of which the churches of England had been erected; she was daily mutilating, racking and butchering her own innocent and conscientious subjects; and yet, she and her profligate court women, when the French ambassador came with the King of France’s explanation of the cause of the massacre, received him in deep mourning, and with all the marks of disapprobation. But, when she remonstrated with her “good brother,” the king of France, and, added her hope, that he would be indulgent to his Protestant subjects, her hypocrisy carried her a little too far; for, the queen mother, in her answer to “good Bess,” observed, that, as to this matter, her son could not take a safer guide than his “good sister of England;” and that, while, like her, he forced no man’s conscience; like her, he was resolved to suffer no man to practice any religion but that which he himself practiced. The French queen mother was still short of “good Betsy’s” mark; for she not only punished the practice of all religion but her own, she, moreover, punished people for not practicing her religion.

But, there is a tail piece, which most admirably elucidates “good Betsy’s” sincerity upon this memorable occasion, and also that same quality in her which induced her to profess, that she wished to live and die a virgin queen. The Parliament and her ministers, anxious for an undisputed succession, and anxious, also, to keep out the Scotch brand of the royal family, urged her several times to marry. She always rejected their advice. Her “virgin” propensity led her to prefer that sort of intercourse with men, which I need not more particularly allude to. Her amours with Leicester, of whom we shall see enough by and bye, were open and notorious, and have been most amply detailed by many Protestant historians, some of whom have been clergymen of the Church of England; it is, moreover, well known that these amours became the subject of a play, acted in the reign of Charles II. She was not, at the time of the St. Bartholomew tragedy, in the 39th year of her age; and she was, as she long had been, leading with Leicester, the life that I have alluded to. Ten years afterwards, whether from the advanced age of Leicester, or from some other cause, the “virgin” propensity seemed, all of a sudden, to quit “good Betsy;” she became bent on wedlock; and, being now forty-nine years of age, there was, to be sure, no time to be lost in providing an hereditary successor to her throne. She had, in the thirteenth year of her reign, assented to an Act that was passed, which secured the crown to her “natural issue,” by which any bastard that she might have by anybody became heir to the throne; and it was, by the same Act, made high treason to deny that such issue was heir to it. This Act, which is still in the Statute Book, 13 Eliz., chap. 1, S. 2, is a proof of the most hardened profligacy that ever was witnessed in a woman, and it is surprising, that such a mark of apparent national abjectness and infamy should have been suffered to remain in black and white to this day. However, at forty-nine “good Betsy” resolved to lead a married life; and, as her savage father, whom she so much resembled, always looked out for a young wife, so “good virgin Betsy” looked out for a young husband; and, in order to convince the world of the sincerity of her horror at the massacre of St. Bartholomew, who should she fix on as a companion for life, who should she want to take to her arms, but the Duke of Aujou, brother of Charles IX., and one of the perpetrators of those bloody deeds, on account of which she and her court ladies, all of her own stamp, had gone into mourning! The Duke was not handsome; but had, what the French call “la beauty du diable;” he was young; only twenty-eight years of age; and her old paramour, Leicester, was not fifty! Betsy, though well stricken in years herself, had still a “colt’s tooth.” Her ministers and the nation, who saw all the dangers of such a match to the independence of their country, protested against it most vehemently, and finally deterred her from it; but, a gentleman of Lincoln’s Inn, who had written and published a pamphlet against the marriage, was prosecuted, and had his right hand chopped off for this public spirited effort in assisting to save England from the ruin about to be brought upon it for the mere gratification of the appetite of a gross, libidinous, nasty, shameless old woman. It was said of her monster of a father, who began the “Reformation,” that “He spared no man in his anger, and no women in his lust;” the very same, in substance, with a little change of the terms, might be said this his monster of a daughter, who completed that “Reformation.”

Before we come to the three other great transactions of the long reign of this wicked woman, her foul murder of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, her war with Spain, and her scourging of Ireland, which unhappy country still bears the marks of her scorpion lash; before we come to these, it will be necessary to make ourselves acquainted with the names and characters of some of her principal advisers, and co-operators; because, unless we do this, we shall hardly be able to comprehend many things, which we ought, nevertheless, to carry along clearly in our minds.

Leicester was her favorite, both in council and in the field. Doctor Heylin (History of the Reformation, Elizabeth, p. 168) describes him in these words: “Sir Robert Dudley, the second sons of the Duke of Northumberland, she made, soon after she came to the throne, Lord Denbeigh and Earl of Leicester, having him her Master of Horse, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and a Knight of the Garter; and she now gave him the fair manor of Denbeigh, with more gentlemen owing suit and service to it than any other in England in the hands of a subject, adding even to this the goodly castle and manor of Kenilworth. Advanced to this height, he engrossed unto himself the disposing of all offices in court and state, and of all preferment’s in the church, proving, in fine, so unappeasable in his malice, and so insatiable in his lusts, so sacrilegious in his rapines, so false in premises, and so treacherous in point of trust, and finally so destructive of the lives and properties of particular persons, that his little finger lay far heavier on the English subjects, than the loins of all the favorites of the last two kings.” And, mind, those “two kings” were the plundering and confiscating Henry the VIII., and Edward VI.! “And, that his monstrous vices might either be connived at, or not complained of, he cloaks them with a seeming zeal for true religion, and made himself the head of the Puritan faction, who spared no pains in setting forth his praises; nor was he wanting to caress them after such manner as he found most agreeable to these holy hypocrites, using no other language in his speech and letters than the Scripture phrase, in which he was as dexterous as if he had received the same inspirations as the sacred penmen.” We must bear in mind, that this character is drawn by a Doctor of the Church of England (Betsy’s own Church), in a work dedicated by permission to King Charles II. She, beyond all doubt, meant to marry Leicester, who had, as all the world believed, murdered his own wife to make way for the match. She was prevented from marrying him by the reports from her ambassadors of what was said about this odious proceeding in foreign courts, and also by the remonstrances of her other ministers. Higgons, an historian of distinguished talent and veracity, states, distinctly, that Leicester murdered his first wife for the purpose of marrying the Queen. He afterwards married, secretly, a second wife, and when she, upon his wanting o marry a third, refused to be divorced, he poisoned her; at least, so said a publication, called “Leicester’s Republic,” put forth in 1568. Yet, after all these things, this man, or rather this monster continued to possess all his power, and his emoluments, and all his favor with the “virgin” Queen, to the last day of his life, ended in 1588, after thirty years of plundering and oppressing the people of England. This was a “reformer” of religion, truly worthy of being enrolled with Henry VIII., Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell, and “good Queen Bess.”

Sir William Cecil was her next man. He was her Secretary of State; but she afterwards made him a lord, under the title of Burleigh, and also made him Lord Treasurer. He had been a Protestant in the reign of Edward the Sixth, when he was Secretary, first under the Protector Somerset, who when Dudley overpowered him, was abandoned by Cecil, who took to the latter, and was the very man that drew up the treasonable instrument, by which Edward on death-bed, disinherited his sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Pardoned for his treason by Mary, he became a most zealous Catholic, and was, amongst others, a volunteer to go over to Brussels, to conduct Cardinal Pole to England. But, the wind being changed, he became Protestant again, and Secretary of State to “good Betsy,” who never cared anything about the character or principles of those she employed, so that they did but answer her selfish ends. This Cecil, who was a man of extraordinary abilities, and of still greater prudence and cunning, was the chief prop of her throne for nearly forty of the forty-three years of her reign. He died in 1598, in the 77th year of his age; and if success in unprincipled artifice; if fertility in cunning devices; if the obtaining of one’s ends without any regard to the means; if, in this pursuit sincerity be to be set at naught, and truth, law, justice and mercy, be to be trampled under foot; if, so that you succeed in your end, apostacy, forgery, perjury, and the shedding of innocent blood be to be thought nothing of, this Cecil was certainly the greatest statesman that ever lived. Above all others he was confided in by the Queen, who, when he grew old, and feeble in his limbs, used to make him sit in her presence, saying, in her accustomed masculine and emphatical style: “I have you, not for your weak legs, but for your strong head.”

Francis Walsingham became Secretary of State after Cecil; but he had been employed by the queen almost from the beginning of her reign. He had been her ambassador at several courts, had negotiated many treaties, was exceedingly prudent and cunning, and wholly destitute of all care about means, so that he carried his end. He was said to have fifty-three agents and eighteen real spies in foreign courts. He was a most bitter and inflexible persecutor of the Catholics; and other dissenters from the Church of England, but before his death, which took place in 1590, he had to feel himself, a little of that tyranny and ingratitude, and that want of mercy, of which he had so long mainly assisted to make so many innocent persons feel.

Paulet St. John, Marquis of Winchester. This was not a statesman. He, like many more, was a backer-on. He presided at trials; and did other such like work. These are unworthy of particular notice here and Paulet is named merely as a specimen of the character and conduct of the makers and supporters of the famous “reformation.” This Paulet (the first noble of the family) was, at his out-set Steward to the Bishop of Winchester, in the time of Bishop Fox, in the reign of Henry VII. He was, by old brutal Henry VIII., made Treasurer of the king’s household, and, zealously entering into all the views of that famous “Defender of the Faith,” he was made Lord St. John. He was one of those famous executors, who were to carry into effect the will of Henry VIII. Though Henry had enjoined on these men to maintain his sort of half Catholic religion, Paulet now, in the reign of Edward, became a zealous Protestant, and continued to enjoy all his offices and emoluments, besides getting some new grants from the further spoils of the church and poor. Seeing that Dudley was about to supplant Somerset, which he finally did, Paulet joined Dudley, and actually presided at the trial and passed sentence of death on Somerset, “whose very name,” says Dr. Milner, “had, a little more than two years before, caused him to tremble.” Dudley made him first Earl of Wiltshire, and then Marquis of Winchester, and gave him the palace of the Bishop of Winchester at Bishop’s Waltham, together with other spoils of that Bishopric. When Mary came, which was almost directly afterwards, he became one more a Catholic, and continued to hold and enjoy all his offices and emoluments. Not only a Catholic, but most active and vigorous of all the persecutors of those very Protestants, with whom he had made it his boast to join in communion only about two years before! We hae heard a great deal about the cruelties of the “bloody Bishop Bonner;” but nobody ever tells us that this Marquis of Winchester, as President of the Council, repeatedly reprimanded Bonner, in very severe terms, for want of zeal and diligence in sending Protestants to the stake! Fox says, that, “of that Council, the most active in these prosecutions was the Marquis of Winchester.” But now, Mary being dead, and Elizabeth being resolved to extirpate the Catholics, Paulet instantly became a Protestant again, a most cruel persecutor of the Catholics, President on several commissions for condemning them to death, and he was in such high favor with “good Bess,” that she said, were he not so very old, as he was, she would prefer him, as a husband, to any man in her dominions. He died in the 13th year of her reign, at the age of 97, having kept in place during the reigns of five sovereigns, and having made four changes in his religion to correspond with the changes made by four out of the five. A French historian says that Paulet being asked, how he had been able to get through so many storms, not only unhurt, but rising all the while, answered, “En etant un saule, et non pas un chene” – “by being a willow, and not an oak.”

Such were the tools with which “good Bess” had to work; and we have now to see in what manner they worked with regard to Mary Stuart, the celebrated and unfortunate queen of the Scotch. Without going into her history, it is impossible to make it clearly appear how Betsy was able to establish the Protestant religion in England. She actually butchered, that is to say, ripped up the bellies, of some hundreds of them; she put many and many hundreds of them to the rack; she killed in various ways many thousands; and she reduced to absolute beggary as many as made the population of one of the smaller counties of England; to say nothing, at present, of that great slaughter-house, Ireland. It is impossible for us to see how she came to be able to do this; how she same to be able to get the Parliament to do the many monstrous things that they did; how they, without any force, indeed, came to do such barefaced things, as to provide that any bastard that she might have should inherit the throne, and to make it high treason to deny that such bastard was rightful heir to the throne. It is impossible to account for her being able to exist in England after that act of indelibly infamy, the murder of Mary Stuart. It is impossible for us to see these things in their causes, unless we make ourselves acquainted with the history of Mary, and thereby show how the English were influenced at this most interesting period.

Mary Stuart, born in 1542, (nine years after the birth of Elizabeth,) was daughter of James V., King of Scotland, and of Mary, of Lorraine, sister of that brave and patriotic nobleman, the Duke of Guise, who, as we have seen, was so basely murdered by Coligni. Mary Stuart’s father died when she was only eight days old; so that she became the reigning queen of Scotland, while in the cradle. Her father (James V.) was the son of James IV., and Margaret the eldest sister of the old savage Henry VIII. This “Defender of the Faith” wished Mary Stuart to be betrothed to his son Edward, and by that means to add Scotland to the dominions of England. The family of Guise were too deep for the old “Defender.” Mary Stuart (a Regency having been settle din Scotland,) was take to France, where she had her education, and where her heart seemed to remain all her life. The French, in order to secure Scotland to themselves, as a constant ally against England, got Mary to be betrothed to Francis, Dauphin of France, son and successor of Henry II., king of France. She, at the age of seventeen years, was married to him, who was two years younger than herself, in 1558, the very year that Elizabeth mounted the throne of England.

That very thing now took place which old Harry had been so much afraid of, and which, indeed, had been the dread of his councilors, and his people. Edward was dead, Queen Mary was dead, and as Elizabeth was a bastard, both in law and in fact, Mary Stuart was the heiress to the throne of England, and she was not the wife of the immediate heir to the King of France. Nothing could be so fortunate for Elizabeth. The nation had no choice but one: to take her and uphold her; or, to become a great province of France. If Elizabeth had died at this time, or had died before her sister Mary, England must have become degraded thus; or, it must have created a new dynasty, or become a Republic. Therefore, it was, that all Englishmen, whether Catholics or Protestants, were for the placing and supporting of Elizabeth on the throne; and for setting aside Mary Stuart, though unquestionably she was the lawful heiress to the crown of England.

As if purposely to add to the weight of this motive, of itself weighty enough, Henry II., King of France, died in eight months after Elizabeth’s accession; so that Mary Stuart was not, 1559, Queen consort of France, Queen of Scotland, and called herself Queen of England; she and her husband bore the arms of England along with those of France and Scotland; and the Pope had refused to acknowledge the right of Elizabeth to the English throne. Thus, as old Harry had foreseen, when he made his will setting aside the Scotch branch of his family, was Eland actually transferred to the dominion of France, unless the nation set at nought the decision of the Pope, and supported Elizabeth.

This was the real cause of Elizabeth’s success in her work of extirpating the Catholic religion. According to the decision of the head of the Catholic church, Elizabeth was an usurper; if she were an usurper, she ought to be set aside; if she were set aside, Mary Stuart and the King of France became King and Queen of England; if they became Queen and King of England, England became a mere province, ruled by Scotchmen and Frenchmen, the bare idea of which was quite sufficient to put every drop of English blood in motion. All Englishmen, therefore, of all ranks in life, whether Protestants or Catholics, were for Elizabeth. To preserve her life became an object dear to all her people; and, though her cruelties did, in one or two instances, arm Catholics against her life, as a body they were as loyal to her as her Protestant subjects; she was as great a tyrant as ever lived; she was the most cruel of women; her disgusting amours were notorious; yet she was the most popular sovereign that had ever reigned since the days of Alfred; and we have thousands of proofs, that her people, of all ranks and degrees, felt a most anxious interest in everything affecting her life or her health. Effects like this do not come from ordinary causes. Her treatment of great masses of her people, her almost unparalleled cruelties, her flagrant falsehoods, her haughtiness, her insolence and her lewd life, were naturally calculated to make her detested, and to make her people pray for anything that might rid them of her. But, they saw nothing but her between them and subjection to foreigners, a thing which they had always most laudably held in the greatest abhorrence. Hence it was, that the Parliament, when they could not prevail upon her to marry, passed an act to make any bastard (“natural issue”) of hers, lawful heir to the throne. Whitaker (a clergyman of the Church of England) calls this a most infamous act. It was in itself, an infamous act; but, that abjectness in the nation, which it now, at first sight, appears to denote, disappears, when we consider well what we have stated above.

Mary Stuart, was, in the year 1559, on the highest pinnacle of earthly glory, queen Consort of France, Queen Regnant of Scotland, Queen in lawful right of England, and was, besides, deemed one of the most beautiful women in the whole world. Never was fall like that of this Queen. Her husband, Francis II., died seventeen months after his accession, and was succeeded by Charles IX., then not more than three years old. Her husband’s mother, Catherine de Medici, soon convinced her, that to be anything, she must return to Scotland. To Scotland she returned with a heavy heart, anticipating very little quiet in a country which was plunged in all the horrors of the “Reformation” even more deeply than England had been. Her long minority, together with her absence fro her dominions, had given rise to contending factions of nobles, who alternately triumphed over each other, and who kept the country in a state of almost incessant civil war, accompanied with deeds of perfidy and ferocity, of which there is scarcely any parallel to be found in history, ancient or modern. Added to this was the work of the new ‘Saints,’ who had carried the work of “Reformation” much further than in England. The famous John Knox, an apostate monk, whom Dr. Johnson calls the “Ruffian of the Reformation,” was leader of the “holy hypocrites,” (as Dr. Heylin calls them,) in Scotland. Mary, who had been bred a Catholic, and who had almost been defied in the court of France, was not likely to lead a happy life amongst people like these.

All this, however, Elizabeth and her ministers, and the English people, saw with great and ungenerous satisfaction. There was, for the present, at least, an end to the danger from the union of Scotland with France. But, Mary Stuart might marry again. There were the powerful family of Guise, her near relations; and she was still a formidable person, especially to Elizabeth. If Mary had been a man, Betsy would certainly have married her; but here was a difficulty too great even for Cecil to overcome. The English Queen soon began to stir up factions and rebellions against her cousin; and, indeed, by her intrigues with the religious factions and with the aspiring nobles, became, in a short time, with the aid of her money, (a drug of infallible effect with the Scotch reformers) more the real ruler of Scotland than poor Mary was. She, had for the greatest part of her whole reign, always a band of one faction or the other at, or about her court. Her object was to keep Mary from possessing any real power, and to destroy her, if by any means short of detectable murder, she could effect that purpose.

In 1565, about three years after the return of Mary to Scotland, she was married to Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley, her cousin, in which she over-reached the Queen of England, who, fearing that a visible heir to her own throne (as it actually happened) might come from this marriage, took desperate measures to prevent it; but those measures came too late. Darnley, though young and handsome, proved to be a very foolish and disagreeable husband, and he was a Protestant into the bargain. She soon treated him with great contempt, suffered him to have no real authority, and, in fact, as good as banished him from her court and disowned him. Darnley sought revenge. He ascribed his ill-treatment to Mary’s being under the advice and control of her Catholic favorites, and particularly to advice of Rizzio, a foreigner, her private secretary. Several malcontent “reformed” nobles joined with Darnley in agreeing to assist him in the assassinating of Rizzio, taking a bond from him to protect them against evil consequences. Mary was sitting at supper with some ladies of her court, Rizzio, and other servants, being in waiting, when the conspirators rushed in. Darnley went to the back of the Queen’s chair; Rizzio, seeing their object, ran to the Queen for protection; she, who was in the sixth month of her pregnancy, endeavored by entreaties and screams, to save his life. The ruffians stabbed him at her feet, and then dragged him out and covered his body with wounds.

This black and bloody transaction, for which not one of the assistants of Darnley was ever punished, was, in all probability, the cause, the chief cause, of the just, though illegal, killing of Darnley himself. The next year after the murder of Rizzio, 1567, Mary having, in the meanwhile, brought forth a son, (afterwards James I., of half Pope and half Puritanical memory,) Darnley was taken ill at Glasgow. The Queen went to visit him, treated him with great kindness, and, when he became better in health, brought him back to Edinburgh; but, for the sake of better air, lodged him in a house, at some distance from other houses, out of the way, where she visited him daily and where, in a room immediately under his, she slept every night. But, on the night of the 10th of February, 1567, she having notified it to him, slept at her palace, having promised to be present at the marriage of two of the attendants of her court, which marriage took place, and at which she was present; on this very night, the king’s lodging house was blown up by powder, and his dead body cast into an adjoining piece of ground! If the powder had given this base and bloody man time for thought, he would, perhaps, have reflected on the stabs he had given, Rizzio in spite of the screams of a swooning and pregnant wife.

Now it was that the great and life long calamities of this unfortunate Queen began. She had been repeatedly insulted, and even imprisoned, by the different factions, who, aided and abetted by the English Queen, alternately oppressed both her and her people; but, she was now to lead the life and die the death of a malefactor. It has been proved beyond all doubt, that the Earl of Bothwel, with other associates, bound in a “bloody bond,” murdered Darnley. This was openly alleged, and, in placards about the streets, it was averred that Mary was in the plot. No positive proof has ever been produced to make good this charge; but, the subsequent conduct of the Queen was of a nature very suspicious. We shall simply state such facts as ar admitted on all hands, namely, that Bothwel had, before the murder, been in great favor with the Queen, and possessed power that his talents and character did not entitle him to; that, after the murder, he was acquitted of it by a mock trial, which she might have prevented; that on the 24th of April (fifty-three days after the murder) she was, on her return from a visit to her infant son, seized by Bothwel at the head of three thousand horsemen, and carried to his castle of Dunbar; that, before she left the castle, on the third of May, she agreed to marry him; that he had a wife then alive; that a divorce, both Protestant and Catholic, in one court for adultery and in the other for consanguinity, took place between Bothwel and his wife, in the space of six days; that, on the twelfth of May, Bothwel led the Queen to the Sessions House, where, in the presence of the judges, she pardoned him for the violence committed on her person: that, on the fifteenth of May, she openly married him; that the French Ambassador refused to appear at the ceremony; and that Mary refused, in this case, to listen to the entreaties of the family of Guise.

Scores of volumes have been written, some in support of the assertion, that Mary was consenting to the murder of her husband, and others in support of her husband, and others in support of the negative of that proposition. Her enemies brought forward letters and sonnets, which they alleged to have been written by Mary to Bothwel, previous to her husband’s murder. Her friends deny the authenticity of these; and, I think they make their denial good. Whitaker, an Englishman, a Rector in the Church of England, mind, a man, too, who has written much against the Catholic religion, defends Mary against the charge of having consented, ir of having known of the intention, to murder her husband. But, nobody can deny the above stated facts; nobody can deny, that she was carried off by Bothwel; that she, being at perfect liberty, pardoned him for that; and that she immediately married him, though it excited horror in the family of Guise, whom she had always theretofore listened to with the docility of a dutiful daughter.

This gross conduct, almost equal, in power of exciting odium, to the murder of such a wretch as Darnley, was speedily followed by tremendous punishment. A part of her subjects armed against her, defeated Bothwel, who was compelled to flee the country, and who, in a few years afterwards, died in prison in Denmark. She herself became a prisoner in the hands of her own subjects; and she escaped from their prison walls only to come and end her life within those of Elizabeth, her wily and deadly enemy.

The rebels were headed by the Earl of Murray, a natural son of Mary’s father, and to her a most unnatural and cruel brother. He had imprisoned and deposed the Queen, had had her son crowned at thirteen months old, and had had himself elected Regent of the Kingdom. Murray had begun his life of manhood, not only as a Catholic, but as an ecclesiastic. He was prior of St. Andrews; but, finding that he could gain by apostacy, he, like Knox, apostatized, and, of course, broke his oath; and Whitaker says of him, that though “He was guilty of the most monstrous crimes, yet he was denominated a good man by the reformers of those days.” His great object was to extirpate the Catholic religion, as the best means of retaining his power; and, being also a “bold liar,” and a man that stuck at no forgery, no perjury, no bloody deed, that answered his purpose, he was a man after “good Queen Bess’s” own heart. She, however, at first, affected to disapprove of his conduct, threatened to march an army to compel him to restore the Queen, gave the Queen positive assurances of her support, and invited her to take, in case of need, shelter, and receive protection, in England. In an evil hour, Mary, confiding in these promises and invitations, took, contrary to the prayers of her faithful friends, on their knees, the fatal resolution to throw herself into the jaws of her who had so long thirsted for her blood. At the end of three days, she found that she had escaped to a prison. Her prison was, indeed, changed two or three times; but a prisoner she remained for nineteen long years; and was at last, most savagely murdered for an imputed crime, which she neither did nor could commit.

During these nineteen years, Elizabeth was intriguing with Mary’s rebellious subjects, tearing Scotland to pieces by means of her corruption spread amongst the different bands of traitors, and inflicting on a people, who had never offended her, every species of evil that a nation can possibly endure.

To enumerate, barely to enumerate, all, or one half, of the acts of hypocrisy, perfidy, meanness and barbarity that “good Bess” practiced against this unfortunate Queen, who was little more than twenty-five years of age when she was inveigled within the reach of her harpy claws; barely to enumerate these would require a space exceeding that of this whole number. While she affected to disapprove of Murray, she instigated him to accuse his Queen and sister; while she pretended to assert the inviolability of sovereigns, she appointed a commission to try Mary for her conduct in Scotland; while she was vowing vengeance against the Scotch traitors for their rebellious acts against her cousin, she received, as presents from them, a large part of the jewels which Mary had received from her first husband, the King of France; and when, at last, she was compelled to declare Mary innocent of having consented to the murder, she not only refused to restore her agreeably to her solemn promise repeatedly made, but refused also to give her her liberty, and, moreover, made her imprisonment more close, rigorous and painful than ever. Murray, her associate in perfidy, was killed in 1570 by a man whose estate he had unjustly confiscated; but, traitor after traitor succeeded him, every traitor in her pay, and Scotland, bleeding all the while at every pore, because her cruel policy taught here that it was necessary to her own security. Whitaker produces a crown of authorities to prove, that she endeavored to get Mary’s infant son into her hands, and that, having failed in that, she endeavored to cause him to e taken off by poison!

At last, in 1587, the tigress brought her long-suffering victim tot eh block! Those means of dividing and destroying, which she had, all her life long, been employing against others, began now to be employed against herself, and she saw her life in constant danger. She though, and perhaps, rightly, that these machinations against her arose from a desire of Dissenters to rid the world of her and her horrid barbarities, and to make way for her lawful successor, Mary; so that, now, nothing short of the death of this Queen seemed to her a competent guarantee for her own life. In order to open the way for the foul deed that had been resolved on, an act of Parliament was passed, making it death for for any one who was within the realm to conspire, with others, for the purpose of invading it, or, for the purpose of procuring the death of the Queen. A seizure was made of Mary’s papers. What was wanting in reality, was, as Whitaker has proved, supplied by forgery, “a crime,” says he, “which, with shame to us, it must be confessed, belonged peculiarly to the Protestants.” but, what right had Bess to complain of any hostile intention on the part of Mary? She was a Queen as well as herself. She was held in prison by force; not having been made a prisoner in war; but having been perfidiously entrapped and forcibly detained. Every thing had been done against her short of spilling her blood; and, had she not a clear and indisputable right, to make war upon, and to destroy, her remorseless enemy, by all the means within her power? And, as to a trial, where was the law, or usage, that authorized one queen to invite another into her dominions, then imprison her, and then bring her to trial for alleged offences against her?

When the mode of getting rid of Mary was debated in “good Bess’s” council, Leicester was for poison, others were for hardening her imprisonment, and killing her in that way; but Walsingham was for death by means of a trial, a legal proceeding being the only one that would silence the tongues of the world. A commission was accordingly appointed, and Mary was tried and condemned; and that, too, on the evidence of papers, a part, at least, of which, were barefaced forgeries, all of which were copies, and the originals of none of which were attempted to be produced! The sentence of death was pronounced in October. For four months the savage “good Queen Bess” was employed in devising plans for causing her victim to be assassinated, in order to avoid the odium of being herself the murderer! This is proved by Whitaker beyond all possibility of doubt; but, though she had entrusted the keeping of Mary to two men, mortal enemies of the Catholics, they, though repeatedly applied to for the purpose, perseveringly refused. Having ordered her Secretary, Davison, to write to them on the subject, Sir Amias Paulet, one of the keepers, returned for answer, that he “Was grieved at the motion made to him, that he offered his life and his property to the disposal of her majesty; but absolutely refused to be concerned in the assassination of Mary.” The other keeper, Sir Drue Drury, did the same. When she read this answer, she broke out in reproaches against them, complained of the “daintiness of their consciences,” talked scornfully of “the niceness of such precise fellows,” and swore that she would “have it done without their assistance.” At the end, however, of four months of unavailing efforts to find men base and bloody enough to do the deed, she resorted to her last shift, the legal murder, which was committed on her hapless victim on the 8th of February, 587, a day of everlasting infamy to the memory of the English Queen, “who,” says Whitaker, “had no sensibilities of tenderness and no sentiments of generosity; who looked not forward to the awful verdict of history, and who shuddered not at the infinitely more awful doom of God.”

Ah! and thus was I taught! and thus have we all been taught! It is surely then our duty to teach our children to know the truth. Talk of “answers” to me, indeed! Let them deny, if they can, that this she “Head of the Church,” this maker of it, was a murderer, and wished to be an assassin, in cold blood!

Detestably base as was the conduct of “good Queen Bess” in the act of murdering her unfortunate cousin, her subsequent hypocrisy was still more detestable. She affected the deepest sorrow for the act that had been committed, pretended that it had been done against her wish, and had the superlative injustice and baseness to imprison her Secretary, Davison, for having dispatched the warrant for the execution, though she, observe, had signed the warrant, and though, as Whitaker has fully proved, she had reviled Davison for not having dispatched it, after she had, in vain, used all the means in her power to induce him to employ assassins to do the deed. She had, by a series of perfidies and cruelties, wholly without a parallel, brought her hapless victim to the block, in that very county to which she had invited her to seek safety; she had, in the last sad and awful moments of that victim, had the barbarity to refuse her the consolations of a divine of her own communion; she had pursued her with hatred and malice that remained unglutted even when she saw her prostrated under the common hangman, and when she saw the blood gushing from her severed neck; and yet, the deed being done, she had the more than satan-like hypocrisy to affect to weep for the untimely end of her “dear cousin;” and, which was still more diabolical, to make use of her despotic power to crush her humane secretary, under pretense that he had been the cause of the sad catastrophe! All expressions of detestation and horror fall short of our feelings, and our consolation is, that we are to see her own end ten thousand times more to be dreaded than that of her own victim.

Yet such were the peculiar circumstances of the times, that this wicked woman escaped, not only for the present, but, throughout her long reign, that general hatred from her subjects, which her character and deeds so well merited; nay, it perversely happened, that, immediately after this foul deed, there took place an event, which rallied all her people round her, and made her life, more than ever, an object of their solicitude.

Philip II., King of Spain, who was also sovereign of the Low Countries, resolved on an invasion of England, with a fleet from Spain and with an army from Flanders. She had given him quite provocation enough; she had fomented rebellions against him, as she long had in France against the king of that country. Philip was the most powerful monarch in Europe; he had fleets and armies vastly superior to hers; the danger to England was really great; but, though these dangers had been brought upon it solely by her malignity, bad faith and perfidy, England was still England to her people, and they unanimously rallied round her. Even the Catholic gentlemen, (and other Dissenters,) though her laws excluded them from all trust and authority, says Hume, “Entered as volunteers in her fleet or army. Some equipped ships at their own charge, and gave the command of them to Protestants; others were active in animating their tenants and vassals and neighbors, to the defense of their country; and, every rank of men, burying, for the present, all party distinctions, seemed to prepare themselves with order as well as vigor, to resist these invaders.”

The intended invasion was prevented by a tremendous storm, which scattered and half destroyed the Spanish fleet, called the “armada,” and in all human probability, the invaders would not have succeeded, even if no storm had arisen. But, at any rate, there was great danger; no one could be certain of the result.

Yet, after this proof of devotion of the Catholics, and other Dissenters, Cobbett says, they “were still treated with every species of barbarous cruelty; subjected to an inquisition infinitely more severe than that of Spain ever had or ever has been; and, even on the bare suspicion of disaffection, imprisoned, racked, and not unfrequently, put to death.

As to Ireland, where the estates of the convents, and where the church property had been confiscated in the same way as in England, and where the greater distance of the people from the focus of power and fanaticism, had rendered it more difficult to effect their “conversion” at the point of the bayonet, or by the halter or the rack; as to this portion of her dominions, her reign was almost one unbroken series of robberies and butcheries. One greedy and merciless minion after another were sent to goad that devoted people into acts of desperation; and that, too, not only for the obvious purpose, but for the avowed purpose, of obtaining a pretense for new confiscations. The “Reformation” had, from its very outset, had plunder written on its front; but, as to Ireland, it was all plunder from the crown of its head to the sole of its foot. This horrible lynx-like she-tyrant could not watch each movements of the Catholics there, as she did in England; she could not so harass them in detail; she could not find there no means of executing her dreadful policy; and, therefore, she murdered them in masses. She sent over those parsons whose successors are there to the present day. The ever blood-stained sword secured them the tithes and the church-lands; but even that blood-stained sword could then, and never did, though at one time wielded by the unsparing and double-distilled Protestant, Cromwell, obtain them congregations. However, she planted, she watered with rivers of blood, and her long reign saw take fast root in the land, that tree, the fruit of which the unfortunate Irish taste to this hour; and which will, unless prevented by more wise and more just measures than appear to have been yet suggested, finally prove the overthrow of England herself.

When one looks at the deeds of this foul tyrant, when one sees what abject slavery she has reduced the nation to, it is impossible for us not to reflect with shame on what we have so long been saying against the Spanish Inquisition, which, from its first establishment to the present hour, has not committed so much cruelty as this ferocious Protestant committed in any one single year of the forty-three years of her reign.

It is hardly necessary to attempt to describe the suffering that the Catholics, and other dissenters, had to endure during this murderous reign. No tongue, no pen is adequate to the task. To hear mass, to harbor a priest, to admit the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, to deny this horrid virago’s spiritual supremacy, and many other things, consigned men to the scaffold and the bowel-ripping knife. But, the most cruel of her acts, even more cruel than her butcheries, because of far more extensive effect, and far more productive of suffering in the end, were the penal laws inflicting fines for recusancy, that is to say, for not going to her new-fangled church. And, was there ever tyranny equal to this? Not only were men to be punished for not confessing that her new religion was the true one: not only for continuing to practice the religion in which they and their fathers and children had been born and bred; but also punished for not actually going to the new assemblages, and there performing what they must, if they were sincere, necessarily deem an act of open apostacy and blasphemy!

The fines were so heavy, and were exacted with such unrelenting rigor, and, for the offence of recusancy alone the sums were so enormous, that conscientious Dissenters were menaced with utter ruin. The priests who had never been out of England, and who were priests before the reign of this horrible woman, were, by the 20th year of her reign few in number, for the laws forbade the making any new ones on pain of death; and indeed none could be made in England, where there was no clerical authority to ordain them, the surviving Catholic bishops being forbidden to do it on pain of death. Then she harassed the remainder of the old priests in such a way, that they were, by the 20th year of her reign, nearly exterminated; and, it was death for a priest to come from abroad, death to harbor him, death for him to perform his function in England.

To say mass, to hear mass, to make confession, to hear confession, to teach the Catholic religion, to be taught it, to keep from church service; these were all great crimes, and all punished with a greater or less degree of severity; so that the gallows and gibbets and racks were in constant use, and the goals and dungeons choking with the victims. The punishment for keeping away from her church wsa 20l. a lunar month, which, of our money of the present day, was about 250l. (or about $1,250 in gold). Thousands upon thousands refused to go to her church; and thus she sacked their thousands upon thousands of estates; for, observe, here was, in money of this day, a fine of 3,250l. a year. And now, sensible and just reader, look at the barbarity of this “Protestant Reformation.” See a gentleman of, perhaps sixty years of age or more; see him, born and bred a Catholic, (or other sectarian,) compelled to make himself and his children beggars, or commit, what he deemed, an act of apostacy and blasphemy. Imagine, if you can, barbarity equal to this; and yet even this is not seen in its most horrible light, unless we take into view, that the tyrant who committed it, had, for many years, or her life, openly professed the Catholic religion and had, at her coronation, sworn that she firmly believed in that religion.

In the enforcing of these horrible edicts, every insult that base minds could devise, was resorted to and in constant use. No Dissenter had a moment’s security or peace. At all hours but generally in the night time, the ruffians entered his house by breaking it open; rushed, in different divisions, into different rooms; broke open closets, chests, and drawers; rummaged beds and pockets; in short, searched every place and things for priests, books, crosses, vestments, or any person or thing appertaining to their worship. In order to pay fines, gentlemen were compelled to sell their estates piece by piece; when they were in arrear the tyrant was, by law authorized to seize all their personal property, and two thirds of heir real estate every six months; and they were in some cases suffered, as a great indulgence, to pay an annual composition for the liberty of abstaining from what they deemed apostacy and blasphemy. Yet, whenever she took it into her suspicious head that her life was in danger, from that whatever cause, and causes, and just causes enough there always were, she had no consideration for them on account of fines or the composition. She imprisoned and kept them banished from their own homes for years. The gentleman’s own house afforded him no security; the indiscretion of children or friends, the malice of the enemies, the dishonesty or revenge of tenants or servants, the hasty conclusions of false suspicion, the deadly wickedness of those ready to commit perjury for gain’s sake, the rapacity and corruption of constables, sheriffs, and magistrates, the virulent prejudice of fanaticism; to every passion hostile to justice, happiness, and peace; to every evil against which it is the object of just laws to protect a man, the conscientious gentleman lived continually exposed.

As to the poor conscientious “recusants,” that is to say, keeper’s away from the tyrant’s church, they, who had no money to pay fines with, were crammed into prison, until the gaols could (which was very soon) hold no more, and until the counties petitioned to be relieved from the charge of keeping them. They were then discharged, being first publicly whipped, or having their ears bored with a hot iron. This not answering the purpose, an act was passed to compel all “recusants,” not worth twenty marks a year, to quit the country in three months after conviction, and to punish them with death, in case of their return. The old “good Bess” defeated herself here; for it was found impossible to cause the law to be executed, in spite of all her menaces against the justices and sheriffs, who could not be brought up to her standard fo ferociousness; and they, therefore, in order to punish the poor, levied sums on them at their pleasure, as a composition for the crime of abstaining from apostacy and profanation.

Talk of Catholic tyrant! Talk of the Catholics having propagated their faith by acts of force and cruelty! I wonder, that an English Churchman, even one whose very bread comes from the spoliation of the Catholics, can be found with so little shame as to talk thus.

Our lying historians tell us, that the ships of the Spanish Armada were “loaded with racks” to be used upon the bodies of the English, who were preserved from these by the wisdom and valor of “good and glorious Queen Bess.” In the first place, it was the storm, and not “glorious Bess,” that prevented an invasion of the country: and, in the next place, the Spaniards might have saved themselves the trouble of importing racks, seeing that gentle Betsy had always plenty of them, which she kept in excellent order and in almost daily use. Justice demands, that I describe one or two of her instruments of torture; because in them we see some of the most powerful of those means which she made us for establishing her Protestant church; and here I think Dr. Lingard for having, in note U of Volume V of his history, enabled me to give this description. One kind of torture, which was called “Scavengers Daughter, was a broad hop of iron, consisting of two parts, fastened by a hinge. The prisoner was made to kneel on the pavement and to contract himself into as small a compass as he could. Then the executioner, kneeling on his shoulders, and having introduced the hoop under his legs, compressed the victim close together, till he was able to fasten the feet and hands together over the small of the back. The time allotted to this kind of torture was an hour and a half, during which time the blood gushed from the nostrils, and sometimes, from the hands and feet. There were several other kinds of arguments of conversion that gentle Betsy made us of to eradicate the damnable errors of religious difference; but her great argument was, the rack. “This was a large open frame of oak, raised three feet from the ground. The prisoner was laid under it, on his back, on the floor. His wrists and ankles were attached by cords to two rollers at the ends of the frame: these were moved by levers in opposite directions till the body rose to a level with the frame. Questions were then put; and, if the answers did not prove satisfactory, the sufferer was stretched more and more till the bones started from their sockets.

These are some of the means which “good Queen Bess” made use of to make her Church, “established by law.” It may not be amiss, before I take my leave of this “good” creature, to observe, that as to her maiden virtues, Whitaker, (a Protestant clergyman, mind,) says that, “Her life was stained with gross licentiousness, and she had many gallants, while she called herself a maiden queen.” Her life, as he truly says, was a life of mischief and misery; and, in her death, (which took place in the year 1603, the 70th year of her age, and the 45th of her reign,) she did all the mischief that it remained her power to do, by sulkily refusing to name her successor, and thus leaving to a people, whom she had been pillaging and scourging for forty-five years, a probable civil war, as “legacy of mischief after her death.” Historians have been divided in opinion, as to which was the worst man that England ever produced, her father, or Cranmer; but, all mankind must agree, that this was the worst woman that ever existed in England, or in the whole world, Jezebel herself not excepted.