h been and is most entirely beloved and
esteemed, their undoubted sincerity and truth: Be it therefore enacted,
that if any person or persons, after the first day of February next
coming, do maliciously wish, will, or desire, by words or writing, or by
craft imagine, invent, practise, or attempt any bodily harm to be done
or committed to the king's most royal person, the queen's, or their
heirs apparent, or to _deprive them or any of them of the dignity,
title, or name of their royal estates_, or slanderously and maliciously
publish and pronounce by express writing or words that the king our
sovereign lord should be heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or
usurper of the crown, &c., &c., that all such persons, their aiders,
counsellors, concertors, or abettors, being thereof lawfully convict
according to the laws and customs of the realm, shall be adjudged
traitors, and that every such offence in any of the premises shall be
adjudged high treason."[405]

[Sidenote: The act made still more comprehensive, in the interpretation
of it.]

[Sidenote: Retributive justice.]

The terrible powers which were thus committed to the government lie on
the surface of this language; but comprehensive as the statute appears,
it was still further extended by the interpretation of the lawyers. In
order to fall under its penalties it was held not to be necessary that
positive guilt should be proved in any one of the specified offences; it
was enough if a man refused to give satisfactory answers when subjected
to official examination.[406] At the discretion of the king or his
ministers the active consent to the supremacy might be required of any
person on whom they pleased to call, under penalty to the recusant of
the dreadful death of a traitor. So extreme a measure can only be
regarded as a remedy for an evil which was also extreme; and as on the
return of quiet times the parliament made haste to repeal a law which
was no longer required, so in the enactment of that law we are bound to
believe that they were not betraying English liberties in a spirit of
careless complacency; but that they believed truly that the security of
the state required unusual precautions. The nation was standing with its
sword half drawn in the face of an armed Europe, and it was no time to
permit dissensions in the camp.[407] Toleration is good--but even the
best things must abide their opportunity; and although we may regret
that in this grand struggle for fr