have
forfeited her throne and her life. Pius V. had not merely
excommunicated her, which was a barren and ineffective threat, a
telum imbelle sine ictu; he had also purported to depose her as a
heretic, and to release her subjects from the duty of allegiance.
Another Vicar of Christ, Gregory XIII., went farther. He intimated,
not obscurely, that whosoever removed such a monster from the world
would be doing God's service. This at least was no idle menace.
Those great leaders of Protestantism in Europe, Coligny, Murray,
William the Silent, were successively murdered within a few years.
That was, as Fra Paolo said when he saw the dagger (stilus) which
had wounded him, the style (stylus) of the Roman Court. It is all
very well to say that Gregory was a blasphemous, murderous old
bigot, and might have been left to the God of justice and mercy, who
would deal with him in His own good time. Before that time came,
Elizabeth might have been in her grave, Mary Stuart might have been
on the English throne, and the liberties of England might have been
as the liberties of Spain.

Elizabeth never felt personal fear. But she was not a private
individual. She was an English sovereign, and the keynote of all her
subtle, intricate, tortuous policy was the resolute determination,
from which she never flinched, that England should be independent,
spiritually as well as politically independent, of a foreign yoke.
Her connection with the Protestants was political, not theological,
for doctrinally she was farther from Geneva than from Rome. Her own
Bishops she despised, not unjustly, as time-servers, calling them
"doctors," not prelates. Although she did not really believe that
any human person, or any human formula, was required between the
Almighty and His creatures, she preferred the mass and the breviary
to the Book of Common Prayer. The Inquisition was the one part of
the Catholic system which she really abhorred. For the first twenty
years of her reign mass was celebrated in private houses with
impunity, though to celebrate it was against the law. No part of her
policy is more odious to modern notions of tolerance and
enlightenment than prohibition of the mass. Nothing shows more
clearly the importance of understanding the mental atmosphere of a
past age before we attempt to judge those who lived in it. Even
Oliver Cromwell, fifty years after Elizabeth's death, declared that
he would not tolerate the mass, and in general principles