been directly concerned in the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, and his great ally, Philip II., is said to have laughed
for the first time when he heard of it. More than a hundred years
afterwards the pious Bossuet thanked God for the frightful slaughter
of the Huguenots which followed the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. While Mary Tudor burnt poor and humble persons who could be
no possible danger to the State because they would not renounce the
only form of Christian faith they had ever known, Elizabeth executed
for treason powerful and influential men sent by the Pope to kill
her. When, after many long years, she reluctantly consented to Mary
Stuart's death on the scaffold, Mary had been implicated in a plot
to take her life and succeed her as queen. Mary would have made much
shorter work of her. If that is called persecution, the word ceases
to have any meaning.

Froude quotes with approval, as well he might, the words of
Campian's admiring biographer Richard Simpson, himself a Catholic, a
most learned and accomplished man. "The eternal truths of
Catholicism were made the vehicle for opinions about the authority
of the Holy See which could not be held by Englishmen loyal to the
Government; and true patriotism united to a false religion overcame
the true religion wedded to opinions that were unpatriotic in
regard to the liberties of Englishmen, and treasonable to the
English Government." In those days there was only one kind of
English Government possible; the Government of Elizabeth, Burghley,
and Walsingham. Parliamentary Government did not exist. Even the
right of free speech in the House of Commons was never recognised by
the Queen. If the English Government had fallen, England would have
been at the mercy of a Papal legate. Protestantism was synonymous
with patriotism, and good Catholics could not be good Englishmen
while there was a heretical sovereign on the throne. After the
Armada things were different. Spain was crushed. Sixtus V. was not a
man to waste money, which he loved, in support of a losing cause.
What Froude wrote to establish, and succeeded in establishing, was
that between 1529 and 1588 the Reformation saved England from the
tyranny of Rome and the proud foot of a Spanish conqueror.

The true hero of Froude's History is not Henry VIII., but Cecil, the
firm, incorruptible, sagacious Minister who saved Elizabeth's
throne, and made England the leading anti-Catholic country. Of a
greater man than