public prayer. The
Queen contented herself in answer with forbidding the bringing in of
Bulls--which was no more than Edward the First had done before her. Had
the Pope and the Jesuits been then content to let matters rest, no
difficulty might have arisen: but they would not. First Mayne, then
Campion, the first Jesuit who entered England, were sent to "move
sedition," and to "make a party in execution of the former Bull." To
this followed an influx of treasonable books. It had now become evident
that the Papal Bull was to be no mere _brutum fulmen_ which might be
safely left alone to die out, but a deliberate attempt to stir up
rebellion against the Queen. For the Government to have kept silence
would have been practically to throw their influence into the scale
against the reign and the life of their Sovereign Lady.

It is now fashionable with a certain section to stigmatise Elizabeth as
a persecutor, and to represent the penal laws against the Papists
enacted in her reign as cruel oppressions of innocent and harmless
persons, enforced simply because they believed certain religious
doctrines. Those who will carefully follow the facts can hardly avoid
seeing that the disloyalty preceded the coercion, and that if the
Romanists were maddened into plotting against the Government by
oppressive laws, those laws were not due to groundless fear or malice,
but were simply the just reward of their own deeds. During the five
years of Queen Mary, three hundred men, women, and children, were put to
death for their religious opinions only. During the forty-four years of
Queen Elizabeth, less than thirty priests, and five harbourers of
priests, were executed, not for their opinions nor their religion, but
for distinctly treasonable practices. [Note 4.]

When matters had come to this pass, in 1580, the first penal laws were
issued, against recusancy and seditious publications. The penalty for
recusancy--by which was meant a legal conviction for absence from public
worship on religious grounds--"was not loss of life or limb, or whole
estate, but only a pecuniary mulct and penalty; and that also only until
they would submit and conform themselves and again come to church, as
they had done for ten years before the Pope's Bull." Twenty pounds per
lunar month was the fine imposed; but this referred only to adult males,
"not being let by sickness." Compared with the laws of Queen Mary, and
even of her predecessors, this pena