Romanists had been on the whole gently and justly
used. But it was in reality, though they could not see it, after her
the deluge.

Who was to be Elizabeth's successor had been for years at once a serious
and an unsettled question. There were three persons living when she
died, each of whom could have put forward a claim to the Crown on
various grounds.

Humanly speaking, the decision was made by two groups of persons--the
Careys and Cecils, and the Romanists of England--both of whom were
determined that James of Scotland should succeed. The latter had been
working for some time past, and had secured promises from James that he
would extend special toleration to them. He was expected to look kindly
on the party which had adhered to his mother--it would be difficult to
say why, since in Scotland his adherents had always been at war with
hers--and it was remembered that he had been born and baptised in the
Church of Rome. The Roman party, therefore, wrought earnestly in his
favour. Sir Thomas Tresham proclaimed him at Northampton, at
considerable personal risk; his sons and Lord Monteagle assisted the
Earl of Southampton to hold the Tower for James. The Pope, Clement the
Eighth, was entirely on James's side, of whose conversion he entertained
the warmest hopes. To the French Ambassador, Monsieur de Beaumont,
James asserted that "he was no heretic, that is, refusing to recognise
the truth; neither was he a Puritan, nor separated from the Church: he
held episcopacy as necessary, and the Pope as the chief bishop, namely,
the president and moderator of councils, but not the head nor superior."

We in this nineteenth century, accustomed to ideas of complete and
perpetual toleration, and alas! also to Gallio-like apathy and
indifference, can scarcely form a conception of what was at that time
the popular estimate of a Papist. A fair view of it is given by the
following sarcastic description, written on the fly-leaf of a volume of
manuscript sermons of this date.

"The Blazon of a Papist [`priest' is erased] contrived prettily by som
Herault of Armes in ye compasse of Armoury.

"First. There is papist Rampant, a furious beast: 'tis written that the
Diuell goes about like a roaring Lion, but the Diuell himselfe is not
more fierce and rigorous then is papist where [he] is of force and
ability to shew his tyranny: wittnes ye murthers, ye massacres, ye
slaughters, ye poysoning, ye stabbing, ye burning, ye broyling, y