quire into their
consciences. This was milder treatment than the burning alive, burying
alive, hanging, and drowning, which had been dealt out to the English and
the Netherland heretics by Philip and by Mary, but it was not the spirit
which William the Silent had been wont to manifest in his measures
towards Anabaptists and Papists alike. Moreover, the Prince could hardly
forget that of the nine thousand four hundred Catholic ecclesiastics who
held benefices at the death of Queen Mary, all had renounced the Pope on
the accession of Queen Elizabeth, and acknowledged her as the head of the
church, saving only one hundred and eighty-nine individuals. In the
hearts of the nine thousand two hundred and eleven others, it might be
thought perhaps that some tenderness for the religion from which they had
so suddenly been converted, might linger, while it could hardly be hoped
that they would seek to inculcate in the minds of their flocks or of
their sovereign any connivance with the doctrines of Geneva.

When, at a later period, the plotting of Catholics, suborned by the Pope
and Philip, against the throne and person of the Queen, made more
rigorous measures necessary; when it was thought indispensable to execute
as traitors those Roman seedlings--seminary priests and their
disciples--who went about preaching to the Queen's subjects the duty of
carrying out the bull by which the Bishop of Rome had deposed and
excommunicated their sovereign, and that "it was a meritorious act to
kill such princes as were excommunicate," even then, the men who preached
and practised treason and murder experienced no severer treatment than
that which other "heretics" had met with at the Queen's hands. Jesuits
and Popish priests were, by Act of Parliament, ordered to depart the
realm within forty days. Those who should afterwards return to the
kingdom were to be held guilty of high treason. Students in the foreign
seminaries were commanded to return within six months and recant, or be
held guilty of high treason. Parents and guardians supplying money to
such students abroad were to incur the penalty of a preamunire--perpetual
exile, namely, with loss of all their goods.

Many seminary priests and others were annually executed in England under
these laws, throughout the Queen's reign, but nominally at least they
were hanged not as Papists, but as traitors; not because they taught
transubstantiation, ecclesiastical celibacy, auricular confession, or