sition taken by her Majesty
on the subject was as fair as could be reasonably expected. Certainly she
was no advocate for religious liberty. She chose that her own subjects
should be Protestants, because she had chosen to be a Protestant herself,
and because it was an incident of her supremacy, to dictate uniformity of
creed to all beneath her sceptre. No more than her father, who sent to
the stake or gallows heretics to transubstantiation as well as believers
in the Pope, had Elizabeth the faintest idea of religious freedom.
Heretics to the English Church were persecuted, fined, imprisoned,
mutilated, and murdered, by sword, rope, and fire. In some respects, the
practice towards those who dissented from Elizabeth was more immoral and
illogical, even if less cruel, than that to which those were subjected
who rebelled against Sixtus. The Act of Uniformity required Papists to
assist at the Protestant worship, but wealthy Papists could obtain
immunity by an enormous fine. The Roman excuse to destroy bodies in order
to save souls, could scarcely be alleged by a Church which might be
bribed into connivance at heresy, and which derived a revenue from the
very nonconformity for which humbler victims were sent to the gallows. It
would, however, be unjust in the extreme to overlook the enormous
difference in the amount of persecution, exercised respectively by the
Protestant and the Roman Church. It is probable that not many more than
two hundred Catholics were executed as such, in Elizabeth's reign, and
this was ten score too many. But what was this against eight hundred
heretics burned, hanged, and drowned, in one Easter week by Alva, against
the eighteen thousand two hundred went to stake and scaffold, as he
boasted during his administration, against the vast numbers of
Protestants, whether they be counted by tens or by hundreds of thousands,
who perished by the edicts of Charles V., in the Netherlands, or in the
single Saint Bartholomew Massacre in France? Moreover, it should never be
forgotten--from undue anxiety for impartiality--that most of the
Catholics who were executed in England, suffered as conspirators rather
than as heretics. No foreign potentate, claiming to be vicegerent of
Christ, had denounced Philip as a bastard and, usurper, or had, by means
of a blasphemous fiction, which then was a terrible reality, severed the
bonds of allegiance by which his subjects were held, cut him off from all
communion with his fello