ham. Intrigues almost inexplicable followed in rapid succession, and the English court was kept in an unceasing agony of alarm by reports of foreign invasions and inroads across the Borders; insurrections at home; plots against the queen's life; English St. Bartholomews. In this state Elizabeth gave full course to the penal code against the Catholics, which had been made more and more severe, and to the fears and fanaticism of her Protestant subjects. Spies and informers were let loose till the land swarmed with them: the adherents to the old faith were incessantly harassed, cast into prison on vague suspicions, ruined in their property and prospects. The conduct of government towards the Catholics somewhat resembled the brutal pranks of a set of boys who drive and torment a dog until he is mad, and then shoot him for being dangerous. And yet, after all, no dangerous Catholic conspiracy was ever traced to any great or powerful number of English subjects-was never brought home to the doors of any but a few fanatics and inveterate plotters who had caught the infection of the times. when the ordinary proceedings of governments looked more like plots and intrigues than state business. Every man was tempted to work destruction on his personal enemy by the ease of the process with which he could accuse him of being unsound in religion and disaffected in politics. In this way Arden, a gentleman of an ancient family in Warwickshire, was sacrificed to the revenge of his neighbour Leicester. Arden's son-in-law Somerville, and Hall, a missionary priest, and Arden's wife, were convicted of a conspiracy upon evidence extracted by the rack. Somerville strangled himself, or was strangled by others, in Newgate. Arden suffered the horrible death of a traitor. Hall, the priest, who had confessed on the rack, was suffered to live. Before this time Campion, an English Jesuit, who had been lurking in England, was put to the rack. He confessed nothing but the writing and distributing of works in favour of the church of Rome, nor does it appear that he was charged with any conspiracy, but he was executed with three priests named Sherwood, Kirby, and Bryant. Notwith

standing the prevailing fanaticism and panic which held in suspense all the generous feelings of the nation, people began to murmur at the frequent and increasing use of torture; and Burghley found it expedient to defend himself against public opinion. He protested that the Jesuit Campion had been racked so gently that he was soon after able to walk about and sign his confession.* Elizabeth did more: she proclaimed that torture should cease: but it ceased only in this specious proclamation,-in reality it became more active than ever. As the vile trade of an informer was a profitable one, many ingenious individuals took it up; and there was a wonderful increase of intercepted letters, forged documents, and lists found hid in Catholic houses,-found, we believe, in three cases out of four by those who had put them there-by the agents of the government. Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, son of the late Duke of Norfolk (one of the poor orphans for whom he had so implored and prayed), grew up a moody, melancholy man, and became a convert to Catholicism. From that moment he had been allowed no rest. To escape imprisonments and questionings, and the fate of his father and his grandfather, who had both suffered on the block, he resolved to quit his country, and, at the moment of departure, he wrote an affecting letter, which was to be delivered to the queen when he should be out of her reach. But some of his own servants, and the master of the vessel in which he intended to seek an asylum abroad, were in the pay of Burghley, and on their timely information he was seized on the coast of Sussex, brought up to London, and consigned to the Tower, where he died some years after in a miserable condition. Before his committal, the Earl of Northumberland, the brother of the last earl, beheaded at York, had destroyed himself by discharging three pistolbullets into his left breast in order to baulk Queen Elizabeth of the forfeiture of his lands. He had been accused of conspiring to liberate Queen Mary.† Passing over

* Somers's Tracts.

An historical doubt may be fairly raised whether this

many other victims, we proceed to the Throckmorton plot, which was detected by the court, or invented by it, in 1584. Francis Throckmorton, a gentleman of Chcshire, was arrested on the evidence of an intercepted letter written by one Morgan, a supposed adherent of the Queen of Scots, though an agent of Burghley's, who was in France, and who, according to this letter, informed him that Mary's nephew, the Duke of Guise, was now ready to invade England for the purpose of liberating his relative. It was proved beyond a doubt that no such preparation existed in France; but that was nothing. Throckmorton was laid upon the rack: he was silent under the first torture ;-he was racked again, and was still silent; he was tortured a third time, and still confessed not. He was led a fourth time to the rack, and then certain papers were exhibited to him which were

unfortunate Percy committed suicide or was assassinated. A dag or pistol was a sort of instrument not commonly left in the hands of a state prisoner in the Tower. To prove the suicide, government brought forward one Mullan, who affirmed that he had sold a dag to the earl; and another state prisoner, named Pantan, who said that he saw it delivered into the hands of the earl by a servant of the name of Price. But this Price, though in custody, was not produced.Howell's State Trials.

According to Camden the Catholics did not believe in the suicide, but cast some doubts and suspicion upon a servant of Sir Christopher Hatton, which servant had been charged with the custody of the Earl of Northumberland just before his death. In a letter-an infernal letter-written, at a later period, by Sir Walter Raleigh to Burghley's son, Sir Robert Cecil, recommending him to get the Earl of Essex put out of the way, and not to fear after revenge from the earl's son, Raleigh says, "Northumberland that now is thinks not of Hatton's issue. Kelloway lives that murdered the brother of Orsay, and Orsay let him go by all his lifetime."Burghley Papers.

If this be not an assuming as a fact known both to Raleigh and to Sir Robert Cecil that the Earl of Northumberland had been murdered by the contrivance of Hatton, we are wonderfully mistaken.

said to have been discovered in his house, and then the wretched man made some confessions in which he implicated Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador. Burghley summoned the ambassador before the privy council, and charged him with practising against the state. Mendoza indignantly repelled the charge, and retorted by accusing Burghley of robbing his master King Philip; of encouraging the rebellious subjects of Spain; and, amongst other things, he charged a certain counsellor of her majesty with having engaged the brother of a certain lord to murder Don John of Austria. The ambassador was sent out of the kingdom. Throckmorton, after a strange trial, was sent to the gallows and the executioner's knife at Tyburn. On the scaffold he declared that there had been no conspiracy, and (calling God to witness) that the confession he had made was a mere fiction invented to save his body from further torture. The Lords Paget and Charles Arundel, who had been named in the intercepted letter, had escaped into France, whence they put forth a declaration stating that they had filed because they feared Leicester and Walsingham, and because they knew that their innocence would not avail them against forged letters.

A.D. 1584. In the autumn of this year Elizabeth summoned a new parliament; for, notwithstanding her thrift, she was deplorably in want of money. The commons voted liberally, and at the same time they passed fresh penal statutes against the Catholics. The blow was

principally directed against the Jesuits, the seminary priests, and all English priests who had received conse eration from the Bishop of Rome. Forty days were allowed them to quit the kingdom for ever: if found after that term they were to die the death of traitors; and all those who concealed them, or gave them hospita lity, would be held as being guilty of felony. Alt per sons knowing of such priests being within the realm, and not discovering them within twelve days, were to be fined and imprisoned. The English Catholics, having no schools allowed to them at home, had or late years sent their sons abroad for education, more especially to

the college of Douay, a large establishment conducted by the Jesuits, who had obtained great reputation as teachers: but it was now enacted that all such students abroad as did not return home within six months after proclamation made should be deemed traitors; that all who furnished them with money should incur a premunire; that parents sending their children to such seminaries without license should forfeit one hundred pounds; and that the children there educated should be disinherited.*

The Catholics presented a petition against the late enactments, vindicating their loyalty and their religion,— declaring that they utterly abhorred all such projects of assassination as had recently been spoken of,—and held that neither priest nor pope could license that which was sinful. Richard Shelley, of Michael Grove, in Sussex, undertook to present this petition to the queen, who forthwith committed him to prison, where he died after a confinement of some years. The captive Queen of Scots, who saw herself altogether abandoned by her only child, now thought that every night would be her last. What seemed to aim at her life was an association recently entered into, called the Protestant Association, against all the enemies of Queen Elizabeth. The members of it solemnly swore to defend the queen, and to revenge her death or any injury committed against her. Leicester was at the head of it, and it had been confirmed by parliament.

The state of Elizabeth's foreign relations at this time was altogether anomalous. There was and there had been no declaration of war with Spain, but yet, ever since 1770, when the great Drake obtained a regular commission,† that commander and others who followed his example had been plundering in the West Indies, in Spanish America, and in the Pacific. The right which Spain assumed of considering the New World as trea

Stat. 27 Elizabeth, c. 2.

+ The buccaneers had commenced operations as early as 1530. Drake himself had commanded several marauding expeditions before, but he did not get the queen's commission till 1570.