the idea of their thus escaping her oppression, and their property was immediately confiscated and sold, or bestowed on her favourites at Court. Those who ventured to remain at home were compelled to attend the established form of worship, according to the queen's notion that it was but a civil duty, and then worshipped in their own way in private; or they refused to attend, and came under the name of recusants, who were looked after with all assiduity and rancour, and were at the mercy of every informer, or ill-disposed or mercenary neighbour who chose to report them. They could be called up at any moment and put to their oath whether they had attended the reformed worship, and how often; when and where they had received the sacrament, and whether they had any private chapel for celebration of mass. Private houses were continually searched for such private oratories or for priests; and the foreign ambassadors complained that their privileges were violated by such inquisitions. Amongst those imprisoned and fined for such offences were Hastings, Lord Loughborough, Sir Edward Waldegrave, Sir Thomas Fitzherbert, Sir Edward Stanley, Sir John Southworth, and the Ladies Waldegrave, Wharton, Carew, Brookes, Morley, Jarmin, Browne, Guildford, &c. The Bishops of London and Ely recommended the torture, to compel the priests taken at private chapels to discover their hearers!
As the Papists wore neither allowed to educate nor ordain priests, William Allen, a clergyman of an ancient family in Lancashire, and formerly principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, proposed the establishment of the afterwards celebrated college at Douay, in France, and became its first master, so that within the first five years he sent into England a hundred qualified missionaries. This gave such offence to the English Court, that the missionaries were pursued with the utmost rigour of the law. Cuthbert Mayne, a priest of Cornwall, was accused of saying mass at the house of a Mr. Tregean, near Truro. Mayne was put to death as a traitor, and Tregean was shut up m prison, where no entreaties could induce Elizabeth to liberate him during her lifetime. After an incarceration of eight-and-twenty years, for the simple fact of worshipping God, as Daniel did, in spite of Royal command, he was released by James at the request of the King of Spain.
Persecution, of course, produced its invariable consequences: the Roman Catholics became more resolute, the men in power more rancorous. In 1578 every gaol in the kingdom had its Popish prisoners; and twenty of rank and fortune perished of an infectious disease in the Castle of York. Nelson, a priest, and Sherwood, a layman, were hanged, drawn, and quartered for denying the queen's supremacy.
In 1580 other prisoners died of the gaol fever in Newgate; and, in fact, not only then, but down almost to our time, the condition of the gaols was so horrible, from want of drainage and proper accommodation, that it amounted to capital punishment to put any one in them. Thousands of untried prisoners—perhaps we might say hundreds of thousands—have perished in our prisons from filth, crowding, and lack of ventilation. In 1577 two judges, the sheriff, under-sheriff, four magistrates, most of the jurors, and many of the spectators were seized in the court at Oxford with fatal sickness whilst trying a bookseller.
The fury of persecution in England stimulated the Roman Catholics abroad to a corresponding enthusiasm of martyrdom. Gregory XIII. followed the example of Allen, and established a second English seminary in the hospital of Santo Spirito, in Rome, and emissaries were also sent thence into the heretical kingdom. First and foremost the general of the Jesuits selected in 1580 two Englishmen of distinguished abilities, and sent them from this college. Robert Persons and Edward Campion arrived with a reputation, and with rumours of the dark conspiracy in which they were engaged, which roused all the alarm and the vigilance of the Government. Rewards were offered for their discovery, and menaces of punishment issued for remissness in tracing them out. The queen sent forth a proclamation, calling on every person who had children, wards, or relatives gone abroad for education to make a return of their names to the ordinary, and to recall them within three months; and all persons whatsoever who knew of any Jesuit or seminarist in the kingdom, and failed to give information, were to be punished as abettors of treason.
As soon as Parliament met in January of 1581, still more stringent laws were passed for the punishment of Roman Catholics. It was made high treason merely to possess the power of absolution. Saying mass incurred a fine of 200 marks, or a year's imprisonment; hearing it, only 100 marks, or the same imprisonment as for saying it; absence from church was made punishable at the rate of twenty pounds per month, and, if prolonged to a whole year, besides the penalty, the offender must produce two securities for his good behaviour of £200 each. The concealment of Roman Catholic tutors, schoolmasters, or priests incurred a year's imprisonment, a priest or tutor, also, being amenable to the same punishment, and the employer of them to a fine of ten pounds per month. There was but one step possible beyond this outrageous despotism, and that was to the stake, as in Mary's time; but the very fury of legal punishment defeated its own object.
Persons and Campion put into the hands of their friends written statements of their objects in coming into the country, which they declared to be solely to exercise their spiritual functions as priests, not to interfere with any worldly concerns or affairs of state; but they declared that all the Jesuits in the world had entered into a league to maintain the Catholic religion at the risk of imprisonment, torture, or death. This announcement excited the greatest alarm, and the most fiery persecution burst forth on the whole body of the Romanists, whilst every means was exerted to discover and secure these missionaries. The names of all the recusants in the kingdom, amounting to 50,000, were returned to Government, and no man included in that number had any longer the least security or privacy in his own house. The doors were broken open without notice given, and the pursuivants, rushing in, spread themselves in different divisions all over the dwelling. Cabinets, cupboards, drawers, closets, were forced and ransacked, beds torn open, tapestry or wainscot dragged down, and every imaginable place explored, to detect by vessels, vestments, books, or crosses, the evidence of heretical
