"self will and self worship" which Bishop Stubbs justly attributes to her father. And, in the well-weighed words of Hallam, "she was too deeply imbued with arbitrary principles to endure any deviation from the mode of worship she should prescribe".
It was on the feast of St. John Baptist, 1559, that the statute took effect which abolished throughout England the old worship, and set up the new. Thenceforth Catholic rites could be performed only by stealth, and at the risk of severe punishment. But during the first decade of the queen's reign Catholics were treated with comparative lenity, occasional fines, confiscations, and imprisonments being the severest penalties employed against them. Camden and others assert that they enjoyed "a pretty free use of their religion". But this is too strongly put. The truth is that a vast number who were Catholics at heart temporized, resorting to the new worship more or less regularly, and attending secretly, when opportunity offered, Catholic rites celebrated by the Marian clergy commonly called "the old priests". Of these a considerable number remained scattered up and down the country, being generally found as chaplains in private families. These occasional conformists were supported by the vague hope of political change which might give relief to their consciences. Elizabeth and her counsellors calculated that when the old priests dropped off, through death and other causes, people generally would be won over to the new religion. But it fell out otherwise. As the old priests disappeared, the question of a supply of Catholic clergy began to engage the minds of those to whom they had ministered. Moreover, stricter conceptions of their duty in respect of heretical worship were gaining ground among English Catholics, partly on account of the decision of a congregation appointed by the Council of Trent, that attendance at it was "grievously sinful", inasmuch as it was "the offspring of schism, the badge of hatred of the Church". Then a man appeared whom Father Bridgett rightly describes as "the father, under God, of the Catholic Church in England after the destruction of the ancient hierarchy", to whom "principally, we owe the continuation of the priesthood, and the succession of the secular clergy".
That man was William Allen, afterwards cardinal. He conceived the idea of an apostolate having for its object the perpetuation of the Faith in England, and in 1568 he founded the seminary at Douai, then belonging to Spanish Flanders, which was for so many generations to minister to the wants of English Catholics. It is notable as the first college organized according to the rules and constitution of the Council of Trent. The missionaries, full of zeal, and not counting their lives dear, who were sent over from this institution, revived the drooping spirits of the faithful in England and maintained the standard of orthodoxy. Elizabeth viewed with much displeasure this frustration of her hopes, nor was the Bull "Regnans in excelsis", by which, in 1570, St. Pius V declared her deposed and her Catholic subjects released from their allegiance, calculated to mollify her. Increased severity of the penal laws marks the rest of Elizabeth's reign. By the Act of Supremacy Catholics offending against that statute had been made liable to capital punishment as traitors, the queen hoping thereby to escape the odium attaching to the infliction of death for religion. Few will now dissent from the words of Green in his "Short History": "There is something even more revolting than open persecution in the policy which brands every Catholic priest as a traitor, and all Catholic worship as disloyalty." But, for a time, the policy succeeded, and the martyrs who suffered for no other cause than their Catholic faith were commonly believed to have been put to death for treason. In 1581 this offense of spiritual treason was the subject of a far more comprehensive enactment (23 Eliz., c. 1). It qualified as traitors all who should absolve or reconcile others to the See of Rome, or willingly be so absolved or reconciled. Many English historians (Hume is the most considerable of them) have affirmed that "sedition, revolt, even assassination were the means by which seminary priests sought to compass their ends against Elizabeth". But this sweeping accusation is not true. No doubt Cardinal Allen, the Jesuit Persons (see Robert Persons(Parsons)), and other Catholic exiles were cognizant of, and involved in, plots which had for their end the queen's overthrow, nor would some of the conspirators have shrunk from taking her life any more than she shrank from taking the life of Mary Queen of Scots. But, in spite of all their sufferings, the great body of English Catholics maintained their loyalty. From the political intrigues in which the exiles were so deeply involved they held aloof, nay, many of them viewed with suspicion not only the exiles, but the whole Society of which Persons was a foremost representative, and desired the exclusion of Jesuits from English Colleges and from the English mission. When the Armada was expected they repaired in every county to the standard of the Lord Lieutenant, imploring that they might not be suspected of bartering the national independence for their religious belief. They received from Elizabeth a characteristic reward. "The Queen," writes Lingard, "whether she sought to satisfy the religious animosities of her subjects, or to display her gratitude to the Almighty by punishing the supposed enemies of His worship, celebrated her triumph with the immolation of human victims" (History of England, VI, 255). In the four months between July 22 and November 27, of 1588, twenty-one seminary priests, eleven laymen, and one woman were put to death for their Catholic faith. During the rest of Elizabeth's life her Catholic subjects groaned under incessant persecution, of which one special note was the systematic use of torture. "The rack seldom stood idle in the Tower during the latter part of her reign", Hallam remarks. The total number of Catholics who suffered under her was one hundred and eighty-nine, one hundred and twenty-eight of them being priests, fifty-eight laymen, and three women. To them should be added, as Law remarks in his "Calendar of English Martyrs" (London, 1870), thirty-two Franciscans who were starved to death.
Notwithstanding the severities of Elizabeth, the number of Catholic clergy on the English missions in her time was considerable. It has been estimated that at the end of the sixteenth century they amounted to three hundred and sixty-six, fifty being survivors of the old Marian priests, three hundred priests from Douai and the other foreign seminaries, and sixteen priests of the Society of Jesus. On the queen's death the eyes of the persecuted remnant of the old faith turned hopefully towards James. Their hopes were doomed to disappointment. That prince took himself seriously as head of the English Church. He chose rather to be the successor of Elizabeth than the avenger of Mary Stuart, and continued the savage policy of the late queen. The year after his accession an Act was passed "for the due execution of the Statutes against Jesuits, Seminary priests and other priests", which took away from Catholics the power of sending their children to be educated abroad, and of providing schools for them at home. In the course of the same year a proclamation was issued banishing all missionary priests out of the kingdom. The next year is marked by the Gunpowder Plot, "the contrivance", as Tierney well observes, "of half a dozen persons of desperate fortunes, who, by that means, brought an odium upon the body of Catholics, who have ever since labored under the weight of the calumny, though no way concerned". Soon afterwards a new oath of allegiance was devised, rather for the purpose of dividing than of relieving Catholics. ItV.—29
