England, there to pursue their ministrations and act as 'missioners' among the neglected catholics. The progress of the college was rapid enough to prove that it had been wanted. In 1574 the first of the newly ordained priests started upon the English mission, and from that time, year by year, great detachments were sent over, till in 1577 there were as many as twenty-four priests ordained, and next year twenty-two more. Meanwhile the pope's bull of excommunication had been published in 1570, and the parliament had expressed its alarm. In 1571 the famous act was passed which made it an offence punishable with death and forfeiture for any catholic priest to give absolution and 'reconcile' any one to the church of Rome, or for any one to receive such absolution at his hands. So far from this act tending to deter young enthusiasts from entering upon the perilous mission, it is plain that there was a certain fascination for many in the very danger to be faced and the hardships to be endured. In 1576 the feeling against the English in the Netherlands became very bitter. A strong party, by no means exclusively Calvinists, felt keenly that Elizabeth had betrayed them or was ready to betray them to Philip, and at Douay there was a cry raised that the English college was a nest of traitors who were playing false to the cause of the United Provinces. They were Englishmen, they should be expelled from the town. At this time there were no fewer than 120 students in the college. The worldly-wise among the townsmen saw that such an institution must needs be a source of income to the place; for a while they managed to keep down the violence of the multitude, but when the landing of Sir John Norris with the force sent by Elizabeth on 7 Jan. 1578 was followed by the disastrous defeat of Gembloux on the 31st, and the dastardly slaughter of six hundred prisoners in cold blood, the grief and rage of the people of Douay burst forth afresh. Elizabeth, they thought, had betrayed them, and Englishmen were all traitors, whatever their creed. The college was compelled to break up. In August it reassembled at Rheims, though with diminished numbers. Henceforth for a while its home was in the dominions of the king of France, not in those of the king of Spain. The stream of missioners continued to flow steadily across the Channel. Thirteen landed in England in 1578, next year twenty-one crossed over, twenty-nine more in 1580, exclusive of the two Jesuit fathers, Parsons and Campion. It was not in the nature of things that such an immigration of proselytisers should not be followed by a revival of catholic sentiment in the country, or that the hopes of the ardent and sanguine among the catholic party should not rise. It is evident that there was a decided catholic revival, and that the comparative leniency shown to the catholic gentry tended to embolden those who had an affection for the old ritual. It was not long before they were awakened to a sense of their danger. A regular system of espionage was begun; the houses of the catholics were watched, and on Palm Sunday 1574 (4 April) a raid was made simultaneously upon three important houses in London, and Lady Morley, Lady Guilford, and Lady Brown, 'with divers other gentlewomen,' were surprised as they were hearing mass, and together with four priests were apprehended to be dealt with 'according to the statute in that case provided.' The four priests appear to have been old 'Queen Mary priests,' not missioners from the seminaries abroad. It was a beginning, but only a beginning.
The spies caught the first seminarist, Cuthbert Mayne, in the autumn of 1577. He was hanged and mangled on 29 Nov., and his host, Francis Tregean, a Cornish gentleman with a good estate, was thrown into prison, where he was kept for twenty-eight years, and sent out of the country to die in exile. In the following February two more of the missioners were taken and hanged at Tyburn, and from this time till the end of the reign the barbarities never ceased. But it was when Parsons and Campion, the first two Jesuits who had ever set foot in England, landed in June 1580, that the queen, or at any rate her council, began to be seriously alarmed. There was no question of sedition, no thought of a rebellion, but there was a very great question as to who was to be obeyed in England in religious matters, the pope or the queen. The priests ordained abroad, and persisting in saying mass at home, were guilty of high treason according to the act. They defied the act, and must take the consequences of their temerity. This view of the case narrowed the issue to limits beyond which Elizabeth refused to look. One and all these priestly fanatics professed to honour her as their queen, and confessed that in conscience they were bound to obey her, with one reservation, however — they could not acknowledge her authority as supreme head of the church in things spiritual. Elizabeth would have all or none; the obedience she claimed admitted of no reserve. Liberty of conscience, freedom of worship, she could no more away with than could Philip II or Alva, No special pleading in the world, no attempt to extenuate the acts done on the ground that they were called for by the exigencies of the
