SECTION VII. THE revolution on the death of Queen Mary reestablished in England the supremacy of the Crown, the Act of Uniformity, and the Reformed Prayer Book. The majority even of the English were still Catholics; yet the change, if largely unwelcome to them, was received without surprise. In the theory of the constitution the law which undertook the direction of conduct extended to the exercise of religion. Opinion remained free; there was no inquisition into the conscience; but public worship was a formal act which, by universal consent, the Crown and Parliament were held to have a right to control. The experience of three hundred years has taught us that the widest divergence of belief is compatible with equal purity of life and equal fidelity to a common government. But the conditions did not exist which make toleration possible at a time when, though differing infinitely in the articles of faith, all parties were nevertheless agreed that heresy was the darkest of crimes, that to hold the right faith was the first of duties, and that the business of the civil magistrate was not only to execute justice but to maintain truth. When feeling was thus intense, and the conscience so keenly excited, to have allowed the public and avowed exercise of more than one religion would have led inevitably to acts of violence. If the law had been silent, the several congregations as they were gathered under their preachers into organized bodies would have themselves attempted to give CHAP. I. I. BOOK expression to the universal sentiment; and so unanimous was the conviction that the state could allow but one religion, that the aspirations of the English Catholics were less directed towards toleration and free chapels and churches, which they would have counted it an impiety to concede to their adversaries, than to a counter-revolution, which would replace the exclusive authority in their own hands. The Catholics, by the necessity of their situation, made themselves liable to additional disabilities. So long as the Pope claimed a right to absolve them from their allegiance, and they on their part refused to repudiate his pretensions, they could neither be, nor be considered, loyal subjects of an excommunicated sovereign. To be a good Catholic was, in the nature of things, to be unfaithful to the secular prince. All Protestant governments were obliged to regard the adherents of the Roman see as secret enemies; and although practice was not governed by logic, and English gentlemen contrived subterfuges by which to reconcile incompatible obligations, Elizabeth's government, when she had decided to go forward with the Reformation, was compelled to watch them with distrust. At first there was the utmost forbearance. The Act of Uniformity was the public law of the land; fines were attached to non-attendance at church; an oath of allegiance, excluding and denying the pretended rights of the Pope, was made a condition of holding office under the Crown, of admission to the Universities, or of the exercise of a learned profession. But mass was said by connivance in private houses. The allegiance of the peers was assumed as not needing to be confirmed by protestations. The fines were not exacted. The widest toleration was permitted consistent with the existence of the law. With some it answered, with others it failed. The passionate Papists murmured, conspired, fell into treason. Their leaders were executed. The laws were enforced more stringently. They conspired again, and invited help from Spain. The nation, whose patriotism was stronger than their superstition, stood by the Crown. The cause of independence triumphed, and the Pope's authority in England died utterly away. The state of Ireland was materially different. In England, at Elizabeth's accession, though the Protestants were a minority, they were the most energetic and vigorous of the population. In Ireland, 'of the birth of the land,' there were no Protestants at all. Yet the difficulty of adopting a separate principle of government was enormous. Although there was no legislative union, yet laws of Imperial consequence, which had been passed in England, were re-enacted as a matter of course by the Irish Parliament. The Ireland of the Statute Book was still only the Pale and the port towns, and though even within these narrow limits Protestantism had as yet made no progress, yet the need of defence against the Pope was even greater there than at home. The Act of Uniformity, therefore, and the Act of Supremacy were pushed, by some means or other, upon the Irish Statute Book. The Bishops of the Pale who refused the oath of allegiance were deprived, and others instituted in their places. The sees in the rest of the island were filled up when they fell vacant, only as the Government found itself strong enough to maintain Protestants there without danger of their being murdered. Meanwhile CHAP. I. BOOK I. the private toleration allowed in England received in Ireland a far larger latitude. The Primate was a Protestant. In the parish churches in the Pale there was either a Protestant service or none. But when over zealous Deputies showed a disposition to proselytize, they were invariably checked by the Queen; and the policy which was succeeding in England, it was supposed, not wholly without reason, might produce analogous effects in the sister country. The Prayer Book especially, when translated into Latin, retained a Catholic complexion. The King of Spain long turned a deaf ear to invitations from the Irish leaders to interfere. If in Ireland, to begin with, there were scarcely any Protestants at all, in England they were in a minority of one to five or six,1 and were almost limited to London and the large towns. One difference was overlooked, and that a vital one. In England, when her independence was threatened by the Catholic powers, the national spirit was on the side of the Reformation. In Ireland, zeal for religion identified itself with political freedom; and the more ardent the orthodoxy, the greater the prospect of obtaining sympathy and help from Spain and Italy and France. Elizabeth, perhaps, considered that the Catholic powers had work enough on their own hands; that, if the magistracy, the public offices, and the learned profession were kept strictly in the hands of conformists, the Pale would become gradually reconciled, and, with time and forbearance, the rest of the island would follow. The calculation was utterly disappointed; the Queen's meaning towards Ireland was nothing but good; she detested persecution, she 1 The highest estimate was one in three. The lowest, in the Catholic representations to Philip, made them but one in twelve. Yet I. was scrupulously anxious, like her fathers, to protect CHAP. the Irish owners in possession of their estates. she pursued a policy the most fertile in disaster that the most malignant ingenuity could have devised. The problem presented to her was, doubtless, complicated. To have left religion alone and contented herself with the secular government, would have been equivalent to a declaration that there should be no Protestants in Ireland at all; it would have furnished an unanswerable argument for indulgence to her Catholic subjects at home; while the Irish, from the nature of the case, would have been in league with all her enemies within the realm and without. To harmonise the laws of the two countries was a political necessity; but, if the Queen found herself compelled to establish a Church which should be independent of the See of Rome, her obvious duty was to secure the presence of a Protestant community by a second influx of colonists, who would be protected by the difference of creed from the seductive influences which had proved so fatal to the descendants of the Normans. The Church property of the Pale, the lands of the abbeys, which were again suppressed, the estates attached to the bishops' sees, had all of them lapsed to the Crown. There was land enough, without dispossessing a single lay proprietor, to have settled colonies of Protestants throughout Dublin, Meath, and Kildare, who would have given strength to the English interest, supported clergy, and at least have shown the Irish people that, to be a Protestant, was not to be an atheist. Elizabeth, unfortunately, not choosing to have a war of creeds in Ireland, preferred to postpone the introduction of the Protestant religion to a more convenient season. Irritated with the expenses of the |