Authoritate, pro loco ac munere quod nobis à Deo commissum fuit, à nobis desiderares, &c. It is also related by an author of credit, who was particularly careful of gathering together every scrap of history of the beginning of her reign, (and which sufficiently manifests the Pope's solicitude on this important matter to the Court of Rome,) that an English Nobleman, (soon after Elizabeth's accession to the Throne,) being at Rome, Pius IV. asked him of her Majesty's casting his Authority out of England, who made answer, that she did it being persuaded by testimonies of Scripture, as well as the laws of the Realm, nullam illius esse in terrâ alienâ Jurisdictionem. Which the Pope seemed not to believe, but did rather think the Sentence of that Court against her Mother's Marriage to be the true cause, which he did promise not only to retract, sed in ejus gratiam quæcunque possum præterea facturum, dum illa ad Nostram Ecclesiam se recipiat, et debitum mihi Primatus titulum reddat: and the same author then adds, extant apud nos Articuli Abbatis Sanctæ Salutis manu conscripti, extant Cardinalis Moronæ literæ, quibus nobilem illum vehementer hortabatur, ut eam rem nervis omnibus apud Reginam nostram sollicitaret. Extant hodie Nobilium nostrorum aliquot, quibus Papa multa aureorum Millia pollicitus est, ut istius amicitiæ atque fœderis inter Romanam Cathedram et Elizabetham Serenissimam Authores essent.

To bring our short epitome of Papal Usurpation, and of the unwearied efforts of the Court of Rome to acquire the ascendency over England, to as rapid a conclusion as is practicable, I would make a general affirmation of this, I think, undeniable fact, that during the whole reign of Elizabeth and that of all the race of Stuarts down to the Revolution, containing a period of 130 years, the Court of Rome and their Roman Catholic Emissaries and Adherents in this country, never for a night rested from their labours to overturn the Government in both Church and State. Elizabeth was against the Roman Catholics, it must be admitted; but she was backed by the Laws of the Land, and her own existence depended upon those Laws being acted upon to their utmost penal force.

severe

The sending such swarms of Roman Catholic Priests from the crowded officina of the Jesuits, if suffered, would soon have accomplished the desired Revolution, more especially when the solemn oath taken by the Students of the different Colleges or Seminaries abroad for the English, (though destructive to the State,) only prescribed what was esteemed both a moral and religious duty; it being rather curious, I transcribe it. "I, A. B. considering with how great benefits God hath blessed me, &c. do promise, by God's assistance, to enter into Holy Orders as soon as I shall be fit, and to return to England to convert my Countrymen there, when

ever

ever it shall please the Superior of this House to recommend me!"

The pure history of these 130 years forms a uniform series of Roman Catholic plots and conspiracies, which even since the Revolution (for it is a worm that never dies,) have generated two Rebellions. It is notorious that the Court of Rome has been at the bottom of them all, as well as of the previous persecutions and massacres, to the latter of which they added the unnecessary impiety of solemnly returning God thanks for the success of their terrible vengeance; it being a well-ascertained fact that the Pope, with his Cardinals, upon hearing the news of the Parisian Massacre of the Huguenots, went straitway to St. Mark's Church, and returned thanks in the most solemn manner for so great a blessing conferred upon the See of Rome and the Christian World!

The natural effects and tendency of the Roman Catholic Religion, are very forcibly and luminously described in a remonstrance of the Commons to King James I.

I. The Popish Religion is incompatible with ours in respect of their positions.

II. It draweth with it an inviolable dependency on Foreign Princes.

III. It

III. It openeth too wide a gap for popularity to any who shall draw too great a party.

IV. It hath a restless spirit, and will strive by these gradations; if it once get but a connivance, it will press for a toleration; if that should be obtained, they must have an equality; from thence they will aspire to superiority, and will never rest till they get a subversion of the true Religion.

It is quite amusing to observe, that Dr. Milner ascribes all these plots and conspiracies, without I believe an exception, to the Court Ministers of the time, or at least to Protestants. Thus when speak. ing of Henry Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots, being blown up and destroyed, with all his servants and attendants, by means of a mine stored with gunpowder, as he lay sick at his house of Kirk-a-Field, he says that the Earls of Murray, Morton, Bothwell, &c. &c. were the contrivers and perpetrators of this villainy, not without the privity and consent of Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Elizabeth herself, who afterwards endeavoured, by every vile artifice, to throw the infamy of that diabolical act upon his widow, and even to get her legally convicted and executed for the guilt of it; that Elizabeth, and her three Ministers, Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham, and Dudley, Earl of Leicester, were the contrivers of Babington's plot and Queen Mary's murder-that the pretended plot of Rheims and Rome was sworn to by a set of perjured hirelings

lings of Sir Francis Walsingham, their employerthat Throckmorton's conspiracy was also a mere pretended one-a mere fabrication also, that the Spanish Armada was an English Roman Catholic plot that Dr. Parry's plot for assassinating Queen Elizabeth, at the instance of the Roman Catholics, with the privity and salvo of absolution, and on the suggestion of the Pope, was in fact the plot of Elizabeth's Ministers, and that Parry was abandoned by his old masters, Burghley and Walsingham, and left to the severity of the law-that Burghley's son, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, (who, according to this author, was the true inheritor of all his father's treachery and cruelty,) was the manager of the Farce called Sir Walter Raleigh's Plot, and also of the famous Gunpowder Plot— · that again, in the time of Car. I. the Roman Catholics were wrongfully accused of divers plots hatched up for the occasion, to murder their best friend, the King, and the leading Members of Parliament, and of exciting the Scotch Rebels against him, and in the time of Car. II. of being the incendiaries in the great fire of London, and also of being the authors of Mocedo's and Oates's Popish plots, the latter of which Dr. Milner avers to have been forged by the hoary Traitor, Shaftesbury.'

To all these strange assertions I shall content myself with observing, Qui nimis probat, nihil probat, it being totally impracticable, within the narrow limits of this little tract, to enter into a refutation

of