had been deprived; though he was ever anxious to shew every personal kindness and attention to the English as individuals; though he was himself, as an hon. friend of mine described him to be, with some latitude indeed, a "Protestant Pope, and almost one of the best Protestants in Europe;" yet so entirely did he, in Cathedra, adopt the principles of his station; so little did he venture to deviate from the intolerance of his predecessors, that the English, in the day in which I was at Rome, seven years after the restoration of that Pope, had no place of worship recognised or tolerated in Rome. I speak in the hearing of many members who must have been in Rome within the last ten years; and without fear of contradiction, I assert, that though the English were connived at, when they went to the drawing-room of one of their own countrymen, to have under his roof the comfort and advantage on Sundays of their own Church service, they were not permitted to have it; and when they wished to have a regular chapel, the permission was distinctly refused. The worship of the English Protestants at Rome was thus not only not licensed, but was up to that time declared unfit to be even tolerated-and the actual exercise of it was only not prohibited. Is this the proof that the spirit of the Church of Rome is changed?-that it is more tolerant, more willing, and more fit, to be blended with Protestantism?-Will the House believe, that the English, that the Protestants generally, had, when I was in Rome, four years ago, no

space allowed them, marked out and secured for themselves, where they could bury those members of their families whom it might be their misery to lose there1? From consecrated ground they

1

In a few days after this debate, I received a communication from a noble Earl then high in His Majesty's Councils, stating that in both parts of this representation I was in error; and that the English in Rome were THEN in the enjoyment of the liberty of public worship, and, also, that the burying-ground of the Protestants was then surrounded by a wall. Though the accuracy of my first statement, which indeed had been limited to my own observations on the spot in 1821, was, as so limited, left unimpeached by this communication, I hastened, nevertheless, in the House of Commons to take the earliest opportunity of giving my new information on this authority; and I now willingly repeat the substance of this communication in order that it may accompany and qualify, so far as it ought, the original passage. I will only add that in the beautiful and affecting narrative "Three Years in Italy," 1828, p. 122-4, there is an account of that burying-ground in 1821, as I had described it; and in p. 124. there is an account of the English receiving an intimation from the Pope, in respect to their worship at Rome; and in consequence abandoning their public meeting in a hired room; and betaking themselves to a private house for their congregational services. In the whole matter both of our chapel, and of our cemetery, in one word, of their treatment of us living or dead, I blamed the fanaticism not of the people but of their Church. Recollecting, indeed, the accounts of the hostility of our London Mobs to the Roman Catholic Chapels in 1780, I should make proportionately greater allowances for the Mob of Rome in any popular ferment: but my chief complaint was not against the momentary fury of an ignorant and excited populace, but against the cold and deliberate bigotry of the government; or, rather, of the Church of which that Government was the mere machine; and the principles of which encourage the people to

were excluded of course; but is it credible that

an intolerance, which it would be the business of every other Government, and the duty of every other Church, to discountenance. The Multitude in Rome are taught by their Creed to regard us as Heretics, and often by their Priests to deny us the very name of Christians; and the feelings excited by such lessons, frequently, in their re-action, compel the Governors to shew less liberality than they feel. Thus the Pope was urged to put down the English chapel by a charge made against him in an Italian sermon, that he was permitting "a temple for the worship of false gods," within sight of the Vatican. "Three Years in Italy," p. 125.

This is not confined to Rome: the scene of the death of Young's Narcissa, his own daughter, who was "denied a grave," is laid in France:

While nature melted, superstition rav'd,

That mourn'd the dead; and this denied a grave.

Deny'd the charity of dust to spread

O'er dust, a charity their dogs enjoy.

Narcissa, Night iii. works ii. p. 262, 3.

Even since Canada came into our possession a Vicar Apostolic appears by some Papers before the House of Commons to have

pushed matters so far as to have the dead bodies of some (English) soldiers taken up, because heretics should not be interred in consecrated ground." (Papers, No. 181 of Session 1814. p. 20.)

In 1815, an English officer of high rank who lost his daughter, (the last and loveliest,) as they were travelling in Spain, was himself obliged, with a former aid-de-camp, to carry her body on the sea shore of Tarragona, and at midnight, a servant bearing a torch, and, digging a grave between high and low watermark, to read the Funeral Service over his child. In Gilly's Vaudois, 4to. p. 108, there is an account of the tomb, and the

they should not have been permitted to wall round, or to fence in that portion of the waste in which they were nevertheless allowed to "cast their dead?" If the Right honourable Gentleman, the Secretary of State for Foreign affairs, had been present, I would have asked him', whether there be not, in the archives of his office some representation dated four or five years ago, on the part of the English in Rome, soliciting the interference of our government in obtaining for them a burying-ground of their own; or at least some security and sacredness to the spot now uninclosed and open to every other purpose whatever was the force of that representation, or the degree of interference exerted in consequence, the state of the case remained, when I was at Rome, exactly as before; nor was either sacredness or security obtained for any place of Protestant interment.

inscription to the memory of an English lady whom I well knew, and who dying at Turin, was removed for interment into the country of the Vaudois. And in 1823-4, as I learned by a letter from a connexion of the party soon after I had made this statement, an English gentleman, whose wife died in Florence, was obliged "to remove her body to the distance of thirty miles, before a burying-ground could be found for a Protestant."

1 To this fact I had a right to refer, as, at one period, I was in some degree a party to the communications. The interest which led me into the question was excited by the circumstances of the deaths in the family of S-, which took place in 1821, and which form the most valuable portion of the little work since published and already quoted, "Three Years in Italy."

Our own experience, the observations of to-day, prove, in fact, that the intolerance of the See of Rome is as great as ever. The late Pope, good as he was in many points, is a sufficient example of this position,-particularly as he appears in that very eurious work printed here thirteen years ago, containing his official correspondence with Alquier and Miollis, when they seized the papal states in 1808 1. The Pope himself was carried off a prisoner into France. While Buonaparte was meditating this outrage, he still felt it right to submit, for the sanction of the Pope, certain articles relating, not to the universal church, but to the internal administration of France itself as it related to religion. One of those articles was, that all religions should be free: "Que tous les cultes soient libres et publiquement exercés.” The Pope answered as if he had been Julius the Second, or Sixtus the Fifth. He turns round to his Cardinals, and tells them in words which no Protestant should ever forget-" We have rejected this article, as contrary to the canons, to the councils, to the Catholic religion, to the tranquillity of life, and to the welfare of the state 3." In another rescript to

' Relation de ce qui s'est passé à Rome dans l'Envahissement des Etats du St. Siège par les François. 3 tom. Lond.

1812.

2 See Appendix, p. 162-7.

3 Pius VII. to his Cardinals, 5 Feb. 1808. ".Si pretende la libertà d'ogni culto con publico esercizio, e questo articolo siccome opposto à canoni ed ai concili, e alla religione cattolica, al quieto vivere, ed alla felicità dello stato, per le funeste consequenze che ne deriverebbero, lo abbiamo pure rigettato."