ing persecuted Papists even as ruthlessly as Mary persecuted Protestants. But the Catholics of her time themselves admitted her great tolerance and leniency in the beginning of her reign. Bishops who had come to their sees in succession to the martyrs of Mary's time, and who refused to tread under Elizabeth the middle way-even those who declined to take part in her coronation on the ground of her illegitimacy-were only deprived of their bishoprics. None were condemned to death, and those who by the law of the land were deserving of imprisonment, suffered only an honourable and most comfortable restraint in palaces of their own, of the new primate, or of other bishops.

But when Rome responded to Elizabeth's magnanimity by sending forth special missioners for the perversion of the English people to their discarded superstitions and for the dethronement and assassination of the English Queen, Elizabeth at last, and most reluctantly, set aside her policy of tolerating, even of favouring the Papists. She was a woman for all she was a statesman, and she had thought to win over the betrayers of the nation and the conspirators against the national Church, by blandishments and by depriving them of grievances. But she had not reckoned with Jesuit zeal, nor with Jesuit ferocity. The thunder of excommunication went out from Rome against Elizabeth. It was proclaimed a virtue for her people to rebel against her. The Pontiff himself told two young English Jesuits, that "as touching the taking away of that impious Jezebel" (Elizabeth), he not only would approve the act of her assassination, but would think the doer deserved canonizing.

Is Elizabeth to be blamed for tyranny, or Protestantism to be reckoned a “bloody " creed, because of punishments dealt out by England's Government to preachers of sedition commissioned by Rome to go, disguised, up and down free England, for the re-imposition of Italianate forms of Church worship and Italianate methods of Church government? On the contrary, even after the need aroseaccording to the universal political practices of the hourfor the condign and ruthless punishment of plotters against

State, Church, and Sovereign, Elizabeth herself, in many instances, delayed justice, and pleaded personally with the criminals to make the wordy compromises she thought as easy for them to speak as for herself to devise, and which were all she demanded of them for the saving of their lives.

Of all the glories of the reign of Elizabeth, the greatest was undoubtedly the establishment of the Church of England on a basis that was enduring, and after a model eminently acceptable to the British people. That it was so established, is due not only to the discernment and to the sagacity of the Queen, who ruled England with an authority and a vigour never surpassed by any sovereign of this country, but also to the character and to the disposition of the woman who was the Queen. With all her faults-and they were legion-and for all the mental abnormalities, fostered by her peculiar situation as maiden-ruler of a court in which art, learning, levity, passion and piety struggled for supremacy, Elizabeth was, by nature, so orderly, so conciliatory, and so humane that, without presumption, it may be claimed for her that she was, in her time, God's chosen minister for England, for the purging of the Church Catholic from superstitions of thought and from enormities of conduct that had crept in during mediaval times. In the divine economy that gives place in the Body Catholic for "differences of administrations" and "diversities of operations," the abilities and methods of Elizabeth were used for the edification of the Reformed Church of England. They were peculiarly adapted to their task, since Elizabeth builded without demolishing, reformed without deforming. For her, the Church Catholic was the "blessed company of all faithful people," working together in the spirit of Him who said, "He that is not against us is on our part." And her keen sense of the importance to Church government of nationality was evidenced by a special manifesto to her people, that anticipated the Bull of Excommunication hurled against her. Elizabeth claimed that the Crown had authority "to direct all estates to live in faith and obedience of the Christian religion, to

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see that the laws of God be duly observed, that offenders be duly punished, and consequently to provide that the Church be governed and taught by archbishops, bishops, and ministers, according to the ancient ecclesiastical policy of the realm, when we do assist with our sovereign power. Yet to answer malicious untruths," the Queen added, "we have no meaning to allow that our subjects be molested either by examination or inquisition in any matter of faith, so long as they profess the Christian faith, not gainsaying the authority of Holy Scripture and of the articles of our faith contained in the Creeds, Apostolic and Catholic; or in any matter of ceremonies, so long as they shall, in their outward conversation, show themselves quiet and conformable, and not manifestly repugnant and obstinate to the laws of our realm, established for frequentation of Divine Service in the ordinary churches." And Elizabeth was willing, “if any potentate in Christendom challenging any universal and sole superiority over the whole Church of Christ, as it is pretended," should condemn the "office by justice annexed" to the English Crown, "because it is not derived from his authority," to submit the question to a free and general assembly. As "a humble servant and handmaid of Christ," Elizabeth would reform herself and her policy in any manner as truth should guide and lead her. But truth was to be received as Almighty God should "please to reveal it by His ordinary ways, and not to be in a disguised manner obtruded and forced by outward wars, or threatenings of bloodshed or suchlike curses, fulminations, or other worldly violences and practices: things unfit to be used for establishing or reforming of Christian religion, and to be rather contemned by sovereign princes having their seats and thrones established by Almighty God and not subject to the wills of foreign and strange usurped potentates."

CHAPTER III

PURITANS AND PRELATES

LUCY, COUNTESS OF BEDFORD; ANNE, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE, DORSET AND MONTGOMERY; ELIZABETH, COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON; LADY (MAGDALEN) HERBERT; MARY,

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE.

WHEN lying upon her funeral bier, Queen Elizabeth made her last progress by water from Hampton Court, and held her last audience in the "Drawing Chamber" of Whitehall, there watched beside her for several days and nights Anne, Countess of Warwick, and her sister Margaret, Countess of Cumberland. A few weeks later these two ladies, with Lady Cumberland's young daughter, the Lady Anne Clifford, went to Dingley, in Northamptonshire, to meet the Queen of James of Scotland, come to be of England too.

At this meeting the younger Anne subsequently recorded that the Queen "kissed us all and used us kindly." The Ladies Warwick and Cumberland (daughters of the Earl of Bedford) had long held offices about the person of the great Elizabeth. They appear to have continued in the favour of Anne (of Denmark), though at a subsequent stage of that Queen's progress to the southern capital, Lady Anne Clifford noted that Her Majesty "gave great dissatisfaction by slighting the stately old dames of Elizabeth's Court and bestowing all her attention on the young, sprightly women of her own age."

Chief of these young and sprightly ones was Lucy (Harrington), Countess of Bedford, sister-in-law of the Ladies Warwick and Cumberland. Lady Bedford had been the first of Elizabeth's ladies to greet Queen Anne. She met Her Majesty as she crossed the border, and was

made almost immediately Mistress of the Robes. All three Countesses were notable Churchwomen, though for piety and good works the fame of the Lady Anne Clifford, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery, subsequently eclipsed that of her aunts and her mother.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, patron of the Puritans, had arranged the marriage of his elder brother, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, with the eldest daughter of Lord Bedford at a time when that nobleman was in the North, giving battle to French and papal influences in Scotland. The wedding of Anne Russell to Lord Warwick was a pledge of the staunch Protestantism of two noble families signally favoured by Queen Elizabeth. Lady Warwick never wavered in her devotion to Anglican principles, and her piety was sufficient for that rigid critic, Anne, Lady Bacon, to commend her and her younger sister, the Lady Cumberland, to her son Anthony, as "both ladies that fear God and love His Word, indeed zealously, specially the younger sister." Lady Bacon added: "Yet upon advice and some experience, I would earnestly counsel you to be wary and circumspect, and not to be too open nor willing to prolong speech with the Countess of Warwick. She, after her father's fashion, will search and sound and lay up with diligence, marking things which seem not courtly, and she is near the Queen, and follows her father's example too much in that."

The Protestantism of Lady Warwick seems to have sprung from her inquisitive turn of mind and from her instinct of respect for regal authority, rather than from a pious simplicity of character. She was a woman of sound virtue and of regular life. Natural dignity taught her to value a due order in religious services, and to prefer an agreed form of public prayer. But she rebelled against severe prescriptions of faith. Indeed, she represented for her time the class of womankind existing in all days-particularly, perhaps, in these later ones-that delights to pry into the occult; to form her own opinions on religious questions, however ill-fitted by intellect and temperament