Dr. Bagshaw's Book.

iii

the catholic Church. It was a pitiful thing,' cried one of the leaders in the fray, looking back upon his own battlefield, 'that men dedicated to God's service in so high a duty and holy a work' should be turned aside, 'and fall the one upon the other, seeking to buffet and break heads with the laughter of all their enemies and the intolerable grief of their friends and superiors. No one knew better than Father Parsons what this buffeting of heads had cost the cause for which he spent his life.

attention.

To the ecclesiastical historian the episode is well worthy of In the institution of the archpriest we have a novel experiment in church government, while the disturbances which arose out of it present some instructive examples on the one hand of the kind of discipline possessed by the clergy, and the procedure of the papal court on the other, at a time when a more than usual strain was laid upon their relations. The picture of prison life among the veterans of the pope's clerical army is unique. We learn something too of the manner of men who left the universities at home to join the papal seminaries abroad, what sort of training they there received for their new vocation, and how they lived and acted as confessors for their faith and in expectation of martyrdom. Much has been written of the religious enthusiasm of these men, their undoubted courage and heroism under the rack and on the scaffold. We have here the reverse of the medal, but no less a faithful portrait.

Well-nigh a score of contemporary tracts, of which some detailed account will be given later on, were written upon these affairs. Dr. Christopher Bagshaw, whose book is here reprinted, is not the most respectable or the most impartial of the writers. His is however by far the most full and circumstantial narrative of the so-called 'Wisbeach Stirs,' or the earlier stage of the quarrel in which he was one of the

chief actors; and his work possesses the further advantages of being written in English, and being in the form of a consecutive narrative, and not, as is the case with the majority of these books, an answer to a preceding work or an argumentative disquisition on points of controversy. Moreover, although Dr. Bagshaw was a bitter partisan, and his tone towards his adversaries and his de facto superior nothing less than insolent, his statements of fact are the statements not of himself alone, but of his party. The Wisbeach prisoners on his side and the appellant priests give one version of the details with scarcely a variation. The archpriest, the jesuits and their adherents, give, with almost equal unanimity, another. The main outlines stand out clearly enough. Whether this or that charge brought by the one set of priests against an individual member of the opposite party be true or not, it may be impossible now to decide, and is often unimportant. But in any case this fact is both undeniable and important that a number of grave priests, among whom were men at one time respected as bishops, doctors, confessors and martyrs, unite in denouncing the principles and policy of the jesuit missionaries as dangerous and criminal, while the responsible chiefs of the society are as outspoken and deliberate in exposing the vices which in their opinion had brought disgrace upon the secular clergy. From this point of view alone the literature is sufficiently instructive. The leaders of the one faction in writing down the character of their opponents often enough betray their own; and where a large part of the controversy turns upon questions of temper and conduct, the situation can only be fully appreciated when the ipsissima verba of the disputants are before us. No apology should therefore be needed for making a beginning of this study with the treatise of Dr. Bagshaw. The True Relation may be taken as a fair specimen of its class. It should be followed perhaps by the

The First Decade of Elizabeth's Reign.

V

Apologie of F. Parsons, which is a reply to some half-dozen works in Latin or English on the appellants' side, and by the answer to the Apologie by Dr. Humphrey Ely, professor of canon law at Pont-à-Mousson, whose Briefe Notes is the only contemporary tract which can strictly be said to proceed from an impartial and independent hand. But, meanwhile, in order that the story may be as complete as possible within the limits of a single volume, and that this book may serve in some sort as a general guide to the literature of the subject, a number of notes and documents, drawn chiefly from other scarce tracts, or from inedited papers of the time, have been added in illustration of the author's text, while in the present introduction an attempt is made to fill up some gaps in Bagshaw's narrative and to tell, what he was unable to tell, the end of the story.

I. The Seminaries and the Jesuit Mission.

When the jesuit fathers, Parsons and Campion, entered England in the summer of 1580, Elizabeth was completing the twenty-second year of her reign. The young men at the universities could remember nothing of the days of queen Mary and the mass. For the first half of those twenty-two years the history of the Roman catholic church in England is a blank. Never had a church so completely gone down before the first blow of opposition. Some nine thousand parish priests were content, with good or bad consciences, to read the book of Common Prayer, and to preserve their livings. Several of their former bishops were dead, others were in prison or on parole, or fugitives abroad. There was no attempt on the part of Rome to fill up vacant sees or to provide for ecclesiastical organization and government. Every ecclesiastical movement was left to private enterprise. A few scholars wrote controversial tracts in safety at Louvain. The laity at home were

left without pastors, guides or instruction. The nation, pestered with religious troubles and the fires of persecution for the past thirty years, now enjoyed a short period of rest and growth. Thanks to the apathy or helplessness of the papal hierarchy, the national church was scarcely conscious of the revolution it had gone through. Pius v. for a moment indeed seemed to rise to the occasion. He ventured so far as to send a couple of priests into England with a commission to proclaim that attendance at the Anglican service was a mortal sin, and with faculties to absolve from heresy. But he soon betook himself to political intrigues with Ridolfi and the queen of Scots, and to stirring up rebellion in the north of England, with promises of aid to the insurgent earls. Early in 1570 came the fatal bull of excommunication and deposition. By this cruel act the harassed consciences of the unfortunate catholics were tormented tenfold. They were told by the vicar of Christ that it was a duty to rebel and a sin to obey the queen. Dr. Sander assured the pope and the Christian world that the insurrection of 1569 had failed only because of the ignorance of catholics on the doctrine of the bull.1 Henceforth, he promised, they should be better instructed. It was the pope now and not Elizabeth who was the aggressor. His money and indulgences, his soldiers and missionaries were at the service of any foreign invader or rebel at home. The bull identified in the mind of Elizabeth the religion of perhaps half her subjects with secret treason. The seminarists became in effect recruiting sergeants for king Philip. If many of the old catholics brought up other traditions could be trusted to defy the papal curses, should it come to fighting, not so the converts. As to her own life, it was in constant danger from the assassin. It was the fault of Pius v. and his successors if the English government, in face of this imminent peril to the nation, refused to dis1 Sander, De Visibili Monarchia, p. 706.

in

The Seminaries, 1568-1580.

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tinguish between allegiance to the pope and disloyalty to the state. Yet, notwithstanding the indignation of parliament, and its savage additions to the coercive legislation against catholics, the executive was for the next ten years surprisingly patient and tolerant. Bishop Challoner ventures to claim only three victims of the penal code as martyrs for their religion before the year 1581.1

Meanwhile William Allen, whose many noble qualities marked him out as the leader among the catholic refugees, had almost single-handed founded the seminary at Douai in 1568; and in 1574 he was able to despatch four young priests into England. Before another six years had gone by he had sent over as many as a hundred. These men were as a rule undistinguished by birth, learning, or abilities. They excited even less attention in the country at large than might have been expected; and we know very little of their doings. One effect however of the foreign seminary was noteworthy. With its offers of board and education free to all comers, it served as a disturbing force upon the universities at home. Young men with catholic tendencies and ambitious of martyrdom, dis

1 The list of Elizabethan martyrs given in bishop Challoner's Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741-42), and generally accepted by Roman catholics, was approved in the ordinary process instituted by cardinal Manning in 1874, and by him forwarded to Rome in view of the further canonical steps to be there taken for their beatification. By an unusual procedure, the congregation of rites added to this traditional roll four martyrs, whom, with all others whose martyrdoms were painted on the walls of the English college in 1582 by Circignani, Leo XIII. beatified in December 1886. The four were Plumtree, the chaplain to the insurgent earls, who was hanged as a rebel in 1579; John Felton, already mentioned; Dr. Story, the civilian, one of the worst instigators of the Marian persecution, who stoutly refused allegiance to the queen; and Thomas Woodhouse, a priest, claimed by the jesuits, who also, on the strength of Pius' bull, refused to acknowledge the right of Elizabeth to the crown. Challoner excluded these men because, in his opinion, they had not suffered purely on religious accounts. Some earlier martyrologists, as Wilson in his English Martyrologe (1608) and Richard Smith, the bishop of Chalcedon, in his official catalogue, prepared by order from Rome (1628), had indeed admitted Felton, Story and Woodhouse, but rejected the rebel chaplain.