The impious heretics,--the Drakes and Raleighs, Grenvilles and Cavendishes, Hawkinses and Frobishers, who had dared to violate that hidden sanctuary of just half the globe, which the pope had bestowed on the defender of the true faith,--a shameful ruin, a terrible death awaited them, when their sacrilegious barks should sink beneath the thunder of Spanish cannon, blessed by the pope, and sanctified with holy water and prayer to the service of "God and his Mother." Yes, they would fall, and England with them.The proud islanders, who had dared to rebel against St.Peter, and to cast off the worship of "Mary," should bow their necks once more under the yoke of the Gospel.Their so-called queen, illegitimate, excommunicate, contumacious, the abettor of free-trade, the defender of the Netherlands, the pillar of false doctrine throughout Europe, should be sent in chains across the Alps, to sue for her life at the feet of the injured and long-suffering father of mankind, while his nominee took her place upon the throne which she had long since forfeited by her heresy.
"What nobler work? How could the Church of God be more gloriously propagated? How could higher merit be obtained by faithful Catholics? It must succeed.Spain was invincible in valor, inexhaustible in wealth.Heaven itself offered them an opportunity.They had nothing now to fear from the Turk, for they had concluded a truce with him; nothing from the French, for they were embroiled in civil war.The heavens themselves had called upon Spain to fulfil her heavenly mission, and restore to the Church's crown this brightest and richest of her lost jewels.The heavens themselves called to a new crusade.The saints, whose altars the English had rifled and profaned, called them to a new crusade.The Virgin Queen of Heaven, whose boundless stores of grace the English spurned, called them to a new crusade.Justly incensed at her own wrongs and indignities, that 'ever-gracious Virgin, refuge of sinners, and mother of fair love, and holy hope,'
adjured by their knightly honor all valiant cavaliers to do battle in her cause against the impious harlot who assumed her titles, received from her idolatrous flatterers the homage due to Mary alone, and even (for Father Parsons had asserted it, therefore it must be true) had caused her name to be substituted for that of Mary in the Litanies of the Church.Let all who wore within a manly heart, without a manly sword, look on the woes of 'Mary,'--her shame, her tears, her blushes, her heart pierced through with daily wounds, from heretic tongues, and choose between her and Elizabeth!"So said Parsons, Allen, and dozens more; and said more than this, too, and much which one had rather not repeat; and were somewhat surprised and mortified to find that their hearers, though they granted the premises, were too dull or carnal to arrive at the same conclusion.The English lay Romanists, almost to a man, had hearts sounder than their heads, and, howsoever illogically, could not help holding to the strange superstition that, being Englishmen, they were bound to fight for England.So the hapless Jesuits, who had been boasting for years past that the persecuted faithful throughout the island would rise as one man to fight under the blessed banner of the pope and Spain, found that the faithful, like Demas of old, forsook them and "went after this present world;"having no objection, of course, to the restoration of Popery: but preferring some more comfortable method than an invasion which would inevitably rob them of their ancestral lands and would seat needy and greedy Castilians in their old country houses, to treat their tenants as they had treated the Indians of Hispaniola, and them as they had treated the caciques.
But though the hearts of men in that ungodly age were too hard to melt at the supposed woes of the Mary who reigned above, and too dull to turn rebels and traitors for the sake of those thrones and principalities in supra-lunar spheres which might be in her gift:
yet there was a Mary who reigned (or ought to reign) below, whose woes (like her gifts) were somewhat more palpable to the carnal sense.A Mary who, having every comfort and luxury (including hounds and horses) found for her by the English Government, at an expense which would be now equal to some twenty thousand a year, could afford to employ the whole of her jointure as Queen Dowager of France (probably equal to fifty thousand a year more), in plotting the destruction of the said government, and the murder of its queen; a Mary who, if she prospered as she ought, might have dukedoms, and earldoms, fair lands and castles to bestow on her faithful servants; a Mary, finally, who contrived by means of an angel face, a serpent tongue, and a heart (as she said herself) as hard as a diamond, to make every weak man fall in love with her, and, what was worse, fancy more or less that she was in love with him.
Of her the Jesuits were not unmindful; and found it convenient, indeed, to forget awhile the sorrows of the Queen of Heaven in those of the Queen of Scots.Not that they cared much for those sorrows; but they were an excellent stock-in-trade.She was a Romanist; she was "beautiful and unfortunate," a virtue which, like charity, hides the multitude of sins; and therefore she was a convenient card to play in the great game of Rome against the Queen and people of England; and played the poor card was, till it got torn up by over-using.Into her merits or demerits I do not enter deeply here.Let her rest in peace.
To all which the people of England made a most practical and terrible answer.From the highest noble to the lowest peasant, arose one simultaneous plebiscitum: "We are tired of these seventeen years of chicanery and terror.This woman must die: or the commonweal of England perish!" We all know which of the two alternatives was chosen.