66.  The year 1586 was probably one of the most critical years that England has passed through since she was first a nation.  Standing alone amongst the European States, with even the Netherlanders growing cold towards her on account of her ambiguous treatment of them, she had to fight out the battle of her independence against odds to all appearances irresistible.  With Sixtus plotting her overthrow at Rome, Philip at Madrid, Mendoza and the English traitors at Paris, and Mary of Scotland at Chartley, while a third of her people were malcontent, and James the Sixth was friend or enemy as it best suited his convenience, the outlook was anything but reassuring for the brave men who held the helm in those stormy times.  But although England owed her deliverance chiefly to the forethought and hardihood of her sons, it cannot be doubted that the sheer imbecility of her foes contributed not a little to that result.  To both these conditions she owed the fact that the great Armada, the embodiment of the foreign hatred and hostility, threatening to break upon her shores like a huge wave, vanished like its spray.  Medina Sidonia, with his querulous complaints and general ineffectuality,[1] was hardly a match for Drake and his sturdy companions; nor were the leaders of the Babington conspiracy, the representatives and would-be leaders of the corresponding internal convulsion, the infatuated worshippers of the fair devil of Scotland, the men to cope for a moment with the intellects of Walsingham and Burleigh.

[Footnote 1:  Froude, xii. p. 405.]

67.  The events which Harsnet investigated and wrote upon with politico-theological animus formed an eddy in the main current of the Babington conspiracy.  For some years before that plot had taken definite shape, seminary priests had been swarming into England from the continent, and were sedulously engaged in preaching rebellion in the rural districts, sheltered and protected by the more powerful of the disaffected nobles and gentry—­modern apostles, preparing the way before the future regenerator of England, Cardinal Allen, the would-be Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury.  Among these was one Weston, who, in his enthusiastic admiration for the martyr-traitor, Edmund Campion, had adopted the alias of Edmonds.  This Jesuit was gifted with the power of casting out devils, and he exercised it in order to prove the divine origin of the Holy Catholic faith, and, by implication, the duty of all persons religiously inclined, to rebel against a sovereign who was ruthlessly treading it into the dust.  The performances which Harsnet examined into took place chiefly in the house of Lord Vaux at Hackney, and of one Peckham at Denham, in the end of the year 1585 and the beginning of 1586.  The possessed persons were Anthony Tyrell, another Jesuit who rounded upon his friends in the time of their tribulation;[1] Marwood, Antony Babington’s private servant, who subsequently found it convenient to leave the country, and was never examined upon the subject; Trayford and Mainy, two young gentlemen, and Sara and Friswood Williams, and Anne Smith, maid-servants.  Richard Mainy, the most edifying subject of them all, was seventeen only when the possession seized him; he had only just returned to England from Rheims, and, when passing through Paris, had come under the influence of Charles Paget and Morgan; so his antecedents appeared somewhat open to suspicion.[2]