The execrable duplicity of these men is by Protestant priests made the theme of unsparing invective, as if the burning of heretics and its justification by Scripture were crimes peculiar to Roman Catholics, when in point of fact both have been shamelessly committed by Christians rejoicing in the name of Protestants.  John Calvin burnt Servetus, and Robert Hall, as we have seen, applauded the act.  England, to say nothing of other countries, has had its auto da fe, as well since as before the Reformation.  Heretics were first made bonfires of in England during the reign of Henry the Fourth, who permitted the abomination in order to please certain bishops he was under obligation to for assisting him to depose Richard the Second and usurp his throne.  But that the practice of committing heretics to the flame prevailed in England long after Popery ceased to be the dominant religion is notorious.  If heretics were thus sacrificed by Henry the Fourth to please Popish Bishops, they were also sacrificed by Elizabeth with a view to the satisfaction of Protestant Bishops.  Cranmer literally compelled her brother, the amiable Edward, to send a half crazed woman named Joan Boacher to the stake.  Elizabeth herself caused two Dutch Anabaptists to be burnt in Smithfield, though it is but just to admit that, unlike her sullen sister, she preferred rather to hang than to burn heretics.  Lord Brougham has recently done mankind another valuable piece of service by painting the portrait of that Protestant princess in colours at once so lively and faithful that none, save the lovers of vulgar fanaticism and murderous hypocrisy, will gaze on it without horror. [81:1]

’Mary, honoured with the title of “bloody,” appears to me a far more estimable character than her ripping-up sister Elizabeth, who, when Mary, on her death-bed, asked her for a real avowal of her religion, “prayed God” that the earth might open and swallow her up if she was not a true Roman Catholic.’  She made the same declaration to the Duke of Ferria, the Spanish Ambassador, who was so deceived that he wrote to Philip, stating no change in religious matters would take place on her accession, and soon afterwards began ripping up the bellies of Catholics.  That was quite the fashionable punishment in this and the succeeding reign.  I have the account, with names, dates, and reference of no less than 101 more Catholics who were burnt, hung, ripped up, &c., by Elizabeth, and on to Charles the Second’s end, than there were Protestants in Mary’s, and all the reigns which preceded her, letting lying Fox count all he has got.  Elizabeth, too, was by law a bastard, and is to this day; and so soon did her intentions appear of changing the religion, that all the bishops but one refused to crown her; and when this was done, it was by the Catholic ritual.  However the Act-of-Parliament religion was set up again; the prayer book of Cranmer was set up again, after sundry alterations:  it was altered too, in Edward’s reign, yet when