No portion of our annals has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation.  In this labyrinth of falsehood and sophistry, the guidance of Mr. Hallam is peculiarly valuable.  It is impossible not to admire the even-handed justice with which he deals out castigation to right and left on the rival persecutors.

It is vehemently maintained by some writers of the present day that Elizabeth persecuted neither Papists nor Puritans as such, and that the severe measures which she occasionally adopted were dictated, not by religious intolerance, but by political necessity.  Even the excellent account of those times which Mr. Hallam has given has not altogether imposed silence on the authors of this fallacy.  The title of the Queen, they say, was annulled by the Pope; her throne was given to another; her subjects were incited to rebellion; her life was menaced; every Catholic was bound in conscience to be a traitor; it was therefore against traitors, not against Catholics, that the penal laws were enacted.

In order that our readers may be fully competent to appreciate the merits of this defence, we will state, as concisely as possible, the substance of some of these laws.

As soon as Elizabeth ascended the throne, and before the least hostility to her government had been shown by the Catholic population, an act passed prohibiting the celebration of the rites of the Romish Church on pain of forfeiture for the first offence, of a year’s imprisonment for the second, and of perpetual imprisonment for the third.

A law was next made in 1562, enacting, that all who had ever graduated at the Universities or received holy orders, all lawyers, and all magistrates, should take the oath of supremacy when tendered to them, on pain of forfeiture and imprisonment during the royal pleasure.  After the lapse of three mouths, the oath might again be tendered to them; and if it were again refused, the recusant was guilty of high treason.  A prospective law, however severe, framed to exclude Catholics from the liberal professions, would have been mercy itself compared with this odious act.  It is a retrospective statute; it is a retrospective penal statute; it is a retrospective penal statute against a large class.  We will not positively affirm that a law of this description must always, and under all circumstances, be unjustifiable.  But the presumption against it is most violent; nor do we remember any crisis either in our own history, or in the history of any other country, which would have rendered such a provision necessary.  In the present case, what circumstances called for extraordinary rigour?  There might be disaffection among the Catholics.  The prohibition of their worship would naturally produce it.  But it is from their situation, not from their conduct, from the wrongs which they had suffered, not from those which they had committed, that the existence of discontent among them must be inferred.  There were libels, no doubt, and prophecies, and rumours and suspicions, strange grounds for a law inflicting capital penalties, ex post facto, on a large body of men.