“Confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes, done in his days of nature,
Are burnt and purged away.”

These lines, we suspect, would have raised a tremendous storm In the theatre at any time during the reign of Charles the Second.  They were clearly not written by a zealous Protestant, or for zealous Protestants.  Yet the author of King John and Henry the Eighth was surely no friend to papal supremacy.

There is, we think, only one solution of the phaenomena which we find in the history and in the drama of that age.  The religion of the English was a mixed religion, like that of the Samaritan settlers, described in the second book of Kings, who “feared the Lord, and served their graven images”; like that of the Judaizing Christians who blended the ceremonies and doctrines of the synagogue with those of the church; like that of the Mexican Indians, who, during many generations after the subjugation of their race, continued to unite with the rites learned from their conquerors the worship of the grotesque idols which had been adored by Montezuma and Guatemozin.

These feelings were not confined to the populace.  Elizabeth herself was by no means exempt from them.  A crucifix, with wax-lights burning round it, stood in her private chapel.  She always spoke with disgust and anger of the marriage of priests.  “I was in horror,” says Archbishop Parker, “to hear such words to come from her mild nature and Christian learned conscience, as she spake concerning God’s holy ordinance and institution of matrimony.”  Burleigh prevailed on her to connive at the marriages of churchmen.  But she would only connive; and the children sprung from such marriages were illegitimate till the accession of James the First.

That which is, as we have said, the great stain on the character of Burleigh is also the great stain on the character of Elizabeth.  Being herself an Adiaphorist, having no scruple about conforming to the Romish Church when conformity was necessary to her own safety, retaining to the last moment of her life a fondness for much of the doctrine and much of the ceremonial of that church, yet she subjected that church to a persecution even more odious than the persecution with which her sister had harassed the Protestants.  We say more odious.  For Mary had at least the plea of fanaticism.  She did nothing for her religion which she was not prepared to suffer for it.  She had held it firmly under persecution.  She fully believed it to be essential to salvation.  If she burned the bodies of her subjects, it was in order to rescue their souls.  Elizabeth had no such pretext.  In opinion, she was little more than half a Protestant.  She had professed, when it suited her, to be wholly a Catholic.  There is an excuse, a wretched excuse, for the massacres of Piedmont and the Autos da fe of Spain.  But what can be said in defence of a ruler who is at once indifferent and intolerant?