Many seminary priests and others were annually executed in England under these laws, throughout the Queen’s reign, but nominally at least they were hanged not as Papists, but as traitors; not because they taught transubstantiation, ecclesiastical celibacy, auricular confession, or even Papal supremacy, but because they taught treason and murder—­because they preached the necessity of killing the Queen.  It was not so easy, however, to defend or even comprehend the banishment and imprisonment of those who without conspiring against the Queen’s life or throne, desired to see the Church of England reformed according to the Church of Geneva.  Yet there is no doubt that many sectaries experienced much inhuman treatment for such delinquency, both in the early and the later years of Elizabeth’s reign.

There was another consideration, which had its due weight in this balance, and that was the respective succession to the throne in the two kingdoms of France and England.  Mary Stuart, the Catholic, the niece of the Guises, emblem and exponent of all that was most Roman in Europe, the sworn friend of Philip, the mortal foe to all heresy, was the legitimate successor to Elizabeth.  Although that sovereign had ever refused to recognize that claim; holding that to confirm Mary in the succession was to “lay her own winding sheet before her eyes, yea, to make her, own grave, while she liveth and looketh on;” and although the unfortunate claimant of two thrones was a prisoner in her enemy’s hands, yet, so long as she lived, there was little security for Protestantism, even in Elizabeth’s lifetime, and less still in case of her sudden death.  On the other hand, not only were the various politico-religious forces of France kept in equilibrium by their action upon each other—­so that it was reasonable to believe that the House of Valois, however Catholic itself, would be always compelled by the fast-expanding strength of French Calvinism, to observe faithfully a compact to tolerate the Netherland churches—­but, upon the death of Henry III. the crown would be legitimately placed upon the head of the great champion and chief of the Huguenots, Henry of Navarre.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that the Prince of Orange, a Calvinist himself, should expect more sympathy with the Netherland reformers in France than in England.  A large proportion of the population of that kingdom, including an influential part of the nobility, was of the Huguenot persuasion, and the religious peace, established by royal edict, had endured so long, that the reformers of France and the Netherlands had begun to believe in the royal clemency, and to confide in the royal word.  Orange did not live to see the actual formation of the Holy League, and could only guess at its secrets.