men’s humours, to disturb religion and commonwealth, and mingle divine and human things; which were a thing in deed evil, in example worst of all; to our own subjects hurtful, and to themselves—­to whom it is granted, neither greatly commodious, nor yet at all safe.”—­[Camden] The words were addressed, it is true, to Papists, but there is very little doubt that Anabaptists or any other heretics would have received a similar reply, had they, too, ventured to demand the right of public worship.  It may even be said that the Romanists in the earlier days of Elizabeth’s reign fared better than the Calvinists.  The Queen neither banished nor imprisoned the Catholics.  She did not enter their houses to disturb their private religious ceremonies, or to inquire into their consciences.  This was milder treatment than the burning alive, burying alive, hanging, and drowning, which had been dealt out to the English and the Netherland heretics by Philip and by Mary, but it was not the spirit which William the Silent had been wont to manifest in his measures towards Anabaptists and Papists alike.  Moreover, the Prince could hardly forget that of the nine thousand four hundred Catholic ecclesiastics who held benefices at the death of Queen Mary, all had renounced the Pope on the accession of Queen Elizabeth, and acknowledged her as the head of the church, saving only one hundred and eighty-nine individuals.  In the hearts of the nine thousand two hundred and eleven others, it might be thought perhaps that some tenderness for the religion from which they had so suddenly been converted, might linger, while it could hardly be hoped that they would seek to inculcate in the minds of their flocks or of their sovereign any connivance with the doctrines of Geneva.

When, at a later period, the plotting of Catholics, suborned by the Pope and Philip, against the throne and person of the Queen, made more rigorous measures necessary; when it was thought indispensable to execute as traitors those Roman seedlings—­seminary priests and their disciples—­who went about preaching to the Queen’s subjects the duty of carrying out the bull by which the Bishop of Rome had deposed and excommunicated their sovereign, and that “it was a meritorious act to kill such princes as were excommunicate,” even then, the men who preached and practised treason and murder experienced no severer treatment than that which other “heretics” had met with at the Queen’s hands.  Jesuits and Popish priests were, by Act of Parliament, ordered to depart the realm within forty days.  Those who should afterwards return to the kingdom were to be held guilty of high treason.  Students in the foreign seminaries were commanded to return within six months and recant, or be held guilty of high treason.  Parents and guardians supplying money to such students abroad were to incur the penalty of a preamunire—­perpetual exile, namely, with loss of all their goods.