During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and during the earlier part of the
reign of King James I., almost all those castellated castles, moated
halls, and gabled manor-houses which to-day, still standing more or less
perfect, “amidst their tall ancestral trees o’er all the pleasant land,”
go to constitute that “old England” which her sons and daughters (and
their brethren and kinsfolk beyond the seas) know and love so well; during
the reign of Elizabeth and during the earlier part of the reign of James
I., these now time-honoured, ivy-clad abodes and dwellings of English men
and English women, over whom the grave has long since closed, but who in
their day and generation were assuredly among the heroic and the supremely
excellent of the earth, were the sheltering, romantic roof-trees of those
who clung tenaciously to the ancient religious Faith of the English race.
This Faith was indeed that faith which had been taken and embraced by
their “rude forefathers” of long ages ago, in the simple hope and with the
pathetic trust that it might “do them good.”[A] And this their hope, they
believed and knew, had been not in vain, neither had been their trust
betrayed.
[Footnote A: See the beautiful apologue of the Saxon nobleman of Deira,
delivered in the presence of St. Edwin King of Northumbria; given in
Bede’s “_Ecclesiastical History_.”]
In the days of the second Henry Tudor——_fons et origo malorum_——the
fountain-head and well-spring of almost all of England’s many present-day
religious and social woes——the men and women of England and Wales knew
full well, whether they were of Cymric, Saxon, Scandinavian, or Norman
race (or a mixture of all four), that to that assemblage of ideas and
emotions, laws and rules, habits and customs, which had come to them from
men of foreign blood and alien name, dwelling on the banks of the far-off
“yellow Tiber” and under sunny, blue Italian skies——these men and women, I
repeat, knew full well that to their religious Faith they owed almost
everything that was best and truest and most enduring, either in
themselves or their kith and kin.[A]
[Footnote A: Yorkshire, being the greatest of English Shires, had among
the inhabitants of its hills and dales and “sounding shores,”
representatives of the various races which compose the English nation. In
the West Riding especially, those of the old Cymric or British stock were
to be found. (Indeed, I am told, even now shepherds often count their
sheep by the old British numerals.) This strong remnant of the old British
race in the West Riding probably accounts for the marvellous gift of song
wherewith this division of Yorkshiremen are endowed to this day, just as
are the Welsh. In none other portion of England was there such a wealth of
stately churches and beautiful monasteries as in Yorkshire, the ancient
Deira, whose melodious name once kept ringing in the ears of St. Gregory
the Great, of a truth, the best friend the English people ever had. But
Yorkshire realised that “before all temples” the One above “preferred the
upright heart and pure.” Therefore, canonized saints arose from among her
vigorous, keen-minded, yet poetically imaginative sons and daughters. York
became sacred to St. Paulinus and St. William; Ripon to St. Wilfrid, the
Apostle of Sussex; also to St. Willibrord, the Apostle of Holland;
Beverley was hallowed by the presence of St. John of Beverley; Whitby by
the Saxon princess St. Hilda, the friend of Caedmon, the father of English
poetry. The moors of Lastingham were blest by the presence of St. Chad and
St. Cedd; and Knaresbrough by St. Robert, in his leafy stone-cave hard-by
the winding Nidd.]
Now regard being had to the indisputable fact that for well-nigh a
thousand years England had been known abroad as “the Dowry of Mary and the
Island of Saints,” by reason of the signal manifestations she had
displayed in the way of cathedrals and churches, abbeys and priories,
convents and nunneries, hospitals and schools (which arose up and down the
length and breadth of the land to Northward and Southward, to East and
West, thereby, by the aid of art, adding even to England’s rare natural
beauty), it was never at all likely that the bulk of the English people
would, all on a sudden, cast off their cherished beliefs and hallowed
affections respecting the deepest central questions of human life.[14]
Moreover, it may be taken as a general rule, to be remembered and applied
by princes and statesmen, all the world over and for all time, that Man is
a creature “full of religious instincts:”——“too superstitious,” should it
be thought more accurate and desirable so to describe this undoubted habit
and bent of the human mind.
Thence it follows that it is the merest fatuous folly for princes and
statesmen if and when they have got themselves entangled in a false
position, from some external cause or causes having little or no relation
to the Invisible and the Eternal, to bid their subjects and denizens,
“right about turn,” at a moment’s notice: however “bright and blissful”
such mental evolutions may be deemed to be by those who have unwisely
taken it into their foolish head to issue the irrational command.[A]
[Footnote A: That able and strong-minded Englishman, Dr. Temple,
Archbishop of Canterbury, said (in 1901) in the House of Lords, during the
debates on that pathetically ridiculous document, the Sovereign’s
Declaration against Popery, when speaking on Lord Salisbury’s proposed
amended form, that England was resolved “to stand no interference with her
religion from the outside.” It is a good thing that the heathen Kings
Ethelbert and Edwin were _less abnormally patriotic_ 1300 years ago. For
the idea of “independence” has to be held subject to the “golden mean” of
“nothing too much.” A fetish must not be made of that idea, especially by
a people conscious of lofty imperial destiny. And “unity” must there be
between ideas that are controlling fundamentals——in other words, between
ideas intellectual, moral, and spiritual.]
Now, in the days of Queen Elizabeth[A] those whom religious loyalty
prompted to worship supremely “the God of their fathers” after a manner
that those eager for change counted “idolatry,” were marked by different
mental characteristics. This was so throughout England; but especially was
it so in those five northern counties which comprised what was then by
Catholics proudly styled “the faithful North.”
[Footnote A: The mother of Queen Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn, died reconciled
to the Church of Rome. Her daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, was brought
up in the tenets of that Church; but, like one type of the children of the
Renaissance, Elizabeth was unconsciously “a Tribal Deist.” Margaret Roper,
the daughter of Sir Thomas More, was equally “cultured,” but she accepted
the Catholic tradition in its letter and in its spirit. I may here state
that I have a great intellectual admiration for Queen Elizabeth, whose
virtues were her own, while her faults, to a large extent, were her
monstrous father’s and her Privy Counsellors’, _who told her not what she
ought to do but what she could do, which no really faithful adviser of a
Sovereign ever does_.]
Some of these English “leile and feile,” that is loyal and faithful,
servants of Rome were, on the subjective side, retained in their
allegiance to the Visible Head of Christendom by bonds formed by mere
natural piety and conservative feeling——dutiful affections of Nature which
are the promise and the pledge of much that is best in the Teutonic race.
Others were mainly ruled by an overmastering sense of that lofty humility
which foes call pride, but friends dignity.
Whilst a third class were persuaded, by intense intellectual, moral, and
spiritual conviction that——“in and by the power of divine grace”——come
what might, nothing should separate them from those hereditary beliefs
which were dearer to them far than not merely earthly goods, lands, and
personal liberty, but even than their very life.
This last-mentioned class, from and after the year 1580, “the year of the
Lord’s controversy with Sion,” as the old English Catholics regarded it,
who loved to recall that “good time” when Campion and Parsons “poured out
their soul in words,” especially Campion, who was remembered in the north
for three generations: this last-mentioned class, I say, were oftentimes,
though certainly not always, found to be greatly attached to the then new
Society of Jesus, which, in England, was in the glow and purity of its
first fervour.
This last-mentioned class——I mean the Jesuitically-affected class of
English Catholics——were also again sub-divided into three sub-divisions.
One sub-division was composed of Mystics; another of Politicians; and a
third of those who, realising a higher unity, were at once Mystics _and_
Politicians——or, in other phraseology, _they were Men of Thought and Men
of Action_.
Now, the Gunpowder conspirators belonged to the last-mentioned class, and
to the second division of that class. That is to say, they were mere
Politicians, speaking broadly and speaking generally.