or to dispossess him of it after he had ascended it. Thus, the English Jesuits were left with the two bulls of Clement VIII., and the good wishes of Philip II., as their only weapons for carrying out their great enterprise of restoring their Church to its former supremacy in England. They did not despair, however. Thrown on their own resources, they considered the means by which they might give triumph to their cause.

The Order of Jesus is never more formidable than when it appears to be least so. It is when the Jesuits are stripped of all external means of doing harm that they devise the vastest schemes, and execute them with the most daring courage. Extremity but compels them to retreat yet deeper into the darkness, and arm themselves with those terrible powers wherein their great strength lies, and the full unsparing application of which they reserve for the conflicts of mightiest moment. The Jesuits in England now began to meditate a great blow. They had delivered an astounding stroke at sea but a few years before; they would signalise the present emergency by a nearly as astounding stroke on land. They would prepare an Armada in the heart of the kingdom, which would inflict on England a ruin sudden, strange, and terrible, like that which Philip's fleet would have inflicted had not the "winds become Lutheran," as Medina Sidonia said with an oath, and in their sectarian fury sent his ships to the bottom.

In September, 1603, it would seem that the first meeting of the leading spirits of the party was held to talk over the course the new king was pursuing, and the measures to be adopted. Catesby, a gentleman of an ancient family, began by recounting the grievances under which the Roman Catholics of England groaned. His words kindling the anger of Percy, a descendant of the House of Northumberland, he observed that nothing was left them but to kill the king. "That," said Catesby, "is to run a great risk, and accomplish little," and he proceeded to unfold to Percy a much grander design, which could be executed with greater safety, and would be followed by far greater consequences. "You have," he continued, "taken off the king; but his children remain, who will succeed to his throne. Suppose you destroy the whole royal family, there will still remain the nobility, the gentry, the Parliament. All these we must sweep away with one stroke; and when our enemies have sunk in a common ruin, then may we restore the Church of Rome in England." In short, he proposed to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder, when the king and the Estates of the Realm should be there assembled.

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with is too well known, and the details are too accessible in the ordinary histories, to require that we should here dwell upon them. The contemplated destruction was on so great a scale that some of the conspirators, when it was first explained to them, shrunk from the perpetration of a wickedness so awful. To satisfy the more scrupulous of the party they resolved to consult their spiritual advisers. "Is it lawful," they asked of Garnet, Tesmond, and Gerard, "to do this thing?" These Fathers assured them that they might go on with a good conscience and do the deed, seeing that those on whom the destruction would fall were heretics and excommunicated persons. "But," it was replied, "some Catholics will perish with the Protestants: is it lawful to destroy the righteous with the wicked?" It was answered, "Yes, for it is expedient that the few should die for the good of the many."

The point of conscience having been resolved, and the way made clear, the next step was an oath of secrecy, to inspire them with mutual confidence: the conspirators swore to one another by the Blessed Trinity and by the Sacrament not to disclose the matter, directly or indirectly, and never to desist from the execution of it, unless released by mutual consent. To add to the solemnity of the oath, they retired into an inner chamber, where they heard mass, and received the Sacrament from Gerard. They had sanctified themselves as the executioners of the vengeance of Heaven upon an apostate nation.

They set to work; they ran a mine under the Houses of Parliament; and now they learned by accident that with less ado they might compass their end. The vault under the House of Lords, commonly used as a coal-cellar, was to be let. They hired it, placed in it thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, and strewing plenteously over them billets, fagots, stones, and iron bars, threw open the doors that all might see how harmless were the materials with which the vault was stored. The plot had been brewing for a year and a half; it had been entrusted to some twenty persons, and not a whisper had been uttered by way of divulging the terrible secret.

execution, Father Garnet began to talk much of bulls and mandates from the Pope to charge all the priests and their flocks in England to carry themselves with profound peace and quiet. Garnet sent Fawkes to Rome with a letter to Clement, supplicating that "commandment might come from his Holiness, or else from Aquaviva, the General of the Jesuits, for staying of all commotions of the Catholics in England." So anxious were they not to hurt a Protestant, or disturb the peace of the kingdom, or shake his Majesty's throne. The sky is clearing, said the Protestants, deceived by

iniquity was not the affair of a few desperate men in England only, but that the authorities of the Popish world knew of it, sanctioned it, and lent it all the help they dared. Del Rio, in a treatise printed in 1600, puts a supposititious case in the confessional: "as if," says Dr. Kennet, "he had already looked into the mine and cellars, and had surveyed the barrels of powder in them, and had heard the whole confession of Fawkes and Catesby."1 The answer to the supposed case, which is that of the Gunpowder Plot, the names of the actors left out, forbade the divulging of such secrets, on the

these arts; the winter of Catholic discontent is past, and all the clouds that lowered upon the land in the days of Elizabeth are buried in the "deep sea" of mutual conciliation. They knew not that the men from whom those loud protestations of loyalty and brotherly concord came were all the while storing gunpowder in the vault underneath the House of Lords, laying the train, and counting the hours when they should fire it, and shake down the pillars of the State, and dissolve the whole frame of the realm. The way in which this hideous crime was prevented, and England saved-namely, by a letter addressed to Lord Monteagle by one of the conspirators, whose heart would seem to have failed him at the last moment, leading to a search below the House of Lords, followed by the discovery of the astounding plot-we need not relate.

There is evidence for believing that the projected

ground that the seal of the confessional must not be violated. This treatise, published at so short a distance from England as Louvain, and so near the time when the train was being laid, shows, as Bishop Burnet remarks, that the plot was then in their minds. In Sully's Memoirs

there is oftener than once a reference to a "sudden blow" which was intended in England about this time; and King James was warned by a letter from the court of Henry IV. to beware of the fate of Henry III.; and in the oration pronounced at Rome in praise of Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV., it was said that he (Henry IV.) was not only an enemy to the Catholic religion in his heart, but that he had obstructed the glorious enterprise of those who would have restored it in

1 Dr. Kennet, Sermon, Nov. 5, 1715.

England, and had caused them to be crowned with martyrdom. It is not easy to see to what this can refer if it be not to the Gunpowder Plot, and the execution of the conspirators by which it was followed. The proof of knowledge beforehand on the part of the Popish authorities seemed to be completed by the action of Pope Paul V., who appointed a jubilee for the year 1605-the year when the plot was to be executed-for the purpose of "praying for help in emergent necessities," and among the

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saw his portrait among the martyrs in the hall of the Jesuit College at Rome, and by his side an angel who shows him the open gates of heaven.3

That the Romanists should thus plot against the religion and liberties of England was only what might be expected, but James himself became a plotter towards the same end. Instead of being warned off from so dangerous neighbours, he began industriously to court alliances with the Popish Powers. In these proceedings he laid the foundation

reasons assigned by the Pontiff for fixing on the year 1605, was that it was to witness "the rooting out of all the impious errors of the heretics." Copely says that "he could never meet with any one Jesuit who blamed it."2 Two of the Jesuit conspirators who made their escape to Rome were rewarded; one being made penitentiary to the Pope, and the other a confessor in St. Peter's. Garnet, who was executed as a traitor, is styled by Bellarmin a martyr; and Misson tells us that he

"Impios hereticorum errores undique evellere." (Bennet, Memorial of the Reformation, p. 130.)

2 Copely, Reas. of Conversion, p. 23. Burnet, Sermon, 5th Nov., 1710.

of all the miseries which afterwards overtook his house and his kingdom. His first step was to send the Earl of Bristol to Spain, to negotiate a marriage with the Infanta for his son Prince Charles. He afterwards dispatched Buckingham with the prince himself on the same errand to the Spanish Courta proceeding that surprised everybody, and which no one but the "English Solomon" could have been capable of. It gave fresh life to Romanism in England, greatly emboldened the Popish recusants, and was the subject (1621) of a remonstrance of the

3 Misson, Travels in Italy, vol. ii., part 1, p. 173. Misson adds, in a marginal note, "Some travellers have told me lately that this picture has been taken away."

Commons to the king. The same man who had endeavoured to stamp out the infant constitutional liberties of Scotland began to plot the overthrow of the more ancient franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of England.

While the prince was in Spain all arts were employed to bring him within the pale of the Roman Church. An interchange of letters took place between him and the Pope, in which the Pontiff expresses his hope that "the Prince of the Apostles would be put in possession of his [the prince's] most noble island, and that he and his royal father might be styled the deliverers and restorers of the ancient paternal religion of Great Britain." The prince replies by expressing his ardent wishes "for an alliance with one that hath the same apprehension of the true religion with myself." A Papal dispensation was granted; the marriage was agreed upon; the terms of the treaty were that no laws enacted against Roman Catholics should ever after be put in execution, that no new laws should ever hereafter be made against them, and that the prince should endeavour to the utmost of his power to procure the ratification by Parliament of these articles; and that, further, the Parliament "should approve and ratify all and singular articles in favour of Roman Catholics capitulated by the most renowned kings." The marriage came to nothing; nevertheless, the consequences of the treaty were most disastrous to both the king and England. It filled the land,

with Popish priests and Jesuits; it brought over the titular Bishop of Chalcedon to exercise epis copal jurisdiction; it lost King James the love of his subjects; it exposed him to the contempt of his enemies; and in addition it cost him the loss of his honour and the sacrifice of Sir Walter Raleigh. Extending beyond the bounds of England, the evil effects of this treaty were felt in foreign countries. For the sake of his alliance with the House of Austria, James sacrificed the interests of his sonin-law: he lost the Palatinate, and became the immediate cause, as we have seen in a previous part of this history, of the overthrow of Protestantism in Bohemia.

THE first part of the mighty task which awaited Protestantism in the sixteenth century was to

James VI. did not grow wiser as he advanced in years. Troubles continued to embitter his life, evils to encompass his throne, contempt to wait upon his person, and calamity and distraction to darken his realm. These manifold miseries grew out of his rooted aversion to the religion of his native land, and an incurable leaning towards Romanism which led him to truckle to the Popish Powers, whose tool and dupe he became, and to cherish a reverence for the Church of Rome, which courted him only that she might rob him of his kingdom. And the same man who made himself so small and contemptible to all the world abroad was, by his invasion of the laws, his love of arbitrary power, and his unconstitutional acts, the tyrant of his Parliament and the oppressor of his people at home.

1 The King of Scotland's Negotiations at Rome for Assistance against the Commonwealth of England. Published to satisfy as many as are not willing to be deceived. By Authority. Lond., printed by William Dugard, 1650. In this pamphlet the letters are given in full in French and English. They are also published in Rushworth's Collections.

breathe life into the nations. It found Christendom a vast sepulchre in which its several peoples were laid out in the sleep of death, and it said to them, "Live." Arms, arts, political constitutions, cannot quicken the ashes of nations, and call them from their tomb: the mighty voice of the Scriptures alone can do this. Conscience is the life, and the Bible awoke the conscience.

The second part of the great task of Protes

tantism was to make the nations free. It first gave them life, it next gave them freedom. We have seen this order attempted to be reversed in some modern instances, but the result has shown how impossible it is to give liberty to the dead. The amplest measure of political freedom cannot profit nations when the conscience continues to slumber. It is like clothing a dead knight in the armour of a living warrior. He reposes proudly in helmet and coat of mail, but the pulse throbs not in the limbs which these cover. Of all the nations of Christendom there was not one in so torpid a state as Scotland. When the sixteenth century dawned, it was twice dead: it was dead in a dominant Romanism, and it was dead in an equally dominant feudalism; and for this reason perhaps it was selected as the best example in the entire circle of the European nations to exhibit the power of the vitalising principle. The slow, silent, and deep permeation of the nation by the Bible dissolved the fetters of this double slavery, and conscience was emancipated. An emancipated conscience, by the first law of nature-self-preservation—immediately set to work to trace the boundary lines around that domain in which she felt that she must be sole and exclusive mistress. Thus arose the spiritual jurisdiction-in other words, the Church. Scotland had thus come into possession of one of her liberties, the religious. A citadel of freedom had been reared in the heart of the nation, and from that inner fortress religious liberty went forth to conquer the surrounding territory for its yoke-fellow, civil liberty; and that kingdom which had so lately been the most enslaved of all the European States was now the freest in Christendom.

Thus in Scotland the Church is older than the modern State. It was the Church that called the modern, that is, the free State, into existence. It watched over it in its cradle; it fought for it in its youth; and it crowned its manhood with a perfect liberty. It was not the State in Scotland that gave freedom to the Church: it was the Church that gave freedom to the State. There is no other philosophy of liberty than this; and nations that have yet their liberty to establish might find it useful to study this model.

The demise of Elizabeth called James away before he had completed his scheme of rearing the fabric of arbitrary power on the ruins of the one independent and liberal institution which Scotland possessed. But he prosecuted on the throne of England the grand object of his ambition. We cannot go into a detail of the chicaneries by which he overreached some, the threats with which he

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terrified others, and the violence with which he assailed those whom his craft could not deceive, nor his power bend. Melville was summoned to London, thrown into the Tower, and when, after an imprisonment of four years, he was liberated, it was not to return to his native land, but to retire to France, where he ended his days. The faithful ministers were silenced, imprisoned, or banished. Those who lent themselves to the measures of the court shrunk from no perfidy to deceive the people, in order to secure the honours which they so eagerly coveted. Gladstanes and others pursued the downward road, renewing the while their subscription to the National Covenant, "promising and swearing by the great name of the Lord our God that we shall continue in the obedience of the doctrine and discipline of this Kirk, and shall defend the same according to our vocation and power all the days of our lives, under the pains contained in the law, and danger both of body and soul in the day of God's fearful judgment." At length, in a packed assembly which met in Glasgow in 1610, James succeeded in carrying his measure-prelacy was set up. The bishops acted as perpetual moderators, and had dioceses assigned them, within which they performed the ordinary functions of bishops. Alongside of them the Presbyterian courts continued to meet: not indeed the General Assembly-this court was suspended-but Kirk sessions, presbyteries, and synods were held, and transacted the business of the Church in something like the old fashion. This was a state of matters pleasing to neither party, and least of all to the court, and accordingly the tribunal of High Commission was set up to give more power to the king's bishops; but it failed to procure for the men in whose interests it existed more obedience from the ministers, or more respect from the people; and the sentiment of the country was still too strong to permit it putting forth all those despotic and unconstitutional powers with which it was armed. Making a virtue of necessity, the new dignitaries, it must be confessed, wore their honours with commendable humility; and this state of matters, which conjoined in the same Church lawn robes and Geneva cloaks, mitred apostles and plain presbyters, continued until 1618, when yet another stage of this affair was reached.

Seated on the throne of England, the courtly divines and the famed statesmen of the southern kingdom bowing before him, and offering continual incense to his "wisdom," his "scholarship," and his "theological erudition," though inwardly they must have felt no little disgust at that curious mixture of pertness, pedantry, and profanity that