Chapter III · (continued 2)

It is not to be imagined that an entire unanimity prevailed in the councils of this reign as to the best mode of dealing with the adherents of Rome. Those temporary connivances or remissions of punishment, which, though to our present view they hardly lighten the shadows of this persecution, excited loud complaints from bigoted men, were owing to the queen's personal humour, or the influence of some advisers more liberal than the rest. Elizabeth herself seems always to have inclined rather to indulgence than extreme severity. Sir Christopher Hatton, for some years her chief favourite, incurred odium for his lenity towards papists, and was, in their own opinion, secretly inclined to them.[264] Whitgift found enough to do with an opposite party. And that too noble and high-minded spirit, so ill fitted for a servile and dissembling court, the Earl of Essex, was the consistent friend of religious liberty, whether the catholic or the puritan were to enjoy it. But those counsellors, on the other hand, who favoured the more precise reformers, and looked coldly on the established church, never failed to demonstrate their protestantism by excessive harshness towards the old religion's adherents. That bold bad man, whose favour is the great reproach of Elizabeth's reign, the Earl of Leicester, and the sagacious, disinterested, inexorable Walsingham, were deemed the chief advisers of sanguinary punishments. But, after their deaths, the catholics were mortified to discover that Lord Burleigh, from whom they had hoped for more moderation, persisted in the same severities; contrary, I think, to the principles he had himself laid down in the paper from which I have above made some extracts.[265]

The restraints and penalties, by which civil governments have at various times thought it expedient to limit the religious liberties of their subjects, may be arranged in something like the following scale. The first and slightest degree is the requisition of a test of conformity to the established religion, as the condition of exercising offices of civil trust. The next step is to restrain the free promulgation of opinions, especially through the press. All prohibitions of the open exercise of religious worship appear to form a third, and more severe, class of restrictive laws. They become yet more rigorous, when they afford no indulgence to the most private and secret acts of devotion or expressions of opinion. Finally, the last stage of persecution is to enforce by legal penalties a conformity to the established church, or an abjuration of heterodox tenets.

The first degree in this classification, or the exclusion of dissidents from trust and power, though it be always incumbent on those who maintain it to prove its necessity, may, under certain rare circumstances, be conducive to the political well-being of a state; and can then only be reckoned an encroachment on the principles of toleration, when it ceases to produce a public benefit sufficient to compensate for the privation it occasions to its objects. Such was the English Test Act during the interval between 1672 and 1688. But, in my judgment, the instances which the history of mankind affords, where even these restrictions have been really consonant to the soundest policy, are by no means numerous. Cases may also be imagined, where the free discussion of controverted doctrines might for a time at least be subjected to some limitation for the sake of public tranquillity. I can scarcely conceive the necessity of restraining an open exercise of religious rites in any case, except that of glaring immorality. In no possible case can it be justifiable for the temporal power to intermeddle with the private devotions or doctrines of any man. But least of all, can it carry its inquisition into the heart's recesses, and bend the reluctant conscience to an insincere profession of truth, or extort from it an acknowledgment of error, for the purpose of inflicting punishment. The statutes of Elizabeth's reign comprehend every one of these progressive degrees of restraint and persecution. And it is much to be regretted that any writers worthy of respect should, either through undue prejudice against an adverse religion, or through timid acquiescence in whatever has been enacted, have offered for this odious code the false pretext of political necessity. That necessity, I am persuaded, can never be made out: the statutes were, in many instances, absolutely unjust; in others, not demanded by circumstances; in almost all, prompted by religious bigotry, by excessive apprehension, or by the arbitrary spirit with which our government was administered under Elizabeth.