Note 293 — Chapter IV
Reading edition
Burnet says, on the authority of the visitors' reports, that out of 9400 beneficed clergymen, not more than about 200 refused to conform. This caused for some years just apprehensions of the danger into which religion was brought by their retaining their affections to the old superstition; "so that," he proceeds, "if Queen Elizabeth had not lived so long as she did, till all that generation was dead, and a new set of men better educated and principled were grown up and put in their rooms; and if a prince of another religion had succeeded before that time, they had probably turned about again to the old superstition as nimbly as they had done before in Queen Mary's days." Vol. ii. p. 401. It would be easy to multiply testimonies out of Strype, to the papist inclinations of a great part of the clergy in the first part of this reign. They are said to have been sunk in superstition and looseness of living. Annals, i. 166.