By What Authority? by Robert Hugh Benson (large ebook reader txt) 📖

the old lady sat, musing; while the light and shadow of reminiscence moved across her face; and her lips quivered or her eyes wrinkled up with humour, at the thought of all those old folks with their faces and their movements and their ways of doing and speaking. Ah! well, please God, some day her dream would really come true; and they shall all be gathered again from France and England with their broken hearts mended and their tears wiped away, and Mr. Wickham himself shall minister to them and make them sermons, and Tom Downe too shall be there to minister to him--all in one of the many mansions of which the Saviour spoke.

And so she heard nothing of the talk of the others; though her sister looked at her tenderly once or twice; and Mary Corbet chattered and twitched her buckles in the sun, and Anthony sat embarrassed in the midst of Paradise; and she knew nothing of where she was nor of what was happening round her, until Mary Corbet said that it was time for the horses to be round, and that she must go and get ready and not keep Mr. James and Mr. Anthony waiting. Then, as she and Anthony went towards the house, the old lady looked up from the braying stag and found herself alone with her sister.

Mistress Margaret waited until the other two disappeared up the steps, and then spoke.

"I have told her all, sister," she said, "she can be trusted."

Lady Maxwell nodded gently.

"She has a good heart," went on the other, "and our Lord no doubt will find some work for her to do at Court."

There was silence again; broken by the gentle little sound of the silk being drawn through the stuff.

"You know best, Margaret," said Lady Maxwell.

Even as she spoke there was the sound of a door thrown violently open and old Sir Nicholas appeared on the top of the steps, hatless and plainly in a state of great agitation; beside him stood a courier, covered with the dust of the white roads, and his face crimson with hard riding. Sir Nicholas stood there as if dazed, and Lady Maxwell sprang up quickly to go to him. But a moment after there appeared behind him a little group, his son James, Miss Corbet and a servant or two; while Anthony hung back; and Mr. James came up quickly, and took his father by the arm; and together the little company came down the steps into the still and sunny garden.

"What is it?" cried Lady Maxwell, trying to keep her voice under control; while Mistress Margaret laid her work quietly down, and stood up too.

"Tell my lady," said Sir Nicholas to the courier, who stood a little apart.

"If you please, my lady," he said, as if repeating a lesson, "a Bull of the Holy Father has been found nailed to the door of the Bishop of London's palace, deposing Elizabeth and releasing all her subjects from their allegiance."

Lady Maxwell went to her husband and took him by the arm gently.

"What does it mean, sweetheart?" she asked.

"It means that Catholics must choose between their sovereign and their God."

"God have mercy," said a servant behind.


CHAPTER VI


MR. STEWART

Sir Nicholas' exclamatory sentence was no exaggeration. That terrible choice of which he spoke, with his old eyes shining with the desire to make it, did not indeed come so immediately as he anticipated; but it came none the less. From every point of view the Bull was unfortunate, though it may have been a necessity; for it marked the declaration of war between England and the Catholic Church. A gentle appeal had been tried before; Elizabeth, who, it must be remembered had been crowned during mass with Catholic ceremonial, and had received the Blessed Sacrament, had been entreated by the Pope as his "dear daughter in Christ" to return to the Fold; and now there seemed to him no possibility left but this ultimatum.

It is indeed difficult to see what else, from his point of view, he could have done. To continue to pretend that Elizabeth was his "dear daughter" would have discredited his fatherly authority in the eyes of the whole Christian world. He had patiently made an advance towards his wayward child; and she had repudiated and scorned him. Nothing was left but to recognise and treat her as an enemy of the Faith, an usurper of spiritual prerogatives, and an apostate spoiler of churches; to do this might certainly bring trouble upon others of his less distinguished but more obedient children, who were in her power; but to pretend that the suffering thus brought down upon Catholics was unnecessary, and that the Pope alone was responsible for their persecution, is to be blind to the fact that Elizabeth had already openly defied and repudiated his authority, and had begun to do her utmost to coax and compel his children to be disobedient to their father.

The shock of the Bull to Elizabeth was considerable; she had not expected this extreme measure; and it was commonly reported too that France and Spain were likely now to unite on a religious basis against England; and that at least one of these Powers had sanctioned the issue of the Bull. This of course helped greatly to complicate further the already complicated political position. Steps were taken immediately to strengthen England's position against Scotland with whom it was now, more than ever, to be feared that France would co-operate; and the Channel Fleet was reinforced under Lord Clinton, and placed with respect to France in what was almost a state of war, while it was already in an informal state of war with Spain. There was fierce confusion in the Privy Council. Elizabeth, who at once began to vacillate under the combined threats of La Mothe, the French ambassador, and the arguments of the friend of Catholics, Lord Arundel, was counter-threatened with ruin by Lord Keeper Bacon unless she would throw in her lot finally with the Protestants and continue her hostility and resistance to the Catholic Scotch party. But in spite of Bacon Elizabeth's heart failed her, and if it had not been for the rashness of Mary Stuart's friends, Lord Southampton and the Bishop of Ross, the Queen might have been induced to substitute conciliation for severity towards Mary and the Catholic party generally. Southampton was arrested, and again there followed the further encouragement of the Protestant camp by the rising fortunes of the Huguenots and the temporary reverses to French Catholicism; so the pendulum swung this way and that. Elizabeth's policy changed almost from day to day. She was tormented with temporal fears of a continental crusade against her, and by the spiritual terrors of the Pope's Bull; and her unfathomable fickleness was the despair of her servants.

Meanwhile in the religious world a furious paper war broke out; and volleys from both sides followed the solemn roar and crash of Regnans in Excelsis.

But while the war of words went on, and the theological assaults and charges were given and received, repulsed or avoided, something practical must, it was felt, be done immediately; and search was made high and low for other copies of the Bull. The lawyers in the previous year had fallen under suspicion of religious unsoundness; judges could not be trusted to convict Catholics accused of their religion; and counsel was unwilling to prosecute them; therefore the first inquisition was made in the Inns of Court; and almost immediately a copy of the Bull was found in the room of a student in Lincoln's Inn, who upon the rack in the Tower confessed that he had received it from one John Felton, a Catholic gentleman who lived upon his property in Southwark. Upon Felton's arrest (for he had not attempted to escape) he confessed immediately, without pressure, that he had affixed the Bull to the Bishop of London's gate; but although he was racked repeatedly he would not incriminate a single person besides himself; but at his trial would only assert with a joyous confidence that he was not alone; and that twenty-five peers, six hundred gentlemen, and thirty thousand commoners were ready to die in the Holy Father's quarrel. He behaved with astonishing gallantry throughout, and after his condemnation had been pronounced upon the fourth of August at the Guildhall, on the charge of high-treason, he sent a diamond ring from his own finger, of the value of L400, to the Queen to show that he bore her no personal ill-will. He had been always a steadfast Catholic; his wife had been maid of honour to Mary and a friend of Elizabeth's. On August the eighth he suffered the abominable punishment prescribed; he was drawn on a hurdle to the gate of the Bishop's palace in S. Paul's Churchyard, where he had affixed the Bull, hanged upon a new gallows, cut down before he was unconscious, disembowelled and quartered. His name has since been placed on the roll of the Blessed by the Apostolic See in whose quarrel he so cheerfully laid down his life.

News of these and such events continued of course to be eagerly sought after by the Papists all over the kingdom; and the Maxwells down at Great Keynes kept in as close touch with the heart of affairs as almost any private persons in the kingdom out of town. Sir Nicholas was one of those fiery natures to whom opposition or pressure is as oil to flame. He began at once to organise his forces and prepare for the struggle that was bound to come. He established first a kind of private post to London and to other Catholic houses round; for purposes however of defence rather than offence, so that if any steps were threatened, he and his friends might be aware of the danger in time. There was great sorrow at the news of John Felton's death; and mass was said for his soul almost immediately in the little oratory at Maxwell Court by one of the concealed priests who went chiefly between Hampshire and Sussex ministering to the Catholics of those districts. Mistress Margaret spent longer than ever at her prayers; Lady Maxwell had all she could do to keep her husband from some furious act of fanatical retaliation for John Felton's death--some useless provocation of the authorities; the children at the Dower House began to come to the Hall less often, not because they were less welcomed, but because there was a constraint in the air. All seemed preoccupied; conversations ceased abruptly on their entrance, and fits of abstraction would fall from time to time upon their kindly hosts. In the meanwhile, too, the preparations for James Maxwell's departure, which had already begun to show themselves, were now pushed forward rapidly; and one morning in the late summer, when Isabel came up to the Hall, she found that Lady Maxwell was confined to her room and could not be seen that day; she caught a glimpse of Sir Nicholas' face as he quickly crossed the entrance hall, that made her draw back from daring to intrude on such grief; and on inquiry found that Mr. James had ridden away that morning, and that the servants did not know when to expect him back, nor what was his destination.

In other ways also at this time did Sir Nicholas actively help on his party. Great Keynes was in a convenient position and circumstances for agents who came across from the Continent. It was sufficiently near London, yet not so near to the highroad or to London itself as to make disturbance probable; and its very quietness under the spiritual care of a moderate