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354 YORK.
St. Bartholomew's Day, all combined? to determine
the government to propose enactments against the
Roman Catholics of still greater severity than those
which were already on the statute book.
The first thought of taking the life of the Queen of
Scots seems to have sprung out of the panic caused
by the Bartholomew massacre. Sandys, then Bishop
of London, afterwards Archbishop of York, writes on
the 5th September, 1572,10 Lord Burleigh, offering
certain suggestions as to what he deemed needful to
ensure the safety of the queen and the realm. The
first was "furthwith to cutte of the Scottish Quene's
heade : ipsa estfundi nostri calainifas." Others follow,
all directed against the Romanists :— " the chiefe
Papistes of this realme to be shutte uppe in the
Tower, and the popishe olde bushoppes returned
thither," and as the climax of the whole, the Protestants,
who, he says, are the only faithful servants
her majesty has, "are to be comforted, preferred, and
placed in autoritie, the Papistes to be displaced, "i
A new penal statute was passed in 1581. It was
severe in the extreme. It was made high treason to
withdraw any of her majesty's subjects from the
religion established by her authority to the religion of
Rome. It was even high treason if any one embraced
the latter of his own free will, without any external
persuasion or allurement.
Aiding such an act, or concealing
their knowledge of it for more than twenty days,
made persons liable to be punished for misprision
of treason. Any priest saying mass was to forfeit 200
' Ellis' "Original Letters" (2nd series), iii. p. 25.