Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/507

A.D. 1582.] where the queen even sent personal and most dictatorial messages stopping all religious discussion, now burst forth through the press. Pamphlets of a most inflammatory nature and abusive style issued in shoals; and one Burchet, a student of the Middle Temple, became so inflamed by zeal, that he murdered Hawkins, an officer, mistaking him for Hatton, the queen's new favourite. In prison he also killed his keeper under the delusion that he was Hatton; and though palpably insane, he was hanged for murder.

Edmund Spenser. From the Original Picture in the Collection of the Earl of Kinnoul.

Parker, who died in 1575, was succeeded by Grindall, whom Elizabeth soon discovered was too much of a Puritan himself to persecute them severely, and she suspended him, and harassed him to such a degree that he died in 1583. To him succeeded Whitgift, a man after Elizabeth's own heart, who framed a test of orthodoxy which he put to all clergymen or others whom he suspected, which consisted of these three notable dogmas—the queen's supremacy, the perfection of the Ordinal and Book of Common Prayer, and the complete accordance of the Thirty-nine Articles with the Scriptures. All those clergymen who refused to subscribe to this he expelled; and in defiance of clamour and intrigue in council or Convocation, he held on his way immovably. Nor did the queen long satisfy herself with mere expulsion. Thacker and Copping, two Brownists, were indicted for objecting to the Book of Common Prayer, which was treated as an attack on the Royal supremacy, and were put to death. The persecution of the Romanists was still more severe than that of the Puritans. Elizabeth, although she retained the crucifix and the lights in her private chapel, was glad to avail herself of the plea that the Roman Catholics were idolaters, because she hated and dreaded them as naturally partisans of the persecuted Queen of Scotland.

So early as 1563 the Emperor Ferdinand had remonstrated against the treatment of Roman Catholics in England. As the persecution under Elizabeth became more intolerable, many sought to find a more unmolested retreat on the Continent; but Elizabeth could not bear