Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/513

] prisons had been crowded, the scaffolds drenched with the blood of Papists. They had been harassed, persecuted, and insulted till they must have been more than mortal to have felt no desire for revenge. Therefore the country swarmed with spies and informers; and Walsingham, as a man of a detective genius, was kept hard at work to trace, by his secret emissaries, every concealed movement of sedition. Both at home and abroad he had a host of agents under a multitude of disguises. The society of Jesuits never had a more expert and fearless general, nor a more varied army of informers. They presented themselves in the shape of travelling noblemen, of physicians, of students in Popish seminaries. They swarmed in seaports lying betwixt England and the different chief Continental routes. Scarcely a Roman Catholic gentleman or nobleman into whose house they had not found their way. To those whom they suspected of a leaning towards the Queen of Scots they professed to be confidential agents of her or of her adherents, and presented forged letters by which they might entrap the unsuspicious into answers. Merry England was truly at this period a deplorable country.



One of the most atrocious examples of the manner in which country gentlemen of distinction and large estate were treated in that day is that of Arden, a gentleman of an ancient Warwickshire family. He had incurred the resentment of Leicester by refusing to sell a part of his estate that the haughty favourite had set his covetous eyes upon. The conduct of Leicester in the case drove this independent man to defend his right as an Englishman not only to hold his own, but assert his privileges and position. He set Leicester at defiance, relied upon the law for protection, and refused to flatter the favourite's pride, like most of his neighbours, by wearing his livery.

The daughter of Ardeu was married to a neighbouring Roman Catholic gentleman of the name of Somerville. This Somerville became a maniac; and—his insane mind probably inflamed by remembrance of the injuries of the professors of his faith, and by the wrongs of his father-in-law—in one of his paroxysms he rushed out with a drawn sword, attacked two men that he met, and swore that he would murder every Protestant, and the queen at their head.

In ordinary times the unfortunate man would have been secured in an asylum, and there would have been an end of the affair; but the circumstance was seized upon by Leicester to wreak his vengeance on the Warwickshire Naboth who refused to this modern Ahab his vineyard. Not only Somerville and his wife and sister, but his father-in-law and mother-in-law Arden, wore arrested and lodged in the Tower, with Hall, a priest.

They were charged with a conspiracy against the queen; but being put upon the rack, the only thing which could be extracted from them by torture was, that Hall said he had once heard Arden say that he wished Elizabeth was in heaven. On that ridiculous evidence—for Arden would confess nothing but that he was perfectly innocent of any conspiracy—Hall, Somerville, Arden, and his wife were convicted and committed to Newgate. There the poor insane Somerville was found strangled in his cell within two hours, Arden was executed as a traitor the next day, and Hall, on account of his confession, escaped death.