Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/72

 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 63. had no such discretion. It was essential that the mis- sion should bear the character of a purely religious crusade, that those who became martyrs should appear as martyrs for their faith, without note or taint of treason on them. To make converts would be entirely sufficient for the purposes of the intended insurrection. Enthusiastic Catholics (and converts were always en- thusiastic) could be relied on with confidence when the army of liberation should appear. Campian therefore was directed to keep strictly to the work of conversion, not to mix himself with politics, to avoid all mention of public matters in his letters to the General, and never to speak against the Queen except in the presence of per- sons of known and tried orthodoxy. Absolute adherence to such a programme was im- possible. The great difficulty of the English Catholics, which they felt more keenly the more their consciences were aroused, was the Bull of Deposition. They had been absolved from their allegiance. They were them- selves implicated in the censures of the Church if they continued to regard Elizabeth as their sovereign, and the alternative of disloyalty or infidelity had been Sanders had landed openly at Smer- wick, with a commission as Legate, in July, 1579, nine months before Parsons and Campian left Rome. He had published circulars to the Irish chiefs immediately on his arrival, announcing that his coming was to be followed by a Papal army. James Fitzmaurice, the Pope's general, had been killed. The pro- gress of the insurrection was being watched with the greatest eagerness in France and Spain, and yet we are to suppose that at Rome itself, the head-quarters of the enterprise, no- thing was generally known about it. Mr Simpson is too intelligent a person to defend seriously so prepos- terous an hypothesis.