Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/424

 410 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 55. That ambiguous crime of treason, which graduates, according to its object and circumstances, through all moral degrees, from the most sublime virtue to the deepest wickedness, has rarely appeared less favourably than in this unlucky paper. If the Duke of Norfolk is to be credited with a sincere conversion to the Roman faith, that faith itself assumed in his person its most revolting and perfidious aspect. The penitent was not to reveal his creed because he was still trusted by those whose cause he was betraying ; and because, by retaining their confidence, he could serve the Catholic interests more effectually. If, as he afterwards protested, he remained at heart a Protestant, he was deceiving alike his new friends and his old. He was without the solitary ex- cuse which he might have pleaded in palliation of his treachery. He was bringing an army of strangers upon England, he was preparing to inflict upon his country- men the inevitable horrors of invasion and civil war, to gratify his own pride and paltry ambition. Doubtless, to his conscience, if conscience pricked him, he could say that there was much in the administration of which he disapproved : the excesses of the Reformation, the social changes, and the growth of a new order of men whom he may have hated as his father hated Cromwell, might have reasonably off ended his prejudices. Doubt- less, even while he called himself a Lutheran, he had no sympathy with the Protestantism of France, and Scotland, and the Low Countries, which Cecil's policy encouraged and protected ; yet, it was not to remedy such ills as these that Alva's legions should have been called in to