that perfidious court was repugnant to genuine protestant sentiments. But the queen's absolute want of foreign alliances, and the secret hostility both of France and Spain, impressed Cecil with that deep sense of the perils of the time which his private letters so strongly bespeak. A treaty was believed to have been concluded in 1567, to which the two last-mentioned powers, with the Emperor Maximilian and some other catholic princes, were parties, for the extirpation of the protestant religion.[209] No alliance that the court of Charles IX. could have formed with Elizabeth was likely to have diverted it from pursuing this object; and it may have been fortunate that her own insincerity saved her from being the dupe of those who practised it so well. Walsingham himself, sagacious as he was, fell into the snares of that den of treachery, giving credit to the young king's assurances almost on the very eve of St. Bartholomew.[210] _Statutes for the queen's security._--The bull of Pius V., far more injurious in its consequences to those it was designed to serve than to Elizabeth, forms a leading epoch in the history of our English catholics. It rested upon a principle never universally acknowledged, and regarded with much jealousy by temporal governments, yet maintained in all countries by many whose zeal and ability rendered them formidable--the right vested in the supreme pontiff to depose kings for heinous crimes against the church. One Felton affixed this bull to the gates of the Bishop of London's palace, and suffered death for the offence. So audacious a manifestation of disloyalty was imputed with little justice to the catholics at large, but might more reasonably lie at the door of those active instruments of Rome, the English refugee priests and jesuits dispersed over Flanders and lately established at Douay, who were continually passing into the kingdom, not only to keep alive the precarious faith of the laity, but, as was generally surmised, to excite them against their sovereign.[211] This produced the act of 13 Eliz. c. 2; which, after reciting these mischiefs, enacts that all persons publishing any bull from Rome, or absolving and reconciling any one to the Romish church, or being so reconciled, should incur the penalties of high treason; and such as brought into the realm any crosses, pictures, or superstitious things consecrated by the pope or under his authority, should be liable to a premunire. Those who should conceal or connive at the offenders were to be held guilty of misprision of treason. This statute exposed the catholic priesthood, and in great measure the laity, to the continual risk of martyrdom; for so many had fallen away from their faith through a pliant spirit of conformity with the times, that the regular discipline would exact their absolution and reconciliation before they could be reinstated in the church's communion. Another act of the same session, manifestly levelled against