These are the men who have founded the greatness of their Country, and base and ungenerous is the Englishman who, reaping the fruits of their valour, would withhold from them his tribute of grateful fame. Instead of that, they have been loaded with reproach and vituperation—called pirates! cutthroats! robbers!—whilst the atrocities of the Spaniards are entirely overlooked as if they were legitimate warfare, whereas our Volunteers with their cruizers were the only DEFENCE of their Country, and their acts, inadequate, but most justifiable RETALIATION. I have endeavoured to do them justice, I have summoned them from the dead to speak their own sentiments, and plead their own cause. I have essayed also, as a most important task, to remove a vulgar prejudice, very general on the minds of both parties, and to do justice to the Catholic Nobility of England, who framed, and have in every age upheld her liberties and CONSTITUTION against encroaching Popes and tyrannical kings. It is a common, almost universal, political error that the age of Mary and Elizabeth was a mere struggle between Protestants and Roman Catholics for ascendancy. Gardiner, the uncompromising persecutor of the Protestants, who desired to set up the Inquisition, and to extirpate heresy with fire and sword, was “FIERCELY JEALOUS” of the independence of England, and when the Spanish Ambassador urged the marriage of Mary with Philip, he told him that Nobles and people were against the Pope, and against foreign interference of all sorts, that Mary could not marry Philip without a dispensation from the Pope, which must be kept secret. The COUNTRY would not TOLERATE it.—(_Froude_, vi, 119.) Queen Mary herself told Commendone, the Pope’s messenger, that for the present she was in the power of the People, of whom the majority mortally detested the Holy See, and that the Lords of the Council were in possession of vast estates which had been alienated from the Church, and they feared their titles might be called in question.—(_Froude_ vi, 89. Citing letter of Pope Julius III, to Pole). Yet certainly there was not one Protestant on her Council. Paget, and he was not a Protestant, was the only man who favoured the Spanish match. But he was opposed to persecution, and would not permit the Queen to alter the succession. He told Gardiner that if she should send Elizabeth to the Tower her own life would not be safe for a single day.—(_Froude_ vi., 120.)