With so many alarming events recently connected with Popery, and while the question of the Reformation in Europe appeared unsettled, and Jesuits were intriguing, and catholic tendencies had reached such a height in the Church of England, it is no wonder that staunch Protestants at home, who made common cause with staunch Protestants abroad, had such an intense dread of their old enemy. It was then with the Puritans of England, as it has ever been, and still is, with the Protestants of France. The latter have never forgotten the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They have cherished, more than we have, the traditions of a suffering Church, a Church struggling to keep its ground against neighbours as powerful as they are antagonistic. Catholic tendencies do not appear amongst the descendants of the Huguenots; the line is distinct between the two Churches, and the trumpet of defiance, in the case of French Protestantism, gives no uncertain sound. A like relative position to papal Europe was maintained by the Puritans of 1641, with animosities even more intense, inasmuch as the tragedies remembered were more recent, and the danger apprehended seemed just at hand: and it explains how the outburst of a neighbouring rebellion on the part of the spiritual subjects of the Pope, struck terror in all Protestants throughout this kingdom, from the Orkneys to the Land's End. [Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._] The Protestant Church never flourished in Ireland. Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore, and Bramhall, then Bishop of Derry, laboured to produce reform. Bedell, seeing that the native Irish were little regarded by the Protestant clergy and were left almost entirely in the hands of the Popish priests, aimed at instructing them in the truths of Christianity; a wise method, which however did not meet the views of Strafford, whose policy was "to enforce religious unity by Church discipline, and to invigorate Church discipline with the secular arm."[268] Bramhall, in 1633, gave a deplorable account of the Irish Church to Archbishop Laud. It was hard to say whether the fabrics were more ruinous, or the people more irreverent. One parochial church, in Dublin, had been turned into a stable, a second into a dwelling, and a third into a tennis court, the vicar acting as keeper. The vaults of Christchurch, from one end to another, were used as tippling rooms, and were frequented for that purpose at the time of Divine service. The very altar had become a seat for maids and apprentices. The bishop also doubted the orthodoxy of his clergy. The inferior sort of ministers (he said) were below contempt in respect of poverty and ignorance, and the boundless heaping together of benefices by _commendams_ and _dispensations_ was but too apparent. Rarely ten pounds a year fell to the incumbent, and yet one prelate held three-and-twenty benefices.[269] Such a state of things, not described by an enemy but by a friend, speaks volumes. Bramhall, in