4. That those two used every possible effort to dissuade the conspirators from their design, and denounced on every occasion all violent attempts to redress the wrongs under which the Catholics suffered. The state of England at the beginning of the XVIIth century, when James of Scotland was called upon to ascend the throne of his mother’s murderer, was deplorable in the extreme. Less than half a century had sufficed to change entirely the whole face of the country socially and morally, and the once “merrie” people were divided into two hostile camps, one the army of plunder and persecution, the other the cowering, dissatisfied, and impoverished masses. Many were yet alive who recollected with sorrow the time when the cross gleamed on the spires of a thousand churches, when the solemn sacrifice was offered up on myriads of altars, when the poor and afflicted easily found food and shelter at the numerous convents and abbeys that dotted the land of S. Augustine, and the young and the aged, the weak woman and the strong man, together bowed their knees in reverence before the statues of the “blessed among women” and other saints. Now all was reformed away—changed not with the consent of the people nor by the argument or eloquence of the preacher, but by the brute force and cunning fraud of a corrupt sovereign, a dissolute and avaricious court, and, partially at least, by a venal and cowardly episcopate. The churches no longer resounded from morning till night with the solemn sacred chants, the monasteries were in ruins or the scenes of impious revelry, the festivals of the church were abolished, and the peasantry, formerly accustomed to look forward to them as days of rest from hard toil and occasions of innocent enjoyment, were sullen and discontented. Those who had shared in the ecclesiastical plunder spent their time in the metropolis in wild extravagance, while the gentry, most of whom still adhered secretly to the faith, remained at home, the prey of anxiety and the tax‐gatherer. The masses were fast degenerating into that state of stolid ignorance and unbelief from which all subsequent legislation has failed to raise them. The laws of Elizabeth aimed at the suppression of all outward manifestation of Catholicity and the ultimate protestantizing of the nation; those of James, at the utter extirpation of the Catholics themselves.