Queen Elizabeth was a great monarch, and she was favoured with statesmen of extraordinary abilities; but, as Dr. Warner remarks, “the severity with which she treated her Protestant subjects by her High Commission Court, was against law, against liberty, and against the rights of human nature. She understood nothing of the rights of conscience in matters of religion; and, like the absurd king, her father, she would have no opinion in religion, acknowledged at least, but her own. She differed from her sister; and as she had much greater abilities for governing, so she applied herself more to promote the strength and glory of her dominion, than Mary did; but she had as much of the bigot and tyrant in her as her sister.” Dr. Bancroft was translated from London to Canterbury, on the death of Whitgift, in 1604; and his severities were sanctioned by the new sovereign, James I., who became a cruel bigot. Under their government the nonconformists suffered grievously. The inquisitors prosecuted their shocking employment, and two men were executed at the stake on the charge of heresy. One of these, Bartholomew Legate, of Essex, was condemned as a heretic, and publicly burnt in Smithfield, March 18, 1612; the other was Edward Wightman, of Burton-upon-Trent; he was condemned by Dr. Neile, bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and burnt as a heretic in Lichfield, April 11, 1612. They were said to be Arians and Baptists, and charged with many absurd opinions; but it is admitted that they were exemplary in their morals. They refused to recant, even at the stake; and popular sympathy being called forth in favour of these victims of the prelates, they were the last that publicly suffered death for their religious opinions in England. There were others in prison under sentence, but they were continued to linger out a miserable existence in Newgate. Dr. Abbot succeeded Bancroft, in 1611, as archbishop of Canterbury; but, being unfitted for political intrigue, he was suspended in 1620, and Laud, bishop of London, exercised almost unlimited authority in ecclesiastical affairs. His bigotry would have qualified him for inquisitor-general in Rome or Spain, and his evil counsels involved both England and Scotland in most grievous troubles, until his intolerance became the chief cause of his own execution, and that of his misguided master, Charles I., to the astonishment of all Europe.