The statesman, whether in his own person aggressively Protestant or not, was forced to consider this antagonism from a different point of view. The outbreak against Rome which had marked the sixteenth century had only partially a doctrinal significance. It meant also the desire of the laity to lower the authority of the clergy. Before the Reformation the clergy owed a great part of their power to the organisation which centred in Rome, and the only way to weaken that organisation, was to strengthen the national organisation which centred in the crown. Hence those notions of the Divine Right of Kings and of _Cujus regio ejus religio_, which, however theoretically indefensible, marked a stage of progress in the world's career. The question whether, in the days of Elizabeth, England should accept the authority of the Pope or the authority of the Queen, was political as much as religious, and it is no wonder that Roman Catholics when they burnt Protestants, they placed the religious aspect of the quarrel in the foreground; nor that Protestants when they hanged and disembowelled Roman Catholics, placed the political aspect in the foreground. As a matter of fact, these were but two sides of the shield. Protestants who returned to the Papal Church not merely signified the acceptance of certain doctrines which they had formerly renounced, but also accepted a different view of the relations between Church and State, and denied the sufficiency of the national Government to decide finally on all causes, ecclesiastical and civil, without appeal. If the religious teaching of the Reformed Church fell, a whole system of earthly government would fall with it. To the Elizabethan statesman therefore the missionary priests who flocked over from the continent constituted the gravest danger for the State as well as for the Church. He was not at the bottom of his heart a persecutor. Neither Elizabeth nor her chief advisers, though, even in the early part of the reign, inflicting sharp penalties for the denial of the royal supremacy, would willingly have put men to death because they held the doctrine of transubstantiation, or any other doctrine which had found favour with the Council of Trent; but after 1570 they could not forget that Pius V. had excommunicated the Queen, and had, as far as his words could reach, released her subjects from the bond of obedience. Hence those excuses that, in enforcing the Recusancy laws against the Catholic laity, and, in putting Catholic priests to death as traitors, Elizabeth and her ministers were actuated by purely political motives. It was not exactly the whole truth, but there was a good deal more of truth in it than Roman Catholic writers are inclined to admit.