They are admitted for a fortnight upon the written recommendation of a clergyman or an associate to whom they are known, subject to the approval of the council. If by no fault of their own they fail in obtaining work during that time, the council frequently permit them to remain longer. The spiritual welfare of the inmates is not forgotten nor uncared for. Two daily services are held in the chapel in accordance with the rules of the house. Should any person desire to be confirmed, the preparation is begun, in the hope that it will be carried on at a future day. In conclusion, let me ask your readers to make themselves personally acquainted with this charitable, and in some respects unique, work, by calling at the fine old house in Greek Street, Soho Square; they may be sure of a kindly welcome from the Clewer Sisters who manage the institution under a warden and council; its visitor being the Bishop of London, and its patron the Archbishop of Canterbury. Further information and reports of the charity can be obtained by writing to the secretaries, F. Graves, Esq., 4, John Street, Berkeley Square, W., and J. W. B. Riddell, Esq., 65, Belgrave Road, S.W., or to the Chaplain, Rev. J. J. Elkington, House of Charity, 1, Greek Street, Soho, W. ASSOCIATE. Church Folk Lore.-In many places, but chiefly in remote villages, there are found usages connected with the Church and its services differing from those ordinarily accepted as customary, and there were many more within the knowledge of people still living. Each taken separately may seem trifling, and even absurd, but we believe, that by collecting and comparing the surviving traditionary customs of different places, matter of much historical interest may be gathered, just as has been already done in the case of popular tales. There is no doubt that many still existing customs are of great antiquity, some probably older than Christianity itself. Others again, are relics of the Ecclesiastical struggles of the seventeenth century. They are, however, now being either swept away by the natural tendency of increased intercommunication to produce uniformity of practice, or mixed up with revivals which will soon make it impossible to distinguish the old from the new. If, therefore, the history latent in such traditions is to be made available, it must be done at once. We thought the work worth undertaking, and have already got together a quantity of material, which, when sifted and arranged, will, we are convinced, prove of wide interest. But as we wish to make our collection as complete as possible, we ask the clergy and all others who may know of the existence of out-of-the-way usages, whether connected directly or indirectly with the ordinary or occasional services of the church, either as regards clergy or people, or with its fabric, arrangement, or furniture, to be so good as to send us authenticated accounts of them. And we further ask that they will not refrain from sending, because they know that like usages exist in other places; for we need scarcely point out the value of a comparative view of the traditions surviving in different parts of the country. Although we have spoken only of churches, we believe that among the older congregations of Dissenters there are some traditions of the kind we want, and we shall be thankful for any descriptions of them also. Communications may be addressed to either of us as under, and they shall be properly acknowledged when used. Rev. J. Edward Vaux, M. A., Crondall, near Farnham, Surrey; J. T. Micklethwaite, F.S.A., 6, Delahay Street, Great George Street, Westminster, S. W. THE MONTHLY PACKET OF EVENING READINGS For Members of the English Church. APRIL, 1880. EASTER EVE. WE deck the Church to honour Him who riseth from the tomb, For every flower that addeth to the festal glory-dies. Torn from the sunshine and the dew, severed from parent stem, And so the Saints are waiting now in Paradise above, Till God shall bring them with Himself to meet all those they love. E. M. CAMEOS FROM ENGLISH HISTORY. CAMEO CLXIII. THE RIDOLFI PLOT. 1571-1572. EUROPEAN politics were arranging themselves into two great parties, dividing all those central portions where the Teuton and Kelt were mixed. Philip II. was the thorough-going chief of the one, Elizabeth the vacillating head of the other, and indeed owing her position rather to accident than to taste or conviction. The Emperor held aloof, and VOL. 29. PART 172. 22 was really tolerant and upright, and it was Spain, guided by Italy, that fought the battle, and with it went the captive Mary of Scotland, her partisans both in France and England, the main body of the Irish people, and the House of Guise with all their adherents in France. On the Reformed side-looking to Elizabeth as their natural head, and finally forcing her out of self-preservation into that position, in spite of all her short-comings-there were the main body of the English people, the king's party among the Scots, the German Protestants, the unfortunate Reformers of the Netherlands, and the Huguenots of France. Like the Emperor, Elizabeth and Charles IX. would have been glad to have kept on good terms with all their subjects, but Maximilian had the good fortune to have fallen upon a calm spot in the middle of the hurricane, while England was still rocked by the subsiding waves of the tempest, and the storm was still raging in France. Conciliation was the main idea with Charles IX. and his mother. Without heed to Elizabeth's state of excommunication, they continued to press upon her the Duke of Anjou as a suitor, though he openly made game of the notion of marrying a princess older than his mother. La Mothe Fénélon, the French Ambassador in England, had plenty of sugary speeches; but Sir Francis Walsingham, who had been sent to Paris, told Cecil a very different tale. Meanwhile, the Bull of Excommunication had given the Queen an impulse away from the Catholicism she had striven to maintain. Cecil, whom she had just created Baron Burghley had, in spite of his conformity in Mary's time, been always a strong Puritan; so was her favourite Leicester; and these influenced her policy, so that Archbishop Parker found himself almost deserted in his struggle to maintain what was ancient and catholic. Thomas Cartwright, formerly Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, had visited Geneva, made friends with Beza, and returned with all the old dislike to ancient usages revived in him, such as the cross in Baptism, the ring in marriage, surplices, Confirmation, and even episcopacy-with all, in short, that the English Church had not sacrificed to the Calvinists of Edward's time. The Puritans rallied round him, and in the Parliament of 1571, an attack was made on the Prayer-book, and seven bills were brought forward for further reforming the Church, by a member named Strickland, one of them intended to overthrow the Thirty-Nine Articles, which were far too Catholic for this party. Greatly angered, Elizabeth, in the Tudor fashion, ordered Strickland to absent himself from the House of Commons. His friends moved that he should be summoned to the bar of the House to account for his non-attendance; and on hearing it was by command of the Queen, the House declared that she had exceeded her privileges, since alone, she could neither make, nor break laws. Elizabeth yielded so far that Strickland appeared in his place the next day, but his seven bills were quashed, and all he obtained was that a commission should be appointed to hold council with the Lords spiritual on the reforms he requested. The foremost in this committee was Peter Wentworth, who placed his abstract of the measures desired in the hands of Archbishop Parker. The first clause, that the Primate saw, was that the Order for the Consecration of Bishops should be struck out of the Prayer-book. He courteously asked why, and Wentworth replied, 'Because the Bishops are so occupied with other matters that they cannot attend to the Word of God, to see whether the doctrines of the Church agree thereto.' 'Methinks you are mistaken, sir,' courteously said the Archbishop, 'these are matters on which men should defer to the Bishops.' 'No!' broke out Wentworth, rudely, we will pass nothing till we understand what it is, for that were to make you Popes. Make you Popes who list, we will make you none.' The next year Wentworth spoke in the House with equal politeness of the Queen, and as she did not bear such treatment as patiently as did the Archbishop, he had to spend some time in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms. All this was secretly supported by the Earl of Leicester, probably with the view of preventing the possibility of the Queen's marriage with a Roman Catholic prince. In another year 1573, Cartwright actually set up a conventicle at Wandsworth, appointing eleven elders for its government, and thus began the first Dissent in England, but with so much secrecy and caution that there were no proceedings against the society for some time. This Puritan parliament had been returned in the zeal excited by the excommunication of the Queen, and by her own desire, it enacted stringent penal laws against the Roman Catholics, such as might compel them to choose between the Pope and the Queen. Three bills were brought forward. The first made it treason to declare the Queen a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper, and punished with a year's imprisonment any who should declare any person-save a child of her own-to be her heir; and the bill made it treasonable to receive or use any bull or writing from Rome, and laid under the statute of præmunire all who should receive crosses, beads, or other objects of devotion' blessed by the Bishop of Rome. The third forced every one not only to Church, but to Communion in the Anglican form under penalty of forfeiture of goods. This bill struck at the Puritans as well as Roman Catholics, while the other was aimed at the partisans of Queen Mary. Indeed, whatever the persecution of Romanists in England afterwards became, it was at first wholly political; since between the Pope and Queen Mary, the presumption was that a Roman Catholic could not be a loyal subject to Elizabeth; though many, honest and inconsistent, still contrived so to remain. However, in the April of 1572, another of those plots was detected, which did so much to harden the Queen and the nation against both Mary and the Romanists. One Charles Bailly, a Fleming, in the service of the Queen of Scots, was arrested at Dover, because on his baggage being searched, a packet of letters in cipher had been found, and this was a suspicious circumstance, added to a bundle of printed copies of a vindication of Queen Mary, written by her constant supporter, David Leslie, Bishop of Ross. One of these ciphered letters was to Lord Lumley, a well known Roman Catholic; one to the Duke of Norfolk, who had been released from the Tower, since the rising in the north, but kept under surveillance at home; and one to the Bishop of Ross, who was residing with his brother Bishop of Ely, half as a prisoner, half as ambassador from Queen Mary. This very clever Bishop begged to see the packet for himself, and by wonderful adroitness exchanged it for another parcel, outwardly exactly the same, but with perfectly innocent letters within. On hearing, however, that Bailly was sent to the Tower, his anxiety was such that he fell into a burning ague, and kept his bed four months. He might well be anxious. Bailly, it appears, had been desired to leave his packet at Calais, to be brought by some one not known to belong to Queen Mary, but he had chosen to carry it himself, and, poor man, he had to rue his disobedience, for he was put to the torture, and though he held out the first time, the second he confessed that the letters had been given him by one Ridolfi, a banker, at Brussels, who had a house of business in London, and that he knew they were from the Duke of Alva, promising to co-operate with numbers thirty and forty in the Queen's cause. Who thirty and forty might be Bailly did not know, but he did know that the Bishop of Ross was to send the letters. Thereupon Leslie was interrogated and his house searched, both without effect, He declared himself an ambassador, but the plea was not allowed, and he was thrown into that part of the Tower called the Bloody Tower, a very close and unwholesome lodging for a sick person. Still, nothing was really proved till August, when one Brown, a carrier of Shrewsbury, brought to the Council a bag of money, which he said had been given him by a man named Higford to carry to Bannister, steward at Shrewsbury to the Duke of Norfolk, as silver coin, but being sure that the weight was too much for silver, he brought it to Lord Burghley. It was opened before the Council, and proved to contain, not silver, but gold, and therewith a letter in cipher. Higford was summoned, and at first pretended ignorance, but he was forced by threats into reading the cipher. It was an order to Bannister, the Duke's steward, to send the gold to one of the clan Lowther in Westmoreland, whence it would be transmitted to Kirkaldy for the maintenance of his garrison in Edinburgh Castle, the money itself being the proceeds of Queen Mary's French dowry, transmitted through La Mothe Fénélon. Here was proof positive that Norfolk in his own captivity was still in the confidence of Mary, in spite of all his professions, when he left the Tower, of perfect loyalty to the Queen. |