“The first object of men who love party better than truth, is to have it believed that the Catholics alone have been persecutors.  But what can be more flagrantly unjust than to take over notions of history only from the conquering and triumphant party?  If you think the Catholics have not their Book of Martyrs as well as the Protestants, take the following enumeration of some of their most learned and careful writers.  The whole number of Catholics who suffered death in England for the exercise of the Catholic religion since the Reformation stands thus:—­

“Henry VIII., 59
Elizabeth, 204
James I., 25
Charles I., and Commonwealth, 23
Charles II., 8
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Total, 319

“Henry VIII., with consummate impartiality, burnt three Protestants and hanged four Catholics for different errors in religion on the same day, and at the same place.  Elizabeth burnt two Dutch Anabaptists for some theological tenets, July 22, 1575, Fox the martyrologist vainly pleading with the queen in their favour.  In 1579, the same Protestant queen cut off the hand of Stubbs, the author of a tract against popish connection, of Singleton, the printer, and Page, the disperser of the book.  Camden saw it done.  Warburton properly says it exceeds in cruelty any thing done by Charles I. On the 4th of June, Mr. Elias Thacker and Mr. John Capper, two ministers of the Brownist persuasion, were hanged at St. Edmund’s-bury, for dispersing books against the Common Prayer.  With respect to the great part of the Catholic victims, the law was fully and literally executed:  after being hanged up, they were cut down alive, dismembered, ripped up, and their bowels burnt before their faces; after which they were beheaded and quartered.  The time employed in this butchery was very considerable, and, in one instance, lasted more than half an hour.

“The uncandid excuse for all this is, that the greater part of these men were put to death for political, not for religious, crimes.  That is, a law is first passed, making it high treason for a priest to exercise his function in England, and so, when he is caught and burnt, this is not religious persecution, but an offence against the State.  We are, I hope, all too busy to need any answer to such childish, uncandid reasoning as this.”

And then the Letter goes on to give, with the fullest apparatus of details, dates, and authorities, the miserable tale of religious persecution practised, during three centuries, at home and abroad, by Anglicans on Puritans, by Protestants on Romanists, by orthodox Protestants on heterodox Protestants; and then, to clinch his argument and drive it home, he gives the substance of the Penal Code under which Irish Catholics suffered so cruelly and so long.