To him the removal of Elizabeth would have been a religious act.  The Queen did all she could to make him save his life by recantation, even applying the cruel and lawless machinery of the rack.  If his errand had been merely to preach what he regarded as Catholic truth, she would have let him go, as she checked the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops over and over again.  But it was as much her duty to defend England from the invasion of the Jesuits as to defend her from the invasion of the Spanish Armada.  Both indeed were parts of one and the same enterprise, the forcible reduction of England to dependence upon the Catholic powers.  Although in God’s good providence it was foiled, it very nearly succeeded; and if Elizabeth had not removed Campian, Campian might, as Babington certainly would, have remove her.

The Pope had been directly concerned in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and his great ally, Philip ii., is said to have laughed for the first time when he heard of it.  More than a hundred years afterwards the pious Bossuet thanked God for the frightful slaughter of the Huguenots which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  While Mary Tudor burnt poor and humble persons who could be no possible danger to the State because they would not renounce the only form of Christian faith they had ever known, Elizabeth executed for treason powerful and influential men sent by the Pope to kill her.  When, after many long years, she reluctantly consented to Mary Stuart’s death on the scaffold, Mary had been implicated in a plot to take her life and succeed her as queen.  Mary would have made much shorter work of her.  If that is called persecution, the word ceases to have any meaning.

Froude quotes with approval, as well he might, the words of Campian’s admiring biographer Richard Simpson, himself a Catholic, a most learned and accomplished man.  “The eternal truths of Catholicism were made the vehicle for opinions about the authority of the Holy See which could not be held by Englishmen loyal to the Government; and true patriotism united to a false religion overcame the true religion wedded to opinions that were unpatriotic in regard to the liberties of Englishmen, and treasonable to the English Government.”  In those days there was only one kind of English Government possible; the Government of Elizabeth, Burghley, and Walsingham.  Parliamentary Government did not exist.  Even the right of free speech in the House of Commons was never recognised by the Queen.  If the English Government had fallen, England would have been at the mercy of a Papal legate.  Protestantism was synonymous with patriotism, and good Catholics could not be good Englishmen while there was a heretical sovereign on the throne.  After the Armada things were different.  Spain was crushed.  Sixtus V. was not a man to waste money, which he loved, in support of a losing cause.  What Froude wrote to establish, and succeeded in establishing, was that between 1529 and 1588 the Reformation saved England from the tyranny of Rome and the proud foot of a Spanish conqueror.