Parents Could Be Easily Alarmed By Any Possibility Of Their Sons'
Conversion To Romanism.
For the penalties of being a Roman Catholic in
England were enough to make an ambitious father dread recusancy in his
son.
Though a gentleman or a nobleman ran no risk of being hanged,
quartered, disembowelled and subjected to such punishments as were dealt
out to active and dangerous priests, he was regarded as a traitor if he
acknowledged himself to be a Romanist. At any moment of anti-Catholic
excitement he might be arrested and clapped into prison. Drearier than
prison must have been his social isolation. For he was cut off from his
generation and had no real part in the life of England. Under the laws
of James he was denied any share in the Government, could hold no public
office, practise no profession. Neither law nor medicine, nor parliament
nor the army, nor the university, was open to him. Banished from London
and the Court, shunned by his contemporaries, he lurked in some country
house, now miserably lonely, now plagued by officers in search of
priests. At last, generally, he went abroad, and wandered out his life,
an exile, despised by his countrymen, who met him hanging on at foreign
Courts; or else he sought a monastery and was buried there. To be sure,
the laws against recusants were not uniformly enforced; papistry in
favourites and friends of the king was winked at, and the rich noblemen,
who were able to pay fines, did not suffer much.
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