Scotland, he must either permit to be used to crush the commons in a quarrel, to which, so far as the land was concerned, he had himself encouraged them; or he must take their side against the gentlemen, put himself at their head in a servile war, and give them back their mass.
The demands of the western insurgents, in a special form, followed close on Carew's arrival. The English service had been either studiously made ridiculous in the manner in which it was performed by the unwilling clergy, or the people had been taught to believe that it was something half profane, half devilish. The new communion, strangely, was thought, like the love-feasts of the Gnostics, to be intended as an instigation to profligacy.[1] In fifteen articles the Commons of Devonshire and Cornwall required the restoration of the Catholic faith and the extinction of Protestantism with fire and sword.
1. 'We will have,' thus imperiously their petition was worded, all the general councils and holy decrees of our forefathers observed, kept, and performed, and whosoever shall gainsay them, we hold them as heretics.
2. We will have the laws of our sovereign lord King
- ↑ 'Doth receiving the communion either make matrimony or give authority and license to whoredom? Did not men and women always heretofore go to God's board, and receive together and all at one time as they do now; and did ever men think that they that did so should be in common?'—Answer of the Protector to the Rebels in the West: MS. Domestic, Edward VI. vol. viii. State Paper Office. Mr Tytler has printed the greater part of the paper from which the above passage is an extract. The passage itself, strange to say, he has omitted.
