researches in the archives of the Tower and the State Paper Office, and the publication of many of the documents there remaining, the journals of the Lords and Commons, the rolls of Parliament and the patent rolls, and the mass of original letters collected by Howell, Ellis, Nicolas, &c., enable us and compel us to draw a somewhat different picture from that which was presented to the last generation. In our portraiture of "good Queen Bess" we have used the facts left under the very hands of herself and her ministers, and from these there can be no appeal. On the other hand, it should be remembered by those who are startled into too severe a judgment of this queen, that the Elizabethan age, though the bright dawn of happier times, lies far behind our own in moral strength and purity; that the darkness of the Middle Ages was not yet quite banished, and threw still its shadow even upon high places; and that consequently our verdict upon this great and imperious monarch must have its just relation to those precedents and traditions which no longer attach to the throne.
Again, some readers may be ready to accuse us of placing the Roman Catholics of those times in too favourable a light. We can only reply that the same undoubted authorities have guided our pen. We will yield to no man in our attachment to Protestant principles, nor in our estimation of their paramount truth and value. We regard the liberation of mind effected by the Reformation as the source of all our present blessings, and our national preeminence. We believe that our firm stand by the truths of the Bible, and the spirit of liberty and law which is their direct result, is the reason why the Almighty has seen fit to place us at the head of nations, and to give to the language, the institutions, the dominion, and the glory of England a pre-eminence and an expanse such as no nation ever before enjoyed; that this is the secret of our invincible arms in all quarters of the globe, of our being chosen as the founders of the new and vast people of North America, of India, South Africa, and Australia, who form the links of a chain of British life, enlightenment, manliness, and religious reverence which encircles the globe as with an imperial zone. But as we hold and must hold the right of every man to maintain the independence of his creed and conscience, we are bound as citizens and subjects to deal out justice and impartiality to Roman Catholics as to Protestants; and were we to sketch and colour the religious partisans of the periods over which we have passed in this Volume, not by the undoubted documents which those times furnish, but by the colours in which the opponents on each side arrayed them to themselves, we should commit a gross and unpardonable violation of the truth of history, and be unworthy to hold the high and responsible position of the narrators of the veritable past in its many-sided completeness.
In our next Volume we shall be called on to detail the progress of still greater events and changes, the conflict of the monarchical and the national will, the overthrow of thrones and intolerance, and to hail the rising of the British Constitution as it now exists out of the waters of this agitated sea of antagonistic principles.
