descriptive list of the clergy and principal laity who suffered exile, imprisonment, or other losses for recusancy. The strong ultramontane position maintained by him throughout the work, his marked approval of the insurrection of 1569, and of the bull of deposition, with his panegyrics of Dr. Story, Felton, and others who had died refusing allegiance to the queen, provoked the bitterest hostility in England, and the book became subsequently a source of dangerous questionings and torments to captured priests (Burghley, Execution of Justice, sig. E, ii.; Allen, Defence, pp. 61–5; Butler, Memoirs, i. 425). In the previous year Sanders had printed a more formal treatise in defence of the bull of Pius V, so extremely outspoken as to cause alarm to his more prudent friends; and in proof of the moderation of the exiles and seminarists in general, Allen, in his reply to Burghley, written fourteen years later, declares that Sanders had himself withdrawn and utterly suppressed the tract in question, ‘no copie thereof that is knowen being now extant’ (p. 65).
Immediately after the publication of the ‘De Monarchia,’ Sanders received a summons to Rome, and the supposition or hope of his friends that he was now to be raised to the purple was probably not without ground. He left Louvain towards the end of January 1572. Pius V, however, died on 1 May following. In October Northumberland, Leonard Dacre, and Englefield were writing to the cardinal of Lorraine begging him to accredit Sanders, as a staunch adherent of the Queen of Scots, to Gregory XIII, and in November 1573 Sanders was in Madrid bearing letters to the king and nuncio. Here he remained in high favour with the Spanish court and in receipt of a pension of three hundred ducats from Philip. His whole energies were now directed towards the dethronement of Elizabeth in favour of a catholic sovereign. He is, however, reported to have advised Philip not to claim the crown for himself by right of conquest or by a grant from the pope, but to content himself with the regency in the name of Queen Mary or her son. He soon grew impatient with the apparent timidity of the Spanish king. On 6 Nov. 1577 he wrote in cipher to Dr. Allen, ‘We shall have steady comfort but from God, in the pope not the king. Therefore I beseech you take hold of the pope, for the king is as fearful of war as a child of fire, and all his endeavour is to avoid such occasions. The pope will give you two thousand when you shall be content with them. If they do not serve to go into England, at the least they will serve to go into Ireland. The state of Christendom dependeth upon the stout assailing of England’ (Knox, Allen, p. 38). In this same year Gregory XIII had appointed as his nuncio in Spain Mgr. Sega, who was instructed to urge Philip to make an attack upon England on the side of Ireland, and he was to offer on the pope's part a force of four to five thousand men. When the papal expedition, soon afterwards fitted out under the conduct of Sir Thomas Stukeley [q. v.], was by him diverted from its purpose, Sanders, who had been in communication with Sega and James Fitzmaurice, was himself commissioned by the pope to go as his nuncio into Ireland, and there incite the chiefs to rise under the papal banner against the English government. Philip assisted with men and money, but very secretly; and Sanders, landing at Dingle with Fitzmaurice, set up the papal standard at Smerwick in July 1579. He soon secured the adherence of the Earl of Desmond, and showed extraordinary activity in directing the movements of the rebels and sustaining their failing courage. ‘We are fighting,’ he wrote to Ulick Burke, ‘by authority of the head of the church … If it please you to join with us in this holy quarrel, you shall be under the protection of that prince whom God shall set up in place of this usurper and of God's vicar.’ In September he was able to persuade Philip to send him reinforcements (Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 28420). For nearly two years, notwithstanding the continued failure of the enterprise, ‘the diligence of the cunning-lettered traitor’ baffled all Burghley's attempts to capture him. He had many hair-breadth escapes; his servant was caught and hanged, his chalice and mass furniture were seized, and eventually, after wandering with Desmond for some time as a fugitive in the hills, he succumbed to want and cold in 1581 (says Rishton), and almost certainly in the spring of that year (Cal. State Papers, Ireland, St. Leger to Burghley, No. lxxxiii.). O'Sullivan, in his ‘Historia Catholicæ Iberniæ’ (1621), ascribes his death to a sudden attack of dysentery, and gives a circumstantial account of his receiving viaticum at the hands of Cornelius, bishop of Killaloe, and of his subsequent burial in secret. Mendoza reported to Philip as a certainty (1 March 1582) that Sanders's body had been found in a wood, ‘with his breviary and his Bible under his arm.’ The leading English exiles did not conceal their discontent at the pope's action in thus exposing in the Irish troubles a life so valuable to them. ‘Our Sanders,’ they exclaimed, ‘is more to us than the whole of Ireland.’ A last attempt had just been
