The mental opposition which existed between Sir William and the extreme Calvinists has already been noticed. Of him it might have been said, as of Algernon Sidney, that 'he seemed to be a Christian, but in a particular form of his own. He thought it was to be like a divine philosophy in the mind.'[1] Such views were as odious to the Church of Rome as to the Church of Geneva, and for the whole ecclesiastical system of Rome, Sir William, as a follower of Hobbes, had a rooted aversion, which recent events had tended to strengthen. He had seen that the true origin of the troubles in Ireland lay in the constant attempts of the Church of Rome to use the leaders of the Irish people as the instruments of their own designs; and he was of opinion that the cause of all the civil strife, not in Ireland only but in Europe, for more than a century, had been the aggressions of that Church on the power of the State, and the religious persecutions on account of opinion with which it had devastated Southern Europe like a pestilence, 'punishing believers heterodox from the authorized way, in public and open places, before great multitudes of ignorant people with loss of life, liberty, and limbs.'[2] Recent events had tended to accentuate these feelings. At the very time when he was in London negotiating with Thurloe, in 1658, the latter had received a despatch from Maynard, the English Consul at Oporto, with an account of the death by burning as heretics—of which Maynard had been an ocular witness—of a motley band of unsound theologians, Jews, and English sailors, who had been seized on different pretexts by the officers of the Inquisition and sentenced to be executed at a 'Grand assize' held there.[3] George Penn also, brother of his friend Admiral Penn, had died just after the Restoration under circumstances
- ↑ Burnet, History of his Own Times, vol. ii. p. 351.
- ↑ Treatise on Taxes, ch. ii. p. 6.
- ↑ It is curious that in this letter Maynard states, with reference to several other persons who were burnt at the same time, that—just as in the case of George Penn mentioned below—the desire of the Church to get possession of their wealth was the true cause of their indictment. 'They were all of them people of great estate, which is supposed was the greatest crime for which they dyed.' Thurloe, vii. 567.
