28 
throughout the kingdom. No other work in the range of 
history has ever had so severe a test as this; for common sense 
will show that if its statements were incorrect, thousands of 
witnesses would have risen up against them in every district 
in which the alleged martyrdoms were said to have taken place. 
Not only were the events themselves fresh in the memory of all 
men then living; but out of the entire body of the clergy in 
England, some eight or nine thousand had been the Roman 
Catholic priests of the days of Qurmn Mary, having kept their . 
livings by giving in their adherence to the new form of worship 
on the accession of HxizasetH; and these men would have 
risen as a legion of witnesses against the book if its contents 
had not been beyond dispute. The great statesmen like Lorp 
BuriercH and WatsincHam, with whose knowledge this step 
was taken, were by no means deficient in wisdom to hit upon 
such a method of witnessing to all posterity the facts which 
had been of such vital importance in the national history. We 
must remember that they had to deal with a body of Jesuits, 
who were not only plotting against the life of the Queen, but 
who were capable of any craft or deceit to hide the truths 
which so inconveniently told against their party. In the reign 
of Mary a terrible body of evidence against the monasteries, 
had been got rid of by calling in and destroying the report of 
the Government commission under Henry VIII, popularly known 
as the “‘ Black Book”; and so cleverly and completely was this 
done, that not a single copy of this Black Book has come 
down to us, though quotations from it occur in contemporary 
writers.* It was therefore an adroit move on behalf of the truth 
* Bishop BURNET says in the preface to his History of the Reformation, 
that he was greatly puzzled at finding many state papers missing from 
the national records, of whose former existence there was abundant proof 
in the reference made to them by contemporary writers. At last he stumbled 
on an order of Queen MAry’s, which accounted for this. It was as follows: 
<‘ Whereas it is come to our knowledge that in the time of the late schism, 
‘¢ divers accounts, books, scrolls, instruments and other writings were 
‘« practised, devised, and made, concerning professions against the pope’s 
“holiness and the see apostolic ; and also sundry infamous scrutinies taken 
