Robert Costin

“fear has inspired just as many acts of inhumanity. Elizabeth’s Government was, with reason, supremely fearful of the Catholic Church; James’s inherited that fear. Both preached regular sermons on their own essential decency and reasonableness (in marked contrast to what they perceived as the king-killing doctrines of Rome), both endorsed State-sanctioned acts of inhumanity: forced internments, show trials, revenge punishments, and the erosion of the common law. The argument goes that it is reductive to judge the past by the standards of today. Still, that does not mean we cannot examine the choices made in a fearful and uncertain past, better to evaluate those available to us in a fearful and uncertain present.”
― Alice Hogge, God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot