Eustace Leigh was the son of a younger brother of Leigh of Burrough, who
had more or less cut himself off from his family, and indeed from his
countrymen, by remaining a Papist. True, though born a Papist, he had
not always been one; for, like many of the gentry, he had become a
Protestant under Edward the Sixth, and then a Papist again under Mary.
But, to his honor be it said, at that point he had stopped, having
too much honesty to turn Protestant a second time, as hundreds did, at
Elizabeth's accession. So a Papist he remained, living out of the way
of the world in a great, rambling, dark house, still called "Chapel,"
on the Atlantic cliffs, in Moorwinstow parish, not far from Sir Richard
Grenville's house of Stow. The penal laws never troubled him; for, in
the first place, they never troubled any one who did not make conspiracy
and rebellion an integral doctrine of his religious creed; and next,
they seldom troubled even them, unless, fired with the glory of
martyrdom, they bullied the long-suffering of Elizabeth and her council
into giving them their deserts, and, like poor Father Southwell in
after years, insisted on being hanged, whether Burleigh liked or not.
Moreover, in such a no-man's-land and end-of-all-the-earth was that old
house at Moorwinstow, that a dozen conspiracies might have been hatched
there without any one hearing of it; and Jesuits and seminary priests
skulked in and out all the year round, unquestioned though unblest; and
found a sort of piquant pleasure, like naughty boys who have crept
into the store-closet, in living in mysterious little dens in a lonely
turret, and going up through a trap-door to celebrate mass in a secret
chamber in the roof, where they were allowed by the powers that were to
play as much as they chose at persecuted saints, and preach about hiding
in dens and caves of the earth.
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