I begin this lecture with a petition addressed to Queen Elizabeth.
Thomas Seely, a merchant of Bristol, hearing a Spaniard in a Spanish
port utter foul and slanderous charges against the Queen's character,
knocked him down. To knock a man down for telling lies about Elizabeth
might be a breach of the peace, but it had not yet been declared heresy.
The Holy Office, however, seized Seely, threw him into a dungeon, and
kept him starving there for three years, at the end of which he
contrived to make his condition known in England. The Queen wrote
herself to Philip to protest. Philip would not interfere. Seely remained
in prison and in irons, and the result was a petition from his wife, in
which the temper which was rising can be read as in letters of fire.
Dorothy Seely demands that 'the friends of her Majesty's subjects so
imprisoned and tormented in Spain may make out ships at their proper
charges, take such Inquisitors or other Papistical subjects of the King
of Spain as they can by sea or land, and retain them in prison with such
torments and diet as her Majesty's subjects be kept with in Spain, and
on complaint made by the King to give such answer as is now made when
her Majesty sues for subjects imprisoned by the Inquisition. Or that a
Commission be granted to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other
bishops word for word for foreign Papists as the Inquisitors have in
Spain for the Protestants. So that all may know that her Majesty cannot
and will not longer endure the spoils and torments of her subjects, and
the Spaniards shall not think this noble realm dares not seek revenge of
such importable wrongs.'

Elizabeth issued no such Commission as Dorothy Seely asked for, but she
did leave her subjects to seek their revenge in their own way, and they
sought it sometimes too rashly.