Merchant companies opened trade with Russia and
the Levant; adventurous sea captains went to Guinea for gold. Sir Hugh
Willoughby followed the phantom of the North-west Passage, turning
eastward round the North Cape to look for it, and perished in the ice.
English commerce was beginning to grow in spite of the Protector's
experiments; but a new and infinitely dangerous element had been
introduced by the change of religion into the relations of English
sailors with the Catholic Powers, and especially with Spain. In their
zeal to keep out heresy, the Spanish Government placed their harbours
under the control of the Holy Office. Any vessel in which an heretical
book was found was confiscated, and her crew carried to the Inquisition
prisons. It had begun in Henry's time. The Inquisitors attempted to
treat schism as heresy and arrest Englishmen in their ports. But Henry
spoke up stoutly to Charles V., and the Holy Office had been made to
hold its hand. All was altered now. It was not necessary that a poor
sailor should have been found teaching heresy. It was enough if he had
an English Bible and Prayer Book with him in his kit; and stories would
come into Dartmouth or Plymouth how some lad that everybody knew--Bill
or Jack or Tom, who had wife or father or mother among them,
perhaps--had been seized hold of for no other crime, been flung into a
dungeon, tortured, starved, set to work in the galleys, or burned in a
fool's coat, as they called it, at an _auto da fe_ at Seville.
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