XXI. HENRY VIII., AND THE BREACH WITH ROME

1509-1536.

The young king who succeeded to the cautious and politic Henry VII. was perhaps the most remarkable man who ever sat upon the English throne. He guided England through the epoch of change and unrest which lay between the middle ages and modern history, and his guidance was of such a peculiar and personal stamp that he left an indelible mark on the land for many succeeding generations. All Europe was transformed during his time, and that the transformation in England differed from that on the continent in almost every respect, was due to his own strange combination of qualities.

[Sidenote: =Character of Henry VIII.=]

Henry's character was a very complex one, mingling qualities good and bad in strange confusion. In many things he showed the traits of his grandfather Edward IV., his selfishness, his love of display, his sensuality, his outbursts of ruthless cruelty. But Edward had been nothing more than a soldier and a man of pleasure; he had no love of work, no power to read the character of others. Henry VIII. was a student, a statesman, a deep plotter, a keen observer of other men. He chose his servants--or rather his tools--with a clear-headed sagacity which no king ever surpassed, and he could break them or fling them away when they became useless, with a coolness that was all his own. Love of power, love of work, love of pleasure, love of show and pomp, did not distract him the one from the other, but blended closely together into one complex impulse--the determination to have his own will in all things. Such a state of mind bespeaks the tyrant, and a tyrant Henry became; but a tyrant whose brain was as strong as his will--who knew the possible from the impossible, who could discern how far it was safe to go, and could check himself on the edge of any dangerous precipice of foreign or internal politics. He kept, as it were, a finger on the nation's pulse, and could restrain himself for a space if ever it began to beat too excitably. He did his best to court popularity with the English by an affable bearing and a regard for their prejudices. He strove to make them look on him as the nation's representative, and to flatter them into believing that his resolves were really in accordance with their own will and interests. He represented to them not only law and order, but national feeling and national pride. It was this clever acting that made it possible for him to manipulate England according to his wishes. He appeared to take the people into his confidence, and they replied by believing his statements even when they were most unfounded and misleading. Thus it was that Henry was able to rule despotically for forty years without having a serious quarrel with his Parliament, and without being compelled to raise a standing army--the tool which all contemporary despots were forced to employ.

[Sidenote: =His popular qualities.=]

Henry VIII. was very young when he came to the throne--he had only reached the age of eighteen. His character was still undeveloped, though he was known to be both clever and active. All that the nation knew of him was that he was a bright, handsome youth, fond of horse and hound, but equally fond of his books and his lute. He had from the first an eye for popularity, and did all that he could to please the people by shows and pageants that forced him to dip deeply into his father's hoarded money.

[Sidenote: =Executions of Empson and Dudley.=]

Yet the first act of Henry's reign was ominous of future cruelty and ruthlessness. Knowing the unpopularity of his father's harsh and extortionate but faithful servants, Empson and Dudley, he cast them into prison, and had them attainted by Parliament on a preposterous charge of treason. They were well hated, and the people saw their heads fall with joy, not reflecting on the character of a king who could deliberately slay his father's councillors merely to win popular applause.

[Sidenote: =Foreign policy.--The Holy League.=]

Henry retained most of his father's old ministers in office, but he instantly reversed his father's policy of non-intervention in the wars of the continent. He had not long been seated on the throne when he joined the "Holy League," a confederacy formed against France by Pope Julius II., in which both those old intriguers, the Emperor Maximilian and King Ferdinand of Aragon, were already enlisted (1511). Henry might have left them to fight their own battles for the mastery of Italy and Flanders, but he was burning to assert his power in Europe and to win military distinction. His arms were fairly fortunate. A first attack on the south of France failed, but he met with considerable success in 1513, when he landed at Calais with 25,000 men, took the towns of Tournay and Térouanne, and routed the French army of the North at an engagement called "the Battle of the Spurs," from the haste with which the French knights urged their horses out of the fray. Finding his armies losing ground both in Italy and in Flanders, King Lewis XII. sought peace from Henry, and obtained it at the cheap price of paying 100,000 crowns, and marrying the Princess Mary, the young English monarch's favourite sister (1514). These easy terms were granted because Henry found that his two wily allies, Ferdinand and Maximilian, had no intention of helping him, and were bent purely on their own aggrandisement. The alliance with Lewis was not to have much duration, for within a year he was dead--killed, as the chroniclers assert, by the late hours and high living which his gay young English queen persuaded him to adopt. His widow soon dried her tears, and married Sir Charles Brandon, one of her brother's favourite companions, whom Henry, to grace the match, decorated with the ill-omened title of Duke of Suffolk, the spoil of the unhappy de la Poles. From this union sprang one who was to sit for a brief moment on the English throne.[31]

[Sidenote: =Scottish war.=]

Ere the French treaty had been made, a short stirring episode of war had taken place on England's northern frontier. King James IV. of Scotland had certain border feuds to settle with the English, and thought he might best take his revenge while Henry and his army were over-seas in Flanders. So he suddenly declared war, and crossed the Tweed into Northumberland.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Flodden.=]

Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, son of John of Norfolk, who fell at Bosworth, was in charge of the Border at the time. He raised the levies of the northern counties, and marched to meet the Scots. By throwing himself between King James and his retreat on Scotland, he forced the enemy to fight. On Flodden Field, between the Till and the Tweed, the armies met and fought a fierce and doubtful battle which lasted far into the night. Though victorious on one wing, the Scots were beaten in the centre, and their king and most of his nobles fell in a desperate struggle around the royal banner. In the darkness the survivors of the struggle dispersed and fled home. The death of their warlike sovereign, and the slaughter which had thinned their fighting men, kept the Scots quiet for many a day. During the long and troublous minority of James V. King Henry need fear no danger from the north. As a reward for his victory, Surrey was restored to his father's dukedom of Norfolk (1513).

[Sidenote: =Wolsey.=]

In these early years of his reign, King Henry had already taken as his chief minister the able statesman who was for twenty years to be the second personage in England. Thomas Wolsey, Dean of Lincoln, was the son of a butcher of Ipswich, who had sought advancement in the Church, the easiest career for an able man of low birth. He had served Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, one of Henry VII.'s chief advisers, and from his service passed into that of the king. He was an active, untiring man, with a great talent for work and organization of all sorts. Henry made him Bishop of Tournay, then Archbishop of York, and finally Chancellor. In this capacity he served for no less than fourteen years, and was the chosen instrument of all his master's schemes. His dignity was increased when, in 1515, the Pope made him a cardinal, and afterwards appointed him his legate in England--an office which seemed to trench over-much on the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury as head and primate of the English Church.

It suited King Henry to have a minister who could relieve him of much of the toil and drudgery of government, who did not fear responsibility, and who was entirely dependent on his master. As long as he was well served, and granted plenty of spare time for his pleasures and enjoyments, he allowed Wolsey a very free hand. The cardinal's head was somewhat turned by his elevation, and he indulged in a pomp and state such as almost befitted a king, never moving about without a sumptuous train of attendants. This arrogance made him much disliked, especially by the old nobility; but the king tolerated it with all the more ease because he preferred that his minister should be less popular than himself. It was always convenient to have some one on whom the blame of royal failures might be laid, and Wolsey, with his ostentation of power and pride, made an admirable shield for his master. Henry allowed him, therefore, the prominence in which his soul delighted, gave him his way in things indifferent, but was ready to check him sharply when he began to develop any tendency to act contrary to his own royal will.

[Sidenote: =Charles V. and Francis I.=]

In the earlier days of Wolsey's ministry, the face of Europe was profoundly changed by the deaths of the three old monarchs who had been the contemporaries of Henry VII. Lewis XII. of France died in 1515, Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the Emperor Maximilian in 1519. The successors of these old diplomatists were two young men, each slightly junior to the young King of England. In France the reckless and warlike Francis I. succeeded his cousin Lewis XII. In Spain and in the dominions of the house of Hapsburg, Ferdinand and Maximilian were followed by their grandson, Charles V., the child of the emperor's son and the king's daughter. Charles, being already King of Spain, Duke of Burgundy, and Archduke of Austria, was elected Emperor by the Germans in succession to his grandfather Maximilian.

[Sidenote: =Policy of Henry.=]

Now Francis of France and Charles of Austria were rivals from their youth, and their rivalry was the main source of trouble in European politics for a whole generation. England had to choose between them when she sought an ally, but Henry found it by no means easy to make up his mind. France was his hereditary enemy, but, on the other hand, Charles, by uniting Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria, and acquiring in addition the position of Emperor, had built up such a vast power that he overshadowed Europe, and seemed dangerous by reason of his over-great dominions and wealth.

THE KIN OF CHARLES V.

[Sidenote: =The balance of power.=]

Henry and Wolsey, therefore, fell back on the idea that a balance of power in Europe was the best thing for England. It would be a misfortune if either Francis I. or Charles V. should grow so powerful as to dominate the whole continent. England accordingly would do well to see that neither obtained complete success, and to make a rule of helping the weaker party from time to time. For the next ten years, therefore, Henry was always trimming the scales, and transferring his weight from one side to the other. Such a policy made him much courted by both parties, and won him much flattery, and an occasional subsidy or treaty of commerce. But, on the other hand, it prevented either Francis or Charles from looking upon him as a trustworthy ally, or dealing fairly with him in the hours of their success. For they argued that there was no object in serving a friend who might turn into an enemy at the shortest notice. Thus Henry and Wolsey, with all their astuteness, got no profit for England or for themselves, for they were never trusted, and promises made to them in the hour when their help was needed were never fulfilled when their aid was no longer necessary. There was something false, insincere, and degrading in this trimming policy. It is disgusting to read how Henry greeted his neighbour Francis in 1520 at the celebrated "Field of the Cloth of Gold" near Calais, with all manner of pomp and pageantry, and profuse protestations of brotherly love, and then within a month had met Charles at Gravelines, and concluded a secret treaty of alliance with him against the friend whose kiss was yet upon his cheek.

[Sidenote: =Heavy taxation.--Benevolences.=]

From all the negotiations and fighting which accompanied the changes of English policy, only one definite result was reached--England was beginning to grow poorer and more discontented. The hoarded treasure of Henry VII. had long been exhausted, and the taxation which his son was compelled to levy was growing more and more heavy. Henry had fallen into the evil habit of dispensing with parliamentary grants; from 1515 to 1523, and again in 1527 and 1528, he never summoned the two Houses to assemble. The money which he ought to have asked from them, he raised by the illegal devices of "benevolences" and forced loans. Wolsey got the credit of advising this tyrannous extortion, and gained no small hatred thereby, but his master was in truth far more responsible for it than he.

[Sidenote: =Wolsey aims at becoming Pope.=]

The cardinal, however, bore the blame, and it was said that all the chaotic changes in England's policy were inspired by Wolsey's desire to attain the position of Pope, by the aid of whichever of the two powers of France and Austria had the advantage for the moment. There is no doubt that there was some truth in the charge; the cardinal's ambition was overweening, and he would gladly have become Pope, because he had conceived great schemes of Church reform which the possession of the papacy alone would have enabled him to carry out. It is certain that Charles V. twice deluded Wolsey into aiding him, by the tempting bait of the papal tiara. But on each occasion the Emperor used his influence at Rome to get some surer partisan elected.

[Sidenote: =Condition of the Church.=]

[Sidenote: =Depravity of the Popes and Clergy.=]

Wolsey's scheme of reforming the Church was no doubt suggested to him by the discontent against the clergy which was at this moment beginning to break out all over Europe. Since the days of Wicliffe, religious matters had not been taking any very prominent place in English politics, but a storm was now at hand far more terrible than that which had swept over the land in the days of the Lollards. The condition of the church of Western Christendom had become more and more deplorable of late. The worst example was set at head-quarters: bad as the Popes of the fourteenth century had been, those who were contemporary with the Tudors were far worse. Rome had seen in succession three scandalous Popes, the first of whom--Alexander VI., the celebrated Rodrigo Borgia--was a monster of depravity, a murderer given up to the practice of the foulest vices; the second--Julius II.--was a mere secular statesman with no piety, but a decided talent both for intrigue and for hard fighting; the third--Leo X.--was a cultured atheist, of artistic tastes, who used to tell his friends that "Christianity was a profitable superstition for Popes." Under such pontiffs all the abuses of the mediaeval Church came to a head. Ill living, corruption, open impiety, reckless interference in secular politics, non-residence, neglect of all spiritual duties, greed for money, were more openly practised by the clergy than in any previous age. Even the better sort of ecclesiastics could see no harm in obvious abuses;--Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, a man of great virtue, absented himself for twenty years from his see. Wolsey held three sees at once, and never went near any of them.

[Sidenote: =The Renaissance.--Printing.=]

The lamentable state of the Church would have provoked murmuring in any age, but in the sixteenth century it led to open rebellion in all those countries of Europe which still retained some regard for religion and morals. The revival of arts and letters, which men call the Renaissance, was now at its height, and Europe was for the first time full of educated laymen who could criticize the Church from outside, and compare its teaching with its practice. The multiplication of books, owing to the discovery of printing, had placed the means of knowledge in every man's hands, and the revived study of Hebrew and Greek was setting the learned to read the Scriptures in their original tongues. All the elements of a violent outbreak against the papacy, its superstitions and its enormities, were ready to combine.

[Sidenote:=Martin Luther.=]

In 1517 a German friar, Martin Luther, had first given voice to the universal discontent, by opposing the immoral practice of selling "indulgences," or papal letters remitting penances for sins, in return for money. He had followed this up by preaching against many other papal abuses, and, when Leo X. replied by excommunicating him, he began to attack the whole system of the mediaeval Church--inveighing against the Pope's spiritual supremacy, the invocation of saints, the celibacy of the clergy, the adoption of the monastic life, and many other matters. He was supported by his prince, Frederick, Elector of Saxony, and a great part of Germany at once declared in his favour (1517-21).

[Sidenote: =The Church in England.=]

England was not at first very much affected by the revolt of Germany against the papacy. The English Church was far less corrupt than those of France or Italy, and though full of abuses, was not really unpopular with the nation. It still retained much of the old national spirit, and was not the mere slave of the Pope. Neither king nor people showed any signs of following the lead of the Germans. Henry wrote a book to prove Luther's views heretical, and received in return from Leo X. the title of Defender of the Faith, which English sovereigns still display on their coinage. Wolsey devoted himself to practical reforms, leaving doctrine alone. His first measure was to suppress many small and decayed monasteries, and to build with their plunder his great foundation of Cardinal's College, afterwards known as Christ Church, in the University of Oxford.

[Sidenote: =Henry and Queen Catherine.=]

It was not till about 1527 that England began to be drawn into the struggle which was convulsing all continental Europe, and then the cause of quarrel came from the king's private affairs, and not from any doctrinal dispute. It will be remembered that Henry had been affianced by his father to Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his brother, Arthur Prince of Wales. Marriage with a deceased brother's wife being illegal, a papal dispensation had been procured to remove the bar, and Henry had married Catherine on his accession, so that he could not plead compulsion on the part of his father. The marriage was not a wise one, for the queen, though a very gentle and virtuous woman, was six years older than her husband, had no personal attractions, and was delicate in health. All the children whom she bore to Henry died in infancy--except one, the Princess Mary. By 1527 Catherine was a confirmed invalid, and showed all the signs of premature old age, though she was only forty-two.

[Sidenote: =Henry desires a divorce.=]

Now Henry VIII. was morbidly anxious for a son to succeed him; he was the only surviving male of the house of Tudor, and could not bear the thought of leaving the throne to a sickly girl. It was obvious that Catherine would bear him no more children, and, regardless of the duty and respect that he owed to her, he began to think of obtaining a divorce, and marrying a younger wife. His project took a definite shape when his eye was caught by the beautiful Anne Boleyn, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and one of the maids of honour. Becoming desperately enamoured of her, he resolved to press for a divorce at once. Wolsey, who saw that the kingdom needed a male heir, undertook to procure the Pope's consent to the repudiation of Catherine.

[Sidenote: =Attitude of the Pope.=]

But this task proved more difficult than he had expected. Popes were generally indulgent enough to kings who would pay handsomely for their heart's desire. But the reigning pontiff, Clement VII., was in an unhappy position: he was completely at the mercy of the Emperor Charles V., whose troops had lately taken and sacked Rome. Charles was resolved that his aunt Catherine should not be divorced, and Pope Clement was mortally afraid of offending him. Instead, therefore, of granting the demand of Henry VIII., he temporized, and appointed two cardinals, Wolsey himself and Campeggio, the Italian bishop of Salisbury, to investigate the question. Henry and Wolsey hoped to force on a prompt decision: but Campeggio deliberately hung back, and the Pope finally recalled him, and summoned the king to send his case to be tried at Rome (1528). Henry wrongly thought that this check was due to some bungling or reluctance on the part of Wolsey, not seeing that the Pope's fears of the Emperor were the real cause.

[Sidenote: =Unpopularity of Wolsey.=]

He at once withdrew his support from the great minister, though Wolsey needed it more at this moment than ever before, for he was in great disfavour with the nation, both for his arrogance and for the heavy taxation which he had imposed on the land. He had actually demanded from Parliament the unprecedented tax of 4_s._ in the pound on all men's lands and incomes, and, though the House plucked up courage to resist this extortionate claim, had obtained as much as 2_s._ In 1529 the cardinal, fearing to meet another Parliament, had recourse to the old device of benevolences, on a larger scale than ever. This led to rioting and open resistance. Then the king, to the surprise of all men, suddenly declared that Wolsey's action was taken without his knowledge and consent, and dismissed him from the office of Chancellor, which he had held since 1515.

[Sidenote: =His disgrace and death.=]

His place as the king's chief counsellor fell to the Duke of Norfolk, the uncle of Anne Boleyn. The king immediately proceeded to treat the cardinal with great ingratitude. Wolsey's harsh deeds had always been wrought for his master's benefit rather than his own, but Henry chose to ignore this fact, and to win a cheap popularity by persecuting his old and faithful servant. Probably Anne Boleyn and her uncle Norfolk, exasperated by the delay in the king's divorce, stirred up Henry to the attack. The cardinal was impeached for having accepted the title of legate from Rome, without the king's formal leave, many years before. Henry had made no objection at the time, and it was pure hypocrisy to pretend indignation now. But Wolsey was declared to have incurred penalties under the Statute of Praemunire, which forbad dealings with Rome conducted without royal leave. He was condemned, deprived of all his enormous personal property, and sent away from court, to live in his archbishopric of York. A year later Henry again commenced to molest him, and he was on his way to London, to answer a preposterous charge of treason, when he died at Leicester, as much of a broken heart as of any disease. He had been arrogant and harsh in his day of power, but had served his master so faithfully that nothing can excuse Henry's ingratitude. Unfortunately for England, he had taught the king the dangerous lesson that he could go very far in the direction of absolute and tyrannical government, and escape from the consequent unpopularity by throwing over his ministers. Henry used this knowledge to the full during the rest of his reign.

[Sidenote: =Cromwell and Cranmer.=]

Meanwhile Wolsey's disgrace, and the complete failure of the attempt to win a divorce from the Pope, had been leading the king into new paths. He had taken to himself two new councillors. In secular matters he gave his confidence to Thomas Cromwell, a clever, low-born adventurer, whom Wolsey had discovered and brought to court. In matters religious he was beginning to listen to his chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, a man with a curious mixture of piety and weakness, one of the few Englishmen who had as yet been touched by the doctrines of the Continental Reformers. It was not, however, as a Reformer that Cranmer commended himself to his master; indeed, he kept his Lutheran opinions very secret. But he had suggested to the king a new method of dealing with the divorce question, which Henry considered not unpromising. It might be urged that marriage with a deceased brother's wife was so strictly and definitely forbidden in the Scriptures, that the Pope had no authority to sanction it, and so the permissory bull of Julius II. might be scouted as so much waste paper. Henry eagerly swallowed the idea, and sent round the question, stated as a moot point, to all the universities of Europe. About half of them answered, as he wished, that the marriage was illegal from the first. Armed with this authority, he resolved to go further.

[Sidenote: =Attack on the clergy.=]

But first Henry was resolved to show the English clergy that he was determined to stand no opposition from them on this point. He opened a campaign against all manner of Church abuses, with the object of winning for himself popularity with the nation, by the cheap expedient of a pretended zeal for purity and piety. He told the Convocation of the clergy that they had all made themselves liable to the penalties of Praemunire, for recognizing Wolsey as legate without the royal leave. They only got pardon by voting the king the large fine of £118,000. He also caused Convocation to address him as "Supreme Head, as far as the law of Christ will allow, of the English Church and clergy," thus casting a slur on the Pope's universal authority. Convocation was also forced to submit to an Act of Parliament which swept away two ancient abuses, the right to claim "benefit of clergy" when accused of felony, and so to escape the king's justice, and the power of evading the Statute of Mortmain, by receiving legacies under trust instead of in full proprietorship. The Pope still proving recalcitrant in the matter of the divorce, Henry took the further step of threatening to cut off the main contribution which England sent to Rome--the annates or first-fruits, paid by all benefices when they changed hands.

[Sidenote: =Henry divorces Catherine.=]

This menace did not bring Clement VII. to reason, and Henry at last took the step which involved a fatal breach with Rome. He appointed the pliant Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury, and bade him try the question of the divorce in an English ecclesiastical court, without any further application to Rome. Queen Catherine refused to appear before such a tribunal, and formally appealed to the Pope's justice. But Cranmer proceeded with the trial, declared the marriage contrary to the law of God, and pronounced the king free from all his ties and able to wed again. Even before the decision was announced, Henry had secretly married Anne Boleyn (January, 1533), and the moment that the court had given judgment he presented her to the nation as Queen of England. The unhappy Catherine retired into privacy at Kimbolton, where she survived nearly three years.

[Sidenote: =Final rupture with the Pope.=]

The Pope at once declared the new marriage illegal, and threatened Henry with an excommunication. Many good men were scandalized to see the king repudiate a wife who had lived as his faithful spouse for twenty years. Murmurings and prophecies of ill filled the air, and Henry felt that trouble was brewing. But he only hardened his heart, and caused Parliament to pass a bill for cutting short the Pope's spiritual authority over England, unless he should acknowledge the validity of the new marriage within three months. Clement refused to be bullied into compliance, and the rupture came (1533).

[Sidenote: =Act of Supremacy.--More and Fisher executed.=]

Queen Anne soon bore the king a daughter, the famous Queen Elizabeth, and Henry then ordered all his subjects to take an oath repudiating all obedience to papal orders, and acknowledging the child as rightful heiress of the realm, to the prejudice of his elder daughter Mary. This oath many persons refused to take, since it openly disavowed the Pope's authority over the English Church. The chief of them were Sir Thomas More, a learned and virtuous statesman who had succeeded Wolsey as Chancellor, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Henry cast them into prison, and soon after caused Parliament to pass the "Act of Supremacy," which declared him "Supreme Head of the Church of England," and pronounced any one who denied him this title guilty of high treason. Under this ferocious edict More and Fisher were beheaded, and many other minor personages suffered with them.

[Sidenote: =Henry excommunicated and deposed.=]

Pope Paul III., who had just succeeded to Pope Clement's tiara, now caused a Bull to be drawn up against his enemy (Dec. 15, 1535). He not only pronounced King Henry an excommunicated person, but declared him to be deposed from his throne. It was now war to the knife between the king and the papacy, and the rest of Henry's reign was to be taken up with the struggle. During the twelve years that he had still to live, he spent all his energies in severing every link that still bound England to Rome.

FOOTNOTE:

[31] Lady Jane Grey, granddaughter and heiress of Charles and Mary.

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XXII. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

1536-1553.

The breach between England and Rome had become irreparable when Henry executed More and Fisher, and when Pope Paul had declared the king deposed. The Church of England had now seceded from the Roman obedience, and organized herself as an independent body with the sovereign as her Supreme Head. The secession had been carried out entirely on the king's initiative, but the nation had acquiesced in it because of the old and long-felt abuses of which the papacy had always been the maintainer. King and people alike wished to make an end of the customs by which the Pope had profited,--his vast gains from the annates of English sees and benefices; his habit of appointing non-resident Italians to the richest English preferments; his power of summoning litigants on ecclesiastical matters before the distant, costly, and corrupt Church courts at Rome. It was generally thought that when England freed herself from the Roman obedience, she would be able to reform in peace all the faults and abuses which disfigured her ecclesiastical system. Further than this the majority of the nation did not at first wish to go; they had not ceased to be Catholics, though they were no longer Roman Catholics. Only a comparatively small section of the English people had yet been affected by the later developments of Continental Protestantism.

[Sidenote: =German Protestantism.=]

But the conditions of the English and the Germans at the moment when both threw off the yoke of Rome, were sufficiently similar to make it inevitable that the theories of the Continental Reformers would ere long begin to act upon English minds. The German protest against the papacy had taken shape in the declaration that the Bible alone was the rule by which Christian men should order their lives--that the tradition of the mediaeval Church, which supplemented the teaching of the Gospels, was dangerous, full of errors and superstitions, and often directly opposed to scriptural precept. Mediaeval traditions were the bulwark of the Roman see, and ere long we find King Henry and his bishops following the Germans into this position, and basing the reform of the English Church on the Bible, and the Bible alone. But when tradition was rejected and the Scriptures taken as the sole test of all doctrines, further development became inevitable. There soon arose Reformers in England, as on the Continent, who could not find in their Bibles any justification for some of the doctrines to which King Henry clung most obstinately, and most of all for the dogma of Transubstantiation, round which the Roman Church had built up its main claim to rule the souls of men.

[Sidenote: =Doctrine of transubstantiation.=]

This doctrine concerning "the Sacrifice of the Mass," as commonly held at this time in the Western Church, taught that, at the celebration of the Holy Communion, when the priest had consecrated the sacramental bread and wine, the very flesh and blood of Christ became carnally and corporeally present in the chalice and patten--that the bread and wine were no longer bread and wine, but had been transubstantiated into Christ's own body, which was day by day offered up in sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Pope and the priesthood, by their power of granting or refusing the sacrament to the laity, stood as the sole mediators between God and man. The Continental Protestants, cut off from the main body of the Western Church by the Pope's ban, had formulated theories which struck at the roots of the power of the clergy. Many of them treated the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as no more than a solemn ceremony, denying any sacramental character to the rite. The majority of the early English Protestants fell into this extreme view.

[Sidenote: =Attitude of the king.=]

Now Henry VIII. to the end of his days stood firm to the mediaeval doctrine of the sacrament, and fully accepted Transubstantiation, though he denied the deduction which the Roman Church had drawn from it--that by it the Pope and clergy are the despotic masters of the souls of men. He merely desired to place himself in the position which the Pope had hitherto held, as head of the spiritual hierarchy of England. With the pliant Cranmer and other bishops of his own to serve him, he wished to become as despotic a sovereign over the souls of Englishmen as he already was over their bodies. To a great extent he succeeded, and for the last twelve years of his reign he exercised a hateful spiritual tyranny over his subjects, drawing a hard-and-fast line of submission to his own views, which no man was allowed to overstep in either direction. Roman Catholics who denied his power to supersede the Pope's authority were hung as traitors. Protestants who refused to accept his theory of the Sacraments were burnt as heretics.

[Sidenote: =The monasteries.=]

The turning-point of Henry's reign was the turbulent and boisterous year 1536-7. In pursuance of his plan of a campaign against the papacy, disguised under the shape of a reform of abuses, Henry had resolved to attack the monasteries. The monks had long been an unpopular class: the impulse towards monasticism, which had been so vigorous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had long died away, and ever since the time of Wicliffe men had been asking each other what was the use of the monasteries? There were no less than 619 of them in England. They were enormously wealthy, and they did little to justify their existence; they had long ceased to be centres of learning or of teaching. Beyond going through their daily round of mechanical Church services, their inmates did absolutely nothing. Their wealth had led to much luxury, both of splendid building and of high living. To this day the traveller who measures the ruins of enormous and sumptuous abbeys planted in the wilderness--like Tintern or Fountains--and learns that they served no public or spiritual end save the sheltering of a few dozen monks, wonders at the magnificence of the husk which contained so small and withered a kernel. But the monasteries were worse than useless--they were absolutely harmful; their worst habit was to acquire rich country livings, draw all the tithes from them, and work them with a vicar on starvation wages. If we see a poor living in modern England, we generally find that the monks sucked the marrow out of it in the Middle Ages, to rear their colossal chapels and their magnificent refectories. It was the monasteries, too, which by their indiscriminate doles and charities, reared and fostered the horde of itinerant beggars who, under the name of pilgrims, tramped from abbey to abbey all the year round. Worse than this, there is no doubt that a considerable amount of evil living prevailed in some of the monasteries. Before the Reformation had been heard of, we find Archbishop Warham and Cardinal Wolsey storming at the immorality of certain religious houses. It was but natural that idleness, luxury, and high living should breed such results among the grosser souls in the monastic corporations. In public esteem the better houses suffered for the sins of the worse.

[Sidenote: =Inquiry into their condition.=]

The monks had always been the faithful allies of the Popes, and Henry determined to suppress this "papal militia," as they have been called, and at the same time to fill his pockets from their plunder. Accordingly, he sent commissioners round England, to report on the state of the religious houses. These officials--as the king had wished--drew up a very gloomy report. They declared that they found nothing but idleness and corruption among the smaller monasteries, and that many of the greater were no better. There can be no doubt that they grossly exaggerated the blackness of the picture, knowing that the king would welcome all possible justification for the action which he was meditating. But it is equally certain that in most parts of England the monks were deservedly unpopular, and that the commissioners' report only reflected the nation's belief.

[Sidenote: =The lesser monasteries suppressed.=]

Henry laid the report before his Parliament, and at his suggestion an act was passed suppressing the lesser monasteries--all such as had an income of less than £200 per annum. Their goods were confiscated to the Crown, but an allowance was made to such of the monks as did not find places in the surviving monasteries of the larger sort (1536).

[Sidenote: =Henry and Anne Boleyn.=]

The year of the dissolution of small monasteries was notable for a tragedy in the palace, which shows Henry's unlovely character at its worst. He had been growing cold to the fair and ambitious queen who had brought on him his quarrel with Rome. She had disappointed his hope of a male heir--only the Princess Elizabeth had sprung from the marriage. Henry had tired of her voluptuous airs and graces, and was beginning to feel vexed at the want of dignity and decorum which she displayed among his courtiers. Anne's light words and unseemly familiarity with many of the gentlemen of his household roused his anger. But what was most fatal to the unfortunate queen was that his eye had caught another face about the court, which now seemed to him more attractive than his wife's.

[Sidenote: =Anne's execution.--Marriage with Jane Seymour.=]

Suddenly and unexpectedly the storm burst. On May 2, 1536, the king sent Anne to the Tower, and charged her with misconduct with several members of his household. Protesting her innocence and amazement to the last, the unhappy young wife was tried, condemned, and executed, within a space of less than three weeks from her arrest. Her own father and uncle sat on the bench of peers which declared her an adulteress; but the fact witnesses to their shame and cowardice rather than to her criminality. In all probability she was guilty of nothing more than unwise levity; her real crime was not adultery, but standing in the way of Henry's lawless desires. With the most unseemly haste, the king wedded Jane Seymour, the lady who had already attracted his notice, the moment that his wretched second wife had breathed her last.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion in Ireland and the North.=]

But he had small leisure to spend on his wedding, for the year 1536 was one of great peril to him. A rebellion in Ireland, led by the Fitzgeralds, the greatest of the Anglo-Irish nobles, was already in progress. A still more dangerous phenomenon was the stir which was arising in the North of England. The Northern counties were always a generation behind the rest of England in their politics. There the monks were more powerful and less disliked than in any other part of the land, and the nobles still retained much of their old feudal power over their vassals, and some of their old turbulence. The North had beheld the breach with Rome with dismay and dislike, and remained strongly Papist in its sympathies. The dissolution of the monasteries moved it to an active protest against the king's religious action.

[Sidenote: =The Pilgrimage of Grace.=]

Rioting suddenly broke out in Lincolnshire, and then in Yorkshire. The insurgents gathered in great bands, and at last no less than 30,000 men mustered at Doncaster, under Robert Aske, a lawyer, and Lord Darcy. They called themselves the army of the Church, raised a banner displaying the five wounds of Christ as their standard, and demanded a reconciliation with the Pope, the restoration of the religious houses, and the dismissal of the king's impious minister Cromwell, and the "heretic bishops" who had favoured the breach with Rome. The gentry of the North and the priors and abbots of the great abbeys of Yorkshire joined the rising, which men called "the Pilgrimage of Grace," because the rebels wished to go to meet the king, and to submit their demands to his personal judgment. Henry was caught unprepared, but he managed to extricate himself from the peril by his unscrupulous double-dealing. He sent the Duke of Norfolk, whose dislike of Protestantism was well known, to treat with the rebels. Norfolk pledged his word that the king would pardon the insurgents, and take all their demands into favourable consideration. The simple Northerners dispersed, trusting to Henry's good faith; but the king employed the time he had gained in raising an army, and getting together a great train of artillery. He then marched into Yorkshire as an invader, and made no further pretence of listening to the claims of the insurgents. In consequence, the more vehement of the partisans of the old faith again took arms. This was as Henry desired, for he wanted an excuse to terrorize the North. He easily put down the second rising, and hung all the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace: Aske, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, and the abbots of all the greatest monastic establishments of the North--Whalley, Fountains, Jervaulx, Barlings, and Sawley (March-May, 1537).

[Sidenote: =Execution of the Marquis of Exeter and Henry Pole.=]

This fearful blow cowed most of the partisans of the papacy, and no more open revolts followed. But a little later the last representatives of the house of York were detected in paths which the king suspected to be treasonable. They thought, it seems, that the indignation of the Catholics against the king's doings might be turned into a dynastic revolution in favour of the old royal line. Edward Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, a grandson of Edward IV., and Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, a grandson of George of Clarence, were the persons implicated in this intrigue, which never got beyond the stage of treasonable talk. Nevertheless, the king beheaded them both, though the evidence against them was most imperfect; but Henry never stayed his hand for want of legal proof, and slew all whom he suspected. He even imprisoned, and some years afterwards executed, the aged mother of Lord Montagu--Margaret of Clarence, Countess of Salisbury, sister of the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, whom his father had slain forty-one years back.

[Sidenote: =The Irish rebellion crushed.=]

The insurrection in Ireland, which had been raging at the same time as the Pilgrimage of Grace, ended in a way no less profitable to the king. Not only did he capture and hang well-nigh the whole family of the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, the heads of the rising, but his armies, under Lord-Deputy Grey, pushed out from the English Pale, and compelled most of the chiefs of Munster and Connaught to do homage to the Crown, though the king's writ had not run in those provinces for two centuries. This was the first step towards the conquest of Ireland afterwards carried out by Queen Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: =Growth of Protestantism. Tyndale's Bible.=]

Meanwhile Henry's determination to strike at all the roots of papal power in England, had been carrying him further than he himself realized on the road towards Protestantism. The "Articles of 1536," drawn up by his own hand, declared that all doctrines and ceremonies for which authority could not be found in the Bible, were superstitious and erroneous. As a logical consequence of this declaration, the Bible itself, translated into English, was issued to the people by royal order in 1538, and ordered to be placed in every church. The translation used was that made by a zealous Protestant, William Tyndale, who had printed it in Antwerp some years before; the unfortunate translator had been caught and burnt by the Emperor Charles V., only a short time before his book became the rule of life for Englishmen.

[Sidenote: =The greater monasteries suppressed.=]

When the Bible had once been placed in the hands of the people, Protestantism in England began to advance by leaps and bounds. It was secretly favoured both by Archbishop Cranmer and by the king's great minister Cromwell. The latter, more logical than his master, wished to see all traces of Roman Catholicism removed from England, and tried to guide the king towards a frank recognition of Protestantism, and an alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany. But it was dangerous work to endeavour to govern or persuade Henry, as Cromwell was to find to his cost. One more step at least he did induce his master to take--the final destruction of all the remaining monasteries. The plunder of the lesser houses had been so profitable, that Henry was easily induced to doom the greater to the same fate. In the course of 1538-9-40 all were swept away; in many cases, the abbots and monks were induced to surrender their estates peaceably into the king's hands, in return for pensions or promotion. But where persuasion failed, force was used; an Act of Parliament was passed by Henry's submissive Commons, bestowing on him the lands of all monastic foundations. Then they were suppressed--the harmless and well-ordered ones no less than the worst and most corrupt. When the monks offered obstinate resistance, the king dealt very cruelly with them--the wealthy abbots of Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, were all hung, really for reluctance to surrender their houses, nominally for treason in refusing to acknowledge the king's complete spiritual supremacy as head of the Church. The enormous plunder of the monasteries brought the king little permanent good; he had promised to use it for ecclesiastical purposes, and had broached a scheme for founding many new churches and schools, and creating twenty fresh bishoprics. But in the end he lavished most of the lands of the religious houses upon those of the nobles and gentry whom he thought worth bribing. The Church only benefited by the endowing of the six new bishoprics--Oxford, Chester, Peterborough, Bristol, Gloucester, and the short-lived see of Westminster.

[Sidenote: =The Six Articles.=]

But Henry was resolved to show the Protestants that they must not expect his countenance, in spite of the blows which he was dealing at the Roman Catholics. In the very year in which the majority of the greater monasteries fell, he forced his Parliament to pass the cruel "Bill of the Six Articles." This odious measure condemned to forfeiture on the first offence, and to death on the second, all who should write or speak against certain of the ancient doctrines of the mediaeval Church, of which Transubstantiation in the Sacrament, the celibacy of the clergy, and auricular confession were the chief (1539).

[Sidenote: =Birth of a son. Death of Jane Seymour.=]

Meanwhile the king had at last obtained the male heir for whom he had so much longed. His third wife, Jane Seymour, bore him a son, Prince Edward, in 1537, though she died at the child's birth. On this boy all Henry's fondness was lavished: he was to be the sole heir to the throne, and his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were both stigmatized as illegitimate.

[Sidenote: =Marriage with Anne of Cleves.=]

After he had mourned Queen Jane for two years, Henry wished to marry again. By Cromwell's persuasion he sought a wife among the Protestant princes of Germany, thinking so to strengthen himself against the Emperor Charles, who never to his death forgave him the matter of Catherine of Aragon's divorce. To his own ruin, Cromwell persuaded the king to choose Anne, sister of Duke William of Cleves, as his fourth spouse. The lady was plain and stupid--facts which Cromwell carefully concealed from his master till she had been solemnly betrothed to him and brought over to England. Henry was bitterly provoked when he was confronted with his new queen, and could not behave with ordinary civility to her. When he learnt that the German alliances which he was to buy with his marriage had fallen through, he repudiated the unfortunate Anne. She was fortunately of a philosophic mood, and readily consented to be bought off for a large annual pension and a handsome residence at Chelsea.

[Sidenote: =Execution of Cromwell.=]

Henry at once wreaked his vengeance on Cromwell for deceiving him as to Anne and for failing in his negotiations with the German princes. He had him arrested, and accused him of receiving bribes and of having favoured the Protestants by "dispersing heretical books and secretly releasing heretics from prison." Both charges were probably true, but they form no excuse for Henry's cruel treatment of the faithful and intrepid minister who had helped him through all the troubles of 1536-40. Cromwell was attainted and beheaded, to the great joy of the Roman Catholics, who thought that he had been the king's tempter and evil genius, whereas in truth he had been no more than his tool.

[Sidenote: =Marriages with Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr.=]

Cromwell's end greatly encouraged the Roman Catholic party, and they were still more elated when the king married a lady known to incline towards the old faith. This was Catherine Howard, a cousin of Anne Boleyn and, like her, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk (1540). Henry had been caught by her beauty, and had not discovered that she was a person of abandoned manners, whose amours were known to many persons about the court. Within eighteen months of her marriage, she was detected in misconduct with one of her old lovers, and sent to the block. In her case Henry had much more excuse for his ruthless cruelty than in that of Anne Boleyn; but what kind of wives could a monarch of such manners expect to find? He was undeservedly fortunate in his sixth marriage, with Catherine Parr, the dowager Lady Latimer, whom he wedded a year after Catherine Howard's execution. She was a young widow of twenty-six, a person of piety and discretion, who gave no opportunity of offence to the king, and nursed him faithfully through the infirmities of his later years. For Henry, who had now reached the age of fifty-two, was growing grossly corpulent and developing a complication of diseases which racked him fearfully during the last five years of his life, and partly explain the frantic exhibitions of cruelty to which he often gave way.

[Sidenote: =Scottish war.--Battle of Solway Moss.=]

The time was a very evil one for England. Not only was the king persecuting Romanist and Protestant indifferently, but he had added external to internal troubles. A war with Scotland had broken out in 1540, and was always keeping the northern frontier unquiet, though the English had the better in the fighting. James V. allied himself to France, and Henry had to keep guard against attacks on the south as well as the north. The victory of Solway Moss (November, 1542) put an end to any danger from Scotland; the news of it killed King James, who left his throne to his infant daughter Mary, the celebrated "Queen of Scots." Her minority gave rise to factious struggles among the Scottish nobles, and Henry, by buying over one party, was able to keep the rest in check. In 1544 a great English army, under the Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour's brother, laid waste the whole of the Lowlands and burnt Edinburgh, but did not succeed in driving the enemy to sue for peace.

[Sidenote: =War with France.=]

The French war was far more dangerous. King Francis collected a great fleet in Normandy, and threatened an invasion of England. Henry was forced to arm and pay a vast array of shire levies to meet the attack, but when it came (1545) the French were only able to land and make a raid in the Isle of Wight. They drew back after fruitlessly demonstrating against Portsmouth and burning a few English ships. The balance of gain in the war was actually in favour of Henry, who had taken Boulogne (1544), and proved able to retain it against all attempts, till it was ceded to him by France at the peace of 1546.

[Sidenote: =Debasement of the currency.=]

But the struggles with France and Scotland had the most disastrous effects on the finances of the realm. Henry had wasted all the wealth that he had wrested from the monasteries, and now, to fill his pockets, tried the unrighteous expedient of debasing the currency. English money, which had been hitherto the best and purest in Europe, was horribly misused by him. He put one-sixth of copper into the gold sovereign, and one-half and afterwards two-thirds of copper into the silver shilling, to the lamentable defrauding of his subjects, who found that English money would no longer be accepted by Continental traders, though previously it had been more esteemed than that of any other country.

[Sidenote: =Growth of pauperism.=]

The debasement of the coinage was only one of the many symptoms of misgovernment which embittered the end of Henry's reign. The general upheaval of society caused by the overthrow of the monasteries, and the sudden transfer of their enormous estates to new holders, had given rise to much distress. Not only were the paupers who had lived on the monks' doles, and the pilgrims who had been wont to wander from abbey to abbey, thrown on the world to beg, but many of the old tenant farmers were displaced. For the new owners often preferred sheep-breeding to agriculture, and drove out the cottiers who had been wont to hold a few acres under the old-fashioned management of the monastic bodies. Contemporary writers speak bitterly of the plague of "sturdy and valiant beggars" who flooded the land--unfrocked monks, pilgrims whose trade was over, disbanded soldiers, and evicted peasantry. The king and his Parliament issued the most ferocious laws against these vagrants--when apprehended they were to be branded, and given as serfs for two years to any one who chose to ask for their services. If caught a second time, they were liable to be hung as incorrigible.

[Sidenote: =Execution of the Earl of Surrey.=]

To complete this gloomy picture, there only remains to be added the story of the king's last outburst of suspicion and cruelty. Conceiving that the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were counting on his approaching death to make an attempt to seize the regency, he had them both apprehended, though nothing definite could be alleged against them, save that of late they had taken to quartering the royal arms in their family shield--a distinction to which they were entitled as descended from Edward III. Surrey, a soldier of great promise and a poet of considerable power, was beheaded; his father was doomed to follow him, had not the king's death intervened. It is even said that Henry, in one of his more irritable moods, was threatening to try his blameless wife, Queen Catherine, for concealed Protestantism.

[Sidenote: =Death of Henry.--Condition of England.=]

But to the general relief of England, Henry died before this last crime could be consummated (January 28, 1547). He left his realm in a condition of great misery, and for all its troubles he was personally responsible. His breach with the papacy had been the result of private pique, not of conscience or principle. When committed to the anti-Roman cause, he had refused to move forward with the one half of his subjects, or to remain behind with the other. He had anchored the English Church for a time in a middle position, intolerable alike to Protestant Reformers and to the Partisans of the Papacy and subjection to Rome. If the nation owed him a certain debt of gratitude for not committing England to some of the excesses of Continental Protestantism, yet it owed him no thanks for officering the Church with a hierarchy of bishops, some of whom, like Cranmer, were meanly timid and pliant, while others were men of low ideals and unworthy lives, the mere creatures of court favour. Nor is it possible to view with equanimity the way in which Henry wasted on pageants, foreign intrigues, and fawning courtiers, the vast sums which the State had acquired by the very proper and necessary abolition of the monasteries.

Of Henry's unbounded selfishness, of his ingratitude to those who had served him best, of his ruthless cruelty to all who stood in his way, we need not further speak. The story of his reign develops each of these traits in its own particular blackness.

[Sidenote: =Henry's foreign policy.=]

Some historians have endeavoured to justify Henry's wavering foreign policy, and all his forcible-feeble wars with Continental powers, by the plea that, if he got no gain in land or gold thereby, yet he raised England to a higher place among European nations than she had held in his father's day. But this statement seems unwise. Henry, though much flattered and courted at times, was in fact the mere dupe of Francis I. and Charles V., each of whom cheated him again and again, and left him hopelessly in the lurch. England's growing wealth and power would have won her back her proper place in Europe far better than Henry's chaotic intrigues. His whole foreign policy was a mistake and a tangle from first to last.

[Sidenote: =The regency.--The Duke of Somerset Protector.=]

It remained to be seen who would now sway the sword and sceptre that the dead tyrant had gripped so firmly. In his last years Henry had surrounded himself by ministers less notable and less capable than Wolsey or Cromwell. The chief place was held by his brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of the unfortunate Queen Jane, and the uncle of Prince Edward, the heir to the crown. It was natural that the charge of the young king--a bright and promising, but delicate lad, now in his tenth year--should fall to his uncle; but the late king, distrusting Hertford's wisdom, had left the regency, not to him individually, but to a council of sixteen members, of which he was but the president. Seymour, however, succeeded in getting a more complete control over his colleagues than had been intended, mainly by bribing them to consent with titles and large gifts of money. They allowed him to make himself "Protector of the realm and of the king's person," and to create himself Duke of Somerset. In return he made the two chief members of the council earls; Wriothsley, head of the Anglo-Catholic party, became Earl of Southampton; Dudley--son of that Dudley who had paid with his head for serving Henry VII. too well--was created Earl of Warwick.

[Sidenote: =Protestantism of Somerset.--First English Prayer-book.=]

Having seized the reins of power, the Duke of Somerset soon showed himself a man of a character very different from the late king's expectation. Instead of pursuing the middle course of Anglo-Catholic policy which Henry had always marked out, he threw himself at once into the hands of the Protestants. His first actions were directed towards the completion of the Reformation, by sweeping away all those remnants of the old faith which the late king had retained himself and imposed upon his subjects. Henry VIII. had issued the Bible in English, and caused the Litany and certain other parts of the Church service to be said in the national tongue. But Somerset abolished the use of the Latin language altogether, and caused the Communion Service and all the rest of the rites of the Church to be celebrated in English. By the end of 1548 he had authorized the issue of the "First Book of Common Prayer," the earliest form of our own Anglican Prayer-book. Cranmer had the chief part in its compilation, and his great gifts of expression are borne witness to by many of the most spiritual and beautiful prayers of our splendid and sonorous liturgy. When the fear of Henry had been removed from his mind, Cranmer showed himself an undoubted Protestant; but he was a moderate man, and spared many old rites and customs, harmless in themselves, from a love of conservatism. The Prayer-book was well received by all save the extreme Romanists, and the few partisans of Continental Protestantism who complained that it did not go far enough.

If the introduction of the English Prayer-book was both popular and necessary, it was far otherwise with the measures which accompanied it. Somerset's first year of rule was the time of the demolition of all the old church ornaments and furniture, which the Protestants condemned as mere idols and lumber. Not only were the images and pictures removed, but much beautiful carved work and stained glass was ruthlessly broken up. This was done with an irreverence and violence which deeply shocked the majority of the nation, and Somerset's agents made no distinction between monuments of superstition and harmless works of religious art. Two of the bishops, Bonner of London and Gardiner of Winchester, who ventured to oppose the Protector's doings, were placed in honourable confinement.

[Sidenote: =Invasion of Scotland.--Battle of Pinkie.=]

While England was disturbed with these changes, many of them rational and necessary, but all of them hasty and rash, Somerset had succeeded in plunging the realm into two foreign wars. The English party north of the Tweed had promised the hand of their little five-year-old Queen Mary to King Edward, but when they proved unable to fulfil their promise, owing to the hatred of the majority of the Scots for England, the Protector resolved to use coercive measures. He declared war, and invaded the Lowlands in the autumn of 1547, wasting the country before him till he was met by the whole levy of Scotland on the hillside of Pinkie, near Musselborough. There he inflicted on them a bloody defeat, but gained no advantage thereby; for the Scots sent their child-queen over to France, to keep her safe from English hands, and when she reached the court of Henry II. she was wedded to his son, the Dauphin Francis. Thus Somerset entirely lost the object of his campaign, and only earned the desperate hate of the Scots for the carnage of Pinkie.

[Sidenote: =Plots and Rebellions in England.=]

The war with Scotland brought about a war with France, in which the Protector wasted much money. The struggle went against the English, and ultimately led to the loss of Boulogne, the sole conquest of Henry VIII. While this war was in progress, Somerset was involved in serious troubles within the bounds of England itself. He detected his own brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely, plotting to marry the Princess Elizabeth, and oust him from the regency. Seymour was pardoned once, but, on renewing his conspiracy, was apprehended and beheaded. But domestic plots were less to be feared than popular risings. In 1548-49 two dangerous rebellions broke out in West and East. In Devonshire the old Catholic party rose in arms, clamouring for the restoration of the Mass and the suppression of Protestantism. In the Eastern Counties an insurrection of another sort was seen; the peasantry banded themselves together under the tanner Robert Ket, who called himself the "King of Norfolk and Suffolk." They dreamed of a social revolution such as that which Wat Tyler had demanded in an earlier age, though their grievances were not the same as those of the fourteenth century. They complained of the rapacity of the new landholders who had superseded the old monastic bodies, and who were evicting the old peasantry right and left, and turning farms into sheep-runs, because wool paid better than corn. The enclosure of common lands, the debasement of the coinage, and the slowness and inefficacy of the law when used by the poor man, were also denounced. Ket and his fellows began seizing and trying unpopular landholders, and spoke of making a clean sweep of the upper classes.

[Sidenote: =Ket's rebellion put down.=]

Now, the Protector had no scruple in putting down the rising of the Devonshire Papists with great severity, but he felt that the Norfolk men had great excuses for their anger, and did not deal promptly and sternly with them. Ket's rising became very dangerous, and it seemed as if anarchy would set in all over the Eastern Counties. The rebels defeated the Marquis of Northampton, and stormed Norwich; they were only dispersed at last by Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, who marched against them with a mercenary force which had been collected for the Scottish war, and routed them on Mousehold Heath. Ket was then hung, and the rebellion subsided.

[Sidenote: =Deposition of Somerset.=]

Somerset's mismanagement and weakness had so disgusted his colleagues in the regency that, after the eastern rebellion, they resolved to depose him from the Protectorship. Finding that he could count on small support, and that the council would be able to turn against him the armies which had pacified Norfolk and Devon, he wisely laid down his power. He was sent for a short time to the Tower, but soon the council released him, and gave him a place among them (1550).

[Sidenote: =Earl of Warwick Protector.=]

Somerset's place was taken by John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, son of the extortionate minister of Henry VII. The new Protector was far more unscrupulous and corrupt than his predecessor. Somerset had been a well-meaning if an incapable ruler. Warwick was purely self-seeking, and cared nothing for national ends. He showed himself not much more competent as a ruler than the man he had overthrown, but he kept his power more firmly than Somerset, because he never hesitated to strike down all who opposed him, without any regard for justice or mercy.

[Sidenote: =His religious policy.--Second Book of Common Prayer.=]

Warwick, finding the Protestant party in the ascendant, used them for his own ends, though in reality he was perfectly indifferent to religion. His tendencies were shown by the appointment of several bishops of ultra-Protestant views, and by the issuing of the "Second Book of Common Prayer," to supersede the first. In this volume strong signs of the influence of Continental Protestantism are found, and the many traces of the pre-Reformation ritual were swept away.

Warwick's administration (1550-53) was no happier than Somerset's. He was forced to make a humiliating peace with France, and to surrender Boulogne. Though he began to reform the coinage by issuing good silver money, yet he made the change harmful to the people by refusing to take back the old base money at the rate at which it had been issued,[32] and by actually uttering a considerable amount of debased money himself.

[Sidenote: =Marriage of his son and Lady Jane Grey.=]

But reckless self-seeking was the main key-note of Warwick's rule. He employed his power unscrupulously to enrich both himself and his family. He took for himself the title of Duke of Northumberland, and ere long allied himself to the royal house by marrying his younger son, Guildford Dudley, to the king's cousin, Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of the Princess Mary, the favourite sister of Henry VIII. This alliance led him into schemes which were to prove his ruin. The young king was a bright and precocious boy, showing signs of capacity and strength of will beyond his years. If he had lived, he would have been a man of mark, for already in his sixteenth year he was showing a keen interest in politics and religion, and a tendency to think for himself. But he was incurably delicate, and by 1553 was obviously falling into consumption.

[Sidenote: =The succession to the crown.--Will of Henry VIII.=]

Dudley saw that his power was bound to vanish on the king's death, if the law of succession was maintained, and the king's eldest sister Mary, the child of Catherine of Aragon, allowed to succeed. The late king had drawn up a will, in which he indicated that, if Edward died, he should be followed first by Mary, and then by her younger sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Henry had then added that, if all his children died heirless, he left the crown to the issue of his favourite sister Mary, the Duchess of Suffolk, and not to the descendants of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland.

[Sidenote: =Edward VI. bequeaths the crown to Lady Jane Grey.=]

Now, Lady Jane Grey, the heiress of Mary of Suffolk, was in Northumberland's hands, through her marriage with his son. Accordingly, the duke resolved to persuade the young king to cut his sisters out of the succession, and leave the crown by will to his cousin. The pretext used was that both Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, the marriages of Catherine and of Anne to Henry VIII. having both been declared void at different times by the obsequious Parliaments of the last reign. It was, of course, utterly absurd that a boy of sixteen should have the power to make a will transferring the crown, for by English usage the king's title depended on hereditary right and Parliamentary sanction, not on the arbitrary decision of his predecessor. It was entirely unconstitutional to think of disinheriting the two princesses by a mere private document drawn up by their brother. But the young king was persuaded to grant his guardian's request, mainly because he feared the Romanist reaction which he knew would follow on the accession of his elder sister, who had always remained an obstinate adherent of the papacy.

[Sidenote: =Execution of Somerset.=]

Long before the king's death, Northumberland had taken all the measures which he thought necessary for carrying out this arbitrary change in the succession. He had packed the council with his hired partisans, and swept away the only man that he feared, his predecessor Somerset. For noting that the late Protector was regaining popularity, and might prove a check upon him, he suddenly laid against him charges of treason and felony, alleging that he was plotting to regain the regency by force of arms. The unfortunate Somerset was condemned and executed, to the great indignation of the people, who esteemed his good heart, though they had doubted his judgment (1552).

All through the following year King Edward's health was failing, and Dudley was perfecting his plans. In the summer of 1553 the young king wasted away, and slowly sank into his grave. His cousin, Lady Jane, was at once proclaimed queen by the unscrupulous Protector.

FOOTNOTE:

[32] He would only take back as sixpences the base testoons (or shillings) which Somerset had paid out from the treasury at full value, alleging truly enough that they had but 4-1/2_d._ of good silver in them.

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XXIII. THE CATHOLIC REACTION

1553-1558.

[Sidenote: =England loyal to Princess Mary.=]

The death of Edward VI. gave the signal for the outbreak of trouble all over England. The nation had acquiesced in the selfish and unscrupulous government of Northumberland solely because of its loyalty to the young king. When Edward passed away, it became at once evident that the Protector's power had no firm base, and that his attempt to change the succession would be fruitless. For every man, the Protestant no less than the Catholic, was fully persuaded that the Princess Mary was the true heir to the crown, and there was no party in the state--save the personal adherents of Dudley--who were prepared to strike a blow against her.

[Sidenote: =Lady Jane Grey proclaimed queen.=]

Meanwhile, however, the Protector proclaimed his daughter-in-law queen in London, though citizens and courtiers alike maintained an attitude of cold disapproval. The Lady Jane was personally well liked; she was an innocent girl of seventeen, who loved her husband and her books, and had no knowledge or skill in affairs of state. But every one knew that she was a usurper--a fact which no personal merits could gloze over.

[Sidenote: =Collapse and execution of Northumberland.=]

Northumberland directed his first efforts to seize the person of the Princess Mary. He sent his son, the Earl of Warwick, to lay hands on her, but she escaped and fled into the Eastern Counties, where the gentry of Norfolk and Suffolk, the most Protestant shires in the kingdom, hailed her as queen, and armed to defend her. Warwick's troops dispersed when he strove to induce them to attack the followers of the rightful heiress. This alarming symptom startled the Protector out of his security; he raised a larger force and set out at once to suppress the rising. But the moment that he had left London there was an outbreak in the capital itself. The majority of the royal council, when Northumberland's eye was off them, threw in their lot with the rioters, and London fell into the hands of Mary's partisans. Nor was this all. The whole of the shires from north to south rose in Mary's favour, and the Protector, who had marched as far as Cambridge, saw his army melt away from him. When the Earl of Arundel came against him in the name of the rightful queen, he was constrained to give up his sword and yield himself a prisoner. He was brought back to London, tried, and condemned for high treason. His last days showed the meanness of his character; for, in the hope of propitiating the queen, he declared himself a Catholic, heard Mass, and made fulsome and degrading protestations of contrition and humility. They did not save his life, for he was beheaded, to the great joy of all England, only six weeks after the death of Edward VI. (August 22, 1553). Mary cast into prison all Northumberland's tools: the unfortunate Lady Jane--queen for just thirteen days--her husband Lord Guildford Dudley, her father the Duke of Suffolk, and most of the Dudley kin. For the present they suffered no further harm.

[Sidenote: =The fanaticism of Mary.=]

The rightful heiress was now set upon the throne, and England had leisure to look on her and learn her moods. Mary was in her thirty-ninth year. Ever since her unfortunate mother's divorce she had been living in neglect and seclusion; her father had stigmatized her as a bastard, and her brother had kept her from court. For twenty years she had been nursing her own and her mother's wrongs in lonely country manors, denied all the state and deference that were her due, and closely supervised by the underlings of the Crown. It was small wonder that she had grown up discontented, suspicious, and morose. One help had sustained her through all her troubles--her intense faith in the old creed, which she believed to be true, and therefore bound to triumph in the end. Veritas temporis filia was her favourite motto.[33] Mary's Catholicism was something more than earnest; it was a devouring flame, ready to consume all that stood in its way. She was set on avenging all the blood that had been shed by her father, all the insults to the old faith that had been inflicted by the ministers of her brother. She thought that she had come with a mission not merely to reconcile England to the papacy, but to scourge her for her past backsliding.

The nation did not yet know of the habits of mind which its mistress harboured. The Protestants were ready to acquiesce in her rule; the majority, who were neither Protestants nor Papists, trusted that she was about to take up the middle course that her father had chosen; the Romanist minority hardly expected more than this from her at the first. But Mary's actions soon showed that she was set on a more violent reaction; not only did she release from bonds the imprisoned bishops, Bonner and Gardiner, the old Duke of Norfolk--a captive since 1547--and all others who had suffered under her father and brother, but she began to molest those who had taken a prominent part in the religious doings of the late reign. Proceedings were begun against ten Protestant bishops, including Cranmer, the Primate of England, before she had been two months on the throne. Some of them fled over seas; the others were caught and put into confinement. The restoration of the Latin Mass was everywhere commanded. All married clergy were threatened with removal from their benefices. Mary began to speak openly of placing her realm under the supremacy of the Pope, and even of restoring to the Church all the monastic estates that her father had appropriated, an idea which filled every landowner with dismay.

[Sidenote: =Projected marriage with Philip of Spain.=]

Meanwhile, another project was filling Mary's brain. She was determined to marry, and to rear up a Catholic heir to the throne; for she hated her half-sister, the Princess Elizabeth--Anne Boleyn's child--and utterly refused to acknowledge her legitimacy, or to own her as her next of kin. Mary had conceived a romantic affection on hearsay evidence for her cousin, Philip of Spain, the son and heir of the Emperor Charles V., a young prince twelve years her junior, whose charms and merits had been grossly overpraised to her by interested persons. The prospect of winning England for his son allured the Emperor, and he warmly pressed the marriage, though Philip did not view with satisfaction the pursuit of such an elderly bride.

[Sidenote: =Unpopularity of the Spanish match.=]

When the queen's intention of wedding Philip of Spain began to be known, it led to great discontent, for such a match implied not only a close union with the papal party on the Continent, but the resumption of the war with France, which had brought so much loss and so little gain under Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; for Spain and France were still involved in their standing struggle for domination on the Continent, and alliance with the one meant war with the other.

[Sidenote: =Wyatt's rebellion.=]

When the queen's betrothal to Philip was announced, trouble at once followed. The Protestant party had viewed with dismay the restoration of the Mass, and foresaw persecution close at hand; many who were not Protestants were anxious to stop the Spanish marriage and the renewal of the foreign war. Hence came the breaking out of a dangerous rebellion, aiming at Mary's deposition, and the substitution for her of her sister Elizabeth, who was, however, kept in ignorance of the plot. The conspirators intended her to marry Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, son of the Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, whom Henry VIII. had beheaded in 1539, and last heir of the house of York. Courtenay himself, a vain and incapable young man, was not the real head of the conspiracy, which was mainly guided by the Duke of Suffolk--the father of Lady Jane Grey--and by Sir Thomas Wyatt, a young knight of Kent. Courtenay's babbling folly betrayed the plot too soon, and the conspirators had to rise before they were ready. Their armed bands were easily crushed in all parts of England save in Kent; Wyatt raised 10,000 men in that very Protestant county, and boldly marched on London. The Government had no sufficient force ready to hold him back, and he nearly succeeded in seizing the capital and the queen's person, for many of the Londoners were ready to throw open the gates to him. But the queen induced him to halt for a day by sending offers for an accommodation, and when he reached London Bridge he found it so strongly held that after some heavy fighting he gave up the passage as impossible, and started westward to cross the Thames at Kingston. This delay saved Mary. She displayed great courage and activity, hurried up to London all the trustworthy gentry within her reach, persuaded many of the citizens to arm in her favour, and was able to offer a firm resistance when Wyatt at last appeared in Middlesex and pressed on into the western suburbs of the city. The queen's troops and the insurgents fought a running fight from Knightsbridge to Charing Cross; Wyatt, with the head of his column, cut his way down the Strand as far as Ludgate Hill, but his main body was broken up and dispersed, and he himself, after a gallant struggle, was taken prisoner at Temple Bar.

[Sidenote: =Harsh measures of Mary.=]

Mary had much excuse for severity against the conquered rebels, but her vengeance went far beyond the bounds of wisdom. Wyatt was cruelly tortured to make him implicate the Princess Elizabeth in the plot, but died protesting that he had acted without her knowledge. Suffolk and his brother, Sir Thomas Grey, were beheaded; eighty of the more important rebels were hung; but in addition the unpardonable crime of slaying Lady Jane Grey was committed. She and her husband had been prisoners all the time of the rising, but Mary thought the opportunity of getting rid of her too good to be lost, and beheaded both her and Lord Guildford Dudley, on the vain pretence that they had been concerned in the conspiracy. The young ex-queen suffered with a dignity and constancy that moved all hearts, affirming to the last her firm adherence to the Protestant faith, and her innocence of all treasonable intent against her cousin (February 12, 1554). There seems little doubt that the queen's own sister, the Princess Elizabeth, would have shared Lady Jane's fate, if only sufficient evidence against her could have been procured. The incapable Earl of Devon owed his life to his insignificance, and was banished after a long sojourn in the Tower.

[Sidenote: =Marriage with Philip.--Submission to Rome.=]

Victorious over her enemies, Queen Mary was now able to carry out her unwise plans without hindrance. In July, 1554, Philip of Spain came over from Flanders, and wedded her at Winchester. In the same autumn a Parliament, elected under strong royal pressure, voted in favour of reconciliation with Rome, and a complete acknowledgment of the papal supremacy. In the capacity of Legate to England, there appeared Reginald Pole, a long-exiled English cardinal of Yorkist blood, brother of that Lord Montagu whom Henry VIII. had slain in 1539. He solemnly absolved the two Houses of Parliament from the papal excommunication which so long had lain upon the land. Shortly afterwards the submission of the realm to the papacy was celebrated in the most typical way by the solemn re-enacting of the cruel statute of Henry IV., De Heretico Comburendo, which made the stake once more the doom of all who refused to obey the Pope. Mary herself, a fanatical party among her bishops, of whom Bonner of London was the worst, and the Legate must all take their share of the responsibility for this crime. The queen had her wrongs to revenge; the bishops had suffered long in prison under King Edward; Pole had been accused by his enemies of Lutheranism, and was anxious to vindicate his orthodoxy by showing a readiness to put Protestants to death.

[Sidenote: =Persecution of the Protestants--Latimer and Ridley.=]

From the moment of the enacting of the laws against heresy (January, 1555), the history of Mary's reign became a catalogue of horrors. Even the callous Philip of Spain, moved by policy if not by pity, besought his wife to hold her hand. But Mary was inflexible. The burnings began with those of Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, and Rogers, Prebendary of St. Paul's, in February, 1555. They went steadily on at the rate of about ten persons a month, till the queen's death. The persecution raged worst in London, the see of the rough and harsh Bishop Bonner; in Canterbury, where Pole succeeded Cranmer; and in the Eastern Counties; there were comparatively few victims in the West and North. As cautious men fled over-sea, and weak men conformed to the queen's faith, it was precisely the most fervent and pious of the Protestants who suffered. The sight of so many men of godly life and blameless conversation going to the stake for their faith, achieved the end that neither the sternness of Henry VIII. nor the violence of Northumberland had been able to secure--it practically converted England to Protestantism. The bigoted queen was always remembered by the English as "Bloody Mary;" her victims as "the Martyrs." A few of them deserve special mention: Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and Ridley, Bishop of London, were burnt together under the walls of Oxford, on September 7, 1555, after being kept in prison for two years. They had been well known as the best of the Protestant bishops, and Latimer's fearless sermons had often protested, in the presence of the late king and the Protectors, against the self-seeking and corruption of the court. "Play the man, Master Ridley," said Latimer, when he and his companion stood at the stake; "for we shall this day light such a candle in England, as by the grace of God shall never be put out."

[Sidenote: =Cranmer burnt.=]

Six months later there suffered a man of weaker and more vacillating faith, Archbishop Cranmer, against whom the queen was especially bitter, because he had pronounced her mother's divorce. Cranmer was a man of real piety, but wholly destitute of moral courage. His jailors forced him to witness the burning of Ridley and Latimer, in order to shake his courage, and subjected him to many harassing trials and cross-examinations, under which his spirit at last broke down. Yielding to a moment of weakness, and lured by a false hint that he might save his life by recantation, he consented to be received back into the Roman Communion. But when he found that his enemies were set upon his death, he refused to conform, bade the multitude assembled in St. Mary's Church at Oxford "beware of the Pope, Christ's enemy, a very Antichrist with all his false doctrine," and went with firmness to the stake, thrusting first into the flames the right hand with which he had written his promise to recant (March, 1556).

Altogether there suffered in the Marian persecution five bishops and about 300 others, among whom were included several women and even children. Mary looked upon her wicked doings not merely as righteous in themselves, but as a means of moving Heaven in her favour for the great end that she had in view--the raising up of a Catholic heir. Her heart was set on bearing a son, and when this was denied her, she fell into a state of gloomy depression. Her morbid and hysterical temper rendered her insufferable to her husband Philip, who betook himself to the Continent, where his father, Charles V., was about to abdicate in his favour. After he became King of Spain (1556) he only paid one short visit to his English realm and his jealous wife, and escaped as quickly as he might. Mary remained a prey to melancholy and disease, and obstinately persisted in "working out her salvation" by faggot and stake. The country grew more and more discontented; conspiracy was rife, fostered by the exiled Protestants, who had gathered in Paris, and tried to excite rebellion by the aid of the King of France. Their efforts nearly cost the life of the Princess Elizabeth, whom the queen kept in confinement, and would have slain if her cautious sister had not been wise enough to avoid all suspicion of offence.

[Sidenote: =War with France.--Loss of Calais.=]

The war with France, which was the necessary consequence of the Spanish match, proved very disastrous for England. Mary's ministers gave Philip no very useful help, while, on the other hand, they contrived to lose the last Continental possession of the Crown. Calais, which had remained in English hands ever since Edward III. captured it in 1346, was suddenly invested by the Duke of Guise, who commanded the French army of the North. The garrison was caught unprepared, and was very weak in numbers. After a few days' siege it was forced to yield, before any help could come either from England or Spain (January, 1558). This disgrace told heavily on the queen's health; she cried that when she died "Calais" would be found written on her heart, and fell into a deeper melancholy than before.

Yet her miserable life was protracted ten months longer, and she survived till November, 1558, racked by disease, and calling in vain for her absent husband, yet persecuting vigorously to the last. Her cousin and adviser, Cardinal Pole, died within three days of her.

So ended Mary Tudor, who in five years had rendered Romanism more hateful in the eyes of Englishmen than five centuries of papal aggression had availed to make it, and who had by her persecutions caused the adoption of Protestantism under her successor to become inevitable.

FOOTNOTE:

[33] For example, she chose it for her coinage.

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XXIV. ELIZABETH

1558-1603.

When Mary Tudor had passed away unwept and unregretted, all England heaved a sigh of relief, and turned to do homage to her sister Elizabeth. The daughter of Anne Boleyn was now a young woman of twenty-five. She had been living for the last five years in almost continual peril of her life, and had required all her caution to keep herself from the two snares which lay about her--the dangers of being accused of treason on the one hand and of heresy on the other. Fortunately for herself, Elizabeth was politic and cautious even to excess--all through her reign her most trusted ministers were often unable to discern her real thoughts and wishes--so that she came unharmed through her sister's reign of terror.

[Sidenote: =The religious crisis.=]

But when the lords of the council came flocking to Hatfield--the place of her honourable confinement--to salute her as queen, Elizabeth knew that her feet were still set in slippery places. The ultra-Catholic party was still in power, and the large majority of the nation were professing Romanists; on the other hand, she knew that her sister had made the name of Rome hateful, and there was a powerful and active band of Protestants, some in exile and some at home, who were ready to rush in and violently reverse all that Mary had done, if the new sovereign would give them any encouragement. Moreover, there was grave danger abroad: England was in the midst of war with France, yet Philip of Spain, the late queen's husband, was likely to be more dangerous than even the King of France, for it was obvious that he would be loth to let England out of his grasp, after he had profited by her alliance for four years.

[Sidenote: =The queen's attitude.=]

Elizabeth's personal predilections, like those of her father, were in favour neither of Romanism nor of Protestantism. She did not wish to be the slave of the Pope, nor did she intend to be the tool of the zealots who had picked up in their Continental exile the newest doctrines of the Swiss and German Reformers. At the same time, she wished to offend neither the Catholic nor the Protestant, but to lead them both into the via media of an English National Church, which should be both orthodox and independent. She was not a woman of much spiritual piety or fervent zeal, and, judging from her own feelings, argued that it would be possible to make others conform, without much difficulty, to the Church which offered the happy mean.

[Sidenote: =The extreme Romanists.=]

Her position, however, was settled for her by the obstinacy of the extreme Romanists. The bishops whom Mary had appointed behaved in the most arrogant and insulting manner to her. When she had been duly saluted as queen by the nation and the Parliament, they tacitly denied her right to the throne; for with one accord they refused to be present at her coronation, much more to place the crown upon her head. In the view of the strict Papist, she was a bastard and a usurper. It was with great difficulty that a single bishop--Oglethorpe, of Carlisle--was at last persuaded to officiate at the ceremony. This senseless obstinacy on the part of the prelates drove Elizabeth further in the direction of Protestantism than she had intended to go. She was constrained to send for the exiled Protestant bishops of King Edward's making, and to replace them in their sees. The disloyal Romanist prelates were deposed, and in their places new men were consecrated by the restored Protestant bishops. Elizabeth took care that they should be moderate personages, who might be trusted not to give trouble; the most important of them was the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, a wise and pious man, who guided the Church of England through the crisis with singular discretion.

[Sidenote: =Protestant reforms.--Adhesion of the moderate Catholics.=]

As it was impossible to conciliate the extreme Romanists, the queen resolved to take up her father's position, with some modifications in the direction of Protestantism. Unlike Henry VIII., she did not call herself Supreme Head of the Church, but all her subjects were summoned to take the oath of spiritual obedience to her. Only a few hundred persons refused it, though among them were all the old bishops. But the moderate Catholics accepted her, though they did not sacrifice their faith to their loyalty. Elizabeth then issued a new Liturgy to be the standard of the Creed of the English Church: it was a revision of the Second Prayer-book of Edward VI., amended in such a way as to make it less expressive of the views of the extreme Protestants. The Latin Mass was forbidden, and all the old ceremonies, which Mary had restored, were again swept away. There was, however, no attempt at enforcing obedience by persecution. Elizabeth had taken warning by the fate of her brother's and her sister's measures, and trusted to loyalty and national feeling, not to prison or stake. She was wise in her generation, for in ten years well-nigh all the moderate Catholics had conformed to the Anglican formularies, rallying to the national church when they saw that it was not to become ultra-Protestant. Their adhesion was the more easily effected because the Pope, on purely political grounds, did not excommunicate Elizabeth, or declare her deposed, so that to hold to the old faith was not yet inconsistent with loyalty to the Crown.

[Sidenote: =Philip of Spain.=]

Ere Elizabeth's religious bent had been clearly ascertained, her widowed brother-in-law, Philip of Spain, had proposed that she should marry him, for he was much set on maintaining his hold on England. Elizabeth detested him, and steadfastly refused the offer, but with a show of politeness, lest she might bring war on herself. Fearing that when foiled Philip might become dangerous, she made peace and alliance with his enemy, the King of France, and left Calais in his hands, receiving instead a sum of 500,000 crowns.

[Sidenote: =Character of the queen.=]

Thus Elizabeth had tided over the first difficulties of her reign, and felt her throne growing firmer beneath her, though there were still dangers on every side. But her character was well suited to cope with the situation. Though marred by many failings peculiarly feminine, she had a man's brain and decision. She was vain of her handsome person, and loved to be flattered and worshipped; but her vanity was not great enough to induce her to put herself under the hand of a husband. She listened to suitor after suitor, but said them nay in the end. Only one of them ever seems to have touched her heart--this was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the son of Protector Northumberland. Though much taken with his comely face, the queen had strength of mind to deny him her hand, seeing that marriage with a subject would bring too many feuds and jealousies in its train. She consoled herself with pageants and pleasures, for which she retained a curious zest even far into her old age. Every one has heard of her elaborate toilette and her thousand gowns, and of how she danced before foreign ambassadors after she had passed the age of sixty.

But the vanity and love of pleasure which she inherited from her mother, Anne Boleyn, were of comparatively little moment in the ordering of the queen's life, because her clear and cold brain dominated her desires. Elizabeth was as cautious, as suspicious, and as secretive, as her grandfather Henry VII. She was very unscrupulous in her diplomacy, and did not stick at a lie when an evasion would no longer serve. Though she had plenty of courage for moments of danger, yet she always put off the struggle as long as possible, holding that every day of respite that she gained might chance to give some unexpected end to the crisis. It is undoubted that she missed many opportunities owing to this cautious slowness, but she also saved herself from many traps into which a more hasty politician would have fallen. We shall have to notice, again and again, her reluctance to interfere in the wars of the Continent, even when it had become inevitable that she must ultimately choose her side. This same caution made her a very economical ruler. She grudged every penny that was spent--except, indeed, the outgoings of her own privy purse--and often pushed parsimony to the most unwise extreme. The very fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada ran short both of powder and provisions before the fighting was quite over.

[Sidenote: =Her popularity.=]

The English much admired their politic, unscrupulous, and parsimonious queen. They saw only that she gave them good and cheap governance, kept the kingdom out of unnecessary wars, and was, on the whole, both tolerant and merciful. As they watched her pick her way successfully through so many snares and perils, they came to look upon her as a sort of second Providence, and credited her with an almost superhuman sagacity and omniscience, which she was far from possessing. But they were not altogether wrong in their confidence; she was, in spite of her faults and foibles, a patriotic, clear-headed, hard-working sovereign, who did her best for her people as well as for herself. Above all, she had the invaluable gift of choosing her servants well; her two great ministers, Cecil and Walsingham, were the most capable men in England for their work, and she seldom failed to appreciate merit when once she cast her eye upon it.

[Sidenote: =Renewed peace and prosperity.=]

For the first twelve years of Elizabeth's rule, England was occupied in slowly settling down after the storms of the last two reigns. The English Church was gradually absorbing the moderate men from both the Protestant and the Romanist ranks. Quiet times were repairing the wealth of the land, and the restoration of the purity of the coinage, which was the queen's earliest care, had put trade once more on a healthy basis. Foreign war was easily avoided; in France Henry II. died ere Elizabeth had reigned a year, and his weak sons had occupation enough in their civil wars with the Huguenots. Philip of Spain was ere long to find a similar distraction, from the stirring of discontent among his much-persecuted Protestant subjects in the Netherlands.

[Sidenote: =Mary Queen of Scots.=]

The chief troubles of the period 1558-68 came from another quarter--the turbulent kingdom of Scotland. Elizabeth's natural heir was her cousin, Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots, who represented the line of Henry VII.'s eldest daughter. Unless Elizabeth should marry and have issue, Mary stood next her in the line of succession. The Queen of Scots, however, was a most undesirable heiress. She had been brought up in France, had married the eldest son of Henry II. and hated England. She was a zealous Romanist, and ready to work hard for her faith. Moreover, she was greatly desirous of being recognized as Elizabeth's next of kin, and openly laid claim to the position. Though very young, she was clever and active, and possessed charms of person and manner which bent many men to her will.

[Sidenote: =The Scottish Reformation.=]

Mary returned from France in 1561, having lost her husband, the young French king, after he had reigned but a single year. She found Scotland, as usual, in a state of turmoil and violence. The Parliament had, in her absence, followed the example of England, by casting off the Roman yoke, and declaring Protestantism the religion of the land. But a strong party of Romanist lords refused obedience, and with them the queen allied herself on her arrival.

[Sidenote: =Darnley and Bothwell.=]

For the seven turbulent years of Mary's stay in Scotland, she was a grievous thorn in the side of Elizabeth. She was always laying claim to be acknowledged as heiress to the English crown, and her demand was secretly approved by the surviving Romanists to the south of the Tweed. Elizabeth replied by intriguing with the Protestant nobles of Scotland, and stirred up as much trouble as she could for her cousin, while outwardly professing the greatest love and esteem for her. The results of their machinations against each other were still uncertain, when Mary spoilt her own game by twice allowing her passion to overrule her judgment. She was fascinated by the handsome person of her first-cousin, Henry Lord Darnley,[34] and most unwisely married him, and made him king-consort. Darnley was a vicious, ill-conditioned young man, and soon made himself unbearable to his wife, by striving to get the royal power into his hands, and at the same time treating her with gross cruelty and neglect. His crowning offence was causing the assassination of Mary's private secretary, Rizzio, in her actual presence, under circumstances of the greatest brutality. After this, Mary completely lost her head. She lent her sanction to a plot for her husband's murder, framed by the Earl of Bothwell, a great lord of the Border. Bothwell slew the young king and blew up his residence with gunpowder, but disavowed the deed, and induced the queen to have him declared guiltless after a mock trial. Mary was well rid of her husband, and, her complicity in the plot not having been proved, she might have escaped the consequences of her crime but for a second fit of infatuation. She had become violently enamoured of the murderer Bothwell, and suffered him to carry her off to the castle of Dunbar, and there to marry her. No one now doubted her complicity in Darnley's murder, and the whole kingdom rose against her in righteous indignation. The army which Bothwell raised in her defence refused to strike a blow, and melted away when faced by the levies of the Protestant lords. The queen herself fell into their hands, was forced to abdicate, and was condemned to lifelong prison in Lochleven Castle. In Mary's place, her young son by Darnley, James VI., was proclaimed as king, the regency being given by the Parliament to James, Earl of Murray, an illegitimate son of James V. (June, 1567).

Queen Mary being thus imprisoned and discredited, Elizabeth thought that her troubles on the side of Scotland were over, and closely allied herself with the Regent Murray. But the struggle was not yet ended. The Romanist party in Scotland saw that the new Protestant rulers of the country would crush their faith, and determined on a desperate rising in favour of their old religion and their old sovereign.

[Sidenote: =Mary flees to England.=]

Mary escaped by night from Lochleven, and joined the insurgents. The Regent gave chase, and caught her army up at Langside, near Glasgow. The queen's friends were routed in the fight that followed, and she herself, riding hard out of the fray, fled for the English border. After a moment's hesitation, she resolved to throw herself on Elizabeth's mercy, rather than to face the almost certain death which awaited her at the hands of her son's adherents. There was no time to wait for any promise of safe conduct or shelter, and she arrived at Carlisle, unprotected by any engagement on the part of the Queen of England (May, 1568).

[Sidenote: =Mary confined In England.--The Casket Letters.=]

Elizabeth's most dangerous enemy had thus fallen into her hands, but the position was not much simplified by the fact. It had to be decided whether the royal refugee should be allowed to proceed to France, as she herself wished; or handed over to the Scots, as the Regent Murray demanded; or kept in custody in England, as Elizabeth's self-interest seemed to require. To let her go to France would be generous, but dangerous; once arrived there, she would conspire with her cousins, the powerful family of Guise, against the peace of England. To send her back to Scotland would have some savour of legality about it, but would be equivalent to pronouncing her death-sentence; and from this Elizabeth shrank. To keep her captive in England seemed harsh, and even treacherous; for what right had one sovereign princess to imprison another? The politic Elizabeth resolved to take a cautious middle course. She protested to the Queen of Scots that she was willing to restore her to her throne, if she found that the accusations which her subjects made against her were untrue. This was practically putting her guest upon her trial for the murder of Darnley; for when the Regent and the Scots lords were informed of the decision, they came forward to accuse their exiled mistress. They laid before Elizabeth's commission of inquiry the famous "Casket Letters," a series of documents which had passed between Mary and Bothwell. If genuine--and it seems almost certain that they were--they proved the guilt and infatuation of the Queen of Scots up to the hilt. Mary protested that they were forgeries, and her followers down to this day have believed her. But she refused to stand any trial; declared that she, a crowned queen and no subject of England, would never plead before English judges, and demanded leave to quit the realm. Satisfied with the effect on English and Scottish public opinion which the "Casket Letters" had produced, Elizabeth now took the decisive step of consigning Mary to close custody; thus practically treating her as a criminal, though no decision had been given against her (January, 1569).

[Sidenote: =Romanist intrigues in Mary's favour.=]

For nearly twenty years the unfortunate Queen of Scots was doomed to spend a weary life, moved about from one manor or castle to another, under the care of guardians who were little better than gaolers. But she soon began to revenge herself. As long as she lived she was undoubtedly Elizabeth's heiress, if hereditary right counted for anything. Using this fact as her weapon, she began to intrigue with English malcontents. She offered her hand to the Duke of Norfolk, an ambitious young man, who was dazzled by the prospect of succeeding to Elizabeth's throne. She stirred up the Catholic lords of the North, by promising to restore the old faith if they would overthrow her cousin. But Elizabeth's ministers were wary and suspicious; Norfolk's designs were discovered, and he was cast into the Tower. The news of his imprisonment led to the immediate outbreak of the Northern Romanists; Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, raised their retainers, and made a dash on Tutbury, where Mary was confined, intending to rescue her and proclaim her as queen.

[Sidenote: =The "Rising in the North."=]

But the days of the Wars of the Roses were past; the retainers of the northern lords could do nothing against the royal power, and the "Rising in the North," as the plot was called, came to an ignominious end. The two earls failed to seize the person of the Queen of Scots, and were easily driven away. They fled--the one to Scotland, the other to Spain,--and gave Elizabeth little further trouble. This was the last insurrection of the old feudal type in the pages of English history (October and November, 1569). Elizabeth showed herself more merciful than might have been expected to the plotters. Norfolk was released after a short captivity; the Queen of Scots suffered no further aggravation of her imprisonment. For this she gave her cousin small thanks, and without delay recommenced plotting to secure her liberty.

[Sidenote: =Religious wars in Europe.=]

Meanwhile the aspect of affairs on the Continent was beginning to engage more and more of Elizabeth's attention. By this time civil wars were alight both in France and in the Netherlands. The French Protestants, or Huguenots, as they were called, had taken arms to secure themselves toleration as early as 1562. The Protestants of the Netherlands, after long suffering under the grinding tyranny of Philip of Spain and the Inquisition, had been driven to revolt in 1568. In both countries the insurgents appealed for help to Elizabeth; they implored the queen to save them from the triumph of popery, and pointed out that if they themselves failed, the victorious Romanists would inevitably turn against England, the only power in Western Europe which denied the Pope's supremacy. They might have added that the Queen of Scots was closely allied with the Guises, the heads of the Catholic party in France, and that she was also intriguing for the aid of Philip of Spain.

[Sidenote: =Elizabeth's foreign policy.=]

In her dealings with the Continental Protestants Elizabeth showed herself at her worst. Vacillation and selfishness marked her actions from first to last. She felt that the civil wars kept France and Spain from being dangerous to her. She knew also that if they ended in the suppression of the rebels, England would be in grave danger. But she hated rebellion, she could not understand religious enthusiasm, and she detested the violent Calvinism which both the Huguenots and the Netherlanders professed. All wars too, she knew, were expensive, and their issues doubtful. Hence it came that she displayed a reluctance to commit herself to one side or the other, which involved her in much double-dealing and even treachery. She refused to declare war either on Philip of Spain or on Charles of France, and allowed their ministers to remain at her court. But she several times sent the Huguenots help, both secretly and openly, and she allowed the Netherland Protestants to take shelter in England, and recruit themselves in her ports. She made no effort to prevent hundreds of English volunteers passing the Channel to aid the insurgents. For if the queen had doubts as to taking her side, the people had none; they sympathized heartily with the Huguenots and the Netherlanders, and did all that private persons could to bring them succour.

[Sidenote: =The Bull of Deposition.=]

Yet Elizabeth refused to assume the position of the champion of Protestantism, even when the inducement to do so became more pressing. In 1570 Pope Pius V. formally excommunicated her, and declared her deposed, and her kingdom transferred to her cousin Mary. This declaration turned all the more violent and fanatical Romanists into potential traitors; if they believed in their Pope's decision, they were bound to regard Elizabeth as a bastard and a usurper, and to look upon Mary as the true queen. Most of the English Catholics steadily refused to take up this position, and remained loyal in spite of the many vexations to which their religion exposed them. But a violent minority accepted the papal decree, and spent their time in scheming to depose or even to murder their sovereign. The knowledge of their designs made Elizabeth doubly cautious and wary, but did not drive her into a crusade against Catholicism. Her Parliament, however, passed bills, making the introduction of papal bulls into the realm, as also the perversion of members of the Church of England to Romanism, high treason. But no attempt was made to save the Continental Protestants from their oppressors, or to put England at the head of a league against the Pope.

[Sidenote: =The Ridolfi Plot.=]

Meanwhile, the Bull of Deposition bore its first-fruits in a new conspiracy of the English Romanists, generally known as the "Ridolfi Plot," from the name of an Italian banker, who served as the go-between of the English malcontents and the King of Spain. The Duke of Norfolk, ungrateful for his pardon two years before, took the lead in the conspiracy, undertaking to seize or even to murder Elizabeth, and then to marry the Queen of Scots. Philip of Spain promised Norfolk's agent, Ridolfi, that the duke should have the aid of Spanish troops the moment that he took arms. But the plan came to Cecil's ears, some of Norfolk's papers fell into the minister's power, and he was able to lay his hands on all concerned in the plot. Norfolk lost his head, as he well deserved, and it was expected that the Queen of Scots would share his fate. But though the nation and the Parliament clamoured for Mary's blood, Elizabeth refused to touch her; she was left unharmed in her captivity. Nor did the queen declare war on Spain, though there was the clearest proof that Philip had been implicated in the plot. Her only wish seems to have been to put off the crisis as long as possible.

[Sidenote: =Progress of the struggle abroad.=]

If her own danger could not tempt Elizabeth to interfere in Continental affairs, it was not likely that anything else would make her take up the sword. Not even the fearful Massacre of St. Bartholomew provoked her to take up arms against the Catholics--though on that one night the weak King of France, egged on by his wicked mother and brother, ordered the slaughter of 20,000 Protestants who had come up to Paris, relying on his good will and promised patronage (1572). Elizabeth stormed at the treacherous French court, but made no attempt to aid the surviving Huguenots in their gallant struggle against their persecutors. So great was her determination to keep the peace, that she even offered to mediate between Philip of Spain and the revolted provinces of the Low Countries, though it is fair to add that she--perhaps designedly--proposed conditions to them which it was unlikely that either would accept.

It was fortunate for England that both the Huguenots in France and the Dutch in the North displayed a far greater power of resistance than might have been expected. The former held their own, and even forced King Charles to come to terms and grant them toleration. The latter, though reduced to great straits, persevered to the end under their wise leader, William, Prince of Orange, and beat back the terrible Duke of Alva, King Philip's best general, from the walls of Alkmaar, when their fortunes seemed at the lowest (1573). Next year they forced Alva's successor, Requesens, to retire from Holland, after the gallant defence and relief of Leyden (October, 1574).

[Sidenote: =Commercial and maritime gains of England.=]

Elizabeth, therefore, escaped the danger that the triumph of the King of Spain and the Catholic party in France would have brought upon her, though her safety came from no merit of her own. It was not till ten years more had passed that she was finally forced to draw the sword and fight for her life and crown. Meanwhile, it cannot be denied that her cautious and selfish policy did much for the material prosperity of England. In twenty years of peace the one country of Western Europe which enjoyed quiet and good government was bound to profit at the expense of its unfortunate neighbours. England became a land of refuge to all the Continental Protestants: to her shores the artisans of France transferred their industries, and the merchants of Antwerp their hoarded wealth. The new settlers were kindly received, as men persecuted in behalf of the true faith, and became good citizens of their adopted country. But most of all did the maritime trade of England prosper. Her seamen got the advantage that comes to the neutral flag in time of war, and began to take into their hands the commerce that had once been the staple of the Hanseatic Towns, the French ocean ports, and the cities of the much-vexed Low Countries. English ships had seldom been seen in earlier days beyond Hamburg or Lisbon, but now they began to push into the Baltic, to follow the Mediterranean as far as Turkey, and even to navigate the wild Arctic Ocean, as far as the ports of Northern Russia.

[Sidenote: =Exploration in the West.--Hawkins--Drake--Frobisher.=]

But the attention of the English seamen was directed most of all to the West, whither the reports of the vast wealth of America drew adventurous spirits as with a magnet. The gold which the Spaniards had plundered from the ancient empires of Mexico and Peru dazzled the eyes of all men, and the English seamen hoped to find some similar hoard on every barren shore from Newfoundland to Patagonia. But the Spaniards arrogated to themselves the sole right to America and its trade, basing their claim on a preposterous grant made them by Alexander VI., the notorious Borgia Pope. They treated all adventurers who pushed into the Western waters not only as intruders, but as pirates. Sir John Hawkins, the pioneer of English trade to America, was always coming into collision with them (1562-64). That more famous sea-captain, Sir Francis Drake, a cousin of Hawkins, spent most of his time in bickering in a somewhat piratical way with the Spanish authorities beyond the ocean. His second voyage to the West was a great landmark in English naval history. Starting in 1577 with the secret connivance of Elizabeth, he sailed round Cape Horn and up the coasts of Chili and Peru, capturing numberless Spanish ships, and often sacking a wealthy port. His greatest achievement was the seizing of the great Lima galleon, which was taking home to King Philip the annual instalment of American treasure--a sum of no less than £500,000. After taking this splendid booty, Drake reached England by crossing the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, thus making the first circumnavigation of the globe which an Englishman had accomplished. While Drake was gathering treasure in South America, other seamen pushed northward, endeavouring to find the "North-West Passage"--a navigable route which was supposed to exist round the northern shore of North America. There Frobisher discovered Labrador and Hudson's Bay, but brought back little profit from his adventures in the frozen Arctic seas.

[Sidenote: =Jesuit intrigues.=]

While the emissaries of England were invading the Spanish waters, England herself was suffering from another kind of invasion at the hands of the friends of the King of Spain. Since the bull of 1570, Elizabeth was considered fair game by every fanatical Romanist on the Continent. Accordingly, there began to land in England many secret missionaries of the old faith, generally exiled Englishmen trained abroad in the "English colleges" at Rheims and Douay, where the banished Catholics mustered strongest. It was their aim not only to keep wavering Romanists in their faith, but to organize them in a secret conspiracy against the queen. They taught that all was permissible in dealing with heretics; their disciples were to feign loyalty, and even conformity with the English Church, but were to be ready to take up arms whenever the signal was given from the Continent. These Jesuits and seminary priests constituted a very serious danger, but they did not escape the eyes of Walsingham and Burleigh, Elizabeth's watchful ministers. Their plans were discovered, and several were caught and hung; yet the conspiracy went on, and was soon to take shape in overt action.

[Sidenote: =Throckmorton's Plot.--War with Spain declared.=]

Its first working was seen in "Throckmorton's Plot," a widely spread scheme for an attack on England by all the Catholic powers combined (1583). The Duke of Guise prepared an army in France, the King of Spain another in the Netherlands, which were to unite for an invasion. Meanwhile, the English Romanists were to rise in favour of the Queen of Scots, and welcome the foreign armies. Throckmorton and a few more fanatics undertook to make the whole plan easier by assassinating the queen. But Walsingham's spies got scent of the matter, Throckmorton was caught and executed, and Elizabeth, convinced at last that dallying with Spain was no longer possible, dismissed King Philip's ambassador, and prepared for open war (1584).

[Sidenote: =Leicester's expedition to Holland.=]

The struggle which had so long been fought out by intrigue and unauthorized buccaneering, was now to be settled by honest hard fighting. It proved perilous enough, but far less formidable than the cautious queen had feared. Elizabeth was at last forced to lend open aid to the Protestants of the Continent, and 7000 men, under her favourite, the Earl of Leicester, sailed for Holland to aid the Dutch against King Philip. They won no great battles, but their presence was invaluable to the Netherlanders, who had begun to despair when their great leader, William of Orange, had been assassinated by a fanatic hired by Spanish gold. Leicester was an incapable general, but his men fought well, and learnt to despise the Spaniards. Even a defeat which they suffered at Zutphen encouraged them, for 500 English there made head against the whole Spanish army, and retired without great harm, though they lost Sir Philip Sidney, the most popular and accomplished young gentleman in England, well known as the author of a curious pastoral romance called "The Arcadia" (1586).

[Sidenote: =English successes at sea.=]

Far more important than the fighting in the Netherlands were the maritime exploits of the English seamen. The moment that they were let loose upon the Spaniards they asserted a clear supremacy at sea. Drake took and sacked Vigo, a great port of Northern Spain, and then, crossing the Atlantic, captured the chief cities of the West Indies and the Spanish main--St. Iago, Cartagena, and St. Domingo (1586).

[Sidenote: =Last plot of Mary Queen of Scots.=]

Meanwhile, Mary Queen of Scots was playing her last stake. From her prison she made over to King Philip her rights to the throne of England, and besought him to despatch his armies to rescue her. But she also gave her approval to one more assassination-plot hatched by the English Catholics. Instigated by a Jesuit priest named Ballard, Anthony Babington, a gentleman of Derbyshire, and a handful of his friends agreed to murder Elizabeth in her own palace. But there were spies of the lynx-eyed Walsingham among the conspirators, and when the Queen of Scots and the would-be murderers were just prepared to strike, hands were laid upon them. Babington and his friends were executed, but this was not enough to appease the cry for blood which arose from the whole nation when the conspiracy was divulged. Urged on by her ministers, Elizabeth at last allowed the Queen of Scots to be put on her trial for this, the fourth attempt to strike down her cousin. Mary was tried by a commission of peers, and clearly convicted, not only of encouraging a Catholic rising and a Spanish invasion, but of having approved Babington's murderous plan. She was found guilty (October 25, 1586), and the Parliament, which met soon after, besought the queen to have her beheaded without delay.

[Sidenote: =Mary executed.=]

But Elizabeth still hesitated. She hated Mary, but her high ideas of royal prerogative made her shrink from slaying a sovereign princess, and she still dreaded the explosion of wrath which she knew must follow all over Catholic Europe. The young King of Scotland might resent his mother's execution, and the Guises in France would never pardon their cousin's death. She lingered for more than three months before she would issue Mary's death-warrant; but at last she gave the fatal signature. Her ministers at once caused the warrant to be carried out, without allowing their mistress time to repent. The Queen of Scots was executed in her prison at Fotheringay Castle. She died with great dignity and courage, asserting on the scaffold that she was a martyr for her religion, not a criminal. Many both in her own day and since have believed her words, but it is impossible to read her story through from first to last, and then to conclude that she was only the victim of circumstances and the prey of unscrupulous enemies. Though much sinned against, she was far more the worker of her own undoing (February 8, 1587).

Elizabeth expressed great wrath against her ministers for hurrying on the execution. She fined and imprisoned Davison, the Secretary of State, who had sent off Mary's death-warrant, and pretended that she had wished to pardon her. Perhaps her anger was real, but no one save the unfortunate Davison took it very seriously. The people felt nothing but satisfaction and relief, and rejoiced that there was no longer a Catholic heiress to trouble the realm. The King of Scots contented himself with a formal protest, and the Guises in France were too busy in their civil wars with King Henry III. and the Huguenots to think of assailing England.

[Sidenote: =The Spanish Armada.=]

Only Philip of Spain, who accepted in sober earnest the legacy of her rights which Mary had left him, took up the task of revenge, and he had already so many causes to hate Elizabeth, that he did not need this additional provocation to spur him on to attack her. He had already begun to prepare for a great naval expedition against England. All through the spring and summer of 1587 the ports of Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Sicily, were busy in manning and equipping every war-ship that the king could get together. The Duke of Parma, the Spanish viceroy in the Netherlands, was also directed to draw off every man that could be spared from the Dutch War, and to be ready to lead them across the Channel the moment that the king's fleet should have secured the Straits of Dover.

But the great flotilla, the Invincible Armada, as the Spaniards called it, was long in sailing. Ere it was ready, Drake made a bold descent on Cadiz, and burnt no less than 10,000 tons of shipping which lay in its harbour. He called this exploit "singeing the King of Spain's beard." This disaster caused so much delay that the expedition had to be put off till the next year.

In the spring of 1588, however, the Armada was at last ready to start. It comprised 130 vessels, half of which were great "galleons" of the largest size that were known to the sixteenth century, and carried 8000 seamen and nearly 20,000 soldiers. But the crews were raw, the ships were ill-found and ill-provisioned, and, what was most fatal of all, the admiral, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, was a mere fair-weather sailor, who hardly knew a mast from an anchor. It may be added that the vessels were overcrowded with the 20,000 soldiers whom they bore, and for the most part were armed with fewer and smaller cannons than their great bulk would have been able to carry.

[Sidenote: =Comparison of Spanish and English fleets.=]

Nevertheless, the Armada was an imposing force, and in strong hands ought to have achieved success. For Elizabeth had a very small permanent royal navy, and had to rely for the defence of her realm mainly on privateers and merchantmen hastily equipped for war service. Moreover, her parsimony had depleted the royal arsenals to such an extent, that in provisioning and arming their fleet the English were at much the same disadvantage as their enemies. But, unlike the Spaniards, they had excellent crews, and were led by old captains who had learnt their trade in long years of exploring and buccaneering across the Atlantic--men like Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and others whose names we have no space to mention. The command of the whole was given to Lord Howard of Effingham, a capable and cautious officer, who showed himself worthy of the queen's confidence--confidence that appeared all the more striking because he was suspected by many to be a Roman Catholic. In the mere number of ships the English fleet which mustered at Plymouth somewhat exceeded the Armada, but in size the individual vessels were far smaller than the Spanish galleons. But they were much more seaworthy, and were armed so heavily with artillery that it was found that an English ship could throw a broadside of the same weight of metal as a Spaniard of almost double its size.

[Sidenote: =Defeat and dispersion of the Armada.=]

The Armada left Corunna, the northernmost port of Spain, on July 22, and appeared off the Lizard on July 28. On the news of its approach, the English fleet put out of Plymouth, and the beacons summoned the militia to arms all over the land from Berwick to Penzance. The Duke of Medina Sidonia had resolved not to fight the English at once, but to pass up the Channel to the Dover Straits, and get into communication with his colleague Parma in Flanders, before engaging in a decisive battle. This unwise resolve gave the English a splendid opportunity. As the Armada slowly rolled eastward, it was beset on all sides by Lord Howard's lighter fleet, and for a whole week was battered and hustled along without being able to induce the enemy to close. The great galleons were so slow and unwieldy, that they could not come up with the English, who sailed around and about them, plying them with distant but effective artillery fire, and cutting off every vessel which was disabled or fell behind. By the time that the Spaniards reached Calais, they were thoroughly demoralized; they had lost comparatively few ships, but every one of the fleet was more or less shattered by shot, and the crews had suffered terribly from the cannonade. At Calais Medina Sidonia received the unwelcome news that Parma could not join him. A Dutch fleet was blockading the Flemish ports, and the viceroy was unable to get his transports out to sea. Thus brought to a check, the duke moored his fleet off Calais, to pause a moment and recruit (August 6). But that night the English sent fire-ships among his crowded vessels, and to escape them the Spaniards had to put off hastily in the darkness. This manoeuvre proved fatal. Some vessels ran ashore on the French coast, others were burnt, others cut off by the enemy. A final engagement, on August 8-9, so shattered the fleet that Medina Sidonia lost heart, and fled away into the German Ocean, before a strong gale from the south which had sprung up. His vessels were dispersed, and each made its way out of the fight as best it could. Some were taken, many driven on to the Dutch coast, the rest passed out of sight of England, steering northward before the gale.

Lord Howard's fleet was therefore able to sail victorious into the Thames, and report the rout of the enemy. It was none too soon, for the English ammunition was well-nigh exhausted after ten days' continuous fighting. They were welcomed by the queen, who had gathered a great force of militia at Tilbury, in Essex, to fight Parma, if he should succeed in crossing. Elizabeth had behaved splendidly during the crisis; she had organized a strong army, and put herself at its head, inspiring every man by the cheerful and resolute spirit which she displayed. Even had the Armada swept away the English fleet, it is unlikely that Parma would have been successful against the numerous and enthusiastic levies which were ready to fight him.

But the Armada was now a thing of naught. Forced to return round the north of Scotland, it was utterly shattered in the unknown seas of the West. The cliffs of the Orkneys, the Hebrides, Connaught, and Kerry, were strewn with the wrecks of Spanish galleons, and only 53 ships out of the 130 that had started straggled back to the ports of northern Spain.

The great crisis of the century was now past; queen and nation had been true to themselves and to each other, and the days of plots and invasions were over. For the future, Elizabeth could not only sleep secure of life and crown, but could feel that she might pose as the arbitress of Western Europe, since the domination of Spain was at an end.

[Sidenote: =Half-hearted foreign policy of Elizabeth.=]

But she was now too far gone in years--she had attained the age of fifty-six--to be able to start on a new and vigorous line of policy. Her old passion for caution and intrigue could not be shaken off, though they were no longer necessary. Hence it came to pass that, though England was strong, healthy, wealthy, and vigorous, she did not take up the dominant position that might have been expected. The queen persisted in her old policy of helping the Continental Protestants only by meagre doles of money, and small detachments of troops. By a vigorous effort she might have thrust the Spaniards completely out of the Low Countries, or enabled the Huguenots to make themselves supreme in France. But she refused to fit out any great expeditions; the expense appalled her parsimonious soul, and she dreaded the chances of war. Hence it came that in the Low Countries the Dutch established their independence in the "Seven United Provinces," but Spain continued to hold Belgium. Hence, too, French parties were condemned to six years more of civil war, which only ended when Henry of Navarre, the Protestant heir to the throne of France, abjured his religion in order to get accepted by the Catholics. "Paris is well worth a Mass," he cynically observed, and swore all that was required of him (1593). But he granted the Huguenots complete peace and toleration by the celebrated Edict of Nantes, and put an end to the civil war which had devastated his unhappy land for thirty years.

[Sidenote: =Naval war with Spain continued.=]

The chief efforts of Elizabeth's foreign policy during the last fifteen years of her reign were naval expeditions against the Spaniards. They caused King Philip much loss and much vexation of spirit, but they did not inflict any very crushing blow on him. The queen would never spend enough money on them, and generally allowed her subjects to carry on the war with squadrons of privateers. But the English adventurers very naturally sought plunder rather than solid political advantages--a fact which accounts for their failure to do anything great. A considerable expedition sent out in 1589 sacked Corunna and Vigo, but failed in an attempt to set upon the Portuguese throne a pretender hostile to King Philip. This was followed by a series of smaller expeditions to South America and the West Indies, in which Drake, and a younger adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth's favourite courtier, did Spain considerable harm, but England no great good. A larger armament sailed in 1596 against Cadiz, under the Earl of Essex and Lord Howard of Effingham. This force took the town, and destroyed Spain's largest naval arsenal and a great part of her fleet: a mere naval expedition could do no more.

[Sidenote: =Colonial enterprise.--Raleigh in Virginia.=]

These successive blows at Spain gave England the complete command of the seas. Hence it is not strange that we find the beginnings of colonial enterprise appearing. An attempt to found a settlement on the bleak shore of Newfoundland was a failure. But Sir Walter Raleigh planted a promising colony in the more clement district about the river Roanoke, which he named Virginia, after his mistress, the "Virgin-Queen," as she loved to be called. The first Virginian scheme came to naught--the Indians were hostile, and the improvident settlers planted tobacco instead of corn, and so starved themselves (1590). It was not till seventeen years later that the colony was founded for the second time, and began to flourish. It was from thence that Raleigh brought to England the two products that are always connected with his name, tobacco and potatoes.

[Sidenote: =Growth of foreign trade.--Chartered companies.=]

Colonial enterprise was accompanied by increased trade with distant lands. The English ships began to appear as far afield as India, China, and even Japan. The merchants who worked the more difficult and dangerous routes, banded themselves into chartered companies, of which the Turkey Company, founded in 1581, the Russian Company, dating from 1566, and the far more famous East India Company (1600) were the most important. By the end of the queen's reign, English commerce had doubled and tripled, and the steady stream of wealth which it poured into the land had done much to end the social troubles and dangers which had marked the middle years of the century.

[Sidenote: =Rural distress.=]

But nearly all the profit went to the town populations. Ports and markets flourished, merchants and skilled artisans grew rich, and a certain proportion of the wretched vagrant hordes, which had been the terror of the middle years of the century, were absorbed into the new employments which were springing up in the towns. But in the countryside, neither the landholder nor the peasant had nearly such a good position as in the days before the Reformation. The prices both of food and of manufactured goods had gone up about threefold, but rents had not risen perceptibly, and the wages of agricultural labour had only increased about 50 percent. The country gentleman, therefore, was no longer so opulent in comparison to the town-dwelling merchant, and the peasant stood far worse compared with the artisan than in the previous century. We may place in the time of Elizabeth the beginning of that rise of the importance of the urban as compared with the rural population, which has been going on ever since, till, in our own day, England is entirely dominated by her towns. It will be noticed that in the great political struggle of the next century, under the Stuarts, the party which represented the wealth and activity of the cities completely beat that which drew its strength from the peerage and gentry of the purely agricultural districts.

[Sidenote: =The Poor Law.=]

It would be wrong to leave the field of social change without mentioning the celebrated Poor Law of Queen Elizabeth (1601). All attempts to cope with pauperism by voluntary charity having failed, it was finally resolved to make the maintenance of the aged and invalid poor a statutory burden on the parishes. The new law provided that the able-bodied vagrant should be forced to work, and, if he refused, should be imprisoned, but that the impotent and deserving should be fed and housed by overseers, who were authorized to levy rates on the parish for their support. The system seems to have worked well, and we hear no complaints on the subject for three or four generations.

[Sidenote: =Growth of poetry and philosophy.=]

It is most noteworthy to mark the way in which the expansion of England in the spheres of political and commercial greatness was accompanied by a corresponding growth in the realms of intellect. The second half of Elizabeth's reign, a mere period of twenty years, was more fertile in great literary names than the two whole centuries which had preceded it. The excitement of the long religious wars, the sudden opening up of the dark places of the world by the great explorers, the free spirit of individual inquiry which accompanied the growth of Protestantism, all conspired to stir and develop men's minds. The greatest English dramatist, William Shakespeare, born in 1564, and the greatest English philosopher, Francis Bacon, born in 1561, were both children of the days of the long struggle with Spain, and had watched the final crisis of the Armada in their early manhood. Edmund Spenser, a few years older than his mightier contemporaries, shows even more clearly the spirit of the times. All through his lengthy epic of the Faërie Queene he is inspired by the enthusiasm of the struggles of England, and tells in allegory the glories of the great Elizabeth. We have but space to allude to Sir Philip Sydney and his pastoral romances, to Hooker's works on political philosophy, to Marlowe and other dramatists whose fame is half eclipsed by Shakespeare's genius. Never before or since has England produced in a few short years such a crop of great literary names.

The two main subjects of domestic importance in the last years of Elizabeth were the development of fresh forms of division in the English Church, and the troubles caused by the new conquest of Ireland. Both of these movements had begun in the earlier years of the reign, but did not fully expand till its end.

[Sidenote: =Dangers from the Romanists at an end.=]

Elizabeth's chief problem in matters religious had for thirty years been that of dealing with the Roman Catholics. But after the death of Mary of Scotland and the defeat of the Armada this question retired somewhat into the background. The vast majority of the Romanists had conformed to the Anglican Church; of the remainder many were loyal, and were therefore tacitly left unharmed by the Government, save when they came into conflict with the Recusancy Laws, as the acts directed against them were called. The small but violent minority who listened to the Jesuits, and were still plotting against the queen, were, on the other hand, treated with the most vehement harshness. At one time and another, a very considerable number of them came to the gallows, though always, as Elizabeth was careful to explain, not as Papists, but as traitors. They were so hated by the nation, who identified them with nothing but assassination plots and intrigues with Spain, that they no longer constituted any danger.

[Sidenote: =Rise of Puritanism.=]

But a new religious problem was growing up. Many of the Protestants who had conformed to the English Church system in Elizabeth's earlier years were growing out of touch with the National Establishment. Constant intercourse with the Huguenots and the Dutch, both of whom professed violent forms of Calvinism, had made them discontented with the ritual and organization of the English Church. Like their Continental friends, they came to hate bishops and canons, vestments and ritual, even things that seem to us parts of the common decencies of church service, such as the surplice in the reading-desk, the usage of kneeling at Holy Communion, the employment of the ring in marriage, and the sign of the cross at baptism. All these remnants of common Christian practice they considered to be "rags of Popery," vain survivals of the old Romanist days. And since they wished to sweep everything away, they were called in derision "Puritans," in allusion to their constant citation of "the pure Gospel."

[Sidenote: =Harsh treatment of the Puritans.=]

Elizabeth detested the Puritan habit of mind. She loved decency and order, and she liked the pomp and splendour of the old church services; indeed, she would have gladly kept much that the Anglican Establishment has rejected. She was proud of her position as head and defender of the national Church, and looked upon the bishops as high and important state officials under her. The Puritan desire to abolish the episcopate, to do away with all ritual, to whitewash the churches and break down all their ornaments, seemed to her to savour of anarchic republicanism and rank disloyalty. She was determined that the Puritan, no less than the Romanist, should suffer if he refused to conform to the usages of the national Church. Hence it came that she dealt very hardly with the Puritans, suppressing their religious meetings for "prophesying"--as they called extempore preaching--and treating their pamphlets as seditious. One very scurrilous set of tracts, issued under the name of Martin Mar-prelate, provoked her wrath so much that John Penry, who was responsible for them, was actually hung for treasonable libel. Puritans who kept quiet did not suffer, any more than the Romanists who kept quiet, but those who resisted the queen were treated with a rigour that showed that the day of freedom of conscience was still far away. The discontented admirers of Calvinism still kept within the Church of England,--it was their ambition to change its doctrine, not to quit it; but already in Elizabeth's reign it was obvious that schism between the moderate and the violent parties was inevitable.

[Sidenote: =Irish policy of Elizabeth.=]

The most miserable and melancholy page of the history of Elizabeth's reign is that which is covered by the records of Ireland. We have already mentioned how Henry VIII. had extended the English influence beyond the borders of "the Pale," and done something towards subduing the whole island to obedience. But the most important share of the work was reserved for Elizabeth. Her intent was shown by her Act of 1569, for dividing the whole land into shires, to be ruled by sheriffs on the English plan--a device for destroying the patriarchal authority of the tribal chiefs, who from time immemorial had governed their clans according to old Celtic law. It was not to be expected that any such scheme could be carried out without causing friction with the natives. They were wholly unaccustomed to obey or respect the royal mandate, and acknowledged no authority higher than that of their own chief: English laws and English manners were alike hateful to them. In many districts they were little better than savages; the "wild Irish," as the more uncivilized tribes were called, dwelt in low huts of mud, wore no shoes or head-gear, and were clothed only in a rough kilt and mantle of frieze. They wore their hair long over neck and eyes, went everywhere armed to the teeth, and looked on tribal war and plundering as the sole serious business of life.

[Sidenote: =Resistance of the Irish clans.=]

To teach such a race to live under the strict English law was an almost impossible task, requiring the utmost patience, and Elizabeth's ministers and officials were not patient. When the chiefs withstood their orders, they declared them traitors, confiscated the lands of whole tribes, and attempted to settle up the annexed districts with English colonists. This, of course, drove the Irish to desperation, and the incomers were soon slain or driven away. In return, the Lord-Deputy of Ireland or one of the "Presidents" of its four provinces would march against the rebels, slay every male person they met, armed or unarmed, and leave the women and children to starve. In this ruthless, devastating war, whole counties were depopulated and left waste, a few survivors only escaping into woods, bogs, or mountains. The worst feature of the struggle was the cruel double-dealing employed against the Irish chiefs; they were often induced to surrender by false promises of pardon, they were caught and slain by treachery, sometimes they were even poisoned. The intractable nature of the rebels explains, but does not excuse, the conduct of the English rulers. The Irish would never keep an oath or observe a peace; they plundered and murdered whenever the Lord-Deputy's eye was not on them, and they were always trying to get aid from Spain.

[Sidenote: =The conflict partly a religious one.=]

At first the struggle between English and Irish was purely a matter of race, but the religious element was soon introduced. Protestantism made no head in the country, and in 1579 a Papal Legate, Nicholas Sanders, came over to organize the tribes to unite in defence of the old religion. No man could ever persuade Irish parties to join for long, and Sanders's mission was in that respect a failure. But for the future the war was embittered by religious as well as racial hatred. In 1580 the Pope sent over a body of Italian and Spanish mercenaries to aid the rebels; but this force was blockaded by Lord Grey in its camp at Smerwick, a harbour in Kerry, and every man was put to the sword. At a later date Philip of Spain sent similar and equally ineffective help.

[Sidenote: =Desmond's Rebellion.=]

The two chief struggles of the Irish against the establishment of the English rule were that of the tribes of Munster in 1578-83, and that of the tribes of Ulster in 1595-1601. The former was led by Garrett Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, the greatest lord of the South, the descendant of one of those Anglo-Norman families which had become more Irish than the Irish themselves. In his desperate struggle with Lord-Deputy Grey and the English colonists in Munster, he saw all the land from Galway to Waterford harried into a wilderness, and was killed at last as a fugitive in the hills.

[Sidenote: =Tyrone's Rebellion.--Expedition of Essex.=]

The Ulster rebellion of Hugh O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone, the head of the greatest of the native Irish septs, was far more formidable than that of the Fitzgeralds. The English could for a long time do nothing against him. In 1598 he defeated an army of 5000 men on the Blackwater and slew its leader, Sir Henry Bagenal, and most of his followers. Tyrone sent for aid to Spain, and so moved Queen Elizabeth's fears that she despatched against him the largest English force that ever went over-sea in her reign. An army of 20,000 men was placed under Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex, whom the queen loved most of all men in her later years, and sent over to Dublin. Essex, though he had won much credit for courage in Holland, and at the capture of Cadiz, was not a great general. He pacified Central and Southern Ireland, but did not succeed in crushing Tyrone. It would seem that he was disgusted at the cruelty and treachery of his predecessors in the government of Ireland, and wished to admit the rebels to submission on easy terms. At any rate, he made a truce with Tyrone in 1600, promising that the queen should grant him toleration in matters of religion, and leave him his earldom. Essex returned to England to get these terms ratified, but was received very coldly by his mistress and her council, who had sent him to Ireland to suppress, not to condone, the rebellion. His treaty was not confirmed, and the war with Tyrone went on. The earl got 7000 men from Spain, and ravaged all Central Ireland, till he was defeated by Lord Montjoy in an attempt to raise the siege of Kinsale (1601). In the next year he made complete submission to the queen, and was pardoned and given back most of his Ulster lands. But the eight years of war had made Northern Ireland a desert, and the power of the O'Neils was almost broken.

[Sidenote: =Intrigues and execution of Essex.=]

Meanwhile the short stay of Essex in Ireland had led to a strange tragedy in London. The young earl had been so much favoured by the queen in earlier years, that he could not brook the rebuke that fell upon him for his dealings with Tyrone. Presuming on the almost doting fondness which his sovereign had shown for him, the headstrong young man plunged into seditious courses. He swore that his enemies in the council had calumniated him to the queen, and that he would be revenged on them and drive them out of office. With this object he gathered many of the Puritan party about him--for he was a strong Protestant--and resolved to overturn the ministry by force. He caught the Lord Chancellor, and locked him up, and then sallied out armed into the streets of London with a band of his friends, calling on the people to rise and deliver the queen from false councillors. But he had counted too much on his popularity; no one joined him, and he was apprehended and put in prison.

Elizabeth was much enraged with her former favourite, and allowed his enemies to persuade her into permitting him to be tried and executed for treason. When he was dead she bitterly regretted him (February, 1601).

[Sidenote: =Last years of Elizabeth.=]

The great queen was now near her end. All her contemporaries, both friends and foes, had passed away already. Philip of Spain had died, a prey to religious melancholy, and racked by a loathsome disease, in 1598. That same year saw the end of the great minister, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. His colleague Walsingham had sunk into the grave some years earlier, in 1590. Leicester, whom the queen had loved till his death-day, had perished of a fever in 1588, the year of the Armada. A younger generation had arisen, which only knew Elizabeth as an old woman, and forgot her brilliant youth. To them the vivacity and love of pleasure which she displayed on the verge of her seventieth year seemed abnormal and even unseemly.

[Sidenote: ="Monopolies" declared illegal.=]

To the last she kept her talent for dealing with men. There was no greater instance of her cleverness shown in all her life than her management of her Parliament in 1601. The Commons had been growing more resolute and strong-willed as the queen grew older, and though Elizabeth often chid them, and sometimes even imprisoned members who displeased her, yet she knew when to yield with a good grace. The Parliament of 1601 was raging against "monopolies"--grants under the royal seal to individuals, permitting them to be the sole vendors or manufacturers of certain articles of trade. Seeing their resolution, Elizabeth came down in person to the House, and addressed the members at length, so cleverly that she persuaded them that she was as much opposed to the abuse as they themselves, and won enormous applause when she announced that all monopolies were at once to be withdrawn and made illegal.

[Sidenote: =Death of Elizabeth.=]

Eighteen months after this strange scene Elizabeth died, in her seventy-first year. On her death-bed she assented to the designation of James of Scotland as her successor--a thing she would never suffer before, for she held that "an expectant heir is like a coffin always in sight."

[Sidenote: =The Elizabethan age.=]

In spite of the many unamiable points in her character, Elizabeth was always liked by her subjects, and well deserved their liking. She had guided England through forty-five most troublous years, and left her subjects wealthy, prosperous, and contented. Her failures had always been upon the side of caution, and such mistakes are the easiest to repair and the soonest forgotten. Both in her own day and in ages to come, she received the credit for all the progress and prosperity of her reign. The nation, groaning under the unwisdom of the Stuarts, cried in vain for a renewal of "the days of good Queen Bess." The modern historian, when he recounts the great deeds of the Englishmen of the latter half of the sixteenth century, invariably speaks of the "Elizabethan age." Nor is this wrong. When we reflect on the evils which a less capable sovereign might have brought upon the realm in that time of storm and stress, we may well give her due meed of thanks to the cautious, politic, unscrupulous queen, who left such peace and prosperity behind her.

FOOTNOTE:

[34]

James IV. = Margaret of England = Earl of Angus. | | James V. Margaret Countess of Lennox. | | Mary Queen of Scots. Henry Lord Darnley.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXV. JAMES I

1603-1625.

With the death of Elizabeth the greatness of England departed. From 1603 to 1688 she counted for little in the Councils of Europe, save indeed during the ten years of Cromwell's rule. She became the tool of foreign powers, sometimes because her rulers were duped, sometimes because they deliberately sold themselves to the stranger.

[Sidenote: =Character of James I.=]

James of Scotland, the old queen's legitimate heir, was a man of thirty-seven when the throne fell to him. He had lived an unhappy life in his northern realm, buffeted to and fro by unruly nobles and domineering ministers of the Scottish Kirk. But most of his troubles had been the results of his own failings. Of all the kings who ever ruled these realms, he is almost the only one of whom it can be said that he was a coward. From this vice sprang his other defects. Like all cowards, he was suspicious, capable of any cruelty against those whom he dreaded, prone always to lean on some stronger man, who would bear his responsibility for him. He chose these favourites with the rankest folly: Arran and Lennox, who were the minions of his youth while yet he reigned in Scotland alone, and Rochester and Buckingham, who ruled his riper age, were--all four--arrogant, vicious, scheming adventurers. They had nothing to recommend them save a handsome person and a fluent and flattering tongue. Each in his turn domineered over his doting master, and made himself a byword for insolence and self-seeking.

James was unfortunate in his outer man. He was ill-made, corpulent, and weak-kneed; though his face was not unpleasing, his speech was marred by a tongue too large for his mouth. But he was grossly and ridiculously vain and conceited. He possessed a certain cleverness of a limited kind, and he was well versed in book-learning. But he imagined that learning was wisdom, and loved to pose as the wisest of mankind--the British Solomon, as his favourites were wont to call him.

This stuttering, shambling pedant now mounted the throne of the politic Elizabeth, and in a reign of twenty-two years contrived to wreck the strong position which the royal power held in England, and to make a revolution inevitable. The crash would have come in his own day, but for one thing--James, as we have said before, was a coward, and had not the courage to fight when affairs came to a crisis.

[Sidenote: =Doctrine of the dispensing power.=]

James based his preposterous claims to override the nation's will and the rights of Parliament on two theories, which represented to him the true foundations of all royal power. The first was his "prerogative," or power to dispense with ordinary laws and customs at his good pleasure. He saw that the Tudors had often gone beyond the letter of the mediaeval constitution, and thought that their action gave him a full precedent for similar encroachment. He forgot two things: first, that Henry VIII. and Elizabeth had lived in times of storm and stress, when firm governance was all-important, and much would be forgiven to a strong ruler; and secondly, that the two great Tudors had always taken the people into their confidence, and been careful to get popular support for their doings. He himself tried to impose an unpopular policy on an unwilling people, and never condescended to explain his motives.

[Sidenote: =The "Divine Right" of kings.=]

The second pillar of the king's policy was the theory of "divine hereditary kingship"--a notion entirely opposed to the old English idea that the crown was elective. James chose to ignore such precedents as the elections of Henry IV. or Henry VII., where the natural heir had been passed over, and wished his subjects to believe that strict hereditary succession was the only title to the throne, and that nothing could justify or legalize any divergence from it. He claimed that kings derived their right to rule from Heaven, not from any choice by their subjects; hence it was impious as well as disloyal to criticize or disobey the king's commands. James found many of the clergy who were ready to accept this theory, partly because they thought they could justify it from the Scriptures, partly because they felt that the orderly governance of the Anglican Church was bound up with the royal supremacy. In Elizabeth's time it had been the queen's guiding and restraining hand which had prevented the nation from lapsing into the anarchical misgovernment which characterized Continental Protestantism.

[Sidenote: =Hopes of the three religious parties.=]

When the new king crossed the Tweed in April, 1603, he was well received in England, where his weaknesses were as yet little known. Every one was glad to see the succession question settled without a war, and every party hoped to gain his favour. The Puritans trusted that a prince reared in the Calvinism of the Scotch Kirk would do much for them. The Romanists dreamed that the son of Mary of Scotland would tolerate his mother's faith. The supporters of the Anglican establishment thought that the king must needs become a good Churchman when he realized the position that awaited him as Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the spiritual hierarchy that embraced nine-tenths of the nation.

[Sidenote: =James supports the Established Church.=]

James himself had no doubt as to his future behaviour. There was nothing that pleased him better than the idea of becoming the head of the English Church. In Scotland he had learnt to hate the dictatorial manners of the presbyters of the Kirk, and their constant interference in politics. The well-ordered and obedient organization which he found south of the Tweed, where every cleric, from the archbishop to the curate, looked for guidance to the sovereign, filled him with joy and admiration. He soon became the zealous patron of the Establishment; he looked upon it as the bulwark of the throne, the best defence against disloyalty and anarchy. "No bishop, no king," was his answer to the Puritans, who strove to persuade him into abolishing episcopacy, and establishing a Presbyterian form of Church government.

[Sidenote: =The Hampton Court Conference.= ]

Before James had been for a year on the English throne, he had shown his intentions in the matter of Church government. On his first arrival the Puritan party, both the Dissenters and the Conformists within the National Church, presented him with the "Millenary Petition,"[35] in which they complained that they were "overburdened with human rites and ceremonies" prescribed in the Prayer-book, and besought him to abolish episcopacy and purify the land from the remnants of Popish superstition. James invited representative Puritan ministers to meet him at the Hampton Court Conference (January, 1604), where they were to dispute with some of his bishops. But the Conference was a mere farce; the king browbeat and hectored the ministers, and declared himself wholly convinced by the arguments of the Anglican clergy. He announced his full approval of the existing Church system, and that he would have "one doctrine, one discipline, one religion in substance and ceremony." The Puritans went away in sore displeasure, and from that moment the large number of them who had hitherto continued in the body of the National Church, began to desert it and to form various schismatic sects. We find it hard to-day to realize the fanatical scruples which made them see snares in a ring or a surplice, or deem that Episcopacy was a Romish invention; but we can understand that the real bent of their minds was directed against dictation in matters of conscience, and the denial of the right of private judgment. With their theory we may sympathize, but the actual points on which they chose to secede from the ancient Church of the land were miserably inadequate to justify schism. It is fair to add, however, that there was much to repel men of conscience and piety in the condition of the National Church. The bishops showed an unworthy subservience to the throne, which seemed peculiarly disgusting when the crown was worn by such a self-satisfied pedant as King James. A glance at the fulsome praises heaped upon him in the preface to the Authorized Version of the Bible will sufficiently serve to make this plain.

[Sidenote: =Administration of the younger Cecil.=]

Almost the only sign of sagacity which the new king showed was that he kept in office, as his chief minister, Robert, the younger Cecil, son of the great Lord Burleigh. James made him Earl of Salisbury, and, first as Secretary of State and afterwards as Lord Treasurer, Cecil kept a firm hand on the reins of power, and restrained many of his master's follies. It was not till he died, in 1612, that the king was able to display his own unwisdom in its full development.

[Sidenote: =Cobham's Plot.=]

Hence it comes that the nine years 1602-1611 are comparatively uneventful, and show little of the king's worst foibles. A few incidents only deserve mention in this period. Cobham's Plot, which followed almost immediately on the king's accession, was a most mysterious business. It was said that Lord Cobham, Lord Grey, Sir Walter Raleigh the explorer, and certain others, all enemies of Robert Cecil, had formed a plot to kidnap the king, and force him to dismiss his minister--perhaps, even to depose him in favour of his cousin, Arabella Stuart, the child of his father's brother.[36] The whole matter is so dark that it is hard to make out what the conspirators desired, or even whether they conspired at all. Both extreme Puritans and fanatical Roman Catholics are said to have been engaged in the plot, and the wildest aims were ascribed to them. It is only certain that James and Cecil used the affair as a means for crushing those whom they feared. The unfortunate Arabella Stuart was put in confinement for the rest of her life; Raleigh languished twelve years in the Tower; and Grey and Cobham also suffered long imprisonment.

[Sidenote: =The Gunpowder Plot.=]

A clearer but not less strange matter was the famous Gunpowder Treason of 1605. A band of fanatical Catholics, disgusted that the king refused to grant the toleration they had expected, or to repeal the Recusancy laws, formed a diabolical scheme for murdering, not only James himself, but his sons and all the chief men of the realm. Their chiefs were Thomas Percy, a relative of the Earl of Northumberland, Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and Sir Everard Digby. Their plan was to hire a cellar which lay under the Houses of Parliament, fill it with barrels of gunpowder, and fire the train when the king was opening Parliament on the 5th of November. Lords, Commons, princes, and king would thus perish in a common disaster, while a Catholic rising and a Spanish invasion were to follow. Garnet, the Provincial of the Jesuits, was informed of the scheme by the conspirators, and kept it secret.

A mere chance saved king and Parliament. When all was ready, and the cellar was charged with its murderous contents, one of the conspirators wrote an anonymous letter to his cousin, Lord Monteagle, a Catholic peer, imploring him not to attend on the 5th of November, on account of a great blow that was impending. Monteagle sent the letter to the king, whose suspicious mind--it will be remembered that his own father had perished by gunpowder--soon read the secret. The cellars were searched on the night of November 4, and Guy Fawkes, who was to fire the train, was discovered lurking there with his great hoard of powder. On the news of his arrest the other conspirators took arms, but their preparations had been ridiculously inadequate for their end, and they were easily hunted down and slain. Fawkes and Garnet the Jesuit were tortured, and then hung, drawn, and quartered. The only result of the Gunpowder Treason was to make the lot of the English Romanists much harder than before, for the nation thought that most of them had been implicated in the plot, and Parliament greatly increased the harshness of the Recusancy laws.

[Sidenote: =Strife between king and Parliament.=]

The persecuting of Romanists, however, was about the only point on which the king and Parliament could agree. From the very first, James and the House of Commons were at odds on almost every matter which they had to discuss. When peace was made with Spain in 1604, the House was ill pleased; for a whole generation of Englishmen had grown up who looked upon war with King Philip as one of the natural conditions of life, and thought that the Spanish colonies in America existed solely for the purpose of being plundered by English buccaneers. James, on the other hand, hated all wars with a coward's hatred, and had a great respect for the ancient greatness and autocratic sovereignty of the Spanish kings. Taxation furnished another fertile source of dispute: the court was numerous, profligate, and wasteful, and, in spite of Cecil's economy, the king piled up a mountain of debts, and exceeded his revenue year by year. To fill his purse, he raised the scale of the customs-duties without the consent of Parliament (1608), and then refrained from calling the Houses together for two years. But in 1610 his increasing necessities forced him to summon them, and a sharp dispute about the legality of the increased customs at once began. It grew so bitter that the king dismissed the Parliament without having obtained the money that he wanted, and was constrained to go on accumulating unpaid debts (1611).

[Sidenote: =Death of Cecil.--Rise of Rochester.=]

Next year the great minister, Robert Cecil, died, and James was left to govern for himself as best he might. A great change was at once apparent. Its chief symptom was the beginning of the system of government by royal favourites. Hitherto James had heaped wealth and favour on his minions, but had not dared to entrust them with affairs of state, so great was his fear of his able Lord Treasurer. When Salisbury was gone, the king fell entirely into the hands of the favourite of the hour, a young Scot named Robert Ker, who had been his page. James made him Viscount Rochester, put him in the Privy Council, and entrusted him with all his confidential business. Ker was a worthless adventurer, whose good looks and ready tongue were his only stock-in-trade. He used his influence purely for personal ends--to fill his pocket and indulge his taste for ostentation. When he meddled in politics, it was to encourage the king in courses which were hateful to the nation--in forming an alliance with Spain, and in persisting in illegal taxation.

[Sidenote: =Murder of Sir T. Overbury.--Fall of Rochester.=]

Ker's domination in the king's council lasted about three years, and was ended by a shocking crime, which did more to lower the court and the king in the eyes of the people than anything which had yet occurred since James's accession. Ker had become enamoured of Frances Howard, the wife of the young Earl of Essex, son of Elizabeth's unfortunate favourite. The countess returned his passion, became his paramour, and agreed to procure her divorce from her husband by bringing scandalous and indelicate accusations against Essex. But a certain Sir Thomas Overbury, an unscrupulous courtier, who was in the secret of this wicked plot, set himself to hinder the marriage, and threatened to make public what he knew. Rochester got him thrown into the Tower, and there he was poisoned by the revengeful countess, with or without the guilty knowledge of the favourite. Lady Essex brought her suit against her husband, and as the king interfered with the course of justice in her favour, the divorce was accomplished. The guilty pair were married with great state, and James raised Rochester to the earldom of Somerset to celebrate the occasion. But murder will out. Two years later the tale of Overbury's assassination got abroad, and the king learnt the story of his favourite's dishonour. James was not quite dead to all feelings of right and wrong, the revelation greatly shocked him, and, moreover, he was growing tired of Somerset's arrogance and dictatorial ways. Hence it came about that he suffered the law to take its course. The earl and countess were tried and convicted of having poisoned Overbury; their lives were spared, but they suffered long imprisonment, and disappeared into obscurity. It is said that Somerset saved his neck by threatening to reveal some disgraceful secret of the king's, of which he was possessed (1616).

[Sidenote: =Ascendency of Buckingham.=]

It might have been supposed that Ker's scandalous end would have weaned King James from his propensity for favourites. But this was not so. He replaced the Earl of Somerset by another minion, George Villiers, the son of a Leicestershire squire. Villiers was as handsome and insinuating as Ker, and possessed far greater ability. He not only acquired an entire ascendency over James himself, but mastered as completely the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. The king's elder son, Henry, Prince of Wales, had died four years before, during Somerset's day of power. He had been a very promising youth, and hated his father's ways; hence some suspected that Somerset had poisoned him, though there seems to have been no foundation for the charge.

For the nine years which James had yet to live, he was completely in the hands of Villiers. The young favourite was vain, arrogant, and ambitious; but worse men than he have lived; he had the saving vice of pride, which kept him from many of the meaner sins. He was not cruel, avaricious, or revengeful, as his predecessor Somerset had been. But his influence on the realm was all in the direction of evil; in his headstrong self-confidence, he thought that he was a Heaven-sent statesman, and led his weak and doting master into many follies.

[Sidenote: =James's subservience to Spain.=]

The days of his domination are filled with the miserable story of the "Spanish Marriage." King James, as we have already had to remark, was filled with a great respect for the ancient power and wealth of Spain, and never realized how much the foundations of its strength had been sapped by the long and ruinous Dutch and English wars of Philip II. Spain was at this moment represented by a very able ambassador, Sarmiento, Count of Gondomar, who systematically misled the king as to the views and intentions of his master, Philip III. His influence induced James to look to Spanish aid for a solution of all his financial troubles, for he thought that, in return for his alliance, Spain would lend or give him money to cover his annual deficits.

[Sidenote: =Execution of Raleigh.=]

This beginning of subservience to Spain is marked by one of the blackest spots in the reign of James--the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh. The old explorer had now lingered for twelve years in the Tower, but got a temporary release by persuading James that he knew of rich gold-mines in Guiana, on the banks of the Orinoco, from which he could bring back a great ransom. He was permitted to sail, but the king informed Gondomar of the matter. Now, the Spaniards still looked on any interference in America as a trespass on their monopoly of the trade of the West. The ambassador sent news of Raleigh's approach to the governors of the West Indies, and preparations were made to give him a hot reception. When he reached South America, Sir Walter was easily drawn into hostilities with the Spaniards, and had to return, after failing to force his way up the Orinoco. When he reached England he was arrested, at Gondomar's request, for having engaged in fighting with a friendly power. But instead of trying him for this misdemeanour, the dastardly king beheaded him without giving him a hearing or an opportunity of defence, on the old charge of having been engaged in Cobham's Plot[37] fifteen years before. He fell a victim to Spanish resentment, not to any crime committed against his own king (1618).

[Sidenote: =Marriage of Princess Elizabeth.--The Thirty Years' War.=]

The year of Raleigh's death saw the opening of a new set of troubles for King James. He had married his daughter Elizabeth to Frederic of the Palatinate, the most rash and venturesome of the Protestant princes of Germany. When the great religious struggle known as the Thirty Years' War broke out, Frederic took the lead among the Protestants, and seized the kingdom of Bohemia, one of the possessions of the Emperor Ferdinand, the bigoted and fanatical head of the Romanist party (1619). Frederic, however, was beaten, and lost not only Bohemia, but his own dominions in the Palatinate (1620). Concerned to see his favourite daughter lose her crown and lands, King James conceived a hope that he might induce his Spanish friends to restore his son-in-law to his Rhenish electorate. He forgot that Philip III., as a devout Catholic, was much pleased to see the headstrong Frederic stripped of house and home. But while intriguing with Spain, James, with great duplicity, tried to persuade his subjects that he was ready to make war on the Emperor, in order to restore the elector by force of arms.

[Sidenote: =Impeachment of Bacon.=]

A Parliament was again summoned. It gave the king a liberal grant for the proposed war in Germany, but it then proceeded to investigate abuses. The most notable scandal which it discovered was that the Lord Chancellor--the great philosopher, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam--had been accepting gifts from corrupt suitors in his court--a misdemeanour so flagrant that it struck at the roots of all justice. Bacon pleaded guilty, and was removed from office (1621). The Parliament then began to discuss internal politics, praying for a more rigorous suppression of the Jesuits, and petitioning the king to marry his heir to a Protestant princess; for it was already rumoured that a Spanish match was being proposed for Prince Charles. After much angry debating on what he considered an invasion of his prerogative, James had to dismiss the two Houses (1622).

[Sidenote: =The Spanish Marriage.=]

The reports which had reached the ears of the Commons about the marriage of the Prince of Wales were quite correct. The king and Villiers, who had lately been created Earl of Buckingham, had formed a chimerical plan for persuading the King of Spain to restore the elector to the Palatinate, by means of a marriage treaty. If Prince Charles were to offer to wed one of the Infantas, the sisters of Philip IV., they thought that the Spaniard would interfere in Germany in order to oblige his brother-in-law. Moreover, the rich dowry of the princess would serve to pay some of James's debts. They forgot that the King of Spain had no interest or inducement to attack the Emperor, his own cousin and co-religionist, and that the only thing which Philip really wanted to secure by a treaty with England, was toleration for the English Catholics.

[Sidenote: =Buckingham and Prince Charles in Spain.=]

From this foolish plan sprang the rash expedition of Buckingham and Prince Charles to Madrid. Thinking to win the consent of the Spanish king by appearing in person, and using the weight of his own attractions, Buckingham persuaded the prince to accompany him, and crossed the Channel. Charles seems to have formed a romantic affection, on hearsay evidence, for the Infanta, and followed his mentor with enthusiasm. They travelled rapidly and in disguise, and were able to present themselves at Madrid before the Spanish court had any idea of their having started. Their presence put Philip IV. in no small perplexity, for he had not really intended to complete the match. His sister, the Infanta Maria, was dismayed at the prince's arrival, and threatened to retire into a nunnery rather than marry him. There followed an interminable series of negotiations, in which the Spaniards attempted to scare off the unwelcome suitor, by proposing hard conditions to him. But Charles at once accepted every proposal made, even offering to grant complete toleration to Catholics in England, which he knew that the nation and Parliament would never permit. Buckingham, meanwhile, made himself much hated by the haughty Spanish court, owing to his absurd arrogance and self-complacency. At last, discovering that the Spaniards did not mean business, he persuaded the prince to take a ceremonious leave of King Philip, and brought him back to England. When they were well out of Spain, they sent back an intimation that nothing more could be done till the king promised to recover the Palatinate for the Elector Frederic--a polite way of breaking off the match.

[Sidenote: =Alliance with France.=]

Highly indignant with the Spanish court for its blindness to his own charms and attractions, the headstrong Buckingham resolved to revenge himself on them. This was most easily done by forming an alliance with France, the eternal enemy of Spain. Accordingly, the favourite, on his return to England, began to urge the king and the prince to declare war on Philip IV., and to take up the cause of Lewis XIII. For once Buckingham had public opinion on his side, for war with Spain was always popular in England. The Parliament voted liberal subsidies for an army to be sent to Germany, and a French alliance was easily concluded. Prince Charles, quite cured of his infatuation for the Infanta, offered his hand to Henrietta Maria, the sister of Lewis XIII. She was at once betrothed to him, and the preliminaries for marriage were in progress when the old king suddenly died--worn out by slothful living and hard drinking, to which he had grown much addicted of late years (February, 1625).

[Sidenote: =Commercial and colonial expansion.=]

In two spheres only was the inglorious reign of James I. redeemed by some measure of success. The first was the realm of trade and colonial expansion. All through the early years of the century, English commerce was steadily growing, especially with the remote regions of Africa, China, India, and the Spice Islands. At the same time, the first successful English colonies were planted. The second plantation of Virginia was completed in 1607, the Bermudas were settled in 1616, Barbados in 1605. The far more important New England colonies date from 1620-28; they were founded by groups of nonconformist Puritans, who left their native country to escape the harassing laws against schism to which they found themselves subject. It is only fair to add that, when they had settled down in North America, they established a church system quite as intolerant and oppressive as that from which they had fled.

[Sidenote: =Ireland.--Ulster colonized.=]

The other sphere in which the reign of James showed a certain success was Ireland. When O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone, the old adversary of Queen Elizabeth, rebelled for a second time in 1607, his dominions in Ulster were confiscated, and carefully portioned out among English and Scotch settlers, who undertook never to resell them to natives. Many thousands of colonists crossed St. George's Channel, and by 1625 Ulster had a large and firmly rooted Protestant population, though its prosperity was founded on the systematic oppression of the native Irish.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] So called because it was supposed to be signed by 1000 ministers. As a matter of fact, it bore less than 800 names.

[36]

Margaret, Countess of Lennox. ____________________|___________________________ | | Henry, Lord Darnley = Mary Queen of Scots. Charles, Earl of Lennox. | | James VI. and I. Arabella Stuart.

[37] See p. 354.

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Chapter XXVI

THE REIGN OF CHARLES I. TO THE OUTBREAK OF THE CIVIL WAR.

1625-1642.

The accession of Charles I. made a profound change in the destinies of England, for though the new king had the same policy and the same notions of government in Church and State as his father, yet his personal character was wholly different. James had been before all things a coward: he seldom dared to translate his theories into action, and hence it came that he died peacefully in his bed. His son, on the other hand, was not lacking in courage, and he was recklessly obstinate; nothing could bend his will or teach him submission; therefore he died on the scaffold.

[Sidenote: =Character of Charles I.=]

Yet Charles was in every way superior to his father. He was a man of handsome face and stately carriage; though reared in a profligate and vicious court, he had grown up with all the private virtues; as a father and husband, he was admirable. He was sincerely religious, and ardently loved the Church of England. He was a wise and judicious patron of art and letters, but his tastes never led him into personal extravagance. If he had been born a peer instead of a prince, he would have been one of the best men of his day. But, unfortunately for England and for himself, he inherited a crown and not a coronet. He came to the helm of State fully persuaded of the truth of the two maxims that his father had taught him--that the royal prerogative overrode all the ancient national rights, and that the king ought to judge for himself in all things, and follow his own ideas, not the advice of his Parliament.

The accession of Charles was saluted with joy on all sides. The nation thought that the young, chivalrous, and enterprising prince would reverse all his father's policy--he would cast away the hated Spanish alliance, and place England at the head of the Protestant powers of Europe, the position that she had held in Elizabeth's day. It was hoped that he would relegate the upstart Buckingham to the background, and rule for himself, but in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the nation.

[Sidenote: =Continued ascendency of Buckingham.=]

The first jarring note was struck when it became evident that the king was still under the control of his father's favourite. Villiers had somehow contrived to master the mind of the staid and firm Charles no less than that of the timid and irresolute James. When the first Parliament of the new reign was summoned, it found him in full possession of the king's ear, and dictating all his enterprises.

[Sidenote: =Demands for money refused by the Commons.=]

The enormous demands for money which Charles laid before the Commons were enough to dash their spirits. The late king had left some £800,000 of debts, and in addition to the sum required to discharge them, £1,000,000 more was asked for purposes of war with Spain and the Emperor. To the disgust of Charles and Buckingham, Parliament voted only two subsidies, about £150,000, and granted "Tunnage and Poundage"--the customs revenue of the kingdom--for one year only, though it had been usual, in late reigns, to give it for the whole term of the king's life.

[Sidenote: =Expedition against Cadiz.=]

The want of confidence which the Commons showed in Buckingham's administrative capacity was thoroughly justified. His first military adventure was a great expedition against the Spanish arsenal of Cadiz. A large fleet was sent out, but the generals were incapable, and the armament returned in a few months, without having accomplished anything save the capture of a single Spanish fort (1625).

[Sidenote: =Loan of ships for the siege of La Rochelle.=]

Meanwhile a new trouble was brewing. Charles had carried out Buckingham's scheme for an alliance with France, and had taken to wife the Princess Henrietta Maria, sister of Lewis XIII., the moment that the mourning for his father was over. Shortly after, his brother-in-law asked him for the loan of eight men-of-war, for the French navy was small and weak. The request was granted, and the French government then proceeded to use the ships against the rebellious Huguenots of La Rochelle, who were in arms against the king.

Now, the English nation had always felt much sympathy with the French Protestants, their old companions-in-arms in the days of Elizabeth, and the news that the royal navy was being used to coerce the Huguenots caused a great outcry throughout the country. All the blame was laid on Buckingham, as was but natural. He had also to face another accusation. Unable to get enough money from Parliament to fit out the unhappy expedition to Cadiz, the king had raised large sums by "benevolences" and forced loans--the old expedient of Edward IV.

[Sidenote: =Parliament attacks Buckingham.=]

When, therefore, the second Parliament of the reign assembled in 1626, it proceeded, not to grant subsidies for the war, but to petition against Buckingham. The king took the matter in the most haughty and high-handed manner. "I must let you know," he exclaimed, "that I will not let any of my servants be questioned by you--much less those that are of eminent place, and near to me." He denied, in short, the ancient right of the House to petition against unpopular ministers--a right which it had used fifty times in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the Commons hardened their hearts, and proceeded to impeach the duke for having raised illegal taxes, sold public offices to unworthy persons, and lent the ships to France contrary to the interests of the realm and the Protestant faith. The king's reply was to dissolve them (June, 1626).

[Sidenote: =The French alliance broken off.=]

But the king and the duke had been seriously moved by the outcry against the loan of the ships to King Lewis. In a vain attempt to conciliate public opinion, and put themselves right with the nation, they suddenly reversed their policy of the last two years, and resolved to break with France, even though the Spanish war was still on their hands. With inconceivable frivolity and thoughtlessness, Buckingham proceeded to pick a quarrel with the French government, and to announce his intention of aiding the Huguenot rebels in La Rochelle against their sovereign.

[Sidenote: =Expedition in aid of La Rochelle.=]

War was declared against France, and Buckingham undertook to lead in person a great armament which was to raise the siege of La Rochelle, now closely beleaguered by the royal armies. This expedition came to a bad end, like everything else which the headstrong and incapable duke took in hand. He landed on the Isle of Rhé, opposite La Rochelle, to drive off the French troops which shut the city in on the side of the sea. But there he suffered a fearful disaster: part of his army was cut to pieces, part compelled to surrender, and, after losing 4000 men, the duke hastily re-embarked for England (October, 1627).

[Sidenote: =Buckingham assassinated.=]

But Buckingham was as obstinate as he was incompetent. He swore that he would still save La Rochelle, and began to gather a second army at Portsmouth to renew his attempt to raise the siege. While employed in organizing his new troops, he was stabbed and mortally wounded by John Felton, a discontented officer who had served under him in Rhé, and wished to avenge his private wrongs and free the country of a tyrant by this single blow (August, 1628).

By the death of his arrogant minister, the king obtained a splendid opportunity of setting himself right with the nation and turning over a new leaf. For men had agreed to consider Buckingham personally answerable for the disasters and illegalities of the two last years, and to hold the king guilty of nothing more than a misplaced confidence in his favourite.

[Sidenote: =The Parliament of 1628.=]

Charles soon showed that he was not wiser nor more teachable than the duke. He took no new favourite into his confidence, and proceeded to act as his own prime minister, so that he made himself clearly responsible for all that followed. He had summoned his third Parliament early in 1628, hoping to extract from it the sums necessary to defray Buckingham's projected second expedition to La Rochelle. The Commons met in no pleasant mood, and were far more set on protesting against the doings of Buckingham than on granting money. The new House contained many men who were to be notable in after-years as the chief opponents of the king's misrule: Oliver Cromwell appeared for the first time to represent Huntingdon; Hampden, Pym, and Eliot were also numbered among the members--all three considerable personages, who had already protested against the methods of the king's administration.

[Sidenote: =The Petition of Right.=]

Instead of waiting to be attacked, the Parliament of 1628 took the initiative, by presenting to the king the celebrated Petition of Right--a document which demanded that certain ancient rights of Englishmen should be formally conceded by the king, namely, that no benevolences or forced loans should be demanded, no soldiers billeted on citizens without payment, no man imprisoned except on a specified and definite charge, and no martial law proclaimed in time of peace. Unless this petition was granted, they intimated that no supplies of money should be forthcoming (May 28). After some quibbling and hesitation, Charles gave his assent; money was absolutely necessary to him, and he was determined to have it. The subsidies were granted, and then in a few months he proceeded to break his plighted word.

[Sidenote: =Parliament dissolved.=]

When the Parliament met after its adjournment in January, 1629, it found that the king had already begun raising Tunnage and Poundage, which had not yet been legally granted him, and was imprisoning those who refused to pay. Their indignation was thoroughly roused, and they displayed such a combative spirit, that Charles determined to dissolve them at once. While his messenger was knocking at the door of the House, the Commons passed a hasty resolution, "that any one who should countenance Popery, or advise the levying of subsidies not granted by Parliament, should be reputed a capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth." This declaration had hardly been carried, when the notice of dissolution was proclaimed (March 10, 1629).

[Sidenote: =Personal government.=]

After waging such bitter war with three successive Parliaments, Charles resolved to try the unprecedented experiment of governing without Parliaments at all. For eleven years he refused to summon the two Houses, and ruled autocratically without any check on his will (1629-1640). He marked his sense of the late Parliament's conduct by apprehending several of its members, and sending three of them to the Tower. Sir John Eliot, the most prominent of these captives, and one of the best men of his day, languished to death in his prison, after a confinement of no less than three years.

After this cruel and unconstitutional beginning, Charles persevered in his evil ways. He chose a body of ministers who would obey his every command, displaced such judges and officials as showed any regard for the old customs of the realm, and governed like a Continental tyrant. He was not a vicious or a malevolent man, but he was fully convinced that his prerogative covered every illegal act that he might commit, and he was persuaded that all who opposed him must be not only foolish but evil-disposed persons. As to the Petition of Right, he managed to forget that he had ever signed it.

[Sidenote: =Archbishop Laud.=]

The two chief councillors of the king in this unhappy period were William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford. The former was an honest but narrow-minded man, who had made a great reputation at Oxford as President of St. John's College, and had grown to note as the head of the High Church party in the University. He was a good scholar and an excellent organizer, but a martinet to the backbone. He accepted the archbishopric with the fixed idea of suppressing and crushing the Puritan party in and out of the Church of England. He hated the Puritan ideal of Church government on republican lines without king or bishop, and he equally detested the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination,[38] which was the shibboleth of Puritan theology. The king was a good Churchman, and gave Laud his full confidence; Laud, in return, became the zealous servant of Charles in secular no less than in religious matters. Not only did he teach consistently that it was a subject's duty to submit without question to a divinely ordained king, not only did he devote himself to molesting and harassing Puritans in the Church Courts, but he made himself the most prominent personage among the king's ministers. His name is signed at the top of every unwise ordinance that the Privy Council ever produced. He sat regularly in the two ancient but unconstitutional courts, the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, which punished those who had offended King Charles in matters secular or spiritual. Hence it came that he was hated, not only as an ecclesiastical tyrant, but as a temporal oppressor. Yet at bottom he was an honest and well-meaning man, who did but follow the dictates of his somewhat pedantic conscience.

[Sidenote: =The Earl of Strafford.--"Thorough."=]

It is difficult to give even this moderate praise to the other great minister who served King Charles. Sir Thomas Wentworth had been a great enemy of Buckingham in Parliament, but after the duke's death he suddenly went over to the king, and enlisted in his service. Wentworth loved power above all things, and sold himself to Charles for high promotion. It was this desertion of his old party that made him so well hated by the friends of liberty. The king gave him the title of Strafford, and entrusted him first with the "Presidency of the North"--the government of the counties beyond the Humber; and afterwards with the Lord-Deputyship of Ireland. Strafford was a very capable man, with a hard hand and a great talent for organization. He called his system the policy of "Thorough," by which he meant a resolute persistence in ignoring all checks of custom or constitutional usage which might restrain the king's action, and a determination to crush all who dared to stand in his way.

[Sidenote: =Strafford's Irish policy.=]

The tale of Strafford's government in Ireland best illustrates what "Thorough" implied. He reduced the island to a more perfect obedience than it had ever known before, made its revenue and expenditure balance, kept up a large and efficient army, and encouraged trade and manufactures. But this was done at the cost of a ruthless disregard alike for law and morality. Strafford bullied and cheated the Irish Parliament; he set up illegal courts of justice; he dragooned the Scottish settlers in Ulster into accepting episcopacy. His worst measures, however, were reserved for the native Irish. On the preposterous plea that the landlords of Connaught could show no valid title-deeds for their estates, he proposed to confiscate the whole of that province, and settle it up with English. As a matter of fact, Connaught was mostly in the hands of ancient Celtic houses, who could show a tenure of many centuries, but had never consigned their claims to parchment. Strafford proposed to take heavy fines from a few of the unfortunate landholders, and to wholly evict the rest from their ancestral estates. And he would have done it, if troubles in England had not called him away from his task.

[Sidenote: =Tyrannous measures of the king.=]

To enumerate all the unconstitutional acts of Charles I. in his eleven years of tyranny would be tedious. He had resolved to raise a sufficient revenue without Parliamentary grants, and to secure it he discovered the most monstrous devices. He established monopolies in the commonest products of trade, such as soap, linen, and leather. He declared whole districts of England to be under forest law, though the forests had disappeared centuries before, and took heavy fines from the inhabitants. He revived the old law of Edward I., which compelled all owners of £40 a year in land to receive knighthood, and made them pay exorbitant fees for the honour. The arbitrary Star Chamber was set to inflict heavy fines on rich men for offences which did not come under the letter of any law, it strained angry words into libel or treason, and made family broils or personal quarrels a fruitful source of revenue. The fines ran up as high as £20,000.

[Sidenote: =Ship-Money.=]

Another invention of the king was the celebrated Ship-Money. In ancient times sea-coast districts had been wont to pay a special contribution in time of war, to provide vessels for the royal navy. Charles, in full time of peace, proposed to raise this tax from every county in England, as an annual imposition. John Hampden, the member for Buckinghamshire in the last Parliament, refused to pay the twenty shillings at which he was assessed, and took the case before the courts. But the subservient judges decided in the king's favour, and Hampden was rigorously fined (1637).

[Sidenote: =The Repression of Puritans.--Bastwick's case.=]

Beside financial extortion, the king countenanced much oppression of other sorts. Laud and his spiritual courts were always at work against the Puritans. The net result of their work was that the whole Calvinistic party in the Church of England went over to Nonconformity, and became for the most part Presbyterians. Few but the "Arminian"[39] High Churchmen remained in the Establishment. It is probable that these eleven years tripled the number of schismatics in the country. To illustrate the dealings of the Government with clamorous Puritans, the case of Dr. John Bastwick may be taken as an example. He accused the bishops of a tendency to Popery in a tract called "The New Litany." For this he was sentenced to lose both his ears, to stand in the pillory, to be fined £5000, and to be imprisoned till his death (1637).

[Sidenote: =The Star Chamber.--Prynne's case.=]

Such sentences, however, were not uncommon in the Court of Star Chamber; nor were they reserved for offenders against spiritual peers only. A case may be quoted even more astonishing than that of Bastwick. A lawyer named William Prynne wrote a book called "Histriomastix," protesting against the growing immorality of the stage. It contained words supposed to reflect on Queen Henrietta Maria, who was very fond of plays, and had sometimes acted in masques herself. For this Prynne was condemned to the same penalty as Bastwick--the pillory, the loss of his ears, and a fine of £5000.

It is not unnatural that England grew more and more disloyal as the years went by. The whole country was seething with discontent. Yet it was not south but north of the Tweed that the first blow was to be struck; it seemed that English wrath needed a Parliament to make its voice articulate. The Scots, on the other hand, found their centre of resistance in the strong local organization of their Kirk.

[Sidenote: =Attempt to force Episcopacy on Scotland.=]

The cause of the Scottish outbreak was the king's attempt to force Episcopal government and High Church doctrine on the Kirk of Scotland, which was deeply attached to its Presbyterian constitution, and wholly committed to Calvinistic theology. Both James I. and Charles in his earlier years had made spasmodic attempts to bring the northern Church up to the same level of faith and ritual as that which prevailed in the south. They had been sturdily resisted, but the struggle had not grown quite desperate till 1637, when Charles and Laud seriously took in hand the conversion of Scotland. The first grievance was the issue, by royal authority alone, of a set of "canons"--or Church rules--drawn up by Laud (1636). They were universally disregarded, but in the following year matters came to a head when the king ordered a new Book of Common Prayer, drawn up on an Anglican model, to be taken into use in all the churches of Scotland. The attempt to introduce it led to the celebrated riot in St. Giles's, Edinburgh, where (as the story goes) the turmoil was started by an old woman hurling her stool at the dean's head, with the war-cry, "Will you say the Mass in my lug?" (ear). All the clergy who attempted to use the new Service-book were hustled and driven away (July, 1637).

[Sidenote: =The National Covenant.=]

It was evident that Charles would bitterly resent this national outburst, and in self-defence the Scots--nobles, ministers, and burgesses alike--entered into the "National Covenant," a solemn sworn agreement to stand by each other to resist tyranny and Popery. Soon after, the General Assembly of the Kirk met at Glasgow, declared the Scottish bishops tainted with Romanism, condemned the king's new canons and Book of Prayer, and proclaimed that Episcopacy was altogether opposed to the rules of faith.

[Sidenote: =The Scots take up arms.=]

This was open rebellion in the king's eyes, and he immediately began to make preparations for a military expedition against Scotland. The whole country was in the hands of the Covenanters, save some of the wild Highland districts, and it was evident that a national war was impending. At the first news of the king's movements, the Scots raised an army of more than 20,000 men, led by veteran officers who had served on the Protestant side in the wars of Germany. This formidable force advanced to Dunse Law, in Berwickshire, and prepared to defend the line of the Tweed. The king had no standing army, save the troops whom Strafford had organized in Ireland: he was therefore compelled to call out the gentry and militia of the northern counties. It soon became apparent that he would not be able to rely on any willing service from these levies. Half England thought the Scots in the right; the men came in unwillingly and in inadequate numbers; and Charles found at York only a raw discontented force, quite unready to take the field. Dismayed at his weakness, he began to negotiate with the insurgents (June, 1639), but they would take no compromise, and as neither men nor money were forthcoming, the king was forced to take the desperate step of summoning a Parliament to grant him supplies.

[Sidenote: =The Short Parliament.=]

The two Houses met in the spring of 1640, in no placable frame of mind. Eleven years of tyranny had maddened the nation, and now that England had found her voice again, it spoke with no uncertain sound. Her mood was quickly shown. Led by John Pym, the member for Tavistock, the Commons at once announced that they were come together to discuss grievances before thinking of grants of supply. Charles immediately dissolved the Parliament ere it had sat three weeks. Hence it is known as the "Short Parliament" (April-May, 1640).

[Sidenote: =The Rout of Newburn.=]

Hardening his heart, Charles raised a few thousand pounds by ship-money and other illegal devices, and launched his disaffected and undisciplined army against the Scots. But the men disbanded themselves at the first shot, and, after the disgraceful rout of Newburn, the Covenanters were able to occupy Northumberland and Durham, and established their head-quarters at Newcastle (August, 1640). The king had already summoned Strafford from Ireland, and the great Lord-Deputy had come over, but without his army. He was now given command of the wrecks of the levies in the north; but even he could not compel that discontented host to stand or fight. In despair, the king saw that he must make concessions to the nation, and called a new Parliament (November 3, 1640).

[Sidenote: =The Long Parliament.=]

For the fifth time Charles found himself confronted with the angry representatives of the nation that he had wronged. But this time the engagement was to be no short skirmish, but a long and desperate battle, destined to endure for eight years, and to end only with his overthrow and death. The "Long Parliament," unlike its predecessors, was to exist for many years. With it the king was to fight out the great dispute for the "sovereignty" of England--to settle whether, for the future, the royal prerogative or the will of the Commons was to be the stronger factor in the governance of the realm. In the existing crisis Charles felt that he was, for the moment, entirely at the mercy of the two Houses. The exchequer was empty, the army disloyal, an active enemy was in possession of the Northern counties. He shrank from playing his last stake by bringing over Strafford's troops from Ireland to resist the Scots, though the stern Lord-Deputy strongly urged him to take that measure.

[Sidenote: ="King Pym."=]

When Parliament met, the same men who had been seen as members in 1628, and in the "Short Parliament" of the last spring, stood forward to confront the king. Pym at once marshalled all the forces of discontent into a compact host; so great was the power over them which he displayed, that he soon was nicknamed "King Pym" by the friends of Charles. He and his confidants were already in secret communication with the Scots, and spoke all the more boldly, because they knew that they could call down the Covenanting host on London, if the king should dare to withstand them.

[Sidenote: =Arrest of Strafford and Laud.=]

The "Long Parliament" met on November 3. It at once proceeded to business. Eight days later, Pym moved that Strafford should be impeached for treason, and, in the following month, Laud was also arraigned on the same charge. Both were arrested, and sent to the Tower. The king made no attempt to defend them. Apparently, he was so conscious of his helplessness, and so dismayed by the riotous mob of London, and the fierce words of the Commons, that he had completely lost his head. It is certain that, if he had resisted, none but a few courtiers would have backed him. He sank in the most extraordinary way, in six months, from an autocrat into a nerveless, hunted creature, amazed at the wrath he had roused, and quite unable to defend himself.

[Sidenote: =Trial and execution of Strafford.=]

The dealings of the Parliament with the two great ministers, the archbishop and the Lord-Deputy, were summary and harsh, even to injustice. It is true that both Laud and Strafford had been cruel enemies of the liberties of England, but it would have been well, in punishing them, to proceed on the best constitutional precedents, and to let the course of justice be clear and calm. Strafford was impeached before the peers, and there was brought against him a vast weight of evidence to prove that, both as President of the North and as Governor of Ireland, he had committed scores of illegal, arbitrary, and cruel acts. But that the acts amounted to treason was not evident, and Pym and his friends were determined to find Strafford guilty of nothing less. After fourteen days' sittings, the accusers suddenly determined to change their procedure. Dropping the method of impeachment, they determined to crush Strafford by a simple declaratory bill of attainder, which stated that he had committed treason, and was worthy of death. This bill was brought into the House of Commons on April 10, and all its three readings were carried in eleven days. The main point on which the charge of treason was founded, was Strafford's advice to the king to bring over the Irish army, and the only proof of that advice was a paper of notes made in the Privy Council, which had surreptitiously come into Pym's hands.[40] Strafford had said, "Your Majesty has an army in Ireland, that you may employ to reduce this kingdom to obedience." It was not even certain that "this kingdom" meant England, and not Scotland, but on that evidence Strafford was convicted of plotting to levy war against the State. The vast majority of the Commons were determined to have his blood; 204 members voted for the bill, only 59 against it, and the names of the minority were soon placarded all over London as traitors to the commonwealth. The House of Lords approved the bill of attainder, and it was sent to the king. Charles had secretly given Strafford a pardon for all his acts, and promised to save his life. But in a moment of alarm, with the angry shouts of the Londoners ringing in his ears, he gave his assent to the bill. It was an inexcusably selfish and cowardly act, the one deed in all his life which we must stamp as mean and perfidious, as well as unwise. Strafford suffered on Tower Hill, with the stern courage that had marked all his acts, muttering, "Put not your trust in princes" with his last breath (May 12, 1641).

[Sidenote: =Impeachment of Laud and others.=]

It was now the turn of the old archbishop. He was impeached on the 15th of December, both for illegal acts in the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, of which he was undoubtedly guilty, and for secret encouragement of Popery, of which he was as undoubtedly innocent. The articles drawn up against him were approved by the vote of both Houses, but he was not at once tried, but allowed to linger in the Tower, where he was to spend more than two years. Several minor ministers of the Crown were also impeached--Windebank, the secretary of state; Finch, the lord keeper; and the judges who had given the unrighteous decision in the ship-money case. The more prominent of these tools of the king saved themselves by flying over-sea.

[Sidenote: =Measures of reform.=]

But while bent on vengeance for the past, the Long Parliament was also desirous of securing good governance for the future. The spring and summer of 1641 saw the abolition of most of the machinery which Charles had used to carry out his tyranny. The two great unconstitutional courts, the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, were abolished by a law passed in July. By another, carried in February, it was provided that Parliaments should be triennial, and that, if the king refrained for three years from calling the two Houses together, they should have the right to meet without his summons. In June a bill was drawn up, declaring illegal the exaction of ship-money, benevolences, and the rest of the king's favourite forms of extortion. An excellent device for keeping the law-courts free from royal interference was found by making the judges hold their office, not during the king's pleasure, but "dum se bene gesserint"--as long as they faithfully discharged their office. This swept away the power which the Stuarts had habitually used, of displacing every judge who gave decisions against the prerogative.

[Sidenote: =The "Root-and-Branch" Bill.=]

If the Long Parliament had halted here, we should owe it nothing but thanks and praise. Unfortunately, however, it soon began to press on from redressing national grievances to pandering to party animosities. Most of its leading members were Puritans, and of them a majority was formed by those who had left the Church and taken to Presbyterianism. These Nonconformists were burning to revenge themselves on the Church of England for the tyranny which Laud and the Court of High Commission had exercised over them. The first symptom of their wrath was a bill for excluding the bishops from the House of Lords; this was afterwards enlarged into a scheme for abolishing the bishops altogether, and reorganizing the Church on a Presbyterian basis. In this form it was popularly known as the "Root-and-Branch" Bill, from a term used in a great London petition in its favour.

[Sidenote: =Split in the Parliamentary party.=]

This sweeping party measure at once threw all the moderate men in the House, who remained loyal Churchmen, though they were also constitutional reformers, into a violent opposition to the majority. After much fierce debating, Pym and his friends passed the second reading by a small majority (138 to 105) in May, 1641. The third reading was bitterly debated all through the summer, but never carried through; in face of the danger of splitting the party of reform, the promoters of the bill wisely dropped it (August, 1641). But they never succeeded in reuniting the Churchmen to themselves in the firm alliance that had existed before. Men like Lord Falkland, Edward Hyde, John Colepepper, and others of equally liberal views, began to doubt the wisdom of continuing to act with a party which was tending to appear more like a synod of fanatics than a committee of constitutional reformers.

[Sidenote: =Position of the king.=]

It was the appearance of this split in the Parliament that first brought some comfort to the disconsolate Charles. After giving a weak and insincere assent to every bill that was sent up to him in the summer, he began to pluck up his heart in the autumn of 1641. It was now his cue to assume the position of a constitutional king, and to accept the present position of affairs. But in his heart he was, no doubt, beginning to dream of ridding himself of his oppressors by the aid of the Church party and the moderate men. He spent the autumn in a visit to Scotland, where he endeavoured to conciliate the Covenanters by granting every request that they laid before him. But, at the same time, he was in secret negotiation with those of the Scottish nobles who disliked the domination of the Kirk, and was endeavouring to build up a Royalist party in the land.

[Sidenote: =The Irish Rebellion.=]

It was while Charles lay in the north that there burst out troubles in Ireland, which were fated to do him no small harm. The iron hand of Strafford had kept the Irish down for a space, in spite of all the wrongs and injustice which he had committed. When Strafford, however, was gone, the wrath of the oppressed natives boiled over, with all the more vigour because of this cruel repression. In October, 1641, there broke out a great national and religious rebellion, such as had not been seen since the days of Elizabeth. The old Irish clans rose to cast out and slay the English colonists. The Anglo-Irish Catholics of the Pale took arms at the same time, not to make Ireland independent, but to compel the king to take off all laws against Romanism, and turn the island into a Catholic country. In the North of Ireland, where the plantation of Ulster had worked the cruelest wrongs, the rising was attended with horrible atrocities. The natives, headed by Sir Phelim O'Neil, a distant kinsman of the old Earls of Tyrone, slew some 5000 of the unarmed colonists in cold blood. Many thousands more died from cold and starvation, being cast out of their dwellings and hunted away naked in the cold autumn weather. Unhappily for the king, the rebels thought it wise to give out that they acted by his permission in taking arms, and that they only struck at the English Parliament and the Protestant religion. Phelim O'Neil even showed a letter purporting to come from Charles, and bearing the royal seal of Scotland, where the king at that moment was staying. It was a forgery, and the seal was taken from an old deed; but the English Puritans would believe anything of Charles, and jumped to the conclusion that he was guilty of fostering the rising, and therefore of authorizing the massacre.

[Sidenote: =The Grand Remonstrance.=]

Under the stress of the news from Ireland, the Long Parliament reassembled in the winter of 1641-42, in no amiable frame of mind. They signalized their reassembly by putting forth the "Grand Remonstrance," a kind of historical summary of all the illegalities which Charles had committed since his accession, followed by a list of their own reforms already carried out, and a scheme for further reforms to come. These last were to include a bill to make the king choose no ministers or officials save such as Parliament should recommend to him, another for the complete suppression of Romanism, and a third for the "reformation" of the Church of England in the direction of pure Protestantism, that is, of extreme Puritanism. The first half of the "Remonstrance" passed the Commons with little opposition, but the last clauses, which practically bound the House to abolish Episcopacy and turn the Established Church into a Presbyterian Kirk, were hotly opposed by all the moderate party. In the end they passed by a narrow majority of eleven. But the victory of the Puritans involved a complete schism in the House. All the Church party now resolved that they would go no further; they would rather trust the king, in spite of all his faults, than the fanatical Presbyterians. For the first time in his life, Charles found himself allied to a powerful party in the Lower House.

[Sidenote: =Attempted arrest of the five members.=]

He might have regained much of his authority if he had now played his cards wisely. But unwisdom was always his characteristic. Taking heart at the divisions among the Commons, he resolved to attempt a coup d'état. On January 4, 1642, he suddenly came down to the House, with a great armed retinue of three or four hundred men, intending to arrest the five chiefs of the Puritan party--Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrig, and Strode. They had received warning of his approach, and fled to the City, where the London militia armed in thousands to protect them. The king looked round the House, and noted that the five members were not present. "I see the birds are flown," he exclaimed, and, after an awkward speech of apology, left the House.

[Sidenote: =Charles leaves London.=]

The plan had completely failed. The Puritans were warned that the king was ready to resume his old illegal habits, and had not learnt his new position as a constitutional ruler. Charles himself was so mortified at the frustration of his scheme, that he hastily decamped, abandoning his capital to the Parliament and its enthusiastic supporters, the merchants and burgesses of the City.

[Sidenote: =Preparations for war.--The Royalist party.=]

The die was now cast. The next six months were occupied by both sides in preparations for war, which was evidently at hand. Every man had now to choose his side and make up his mind. The king went round the Midlands, holding conferences with all whom he thought might be induced to support him. He found more encouragement than he had expected. A large majority of the peerage were on his side. They objected to being ruled by a House of Commons which had grown violent and fanatical. Almost the whole body of Churchmen all over the kingdom were also ready to join him. When forced to choose between a king who had been guilty of oppression and unwisdom, but who was undoubtedly a good Churchman like themselves, and a Parliament ruled by schismatics who wished to wreck the old Church, they reluctantly but firmly threw in their lot with Charles. There were whole shires where the Puritans were few and the Church was strong, and in these the king found promise of steady support. There were thousands who were moved by the old instinct of loyalty, and thousands more who hoped--unwisely perhaps, but whole-heartedly--that their master had learnt moderation, and would, if triumphant, never return to his old courses. Meanwhile Charles took a step which showed that he was preparing for the worst. He sent his wife over-sea, with all the money he could collect, and his crown jewels, bidding her spend the whole in buying munitions of war in France and Holland.

[Sidenote: =The Commons claim control of the militia.=]

The Parliamentarians also were making their preparations. They were determined to get possession of the armed force of the nation--the militia, or "train-bands" of the shires and boroughs. With this object they sent the king proposals, which they could hardly expect him to accept, that for the future the right to call out and officer the militia should be vested in the two Houses, and not in the Crown. The negative answer was promptly sent them back from Newmarket. They then proceeded to pass an ordinance, arrogating to themselves the right to nominate the lord-lieutenants, the official commanders of the militia, and ordering military authorities to look for their orders to the Houses, and not to the king. This ordinance never received the royal sanction, and was, of course, illegal in form; nevertheless, it was acted upon.

[Sidenote: =Charles at Hull.=]

The crisis began when, in April, the king called on Sir John Hotham, governor of Hull, to admit him within the walls of that town, and make over to him a store of arms and munitions which lay there. Hotham shut the gates, and answered that he took orders from the Parliament alone.

The next two months were spent by both parties in gathering armies. In June the king sent "commissions of array" to trustworthy persons in every county, bidding them muster men in his name. The Parliament replied, not only by putting the militia under arms, but by raising new levies for permanent service in the field, under officers whom they could trust. They gave the supreme command to the Earl of Essex, the man who thirty years before had been so cruelly wronged by James I. and his favourite Somerset.

On August 22 the king set up his standard at Nottingham, and bade all his friends come to meet him. At the same time, Essex marched north from London. The war had begun.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] The theory that all men are born to salvation or perdition, according to God's will, and have no share or responsibility in their own fate.

[39] Arminius was a Dutch divine who violently opposed the doctrine of predestination; hence those who denied it were often called Arminians.

[40] The notes were made by Sir H. Vane, one of the council, and a strong Royalist. But they came into the hands of his son, a bitter opponent of the king, who gave them to Pym.

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XXI. HENRY VIII., AND THE BREACH WITH ROME…

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