Chapter VI…

Chapter VI

1553 AND 1554.

Mary affects attachment to Elizabeth.--Short duration of her kindness.--Earl of Devonshire liberated from the Tower.--His character.--He rejects the love of Mary--shows partiality to Elizabeth.--Anger of Mary.--Elizabeth retires from court.--Queen's proposed marriage unpopular.--Character of sir T. Wyat.--His rebellion.--Earl of Devonshire remanded to the Tower.--Elizabeth summoned to court--is detained by illness.--Wyat taken--is said to accuse Elizabeth.--She is brought prisoner to the court--examined by the council--dismissed--brought again to court--re-examined--committed to the Tower.--Particulars of her behaviour.--Influence of Mary's government on various eminent characters.--Reinstatement of the duke of Norfolk in honor and office.--His retirement and death.--Liberation from the Tower of Tonstal.--His character and after fortunes.--Of Gardiner and Bonner.--Their views and characters.--Of the duchess of Somerset and the marchioness of Exeter.--Imprisonment of the Dudleys--of several protestant bishops--of judge Hales.--His sufferings and death.--Characters and fortunes of sir John Cheke, sir Anthony Cook, Dr. Cox, and other protestant exiles.

The conduct of Elizabeth during the late alarming crisis, earned for her from Mary, during the first days of her reign, some demonstration of sisterly affection. She caused her to bear her company in her public entry into London; kindly detained her for a time near her own person; and seemed to have consigned for ever to an equitable oblivion all the mortifications and heartburnings of which the child of Anne Boleyn had been the innocent occasion to her in times past, and under circumstances which could never more return.

In the splendid procession which attended her majesty from the Tower to Whitehall previously to her coronation on October 1st 1553, the royal chariot, sumptuously covered with cloth of tissue and drawn by six horses with trappings of the same material, was immediately followed by another, likewise drawn by six horses and covered with cloth of silver, in which sat the princess Elizabeth and the lady Anne of Cleves, who took place in this ceremony as the adopted sister of Henry VIII.

But notwithstanding these fair appearances, the rancorous feelings of Mary's heart with respect to her sister were only repressed or disguised, not eradicated; and it was not long before a new subject of jealousy caused them to revive in all their pristine energy.

Amongst the state prisoners committed to the Tower by Henry VIII., whose liberation his executors had resisted during the whole reign of Edward, but whom it was Mary's first act of royalty to release and reinstate in their offices or honors, was Edward Courtney, son of the unfortunate marquis of Exeter. From the age of fourteen to that of six-and-twenty, this victim of tyranny had been doomed to expiate in a captivity which threatened to be perpetual, the involuntary offence of inheriting through an attainted father the blood of the fourth Edward. To the surprise and admiration of the court, he now issued forth a comely and accomplished gentleman; deeply versed in the literature of the age; skilled in music, and still more so in the art of painting, which had formed the chief solace of his long seclusion; and graced with that polished elegance of manners, the result, in most who possess it, of early intercourse with the world and an assiduous imitation of the best examples, but to a few of her favorites the free gift of nature herself. To all his prepossessing qualities was superadded that deep romantic kind of interest with which sufferings, long, unmerited, and extraordinary, never fail to invest a youthful sufferer.

What wonder that Courtney speedily became the favorite of the nation!--what wonder that even the severe bosom of Mary herself was touched with tenderness! With the eager zeal of the sentiment just awakened in her heart, she hastened to restore to her too amiable kinsman the title of earl of Devonshire, long hereditary in the illustrious house of Courtney, to which she added the whole of those patrimonial estates which the forfeiture of his father had vested in the crown. She went further; she lent a propitious ear to the whispered suggestion of her people, still secretly partial to the house of York, that an English prince of the blood was most worthy to share the throne of an English queen. It is even affirmed that hints were designedly thrown out to the young man himself of the impression which he had made upon her heart. But Courtney generously disdained, as it appears, to barter his affections for a crown. The youth, the talents, the graces of Elizabeth had inspired him with a preference which he was either unwilling or unable to conceal; Mary was left to vent her disappointment in resentment against the ill-fated object of her preference, and in every demonstration of a malignant jealousy towards her innocent and unprotected rival.

By the first act of a parliament summoned immediately after the coronation, Mary's birth had been pronounced legitimate, the marriage of her father and mother valid, and their divorce null and void. A stigma was thus unavoidably cast on the offspring of Henry's second marriage; and no sooner had Elizabeth incurred the displeasure of her sister, than she was made to feel how far the consequences of this new declaration of the legislature might be made to extend. Notwithstanding the unrevoked succession act which rendered her next heir to the crown, she was forbidden to take place of the countess of Lenox, or the duchess of Suffolk, in the presence-chamber, and her friends were discountenanced or affronted obviously on her account. Her merit, her accomplishments, her insinuating manners, which attracted to her the admiration and attendance of the young nobility, and the favor of the nation, were so many crimes in the eyes of a sovereign who already began to feel her own unpopularity; and Elizabeth, who was not of a spirit to endure public and unmerited slights with tameness, found it at once the most dignified and the safest course, to seek, before the end of the year, the peaceful retirement of her house of Ashridge in Buckinghamshire. It was however made a condition of the leave of absence from court which she was obliged to solicit, that she should take with her sir Thomas Pope and sir John Gage, who were placed about her as inspectors and superintendants of her conduct, under the name of officers of her household.

The marriage of Mary to Philip of Spain was now openly talked of. It was generally and justly unpopular: the protestant party, whom the measures of the queen had already filled with apprehensions, saw, in her desire of connecting herself yet more closely with the most bigoted royal family of Europe, a confirmation of their worst forebodings; and the tyranny of the Tudors had not yet so entirely crushed the spirit of Englishmen as to render them tamely acquiescent in the prospect of their country's becoming a province to Spain, subject to the sway of that detested people whose rapacity, and violence, and unexampled cruelty, had filled both hemispheres with groans and execrations.

The house of commons petitioned the queen against marrying a foreign prince: she replied by dissolving them in anger; and all hope of putting a stop to the connexion by legal means being thus precluded, measures of a more dangerous character began to be resorted to.

Sir Thomas Wyat of Allingham Castle in Kent, son of the poet, wit, and courtier of that name, had hitherto been distinguished by a zealous loyalty; and he is said to have been also a catholic. Though allied in blood to the Dudleys, not only had he refused to Northumberland his concurrence in the nomination of Jane Grey, but, without waiting a moment to see which party would prevail, he had proclaimed queen Mary in the market-place at Maidstone, for which instance of attachment he had received her thanks[20]. But Wyat had been employed during several years of his life in embassies to Spain; and the intimate acquaintance which he had thus acquired of the principles and practices of its court, filled him with such horror of their introduction into his native country, that, preferring patriotism to loyalty where their claims appeared incompatible, he incited his neighbours and friends to insurrection.

[Note 20: See Carte's History of England.]

In the same cause sir Peter Carew, and sir Gawen his uncle, endeavoured to raise the West, but with small success; and the attempts made by the duke of Suffolk, lately pardoned and liberated, to arm his tenantry and retainers in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, proved still more futile. Notwithstanding however this want of co-operation, Wyat's rebellion wore for some time a very formidable appearance. The London trained-bands sent out to oppose him, went over to him in a body under Bret, their captain; the guards, almost the only regular troops in the kingdom, were chiefly protestants, and therefore little trusted by the queen; and it was known that the inhabitants of the metropolis, for which he was in full march, were in their hearts inclined to his cause.

It was pretty well ascertained that the earl of Devonshire had received an invitation to join the western insurgents; and though he appeared to have rejected the proposal, he was arbitrarily remanded to his ancient abode in the Tower.

Elizabeth was naturally regarded under all these circumstances of alarm with extreme jealousy and suspicion. It was well known that her present compliance with the religion of the court was merely prudential; that she was the only hope of the protestant party, a party equally formidable by zeal and by numbers, and which it was resolved to crush; it was more than suspected, that though Wyat himself still professed an inviolable fidelity to the person of the reigning sovereign, and strenuously declared the Spanish match to be the sole grievance against which he had taken arms, many of his partisans had been led by their religious zeal to entertain the further view of dethroning the queen, in favor of her sister, whom they desired to marry to the earl of Devonshire. It was not proved that the princess herself had given any encouragement to these designs; but sir James Croft, an adherent of Wyat's, had lately visited Ashridge, and held conferences with some of her attendants; and it had since been rumored that she was projecting a removal to her manor of Donnington castle in Berkshire, on the south side of the Thames, where nothing but a day's march through an open country would be interposed between her residence and the station of the Kentish rebels.

Policy seemed now to dictate the precaution of securing her person; and the queen addressed to her accordingly the following letter.

* * * * *

"Right dear and entirely beloved sister,

"We greet you well: And whereas certain evil-disposed persons, minding more the satisfaction of their own malicious and seditious minds than their duty of allegiance towards us, have of late foully spread divers lewd and untrue rumours; and by that means and other devilish practises do travail to induce our good and loving subjects to an unnatural rebellion against God, us, and the tranquillity of our realm: We, tendering the surety of your person, which might chance to be in some peril if any sudden tumult should arise where you now be, or about Donnington, whither, as we understand, you are minded shortly to remove, do therefore think expedient you should put yourself in good readiness, with all convenient speed, to make your repair hither to us. Which we pray you fail not to do: Assuring you, that as you may most safely remain here, so shall you be most heartily welcome to us. And of your mind herein we pray you to return answer by this messenger.

"Given under our signet at our manor of St. James's the 26th of January in the 1st year of our reign.

"Your loving sister,

"MARY, the queen."

* * * * *

This summons found Elizabeth confined to her bed by sickness; and her officers sent a formal statement of the fact to the privy-council, praying that the delay of her appearance at court might not, under such circumstances, be misconstrued either with respect to her or to themselves. Monsieur de Noailles, the French ambassador, in some papers of his, calls this "a favorable illness" to Elizabeth, "since," adds he, "it seems likely to save Mary from the crime of putting her sister to death by violence." And true it is, that by detaining her in the country till the insurrection was effectually suppressed, it preserved her from any sudden act of cruelty which the violence of the alarm might have prompted: but other and perhaps greater dangers still awaited her.

A few days after the date of the foregoing letter, Wyat entered Westminster, but with a force very inadequate to his undertaking: he was repulsed in an attack on the palace; and afterwards, finding the gates of London closed against him and seeing his followers slain, taken, or flying in all directions, he voluntarily surrendered himself to one of the queen's officers and was conveyed to the Tower. It was immediately given out, that he had made a full discovery of his accomplices, and named amongst them the princess and the earl of Devonshire; and on this pretext, for it was probably no more, three gentlemen were sent, attended by a troop horse, with peremptory orders to bring Elizabeth back with them to London.

They reached her abode at ten o'clock at night, and bursting into her sick chamber, in spite of the remonstrances of her ladies, abruptly informed her of their errand. Affrighted at the summons, she declared however her entire willingness to wait upon the queen her sister, to whom she warmly protested her loyal attachment; but she appealed to their own observation for the reality of her sickness, and her utter inability to quit her chamber. The gentlemen pleaded, on the other side, the urgency of their commission, and said that they had brought the queen's litter for her conveyance. Two physicians were then called in, who gave it as their opinion that she might be removed without danger to her life; and on the morrow her journey commenced.

The departure of Elizabeth from Ashridge was attended by the tears and passionate lamentations of her afflicted household, who naturally anticipated from such beginnings the worst that could befal her. So extreme was her sickness, aggravated doubtless by terror and dejection, that even these stern conductors found themselves obliged to allow her no less than four nights' rest in a journey of only twenty-nine miles.

Between Highgate and London her spirits were cheered by the appearance of a number of gentlemen who rode out to meet her, as a public testimony of their sympathy and attachment; and as she proceeded, the general feeling was further manifested by crowds of people lining the waysides, who flocked anxiously about her litter, weeping and bewailing her aloud. A manuscript chronicle of the time describes her passage on this occasion through Smithfield and Fleet-street, in a litter open on both sides, with a hundred "velvet coats" after her, and a hundred others "in coats of fine red guarded with velvet;" and with this train she passed through the queen's garden to the court.

This open countenancing of the princess by a formidable party in the capital itself, seems to have disconcerted the plans of Mary and her advisers; and they contented themselves for the present with detaining her in a kind of honorable custody at Whitehall. Here she underwent a strict examination by the privy-council respecting Wyat's insurrection, and the rising in the West under Carew; but she steadfastly protested her innocence and ignorance of all such designs; and nothing coming out against her, in about a fortnight she was dismissed, and suffered to return to her own house. Her troubles, however, were as yet only beginning. Sir William St. Low, one of her officers, was apprehended as an adherent of Wyat's; and this leader himself, who had been respited for the purpose of working on his love of life, and leading him to betray his confederates, was still reported to accuse the princess. An idle story was officiously circulated, of his having conveyed to her in a bracelet the whole scheme of his plot; and on March 15th she was again taken into custody and brought to Hampton-court.

Soon after her arrival, it was finally announced to her by a deputation of the council, not without strong expressions of concern from several of the members, that her majesty had determined on her committal to the Tower till the matter could be further investigated. Bishop Gardiner, now a principal counsellor, and two others, came soon after, and, dismissing the princess's attendants, supplied their place with some of the queen's, and set a guard round the palace for that night. The next day, the earl of Sussex and another lord were sent to announce to her that a barge was in readiness for her immediate conveyance to the Tower. She entreated first to be permitted to write to the queen; and the earl of Sussex assenting, in spite of the angry opposition of his companion, whose name is concealed by the tenderness of his contemporaries, and undertaking to be himself the bearer of her letter, she took the opportunity to repeat her protestations of innocence and loyalty, concluding, with an extraordinary vehemence of asseveration, in these words: "As for that traitor Wyat, he might peradventure write me a letter; but on my faith I never received any from him. And as for the copy of my letter to the French king, I pray God confound me eternally, if ever I sent him word, message, token, or letter, by any means." With respect to the last clause of this disavowal, it may be fit to observe, that there is indeed no proof that Elizabeth ever returned any answer to the letters or messages of the French king; but that it seems a well-authenticated fact, that during some period of her adversity Henry II. made her the offer of an asylum in France. The circumstance of the dauphin's being betrothed to the queen of Scots, who claimed to precede Elizabeth in the order of succession, renders the motive of this invitation somewhat suspicious; at all events, it was one which she was never tempted to accept.

Her letter did not obtain for the princess what she sought,--an interview with her sister; and the next day, being Palm Sunday, strict orders were issued for all people to attend the churches and carry their palms; and in the mean time she was privately removed to the Tower, attended by the earl of Sussex and the other lord, three of her own ladies, three of the queen's, and some of her officers. Several characteristic traits of her behaviour have been preserved. On reaching her melancholy place of destination, she long refused to land at Traitor's gate; and when the uncourteous nobleman declared "that she should not choose," offering her however, at the same time, his cloak to protect her from the rain, she retained enough of her high spirit to put it from her "with a good dash." As she set her foot on the ill-omened stairs, she said, "Here landeth as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs; and before thee, O God! I speak it, having no other friends but thee alone."

On seeing a number of warders and other attendants drawn out in order, she asked, "What meaneth this?" Some one answered that it was customary on receiving a prisoner. "If it be," said she, "I beseech you that for my cause they may be dismissed." Immediately the poor men kneeled down and prayed God to preserve her; for which action they all lost their places the next day.

Going a little further, she sat down on a stone to rest herself; and the lieutenant urging her to rise and come in out of the cold and wet, she answered, "Better sitting here than in a worse place, for God knoweth whither you bring me." On hearing these words her gentleman-usher wept, for which she reproved him; telling him he ought rather to be her comforter, especially since she knew her own truth to be such, that no man should have cause to weep for her. Then rising, she entered the prison, and its gloomy doors were locked and bolted on her. Shocked and dismayed, but still resisting the weakness of unavailing lamentation, she called for her book, and devoutly prayed that she might build her house upon the rock.

Meanwhile her conductors retired to concert measures for keeping her securely; and her firm friend, the earl of Sussex, did not neglect the occasion of reminding all whom it might concern, that the king their master's daughter was to be treated in no other manner than they might be able to justify, whatever should happen hereafter; and that they were to take heed to do nothing but what their commission would bear out. To this the others cordially assented; and having performed their office, the two lords departed.

Having now conducted the heroine of the protestant party to the dismal abode which she was destined for a time to occupy, it will be proper to revert to the period of Mary's accession.

Little more than eight months had yet elapsed from the death of Edward; but this short interval had sufficed to change the whole face of the English court; to alter the most important relations of the country with foreign states; and to restore in great measure the ancient religion, which it had been the grand object of the former reign finally and totally to overthrow. It is the business of the historian to record the series of public measures by which this calamitous revolution was accomplished: the humbler but not uninteresting task, of tracing its effects on the fortunes of eminent individuals, belongs to the compiler of memoirs, and forms an appropriate accompaniment to the relation of the perils, sufferings and obloquy, through which the heiress of the English crown passed on safely to the accomplishment of her high destinies.

The liberation of the state-prisoners confined in the Tower,--an act of grace usual on the accession of a prince,--was one which the causes of detention of the greater part of them rendered it peculiarly gratifying to Mary to perform. The enemies of Henry's or of Edward's government she regarded with reason as her friends and partisans, and the adherents, open or concealed, of that church establishment which was to be forced back on the reluctant consciences of the nation.

The most illustrious of the captives was that aged duke of Norfolk whom the tyrant Henry had condemned to die without a crime, and who had been suffered to languish in confinement during the whole reign of Edward; chiefly, it is probable, because the forfeiture of his vast estates afforded a welcome supply to the exhausted treasury of the young king; though the extensive influence of this nobleman, and the attachment for the old religion which he was believed to cherish, had served as plausible pretexts for his detention. His high birth, his hereditary authority, his religious predilections, were so many titles of merit in the eyes of the new queen, who was also desirous of profiting by his abilities and long experience in all affairs civil and military. Without waiting for the concurrence of parliament, she declared by her own authority his attainder irregular and null, restored to him such of his lands as remained vested in the crown, and proceeded to reinstate him in offices and honors. On August 10th he took his seat at the council-board of the eighth English monarch whose reign he had survived to witness; on the same day he was solemnly reinvested with the garter, of which he had been deprived on his attainder; and a few days after, he sat as lord-high-steward on the trial of that very duke of Northumberland to whom, not long before, his friends and adherents had been unsuccessful suitors for his own liberation.

There is extant a remarkable order of council, dated August 27th of this year, "for a letter to be written to the countess of Surry to send up to Mountjoy Place in London her youngest son, and the rest of her children, by the earl of Surry, where they shall be received by the duke of Norfolk their grandfather[21]." It may be conjectured that these young people were thus authoritatively consigned to the guardianship of the duke, for the purpose of correcting the protestant predilections in which they had been educated; and the circumstance seems also to indicate, what indeed might be well imagined, that little harmony or intercourse subsisted between this nobleman and a daughter-in-law whom he had formerly sought to deprive of her husband in order to form for him a new and more advantageous connexion.

[Note 21: See Burleigh Papers by Haynes.]

The eldest son of the earl of Surry, now in the seventeenth year of his age, was honored with the title of his father; and he began his distinguished though unfortunate career by performing, as deputy to the duke of Norfolk, the office of earl-marshal at the queen's coronation. On the first alarm of Wyat's rebellion, the veteran duke was summoned to march out against him; but his measures, which otherwise promised success, were completely foiled by the desertion of the London bands to the insurgents; and the last military expedition of his life was destined to conclude with a hasty and ignominious flight. He soon after withdrew entirely from the fatigues of public life, and after all the vicissitudes of court and camp, palace and prison, with which the lapse of eighty eventful years had rendered him acquainted, calmly breathed his last at his own castle of Framlingham in September 1554.

Three deprived bishops were released from the Tower, and restored with honor to their sees. These were, Tonstal of Durham, Gardiner of Winchester, and Bonner of London. Tonstal, many of whose younger years had been spent in diplomatic missions, was distinguished in Europe by his erudition, which had gained him the friendship and correspondence of Erasmus; he was also mild, charitable, and of unblemished morals. Attached by principle to the faith of his forefathers, but loth either to incur personal hazard, or to sacrifice the almost princely emoluments of the see of Durham, he had contented himself with regularly opposing in the house of lords all the ecclesiastical innovations of Edward's reign, and as regularly giving them his concurrence when once established. It was not, therefore, professedly on a religious account that he had suffered deprivation and imprisonment, but on an obscure charge of having participated in some traitorous or rebellious design: a charge brought against him, in the opinion of most, falsely, and through the corrupt procurement of Northumberland, to whose project of erecting the bishopric of Durham into a county palatine for himself, the deprivation of Tonstal, and the abolition of the see by act of parliament, were indispensable preliminaries. This meek and amiable prelate returned to the exercise of his high functions, without a wish of revenging on the protestants, in their adversity, the painful acts of disingenuousness which their late ascendency had forced upon him. During the whole of Mary's reign, no person is recorded to have suffered for religion within the limits of his diocess. The mercy which he had shown, he afterwards most deservedly experienced. Refusing, on the accession of Elizabeth, to preserve his mitre by a repetition of compliances of which so many recent examples of conscientious suffering in men of both persuasions must have rendered him ashamed, he suffered a second deprivation; but his person was only committed to the honorable custody of archbishop Parker. By this learned and munificent prelate the acquirements and virtues of Tonstal were duly appretiated and esteemed. He found at Lambeth a retirement suited to his age, his tastes, his favorite pursuits; by the arguments of his friendly host he was brought to renounce several of the grosser corruptions of popery; and dying in the year 1560, an honorable monument was erected by the primate to his memory.

With views and sentiments how opposite did Gardiner and Bonner resume the crosier! A deep-rooted conviction of the truth and vital importance of the religious opinions which he defends, supplies to the persecutor the only apology of which his foolish and atrocious barbarity admits; and to men naturally mild and candid, we feel a consolation in allowing it in all its force;--but by no particle of such indulgence should Bonner or Gardiner be permitted to benefit. It would be credulity, not candor, to yield to either of these bad men the character of sincere, though over zealous, religionists. True it is that they had subjected themselves to the loss of their bishoprics, and to a severe imprisonment, by a refusal to give in their renunciation of certain doctrines of the Romish church; but they had previously gone much further in compliance than conscience would allow to any real catholic; and they appear to have stopped short in this career only because they perceived in the council such a determination to strip them, under one pretext or another, of all their preferments, as manifestly rendered further compliance useless. Both of them had policy enough to restrain them, under such circumstances, from degrading their characters gratuitously, and depriving themselves of the merit of having suffered for a faith which might soon become again predominant. They received their due reward in the favor of Mary, who recognised them with joy as the fit instruments of all her bloody and tyrannical designs, to which Gardiner supplied the crafty and contriving head, Bonner the vigorous and unsparing arm.

The proud wife of the protector Somerset,--who had been imprisoned, but never brought to trial, as an accomplice in her husband's plots,--was now dismissed to a safe insignificance. The marchioness of Exeter, against whom, in Henry's reign, an attainder had passed too iniquitous for even him to carry into effect, was also rescued from her long captivity, and indemnified for the loss of her property by some valuable grants from the new confiscations of the Dudleys and their adherents.

The only state prisoner to whom the door was not opened on this occasion was Geffrey Pole, that base betrayer of his brother and his friends by whose evidence lord Montacute and the marquis of Exeter had been brought to an untimely end. It is some satisfaction to know, that the commutation of death for perpetual imprisonment was all the favor which this wretch obtained from Henry; that neither Edward nor Mary broke his bonds; and that, as far as appears, his punishment ended only with his miserable existence.

Not long, however, were these dismal abodes suffered to remain unpeopled. The failure of the criminal enterprise of Northumberland first filled the Tower with the associates, or victims, of his guilt. Nearly the whole of the Dudley family were its tenants for a longer or shorter time; and it was another remarkable coincidence of their destinies, which Elizabeth in the after days of her power and glory might have pleasure in recalling to her favorite Leicester, that during the whole of her captivity in this fortress he also was included in the number of its melancholy inmates.

The places of Tonstal, Gardiner, and Bonner, were soon after supplied by the more zealous of Edward's bishops, Holgate, Coverdale, Ridley, and Hooper; and it was not long before the vehement Latimer and even the cautious Cranmer were added to their suffering brethren.

The queen made no difficulty of pardoning and receiving into favor those noblemen and others, members of the privy-council, whom a base dread of the resentment of Northumberland had driven into compliance with his measures in favor of Jane Grey; wisely considering, perhaps, that the men who had submitted to be the instruments of his violent and illegal proceedings, would feel little hesitation in lending their concurrence to hers also. On this principle, the marquis of Winchester and the earls of Arundel and Pembroke were employed and distinguished; the last of these experienced courtiers making expiation for his past errors, by causing his son, lord Herbert, to divorce the lady Catherine Grey, to whom it had so lately suited his political views to unite him.

Sir James Hales on the contrary, that conscientious and upright judge, who alone, of all the privy-counsellors and crown-lawyers, had persisted in refusing his signature to the act by which Mary was disinherited of the crown, found himself unrewarded and even discountenanced. The queen well knew, what probably the judge was not inclined to deny, that it was attachment, not to her person, but to the constitution of his country, which had prompted his resistance to that violation of the legal order of succession; and had it even been otherwise, she would have regarded all her obligations to him as effectually cancelled by his zealous adherence to the church establishment of the preceding reign. For daring to urge upon the grand juries whom he addressed in his circuit, the execution of some of Edward's laws in matter of religion, yet unrepealed, judge Hales was soon after thrown into prison. He endured with constancy the sufferings of a long and rigorous confinement, aggravated by the threats and ill-treatment of a cruel jailor. At length some persons in authority were sent to propound to him terms of release. It is suspected that they extorted from him some concessions on the point of religion; for immediately after their departure, retiring to his cell, in a fit of despair he stabbed himself with his knife in different parts of the body, and was only withheld by the sudden entrance of his servant from inflicting a mortal wound. Bishop Gardiner had the barbarity to insult over the agony or distraction of a noble spirit overthrown by persecution; he even converted his solitary act into a general reflection against protestantism, which he called "the doctrine of desperation." Some time after, Hales obtained his enlargement on payment of an arbitrary fine of six thousand pounds. But he did not with his liberty recover his peace of mind; and after struggling for a few months with an unconquerable melancholy, he sought and found its final cure in the waters of a pond in his garden.

No blood except of principals, was shed by Mary on account of the proclamation of Jane Grey; but she visited with lower degrees of punishment, secretly proportioned to the zeal which they had displayed in the reformation of religion, several of the more eminent partisans of this "meek usurper." The three tutors of king Edward, sir Anthony Cook, sir John Cheke and Dr. Cox, were sufficiently implicated in this affair to warrant their imprisonment for some time on suspicion; and all were eager, on their release, to shelter themselves from the approaching storm by flight.

Cheke, after confiscation of his estate, obtained permission to travel for a given time on the continent. Strasburgh was selected by Cook for his place of exile. The wise moderation of character by which this excellent person was distinguished, seems to have preserved him from taking any part in the angry contentions of protestant with protestant, exile with exile, by which the refugees of Strasburgh and Frankfort scandalized their brethren and afforded matter of triumph to the church of Rome. On the accession of Elizabeth he returned with alacrity to re-occupy and embellish the modest mansion of his forefathers, and "through the loopholes of retreat" to view with honest exultation the high career of public fortune run by his two illustrious sons-in-law, Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil.

The enlightened views of society taken by sir Anthony led him to extend to his daughters the noblest privileges of the other sex, those which concern the early and systematic acquisition of solid knowledge. Through his admirable instructions their minds were stored with learning, strengthened with principles, and formed to habits of reasoning and observation, which rendered them the worthy partners of great statesmen, who knew and felt their value. The fame, too, of these distinguished females has reflected back additional lustre on the character of a father, who was wont to say to them in the noble confidence of unblemished integrity, "My life is your portion, my example your inheritance."

Dr. Cox was quite another manner of man. Repairing first to Strasburgh, where the English exiles had formed themselves into a congregation using the liturgy of the church of England, he went thence to Frankfort, another city of refuge to his countrymen at this period; where the intolerance of his zeal against such as more inclined to the form of worship instituted by the Genevan reformer, embarked him in a violent quarrel with John Knox, against whom, on pretext of his having libelled the emperor, he found means to kindle the resentment of the magistrates, who compelled him to quit the city. After this disgraceful victory over a brother reformer smarting under the same scourge of persecution with himself, he returned to Strasburgh, where he more laudably employed himself in establishing a kind of English university.

His zeal for the church of England, his sufferings in the cause, and his services to learning, obtained for him from Elizabeth the bishopric of Ely; but neither party enjoyed from this appointment all the satisfaction which might have been anticipated. The courage, perhaps the self opinion, of Dr. Cox, engaged him on several occasions in opposition to the measures of the queen; and his narrow and persecuting spirit involved him in perpetual disputes and animosities, which rendered the close of a long life turbulent and unhappy, and took from his learning and gray hairs their due reverence. The rapacity of the courtiers, who obtained grant after grant of the lands belonging to his bishopric, was another fruitful source to him of vexation; and he had actually tendered the resignation of his see on very humiliating terms, when death came to his relief in the year 1581, the eighty-second of his age.

If in this and a few other instances, the polemical zeal natural to men who had sacrificed their worldly all for the sake of religion, was observed to degenerate among the refugees into personal quarrels disgraceful to themselves and injurious to their noble cause, it ought on the other hand to be observed, that some of the firmest and most affectionate friendships of the age were formed amongst these companions in adversity; and that by many who attained under Elizabeth the highest preferments and distinctions, the title of fellow-exile never ceased to be regarded as the most sacred and endearing bond of brotherhood.

Other opportunities will arise of commemorating some of the more eminent of the clergy who renounced their country during the persecutions of Mary; but respecting the laity, it may here be remarked, that with the exception of Catherine duchess-dowager of Suffolk, not a single person of quality was found in this list of conscientious sufferers; though one peer, probably the earl of Bedford, underwent imprisonment on a religious account at home. Of the higher gentry, however, there were considerable numbers who either went and established themselves in the protestant cities of Germany, or passed away the time in travelling.

Sir Francis Knowles, whose lady was niece to Anne Boleyn, took the former part, residing with his eldest son at Frankfort; Walsingham adopted the latter. With the views of a future minister of state, he visited in succession the principal courts of Europe, where he employed his diligence and sagacity in laying the foundations of that intimate knowledge of their policy and resources by which he afterwards rendered his services so important to his queen and country.

Chapter VII

1554 AND 1555.

Arrival of Wyat and his associates at the Tower.--Savage treatment of them.--Further instances of Mary's severity.--Duke of Suffolk beheaded.--Death of lady Jane Grey--of Wyat, who clears Elizabeth of all share in his designs.--Trial of Throgmorton.--Bill for the exclusion of Elizabeth thrown out.--Parliament protects her rights--is dissolved.--Rigorous confinement of Elizabeth in the Tower.--She is removed under guard of Beddingfield--carried to Richmond--offered liberty with the hand of the duke of Savoy--refuses--is carried to Ricot, thence prisoner to Woodstock.--Anecdotes of her behaviour.--Cruelty of Gardiner towards her attendants.--Verses by Harrington.--Marriage of the queen.--Alarms of the protestants.--Arrival of cardinal Pole.--Popery restored.--Persecution begun.--King Philip procures the liberation of state prisoners.--Earl of Devon travels into Italy--dies.--Obligation of Elizabeth to Philip discussed.--She is invited to court--keeps her Christmas there--returns to Woodstock--is brought again to court by Philip's intercession.--Gardiner urges her to make submissions, but in vain.--She is brought to the queen--permitted to reside without guards at one of the royal seats--finally settled at Hatfield.--Character of sir Thomas Pope.--Notice of the Harringtons.--Philip quits England.--Death of Gardiner.

It is now proper to return to circumstances more closely connected with the situation of Elizabeth at this eventful period of her life.

Two or three weeks before her arrival in the Tower, Wyat with some of his principal adherents had been carried thither. Towards these unhappy persons, none of those decencies of behaviour were observed which the sex and rank of Elizabeth had commanded from the ministers of her sister's severity; and Holinshed's circumstantial narrative of the circumstances attending their committal, may be cited as an instructive example of the fierce and brutal manners of the age.

"Sir Philip Denny received them at the bulwark, and as Wyat passed by, he said, 'Go, traitor, there was never such a traitor in England.' To whom sir Thomas Wyat turned and said, 'I am no traitor; I would thou shouldest well know that thou art more traitor than I; it is not the point of an honest man to call me so.' And so went forth. When he came to the Tower gate, sir Thomas Bridges lieutenant took in through the wicket first Mantell, and said; 'Ah thou traitor! what hast thou and thy company wrought?' But he, holding down his head, said nothing. Then came Thomas Knevet, whom master Chamberlain, gentleman-porter of the Tower, took in. Then came Alexander Bret, (captain of the white coats,) whom sir Thomas Pope took by the bosom, saying, 'O traitor! how couldst thou find in thy heart to work such a villainy as to take wages, and being trusted over a band of men, to fall to her enemies, returning against her in battle?' Bret answered, 'Yea, I have offended in that case.' Then came Thomas Cobham, whom sir Thomas Poins took in, and said; 'Alas, master Cobham, what wind headed you to work such treason?' And he answered, 'O sir! I was seduced.' Then came sir Thomas Wyat, whom sir Thomas Bridges took by the collar, and said; 'O thou villain! how couldst thou find in thy heart to work such detestable treason to the queen's majesty, who gave thee thy life and living once already, although thou didst before this time bear arms in the field against her?[22]... If it were not (saith he) but that the law must pass upon thee, I would stick thee through with my dagger.' To the which Wyat, holding his arms under his sides and looking grievously with a grim look upon the lieutenant, said, 'It is no mastery now;' and so passed on."

[Note 22: It is plain that Wyat is here accused of having taken arms for Jane Grey; but most wrongfully, if Carte's account of him is to be credited, which there seems no reason to disbelieve.]

Other circumstances attending the suppression of this rebellion mark with equal force the stern and vindictive spirit of Mary's government, and the remaining barbarity of English customs. The inhabitants of London being for the most part protestants and well affected, as the defection of their trained bands had proved, to the cause of Wyat, it was thought expedient to admonish them of the fruits of rebellion by the gibbeting of about sixty of his followers in the most public parts of the city. Neither were the bodies suffered to be removed till the public entry of king Philip after the royal nuptials; on which festal occasion the streets were cleared of these noisome objects which had disgraced them for nearly half a year.

Some hundreds of the meaner rebels, to whom the queen was pleased to extend her mercy, were ordered to appear before her bound two-and-two together, with halters about their necks; and kneeling before her in this guise, they received her gracious pardon of all offences; but no general amnesty was ever granted.

That the rash attempt of the duke of Suffolk should have been visited upon himself by capital punishment, is neither to be wondered at nor censured; but it was a foul act of cruelty to make this the pretext for taking away the lives of a youthful pair entirely innocent of this last design, and forgiven, as it was fondly hoped, for the almost involuntary part which they had taken in a former and more criminal enterprise. But religious bigotry and political jealousy, each perhaps sufficient for the effect, combined in this instance to urge on the relentless temper of Mary; and the lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley her husband were ordered to prepare for the execution of the sentence which had remained suspended over them.

Every thinking mind must have been shocked at the vengeance taken on Guildford Dudley,--a youth too insignificant, it might be thought, to call forth the animadversion of the most apprehensive government, and guilty of nothing but having accepted, in obedience to his father's pleasure, the hand of Jane Grey. But the fate of this distinguished lady herself was calculated to awaken stronger feelings. The fortitude, the piety, the genuine humility and contrition evinced by her in the last scene of an unsullied life, furnished the best evidence of her guiltlessness even of a wish to resume the sceptre which paternal authority had once forced on her reluctant grasp; and few could witness the piteous spectacle of her violent and untimely end, without a thrill of indignant horror, and secret imprecations against the barbarity of her unnatural kinswoman.

The earl of Devonshire was still detained in the Tower on Wyat's information, as was pretended, and on other indications of guilt, all of which were proved in the end equally fallacious: and at the time of Elizabeth's removal hither this state-prison was thronged with captives of minor importance implicated in the designs of Wyat. These were assiduously plied on one hand with offers of liberty and reward, and subjected on the other to the most rigorous treatment, the closest interrogatories, and one of them even to the rack, in the hope of eliciting from them some evidence which might reconcile to Mary's conscience, or color to the nation, the death or perpetual imprisonment of a sister whom she feared and hated.

To have brought her to criminate herself would have been better still; and no pains were spared for this purpose. A few days after her committal, Gardiner and other privy-councillors came to examine her respecting the conversation which she had held with sir James Croft touching her removal to Donnington Castle. She said, after some recollection, that she had indeed such a place, but that she never occupied it in her life, and she did not remember that any one had moved her so to do. Then, "to enforce the matter," they brought forth sir James Croft, and Gardiner demanded what she had to say to that man? She answered that she had little to say to him or to the rest that were in the Tower. "But, my lords," said she, "you do examine every mean prisoner of me, wherein methinks you do me great injury. If they have done evil and offended the queen's majesty, let them answer to it accordingly. I beseech you, my lords, join not me in this sort with any of these offenders. And concerning my going to Donnington Castle, I do remember that master Hobby and mine officers and you sir James Croft had such talk;--but what is that to the purpose, my lords, but that I may go to mine own houses at all times?" The earl of Arundel kneeling down said, "Your grace sayeth true, and certainly we are very sorry that we have troubled you about so vain matter." She then said, "My lords, you do sift me very narrowly; but I am well assured you shall not do more to me than God hath appointed, and so God forgive you all."

Before their departure sir James Croft kneeled down before her, declaring that he was sorry to see the day in which he should be brought as a witness against her grace. But he added, that he had been "marvellously tossed and examined touching her grace;" and ended by protesting his innocence of the crime laid to his charge[23].

[Note 23: Fox's narrative in Holinshed.]

Wyat was at length, on April 11th, brought to his death; when he confounded all the hopes and expectations of Elizabeth's enemies, by strenuously and publicly asserting her entire innocence of any participation in his designs.

Sir Nicholas Throgmorton was brought to the bar immediately afterwards. His trial at length, as it has come down to us in Holinshed's Chronicle, is one of the most interesting documents of that nature extant. He was esteemed "a deep conspirator, whose post was thought to be at London as a factor, to give intelligence as well to them in the West, as to Wyat and the rest in Kent. It was believed that he gave notice to Wyat to come forward with his power, and that the Londoners would be ready to take his part. And that he sent a post to sir Peter Carew also, to advance with as much speed as might be, and to bring his forces with him.

"He was said moreover to be the man that excited the earl of Devon to go down into the West, and that sir James Croft and he had many times consulted about the whole matter[24]."

[Note 24: Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials.]

To these political offences, sir Nicholas added religious principles still more heinous in the eyes of Mary. He, with two other gentlemen of his family, had been of the number of those who attended to the stake that noble martyr Anne Askew, burned for heresy in the latter end of Henry's reign; when they were bid to take care of their lives, for they were all marked men. Since the accession of Mary also he had "bemoaned to his friend sir Edward Warner, late lieutenant of the Tower, his own estate and the tyranny of the times, extending upon divers honest persons for religion, and wished it were lawful for all of each religion to live safely according to their conscience. For the law ex-officio he said would be intolerable, and the clergy discipline now might rather be resembled to the Turkish tyranny than the teaching of the Christian religion. Which words he was not afraid at his trial openly to acknowledge that he had said to the said Warner[25]."

[Note 25: Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials.]

The prosecution was conducted with all the iniquity which the corrupt practice of that age admitted. Not only was the prisoner debarred the assistance of counsel on his trial, he was even refused the privilege of calling a single witness in his favor. He defended himself however under all these disadvantages, with surprising skill, boldness and presence of mind; and he retorted with becoming spirit the brutal taunts of the crown lawyers and judges, who disgraced themselves on the occasion by all the excesses of an unprincipled servility. Fortunately for Throgmorton, the additional clauses to the treason laws added under Henry VIII. had been abolished under his successor and were not yet re-enacted. Only the clear and equitable statute of Edward III. remained therefore in force; and the lawyers were reduced to endeavour at such an explanation of it as should comprehend a kind of constructive treason. "If," said they, "it be proved that the prisoner was connected with Wyat, and of his counsel, the overt acts of Wyat are to be taken as his, and visited accordingly." But besides that no participation with Wyat after he had taken up arms, was proved upon Throgmorton, the jury were moved by his solemn protest against so unwarrantable a principle as that the overt acts of one man might be charged as overt acts upon another. They acquitted him therefore with little hesitation, to the inexpressible disappointment and indignation of the queen and her ministers, who then possessed the power of making their displeasure on such an occasion deeply felt. The jury were immediately committed to custody, and eight of them, who refused to confess themselves in fault, were further imprisoned for several months and heavily fined.

The acquitted person himself, in defiance of all law and justice, was remanded to the Tower, and did not regain his liberty till the commencement of the following year, when the intercession of king Philip obtained the liberation of almost all the prisoners there detained.

Throgmorton, like all the others called in question for the late insurrections, was closely questioned respecting Elizabeth and the earl of Devon; "and very fain," we are told, "the privy-councillors employed in this work would have got out of him something against them. For when at Throgmorton's trial, his writing containing his confession was read in open court, he prayed the queen's serjeant that was reading it to read further, 'that hereafter,' said he, 'whatsoever become of me, my words may not be perverted and abused to the hurt of some others, and especially against the great personages of whom I have been sundry times, as appears by my answers, examined. For I perceive the net was not cast only for little fishes but for great ones[26]."

[Note 26: Strype's Memorials.]

This generous concern for the safety of Elizabeth in the midst of his own perils appears not to have been lost upon her; and under the ensuing reign we shall have the satisfaction of seeing the abilities of sir Nicholas displayed in other scenes and under happier auspices.

All manifestations of popular favor towards those whom the court had proscribed and sought to ruin, were at this juncture visited with the extreme of arbitrary severity. Two merchants of London, for words injurious to the queen, but principally for having affirmed that Wyat at his death had cleared the lady Elizabeth and the earl of Devonshire, were set in the pillory, to which their ears were fastened with large nails.

It was in fact an object of great importance to the catholic party to keep up the opinion, so industriously inculcated, of the princess being implicated in the late disturbances; since it was only on this false pretext that she could be detained close prisoner in the Tower while a fatal stroke was aimed against her rights and interests.

Gardiner, now chancellor and prime minister, the most inveterate of Elizabeth's enemies and the most devoted partisan of the Spanish interest, thinking that all was subdued to the wishes of the court, brought before the new parliament a bill for declaring the princess illegitimate and incapable of succeeding:--it was indignantly rejected, however, by a great majority; but the failure only admonished him to renew the attack in a more indirect and covert manner. Accordingly, the articles of the marriage treaty between Mary and the prince of Spain, artfully drawn with great seeming advantage to England, had no sooner received the assent of the two houses, than he proposed a law for conferring upon the queen the same power enjoyed by her father; that of naming a successor. But neither could this be obtained from a house of commons attached for the most part to the protestant cause and the person of the rightful heir, and justly apprehensive of the extinction of their few remaining privileges under the yoke of a detested foreign tyrant. Nobody doubted that it was the purpose of the queen, in default of immediate issue of her own, to bequeath the crown to her husband, whose descent from a daughter of John of Gaunt had been already much insisted on by his adherents. The bill was therefore thrown out; and the alarm excited by its introduction had caused the house to pass several spirited resolutions, one of which declared that her majesty should reign as a sole queen without any participation of her authority, while the rest guarded in various points against the anticipated encroachments of Philip, when Mary thought good to put a stop to the further discussion of the subject by a prorogation of parliament.

After these manifold disappointments, the court party was compelled to give up, with whatever reluctance, its deep-laid plots against the unoffending princess. Her own prudence had protected her life; and the independent spirit of a house of commons conscious of speaking the sense of the nation guarantied her succession. One only resource remained to Gardiner and his faction:--they judged that a long-continued absence, while it gradually loosened her hold upon the affections of the people, would afford many facilities for injuring or supplanting her; and it was determined soon to provide for her a kind of honorable banishment.

The confinement of the princess in the Tower had purposely been rendered as irksome and comfortless as possible. It was not till after a month's close imprisonment, by which her health had suffered severely, that she obtained, after many difficulties, permission to walk in the royal apartments; and this under the constant inspection of the constable of the Tower and the lord-chamberlain, with the attendance of three of the queen's women; the windows also being shut, and she not permitted to look out at them. Afterwards she had liberty to walk in a small garden, the gates and doors being carefully closed; and the prisoners whose rooms looked into it being at such times closely watched by their keepers, to prevent the interchange of any word or sign with the princess. Even a child of five years old belonging to some inferior officer in the Tower, who was wont to cheer her by his daily visits, and to bring her flowers, was suspected of being employed as a messenger between her and the earl of Devonshire; and notwithstanding the innocent simplicity of his answers to the lord-chamberlain by whom he was strictly examined, was ordered to visit her no more. The next day the child peeped in through a hole of the door as she walked in the garden, crying out, "Mistress, I can bring you no more flowers!" for which, it seems, his father was severely chidden and ordered to keep his boy out of the way.

From the beginning of her imprisonment orders had been given that the princess should have mass regularly said in her apartment. It is probable that Elizabeth did not feel any great repugnance to this rite:--however this might be, she at least expressed none; and by this compliance deprived her sister of all pretext for persecuting her on a religious ground. But some of her household were found less submissive on this head, and she had the mortification of seeing Mrs. Sands, one of her ladies, carried forcibly away from her under an accusation of heresy and her place supplied by another.

All these severities failed however of their intended effect: neither sufferings nor menaces could bring the princess to acknowledge herself guilty of offending even in thought against her sovereign and sister; and as the dying asseverations of Wyat had fully acquitted her in the eyes of the country, it became evident that her detention in the Tower could not much longer be persisted in. Yet the habitual jealousy of Mary's government, and the apparent danger of furnishing a head to the protestants rendered desperate by her cruelties, forbade the entire liberation of the princess; and it was resolved to adopt as a middle course the expedient sanctioned by many examples in that age, of committing her to the care of certain persons who should be answerable for her safe keeping, either in their own houses, or at some one of the royal seats. Lord Williams of Thame, and sir Henry Beddingfield captain of the guard, were accordingly joined in commission for the execution of this delicate and important trust.

The unfortunate prisoner conceived neither hope nor comfort from this approaching change in her situation, nor probably was it designed that she should; for intimidation seems still to have formed an essential feature in the policy of her relentless enemies. Sir Henry Beddingfield entered the Tower at the head of a hundred of his men; and Elizabeth, struck with the unexpected sight, could not forbear inquiring with dismay, whether the lady Jane's scaffold were removed? On being informed that it was, she received some comfort, but this was not of long duration; for soon a frightful rumor reached her, that she was to be carried away by this captain and his soldiers no one knew whither. She sent immediately for lord Chandos, constable of the Tower, whose humanity and courtesy had led him to soften as much as possible the hardships of her situation, though at the hazard of incurring the indignation of the court; and closely questioning him, he at length plainly told her that there was no help for it, orders were given, and she must be consigned to Beddingfield's care to be carried, as he believed, to Woodstock. Anxious and alarmed, she now asked of her attendants what kind of man this Beddingfield was; and whether, if the murdering of her were secretly committed to him, his conscience would allow him to see it executed? None about her could give a satisfactory answer, for he was a stranger to them all; but they bade her trust in God that such wickedness should not be perpetrated against her.

At length, on May 19th, after a close imprisonment of three months, she was brought out of the Tower under the conduct of Beddingfield and his troop; and on the evening of the same day found herself at Richmond Palace, where her sister then kept her court. She was still treated in all respects like a captive: the manners of Beddingfield were harsh and insolent; and such terror did she conceive from the appearances around her, that sending for her gentleman-usher, she desired him and the rest of her officers to pray for her; "For this night," said she, "I think to die." The gentleman, much affected by her distress, encouraged her as well as he was able: then going down to lord Williams, who was walking with Beddingfield, he called him aside and implored him to tell him sincerely, whether any mischief were designed against his mistress that night or no; "that he and his men might take such part as God should please to appoint." "For certainly," added this faithful servant, "we will rather die than she should secretly and innocently miscarry." "Marry, God forbid," answered Williams, "that any such wicked purpose should be wrought; and rather than it should be so, I with my men are ready to die at her feet also."

In the midst of her gloomy apprehensions, the princess was surprised by an offer from the highest quarter, of immediate liberty on condition of her accepting the hand of the duke of Savoy in marriage.

Oppressed, persecuted, and a prisoner, sequestered from every friend and counsellor, guarded day and night by soldiers, and in hourly dread of some attempt upon her life, it must have been confidently expected that the young princess would embrace as a most joyful and fortunate deliverance this unhoped-for proposal; and by few women, certainly, under all the circumstances, would such expectations have been frustrated. But the firm mind of Elizabeth was not thus to be shaken, nor her penetration deceived. She saw that it was banishment which was held out to her in the guise of marriage; she knew that it was her reversion of an independent English crown which she was required to barter for the matrimonial coronet of a foreign dukedom; and she felt the proposal as what in truth it was;--an injury in disguise. Fortunately for herself and her country, she had the magnanimity to disdain the purchase of present ease and safety at a price so disproportionate; and returning to the overture a modest but decided negative, she prepared herself to endure with patience and resolution the worst that her enraged and baffled enemies might dare against her.

No sooner was her refusal of the offered marriage made known, than orders were given for her immediate removal into Oxfordshire. On crossing the river at Richmond on this melancholy journey, she descried on the other side "certain of her poor servants," who had been restrained from giving their attendance during her imprisonment, and were anxiously desirous of seeing her again. "Go to them," said she to one of her men, "and say these words from me, Tanquam ovis" (Like a sheep to the slaughter).

As she travelled on horseback the journey occupied four days, and the slowness of her progress gave opportunity for some striking displays of popular feeling. In one place, numbers of people were seen standing by the way-side who presented to her various little gifts; for which Beddingfield did not scruple, in his anger, to call them traitors and rebels. The bells were every where rung as she passed through the villages, in token of joy for her liberation; but the people were soon admonished that she was still a prisoner and in disgrace, by the orders of Beddingfield to set the ringers in the stocks.

On the third evening she arrived at Ricot, the house of lord Williams, where its owner, gracefully sinking the character of a watchful superintendant in that of a host who felt himself honored by her visit, introduced her to a large circle of nobility and gentry whom he had invited to bid her welcome. The severe or suspicious temper of Beddingfield took violent umbrage at the sight of such an assemblage: he caused his soldiers to keep strict watch; insisted that none of the guests should be permitted to pass the night in the house; and asked lord Williams if he were aware of the consequences of thus entertaining the queen's prisoner? But he made answer, that he well knew what he did, and that "her grace might and should in his house be merry." Intelligence however had no sooner reached the court of the reception afforded to the princess at Ricot, than directions arrived for her immediate removal to Woodstock. Here, under the harsher inspection of Beddingfield, she found herself once more a prisoner. No visitant was permitted to approach; the doors were closed upon her as in the Tower; and a military guard again kept watch around the walls both day and night.

We possess many particulars relative to the captivity of Elizabeth at Woodstock. In some of them we may recognise that spirit of exaggeration which the anxious sympathy excited by her sufferings at the time, and the unbounded adulation paid to her afterwards, were certain to produce; others bear all the characters of truth and nature.

It is certain that her present residence, though less painful and especially less opprobrious than imprisonment in the Tower, was yet a state of rigorous constraint and jealous inspection, in which she was haunted with cares and fears which robbed her youth of its bloom and vivacity, and her constitution of its vigor. On June 8th such was the state of her health that two physicians were sent from the court who remained for several days in attendance on her. On their return, they performed for their patient the friendly office of making a favorable report of her behaviour and of the dutiful humility of her sentiments towards her majesty, which was received, we are told, with more complacency by Mary than by her bishops. Soon after, she was advised by some friend to make her peace with the queen by submissions and acknowledgements, which, with her usual constancy, she absolutely refused, though apparently the only terms on which she could hope for liberty.

Under such circumstances we may give easy belief to the touching anecdote, that "she, hearing upon a time out of her garden at Woodstock, a milkmaid singing pleasantly, wished herself a milkmaid too; saying that her case was better, and her life merrier than hers."

The instances related of the severity and insolence of sir Henry Beddingfield are to be received with more distrust. We are told, that observing a chair of state prepared for the princess in an upper chamber at lord Williams's house, he seized upon it for himself and insolently ordered his boots to be pulled off in that apartment. Yet we learn from the same authority that afterwards at Woodstock, when she seems to have been in his sole custody, Elizabeth having called him her jailor, on observing him lock the gate of the garden while she was walking in it, he fell on his knees and entreated her grace not to give him that name, for he was appointed to be one of her officers. It has also been asserted, that on her accession to the throne she dismissed him from her presence with the speech, that she prayed God to forgive him, as she did, and that when she had a prisoner whom she would have straitly kept and hardly used, she would send for him. But if she ever used to him words like these, it must have been in jest; for it is known from the best authority, that Beddingfield was frequently at the court of Elizabeth, and that she once visited him on a progress. If there is any truth in the stories told of persons of suspicious appearance lurking about the walls of the palace, who sought to gain admittance for the purpose of taking away her life, the exact vigilance of her keeper, by which all access was barred, might more deserve her thanks than her reproaches.

During the period that the princess was thus industriously secluded from conversation with any but the few attendants who had been allowed to remain about her person, her correspondence was not less watchfully restricted. We are told, that when, after urgent application to the council, she had at length been permitted to write to the queen, Beddingfield looked over her as she wrote, took the paper into his own keeping when she paused, and brought it back to her when she chose to resume her task.

Yet could not his utmost precaution entirely cut off her communications with the large and zealous party who rested upon her all their hopes of better times for themselves or for the country. Through the medium of a visitor to one of her ladies, she received the satisfactory assurance that none of the prisoners for Wyat's business had been brought to utter any thing by which she could be endangered. Perhaps it was with immediate reference to this intelligence that she wrote with a diamond on her window the homely but expressive distich,

"Much suspected by me Nothing proved can be, Quoth Elizabeth prisoner."

But these secret intelligencers were not always fortunate enough to escape detection, of which the consequences were rendered very grievous through the arbitrary severity of Mary's government, and the peculiar malice exercised by Gardiner against the adherents of the princess.

Sir John Harrington, son to the gentleman of the same name formerly mentioned as a follower of admiral Seymour, thus, in his Brief View of the Church, sums up the character of this celebrated bishop of Winchester, with reference to this part of his conduct.

"Lastly, the plots he laid to entrap the lady Elizabeth, and his terrible hard usage of all her followers, I cannot yet scarce think of with charity, nor write of with patience. My father, for only carrying a letter to the lady Elizabeth, and professing to wish her well, he kept in the Tower twelve months, and made him spend a thousand pounds ere he could be free of that trouble. My mother, that then served the lady Elizabeth, he caused to be sequestered from her as an heretic, insomuch that her own father durst not take her into his house, but she was glad to sojourn with one Mr. Topcliff; so as I may say in some sort, this bishop persecuted me before I was born."

In the twelfth month of his imprisonment, this unfortunate Harrington, having previously sent to the bishop many letters and petitions for liberty without effect, had the courage to address to him a "Sonnet," which his son has cited as "no ill verse for those unrefined times;" a modest commendation of lines so spirited, which the taste of the more modern reader, however fastidious, need not hesitate to confirm.

TO BISHOP GARDINER.

1. "At least withdraw your cruelty, Or force the time to work your will; It is too much extremity To keep me pent in prison still, Free from all fault, void of all cause, Without all right, against all laws. How can you do more cruel spite Than proffer wrong and promise right? Nor can accuse, nor will acquight.

2. Eleven months past and longer space I have abode your dev'lish drifts, While you have sought both man and place, And set your snares, with all your shifts, The faultless foot to wrap in wile With any guilt, by any guile: And now you see that will not be, How can you thus for shame agree To keep him bound you should set free?

3. Your chance was once as mine is now, To keep this hold against your will, And then you sware you well know how, Though now you swerve, I know how ill. But thus this world his course doth pass, The priest forgets a clerk he was, And you that have cried justice still, And now have justice at your will, Wrest justice wrong against all skill.

4. But why do I thus coldly plain As if it were my cause alone? When cause doth each man so constrain As England through hath cause to moan, To see your bloody search of such As all the earth can no way touch. And better were that all your kind Like hounds in hell with shame were shrined, Than you add might unto your mind.

5. But as the stone that strikes the wall Sometimes bounds back on th' hurler's head, So your foul fetch, to your foul fall May turn, and 'noy the breast that bred. And then, such measure as you gave Of right and justice look to have, If good or ill, if short or long; If false or true, if right or wrong; And thus, till then, I end my song."

Such were the trials and sufferings which exercised the fortitude of Elizabeth and her faithful followers during her deplorable abode at Woodstock. Mary, meanwhile, was rapt in fond anticipations of the felicity of her married life with a prince for whom, on the sight of his picture, she is said to have conceived the most violent passion. The more strongly her people expressed their aversion and dread of the Spanish match, the more vehemently did she show herself bent on its conclusion; and having succeeded in suppressing by force the formidable rebellion to which the first report of such an union had given birth, she judged it unnecessary to employ any of those arts of popularity to which her disposition was naturally adverse, for conciliating to herself or her destined spouse the good will of her subjects. After many delays which severely tried her temper, the arrival of the prince of Spain at Southampton was announced to the expecting queen, who went as far as Winchester to meet him, in which city Gardiner blessed their nuptials on July the 27th, 1554.

The royal pair passed in state through London a few days after, and the city exhibited by command the outward tokens of rejoicing customary in that age. Bonfires were kindled in the open places, tables spread in the streets at which all passers-by might freely regale themselves with liquor: every parish sent forth its procession singing Te Deum; the fine cross in Cheapside was beautified and newly gilt, and pageants were set up in the principal streets. But there was little gladness of heart among the people; and one of these festal devices gave occasion to a manifestation of the dispositions of the court respecting religion, which filled the citizens with grief and horror. A large picture had been hung over the conduit in Gracechurch street representing the nine Worthies, and among them king Henry VIII. made his appearance, according to former draughts of him, holding in his hand a book on which was inscribed "Verbum Dei." This accompaniment gave so much offence, that Gardiner sent for the painter; and after chiding him severely, ordered that a pair of gloves should be substituted for the bible.

Religion had already been restored to the state in which it remained at the death of Henry; but this was by no means sufficient to satisfy the conscience of the queen, which required the entire restoration in all its parts, of the ancient church-establishment. It had been, in fact, one of the first acts of her reign to forward to Rome a respectful embassy which conveyed to the sovereign pontiff her recognition of the supremacy of the holy see, and a petition that he would be pleased to invest with the character of his legate for England Cardinal Pole,--that earnest champion of her own legitimacy and the church's unity, who had been for so many years the object of her father's bitterest animosity.

Mary's precipitate zeal had received some check in this instance from the worldly policy of the emperor Charles V., who, either entertaining some jealousy of the influence of Pole with the queen, or at least judging it fit to secure the great point of his son's marriage before the patience of the people of England should be proved by the arrival of a papal legate, had impeded the journey of the cardinal by a detention of several weeks in his court at Brussels. But no sooner was Philip in secure possession of his bride, than Pole was suffered to proceed on his mission. The parliament, which met early in November 1554, reversed the attainder which had laid him under sentence of death, and on the 24th of the same month he was received at court with great solemnity, and with every demonstration of affection on the part of his royal cousin.

From this period the cause of popery proceeded triumphantly: a reign of terror commenced; and the government gained fresh strength and courage by every exertion of the tyrannic power which it had assumed. After the married clergy had been reduced to give up either their wives or their benefices, and the protestant bishops deprived, and many of them imprisoned, without exciting any popular commotion in their behalf, the court became emboldened to propose in parliament a solemn reconciliation of the country to the papal see. A house of commons more obsequious than the former acceded to the motion, and on November 29th the legate formally absolved the nation from all ecclesiastical censures, and readmitted it within the pale of the church.

The ancient statutes against heretics were next revived; and the violent counsels of Gardiner proving more acceptable to the queen than the milder ones of Pole, a furious persecution was immediately set on foot. Bishops Hooper and Rogers were the first victims; Saunders and Taylor, two eminent divines, succeeded; upon all of whom Gardiner pronounced sentence in person; after which he resigned to Bonner, his more brutal but not more merciless colleague, the inglorious task of dragging forth to punishment the heretics of inferior note and humbler station. In the midst however of his barbarous proceedings, of which London was the principal theatre, the bench of bishops thought proper in solemn assembly to declare that they had no part in such severities; and Philip, who shrank from the odium of the very deeds most grateful to his savage soul, caused a Spanish friar his confessor to preach before him in praise of toleration, and to show that Christians could bring no warrant from Scripture for shedding the blood of their brethren on account of religious differences. But justly apprehensive that so extraordinary a declaration of opinion from such a person might not of itself suffice to establish in the minds of the English that character of lenity and moderation which he found it his interest to acquire, he determined to add some few deeds to words.

About the close of the year 1554, sir Nicholas Throgmorton, Robert Dudley, and all the other prisoners on account of the usurpation of Jane Grey or the insurrection of Wyat, were liberated, at the intercession, as was publicly declared, of king Philip; and he soon after employed his good offices in the cause of two personages still more interesting to the feelings of the nation,--the princess Elizabeth and the earl of Devonshire.

It is worth while to estimate the value of these boasted acts of generosity. With regard to Courtney it may be sufficient to observe, that a close investigation of facts had proved him to have been grateful for the liberation extended to him by Mary on her accession, and averse from all schemes for disturbing her government, and that the queen's marriage had served to banish from her mind some former grounds of displeasure against him. Nothing but an union with Elizabeth could at this time have rendered him formidable; and it was easy to guard effectually against the accomplishment of any such design, without the odious measure of detaining the earl in perpetual imprisonment at Fotheringay Castle, whither he had been already removed from the Tower. After all, it was but the shadow of liberty which he was permitted to enjoy; and he found himself so beset with spies and suspicion, that a very few months after his release he requested and obtained the royal license to travel. Proceeding into Italy, he shortly after ended at Padua his blameless and unfortunate career. Popular fame attributed his early death to poison administered by the Imperialists, but probably, as in a multitude of similar cases, on no sufficient authority.

As to Elizabeth, certain writers have ascribed Philip's protection of her at this juncture to the following deduction of consequences;--that if she were taken off, and if the queen should die childless, England would become the inheritance of the queen of Scots, now betrothed to the dauphin, and thus go to augment the power of France, already the most formidable rival of the Spanish monarchy. Admitting however that such a calculation of remote contingencies might not be too refined to act upon the politic brain of Philip, it is yet plainly absurd to suppose that the life or death of Elizabeth was at this time at all the matter in question. Secret assassination does not appear to have been so much as dreamed of, and Mary and her council, even supposing them to have been sufficiently wicked, were certainly not audacious enough to think of bringing to the scaffold, without form of trial, without even a plausible accusation, the immediate heiress of the crown, and the hope and favorite of the nation. The only question must now have been, what degree of liberty it would be advisable to allow her; and a due consideration of the facts, that she had already been removed from the Tower, and that after her second release, (that, namely, from Woodstock), she was never, to the end of the reign, permitted to reside in a house of her own without an inspector of her conduct, will reduce within very moderate limits the vaunted claims of Philip to her lasting gratitude.

The project of marrying the princess to the duke of Savoy had doubtless originated with the Spanish court; and it was still persisted in by Philip, from the double motive of providing for the head of the protestant party in England a kind of honorable exile, and of attaching to himself by the gift of her hand, a young prince whom he favored and destined to high employments in his service. But as severity had already been tried in vain to bring Elizabeth to compliance on this point, it seems now to have been determined to make experiment of opposite measures. The duke of Savoy, who had attended Philip to England, was still in the country; and as he was in the prime of life and a man of merit and talents, it appeared not unreasonable to hope that a personal interview might incline the princess to lend a more propitious ear to his suit. To this consideration then we are probably to ascribe the invitation which admitted Elizabeth to share in the festivals of a Christmas celebrated by Philip and Mary at Hampton Court with great magnificence, and which must have been that of the year 1554, because this is well known to have been the only one passed by the Spanish prince in England.

A contemporary chronicle still preserved amongst the MSS of the British Museum, furnishes several particulars of her entertainment. On Christmas eve, the great hall of the palace being illuminated with a thousand lamps artificially disposed, the king and queen supped in it; the princess being seated at the same table, next to the cloth of estate. After supper she was served with a perfumed napkin and a plate of "comfects" by lord Paget, but retired to her ladies before the revels, masking, and disguisings began. On St. Stephen's day she heard mattins in the queen's closet adjoining to the chapel, where she was attired in a robe of white satin, strung all over with large pearls; and on December the 29th she sat with their majesties and the nobility at a grand spectacle of justing, when two hundred spears were broken by combatants of whom half were accoutered in the Almaine and half in the Spanish fashion.

How soon the princess again exchanged the splendors of a court for the melancholy monotony of Woodstock does not appear from this document, nor from any other with which I am acquainted; but several circumstances make it clear that we ought to place about this period an incident recorded by Holinshed, and vaguely stated to have occurred soon after "the stir of Wyat" and the troubles of Elizabeth for that cause. A servant of the princess's had summoned a person before the magistrates for having mentioned his lady by the contumelious appellation of a jill, and having made use of other disparaging language respecting her. Was it to be endured, asked the accuser, that a low fellow like this should speak of her grace thus insolently, when the greatest personages in the land treated her with every mark of respect? He added, "I saw yesterday in the court that my lord cardinal Pole, meeting her in the chamber of presence, kneeled down on his knee and kissed her hand; and I saw also, that king Philip meeting her made her such obeisance that his knee touched the ground."

If this story be correct, which is not indeed vouched by the chronicler, but which seems to bear internal evidence of genuineness, it will go far to prove that the situation of Elizabeth during her abode at Woodstock was by no means that opprobrious captivity which it has usually been represented. She visited the court, it appears, occasionally, perhaps frequently; and was greeted in public by the king himself with every demonstration of civility and respect;--demonstrations which, whether accompanied or not by the corresponding sentiments, would surely suffice to protect her from all harsh or insolent treatment on the part of those to whom the immediate superintendance of her actions was committed.

Her enemies however were still numerous and powerful; and it is certain that she found no advocate in the heart of her sister. That able, but thoroughly profligate politician lord Paget, notwithstanding his serving the princess with "comfects," is reported to have said, that the queen would never have peace in the country till her head were smitten off; and Gardiner never ceased to look upon her with an evil eye. Lord Williams, it seems, had made suit that he might be permitted to take her from Woodstock to his own home, giving large bail for her safe keeping; and as he was a known catholic and much in favor, it was supposed at first that his petition would be heard; but by some secret influence the mind of Mary was indisposed to the granting of this indulgence and the proposal was dropped. But the Spanish counsellors who attended their prince never ceased, we are told, to persuade him "that the like honor he should never obtain as he should in delivering the lady Elizabeth" out of her confinement: and Philip, who was now labouring earnestly at the design, which he had entertained ever since his marriage, of procuring himself to be crowned king of England, was himself aware of the necessity of previously softening the prejudices of the nation by some act of conspicuous popularity: he renewed therefore his solicitations on this point with a zeal which rendered them effectual. The moment indeed was favorable;--Mary, who now believed herself far advanced in pregnancy, was too happy in her hopes to remain inflexible to the entreaties of her husband; and the privy-council, in their sanguine expectations of an heir, viewed the princess as less than formerly an object of political jealousy. And thus, by a contrariety of cause and effect by no means rare in the complicated system of human affairs, Elizabeth became indebted for present tranquillity and comparative freedom to the concurrence of projects and expectations the most fatal to all her hopes of future greatness.

About the end of April, 1555, the princess took at length her final departure from Woodstock, and proceeded,--but still under the escort of Beddingfield and his men,--to Hampton Court. At Colnbrook she was met by her own gentlemen and yeomen to the number of sixty, "much," says John Fox, "to all their comforts, which had not seen her of long season before, notwithstanding they were immediately commanded in the queen's name to depart the town, and she not suffered once to speak to them."

The next day she reached Hampton Court, and was ushered into the prince's lodgings; but the doors were closed upon her and guarded as at Woodstock, and it was a fortnight, according to the martyrologist, before any one had recourse to her.

At the end of this time she was solaced by a visit from lord William Howard, son of the old duke of Norfolk, and first-cousin to her mother, who "very honorably used her," and through whom she requested to speak to some of the privy-council. Several of its members waited upon her in consequence, and Gardiner among the rest, who "humbled himself before her with all humility," but nevertheless seized the opportunity to urge her once more to make submission to the queen, as a necessary preliminary to the obtaining of her favor. Elizabeth, with that firmness and wisdom which had never, in her severest trials, forsaken her, declared that rather than do so, she would lie in prison all the days of her life; adding, that she craved no mercy at her majesty's hand, but rather the law, if ever she did offend her in thought, word, or deed. "And besides this," said she, "in yielding I should speak against myself, and confess myself an offender, by occasion of which the king and queen might ever after conceive of me an ill opinion; and it were better for me to lie in prison for the truth, than to be abroad and suspected of my prince." The councillors now departed, promising to deliver her message to the queen. The next day Gardiner waited upon her again and told her that her majesty "marvelled she would so stoutly carry herself, denying to have offended; so that it should seem the queen had wrongfully imprisoned her grace:" and that she must tell another tale ere she had her liberty. The lady Elizabeth declared she would stand to her former resolution, for she would never belie herself. "Then," said the bishop, "your grace hath the 'vantage of me and the other councillors for your long and wrong imprisonment." She took God to witness that she sought no 'vantage against them for their so dealing with her. Gardiner and the rest then kneeled, desiring that all might be forgotten, and so departed; she being locked up again.

About a week after the failure of this last effort of her crafty enemy to extort some concession which might afterwards be employed to criminate her or justify himself, she received a sudden summons from the queen, and was conducted by torch-light to the royal apartments.

Mary received her in her chamber, to which she had now confined herself in expectation of that joyful event which was destined never to arrive. The princess on entering kneeled down, and protested herself a true and loyal subject, adding, that she did not doubt that her majesty would one day find her to be such, whatever different report had gone of her. The queen expressed at first some dissatisfaction at her still persisting so strongly in her assertions of innocence, thinking that she might take occasion to inveigh against her imprisonment as the act of injustice and oppression which in truth it was; but on her sister's replying in a submissive manner, that it was her business to bear what the queen was pleased to inflict and that she should make no complaints, she appears to have been appeased. Fox's account however is, that they parted with few comfortable words of the queen in English, but what she said in Spanish was not known: that it was thought that king Philip was there behind a cloth, and not seen, and that he showed himself "a very friend" in this business. From other accounts we learn, that Elizabeth scrupled not the attempt to ingratiate herself with Mary at this interview by requesting that her majesty would be pleased to send her some catholic tractates for confirmation of her faith and to counteract the doctrines which she had imbibed from the works of the reformers. Mary showed herself somewhat distrustful of her professions on this point, but dismissed her at length with tokens of kindness. She put upon her finger, as a pledge of amity, a ring worth seven hundred crowns;--mentioned that sir Thomas Pope was again appointed to reside with her, and observing that he was already well known to her sister commended him as a person whose prudence, humanity, and other estimable qualities, were calculated to render her new situation perfectly agreeable.

To what place the princess was first conveyed from this audience does not appear, but it must have been to one of the royal seats in the neighbourhood of London, to several of which she was successively removed during some time; after which she was permitted to establish herself permanently at the palace of Hatfield in Hertfordshire.

From this auspicious interview the termination of her prisoner-state may be dated. Henceforth she was released from the formidable parade of guards and keepers; no doors were closed, no locks were turned upon her; and though her place of residence was still prescribed, and could not, apparently, be changed by her at pleasure, she was treated in all respects as at home and mistress of her actions.

Sir Thomas Pope was a man of worth and a gentleman; and such were the tenderness and discretion with which he exercised the delicate trust reposed in him, that the princess must soon have learned to regard him in the light of a real friend. It is not a little remarkable at the same time, that the person selected by Mary to receive so distinguished a proof of her confidence, should have made his first appearance in public life as the active assistant of Cromwel in the great work of the destruction of monasteries; and that from grants of abbey lands, which the queen esteemed it sacrilege to touch, he had derived the whole of that wealth of which he was now employing a considerable portion in the foundation of Trinity college Oxford.

But sir Thomas Pope, even in the execution of the arbitrary and rapacious mandates of Henry, had been advantageously distinguished amongst his colleagues by the qualities of mildness and integrity; and the circumstance of his having obtained a seat at the council-board of Mary from the very commencement of her reign, proves him to have acquired some peculiar merits in her eyes. Certain it is, however, that a furious zeal, whether real or pretended, for the Romish faith, was not amongst his courtly arts; for though strictly enjoined to watch over the due performance and attendance of mass in the family of the princess, he connived at her retaining about her person many servants who were earnest protestants.

This circumstance unfortunately reached the vigilant ears of Gardiner; and it was to a last expiring effort of his indefatigable malice that Elizabeth owed the mortification of seeing two gentlemen from the queen arrive at Lamer, a house in Hertfordshire which she then occupied, who carried away her favorite Mrs. Ashley and three of her maids of honor, and lodged them in the Tower.

Isabella Markham, afterwards the wife of that sir John Harrington whose sufferings in the princess's service have been already adverted to, was doubtless one of these unfortunate ladies. Elizabeth, highly to her honor, never dismissed from remembrance the claims of such as had been faithful to her in her adversity; she distinguished this worthy pair by many tokens of her royal favor; stood godfather to their son, and admitted him from his tenderest youth to a degree of affectionate intimacy little inferior to that in which she indulged the best beloved of her own relations.

In the beginning of September 1555 king Philip, mortified by the refusal of his coronation, in which the parliament with steady patriotism persisted; disappointed in his hopes of an heir; and disgusted by the fondness and the jealousy of a spouse devoid of every attraction personal and mental, quitted England for the continent, and deigned not to revisit it during a year and a half. Elizabeth might regret his absence, as depriving her of the personal attentions of a powerful protector; but late events had so firmly established her as next heir to the crown, that she was now perfectly secure against the recurrence of any attempt to degrade her from her proper station; and her reconciliation with the queen, whether cordial or not, obtained for her occasional admission to the courtly circle.

A few days after the king's departure we find it mentioned that "the queen's grace, the lady Elizabeth, and all the court, did fast from flesh to qualify them to take the Pope's jubilee and pardon granted to all out of his abundant clemency[27];" a trait which makes it probable that Mary was now in the habit of exacting her sister's attendance at court, for the purpose of witnessing with her own eyes her punctual observance of the rites of that church to which she still believed her a reluctant conformist.

[Note 27: Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials.]

A few weeks afterwards, the death of her capital enemy, Gardiner, removed the worst of the ill instruments who had interposed to aggravate the suspicions of the queen, and there is reason to believe that the princess found in various ways the beneficial effects of this event.

Chapter VIII

1555 TO 1558.

Elizabeth applies herself to classical literature.--Its neglected state.--Progress of English poetry.--Account of Sackville and his works.--Plan of his Mirror for Magistrates.--Extracts.--Notice of the contributors to this collection.--Its popularity and literary merits.--Entertainment given to Elizabeth by sir Thomas Pope.--Dudley Ashton's attempt.--Elizabeth acknowledged innocent of his designs.--Her letter to the queen.--She returns to London--quits it in some disgrace after again refusing the duke of Savoy.--Violence of Philip respecting this match.--Mary protects her sister.--Festivities at Hatfield, Enfield, and Richmond.--King of Sweden's addresses to Elizabeth rejected.--Letter of sir T. Pope respecting her dislike of marriage.--Proceedings of the ecclesiastical commission.--Cruel treatment of sir John Cheke.--General decay of national prosperity.--Loss of Calais.--Death of Mary.

Notwithstanding the late fortunate change in her situation, Elizabeth must have entertained an anxious sense of its remaining difficulties, if not dangers; and the prudent circumspection of her character again, as in the latter years of her brother, dictated the expediency of shrouding herself in all the obscurity compatible with her rank and expectations. To literature, the never failing resource of its votaries, she turned again for solace and occupation; and claiming the assistance which Ascham was proud and happy to afford her, she resumed the diligent perusal of the Greek and Latin classics.

The concerns of the college of which sir Thomas Pope was the founder likewise engaged a portion of her thoughts; and this gentleman, in a letter to a friend, mentions that the lady Elizabeth, whom he served, and who was "not only gracious but right learned," often asked him of the course which he had devised for his scholars.

Classical literature was now daily declining from the eminence on which the two preceding sovereigns had labored to place it. The destruction of monastic institutions, and the dispersion of libraries, with the impoverishment of public schools and colleges through the rapacity of Edward's courtiers, had inflicted far deeper injury on the cause of learning than the studious example of the young monarch and his chosen companions was able to compensate. The persecuting spirit of Mary, by driving into exile or suspending from the exercise of their functions the able and enlightened professors of the protestant doctrine, had robbed the church and the universities of their brightest luminaries; and it was not under the auspices of her fierce and ignorant bigotry that the cultivators of the elegant and humanizing arts would seek encouragement or protection. Gardiner indeed, where particular prejudices did not interfere, was inclined to favor the learned; and Ascham owed to him the place of Latin secretary. Cardinal Pole also, himself a scholar, was desirous to support, as much as present circumstances would permit, his ancient character of a patron of scholars, and he earnestly pleaded with sir Thomas Pope to provide for the teaching of Greek as well as Latin in his college; but sir Thomas persisted in his opinion that a Latin professorship was sufficient, considering the general decay of erudition in the country, which had caused an almost total cessation of the study of the Greek language.

It was in the department of English poetry alone that any perceptible advance was effected or prepared during this deplorable aera; and it was to the vigorous genius of one man, whose vivid personifications of abstract beings were then quite unrivalled, and have since been rarely excelled in our language, and whose clear, copious, and forcible style of poetic narrative interested all readers, and inspired a whole school of writers who worked upon his model, that this advance is chiefly to be attributed. This benefactor to our literature was Thomas Sackville, son of sir Richard Sackville, an eminent member of queen Mary's council, and second-cousin to the lady Elizabeth by his paternal grandmother, who was a Boleyn. The time of his birth is doubtful, some placing it in 1536, others as early as 1527. He studied first at Oxford and afterwards at Cambridge, distinguishing himself at both universities by the vivacity of his parts and the excellence of his compositions both in verse and prose. According to the custom of that age, which required that an English gentleman should acquaint himself intimately with the laws of his country before he took a seat amongst her legislators, he next entered himself of the Inner Temple, and about the last year of Mary's reign he served in parliament. But at this early period of life poetry had more charms for Sackville than law or politics; and following the bent of his genius, he first produced "Gorboduc," confessedly the earliest specimen of regular tragedy in our language; but which will be noticed with more propriety when we reach the period of its representation before queen Elizabeth. He then, about the year 1557 as is supposed, laid the plan of an extensive work to be called "A Mirror for Magistrates;" of which the design is thus unfolded in a highly poetical "Induction."

The poet wandering forth on a winter's evening, and taking occasion from the various objects which "told the cruel season," to muse on the melancholy changes of human affairs, and especially on the reverses incident to greatness, suddenly encounters a "piteous wight," clad all in black, who was weeping, sighing, and wringing her hands, in such lamentable guise, that

"----never man did see A wight but half so woe-begone as she."

Struck with grief and horror at the view, he earnestly requires her to "unwrap" her woes, and inform him who and whence she is, since her anguish, if not relieved, must soon put an end to her life. She answers,

"Sorrow am I, in endless torments pained Among the furies in th' infernal lake:"

from these dismal regions she is come, she says, to bemoan the luckless lot of those

"Whom Fortune in this maze of misery, Of wretched chance most woful Mirrors chose:"

and she ends by inviting him to accompany her in her return:

"Come, come, quoth she, and see what I shall show, Come hear the plaining and the bitter bale Of worthy men by Fortune's overthrow: Come thou and see them ruing all in row. They were but shades that erst in mind thou rolled, Come, come with me, thine eyes shall then behold."

He accepts the invitation, having first done homage to Sorrow as to a goddess, since she had been able to read his thought. The scenery and personages are now chiefly copied from the sixth book of the AEneid; but with the addition of many highly picturesque and original touches.

The companions enter, hand in hand, a gloomy wood, through which Sorrow only could have found the way.

"But lo, while thus amid the desert dark We passed on with steps and pace unmeet, A rumbling roar, confused with howl and bark Of dogs, shook all the ground beneath our feet, And struck the din within our ears so deep, As half distraught unto the ground I fell; Besought return, and not to visit hell."

His guide however encourages him, and they proceed by the "lothly lake" Avernus,

"In dreadful fear amid the dreadful place."

"And first within the porch and jaws of hell Sat deep Remorse of Conscience, all besprent With tears; and to herself oft would she tell Her wretchedness, and cursing never stent To sob and sigh: but ever thus lament With thoughtful care, as she that all in vain Should wear and waste continually in pain.

Her eyes, unsteadfast rolling here and there, Whirled on each place as place that vengeance brought, So was her mind continually in fear, Tossed and tormented with tedious thought Of those detested crimes that she had wrought: With dreadful cheer and looks thrown to the sky, Longing for death, and yet she could not die.

Next saw we Dread, all trembling how he shook With foot uncertain proffered here and there, Benumbed of speech, and with a ghastly look Searched every place, all pale and dead with fear, His cap borne up with staring of his hair." &c.

All the other allegorical personages named, and only named, by Virgil, as well as a few additional ones, are pourtrayed in succession, and with the same strength and fullness of delineation; but with the exception of War, who appears in the attributes of Mars, they are represented simply as examples of Old age, Malady, &c., not as the agents by whom these evils are inflicted upon others. Cerberus and Charon occur in their appropriate offices, but the monstrous forms Gorgon, Chimaera, &c., are judiciously suppressed; and the poet is speedily conducted to the banks of that "main broad flood"

"Which parts the gladsome fields from place of woe."

"With Sorrow for my guide, as there I stood, A troop of men the most in arms bedight, In tumult clustered 'bout both sides the flood: 'Mongst whom, who were ordained t' eternal night, Or who to blissful peace and sweet delight, I wot not well, it seemed that they were all Such as by death's untimely stroke did fall."

Sorrow acquaints him that these are all illustrious examples of the reverses which he was lately deploring, who will themselves relate to him their misfortunes; and that he must afterwards

"Recount the same to Kesar, king and peer."

The first whom he sees advancing towards him from the throng of ghosts is Henry duke of Buckingham, put to death under Richard III.: and his "Legend," or story, is unfortunately the only one which its author ever found leisure to complete; the favor of his illustrious kinswoman on her accession causing him to sink the poet in the courtier, the ambassador, and finally the minister of state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those of them which relate to the siege of Troy, with the exquisitely rich and vivid description of a picture on that subject in Shakespeare's early poem on Tarquin and Lucretia.

The legend of the duke of Buckingham is composed in a style rich, free and forcible; the examples brought from ancient history, of the suspicion and inward wretchedness to which tyrants have ever been a prey, and afterwards, of the instability of popular favor, might in this age be accounted tedious and pedantic; they are however pertinent, well recited, and doubtless possessed the charm of novelty with respect to the majority of contemporary readers. The curses which the unhappy duke pours forth against the dependent who had betrayed him, may almost compare, in the energy and inventiveness of malice, with those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque.

The mind of Sackville was deeply fraught, as we have seen, with classic stores; and at a time when England possessed as yet no complete translation of Virgil, he might justly regard it as a considerable service to the cause of national taste to transplant into our vernacular poetry some scattered flowers from his rich garden of poetic sweets. Thus he has embellished his legend with an imitation or rather paraphrase of the celebrated description of night in the fourth book of the AEneid. The lines well merit transcription.

"Midnight was come, when ev'ry vital thing With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest; The beasts were still, the little birds that sing Now sweetly slept besides their mother's breast, The old and all were shrowded in their nest; The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease; The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.

The golden stars were whirled amid their race, And on the earth did laugh with twinkling light, When each thing nestled in his resting place Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night: The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight; The fearful deer had not the dogs in doubt, The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot.

The ugly bear now minded not the stake, Nor how the cruel mastives do him tear; The stag lay still unroused from the brake; The foamy boar feared not the hunter's spear: All things were still in desert, bush and breer. With quiet heart now from their travails ceast Soundly they slept in midst of all their rest."

The allusion to bear-bating in the concluding stanza may offend the delicacy of a modern reader; but let it be remembered that in the days of Mary, and even of Elizabeth, this amusement was accounted "sport for ladies."

The "Mirror for Magistrates" was not lost to the world by the desertion of Sackville from the service of the muses; for a similar or rather perhaps the same design was entertained, and soon after carried into execution, by other and able though certainly inferior hands.

During the reign of Mary,--but whether before or after the composition of Sackville's Induction does not appear,--a certain printer, having communicated to several "worshipful and honorable persons" his intention of republishing Lydgate's translation in verse of Boccacio's "Fall of Princes," was by them advised to procure a continuation of the work, chiefly in English examples; and he applied in consequence to Baldwyne, an ecclesiastic and graduate of Oxford. Baldwyne declined to embark alone in so vast a design, and one, as he thought, so little likely to prove profitable; but seven other contemporary poets, of whom George Ferrers has already been mentioned as one, having promised their assistance, he consented to assume the editorship of the work. The general frame agreed upon by these associates was that employed in the original work of Boccacio, who feigned, that a party of friends being assembled, it was determined that each of them should contribute to the pleasure of the company by personating some illustrious and unfortunate character, and relating his adventures in the first person. A contrivance so tame and meagre compared with the descent to the regions of the dead sketched with so much spirit by Sackville, that it must have preceded, in all probability, their knowledge at least of his performance. The first part of the work, almost entirely by Baldwyne, was written, and partly printed, in Mary's time, but its publication was prevented by the interference of the lord-chancellor,--a trait of the mean and cowardly jealousy of the administration, which speaks volumes. In the first year of Elizabeth lord Stafford, an enlightened patron of letters, procured a licence for its appearance. A second part soon followed, in which Sackville's Induction and Legend were inserted. The success of this collection was prodigious; edition after edition was given to the public under the inspection of different poetical revisers, by each of whom copious additions were made to the original work. Its favor and reputation continued during all the reign of Elizabeth, and far into that of James; for Mr. Warton tells us that in Chapman's "May-day," printed in 1611, "a gentleman of the most elegant taste for reading and highly accomplished in the current books of the times, is called 'one that has read Marcus Aurelius, Gesta Romanorum, and the Mirror of Magistrates.'[28]"

[Note 28: History of English Poetry, vol. iii.]

The greater part of the contributors to this work were lawyers; an order of men who, in most ages and nations, have accounted it a part of professional duty to stand in opposition to popular seditions on one hand, and to the violent and illegal exertion of arbitrary power on the other. Accordingly, many of the legends are made to exemplify the evils of both these excesses; and though, in more places than one, the unlawfulness, on any provocation, of lifting a hand against "the Lord's anointed" is in strong terms asserted, the deposition of tyrants is often recorded with applause; and no mercy is shown to the corrupt judge or minister who wrests law and justice in compliance with the wicked will of his prince.

The newly published chronicles of the wars of York and Lancaster by Hall, a writer who made some approach to the character of a genuine historian, furnished facts to the first composers of the Mirror; the later ones might draw also from Holinshed and Stow. There is some probability that the idea of forming plays on English history was suggested to Shakespeare by the earlier of these legends; and it is certain that his plays, in their turn, furnished some of their brightest ornaments of sentiment and diction to the legends added by later editors.

To a modern reader, the greater part of these once admired pieces will appear trite, prosaic, and tedious; but an uncultivated age--like the children and the common people of all ages--is most attracted and impressed by that mode of narration which leaves the least to be supplied by the imagination of the hearer or reader; and when this collection of history in verse is compared, not with the finished labors of a Hume or a Robertson, but with the prolix and vulgar narratives of the chroniclers, the admiration and delight with which it was received will no longer surprise.

One circumstance more respecting a work so important by the quantity of historical knowledge which it diffused among the mass of readers, and the influence which it exerted over the public mind during half a century, deserves to be here adverted to. Baldwyne and his fellow-laborers began their series from the Norman conquest, and the same starting-point had been judiciously chosen by Sackville; but the fabulous history of Geffrey of Monmouth still found such powerful advocates in national vanity, ignorance and credulity, that succeeding editors found it convenient to embellish their work with moral examples drawn from his fictitious series of British kings before the invasion of the Romans. Accordingly they have brought forward a long line of worthies, beginning with king Albanact, son of Brute the Trojan, and ending with Cadwallader the last king of the Britons, scarcely one of whom, excepting the renowned prince Arthur, is known even by name to the present race of students in English history; though amongst poetical readers, the immortal verse of Spenser preserves some recollection that such characters once were fabled. In return for this superfluity, our Saxon line of kings is passed over with very little notice, only three legends, and those of very obscure personages, being interposed between Cadwallader and king Harold. The descent of the royal race of Britain from the Trojans was at this period more than an article of poetical faith; it was maintained, or rather taken for granted, by the gravest and most learned writers. One Kelston, who dedicated a versified chronicle of the Brutes to Edward VI., went further still, and traced up the pedigree of his majesty through two-and-thirty generations, to Osiris king of Egypt. Troynovant, the name said to have been given to London by Brute its founder, was frequently employed in verse. A song addressed to Elizabeth entitles her the "beauteous queen of second Troy;" and in describing the pageants which celebrated her entrance into the provincial capitals which she visited in her progresses, it will frequently be necessary to introduce to the reader personages of the ancient race of this fabled conqueror of our island, who claimed for his direct ancestor,--but whether in the third or fourth degree authors differ,--no less a hero than the pious AEneas himself.

But to return to the personal circumstances of Elizabeth.

The public and splendid celebration of the festivals of the church was the least reprehensible of the measures employed by Mary for restoring the ascendancy of her religion over the minds of her subjects. She had been profuse in her donations of sacred vestments and ornaments to the churches and the monasteries, of which she had restored several; and these gaudy trappings of a ceremonial worship were exhibited, rather indeed to the scandal than the edification of a dejected people, in frequent processions conducted with the utmost solemnity and magnificence. Court entertainments always accompanied these devotional ceremonies, and Elizabeth seems by assisting at the latter to have purchased admission to the former. The Christmas festivities in which she shared have already been described in the words of a contemporary chronicler; and from the same source we derive the following account of the "antique pageantries" with which another season of rejoicing was celebrated for her recreation, by the munificence of the indulgent superintendent of her conduct and affairs. "In Shrove-tide 1556, sir Thomas Pope made for the lady Elizabeth, all at his own costs, a great and rich masking in the great hall at Hatfield, where the pageants were marvellously furnished. There were there twelve minstrels anticly disguised; with forty six or more gentlemen and ladies, many of them knights or nobles, and ladies of honor, apparelled in crimson sattin, embroidered upon with wreaths of gold, and garnished with borders of hanging pearl. And the devise of a castle of cloth of gold, set with pomegranates about the battlements, with shields of knights hanging therefrom; and six knights in rich harness tourneyed. At night the cupboard in the hall was of twelve stages mainly furnished with garnish of gold and silver vessul, and a banquet of seventy dishes, and after a voidee of spices and suttleties with thirty six spice-plates; all at the charges of sir Thomas Pope. And the next day the play of Holophernes. But the queen percase misliked these folleries as by her letters to sir Thomas it did appear; and so their disguisings ceased[29]."

[Note 29: See Nichols's "Progresses," vol. i. p. 19.]

A circumstance soon afterwards occurred calculated to recall past dangers to the mind of the princess, and perhaps to disturb her with apprehensions of their recurrence.

Dudley Ashton, formerly a partisan of Wyat, had escaped into France, after the defeat and capture of his leader, whence he was still plotting the overthrow of Mary's government. By the connivance or assistance of that court, now on the brink of war with England, he was at length enabled to send over one Cleberry, a condemned person, whom he instructed to counterfeit the earl of Devonshire, and endeavour to raise the country in his cause. Letters and proclamations were at the same time dispersed by Ashton, in which the name of Elizabeth was employed without scruple. The party had even the slanderous audacity to pretend, that between Courtney and the heiress of the crown the closest of all intimacies, if not an actual marriage, subsisted; and the matter went so far that at Ipswich, one of the strong holds of protestantism, Cleberry proclaimed the earl of Devonshire and the princess, king and queen. But the times were past when any advantage could be taken of this circumstance against Elizabeth, whose perfect innocence was well known to the government; and the council immediately wrote in handsome terms to sir Thomas Pope, directing him to acquaint her, in whatever manner he should judge best, with the abominable falsehoods circulated respecting her. A few days after, the queen herself wrote also to her sister in terms fitted to assure her of perfect safety. The princess replied, says Strype, "in a well penned letter," "utterly detesting and disclaiming all concern in the enterprise, and declaiming against the actors in it." Of the epistle thus commended, a single paragraph will probably be esteemed a sufficient specimen.... "And among earthly things I chiefly wish this one; that there were as good surgeons for making anatomies of hearts, that might show my thoughts to your majesty, as there are expert physicians of the bodies, able to express the inward griefs of their maladies to the patient. For then I doubt not, but know well, that whatsoever others should suggest by malice, yet your majesty should be sure by knowledge; so that the more such misty clouds offuscate the clear light of my truth, the more my tried thoughts should glister to the dimming of their hidden malice." &c. It must be confessed that this erudite princess had not perfectly succeeded in transplanting into her own language the epistolary graces of her favorite Cicero;--but to how many much superior classical scholars might a similar remark be applied!

The frustration of Mary's hope of becoming a mother, her subsequent ill state of health, and the resolute refusal of the parliament to permit the coronation of her husband, who had quitted England in disgust to attend his affairs on the continent, conferred, in spite of all the efforts of the catholic party, a daily augmenting importance on Elizabeth. When therefore in November 1556 she had come in state to Somerset Place, her town-residence, to take up her abode for the winter, a kind of court was immediately formed around her; and she might hope to be richly indemnified for any late anxieties or privations, by the brilliant festivities, the respectful observances, and the still more welcome flatteries, of which she found herself the distinguished object:--But disappointment awaited her.

She had been invited to court for the purpose of receiving a second and more solemn offer of the hand of the duke of Savoy, whose suit was enforced by the king her brother-in-law with the whole weight of his influence or authority. This alliance had been the subject of earnest correspondence between Philip and the English council; the Imperial ambassadors were waiting in England for her answer; and the disappointment of the high-raised hopes of the royal party, by her reiteration of a decided negative, was followed by her quitting London in a kind of disgrace early in the month of December.

But Philip would not suffer the business to end here. Indignant at the resistance opposed by the princess to his measures, he seems to have urged the queen to interfere in a manner authoritative enough to compel obedience; but, by a remarkable exchange of characters, Mary now appeared as the protectress of her sister from the violence of Philip.

In a letter still preserved, she tells him, that unless the consent of parliament were first obtained, she fears that the accomplishment of the marriage would fail to procure for him the advantages which he expected; but that, however this might be, her conscience would not allow her to press the matter further. That the friar Alphonso, Philip's confessor, whom he had sent to argue the point with her, had entirely failed of convincing her; that in fact she could not comprehend the drift of his arguments. Philip, it is manifest, must already have made use of very harsh language towards the queen respecting her conduct in this affair, for she deprecates his further displeasure in very abject terms; but yet persists in her resolution with laudable firmness. Her husband was so far, however, from yielding with a good grace a point on which he had certainly no right to dictate either to Mary or to her sister, that soon afterwards he sent into England the duchesses of Parma and Lorrain for the purpose of conducting the princess into Flanders:--but this step was ill-judged. His coldness and neglect had by this time nearly extinguished the fond passion of the queen, who is said to have torn his picture in a fit of rage, on report of some disrespectful language which he had used concerning her since his departure for the continent. Resentment and jealousy now divided her gloomy soul; and Philip's behaviour, on which she had doubtless her spies, caused her to regard the duchess of Lorrain as the usurper of his heart. The extraordinary circumstances of pomp and parade with which this lady, notwithstanding the smallness of her revenues, now appeared in England, confirmed and aggravated her most painful suspicions; and so far from favoring the suit urged by such an ambassadress, Mary became more than ever determined on thwarting it. She would not permit the duchesses to pay the princess a single visit at Hatfield; and her reception gave them so little encouragement to persevere, that they speedily returned to report their failure to him who sent them.

These circumstances seem to have produced a cordiality of feeling and frequency of intercourse between the sisters which had never before existed. In February 1557 the princess arrived with a great retinue at Somerset Place, and went thence to wait upon the queen at Whitehall; and when the spring was somewhat further advanced, her majesty honored her by returning the visit at Hatfield. The royal guest was, of course, to be entertained with every species of courtly and elegant delight; and accordingly, on the morning after her arrival, she and the princess, after attending mass, went to witness a grand exhibition of bear-bating, "with which their highnesses were right well content." In the evening the chamber was adorned with a sumptuous suit of tapestry, called, but from what circumstance does not appear, "the hangings of Antioch." After supper a play was represented by the choristers of St. Paul's, then the most applauded actors in London; and after it was over, one of the children accompanied with his voice the performance of the princess on the virginals.

Sir Thomas Pope could now without offence gratify his lady with another show, devised by him in that spirit of romantic magnificence equally agreeable to the taste of the age and the temper of Elizabeth herself. She was invited to repair to Enfield Chase to take the amusement of hunting the hart. Twelve ladies in white satin attended her on their "ambling palfreys," and twenty yeomen clad in green. At the entrance of the forest she was met by fifty archers in scarlet boots and yellow caps, armed with gilded bows, one of whom presented to her a silver-headed arrow winged with peacock's feathers. The splendid show concluded, according to the established laws of the chase, by the offering of the knife to the princess, as first lady on the field; and her taking 'say of the buck with her own fair and royal hand.

During the summer of the same year the queen was pleased to invite her sister to an entertainment at Richmond, of which we have received some rather interesting particulars. The princess was brought from Somerset Place in the queen's barge, which was richly hung with garlands of artificial flowers and covered with a canopy of green sarcenet, wrought with branches of eglantine in embroidery and powdered with blossoms of gold. In the barge she was accompanied by sir Thomas Pope and four ladies of her chamber. Six boats attended filled with her retinue, habited in russet damask and blue embroidered satin, tasseled and spangled with silver; their bonnets cloth of silver with green feathers. The queen received her in a sumptuous pavilion in the labyrinth of the gardens. This pavilion, which was of cloth of gold and purple velvet, was made in the form of a castle, probably in allusion to the kingdom of Castile; its sides were divided in compartments, which bore alternately the fleur de lis in silver, and the pomegranate, the bearing of Granada, in gold. A sumptuous banquet was here served up to the royal ladies, in which there was introduced a pomegranate-tree in confectionary work, bearing the arms of Spain:--so offensively glaring was the preference given by Mary to the country of her husband and of her maternal ancestry over that of which she was a native and in her own right queen! There was no masking or dancing, but a great number of minstrels performed. The princess returned to Somerset Place the same evening, and the next day to Hatfield.

The addresses of a new suitor soon after furnished Elizabeth with an occasion of gratifying the queen by fresh demonstrations of respect and duty. The king of Sweden was earnestly desirous of obtaining for Eric his eldest son the hand of a lady whose reversionary prospects, added to her merit and accomplishments, rendered her without dispute the first match in Europe. He had denied his son's request to be permitted to visit her in person, fearing that those violences of temper and eccentricities of conduct of which this ill-fated prince had already given strong indications, might injure his cause in the judgement of so discerning a princess. The business was therefore to be transacted through the Swedish ambassador; but he was directed by his sovereign to make his application by a message to Elizabeth herself, in which the queen and council were not for the present to participate. The princess took hold of this circumstance as a convenient pretext for rejecting a proposal which she felt no disposition to encourage; and she declared that she could never listen to any overtures of this nature which had not first received the sanction of her majesty. The ambassador pleaded in answer, that as a gentleman his master had judged it becoming that his first application should be made to herself; but that should he be so happy as to obtain her concurrence, he would then, as a king, make his demand in form to the queen her sister. The princess replied, that if it were to depend on herself, a single life would ever be her choice; and she finally dismissed the suit with a negative.

On receiving some hint of this transaction, Mary sent for sir Thomas Pope, and having learned from him all the particulars, she directed him to express to her sister her high approbation of her proper and dutiful conduct on this occasion; and also to make himself acquainted with her sentiments on the subject of matrimony in general. He soon after transmitted to her majesty all the information she could desire, in the following letter:

"First after I had declared to her grace how well the queen's majesty liked of her prudent and honorable answer made to the same messenger; I then opened unto her grace the effects of the said messenger's credence; which after her grace had heard, I said, the queen's highness had sent me to her grace, not only to declare the same, but also to understand how her grace liked the said motion. Whereunto, after a little pause taken, her grace answered in form following: 'Master Pope, I require you, after my most humble commendations to the queen's majesty, to render unto the same like thanks that it pleased her highness, of her goodness, to conceive so well of my answer made to the same messenger; and herewithal, of her princely consideration, with such speed to command you by your letters to signify the same unto me: who before remained wonderfully perplexed, fearing that her majesty might mistake the same: for which her goodness, I acknowledge myself bound to honor, serve, love, and obey her highness during my life. Requiring you also to say unto her majesty, that in the king my brother's time there was offered me a very honorable marriage, or two; and ambassadors sent to treat with me touching the same; whereupon I made my humble suit unto his highness, as some of honor yet living can be testimonies, that it would like the same to give me leave, with his grace's favor, to remain in that estate I was, which of all others best liked me, or pleased me. And, in good faith, I pray you say unto her highness, I am even at this present of the same mind, and so intend to continue, with her majesty's favor: and assuring her highness I so well like this estate, as I persuade myself there is not any kind of life comparable unto it. And as concerning my liking the said motion made by the said messenger, I beseech you say unto her majesty, that to my remembrance I never heard of his master before this time; and that I so well like both the message and the messenger, as I shall most humbly pray God upon my knees, that from henceforth I never hear of the one nor the other: assure you that if he should eftsoons repair unto me, I would forbear to speak to him. And were there nothing else to move me to mislike the motion, other than that his master would attempt the same without making the queen's majesty privy thereunto, it were cause sufficient.'

"And when her grace had thus ended, I was so bold as of myself to say unto her grace, her pardon first required, that I thought few or none would believe but that her grace could be right well contented to marry; so that there were some honorable marriage offered her by the queen's highness, or by her majesty's assent. Whereunto her grace answered, 'What I shall do hereafter I know not; but I assure you, upon my truth and fidelity, and as God be merciful unto me, I am not at this time otherwise minded than I have declared unto you; no, though I were offered the greatest prince in all Europe.' And yet percase, the queen's majesty may conceive this rather to proceed of a maidenly shamefacedness, than upon any such certain determination[30]."

[Note 30: The hint of "some honorable marriage" in the above letter, has been supposed to refer to the duke of Savoy; but if the date inscribed upon the copy which is found among the Harleian MSS. be correct (April 26th 1558), this could not well be; since the queen, early in the preceding year, had declined to interfere further in his behalf.]

This letter appears to have been the last transaction which occurred between Mary and Elizabeth: from it, and from the whole of the notices relative to the situation of the latter thrown together in the preceding pages, it may be collected, that during the three last years of her sister's reign,--the period, namely, of her residence at Hatfield,--she had few privations, and no personal hardships to endure: but for individuals whom she esteemed, for principles to which her conscience secretly inclined, for her country which she truly loved, her apprehensions must have been continually excited, and too often justified by events the most cruel and disastrous.

The reestablishment, by solemn acts of the legislature, of the Romish ritual and the papal authority, though attended with the entire prohibition of all protestant worship, was not sufficient for the bigotry of Mary. Aware that the new doctrines still found harbour in the bosoms of her subjects, she sought to drag them by her violence from this last asylum; for to her, as to all tyrants, it appeared both desirable and possible to subject the liberty of thinking to the regulation and control of human laws.

By virtue of her authority as head of the English church,--a title which the murmurs of her parliament had compelled her against her conscience to resume after laying it aside for some time,--she issued an ecclesiastical commission, which wanted nothing of the Spanish inquisition but the name. The commissioners were empowered to call before them the leading men in every parish of the kingdom, and to compel them to bind themselves by oath to give information against such of their neighbours as, by abstaining from attendance at church or other symptoms of disaffection to the present order of things, afforded room to doubt the soundness of their belief. Articles of faith were then offered to the suspected persons for their signature, and on their simple refusal they were handed over to the civil power, and fire and faggot awaited them. By this barbarous species of punishment, about two hundred and eighty persons are stated to have perished during the reign of Mary; but, to the disgrace of the learned, the rich, and the noble, these martyrs, with the exception of a few distinguished ecclesiastics, were almost all from the middling or lower, some from the very lowest classes of society.

Amongst these glorious sufferers, therefore, the princess could have few personal friends to regret; but in the much larger number of the disgraced, the suspected, the imprisoned, the fugitive, she saw the greater part of the public characters, whether statesmen or divines, on whose support and attachment she had learned to place reliance.

The extraordinary cruelties exercised upon sir John Cheke, who whilst he held the post of preceptor to her brother had also assisted in her own education, must have been viewed by Elizabeth with strong emotion of indignation and grief.

It has been already mentioned, that after his release from imprisonment incurred in the cause of lady Jane Grey,--a release, by the way, which was purchased by the sacrifice of his landed property and all his appointments,--this learned and estimable person obtained permission to travel for a limited period. This was regarded as a special favor; for it was one of Mary's earliest acts of tyranny to prohibit the escape of her destined victims, and it was only by joining themselves to the foreign congregations of the reformed, who had license to depart the kingdom, or by eluding with much hazard the vigilance of the officers by whom the seaports were watched, that any of her protestant subjects had been enabled to secure liberty of conscience in a voluntary exile. It is a little remarkable that Rome should have been Cheke's first city of pilgrimage; but classical associations in this instance overcame the force of protestant antipathies. He took the opportunity however of visiting Basil in his way, where an English congregation was established, and where he had the pleasure of introducing himself to several learned characters, once perhaps the chosen associates of Erasmus.

In the beginning of 1556 he had reached Strasburgh, for it was thence that he addressed a letter to his dear friend and brother-in-law sir William Cecil, who appears to have made some compliances with the times which alarmed and grieved him. It is in a strain of the most affectionate earnestness that he entreats him to hold fast his faith, and "to take heed how he did in the least warp or strain his conscience by any compliance for his worldly security." But such exhortations, however salutary in themselves, did not come with the best grace from those who had found in flight a refuge from the terrors of that persecution which was raging in all its fierceness before the eyes of such of their unfortunate brethren as had found themselves necessitated to abide the fiery trial. A remark by no means foreign to the case before us! Sir John Cheke's leave of absence seems now to have expired; and it was probably with the design of making interest for its renewal that he privately repaired, soon after the date of his letter, to Brussels, on a visit to his two learned friends, lord Paget and sir John Mason, then residing in that city as Mary's ambassadors. These men were recent converts, or more likely conformists, to the court religion; and Paget's furious councils against Elizabeth have been already mentioned. It is to be hoped that they did not add to the guilt of self-interested compliances in matters of faith the blacker crime of a barbarous act of perfidy against a former associate and brother-protestant who had scarcely ceased to be their guest;--but certain it is, that on some secret intimation of his having entered his territories, king Philip issued special orders for the seizure of Cheke. On his return, between Brussels and Antwerp, the unhappy man, with sir Peter Carew his companion, was apprehended by a provost-marshal, bound hand and foot, thrown into a cart, and so conveyed on board a vessel sailing for England. He is said to have been brought to the Tower muffled, according to an odious practice of Spanish despotism introduced into the country during the reign of Mary. Under the terror of such a surprise the awful alternative "Comply or burn" was laid before him. Human frailty under these trying circumstances prevailed; and in an evil hour this champion of light and learning was tempted to subscribe his false assent to the doctrine of the real presence and the whole list of Romish articles. This was but the beginning of humiliations: he was now required to pronounce two ample recantations, one before the queen in person, the other before cardinal Pole, who also imposed upon him various acts of penance. Even this did not immediately procure his liberation from prison; and while he was obliged in public to applaud the mercy of his enemies in terms of the most abject submission, he bewailed in private, with abundance of bitter tears, their cruelty, and still more his own criminal compliance. The savage zealots knew not how to set bounds to their triumph over a man whom learning and acknowledged talents and honorable employments had rendered so considerable.

Even when at length he was set free, and flattered himself that he had drained to the dregs his cup of bitterness, he discovered that the masterpiece of barbarity, the refinement of insult, was yet in store. He was required, as evidence of the sincerity of his conversion and a token of his complete restoration to royal favor, to take his seat on the bench by the side of the savage Bonner, and assist at the condemnation of his brother-protestants. The unhappy man did not refuse,--so thoroughly was his spirit subdued within him,--but it broke his heart; and retiring at last to the house of an old and learned friend, whose door was opened to him in Christian charity, he there ended within a few months, his miserable life, a prey to shame, remorse and melancholy. A sadder tale the annals of persecution do not furnish, or one more humbling to the pride and confidence of human virtue. Many have failed under lighter trials; few have expiated a failure by sufferings so severe. How often must this victim of a wounded spirit have dwelt with envy, amid his slower torments, on the brief agonies and lasting crown of a courageous martyrdom!

It is happily not possible for a kingdom to flourish under the crushing weight of such a tyranny as that of Mary. The retreat of the foreign protestants had robbed the country of hundreds of industrious and skilful artificers; the arbitrary exactions of the queen impoverished and discouraged the trading classes, against whom they principally operated; tumults and insurrections were frequent, and afforded a pretext for the introduction of Spanish troops; the treasury was exhausted in efforts for maintaining the power of the sovereign, restoring the church to opulence and splendor, and re-edifying the fallen monasteries. To add to these evils, a foreign marriage rendered both the queen and country subservient to the interested or ambitious projects of the Spanish sovereign. For his sake a needless war was declared against France, which, after draining entirely an already failing treasury, ended in the loss of Calais, the last remaining trophy of the victories by which the Edwards and the Henrys had humbled in the dust the pride and power of France.

This last stroke completed the dejection of the nation; and Mary herself, who was by no means destitute of sensibility where the honor of her crown was concerned, sunk into an incurable melancholy. "When I die," said she to her attendants who sought to discover the cause of her despondency, "Calais will be found at my heart."

The unfeeling desertion of her husband, the consciousness of having incurred the hatred of her subjects, the unprosperous state of her affairs, and the well founded apprehension that her successor would once more overthrow the whole edifice of papal power which she had labored with such indefatigable ardor to restore, may each be supposed to have infused its own drop of bitterness into the soul of this unhappy princess. The long and severe mortifications of her youth, while they soured her temper, had also undermined her constitution, and contributed to bring upon her a premature old age; dropsical symptoms began to appear, and after a lingering illness of nearly half a year she sunk into the grave on the 17th day of November 1558, in the forty-fourth year of her age.

Chapter IX

1558 AND 1559.

General joy on the accession of Elizabeth.--Views of the nobility--of the middling and lower classes.--Flattery with which she is addressed.--Descriptions of her person.--Her first privy-council.--Parry and Cecil brought into office.--Notices of each.--Death of cardinal Pole.--The queen enters London--passes to the Tower.--Lord Robert Dudley her master of the horse.--Notices respecting him.--The queen's treatment of her relations.--The Howard family.--Sir Richard Sackville.--Henry Cary.--The last, created lord Hunsdon.--Preparations in London against the queen's coronation.--Splendid costume of the age.--She passes by water from Westminster to the Tower.--The procession described.--Her passage through the city.--Pageants exhibited.--The bishops refuse to crown her.--Bishop of Carlisle prevailed on.--Religious sentiments of the queen.--Prohibition of preaching--of theatrical exhibitions.

Never perhaps was the accession of any prince the subject of such keen and lively interest to a whole people as that of Elizabeth.

Both in the religious establishments and political relations of the country, the most important changes were anticipated; changes in which the humblest individual found himself concerned, and to which a vast majority of the nation looked forward with hope and joy.

With the courtiers and great nobles, whose mutability of faith had so happily corresponded with every ecclesiastical vicissitude of the last three reigns, political and personal considerations may well be supposed to have held the first place; and though the old religion might still be endeared to them by many cherished associations and by early prejudice, there were few among them who did not regard the liberation of the country from Spanish influence as ample compensation for the probable restoration of the religious establishment of Henry or of Edward. Besides, there was scarcely an individual belonging to these classes who had not in some manner partaken of the plunder of the church, and whom the avowed principles of Mary had not disquieted with apprehensions that some plan of compulsory restitution would sooner or later be attempted by an union of royal and papal authority.

With the middling and lower classes religious views and feelings were predominant The doctrines of the new and better system of faith and worship had now become more precious and important than ever in the eyes of its adherents from the hardships which many of them had encountered for its sake, and from the interest which each disciple vindicated to himself in the glory and merit of the holy martyrs whose triumphant exit they had witnessed. With all the fervor of pious gratitude they offered up their thanksgivings for the signal deliverance by which their prayers had been answered. The bloody tyranny of Mary was at an end; and though the known conformity of Elizabeth to Romish rites might apparently give room for doubts and suspicions, it should seem that neither catholics nor protestants were willing to believe that the daughter of Anne Boleyn could in her heart be a papist. Under this impression the citizens of London, who spoke the sense of their own class throughout the kingdom, welcomed the new queen as a protectress sent by Heaven itself: but even in the first transports of their joy, and amid the pompous pageantries by which their loyal congratulations were expressed, they took care to intimate, in a manner not to be misunderstood, their hopes and expectations on the great concern now nearest to their hearts.

Prudence confined within their own bosoms the regrets and murmurs of the popish clergy; submission and a simulated loyalty were at present obviously their only policy: thus not a whisper breathed abroad but of joy and gratulation and happy presage of the days to come.

The sex, the youth, the accomplishments, the graces, the past misfortunes of the princess, all served to heighten the interest with which she was beheld: the age of chivalry had not yet expired; and in spite of the late unfortunate experience of a female reign, the romantic image of a maiden queen dazzled all eyes, subdued all hearts, inflamed the imaginations of the brave and courtly youth with visions of love and glory, exalted into a passionate homage the principle of loyalty, and urged adulation to the very brink of idolatry.

The fulsome compliments on her beauty which Elizabeth, almost to the latest period of her life, not only permitted but required and delighted in, have been adverted to by all the writers who have made her reign and character their theme: and those of the number whom admiration and pity of the fair queen of Scots have rendered hostile to her memory, have taken a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the extravagance of this weakness, by denying her, even in her freshest years, all pretensions to those personal charms by which her rival was so eminently, distinguished. Others however have been more favorable, and probably more just, to her on this point; and it would be an injury to her memory to withhold from the reader the following portraitures which authorize us to form a pleasing as well as majestic image of this illustrious female at the period of her accession and at the age of five-and-twenty.

"She was a lady of great beauty, of decent stature, and of an excellent shape. In her youth she was adorned with a more than usual maiden modesty; her skin was of pure white, and her hair of a yellow colour; her eyes were beautiful and lively. In short, her whole body was well made, and her face was adorned with a wonderful and sweet beauty and majesty. This beauty lasted till her middle age, though it declined[31]." &c.

[Note 31: Bohun's "Character of Queen Elizabeth."]

"She was of personage tall, of hair and complexion fair, and therewith well favored, but high-nosed; of limbs and feature neat, and, which added to the lustre of those exterior graces, of stately and majestic comportment; participating in this more of her father than her mother, who was of an inferior allay, plausible, or, as the French hath it, more debonaire and affable, virtues which might suit well with majesty, and which descending as hereditary to the daughter, did render her of a more sweeter temper and endeared her more to the love and liking of her people, who gave her the name and fame of a most gracious and popular prince[32]."

[Note 32: Naunton's "Fragmenta Regalia."]

The death of Mary was announced to the two houses, which were then sitting, by Heath bishop of Ely, the lord-chancellor. In both assemblies, after the decorum of a short pause, the notification was followed by joyful shouts of "God save queen Elizabeth! long and happily may she reign!" and with great alacrity the members issued out to proclaim the new sovereign before the palace in Westminster and again at the great cross in Cheapside.

The Londoners knew not how to contain their joy on this happy occasion:--the bells of all the churches were set ringing, bonfires were kindled, and tables were spread in the streets according to the bountiful and hospitable custom of that day, "where was plentiful eating, drinking, and making merry." On the following Sunday Te Deum was sung in the churches; probably an unexampled, however merited, expression of disrespect to the memory of the former sovereign.

Elizabeth received the news of her own accession at Hatfield. We are not told that she affected any great concern for the loss of her sister, much less did any unbecoming sign of exultation escape her; but, "falling on her knees, after a good time of respiration she uttered this verse of the Psalms; A Domino factum est istud, et est mirabile oculis nostris[33]: which to this day we find on the stamp of her gold; with this on her silver, Posui Deum adjutorem meum[34]."[35]

[Note 33: It is the Lord's doing, it is marvellous in our eyes.]

[Note 34: I have chosen God for my helper.]

[Note 35: "Fragmenta Regalia."]

Several noblemen of the late queen's council now repairing to her, she held at Hatfield on November the 20th her first privy-council; at which she declared sir Thomas Parry comptroller of her household, sir Edward Rogers captain of the guard, and sir William Cecil principal secretary of state, all three being at the same time admitted to the council-board. From these appointments, the first of her reign, some presages might be drawn of her future government favorable to her own character and correspondent to the wishes of her people.

Parry was the person who had filled for many years the office of her cofferer, who was perfectly in the secret of whatever confidential intercourse she might formerly have held with the lord-admiral, and whose fidelity to her in that business had stood firm against all the threats of the protector and council, and the artifices of those by whom his examination had been conducted. That mindfulness of former services, of which the advancement of this man formed by no means a solitary instance in the conduct of Elizabeth, appeared the more commendable in her, because she accompanied it with a generous oblivion of the many slights and injuries to which her defenceless and persecuted condition had so long exposed her from others.

The merit of Cecil was already in part known to the public; and his promotion to an office of such importance was a happy omen for the protestant cause, his attachment to which had been judged the sole impediment to his advancement under the late reign to situations of power and trust corresponding with the opinion entertained of his integrity and political wisdom. A brief retrospect of the scenes of public life in which he had already been an actor will best explain the character and sentiments of this eminent person, destined to wield for more than forty years with unparalleled skill and felicity, under a mistress who knew his value, the energies of the English state.

Born, in 1520, the son of the master of the royal wardrobe, Cecil early engaged the notice of Henry VIII. by the fame of a religious dispute which he had held in Latin with two popish priests attached to the Irish chieftain O'Neal. A place in reversion freely bestowed on him by the king at once rewarded the zeal of the young polemic, and encouraged him to desert the profession of the law, in which he had embarked, for the political career.

His marriage with the sister of sir John Cheke strengthened his interest at court by procuring him an introduction to the earl of Hertford, and early in the reign of Edward this powerful patronage obtained for him the office of secretary of state. In the first disgrace of the protector he lost his place, and was for a short time a prisoner in the Tower; but his compliant conduct soon restored him to favor: he scrupled not to draw the articles of impeachment against the protector; and Northumberland, finding him both able in business and highly acceptable to the young monarch, procured, or permitted, his reinstatement in office in September 1550.

Cecil, however, was both too wary and too honest to regard himself as pledged to the support of Northumberland's inordinate schemes of ambition; and scarcely any public man of the day, attached to the protestant cause, escaped better in the affair of lady Jane Grey. It is true that one writer accuses him of having drawn all the papers in her favor: but this appears to be, in part at least, either a mistake or a calumny; and it seems, on the contrary, that he refused to Northumberland some services of this nature. It has been already mentioned that his name appeared with those of the other privy-councillors to Edward's settlement of the crown; and his plea of having signed it merely as a witness to the king's signature, deserves to be regarded as a kind of subterfuge. But he was early in paying his respects to Mary, and he took advantage of the graciousness with which she received his explanations to obtain a general pardon, which protected him from all personal danger. He lost however his place of secretary, which some have affirmed that he might have retained by further compliances in religion. This however is the more doubtful, because it cannot be questioned that he must have yielded a good deal on this point, without which he neither could nor would have made one of a deputation sent to conduct to England cardinal Pole the papal legate, nor probably would he have been joined in commission with the cardinal and other persons sent to treat of a peace with France.

But admitting, as we must, that this eminent statesman was far from aspiring to the praise of a confessor, he will still be found to deserve high commendation for the zeal and courage with which, as a member of parliament, he defended the interests of his oppressed and suffering fellow-protestants. At considerable hazard to himself, he opposed with great freedom of speech a bill for confiscating the property of exiles for religion; and he appears to have escaped committal to the Tower on this account, solely by the presence of mind which he exhibited before the council and the friendship of some of its members.

He is known to have maintained a secret and intimate correspondence with Elizabeth during the time of her adversity, and to have assisted her on various trying occasions with his salutary counsels; and nothing could be more interesting than to trace the origin and progress of that confidential relation between these eminent and in many respects congenial characters, which after a long course of years was only terminated by the hand of death;--but materials for this purpose are unfortunately wanting.

The letters on both sides were probably sacrificed by the parties themselves to the caution which their situation required; and among the published extracts from the Burleigh papers, only a single document is found relative to the connexion subsisting between them during the reign of Mary. This is a short and uninteresting letter addressed to Cecil by sir Thomas Benger, one of the princess's officers, in which, after some mention of accounts, not now intelligible, he promises that he and sir Thomas Parry will move the princess to grant his correspondent's request, which is not particularized, and assures him that as his coming thither would be thankfully received, so he wishes that all the friends of the princess entertained the same sense of that matter as he does. The letter seems to point at some official concern of Cecil in the affairs of Elizabeth. It is dated October 24th 1556.

The private character of Cecil was in every respect exemplary, and his disposition truly amiable. His second marriage with one of the learned daughters of sir Anthony Cook conferred upon him that exalted species of domestic happiness which a sympathy in mental endowments can alone bestow; whilst it had the further advantage of connecting him with the excellent man her father, with sir Nicholas Bacon and sir Thomas Hobby, the husbands of two of her sisters, and generally with the wisest and most conscientious supporters of the protestant interest. This great minister was honorably distinguished through life by an ardor and constancy of friendship rare in all classes of men, but esteemed peculiarly so in those whose lives are occupied amid the heartless ceremonial of courts and the political intrigues of princes. His attachments, as they never degenerated into the weakness of favoritism, were as much a source of benefit to his country as of enjoyment to himself; for his friends were those of virtue and the state. And there were few among the more estimable public men of this reign who were not indebted either for their first introduction to the notice of Elizabeth, their continuance in her favor, or their restoration to it when undeservedly lost, to the generous patronage or powerful intercession of Cecil.

On appointing him a member of her council, the queen addressed her secretary in the following gracious words:

"I give you this charge, that you shall be of my privy-council, and content yourself to take pains for me and my realm. This judgement I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that, without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best: And that if you shall know any thing necessary to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only, and assure yourself I will not fail to keep taciturnity therein. And therefore herewith I charge you[36]."

[Note 36: "Nugae Antiquae."]

Cardinal Pole was not doomed to be an eye-witness of the relapse of the nation into what he must have regarded as heresy of the most aggravated nature; he expired a few hours after his royal kinswoman: and Elizabeth, with due consideration for the illustrious ancestry, the learning, the moderation, and the blameless manners of the man, authorized his honorable interment at Canterbury among the archbishops his predecessors, with the attendance of two bishops, his ancient friends and the faithful companions of his long exile.

On November 23d the queen set forward for her capital, attended by a train of about a thousand nobles, knights, gentlemen, and ladies, and took up her abode for the present at the dissolved monastery of the Chartreux, or Charterhouse, then the residence of lord North; a splendid pile which offered ample accommodation for a royal retinue. Her next remove, in compliance with ancient custom, was to the Tower. On this occasion all the streets from the Charterhouse were spread with fine gravel; singers and musicians were stationed by the way, and a vast concourse of people freely lent their joyful and admiring acclamations, as preceded by her heralds and great officers, and richly attired in purple velvet, she passed along mounted on her palfrey, and returning the salutations of the humblest of her subjects with graceful and winning affability.

With what vivid and what affecting impressions of the vicissitudes attending on the great must she have passed again within the antique walls of that fortress once her dungeon, now her palace! She had entered it by the Traitor's gate, a terrified and defenceless prisoner, smarting under many wrongs, hopeless of deliverance, and apprehending nothing less than an ignominious death. She had quitted it, still a captive, under the guard of armed men, to be conducted she knew not whither. She returned to it in all the pomp of royalty, surrounded by the ministers of her power, ushered by the applauses of her people; the cherished object of every eye, the idol of every heart.

Devotion alone could supply becoming language to the emotions which swelled her bosom; and no sooner had she reached the royal apartments, than falling on her knees she returned humble and fervent thanks to that Providence which had brought her in safety, like Daniel from the den of lions, to behold this day of exaltation.

Elizabeth was attended on her passage to the Tower by one who like herself returned with honor to that place of his former captivity; but not, like herself, with a mind disciplined by adversity to receive with moderation and wisdom "the good vicissitude of joy." This person was lord Robert Dudley, whom the queen had thus early encouraged to aspire to her future favors by appointing him to the office of master of the horse.

We are totally uninformed of the circumstances which had recommended to her peculiar patronage this bad son of a bad father; whose enterprises, if successful, would have disinherited of a kingdom Elizabeth herself no less than Mary. But it is remarkable, that even under the reign of the latter, the surviving members of the Dudley family had been able to recover in great measure from the effects of their late signal reverses. Lord Robert, soon after his release from the Tower, contrived to make himself so acceptable to king Philip by his courtier-like attentions, and to Mary by his diligence in posting backwards and forwards to bring her intelligence of her husband during his long visits to the continent, that he earned from the latter several marks of favor. Two of his brothers fought, and one fell, in the battle of St. Quintin's; and immediately afterwards the duchess their mother found means, through some Spanish interests and connexions, to procure the restoration in blood of all her surviving children. The appointment of Robert to the place of master of the ordnance soon followed; so that even before the accession of Elizabeth he might be regarded as a rising man in the state. His personal graces and elegant accomplishments are on all hands acknowledged to have been sufficiently striking to dazzle the eyes and charm the heart of a young princess of a lively imagination and absolute mistress of her own actions. The circumstance of his being already married, blinded her perhaps to the nature of her sentiments towards him, or at least it was regarded by her as a sufficient sanction in the eyes of the public for those manifestations of favor and esteem with which she was pleased to honor him. But whether the affection which she entertained for him best deserved the name of friendship or a still tenderer one, seems after all a question of too subtile and obscure a nature for sober discussion; though in a French "cour d'amour" it might have furnished pleas and counterpleas of exquisite ingenuity, prodigious sentimental interest, and length interminable. What is unfortunately too certain is, that he was a favorite, and in the common judgement of the court, of the nation, and of posterity, an unworthy one; but calumny and prejudice alone have dared to attack the reputation of the queen.

Elizabeth had no propensity to exalt immoderately her relations by the mother's side;--for she neither loved nor honored that mother's memory; but several of the number may be mentioned, whose merits towards herself, or whose qualifications for the public service, justly entitled them to share in her distribution of offices and honors, and whom she always treated with distinction. The whole illustrious family of the Howards were her relations; and in the first year of her reign she conferred on the duke of Norfolk, her second-cousin, the order of the garter. Her great-uncle lord William Howard, created baron of Effingham by Mary, was continued by her in the high office of lord-chamberlain, and soon after appointed one of the commissioners for concluding a peace with France. Lord Thomas Howard, her mother's first-cousin, who had treated her with distinguished respect and kindness on her arrival at Hampton Court from Woodstock, and had the further merit of being indulgent to protestants during the persecutions of Mary, received from her the title of viscount Bindon, and continued much in her favor to the end of his days.

Sir Richard Sackville, also her mother's first-cousin, had filled different fiscal offices under the three last reigns; he was a man of abilities, and derived from a long line of ancestors great estates and extensive influence in the county of Sussex. The people, who marked his growing wealth, and to whom he was perhaps officially obnoxious, nicknamed him Fill-sack: in Mary's time he was a catholic, a privy-councillor, and chancellor of the court of Augmentations; under her successor he changed the first designation and retained the two last, which he probably valued more. He is chiefly memorable as the father of Sackville the poet, afterwards lord Buckhurst and progenitor of the dukes of Dorset.

Sir Francis Knolles, whose lady was one of the queen's nearest kinswomen, was deservedly called to the privy-council on his return from his voluntary banishment for conscience' sake; his sons gained considerable influence in the court of Elizabeth; his daughter, the mother of Essex, and afterwards the wife of Leicester, was for various reasons long an object of the queen's particular aversion.

But of all her relations, the one who had deserved most at her hands was Henry Carey, brother to lady Knolles, and son to Mary Boleyn, her majesty's aunt. This gentleman had expended several thousand pounds of his own patrimony in her service and relief during the time of her imprisonment, and she liberally requited his friendship at her first creation of peers, by conferring upon him, with the title of baron Hunsdon, the royal residence of that name, with its surrounding park and several beneficial leases of crown lands. He was afterwards joined in various commissions and offices of trust: but his remuneration was, on the whole, by no means exorbitant; for he was not rapacious, and consequently not importunate; and the queen, in the employments which she assigned him, seemed rather to consult her own advantage and that of her country, by availing herself of the abilities of a diligent and faithful servant, than to please herself by granting rewards to an affectionate and generous kinsman. In fact, lord Hunsdon was skilled as little in the ceremonious and sentimental gallantry which she required from her courtiers, as in the circumspect and winding policy which she approved in her statesmen. "As he lived in a ruffling time," says Naunton, "so he loved sword and buckler men, and such as our fathers wont to call men of their hands, of which sort he had many brave gentlemen that followed him; yet not taken for a popular or dangerous person." Though extremely choleric, he was honest, and not at all malicious. It was said of him that "his Latin and his dissimulation were both alike," equally bad, and that "his custom in swearing and obscenity in speech made him seem a worse Christian than he was."

Fuller relates of him the following characteristic anecdote. "Once, one Mr. Colt chanced to meet him coming from Hunsdon to London, in the equipage of a lord of those days. The lord, on some former grudge, gave him a box on the ear: Colt presently returned the principal with interest; and thereupon his servants drawing their swords, swarmed about him. 'You rogues,' said my lord, 'may not I and my neighbour change a blow but you must interpose?' Thus the quarrel was begun and ended in the same minute[37]."

[Note 37: "Worthies" in Herts.]

The queen's attachment to such of her family as she was pleased to honor with her notice, was probably the more constant because there was nothing in it of excess or of blindness:--even Leicester in the height of his favor felt that he must hold sacred their claims to her regard: according to Naunton's phrase, he used to say of Sackville and Hunsdon, "that they were of the tribe of Dan, and were Noli me tangere's."

After a few days spent in the Tower, Elizabeth passed by water to Somerset Place; and thence, about a fortnight after, when the funeral of her predecessor was over, to the palace of Westminster, where she kept her Christmas.

Busy preparation was now making in her good city of London against the solemn day of her passage in state from the Tower to her coronation at Westminster. The usages and sentiments of that age conferred upon these public ceremonials a character of earnest and dignified importance now lost; and on this memorable occasion, when the mingled sense of deliverance received and of future favor to be conciliated had opened the hearts of all men, it was resolved to lavish in honor of the new sovereign every possible demonstration of loyal affection, and every known device of festal magnificence.

The costume of the age was splendid. Gowns of velvet or satin, richly trimmed with silk, furs, or gold lace, costly gold chains, and caps or hoods of rich materials adorned with feathers or ouches, decorated on all occasions of display the persons not of nobles or courtiers alone, but of their crowds of retainers and higher menials, and even of the plain substantial citizens. Female attire was proportionally sumptuous. Hangings, of cloth, of silk, of velvet, cloth of gold or silver, or "needlework sublime," clothed on days of family-festivity the upper chamber[38] of every house of respectable appearance; these on public festivals were suspended from the balconies, and uniting with the banners and pennons floating overhead, gave to the streets almost the appearance of a suit of long and gayly-dressed saloons. Every circumstance thus conspired to render the public entry of queen Elizabeth the most gorgeous and at the same time the most interesting spectacle of the kind ever exhibited in the English metropolis.

[Note 38: As long as that style of domestic architecture prevailed in which every story was made to project considerably beyond the one beneath it, the upper room, from its superior size and lightsomeness, appears to have been that dedicated to the entertainment of guests.]

Her majesty was first to be conducted from her palace in Westminster to the royal apartments in the Tower; and a splendid water procession was appointed for the purpose. At this period, when the streets were narrow and ill-paved, the roads bad, and the luxury of close carriages unknown, the Thames was the great thoroughfare of the metropolis. The old palace of Westminster, as well as those of Richmond and Greenwich, the favorite summer residences of the Tudor princes, stood on its banks, and the court passed from one to the other in barges. The nobility were beginning to occupy with their mansions and gardens the space between the Strand and the water, and it had become a reigning folly amongst them to vie with each other in the splendor of their barges and of the liveries of the rowers, who were all distinguished by the crests or badges of their lords.

The corporation and trading companies of London possessed, as now, their state-barges enriched with carved and gilded figures and "decked and trimmed with targets and banners of their misteries."

On the 12th of January 1559 these were all drawn forth in grand array; and to enliven the pomp, "the bachelor's barge of the lord-mayor's company, to wit the mercers, had their barge with a foist trimmed with three tops and artillery aboard, gallantly appointed to wait upon them, shooting off lustily as they went, with great and pleasant melody of instruments, which played in most sweet and heavenly manner." In this state they rowed up to Westminster and attended her majesty with the royal barges back to the Tower.

Her passage through the city took place two days after.

She issued forth drawn in a sumptuous chariot, preceded by trumpeters and heralds in their coat-armour and "most honorably accompanied as well with gentlemen, barons, and other the nobility of this realm, as also with a notable train of goodly and beautiful ladies, richly appointed." The ladies were on horseback, and both they and the lords were habited in crimson velvet, with which their horses were also trapped. Let it be remarked by the way, that the retinue of fair equestrians constantly attendant on the person of the maiden queen in all her public appearances, was a circumstance of prodigious effect; the gorgeousness of royal pomp was thus heightened, and at the same time rendered more amiable and attractive by the alliance of grace and beauty; and a romantic kind of charm, comparable to that which seizes the imagination in the splendid fictions of chivalry, was cast over the heartless parade of courtly ceremonial.

It was a very different spirit, however, from that of romance or of knight-errantry which inspired the bosoms of the citizens whose acclamations now rent the air on her approach. They beheld in the princess whom they welcomed the daughter of that Henry who had redeemed the land from papal tyranny and extortion; the sister of that young and godly Edward,--the Josiah of English story,--whose pious hand had reared again the altars of pure and primitive religion; and they had bodied forth for her instruction and admonition, in a series of solemn pageants, the maxims by which they hoped to see her equal or surpass these deep-felt merits of her predecessors.

These pageants were erections placed across the principal streets in the manner of triumphal arches: illustrative sentences in English and Latin were inscribed upon them; and a child was stationed in each, who explained to the queen in English verse the meaning of the whole. The first was of three stories, and represented by living figures: first, Henry VII. and his royal spouse Elizabeth of York, from whom her majesty derived her name; secondly, Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn; and lastly, her majesty in person; all in royal robes. The verses described the felicity of that union of the houses to which she owed her existence, and of concord in general. The second pageant was styled "The seat of worthy governance," on the summit of which sat another representative of the queen; beneath were the cardinal virtues trampling under their feet the opposite vices, among whom Ignorance and Superstition were not forgotten. The third exhibited the eight Beatitudes, all ascribed with some ingenuity of application to her majesty. The fourth ventured upon a more trying topic: its opposite sides represented in lively contrast the images of a decayed and of a flourishing commonwealth; and from a cave below issued Time leading forth his daughter Truth, who held in her hand an English bible, which she offered to the queen's acceptance. Elizabeth received the volume, and reverently pressing it with both hands to her heart and to her lips, declared aloud, amid the tears and grateful benedictions of her people, that she thanked the city more for that gift than for all the cost they had bestowed upon her, and that she would often read over that book. The last pageant exhibited "a seemly and mete personage, richly apparelled in parliament robes, with a sceptre in her hand, over whose head was written 'Deborah, the judge and restorer of the house of Israel.'"

To render more palatable these grave moralities, the recorder of London, approaching her majesty's chariot near the further end of Cheapside, where ended the long array of the city companies, which had lined the streets all the way from Fenchurch, presented her with a splendid and ample purse, containing one thousand marks in gold. The queen graciously received it with both hands, and answered his harangue "marvellous pithily."

To crown the whole, those two griesly personages vulgarly called Gog and Magog, but described by the learned as Gogmagog the Albion and Corineus the Briton, deserted on this memorable day that accustomed station in Guildhall where they appear as the tutelary genii of the city, and were seen rearing up their stately height on each side of Temple-bar. With joined hands they supported above the gate a copy of Latin verses, in which they obligingly expounded to her majesty the sense of all the pageants which had been offered to her view, concluding with compliments and felicitations suitable to the happy occasion. The queen, in few but cordial words, thanked the citizens for all their cost and pains, assured them that she would "stand their good queen," and passed the gate amid a thunder of applause.

Elizabeth possessed in a higher degree than any other English prince who ever reigned, the innocent and honest arts of popularity; and the following traits of her behaviour on this day are recorded by our chroniclers with affectionate delight. "'Yonder is an ancient citizen,' said one of the knights attending on her person, 'which weepeth and turneth his face backward: How may it be interpreted? that he doth so for sorrow or for gladness?' With a just and pleasing confidence, the queen replied, 'I warrant you it is for gladness,'" "How many nosegays did her grace receive at poor women's hands! How many times staid she her chariot when she saw any simple body offer to speak to her grace! A branch of rosemary given her grace with a supplication by a poor woman about Fleet-bridge was seen in her chariot till her grace came to Westminster[39]."

[Note 39: Holinshed's Chronicles.]

The reader may here be reminded, that five-and-twenty years before, when the mother of this queen passed through London to her coronation, the pageants exhibited derived their personages and allusions chiefly from pagan mythology or classical fiction. But all was now changed; the earnestness of religious controversy in Edward's time, and the fury of persecution since, had put to flight Apollo, the Muses, and the Graces: Learning indeed had kept her station and her honors, but she had lent her lamp to other studies, and whether in the tongue of ancient Rome or modern England, Elizabeth was hailed in Christian strains, and as the sovereign of a Christian country. A people filled with earnest zeal in the best of causes implored her to free them once again from popery; to overthrow the tyranny of error and of superstition; to establish gospel truth; and to accept at their hands, as the standard of her faith and the rule of her conduct, that holy book of which they regarded the free and undisturbed possession as their brightest privilege.

How tame, how puerile, in the midst of sentiments serious and profound as these, would have appeared the intrusion of classical imagery, however graceful in itself or ingenious in its application! Frigid must have been the spectator who could even have remarked its absence, while shouts of patriotic ardor and of religious joy were bursting from the lips of the whole assembled population.

The august ceremonies of the coronation, which took place on the following day, merit no particular description; regulated in every thing by ancient custom, they afforded little scope for that display of popular sentiment which had given so intense an interest to the procession of the day before. Great perplexity was occasioned by the refusal of the whole bench of bishops to perform the coronation service; but at length, to the displeasure of his brethren, Ogelthorp bishop of Carlisle suffered himself to be gained over, and the rite was duly celebrated. This refractoriness of the episcopal order was wisely overlooked for the present by the new government; but it proceeded no doubt from the principle, that, the marriage of Henry VIII. with Catherine of Arragon having been declared lawful and valid, the child of Anne Boleyn must be regarded as illegitimate and incapable of the succession. The compliance of Ogelthorp could indeed be censured by the other bishops on no other ground than their disallowance of the title of the sovereign; in the office itself, as he performed it, there was nothing to which the most rigid catholic could object, for the ancient ritual is said to have been followed without the slightest modification. This circumstance has been adduced among others, to show that it was rather by the political necessities of her situation, than by her private judgement and conscience in religious matters, that Elizabeth was impelled finally to abjure the Roman catholic system, and to declare herself the general protectress of the protestant cause.

Probably, had she found herself free to follow entirely the dictates of her own inclinations, she would have established in the church of which she found herself the head, a kind of middle scheme like that devised by her father, for whose authority she was impressed with the highest veneration. To the end of her days she could never be reconciled to married bishops; indeed with respect to the clergy generally, a sagacious writer of her own time observes, that "caeteris paribus, and sometimes imparibus too, she preferred the single man before the married[40]."

[Note 40: Harrington's "Brief View."]

She would allow no one "to speak irreverently of the sacrament of the altar;" that is, to enter into discussions respecting the real presence; she enjoined the like respectful silence concerning the intercession of saints; and we learn that one Patch, who had been Wolsey's fool, and had contrived, like some others, to keep in favor through all the changes of four successive reigns, was employed by sir Francis Knolles to break down a crucifix which she still retained in her private chapel to the scandal of all good protestants.

A remarkable incident soon served to intimate the coolness and caution with which it was her intention to proceed in re-establishing the maxims of the reformers. Lord Bacon thus relates the anecdote: "Queen Elizabeth on the morrow of her coronation (it being the custom to release prisoners at the inauguration of a prince) went to the chapel; and in the great chamber one of her courtiers, who was well known to her, either out of his own motion, or by the instigation of a wiser man, presented her with a petition, and before a great number of courtiers besought her with a loud voice that now this good time there might be four or five more principal prisoners released: these were the four evangelists, and the apostle St. Paul, who had been long shut up in an unknown tongue, as it were in prison; so as they could not converse with the common people. The queen answered very gravely, that it was best first to inquire of themselves whether they would be released or not[41]."

[Note 41: Bacon's "Apophthegms."]

It was not long, however, ere this happy deliverance was fully effected. Before her coronation, Elizabeth had taken the important step of authorizing the reading of the liturgy in English; but she forbade preaching on controverted topics generally, and all preaching at Paul's Cross in particular, till the completion of that revision of the service used in the time of Edward VI. which she had intrusted to Parker archbishop-elect of Canterbury, with several of her wisest counsellors. It was the zeal of the ministers lately returned from exile, many of whom had imbibed at Geneva or Zurich ideas of a primitive simplicity in Christian worship widely remote from the views and sentiments of the queen, which gave occasion to this prohibition. The learning, the piety, the past sufferings of the men gave them great power over the minds and opinions of the people, who ran in crowds to listen to their sermons; and Elizabeth began already to apprehend that the hierarchy which she desired to establish would stand as much in need of protection from the disciples of Calvin and Zwingle on one hand, as from the adherents of popery on the other.

There is good reason to believe, that a royal proclamation issued some time after, by which all manner of plays and interludes were forbidden to be represented till after the ensuing hallowmass, was dictated by similar reasons of state with the prohibition of popular and unlicensed preaching.

From the earliest beginnings of the reformation under Henry VIII. the stage had come in aid of the pulpit; not, according to the practice of its purer ages, as the "teacher best of moral wisdom, with delight received," but as the vehicle of religious controversy, and not seldom of polemical scurrility. Several times already had this dangerous novelty attracted the jealous eyes of authority, and measures had in vain been taken for its suppression.

In 1542 Henry added to an edict for the destruction of Tyndale's English bible, with all the controversial works on both sides of which it had been the fertile parent, an injunction that "the kingdom should be purged and cleansed of all religious plays, interludes, rhymes, ballads, and songs, which are equally pestiferous and noisome to the peace of the church." During the reign of Edward, when the papists had availed themselves of the license of the theatre to attack Cranmer and the protector, a similar prohibition was issued against all dramatic performances, as tending to the growth of "disquiet, division, tumults and uproars." Mary's privy-council, on the other hand, found it necessary to address a remonstrance to the president of the North, respecting certain players, servants to sir Francis Lake, who had gone about the country representing pieces in ridicule of the king and queen and the formalities of the mass; and the design of the proclamation of Elizabeth was rendered evident by a solemn enactment of heavy penalties against such as should abuse the Common-prayer in any interludes, songs, or rhymes[42].

[Note 42: Warton's "History of English Poetry," vol. iii. p. 202 et seq.]

Chapter X

1559.

Meeting of parliament.--Prudent counsel of sir N. Bacon.--Act declaratory of the queen's title.--Her answer to an address praying her to marry.--Philip II. offers her his hand.--Motives of her refusal.--Proposes to her the archduke Charles.--The king of Sweden renews his addresses by the duke of Finland.--Honorable reception of the duke.--Addresses of the duke of Holstein.--The duke of Norfolk, lord R. Dudley, the marquis of Northampton, the earl of Rutland, made knights of the garter.--Notices of the two last.--Queen visits the earl of Pembroke.--His life and character.--Arrival and entertainment of a French embassy.--Review of the London trained-bands.--Tilt in Greenwich park.--Band of gentlemen-pensioners.--Royal progress to Dartford, Cobham Hall, Eltham, and Nonsuch.--The earl of Arundel entertains her at the latter place.--Obsequies for the king of France.--Death of Frances duchess of Suffolk.--Sumptuary law respecting apparel.--Fashions of dress.--Law against witchcraft.

In the parliament which met in January 1559, two matters personally interesting to the queen were agitated; her title to the crown, and her marriage; and both were disposed of in a manner calculated to afford a just presage of the maxims by which the whole tenor of her future life and reign was to be guided. By the eminently prudent and judicious counsels of sir Nicholas Bacon keeper of the seals, she omitted to require of parliament the repeal of those acts of her father's reign which had declared his marriage with her mother null, and herself illegitimate; and reposing on the acknowledged maxim of law, that the crown once worn takes away all defects in blood, she contented herself with an act declaratory in general terms of her right of succession. Thus the whole perplexing subject of her mother's character and conduct was consigned to an oblivion equally safe and decent; and the memory of her father, which, in spite of all his acts of violence and injustice, was popular in the nation and respected by herself, was saved from the stigma which the vindication of Anne Boleyn must have impressed indelibly upon it.

On the other topic she explained herself with an earnest sincerity which might have freed her from all further importunity in any concern less interesting to the wishes of her people. To a deputation from the house of commons with an address, "the special matter whereof was to move her grace to marriage," after a gracious reception, she delivered an answer in which the following passages are remarkable.

"...From my years of understanding, sith I first had consideration of my life, to be born a servitor of almighty God, I happily chose this kind of life, in the which I yet live; which I assure you for mine own part hath hitherto best contented myself, and I trust hath been most acceptable unto God. From the which, if either ambition of high estate, offered to me in marriage by the pleasure and appointment of my prince, whereof I have some records in this presence (as you our treasurer well know); or if eschewing the danger of mine enemies, or the avoiding of the peril of death, whose messenger, or rather a continual watchman, the prince's indignation, was no little time daily before mine eyes, (by whose means although I know, or justly may suspect, yet I will not now utter, or if the whole cause were in my sister herself, I will not now burden her therewith, because I will not charge the dead): if any of these, I say, could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me; but so constant have I always continued in this determination, although my youth and words may seem to some hardly to agree together; yet it is most true that at this day I stand free from any other meaning that either I have had in times past, or have at this present."

After a somewhat haughty assurance that she takes the recommendation of the parliament in good part, because it contains no limitation of place or person, which she should have regarded as great presumption in them, "whose duties are to obey," and "not to require them that may command;" having declared that should she change her resolution, she will choose one for her husband who shall, if possible, be as careful for the realm as herself, she thus concludes: "And in the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare, that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin."

One matrimonial proposal her majesty had already received, and that at once the most splendid and the least suitable which Europe could afford. Philip of Spain, loth to relinquish his hold upon England, but long since aware of the impracticability of establishing any claims of his own in opposition to the title of Elizabeth, now sought to reign by her; and to the formal announcement which she conveyed to him of the death of his late wife, accompanied with expressions of her anxiety to preserve his friendship, he had replied by an offer of his hand.

The objections to this union were so peculiarly forcible, and so obvious to every eye, that it appears at first view almost incredible that the proposal should have been made, as it yet undoubtedly was, seriously and with strong expectations of success. But Philip, himself a politician, believed Elizabeth to be one also; and he flattered himself that he should be able to point out such advantages in the connexion as might over-balance in her mind any scruples of patriotism, of feeling, or of conscience. She stood alone, the last of her father's house, unsupported at home by the authority of a powerful royal family, or abroad by great alliances. The queen of Scots, whom few of the subjects of Elizabeth denied to be next heir to the crown, and whose claim was by most of the catholics held preferable to her own, was married to the dauphin of France, consequently her title would be upheld by the whole force of that country, with which, as well as with Scotland, Elizabeth at her accession had found the nation involved in an unsuccessful war. The loss of Calais, the decay of trade, the failure of the exchequer, and the recent visitations of famine and pestilence, had infected the minds of the English with despondency, and paralysed all their efforts.

In religion they were confessedly a divided people; but it is probable that Philip, misled by his own zeal and that of the catholic clergy, confidently anticipated the extirpation of heresy and the final triumph of the papal system, if the measures of salutary rigor which had distinguished the reign of Mary should be persisted in by her successor; and that he actually supposed the majority of the nation to be at this time sincerely and cordially catholic. In offering therefore his hand to Elizabeth, he seemed to lend her that powerful aid against her foreign foe and rival without which her possession of the throne could not be secure, and that support against domestic faction without which it could not be tranquil. He readily undertook to procure from the pope the necessary dispensation for the marriage, which he was certain would be granted with alacrity; and before the answer of Elizabeth could reach him, he had actually dispatched envoys to Rome for this purpose.

A princess, in fact, of a character less firm and less sagacious than Elizabeth, might have found in these seeming benefits temptations not to be resisted; the splendor of Philip's rank and power would have dazzled and overawed, the difficulties of her own situation would have affrighted her, and between ambition and alarm she would probably have thrown herself into the arms, and abandoned her country to the mercy, of a gloomy, calculating, relentless tyrant.

But Elizabeth was neither to be deceived nor intimidated. She well knew how odious this very marriage had rendered her unhappy sister; she understood and sympathized in the religious sentiments of the great mass of her subjects; she felt too all the pride, as well as the felicity, of independence; and looking around with a cheerful confidence on a people who adored her, she formed at once the patriotic resolution to wear her English diadem by the suffrage of the English nation alone, unindebted to the protection and free from the participation of any brother-monarch living, even of him who held the highest place among the potentates of Europe.

Her best and wisest counsellors applauded her decision, but they unanimously advised that no means consistent with the rejection of his suit should be omitted, by which the friendship of the king of Spain might be preserved and cultivated. Expedients were accordingly found, without actually encouraging his hopes, for protracting the negotiation till a peace was concluded with France and with Scotland, and finally of declining the marriage without a breach of amity. Yet the duke de Feria, the Spanish ambassador, had not failed to represent to the queen, that as the addresses of his master were founded on personal acquaintance and high admiration of her charms and merit, a negative could not be returned without wounding equally his pride and his feelings. Philip, however, soon consoled himself for this disappointment by taking to wife the daughter of the king of France; and before the end of the year we find him recommending to Elizabeth as a husband his cousin the archduke Charles, son of the emperor Ferdinand. The overture was at this time declined by the queen without hesitation; but some time afterwards, circumstances arose which caused the negotiation to be resumed with prospect of success, and the pretensions and qualifications of the Austrian prince became, as we shall see, an object of serious discussion.

Eric, who had now ascended the throne of Sweden, sent his brother the duke of Finland to plead once more with the English princess in his behalf; and the king of Denmark, unwilling that his neighbour should bear off without a contest so glorious a prize, lost no time in sending forth on the same high adventure his nephew the duke of Holstein. It is more than probable that Shakespear, in his description of the wooers of all countries who contend for the possession of the fair and wealthy Portia[43], satirically alludes to several of these royal suitors, whose departure would often be accounted by his sovereign "a gentle ridance," since she might well exclaim with the Italian heiress, "while we shut the gate on one wooer, another knocks at the door."

[Note 43: See "The Merchant of Venice."]

The duke of Finland was received with high honors. The earl of Oxford and lord Robert Dudley repaired to him at Colchester and conducted him into London. At the corner of Gracechurch-street he was received by the marquis of Northampton and lord Ambrose Dudley, attended by many gentlemen, and, what seems remarkable, by ladies also; and thence, followed by a great troop of gentlemen in gold chains and yeomen of the guard, he proceeded to the bishop of Winchester's palace in Southwark, "which was hung with rich cloth of arras, and wrought with gold and silver and silks. And there he remained."

On the last circumstance it may be remarked, that it appears at this time to have been the invariable custom for ambassadors and other royal visitants to be lodged at some private house, where they were entertained, nominally perhaps at the expense of the sovereign, but really to the great cost as well as inconvenience of the selected host. The practice discovers a kind of feudal right of ownership still claimed by the prince in the mansions of his barons, some of which indeed were royal castles or manor-houses and held perhaps under peculiar obligations: at the same time it gives us a magnificent idea of the size and accommodation of these mansions and of the style of house-keeping used in them. It further intimates that an habitual distrust of these foreign guests caused it to be regarded as a point of prudence to place them under the secret inspection of some native of approved loyalty and discretion. Prisoners of state, as well as ambassadors and royal strangers, were thus committed to the private custody of peers or bishops.

The duke of Holstein on his arrival was lodged at Somerset Place, of which the queen had granted the use to lord Hunsdon. He came, it seems, with sanguine expectations of success in his suit; but the royal fair one deemed it sufficient to acknowledge his pains by an honorable reception, the order of the garter, and the grant of a yearly pension.

Meantime the queen herself, with equal assiduity and better success than awaited these princely wooers, was applying her cares to gain the affections of her subjects of every class, and if possible of both religious denominations.

On her young kinsman the duke of Norfolk, the first peer of the realm by rank, property, and great alliances, and the most popular by his known attachment to the protestant faith, she now conferred the distinction of the garter, decorating with it at the same time the marquis of Northampton, the earl of Rutland, and lord Robert Dudley.

The marquis, a brother of queen Catherine Parr, whom he resembled in the turn of his religious opinions, had been for these opinions a great sufferer under the last reign. On pretext of his adherence to the cause of Jane Grey, in which he had certainly not partaken more deeply than many others who found nothing but favor in the sight of Mary, he was attainted of high treason, and though his life was spared, his estates were forfeited and he had remained ever since in disgrace and suspicion. A divorce which he had obtained from an unfaithful wife under the ecclesiastical law of Henry VIII. was also called in question, and an after marriage which he had contracted declared null, but it appears to have been confirmed under Elizabeth. He was accounted a modest and upright character, endowed with no great talents for military command, in which he had been unsuccessful, nor yet for civil business; but distinguished by a fine taste in music and poetry, which formed his chief delight. From the new sovereign substantial benefits as well as flattering distinctions awaited him, being reinstated by her in the possession of his confiscated estates and appointed a privy-councillor.

Henry second earl of Rutland of the surname of Manners, was the representative of a knightly family seated during many generations at Ettal in Northumberland, and known in border history amongst the stoutest champions on the English side. But Ettal, a place of strength, was more than once laid in ruins, and the lands devastated and rendered "nothing worth," by incursions of the Scots; and though successive kings rewarded the services and compensated the losses of these valiant knights, by grants of land and appointments to honorable offices in the north, it was many an age before they attained to such a degree of wealth as would enable them to appear with distinction amongst the great families of the kingdom. At length sir Robert Manners, high sheriff of Northumberland, having recommended himself to the favor of the king-making Warwick and of Richard duke of Gloucester, was fortunate enough by a judicious marriage with the daughter of lord Roos, heiress of the Tiptofts earls of Worcester, to add the noble castle and fertile vale of Belvoir to the battered towers and wasted fields of his paternal inheritance.

A second splendid alliance completed the aggrandizement of the house of Manners. The son of sir Robert, bearing in right of his mother the title of lord Roos, and knighted by the earl of Surry for his distinguished bravery in the Scottish wars, was honored with the hand of Anne sole heiress of sir Thomas St. Leger by the duchess-dowager of Exeter, a sister of king Edward IV. The heir of this marriage, in consideration of his maternal ancestry, was advanced by Henry VIII. to the title of earl of Rutland, never borne but by princes of the blood. His successor, whom the queen was pleased to honor on this occasion, had suffered a short imprisonment in the cause of Jane Grey, but was afterwards intrusted by Mary with a military command. Under Elizabeth he was lord lieutenant of the counties of Nottingham and Rutland, and one of the commissioners for enforcing the oath of supremacy on all persons in offices of trust or profit suspected of adherence to the old religion. He died in 1563.

Of lord Robert Dudley it is only necessary here to observe, that his favor with the queen became daily more apparent, and began to give fears and jealousies to her best friends and wisest counsellors.

The hearts of the common people, as this wise princess well knew, were easily and cheaply to be won by gratifying their eyes with the frequent view of her royal person, and she neglected no opportunity of offering herself, all smiles and affability, to their ready acclamations.

On one occasion she passed publicly through the city to visit the mint and inspect the new coinage, which she had the great merit of restoring to its just standard from the extremely depreciated state to which it had been brought by the successive encroachments of her immediate predecessors. Another time she visited the dissolved priory of St. Mary Spittle in Bishopsgate-street, which was noted for its pulpit-cross, where, on set days, the lord-mayor and aldermen attended to hear sermons. It is conjectured that the queen went thither for the same purpose; but if this were the case, her equipage was somewhat whimsical. She was attended, as Stow informs us, by a thousand men in harness with shirts of mail and corselets and morice-pikes, and ten great pieces carried through the city unto the court, with drums and trumpets sounding, and two morice dancings, and in a cart two white bears.

Having supped one afternoon with the earl of Pembroke at Baynard's castle in Thames-street, she afterwards took boat and was rowed up and down the river, "hundreds of boats and barges rowing about her, and thousands of people thronging at the water side to look upon her majesty; rejoicing to see her, and partaking of the music and sights upon the Thames."

This peer was the offspring of a base-born son of William Herbert earl of Pembroke, and coming early to court to push his fortune, became an esquire of the body to Henry VIII. Soon ingratiating himself with this monarch, he obtained from his customary profusion towards his favorites, several offices in Wales and enormous grants of abbey-lands in some of the southern counties. In the year 1554, the 37th of his age, we find him considerable enough to procure the king's license "to retain thirty persons at his will and pleasure, over and above such persons as attended on him, and to give them his livery, badges, and cognizance." The king's marriage with Catherine Parr, his wife's sister, increased his consequence, and Henry on his death-bed appointed him one of his executors and a member of the young king's council. He was actively useful in the beginning of Edward's reign in keeping down commotions in Wales and suppressing some which had arisen in Wiltshire and Somersetshire. This service obtained for him the office of master of the horse; and that more important service which he afterwards performed at the head of one thousand Welshmen, with whom he took the field against the Cornish rebels, was rewarded by the garter, the presidency of the council for Wales, and a valuable wardship. He figured next as commander of part of the forces in Picardy and governor of Calais, and found himself strong enough to claim of the feeble protector as his reward the titles of baron Herbert and earl of Pembroke, become extinct by the failure of legitimate heirs. As soon as his sagacity prognosticated the fall of Somerset, he judiciously attached himself to the rising fortunes of Northumberland. With this aspiring leader it was an object of prime importance to purchase the support of a nobleman who now appeared at the head of three hundred retainers, and whose authority in Wales and the southern counties was equal, or superior, to the hereditary influence of the most powerful and ancient houses. To engage him therefore the more firmly in his interest, Northumberland proposed a marriage between Pembroke's son lord Herbert and lady Catherine Grey, which was solemnized at the same time with that between lord Guildford Dudley and the lady Jane her eldest sister.

But no ties of friendship or alliance could permanently engage Pembroke on the losing side; and though he concurred in the first measures of the privy-council in behalf of lady Jane's title, it was he who devised a pretext for extricating its members from the Tower, where Northumberland had detained them in order to secure their fidelity, and, assembling them in Baynard's castle, procured their concurrence in the proclamation of Mary. By this act he secured the favor of the new queen, whom he further propitiated by compelling his son to repudiate the innocent and ill-fated lady Catherine, whose birth caused her to be regarded at court with jealous eyes. Mary soon confided to him the charge of effectually suppressing Wyat's rebellion, and afterwards constituted him her captain-general beyond the seas, in which capacity he commanded the English forces at the battle of St. Quintin's. Such was the respect entertained for his experience and capacity, that Elizabeth admitted him to her privy-council immediately after her accession, and as a still higher mark of her confidence named him,--with the marquis of Northampton, the earl of Bedford, and lord John Grey, leading men of the protestant party,--to assist at the meetings of divines and men of learning by whom the religious establishment of the country was to be settled. He was likewise appointed a commissioner for administering the oath of supremacy. In short, he retained to his death, which occurred in 1570, in the 63d year of his age, the same high station among the confidential servants of the crown which he had held unmoved through all the mutations of the eventful period of his public life.

Naunton, in his "Fragmenta Regalia," speaking of Paulet marquis of Winchester and lord-treasurer, who, he says, had then served four princes "in as various and changeable season that well I may say, neither time nor age hath yielded the like precedent," thus proceeds: "This man being noted to grow high in her" (queen Elizabeth's) "favor, as his place and experience required, was questioned by an intimate friend of his, how he stood up for thirty years together amidst the changes and reigns of so many chancellors and great personages. 'Why,' quoth the marquis, 'ortus sum ex salice, non ex quercu.' (By being a willow and not an oak). And truly the old man hath taught them all, especially William earl of Pembroke, for they two were ever of the king's religion, and over-zealous professors. Of these it is said, that both younger brothers, yet of noble houses, they spent what was left them and came on trust to the court; where, upon the bare stock of their wits, they began to traffic for themselves, and prospered so well, that they got, spent, and left, more than any subjects from the Norman conquest to their own times: whereunto it hath been prettily replied, that they lived in a time of dissolution.--Of any of the former reign, it is said that these two lived and died chiefly in the queen's favor."

Among the means employed by Pembroke for preserving the good graces of the new queen, the obvious one of paying court to her prime favorite Robert Dudley was not neglected; and lord Herbert, whose first marriage had been contracted in compliance with the views of the father, now formed a third in obedience to the wishes of the son. The lady to whom he was thus united by motives in which inclination had probably no share on either side, was the niece of Dudley and sister of sir Philip Sidney, one of the most accomplished women of her age, celebrated during her life by the wits and poets whom she patronized, and preserved in the memory of posterity by an epitaph from the pen of Ben Jonson which will not be forgotten whilst English poetry remains.

The arrival of ambassadors of high rank from France, on occasion of the peace recently concluded with that country, afforded the queen an opportunity of displaying all the magnificence of her court; and their entertainment has furnished for the curious inquirer in later times some amusing traits of the half-barbarous manners of the age. The duke de Montmorenci, the head of the embassy, was lodged at the bishop of London's, and the houses of the dean and canons of St. Paul's were entirely filled with his numerous retinue. The gorgeousness of the ambassador's dress was thought remarkable even in those gorgeous times. The day after their arrival they were conducted in state to court, where they supped with the queen, and afterwards partook of a "goodly banquet," with all manner of entertainment till midnight. The next day her majesty gave them a sumptuous dinner, followed by a baiting of bulls and bears. "The queen's grace herself" stood with them in a gallery, looking on the pastime, till six o'clock, when they returned by water to sup with the bishop their host. On the following day they were conducted to the Paris Garden, then a favorite place of amusement on the Surry side of the Thames, and there regaled with another exhibition of bull and bear baiting. Two days afterwards they departed, "taking their barge towards Gravesend," highly delighted, it is to be hoped, with the elegant taste of the English in public diversions, and carrying with them a number of mastiffs, given them to hunt wolves in their own country.

But notwithstanding all outward shows of amity with France, Elizabeth had great cause to apprehend that the pretensions of the queen of Scots and her husband the dauphin, who had openly assumed the royal arms of England, might soon reinvolve her in hostilities with that country and with Scotland; and it consequently became a point of policy with her to animate by means of military spectacles, graced with her royal presence and encouragement, the warlike preparations of her subjects. She was now established for a time in her favorite summer-palace of Greenwich, and the London companies were ordered to make a muster of their men at arms in the adjoining park.

The employment of fire-arms had not as yet consigned to disuse either the defensive armour or the weapons of offence of the middle ages; and the military arrays of that time amused the eye of the spectator with a rich variety of accoutrement far more picturesque in its details, and probably more striking even in its general effect, than that magnificent uniformity which, at a modern review, dazzles but soon satiates the sight.

Of the fourteen hundred men whom the metropolis sent forth on this occasion, eight hundred, armed in fine corselets, bore the long Moorish pike; two hundred were halberdiers wearing a different kind of armour, called Almain rivets; and the gunners, or musketeers, were equipped in shirts of mail, with morions or steel caps. Her majesty, surrounded by a splendid court, beheld all their evolutions from a gallery over the park gate, and finally dismissed them, confirmed in loyalty and valor by praises, thanks, and smiles of graciousness.

A few days afterwards the queen's pensioners were appointed "to run with the spear," and this chivalrous exhibition was accompanied with such circumstances of romantic decoration as peculiarly delighted the fancy of Elizabeth. She caused to be erected for her in Greenwich park a banqueting-house "made with fir poles and decked with birch branches and all manner of flowers both of the field and the garden, as roses, julyflowers, lavender, marygolds, and all manner of strewing-herbs and rushes." Tents were also set up for her household, and a place was prepared for the tilters. After the exercises were over, the queen gave a supper in the banqueting-house, succeeded by a masque, and that by a splendid banquet. "And then followed great casting of fire and shooting of guns till midnight."

This band of gentlemen pensioners, the boast and ornament of the court of Elizabeth, was probably the most splendid establishment of the kind in Europe. It was entirely composed of the flower of the nobility and gentry, and to be admitted to serve in its ranks was during the whole of the reign regarded as a distinction worthy the ambition of young men of the highest families and most brilliant prospects. Sir John Holles, afterwards earl of Clare, was accustomed to say, that while he was a pensioner to queen Elizabeth, he did not know a worse man in the whole band than himself; yet he was then in possession of an inheritance of four thousand a year. "It was the constant custom of that queen," pursues the earl's biographer, "to call out of all counties of the kingdom, the gentlemen of the greatest hopes and the best fortunes and families, and with them to fill the more honorable rooms of her household servants, by which she honored them, obliged their kindred and alliance, and fortified herself[44]."

[Note 44: Collins's "Historical Collections."]

On this point of policy it deserves to be remarked, that however it might strengthen the personal influence of the sovereign to enroll amongst the menial servants of the crown gentlemen of influence and property, it is chiefly perhaps to this practice that we ought to impute that baseness of servility which infected, with scarcely one honorable exception, the public characters of the reign of Elizabeth.

On July 17th the queen set out on the first of those royal progresses which form so striking a feature in the domestic history of her reign. In them, as in most of the recreations in which she at any time indulged herself, Elizabeth sought to unite political utilities with the gratification of her taste for magnificence, and especially for admiration. It has also been surmised, that she was not inattentive to the savings occasioned to her privy purse by maintaining her household for several weeks in every year at the expense of her nobles, or of the towns through which she passed; and it must be admitted that more than one disgraceful instance might be pointed out, of a great man obliged to purchase the continuance or restoration of her favor by soliciting the almost ruinous honor of a royal visit. On the whole, however, her deportment on these occasions warrants the conclusion, that an earnest and constant desire of popularity was her principal motive for persevering to the latest period of her life to encounter the fatigue of these frequent journeys, and of the acts of public representation which they imposed upon her.

"In her progress," says an acute and lively delineator of her character, "she was most easy to be approached; private persons and magistrates, men and women, country-people and children, came joyfully and without any fear to wait upon her and see her. Her ears were then open to the complaints of the afflicted and of those that had been any way injured. She would not suffer the meanest of her people to be shut out from the places where she resided, but the greatest and the least were then in a manner levelled. She took with her own hand, and read with the greatest goodness, the petitions of the meanest rustics. And she would frequently assure them that she would take a particular care of their affairs, and she would ever be as good as her word. She was never seen angry with the most unseasonable or uncourtly approach; she was never offended with the most impudent or importunate petitioner. Nor was there any thing in the whole course of her reign that more won the hearts of the people than this her wonderful facility, condescension, and the sweetness and pleasantness with which she entertained all that came to her[45]."

[Note 45: Bohun's "Character of Queen Elizabeth."]

The first stage of the queen's progress was to Dartford in Kent, where Henry VIII., whose profusion in the article of royal residences was extreme, had fitted up a dissolved priory as a palace for himself and his successors. Elizabeth kept this mansion in her own hands during the whole of her reign, and once more, after an interval of several years, is recorded to have passed two days under its roof. James I. granted it to the earl of Salisbury: the lords Darcy were afterwards its owners. The embattled gatehouse with an adjoining wing, all that remains in habitable condition, are at the present time occupied as a farm house; while foundations of walls running along the neighbouring fields to a considerable distance, alone attest the magnitude, and leave to be imagined the splendor, of the ancient edifice. Such is at this day the common fate of the castles of our ancient barons, the mansions of our nobles of a following age, and the palaces of the Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the Stuarts!

From Dartford she proceeded to Cobham Hall,--an exception to the general rule,--for this venerable mansion is at present the noble seat of the earl of Darnley; and though the centre has been rebuilt in a more modern style, the wings remain untouched, and in one of them the apartment occupied by the queen on this visit is still pointed out to the stranger. She was here sumptuously entertained by William lord Cobham, a nobleman who enjoyed a considerable share of her favor, and who, after acquitting himself to her satisfaction in an embassy to the Low-Countries, was rewarded with the garter and the place of a privy-councillor. He was however a person of no conspicuous ability, and his wealth and his loyalty appear to have been his principal titles of merit.

Eltham was her next stage; an ancient palace frequently commemorated in the history of our early kings as the scene of rude magnificence and boundless hospitality. In 1270 Henry III. kept a grand Christmas at Ealdham palace,--so it was then called. A son of Edward II. was named John of Eltham, from its being the place of his birth.

Edward III. twice held his parliament in its capacious hall. It was repaired at great cost by Edward IV., who made it a frequent place of residence; but Henry VIII. began to neglect it for Greenwich, and Elizabeth was the last sovereign by whom it was visited.

Its hall, 100 feet in length, with a beautifully carved roof resembling that of Westminster-hall and windows adorned with all the elegance of gothic tracery, is still in being, and admirably serves the purposes of a barn and granary.

Elizabeth soon quitted this seat of antique grandeur to contemplate the gay magnificence of Nonsuch, regarded as the triumph of her father's taste and the masterpiece of all the decorative arts. This stately edifice, of which not a vestige now remains, was situated near Ewel in Surry, and commanded from its lofty turrets extensive views of the surrounding country.

It was built round two courts, an outer and an inner one, both very spacious; and the entrance to each was by a square gatehouse highly ornamented, embattled, and having turrets at the four corners. These gatehouses were of stone, as was the lower story of the palace itself; but the upper one was of wood, "richly adorned and set forth and garnished with variety of statues, pictures, and other antic forms of excellent art and workmanship, and of no small cost:" all which ornaments, it seems, were made of rye dough. In modern language the "pictures" would probably be called basso-relievos. From the eastern and western angles of the inner court rose two slender turrets five stories high, with lanthorns on the top, which were leaded and surrounded with wooden balustrades. These towers of observation, from which the two parks attached to the palace and a wide expanse of champaign country beyond might be surveyed as in a map, were celebrated as the peculiar boast of Nonsuch.

Henry was prevented by death from beholding the completion of this gaudy structure, and queen Mary had it in contemplation to pull it down to save further charges; but the earl of Arundel, "for the love and honor he bare to his old master," purchased the place, and finished it according to the original design. It was to this splendid nobleman that the visit of the queen was paid. He received her with the utmost magnificence. On Sunday night a banquet, a mask, and a concert were the entertainments: the next day she witnessed a course from a standing made for her in the park, and "the children of Paul's" performed a play; after which a costly banquet was served up in gilt dishes. On her majesty's departure her noble host further presented her with a cupboard of plate. The earl of Arundel was wealthy, munificent, and one of the finest courtiers of his day: but it must not be imagined that even by him such extraordinary cost and pains would have been lavished upon his illustrious guest as a pure and simple homage of that sentimental loyalty which feels its utmost efforts overpaid by their acceptance. He looked in fact to a high and splendid recompense,--one which as yet perhaps he dared not name, but which the sagacity of his royal mistress would, as he flattered himself, be neither tardy nor reluctant to divine.

The death of Henry II. of France, which occurred during the summer of this year, gave occasion to a splendid ceremony in St. Paul's cathedral, which was rendered remarkable by some circumstances connected with the late change of religion. This was the performance of his obsequies, then a customary tribute among the princes of Europe to the memory of each other; which Elizabeth therefore would by no means omit, though the custom was so intimately connected with doctrines and practices characteristic of the Romish church, that it was difficult to divest it, in the judgement of a protestant people, of the character of a superstitious observance. A hearse magnificently adorned with the banners and scutcheons of the deceased was placed in the church; a great train of lords and gentlemen attended as mourners; and all the ceremonies of a real funeral were duly performed, not excepting the offering at the altar of money, originally designed, without doubt, for the purchase of masses for the dead. The herald, however, was ordered to substitute other words in place of the ancient request to all present to pray for the soul of the departed; and several reformations were made in the service, and in the communion with which this stately piece of pageantry concluded.

In the month of December was interred with much ceremony in Westminster Abbey Frances duchess-dowager of Suffolk, grandaughter to Henry VII. After the tragical catastrophe of her misguided husband and of lady Jane Grey her eldest daughter, the duchess was suffered to remain in unmolested privacy, and she had since rendered herself utterly insignificant, not to say contemptible, by an obscure marriage with one Stoke, a young man who was her master of the horse. There is a tradition, that on Elizabeth's exclaiming with surprise and indignation when the news of this connexion reached her ears, "What, hath she married her horse keeper?" Cecil replied, "Yes, madam, and she says your majesty would like to do so too;" lord Robert Dudley then filling the office of master of the horse to the queen.

The impolicy or inutility of sumptuary laws was not in this age acknowledged. A proclamation therefore was issued in October 1559 to check that prevalent excess in apparel which was felt as a serious evil at this period, when the manufactures of England were in so rude a state that almost every article for the use of the higher classes was imported from Flanders, France, or Italy, in exchange for the raw commodities of the country, or perhaps for money.

The invectives of divines, in various ages of the Christian church, have placed upon lasting record some transient follies which would otherwise have sunk into oblivion, and the sermons of bishop Pilkington, a warm polemic of this time, may be quoted as a kind of commentary on the proclamation. He reproves "fine-fingered rufflers, with their sables about their necks, corked slippers, trimmed buskins, and warm mittons."--"These tender Parnels," he says, "must have one gown for the day, another for the night; one long, another short; one for winter, another for summer. One furred through, another but faced: one for the work-day, another for the holiday. One of this color, another of that. One of cloth, another of silk, or damask. Change of apparel; one afore dinner, another at after: one of Spanish fashion, another of Turkey. And to be brief, never content with enough, but always devising new fashions and strange. Yea a ruffian will have more in his ruff and his hose than he should spend in a year. He which ought to go in a russet coat, spends as much on apparel for him and his wife, as his father would have kept a good house with."

The costly furs here mentioned had probably become fashionable since a direct intercourse had been opened in the last reign with Russia, from which country ambassadors had arrived, whose barbaric splendor astonished the eyes of the good people of London. The affectation of wearing by turns the costume of all the nations of Europe, with which the queen herself was not a little infected, may be traced partly to the practice of importing articles of dress from those nations, and that of employing foreign tailors in preference to native ones, and partly to the taste for travelling, which since the revival of letters had become laudably prevalent among the young nobility and gentry of England. That more in proportion was expended on the elegant luxuries of dress, and less on the coarser indulgences of the table, ought rather to have been considered as a desirable approach to refinement of manners than a legitimate subject of censure.

An act of parliament was passed in this year subjecting the use of enchantment and witchcraft to the pains of felony. The malcontent catholics, it seems, were accused of employing practices of this nature; their predictions of her majesty's death had given uneasiness to government by encouraging plots against her government; and it was feared, "by many good and sober men," that these dealers in the black art might even bewitch the queen herself. That it was the learned bishop Jewel who had led the way in inspiring these superstitious terrors, to which religious animosities lent additional violence, may fairly be inferred from the following passage of a discourse which was delivered by him in the queen's presence the year before.... "Witches and sorcerers within these last few years are marvellously increased within your grace's realm. These eyes have seen most evident and manifest marks of their wickedness. Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death; their color fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft. Wherefore your poor subjects' most humble petition to your highness is, that the laws touching such malefactors may be put in due execution. For the shoal of them is great, their doing horrible, their malice intolerable, the examples most miserable. And I pray God they never practise further than upon the subject."