RICHMOND PALACE. (See p. [382.])
"The queen," says Lady Southwell, "kept her bed fifteen days, besides the three days she sat upon a stool, and one day, when, being pulled up by force, she obstinately stood upon her feet for fifteen hours." What a most miserable scene was the death-bed of this glorious woman! Surely nothing was ever more melancholy and terrible in its mixture of mental decay, dark remorse, and indomitable hardiness and self-will. At one and the same time around her bed were men urging her to take broth, to name her successor, and to hear prayers. The kings of France and Scotland were mentioned to her, but without eliciting the slightest notice; but when they named Beauchamp, the son of the Earl of Hertford and Catherine Grey, one of Elizabeth's victims, she fired up and exclaimed, "I will have no rascal's son in my nest, but one worthy to be a king!"
At length they persuaded her to listen to a prayer by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and when he had once begun she appeared unwilling to let him leave off; half-hour after half-hour she kept the primate on his knees. She then sank into a state of insensibility, and died at three o'clock in the morning of the 24th of March, 1603, in the seventieth year of her age, and the forty-fifth of her reign. Robert Carey, afterwards Earl of Monmouth, was anxiously waiting under the window of Elizabeth's room at Richmond Palace for the first news of her death, which Lady Scrope, his sister, communicated to him by silently letting fall, as a signal, a sapphire ring, afterwards celebrated as "the blue ring," which he caught, and the moment after was galloping off towards Scotland to be the first herald of the mighty event to the expecting James. Three hours later Cecil, the Lord Keeper, and the Lord Admiral were with the Council in London, and it was resolved to proclaim James VI. of Scotland James I. of England.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
The Tudors and the Nation—The Church—Population and Wealth—Royal Prerogative—Legislation of Henry VIII.—The Star Chamber—Beneficial Legislation—Treason Laws—Legislation of Edward and Mary—Elizabeth's Policy—Religion and the Church—Sketch of Ecclesiastical History under the Tudors—Literature, Science, and Art—Greatness of the Period—Foundation of Colleges and Schools—Revival of Learning—Its Temporary Decay—Prose Writers of the Period—The Poets—Scottish Bards—Music—Architecture—Painting and Sculpture—Furniture and Decorations—Arms and Armour—Costumes, Coins, and Coinage—Ships, Commerce, Colonies, and Manufactures—Manners and Customs—Condition of the People.
The century of which we have just traced the events was a period marked by vast progress and by changes which were the springs of still more wonderful progress in after ages. Though the character of the Tudors was absolutely despotic, no dynasty since the days of Alfred and Magna Charta wrought out such revolutions in the constitution of England. These revolutions were partly effected by the very efforts of the Tudor monarchs to establish their own power and gratify their own self-will, but were due also to the fact that the Tudor despotism was essentially popular, and encouraged manifestations of the national will. These revolutions extended not only into the political constitution of the nation, but into its religious one; into its literature, its philosophy, and its morals; and that simply because the spirit of the age was of that tone and strength that, though outward powers could agitate it, nothing but its own momentum could direct its tendency. Henry VII., with an indifferent title, succeeded to the crown, because the nation was weary of the conflicts of the York and Lancaster monarchs, and longed for peace, which his disposition promised. Cold, cautious, and penurious, he took care not to raise a fresh race of powerful barons in place of that which the Wars of the Roses had destroyed, but hoarded up money; and beyond the injustice practised in its collection, left his people to pursue their trades and their agriculture, and thus renew their strength. Henry VIII.—violent, passionate, sensual, and intensely arbitrary, but fond of parade, and in his youth boastful of his prowess—gratified the pride of the nation, whilst he ruled it with a rod of iron. In the gratification of his lusts he did not hesitate to renounce allegiance to that great spiritual power which for above a thousand years had ruled haughtily over Europe and all its kings and warriors. By this act he set free for ever the mind and conscience of England. In vain did he endeavour to bind the nation in a knot of his own making. Though he hurled his fiercest terms against those who claimed a universal liberty which he intended only for himself, he had broken the mighty spell of ages—a power and a mystery before which the world had bowed in impotent awe; and no chains which he could forge, no creed which he could set up, no hierarchy which he could frame, could possess more than the strength of the fire-scorched flax against the will of the enfranchised people. The moment that Henry perished, the soul of the nation showed itself alive. The very Reformers around his throne, who had cowered beneath the fell and deadly ire of the tyrant, rose, with Cranmer at their head and, under the mild auspices of the religious Edward, gave free vent to the spirit and the doctrines of the Reformation. The return of theologic despotism under Mary only added force to the spirit of reform, by showing how terrible and bloody was the animus of ancient superstition. The fires of Smithfield lit up the dark places of spiritual tyranny to the remotest corners of the nation, and gave the blow to the tottering Bastille of restringent faith in Great Britain. Elizabeth, with all the self-will of her father, lived to see both in people and Parliament, a spirit that made her lion-heart shrink with awe, and own, however reluctantly, a power looking already gigantically down upon her own. She felt more than once, in the pride of her might, the terror of that national will which, in less than half a century from her death, shattered the throne of her successor, and gave to the world the unheard-of spectacle of a king decapitated for treason to his people.