England under the Tudors

by Arthur D. Innes

It seemed most probable that this astonishingly audacious proceeding must result either in the fall of Cecil, to whom it was due, or in open war with Spain, and the immediate committal of England to the formation of a Protestant League; which might force the English Catholics in their turn directly to espouse the cause of Mary. The reception given in this country shortly before to the Cardinal of Chatillon, Coligny's brother, was a symptom of Cecil's Protestant policy, and he at least was probably willing enough that any tendency of the English Catholics towards revolt should be precipitated rather than delayed.

[Sidenote: 1569 The incident passed over]

Even Cecil however was not anxious for open war, while Elizabeth always shrank from that last extremity. On the other side, Philip had three very good reasons for passing over the affront he had received. First, the Netherlands were giving him enough to do for the time. Secondly, Don Guerau was satisfied that the downfall of Cecil and the reversal of his policy were imminent. Thirdly, the French court would assuredly subordinate religious questions to the political gain of uniting with England against him. A definite league between Condé and the English might have averted that danger, by driving the French Catholics to make common cause with Spain; but any immediate prospect of such a solution of the entanglement vanished when the Huguenots were defeated and Condé himself killed at the battle of Jarnac in May. The result of that event was the immediate prohibition of the English adventurers from joining the Huguenot fleet of Rochelle and sailing under the Huguenot flag; as many of them had been in the habit of doing.

In May, then, the risk of a rupture between the French Government and England, and of the formation of a universal Protestant league, was over for the time at least; and within a few months, in England, the Northern Earls, by a premature rising, inflicted a severe blow on their own party, and decided large numbers of the Catholics to take their stand as in the first place patriots and loyalists.

[Sidenote: The Northern Rebellion]

What we have called the Catholic party included many professing Protestants—i.e. men who conformed with entire equanimity, yet would have preferred to see the old worship restored; such as Norfolk. Extreme men saw in the union of the Duke with Mary a prospect of immediately placing the captive Queen on the English throne. The moderate men wanted the marriage, accompanied by her recognition as heir presumptive. There were others outside the Catholic connexion who dreamed rather of Mary under the circumstances conforming to the Anglican faith. Norfolk dallied with all three. There was a moment when Elizabeth herself might have been persuaded to assent; but the Duke missed his opportunity, and she, reverting to a conviction that the marriage would soon be followed by her own assassination, presently forbade it, and summoned Norfolk to answer for his loyalty. After brief hesitation he surrendered himself and was confined in the Tower: but the Northern Earls, Northumberland and Westmorland, believing that they must strike at once if at all, rose and marched to deliver Mary from Tutbury—whither she had been suddenly conveyed to safe keeping, in the expectation of some such event. The rest of the Catholics however were not ready for such a venture; being forced to make up their minds, they resolved to stand loyal. The royal musters were quickly advancing to meet the insurgents, who presently concluded that the cause was hopeless, and fled. Northumberland was subsequently arrested and detained by Murray in Scotland: Westmorland made his way to Spain. Sussex received and carried out orders to punish with a heavy hand those who had taken part in the rebellion; and so without any great difficulty the one serious revolt of the reign was stamped out.

[Sidenote: 1570 Murder of Murray]

The year 1570 had hardly opened when Elizabeth lost one of her most valuable allies by the murder of the Regent Murray, assassinated by Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. Murray's figure in history is a sombre one, and the sombreness is thrown into the greater relief by the picturesque brilliancy of his hapless sister. It was his fate to fight on the gloomy side; to stand at the head of a nobility conspicuously sordid and unprincipled, half of whom, when not occupied in plotting against the life of a hereditary foe or a political rival, were posing as representatives of the "godly"—an attitude held to be entirely compatible with a total disregard for the decalogue. Perhaps there is no prominent statesman of his times who came through the heavy ordeal of public life with cleaner hands. There is no fair ground for associating him directly and actively with any of the great crimes in one or another of which almost every one of the Scots lords had a share. When his sister married Darnley, he took up arms against her: he did so again when she married Bothwell: and on both occasions he was probably obeying an elastic conscience. While he was endeavouring to fix the odium of the Darnley murder on Mary, he must have been quite aware that both Lethington and Morton, his allies, were steeped in the guilt of it. But he could neither stand aside from the turmoil, nor pick and choose his associates. The political support or countenance of Elizabeth seemed absolutely necessary to the cause of the Reformation in Scotland. A man of a more generous spirit would more than once have felt that the price was too high, that he was accepting a too ignominious position; he stooped to a course which if not exactly dishonourable was perilously near it. But the part he was forced to play was the hardest and the most thankless imaginable; and he played it with a constant effort to be tolerant, to be as just as circumstances permitted, to be true to himself. He was the one man in Scotland who had striven resolutely amid the kaleidoscopic chaos of factions to maintain some sort of order, some sort of liberty, some sort of standard of public spirit. With his fall, anarchy became more rampant than ever. Elizabeth lamented, not without reason, that she had lost her best friend; but while he lived she had not made his task the easier.

[Sidenote: March The Bull of Deposition]

In March, the Pope took the step which paralysed Catholicism as an open political force in England, by issuing a Bull against Elizabeth which virtually declared loyalty to the Queen and loyalty to the Faith to be incompatible; yet since the profession of loyalty was to be condoned, every Catholic was ipso facto rendered suspect. The suspicion of disloyalty breeds the disease. Englishmen of the Roman Communion have a right to be proud that so many in those years of storm and stress neither relinquished their faith nor forgot their patriotism; yet when their fellow-subjects had been thus absolved of their allegiance, the Protestants can hardly be blamed for being over-ready to assume that they were in league with the Queen's enemies. The Pope could have done nothing calculated more thoroughly to translate the ordinary sentiment of loyalty into a passion of resentment against its opposite.