Hardly less important was the restoration of financial stability. Twelve years before, King Henry had left matters in sufficiently ill-plight. The Government could not, perhaps, be held responsible for the existence of severe agricultural depression; but, for its aggravation, the newly developed class of landlords was largely to blame, while no one but Somerset had attempted to hold them in check. In the general ferment, commercial honesty had been on the downgrade. Among financial officials, corruption had been rampant; and Henry set the example of one of the grossest forms of dishonesty by debasing the coinage, paying his debts, when he did pay them, in the debased coin. Hence in commercial circles credit was bad, while abroad the national credit was exceedingly low; and the national exchequer was almost empty. Through the last two reigns, matters had gone from bad to worse. Cecil took the finances in hand with solid systematic common sense. A rigid supervision of expenditure and stoppage of waste took the place of the prevailing laxity. Men of probity were employed by the Government as its financial agents. The debased coins were called in, and the new currency issued was of a standard which had never been surpassed. Loans were repaid with punctuality, and debts discharged. Almost at once, it followed that fresh loans could be raised at reasonable rates of interest, instead of at the ruinous charges which Edward and Mary had to pay; before long, it was hardly necessary to seek for them abroad—the merchants at home were ready and willing to come forward. Confidence was restored under a steady Government.
Cecil’s economy may have verged on parsimony, and his mistress was as sharp in money matters as her grandfather; hard things are always said of a Government which takes Peace and Retrenchment for its motto. But peace and retrenchment were a stern necessity, and in many respects the parsimony has been exaggerated; at any rate, the expenditure was thoroughly well directed. Later in the reign it would probably have been sound policy to spend more, particularly in Ireland, where efficiency was sacrificed to economy; but outside of Ireland the nation got good value for every penny of outlay. In finance, as in other matters, Cecil habitually followed the maxims of caution. Consistently with this attitude, we do not find him striking out new economic theories. He believed, as nearly every one believed three hundred years ago, that new industries had very little chance of being established without the artificial stimulus of monopolies and patents to prevent competition—a system which always appeals most convincingly to the monopolist, but less convincingly to the consumer and the would-be competitor, as Elizabeth found before the end of the reign. Whatever we may think of the methods adopted to foster and encourage trade and the development of new industries, Cecil is at least entitled to full credit for recognising that this was the direction in which the compensation and the remedy for agricultural depression were to be sought.
The subject of the secretary’s financial reforms has carried us on to a general account of principles which were only gradually illustrated in the progress of the reign. The third question which engaged his immediate activities on Elizabeth’s accession was the policy to be followed in dealing with Scotland.
Traditionally, Scotland was the friend of France and the enemy of England; from which it followed in a general way that Scottish malcontents habitually looked to England for open or secret countenance, and very commonly got it. To foster divisions in Scotland was one way of preventing her from becoming too actively dangerous a neighbour, and the plan had been very sedulously followed, especially throughout the reign of Henry VIII. The Scottish clerics since the days of Bruce had always been strongly anti-English, a term which was almost equivalent to Nationalist. Both James and David Beton had been especially hostile; while, during the progress of the Reformation, the Cardinal was a rigorous and cruel persecutor of heresy. Henry, with all his pride of orthodoxy, had no objection to heresy in the northern kingdom, where Protestant and mal-content were nearly synonymous. Had England devoted her attention simply to giving the Protestants such support as would have secured them a predominance conditional on the support being maintained, diplomacy might have achieved the union of the crowns by the marriage of King Edward to his cousin of Scotland; but Henry and Somerset between them, by the re-assertion of English sovereignty and by the appeal to arms, had roused in Protestants as well as Catholics the nationalist sentiment which would not endure subjection to England at any price. The child-queen had been carried off to France and betrothed to the Dauphin; and in the years that passed before the actual marriage the Catholics had held the mastery; Mary of Guise was regent, and her power was maintained by French support and French troops. Thus the Scots began to realise that there was a danger, when their own Queen should be Queen of France also, that Scotland might become an appendage of France. Scotland was no more willing to be subject to France than to be subject to England.
Thus it was again open to Cecil to adopt the policy, not of exercising a direct English domination, but of establishing a Protestant domination, which would in the nature of things be favourable to England and unfavourable to France—a policy which fitted in precisely with that of establishing a comprehensive Protestantism in England, to which he was committed on other counts. He could rely, as we have already noted, on the fact that Philip, however reluctant, would be compelled to check aggressive interference on the part of France, if carried beyond the limit at which England could cope with it unaided. This, therefore, was the keynote of his Scottish policy—to avoid the blunder of seeming to threaten Scotland’s independence, to maintain friendly relations with the Scottish Protestants, and to help them to a predominance which should yet depend for its security on the goodwill of England.
It was not till December 1560, that the death of Francis deprived Mary of the French crown. During these first two years of Elizabeth’s reign, Philip was kept in play partly by a pretence of negotiations for the Queen’s marriage to his kinsman the Austrian Archduke Charles; while the Scottish Protestants, or Lords of the Congregation, as their chiefs were called, were flattered by the idea of her marriage with James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who then stood next in succession to the Scottish throne—a scheme of which the real motive was the possibility of dethroning Mary in his favour. But the real business was to get the French out of Scotland. Cecil at last manœuvred his mistress into sending armed assistance to the Lords of the Congregation; the French garrison was cooped up in Leith; in May 1560, Sir William went to Scotland himself to negotiate; in June Mary of Guise died, and in the beginning of July the Treaty of Edinburgh secured the Protestant ascendency in Scotland, and removed the French garrison for ever. Although Queen Mary refused to ratify the instrument, consistently declining formally to withdraw her claim to the throne of England unless she were equally formally recognised as heir presumptive, Cecil’s great object was achieved, in spite of Elizabeth’s vacillations.
Thirteen months later, Mary, an eighteen-year-old widow, landed in Scotland. During the seven troublous years she passed in that country, Cecil’s policy remained the same—to support Scottish Protestantism, to prevent Mary from making a marriage that would be dangerous to England. It is hardly necessary to say that the methods were never qualified by any touch of magnanimity—that the interests of England solely were considered, those of Scotland disregarded. How much of what went on, on the part of England, was Cecil’s doing and how much Elizabeth’s, cannot well be decided. They may or may not have intended the Darnley marriage to take place. They did encourage Moray’s revolt on that occasion, and then repudiate responsibility for it. They knew something—how much is uncertain—about the Rizzio murder, before it took place. Generally, we can be tolerably confident that Cecil, unfettered, would have given Moray a more stable support throughout than it pleased his mistress to permit. It was Elizabeth’s standing rule to object vehemently to being considered as having committed herself to anything by any words or acts in which she might have indulged.
V
CECIL AND PROTESTANTISM
Cecil had been successful in turning the French out of Scotland. He held steadily, and the queen held unsteadily, to the conviction that Spain would not move against England for two reasons—one, that the triumph of the Scots queen would be too advantageous to France; the other, that the existing commercial war with the Low Countries, while bad enough for English trade, was threatening to ruin Flanders, and could hardly fail to do so if any further burden were added. France, on the other hand, was not likely to be actively dangerous independently, so long as neither Catholics nor Huguenots could lay the opposing party prostrate. Nevertheless, Cecil had to be constantly on guard against the risk of a Catholic combination. If Mary placed herself under the ægis of Philip, and the Guises and their following got his active support in France—if he played to the French Catholics the part which England was playing to the Scottish Protestants—he might reckon himself free of the fear of French advancement. The thing was not a probability, but it was a chance against which England had to be on the watch. Every time, however, that a crisis of this kind threatened, or that a Spanish ambassador hinted that his master would feel himself driven into active antagonism, the Secretary refused to be frightened; direct threats always stiffened his mistress; and his calculation turned out correct.
At the bottom of Cecil’s whole system of foreign policy was the theory that Philip as Lord of Burgundy could not, for commercial reasons, afford to quarrel with England, and as King of Spain was tied by the danger of strengthening France. Spain, then, was not to be feared, but France might be; this, however, would be conditional on the Huguenots being decisively crushed—a consummation not desired by Catherine and the Politiques; but this, in turn, required that the French Huguenots should have enough support from England to maintain their power of resistance, if not their domination. As time went on, and the Protestant Netherlands found themselves in open armed resistance to Philip, it was in just the same way necessary for England to keep them from being crushed. Cecil saw the necessity of thus abetting the Protestants in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands; and, being a genuine Protestant if not an over-ardent one, did not dislike it. Elizabeth saw the necessity also, but as in each case the Protestants were subjects acting in opposition to the Government, she did dislike it, and lost no opportunity of making the support she gave as ungracious, as niggardly, and as precarious as she dared, while she perpetually kept up a sort of pretence to herself as well as to others that she was not really helping those whom she called rebels. Yet without the help that was wrung from her, it is doubtful whether in France, in the Netherlands, or even in Scotland, the issue of the struggles during her reign would not have been materially different.