A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. II

by François Guizot

The faithful attachment of the English nation to its sovereign did not, however, prevent the progress of a new principle of liberty which grew with the independent and firm opinions of a portion of the Protestant population. Elizabeth had preserved at the bottom of her heart considerable affection for the Catholic doctrines, still more for the external practices of their worship. She loved sacerdotal garments and pompous ceremonies. She retained in her chapel some candles and a crucifix, and she had a horror of married priests. All the weight of her authority did not prevent the most fervent Protestants of her kingdom, especially among the middle classes, from being convinced that the Reformation had been too quickly checked in England, and had not been sufficiently thorough. They thus inclined more and more towards the religious practices and doctrines of the Continent in their austere simplicity. The "Puritans," as they were already called, were in bad odour with Elizabeth, and she often persecuted them, all the more because she attributed to them, and not without reason, the republican and democratic tendencies fostered in Scotland by Knox, of which she had seen the effect in the revolts against Mary Stuart. A certain number of Bishops and many great noblemen secretly inclined towards the Puritan ideas. Even Cecil was not hostile to them, although he had the royal favor more at heart than all the sects and doctrines. In the Parliament of 1571, the Puritans raised their heads for the first time. Thomas Cartwright, a distinguished professor who occupied, at Cambridge, the Margaret Professorship of Theology, maintained that the Episcopal system was opposed to the Holy Scriptures. He was suspended, but not without commotion among the public. The laws proposed to Parliament were hostile to the Catholics; they prohibited, under the penalties of treason, claiming the succession to the crown, for whomsoever it might be, during the lifetime of the Queen; they placed an absolute veto upon any communication with the Pope, and all obedience rendered to his bulls; but at the same time they required assiduity in the worship established by the State, and, four times a year, participation in the communion of the Anglican Church. This last article was abandoned by the Queen, but the Anglican worship was as odious to the Puritans as to the Catholics. They presented to Parliament seven bills for the progress of reform and the repression of abuses. The Queen, in a passion, ordered the member of the House who had proposed them, Mr. Stickland, to abstain from appearing at the sittings; but the Puritans had gained more ground than the Queen was aware of; they introduced a motion to summon Strickland to the bar, and to cause his exclusion to be explained to him, declaring that the House which could decide the right to the throne, had the privilege of occupying itself in ecclesiastical matters. The wise prudence of Elizabeth prevailed over her anger. Strickland reappeared on the morrow in Parliament, and was received with acclamations by his colleagues; but the Queen had been vanquished, and her aversion to the Puritans was thereby increased. It was the first triumph gained by the fathers of the liberties of England over the political and religious despotism winch rose in the shadow of the throne of the Tudors. At the end of the session, after the Commons had been reprimanded for their indocility, by the Lord Keeper of the Seals, Nicholas Bacon, Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, caused Mr. Wentworth, one of the great orators of the House of Commons, to be summoned, to demand of him how they had dared to suppress some of the articles of faith which had been presented to their vote. "We were too busy to have time to ascertain whether they were in conformity with the word of God," boldly replied Wentworth. "What?" said the Bishop; "you are mistaken, you must refer to us in this matter." "No," said the Puritan, "by the faith which I have in God, we will vote nothing without understanding what it relates to, for that would be to make you Pope; it will not be by our hands." Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the proud resistance of the Houses, the Bishops continued to insist upon the preservation of the new edition of the articles of faith, under thirty-nine heads, which had replaced the forty articles of Edward VI. A complete submission was required of the pastors, and they were deprived of their livings at the first refusal declared before the court of high commission, entrusted to judge all ecclesiastical disputes. "Matters will soon be ended with them," wrote Parker to Cecil, speaking of the nonconformist ministers, "for I know that they are cowards." The learned archbishop was never more completely mistaken. The courage of the Puritans was to remain firm through all persecutions. A hundred years were not destined to elapse without bringing the day of their triumph. The friends of Queen Mary had resolved upon her marriage. The Duke of Norfolk was in the Tower. People began to talk of causing the Queen of Scotland to marry her brother-in-law, the Duke of Anjou. Queen Elizabeth was alarmed, and in order to cut short this new intrigue, she made overtures on her own behalf to the Court of France. Her most skilful diplomatist, Walsingham, was sent to Paris, entrusted with this negotiation, complicated by the secret support which the queen continued to give to the Huguenots. The parley lasted for several months, but the Duke of Anjou positively refused to change his religion; people turned their eyes towards the Duke of Alençon, the youngest son of Catherine of Médicis; he had scarcely reached his eighteenth year; the queen was drawing near her fortieth. The negotiations nevertheless took their course, amusing Elizabeth by outward tokens of gallantry, in which she still took delight, and, at the same time, preventing all the assistance which the court of France might have brought to avert the unhappy fate of Mary Stuart. Charles IX. had claimed, for his sister-in-law, permission to live in France; but, piqued at the reports of the French ambassadors, upon the relations of the captive with the King of Spain, and by her correspondence with the Duke of Alba, he at length exclaimed, "Ah! the poor fool will never cease till she shall have lost her head; she will be put to death through her own fault, I see it clearly; but I am powerless in the matter." The prospect of the throne of England for the Duke of Alençon was too brilliant to be sacrificed to the interests of Mary. Queen Catherine was negotiating an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Walsingham.

Abandoned by her relatives and her friends in France, Mary Stuart had not ceased to conspire with Spain; but her agents were so closely watched, the supervision of Cecil was so strict, that several emissaries fell in succession into his hands. On one occasion, the Bishop of Ross, recently restored to liberty, contrived to substitute innocent letters for the compromising papers, which his messenger brought; but enough was soon known to make it certain that Mary was urging the Spaniards to attempt an invasion of England, and that the Duke of Alba promised to make arrangements with a person designated in cypher. Suspicion immediately fell upon the Duke of Norfolk. The plague having broken out in the Tower, he had been guarded in his house in London for fifteen months. He was taken back to his prison, and his trial began. The duke at first made a bold denial; then, when the confessions were shown him, which had been extorted by torture or fear from his servants and the agents of Queen Mary, including the Bishop of Ross, he admitted certain things, still maintaining that he had never conspired against the queen, that he had only engaged in the negotiation for the marriage, because he thought she was informed of it, and that, in marrying Queen Mary, he did nothing prejudicial to her Majesty. He formally resented all accusations of correspondence abroad or with the rebels during the insurrection. No witness was confronted with him; only the depositions, written after the tortures, were communicated to him. He was accused of having maintained relations with the Pope. Norfolk, the old pupil of Fox, the author of the Protestant martyrology, declared that he would rather be drawn by four horses than change his religion. He recalled the solicitations which the Earl of Leicester had made him, before he had become concerned in this affair. Leicester sat at the council listening without pity to the complaints of his confiding victim. He voted the death of the duke, who immediately turned toward his judges. "This is the punishment of traitors, my lords," he exclaimed: "but I am faithful to God and the queen, as I have always been. I do not desire to live and do not ask you for my life. You have this day cut me off from your company, but I hope soon to find a better one. I only beg you, my lords, to intercede with her Majesty, in order that she may have pity upon my poor orphan children." Even in his letters to the queen, full of repentance for having offended her, and for having acted in several matters without her knowledge, the duke never asked for mercy, and refused to make any confession which might drag other victims to the unhappy fate which awaited him. Norfolk had been condemned since the middle of January, and the queen had signed his sentence on the 8th of February; but during the night, she became agitated, and caused Cecil, whom she had raised to the rank of Lord Burleigh, to be summoned. She forbade him to have the sentence executed, saying that she wished to reflect again; three times the sentence was signed, and three times Elizabeth recalled it, hesitating to put to death her relative and former friend. At length Parliament intervened. The nation was profoundly agitated by rumours of plots. The documents found upon the emissaries of Mary had circulated among the public; already they saw the Duke of Alba, the ferocious butcher of the Low Countries, invade England at the head of those Spanish soldiers whose dark exploits had terrified Europe. On the 16th of May, the Commons presented to the queen a petition accepted by the Lords, demanding the execution of the duke, for the security of the country. This time the sentence was not withdrawn, and, on the 2nd of June, 1572, the Duke of Norfolk was beheaded on Tower Hill, protesting to the last his devotion to his sovereign and his attachment to the reformed faith. He refused the handkerchief with which it was proposed to bind his eyes. "I do not fear death," he said. When his head fell, the crowd wept as they had wept twenty-five years before at the death of his father, the Earl of Surrey, beheaded on the same spot, by order of King Henry VIII. Two months later, on the 22nd of August, the Duke of Northumberland, captured by treachery when he thought himself delivered at the price of an enormous ransom paid by his wife, died upon the scaffold at York. He was seized upon the vessel which was to take him to the Low Countries, and the "attainder" which overtook him, avoided the embarrassment of a trial. His father had also died upon the scaffold, upon the same day, nineteen years before.

All these prosecutions and deaths upon the scaffold tended towards the same end. Mary Stuart had been condemned before her accusation. Protestant opinion, and Protestant fears were violently excited against her. Burleigh and Walsingham were both convinced that the repose of England was only to be purchased at the price of her blood. Parliament, always ardent in such a matter, proposed to proceed against the prisoner by means of an attainder, but the queen opposed this. The Houses contented themselves with depriving Mary of her hereditary rights, and declaring her unfit to succeed to the throne of England. The captive queen was then at Sheffield, in the custody of Sir Ralph Sadler, and the Countess of Shrewsbury. None of the details of the death of the Duke of Norfolk had been spared her. She had refused to leave her apartment during all the time of the trial. Her faithful servants were everywhere losing ground in Scotland. The archbishop of St. Andrew's, seized by Lennox in Dunbar Castle, had been hanged without more ado, and the murder of Lennox himself by the Hamiltons had not sufficed to compensate for the blows to the Catholic cause. The new regent, the Earl of Mar, was less powerful than Morton, his fiercest enemy. Meanwhile Edinburgh Castle still held out for Mary, and the Highlanders recognized no other sovereign.

A crime committed far off, and for which she was in nowise responsible, was destined to condemn the unfortunate Mary to death, however long the alternations between hope and fear might be. In the night of the 23rd to the 24th of August, 1572, following the day of St. Bartholomew, the Protestants, gathered together in great numbers in Paris, upon the occasion of the marriage of the King of Navarre to Marguerite of Valois, sister of King Charles IX, were surprised and massacred, in their beds, in the streets, or while flying upon the housetops; and the same slaughter, spreading from town to town like a fire, soon extended through the whole of France. Thirty to forty thousand persons perished thus in a few days. Almost all the chiefs of the Protestants had fallen. The most illustrious, the Admiral de Coligny, was killed in his apartment, and his body thrown out of the window. It was to free themselves from the preponderating influence which he was beginning to assume over the king, that Catherine of Medicis and her son, the Duke of Anjou, formerly an aspirant to the hand of Elizabeth, now king-elect of Poland, had concerted and accomplished the massacre, for which they had only obtained the authorization of Charles IX. by dint of harassments which had almost reduced the monarch to imbecility. The public outcry was terrible in all Protestant countries, nowhere, however, more than in England, whither the fugitives, who escaped from their executioners, flocked from all quarters. The queen went into mourning, and refused for several days to receive the French ambassador, M. de La Mothe-Fénelon; but she felt no real sympathy for the French Huguenots, and the horrors which caused the blood of her subjects to boil in their veins, did not interrupt the tranquil course of her policy. Walsingham courteously thanked the king, inasmuch as his house had been spared during "the riot." The excuses and explanations of Charles IX., transmitted by his ambassador, were accepted. The project of marriage with the Duke of Alençon was not abandoned: but Walsingham gave Queen Catherine to understand that the time was not favourable for the visit of the Duke of Alençon to England, considering the extreme exasperation of the people against the Catholics.

The fruits of this exasperation were the counsels which queen Elizabeth received from all quarters for the destruction of her rival, so long a prisoner. The bishops, in a body, advised her to rid herself of the Queen of Scotland, "the origin and source of all the evils;" but Elizabeth shrank from the State crime which has sullied her name in the eyes of posterity. She would have wished that the natural enemies of Mary Stuart, the subjects whom she had misgoverned and who had revolted against her, might have steeped their hands in the blood of their sovereign. She dispatched Killigrew, one of her most skilful agents, to negotiate for the liberation of Mary Stuart, who was to be consigned to the justice of the people, in exchange for certain hostages of the great families of Scotland. "It was becoming too difficult to keep the Queen of Scotland (Killigrew was to say); she drew too many dangers upon the Kingdom, and the queen preferred to consign her into the hands of her subjects."

This attempt failed through the royal uprightness of the Earl of Mar, then engaged in the difficult task of reconciling the factions. After taking part in a banquet at the residence of Lord Morton, in the course of his patriotic negotiations, he fell ill and died, not without suspicion of foul play, and, on the 14th of October, 1572, Morton, who for a long time previously, had been a dependant of Elizabeth, was raised under her auspices to the dignity of Regent. Killigrew assisted him in negotiating for the surrender of Edinburgh Castle, which was reduced to the last extremities by the private treaty concluded by Lord Huntley and the Hamiltons. The secretary, Maitland, shut up in the castle with the brave Kircaldy of Grange, poisoned himself a few days after the capitulation, ending, by his voluntary death, a life of ingenious and subtile intrigues which were almost always doomed to final collapse. Kircaldy was hanged as a traitor, and Queen Mary lost her last friends in Scotland. Charles IX. had refused assistance to the faithful defenders of the citadel of Edinburgh, for fear that Elizabeth might support the Protestants, who depended upon La Rochelle. Secretly, she had several times come to their assistance, and she encouraged the naval expedition of the Earl of Montgomery in their favour. When the unhappy Charles IX. died in 1574, haunted upon his deathbed by the remembrance of his victims, the efforts of the French reformers were suddenly seconded by the support of the Duke of Alençon leagued against his brother, Henry III., who had returned from Poland to ascend that throne of France whereon the sons of Catherine of Medicis sat successively, to the misfortune and shame of their country. When the new king had discovered the plot, the Duke of Alençon was already engaged in concert with the young King of Navarre in raising an army: both asked assistance of Elizabeth, but she preferred the position of mediator, and it was through her good offices that the peace of St. Germain was concluded in 1576, securing to the Protestants the free exercise of their religion, and to the Duke of Alençon the appanage and title of Duke of Anjou. The peace was not of long duration, and the formation of the League, the progress of the influence of the Guises in the kingdom, and their authority over King Henry III. as well as the fanatical party, soon put arms once more into the hands of the reformers. A brilliant prospect was opened up at the same time in the Low Countries to the new Duke of Anjou.

The affairs of the Prince of Orange and the cause of liberty in the United Provinces had been under a cloud since the commencement of the struggle; but through defeat after defeat, from disaster after disaster oppression after oppression, the indomitable courage of William the Taciturn and his fellow-citizens had by degrees gained so much ground, that Spain was upon the point of losing for ever half of the Low Countries. The Duke of Alba had been recalled after that government, the fearful memory of which yet causes us to tremble. His successor, the great commander Requesens, died in 1576; shortly afterwards the Prince of Orange, not knowing where to look for a support in his growing embarrassments offered the Protectorate of Holland and Zealand to Queen Elizabeth, as the descendant of the former sovereigns of the country through Philippine of Hainault, wife of Edward III. The Queen of England refused, not desiring, she said, to encourage the subjects of her good brother the King of Spain in revolt. William the Taciturn offered the sovereignty to the Duke of Anjou. Don Juan of Austria, then governor of the Low Countries, longed to invade England, to deliver Queen Mary, marry her, and sit with her upon the throne of Elizabeth. The project was chimerical, and was not encouraged by Philip II.; but it was a plausible pretext for Elizabeth with regard to the King of Spain. She affirmed that the offensive and defensive alliance which she had concluded with the Prince of Orange, was solely intended to defend the Low Countries against the invasions of France, and to protect England from the invasions of Don Juan. Queen Elizabeth had already given a great deal of money to the revolted provinces; she gave yet more upon the pledges which the State-general furnished her; but the Duke of Anjou took no steps, and the patriotic armies were twice defeated by Alexander Farnèse, nephew of the King of Spain. The French prince excused himself for his tardiness by the fear of offending the Queen of England. He had resumed his matrimonial negotiations with her. The agent whom he sent to London, M. de Simier was a man of talents and of pleasant manners; he obtained great influence over the queen, and revealed to her a circumstance of which she was ignorant, namely, the secret marriage of the Earl of Leicester with the widow of the Earl of Essex, then very recently deceased. Elizabeth flew into a passion; the man who had occupied for thirty years the first place at her court was closely confined in his mansion at Greenwich. Simier did still more: he induced his master to attempt a romantic venture with the queen; in the middle of the summer of 1580 the Duke of Anjou appeared in England under a disguise. He was short, lean, marked with small-pox; but his amorous ardour, his youth, his journey, pleased the queen. When the duke was about to return, it seemed that, for the first time, Elizabeth really wished to contract a princely union. The council was much divided: the queen was forty-eight years of age, the prince was very young and a Catholic. The most skilful politicians could not contrive to discover the secret feelings of their sovereign; but the time of petitions for her marriage had gone by; the queen bitterly felt it. The negotiations with Simier continued with alternations of favour and discontent on the part of Elizabeth. It was at length announced that the marriage would take place in six weeks. The States-general of the Low Countries proclaimed the Duke of Anjou, and when he entered the provinces with an army of sixteen thousand men, his royal affianced wife sent him a present of a hundred thousand crowns. After having achieved several successes and delivered the city of Cambray, besieged by the Spaniards, he repaired to England, where he was favorably received. The queen gave him her ring, and commanded that the contract should be prepared. There was rejoicing at the marriage in Paris and in the Low Countries. Even in England it was believed that the queen was at length about to take a husband. This was the 22nd of November, 1581. When the duke appeared before the queen on the morning of the 23rd, he found her pale and in tears; it is said that she had changed her mind during the night upon the representations of her ladies, and at the idea of the danger which threatened her if she should have children; she declared to the prince that she would never marry. The duke in a passion, returned to his residence, throwing the ring upon the ground, and accusing the women of England of being as capricious as the waves of their seas. The change which had been wrought in the designs of the queen was not yet made public; the Protestant preachers thundered against the Catholic marriage, and libels abounded against the Duke of Anjou, which were severely punished by the queen, who accompanied the prince as far as Canterbury, weeping bitterly at his departure. She was never to see him again; the defeats suffered by his arms in the Low Countries, his retreat into France, and his death in the month of June, 1584, caused so much grief to the queen, that the ambassador of her Majesty in Paris dared not write her the details of his last moments, fearing "to cause her too much sorrow."

The affairs of Scotland caused great anxieties to Elizabeth. As long as Morton governed she was assured of the support of a mortal enemy of Queen Mary; but the great Scottish noblemen, had become wearied of the iron hand of a master sullied by so many crimes; and in 1578 the assembly of the nobility declared the young king, then thirteen years of age, competent to exercise his authority himself. Morton retired to Lochleven Castle, then reappeared at Court, powerful with the young king, and abusing his power as usual; but the ground was undermined beneath his feet; King James had a favorite, the first of a long list, Esme Stuart, his cousin, son of a brother of the Earl of Lennox. The young monarch had raised him to the title of Duke of Lennox; he was seconded by another Stuart, son of Lord Ochiltree; both accused Morton of the murder of Darnley. The earl was arrested. Queen Elizabeth sent Randolph, her former agent, to Scotland, to plead in his favour. It was even attempted to intimidate the Scots by movements of troops; but all was useless; Elizabeth did not wish to wage war to save the head of Morton; he was condemned, and perished upon the scaffold. The young Duke of Lennox and Stuart, who had become Earl of Arran, governed the kingdom in the name of James VI.