This offensive behaviour of the French court is the apology of Elizabeth's intrigues during the same period with the malcontents, which to a certain extent cannot be denied by any one who has read the collection above quoted; though I do not think Dr. Lingard warranted in asserting her privity to the conspiracy of Amboise as a proved fact. Throckmorton was a man very likely to exceed his instructions; and there is much reason to believe that he did so. It is remarkable that no modern French writer that I have seen, Anquetil, Garnier, Lacretelle, or the editors of the General Collection of Memoirs, seem to have been aware of Elizabeth's secret intrigues with the king of Navarre and other protestant chiefs in 1559, which these letters, published by Forbes in 1740, demonstrate.
[197] Burnet, i. Append. 266. Many letters, both of Mary herself and of her secretary, the famous Maitland of Lethington, occur in Haynes's State Papers, about the end of 1561. In one of his to Cecil, he urges, in answer to what had been alleged by the English court, that a collateral successor had never been declared in any prince's life-time, that whatever reason there might be for that, "if the succession had remained untouched according to the law, yet where by a limitation men had gone about to prevent the providence of God, and shift one into the place due to another, the offended party could not but seek the redress thereof."—P. 373.
[198] A very remarkable letter of the Earl of Sussex, October 22, 1568, contains these words: "I think surely no end can be made good for England, except the person of the Scottish queen be detained, by one means or other, in England." The whole letter manifests the spirit of Elizabeth's advisers, and does no great credit to Sussex's sense of justice, but a great deal to his ability. Yet he afterwards became an advocate for the Duke of Norfolk's marriage with Mary. Lodge's Illustrations, vol. ii. p. 4.
[199] Hume and Carte say, this first illness was the small-pox. But it appears by a letter from the queen to Lord Shrewsbury (Lodge, 279) that her attack in 1571 was suspected to be that disorder.
[200] Haynes, 580.
[201] In a conversation which Mary had with one Rooksby, a spy of Cecil's, about the spring of 1566, she imprudently named several of her friends, and of others whom she hoped to win, such as the Duke of Norfolk, the Earls of Derby, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Shrewsbury. "She had the better hope of this, for that she thought them to be all of the old religion, which she meant to restore again with all expedition, and thereby win the hearts of the common people." The whole passage is worth notice. Haynes, 447. See also Melvil's Memoirs, for the dispositions of an English party towards Mary in 1566.
[202] Murden's State Papers, 134, 180. Norfolk was a very weak man, the dupe of some very cunning ones. We may observe that his submission, to the queen (Id. 153) is expressed in a style which would now be thought most pusillanimous in a man of much lower station, yet he died with great intrepidity. But such was the tone of those times; an exaggerated hypocrisy prevailed in everything.
[203] State Trials, i. 957. He was interrogated by the queen's counsel with the most insidious questions. All the material evidence was read to the Lords from written depositions of witnesses who might have been called, contrary to the statute of Edward VI. But the Burghley Papers, published by Haynes and Murden, contain a mass of documents relative to this conspiracy, which leave no doubt as to the most heinous charge, that of inviting the Duke of Alva to invade the kingdom. There is reason to suspect that he feigned himself a catholic in order to secure Alva's assistance. Murden, p. 10.
[204] The northern counties were at this time chiefly catholic. "There are not," says Sadler, writing from thence, "ten gentlemen in this country who do favour and allow of their majesty's proceedings in the cause of religion." Lingard, vii. 54. It was consequently the great resort of the priests from the Netherlands, and in the feeble state of the protestant church there wanted sufficient ministers to stand up in its defence. Strype, i. 509, et post; ii. 183. Many of the gentry indeed were still disaffected in other parts towards the new religion. A profession of conformity was required in 1569 from all justices of the peace, which some refused, and others made against their consciences. Id. i. 567.
[205] Camden has quoted a long passage from Hieronymo Catena's Life of Pius V., published at Rome in 1588, which illustrates the evidence to the same effect contained in the Burghley Papers, and partly adduced on the Duke of Norfolk's trial.