The name of sir Nicholas Throgmorton was so mixed up in the confessions of the bishop of Ross, that it was perhaps an indulgent fate which had removed him some months previously from the sphere of human action. He died at the house of the earl of Leicester, and certainly of a pleurisy; but the malevolent credulity of that age seldom allowed a person of any eminence to quit the world without imputing the occurrence in some manner, direct or indirect, to the malice of his enemies. It was rumored that Throgmorton had fallen a victim to the hostility of Leicester, which he was thought to have provoked by quitting the party of the earl to reconcile himself with Burleigh, his secret enemy; and the suspicion of proficiency in the art of poisoning, which had so long rested upon the favorite, obtained credit to this absurd report. Possibly there might be more truth in the general opinion, that it was in some measure owing to the enmity of Burleigh that a person of such acknowledged abilities in public affairs, and one who had conducted himself so skilfully in various important negotiations, should never have been advanced to any considerable office of trust or profit. But the lofty and somewhat turbulent spirit of Throgmorton himself, ought probably to bear the chief blame both of this enmity, and of his want of success at the court of a princess who exacted from her servants the exercise of the most refined and cautious policy, as well as an entire and implicit submission to all her views and wishes. It is highly probable that she never entirely pardoned Throgmorton for giving the lie to her declarations respecting the promises made to the earl of Murray and his party, by the open production of his own diplomatic instructions.
The hostility of Leicester extended, as we shall see hereafter, to other branches of the unfortunate family of Throgmorton, whom an imprudent or criminal zeal in the cause of popery exposed without defence to the whole weight of his vengeance. On some slight pretext he procured the dismissal of sir John Throgmorton, the brother of sir Nicholas; from his office of chief justice of Chester, who did not long survive the disgrace though apparently unmerited. Puttenham, author of the "Art of English Poesie," ventured, though a professed courtier, to compose an epitaph on this victim of oppression, of which he has preserved to us the following lines in the work above mentioned:
"Whom Virtue reared Envy hath overthrown,
And lodged full low under this marble stone:
Ne never were his values so well known
Whilst he lived here, as now that he is gone.
No sun by day that ever saw him rest
Free from the toils of his so busy charge,
No night that harboured rancour in his breast,
Nor merry mood made Reason run at large.
His head a source of gravity and sense,
His memory a shop of civil art:
His tongue a stream of sugred eloquence,
Wisdom and meekness lay mingled in his heart." &c.
The literary propensities of Elizabeth have already come under our notice: they had frequently served to divert her mind from the cares of government; but in the state of unremitted anxiety occasioned by her dread of the machinations relative to the queen of Scots, in which she had found the first peer of her realm a principal actor, her thoughts, even in the few leisure hours which she found means to bestow on these soothing recreations, still hovered about the objects from which she most sought to withdraw them.
The following sonnet of her composition will illustrate this remark: it was published during her lifetime in Puttenham's "Arte of English Poesie," and its authenticity, its principal merit, has never been called in question.
Sonnet by Queen Elizabeth.
The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy.
For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects' faith doth ebb;
Which would not be if Reason ruled, or Wisdom weaved the web.
But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds,
Which turn to rain of late repent by course of changed winds.
The top of hope supposed the root of ruth will be;
And fruitless all their graffed guiles, as shortly ye shall see.
Those dazzled eves with pride, which great ambition blinds,
Shall be unseal'd by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds.
The Daughter of Debate that eke discord doth sow,
Shall reap no gain where former rule hath taught still peace to grow.
No foreign banish'd wight shall anchor in this port;
Our realm it brooks no strangers' force, let them elsewhere resort.
Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ,
To poll their tops that seek such change, and gape for joy.
The house of commons, in which great dread and hatred of the queen of Scots and her adherents now prevailed, showed itself strongly disposed to pass an act by which Mary should be declared for ever unworthy and incapable of the English succession: but Elizabeth, with her usual averseness to all unqualified declarations and irrevocable decisions, interfered to prevent the completion of a measure which most sovereigns, under all the circumstances, would have been eager to embrace. To the unanimous expression of the opinion of the house, that the execution of the sentence against the duke of Norfolk ought not to be longer delayed, she was however prevailed upon to lend a more favorable ear; and on June 2d, 1572, this nobleman received his death on Tower-hill.
Norfolk was a man of many amiable and several estimable qualities, and much too good for the faction with which he had been enticed to act and the cause in which he suffered. On the scaffold he acknowledged, with great apparent sincerity, the justice of his sentence, and his peculiar guiltiness in breaking the solemn promise which he had pledged to his sovereign. He declared himself to have been an earnest protestant ever since he had had any taste for religion, and in this faith he died very devoutly. He bequeathed by his will his best George to his kinsman and true friend the earl of Sussex, whose faithful counsels he too late reproached himself with neglecting. By his attainder the dukedom was lost to the family of Howard; but Philip, his eldest son, succeeded his maternal grandfather in the earldom of Arundel; lord Thomas, his second son, (whose mother was the daughter and heiress of lord Audley,) was created lord Howard of Walden by Elizabeth and earl of Suffolk by James; and lord William, the youngest, who possessed Naworth-castle in right of Elizabeth Dacre his wife, and was known upon the West Border (of which he was warden) by the appellation of "Belted Will," was ancestor to the earls of Carlisle[74].
The king of Spain had long been regarded in England as the most implacable and formidable of the enemies of Elizabeth; and on good grounds. It was believed to be through his procurement that Sixtus V. had been led to fulminate his anathema against her;—it was well known that the pope had made a donation to him of the kingdom of Ireland, of which he was anxious to avail himself;—there was strong ground to suspect that he had sent one of his ablest generals in embassy to England with no other view than to have taken the command of the northern rebels, had their enterprise prospered;—and the intimate participation of his agents in all the intrigues of the queen of Scots was notorious. Dr. Wylson, a learned civilian, an accomplished scholar, and one of the first refiners of English prose, had published in 1571, with the express view of rousing the spirit of his readers against this formidable tyrant, a version of the Orations of Demosthenes against the king Philip of his day, and had been at the pains of pointing out in the notes coincidences in the situation of Athens and of England. The author, who was an earnest protestant, had the further motive in this work of paying a tribute to the memory of the learned and unfortunate Cheke, who during his voluntary exile had read gratuitous lectures to his countrymen at Padua on the works of the great Grecian orator, of which Wylson had been an auditor, and who had also made a Latin version of them, of which the English translator freely availed himself.
It was principally her dread of the Spaniards which led Elizabeth into those perpetual reciprocations of deceitful professions and empty negotiations with the profligate and perfidious court of France, which in the judgement of posterity have redounded so little to her honor, but which appeared to her of so much importance that she now thought herself peculiarly fortunate in having discovered an agent capable of conducting with all the wariness, penetration and profound address so peculiarly requisite where sincerity and good faith are wanting. This agent was sir Francis Walsingham, whose rare acquisitions of political knowledge, made principally during the period of his voluntary exile for religion, and still rarer talents for public business, had induced lord Burleigh to recommend him to the service and confidence of his mistress. For several years from this time he resided as the queen's ambassador at the court of France, at first as coadjutor to sir Thomas Smith,—a learned and able man, who afterwards became a principal secretary of state,—the rest of the time alone. There was not in England a man who was regarded as a more sincere and earnest protestant than Walsingham; yet such was at this time his sense of the importance to the country of the French alliance, that he expressed himself strongly in favor of the match between Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou, and, as a minister, spared no pains to promote it.