This lenient proceeding on the part of her majesty was productive of the best effects; the catholics who remained at liberty became earnest to prove themselves possessed of that spirit of patriotism and loyalty for which she had given them credit. Some entered the ranks as volunteers; others armed and encouraged their tenantry and dependants for the defence of their country; several even fitted out vessels at their own expense, and intrusted the command of them to protestant officers on whom the government could entirely rely.
After the defeat of the Armada, the prisoners at Wisbeach-castle, having signed the submission required by law of such as had offended in hearing mass and absenting themselves from church, petitioned the privy-council for their liberty; but a bond for good behaviour being further demanded of them, with the condition of being obedient to such orders as six members of the privy-council should write down respecting them, they refused to comply with such terms of enlargement, and remained in custody. As the submission which they had tendered voluntarily was in terms apparently no less strong than the bond which they refused, it was conjectured that the former piece had been drawn up by their ghostly fathers with some private equivocation or mental reservation; a suspicion which receives strong confirmation from the characters and subsequent conduct of some of these persons,—the most noted fanatics certainly of their party,—and amongst whom we read the names of Talbot, Catesby, and Tresham, afterwards principal conspirators in the detestable gunpowder plot[98].
The ships equipped by the nobility and gentry to combat the armada amounted in the whole to forty-three, and it was on-board these vessels that young men of the noblest blood and highest hopes now made their first essay in arms. In this number may be distinguished George Clifford third earl of Cumberland, one of the most remarkable, if not the greatest, characters of the reign of Elizabeth.
The illustrious race of Clifford takes origin from William duke of Normandy; in a later age its blood was mingled with that of the Plantagenets by the intermarriage of the seventh lord de Clifford and a daughter of the celebrated Hotspur by Elizabeth his wife, whose father was Edward Mortimer earl of March. Notwithstanding this alliance with the house of York, two successive lords de Clifford were slain in the civil wars fighting strenuously on the Lancastrian side. It was to the younger of these, whose sanguinary spirit gained him the surname of the Butcher, that the barbarous murder of the young earl of Rutland was popularly imputed; and a well-founded dread of the vengeance of the Yorkists caused his widow to conceal his son and heir under the lowly disguise of a shepherd-boy, in which condition he grew up among the fells of Westmorland totally illiterate, and probably unsuspicious of his origin.
At the end of five-and-twenty years, the restoration of the line of Lancaster in the person of Henry VII. restored to lord de Clifford the name, rank, and large possessions of his ancestors; but the peasant-noble preferred through life that rustic obscurity in which his character had been formed and his habits fixed, to the splendors of a court or the turmoils of ambition. He kept aloof from the capital; and it was only on the field of Flodden, to which he led in person his hardy tenantry, that this de Clifford exhibited some sparks of the warlike fire inherent in his race.
His successor, by qualities very different from the homely virtues which had obtained for his father among his tenantry and neighbours the surname of the Good, recommended himself to the special favor of Henry VIII., who created him earl of Cumberland, and matched his heir to his own niece lady Eleanor Brandon. The sole fruit of this illustrious alliance, which involved the earl in an almost ruinous course of expense, was a daughter, who afterwards became the mother of Ferdinando earl of Derby, a nobleman whose mysterious and untimely fate remains to be hereafter related. By a second and better-assorted marriage, the earl of Cumberland became the father of George, his successor, our present subject, who proved the most remarkable of this distinguished family. The death of his father during his childhood had brought him under wardship to the queen; and by her command he was sent to pursue his studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge, under Whitgift, afterwards primate. Here he applied himself with ardor to the mathematics, and it was apparently the bent of his genius towards these studies which first caused him to turn his attention to nautical matters. An enterprising spirit and a turn for all the fashionable profusions of the day, which speedily plunged him in pecuniary embarrassments, added incitements to his activity in these pursuits; and in 1586 he fitted out three ships and a pinnace to cruise against the Spaniards and plunder their settlements. It appears extraordinary that he did not assume in person the command of his little squadron; but combats and triumphs perhaps still more glorious in his estimation awaited him on the smoother element of the court.
In the games of chivalry he bore off the prize of courage and dexterity from all his peers; the romantic band of knights-tilters boasted of him as one of its brightest ornaments, and her majesty deigned to encourage his devotedness to her glory by an envied pledge of favor.
As he stood or kneeled before her, she dropped her glove, perhaps not undesignedly, and on his picking it up, graciously desired him to keep it. He caused the trophy to be encircled with diamonds, and ever after at all tilts and tourneys bore it conspicuously placed in front of his high-crowned hat.
But the emergencies of the year 1588 summoned him to resign the fopperies of an antiquated knight-errantry for serious warfare and the exercise of genuine valor. Taking upon him the command of a ship, he joined the fleet appointed to hang upon the motions of the Spanish armada and harass it in its progress up the British Channel; and on several occasions, especially in the last action, off Calais, he signalized himself by uncommon exertions.
In reward of his services, her majesty granted him her royal commission to pursue a voyage to the South Sea, which he had already projected; she even lent him for the occasion one of her own ships; and thus encouraged, he commenced that long series of naval enterprises which has given him an enduring name. After two or three voyages he constantly declined her majesty's gracious offers of the loan of her ships, because they were accompanied with the express condition that he should never lay any vessel of hers on-board a Spanish one, lest both should be destroyed by fire. Such was the character of mingled penuriousness and timidity which pervaded the maritime policy of this great princess, even after the defeat of the armada had demonstrated that, ship for ship, her navy might defy the world!