The negotiations with Catharine de Medici were conducted by Smith, and were based upon the restoration of Calais to Elizabeth, the toleration of Protestantism in France, and the assurance of the Guises that they would not interfere in Scotland;[176] but whilst they were in progress the war followed its course. The King of Navarre fell fighting before Rouen against his former friends, the Protestants; at the great battle of Dreux (19th December 1562), Condé, the Protestant chief, and Constable Montmorenci on the Catholic side, were taken prisoners, and Coligny, with a mere remnant of his Protestants, alone kept the field. At the siege of Orleans (18th February 1563), Guise was assassinated, and a pacification then became possible. Condé, away from honest Coligny and La Noue, was but a weak vessel, as his brother Navarre had been, and Catharine well knew how to manage such men. All of Cecil’s distrust of the French was justified, and the shameful treaty of Amboise was signed (19th March), leaving Elizabeth and the English in the lurch. The moment that English policy escaped from the capable hands of Cecil, to pass temporarily under the lamentable influence of Dudley, disaster and failure were the inevitable result.
The Queen could do no more than rail at Condé’s envoy, Briquemault, and call his master a lying scamp; pestilence and famine decimated the English garrison at Havre, closely beleaguered by the French; and in the autumn of 1563 the force had to be withdrawn without glory or material satisfaction. Before this happened, however, cautious Cecil was gradually working affairs into his own groove again. Dudley had continued to send amiable messages to the Spanish Ambassador, whilst promoting an agreement with the French Government, and had exercised his influence in favour of the release of Lennox from the Tower; the object being in both cases to curry favour with the Catholics, and so to diminish Cecil’s power. As usual the Secretary’s opposition was an indirect one. His spies had kept him informed of the old Spanish Bishop’s continued correspondence with Shan O’Neil; of his having received and encouraged foolish Arthur Pole in his treason, and having allowed English people, against the law, to attend the embassy mass; and he watched and waited for an opportunity to demonstrate to the Catholics the powerlessness of both the Bishop and his master. He had not to wait long. One evening at the beginning of January 1563, as the light was failing, a knot of idle hangers-on of the Bishop’s household were lounging at the great gate of Durham Place opening to the Strand. An Italian Protestant captain, in the service of the Vidame de Chartres, swaggered down the street on his way to Whitehall, and from the Bishop’s gateway a lad shot a harquebuss at him, and missed him. The captain whipped out his long rapier and pursued the would-be murderer to the outer courtyard. The Bishop’s servants closed the gates against the pursuers, and the assassin ran up shouting to the door of the chamber where the Ambassador was playing cards with the French Ambassador and a Guisan hostage, Nantouillet, Provost of Paris. A few hurried words of explanation at the door—for the Guisan had paid the boy to do the act—and the assassin was hurried down to the water gate, where a boat was in waiting, and he was allowed to escape, whilst his pursuers were thundering at the solid gates of the inner court.
This was enough for Cecil. New locks were put on the house gates, and the keys held by the “heretic English gatekeeper.” The Bishop could obtain no interview with the Queen, but was obliged to see Cecil instead. Send me to jail, he indignantly pleaded, if I have offended; but if nothing is proved against me, as nothing can be, at least let me have free ingress and egress from my own house. Cecil’s reply was a long indictment of the Bishop’s whole proceedings. The Ambassador, he said, was by the Queen’s kindness living in one of her houses, which had been turned into a hotbed of conspiracies against her and a refuge for malefactors. The law of the land had been openly defied, and the Queen desired the Ambassador to quit her house. In vain the Bishop protested. One indignity after another was placed upon him. The folks going to mass in the embassy were haled off to prison as they came out; all the most private conversations between the Ambassador and the English rebels were repeated to him by Cecil; he was confronted with the text of his most secret despatches; he was turned out of Durham House with ignominy, and all he could do was to weep tears of rage, and pray Philip to avenge him.[177] But Philip’s hands were more than full in the Netherlands now, as Cecil knew, for before the writing-table in the Secretary’s room in Cecil House[178] there stood a portrait of Count Egmont,[179] and Gresham’s agents in Antwerp, Bruges, and Brussels left no event unreported. The blow to the Spanish Ambassador was cleverly planned by Cecil. That the former had been futilely plotting, was known, and it served as a good pretext for his disgrace; but the real reason for it was the need to prove to Dudley and his friends, and to the discontented Catholics, that they were leaning on a broken reed when they depended upon Spain to help them against the Secretary. The bankrupt, heartbroken old Bishop was a good object-lesson. If his master could not pay his debts or defend him from deliberate indignity, much less could he help discontented Englishmen who only had their own ends to serve.
Almost simultaneously with the Bishop’s disgrace, and also partly explaining it, another important move was made. The second Parliament of Elizabeth was opened on the 12th January 1563 by the Queen herself, in great state. The speech of Lord Keeper Bacon dwelt at length on the want of order and discipline in the Anglican Church, the incompetency of many of the ministers, and the want of uniformity in the services.[180] Cecil himself was offered and refused the Speakership, but to him has been attributed the authorship of the harangue which the Speaker (Williams) addressed to the Queen.[181] The decay of schools and the poverty of benefices through lay impropriations is dwelt on at length in this speech, and the completion of the reform of religion and learning in the Queen’s dominions advocated. Cecil followed this with a speech denouncing the Queen’s enemies, the Guises and the Catholics, supported by the countenance of Spain. The penalties for refusing the oath of supremacy were greatly increased, the oath was rendered obligatory upon every person holding any sort of office, and other acts for insuring the progress of Protestantism were made,[182] as well as large subsidies granted. The Catholic lords, even the Lord Treasurer (Winchester), were uneasy and apprehensive; but they dared not move, for Cecil and the Protestants had now a firm grasp of affairs, and the Secretary was vehement in Parliament in favour of the proposed ecclesiastical measures. The Queen’s embarrassments, he said, arose entirely from her determination to resist the authority of the Pope, who had bribed Spain, the Austrian and German princes. She now stood alone, with the Catholic world against her, but he exhorted all faithful subjects to defend her with laws, life, and property.[183] At the same time, as the Parliament was sitting, Convocation assembled to settle the ritual and doctrine of the Church. The articles were reformed and altered to thirty-nine, the catechism and the homilies were adopted, and other measures tending to uniformity of doctrine were agreed upon, but in a way which, although it did not satisfy the Puritan minority, was intended to include as large a number as possible of those who were not irreconcilably pledged to the Roman faith.
Cecil’s hand can be traced clearly in all these activities, for they struck indirectly at his enemies; but a bolder step in the same direction taken by Parliament itself can only be surmised as being prompted by him. Dudley had for months been gaining friends for the candidature of the Earl of Huntingdon as heir to the crown, whilst the Catholics were divided on the claims of Mary Stuart and Darnley. Cecil was determined, if possible, to prevent the success of either of them, and desired to adhere to the Parliamentary title of Lady Catharine[184] (Countess of Hertford). The House of Commons was mainly Protestant, and under the influence of Cecil; and it was agreed that deputations of both Houses should petition the Queen either to fix the succession or else to marry, the latter alternative being probably added out of politeness. The Queen received the deputations very ungraciously. She turned her back on the Commons, and for a long time sent no answer at all. On an address being presented to the Council begging them to remind her, she sent an answer by Cecil and Rogers to the effect that “she doubted not the grave heads of this House did right well consider that she forgot not the suit of this House for the succession, the matter being so weighty; nor could forget it; but she willed the young heads to take example of their elders.” To the Lords she was more outspoken. She asked them whether they thought what they saw on her face were wrinkles. They were nothing of the sort, but pockmarks, and she was not so old yet that she had lost hope of having children of her own to succeed her.[185] This was a rebuff to Cecil’s policy; but only what might have been expected from the Queen, whose principal care was to sustain herself without concerning herself greatly as to what came after her; whereas the Secretary was doubtless thinking of what would become of himself and the Protestant party if she died. For Mary Stuart, and even her Protestant Councillors, he knew, were busy intriguing for the succession, and her claims were powerfully supported, even in England.
Maitland of Lethington came to London during the sitting of Parliament to forward his mistress’s claims. He found Cecil now against the solution which he had formerly favoured, namely, the abandonment of Mary’s present claims in exchange for the reversion, failing Elizabeth and her descendants. Cecil was more distrustful of the French than ever; for the defection of Condé had turned all arms against the English in Havre, and he knew that Cardinal Lorraine was still untiring in his planning of the Austrian match for Mary, whilst the Protestants of France and Germany watched unmoved the isolation and embarrassment of England. Maitland therefore soon persuaded himself that his mistress had not much more to hope for now from the dominant party in England than from Elizabeth herself. Mary was convinced that both Catharine de Medici and the English Queen wished to force her into an unworthy Protestant marriage with a subject, in order to injure her prestige with English Catholics and decrease the power of the Guises.[186] Maitland consequently cast his eyes to another quarter. Mary was determined to fight for the English succession, if she could not get it by fair means; and with this end she wanted a consort strong enough to force her claims, which her uncle’s candidate, the Archduke Charles, could not do. She and Maitland accordingly threw over the Guises, who did not wish their niece to marry a prince strong enough to exclude them, and boldly proposed a marriage with Philip’s heir, Don Carlos. Maitland went one night secretly to the Bishop of Aquila in London, and cautiously opened the negotiation. The Queen of Scots, he said, was determined never to marry a Protestant, even if he owned half the world, nor would she accept a husband from the hands of the Queen of England. The French and English Queens were almost equally against her, the Duke of Guise was dead, the Archduke Charles was not strong enough to help her; would Philip consent to a marriage with his son?
Whilst this matter was being discussed by Maitland and the Bishop and the Spanish partisans in England, the news of the untoward adventure of Mary Stuart with Chastelard arrived in London. Mary said it was a plot of the Queen-mother to discredit her; but the old Bishop was no less anxious than before to urge his master to seize such an opportunity as that offered by the proposed marriage. But Philip was slow. His hands were full and his coffers were empty as usual, and whilst he was asking for pledges and guarantees from the Scots and the English Catholics, the opportunity passed. Philip, in appearance at all events, accepted the suggestion, in alarm lest a refusal might lead to a marriage between Mary and the boy-King of France; for, as he says, “I well bear in mind the anxiety I underwent from King Francis when he was married to this Queen, and I am sure that if he had lived we could not have avoided war, on the ground of my protection of the Queen of England, whose country he would have invaded.”[187] But whilst Philip was pondering—and it must be conceded that this time he had much reason for hesitation—others were acting. When Lethington came back from France, on his way through London to Scotland, he saw the Spanish Bishop again. He found that matters had not progressed, and was disheartened. Elizabeth threatened his mistress with her undying enmity if she married a member of the House of Austria, and Cecil persuaded him that the Queen might yet appoint Mary her heir if she married to her liking. Lady Margaret, also, was now ostentatiously favoured by the Queen, and Maitland returned to Scotland convinced that it would be unsafe to look elsewhere than to England for support, and that, after all, the best solution of his country’s difficulties would be the marriage of Mary and Darnley under Elizabeth’s patronage. This certainly was the impression that the English Government wished him to convey, for whilst it lasted it would check more ambitious schemes which would be dangerous to England.
So far Cecil’s policy, though often thwarted by the Queen’s waywardness and Dudley’s ambition, had been in the main successful. The French had been kept out of Scotland, the Catholics in England had been divided and discouraged, whilst waverers were conciliated; the Anglican Church was more firmly established, and Philip had been kept more or less friendly, out of fear of a league of Protestants on the one hand and of French influence in England on the other. Nor was the indefatigable Secretary’s effort confined to foreign affairs. The strengthening of the Queen’s navy and the building of merchantmen continued without intermission. Camden says that in consequence of this activity there were now (1562) 20,000 fighting men ready for sea service alone. All the fortresses were put into order for defence, and the shortcomings of material and system demonstrated in the Scottish campaign were remedied. The ample correspondence on these points in the Hatfield Papers are all endorsed, annotated, or drafted in Sir William Cecil’s own hand, and no detail seems to have escaped him.[188]
Notwithstanding his frequent illness, as recorded in his journals, his work must have been incessant. In addition to his vast administrative duties, he had, on Sir Thomas Parry’s death, been appointed to the important post of Master of the Court of Wards, which assumed the guardianship of the estates of minors; and Camden speaks of him as “managing this place, as he did all his others, very providentially for the service of his prince and the wards, for his own profit moderately, and for the benefit of his followers and retainers, yet without offence, and with great commendations for his integrity.” His interest, too, in the universities, and particularly that of Cambridge, was constant. He had been appointed Chancellor of the University in the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, and had worked manfully to introduce order and reform into the institution.[189] In June 1562, Cecil endeavoured to resign his Chancellorship, his pretexts being his unfitness for the post, his want of leisure, and the serious contentions which existed in the University; but the real reason was that which he cited last, namely, the tendency to laxity with regard to uniform worship manifested by a large number of the masters and students. “Lastly,” he says, “which most of all I lament, I cannot find such care in the heads of houses there to supply my lack as I hoped for, to the ruling of inordinate youth, to the observation of good order, and increase of learning and knowledge of God. For I see that if the wiser sort that have authority will not join earnestly together to overrule the licentious part of youth in breaking orders, and the stubbornness of others that malign and deprave the ecclesiastical orders established by law in this realm, I shall shortly hear no good or comfortable report from thence. And to keep an office of authority by which these disorders may be remedied, and not to use it, is to betray the safety of the same, whereof I have some conscience.… And so I end, praying you all to accept this, my perplexed writing and complaint, to proceed of a careful mind that I bear to that honourable and dear University; whereof, although I was once but a simple, small, unlearned, low member, I love,” &c., &c. Only on the promise of complete amendment on the part of heads of houses, and at the intercession of Archbishop Parker, Sir William withdrew his resignation and continued his labours in favour of the University.[190]