It had been as necessary for Catharine de Medici as for Elizabeth to provide against the complete domination of England and Scotland by a Spanish-Papal conspiracy in favour of Mary Stuart, and she had seconded Walsingham strenuously in endeavouring to overcome Anjou’s religious scruples against marrying Elizabeth. Anjou shifted like the wind, as he fell under the influence of the Guises and his mother alternately. Sometimes the match looked certain, and Catharine was effusive in her thanks to Burghley; the next week it appeared hopeless. But the intrigue served its purpose, and kept the French Government friendly with Elizabeth during the critical time of the Spanish-Guisan conspiracy against her—a conspiracy which also threatened Catharine’s influence in France. Burghley himself seems to have been at a loss to understand Elizabeth’s real intentions at the time; but it would appear that both he and Walsingham were in earnest in wishing for the Anjou match, of course with the safeguards laid down in Cecil’s several minutes on the matter; but “the conferences,” wrote the Secretary, “have as many variations as there are days.”
When at length it was seen that Anjou would no longer act as a party to the game, but was looking to the possibility of a marriage with Mary Stuart or with a Polish princess, the idea of the marriage of Elizabeth with his youngest brother, the Duke of Alençon, was again very cautiously brought up by Sir Thomas Smith and Killigrew, who were acting as English Ambassadors in France during Walsingham’s illness. Alençon was only a lad as yet, and could be used without loss of dignity as a stalking-horse until the treaty of close alliance was finally agreed upon between the two countries. The inevitable Guido Cavalcanti broached the matter to Burghley in January, as he was coming away from an interview with Elizabeth, and after some conference Burghley himself discussed the matter with the Queen. She was thirty-nine, and the suggested bridegroom was barely seventeen; but she was full of curiosity as to the looks of the suitor, and distrustful about their respective ages. She asked Burghley how tall Alençon was. “About as tall as I am,” replied the Secretary. “About as tall as your grandson, you mean,” snapped her Majesty,[346] and so the colloquy ended for a time. On the 19th April 1572 the draft treaty between England and France was signed at Blois. It provided that aid was to be given unofficially by both nations to the revolted Hollanders; the fleet of Protestant privateers was to be sheltered and encouraged, and Huguenot Henry of Navarre was to marry the King’s sister Margaret. The Protestants and politicians of France had thus for the moment triumphed all along the line; the connection between England and France was closer than it had been for many years, and Elizabeth and Burghley could look back upon a great peril to their nation and their faith manfully met and astutely overcome.
The Catholic party in England was now utterly prostrate. The Duke of Norfolk, condemned to death for treason, was respited again and again by the Queen, whilst he abjectly prevaricated, and threw the blame upon others. The Bishop of Ross and Barker, he said, had forsworn him: he never meant to bring a foreign force to England to depose the Queen, and so forth. From the first, Burghley, who had always been Norfolk’s friend, urged the Queen to let the law take its course.[347] He has been bitterly blamed for doing so; but seeing the danger to which Norfolk’s treason had reduced the realm, he would have failed in his duty as a First Minister if he had allowed any weakness or personal consideration to stand in the way of the just punishment for a great crime. Norfolk, though he was the most popular man and greatest noble in the realm, and still has many apologists, had plotted with the enemies of England to bring the country again under foreign tutelage for his own ambition, and it was right that he should suffer.
That Burghley did not flinch in the case of a man with so many friends, is a proof of his rectitude and his courage. Though Norfolk himself must have known what his attitude was, his esteem for him was evidently not lessened. In the first letter he wrote to the Queen after his condemnation, 21st January 1572, he prays for “her Majesty’s forgiveness for his manifold offences, that he may leave this vale of misery with a lighter heart and quieter conscience. He desires that Lord Burghley should act as guardian to his poor orphans,” and he signs his letter, “Written by the woeful hand of a dead man, your Majesty’s unworthy subject, Thomas Howard”;[348] and when this prayer was granted, he again wrote to the Queen expressing “his comfort at hearing of her Majesty’s intended goodness to his unfortunate brats, and that she had christened them with such an adopted father as Lord Burghley.”[349] At length, when Parliament had added its pressure to that of her minister’s, the Queen’s real or pretended reluctance to execute her near kinsman was overcome, and the Duke’s head fell on Tower Hill, 2nd June, before the lamentations of a great populace, who loved him above any subject of the Queen.
Less than a week afterwards Marshal Montmorenci, Paul de Foix, and a splendid embassy arrived in England for the purpose of formally ratifying the treaty of alliance between England and France, a corresponding embassy from England under Lord Lincoln being in France for a similar purpose. The courts vied with each other in their splendid entertainments. The Frenchmen with forty followers were lodged in Somerset House. At Whitehall, at Windsor (where Montmorenci received the Garter), at Leicester House, and at Cecil House, sumptuous banquets were given, followed by masques, balls, and tourneys. There was much talk about the Duke of Alençon, but no decided answer given by Elizabeth to the hints of marriage, which, indeed, was not now so pressing a matter for her as it had been. When the Frenchmen had taken leave, Burghley sent to Walsingham an interesting letter giving some account of the embassy, by which it is clear that the Queen still desired to keep up the talk of the marriage, in view of a possible need to draw still closer to the French. “I am willed,” he writes, “to require you to use all good means to understand what you can of the Duke of Alençon, his age in certainty, of his stature, his conditions, his inclination in religion, his devotion this way, his followers and servitors: hereof her Majesty seeketh speedily to be advertised, that she may resolve before the month.” He says, that for his part, he can see no great dislike of the idea, except in the matter of age, and hints at getting Calais as the young Prince’s dower. “If somewhat be not advised to recompense the opinion that her Majesty conceiveth, as that she should be misliked to make choice of so young a prince, I doubt the end.”[350] When, however, Lincoln came back from France loaded with plate and jewels, and full of praise of the gallantry of Alençon, the Queen became somewhat warmer, and Walsingham for weeks to come was bombarded with minute questions as to the personal qualities, and particularly as to the pock-marked visage, of the suitor.
There was but one more of the great conspirators against England to deal with. Norfolk had deservedly died the death of a traitor, and those who had supported him were either dead or lingering sufferers in prison, the disloyal Catholics were despairing, Spain had received its answer by the expulsion of De Spes and the renewal of the war in the Netherlands, whilst Coligny and the Huguenots rode rough-shod over the Guises and their friends. But the very spring-head of the conspiracy remained untouched. A commission was appointed in June to formulate charges against Mary Stuart herself,[351] and in Parliament it was resolved that she was unworthy to succeed to the English crown. But Elizabeth again allowed her personal feeling to stand in the way of her patriotic duty, or, as some would prefer to say, desired to fix upon others the responsibility of a grave act against her own order and kin. Burghley, in his letter already quoted, written at the end of June to Walsingham, says: “Now for Parliament: I cannot write patiently: all that we laboured for, and with full consent brought to fashion, I mean a law to make the Scottish Queen unable and unworthy of succession of the crown, was by her Majesty neither assented to nor rejected, but deferred until the feast of All Saints; but what all other good and wise men think thereof, you may guess. Some here have, as it seemeth, abused their favour about her Majesty, to make herself her most enemy. God amend them.”[352]
A fortnight after this letter was written Burghley was made Lord Treasurer of England in place of the Marquis of Winchester, who had recently died. The work and strain of the Secretaryship had gravely affected Burghley’s health, and early in the previous April he had been so ill that his life was despaired of. De Guaras, the merchant who acted informally as Spanish agent, says that the Queen and most of the Councillors visited him, in the belief that his state was desperate.[353] For some time he had been begging for permission to rest, but until the great matters in hand were settled, this was impossible. The sky over England had once more become cleared, and the great minister could hand over to his old friend Sir Thomas Smith the Secretaryship, in which he had done such signal service to the State.
The day after the elevation of Burghley to the Treasurership, the Queen started on one of the stately progresses which caused so much delight and enthusiasm to all her subjects but those who had to entertain her, except perhaps Burghley and his rival Leicester, who were both honoured during this summer with a visit from the sovereign. Burghley’s entry of the great event comes curtly enough in his diary after the memorandum of his new appointment, thus:—
“1572. July 15. Lord Burghley made Lord Treasurer of England.”
“July 22. The Queen’s Majesty at Theobalds.”[354]