About the time when the Scottish Parliament was establishing the reformed religion, Mary of Guise breathed her last, leaving the country to be managed by the reforming nobles. Her daughter, the Queen of Scots, now eighteen years of age, and the most beautiful woman of her time, had in 1559 become the queen-consort of France; but in consequence of the death of her husband, she was next year left without any political interest in that country. She accordingly, in August 1561, returned to Scotland, and assumed the sovereignty of a country which was chiefly under the rule of fierce nobles, and where the people, from the difference of their religious faiths, as well as their native barbarism, were little fitted to yield her the obedience of loyal and loving subjects.
The change of religion in Scotland was of a more decisive kind than it had been in England. The English Reformation had been effected by sovereigns who, while they wished to throw off the supremacy of the Pope, and some of the Catholic rites, desired to give as little way as possible to popular principles. They therefore not only seized the supremacy of the church to themselves, but, by bishops and other dignitaries, made it an efficient instrument for supporting monarchical government. In Scotland, where the Reformation was effected by the nobles and the people, at a time when still bolder principles had sprung up, none of this machinery of power was retained. The clergy were placed on a footing of perfect equality; they were all of them engaged in parochial duties, and only a small part of the ancient ecclesiastical revenues was allowed to them. In imitation of the system established at Geneva, their general affairs, instead of being intrusted to the hands of bishops, were confided to courts formed by themselves. These courts, being partly formed by lay elders, kept up a sympathy and attachment among the community, which has never existed in so great a degree in the English church. What was of perhaps still greater importance, while a large part of the ancient revenues was absorbed by the nobles, a very considerable portion was devoted to the maintenance of parish schools, under the express control of the clergy. These at once formed regular nurseries of Protestant Christians, and disseminated the elements of learning more extensively over this small and remote country than it had ever been over any other part of the world.
Queen Mary, having little power in her own country, was obliged to govern by means of her natural brother, James Stuart, whom she created Earl of Moray, and who was the leader of the Protestant interest in Scotland. Personally, however, she was intimately connected with the great Catholic powers of the continent, and became a party, in 1564, to a coalition formed by them for the suppression of Protestantism all over Europe. She had never yet resigned her pretensions to the English throne, but lived in the hope that, when the Catholics succeeded in everywhere subduing the Protestants, she would attain that object. Elizabeth, who had only the support of the Protestant part of her own subjects, with a friendly feeling among the Scotch and other unimportant Protestant nations, had great reason to dread the confederacy formed against her. She nevertheless stood firm upon the Protestant faith, and the principles of a comparatively liberal and popular government, as the only safe position.
A series of unfortunate events threw Mary into the hands of Elizabeth. The former queen, in 1565, married her cousin Lord Darnley, and by that means alienated the affections of her brother and chief minister, the Earl of Moray, as well as of other Protestant lords, who raised a rebellion against her, and were obliged to fly into England. Soon after, the jealousy of Darnley respecting an Italian musician named Rizzio, who acted as French secretary to the queen, united him in a conspiracy with the banished Protestant noblemen for the murder of that humble foreigner, which was effected under very barbarous circumstances, March 9, 1566. Mary, who was delivered in the succeeding June, of her son James, withdrew her affections entirely from her husband, and began to confide chiefly in the Earl of Bothwell, who some months afterwards caused Darnley to be blown up by gunpowder, while he lay in a state of sickness; in which transaction it has always been suspected, but never proved, that the queen had a considerable share. Bothwell soon after forced her, in appearance, into a marriage, which excited so much indignation among her subjects, that the same Protestant lords who had effected the Reformation, and were the friends of Elizabeth, easily obtained the possession of her person, and having deposed her, crowned her infant son as king, under the title of James VI, while the regency was vested in the Earl of Moray. In May 1568, Mary escaped from her prison in Lochleven, and put herself at the head of a body of her partisans, but was defeated by the regent at the battle of Langside, and was then compelled to seek refuge in England. By placing her rival under strict confinement, and extending an effectual protection to the regents Moray, Lennox, Mar, and Morton, who successively governed Scotland, Elizabeth fortified herself in a great degree against the Catholic confederacy.
GOVERNMENT OF ELIZABETH.
It has already been seen that the liberties of the people were much favored by the frequent interruptions in the succession to the crown. Whenever one branch of the Plantagenet family displaced another, the new king, feeling himself weak, endeavored to strengthen his title by procuring a parliamentary enactment in support of it. It thus became established as a regular principle in the English government, that the people who were represented in parliament had something to say in the appointment of their king. A considerable change, however, had taken place since the accession of Henry VII. The great power acquired by that king, through his worldly wisdom and the destruction of the nobility during the civil wars, had been handed down through four successive princes, who inherited the crown by birthright, and did not require to cringe to the people for a confirmation of their title. The parliaments, therefore, were now a great deal more under the control of the sovereign than they had formerly been. From an early period of his reign, Henry VIII never permitted his parliament to oppose his will in the least. To the various changes of religion under successive sovereigns, the parliaments presented no obstacle. An idea was now beginning to arise, very much through the supremacy which the sovereigns had acquired over the church, that the right of the crown was one derived from God, and that the people had nothing to do with it, except to obey what it dictated to them. Of this notion, no one took so much advantage, or was at so much pains to impress it, as Elizabeth. No doubt her arbitrary measures were generally of a popular nature, yet this does not excuse them in principle; and their ultimate mischief is seen in the attempts of future sovereigns to pursue worse ends upon the same means. Elizabeth’s government consisted entirely of herself and her ministers, who were, from the beginning to the end of her reign, the very spirit and essence of the enlightened men of England. Her prime minister was the celebrated Lord Burleigh, by far the most sagacious man who ever acted as a minister in Britain; and all her emissaries to foreign courts were of one complexion—circumspect and penetrating men, ardently devoted to their country, their mistress, and to the Protestant religion.
On the accession of Elizabeth, the two celebrated acts of Supremacy and Conformity were passed, for the purpose of crushing the political influence of the Popish religion; an end which they sufficiently accomplished. By the act of supremacy, all beneficed clergymen, and all holding offices under the crown, were compelled to take an oath adjuring the temporal and spiritual jurisdiction of any foreign prince or prelate, on pain of forfeiting their offices, while any one maintaining such supremacy was liable to heavy penalties. The other statute prohibited any one from following any clergyman who was not of the established religion, under pain of forfeiting his goods and chattels for the first offense, of a year’s imprisonment for the second, and of imprisonment during life for the third; while it imposed a fine of a shilling on any one absenting himself from the established church on Sundays and holidays. By means of a court of ecclesiastical commission, which the queen erected, these laws, and others of a more trifling and vexatious nature, were enforced with great severity. It may afford some idea of the barbarity of the age, and of the terror in which the church of Rome was now held, that, during the reign of Elizabeth, one hundred and eighty persons suffered death by the laws affecting Catholic priests and converts.
WAR IN THE NETHERLANDS.
For more than a century after the Reformation, religion was the real or apparent motive of the most remarkable transactions in European history. It is scarcely necessary to point out that this sentiment, though in general the purest by which human beings can be actuated, is, like all the other higher sentiments of our nature, when offended or shocked, capable of rousing the inferior sentiments into great activity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European society was comparatively unenlightened and barbarous; we therefore find the variances of opinion respecting religion were then productive of far fiercer feelings than they are in our own more humane age. The Protestant heresy, as it was termed by the Catholics, was also a novelty, the remote effects of which no man could foretell; it was mingled with political questions, and by some princes was supposed to forebode a general revolt against monarchical authority. We are not therefore to wonder that great cruelties were committed, either by the Catholics in seeking to support the church of Rome, or by the Protestants in endeavoring to insure themselves against a renewal of severities inflicted by the opposite party. Nor is it necessary, in the present age, that the adherents of either faith should retain any feeling of displeasure against the other, on account of barbarities which took their rise in the ignorance and rudeness of a former period, and of which the enlightened of both parties have long since disapproved.
In the Netherlands, which formed part of the dominions of Philip II of Spain, the reformed faith had made considerable advances. Philip, like other Catholic princes, entertained the idea that this new creed, besides being condemnable as a heresy and an offense against the Deity, tended to make men independent of their rulers. Finding the people obstinate in their professions, he commenced a war with the Netherlanders, for the purpose of enforcing his authority over their consciences. This war lasted about twenty years; for the Netherlanders, though a nation of no great strength, fought like desperate men, and endured the most dreadful hardships rather than submit. The chief leader in this war of liberty was William, Prince of Orange, one of the purest and most courageous patriots that ever breathed. Elizabeth could not help wishing well to the Netherlanders, though for a long time her dread of Spain, then one of the greatest powers in Europe, prevented her from openly assisting them. At the same time, about two millions of the people of France were Protestants, or, as they were then called, Huguenots, who acted also for the general Protestant cause with as much energy as the great strength of the French government would permit. Elizabeth at length, in 1578, extended an open protection to the Netherlanders, excusing herself to Philip by stating her fear that they would otherwise throw themselves into the arms of France. The northern provinces were thus enabled to assert their independence, and to constitute the country which has since been called Holland.