amorous intimacy with Sir Christopher Hatton, Bishop of Ross ingeniously contrived to exchange besides Walsingham was instructed to com- these letters for others of an insignificant kind, plain of these foul reports; and Catherine de' Me-, which were laid before the council; but Elizadici was fain to protest she had never believed them.

Sir Thomas Smith and Walsingham, between them, had prevented the taking of any serious steps for the release of the captive queen, in which, indeed, the French court had never showed much earnestness. Though allies in religion, there were many old jealousies between his most Christian and his Catholic majesty: the English envoys revived these feelings, and Mary's correspondence with the Duke of Alva was turned to good account. They told the French king and his mother that there were letters intercepted of the Queen of Scots to the duke, imploring for his assistance, and offering to send her son, Prince James, to be brought up in Spain, and proposing other things which would make a perpetual pique between England and Scotland, France and Spain; and they informed Cecil that King Charles had exclaimed, in acknowledging Mary's imprudence "Ah! the poor fool will never cease till she lose her head: in faith they will put her to death; I see it is her own fault and folly I see no remedy for it: I meant to help, but if she will not be helped, Je ne puis mais, that is, I cannot do withal." Charles had indeed requested that Mary might be sent to live in France; and had said that, by the ties of relationship, he was bound to secure to her a kinder and milder treatment. But the captive's sufferings were forgotten in the bright prospect of seeing one of his brothers married to ElizaHe agreed to leave her where she was, and began the arrangement of an alliance offensive and defensive with the English queen's able envoys, altogether disregarding the warning of his own ambassador, who had assured him that Elizabeth would never marry any one.

beth.

While these negotiations had been in progress the case of Mary had been still further complicated, the hatre 1 of Elizabeth increased, and the whole Protestant party in England thrown into agonies of alarm, by revelations of plots and conspiracies. In the month of April one Charles Bailly, a servant of the Queen of Scots, was seized at Dover as he was returning from the Duke of Alva with a packet of letters. The

"On le taxa de ce qu'ayant l'entrée, comme il a, dans la

chambre de la Reyne lorsqu elle est au lict, il Leicester) s'estoit ingéré de luy bailler la chemise au lieu de sa dame d'honneur,

et de s'azarder de luy mesme de la bayser, sans y estre convyé."

La Mothe Fendion. The ambassador says that, at the instigation

of the Earl of Arundel and others, the Duke of Norfolk had ventured to complain of these familiarities to the queen herself!

* Walsingham was instructed to say that Mary was kindly treated and liberally supplied with everything; but La Mothe

Fénélon had informed his court that she was harshly treated, in want of every comfort.

beth and her ministers sent Bailly to the Tower
and to the rack.' Under torture Bailly con-
fessed that he had received the packet from
Rudolfi, formerly an Italian banker in London,
and that it contained assurances that the Duke
of Alva entered into the captive queen's cause,
and approved of her plan for a foreign invasion
of England-that, if authorized by the King
of Spain, his master, he should be ready to co-
operate with 40 and 30. Bailly said he did not
know the parties designated by the ciphers 40
and 30, but that there was a letter in the packet
for the Bishop of Ross, desiring him to deliver
the other letters to the proper parties. Suspi-
cion immediately fell upon the Duke of Norfolk.
That nobleman had lain in the Tower from the
9th of October, 1569, till the 4th of August, 1570
(the day on which Felton was arraigned for the
affair of the bull of excommunication), when he
was removed in custody to one of his own houses,
in consequence of the plague having broken out
in the Tower. Some time before this delivery
he made the most humble submission to the
queen, beseeching her most gracious goodness
accept him again into favour to serve her in any
manner that it should please her to direct and
command. He acknowledged himself in fault for
that he did unhappily give ear to certain motions
in a cause of marriage to be prosecuted for him
with the Queen of Scots; "but surely," he adds,
"I never consented thereto into any respect,
save upon reasons that were propounded to in
duce me for your highness's benefit and surety."
He then solemnly binds himself to have nothing
more to do with the marriage or with anything
that concerns Queen Mary. Cecil 1 ad long since
assured the queen that it would be very difficult
to make high treason of anything Norfolk bad
done as yet. Of course the duke, though he
had been ten months a prisoner, had never been
brought to any trial, but only interrogated and
cross-questioned by the lords of the privy coun-
cil. Nor did he even now obtain much more
than a milder sort of imprisonment. He was
watched and closely warded in his own house by
Sir Henry Nevil; he was afterwards removed
to the house of another nobleman devoted to the
court, and then to another, and another, being
everywhere in custody or closely watched. He
petitioned the queen, Cecil, and others, to be re-
stored to his seat in the council;-this was re-
fused him; and it was a thing which the sove
reign, having the free choice of her counsellors,
might refuse without the infringement of law or
constitutional right. He requested that he might

home: we think surely, that we have done all that at this time may be done. Of Bannister with the rack, of Barker with the extreme fear of it, we suppose to have gotten all. Bannister, indeed, knoweth little. . . . Barker was common doer in the practice, but rather, it may seem, chosen for zeal than for wit." He then proceeds to tell the upright Cecil that he and, his coadjutors had been putting Barker's confessions into proper order—that is, they had been tampering with the evidence which they had procured by threatening a weak and silly man with the rack. Barker confessed sundry other things, in a most

be permitted to attend in his place in parliament; | said he, "good hope, at last, that we may come but this also was refused, and illegally, for he had been convicted of no treason, no crime by law. If Norfolk had been ever so well inclined to keep his engagement, this was certainly the way to make him break it in sheer desperation. Upon the arrest of Bailly he was more closely looked to; but some months elapsed before the matter was brought to his own door. At the end of August, 1571, one Brown, of Shrewsbury, carried to the privy council a certain bag full of money, which he said he had received from Hickford, the Duke of Norfolk's secretary, with directions to carry it to Bannister, the duke's steward. The lords opened the bag, and counted | confused way, which went to prove that Norfolk the money, which amounted to £600. But there was something else in the bag that gave them more trouble, in the shape of two tickets, or notes, written in cipher. As Brown named Hickford, the poor secretary was apprehended, and on the 2d of September, he deciphered the two notes, which, with the money, were destined for Lord Herries in Scotland, who was making fresh exertions there with her party in favour of the capfive queen. Sir Ralph Sadler was immediately sent for to guard the Duke of Norfolk, who was then at Howard House; where, on the 5th of September, on a strict examination, he denied all that Hickford had confessed. Two days afterwards he was committed to his old apartment in the Tower.' In the meanwhile Bannister, and Barker, another secretary of the duke's, had been arrested; and as the Bishop of Ross had long been in custody with the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Ely, and others, it was easy to lay hold of him. Hickford did not stop at betraying the key to the ciphers; he confessed many other things against his master the duke, without much pressing, and voluntarily offered to show some secret places in his house where his master had deposited letters. As the rest of Norfolk's servants were much attached to their master, and would confess nothing till they were tortured, or threatened with torture, it has been supposed by many that this Hickford had been for some time in the pay of the court. Bannister's fortitude and fidelity did not give way till he had suffered torture, but Barker's forsook him when he was shown the horrid rack. On the 20th of September Sir Thomas Smith, the matrimonial diplomatist, wrote to Cecil, now Lord Burghley, in a pleasant humour. "We have,"

'Cecil's Diary.

It appears that the Scotch bishop was not brought to London till the end of October, when he was removed from Ely, and

that he was not committed to the Tower till the month of November.-Ibid.

Cecil was created Baron Burghley in 1571. In 1572 he received the order of the Garter, and in the same year succeeded the Marquis of Winchester as lord high-treasurer, which office be held till his death.

had never intermitted his correspondence with the Scottish queen, neither during his first confinement in the Tower nor after his release from that prison—that he had corresponded with the friends of Mary in Scotland by means of the Bishop of Ross, and with the Duke of Alva by means of Rudolfi, who had once delivered to him a letter from the pope. Although Smith had asserted that Bannister knew little, they made his evidence declare a good deal, and so shaped it as to make it agree with that of Barker and Hickford. When it came to the turn of the Bishop of Ross to be questioned, that prelate was found deficient in the nerve and courage which he had recommended to Bailly; but it is much easier to excuse his want of fortitude than the atrocity of his inquisitors. The bishop claimed the privileges of an ambassador, asserting that, even if he had been somewhat implicated, he was not liable to their jurisdiction, being the representative of an independent sovereign; but Lord Burghley cut him short, by saying that he must answer or be put upon the rack.3 Then the bishop wavered, but still he did not confess until he was told that his depositions were merely required to satisfy the mind of Queen Elizabeth, and should not be used against the life of any man. The duke had continued to deny everything, as at first, "with such confidence and ostentation," say Sir Thomas Smith and Dr. Wilson, “that he did astonish us all, and we knew not how we should judge of him." But when the commissioners showed him the confession of Barker and his other servants, the letters of the Queen of Scots, of which they had obtained possession through Hickford and Barker, and the deposition of the Bishop of Ross, he exclaimed that he was betrayed and undone by his confidence in others, and began to confess to sundry minor charges; for he never allowed that he had contemplated treason against his sovereign. Upwards of fifty interrogatories were put to him in one day; but the purport of the

House of Commons, which was so very antiCatholic, there was a large and powerful section who agreed with Cartwright, and who were bold enough to show their discontent at the queen's church. In this present parliament they introduced seven bills for furthering the work of reformation and for extirpating what they considered as crying abuses. Elizabeth was furious; and, in her own way, she commanded Strickland, the mover of the bills, to absent himself from the house, and await the orders of her privy council. But Strickland's friends, who were beginning to feel their strength, moved that he should be called to the bar of the house, and there made to state the reason of his absence. And as this reason was no secret to them, they proceeded to declare that the privileges of parliament had been violated in his person; that, if such a measure was submitted to, it would form a dangerous precedent; that the queen, of herself, could neither make nor break the laws. This house, said they, which has the faculty of determining the right to the crown itself, is certainly competent to treat of religious ceremonies and church discipline. The ministers were astounded, and, after a consultation apart, the speaker proposed that the debate should be suspended. The house rose, but on the very next morning, Strickland re-appeared in his place, and was received with cheers! Elizabeth's caution had prevailed over her anger; but she felt as if her royal prerogative had been touched, and her antipathy to the Puritan party increased. In a political sense this was a great revival; and the base servility of parliament would hardly have been cured but for the religious enthusiasm. The case of Strickland was the first of many victories obtained over

talk of a remonstrance, but the House of Com- | impression by his polemical writings. In the mons' and the people were most zealously Protestant; and the Catholic lords in the upper house, though forming a considerable party, had not courage to do much. Elizabeth, however, voluntarily gave up her bill for the forced taking of the sacrament a thing horrible in Catholic eyes. But it was not every class of Protestants that was to rejoice and be glad. There was one class of them, great, and constantly increasing, dangerous from their enthusiasm, odious from their republican and democratic notions, that were feared equally with the Catholics, and hated much more by the queen. These were the Puritans-men who had imbibed the strict notions of Calvin-a sect which Elizabeth, however much she hated it herself, had forced upon Queen Mary in Scotland. This sect had always taught that the church of Christ ought to be separate from, and independent of the state-a doctrine that went to overthrow the queen's supremacy. But there was another heinous offence which Elizabeth could never forgive: they fraternized with the Puritans of Scotland; they regarded John Knox as an inspired apostle-Knox, who had written against "the monstrous regiment of women." The first striking instance of actual punishment inflicted upon any of them was in June, 1567, when a company of more than a hundred were seized during their religious exercises, and fourteen or fifteen of them were sent to prison. They behaved with much rudeness and self-sufficiency on their examination; but these defects became worse and worse under the goads of persecution. Yet, at this very moment, unknown to Elizabeth, three or four of her bishops were favourable to the non-conforming ministers, in whose scruples touching many ceremonies and practices in the church they partook; and in her very council | the despotic principle-the first great achievethe Earls of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Warwick, the Lord-keeper Bacon, Walsingham, Sadler, and Knollys, inclined from conviction to the Puritans, while Leicester, who saw that their numbers were rapidly increasing that in the great industrious towns, the strength of the peo-restrain her wrath. At her command, the Lordple, or tiers état, they were becoming strongest -intrigued with them underhand, in the view of furthering his own ambitious projects. In the preceding year Thomas Cartwright, the Lady Margaret professor of divinity at Cambridge, and a man of virtue, learning, and a ready eloquence, had electrified numerous audiences by inculcating the unlawfulness of any form of church government except the Presbyterian, which he maintained to have been that instituted by the first apostles; and the same powerful Puritan soon began to make a wider and more lasting

By the statute 5 Eliz. c. 1, § 16, Roman Catholics had been excluded from the House of Commons.

ment of a class of men who, in their evil and in their good, worked out the cause of constitutional liberty to a degree which very few of them, even at a later period, foresaw. At the end of the session not all Elizabeth's prudence could

keeper Bacon informed the commons that their conduct had been strange, unbecoming, and undutiful; that, as they had forgotten themselves, they should be otherwise remembered; and that the queen's highness did utterly disallow and condemn their folly, in meddling with things not appertaining to them, nor within the capacity of their understanding. But this only confirmed the Puritans' suspicion that Elizabeth, in conjunction with some of her bishops, really thought of creating herself into a sort of Protestant pope, that was to decide as by a Divine inspiration and legation in all matters relating to the next world.

amorous intimacy with Sir Christopher Hatton | Bishop of Ross ingeniously contrived to exchange besides Walsingham was instructed to complain of these foul reports; and Catherine de' Medici was fain to protest she had never believed them.

chambre de la Reyne lorsqu'elle est au lict, il (Leicester) s'estoit ingéré de luy bailler la chemise au lieu de sa dame d'honneur, et de s'azarder de luymesme de la bayser, sans y estre convyé."-stored to his seat in the council;-this was reLa Mothe Fencion. The ambassador says that, at the instigation