with few privations, and no personal hardships | plished man to die in the forty-seventh year of to endure. A tender heart might have been racked and tortured by the fate of others; and in one particular case the royally dull feelings of Elizabeth must have been touched. Sir John Cheke, one of the finest scholars of that periodone of the best of men if he had risen above the intolerance and persecuting spirit of his age, had been preceptor to her brother King Edward, and had assisted in her own education. Sir John got free from the Tower, into which he was thrown for the part he had taken in the affair of Lady Jane Grey, but all his landed property was confiscated. Having obtained her majesty's permission to travel on the Continent for a limited period, he went to Switzerland. Led by his love of classical lore, he crossed the Alps into Italy, and even visited Rome, the head-quarters of the religion which he had attacked. In the beginning of 1556 he reached Strasburg, whence he addressed a letter to his dear friend and brotherin-law, Sir William Cecil, imploring him to hold fast his Protestant faith. From Strasburg Sir John Cheke privately repaired on a visit to his two learned friends Lord Paget and Sir John Mason, who were then Mary's ambassadors in Flanders. Both these men were recent court converts to Catholicism, and Paget had testified great zeal. On his return, between Brussels and Antwerp, Cheke, with his companion Sir Peter Carew, was arrested by a provost-marshal of King Philip, bound hand and foot, thrown into a cart, and conveyed to a vessel which was about to sail for England. It seems that his leave of absence had expired, and that there was no new political offence to be alleged against him except his not returning home at the time fixed. But in these cruel proceedings the queen and her husband, and the zealots of their party, aimed at a high object. Cheke, though a layman, had done almost as much as Cranmer in consolidating the Protestant church, and it was resolved to force him to recant. Gagged and muffled, he was thrown into the Tower, and, to escape the stake and the miseries to which he was subjected, he signed three ample recantations, and publicly proclaimed his acceptance of all the tenets and doctrines of the Roman church. But this was not deemed price enough for a liberation from prison to shame and obloquy: he was made to applaud the heavenly mercy of his persecutors; nay, it is said that he was obliged to take his seat on the bench by the side of Bishop Bonner, and assist that English inquisitor in sentencing his brother Protestants to the flames at Smithfield. Shame, remorse, and affliction caused this accom of Noailles, the French ambassador. The Venetian says that, though Elizabeth was living Catholically (rivendo Cattolicamente), yet it was thought that she was only dissimulating. his age of a death more terrible than burning. 1 Burnet. 2 Ibid. blazing from one end of Europe to the other; and terrible as was the brief rage of Mary's reign, England, as compared with most other Christian countries, was singularly fortunate.' one of emperor, which it was not in his power to bestow." He chose for his retreat the monastery of St. Just, situated on the frontiers of Castile and Portugal, near to Placentia. He survived Mary's care for the souls of her subjects did about two years, chiefly occupying his time in not improve their morals. Without going to the cultivating a little garden, reading divinity, makfull length of some Protestant writers, we may ing clocks, and trying experiments and invenassert, upon good evidence, that crime was on tions in mechanics. Many things are related of the increase, and that capital offences, indepen-him in his retreat; one of the best, which is prodently of those of a religious kind, greatly multi-bably as true as any of them, being that, upon plied. Fifty-two persons were condemned and finding he could never make two clocks to go executed at Oxford at one assize. Loathsome exactly alike, he deplored the pains he had taken, offences re-appeared: the highways became again and the blood he had shed, in order to make insecure. On more than one occasion men of all mankind think and believe in one way.3 rank became thieves and cut-purses. In this unlucky year London and other cities were visited by the "hot burning fevers" which were particularly fatal to old persons. In the following year the country was afflicted by an extreme dearth, and pestilence stalked in the rear of famine. Plots and conspiracies, also, were not wanting, for which such abundant causes were ministered in the violation both of civil and religious liberty. A.D. 1557. Mary's husband Philip was now King of Spain, and absolute Lord of Naples, Sicily, the Milanese, the Low Countries, the Indies, and other fair and fertile countries, which well deserved a better master. This had not happened by the death, but by the voluntary resignation of his father Charles V. The emperor and king, who had been for forty years the mightiest potentate in Europe, becoming suddenly sick of worldly dominion "Cast crowns for rosaries away- Though only fifty-five years old, and with his According to Fra Paolo, in the Netherlands alone 50,000 persons were hanged, beheaded, buried alive, or burned on account of religion; and in France, even before the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the number of victims who suffered death in the same cause was to be stated, not, as in England, by hundreds, but by thousands. In Germany, besides the happier tens of thousands who perished in battle, fighting for the privilege of worshipping God in their own way, thousands died on the scaffold, in the flames, and in dungeons; and, as yet, the liberty of conscience was insecure. * Charles had secured it already to his brother Ferdinand, who became the Emperor Ferdinand I. 3 De Thou Bayle. The real Inquisition was first established at Rome by the It was not always that the most Catholic king enjoyed the favour of the court of Rome; for even in that high quarter political considerations or personal animosities continually interfered with the spiritual scheme. Paul IV., who, as a bigot, and as the first that introduced the tribunal of the Inquisition in Rome, might have been expected to lean towards the congenial fanaticism of Philip, hated the Spaniards with an ancient and hereditary hatred, and, as a necessary consequence, favoured the French and their party in Italy; for, without the arms of France, the pope saw no possibility of overthrowing the dominion of Spain, which, be it said, was oppressive, and barbarizing, and odious to the Italian people. The great ability of the Emperor Charles had imposed respect; but Paul thought the accession of Philip, in such unusual circumstances, too good an opportunity to be lost, and, before the new king was well settled on his throne, the pontiff opened negotiations with the French. He set on foot plots and conspiracies in Naples, his native country, which was groaning under the weight of Spanish misrule; and he finally arranged a grand plan, by which the French king was to expel Philip by force of arms, and take possession of the Neapolitan kingdom, of the Milanese, and the other states in Upper Italy, which his ancestors had claimed, and several times held, though for very short periods. But Paul had formed an erroneous estimate of Philip, who was ever vigilant and suspicious, and who soon obtained intelligence of the secret manœuvres in Italy. In an opportune moment, at the end of the year 1555, he sent the Duke of Alva to take advice of Paul IV., then only Cardinal Caraffa, a Neapolitan, under the pontificate of Paul III. It was rendered frightful by its rigorous laws and novel forms of procedure; but it did not obtain all its monstrous vigour until the election of Paul IV.; and the first thing the Romans did after the death of this odious pontiff (which happened in 1559) was to burn the tribunal of the Holy Office, to liberate all the prisoners for matters of religion, and to raze the prisons of the Inquisition to the ground. It is a great mistake to suppose that this horrid tribunal was most powerful at Rome. Many of the popes detested it. The true scene of its might was not beyond the Alps, but the Pyreneesin Spain and Portugal. In a considerable part of Italy it was never established at all. accident. Among the numerous English refugees in France was one Thomas Stafford, a person of some rank and influence, who entertained the notion of revolutionizing England. With only thirty-two persons he crossed over from France, landed at Scarborough in Yorkshire, and surprised the castle there: but, on the third day they were all made prisoners by the Earl of Westmoreland, without effusion of blood; Stafford, Richard Saunders, and three or four others, among whom was a Frenchman, were sent up to London, committed to the Tower, and there tortured into a confession that Henry II., the French king, had aided and abetted their enterprise; which was not altogether improbable, as the French court knew what Philip and the Spaniards were doing in London, as well as the devotion of Mary to her husband's interests. Upon the 28th of May, Stafford was beheaded on Tower-hill, and on the morrow three of his companions were drawn to Tyburn and there executed. Richard Saunders, who had probably been a traitor, or had divulged more than the rest, received the queen's pardon. Making the most of what had happened, the queen accused the French court of encouraging many traitorous bands of her subjects-of giving an asylum to her out upon himself the government of Naples. Before | But the Spanish interests were served by a strange this, Alva was governor of Milan, and now he had the supreme command of the whole of Italy that appertained to the Spaniards, whose armies were reinforced in order to meet the French (then preparing to cross the Alps under the Duke of Guise) and keep down the Italian people, who, in many places, were ready to rise. The pope was in a paroxysm of rage, which did not permit him to wear an almost useless mask. He arrested and threw into prison Garcilasso de la Vega, who was then at Rome as ambassador from Philip in his quality of King of England; and he imprisoned and put to the torture De Tassis, the Roman postmaster, for passing certain letters written in the Spanish interest. The Duke of Alva, who soon afterwards massacred the Protestants in heaps in the Low Countries, showed little delicacy towards this turbulent head of the Catholic church: anticipating his movements, he marched an army across the Neapolitan frontiers into the Roman States. The Spaniards spread confusion, destruction, and terror through the whole Papal territory: people fled from the city of Rome, expecting another sack, and not doubting that the troops of his most Catholic majesty would prove as bloodthirsty and rapacious as the auxiliaries under the Constable Bourbon: but Paul IV., who had the fierce spirit of a pope of the four-laws, who were maintained in France with annual teenth century, would not listen to terms of accommodation; and though one of his nephews, the Cardinal Caraffa, had a conference with the Duke of Alva, they concluded nothing but a truce for forty days. In the meanwhile, notwithstanding a solemn truce for five years, which still existed between France and Spain, the Duke of Guise had led an army through the passes of the Alps, and was looking forward with bright and not unreasonable hopes to the conquest of Lombardy. This was the state of affairs in Italy towards the end of the year 1556. In the month of March of the present year (1557) King-most difficult to do her husband's bidding; Philip gratified his wife Mary with a short visit, and he entered London in some state, being accompanied by the queen and divers nobles of the real:n.2 But it was soon seen that his most Catholic majesty had not come for love, the sole object of his visit being to drive Mary and her council into a declaration of war against France. This, however, was not so easy a matter as he had fancied: Cardinal Pole and nearly the whole of the council opposed the measure; and even such of the ministry as were more compliant dreaded the effects of a war with France, which was sure to be accompanied by a war with Scotland, in the present deranged state of the finances and evident ill-humour of the people. 1 Giannone, Storia Civile del Regno di Napoli; Summonte; De Thou. 2 Stow; Holinshed. pensions, contrary to treaty-of sending over to the castle of Scarborough, Stafford and others in French ships, provided with armour, munition, and money; and on the 7th of June she made a formal declaration of war-perhaps the first declaration of the kind thoroughly unpopular with the nation. Having obtained what he wanted, and earnestly recommended the instant raising of troops to act as auxiliaries to his own army on the northern frontiers of France, Philip took his departure on the 6th of July, and, happily for England, he never returned! It was difficult but, with great exertions, Mary levied 1000 horse, 4000 foot, and 2000 pioneers, and sent them over to Flanders in the end of July, under the command of the Earl of Pembroke, with the Lord Robert Dudley, for his master of the ordnance.3 Amidst this din of war, the Lady Anne of Cleves died very quietly at Chelsea. She left a good name behind her among the people, and was buried like a princess royal in Westminster Abbey. Having joined the bands of Flemings, Germans, Italians, Dalmatians, Illyrians, Croats, and others, that formed the army of King Philip, the English marched with this mixed host, under the supreme command of Elizabeth's rejected 3 Stow; Holinshed. suitor, the Duke of Savoy, one of the most ap- | guise. When Philip obtained a hint of the inproved captains of those times; and they soon tended project of Guise, he offered to reinforce distinguished themselves by their bravery in a the garrison of Calais with a body of Spanish fierce battle under the walls of St. Quentin, troops; but the English council, with a jealousy where many of the chief nobility of France were certainly not groundless, declined this offer. But either slain or taken prisoners; and such a con- at the same time they were unable to make any sternation was spread among the French, that it ready effort themselves, even when warned of the was thought by many that Philip might have danger: the English navy had been allowed to go taken Paris had he marched immediately upon to wreck and ruin :' to victual the remnant of it, it. But Philip was always wary and cautious; to send the troops to Flanders, the queen had nor does he appear ever to have contemplated seized all the corn she could find in Norfolk and the doing of much more than the forcing of the Suffolk, without paying for it: to meet the exDuke of Guise to come out of Italy. He sat penses of that expedition she had forced the city down before the town of St. Quentin, which made of London to lend or give her £60,000; she a gallant resistance for seventeen days, during had levied before the legal time the second year's which the French had time to fortify Paris, and subsidy voted by parliament; she had issued to call up troops from the provinces. But an many privy seals to procure loans from people invading army of 60,000 men was so formidable of property; she had, in short, exhausted her that they were obliged even to recal the Duke of means for her husband, and at the moment of Guise, and, as Philip had calculated, that general, crisis she appears to have dreaded calling her who had advanced to the frontiers of Naples, hurried back across the Alps. To prolong the campaign in an easy manner, Philip ordered the Spaniards, English, Croats, and the rest, to lay siege to Ham and Cattelet, which places they took, and then, on the approach of winter, they retired into quarters in Flanders. In fact, the coming of Guise out of Italy, which was so profitable to Philip, was a mortal blow to Mary; for that active commander, after securing the northern frontiers, resolved to sit down before Calais in the depth of winter, and vigorously, and with a large army, commence a siege which, for ages, had been deemed utterly hopeless. Calais, which the English considered as impregnable, and as perfectly secure from an assault during the THE FORT FORT S E Ꭺ THE To Flanders.y Gravelines & Dunnario! winter, had generally its garrison reduced at that season; but in the present year, through want of money and the efforts made to serve Philip, that reduction had amounted to twothirds of the whole force. In the month of November two skilful Italian engineers, Strozzi and Delbene, reconnoitred the town and all the forts adjacent, having gained admittance in dis The whole of the blame is not to be laid to Mary's government. The navy had been much diminished, and shamefully neglected during the reign of Edward VI., when all the servants of government, from the highest to the lowest, were addicted to gaspillage. *The above plan of Calais is derived from a curious Italian parliament together to ask for more money. And thus were the weak garrison and the English citizens and merchants of Calais left to their fate, almost without a single effort being made for their relief. A.D. 1558. On New Year's Day Guise entered the English pale; and, sending one part of his army along the downs to Risebank, work, De' disegni delle piu illustri Città et fortezza del monde. . . raccolta da M. G. Ballino. Venetiis, 1568. This work, it will be observed, was published only ten years after the siege of Calais by the Duke of Guise, and the plan may, therefore, be presumed to represent the actual extent and fortifications of the town at the time it was lost by the English. he, with the other, and an unusually heavy train | destroy them fail. After passing the night in the of artillery, marched towards Nieulay, or Newn- castle, Guise sent on his men to the assault of the ham Bridge, and, attacking in force an outwork town, which he fancied would be taken with at the village of St. Agatha, at the head of the causeway, drove the garrison into Newnham, and took possession of that outwork. The English lord-deputy Wentworth feeling that, from the miserable weakness of the garrison, he could spare no assistance for the defence of the other outworks, ordered them to be evacuated as soon as they should be attacked. This was done at Newnham Bridge, whence the captain retired with his soldiers into Calais; but the outwork of Risebank surrendered with its garrison. Thus, by the third morning of the siege, the Duke of Guise had made himself master of two most important posts, of which one commanded the entrance of the harbour, the other the approach across the marshes from Flanders. The next day, he battered the walls near to the Watergate, in order to make the English believe that he intended to force an entrance at that point, and cause them "to have the less regard unto the defence of the castle," which was the weakest part of the town, and the place "where the French were ascertained by their espials to win easy entry;" and while the garrison lost time in repairing a false breach made by the Watergate, Guise suddenly brought fifteen double cannons to bear upon the castle, which, with astounding negligence on the part of the English government, had been suffered to fall into such decay that it tottered at the first cannon shot, and a wide breach was made in it before evening. When that was done, Guise detached one body to occupy the quay, and another, under Strozzi, to effect a lodgment on the other side of the harbour; but Strozzi was beaten back with loss. About eight in the evening, at ebb-tide, De Grammont was thrown forward with some 300 arquebusiers to reconnoitre the great breach in the castle. The ditch was broad and deep, but the water was low, having been partially drained off, and the French had brought up by sea a great quantity of hurdles and other materials to facilitate the passage. | but would grant none but the harshest terms of Upon Grammont's report that the breach seemed capitulation.' to be abandoned, Guise threw himself into the ditch, and forded it, not finding the water much above his girdle: his men followed in great haste -and happy men were they to enter the rotten old castle without resistance. The Lord Wentworth, as the best thing that could be done, had withdrawn the English soldiers, had made a train with certain big barrels of gunpowder, and now anticipated the pleasure of blowing the castle and the Frenchmen into the air together. But this train was badly laid; the French, coming up out of the ditch with their clothes wringing wet, moistened the gunpowder, and saw the attempt to CALAIS, THE OLD BELFRY, &c. From Voyages dans l'Ancienne France. equal ease; but the marshal, Sir Anthony Agar, with a small body of brave men, repulsed the French, and drove them back to the castle. Sir Anthony next tried to drive them from that position, and persevered till he himself, his son and heir, and some fourscore officers and men, were laid low in front of the castle-gate. So miserably weak was the garrison, that this small loss of men was decisive. Having in vain expected aid from Dover-having received no tidings, nor so much as a sign-the lord-deputy on that same night demanded a parley. The French acceded, "About two of the clock next day at afternoon, being the 7th of January, a great number of the meanest sort were suffered to pass out of the town in safety, being guarded through the army with a number of Scottish light-horsemen, who used the English very well and friendly; and after this, every day for the space of three or four days together, there were sent away divers companies of them till all were avoided, those only excepted that were appointed to be reserved for prisoners, as the Lord Wentworth and others. There were in the town of Calais 500 English Holinrhed. |