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CHAPTER XIII. CIVIL AND MILITARY HISTORY.-A.D. 1558-1560.

ELIZABETH.-ACCESSION, A.D. 1558-DEATH, A.D. 1630.

Elizabeth proclaimed queen-Popular joy at her accession-Her ambiguous conduct about the settlement of religion -Pageants at her entrance into London-Her coronation-She is urged to declare her intentions about religion -Enactments of parliament for its settlement-Dissatisfaction of the Papists-Elizabeth rejects the advice of parliament to marry-Protestantism re-established in England-Penalties inflicted on Papists-Deprivation and imprisonment of the Popish bishops-Elizabeth's legitimacy denied by the Guises-Reformation in ScotlandEffects of John Knox's preaching-Demolition of abbeys and monasteries-Mary Stuart becomes Queen of France Contention between Mary of Guise, Regent of Scotland, and the Protestants-Elizabeth aids the Scottish Protestants-Negotiations between them and her ministers-The contest maintained in Scotland by French and English money--Leith fortified by French troops against the Scottish Protestants-The Scots aided by troops from England-Siege of Leith-Death of Mary of Guise-Capitulation of Leith-Suitors to Elizabeth for marriage.

T the time of Mary's demise the parliament was sitting. Her death was concealed from the public for some hours; but, before noon, Heath, Archbishop of York, who had been lord-chancellor since Gardiner's decease, went down to the House of Lords, and sent immediately to the speaker of the commons, desiring him, with the knights and burgesses, to repair without delay to the upper house, in order to give their assent in a case of great importance. Heath

then announced in due form that God had called to his mercy the late sovereign lady Queen Mary-a heavy and grievous woe, but relieved by the blessing God had left them in a true, loyal, and right inheritress to the crown -the Lady Elizabeth, second daughter to the late sovereign lord of noble memory, King Henry VIII., and sis-, ter unto the said late queen. Not a challenge was raised to her title: the Lady Elizabeth was acknowledged in both houses, which resounded with the shouts of "God save Queen Elizabeth, and long and happy may she reign!" and in the course of the day she was proclaimed amidst lively demonstrations of popular joy. The bells of all the churches were set ringing; tables were spread in the streets, "where was plentiful

eating, drinking, and making merry;" and at night bonfires were lighted in all directions, and the skies were reddened by flames which had not consumed human victims.' Elizabeth was at Hatfield when she received the news of her easy accession. She fell upon her knees, exclaiming, in Latin, "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." On the following day several noblemen of the late queen's council repaired to her: she gave them a kind reception,

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but presently showed her decided preference for Sir William Cecil -the astute, the most politic Cecil-whom she instantly appointed principal secretary of state. On the 23d of November the queen removed from Hatfield, with a joyous escort of more than 1000 persons. At Highgate she was met by the bishops, who, kneeling, acknowledged their allegiance: she received them very graciously, giving to every one of them her hand to kiss with the exception of Bishop Bonner. At the foot of Highgate Hill she was very dutifully and honourably met by the lord-mayor and whole estate of London, and so conducted to the

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QUEEN ELIZABETH.-After Zucchero.

Stow; Holinshed; Burnet.

2 A Domino factum est istud, et est mirabile oculis nostris. These

words were afterwards stamped on her gold coin, a motto she have chosen God for my helper).

chose for her silver coin being Posui Deum adjutorem meu (I

Charter-house, then occupied as a town residence | would have left the Roman church undisturbed. by her friend Lord North. On the afternoon of She was too cool and calculating for a zealot; Monday, the 23th, she entered into the city at and even the fate of her mother, and the circumCripplegate, "and rode in state along by the Wall stances of her own birth, failed to excite her. In to the Tower :" here she remained till Monday, the fact, Elizabeth seems to have adopted, at the be5th of December, when she removed by water to ginning of her reign, the maxim recommended Somerset House. The ambiguity of her conduct by the most crafty of then living politicianswith regard to religion had been well studied: that the Protestants should be kept in hope, the and it appears quite certain that her compliances Papists not cast into despair.' Her real intenin the former reign had deceived many into a tions were kept a profound secret from the manotion that she was really the good Catholic she jority of her council; and her measures of change professed herself to be; otherwise it is difficult and reform were concerted only with Cecil and to understand the unanimity of the lords, for one or two others, who appear to have been most the majority of the upper house were Catholics, thoroughly aware of the fact that the Protestant and both the bishops and the lay peers would party had become infinitely stronger than the have been disposed to resist her claim if they Catholic. On the 13th of December the body of had expected that she would venture to disturb Mary was very royally interred in Westminster the established order of things. The mistake Abbey, with all the solemn funeral rites used by was confirmed by her retaining in her privy the Roman church, and a mass of requiem; and council no fewer than thirteen known and sincere on the 24th day of the same month a grand funeCatholics who had been members of that of her ral service for the late Emperor Charles V. was sister, and the seven new counsellors she ap- celebrated in the same place and in the same pointed, though probably known to herself to be manner, with a great attendance of Catholic zealous Protestants, did not bear that character priests, English and foreign, and of noble lords with the rest of the world; for one and all of and ladies of the realm. And yet, if we are to believe a letter written at the time, Elizabeth, on the very day after these obsequies, refused to hear mass in her own house.

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SIR WILLIAM CECT, afterwards Lord Burghley.
From a rare print by Vertue.

them, like her favourite minister Cecil, had
shrunk under the fiery bigotry of Mary, and
had conformed to the Roman Church. Even
decency demanded some little time, but policy
required more; and we feel convinced that if it
had not been established beyond the reach of a
doubt that the Catholics had lost ground im-
mensely, and were no longer the majority of the
nation, Elizabeth, who was never in her heart a
thorough Protestant-who scarcely went farther
with the Reformers than her father had done-

On the 12th of January the queen took her barge, and went down the river, being attended by the lord-mayor and citizens, and greeted with peals of ordnance, with music, and many triumphant shows on the water. She landed at the Tower; but, this time, it was not as a criminal, at the Traitors' Gate, but as a triumphant queen preparing for her coronation. Upon the morrow there was a creation of peers: it was not numerous, but Henry Carey, brother to Lady Knowles, and son to Mary Boleyn, her majesty's aunt, was included in it under the title of Lord Hunsdon. On the morrow, being the 14th of January, 1559, the queen rode with great majesty out of the Tower. The lord-mayor and citizens had been lavish of their loyalty and their money; the artists had exhausted their ingenuity and invention; and all the streets through which the procession passed on its way to Westminster were furnished with stately pageants, sumptuous shows, and cunning devices. The figures of the queen's grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, were brought upon the stage, and Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, with a glorious forgetfulness of the past, were seen walking lovingly together. Prophecies and Latin verses were prodigally expended on the queen; nor was there a parsimony of English verse or rhyme. In another pageant Time led forth his daughter Truth, and Truth, greeting her majesty, presented to her an English 1 Sir Ralph Sadler.

Bible. In the last pageant of all there stood "a | restorer over the house of Israel."" Gog and Maseeinly and meek personage, richly apparelled in gog, deserting their posts in Guildhall, stood to parliament robes, with a sceptre in her hand, over honour the queen, one on each side of Temple Bar, whose head was written 'Deborah, the judge and supporting a wondrous tablet of Latin verse,

STATE BARGE OF THE PERIOD, AND WATER PROCESSION.-From a print by Vischer.

from re-lighting the fires at Smithfield. Yet, at the same time, to the scandal of all Protestants, she forbade the destruction of images, kept her crucifix and holy water in her private chapel, and strictly prohibited preaching on controversial points generally, and all preaching whatsoever at Paul's Cross, where, be it said, neither

and good-will toward men.

which expounded to her majesty the hidden sense of all the pageants in the city.2 Her behaviour during this day was popular in the extreme; and from the beginning to the end of her reign she possessed the art of delighting the people, when she thought necessary, with little condescensions, smiles, and cheerful words. On the following day, being Sunday, the 15th of January, Eliza-sect had been in the habit of preaching peace beth was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Dr. Oglethorpe, Bishop of Carlisle, and afterwards she dined in Westminster Hall. The ceremony of the coronation was regulated strictly in the ancient manner of the most Catholic times, but there was one remarkable circumstance attending it. Either from a suspicion of the course she intended to pursue, or from a somewhat tardy recollection that, by the laws of the Roman church, Elizabeth was not legitimate, or in consequence of orders received from Rome since the death of Mary and their congratulatory visit to Elizabeth at Highgate, every one of the bishops, with the exception of Oglethorpe, refused to perform the coronation service. From whatever cause it might proceed, this refractoriness of the bishops was a great political mistake on the part of the Catholics.3

On the very day after her coronation the Protestants pressed her for a declaration of her intentions as to religion. They must have felt alarmed at the Popish celebrations in the Abbey; but it was some time before the cautious queen would in any way commit herself. Before this application, however, Elizabeth had taken the important step of authorizing the reading of the Liturgy in English, and had shown at least a fixed determination to prevent the Catholics

1 This rare work of Vischer, Hollar's predecessor, is the earliest delineation of a royal procession by water. The thistle and royal arms of England on the banner and drapery of the principal barge, are probably the insignia of James I.; but the fashion of those vessels remained unchanged from the time of Elizabeth nearly to the present century. Four barges contain guards with partizans; and a fifth, which precedes the state barge, and is

There was an additional cause for the queen's slowness and circumspection. Upon the death of her sister the English exiles for religious opinions flocked back to their country with a zeal sharpened by persecution. Of these men many would have carried the Reformation wholly into the path of Calvin and Zwingle, being disposed, after their theological studies in Switzerland, to dissent widely from the Anglican church as established in the reign of Edward VI.; and, what was not of less importance, some of them thought that the republican system, which they had seen to suit the little cantons among the Alps, would be a preferable form of government for England, and they were well furnished with texts of Scripture to prove the uselessness and wickedness of royalty. In a moment of indecision the queen had directed Sir Edward Carne, her sister's ambassador at Rome, to notify her accession to the pope; and the Protestants must have been delighted and re-assured when Paul IV. hastily replied that he looked upon her as illegitimate, and that she ought therefore to lay down the government, and expect what he might decide. After this, she could not be expected to become an adherent of Popery.

Ten days after the coronation (on the 25th of connected by a tow line, holds a band of four musicians, trumpeters and drummers. 2 Holinshed; Store.

3 Even the Bishop of Carlisle reluctantly consented to put the crown on her head. At her coronation, Elizabeth, of course, partook of the mass; but it appears from one account that she had forbidden the elevation of the host, and that this was probably the cause of the bishops refusing to crown her.

January) Elizabeth met her first parliament, with | ration of all such clergymen as had been deprived

a wise resolution of leaving them to settle the religion of the state, merely giving out, through the ahle Cecil, and the scarcely less able Sir Nicholas Bacon, now keeper of the seals, what were her real wishes. Lords and commons showed a wonderfully eager desire, as they had done in the days of her imperious father, to adapt themselves to precisely such a church regimen as she in her wisdom might propose. They enacted that the first-fruits and tenths should be restored to the crown-that the queen, notwithstanding her sex,' should in right of her legitimacy, be supreme head of the church that the laws made concerning religion in Edward's time should be reestablished in full force-that his Book of Common Prayer in the mother-tongue should be restored and used to the exclusion of all others in all places of worship. The Act of Supremacy, though the most ridiculous or the most horrible of all to the Catholics on the Continent, met with no opposition whatever; but nine temporal peers and the whole bench of bishops protested in the lords against the bill of uniformity, establishing the Anglican Liturgy, notwithstanding the pains which had been taken to qualify it, and to soften certain passages most offensive to Catholic ears. A rubric directed against the doctrine of the real presence was omitted, to the avoidance of the long-standing and bitter controversies on this head.

One of the first measures taken up by Queen Mary had been to vindicate the fame of her mother Catherine of Aragon and her own legitimacy; and it was expected that Elizabeth, if only out of filial reverence, would pursue the same course for her mother, Anne Boleyn, who, as the law stood, had never been a lawful wife; but she carefully avoided all discussion on this point, and satisfied herself with an act declaratory, in general terms, of her right of succession to the throne, in which act all the bishops agreed.

for marriage during the late reign. The last bill was given up by command of Elizabeth herself, who was not Protestant enough to overcome a prejudice against married priests, and who, to the end of her days, could never reconcile herself to married bishops. The two other bills also failed, for the bishops whom it was proposed to restore were married men; and as for the commission for a canonical code, Elizabeth entertained a salutary dread of the zealots.

It was not possible altogether to avoid recrimination. Nor did the Catholics-now the weaker party-on all occasions submit in silence to such castigation. Dr. Story, who had acted as royal proctor in the proceedings against Cranmer, and who had given other proofs of his zeal and intolerance, had the boldness to lament that he and others had not been more vehement in executing the laws against heresy. "It was my counsel,” said this doughty priest, "that heretics of eminence should be plucked down as well as the ordinary sort, nor do I see anything in all those affairs which ought to make me feel shame or sorrow. My sole grief, indeed, is, that we laboured only about the little twigs: we should have struck at the roots." It was understood that he meant hereby-what, indeed, had been proposed by several-that Elizabeth should have been removed out of the way while her sister lived. Soon after delivering this speech Dr. Story escaped out of the kingdom, and fixed himself at Antwerp under the protection of the Spaniards. There he ought to have been left, particularly as his notions were every day becoming less dangerous; but Elizabeth caused him to be kidnapped, to be brought over to England by stratagem, and executed as a traitor—a proceeding as base as that of her sister Mary with regard to that zealous Protestant refugee Sir John Cheke. Bishop Bonner, notwithstanding the unequivocal marks of the queen's displeasure, attended at his post in parliament, and even presented to the Lord-keeper Bacon certain articles drawn up by the convocation, and endeavoured, in part by ingenious compromises, in part by more open proceedings, to limit the authority of the queen, and maintain that of the pope, in matters of faith and ecclesiastical discipline. Bacon received the said articles courteously, but no further notice was taken of them, and the convocation, after a series of adjournments, separated in dismay. The way in which the parliament had recognized her title was highly satisfactory to Elizabeth; but they were less for

Acts were passed empowering the queen upon the avoidance of any bishopric to exchange her tenths and parsonages appropriate within the diocese for an equivalent portion of the landed estates belonging to the see. But the more active of the Protestants were checked and disappointed when they brought a bill into the commons for the restoration to their sees of Bishops Barlow, Scory, and Coverdale; another, for the revival of former statutes, passed in the reign of Edward VI., authorizing the crown to nominate a commission for drawing up a complete body of Church of England canon law; and a third for the resto-tunate in their treatment of another high ques

The ambassador of a Catholic court wrote, with a ludicrous horror, that he had seen the supreme head of the English church -dancing! 2 Burnet; Strype; Blunt.

3 Harrington, in his Brief View, says, "Cæteris paribus, and sometimes imparibus too, she preferred the single man before the married." • Holinshed; Strype: Burnet.

At this moment Elizabeth had received one matrimonial proposal, the strangest of the many that were made to her. When she announced to King Philip the death of his wife and her own accession, that monarch, regardless of canonical laws, made her an instant offer of his own hand; for, so long as he could obtain a hold upon England, he cared little whether it was through a Mary or an Elizabeth. With a duplicity which was the general rule of her conduct she gave Philip a certain degree of hope, for she was very anxious to recover Calais through his means, and England was still involved in a war both with France and Scotland on his account. It would besides have been dangerous to give the Spaniard any serious offence at this moment.

tion. In the course of this session a deputation | would rely on her determination of never marrywas sent to her majesty by the commons with ing, she assured them that at all events she would an address, "the principal matter whereof most never choose a husband but one who should be specially was to move her grace to marriage, as careful for the realm and their safety as she whereby to all their comforts they might enjoy herself was; and she made an end of a very long the royal issue of her body to reign over them." speech by saying “And for me it shall be suffiElizabeth received the deputation in the great cient that a marble stone declare that a queen, gallery of her palace at Westminster, called the having reigned such a time, lived and died a Whitehall; and when the speaker of the House virgin."1 of Commons had solemnly and eloquently set forth the message, she delivered a remarkable answer the first of her many public declarations of her intention to live and die a virgin queen: "From my years of understanding, knowing myself a servitor of Almighty God, I chose this kind of life, in which I do yet live, as a life most acceptable unto him, wherein I thought I could best serve him, and with most quietness do my duty unto him. From which my choice, if either ambition of high estate offered unto me by marriages (whereof I have records in this presence), the displeasure of the prince, the eschewing the danger of mine enemies, or the avoiding the peril of death (whose messenger, the prince's indignation, was no little time continually present before mine eyes, by whose means if I knew, or do justly suspect, I will not now utter them; or, if the whole cause were my sister herself, I will not now charge the dead), could have drawn or dissuaded me, I had not now remained in this virgin's estate wherein you see me. But so constant have I always continued in this my determination that (although my words and youth may seem to some hardly to agree together), yet it is true that to this day I stand free from any other meaning that either I have had in times past or have at this present. In which state and trade of living wherewith I am so thoroughly acquainted God hath so hitherto preserved me, and hath so watchful an eye upon me, and so hath guided me and led me by the hand, as my full trust is, he will not suffer me to go alone." After these somewhat roundabout, ambiguous, and ascetic expressions-which were anti-Protestant, inasmuch as they showed a preference for a single life—she gave the commons a foretaste of that absolute and imperative tone which she soon adopted :-"The manner of your petition," said she, "I do like, and take in good part, for it is simple, and containeth no limitation of place or person. If it had been otherwise I must have misliked it very much, and thought it in you a very great presumption, being unfit and altogether unmeet to require them that may command." In still plainer terms she told them that it was their duty to obey, and not to take upon themselves to bind and limit her in her proceedings, or even to press their advice upon her. As if doubting whether the commons

On the 8th of May, Elizabeth's first parliament was dissolved, and on the 15th of the same month, the bishops, deans, and other churchmen of note, were summoned before the queen and her privy council, and there admonished to make themselves and their dependants conformable to the statutes which had just been enacted. Archbishop Heath replied by reminding her majesty of her sister's recent reconciliation with Rome, and of her own promise not to change the religion which she found by law established; and he told her that his conscience would not suffer him to obey her present commands. All the bishops took precisely the same course as Heath; and the government, which evidently had expected to win over the majority of them, was startled at their unanimous opposition. To terrify them into compliance, certain papers, which had been sealed up in the royal closet at the death of the late queen, were produced by advice of the Earl of Sussex; and these documents, which had lain dormant during two short reigns, were found, or were made, to contain proofs that Heath, Bonner, and Gardiner, during the protectorate of Somerset, had carried on secret intrigues with Rome, with the view of overthrowing the English government of that time. But the bishops, feeling themselves screened by two general pardons from the crown, continued as firm as ever; and the council wisely determined that these papers could not fairly be acted upon, and resolved to proceed merely upon the oath of supremacy, which they saw the prelates were determined to refuse at all

Holinshed.

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