and national, and she herself, in the words of her own minister, Robert Cecil, being more than a man, and, in truth, sometimes less than a woman.' She not only dreaded the claims to the succession of Mary Queen of Scots, but she was also most jealous of the weaker rights of the line of Suffolk, and she persecuted the Lady Catherine Grey, the heiress of this house, with an unrelenting spirit. A.D. 1562. Elizabeth was made to feel, in many ways, that the Catholic princes of Europe regarded her and her proceedings with an evil eye, and to suspect that constant machinations were on foot in France to expel her from the throne, and to seat Mary Queen of Scots in her place. She, therefore, resolved to ally herself with the Protestant powers on the Continent, and to avail herself to the utmost of the religious animosities of men both at home and abroad. The persecutions practised by Philip and the French court made it easy for her to put herself in a position of great might and reverence, as the head and protector of the Protestant religion. Her course was shaped out by the instinct of self-preservation, and not by any religious zeal; and in pursuing it she was inevitably induced to encourage revolted subjects in their wars with their governments-thus beginning in her own practice the system which she afterward accused her enemies of carrying on against herself. France, under the regency of Catherine de' Medici, soon became the scene of confusion and anarchy. The Protestants of the south took up arms for the liberty of conscience; and in 1561 the government consented to a hollow treaty, by which they were to be allowed the free exercise of their religion. But the Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic party, soon infringed this treaty, and having possession of the person of the young king, Charles IX., he dictated to the regent, who, however, wanted no stimulus. She was a real bigot, while Guise's religious zeal was more than half feigned and politic. The Protestants, or Huguenots, as they were called in France, flew once more to arms, under the command of the Prince of Condé, the Admiral Colligny, Andelot, and others, and fourteen armies were presently in motion in different parts of the kingdom. The success was various-the fury of both parties pretty equal. The parliament of Paris, which was very orthodox, published an edict, authorizing the Catholics everywhere to massacre the Protestants; and the Protestants replied by making sharper the edges of their own swords. Women and children flocked to the ranks on both sides, and partook in the carnage. The Huguenots, notwithstanding their great infe1 Letter from Sir Robert Cecil to Sir J. Harrington, 1603, published in Dr. H. Harrington's Nuga Antiqua. riority in numbers, pressed the Catholics so hard, that the Duke of Guise was fain to solicit aid from Philip II.; and that sovereign, for various reasons, besides his desire to check the spread of heresy into his dominions in Flanders, gladly entered into an alliance, and sent six thousand men and some money into France. Upon this, the Prince of Condé, the chief leader of the Huguenots, solicited the assistance and protection of Elizabeth; and he offered to her, as an immediate advantage, possession of the important maritime town of Havre-de-Grace. After some short negotiations, during which Sir Henry Sidney, the able and accomplished father of the more famous Sir Philip Sidney, was sent into France, ostensibly to mediate between the Catholics and Protestants, Elizabeth concluded a compact with the Prince of Condé, furnished him with some money, and then sent over three thousand men, under the command of Sir Edward Poynings, to take possession of Havre. No declaration of hostilities was made to the French court, and Elizabeth asserted to the foreign ambassadors that her only object was to serve his majesty of France, and to free him from the hands of the Guises, who, according to her version, held the youth an unwilling prisoner. Soon after his arrival, Poynings was obliged to throw some reinforcements into Rouen, which was besieged by the Catholics under the command of the King of Navarre and the Duke of Montmorency. This detachment was cut to pieces to a man; for the besiegers carried the place by assault, and put the garrison to the sword. But the handful of Englishmen behaved bravely, and, before they met their fate the Catholic King of Navarre was mortally wounded.' As the Huguenots were still strong in Normandy, Elizabeth resolved to reinforce her very small army; and she sent over Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, the elder brother of her favourite, with a fresh force of three thousand men.3 Warwick took the command of Havre, and began to fortify that place, which was threatened with a siege by the Duke of Guise, the captor of Calais, the expeller of the English, whose party was strengthened by the odium excited against Condé, for calling the old enemies of his country back to it, and giving them something like a firm footing in it. Havre, indeed, might have been made a second English Calais. By means of English money, a considerable body of Protestant soldiers were engaged in Germany; and this force and others under the com 2 During the siege of Rouen, a French gentleman of the Protestant persuasion attempted to assassinate the Duke of Guise. 3 Ambrose Dudley, the eldest son of the late Duke of Nor thumberland, was restored to his father's title of Baron L'Isle, in 1561, and to that of Earl of Warwick in the present year, 1562 mand of Andelot and the Admiral Colligny, ob- | bound to take the oath of supremacy, as were liged Guise to move from the Seine and the neigh- also all who were advanced to any degree, either bourhood of Havre towards the Loire, where the in the universities or in the inns of court, all Huguenots were very powerful, possessing the schoolmasters, officers in court, and members of city of Orleans. After a remarkable campaign, parliament; and a second refusal of the oath was during which the Huguenots, under the admiral | made treason. By a strange restriction, considand Condé, threatened the city of Paris, a fierce battle was fought at Dreux, and the Protestants were defeated. The affair, however, was not very decisive; and, to support Colligny, Elizabeth sent over some more money, and offered to give her bond for a further sum if he could find merchants disposed to lend on such a security.' At this moment the queen's exA.D. 1563. chequer was empty, and she was obliged to summon a parliament a body for the wisdom or authority of which she never testified much respect. Almost as soon as this parliament met, the odious subject of the succession and matrimony was renewed. Elizabeth had just undergone that dangerous disease the small-pox, and, as her life had been despaired of, people had been made more than ever sensible of the perils likely to arise from a disputed succession. The commons, therefore, voted an address to her majesty, in which, after mentioning the civil wars of former times, they entreated her to choose a husband by God's grace, engaging on their part to serve, honour, and obey the husband of her choice: or if, indeed, her high mind was for ever set against matrimony, they entreated that she would permit her lawful successor to be named and acknowledged by act of parliament. Being thus placed between the sharp horns of a dilemma, and being fully resolved on no account to acknowledge the rights either of Mary Queen of Scots, or of the Lady Catherine Grey, the representative of the Suffolk line, whose children she had just bastardized, she pretended that her resolution of living and dying a virgin was shaken; and, without making anything like a positive declaration, she gave them to understand that she might be induced, for the sake of her people, to think of marriage. Nearly at this moment another suitor appeared in the field. The Duke of Würtemberg, a German Protestant prince, offered his service to the queen "in case she were minded to marry." The parliament was obliged to be satisfied with the queen's evasive answer, and to proceed to other business. A most remarkable law they passed was the act of "assurance of the queen's royal power over all states and subjects within her dominions." This was, in effect, an extension of the former acts of supremacy. For asserting twice in writing, word, or deed, the authority of the pope, the offender was subjected to the penalties of treason: all persons in holy orders were Holinshed; Burghley Papers. ering that some of the noblest families were Catholics, the statute did not extend to any man of the rank of a baron, it being assumed, as a convenient fiction, that no doubt could be enter tained as to the fidelity of persons of such rank. All Elizabeth's parliaments were zealously Protestant in this the House of Commons were sincere: but in the lords there must have been considerable dissimulation, as the known Catholics seldom made any opposition. In the present session, however, Lord Montacute showed some spirit. He opposed the bill of assurance, and contended, in favour of the English Catholics, that they were loyal and dutiful subjects, neither disputing, nor preaching, nor causing tumults among the people. But Elizabeth could never repose confidence in a sect which could not but believe in her illegitimacy; and the spirit of disloyalty which no doubt existed in many breasts, notwithstanding the assertion of Montacute, was naturally increased and strengthened by these very penal acts directed against them. It is quite certain that Elizabeth never thought of trying the grand and humane experiment; but it would indeed not "be safe to assert that a more conciliating policy would have altogether disarmed their hostility." An increase of violence produced a seeming conformity; but the Catholics had recourse to what has been justly called the usual artifice of an oppressed people, and met force by fraud. This was the most dangerous of all states; and Elizabeth and Cecil fairly acknowledged that their system of coercion was a failure, when they complained that they could not take the Catholics for good Protestants and loyal subjects, though they constantly attended the Anglican church, and prayed for the queen in the words of the Liturgy. If no force had been adopted-if the adherents to the old church had been allowed the free exercise of their religion— the government at least might have known who were Catholics and who were not; but now it was impossible to distinguish between the unwilling converts to force and the willing converts to persuasion, and use, and time. And, as men always hate intensely those who degrade them in their own eyes, or force them to commit acts of subservience and baseness, Elizabeth became more and more an object of detestation to this class. It was during this same session that the law against false prophets was passed, and it was accompanied by a statute against conjuration, 12 2 Hallam, Const. Hist. enchantments, and witchcraft. It should appear | had advanced should be repaid by the French as if the people of England had not yet advanced court, and that Calais, at the expiration of the to a condition in which they could do without a term before fixed, should be restored to her. In certain pabulum of credulity, and that it was this instance Elizabeth's anger got the better of necessary that the superstition which had lost her discretion: she sent Warwick orders to deits old food—such as saints and Madonnas and fend Havre to the last against the whole French miracles-should find some new nourishment. monarchy; for Protestants and Catholics were In the countries where the common people are now alike anxious to see the English out of fed with legends and miracles, there is little or France. In taking possession of this place the no belief in witches and ghosts; and, for a long English had expelled nearly all the French inhatime after the Reformation, the people in most bitants, so that they had little to fear in that countries seem to have believed in witches and direction. Warwick had about 5000 men with ghosts because they were no longer allowed to him, and during the siege Sir Hugh Paulet conbelieve in saints and miracles. The chronicles ducted to him a reinforcement of 800. The Conremark that the preceding year had been very stable Montmorency, so recently in alliance with awful on account of the great number of mon- the English, took the command of the besieging strous births, and probably this was believed to army, in which also served the Protestant Prince be the effect of witchcraft and conjuration. But of Condé, who, more than any one, had led Elizaall kinds of insane notions were very prevalent. beth into the late treaty with the Huguenots. The penal statutes now passed only increased The brave Admiral Colligny, who still doubted the number of mad prophets, conjurors, and so- the good faith of the queen-regent, kept aloof. So called witches. Having voted the queen a supply important was the enterprise in the eyes of the of a subsidy, and two-fifteenths, the parliament government that Catherine de' Medici took her was prorogued. Still further to enable the queen son, the young king, with nearly the whole court, to prosecute her continental scheme, which was to the besieging camp, and called upon all loyal popular with Protestant churchmen, and with Frenchmen to repair to the siege. In the month the majority of the nation, as being in favour of of May, notwithstanding some gallant sorties men who were co-religionists, or nearly so, the made by the English, the French established convocation of the clergy voted her a subsidy of themselves in favourable positions round the six shillings in the pound, payable in three years. town, and began to batter in sundry places. Apparently some of this money was immediately During the whole of the month of June they sent to the Huguenots, and some to the Earl of tried in vain to force an entrance, and they were Warwick, who, however, received strict orders to several times beaten out of their trenches. On keep his troops within the walls of Havre, and the 14th of July the besiegers made an assault not to join the Admiral Colligny in the field, who, with 3000 men, and were repulsed with the loss without his assistance, had reduced most of the of four hundred. On the 27th of the same places in Normandy which held for the Guises. month the French desperately made fresh apThe admiral, however, complained to Elizabeth proaches, and "were made by the English gunof the strange neutrality of her little army, and ners to taste the bitter fruit that the cannon and his complaints became louder when he saw that culverins yielded." But the besieging force was the Duke of Guise was preparing to crush the so numerous, and the walls were so effectually Protestants on the Loire, and that he was laying breached, that on the following day, the 28th of siege to Orleans with every prospect of taking July, 1563, a capitulation was signed, the French that city. But soon after Guise was assassinated agreeing to permit the garrison to depart with by Poltrot, a young gentleman of the Huguenot their arms, baggage, and whatever goods beparty, and the death of this brave leader and longed to the Queen of England or to any of her accomplished soldier, which happened on the subjects, and to allow the English six whole days 24th of February, 1563, induced the French Ca- to embark themselves and their property. It was tholics to offer conditions of peace and recon- a sad embarkation, the sick and feeble having to ciliation. The admiral, who knew her well, carry those who were in a still worse state, and maintained that there was no trusting the Queen- the men in health being exposed to the closest regent Catherine de' Medici; but he was over- contact with the plague patients, for a pestilence ruled by his associates, and, in the end, another which had broken out among the garrison was hollow pacification was concluded between the none other than the deadly plague. And these French Protestants and the French Catholics. plague patients brought the frightful disorder In this hasty and unwise treaty the Huguenots with them into England, where it committed took little or no care of the interests of the Eng- great ravages, spreading into various parts of lish queen, merely stipulating that if she would the kingdom, and raging so fiercely in London give up Havre, her charges and the money she that, in the course of the year, it carried off VCL. II. 119 20,000 persons. The Catholic party saw in these | met with a cold reception from the Highland things a visible manifestation of the wrath of clans, who were accustomed to consider the will Heaven at the changes which had taken place in of the Earl of Huntly as a thing far above the religion. royal authority. As she advanced, apprehensions were even entertained for her personal safety; and all the persons in her retinue, not excepting the foreign ambassadors, did regular duty about her like soldiers, keeping watch and ward against surprise. On her arrival at Inverness the castle was held against her by some of the Gordons, An entrance was obtained by force of arms, and the captain of the little garrison was put to death for a very unequivocal proof of disloyalty. As it was found that Lord Erskine possessed a legal right to the earldom of Mar, Stuart gave up that claim, and obtained the much greater earldom of Moray in its stead. From this time the former prior of St. Andrews will be designated by the title of the Earl of Moray-a name which was soon made a sound of terror in the queen's ears. If the Earl of Huntly had been enraged before, he now became desperate; for he had received a grant of the wealthy earldom of Moray as far back as the year 1548, and had ever since enjoyed the estates belonging to it. He summoned together his vassals and allies, determined to defend his title with the sword. On the 28th of October, while Mary was still in the north, a fierce battle was fought at Corrichie, near Aberdeen, almost under her eyes. Her brother, the Earl of Moray, who had hastily collected some Southland men, and won over some of the Highland clans, gained a complete victory. The Earl of Huntly, in fleeing from the field, was thrown from his horse into a morass, and there smothered: his son, Sir John Gordon, was taken prisoner. The body of the old earl was discovered, and carried before parliament, by which sentence of attainder and forfeiture was pronounced upon it: his son was condemned to the block, and butchered by a clumsy executioner at Aberdeen. The whole of this great family was reduced to beggary; but, five years after, Mary allowed their attainder to be reversed. There is no very satisfactory evidence to establish the fact, but it was generally said that, if the Earl of Huntly had proved the victor in the battle of Corrichie, he would have seized the queen, and forced her to marry one of his sons. Reports of this kind, and the circumstance of there being no heir to the crown, made the Scots as anxious about the marriage of their queen as were the English about the marriage of theirs. Nor was there any greater want of suitors in Scotland This first of Elizabeth's continental wars was sufficiently discouraging, and she readily consented to give up the cause of the Protestants in France, and to conclude a fresh peace with the queen-regent, who was most earnest in detaching her from the Huguenots. A peace signed at Troyes, on the 11th of April, 1564, was shortly after proclaimed, with sound of trumpet, before the queen's majesty in her castle of Windsor, the French ambassadors being present. By this new treaty Elizabeth delivered up the hostages which the French had given for the restitution of Calais; but she received 220,000 crowns for their libera- | tion. The questions of the restitution of Calais and other matters were left in the state they were in before the late hostilities, each party retaining its claims and pretensions, which were to be settled by after negotiation.' In this interval Scotland had been the scene of many turmoils and, more intrigues. The gay, the handsome, and accomplished queen gradually gained ground in the affections of the people; but she was surrounded by a remorseless set of nobles a class of men who had rarely lived in peace, even under the government of the hardiest and most skilful of their kings. In 1562, the Duke of Chatellerault's son, the Earl of Arran, accused the Earl of Bothwell and others of a plot to murder the Lord James Stuart and Maitland, in order to get possession of the power which they monopolized between them. It was soon made to appear that Arran was mad; and this unfortunate young nobleman was secured in the castle of Edinburgh. To reward the services of the Lord James, the queen, who treated him as her brother, conferred upon him the earldom of Mar and the land belonging to it a measure which greatly incensed the powerful Earl of Huntly, who had hitherto occupied, without challenge, some of the estates included in the earldom of Mar. While there was hot blood upon this subject, Sir John Gordon, one of the Earl of Huntly's sons, engaged in the public streets of Edinburgh in an affray with Lord Ogilvie, a friend of the Lord James. The queen caused both these disturbers of the peace of her capital to be placed under arrest; but Sir John Gordon soon escaped out of prison, and fled to his father in the Highlands. The Lord James, who appears to have been anxious to enter on the estate of Mar under the cover of the royal presence, chose this very moment for conducting his sister on a royal progress to the north. The journey was fatiguing, and the queen everywhere 1 Camden; Rymer. than in England. Mary had none of her rival's aversions to sharing her authority with a husband, but there was an immense difficulty in the way of a proper choice. Her own inclination would have led her to an alliance with some foreign prince; and her French relations successively proposed to her Don Carlos, then heir of the Spanish monarchy; the Duke of Anjou, one of the brothers of her late husband; the Cardinal of Bourbon, who had only lately taken deacon's orders; the Duke of Ferrara, and some others. But all these suitors were odious to the mass of the Scottish nation, as Catholics; and Elizabeth let it be understood that any alliance of that kind, as opening the way for her foreign enemies to her dominions, would occasion an immediate war with England. Mary, though urged on by the princes of the house of Guise, was not disposed to provoke this danger, and she even condescended to consult with Elizabeth, as to a choice which might be alike agreeable to both countries. In the summer of 1563 a personal interview at York between the two queens was spoken of; but Elizabeth, from various motives, the least of which was not her jealousy of her rival's superiority in beauty, artfully put off the meeting till the next year; and, in fact, she never met Mary at all. In order to detach Don Carlos from his pursuit, she held out hopes of renewing an old treaty, and of marrying him herself. In her anxiety to conciliate, and to secure her succession to the English throne in case of Elizabeth's dying without issue, Mary despatched Sir James Melville to London, in order to ascertain, if possible, what kind of a husband it was that would give entire satisfaction to her grace. All this condescension and frankness-for the Scottish queen, to all appearance, honestly meant to abide by Elizabeth's decision-was met with fraud and the most artful duplicity. Elizabeth proposed, as a fitting husband, her own favourite, the Lord Robert Dudley, who, on the 29th of September, 1563, attained to his well-known title of Earl of Leicester. Mary, who could not have been ignorant of so notorious a fact as the attachment which Elizabeth had for this showy nobleman, must have seen that he was only named to lengthen and embarrass these delicate negotiations. Nor was the Earl of Leicester, who had little to recommend him beyond his hand A contemporary says, with more force than elegance-"You know the bear's love is all for his own paunch, and this bear. whelp turneth all to his own commodity, and for greedliness thereof will overturn all if he be not stopped or muzzled in time."-Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. These memoirs were written during the favourite's life, and at the moment when people most feared the queen would marry him. They remained in MS. till 1706, when they were published by Dr. Drake. Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The author some person, in any way a suitable match for that queen. The man whom Elizabeth thus delighted to honour enjoyed a very bad reputation among the people, who, with a sad confidence, anticipated his marriage with the queen.' It was believed that, in the fulness of his hope that Elizabeth would marry him, he had murdered a young and beautiful wife, whose death was certainly attended with very mysterious circumstances. According to a striking account, which, whether wholly correct or not, conveys perfectly the ROBERT DUDLEY, Earl of Leicester.-After Zucchero. popular opinion of the time-" as his own wife stood in his light, as he supposed, he did but send her to the house of his servant Foster, of Cumnor, by Oxford, where shortly after she had the chance to fall from a pair of stairs, and so to break her neck; but yet without hurting of her hood that stood upon her head. But Sir Richard Varney, who, by commandment, remained with her that day alone with one man, and had sent away per force all her servants from her to a market two miles off-he, I say, with his man, can tell you how she died." The stars had been consulted by order of the great Cecil, who either was not too wise a man to give credit to as of this very curious piece adds:-"This man, being afterwards taken for a felony in the marches of Wales, and offering the matter of the said murder, was made away privily in the prison; and Sir Richard Varney himself [the exquisite villain of Scott's touching story] died about the same time in London, cried piteously, and blasphemed God, and said to a gentleman of worship, of my acquaintance, not long before his death, that all the devile in hell did tear him to pieces. The wife also of Baldwin Butler, kinsman to my lord, gave out the whole fact a little before her death." |