Page images
PDF
EPUB

that it was only by their steeples that the Parisians were known to be Christians. This debauchery alternated with extravagant penances and devotions, when the king and all his court went in sackcloth, barefooted, and scourging one another. The king of Navarre, after four years of sluggishness in this court, broke away and joined the Huguenot army, abjuring the Catholic church, and declaring that he would never enter Paris again save as king of France.

The champion of the Roman Catholic church was Philip II. of Spain, while Queen Elizabeth was looked on as the head of the Reform everywhere. But the hereditary policy of the house of Valois was enmity to Spain and alliance with England; Anjou moreover, like his brother, was a wooer of the English queen, and he accepted the invitation of the revolted Dutch Calvinists in the Netherlands to become their head and protector. The zealous Catholics took alarm, and formed a League for the protection of their faith, binding themselves to resist to the utmost any attack on the church, and to prevent any heretic from coming to the crown. At the head of this League stood the Duke of Guise and his brothers, and it was greatly fostered by the order of Jesuits. Matters were brought to a point by the death of Monsieur, the king's eldest brother, unmarried, in 1584. The king was childless, and Henry of Navarre was the next male heir.

The pope Sixtus V., forced by Spain, excommunicated Henry of Navarre, who in return caused a paper to be affixed to the gates of the Vatican, declaring that "Monsieur Sixtus," calling himself pope, had lied, appealing from him to a general council. At Coutras, October 20, 1587, Henry of Navarre gained a victory.

The Catholics were divided into three parties, namely, the Leaguers, the Duke of Guise its head, who would have no Calvinist king, nor toleration for a heretic; the Royalists, who thought nothing could interfere with hereditary right; and the Montmorency party, who made common cause with the Huguenots, in hopes of restoring the ancient power of the nobility.

The Leaguers were furious with the king, who left Paris. He was shot at, and swore he would never re-enter the city save through a breach in the walls. The Duke of Guise was summoned into the king's apartments, where eight of Henry's gentle

The

men fell on him and killed him on the spot. duke's brother, the cardinal, was killed the next day. The king then spurned the body with his foot, and Henry, going to the room where Queen Catherine lay ill in bed, said, "I am King of France, the King of Paris is dead." "Take care that you are not king of nothing," she answered; "you have cut, can you sew up again?" She died a fortnight later. All Catholic France cried out with horror, and Paris uttered roars of frenzy, tearing down the king's coats of arms, destroying his portraits, and talking of a republic. The only hope for Henry III. was in throwing himself on his brother-in-law of Navarre and owning him as his heir. A young Dominican monk named Jacques Clement stole out of Paris in disguise, and, presenting a letter to the king, stabbed him during the reading of it. Thus Henry III. died on the 5th of August, 1589, in his thirty-eighth year, exhorting his friends to cleave to his cousin of Navarre. In him the house of Valois became extinct.

Henry of Navarre became Henry IV. of France. The Huguenots and Leaguers met in battle at Ivry, and Henry made one of the speeches that act so much on the French, "Upon them! God is for us. Behold His enemies and yours! If signals fail you, follow my white plume. It shall lead the way to honor and victory." The army of the League was destroyed. Henry besieged Paris. Famine threatened the Parisians, but the king allowed, during a short truce, all useless mouths to depart, exclaiming, "Paris must not become a graveyard." The Spaniards raised the siege, compelling Henry to retire. Philip II. of Spain now debated the terms of a marriage between his daughter and the young Duke of Guise, and Henry listened to the arguments of the French clergy. After a five hours' discussion he declared himself convinced, and on the 23d of July, 1592, he was received into the Roman Catholic church and heard mass at St. Denys. This gained him hearty support from all loyal Catholics, and made many desert the League. City after city. yielded to him, and he was crowned at Chartres on the 17th of February, 1594. Paris was weary of the war, and offered to admit him. He promised all that was asked, and made his entry on the 22d of March, 1594.

Clement VIII. absolved Henry on condition that the Council of Trent should be acknowledged in

France, and that the heir of the crown, the young son of the lately deceased Prince of Condé, should be bred up as a Catholic. Then in 1595, under the portico of St. Peter's at Rome, the pope first declared the former absolution at St. Denys null and void, and then formally pronounced Henry to be absolved, and within the bosom of the church. The Treaty of Vervens, May 2, 1598, ended the war with Spain.

The famous Edict of Nantes was signed on the 13th of April, 1598, but was not registered by the Parliament of Paris till the 29th of February, 1599. By this edict Huguenots were admitted to all civil rights, and to all offices equally with Catholics. To secure impartial justice, chambers were instituted for the Huguenots in the parliaments of all the provinces where they were numerous, and they were allowed to keep all the cities they had garrisoned, to the number of two hundred, of which Rochelle and Montauban were the most important. Under the administration of Sully, 1600, France began to lift its head. In the south the Huguenots commenced to cultivate the silk trade. The colonization of Canada began, and cod-fishing and the fur-trade were carried on upon the American coast. Henry subdued Savoy, and, later, Sédan, the rallying point for discontented Calvinists. On the 13th of May, 1610, Henry was stabbed to the heart by a man named Ravaillac. Few kings have had more of the element of greatness than Henry IV.

Louis XIII. became king at nine years old, with his mother, Mary de Medici, as regent. He was ruled by the family of Concini, whose power was destroyed, in 1617, by the assassination of Concini,

and the beheading of his wife on a charge of witchcraft. The Huguenots, having broken the conditions of the Edict of Nantes, were warred upon and all their cities taken save two. The king was so dull and feeble that he could not live without some one to act for him, and yet he was sure to chafe against any one who had the mastery over him. For a few years there was a struggle between Mary de Medici and the Prince of Condé, till at last the power was grasped by the far stronger hands of Armand Duplessis de Richelieu. This man, who was then bishop of Luçon, and had been lately created a cardinal, was the ablest statesman in Europe. His force of character made him as powerful as any despotic monarch, and he wielded his might for the aggrandizement of his country abroad, and for the increase of the royal power at home.

In 1625 the king's sister, Henrietta Maria, was married to Charles I. of England. The Duke de Rohan, the leading Huguenot noble, urged by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, who promised English support, revolted and held Rochelle. The king and cardinal besieged the city and captured it. This was the end of the sixty years of desultory religious wars. Huguenots were still numerous, especially in the south; but with the taking of Rochelle their political importance ended. The church of France was also infinitely improved. Men of great piety and talent were working hard to purify her clergy, and doing wonderful deeds of charity. Thus many of the conscientious and high-minded among the Huguenot nobility were converted, while many others became Catholics from less worthy motives.

ENGLAND

LIZABETH was proclaimed queen of England Nov. 17,1558, and crowned Jan. 13, 1559, by the Bishop of Carlisle, the only prelate who would officiate. The English Liturgy was restored, and in 1563 the final settlement of the reformed church of England was made by Parliament, and the Convocation drew up the thirty-nine Articles as they now stand. Puritans, Nonconformists, and Dissenters now cropped up, the Catholics were repressed by the penal laws, and the fires of Smithfield were rekindled for the Anabaptists. Parliament pressed the queen upon the subject of marriage. Elizabeth, who had already refused the overtures of Philip II., her late sister's husband, now expressed her resolution to have for her epitaph, "Here lies Elizabeth, who lived and died a maiden queen;" and she kept her word, in spite of all that her detractors have said.

The great drawback on Elizabeth's prosperity was Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, whose superior beauty hurt the vanity of the woman as much as her rival claims troubled the policy of the queen. Mary was a princess of the house of Tudor, through her father James V., son of Margaret Tudor, the second daughter of Henry VII. After Elizabeth, therefore, she was the legitimate heir to the crown of England, though her branch had been passed over, by the will of Henry VIII., in favor of his younger sister's children. Her mother was Mary of Guise, the sister of the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal Lorraine. Her father died a week after her birth, which took place Dec. 7, 1542. Her training devolved upon her mother; while the government of Scotland fell into the hands of Cardinal Beaton,

who defeated the attempt to unite her with Edward, prince of Wales, and betrothed her to the dauphin Francis. In her fifth year she was taken to the court of France, and educated there, till her marriage, April 24, 1558. Thus born and brought up, she became, by inevitable necessity, the rival of Protestant Elizabeth in the eyes of the Catholics. On the death of Francis, Dec. 5, 1560, she would fain have stayed in France, but the jealousy of the queen-mother, Catherine de Medici, decided her departure. She took a piteous farewell of the beloved shores, and landed at Leith, August 19, 1561, "a stranger to her subjects, without experience, without allies, and almost without a friend."

66

The Reformation was at this time going forward in Scotland with the most ardent zeal. The earls of Argyle, Morton, Glencairn, and others, its chief promoters, had, by their own authority, suppressed the worship of the mass over a great part of the kingdom. The Roman Catholic bishops, by an illjudged persecution of the Reformers, greatly increased the number of their proselytes. They began to muster their strength; and headed by John Knox, a disciple of Calvin, a virtuous man, but of the most furious and intemperate zeal, threw down the altars and images, expelled the priests, and demolished the churches and monasteries. Acting now in arms, and in open defiance of government, the queen-mother, Mary of Guise, attempted, by the aid of French troops, to reduce her Protestant subjects to submission; and these applied for aid to the Protestant queen of England. Elizabeth sent an army and a fleet to their assistance. The death of the queen-mother was followed by a capitulation, by which it was agreed that the French

should evacuate Scotland, and that Mary should renounce all pretension to the crown of England. The Protestant religion, under Presbyterian forms, was now established in the room of the Roman Catholic.

In this situation of Scotland, Mary, at the age of eighteen, on the death of her mother, and of her husband Francis II., returned to her hereditary kingdom; having fortunately escaped an English fleet which Elizabeth had despatched to take her prisoner on her passage. Her misfortunes began from that hour. Her Protestant subjects regarded their Roman Catholic queen with abhorrence, and looked up to her enemy Elizabeth as their support and defender. This artful princess had secured to her interest the very men on whom the unsuspecting Mary placed her utmost confidence, her bastardbrother the Earl of Murray, the Earl of Morton, and Secretary Lethington. The views of Murray aimed at nothing less than his sister's crown, and the obstacles which opposed his criminal ambition served only to render his attempt more daring and more flagitious. The marriage of Mary with her cousin Lord Darnley, a Roman Catholic as well as herself, son of the Earl of Lennox, who stood in the same relation to Elizabeth, was not relished by that princess. Encouraged by her ministers, Randolph and Cecil, Murray formed a conspiracy to seize and imprison the queen, and to put to death her husband and usurp the government; and, on the detection of his designs, attempted to support them by open rebellion. Defeated, exiled, pardoned, and loaded with benefits by his injured sovereign, he persevered in the same atrocious purposes, till he at length accomplished them.

The spouse of Mary had incurred her resentment by his vices and his follies. Taking advantage of the weakness of his mind, Murray, Morton, and Lethington had rendered him jealous of the partiality of Mary for her foreign secretary Rizzio, and engaged him in the barbarous act of murdering the ill-fated wretch. As Mary was supping in private with Rizzio and her servants, the conspirators burst into the room, guided by Darnley himself; and, in spite of the cries and resistance of the queen, who was in the sixth month of her pregnancy, Ruthven stabbed Rizzio before her face, and the rest dragged him into the next apartment, and despatched him with fifty-six wounds, March 9, 1566. On learning

that he had expired, Mary said, "I will then dry my tears, and study revenge." She dissembled her feelings, pardoned the conspirators, and appeared to be reconciled to her husband, while she restored to her favor Murray and the other banished lords, whom Darnley had called back to Scotland to strengthen his party. On the 19th of June, 1566, she gave birth to a son, who was baptized, according to the rites of the church of Rome, by the name of James, and became afterwards king of Scotland and England.

Darnley, continuing his profligate course of life, had again left the court, when he was taken ill, it was said with the small-pox, near Glasgow. Mary brought him to Edinburgh, where he was lodged in a solitary house called the Kirk of Field. Early on the morning of February 10, 1567, this house, with all its inmates, was blown up by gunpowder, and the dead body of the king was found in a neighboring field, and the report was immediately circulated that Mary was accessory to his murder.

A most imprudent step, to which she was conducted by the same band of traitors, gave counte nance to this suspicion. At the earnest recommendation of Morton and some of her chief nobility, she married Bothwell, a man openly stigmatized as one of the murderers of her husband. He had, it is true, been absolved on trial for that crime, and had, by force, made himself master of her person. Having formed a league among the nobles, he carried off the queen as she was returning from a visit to her son at Stirling. The plans of Murray and his associates, successful to the utmost of their wishes, were now ripe for consummation. On the pretext of the queen's guilt of murder and adultery, she was confined by Murray in the castle of Lochleven, and there compelled to resign her crown into the hands of her unnatural brother, who was to govern the kingdom as regent during the minority of her infant son, now proclaimed king by the title of James VI., 1567. Bothwell escaped beyond seas,

and died in Denmark.

A great part of the nation reprobated these infamous proceedings. Mary escaped from her confinement; and at the head of an army gave battle to the rebels at Langside; but, being defeated, she fled for shelter to the north of England. Elizabeth, who had secretly taken part in all the machinations of her enemies, had now gained a great object of

her ambition; she had in her hands a hated rival, and, by her support of Murray and his party, the absolute command of the kingdom of Scotland. Yet policy required some show of friendship and humanity to the Queen of Scots, who claimed as a suppliant her protection and aid. She professed her desire to do her justice, but first required that she should clear herself of the crimes alleged against her. To this Mary agreed, in the intrepidity of conscious innocence. In a conference held for that purpose, Murray openly stood forth as the accuser of his sister and queen, appealing to certain letters said to be written by her to Bothwell, plainly intimating her guilt. Copies of these letters were produced. Mary demanded the originals, boldly declaring them to be the forgeries of her enemies; but they were never produced. She retorted on Murray and Morton the charge of Darnley's murder; and the conference was broken off at the command of the Queen of England, who detained Mary in close imprisonment.

The ungenerous policy of Elizabeth was condemned by her own subjects. The Duke of Norfolk, the first of her nobility, and, though a Protestant, favored by the Roman Catholic party in England, secretly projected to marry the Queen of Scots; and the discovery of these views giving alarm to Elizabeth, brought that ill-fated nobleman to the block, and hastened the doom of the unfortunate Mary. Worn out with the miseries of her confinement, she privately solicited the aid of foreign princes for her deliverance. Her cause was espoused by all the Catholics of England; and some of the most intemperate of these-animated, if not encouraged, by the princes of Guise, the Holy See, the Jesuits, and the Spaniards-had formed a plot to deliver her from captivity, and to place her on the throne by the murder of Elizabeth. This dangerous conspiracy was discovered, and its authors, to the number of fourteen, suffered death. The schemes of Mary for her own deliverance were held presumptive of her acquiescence in the whole of the plot. Though an independent sovereign, she was brought to trial before a foreign tribunal, which had already decreed her fate, and she was condemned to suffer death.

Mary received the news as a relief from long suspense, and claimed the character of a martyr. She wrote a touching and dignified letter to Elizabeth,

asking to be buried in France, and making some requests for her servants. She did not ask for life; but urgent entreaties were made for her by the king of France, while her son, the king of Scotland, added threats. The warrant was directed to the earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, who proceeded to Fotheringhay, where Mary received them with a cheerful resignation, which she maintained to the last. The next morning, February 8, 1587, she was beheaded in the castle hall, in the forty-fifth year of her age and the nineteenth of her captivity, amidst a pity for her fate which has too often warmed into the chivalrous desire to reverse the judgment of her own age upon her alleged crimes.

The next event of importance in Elizabeth's reign is the attempted invasion of England by the Invincible Armada, which is treated at length elsewhere. The English, in their turn, made descents upon the Spanish coasts; and the glory of the nation was nobly sustained by those great admirals, Raleigh, Howard, Drake, Cavendish, and Hawkins. The enterprises in the American seas bore lasting fruit, as they led to the foundation of England's colonial empire, a beginning of which had been attempted by Raleigh some years before, in the settlement which he named Virginia in honor of the queen, 1584. The Earl of Essex distinguished himself in those expeditions, and won the favor of Elizabeth, both by his prowess and his personal accomplishments. The death of Leicester, her former favorite, in 1589, and of her minister, Burghley, in 1598, left Essex unrivalled in her affections, and of chief authority in the direction of her councils. Haughty and impatient of control, he disgusted the nobles; and his failure in quelling a rebellion in Ireland, gave them ground to undermine him in the favor of his sovereign. In the madness of inordinate ambition, he proposed to possess himself master of the person of the queen, and compel her to remove his enemies, and acquiesce in all his measures.

During the last two years of her life Elizabeth was the victim of a dejection which some ascribed to her remorse for the fate of Essex. Her greatest anxiety was about the succession to her crown. She had survived all the family of Charles Brandon, whom her father's will had named as her successors; and there remained only the claim of James Stuart, king of Scots, who, besides being the legitimate heir, was a Protestant. But James was personally

« PreviousContinue »