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1566-1570 FRANCE, SPAIN, AND SCOTLAND

443

lands nor in France were the governments in a position to quarrel with her. In the Netherlands Philip, who burnt and slaughtered Protestants without mercy, was in 1566 opposed by the nobility, and in 1568 he sent the Duke of Alva, a relentless soldier, to Brussels with a Spanish army to establish the absolute authority of the king and the absolute authority of the Papacy. In 1569 Alva believed himself to have accomplished his task by wholesale executions, and by the destruction of the constitutional privileges of the Netherlanders. His rule was a grinding tyranny, rousing both Catholics and Protestants to cry out for the preservation of their customs and liberties from the intruding Spanish army. Alva had therefore no men to spare to send to aid the English Catholics. In France the civil war had broken out afresh in 1568, and in 1569 the Catholics headed by Henry, Duke of Guise, the son of the murdered Duke Francis (see p. 436), and by Henry, Duke of Anjou, the brother of the young king, Charles IX., won victories at Jarnac and Moncontour. Charles and his mother took alarm lest the Catholics should become too powerful for the royal authority, and in 1570 a peace was signed once more, the French king refusing to be the instrument of persecution and being very much afraid of the establishment of a Catholic government in England which might give support to the Catholics of France. Accordingly in 1570, France would not interfere in England if she could, whilst Spain could not interfere if she would.

2. The Anjou Marriage Treaty and the Ridolfi Plot. 1570— 1571. For all that, Elizabeth's danger was great. In 1570 she had done her best to embroil parties in Scotland lest they should join against herself. The bulk of the nobility in that country had thrown themselves on the side of Mary, and were fighting against the new regent, Lennox, having taken alarm at the growth of the popular Church organisation of Knox and the Presbyterians, who sheltered themselves under the title of the little James VI. At home Elizabeth expected a fresh outbreak, and could not be certain that Alva would be unable to support it when it occurred. Cecil accordingly pleaded hard with her to marry the frivolous Duke of Anjou. He thought that unless she married and had children, her subjects would turn from her to Mary, who, having already a son, would give them an assured succession., If she was to many, an alliance with the tolerant Government of France was better than any other. Elizabeth indeed consented to open negotiations for the marriage, though it was most unlikely that she would ever really make up her mind to it. The English Catholics, in conse

quence, flung themselves into the arms of the king of Spain, and in March 1571, Ridolfi, a Florentine banker residing in England, who carried on their correspondence with Alva, crossed to the Netherlands to inform him that the great majority of the lay peers had invited him to send 6,000 Spanish soldiers to dethrone Elizabeth and to put Mary in her place. Norfolk, who had been released from the Tower (see p. 441), was then to become the husband of Mary, and it was hoped that there would spring from the marriage a long line of Catholic sovereigns ready to support the Papal Church.

3. Elizabeth and the Puritans.-Elizabeth's temporising policy had naturally strengthened the Calvinism of the Calvinistic clergy. In every generation there are some who ask not what is expedient but what is true, and the very fact that they aim at truth, in defiance of all earthly considerations, not merely assures them influence, but diffuses around them a life and vigour which would be entirely wanting if all men were content to support that which is politically or socially convenient. Such were the best of the English Puritans, so called because, though they did not insist upon the abolition of Episcopacy or the establishment of the Calvinistic discipline (see p. 431), they contended for what they called purity of worship, which meant the rejection of such rites and vestments as reminded them of what they termed the idolatry of the Roman Church. Elizabeth and Parker had from time to time interfered, and some of the Puritan leaders had been deprived of their benefices for refusing to wear the cap and surplice.

4. Elizabeth and Parliament. 1566.—From 1566 to 1571 Elizabeth abstained from summoning a Parliament, having been far more economical than any one of the last three sovereigns. Early in her reign she had restored the currency, and after the session of 1566 had actually returned to her subjects a subsidy which had been voted to her and which had been already collected. Her reason for avoiding Parliaments was political. Neither of the Houses was likely to favour her ecclesiastical policy. The House of Lords wanted her to go backwards-to declare Mary her successor and to restore the mass. The House of Commons wanted her to go forwards-to marry, and have children of her own, and to alter the Prayer Book in a Puritan direction. In 1566, if the House of Commons had really represented the average opinion of the nation, she would have been obliged to yield. That

1 A subsidy was a tax on lands and goods voted by Parliament to the Crown, resembling in many respects the modern income-tax.

1566-1571

ELIZABETH AND PURITANISM

445 it did not was partly owing to the imposition in 1562 of the oath of supremacy upon its members, by which all who favoured the Pope's authority were excluded from its benches, but still more on account of the difficulty of packing a Parliament so as to suit the queen's moderate ideas. Those who admired the existing Church system were but few. The majority of the nation, even if those who refused to accept the Royal supremacy were left out of account, was undoubtedly sufficiently attached to the old state of things to be favourable at least to Mary's claim to be acknowledged as heir to the throne. To Elizabeth it was of the first importance that the influence of the Crown should be used to reduce the numbers of such men in the House of Commons. If, however, they were kept out, there was nothing to be done but to favour the election of Puritans, or at least of those who had a leaning towards Puritanism. The queen, therefore, having to make her choice between those who objected to her proceedings as too Protestant and those who objected to them as not Protestant enough, not unnaturally preferred the latter.

5. A Puritan Parliament. 1571.—In 1571 Elizabeth had to deal with a Puritan House of Commons. The House granted supplies, and wanted to impose new penalties on the Roman Catholics and to suppress ecclesiastical abuses. One of the members named Strickland, having proposed to ask leave to amend the Prayer Book, the Queen ordered him to absent himself from the House. The House was proceeding to remonstrate when Elizabeth, too prudent to allow a quarrel to spring up, gave him permission to return. She had her way, however, and the Prayer Book remained untouched. She was herself a better representative of the nation than the House of Commons, but as yet she represented it only as standing between two hostile parties; though she hoped that the time would come when she would have a strong middle party of her

own.

1571-1572.

6. The Duke of Norfolk's Plot and Execution. For the present Elizabeth's chief enemies were the conspirators who were aiming at placing Mary on her throne. In April 1571 Ridolfi reached the Netherlands, and urged Alva to send a Spanish army to England. Alva was cautious, and thought the attempt dangerous unless Elizabeth had first been killed or captured. Philip was consulted, gave his approval to the murder, but afterwards drew back, though he ordered Alva to proceed with the invasion. In the meanwhile Cecil, who had just been made Lord Burghley, came upon traces of the plot. Norfolk was arrested, and

before the end of the year everything was known. Though the proposal of a marriage between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou had lately broken down, she now, in her anxiety to find support in France against Spain, entered into a negotiation to marry Anjou's brother, the Duke of Alençon, a vicious lad twenty-one years younger than herself. Then she was free to act. She drove the Spanish ambassador out of England, and Norfolk was tried and convicted of treason. A fresh Parliament meeting in 1572 urged the queen to consent to the execution of Mary. Elizabeth refused, but she sent Norfolk to the block.

7. The Admonition to Parliament. 1572.-The rising in the North and the invitation to bring a Spanish army into England could not but fan the zeal of the Puritans. At the beginning of the reign they had contented themselves with calling for the abolition of certain ceremonies. A more decided party now added a demand for the abolition of episcopacy and the establishment of Presbyterianism and of the complete Calvinistic discipline. The leader of this party was Thomas Cartwright, a theological professor at Cambridge, the university which had produced the greater number of the reformers, as it now produced the greater number of Puritans. In 1570, Cartwright was expelled from his Professorship. He sympathised with An Admonition to Parliament written in 1572 by two of his disciples, and himself wrote A Second Admonition to Parliament, to second their views. Cartwright was far from claiming for the Puritans the position of a sect to be tolerated. He had no thought of establishing religious liberty in his mind. He declared the Presbyterian Church to be the only divinely appointed one, and asked that all Englishmen should be forced to submit to its ordinances. The civil magistrate was to have no control over its ministers. All active religious feeling being enlisted either on the Papal or the Puritanical side, Elizabeth's reformed, but not Puritan, Church seemed likely to be crushed between two forces. It was saved by the existence of a large body of men who cared for other things more than for religious disputes, and who were ready to defend the Queen as ruler of the nation without any special regard for the ecclesiastical system which she maintained.

8. Mariners and Pirates. Of all Elizabeth's subjects there were none who stood their country in such good stead in the impending conflict with Spain and the Papacy as the mariners. Hardy and reckless, they cared little for theological distinctions or for forms of Church government, their first instinct being to fill their own purses either by honest trade if it might be, or by piracy if that seemed

1572

WESTWARD HO!

447

likely to be more profitable. Even before Elizabeth's accession, the Channel and the seas beyond it swarmed with English pirates. Though the pirates cared nothing for the nationality of the vessels which they plundered, it was inevitable that the greatest loss should fall on Spain. Spain was the first maritime power in the world, and her galleons as they passed up to Antwerp to exchange the silks and spices of the East for the commodities of Europe, fell an easy prey to the swift and well-armed cruisers which put out from English harbours. The Spaniards retaliated by seizing English sailors wherever they could lay their hands upon them, sometimes hanging them out of hand, sometimes destroying them with starvation and misery in fetid dungeons, sometimes handing them over to the Inquisition-a court the function of which was the suppression of heresy-in other words, to the torture-room or the stake.

9. Westward Ho !-Every year the hatred between the mariners of Spain and England grew more bitter, and it was not long before English sailors angered the king of Spain by crossing the Atlantic to trade or plunder in the West Indies, where both the islands and the mainland of Mexico and South America were full of Spanish settlements. In those days a country which sent out colonies claimed the sole right of trading with them; besides which the king of Spain claimed a right of refusing to foreigners an entrance into his American dominions because, towards the end of the fifteenth century, Pope Alexander VI. being called on to mediate between Spain and Portugal, had drawn a line on the map to the east of which was to be the Portuguese colony of Brazil, whilst all the rest of America to the west of it was to be Spanish. From this the Spaniards reasoned that all America except Brazil was theirs by the gift of the Pope-which in their eyes was equivalent to the gift of God. English sailors refusing to recognise this pretension, sailed to the Spanish settlements to trade, and attacked the Spanish officials who tried to prevent them. The Spanish settlers were eager to get negro slaves to cultivate their plantations, and Englishmen were equally eager to kidnap negroes in Africa and to sell them in the West Indies. A curious combination of the love of gain and of Protestantism sprang up amongst the sailors, who had no idea that to sell black men was in any way wrong. One engaged in this villanous work explained how he had been saved from the perils of the sea by 'Almighty God, who never suffers his elect to perish!' There was money enough to be got, and sometimes there would be hard fighting and the gain or loss of all.

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