a disciplinarian, he was foremost in Spain, perhaps in Europe. A
spendthrift of time, he was an economist of blood, and this was,
perhaps, in the eyes of humanity, his principal virtue. “Time and myself
are two,” was a frequent observation of Philip, and his favorite general
considered the maxim as applicable to war as to politics. Such were his
qualities as a military commander. As a statesman, he had neither
experience nor talent. As a man, his character was simple. He did not
combine a great variety of vices, but those which he had were colossal,
and he possessed no virtues. He was neither lustful nor intemperate, but
his professed eulogists admitted his enormous avarice, while the world
has agreed that such an amount of stealth and ferocity, of patient
vindictiveness and universal bloodthirstiness, were never found in a
savage beast of the forest, and but rarely in a human bosom. His history
was now to show that his previous thrift of human life was not derived
from any love of his kind. Personally he was stern and overbearing. As
difficult of access as Philip himself, he was even more haughty to those
who were admitted to his presence.
The duke’s military fame was unquestionable when he came to the
provinces, and both in stricken fields and in long campaigns he showed
how thoroughly it had been deserved; yet he left the Netherlands a
baffled man. The prince might be many times defeated, but he was not
conquered. As Alva penetrated into the heart of the ancient Batavian
land, he found himself overmatched as he had never been before, even by
the most potent generals of his day. More audacious, more inventive,
more desperate than all the commanders of that or any other age, the
spirit of national freedom now taught the oppressor that it was
invincible, except by annihilation. The same lesson had been read in the
same thickets by the Nervii to Julius Cæsar, by the Batavians to the
legions of Vespasian; and now a loftier and a purer flame than that
which inspired the national struggles against Rome glowed within the
breasts of the descendants of the same people, and inspired them with
the strength which comes from religious enthusiasm.
As an administrator of the civil and judicial affairs of the country,
Alva at once reduced its institutions to a frightful simplicity. In the
place of the ancient laws of which the Netherlander were so proud, he
substituted the Blood Council. This tribunal was even more arbitrary
than the Inquisition. Never was a simpler apparatus for tyranny devised
than this great labor-saving machine. Never was so great a quantity of
murder and robbery achieved with such dispatch and regularity.
Sentences, executions, and confiscations, to an incredible extent, were
turned out daily with an appalling precision. For this invention Alva is
alone responsible. The tribunal and its councilors were the work and the
creatures of his hand, and faithfully did they accomplish the dark
purpose of their existence. Nor can it be urged, in extenuation of the
governor’s crimes, that he was but the blind and fanatically loyal slave
of his sovereign.
A noble nature could not have contaminated itself with such
slaughter-house work, but might have sought to mitigate the royal
policy without forswearing allegiance. A nature less rigid than iron
would at least have manifested compunction, as it found itself converted
into a fleshless instrument of massacre. More decided than his master,
however, he seemed by his promptness to rebuke the dilatory genius of
Philip. The king seemed, at times, to loiter over his work, teasing and
tantalizing his appetite for vengeance before it should be gratified.
Alva, rapid and brutal, scorned such epicureanism. He strode with
gigantic steps over haughty statutes and popular constitutions; crushing
alike the magnates who claimed a bench of monarchs for their jury, and
the ignoble artisans who could appeal only to the laws of their land.
From the pompous and theatrical scaffolds of Egmont and Horn, to the
nineteen halters prepared by Master Karl to hang up the chief bakers and
brewers of Brussels on their own thresholds; from the beheading of the
twenty nobles on the horse-market, in the opening of the governor’s
career, to the roasting alive of Uitenhoove at its close; from the block
on which fell the honored head of Antony Straalen, to the obscure chair
in which the ancient gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act
of vicarious mercy; from one year’s end to another’s--from the most
signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the eye and hand of the
great master directed without weariness the task imposed by the
sovereign.
QUEEN ELIZABETH.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, second queen-regnant of
England, born 1533, crowned 1558, died 1603. As princess during the
reign of her sister, Queen Mary, she was subjected to many perils
on account of her devotion to Protestantism. Shortly after her
accession to the throne she was declared illegitimate by the pope
and the Catholic kings of Europe, and a claim of the English
succession set up for Mary, Queen of Scots. Threatened on all
sides, Queen Elizabeth bore herself with consummate skill and
prudence, and even managed to make herself felt aggressively in
continental affairs. The more striking events of her reign were the
defeat of the great Spanish Armada, probably the most brilliant and
complete sea-victory recorded in history, and the execution of
Mary, Queen of Scots, her rival and captive. Queen Elizabeth’s
reign shines as probably the most remarkable known for its
intellectual flowering in every branch of human energy.]
England’s one hope lay in the character of her queen. Elizabeth was now
in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had more than her mother’s
beauty; her figure was commanding, her face long but queenly and
intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amid the liberal
culture of Henry’s court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful
dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. She studied
every morning the Greek Testament, and followed this by the tragedies of
Sophocles or orations of Demosthenes, and could “rub up her rusty Greek”
at need to bandy pedantry with a vice-chancellor. But she was far from
being a mere pedant. The new literature which was springing up around
her found constant welcome in her court. She spoke Italian and French as
fluently as her mother-tongue. She was familiar with Ariosto and Tasso.
Even amid the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which
sullied her later years, she listened with delight to the “Faery Queen,”
and found a smile for “Master Spenser” when he appeared in her presence.
Her moral temper recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed blood
within her veins.
She was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne Boleyn. From her
father she inherited her frank and hearty address, her love of
popularity and of free intercourse with the people, her dauntless
courage, and her amazing self-confidence. Her harsh, manlike voice, her
impetuous will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger, came to her
with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were
school-boys; she met the insolence of Essex with a box on the ear; she
would break now and then into the gravest deliberations to swear at her
ministers like a fish-wife. But strangely in contrast with the violent
outlines of her Tudor temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature
she derived from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure were with Elizabeth
the very air she breathed. Her delight was to move in perpetual
progresses from castle to castle through a series of gorgeous pageants,
fanciful and extravagant as a caliph’s dream. She loved gayety and
laughter and wit. A happy retort or a finished compliment never failed
to win her favor. She hoarded jewels. Her dresses were innumerable. Her
vanity remained, even to old age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens.
No adulation was too fulsome for her, no flattery of her beauty too
gross. “To see her was heaven,” Hatton told her, “the lack of her was
hell.” She would play with her rings that her courtiers might note the
delicacy of her hands; or dance a coranto that the French ambassador,
hidden dexterously behind a curtain, might report her sprightliness to
his master. Her levity, her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests,
gave color to a thousand scandals. Her character, in fact, like her
portraits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or
self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy veiled the
voluptuous temper which had broken out in the romps of her girlhood and
showed itself almost ostentatiously throughout her later life. Personal
beauty in a man was a sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome
young squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and fondled
her “sweet Robin,” Lord Leicester, in the face of the court.
It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held Elizabeth
almost to the last to be little more than a frivolous woman, or that
Philip of Spain wondered how “a wanton” could hold in check the policy
of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all
of Elizabeth. The willfulness of Henry, the triviality of Anne Boleyn,
played over the surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely
intellectual, the very type of reason untouched by imagination or
passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, Elizabeth lived
simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her vanity and caprice had no
weight whatever with her in state affairs. The coquette of the
presence-chamber became the coolest and hardest of politicians at the
council-board. Fresh from the flattery of her courtiers, she would
tolerate no flattery in the closet; she was herself plain and downright
of speech with her counselors, and she looked for a corresponding
plainness of speech in return. If any trace of her sex lingered in her
actual statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity of
purpose that often underlies a woman’s fluctuations of feeling.
It was this, in part, which gave her her marked superiority over the
statesmen of her time. No nobler group of ministers ever gathered round
a council-board than those who gathered round the council-board of
Elizabeth. But she was the instrument of none. She listened, she
weighed, she used or put by the counsels of each in turn, but her policy
as a whole was her own. It was a policy not of genius but of good sense.
Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep
England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of
womanly caution and timidity, perhaps, backed the passionless
indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition
which were ever opening before her eyes. She was resolute in her refusal
of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the
Protestants to make her “head of the religion” and “mistress of the
seas.” But her amazing success in the end sprang mainly from this wise
limitation of her aims. She had a finer sense than any of her counselors
of her real resources; she knew instinctively how far she could go and
what she could do. Her cold, critical intellect was never swayed by
enthusiasm or by panic either to exaggerate or to underestimate her
risks or her power.
Of political wisdom, indeed, in its larger and more generous sense
Elizabeth had little or none; but her political tact was unerring. She
seldom saw her course at a glance, but she played with a hundred
courses, fitfully and discursively, as a musician runs his fingers over
the key-board, till she hit suddenly upon the right one. Her nature was
essentially practical and of the present. She distrusted a plan, in
fact, just in proportion to its speculative range or its outlook into
the future. Her notion of statesmanship lay in watching how things
turned out around her, and in seizing the moment for making the best of
them. A policy of this limited, practical, tentative order was not only
best suited to the England of her day, to its small resources and the
transitional character of its religious and political belief, but it was
one eminently suited to Elizabeth’s peculiar powers. It was a policy of
detail, and in details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity found scope
for their exercise. “No war, my lords,” the queen used to cry
imperiously at the council-board, “No war!” but her hatred of war sprang
less from her aversion to blood or to expense, real as was her aversion
to both, than from the fact that peace left the field open to the
diplomatic manœuvres and intrigues in which she excelled. Her delight in
the consciousness of her ingenuity broke out in a thousand puckish
freaks--freaks in which one can hardly see any purpose beyond the
purpose of sheer mystification. She reveled in “by-ways” and “crooked
ways.” She played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, and
with much of the same feline delight in the mere embarrassment of her
victims. When she was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen, she turned
to find fresh sport in mystifying her own ministers.
Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign, she would have prided
herself not on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on the
skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in
Europe during fifty years. Nor was her trickery without political value.
Ignoble, inexpressibly wearisome as the queen’s diplomacy seems to us
now, tracing it as we do through a thousand dispatches, it succeeded in
its main end. It gained time, and every year that was gained doubled
Elizabeth’s strength. Nothing is more revolting in the queen, but
nothing is more characteristic than her shameless mendacity. It was an
age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her
lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to
her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty; and the ease
with which she asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose, was only
equaled by the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure of
her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. The same purely
intellectual view of things showed itself in the dexterous use she made
of her very faults. Her levity carried her gayly over moments of
detection and embarrassment where better women would have died of shame.
She screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the
natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury
and sports to good account. There were moments of grave danger in her
reign, when the country remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw
the queen give her days to hawking and hunting and her nights to dancing
and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly fickleness and
caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic comedies she played with
the successive candidates for her hand. If political necessities made
her life a lonely one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting
war and conspiracies by love-sonnets and romantic interviews, or of
gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a
flirtation.
As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and intrigue,
the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. But,
wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were
throughout temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a singular
tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to time broke her
habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness.
Elizabeth could wait and finesse; but when the hour was come she could
strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash
self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. She had, as strong natures
always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. “Her Majesty counts
much on Fortune,” Walsingham wrote bitterly; “I wish she would trust
more in Almighty God.” The diplomatists who censured at one moment her
irresolution, her delay, her changes of front, censure at the next her
“obstinacy,” her iron will, her defiance of what seemed to them
inevitable ruin. “This woman,” Philip’s envoy wrote after a wasted
remonstrance, “this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand devils.”
To her own subjects, indeed, who knew nothing of her manœuvres and
retreats, of her “by-ways” and “crooked ways,” she seemed the embodiment
of dauntless resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the
Spanish main or glided between the icebergs of Baffin Bay never doubted
that the palm of bravery lay with their queen. Her steadiness and
courage in the pursuit of her aims was equaled by the wisdom with which
she chose the men to accomplish them. She had a quick eye for merit of
any sort, and a wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her
service. The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham was just as
unerring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success,
indeed, in securing from the beginning of her reign to its end, with the
single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she
set them to do, sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic
of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below many of
the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the
universality of its sympathy, it stood far above them all. Elizabeth
could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with Bruno; she could
discuss euphuism with Lyly, and enjoy the chivalry of Essex; she could
turn from talk of the last fashions to pore with Cecil over dispatches
and treasury books; she could pass from tracking traitors with
Walsingham to settle points of doctrine with Parker, or to calculate
with Frobisher the chances of a northwest passage to the Indies. The
versatility and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand
every phase of the intellectual movement of her day, and to fix by a
sort of instinct on its higher representatives. But the greatness of the
queen rests above all on her power over her people.
We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so popular as Elizabeth.
The passion of love, of loyalty, of admiration, which finds its most
perfect expression in the “Faery Queen,” throbbed as intensely through
the veins of her meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of half
a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant queen; and her immorality,
her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed utterly to blur the
brightness of the national idea. Her worst acts broke fruitlessly
against the general devotion. A Puritan, whose hand she cut off in a
freak of tyrannous resentment, waved his hat with the hand that was
left, and shouted, “God save Queen Elizabeth!” Of her faults, indeed,
England beyond the circle of her court knew little or nothing. The
shiftings of her diplomacy were never seen outside the royal closet. The
nation at large could only judge her foreign policy by its main
outlines, by its temperance and good sense, and above all by its
success. But every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at
home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness and
moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of conciliation and
compromise among warring factions, which gave the country an unexampled
tranquillity at a time when almost every other country in Europe was
torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, the sight of
London as it became the mart of the world, of stately mansions as they
rose on every manor, told, and justly told, in Elizabeth’s favor.
In one act of her civil administration she showed the boldness and
originality of a great ruler; for the opening of her reign saw her face
the social difficulty which had so long impeded English progress, by the
issue of a commission of inquiry which ended in the solution of the
problem by the system of poor-laws. She lent a ready patronage to the
new commerce; she considered its extension and protection as a part of
public policy, and her statue in the center of the London Exchange was a
tribute on the part of the merchant class to the interest with which she
watched and shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a
general gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the martyrs threw
into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspicuous in
her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its fiercer close.
Above all, there was a general confidence in her instinctive knowledge
of the national temper. Her finger was always on the public pulse. She
knew exactly when she could resist the feeling of her people, and when
she must give way before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy
unconsciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the
grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won
back at once the love that her resistance had lost. Her attitude at
home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in the well-being of her
subjects, and whose longing for their favor, was the one warm touch in
the coldness of her natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to love
anything, she loved England. “Nothing,” she said to her first Parliament
in words of unwonted fire, “nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is
so dear to me as the love and good-will of my subjects.” And the love
and good-will which were so dear to her she fully won.
She clung, perhaps, to her popularity the more passionately that it hid
in some measure from her the terrible loneliness of her life. She was
the last of the Tudors, the last of Henry’s children; and her nearest
relatives were Mary Stuart and the house of Suffolk, one the avowed, the
other the secret, claimant of her throne. Among her mother’s kindred she
found but a single cousin. Whatever womanly tenderness she had, wrapped
itself around Leicester; but a marriage with Leicester was impossible,
and every other union, could she even have bent to one, was denied to
her by the political difficulties of her position. The one cry of
bitterness which burst from Elizabeth revealed her terrible sense of the
solitude of her life. “The Queen of Scots,” she cried at the birth of
James, “has a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.” But the loneliness
of her position only reflected the loneliness of her nature. She stood
utterly apart from the world around her, sometimes above it, sometimes
below it, but never of it. It was only on its intellectual side that
Elizabeth touched the England of her day. All its moral aspects were
simply dead to her.
It was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness by the new moral
energy which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole people, when
honor and enthusiasm took colors of poetic beauty, and religion became a
chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the men around her touched
Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a picture would have touched her.
She made her market with equal indifference out of the heroism of
William of Orange or the bigotry of Philip. The noblest aims and lives
were only counters on her board. She was the one soul in her realm whom
the news of St. Bartholomew stirred to no thirst for vengeance; and
while England was thrilling with its triumph over the Armada, its queen
was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making her profit out of the
spoiled provisions she had ordered for the fleet that saved her. To the
voice of gratitude, indeed, she was for the most part deaf. She accepted
services such as were never rendered to any other English sovereign
without a thought of return. Walsingham spent his fortune in saving her
life and throne, and she left him to die a beggar.
But, as if by a strange irony, it was to this very want of sympathy that
she owed some of the grander features of her character. If she was
without love, she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments;
she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She
was indifferent to abuse. Her good-humor was never ruffled by the
charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every
court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last the
mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the one
hardest to bring home to her. Even when the Catholic plots broke out in
her very household, she would listen to no proposals for the removal of
Catholics from her court.
MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS.
BY DAVID HUME.