CHAPTER V

ENGLAND AND THE PAPACY

1567-1582

[Sidenote: England and religious change.]

The fall of Mary freed Elizabeth from the most terrible of her outer

dangers. But it left her still struggling with ever-growing dangers at

home. The religious peace for which she had fought so hard was drawing

to an end. Sturdily as she might aver to her subjects that no change had

really been made in English religion, that the old faith had only been

purified, that the realm had only been freed from Papal usurpation,

jealously as she might preserve the old episcopate, the old service, the

old vestments and usages of public worship, her action abroad told too

plainly its tale. The world was slowly drifting to a gigantic conflict

between the tradition of the past and a faith that rejected the

tradition of the past; and in this conflict men saw that England was

ranging itself not on the side of the old belief but of the new. The

real meaning of Elizabeth's attitude was revealed in her refusal to own

the Council of Trent. From that moment the hold which she had retained

on all who still clung strongly to Catholic doctrine was roughly shaken.

Her system of conformity received a heavy blow from the decision of the

Papacy that attendance at the common prayer was unlawful. Her religious

compromise was almost destroyed by the victory of the Guises. In the

moment of peril she was driven on Protestant support, and Protestant

support had to be bought by a Test Act which excluded every zealous

Catholic from all share in the government or administration of the

realm, while the re-enactment of Edward's Articles by the Convocation of

the clergy was an avowal of Protestantism which none could mistake.

Whatever in fact might be Elizabeth's own predilections, even the most

cautious of Englishmen could hardly doubt of the drift of her policy.

The hopes which the party of moderation had founded on a marriage with

Philip, or a marriage with the Austrian Archduke, or a marriage with

Dudley, had all passed away. The conciliatory efforts of Pope Pius had

been equally fruitless. The last hope of a quiet undoing of the

religious changes lay in the succession of Mary Stuart. But with the

fall of Mary a peaceful return to the older faith became impossible; and

the consciousness of this could hardly fail to wake new dangers for

Elizabeth, whether at home or abroad.

[Sidenote: Progress of the Reformation.]

It was in fact at this moment of seeming triumph that the great struggle

of her reign began. In 1565 a pontiff was chosen to fill the Papal chair

whose policy was that of open war between England and Rome. At no moment

in its history had the fortunes of the Roman See sunk so low as at the

accession of Pius the Fifth. The Catholic revival had as yet done

nothing to arrest the march of the Reformation. In less than half a

century the new doctrines had spread from Iceland to the Pyrenees and

from Finland to the Alps. When Pius mounted the throne Lutheranism was

firmly established in Scandinavia and in Northern Germany. Along the

Eastern border of the Empire it had conquered Livonia and Old Prussia;

its adherents formed a majority of the nobles of Poland; Hungary seemed

drifting towards heresy; and in Transylvania the Diet had already

confiscated all Church lands. In Central Germany the great prelates

whose princedoms covered so large a part of Franconia opposed in vain

the spread of Lutheran doctrine. It seemed as triumphant in Southern

Germany, for the Duchy of Austria was for the most part Lutheran, and

many of the Bavarian towns with a large part of the Bavarian nobles had

espoused the cause of the Reformation. In Western Europe the fiercer

doctrines of Calvinism took the place of the faith of Luther. At the

death of Henry the Second Calvin's missionaries poured from Geneva over

France, and in a few years every province of the realm was dotted with

Calvinistic churches. The Huguenots rose into a great political and

religious party which struggled openly for the mastery of the realm and

wrested from the Crown a legal recognition of its existence and of

freedom of worship. The influence of France told quickly on the regions

about it. The Rhineland was fast losing its hold on Catholicism. In the

Netherlands, where the persecutions of Charles the Fifth had failed to

check the upgrowth of heresy, his successor saw Calvinism win state

after state, and gird itself to a desperate struggle at once for

religious and for civil independence. Still farther west a sudden

revolution had won Scotland for the faith of Geneva; and a revolution

hardly less sudden, though marked with consummate subtlety, had in

effect added England to the Churches of the Reformation. Christendom in

fact was almost lost to the Papacy; for only two European countries

owned its sway without dispute. "There remain firm to the Pope," wrote a

Venetian ambassador to his State, "only Spain and Italy with some few

islands, and those countries possessed by your Serenity in Dalmatia and

Greece."

[Sidenote: Pius the Fifth.]

It was at this moment of defeat that Pius the Fifth mounted the Papal

throne. His earlier life had been that of an Inquisitor; and he combined

the ruthlessness of a persecutor with the ascetic devotion of a saint.

Pius had but one end, that of reconquering Christendom, of restoring

the rebel nations to the fold of the Church, and of stamping out heresy

by fire and sword. To his fiery faith every means of warfare seemed

hallowed by the sanctity of his cause. The despotism of the prince, the

passion of the populace, the sword of the mercenary, the very dagger of

the assassin, were all seized without scruple as weapons in the warfare

of God. The ruthlessness of the Inquisitor was turned into the

world-wide policy of the Papacy. When Philip doubted how to deal with

the troubles in the Netherlands, Pius bade him deal with them by force

of arms. When the Pope sent soldiers of his own to join the Catholics in

France he bade their leader "slay instantly whatever heretic fell into

his hands." The massacres of Alva were rewarded by a gift of the

consecrated hat and sword, as the massacre of St. Bartholomew was hailed

by the successor of Pius with a solemn thanksgiving. The force of the

Pope's effort lay in its concentration of every energy on a single aim.

Rome drew in fact a new power from the ruin of her schemes of secular

aggrandizement. The narrower hopes and dreads which had sprung from

their position as Italian princes told no longer on the Popes. All hope

of the building up of a wider princedom passed away. The hope of driving

the stranger from Italy came equally to an end. But on the other hand

Rome was screened from the general conflicts of the secular powers. It

was enabled to be the friend of every Catholic State, and that at a

moment when every Catholic State saw in the rise of Calvinism a new

cause for seeking its friendship. Calvinism drew with it a thirst for

political liberty, and religious revolution became the prelude to

political revolution. From this moment therefore the cause of the Papacy

became the cause of kings, and a craving for self-preservation rallied

the Catholic princes round the Papal throne. The same dread of utter

ruin rallied round it the Catholic Church. All strife, all controversy

was hushed in the presence of the foe. With the close of the Council of

Trent came a unity of feeling and of action such as had never been seen

before. Faith was defined. The Papal authority stood higher than ever.

The bishops owned themselves to be delegates of the Roman See. The

clergy were drawn together into a disciplined body by the institution of

seminaries. The new religious orders carried everywhere the watchword of

implicit obedience. As the heresy of Calvin pressed on to one victory

after another, the Catholic world drew closer and closer round the

standard of Rome.

[Sidenote: England and Rome.]

What raised the warfare of Pius into grandeur was the scale upon which

he warred. His hand was everywhere throughout Christendom. Under him

Rome became the political as well as the religious centre of Western

Europe. The history of the Papacy widened again, as in the Middle Ages,

into the history of the world. Every scheme of the Catholic resistance

was devised or emboldened at Rome. While her Jesuit emissaries won a new

hold in Bavaria and Southern Germany, rolled back the tide of

Protestantism in the Rhineland, and by school and pulpit laboured to

re-Catholicize the Empire, Rome spurred Mary Stuart to the Darnley

marriage, urged Philip to march Alva on the Netherlands, broke up the

religious truce which Catharine had won for France, and celebrated with

solemn pomp the massacre of the Huguenots. England above all was the

object of Papal attack. The realm of Elizabeth was too important for the

general Papal scheme of reconquering Christendom to be lightly let go.

England alone could furnish a centre to the reformed communions of

Western Europe. The Lutheran states of North Germany were too small. The

Scandinavian kingdoms were too remote. Scotland hardly ranked as yet as

a European power. Even if France joined the new movement her influence

would long be neutralized by the strife of the religious parties within

her pale. But England was to outer seeming a united realm. Her

government held the country firmly in hand. Whether as an island or from

her neighbourhood to the chief centres of the religious strife, she was

so placed as to give an effective support to the new opinions.

Protestant refugees found a safe shelter within her bounds. Her trading

ships diffused heresy in every port they touched at. She could at little

risk feed the Calvinistic revolution in France or the Netherlands. In

the great battle of the old faith and the new England was thus the key

of the reformed position. With England Protestant the fight against

Protestantism could only be a slow and doubtful one. On the other hand a

Catholic England would render religious revolution in the west all but

hopeless. Hand in hand with Philip religiously, as she already was

politically, the great island might turn the tide of the mighty conflict

which had so long gone against the Papacy.

[Sidenote: Philip and the Netherlands.]

It was from this sense of the importance of England in the world-wide

struggle which it was preparing that Rome had watched with such a

feverish interest the effort of Mary Stuart. Her victory would have

given to Catholicism the two westernmost realms of the Reformation,

England and Scotland; it would have aided it in the reconquest of the

Netherlands and of France. No formal bond indeed, such as the Calvinists

believed to exist, bound Mary and Pius and Philip and Catharine of

Medicis together in a vast league for the restoration of the Faith;

their difference of political aim held France and Spain obstinately

apart both from each other and from Mary Stuart, and it was only at the

Vatican that the great movement was conceived as a whole. But

practically the policy of Mary and Philip worked forward to the same

end. While the Scottish Queen prepared her counter-reformation in

England and Scotland, Philip was gathering a formidable host which was

to suppress Calvinism as well as liberty in the Netherlands. Of the

seventeen provinces which Philip had inherited from his father, Charles,

in this part of his dominions, each had its own constitution, its own

charter and privileges, its own right of taxation. All clung to their

local independence; and resistance to any projects of centralization was

common to the great nobles and the burghers of the towns. Philip on the

other hand was resolute to bring them by gradual steps to the same level

of absolute subjection and incorporation in the body of the monarchy as

the provinces of Castille. The Netherlands were the wealthiest part of

his dominions. Flanders alone contributed more to his exchequer than all

his kingdoms in Spain. With a treasury drained by a thousand schemes

Philip longed to have this wealth at his unfettered disposal, while his

absolutism recoiled from the independence of the States, and his bigotry

drove him to tread their heresy under foot. Policy backed the impulses

of greed and fanaticism. In the strangely-mingled mass of the Spanish

monarchy, the one bond which held together its various parts, divided as

they were by blood, by tradition, by tongue, was their common faith.

Philip was in more than name the "Catholic King." Catholicism alone

united the burgher of the Netherlands to the nobles of Castille, or

Milanese and Neapolitan to the Aztec of Mexico and Peru. With such an

empire heresy meant to Philip political chaos, and the heresy of Calvin,

with its ready organization and its doctrine of resistance, promised not

only chaos but active revolt. In spite therefore of the growing

discontent in the Netherlands, in spite of the alienation of the nobles

and the resistance of the Estates, he clung to a system of government

which ignored the liberties of every province, and to a persecution

which drove thousands of skilled workmen to the shores of England.

[Sidenote: Alva.]

At last the general discontent took shape in open resistance. The

success of the French Huguenots in wresting the free exercise of their

faith from the monarchy told on the Calvinists of the Low Countries. The

nobles gathered in leagues. Riots broke out in the towns. The churches

were sacked, and heretic preachers preached in the open fields to

multitudes who carried weapons to protect them. If Philip's system was

to continue it must be by force of arms, and the king seized the

disturbances as a pretext for dealing a blow he had long meditated at

the growing heresy of this portion of his dominions. Pius the Fifth

pressed him to deal with heresy by the sword, and in 1567 an army of ten

thousand men gathered in Italy under the Duke of Alva for a march on

the Low Countries. Had Alva reached the Netherlands while Mary was still

in the flush of her success, it is hard to see how England could have

been saved. But again Fortune proved Elizabeth's friend. The passion of

Mary shattered the hopes of Catholicism, and at the moment when Alva led

his troops over the Alps Mary passed a prisoner within the walls of

Lochleven. Alone however the Duke was a mighty danger: nor could any

event have been more embarrassing to Elizabeth than his arrival in the

Netherlands in the autumn of 1567. The terror he inspired hushed all

thought of resistance. The towns were occupied. The heretics were

burned. The greatest nobles were sent to the block or driven, like

William of Orange, from the country. The Netherlands lay at Philip's

feet; and Alva's army lowered like a thundercloud over the Protestant

West.

[Sidenote: Mary's abdication.]

The triumph of Catholicism and the presence of a Catholic army in a

country so closely connected with England at once revived the dreams of

a Catholic rising against Elizabeth's throne, while the news of Alva's

massacres stirred in every one of her Protestant subjects a thirst for

revenge which it was hard to hold in check. Yet to strike a blow at Alva

was impossible. Antwerp was the great mart of English trade, and a

stoppage of the trade with Flanders, such as war must bring about, would

have broken half the merchants in London. Elizabeth could only look on

while the Duke trod resistance and heresy under foot, and prepared in

the Low Countries a securer starting-point for his attack on

Protestantism in the West. With Elizabeth, indeed, or her cautious and

moderate Lutheranism Philip had as yet little will to meddle, however

hotly Rome might urge him to attack her. He knew that the Calvinism of

the Netherlands looked for support to the Calvinism of France; and as

soon as Alva's work was done in the Low Countries the Duke had orders to

aid the Guises in assailing the Huguenots. But the terror of the

Huguenots precipitated the strife, and while Alva was still busy with

attacks from the patriots under the princes of the house of Orange a

fresh rising in France woke the civil war at the close of 1567.

Catharine lulled this strife for the moment by a new edict of

toleration; but the presence of Alva was stirring hopes and fears in

other lands than France. Between Mary Stuart and the lords who had

imprisoned her in Lochleven reconciliation was impossible. Elizabeth,

once lightened of her dread from Mary, would have been content with a

restoration of Murray's actual supremacy. Already alarmed by Calvinistic

revolt against monarchy in France, she was still more alarmed by the

success of Calvinistic revolt against monarchy in Scotland; and the

presence of Alva in the Netherlands made her anxious above all to settle

the troubles in the north and to devise some terms of reconciliation

between Mary and her subjects. But it was in vain that she demanded the

release of the Queen. The Scotch Protestants, with Knox at their head,

called loudly for Mary's death, as a murderess. If the lords shrank from

such extremities, they had no mind to set her free and to risk their

heads for Elizabeth's pleasure. As the price of her life they forced

Mary to resign her crown in favour of her child, and to name Murray, who

was now returning from France, as regent during his minority. In July

1567 the babe was solemnly crowned as James the Sixth.

[Sidenote: Langside.]

But Mary had only consented to abdicate because she felt sure of escape.

With an infant king the regency of Murray promised to be a virtual

sovereignty; and the old factions of Scotland woke again into life. The

house of Hamilton, which stood next in succession to the throne, became

the centre of a secret league which gathered to it the nobles and

prelates who longed for the re-establishment of Catholicism, and who saw

in Alva's triumph a pledge of their own. The regent's difficulties were

doubled by the policy of Elizabeth. Her wrath at the revolt of subjects

against their Queen, her anxiety that "by this example none of her own

be encouraged," only grew with the disregard of her protests and

threats. In spite of Cecil she refused to recognize Murray's government,

renewed her demands for the Queen's release, and encouraged the

Hamiltons in their designs of freeing her. She was in fact stirred by

more fears than her dread of Calvinism and of Calvinistic liberty.

Philip's triumph in the Netherlands and the presence of his army across

the sea was filling the Catholics of the northern counties with new

hopes, and scaring Elizabeth from any joint action with the Scotch

Calvinists which might call the Spanish forces over sea. She even

stooped to guard against any possible projects of Philip by fresh

negotiations for a marriage with one of the Austrian archdukes. But the

negotiations proved as fruitless as before, while Scotland moved boldly

forward in its new career. A Parliament which assembled at the opening

of 1568 confirmed the deposition of the Queen, and made Catholic worship

punishable with the pain of death. The triumph of Calvinistic bigotry

only hastened the outbreak which had long been preparing, and at the

beginning of May an escape of Mary from her prison was a signal for

civil war. Five days later six thousand men gathered round her at

Hamilton, and Argyle joined the Catholic lords who rallied to her

banner. The news found different welcomes at the English court.

Elizabeth at once offered to arbitrate between Mary and her subjects.

Cecil, on the other hand, pressed Murray to strike quick and hard. But

the regent needed little pressing. Surprised as he was, Murray was

quickly in arms; and cutting off Mary's force as it moved on Dumbarton,

he brought it to battle at Langside on the Clyde on the thirteenth of

May, and broke it in a panic-stricken rout. Mary herself, after a

fruitless effort to reach Dumbarton, fled southwards to find a refuge in

Galloway. A ride of ninety miles brought her to the Solway, but she

found her friends wavering in her support and ready to purchase pardon

from Murray by surrendering her into the regent's hands. From that

moment she abandoned all hope from Scotland. She believed that Elizabeth

would in the interests of monarchy restore her to the throne; and

changing her designs with the rapidity of genius, she pushed in a light

boat across the Solway, and was safe before the evening fell in the

castle of Carlisle.

[Sidenote: Mary in England.]

The presence of Alva in Flanders was a far less peril than the presence

of Mary in Carlisle. To restore her, as she demanded, by force of arms

was impossible. If Elizabeth was zealous for the cause of monarchy, she

had no mind to crush the nobles who had given her security against her

rival simply to seat that rival triumphantly on the throne. On the other

hand to retain her in England was to furnish a centre for revolt. Mary

herself indeed threatened that "if they kept her prisoner they should

have enough to do with her." If the Queen would not aid in her

restoration to the throne, she demanded a free passage to France. But

compliance with such a request would have given the Guises a terrible

weapon against Elizabeth and have ensured French intervention in

Scotland. For a while Elizabeth hoped to bring Murray to receive Mary

back peaceably as Queen. But the regent refused to sacrifice himself and

the realm to Elizabeth's policy. When the Duke of Norfolk with other

commissioners appeared at York to hold a formal enquiry into Mary's

conduct with a view to her restoration, Murray openly charged the Queen

with a share in the murder of her husband, and he produced letters from

her to Bothwell, which if genuine substantiated the charge. Till Mary

was cleared of guilt, Murray would hear nothing of her return, and Mary

refused to submit to such a trial as would clear her. So eager however

was Elizabeth to get rid of the pressing peril of her presence in

England that Mary's refusal to submit to any trial only drove her to

fresh devices for her restoration. She urged upon Murray the suppression

of the graver charges, and upon Mary the leaving Murray in actual

possession of the royal power as the price of her return. Neither

however would listen to terms which sacrificed both to Elizabeth's

self-interest. The Regent persisted in charging the Queen with murder

and adultery. Mary refused either to answer or to abdicate in favour of

her infant son.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's difficulties.]

The triumph indeed of her bold policy was best advanced, as the Queen of

Scots had no doubt foreseen, by simple inaction. Her misfortunes, her

resolute denials, were gradually wiping away the stain of her guilt and

winning back the Catholics of England to her cause. Already there were

plans for her marriage with Norfolk, the head of the English nobles, as

for her marriage with the heir of the Hamiltons. The first match might

give her the English crown, the second could hardly fail to restore her

to the crown of Scotland. In any case her presence, rousing as it did

fresh hopes of a Catholic reaction, put pressure on her sister Queen.

Elizabeth "had the wolf by the ears," while the fierce contest which

Alva's presence roused in France and in the Netherlands was firing the

temper of the two great parties in England. In the Court, as in the

country, the forces of progress and of resistance stood at last in sharp

and declared opposition to each other. Cecil at the head of the

Protestants demanded a general alliance with the Protestant churches

throughout Europe, a war in the Low Countries against Alva, and the

unconditional surrender of Mary to her Scotch subjects for the

punishment she deserved. The Catholics on the other hand, backed by the

mass of the Conservative party with the Duke of Norfolk at its head, and

supported by the wealthier merchants who dreaded the ruin of the Flemish

trade, were as earnest in demanding the dismissal of Cecil and the

Protestants from the council-board, a steady peace with Spain, and,

though less openly, a recognition of Mary's succession. Elizabeth was

driven to temporize as before. She refused Cecil's counsels; but she

sent money and arms to Conde, and hampered Alva by seizing treasure on

its way to him, and by pushing the quarrel even to a temporary embargo

on shipping either side the sea. She refused the counsels of Norfolk;

but she would hear nothing of a declaration of war, or give any

judgement on the charges against the Scottish Queen, or recognize the

accession of James in her stead.

[Sidenote: Norfolk.]

But to the pressure of Alva and Mary was now added the pressure of Rome.

With the triumph of Philip in the Netherlands and of the Guises in

France Pius the Fifth held that the time had come for a decisive attack

on Elizabeth. If Philip held back from playing the champion of

Catholicism, if even the insults to Alva failed to stir him to active

hostility, Rome could still turn to its adherents within the realm. Pius

had already sent two envoys in 1567 with powers to absolve the English

Catholics who had attended church from their schism, but to withdraw all

hope of future absolution for those who continued to conform. The result

of their mission however had been so small that it was necessary to go

further. The triumph of Alva in the Netherlands, the failure of the

Prince of Orange in an attempt to rescue them from the Spanish army, the

terror-struck rising of the French Huguenots, the growing embarrassments

of Elizabeth both at home and abroad, seemed to offer Rome its

opportunity of delivering a final blow. In February 1569 the Queen was

declared a heretic by a Bull which asserted in their strongest form the

Papal claims to a temporal supremacy over princes. As a heretic and

excommunicate, she was "deprived of her pretended right to the said

kingdom," her subjects were absolved from allegiance to her, commanded

"not to dare to obey her," and anathematized if they did obey. The Bull

was not as yet promulgated, but Dr. Morton was sent into England to

denounce the Queen as fallen from her usurped authority, and to promise

the speedy issue of the sentence of deposition. The religious pressure

was backed by political intrigue. Ridolfi, an Italian merchant settled

in London, who had received full powers and money from Rome, knit the

threads of a Catholic revolt in the north, and drew the Duke of Norfolk

into correspondence with Mary Stuart. The Duke was the son of Lord

Surrey and grandson of the Norfolk who had headed the Conservative party

through the reign of Henry the Eighth. Like the rest of the English

peers, he had acquiesced in the religious compromise of the Queen. It

was as a Protestant that the more Conservative among his fellow-nobles

now supported a project for his union with the Scottish Queen. With an

English and Protestant husband it was thought that Murray and the lords

might safely take back Mary to the Scottish throne, and England again

accept her as the successor to her crown. But Norfolk was not contented

with a single game. From the Pope and Philip he sought aid in his

marriage-plot as a Catholic at heart, whose success would bring about a

restoration of Catholicism throughout the realm. With the Catholic lords

he plotted the overthrow of Cecil and the renewal of friendship with

Spain. To carry out schemes such as these however required a temper of

subtler and bolder stamp than the Duke's: Cecil found it easy by playing

on his greed to part him from his fellow-nobles; his marriage with Mary

as a Protestant was set aside by Murray's refusal to accept her as

Queen; and Norfolk promised to enter into no correspondence with Mary

Stuart but with Elizabeth's sanction.

[Sidenote: The Catholic Earls.]

The hope of a crown, whether in Scotland or at home, proved too great

however for his good faith, and Norfolk was soon wrapped anew in the net

of papal intrigue. But it was not so much on Norfolk that Rome counted

as on the nobles of the North. The three great houses of the northern

border--the Cliffords of Cumberland, the Nevilles of Westmoreland, the

Percies of Northumberland--had remained Catholics at heart; and from the

moment of Mary's entrance into England they had been only waiting for a

signal of revolt. They looked for foreign aid, and foreign aid now

seemed assured. In spite of Elizabeth's help the civil war in France

went steadily against the Huguenots. In March 1569 their army was

routed at Jarnac, and their leader, Conde, left dead on the field. The

joy with which the victory was greeted by the English Catholics sprang

from a consciousness that the victors looked on it as a prelude to their

attack on Protestantism across the sea. No sooner indeed was this

triumph won than Mary's uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, as the head of

the house of Guise, proposed to Philip to complete the victory of

Catholicism by uniting the forces of France and Spain against Elizabeth.

The moment was one of peril such as England had never known. Norfolk was

still pressing forward to a marriage with Mary; he was backed by the

second great Conservative peer, Lord Arundel, and supported by a large

part of the nobles. The Northern Earls with Lords Montague and Lumley

and the head of the great house of Dacres were ready to take up arms,

and sure--as they believed--of the aid of the Earls of Derby and

Shrewsbury. Both parties of plotters sought Philip's sanction and placed

themselves at his disposal. A descent of French and Spanish troops would

have called both to the field. But much as Philip longed for a triumph

of religion he had no mind for a triumph of France. France now meant the

Guises, and to set their niece Mary Stuart on the English throne was to

ensure the close union of England and the France they ruled. Though he

suffered Alva therefore to plan the despatch of a force from the

Netherlands should a Catholic revolt prove successful, he refused to

join in a French attack.

[Sidenote: The revolt of the Earls.]

But the Papal exhortations and the victories of the Guises did their

work without Philip's aid. The conspirators of the north only waited for

Norfolk's word to rise in arms. But the Duke dissembled and delayed,

while Elizabeth, roused at last to her danger, struck quick and hard.

Mary Stuart was given in charge to the Puritan Lord Huntingdon. The

Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, with Lord Lumley, were secured. Norfolk

himself, summoned peremptorily to court, dared not disobey; and found

himself at the opening of October a prisoner in the Tower. The more

dangerous plot was foiled, for whatever were Norfolk's own designs, most

of his Conservative partizans were good Protestants, and their aim of

securing the succession by a Protestant marriage for Mary was one with

which the bulk of the nation would have sympathized. But the Catholic

plot remained; and in October the hopes of its leaders were stirred

afresh by a new defeat of the Huguenots at Montcontour; while a Papal

envoy, Dr. Morton, goaded them to action by news that a Bull of

Deposition was ready at Rome. At last a summons to court tested the

loyalty of the Earls, and on the tenth of November 1569 Northumberland

gave the signal for a rising. He was at once joined by the Earl of

Westmoreland, and in a few days the Earls entered Durham and called the

North to arms. They shrank from an open revolt against the Queen, and

demanded only the dismissal of her ministers and the recognition of

Mary's right of succession. But with these demands went a pledge to

re-establish the Catholic religion. The Bible and Prayer-Book were torn

to pieces, and Mass said once more at the altar of Durham Cathedral,

before the Earls pushed on to Doncaster with an army which soon swelled

to thousands of men. Their cry was "to reduce all causes of religion to

the old custom and usage"; and the Earl of Sussex, her general in the

North, wrote frankly to Elizabeth that "there were not ten gentlemen in

Yorkshire that did allow [approve] her proceedings in the cause of

religion." But he was as loyal as he was frank, and held York stoutly

while the Queen ordered Mary's hasty removal to a new prison at

Coventry. The storm however broke as rapidly as it had gathered. Leonard

Dacres held aloof. Lord Derby proved loyal. The Catholic lords of the

south refused to stir without help from Spain. The mass of the Catholics

throughout the country made no sign; and the Earls no sooner halted

irresolute in presence of this unexpected inaction than their army

caught the panic and dispersed. Northumberland and Westmoreland fled in

the middle of December, and were followed in their flight by Leonard

Dacres of Naworth, while their miserable adherents paid for their

disloyalty in bloodshed and ruin.

[Sidenote: The Bull of Deposition.]

The ruthless measures of repression which followed this revolt were the

first breach in the clemency of Elizabeth's rule. But they were signs of

terror which were not lost on her opponents. It was the general inaction

of the Catholics which had foiled the hopes of the northern Earls; and

Pope Pius resolved to stir them to activity by publishing in March 1570

the Bull of Excommunication and Deposition which had been secretly

issued in the preceding year. In his Bull Pius declared that Elizabeth

had forfeited all right to the throne, released her subjects from their

oath of allegiance to her, and forbade her nobles and people to obey her

on pain of excommunication. In spite of the efforts of the Government to

prevent the entry of any copies of this sentence into the realm the Bull

was found nailed in a spirit of ironical defiance on the Bishop of

London's door. Its effect was far from being what Rome desired. With the

exception of one or two zealots the English Catholics treated the Bull

as a dead letter. The duty of obeying the Queen seemed a certain thing

to them, while that of obeying the Pope in temporal matters was denied

by most and doubted by all. Its spiritual effect indeed was greater. The

Bull dealt a severe blow to the religious truce which Elizabeth had

secured. In the North the Catholics withdrew stubbornly from the

national worship, and everywhere throughout the realm an increase in the

number of recusants showed the obedience of a large body of Englishmen

to the Papal command. To the minds of English statesmen such an

obedience to the Papal bidding in matters of religion only heralded an

obedience to the Papal bidding in matters of state. In issuing the Bull

of Deposition Pius had declared war upon the Queen. He had threatened

her throne. He had called on her subjects to revolt. If his secret

pressure had stirred the rising of the Northern Earls, his open

declaration of war might well rouse a general insurrection of Catholics

throughout the realm, while the plots of his agents threatened the

Queen's life.

[Sidenote: The Ridolfi plot.]

How real was the last danger was shown at this moment by the murder of

Murray. In January 1570 a Catholic partizan, James Hamilton, shot the

Regent in the streets of Linlithgow; and Scotland plunged at once into

war between the adherents of Mary and those of her son. The blow broke

Elizabeth's hold on Scotland at a moment when conspiracy threatened her

hold on England itself. The defeat of the Earls had done little to check

the hopes of the Roman court. Its intrigues were busier than ever. At

the close of the rising Norfolk was released from the Tower, but he was

no sooner free than he renewed his correspondence with the Scottish

Queen. Mary consented to wed him, and the Duke, who still professed

himself a Protestant, trusted to carry the bulk of the English nobles

with him in pressing a marriage which seemed to take Mary out of the

hands of French and Catholic intriguers, to make her an Englishwoman,

and to settle the vexed question of the succession to the throne. But it

was only to secure this general adhesion that Norfolk delayed to declare

himself a Catholic. He sought the Pope's approval of his plans, and

appealed to Philip for the intervention of a Spanish army. At the head

of this appeal stood the name of Mary; while Norfolk's name was followed

by those of many lords of "the old blood," as the prouder peers styled

themselves. The significance of the request was heightened by gatherings

of Catholic refugees at Antwerp in the heart of Philip's dominions in

the Low Countries round the fugitive leaders of the Northern Revolt. The

intervention of the Pope was brought to quicken Philip's slow designs.

Ridolfi, as the agent of the conspirators, appeared at Rome and laid

before Pius their plans for the marriage of Norfolk and Mary, the union

of both realms under the Duke and the Scottish Queen, and the seizure of

Elizabeth and her counsellors at one of the royal country houses. Pius

backed the project with his warm approval, and Ridolfi hurried to secure

the needful aid from Philip of Spain.

[Sidenote: Norfolk's death.]

Enough of these conspiracies was discovered to rouse a fresh ardour in

the menaced Protestants. While Ridolfi was negotiating at Rome and

Madrid, the Parliament met to pass an act of attainder against the

Northern Earls, and to declare the introduction of Papal Bulls into the

country an act of high treason. It was made treason to call the Queen

heretic or schismatic, or to deny her right to the throne. The rising

indignation against Mary, as "the daughter of Debate, who discord fell

doth sow," was shown in a statute, which declared any person who laid

claim to the Crown during the Queen's lifetime incapable of ever

succeeding to it. The disaffection of the Catholics was met by imposing

on all magistrates and public officers the obligation of subscribing to

the Articles of Faith, a measure which in fact transferred the

administration of justice and public order to their Protestant

opponents, by forbidding conversions to Catholicism or the bringing into

England of Papal absolutions or objects consecrated by the Pope.

Meanwhile Ridolfi was struggling in vain against Philip's caution. The

king made no objection to the seizure or assassination of Elizabeth. The

scheme secured his fullest sympathy; no such opportunity, he held, would

ever offer again; and he longed to finish the affair quickly before

France should take part in it. But he could not be brought to send

troops to England before Elizabeth was secured. If troops were once

sent, the failure of the plot would mean war with England; and with

fresh troubles threatening Alva's hold on the Netherlands Philip had no

mind to risk an English war. Norfolk on the other hand had no mind to

risk a rising before Spanish troops were landed, and Ridolfi's efforts

failed to bring either Duke or king to action. But the clue to these

negotiations had long been in Cecil's hands; and at the opening of 1571

Norfolk's schemes of ambition were foiled by his arrest. He was

convicted of treason, and after a few months' delay executed at the

Tower.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and England.]

With the death of Norfolk and that of Northumberland, who followed him

to the scaffold, the dread of revolt within the realm which had so long

hung over England passed quietly away. The failure of the two attempts

not only showed the weakness and disunion of the party of discontent and

reaction, but it revealed the weakness of all party feeling before the

rise of a national temper which was springing naturally out of the peace

of Elizabeth's reign, and which a growing sense of danger to the order

and prosperity around it was fast turning into a passionate loyalty to

the Queen. It was not merely against Cecil's watchfulness or Elizabeth's

cunning that Mary and Philip and the Percies dashed themselves in vain;

it was against a new England. And this England owed its existence to the

Queen. "I have desired," Elizabeth said proudly to her Parliament, "to

have the obedience of my subjects by love, and not by compulsion."

Through the fourteen years which had passed since she mounted the

throne, her subjects' love had been fairly won by justice and good

government. The current of political events had drawn men's eyes chiefly

to the outer dangers of the country, to the policy of Philip and of

Rome, to the revolutions of France, to the pressure from Mary Stuart. No

one had watched these outer dangers so closely as the Queen. But buried

as she seemed in foreign negotiations and intrigues, Elizabeth was above

all an English sovereign. She devoted herself ably and energetically to

the task of civil administration. At the first moment of relief from the

pressure of outer troubles, after the treaty of Edinburgh, she faced the

two main causes of internal disorder. The debasement of the coinage was

brought to an end in 1560. In 1561 a commission was issued to enquire

into the best means of facing the problem of social pauperism.

[Sidenote: The Poor Laws.]

Time, and the natural developement of new branches of industry, were

working quietly for the relief of the glutted labour market; but a vast

mass of disorder still existed in England, which found a constant ground

of resentment in the enclosures and evictions which accompanied the

progress of agricultural change. It was on this host of "broken men"

that every rebellion could count for support; their mere existence was

an encouragement to civil war; while in peace their presence was felt in

the insecurity of life and property, in bands of marauders which held

whole counties in terror, and in "sturdy beggars" who stripped

travellers on the road. Under Elizabeth as under her predecessors the

terrible measures of repression, whose uselessness More had in vain

pointed out, went pitilessly on. We find the magistrates of

Somersetshire capturing a gang of a hundred at a stroke, hanging fifty

at once on the gallows, and complaining bitterly to the Council of the

necessity for waiting till the Assizes before they could enjoy the

spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. But the Government

were dealing with the difficulty in a wiser and more effectual way. The

old powers to enforce labour on the idle and settlement on the vagrant

class which had been given by statutes of Henry the Eighth were

continued; and each town and parish was held responsible for the relief

of its indigent and disabled poor, as well as for the employment of

able-bodied mendicants. But a more efficient machinery was gradually

devised for carrying out the relief and employment of the poor. Funds

for this purpose had been provided by the collection of alms in church;

but by an Act of 1562 the mayor of each town and the churchwardens of

each country parish were directed to draw up lists of all inhabitants

able to contribute to such a fund, and on a persistent refusal the

justices in sessions were empowered to assess the offender at a fitting

sum and to enforce its payment by imprisonment.

The principles embodied in these measures, that of local responsibility

for local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the

vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act

the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in

towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in

fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support.

Overseers were appointed to enforce and superintend their labour, for

which wool, hemp, flax, or other stuff was to be provided at the expense

of the inhabitants; and houses of correction were established in every

county for obstinate vagabonds or for paupers refusing to work at the

overseer's bidding. A subsequent Act transferred to these overseers the

collection of the poor rate, and powers were given to bind poor children

as apprentices, to erect buildings for the improvident poor, and to

force the parents and children of such paupers to maintain them. The

well-known Act which matured and finally established this system, the

43rd of Elizabeth, remained the base of our system of

pauper-administration until a time within the recollection of living

men. Whatever flaws a later experience has found in these measures,

their wise and humane character formed a striking contrast to the

legislation which had degraded our statute-book from the date of the

Statute of Labourers; and their efficacy at the time was proved by the

cessation of the social danger against which they were intended to

provide.

[Sidenote: Growth of wealth.]

Its cessation however was owing, not merely to law, but to the natural

growth of wealth and industry throughout the country. A middle class of

wealthier landowners and merchants was fast rising into importance. "The

wealth of the meaner sort," wrote one to Cecil, "is the very fount of

rebellion, the occasion of their indolence, of the contempt of the

nobility, and of the hatred they have conceived against them." But Cecil

and his mistress could watch the upgrowth of national wealth with cooler

eyes. In the country its effect was to undo much of the evil which the

diminution of small holdings had done. Whatever social embarrassment it

might bring about, the revolution in agriculture which Latimer deplored

undoubtedly favoured production. Not only was a larger capital brought

to bear upon the land, but the mere change in the system of cultivation

introduced a taste for new and better modes of farming; the breed of

horses and of cattle was improved, and a far greater use made of manure

and dressings. One acre under the new system produced, it was said, as

much as two under the old. As a more careful and constant cultivation

was introduced, a greater number of hands came to be required on every

farm; and much of the surplus labour which had been flung off the land

in the commencement of the new system was thus recalled to it.

[Sidenote: Growth of manufactures.]

A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was found in the

developement of manufactures. The linen trade was as yet of small value,

and that of silk-weaving was only just introduced. But the woollen

manufacture was fast becoming an important element in the national

wealth. England no longer sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and

to be dyed at Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling and

dyeing of cloth, were spreading rapidly from the towns over the

country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the centre,

extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers' wives began

everywhere to spin their wool from their own sheep's backs into a coarse

"home-spun." The South and the West however still remained the great

seats of industry and of wealth, for they were the homes of mining and

manufacturing activity. The iron manufactures were limited to Kent and

Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already threatened

by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their furnaces, and by the

exhaustion of the forests of the Weald. Cornwall was then, as now, the

sole exporter of tin; and the exportation of its copper was just

beginning. The broadcloths of the West claimed the palm among the

woollen stuffs of England. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of

the commerce of the Channel. Every little harbour from the Foreland to

the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing boats, manned with bold

seamen who were to furnish crews for Drake and the Buccaneers. Northern

England still lagged far behind the rest of the realm in its industrial

activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth the poverty and inaction to

which it had been doomed for so many centuries began at last to be

broken. We see the first sign of the revolution which has transferred

English manufactures and English wealth to the north of the Mersey and

of the Humber in the mention which now meets us of the friezes of

Manchester, the coverlets of York, the cutlery of Sheffield, and the

cloth-trade of Halifax.

[Sidenote: Growth of commerce.]

The growth however of English commerce far outstripped as yet that of

its manufactures. We must not judge of it by any modern standard; for

the whole population of the country can hardly have exceeded five or six

millions, and the burthen of all the vessels engaged in ordinary

commerce was estimated at little more than fifty thousand tons. The size

of the vessels employed in it would nowadays seem insignificant; a

modern collier brig is probably as large as the biggest merchant vessel

which then sailed from the port of London. But it was under Elizabeth

that English commerce began the rapid career of developement which has

made us the carriers of the world. The foundation of the Royal Exchange

at London by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1566 was a mark of the commercial

progress of the time. By far the most important branch of our trade was

the commerce with Flanders. Antwerp and Bruges were in fact the general

marts of the world in the early part of the sixteenth century, and the

annual export of English wool and drapery to their markets was estimated

at a sum of more than two millions in value. But the religious troubles

of the Netherlands were already scaring capital and industry from their

older seats. As early as 1560 Philip's envoy reported to his master that

"ten thousand of your Majesty's servants in the Low Countries are

already in England with their preachers and ministers." Alva's

severities soon raised the number of refugees to fifty thousand; and the

outbreak of war which followed drove trade as well as traders from the

Low Countries. It was with the ruin of Antwerp at the time of its siege

and capture by the Duke of Parma that the commercial supremacy of our

own capital was first established. A third of the merchants and

manufacturers of the ruined city are said to have found a refuge on the

banks of the Thames. The export trade to Flanders died away as London

developed into the general mart of Europe, where the gold and sugar of

the New World were found side by side with the cotton of India, the

silks of the East, and the woollen stuffs of England itself.

[Sidenote: New trade routes.]

Not only was much of the world's older trade transferred by this change

to English shores, but the burst of national vigour which characterized

the time found new outlets for its activity. The fisheries grew more and

more valuable. Those of the Channel and the German Ocean gave

occupation to the ports which lined the coast from Yarmouth to Plymouth

Haven; while Bristol and Chester were rivals in the fisheries of Ulster.

The merchant-navy of England was fast widening its sphere of commerce.

The Venetian carrying fleet still touched at Southampton; but as far

back as the reign of Henry the Seventh a commercial treaty had been

concluded with Florence, and the trade with the Mediterranean which

began under Richard the Third constantly took a wider developement. The

trade between England and the Baltic ports had hitherto been conducted

by the Hanseatic merchants; but the extinction at this time of their

London depot, the Steel Yard, was a sign that this trade too had now

passed into English hands. The growth of Boston and Hull marked an

increase of commercial intercourse with the Scandinavian states. The

prosperity of Bristol, which depended in great measure on the trade with

Ireland, was stimulated by the conquest and colonization of that island

at the close of the Queen's reign and the beginning of her successor's.

The dream of a northern passage to India opened up a trade with a land

as yet unknown. Of three ships which sailed in the reign of Mary under

Hugh Willoughby to discover this passage, two were found frozen with

their crews and their hapless commander on the coast of Lapland; but the

third, under Richard Chancellor, made its way safely to the White Sea

and by the discovery of Archangel created the trade with Russia. A more

lucrative traffic had already begun with the coast of Guinea, to whose

gold dust and ivory the merchants of Southampton owed their wealth. The

guilt of the Slave Trade which sprang out of it rests with John Hawkins.

In 1562 he returned from the African coast with a cargo of negroes; and

the arms, whose grant rewarded this achievement (a demi-moor, proper,

bound with a cord), commemorated his priority in the transport of slaves

to the labour-fields of the New World. But the New World was already

furnishing more honest sources of wealth. The voyage of Sebastian Cabot

from Bristol to the mainland of North America had called English vessels

to the stormy ocean of the North. From the time of Henry the Eighth the

number of English boats engaged on the cod-banks of Newfoundland

steadily increased, and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the seamen of

Biscay found English rivals in the whale-fishery of the Polar seas.

[Sidenote: General comfort.]

Elizabeth lent a ready patronage to the new commerce, she shared in its

speculations, she considered its extension and protection as a part of

public policy, and she sanctioned the formation of the great Merchant

Companies which could alone secure the trader against wrong or injustice

in distant countries. The Merchant-Adventurers of London, a body which

had existed long before, and had received a charter of incorporation

under Henry the Seventh, furnished a model for the Russia Company and

the Company which absorbed the new commerce to the Indies. But it was

not wholly with satisfaction that either the Queen or her ministers

watched the social change which wealth was producing around them. They

feared the increased expenditure and comfort which necessarily followed

it, as likely to impoverish the land and to eat out the hardihood of the

people. "England spendeth more on wines in one year," complained Cecil,

"than it did in ancient times in four years." In the upper classes the

lavishness of a new wealth combined with a lavishness of life, a love of

beauty, of colour, of display, to revolutionize English dress. Men "wore

a manor on their backs." The Queen's three thousand robes were rivalled

in their bravery by the slashed velvets, the ruffs, the jewelled

purpoints of the courtiers around her. But signs of the growing wealth

were as evident in the lower class as in the higher. The disuse of

salt-fish and the greater consumption of meat marked the improvement

which had taken place among the country folk. Their rough and wattled

farm-houses were being superseded by dwellings of brick and stone.

Pewter was replacing the wooden trenchers of the early yeomanry, and

there were yeomen who could boast of a fair show of silver plate. It is

from this period indeed that we can first date the rise of a conception

which seems to us now a peculiarly English one, the conception of

domestic comfort. The chimney-corner, so closely associated with family

life, came into existence with the general introduction of chimneys, a

feature rare in ordinary houses at the beginning of this reign. Pillows,

which had before been despised by the farmer and the trader as fit only

"for women in childbed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded the

filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier houses of the wealthier

merchants, their parapeted fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous

but elaborate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly-figured

gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till then

characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class

which was to play its part in later history.

[Sidenote: Architectural change.]

A transformation of an even more striking kind marked the extinction of

the feudal character of the noblesse. Gloomy walls and serried

battlements disappeared from the dwellings of the gentry. The strength

of the mediaeval fortress gave way to the pomp and grace of the

Elizabethan Hall. Knole, Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick and

Audley End, are familiar instances of a social as well as an

architectural change which covered England with buildings where the

thought of defence was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and

refinement. We still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of

gables, their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes,

their castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great

noble looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces and

broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, its

formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hopeless

rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South. Nor was the change less

within than without. The life of the Middle Ages concentrated itself in

the vast castle hall, where the baron looked from his upper dais on the

retainers who gathered at his board. But the great households were fast

breaking up; and the whole feudal economy disappeared when the lord of

the household withdrew with his family into his "parlour" or

"withdrawing-room" and left the hall to his dependants. The Italian

refinement of life which told on pleasance and garden told on the

remodelling of the house within, raised the principal apartments to an

upper floor--a change to which we owe the grand staircases of the

time--surrounded the quiet courts by long "galleries of the presence,"

crowned the rude hearth with huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and

cupids, with quaintly-interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques,

hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber with

quaintly-carved chairs and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass

became a marked feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and

one whose influence on the general health of the people can hardly be

overrated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the new

manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. "You shall have

sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, "your houses so full of glass, that we

cannot tell where to come to be out of the sun or the cold."

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and English order.]

What Elizabeth contributed to this upgrowth of national prosperity was

the peace and social order from which it sprang. While autos-de-fe were

blazing at Rome and Madrid, while the Inquisition was driving the sober

traders of the Netherlands to madness, while Scotland was tossing with

religious strife, while the policy of Catharine secured for France but a

brief respite from the horrors of civil war, England remained untroubled

and at peace. Religious order was little disturbed. Recusants were few.

There was little cry as yet for freedom of worship. Freedom of

conscience was the right of every man. Persecution had ceased. It was

only as the tale of a darker past that men recalled how ten years back

heretics had been sent to the fire. Civil order was even more profound

than religious order. The failure of the northern revolt proved the

political tranquillity of the country. The social troubles from vagrancy

and evictions were slowly passing away. Taxation was light. The country

was firmly and steadily governed. The popular favour which had met

Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a passionate devotion. 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 the

Queen's favour. Her statue in the centre 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 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 favour 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 goodwill of my subjects." And the love and

goodwill which were so dear to her she fully won.

[Sidenote: The religious truce.]

It was this personal devotion that enabled Elizabeth to face the

religious difficulties of her reign. Formidable as these had been from

its outset, they were now growing into actual dangers. The attack of the

Papacy from without had deepened the tide of religious fanaticism

within. For the nation at large Elizabeth's system was no doubt a wise

and healthy one. Single-handed, unsupported by any of the statesmen or

divines about her, the Queen had forced on the warring religions a sort

of armed truce. While the main principles of the Reformation were

accepted the zeal of the ultra-reformers was held at bay. Outer

conformity, attendance at the common prayer, was exacted from all, but

changes in ritual which would have drawn attention to the change in

religion were steadily resisted. The Bible was left open. Public

discussion was unrestrained. On the other hand the warfare of pulpit

against pulpit was silenced by the licensing of preachers. In 1576

Elizabeth gave the Protestant zealots a rough proof that she would not

suffer them to draw the Catholics into controversy and rouse the

opposition to her system which controversy could not fail to bring with

it. Parker's successor, Archbishop Grindal, who had been one of the

Marian exiles and returned with much of the Calvinistic fanaticism,

showed favour to a "liberty of prophesying" or preaching which would

have flooded the realm with Protestant disputants. Elizabeth at once

interposed. The "liberty of prophesying" was brought to an end; even the

number of licensed preachers was curtailed; and the Primate himself was

suspended from the exercise of his functions.

[Sidenote: The religious change.]

No stronger proof could have been given of the Queen's resolve to watch

jealously over the religious peace of her realm. In her earlier years

such a resolve went fairly with the general temper of the people at

large. The mass of Englishmen remained true in sentiment to the older

creed. But they conformed to the new worship. They shrank from any open

defiance of the government. They shrank from reawakening the fierce

strife of religions, of calling back the horsemen of Somerset or the

fires of Mary. They saw little doctrinal difference between the new

prayer and the old. Above all they trusted to patience. They had seen

too many religious revolutions to believe that any revolution would be

lasting. They believed that the changes would be undone again as they

had been undone before. They held that Elizabeth was only acting under

pressure, and that her real inclination was towards the old religion.

They trusted in Philip's influence, in an Austrian marriage, in the

Queen's dread of a breach with the Papacy, in the pressure of Mary

Stuart. And meanwhile the years went by, and as the memories of the past

became dimmer, and custom laid a heavier and heavier hand on the mass of

men, and a new generation grew up that had never known the spell of

Catholicism, the nation drifted from its older tradition and became

Protestant in its own despite.

[Sidenote: The Puritan pressure.]

It was no doubt a sense that the religious truce was doing their work,

as well as a dread of alienating the Queen and throwing her into the

hands of their opponents by a more violent pressure, which brought the

more zealous reformers to acquiesce through Elizabeth's earlier years in

this system of compromise. But it was no sooner denounced by the Papacy

than it was attacked by the Puritans. The rebellion of the Northern

Earls, the withdrawal from the public worship, the Bull of Deposition,

roused a fanatical zeal among the Calvinistic party which predominated

in the Parliament of 1571. The movement in favour of a more pronounced

Protestantism, of a more utter break with the Catholic past, which had

slowly spread from the knot of exiles who returned to Geneva, now

gathered a new strength; and a bill was brought in for the reform of the

book of Common Prayer by the omission of the practices which displeased

the Genevan party among the clergy. A yet closer approach to the

theocratic system of Calvin was seen when the Lower House refused its

assent to a statute that would have bound the clergy to subscribe to

those articles which recognised the royal supremacy, the power of the

Church to ordain rites and ceremonies, and the actual form of Church

government. At such a crisis even the weightiest statesmen at

Elizabeth's council-board believed that in the contest with Rome the

Crown would have to rely on Protestant zeal, and the influence of Cecil

and Walsingham backed the pressure of the Parliament. But the Queen was

only stirred to a burst of anger; she ordered Strickland, who had

introduced the bill for liturgical reform, to appear no more in

Parliament, and though she withdrew the order as soon as she perceived

the House was bent on his restoration, she would hear nothing of the

changes on which the Commons were set.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's resistance.]

Her resistance showed the sagacity with which the Queen caught the

general temper of her people. The Catholic pressure had made it needful

to exclude Catholics from the Commons and from the council-board, but a

Protestant Council and a Protestant Parliament were by no means fair

representatives of the general drift of English opinion. Her religious

indifference left Elizabeth a better judge of the timid and hesitating

advance of religious sentiment, of the stubborn clinging to the past, of

the fear of change, of the dread of revolution, which made the winning

of the people as a whole to the Reformation a slow and tedious process.

The Protestants were increasing in number, but they were still a

minority of the nation. The zealous Catholics, who withdrew from church

at the Pope's bidding, were a still smaller minority. The bulk of

Englishmen were striving to cling to their religious prejudice and to

loyalty as well, to obey their conscience and their Queen at once, and

in such a temper of men's minds any sudden and decisive change would

have fallen like a thunderbolt. Elizabeth had no will to follow in the

track of Rome, and to help the Pope to drive every waverer into action.

Weakened and broken as it was, she clung obstinately to her system of

compromise; and the general opinion gave her a strength which enabled

her to resist the pressure of her council and her Parliament. So

difficult however was her position that a change might have been forced

on her had she not been aided at this moment by a group of clerical

bigots who gathered under the banner of Presbyterianism.

[Sidenote: Cartwright.]

Of these Thomas Cartwright was the chief. He had studied at Geneva; he

returned with a fanatical faith in Calvinism, and in the system of

Church government which Calvin had devised; and as Margaret Professor of

Divinity at Cambridge he used to the full the opportunities which his

chair gave him of propagating his opinions. No leader of a religious

party ever deserved less of after sympathy. Cartwright was

unquestionably learned and devout, but his bigotry was that of a

mediaeval inquisitor. The relics of the old ritual, the cross in baptism,

the surplice, the giving of a ring in marriage, were to him not merely

distasteful, as they were to the Puritans at large, they were idolatrous

and the mark of the beast. His declamation against ceremonies and

superstition however had little weight with Elizabeth or her Primates;

what scared them was his reckless advocacy of a scheme of ecclesiastical

government which placed the State beneath the feet of the Church. The

absolute rule of bishops indeed Cartwright denounced as begotten of the

devil; but the absolute rule of Presbyters he held to be established by

the word of God. For the Church modelled after the fashion of Geneva he

claimed an authority which surpassed the wildest dreams of the masters

of the Vatican. All spiritual authority and jurisdiction, the decreeing

of doctrine, the ordering of ceremonies, lay wholly in the hands of the

ministers of the Church. To them belonged the supervision of public

morals. In an ordered arrangement of classes and synods, these

Presbyters were to govern their flocks, to regulate their own order, to

decide in matters of faith, to administer "discipline." Their weapon was

excommunication, and they were responsible for its use to none but

Christ. The province of the civil ruler in such a system of religion as

this was simply to carry out the decisions of the Presbyters, "to see

their decrees executed and to punish the contemners of them." Nor was

this work of the civil power likely to be a light work. The spirit of

Calvinistic Presbyterianism excluded all toleration of practice or

belief. Not only was the rule of ministers to be established as the one

legal form of Church government, but all other forms, Episcopalian and

Separatist, were to be ruthlessly put down. For heresy there was the

punishment of death. Never had the doctrine of persecution been urged

with such a blind and reckless ferocity. "I deny," wrote Cartwright,

"that upon repentance there ought to follow any pardon of death....

Heretics ought to be put to death now. If this be bloody and extreme, I

am content to be so counted with the Holy Ghost." The violence of

language such as this was as unlikely as the dogmatism of his

theological teaching to commend Cartwright's opinions to the mass of

Englishmen. Popular as the Presbyterian system became in Scotland, it

never took any popular hold on England. It remained to the last a

clerical rather than a national creed, and even in the moment of its

seeming triumph under the Commonwealth it was rejected by every part of

England save London and Lancashire. But the bold challenge which

Cartwright's party delivered to the Government in 1572 in an "admonition

to the Parliament," which denounced the government of bishops as

contrary to the word of God and demanded the establishment in its place

of government by Presbyters, raised a panic among English statesmen and

prelates which cut off all hopes of a quiet treatment of the merely

ceremonial questions which really troubled the consciences of the more

advanced Protestants. The natural progress of opinion abruptly ceased,

and the moderate thinkers who had pressed for a change in ritual which

would have satisfied the zeal of the reformers withdrew from union with

a party which revived the worst pretensions of the Papacy.

[Sidenote: Revolt of the Netherlands.]

But the eyes of Elizabeth as of her subjects were drawn from

difficulties at home to the conflict which took fresh fire oversea. In

Europe, as in England, the tide of religious passion which had so long

been held in check was now breaking over the banks which restrained it;

and with this outbreak of forces before which the diplomacy and

intrigues of its statesmen fell powerless the political face of Europe

was changed. In 1572 the power of the king of Spain had reached its

height. The Netherlands were at his feet. In the East his trouble from

the pressure of the Turks seemed brought to an end by a brilliant

victory at Lepanto in which his fleet with those of Venice and the Pope

annihilated the fleet of the Sultan. He could throw his whole weight

upon the Calvinism of the West, and above all upon France, where the

Guises were fast sinking into mere partizans of Spain. The common danger

drew France and England together; and Catharine of Medicis strove to

bind the two countries in one political action by offering to Elizabeth

the hand of her son Henry, the Duke of Anjou. But at this moment of

danger the whole situation was changed by the rising of the Netherlands.

Driven to despair by the greed and persecution of Alva, the Low

Countries rose in a revolt which after strange alternations of fortune

gave to the world the Republic of the United Provinces. Of the

Protestants driven out by the Duke's cruelties, many had taken to the

seas and cruised as pirates in the Channel, making war on Spanish

vessels under the flag of the Prince of Orange. Like the Huguenot

privateers who had sailed under Conde's flag, these freebooters found

shelter in the English ports. But in the spring of 1572 Alva demanded

their expulsion; and Elizabeth, unable to resist, sent them orders to

put to sea. The Duke's success proved fatal to his master's cause. The

"water-beggars," a little band of some two hundred and fifty men, were

driven by stress of weather into the Meuse. There they seized the city

of Brill, and repulsed a Spanish force which strove to recapture it. The

repulse was the signal for a general rising. All the great cities of

Holland and Zealand drove out their garrisons. The northern Provinces of

Gelderland, Overyssel, and Friesland, followed their example, and by the

summer half of the Low Countries were in revolt.

[Sidenote: The massacre of St. Bartholomew.]

A yet greater danger threatened Alva in the south, where Mons had been

surprised by Lewis of Nassau, and where the Calvinists were crying for

support from the Huguenots of France. The opening which their rising

afforded was seized by the Huguenot leaders as a political engine to

break the power which Catharine of Medicis exercised over Charles the

Ninth, and to set aside her policy of religious balance by placing

France at the head of Protestantism in the West. Weak and passionate in

temper, jealous of the warlike fame which his brother, the Duke of

Anjou, had won at Montcontour, dreading above all the power of Spain and

eager to grasp the opportunity of breaking it by a seizure of the

Netherlands, Charles listened to the counsels of Coligni, who pressed

for war upon Philip and promised the support of the Huguenots in an

invasion of the Low Countries. Never had a fairer prospect opened to

French ambition. But Catharine had no mind to be set aside. To her cool

political temper the supremacy of the Huguenots seemed as fatal to the

Crown as the supremacy of the Catholics. A triumph of Calvinism in the

Netherlands, wrought out by the swords of the French Calvinists, would

decide not only the religious but the political destinies of France; and

Catharine saw ruin for the monarchy in a France at once Protestant and

free. She suddenly united with the Guises and suffered them to rouse the

fanatical mob of Paris, while she won back the king by picturing the

royal power as about to pass into the hands of Coligni. On the

twenty-fourth of August, St. Bartholomew's day, the plot broke out in an

awful massacre. At Paris the populace murdered Coligni and almost all

the Huguenot leaders. A hundred thousand Protestants fell as the fury

spread from town to town. In that awful hour Philip and Catholicism were

saved. The Spanish king laughed for joy. The new Pope, Gregory the

Thirteenth, ordered a _Te Deum_ to be sung. Instead of conquering the

Netherlands France plunged madly back into a chaos of civil war, and the

Low Countries were left to cope single-handed with the armies of Spain.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and the Netherlands.]

They could look for no help from Elizabeth. Whatever enthusiasm the

heroic struggle of the Prince of Orange for their liberties excited

among her subjects, it failed to move Elizabeth even for an instant from

the path of cold self-interest. To her the revolt of the Netherlands was

simply "a bridle of Spain, which kept war out of our own gate." At the

darkest moment of the contest, when Alva had won back all but Holland

and Zealand and even William of Orange despaired, the Queen bent her

energies to prevent him from finding succour in France. That the Low

Countries could in the end withstand Philip, neither she nor any English

statesmen believed. They held that the struggle must close either in

their subjection to him, or in their selling themselves for aid to

France; and the accession of power which either result must give to one

of her two Catholic foes the Queen was eager to avert. Her plan for

averting it was by forcing the Provinces to accept the terms which were

now offered by Alva's successor, Requesens, a restoration of their

constitutional privileges on condition of their submission to the

Church. Peace on such a footing would not only restore English commerce,

which suffered from the war; it would leave the Netherlands still

formidable as a weapon against Philip. The freedom of the Provinces

would be saved; and the religious question involved in a fresh

submission to the yoke of Catholicism was one which Elizabeth was

incapable of appreciating. To her the steady refusal of William the

Silent to sacrifice his faith was as unintelligible as the steady

bigotry of Philip in demanding such a sacrifice. It was of more

immediate consequence that Philip's anxiety to avoid provoking an

intervention on the part of England left Elizabeth tranquil at home. The

policy of Requesens after Alva's departure at the close of 1573 was a

policy of pacification; and with the steady resistance of the

Netherlands still foiling his efforts Philip saw that his one hope of

success rested on the avoidance of intervention from without. The civil

war which followed the massacre of St. Bartholomew removed all danger of

such an intervention on the side of France. A weariness of religious

strife enabled Catharine again to return to her policy of toleration in

the summer of 1573; but though the death of Charles the Ninth and

accession of his brother Henry the Third in the following year left the

queen-mother's power unbroken, the balance she preserved was too

delicate to leave room for any schemes without the realm.

[Sidenote: England becomes Protestant.]

English intervention it was yet more needful to avoid; and the hopes of

an attack upon England which Rome had drawn from Philip's fanaticism

were thus utterly blasted. To the fiery exhortations of Gregory the

Thirteenth the king only answered by counsels of delay. But Rome could

not delay her efforts. All her hopes of recovering England lay in the

Catholic sympathies of the mass of Englishmen, and every year that went

by weakened her chance of victory. The firm refusal of Elizabeth to

suffer the Puritans to break in with any violent changes on her

ecclesiastical policy was justified by its slow but steady success.

Silently, almost unconsciously, England became Protestant as the

traditionary Catholicism which formed the religion of three-fourths of

the people at the Queen's accession died quietly away. At the close of

her reign the only parts of England where the old faith retained

anything of its former vigour were the north and the extreme west, at

that time the poorest and least populated parts of the kingdom. One main

cause of the change lay in the gradual dying out or removal of the

Catholic priesthood and the growth of a new Protestant clergy who

supplied their place. The older parish priests, though they had almost

to a man acquiesced in the changes of ritual and doctrine which the

various phases of the Reformation imposed upon them, remained in heart

utterly hostile to its spirit. As Mary had undone the changes of Edward,

they hoped for a Catholic successor to undo the changes of Elizabeth;

and in the meantime they were content to wear the surplice instead of

the chasuble, and to use the Communion office instead of the Mass-book.

But if they were forced to read the Homilies from the pulpit the spirit

of their teaching remained unchanged; and it was easy for them to cast

contempt on the new services, till they seemed to old-fashioned

worshippers a mere "Christmas game." But the lapse of years did its work

in emptying parsonage after parsonage. In 1579 the Queen felt strong

enough to enforce for the first time a general compliance with the Act

of Uniformity; and the jealous supervision of Parker and the bishops

ensured an inner as well as an outer conformity to the established faith

in the clergy who took the place of the dying priesthood. The new

parsons were for the most part not merely Protestant in belief and

teaching, but ultra-Protestant. The old restrictions on the use of the

pulpit were silently removed as the need for them passed away, and the

zeal of the young ministers showed itself in an assiduous preaching

which moulded in their own fashion the religious ideas of the new

generation. But their character had even a greater influence than their

preaching. Under Henry the priests had in large part been ignorant and

sensual men; and the character of the clergy appointed by the greedy

Protestants under Edward or at the opening of Elizabeth's reign was even

worse than that of their Catholic rivals. But the energy of the

successive Primates, seconded as it was by the general increase of zeal

and morality at the time, did its work; and by the close of the Queen's

reign the moral temper as well as the social character of the clergy

had greatly changed. Scholars like Hooker could now be found in the

ranks of the priesthood, and the grosser scandals which disgraced the

clergy as a body for the most part disappeared. It was impossible for a

Puritan libeller to bring against the ministers of Elizabeth's reign the

charges of drunkenness and immorality which Protestant libellers had

been able to bring against the priesthood of Henry's.

[Sidenote: Patriotism and Protestantism.]

But the influence of the new clergy was backed by a general revolution

in English thought. The grammar schools were diffusing a new knowledge

and mental energy through the middle classes and among the country

gentry. The tone of the Universities, no unfair test of the tone of the

nation at large, changed wholly as the Queen's reign went on. At its

opening Oxford was "a nest of Papists" and sent its best scholars to

feed the Catholic seminaries. At its close the University was a hot-bed

of Puritanism, where the fiercest tenets of Calvin reigned supreme. The

movement was no doubt hastened by the political circumstances of the

time. Under the rule of Elizabeth loyalty became more and more a passion

among Englishmen; and the Bull of Deposition placed Rome in the

forefront of Elizabeth's foes. The conspiracies which festered around

Mary were laid to the Pope's charge; he was known to be pressing on

France and on Spain the invasion and conquest of the heretic kingdom;

he was soon to bless the Armada. Every day made it harder for a Catholic

to reconcile Catholicism with loyalty to his Queen or devotion to his

country; and the mass of men, who are moved by sentiment rather than by

reason, swung slowly round to the side which, whatever its religious

significance might be, was the side of patriotism, of liberty against

tyranny, of England against Spain. A new impulse was given to this

silent drift of religious opinion by the atrocities which marked the

Catholic triumph on the other side of the Channel. The horror of Alva's

butcheries or of the massacre in Paris on St. Bartholomew's day revived

the memories of the bloodshed under Mary. The tale of Protestant

sufferings was told with a wonderful pathos and picturesqueness by John

Foxe, an exile during the persecution; and his "Book of Martyrs," which

was set up by royal order in the churches for public reading, passed

from the churches to the shelves of every English household. The trading

classes of the towns had been the first to embrace the doctrines of the

Reformation, but their Protestantism became a passion as the refugees of

the Continent brought to shop and market their tale of outrage and

blood. Thousands of Flemish exiles found a refuge in the Cinque Ports, a

third of the Antwerp merchants were seen pacing the new London Exchange,

and a Church of French Huguenots found a home which it still retains in

the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.

[Sidenote: The Seminary Priests.]

But the decay of Catholicism appealed strongly to the new spirit of

Catholic zeal which, in its despair of aid from Catholic princes, was

girding itself for its own bitter struggle with heresy. Pius the Fifth

had now passed away, but the policy of the Papal court remained

unchanged. His successor, Gregory the Thirteenth, showed the same

restless zeal, the same world-wide energy in the work of winning back

the nations to the Catholic Church. Rome was still the centre of the

Catholic crusade. It wielded material as well as spiritual arms. If the

Papacy had ceased to be a military power, it remained a financial power.

Taxes were multiplied, expenses reduced, estates confiscated, free towns

reduced to servitude, with the one aim of enabling Gregory and his

successors to build up a vast system of loans which poured the wealth of

Europe into the treasury of Catholicism. It was the treasure of the

Vatican which financed the Catholic movement. Subsidies from the Papacy

fitted out the fleet that faced the Turk at Lepanto, and gathered round

the Guises their lance-knights from the Rhine. Papal supplies equipped

expeditions against Ireland, and helped Philip to bear the cost of the

Armada. It was the Papal exchequer which supported the world-wide

diplomacy that was carrying on negotiations in Sweden and intrigues in

Poland, goading the lukewarm Emperor to action or quickening the

sluggish movements of Spain, plotting the ruin of Geneva or the

assassination of Orange, stirring up revolt in England and civil war in

France. It was the Papacy that bore the cost of the religious propaganda

that was fighting its stubborn battle with Calvinist and Lutheran on the

Rhine and the Elbe, or sending its missionaries to win back the lost

isle of the west. As early as 1568 Dr. Allen, a scholar who had been

driven from Oxford by the test prescribed in the Act of Uniformity, had

foreseen the results of the dying out of the Marian priests, and had set

up a seminary at Douay to supply their place. The new college was

liberally supported by the Catholic peers, and supplied with pupils by a

stream of refugees from Oxford and the English grammar schools. Three

years after its opening the college numbered a hundred and fifty

members. It was in these "seminary priests" that Gregory the Thirteenth

saw the means of reviving Catholic zeal in England, and at the Pope's

bidding they began in 1576 to pass over to English shores.

[Sidenote: The English Panic.]

Few as the new-comers were at first, their presence was at once felt in

the check which it gave to the gradual reconciliation of the Catholic

gentry to the English Church. No check could have been more galling to

Elizabeth, and her resentment was quickened by the sense of danger.

Rome had set itself in the forefront of her foes. She had accepted the

issue of the Bull of Deposition as a declaration of war on the part of

the Papacy, and she viewed the Douay priests with some justice as its

political emissaries. The comparative security of the Catholics from

active persecution during the early part of her reign had arisen, partly

from the sympathy and connivance of the gentry who acted as justices of

the peace, and still more from her own religious indifference. But the

Test Act placed the magistracy in Protestant hands; and as Elizabeth

passed from indifference to suspicion and from suspicion to terror she

put less restraint on the bigotry around her. In quitting Euston Hall

which she had visited in one of her pilgrimages the Queen gave its

master, young Rookwood, thanks for his entertainment and her hand to

kiss. "But my Lord Chamberlain nobly and gravely understanding that

Rookwood was excommunicate" for non-attendance at church "called him

before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her royal

presence, he unfit to accompany any Christian person, forthwith said

that he was fitter for a pair of stocks, commanded him out of Court, and

yet to attend the Council's pleasure." The Council's pleasure was seen

in his committal to the town prison at Norwich, while "seven more

gentlemen of worship" were fortunate enough to escape with a simple

sentence of arrest at their own homes. The Queen's terror became a

panic in the nation at large. The few priests who landed from Douay were

multiplied into an army of Papal emissaries despatched to sow treason

and revolt throughout the land. Parliament, which the working of the

Test Act had made a wholly Protestant body, save for the presence of a

few Catholics among the peers, was summoned to meet the new danger, and

declared by formal statute the landing of these priests and the

harbouring of them to be treason. The Act proved no idle menace; and the

execution of Cuthbert Mayne, a young priest who was arrested in Cornwall

with the Papal Bull of Deposition hidden about him, gave a terrible

indication of the character of the struggle upon which Elizabeth was

about to enter.

[Sidenote: Don John of Austria.]

The execution of Cuthbert Mayne was far from being purposed as the

opening of a religious persecution. To modern eyes there is something

even more revolting than open persecution in a policy which branded

every Catholic priest as a traitor and all Catholic worship as

disloyalty; but the first step towards toleration was won when the Queen

rested her system of repression on purely political grounds. If

Elizabeth was a persecutor, she was the first English ruler who felt the

charge of religious persecution to be a stigma on her rule. Nor can it

be denied that there was a real political danger in the new

missionaries. Allen was a restless conspirator, and the work of his

seminary priests was meant to aid a new plan of the Papacy for the

conquest of England. In 1576, on the death of Requesens, the Spanish

governor of the Low Countries, a successor was found for him in Don John

of Austria, a natural brother of Philip, the victor of Lepanto, and the

most famous general of his day. The temper of Don John was daring and

ambitious; his aim was a crown; and he sought in the Netherlands the

means of winning one. His ambition lent itself easily to the schemes of

Mary Stuart and of Rome; and he resolved to bring about by quick

concessions a settlement in the Low Countries, to cross with the Spanish

forces employed there to England, to raise the Catholics in revolt, to

free and marry Mary Stuart, and reign in her right as an English king.

The plan was an able one; but it was foiled ere he reached his post. The

Spanish troops had mutinied on the death of Requesens; and their sack of

Antwerp drew the States of the Netherlands together in a "Pacification

of Ghent." All differences of religion were set aside in a common

purpose to drive out the stranger. Baffled as he was, the subtlety of

Don John turned even this league to account. Their demand for the

withdrawal of the Spanish troops, though fatal to Philip's interests in

the Low Countries, could be made to serve the interests of Don John

across the seas. In February 1577, therefore, he ratified the

Pacification of Ghent, consented to the maintenance of the liberties of

the States, and engaged to withdraw the army. He stipulated only for its

withdrawal by sea, and for a delay of three months, which was needful

for the arrangement of his descent on the English coast. Both demands

however were refused; he was forced to withdraw his troops at once and

by land, and the scheme of the Papacy found itself utterly foiled.

[Sidenote: The Prince of Parma.]

Secret as were the plans of Don John, Elizabeth had seen how near danger

had drawn to her. Fortune once more proved her friend, for the efforts

of Don John to bring about a reconciliation of the Netherlands proved

fruitless, and negotiations soon passed again into the clash of arms.

But the Queen was warned at last. On the new outbreak of war in 1577 she

allied herself with the States and sent them money and men. Such a step,

though not in form an act of hostility against Philip, for the Provinces

with which she leagued herself still owned themselves as Philip's

subjects, was a measure which proved the Queen's sense of her need of

the Netherlands. Though she had little sympathy with their effort for

freedom, she saw in them "the one bridle to Spain to keep war out of our

own gate." But she was to see the war drift nearer and nearer to her

shores. Now that the Netherlands were all but lost Philip's slow

stubborn temper strung itself to meet the greatness of the peril. The

Spanish army was reinforced; and in January 1578 it routed the army of

the States on the field of Gemblours. The sickness and death of Don John

arrested its progress for a few months; but his successor, Philip's

nephew, Alexander Farnese, the Prince of Parma, soon proved his

greatness whether as a statesman or a general. He seized on the

difference of faith between the Catholic and Protestant States as a

means of division. The Pacification of Ghent was broken at the opening

of 1579 by the secession of the Walloon provinces of the southern

border. It was only by a new league of the seven northern provinces,

where Protestantism was dominant, in the Union of Utrecht that William

of Orange could meet Parma's stroke. But the general union of the Low

Countries was fatally broken, and from this moment the ten Catholic

states passed one by one into the hands of Spain.

[Sidenote: The Papal attack.]

The new vigour of Philip in the West marked a change in the whole policy

of Spain. Till now, in spite of endless provocations, Philip had clung

to the English alliance. Fear of Elizabeth's union with France, dread of

her help to the Netherlands, had steeled him to bear patiently her

defiance of his counsels, her neglect of his threats, her seizure of his

treasure, her persecution of the Catholic party which looked to him as

its head. But patience had only been met by fresh attacks. The attempt

of Don John had spurred Elizabeth to ally herself to France. She was

expected every hour to marry the Duke of Anjou. She had given friendship

and aid to the revolted provinces. Above all her freebooters were

carrying war into the far Pacific, and challenging the right of Spain to

the New World of the West. Philip drifted whether he would or no into a

position of hostility. He had not forbidden the projects of Don John; he

at last promised aid to the projects of Rome. In 1579 the Papacy planned

the greatest and most comprehensive of its attacks upon Elizabeth. If

the Catholic powers still hesitated and delayed, Rome was resolute to

try its own strength in the West. The spiritual reconciliation of

England was not enough. However successful the efforts of the seminary

priests might prove they would leave Elizabeth on the throne, and the

reign of Elizabeth was a defeat to the Papacy. In issuing its Bull of

Deposition Rome had staked all on the ruin of the Queen, and even if

England became Catholic Gregory could not suffer his spiritual subjects

to obey a ruler whom his sentence had declared an unlawful possessor of

the throne. And now that the temper of Spain promised more vigorous

action Rome could pave the way for a landing of Philip's troops by

stirring up a threefold danger for Elizabeth. While fresh and more

vigorous missionaries egged on the English Catholics to revolt, the

Pope hastened to bring about a Catholic revolution in Scotland and a

Catholic insurrection in Ireland.

[Sidenote: Ireland.]

In Ireland Sidney's victory had been followed by ten years of peace. Had

the land been left to itself there would have been nothing more than the

common feuds and disturbances of the time. The policy of driving its

people to despair by seizing their lands for English settlements had

been abandoned since Mary's day. The religious question had hardly any

practical existence. On the Queen's accession indeed the ecclesiastical

policy of the Protestants had been revived in name; Rome was again

renounced; the Act of Uniformity forced on the island the use of the

English Prayer-Book and compelled attendances at the services where it

was used. There was as before a general air of compliance with the law.

Even in the districts without the Pale the bishops generally conformed;

and the only exceptions of which we have any information were to be

found in the extreme south and in the north, where resistance was

distant enough to be safe. But the real cause of this apparent

submission to the Act of Uniformity lay in the fact that it remained,

and necessarily remained, a dead letter. It was impossible to find any

considerable number of English ministers, or of Irish priests acquainted

with English. Meath was one of the most civilized dioceses of the

island, and out of a hundred curates in it hardly ten knew any tongue

save their own. The promise that the service-book should be translated

into Irish was never carried out, and the final clause of the Act itself

authorized the use of a Latin rendering of it till further order could

be taken. But this, like its other provisions, was ignored; and

throughout Elizabeth's reign the gentry of the Pale went unquestioned to

Mass. There was in fact no religious persecution, and in the many

complaints of Shane O'Neill we find no mention of a religious grievance.

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Papacy.]

But this was far from being the view of Rome or of Spain, of the

Catholic missionaries, or of the Irish exiles abroad. They represented

and perhaps believed the Irish people to be writhing under a religious

oppression which it was burning to shake off. They saw in the Irish

loyalty to Catholicism a lever for overthrowing the heretic Queen.

Stukely, an Irish refugee, had pressed on the Pope and Spain as early as

1571 the policy of a descent on Ireland; and though a force gathered in

1578 by the Pope for this purpose was diverted to a mad crusade against

the Moors, his plans were carried out in 1579 by the landing of a few

soldiers under the brother of the Earl of Desmond, James Fitzmaurice, on

the coast of Kerry. The Irish however held aloof, and Fitzmaurice fell

in a skirmish; but the revolt of the Earl of Desmond gave fresh hope of

success, and the rising was backed by the arrival in 1580 of two

thousand Papal soldiers "in five great ships." These mercenaries were

headed by an Italian captain, San Giuseppe, and accompanied by a Papal

Legate, the Jesuit Sanders, who brought plenary indulgence for all who

joined the sacred enterprise and threats of damnation for all who

resisted it. "What will you answer to the Pope's treatment," ran his

letter to the Irish, "when he, bringing us the Pope's and other Catholic

princes' aid, shall charge you with the crime and pain of heretics for

maintaining an heretical pretensed Queen against the public sentence of

Christ's vicar? Can she with her feigned supremacy absolve and acquit

you from the Pope's excommunication and curse?" The news of the landing

of this force stirred in England a Protestant frenzy that foiled the

scheme for a Catholic marriage with the Duke of Anjou; while Elizabeth,

panic-stricken, urged the French king to save her from Philip by an

invasion of the Netherlands. But the danger passed quickly away. The

Papal attempt ended in a miserable failure. The fort of Smerwick, in

which the invaders entrenched themselves, was forced to surrender, and

its garrison put ruthlessly to the sword. The Earl of Desmond, who after

long indecision rose to support them, was defeated and hunted over his

own country, which the panic-born cruelty of his pursuers harried into a

wilderness.

[Sidenote: The Jesuit landing.]

Pitiless as it was, the work done in Munster spread a terror over

Ireland which served England in good stead when the struggle of

Catholicism culminated in the fight with the Armada; and not a chieftain

stirred during that memorable year save to massacre the miserable men

who were shipwrecked along the coast of Bantry or Sligo. But the Irish

revolt did much to give fresh strength to the panic which the efforts of

the seminary priests had roused in England. This was raised to frenzy by

news that to the efforts of the seminary priests were now added those of

Jesuit missionaries. Pope Gregory had resolved to support his military

effort in Ireland by a fresh missionary effort in England itself. Philip

would only promise to invade England if the co-operation of its

Catholics was secured; and the aim of the new mission was to prepare

them for revolt. While the force of San Giuseppe was being equipped for

Kerry a young convert, William Gilbert, was despatched to form a

Catholic association in England; among whose members the chief were

afterwards found engaged in conspiracies for the death of Elizabeth or

sharing in the Gunpowder Plot. As soon as this was organized, as many as

fifty priests, if we may trust Allen's statement, were sent to land

secretly on the coast. They were headed by two men of remarkable talents

and energy. A large number of the Oxford refugees at Douay had joined

the Order of Jesus, whose members were already famous for their blind

devotion to the will and judgements of Rome; and the two ablest and most

eloquent of these exiles, Campian, once a fellow of St. John's, and

Parsons, once a fellow of Balliol, were despatched in the spring of 1580

as the heads of a Jesuit mission in England. Their special aim was to

win the nobility and gentry to the Church, and for the moment their

success seemed overwhelming. "It is supposed," wrote Allen triumphantly,

"that there are twenty thousand more Catholics this year than last." The

eagerness shown to hear Campian was so great that in spite of the

rewards offered for his arrest by the Government he was able to preach

with hardly a show of concealment to a large audience at Smithfield.

From London the Jesuits wandered in the disguise of captains or

serving-men, sometimes even in the cassocks of the English clergy,

through many of the counties; and wherever they went the zeal of the

Catholic gentry revived. The list of nobles won back to the older faith

by these wandering apostles was headed by the name of Lord Oxford,

Cecil's own son-in-law, and the proudest among English peers.

[Sidenote: The Protestant terror.]

Their success in undoing the Queen's work of compromise was shown in a

more public way by the growing withdrawal of the Catholics from

attendance at the worship of the English Church. It was plain that a

fierce religious struggle was at hand, and men felt that behind this

lay a yet fiercer political struggle. Philip's hosts were looming over

sea, and the horrors of foreign invasion seemed about to be added to the

horrors of civil war. The panic of the Protestants and of the Parliament

outran even the real greatness of the danger. The little group of

missionaries was magnified by popular fancy into a host of disguised

Jesuits; and the invasion of this imaginary host was met by the seizure

and torture of as many priests as the government could lay hands on, the

imprisonment of recusants, the securing of the prominent Catholics

throughout the country, and by the assembling of Parliament at the

opening of 1581. An Act "to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in due

obedience" prohibited the saying of Mass even in private houses,

increased the fine on recusants to twenty pounds a month, and enacted

that "all persons pretending to any power of absolving subjects from

their allegiance, or practising to withdraw them to the Romish religion,

with all persons after the present session willingly so absolved or

reconciled to the See of Rome, shall be guilty of High Treason." The way

in which the vast powers conferred on the Crown by this statute were

used by Elizabeth was not only characteristic in itself, but important

as at once defining the policy to which, in theory at least, her

successors adhered for more than a hundred years. No layman was brought

to the bar or to the block under its provisions. The oppression of the

Catholic gentry was limited to an exaction, more or less rigorous at

different times, of the fines for recusancy or non-attendance at public

worship. The work of bloodshed was reserved wholly for priests, and

under Elizabeth this work was done with a ruthless energy which for the

moment crushed the Catholic reaction. The Jesuits were tracked by

pursuivants and spies, dragged from their hiding-places, and sent in

batches to the Tower. So hot was the pursuit that Parsons was forced to

fly across the Channel; while Campian was arrested in July 1581, brought

a prisoner through the streets of London amidst the howling of the mob,

and placed at the bar on the charge of treason. "Our religion only is

our crime," was a plea which galled his judges; but the political danger

of the Jesuit preaching was disclosed in his evasion of any direct reply

when questioned as to his belief in the validity of the excommunication

or deposition of the Queen by the Papal See, and after much hesitation

he was executed as a traitor.

[Sidenote: The Catholic resistance.]

Rome was now at open war with England. Even the more conservative

Englishmen looked on the Papacy as the first among England's foes. In

striving to enforce the claims of its temporal supremacy, Rome had

roused against it that national pride which had battled with it even in

the middle ages. From that hour therefore the cause of Catholicism was

lost. England became Protestant in heart and soul when Protestantism

became identified with patriotism. But it was not to Protestantism only

that this attitude of Rome and the policy it forced on the Government

gave a new impulse. The death of Campian was the prelude to a steady,

pitiless effort at the extermination of his class. If we adopt the

Catholic estimate of the time, the twenty years which followed saw the

execution of two hundred priests, while a yet greater number perished in

the filthy and fever-stricken gaols into which they were plunged. The

work of reconciliation to Rome was arrested by this ruthless energy;

but, on the other hand, the work which the priests had effected could

not be undone. The system of quiet compulsion and conciliation to which

Elizabeth had trusted for the religious reunion of her subjects was

foiled; and the English Catholics, fined, imprisoned at every crisis of

national danger, and deprived of their teachers by the prison and the

gibbet, were severed more hopelessly than ever from the national Church.

A fresh impulse was thus given to the growing current of opinion which

was to bring England at last to recognize the right of every man to

freedom both of conscience and of worship. "In Henry's days, the father

of this Elizabeth," wrote a Catholic priest at this time, "the whole

kingdom with all its bishops and learned men abjured their faith at one

word of the tyrant. But now in his daughter's days boys and women

boldly profess the faith before the judge, and refuse to make the

slightest concession even at the threat of death." What Protestantism

had first done under Mary, Catholicism was doing under Elizabeth. It was

deepening the sense of personal religion. It was revealing in men who

had till now cowered before the might of kingship a power greater than

the might of kings. It was breaking the spell which the monarchy had

laid on the imagination of the people. The Crown ceased to seem

irresistible when "boys and women" dared to resist it: it lost its

mysterious sacredness when half the nation looked on their sovereign as

a heretic. The "divinity that doth hedge a king" was rudely broken in

upon when Jesuit libellers were able to brand the wearer of the crown

not only as a usurper but as a profligate and abandoned woman. The

mighty impulse of patriotism, of national pride, which rallied the whole

people round Elizabeth as the Armada threatened England or Drake

threatened Spain, shielded indeed Elizabeth from much of the natural

results of this drift of opinion. But with her death the new sentiment

started suddenly to the front. The divine right of kings, the divine

right of bishops, found themselves face to face with a passion for

religious and political liberty which had gained vigour from the dungeon

of the Catholic priest as from that of the Protestant zealot.