DOMESTIC AFFAIRS: 1588-1601
It was a boast of Elizabeth that when once her servants were chosen she
did not lightly displace them. Difference of opinion from their
mistress, or from one another, did not involve resignation or dismissal,
because, though they were free to speak their minds, all had to carry
out with fidelity and even zeal, whatever policy the Queen prescribed.
This condition they accepted; not only the astute and compliant
Burghley, but the more eager and opinionated Walsingham; and therefore
they had practically a life-tenure of office. Soon after the Armada the
first generation of them began to disappear. Bacon, Sussex, and Bedford
were already gone. Leicester died in 1588; his brother Warwick, and
Mildmay in 1589; Walsingham and Randolph in 1591; Hatton in 1592; Grey
de Wilton in 1593; Knollys and Hunsdon in 1596. Of the trusty servants
with whom she began her reign, Burghley alone remained. The leading men
of the new generation were Robert Cecil, the Treasurer’s second son,
trained to business under his father’s eye, and of qualities similar,
though inferior; Nottingham (formerly Howard of Effingham), a
straightforward man of no great ability, but acceptable to the Queen for
his father’s services and his own (and not the less so for his fine
presence); the accomplished Buckhurst; the brilliant Raleigh; and,
younger than the rest, Essex. The last was the son of a man much
favoured by Elizabeth. Leicester was his step-father, Knollys his
grandfather, Hunsdon his great-uncle, Walsingham his father-in-law,
Burghley his guardian. Ardent, impulsive, presumptuous, a warm friend, a
rancorous enemy, profuse in expense, lawless in his amours, jealous of
his equals, brooking no superior, impatient of all rule or order that
delayed him from leaping at once to the highest place,--he was possessed
with a most exaggerated notion of his own capacity, which appears to
have been only moderate. As the ward of Burghley he had been much in the
company of his future enemy, Robert Cecil, whose sly prim ways were most
unlike his own. The contrast did him no harm with the public, to whom
the younger man was a Tom Jones and the elder a Blifil. Two vastly abler
men, Francis Bacon and Raleigh, less advantageously placed, but
unhampered with any scruples, were busily trying to profit by the
all-pervading animosity of Cecil and Essex.
Belonging, as Essex did by his connections, to the inner circle who
stood closest to Elizabeth, it was natural that she should take an
interest in him, and give him opportunities for turning his showy
qualities to account. In 1586 he was sent to the Low Countries as
general of cavalry under his step-father, Leicester. He distinguished
himself by his fiery valour in the expeditions to Spain, and as
commander of the English army in France, though he does not seem to have
had any real military talent. But Elizabeth’s regard for him was soon
shaken by his presumptuous and unruly behaviour. When he fought a duel
with Sir Charles Blount because she had conferred some favour on the
latter, she swore “by God’s death it were fitting some one should take
him down and teach him better manners, or there were no rule with him.”
He displeased her by his quarrels with Cecil and Effingham, and his
discontented grumbling. She was highly dissatisfied with his management
of the Azores expedition in 1597. In July 1598, at a meeting of the
Council, she was provoked by his insolence to strike him; and though
after three months he obtained his pardon, he never regained her favour.
It was at this time that Burghley died (August 4), in his seventy-eighth
year. Elizabeth, though she could call him “a froward old fool” about a
trifling matter (March 1596), could not but feel that much was changed
when she lost the able and faithful servant who had worked with her for
forty years. “She seemeth to take it very grievously, shedding of tears
and separating herself from all company.” Buckhurst was the new
Treasurer.
Essex had for some time cast his eyes on Ireland as a field where glory
and power might be won. There can be little doubt that he was already
speculating on the advantage that the possession of an army might give
him in any difficulty with his rivals or with the Queen herself. Cecil
perfidiously advocated his appointment to a post which had been the
grave of so many reputations. The Queen at length consented, though
reluctantly. Essex was a popular favourite. He had managed--it is not
very clear how--to win the confidence of both Puritans and Papists. The
general belief was that, for the first time since she had mounted the
throne, Elizabeth was afraid of one of her subjects.
During the whole of the reign Ireland had been a cause of trouble and
anxiety. Elizabeth’s treatment of that unhappy country was not more
creditable or successful than that of other English statesmen before and
after her. There was the same absence of any systematic policy steadily
carried out, the same wearisome and disreputable alternation between
bursts of savage repression and intervals of pusillanimity, concession,
and neglect. In the competition of the various departments of the public
service for attention and expenditure, Ireland generally came last. All
other needs had to be served first whether at home or abroad.
In the early years of the reign the chief trouble lay in Ulster, then
the most purely Celtic part of Ireland, and practically untouched by
English conquest. Twice, in her weariness of the struggle with Shan
O’Neill, Elizabeth conceded to him something like a sub-kingship of
Ulster in return for his nominal submission. In the end he was beaten,
and his head was fixed on the walls of Dublin Castle (1566). But nothing
further was done to anglicise Ulster. During the attempt of the
Devonshire adventurers to colonise South Munster (1569-71), and the
consequent rebellion, the northern province remained an unconcerned
spectator. Nor did it join in the great Desmond rising (1579-83), which,
with the insurrection of the Catholic lords of the Pale and the landing
of the Pope’s Italians at Smerwick, was the Irish branch of the
threefold attack on Elizabeth directed by Gregory XIII. The attempt of
the elder Essex to colonise Antrim (1573-75) was a disastrous failure,
and Ulster still remained practically independent of the Dublin
Government.
The most successful Deputy of the reign was Perrot (1584-87), a valiant
soldier and strict ruler, who, after long experience in the Irish wars,
had come to the conclusion that what Ireland most wanted was justice.
The native chiefs, released from the constant dread of spoliation, and
finding that English encroachment was repressed as inflexibly as Irish
disorder, became quiet and friendly. But this system did not suit the
dominant race. The Deputy was accused to the Queen of seeking to betray
the country to the Irish and the Spaniard. Recalled, and put upon his
trial for treason, he was found guilty on suborned evidence, and
sentenced to death. It is usually said that his real offence was some
disrespectful language about the Queen, which he confessed. But it seems
that she forbore to take his life precisely because she would not have
it thought that she was influenced by personal resentment.
His successor, Fitzwilliam, was a Deputy of the old sort--greedy,
violent, careless of consequences, and always acting on the principle
that, as against an Englishman, a Celt had no rights. The execution of
MacMahon in Monaghan, and the confiscation of his lands on a trivial
pretext, alarmed the North. Ulster had not been bled white like the rest
of Ireland. The O’Neills had a nephew of their old hero Shan for their
chief, who had been brought up at the English Court and made Earl of
Tyrone by Elizabeth. An educated and remarkably able man, he had none of
his uncle’s illusions. He clung to his ancestral rights and dignity, but
he hoped to preserve them by zealously discharging his obligations as a
vassal of the Queen. He served in the war against Desmond, and exerted
himself to maintain order in Ulster. But he had no mind to sink into the
position of a mere dignified land-owner like the English nobles; nor
indeed, under such a Deputy as Fitzwilliam, was he likely to preserve
even his lands if he lost his power. Rather than that, he determined to
enter into what he knew was a most unequal struggle, on the off-chance
of pulling through by help from Spain. It is clear that he was driven
into rebellion against his inclination. But when he had once drawn the
sword he maintained the struggle against one Deputy after another with
wonderful tenacity and resource. For the first time in Irish history,
the rebel forces were disciplined and armed like those of the crown, and
stood up to them in equal numbers on equal terms. At length, in August
1598, Tyrone inflicted upon Sir Henry Bagnall near Armagh the severest
defeat that the English had ever suffered in Ireland; slaying 1500 of
his men, and capturing all his artillery and baggage. Insurrections at
once broke out all over Ireland.
This was the situation with which Essex undertook to deal. He had loudly
blamed other Deputies for not vigorously attacking Tyrone in his own
country. Vigour was the one military quality which he himself possessed.
He went with the title of Lieutenant and Governor-General, and with
extraordinary powers, at the head of 21,000 men--such an army as had
never been sent to Ireland (April 1599). The Queen, who trembled at the
expense, and did not wish to see any of her nobles, least of all Essex,
permanently established in a great military command, enjoined him to
push at once into Ulster, as he had himself proposed, and finish the
war. Instead of doing this, he went south into districts that had been
depopulated and desolated by the savage warfare of the last thirty
years. Even here he met with discreditable reverses. When he got back to
Dublin (July) his army was reduced by disease and desertion to less than
5000 men. Disregarding the Queen’s express prohibition, he made his
friend Southampton General of horse. When she censured his bad
management, he replied with impertinent complaints about the favour she
was showing to Cecil, Raleigh, and Cobham, and began to consult with his
friends about carrying selected troops over to England to remove them.
Rumours of his intention to return reached the Queen. “We do charge
you,” she wrote, “as you tender our pleasure, that you adventure not to
come out of that kingdom.” He declared that he could not invade Ulster
without reinforcements. They were sent, and at length he marched into
Louth (September). There he was met by Tyrone, who, in an interview,
completely twisted him round his finger, and obtained a cessation of
arms and the promise of concessions amounting to what would now be
called Home Rule. A few days later, on receipt of an angry letter from
the Queen forbidding him to grant any terms without her permission, he
deserted his post and hurried to England. The first notice Elizabeth
received of this astounding piece of insubordination was his still more
astounding incursion into her bedroom, all muddy from his ride, before
she was completely dressed (September 28, 1599).
Elizabeth seems to have been so much taken aback by the Earl’s
unparalleled presumption, that she did not blaze out as might have been
expected. She gave him audience an hour or two later, and heard what he
had to say. Probably he adopted an injured tone as usual, and inveighed
against “that knave Raleigh” and “that sycophant Cobham.” But his
insubordination had been gross, and no talking could make it anything
else. It was more dangerous than Leicester’s disobedience in 1586,
because it came from a vastly more dangerous person. The same afternoon
the Queen referred the matter to the Council. Essex was put under
arrest, and never saw her again. The more she reflected, the more
indignant and alarmed she became. “By God’s son,” she said to Harington,
“I am no Queen; this man is above me.” After a delay of nine months,
occasioned by his illness, the fallen favourite was brought before a
special Commission on the charge of contempt and disobedience, and
sentenced to be suspended from his offices and confined to his house
during the Queen’s pleasure (June 1600). In a few weeks he was released
from arrest, but he could not obtain permission to appear at court,
though he implored it in most abject letters.
There are persons who consider themselves to be intolerably wronged and
persecuted if they cannot have precedence and power over their
fellow-citizens. Essex was such a person. Instead of being thankful that
he had escaped the punishment which under most sovereigns he would have
suffered, he entered into criminal plots for coercing, if not
overthrowing, the Queen. He urged the Scotch King to enforce the
recognition of his title by arms. He tried to persuade Mountjoy, his
successor in Ireland, to carry his army to Scotland to co-operate with
James. These intrigues were not known to the Government. But it did not
escape observation that he was collecting men of the sword in the
neighbourhood of his house; that he was holding consultations with
suspected nobles and gentlemen (some of whom were afterwards engaged in
the Gunpowder Plot); that the Puritan clergy were preaching and praying
for his cause; and that there was a certain ferment in the city. Essex
was therefore summoned to attend before the Council. Instead of obeying,
he flew to arms, with Lords Southampton, Rutland, Sandys, Cromwell, and
Monteagle, and about 300 gentlemen. But the citizens of London did not
respond to his appeal, and the insurrection was easily suppressed, less
than a dozen persons being slain on both sides (February 8, 1601). A
more senseless and profligate attempt to overthrow a good government it
would be difficult to find in history. It was not dignified by any
semblance of principle, and it would sufficiently stamp the character of
its author, even if it stood alone as an evidence of his vanity,
egotism, and want of common sense.
The trial and execution of the principal malefactor followed as a matter
of course and without delay (February 25). It would have been scandalous
to spare him. Elizabeth had once been fond of him, and had no reason to
be ashamed of it. To talk of her “passion” and her “amorous
inclination,” as Hume and others have done, is revolting and malignant
nonsense. It is creditable to old age when it can take pleasure in the
unfolding of bright and promising youth. But royal favour was not good
for such a man as Essex. It developed the worst features in his showy
but faulty character. As he steadily deteriorated, her regard cooled;
but so much of it remained that she tried to amend him by chastisement,
“_ad correctionem_” as she said, “_non ad ruinam_.” She had long before
warned him that, though she had put up with much disrespect to her
person, he must not touch her sceptre, or he would be dealt with
according to the law of England. She was as good as her word, and,
though the memory of it was painful to her, there is not the smallest
evidence that she ever repented of having allowed the law to take its
course.[16] Only three of the accomplices of Essex were punished
capitally. The five peers, none of them powerful or formidable,
experienced Elizabeth’s accustomed clemency.
It has been suggested by an admirer of Essex that he failed in Ireland
because his “sensitively attuned nature” shrank from the systematic
desolation and starvation afterwards employed by his successor. No
evidence is offered for this suggestion. In a letter to the Queen (June
25, 1599) he advocates “burning and spoiling the country _in all
places_,” which method “shall starve the rebels in one year.” This
course Mountjoy carried out. With means far inferior to those of Essex,
and notwithstanding the landing of 3000 Spaniards at Kinsale (September
1601), he was the first Englishman who completely subdued Ireland.
Tyrone surrendered a few days before the Queen’s death.
Little has been said in these pages about parliamentary proceedings. The
real history of the reign does not lie there. The country was governed
wholly by the Queen, with the advice of her Council, and not at all by
Parliament. In the forty-five years of her reign there were only
thirteen sessions of Parliament. The functions of Parliament were to
vote grants of money when the ordinary revenues of the crown were
insufficient, and to make laws. Its right in these matters was
unquestioned. If the Queen had never wanted subsidies or penal laws
against her political and religious opponents (of other laws she often
said there were more than enough already), it would never have been
summoned at all; nor is there any reason to suppose that the country
would have complained as long as it was governed with prudence and
success. In fact, to do without Parliaments was distinctly popular,
because it meant doing without subsidies.
In the thirty years preceding the Armada--the sessions of Parliament
being nine--Elizabeth applied for only eight subsidies, and of one of
them a portion was remitted. By her economy she not only defrayed the
expenses of government out of the ordinary revenue, which, at the end of
the reign was about £300,000 a year, but paid off old debts. It was not
till the twenty-fourth year of her reign that she discharged the last of
her father’s debts, up to which time she had been paying interest on it.
Subsequently she even accumulated a small reserve, which, as she told
Parliament, was a most necessary thing if she was not to be driven to
borrow on sudden emergency. But this reserve vanished immediately she
became involved in the great war with Spain; and during the last fifteen
years of her life, although she received twelve subsidies, she was
always in difficulty for money. She had to sell crown lands to the value
of £372,000. Parliament, which had voted the usual single subsidies
without complaint, grumbled and pretended poverty when she asked for
three and even four.[17] Bacon’s famous outburst (1593) about gentlemen
having to sell their plate and farmers their brass pots to pay the tax,
was a piece of claptrap. The nation was, relatively to former times,
rolling in wealth. But the old belief had still considerable
strength--that government being the affair of the King, not of his
subjects, he should provide for its expenses out of his hereditary
income, just as they paid their private expenses out of their private
incomes; that he had no more claim to dip into their pockets than they
had to dip into his; and that a subsidy, as its name imports, was an
occasional and extraordinary assistance furnished as a matter not of
duty but of good-will.
This might have been healthy doctrine when kings were campaigning on the
Continent for personal or dynastic objects. It was out of place when a
large expenditure was indispensable for the interests and safety of the
country. The grumbling, therefore, about taxation towards the end of the
reign was unreasonable and discreditable to the grumblers. The Queen met
them with her usual good sense. She explained to them--though, as she
correctly said, she was under no constitutional obligation to do so--how
the money went, what she had spent on the Spanish war, on Ireland, and
in loans to the Dutch and the French King. The plea was unanswerable.
Her private expenditure was on a very modest scale. In particular she
had never indulged in that besetting and costly sin of princes,
palace-building; and this at a time when the noble mansions which still
testify to the wealth of the England of that day were rising in every
county. Her only extravagance was dress. Some have carped at her
collection of jewelry. But jewels, like the silver balustrades of
Frederick William I., were a mode of hoarding, and in her later years
she reconverted jewels into money to meet the expenses of the State.
Modern writers, who so airily blame her for not subsidising more
liberally her Scotch, Dutch, and French allies, would find it difficult,
if they condescended to particulars, to explain how she was able to give
them as much money as she did.
It is common to make much of the debate on monopolies in the last
Parliament of Elizabeth (1601), as showing the rise of a spirit of
resistance to the royal prerogative. I do not think that the report of
that debate would convey such an impression to any one reading it
without preconceived views. None of the speakers contested the
prerogative. They only complained that it was being exercised in a way
prejudicial to the public interest. If the monopolies had been
unimportant, or if the patentees had used their privilege less greedily,
there would evidently have been no complaint as to the principle
involved. No course of action was decided on, because the Queen
intervened by a message in which she stated that she had not been aware
of the abuses prevailing, that she was as indignant at them as
Parliament could be, and that she would put a stop, not to monopolies,
but to such as were injurious. With this message the House of Commons
was more than satisfied. As a matter of fact monopolies went on till
dealt with by the declaratory statute in the twenty-first year of James
I.
If the last Tudor handed down the English Constitution to the first
Stuart as she had received it from her predecessors, unchanged either in
theory or practice, it was far otherwise with the English Church. There
are two conflicting views as to the historical position of the Church in
this country. According to one it was, all through the Middle Age,
National as well as Catholic. The changes which took place at the
Reformation made no difference in that respect, and involved no break in
its continuity. It is not a Protestant Church. It is still National and
still Catholic, resting on precisely the same foundations, and existing
by the same title as it did in the days of Dunstan and Becket. According
to the other view, the epithets National and Catholic are contradictory.
A Church which undergoes radical changes of government, worship, and
doctrine is no longer the same Church but a new one, and must be held to
have been established by the authority which prescribed these changes,
which, in this case, was the Queen and Parliament. The word “Protestant”
was avoided in its formularies to make conformity easier for Catholics;
but it is a Protestant Church all the same. Whichever of these views is
nearer to the truth, it cannot be denied that, by the legislation of
Elizabeth the English Church became--what it was not in the Middle
Age--a spiritual organisation entirely dependent on the State. This it
remains still; the supremacy having been virtually transferred from the
crown to Parliament in the next century. I shall not venture to inquire
how far this condition of dependence has affected its ability and
inclination to perform the part of a true spiritual power. It is enough
to say that no act of will on the part of any English statesman has had
such important and lasting consequences, for good or for evil, as the
decision of Elizabeth to make the Church of England what it is.
We have seen that the government and worship of the Church were
established by Act of Parliament in 1559, and its doctrines in 1571. But
when once Elizabeth had placed her ecclesiastical powers beyond dispute,
by obtaining statutory sanction for them, she allowed no further
interference by Parliament. All its attempts, even at mere discussion of
ecclesiastical matters, she peremptorily suppressed. She supplied any
further legislation that was needed by virtue of her supremacy, and she
exercised her ecclesiastical government by the Court of High Commission.
The new Anglican model was acquiesced in by the majority of the nation.
But it had, at first, no hearty support except from the Government. The
earnest religionists were either Catholics or Puritans. The object of
Elizabeth was to compel these two extreme parties to outward conformity
of worship. What their real beliefs were she did not care.
The large majority of the Catholics showed a loyal and patriotic spirit
at the time of the Armada. But they were not treated with confidence by
the Government. Great numbers of them were imprisoned or confined in the
houses of Protestant gentlemen, by way of precaution, when the Armada
was approaching. No Catholic, I believe, was intrusted with any command
either by land or sea; and after the danger was over, the persecution,
in all its forms, became sharper than ever. There was the less reason
for this, inasmuch as it was no secret that the secular priests and the
great majority of the English Catholics had become bitterly hostile to
the small Jesuitical faction whose treasonable conspiracies had brought
so much trouble on their loyal co-religionists.
The term “Puritan” is used loosely, though conveniently, to designate
several shades of belief. By far the larger number of those to whom it
is applied were, and meant to remain, members of the Established Church.
They objected to certain ceremonies and vestments. They hoped to procure
the abolition of these, and, in the meantime, evaded them when they
could. They were what would now be called the Evangelical or Low Church
party. They held Calvin’s distinctive doctrines on predestination, as
indeed did most of the bishops; but though preferring his Presbyterian
organisation, or something like it, they did not treat it as essential.
They were broadly distinguished from the Brownists or Independents, then
an insignificant minority, who held each congregation to be a church,
and therefore protested against the establishment of any national
church.
Though Elizabeth persecuted the Catholics with a severity steadily
increasing in proportion as they became less numerous and formidable,
she remained to the last anxious to make conformity easy for them. This
was her reason for so obstinately refusing the concessions in the matter
of ritual and vestments--trifling as they appear to the modern
mind--which would have satisfied almost the whole of the Puritan party.
This policy (for policy it assuredly was rather than conviction), which
drove the most earnest Protestants into an attitude of opposition
destined in the next two reigns to have such serious consequences, has
been severely censured. But there can be no question that it did answer
the purpose she had in view, which for the moment was most important. It
did induce great numbers of Catholics to conform. She avoided a civil
war in her own time between Catholics and Anglicans at the price of a
civil war later on between Anglicans and Puritans. Looking at the great
drama as a whole, perhaps the Puritans of the Great Rebellion might
congratulate themselves on the part that Elizabeth chose to play in its
earlier acts. It cannot be doubted that a civil war in the sixteenth
century between Catholics and Protestants would have been waged with far
more ferocity than was displayed by either Cavaliers or Roundheads, and
would have been attended with the horrors of foreign invasion. To
conciliate the earnest religionists on both sides was impossible.
Elizabeth chose the _via media_, and the successful equilibrium which
she maintained during nearly half a century proves that she hit upon
what in her own day was the true centre of gravity.
But while doing justice to Elizabeth’s insight and prudence, we may not
excuse her extreme severity to the nonconformists of either party. It
was not necessary. It seems to have been even impolitic. It arose from
her arbitrary temper--from a quality, that is to say, valuable in a
ruler, but apt, in great rulers, to be somewhat in excess. I have
condemned her persecution of the Catholics. Her persecution of the
Protestant nonconformists was marked by even greater injustice. Against
the Catholics it might at least be urged that their opinions logically
led to disloyalty. But the Independents, Barrow, Greenwood, and Penry,
were indisputably loyal men. They were put to death nominally for
spreading writings which, contrary to common sense, were held to be
seditious, but really for their religious opinions, which, in the case
of the first two, were extracted from them by the interrogatories of
Archbishop Whitgift, an Inquisitor as strenuous and merciless as
Torquemada. Some of the Council, especially Burghley and Knollys, were
strongly opposed to Whitgift’s proceedings. It must therefore be assumed
that he had the Queen’s personal approval. She had committed herself to
a struggle with intrepid and obstinate men. The crowded gaols were a
visible demonstration that she could not compel them to submit; and to
hang them all was out of the question. An Act was therefore passed in
1593, by which those who would not promise to attend church were to be
banished the country. Thus most of the Independents were at last got rid
of. The non-separatist Puritans, who aimed at less radical changes, and
hoped to effect them, if not under their present sovereign, yet under
her successor, kept on the windy side of the law, attending church once
a month, and not entering till the service was nearly over. Thus, at the
end of her reign, Elizabeth perhaps flattered herself that she was
within measurable distance of religious uniformity.