necessity for her personal government. She did not feel strongly
that it would still be a necessity for England when she should be in
her grave. Cecil did; while for Walsingham it was a necessity _per
se_. Therefore, to Elizabeth the settlement of the succession was a
political counter of which she did not choose to be deprived; while
to her ministers the delay of it was a perpetual nightmare, because
it meant a constant fear of the accession of Mary Stewart--a prospect
even more threatening after she had left Scotland than while she was a
reigning queen. Herein is to be found one of the reasons why Elizabeth
was not anxious to get rid of a prisoner round whom--dangerous though
Mary might be--she could weave intrigues and negotiations as well as
her opponents; whereas Cecil and Walsingham would always have been
pleased to find any decent excuse for eliminating the Scots Queen from
the situation. In the same way, the ministers wanted their own Queen
to make a suitable marriage, whereas she herself used matrimonial
negotiations merely as tricks for circumventing crises, and probably
never at any time really intended to wed any one among the numerous
suitors, of whom the last did not finally disappear till she was in her
fiftieth year. There is no practical doubt that at one time, early in
the reign, Cecil was himself so much perturbed on the question of the
succession as to have made a move in co-operation with Nicholas Bacon
to get Katharine Grey--sister of Lady Jane, and now married to Lord
Hertford--recognised officially as heir presumptive in accordance with
the terms of the will of Henry VIII.; for which he very nearly got into
serious trouble. Also, it was many years before the Secretary really
felt thoroughly free from the fear, which Elizabeth enjoyed holding in
suspense over his head, that she might some day throw policy to the
winds and court ruin by marrying Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
VI
ELIZABETH’S SECOND PERIOD
The year 1568 and those immediately following had a very material
effect on the general situation. In the first place, the Queen of Scots
delivered herself into Elizabeth’s hands, having already forfeited some
of her chances of foreign support by her marriage with Bothwell. In the
second place, the disaffected provinces of the Netherlands were driven
into open revolt. Broadly speaking, it may be said that from this time
forward Philip always wished to crush Elizabeth, while he would not
involve himself in war with England until he could reckon on crushing
her decisively. There was always the possibility of an Anglo-French
combination, involving Huguenot predominance in France; and in that
event the fleets of the two Powers would command his only line of
communication with the Netherlands. So that on the one hand Spaniards
are found, throughout Mary’s captivity, engaged in plot after plot for
her liberation and enthronement in England; while on the other, Philip
is obliged to swallow one affront after another, and to vary threats
of utter destruction with elaborate efforts to placate the Queen of
England. Cecil--Lord Burghley, as he became in 1571--was no less
anxious to avoid war, but was also determined to go as far as might be,
short of war, in support of the insurgent provinces; while steadily
accumulating the evidence of Spanish complicity in Marian plots, to
be produced as an effective answer to any complaints that England was
abetting treason in the Netherlands, or her seamen committing acts of
war in the Spanish Main or the West Indian Islands.
The Protestantism of the Government stiffened inevitably with the
development of Catholic plots centring on Mary, the atrocities
perpetrated by Alva in the Netherlands, the cruelties practised by the
Spanish Inquisition on English sailors who fell into its hands, and the
blundering Papal Bull of deposition--which, in fact, embarrassed Philip
a good deal more than it injured the Queen of England. This singularly
impolitic act of the Roman Pontiff, emphasising the direct antagonism,
not to say the irreconcilability, of loyalty to the Throne and loyalty
to the Church, sufficed in itself to bring all Catholics under
suspicion of being at heart traitors--in the technical sense; pledged
by their faith to desire, if not actively to compass, the overthrow of
the reigning queen. Preceded, as it was, by the insurrection of the
northern Catholic Earls in Mary’s favour, and followed by the Ridolfi
conspiracy, it is difficult to perceive how the Queen’s government
could have done otherwise than assume that to be a Catholic was to be
disaffected. Nor is it possible to imagine that, after the appalling
St. Bartholomew massacres of 1572, anti-Catholic sentiment in the
country was not intensified to a white heat.
The people of England had a further grievance against Spain, inasmuch
as she had taken possession of the wealth of the New World, and
meant to keep it for herself--whereas the English desired a share.
Throughout the later sixties and the seventies, English adventurers
were engaged in making good their claims, in spite of nominal peace
and law, by force of arms, raiding Spanish settlements or compelling
local authorities to allow them to trade in defiance of all injunctions
from headquarters. Technically, at least, these proceedings amounted
to piracy, and if the Spaniards had been content to treat their
perpetrators as pirates, it would have been extremely difficult to
protest. Having an almost incontrovertible case, the Spaniards elected
to put themselves in the wrong by punishing their prisoners--when they
caught them--not as pirates but as heretics, gratuitously introducing
the religious factor. Even in 1568 English sailors, under such captains
as John Hawkins, had learnt to feel that ship for ship they were very
much more than a match for Spanish galleons. Thus the most adventurous
and most irrepressible class in the community was athirst to measure
its strength with the Spaniard, and found no difficulty in convincing
itself that to do so was a religious duty. The spirit of rivalry,
greed of wealth, and sheer love of adventure, formed a sufficiently
strong combination of motives; zeal against the persecutors of true
religion gave them a colour which satisfied any but the most fastidious
consciences.
Now, it will be easy to see from the foregoing paragraphs that already
in 1568 enough had occurred to inflame popular feeling against
Spain. There were the doings of the Spanish Inquisition in respect
of English sailors. There was, amongst other grievances, the attack
on John Hawkins at San Juan d’Ulloa. There was Alva’s tyranny in
the Netherlands. In France, no one could tell whether Huguenots or
Catholics were going to get the upper hand; but Philip was fully
committed to the suppression of heresy within his own dominions, and
outside them as well so far as it might lie in his power. During the
next four years, every event of importance went to intensify the
sentiment against Spain, to which, and not to France, the Ridolfi plot
pointed as Mary’s ally. On the other hand, it was evident at once,
when Elizabeth was able to detain in her own ports for her own use
the treasure which was on its way up channel to help Alva, that for
the time Philip was too heavily hampered to be able to turn his full
strength against England; and as time went on it became increasingly
clear that Spain could not, with the Netherlands revolt on her hands,
contemplate an English war with equanimity. Even Saint Bartholomew did
not divert the hostile sentiment in the direction of France, since
still after the massacre it was difficult to say whether the French
nation should be identified with the party of the perpetrators rather
than with that of the victims.
At the lowest estimate, then, there was a mass of feeling in the
country which could very easily have been fanned into a blaze of
indignation, imperatively demanding open defiance of Spain, vigorous
support of the Netherlands and of the Huguenots--in short, immediate
war instead of the chance of war in the future. But the Queen and
Burghley were determined to avoid war; and for nearly twenty years they
succeeded. Burghley’s own primary conviction was that amity between
Burgundy and England was of such enormous importance to both that
considerations of policy would prevent Philip, as they had prevented
his father, from being dragged into war by considerations of religious
zeal. Protestantism--so much of it, at least, as was necessary--could
be saved, probably without adopting heroic courses; and in any case,
if a duel should ultimately prove inevitable, every year that it was
deferred would tell in favour of England, which was daily growing in
wealth, in stability, and in efficiency; and against Spain, which
was constantly subjected to the exhausting strain of war in the Low
Countries and war with the Turk.
Ultimate friendship with Spain, on the basis of immunity for
unaggressive Protestantism, mutual toleration, and unfettered trade,
was broadly the ideal for which Burghley worked; to achieve it, he was
ready to bring to bear any amount of pressure which would not actually
precipitate war. But it was part of the policy always to make sure that
there was, at any rate, technical justification for everything done
by the English Government. This technical correctness is particularly
characteristic of the man. While Elizabeth herself and nearly every man
in her court, were all shareholders, or in some degree interested, in
the privateering expeditions of Drake and other captains, Burghley held
himself rigidly aloof from them, and never made a penny of personal
profit in that way. He had no moral qualms about seizing the Genoese
treasure in 1568--that was merely an arrangement by which the bankers
lent to England money which they had intended to lend to Spain; if it
inconvenienced Spain, Spain should not have seized the English ships
in her harbours. But when Drake came home after sailing round the
world, with vast quantities of captured treasure in the _Golden Hind_,
Burghley stigmatised the whole proceedings as piratical, declined any
share of the spoil, and would have had it restored to Spain.
In this connection, the Lord Treasurer’s[E] aversion to these raiding
expeditions was so strong that when Drake’s great voyage was in
contemplation the utmost pains were taken to keep the matter out of his
knowledge. But there were very few things that Burghley did not succeed
in being aware of; and one of the gentleman-adventurers who sailed in
that expedition, Thomas Doughty, was in personal communication with
him before it started. This man was executed by Drake at Port St.
Julian, in Patagonia--one of the grounds on which he was held guilty
of treason towards the “General,” Drake, being that he had admittedly
revealed as much as he knew to Burghley. The fact that inquiry into
that execution was carefully shirked, while the recorded evidence is
somewhat contradictory and inconclusive, has led to the formation of
various surmises to the disfavour of Drake, of Burghley, of Doughty,
or of the witnesses, according to the point of view of the critic. The
most natural interpretation would seem to be that in the first place
Drake and the sailors in general suspected gentleman-adventurers at
large of being an objectionably insubordinate and troublesome element;
and the General may very possibly have been injudicially ready to
condemn one of them on insufficient evidence--evidence which satisfied
him but did not amount to legal proof--and fancied that collusion with
the antagonistic Lord Treasurer implied certainly ill-will and probably
treachery to the commander. Applying those current rules of evidence
which repeatedly sufficed to condemn men for treason at home, the
case for executing Doughty was quite strong enough to act on, though
exceedingly awkward to make public. It would show, of course, that the
sailor was very suspicious of the designs of the statesman from whom
the Queen wanted to have the thing concealed; it also suggests that
Elizabeth liked to do behind the minister’s back, if she could manage
it, the things which she knew he would disapprove. But it does not
involve anything outrageous on Drake’s part, or any real discredit to
the Lord Treasurer.
[E] Burghley was made Lord High Treasurer in 1572.
In fact, for a dozen years after Saint Bartholomew, while Burghley
and the Queen had the same main object in view, though others of the
Council were urgent in favour of her presenting herself openly as
the champion of Protestantism, Burghley’s difficulties were mainly
of Elizabeth’s creating. To all appearance, she was in a state of
ceaseless vacillation--now on the verge of a shameful betrayal of
Orange, now on the brink of a French marriage, now on the point of
announcing her readiness to head a League of Protestants, now of
allowing them to take their chance with the preposterous Alençon
as their figure-head, while she stood aside, and anon dangling her
matrimonial bait before that luckless and incapable prince as a
preferable alternative. Burghley, Walsingham, all her advisers, were
repeatedly driven almost to despair by her vagaries; none knew what her
next twist would be--yet every twist that seemed to produce a fresh
entanglement was followed by another which evaded it; and always as an
open breach with Spain or a flagrant rupture with France seemed really
a thing immediately inevitable, some happy accident appeared to save
the situation once more.
VII
THE WAR WITH SPAIN
It would seem, however, that the discovery of the Throgmorton
conspiracy led Burghley in the beginning of 1584 to the conclusion that
a bolder support should be given to the Netherlands, more especially
as the Alençon farce was finished. In 1585, Elizabeth committed
herself to the Hollanders, Drake went off on the Cartagena raid, and
in 1586 Leicester was in the Low Countries in command of the English
troops. Then came the Babington plot, the execution of the Queen of
Scots after the New Year, the certainty of Philip’s preparations for
the Armada, and the “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard” by Drake,
which deferred the great invasion for a twelvemonth; finally the
week-long battle with the Armada itself, ending in its destruction
off Gravelines, and subsequent annihilation by the tempests. To the
very last Elizabeth went on playing at negotiations with Parma, on
lines involving the basest treachery to the Hollanders; to the entire
satisfaction of Sir James Crofts whom she employed in the business, and
who is known to have been in Philip’s pay. This, however, was merely
one of her regular pieces of diplomatic play-acting; while Burghley
kept his own counsel. The war-party lived on thorns; they did not know
what to make of the trickery, whether it was genuine or a sham. Howard
of Effingham, in fiery wrath, wrote--quoting an old byword--of the
“long grey beard with a white head witless that to all the world would
prove England heart-less,” _i.e._, cowardly. Still, though it would
have been natural enough for them to suspect that the peace-loving
Burghley was abetting the Queen, the probabilities are that Effingham
was referring not to him but to Crofts. Retreat without dishonour was
impossible; he certainly would not have advocated it seriously; and
the elaborate farce which Elizabeth deliberately played was merely a
piece of that eternally baffling and exasperating diplomacy of which
she might be called the inventor and patentee--methods which Burghley
always condemned, though probably his long experience of them had by
this time taught him to see through them. From 1584 he recognised that
events had forced his own peace-loving policy out of court, and that it
could not be revived till the issue between England and Spain had been
fought out. The completeness of England’s triumph when the combatants
did crash together in mortal fray went far, at any rate, to justify the
theory on which he had systematically acted that, if the fight must
come, the longer it could be staved off the more decisively it would
favour his own country.
The wild outburst of enthusiasm following on the defeat of the Armada
very nearly delivered the future of England into the hands of the
Protestant war-party, whose desire was to break the power of Spain
to pieces; and through the winter Drake and Norreys were preparing
for the Lisbon expedition which, as they planned it, would have
been another very crushing blow to Philip. But the great victory
had brought Burghley’s ideal back into the sphere of practical
politics. That is, if English and Spaniards could be brought to see
reason, or to act as if they saw reason, an _entente_ might now be
established securing religious toleration and the recognition of the
old Constitution in the Netherlands, the old Burgundian alliance with
its corollary of commercial privileges and legitimate trading with
Spanish settlements all over the world, and the immunity of English
sailors from the Inquisition. With Spain as an allied Power, whatever
might come of the party strife in France, England would have nothing
to fear. The aggressive sentiment in England was, indeed, too strong
to be repressed; but though the present continuation of the war was
inevitable, it might be so manipulated as to bring it home to the
obstinate mind of Philip that peace on Burghley’s terms would be a very
good bargain for him, without making a total wreck of the power of
Spain.
Elizabeth, as usual, was at one with Burghley on the point, and with
Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, who was now drawing to the front and
making it possible for his father to transfer to him much of the
burden of active work for which he was becoming unfitted by age. The
main method by which the policy was given effect was by placing the
conduct of the war as far as possible in the hands of that section of
the war-party, headed by John Hawkins among the seamen and by Essex
at Court, which thought more of booty than of Empire--which did not
realise, with Drake and Raleigh, that the despoiling of treasure-fleets
and the sacking of ports would accomplish very much less than the
annihilation of fighting fleets and the establishment in the New World
of rival English settlements. Thus, by the time Drake started for
Lisbon, he found his hands so tied by restrictions as to what he was to
do and what he was not to do that the expedition failed of its purpose.
Drake was discredited in consequence, and for some years the war became
a mere series of raids; conducted in force, indeed, and openly avowed
and authorised by the Queen, but not in essence differing from the
semi-piratical performances of the Drakes and Hawkinses when Spain
and England were nominally at peace. Hence, in 1598, when Burghley
and Philip both died within a few weeks of each other, Spain had been
invariably defeated in every successive attempt to strike a blow at her
rival; she had suffered a serious disaster at Cadiz; her treasure-ships
had been repeatedly raided; her enemy, Henry of Navarre, had carried
the day in France: but her hold on the New World remained, she was
still an effective Power in Europe, and the fear of her was not yet
dead, though England still held, and more than held, the priority she
had won ten years before.
VIII
AN APPRECIATION
In foreign policy we have seen that, at any rate in the broader
aspects of it, Burghley and Elizabeth were at one--that is, the Queen
never departed so far from the path he laid down but that she could
regain her footing thereon the moment a crisis arrived. That policy
may be summed up as aiming at one issue--friendship with Spain on an
equality--while preparing for the alternative, a fight for the mastery.
The policy failed to achieve the preferable issue, but in its secondary
aspect was completely successful. Burghley’s own methods were not of
the heroic type; there was no glamour of chivalry and knight-errantry
about them; they were untouched by magnanimity, generosity, moral
enthusiasm; they were ruled by a devotion to law and order, to
propriety, to sober respectability; they were entirely practical,
unsympathetic; but they were essentially marked at least with the
intention of strict justice and reasonableness.
The same characteristics present themselves in his domestic policy. In
the religious settlement and in finance the course taken throughout
the reign is along the broad lines laid down by him; the Queen permits
herself to indulge in personal outbreaks, and sets the general scheme
at naught in individual instances, but, if she flies off at a tangent,
still manages to return before it is too late, before any general
deflection has been brought about. And again the desire of essential
practical justice is the predominating feature. Zeal for particular
religious views, however sincere, must not be permitted to disturb
public order; the decencies must be observed, but the decencies would
allow of as much latitude as reasonable men could desire. If zeal
went the length of harbouring and fostering persons whose doctrines
might be interpreted as impugning the right of the Queen to sit on
the throne of England, justice required that such zeal should be
penalised; if, further, zeal propagated such doctrines actively, zeal
became treason. So, when Parsons and Campion came over with their
propaganda, the Catholic persecution which followed had Burghley’s
entire approval; nonconformity, aggressive and abusive, he was quite
ready to punish with severity, but when Archbishop Whitgift and his
Court of High Commission set about hunting for nonconformity, Burghley
was for restraining them though the Queen sympathised not with him
but with them. A more sensitive and sympathetic imagination would
often have been alive to the existence of real injustice where the
Lord Treasurer failed to perceive it; but where he did perceive it he
always endeavoured to moderate it, even though he might not set his
face stubbornly against it. His gorge rose at the stories of atrocities
perpetrated in Ireland which almost every one else seems to have taken
as a matter of course. If the use of the rack met with his approval it
was only in cases where he honestly believed that the ends of justice
were thereby furthered; and though the practice had not been common in
England, its prevalence elsewhere was so general that its increased
employment involved no shock to the moral sense of contemporaries.
Burghley’s principles of political action, then, were quite remote
from those of Machiavelli and Thomas Cromwell, according to which
the slightest claim of political expediency outweighed the entire
moral code, and ethical considerations were reduced at the best to a
sentiment which under certain circumstances it might be expedient to
humour. His principles were equally remote from those of Somerset,
which ignored the fact that no ends, however noble, can be achieved
by disregarding hard facts. He insisted on upholding a moral standard
in policy, and maintained a moral standard in his personal political
relations. Admitting the principle _salus populi suprema lex_, he
allowed that supreme necessity might over-ride the moral law, but there
were few of his contemporaries who were not very much readier than he
to recognise such an exigency on slight provocation. On the other hand,
while his personal standard was so high that even his bitterest foes
among the Spanish ambassadors acknowledged it with abusive candour,
his normal political standard was that of his times. We may, perhaps,
express it by saying that he had an almost abnormally strong sense of
political proprieties but a complete absence of moral fervour.
Intellectually, he lacked imagination, while no statesman was
ever endowed with a more imperturbably shrewd common sense, which
served as perpetual ballast to counteract the flightiness of his
mistress. He worked as assiduously as Philip of Spain himself, but,
unlike Philip, he knew when to trust other men, never misplacing his
confidence--whereas Philip never trusted any other man an inch further
than he could help. Burghley’s extreme caution was due, not to lack
of courage or of self-confidence, but to a thorough distrust of all
emotional impulses. He weighed, deliberated, decided on the merits of
each case as it arose, with careful and safe judgment; but had none of
those flashes of intuitive perception which have characterised the most
triumphant types of political genius. He ruled, not by magnetism, but
by tact. Among statesmen he was of the order of Walpole and Peel, not
of Oliver Cromwell and Chatham. He was lacking in creative imagination;
but he was, perhaps, the most thoroughly level-headed minister who
has ever guided the destinies of England. He cannot be elevated into
an object of hero-worship. But he was precisely the type of man of
whom his country had most need at the helm in the second half of the
sixteenth century; and he served her as perhaps no other man could
have done, with unswerving patriotism, sturdy resolution, and infinite
devotion to duty.