A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century Part 24

Hence Queen Elizabeth, who perceived the connexion of these hostilities, now reverted to the necessity of carrying on the war again on a larger scale. Her view was chiefly directed to a new enterprise against Portugal: its separation from Castile she held to be the greatest European success that was possible: but she hoped to bring about a change in Italy as well: there Venice was to attack the nearest Spanish territories. When she called the Venetians to aid--among other things she wished also to obtain a loan from the government--she put them in mind how much her resistance to the Spanish monarchy had benefited the European commonwealth: hence it was that Spain had been prevented from carrying out her tyrannical views throughout the world, in the Netherlands and in Germany, in France and Italy; the Republic, which loved freedom, would recognise this.

Elizabeth thought to resume the war, if possible, at the head of all that part of Europe which was opposed to Spain, and in league with Henry IV, with whom she negociated on this subject. In the beginning of 1603 a squadron was fitted out under Sir Richard Lawson to attack the coasts of the Pyrenean peninsula. Men discussed the comparative forces which the two kingdoms could bring into the field.

But the Queen's days were already drawing to a close.

In February 1603 the Venetian secretary Scaramelli had an audience of her, and gives a report of it from which we see that she still completely preserved her wonted demeanour. He found the whole court, the leading ecclesiastics and the temporal dignitaries, a.s.sembled around her: they had been entertained with music. When he entered, the Queen rose in her usual rich attire, with a diadem of precious stones, almost encircled with pearls: rubies hung from her neck; and in her mien no one could detect any decay of her powers. 'It is time at last,' she said to the secretary, who wished to throw himself on his knees before her, while she raised him with both hands, 'it is time at last for the Republic to send its representative to a Queen by whom it has been always honoured.' The letter of the Republic was handed to her, and she gave it to the Secretary of State; after he had opened it and given it back to her again, she sat down to read it: it contained a complaint that Venetian ships had been seized by the English privateers, who then made all seas unsafe. The English nation, she then said, is not so small but that evil and thievish men may be found in it: while she promised enquiry and justice, she nevertheless reverted to her main point that she had received nothing from the republic during the forty-four years of her government but grievances and demands,--even the loan had been refused;--Venice had hitherto, contrary to her custom, not sent any emba.s.sy to her; not, she thought, because she was a woman, but through fear of other powers. Scaramelli answered that no temporal or even spiritual sovereign had any influence on the Republic in such matters; he ascribed the neglect to circ.u.mstances which no one could control. The Queen broke off: I do not know, she added, whether I have expressed myself in good Italian: I learned the language as a child, and think I have not forgotten it.

After that serious address she again seemed gracious, and gave the secretary her hand to kiss, when she dismissed him. The next day commissioners were appointed to enquire into his grievances.[290]

At that time the affairs of Ireland were once more occupying the Queen. The Spaniards had been compelled by Lord Mountjoy to leave the island; he had beaten them together with the Irish in a decisive action: but, despite his victory, many further conflicts took place, and the rebellion was not suppressed; Tyrone still maintained himself in the hills and woods of Ulster; and, as a return of the Spaniards was feared, Mountjoy too was at last disposed to come to an agreement with him. The Queen was in her inmost soul against this, for only fresh rebellions would be occasioned by it; she required an absolute surrender at discretion: if she once allowed the rebels to have their lives secured to them, she soon after retracted the concession. She even spoke of wishing to go to Ireland, in person; the impression produced by her presence would put an end to all revolt.

But at this moment a sudden alteration was remarked in her: she no longer appeared at the festivities before Lent, which went off in an insignificant style. At first her seclusion was explained by the death of one of her ladies whom she loved, the Countess of Nottingham: but soon it could not be concealed that the Queen herself was seized with a dangerous illness: sleep and appet.i.te began to fail her: she showed a deep melancholy. 'No,' she replied to one of the kinsmen of her mother's house, Robert Cary, who at that moment had come back to court and addressed friendly words to her about her health, 'No Robin, well I am not, my heart has been for some time oppressed and heavy;' she broke off with painful groans and sighing, hitherto unwonted in her, now no longer suppressed. It was manifest that mental distress accompanied the bodily decay.[291]

Who has not heard of the ring which Elizabeth is said to have once given to the Earl of Ess.e.x with the promise that, if it were presented to her, she would show him mercy, whatever might have occurred: he had, so the tale runs, in his last distresses wished to send it her through the Countess of Nottingham: but she was prevented from giving it by her husband who was an enemy of Ess.e.x, and so he had to die without mercy: the Queen, to whom the Countess revealed this on her death bed, fell into despair over it. The ring is still shown, and indeed several rings are shown as the true one: as also the tradition itself is extant in two somewhat varying forms; attempts have been made to get rid of the improbabilities of the first by fresh fictions in the second.[292] They are both so late, and rest so completely on hearsay, that they can no longer stand before historical criticism.

Nevertheless we cannot deny, as the reports in fact testify in several places, that the remembrance of Ess.e.x weighed on the Queen's soul. It must certainly have reminded her of him, that she was now brought back exactly to the course he had insisted on, namely a friendly agreement with the invincible Irish chief. She had allowed less imperious, more compliant, declarations to reach Ireland. But was the man a traitor, who had recommended a policy to which they had been forced to have recourse after such repeated efforts? Had he deserved his fate at her hands?[293] It was remarked that the anniversary of the day on which Ess.e.x two years before had suffered on the scaffold, Ash Wednesday, thrilled through her with heart-rending pain; the world seemed to her desolate, since he was no longer there; she imputed his guilt to the ambition, against which she had warned him, and which had misled him into steps, from the consequences of which she could not protect him.

But had she not herself uttered the decisive word? She burst into self-accusing tears. Her distress may have been increased by finding that her statesmen no longer showed her the old devotion, the earlier absolute obedience. When they, as we know, had framed a formal theory for themselves, that they might act against an express command of the Queen, on the a.s.sumption of her general intention being directed to the public good, could the sharp-sighted, suspicious, sovereign fail to perceive it? Could she fail to remark the agitation as to her successor, which occupied all men's minds, while the reins were slipping from her hands? The people, on whose devotion she had from the first moment laid so much stress, and partly based her government, seemed after Ess.e.x' death to have become cold towards her.

In every great life there comes a moment when the soul feels that it no longer lives in the present world, and draws back from it.

Once more Elizabeth had the English Liturgy read in her room: there she sat afterwards day and night on the cushions with which it was covered, in deep silence, her finger on her mouth: she rejected physic with disdain.[294] Most said and believed she did not care to recover or to live any longer, that she wished to die. When she was at last got to bed, and had a moment left of consciousness and interest in the world, she had the members of her Privy Council summoned: she then either said to them directly that she held the King of Scotland to be her lawful and deserving successor, or she designated him in a way that left no doubt.[295]

Amidst the prayers of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was kneeling by her bed, she breathed her last.

It is not merely the business of History to point out how far great personages have attained the ideals which float before the mind of man, or how far they have remained below them. It is almost more important for it to ascertain how far the universal interests, in the midst of which eminent characters appear, have been advanced by them, whether their inborn force was a match for the opposing elements, whether it allowed itself to be conquered by them or not. There never was a sovereign who maintained a conflict of world-wide importance amidst greater dangers and with greater success than Queen Elizabeth.

Her grandfather had begun a political emanc.i.p.ation from the ruling influences of the continent, her father an ecclesiastical one: Elizabeth took up their task and accomplished it victoriously against Rome and against Spain, while her people had an ever-increasing part in public affairs, and thus entered into a new stage of development.

Her memory is inseparably connected with the independence and power of England.

NOTES:

[274] Elizabeth to James VI, August 1588, in Rymer and Bruce 53.

[275] Molino: 'Fu prudentissima nel governare diligente nel consultare, perche voleva a.s.sistere a tutti li negotii, perspicasissima nel provedere le cose ed accuratissima perche le deliberationi fatte fossero eseguite.'

[276] One of her expressions was: 'He that placed her in that seat would preserve her in it.' Contemporary notice in Ellis, Letters ii.

iii. 194.

[277] Hentzner, Itinerarium 137.

[278] De Maisse, in Prevost-Paradol, Memoire sur Elizabeth et Henri IV. Seances et travaux de l'academie des sciences morales, tom. 34.

[279] Ockland, in Strype iii. 2, 237: 'Somni perparcus, parce vinique cibique in mensa sumens, semper gravis atque modestus.'

[280] Letter to a friend, in Strype iii. 2, 379. Certain true general notes upon the actions of Lord Burleigh, in Strype iii. 2, 505. A letter from Leicester is in existence, in which he tries to prove that William Cecil had obligations to his father and not merely to the Protector.

[281] Naunton, Fragmenta regalia.

[282] Sir H. Nicolas, Life and Times of Christopher Hatton, communicates (p. 30) fragments of the Queen's letters, which lead him to remark that the supposition of an immoral relation (which he elsewhere adopts) is refuted by them. The Queen inquires for instance, What is friendship? 'The union of two minds bound to each other by virtue. He is no more a friend who desires more than the other can reasonably grant.'

[283] Herrera, Historia del mundo iii. 754.

[284] Device made by the Earl of Ess.e.x: Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Ess.e.x, ii. App. F.

[285] Herrera complains at first of the 'ministros infideles' of the Queen: among them he names Ess.e.x.

[286] In Winwood, Memorials i.

[287] Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney, Michaelma.s.s Day 1599 (the day after the Earl's arrival). Sidney Papers ii. 127.

[288] 'I could not but see and feel what misery was near unto my country by the great power of such as are known indeed to be atheists papists and pensioners of the mortal enemies of this kingdom.'

Confession to Ashton, in Devereux ii. 165.

[289] 'As foreseeing that the rebel will never suffer the King to live or reign, who might permit or take revenge of the treason and rebellion.' In Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors ii. 199.

[290] Dis.p.a.ccio di Carlo Scaramelli 19 Feb. 1603 (Venetian Archives).

[291] Memoirs of Robert Cary 116.

[292] The first appears in Aubery's Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de Hollande 1687, 214; with another apocryphal tale about finding the bones of Edward IV's children as early as Elizabeth's time. Aubery a.s.serts that he heard the history of the ring from his father's mouth, who had heard it from Prince Maurice of Orange, to whom it had been communicated by the English amba.s.sador Carleton. According to him the Queen then took to her bed, dressed as she was, sprang from it a hundred times during the night, and starved herself to death. Who does not, in reading this, feel himself in a sphere of wild romance? Lady Spelman has tried to clear away the improbability involved in it, that Ess.e.x should have applied to the wife of one of his enemies, by making Ess.e.x give the ring to a boy pa.s.sing by, who was to give it, not to the Countess of Nottingham, but to her sister, and then mistook the two ladies.

[293] Scaramelli, 27 March: 'per occasione del perdono finalmente fatto al conte di Tirone cadde in una consideratione, che il conte di Esses gia tanto suo intimo di cuore fosse morto innocente.'

[294] Letter of the French amba.s.sador from London, 3rd April 1603.

'C'est la verite que delors, qu'elle se sent.i.t atteinte du mal, elle dit de vouloir mourir.' Villeroy, Memoires d'estat iii. 212. Cary: 'The Queen grew worse and worse, because she would be so.' Compare Sloane MS. in Ellis iii. 194.

[295] Scaramelli writes to his Signoria 7th April (New Style) what was said during those days: 'La regina nel fine della infirmita et della vita dopo haver dormito alcune poche h.o.r.e ritornata di sana mente conoscendosi moribonda il primo di Aprile corr. fece chiamare i signori del regio consiglio--e commandava loro,--che la corona pervenisse al Piu meritevole ch'ella ha trovato sempre nel suo secreto esser il Re di Scotia cosi per il dritto della successione, che per esserne Piu degno che non e stata lei, poiche egli e nato re et ella privata--egli le portera un regno et ella non porta altro che se stessa donna.' Without quite accepting this, we must not pa.s.s it over.

Winwood too writes to Tremouille: 'le jour avant son trespas elle declara pour son successeur le roy d'Escosse.' Memoires i. 461.

BOOK IV.

FOUNDATION OF THE KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN. FIRST DISTURBANCES UNDER THE STUARTS.

Under no dynasty in the world have great national changes been so dependent on the personal aims of princes as in England under the Tudors. Just as all Henry VIII's subsequent proceedings were determined by the affair of the divorce, so also the policy of his three children was due to the relations into which they were thrown by their birth.

No one however could derive the course of English history at this epoch from this cause alone. How could Henry VIII have even thought of detaching his kingdom from the Roman See, but for the ancient and deep-seated national opposition to its encroachments? But the nation had also for ages had manifold and deep sympathies with Rome; and Mary Tudor allied herself with these. Together with subjective personal agencies, national influences of universal prevalence were at work.

The different leanings of the sovereigns appear as exponents of opposite tendencies already existing in the nation. The struggle between these was decided when, as in the reign of Elizabeth, the most vigorous nature combined with the most powerful interests and the most influential motives to gain the mastery, although others of a different character were still by no means suppressed.

Now however the energetic race of the Tudors had disappeared from the throne. By the right of natural inheritance another family ascended it, which had its roots and a.s.sociations in Scotland, the crown of which country it united with that of England. If a long time elapsed before the English commonwealth was as closely attached to the new dynasty as it had been to the old, under which it had developed; so it is also clear that the point of view from which this dynasty started could not be exactly the same as that which had hitherto prevailed. This could not be expected under a prince who had already reigned for a quarter of a century and had long ago taken up, in his native country, a firm position with regard to the great conflicts of the age. This position we must first of all endeavour to represent.

CHAPTER I.

JAMES VI OF SCOTLAND: HIS ACCESSION TO THE THRONE OF ENGLAND.