History of the English People Volume Iv Part 7

With the Test Act and the establishment of the High Commission the system which the Queen had till now pursued in great measure ceased.

Elizabeth had "drawn the sword." It is possible she might still have clung to her older policy had she foreseen how suddenly the danger which appalled her was to pa.s.s away. At this crisis, as ever, she was able to "count on Fortune." The Test Act was hardly pa.s.sed when in February 1563 the Duke of Guise was a.s.sa.s.sinated by a Protestant zealot, and with his murder the whole face of affairs was changed. The Catholic army was paralyzed by its leader's loss, while Coligni, who was now strengthened with money and forces from England, became master of Normandy. The war however came quietly to an end; for Catharine of Medicis regained her power on the Duke's death, and her aim was still an aim of peace. A treaty with the Huguenots was concluded in March, and a new edict of Amboise restored the truce of religion. Elizabeth's luck indeed was chequered by a merited humiliation. Now that peace was restored Huguenot and Catholic united to demand the surrender of Havre; and an outbreak of plague among its garrison compelled the town to capitulate. The new strife in which England thus found itself involved with the whole realm of France moved fresh hopes in Mary Stuart. Mary had anxiously watched her uncle's progress, for his success would have given her the aid of a Catholic France in her projects on either side of the border. But even his defeat failed utterly to dishearten her. The war between the two Queens which followed it might well force Catharine of Medicis to seek Scottish aid against England, and the Scottish Queen would thus have secured that alliance with a great power which the English Catholics demanded before they would rise at her call. At home troubles were gathering fast around her. Veil her hopes as she might, the anxiety with which she had followed the struggle of her kindred had not been lost on the Protestant leaders, and it is probable that Knox at any rate had learned something of her secret correspondence with the Pope and the Guises. The Scotch Calvinists were stirred by the peril of their brethren in France, and the zeal of the preachers was roused by a revival of the old worship in Clydesdale and by the neglect of the Government to suppress it. In the opening of 1563 they resolved "to put to their own hands," and without further plaint to Queen or Council to carry out "the punishment that G.o.d had appointed to idolaters in his law." In Mary's eyes such a resolve was rebellion. But her remonstrances only drew a more formal doctrine of resistance from Knox. "The sword of justice, madam, is G.o.d's," said the stern preacher, "and is given to princes and rulers for an end; which, if they transgress, they that in the fear of G.o.d execute judgements when G.o.d has commanded offend not G.o.d. Neither yet sin they that bridle kings who strike innocent men in their rage." The Queen was forced to look on while nearly fifty Catholics, some of them high ecclesiastics, were indicted and sent to prison for celebrating ma.s.s in Paisley and Ayrshire.

[Sidenote: Peace with France.]

The zeal of the preachers was only heightened by the coolness of the Lords. A Scotch Parliament which a.s.sembled in the summer of 1563 contented itself with securing the spoilers in their possession of the Church lands, but left the Acts pa.s.sed in 1560 for the establishment of Protestantism unconfirmed as before. Such a silence Knox regarded as treason to the faith. He ceased to have any further intercourse with Murray, and addressed a burning appeal to the Lords, "Will ye betray G.o.d's cause when ye have it in your hands to establish it as ye please?

The Queen, ye say, will not agree with you. Ask ye of her that which by G.o.d's word ye may justly require, and if she will not agree with ye in G.o.d, ye are not bound to agree with her in the devil!" The inaction of the n.o.bles proved the strength which Mary drew from the att.i.tude of France. So long as France and England were at war, so long as a French force might at any moment be despatched to Mary's aid, it was impossible for them to put pressure on the Queen; and bold as was the action of the preachers the Queen only waited her opportunity for dealing them a fatal blow. But whatever hopes Mary may have founded on the strife, they were soon brought to an end. Catharine used her triumph only to carry out her system of balance, and to resist the joint remonstrance of the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of Spain against her edict of toleration. The policy of Elizabeth, on the other hand, was too much identified with Catharine's success to leave room for further hostilities; and a treaty of peace between the two countries was concluded in the spring of 1564.

[Sidenote: Darnley.]

The peace with France marked a crisis in the struggle between the rival Queens. It left Elizabeth secure against a Catholic rising and free to meet the pressure from the north. But it dashed the last hopes of Mary Stuart to the ground. The policy which she had pursued from her landing in Scotland had proved a failure in the end at which it aimed. Her religious toleration, her patience, her fair speeches, had failed to win from Elizabeth a promise of the succession. And meanwhile the Calvinism she hated was growing bolder and bolder about her. The strife of religion in France had woke a fiercer bigotry in the Scotch preachers.

Knox had discovered her plans of reaction, had publicly denounced her designs of a Catholic marriage, and had met her angry tears, her threats of vengeance, with a cool defiance. All that Murray's policy seemed to have really done was to estrange from her the English Catholics. Already alienated from Mary by her connexion with France, which they still regarded as a half-heretic power, and by the hostility of Philip, in whom they trusted as a pure Catholic, the adherents of the older faith could hardly believe in the Queen's fidelity to their religion when they saw her abandoning Scotland to heresy and holding out hopes of her acceptance of the Anglican creed. Her presence had roused them to a new energy, and they were drifting more and more as the strife waxed warmer abroad to dreams of forcing on Elizabeth a Catholic successor. But as yet their hopes turned not so much to Mary Stuart as to the youth who stood next to the Scottish Queen in the line of blood. Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was a son of the Countess of Lennox, Margaret Douglas, a daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage with the Earl of Angus. Lady Lennox was the successor whom Mary Tudor would willingly have chosen in her sister's stead, had Philip and the Parliament suffered her; and from the moment of Elizabeth's accession the Countess had schemed to drive her from the throne. She offered Philip to fly with her boy to the Low Countries and to serve as a pretender in his hands.

She intrigued with the partizans of the old religion. Though the house of Lennox conformed to the new system of English worship, its sympathies were known to be Catholic, and the hopes of the Catholics wrapped themselves round its heir. "Should any disaster befall the Queen," wrote a Spanish amba.s.sador in 1560, "the Catholics would choose Lord Darnley for King." "Not only," he adds in a later letter, "would all sides agree to choose him were the Queen to die, but the Catholic Lords, if opportunity offer, may declare for him at once."

[Sidenote: Mary and Darnley.]

His strongest rival was Mary Stuart, and before Mary landed in Scotland Lady Lennox planned the union of both their claims by the marriage of her son with the Scottish Queen. A few days after her landing Mary received a formal offer of his hand. Hopes of yet greater matches, of a marriage with Philip's son, Don Carlos, or with the young French king, Charles the Ninth, had long held the scheme at bay; but as these and her policy of conciliation proved alike fruitless Mary turned to the Lennoxes. The marriage was probably planned by David Rizzio, a young Piedmontese who had won the Scotch Queen's favour, and through whom she conducted the intrigues, both in England and abroad, by which she purposed to free herself from Murray's power and to threaten Elizabeth.

Her diplomacy was winning Philip to her cause. The Spanish king had as yet looked upon Mary's system of toleration and on her hopes from France with equal suspicion. But he now drew slowly to her side. Pressed hard in the Mediterranean by the Turks, he was hara.s.sed more than ever by the growing discontent of the Netherlands, where the triumph of Protestantism in England and Scotland and the power of the Huguenots in France gave fresh vigour to the growth of Calvinism, and where the n.o.bles were stirred to new outbreaks against the foreign rule of Spain by the success of the Scottish Lords in their rising and by the terms of semi-independence which the French n.o.bles wrested from the Queen. It was to hold the Netherlands in check that Philip longed for Mary's success.

Her triumph over Murray and his confederates would vindicate the cause of monarchy; her triumph over Calvinism would vindicate that of Catholicism both in her own realm and in the realm which she hoped to win. He sent her therefore a.s.surances of his support, and a.s.surances as strong reached her from the Vatican. The dispensation which was secretly obtained for her marriage with Darnley was granted on the pledge of both to do their utmost for the restoration of the old religion.

[Sidenote: The Darnley Marriage.]

Secret as was the pledge, the mere whisper of the match revealed their danger to the Scotch Protestants. The Lords of the Congregation woke with a start from their confidence in the Queen. Murray saw that the policy to which he had held his sister since her arrival in the realm was now to be abandoned. Mary was no longer to be the Catholic ruler of a Protestant country, seeking peaceful acknowledgement of her right of succession to Elizabeth's throne; she had placed herself at the head of the English Catholics, and such a position at once threatened the safety of Protestantism in Scotland itself. If once Elizabeth were overthrown by a Catholic rising, and a Catholic policy established in England, Scotch Protestantism was at an end. At the first rumour of the match therefore Murray drew Argyle and the Hamiltons round him in a band of self-defence, and refused his signature to a paper recommending Darnley as husband to the Queen. But Mary's diplomacy detached from him lord after lord, till his only hope lay in the opposition of Elizabeth. The marriage with Darnley was undoubtedly a danger even more formidable to England than to Scotland. It put an end to the dissensions which had till now broken the strength of the English Catholics. It rallied them round Mary and Darnley as successors to the throne. It gathered to their cause the far greater ma.s.s of cautious conservatives who had been detached from Mary by her foreign blood and by dread of her kinship with the Guises. Darnley was reckoned an Englishman, and with an English husband to sway her policy Mary herself seemed to become an Englishwoman. But it was in vain that the Council p.r.o.nounced the marriage a danger to the realm, that Elizabeth threatened Mary with war, or that she plotted with Murray for the seizure of Mary and the driving Darnley back over the border. Threat and plot were too late to avert the union, and at the close of July 1565, Darnley was married to Mary Stuart and proclaimed king of Scotland. Murray at once called the Lords of the Congregation to arms. But the most powerful and active stood aloof. As heir of the line of Angus, Darnley was by blood the head of the house of Douglas, and, Protestants as they were, the Douglases rallied to their kinsman. Their actual chieftain, the Earl of Morton, stood next to Murray himself in his power over the Congregation; he was chancellor of the realm; and his strength as a great n.o.ble was backed by a dark and unscrupulous ability. By waiving their claim to the earldom of Angus and the lands which he held, the Lennoxes won Morton to his kinsman's cause, and the Earl was followed in his course by two of the sternest and most active among the Protestant Lords, Darnley's uncle, Lord Ruthven, and Lord Lindesay, who had married a Douglas. Their desertion broke Murray's strength; and his rising was hardly declared when Mary marched on his little force with pistols in her belt, and drove its leaders over the border.

[Sidenote: Mary and Catholicism.]

The work which Elizabeth had done in Scotland had been undone in an hour. Murray was a fugitive. The Lords of the Congregation were broken or dispersed. The English party was ruined. And while Scotland was lost it seemed as if the triumph of Mary was a signal for the general revival of Catholicism. The influence of the Guises had again become strong in France, and though Catharine of Medicis held firmly to her policy of toleration, an interview which she held with Alva at Bayonne led every Protestant to believe in the conclusion of a league between France and Spain for a common war on Protestantism. To this league the English statesmen held that Mary Stuart had become a party, and her pressure upon Elizabeth was backed by the suspicion that the two great monarchies had pledged her their support. No such league existed, nor had such a pledge been given, but the dread served Mary's purpose as well as the reality could have done. Girt in, as she believed, with foes, Elizabeth took refuge in the meanest dissimulation, while Mary Stuart imperiously demanded a recognition of her succession as the price of peace. But her aims went far beyond this demand. She found herself greeted at Rome as the champion of the Faith. Pius the Fifth, who mounted the Papal throne at the moment of her success, seized on the young Queen to strike the first blow in the crusade against Protestantism on which he was set. He promised her troops and money. He would support her, he said, so long as he had a single chalice to sell. "With the help of G.o.d and your Holiness," Mary wrote back, "I will leap over the wall." In England itself the marriage and her new att.i.tude rallied every Catholic to Mary's standard; and the announcement of her pregnancy which followed gave her a strength that swept aside Philip's counsels of caution and delay. The daring advice of Rizzio fell in with her natural temper. She resolved to restore Catholicism in Scotland. Yield as she might to Murray's pressure, she had dexterously refrained from giving legal confirmation to the resolutions of the Parliament by which Calvinism had been set up in Scotland; and in the Parliament which she summoned for the coming spring she trusted to do "some good anent restoring the old religion." The appearance of the Catholic lords, the Earls of Huntly, Athol, and Bothwell, at Mary's court showed her purpose to attempt this religious revolution. Nor were her political schemes less resolute. She was determined to wring from the coming Parliament a confirmation of the banishment of the lords who had fled with Murray which would free her for ever from the pressure of the Protestant n.o.bles. Mistress of her kingdom, politically as well as religiously, Mary could put a pressure on Elizabeth which might win for her more than an acknowledgement of her right to the succession. She still clung to her hopes of the crown; and she knew that the Catholics of Northumberland and Yorkshire were ready to revolt as soon as she was ready to aid them.

[Sidenote: The murder of Rizzio.]

No such danger had ever threatened Elizabeth as this. But again she could "trust to fortune." Mary had staked all on her union with Darnley, and yet only a few months had pa.s.sed since her wedding-day when men saw that she "hated the King." The boy turned out a dissolute, insolent husband; and Mary's scornful refusal of his claim of the "crown matrimonial," which would have given him an equal share of the royal power with herself, widened the breach between them. Darnley attributed this refusal to Rizzio's counsels; and his father, Lord Lennox, joined with him in plotting vengeance against the secretary. They sought aid from the very party whom Darnley's marriage had been planned to crush.

Though the strength of the Protestant n.o.bles had been broken by the flight of Murray, the Douglases remained at the court. Morton had no purpose of lending himself to the ruin of the religion he professed, and Ruthven and Lindesay were roused to action when they saw themselves threatened with a restoration of Catholicism, and with a legal banishment of Murray and his companions in the coming Parliament, which could only serve as a prelude to their own ruin. Rizzio was the author of this policy; and when Darnley called on his kinsmen to aid him in attacking Rizzio, the Douglases grasped at his proposal. Their aid and their promise of the crown matrimonial were bought by Darnley's consent to the recall of the fugitive lords and of Murray. The plot of the Douglases was so jealously hidden that no whisper of it reached the Queen. Her plans were on the brink of success. The Catholic n.o.bles were ready for action at her court. Huntly and Bothwell were called into the Privy Council. At the opening of March 1566 the Parliament which was to carry out her projects was to a.s.semble; and the Queen prepared for her decisive stroke by naming men whom she could trust as Lords of the Articles--a body with whom lay the proposal of measures to the Houses--and by restoring the bishops to their old places among the peers. But at the moment when Mary revealed the extent of her schemes by her dismissal of the English amba.s.sador, the young king, followed by Lord Ruthven, burst into her chamber, dragged Rizzio from her presence, and stabbed him in an outer chamber, while Morton and Lord Lindesay with their followers seized the palace gate. Mary found herself a prisoner in the hands of her husband and his confederates. Her plans were wrecked in an hour. A proclamation of the king dissolved the Parliament which she had called for the ruin of her foes; and Murray, who was on his way back from England when the deed was done, was received at Court and restored to his old post at the Council-board.

[Sidenote: Mary's revenge.]

Terrible as the blow had been, it roused the more terrible energies which lay hid beneath the graceful bearing of the Queen. The darker features of her character were now to develope themselves. With an inflexible will she turned to build up again the policy which seemed shattered in Rizzio's murder. Her pa.s.sionate resentment bent to the demands of her ambition. "No more tears," she said when they brought her news of Rizzio's murder; "I will think upon revenge." But even revenge was not suffered to interfere with her political schemes. Keen as was Mary's thirst for vengeance on him, Darnley was needful to the triumph of her aims, and her first effort was to win him back. He was already grudging at the supremacy of the n.o.bles and his virtual exclusion from power, when Mary masking her hatred beneath a show of affection succeeded in severing the wretched boy from his fellow-conspirators, and in gaining his help in an escape to Dunbar. Once free, a force of eight thousand men under the Earl of Bothwell quickly gathered round her, and with these troops she marched in triumph on Edinburgh. An offer of pardon to all save those concerned in Rizzio's murder broke up the force of the Lords; Glencairn and Argyle joined the Queen, while Morton, Ruthven, and Lindesay fled in terror over the border. But Mary had learned by a terrible lesson the need of dissimulation. She made no show of renewing her Catholic policy. On the contrary, she affected to resume the system which she had pursued from the opening of her reign, and suffered Murray to remain at the court. Rizzio's death, had in fact strengthened her position. With him pa.s.sed away the dread of a Catholic reaction. Mary's toleration, her pledges of extending an equal indulgence to Protestantism in England, should she mount its throne, her marriage to one who was looked upon as an English n.o.ble, above all the hope of realizing through her succession the dream of a union of the realms, again told on the wavering body of more Conservative statesmen, like Norfolk, and even drew to her side some of the steadier Protestants who despaired of a Protestant succession. Even Elizabeth at last seemed wavering towards a recognition of her as her successor. But Mary aimed at more than the succession. Her intrigues with the English Catholics were never interrupted. Her seeming reconciliation with the young king preserved that union of the whole Catholic body which her marriage had brought about and which the strife over Rizzio threatened with ruin.

Her court was full of refugees from the northern counties. "Your actions," Elizabeth wrote in a sudden break of fierce candour, "are as full of venom as your words are of honey." Fierce words however did nothing to break the clouds that gathered thicker and thicker round England: and in June the birth of a boy, the future James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England, doubled Mary's strength. Elizabeth felt bitterly the blow. "The Queen of Scots," she cried, "has a fair son, and I am but a barren stock." The birth of James in fact seemed to settle the long struggle in Mary's favour. The moderate Conservatives joined the ranks of her adherents. The Catholics were wild with hope. "Your friends are so increased," her amba.s.sador, Melville, wrote to her from England, "that many whole shires are ready to rebel, and their captains named by election of the n.o.bility." On the other hand, the Protestants were filled with despair. It seemed as if no effort could avert the rule of England by a Catholic Queen.

[Sidenote: The developement of England.]

It was at this moment of peril that the English Parliament was again called together. Its action showed more than the natural anxiety of the time; it showed the growth of those national forces which far more than the schemes of Mary or the counter-schemes of Elizabeth were to determine the future of England. While the two Queens were heaping intrigue on intrigue, while abroad and at home every statesman held firmly that national welfare or national misery hung on the fortune of the one or the success of the other, the English people itself was steadily moving forward to a new spiritual enlightenment and a new political liberty. The intellectual and religious impulses of the age were already combining with the influence of its growing wealth to revive a spirit of independence in the nation at large. It was impossible for Elizabeth to understand this spirit, but her wonderful tact enabled her from the first to feel the strength of it. Long before any open conflict arose between the people and the Crown we see her instinctive perception of the changes which were going on around her in the modifications, conscious or unconscious, which she introduced into the system of the monarchy. Of its usurpations upon English liberty she abandoned none. But she curtailed and softened down almost all. She tampered, as her predecessors had tampered, with personal freedom; there was the same straining of statutes and coercion of juries in political trials as before, and an arbitrary power of imprisonment was still exercised by the Council. The duties she imposed on cloth and sweet wines were an a.s.sertion of her right of arbitrary taxation.

Proclamations in Council constantly a.s.sumed the force of law. But, boldly as it was a.s.serted, the royal power was practically wielded with a caution and moderation that showed the sense of a growing difficulty in the full exercise of it. The ordinary course of justice was left undisturbed. The jurisdiction of the Council was a.s.serted almost exclusively over the Catholics; and defended in their case as a precaution against pressing dangers. The proclamations issued were temporary in character and of small importance. The two duties imposed were so slight as to pa.s.s almost unnoticed in the general satisfaction at Elizabeth's abstinence from internal taxation. She abandoned the benevolences and forced loans which had brought home the sense of tyranny to the subjects of her predecessors. She treated the Privy Seals, which on emergencies she issued for advances to her Exchequer, simply as antic.i.p.ations of her revenue (like our own Exchequer Bills), and punctually repaid them. The monopolies with which she fettered trade proved a more serious grievance; but during her earlier reign they were looked on as a part of the system of Merchant a.s.sociations, which were at that time regarded as necessary for the regulation and protection of the growing commerce.

[Sidenote: The advance of the Parliament.]

The political developement of the nation is seen still more in the advance of the Parliament during Elizabeth's reign. The Queen's thrift enabled her in ordinary times of peace to defray the current expenses of the Crown from its ordinary revenues. But her thrift was dictated not so much by economy as by a desire to avoid summoning fresh Parliaments. We have seen how boldly the genius of Thomas Cromwell set aside on this point the tradition of the New Monarchy. His confidence in the power of the Crown revived the Parliament as an easy and manageable instrument of tyranny. The old forms of const.i.tutional freedom were turned to the profit of the royal despotism, and a revolution which for the moment left England absolutely at Henry's feet was wrought out by a series of parliamentary statutes. Throughout Henry's reign Cromwell's confidence was justified by the spirit of slavish submission which pervaded the Houses. But the effect of the religious change for which his measures made room began to be felt during the minority of Edward the Sixth; and the debates and divisions on the religious reaction which Mary pressed on the Parliament were many and violent. A great step forward was marked by the effort of the Crown to neutralize by "management" an opposition which it could no longer overawe. Not only was the Parliament packed with nominees of the Crown but new const.i.tuencies were created whose members would follow implicitly its will. For this purpose twenty-two new boroughs were created under Edward, fourteen under Mary; some, indeed, places ent.i.tled to representation by their wealth and population, but the bulk of them small towns or hamlets which lay wholly at the disposal of the Royal Council.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and the Houses.]

Elizabeth adopted the system of her two predecessors both in the creation of boroughs and the recommendation of candidates; but her keen political instinct soon perceived the inutility of both expedients. She saw that the "management" of the Houses, so easy under Cromwell, was becoming harder every day. The very number of the members she called up into the Commons from nomination boroughs, sixty-two in all, showed the increasing difficulty which the government found in securing a working majority. The rise of a new n.o.bility enriched by the spoils of the Church and trained to political life by the stress of events around them was giving fresh vigour to the House of Lords. The increased wealth of the country gentry as well as the growing desire to obtain a seat among the Commons brought about the cessation at this time of the old payment of members by their const.i.tuencies. A change too in the borough representation, which had long been in progress but was now for the first time legally recognized, tended greatly to increase the vigour and independence of the Lower House. By the terms of the older writs borough members were required to be chosen from the body of the burgesses; and an act of Henry the Fifth gave this custom the force of law. But the pa.s.sing of such an act shows that the custom was already widely infringed, and by Elizabeth's day act and custom alike had ceased to have force. Most seats were now filled by representatives who were strange to the borough itself, and who were often nominees of the great landowners round. But they were commonly men of wealth and blood whose aim in entering Parliament was a purely political one, and whose att.i.tude towards the Crown was far bolder and more independent than that of the quiet tradesmen who preceded them. Elizabeth saw that "management" was of little avail with a house of members such as these; and she fell back as far as she could on Wolsey's policy of practical abolition. She summoned Parliaments at longer and longer intervals. By rigid economy, by a policy of balance and peace, she strove, and for a long time successfully strove, to avoid the necessity of a.s.sembling them at all. But Mary of Scotland and Philip of Spain proved friends to English liberty in its sorest need. The struggle with Catholicism forced Elizabeth to have more frequent recourse to her Parliaments, and as she was driven to appeal for increasing supplies the tone of the Houses rose higher and higher.

[Sidenote: The struggle with the Parliament.]

What made this revival of Parliamentary independence more important was the range which Cromwell's policy had given to Parliamentary action. In theory the Tudor statesman regarded three cardinal subjects, matters of trade, matters of religion, and matters of State, as lying exclusively within the competence of the Crown. But in actual fact such subjects had been treated by Parliament after Parliament. The whole religious fabric of the realm rested on Parliamentary enactments. The very t.i.tle of Elizabeth rested in a Parliamentary statute. When the Houses pet.i.tioned at the outset of her reign for the declaration of a successor and for the Queen's marriage it was impossible for her to deny their right to intermeddle with these "matters of State," though she rebuked the demand and evaded an answer. But the question of the succession was a question too vital for English freedom and English religion to remain prisoned within Elizabeth's council-chamber. It came again to the front in the Parliament which the pressure from Mary Stuart forced Elizabeth to a.s.semble after six prorogations and an interval of four years in September 1566. The Lower House at once resolved that the business of supply should go hand in hand with that of the succession. Such a step put a stress on the monarchy which it had never known since the War of the Roses. The Commons no longer confined themselves to limiting or resisting the policy of the Crown; they dared to dictate it. Elizabeth's wrath showed her sense of the importance of their action. "They had acted like rebels!" she said, "they had dealt with her as they dared not have dealt with her father." "I cannot tell," she broke out angrily to the Spanish amba.s.sador, "what these devils want!" "They want liberty, madam," replied the Spaniard, "and if princes do not look to themselves and work together to put such people down they will find before long what all this is coming to!" But Elizabeth had to front more than her Puritan Commons. The Lords joined with the Lower House in demanding the Queen's marriage and a settlement of the succession, and after a furious burst of anger Elizabeth gave a promise of marriage, which she was no doubt resolved to evade as she had evaded it before. But the subject of the succession was one which could not be evaded. Yet any decision on it meant civil war. It was notorious that if the Commons were resolute to name the Lady Catharine Grey, the heiress of the House of Suffolk, successor to the throne, the Lords were as resolute to a.s.sert the right of Mary Stuart. To settle such a matter was at once to draw the sword.

The Queen therefore peremptorily forbade the subject to be approached.

But the royal message was no sooner delivered than Wentworth, a member of the House of Commons, rose to ask whether such a prohibition was not "against the liberties of Parliament." The question was followed by a hot debate, and a fresh message from the Queen commanding "that there should be no further argument" was met by a request for freedom of deliberation while the subsidy bill lay significantly unnoticed on the table. A new strife broke out when another member of the Commons, Mr.

Dalton, denounced the claims put forward by the Scottish Queen.

Elizabeth at once ordered him into arrest. But the Commons prayed for leave "to confer upon their liberties," and the Queen's prudence taught her that it was necessary to give way. She released Dalton; she protested to the Commons that "she did not mean to prejudice any part of the liberties heretofore granted them"; she softened the order of silence into a request. Won by the graceful concession, the Lower House granted the subsidy and a.s.sented loyally to her wish. But the victory was none the less a real one. No such struggle had taken place between the Crown and the Commons since the beginning of the New Monarchy; and the struggle had ended in the virtual defeat of the Crown.

[Sidenote: Shane O'Neill.]

The strife with the Parliament hit Elizabeth hard. It was "secret foes at home," she told the House as the quarrel pa.s.sed away in a warm reconciliation, "who thought to work me that mischief which never foreign enemies could bring to pa.s.s, which is the hatred of my Commons.

Do you think that either I am so unmindful of your surety by succession, wherein is all my care, or that I went about to break your liberties?

No! it never was my meaning; but to stay you before you fell into the ditch." But it was impossible for her to explain the real reasons for her course, and the dissolution of the Parliament in January 1567 left her face to face with a national discontent added to the ever-deepening peril from without. To the danger from the north and from the east was added a danger from the west. The north of Ireland was in full revolt.

From the moment of her accession Elizabeth had realized the risks of the policy of confiscation and colonization which had been pursued in the island by her predecessor: and the prudence of Cecil fell back on the safer though more tedious policy of Henry the Eighth. But the alarm at English aggression had already spread among the natives; and its result was seen in a revolt of the north, and in the rise of a leader more vigorous and able than any with whom the Government had had as yet to contend. An acceptance of the Earldom of Tyrone by the chief of the O'Neills brought about the inevitable conflict between the system of succession recognized by English and that recognized by Irish law. On the death of the Earl of Tyrone England acknowledged his eldest son as the heir of his Earldom; while the sept of which he was the head maintained their older right of choosing a chief from among the members of the family, and preferred Shane O'Neill, a younger son of less doubtful legitimacy. The Lord Deputy, the Earl of Suss.e.x, marched northward to settle the question by force of arms; but ere he could reach Ulster the activity of Shane had quelled the disaffection of his rivals, the O'Donnells of Donegal, and won over the Scots of Antrim.

"Never before," wrote Suss.e.x, "durst Scot or Irishman look Englishman in the face in plain or wood since I came here"; but Shane fired his men with a new courage, and charging the Deputy's army with a force hardly half its number drove it back in rout on Armagh. A promise of pardon induced the Irish chieftain to visit London, and make an illusory submission, but he was no sooner safe home again than its terms were set aside; and after a wearisome struggle, in which Shane foiled the efforts of the Lord Deputy to entrap or to poison him, he remained virtually master of the north. His success stirred larger dreams of ambition. He invaded Connaught, and pressed Clanrickard hard; while he replied to the remonstrances of the Council at Dublin with a bold defiance. "By the sword I have won these lands," he answered, "and by the sword will I keep them." But defiance broke idly against the skill and vigour of Sir Henry Sidney, who succeeded Suss.e.x as Lord Deputy. The rival septs of the north were drawn into a rising against O'Neill, while the English army advanced from the Pale; and in 1567 Shane, defeated by the O'Donnells, took refuge in Antrim, and was hewn to pieces in a drunken squabble by his Scottish entertainers.

[Sidenote: Bothwell.]

The victory of Sidney marked the turn of the tide which had run so long against Elizabeth. The danger which England dreaded from Mary Stuart, the terror of a Catholic sovereign and a Catholic reaction, reached its height only to pa.s.s irretrievably away. At the moment when the Irish revolt was being trampled under foot a terrible event suddenly struck light through the gathering clouds in the north. Mary had used Darnley as a tool to bring about the ruin of his confederates and to further her policy; but from the moment that she discovered his actual complicity in the plot for Rizzio's murder she had loathed and avoided him. Ominous words dropped from her lips. "Unless she were free of him some way,"

Mary was heard to mutter, "she had no pleasure to live." The lords whom he had drawn into his plot only to desert and betray them hated him with as terrible a hatred, and in their longing for vengeance a new adventurer saw the road to power. Of all the border n.o.bles James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, was the boldest and the most unscrupulous. But, Protestant as he was, he had never swerved from the side of the Crown; he had supported the Regent, and crossed the seas to pledge as firm a support to Mary; and his loyalty and daring alike appealed to the young Queen's heart. Little as he was touched by Mary's pa.s.sion, it stirred in the Earl dreams of a union with the Queen; and great as were the obstacles to such a union which presented themselves in Mary's marriage and his own, Bothwell was of too desperate a temper to recoil before obstacles such as these. Divorce would free him from his own wife. To free himself from Darnley he seized on the hatred which the lords whom Darnley had deserted and betrayed bore to the king.

Bothwell joined Murray and the English amba.s.sador in praying for the recall of Morton and the exiles. The pardon was granted; the n.o.bles returned to court, and the bulk of them joined readily in a conspiracy to strike down one whom they still looked on as their bitterest foe.

[Sidenote: Darnley's murder.]

Morton alone stood aloof. He demanded an a.s.surance of the Queen's sanction to the deed; and no such a.s.surance was given him. On the contrary Mary's mood seemed suddenly to change. Her hatred to Darnley pa.s.sed all at once into demonstration of the old affection. He had fallen sick with vice and misery, and she visited him on his sick-bed, and persuaded him to follow her to Edinburgh. She visited him again in a ruinous and lonely house near the palace in which he was lodged by her order, on the ground that its purer air would further his recovery, kissed him as she bade him farewell, and rode gaily back to a wedding-dance at Holyrood. If Mary's pa.s.sion had drawn her to share Bothwell's guilt, these acts were but awful preludes to her husband's doom. If on the other hand her reconciliation was a real one, it only drove Bothwell to hurry on his deed of blood without waiting for the aid of the n.o.bles who had sworn the king's death. The terrible secret is still hid in a cloud of doubt and mystery which will probably never be wholly dispelled. But Mary had hardly returned to her palace when, two hours after midnight on the ninth of February 1567, an awful explosion shook the city. The burghers rushed out from the gates to find the house of Kirk o' Field destroyed and Darnley's body dead beside the ruins.

[Sidenote: Mary's fall.]

The murder was undoubtedly the deed of Bothwell. It was soon known that his servant had stored the powder beneath the king's bedchamber and that the Earl had watched without the walls till the deed was done. But, in spite of gathering suspicion and of a charge of murder made formally against Bothwell by Lord Lennox, no serious steps were taken to investigate the crime; and a rumour that Mary purposed to marry the murderer drove her friends to despair. Her agent in England wrote to her that "if she married that man she would lose the favour of G.o.d, her own reputation, and the hearts of all England, Ireland, and Scotland." But whatever may have been the ties of pa.s.sion or guilt which united them, Mary was now powerless in Bothwell's hands. While Murray withdrew to France on pretext of travel, the young Earl used the plot against Darnley into which he had drawn the lords to force from them a declaration that he was guiltless of the murder and their consent to his marriage with the Queen. He boasted that he would marry Mary, whether she would or no. Every stronghold in the kingdom was placed in his hands, and this step was the prelude to a trial and acquittal which the overwhelming force of his followers in Edinburgh turned into a bitter mockery. The Protestants were bribed by the a.s.sembling of a Parliament in which Mary for the first time gave her sanction to the laws which established the reformation in Scotland. A shameless suit for his divorce removed the last obstacle to Bothwell's ambition; and a seizure of the Queen as she rode to Linlithgow, whether real or fict.i.tious, was followed three weeks later by their union on the fifteenth of May. Mary may have yielded to force; she may have yielded to pa.s.sion; it is possible that in Bothwell's vigour she saw the means of at last mastering the kingdom and wreaking her vengeance on the Lords. But whatever were her hopes or fears, in a month more all was over. The horror at the Queen's marriage with a man fresh from her husband's blood drove the whole nation to revolt. The Catholic party held aloof from a Queen who seemed to have forsaken them by a Protestant marriage and by her acknowledgement of the Protestant Church. The Protestant Lords seized on the general horror to free themselves from a master whose subtlety and bloodshed had placed them at his feet. Morton and Argyle rallied the forces of the Congregation at Stirling, and were soon joined by the bulk of the Scottish n.o.bles of either religion. Their entrance into Edinburgh roused the capital into insurrection. On the fifteenth of June Mary and her husband advanced with a fair force to Seton to encounter the Lords; but their men refused to fight, and Bothwell galloped off into lifelong exile, while the Queen was brought back to Edinburgh in a frenzy of despair, tossing back wild words of defiance to the curses of the crowd.

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. St.u.r.dily 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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.]