II. BOOK claimed the kingdom as lapsing to him, because its last sovereign, Henry, had been a cardinal. Antonio came to England, to interest Elizabeth to assist him to rescue his country from its subjugation by Spain. Elizabeth honorably received and bountifully relieved him as a kinsman; but declined involving her nation in a war to expel Philip from his new possession.' Catherine wished the queen to support him; yet it was more to embarrass her with Philip, than to benefit the Portuguese aspirant. Antonio [in London], which the queen would have to be secret, tho indeed it be openly spoken of. Seeing he landed in France first, I think his first coming here is not without the consent of that king.' Lodge p. 255. The Jesuits, in their Imago, speak bitterly of Antonio. Hist. Portug 7 His relationship with her was thro the duke of Lancaster, son of Edward III. Camd. p 232. The card. Granville, in his letter of 6 July 1580, mentions that don Antonio had been proclaimed king, par quelques gens viles et menu peuple.' Granv. Lett. This Spanish minister mentions with delight, that in his passage thro France, from Artois to Paris, thence to Orleans, and all about towards Nantz, there was not a town, village or castle, from which the new religion had not been taken away, and the old one re-established.' Lett. 11 July 1580. On May 1581, we find Antonio at Tunis, ready to sail to Portugal with an armament, to rescue it from Philip. Sidney's Letters, v. 1. p. 294. Camd. p. 232. Catherine about this time, notwithstanding her power, could not, even with the king's aid, command the appointment of an abbess at Puissy. Our ambassador on 12 Dec. 1583, thus described her defeat, and the amusing turbulence of even holy nuns. 'Their abbess being dead, they fell to chuse another. Seventy-five voices were for an old woman, one of the nuns, and but 25 for the madame de Perron, the marshal of Retz's sister. Yet the king and queen-mother favoring her, would needs have her to be chosen; and for that intent, sent old Lansac thither, to whom they made very shrewd answers. After, the queen-mother came herself, and would place her in her seat of abbess. The nuns that were against her, came out of their chamber against the queen; insomuch that a day or two after, she made great complaint to my wife of the nuns, and of their evil and disdainful using of her; and assured her that she would be revenged of them. She [the queen] went to them again, but they would not open the gates to her. She was fain to make some of her guard to dig a hole under the wall, and get in, to open her the gates. This being done, the nuns, seeing the yard full of guards, every one shut herself up in their chambers, and looking out of the windows, told the queen, that with her pardon, they would be starved there first, afore they would lose their accustomed liberties. XXXIII. Elizabeth withstood all solicitations to engage her CHAP. people in a war of difficulty and uncertainty for a foreign succession. She was personally kind both to him and to his children; and limiting her favor to her private beneficence, until one late effort, he died without attaining the regal dominion to which he pretended." But this forbearance towards the Spanish king neither lessened his determination and attempts, nor those of his confederate, the pope, nor of their conspirators and agents, to dispossess and destroy her. To foment disaffection, and to prepare for insurrections, when the long-planned foreign invasion should take place, were still the persisting efforts of their secret missionaries and more infatuated adherents. For ten years after the northern rebellion, which they had before excited, notwithstanding all the treasonable practices which were afloat, only five papists had been put to death." 10 The next day they fell upon madame du Perron, and BEAT HER as long as she could stand, as the author of their harm. The king, upon that, sent his guard thither, and took out two or three of the headiest nuns, and put them in divers houses, in keeping abroad.' Lett. in Murdin, p. 384. So that, tho Catherine and Charles could massacre, without much difficulty, 10,000 Huguenots, they could not so easily master 75 nuns ! The following MS. letters are in the British Museum: Nero. B. 1. concerning don Antonio. On 9 Oct. 1581, Lopez reports to him Elizabeth's favorable disposition towards him. p. 251. In 1586, the same agents stated to the English government the distresses of Antonio and his son Emmanuel. p. 267. On 12 Sept. 1587, don Botelho, his agent at Middleburg, presses lord Leicester for the promised supply of money for raising troops. p. 269. On 12 Nov. 1594, Elizabeth wrote to Antonio, assuring him of the continuance of her friendship, and sent it by his son don Christopher. p. 276. The next year closed his unsuccessful hopes; for on 12 Sept. 1595, this son informed the queen from Paris, of the death of his father, and asks her protection for himself and for his brother Emmanuel, p. 278. 10 Camd. 240. The attempts and projects to assassinate her, were more numerous than were made public. On 24 December 1586, we BOOK II. Elizabeth long shrunk from all extreme severity. She met danger after danger with a magnanimity and courage, which few sovereigns would have so patiently exercised. She felt that the guilty agents who were pursuing these seditious and illegal machinations, were the enthusiastic victims of superior employers abroad, whom the arm of punishment could not reach." Yet the labors and insinuations of the self-devoting pupils were too perilous to be allowed to continue with legal impunity." They were pursuing a crafty and dark system, with as much privacy as assiduity, of sapping the foundations of the existing government; and thus, on the first external attack, to ensure its unexpected overthrow.13 Against these the stern laws, which they find a private letter from sir F. Walsingham to Lord Leicester, intimating 12 We have this strong assertion from Camden, who not only was then living, but was also connected with those who had the best means of information at that time. 'Great number of priests creeping daily into England, privily felt men's minds: spread abroad, that princes excommunicated were to be deposed; and whispered in corners, that such princes as professed not the Romish religion, had forfeited their title and legal authority; and that those men who had entered into holy orders, were, by a certain ecclesiastical freedom, exempted from all jurisdiction of princes, and not bound by their laws, nor ought to reverence them.' Camd. 240. 13 Our venerable herald adds this striking fact, Some of them dissembled not that they were returned into England with no other intent than, by reconciling in confession, to absolve every one in particular from all oath of allegiance and obedience to the queen, as the bull [of Pius V.] did absolve them at once in general.' ib. 241. I subjoin with pleasure, for it is a pleasure to distinguish the better from the baser mind, that one XXXIII. had compelled into existence, were at times enforced; CHAP. but the few, even from these sources of mischief, who chose to be peaceful and loyal, were left undisturbed by a wise and distinguished toleration, as one of their own party stated to another, who preferred to be an active instrument of treason and destruction." 14 These continuing practices, and Philip's unusual and unnecessary augmentation of his forces in Flanders, far beyond what the warfare in that country required," and his increasing hostilities against Elizabeth and England, compelled the pacific disposition of the endangered queen, to yield to the more vigorous counsels of her anxious cabinet. The Catholic, J. Bishop, tho devoted to the pope, wrote against them, and denied that the constitution of Lateran council, on which the pontiffs grounded their authority to depose sovereigns, was a bonâ fide act of such a council. He said, 'It was no other than a decree of Innocent III. and was never admitted in England; that the council was no council; nor was any thing at all there decreed by the fathers.' Camd. 243. So that, if this loyal Catholic was right, his papal master was acting, as other pontiffs before him, on fraud and forgery. "This individual was the Jesuit Mr. Wright. Garnet, who became a provincial of the order, and was afterwards executed for the gunpowder plot, having written to him on his quitting their society, Mr. Wright, in his answer, stated to him, 'It is too common now in England that all Jesuits and Seminaries are sworn enemies to her majesty, intending, persuading, and procuring her death. I can assure you, if such plotting and practising had never been invented, the poor Catholics in England had enjoyed more peace and tranquillity. For my part, because her majesty understandeth that I pretended nothing in England but religion, I have found that favor which perhaps none hath obtained hitherto, which is, that none shall trouble me for my conscience; and so I think many more should obtain, if they proceeded in the same manner. Good sir! resist as much as you can any such Machiavellian treasons; and let her majesty understand that all ambition, covetousness, or any other pretence, is far from us, whose vocation is religion, and not suppressing of princes! for, otherwise, I am afraid lest all our priests be rather put to death for matters of state than religion.' Birch's Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 359, from the MSS. of Anthony Bacon, brother of lord Bacon. 15 On 10 Dec. 1583, sir Edward Stafford apprized his court, from Paris, of this rumor,' Murd. 381; and on the 8th of the following January he sent his cabinet further information upon it. BOOK II. 16 assassination of the prince of Orange, which the cabinet of Madrid had been laboring to procure," having by his death," more than by its arms, shaken the stability of the Reformation in his country : Elizabeth at length, in the summer of 1585, decided on supporting the dismayed but unconquered Hollanders, by a public alliance, and with an effective force. Hence, when they besought her to receive them into her protection, she acquiesced in their request. It was indeed no small exertion of intellectual courage to commit her worldly fate, at this juncture, to the issue of such a measure, as to dare and wrestle, single handed, with the great Spanish monarchy, now aggrandized with all the resources of Portugal and its East Indian possessions; but Elizabeth was always great on great occasions, without dramatically acting or ostentatiously affecting to be so; and while Europe wondered at her intrepidity in taking the field against the most formidable potentate then on the globe, she fixed her steady mind resolutely on the necessary contest.18 She therefore 16 See the intercepted correspondence of cardinal Granville, quoted before, in Chapter xxxi. p. 359, note 69. In July 1582, Salcedo and Baza were seized at Bruges, for a plot to kill the prince; and also Alençon; at the instigation of the prince of Parma, on the part of the king of Spain. They confessed the fact. Meteren. 217. De Thou, 1. 35. c. 16. 17 He was shot with three bullets from a pistol, by Balthazar Gerard, a Burgundian. Camd. 271. This man confessed that he had previously discovered his design to a Jesuit at Treves, in confession, who kept him in their college, and gave him advice and direction. Strype's Ann. v.3. p. 309. Elizabeth's letter of 18 Oct. 1584, to the duc de Montpensier, acquainting him that the prince, apprehending such an event, had recommended his five daughters to her care, and stating how she wished to dispose of them, Strype has printed in part from the MS. Titus, B. 2. p. 201, in his app. to vol. 3. p. 276. 18 Camden thus expresses the continental feeling of this day, on the courage of the determination: All the princes of Christendom admired such manly fortitude in a woman, who durst denounce a war against a |