The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, heads of the ancient and warlike families of Percy and Nevil, were the first to break that internal tranquillity which the kingdom had hitherto enjoyed without the slightest interruption, under the wise and vigorous rule of Elizabeth. The remoteness of these noblemen from the court and capital, with the poverty and simplicity, we might almost say the barbarism, of the vassals over whom they bore sway; and whose homage they received like native and independent princes, appears to have nourished in their minds ideas of their own importance better suited to the period of the wars of the Roses than to the happier age of peace and order which had succeeded.

The offended pride of the earl of Westmoreland, a man destitute in fact of every kind of talent, seems on some occasion to have led him to the discovery, that at the court of Elizabeth the representative of the king-making Warwick was a person of very slender consideration. The failure of the grand attack upon the secretary, in which he had taken part, confirmed this mortifying impression; and the subsequent committal of his brother-in-law, the great and powerful duke of Norfolk himself, must have carried home to the bottom of his heart unwilling conviction that the preponderance of the ancient aristocracy of the country was subverted; and that its proudest chieftains were fast sinking to the common level of subjects. His attachment to the religion, with the other practices and prejudices of former ages, gave additional exasperation to his discontent against the established order of things the incessant invectives of Romish priests against a princess whom the pope was on the point of anathematizing, represented the cause of her enemies as that of Heaven itself; and the spirit of the earl was roused at length to seek full vengeance for all the injuris sustained by his pride, his interests, or his principles.

Every motive of disaffection which wrought upon the mind of Westmoreland, affected equally the earl of Northumberland; and to the Romish cause the latter was still further pledged by the example and fate of his father; that sir Thomas Percy who had perished on the scaffold for his share in Aske's rebellion. The attainder of sir Thomas had debarred his son from succeeding to the titles and estates of the last unhappy earl his uncle; and he had suffered the mortification of seeing them go to raise the fortunes of the house of Dudley; but on the accession of Mary, by whom his father was regarded as a martyr, he had been restored to all the honors of his birth, and treated with a degree of favor which could not but strengthen his predilection for the faith of which she was the patroness. It appears, however, that the attachment of the earl to the catholic cause had not on all occasions been proof against immediate personal interest.

Soon after the marriage of the queen of Scots with Darnley, that rash and ill-judging pair, esteeming their authority in the country

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DESTRUCTION OF THE NEVIL AND PERCY FAMILIES.

sufficiently established to enable them to venture on an attempt for the restoration of the old religion, the pope, in furtherance of their pious designs, had remitted to them the sum of eight thousand crowns. 'But the ship wherein the said gold was,' says James Melvil in his Memoirs, 'did shipwrack upon the coast of England, within the earl of Northumberland's bounds; who alleged the whole to appertain to him by just law, which he caused his advocate to read unto me, when I was directed to him for the demanding restitution of the said sum, in the old Norman language; which neither he nor I understood well, it was so corrupt. But all my entreaties were ineffectual, he altogether refusing to give any part thereof to the queen, albeit he was himself a catholic and professed secretly to be her friend.' And through this disappointment Mary was compelled to give up her design.

An additional trait of the earl's character is furnished by the same author in transcribing the instructions which he carried home from his brother si Robert Melvil, then ambassador to England, on his return from that country, after announcing the birth of the prince of Scotland. 'Item, that her majesty cast not off the earl of Northumberland, albeit as a fearful and facile man he delivered her letter to the queen of England; neither appear to find fault with sir Henry Percy as yet for his dealing with Mr. Ruxbie,' (an English spy in Scotland) which he doth to gain favor at court, being upon a contrary faction to his brother the earl.'

The machinations of the two earls, however cautiously carried on, did not entirely escape the penetration of the earl of Sussex, lord president of the north; who sent for them both and subjected them to some kind of examination; but no sufficient cause for their detention then appearing, he dismissed them, hoping probably that the warning would prove efficacious in securing their peaceable behaviour. In this idea, however, he was deceived; on their return they instantly resumed their mischievous designs; and they were actually preparing for an insurrection, which was to be supported by troops from Flanders promised by the duke of Alva, when a summons from the queen for their immediate attendance at court disconcerted all their measures.

To comply with the command seemed madness in men who were conscious that their proceedings had already amounted to high treason; -but to refuse obedience, and thus set at defiance a power to which they were as yet unprepared to oppose any effectual resistance, seemed equally desperate. They hesitated; and it is said that the irresolution of Northumberland was only ended by the stratagem of some of his dependents, who waked him one night with a false alarm that his enemies were upon him; and thus hurried him into the irretrievable step of quitting his home and joining Westmorland; upon which the country flocked in for their defence, and they found themselves comdelled to raise their standard.

The enterprise immediately assumed the aspect of a Holy War, or crusade against heresy: on the banners of the insurgents were displayed the cross, the five wounds of Christ and the cup of the eucharist: mass was regularly performed in their camp; and on reaching Durham, they carried off from the cathedral and committed to the flames the Bible and the English service books.

The want of money to purchase provisions compelled the earls to relinquish their first idea of marching to London; they however captured a neighbouring castle, and remained masters of the country as long as no army appeared to oppose them; but on the approach of the earl of Sussex and lord Hunsdon from York, with a large body of troops, they gradually retreated to the Scotch borders and there disbanded their men without a blow. The earl of Westmorland finally made his escape to Flanders; where he dragged out a tedious existence in poverty and obscurity, barely supplied with the necessaries of life by a slender pension from the king of Spain. Northumberland, being betrayed for a reward by a Scottish borderer to whom, as to a friend, he had fled for refuge, was at length delivered up by the regent Morton to the English government; was tried and beheaded at York.

Posterity is not called upon to respect the memory of these rebellious earls as martyrs even to a mistaken zeal for the good of their country; or to any other generous principle of action. The objects of their enterprise, as assigned by themselves, were the restoration of the old religion, the removal of evil counsellors, and the liberation of the duke of Norfolk and other imprisoned nobles. But even their attachment to the church of Rome appears to have been entirely subservient to their views of personal interest; and so little was the duke inclined to blend his cause with theirs, that he exerted himself in every mode that his situation would permit, to strengthen the hands of government for their overthrow; and it was in consideration of the loyal spirit manifested by him on occasion of this rebellion, and of a subsequent rising in Norfolk, that he soon after obtained his liberty on a promise to renounce all connexion with the queen of Scots.

In the northern counties, however, the cause and the persons of the two earls, who had well maintained the hospitable fame of their great ancestors, were alike the objects of popular attachment: The miserable destiny of the outlawed and ruined Westmorland and the untimely end of Northumberland through the perfidy of the false friend in whom he had put his trust, were long remembered with pity and indignation; and many a minstrel 'tuned his rude harp of border frame' to the fall of the Percy or the wanderings of the Nevil. There was also an ancient gentleman named Norton, of Norton in Yorkshire, who bore the banner of the cross and the five wounds before the rebel army, whose tragic fall, with that of his eight sons, has received such

R

258

NORTON FAMILY-SEVERITIES AGAINST THE REBELS.

commemoration and embellishment as the pathetic strains of a nameless but probably contemporary bard could bestow. The excellent ballad entitled "The rising in the north' [Percy's Reliques, vol. ii.] impressively describes the mission of Percy's 'little foot page' to Norton, to pray that he will 'ride in his company;' and the council held by Richard Norton with his nine sons, when

'Eight of them did answer make,

Eight of them spake hastily;

O father! till the day we die

We'll stand by that good earl and thee;

while Francis, the eldest, seeks to dissuade his father from rebellion, but finding him resolved, offers to accompany him 'unarmed and naked.' Their standard is then mentioned; and after recording the flight of the two earls, the minstrel adds,

'Thee Norton with thine eight good sons

They doomed to die, alas for ruth !
Thy reverend locks thee could not save,

Nor them their fair and blooming youth!

But how slender is the authority of a poet in matters of history! It is quite certain that Richard Norton did not perish by the hands of the executioner; and we are not certain that any one of his sons did. It is true that the old man, with three more of the family, was attainted; that his great estates were confiscated; and that he ended his days a miserable exile in Flanders. We also know that two gentlemen of the name of Norton were hanged at London; but some authorities make them brothers of the head of the family; and two of the sons of Richard Norton, Francis and Edmund, ancestor of the present lord Grantley, certainly lived and died in peace on their large estates in Yorkshire.

It is little to the honor of Elizabeth's clemency, that a rebellion suppressed almost without bloodshed should have been judged by her to justify and require the unmitigated exercise of martial law over the whole of the disaffected country. Sir John Bowes, marshal of the army, made it his boast, that in a tract sixty miles in length, and forty in breadth, there was scarcely a town or village where he had not put some to death; and at Durham the earl of Sussex caused sixty-three constables to be hanged at once ;-a severity of which it should appear that he was the unwilling instrument; for in a letter written soon after to Cecil he complains, that during part of the time of his command in the north he had nothing left to him 'but to direct hanging matters.' But the situation of this nobleman at the time was such as would by no means permit him at his own peril to suspend or evade the execution of the orders he received from court. Egremont Ratcliffe his halfbrother, was one of about forty noblemen and gentlemen attainted for

11

their concern in this rebellion; he had in the earl of Leicester an enemy equally vindictive and powerful; and some secret informations had infused into the mind of the queen a suspicion that there had been wilful slackness in his proceedings against the insurgents. There was, however, at the bottom of Elizabeth's heart a conviction of the truth and loyalty of her kinsman which could not be eradicated; and he soon after took a spirited step which disconcerted entirely the measures of his enemies and placed him higher than ever in her confidence and esteem. Cecil thus relates the circumstance in one of his letters to Norris, dated February 1570.

'The earl of Sussex . . . upon desire to see her majesty, came hither unlooked for; and although, in the beginning of this northern rebellion, her majesty sometimes uttered some misliking of the earl, yet this day she, meaning to deal very princely with him, in presence of her council charged him with such things as she had heard to cause her misliking, without any note of mistrust towards him for his fidelity; whereupon he did with such humbleness, wisdom, plainness and dexterity, answer her majesty, as both she and all the rest were fully satisfied; and he adjudged by good proofs to have served in all this time faithfully; and so circumspectly, as it manifestly appeareth that if he had not so used himself in the beginning, the whole north part had entered into the rebellion.'

A formidable mass of discontent subsisted in fact among the catholics of the North; and it was not long before a new and more daring leader found means again to set it in fierce and violent action.

Leonard Dacre, a character interesting on many accounts, was the second son of William lord Dacre of Gilsland, descended from the ancient barons Vaux who had held lordships in Cumberland from the days of the conqueror.

In 1568, on the death without issue of his nephew, a minor in wardship to the duke of Norfolk, Leonard, as heir male, laid claim to the title and family estates; but the three sisters of the last lord disputed with him this valuable succession; and being supported by the interest of the duke of Norfolk their step-father, with whose three sons they had also intermarried, they found means to defeat the claims of their uncle, though indisputably good in law ;-one instance out of a thousand of the scandalous partiality towards the rich and powerful exhibited in the legal decisions of that age!

Stung with resentment against the government and the queen herself, by whom justice had been denied him, Leonard Dacre threw himself, with all the impetuosity of his character, into the measures of the malcontents and the interests of the queen of Scots; and he laid a daring plan for her deliverance from Tutbury Castle. This plan the duke, on its being communicated to him, had vehemently opposed, partly from his repugnance to measures of violence, partly from the apprehension