388 RISE OF THE QUEEN'S AFFECTION FOR THE EARL OF ESSEX,

CHAP. XXIII. 1588 TO 1591.

Effects of Leicester's death.-Rise of the queen's affection for Essex. -Trial of the earl of Arundel.-Letter of Walsingham on religious affairs.-Death of Mildmay.-Case of don Antonio.-Expedition to Cadiz.-Behaviour of Essex-Traits of sir C. Blount.— Sir H. Leigh's resignation.-Conduct of Elizabeth to the king of Scots.-His marriage.—Death and character of sir Francis Walsingham.-Struggle between the earl of Essex and lord Burleigh for the nomination of his successor.-Extracts of letters from Essex to Davison.-Inveteracy of the queen against Davison.-Robert Cecil appointed assistant secretary.--Private marriage of Essex.-Anger of the queen.-Reform effected by the queen in the collection of the revenue.-Speech of Burleigh.-Parsimony of the queen considered. Anecdotes on this subject.-Lines by Spenser.-Succours afforded by her to the king of France.-Account of sir John Norris.— Essex's campaign in France.-Royal progress.-Entertainment at Coudray-at Elvetham—at Theobald's.-Death and character of ir Christopher Hatton.-Puckering lord-keeper.-Notice of sir John Perrot.-Puttenham's Art of Poetry.-Verses y Gascoigne. -Warner's Albion's England.

THE death of Leicester forms an important era in the history of the court of Elizabeth, and also in that of her private life and more intimate feelings. The powerful faction of which the favorite had been the head, now acknowledged for its leader the earl of Essex, whom Ins step-father had brought forward at court as a counterpoise to the influence of Raleigh; and who now stood second to none in the good graces of her majesty. But Essex, however gifted with noble and brilliant qualities totally deficient in Leicester, was, on the other hand, confessedly inferior to him in several other endowments still more essential to the leader of a court-party. Though not devoid of art, he was by no means master of the profound dissimulation, the exquisite address, and especially the wary coolness, by which his predecessor well knew how to accomplish his ends in despite of all opposition. His character was impetuous, his disposition frank; and experience had not yet taught him to distrust himself or others.

With the friendships, Essex received as an inheritance the enmities also of Leicester; and no one at court could ever have entertained the least doubt who it was that he in fact regarded as his principal opponent; but it would have been deemed too high a pitch of presumption in so young a man and so recent a favorite as Essex, to place himself in immediate and open hostility to the long established and far extending influence of Burleigh. With this great minister therefore and his adherents he attempted at first a kind of compro.

mise; and the noted division of the court into the Essex and the Cecil parties does not appear to have taken place till some years after the period of which we are treating. Meantime, the death of Walsingham afforded the lord-treasurer an occasion of introducing to the notice and confidence of her majesty, and eventually to the important office of secretary of state, his son Robert; whose eminent talents for affairs, joined to the utmost refinement of intrigue and duplicity, immediately established him in the same independence on the good will of the new favorite, as the elder Cecil had ever asserted on that of the former one; and finally enabled him to prepare in secret that favorite's most disastrous fall.

With regard to Elizabeth herself, it has been a thousand times remarked, that she was never able to forget the woman in the sovereign; and in spite of that preponderating love of sway which all her life forbade her to admit a partner of her bed and throne, her heart was to the last deeply sensible of the want, or her imagination of the charm, of loving and being beloved. The death, therefore, of the man who had been for thirty years the object of a tenderness which he had long repaid by every flattering profession, every homage of gallantry, and every manifestation of entire devotedness, left, notwithstanding any late disgusts which she might have entertained, a void in her existence which she felt it necessary to supply. It was no doubt this situation of her feelings, which caused the gradual conversion into a softer sentiment of that natural and innocent tenderness with which she had at first regarded the brilliant and engaging qualities of her youthful kinsman, the earl of Essex ;—a change so fatal to them both.

The Spanish armament incidentally became the occasion of involving the earl of Arundel in a charge of a capital nature. Ever since the treachery of his agents, in the year 1585, had baffled his design of quitting for ever a country to which his religion and his political attachments had rendered him an alien; this unfortunate nobleman had been kept close prisoner in the Tower. Such treatment might well be supposed calculated to augment the vehemence of his bigotry and the rancor of his disaffection: and it became a current report that on hearing news of the sailing of the armada, he had caused a mass of the Holy Ghost and devotions of twenty-four hours' continuance to be celebrated for its success. This rumor being confirmed by one Bennet, a priest then under examination, and other circumstances of suspicion coming out, the earl, on 14 April, 1589, was brought to the bar of the house of lords on a charge of high treason. Bennet, struck with compunction, addressed to him a letter acknowledging his testimony to have been false and extorted from him solely by the fear of the rack. But it appears that this letter, still extant among the Burleigh papers, was intercepted by the government; and the prisoner, by this cruel and iniquitous artifice, was

390 THE INIQUITOUS TRIAL OF THE EARL OF ARUNDEL. deprived of all means of invalidating the testimony of the priest, who was brought into court as a witness against him. By a second violation of every principle of justice, the matters for which, as contempts, he had already undergone the sentence of the Star-chamber, were now introduced into his indictment for high treason, to which the following articles were added ;—that he had engaged to assist cardinal Allen in the restoration of popery;—that he had intimated the unfitness of the queen to govern ;-that he had caused masses to be said for the success of the armada;-that he had attempted to withdraw himself beyond seas for the purpose of serving under the duke of Parma;—and that he had been privy to the bull of Pope Sixtus V., transferring the sovereignty of England from her majesty to the Catholic king of Spain.

To all these articles, which he was not allowed to separate, the earl pleaded not guilty; but afterwards, in his defence, confessed some of them, though with certain extenuations. He asserted, that the prayers and masses which he had caused to be said, were for the averting of a general massacre of the English catholics, alleged to be designed; and not for the success of the armada. The aid to the catholic cause which he had promised in his correspondence with cardinal Allen, he declared to refer only to peaceful attempts at making converts; not to the encouragement of any plan of rebellion. He acknowledged a design of going to serve under the prince of Parma, since he was denied the exercise of his religion at home; but he argued his innocence of any view of co-operating in plans of invasion, from the circumstance, that his attempt to leave England had taken place during the year fixed by cardinal Allen and the queen of Scots for the execution of a scheme of this nature.

The crown-lawyers, in order to make out a case of constructive treason, urged the reconcilement of the prisoner with the church of Rome, which they held to be of itself a traitorous act ;-his correspondence with declared traitors;—and the high opinion entertained of him by the queen of Scots and cardinal Allen, as the chief support of popery in England. They likewise exhibited an emblematical picture found in his house, representing, in one part, a hand shaking off a viper into the fire, with the motto, "If God is for us, who can be against us?' and in another part, a lion, the cognisance of the Howard family, deprived of his claws; under him the words, 'Yet still a lion.' On these charges, none of which, though proved by the most unexceptionable witnesses, could have brought him within the true meaning of the statute of Edward III., on which he was indicted, the peers were base enough to pronounce a unanimous verdict of Guilty; which he received, as his father had done before him, with the words' God's will be done!' But here the queen felt herself concerned in honor to interpose. It had ever been her maxim and her boast, to punish none capitally for

religious delinquencies unconnected with traitorous designs; and sensible, probably, how imperfectly such designs had in this case been proved, she was pleased, in her abundant mercy, to commute the capital part of the sentence against her unhappy kinsman into perpetual imprisonment; but attended with the forfeiture of the greater part of his estate.

In 1595, this victim of the religious dissensions of a fierce and bigoted age, ended in his thirty-ninth year an unfortunate life, shortened, as well as embittered, by the more than monkish austerities which he imagined it meritorious to inflict upon himself.

From the period of the abortive attempt at insurrection under the earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, the whole course of public events had tended to increase the difficulties and aggravate the sufferings in which the catholics of England found themselves inextricably involved. Their situation was thus forcibly depicted by Philip Sidney, in a passage of his celebrated letter to her majesty against the French marriage; which at the present day will probably be read in a spirit very different from that in which it was written.

'The other faction, most rightly indeed to be called a faction, is the papists; men whose spirits are full of anguish; some being infested by others whom they accounted damnable; some having their ambition stopped because they are not in the way of advancement; some in prison and disgrace; some whose best friends are banished practisers; many thinking you an usurper; many thinking also you had disannulled your right because of the pope's excommunication; all burthened with the weight of their consciences. Men of great numbers, of great riches (because the affairs of state have not lain on them), of united minds, as all men that deem themselves oppressed most naturally åre.'

A further explanation of their situation may be extracted from an apology for the measures of the English government towards both papists and puritans, addressed by Walsingham to M. Critoy the French secretary of state.

'Sir,

Whereas you desire to be advertised touching the proceedings here in ecclesiastical causes, because you secm to note in them some inconstancy and variation; as if we sometimes inclined to one side, sometimes to another, as if that clemency and lenity were not used in the beginning; all which you impute to your own superficial understanding of the affairs of this state, having notwithstanding her majesty's doings in singular reverence, as the real pledges which she hath given unto the world of her sincerity in religion and her wisdom in government well meriteth; I am glad of this occasion to impart that little I know in that matter to you; both for your own satisfaction and to the end you may make use thereof towards any that shall not

392 RELIGIOUS POLICY OF ELIZABETH DEFENDED BY WALSINGHAM.

be so modestly and so reasonably minded as you are. I find therefore her majesty's proceedings to have been grounded upon two principles.

1. The one, that consciences are not to be forced, but to be won and reduced by the force of truth, with the aid of time and use of all good means of instruction and persuasion.

2. The other, that the causes of conscience, wherein they exceed their bounds and grow to be matter of faction, lose their nature; and that sovereign princes ought distinctly to punish the practice in contempt, though colored under pretence of conscience and religion.

'According to these principles, her majesty, at her coming to the crown, utterly disliking the tyranny of Rome, which had used by terror and rigor to settle commandments of men's faiths and consciences; though, as a prince of great wisdom and magnanimity, she suffered but the exercise of one religion, yet her proceedings towards the papists were with great lenity; expecting the good effects which time might work in them. And therefore her majesty revived not the laws made in the 28 and 35 of her father's reign; whereby the oath of supremacy might have been offered at the king's pleasure to any subject, though he kept his conscience never so modestly to himself, and the refusal to take the same oath without further circumstance was made treason. But contrarise her majesty, not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts; except the abundance of them did overflow into overt or express acts or affirmations: tempered her laws so as it restraineth every manifest disobedience in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her majesty's supreme power maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction. And as for the oath, it was altered by her majesty into a more grateful form; the hardness of the name and appellation of supreme head was removed; and the penalty of the refusal thereof turned only into disablement to take any promotion, or to exercise any change; and yet with liberty of being reinvested therein if any man should accept thereof during his life. But when, after Pius Quintus had excommunicated her majesty and the bills of excommunication were published in London, whereby her majesty was in a sort proscribed; and that thereupon, as a principal motive or preparative, followed the rebellion in the North; yet because the ill humors of the realm were by that rebellion partly purged; and that she feared at that time no foreign invasion and much less the attempt of any within the realm not backed by some potent succour from without; she contented herself to make a law against that special case of bringing and publishing any bulls, or the like instruments; whereunto was added a prohibition, upon pain, not of treason, but of an inferior degree of punishment, against the bringing in of agnus Dei, hallowed bread and such other merchandise of Rome as are well known not to be any essential part of the Romish religion; but only