stratagem had nearly succeeded: she had reached Hoddesdon on her journey to London, when secret intelligence of the true state of the case, conveyed to her by the earl of Arundel, caused her to change her It was doubtless a similar intimation from some friendly hand, Cecil's perhaps, which caused Elizabeth to disobey the summons, and remain tranquil at one of her houses in Hertfordshire.

course.

Here she was soon after waited upon by messengers from Northumberland, who apprised her of the accession of the lady Jane, and proposed to her to resign her own title in consideration of a sum of money and certain lands which should be assigned her. But Elizabeth wisely and courageously replied, that her eldest sister was first to be agreed with, during whose lifetime she, for her part, could claim no right at all. And, determined to make common cause with Mary against their common enemies, she equipped with all speed a body of a thousand horse, at the head of which she went forth to meet her sister on her approach to London.

The event quickly proved that she had taken the right part. Though the council manifested their present subserviency to Northumberland by proclaiming queen Jane in the capital, and by issuing in her name a summons to Mary to lay aside her pretentions to the crown, this leader was too well practised in the arts of courts to be the dupe of their hollow professions of attachment to a cause unsupported, as he soon perceived, by the good will of the people.

The march of Northumberland at the head of a small body of troops, to resist the forces levied by Mary in Norfolk and Suffolk, was the signal for the defection of a great majority of the council. They broke from the kind of honorable custody in the Tower, in which Northumberland had judged it expedient to detain them; and ordering Mary to be proclaimed in London, they caused the unfortunate Jane, after a nominal reign of ten days, to be held as a prisoner in that fortress which she had entered as a sovereign.

Not a hand was raised, not a drop of blood was shed, in defence of this pageant raised by the ambition of Dudley. Deserted by his partisans, his soldiers, and himself, he sought, as a last feeble resource, to make a merit of being the first man to throw up his cap in the marketplace of Cambridge, and cry, 'God save queen Mary! But on the following day, the earl of Arundel, whom he had disgraced, and who hated him,—though a little before he had professed that he could wish to spend his blood at his feet,-came and arrested him in her majesty's name; and Mary, proceeding to London, seated herself without opposition on the throne of her ancestors.

CHAP. VI. 1553 AND 1554.

Mary affects attachment to Elizabeth.-Short duration of her kindness.-Earl of Devonshire liberated from the Tower.-His character. He rejects the love of Mary-shows partiality to Elizabeth.-Anger of Mary.—Elizabeth retires from court. — Queen's proposed marriage unpopular.-Character of sir T. Wyat.-His rebellion.-Earl of Devonshire remanded to the Tower.-Elizabeth summoned to court-is detained by illness.-Wyat taken-is said to accuse Elizabeth.-She is brought prisoner to the courtexamined by the council-dismissed-brought again to court-reexamined—committed to the Tower.-Particulars of her behaviour.— Influence of Mary's government on various eminent characters.—Reinstatement of the duke of Norfolk in honor and office.-His retirement and death.-Liberation from the Tower of Tunstal.-His character and after fortunes.-Of Gardiner and Bonner.-Their views and characters. Of the duchess of Somerset and the marchioness of Exeter.-Imprisonment of the Dudleys-of several protestant bishops—of judge Hales.-his suffering and death.-Characters and fortunes of sir 7. Cheke, sir Anth. Cook, Dr. Cox, and other protestant exiles. THE conduct of Elizabeth during the late alarming crisis procured for her from Mary, during the first days of her reign, some demonstrations of sisterly affection. She caused her to bear her company in her public entry into London; kindly detained her for a time near her person; and seemed to have consigned to everlasting oblivion all the mortifications and heartburnings of which the child of Anne Boleyn had been the innocent occasion to her in times past, and under circumstances which could never more return.

In the splendid procession which attended her majesty from the Tower to Whitehall, previously to her coronation on 1 Oct., 1553, the royal chariot, sumptuously covered with cloth of tissue, and drawn by six horses with trappings of the same material, was immediately followed by another, likewise drawn by six horses and covered with cloth of silver, in which sat the princess Elizabeth and the lady Anne of Cleves, who took place in this ceremony as the adopted sister of Henry VIII. [Holinshed.]

But notwithstanding these fair appearances, the rancorous feelings of Mary's heart with respect to her sister were only repressed or disguised, not eradicated; and it was not long before a new subject of jealousy caused them to revive in all their pristine energy.

Amongst the state prisoners committed to the Tower by Henry VIII., and detained there during the ensuing regency, whom it was Mary's first act of royalty to release and reinstate in their offices or honors,

was Edward Courtney, son of the unfortunate marquis of Exeter. From the age of twelve to that of six-and-twenty, this victim of tyranny had been doomed to expiate, in hopeless captivity, the involuntary offence of inheriting through an attainted father the blood of Edward IV. To the surprise and admiration of the court, he now issued forth from his seclusion a comely and accomplished gentleman; deeply versed in the literature of the age; skilled in music, and still more so in the art of painting, which had formed the chief solace of his long confinement; and graced with that polished elegance of manners, the result, in most who possess it, of early intercourse with the world and an assiduous imitation of the best examples, but to a few of her favorites the free gift of nature herself. To all his prepossessing qualities was superadded that deep, romantic kind of interest with which long, extraordinary, and unmerited misfortune, cannot fail to invest a youthful sufferer.

What wonder that Courtney speedily became the favorite of the nation!—what wonder that even the stern bosom of Mary herself was touched with tenderness! With the eager zeal of the sentiment just awakened in her heart, she hastened to restore to her too amiable kinsman the title of earl of Devonshire, long hereditary in the illustrious house of Courtney, to which she added the whole of those patrimonial estates which the forfeiture of his father had vested in the crown. She went further; she lent a propitious ear to the whispered suggestion of her people, still secretly partial to the house of York, that an English prince of the blood was most worthy to share the throne of an English queen. It is even affirmed that hints were designedly thrown out to the young man himself of the impression which he had made upon her heart. But Courtney disdained, as it appears, to barter his affections for a crown. The youth, the talents, the graces of Elizabeth had ·inspired him with a preference which he was either unwilling or unable to conceal; and Mary was left to vent her disappointment in resentment against the ill-fated object of her preference, and in every demonstration of malignant jealously towards her sister—an innocent and unprotected rival.

By the first act of a parliament summoned immediately after the coronation, Mary's birth had been pronounced legitimate, the marriage of her father and mother valid, and their divorce null and void. A stigma was thus unavoidably cast on the offspring of Henry's second marriage; and no sooner had Elizabeth incurred the displeasure of her sister, than she was made to feel how far the consequences of this new declaration of the legislature might be made to extend. Notwithstanding the unrevoked succession-act, which rendered her next heir to the crown, she was forbidden to take place of the countess of Lennox, or the duchess of Suffolk, in the presence-chamber, and her friends were studiously discountenanced or affronted. Her merit, her accomplishments, her

78

INSURRECTION OF SIR THOMAS WYATT OF KENT.

insinuating manners, which attracted to her the admiration and attend ance of the young nobility and the favor of the nation, were so many crimes in the eyes of a sovereign who already began to feel her own unpopularity; and Elizabeth, who was not of a spirit to endure public and unmerited slights with tameness, found it at once the most dignified and the safest course to seek, before the end of the year, the peaceful retirement of her house of Ashridge, in Buckinghamshire. It was however made a condition of the leave of absence from court, which she was obliged to solicit, that she should take with her sir Thomas Pope and sir John Gage, who were placed about her as inspectors and superintendents of her conduct, under the name of chief officers of her household.

The marriage of Mary to Philip of Spain was now openly talked of, It was generally and justly unpopular; the protestant party, whom the measures of the queen had already filled with apprehensions, saw, in her desire of connecting herself yet more closely with the most bigoted royal family of Europe, a confirmation of their worst forebodings; and the tyranny of the Tudors had not yet so entirely crushed the spirit of Englishmen, as to render them tamely acquiescent in the prospect of their country's becoming a province to Spain, subject to the sway of that detested people whose rapacity, and violence, and unexampled cruelty, had filled both hemispheres with groans and execrations.

The house of commons petitioned the queen against marrying a foreign prince she replied by dissolving them in anger; and all hope of putting a stop to the connexion by legal means being thus precluded, measures of a more dangerous character began to be concerted.

Sir Thomas Wyat of Allingham Castle, in Kent, son of the poet, wit, and courtier of that name, had hitherto been distinguished by zealous loyalty; and he is said to have been also a catholic. Though allied in blood to the Dudleys, not only had he refused to Northumberland his concurrence in the nomination of Jane Grey, but, without waiting a moment to see which party would prevail, he had proclaimed queen Mary in the market-place at Maidstone, for which instance of attachment he had received her thanks. [Carte's Hist. of England.] But Wyat had been employed during several years of his life in embassies to Spain; and the intimate acquaintance which he had thus acquired of the principles and practices of its court filled him with such horror of their introduction into his native country, that, preferring patriotism to loyalty where their claims appeared incompatible, he incited his neighbours and friends to insurrection.

Sir Peter Carew and sir Gawen his uncle endeavored to raise the West in the same cause, but with small success; and the attempts made by the duke of Suffolk, lately pardoned and liberated, to arm his tenantry and retainers in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, proved still more futile. Notwithstanding, however, this want of co-operation

Wyat's rebellion wore for some time a very formidable appearance. The London trained-bands sent out to oppose him went over to him in a body, under Bret, their captain : the guards, almost the only regular troops in the kingdom, were chiefly protestants, and therefore little trusted by the queen; and it was known that the inhabitants of the metropolis, for which Wyat. was in full march, were in their hearts inclined to his cause.

It was pretty well ascertained that the earl of Devonshire had received an invitation to join the western insurgents; and though he appeared to have rejected the proposal, he was arbitrarily remanded to his ancient abode in the Tower.

Elizabeth was naturally regarded, under all these circumstances of alarm, with extreme jealousy and suspicion. It was well known that her present compliance with the religion of the court was merely prudential; that she was the only hope of the protestant party,—a party equally formidable by zeal and by numbers, which it was resolved to crush; it was more than suspected, that though Wyat himself still professed an inviolable fidelity to the person of the reigning sovereign, and strenuously declared the Spanish match to be the sole grievance against which he had taken arms, many of his partisans had been led by their religious zeal to entertain the further view of dethroning the queen in favor of her sister, whom they proposed to marry to the earl of Devonshire. It was not proved that the princess herself had given any encouragement to these designs; but sir James Croft, an adherent of Wyat's, had lately visited Ashridge, and held conferences with some of her attendants; and it had afterwards been rumoured that she was projecting a removal to her manor of Donnington Castle, in Berkshire, on the south side of the Thames, where nothing but a day's march through an open country would separate her residenee from the station of the Kentish rebels.

Policy seemed now to dictate the precaution of securing her person; and the queen addressed to her accordingly the following letter :

'Right dear and entirely beloved sister,

"We greet you well: And whereas certain evil-disposed persons, minding more the satisfaction of their own malicious and seditious minds than their duty of allegiance towards us, have of late foully spread divers lewd and untrue rumours; and by that means and other devilish practices do travail to induce our good and loving subjects to an unnatural rebellion against God, us, and the tranquillity of our realm; We, tendering the surety of your person, which might chance to be in some peril if any sudden tumult should arise where you now be, or about Donnington, whither, as we understand, you are minded shortly to remove, do therefore think expedient you should put yourself in good readiness, with all convenient speed, to make your repair hither to us. Which we pray you fail not to do: Assuring you, that as