what a deluge of misery would have terrified and saddened Europe, if the Grand Armada of the Escurial and of the Vatican had succeeded in its direful expedition. This league of persecution Henry III. did not join. On the contrary it is intimated, altho he was bigot enough," and had been also a sufficient Huguenot destroyer, to have deserved as much as Pius V. a place in the Roman Breviary of his friends had secretly seen one of James' letters to Elizabeth, and in much alarm at the prospect which it opened, adds, ' It should seem, that she has made him some deceitful assurance of that crown after her; so that the heretics of both realms make their account to live in continual heresy under him, and so prefer him before yourself unto that crown. But I hope in heaven the heretics shall be frustrate of their wicked practices.' Murd. 525. It was against her giving James the succession that Mary herself wrote the warm French letter of the 23 March 1586, to Elizabeth: What can be more impious and detestable, than for an only son to take from his mother her state and crown! Be you not aware that I should give him, as I will if he persists, my malediction, and deprive him, as far as I can, of all good and greatness, which by me he can pretend to in Scotland or elsewhere? I doubt not that I shall find in Christendom heirs enough, who will have nails sufficiently strong to retain what I shall put into their hand.' Murdin, p. 566. Of some of the habits and superstitions of Henry III. we find a few notices in the dispatches of sir Edward Stafford, in 1584. On his habits, we read: He is continually occupied from two o'clock after midnight, which is his ordinary time of rising, till eight o'clock in the morning, shut up in his cabinet, himself scribbling, and two or three others under him.' Besides his ordinary guard of French, in two sorts, and of Swissers and Scots, he has erected five-and-forty, which they term Talliagambi. These must never go from his person; and whenever he goeth out, they must be nearest the king; every one with a cuirass under his coat, and never eat nor drink out of the court or their own chamber, at any bodies board whatsoever. Besides these, he hath 40 gentlemen of his chamber, who must perpetually wait; every one a chain of gold about their neck.' Murd. p. 426. On his superstitions, we learn from the ambassador, on 10 Dec. 1583, that Henry chose to invent a new order of friars. The king is in a marvellous humor for a new confreyrey of Jeronomites, which he erecteth at Bois de Vincennes, and will have his favorites to be of it with him. They be clad in a kind of smoky grey, to go bare-foot, to have stones in their hands to knock their breasts with when they be at their prayers; and to live of alms. The king, a Sunday was se'nnight, went thither, and for three hours together wore the habit; and took such cold, that when he came home he fell into a fever and a flux; so that men were in doubt that he would have ended his life with his CHAP. XXXV. II. BOOK and Calendar, yet that now he had so far felt the mischiefs of such conduct, as to desire, with lategained wisdom, to harmonize his Protestant and Catholic subjects; and therefore receding from the wishes of the pope to employ and direct their united energies against the ambitious king of Spain." But what he might have accomplished more successfully and to his glory and happiness when he preferred to destroy his Huguenot nobility at St. Bartholomew's fatal dawn, the associates of his then criminality would not suffer him to do now. They had made their yet unbroken league, to extirpate those, whom in this day of his half repentance he was wishing to favor. They maintained this combination in defiance of his dislike. He sought in vain to shatter it.23 He only roused the wish and hope for his own early destruction, and practices to produce it; till finding himself in the alternative, that either he or his former friends in guilt must 22 We learn this from the stout Catholic, and therefore, disapproving Morgan, on 25 Jan. 1586: The pope and the king here do not agree well hitherto. The king, seeing himself the last of his race, desireth to entertain both Catholics and heretics, and to advance a few whom he loveth, and to turn the wars of this country to Flanders.' Lett. to Mary in Murd. 475. So we read again from him at the end of March: The preparation outward is to make the wars against the Huguenots; but the king of France doth inwardly desire rather peace than war, and is led to make war against his will.' ib. 500. 23 The same Morgan reported, Notwithstanding this king drew M. de Guise, and the princes that were in arms last summer for the extirpation of heresy, to come to a composition with him; nevertheless it is apparent that the king hath and doth labor to break the said Catholic league, and to disjoin and weaken the favorers of the same. His majesty doth not so much fear the Huguenots, as he does envy and mistrust the house of Lorraine.' Lett. Murd. 475. " Morgan avows to his queen this feeling: There is nothing to be expected but the ruin of this state, unless it shall please heaven with speed TO TAKE AWAY this king, or alter his heart, which I pray may ensue.' ib. 475. He there declares, that The holy league was addressed to pull down heresy and the favorers of the same." ib. XXXV. perish from each other's hostility, he resolved, by CHAP. a repetition of that guilt, to make them his anticipated victims, instead of waiting to become theirs. He achieved his ghastly purpose," but it was to receive himself, a few months afterwards, from their vindictive adherents, the same fate 26 to which he had consigned so many without pity; tho not without a portion of that remorse, which Eschylus pourtrayed, under the fearful forms and scourges of his pursuing furies; and whose intrusive visitations, the unsleeping Henry, in all his state, could neither medicine, overpower, nor exclude."7 The steady operation of Elizabeth's restrictive, prohibitory and penal laws against the Jesuits and Seminary priests, had not been ineffectual. The enforcement of the legal provisions had so far defeated the projects, and thereby lessened the utility to Rome, of these institutions, that in 1586, after sixteen years of persevering conflict, the maternal seminary at Rheims began to wither into decay.' It was no longer patronized by the popedom. Sixtus Quintus, the new pontiff, tho originally but a swineherd, had grown up amid the varying incidents of his ascending life, to that early stimulated and expanding spirit, which loves the progress of ampler 25 At Blois, on 14 Dec. 1588. See before, p. 332-333. 28 26 In the camp before Paris, on 1st August 1589. See before, p. 365. See before, p. 335, note 2. 29 It is Morgan who stated this fact to Mary, on 31 March 1586, and thus begs her assistance to remedy the evil. It is [will be] a work of honor and of great charity in your majesty, if it shall also please you to recommend to his holiness's favorable protection the English seminary at Rheims, which, for want of support necessary, hath been forced, these months past, TO DISPERSE THEMSELVES: I mean a great number thereof; yet I hear there be six score together. Dr. Allen is at Rome, to solicit more help for the seminary.' Murd. 497 II. BOOK prospects and of lofty aims; and which, always enlarging as its horizon spreads and its resources multiply, prefers the great to the insignificant; and turns from the creeping and snake-like artifice of little souls and cowardly craft, to the vigorous exertion of might, and of might-like means. It is a gratification to read, that he undervalued the Jesuits, to their high displeasure;20 and this depreciating estimation of an order, which had debased itself so far as to turn part of its members into political agitators, is creditable to his memory, tho it brought down their invectives upon him from their press, as well as from their tongue: 30 but it diminished the attachment of the English Catholics to this ambiguous order. He seems to have preferred grander designs, and to accomplish them by grander measures. Instead of the insidious counterfeit, the evershifting disguise and the dark-working machination, he sought and urged the manly and the magnificent battle. It may be doubted if a single conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth, or to seduce to disaffection by deceit and subtlety, originated with him. He contemplated the real power and abundant resources of 29 On 4 July 1586, Morgan expresses to his royal employer, I have already declared to your majesty, that his holiness that now is hath not the like conceit of the Jesuits that his predecessor had, which maketh them to storm not a little.' Murd. 523. 30 Morgan added, And to talk of him as liberally in secret sort, by pen and by mouth, as they did these years past of some of the greatest, to whom all honor and reverence is due.' ib. 523. 31 Morgan remarked, that the Dominicans were beginning to florish again. And whereas the English scholars, in the English college at Rome, were heretofore under the government of the Jesuits, these later years past, as they are still, there is many of the English, nevertheless, that have of late quitted themselves from the government of the Jesuits, and have rendered themselves under the government of the Dominicans, which example of theirs will bring others to follow the same.' ib. 523. the redoubted Spanish monarchy, as the proper and competent instrument of elevation and victory to the cause he promoted; and he directed all his energies to put this formidable mass of force into vigorous action against the celebrated and yet unconquered queen and country, which he desired to have subdued, that it might be subjected to his mutilated sovereignty. It was from a perception of this advancing peril, that Elizabeth had determined on assisting the States of Holland, with Leicester, and his useful, tho not emancipating, army. She could not safely employ larger forces there, because the Netherlands were but one of the wings of Philip's power, and the minor outpost of his aggression. The deciding battle would have to be fought at her own threshold; for it was obvious, that the great storm of war and vengeance would sail direct towards her shores from the Bay of Biscay. She therefore limited the portion of her troops that were to occupy her adversaries on the Maes and Scheldt; and reserved the main body of her native soldiery to confront the main attack. But as a naval armament must form an essential part of the invading force, sir Francis Drake was dispatched with a competent fleet in the Spring of 1587, to explore, assail, and destroy the collecting portions of the maritime annoyance, wherever he could find them, on the coast or in the ports of Spain. He had been sent in September 1585, with a fleet of twenty-one ships and two thousand three hundred military volunteers, to divert the attention and excite the fears of the Spanish government, by an attack on its West India possessions. He captured St. Jago in the Cape de Verd Islands, СНАР. XXXV. |