might be shown to them. She was very ill after this blow, partly from want of air and exercise, and her griefs had nearly ended that winter in death. As to the English people, they were furious with all sorts of vague alarms for themselves and their Queen, and the dread of Alva's Spaniards sailing into the Thames, or landing at one of Ridolfi's seaports. Burghley longed to put Don Gueraldo safely into the Tower with the Bishop of Ross, but did not dare. Feelings were further aggravated by reports from France. One represented Charles IX. as saying of his sister-in-law that "the poor fool would never cease plotting till she had lost her head," and another represented the Court as persuading the Duke of Anjou to woo her instead of Elizabeth, declaring that she was the most beautiful princess then living. Monsieur, who had a love of his own in the French Court, was not in the least disposed to marry either of the ladies, in spite of the polite speeches of his mother and Fénélon; and reports of a sore which Elizabeth had in her leg for some weeks, and of a sprain she gave her side, were made the most of, and canvassed in very uncomplimentary terms, none of which Walsingham spared in his letters to Burghley, no doubt in hopes of disgusting Elizabeth. However, she sent Fénélon a basket of apricots that he might report on English fruit, and a stag which she had herself brought down at Oatlands; and she showed an eagerness for Monsieur's portrait. The coarsest construction was openly put in France upon Leicester's favour, and also on that of Christopher Hatton, a young gentleman of the Inns of Court, whose handsome person and fine dancing of a galliard had so struck the Queen that she ordered him to become one of her band of gentlemen pensioners, then made him vice-chamberlain, and finally the Keeper of the Seals. "My grave Lord Keeper led the brawls; The seals and maces danced before him." Hatton was in the main an honest, though dull man, but he presumed in these young days of favour to cast his eyes on the garden belonging to the Bishop of Ely's town house on Holborn Hill-twenty acres of beautiful ground, where, it may be remembered, the strawberries grew that Richard III. asked for on the day he sentenced Hastings. The Bishop of Ely, Dr. Cox, who had been tutor to Edward VI. and had upheld the English Prayer-book at Frankfort, tried to prevent this shameful despoiling of his see; but he received the following imperious note: what "PROUD PRELATE,-You know what you were before I made you If you do not immediately comply with my request, ELIZABETH." you are now. I will unfrock you. Dr. Cox had not the moral courage to try whether she could have done so. He yielded, with the poor compensation of free admission CAMEO X. Detection. 1572. CAMEO X. Trial of Norfolk. 1572. through the gate-house, and the right for himself and his successors yearly to gather twenty bushels of roses in the grounds, still called Hatton Garden, though all the roses the present Bishop of Ely is likely to obtain there must be artificial. Dr. Cox perhaps yielded the more readily that he had felt his ground insecure ever since his Calvinism had led him to object to the crucifix and lighted candles the Queen retained on the altar of her chapel, and thus had made her very angry. Walsingham's reports, however, convinced the Queen that Anjou was not likely to be forced into the marriage; and either this, or the fact of having disconcerted the whole Ridolfi plot, made her put an end to the affair by refusing the Duke on the ground of religion. All this time Norfolk's affair had been going on, assisted, sad to say, by the torture of his poor officers. The examination was conducted in their prison, but on the 16th of January the Duke, after four months' imprisonment, was arraigned before the High Steward in Westminster Hall for high treason. Trials of this kind were conducted on the principle that a prisoner was to be hunted down, so he was allowed no counsel and no witnesses in his own defence, nor even to see and cross-examine the witnesses against him, only to hear their written depositions; and his judges were his greatest enemies, such as Burghley, Bedford, Leicester-all new Tudor creations, the natural foes of the small remnant of the old feudal peerage. Treason was involved in his intended marriage with Mary, because in the time of her first husband she had borne the arms of a Queen of England! This could not be more than a mere pretext; but what his guilt turned upon was his complicity in the scheme of landing Spanish troops. This he flatly denied, and the strongest available proof against him was a sentence in one of Mary's letters, saying, "If the Duke of Norfolk think Ridolfi's scheme good." No doubt he did know of part of it, though not of its full blackness, and he thus deserved the sentence of death pronounced against him, though probably no modern jury would have convicted the poor, vain, foolish man. He had behaved with dignity at his trial, and received his sentence bravely, declaring himself to die a true man to the Queen, as perhaps he thought he was, though it is hard to say how this was consistent with making her life and crown depend upon satisfying Philip II. of her orthodoxy. And yet Norfolk had been a pupil of George Foxe, the martyrologist! Elizabeth could hardly bring herself to consent to the execution of her kinsman and old companion. She signed the warrant, and revoked her signature. Leicester declared his life would be saved, and the Queen continued to hesitate, while Burghley and the Council assured her that his execution was necessary to her safety, as was also the death of the Queen of Scots. Mary had recovered, and when Lord Shrewsbury returned from Norfolk's trial and allowed her again to take exercise, she was so delighted, that the first time she went out she plunged into the snow up to her ankles. Elizabeth could not make up her mind to put her captive cousin to death, but to satisfy her advisers she at last yielded Norfolk, and after five months' suspense his warrant was signed, and he was beheaded on Tower Hill, much regretted by the people, who had by this time forgotten his treason, in June, 1572. His unfortunate sister, the Countess of Northumberland, had been all this time collecting a sum with which to ransom her husband, who had been two years shut up in Lochleven Castle. The Regent, Mar, would perhaps have accepted her 2,000l., but he was in the hands of a much worse and more rapacious person, the Earl of Morton, who proposed to see whether the English would not bid as much; and Elizabeth, after chafing at the amount, consented, rather than have the head of the Percys abroad with Alva. The price was weighed out to the Scots by Lord Hunsdon, and poor Northumberland, setting out in the hope of meeting his wife at the Firth of Forth, was taken to the Border and given up to Hunsdon. That honest noble hated the whole affair, and when he found Northumberland was to die, he flatly declared he would have nothing to do with the execution, and absolutely refused to obey the Queen's orders to take him to York to be beheaded, on the old act of attainder for the Rising of the North, without fresh trial. Sir John Foster was sent to take charge of the prisoner, and he was beheaded at York, with a common carpenter's axe, in the September following the death of his brother-in-law. The indignant north country sang "The noblest lord of Percy kind, "Who shall hereafter trust a Scot, Or who will do that nation good, The Scots meantime had made a truce with Lethington in Edinburgh Castle, and were holding a parliament and a convention of the clergy. No formal act of the State had yet recognised the Reformation, and there were still supposed to be Bishops, Archbishops, and Abbots, mitred and unmitred. Alexander Gordon, Bishop of Galloway, and by old papal favour Archbishop of Athens, preserved the titles and the estates of the first, though an ardent Calvinist minister; the Catholic Archbishop of St. Andrews, John Hamilton, died, and a John Douglas, a Presbyterian, was appointed in his room; Kirkaldy of Grange was prior of St. Andrews, and so on. CAMEO X. Betrayal of Northumberland. 1572. CAMEO X. Tulchan 1572. However, in the winter of 1572 an agreement was made between Kirk and Privy Council, leaving all the dioceses and parishes as before, and actually appointing titular archbishops and bishops, who were of course not consecrated and who had no real jurisdiction, but were subject to the General Assembly. Their use and purpose was to collect the dues that legally belonged to the original prelates, and pay them over to the great lord who obtained the appointment for them and who was usually head of their family. Now when a cow had lost her calf, it was the custom to place by her side when she was milked, a calf-skin stuffed with hay to induce her to yield her milk. This figure was called a "tulchan," and these mock prelates became known as "tulchan bishops." THE deaths of Egmont and Hoorn, and the cruel persecution raging in the Netherlands, while all the rights of the States were trampled down by Alva and his terrible army, angered rather than daunted the sturdy spirits of the Hollanders. William the Silent was the man to whom all looked. He had hitherto been a Roman Catholic, not very devout nor regular in life, nor had the subject of religion interested him; but on the one hand, Philip's conduct could not but disgust him with the Church that accepted and promoted such services, shocking to the natural instincts of humanity, and on the other, as the champion of the liberties of his country, he could hardly work with the Reformers while adhering to the Church that persecuted them. So he examined their forms of faith, and ended by declaring himself a Calvinist, but at the same time he recommended the followers of Luther and Calvin alike to sink their differences in their resistance to the common enemy. Meantime he collected German troops, and when the Emperor Maximilian, who had just given his daughter to Philip, commanded him to desist, he replied with an elaborate justification, showing the legal rights of the Low Countries, which the Spaniards were trampling down. On the 31st of August he put forth a Proclamation, headed with the motto, "Pro rege, lege, grege (For king, law, and flock), and with these verses from the Book : "The hope of the righteous shall be gladness: The righteous shall never be removed: But the wicked shall not inhabit the earth." (Prov. x. 28-30) CAMEO XI. William the Silent 1568. |