Kitabı oku: «Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth», sayfa 39
His conduct during the younger part of life was scandalously licentious: latterly he became, says Camden, uxorious to excess. In the early days of his favor with the queen, her profuse donations had gratified his cupidity and displayed the fondness of her attachment; but at a later period the stream of her bounty ran low; and following the natural bent of her disposition, or complying with the necessity of her affairs, she compelled him to mortgage to her his barony of Denbigh for the expenses of his last expedition to Holland. Immediately after his death she also caused his effects to be sold by auction, for the satisfaction of certain demands of her treasury. From these circumstances it may probably be inferred, that the influence which Leicester still retained over her was secured rather by the chain of habit than the tie of affection; and after the first shock of final separation from him whom she had so long loved and trusted, it is not improbable that she might contemplate the event with a feeling somewhat akin to that of deliverance from a yoke under which her haughty spirit had repined without the courage to resist.
Leicester died, beyond all doubt, of a fever; but so reluctant were the prejudices of that age to dismiss any eminent person by the ordinary roads of mortality, that it was judged necessary to take examinations before the privy-council respecting certain magical practices said to have been employed against his life. The son of sir James Croft comptroller of the household, made no scruple to confess that he had consulted an adept of the name of Smith, to learn who were his father's enemies in the council; that Smith mentioned the earl of Leicester; and that a little while after, flirting with his thumbs, he exclaimed, alluding to this nobleman's cognisance, "The bear is bound to the stake;" and again, that nothing could now save him. But as it might after all have been difficult to show in what manner the flirting of a thumb in London could have exerted a fatal power over the life of the earl at Kennelworth, the adept seems to have escaped unpunished, notwithstanding the accidental fulfilment of his denunciations.
CHAPTER XXII
FROM 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 sir Christopher Hatton.—Puckering lord-keeper.—Notice of sir John Perrot.—Puttenham's Art of Poetry.—Verses by Gascoigne.—Warner's Albion's England.
The death of Leicester forms an important æra 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, acknowledged a new leader in the earl of Essex, whom his 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 void 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 natural disposition frank; and experience had not yet taught him to distrust either himself or others.
With the friendships, Essex received as an inheritance the enmities also of Leicester, and no one at court could have entertained the least doubt whom he 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 compromise, 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 transcendent 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 appears finally to have enabled him to prepare in secret that favorite's 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 to the want, or her imagination to 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 this situation, doubtless, of her feelings which led to the gradual conversion into a softer sentiment, of that natural and innocent tenderness with which she had hitherto regarded the brilliant and engaging qualities of her youthful kinsman the earl of Essex;—a change which terminated so fatally to both.
The enormous disproportion of ages gave to the new inclination of the queen a stamp of dotage inconsistent with the reputation for good sense and dignity of conduct which she had hitherto preserved. Nor did she long receive from the indulgence of so untimely a sentiment any portion of the felicity which she coveted. The careless and even affronting behaviour in which Essex occasionally indulged himself, combined with her own sagacity to admonish her that her fondness was unreturned; and that nothing but the substantial benefits by which it declared itself could have induced its object to meet it with even the semblance of gratitude. As this mortifying conviction came home to her bosom, she grew restless, irritable, and captious to excess; she watched all his motions with a self-tormenting jealousy; she fed her own disquiet by listening to the malicious informations of his enemies; and her heart at length becoming callous by repeated exasperations, she began to visit his delinquencies with an unrelenting sternness. This conduct, attempted too late and persisted in too long, hurried Essex to his ruin, and ended by inflicting upon herself the mortal agonies of an unavailing repentance.
Lord Bacon relates, in his Apophthegms, that "a great officer about court when my lord of Essex was first in trouble, and that he and those that dealt for him would talk much of my lord's friends and of his enemies, answered to one of them; 'I will tell you, I know but one friend and one enemy my lord hath; and that one friend is the queen, and that one enemy, is himself.'" But rather might both have been esteemed his enemies; for what except the imprudent fondness of the queen, and the excess of favor which she at first lavished upon him, was the original cause of that intoxication of mind which finally became the instrument of his destruction?
But from observations which anticipate perhaps too much the catastrophe of this melancholy history, it is time to return to a narrative of events.
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 in which his religion and his political attachments had rendered him an alien, this unfortunate nobleman had remained 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 April the 14th, 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 deprived of all means of invalidating the testimony of Bennet, 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 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 cooperating 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 bring him within the true meaning of the old statute of Edward III., on which he was indicted, the peers were base enough to pronounce an 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 in this case the latter had been proved, she was pleased, in her abundant mercy, to commute the capital part of the sentence against her unhappy kinsman for perpetual imprisonment, 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 Westmorland, 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 naturally are."
A further commentary on the hardships of their condition 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 seem 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 of late that was used in the beginning, all which you impute to your own superficial understanding of the affairs of this state, having notwithstanding her majesty's doing 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 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 coloured under the 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 was 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 contrariwise 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 charge, 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 to be used in practice as love-tokens to inchant the people's affections from their allegiance to their natural sovereign. In all other points her majesty continued her former lenity: but when, about the twentieth year of her reign, she had discovered in the king of Spain an intention to invade her dominions, and that a principal part of the plot was, to prepare a party within the realm that might adhere to the foreigner; and after that the seminaries began to blossom, and to send forth daily priests and professed men, who should by vow taken at shrift reconcile her subjects from their obedience, yea, and bind many of them to attempt against her majesty's sacred person; and that, by the poison which they spread, the humors of papists were altered, and that they were no more papists in conscience, and of softness, but papists in faction; then were there new laws made for the punishment of such as should submit themselves to such reconcilements, or renunciations of obedience. And because it was a treason carried in the clouds, and in wonderful secresy, and came seldom to light, and that there was no presupposition thereof so great, as the recusants to come to divine service, because it was set down by their decrees, that to come to church before reconcilement was absolutely heretical and damnable. Therefore there were laws added containing punishment pecuniary against such recusants, not to enforce conscience, but to enfeeble and impoverish the means of those of whom it resteth indifferent and ambiguous whether they were reconciled or no. And when, notwithstanding all this provision, this poison was dispersed so secretly, as that there were no means to stay it but by restraining the merchants that brought it in; then, lastly, there was added another law, whereby such seditious priests of new erection were exiled, and those that were at that time within the land shipped over, and so commanded to keep hence on pain of treason.
"This hath been the proceeding, though intermingled not only with sundry examples of her majesty's grace towards such as she knew to be papists in conscience, and not in faction and singularity, but also with an ordinary mitigation towards offenders in the highest degree committed by law, if they would but protest, that in case the realm should be invaded with a foreign army, by the Pope's authority, for the catholic cause, as they term it, they would take part with her majesty and not adhere to her enemies." &c.
The country sustained a heavy loss in 1589 by the death of sir Walter Mildmay chancellor of the exchequer, one of the most irreproachable public characters and best patriots of the age. He was old enough to have received his introduction to business in the time of Henry VIII., under whom he enjoyed a gainful office in the court of augmentations. During the reign of Edward he was warden of the mint. Under Mary, he shrowded himself in that profound obscurity in which alone he could make safety accord with honor and conscience. Elizabeth, on the death of sir Richard Sackville in 1568, advanced Mildmay to the important post of chancellor of the exchequer, which he held to the end of his life; but not so, it should appear, the favor of her majesty, some of his back friends, or secret enemies, having whispered in her ear, that he was a better patriot than subject, and over-popular in parliament, where he had gone so far as to complain that many subsidies were granted and few grievances redressed. Another strong ground of royal displeasure existed in the imputation of puritanism under which he labored.
Generously sacrificing to higher considerations the aggrandizement of his children, Mildmay devoted a large share of the wealth which he had gained in the public service to the erection and endowment of a college;—that of Emanuel at Cambridge,—an action little agreeable it seems to her majesty,—for, on his coming to court after the completion of this noble undertaking, she said tartly to him; "Sir Walter, I hear you have erected a puritan foundation." "No, Madam," replied he; "far be it from me to countenance any thing contrary to your established laws; but I have set an acorn, which, when it comes to be an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit of it." That this fruit however proved to be of the flavor so much distasted by her majesty, there is good evidence.
"In the house of pure Emanuel
I had my education,
Where some surmise I dazzled my eyes
With the light of revelation;"
says "the Distracted Puritan," in a song composed in king James's days by the witty bishop Corbet.
Mildmay was succeeded in his office by sir John Fortescue, master of the wardrobe, a gentleman whose accomplishments in classical literature had induced the queen to take him for her guide and assistant in the study of the Greek and Latin writers. In the discharge of his new functions he too was distinguished by moderation and integrity, so that in this important department of administration no oppression was exercised upon the subject during the whole of the reign;—a circumstance highly conducive both to the popularity of the queen, and to the alacrity in granting supplies usually exhibited by her parliaments.
The late attempt at invasion, so gloriously and happily frustrated, had given a new impulse to the public mind; the gallant youth of the country were seized with an universal rage for military enterprise, and burned at once for vengeance and renown. The riches and the weakness of the Spanish empire, both of them considerably exaggerated in popular opinion, tempted the hopes and the cupidity of adventurers of a different class; and by means of the united stimulus of gain and glory, a numerous fleet was fitted out in the spring of 1589 for an expedition to Portugal, which was equipped and manned almost entirely by the exertions of individuals, the queen contributing only sixty-six thousand pounds to the expenses, and six of her ships to the armament.
It will be remembered, that on the death in 1580 of Henry king of Portugal, Philip of Spain had possessed himself of that kingdom as rightful heir; having compelled don Antonio, an illegitimate nephew of the deceased sovereign, who had ventured to dispute the succession, to quit the country, and take refuge first in France and afterwards in England.
This pretender had hitherto received little support or encouragement at the hands of Elizabeth; in fact, she had suffered him to languish in the most abject poverty; for there is a letter extant from a person about him to lord Burleigh99, entreating that he would move her majesty either to advance don Antonio two hundred thousand crowns out of her share of the rich Portuguese carrack captured by sir Francis Drake, to enable him to recover his kingdom,—or at least to take upon herself the payment of his debts, amounting to twelve or thirteen pounds, without which his poor creditors are likely to be ruined. The first part of this extraordinary alternative the prudent princess certainly declined; what might be the fate of the second does not in this place appear: but we learn elsewhere, that during the long vacancy of the see of Ely which the queen caused to succeed to the death of bishop Cox in 1581, a part of its revenues were appropriated to the maintenance of this unfortunate competitor for royalty. It was imagined however, by the projectors of the present expedition, that the discontent of the Portuguese under the yoke of Spain would now incline them to receive as a deliverer even this spurious representative of their ancient race of monarchs; and don Antonio received an invitation, which he joyfully embraced, to embark himself and his fortunes on board the English fleet.
The armament consisted of 180 vessels of all kinds, carrying 21,000 men; it set sail from Plymouth on April 18th, sir Francis Drake being admiral and sir John Norris general. The earl of Essex, urged by the romantic gallantry of his disposition, afterwards joined the expedition with several ships fitted out at his own expense in support of don Antonio's title, though he bore in it no regular command, since he sailed without the consent or privity of her majesty. The first landing of the forces was at Corunna; where having captured four ships of war in the harbour, they took and burned the lower town and made some bold attempts on the upper, which was strongly fortified: but after defeating with great slaughter a body of Spaniards who were intrenched in the neighbourhood, sir John Norris, finding it impracticable to renew his assaults on the upper town, on account of a general want of powder in the fleet, re-embarked his men, already suffering from sickness, and made sail for Portugal.
After some consultation they landed at Penicha, about thirty miles to the north of Lisbon, took the castle; and having thrown into it a garrison, every man of which was afterwards put to the sword by the Spaniards, they began their march for the capital. So ill was the army provided, that many died on the road for want of food; and others who had fainted with the heat must also have perished, had not Essex, with characteristic generosity, caused all his baggage to be thrown out, and the carriages to be filled with the sick and weary. Instead of the troops of nobility and gentry by whom don Antonio had flattered himself and his companions that he should be joined and recognised, there only appeared upon their march a band of miserable peasants without shoes or stockings, and one gentleman who presented him with a basket of plums and cherries. The English however proceeded, and made themselves masters without difficulty of the suburbs of Lisbon, in which they found great riches; but the entreaties of don Antonio, and his anxiety to preserve the good will of the people, caused the general, to restrain his men from plunder. Essex distinguished himself in every skirmish; and, knocking at the gates of Lisbon itself, challenged the governor, or any other of equal rank, to single combat: but this romantic proposal was prudently declined; and though the city was known to be weakly guarded, the total want of battering cannon in the English army precluded the general from making an assault.
In the meantime Drake, who was to have co-operated with the land forces by an attack upon the city from the water side, found his progress effectually barred by the forts at the mouth of the Tagus, and was thus compelled to relinquish all share in the enterprise. This disappointment, joined to the want of ammunition and other necessaries, and the rapid progress of sickness among the men, rendered necessary a speedy retreat and re-embarkation. About sixty vessels lying at the mouth of the Tagus, laden with corn and other articles of commerce, were seized by the English, though the property of the Hanse Towns, and Drake and Norris in their return burned Vigo: but various disasters overtook the fleet on its homeward voyage, subsequently to its dispersion by a violent storm. On the whole, it was computed that not less than eleven thousand persons perished in this unfortunate and ill-planned expedition, by which no one important object had been attained; and that of eleven hundred gentlemen who accompanied it, not more than three hundred and fifty escaped the united ravages of famine, sickness, and the sword.
