Kitabı oku: «Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth», sayfa 4
CHAPTER III
1542 TO 1547
Rout of Solway and death of James V. of Scotland.—Birth of queen Mary.—Henry projects to marry her to his son.—Offers the hand of Elizabeth to the earl of Arran.—Earl of Lenox marries lady M. Douglas.—Marriage of the king to Catherine Parr.—Her person and acquirements.—Influence of her conduct on Elizabeth.—Henry joins the emperor against Francis I.—His campaign in France.—Princess Mary replaced in order of succession, and Elizabeth also.—Proposals for a marriage between Elizabeth and Philip of Spain.—The duke of Norfolk and earl of Hertford heads of the catholic and protestant parties. Circumstances which give a preponderance to the latter.—Disgrace of the duke.—Trial of the earl of Surry.—His death and character.—Sentence against the duke of Norfolk.—Death of Henry.
In the month of December 1542, shortly after the rout of Solway, in which the English made prisoners the flower of the Scottish nobility, the same messenger brought to Henry VIII. the tidings that the grief and shame of this defeat had broken the heart of king James V., and that his queen had brought into the world a daughter, who had received the name of Mary, and was now queen of Scotland. Without stopping to deplore the melancholy fate of a nephew whom he had himself brought to destruction, Henry instantly formed the project of uniting the whole island under one crown, by the marriage of this infant sovereign with the prince his son. All the Scottish prisoners of rank then in London were immediately offered the liberty of returning to their own country on the condition, to which they acceded with apparent alacrity, of promoting this union with all their interest; and so confident was the English monarch in the success of his measures, that previously to their departure, several of them were carried to the palace of Enfield, where young Edward then resided, that they might tender homage to the future husband of their queen.
The regency of Scotland at this critical juncture was claimed by the earl of Arran, who was generally regarded as next heir to the crown, though his legitimacy had been disputed; and to this nobleman,—but whether for himself or his son seems doubtful,—Henry, as a further means of securing the important object which he had at heart, offered the hand of his daughter Elizabeth. So early were the concerns and interests blended, of two princesses whose celebrated rivalry was destined to endure until the life of one of them had become its sacrifice! So remarkably, too, in this first transaction was contrasted the high preeminence from which the Scottish princess was destined to hurl herself by her own misconduct, with the abasement and comparative insignificance out of which her genius and her good fortune were to be employed in elevating the future sovereign of England.
Born in the purple of her hereditary kingdom, the monarchs of France and England made it an object of eager contention which of them should succeed in encircling with a second diadem the baby brows of Mary; while the hand of Elizabeth was tossed as a trivial boon to a Scottish earl of equivocal birth, despicable abilities, and feeble character. So little too was even this person flattered by the honor, or aware of the advantages, of such a connection, that he soon after renounced it by quitting the English for the French party. Elizabeth in consequence remained unbetrothed, and her father soon afterwards secured to himself a more strenuous ally in the earl of Lenox, also of the blood-royal of Scotland, by bestowing upon this nobleman the hand, not of his daughter, but of his niece the lady Margaret Douglas.
Undeterred by his late severe disappointment Henry was bent on entering once more into the marriage state, and his choice now fell on Catherine Parr, sprung from a knightly family possessed of large estates in Westmoreland, and widow of lord Latimer, a member of the great house of Nevil.
A portrait of this lady still in existence, exhibits, with fine and regular features, a character of intelligence and arch simplicity extremely captivating. She was indeed a woman of uncommon talent and address; and her mental accomplishments, besides the honor which they reflect on herself, inspire us with respect for the enlightened liberality of an age in which such acquirements could be placed within the ambition and attainment of a private gentlewoman, born in a remote county, remarkable even in much later times for a primitive simplicity of manners and domestic habits. Catherine was both learned herself, and, after her elevation a zealous patroness of learning and of protestantism, to which she was become a convert. Nicholas Udal master of Eton was employed by her to translate Erasmus's paraphrase of the four gospels; and there is extant a Latin letter of hers to the princess Mary, whose conversion from popery she seems to have had much at heart, in which she entreats her to permit this work to appear under her auspices. She also printed some prayers and meditations, and there was found among her papers, after her death, a piece entitled "The lamentations of a sinner bewailing her blind life," in which she deplores the years that she had passed in popish observances, and which was afterwards published by secretary Cecil.
It is a striking proof of the address of this queen, that she conciliated the affection of all the three children of the king, letters from each of whom have been preserved addressed to her after the death of their father.
Elizabeth in particular maintained with her a very intimate and frequent intercourse; which ended however in a manner reflecting little credit on either party, as will be more fully explained in its proper place.
The adroitness with which Catherine extricated herself from the snare in which her own religious zeal, the moroseness of the king, and the enmity of Gardiner had conspired to entangle her, has often been celebrated. May it not be conjectured, that such an example, given by one of whom she entertained a high opinion, might exert no inconsiderable influence on the opening mind of Elizabeth, whose conduct in the many similar dilemmas to which it was her lot to be reduced, partook so much of the same character of politic and cautious equivocation?
Henry discovered by experiment that it would prove a much more difficult matter than he had apprehended to accomplish, either by force or persuasion, the marriage of young Edward with the queen of Scots; and learning that it was principally to the intrigues of Francis I., against whom he had other causes also of complaint, that he was likely to owe the disappointment of this favourite scheme, he determined on revenge. With this design he turned his eyes on the emperor; and finding Charles perfectly well disposed to forget all ancient animosities in sympathy with his newly-conceived indignation against the French king, he entered with him into a strict alliance. War was soon declared against France by the new confederates; and after a campaign in which little was effected, it was agreed that Charles and Henry, uniting their efforts, should assail that kingdom with a force which it was judged incapable of resisting, and without stopping at inferior objects, march straight to Paris. Accordingly, in July 1544, preceded by a fine army, and attended by the flower of his nobility splendidly equipped, Henry took his departure for Calais in a ship the sails of which were made of cloth of gold.
He arrived in safety, and enjoyed the satisfaction of dazzling with his magnificence the count de Buren whom the emperor sent with a body of horse to meet him; quarrelled soon after with that potentate, who found it his interest to make a separate peace; took the towns of Montreuil and Boulogne, neither of them of any value to him, and returned.
So foolish and expensive a sally of passion, however characteristic of the disposition of this monarch, would not merit commemoration in this place, but for the important influence which it unexpectedly exerted on the fortune and expectations of Elizabeth through the following train of circumstances.
The emperor, whose long enmity with Henry had taken its rise from what he justly regarded as the injuries of Catherine of Arragon his aunt, in whose person the whole royal family of Spain had been insulted, had required of him as a preliminary to their treaty a formal acknowledgement of the legitimacy of his daughter Mary. This Henry could not, with any regard to consistency, grant; but desirous to accede as far as he conveniently could to the wishes of his new ally, he consented to stipulate, that without any explanation on this point, his eldest daughter should by act of parliament be reinstated in the order of succession. At the same time, glad to relent in behalf of his favorite child, and unwilling perhaps to give the catholic party the triumph of asserting that he had virtually declared his first marriage more lawful than his second, he caused a similar privilege to be extended to Elizabeth, who was thus happily restored to her original station and prospects, before she had attained sufficient maturity of age to suffer by the cruel and mortifying degradation to which she had been for several years subjected.
Henceforth, though the act which declared null the marriage of the king with Anne Boleyn remained for ever unrepealed, her daughter appears to have been universally recognised on the footing of a princess of England; and so completely were the old disputes concerning the divorce of Catherine consigned to oblivion, that in 1546, when France, Spain and England had concluded a treaty of peace, proposals passed between the courts of London and Madrid for the marriage of Elizabeth with Philip prince of Spain; that very Philip afterwards her brother-in-law and in adversity her friend and protector, then a second time her suitor, and afterwards again to the end of his days the most formidable and implacable of her enemies. On which side, or on what assigned objections, this treaty of marriage was relinquished, we do not learn; but as the demonstrations of friendship between Charles and Henry after their French campaign were full of insincerity, it may perhaps be doubted whether either party was ever bent in earnest on the completion of this extraordinary union.
The popish and protestant factions which now divided the English court, had for several years acknowledged as their respective leaders the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Hertford. To the latter of these, the painful impression left on Henry's mind by the excesses of Catherine Howard, the religious sentiments embraced by the present queen, the king's increasing jealousy of the ancient nobility of the country, and above all the visible decline of his health, which brought into immediate prospect the accession of young Edward under the tutelage of his uncle, had now conspired to give a decided preponderancy. The aged duke, sagacious, politic, and deeply versed in all the secrets and the arts of courts, saw in a coalition with the Seymours the only expedient for averting the ruin of his house; and he proposed to bestow his daughter the duchess of Richmond in marriage on sir Thomas Seymour, while he exerted all his authority with his son to prevail upon him to address one of the daughters of the earl of Hertford. But Surry's scorn of the new nobility of the house of Seymour, and his animosity against the person of its chief, was not to be overcome by any plea of expedience or threatening of danger. He could not forget that it was at the instance of the earl of Hertford that he, with some other nobles and gentlemen, had suffered the disgrace of imprisonment for eating flesh in Lent; that when a trifling defeat which he had sustained near Boulogne had caused him to be removed from the government of that town, it was the earl of Hertford who ultimately profited by his misfortune, in succeeding to the command of the army. Other grounds of offence the haughty Surry had also conceived against him; and choosing rather to fall, than cling for support to an enemy at once despised and hated, he braved the utmost displeasure of his father, by an absolute refusal to lend himself to such a scheme of alliance. Of this circumstance his enemies availed themselves to instil into the mind of the king a suspicion that the earl of Surry aspired to the hand of the princess Mary; they also commented with industrious malice on his bearing the arms of Edward the Confessor, to which he was clearly entitled in right of his mother, a daughter of the duke of Buckingham, but which his more cautious father had ceased to quarter after the attainder of that unfortunate nobleman.
The sick mind of Henry received with eagerness all these suggestions, and the ruin of the earl was determined9. An indictment of high treason was preferred against him: his proposal of disproving the charge, according to a mode then legal, by fighting his principal accuser in his shirt, was overruled; his spirited, strong and eloquent defence was disregarded—a jury devoted to the crown brought in a verdict of guilty; and in January 1547, at the early age of seven-and-twenty, he underwent the fatal sentence of the law.
No one during the whole sanguinary tyranny of Henry VIII. fell more guiltless, or more generally deplored by all whom personal animosity or the spirit of party had not hardened against sentiments of compassion, or blinded to the perception of merit. But much of Surry has survived the cruelty of his fate. His beautiful songs and sonnets, which served as a model to the most popular poets of the age of Elizabeth, still excite the admiration of every student attached to the early literature of our country. Amongst other frivolous charges brought against him on his trial, it was mentioned that he kept an Italian jester, thought to be a spy, and that he loved to converse with foreigners and conform his behaviour to them. For his personal safety, therefore, it was perhaps unfortunate that a portion of his youth had been passed in a visit to Italy, then the focus of literature and fount of inspiration; but for his surviving fame, and for the progress of English poetry, the circumstance was eminently propitious; since it is from the return of this noble traveller that we are to date not only the introduction into our language of the Petrarchan sonnet, and with it of a tenderness and refinement of sentiment unknown to the barbarism of our preceding versifiers; but what is much more, that of heroic blank verse; a noble measure, of which the earliest example exists in Surry's spirited and faithful version of one book of the Æneid.
The exalted rank, the splendid talents, the lofty spirit of this lamented nobleman seemed to destine him to a station second to none among the public characters of his time; and if, instead of being cut off by the hand of violence in the morning of life, he had been permitted to attain a length of days at all approaching to the fourscore years of his father, it is probable that the votary of letters would have been lost to us in the statesman or the soldier. Queen Mary, who sought by her favor and confidence to revive the almost extinguished energies of his father, and called forth into premature distinction the aspiring boyhood of his son, would have intrusted to his vigorous years the highest offices and most weighty affairs of state. Perhaps even the suspicions of her father might have been verified by the event, and her own royal hand might itself have become the reward of his virtues and attachment.
Elizabeth, whose maternal ancestry closely connected her with the house of Howard, might have sought and found, in her kinsman the earl of Surry, a counsellor and friend deserving of all her confidence and esteem; and it is possible that he, with safety and effect, might have placed himself as a mediator between the queen and that formidable catholic party of which his misguided son, fatally for himself, aspired to be regarded as the leader, and was in fact only the instrument. But the career of ambition, ere he had well entered it, was closed upon him for ever; and it is as an accomplished knight, a polished lover, and above all as a poet, that the name of Surry now lives in the annals of his country.
Of the five children who survived to feel the want of his paternal guidance, one daughter, married to the earl of Westmorland, was honorably distinguished by talents, erudition, and the patronage of letters; but of the two sons, the elder was that unfortunate duke of Norfolk who paid on the scaffold the forfeit of an inconsiderate and guilty enterprise; and the younger, created earl of Northampton by James I., lived to disgrace his birth and fine talents by every kind of baseness, and died just in time to escape punishment as an accomplice in Overbury's murder.
The duke of Norfolk had been declared guilty of high treason on grounds equally frivolous with his son; but the opportune death of Henry VIII. on the day that his cruel and unmerited sentence was to have been carried into execution, saved his life, when his humble submissions and pathetic supplications for mercy had failed to touch the callous heart of the expiring despot. The jealousies however, religious and political, of the council of regency, on which the administration devolved, prompted them to refuse liberty to the illustrious prisoner after their weakness or their clemency had granted him his life. During the whole reign of Edward VI. the duke was detained under close custody in the Tower; his estates were confiscated, his blood attainted, and for this period the great name of Howard disappears from the page of English history.
CHAPTER IV
1547 TO 1549
Testamentary provisions of Henry VIII.—Exclusion of the Scottish line.—Discontent of the earl of Arundel.—His character and intrigues.—Hertford declared protector—becomes duke of Somerset.—Other titles conferred.—Thomas Seymour made lord-admiral—marries the queen dowager.—His discontent and intrigues.—His behaviour to Elizabeth.—Death of the queen.—Seymour aspires to the hand of Elizabeth—conspires against his brother—is attainted—put to death.—Particulars of his intercourse with Elizabeth.—Examinations which she underwent on this subject.—Traits of her early character.—Verses on admiral Seymour.—The learning of Elizabeth.—Extracts from Ascham's Letters respecting her, Jane Grey, and other learned ladies.—Two of her letters to Edward VI.
The death of Henry VIII., which took place on January 28th 1547, opened a new and busy scene, and affected in several important points the situation of Elizabeth.
The testament by which the parliament had empowered the king to regulate the government of the country during his son's minority, and even to settle the order of succession itself, with as full authority as the distribution of his private property, was the first object of attention; and its provisions were found strongly characteristic of the temper and maxims of its author. He confirmed the act of parliament by which his two daughters had been rendered capable of inheriting the crown, and appointed to each of them a pension of three thousand pounds, with a marriage-portion of ten thousand pounds, but annexed the condition of their marrying with the consent of such of his executors as should be living. After them, he placed in order of succession Frances marchioness of Dorset, and Eleanor countess of Cumberland, daughters of his younger sister the queen-dowager of France by Charles Brandon duke of Suffolk; and failing the descendants of these ladies he bequeathed the crown to the next heir. By this disposition he either totally excluded, or at least removed from their rightful place, his eldest and still surviving sister the queen-dowager of Scotland, and all her issue;—a most absurd and dangerous indulgence of his feelings of enmity against the Scottish line, which might eventually have involved the nation in all the horrors of a civil war, and from which in fact the whole calamitous destinies of the house of Suffolk, which the progress of this work will record, and in some measure also the long misfortunes of the queen of Scots herself, will be found to draw their origin. Sixteen executors named in the will were to exercise in common the royal functions till young Edward should attain the age of eighteen; and to these, twelve others were added as a council of regency, invested however with no other privilege than that of giving their opinions when called upon. The selection of the executors and counsellors was in perfect unison with the policy of the Tudors. The great officers of state formed of necessity a considerable portion of the former body, and four of these, lord Wriothesley the chancellor, the earl of Hertford lord-chamberlain, lord St. John master of the household, and lord Russel privy-seal, were decorated with the peerage; but with the exception of sir John Dudley, who had lately acquired by marriage the rank of viscount Lisle, these were the only titled men of the sixteen. Thus it appeared, that not a single individual amongst the hereditary nobility of the country enjoyed in a sufficient degree the favor and confidence of the monarch, to be associated in a charge which he had not hesitated to confer on persons of no higher importance than the principal gentlemen of the bed-chamber, the treasurer of Calais, and the dean of Canterbury.
Even the council reckoned among its members only two peers: one of them the brother of the queen-dowager, on whom, since the fall of Cromwel, the title of earl of Essex had at length been conferred in right of his wife, the heiress of the Bourchiers: the other, the earl of Arundel, premier earl of England and last of the ancient name of Fitzalan; a distinguished nobleman, whom vast wealth, elegant tastes acquired in foreign travel, and a spirit of magnificence, combined to render one of the principal ornaments of the court, while his political talents and experience of affairs qualified him to assume a leading station in the cabinet. The loyalty and prudence of the Fitzalans must have been conspicuous for ages, since no attainder, during so long a period of greatness, had stained the honor of the race; and the moderation or subserviency of the present earl had been shown by his perfect acquiescence in all the measures of Henry, notwithstanding his private preference of the ancient faith: to crown his merits, his blood appears to have been unmingled with that of the Plantagenets. Notwithstanding all this, the king had thought fit to name him only a counsellor, not an executor. Arundel deeply felt the injury; and impatience of the insignificance to which he was thus consigned, joined to his disapprobation of the measures of the regency with respect to religion, threw him into intrigues which contributed not a little to the turbulence of this disastrous period.
It was doubtless the intention of Henry, that the religion of the country, at least during the minority of his son, should be left vibrating on the same nice balance between protestantism and popery on which it had cost him so much pains to fix it; and with a view to this object he had originally composed the regency with a pretty equal distribution of power between the adherents of the two communions. But the suspicion, or disgust, which afterwards caused him to erase the name of Gardiner from the list, destroyed the equipoise, and rendered the scale of reformation decidedly preponderant. In vain did Wriothesley, a man of vigorous talents and aspiring mind, struggle with Hertford for the highest place in the administration; in vain did Tunstal bishop of Durham,—no bigot, but a firm papist,—check with all the authority that he could venture to exert, the bold career of innovation on which he beheld Cranmer full of eagerness to enter; in vain did the catholics invoke to their aid the active interference of Dudley; he suffered them to imagine that his heart was with them, and that he watched an opportunity to interpose with effect in their behalf, whilst, in fact, he was only waiting till the fall of one of the Seymours by the hand of the other should enable him to crush the survivor, and rise to uncontrolled authority on the ruins of both.
The first attempt of the protestant party in the regency showed their intentions; its success proved their strength, and silenced for the present all opposition. It was proposed, and carried by a majority of the executors, that the earl of Hertford should be declared protector of the realm, and governor of the king's person; and the new dictator soon after procured the ratification of this appointment, which overturned some of the most important clauses of the late king's will, by causing a patent to be drawn and sanctioned by the two houses which invested him, during the minority, with all the prerogatives ever assumed by the most arbitrary of the English sovereigns, and many more than were ever recognised by the constitution.
As if in compensation for any disrespect shown to the memory of the deceased monarch by these proceedings, the executors next declared their intention of fulfilling certain promises made by him in his last illness, and which death alone had prevented him from carrying into effect. On this plea, they bestowed upon themselves and their adherents various titles of honor, and a number of valuable church preferments, now first conferred upon laymen, the protector himself unblushingly assuming the title of duke of Somerset, and taking possession of benefices and impropriations to a vast amount. Viscount Lisle was created earl of Warwick, and Wriothesley became earl of Southampton;—an empty dignity, which afforded him little consolation for seeing himself soon after, on pretence of some irregular proceedings in his office, stripped of the post of chancellor, deprived of his place amongst the other executors of the king, who now formed a privy council to the protector, and consigned to obscurity and insignificance for the short remnant of his days. Sir Thomas Seymour ought to have been consoled by the share allotted him in this splendid distribution, for the mortification of having been named a counsellor only, and not an executor. He was made lord Seymour of Sudley, and soon after, lord high-admiral—preferments greatly exceeding any expectations which his birth or his services to the state could properly authorize. But he measured his claims by his nearness to the king; he compared these inferior dignities with the state and power usurped by his brother, and his arrogant spirit disdained as a meanness the thought of resting satisfied or appeased. Circumstances soon arose which converted this general feeling of discontent in the mind of Thomas Seymour into a more rancorous spirit of envy and hostility against his brother, and gradually involved him in a succession of dark intrigues, which, on account of the embarrassments and dangers in which they eventually implicated the princess Elizabeth, it will now become necessary to unravel. The younger Seymour, still in the prime of life, was endowed in a striking degree with those graces of person and manner which serve to captivate the female heart, and his ambition had sought in consequence to avail itself of a splendid marriage.
It is said that the princess Mary herself was at first the object of his hopes or wishes: but if this were really the case, she must speedily have quelled his presumption by the lofty sternness of her repulse; for it is impossible to discover in the history of his life at what particular period he could have been occupied with such a design.
Immediately after the death of Henry, he found means to revive with such energy in the bosom of the queen-dowager, an attachment which she had entertained for him before her marriage with the king, that she consented to become his wife with a precipitation highly indecorous and reprehensible. The connexion proved unfortunate on both sides, and its first effect was to embroil him with his brother.
The protector, of a temper still weaker than his not very vigorous understanding, had long allowed himself to be governed both in great and small concerns by his wife, a woman of little principle and of a disposition in the highest degree violent, imperious, and insolent. Nothing could be more insupportable to the spirit of this lady, who prided herself on her descent from Thomas of Woodstock, and now saw her husband governing the kingdom with all the prerogatives and almost all the splendor of royalty, than to find herself compelled to yield precedency to the wife of his younger brother; and unable to submit patiently to a mortification from which, after all, there was no escape, she could not forbear engaging in continual disputes on the subject with the queen-dowager. Their husbands soon were drawn in to take part in this senseless quarrel, and a serious difference ensued between them. The protector and council soon after refused to the lord-admiral certain grants of land and valuable jewels which he claimed as bequests to his wife from the late king, and the, perhaps, real injury, thus added to the slights of which he before complained, gave fresh exasperation to the pride and turbulence of his character.
Taking advantage of the protector's absence on that campaign in Scotland which ended with the victory of Pinkey, he formed partisans among the discontented nobles, won from his brother the affections of the young king, and believing every thing ripe for an attack on his usurped authority, he designed to bring forward in the ensuing parliament a proposal for separating, according to ancient precedent, the office of guardian of the king's person from that of protector of the realm, and for conferring upon himself the former. But he discovered too late that he had greatly miscalculated his forces; his proposal was not even permitted to come to a hearing. Having rendered himself further obnoxious to the vengeance of the administration by menaces thrown out in the rage of disappointment, he saw himself reduced, in order to escape a committal to the Tower, to make submissions to his brother. An apparent reconciliation took place; and the admiral was compelled to change, but not to relinquish, his schemes of ambition.
