but some other persons; or to affirm that she is a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper. The second clause of this statute is evidently directed against Mary Stuart, enacting that all persons of any degree, nation, or estate, who during the queen's life should claim title to the crown should be disabled from inheriting the same; and that any claimant to the right of succession, contrary to any proclamation on the matter that might be issued by the queen, should be declared guilty of high treason. The queen's advisers were desirous to carry the principle of exclusion further ; and to make a law that the queen of Scots was unable and unworthy to succeed. A committee of the Commons presented an address to Elizabeth, asking her to proceed criminally against Mary. Divines and statesmen concurred in urging violent measures towards the prisoner. The difficulties of the crisis were held to be met by the enactment of strong laws against the papists themselves. "Confidence," says Chatham, "is a plant of slow growth;" and so is toleration. There was at this time a strong party in England that would not have endured anything approaching to union between Protestant and Roman Catholic. In 1568, when Alva was appointed, by Philip, captain-general of the Netherlands, with a mission to destroy the heretics, root and branch, hosts of fugitives came for refuge to England. The same asylum was sought by the Huguenots of France. Whilst the general body of these refugees, by the recital of their injuries, diffused a popular hatred of papal persecution, some strengthened that dislike to many of the ceremonial observances of the English church, which gradually established a large class who, in their hatred of popery, would tolerate no forms that appeared derived from the ancient worship. That contest between the Establishment and the Puritans which convulsed England for many a year, and of which the traces are by no means extinct, was actively beginning before the "halcyon days" were past.

The duke of Norfolk had been released from his imprisonment in the Tower on the 4th of August, 1570. On the 7th of September, 1571, he was again arrested. During the thirteen months of his comparative freedom he was in a sort of honourable custody, and was not called to Council or to Parliament. In April, 1571, a correspondence was detected, which showed that some treasonable project was in course of formation. Further correspondence was intercepted in August, and various persons were arrested. Amongst these was the bishop of Ross, who made a full declaration, which was corroborated by the confessions of the other prisoners. The duke was tried on a charge of high-treason by his peers, on the 16th of January, 1572. It was stated that through the agency of Rudolphi, an Italian, who had been sent by Mary to the pope, the king of Spain, and the duke of Alva, Norfolk had received assurances of the support of these personages to a plan for his marriage with Mary, for seizing the person of Elizabeth, and for landing a foreign army in England. Norfolk was unanimously condemned; but his execution was deferred till the 2nd of June. Again and again, Elizabeth revoked the warrant which consigned him to the block. Two Derbyshire gentlemen were tried and executed in May, upon a charge of having corresponded with Mary, for the purpose of delivering her from the custody of the earl of Shrewsbury. The affairs of Scotland

A.D. 1572.

THE ST. BARTHOLOMEW MASSACRE.

261

had become more and more distracted since the period of the detention of the queen. The regent Murray had been assassinated, from motives of private revenge, at Linlithgow, in January, 1570. Lennox, the father of Darnley, had succeeded him in the regency. He, also, was assassinated in September, 1571.

In 1570, a treaty was concluded between the Huguenots of France and the young king, Charles IX.; who professed great anxiety for reconciliation with this portion of his subjects. England entered into a treaty with France, which had for one of its objects to wrest the Netherlands from Spain; and the advisers of Elizabeth recommended a marriage with the duke of Alençon, the younger son of Catherine de Medici, who had given intimation of his disposition to favour the Protestants. The great Huguenot leader, Coligni, admiral of France, was earnestly invited to repair to the king's court; to which, after some manifestations of distrust, he went in the autumn of 1571. The sister of Charles was pressed in marriage upon the prince of Navarre, the acknowledged head of the Huguenots, and that marriage was celebrated with great magnificence, on the 18th of August, 1572. The Huguenots were drawn in large numbers to Paris by these festivities. On the 22nd of August, Coligni was shot from the window of a house occupied by a dependent of the duke of Guise. His wounds were not dangerous. The king, with his mother, Catherine, visited the wounded man. The queen-mother had concerted the assassination with the duke of Anjou and the duchess of Nemours, whose first husband had been slain by a Huguenot. On the 23rd of August, according to the account given by Charles himself to his sister Margaret, after the noontide dinner of the court he was told of a treasonable conspiracy of the Huguenots against himself and his family. It would be necessary, his relations said, to anticipate the designs of the conspirators by their previous destruction. He gave his consent, and expressed his hope that not a single Huguenot would be left alive to reproach him with the deed. Night had descended upon Paris. There was no alarm, as bands of assassins silently congregated in the streets. A signal was to be given when the work of slaughter was to commence. The king, his mother, and Anjou sat amidst darkness and stillness in a balcony of the Louvre. At length the clocks of Paris struck two. Then the bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois tolled forth the signal. The duke of Guise burst into the defenceless court where Coligni slept, and three hundred men slaughtered him and his followers. His body was cast out of the window, and the cry of "Death to the Huguenots,' amidst the sound of the tocsin, woke up the fanatical citizens, and one universal butchery of the Protestants was accomplished. For three days the slaughter went on; and the fury extended to Orleans, Lyons, Troyes, Rouen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and other towns. The English queen and court put on deep mourning. There was a general terror in England that the example of St. Bartholomew's day would spread. The bishop of London and others advised, amongst other precautions, "Forthwith to cut off the Scottish queen's head." Elizabeth would not comply with these suggestions; but there appears little doubt that she was cognisant of a plot between some of these ministers and the earl of Mar, the regent of Scotland, to deliver Mary up, that she might

be put to death by her own people. The death of Mar put an end to these dark intrigues.

In 1580, the pope, Gregory XIII., at the suggestion of William Allen, despatched a body of Jesuits to England. The mission of these religious enthusiasts was to attempt the re-conversion of the heretic islanders. They were led and organised by Robert Parsons and Edmond Campion, who had formerly belonged to colleges in Oxford, and had been avowed Protestants before their conversion to Romanism. The parliament of 1581 met this inroad of able Englishmen, trained in the school of Loyola to extraordinary subtlety and invincible determination, by the most stringent enactments. Campion was arrested in Berkshire, in July, 1581; and was lodged in the Tower with two other priests. He was tortured; and revealed the names of those who had sheltered him. Finally he was tried for high-treason. Others were tried and convicted with him; but three were spared, who renounced the pope's deposing power. The English government rested its defence of the severities which it practised upon the ground that the persecutions were not directed against religious tenets; and that none were indicted for treason but such as obstinately maintained the pope's bull depriving the queen of the crown. The severities of the laws against papists went on increasing. In 1584, all Jesuits, seminary priests, and other priests, were commanded by Act of parliament to depart from the kingdom within forty days, on pain of being adjudged traitors; and penalties were to be inflicted upon those who, knowing any priest to be within the realm, should not denounce him to a magistrate. Cecil, now lord Burleigh, wrote of the effect of these intolerant enactments, "I account that putting to death does no ways lessen them [the papists] .

so that, for my part, I wish no lessening of their number, but by preaching and by education of the younger, under schoolmasters." The assassination of the prince of Orange in 1584, by a religious fanatic, excited by the reward which Philip II. had set upon his head, had produced a fierce indignation in England against the bigoted king of Spain. The schemes of Philip and pope Sixtus V. for the invasion of the contumacious island were no longer concealed. It was a wise resolve, therefore, of Elizabeth's government to break through that superstitious love of peace which influenced the queen, and boldly encounter Philip on his own ground. Elizabeth was very slow to consent to engage in a war in the Netherlands, but her old sagacious counsellor, Burleigh, the acute Walsingham, and the favourite Leicester, prevailed over her scruples, and an expedition was determined upon at the end of 1585. Elizabeth had again declined the sovereignty which had been again offered her by the commissioners of the States; and she instructed her lieutenant, Leicester, also to refuse their offer to put themselves under his absolute control. Leicester was received with pageantries, and on New Year's Day, 1586, the States General, by a solemn deputation, offered the queen of England's lieutenant the absolute government of the United Provinces. He first hesitated, then yielded to further supplications, and on the 25th of January accepted the dangerous honour. It was very long before the anger of the queen could be softened. She withdrew from her first intention to compel Leicester publicly to lay down his authority, but she restricted its exercise in many ways which

A.D. 1585.

THE BABINGTON CONSPIRACY.

263

were irksome to so proud a man. The war was altogether mismanaged. The prince of Parma, who commanded the troops of Spain, was an experienced general. Leicester was always hesitating; sometimes successful through the bravery of his captains; but gradually losing fortress after fortress, and obtaining petty advantages with no permanent results. In this disastrous campaign, Philip Sidney-the rare scholar, the accomplished writer, the perfect gentleman-closed his short career of military experience. His memory was honoured by a magnificent funeral pageant, undertaken at queen Elizabeth's expense, on the 16th of February, 1587.

Philip of Spain had laid an embargo upon English vessels and property through the extent of his wide dominions. Elizabeth gave her subjects permission to seize Spanish ships or merchandise wherever they were to be found. The spirit of the old Norsemen was revived; and the hope of gain sent hardy adventurers into distant seas, and eager colonists to search for new lands to subdue.

The secretary Walsingham, though a statesman of rare disinterestedness and general integrity, was so vigilant in the detection of plots against his mistress, that his spies and secret agents were in every court abroad, and in every suspected house at home. In February, 1585, Dr. William Parry was convicted of high-treason, and he was executed on the 2nd of March. His career was a very extraordinary one. He was, after 1580, employed as "a collector of secret intelligence in foreign countries." He had a pension given him in 1584. He was tried as a public enemy six months afterwards. On his trial he made a confession which implicated one Morgan, an agent of Mary at Paris for the receipt and administration of her dower as queen of France. His statement was to the effect that, in October, 1582, Morgan had engaged him to undertake the assassination of Elizabeth, "for the restitution of England to the ancient obedience of the see apostolic." Elizabeth was greatly enraged against Morgan, and called upon the king of France to deliver him up. This was refused; but Morgan was sent to the Bastile. Full of plans of revenge, he procured means of correspondence with Mary, and had various agents in England. In the summer and autumn of 1585, a catholic priest came to England, who was dressed as an officer, and moved about under the name of Fortescue. His real name was John Ballard. One of Walsingham's intelligencers obtained his confidence; and made the secretary acquainted with a plot to kill Elizabeth and liberate Mary, in which an English officer of the name of Savage; Anthony Babington, a gentleman of Detnick, in Derbyshire; and several young men, the friends of Babington, were implicated. On the 13th, 14th, and 15th of September, fourteen persons accused as treasonable conspirators were brought to trial. Babington, Ballard, and Savage, with four others, pleaded guilty. The remainder were also convicted. The executions of seven, on the 20th of September, were attended with the horrible barbarities of the full penalty of treason. In the case of the others these cruelties were dispensed with. In Babington's confession was found what was alleged as corroborative proof of Mary's complicity with this attempt. The Scottish queen's two secretaries-De Naou, a Frenchman, and Curle, a Scot-had been arrested; and Mary's papers were seized and transmitted

to the Council. Mary was removed from Chartley, in Staffordshire, to Fotheringay Castle. Chateauneuf, the French ambassador, wrote on the subject of this conspiracy to his king, "A great sensation was caused by it in this town, where the people are much incensed against the catholics; nay, for eight or ten days there was reason to apprehend that acts of violence would be committed upon all who were considered to be catholics." He adds that Elizabeth ascribes the whole undertaking to the queen of Scots.

CHAPTER XX.

IN the session of parliament of 1584-5, a law was passed entitled, "An Act for provision to be made for the surety of the queen's majesty's most royal person, and the continuance of the realm in peace." The fourth clause of this statute recognised an Association which had been formed "to withstand and revenge to the uttermost all malicious actions and attempts against her majesty's most royal person." It provided that the articles of the Association "shall and ought to be in all things expounded and adjudged according to the true intent and meaning of this Act;" and the Act expressly limited its meaning by the condition "that if any invasion or rebellion should be made by or for any person pretending title to the crown after her majesty's decease, or if any thing be confessed or imagined tending to the hurt of her person," it should be "with the privity of any such person." In that case it was provided that a commission, composed of peers, privy councillors, and judges, should examine and give judgment on such offences; and that, after a proclamation of such judgment under the great seal, all persons against whom such sentence shall be given and proclaimed should be disabled for ever to have any claim to the crown; and all her majesty's subjects, by virtue of this statute, and by the queen's direction, might pursue the said persons to death. Mary was put upon her trial under this law.

On the 5th of October, 1586, a commission was issued to a large number of the most eminent persons of the kingdom, including twenty-nine peers, nine privy councillors, the chancellor, and five judges. The commissioners were given full power to examine evidence, and to give sentence and judgment, under the Act for the surety of the royal person. Thirty-six commissioners repaired to the castle of Fotheringay; and letters from Elizabeth were delivered to Mary, apprising her of the proceedings that were to be taken against her. At some preliminary interviews with a deputation from the commissioners, Mary maintained that she was an absolute queen; that she was no subject; and rather would die a thousand deaths than acknowledge herself a subject. She ultimately yielded. The court was opened on Friday, the 14th of October, in the great hall at Fotheringay Castle. Like all other trials for high-treason at that period, the witnesses were not