Behind the wild rhetoric of words like these lay the new sense of a prophetic power, the sense of a divine commission given to the preachers of the Word to rebuke nobles and kings. At the moment when the policy of Cromwell crushed the Church as a political power and freed the growing Monarchy from the constitutional check which its independence furnished, a new check offered itself in the very enthusiasm which sprang out of the wreck of the great religious body. Men stirred with a new sense of righteousness and of a divine government of the world, men too whose natural boldness was quickened and fired by daily contact with the older seers who rebuked David or Jezebel, could not hold their peace in the presence of wrong. While nobles and statesmen were cowering in silence before the dreaded power of the kingship the preachers spoke bluntly out. Not only Latimer, but Knox, Grindal, and Lever had uttered fiery remonstrances against the plunderers of Edward's reign. Bradford had threatened them with the divine judgement which at last overtook them. "'The judgement of the Lord! The judgement of the Lord!' cried he, with a lamentable voice and weeping tears." Wise or unwise, the pamphlets of the exiles only carried on this theory to its full developement. The great conception of the mediaeval Church, that of the responsibility of kings to a spiritual power, was revived at an hour when kingship was trampling all responsibility to God or man beneath its feet. Such a revival was to have large and beneficial issues in our later history. Gathering strength under Elizabeth, it created at the close of her reign that moral force of public opinion which under the name of Puritanism brought the acts and policy of our kings to the tests of reason and the Gospel. However ill directed that force might be, however erroneously such tests were often applied, it is to this new force that we owe the restoration of liberty and the establishment of religious freedom. As the voice of the first Christian preachers had broken the despotism of the Roman Empire, so the voice of the preachers of Puritanism broke the despotism of the English Monarchy.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth.]

But great as their issues were to be, for the moment these protests only quickened the persecution at home. We can hardly wonder that the arrival of Goodman's book in England in the summer of 1558 was followed by stern measures to prevent the circulation of such incentives to revolt. "Whereas divers books" ran a royal proclamation, "filled with heresy, sedition, and treason, have of late and be daily brought into the realm out of foreign countries and places beyond seas, and some also covertly printed within this realm and cast abroad in sundry parts thereof, whereby not only God is dishonoured but also encouragement is given to disobey lawful princes and governors," any person possessing such books "shall be reported and taken for a rebel, and shall without delay be executed for that offence according to the order of martial law." But what really robbed these pamphlets of all force for harm was the prudence and foresight of the people itself. Never indeed did the nation show its patient good sense more clearly than in the later years of Mary's reign. While fires blazed in Smithfield and news of defeat came from over sea, while the hot voices of Protestant zealots hounded men on to assassination and revolt, the bulk of Englishmen looked quietly from the dying Queen to the girl who in a little while must wear her crown. What nerved men to endure the shame and bloodshed about them was the certainty of the speedy succession of the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had much of her mother's charm with more than her mother's beauty. Her figure was commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. Even among the highly-trained women who caught the impulse of the New Learning she stood in the extent of her acquirements without a peer. Ascham, who succeeded Grindal and Cheke in the direction of her studies, tells us how keen and resolute was Elizabeth's love of learning, even in her girlhood. At sixteen she already showed "a man's power of application" to her books. She had read almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy. She began the day with the study of the New Testament in Greek, and followed this up by reading selected orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. She could speak Latin with fluency and Greek moderately well. Her love of classical culture lasted through her life. Amidst the press and cares of her later reign we find Ascham recording how "after dinner I went up to read with the Queen's majesty that noble oration of Demosthenes against AEschines." At a later time her Latin served her to rebuke the insolence of a Polish ambassador, and she could "rub up her rusty Greek" at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice-Chancellor. But Elizabeth was far as yet from being a mere pedant. She could already speak French and Italian as fluently as her mother-tongue. In later days we find her familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. The purity of her literary taste, the love for a chaste and simple style, which Ascham noted with praise in her girlhood, had not yet perished under the influence of euphuism. But even amidst the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which sullied her later years Elizabeth remained a lover of letters and of all that was greatest and purest in letters. She listened with delight to the "Faery Queen," and found a smile for "Master Spenser" when he appeared in her presence.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Mary.]

From the bodily and mental energy of her girlhood, the close of Edward's reign drew Elizabeth at nineteen to face the sterner problems of religion and politics. In the daring attempt of Northumberland to place Jane Grey on the throne Elizabeth's rights were equally set aside with those of Mary; and the first public act of the girl was to call the gentry to her standard and to join her sister with five hundred followers in her train. But the momentary union was soon dissolved. The daughter of Catharine could look with little but hate on the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth's tendency to the "new religion" jarred with the Queen's bigotry; and the warnings of the imperial ambassador were hardly needful to spur Mary to watch jealously a possible pretender to her throne. The girl bent to the Queen's will in hearing mass, but her manner showed that the compromise was merely a matter of obedience, and fed the hopes of the Protestant zealots who saw in the Spanish marriage a chance of driving Mary from the throne. The resolve which the Queen showed to cancel her sister's right of succession only quickened the project for setting Elizabeth in her place; and it was to make Elizabeth their sovereign that Suffolk rose in Leicestershire and Wyatt and his Kentishmen marched against London Bridge. The failure of the rising seemed to ensure her doom. The Emperor pressed for her death as a security for Philip on his arrival; and the detection of a correspondence with the French king served as a pretext for her committal to the Tower. The fierce Tudor temper broke through Elizabeth's self-control as she landed at Traitor's Gate. "Are all these harnessed men there for me?" she cried as she saw the guard; "it needed not for me, being but a weak woman!" and passionately calling on the soldiers to "bear witness that I come as no traitor!" she flung herself down on a stone in the rain and refused to enter her prison. "Better sitting here than in a worse place," she cried; "I know not whither you will bring me." But Elizabeth's danger was less than it seemed. Wyatt denied to the last her complicity in the revolt, and in spite of Gardiner's will to "go roundly to work" with her the Lords of the Council forced Mary to set her free. The Queen's terrors however revived with her hopes of a child in the summer of 1555. To Mary her sister seemed the one danger which threatened the succession of her coming babe and the vast issues which hung on it, and Elizabeth was summoned to her sister's side and kept a close prisoner at Hampton Court. Philip joined in this precaution, for "holding her in his power he could depart safely and without peril" in the event of the Queen's death in childbirth; and other plans were perhaps already stirring his breast. Should Mary die, a fresh match might renew his hold on England; "he might hope," writes the Venetian ambassador, "with the help of many of the nobility, won over by his presents and favours, to marry her (Elizabeth) again, and thus succeed anew to the crown."

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Philip.]

But whatever may have been Philip's designs, the time had not as yet come for their realization; the final disappointment of the Queen's hopes of childbirth set Elizabeth free, and in July she returned to her house at Ashridge. From this moment her position was utterly changed. With the disappearance of all chance of offspring from the Queen and the certainty of Mary's coming death her sister's danger passed away. Elizabeth alone stood between England and the succession of Mary Stuart; and, whatever might be the wishes of the Queen, the policy of the House of Austria forced it to support even the daughter of Anne Boleyn against a claimant who would bind England to the French monarchy. From this moment therefore Philip watched jealously over Elizabeth's safety. On his departure for the Continent he gave written instructions to the Queen to show favour to her sister, and the charge was repeated to those of his followers whom he left behind him. What guarded her even more effectually was the love of the people. When Philip at a later time claimed Elizabeth's gratitude for his protection she told him bluntly that her gratitude was really due neither to him nor her nobles, though she owned her obligations to both, but to the English people. It was they who had saved her from death and hindered all projects for barring her right to the throne. "It is the people," she said, "who have placed me where I am now." It was indeed their faith in Elizabeth's speedy succession that enabled Englishmen to bear the bloodshed and shame of Mary's later years, and to wait patiently for the end.

Nor were these years of waiting without value for Elizabeth herself. The steady purpose, the clear perception of a just policy which ran through her wonderful reign, were formed as the girl looked coolly on at the chaos of bigotry and misrule which spread before her. More and more she realized what was to be the aim of her after life, the aim of reuniting the England which Edward and Mary alike had rent into two warring nations, of restoring again that English independence which Mary was trailing at the feet of Spain. With such an aim she could draw to her the men who, indifferent like herself to purely spiritual considerations, and estranged from Mary's system rather by its political than its religious consequences, were anxious for the restoration of English independence and English order. It was among these "Politicals," as they were soon to be called, that Elizabeth found at this moment a counsellor who was to stand by her side through the long years of her after reign. William Cecil sprang from the smaller gentry whom the changes of the time were bringing to the front. He was the son of a Yeoman of the Wardrobe at Henry's court; but his abilities had already raised him at the age of twenty-seven to the post of secretary to the Duke of Somerset, and through Somerset's Protectorate he remained high in his confidence. He was seized by the Lords on the Duke's arrest, and even sent to the Tower; but he was set at liberty with his master, and his ability was now so well known that a few months later saw him Secretary of State under Northumberland. The post and the knighthood which accompanied it hardly compensated for the yoke which Northumberland's pride laid upon all who served him, or for the risks in which his ambition involved them. Cecil saw with a fatal clearness the silent opposition of the whole realm to the system of the Protectorate, and the knowledge of this convinced him that the Duke's schemes for a change in the succession were destined to failure. On the disclosure of the plot to set Mary aside he withdrew for some days from the court, and even meditated flight from the country, till fear of the young king's wrath drew him back to share in the submission of his fellow-counsellors and to pledge himself with them to carry the new settlement into effect. But Northumberland had no sooner quitted London than Cecil became the soul of the intrigues by which the royal Council declared themselves in Mary's favour. His desertion of the Duke secured him pardon from the Queen, and though he was known to be in heart "a heretic" he continued at court, conformed like Elizabeth to the established religion, confessed and attended mass. Cecil was employed in bringing Pole to England and in attending him in embassies abroad. But his caution held him aloof from any close connexion with public affairs. He busied himself in building at Burghley and in the culture of the Church lands he had won from Edward the Sixth, while he drew closer to the girl who alone could rescue England from the misgovernment of Mary's rule. Even before the Queen's death it was known that Cecil would be the chief counsellor of the coming reign. "I am told for certain," the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip after a visit to Elizabeth during the last hours of Mary's life, "that Cecil who was secretary to King Edward will be her secretary also. He has the character of a prudent and virtuous man, although a heretic." But it was only from a belief that Cecil retained at heart the convictions of his earlier days that men could call him a heretic. In all outer matters of faith or worship he conformed to the religion of the state.

[Sidenote: The Politicals.]

It is idle to charge Cecil, or the mass of Englishmen who conformed with him in turn to the religion of Henry, of Edward, of Mary, and of Elizabeth, with baseness or hypocrisy. They followed the accepted doctrine of the time—that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole right of determining what should be the form of religion within its bounds. What the Marian persecution was gradually pressing on such men was a conviction, not of the falsehood of such a doctrine, but of the need of limiting it. Under Henry, under Edward, under Mary, no distinction had been drawn between inner belief and outer conformity. Every English subject was called upon to adjust his conscience as well as his conduct to the varying policy of the state. But the fires of Smithfield had proved that obedience such as this could not be exacted save by a persecution which filled all England with horror. Such a persecution indeed failed in the very end for which it was wrought. Instead of strengthening religious unity, it gave a new force to religious separation; it enlisted the conscience of the zealot in the cause of resistance; it secured the sympathy of the great mass of waverers to those who withstood the civil power. To Cecil, as to the purely political statesmen of whom he was the type, such a persecution seemed as needless as it was mischievous. Conformity indeed was necessary, for men could as yet conceive of no state without a religion or of civil obedience apart from compliance with the religious order of the state. But only outer conformity was needed. That no man should set up a worship other than that of the nation at large, that every subject should duly attend at the national worship, Cecil believed to be essential to public order. But he saw no need for prying into the actual beliefs of those who conformed to the religious laws of the realm, nor did he think that such beliefs could be changed by the fear of punishment. While refusing freedom of worship therefore, Cecil, like Elizabeth, was ready to concede freedom of conscience. And in this concession we can hardly doubt that the bulk of Englishmen went with him. Catholics shared with Protestants the horror of Mary's persecution. To Protestantism indeed the horror of the persecution had done much to give a force such as it had never had before. The number of Protestants grew with every murder done in the cause of Catholicism. But they still remained a small part of the realm. What the bulk of Englishmen had been driven to by the martyrdoms was not a change of creed, but a longing for religious peace and for such a system of government as, without destroying the spiritual oneness of the nation, would render a religious peace possible. And such a system of government Cecil and Elizabeth were prepared to give.

[Sidenote: Mary's death.]

We may ascribe to Cecil's counsels somewhat of the wise patience with which Elizabeth waited for the coming crown. Her succession was assured, and the throng of visitors to her presence showed a general sense that the Queen's end was near. Mary stood lonely and desolate in her realm. "I will not be buried while I am living, as my sister was," Elizabeth said in later years. "Do I not know how during her life every one hastened to me at Hatfield?" The bloodshed indeed went on more busily than ever. It had spread now from bishops and priests to the people itself, and the sufferers were sent in batches to the flames. In a single day thirteen victims, two of them women, were burned at Stratford-le-Bow. Seventy-three Protestants of Colchester were dragged through the streets of London tied to a single rope. A new commission for the suppression of heresy was exempted by royal authority from all restrictions of law which fettered its activity. But the work of terror broke down before the silent revolt of the whole nation. The persecution failed even to put an end to heretical worship. Not only do we find ministers moving about in London and Kent to hold "secret meetings of the Gospellers," but up to the middle of 1555 four parishes in Essex still persisted in using the English-Prayer Book. Open marks of sympathy at last began to be offered to the victims at the stake. "There were seven men burned in Smithfield the twenty-eighth day of July," a Londoner writes in 1558, "a fearful and a cruel proclamation being made that under pain of present death no man should either approach nigh unto them, touch them, neither speak to them nor comfort them. Yet were they so comfortably taken by the hand and so goodly comforted, notwithstanding that fearful proclamation and the present threatenings of the sheriffs and serjeants, that the adversaries themselves were astonished." The crowd round the fire shouted "Amen" to the martyrs' prayers, and prayed with them that God would strengthen them. What galled Mary yet more was the ill will of the Pope. Paul the Fourth still adhered to his demand for full restoration of the Church lands, and held England as only partly reconciled to the Holy See. He was hostile to Philip; he was yet more hostile to Pole. At this moment he dealt a last blow at the Queen by depriving Pole of his legatine power, and was believed to be on the point of calling him to answer a charge of heresy. Even when she was freed from part of her troubles in the autumn of 1558 by the opening of conferences for peace at Cambray a fresh danger disclosed itself. The demands of the queen's envoys for the restoration of Calais met with so stubborn a refusal from France that it seemed as if England would be left alone to bear the brunt of a future struggle, for Mary's fierce pride, had she lived, could hardly have bowed to the surrender of the town. But the Queen was dying. Her health had long been weak, and the miseries and failure of her reign hastened the progress of disease. Already enfeebled, she was attacked as winter drew near by a fever which was at this time ravaging the country, and on the seventeenth of November, 1558, she breathed her last.



CHAPTER III

THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH

1558-1561

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's accession.]

Tradition still points out the tree in Hatfield Park beneath which Elizabeth was sitting when she received the news of her peaceful accession to the throne. She fell on her knees, and drawing a long breath, exclaimed at last, "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." To the last these words remained stamped on the golden coinage of the Queen. The sense never left her that her preservation and her reign were the issues of a direct interposition of God. Daring and self-confident indeed as was her temper, it was awed into seriousness by the weight of responsibility which fell on her with her sister's death. Never had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower ebb. Dragged at the heels of Philip into a useless and ruinous war, the country was left without an ally save Spain. The loss of Calais gave France the mastery of the Channel, and seemed to English eyes "to introduce the French King within the threshold of our house." "If God start not forth to the helm," wrote the Council in an appeal to the country, "we be at the point of greatest misery that can happen to any people, which is to become thrall to a foreign nation." The French king in fact "bestrode the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland." Ireland too was torn with civil war, while Scotland, always a danger in the north, had become formidable through the French marriage of its queen. In presence of enemies such as these, the country lay helpless, without army or fleet, or the means of manning one, for the treasury, already drained by the waste of Edward's reign, had been utterly exhausted by the restoration of the Church lands in possession of the Crown and by the cost of the war with France. But formidable as was the danger from without, it was little to the danger from within. The country was humiliated by defeat and brought to the verge of rebellion by the bloodshed and misgovernment of Mary's reign. The social discontent which had been trampled down for a while by the horsemen of Somerset remained a menace to further order. Above all, the religious strife had passed beyond hope of reconciliation now that the reformers were parted from their opponents by the fires of Smithfield and the party of the New Learning all but dissolved. The more earnest Catholics were bound helplessly to Rome. The temper of the Protestants, burned at home or driven into exile abroad, had become a fiercer thing, and the Calvinistic refugees were pouring back from Geneva with dreams of revolutionary changes in Church and State.

[Sidenote: Her religious policy.]

It was with the religious difficulty that Elizabeth was called first to deal; and the way in which she dealt with it showed at once the peculiar bent of her mind. The young Queen was not without a sense of religion; at moments of peril or deliverance throughout her reign her acknowledgements of a divine protection took a strange depth and earnestness. But she was almost wholly destitute of spiritual emotion, or of any consciousness of the vast questions with which theology strove to deal. While the world around her was being swayed more and more by theological beliefs and controversies, Elizabeth was absolutely untouched by them. She was a child of the Italian Renascence rather than of the New Learning of Colet or Erasmus, and her attitude towards the enthusiasm of her time was that of Lorenzo de' Medici towards Savonarola. Her mind was untroubled by the spiritual problems which were vexing the minds around her; to Elizabeth indeed they were not only unintelligible, they were a little ridiculous. She had been brought up under Henry amidst the ritual of the older Church; under Edward she had submitted to the English Prayer-Book, and drunk in much of the Protestant theology; under Mary she was ready after a slight resistance to conform again to the mass. Her temper remained unchanged through the whole course of her reign. She showed the same intellectual contempt for the superstition of the Romanist as for the bigotry of the Protestant. While she ordered Catholic images to be flung into the fire, she quizzed the Puritans as "brethren in Christ." But she had no sort of religious aversion from either Puritan or Papist. The Protestants grumbled at the Catholic nobles whom she admitted to the presence. The Catholics grumbled at the Protestant statesmen whom she called to her council-board. To Elizabeth on the other hand the arrangement was the most natural thing in the world. She looked at theological differences in a purely political light. She agreed with Henry the Fourth that a kingdom was well worth a mass. It seemed an obvious thing to her to hold out hopes of conversion as a means of deceiving Philip, or to gain a point in negotiation by restoring the crucifix to her chapel. The first interest in her own mind was the interest of public order, and she never could understand how it could fail to be the first in every one's mind.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's toleration.]

One memorable change marked the nobler side of the policy she brought with her to the throne. Elizabeth's accession was at once followed by a close of the religious persecution. Whatever might be the changes that awaited the country, conformity was no longer to be enforced by the penalty of death. At a moment when Philip was presiding at autos-de-fe and Henry of France plotting a massacre of his Huguenot subjects, such a resolve was a gain for humanity as well as a step towards religious toleration. And from this resolve Elizabeth never wavered. Through all her long reign, save a few Anabaptists whom the whole nation loathed as blasphemers of God and dreaded as enemies of social order, no heretic was "sent to the fire." It was a far greater gain for humanity when the Queen declared her will to meddle in no way with the consciences of her subjects. She would hear of no inquisition into a man's private thoughts on religious matters or into his personal religion. Cecil could boldly assert in her name at a later time the right of every Englishman to perfect liberty of religious opinion. Such a liberty of opinion by no means implied liberty of public worship. On the incompatibility of freedom of worship with public order Catholic and Protestant were as yet at one. The most advanced reformers did not dream of contending for a right to stand apart from the national religion. What they sought was to make the national religion their own. The tendency of the reformation had been to press for the religious as well as the political unity of every state. Even Calvin looked forward to the winning of the nations to a purer faith without a suspicion that the religious movement which he headed would end in establishing the right even of the children of "antichrist" to worship as they would in a Protestant commonwealth. If the Protestant lords in Scotland had been driven to assert a right of nonconformity, if the Huguenots of France were following their example, it was with no thought of asserting the right of every man to worship God as he would. From the claim of such a right Knox or Coligni would have shrunk with even greater horror than Elizabeth. What they aimed at was simply the establishment of a truce till by force or persuasion they could win the realms that tolerated them for their own. In this matter therefore Elizabeth was at one with every statesman of her day. While granting freedom of conscience to her subjects, she was resolute to exact an outward conformity to the established religion.

[Sidenote: Religion unchanged.]

But men watched curiously to see what religion the Queen would establish. Even before her accession the keen eye of the Spanish ambassador had noted her "great admiration for the king her father's mode of carrying on matters," as a matter of ill omen for the interests of Catholicism. He had marked that the ladies about her and the counsellors on whom she seemed about to rely were, like Cecil, "held to be heretics." "I fear much," he wrote, "that in religion she will not go right." As keen an instinct warned the Protestants that the tide had turned. The cessation of the burnings, and the release of all persons imprisoned for religion, seemed to receive their interpretation when Elizabeth on her entry into London kissed an English Bible which the citizens presented to her and promised "diligently to read therein." The exiles at Strassburg or Geneva flocked home with wild dreams of a religious revolution and of vengeance upon their foes. But hopes and fears alike met a startling check. For months there was little change in either government or religion. If Elizabeth introduced Cecil and his kinsman, Sir Nicholas Bacon, to her council-board, she retained as yet most of her sister's advisers. The Mass went on as before, and the Queen was regular in her attendance at it. As soon as the revival of Protestantism showed itself in controversial sermons and insults to the priesthood it was bridled by a proclamation which forbade unlicensed preaching and enforced silence on the religious controversy. Elizabeth showed indeed a distaste for the elevation of the Host, and allowed the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments to be used in English. But months passed after her accession before she would go further than this. A royal proclamation which ordered the existing form of worship to be observed "till consultation might be had in Parliament by the Queen and the Three Estates" startled the prelates; and only one bishop could be found to assist at the coronation of Elizabeth. But no change was made in the ceremonies of the coronation; the Queen took the customary oath to observe the liberties of the Church, and conformed to the Catholic ritual. There was little in fact to excite any reasonable alarm among the adherents of the older faith, or any reasonable hope among the adherents of the new. "I will do," the Queen said, "as my father did." Instead of the reforms of Edward and the Protectorate, the Protestants saw themselves thrown back on the reforms of Henry the Eighth. Even Henry's system indeed seemed too extreme for Elizabeth. Her father had at any rate broken boldly from the Papacy. But the first work of the Queen was to open negotiations for her recognition with the Papal Court.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and Philip.]

What shaped Elizabeth's course in fact was hard necessity. She found herself at war with France and Scotland, and her throne threatened by the claim of the girl who linked the two countries, the claim of Mary Stuart, at once Queen of Scotland and wife of the Dauphin Francis. On Elizabeth's accession Mary and Francis assumed by the French king's order the arms and style of English sovereigns: and if war continued it was clear that their pretensions would be backed by Henry's forces as well as by the efforts of the Scots. Against such a danger Philip of Spain was Elizabeth's only ally. Philip's policy was at this time a purely conservative one. The vast schemes of ambition which had so often knit both Pope and Protestants, Germany and France, against his father were set aside by the young king. His position indeed was very different from that of Charles the Fifth. He was not Emperor. He had little weight in Germany. Even in Italy his influence was less than his father's. He had lost with Mary's death the crown of England. His most valuable possessions outside Spain, the provinces of the Netherlands, were disaffected to a foreign rule. All the king therefore aimed at was to keep his own. But the Netherlands were hard to keep: and with France mistress of England as of Scotland, and so mistress of the Channel, to keep them would be impossible. Sheer necessity forbade Philip to suffer the union of the three crowns of the west on the head of a French king; and the French marriage of Mary Stuart pledged him to oppose her pretensions and support Elizabeth's throne. For a moment he even dreamed of meeting the union of France with Scotland by that union of England with Spain which had been seen under Mary. He offered Elizabeth his hand. The match was a more natural one than Philip's union with her sister, for the young king's age was not far from her own. The offer however was courteously put aside, for Elizabeth had no purpose of lending England to the ambition of Spain, nor was it possible for her to repeat her sister's unpopular experiment. But Philip remained firm in his support of her throne. He secured for her the allegiance of the Catholics within her realm, who looked to him as their friend while they distrusted France as an ally of heretics. His envoys supported her cause in the negotiations at Cateau-Cambresis; he suffered her to borrow money and provide herself with arms in his provinces of the Netherlands. At such a crisis Elizabeth could not afford to alienate Philip by changes which would roughly dispel his hopes of retaining her within the bounds of Catholicism.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and the Papacy.]

Nor is there any sign that Elizabeth had resolved on a defiance of the Papacy. She was firm indeed to assert her father's claim of supremacy over the clergy and her own title to the throne. But the difficulties in the way of an accommodation on these points were such as could be settled by negotiation; and, acting on Cecil's counsel, Elizabeth announced her accession to the Pope. The announcement showed her purpose of making no violent break in the relations of England with the Papal See. But between Elizabeth and the Papacy lay the fatal question of the Divorce. To acknowledge the young Queen was not only to own her mother's marriage, but to cancel the solemn judgement of the Holy See in Catharine's favour and its solemn assertion of her own bastardy. The temper of Paul the Fourth took fire at the news. He reproached Elizabeth with her presumption in ascending the throne, recalled the Papal judgement which pronounced her illegitimate, and summoned her to submit her claims to his tribunal. Much of this indignation was no doubt merely diplomatic. If the Pope listened to the claims of Mary Stuart, which were urged on him by the French Court, it was probably only with the purpose of using them to bring pressure to bear on Elizabeth and on the stubborn country which still refused to restore its lands to the Church and to make the complete submission which Paul demanded. But Cecil and the Queen knew that, even had they been willing to pay such a price for the crown, it was beyond their power to bring England to pay it. The form too in which Paul had couched his answer admitted of no compromise. The summons to submit the Queen's claim of succession to the judgement of Rome produced its old effect. Elizabeth was driven, as Henry had been driven, to assert the right of the nation to decide on questions which affected its very life. A Parliament which met in January, 1559, acknowledged the legitimacy of Elizabeth and her title to the crown.

[Sidenote: The Supremacy re-established.]

Such an acknowledgement in the teeth of the Papal repudiation of Anne Boleyn's marriage carried with it a repudiation of the supremacy of the Papacy. It was in vain that the clergy in convocation unanimously adopted five articles which affirmed their faith in transubstantiation, their acceptance of the supreme authority of the Popes as "Christ's vicars and supreme rulers of the Church," and their resolve "that the authority in all matters of faith and discipline belongs and ought to belong only to the pastors of the Church, and not to laymen." It was in vain that the bishops unanimously opposed the Bill for restoring the royal supremacy when it was brought before the Lords. The "ancient jurisdiction of the Crown over the Estate ecclesiastical and spiritual" was restored; the Acts which under Mary re-established the independent jurisdiction and legislation of the Church were repealed; and the clergy were called on to swear to the supremacy of the Crown and to abjure all foreign authority and jurisdiction. Further Elizabeth had no personal wish to go. A third of the Council and at least two-thirds of the people were as opposed to any radical changes in religion as the Queen. Among the gentry the older and wealthier were on the conservative side, and only the younger and meaner on the other. In the Parliament itself Sir Thomas White protested that "it was unjust that a religion begun in such a miraculous way and established by such grave men should be abolished by a set of beardless boys." Yet even this "beardless" Parliament had shown a strong conservatism. The Bill which re-established the royal supremacy met with violent opposition in the Commons, and only passed through Cecil's adroit manoeuvring.

[Sidenote: Prayer-Book restored.]

But the steps which Elizabeth had taken made it necessary to go further. If the Protestants were the less numerous, they were the abler and the more vigorous party, and the break with Rome threw Elizabeth, whether she would or no, on their support. It was a support that could only be bought by theological concessions, and above all by the surrender of the Mass; for to every Protestant the Mass was identified with the fires of Smithfield, while the Prayer-Book which it had displaced was hallowed by the memories of the Martyrs. The pressure of the reforming party indeed would have been fruitless had the Queen still been hampered by danger from France. Fortunately for their cause the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis at this juncture freed Elizabeth's hands. By this treaty, which was practically concluded in March 1559, Calais was left in French holding on the illusory pledge of its restoration to England eight years later; but peace was secured and the danger of a war of succession, in which Mary Stuart would be backed by the arms of France, for a while averted. Secure from without, Elizabeth could venture to buy the support of the Protestants within her realm by the restoration of the English Prayer-Book. Such a measure was far indeed from being meant as an open break with Catholicism. The use of the vulgar tongue in public worship was still popular with a large part of the Catholic world; and the Queen did her best by the alterations she made in Edward's Prayer-Book to strip it of its more Protestant tone. To the bulk of the people the book must have seemed merely a rendering of the old service in their own tongue. As the English Catholics afterwards represented at Rome when excusing their own use of it, the Prayer-Book "contained neither impiety nor false doctrine; its prayers were those of the Catholic Church, altered only so far as to omit the merits and intercession of the saints." On such a concession as this the Queen felt it safe to venture in spite of the stubborn opposition of the spiritual estate. She ordered a disputation to be held in Westminster Abbey before the Houses on the question, and when the disputation ended in the refusal of the bishops to proceed, an Act of Uniformity, which was passed in spite of their strenuous opposition, restored at the close of April the last Prayer-Book of Edward, and enforced its use on the clergy on pain of deprivation.

[Sidenote: Pius the Fourth.]

At Rome the news of these changes stirred a fiercer wrath in Paul the Fourth, and his threats of excommunication were only held in check by the protests of Philip. The policy of the Spanish king still bound him to Elizabeth's cause, for the claims of Mary Stuart had been reserved in the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis and the refusal of France to abandon them held Spain to its alliance with the Queen. Vexed as he was at the news of the Acts which re-established the supremacy, Philip ordered his ambassador to assure Elizabeth he was as sure a friend as ever, and to soothe the resentment of the English Catholics if it threatened to break out into revolt. He showed the same temper in his protest against action at Rome. Paul had however resolved to carry out his threats when his death and the interregnum which followed gave Elizabeth a fresh respite. His successor, Pius the Fourth, was of milder temper and leaned rather to a policy of conciliation. Decisive indeed as the Queen's action may seem in modern eyes, it was far from being held as decisive at the time. The Act of Supremacy might be regarded as having been forced upon Elizabeth by Paul's repudiation of her title to the crown. The alterations which were made by the Queen's authority in the Prayer-Book showed a wish to conciliate those who clung to the older faith. It was clear that Elizabeth had no mind merely to restore the system of the Protectorate. She set up again the royal supremacy, but she dropped the words "Head of the Church" from the royal title. The forty-two Articles of Protestant doctrine which Cranmer had drawn up were left in abeyance. If the Queen had had her will, she would have retained the celibacy of the clergy and restored the use of crucifixes in the churches.

[Sidenote: The Clergy and the oath.]

The caution and hesitation with which she enforced on the clergy the oath required by the Act of Supremacy showed Elizabeth's wish to avoid the opening of a religious strife. The higher dignitaries indeed were unsparingly dealt with. The bishops, who with a single exception refused to take the oath, were imprisoned and deprived. The same measure was dealt out to most of the archdeacons and deans. But with the mass of the parish priests a very different course was taken. The Commissioners appointed in May 1559 were found to be too zealous in October, and several of the clerical members were replaced by cooler laymen. The great bulk of the clergy seem neither to have refused nor to have consented to the oath, but to have left the Commissioners' summons unheeded and to have stayed quietly at home. Of the nine thousand four hundred beneficed clergy only a tenth presented themselves before the Commissioners. Of those who attended and refused the oath a hundred and eighty-nine were deprived, but many of the most prominent went unharmed. At Winchester, though the dean and canons of the cathedral, the warden and fellows of the college, and the master of St. Cross, refused the oath, only four of these appear in the list of deprivations. Even the few who suffered proved too many for the purpose of the Queen. In the more remote parts of the kingdom the proceedings of the visitors threatened to wake the religious strife which she was endeavouring to lull to sleep. On the northern border, where the great nobles, Lord Dacres and the Earls of Cumberland and Westmoreland, were zealous Catholics, and refused to let the bishop "meddle with them," the clergy held stubbornly aloof. At Durham a parson was able to protest without danger that the Pope alone had power in spiritual matters. In Hereford the town turned out to receive in triumph a party of priests from the west who had refused the oath. The University of Oxford took refuge in sullen opposition. In spite of pressure from the Protestant prelates, who occupied the sees vacated by the deprived bishops, Elizabeth was firm in her policy of patience, and in December she ordered the Commissioners in both provinces to suspend their proceedings.

[Sidenote: The Religious Chaos.]

In part indeed of her effort she was foiled by the bitterness of the reformers. The London mob tore down the crosses in the streets. Her attempt to retain the crucifix, or to enforce the celibacy of the priesthood, fell dead before the opposition of the Protestant clergy. But to the mass of the nation the compromise of Elizabeth seems to have been fairly acceptable. They saw but little change. Their old vicar or rector in almost every case remained in his parsonage and ministered in his church. The new Prayer-Book was for the most part an English rendering of the old service. Even the more zealous adherents of Catholicism held as yet that in complying with the order for attendance at public worship "there could be nothing positively unlawful." Where party feeling ran high indeed the matter was sometimes settled by a compromise. A priest would celebrate mass at his parsonage for the more rigid Catholics, and administer the new communion in church to the more rigid Protestants. Sometimes both parties knelt together at the same altar-rails, the one to receive hosts consecrated by the priest at home after the old usage, the other wafers consecrated in church after the new. In many parishes of the north no change of service was made at all. Even where priest and people conformed it was often with a secret belief that better times were soon to bring back the older observances. As late as 1569 some of the chief parishes in Sussex were still merely bending to the storm of heresy. "In the church of Arundel certain altars do stand yet, to the offence of the godly, which murmur and speak much against the same. In the town of Battle when a preacher doth come and speak anything against the Pope's doctrine they will not abide but get them out of the church. They have yet in the diocese in many places thereof images hidden and other popish ornaments ready to set up the mass again within twenty-four hours warning. In many places they keep yet their chalices, looking to have mass again." Nor was there much new teaching as yet to stir up strife in those who clung to the older faith. Elizabeth had no mind for controversies which would set her people by the ears. "In many churches they have no sermons, not one in seven years, and some not one in twelve." The older priests of Mary's days held their peace. The Protestant preachers were few and hampered by the exaction of licences. In many cases churches had "neither parson, vicar, nor curate, but a sorry reader." Even where the new clergy were of higher intellectual stamp they were often unpopular. Many of those who were set in the place of the displaced clergy roused disgust by their violence and greed. Chapters plundered their own estates by leases and fines and by felling timber. The marriages of the clergy became a scandal, which was increased when the gorgeous vestments of the old worship were cut up into gowns and bodices for the priests' wives. The new services sometimes turned into scenes of utter disorder where the ministers wore what dress they pleased and the communicant stood or sat as he liked; while the old altars were broken down and the communion-table was often a bare board upon trestles. Only in the few places where the more zealous of the reformers had settled was there any religious instruction. "In many places," it was reported after ten years of the Queen's rule, "the people cannot yet say their commandments, and in some not the articles of their belief." Naturally enough, the bulk of Englishmen were found to be "utterly devoid of religion," and came to church "as to a May game."

[Sidenote: Parker.]

To modern eyes the Church under Elizabeth would seem little better than a religious chaos. But England was fairly used to religious confusion, for the whole machinery of English religion had been thrown out of gear by the rapid and radical changes of the last two reigns. And to the Queen's mind a religious chaos was a far less difficulty than the parting of the nation into two warring Churches which would have been brought about by a more rigorous policy. She trusted to time to bring about greater order; and she found in Matthew Parker, whom Pole's death at the moment of her accession enabled her to raise to the See of Canterbury, an agent in the reorganization of the Church whose patience and moderation were akin to her own. To the difficulties which Parker found indeed in the temper of the reformers and their opponents new difficulties were sometimes added by the freaks of the Queen herself. If she had no convictions, she had tastes; and her taste revolted from the bareness of Protestant ritual and above all from the marriage of priests. "Leave that alone," she shouted to Dean Nowell from the royal closet as he denounced the use of images—"stick to your text, Master Dean, leave that alone!" When Parker was firm in resisting the introduction of the crucifix or of celibacy, Elizabeth showed her resentment by an insult to his wife. Married ladies were addressed at this time as "Madam," unmarried ladies as "Mistress"; but the marriage of the clergy was still unsanctioned by law, for Elizabeth had refused to revive the statute of Edward by which it was allowed, and the position of a priest's wife was legally a very doubtful one. When Mrs. Parker therefore advanced at the close of a sumptuous entertainment at Lambeth to take leave of the Queen, Elizabeth feigned a momentary hesitation. "Madam," she said at last, "I may not call you, and Mistress I am loath to call you; however, I thank you for your good cheer." But freaks of this sort had little real weight beside the steady support which the Queen gave to the Primate in his work of order. The vacant sees were filled with men from among the exiles, for the most part learned and able, though far more Protestant than the bulk of their flocks; the plunder of the Church by the nobles was checked; and at the close of 1559 England seemed to settle quietly down in a religious peace.

[Sidenote: England Protestant.]

But cautious as had been Elizabeth's movements and skilfully as she had hidden the real drift of her measures from the bulk of the people, the religion of England was changed. The old service was gone. The old bishops were gone. The royal supremacy was again restored. All connexion with Rome was again broken. The repudiation of the Papacy and the restoration of the Prayer-Book in the teeth of the unanimous opposition of the priesthood had established the great principle of the Reformation, that the form of a nation's faith should be determined not by the clergy but by the nation itself. Different therefore as was the temper of the government, the religious attitude of England was once more what it had been under the Protectorate. At the most critical moment of the strife between the new religion and the old England had ranged itself on the side of Protestantism. It was only the later history of Elizabeth's reign which was to reveal of what mighty import this Protestantism of England was to prove. Had England remained Catholic the freedom of the Dutch Republic would have been impossible. No Henry the Fourth would have reigned in France to save French Protestantism by the Edict of Nantes. No struggle over far-off seas would have broken the power of Spain and baffled the hopes which the House of Austria cherished of winning a mastery over the western world. Nor could Calvinism have found a home across the northern border. The first result of the religious change in England was to give a new impulse to the religious revolution in Scotland.

[Sidenote: Scotch Calvinism.]

In the midst of anxieties at home Elizabeth had been keenly watching the fortunes of the north. We have seen how the policy of Mary of Guise had given life and force to the Scottish Reformation. Not only had the Regent given shelter to the exiled Protestants and looked on at the diffusion of the new doctrines, but her "fair words" had raised hopes that the government itself would join the ranks of the reformers. Mary of Guise had regarded the religious movement in a purely political light. It was as enemies of Mary Tudor that she gave shelter to the exiles, and it was to avoid a national strife which would have left Scotland open to English attack in the war which closed Mary's reign that the Regent gave "fair words" to the preachers. But with the first Covenant, with the appearance of the Lords of the Congregation in an avowed league in the heart of the land, with their rejection of the state worship and their resolve to enforce a change of religion, her attitude suddenly altered. To the Regent the new religion was henceforth but a garb under which the old quarrel of the nobles was breaking out anew against the Crown. Smooth as were her words, men knew that Mary of Guise was resolute to withstand religious change. But Elizabeth's elevation to the throne gave a new fire to the reformers. Conservative as her earlier policy seemed, the instinct of the Protestants told them that the new Queen's accession was a triumph for Protestantism. The Lords at once demanded that all bishops should be chosen by the nobles and gentry, each priest by his parish, and that divine service should be henceforth in the vulgar tongue. These demands were rejected by the bishops, while the royal court in May 1559 summoned the preachers to its bar and on their refusal to appear condemned them to banishment as rebels. The sentence was a signal for open strife. The Protestants, whose strength as yet lay mainly in Fife, had gathered in great numbers at Perth, and the news stirred them to an outbreak of fury. The images were torn down from the churches, the monasteries of the town were sacked and demolished. The riot at Perth was followed by a general rising. The work of destruction went on along the east coast and through the Lowlands, while the "Congregation" sprang up everywhere in its train. The Mass came to an end. The Prayer-Book of Edward was heard in the churches. The Lords occupied the capital and found its burghers as zealous in the cause of reformation as themselves. Throughout all these movements the Lords had been in communication with England, for the old jealousy of English annexation was now lost in a jealousy of French conquest. Their jealousy had solid grounds. The marriage of Mary Stuart with the Dauphin of France had been celebrated in April 1558 and three days before the wedding the girl-queen had been brought to convey her kingdom away by deed to the House of Valois. The deed was kept secret; but Mary's demand of the crown matrimonial for her husband roused suspicions. It was known that the government of Scotland was discussed at the French council-board, and whispers came of a suggestion that the kingdom should be turned into an appanage for a younger son of the French king. Meanwhile French money was sent to the Regent, a body of French troops served as her bodyguard, and on the advance of the Lords in arms the French Court promised her the support of a larger army.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Elizabeth.]

Against these schemes of the French Court the Scotch Lords saw no aid save in Elizabeth. Their aim was to drive the Frenchmen out of Scotland; and this could only be done by help both in money and men from England. Nor was the English Council slow to promise help. To Elizabeth indeed the need of supporting rebels against their sovereign was a bitter one. The need of establishing a Calvinistic Church on her frontier was yet bitterer. It was not a material force which upheld the fabric of the monarchy, as it had been built up by the Houses of York and of Tudor, but a moral force. England held that safety against anarchy within and against attacks on the national independence from without was to be found in the Crown alone, and that obedience to the Crown was the first element of national order and national greatness. In their religious reforms the Tudor sovereigns had aimed at giving a religious sanction to the power which sprang from this general conviction, and at hallowing their secular supremacy by blending with it their supremacy over the Church. Against such a theory, either of Church or State, Calvinism was an emphatic protest, and in aiding Calvinism to establish itself in Scotland the Queen felt that she was dealing a heavy blow to her political and religious system at home. But, struggle as she might against the necessity, she had no choice but to submit. The assumption by Francis and Mary of the style of king and queen of England, the express reservation of this claim, even in the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, made a French occupation of Scotland a matter of life and death to the kingdom over the border. The English Council believed "that the French mean, after their forces are brought into Scotland, first to conquer it,—which will be neither hard nor long—and next that they and the Scots will invade this realm." They were soon pressed to decide on their course. The Regent used her money to good purpose, and at the approach of her forces the Lords withdrew from Edinburgh to the west. At the end of August two thousand French soldiers landed at Leith, as the advance guard of the promised forces, and entrenched themselves strongly. It was in vain that the Lords again appeared in the field, demanded the withdrawal of the foreigners, and threatened Mary of Guise that as she would no longer hold them for her counsellors "we also will no longer acknowledge you as our Regent." They were ordered to disperse as traitors, beaten off from the fortifications of Leith, and attacked by the French troops in Fife itself.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's action.]

The Lords called loudly for aid from the English Queen. To give such assistance would have seemed impossible but twelve months back. But the appeal of the Scots found a different England from that which had met Elizabeth on her accession. The Queen's diplomacy had gained her a year, and her matchless activity had used the year to good purpose. Order was restored throughout England, the Church was reorganized, the debts of the Crown were in part paid off, the treasury was recruited, a navy created, and a force made ready for action in the north. Neither religiously nor politically indeed had Elizabeth any sympathy with the Scotch Lords. Knox was to her simply a firebrand of rebellion; her political instinct shrank from the Scotch Calvinism with its protest against the whole English system of government, whether in Church or State; and as a Queen she hated revolt. But the danger forced her hand. Elizabeth was ready to act, and to act even in the defiance of France. As yet she stood almost alone in her self-reliance. Spain believed her ruin to be certain. Her challenge would bring war with France, and in a war with France the Spanish statesmen held that only their master's intervention could save her. "For our own sake," said one of Philip's ministers, "we must take as much care of England as of the Low Countries." But that such a care would be needed Granvelle never doubted; and Philip's councillors solemnly debated whether it might not be well to avoid the risk of a European struggle by landing the six thousand men whom Philip was now withdrawing from the Netherlands on the English shore, and coercing Elizabeth into quietness. France meanwhile despised her chances. Her very Council was in despair. The one minister in whom she dared to confide throughout these Scotch negotiations was Cecil, the youngest and boldest of her advisers, and even Cecil trembled for her success. The Duke of Norfolk refused at first to take command of the force destined as he held for a desperate enterprise. Arundel, the leading peer among the Catholics, denounced the supporters of a Scottish war as traitors. But lies and hesitation were no sooner put aside than the Queen's vigour and tenacity came fairly into play. In January 1560, at a moment when D'Oysel, the French commander, was on the point of crushing the Lords of the Congregation, an English fleet appeared suddenly in the Forth and forced the Regent's army to fall back upon Leith.

[Sidenote: The Huguenot rising.]

Here however it again made an easy stand against the Protestant attacks, and at the close of February the Queen was driven to make a formal treaty with the Lords by which she promised to assist them in the expulsion of the strangers. The treaty was a bold defiance of the power from whom Elizabeth had been glad to buy peace only a year before, even by the sacrifice of Calais. But the Queen had little fear of a counter-blow from France. The Reformation was fighting for her on the one side of the sea as on the other. From the outset of her reign the rapid growth of the Huguenots in France had been threatening a strife between the old religion and the new. It was to gird himself for such a struggle that Henry the Second concluded the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis; and though Henry's projects were foiled by his death, the Duke of Guise, who ruled his successor, Francis the Second, pressed on yet more bitterly the work of persecution. It was believed that he had sworn to exterminate "those of the religion." But the Huguenots were in no mood to bear extermination. Their Protestantism, like that of the Scots, was the Protestantism of Calvin. As they grew in numbers, their churches formed themselves on the model of Geneva, and furnished in their synods and assemblies a political as well as a religious organization; while the doctrine of resistance even to kings, if kings showed themselves enemies to God, found ready hearers, whether among the turbulent French noblesse, or among the traders of the towns who were stirred to new dreams of constitutional freedom. Theories of liberty or of resistance to the crown were as abhorrent to Elizabeth as to the Guises, but again necessity swept her into the current of Calvinism. She was forced to seize on the religious disaffection of France as a check on the dreams of aggression which Francis and Mary had shown in assuming the style of English Sovereigns. The English ambassador, Throckmorton, fed the alarms of the Huguenots and pressed them to take up arms. It is probable that the Huguenot plot which broke out in the March of 1560 in an attempt to surprise the French Court at Amboise was known beforehand by Cecil; and, though the conspiracy was ruthlessly suppressed, the Queen drew fresh courage from a sense that the Guises had henceforth work for their troops at home.

[Sidenote: Treaty of Edinburgh.]

At the end of March therefore Lord Grey pushed over the border with 8000 men to join the Lords of the Congregation in the siege of Leith. The Scots gave little aid; and an assault on the town signally failed. Philip too in a sudden jealousy of Elizabeth's growing strength demanded the abandonment of the enterprise, and offered to warrant England against any attack from the north if its forces were withdrawn. But eager as Elizabeth was to preserve Philip's alliance, she preferred to be her own security. She knew that the Spanish king could not abandon her while Mary Stuart was queen of France, and that at the moment of his remonstrances Philip was menacing the Guises with war if they carried out their project of bringing about a Catholic rising by a descent on the English coast. Nor were the threats of the French Court more formidable. The bloody repression of the conspiracy of Amboise had only fired the temper of the Huguenots; southern and western France were on the verge of revolt; the House of Bourbon had adopted the reformed faith, and put itself at the head of the Protestant movement. In the face of dangers such as these the Guises could send to Leith neither money nor men. Elizabeth therefore remained immoveable while famine did its work on the town. At the crisis of the siege the death of Mary of Guise threw the direct rule over Scotland into the hands of Francis and Mary Stuart; and the exhaustion of the garrison forced the two sovereigns to purchase its liberation by two treaties which their envoys concluded at Edinburgh in June 1560. That with the Scotch pledged them to withdraw for ever the French from the realm, and left the government of Scotland to a Council of the Lords. The treaty with England was a more difficult matter. Francis and Mary had forbidden their envoys to sign any engagement with Elizabeth as to the Scottish realm, or to consent to any abandonment of their claims on the royal style of England. It was only after long debate that Cecil wrested from them the acknowledgement that the realms of England and Ireland of right appertained to Elizabeth, and a vague clause by which the French sovereigns promised the English Queen that they would fulfil their pledges to the Scots.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's character.]

Stubborn however as was the resistance of the French envoys the signature of the treaty proclaimed Elizabeth's success. The issue of the Scotch war revealed suddenly to Europe the vigour of the Queen and the strength of her throne. What her ability really was no one, save Cecil, had as yet suspected. There was little indeed in her outward demeanour to give any indication of her greatness. To the world about her the temper of Elizabeth recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed blood within her veins. She was at once a daughter of Henry and of Anne Boleyn. From her father she inherited her frank and hearty address, her love of popularity and of free intercourse with the people, her dauntless courage and her amazing self-confidence. Her harsh, manlike voice, her impetuous will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger came to her with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were schoolboys; she met the insolence of Lord Essex with a box on the ear; she broke now and then into the gravest deliberations to swear at her ministers like a fishwife. Strangely in contrast with these violent outlines of her father's temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature she drew from Anne Boleyn. Splendour and pleasure were with Elizabeth the very air she breathed. Her delight was to move in perpetual progresses from castle to castle through a series of gorgeous pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a caliph's dream. She loved gaiety and laughter and wit. A happy retort or a finished compliment never failed to win her favour. She hoarded jewels. Her dresses were innumerable. Her vanity remained, even to old age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens. No adulation was too fulsome for her, no flattery of her beauty too gross. She would play with her rings that her courtiers might note the delicacy of her hands; or dance a coranto that an ambassador, hidden dexterously behind a curtain, might report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests gave colour to a thousand scandals. Her character in fact, like her portraits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy veiled the voluptuous temper which broke out in the romps of her girlhood and showed itself almost ostentatiously through her later life. Personal beauty in a man was a sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome young squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and fondled her "sweet Robin," Lord Leicester, in the face of the Court.

It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held Elizabeth to be little more than a frivolous woman, or that Philip of Spain wondered how "a wanton" could hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. Wilfulness and triviality played over the surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very type of reason untouched by imagination or passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, the young Queen lived simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her vanity and caprice had no weight whatever with her in state affairs. The coquette of the presence-chamber became the coolest and hardest of politicians at the council-board. Fresh from the flattery of her courtiers, she would tolerate no flattery in the closet; she was herself plain and downright of speech with her counsellors, and she looked for a corresponding plainness of speech in return. The very choice of her advisers indeed showed Elizabeth's ability. She had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her service. The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham was just as unerring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success indeed in securing from the beginning of her reign to its end, with the single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them to do sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim the Queen's temper fell below many of the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy it stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with Bruno; she could discuss Euphuism with Lilly, and enjoy the chivalry of Essex; she could turn from talk of the last fashions to pore with Cecil over despatches and treasury books; she could pass from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points of doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances of a north-west passage to the Indies. The versatility and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand every phase of the intellectual movement about her, and to fix by a sort of instinct on its higher representatives.

It was only on its intellectual side indeed that Elizabeth touched the England of her day. All its moral aspects were simply dead to her. It was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness by the new moral energy which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole people, when honour and enthusiasm took colours of poetic beauty, and religion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the men about her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a picture would have touched her. She made her market with equal indifference out of the heroism of William of Orange or the bigotry of Philip. The noblest aims and lives were only counters on her board. She was the one soul in her realm whom the news of St. Bartholomew stirred to no thirst for vengeance; and while England was thrilling with the triumph over the Armada, its Queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making her profit out of the spoiled provisions she had ordered for the fleet that saved her. No womanly sympathy bound her even to those who stood closest to her life. She loved Leicester indeed; she was grateful to Cecil. But for the most part she was deaf to the voices either of love or gratitude. She accepted such services as were never rendered to any other English sovereign without a thought of return. Walsingham spent his fortune in saving her life and her throne, and she left him to die a beggar. But, as if by a strange irony, it was to this very lack of womanly sympathy that she owed some of the grandest features of her character. If she was without love she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good humour was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every Court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last a mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the thought hardest to bring home to her. Even when Catholic plots broke out in her very household she would listen to no proposals for the removal of Catholics from her court.

If any trace of her sex lingered in the Queen's actual statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity of purpose that often underlies a woman's fluctuations of feeling. It was the directness and steadiness of her aims which gave her her marked superiority over the statesmen of her time. No nobler group of ministers ever gathered round a council-board than those who gathered round the council-board of Elizabeth. But she was the instrument of none. She listened, she weighed, she used or put by the counsels of each in turn, but her policy as a whole was her own. It was a policy, not of genius, but of good sense. Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution and timidity perhaps backed the passionless indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. In later days she was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her "head of the religion" and "mistress of the seas." But her amazing success in the end sprang mainly from this wise limitation of her aims. She had a finer sense than any of her counsellors of her real resources; she knew instinctively how far she could go and what she could do. Her cold, critical intellect was never swayed by enthusiasm or by panic either to exaggerate or to underestimate her risks or her power. Of political wisdom indeed in its larger and more generous sense Elizabeth had little or none; but her political tact was unerring. She seldom saw her course at a glance, but she played with a hundred courses, fitfully and discursively, as a musician runs his fingers over the keyboard, till she hit suddenly upon the right one. Her nature was essentially practical and of the present. She distrusted a plan in fact just in proportion to its speculative range or its outlook into the future. Her notion of statesmanship lay in watching how things turned out around her, and in seizing the moment for making the best of them.

Such a policy as this, limited, practical, tentative as it always was, had little of grandeur and originality about it; it was apt indeed to degenerate into mere trickery and finesse. But it was a policy suited to the England of her day, to its small resources and the transitional character of its religious and political belief, and it was eminently suited to Elizabeth's peculiar powers. It was a policy of detail, and in details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity found scope for their exercise. "No War, my Lords," the Queen used to cry imperiously at the council-board, "No War!" but her hatred of war sprang not so much from aversion to blood or to expense, real as was her aversion to both, as from the fact that peace left the field open to the diplomatic manoeuvres and intrigues in which she excelled. Her delight in the consciousness of her ingenuity broke out in a thousand puckish freaks, freaks in which one can hardly see any purpose beyond the purpose of sheer mystification. She revelled in "bye-ways" and "crooked ways." She played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, and with much of the same feline delight in the mere embarrassment of her victims. When she was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen she turned to find fresh sport in mystifying her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign she would have prided herself, not on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nothing is more revolting, but nothing is more characteristic of the Queen, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty; and the ease with which she asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose was only equalled by the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. Her trickery in fact had its political value. Ignoble and wearisome as the Queen's diplomacy seems to us now, tracking it as we do through a thousand despatches, it succeeded in its main end, for it gained time, and every year that was gained doubled Elizabeth's strength. She made as dexterous a use of the foibles of her temper. Her levity carried her gaily over moments of detection and embarrassment where better women would have died of shame. She screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury and sports to good account. There were moments of grave danger in her reign when the country remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the Queen give her days to hawking and hunting, and her nights to dancing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive candidates for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and conspiracies by love sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation.

As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. But, wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were throughout temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a rare tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse; but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. "I have the heart of a King," she cried at a moment of utter peril, and it was with a kingly unconsciousness of the dangers about her that she fronted them for fifty years. She had, as strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. "Her Majesty counts much on Fortune," Walsingham wrote bitterly; "I wish she would trust more in Almighty God." The diplomatists who censured at one moment her irresolution, her delay, her changes of front, censure at the next her "obstinacy," her iron will, her defiance of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. "This woman," Philip's envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance, "this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand devils." To her own subjects, who knew nothing of her manoeuvres and flirtations, of her "bye-ways" and "crooked ways," she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish Main or glided between the icebergs of Baffin's Bay never doubted that the palm of bravery lay with their Queen.

[Sidenote: Catharine of Medicis.]

It was this dauntless courage which backed Elizabeth's good luck in the Scottish war. The issue of the war wholly changed her position at home and abroad. Not only had she liberated herself from the control of Philip and successfully defied the threats of the Guises, but at a single blow she had freed England from what had been its sorest danger for two hundred years. She had broken the dependence of Scotland upon France. That perpetual peace between England and the Scots which the policy of the Tudors had steadily aimed at was at last sworn in the Treaty of Edinburgh. If the Queen had not bound to her all Scotland, she had bound to her the strongest and most vigorous party among the nobles of the north. The Lords of the Congregation promised to be obedient to Elizabeth in all such matters as might not lead to the overthrow of their country's rights or of Scottish liberties. They were bound to her not only by the war but by the events that followed the war. A Parliament at Edinburgh accepted the Calvinistic confession of Geneva as the religion of Scotland, abolished the temporal jurisdiction of the bishops, and prohibited the celebration of the Mass. The Act and the Treaty were alike presented for confirmation to Francis and Mary. They were roughly put aside, for the French king would give no sanction to a successful revolt, and Mary had no mind to waive her claim to the English throne. But from action the two sovereigns were held back by the troubles in France. It was in vain that the Guises strove to restore political and religious unity by an assembly of the French notables: the notables met only to receive a demand for freedom of worship from the Huguenots of the west, and to force the Government to promise a national council for the settlement of the religious disputes as well as a gathering of the States-General. The counsellors of Francis resolved to anticipate this meeting by a sudden stroke at the heretics; and as a preliminary step the chiefs of the House of Bourbon were seized at the court and the Prince of Conde threatened with death. The success of this measure roused anew the wrath of the young king at the demands of the Scots, and at the close of 1560 Francis was again nursing plans of vengeance on the Lords of the Congregation. But Elizabeth's good fortune still proved true to her. The projects of the Guises were suddenly foiled by the young king's death. The power of Mary Stuart and her kindred came to an end, for the childhood of Charles the Ninth gave the regency over France to the queen-mother, Catharine of Medicis, and the policy of Catharine secured England and Scotland alike from danger of attack. Her temper, like that of Elizabeth, was a purely political temper; her aim was to balance Catholics against Protestants to the profit of the throne. She needed peace abroad to preserve this political and religious balance at home, and though she made some fruitless efforts to renew the old friendship with Scotland, she had no mind to intrigue like the Guises with the English Catholics nor to back Mary Stuart's pretensions to the English throne.

[Sidenote: Philip's policy.]

With Scotland as an ally and with France at peace Elizabeth's throne at last seemed secure. The outbreak of the strife between the Old Faith and the New indeed, if it gave the Queen safety abroad, somewhat weakened her at home. The sense of a religious change which her caution had done so much to disguise broke slowly on England as it saw the Queen allying herself with Scotch Calvinists and French Huguenots; and the compromise she had hoped to establish in matters of worship became hourly less possible as the more earnest Catholics discerned the Protestant drift of Elizabeth's policy. But Philip still held them back from any open resistance. There was much indeed to move him from his old support of the Queen. The widowhood of Mary Stuart freed him from his dread of a permanent annexation of Scotland by France as well as of a French annexation of England, while the need of holding England as a check on French hostility to the House of Austria grew weaker as the outbreak of civil war between the Guises and their opponents rendered French hostility less possible. Elizabeth's support of the Huguenots drove the Spanish king to a burst of passion. A Protestant France not only outraged his religious bigotry, but, as he justly feared, it would give an impulse to heresy throughout his possessions in the Netherlands which would make it hard to keep his hold upon them. Philip noted that the success of the Scotch Calvinists had been followed by the revolt of the Calvinists in France. He could hardly doubt that the success of the French Huguenots would be followed by a rising of the Calvinists in the Low Countries. "Religion" he told Elizabeth angrily "was being made a cloak for anarchy and revolution." But, vexed as Philip was with her course both abroad and at home, he was still far from withdrawing his support from Elizabeth. Even now he could not look upon the Queen as lost to Catholicism. He knew how her course both at home and abroad had been forced on her not by religious enthusiasm but by political necessity, and he still "trusted that ere long God would give us either a general council or a good Pope who would correct abuses and then all would go well. That God would allow so noble and Christian a realm as England to break away from Christendom and run the risk of perdition he could not believe."

[Sidenote: Pius the Fourth.]

What was needed, Philip thought, was a change of policy in the Papacy. The bigotry of Paul the Fourth had driven England from the obedience of the Roman See. The gentler policy of Pius the Fourth might yet restore her to it. Pius was as averse from any break with Elizabeth as Philip was. He censured bitterly the harshness of his predecessor. The loss of Scotland and the threatened loss of France he laid to the charge of the wars which Paul had stirred up against Philip and which had opened a way for the spread of Calvinism in both kingdoms. England, he held, could have been easily preserved for Catholicism but for Paul's rejection of the conciliatory efforts of Pole. When he ascended the Papal throne at the end of 1559 indeed the accession of England to the Reformation seemed complete. The royal supremacy was re-established: the Mass abolished: the English Liturgy restored. A new episcopate, drawn from the Calvinistic refugees, was being gathered round Matthew Parker. But Pius would not despair. He saw no reason why England should not again be Catholic. He knew that the bulk of its people clung to the older religion, if they clung also to independence of the Papal jurisdiction and to the secularization of the Abbey-lands. The Queen, as he believed, had been ready for a compromise at her accession, and he was ready to make terms with her now. In the spring of 1560 therefore he despatched Parpaglia, a follower of Pole, to open negotiations with Elizabeth. The moment which the Pope had chosen was a critical one for the Queen. She was in the midst of the Scotch war, and her forces had just been repulsed in an attempt to storm the walls of Leith. Such a repulse woke fears of conspiracy among the Catholic nobles of the northern border, and a refusal to receive the legate would have driven them to an open rising. On the other hand the reception of Parpaglia would have alienated the Protestants, shaken the trust of the Lords of the Congregation in the Queen's support, and driven them to make terms with Francis and Mary. In either case Scotland fell again under the rule of France, and the throne of Elizabeth was placed in greater peril than ever. So great was the Queen's embarrassment that she availed herself of Cecil's absence in the north to hold out hopes of the legate's admission to the realm and her own reconciliation with the Papacy. But she was freed from these difficulties by the resolute intervention of Philip. If he disapproved of her policy in Scotland he had no mind that Scotland should become wholly French or Elizabeth be really shaken on her throne. He ordered the legate therefore to be detained in Flanders till his threats had obtained from the Pope an order for his recall.

[Sidenote: The Council of Trent.]

But Pius was far from abandoning his hopes. After ten years suspension he had again summoned the Council of Trent. The cry for Church reform, the threat of national synods in Spain and in France, forced this measure on the Pope; and Pius availed himself of the assembly of the Council to make a fresh attempt to turn the tide of the Reformation and to win back the Protestant Churches to Catholicism. He called therefore on the Lutheran princes of Germany to send doctors to the Council, and in May 1561, eight months after Parpaglia's failure, despatched a fresh nuncio, Martinengo, to invite Elizabeth to send ambassadors to Trent. Philip pressed for the nuncio's admission to the realm. His hopes of the Queen's return to the faith were now being fed by a new marriage-negotiation; for on the withdrawal of the Archduke of Austria in sheer weariness of Elizabeth's treachery, she had encouraged her old playfellow, Lord Robert Dudley, to hope for her hand and to amuse Philip by pledges of bringing back "the religion," should the help of the Spanish king enable him to win it. Philip gave his help, but Dudley remained a suitor, and the hopes of a Catholic revolution became fainter than ever. The Queen would suffer no landing of a legate in her realm. The invitation to the Council fared no better. The Lutheran states of North Germany had already refused to attend. The Council, they held, was no longer a council of reunion. In its earlier session it had formally condemned the very doctrine on which Protestantism was based; and to join it now would simply be to undo all that Luther had done. Elizabeth showed as little hesitation. The hour of her triumph, when a Calvinistic Scotland and a Calvinistic France proved the mainstays of her policy, was no hour of submission to the Papacy. In spite of Philip's entreaties she refused to send envoys to what was not "a free Christian Council." The refusal was decisive in marking Elizabeth's position. The long period of hesitation, of drift, was over. All chance of submission to the Papacy was at an end. In joining the Lutheran states in their rejection of this Council, England had definitely ranged itself on the side of the Reformation.



CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND MARY STUART

1561-1567

[Sidenote: The English Catholics.]

What had hitherto kept the bulk of Elizabeth's subjects from opposition to her religious system was a disbelief in its permanence. Englishmen had seen English religion changed too often to believe that it would change no more. When the Commissioners forced a Protestant ritual on St. John's College at Oxford, its founder, Sir Thomas White, simply took away its vestments and crucifixes, and hid them in his house for the better times that every zealous Catholic trusted would have their turn. They believed that a Catholic marriage would at once bring such a turn about; and if Elizabeth dismissed the offer of Philip's hand she played long and assiduously with that of a son of the Emperor, an archduke of the same Austrian house. But the alliance with the Scotch heretics proved a rough blow to this trust: and after the repulse at Leith there were whispers that the two great Catholic nobles of the border, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, were only waiting for the failure of the Scotch enterprise to rise on behalf of the older faith. Whatever their projects were, they were crushed by the Queen's success. With the Lords of the Congregation masters across the border the northern Earls lay helpless between the two Protestant realms. In the mass of men loyalty was still too strong for any dream of revolt; but there was a growing uneasiness lest they should find themselves heretics after all, which the failure of the Austrian match and the help given to the Huguenots was fanning into active discontent. It was this which gave such weight to the Queen's rejection of the summons to Trent. Whatever colour she might strive to put upon it, the bulk of her subjects accepted the refusal as a final break with Catholicism, as a final close to all hope of their reunion with the Catholic Church.

[Sidenote: Mary Stuart.]

The Catholic disaffection which the Queen was henceforth to regard as her greatest danger was thus growing into life when in August 1561, but a few months after the Queen's refusal to acknowledge the Council, Mary Stuart landed at Leith. Girl as she was, and she was only nineteen, Mary was hardly inferior in intellectual power to Elizabeth herself, while in fire and grace and brilliancy of temper she stood high above her. She brought with her the voluptuous refinement of the French Renascence; she would lounge for days in bed, and rise only at night for dances and music. But her frame was of iron, and incapable of fatigue; she galloped ninety miles after her last defeat without a pause save to change horses. She loved risk and adventure and the ring of arms; as she rode in a foray to the north the swordsmen beside her heard her wish she was a man "to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk on the cawsey with a jack and knapschalle, a Glasgow buckler and a broadsword." But in the closet she was as cool and astute a politician as Elizabeth herself; with plans as subtle, and of a far wider and bolder range than the Queen's. "Whatever policy is in all the chief and best practised heads of France," wrote an English envoy, "whatever craft, falsehood, and deceit is in all the subtle brains of Scotland, is either fresh in this woman's memory, or she can fetch it out with a wet finger." Her beauty, her exquisite grace of manner, her generosity of temper and warmth of affection, her frankness of speech, her sensibility, her gaiety, her womanly tears, her manlike courage, the play and freedom of her nature, the flashes of poetry that broke from her at every intense moment of her life, flung a spell over friend or foe which has only deepened with the lapse of years. Even to Knollys, the sternest Puritan of his day, she seemed in her later captivity to be "a notable woman." "She seemeth to regard no ceremonious honour besides the acknowledgement of her estate royal. She showeth a disposition to speak much, to be bold, to be pleasant, to be very familiar. She showeth a great desire to be avenged on her enemies. She showeth a readiness to expose herself to all perils in hope of victory. She desireth much to hear of hardiness and valiancy, commending by name all approved hardy men of her country though they be her enemies, and she concealeth no cowardice even in her friends."

[Sidenote: Mary's plans.]

Of the stern bigotry, the intensity of passion, which lay beneath the winning surface of Mary's womanhood, men as yet knew nothing. But they at once recognized her political ability. Till now she had proved in her own despite a powerful friend to the Reformation. It was her claim of the English crown which had seated Elizabeth on the throne, had thrown her on the support of the Protestants, and had secured to the Queen in the midst of her religious changes the protection of Philip of Spain. It was the dread of Mary's ambition which had forced Elizabeth to back the Lords of the Congregation, and the dread of her husband's ambition which had driven Scotland to throw aside its jealousy of England and ally itself with the Queen. But with the death of Francis Mary's position had wholly changed. She had no longer the means of carrying out her husband's threats of crushing the Lords of the Congregation by force of arms. The forces of France were in the hands of Catharine of Medicis; and Catharine was parted from her both by her dread of the Guises and by a personal hate. Yet the attitude of the Lords became every day more threatening. They were pressing Elizabeth to marry the Earl of Arran, a chief of the house of Hamilton and near heir to the throne, a marriage which pointed to the complete exclusion of Mary from her realm. Even when this project failed, they rejected with stern defiance the young Queen's proposal of restoring the old religion as a condition of her return. If they invited her to Scotland, it was in the name of the Parliament which had set up Calvinism as the law of the land. Bitter as such terms must have been Mary had no choice but to submit to them. To accept the offer of the Catholic Lords of Northern Scotland with the Earl of Huntly at their head, who proposed to welcome her in arms as a champion of Catholicism, was to risk a desperate civil war, a war which would in any case defeat a project far dearer to her than her plans for winning Scotland, the project she was nursing of winning the English realm. In the first months of her widowhood therefore her whole attitude was reversed. She received the leader of the Protestant Lords, her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, at her court. She showed her favour to him by creating him Earl of Murray. She adopted his policy of accepting the religious changes in Scotland and of bringing Elizabeth by friendly pressure to acknowledge her right, not of reigning in her stead, but of following her on the throne. But while thus in form adopting Murray's policy, Mary at heart was resolute to carry out her own policy too. If she must win the Scots by submitting to a Protestant system in Scotland, she would rally round her the English Catholics by remaining a Catholic herself. If she ceased to call herself Queen of England and only pressed for her acknowledgement as rightful successor to Elizabeth, she would not formally abandon her claim to reign as rightful Queen in Elizabeth's stead. Above all she would give her compliance with Murray's counsels no legal air. No pressure either from her brother or from Elizabeth could bring the young Queen to give her royal confirmation to the Parliamentary Acts which established the new religion in Scotland, or her signature to the Treaty of Edinburgh. In spite of her habitual caution the bold words which broke from Mary Stuart on Elizabeth's refusal of a safe conduct betrayed her hopes. "I came to France in spite of her brother's opposition," she said, "and I will return in spite of her own. She has combined with rebel subjects of mine: but there are rebel subjects in England too who would gladly listen to a call from me. I am a queen as well as she, and not altogether friendless. And perhaps I have as great a soul too!"