[Sidenote: Langside.]

But Mary had only consented to abdicate because she felt sure of escape. With an infant king the regency of Murray promised to be a virtual sovereignty; and the old factions of Scotland woke again into life. The house of Hamilton, which stood next in succession to the throne, became the centre of a secret league which gathered to it the nobles and prelates who longed for the re-establishment of Catholicism, and who saw in Alva's triumph a pledge of their own. The regent's difficulties were doubled by the policy of Elizabeth. Her wrath at the revolt of subjects against their Queen, her anxiety that "by this example none of her own be encouraged," only grew with the disregard of her protests and threats. In spite of Cecil she refused to recognize Murray's government, renewed her demands for the Queen's release, and encouraged the Hamiltons in their designs of freeing her. She was in fact stirred by more fears than her dread of Calvinism and of Calvinistic liberty. Philip's triumph in the Netherlands and the presence of his army across the sea was filling the Catholics of the northern counties with new hopes, and scaring Elizabeth from any joint action with the Scotch Calvinists which might call the Spanish forces over sea. She even stooped to guard against any possible projects of Philip by fresh negotiations for a marriage with one of the Austrian archdukes. But the negotiations proved as fruitless as before, while Scotland moved boldly forward in its new career. A Parliament which assembled at the opening of 1568 confirmed the deposition of the Queen, and made Catholic worship punishable with the pain of death. The triumph of Calvinistic bigotry only hastened the outbreak which had long been preparing, and at the beginning of May an escape of Mary from her prison was a signal for civil war. Five days later six thousand men gathered round her at Hamilton, and Argyle joined the Catholic lords who rallied to her banner. The news found different welcomes at the English court. Elizabeth at once offered to arbitrate between Mary and her subjects. Cecil, on the other hand, pressed Murray to strike quick and hard. But the regent needed little pressing. Surprised as he was, Murray was quickly in arms; and cutting off Mary's force as it moved on Dumbarton, he brought it to battle at Langside on the Clyde on the thirteenth of May, and broke it in a panic-stricken rout. Mary herself, after a fruitless effort to reach Dumbarton, fled southwards to find a refuge in Galloway. A ride of ninety miles brought her to the Solway, but she found her friends wavering in her support and ready to purchase pardon from Murray by surrendering her into the regent's hands. From that moment she abandoned all hope from Scotland. She believed that Elizabeth would in the interests of monarchy restore her to the throne; and changing her designs with the rapidity of genius, she pushed in a light boat across the Solway, and was safe before the evening fell in the castle of Carlisle.

[Sidenote: Mary in England.]

The presence of Alva in Flanders was a far less peril than the presence of Mary in Carlisle. To restore her, as she demanded, by force of arms was impossible. If Elizabeth was zealous for the cause of monarchy, she had no mind to crush the nobles who had given her security against her rival simply to seat that rival triumphantly on the throne. On the other hand to retain her in England was to furnish a centre for revolt. Mary herself indeed threatened that "if they kept her prisoner they should have enough to do with her." If the Queen would not aid in her restoration to the throne, she demanded a free passage to France. But compliance with such a request would have given the Guises a terrible weapon against Elizabeth and have ensured French intervention in Scotland. For a while Elizabeth hoped to bring Murray to receive Mary back peaceably as Queen. But the regent refused to sacrifice himself and the realm to Elizabeth's policy. When the Duke of Norfolk with other commissioners appeared at York to hold a formal enquiry into Mary's conduct with a view to her restoration, Murray openly charged the Queen with a share in the murder of her husband, and he produced letters from her to Bothwell, which if genuine substantiated the charge. Till Mary was cleared of guilt, Murray would hear nothing of her return, and Mary refused to submit to such a trial as would clear her. So eager however was Elizabeth to get rid of the pressing peril of her presence in England that Mary's refusal to submit to any trial only drove her to fresh devices for her restoration. She urged upon Murray the suppression of the graver charges, and upon Mary the leaving Murray in actual possession of the royal power as the price of her return. Neither however would listen to terms which sacrificed both to Elizabeth's self-interest. The Regent persisted in charging the Queen with murder and adultery. Mary refused either to answer or to abdicate in favour of her infant son.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's difficulties.]

The triumph indeed of her bold policy was best advanced, as the Queen of Scots had no doubt foreseen, by simple inaction. Her misfortunes, her resolute denials, were gradually wiping away the stain of her guilt and winning back the Catholics of England to her cause. Already there were plans for her marriage with Norfolk, the head of the English nobles, as for her marriage with the heir of the Hamiltons. The first match might give her the English crown, the second could hardly fail to restore her to the crown of Scotland. In any case her presence, rousing as it did fresh hopes of a Catholic reaction, put pressure on her sister Queen. Elizabeth "had the wolf by the ears," while the fierce contest which Alva's presence roused in France and in the Netherlands was firing the temper of the two great parties in England. In the Court, as in the country, the forces of progress and of resistance stood at last in sharp and declared opposition to each other. Cecil at the head of the Protestants demanded a general alliance with the Protestant churches throughout Europe, a war in the Low Countries against Alva, and the unconditional surrender of Mary to her Scotch subjects for the punishment she deserved. The Catholics on the other hand, backed by the mass of the Conservative party with the Duke of Norfolk at its head, and supported by the wealthier merchants who dreaded the ruin of the Flemish trade, were as earnest in demanding the dismissal of Cecil and the Protestants from the council-board, a steady peace with Spain, and, though less openly, a recognition of Mary's succession. Elizabeth was driven to temporize as before. She refused Cecil's counsels; but she sent money and arms to Conde, and hampered Alva by seizing treasure on its way to him, and by pushing the quarrel even to a temporary embargo on shipping either side the sea. She refused the counsels of Norfolk; but she would hear nothing of a declaration of war, or give any judgement on the charges against the Scottish Queen, or recognize the accession of James in her stead.

[Sidenote: Norfolk.]

But to the pressure of Alva and Mary was now added the pressure of Rome. With the triumph of Philip in the Netherlands and of the Guises in France Pius the Fifth held that the time had come for a decisive attack on Elizabeth. If Philip held back from playing the champion of Catholicism, if even the insults to Alva failed to stir him to active hostility, Rome could still turn to its adherents within the realm. Pius had already sent two envoys in 1567 with powers to absolve the English Catholics who had attended church from their schism, but to withdraw all hope of future absolution for those who continued to conform. The result of their mission however had been so small that it was necessary to go further. The triumph of Alva in the Netherlands, the failure of the Prince of Orange in an attempt to rescue them from the Spanish army, the terror-struck rising of the French Huguenots, the growing embarrassments of Elizabeth both at home and abroad, seemed to offer Rome its opportunity of delivering a final blow. In February 1569 the Queen was declared a heretic by a Bull which asserted in their strongest form the Papal claims to a temporal supremacy over princes. As a heretic and excommunicate, she was "deprived of her pretended right to the said kingdom," her subjects were absolved from allegiance to her, commanded "not to dare to obey her," and anathematized if they did obey. The Bull was not as yet promulgated, but Dr. Morton was sent into England to denounce the Queen as fallen from her usurped authority, and to promise the speedy issue of the sentence of deposition. The religious pressure was backed by political intrigue. Ridolfi, an Italian merchant settled in London, who had received full powers and money from Rome, knit the threads of a Catholic revolt in the north, and drew the Duke of Norfolk into correspondence with Mary Stuart. The Duke was the son of Lord Surrey and grandson of the Norfolk who had headed the Conservative party through the reign of Henry the Eighth. Like the rest of the English peers, he had acquiesced in the religious compromise of the Queen. It was as a Protestant that the more Conservative among his fellow-nobles now supported a project for his union with the Scottish Queen. With an English and Protestant husband it was thought that Murray and the lords might safely take back Mary to the Scottish throne, and England again accept her as the successor to her crown. But Norfolk was not contented with a single game. From the Pope and Philip he sought aid in his marriage-plot as a Catholic at heart, whose success would bring about a restoration of Catholicism throughout the realm. With the Catholic lords he plotted the overthrow of Cecil and the renewal of friendship with Spain. To carry out schemes such as these however required a temper of subtler and bolder stamp than the Duke's: Cecil found it easy by playing on his greed to part him from his fellow-nobles; his marriage with Mary as a Protestant was set aside by Murray's refusal to accept her as Queen; and Norfolk promised to enter into no correspondence with Mary Stuart but with Elizabeth's sanction.

[Sidenote: The Catholic Earls.]

The hope of a crown, whether in Scotland or at home, proved too great however for his good faith, and Norfolk was soon wrapped anew in the net of papal intrigue. But it was not so much on Norfolk that Rome counted as on the nobles of the North. The three great houses of the northern border—the Cliffords of Cumberland, the Nevilles of Westmoreland, the Percies of Northumberland—had remained Catholics at heart; and from the moment of Mary's entrance into England they had been only waiting for a signal of revolt. They looked for foreign aid, and foreign aid now seemed assured. In spite of Elizabeth's help the civil war in France went steadily against the Huguenots. In March 1569 their army was routed at Jarnac, and their leader, Conde, left dead on the field. The joy with which the victory was greeted by the English Catholics sprang from a consciousness that the victors looked on it as a prelude to their attack on Protestantism across the sea. No sooner indeed was this triumph won than Mary's uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, as the head of the house of Guise, proposed to Philip to complete the victory of Catholicism by uniting the forces of France and Spain against Elizabeth. The moment was one of peril such as England had never known. Norfolk was still pressing forward to a marriage with Mary; he was backed by the second great Conservative peer, Lord Arundel, and supported by a large part of the nobles. The Northern Earls with Lords Montague and Lumley and the head of the great house of Dacres were ready to take up arms, and sure—as they believed—of the aid of the Earls of Derby and Shrewsbury. Both parties of plotters sought Philip's sanction and placed themselves at his disposal. A descent of French and Spanish troops would have called both to the field. But much as Philip longed for a triumph of religion he had no mind for a triumph of France. France now meant the Guises, and to set their niece Mary Stuart on the English throne was to ensure the close union of England and the France they ruled. Though he suffered Alva therefore to plan the despatch of a force from the Netherlands should a Catholic revolt prove successful, he refused to join in a French attack.

[Sidenote: The revolt of the Earls.]

But the Papal exhortations and the victories of the Guises did their work without Philip's aid. The conspirators of the north only waited for Norfolk's word to rise in arms. But the Duke dissembled and delayed, while Elizabeth, roused at last to her danger, struck quick and hard. Mary Stuart was given in charge to the Puritan Lord Huntingdon. The Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, with Lord Lumley, were secured. Norfolk himself, summoned peremptorily to court, dared not disobey; and found himself at the opening of October a prisoner in the Tower. The more dangerous plot was foiled, for whatever were Norfolk's own designs, most of his Conservative partizans were good Protestants, and their aim of securing the succession by a Protestant marriage for Mary was one with which the bulk of the nation would have sympathized. But the Catholic plot remained; and in October the hopes of its leaders were stirred afresh by a new defeat of the Huguenots at Montcontour; while a Papal envoy, Dr. Morton, goaded them to action by news that a Bull of Deposition was ready at Rome. At last a summons to court tested the loyalty of the Earls, and on the tenth of November 1569 Northumberland gave the signal for a rising. He was at once joined by the Earl of Westmoreland, and in a few days the Earls entered Durham and called the North to arms. They shrank from an open revolt against the Queen, and demanded only the dismissal of her ministers and the recognition of Mary's right of succession. But with these demands went a pledge to re-establish the Catholic religion. The Bible and Prayer-Book were torn to pieces, and Mass said once more at the altar of Durham Cathedral, before the Earls pushed on to Doncaster with an army which soon swelled to thousands of men. Their cry was "to reduce all causes of religion to the old custom and usage"; and the Earl of Sussex, her general in the North, wrote frankly to Elizabeth that "there were not ten gentlemen in Yorkshire that did allow [approve] her proceedings in the cause of religion." But he was as loyal as he was frank, and held York stoutly while the Queen ordered Mary's hasty removal to a new prison at Coventry. The storm however broke as rapidly as it had gathered. Leonard Dacres held aloof. Lord Derby proved loyal. The Catholic lords of the south refused to stir without help from Spain. The mass of the Catholics throughout the country made no sign; and the Earls no sooner halted irresolute in presence of this unexpected inaction than their army caught the panic and dispersed. Northumberland and Westmoreland fled in the middle of December, and were followed in their flight by Leonard Dacres of Naworth, while their miserable adherents paid for their disloyalty in bloodshed and ruin.

[Sidenote: The Bull of Deposition.]

The ruthless measures of repression which followed this revolt were the first breach in the clemency of Elizabeth's rule. But they were signs of terror which were not lost on her opponents. It was the general inaction of the Catholics which had foiled the hopes of the northern Earls; and Pope Pius resolved to stir them to activity by publishing in March 1570 the Bull of Excommunication and Deposition which had been secretly issued in the preceding year. In his Bull Pius declared that Elizabeth had forfeited all right to the throne, released her subjects from their oath of allegiance to her, and forbade her nobles and people to obey her on pain of excommunication. In spite of the efforts of the Government to prevent the entry of any copies of this sentence into the realm the Bull was found nailed in a spirit of ironical defiance on the Bishop of London's door. Its effect was far from being what Rome desired. With the exception of one or two zealots the English Catholics treated the Bull as a dead letter. The duty of obeying the Queen seemed a certain thing to them, while that of obeying the Pope in temporal matters was denied by most and doubted by all. Its spiritual effect indeed was greater. The Bull dealt a severe blow to the religious truce which Elizabeth had secured. In the North the Catholics withdrew stubbornly from the national worship, and everywhere throughout the realm an increase in the number of recusants showed the obedience of a large body of Englishmen to the Papal command. To the minds of English statesmen such an obedience to the Papal bidding in matters of religion only heralded an obedience to the Papal bidding in matters of state. In issuing the Bull of Deposition Pius had declared war upon the Queen. He had threatened her throne. He had called on her subjects to revolt. If his secret pressure had stirred the rising of the Northern Earls, his open declaration of war might well rouse a general insurrection of Catholics throughout the realm, while the plots of his agents threatened the Queen's life.

[Sidenote: The Ridolfi plot.]

How real was the last danger was shown at this moment by the murder of Murray. In January 1570 a Catholic partizan, James Hamilton, shot the Regent in the streets of Linlithgow; and Scotland plunged at once into war between the adherents of Mary and those of her son. The blow broke Elizabeth's hold on Scotland at a moment when conspiracy threatened her hold on England itself. The defeat of the Earls had done little to check the hopes of the Roman court. Its intrigues were busier than ever. At the close of the rising Norfolk was released from the Tower, but he was no sooner free than he renewed his correspondence with the Scottish Queen. Mary consented to wed him, and the Duke, who still professed himself a Protestant, trusted to carry the bulk of the English nobles with him in pressing a marriage which seemed to take Mary out of the hands of French and Catholic intriguers, to make her an Englishwoman, and to settle the vexed question of the succession to the throne. But it was only to secure this general adhesion that Norfolk delayed to declare himself a Catholic. He sought the Pope's approval of his plans, and appealed to Philip for the intervention of a Spanish army. At the head of this appeal stood the name of Mary; while Norfolk's name was followed by those of many lords of "the old blood," as the prouder peers styled themselves. The significance of the request was heightened by gatherings of Catholic refugees at Antwerp in the heart of Philip's dominions in the Low Countries round the fugitive leaders of the Northern Revolt. The intervention of the Pope was brought to quicken Philip's slow designs. Ridolfi, as the agent of the conspirators, appeared at Rome and laid before Pius their plans for the marriage of Norfolk and Mary, the union of both realms under the Duke and the Scottish Queen, and the seizure of Elizabeth and her counsellors at one of the royal country houses. Pius backed the project with his warm approval, and Ridolfi hurried to secure the needful aid from Philip of Spain.

[Sidenote: Norfolk's death.]

Enough of these conspiracies was discovered to rouse a fresh ardour in the menaced Protestants. While Ridolfi was negotiating at Rome and Madrid, the Parliament met to pass an act of attainder against the Northern Earls, and to declare the introduction of Papal Bulls into the country an act of high treason. It was made treason to call the Queen heretic or schismatic, or to deny her right to the throne. The rising indignation against Mary, as "the daughter of Debate, who discord fell doth sow," was shown in a statute, which declared any person who laid claim to the Crown during the Queen's lifetime incapable of ever succeeding to it. The disaffection of the Catholics was met by imposing on all magistrates and public officers the obligation of subscribing to the Articles of Faith, a measure which in fact transferred the administration of justice and public order to their Protestant opponents, by forbidding conversions to Catholicism or the bringing into England of Papal absolutions or objects consecrated by the Pope. Meanwhile Ridolfi was struggling in vain against Philip's caution. The king made no objection to the seizure or assassination of Elizabeth. The scheme secured his fullest sympathy; no such opportunity, he held, would ever offer again; and he longed to finish the affair quickly before France should take part in it. But he could not be brought to send troops to England before Elizabeth was secured. If troops were once sent, the failure of the plot would mean war with England; and with fresh troubles threatening Alva's hold on the Netherlands Philip had no mind to risk an English war. Norfolk on the other hand had no mind to risk a rising before Spanish troops were landed, and Ridolfi's efforts failed to bring either Duke or king to action. But the clue to these negotiations had long been in Cecil's hands; and at the opening of 1571 Norfolk's schemes of ambition were foiled by his arrest. He was convicted of treason, and after a few months' delay executed at the Tower.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and England.]

With the death of Norfolk and that of Northumberland, who followed him to the scaffold, the dread of revolt within the realm which had so long hung over England passed quietly away. The failure of the two attempts not only showed the weakness and disunion of the party of discontent and reaction, but it revealed the weakness of all party feeling before the rise of a national temper which was springing naturally out of the peace of Elizabeth's reign, and which a growing sense of danger to the order and prosperity around it was fast turning into a passionate loyalty to the Queen. It was not merely against Cecil's watchfulness or Elizabeth's cunning that Mary and Philip and the Percies dashed themselves in vain; it was against a new England. And this England owed its existence to the Queen. "I have desired," Elizabeth said proudly to her Parliament, "to have the obedience of my subjects by love, and not by compulsion." Through the fourteen years which had passed since she mounted the throne, her subjects' love had been fairly won by justice and good government. The current of political events had drawn men's eyes chiefly to the outer dangers of the country, to the policy of Philip and of Rome, to the revolutions of France, to the pressure from Mary Stuart. No one had watched these outer dangers so closely as the Queen. But buried as she seemed in foreign negotiations and intrigues, Elizabeth was above all an English sovereign. She devoted herself ably and energetically to the task of civil administration. At the first moment of relief from the pressure of outer troubles, after the treaty of Edinburgh, she faced the two main causes of internal disorder. The debasement of the coinage was brought to an end in 1560. In 1561 a commission was issued to enquire into the best means of facing the problem of social pauperism.

[Sidenote: The Poor Laws.]

Time, and the natural developement of new branches of industry, were working quietly for the relief of the glutted labour market; but a vast mass of disorder still existed in England, which found a constant ground of resentment in the enclosures and evictions which accompanied the progress of agricultural change. It was on this host of "broken men" that every rebellion could count for support; their mere existence was an encouragement to civil war; while in peace their presence was felt in the insecurity of life and property, in bands of marauders which held whole counties in terror, and in "sturdy beggars" who stripped travellers on the road. Under Elizabeth as under her predecessors the terrible measures of repression, whose uselessness More had in vain pointed out, went pitilessly on. We find the magistrates of Somersetshire capturing a gang of a hundred at a stroke, hanging fifty at once on the gallows, and complaining bitterly to the Council of the necessity for waiting till the Assizes before they could enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. But the Government were dealing with the difficulty in a wiser and more effectual way. The old powers to enforce labour on the idle and settlement on the vagrant class which had been given by statutes of Henry the Eighth were continued; and each town and parish was held responsible for the relief of its indigent and disabled poor, as well as for the employment of able-bodied mendicants. But a more efficient machinery was gradually devised for carrying out the relief and employment of the poor. Funds for this purpose had been provided by the collection of alms in church; but by an Act of 1562 the mayor of each town and the churchwardens of each country parish were directed to draw up lists of all inhabitants able to contribute to such a fund, and on a persistent refusal the justices in sessions were empowered to assess the offender at a fitting sum and to enforce its payment by imprisonment.

The principles embodied in these measures, that of local responsibility for local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support. Overseers were appointed to enforce and superintend their labour, for which wool, hemp, flax, or other stuff was to be provided at the expense of the inhabitants; and houses of correction were established in every county for obstinate vagabonds or for paupers refusing to work at the overseer's bidding. A subsequent Act transferred to these overseers the collection of the poor rate, and powers were given to bind poor children as apprentices, to erect buildings for the improvident poor, and to force the parents and children of such paupers to maintain them. The well-known Act which matured and finally established this system, the 43rd of Elizabeth, remained the base of our system of pauper-administration until a time within the recollection of living men. Whatever flaws a later experience has found in these measures, their wise and humane character formed a striking contrast to the legislation which had degraded our statute-book from the date of the Statute of Labourers; and their efficacy at the time was proved by the cessation of the social danger against which they were intended to provide.

[Sidenote: Growth of wealth.]

Its cessation however was owing, not merely to law, but to the natural growth of wealth and industry throughout the country. A middle class of wealthier landowners and merchants was fast rising into importance. "The wealth of the meaner sort," wrote one to Cecil, "is the very fount of rebellion, the occasion of their indolence, of the contempt of the nobility, and of the hatred they have conceived against them." But Cecil and his mistress could watch the upgrowth of national wealth with cooler eyes. In the country its effect was to undo much of the evil which the diminution of small holdings had done. Whatever social embarrassment it might bring about, the revolution in agriculture which Latimer deplored undoubtedly favoured production. Not only was a larger capital brought to bear upon the land, but the mere change in the system of cultivation introduced a taste for new and better modes of farming; the breed of horses and of cattle was improved, and a far greater use made of manure and dressings. One acre under the new system produced, it was said, as much as two under the old. As a more careful and constant cultivation was introduced, a greater number of hands came to be required on every farm; and much of the surplus labour which had been flung off the land in the commencement of the new system was thus recalled to it.

[Sidenote: Growth of manufactures.]

A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was found in the developement of manufactures. The linen trade was as yet of small value, and that of silk-weaving was only just introduced. But the woollen manufacture was fast becoming an important element in the national wealth. England no longer sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and to be dyed at Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling and dyeing of cloth, were spreading rapidly from the towns over the country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the centre, extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers' wives began everywhere to spin their wool from their own sheep's backs into a coarse "home-spun." The South and the West however still remained the great seats of industry and of wealth, for they were the homes of mining and manufacturing activity. The iron manufactures were limited to Kent and Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already threatened by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their furnaces, and by the exhaustion of the forests of the Weald. Cornwall was then, as now, the sole exporter of tin; and the exportation of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths of the West claimed the palm among the woollen stuffs of England. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the commerce of the Channel. Every little harbour from the Foreland to the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing boats, manned with bold seamen who were to furnish crews for Drake and the Buccaneers. Northern England still lagged far behind the rest of the realm in its industrial activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth the poverty and inaction to which it had been doomed for so many centuries began at last to be broken. We see the first sign of the revolution which has transferred English manufactures and English wealth to the north of the Mersey and of the Humber in the mention which now meets us of the friezes of Manchester, the coverlets of York, the cutlery of Sheffield, and the cloth-trade of Halifax.

[Sidenote: Growth of commerce.]

The growth however of English commerce far outstripped as yet that of its manufactures. We must not judge of it by any modern standard; for the whole population of the country can hardly have exceeded five or six millions, and the burthen of all the vessels engaged in ordinary commerce was estimated at little more than fifty thousand tons. The size of the vessels employed in it would nowadays seem insignificant; a modern collier brig is probably as large as the biggest merchant vessel which then sailed from the port of London. But it was under Elizabeth that English commerce began the rapid career of developement which has made us the carriers of the world. The foundation of the Royal Exchange at London by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1566 was a mark of the commercial progress of the time. By far the most important branch of our trade was the commerce with Flanders. Antwerp and Bruges were in fact the general marts of the world in the early part of the sixteenth century, and the annual export of English wool and drapery to their markets was estimated at a sum of more than two millions in value. But the religious troubles of the Netherlands were already scaring capital and industry from their older seats. As early as 1560 Philip's envoy reported to his master that "ten thousand of your Majesty's servants in the Low Countries are already in England with their preachers and ministers." Alva's severities soon raised the number of refugees to fifty thousand; and the outbreak of war which followed drove trade as well as traders from the Low Countries. It was with the ruin of Antwerp at the time of its siege and capture by the Duke of Parma that the commercial supremacy of our own capital was first established. A third of the merchants and manufacturers of the ruined city are said to have found a refuge on the banks of the Thames. The export trade to Flanders died away as London developed into the general mart of Europe, where the gold and sugar of the New World were found side by side with the cotton of India, the silks of the East, and the woollen stuffs of England itself.

[Sidenote: New trade routes.]

Not only was much of the world's older trade transferred by this change to English shores, but the burst of national vigour which characterized the time found new outlets for its activity. The fisheries grew more and more valuable. Those of the Channel and the German Ocean gave occupation to the ports which lined the coast from Yarmouth to Plymouth Haven; while Bristol and Chester were rivals in the fisheries of Ulster. The merchant-navy of England was fast widening its sphere of commerce. The Venetian carrying fleet still touched at Southampton; but as far back as the reign of Henry the Seventh a commercial treaty had been concluded with Florence, and the trade with the Mediterranean which began under Richard the Third constantly took a wider developement. The trade between England and the Baltic ports had hitherto been conducted by the Hanseatic merchants; but the extinction at this time of their London depot, the Steel Yard, was a sign that this trade too had now passed into English hands. The growth of Boston and Hull marked an increase of commercial intercourse with the Scandinavian states. The prosperity of Bristol, which depended in great measure on the trade with Ireland, was stimulated by the conquest and colonization of that island at the close of the Queen's reign and the beginning of her successor's. The dream of a northern passage to India opened up a trade with a land as yet unknown. Of three ships which sailed in the reign of Mary under Hugh Willoughby to discover this passage, two were found frozen with their crews and their hapless commander on the coast of Lapland; but the third, under Richard Chancellor, made its way safely to the White Sea and by the discovery of Archangel created the trade with Russia. A more lucrative traffic had already begun with the coast of Guinea, to whose gold dust and ivory the merchants of Southampton owed their wealth. The guilt of the Slave Trade which sprang out of it rests with John Hawkins. In 1562 he returned from the African coast with a cargo of negroes; and the arms, whose grant rewarded this achievement (a demi-moor, proper, bound with a cord), commemorated his priority in the transport of slaves to the labour-fields of the New World. But the New World was already furnishing more honest sources of wealth. The voyage of Sebastian Cabot from Bristol to the mainland of North America had called English vessels to the stormy ocean of the North. From the time of Henry the Eighth the number of English boats engaged on the cod-banks of Newfoundland steadily increased, and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the seamen of Biscay found English rivals in the whale-fishery of the Polar seas.

[Sidenote: General comfort.]

Elizabeth lent a ready patronage to the new commerce, she shared in its speculations, she considered its extension and protection as a part of public policy, and she sanctioned the formation of the great Merchant Companies which could alone secure the trader against wrong or injustice in distant countries. The Merchant-Adventurers of London, a body which had existed long before, and had received a charter of incorporation under Henry the Seventh, furnished a model for the Russia Company and the Company which absorbed the new commerce to the Indies. But it was not wholly with satisfaction that either the Queen or her ministers watched the social change which wealth was producing around them. They feared the increased expenditure and comfort which necessarily followed it, as likely to impoverish the land and to eat out the hardihood of the people. "England spendeth more on wines in one year," complained Cecil, "than it did in ancient times in four years." In the upper classes the lavishness of a new wealth combined with a lavishness of life, a love of beauty, of colour, of display, to revolutionize English dress. Men "wore a manor on their backs." The Queen's three thousand robes were rivalled in their bravery by the slashed velvets, the ruffs, the jewelled purpoints of the courtiers around her. But signs of the growing wealth were as evident in the lower class as in the higher. The disuse of salt-fish and the greater consumption of meat marked the improvement which had taken place among the country folk. Their rough and wattled farm-houses were being superseded by dwellings of brick and stone. Pewter was replacing the wooden trenchers of the early yeomanry, and there were yeomen who could boast of a fair show of silver plate. It is from this period indeed that we can first date the rise of a conception which seems to us now a peculiarly English one, the conception of domestic comfort. The chimney-corner, so closely associated with family life, came into existence with the general introduction of chimneys, a feature rare in ordinary houses at the beginning of this reign. Pillows, which had before been despised by the farmer and the trader as fit only "for women in childbed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly-figured gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to play its part in later history.

[Sidenote: Architectural change.]

A transformation of an even more striking kind marked the extinction of the feudal character of the noblesse. Gloomy walls and serried battlements disappeared from the dwellings of the gentry. The strength of the mediaeval fortress gave way to the pomp and grace of the Elizabethan Hall. Knole, Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick and Audley End, are familiar instances of a social as well as an architectural change which covered England with buildings where the thought of defence was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and refinement. We still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South. Nor was the change less within than without. The life of the Middle Ages concentrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the baron looked from his upper dais on the retainers who gathered at his board. But the great households were fast breaking up; and the whole feudal economy disappeared when the lord of the household withdrew with his family into his "parlour" or "withdrawing-room" and left the hall to his dependants. The Italian refinement of life which told on pleasance and garden told on the remodelling of the house within, raised the principal apartments to an upper floor—a change to which we owe the grand staircases of the time—surrounded the quiet courts by long "galleries of the presence," crowned the rude hearth with huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, with quaintly-interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly-carved chairs and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass became a marked feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one whose influence on the general health of the people can hardly be overrated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the new manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. "You shall have sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, "your houses so full of glass, that we cannot tell where to come to be out of the sun or the cold."

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and English order.]

What Elizabeth contributed to this upgrowth of national prosperity was the peace and social order from which it sprang. While autos-de-fe were blazing at Rome and Madrid, while the Inquisition was driving the sober traders of the Netherlands to madness, while Scotland was tossing with religious strife, while the policy of Catharine secured for France but a brief respite from the horrors of civil war, England remained untroubled and at peace. Religious order was little disturbed. Recusants were few. There was little cry as yet for freedom of worship. Freedom of conscience was the right of every man. Persecution had ceased. It was only as the tale of a darker past that men recalled how ten years back heretics had been sent to the fire. Civil order was even more profound than religious order. The failure of the northern revolt proved the political tranquillity of the country. The social troubles from vagrancy and evictions were slowly passing away. Taxation was light. The country was firmly and steadily governed. The popular favour which had met Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a passionate devotion. Of her faults indeed England beyond the circle of her court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy were never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. But every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness and moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of conciliation and compromise among warring factions which gave the country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when almost every other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and justly told, in the Queen's favour. Her statue in the centre of the London Exchange was a tribute on the part of the merchant class to the interest with which she watched and shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a general gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the Martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its fiercer close. Above all there was a general confidence in her instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy unconsciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won back at once the love that her resistance lost. Her attitude at home in fact was that of a woman whose pride in the well-being of her subjects and whose longing for their favour was the one warm touch in the coldness of her natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England. "Nothing," she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted fire, "nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me as the love and goodwill of my subjects." And the love and goodwill which were so dear to her she fully won.

[Sidenote: The religious truce.]

It was this personal devotion that enabled Elizabeth to face the religious difficulties of her reign. Formidable as these had been from its outset, they were now growing into actual dangers. The attack of the Papacy from without had deepened the tide of religious fanaticism within. For the nation at large Elizabeth's system was no doubt a wise and healthy one. Single-handed, unsupported by any of the statesmen or divines about her, the Queen had forced on the warring religions a sort of armed truce. While the main principles of the Reformation were accepted the zeal of the ultra-reformers was held at bay. Outer conformity, attendance at the common prayer, was exacted from all, but changes in ritual which would have drawn attention to the change in religion were steadily resisted. The Bible was left open. Public discussion was unrestrained. On the other hand the warfare of pulpit against pulpit was silenced by the licensing of preachers. In 1576 Elizabeth gave the Protestant zealots a rough proof that she would not suffer them to draw the Catholics into controversy and rouse the opposition to her system which controversy could not fail to bring with it. Parker's successor, Archbishop Grindal, who had been one of the Marian exiles and returned with much of the Calvinistic fanaticism, showed favour to a "liberty of prophesying" or preaching which would have flooded the realm with Protestant disputants. Elizabeth at once interposed. The "liberty of prophesying" was brought to an end; even the number of licensed preachers was curtailed; and the Primate himself was suspended from the exercise of his functions.

[Sidenote: The religious change.]

No stronger proof could have been given of the Queen's resolve to watch jealously over the religious peace of her realm. In her earlier years such a resolve went fairly with the general temper of the people at large. The mass of Englishmen remained true in sentiment to the older creed. But they conformed to the new worship. They shrank from any open defiance of the government. They shrank from reawakening the fierce strife of religions, of calling back the horsemen of Somerset or the fires of Mary. They saw little doctrinal difference between the new prayer and the old. Above all they trusted to patience. They had seen too many religious revolutions to believe that any revolution would be lasting. They believed that the changes would be undone again as they had been undone before. They held that Elizabeth was only acting under pressure, and that her real inclination was towards the old religion. They trusted in Philip's influence, in an Austrian marriage, in the Queen's dread of a breach with the Papacy, in the pressure of Mary Stuart. And meanwhile the years went by, and as the memories of the past became dimmer, and custom laid a heavier and heavier hand on the mass of men, and a new generation grew up that had never known the spell of Catholicism, the nation drifted from its older tradition and became Protestant in its own despite.

[Sidenote: The Puritan pressure.]

It was no doubt a sense that the religious truce was doing their work, as well as a dread of alienating the Queen and throwing her into the hands of their opponents by a more violent pressure, which brought the more zealous reformers to acquiesce through Elizabeth's earlier years in this system of compromise. But it was no sooner denounced by the Papacy than it was attacked by the Puritans. The rebellion of the Northern Earls, the withdrawal from the public worship, the Bull of Deposition, roused a fanatical zeal among the Calvinistic party which predominated in the Parliament of 1571. The movement in favour of a more pronounced Protestantism, of a more utter break with the Catholic past, which had slowly spread from the knot of exiles who returned to Geneva, now gathered a new strength; and a bill was brought in for the reform of the book of Common Prayer by the omission of the practices which displeased the Genevan party among the clergy. A yet closer approach to the theocratic system of Calvin was seen when the Lower House refused its assent to a statute that would have bound the clergy to subscribe to those articles which recognised the royal supremacy, the power of the Church to ordain rites and ceremonies, and the actual form of Church government. At such a crisis even the weightiest statesmen at Elizabeth's council-board believed that in the contest with Rome the Crown would have to rely on Protestant zeal, and the influence of Cecil and Walsingham backed the pressure of the Parliament. But the Queen was only stirred to a burst of anger; she ordered Strickland, who had introduced the bill for liturgical reform, to appear no more in Parliament, and though she withdrew the order as soon as she perceived the House was bent on his restoration, she would hear nothing of the changes on which the Commons were set.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth's resistance.]

Her resistance showed the sagacity with which the Queen caught the general temper of her people. The Catholic pressure had made it needful to exclude Catholics from the Commons and from the council-board, but a Protestant Council and a Protestant Parliament were by no means fair representatives of the general drift of English opinion. Her religious indifference left Elizabeth a better judge of the timid and hesitating advance of religious sentiment, of the stubborn clinging to the past, of the fear of change, of the dread of revolution, which made the winning of the people as a whole to the Reformation a slow and tedious process. The Protestants were increasing in number, but they were still a minority of the nation. The zealous Catholics, who withdrew from church at the Pope's bidding, were a still smaller minority. The bulk of Englishmen were striving to cling to their religious prejudice and to loyalty as well, to obey their conscience and their Queen at once, and in such a temper of men's minds any sudden and decisive change would have fallen like a thunderbolt. Elizabeth had no will to follow in the track of Rome, and to help the Pope to drive every waverer into action. Weakened and broken as it was, she clung obstinately to her system of compromise; and the general opinion gave her a strength which enabled her to resist the pressure of her council and her Parliament. So difficult however was her position that a change might have been forced on her had she not been aided at this moment by a group of clerical bigots who gathered under the banner of Presbyterianism.

[Sidenote: Cartwright.]

Of these Thomas Cartwright was the chief. He had studied at Geneva; he returned with a fanatical faith in Calvinism, and in the system of Church government which Calvin had devised; and as Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge he used to the full the opportunities which his chair gave him of propagating his opinions. No leader of a religious party ever deserved less of after sympathy. Cartwright was unquestionably learned and devout, but his bigotry was that of a mediaeval inquisitor. The relics of the old ritual, the cross in baptism, the surplice, the giving of a ring in marriage, were to him not merely distasteful, as they were to the Puritans at large, they were idolatrous and the mark of the beast. His declamation against ceremonies and superstition however had little weight with Elizabeth or her Primates; what scared them was his reckless advocacy of a scheme of ecclesiastical government which placed the State beneath the feet of the Church. The absolute rule of bishops indeed Cartwright denounced as begotten of the devil; but the absolute rule of Presbyters he held to be established by the word of God. For the Church modelled after the fashion of Geneva he claimed an authority which surpassed the wildest dreams of the masters of the Vatican. All spiritual authority and jurisdiction, the decreeing of doctrine, the ordering of ceremonies, lay wholly in the hands of the ministers of the Church. To them belonged the supervision of public morals. In an ordered arrangement of classes and synods, these Presbyters were to govern their flocks, to regulate their own order, to decide in matters of faith, to administer "discipline." Their weapon was excommunication, and they were responsible for its use to none but Christ. The province of the civil ruler in such a system of religion as this was simply to carry out the decisions of the Presbyters, "to see their decrees executed and to punish the contemners of them." Nor was this work of the civil power likely to be a light work. The spirit of Calvinistic Presbyterianism excluded all toleration of practice or belief. Not only was the rule of ministers to be established as the one legal form of Church government, but all other forms, Episcopalian and Separatist, were to be ruthlessly put down. For heresy there was the punishment of death. Never had the doctrine of persecution been urged with such a blind and reckless ferocity. "I deny," wrote Cartwright, "that upon repentance there ought to follow any pardon of death.... Heretics ought to be put to death now. If this be bloody and extreme, I am content to be so counted with the Holy Ghost." The violence of language such as this was as unlikely as the dogmatism of his theological teaching to commend Cartwright's opinions to the mass of Englishmen. Popular as the Presbyterian system became in Scotland, it never took any popular hold on England. It remained to the last a clerical rather than a national creed, and even in the moment of its seeming triumph under the Commonwealth it was rejected by every part of England save London and Lancashire. But the bold challenge which Cartwright's party delivered to the Government in 1572 in an "admonition to the Parliament," which denounced the government of bishops as contrary to the word of God and demanded the establishment in its place of government by Presbyters, raised a panic among English statesmen and prelates which cut off all hopes of a quiet treatment of the merely ceremonial questions which really troubled the consciences of the more advanced Protestants. The natural progress of opinion abruptly ceased, and the moderate thinkers who had pressed for a change in ritual which would have satisfied the zeal of the reformers withdrew from union with a party which revived the worst pretensions of the Papacy.

[Sidenote: Revolt of the Netherlands.]

But the eyes of Elizabeth as of her subjects were drawn from difficulties at home to the conflict which took fresh fire oversea. In Europe, as in England, the tide of religious passion which had so long been held in check was now breaking over the banks which restrained it; and with this outbreak of forces before which the diplomacy and intrigues of its statesmen fell powerless the political face of Europe was changed. In 1572 the power of the king of Spain had reached its height. The Netherlands were at his feet. In the East his trouble from the pressure of the Turks seemed brought to an end by a brilliant victory at Lepanto in which his fleet with those of Venice and the Pope annihilated the fleet of the Sultan. He could throw his whole weight upon the Calvinism of the West, and above all upon France, where the Guises were fast sinking into mere partizans of Spain. The common danger drew France and England together; and Catharine of Medicis strove to bind the two countries in one political action by offering to Elizabeth the hand of her son Henry, the Duke of Anjou. But at this moment of danger the whole situation was changed by the rising of the Netherlands. Driven to despair by the greed and persecution of Alva, the Low Countries rose in a revolt which after strange alternations of fortune gave to the world the Republic of the United Provinces. Of the Protestants driven out by the Duke's cruelties, many had taken to the seas and cruised as pirates in the Channel, making war on Spanish vessels under the flag of the Prince of Orange. Like the Huguenot privateers who had sailed under Conde's flag, these freebooters found shelter in the English ports. But in the spring of 1572 Alva demanded their expulsion; and Elizabeth, unable to resist, sent them orders to put to sea. The Duke's success proved fatal to his master's cause. The "water-beggars," a little band of some two hundred and fifty men, were driven by stress of weather into the Meuse. There they seized the city of Brill, and repulsed a Spanish force which strove to recapture it. The repulse was the signal for a general rising. All the great cities of Holland and Zealand drove out their garrisons. The northern Provinces of Gelderland, Overyssel, and Friesland, followed their example, and by the summer half of the Low Countries were in revolt.

[Sidenote: The massacre of St. Bartholomew.]

A yet greater danger threatened Alva in the south, where Mons had been surprised by Lewis of Nassau, and where the Calvinists were crying for support from the Huguenots of France. The opening which their rising afforded was seized by the Huguenot leaders as a political engine to break the power which Catharine of Medicis exercised over Charles the Ninth, and to set aside her policy of religious balance by placing France at the head of Protestantism in the West. Weak and passionate in temper, jealous of the warlike fame which his brother, the Duke of Anjou, had won at Montcontour, dreading above all the power of Spain and eager to grasp the opportunity of breaking it by a seizure of the Netherlands, Charles listened to the counsels of Coligni, who pressed for war upon Philip and promised the support of the Huguenots in an invasion of the Low Countries. Never had a fairer prospect opened to French ambition. But Catharine had no mind to be set aside. To her cool political temper the supremacy of the Huguenots seemed as fatal to the Crown as the supremacy of the Catholics. A triumph of Calvinism in the Netherlands, wrought out by the swords of the French Calvinists, would decide not only the religious but the political destinies of France; and Catharine saw ruin for the monarchy in a France at once Protestant and free. She suddenly united with the Guises and suffered them to rouse the fanatical mob of Paris, while she won back the king by picturing the royal power as about to pass into the hands of Coligni. On the twenty-fourth of August, St. Bartholomew's day, the plot broke out in an awful massacre. At Paris the populace murdered Coligni and almost all the Huguenot leaders. A hundred thousand Protestants fell as the fury spread from town to town. In that awful hour Philip and Catholicism were saved. The Spanish king laughed for joy. The new Pope, Gregory the Thirteenth, ordered a Te Deum to be sung. Instead of conquering the Netherlands France plunged madly back into a chaos of civil war, and the Low Countries were left to cope single-handed with the armies of Spain.

[Sidenote: Elizabeth and the Netherlands.]

They could look for no help from Elizabeth. Whatever enthusiasm the heroic struggle of the Prince of Orange for their liberties excited among her subjects, it failed to move Elizabeth even for an instant from the path of cold self-interest. To her the revolt of the Netherlands was simply "a bridle of Spain, which kept war out of our own gate." At the darkest moment of the contest, when Alva had won back all but Holland and Zealand and even William of Orange despaired, the Queen bent her energies to prevent him from finding succour in France. That the Low Countries could in the end withstand Philip, neither she nor any English statesmen believed. They held that the struggle must close either in their subjection to him, or in their selling themselves for aid to France; and the accession of power which either result must give to one of her two Catholic foes the Queen was eager to avert. Her plan for averting it was by forcing the Provinces to accept the terms which were now offered by Alva's successor, Requesens, a restoration of their constitutional privileges on condition of their submission to the Church. Peace on such a footing would not only restore English commerce, which suffered from the war; it would leave the Netherlands still formidable as a weapon against Philip. The freedom of the Provinces would be saved; and the religious question involved in a fresh submission to the yoke of Catholicism was one which Elizabeth was incapable of appreciating. To her the steady refusal of William the Silent to sacrifice his faith was as unintelligible as the steady bigotry of Philip in demanding such a sacrifice. It was of more immediate consequence that Philip's anxiety to avoid provoking an intervention on the part of England left Elizabeth tranquil at home. The policy of Requesens after Alva's departure at the close of 1573 was a policy of pacification; and with the steady resistance of the Netherlands still foiling his efforts Philip saw that his one hope of success rested on the avoidance of intervention from without. The civil war which followed the massacre of St. Bartholomew removed all danger of such an intervention on the side of France. A weariness of religious strife enabled Catharine again to return to her policy of toleration in the summer of 1573; but though the death of Charles the Ninth and accession of his brother Henry the Third in the following year left the queen-mother's power unbroken, the balance she preserved was too delicate to leave room for any schemes without the realm.

[Sidenote: England becomes Protestant.]

English intervention it was yet more needful to avoid; and the hopes of an attack upon England which Rome had drawn from Philip's fanaticism were thus utterly blasted. To the fiery exhortations of Gregory the Thirteenth the king only answered by counsels of delay. But Rome could not delay her efforts. All her hopes of recovering England lay in the Catholic sympathies of the mass of Englishmen, and every year that went by weakened her chance of victory. The firm refusal of Elizabeth to suffer the Puritans to break in with any violent changes on her ecclesiastical policy was justified by its slow but steady success. Silently, almost unconsciously, England became Protestant as the traditionary Catholicism which formed the religion of three-fourths of the people at the Queen's accession died quietly away. At the close of her reign the only parts of England where the old faith retained anything of its former vigour were the north and the extreme west, at that time the poorest and least populated parts of the kingdom. One main cause of the change lay in the gradual dying out or removal of the Catholic priesthood and the growth of a new Protestant clergy who supplied their place. The older parish priests, though they had almost to a man acquiesced in the changes of ritual and doctrine which the various phases of the Reformation imposed upon them, remained in heart utterly hostile to its spirit. As Mary had undone the changes of Edward, they hoped for a Catholic successor to undo the changes of Elizabeth; and in the meantime they were content to wear the surplice instead of the chasuble, and to use the Communion office instead of the Mass-book. But if they were forced to read the Homilies from the pulpit the spirit of their teaching remained unchanged; and it was easy for them to cast contempt on the new services, till they seemed to old-fashioned worshippers a mere "Christmas game." But the lapse of years did its work in emptying parsonage after parsonage. In 1579 the Queen felt strong enough to enforce for the first time a general compliance with the Act of Uniformity; and the jealous supervision of Parker and the bishops ensured an inner as well as an outer conformity to the established faith in the clergy who took the place of the dying priesthood. The new parsons were for the most part not merely Protestant in belief and teaching, but ultra-Protestant. The old restrictions on the use of the pulpit were silently removed as the need for them passed away, and the zeal of the young ministers showed itself in an assiduous preaching which moulded in their own fashion the religious ideas of the new generation. But their character had even a greater influence than their preaching. Under Henry the priests had in large part been ignorant and sensual men; and the character of the clergy appointed by the greedy Protestants under Edward or at the opening of Elizabeth's reign was even worse than that of their Catholic rivals. But the energy of the successive Primates, seconded as it was by the general increase of zeal and morality at the time, did its work; and by the close of the Queen's reign the moral temper as well as the social character of the clergy had greatly changed. Scholars like Hooker could now be found in the ranks of the priesthood, and the grosser scandals which disgraced the clergy as a body for the most part disappeared. It was impossible for a Puritan libeller to bring against the ministers of Elizabeth's reign the charges of drunkenness and immorality which Protestant libellers had been able to bring against the priesthood of Henry's.

[Sidenote: Patriotism and Protestantism.]

But the influence of the new clergy was backed by a general revolution in English thought. The grammar schools were diffusing a new knowledge and mental energy through the middle classes and among the country gentry. The tone of the Universities, no unfair test of the tone of the nation at large, changed wholly as the Queen's reign went on. At its opening Oxford was "a nest of Papists" and sent its best scholars to feed the Catholic seminaries. At its close the University was a hot-bed of Puritanism, where the fiercest tenets of Calvin reigned supreme. The movement was no doubt hastened by the political circumstances of the time. Under the rule of Elizabeth loyalty became more and more a passion among Englishmen; and the Bull of Deposition placed Rome in the forefront of Elizabeth's foes. The conspiracies which festered around Mary were laid to the Pope's charge; he was known to be pressing on France and on Spain the invasion and conquest of the heretic kingdom; he was soon to bless the Armada. Every day made it harder for a Catholic to reconcile Catholicism with loyalty to his Queen or devotion to his country; and the mass of men, who are moved by sentiment rather than by reason, swung slowly round to the side which, whatever its religious significance might be, was the side of patriotism, of liberty against tyranny, of England against Spain. A new impulse was given to this silent drift of religious opinion by the atrocities which marked the Catholic triumph on the other side of the Channel. The horror of Alva's butcheries or of the massacre in Paris on St. Bartholomew's day revived the memories of the bloodshed under Mary. The tale of Protestant sufferings was told with a wonderful pathos and picturesqueness by John Foxe, an exile during the persecution; and his "Book of Martyrs," which was set up by royal order in the churches for public reading, passed from the churches to the shelves of every English household. The trading classes of the towns had been the first to embrace the doctrines of the Reformation, but their Protestantism became a passion as the refugees of the Continent brought to shop and market their tale of outrage and blood. Thousands of Flemish exiles found a refuge in the Cinque Ports, a third of the Antwerp merchants were seen pacing the new London Exchange, and a Church of French Huguenots found a home which it still retains in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.

[Sidenote: The Seminary Priests.]

But the decay of Catholicism appealed strongly to the new spirit of Catholic zeal which, in its despair of aid from Catholic princes, was girding itself for its own bitter struggle with heresy. Pius the Fifth had now passed away, but the policy of the Papal court remained unchanged. His successor, Gregory the Thirteenth, showed the same restless zeal, the same world-wide energy in the work of winning back the nations to the Catholic Church. Rome was still the centre of the Catholic crusade. It wielded material as well as spiritual arms. If the Papacy had ceased to be a military power, it remained a financial power. Taxes were multiplied, expenses reduced, estates confiscated, free towns reduced to servitude, with the one aim of enabling Gregory and his successors to build up a vast system of loans which poured the wealth of Europe into the treasury of Catholicism. It was the treasure of the Vatican which financed the Catholic movement. Subsidies from the Papacy fitted out the fleet that faced the Turk at Lepanto, and gathered round the Guises their lance-knights from the Rhine. Papal supplies equipped expeditions against Ireland, and helped Philip to bear the cost of the Armada. It was the Papal exchequer which supported the world-wide diplomacy that was carrying on negotiations in Sweden and intrigues in Poland, goading the lukewarm Emperor to action or quickening the sluggish movements of Spain, plotting the ruin of Geneva or the assassination of Orange, stirring up revolt in England and civil war in France. It was the Papacy that bore the cost of the religious propaganda that was fighting its stubborn battle with Calvinist and Lutheran on the Rhine and the Elbe, or sending its missionaries to win back the lost isle of the west. As early as 1568 Dr. Allen, a scholar who had been driven from Oxford by the test prescribed in the Act of Uniformity, had foreseen the results of the dying out of the Marian priests, and had set up a seminary at Douay to supply their place. The new college was liberally supported by the Catholic peers, and supplied with pupils by a stream of refugees from Oxford and the English grammar schools. Three years after its opening the college numbered a hundred and fifty members. It was in these "seminary priests" that Gregory the Thirteenth saw the means of reviving Catholic zeal in England, and at the Pope's bidding they began in 1576 to pass over to English shores.

[Sidenote: The English Panic.]

Few as the new-comers were at first, their presence was at once felt in the check which it gave to the gradual reconciliation of the Catholic gentry to the English Church. No check could have been more galling to Elizabeth, and her resentment was quickened by the sense of danger. Rome had set itself in the forefront of her foes. She had accepted the issue of the Bull of Deposition as a declaration of war on the part of the Papacy, and she viewed the Douay priests with some justice as its political emissaries. The comparative security of the Catholics from active persecution during the early part of her reign had arisen, partly from the sympathy and connivance of the gentry who acted as justices of the peace, and still more from her own religious indifference. But the Test Act placed the magistracy in Protestant hands; and as Elizabeth passed from indifference to suspicion and from suspicion to terror she put less restraint on the bigotry around her. In quitting Euston Hall which she had visited in one of her pilgrimages the Queen gave its master, young Rookwood, thanks for his entertainment and her hand to kiss. "But my Lord Chamberlain nobly and gravely understanding that Rookwood was excommunicate" for non-attendance at church "called him before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her royal presence, he unfit to accompany any Christian person, forthwith said that he was fitter for a pair of stocks, commanded him out of Court, and yet to attend the Council's pleasure." The Council's pleasure was seen in his committal to the town prison at Norwich, while "seven more gentlemen of worship" were fortunate enough to escape with a simple sentence of arrest at their own homes. The Queen's terror became a panic in the nation at large. The few priests who landed from Douay were multiplied into an army of Papal emissaries despatched to sow treason and revolt throughout the land. Parliament, which the working of the Test Act had made a wholly Protestant body, save for the presence of a few Catholics among the peers, was summoned to meet the new danger, and declared by formal statute the landing of these priests and the harbouring of them to be treason. The Act proved no idle menace; and the execution of Cuthbert Mayne, a young priest who was arrested in Cornwall with the Papal Bull of Deposition hidden about him, gave a terrible indication of the character of the struggle upon which Elizabeth was about to enter.

[Sidenote: Don John of Austria.]

The execution of Cuthbert Mayne was far from being purposed as the opening of a religious persecution. To modern eyes there is something even more revolting than open persecution in a policy which branded every Catholic priest as a traitor and all Catholic worship as disloyalty; but the first step towards toleration was won when the Queen rested her system of repression on purely political grounds. If Elizabeth was a persecutor, she was the first English ruler who felt the charge of religious persecution to be a stigma on her rule. Nor can it be denied that there was a real political danger in the new missionaries. Allen was a restless conspirator, and the work of his seminary priests was meant to aid a new plan of the Papacy for the conquest of England. In 1576, on the death of Requesens, the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, a successor was found for him in Don John of Austria, a natural brother of Philip, the victor of Lepanto, and the most famous general of his day. The temper of Don John was daring and ambitious; his aim was a crown; and he sought in the Netherlands the means of winning one. His ambition lent itself easily to the schemes of Mary Stuart and of Rome; and he resolved to bring about by quick concessions a settlement in the Low Countries, to cross with the Spanish forces employed there to England, to raise the Catholics in revolt, to free and marry Mary Stuart, and reign in her right as an English king. The plan was an able one; but it was foiled ere he reached his post. The Spanish troops had mutinied on the death of Requesens; and their sack of Antwerp drew the States of the Netherlands together in a "Pacification of Ghent." All differences of religion were set aside in a common purpose to drive out the stranger. Baffled as he was, the subtlety of Don John turned even this league to account. Their demand for the withdrawal of the Spanish troops, though fatal to Philip's interests in the Low Countries, could be made to serve the interests of Don John across the seas. In February 1577, therefore, he ratified the Pacification of Ghent, consented to the maintenance of the liberties of the States, and engaged to withdraw the army. He stipulated only for its withdrawal by sea, and for a delay of three months, which was needful for the arrangement of his descent on the English coast. Both demands however were refused; he was forced to withdraw his troops at once and by land, and the scheme of the Papacy found itself utterly foiled.

[Sidenote: The Prince of Parma.]

Secret as were the plans of Don John, Elizabeth had seen how near danger had drawn to her. Fortune once more proved her friend, for the efforts of Don John to bring about a reconciliation of the Netherlands proved fruitless, and negotiations soon passed again into the clash of arms. But the Queen was warned at last. On the new outbreak of war in 1577 she allied herself with the States and sent them money and men. Such a step, though not in form an act of hostility against Philip, for the Provinces with which she leagued herself still owned themselves as Philip's subjects, was a measure which proved the Queen's sense of her need of the Netherlands. Though she had little sympathy with their effort for freedom, she saw in them "the one bridle to Spain to keep war out of our own gate." But she was to see the war drift nearer and nearer to her shores. Now that the Netherlands were all but lost Philip's slow stubborn temper strung itself to meet the greatness of the peril. The Spanish army was reinforced; and in January 1578 it routed the army of the States on the field of Gemblours. The sickness and death of Don John arrested its progress for a few months; but his successor, Philip's nephew, Alexander Farnese, the Prince of Parma, soon proved his greatness whether as a statesman or a general. He seized on the difference of faith between the Catholic and Protestant States as a means of division. The Pacification of Ghent was broken at the opening of 1579 by the secession of the Walloon provinces of the southern border. It was only by a new league of the seven northern provinces, where Protestantism was dominant, in the Union of Utrecht that William of Orange could meet Parma's stroke. But the general union of the Low Countries was fatally broken, and from this moment the ten Catholic states passed one by one into the hands of Spain.

[Sidenote: The Papal attack.]

The new vigour of Philip in the West marked a change in the whole policy of Spain. Till now, in spite of endless provocations, Philip had clung to the English alliance. Fear of Elizabeth's union with France, dread of her help to the Netherlands, had steeled him to bear patiently her defiance of his counsels, her neglect of his threats, her seizure of his treasure, her persecution of the Catholic party which looked to him as its head. But patience had only been met by fresh attacks. The attempt of Don John had spurred Elizabeth to ally herself to France. She was expected every hour to marry the Duke of Anjou. She had given friendship and aid to the revolted provinces. Above all her freebooters were carrying war into the far Pacific, and challenging the right of Spain to the New World of the West. Philip drifted whether he would or no into a position of hostility. He had not forbidden the projects of Don John; he at last promised aid to the projects of Rome. In 1579 the Papacy planned the greatest and most comprehensive of its attacks upon Elizabeth. If the Catholic powers still hesitated and delayed, Rome was resolute to try its own strength in the West. The spiritual reconciliation of England was not enough. However successful the efforts of the seminary priests might prove they would leave Elizabeth on the throne, and the reign of Elizabeth was a defeat to the Papacy. In issuing its Bull of Deposition Rome had staked all on the ruin of the Queen, and even if England became Catholic Gregory could not suffer his spiritual subjects to obey a ruler whom his sentence had declared an unlawful possessor of the throne. And now that the temper of Spain promised more vigorous action Rome could pave the way for a landing of Philip's troops by stirring up a threefold danger for Elizabeth. While fresh and more vigorous missionaries egged on the English Catholics to revolt, the Pope hastened to bring about a Catholic revolution in Scotland and a Catholic insurrection in Ireland.

[Sidenote: Ireland.]

In Ireland Sidney's victory had been followed by ten years of peace. Had the land been left to itself there would have been nothing more than the common feuds and disturbances of the time. The policy of driving its people to despair by seizing their lands for English settlements had been abandoned since Mary's day. The religious question had hardly any practical existence. On the Queen's accession indeed the ecclesiastical policy of the Protestants had been revived in name; Rome was again renounced; the Act of Uniformity forced on the island the use of the English Prayer-Book and compelled attendances at the services where it was used. There was as before a general air of compliance with the law. Even in the districts without the Pale the bishops generally conformed; and the only exceptions of which we have any information were to be found in the extreme south and in the north, where resistance was distant enough to be safe. But the real cause of this apparent submission to the Act of Uniformity lay in the fact that it remained, and necessarily remained, a dead letter. It was impossible to find any considerable number of English ministers, or of Irish priests acquainted with English. Meath was one of the most civilized dioceses of the island, and out of a hundred curates in it hardly ten knew any tongue save their own. The promise that the service-book should be translated into Irish was never carried out, and the final clause of the Act itself authorized the use of a Latin rendering of it till further order could be taken. But this, like its other provisions, was ignored; and throughout Elizabeth's reign the gentry of the Pale went unquestioned to Mass. There was in fact no religious persecution, and in the many complaints of Shane O'Neill we find no mention of a religious grievance.

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Papacy.]

But this was far from being the view of Rome or of Spain, of the Catholic missionaries, or of the Irish exiles abroad. They represented and perhaps believed the Irish people to be writhing under a religious oppression which it was burning to shake off. They saw in the Irish loyalty to Catholicism a lever for overthrowing the heretic Queen. Stukely, an Irish refugee, had pressed on the Pope and Spain as early as 1571 the policy of a descent on Ireland; and though a force gathered in 1578 by the Pope for this purpose was diverted to a mad crusade against the Moors, his plans were carried out in 1579 by the landing of a few soldiers under the brother of the Earl of Desmond, James Fitzmaurice, on the coast of Kerry. The Irish however held aloof, and Fitzmaurice fell in a skirmish; but the revolt of the Earl of Desmond gave fresh hope of success, and the rising was backed by the arrival in 1580 of two thousand Papal soldiers "in five great ships." These mercenaries were headed by an Italian captain, San Giuseppe, and accompanied by a Papal Legate, the Jesuit Sanders, who brought plenary indulgence for all who joined the sacred enterprise and threats of damnation for all who resisted it. "What will you answer to the Pope's treatment," ran his letter to the Irish, "when he, bringing us the Pope's and other Catholic princes' aid, shall charge you with the crime and pain of heretics for maintaining an heretical pretensed Queen against the public sentence of Christ's vicar? Can she with her feigned supremacy absolve and acquit you from the Pope's excommunication and curse?" The news of the landing of this force stirred in England a Protestant frenzy that foiled the scheme for a Catholic marriage with the Duke of Anjou; while Elizabeth, panic-stricken, urged the French king to save her from Philip by an invasion of the Netherlands. But the danger passed quickly away. The Papal attempt ended in a miserable failure. The fort of Smerwick, in which the invaders entrenched themselves, was forced to surrender, and its garrison put ruthlessly to the sword. The Earl of Desmond, who after long indecision rose to support them, was defeated and hunted over his own country, which the panic-born cruelty of his pursuers harried into a wilderness.

[Sidenote: The Jesuit landing.]

Pitiless as it was, the work done in Munster spread a terror over Ireland which served England in good stead when the struggle of Catholicism culminated in the fight with the Armada; and not a chieftain stirred during that memorable year save to massacre the miserable men who were shipwrecked along the coast of Bantry or Sligo. But the Irish revolt did much to give fresh strength to the panic which the efforts of the seminary priests had roused in England. This was raised to frenzy by news that to the efforts of the seminary priests were now added those of Jesuit missionaries. Pope Gregory had resolved to support his military effort in Ireland by a fresh missionary effort in England itself. Philip would only promise to invade England if the co-operation of its Catholics was secured; and the aim of the new mission was to prepare them for revolt. While the force of San Giuseppe was being equipped for Kerry a young convert, William Gilbert, was despatched to form a Catholic association in England; among whose members the chief were afterwards found engaged in conspiracies for the death of Elizabeth or sharing in the Gunpowder Plot. As soon as this was organized, as many as fifty priests, if we may trust Allen's statement, were sent to land secretly on the coast. They were headed by two men of remarkable talents and energy. A large number of the Oxford refugees at Douay had joined the Order of Jesus, whose members were already famous for their blind devotion to the will and judgements of Rome; and the two ablest and most eloquent of these exiles, Campian, once a fellow of St. John's, and Parsons, once a fellow of Balliol, were despatched in the spring of 1580 as the heads of a Jesuit mission in England. Their special aim was to win the nobility and gentry to the Church, and for the moment their success seemed overwhelming. "It is supposed," wrote Allen triumphantly, "that there are twenty thousand more Catholics this year than last." The eagerness shown to hear Campian was so great that in spite of the rewards offered for his arrest by the Government he was able to preach with hardly a show of concealment to a large audience at Smithfield. From London the Jesuits wandered in the disguise of captains or serving-men, sometimes even in the cassocks of the English clergy, through many of the counties; and wherever they went the zeal of the Catholic gentry revived. The list of nobles won back to the older faith by these wandering apostles was headed by the name of Lord Oxford, Cecil's own son-in-law, and the proudest among English peers.

[Sidenote: The Protestant terror.]

Their success in undoing the Queen's work of compromise was shown in a more public way by the growing withdrawal of the Catholics from attendance at the worship of the English Church. It was plain that a fierce religious struggle was at hand, and men felt that behind this lay a yet fiercer political struggle. Philip's hosts were looming over sea, and the horrors of foreign invasion seemed about to be added to the horrors of civil war. The panic of the Protestants and of the Parliament outran even the real greatness of the danger. The little group of missionaries was magnified by popular fancy into a host of disguised Jesuits; and the invasion of this imaginary host was met by the seizure and torture of as many priests as the government could lay hands on, the imprisonment of recusants, the securing of the prominent Catholics throughout the country, and by the assembling of Parliament at the opening of 1581. An Act "to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in due obedience" prohibited the saying of Mass even in private houses, increased the fine on recusants to twenty pounds a month, and enacted that "all persons pretending to any power of absolving subjects from their allegiance, or practising to withdraw them to the Romish religion, with all persons after the present session willingly so absolved or reconciled to the See of Rome, shall be guilty of High Treason." The way in which the vast powers conferred on the Crown by this statute were used by Elizabeth was not only characteristic in itself, but important as at once defining the policy to which, in theory at least, her successors adhered for more than a hundred years. No layman was brought to the bar or to the block under its provisions. The oppression of the Catholic gentry was limited to an exaction, more or less rigorous at different times, of the fines for recusancy or non-attendance at public worship. The work of bloodshed was reserved wholly for priests, and under Elizabeth this work was done with a ruthless energy which for the moment crushed the Catholic reaction. The Jesuits were tracked by pursuivants and spies, dragged from their hiding-places, and sent in batches to the Tower. So hot was the pursuit that Parsons was forced to fly across the Channel; while Campian was arrested in July 1581, brought a prisoner through the streets of London amidst the howling of the mob, and placed at the bar on the charge of treason. "Our religion only is our crime," was a plea which galled his judges; but the political danger of the Jesuit preaching was disclosed in his evasion of any direct reply when questioned as to his belief in the validity of the excommunication or deposition of the Queen by the Papal See, and after much hesitation he was executed as a traitor.

[Sidenote: The Catholic resistance.]

Rome was now at open war with England. Even the more conservative Englishmen looked on the Papacy as the first among England's foes. In striving to enforce the claims of its temporal supremacy, Rome had roused against it that national pride which had battled with it even in the middle ages. From that hour therefore the cause of Catholicism was lost. England became Protestant in heart and soul when Protestantism became identified with patriotism. But it was not to Protestantism only that this attitude of Rome and the policy it forced on the Government gave a new impulse. The death of Campian was the prelude to a steady, pitiless effort at the extermination of his class. If we adopt the Catholic estimate of the time, the twenty years which followed saw the execution of two hundred priests, while a yet greater number perished in the filthy and fever-stricken gaols into which they were plunged. The work of reconciliation to Rome was arrested by this ruthless energy; but, on the other hand, the work which the priests had effected could not be undone. The system of quiet compulsion and conciliation to which Elizabeth had trusted for the religious reunion of her subjects was foiled; and the English Catholics, fined, imprisoned at every crisis of national danger, and deprived of their teachers by the prison and the gibbet, were severed more hopelessly than ever from the national Church. A fresh impulse was thus given to the growing current of opinion which was to bring England at last to recognize the right of every man to freedom both of conscience and of worship. "In Henry's days, the father of this Elizabeth," wrote a Catholic priest at this time, "the whole kingdom with all its bishops and learned men abjured their faith at one word of the tyrant. But now in his daughter's days boys and women boldly profess the faith before the judge, and refuse to make the slightest concession even at the threat of death." What Protestantism had first done under Mary, Catholicism was doing under Elizabeth. It was deepening the sense of personal religion. It was revealing in men who had till now cowered before the might of kingship a power greater than the might of kings. It was breaking the spell which the monarchy had laid on the imagination of the people. The Crown ceased to seem irresistible when "boys and women" dared to resist it: it lost its mysterious sacredness when half the nation looked on their sovereign as a heretic. The "divinity that doth hedge a king" was rudely broken in upon when Jesuit libellers were able to brand the wearer of the crown not only as a usurper but as a profligate and abandoned woman. The mighty impulse of patriotism, of national pride, which rallied the whole people round Elizabeth as the Armada threatened England or Drake threatened Spain, shielded indeed Elizabeth from much of the natural results of this drift of opinion. But with her death the new sentiment started suddenly to the front. The divine right of kings, the divine right of bishops, found themselves face to face with a passion for religious and political liberty which had gained vigour from the dungeon of the Catholic priest as from that of the Protestant zealot.