 CHAPTER 31 England under Elizabeth There was great rejoicing all over the land when the Lords of the Council went down to Hartfield to hail the Princess Elizabeth as the new Queen of England. Weary of the barbarities of Mary's reign, the people looked with hope and gladness to the new sovereign. The nations seemed to wake from a horrible dream, and heaven, so long hidden by the smoke of the fires that roasted men and women to death, appeared to brighten once more. Queen Elizabeth was five and twenty years of age when she rode through the streets of London from the Tower to Westminster Abbey to be crowned. Her countenance was strongly marked but on the whole, commanding and dignified. Her hair was red and her nose something too long and sharp for a woman's. She was not the beautiful creature her courtiers made out, but she was well enough and no doubt looked all the better for coming after the dark and gloomy Mary. She was well educated, but a roundabout rider, and rather a hard-swearer and coarse talker. She was clever, but cunning and deceitful, and inherited much of her father's violent temper. I mention this now because she has been so over-praised by one party and so over-abused by another that it is hardly possible to understand the greater part of her reign without first understanding what kind of woman she really was. She began her reign with the great advantage of having a very wise and careful minister, William Cecil, whom she afterwards made Lord Burley. All together the people had greater reason for rejoicing than they usually had, when there were processions in the streets, and they were happy with some reason. All kinds of shows and images were set up. Gog and Magog were hoisted to the top of Temple Bar, and, which was more to the purpose, the corporation dutifully presented the young queen with the sum of a thousand marks in gold, so heavy a present that she was obliged to take it into her carriage with both hands. The coronation was a great success, and on the next day one of the courtiers presented a petition to the new queen, praying that, as it was the custom to release some prisoners on such occasions, she would have the goodness to release the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and also the Apostle St. Paul, who had been for some time shut up in a strange language, so that the people could not get at them. To this the queen replied that it would be better first to inquire of themselves whether they desired to be released or not, and, as a means of finding out a great public discussion, a sort of religious tournament was appointed to take place between certain champions of the two religions in Westminster Abbey. You may suppose that it was soon made pretty clear to common sense that for people to benefit by what they repeat or read, it is rather necessary they should understand something about it. Accordingly, a church service in plain English was settled, and other laws and regulations were made, completely establishing the great work of the Reformation. The Romish bishops and champions were not harshly dealt with, all things considered, and the queen's ministers were both prudent and merciful. The one great trouble of this reign, and the unfortunate cause of the greater part of such turmoil and bloodshed as occurred in it, was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. We will try to understand, in as few words as possible, who Mary was, what she was, and how she came to be a thorn in the royal pillow of Elizabeth. She was the daughter of the Queen Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise. She had been married when a mere child to the Dauphin, the son and heir of the King of France. The Pope, who pretended that no one could rightfully wear the crown of England without his gracious permission, was strongly opposed to Elizabeth, who had not asked for the said gracious permission. And as Mary, Queen of Scots, would have inherited the English crown in right of her birth, supposing the English Parliament not to have altered the succession, the Pope himself and most of the discontented who were followers of his maintained that Mary was the rightful Queen of England, and Elizabeth the wrongful Queen. Mary, being so closely connected with France, and France being jealous of England, there was far greater danger in this than there would have been if she had had no alliance with that great power. And when her young husband, on the death of his father, became Francis II, King of France, the matter grew very serious. For the young couple styled themselves King and Queen of England, and the Pope was disposed to help them by doing all the mischief he could. Now the reformed religion under the guidance of a stern and powerful preacher named John Knox, and other such men, had been making fierce progress in Scotland. It was still a half-savage country where there was a great deal of murdering and rioting continually going on, and the reformers, instead of reforming these evils as they should have done, went to work in the ferocious old Scottish spirit, laying churches and chapels to waste, pulling down pictures and altars, and knocking about the grey friars and the black friars and the white friars, and all the friars of all sorts of colors in all direction. This obdurate and harsh spirit of the Scottish reformers, the scotch have always been rather a sullen and frowning people in religious matters, put up the blood of the Romish French court, and caused Francis and troops over to Scotland with the hope of settling the friars of all sorts of colors on their legs again, of conquering that country first, and England afterwards, and so crushing the reformation all to pieces. The Scottish reformers who had formed a great league which they called the Congregation of the Lord, secretly represented to Elizabeth that, if the reformed religion got the worst of it with them, it would be likely to get the worst of it in England, too, and thus Elizabeth, though she had a high notion of the rites of kings and queens to do anything they liked, sent an army to Scotland to support the reformers, who were in arms against their sovereign. All these proceedings led to a treaty of peace at Edinburgh, under which the French consented to depart from the kingdom. By a separate treaty, Mary and her young husband engaged to renounce their assumed title of King and Queen of England. But this treaty they never fulfilled. It happened soon after matters had got to this state that the young French king died, leaving Mary a young widow. She was then invited by her Scottish subjects to return home and reign over them, and as she was now happy where she was, after a little time, complied. Elizabeth had been queen three years when Mary, Queen of Scots, embarked at Calais for her own rough, quarreling country. As she came out of the harbor, a vessel was lost before her eyes, and she said, Oh, good God, what an omen this is for such a voyage! She was very fond of France, and sat on the deck, looking back at it and weeping until it was quite dark. When she went to bed, she directed to be called at daybreak if the French coast were still visible that she might behold it for the last time. As it proved to be a clear morning this was done, and she again wept for the country she was leaving, and said many times, Farewell France, Farewell France, I shall never see thee again. All this was long remembered afterwards, as sorrowful and interesting in a fair young princess of nineteen. Indeed, I am afraid it gradually came, together with her other distresses, to surround her with greater sympathy than she deserved. When she came to Scotland and took up her abode at the palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, she found herself among uncouth strangers and wild, uncomfortable customs very different from her experiences in the court of France. The very people who were disposed to love her made her head ache when she was tired out by her voyage, with a serenade of discordant music, a fearful concert of bagpipes, I suppose, and brought her and her train home to her palace on miserable little scotch horses that appeared to be half-starved. Among the people who were not disposed to love her she found the powerful leaders of the Reformed Church, who were bitter upon her amusements, however innocent, and denounced music and dancing as works of the devil. John Knox himself often lectured her violently and angrily, and did much to make her life unhappy. All these reasons confirmed her old attachment to the Romish religion, and caused her, there is no doubt, most imprudently and dangerously both for herself and for England too, to give a solemn pledge to the heads of the Romish church that if she ever succeeded to the English crown she would set up that religion again. In reading her unhappy history you must always remember this, and also that during her whole life she was constantly put forward against the Queen in some form or other by the Romish Party. That Elizabeth, on the other hand, was not inclined to like her as pretty certain. Elizabeth was very vain and jealous, and had an extraordinary dislike to people being married. She treated Lady Catherine Gray, sister of the beheaded Lady Jane, with such shameful severity, for no other reason than her being secretly married, that she died and her husband was ruined. So when a second marriage for Mary began to be talked about, probably Elizabeth disliked her more. Not that Elizabeth wanted suitors of her own, for they started up from Spain, Austria, Sweden, and England. Her English lover at this time, and one whom she much favored too, was Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, himself secretly married to Amy Robbsart, the daughter of an English gentleman whom he was strongly suspected of causing to be murdered, down at his country seat, Cumner Hall in Berkshire, that he might be free to marry the Queen. Upon this story the great writer, Sir Walter Scott, has founded one of his best romances. But if Elizabeth knew how to lead her handsome favorite on, for her own vanity and pleasure, she knew how to stop him for her own pride and his love, and all the other proposals came to nothing. The Queen always declared in good-set speeches that she would never be married at all, but would live and die a maiden Queen. It was a very pleasant and meritorious declaration, I suppose, but it has been puffed and trumpeted so much that I am rather tired of it myself. Diverse princes proposed to marry Mary, but the English court had reasons for being jealous of them all, and even proposed, as a matter of policy, that she should marry that very Earl of Leicester who had aspired to be the husband of Elizabeth. At last Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lenox, and himself descended from the royal family of Scotland, went over with Elizabeth's consent to try his fortune at Holyrood. He was a tall simpleton, and could dance and play the guitar, but I know of nothing else he could do, unless it were to get very drunk and eat gluttonously and make a contemptible spectacle of himself in many mean and vain ways. However, he gained Mary's heart, not disdaining in the pursuit of his object to ally himself with one of her secretaries, David Rizio, who had great influence with her. He soon married the Queen. This marriage does not say much for her, but what followed will presently say less. Mary's brother, the Earl of Murray, and head of the Protestant Party in Scotland, had opposed this marriage partly on religious grounds and partly perhaps from personal dislike of the very contemptible bridegroom. When it had taken place, through Mary's gaining over to it the more powerful of the lords about her, she banished Murray for his pains, and when he and some other nobles rose in arms to support the reformed religion, she herself, within a month of her wedding day, rode against them in armor with loaded pistols in her saddle. Driven out of Scotland, they presented themselves before Elizabeth, who called them traitors and public and assisted them in private, according to her crafty nature. Mary had been married but a little while when she began to hate her husband, who in his turn began to hate that David Rizio, with whom he had lead to gain her favor, and whom he now believed to be her lover. He hated Rizio to that extent that he made a compact with Lord Ruthman and three other lords to get rid of him by murder. This wicked agreement they made in solemn secrecy upon the first of March, fifteen hundred and sixty-six, and on the night of Saturday the night, the conspirators were brought by Darnley up a private staircase, dark and steep, into a range of rooms where they knew that Mary was sitting at supper, with her sister, Lady Argyle, and this doomed man. When they went into the room, Darnley took the queen round the waist, and Lord Ruthman, who had risen from a bed of sickness to do this murder, came in, gaunt and ghastly, leaning on two men. Rizio ran behind the queen for shelter and protection. Let him come out of the room, said Ruthman. He shall not leave the room, replied the queen. I read his danger in your face, and it is my will that he remain here. They then set upon him, struggled with him, overturned the table, dragged him out, and killed him with fifty-six stabs. When the queen heard that he was dead, she said, no more tears, I will think now of revenge. Within a day or two she gained her husband over, and prevailed on the tall idiot to abandon the conspirators and fly with her to Dunbar. There he issued a proclamation, audaciously and falsely denying that he had any knowledge of the late, bloody business. And there they were joined by the Earl Bothwell and some other nobles. With their help they raised eight thousand men, returned to Edinburgh, and drove the assassins into England. Mary soon afterwards gave birth to a son, still thinking of revenge. That she should have had a greater scorn for her husband after his late cowardice and treachery than she had had before was natural enough. There is little doubt that she now began to love Bothwell instead, and to plan with him means of getting rid of Darnley. Bothwell had such power over her that he induced her even to pardon the assassins of Rizio. The arrangements for the christening of the young prince were entrusted to him, and he was one of the most important people at the ceremony, where the child was named James, Elizabeth being his godmother, though not present on the occasion. A week afterwards Darnley, who had left Mary and gone to his father's house at Glasgow, being taken ill with the smallpox, she sent her own physician to attend him. But there is reason to apprehend that this was merely a show and a pretense, and that she knew what was doing when Bothwell within another month proposed to one of the late conspirators against Rizio to murder Darnley. For that it was the queen's mind that he should be taken away. It is certain that on the very day she wrote to her ambassador in France, complaining of him, and yet when immediately to Glasgow, feigning to be very anxious about him and to love him very much. If she wanted to get him in her power, she succeeded to her heart's content, for she induced him to go back with her to Edinburgh and to occupy, instead of the palace, a lone house outside the city called the Kirk of Field. Here he lived for about a week. One Sunday night she remained with him until ten o'clock, and then left him to go to Holyrood to be present at an entertainment given in celebration of the marriage of one of her favorite servants. At two o'clock in the morning the city was shaken by a great explosion, and the Kirk of Field was blown to Adams. The city's body was found next day lying under a tree at some distance. How it came there, undisfigured and unscorched by gunpower, and how this crime came to be so clumsily and strangely committed, it is impossible to discover. The deceitful character of Mary and the deceitful character of Elizabeth have rendered almost every part of their joint history uncertain and obscure. But I fear that Mary was unquestionably a party to her husband's murder, and that this was the revenge she had threatened. The scotch people universally believed it. Voices cried out in the streets of Edinburgh in the dead of the night for justice on the murderess. Plackards were posted by unknown hands in the public places denouncing Wothwell as the murderer, and the queen as his accomplice, and when he afterwards married her, though himself already married, previously making a show of taking her prisoner by force, the indignation of the people knew no bounds. The women particularly are described as having been quite frantic against the queen, and have hooded and cried after her in the streets with terrific vehemence. Such guilty unions seldom prosper. This husband and wife had lived together but a month when they were separated forever by the success of a band of scotch nobles who associated against them for the protection of the young prince, whom Wothwell had vainly endeavored to lay hold of, and whom he would have certainly murdered. If the Earl of Mar, in whose hands the boy was, had not been firmly and honorably faithful to his trust. Before this angry power Wothwell fled abroad where he died, a prisoner and mad, nine miserable years afterwards. Mary being found by the associated lords to deceive them at every turn was sent to prisoner to Lucklevin Castle, which, as it stood in the midst of a lake, could only be approached by boat. Here one Lord Lindsay, who was so much of a brute that the nobles would have done better if they had chosen a mere gentleman for their messenger, made her sign her abdication and appoint Murray, regent of Scotland. Here too Murray saw her in a sorrowing and humbled state. She had better have remained in the castle of Lucklevin, dull prison as it was, with the rippling of the lake against it and the moving shadows of the water on the room walls, but she could not rest there and more than once tried to escape. The first time she had nearly succeeded dressed in the clothes of her own washerwoman, but, putting up her hand to prevent one of the boatmen from lifting her veil, the men suspected her, seeing how wide it was, and rode her back again. A short time afterwards her fascinating manners enlisted in her cause a boy in the castle, called the little Douglas, who, while the family were at supper, stole the keys of the great gate, went softly out with the queen, locked the gate on the outside, and rode her away across the lake, sinking the keys as they went along. On the opposite shore she was met by another Douglas, and some few lords, and so, accompanied, rode away on horseback to Hamilton, where they raised three thousand men. Here she issued a proclamation declaring that the abdication she had signed in her prison was illegal, and requiring the regent to yield to his lawful queen. Being a steady soldier and in no way discomposed, although he was without an army, Murray pretended to treat with her until he had collected a force about half equal to her own, and then he gave her battle. In one quarter of an hour he cut down all her hopes. She had another weary ride on horseback of sixty long scotch miles, and took shelter at Dundreddon Abbey, when she fled for safety to Elizabeth's dominions. Mary Queen of Scots came to England, to her own ruin, the trouble of the kingdom, and the misery and death of many, in the year one thousand five hundred and sixty-eight. While she left it, and the world, nineteen years afterwards, we have now to see. Second Part When Mary Queen of Scots arrived in England without money, and even without any other clothes than those she wore, she wrote to Elizabeth, representing herself as an innocent and injured piece of royalty, and in treating her assistance to oblige her Scottish subjects to take her back again and obey her. But as her character was already known in England, to be a very different one from what she made it out to be, she was told an answer that she must first clear herself. Made uneasy by this condition Mary, rather than stay in England, would have gone to Spain or to France, or would even have gone back to Scotland. But as her doing either would have been likely to trouble England afresh, it was decided that she should be detained here. She first came to Carlisle, and, after that, was moved about from castle to castle, as was considered necessary, but England she never left again. After trying very hard to get rid of the necessity of clearing herself, Mary, advised by Lord Harry's, her best friend in England, agreed to answer the charges against her, if the Scottish noblemen who made them would attend to maintain them before such English noblemen as Elizabeth might appoint for that purpose. Finally such an assembly under the name of a conference met, first at York, and afterwards at Hampton Court. In its presence Lord Lennox, Darnley's father, openly charged Mary with the murder of his son, and whatever Mary's friends may now say or write in her behalf, there is no doubt that, when her brother Murray produced against her a casket containing certain guilty letters and verses, which he stated to have passed between her and Bothwell, she withdrew from the inquiry. Consequently it is to be supposed that she was then considered guilty by those who had the best opportunities of judging of the truth, and that the feeling which afterwards arose in her behalf was a very generous but not a very reasonable one. However, the Duke of Norfolk, an honorable but rather weak nobleman, partly because Mary was captivating, partly because he was ambitious, partly because he was over persuaded by artful plotters against Elizabeth, conceived a strong idea that he would like to marry the Queen of Scots, though he was a little frightened, too, by the letters in the casket. This idea being secretly encouraged by some nobleman of Elizabeth's court, and even by the favorite Earl of Leicester, because it was objected to by other favorites who were his rivals. Mary expressed her approval of it, and the King of France and the King of Spain are supposed to have done the same. It was not so quietly planned, though, but that it came to Elizabeth's ears, who warned the Duke to be careful what sort of pillow he was going to lay his head upon. He made a humble reply at the time, but turned sulky soon afterwards, and, being considered dangerous, was sent to the tower. Thus from the moment of Mary's coming to England she began to be the center of plots and miseries. A rise of the Catholics in the north was the nest of these, and it was only checked by many executions and much bloodshed. It was followed by a great conspiracy of the Pope and some of the Catholic sovereigns of Europe to depose Elizabeth, place Mary on the throne, and restore the unreformed religion. It is almost impossible to doubt that Mary knew and approved this, and the Pope himself was so hot in the matter that he issued a bull, in which he openly called Elizabeth the pretended Queen of England, excommunicated her, and excommunicated all her subjects who should continue to obey her. A copy of this miserable paper got into London, and was found one morning publicly posted on the Bishop of London's gate. A great hue and cry being raised, another copy was found in the chamber of a student of Lincoln's Inn, who confessed, being put upon the rack, that he had received it from one John Felton, a rich gentleman who lived across the Thames, near Southwark. This John Felton, being put upon the rack, too, confessed that he had posted the placard on the Bishop's gate. For this offense he was, within four days, taken to St. Paul's churchyard, and there hanged and quartered. As to the Pope's bull, the people, by the Reformation, having thrown off the Pope, did not care much, you may suppose, for the Pope's throwing off them. It was a mere dirty piece of paper, and not half so powerful as a street ballad. On the very day when Felton was brought to his trial, the poor Duke of Norfolk was released. It would have been well for him if he had kept away from the tower ever more, and from the snares that had taken him there. But even while he was in that dismal place he corresponded with Mary, and as soon as he was out of it he began to plot again. Being discovered in correspondence with the Pope, with a view to a rising in England which should force Elizabeth to consent to his marriage with Mary and to repeal the laws against Catholics, he was recommitted to the tower and brought to trial. He was found guilty by the unanimous verdict of the laws who tried him, and was sentenced to the block. It is very difficult to make out, at this distance of time, and between opposite accounts, whether Elizabeth really was a humane woman, or desired to appear so, or was fearful of shedding the blood of people of great name who were popular in the country. Twice she commanded and countermanded the execution of this duke, and it did not take place until five months after his trial. The scaffold was erected on Tower Hill, and there he died like a brave man. He refused to have his eyes bandaged, saying that he was not at all afraid of death, and he admitted the justice of his sentence and was much regretted by the people. Although Mary had shrunk at the most important time from disproving her guilt, she was very careful never to do anything that would admit it. All such proposals as were made to her by Elizabeth for her release required that admission in some form or other, and therefore came to nothing. Moreover, both women, being artful and treacherous, and neither ever trusting the other, it was not likely that they ever could make an agreement. So the Parliament, aggravated by what the Pope had done, made new and strong laws against the spreading of the Catholic religion in England, and declared it treason in any one to say that the Queen and her successors were not the lawful sovereigns of England. It would have done more than this, but for Elizabeth's moderation. Since the Reformation there had come to be three great sects of religious people, or people who called themselves so, in England, that is to say those who belonged to the Reformed Church, those who belonged to the Unreformed Church, and those who were called the Puritans, because they said that they wanted to have everything very pure and plain in all the Church service. These last were, for the most part, an uncomfortable people who thought it highly meritorious to dress in a hideous manner, talk through their noses, and oppose all harmless enjoyments. But they were powerful too, and very much in earnest, and they were one in all the determined enemies of the Queen of Scots. The Protestant feeling in England was further strengthened by the tremendous cruelties to which Protestants were exposed in France and in the Netherlands. Scores of thousands of them were put to death in those countries with every cruelty that can be imagined. And at last, in the autumn of the year 1572, one of the greatest barbarities ever committed in the world took place at Paris. It is called in history the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, because it took place on Saint Bartholomew's eve. The day fell on Saturday the twenty-third of August. On that day all the great leaders of the Protestants, who were there called Huguenots, were assembled together for the purpose as was represented to them of doing honor to the marriage of their chief, the young King of Navarre, with the sister of Charles the Ninth, a miserable young king who then occupied the French throne. This dull creature was made to believe by his mother and other fierce Catholics about him that the Huguenots meant to take his life, and he was persuaded to give secret orders that, on the tolling of a great bell, they should be fallen upon by an overpowering force of armed men, and slaughtered wherever they could be found. When the appointed hour was close at hand, the stupid wretch, trembling from head to foot, was taken into a balcony by his mother to see the atrocious work begun. The moment the bell tolled, the murderers broke forth. During all that night in the next two days they broke into the houses, fired the houses, shot and stabbed the Protestants, men, women, and children, and flung their bodies into the streets. They were shot in the streets as they passed along and their blood ran down the gutters. Upwards of ten thousand Protestants were killed in Paris alone, in all of France four or five times that number. To return thanks to heaven for these diabolical murderers, the Pope and his train actually went in public procession at Rome, and, as if this were not shame enough for them, they had a metal struck to commemorate the event. But however comfortable the wholesale murders were to these high authorities, they had not that soothing effect upon the doll-king. I am happy to state that he never knew a moment's peace afterwards, that he was continually crying out that he saw the Huguenots covered with blood and wounds falling dead before him, and that he died within a year, shrieking and yelling and raving to that degree, that of all the popes who had ever lived had been rolled into one, they would not have afforded his guilty majesty the slightest consolation. When the terrible news of the massacre arrived in England, it made a powerful impression indeed upon the people. If they began to run a little wild against the Catholics at about this time, this fearful reason for it, coming so soon after the days of Bloody Queen Mary, must be remembered in their excuse. The court was not quite so honest as the people, but perhaps it sometimes is not. It received the French ambassador with all the lords and ladies dressed in deep mourning and keeping a profound silence. Nevertheless a proposal of marriage which she had made to Elizabeth only two days before the eve of St. Bartholomew, on behalf of the Duke of Alcennon, the French king's brother, a boy of seventeen, still went on, while on the other hand in her usual crafty way the queens secretly supplied the Huguenots with money and weapons. I must say that for a queen who made all those fine speeches, of which I have confessed myself to be rather tired, about living and dying a maiden queen, Elizabeth was going to be married pretty often. Besides always having some English favorite or other, whom she by turns encouraged and swore at and knocked about, for the maiden queen was very free with her fists, she held this French duke off and on through several years. When he at last came over to England the marriage articles were actually drawn up, and it was settled that the wedding should take place in six weeks. The queen was so then bend upon it that she prosecuted a poor Puritan named Stubbs, and a poor bookseller named Page for writing and publishing a pamphlet against it. Their right hands were chopped off for this crime, and poor Stubbs, more loyal than I should have been myself under the circumstances, immediately pulled off his hat with his left hand and cried, God save the queen! Stubbs was cruelly treated for the marriage never took place after all, though the queen pledged herself to the duke with a ring from her own finger. He went away no better than he came when the courtship had lasted some ten years altogether, and he died a couple of years afterwards, mourned by Elizabeth, who appears to have been really fond of him. It is not much to her credit for he was a bad enough member of a bad family. To return to the Catholics. There arose two orders of priests who were very busy in England and who were much dreaded. These were the Jesuits, who were everywhere in all sorts of disguises, and the seminary priests. The people had a great horror of the first because they were known to have taught that murder was lawful if it were done with an object of which they approved, and they had a great horror of the second because they came to teach the old religion and to be the successors of Queen Mary's priests, as those yet lingering in England were called when they should die out. The severest laws were made against them and were most unmercifully executed. Those who sheltered them in their houses often suffered heavily for what was an act of humanity, and the rack that cruel torture which tore men's limbs asunder was constantly kept going. What these unhappy men confessed, or what was ever confessed by anyone under that agony, must always be received with great doubt, as it is certain that people have frequently owned to the most absurd and impossible crimes to escape such dreadful suffering. But I cannot doubt it to have been proved by papers that there were many plots both among the Jesuits and with France and with Scotland and with Spain for the destruction of Queen Elizabeth, for the placing of Mary on the throne and for the revival of the old religion. If the English people were too ready to believe in plots, there were, as I have said, good reasons for it. When the massacre of St. Bartholomew was yet fresh in their recollection, a great Protestant Dutch hero, the Prince of Orange, was shot by an assassin, who confessed that he had been kept and trained for the purpose in a college of Jesuits. The Dutch, in this surprise and distress, offered to make Elizabeth their sovereign, but she declined the honor and sent them a small army instead under the command of the Earl of Leicester, who, although a capital court favorite, was not much of a general. He did so little in Holland that his campaign there would probably have been forgotten, but for its occasioning the death of one of the best riders, the best knights, and the best gentleman of that or any age. This was Sir Philip Sidney, who was wounded by a musket-ball in the thigh as he mounted a fresh horse after having had his own killed under him. He had to ride back wounded a long distance and was very faint with fatigue and loss of blood, when some water for which he had eagerly asked was handed to him. But he was so good and gentle even then that seeing a poor badly wounded common soldier lying on the ground, looking at the water with longing eyes, he said, Thy necessity is greater than mine, and gave it up to him. This touching action of a noble heart is perhaps as well known as any incident in history, is as famous far and wide as the blood-stained Tower of London, with its axe and block and murders out of number. So delightful is an act of true humanity, and so glad our mankind to remember it. At home intelligence of plots began to thicken every day. I suppose the people never did live under such continual terrors as those by which they were possessed now, of Catholic risings and burnings and poisonings, and I don't know what. Still we must always remember that they lived near and close to awful realities of that kind, and that with their experience it was not difficult to believe in any enormity. The government had the same fear and did not take the best means of discovering the truth. Or besides torturing the suspected, it employed paid spies, who will always lie for their own profit. It even made some of the conspiracies it brought to light by sending false letters to disaffected people, inviting them to join in pretended plots which they too readily did. But one great real plot was at length discovered, and it ended the career of Mary, Queen of Scots. A seminary priest named Ballard and a Spanish soldier named Savage, set on and encouraged by certain French priests, imparted a design to one Anthony Babington, a gentleman of fortune in Darbyshire, who had been for some time a secret agent of Mary's, for murdering the Queen. Babington then confided the scheme to some other Catholic gentlemen who were his friends, and they joined in it heartily. They were vain, weak-headed young men, ridiculously confident and preposterously proud of their plan, for they got a gim-crack painting made of the six-choice spirits who were to murder Elizabeth, with Babington in an attitude for the center figure. Two of their number, however, one of whom was a priest, kept Elizabeth's wisest minister, Sir Francis Walsingham, acquainted with the whole project from the first. The conspirators were completely deceived to the final point, when Babington gave Savage, because he was shabby, a ring from his finger, and some money from his purse, wherewith to buy himself new clothes in which to kill the Queen. Walsingham, having then full evidence against the whole band and two letters of Mary's besides, resolved to seize them. Suspecting something wrong, they stole out of the city one by one, and hid themselves in St. John's Wood, and other places which really were hiding places then, but they were all taken and all executed. When they were seized, a gentleman was sent from court to inform Mary of the fact, and of her being involved in the discovery. Her friends have complained that she was kept in very hard and severe custody. It does not appear very likely, for she was going out hunting that very morning. Queen Elizabeth had been warned long ago by one in France who had good information of what was secretly doing, that in holding Mary alive she held the wolf who would devour her. The Bishop of London had, more lately given the Queen's favorite minister the advice in writing, forthwith to cut off the Scottish Queen's head. The question now was what to do with her. The Earl of Leicester wrote a little note home from Holland, recommending that she should be quietly poisoned, that noble favorite having accustomed his mind it is possible to remedies of that nature. His black advice, however, was disregarded, and she was brought to trial at Fatheringay Castle in Northamptonshire, before a tribunal of forty composed of both religions. There and in the star chamber at Westminster the trial lasted a fortnight. She defended herself with great ability, but could only deny the confessions that had been made by Babington and others, could only call her own letters produced against her by her own secretaries, forgeries, and, in short, could only deny everything. She was found guilty and declared to have incurred the penalty of death. The Parliament met, approved the sentence, and prayed the Queen to have it executed. The Queen replied that she requested them to consider whether no means could be found of saving Mary's life without endangering her own. The Parliament rejoined, no, and the citizens illuminated their houses and lighted bonfires in token of their joy that all these plots and troubles were to be ended by the death of the Queen of Scots. She, feeling sure that her time was now come, wrote a letter to the Queen of England making three entreaties. First that she might be buried in France. Thirdly that she might not be executed in secret but before her servants and some others. Thirdly that, after her death, her servants should not be molested, but should be suffered to go home with the legacies she left them. It was an affecting letter, and Elizabeth shed tears over it, but sent no answer. Then came a special ambassador from France and another from Scotland to intercede for Mary's life. And then the nation began to clamor more and more for her death. What the real feelings or intentions of Elizabeth were can never be known now, but I strongly suspect her of only wishing one thing more than Mary's death, and that was to keep free of the blame of it. On the first of February 1587, Lord Burley, having drawn out the warrant for the execution, the Queen sent to the Secretary Davidson to bring it to her that she might sign it which she did. Next day when Davidson told her it was sealed she angrily asked him why such haste was necessary. Next day but one she joked about it and swore a little. Again next day but one she seemed to complain that it was not yet done. But still she would not be plain with those about her. So on the seventh the earls of Kent and Shrewsbury, with the Sheriff of Northamptonshire, came with the warrant to Fatheringay to tell the Queen of Scots to prepare for death. When those messengers of Iloman were gone, Mary made a frugal supper, drank to her servants, read over her will, went to bed, slept for some hours, and then arose and passed the remainder of the night saying prayers. In the morning she dressed herself in her best clothes, and, at eight o'clock, when the Sheriff came for her to her chapel, took leave of her servants who were there assembled praying with her, and went downstairs carrying a Bible in one hand and a crucifix in the other. Two of her women and four of her men were allowed to be present in the hall, where a low scaffold only two feet from the ground was erected and covered with black, and where the executioner from the tower and his assistant stood dressed in black velvet. The hall was full of people. While the sentence was being read she sat upon a stool, and, when it was finished, she again denied her guilt as she had done before. The earl of Kent and the Dean of Peterborough in their Protestant zeal made some very unnecessary speeches to her, to which she replied that she died in the Catholic religion and that they need not trouble themselves about that matter. When her head and neck were uncovered by the executioners, she said that she had not been used to be undressed by such hands or before such company. Finally, one of her women fastened a cloth over her face, and she laid her neck upon the block, and repeated more than once in Latin, into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. Some say her head was struck off in two blows, some say in three. However, that be, when it was held up, streaming with blood, the real hair beneath the false hair she had long worn was seen to be as gray as that of a woman of seventy, though she was at that time only in her forty-sixth year. All her beauty was gone. But she was beautiful enough to her little dog, who cowered under her dress, frightened, when she went upon the scaffold, and who lay down beside her headless body when all her earthly sorrows were over. On its being formally made known to Elizabeth that the sentence had been executed on the Queen of Scots, she sewed the utmost grief and rage, drove her favorites from her with violent indignation, and sent Davison to the tower, from which place he was only released in the end by paying an immense fine which completely ruined him. Elizabeth not only overacted her part in making these pretenses, but most basely reduced to poverty one of her faithful servants for no other fault than obeying her commands. James, King of Scotland, Mary's son, made a show likewise of being very angry on the occasion, but he was a pensioner of England to the amount of five thousand pounds a year, and he had known very little of his mother, and he possibly regarded her as the murderer of his father, and he soon took it quietly. Philip, King of Spain, however, threatened to do greater things than had ever been done yet, to set up the Catholic religion and punish Protestant England. Elizabeth, hearing that he and the Prince of Parma were making great preparations for this purpose, in order to be beforehand with them, sent out Admiral Drake, a famous navigator who had sailed about the world, and had already brought great plunder from Spain, to the port of Cadiz where he burnt a hundred vessels full of stores. This great loss obliged the Spaniards to put off the invasion for a year, but it was nonetheless formidable for that amounting to one hundred and thirty ships, nineteen thousand soldiers, eight thousand sailors, two thousand slaves, and between two and three thousand great guns. England was not idle in making ready to resist this great force. All the men between sixteen years old and sixty were trained and drilled. The national fleet of ships, in number only thirty-four at first, was enlarged by public contributions and by private ships, fitted out by noblemen, the city of London of its own accord furnished double the number of ships and men that it was required to provide, and if ever the national spirit was up in England it was up all through the country to resist the Spaniards. Some of the Queen's advisors were for seizing the principle English Catholics and putting them to death, but the Queen, who, to her honor, used to say that she would never believe any ill of her subjects, which a parent would not believe of her own children, rejected the advice and only confined a few of those who were the most suspected in the fens in Lincolnshire. The great body of Catholics deserved this confidence for they behaved most loyally, nobly, and bravely. So with all England firing up like one strong angry man, and with both sides of the Thames fortified, and with the soldiers under arms and with the sailors in their ships, the country waited for the coming of the proud Spanish fleet, which was called the Invincible Armada. The Queen herself, riding in armor on a white horse, and the earl of Essex and the earl of Lester holding her bridal reign, made a brave speech to the troops at Tilbury Fort opposite Graves End, which was received with such enthusiasm as is seldom known. Then came the Spanish Armada into the English Channel, sailing along in the form of a half-moon, of such great size that it was seven miles broad. But the English were quickly upon it, and woe then to all the Spanish ships that dropped a little out of the half-moon, for the English took them instantly. And it soon appeared that the great Armada was anything but invincible, for on a summer night bold drakes sent eight blazing fire-ships right into the midst of it. In terrible consternation the Spaniards tried to get out to sea, and so became dispersed. The English pursued them at a great advantage. A storm came on, and drove the Spaniards among rocks and shoals, and the swift end of the invincible fleet was that it lost thirty great ships and ten thousand men, and, defeated and disgraced, sailed home again. Being afraid to go by the English Channel it sailed all around Scotland and Ireland, some of the ships getting cast away on the latter coast in bad weather. The Irish, who were a kind of savages, plundered those vessels and killed their crews. So ended this great attempt to invade and conquer England. And I think it will be a long time before any other invincible fleet coming to England with the same object will fare much better than the Spanish Armada. Though the Spanish King had this bitter taste of English bravery, he was so little the wiser for it as still to entertain his old designs, and even to conceive the absurd idea of placing his daughter on the English throne. But the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Thomas Howard, and some other distinguished leaders put to sea from Plymouth, entered the port of Cadiz once more, obtained a complete victory over the shipping assembled there, and got possession of the town. In obedience to the Queen's express instructions they behaved with great humanity, and the principal loss of the Spaniards was a vast sum of money which they had to pay for ransom. This was one of many gulant achievements on the sea affected in this reign. Sir Walter Raleigh himself, after marrying a maid of honor and giving offense to the maiden Queen thereby, had already sailed to South America in search of gold. The Earl of Lester was now dead, and so was Sir Thomas Walsingham, whom Lord Burley assumed to follow. The principal favorite was the Earl of Essex, a spirited and handsome man, a favorite with the people, too, as well as with the Queen, and possessed of many admirable qualities. It was much debated at court whether there should be peace with Spain or no, and he was very urgent for war. He also tried hard to have his own way in the appointment of a deputy to govern in Ireland. One day, while this question was in dispute, he hastily took a fence and turned his back upon the Queen, as a gentle reminder of which impropriety the Queen gave him a tremendous box on the ear, and told him to go to the devil. He went home instead and did not reappear at court for half a year or so when he and the Queen were reconciled, though never, as some suppose, thoroughly. From this time the fate of the Earl of Essex and that of the Queen seemed to be blended together. The Irish were still perpetually quarreling and fighting amongst themselves, and he went over to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant to the great joy of his enemies, Sir Walter Raleigh among the rest, who were glad to have so dangerous a rival far off. Not being by any means successful there, and knowing that his enemies would take advantage of that circumstance to injure him with the Queen, he came home again, though against her orders. The Queen, being taken by surprise when he appeared before her, gave him her hand to kiss, and he was overjoyed, though it was not a very lovely hand by this time. But in the course of the same day she ordered him to confine himself to his room, and two or three days afterwards had him taken into custody. With the same sort of caprice, and as capricious an old woman she now was, as ever wore a crown or head either, she sent him broth from her own table on his falling ill from anxiety and cried about him. He was a man who could find comfort in occupation in his books, and he did so for a time, not the least happy time I dare say of his life. But it happened, unfortunately for him, that he held a monopoly in sweet wines, which means that nobody could sell them without purchasing his permission. This rite which was only for a term expiring he applied to have it renewed. The queen refused, with the rather strong observation—but she did make strong observations—that an unruly beast must be stinted in his food. Upon this the angry Earl, who had been already deprived of many offices, thought himself in danger of complete ruin, and turned against the queen, whom he called a vain old woman who had grown as crooked in her mind as she had in her figure. These uncomplementary expressions the ladies of the court immediately snapped up and carried to the queen, whom they did not put in a better temper, you may believe. The same court ladies, when they had beautiful dark hair of their own, used to wear false red hair to be like the queen. So they were not very high-spirited ladies, however high in rank. The worst object of the Earl of Essex, and some friends of his who used to meet at Lord Southampton's house, was to obtain possession of the queen, and obliged her by force to dismiss her ministers and change her favorites. On Saturday the 7th of February 1601 the council suspecting this summoned the Earl to come before them. He, pretending to be ill, declined. It was then settled among his friends, that as the next day would be Sunday, when many of the citizens usually assembled at the cross by St. Paul's Cathedral, he should make one bold effort to induce them to rise and follow him to the palace. So on the Sunday morning he in a small body of adherents started out of his house, Essex's house by the Strand, with steps to the river, having first shut up in it as prisoners some members of the council who came to examine him, and hurried into the city with the Earl at their head crying out, for the queen, for the queen, a plot is laid for my life. No one heeded them, however, and when they came to St. Paul's there were no citizens there. In the meantime the prisoners at Essex's house had been released by one of the Earl's own friends. He had been promptly proclaimed a traitor in the city itself, and the streets were barricaded with carts and guarded by soldiers. The Earl got back to his house by water with difficulty, and after an attempt to defend his house against the troops and cannon by which it was soon surrounded, gave himself up that night. He was brought to trial on the nineteenth, and found guilty on the twenty-fifth he was executed on Tower Hill, where he died at thirty-four years old both courageously and penitently. His stepfather suffered with him. His enemies, Sir Walter Raleigh, stood near the scaffold all the time, but not so near it as we shall see him stand before we finish this history. In this case, as in the cases of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen of Scots, the queen had commanded and countermanded and again commanded the execution. It is probable that the death of her young and gallant favorite in the prime of his good qualities was never off her mind afterwards. As she held out the same vain obstinate and capricious woman for another year. Then she danced before her court on a state occasion, and cut, I should think, a mighty ridiculous figure, doing so in an immense rough, stomacher and wig at seventy years old. For another year still she held out but without any more dancing, and as a moody, sorrowful, broken creature. At last, on the tenth of March, one thousand six hundred and three, having been ill of a very bad cold, and made worse by the death of the Countess of Nottingham, who was her intimate friend, she fell into a stupor and was supposed to be dead. She recovered her consciousness, however, and then nothing would induce her to go to bed, for she said that she knew that if she did she would never get up again. There she lay for ten days, on cushions on the floor, without any food, until the Lord Admiral got her into bed at last, partly by persuasions, and partly by main force. When they asked her who should succeed her, she replied that her seat had been the seat of kings, and that she would have for her successor no rascal's son but a king's. Upon this the Lord's presence stared at one another, and took the liberty of asking whom she meant, to which she replied, whom should I mean but our cousin of Scotland? This was on the twenty-third of March. They asked her once again that day, after she was speechless, after she was still in the same mind. She struggled up in bed and joined her hands over her head in the form of a crown, as the only reply she could make. At three o'clock the next morning she very quietly died in the forty-fifth year of her reign. That reign had been a glorious one, and is made forever memorable by the distinguished men who flourished in it. Apart from the great voyagers, statesmen, and scholars whom it produced, the names of Bacon, Spencer, and Shakespeare will always be remembered with pride and veneration by the civilized world, and will always in part, though with no great reason perhaps, some portion of their luster to the name of Elizabeth herself. It was a great reign for discovery, for commerce, and for English enterprise and spirit in general. It was a great reign for the Protestant religion and for the Reformation which made England free. The queen was very popular, and in her progresses or journeys about her dominions was everywhere received with the liveliest joy. I think the truth is that she was not half so good as she has been made out, and not half so bad as she has been made out. She had her fine qualities, but she was coarse, capricious, and treacherous, and had all the faults of an excessively vain young woman long after she was an old one. On the whole she had a great deal too much of her father in her to please me. Many improvements and luxuries were introduced in the course of these five and forty years in the general manner of living. But cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and bear-baiting were still the national amusements, and a coach was so rarely seen, and was such an ugly encumberment affair when it was seen, that even the queen herself, on many high occasions, rode on horseback on a pillion behind the Lord Chancellor. End of Chapter 31. The Caucasian of Scotland was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in mind and person. His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull, goggle eyes stared and rolled like idiots. He was cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited man on earth. His figure, what is commonly called rickety from his birth, presented a most ridiculous appearance, dressed in thick-padded clothes as a safeguard against being stabbed, of which he lived in continual fear, of a grass-green colour from head to foot, with a hunting-horn dangling at his side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather sticking over one eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as he happened to toss it on. He used to lull on the necks of his favourite courtiers, and slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks, and the greatest favourite he ever had used to sign himself in his letters to his Royal Master, his Majesty's dog and slave, and used to address his Majesty as his sow-ship. His Majesty was the worst rider ever seen, and thought himself the best. He was one of the most impertinent talkers in the broadest scotch ever heard, and boasted of being unanswerable in all manner of argument. He wrote some of the most weary-some treaties ever read, among others a book upon witchcraft, in which he was a devout believer, and thought himself a prodigy of authorship. He thought, and wrote, and said, that a king had a right to make and unmake what laws he pleased, and ought to be accountable to nobody on earth. This is the plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest men about the court praised and flattered to that degree, for I doubt if there be anything more shameful in the annals of human nature. He came to the English throne with great ease. The miseries of a disputed succession had been felt so long and so dreadfully that he was proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth's death, and was accepted by the nation, even without being asked to give any pledge that he would govern well, or that he would redress crying grievances. He took a month to come from Edinburgh to London, and, by way of exercising his new power, hanged a pickpocket on the journey without any trial, and knighted everybody he could lay hold of. He made two hundred knights before he got to his palace in London, and seven hundred before he had been in it three months. He also shoveled sixty-two new peers into the House of Lords, and there was a pretty large sprinkling of Scotchmen among them, you may believe. His sous-ship's prime minister, Cecil, for I can do no better than call his majesty what his favourite called him, was the enemy of Sir Walter Raleigh, and of Sir Walter's political friend, Lord Cobham. And his sous-ship's first trouble was a plot, originated by these two, and entered into by some others, with the old object of seizing the king, and keeping him in imprisonment, until he should change his ministers. There were Catholic priests in the plot, and there were Puritan noblemen too, for although the Catholics and Puritans were strongly opposed to each other, they united at this time against his sous-ship, because they knew that he had a design against both, after pretending to be friendly to each. This design being to have only one high and convenient form of the Protestant religion, which everybody should be bound to belong to, whether they liked it or not. This plot was mixed up with another, which may or may not have had some reference to placing on the throne at some time the Lady Arabella Stuart, whose misfortune it was to be the daughter of the younger brother of his sous-ship's father, but who was quite innocent of any part in the scheme. Sir Walter Raleigh was accused on the confession of Lord Cobham, a miserable creature, who said one thing at one time, and another thing at another time, and could be relied upon in nothing. The trial of Sir Walter Raleigh lasted from eight in the morning until nearly midnight. He defended himself with such eloquence, genius, and spirit against all accusations, and against the insults of Coke, the attorney general, who, according to the custom of the time, foully abused him, that those who went there detesting the prisoner came away admiring him, and declaring that anything so wonderful and so captivating was never heard. He was found guilty nevertheless, and sentenced to death. Execution was deferred, and he was taken to the tower. The two Catholic priests, less fortunate, were executed with the usual atrocity, and Lord Cobham and two others were pardoned on the scaffold. His sous-ship thought it wonderfully knowing in him to surprise the people by pardoning these three at the very block, but, blundering and bundling, as usual, he had very nearly overreached himself. For the messenger on horseback who brought the pardon came so late that he was pushed to the outside of the crowd, and was obliged to shout and roar out what he came for. The miserable Cobham did not gain much by being spared that day. He lived both as a prisoner and a beggar, utterly despised and miserably poor, for thirteen years, and then died in an old outhouse belonging to one of his former servants. This block got rid of, and so while to rally safely shut up in the tower, his sous-ship held a great dispute with the Puritans on their presenting a petition to him, and had it all his own way. Not so very wonderful as he would talk continually and would not hear anybody else, and filled the bishops with admiration. It was comfortably settled that there was to be only one form of religion, and that all men were to think exactly alike. But although this was arranged two centuries and a half ago, and although the arrangement was supported by much finding and imprisonment, I do not find that it is quite successful, even yet. His sous-ship, having that uncommonly high opinion of himself as a king, had a very low opinion of Parliament as a power that audaciously wanted to control him. When he called his first Parliament after he had been king a year, he accordingly thought he would take pretty high ground with them, and told them that he commanded them as an absolute king. The Parliament thought those strong words, and saw the necessity of upholding their authority. His sous-ship had three children, Prince Henry, Prince Charles, and Princess Elizabeth. It would have been well for one of these, and we shall too soon see which, if he had learned to little wisdom concerning Parliament's from his father's obstinacy. Now, the people still laboring under their old dread of the Catholic religion, this Parliament revived and strengthened the severe laws against it. And this so angered Robert Catesby, a restless Catholic gentleman of an old family, that he formed one of the most desperate and terrible designs ever conceived in the mind of man. No less a scheme than the gunpowder plot. His object was, when the king, lords, and commons should be assembled at the next opening of Parliament, to blow them up, one and all, with a great mind of gunpowder. The first person to whom he confided this horrible idea was Thomas Winter, a Worcestershire gentleman, who had served in the army abroad, and had been secretly employed in Catholic projects. While Winter was yet undecided, and when he had gone over to the Netherlands to learn from the Spanish ambassador there, whether there was any hope of Catholics being relieved through the intercession of the King of Spain with his sous-ship, he found at Ostend a tall, dark, daring man, whom he had known when they were both soldiers abroad, and whose name was Guido, or Guy, Fawkes. Resulted to join the plot, he proposed it to this man, knowing him to be the man for any desperate deed, and they too came back to England together. Here they admitted two other conspirators, Thomas Percy, related to the Earl of Northumberland, and John Wright, his brother-in-law. All these met together in a solitary house in the open fields, which were then near Clements Inn, now a closely blocked-up part of London. And when they had all taken a great oath of secrecy, Catesby told the rest what his plan was. They then went upstairs into a garret, and received the sacrament from Father Gerard, a Jesuit, who is said not to have known actually of the gunpowder plot, but who, I think, must have had his suspicions that there was something desperate afoot. Percy was a gentleman-pensioner, and as he had occasional duties to perform about the court, then kept at Whitehall, there would be nothing suspicious in his living at Westminster. So, having looked well about him, and having found a house to let, the back of which joined the Parliament House, he hired it of a person named Ferris, for the purpose of undermining the wall. Having got possession of this house, the conspirators hired another on the Lambeth side of the Thames, which they used as a storehouse for wood, gunpowder, and other combustible matters. These were to be removed at night, and afterwards were removed, bit by bit, to the house at Westminster. And, that there might be some trusty person to keep watch over the Lambeth stores, they admitted another conspirator by name Robert Kaye, a very poor Catholic gentleman. All these arrangements had been made some months, and it was a dark, wintry December night when the conspirators, who had been in the meantime dispersed to avoid observation, met in the house at Westminster, and began to dig. They had laid in a good stock of eatables to avoid going in and out, and they dug and dug with great ardour. But the wall being tremendously thick, and the work very severe. They took into their plot Christopher Wright, a younger brother of John Wright, and they might have a new pair of hands to help, and Christopher Wright fell to like a freshman, and they dug and dug by night and by day, and forks stood sentinel all the time. And if any man's heart seemed to fail him at all, forks said, gentlemen, we have abundance of power and shot here, and there is no fear of our being taken alive, even if discovered. The same forks who, in the capacity of sentinel, was always prowling about, soon picked up the intelligence that the king had prorogued the parliament again from the 7th of February, the day first fixed upon until the 3rd of October. When the conspirators knew this, they agreed to separate until after the Christmas holidays, and to take no notice of each other in the meanwhile, and never to write letters to one another on any account. So the house in Westminster was shut up again, and I suppose the neighbours thought that those strange-looking men who lived there so gloomily, and went out so seldom, were gone away to have a merry Christmas somewhere. It was the beginning of February, 1605, when Catesby Mattish fellow conspirators again at this Westminster house. He had now admitted three more. John Grant, a Warwickshire gentleman of a melancholy temper, who lived in a doleful house near Stratford-upon-Avon, with a frowning wall all around it, and a deep moat. Robert Winter, eldest brother of Thomas, and Catesby's own servant, Thomas Bates, who, Catesby thought, had had some suspicion of what his master was about. These three had all suffered more or less for their religion in Elizabeth's time, and now they all began to dig again, and they dug and dug by night and by day. They found it dismal work alone there, underground, with such a fearful secret on their minds, and so many murders before them. They were filled with wild fancies. Sometimes they thought they heard a great bell tolling deep in the earth under the Parliament House. Sometimes they thought they heard low voices, muttering about the gunpowder plot. Once in the morning, they really did hear a great rumbling noise over their heads, as they dug and sweated in their mind. Every man stopped and looked aghast at his neighbour, wondering what had happened, when that bold prowler, Forks, who had been out to look, came in and told them that it was only a dealer in coals who had occupied a cellar under the Parliament House, removing his stock in trade to some other place. Upon this, the conspirators, who, with all their digging and digging, had not yet dug through the tremendously thick wall, changed their plan, hired that cellar, which was directly under the House of Lords, put six and thirty barrels of gunpowder in it, and covered them over with faggots and coals. Then they all dispersed again till September, when the following new conspirators were admitted. Sir Edward Bainham of Gloucestershire, Sir Everard Digby of Rutlandshire, Ambrose Rookwood of Suffolk, Francis Tresher of Northamptonshire. Most of these were rich and were to assist the plot, some with money and some with horses on which the conspirators were to ride through the country and rouse the Catholics after the Parliament should be blown into air. Parliament being again prorogued from the 3rd of October to the 5th of November, and the conspirators being uneasy, lest their design should have been found out. Thomas Winter said he would go up into the House of Lords on the day of the prorogation and see how matters looked. Nothing could be better. The unconscious commissioners were walking about and talking to one another, just over the six and thirty barrels of gunpowder. He came back and told the rest so, and they went on with their preparations. They hired a ship and kept it ready in the Thames, in which forks was to sail for Flanders after firing with a slow match, the train that was to explode the powder. A number of Catholic gentlemen not in the secret were invited, on pretense of a hunting party, to meet Sir Everard Digby at Dunn Church on the fatal day, that they might be ready to act together, and now all was ready. But now the great wickedness and danger which had been all along at the bottom of this wicked plot began to show itself. As the fifth of November drew near, most of the conspirators, remembering that they had friends and relations who would be in the House of Lords that day, felt some natural relenting and a wish to warn them to keep away. They were not much comforted by Catesby's declaring that in such a cause he would blow up his own son. Lord Mount Eagle, Tresham's brother-in-law, was certain to be in the House, and when Tresham found that he could not prevail upon the rest to devise any means of sparing their friends, he wrote a mysterious letter to this Lord and left it at his lodging in the dusk, urging him to keep away from the opening of Parliament, since God and man had concurred him to punish the wickedness of the times. It contained the words that the Parliament should receive a terrible blow and yet should not see who hurt them. And it added, the danger is past as soon as you have burnt the letter. The ministers and courtiers made out that his sowship, by a direct miracle from heaven, found out what this letter meant. The truth is that they were not long as few men would be in finding out for themselves, and it was decided to let the conspirators alone until the very day before the opening of Parliament, that the conspirators had their fears is certain, for Tresham himself said before them all that they were every one dead men, and although even he did not take flight, there is reason to suppose that he had warned other persons besides Lord Mount Eagle. However, they were all firm, and forks, who was a man of iron, went down every day and night to keep watch in the cellar as usual. He was there about two in the afternoon of the fourth, when the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Mount Eagle threw open the door and looked in. Who are you friend? said they. Why? said forks. I am Mr. Percy's servant, and I'm looking after his store of fuel here. Your master has laid in a pretty good store, they returned and shut the door and went away. Forks upon this posted off to the other conspirators to tell them all was quiet, and went back and shut himself up in the dark black cellar again, where he heard the bell go twelve o'clock and usher in the fifth of November. About two hours afterwards, he slowly opened the door and came out to look about him in his old prowling way. He was instantly seized and bound by a party of soldiers under, said Thomas Nevitt. He had a watch upon him, some touchwood, some tinder, some slow matches, and there was a dark lantern with a candle in it, lighted behind the door. He had his boots and spares on, to ride the ship, I suppose, and it was well for the soldiers that they took him so suddenly. If they had left him but a moment's time to light a match, he certainly would have tossed it in among the powder and blown up himself and them. They took him to the king's bed-chamber, first of all, and there the king, causing him to be held very tight and keeping a good way off, asked him how he could have the heart to intend to destroy so many innocent people. Because, said Guy Fawkes, desperate diseases need desperate remedies. To a little scotch-favourite with a face like a terrier who asked him with no particular wisdom, why he had collected so much gunpowder, he replied, because he had meant to blow scotch-men back to Scotland, and it would take a great deal of powder to do that. Next day he was carried to the tower, but would make no confession. Even after being horribly tortured, he confessed nothing that the government did not already know, though he must have been in a fearful state, as his signature, still preserved, in contrast with his natural handwriting before he was put upon the dreadful rack, most frightfully shows. Bates, a very different man, soon said the Jesuits had had to do with the plot, and probably, under the torture, would as readily have said anything. Treshem, taken and put in the tower too, made confessions and unmade them, and died of an illness that was heavy upon him. Rookwood, who had stationed relays of his own horses all the way to Dunnchurch, did not mount to escape until the middle of the day, when the news of the plot was all over London. On the road he came up with the two rites, Catesby and Percy, and they all galloped together into Northamptonshire, thence to Dunnchurch, where they had found the proposed party assembled. Finding, however, that there had been a plot, and that it had been discovered, the party disappeared in the course of the night, and left them alone with Sir Everard Digby. Away they all rode again, through Warwickshire and Worcestershire, to a house called Hull Beach, on the borders of Staffordshire. They tried to raise the Catholics on their way, but were indignantly driven off by them. All this time they were hotly pursued by the Sheriff of Worcester, and a fast-increasing concourse of riders. At last, resolving to defend themselves at Hull Beach, they shut themselves up in the house, and put some wet powder before the fire to dry. But it blew up, and Catesby was singed and blackened, and almost killed, and some of the others were sadly hurt. Still, knowing that they must die, they resolved to die there, and with only the swords in their hands, appeared at the windows to be shot at, by the Sheriff and his assistants. Catesby said to Thomas Winter, after Thomas had been hit in the right arm, which dropped powerless by his side, Stand by me, Tom, and we will die together. Which they did, being shot through the body by two bullets from one gun. John Wright and Christopher Wright and Percy were also shot. Rookwood and Digby were taken, the former with a broken arm, and a wound in his body, too. It was the 15th of January before the Trial of Guy Fawkes, and such of the other conspirators as were left alive, came on. They were all found guilty, all hanged, drawn, and quartered. Some in St. Paul's Churchyard, on the top of Ludget Hill, some before the Parliament House. A Jesuit priest named Henry Garnett, to whom the dreadful design was said to have been communicated, was taken and tried, and two of his servants, as well as a poor priest who was taken with him, were tortured without mercy. He himself was not tortured, but was surrounded in the tower by tamperers and traitors, and so was made unfairly to convict himself out of his own mouth. He said upon his trial that he had done all he could to prevent the deed, and that he could not make public what had been told him in confession, though I am afraid he knew of the plot in other ways. He was found guilty and executed after a manful defence, and the Catholic Church made a saint of him. Some rich and powerful persons who had had nothing to do with the project were fined and imprisoned for it by the Star Chamber. The Catholics, in general, who had recoiled with horror from the idea of the infernal contrivance, were unjustly put under more severe laws than before, and this was the end of the gunpowder plot. Second part, his sowship would pretty willingly, I think, have blown the House of Commons into the air himself, for his dread and jealousy of it knew no bounds all through his reign. When he was hard-pressed for money he was obliged to order it to meet, as he could get no money without it, and when he tasked him first to abolish some of the monopolies in necessaries of life which were a great grievance to the people, and to redress other public wrongs, he flew into a rage and got rid of it again. At one time he wanted it to consent to the Union of England with Scotland, and quarrelled about that. At another time it wanted him to put down a most infamous church abuse called the High Commission Court, and he quarreled with it about that. At another time it entreated him not to be quite so fond of his archbishops and bishops who made speeches in his praise too awful to be related, but to have some little consideration for the poor, puritan clergy who were persecuted for preaching in their own way, and not according to the archbishops and bishops, and they quarrelled about that. In short, what with hating the House of Commons and pretending not to hate it, and what with now sending some of its members who opposed him to Newgate or to the Tower, and now telling the rest that they must not presume to make speeches about the public affairs which could not possibly concern them, and what with cajoling and bullying and fighting and being frightened, the House of Commons was the plague of his sowship's existence. It was pretty firm, however, in maintaining its rights and insisting that the Parliament should make the laws, and not the King by his own single proclamations which he tried hard to do. And his sowship was so often distressed for money in consequence that he sold every sort of title and public office as if they were merchandise and even invented a new dignity called a baronetcy which anybody could buy for a thousand pounds. These disputes with his Parliaments and his hunting and his drinking and his lying in bed for he was a great sluggard occupied his sowship pretty well. The rest of his time he chiefly passed in hugging and slobbering his favourites. The first of these was Sir Philip Herbert who had no knowledge whatever except of dogs and horses and hunting but whom he soon made Earl of Montgomery. The next and a much more famous one was Robert Carr or Kerr for it is not certain which was his right name who came from the border country and whom he soon made Viscount Rochester and afterwards Earl of Somerset. The way in which his sowship doted on this handsome young man is even more odious to think of than the way in which the really great men of England condescended to bow down before him. The favourites great friend was a certain Sir Thomas Overbury who wrote his love letters for him and assisted him in the duties of his many high places which his own ignorance prevented him from discharging. But this same Sir Thomas having just manhood enough to dissuade the favourite from a wicked marriage with the beautiful Countess of Essex who was to get a divorce from her husband for the purpose. The said Countess in her rage got Sir Thomas put into the tower and there poisoned him. Then the favourite and this bad woman were publicly married by the king's pet bishop with as much to do and rejoicing as if he had been the best man and the best woman upon the face of the earth. But after a longer sunshine than might have been expected of seven years or so that is to say another handsome young man started up and eclipsed the Earl of Somerset. This was George Filia's the youngest son of a Leicestershire gentleman who came to court with all the Paris fashions on him and could dance as well as the best mount-bank that ever was seen. He soon danced himself into the good graces of his soundship and danced the other favourite out of favour. Then it was all at once discovered that the Earl and Countess of Somerset had not deserved all those great promotions and mighty rejoicings and they were separately tried for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury and for other crimes. But the king was so afraid of his late favourites publicly telling some disgraceful things he knew of him which he'd darkly threatened to do that he was even examined with two men standing worn on either side of him each with a cloak in his hand ready to throw it over his head and stop his mouth if he should break out with what he had it in his power to tell. So a very lame affair was purposely made of the trial and his punishment was an allowance of four thousand pounds a year in retirement while the Countess was pardoned and allowed to pass into retirement too. They hated one another by this time and lived to revile and torment each other some years. While these events were in progress and while his soundship was making such an exhibition of himself from day to day and from year to year as is not often seen in any style three remarkable deaths took place in England. The first was that of the minister, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury who was past sixty and had never been strong being deformed from his birth. He said at last that he had no wish to live and no minister need have had with his experience of the meanness and wickedness of those disgraceful times. The second was that of the lady, Arabella Stewart who alarmed his soundship mightily by privately marrying William Seymour, son of Lord Beecham who was a descendant of King Henry VII and who, his soundship thought might consequently increase and strengthen any claim she might one day set up to the throne. She was separated from her husband who was put in the tower and thrust into a boat to be confined at Durham. She escaped in a man's dress to get away in a French ship from Gravesend to France but unhappily missed her husband who would escape too and was soon taken. She went raving mad in the miserable tower and died there after four years. The last and the most important of these three deaths was that of Prince Henry, the heir to the throne in the nineteenth year of his age. He was a promising young prince and greatly liked a quiet, well-conducted youth of whom two very good things are known. First, that his father was jealous of him. Secondly, that he was the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh languishing through all those years in the tower and often said that no man but his father would keep such a bird in such a cage. On the occasion of the preparations for the marriage of his sister, the Princess Elizabeth with the foreign prince and an unhappy marriage it turned out he came from Richmond where he had been very ill to greet his new brother-in-law at the palace at Whitehall. There he played a great game at tennis in his shirt, though it was very cold weather and was seized with an alarming illness and died within a fortnight of a putrid fever. For this young prince Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in his prison in the tower the beginning of a history of the world a wonderful instance how little his sowship could do to confine a great man's mind however long he might imprison his body. And this mention of Sir Walter Raleigh who had many faults but who never showed so many merits as in trouble and adversity may bring me at once to the end of his sad story. After an imprisonment in the tower of twelve long years he proposed to resume those old sea voyages of his and to go to South America in search of gold. His sowship divided between his wish to be on good terms with the Spaniards through whose territory Sir Walter must pass he had long had an idea of marrying Prince Henry to a Spanish princess and his avaricious eagerness to get hold of the gold did not know what to do. But in the end he set Sir Walter free taking securities for his return and Sir Walter fitted out an expedition at his own cost and on the 28th of March 1616 sailed away in command of one of its ships which he ominously called the Destiny. The expedition failed the common men not finding the gold they had expected mutinied a quarrel broke out between Sir Walter and the Spaniards who hated him for old successes of his against them and he took and burned a little town called St. Thomas for this he was denounced to his sowship by the Spanish ambassador as a pirate and returning almost broken hearted with his hopes and fortunes shattered his company of friends dispersed and his brave son who had been one of them killed he was taken through the treachery of Sir Louis Stucley his near relation a scoundrel and a vice admiral and was once again immured in his prison home of so many years his sowship being mightily disappointed in not getting any gold Sir Walter Rally was tried as unfairly and with as many lies and evasions as the judges and law officers and every other authority in church and state habitually practiced under such a king after a great deal of prevarication on all parts but his own it was declared that he must die under his former sentence now fifteen years old so on the 28th of October 1618 he was shut up in the gatehouse at Westminster to pass his late night on earth and there he took leave of his good and faithful lady who was worthy to have lived in better days at eight o'clock next morning after a cheerful breakfast and a pipe and a cup of good wine he was taken to the old palace yard in Westminster where the scaffold was set up and where so many people of high degree stumbled to see him die that it was a matter of some difficulty to get him through the crowd he behaved most nobly but if anything lay heavy on his mind it was that Earl of Essex whose head he had seen roll off and he solemnly said that he had had no hand in bringing him to the block and that he had shed tears for him when he died as the morning was very cold the sheriff said he went down to a fire for a little space and warm himself but Sir Walter thanked him and said no he would rather it were done at once for he was ill of fever and ache and in another quarter of an hour his shaking fit would come upon him if he was still alive and his enemies might then suppose that he trembled for fear with that he kneeled and made a very beautiful and christian prayer before he laid his head upon the block he felt the edge of the axe and said with a smile upon his face that it was a short medicine but would cure the worst disease when he was bent down ready for death he said to the executioner finding that he hesitated what does thou fear? strike man so the axe came down and struck his head off in the 66th year of his age his new favourite got on fast he was made a vicount he was made Duke of Buckingham he was made a marquis and he was made master of the horse he was made Lord High Admiral and the chief commander of the gallant English forces that had dispersed the Spanish Armada was displaced to make room for him he had the whole kingdom at his disposal and his mother sold all the profits and honours of the state as if she had kept a shop he blazed all over with diamonds and other precious stones from his hat band and his earrings to his shoes yet he was an ignorant presumptuous swaggering compound of nave and fool with nothing but his beauty and his dancing to recommend him this is the gentleman who called himself his majesty's dog and slave and called his majesty your souship his souship called him steeney it is supposed because that was a nickname for Stephen and because Saint Stephen was generally represented in pictures as a handsome saint his souship was driven sometimes to his wit's end by his trimming between the general dislike of the Catholic religion at home and his desire to weedle and flatter it abroad as his only means of getting a rich princess for his son's wife a part of whose fortune he might cram into his greasy pockets Prince Charles or as his souship called him baby Charles being now Prince of Wales the old project of a marriage with the Spanish king's daughter had been revived for him and as she could not marry a Protestant without leave from the Pope his souship himself secretly and meanly wrote to his infallibility asking for it the negotiation for this Spanish marriage takes up a larger space in great books than you can imagine but the upshot of it all is that when it had been held off by the Spanish court for a long time baby Charles and steeney set off in disguise as Mr. Thomas Smith and Mr. John Smith to see the Spanish princess that baby Charles pretended to be desperately in love with her and jumped off walls to look at her and made a considerable fool of himself in a good many ways that she was called Princess of Wales and that the whole Spanish court believed baby Charles to be all but dying for her sake as he expressly told them he was that baby Charles and steeney came back to England and were received with as much rapture as if they had been a blessing to it that baby Charles had actually fallen in love with Henrietta Maria the French king's sister whom he had seen in Paris that he thought it a wonderfully fine and princely thing to have deceived the Spaniards all through and that he openly said with a chuckle as soon as he was safe and sound at home again that the Spaniards were great fools to have believed him like most dishonest men the prince and the favourite complained that the people whom they had deluded were dishonest they made such misrepresentations of the treachery of the Spaniards in this business of the Spanish match that the English nation became eager for a war with them although the gravest Spaniards laughed at the idea of his sowship in a war like attitude the parliament granted money for the beginning of hostilities and the treaties with Spain were publicly declared to be at an end the Spanish ambassador in London probably with the help of the fallen favourites the Earl of Somerset being unable to obtain speech with his sowship slipped a paper into his hand declaring that he was a prisoner in his own house and was entirely governed by Buckingham and his creatures the first effect of this letter was that his sowship began to cry and whine and took baby Charles away from Stine and went down to Windsor, gubbling all sorts of nonsense the end of it was that his sowship hugged his dog and slave and said he was quite satisfied he had given the prince and the favourite almost unlimited power to settle anything with the Pope as to the Spanish marriage and he now, with a view to the French one signed a treaty that all Roman Catholics in England should exercise their religion freely and should never be required to take any oath contrary thereto in return for this and for other concessions much less to be defended Henrietta Maria was to become the prince's wife and was to bring him a fortune of 800,000 crowns his sowship's eyes were getting red with eagerly looking for the money when the end of a gluttonous life came upon him and after a fortnight's illness on Sunday the 27th of March 1625 he died he had reigned 22 years and was 59 years old I know of nothing more abominable in history than the adulation that was lavished on this king and the vice and corruption that such a bare-faced habit of lying produced in his court it is much to be doubted whether one man of honour and not utterly self-disgraced kept his place near James I Lord Bacon, that able and wise philosopher as the first judge in the kingdom in this reign became a public spectacle of dishonesty and corruption and in his base, flattery of his sowship and in his crawling civility to his dog and slave disgraced himself even more but a creature like his sowship set upon a throne is like the plague and everybody receives infection from him