Part 23 (1/2)

So the mystery of Mary Stewart remains a mystery to this day. That she was cognisant of the plot to murder Darnley is the more probable theory, in view of facts which no one denies; yet those facts remain intelligible if she was innocent. There are no admitted facts which preclude her guilt: none which prove it conclusively. The various confessions of interested witnesses, voluntary or extorted, are untrustworthy. The genuineness of the Casket Letters is doubtful. No opportunity was given for cross-examining the witnesses or examining the letters. The world believed that Mary was guilty, however it may have been disposed to condone the guilt. The world was probably right.

But to pretend that there was a fair or complete investigation--that Mary's guilt was proved before the Commission--is absurd. That Mary from first to last protested against being brought to the bar of an English tribunal--whose authority she could not acknowledge without implying a recognition of that suzerainty which Edward I of England had claimed, and Robert I of Scotland had wiped out at Bannockburn--was entirely compatible with the innocence of a high-spirited and courageous princess: and would have been so, even if she could have counted on the absolute impartiality of her judges. Knowing that she could count on nothing of the kind, fully aware that Elizabeth herself would in fact be the judge, and suspecting with very good reason that any verdict p.r.o.nounced by her would be shaped strictly with a view to her own political convenience, it is almost inconceivable that Mary should have acknowledged the jurisdiction merely because Innocence in the abstract ought to invite enquiry. Had Mary been less beautiful, less unfortunate, less of a heroine of romance, it is likely enough that she would find few champions; but the pretence that she had a fair trial would still be none the less untenable.

[Sidenote: Dec. Seizure of Spanish Treasure]

In the meantime, an incident had occurred which shows what an immense change had been taking place in England during the ten years of Elizabeth's reign; how completely the nation had recovered confidence in itself. Throughout these years, English s.h.i.+ps had been multiplying, English sailors had been ignoring the Spanish and Portuguese monopolies of ocean traffic, and English captains had been, with only the most perfunctory official discouragement, and under colour of the flimsiest pretexts or of no pretext at all, indulging in what was virtually piracy. Now, the religious struggle, after a few months' smouldering, had again broken out in France. La Roch.e.l.le, the Huguenot head-quarters, was a nest of privateers, with whom the English adventurers consorted, and the water-way for Spanish s.h.i.+ps to the Netherlands was infested with dangers. Alva was in want of money. Philip borrowed a great sum from the Genoese bankers. The vessels conveying the bullion were forced to put into English ports, in fear of capture. Elizabeth was not ready to declare war in favour of the revolted provinces; but Cecil was extremely anxious to render them all the help possible short of declaring war. The treasure-s.h.i.+ps had sailed into a trap. Don Guerau invited Elizabeth to send them on under escort to the Netherlands; she replied that as the money belonged not to Philip but to the Genoese bankers, who would not object, she intended to borrow it herself. Don Guerau was furious, and sent messages to Alva, who promptly seized all English goods and persons in the Netherlands. With equal prompt.i.tude, all Spaniards and Spanish goods were seized in England. The balance of loss was heavily in favour of the English.

It seemed most probable that this astonis.h.i.+ngly audacious proceeding must result either in the fall of Cecil, to whom it was due, or in open war with Spain, and the immediate committal of England to the formation of a Protestant League; which might force the English Catholics in their turn directly to espouse the cause of Mary. The reception given in this country shortly before to the Cardinal of Chatillon, Coligny's brother, was a symptom of Cecil's Protestant policy, and he at least was probably willing enough that any tendency of the English Catholics towards revolt should be precipitated rather than delayed.

[Sidenote: 1569 The incident pa.s.sed over]

Even Cecil however was not anxious for open war, while Elizabeth always shrank from that last extremity. On the other side, Philip had three very good reasons for pa.s.sing over the affront he had received. First, the Netherlands were giving him enough to do for the time. Secondly, Don Guerau was satisfied that the downfall of Cecil and the reversal of his policy were imminent. Thirdly, the French court would a.s.suredly subordinate religious questions to the political gain of uniting with England against him. A definite league between Conde and the English might have averted that danger, by driving the French Catholics to make common cause with Spain; but any immediate prospect of such a solution of the entanglement vanished when the Huguenots were defeated and Conde himself killed at the battle of Jarnac in May. The result of that event was the immediate prohibition of the English adventurers from joining the Huguenot fleet of Roch.e.l.le and sailing under the Huguenot flag; as many of them had been in the habit of doing.

In May, then, the risk of a rupture between the French Government and England, and of the formation of a universal Protestant league, was over for the time at least; and within a few months, in England, the Northern Earls, by a premature rising, inflicted a severe blow on their own party, and decided large numbers of the Catholics to take their stand as in the first place patriots and loyalists.

[Sidenote: The Northern Rebellion]

What we have called the Catholic party included many professing Protestants--_i.e._ men who conformed with entire equanimity, yet would have preferred to see the old wors.h.i.+p restored; such as Norfolk.

Extreme men saw in the union of the Duke with Mary a prospect of immediately placing the captive Queen on the English throne. The moderate men wanted the marriage, accompanied by her recognition as heir presumptive. There were others outside the Catholic connexion who dreamed rather of Mary under the circ.u.mstances conforming to the Anglican faith. Norfolk dallied with all three. There was a moment when Elizabeth herself might have been persuaded to a.s.sent; but the Duke missed his opportunity, and she, reverting to a conviction that the marriage would soon be followed by her own a.s.sa.s.sination, presently forbade it, and summoned Norfolk to answer for his loyalty. After brief hesitation he surrendered himself and was confined in the Tower: but the Northern Earls, Northumberland and Westmorland, believing that they must strike at once if at all, rose and marched to deliver Mary from Tutbury--whither she had been suddenly conveyed to safe keeping, in the expectation of some such event. The rest of the Catholics however were not ready for such a venture; being forced to make up their minds, they resolved to stand loyal. The royal musters were quickly advancing to meet the insurgents, who presently concluded that the cause was hopeless, and fled. Northumberland was subsequently arrested and detained by Murray in Scotland: Westmorland made his way to Spain.

Suss.e.x received and carried out orders to punish with a heavy hand those who had taken part in the rebellion; and so without any great difficulty the one serious revolt of the reign was stamped out.

[Sidenote: 1570 Murder of Murray]

The year 1570 had hardly opened when Elizabeth lost one of her most valuable allies by the murder of the Regent Murray, a.s.sa.s.sinated by Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. Murray's figure in history is a sombre one, and the sombreness is thrown into the greater relief by the picturesque brilliancy of his hapless sister. It was his fate to fight on the gloomy side; to stand at the head of a n.o.bility conspicuously sordid and unprincipled, half of whom, when not occupied in plotting against the life of a hereditary foe or a political rival, were posing as representatives of the ”G.o.dly”--an att.i.tude held to be entirely compatible with a total disregard for the decalogue. Perhaps there is no prominent statesman of his times who came through the heavy ordeal of public life with cleaner hands. There is no fair ground for a.s.sociating him directly and actively with any of the great crimes in one or another of which almost every one of the Scots lords had a share.

When his sister married Darnley, he took up arms against her: he did so again when she married Bothwell: and on both occasions he was probably obeying an elastic conscience. While he was endeavouring to fix the odium of the Darnley murder on Mary, he must have been quite aware that both Lethington and Morton, his allies, were steeped in the guilt of it.

But he could neither stand aside from the turmoil, nor pick and choose his a.s.sociates. The political support or countenance of Elizabeth seemed absolutely necessary to the cause of the Reformation in Scotland.

A man of a more generous spirit would more than once have felt that the price was too high, that he was accepting a too ignominious position; he stooped to a course which if not exactly dishonourable was perilously near it. But the part he was forced to play was the hardest and the most thankless imaginable; and he played it with a constant effort to be tolerant, to be as just as circ.u.mstances permitted, to be true to himself. He was the one man in Scotland who had striven resolutely amid the kaleidoscopic chaos of factions to maintain some sort of order, some sort of liberty, some sort of standard of public spirit. With his fall, anarchy became more rampant than ever. Elizabeth lamented, not without reason, that she had lost her best friend; but while he lived she had not made his task the easier.

[Sidenote: March The Bull of Deposition]

In March, the Pope took the step which paralysed Catholicism as an open political force in England, by issuing a Bull against Elizabeth which virtually declared loyalty to the Queen and loyalty to the Faith to be incompatible; yet since the profession of loyalty was to be condoned, every Catholic was _ipso facto_ rendered suspect. The suspicion of disloyalty breeds the disease. Englishmen of the Roman Communion have a right to be proud that so many in those years of storm and stress neither relinquished their faith nor forgot their patriotism; yet when their fellow-subjects had been thus absolved of their allegiance, the Protestants can hardly be blamed for being over-ready to a.s.sume that they were in league with the Queen's enemies. The Pope could have done nothing calculated more thoroughly to translate the ordinary sentiment of loyalty into a pa.s.sion of resentment against its opposite.

[Sidenote: The Anjou Match]

The immediate situation however was fraught with sufficient peril. Mary for the sake of liberty was by this time fairly ready to promise anything, and trust to the chapter of accidents to find some plausible ground for repudiating her promises later. Elizabeth would have been glad enough to get her out of the country if she could by any means be rendered harmless. Once again, to the dismay of Cecil, a restoration, on terms, seemed probable, while the Queen herself showed a tendency to try at any cost to recover the support of the Catholics. In fact however, she would make up her mind to no decided course. But affairs in France suggested to her a new scheme which could be played with indefinitely. In spite of Jarnac, and of another defeat later in the year at Montcontour, Coligny and the Huguenots remained unvanquished in 1570. In the autumn, there was a fresh pacification, and Coligny became once more a power at Court as well as in the country. The younger brother of the young French King, Henry Duke of Anjou, was now old enough to marry. There had been talk of uniting him to Mary. But if he were to marry Elizabeth, who was only some seventeen years his senior, Protestants and Catholics in both countries might make their peace, and all present a united front to Philip and to Papal aggression--for even the Cardinal of Lorraine had dallied with the notion of Nationalism in matters ecclesiastical. Cecil and Walsingham, who had recently come to the front and now represented England in Paris, were keenly in favour of the scheme. As for the Queen she probably intended to use it precisely as she had used all the previous marriage schemes, simply as an instrument for manipulating foreign courts and her own ministers.

[Sidenote: 1570-71 The Ridolfi plot initiated]

Under these conditions, a new plot was initiated for the liberation of Mary, her marriage to Norfolk, and the removal of Elizabeth; to be at last actively if secretly aided by Alva and Philip, on whom the vehement remonstrances of the Pope were now taking effect--in view of the threatened alliance between England and France. The agent was one Ridolfi, who combined cleverness sufficient to deceive even Walsingham for a time with a garrulity and carelessness which proved ruinous in the long run. It was fortunate for Elizabeth that of the two necessary figure-heads for any conspiracy, Mary and Norfolk, one was more than half-believed even by her own party to be stained by the grossest crimes, while the other was nerveless and vacillating.

[Sidenote: 1571 April, Parliament]

At this juncture, need of funds made it impossible for Elizabeth to continue longer without calling a Parliament, which met early in April (1571). The bulk of the peers were still in sympathy with Catholicism and the ideas a.s.sociated therewith; the lower House, always Protestant, was now more emphatically so than ever. The Puritan element, naturally enough, had come to regard Catholicism as _prima facie_ evidence of treason, and was bent on enforcing a more uncompromising conformity, with a greater severity, than heretofore. The Commons insisted on discussing religious matters, and ignored the Queen's attempts to silence them. They gave, what the last parliament had refused, their sanction to the Thirty-nine Articles. The effect of the Papal excommunication was seen in an Act making it high Treason to question the Queen's t.i.tle, or to call her a heretic, and disqualifying from the succession any one who laid claim to the crown; they sought even to make the Act retrospective, which would have forthwith excluded Mary permanently. They submitted however to some modification of the original harshness of their intentions; whereby it is probable that not a few Catholics, who would otherwise have been fatally alienated, did as matters turned out remain loyal. Finally, a substantial grant of money was made. The Commons in short were thoroughly at one with Cecil, now known as Lord Burghley. They were intensely loyal, and showed their loyalty none the less emphatically because they ignored the Queen's predilections in the manner of doing it.

[Sidenote: Collapse of Anjou marriage]

At the end of May, Parliament was dissolved. In the meantime, and for some months longer, the affair of the Anjou marriage was running the usual course. As mere postponement seemed to become impossible, the old pretended difficulties by which the Archduke Charles had been finally evaded were rehabilitated. Anjou must not have even his private Ma.s.s. The Queen's Ministers understood the position, and their one object became the avoidance of a breach with France. By the exercise of much dexterity, Anjou was drawn into taking the initiative in breaking off the match in a quite complimentary manner; and there was even discussion of the subst.i.tution for him of his still younger brother Alencon. France, in fact, at this time was swaying strongly towards antagonism to Spain, at any price which would secure English support; the idea of part.i.tioning the Netherlands being part of the programme. Cecil and Walsingham, believing with reason that an accident might again turn the balance with the French government, and painfully distrustful of Elizabeth's endless vacillations, were on tenterhooks till the amicable conclusion of the Anjou affair.