A SPECTACLE unparalleled-these two queens in Albion, proud clever, yet, on account of their allusions and antitheses, are far MARY was now in her nineteenth year. She had been brought up in a court where the serpent too frequently lurked beneath the roses; treachery, falsehood, and cruelty hiding themselves under the covert of honeyed words and wreathed smiles, and where dissoluteness of manners prevailed. She had also been reared in adherence to the tenets and practices of the papacy. She was come to a country poor and semi-barbarous, where deeds of violence and treachery were openly enacted; where the Reformation had breathed its sternest spirit, little mitigated by the Gospel precepts of peace and charity; where the reformed clergy, led by the fanatic Knox, sought to deprive mankind of most of the innocent pleasures of life, and viewed the masks, the dances, the banquets, in which the queen naturally took delight, as sinful abom inations. Between a sovereign and a people of such opposite characters long-continued harmony could hardly be expected to prevail. Yet Mary's reign was for some years happy and prosperous. For this she was indebted to her following the advice of her uncles and giving her confidence to her half-brother, the [1562-1565 A.D.] prior of St. Andrews (whom she raised to the dignity of earl of Mar, and soon after to that of Murray or Moray), the head of the Protestant party and a man of ability. She also held occasional conferences with the rugged Knox, and bore his uncourteous animadversions with no little patience. Yet all the while her fixed design was the overthrow of the reformed religion. In 1562, when some zealots presented a petition for the suppression of the Roman worship, she angrily replied that she hoped before another year to have the mass restored throughout the whole kingdom. On the 10th of May in the following year (1563) her uncle, the cardinal of Lorraine, read her letters to the council of Trent, professing her submission to its authority, and promising if she succeeded to the throne of England to subject both kingdoms to the holy see. We are further assured that she was a subscribing party to the famous Holy League concluded at Bayonne in 1565 for the extermination of the Protestants. Surely it is not possible that the intentions of Mary with respect to religion could have escaped the knowledge of Elizabeth and her wise minister Cecil; and was it not therefore their duty to guard against her having the power to carry these designs into effect? The queen of Scots, we have seen, laid claim to the throne of England; and supposing the divorce of Henry VIII not to have been legal, and the power of parliament to limit the succession not paramount, her claim was irresistible. The Catholics in general took this view of the case. On the other hand Henry, by his will, sanctioned by parliament, devised the crown after his own children to the issue of his younger sister the queen of France by the duke of Suffolk; and many of the Protestants, such as Cecil and Bacon, favoured this line. The general feeling, however, was on the side of the elder or Scottish branch, and Elizabeth herself seems to have viewed the queen of Scots as her true heir, though she was probably secretly determined to keep the matter in uncertainty as long as she lived. By an act of great harshness and even cruelty she at this time put it nearly out of her own power to exclude the queen of Scots. The lady Catherine Grey,2 next sister to the lady Jane, had been married to the son of the earl of Pembroke, but on the fall of her family that timeserving nobleman had them divorced. Catherine was afterwards privately married to the earl of Hertford, son of the protector. Her pregnancy revealed the secret, and Elizabeth, who could not bear that others should enjoy those delights of love from which she excluded herself, sent the lovers to the Tower. As they were unable to prove their marriage the primate pronounced a divorce; but their keepers allowing them to meet, the birth of a second child was the result. Hertford was heavily fined, and detained in prison till his unhappy wife sank under the ill-treatment she received, and died. The legitimacy of their children was acknowledged in a subsequent reign. Shortly after her arrival in Scotland Mary sent Maitland of Lethington to Elizabeth to propose a friendly alliance, but at the same time requiring to be declared successor to the throne. Elizabeth insisted on the execution of the treaty of Edinburgh; she declared that in such case she would do nothing to prejudice the rights of Mary; but she said that her own experience when she was at Hatfield had convinced her how dangerous to the present possessor of power it was to have a designated successor, who would thus become a rallying point for the disaffected. This was a subject on which all through [1 Furthermore, as we have seen, Elizabeth's own parliament had never specifically reversed the attainder of her blood. The reasons have already been shown.] Lady Catherine was Elizabeth's heir according to Henry VIII's will in favor of the Suffolk line. But Elizabeth would not name her a successor.] [1559-1560 A.D.] her reign Elizabeth was remarkably jealous, and though, as we have said, she secretly favoured the hereditary principle, she never would declare herself. The two queens, notwithstanding, kept up an amicable intercourse by letters, and at one time proposed a personal interview at York, which, however, did not take place in consequence of Elizabeth's vanity and jealousy, according to those writers who take a delight in assigning little paltry motives to the actions of this great princess. To us the conduct of Elizabeth towards Mary at this period seems to have been as cordial and friendly as was consistent with her station as the head of the Protestant party in Great Britain, and the obstinate retention by Mary of her claim to the crown of England. THE SUITORS OF ELIZABETH It was a curious circumstance that the rulers of the two British kingdoms should be both young women, both handsome, both single. Their hands were therefore naturally objects of ambition to foreign princes, and the disposal of them matter of solicitude to their subjects. The English parliament were particularly anxious that their sovereign should marry, as her having issue would secure a Protestant succession, and preclude the collision which might ensue between the hereditary claims of the descendants of Margaret and the parliamentary title of those of Mary Tudor, the daughters of Henry VII. But the masculine and arbitrary temper of Elizabeth had early brought her to a secret determination never to give herself a master, and though she gave her parliament fair words, and coquetted with some of her suitors, there does not appear any reason to suppose that she seriously thought of marriage. When Philip of Spain had given up all hopes of obtaining the hand of Elizabeth himself, he put forward the pretensions of his cousin Charles, archduke of Austria, in the design of counterbalancing the influence of France in the British island. Some of Elizabeth's leading nobles were strongly in favour of this match, and it continued for some years to be the subject of discussion.c The family connections of this prince promised equal support against the rivalry of Francis and Mary; to his person, talents, and acquirements, no objection could be adduced; but his religion opposed, if not in the opinion of the queen, at least in that of her counsellors, an insuperable obstacle to his suit. Elizabeth's vanity was indeed flattered, and she intimated a wish to see the archduke in England. It was generally understood that he had resolved to visit his intended bride under an assumed character in November, 1559, and in foreign courts an idea prevailed that the marriage was actually concluded; but the emperor conceived it beneath his dignity to proceed with so much precipitancy, and opened a negotiation which defeated his own purpose. Though he was induced to withdraw his first demand of a church for the celebration of the Catholic service in London; though he consented that Charles should, on occasions of ceremony, attend the queen to the Protestant worship; still he insisted that his son should possess a private chapel for his own use and that of his Catholic family. To this it was replied, that the laws of the realm allowed of no other than the established liturgy, and that the conscience of the queen forbade her to connive at the celebration of an idolatrous worship. So uncourteous an answer cooled the ardour of the young prince. The emperor demanded a positive answer, and the queen replied, January 20th, 1560, that she had in reality no wish to marry. Charles imme [1559-1560 A.D.] diately turned his attention towards the widow queen of Scotland, and the subject was dropped without any expression of dissatisfaction by either party. While the Austrian was thus preferring his suit, John, duke of Finland, arrived in England, September 27th, 1559, to solicit the hand of the queen for his brother Eric, king of Sweden. He was received with royal honours and flattered with delusive hopes. To the queen he paid incessant attention, sought to win the goodwill of her favourites by his affability and presents, and as he went to court, usually threw money amongst the populace, saying that he gave them silver, but the king would give them gold. To Eric, a Protestant, no objection could be made on the ground of religion; finding, however, that his suit made little progress, he grew jealous of his brother, and recalling him, confided his interests to the care of an ambassador. At the same time he sent to Elizabeth, October 3rd, 1561, eighteen piebald horses and several chests of bullion, with an intimation that he would quickly follow in person to lay his heart at her feet. The queen had no objection to the present; but to relieve herself from the expense and embarrassment of a visit she requested him, for his own sake, to postpone his journey till the time when she could make up her mind to enter into matrimony. At length his patience was exhausted, and he consoled himself for his disappointment by marrying a lady who, though unequal in rank to Elizabeth, could boast of superior beauty, and repaid his choice by the sincerity of her attachment. Jealousy of the power of Eric had induced the king of Denmark to set up a rival suitor in the person of Adolphus, duke of Holstein-Eutin. The prince was young, handsome, and (which exalted him more in the eyes of Elizabeth) a soldier and a conqueror. On his arrival, March 20th, 1560, he was received with honour and treated with peculiar kindness. The queen made him knight of the Garter; she granted him a pension for life, still she could not be induced to take him for her husband. ENGLISH ARMOUR While Charles, and Eric, and Adolphus thus openly contended for the hand, or rather the crown, of Elizabeth, they were secretly opposed by a rival whose pretensions were the more formidable as they received the united support of the secretary and of the secretary's wife. This rival was the earl of Arran, whose zeal for the glory of God had been stimulated with the hope of an earthly reward in the marriage of the queen. During the war of the Reformation he had displayed a courage and constancy which left all his associates, with the exception, perhaps, of the lord James, far behind him; and as soon as the peace was concluded he presumed to apply for the expected recompense of his services. To the deputies of the Scottish convention who urged his suit Elizabeth, with her usual affectation, replied that she was content with her maiden state, and that God had given her no inclination for marriage. Yet the sudden [1560 A.D.] departure of the ambassadors deeply offended her pride. She complained that while kings and princes persevered for months and years in their suit, the Scots did not deign to urge their requests a second time. As for Arran, whether it were owing to his disappointment or to some other cause, he fell into a deep melancholy which ended in the loss of his reason. From foreign princes we may turn to those among the queen's subjects who, prompted by their hopes or seduced by her smiles, flattered themselves with the expectation of winning her consent. The first of these was Sir William Pickering. He could not boast of noble blood, nor had he exercised any higher charge than that of a mission to some of the petty princes of Germany. But the beauty of his person, his address, and his taste in the polite OLD HOUSES AT RYE arts, attracted the notice of the young queen; and so lavish was she of her attention to this unexpected favourite that for some weeks he was considered by the courtiers as her future consort. But Pickering was soon forgotten; and if disparity of age could have been compensated by political experience and nobility of descent, the earl of Arundel had a better claim to the royal preference. For some years that nobleman persevered in his suit, to the disquietude of his conscience and the disparagement of his fortune. He was by persuasion a Catholic, but, to please the queen, voted in favour of the Reformation; he possessed considerable estates, but involved himself in debt by expensive presents, and by entertainments given to his sovereign and her court. When at length he could no longer serve her politics or minister to her amusements, she cast him off, and treated him not only with coldness, but occasionally with severity. The man who made the deepest and most lasting impression on her heart was the lord Robert Dudley [better known by his later title, earl of Leicester], who had been attainted with his father, the duke of Northumberland, for the attempt to remove Elizabeth as well as Mary from the succession.f MOTLEY'S PORTRAIT OF ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER There are few personages in English history whose adventures, real or fictitious, have been made more familiar to the world than his have been, or whose individuality has been presented in more picturesque fashion by chronHe was forty-seven years old at the queen's accession. From papers in Haynes d it appears that he was the great rival of Dudley. If we may believe a note preserved by Cam 1 |