[1589 A.D.] on the condition of conformity to the established worship; but the offer was generally refused; the refusal was followed by death; and the butchery, with very few exceptions, was performed on the victim while he was yet in perfect possession of his senses.

From the religious contests, which placed in so strong a light the stern, intolerant spirit of the age, we may now turn to the foreign wars and domestic intrigues which occupied the attention of the queen till the end of her reign. As soon as the intoxication of joy excited by the defeat of the Armada had subsided, she began to calculate the expense of the victory, and stood aghast at the enormous amount. A forced loan offered the readiest way of procuring an immediate supply. The merchants of the city were rated according to their supposed ability to pay; privy seals were despatched to the lords lieutenant of the different counties; and every recusant of fortune, every individual suspected for religion, almost every gentleman who possessed not some powerful friend at court, was compelled to advance the sum at which he had been taxed.

In a short time the convocation and parliament assembled, March 8th, 1589. From the former the queen received a grant of two subsidies of six shillings in the pound; from the latter, of two subsidies of four shillings, and four tenths and fifteenths. With this liberal vote the commons coupled a petition to the throne. As the terror of the Spanish arms was now dispelled, men thought of nothing but revenge and conquest; and the house prayed the queen to punish the insult which she had received from Philip by carrying the scourge of war into his dominions. Elizabeth praised the spirit of her affectionate people; but her exchequer was exhausted; she had no money to advance; she might supply ships of war and a few bands of veteran soldiers, but her subjects must furnish the rest from their own resources. An association was quickly formed, at the head of which appeared the names of Norris and Drake, men who were justly esteemed the first in the military and naval service; and under their auspices an armament of nearly two hundred sail, carrying twenty-one thousand men, was collected in the harbour of Plymouth.

THE EARL OF ESSEX

The reader will recollect that Lætitia, the dowager countess of Essex, had married the earl of Leicester, who introduced her son, the earl of Essex, to the queen. His youth and address and spirit soon captivated Elizabeth. She made him her master of the horse; on the appearance of the Armada she appointed him (he was then almost twenty-one years old) to the important office of captain-general of the cavalry; and when she visited the camp, ostentatiously displayed her fondness for him in the eyes of the whole army, and honoured him for his bloodless services with the order of the Garter. On the death of Leicester he succeeded to the post of prime favourite; the queen required his constant attendance at court; and her indulgence of his caprice cherished and strengthened his passions.

But the company of "the old woman" had few attractions for the volatile young nobleman, and the desire of glory, perhaps the hope of plunder (for he was already twenty-two thousand pounds in debt), taught him to turn his eyes towards the armament at Plymouth. Without communicating his intention to the queen, he suddenly disappeared from court, rode with expedition to Plymouth, embarked on board the Swiftsure, April 1st, a ship of the royal navy, and instantly put out to sea with the intention of following

[1589 A.D.]

the fleet which had sailed several days before. He was scarcely departed when the earl of Huntingdon arrived with orders to arrest the fugitive, and bring him back a prisoner to the feet of his sovereign. Finding that he was too late, he sent a copy of the royal instructions to the commanders of the expedition.

THE INVASION OF SPAIN

In their company was Don Antonio, prior of Crato, who had unsuccessfully contended with Philip for the crown of Portugal. The queen had given orders that they should first attempt to raise a revolution in his favour; and if that failed, should scour the coast of the peninsula and inflict on the subjects of Philip every injury in their power. But Drake had too long been accustomed to absolute command in his freebooting expeditions. He refused to be shackled by instructions, and sailed directly to the harbour of Corunna, April 2nd. Several sail of merchantmen and ships of war fell into his hands; the fishermen's town or suburb was taken; and the magazines, stored with oil and wine, became the reward of the conquerors. But it was in vain that a breach was made in the wall of the place itself; every assault was repulsed, and three hundred men perished by the unexpected fall of a tower. By this time Andrada had intrenched himself at the bridge of Burgos. Norris marched against him with an inferior force; the first attempt to cross the bridge failed; the next succeeded, and the invaders had the honour of pursuing their opponents more than a mile. But it was a barren honour, purchased with the loss of many valuable lives.1

From Corunna the commanders wrote to the queen an exaggerated account of their success, but informed her that they had received no tidings of the earl of Essex. That nobleman waited for them at sea, and accompanied them to Peniche, on the coast of Portugal. On their arrival it was resolved to land. Essex leaped the first into the surf, and the castle was instantly taken. Thence the fleet sailed to the mouth of the Tagus; the army marched through Torres Vedras and St. Sebastian to Lisbon. But the cardinal Albert, the governor of the kingdom, had given the command to Fonteio, an experienced captain, who destroyed all the provisions in the vicinity, and, having distributed his small band of Spaniards in positions the best adapted to suppress any rising in the city, patiently waited the arrival of the enemy.

The English advanced without opposition. Essex with his company knocked at the gate for admittance; but the moment they retired the Spaniards sallied out in small parties and surprised the weak and the stragglers. At length sickness and want compelled Norris to abandon the enterprise; not a sword had been drawn in favour of Antonio, and, in spite of the prayers and the representations of that prince, the army marched to Cascaes, a town already captured and plundered by Drake. From Cascaes the expedition sailed on its return to England, May 27th, and the next day was separated by a storm into several small squadrons. One of these took and pillaged the town of Vigo; the others, having suffered much from the weather, and still more from the vigorous pursuit of Padilla with a fleet of seventeen galleys, successively reached Plymouth.

1 Norris and Drake appear to have been proficients in the art of composing official despatches. They tell the council that in these battles, which were fiercely contested, they killed one thousand of the enemy with the loss of only three men. See LODGE C. But Lord Talbot writes to his father: "As I hear privately, not without the loss of as many of our men as of theirs, if not more; and without the gain of anything, unless it were honour, and the acquainting our men with the use of their weapons."

men.

[1589-1593 A.D.]

Of the twenty-one thousand men who sailed on this disastrous expedition, not one-half, and out of eleven hundred gentlemen, not more than one-third, lived to revisit their native country. The queen rejoiced that she had retaliated the boast of invasion upon Philip, but lamented the loss of lives and treasure with which it had been purchased. The blame was laid by her on the disobedience and rapacity of the two commanders; by them partly on each other, partly on the heat of the climate and the intemperance of the But these complaints were carefully suppressed; in the public accounts the loss was concealed; every advantage was magnified, and the people celebrated with joy the triumph of England over the pride and power of Spain. Essex, on his return, found the court divided between the factions of two competitors for the royal favour, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Charles Blount. Blount was the second son of Lord Mountjoy and a student in the Inner Temple. One day the queen singled him out from the spectators, as she dined in public, inquired his name, gave him her hand to kiss, and bade him remain at court. This was sufficient to point him out to Raleigh as a rival; but the earl of Essex, on his return, assumed a proud superiority over them both; and Raleigh, when he ventured to come into collision with that young nobleman, received from the queen an order to leave England, and go and plant his twelve thousand acres in Ireland.

Blount was more fortunate at a tilting-match. Elizabeth, to show her approbation, sent him a chess-queen of gold, which he bound to his arm with a crimson ribbon. The jealousy of Essex induced him to remark that "now every fool must have his favour"; and the pride of Blount demanded satisfaction for the insult. They fought; Essex was wounded in the thigh; and the queen gratified her vanity with the conceit "that her beauty had been the object of their quarrel." By her command they were reconciled, and in process of time became sincere and assured friends.

The attention of Elizabeth was soon absorbed by the extraordinary and important events which rapidly succeeded each other in France.d

Henry III had caused the duke of Guise and his brother the cardinal to be murdered; he himself perished soon after by the dagger of a fanatical monk, and the king of Navarre, being the next heir, assumed the title of Henry IV. But the Catholic party, excited by Philip II, refused to acknowledge an heretical sovereign; they set up the cardinal of Bourbon against him, and the war continued to rage with its wonted animosity. Elizabeth aided Henry with both money and men; the English troops, led by Sir John Norris, the gallant earl of Essex, and other brave officers, distinguished themselves on all occasions.1 Henry, however, after continuing the contest for nearly three years, found that unless he conformed to the religion of the great majority of his subjects he had little chance of ultimate success. He therefore (1593) declared himself a Catholic, and gradually the whole kingdom submitted to him. Elizabeth, though grieved at this change of faith, felt it her interest to maintain the alliance she had formed, and her troops aided in the reduction of such places as still held out against him.

Against Spain the naval warfare was still kept up, and the earl of Cumberland, Sir Martin Frobisher, and Thomas White did much injury to the Spanish trade. The English at this time also first made their way to the East Indies.

[Year after year a subsidiary force sailed from England, too inconsiderable to do more than create a diversion for the moment; in a few months it dwindled away through disease and the casualties of war, and the loss was subsequently repaired by the transmission of other petty reinforcements. The truth is, that Henry and Elizabeth were playing a similar game, each trying to derive benefits from the embarrassment of the other.-LINGARD.d]

[1590-1595 A.D.]

Two vessels, commanded by George Riman and James Lancaster, doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Riman perished off the east coast of Africa; but Lancaster proceeded, and, after enduring many hardships and losing the greater part of his men, returned to England.

The year 1590 was distinguished by the deaths of the able and disinterested secretary Walsingham; of Thomas Randolph, who had been on thirteen embassies to Scotland, three to Russia, and two to France; of Sir James Crofts, and of the earl of Shrewsbury, earl-marshal of England. The following year the chancellor Hatton died. The generous Essex endeavoured to procure Walsingham's office for the unfortunate Davison, but the queen's resentment against him was too strong, and Burghley, as a means of bringing forward his son Sir Robert Cecil, took the duties of the office on himself. The great seal was committed to Sergeant Puckering, under the title of lord-keeper.

In 1594, Richard, son of Sir John Hawkins, sailed to the South Sea; but he was made a prisoner on the coast of Chili and sent to Spain. The same year James Lancaster was furnished with three vessels by the merchants of London; he captured thirty-nine ships of the enemy, and took and plundered the town of Pernambuco, on the coast of Brazil. The next year (1595) the able and enterprising Sir Walter Raleigh set forth in search of fortune to America.e

S. R. GARDINER'S ACCOUNT OF RALEIGH

Raleigh was born at Hayes, in Devonshire, in 1552. After a short residence at Oriel College, Oxford, he took service, in the autumn of 1569, with a body of volunteers serving in the French Huguenot army, and he probably did not return to England till 1576. During the course of these years he appears to have made himself master of seamanship, though no evidence of this is obtainable. In 1579 he was stopped by the council from taking part in a voyage planned by his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and in 1580 he commanded an English company in Munster (Ireland). On the 10th of November he took part in the massacre at Smerwick. He remained in Ireland till December, 1581, distinguished for his vigour and ability as well as for his readiness to treat Irish rebels as mere wild beasts, who were to be pitilessly exterminated, and whose leaders might be smitten down if necessary by assassination. In one way or another Raleigh's conduct gained the favourable notice of Elizabeth, especially as he had chosen to seek for the support of Leicester, in whose suite he is found at Antwerp in February, 1582.

For some years Raleigh shone as a courtier, receiving from time to time. licenses to export woollen cloths and to sell wine, after the system by which Elizabeth rewarded her favourites without expense to herself. In 1585 he became lord warden of the stannaries, soon afterwards he was vice-admiral of Devon and Cornwall, and in 1587 was captain of the guard. But he was one of those who were dissatisfied unless they could pursue some public object in connection with their chase after a private fortune. In 1583 he risked £2,000 in the expedition in which Sir Humphrey Gilbert perished. In 1584 he obtained a charter of colonisation, and sent Amidas and Barlow to examine the country, which he named Virginia. In 1585 he despatched a fleet laden with colonists. They were, however, soon discouraged, and were brought back to England by Drake in the following year. Shortly afterwards fifteen fresh colonists were landed, and another party in 1587. All these, however, perished, and though Raleigh did all that was possible to succour them, the permanent colonising of Virginia passed into other hands.

[1584-1589 A.D.]

In 1584 Raleigh obtained a grant of an enormous tract of land in Munster, in one corner of which he introduced the cultivation of the potato. To people that land with English colonists was but the counterpart of the attempt to exterminate its original possessors. This view of the policy of England in Ireland was not confined to Raleigh, but it found in him its most eminent supporter. In his haste to be wealthy, his love of adventure, his practical insight into the difficulties of the world, and his unscrupulousness in dealing with peoples of different habits and beliefs from his own, Raleigh was a representative Elizabethan Englishman. He did his best, so far as a usually absentee landlord could do, to make his colonists prosperous and successful;

but he underestimated the extraordinary vitality of the Irish race, and the resistance which was awakened by the harsh system of which he was the constant adviser at Elizabeth's court.

Elizabeth, too, was unable to support him with the necessary force, and his whole attempt ended in failure. Raleigh's efforts were at least made on behalf of a race whose own civilisation and national independence were at stake. The Elizabethan men were driven to take large views of their difficulties, and it was impossible for Raleigh to separate the question whether English forms of life should prevail in Munster from the question whether they should be maintained in England. Two conceptions of politics and religion stood face to face from the Atlantic to the Carpathians, and everyone of vigour took a side. The balancing intellects were silenced, or, like Elizabeth's, were drawn in the wake of the champions of one party or the other.

Wherever the strife was hottest Raleigh was sure to be found. If he could not succeed in Ireland, he would fight it out with Spain. In 1588 he took an active part against the Armada, and is even supposed by some to have been the adviser of the successful tactics which avoided any attempt to board the Spanish galleons. In 1589 he shared in the unsuccessful expedition commanded by Drake and Norris, and for some time vessels fitted out by him were actively employed in making reprisals upon Spain.

Raleigh was a courtier as well as a soldier and a mariner, and as early as 1589 he was brought into collision with the young earl of Essex, who challenged him, though the duel was prevented. Some passing anger of the queen drove him in this year to visit Ireland, where he renewed his friendship with Spenser, and, as is told in poetic language in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, took the poet back with him to England, introduced him to Elizabeth, and