Chapter 20

1587 AND 1588.

Small political effect of the death of Mary.--Warlike preparations of Spain destroyed by Drake.--Case of lord Beauchamp.--Death and character of the duchess of Somerset.--Hatton appointed chancellor.--Leicester returns to Holland--is again recalled.--Disgrace of lord Buckhurst.--Rupture with Spain.--Preparations against the Armada.--Notices of the earls of Cumberland and Northumberland--T. and R. Cecil--earl of Oxford--sir C. Blount--W. Raleigh--lord Howard of Effingham--Hawkins--Frobisher--Drake.--Leicester appointed general.--Queen at Tilbury.--Defeat of the Armada.--Introduction of newspapers.--Death of Leicester.

It is well deserving of remark, that the strongest and most extraordinary act of the whole administration of Elizabeth,--that which brought the blood of a sister-queen upon her head and indelible reproach upon her memory,--appears to have been productive of scarcely any assignable political effect. It changed her relations with no foreign power, it altered very little the state of parties at home, it recommended no new adviser to her favor, it occasioned the displacement of Davison alone.

She may appear, it is true, to have obtained by this stroke an immunity from that long series of dark conspiracies by which, during so many years, she had been disquieted and endangered. To deliver the queen of Scots was an object for which many men had been willing to risk their lives; but none were found desperate or chivalrous enough to run the same hazard in order to avenge her. But the recent detection of Babington and his associates, and the rigorous justice executed upon them, was likely, even without the death of Mary, to have deterred from the speedy repetition of similar practices; and a crisis was now approaching fitted to suspend the machinations of faction, to check the operation even of religious bigotry, and to unite all hearts in the love, all hands in the protection, of their native soil.

Philip of Spain, though he purposely avoided as yet a declaration of war, was known to be intently occupied upon the means of taking signal vengeance on the queen of England for all the acts of hostility on her part of which he thought himself entitled to complain.

Already in the summer of 1587 the ports of Spain and Portugal had begun to be thronged with vessels of various sorts and every size, destined to compose that terrible armada from which nothing less than the complete subjugation of England was anticipated;--already had the pope showered down his benedictions on the holy enterprise; and, by a bull declaring the throne of the schismatic princess forfeited to the first occupant, made way for the pretensions of Philip, who claimed it as the true heir of the house of Lancaster.

But Elizabeth was not of a temper so timid or so supine as to suffer these preparations to advance without interruption. She ordered Drake to sail immediately for the coast of Spain, and put in practice against her enemy every possible mode of injury and annoyance. To the four great ships which she allotted to him for this service, the English merchants, instigated by the hopes of plunder, cheerfully added twenty-six more of different sizes; and with this force the daring leader steered for the port of Cadiz, where a richly-laden fleet lay ready to sail for Lisbon, the final rendezvous for the whole armada. By the impetuosity of his attack, he compelled six galleys which defended the mouth of the harbour to seek shelter under its batteries; and having thus forced an entrance, he took, burned and destroyed about a hundred store-ships and two galleons of superior size. This done, he returned to Cape St. Vincent; then took three castles; and destroying as he proceeded every thing that came in his way, even to the fishing-boats and nets, he endeavoured to provoke the Spanish admiral to come out and give him battle off the mouth of the Tagus. But the marquis of Santa Croce deemed it prudent to suffer him to pillage the coast without molestation. Having fully effected this object, he made sail for the Azores, where the capture of a bulky carrack returning from India amply indemnified the merchants for all the expenses of the expedition, and enriched the admiral and his crews. Drake returned to England in a kind of triumph, boasting that he had "singed the whiskers" of the king of Spain: nor was his vaunt unfounded; the destruction of the store-ships, and the havoc committed by him on the magazines of every kind, was a mischief so great, and for the present so irreparable, that it crippled the whole design, and compelled Philip to defer, for no less than a year, the sailing of his invincible armada.

The respite thus procured was diligently improved by Elizabeth for the completion of her plans of defence against the hour of trial, which she still anticipated.--The interval seems to afford a fit occasion for the relation of some incidents of a more private nature, but interesting as illustrative of the manners and practices of the age.

It has been already mentioned, that the secret marriage of the earl of Hertford with lady Catherine Gray, notwithstanding the sentence of nullity which the queen had caused to be so precipitately pronounced and the punishment which she had tyrannically inflicted on the parties, had at length been duly established by a legal decision in which her majesty was compelled to acquiesce. The eldest son of the earl assumed in consequence his father's second title of lord Beauchamp, and became undoubted heir to all the claims of the Suffolk line. About the year 1585, this young nobleman married, unknown to his father, a daughter of sir Richard Rogers, of Brianston, a gentleman of ancient family, whose son had already been permitted to intermarry with a daughter of the house of Seymour. It might have been hoped that the earl of Hertford, from his own long and unmerited sufferings on a similar account, would have learned such a lesson of indulgence towards the affections of his children, that a match of greater disparity might have received from him a ready forgiveness. But he inherited, it seems, too much of the unfeeling haughtiness of his high-born mother; and in the fury of his resentment on discovery of this connexion of his son's, he made no scruple of separating by force the young couple, in direct defiance of the sacred tie which bound them to each other. Lord Beauchamp bore in the beginning this arbitrary treatment with a dutiful submission, by which he flattered himself that the heart of his father must sooner or later be touched; but at length, finding all entreaties vain, and seeing reason to believe that a settled plan was entertained by the earl of estranging him for ever from his wife, he broke on a sudden from the solitary mansion which had been assigned him as his place of abode, or of banishment, and was hastening to London to throw himself at the feet of her majesty and beseech her interposition, when a servant of his father's overtook and forcibly detained him.

Well aware that his nearness to the crown must have rendered peculiarly offensive to the queen what she would regard as his presumption in marrying without her knowledge and consent, he at first suspected her majesty as the author of this attack on his liberty; but being soon informed of her declaration, "that he was no prisoner of hers, and the man had acted without warrant," he addressed to lord Burleigh an earnest petition for redress. In this remarkable piece, after a statement of his case, he begs to submit himself by the lord-treasurer's means to the queen and council, hoping _that they will grant him the benefit of the laws of the realm_; that it would please his lordship to send for him by his warrant; and that he might not be injured by his father's men, though hardly dealt with by himself. Such were the lengths to which, in this age, a parent could venture to proceed against his child, and such the measures which it was then necessary to take in order to obtain the protection of the laws. It is not stated whether lord Beauchamp was at this time a minor; but if so, he probably made application to Burleigh as master of the wards. Apparently his representations were not without effect; for he procured in the end both a re-union with his wife and a reconciliation with his father.

The grandmother of this young nobleman, Anne duchess-dowager of Somerset, died at a great age in 1587. Maternally descended from the Plantagenets, and elevated by marriage to the highest rank of English nobility, she perhaps gloried in the character of being the proudest woman of her day. It has often been repeated, that her repugnance to yield precedence to queen Catherine Parr, when remarried to the younger brother of her husband, was the first occasion of that division in the house of Seymour by which Northumberland succeeded in working its overthrow. In the misfortune to which she had thus contributed, the duchess largely shared. When the Protector was committed to the Tower, she also was carried thither amid the insults of the people, to whom her arrogance had rendered her odious; and rigorous examinations and an imprisonment of considerable duration here awaited her. She saw her husband stripped of power and reputation, convicted of felony, and led by his enemies to an ignominious death; and what to a woman of her temper was perhaps a still severer trial, she beheld her son,--that son for whose aggrandizement she had without remorse urged her weak husband to strip of his birthright his own eldest born,--dispossessed in his turn of title and estates, and reduced by an act of forfeiture to the humble level of a private gentleman.

Her remarriage to an obscure person of the name of Newdigate, may prove, either that ambition was not the only inordinate affection to which the disposition of the duchess was subject, or that she was now reduced to seek safety in insignificance.

During the reign of Mary, no favor beyond an unmolested obscurity was to be expected by the protestant house of Seymour; but it was one of the earliest acts of Elizabeth generously to restore to Edward Seymour the whole of the Protector's confiscated estates not previously granted to his elder half-brother, and with them the title of earl of Hertford, the highest which his father had received from Henry VIII., and that with which he ought to have rested content. Still no door was opened for the return of the duchess of Somerset to power or favor; Elizabeth never ceasing to behold in this haughty woman both the deadly enemy of admiral Seymour,--that Seymour who was the first to touch her youthful heart, and whose pretensions to her hand had precipitated his ruin,--and that rigid censor of her early levities, who, dressed in a "brief authority," had once dared to assume over her a kind of superiority, which she had treated at the time with disdain, and apparently continued to recollect with bitterness.

It appears from a letter in which the duchess earnestly implores the intercession of Cecil in behalf of her son, when under confinement on account of his marriage, that she was at the time of writing it excluded from the royal presence; and it was nine whole years before all the interest she could make, all the solicitations which she compelled herself to use towards persons whom she could once have commanded at her pleasure, proved effectual in procuring his release. The vast wealth which she had amassed must still, however, have maintained her ascendency over her own family and numerous dependents, though with its final disposal her majesty evinced a strong disposition to intermeddle. Learning that she had appointed her eldest son sole executor, to the prejudice of his brother sir Henry Seymour, whom she did not love, the queen sent a gentleman to expostulate with her, and urge her strongly to change this disposition. The aged duchess, after long refusal, agreed at length to comply with the royal wish: but this promise she omitted to fulfil, and some obstruction was in consequence given to the execution of her last will. We possess a large inventory of her jewels and valuables, among which are enumerated "two pieces of unicorn's horn," an article highly valued in that day, from its supposed efficacy as an antidote, or a test, for poisons. The extreme smallness of her bequests for charitable purposes was justly remarked as a strong indication of a harsh and unfeeling disposition, in an age when similar benefactions formed almost the sole resource of the sick and needy.

In this year lord-chancellor Bromley died: and it should appear that there was at the time no other lawyer of eminence who had the good fortune to stand high in the favor of the queen and her counsellors, for we are told that she had it in contemplation to appoint as his successor the earl of Rutland; a nobleman in the thirtieth year of his age, distinguished indeed among the courtiers for his proficiency in elegant literature and his knowledge of the laws of his country, but known to the public only in the capacity of a colonel of foot in the bloodless campaign of the earl of Sussex against the Northern rebels.

How far this young man might have been qualified to do honor to so extraordinary a choice, remains matter of conjecture; his lordship being carried off by a sudden illness within a week of Bromley himself, after which her majesty thought proper to invest with this high office sir Christopher Hatton her vice-chamberlain.

This was a nomination scarcely less mortifying to lawyers than that of the earl of Rutland. Hatton's abode at one of the inns of court had been so short as scarcely to entitle him to a professional character; and since his fine dancing had recommended him to the favor of her majesty, he had entirely abandoned his legal pursuits for the life and the hopes of a courtier. It is asserted that his enemies promoted his appointment with more zeal than his friends, in the confident expectation of seeing him disgrace himself: what may be regarded as more certain is, that he was so disquieted by intimations of the queen's repenting of her choice, that he tendered to her his resignation before he entered on the duties of his office; and that in the beginning of his career the serjeants refused to plead before him. But he soon found means both to vanquish their repugnance and to establish in the public mind an opinion of his integrity and sufficiency, which served to redeem his sovereign from the censure or ridicule to which this extraordinary choice seemed likely to expose her. He had the wisdom to avail himself, in all cases of peculiar difficulty, of the advice of two learned serjeants;--in other matters he might reasonably regard his own prudence and good sense as competent guides. In fact, it was only since the reformation that this great office had begun to be filled by common-law lawyers: before this period it was usally exercised by some ecclesiastic who was also a civilian, and instances were not rare of the seals having been held in commission by noblemen during considerable intervals;--facts which, in justice to Hatton and to Elizabeth, ought on this occasion to be kept in mind.

The pride of Leicester had been deeply wounded by the circumstances of that forced return from Holland which, notwithstanding all his artful endeavours to color it to the world, was perfectly understood at court as a disgraceful recall.

The queen, in the first emotions of indignation and disappointment called forth by his ill-success, had in public made use of expressions respecting his conduct, of which he well knew that the effect could only be obviated by some mark of favor equally public; and he spared no labor for the accomplishment of this object. By an extraordinary exertion of that influence over her majesty's affections which enabled him to hold her judgement in lasting captivity, he was at length successful, and the honorable and lucrative place of chief justice in Eyre of all the forests south of Trent was bestowed upon him early in 1587. So far was well; but he disdained to rest satisfied with less than the restitution of that supreme command over the Dutch provinces which had flattered his vanity with a title never borne by Englishman before; that of _Excellence_. His usual arts prevailed in this instance likewise. By means of the authority which he had surreptitiously reserved to himself, he held the governors of towns and forts in Holland in complete dependence, whilst his solemn ostentation of religion had secured the zealous attachment of the protestant clergy; an order which then exerted an important influence over public opinion. It had thus been in his power to raise a strong faction in the country, through the instrumentality of which he raised such impediments to the measures of administration, that the States-general saw themselves at length compelled, as the smaller of two evils, to solicit the queen for his return. It was a considerable time before she could be brought to sanction a step of which her sagest counsellors, secretly hostile to Leicester, labored to demonstrate the entire inexpediency. The affairs of Holland suffered at once by the dissensions which the malice of Leicester had sown, and by the long irresolution of Elizabeth; and she at length sent over lord Buckhurst to make inquiry into some measures of the States which had given her umbrage, and to report upon the whole matter.

The sagacious and upright statesman was soon satisfied where the blame ought to rest, and he suggested a plan for the government of the country which excluded the idea of Leicester's return. But the intrigues of the favorite finally prevailed, and he was authorized in June 1587 to resume a station of which he had proved himself equally incapable and unworthy, having previously been further gratified by her majesty with the office of lord high-steward, and with permission to resign that of master of the horse to his stepson the earl of Essex. But fortune disdained to smile upon his arms; and his failure in an attempt to raise the siege of Sluys produced such an exasperation of his former quarrel with the States, that in the month of November the queen found herself compelled to supersede him, appointing the brave lord Willoughby captain-general in his place.

On his return to England, Leicester found lord Buckhurst preparing against him a charge of malversation in Holland, and he received a summons to justify himself before the privy-council; but he better consulted his safety by flying for protection to the footstool of the throne. The queen, touched by his expressions of humility and sorrow, and his earnest entreaties "that she would not receive with disgrace on his return, him whom she had sent forth with honor, nor bring down alive to the grave one whom her former goodness had raised from the dust," consented once again to receive him into wonted favor. Nor was this all; for on the day when he was expected to give in his answer before the council, he appeared in his place, and by a triumphant appeal to her majesty, whose secret orders limited, as he asserted, his public commission, baffled at once the hopes of his enemies and the claims of public justice. What was still more gross, he was suffered to succeed in procuring a censure to be passed upon lord Buckhurst, who continued in disgrace for the nine remaining months of Leicester's life, during which a royal command restrained him within his house. Elizabeth must in this instance have known her own injustice even while she was committing it; but by the loyal and chivalrous nobility, who knelt before the footstool of the maiden-queen, "her buffets and rewards were ta'en with equal thanks;" and Abbot, the chaplain of lord Buckhurst, has recorded of his patron, that "so obsequious was he to this command, that in all the time he never would endure, openly or secretly, by day or night, to see either wife or child." He had his reward; for no sooner was the queen restored to liberty by the death of her imperious favorite, than she released her kinsman, honored him with the garter, procured, two years after, his election to the chancellorship of the university of Oxford, and finally appointed him Burleigh's successor in the honorable and lucrative post of lord treasurer.

During the unavoidable delay which the expedition of Drake had brought to the designs of Philip II., the prince of Parma had by his master's directions been endeavouring to amuse the vigilance of Elizabeth with overtures of negotiation. The queen, at the request of the prince, sent plenipotentiaries to treat with him in Flanders; and though the Hollanders absolutely refused to enter into the treaty, they proceeded with apparent earnestness in the task of settling preliminaries. Some writers maintain, that there was, from the beginning, as little sincerity on one side as on the other; to gain time for the preparations of attack or defence, being the sole object of both parties in these manoeuvres. Yet the cautious and pacific character of the policy of Elizabeth, and the secret dread which she ever entertained of a serious contest with the power of Spain, seem to render it more probable that the wish and hope of an accommodation was at first on her side real; and that the fears of the States that their interests might become the sacrifice, must have been by no means destitute of foundation. Leicester is said to have had the merit of first opening the eyes of his sovereign to the fraudulent conduct of the prince of Parma,--who in fact was furnished with no powers to treat,--and to have earned for himself by this discovery the restoration of her favor.

In March 1588 these conferences broke off abruptly. It was impossible for either party longer to deceive or to act the being deceived; for all Europe now rang with the mighty preparations of king Philip for the conquest of England;--preparations which occupied the whole of his vast though disjointed empire, from the Flemish provinces which still owned his yoke, to the distant ports of Sicily and Naples.

The spirit of the English people rose with the emergency. All ranks and orders vied with each other in an eager devotedness to the sacred cause of national independence; the rich poured forth their treasures with unsparing hand; the chivalrous and young rushed on-board ships of their own equipment, a band of generous volunteers; the poor demanded arms to exterminate every invader who should set foot on English ground; while the clergy animated their audience against the Pope and the Spaniard, and invoked a blessing on the holy warfare of their fellow-citizens. Elizabeth, casting aside all her weaknesses, showed herself worthy to be the queen and heroine of such a people. Her prudence, her vigilance, her presence of mind, which failed not for a moment, inspired unbounded confidence, while her cheerful countenance and spirited demeanour breathed hope and courage and alacrity into the coldest bosoms. Never did a sovereign enter upon a great and awful contest with a more strenuous resolution to fulfil all duties, to confront all perils; never did a people repay with such ardor of gratitude, such enthusiasm of attachment, the noblest virtues of a prince.

The best troops of the country were at this time absent in Flanders; and there was no standing army except the queen's guard and the garrisons kept in a few forts on the coast or the Scottish border. The royal navy was extremely small, and the revenues of the crown totally inadequate to the effort of raising it to any thing approaching a parity with the fleets of Spain. The queen possessed not a single ally on the continent capable of affording her aid; she doubted the fidelity of the king of Scots to her interests, and a formidable mass of disaffection was believed to subsist among her own subjects of the catholic communion. It was on the spontaneous efforts of individuals that the whole safety of the country at this momentous crisis was left dependent: if these failed, England was lost;--but in such a cause, at such a juncture, they could not fail; and the first appeal made by government to the patriotism of the people was answered with that spirit in which a nation is invincible. A message was sent by the privy-council to inquire of the corporation of London what the city would be willing to undertake for the public service? The corporation requested to be informed what the council might judge requisite in such a case. Fifteen ships and five thousand men, was the answer. Two days after, the city "humbly intreated the council, in sign of their perfect love and loyalty, to prince and country, to accept ten thousand men and thirty ships amply furnished." "And," adds the chronicler, "even as London, London like, gave precedent, the whole kingdom kept true rank and equipage." At this time, the able-bodied men in the capital between the ages of eighteen and sixty amounted to no more than 17,083.

Without entering into further detail respecting the particular contributions of different towns or districts to the common defence, it is sufficient to remark, that every sinew was strained, and that little was left to the charge of government but the task of arranging and applying the abundant succours furnished by the zeal of the country. One trait of the times, however, it is essential to commemorate. Terror is perhaps the most merciless of all sentiments, and that which is least restrained either by shame or a sense of justice; and under this debasing influence some of the queen's advisers did not hesitate to suggest, that in a crisis so desperate, she ought to consult her own safety and that of the country, by seeking pretexts to take away the lives of some of the leading catholics. They cited in support of this atrocious proposal the example of Henry VIII. her father, who, before his departure for the French wars, had without scruple brought to the block his own cousin the marquis of Exeter and several others, whose chief crime was their attachment to the ancient faith and their enjoying a degree of popularity which might enable them to raise commotions in his absence.

Elizabeth rejected with horror these suggestions of cowardice and cruelty, at the same time that she omitted no measures of precaution which she regarded as justifiable. The existing laws against priests and seminary-men were enforced with vigilance and severity, all popish recusants were placed under close inspection, and a considerable number of those accounted most formidable were placed under safe custody in Wisbeach-castle.

To these gentlemen, however, the queen caused it to be intimated, that the step which she had taken was principally designed for their protection, since it was greatly to be apprehended that, in the event of landing of the Spaniards, the Roman catholics might become the victims of some ebullition of popular fury which it would not then be in the power of government to repress.

This lenient proceeding on the part of her majesty was productive of the best effects; the catholics who remained at liberty became earnest to prove themselves possessed of that spirit of patriotism and loyalty for which she had given them credit. Some entered the ranks as volunteers; others armed and encouraged their tenantry and dependants for the defence of their country; several even fitted out vessels at their own expense, and intrusted the command of them to protestant officers on whom the government could entirely rely.

After the defeat of the Armada, the prisoners at Wisbeach-castle, having signed the submission required by law of such as had offended in hearing mass and absenting themselves from church, petitioned the privy-council for their liberty; but a bond for good behaviour being further demanded of them, with the condition of being obedient to such orders as six members of the privy-council should write down respecting them, they refused to comply with such terms of enlargement, and remained in custody. As the submission which they had tendered voluntarily was in terms apparently no less strong than the bond which they refused, it was conjectured that the former piece had been drawn up by their ghostly fathers with some private equivocation or mental reservation; a suspicion which receives strong confirmation from the characters and subsequent conduct of some of these persons,--the most noted fanatics certainly of their party,--and amongst whom we read the names of Talbot, Catesby, and Tresham, afterwards principal conspirators in the detestable gunpowder plot[98].

[Note 98: Life of Whitgift, by Strype.]

The ships equipped by the nobility and gentry to combat the armada amounted in the whole to forty-three, and it was on-board these vessels that young men of the noblest blood and highest hopes now made their first essay in arms. In this number may be distinguished George Clifford third earl of Cumberland, one of the most remarkable, if not the greatest, characters of the reign of Elizabeth.

The illustrious race of Clifford takes origin from William duke of Normandy; in a later age its blood was mingled with that of the Plantagenets by the intermarriage of the seventh lord de Clifford and a daughter of the celebrated Hotspur by Elizabeth his wife, whose father was Edward Mortimer earl of March. Notwithstanding this alliance with the house of York, two successive lords de Clifford were slain in the civil wars fighting strenuously on the Lancastrian side. It was to the younger of these, whose sanguinary spirit gained him the surname of the Butcher, that the barbarous murder of the young earl of Rutland was popularly imputed; and a well-founded dread of the vengeance of the Yorkists caused his widow to conceal his son and heir under the lowly disguise of a shepherd-boy, in which condition he grew up among the fells of Westmorland totally illiterate, and probably unsuspicious of his origin.

At the end of five-and-twenty years, the restoration of the line of Lancaster in the person of Henry VII. restored to lord de Clifford the name, rank, and large possessions of his ancestors; but the peasant-noble preferred through life that rustic obscurity in which his character had been formed and his habits fixed, to the splendors of a court or the turmoils of ambition. He kept aloof from the capital; and it was only on the field of Flodden, to which he led in person his hardy tenantry, that this de Clifford exhibited some sparks of the warlike fire inherent in his race.

His successor, by qualities very different from the homely virtues which had obtained for his father among his tenantry and neighbours the surname of the Good, recommended himself to the special favor of Henry VIII., who created him earl of Cumberland, and matched his heir to his own niece lady Eleanor Brandon. The sole fruit of this illustrious alliance, which involved the earl in an almost ruinous course of expense, was a daughter, who afterwards became the mother of Ferdinando earl of Derby, a nobleman whose mysterious and untimely fate remains to be hereafter related. By a second and better-assorted marriage, the earl of Cumberland became the father of George, his successor, our present subject, who proved the most remarkable of this distinguished family. The death of his father during his childhood had brought him under wardship to the queen; and by her command he was sent to pursue his studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge, under Whitgift, afterwards primate. Here he applied himself with ardor to the mathematics, and it was apparently the bent of his genius towards these studies which first caused him to turn his attention to nautical matters. An enterprising spirit and a turn for all the fashionable profusions of the day, which speedily plunged him in pecuniary embarrassments, added incitements to his activity in these pursuits; and in 1586 he fitted out three ships and a pinnace to cruise against the Spaniards and plunder their settlements. It appears extraordinary that he did not assume in person the command of his little squadron; but combats and triumphs perhaps still more glorious in his estimation awaited him on the smoother element of the court.

In the games of chivalry he bore off the prize of courage and dexterity from all his peers; the romantic band of knights-tilters boasted of him as one of its brightest ornaments, and her majesty deigned to encourage his devotedness to her glory by an envied pledge of favor.

As he stood or kneeled before her, she dropped her glove, perhaps not undesignedly, and on his picking it up, graciously desired him to keep it. He caused the trophy to be encircled with diamonds, and ever after at all tilts and tourneys bore it conspicuously placed in front of his high-crowned hat.

But the emergencies of the year 1588 summoned him to resign the fopperies of an antiquated knight-errantry for serious warfare and the exercise of genuine valor. Taking upon him the command of a ship, he joined the fleet appointed to hang upon the motions of the Spanish armada and harass it in its progress up the British Channel; and on several occasions, especially in the last action, off Calais, he signalized himself by uncommon exertions.

In reward of his services, her majesty granted him her royal commission to pursue a voyage to the South Sea, which he had already projected; she even lent him for the occasion one of her own ships; and thus encouraged, he commenced that long series of naval enterprises which has given him an enduring name. After two or three voyages he constantly declined her majesty's gracious offers of the loan of her ships, because they were accompanied with the express condition that he should never lay any vessel of hers on-board a Spanish one, lest both should be destroyed by fire. Such was the character of mingled penuriousness and timidity which pervaded the maritime policy of this great princess, even after the defeat of the armada had demonstrated that, ship for ship, her navy might defy the world!

At this period, all attempts against the power and prosperity of Spain were naturally regarded with high favor and admiration; and it cannot be denied that in his long and hazardous expeditions the earl of Cumberland evinced high courage, undaunted enterprise, and an extraordinary share of perseverance under repeated failures, disappointments, and hardships of every kind. It is also true that his vigorous attacks embarrassed extremely the intercourse of Spain with her colonies; and, besides the direct injury which they inflicted, compelled this power to incur an immense additional expense for the protection of her treasure-ships and settlements. But the benefit to England was comparatively trifling; and to the earl himself, notwithstanding occasional captures of great value, his voyages were far from producing any lasting advantage; they scarcely repaid on the whole the cost of equipment; while the influx of sudden wealth with which they sometimes gratified him, only ministered food to that magnificent profusion in which he finally squandered both his acquisitions and his patrimony. None of the liberal and enlightened views which had prompted the efforts of the great navigators of this and a preceding age appear to have had any share in the enterprises of the earl of Cumberland. Even the thirst of martial glory seems in him to have been subordinate to the love of gain, and that appetite for rapine to which his loose and extravagant habits had given the force of a passion.

He had formed, early in life, an attachment to the beautiful daughter of that worthy character and rare exemplar of old English hospitality, sir William Holles, ancestor to the earls of Clare of that surname; but her father, from a singular pride of independence, refused to listen to his proposals, saying "that he would not have to stand cap in hand to his son-in-law; his daughter should marry a good gentleman with whom he might have society and friendship." Disappointed thus of the object of his affections, he matched himself with a daughter of the earl of Bedford; a woman of merit, as it appears, but whom their mutual indifference precluded from exerting over him any salutary influence. As a husband, he proved both unfaithful and cruel; and separating himself after a few years from his countess, on pretence of incompatibility of tempers, he suffered her to pine not only in desertion, but in poverty. We shall hereafter have occasion to view this celebrated earl in the idly-solemn personage of queen's champion; meantime, he must be dismissed with no more of applause than may be challenged by a character signally deficient in the guiding and restraining virtues, and endowed with such a share only of the more active ones as served to render it conspicuous and glittering rather than truly and permanently illustrious.

Henry earl of Northumberland likewise joined the fleet, on-board a vessel hired by himself. Immediately after the fatal catastrophe of his father in 1585, this young nobleman, anxious apparently to efface the stigma of popery and disaffection stamped by the rash attempts of his uncle and father on the gallant name of Percy, had seized the opportunity of embarking with Leicester for the wars of the Low Countries. He now sought distinction on another element, and in a cause still nearer to the hearts of Englishmen. The conversion to protestantism and loyalty of the head of such a house could not but be regarded by Elizabeth with feelings of peculiar complacency, and in 1593 she was pleased to confer upon the earl the insignia of the garter. He was present in 1601 at the siege of Ostend, where he considered himself as so much aggrieved by the conduct of sir Francis Vere, that on the return of this officer to England he sent him a challenge. During the decline of the queen's health, Northumberland was distinguished by the warmth with which he embraced the interests of the king of Scots, and he was the first privy-councillor named by James on his accession to the English throne. But the fate of his family seemed still to pursue him: on some unsupported charges connected with the gunpowder plot, he was stripped of all his offices, heavily fined, and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment: the tardy mercy of the king procured however his release at the end of fifteen years, and he spent the remnant of his life in tranquil and honorable retirement. This unfortunate nobleman was a man of parts: the abundant leisure for intellectual pursuits afforded by his long captivity was chiefly employed by him in the study of the mathematics, including perhaps the occult sciences; and as he was permitted to enjoy freely the conversation of such men of learning as he wished to assemble around him, he became one of their most bountiful patrons.

Thomas Cecil, eldest son of the lord-treasurer, formerly a volunteer in the expedition to Scotland undertaken in favor of the regent Murray, and more recently appointed governor of the Brill in consideration of his services in the war in Flanders, also embarked to repel the invaders; as did Robert his half-brother, the afterwards celebrated secretary of state created earl of Salisbury by James I.

Robert Cecil was deformed in his person, of a feeble and sickly constitution, and entirely devoted to the study of politics; and nothing, it is to be presumed, but his steady determination of omitting no means of attracting to himself that royal favor which he contemplated as the instrument by which to work out his future fortunes, could have engaged him in a service so repugnant to his habits and pursuits, and for which the hand of nature herself had so evidently disabled him.

The earl of Oxford, in expiation perhaps of some of those violences of temper and irregularities of conduct by which he was perpetually offending the queen and obstructing his own advancement in the state, equipped on this occasion a vessel which he commanded.

Sir Charles Blount, notwithstanding the narrowness of his present fortunes, judged it incumbent on him to give a similar proof of attachment to his queen and country; and the circumstance affords an occasion of introducing to the notice of the reader one of the brightest ornaments of the court of Elizabeth.

This distinguished gentleman, now in the twenty-fifth year of his age, was the second son of James sixth lord Montjoy of the ancient Norman name of Le Blonde, corruptly written Blount. The family history might serve as a commentary on the reigning follies of the English court during two or three generations. His grandfather, a splendid courtier, consumed his resources on the ostentatious equipage with which he attended to the French wars his master Henry VIII. with whom he had the misfortune to be a favorite. His father squandered a diminished patrimony still more absurdly in his search after the philosopher's stone; and the ruin of the family was so consummated by the ill-timed prodigalities of his elder brother, that when his death without children in 1594 transmitted the title of lord Montjoy to sir Charles, a thousand marks was the whole amount of the inheritance by which this honor was to be maintained. It is needless to add that the younger brother's portion with which he set out in life was next to nothing. Having thus his own way to make, he immediately after completing his education at Oxford entered himself of the Inner Temple, as meaning to pursue the profession of the law: but fortune had ordained his destiny otherwise; and being led by his curiosity to visit the court, he there found "a pretty strange kind of admission," which cannot be related with more vivacity than in the original words of Naunton. "He was then much about twenty years of age, of a brown hair, a sweet face, a most neat composure, and tall in his person. The queen was then at Whitehall, and at dinner, whither he came to see the fashion of the court. The queen had soon found him out, and with a kind of an affected frown asked the lady carver who he was? She answered, she knew him not; insomuch that enquiry was made from one to another who he might be, till at length it was told the queen that he was brother to the lord William Mountjoy. This inquisition, with the eye of majesty fixed upon him, (as she was wont to do to daunt men she knew not,) stirred the blood of this young gentleman, insomuch as his colour went and came; which the queen observing called him unto her, and gave him her hand to kiss, encouraging him with gracious words and new looks; and so diverting her speech to the lords and ladies, she said, that she no sooner observed him but that she knew there was in him some noble blood, with some other expressions of pity towards his house. And then again, demanding his name, she said, 'Fail you not to come to the court, and I will bethink myself how to do you good.' And this was his inlet, and the beginning of his grace." It does not appear what boon the queen immediately bestowed upon her new courtier; but he deserted the profession of the law, sat in the parliaments of 1585 and 1586 as the representative of two different Cornish boroughs, received in the latter year the honor of knighthood, and soon after his present expedition appeared considerable enough at court to provoke the hostility of the earl of Essex himself. Raleigh, now high in favor, and invested with the offices of captain of the queen's guard and her lieutenant for Cornwall, had been actively engaged since the last year in training to arms the militia of that county. He had also been employed, as a member of the council of war, in concerting the general plan of national defence: but his ardent and adventurous valor prompted him to aid his country in her hour of trial on both elements, and with hand as well as head: throwing himself therefore into a vessel of his own which waited his orders, he hastened to share in the discomfiture of her insulting foe.

But it would be endless to enumerate all who spontaneously came forward to partake the perils and the glory of this ever-memorable contest; and the naval commanders of principal eminence have higher claims to our notice.

The dignity of lord-high-admiral,--customarily conferred on mere men of rank, in whom not the slightest tincture of professional knowledge was required or expected,--at this critical juncture belonged to Charles second lord Howard of Effingham, of whom we have formerly spoken, and who appears never in the whole course of his life to have been at sea but once before, and that only on an occasion of ceremony. He was every way an untried man, and as yet distinguished for nothing except the accomplishments of a courtier: but he exhibited on trial courage, resolution, and conduct; an affability of manner which endeared him to the sailors; and a prudent sense of his own inexperience, which rendered him perfectly docile to the counsels of those excellent sea-officers by whom he had the good fortune to find himself surrounded. He encouraged his crew, and manifested his alacrity in the service, by putting his own hand to the rope which was to tow his ship out of harbour; and he afterwards gave proof of his good sense and his patriotism, by his opposition to the orders which her majesty's excess of oeconomy led her to issue on the first dispersion of the armada by a storm, for laying up four of her largest ships; earnestly requesting that he might be permitted to retain them at his own expense rather than the safety of the country should be risked by their dismissal. John Hawkins, one of the ablest and most experienced seamen of the age, was chiefly relied upon for the conduct of the main fleet, in which he acted as vice-admiral. For his good service he was knighted by the lord-admiral on board his own ship immediately after the action, when the like honor was bestowed on that eminent navigator Frobisher, who led into action the Triumph, one of the three first-rates which were then all that the English navy could boast.

To the hero Drake, as rear-admiral, a separate squadron was intrusted; and it was by this division that the principal execution was done upon the discomfited armada as it fled in confusion before the valor of the English and the fury of their tempestuous seas. An enormous galleon surrendered without firing a shot to the much smaller vessel of Drake, purely from the terror of his name.

Whilst the lord-admiral, with the principal fleet stationed off Plymouth, prepared to engage the armada in its passage up the Channel, sir Henry Seymour, youngest son of the protector, was stationed with a smaller force, partly English partly Flemish, off Dunkirk, for the purpose of intercepting the duke of Parma, who was lying with his veteran forces on the coast, ready to embark and co-operate in the conquest of England.

In the midst of these naval preparations, which happily sufficed in the event to frustrate entirely the designs of the enemy, equal activity was exerted to place the land-forces in a condition to dispute the soil against the finest troops and most consummate general of Europe.

An army of reserve consisting of about thirty-six thousand men was drawn together for the defence of the queen's person, and appointed to march towards any quarter in which the most pressing danger should manifest itself. A smaller, but probably better appointed, force of twenty-three thousand was stationed in a camp near Tilbury to protect the capital, against which it was not doubted that the most formidable efforts of the enemy on making good his landing would be immediately directed.

Owing to the long peace which the country had enjoyed, England possessed at this juncture no general of reputation, though, doubtless, a sufficiency of men of resolution and capacity whom a short experience of actual service would have matured into able officers. Under circumstances which afforded to the government so small a choice of men, the respective appointments of Arthur lord Grey,--distinguished by the vigor which he had exerted in suppressing the last Irish rebellion,--to the post of president of the council of war; of lord Hunsdon,--a brave soldier long practised in the desultory warfare of the northern border, as well as in several regular campaigns against Scotland,--to the command of the army of reserve; and of the earl of Essex,--a gallant youth who had fleshed his maiden sword and gained his spurs in the affair of Zutphen,--to the post of general of the horse in the main army;--seem to have merited the sanction of public approbation. But the most strenuous defender of the measures of her majesty must have been staggered by her nomination of Leicester,--the hated, the disgraced, the incapable Leicester,--to the station of highest honor, danger, and importance;--that of commander in chief of the army at Tilbury. Military experience, indeed, the favorite possessed in a higher degree than most of those to whom the defence of the country was now of necessity intrusted, but of skill and conduct he had proved himself destitute; even his personal courage was doubtful; and his recent failures in Holland must have inspired distrust in the bosom of every individual, whether officer or private, appointed to serve under him. Something must be allowed for the embarrassments of the time; the deficiency of military talent; the high rank of Leicester in the service, which forbade his employment in any inferior capacity: but, with all these palliations, the nomination of such an antagonist to confront the duke of Parma must eternally be regarded as the weakest act into which the prudence of Elizabeth was ever betrayed by a blind and unaccountable partiality.

All these preparations for defence being finally arranged, her majesty resolved to visit in person the camp at Tilbury, for the purpose of encouraging her troops.

It had been a part of the commendation of Elizabeth, that in her public appearances, of whatsoever nature, no sovereign on record had _acted_ the part so well, or with such universal applause. But on this memorable and momentous occasion, when,--like a second Boadicea, armed for defence against the invader of her country,--she appeared at once the warrior and the queen, the sacred feelings of the moment, superior to all the artifices of regal dignity and the tricks of regal condescension, inspired her with that impressive earnestness of look, of words, of gesture, which alone is truly dignified and truly eloquent.

Mounted on a noble charger, with a general's truncheon in her hand, a corselet of polished steel laced on over her magnificent apparel, and a page in attendance bearing her white-plumed helmet, she rode bare-headed from rank to rank with a courageous deportment and smiling countenance; and amid the affectionate plaudits and shouts of military ardor which burst from the animated and admiring soldiery, she addressed them in the following short and spirited harangue.

"My loving people; we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but, assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear: I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms: To which, rather than any dishonor should grow by me, I myself will take up arms; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

"I know already by your forwardness, that you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the meantime, my lieutenant-general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble and worthy subject; not doubting by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valor in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people."

The extraordinary reliance placed by the queen in this emergency upon the counsels of Leicester encouraged the insatiable favorite to grasp at honor and authority still more exorbitant; and he ventured to urge her majesty to invest him with the office of her lieutenant in England and Ireland; a dignity paramount to all other commands. She had the weakness to comply; and it is said that the patent was actually drawn out, when the defeat of the armada, by taking away all pretext for the creation of such an officer, gave her leisure to attend to the earnest representations of Hatton and Burleigh on the imprudence of conferring on any subject powers so excessive, and capable even in some instances of controlling her own prerogative. On better consideration the project therefore was dropped.

It is foreign from the business of this work to detail the particulars of that signal victory obtained by English seamanship and English valor against the boasted armament of Spain, prodigiously superior as it was in every circumstance of force excepting the moral energies employed to wield it. While the history of the year 1588 in all its details must ever form a favorite chapter in the splendid tale of England's naval glory, it will here suffice to mark the general results.

Not a single Spaniard set foot on English ground but as a prisoner; one English vessel only, and that of smaller size, became the prize of the invaders. The duke of Parma did not venture to embark a man. The king of Scots, standing firm to his alliance with his illustrious kinswoman, afforded not the slightest succour to the Spanish ships which the storms and the English drove in shattered plight upon his rugged coasts; while the lord-deputy of Ireland caused to be butchered without remorse the crews of all the vessels wrecked upon that island in their disastrous circumnavigation of Great Britain: so that not more than half of this vaunted _invincible armada_ returned in safety to the ports of Spain. Never in the records of history was the event of war on one side more entirely satisfactory, and glorious, on the other more deeply humiliating and utterly disgraceful. Philip did indeed support the credit of his personal character by the dignified composure with which he heard the tidings of this great disaster; but it was out of his power to throw the slightest veil over the dishonor of the Spanish arms, or repair the total and final failure of the great popish cause.

By the English nation, this signal discomfiture of its most dreaded and detested foe was hailed as the victory of protestant principles no less than of national independence; and the tidings of the national deliverance were welcomed, by all the reformed churches of Europe, with an ardor of joy and thankfulness proportioned to the intenseness of anxiety with which they had watched the event of a conflict where their own dearest interests were staked along with the existence of their best ally and firmest protector.

Repeated thanksgivings were observed in London in commemoration of this great event: on the anniversary of the queen's birth a general festival was proclaimed and celebrated with "sermons, singing of psalms, bonfires, &c." and on the following Sunday her majesty went in state to St. Paul's, magnificently attended by her nobles and great officers, and borne along on a sumptuous chariot formed like a throne, with four pillars supporting a canopy, and drawn by a pair of white horses. The streets through which she passed were hung with blue cloth, in honor doubtless of the navy, and the colors taken from the enemy were borne in triumph.

Her majesty rewarded the lord-admiral with a considerable pension, and settled annuities on the wounded seamen and on some of the more necessitous among the officers; the rest she honored with much personal notice and many gracious terms of commendation, which they were expected to receive in lieu of more substantial remuneration;--for parsimony, the darling virtue of Elizabeth, was not forgotten even in her gratitude to the brave defenders of her country.

Two medals were struck on this great occasion; one, representing a fleet retiring under full sail, with the motto, "_Venit, vidit, fugit_;" the other, fire-ships scattering a fleet; the motto, "_Dux faemina facti_;" a compliment to the queen, who is said to have herself suggested the employment of these engines of destruction, by which the armada suffered severely.

The intense interest in public events excited in every class by the threatened invasion of Spain, gave rise to the introduction in this country of one of the most important inventions of social life,--that of newspapers. Previously to this period all articles of intelligence had been circulated in manuscript; and all political remarks which the government had found itself interested in addressing to the people, had issued from the press in the shape of pamphlets, of which many had been composed during the administration of Burleigh, either by himself or immediately under his direction. But the peculiar convenience at such a juncture of uniting these two objects in a periodical publication becoming obvious to the ministry, there appeared, some time in the month of April 1588, the first number of _The English Mercury_; a paper resembling the present London Gazette, which must have come out almost daily; since No. 50, the earliest specimen of the work now extant, is dated July 23d of the same year. This interesting relic is preserved in the British Museum.

In the midst of the public rejoicings an event occurred, which, in whatever manner it might be felt by Elizabeth herself, certainly cast no damp on the spirits of the nation at large; the death of Leicester.

After the frequent notices of this celebrated favorite contained in the foregoing pages, a formal delineation of his character is unnecessary;--a few traits may however be added.

Speaking of his letters and public papers, Naunton says, "I never yet saw a style or phrase more seeming religious and fuller of the streams of devotion;" and notwithstanding the charge of hypocrisy on this head usually brought against Leicester in the most unqualified terms, many reasons might induce us to believe his religious faith sincere, and his attachment for certain schemes of doctrine, zealous. On no other supposition does it appear possible to account for that steady patronage of the puritanical party,--so odious to his mistress,--which gave on some occasions such important advantages over him to his adversary Hatton,--the only minister of Elizabeth who appears to have aimed at the character of a high church-of-England man. The circumstance also of his devoting during his lifetime a considerable sum of ready money, which he could ill spare, to the endowment of a hospital, has much the air of an act of expiation prompted by religious fears. As a statesman Leicester appears to have displayed on some occasions considerable acuteness and penetration, but in the higher kind of wisdom he was utterly deficient. His moral insensibility sometimes caused him to offer to his sovereign the most pernicious counsels; and had not the superior rectitude of Burleigh's judgement interposed, his influence might have inflicted still deeper wounds on the honor of the queen and the prosperity of the nation.

Towards his own friends and adherents he is said to have been a religious observer of his promises; a virtue very remarkable in such a man. In the midst of that profusion which rendered him rapacious, he was capable of acts of real generosity, and both soldiers and scholars tasted largely of his bounty. That he was guilty of many detestable acts of oppression, and pursued with secret and unrelenting vengeance such as offended his arrogance by any failure in the servile homage which he made it his glory to exact, are charges proved by undeniable facts; but it has already been observed that the more atrocious of the crimes popularly imputed to him, remain, and must ever remain, matters of suspicion rather than proof.

His conduct during the younger part of life was scandalously licentious: latterly he became, says Camden, uxorious to excess. In the early days of his favor with the queen, her profuse donations had gratified his cupidity and displayed the fondness of her attachment; but at a later period the stream of her bounty ran low; and following the natural bent of her disposition, or complying with the necessity of her affairs, she compelled him to mortgage to her his barony of Denbigh for the expenses of his last expedition to Holland. Immediately after his death she also caused his effects to be sold by auction, for the satisfaction of certain demands of her treasury. From these circumstances it may probably be inferred, that the influence which Leicester still retained over her was secured rather by the chain of habit than the tie of affection; and after the first shock of final separation from him whom she had so long loved and trusted, it is not improbable that she might contemplate the event with a feeling somewhat akin to that of deliverance from a yoke under which her haughty spirit had repined without the courage to resist.

Leicester died, beyond all doubt, of a fever; but so reluctant were the prejudices of that age to dismiss any eminent person by the ordinary roads of mortality, that it was judged necessary to take examinations before the privy-council respecting certain magical practices said to have been employed against his life. The son of sir James Croft comptroller of the household, made no scruple to confess that he had consulted an adept of the name of Smith, to learn who were his father's enemies in the council; that Smith mentioned the earl of Leicester; and that a little while after, flirting with his thumbs, he exclaimed, alluding to this nobleman's cognisance, "The bear is bound to the stake;" and again, that nothing could now save him. But as it might after all have been difficult to show in what manner the flirting of a thumb in London could have exerted a fatal power over the life of the earl at Kennelworth, the adept seems to have escaped unpunished, notwithstanding the accidental fulfilment of his denunciations.