Part 19

Within a short period, the French King, Henry II., was mortally injured in a tournament. The Dauphin succeeded, and his wife became Queen of France, as well as of Scotland. Then the situation was modified by the death of Francis and the accession of Charles IX. to the throne, and to power of the Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, and the middle party who came to be known by the title of the “Politiques.” With them the Guises were out of favour, and could no longer count on wielding the power of France to advance Mary’s interests; yet their popularity and strength in the country were still sufficient to keep the chance of their recovering their ascendency as a menace which Philip could not disregard. The change, in short, cut both ways: it was not quite so imperative for Philip that he should support Elizabeth, but then it was not so necessary for Elizabeth to have his support.

Thus throughout the first decade of the reign Cecil calculated with perfect accuracy that Philip would not attack Elizabeth, whatever she might do, because he could not risk the accession of Mary Stewart in her place; and that France would not make a direct attack, because that would compel the intervention of Philip. Hence he could go his own way safely in dealing both with domestic affairs and with the everlasting problem of Scotland. There was another matter, that of the Queen’s marriage, in which Cecil might judge and advise as he thought fit, but the Queen herself never had the slightest intention of following any but her own counsel, or of revealing even to her most trusted minister what that counsel might really be.

IV

DOMESTIC AND SCOTTISH POLICY

Now, as concerned domestic affairs, two matters were of first-rate importance. One was religion; the other finance.

It was evidently quite necessary that a definite religious settlement should be arrived at, and that it must be one in which there was a reasonable prospect of the majority of Englishmen concurring. There were fervent adherents of the Papacy as restored by Mary; these were not very numerous. There were fervent adherents of extreme Swiss doctrines, Calvinistic or Zwinglian; these were also few. There were many who, like Gardiner in early days, had no love for the Papacy, but clung to traditional doctrines and ritual; there were not quite so many who might be called perhaps moderately evangelical; there were a very great many more who troubled their heads very little one way or another, and were what we should describe as High or Low, pretty much according to their environment. The extreme reformers had very nearly but not quite succeeded in carrying the day during Northumberland’s ascendency; the extreme Catholics had just had their turn under Mary. The extremists on both sides were intolerant, and it was quite obvious that the triumph of either would drive many moderates into joining the other extreme, and would keep the country in a state of violent unrest, or, at the best, of sullen submission. The experiment of trying to maintain traditional doctrine and ritual with the minimum of modification, while repudiating the Roman authority, had been tried under Henry; and it was fairly clear that a simple return to Henry’s standards was impracticable. The course which Cecil laid down was to adopt a compromise in which the great majority could at any rate acquiesce; a compromise which, while insisting on conformity, allowed of a very considerable latitude of interpretation; which would still pass, in many quarters where it did not satisfy; which was in short politically adequate. Cecil himself would probably have had no quite insuperable objection either to attending Mass or to sitting at Communion; but a compromise which allowed of either course would also probably have found a less general acceptance than one which excluded both.

Hardly less important was the restoration of financial stability. Twelve years before, King Henry had left matters in sufficiently ill-plight. The Government could not, perhaps, be held responsible for the existence of severe agricultural depression; but, for its aggravation, the newly developed class of landlords was largely to blame, while no one but Somerset had attempted to hold them in check. In the general ferment, commercial honesty had been on the downgrade. Among financial officials, corruption had been rampant; and Henry set the example of one of the grossest forms of dishonesty by debasing the coinage, paying his debts, when he did pay them, in the debased coin. Hence in commercial circles credit was bad, while abroad the national credit was exceedingly low; and the national exchequer was almost empty. Through the last two reigns, matters had gone from bad to worse. Cecil took the finances in hand with solid systematic common sense. A rigid supervision of expenditure and stoppage of waste took the place of the prevailing laxity. Men of probity were employed by the Government as its financial agents. The debased coins were called in, and the new currency issued was of a standard which had never been surpassed. Loans were repaid with punctuality, and debts discharged. Almost at once, it followed that fresh loans could be raised at reasonable rates of interest, instead of at the ruinous charges which Edward and Mary had to pay; before long, it was hardly necessary to seek for them abroad--the merchants at home were ready and willing to come forward. Confidence was restored under a steady Government.

Cecil’s economy may have verged on parsimony, and his mistress was as sharp in money matters as her grandfather; hard things are always said of a Government which takes Peace and Retrenchment for its motto. But peace and retrenchment were a stern necessity, and in many respects the parsimony has been exaggerated; at any rate, the expenditure was thoroughly well directed. Later in the reign it would probably have been sound policy to spend more, particularly in Ireland, where efficiency was sacrificed to economy; but outside of Ireland the nation got good value for every penny of outlay. In finance, as in other matters, Cecil habitually followed the maxims of caution. Consistently with this attitude, we do not find him striking out new economic theories. He believed, as nearly every one believed three hundred years ago, that new industries had very little chance of being established without the artificial stimulus of monopolies and patents to prevent competition--a system which always appeals most convincingly to the monopolist, but less convincingly to the consumer and the would-be competitor, as Elizabeth found before the end of the reign. Whatever we may think of the methods adopted to foster and encourage trade and the development of new industries, Cecil is at least entitled to full credit for recognising that this was the direction in which the compensation and the remedy for agricultural depression were to be sought.

The subject of the secretary’s financial reforms has carried us on to a general account of principles which were only gradually illustrated in the progress of the reign. The third question which engaged his immediate activities on Elizabeth’s accession was the policy to be followed in dealing with Scotland.

Traditionally, Scotland was the friend of France and the enemy of England; from which it followed in a general way that Scottish malcontents habitually looked to England for open or secret countenance, and very commonly got it. To foster divisions in Scotland was one way of preventing her from becoming too actively dangerous a neighbour, and the plan had been very sedulously followed, especially throughout the reign of Henry VIII. The Scottish clerics since the days of Bruce had always been strongly anti-English, a term which was almost equivalent to Nationalist. Both James and David Beton had been especially hostile; while, during the progress of the Reformation, the Cardinal was a rigorous and cruel persecutor of heresy. Henry, with all his pride of orthodoxy, had no objection to heresy in the northern kingdom, where Protestant and mal-content were nearly synonymous. Had England devoted her attention simply to giving the Protestants such support as would have secured them a predominance conditional on the support being maintained, diplomacy might have achieved the union of the crowns by the marriage of King Edward to his cousin of Scotland; but Henry and Somerset between them, by the re-assertion of English sovereignty and by the appeal to arms, had roused in Protestants as well as Catholics the nationalist sentiment which would not endure subjection to England at any price. The child-queen had been carried off to France and betrothed to the Dauphin; and in the years that passed before the actual marriage the Catholics had held the mastery; Mary of Guise was regent, and her power was maintained by French support and French troops. Thus the Scots began to realise that there was a danger, when their own Queen should be Queen of France also, that Scotland might become an appendage of France. Scotland was no more willing to be subject to France than to be subject to England.

Thus it was again open to Cecil to adopt the policy, not of exercising a direct English domination, but of establishing a Protestant domination, which would in the nature of things be favourable to England and unfavourable to France--a policy which fitted in precisely with that of establishing a comprehensive Protestantism in England, to which he was committed on other counts. He could rely, as we have already noted, on the fact that Philip, however reluctant, would be compelled to check aggressive interference on the part of France, if carried beyond the limit at which England could cope with it unaided. This, therefore, was the keynote of his Scottish policy--to avoid the blunder of seeming to threaten Scotland’s independence, to maintain friendly relations with the Scottish Protestants, and to help them to a predominance which should yet depend for its security on the goodwill of England.

It was not till December 1560, that the death of Francis deprived Mary of the French crown. During these first two years of Elizabeth’s reign, Philip was kept in play partly by a pretence of negotiations for the Queen’s marriage to his kinsman the Austrian Archduke Charles; while the Scottish Protestants, or Lords of the Congregation, as their chiefs were called, were flattered by the idea of her marriage with James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who then stood next in succession to the Scottish throne--a scheme of which the real motive was the possibility of dethroning Mary in his favour. But the real business was to get the French out of Scotland. Cecil at last manœuvred his mistress into sending armed assistance to the Lords of the Congregation; the French garrison was cooped up in Leith; in May 1560, Sir William went to Scotland himself to negotiate; in June Mary of Guise died, and in the beginning of July the Treaty of Edinburgh secured the Protestant ascendency in Scotland, and removed the French garrison for ever. Although Queen Mary refused to ratify the instrument, consistently declining formally to withdraw her claim to the throne of England unless she were equally formally recognised as heir presumptive, Cecil’s great object was achieved, in spite of Elizabeth’s vacillations.

Thirteen months later, Mary, an eighteen-year-old widow, landed in Scotland. During the seven troublous years she passed in that country, Cecil’s policy remained the same--to support Scottish Protestantism, to prevent Mary from making a marriage that would be dangerous to England. It is hardly necessary to say that the methods were never qualified by any touch of magnanimity--that the interests of England solely were considered, those of Scotland disregarded. How much of what went on, on the part of England, was Cecil’s doing and how much Elizabeth’s, cannot well be decided. They may or may not have intended the Darnley marriage to take place. They did encourage Moray’s revolt on that occasion, and then repudiate responsibility for it. They knew something--how much is uncertain--about the Rizzio murder, before it took place. Generally, we can be tolerably confident that Cecil, unfettered, would have given Moray a more stable support throughout than it pleased his mistress to permit. It was Elizabeth’s standing rule to object vehemently to being considered as having committed herself to anything by any words or acts in which she might have indulged.

V

CECIL AND PROTESTANTISM

Cecil had been successful in turning the French out of Scotland. He held steadily, and the queen held unsteadily, to the conviction that Spain would not move against England for two reasons--one, that the triumph of the Scots queen would be too advantageous to France; the other, that the existing commercial war with the Low Countries, while bad enough for English trade, was threatening to ruin Flanders, and could hardly fail to do so if any further burden were added. France, on the other hand, was not likely to be actively dangerous independently, so long as neither Catholics nor Huguenots could lay the opposing party prostrate. Nevertheless, Cecil had to be constantly on guard against the risk of a Catholic combination. If Mary placed herself under the ægis of Philip, and the Guises and their following got his active support in France--if he played to the French Catholics the part which England was playing to the Scottish Protestants--he might reckon himself free of the fear of French advancement. The thing was not a probability, but it was a chance against which England had to be on the watch. Every time, however, that a crisis of this kind threatened, or that a Spanish ambassador hinted that his master would feel himself driven into active antagonism, the Secretary refused to be frightened; direct threats always stiffened his mistress; and his calculation turned out correct.

At the bottom of Cecil’s whole system of foreign policy was the theory that Philip as Lord of Burgundy could not, for commercial reasons, afford to quarrel with England, and as King of Spain was tied by the danger of strengthening France. Spain, then, was not to be feared, but France might be; this, however, would be conditional on the Huguenots being decisively crushed--a consummation not desired by Catherine and the _Politiques_; but this, in turn, required that the French Huguenots should have enough support from England to maintain their power of resistance, if not their domination. As time went on, and the Protestant Netherlands found themselves in open armed resistance to Philip, it was in just the same way necessary for England to keep them from being crushed. Cecil saw the necessity of thus abetting the Protestants in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands; and, being a genuine Protestant if not an over-ardent one, did not dislike it. Elizabeth saw the necessity also, but as in each case the Protestants were subjects acting in opposition to the Government, she did dislike it, and lost no opportunity of making the support she gave as ungracious, as niggardly, and as precarious as she dared, while she perpetually kept up a sort of pretence to herself as well as to others that she was not really helping those whom she called rebels. Yet without the help that was wrung from her, it is doubtful whether in France, in the Netherlands, or even in Scotland, the issue of the struggles during her reign would not have been materially different.

Now Cecil’s ideal was one of sober and opulent respectability; he was not troubled with any notion that the Pope was the Scarlet Woman; he held generally to the view that subjects ought to conform to the religion prescribed by Government. But where the views which he himself held were not prescribed but proscribed, decency compelled sympathy with the sufferers. Besides, the suppression of Protestantism outside of England would inevitably mean its suppression in England also, in course of time. He was thoroughly satisfied that Protestantism was best for England, and thus, although he had no abstract interest in what might be good for other countries, for England’s sake he was satisfied that Protestantism must not be suppressed elsewhere. This was the mark up to which he had to keep the Queen--who, for her part, was quite aware that the security of her throne depended on her sustaining the part laid down for her. But Cecil’s minimum was her maximum, whereas his maximum--with which she would have nothing to do--was the minimum that would have satisfied her other great minister, Walsingham.

Elizabeth, we may put it, felt that Protestantism was a political necessity for her personal government. She did not feel strongly that it would still be a necessity for England when she should be in her grave. Cecil did; while for Walsingham it was a necessity _per se_. Therefore, to Elizabeth the settlement of the succession was a political counter of which she did not choose to be deprived; while to her ministers the delay of it was a perpetual nightmare, because it meant a constant fear of the accession of Mary Stewart--a prospect even more threatening after she had left Scotland than while she was a reigning queen. Herein is to be found one of the reasons why Elizabeth was not anxious to get rid of a prisoner round whom--dangerous though Mary might be--she could weave intrigues and negotiations as well as her opponents; whereas Cecil and Walsingham would always have been pleased to find any decent excuse for eliminating the Scots Queen from the situation. In the same way, the ministers wanted their own Queen to make a suitable marriage, whereas she herself used matrimonial negotiations merely as tricks for circumventing crises, and probably never at any time really intended to wed any one among the numerous suitors, of whom the last did not finally disappear till she was in her fiftieth year. There is no practical doubt that at one time, early in the reign, Cecil was himself so much perturbed on the question of the succession as to have made a move in co-operation with Nicholas Bacon to get Katharine Grey--sister of Lady Jane, and now married to Lord Hertford--recognised officially as heir presumptive in accordance with the terms of the will of Henry VIII.; for which he very nearly got into serious trouble. Also, it was many years before the Secretary really felt thoroughly free from the fear, which Elizabeth enjoyed holding in suspense over his head, that she might some day throw policy to the winds and court ruin by marrying Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

VI

ELIZABETH’S SECOND PERIOD

The year 1568 and those immediately following had a very material effect on the general situation. In the first place, the Queen of Scots delivered herself into Elizabeth’s hands, having already forfeited some of her chances of foreign support by her marriage with Bothwell. In the second place, the disaffected provinces of the Netherlands were driven into open revolt. Broadly speaking, it may be said that from this time forward Philip always wished to crush Elizabeth, while he would not involve himself in war with England until he could reckon on crushing her decisively. There was always the possibility of an Anglo-French combination, involving Huguenot predominance in France; and in that event the fleets of the two Powers would command his only line of communication with the Netherlands. So that on the one hand Spaniards are found, throughout Mary’s captivity, engaged in plot after plot for her liberation and enthronement in England; while on the other, Philip is obliged to swallow one affront after another, and to vary threats of utter destruction with elaborate efforts to placate the Queen of England. Cecil--Lord Burghley, as he became in 1571--was no less anxious to avoid war, but was also determined to go as far as might be, short of war, in support of the insurgent provinces; while steadily accumulating the evidence of Spanish complicity in Marian plots, to be produced as an effective answer to any complaints that England was abetting treason in the Netherlands, or her seamen committing acts of war in the Spanish Main or the West Indian Islands.

The Protestantism of the Government stiffened inevitably with the development of Catholic plots centring on Mary, the atrocities perpetrated by Alva in the Netherlands, the cruelties practised by the Spanish Inquisition on English sailors who fell into its hands, and the blundering Papal Bull of deposition--which, in fact, embarrassed Philip a good deal more than it injured the Queen of England. This singularly impolitic act of the Roman Pontiff, emphasising the direct antagonism, not to say the irreconcilability, of loyalty to the Throne and loyalty to the Church, sufficed in itself to bring all Catholics under suspicion of being at heart traitors--in the technical sense; pledged by their faith to desire, if not actively to compass, the overthrow of the reigning queen. Preceded, as it was, by the insurrection of the northern Catholic Earls in Mary’s favour, and followed by the Ridolfi conspiracy, it is difficult to perceive how the Queen’s government could have done otherwise than assume that to be a Catholic was to be disaffected. Nor is it possible to imagine that, after the appalling St. Bartholomew massacres of 1572, anti-Catholic sentiment in the country was not intensified to a white heat.

The people of England had a further grievance against Spain, inasmuch as she had taken possession of the wealth of the New World, and meant to keep it for herself--whereas the English desired a share. Throughout the later sixties and the seventies, English adventurers were engaged in making good their claims, in spite of nominal peace and law, by force of arms, raiding Spanish settlements or compelling local authorities to allow them to trade in defiance of all injunctions from headquarters. Technically, at least, these proceedings amounted to piracy, and if the Spaniards had been content to treat their perpetrators as pirates, it would have been extremely difficult to protest. Having an almost incontrovertible case, the Spaniards elected to put themselves in the wrong by punishing their prisoners--when they caught them--not as pirates but as heretics, gratuitously introducing the religious factor. Even in 1568 English sailors, under such captains as John Hawkins, had learnt to feel that ship for ship they were very much more than a match for Spanish galleons. Thus the most adventurous and most irrepressible class in the community was athirst to measure its strength with the Spaniard, and found no difficulty in convincing itself that to do so was a religious duty. The spirit of rivalry, greed of wealth, and sheer love of adventure, formed a sufficiently strong combination of motives; zeal against the persecutors of true religion gave them a colour which satisfied any but the most fastidious consciences.