Part 20

Now, it will be easy to see from the foregoing paragraphs that already in 1568 enough had occurred to inflame popular feeling against Spain. There were the doings of the Spanish Inquisition in respect of English sailors. There was, amongst other grievances, the attack on John Hawkins at San Juan d’Ulloa. There was Alva’s tyranny in the Netherlands. In France, no one could tell whether Huguenots or Catholics were going to get the upper hand; but Philip was fully committed to the suppression of heresy within his own dominions, and outside them as well so far as it might lie in his power. During the next four years, every event of importance went to intensify the sentiment against Spain, to which, and not to France, the Ridolfi plot pointed as Mary’s ally. On the other hand, it was evident at once, when Elizabeth was able to detain in her own ports for her own use the treasure which was on its way up channel to help Alva, that for the time Philip was too heavily hampered to be able to turn his full strength against England; and as time went on it became increasingly clear that Spain could not, with the Netherlands revolt on her hands, contemplate an English war with equanimity. Even Saint Bartholomew did not divert the hostile sentiment in the direction of France, since still after the massacre it was difficult to say whether the French nation should be identified with the party of the perpetrators rather than with that of the victims.

At the lowest estimate, then, there was a mass of feeling in the country which could very easily have been fanned into a blaze of indignation, imperatively demanding open defiance of Spain, vigorous support of the Netherlands and of the Huguenots--in short, immediate war instead of the chance of war in the future. But the Queen and Burghley were determined to avoid war; and for nearly twenty years they succeeded. Burghley’s own primary conviction was that amity between Burgundy and England was of such enormous importance to both that considerations of policy would prevent Philip, as they had prevented his father, from being dragged into war by considerations of religious zeal. Protestantism--so much of it, at least, as was necessary--could be saved, probably without adopting heroic courses; and in any case, if a duel should ultimately prove inevitable, every year that it was deferred would tell in favour of England, which was daily growing in wealth, in stability, and in efficiency; and against Spain, which was constantly subjected to the exhausting strain of war in the Low Countries and war with the Turk.

Ultimate friendship with Spain, on the basis of immunity for unaggressive Protestantism, mutual toleration, and unfettered trade, was broadly the ideal for which Burghley worked; to achieve it, he was ready to bring to bear any amount of pressure which would not actually precipitate war. But it was part of the policy always to make sure that there was, at any rate, technical justification for everything done by the English Government. This technical correctness is particularly characteristic of the man. While Elizabeth herself and nearly every man in her court, were all shareholders, or in some degree interested, in the privateering expeditions of Drake and other captains, Burghley held himself rigidly aloof from them, and never made a penny of personal profit in that way. He had no moral qualms about seizing the Genoese treasure in 1568--that was merely an arrangement by which the bankers lent to England money which they had intended to lend to Spain; if it inconvenienced Spain, Spain should not have seized the English ships in her harbours. But when Drake came home after sailing round the world, with vast quantities of captured treasure in the _Golden Hind_, Burghley stigmatised the whole proceedings as piratical, declined any share of the spoil, and would have had it restored to Spain.

In this connection, the Lord Treasurer’s[E] aversion to these raiding expeditions was so strong that when Drake’s great voyage was in contemplation the utmost pains were taken to keep the matter out of his knowledge. But there were very few things that Burghley did not succeed in being aware of; and one of the gentleman-adventurers who sailed in that expedition, Thomas Doughty, was in personal communication with him before it started. This man was executed by Drake at Port St. Julian, in Patagonia--one of the grounds on which he was held guilty of treason towards the “General,” Drake, being that he had admittedly revealed as much as he knew to Burghley. The fact that inquiry into that execution was carefully shirked, while the recorded evidence is somewhat contradictory and inconclusive, has led to the formation of various surmises to the disfavour of Drake, of Burghley, of Doughty, or of the witnesses, according to the point of view of the critic. The most natural interpretation would seem to be that in the first place Drake and the sailors in general suspected gentleman-adventurers at large of being an objectionably insubordinate and troublesome element; and the General may very possibly have been injudicially ready to condemn one of them on insufficient evidence--evidence which satisfied him but did not amount to legal proof--and fancied that collusion with the antagonistic Lord Treasurer implied certainly ill-will and probably treachery to the commander. Applying those current rules of evidence which repeatedly sufficed to condemn men for treason at home, the case for executing Doughty was quite strong enough to act on, though exceedingly awkward to make public. It would show, of course, that the sailor was very suspicious of the designs of the statesman from whom the Queen wanted to have the thing concealed; it also suggests that Elizabeth liked to do behind the minister’s back, if she could manage it, the things which she knew he would disapprove. But it does not involve anything outrageous on Drake’s part, or any real discredit to the Lord Treasurer.

[E] Burghley was made Lord High Treasurer in 1572.

In fact, for a dozen years after Saint Bartholomew, while Burghley and the Queen had the same main object in view, though others of the Council were urgent in favour of her presenting herself openly as the champion of Protestantism, Burghley’s difficulties were mainly of Elizabeth’s creating. To all appearance, she was in a state of ceaseless vacillation--now on the verge of a shameful betrayal of Orange, now on the brink of a French marriage, now on the point of announcing her readiness to head a League of Protestants, now of allowing them to take their chance with the preposterous Alençon as their figure-head, while she stood aside, and anon dangling her matrimonial bait before that luckless and incapable prince as a preferable alternative. Burghley, Walsingham, all her advisers, were repeatedly driven almost to despair by her vagaries; none knew what her next twist would be--yet every twist that seemed to produce a fresh entanglement was followed by another which evaded it; and always as an open breach with Spain or a flagrant rupture with France seemed really a thing immediately inevitable, some happy accident appeared to save the situation once more.

VII

THE WAR WITH SPAIN

It would seem, however, that the discovery of the Throgmorton conspiracy led Burghley in the beginning of 1584 to the conclusion that a bolder support should be given to the Netherlands, more especially as the Alençon farce was finished. In 1585, Elizabeth committed herself to the Hollanders, Drake went off on the Cartagena raid, and in 1586 Leicester was in the Low Countries in command of the English troops. Then came the Babington plot, the execution of the Queen of Scots after the New Year, the certainty of Philip’s preparations for the Armada, and the “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard” by Drake, which deferred the great invasion for a twelvemonth; finally the week-long battle with the Armada itself, ending in its destruction off Gravelines, and subsequent annihilation by the tempests. To the very last Elizabeth went on playing at negotiations with Parma, on lines involving the basest treachery to the Hollanders; to the entire satisfaction of Sir James Crofts whom she employed in the business, and who is known to have been in Philip’s pay. This, however, was merely one of her regular pieces of diplomatic play-acting; while Burghley kept his own counsel. The war-party lived on thorns; they did not know what to make of the trickery, whether it was genuine or a sham. Howard of Effingham, in fiery wrath, wrote--quoting an old byword--of the “long grey beard with a white head witless that to all the world would prove England heart-less,” _i.e._, cowardly. Still, though it would have been natural enough for them to suspect that the peace-loving Burghley was abetting the Queen, the probabilities are that Effingham was referring not to him but to Crofts. Retreat without dishonour was impossible; he certainly would not have advocated it seriously; and the elaborate farce which Elizabeth deliberately played was merely a piece of that eternally baffling and exasperating diplomacy of which she might be called the inventor and patentee--methods which Burghley always condemned, though probably his long experience of them had by this time taught him to see through them. From 1584 he recognised that events had forced his own peace-loving policy out of court, and that it could not be revived till the issue between England and Spain had been fought out. The completeness of England’s triumph when the combatants did crash together in mortal fray went far, at any rate, to justify the theory on which he had systematically acted that, if the fight must come, the longer it could be staved off the more decisively it would favour his own country.

The wild outburst of enthusiasm following on the defeat of the Armada very nearly delivered the future of England into the hands of the Protestant war-party, whose desire was to break the power of Spain to pieces; and through the winter Drake and Norreys were preparing for the Lisbon expedition which, as they planned it, would have been another very crushing blow to Philip. But the great victory had brought Burghley’s ideal back into the sphere of practical politics. That is, if English and Spaniards could be brought to see reason, or to act as if they saw reason, an _entente_ might now be established securing religious toleration and the recognition of the old Constitution in the Netherlands, the old Burgundian alliance with its corollary of commercial privileges and legitimate trading with Spanish settlements all over the world, and the immunity of English sailors from the Inquisition. With Spain as an allied Power, whatever might come of the party strife in France, England would have nothing to fear. The aggressive sentiment in England was, indeed, too strong to be repressed; but though the present continuation of the war was inevitable, it might be so manipulated as to bring it home to the obstinate mind of Philip that peace on Burghley’s terms would be a very good bargain for him, without making a total wreck of the power of Spain.

Elizabeth, as usual, was at one with Burghley on the point, and with Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, who was now drawing to the front and making it possible for his father to transfer to him much of the burden of active work for which he was becoming unfitted by age. The main method by which the policy was given effect was by placing the conduct of the war as far as possible in the hands of that section of the war-party, headed by John Hawkins among the seamen and by Essex at Court, which thought more of booty than of Empire--which did not realise, with Drake and Raleigh, that the despoiling of treasure-fleets and the sacking of ports would accomplish very much less than the annihilation of fighting fleets and the establishment in the New World of rival English settlements. Thus, by the time Drake started for Lisbon, he found his hands so tied by restrictions as to what he was to do and what he was not to do that the expedition failed of its purpose. Drake was discredited in consequence, and for some years the war became a mere series of raids; conducted in force, indeed, and openly avowed and authorised by the Queen, but not in essence differing from the semi-piratical performances of the Drakes and Hawkinses when Spain and England were nominally at peace. Hence, in 1598, when Burghley and Philip both died within a few weeks of each other, Spain had been invariably defeated in every successive attempt to strike a blow at her rival; she had suffered a serious disaster at Cadiz; her treasure-ships had been repeatedly raided; her enemy, Henry of Navarre, had carried the day in France: but her hold on the New World remained, she was still an effective Power in Europe, and the fear of her was not yet dead, though England still held, and more than held, the priority she had won ten years before.

VIII

AN APPRECIATION

In foreign policy we have seen that, at any rate in the broader aspects of it, Burghley and Elizabeth were at one--that is, the Queen never departed so far from the path he laid down but that she could regain her footing thereon the moment a crisis arrived. That policy may be summed up as aiming at one issue--friendship with Spain on an equality--while preparing for the alternative, a fight for the mastery. The policy failed to achieve the preferable issue, but in its secondary aspect was completely successful. Burghley’s own methods were not of the heroic type; there was no glamour of chivalry and knight-errantry about them; they were untouched by magnanimity, generosity, moral enthusiasm; they were ruled by a devotion to law and order, to propriety, to sober respectability; they were entirely practical, unsympathetic; but they were essentially marked at least with the intention of strict justice and reasonableness.

The same characteristics present themselves in his domestic policy. In the religious settlement and in finance the course taken throughout the reign is along the broad lines laid down by him; the Queen permits herself to indulge in personal outbreaks, and sets the general scheme at naught in individual instances, but, if she flies off at a tangent, still manages to return before it is too late, before any general deflection has been brought about. And again the desire of essential practical justice is the predominating feature. Zeal for particular religious views, however sincere, must not be permitted to disturb public order; the decencies must be observed, but the decencies would allow of as much latitude as reasonable men could desire. If zeal went the length of harbouring and fostering persons whose doctrines might be interpreted as impugning the right of the Queen to sit on the throne of England, justice required that such zeal should be penalised; if, further, zeal propagated such doctrines actively, zeal became treason. So, when Parsons and Campion came over with their propaganda, the Catholic persecution which followed had Burghley’s entire approval; nonconformity, aggressive and abusive, he was quite ready to punish with severity, but when Archbishop Whitgift and his Court of High Commission set about hunting for nonconformity, Burghley was for restraining them though the Queen sympathised not with him but with them. A more sensitive and sympathetic imagination would often have been alive to the existence of real injustice where the Lord Treasurer failed to perceive it; but where he did perceive it he always endeavoured to moderate it, even though he might not set his face stubbornly against it. His gorge rose at the stories of atrocities perpetrated in Ireland which almost every one else seems to have taken as a matter of course. If the use of the rack met with his approval it was only in cases where he honestly believed that the ends of justice were thereby furthered; and though the practice had not been common in England, its prevalence elsewhere was so general that its increased employment involved no shock to the moral sense of contemporaries.

Burghley’s principles of political action, then, were quite remote from those of Machiavelli and Thomas Cromwell, according to which the slightest claim of political expediency outweighed the entire moral code, and ethical considerations were reduced at the best to a sentiment which under certain circumstances it might be expedient to humour. His principles were equally remote from those of Somerset, which ignored the fact that no ends, however noble, can be achieved by disregarding hard facts. He insisted on upholding a moral standard in policy, and maintained a moral standard in his personal political relations. Admitting the principle _salus populi suprema lex_, he allowed that supreme necessity might over-ride the moral law, but there were few of his contemporaries who were not very much readier than he to recognise such an exigency on slight provocation. On the other hand, while his personal standard was so high that even his bitterest foes among the Spanish ambassadors acknowledged it with abusive candour, his normal political standard was that of his times. We may, perhaps, express it by saying that he had an almost abnormally strong sense of political proprieties but a complete absence of moral fervour.

Intellectually, he lacked imagination, while no statesman was ever endowed with a more imperturbably shrewd common sense, which served as perpetual ballast to counteract the flightiness of his mistress. He worked as assiduously as Philip of Spain himself, but, unlike Philip, he knew when to trust other men, never misplacing his confidence--whereas Philip never trusted any other man an inch further than he could help. Burghley’s extreme caution was due, not to lack of courage or of self-confidence, but to a thorough distrust of all emotional impulses. He weighed, deliberated, decided on the merits of each case as it arose, with careful and safe judgment; but had none of those flashes of intuitive perception which have characterised the most triumphant types of political genius. He ruled, not by magnetism, but by tact. Among statesmen he was of the order of Walpole and Peel, not of Oliver Cromwell and Chatham. He was lacking in creative imagination; but he was, perhaps, the most thoroughly level-headed minister who has ever guided the destinies of England. He cannot be elevated into an object of hero-worship. But he was precisely the type of man of whom his country had most need at the helm in the second half of the sixteenth century; and he served her as perhaps no other man could have done, with unswerving patriotism, sturdy resolution, and infinite devotion to duty.

SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM

I

WALSINGHAM’S CHARACTER

Of the many Englishmen, who, by loyal service to the nation in the reign of the Virgin Queen, deserved well of the State, there is perhaps not one whose claim stands higher than that of Walsingham. For twenty years, or near it, Elizabeth trusted him more completely than any of her council, except Burghley, relied on his ability and his fidelity to carry out every task of exceptional difficulty, profited by his devotion, his penetration, and his resourcefulness, rejected his advice on the cardinal question of policy till she was compelled by circumstances in some measure to adopt it, suffered him to ruin his fortunes in her service, and finally permitted him to die the poorest of all her Ministers. It was said, in the study of Burghley, that she was loyal to him; she was so, in the sense that nothing would induce her to part from him. Unlike many other princes, when she found a good servant, she never let him go from personal pique, or on account of differences; her loyalty was the loyalty of a very acute woman, but one wholly devoid of generosity. His loyalty she left to be its own reward.

Walsingham won his position by sheer force of ability and character; qualities in him which were probably discovered by the penetration of William Cecil, with whom he was always on the most cordial terms, although himself the advocate of a much bolder policy than was favoured by the cautious Lord Treasurer. None could say of Walsingham, as his enemies have said of Cecil, that he was in any degree a time-server; he was not only as incorruptible, but it could never be hinted that in affairs of State his line of action was deflected by a hair’s-breadth by any considerations of personal advantage or advancement. He indulged in none of those arts of courtiership which not only a Leicester, a Hatton, or an Essex, but even a Raleigh, took no shame in employing to extravagance. Not Knollys nor Hunsdon, her own outspoken kinsmen, could be more blunt and outspoken to their royal mistress than he. It would be difficult to find in the long roll of English statesmen one more resolutely disinterested, or one whose services, being admittedly so great, were rewarded so meagrely.

There are diversities of conscientiousness. Henry VIII. referred most questions to his conscience, after he had made up his mind about the answer; and his conscience always endorsed his judgment. Cromwell ignored conscience altogether; with More, it overruled every other consideration. Burghley’s was tolerably active, but perhaps somewhat obtuse. Walsingham, if we read him aright, was as rigidly conscientious as More himself; but his moral standard requires to be understood before it can be appreciated. It was derived, not from the New Testament, but from the Old. It assumed that the Protestants were in the position of the ancient Hebrews; that they were the Chosen People, and their enemies, the enemies of the Lord of Sabaoth. It justified the spoiling of the Egyptians. It was sufficiently tempered to disapprove the extermination of the Canaanite, but it hardly condemned Ehud and Jael. Broadly speaking it applied different moral codes in dealing with the foes of the Faith and in other relations. Identifying the foes of the Faith with the enemies of the State, it authorised the use, in self-defence, of every weapon and every artifice employed on the other side. It was not with him as with those to whom the law serves for conscience; who will do with a light heart anything that the law permits, and shrink in horror from anything that it condemns. Nor did he act on the principle that the right must give way to the expedient. With him, conscience positively approved in one group of relations the adoption of practices which in other relations it would have sternly denounced. That type of conscience is absolutely genuine and sincere; but it permits actions which are, to say the least, censurable from a more enlightened point of view.

II

WALSINGHAM’S RISE

The records of Walsingham’s early years are somewhat scanty. An uncle was Lieutenant of the Tower during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.; of whom it is reported that when Anne Askew was on the rack, he refused to strain the torture to the point desired by Wriothesly. His father was a considerable landed proprietor at Chiselhurst, and filled sundry minor legal offices. He died in 1533, leaving several daughters and one son, Francis, an infant, born not earlier than 1530, and so ten years younger than William Cecil. Young Walsingham was up at King’s College, Cambridge, from 1548 to 1550, and entered Gray’s Inn in 1552.