Chapter IX: Part 9

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.

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.

_From an Engraving by_ G. VERTUE, _after the picture by Holbein, in the British Museum_]

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.

Being of the advanced Reformation party, young Walsingham quitted the country on Mary’s accession, remained abroad during the five years of her rule, and returned when Elizabeth succeeded, to take his place in the House of Commons. His sojourn abroad emphasised his Protestantism; he utilised it also to acquire a very extensive knowledge of foreign affairs, though he omitted to make himself a master of the Spanish tongue. He does not appear to have taken prominent part in the affairs of Parliament when he came back to England; but he attracted Cecil’s notice, and was employed by the Secretary in procuring secret intelligence, of which the earliest definite record is a report of August 1568, giving a “descriptive list of suspicious persons arriving in Italy during the space of three months,” obtained from “Franchiotto the Italian.” On November 20 of the same year, he writes to Cecil to say that, if the evidence of Mary’s complicity in Darnley’s murder is insufficient, “my friend is able to discover certain that should have been employed in the said murder, who are here to be produced.” Incidentally, it may be remarked that this, of course, means no more than that Walsingham knew where to lay his hand on some one who professed to have information; which Mr. Froude renders by a phrase implying that he actually had information, known to be valuable, ready to be brought forward. What it really shows is, that Walsingham was engaged in looking out for anything which offered a chance of being turned to account.

In the autumn of the following year, just before the rising of the northern earls, when it was practically certain that some kind of Catholic plot was afoot and that the Spanish ambassador, Don Guerau de Espes was mixed up in it, circumstances brought the Florentine banker Ridolfi under suspicion. The position to which Walsingham was now attaining is shown by the Italian being assigned to his surveillance--with the result that Ridolfi’s house and papers were thoroughly searched without his knowledge, but also without the discovery of anything incriminating. Whether honestly or with the object of deceiving him, Ridolfi was thereupon treated as if no vestige of suspicion attached to him. In the modern phrase, it was an integral part of Walsingham’s system in dealing with persons on whom he expected to pounce when his own time came, to give them every inch of rope he could afford: but a year later Walsingham wrote about the man to Cecil in terms which imply that the belief in his honesty was genuine. When the whole of the Ridolfi plot was revealed in 1571, Walsingham was in France. The secret service was Cecil’s creation, not Walsingham’s, though doubtless the latter had a considerable share in organising it, and a little later became mainly responsible for controlling it. Valuable as he was already rendering himself, he only emerges definitely into the front rank on his appointment as a special envoy to the French Court in August 1570; followed immediately thereafter by his selection for the post of Ambassador Resident.

The situation at this time was exceedingly critical. At home, the northern insurrection had just been suppressed, Norfolk and others of the peers were very much subjects of suspicion, and the Papal Bull of deposition had increased the sense of nervousness. The Spanish representative in England was the hot-headed and intriguing Don Guerau de Espes; in the Netherlands, Alva had made the world in general believe--though he knew better himself--that the revolt was crushed. In France the Huguenots, despite defeat in the field, had just shown themselves strong enough to obtain, through the balancing party of the Politiques, terms which placed them fairly on a level with the Guise faction; but a marriage was being planned between Henry of Anjou, the king’s next brother and heir presumptive, and the imprisoned Queen of Scots. In Scotland itself, the assassination of Moray had revived the confusion which the sombre regent had been struggling to allay. Thus, there was danger to Elizabeth’s throne from her own Catholic subjects; danger from France, since Anjou was regarded as of the Guise party; and danger, imagined at least, from Spain, where that surprising charlatan, Stukely, had almost, if not quite, persuaded Philip that at his call--with some armed assistance--all Ireland would rise, fling off the English yoke, and offer itself to Spain. As a matter of fact, Philip was much too heavily hampered to take openly aggressive action against England at the time--but that was known to very few people besides himself and Alva.

These difficulties of Philip’s were the first redeeming feature in the situation. The second was that on which Cecil always relied, that the national interests of France and Spain were too antagonistic to permit of any cordial alliance between them. Mary Stewart on the English throne as Philip’s _protégée_ would not suit France; as Anjou’s wife she would not suit Philip. France might at any time see her own interest in fostering the revolt in the Netherlands and intriguing for their Protectorate. The third point was that in France itself, the Politiques were at one with the Huguenots in wishing to avoid the union of Anjou with Mary, which would be a great victory for the Guises; so that the balance of forces in France would turn definitely in favour of England if she could offer anything in the way of a make-weight.

Such were the conditions under which Walsingham was sent to France as a special envoy in August 1570--to congratulate the French Government on the pacification just concluded; to urge the necessity of maintaining it loyally; and to dissuade the Court from espousing the cause of the Scots Queen. Within a month, he received official intimation that the resident Ambassador, Sir Henry Norris, was about to be recalled, and he was himself to succeed to the post; which arrangement took effect in January.

III

AMBASSADOR AT PARIS

In the interval, an ingenious solution of several problems had suggested itself to the Huguenot leaders, and found favour with the Queen-Mother. This was that Anjou should drop the idea of marrying Mary and should instead marry Elizabeth herself. He was her junior by seventeen years, but that was a small matter. If he wedded the Protestant Queen, he would be definitely detached from the Guises, toleration for both religions would be assured both in England and France, and the two countries could join in the liberation of the Netherlands. The problem would be to arrange the marriage on terms which would give the parties who were favourably disposed to it security for the carrying out of those parts of the programme which were from their several points of view essential.

_Prima facie_ the plan was acceptable to the Huguenots, to the Politiques, to the English Council, and to Walsingham himself. To the Guises, it was very much the reverse, and they tried, with a degree of success, to frighten the Duke with the old scandals about the Virgin Queen and Leicester. The Spaniards were much perturbed. Their Ambassador first tried to draw the French into engagements with them against Orange; and, failing in that attempt, began making overtures to Walsingham which he appreciated at their true value. He knew all about the overtures to France--to which, as the Englishman wrote drily to Cecil, “the answers falling not out to his contentment, maketh him, as I suppose, to think that the friendship of England is worth the having.” The same letter notes information that the Pope has a “practice in hand for England, which would not be long before it brake forth”--no doubt in connexion with the Ridolfi plot, which was now maturing.

Side by side with the business of the Anjou marriage, Walsingham was much engaged in gathering information as to the suspected Spanish expedition to Ireland; in respect of which he held much diplomatic conversation with the ex-Archbishop of Cashel and heard many tales of Stukely’s doings and sayings. Walsingham suspected his good faith, and remarked significantly to Cecil--who had just been “ordered to write William Burleigh” instead of William Cecil, but had still some difficulty in remembering the new signature--“I have placed some especially about him, to whom he repaireth, as also who repairs unto him.” The suspicions were not dissipated as time went on.

The Ambassador’s situation was one of singular difficulty. For a dozen years past, Elizabeth had played fast and loose with so many suitors that any lack of straightforwardness on her part was certain to be construed as meaning that she intended to play with Anjou in the same way; while she was absolutely incapable of being straightforward. As a matter of fact, she was probably merely playing her usual game. So long as the match was on the _tapis_, but only on the _tapis_, Philip would be afraid to move lest he should precipitate it. Meantime, Orange was making ready to renew the struggle in the Netherlands, and she might presently find that she could afford to manœuvre herself out of the marriage, and would have skill enough to make the rupture of negotiations come from the other side. Burghley and Leicester both wanted the match--the former being satisfied that it would result in the Burgundian dominions being separated from Spain without being absorbed by France, while Protestantism would be generally much strengthened. But in his private correspondence with Walsingham, he warned the Ambassador very plainly that neither he nor Leicester knew what the Queen meant to do--it was as likely as not that she wished in the long run to get the match broken off by Anjou on the score of the English stipulations for his conforming to the English law in matters of religion. Walsingham, who was a Protestant with his heart and soul as well as his head, and believed that the Protestant cause was the national cause much more uncompromisingly than Burghley, was more zealous on behalf of the marriage than the Secretary himself, being convinced that it would bring about the victory of Protestantism, in alliance with England, both in France and the Netherlands.

It was not Burghley nor Walsingham, but Elizabeth, who controlled the situation; and however strongly the ministers might express their private feelings to each other, they had to do as she told them. Her trickery met with its usual success. In due course, Henry of Anjou found that he could not accede to the demand for conformity, and in spite of his mother’s entreaties withdrew his suit; yet the business was so successfully managed that the French court, instead of being offended, very soon began to hint that the French king had yet another brother, the Duke of Alençon, whose hand and heart were not yet disposed of. So the play began again.