arms, and with the sailors in their ships, the country waited for
the coming of the proud Spanish fleet, which was called THE
INVINCIBLE ARMADA. The Queen herself, riding in armour on a white
horse, and the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Leicester holding her
bridal rein, made a brave speech to the troops at Tilbury Fort
opposite Gravesend, which was received with such enthusiasm as is
seldom known. Then came the Spanish Armada into the English
Channel, sailing along in the form of a half moon, of such great
size that it was seven miles broad. But the English were quickly
upon it, and woe then to all the Spanish ships that dropped a
little out of the half moon, for the English took them instantly!
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And it soon appeared that the great Armada was anything but
invincible, for on a summer night, bold Drake sent eight blazing
fire-ships right into the midst of it. In terrible consternation
the Spaniards tried to get out to sea, and so became dispersed; the
English pursued them at a great advantage; a storm came on, and
drove the Spaniards among rocks and shoals; and the swift end of
the Invincible fleet was, that it lost thirty great ships and ten
thousand men, and, defeated and disgraced, sailed home again.
Being afraid to go by the English Channel, it sailed all round
Scotland and Ireland; some of the ships getting cast away on the
latter coast in bad weather, the Irish, who were a kind of savages,
plundered those vessels and killed their crews. So ended this
great attempt to invade and conquer England. And I think it will
be a long time before any other invincible fleet coming to England
with the same object, will fare much better than the Spanish
Armada.
Though the Spanish king had had this bitter taste of English
bravery, he was so little the wiser for it, as still to entertain
his old designs, and even to conceive the absurd idea of placing
his daughter on the English throne. But the Earl of Essex, SIR
WALTER RALEIGH, SIR THOMAS HOWARD, and some other distinguished
leaders, put to sea from Plymouth, entered the port of Cadiz once
more, obtained a complete victory over the shipping assembled
there, and got possession of the town. In obedience to the Queen's
express instructions, they behaved with great humanity; and the
principal loss of the Spaniards was a vast sum of money which they
had to pay for ransom. This was one of many gallant achievements
on the sea, effected in this reign. Sir Walter Raleigh himself,
after marrying a maid of honour and giving offence to the Maiden
Queen thereby, had already sailed to South America in search of
gold.
The Earl of Leicester was now dead, and so was Sir Thomas
Walsingham, whom Lord Burleigh was soon to follow. The principal
favourite was the EARL OF ESSEX, a spirited and handsome man, a
favourite with the people too as well as with the Queen, and
possessed of many admirable qualities. It was much debated at
Court whether there should be peace with Spain or no, and he was
very urgent for war. He also tried hard to have his own way in the
appointment of a deputy to govern in Ireland. One day, while this
question was in dispute, he hastily took offence, and turned his
back upon the Queen; as a gentle reminder of which impropriety, the
Queen gave him a tremendous box on the ear, and told him to go to
the devil. He went home instead, and did not reappear at Court for
half a year or so, when he and the Queen were reconciled, though
never (as some suppose) thoroughly.
From this time the fate of the Earl of Essex and that of the Queen
seemed to be blended together. The Irish were still perpetually
quarrelling and fighting among themselves, and he went over to
Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, to the great joy of his enemies (Sir
Walter Raleigh among the rest), who were glad to have so dangerous
a rival far off. Not being by any means successful there, and
knowing that his enemies would take advantage of that circumstance
to injure him with the Queen, he came home again, though against
before her, gave him her hand to kiss, and he was overjoyed -
though it was not a very lovely hand by this time - but in the
course of the same day she ordered him to confine himself to his
room, and two or three days afterwards had him taken into custody.
With the same sort of caprice - and as capricious an old woman she
now was, as ever wore a crown or a head either - she sent him broth
from her own table on his falling ill from anxiety, and cried about
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him.
He was a man who could find comfort and occupation in his books,
and he did so for a time; not the least happy time, I dare say, of
his life. But it happened unfortunately for him, that he held a
monopoly in sweet wines: which means that nobody could sell them
without purchasing his permission. This right, which was only for
a term, expiring, he applied to have it renewed. The Queen
refused, with the rather strong observation - but she DID make
strong observations - that an unruly beast must be stinted in his
food. Upon this, the angry Earl, who had been already deprived of
many offices, thought himself in danger of complete ruin, and
turned against the Queen, whom he called a vain old woman who had
grown as crooked in her mind as she had in her figure. These
uncomplimentary expressions the ladies of the Court immediately
snapped up and carried to the Queen, whom they did not put in a
better tempter, you may believe. The same Court ladies, when they
had beautiful dark hair of their own, used to wear false red hair,
to be like the Queen. So they were not very high-spirited ladies,
however high in rank.
The worst object of the Earl of Essex, and some friends of his who
used to meet at LORD SOUTHAMPTON'S house, was to obtain possession
of the Queen, and oblige her by force to dismiss her ministers and
change her favourites. On Saturday the seventh of February, one
thousand six hundred and one, the council suspecting this, summoned
the Earl to come before them. He, pretending to be ill, declined;
it was then settled among his friends, that as the next day would
be Sunday, when many of the citizens usually assembled at the Cross
by St. Paul's Cathedral, he should make one bold effort to induce
them to rise and follow him to the Palace.
So, on the Sunday morning, he and a small body of adherents started
out of his house - Essex House by the Strand, with steps to the
river - having first shut up in it, as prisoners, some members of
the council who came to examine him - and hurried into the City
with the Earl at their head crying out 'For the Queen! For the
Queen! A plot is laid for my life!' No one heeded them, however,
and when they came to St. Paul's there were no citizens there. In
the meant
ime the prisoners at Essex House had been released by one
of the Earl's own friends; he had been promptly proclaimed a
traitor in the City itself; and the streets were barricaded with
carts and guarded by soldiers. The Earl got back to his house by
water, with difficulty, and after an attempt to defend his house
against the troops and cannon by which it was soon surrounded, gave
himself up that night. He was brought to trial on the nineteenth,
and found guilty; on the twenty-fifth, he was executed on Tower
Hill, where he died, at thirty-four years old, both courageously
and penitently. His step-father suffered with him. His enemy, Sir
Walter Raleigh, stood near the scaffold all the time - but not so
near it as we shall see him stand, before we finish his history.
In this case, as in the cases of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen
of Scots, the Queen had commanded, and countermanded, and again
commanded, the execution. It is probable that the death of her
young and gallant favourite in the prime of his good qualities, was
never off her mind afterwards, but she held out, the same vain,
obstinate and capricious woman, for another year. Then she danced
before her Court on a state occasion - and cut, I should think, a
mighty ridiculous figure, doing so in an immense ruff, stomacher
and wig, at seventy years old. For another year still, she held
out, but, without any more dancing, and as a moody, sorrowful,
broken creature. At last, on the tenth of March, one thousand six
hundred and three, having been ill of a very bad cold, and made
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worse by the death of the Countess of Nottingham who was her
intimate friend, she fell into a stupor and was supposed to be
dead. She recovered her consciousness, however, and then nothing
would induce her to go to bed; for she said that she knew that if
she did, she should never get up again. There she lay for ten
days, on cushions on the floor, without any food, until the Lord
Admiral got her into bed at last, partly by persuasions and partly
by main force. When they asked her who should succeed her, she
replied that her seat had been the seat of Kings, and that she
would have for her successor, 'No rascal's son, but a King's.'
Upon this, the lords present stared at one another, and took the
liberty of asking whom she meant; to which she replied, 'Whom
should I mean, but our cousin of Scotland!' This was on the
twenty-third of March. They asked her once again that day, after
she was speechless, whether she was still in the same mind? She
struggled up in bed, and joined her hands over her head in the form
of a crown, as the only reply she could make. At three o'clock
next morning, she very quietly died, in the forty-fifth year of her
reign.
That reign had been a glorious one, and is made for ever memorable
by the distinguished men who flourished in it. Apart from the
great voyagers, statesmen, and scholars, whom it produced, the
names of BACON, SPENSER, and SHAKESPEARE, will always be remembered
with pride and veneration by the civilised world, and will always
impart (though with no great reason, perhaps) some portion of their
lustre to the name of Elizabeth herself. It was a great reign for
discovery, for commerce, and for English enterprise and spirit in
general. It was a great reign for the Protestant religion and for
the Reformation which made England free. The Queen was very
popular, and in her progresses, or journeys about her dominions,
was everywhere received with the liveliest joy. I think the truth
is, that she was not half so good as she has been made out, and not
half so bad as she has been made out. She had her fine qualities,
but she was coarse, capricious, and treacherous, and had all the
faults of an excessively vain young woman long after she was an old
one. On the whole, she had a great deal too much of her father in
her, to please me.
Many improvements and luxuries were introduced in the course of
these five-and-forty years in the general manner of living; but
cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and bear-baiting, were still the
national amusements; and a coach was so rarely seen, and was such
an ugly and cumbersome affair when it was seen, that even the Queen
herself, on many high occasions, rode on horseback on a pillion
behind the Lord Chancellor.
CHAPTER XXXII - ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE FIRST
'OUR cousin of Scotland' was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in
mind and person. His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his
legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull goggle-eyes
stared and rolled like an idiot's. He was cunning, covetous,
wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer,
and the most conceited man on earth. His figure - what is commonly
called rickety from his birth - presented a most ridiculous
appearance, dressed in thick padded clothes, as a safeguard against
being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), of a grassgreen
colour from head to foot, with a hunting-horn dangling at his
side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather sticking over one
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eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as he happened to toss it
on. He used to loll on the necks of his favourite courtiers, and
slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks; and the
greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign himself in his letters
to his royal master, His Majesty's 'dog and slave,' and used to
address his majesty as 'his Sowship.' His majesty was the worst
rider ever seen, and thought himself the best. He was one of the
most impertinent talkers (in the broadest Scotch) ever heard, and
boasted of being unanswerable in all manner of argument. He wrote
some of the most wearisome treatises ever read - among others, a
book upon witchcraft, in which he was a devout believer - and
thought himself a prodigy of authorship. He thought, and wrote,
and said, that a king had a right to make and unmake what laws he
pleased, and ought to be accountable to nobody on earth. This is
the plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest men
about the court praised and flattered to that degree, that I doubt
if there be anything much more shameful in the annals of human
nature.
He came to the English throne with great ease. The miseries of a
disputed succession had been felt so long, and so dreadfully, that
he was proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth's death, and was
accepted by the nation, even without being asked to give any pledge
that he would govern well, or that he would redress crying
grievances. He took a month to come from Edinburgh to London; and,
by way of exercising his new power, hanged a pickpocket on the
journey without any trial, and knighted everybody he could lay hold
of. He made two hundred knights before he got to his palace in
London, and seven hundred before he had been in it
three months.
He also shovelled sixty-two new peers into the House of Lords - and
there was a pretty large sprinkling of Scotchmen among them, you
may believe.
His Sowship's prime Minister, CECIL (for I cannot do better than
call his majesty what his favourite called him), was the enemy of
Sir Walter Raleigh, and also of Sir Walter's political friend, LORD
COBHAM; and his Sowship's first trouble was a plot originated by
these two, and entered into by some others, with the old object of
seizing the King and keeping him in imprisonment until he should
change his ministers. There were Catholic priests in the plot, and
there were Puritan noblemen too; for, although the Catholics and
Puritans were strongly opposed to each other, they united at this
time against his Sowship, because they knew that he had a design
against both, after pretending to be friendly to each; this design
being to have only one high and convenient form of the Protestant
religion, which everybody should be bound to belong to, whether
they liked it or not. This plot was mixed up with another, which
may or may not have had some reference to placing on the throne, at
some time, the LADY ARABELLA STUART; whose misfortune it was, to be
the daughter of the younger brother of his Sowship's father, but
who was quite innocent of any part in the scheme. Sir Walter
Raleigh was accused on the confession of Lord Cobham - a miserable
creature, who said one thing at one time, and another thing at
another time, and could be relied upon in nothing. The trial of
Sir Walter Raleigh lasted from eight in the morning until nearly
midnight; he defended himself with such eloquence, genius, and
spirit against all accusations, and against the insults of COKE,
the Attorney-General - who, according to the custom of the time,
foully abused him - that those who went there detesting the
prisoner, came away admiring him, and declaring that anything so
wonderful and so captivating was never heard. He was found guilty,
nevertheless, and sentenced to death. Execution was deferred, and
he was taken to the Tower. The two Catholic priests, less
fortunate, were executed with the usual atrocity; and Lord Cobham
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and two others were pardoned on the scaffold. His Sowship thought