in any thing but the atrocious application to sir Amias Paulet; by which he could incur, as he well knew, no hazard. A still more crafty politician, Leicester, after throwing out in the privy council hints of her majesty's wishes which served to accelerate the decisive steps there taken, had artfully contrived to escape from all further participation in their proceedings. Both ministers, in secret letters to Scotland, washed their hands of the blood of Mary. But Leicester, not content with these defensive measures, sought to improve the opportunity to the destruction of a rival whom he had never ceased to hate and to envy. To his insidious arts the temporary disgrace of Burleigh is probably to be imputed; and it seems to have been from the apprehension of his malignant misconstructions that the lord-treasurer refused to put on paper the particulars of his defence; and never ceased to implore admission to plead his cause before his sovereign in person. His perseverance at length prevailed: the queen saw him; heard his justification and restored him to her wonted grace; after which the tacit compromise between the minister and the favorite was restored; that compromise by which, during eightand-twenty years, each party had been content to share political power, personal influence, and royal favor, with the secret enemy whom he vainly wished, and hoped, and plotted, to displace.

To relate again those melancholy details of Mary's closing scene on which the historians of England and of Scotland, as well as the numerous biographers of this ill-fated princess, have ex

hausted all the arts of eloquence, would be equally needless and presumptuous. It is, however, important to remark, that she died rather with the triumphant air of a martyr to her religion, than with the meekness of a victim or the penitence of a culprit. She bade Melvil tell her son that she had done nothing injurious to his rights or his honor;-though she was actually in treaty tỏ disinherit him, and had also consented to a nefarious plot for carrying him off prisoner to Rome; - and she denied with obstinacy to the last, the charge of conspiring the death of Elizabeth, though by her will, written the day before her death, she rewarded as faithful servants the two secretaries who had borne this testimony against her. Α spirit of self-justification so haughty and so unprincipled, -a perseverance in deliberate falsehood so resolute and so shameless,-ought under no circumstances and in no personage, not even in a captive beauty and an injured queen, to be confounded; by any writer studious of the moral tendencies of history and capable of sound discrimination; with genuine religion, true fortitude, or the dignity which renders misfortune respectable.

Let such censure as is due be passed on the infringement of morality committed by Elizabeth, in detaining as a captive that rival kinswoman and pretender to her crown, whom the dread of still more formidable dangers had compelled to take refuge in her dominions:- let it be admitted, that the exercise of criminal jurisdiction over a person thus lawlessly detained in a foreign country,

was another stretch of power, which none but a profligate politician will venture to defend;—and let the efforts of Mary to procure her own liberty, though with the destruction of her enemy and at the cost of a civil war to England, be held, if religion will permit, justifiable or venial;-but let not our resentment of the wrongs, or compassion for the long misfortunes of this unhappy woman, betray us into a blind concurrence in eulogiums lavished by prejudice or weakness, on a character blemished by many foibles; stained by some enormous crimes; and never submitted to the guidance of the genuine principles of moral rectitude.

CHAPTER XXI.

1587 AND 1588.

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

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

She may appear, it is true, to have obtained by this stroke an immunity from that long series of dark conspiracies by which, during so many years, she had been disquieted and endangered. To de

liver the queen of Scots was an object for which many men had been willing to risk their lives; but none were found desperate or chivalrous enough to run the same hazard in order to avenge her. But the recent detection of Babington and his associates and the rigorous justice executed upon them, was likely, even without the death of Mary, to have deterred from the speedy repetition of similar practices; and a crisis was now approaching fitted to suspend the machinations of domestic faction; to check in minds the operation even of religious bigotry; and to unite all hearts in the love, all hands in the protection, of their native soil.

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

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

But Elizabeth was not of a temper so timid or so supine as to suffer these preparations to advance