262 CONTESTS OF THE CROWN AND THE COMMONS. [1593. confused humming: the town-dwellers demanding putting down of imposts, the country fellows laying out of commons: some would have the prince keep his court in one place, some in another: all cried out to have new counsellors; but when they should think of any new, they liked them as well as any other that they could remember; especially they would have the treasure so looked unto, as that he should never need to take any more subsidies. At length they fell to direct contrarieties. For the artisans they would have corn and wine set at a lower price, and bound to be kept so still; the ploughmen, vine-labourers, and the farmers would have none of that. The countrymen demanded that every man might be free in the chief towns; that could not the burgesses like of. The peasants would have all the gentlemen destroyed; the citizens, especially such as cooks, barbers, and those other that lived most on gentlemen, would but have them reformed. And of each side were like divisions, one neighbourhood beginning to find fault with another, but no confusion was greater than of particular men's likings and dislikings: one dispraising such a one, whom another praised, and demanding such a one to be punished, whom the other would have exalted. No less ado was there about choosing him who should be their spokesman. The finer sort of burgesses, as merchants, prentices, and cloth-workers, because of their riches, disdaining the baser occupations: and they, because of their number, as much disdaining them; all they scorning the country men's ignorance, and the country men suspecting as much their cunning." This picture of a state of things from which the "regimenting" of the Plantagenets and the two first Tudors had passed away, presents a vivid notion of the keen and jealous competition of an industrious people amongst themselves; and the grudging submission which citizen and peasant now yielded to those who had once lorded it over their traditionary liberties. Out of such "contrarieties" is gradually formed that power of public opinion which no statesman can safely despise. When the chaotic elements have grown into form and substance when there is liberty of speech and liberty of writing-representative government becomes the surest basis of social order. But in the first rough utterances of public opinion rulers only hear prophetic sounds of coming woe. Such a condition of society as Sidney has described, of which the more daring spirits in the House of Commons were the exponents, was calculated to precipitate a contest between the Crown and the people's representatives. But the strength was as yet all on one side; and Elizabeth was too sagacious to use her strength unnecessarily. There was a discontented temper amongst some members of the parliament of 1593, and the queen put it down with a haughtiness which looks like unmitigated despotism. When the Commons asked, according to ancient usage, for Liberty of Speech, the lord keeper replied, in the name of the queen, "Privilege of speech is granted, but you must know what privilege you have; not to speak every one what he listeth, or what cometh in his brain to utter that; but your privilege is, aye or no. Wherefore, Mr. Speaker, her majesty's pleasure is, that if you perceive any idle heads, which will not stick to hazard their own estates; which will meddle with reforming the Church, and transforming the Commonwealth; and do exhibit any bills to such purpose, that you receive them not, until they be viewed and considered by those who it is fitter should consider of such things, and can better judge of them." A few bold members were not 1593.] CONTESTS OF THE CROWN AND THE COMMONS. 263 daunted by this temper; but prepared a bill for entailing the Succession to the Crown. This, of all other subjects, was the most disagreeable to the queen; and four of the members were committed to prison for this hardihood. The courage of the Puritans was not subdued by this severity, for Mr. Morice brought in a bill for correcting the abuses of the Ecclesiastical Court. The queen sent for the Speaker, who delivered a message to the House, that her majesty commanded that "no bills touching matters of state, or reformation in causes ecclesiastical, be exhibited." The same day Morice was committed to custody, and, according to some statements, was in confinement when he died in 1596. In a dignified letter to Burleigh, the persecuted Morice says, “That I am no more hardly handled, I impute, next unto God, to your honourable good-will and favour. . . I see no cause in my conscience to repent me of what I have done, nor to be dismayed, although grieved, by this restraint of my liberty; for I stand for the maintenance of the honour of God and of my prince, and for the preservation of public justice and the liberties of my country against wrong and oppression; being well content, at her majesty's good pleasure and commandment, (whom I beseech God long to preserve in all princely felicity,) to suffer and abide much more. But I had thought that the judges ecclesiastical, being charged in the great council of the realm to be dishonorers of God and of her majesty; perverters of law and public justice; and wrong-doers unto the liberties and freedoms of all her majesty's subjects, by their extorted oaths, wrongful imprisonments, lawless subscription and unjust absolutions; would rather have sought means to be cleared of this weighty accusation, than to shroud themselves under the suppressing of the complaint and shadow of mine imprisonment." Such men as Morice built up the constitutional freedom whose foundations were still strong, however decayed the old fabric. Upon the matter of the subsidy, the Commons met the wishes of the Crown, but with evident reluctance. Francis Bacon, then rising into importance, made a strong speech against the amount of the subsidy, and for some time lost his chance of court favour. The contest between the Crown and the Commons, in the question of the succession, was the renewal of a controversy which had been conducted with some bitterness in 1566. There had been other occasions on which the queen resisted the freedom with which members uttered opinions which seemed to limit her prerogative. Mr. Yelverton, in 1576, said that princes were to have their prerogatives, but yet to be confined within reasonable limits; the queen could not of herself make laws, neither could she break them. In 1576, Peter Wentworth complained that the liberty of free speech had been infringed; and he went so far as to say, "none is without fault, no, not our noble queen, but has committed great and dangerous faults to herself." The Commons themselves consigned Wentworth to the Tower; but after a month's imprisonment, the queen said she remitted her displeasure towards him. Before we join in the common cry against the despotism of Elizabeth as a personal attribute, we must bear in mind that in those days the doctrine of ministerial responsibility for every act of the Crown was utterly unknown. There was no intervening authority to break the force of a collision between the sovereign and the parliament. Elizabeth was responsible to public opinion for her public acts, and she almost invariably took these acts upon herself. 264 INTRIGUES OF SPAIN IN SCOTLAND. [1593. We need therefore scarcely wonder at occasional displays of temper when any member made an attack upon her administration of affairs. Mr. Hallam has truly remarked upon the conflicts between the Crown and the parliament, that "if the former often asserted the victory, the latter sometimes kept the field, and was left on the whole a gainer at the close of the campaign." Whatever might have been the desire of the Crown to narrow the powers of parliament, its constitutional authority was universally recognised. Had the monarchy under Elizabeth been so wholly despotic as Hume, the defender of the divine right of the next race of kings, has chosen to maintain, Harrison, in 1577, would not have dared to write the following unqualified statement of the nature of parliament: "This house hath the most high and absolute power of the realm; for thereby kings and mighty princes have from time to time been deposed from their thrones; laws either enacted or abrogated; offenders of all sorts punished; and corrupted religion either disannulled or reformed. To be short, whatsoever the people of Rome did in their centuriatis or tribunitiis comitiis, the same is and may be done by authority of our parliament-house, which is the head and body of all the realm, and the place wherein every particular person is intended to be present, if not by himself, yet by his advocate or attorney. For this cause also any thing there enacted is not to be misliked, but obeyed of all men, without contradiction or grudge."+ The war of Spain against England never lost its original character of a war of religious hatred, in which the utter destruction of the Protestant queen was the great object to be kept in view. In 1593 Elizabeth was to be assailed through Scotland. Philip was conspiring with the earls of Angus, Errol, and Huntley, to send an army to operate with them in re-establishing Romanism in Scotland, and to march upon England with a united force for the same purpose. This scheme to betray Scotland to Spain, and then to subdue England, had been the policy of the Roman Catholic faction for several years. The lord-keeper, in his speech to the parliament in 1593, says, "A greater part of the nobility in Scotland be combined in this conspiracy, and they have received great sums of money for their services therein. This conspiracy the king of Scots was hardly brought to believe, but that her majesty advertised him thereof, having entertained intelligence thereof, as she hath of all things done and intended in these parts." This vigilance on the part of the English government was necessary for its own safety; for James, with the weakness and cunning of his nature, suspected Elizabeth of a design to promote discord between himself and his friends-a design which many historians take for granted in these transactions, as in every other between the governments. A writer, who is too well informed to be led away by these historical prejudices, says, with regard to this plot of the Catholic nobles, that when the truth became too apparent to the Scottish king," to admit of denial, his childish fondness for some of the very persons who were striving to ruin him, involved his country in troubles and bloodshed, and called down upon him many an indignant remonstrance from his neighbour queen." James at length took arms against the " Spaniolised rebels," and this danger was past. But Philip had in his armoury another weapon against Elizabeth. He bribed her domestic physician, Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, to poison her. "Description of England." Bruce, Introduction to "Letters of Elizabeth and James," p. xv. "Constitutional History," chap. v. 1595.] NAVAL EXPEDITIONS. 265 This man had been taken prisoner in one of the ships of the Armada, and his skill in medicine, according to the imperfect knowledge of that time, recommended him to the queen. He soon availed himself of his position to become a spy of the Spanish ministers. The count de Fuentes accepted the offer of Lopez to poison the queen for a reward of fifty thousand crowns; and he urged the mediciner to complete the business speedily, "that the king may have a merry Easter." Lopez had two Portuguese refugees as confederates. They were convicted, and hanged on the 7th of June, 1594. The discovery of this atrocious scheme was due to the perseverance of Essex. In 1593 Henry IV. made a formal abjuration of those Protestant opinions for which he had so long gallantly fought. Without this concession he would probably never have succeeded in tranquillising France. But he did not, as many apostates have done, persecute the religion which he had forsaken. The edict of Nantes, by which he granted toleration to the Protestants, in 1598, may advantageously contrast with the penal laws to which the Roman Catholics of England were so long subjected. Elizabeth, although displeased at the position which Henry had taken, still continued to render him aid in his war with Spain-the common cause of each country. An English naval armament assisted him, in 1594, in taking Brest from the Spaniards. In the attack upon this fort, sir Martin Frobisher was mortally wounded. Two other of the heroes of 1588 fell victims to disease, in an expedition against the Spanish settlements in the West Indies. Sir Francis Drake and sir John Hawkins sailed in 1595, with six of the queen's ships, and twenty others, fitted out at private charge, having on board a considerable land force, commanded by sir Thomas Baskerville. They made an assault on Porto Rico; but they were repulsed. Hawkins soon after died. Drake went forward, and landed at Nombre di Dios, in the isthmus of Darien. The success which had attended his early exploits had now deserted him. The Spaniards were prepared, as at Porto Rico. The enterprise failed, and the great admiral succumbed to sickness and to disappointment. Baskerville returned home, after having fought with a Spanish fleet off Cuba, with no decisive results on either side. The year 1596 was signalised by an expedition against Philip's European dominions. He was making preparations for another invasion of England; and the lord-high admiral, Howard, of Effingham, counselled that the blow should be anticipated by an attack upon Spain herself. Burleigh, always cautious, but more cautious in his declining years, was opposed to so costly and doubtful an enterprise. But there was a youthful counsellor with influence greater than Burleigh's, whose sentence was for the boldest warlike policy. Essex prevailed; and was appointed commander of the expedition, but somewhat restrained by a council of war. The English fleet sailed from Plymouth on the 1st of June, 1596. The harbour of Cadiz was known to be full of shipping; and after an attempt, which failed, to land at St. Sebastian's, it was determined to attack the galleys in the bay. Essex, when the council had somewhat unwillingly come to this determination, threw his hat into the sea, in the extravagance of his joy; and, though against the orders which had given the honour of leading the attack to Raleigh and lord Thomas Howard, broke through the midst of the fleet in which he had been stationed, and was soon in the heat of the action. The Spanish ships fled to 266 THE TAKING OF CADIZ. [1596. the protection of the guns at the fort of Puntal, where some were set on fire by their own crews. The English admiral refused to accept a price as the ransom of the remainder; and they were all burnt by the Spanish commander. Essex now led his men to an attack upon the town of Cadiz, which was strongly fortified. The daring of this young leader called forth the impetuous courage of his "war-proof" English. At the moment when the issue of the attack seemed doubtful, Essex threw his own standard over the wall; "giving withal a most hot assault unto the gate, where, to save the honour of their ensign, happy was he that could first leap down from the wall, and with shot and sword make way through the thickest press of the enemy." The town was taken, and given up to plunder. But Essex, departing somewhat from the brutal spirit of ancient warfare, exerted himself as strenuously to prevent slaughter as he had done in leading the attack. The town was burnt, after the unhappy inhabitants had been permitted to withdraw. It was the wish of Essex to hold Cadiz; but he was over-ruled by the council. Nor was he more successful in receiving their support for other enterprises which he proposed. The fleet returned to England, with no greater success than the large destruction which had been effected of the resources of Spain, whose loss was estimated at twenty millions of ducats. Essex wrote a "Censure" upon the conduct of the expedition, in which he blamed the lord admiral and Raleigh. His impetuous nature was calculated to draw down opposition, even in the hour of the most brilliant success. For such a feat as the capture of Cadiz he was eminently fitted; and in being restrained in carrying forward his victory some injustice was probably inflicted upon him. In our time, what Essex did at Cadiz has been described as the most brilliant military exploit that was achieved on the Continent by English arms during the long interval which elapsed between the battle of Agincourt and that of Blenheim.' In the following year another naval armament was fitted out against Spain. A fleet sailed from Plymouth, on the 9th of July, 1597; but was driven back by a storm, in which many of the ships were disabled and sunk. The remainder of this shattered squadron sailed again on the 17th of August. The commanders, Essex and Raleigh, had disagreements; and the only success that saved the expedition from disgrace was the profitable capture of three ships returning from the Havannah. A new parliament was called to meet on the 24th of October, 1597, which sate till the 9th of February, 1598. In this parliament some of the most important statutes of domestic policy were passed, which require a detailed notice; illustrating, as they all do, the condition of society at that period; and some having held their places in our system of economical law, even to the present time. When the legislators of the reign of Edward VI. had suddenly repealed their wicked and foolish Statute of Vagabondage,† they had discovered that something more effectual than severity was necessary to be applied to the large number of the population who were unable to work, who were unwilling to work, or for whom no work was provided. They saw that there was a class for whom some public provision must be appointed-a class who would not Macaulay, "Essays," art. "Lord Bacon." + See ante, vol. ii. p. 469. |