was assumed to be a representative of their ancient princes by her descent from Philippa of Hainault, the wife of Edward III. The queen hesitated, and changed her mind more than once, but at last declared that she could not in conscience accept their offer, but that she would act as mediatrix between them and their lawful sovereign Philip. This answer was given in the month of February, 1576, but events occurred with wonderful rapidity which wholly changed the queen's plans. Requesens died, and was succeeded by John of Austria (a bastard son of the late Emperor Charles V.), a brave and popular commander; and it was rumoured that, not satisfied with the subjugation of the whole of the Netherlands, he contemplated an invasion of England and a marriage with the Queen of Scots. At the same time the Prince of Orange, in his despair, talked of offering the sovereignty of his country to Elizabeth's suitor Alençon, now Duke of Anjou. Upon this Elizabeth concluded an alliance, offensive and defensive, with the Orange party, protesting all the while to Philip that she merely intended to preserve to him the Netherlands from the grasp of the French, and to herself the kingdom of England free from invasion by his ambitious halfbrother Don John. The English negotiator on this occasion was William Davison. The queen had already furnished large sums of money, but now they were in want of more, and Davison engaged to procure it on their giving adequate security. The Dutch diplomatist produced the valuable jewels and plate which had been pledged by Mathias of Austria to the States of Holland; and, on these things being sent to England, fifty thousand pounds were advanced for present exigencies.* In spite of the new spirit which had been infused into them by the English treaty, the Dutch were defeated in the great battle of Gemblours. They then applied, in a breath, to the Protestant princes of Germany, to Eliza * Sir Harris Nicholas, Life of William Davison, Secretary of State and Privy Councillor to Queen Elizabeth,'—a very valuable contribution to the history of this reign. beth, and to the Duke of Anjou. Cassimir, another of the English queen's suitors, marched into the Netherlands with a powerful army, and Anjou soon followed with ten thousand men. Neither, however, could do much against such great commanders as Don John and Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma, who had recently arrived with another army of Spaniards and Italians. The Duke of Anjou excused his want of success by pleading his anxiety not to offend Elizabeth; and at this very moment he was renewing his suit with a rare ardour. He sent over Simier, a nobleman who possessed uncommon skill in amorous matters, and who was irresistibly witty and gallant. This Simier soon gained an extraordinary ascendancy over the mind of the queen, to whom he constantly represented that his employer Anjou was almost dying of love for her. He did more: he disclosed to her that the Earl of Leicester had recently married in private the widow of the late Earl of Essex. According to popular rumour the favourite had poisoned Essex to make way to his bed. Leicester stormed and protested; but, for the first time in his life, he found his royal mistress implacable. He was severely reprimanded, and placed in confinement at Greenwich. In the following summer (1580) the Duke of Anjou suddenly appeared at Greenwich, having travelled thither in disguise. The strong and masculine mind of Elizabeth was weaker than that of a child in some points, and this was one of them. The romance of the thing quite fascinated her. After a few days of ardent courtship, and much private talk, Anjou went his way. A few days after his departure Elizabeth assembled the lords of her council, and submitted to them "the great question." These lords were divided in opinion-some of them representing the danger to religion from a Catholic husband; the sinfulness of allowing the mass to be set up, though in private, in the royal palace; the peril to her majesty's life, if, at her age (she was now in her forty-ninth year), she should have issue; and the uselessness of the marriage if she had not.* Every account of Elizabeth's conduct * Burghley Papers.-Sadler. at this critical moment is startling and perplexing, but most of them would lead us to believe that she was now really anxious for a marriage with this young prince. Burghley, the scarcely less adroit Walsingham, her relative Hunsdon, Mildmay, Sadler,-all were lost in amazement, and doubt, and dread. It is said that she shed passionate tears upon finding that they did not unanimously petition her to marry, as they had done before. They were, however, too careful of their liberty and their places to offer any open opposition to what seemed to be the queen's wishes; and they actively drove on to its conclusion a preliminary matrimonial treaty with Simier. But in two months Elizabeth again declared that she would die a virgin queen. Again, however, in a few months, when a splendid embassy from Catherine de' Medici arrived in London (it was in the spring of 1581), she agreed that the marriage should be concluded within six weeks, but with a provision that she should be at liberty to change her mind again if certain secret stipulations were not previously fulfilled. It is difficult to understand, even with full reference to all her political relations at home and abroad,-it is impossible to reconcile to any fixed and wise principle the vacillating conduct of the queen. The States of the Netherlands, where her influence was great, formally elected the Duke of Anjou to be their sovereign; and when that prince marched into the country at the head of sixteen thousand inen, heedless of her old anxieties about French ambition, she sent him a present of one hundred thousand crowns. Chiefly by means of this seasonable aid Anjou gained many other successes. On the approach of winter he put his troops into winter quarters, and hurried over to England, whither, it is said, he was now warmly invited by Elizabeth. His arrival was welcomed with fireworks and other rejoicings; and soon after the queen, before her whole court, took a ring from her finger and put it upon his. Hereupon the news was spread abroad upon the wings of the wind that the queen was going to marry at last. In Paris the news was, that the match could know no further impediment; in Antwerp and Brussels they lit bonfires and discharged artillery, as if it had really taken place. But, in the night, Elizabeth had talked with some of her council, and in the morning Anjou found his affianced bride pale and in tears; and before he left her apartment he was assured that she could never marry.* It was, however, some time before these matters were made public; and the zealous Protestants continued to rail against the marriage, heaping all kinds of abuse, not only on the Duke of Anjou, but on the whole French nation, and much marvelling that the queen had not a better recollection of the feast of St. Bartholomew. The preachers had begun the attack some time before, by condemning the intended match from the pulpit, but they had been pretty well silenced. After staying three months in England, Anjou prepared to depart, pledging, however, his word to the queen that he would soon return. She accompanied him as far as Canterbury, and there took leave of him, weeping like an amorous girl. On his arrival in the Netherlands Anjou found very different employment: Alexander Farnese was not yet conquered, and the Prince of Orange possessed in reality the power which nominally belonged to the French prince. Dissensions broke out between the French and the Dutch, and, in the month of June of the following year, Anjou, having witnessed the loss of the greater part of his troops, fled back to France. Soon after his return he fell into a lingering illness, of which he died in the month of June, 1584,--we need scarcely add, "not without suspicion of being poisoned." We have alluded to the troubles of Ireland and to the views in that direction of France and Spain. That country had never been well governed or tranquil for a single year, but the difference of religion was now a perennial source of havoc and desolation. Sometimes the English pale was wasted by fire and sword; but, generally speaking, the undisciplined Irish were the victims of that merciless war. Shane O'Neil was basely assassinated, * Camden.-Mémoire de Nevers.-Daniel. and his lands, comprising the greater part of Ulster, were vested in the English crown as early as 1568. Numerous colonists were sent over from England to occupy these lands, where they had to maintain themselves by the sword, for the dispossessed proprietors struggled hard to keep their inheritance. In 1573 Walter Devereux, earl of Essex, undertook to subdue and colonize the district of Clan-huboy. He set sail with a small army of his own raising, but he met with little success; he was wretchedly seconded by the penurious and jealous court of England; and he died at Dublin in 1576, suspecting himself that he was poisoned.* The Irish priests naturally looked to the pope and the Catholic powers for assistance. From time to time they received encouraging messages from France and Spain; but the first to send them any real assistance in the shape of troops was Pope Gregory XIII. Six hundred disciplined troops and three thousand stand of arms were embarked at Civita Veccia, the nearest port to Rome, to fall down the Mediterranean, to touch at Lisbon, there to take on board Fitz-Morris, an Irish exile, and then to proceed to the Irish coast. But Stukely, the officer to whom this expedition was intrusted, proved a traitor or a mad adventurer: on reaching Lisbon he offered his services to Sebastian, king of Portugal, and, instead of going to Ireland to fight the English, he went to Africa to fight the Moors, who slew him, and King Sebastian, and all his host, at the battle of Alcazar. Fitz-Morris, who was a brother or half-brother of the Earl of Desmond, sailed from Lisbon in the right direction, but he had with him only about eighty Spanish soldiers, a troop of Irish and English Catholic exiles, and Saunders, the Jesuit, whom the pope had named his legate. Such a force could maintain itself nowhere, and the Irish had suffered so severely that they were slow to rise. Fitz-Morris, therefore, lingered among the moors and bogs; but in the This was the unfortunate nobleman whose widow, a daughter of Sir Francis Knollys, Leicester, as mentioned above, married for his third wife. |