for the arrest of Arden, his wife, daughters, sister, and a missionary priest named Hall.

Arden and Hall were subjected to the torture, and Hall admitted that Arden had once been heard to wish "that the queen were in heaven.” This was sufficient to procure the condemnation and execution of Arden. Somerville was found strangled in his cell at Newgate. Hall and the ladies were pardoned. As the insanity of Somerville was notorious, it was generally considered that Arden fell a victim to the malice of Leicester, who parcelled out his lands among his dependents.' But while plots, real and pretended, threatening the life of the queen, agitated the public mind from day to day, it had become customary for groups of the populace to throw themselves on their knees in the dirt by the wayside, whenever she rode out, and pray for her preservation, invoking blessings on her head, and confusion to the papists, with the utmost power of their voices. A scene of this kind once interrupted an important political dialogue, the maiden queen held with the ambassador Mauvissière, as he rode by her side, from Hampton Court to London, in November, 1583. She was in the act of discussing the plots of the Jesuits, "when," says Mauvissière, "just at this moment many people, in large companies, met her by the way, and kneeling on the ground, with divers sorts of prayers, wished her a thousand blessings, and that the evil-disposed who meant to harm her might be discovered, and punished as they deserved. She frequently stopped to thank them, for the affection they manifested for her. She and I being alone, amidst her retinue, mounted on goodly horses, she observed to me 6 that she saw clearly that she was not dis

liked by all.""

It is not very difficult to perceive, by the dry manner of Mauvissière, that he deemed this scene was got up for the purpose. Indeed, such public displays of fervency are by no means in unison with the English national character.

The parsimony of Elizabeth in all affairs of state policy, where a certain expenditure was required, often embarrassed her ministers, and traversed the arrangements they had

1 Camden.

2 Letters of Mary queen of Scots, vol. ii. p. 29, published by Mr. Colburn, 1842.

made, or were desirous of making, in her name, with foreign princes. Walsingham was, on one occasion, so greatly annoyed by her majesty's teasing minuteness and provoking interference in regard to money matters, that he took the liberty of penning a long letter of remonstrance to her, amounting to an absolute lecture on the subject.

* Sometimes," says he, “when your majesty doth behold in what doubtful terms you stand with foreign princes, then do you wish, with great affection, that opportunities offered had not been slipped. But when they are offered to you, (if they be accompanied with charges,) they are altogether neglected. Common experience teacheth, that it is as hard in a politic body to prevent any mischier without charges, as in a natural body, diseased, to cure the same without pain. Remember, I humbly beseech your majesty, the respect of charges hath lost Scotland, and I would to God I had no cause to think that it might put your highness in peril of the loss of England. I see it, and they stick not to say it, that the only cause that maketh them here (in France) not to weigh your majesty's friendship, is, that they see your majesty doth fly charges, otherwise than by doing them underhand. It is strange, considering in what state your majesty standeth, that in all directions that we have here received, we have special charge not to yield to anything that may be accompanied with charges.

"The general league must be without any certain charges; the particular league, with a voluntary and no certain charge; as also that which is to be attempted in favour of don Antonio. The best is, that if they were (as they are not) inclined to deal in any of these points, then they were like to receive but small comfort for anything that we have direction to assent unto. Heretofore your majesty's predecessors, in matters of peril, did never look into charges, though their treasure was neither so great as your majesty's is, nor their subjects so wealthy, nor so willing to contribute. A person that is diseased, if he look only upon the medicine, without regard of the pain he sustaineth, cannot in reason and nature but abhor the same; if, therefore, no peril, why then 'tis vain to be at charges, but if there be peril, it is hard that charges should be preferred before peril. I pray God that the abatement of the charges towards that nobleman, that hath the custody of the bosom serpent, (meaning Mary Queen of Scots,) hath not lessened his eare in keeping of her. To think that in a man of his birth and quality, after twelve years' travail, in charge of such weight, to have an abatement of allowance, and no recompence otherwise made, should not breed discontentment, no man that hath reason can so judge; and, therefore, to have so special a charge committed to a person discontented, everybody seeth it standeth no way with policy. What dangerous effects this loose keeping hath bred! The taking away of Morton, the alienation of the king, (James of Scotland,) and a general revolt in religion, intended (caused) only by her charges, doth shew.

"And, therefore, nothing being done to help the same, is a manifest argument that the peril that is like to grow thereby is so fatal, as it can by no means be prevented, if this sparing and improvident course be still held, the mischiefs approaching being so apparent as they are. I conclude, therefore, having spoken in the heat of duty, without offence to your majesty, that no one that serveth in the place of a counsellor, that either weigheth his own credit, or carrieth that sound affection to your majesty as he ought to do, that would not wish himself in the furthest part pia, rather than enjoy the fairest palace in England. The

Lord, therefore, direct your majesty's heart to take that way of counsel that may be most for your safety and honour.

September 2nd.

"F. WALSINGHAM."1

There is no date of place or year to this very curious letter; but the allusions render it apparent that it was written in France, just after the attempt made by Elizabeth and her council at home, to curtail the allowance of fiftytwo pounds per week, which had been, in the first instance, granted to the earl of Shrewsbury, for the board and maintenance of the captive queen of Scots and her household, to thirty. Even this stinted sum was sorely grudged by Elizabeth. The earl complained of being a great loser, and pinched the table of his luckless charge in so niggardly a fashion, that a serious complaint was made to queen Elizabeth, by the French ambassador, of the badness and meanness of the diet provided for Mary. Elizabeth wrote a severe reprimand to Shrewsbury; and he, who was rendered by the jealousy of his wife the most miserable of men, petitioned to be released from the odious office that had been thrust upon him, of jailer to the fair, ill-fated Scottish queen. After a long delay, his resignation was accepted; but he had to give up his gloomy castle of Tutbury, for a prison for Mary, no other house in England, it was presumed, being so thoroughly distasteful to the royal captive, as an abiding place."

Walsingham's term of "bosom serpent" appears peculiarly infelicitous, as applied to Mary Stuart, who was never admitted to Elizabeth's presence, or vouchsafed the courtesies due to a royal lady and a guest, but, when crippled with chronic maladies, was denied the trifling indulgence of a coach, or an additional servant to carry her in a chair.

The arrest and execution of Morton, in Scotland, was peculiarly displeasing to Elizabeth and embarrassing to her council. Walsingham boldly reproaches his royal mistress, in the above letter, with having lost this valuable political tool, by not having offered a sufficient bribe for the preservation of his life. Mauvissière, in a letter to his own court, gives an amusing detail of an altercation which was carried on between Elizabeth and the archbishop of St. Andrew's, on account of the execution of Morton, in which

1 Complete Ambassador, p. 427. 2 Lodge's Illustrations.

she vituperated the queen of Scots and the young king James, and in the midst of her choler exclaimed:

"I am more afraid of making a fault in my Latin, than of the kings of Spain, France, and Scotland, the whole house of Guise, and their confederates."1

Elizabeth stood on no ceremony with the envoys of Scotland, who scrupled to sell their fealty for English gold. In the previous year, when James had dispatched his favourite minister, the duke of Lenox, with a letter and message to her, explanatory of the late events in Scotland, she at first refused to see him, and when she was, at last, induced to grant him an interview, she, according to the phrase of Calderwood, the historian of the Kirk, "rattled him up" on the subject of his political conduct, but_he replied with so much mildness and politeness, that her wrath was subdued, and she parted from him courteously.

The revolution by which Lenox and his colleague Stuart, earl of Arran, had emancipated their youthful sovereign from the degrading tutelage in which he had been kept, by his father's murderers and his mother's foes, had also broken Elizabeth's ascendancy in the Scottish court. A counter influence, even that of the captive Mary Stuart, was just then predominant there. Davison, Elizabeth's ambassador to Scotland, assured Walsingham that the Scottish queen, from the guarded recesses of her prison, guided both king and nobles as she pleased.'

The young king was now marriageable, and his mother's intense desire for him to marry with a princess of Spain was well known. If such an alliance were once accomplished, it might be suspected that the English catholics, assured of aid both from Scotland and Spain, would no longer endure the severity of penal laws, and the injustice to which they were subjected by a queen, whose doubtful legitimacy might afford a convenient pretext to the malcontent party for her deposition. The Jesuits, undismayed by tortures and death, arrayed their talents, their courage, and subtlety, against Elizabeth, with quiet determination, and plots, and rumours of plots, against her life and government, thickened round her. The details of these would require a folio volume. The most important in its 1 MS. Harl., folio 398.

2

MS. letter in State Paper office, quoted by Tytler.

effects was that in which the two Throckmortons, Francis and George, were implicated, with Charles Paget, in a correspondence with Morgan, an exiled catholic, employed in the queen of Scots' service abroad. Francis Throckmorton endured the rack thrice with unflinching constancy; but when, with bruised and distorted limbs, he was led for a fourth examination to that terrible machine, he was observed to tremble. The nervous system had been wholly disarranged, and, in the weakness of exhausted nature, he made admissions which appeared to implicate Mendoça, the Spanish ambassador, as the author of a plot for dethroning queen Elizabeth. Mendoça indignantly denied the charge, when called upon to answer it, before the privy council, and retorted upon Burleigh the injury that had been done to his sovereign, by the detention of the treasure in the Genoese vessels.' He was, however, ordered to quit England without delay. Lord Paget and Charles Arundel fled to France, where they set forth a statement that they had retired beyond seas, not from a consciousness of guilt, but to avoid the effects of Leicester's malice. Lord Paget was brother to one of the persons accused.

Throckmorton retracted on the scaffold all that had been wrung from his reluctant lips by the terrors of the rack.

The capture of Creighton, the Scotch Jesuit, and the seizure of his papers, which he had vainly endeavoured to destroy, by throwing them into the sea, when he found the vessel in which he had taken his passage pursued by the queen's ships, brought to light an important mass of evidence connected with the projected invasion of England, and Elizabeth perceived that a third of her subjects were ready to raise the standard of revolt in the name of Mary Stuart. At this momentous crisis, the treachery of the king of Scotland's mercenary envoy, Arthur Gray, by putting Elizabeth in possession of the secrets of his own court and the plans of the captive queen, enabled her to countermine the operations of her foes. She out-manoeuvred king James, and, as usual, bribed his cabinet; she first duped, and then crushed Mary, and laid the rod of her vengeance with such unsparing severity on her catholic subjects, that the more timorous fled, as the reformers had done in the reign of

1 Camden.