vide for the safety of her majesty's person; to rescue her out of the hands of evil counsellors; to obtain liberty for their consciences; and to settle true religion on such foundations as might supersede the interference of foreign princes, who would otherwise interpose to cure the long distempers of this distracted island.* On their march to Durham they manifested their fidelity to the faith of their fathers by a flag, on which the body of Christ, with the five wounds received in the crucifixion, was painted, which was borne before their van by Mr. Norton, a venerable old gentleman of the country, who, with his five sons, devoted himself for the restoration of his religion. They purified the cathedral of Durham by burning the heretical (and probably in their opinion unfaithful) versions of the Bible, and the books of public devotion, which had been profaned by heretics. On the 14th of November, at Darlington, the earls and their followers publicly heard mass. In about nine days after, they mustered 9000 men on a moor near Witherby; a force with which they had intended to march against York, had they not been induced by the advance of some of the queen's troops, who threw themselves into that city, to secure the country behind them by laying siege to the fortress of Barnard's Castle, which occupied the revolters for eleven critical days. On the 6th of December, Sussex began his march from York against the insurgents, and established his head-quarters at Hexham on the 20th, and when the insurgents had retreated almost to the border of Scotland, at Neworth Castle, in Cumberland. The earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland fled to Scotland, leaving their followers to the mercy of an exasperated party, whose execution of justice was accounted in their own age rigorous, and would in our times be justly deemed cruel. Holinshed, iv. 235. + The share of the Nortons in this revolt, and the extinction of their family, are the subject of Mr. Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone, — a poem in which the blended powers of history and legend, placed amidst beautiful scenes, and enthroned as it were in the remains of ancient piety, breathe a sage and solemn strain of poetical sentiment. Our information concerning particulars is here more than commonly defective. On the 4th or 5th of January, "sixty-six constables and others" were executed at Durham. Sir George Bowes, charged with the administration of martial law, executed many favourers of the rebellion in "divers places of the country.” * Northumberland fled to Scotland; and being made prisoner in the castle of Lochleven by Moray, he was, long after, surrendered by Morton to the English government, who caused him to be executed at York. Westmoreland also ran across the borders, where he was welcomed by the Carrs † and Scotts, two border tribes, who were partisans of Mary. A signal act of baseness was perpetrated on this occasion by one whose pride and prejudice might have been deemed a security for his superiority to such degrading falsehood. Robert Constable, the son of an ancient and distinguished family in Yorkshire, tendered his services to sir Ralph Sadler, first as a spy to discover the number of the rebels; but soon after the flight of the two earls into Scotland (to use his own words), "I waded deeply into a more treacherous kind of service, to trap them that trusted in me, as Judas did Christ.” His intended victim was the earl of Westmoreland, who was either his uncle or his cousin. At Fernihurst, where the fugitive earl had been sheltered, Constable urged him to throw himself upon the mercy of the English government, as his best or only chance. The rest can be adequately told only in his own words: "The tears overhayled his cheeks abundantly: I could not forbear to weep to see him suddenly fall to repentance. When we retired into a secret chamber he said, Modern Holinshed, iv. 337. This appears to be the narrative nearest to the events; and it is corroborated by the insertion of some names. writers, by leaving out the words "and others," and by representing Bowes's executions to have occurred in every village from Newcastle to Wetherby, have exaggerated severities which were doubtless excessive. Leslie, who is quoted by Hume, is not an admissible witness against Elizabeth's lieutenants. + Carr of Fernihurst (the ancestor of the marquis of Lothian), according to Dugdale, i. 301. Sir R. Sadler tells us, that lady Northumberland, with lord Westmoreland, Norton, Tempest, and Radcliffe, were "maintained against the regent's will by lord Hume, Fernihurst, Buccleugh, Johnstone," and other border chiefs. Sadler, ii. 96. Dugdale, i. 301. "Cousin Robert, you are my kinsman, nearly come forth from my house, and one whom I trust and dearly love."" Though the remembrances of near kindred did not shake the purpose of Constable, he knew how to turn it to account, by reminding his employer what obstacles of affection he conquered in his zeal for the public cause, and how much his importunate demand for large sums of money were justified by such heroic sacrifices. The treachery of Constable did not inveigle Westmoreland into the snare. But it affords a frightful example of a government accepting the service of infamous men, who entice accused or suspected persons to be slaughtered, on pretext that they only bring forward the lurking disposition to guilt, which would otherwise have been mischievously exerted; a practice which in general offences against society is an attempt to do the works of justice by the power of depravity, and in political charges has the additional fault of bolting the doors of sanctuary against those whose defeat may be their only crime. The earl of Westmoreland escaped into Flanders, and died in 1584, in the station beneath his habits, and, it may be hoped, abhorrent from his feelings, of commandant of a Spanish regiment, in the midst of the indignities and wrongs to which emigrants are often doomed, against which his own dignity, age, and calamities did not protect him, and which were unsparingly practised towards those unpitied Englishmen who, as we shall see afterwards, had betrayed to the enemy the important fortresses intrusted to English faith.† In defiance of victory and rigour, Leonard Dacres, uncle of the lord Dacres of the north, renewed the rebellion towards the close of January, 1570, when he collected 3000 men at Naworth castle, which was his dwelling, and which is still preserved, a beautiful specimen of the border architecture of that age. On the 22d of Fe Sadler, ii. 110-124. +"The estate of English fugitives under the king of Spain."-Sadler, ii. 208-330. A very curious tract, probably written to serve a purpose; but bearing many marks of tolerable veracity and accuracy. Now a seat of the earl of Carlisle. bruary, 1570, on the banks of the small river Chelt, near Naworth, Dacres made a hardy onset against the queen's army under her kinsman lord Hunsden. The fight was sharp and cruel, and the event for a while very doubtful; for the frenzy of the catholic party might be estimated from the fact, that there were in the ranks of the revolters many desperate women, who not only fought stoutly, but inflamed and shamed their companions into mortal resistance. Three hundred were killed on both sides, which contemporaries considered as a great slaughter; as it might, perhaps, be generally deemed, being probably about a twentieth part of the number of the combatants. Dacres escaped by the speed of his horse into Scotland. Executions at York followed, of which we have few particulars; and general submission was restored. During these disturbances, on the 22d of January,1570, the regent earl of Moray was assassinated by Hamilton of Bothwell-haugh, from motives of private revenge. On the very day of the murder, Buccleugh and Fernihurst, as if not unconscious that the strong arm which had often curbed their career was withdrawn by that crime, entered. the northern counties of England, burning and destroying the houses of friends and enemies in a spirit of impartial rapine. To take revenge for this inroad, as well as to punish the Scotch borderers for their aid to the catholic insurgents, Sussex commanded Scrope and Porter, his lieutenants, to march into Scotland, with instructions to plunder, waste, burn, or otherwise destroy whatever they met. Lord Scroop and sir John Foster, at the same time, carried fire and sword through various parts of the Scottish border. They demolished the castles of Home and Fernihurst. Hamilton, the greatest of the fortified dwellings in the accessible portion of Scotland, fell under their destroying hands. A few of their stragglers entered Edinburgh, rather as a mode of showing defiance and triumph than with any more serious purpose. Satiated with a month's ravage and destruction, they returned without molestation. * Holinshed, iv. 237. + Hist of James VI., 48. ed. Edinburgh, 1895. The fate of Moray's name is singular, even among conspicuous and active men, in an age torn in pieces by contending factions. Contemporary writers agree in nothing, indeed, but his great abilities and energetic resolution. Among the people he was long remembered as "the good regent," partly from their protestant zeal, but in a great measure from a strong sense of the unwonted security of life and property enjoyed in Scotland during his vigorous administration.* His catholic coun trymen abroad bestowed the highest commendations on his moral character, which are not impugned by one authenticated fact. But a powerful party has for nearly three centuries defamed and maligned him, in order to extract from the perversion of history a hypothetical web to serve as a screen for his unhappy sister,—in the formation of which they are compelled to assume, that she did nothing which she appeared to have done; and that he did all that he appears to have cautiously abstained from doing. The English revolt seemed thus to be finally extinguished by the triumph of Sussex over the partisans of Mary in Scotland. That revolt was deeply connected with the facts which, after its suppression, led to judicial proceedings of the highest sort against the first subject in the realm. The duke of Norfolk, no unworthy son of the illustrious Surrey, heir to his vast possessions and princely descent, added to that share in Elizabeth's favour which belonged to the noblest of her mother's kindred, the better sources of influence which arose from his own excellent qualities. Among these were particularly distinguished a facility of temper, and a generous prone ness to trust, which, though they always contribute to the charm of private life, are in troublous seasons sometimes irreconcilable with the sternness which may then become indispensable, either to the uniformity of inflexible virtue, or to the success of daring ambition. Though he professed the protestant faith, yet, like others of the *Thuani Histor. ubi supra. |