to reserve our censure for cases in which either the inviolable and unchangeable principles of reason, justice, and humanity were violated, or where the rules of law, as they were understood, and as they were practised towards men in general, were, in defiance of even-handed justice, withheld from some individuals.* Under the first head of charge, it was sufficiently established that he secretly sought marriage with a princess who had never renounced her pretensions to the crown of England; that he had given clandestine counsel to the rebel lords; that he had made private advances of money to the rebels in Scotland, who were the queen's enemies; that he had thrown out hints, easily intelligible, that, if his marriage were forbidden by his sovereign, he should not shrink from maintaining his claims by arms; and that he had obtained promises of support in his pursuit, from the mighty potentates of the Continent, who were conspiring the destruction of England. The new treason materially consisted in the fact that, after he had been forgiven and enlarged by Elizabeth, and when she had given him the fairest earnest of a legal pardon, he had again renewed his secret intercourse with the queen of Scots, in breach of all his promises; and that, in spite of a clemency for which he had professed gratitude, he had once more listened to the proposals of Rudolfi and the holy allies of Bayonne, for taking a part in measures which aimed at the deposition of the queen of England, and were likely to terminate in her destruction. Rudolfi, a Florentine banker, appears to have been sent * I should not have said so much on a legal proceeding, if I had not been compelled, in some degree, to dissent from one of the most valuable, and. I must add, one of the most interesting, works of this age, Mr. Phillipps's abridgment of the State Trials, which wants nothing but a continuation of equal merit. That want may not indeed be soon supplied; for it is the work of a man who surveys the most contested, the most obscure, and the most bloody proceedings in our history, with the sagacity, probity, and sincerity of the wisest magistrate. I rather agree, however, with Mr. Hume, who considers the proceedings against Norfolk as considerably justified by the ordinary practice of the age. Phillipps's Abridgment, i. 32, 33. by Mary as her minister to the pope, the king of Spain, and the duke of Alva, to obtain aid in money and troops. He brought back favourable assurances, to be delivered to the queen of Scots and the duke of Norfolk, whose union was assented to by these great personages, although the king of Spain endeavoured to clog it with the condition that Norfolk should declare himself a catholic, and that the prince of Scotland (entitled king by the rebels) should be sent for education into Spain. Rudolfi declared to the privy council that he had proposed to Norfolk an insurrection, for the purposes of obtaining a repeal of the laws against catholics, and the consent of the queen to the union of Mary with the duke, to be carried into effect either by the means of English insurgents alone, who were to seize the queen's person, or through a junction with the duke of Alva, who had undertaken to land in England at the head of 10,000 men. Norfolk was brought to trial for these offences, in January, 1572, before the lord steward, and twenty-six lords triers. He conducted himself with dignity, and defended himself with an ability which the accounts of historians, who vie with each other in praise of his virtues, would not have taught us to expect. On the other hand, Wilbraham, attorney-general of the court of wards, distinguished himself by early specimens of that genuine eloquence, which, by its power over reason and feeling, influences the course of human affairs.* There is no reasonable ground for doubting that the duke of Norfolk had actually incurred the penalties of treason. The secret matters urged against him on his trial, tally so exactly with well known facts, and with his own admission of his intercourse with the catholic princes, and of his clandestine renewal of negotiations for the delivery and espousal of Mary, which could hardly have been effected without force, that all the confessions of the other conspirators seem only to reveal the natural con * State Trials, i. 958. sequences of his acknowledged conduct.* That the depositions of witnesses not confronted with the prisoner were read against him, is an instance of a most defective jurisprudence; but, being general, it neither affords a presumption that the government had any thing to hide, or that wrong was intended against the duke of Norfolk. It is otherwise with torture, or even with threats, which, without any reference to established rules of law, have in their own nature a tendency to abate or to destroy the value of testimony obtained by employing them. But this important consideration is outweighed, in the case of Norfolk, by the subsequent silence of the bishop of Ross, one of the witnesses whose depositions were read, who, though he outlived Norfolk for many years, in which he never had any measures to keep with Elizabeth, neither alleged that his own examinations were falsified, nor contradicted the accounts given by others of negotiations of which he had the chief conduct. Norfolk's protestations against the charge of an attack on the queen may be reasonably considered as referring to plans of assassination. It is also an act of justice to observe, that he, whose ancestors had taken so large a part in the wars of York and Lancaster, probably regarded a rising for a redress of grievances as being not only, as it is sometimes, innocent or meritorious in the eye of conscience, but perhaps as not amounting to treason in point of law. He was unanimously found guilty, and judgment of death was necessarily pronounced upon him. But Elizabeth hesitated to inflict it on so popular a nobleman, the chief of her nobility, her own friend and near kinsman. A warrant for execution had been issued on the 8th of February, but it was countermanded at the unusual hour of eleven at night. After two other warrants had been countermanded in like mannert, a fourth was obtained from * Murdin, i. 175. compared with Anderson's Collections, iii., forms a vast mass of unanswerable evidence. . † Despatches of Fénélon, quoted by Carte. her, as she seems to intimate, by importunate counsel, on the 30th of April, which she countermanded with her own hand at the unseasonable hour of two o'clock in the morning. These circumstances are more indicative of conflicting emotions, than of the hypocritical policy to which they have been ascribed. * We learn from Cecil that the queen 66 was somewhat sad" after the death of Norfolk. † It is not unreasonable to believe with Camden that Norfolk would have been spared if the rumour of conspiracy to release him had not supplied the sterner statesmen with a specious reason for his execution. He was put to death on the 8th of June, 1572. He was the only nobleman who perished on the scaffold during the first fourteen years of Elizabeth's reign. The people, to whom he was endeared by his benignity and gracious deportment, not to mention the fine proportions of his person and the manly beauty of his countenance, were moved to compassion by the fate of so excellent a man. § They called to mind the fortunes of his father, adorned as he was by the fame of letters and of arms, who had five and twenty years before perished on the same spot. Elizabeth betrayed her sense of the odium of the execution of the most popular of her nobility, when his sister, lady Berkeley, two years after, having knelt down to obtain a grace from the queen, the latter answered in haste, “No! no! my lady Berkeley! We know you never will love us, for the death of your brother." || Sir Ralph Sadler, in a letter full of insolence and sarcasm, described the impression of Norfolk's conviction on the queen of Scots, whose prison was at that time at Sheffield. During the week of his arraignment and trial, "she never once looked out of her chamber." When she heard the conviction noised abroad in the household, "this queen wept very bitterly, so that my lady Shrewsbury found her weeping and mourning so as to ask the queen what ailed Digges, 212, Ellis, ii. 262. Camd. 255. Fosbroke's Extracts from Smythe's Lives of the Berkeleys, 190. London, 1821. her; to which she answered, that my lady could not be ignorant of the cause.' What previous faults of such a woman could dispose a manly spirit to withhold fellow feeling from her when she was in the hands of a gaoler, who made her generous sorrows the subject of scurrilous ribaldry? A great part of the conspiracy to restore Mary through the means of an union with Norfolk, was carried on by Leslie, her representative at the court of London, who was committed to the Tower, where he confessed more important circumstances than were suitable to his deserved reputation for faith and firmness. This prelate complained loudly that the sacred, because most useful, privileges of ambassadors were violated in his person. To his remonstrances the English government returned a twofold answer. They contended that the exemption of ambassadors from those laws to which all other resident aliens were amenable, had for its professed purpose and sole object the preservation of amity with foreign states; but that a crime so flagrantly adverse to this object as high treason could not be embraced within diplomatic inviolability. They urged, again, that as sovereigns negotiate only on behalf of the communities who own their authority, a dispossessed sovereign wanted the quality most essential to the right of sending ambassadors; that Leslie was no more than the ordinary agent of a princess who, by her abdication, had become a private individual, and that Elizabeth could not consent to clothe her agent with the immunities of the diplomatic character, without contradicting her own recognition of the young king of Scots, and betraying the interests of her neighbours and friends, the successive regents of Scotland. The English civilians, who were consulted on this grave occasion, determined that the most legitimate ambassador would forfeit his immunities by exciting rebellion against the state with which he was commissioned to cultivate friendship; and that the agents of a prince * Ellis, second series, ii. 329. |