rie, by Thomas Tusser. Tottel's Miscellany was a collection of verses, known in society, but never before published, by the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and others. Thomas Tusser's poem was the first edition of a work afterwards much enlarged. These were new books at the accession of Elizabeth, and are related to the early literature of her reign.

CHAPTER VII.

THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH.

1. ON New Year's-day, 1540, when Francis I. and Charles V. rode into Paris together (ch. vi. § 43, 54), the Emperor was on his way through France to punish Ghent. The Netherlands passed in 1477 to Austria, by marriage of Mary of Burgundy with Archduke Maximilian. Charles V. was born of marriage between Archduke Philip, heir by right of his mother to the Netherlands, and Joanna, who being the second daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, was, after the death of intervening persons, heir to the monarchies of Spain. Thus Charles acquired by inheritance both Spain, which was essentially Catholic, and the Netherlands, with a population kindred to our own.

The seventeen provinces of the Netherlands differed in character and constitution, but they all sent deputies to a StatesGeneral, which had no power of taxation, and acknowledged appeals to a Supreme Tribunal at Mechlin. Four of these provinces were duchies-Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, and Guelderland; seven were counties-Flanders, Holland, Zealand, Artois, Hainault, Namur, and Zutphen; five were seignioriesFriesland, Mechlin, Utrecht, Overyssel, and Groningen; and the seventeenth-Antwerp-was a margraviate. Charles was himself born and bred in Flanders; he talked Flemish and favoured Flemings. The Netherlanders, therefore, liked him, though their temper was republican, and his was a despotic rule. He taxed them heavily because they were more prosperous than their neighbours. It was revolt in Ghent against an excessive tax that Charles went to put down in 1540. He did put it down with a strong hand, compelling the chief citizens to kneel before him in their shirts, with halters round their necks.

The spirit of the Reformation spread also among these people

TO A.D. 1558.] SPAIN, ENGLAND, AND THE NETHERLANDS. 317

of the Netherlands; and Charles V. battled in vain against it. He sought to bring into Flanders the Inquisition, which had been re-instituted in Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1480; but the people rose and expelled the Inquisitor-General who had been sent to them by the pope. A modified Inquisition was established, with provision made in 1546 that no sentence of an inquisitor should be carried out until it had the sanction of a member of the Provincial Council. Thus in the Netherlands thousands died for their faith, while the English Reformers were during the reign of Edward VI. gathering strength.

In October, 1555, Charles V., aged about fifty-six, abdicated at Brussels in favour of his son Philip II., then twenty-eight years old, a small, thin, sullen man, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with a great mouth, a protruding lower jaw, and a digestion spoilt by pastry. He had been married about fifteen months before to Queen Mary of England; and Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger had been executed for rebellious objection to the wedding (ch. vi. § 60). Philip received from his living father Spain, with all its outlying dominion, a month after the sovereignty of the Netherlands had been transferred to him. His dignity as head of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles resigned in favour of his brother Ferdinand. In September, 1556, Charles sailed for Spain, and he died in his seclusion at Yuste about two months before Anne Boleyn's daughter became Queen of England.

If Charles had been in some respects a Fleming among the Spaniards, Philip, born and bred in Spain, was a Spaniard among the Flemings. His court in Brussels was almost wholly Spanish, his advisers were Spanish grandees; the chief of them, Philip's pliant favourite, Ruy Gomez, afterwards Prince of Eboli, who usually counselled peace, and the Duke of Alva, counsellor of war. Philip had remained in England with Queen Mary after his marriage to her in July, 1554, until some weeks before his father's abdication. He did not return to England until March, 1557, when, for reasons of his own, as King of Spain, he urged England into war with France. Paul IV. was seeking, by alliance with France, to loosen the hold of Spain upon Italian soil. Philip, therefore, caused England, in June, 1557, to declare war against his enemy of France, and in July, having gained his point, left England never to return. On the other side, Mary of Guise, then Regent of Scotland, was incited by King Henry II. of France to attack England. The Duke of Savoy, with the Spanish army of the Netherlands and

English reinforcements, gained in August a great victory over the Constable Montmorenci, at St. Quentin, and then, through advice of Philip, lost the opportunity of pressing victory by an advance. He stayed to press siege of the town, which was not taken till a fortnight later. The Duke of Guise, coming from Italy, was made Lieutenant-General of France, assembled a fresh army, and by surprise took Calais and Guines from the English in January, 1558, thus making a happy end of English domination on French soil. On the 24th of the following April, Guise's niece, Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots, then about sixteen years old, was married to Francis, the French dauphin, a youth of her own age; and by a secret article of the marriage contract, Scotland and France were to be united under one sovereign if Mary died childless. When Mary of England died, on the 17th of November, 1558, Elizabeth was twenty-five years old, and the Queen of Scots was held by many in England, and by most in France, to have a more legitimate right to the throne. The new queen took for her chief counsellor Sir William Cecil, then aged thirty-eight, the Lord Burleigh of after years, and made Cecil's brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon (they married two daughters of Sir Anthony Coke) her Lord Keeper. Philip of Spain, her sister's widower, thought it good policy to offer his hand to Elizabeth of England, on condition that she would profess the same religion he professed, and maintain it and keep her subjects true to it. Elizabeth dead, the English throne would pass to the Queen of Scots-through her to France. The marriage of Elizabeth, though not to Philip, was therefore, desired by her people. Spain was the first power of the world, and France the second. England had declined during the reign of Mary. Her active fleet consisted of seven coast-guard vessels, and eight small merchant brigs and schooners altered for fighting, besides twenty-one vessels in harbour, of which all but six or seven were sloops and boats. But Spain and France were rival powers, and for a time Elizabeth could make the jealousies of one serve to protect England from the other. The endeavours of Spain and England to procure restitution of Calais were suspended for some months; and in April, 1559, the belligerents, Spain helping England in negotiation, made peace in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. In the following July, at festivities in celebration of this peace, Henry II. of France was killed by an accident, and was succeeded by the eldest of his seven children, the young husband of Mary Queen of Scots,

TO A.D. 1559.] AT THE Accession OF ELIZABETH.

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who was ruled by the Guises, through their niece, his wife, during the seventeen months of his reign. Francis and Mary called themselves King and Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The chief endeavour of the Guises was to subdue the Church Reformers, or Huguenots, as they were called, from “Eguenots," a French corruption of the German "Eidgenossen" (sworn associates). Oppression by the Guises produced organised resistance, part political, and part religious. Elizabeth in England had restored Cranmer's liturgy; established in the Prayerbook a choice of prayers to meet differences of opinion, and other compromises; dissolved the monasteries which Mary had refounded; sent to the Tower, where they were well lodged and had no axe to fear, those bishops who refused allegiance to her supremacy; and held her own, although the Protestantism of the English towns was represented by much smaller numbers than Catholicism of the rural districts. To foreign menace the young queen could reply with spirit that "her realm was not too poor, nor her people too faint-hearted, to defend their liberties at home and to protect their rights abroad." In December, 1560, Francis II. died, and the next brother, a boy in his eleventh year, became king as Charles IX. His mother, Catherine de' Medici, ruled in his name, at first with a desire to please all parties, and allay their strife.

Soon after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, which ended war between France and Spain, King Philip left the Netherlands under the regency of his half-sister, the Duchess Margaret of Parma, natural daughter of Charles V. Philip parted from the Netherlands in August, 1559, with a "Request" for three millions of gold florins; and information that he had commanded the Regent accurately and exactly to enforce every existing edict and decree for the extirpation of all sects and heresies. The Request was not assented to without an emphatic counter-request from each of the provinces, and a remonstrance from the States-General, signed by the Prince of Orange, Count Egmont, and others, urging the withdrawal of Spanish troops out of the Netherlands. Very soon after Philip had returned to Spain, at an auto-da-fé in October, he swore by the cross of his sword to give all necessary favour to the holy office of the Inquisition; and to a young man, one of thirteen then burnt alive before him, who asked how he could look on and suffer such things to be done, he answered, “I would carry the wood to burn my own son withal, were he as wicked as you."

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2. John Knox, after his imprisonment in the French galleys (ch. vi. § 53), had been in England from 1549 to 1554, and as one of Edward VI's chaplains had been associated with men of the English Reformation. He spent two of the five years in Berwick, two in Newcastle, and one in London. He found his first wife at Berwick, and married her before he was driven out of England by the persecutions under Mary. He was then in different places on the Continent, at Dieppe, at Frankfort, until 1555, when, after a short visit to Scotland, he became the pastor of an English congregation at Geneva. There he worked with Calvin, who had become supreme, and made the city what Knox took to be "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles." It was from Geneva, just before the accession of Elizabeth, that Knox issued, without his name, his First Birst of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women. His wrath was against the rule of the three Marys, Mary of Guise, queen dowager and regent of Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots, and Queen Mary of England, and on behalf of so many learned and men of grave judgment as this day by Jezebel are exiled." In his preface he said that men had offended "by error and ignorance, giving their suffrages, consent and help to establish women in their kingdoms and empires, not understanding how abominable, odious and detestable is all such usurped authority in the presence of God;" and he ended with this sentence: "My purpose is thrice to blow the trumpet in the same matter, if God so permit: twice I intend to do it without name, but at the last blast to take the blame upon myself, that all others may be purged." After such preface he began his book, a small quarto, about as big as a man's hand, with the assertion that "to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to His revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice." Women are not worthy to rule. "I exempt," said Knox, "such as God, by singular privilege and for certain causes known only to Himself hath exempted from the common rank of women, and do speak of women as nature and experience do this day declare them. Nature, I say, doth paint them further to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish : and experience hath declared them to be unconstant. variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of