Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth Part 23

It is difficult to believe, notwithstanding this positive testimony, that the duke of Norfolk, a man of mild dispositions and guided in the main by religion and conscience, would have hazarded, or would not have scrupled, so atrocious, so inexpiable an act of violence, as that of cutting off the regent of Scotland returning to his own country under sanction of the public faith and the express protection of the queen: but he may have indulged himself in vague menaces, which Westmorland, a bigoted papist, ripe for rebellion against the government of Elizabeth, would have felt little reluctance to carry into effect, and thus the regent's duplicity might in fact be prompted and excused to himself by a principle of self-defence.

Whatever degree of confidence Norfolk and his advisers might place in Murray's sincerity, they were well aware that other steps must be taken, and other confederates engaged, before the grand affair of the marriage could be put in a train to ensure its final success. There was no immediate prospect of Mary's regaining her liberty by means of the queen of England, or with her concurrence; for since the production of the great charge against her, to which she had instructed her commissioners to decline making any answer, Elizabeth had regarded her as one who had suffered judgement to go against her by default, and began to treat her accordingly. Her confinement was rendered more rigorous, and henceforth the still pending negotiations respecting her return to her own country were carried on with a slackness which evidently proceeded from the dread of Mary, and the reluctance of Elizabeth, to bring to a decided determination a business which could not now be ended either with credit or advantage to the deposed queen.

Elizabeth had dismissed the regent to his government without open approbation of his conduct as without censure; but he had received from her in private an important supply of money, and such other effectual aids as not only served to establish the present preponderance of his authority, but would enable him, it was thought, successfully to withstand all future attempts for the restoration of Mary. Evidently then it was only by the raising of a formidable party in the English court that any thing could be effected in behalf of the royal captive; but her agents and those of the duke a.s.sured themselves that ample means were in their hands for setting this machine in action.

Elizabeth, it was now thought, would not marry: the queen of Scots was generally admitted to be her legal heir; and it appeared highly important to the welfare of England that she should not transfer her claims, with her hand, to any of the more powerful princes of Europe; consequently the duke entertained little doubt of uniting in favor of his suit the suffrages of all those leading characters in the English court who had formerly conveyed to Mary a.s.surances of their attachment to her t.i.tle and interests. His own influence amongst the n.o.bility was very considerable, and he readily obtained the concurrence of the earl of Pembroke, the earl of Arundel (his first wife's father), and lord Lumley (a catholic peer closely connected with the house of Howard). The design was now imparted to Leicester, who entered into it with an ostentation of affectionate zeal which ought perhaps to have alarmed the too credulous duke. As if impatient to give an undeniable pledge of his sincerity, he undertook to draw up with his own hand a letter to the queen of Scots, warmly recommending the duke to her matrimonial choice, which immediately received the signatures of the three n.o.bles above mentioned and the rest of the confederates. By these subscribers it was distinctly stipulated, that the union should not take place without the knowledge and approbation of the queen of England, and that the reformed religion should be maintained in both the British kingdoms;--conditions by which they at first perhaps believed that they had provided sufficiently for the interests of Elizabeth and of protestantism: it was however immediately obvious that the duke and his agents had the design of concealing carefully all their measures from their sovereign, till the party should have gained such strength that it would no longer be safe for her to refuse a consent which it was well known that she would always be unwilling to grant.

But when, on encouragement being given by Mary to the hopes of her suitor, the kings of France and Spain, and even the Pope himself, were made privy to the scheme and pledged to give it their a.s.sistance, all its English, and especially all its protestant supporters, ought to have been aware that their undertaking was a.s.suming the form of a conspiracy with the enemies of their queen and country against her government and personal safety; against the public peace, and the religion by law established; and nothing can excuse the blindness, or palliate the guilt, of their perseverance in a course so perilous and so crooked.

Private interests were doubtless at the bottom with most or all of the partic.i.p.ators in this affair who were not papists; and those,--they were not a few,--who envied or who feared the influence and authority of Cecil, eagerly seized the occasion to array against him a body of hostility by which they trusted to work his final and irretrievable ruin.

It seems to have been by an ambitious rivalry with the secretary, that sir Nicholas Throgmorton, whose early life had exhibited so bold a spirit of resistance to tyranny and popery when triumphant and enthroned, had been carried into a faction which all his principles ought to have rendered odious to him. In his intercourses with the queen of Scots as amba.s.sador from Elizabeth, he had already shown himself her zealous partisan. In advising her to sign for her safety the deed of abdication tendered to her at Loch-Leven, he had basely suggested that the compulsion under which she acted would excuse her from regarding it as binding: to the English crown he also regarded her future t.i.tle as incontrovertible. He now represented to his party, that Cecil was secretly inclined to the house of Suffolk; and that no measure favorable to the reputation or authority of the queen of Scots could be carried whilst he enjoyed the confidence of his mistress. By these suggestions, the duke, unfortunately for himself, was led to sanction an attempt against the power and reputation of this great minister.

Leicester, who had long hated his virtues; the old corrupt statesmen Winchester, Pembroke, and Arundel; and the discontented catholic peers Northumberland and Westmorland, eagerly joined in the plot. It was agreed to attack the secretary in the privy-council, on the ground of his having advised the detention of the money going into the Low Countries for the service of the king of Spain, and thus exposing the nation to the danger of a war with this potentate; and Throgmorton is said to have advised that, whatever he answered, they should find some pretext for sending him to the Tower; after which, he said, it would be easy to compa.s.s his overthrow.

But the penetration of Elizabeth enabled her to appretiate justly, with a single exception, the principles, characters, and motives of all her servants; and she knew that, while his enemies were exclusively attached to their own interests, Cecil was attached also to the interests of his prince, his country, and his religion; that while others,--with that far-sighted selfishness which involves men in so many intrigues, usually rendered fruitless or needless by the after-course of events,--were bent on securing to themselves the good graces of her successor, he was content to depend on her alone; that while others were the courtiers, the flatterers, or the ministers, of the queen, he, and perhaps he only, was the friend of Elizabeth. All the rest she knew that she could replace at a moment;--him never. Secret information was carried to her of all that her council were contriving, and had almost executed, against the secretary: full of indignation she hurried to their meeting, where she was not expected, and by her peremptory mandate put an instant stop to their proceedings; making Leicester himself sensible, by a warmth which did her honor, that the man who held the first place in her esteem was by no one to be injured with impunity.

The earl of Suss.e.x, the true friend of Norfolk, and never his abettor in designs of which his sober judgement could discern all the criminality and all the rashness, was grieved to the soul that the artifices of his followers should have set him at variance with Cecil. He was doubtless aware of the advantage which their disagreement would minister against them both to the malignant Leicester, his and their common enemy; and trembling for the safety of the duke and the welfare of both, he addressed to the secretary, from the north, where he was then occupied in the queen's service, a letter on the subject, eloquent by its uncommon earnestness.

He tells him that he knows not the occasion of the coldness between him and the duke, of which he had acknowledged the existence; but that he cannot believe other, esteeming both parties as he does, than that it must have had its origin in misrepresentation and the ill offices of their enemies; and he implores him, as the general remedy of all such differences, to resort to a full and fair explanation with the duke himself, in whom he will find "honor, truth, wisdom and plainness."

These excellent exhortations were not without effect: it is probable that the incautious duke had either been led inadvertently or dragged unwillingly, by his faction, into the plot against the secretary, whose ruin he was not likely to have sought from any personal motive of enmity; and accordingly a few weeks after (June 1569) we find Suss.e.x congratulating Cecil, in a second letter, on a reconciliation between them which he trusts will prove entire and permanent[68].

[Note 68: "Ill.u.s.trations" &c. by Lodge, vol. ii.]

Hitherto the queen had preserved so profound a silence respecting the intrigues of the duke, that he flattered himself she was without a suspicion of their existence; but this illusion was soon to vanish. In August 1569, the queen being at Farnham in her progress and the duke in attendance on her, she took him to dine with her, and in the course of conversation found occasion, "without any show of displeasure," but with sufficient significance of manner, to give him the advice, "to be very careful on what pillow he rested his head." Afterwards she cautioned him in plain terms against entering into any marriage treaty with the queen of Scots. The duke, in his first surprise, made no scruple to promise on his allegiance that he would entertain no thoughts of her; he even affected to speak of such a connexion with disdain, declaring that he esteemed his lands in England worth nearly as much as the whole kingdom of Scotland, wasted as it was by wars and tumults, and that in his tennis-court at Norwich he reckoned himself equal to many a prince.--These demonstrations were all insincere; the duke remained steady to his purpose, and his correspondence with the queen of Scots was not for a single day intermitted in submission to his Sovereign. But he felt that it was now time to take off the mask; and fully confiding in the strength of his party, he requested the earl of Leicester immediately to open the marriage proposal to her majesty, and solicit her consent. This the favorite promised, but for his own ends continued to defer the business from day to day.

Cecil, who had recently been taken into the consultations of the duke, urged upon him with great force the expediency of being himself the first to name his wishes to the queen; but Norfolk, either from timidity, or, more probably, from an ill-founded reliance on Leicester's sincerity, and a distrust, equally misplaced, of that of Cecil, whom he was conscious of having ill treated, neglected to avail himself of this wise and friendly counsel, by which he might yet have been preserved.

Leicester, who watched all his motions, was at length satisfied that his purpose was effected,--the victim was inveigled beyond the power of retreat or escape, and it was time for the decoy-bird to slip out of the snare.

He summoned to his aid a fit of sickness, the never-failing resource of the courtiers of Elizabeth in case of need. His pitying mistress, as he had doubtless antic.i.p.ated, hastened to pay him a charitable visit at his own house, and he then suffered her to discover that his malady was occasioned by some momentous secret which weighed upon his spirits; and after due ostentation of penitence and concern, at length revealed to her the whole of the negotiations for the marriage of the duke with the queen of Scots, including the part which he had himself taken in that business.

Elizabeth, who seems by no means to have suspected that matters had gone so far, or that so many of her n.o.bles were implicated in this transaction, was moved with indignation, and commanded the immediate attendance of the duke, who, conscious of his delinquency, and disquieted by the change which he thought he had observed in the countenance of her majesty and the carriage towards him of his brother peers, had sometime before quitted the court, and retired first to his house in London, and afterwards to his seat of Kenninghall in Norfolk.

The duke delayed to appear, not daring to trust himself in the hands of his offended sovereign; and after a short delay, procured for him by the compa.s.sion of Cecil, who persisted in a.s.suring the queen that he would doubtless come shortly of his own accord, a messenger was sent to bring him up to London. This messenger, on his arrival, found the duke apparently, and perhaps really, laboring under a violent ague; and he suffered himself to be prevailed upon to accept his solemn promise of appearing at court as soon as he should be able to travel, and to return without him.

Meanwhile the queen, now bent upon sifting this matter to the bottom, had written to require the Scottish regent to inform her of the share which he had taken in the intrigue, and whatever else he knew respecting it. Murray had become fully aware how much more important it was to his interests to preserve the favor and friends.h.i.+p of Elizabeth than to aim at keeping any measures with Mary, by whom he was now hated with extreme bitterness; and learning that the confidence of the duke had already been betrayed by the earl of Leicester, he made no scruple of acquainting her with all the particulars in which he was immediately concerned.

It thus became known to Elizabeth, that as early as the conferences at York, the regent had been compelled, by threats of personal violence on his return to Scotland, to close with the proposals of the duke relative to his marriage;--that it was with a view to this union that Mary had solicited from the states of Scotland a sentence of divorce from Bothwell, which Murray by the exertion of his influence had induced them to refuse, and thus delayed the completion of the contract: but it appeared from other evidence, that written promises of marriage had actually been exchanged between the duke and Mary, and committed to the safe keeping of the French amba.s.sador. It was also found to be a part of the scheme to betroth the infant king of Scots to a daughter of the duke of Norfolk.

The anger of Elizabeth disdained to be longer trifled with; and she dispatched a messenger with peremptory orders to bring up the duke, "his ague notwithstanding," who found him already preparing to set out on his journey. Cecil in one of his letters to sir Henry Norris, dated October 1569, relates these circ.u.mstances at length, and expresses his satisfaction in the last, both for the sake of the state and of the duke himself, whom, of all subjects, he declares he most loved and honored. He then proceeds thus: "The queen's majesty hath willed the earl of Arundel and my lord of Pembroke to keep their lodgings here, for that they were privy of this marriage intended, and did not reveal it to her majesty; but I think none of them did so with any evil meaning, and of my lord of Pembroke's intent herein I can witness, that he meant nothing but well to the queen's majesty; my lord Lumley is also restrained: the queen's majesty hath also been grievously offended with my lord of Leicester; but considering that he hath revealed all that he saith he knoweth of himself, her majesty spareth her displeasure the more towards him. Some disquiets must arise, but I trust not hurtful; for her majesty saith she will know the truth, so as every one shall see his own fault, and so stay.... My lord of Huntingdon is joined with the earl of Shrewsbury for the Scots queen's safety. Whilst this matter was in pa.s.sing, you must not think but the queen of Scots was nearer looked to than before."

The duke on his arrival was committed to the Tower; but neither against him nor any of his adherents did the queen think proper to proceed by course of law, and they were all liberated after a restraint of longer or shorter duration.

It is proper to mention, that the adherents of Mary in her own time, and various writers since, have conspired to cast severe reflections upon Elizabeth for committing her to the joint custody of the earl of Huntingdon, because this n.o.bleman, being descended by his mother, a daughter of Henry Pole lord Montacute, from the house of Clarence, was supposed to put his right of succession to the crown in compet.i.tion with hers, and therefore to entertain against her peculiar animosity. But on the part of Elizabeth it may be observed, First, that there is not the slightest ground to suspect that this n.o.bleman, who was childless, entertained the most distant idea of reviving the obsolete claims of his family; and certainly if Elizabeth had suspected him of it, he would never have held so high a place in her confidence. Secondly, nothing less than the death of Mary would have served any designs that he might have formed; and by joining him in commission with others for her safe keeping, Elizabeth will scarcely be said to have put it in his power to make away with her. Thirdly, the very writers who complain of the vigilance and strictness with which the queen of Scots was now guarded, all acknowledge that nothing less could have baffled the plans of escape which the zeal of her partisans was continually setting on foot. Amongst the warmest of these partisans was Leonard Dacre, a gentleman whose personal qualities, whose errors, injuries and misfortunes, all conspire to render him an object of attention, ill.u.s.trative as they also are of the practices and sentiments of his age.

Leonard was the second son of William lord Dacre of Gilsland, descended from the ancient barons Vaux who had held lords.h.i.+ps in c.u.mberland from the days of the Conqueror.

In 1568, on the death without issue of his nephew, a minor in wards.h.i.+p to the duke of Norfolk, Leonard as heir male laid claim to the t.i.tle and family estates, but the three sisters of the last lord disputed with him this valuable succession; and being supported by the interest of the duke of Norfolk their step-father, to whose three sons they were married, they found means to defeat the claims of their uncle, though indisputably good in law;--one instance in a thousand of the scandalous partiality towards the rich and powerful exhibited in the legal decisions of that age.

Stung with resentment against the government and the queen herself, by whom justice had been denied him, Leonard Dacre threw himself, with all the impetuosity of his character, into the measures of the malcontents and the interests of the queen of Scots, and he laid a daring plan for her deliverance from Tutbury-castle. This plan the duke on its being communicated to him had vehemently opposed, partly from his repugnance to measures of violence, partly from the apprehension that Mary, when at liberty, might fall into the hands of a foreign and catholic party, and desert her engagements with him for a marriage with the king of Spain.

Dacre, however, was not to be diverted from his design, especially by the man with whom he was at open enmity, and he a.s.sembled a troop of horse for its execution; but suspicions had probably been excited, and the sudden removal of the prisoner to Wingfield frustrated all his measures.

This was not the only attempt of that turbulent and dangerous faction of which the inconsiderate ambition of the duke had rendered him nominally the head but really the tool and victim, which he had now the grief to find himself utterly unable to guide or restrain.

The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, heads of the ancient and warlike families of Percy and Nevil, were the first to break that internal tranquillity which the kingdom had hitherto enjoyed, without the slightest interruption, under the wise and vigorous rule of Elizabeth. The remoteness of these n.o.blemen from the court and capital, with the poverty and consequent simplicity, almost barbarism, of the va.s.sals over whom they bore sway, and whose homage they received like native and independent princes, appears to have nourished in their minds ideas of their own importance better suited to the period of the wars of the Roses than to the happier age of peace and order which had succeeded.

The offended pride of the earl of Westmorland, a man dest.i.tute in fact of every kind of talent, seems on some occasion to have conducted him to the discovery that at the court of Elizabeth the representative of the king-making Warwick was a person of very slender consideration. The failure of the grand attack upon the secretary, in which he had taken part, confirmed this mortifying impression; and the committal of his brother-in-law, the great and powerful duke of Norfolk himself, must subsequently have carried home to the bottom of his heart unwilling conviction that the preponderance of the ancient aristocracy of the country was subverted, and its proudest chieftains fast sinking to the common level of subjects. His attachment to the religion, with the other practices and prejudices of former ages, gave additional exasperation to his discontent against the established order of things: the incessant invectives of Romish priests against a princess whom the pope was on the point of anathematizing, represented the cause of her enemies as that of Heaven itself; and the spirit of the earl was roused at length to seek full vengeance for all the injuries sustained by his pride, his interests, or his principles.

Every motive of disaffection which wrought upon the mind of Westmorland, affected equally the earl of Northumberland; and to the cause of popery the latter was still further pledged by the example and fate of his father, that sir Thomas Percy who had perished on the scaffold for his share in Aske's rebellion. The attainder of sir Thomas had debarred his son from succeeding to the t.i.tles and estates of the last unhappy earl his uncle, and he had suffered the mortification of seeing them go to raise the fortunes of the house of Dudley; but on the accession of Mary, by whom his father was regarded as a martyr, he had been restored to all the honors of his birth, and treated with a degree of favor which could not but strengthen his predilection for the faith of which she was the patroness. It appears, however, that the attachment of the earl to the cause of popery had not on all occasions been proof against immediate personal interest. Soon after the marriage of the queen of Scots with Darnley, that rash and ill-judging pair esteeming their authority in the country sufficiently established to enable them to venture on an attempt for the restoration of the old religion, the pope, in furtherance of their pious designs, had remitted the sum of eight thousand crowns. "But the s.h.i.+p wherein the said gold was," says James Melvil in his memoirs, "did s.h.i.+pwrack upon the coast of England, within the earl of Northumberland's bounds, who alleged the whole to appertain to him by just law, which he caused his advocate to read unto me, when I was directed to him for the demanding rest.i.tution of the said sum, in the old Norman language, which neither he nor I understood well, it was so corrupt. But all my entreaties were ineffectual, he altogether refusing to give any part thereof to the queen, albeit he was himself a catholic, and professed secretly to be her friend." And through this disappointment Mary was compelled to give up her design.

An additional trait of the earl's character is furnished by the same author, in transcribing the instructions which he carried home from his brother sir Robert Melvil, then amba.s.sador to England, on his return from that country, after announcing the birth of the prince of Scotland.

"_Item_, that her majesty cast not off the earl of Northumberland, albeit as a fearful and facile man he delivered her letter to the queen of England; neither appear to find fault with sir Henry Percy as yet for his dealing with Mr. Ruxbie," (an English spy in Scotland) "which he doth to gain favor at court, being upon a contrary faction to his brother the earl."

The machinations of the two earls, however cautiously carried on, did not entirely escape the penetration of the earl of Suss.e.x, lord president of the north, who sent for them both and subjected them to some kind of examination; but no sufficient cause for their detention then appearing, he dismissed them, hoping probably that the warning would prove efficacious in securing their peaceable behaviour. In this idea, however, he was deceived: on their return they instantly resumed their mischievous designs; and they were actually preparing for an insurrection, which was to be supported by troops from Flanders promised by the duke of Alva, when a summons from the queen for their immediate attendance at court disconcerted all their measures.

To comply with the command seemed madness in men who were conscious that their proceedings had already amounted to high treason;--but to refuse obedience, and thus set at defiance a power to which they were as yet unprepared to oppose any effectual resistance, seemed equally desperate.

They hesitated; and it is said that the irresolution of Northumberland was only ended by the stratagem of some of his dependents, who waked him one night with a false alarm that his enemies were upon him, and thus hurried him into the irretrievable step of quitting his home and joining Westmorland, on which the country flocked in for their defence, and they found themselves compelled to raise their standard.

The enterprise immediately a.s.sumed the aspect of a Holy War, or crusade against heresy: on the banners of the insurgents were displayed the cross, the five wounds of Christ, and the cup of the eucharist: ma.s.s was regularly performed in their camp; and on reaching Durham, they carried off from the cathedral and committed to the flames the bible and the English service books.

The want of money to purchase provisions compelled the earls to relinquish their first idea of marching to London; they took however a neighbouring castle, and remained masters of the country as long as no army appeared to oppose them; but on the approach of the earl of Suss.e.x and lord Hunsdon from York, with a large body of troops, they gradually retreated to the Scotch borders; and there disbanded their men without a blow. The earl of Westmorland finally made his escape to Flanders, where he dragged out a tedious existence in poverty and obscurity, barely supplied with the necessaries of life by a slender pension from the king of Spain. Northumberland, being betrayed for a reward by a Scottish borderer to whom, as to a friend, he had fled for refuge, was at length delivered up by the regent Morton to the English government, and was beheaded at York.

Posterity is not called upon to respect the memory of these rebellious earls as martyrs even to a mistaken zeal for the good of their country, or to any other generous principle of action. The objects of their enterprise, as a.s.signed by themselves, were the restoration of the old religion, the removal of evil counsellors, and the liberation of the duke of Norfolk and other imprisoned n.o.bles. But even their attachment to popery appears to have been entirely subservient to their views of personal interest; and so little was the duke inclined to blend his cause with theirs, that he exerted himself in every mode that his situation would permit to strengthen the hands of government for their overthrow; and it was in consideration of the loyal spirit manifested by him on occasion of this rebellion, and of a subsequent rising in Norfolk, that he soon after obtained his liberty on a solemn promise to renounce all connexion with the queen of Scots.

In the northern counties, however, the cause and the persons of the two earls, who had well maintained the hospitable fame of their great ancestors, were alike the objects of popular attachment: the miserable destiny of the outlawed and ruined Westmorland, and the untimely end of Northumberland through the perfidy of the false friend in whom he had put his trust, were long remembered with pity and indignation, and many a minstrel "tuned his rude harp of border frame" to the fall of the Percy or the wanderings of the Nevil. There was also an ancient gentleman named Norton, of Norton in Yorks.h.i.+re, who bore the banner of the cross and the five wounds before the rebel army, whose tragic fall, with that of his eight sons, has received such commemoration and embellishment as the pathetic strains of a nameless but probably contemporary bard could bestow. The excellent ballad ent.i.tled "The Rising in the North[69]" impressively describes the mission of Percy's "little foot page" to Norton, to pray that he will "ride in his company;" the council held by Richard Norton with his nine sons, when

"Eight of them did answer make, Eight of them spake hastily, O father! till the day we die We'll stand by that good earl and thee;"

while Francis, the eldest, seeks to dissuade his father from rebellion, but finding him resolved, offers to accompany him "unarmed and naked."

Their standard is then mentioned: and after recording the flight of the two earls, the minstrel adds,

"Thee Norton with thine eight good sons They doomed to die, alas for ruth!

Thy reverend locks thee could not save, Nor them their fair and blooming youth!"

[Note 69: See Percy's "Reliques," vol. ii.]

But how slender is the authority of a poet in matters of history! It is quite certain that Richard Norton did not perish by the hands of the executioner, and it is uncertain whether any one of his sons did. It is true that the old man with three more of the family was attainted, that his great estates were confiscated, and that he ended his days a miserable exile in Flanders. We also know that two gentlemen of the name of Norton were hanged at London: but some authorities make them brothers of the head of the family; and two of the sons of Richard Norton, Francis, and Edmund ancestor of the present lord Grantley, certainly lived and died in peace on their estates in Yorks.h.i.+re.

It is little to the honor of Elizabeth's clemency, that a rebellion suppressed almost without bloodshed should have been judged by her to justify and require the unmitigated exercise of martial law over the whole of the disaffected country. Sir John Bowes, marshal of the army, made it his boast, that in a tract sixty miles in length and forty in breadth, there was scarcely a town or village where he had not put some to death; and at Durham the earl of Suss.e.x caused sixty-three constables to be hanged at once;--a severity of which it should appear that he was the unwilling instrument; for in a letter written soon after to Cecil he complains, that during part of the time of his command in the north he had nothing left to him "but to direct hanging matters." But the situation of this n.o.bleman at the time was such as would by no means permit him at his own peril to suspend or evade the execution of such orders as he received from court. Egremond Ratcliffe his half-brother was one of about forty n.o.blemen and gentlemen attainted for their concern in this rebellion; he had in the earl of Leicester an enemy equally vindictive and powerful; and some secret informations had infused into the mind of the queen a suspicion that there had been some wilful slackness in his proceedings against the insurgents. There was however at the bottom of Elizabeth's heart a conviction of the truth and loyalty of her kinsman which could not be eradicated, and he soon after took a spirited step which disconcerted entirely the measures of his enemies, and placed him higher than ever in her confidence and esteem.

Cecil thus relates the circ.u.mstance in one of his letters to Norris, dated February 1570.

"The earl of Suss.e.x... upon desire to see her majesty, came hither unlooked for; and although, in the beginning of this northern rebellion, her majesty sometimes uttered some misliking of the earl, yet this day she, meaning to deal very princely with him, in presence of her council, charged him with such things as she had heard to cause her misliking, without any note of mistrust towards him for his fidelity; whereupon he did with such humbleness, wisdom, plainness and dexterity, answer her majesty, as both she and all the rest were fully satisfied, and he adjudged by good proofs to have served in all this time faithfully, and so circ.u.mspectly, as it manifestly appeareth that if he had not so used himself in the beginning, the whole north part had entered into the rebellion."

A formidable ma.s.s of discontent did in fact subsist among the catholics of the north, and it was not long before a new and more daring leader found means to set it again in fierce and violent action.

Leonard Dacre had found no opportunity to take part in the enterprise of the two earls, though a deep partic.i.p.ator in their counsels; for knowing that their design could not yet be ripe for execution, and foreseeing as little as the rest of the faction those measures of the queen by which their affairs were prematurely brought to a crisis, he had proceeded to court on his private concerns, and was there amusing her majesty with protestations of his unalterable fidelity and attachment, while his a.s.sociates in the north were placing their lands and lives on the hazard of rebellion. Learning on his journey homewards the total discomfiture of the earls, he carefully preserved the semblance of a zealous loyalty, till, having armed the retainers of his family on pretence of preserving the country in the queen's obedience, and having strongly garrisoned its hereditary castles of Naworth and Greystock, which he wrested from the custody of the Howards, he declared himself, and broke out into violent rebellion.

The late severities had rather exasperated than subdued the spirit of disaffection in this neighbourhood, and three thousand men ranged themselves under the scallop-sh.e.l.ls of Dacre;--a well known ensign which from age to age had marshalled the hardy borderers to deeds of warlike prowess. Lord Hunsdon, the governor of Berwick, marched promptly forth with all the force he could muster to disperse the rebels; but this time they stood firmly on the banks of the little river Gelt, to give him battle. Such indeed was the height of fanaticism or despair to which these unhappy people were wrought up, that the phrensy gained the softer s.e.x; and there were seen in their ranks, says the chronicler, "many desperate women that gave the adventure of their lives, and fought right stoutly." After a sharp action in which about three hundred were left dead on the field, victory at length declared for the queen's troops; and Leonard Dacre, who had bravely sustained, notwithstanding the deformity of his person, the part of soldier as well as general, seeing that all was lost, turned his horse's head and rode off full speed for Scotland, whence he pa.s.sed into Flanders and took up at Lovain his melancholy abode.