THE LIBRARY
,,f
\ ICTORIA UNIVERSITY
Toronto
HENRY FROWDE M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THI UNIV'ER$1TY OF OXFORD
LONDOlq, EDINBURGH NE,V YORK
TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
PREFACE
Tins collection of Portraits of Persons celebrated in the History
of Great Britain and Ireland owes its existence largely to the zeal
of Mr. Emery Walker, whose well-known skill as a reproducer of
ancient pictures has elevated Photography to the rank of a fine art.
It is not possible to guarantee the perfect authenticity of all the
portraits reproduced; all that can be said is that no portrait has
been admitted which was knoxvn to be without serious claims to
authenticity. Much must depend in all doubtful cases upon the value
attached to family tradition; and every one knows how very readily
family tradition goes astray in the matter of pictures. Moreover, the
History of the Art of Portrait-painting in Great Britain still remains
to be written ; and it ought to be written soon, before the details of
the almost lost arts of line engraving and mezzo-tint are wholly
forgotten.
It has been thought best to leave the portraits to speak for
themselves, without attempting to point out in the accompanying
'Lives' their respective merits and defects. It is hoped that
subsequent volumes may carry the series down to the middle of the
nineteenth century; the reason for beginning at the close of the
fourteenth will appear obvious to every one who knows anything
of the History of Art.
It is obviously impossible to begin a series of portraits from a
date at which portrait-painting xvas unknoxvn north of the Alps.
iv PREFACE
This is the reason why the book begins, as all previous books of
the same kind have begun, with King Richard I I. Even for his
picture and one or two more at the commencement of this volume
little more than traditional authenticity can be claimed.
Acknowledgements are due to the following persons for kindly
granting permission to photograph portraits in their possession :
His Majesty the King for Bishop Fisher, Lord Darnley, Sir
Philip Sidney, and Prince Arthur; the Barber Surgeons' Company
for Henry VIII; the Marquess of Bath for Lord Seymour and
Henry FitzAlan Earl of Arundel; His Grace the Duke of Bed-
ford, K.G., for Mary Tudor twith the Duke of Suffolk) and Jane
Seymour; the President of Blair's College, Aberdeen, for David
Beaton ; the Curators of the Bodleian Library for Isaac Casaubon
and Sir Martin Frobisher; the Hon. Mrs. Boyle for the Earl of
Bothwell; His Grace the Duke of Buccleugh for Holbein; His
Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury for Edward V, Richard Fox,
Katherine Parr, Archbishop Whitgift, Archbishop Parker, Antony
Woodville, Earl Rivers, Archbishop Chicheley, and Archbishop
Grindal ; the Right Hon. Lord De L'Isle and Dudley for Sir Francis
Walsingham; the Right Hon. the Earl of Derby for Sir Francis
Drake; the Right Hon. the Earl of Devon for Edward Courtenay
Earl of Devon ; His Grace the Duke of Devonshire for James V of
Scotland ; the Right Hon. the Viscount Dillon for Queen Elizabeth
and Archbishop Warham ; the Right Hon. the Earl of Effingham for
Lord William Howard ; the Provost of Eton College for Henry VI ;
the Vice-Chancellor, Glasgow University, for George Wishart; His
Grace the Duke of Hamilton for Regent Moray; Miss Stuart
Hawkins for Sir John Hawkins ; the Principal of Hertford College
for William Tyndale; Edward Huth, Esq., for Sir Thomas More;
the Executors of the late Sir James Knowles, K.C.V.O., for Henry
Wriothesley third Earl of Southampton; the Right Hon. the Earl
PREFACE v
of Lauderdale for William Maitland ; the President of Magdalen for
Dean Colet and Waynflete; the Master of Magdalene College,
Cambridge, for Edward Duke of Buckingham ; His Grace the Duke
of Norfolk, K.G., for the second and third Dukes of Norfolk; His
Grace the Duke of Northumberland, K.G., for Protector Somerset;
the Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, for Edmund Spenser ;
the Royal College ot Physicians for Thomas Linacre ; the Principal
of Queens' College, Cambridge, for Lady Elizabeth Grey and Sir
Thomas Smith; the Right Hon. the Countess of Romney for Sir
Thomas Wyatt; the Right Hon. Lord Sackville for John Dudley
Duke of Northumberland and Thomas Sackville Earl of Dorset;
the President of St. John's College, Oxford, for Anne of Cleves ; the
Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, for Bishop Gardiner; and the
Hon. the Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham for Sir Christopher
Hatton.
The portraits from the National Portrait Gallery are from photo-
graphs by Mr. Emery Walker, F.S.A.
OXFORD, 29o 9.
viii CONTENTS
William Paget
Hans Holbein
David Beaton .
Mary of Guise
Hugh Latimer
Nicholas Ridley
Edmund Bonner
John Hooper .
William Maitland of Lething-
ton
James Stewart, Earl of Moray
Matthew Parker
John Whitgift
Henry Lord Darnley
James Hepburn, fourth Earl of
Bothwell
Sir Henry Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney
Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester
Sir Christopher Hatton
Richard Hooker
John Jewel
Charles Howard, Earl of
Nottingham
Charles Blount, Earl of Devon-
shire
Sir John Hawkins .
Edmund Spenser
Henry Wriothesley, third Earl
of Southampton
Sir Francis Walsingham
Robert Devereux, second Earl
of Essex
PAGE
r28
r3o
r31
r33
I36
I38
r43
145
I47
I49
I5I
r53
54
I56
I59
i6o
I6I
I62
I67
i68
I7O
PAGE
r73
Sir Thomas Gresham
Antony Woodville, second Earl
Rivers r74
William of Waynflete I75
Henry Chicheley *76
Elizabeth Woodville I77
Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk. I78
Arthur, Prince of Wales. I79
Edward Courtenay, Earl of
Devon. *80
Thomas Howard, second Duke
of Norfolk I8I
Lord William Howard i82
Thomas Howard, third Duke
of Norfolk 183
Thomas Seymour, Lord
Seymour of Sudeley 184
Henry Fitzalan, twelfth Earl of
Arundel 185
Hugh O'Neill, second Earl of
Tyrone ,87
Sir Thomas Wyatt. r89
George Buchanan I9o
Isaac Casaubon I9r
Edmund Grindal r92
Henry Carey, first Lord
Hunsdon 193
Thomas Sackville, first Earl of
Dorset I94
John Foxe I95
George Wishart i96
Sir Nicholas Bacon i97
Sir Thomas Smith . i98
Sir Martin Frobisher 199
INTRODUCTION
Sov_ effort of imagination is required to realize at the present time
what sort of people'were those of whom the King of Spades, the
Queen of Hearts and the Knave of Diamonds were once agreed to
be living resemblances. To us these more or less grotesque diagrams
only remotely resemble men and women at all, and are totally lacking
in characteristic features. Yet they were, no doubt, as completely
individualized to the men who designed them, and their contempo-
raries, as a photograph of a living public character is to us. Imagina-
tive discipline of the same sort is no less necessary to the study of
the earliest paintings of English historical personages ; the outlines
are heavy and hard, surfaces which we are accustomed to see, in
nature, varied with softly rounded shadows, appear as patches of flat
tints, clothing is represented by a geometrical arrangement of lines
and angles, and the accessory details contribute more to puzzle the
spectator than to assist in defining the objects it was intended to
represent.
It is, however, upon paintings of this type that we are dependent
when we attempt to gather together a gallery of mediaeval portraits
in a volume. The portraits occasionally to be found in illumi-
nated manuscripts might indeed be relied upon to carry the series
back to a more remote period ; but as they are closely fettered by
the decorative canons of the design of which they form part, they
have not only, in an acute form, the defects already described, but
also the added disadvantage of diminutive scale.
Coins and medals, in later periods of the highest importance,
x INTRODUCTION
particularly in the case of the portraiture of Royal personages, provide
us with only scanty information until the Tudor period. It is from
the effigies on their tombs that most of our knowledge of the appear-
ance of the Kings and Queens, the great Churchmen and Soldiers
of the Norman and Plantagenet periods, is derived. The series of
monumental figures of English Sovereigns and Consorts from the
Norman Conquest to the accession of the House of Stuart, although
not complete, presents an impressive array, probably unrivalled by
those which exist of any other European dynasty ; but placed as they
are, for the most part, in situations in churches where they are
difficult to draw and impossible to photograph, these statues lie rather
outside the range of a volume of illustrations such as the present ;
they must be studied in
Our National gallery of painted portraits begins with Richard I I.
Of this monarch two most interesting and also very beautiful pictures
are preserved, one the seated kingly figure, reproduced in these pages,
which now hangs in the presbytery of Westminster Abbey, the other
forming part of a diptych, or folding picture of two panels, now in the
collection of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House. In this the
King is represented with his patron saints kneeling at the feet of the
Virgin and Infant Christ. It is uncertain whether these are the only
chance su'ivors of a series of fine works of the same type, or
really represent a brief meteoric blaze of the fine arts at the Court
of Richard. It is also a matter of dispute whether the artist or
artists belonged to the French school or to the band of Bohemian
folloxvers who accompanied Richard's queen, Anne, from the Court
of Prague, where a very flourishing offshoot of the Italian school is
known to have been established at that time.
The remaining Royal portraits--and few remain of any other
rank--up to the time of Richard III belong to a class about whose
origin but little is known. Their importance as portraits may be very
INTRODUCTION xi
justly summed up in some words of Horace Walpole's in his
Anecdotes of Paintizg in Ezgland. 'Though not all originals,' he says,
speaking of some other works attributed to this same era, 'they
undoubtedly are very valuable, being in all probability painted from the
best memorials then extant and.., representations of remarkable
persons of whom no other image remains.' In spite of the destruction
wrought by religious and political fanaticism at the time of the
Reformation and the Civil War, in spite of neglect due to changes of
fashion, and decay due to the inevitable ravages of time, enough
paintings remain, especially on the panels of screens in Churches in
Norfolk and Suffolk, to show, apart from plentiful documentary
evidence, that a prosperous school of pictorial art {affected, as was
natural enough in that part of the country, by Flemish influence}
existed in England during the fifteenth century. At the same time,
it seems probable that a very considerable proportion of the actual
pictures which have come down to us are what are called restorations,
copies, that is, of the later Tudor period, either made to complete
already existing sets of the Kings of England, or forming parts of
series entirely manufactured at that time.
With the admirable portrait of Henry VI I, which is now happily
preserved in the National Portrait Gallery, and of which a reproduction
is here given, we quit the category of the Court-cards and enter the
realm of portraiture in the modern sense. A wealthy and securely-
seated sovereign, reigning in peace over a rich country., happy in
encouraging the political and commercial relations of his kingdom
with the continent of Europe, was a potential Maecenas to whom some
of the less fashionable denizens of the teeming artistic hives of Italy
and Flanders were glad to pay their court. Piero Torrigiano {i472-
I52) , the Florentine sculptor, fellow student of Michelangelo, was
one of these ; and in designing the magnificent monumental effigies of
the King, his Queen and his mother, in Westminster Abbey, ",vas
b2
xii INTRODUCTION
astute enough to colour his style with a strong infusion of naturalism,
to make it palatable to the taste of a race which he regarded as semi-
barbarian. To the Flemish immigrants, such as the artist to whom
our picture of the King is due, this highly elaborated imitation of
nature came quite naturally. One of the most successful of these
men, one who, indeed, narrowly missed being a great portrait painter,
xvas Jan Rave (ft. I512-441, who also latinized his name as Johannes
Corvus. It is not known when he came to England, but his finest
xvork, the picture of Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, preserved
at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, appears to have been executed
between about i52o and t528. Another noble portrait from his hand
is that of Mar)- Tudor, Queen of France, in the collection of
Mr. H. Dent Brocklehurst at Sudeley Castle ; a third xvork attributed
to him is the portrait of Queen Mar 5" I, illustrated in the present
volume.
All minor stars, and there must have been many of all nationalities
shining, xvere eclipsed by the appearance of one in xvhom the
Teutonic mastery of minute and literal statement of fact was blended
with something of the Southern love of colour and softly rounded
light and shade, and heightened by insight and genius of the highest
order. This was Hans Holbein of Baselli497-i543, who arrived in
England in i526, bearing an introduction from Erasmus to Sir Thomas
More, by whom the painter xvas forthwith commissioned to paint
a large group of the More family. Drawings for several of the
heads and copies or imaginary reproductions of the whole picture
are in existence, but the original work, if it was ever executed,
has disappeared. The single bust of Sir Thomas More himself
in the possession of Mr. Edward Huth (included in the present
collection) is dated i527. William Warham, Archbishop of Canter-
bury, another correspondent of Erasmus, also patronized Holbein,
and sat, also in t527, for a portrait of which three examples are
INTRODUCTION xiii
preserved, one at Lambeth Palace, a second in the Museum of the
Louvre, and the third (here reproduced) in the collection of Viscount
Dillon at Ditchley.
From this time Holbein's supremacy at the English Court was
assured, but unfortunately many of his most admirable pictures of
English men and women have been allowed to drift away from their
native land. Thus his finest portraits of two Queens, Anne of
Cleves and Jane Seymour, are now the one in Paris, the other
in Vienna; while his original sketch of the head of Henry VIII
adorns the Royal print-cabinet at Munich. With this last important
exception, however, Holbein's most valuable legacy to students of
English history is the magnificent series of drawings in chalks on pale
pink paperof almost all the most famous personages of Henry VIII's
Court ; and these are preserved nearly intact in the Royal Library at
Windsor Castle. The head of Bishop Fisher in the present volume
is a specimen of them. As a gallery at once of contemporary
portraits and of works of art of the highest order, these drawings
are without any possible rival. Holbein's last work, left unfinished
when he was snatched away by the plague, was a large panel
representing Henry VI I I granting a charter to the Barber-Surgeons'
Company of London; our portrait of the King forms part of this
composition.
During Holbein's lifetime the peculiarly English art of
miniature-painting in water-colours took its rise. It was in some
degree a derivative of the illuminations with which it had been
customary to enrich not only manuscript, and, more recently,
printed books, but patents, grants and documents of that kind;
in these very frequently the initial letter was actually adorned
with the Royal portrait. From the point of view of the historian,
miniatures, particularly those of the earlier periods, are only too often
of little value on account of the difficulty of verifying the subjects.
xiv INTRODUCTION
Owing perhaps to their portability, even the sequence of their
owners--to say nothing of the identity of their subjects--can very
seldom be traced with the certainty that attaches itself to more
bulky portraits on wood or canvas, preserved for long generations
on the walls they were originally intended to decorate; while
the smallness of the space at the command of the artist often
precluded the introduction of inscriptions, coats of arms, and other
marks of identification. For somewhat similar reasons, although the
names of a number of miniature-painters, or limners as they were
called, of the Tudor period, have been recorded, the difficulties
of apportioning their extant works amongst them are now quite
beyond solution.
The success of Holbein and other foreign artists soon en-
couraged that native talent for the fine arts, which has always been
present, and that in an eminent degree, in England, to produce fresh
evidences of its vitality. Among the British painters of this period
the name of one Guillim Stretes has been greatly conjured with.
Actually, however, the pictures attributed to him, although all works
of remarkable merit, display a variety of styles, influenced now by
Holbein, nov by the Italians; which seems clearly to show that
they cannot be the work of one man. Other artists, equally
shadows of names, it is scarcely necessary to mention here.
A foreigner of great talent, very little lower than the greatest,
whose name has attached itself to English history on the strength of
a few portraits only, was Anthonis Mor. He came to England to
paint for Philip II the wonderful portrait of his bride Mary I, now
in the Prado Gallery at Madrid. Besides this, which is probably the
only picture executed by him in England, Mor painted several
portraits of Sir Thomas Gresham, one of which is included in the
present collection, and others of sundry Englishmen whose affairs
carried them to the Low Countries, where he passed most of his life.
INTRODUCTION xv
Many Italian painters of secondary rank, finding the markets
on the banks of the Tiber and Arno overstocked, carried their
talents beyond the Alps; a similar congestion in the Netherlands
drove others over the North Sea; and as soon as the persecution of
the reformed religion began in Holland and Flanders, such artists
helped to swell the great body of refugees who did so much to build
up the greatness of England in science and art. Amongst these
fugitives came Lucas d'Heere of Ghent [i534-84}, whose work
was greatly in favour with Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.
Although not a portrait-painter of high rank, d'Heere had a pretty
taste for costume and accessories, which doubtless appealed to
his Royal patronesses; and it makes his pictures attractive and
interesting to modern eyes. A large imaginary group of Henry VII I
and his family, in the collection of Mr. H. Dent Brocklehurst
at Sudeley Castle, is a striking instance of his skill and fancy; but
his portrait of Queen Mary I, in the possession of the Society of
Antiquaries at Burlington House, displays a grasp of character
which is rare with him.
The early years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth witnessed
the birth of a new form of portraiture in England ; the art, namely,
of engraving on plates, which were frequently taken from sketches
from life made for the purpose. To this art, imported, like much
that we have already mentioned, from Flanders, we are indebted
for the several important and authentic representations of Queen
Elizabeth as a young woman by Thomas Geminus, Franciscus
(ft. i558-88 , and Remigius (ft. I572-87) Hogenburg, and the whole-
length of her in old age by William Rogers (ft. i589-i6o4 ; this is
the first portrait engraving ever signed by an Englishman, and
is perhaps the most impressive and indeed awe-inspiring effigy of the
great Queen that has come down to us.
Queen Elizabeth held very definite views as to the form in which
xvi INTRODUCTION
she desired her features to be handed down to posterity; a pro-
clamation, well known from frequent quotation, was drafted for-
bidding the circulation of any such representation of the Royal
person as had not received official sanction. Evelyn declares in his
Scu[jblttra that it was actually put into force, and that in one instance
so vast a quantity of'vile copies, multiplied from an ill painting'
was confiscated, that the prints being 'brought to Essex House
did for several years furnish the Pastry-men with peels for the use
of their Ovens'. Restrictions of this sort were successful in in-
fluencing all the works of painters occupied in executing portraits
about the Court, then the principal if not the only sphere of em-
ployment for an artist. An inimitable description of the portraits
of the Virgin Queen is given by Horace Walpole. 'The profusion
of ornaments with which they are loaded are marks of her continual
fondness for dress while they entirely exclude all grace, and leave
no more room for a painter's genius than if he had been employed
to copy an Indian idol, totally composed of hands and necklaces.
A pale Roman nose, a head of hair loaded vith crowns and powdered
with diamonds, a vast ruff, a vaster fardingale, and a bushel of pearls
are the features by which everybody knows at once the pictures
of Queen Elizabeth.'
So stereotyped did Court portraiture become that it is some-
times difficult to identify with any certainty the subject of the
picture ; very often, indeed, portraits of ladies of rank answering more
or less to Walpole's description, and to the general idea of what
a portrait of Queen Elizabeth ought to look like, have been given her
name without further inquiry. Too little, also, is known of the
painters of these pictures; it is easy to divide them roughly into
groups and isolate the works of one man, but to give that man
a name is, in the present state of our knowledge, hazardous in the
extreme.
xviii INTRODUCTION
the Queen; to her may also be due the taste for a bright, cheerful
scheme of colour, in which scarlet and white contrasted with black
seem often to predominate, and a thoroughgoing minuteness in the
details of costumes and accessories, which often sets tone and aerial
perspective at defiance. All these merits and defects are fully
displayed in the artist's most ambitious work, the large group, now
in the National Portrait Gallery, of the English and Spanish Pleni-
potentiaries (6o4).
The rise of miniature painting and its progress in the hands of
foreign practitioners have already been spoken of. The reign of
Queen Elizabeth witnessed a great development in this branch of art
at the hands of a native master, Nicholas Hilliard (537-69). As
an artist Hilliard cannot, of course, be compared with Holbein; his
style is stiff and archaic; but the number of portraits of remarkable
personages that he executed, even when we have withdrawn from
consideration a large proportion of them xvhich are doubtfully or
erroneously named, gives his work high importance to the student
of history. The career of Hilliard's pupil, Isaac Oliver (t556-t617) ,
really belongs to the following reign, but some of his work, notably
the famous miniature of Sir Philip Sidney in the Royal Library at
Windsor Castle, reproduced in the following pages, may fairly be
classed as Elizabethan.
As has been already noted, it was during the Tudor period that
the coin-types begin to acquire a distinct iconographic value ; indeed
a well-known proof-piece in the British Museum, with a portrait
of Elizabeth in old age, was so unpalatably realistic to her Majesty
that she attempted to deface it with her scissors, the marks of which
it still bears. Medals were occasionally struck throughout the
period ; but with the exception of a fexv, such as Jacopo da Trezzo's
medals of Queen Mary, they are rarely of high interest as portraits.
The cameos with Regal portraits, particularly abundant in the case
INTRODUCTION xix
of Queen Elizabeth, are equally from this point of view without value ;
little is known about their authorship.
The Royal and other monumental effigies up to the time of
Henry VII have already been mentioned. None of the three
succeeding sovereigns is commemorated by tomb-sculptures; and
there is generally noticeable, in the Reformation period, a falling off
in the quantity and quality of the sepulchral memorials, xvhich is
perhaps little surprising. The Elizabethan era witnessed a revival in
this respect. The Queen's own effigy in Westminster Abbey, made
by Maximilian Poutrain, alias Colt I'fl. I6OO-I8), a Flemish refugee, is
a very striking naturalistic work. It is recumbent, as is that of Mary
Queen of Scots, in the other aisle of Henry the Seventh's Chapel.
The funereal monuments of this period very frequently, however, take
the form of kneeling figures or half-length statues. Naive and stiff
in manner, their uncouth and startling effect increased by gaudy
colouring, these figures have an undeniable air of truthfulness, owing
doubtless in many instances to the fact that they were based upon
casts taken after death from the features of those xvhom they com-
memorate. A great debt of gratitude is due to the sculptors of these
memorials, one of whom has bequeathed to us by far the more vivid
of the two unassailably authentic portraits of Shakespeare.
In examining the paintings of the Tudor period it is necessary
to bear in mind the purposes that they were originally intended to
serve and the technical restrictions imposed upon the artists who
executed them. Although portraits doubtless sometimes formed
part of the painted decoration of the walls of buildings--for example,
the great group of Henry VIII with his Queen, Jane Seymour, and
his father and mother, one of the most important works of Holbein's
English period, was painted on a wall in the old Palace of Whitehall
--the pictures which have come down to us are, almost without
exception, of a portable character. These ' tables', as they are called,
xx INTRODUCTION
are painted on vooden--usually oaken--panels; the use of canvas,
an Italian invention, was not introduced until the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Difficulties in the preparation of large panels,
and their unwieldy weight when constructed, restricted the gener-
ality of pictures to small dimensions. Such vast panels as those
used by Holbein for his 'Ambassadors' and 'Henry VIII granting
a Charter to the Barber-Surgeons' Company' are rarely to be found;
even life-sized, whole-length portraits are not common before the
introduction of canvas.
From an artistic point of view nearly all the paintings reproduced
in the present volume are what may be called Primitive; that is
to say, they belong to an epoch and style in which a quasi-deceptive
appearance of roundness, depth of tone and aerial perspective was
not regarded, as it has been in more modern times, as a principal
object of attainment. Holbein himself used leaf-gold to represent
metal, and all the painters of the period freely introduced coats of
arms, emblems, and inscriptions floating, as it were, in mid-air, and
having no tonal relation to the rest of the picture, being employed,
in fact, simply to enhance the decorative effect.
I n the eighteenth century when the race of diletlazti believed, or
affected to believe, that the grand style of art could only find
expression in historical and subject pictures, the taste for portraiture,
deeply rooted in the English character, was sometimes satirized as
a childish if not vulgar form of personal vanity. The history
of the art proves, however, that this lively interest in the appearance
of our forefathers and contemporaries really amounts to a national
characteristic. As a result of this there exists in the British
Islands a profusion of historical monuments of this class rivalled by
no other country in the world. The National Portrait Gallery in
London, and the similar but less extensive galleries in Edinburgh and
Dublin, are, considered as a whole, without parallel in the other capitals
INTRODUCTION xxi
of Europe. The accessory collection of engraved portraits in the
Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum is the
most numerous in existence. Many corporate bodies, particularly
the Universities and Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, possess large
and interesting collections, supplemented in the case of Oxford by
a collection of engravings (the Hope Collection) but little inferior to
that of the British Museum. Especial interest attaches to some of
the galleries of what may be called official family portraits in the
possession of episcopal sees and learned societies ; the series belong-
ing to the Archbishopric of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, to the
Royal Society at Burlington House and to the College of Physicians,
are noteworthy instances. At the head of the legion of ancestral
collections comes, very properly, that belonging to the Crown; to
realize the matchless quality of this, it is only necessary to reflect
that Windsor Castle contains the Holbein drawings, the treasures of
the Vandyck room, the great canvases of Lawrence in the Waterloo
Gallery, the miniatures--Royal accumulations of three hundred
years--and a priceless series of Tudor and Stuart portraits, which
finds its complement scattered through the state apartments at
Hampton Court. This latter palace possesses also the beauties of
the Court of Charles I I painted by Lely, and those of the Court
of William III by Kneller. Buckingham Palace has its share as well
as Windsor of the masterpieces of Reynolds and Gainsborough
and the portraits of the Victorian era, which only need time to set
them as far beyond price, as portraits, as the rest. It would be
invidious to single out the greater of the great mansions of the
nobility on account of their riches in this particular. Knole,
Hardwick, Woburn, Wilton, Althorp and Welbeck, where the
assemblage of family portraits is supplemented by a magnificent
series of miniatures, may be named without nearly exhausting the
list of collections of the first rank; while at Montagu House the
INTRODUCTION xxiii
the Trustees of the British Museum in J9o5; and the present year
has seen the issue by the same body of the first volume of the
Catalogue of British Engraved Portraits by Mr. F. M. O'Donoghue.
The identification of the subject of a miniature frequently needs, for
reasons which have already been noticed in these pages, judicious
scrutiny; but making allowance for this, much of high iconographic
value will be found in two handsome works dedicated to this branch
of art : Miniahtre Pahzlers, British and Foreign, by Mr. J. J. Foster,
9o3, and the History of Portrait Miniatures by Mr. G. C. William-
son, 9o4 . The coinage types are very fully illustrated in Mr.
H. A. Grueber's Handbook of the Cohts of Great Britaht and 1roland,
899. For the sepulchral statues of the mediaeval period no
representations superseding the exquisite etchings in C. A. Stothard's
MonumeMal Effi.gies of Great lritat)t, 817, and the continuation by
T. and G. I-Iollis, 84o-2, have yet appeared. The titles of other
works bearing on the subject might be quoted, but enough have
been named to show those whose interest is excited by the present
volume how ample a field exists for widening their knowledge of
English Historical Portraits.
RICHARD II
crown. In the next year he contrived to arrest Gloucester and
Arundel, always his secret enemies; then, overawing a Parliament
by the presence ot a strong armed levy, he got the Acts of I386 and
i387 repealed, condemned Arundel, Gloucester and Warwick to
death, banished Archbishop Arundel and acquitted Derby and Not-
tingham, whom he soon afterwards advanced to dukedoms. A fresh
Parliament in the next 3-ear at Shrewsbury gave the King the customs
for life, and he afterwards interpolated into the Act clauses still more
favourable to the royal authority. Meanwhile the two remaining
leaders of 387, now Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk, could not
but feel uneasy. Each suspected the other of maligning him to the
King; they quarrelled and challenged each other to a duel. The King
stopped the duel when the combatants were already in the lists, and
banished them both. To Hereford, however, he expressly promised
the estates of his father, John of Gaunt, if that prince should
die during his son's exile. John died in i399 and Richard
violated his promise by confiscating the Lancastrian estates. Duke
Henry returned from France and landed in Yorkshire, professing to
claim only his father's title and property : but Richard's government
had been so unpopular that Henry was eventually able to go on to
claim the Crown itself. Richard was in Ireland when Henry landed,
and Henry, though as yet acting only" as Duke of Lancaster, was
practically master of the kingdom before his rival's return (July i399.
They met at Flint; Richard's own army had already melted away
or deserted him there, and he was at once treated as a captive. He
is said to have offered to resign the Crown there and then : but the
actual resignation did not take place till he had been taken in Henry's
train to London, where he was sent to the Tower. A committee
nominated by a Parliament, which Henry had called in Richard's
name, received his resignation. After confinement in various places
Richard seems either to have been starved or to have starved him-
self to death at Pontefract Castle in 4oo, in his thirty-fourth year.
Numerous traditions that he was alive and had escaped to Scotland
RICHARD II 3
or elsewhere were handed down, but none of them are capable of
proof.
Richard's character has been a standing puzzle to historians, for
it was evidently full of self-contradictory traits. The high-spirited
boy who, alone of English sovereigns before George I I I, was ever
called upon to confront a dangerous mob, and who emerged so
triumphantly from that ordeal, ended as a melancholy, perhaps an
insane captive. Fierce, impulsive and affectionate at some periods of
his life, he was crafty and secret at others, yet with occasional fits of
dreaminess. He had evidently a very high idea of royal prerogative
and a great contempt for Parliament and for his nobles. He was
able to show much interest in letters and in art, though we do not
know whether he was himself at all learned. He was prudent
enough to make peace with France, which no doubt added to his
unpopularity, and to undertake on two occasions, though without
success, the long neglected task of restoring peace to Ireland. He
was a man of great stature and great personal beauty.
HENRY IV
From the picture in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown
HENRY IV 5
the whole of the Lancastrian inheritance. Henry, whose whole
life in England had been devoted, in accordance with the traditions
of his house, to a quiet but steady conciliation of popular favour,
was no doubt well informed of the growing unpopularity of
Richard; he therefore took advantage of Richard's absence in
Ireland to land in Yorkshire with a few followers, professing to
claim only his paternal inheritance of Lancaster. But, as he
advanced south-westwards, he was received with such acclamations
and joined by such powerful men, notably the Percys of North-
umberland, that he was able to take a sharp vengeance on the
unpopular ministers of Richard, many of whom he beheaded, and
to advance in overwhelming force to meet the King on his return
from Ireland. Richard submitted tamely, and Henry issued writs,
still in Richard's name, for a Parliament in London. At this Parlia-
ment, September I399, Henry claimed the Crown, which Richard
resigned, and was joyfully accepted as King by both Houses. The
popularity of the House of Lancaster veiled the essential illegality
of the business. A month later Richard was condemned to per-
petual imprisonment and was never seen again; a rising of his
friends in the next year was easily put down, and it is supposed
that this led to Richard's murder at Pontefract.
Henry's reign, however, was never for a moment quiet, and
treason always dogged the steps of the King who had usurped
the throne. His enemies constantly tried to poison or assassinate
him; France and Scotland were both hostile: even Wales was
able to lift its head in little spurts of rebellion. Pseudo-Richards
began to appear in various parts of England, and their appearance
was always the signal for revolts. The state of society, which had
been unquiet for a quarter of a century, ,,vent from bad to worse
during Henry's reign. The King was constantly on the move
endeavouring to repress sedition and riots, and was generally
successful in doing so for the time; but, directly he had passed
by, they broke out again behind him. Thus his own friends the
8 HENRY V
march to Calais, in the course of which he xvon, by superior
tactics, the great battle of Agincourt (Oct. 25t against enormous
odds. He then returned in triumph to England, and received in
the following year a visit from the Emperor Sigismund, who
consulted xvith him as to a projected 'reform' of the Church.
No peace, however, had been made with France, and no real
conquests achieved except the capture of Harfleur, and in 1417
Henry sailed again to France with a very large army and spent
two years in a steady and merciless reduction of the various cities
and fortresses of Normandy. Only the frightful internal dissensions
between the French princes and the insanity of King Charles VI
permitted him this hard-won and temporary success; and his
cruelties at Rouen, which only capitulated after a long and heroic
defence, hardened all French hearts against him. In 1419 the
murder of the Duke of Burgundy by the Dauphin and the partisans
of the rival House of Orleans threw on to the English side the
powerful Burgundian family, which ruled in the Low Countries
and had great influence over all the north of France. At last
in i42o the poor King of France gave up the struggle and concluded
at Troyes a peace, by which he recognized Henry as Regent
and heir of France and gave him his daughter Katharine to wife.
Early in i42 Henry and Katharine landed at Dover, and in
June Henry had to return to his sorry task of holding down his
prospective kingdom of France by the sword. His last act was
the capture of eaux, during the siege of which he became
seriously ill. He died at Vincennes on August 31 , 1422 , in the
thirty-sixth year of his age.
It is before all things as a conqueror that Henry V is pre-
eminent. That he really believed his claim to the French croxvn
to be founded in justice seems, in the case of such an intelligent
man, to be impossible; but it suited him to say that he believed
it. In the prosecution of this claim he spared no pains and intended
to make his conquests permanent. He covered the whole of this
HENRY V
From the picture in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unkaown
HENRY V 9
ambitious policy with a mantle of religion, which may have been
fanaticism or may have been hypocrisy, but which, at any rate, was
an essential part of the popular and plausible Lancastrian character.
He always said that he intended to unite the crowns of the two
great Western nations with a view to a crusade for the deliverance
of the Holy Sepulchre; he was a considerable reader of religious
and crusading literature, and he took a keen interest in the
healing of the schism then existing in the Western Church. Such
a character, backed up by a firm hand in domestic administration,
made Henry not only a successful and popular ruler at home, but
also to some extent a national hero to after generations. Of his
ability on the battle-field and especially in siege-craft there can
be no doubt; but his legacy to his country was a reopening of
the terrible French war, and this again bequeathed to the England
of his son's reign the damnosa hcreditas of the Wars of the
Roses.
CARDINAL BEAUFORT
From an engraving of his tomb in "Vinchester Cathedral
(From I'etusta .'[omtttlella
HENRY BEAUFORT II
the enormous sums of money which for over thirty years he was
continually lending to the Crown ; and the only intelligible solution
is that ' he thoroughly understood how to deal with money'--in other
words, was an accomplished and successful usurer. The quarrels
between Beaufort and Gloucester, which only ended with their
deaths within a few weeks of each other in i447, are wearisome to
trace in detail, and are mainly of interest for their after effects ; for
they led to the formation at the court of Henry VI of the 'peace
party' and the ' war party ', which a little later became the Lancastrian
and the Yorkist parties. From the year 1435 at least Beaufort steadily
laboured to bring about a peace with France, and thereby increased
his unpopularity, which was already great on account of his
reputation as an avaricious Churchman of un-English views, who had
accepted in i426 the cardinal's hat which Henry V had compelled
him to refuse. In the fifteenth century no cardinal or legate
(and Beaufort was now both) could ever meet with fair play in
England, and, although we cannot specifically point to any occasion
on which Cardinal Henry sacrificed the interests of his country to
those of the Church, we must admit that he had frequently to seek
occasions of clearing himself in Parliament against accusations that
he had sacrificed them. Gloucester, on the other hand, was a vain
and foolish fellow, who courted and enjoyed the worst kind of
popularity, that with the London mob ; and the result was that, when
Gloucester died suddenly and somewhat mysteriously in February
447, the voice of ill fame at once accused the Cardinal of having
had a hand in his death, a rumour which in spite of Shakespeare's
authority (Henry II, _Part II, m. iii) is quite without foundation.
Henry Beaufort died in April of that ),ear, and the Wars of the
Roses were as good as begun.
HENRY VI
(I42I-I47I}
only child of Henry V and Katharine of France, was born at
Windsor and became King of England, at his father's death, when
he was only nine months old. The Council assumed the regency,
but, as the King's elder uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, was usually
fighting in France, his younger uncle, Humphry, Duke of Glouces-
ter, was practically allowed to act as Protector. Two months after his
accession to the English crown, Henry became, so far as the Treaty of
Troyes could make him so, King of France also, and he was the only
English King ever crowned in France with that title. His uncles,
Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, and the Gloucester above mentioned,
both imbued him with a love of learning which remained his
consolation during his long and miserable reign. His first tutor in
martial exercises was Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, vho
perhaps ill-treated him and gave him a disgust for such matters ; for
he seems to have been a tender and delicate boy. He was crowned
at Westminster in i429 and at Paris in i43o. But, with the appear-
ance of Joan of Arc in i4-o, the French possessions began to slip
from the English grasp, and the disappointed Lancastrian princes
thereupon began to quarrel among themselves at home. Henry was
continually obliged to make peace between his uncles, and the death
of the Duke of Bedford, the ablest and perhaps the best of them, in
435, was a severe loss to his nephew. Beaufort and Gloucester
were perpetually quarrelling, and their quarrels disgusted the pious
and unworldly boy, who, at the age of eighteen, turned to the solid
work of his life, the establishment of his great foundations for learn-
HENRY VI
From the portrait at Eton College
HENRY VI 13
ing at Eton and Cambridge. These he pursued with a resoluteness,
an attention and an insight which are worthy of all praise, and which
entirely dispose of all stories to the effect that he was of weak
intellect. The only other matter in which the King showed any
interest was the possibility of a peace with France, and this, which
really redounded so much to his honour, was the very thing that made
his contemporaries despise him. A marriage with a French princess
{several were suggested would probably form an important part of
any treaty, and at last Henry obtained a step towards such a treaty
by consenting to marry Margaret of Anjou in 1445; the French
King, Charles VII, who was rapidly reconquering his northern
provinces, took no notice of the match, but was not ill pleased at it ;
and soon after its arrangement he concluded a truce for two years.
But every disappointed English plunderer of France, noble and
yeoman alike, exclaimed against it and against Henry's friend, the
Duke of Suffolk, who had arranged it. Margaret xvas hated as
an 'outlandish xvoman', whose marriage had been bought with
surrenders; and her stern and vindictive character did nothing to
conciliate opposition. For gentle Henry she was no fit mate, and
the French peace when it at last came {t453 was merely the prelude
to civil war in England. Gloucester from the first voiced the popular
cry for a continuance of the war at all costs, and when he died in
February 447, Beaufort, Suffolk, Margaret and even Henry himself
were freely accused of murdering him. Beaufort followed Gloucester
to the grave a few xveeks later. Normandy was rapidly lost in 1449 ;
Suffolk was in consequence impeached in Parliament, and, though
never convicted, was murdered by Henry's enemies. A popular
insurrection in the following year shook the throne badly, and in
145o Henry's great rival, Richard, Duke of York, great-grandson of
Edward I I I, appeared upon the scene. At what date York deter-
mined to play for his own hand is uncertain; perhaps he was mainly
a tool of the ambitious and discontented nobles. At first he professed
merely a desire to exclude 'evil counsellors'--chiefly the Beaufort
I4 HENRY VI
family--from the King's presence: Henry would probably have
submitted to this or to anything but for his ambitious wife. But
Margaret could act with vigour : now she would pack a Parliament
which would attaint York and his partisans ; now she would call, and
not in vain, on her supporters to take the field in arms. The final
loss in 1453 of Guienne, the last of our French possessions except
Calais, did not mend matters: the country was full of disbanded
soldiers and ripe for civil war. Twice during the decade i45o-6o
Henry was overcome by a grievous illness both of mind and body
{July 1453-Jan. I454; Oct. 1455--Feb. I456). During the former of
these illnesses his only child, Prince Edward of Lancaster, was born,
and during each of them York acted as Protector. In one of the
early battles [St. Albansl, in May I455, the gentle King was wounded
in the neck by an arrow. At last, in 46o, York formally claimed
the throne; though he agreed to allow Henry to retain for life the
title of King, the young Lancastrian prince was to be excluded.
Margaret would never tolerate this for a moment and would fight to
the last: but, on York's death at Wakefield, his soldier son acted
with vigour, seized the throne as King Edward IV, and drove
Henry and Margaret northwards, defeating their troops at Towton.
Henry was thenceforth for three years, I46I- 4, a wanderer on the
Scottish border or a dependant on the charity of the Scottish King:
when, in I464, his partisans in the north of England again rose for
him and were speedily defeated, he lurked in disguise in various
old houses in Lancashire or Westmoreland, and was finally captured
in Ribblesdale in i465. He was brought to London a prisoner in
bonds, and was hooted by the mob. He was sent to the Tower,
where he remained a prisoner for five years ; various stories are told
of his treatment, which under such a man as Edward IV is not likely
to have been good : but friend and foe alike agree as to his patience and
gentleness in suffering. When the Yorkists in their turn began to
quarrel among themselves and the Earl of Warwick drove out Edward
IV IOct. I47Ol, Henry was again taken from the Tower and treated
HENRY VI i S
as King. It was a very brief' Restoration' ; and, after the defeats of
Warwick and Margaret by the returned Edward at Barnet and
Tewkesbury, Henry was murdered in the Tower, May 2x, 47.
Tradition has always pointed to Richard, Duke of Gloucester,
afterwards King Richard I I I, as the actual murderer; and history
has done nothing to upset this tradition. Henry was buried at
Chertsey Abbey until his murderer sought to conciliate public
opinion by removing his body to Windsor. Popular affection, in the
North especially, had already canonized the deceased King : miracles
were reported of him; hymns and prayers addressed to him still
exist. Henry VII, seeing what a valuable addition to Lancastrian
power it would be to have his predecessor regularly enrolled as a
saint, took soundings at Rome on the subject ; but canonization xvas
an expensive process in the Rome of the Renaissance, and Henry
VII was too fond of money to carry it through.
Few characters have, however, so profoundly left their mark
upon English imagination; and it is to the credit of Englishmen
that they could worship the purity, the meekness and the devo-
tion of the ' murdered saint ', as well as the force and virility of the
'majestic Lord vho broke the bonds of Rome'. If Henry VI was
wholly out of touch with his own age, it was perhaps because some
divine insight, the result of his saintly life, enabled him to see
through the bloodshed and sordid horrors of the immediate future,
and to devote his energies to the provision of education for
generations of Englishmen yet to come.
RICIIARD NEVILLE, E,\RL OF \V,\R\VICK
From the seal il the ]3ritish 31ueum found on the
site of the Battle of Bavnct
RICHARD NEVILLE, EARL OF WARWICK x7
of Wakefield left him head of the Neville family, and added to his
castles the great Yorkshire strongholds of Middleham and Sheriff
Hutton ; while York's death, though it left the nominal headship of
the party to the young Earl of March, gave Warwick undisputed
command of the policy of that party. In February 146 he marched
out, with poor Henry in his train, to meet the great Lancastrian
army at St. Albans, xvas beaten by it, and fled to join March,
who in the West had won the battle of Mortimer's Cross.
Edward IV, as March noxv claimed to be, entered London as a victor
with Warwick as his ' King-maker' by his side. It xvas not, hoxvever,
Warwick but Edward himself whose generalship was responsible
for the final Yorkist victory at Towton on Palm Sunday, I46I.
Edward rewarded his great subject with the wardenships of the
Cinque Ports and of the Scottish Marches and the office of Chamber-
lain ; and Warwick's riches must have been enormous. He seems to
have had some skill in diplomacy, and, for the first few years of the
reign, Edward left most things in his hands. But Waravick xvas
anxious that the King should marry either one of his own daughters
or a French princess chosen by himself; wherefore Edward's marriage
xvith Elizabeth Woodville, and still more the favours xvhich he
shoxvered on her relations, soon roused the jealousy of the Earl, who,
by the year I46 , seems to have determined to upset Edward's throne
by some means or another ; but, as too deep a stream of blood which
he had spilt seemed to run betxveen him and the Lancastrians, he
turned to Edward's second brother, Clarence, married him to his
daughter, and raised an insurrection which he alloxved Clarence to
think would ultimately put him upon the throne. Edward, a lazy
man, was caught napping and allowed Warwick to take him prisoner:
but then Warwick altogether belied his reputation for craft and recon-
ciled himself to Edward, who, as soon as he was free, drove him from
the kingdom. There was now but one thing for the Earl to do ; he
must throw himself at the feet of the haughty Queen Margaret, whom
he had slandered and vilified in every possible way, and by her agency
I8 RICHARD NEVILLE, EARL OF WARWICK
raise the flag of King Henry. Louis XI, Warxvick's steady friend,
was able to mediate this astonishing alliance. The Nevilles rose for
Warwick and the Western Lancastrians for Henry. Edward was
driven from his kingdom to the Burgundian Court, and the King-
maker landed in England and 'remade' in October I47O, as he had
previously unmade, Henry VI King of England. But Margaret de-
layed her return; Clarence, nominally Warwick's ally, was discon-
tented because Warwick had married his elder daughter to Prince
Edward of Lancaster ; the restored government was profoundly un-
popular in London; and, in March i47i , King Edward returned,
caught Warwick in a trap at Barnet and slew him, and then advanced
to meet and destroy the true Lancastrian army at Tewkesbury.
Warwick, in spite of his great reputation, was merely a selfish
baron of the worst type of the bastard-feudal age of the fifteenth
century. His enormous riches bought him a following, which he
was able to reward from the goods and lands of his enemies.
I9
EDWARD IV
(I442-I483)
eldest son of Richard, Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, was born at
Rouen, and shared, from 455, in his father's vicissitudes at the
commencement of the Wars of the Roses: we find him now in the
neighbourhood of St. Albans, now at Ludlow, now an exile in
Ireland, Guernsey, Calais. His first title was Earl of March, and it
was by that title that he was attainted by a Lancastrian Parliament
in i459. From Calais in 46o he came to England, and helped the
Yorkists to win the battle of Northampton. When his father was
defeated and slain at Wakefield he resolved on claiming the Crown
for himself, defeated the Western Lancastrians at Mortimer's Cross
lFeb. I46I, pushed on to London, where he was received as King,
and then, without waiting to be crowned, hurried northwards and
annihilated Queen Margaret's great Northern army at the battle of
Towton. This left him in secure possession of all England but
a few Northern castles which were gradually taken. Fresh risings of
Lancastrians were easily defeated in 464, and in the next year the
captive Henry VI was sent to the Tower. But Edward, though
owing his victories in the field wholly to his own excellent grasp of
strategy and tactics, had really owed his throne to the support of
the powerful family of Neville, with which he soon managed to
quarrel. Richard Neville, Earl of Walvick, the head of this family,
expected Edward to be guided by his counsels in the matter of his
marriage as in everything else. But Edward fell in love with
Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Sir John Grey, and married her
secretly. When the marriage had to be declared Warwick chose to
C2
EDWARD IV
be offended, and he xvas still more offended by Edward's zeal for
a Burgundian as opposed to a French alliance. He thereupon
determined to upset his puppet King, and the first tool of vehich he
made use was Edward's vain and foolish brother, Clarence (469b
Edward, who, in spite of his military talents, was slow to take the
field in person, was captured and imprisoned; yet Warwick
hesitated to put Clarence on the throne, and was therefore obliged
to release his captive. A fresh treason of Warwick opened the
King's somewhat sleepy eyes, and he defeated Warwick and
Clarence at Stamford, 47 o. They thereon fled to France, and
Wal-wick at last threw himself into the arms of the Lancastrians;
on the news of this other partisans of the Nevilles in England
rose in arms and forced Edward to flee to the Low Countries:
Wal-wick returned to England and put Henry VI again upon the
throne. But the Duke of Burgundy, who, much as he hated Edward,
hated France more, looked upon the Lancastrian Restoration wholly
as a French job, and supplied Edward with money for a fresh
attempt upon England. Edward landed in Yorkshire and professed
at first only to claim his own Duchy of York ; but, being gradually
better and better received as he marched southwards, soon resolved
to claim the Croxvn again. Warvdck was no match for Edveard as
a general, was defeated and slain at Barnet (April 47 } and three
weeks later Queen Margaret and the true Lancastrians were
equally annihilated at Tewkesbury. Bloody reprisals followed these
victories, as indeed they followed the victories of each side in these
horrible wars; among Edward's victims were King Henry VI and
his only son, Prince Edward of Lancaster.
The rest of Edward's reign was tranquil. He invaded France
with a very large army in 474, but he early let the King of France
understand that he was not very much in earnest, that it was the
sort of thing a spirited King of England was expected to do, but
that a round sum of money, which the English could call a tribute
and the French a pension, would buy his retreat. The wily
EDWARD IV
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown
EDWARD IV 21
Louis X I agreed to these terms, and even promised to wed his
son the Dauphin to Edward's eldest daughter. Edward put his
brother Clarence to death in 478; the motive seems to have been
jealousy, whether ill or well founded it is difficult to say. He even
managed to quarrel to some extent with his surviving brother,
Richard of Gloucester, who had been perfectly loyal to him, before
the end of his reign. He died in his forty-first year in 1483 .
All that we know of Edward's character is entirely to his discredit :
his only ability was that of the soldier, and his laziness, at the times
when he should have been most active, decidedly counterbalanced
his military talents. He -,,,,as sensual and immoral to a flagrant
extent, and drink and debauchery probably hastened his end. He
was also vindictive, suspicious and cruel to a degree remarkable
even in that age of blood. He professed some interest in letters, and
allowed Caxton to set up a press at Westminster; but his tastes
were on the whole low, and he must be regarded as having degraded
the Crown as no King had done since Edward I I. In person he was
for that age a giant, being six feet three inches tall, and was
considered, although his portraits belie it, to have been of great
personal beauty. It is easy for kings to be thought handsome.
EDWARD V
STANDING AT THE LEFT OF ED,V.RD IV
From the MS. of Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers
at Lambeth Palace
23
RICHARD III
(I452- J485)
the youngest son of Richard, Duke of York, and Cecily Neville,
was born at Fotheringhay and was only nine years old when the
crown fell to his eldest brother, Edward IV, who at his coronation
created him Duke of Gloucester. During Edward's reign the
young prince, in spite of being severely tempted by Warwick and his
second brother, Clarence, remained steadily loyal. He probably
first saw service in 1469, when Edward was fighting against Clarence
and Warwick: he accompanied Edward into exile in 147o and
helped him to recover the Crovn in I47- There is some evidence
that he murdered the young Prince Edward of Lancaster at
Tewkesbury, and much better evidence that he murdered Henry VI
in the Tower--both of these bloody deeds are attributed to him
before he was twenty years of age. He married, probably against
her will, Anne Neville, the daughter of Richard Neville, Earl of
Warwick, who was already the widow of his reputed victim,
Prince Edward; and he soon quarrelled, over the inheritance of
the said Earl of Warwick, with his brother Clarence, who had
married Anne's sister Isabel. As a vigorous and strenuous man,
who had considerable contempt for the sensuality and sloth of
his King-brother, Richard protested against the Peace of Pecquigny,
by which Edward allowed Louis X I to buy off his invasion of
France in 1475 . There is no direct proof that he had any hand
in Clarence's death in 1478, but all murders would naturally be
attributed to a man such as Richard. In 148o he was sent to the
North, and in 1482 invaded Scotland in the interest of King
Edward and a Scottish traitor, the Duke of Albany ; and his success
there seems to have cost him the jealousy of his brother, with whom
he was out of favour for the last two years of the reign.
24 RICHARD III
Edward, hoxvever, left him guardian of his son Edward V, of
whose person he got hold a few days after the boy's accession to the
Crown. In conjunction xvith the Duke of Buckingham, he got
rid successively of the leading members of the families of Grey
and VToodville [the young King's maternal relatives), of Lord
Hastings and of other probable rivals : finally, while the young King
and his brother were practically prisoners in the Tower, he trumped.
up a charge of bastardy against them and claimed the Crown. Some
packed assembly of London citizens, overaxved by large bodies
of retainers from the North, where Richard was always popular,
seems to have given some sort of assent to this usurpation, and
Richard's reign is dated from June 26: his coronation and that
of his Queen Anne followed ten days later. While on a progress in
the Midlands in August he probably gave the order for the murder
of the two sons of Edward IV; and it was probably this murder
which alienated from him his best adherent, the Duke of
Buckingham. From the day when it was known that the boys were
dead Richard's reign was never for a moment quiet. Buckingham,
urged on by John Morton, Bishop of Ely, raised the first flag of
rebellion on behalf of the exiled heir of the Lancastrian house, Henry,
Earl of Richmond, but was caught and beheaded. Richard met his
only Parliament in January I484, and tried, by assuming a popular
and ' constitutional' attitude, to bid for favour; he even induced the
xvidowed Queen of Edward IV and her daughters to come out
of sanctuary, and proposed, to the horror of every one, to marry
his own niece, Elizabeth, affel-wards the Queen of Henry VII ; his
own wife, Anne, was then ill, and it was not unnatural that people
should say that she was being poisoned, though she did not actually
die till March 485: his own only son was already dead, and
he proclaimed as his heir his sister's son, John, Earl of Lincoln.
Meanwhile Henry of Richmond was preparing for an invasion,
and Richard moved uneasily about England, uncertain where the
landing would take place. Milford Haven was the spot finally
RICHARD III
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown
-'4
26
HENRY VII
(I457-5o9)
son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and Margaret Beaufort, who
was heiress, after i47I , to the Lancastrian claim to the English Crown,
was born at Pembroke Castle. He was presented to King HenryVI
during the brief Lancastrian Restoration of 47o-I, and, after the
return of Edward IV in the latter year, found an asylum in Brittany.
Both Edward IV and Richard I II made attempts to induce the
Duke of Brittany to surrender his guest, and one of these was very
nearly successful. When Buckingham rose against Richard III,
Henry was already off the English coast preparing to join him, but
was unable to land. After this failure Henry repaired to France, where
English exiles gathered round him in x484-5; and on August x of
the latter 5,ear he sailed from Harfleur with about 2,ooo men, landed
in Wales and defeated and slew Richard III at Bosworth three
weeks later. He was well received in London as King Henry VII
and was crowned in October; Parliament entailed the Crown on him
and the heirs of his body. He had, however, solemnly sworn in
France to marry the Princess Elizabeth, now the undoubted heiress
of the Yorkist claims, and thus to unite the two rival houses. The
marriage took place at the beginning of 486, but Henry was always
careful to maintain that his title to the Crown was independent
of his wife's. Txvo successive pretenders to the throne, each
claiming to represent a Plantagenet prince, were easily disposed
of--Lambert Simnel at the battle of Stoke in x487, and Perkin
Warbeck, who gave more trouble, by adroit diplomacy with the
various European Courts which had successively given him shelter,
HENRY VII 27
in I497. When the French threatened in 749 o to absorb Brittany,
Henry felt it to be a necessary diplomatic move to get up an
expedition against France, and actually crossed the Channel and
laid siege to Boulogne two years later. But he was able to let
King Charles VIII understand that he was quite ready to treat,
and they made a treaty at taples. When Perkin Warbeck
finally left Scotland in I497, Henry concluded xvith James IV a
truce which soon became a peace, and which was based upon the
marriage of his elder daughter, Margaret, to the Scottish King.
From I499 to I5O6 a real scion of the Plantagenet house, Edmund
de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, gave the King some trouble, but Henry
at last got the Duke of Burgundy, who had protected Edmund, to
surrender him in the latter year. In xSOX he was able to marry his
elder son Arthur to Katharine, princess of Spain, and, when Arthur
died in the next year, Katharine was betrothed to Arthur's brother
Prince Henry, now heir to the English throne ; Henry VI I's friend-
ship with the crafty Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, xvas
never a cordial one, but the alliance between England and Spain
remained fairly durable, and was perhaps the strongest card in
the English King's hand.
Two other points besides his adroit diplomacy are specially in-
teresting in Henry's career ; he was to a considerable extent a patron
of commerce and perhaps pioneer of the system of Navigation Acts ;
and he was unquestionably the founder of that ss'stem of strong
government which his son and grandchildren xvorked so much for
the benefit of England. But everything which he did was tentative,
and we feel, as we watch him, that he was never very sure of his
ground. Avarice often led him to abandon great plans of the
usefulness of which he probably felt no doubt; but the poverty of
the Crown had been for over a century the greatest misfortune
of England, and Henry saw clearly that, if the country was to be
governed with any success, he must become a rich king. In private
life his tastes were simple and frugal, and his only great expenditure
28 HENRY VII
was upon music and architecture. He seems to have had a good,
though not, considering his mother's great reputation for learning,
a specially learned education, but he was careful to bring up his
children to be really learned in the best sense of the word. Above
all things Henry was a patient and laborious king, and he died in
5o9 at the age of 5_-2, worn out from unceasing toil in the business
of state.
29
JAMES IV, KING OF SCOTLAND
473-53
eldest son of James III and Margaret of Denmark, began his
political life in a rebellion against his father at the age of fifteen.
The rebellion was successful ; King James was killed at Sauchieburn,
and the young prince was crowned at Scone a few days afterwards
as James IV. It is fairly obvious that he had been a mere tool
of the ambitious nobles, and that he always repented the share he
had had in his father's death. He was evidently a young man o!
precocious talents, an excellent linguist, speaking, among other lan-
guages, the Gaelic, and writing excellent Latin: he was also devoted
to arts and letters. He was, moreover, an energetic administrator, a
great builder of ships, a favourer of commerce and of the rising
Scottish burghs. We find him constantly on the move even to the
remotest parts of his kingdom, and he did much, by his energetic
presidence of the judicial eyres of his kingdom, to bring both the
wilder feudal nobles of the border and the chieftains of the Islands
under royal control. The institution of a central Court of Justice
in Edinburgh in J5o4 was his work, as vas also the introduction
of the regular system of tenure of lands by feu. His devotion to
the science of artillery may have been as much due to his eager
interest in experiments as to his warlike designs, but he was for
ever casting big guns and making gunpowder. He was also a most
ostentatiously devout servant of the Church, and made yearly
pilgrimages to distant holy places in Scotland; he even talked of
a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
At his Court foreign influences of every kind pulled him now
30 JAMES IV, KING OF SCOTLAND
this way, now that, and Scotland became the focus of a diplomatic
struggle in which England, France and Spain played the leading parts.
James was distinctly ahead of his age and of the traditions of his
people in wishing to keep the peace with England, but no Scottish
King could at that time safely or honourably abandon the alliance
with France. James kept for some time at his Court the English
pretender Perkin Warbeck, whose tale he seems really to have
believed, gave him a lady of royal blood to wife and undertook small
warlike movements on his behalf; Perkin, however, yeas not a warlike
person, and on one occasion showed some disposition to cowardice.
This may have disgusted the King of Scots, who probably was
glad when his guest went off to Ireland in I497. James thereon con-
cluded the treaty of Ayton with Henry VII and agreed to marry that
king's elder daughter, lIargaret, vho, in i5o 3, at the age of fourteen,
crossed the border as Queen of Scots: it is said that upon this
occasion the Order of the Thistle was instituted. Peace and amity
continued between England and Scotland until the death of Henry
VII, and the lesser country made great strides in prosperity. Henry
VII I's espousal of the cause of the Pope against the French King in
5 speedily put an end to this condition of peace, and it needed
little persuasion on the part of Louis XII to throw James back upon
the older traditional policy of Scotland. He prepared for a great
invasion of England and took with him to the border in 53 the
whole force of Scotland. He was able to take Norham and cross the
Tweed, but was entirely outgeneralled by the prudent Earl of Surrey,
defeated and slain at Flodden, September 9, I513- James's private
life was stained by flagrant immorality and he left many illegiti-
mate children ; but his zeal for good government and his patriotism
are indubitable.
HENRY VIII
{I49I-I547}
second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was born at
Greenwich. He became heir to the throne on the death of his
brother Arthur in I5o% and two years later a dispensation arrived
from the Pope to enable him to marry his brother's widow, Katharine
of Spain ; but he protested at the time against the dispensation, and,
until his own accession to the throne, it did not seem certain that
the marriage would take place. Henry received the most careful
and learned education, and became an accomplished scholar in the
best sense of the term. He was also a fine athlete and of great
bodily strength. For almost fifteen years after his accession to the
throne in 15o 9 no one suspected that Henry was more than a
pleasure-loving monarch of great natural gifts and graces, but also
of much extravagance, who was content to pass his time in a series
of tournaments and revels, and to leave business to his ministers,
especially to Cardinal Wolsey. He married Katharine two months
after his accession and had by her several children, all of whom,
except Princess Mary, born 1516 , died in infancy. He engaged in
two futile wars with France, 1512 and 1522 , and thus spoiled his
father's excellent understanding with the Scots. He professed
excessive devotion to the Holy See, and, even in after years, all the
doctrines and ritual of the old Church remained dear to him.
During this period taxation was heavy and was by no means
cheerfully borne.
Sometime between i5, 5 and 1529 a complete change came over
Henry's character and method of government: he may be said to
32 HENRY VIII
have awaked; and the results of his awakening, if on the
whole of enormous benefit to his country, were very terrible
to many of the old interests in that country. He desired, not
wholly for immoral reasons, a divorce from Katharine, for he
was anxious to secure the English succession to a son, and he
professed that his conscience was uneasy at the thought of his
long but unhallowed union with a brother's wife. Every man and
every interest that stood in the way of the royal will had now to be
swept from Henry's path. Among these interests was the Church
of Rome, as the Popes of that age understood it. Pope Clement VII
was ready to give Henry a dispensation to have two wives at once ;
but for political reasons he was unable to grant a divorce from
Katharine, for he was in the clutches of the Emperor Charles V,
who vas Katharine's nephew. Henry turned in 1529 to the people
of England, that is to the upper classes vho were represented in the
House of Commons. These had for two centuries or more hated
and despised the foreign-hearted Papal Church; and, while not
wishing as yet for any innovations in doctrine, were quite ready to
join the King in the confiscation of clerical property and in the
wholesale abolition of the Papal authority in England. Though at
first the House of Lords, where bishops, abbots, and conservative
peers were strong, gave some trouble, Henry and his devoted
Houses of Commons ended by sweeping all before them. Cardinal
\Volsey, the Papal headship of the Church, the monasteries and the
monastic orders successively fell, and the Crown and the laity were
enriched with their spoils. All payments to Rome were forbidden,
and all appeals, and the supremacy of the Crown over the Church
was entirely established. This was not accomplished without much
resistance both from individuals and corporations, nor even without
an insurrection in the North, 1536, which at the time threatened to
be serious. But each successive movement of resistance was
stamped out in blood and fire, and the numerous executions, which
might well have been avoided (for almost the whole force and
|
|
HENRY VIII
From the portrait by Holbein in possession of the Barber-Surgeons' Company of London .detail)
Face . 3
34
THOMAS WOLSEY
(1475-I53O)
Cardinal and Archbishop of York, the celebrated statesman of Henry
VIII's reign, was probably born at Ipswich and was most likely the
son of a tradesman of some substance. He came to Oxford and took
his degree from Magdalen College at the age of fifteen, was elected
Fellow in 1497 and soon afterwards bursar and master of the choir
school. His first patron was the Marquis of Dorset, to whose sons
he was tutor, and it was Dorset who gave him his first living in the
Church : but he began his career as a pluralist very early by getting
a dispensation in i5oi to hold two more benefices, and he sub-
sequently became one of the greatest pluralists that ever lived.
It would be futile to attempt to enumerate the livings and small
preferments which he held at different times, but he does not appear
to have performed any ecclesiastical duty or office in any of them.
In 15o 7 he came to Court as Henry VII's chaplain and was
patronized by Richard Fox, the statesman Bishop of Winchester;
he vas employed on one or two diplomatic missions by Henry VII,
and, just before that King's death, became Dean of Lincoln. He
must have been knovn to Henry VIII before his accession to the
throne, for on that event he at once became the new King's almoner
and soon afterwards Canon of Windsor. From that moment till
527 his influence with Henry was increasing and became supreme.
Wolsey, or 'Wulcy', as he always vrote himself, appears to
have believed that he possessed a special genius for foreign politics,
and that he could make England, in virtue of the great treasures
accumulated by Henry VII and the riches which she derived
CARDINAL rOLSEY
From the drawing attributed to Jacques le Boucq of Artois
in the Library of the town of Arras
'ace . 34
3 6 THOMAS WOLSEY
but it is not true that he suggested it to the King, and he always
intended that it should be followed by a marriage to some great
European princess, preferably a French one. He was joined
by the Pope with an Italian Cardinal, Campeggio, in a legatine
commission to try the divorce question (i5_.8), but he soon dis-
covered that the Pope never intended to conclude anything, and
he was already aware that the King intended to marry Anne Boleyn.
In these two circumstances he read his own fall as certain, and
indeed it was not long delayed: he was rapidly stripped of all his
preferments except the See of York, indicted under the Statute
of' Premunire' in the King's Bench and made to surrender the
Great Seal. He made no attempt at resistance, and perhaps really
intended to atone for his past life by future humility, but his attitude
bore very much the look of abject servility to the King, who
certainly treated him with infamous ingratitude. Anne Boleyn
was his most determined enemy, and, hateful as Anne Boleyn
,,','as even to Henry's courtiers, every one was glad to use her as
a tool against the minister who had been so omnipotent, so greedy
and so futile. A Bill of Attainder was passed against Wolsey in
the Lords on December 29, but thrown out in the Commons,
apparently at the King's request. Early in 53 o Wolsey thought he
might get out of the way if he visited his See of York, which he had
never seen, and it was at Cawood, close to York, that he xvas arrested
for high treason in the November of that year. While journeying
slowly back towards the Toxver he died at Leicester Abbey,
November 29 .
Wolsey was a man of indefatigable talent for details, and his
industry is undoubted: he xvas also merciful and averse to the
persecution of heretics. If he became a patron of learning by his
great foundation at Christ Church, Oxford, and his suppressed
college at Ipswich, it was probably rather from desire to show
his magnificence than because he possessed any great interest in
letters for their own sake. But he was fully aware of the danger in
THOMAS WOLSEY
37
which the Church of his age stood, and certainly desired, in order to
stave off that danger, to promote learning among the clergy. He
was a great builder, though rather of palaces than churches, and
his most famous creations were Hampton Court and York Place,
now Whitehall, both of which he made over to Henry in attempts
to conciliate him at the hour of his fall. His private life was
immoral and he left two illegitimate children.
38
JAMES V
{I512-I542)
King of Scotland, son of James IV and Margaret Tudor, was born
at Linlithgow, and was seventeen months old when he succeeded
his father after the fatal battle of Flodden. His father's will had
appointed Queen Margaret as Regent, but only on condition of
her remaining a widow; and her marriage with the Earl of Angus,
of the great House of Douglas, speedily lost her the regency, which
she was naturally loth to resign. The Scottish nobles never ceased
to hate her, and, while often intriguing with England on their own
account, were continually alarmed with the prospect that Margaret
would act in the interests of the English King, her brother. But
she quarrelled with him, with her second husband and successively
with most other people, too much to have any settled policy at all.
The French influence was represented in Scotland by Albany,
who succeeded Margaret as Regent in 1515; but Albany was
often in France, and the struggle for influence over the boy was
mainly between the Douglases and the Hamiltons. Somebody,
perhaps his tutor, Gavin Dunbar, gave James a good education,
and, though poems have been ascribed to him which he did not
write and reforms which he did not initiate, he grew up to be not
only a shrewd and clever but a very fairly learned man. In 1524
the Estates declared him to be of age, but Angus retained the
chief power over him even after Margaret had divorced Angus
and married Henry Stuart ; but James evidently hated Angus and all
the Douglas family, and by the time he was really able to think
for himself he chose his councillors mainly from the clergy. He
JAIES V OF SCOTLAND
From a portrait in the possession ot the Duke of Devonshire
JAMES V 39
drove Angus out of Scotland and bent all his energies to crushing
his partisans, especially upon the borders; and, to repress feuds,
he set in working, in 532, the Central College of Justice at
Edinburgh, afterwards known as 'the Fifteen '. From that date
begin Henry's attempts to control his Scottish nephew: in various
ways, among others by the offer of the hand of Princess Mary, he
attempted to get James to move in the orbit of England; and he
had unfortunately always the alternative card to play of exciting
the disloyal Scots nobles to make insurrections. Any alliance with
England would, James saw, have to be based upon a repudiation
of Papal Supremacy and consequently upon a breach with his
clergy, whom alone he felt able to trust. Protestantism had
begun to show its head in a few of the eastern ports of Scotland, and
James, as an intelligent person, knew and avowed that there were
many things in the Scottish Church which urgently needed reform.
But both Imperial and French offers of alliance and marriage were
being constantly pressed upon him, and Henry VIII showed less
than his usual diplomatic skill in posing as James's ' candid friend '.
The result was that in 536 James went to France and was married
to Princess Magdalen, daughter of Francis I, at Notre Dame on
January I, 1537. He landed at Leith with his bride in May; she
died in July, and in the summer of the next year he married Mary
of Guise, widowed Duchess of Longueville. This meant final
rejection of all overtures to the Reformation, a deadly quarrel with
Henry VIII, and the triumph of the influence of James Beaton,
Archbishop of St. Andrews, and, on his death, of his nephew and
successor, David Beaton. Henry's rage knew no bounds, and
the death of the Queen-Mother, Margaret, in 1541 snapped the
last link in Henry VII's wise policy of conciliation. At the end of
154o James got the Estates to declare forfeit to the Crown all
the lands of the Douglases and Lindsays, much of the Hamilton
and Hepburn property and all the islands on the West and North
coasts: it was practically an open declaration of war on the great
4o JAMES V
houses of Scotland. When James, fearing a trap, which had indeed
been laid for him, declined at the end of to come and meet
his uncle Henry at York, Henry declared war and sent Norfolk with
a large force to waste the eastern borders. James's barons, after
their recent rough treatment, had little inclination to fight for him,
and his counter-raid in the direction of Carlisle, which he accom-
panied himself as far as Lochmaben, ended in the dreadful defeat
and disgraceful rout of Solway Moss, November I542. A few days
after that Queen Mary gave birth (Dec. 8) to the only child that
survived her, and a week later James died of a broken heart at
Falkland Castle.
That James neglected great opportunities, that he struck at
the wrong time and often at the wrong persons, is beyond question;
but his long minority and the previous history of the Scottish
nobles were the main causes of his misfortunes, which were greater
than had fallen on many less worthy Kings. Though very immoral
in private life, he always retained the affection of the common
people both in town and country: perhaps no King since
Alexander I II had been more popular.
41
SIR THOMAS 5IORE
(478-535)
the flower of the early English Renaissance, son of Sir John More
and Agnes Graunger, was born in London. It is possible that he
was a schoolfellow of John Colet's ; at the age of thirteen he entered
the household of Cardinal Morton, Archbishop and Chancellor to
Henry VII. In the next year he was sent to Canterbury Hall,
Oxford, where he remained for two years and where he met Linacre,
Grocyn and possibly Colet, and it was probably from Grocyn that
he picked up his first love of Greek. Neither he nor Colet ever
became finished Greek scholars, but it is evident that they could
read and translate the language fluently. More, at all events, became
a most elegant Latinist. In *494 he began his study of the law
and became eventually a barrister with a large practice, while
devoting all his leisure to literary studies. His most intimate friend-
ship with Colet can hardly be dated earlier than ,5o4, but he had
evidently met him before, and from *497 he was a warm friend of
Erasmus, with whom in '499 he paid a visit to Henry VI I's children,
being delighted with the intelligence of Prince Henry. For a short
period (,499-,5o3) More was taken with the idea of becoming a
priest or even a monk, and he never wholly relinquished the ascetic
practices and view which he then adopted. He first sat in the
Parliament of I5O4, and was in disgrace for some time for leading
an opposition to Henry VII's fiscal policy. He married Jane
Colt in I5O 5, and on her death in ,5,, Alice Middleton. When he
was making a large fortune at the bar he built himself a beautiful
house in Chelsea, where he continued to reside till his imprison-
42 SIR THOMAS MORE
merit and death. He was employed on some diplomatic missions by
Wolsey, and on one of these he met at Antwerp Erasmus's friend
Giles, in whose society he conceived the idea of his most famous
work, Utopia {first published in Latin I516 ). He became Master of
Requests 1518 and a privy councillor the same year. From that
time probably dates his close intimacy with Henry VIII, who
delighted in his witty and learned conversation. He accompanied
the King to Calais in 1520 and there met the greatest Greek
scholar of the age, Budaeus, with whom he afterwards corresponded.
In 1521 Henry knighted him and two years later he became Speaker
of the House of Commons: honours thereafter came thick upon
him, the Chancellorship of the University of Cambridge, the Chan-
cellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster; and it is to this same period
that his controversial writings against Luther and Tyndale belong.
Finally in 1529 he was made Lord Chancellor, and so had to preside
in the early sessions of the ' Reformation Parliament'. He made
a most excellent and equitable Chancellor, and was famous for the
speed with which he cleared axvay suits from a court whose delays
vere already notorious.
But the tide that was to engulf him was already rising. King
and Parliament were set on one thing, the diminution and ultimately
the destruction of the Papal power in England. More was far too
conservative to approve of such a breach with the past, and he saw
clearly that the iniquitous divorce from Queen Katharine, whose
warm partisan he was, had been Henry's main incentive. In May
1532 he therefore resigned his office of Chancellor and thenceforth
kept away from Court. In 1533 he was for a time involved in the
superstition of Elizabeth Barton, 'the Nun of Kent,' who was
setting up for a prophetess, but on closer examination he admitted
that he had been her dupe, and his name was struck off the Bill of
Attainder in which her adherents were mentioned. But in 1534 he
found himself confronted with the demand that he should swear to
the Act of Succession, and should swear in such explicit terms as
SIR THO.IAS IIORE
From a portrait by Holbein in the possession of Edward Huth, Esq.
44
T H OMAS CROMWELL
{ t485 ?- 54 o}
Earl of Essex and tool of Henry VIII, seems to have been born
at Putney of humble origin. All the early stories of his life are
obscure and often self-contradictory, and the only certain things are
that he had been in Italy in his youth and had aftervards been in
business in Antwerp. It is, however, extremely probable that he
had also served as a private soldier. He was in England as early
as 5t3, and beginning to prosper in business both as a merchant
and a solicitor. He vas employed by Wolsey as collector of the
revenues of his See of York as early as I514, and he sat in Parlia-
ment in I523. Wolsey evidently employed him if he had dirty
work to do; e.g. he was his agent in 5:4 in the suppression of
some small monasteries, whose revenues were to go to the Cardinal's
foundations at Oxford and Ipswich ; and he is said to have executed
this task with much vulgar cruelty. Finally he became Wolsey's
chief financial adviser, and, in 53 o, managed to give the world the
impression that both in Parliament and outside it he was defending
fallen greatness, while he was in reality taking care not to be in-
volved in his patron's fall. Like the unjust steward, he advised
the Cardinal to satisfy his enemies by large bribes, of the convey-
ance of which he was to be the agent. We have no authority for
saying that Wolsey in any way'bequeathed' Cromwell as a trusty
servant to the King, nor do we even know how or when the King
first became acquainted with his future minister: but, by the be-
ginning of i53i , Cromwell had become a privy councillor, and a
year later Master of the Jewel House and Clerk of the Hanaper.
THOMAS CROblWELL. EARL OF ESSEX
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Face 1. 44
THOMAS CRANMER
{489-I556I
Archbishop of Canterbury and martyr, son of Thomas Cranmer
and Agnes Hatfield, was born in Nottinghamshire of a family
of country squires. He went to Cambridge in I5O 3 and remained
there engaged in study for many years. He became a Fellow of
Jesus College, married, lost his wife and was re-elected to his
Fellowship. In i529 he, then acting as a tutor at Waltham Abbey,
met Stephen Gardiner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, who
was acting for Henry VIII in the matter of the divorce, and made
to him the suggestion that the King would do well to take the
opinion of the leading divines of the Universities of Europe. The
King was pleased with the idea and summoned Cranmer to
Greenwich; he became chaplain in the Boleyn household and
was warmly patronized by Anne, his first preferment being to
the Archdeaconry of Taunton. He went to Italy with Anne's
father on the divorce business, and was well received by Pope
Clement VII; thence to Germany, where he saw Charles V, who
also treated him kindly, and where he married a German lady.
While he was accompanying the Imperial Court to North Italy he
received news of his own nomination to the See of Canterbury,
vacant by Warham's death (r53el: he returned to England in r533
and was consecrated in March after the requisite Papal Bulls had
been procured. The consecration ceremony involved an oath of
obedience to the Pope which he took, but against which he
THOSIAS CRANKIER
From the portrait by G. Fliccius in the National Portrait Gallery
THOMAS CRANMER 47
registered an open protest: and his first business as Archbishop was
to hold a court to inquire into the validity of the union of Henry and
Katharine; his next was to hold an inquiry into the validity of
Henry's secret marriage with Anne. On both occasions he pro-
nounced in favour of the King. Thenceafter he became the pliant
instrument of all the King's ecclesiastical changes, and the Royal
Supremacy became the first article of his creed ; but on the other
hand, he lost no opportunity of trying to mitigate the King's severity
against opponents. There is hardly a victim of Henry's tyranny for
whom Cranmer's intercession is not recorded. It is very difficult to
determine the progress of the Archbishop's theological opinions;
probably the abjuration of the Pope, the marriage of priests,
communion in both kinds, with an English Bible and Prayer Book,
were the things upon which he set most store; and we may also feel
tolerably sure that it was not until the very end of Henry's reign
that he became 'heretical' on the cardinal doctrine of the Sacra-
ment. Once, however, he had come to reject Transubstantiation, he
clung firmly to that position, although it is also clear that he retained
to the end of his life belief in some form of the Real Presence.
The Ten Articles of x536, the first Anglican confession of faith,
were at least revised by him: with the Six Articles of 539 he
had nothing to do, and his assent to them was probably an unwilling
compliance. Indeed he was more than once in danger of being
indicted as a heretic under them, and complaints were freely spoken
against him in his own diocese and by his own cathedral clergy;
but Henry protected him with a strong hand. More than anything
else he was interested in the translation of the Bible and especially
in the production of the Authorized Version of x539; and his deep
patristic learning was of invaluable service in this matter: the
English Litany of 544 was his work, and was in fact but a step to
the publication of the first English Prayer Book. For this, however,
he had to wait till the reign of Edward VI, but when it appeared,
549, it was almost wholly his work. In this reign he opposed
48 THOMAS CRANMER
with all the influence he possessed the continued spoliation of
the property of the Church, yet he was a warm friend of the
Protector Somerset, who must certainly be classed as a spoiler.
The first ' Edwardian settlement' of religion (i549) probably repre-
sents Cranmer's views best. From the fall of Somerset wilder
spirits got the upper hand, and the Archbishop's influence waned.
Northumberland determined upon a 'thorough reformation' and
a close union with the Calvinistic and Zwinglian Churches of
the Continent. Cranmer submitted to this as to everything, and
allowed in 552 a revision of the Prayer Book to be published
as the 'Second Prayer Book of Edward VI', together with a
confession of faith, of a decidedly Calvinistic tone, known as the
'Forty-two Articles'. But he hated the crew of foreigners, which
the government obliged him to invite and to quarter on the English
Church; and he profoundly distrusted Northumberland. At
Edward's death-bed he consented with extreme unwillingness to
put his name to the document devising the succession to Jane Grey,
and thereby excluding the Princess Mary ; but when every one else
afterwards disavowed their signatures, Cranmer openly avowed
to Mary that he had signed in good faith. He read the funeral
sen'ice of the Prayer Book over his royal godson, whom he had
so dearly loved, and offered to defend in a public disputation the
Communion against the Mass: but he was at once committed to
the Tower, and shortly after condemned to death as a traitor along
with Jane Grey and Northumberland. The vindictive Queen, hoxv-
ever, reserved him for a worse fate: in March 1554 he was sent
to Oxford together with the ex-Bishops Ridley and Latimer with the
obvious intention of bringing him to trial as a heretic. Reliance
was placed by his enemies on the effect which a long imprisonment
would have, on a person of his tender and pliant character, in
the direction of recantation; for, if the Protestant primate recanted
in face of the stake, they thought a lasting blow would be struck
at Protestantism. Every artifice of Papal and Spanish craft was
THOMAS CRANMER
49
brought to bear, and at last successfully. Cranmer, after disputa-
tions in public, denials of the Pope's jurisdiction, degradations from
episcopate and priesthood, signed several successive recantations
in the hope of saving his life. But when in March 1556 he was
told he was to be burnt alive after all, he recovered his character
and publicly recanted his recantation, denounced the Pope as
Antichrist, and met his death with perfect bravery and cheerfulness.
50
EDWARD VI
([537-1553)
only child of Henry VII I and Jane Seymour, was born at Hampton
Court, his mother dying twelve days after his birth. He spent most
of his time at Greenwich or at Hampton, and his feeble health was
probably a reason against his travelling very far from home. His
most important tutor was Sir John Cheke, a great Cambridge
scholar; but he had also lessons from Richard Cox and Roger
Ascham. His early precocity and delight in study were, even for
that learned age, very great, but it is probable that he was not
physically strong enough for much devotion to open-air sports. He
seems to have had few friends except Barnaby Fitz-Patrick, the son
of an Irish peer, with whom he corresponded regularly, and who was,
according to tradition, the person who was swished when Edward did
anything wrong. When his father died, Edward was only nine years
and three months old, and a Council of sixteen executors had been
appointed by the late King's will to carry on the government. But
from the first meeting of that Council, February I, I547, Edward's
maternal uncle Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, emerged as Pro-
tector of the Realm and was soon afterwards made, or made himself,
Duke of Somerset. Cranmer, who was his godfather, performed the
coronation ceremony for Edward on February ,oth, and both Ridley
and Latimer were favourite preachers of his: indeed his delight in
sermons was excessive, and his zeal for pushing on the Reformation
remarkable. He was able to dispute on high points of sacramental
theology ; but it is no doubt easy for kings to shine in disputations,
especially when no opponents are allowed to answer them. More ex-
treme reformers, such as Hooper and even John Knox, soon appeared
EDWARD SEYMOUR
DUKE OF SOMERSET
I5o6- 552}
son of Sir John Seymour and Margaret Wentvorth, of an old
Wiltshire family, is first heard of in the company of his father, who
was a courtier of Henry VIII's early years. He saw service in the
second French var of that King and was knighted on the field
by the Duke of Suffolk. But his fortunes really began vhen, in
1536, Henry married his sister Jane and created him Earl of Hert-
ford; and her death in the folloving year did nothing to diminish
his influence. In i544 he vas in command of the English army
which raided southern Scotland and sacked Edinburgh. Next
year he valiantly defended Boulogne against a French attempt at
recapture, and six months afterwards he was again raiding in force
beyond the Scottish border. In the last months of Henry's reign
his influence finally triumphed over that of his rivals the Howards,
and this came to mean the triumph of the Protestant cause against
Catholic reaction. Hertford and Paget seem to have received, on
28th January, I547, the dying commands of King Henry, and though
that monarch's vill had provided for a Council of sixteen to
govern during his son's minority, they set it aside, got possession
of the person of Edward VI, and, overcoming all opposition in
the Council, contrived to have Hertford declared Protector. A fev
days later he made himself Duke of Somerset. Whether or not
Henry VIII had intended the Anglo-Catholic settlement of 539
to endure, Somerset resolved at once to set it aside, and to make
England a Protestant country. In much of this, though not in all of
EDWARD SEY3IOUR. DUKE OF SO3IERSET
From a portrait by Holbein in the possession of the Duke oI Northumberland:
'acc 1. 5z
54 EDWARD SEYMOUR, DUKE OF SOMERSET
and executed. All this lent opportunity to the Protector's numerous
enemies to conspire against him, Warwick taking the lead. In
October 1549 the majority of the Council, under Warwick's guidance,
having secured the Tower and being strong in armed force, deprived
him of the Protectorate and sent him to prison. Somerset, in
spite of some ill-judged appeals to the ' poor commons' to rise on his
behalf, submitted tamely: he remained in the Tower till February
i55o, and, though charges were preferred against him in Parliament,
he was not brought to trial. In April an apparent reconciliation
took place; Somerset was readmitted to the Privy Council and
much of his already forfeited property was restored to him. But
he had no more influence on the government, and, in the autumn
of I55I, Warwick took advantage of some unguarded speeches
of the Duke's to arrest him for high treason: false evidence
of an intended conspiracy was got up against him and, though the
charge of treason broke down, his peers found him guilty of felony
and he was beheaded in January i552.
55
JOHN DUDLEY
DUKE OF NORTHUMBERLAND
son of Edmund Dudley and Elizabeth Grey, is first heard of as
distinguishing himself, together with his future rival Edward
Seymour, in the second French war of Henry VIII ; and whatever
else he was, no one can deny that on the battle-field he was a brave
soldier. As Viscount Lisle he became in 542 Warden of the
Marches and Lord High Admiral, and xvas present xvith Seymour,
now Earl of Hertford, in the dreadful raid of I544 in which
Edinburgh was sacked. Shortly afterxvards he aided in the capture
of Boulogne, and drove before him the French fleet xvhich had
attacked the Isle o! Wight, fighting a successful rearguard action
with them off Shoreham. He acquiesced, probably with dissimula-
tion in the Protectorate of Hertford over young Edxvard VI, and
was raised to the Earldom of Warwick xvhen Hertford made himself
Duke of Somerset, but he xvas obliged to resign his office of
Admiral to Thomas Seymour. He xvas present and displayed great
valour at the Battle of Pinkie in I547 ; but it is evident that he lost
no opportunity of intriguing against the Protector, who made a great
mistake in entrusting to him the suppression of the peasant rebellion
in Norfolk in 549- On his return from that task, xvhich he
executed xvith ability, but also with savage cruelty, Warwick began
to show his hand, and it was at his house in London that the
conspirators against Somerset met. The Protector's openly avowed
zeal for the ' poor commons ', whose livelihood was threatened by the
growth of the enclosures, had frightened the upper classes and
JOHN DUDLEY DUKE OF NORTHUMBERLAND. K.G.
From a portrait in the possession of Lord Sackville
'a-e 2. $6
58
LADY JANE GREY
(537-554
elder daughter of Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, afterwards
Duke of Suffolk, and of Frances Brandon, who was daughter of
Henry VI I's youngest child, Mary, was born at Bradgate, Leicester-
shire, in the same month as her cousin, King Edward VI. For
learning, accomplishments and fervent Protestant piety, she was one
of the marvels of that learned age. Her first tutor was John Aylmer,
afterwards Elizabeth's Bishop of London. Roger Ascham knew
her and extolled her learning; she could read Plato for pleasure
at thirteen, and at fifteen had begun Hebrew; she held her own in
her last hours in controversial theology against the Catholic divines
who were sent to dispute with her. Before King Henry's death
she was a member of Katharine Parr's household, and, when that
lady subsequently married Thomas Seymour, she was to some
extent a victim, together with her cousin Elizabeth, of Seymour's
unscrupulous policy. He professed to wish to marry her to
Edward VI ; of his ulterior designs on the two young ladies it is
difficult to speak with certainty. When the astute Northumberland
was preparing in the spring of x553 to change the succession, he
contrived a marriage between Jane and his own fourth son, Lord
Guildford Dudley [May 2ISt), probably much against Jane's will,
for she never concealed her hatred of Northumberland. In June
Edward was persuaded to make a devise of the succession in
favour of Jane and her heirs male, and, when Edward died (July 6)
Jane, who had known nothing of the plot, was astonished to be told
that she was the Queen (July 9. Next day she came in a barge
LAD'S" JANE GRE"
From a portrait by Lucas De Ileere in the National Portrait Gallery
.Fate
LADY JANE GREY 59
to the Tower with her husband, and was obliged to acquiesce in
her elevation. She even signed during the next few days some
documents of .tate and appointed an ambassador. But outside
London she seems to have been proclaimed only at King's Lynn
and at Berwick: the whole country was rising for Mary, and even
the traitor Northumberland, who had gone to secure the person of
the Princess, was obliged to proclaim her Queen; and on the
t9th Jane's own father, Suffolk, followed suit at the Tower. Jane
accordingly remained a prisoner there until November, when she
was arraigned at the Guildhall of high treason, pleaded guilty and
was condemned to death. She was not, however, executed until the
failure of Wyatt's rebellion in the late winter: she and her husband
suffered on the same day--February I2, I554 .
MARY I
(56-558)
daughter and only suta'iving child of Henry VIII and Katharine of
Spain, vas born at Greenwich and was the godchild of Wolsey.
Hers is perhaps the most tragic story in English history. Her
disposition, naturally one of extreme sweetness and affection, was
soured by a series of cruel wrongs lasting from her thirteenth to
her thirty-seventh year. She was well educated and became an
accomplished scholar in Latin, French and Spanish, though there
is no evidence that she spoke or even understood Greek. She was
an extremely accomplished musician and found in music one of the few
comforts of her later life. Her earliest friends appear to have been
the aged Lady Salisbut3. , niece of King Edvard IV, and that lady's
son, Reginald Pole : both these, as well as her saintly mother, would
nourish her in hatred of everything savouring of heresy or of the
breach with Rome. Endless marriages--French, Spanish, Portu-
guese, German-Protestant of several varieties--were proposed for
the Princess, who, until her mother's divorce began to be mooted, was
recognized as unquestioned heir to the Crovn and often spoken of
as ' Princess of Wales'; indeed at one time she kept a little Court
at Ludlov, as former Princes of Wales had done. The person
to whom she was affianced for the longest time vas her future
husband's father, the Emperor Charles V: the most revolting
suggestion made, when Henry was pushing on the divorce, was
that a Papal dispensation should be procured to marry her to his
own natural son, the Duke of Richmond. The divorce entailed her
banishment from Court, and at last, in I53, her final separation
-2
3IARY I
From the portrait by Joannes Corvus in the National Portrait Gallery
Foot . o
MARY I
from her mother. Henceforth, until the fall of Anne Boleyn, she
was subject to endless humiliations, and even for long after
that continued to be styled 'The Lady Mary, the King's natural
daughter'. Both Queen Anne and Cromwell were said to have
designs upon her life; but Queen Jane and Queen Katharine I II
treated her with warm kindness, and, in the summer of I536. she
bowed to the inevitable, begged pardon of her father for offences
she had never committed, and, at the end of the year, xvas restored
to his favour. Danger came for her again when the northern rebels
in 537 demanded her recognition as heiress; and in the next fexv
years she saw her dearest friends, of the families of Pole and
Courtenay, perishing on the scaffold or driven into exile. But in
I544, perhaps owing to the influence of good Katharine Parr, she
was named in Henry's will as next to Edward in the succession,
though no formal recognition of her legitimacy was ever made
until her oxvn first Parliament met.
During the reign of her brother she resided chiefly at her
manors of Kenninghall, Hunsdon, or Newhall; and during Somer-
set's protectorate at least she was not ill-treated. The Duchess of
Somerset was her friend, and to her many of Mary's affectionate
letters are written. She remonstrated stoutly against the religious
changes which were introduced t547-9, but she occasionally visited
her brother, for whom she always showed an affection which there
is no evidence that he reciprocated. It is about this time that we
begin to be aware that she was frequently in ill-health, especially in
the autumnal season, but from what disease she suffered, unless it
were tumour or incipient dropsy, it is hard to say. The Act of
Uniformity of I549 at once brought her into difficulties. Somerset,
it is clear, had no intention of pressing hardly on her, and the
Council as a whole must have known, from the frailty of Edward's
health and the universal love and respect felt for the Princess by
the whole nation, how probable her ultimate succession was. But
Northumberland was, from I55i at least, master of the Council, and
62 MARY I
he made every effort to force Mary to conform, deprived her of her
servants, prosecuted them and insulted her and finally determined
to prevail on Edward to alter the succession to the Crown. Spies
watched Mary's actions from morning till night, yet she contrived to
communicate with the Imperial ambassador, and through him with
Charles V. It is practically certain that, if Edward's life had been
prolonged or if Jane's usurpation had had any chance of success,
Charles xvould have struck for Mary; the folly and incompetence
of Northumberland made this unnecessary. Jane's 'reign' lasted
but ten days, and the whole country welcomed on July i9th,
x553, the bitterly wronged Princess to the throne of her father.
But the cruel experience of twenty-five years had been too much to
be borne without fatal results upon her character. Mary had become
wholly un-English. Her mother's sufferings and the Catholic faith
were written upon her heart; and by 553 the Catholic faith meant
to her an uncompromising championship of the Papacy, and of the
Papal standard-bearer, Spain. By degrees, loyal Englishmen, most of
whom wished for an Anglo-Catholic settlement independent of Pope
or Spain and perhaps with the Mass in English, learned that Mary
had the imperious will of her father, the bigotry of her Spanish
ancestors, and more vindictiveness than could be found in either.
Policy, interest of every sort and kind, must give way to the duty of
extirpating the Reformation and the leading reformers, root and
branch. Mary and her Spanish confessors, and not Gardiner or
Bonner, not even Philip of Spain, are to blame for the cruel series
of martyrdoms that stained her reign and have stained her name for
ever,
At first indeed she was obliged to maintain some show of
moderation. Charles V, her constant adviser, had no mind to
cloud the renewal of the Anglo-Spanish alliance with a shadow of
popular hatred. Mary's own Council was much divided, and the
Queen could not venture to show her hand openly. But the failure
of Wyatt's rebellion in the early days of x554 strengthened her hands,
MARY I 63
and she sent her enemies to the block wholesale. The coming of
Philip and the marriage with him in the following July further
removed the need for caution, yet no religious persecution could begin
until Parliament had re-enacted the Statutes for burning heretics;
and these Statutes were twice thrown out in the House of Lords.
Pole was allowed to land in state as legate in the autumn of x554,
and, after a regular agreement had been arrived at that the Pope was
not to demand the restitution of the old monastic lands to the Church,
the two Houses accepted absolution from him and the realm was
reconciled to the Roman See. The same third Parliament at last re-
enacted the persecuting Acts, and in the remaining forty-two months
of Mary's reign nearly three hundred persons were burnt alive for
denying the Real Presence in the Sacrament. The fact that this
appeared to be the result of the Spanish connexion added fuel to the
hatred which the persecution aroused in England ; but the truth was
that Philip regarded England merely as a useful ally in European
politics : when it became obvious that Mary would bear him no son,
he did not conceal his indifference to her; and this, with the tardy
discovery of her barrenness, finally broke her health and her heart.
Philip did indeed revisit England, after a long absence, in the spring
of x557, but it was only to draw the Council into his war with France,
a war which resulted in the loss of Calais in the following January.
To this new grief, and to the terrible financial straits which had been
getting worse all through her reign, the last straw vas added in
the shape of a quarrel with the Papacy, for whose sake Mary had
sacrificed so much. Pole, her only true friend, was dying;and
Mary died only a few hours before him, on Nov. Tth, 558.
To the last, Mary remained capable of inspiring affection : her
ladies-in-waiting were passionately devoted to her" she was infinitely
charitable and courteous where religion was not concerned: but
for her early wrongs, and had there never been a Reformation to
stamp out, she would have made a noble queen.
STEPHEN GARDINER
From the portrait belonging to Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Face p. .4
STEPHEN GARDINER 65
obedientia', 535), yet retained the confidence of the Catholic party
and even of successive Popes. Of Cranmer he always appears as
the jealous enemy, yet almost more the enemy of the now exiled
champion of the Papacy Reginald Pole, and it is quite possible to look
upon his attitude as indicating a patriotic leaning to a 'high' Anglo-
Catholic position of national independence. But there is also evidence
that Henry thoroughly mistrusted him and yet found him too useful
to be abandoned. In the framing of the Six Articles, I539, he had
the chief share, and here he and the King could cordially agree.
On the accession of Edward VI, he dt once appears as the
leader of the Opposition and the devout champion of Catholic
doctrine and practice. Somerset was most anxious to conciliate
him, and, though obliged to send him to a short imprisonment for
resisting the first Ecclesiastical Visitation of 547, he got him
liberated and restored to his see within three months. As, how-
ever, he openly preached against the whole new Settlement, he
had to be sent to the Tower in July I548; but it was left to
Northumberland to deprive him of his bishopric and to make his
confinement rigorous. Gardiner was therefore the man of all
others who had most reason to rejoice at Mary's accession.
To Mary he had as yet mainly been known as one of the
leading agents in her mother's divorce, and as the hated enemy of
Pole, whom she regarded as her best champion. Yet of all this not
one word was breathed ; she made him Chancellor and restored him
to his see ; he crowned her Queen and became her leading councillor.
He at once set to work to restore the Catholic faith and, apparently
without regret, ate his own words about the Papal Supremacy.
In the first Parliament of the reign he tried to pass an Act declaring
Elizabeth illegitimate, and Elizabeth seems to have been in more
danger from his hostility than from Philip's or even Pole's. Finally,
Gardiner laboured assiduously, but until the autumn of 554 without
success, to re-enact the statutes against 'heresy' which Somerset
had repealed; yet, though he was obliged to preside over the first
66 STEPHEN GARDINER
Commission xvhich sat to try heretics, none were burned during
the reign from his own diocese of Winchester; and it is certain
that he did his best to induce Cranmer and Latimer to fly to the
Continent. Thus though the Protestants always labelled 'Wily
Winchester' along with ' Bloody Bonner' as their two chief enemies,
the charge against Gardiner of wholesale persecution must be
pronounced doubtful. In political matters Gardiner's line appears
more clear: he wanted to keep England free from Spanish influences
and to marry the Queen to an Englishman, his candidate being
Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon. But when this proved impos-
sible he acquiesced in the marriage of Mary and Philip of Spain,
and even performed the rite in his own cathedral. He died in the
autumn of 555.
It is natural that a man who had played so many parts should
have pleased few, yet the universal testimony of contemporaries
as to Gardiner's double-dealing is too strong to be rejected, and,
though there are in him traits of a patriotic Englishman, there is
also too much xvhich can only be accounted for on the theory of
pure self-seeking to permit of a favourable judgement being passed
on his character.
67
ELIZABETH
(533-6o3)
daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was born at Green-
wich on September 7th. Cranmer was her godfather and Lady
Bryan her first governess. On her father's third marriage she
was declared illegitimate, as her sister Mary had already been, but
she was too young to feel the effects of this before, at the age of
eleven, her name was put back into the order of succession next
after llary's. Among her tutors were Sir John Cheke, the first
scholar of the age, Roger Ascham, and William Grindal. Her best
friend in childhood was Henry's last Queen, Katharine Parr. In
her household Elizabeth resided after her father's death, and was
there infamously courted by Thomas Seymour, vho had married
the widowed Queen. Seymour probably designed to marry her, and
she is said to have cried when he was executed i549. During the
rest of Edward's reign she lived either at Hatfield or at Ashridge,
but was often at Court with her brother and pursued her studies
with him. As she conformed readily to all ecclesiastical changes,
the fall of Somerset did not make to her the difference that it made to
her sister Mary; but, in common with Mary, she was excluded from
the succession by Edward's final devise of the crown in June 553-
On his death, therefore, she rode by her sister's side triumphantly
into Lbndon, after the collapse of the effort of Northumberland to
maintain Jane Grey, and, though Mary could hardly have felt kindly
to the daughter of Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth, who conformed readily
to the restoration of the Mass, was in no danger until the hatred
felt for Mary's projected Spanish match led to Wyatt's revolt in
F2
QUEEN ELIZABETH
From the portrait at Ditchley belonging to the Viscount Dillon
ELIZABETH
English fleet, and the infinitely superior seamanship of the English
sailors. In this great victory the Queen has, in the light of historical
research, little demonstrable share ; but to her contemporaries she is
the guiding spirit of the whole. She becomes'Gloriana', an idol
aloft on a shrine. Really, she becomes a lonely, selfish, scolding old
xvoman, who refuses to take advantage of the triumph, and above all
to pay a penny that she can avoid paying. Diplomatic intrigue
becomes to her an end in itself, and she even refuses to believe for
the rest of her reign that she is at war with the King of Spain. Her
great councillors, one by one, drop from her side,--the greatest of
them, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, not till 1598. She outlives
even her life-long rival Philip. Her favourites and her innumerable
suitors, too, are all gone ; the most favoured, Leicester, in 588 ; the
last of them, Essex, she has to behead for actually attempting an
insurrection against her in 6oo. Yet she keeps up the game to the
last ; she hunts, goes on progress, hurls torrents of elegant Latin or
still more elegant Italian at Ambassadors, and occasionally replies
in very fair Greek to gentlemen of the University; above all, she
dances, dresses, rouges and bejewels herself till she has one foot
in the grave. The end comes on March _.9. 4 , 6o3: no English
sovereign before her had attained such patriarchal years.
The only answer that can be given to the strange problem that
Elizabeth's career presents, is that she embodied, not by her own
merit but by the accidents of her position, the wishes of the enor-
mous majority of the English nation ; on Parliament rested her own
legitimacy and the whole of her new Church settlement; on the
ungrudging votes ot Parliament rested her final resistance to Spain.
And her intellect was of that masculine type that fully fitted her to
take advantage of this intensely national position, and yet to pretend
that she was ruling as an absolute sovereign; to scold and yet to
agree with her people ; to let them act in her name and to bear the cost
of their own actions, and yet to claim the glo W of those actions when
successful and to repudiate them when it was convenient to do so.
ELIZABETH
71
With all her scholarship, intellect and intellectual graces, Eliza-
beth at heart cared little for letters: she endowed no colleges, she
favoured no learned men ; of the arts--unless we can class as arts the
painting of her own portrait, and that of dress which she elevated to
a barbaric fine art--music alone appealed to her. Thus, while she
roared with laughter at Falstaff in the buck-basket, there is no reason
to suppose that she would have wept for Desdemona or Ophelia, if she
had lived long enough to witness Shakespeare's greatest tragedies.
What she loved was hunting and strong ale, adulation, show and
revelry; and she would flirt outrageously with any handsome man.
She slept--for personal dangers were never far away--with a drawn
sword by her bedside, and we may well believe that she would have
known how to use it if occasion had arisen.
7 9 .
MARY OUEEN OF
SCOTS
(1542-I587}
only sura'iving child of James V and Mary of Guise, vas born at
Linlithgow a veek before her father's death, December 7th. The
story of her life, although lacking in the highest elements of tragedy
which overshadoxved the life of her contemporary Mary Tudor, has
always attracted attention from its essential sadness, and has long
been the battle-ground of rival historians. Mary was the child of
misfortune. 'It came' (the crown of Scotlandl 'with a lass, and it
will go with a lass,' said her father, dying of a broken heart after
the defeat and disgrace of Solway Moss. But Mary's gallant
mother strove for eighteen years to keep that crown for her
daughter, and with it the French alliance with which the whole
history of old Scotland vas bound up. The child was crovned at
Stifling in her ninth month, and, after overtures had been made
both by Henry VIII and the Protector Somerset for a marriage
between her and Edward VI,--overtures naturally fruitless because
the English endeavoured to back them up by bloody raids and
invasions,--she was sent in I548 to France as the affianced bride of
the Dauphin. There for twelve years her upbringing vas wholly
French, and it must be sadly confessed that she remained a French-
woman rather than a Scot to the end of her life. Of her natural
gifts, refined by a brilliant though not solid education, there can be
no doubt, any more than of her great personal charm and beauty.
But. when her marriage to the Dauphin actually took place in 1558 ,
she signed, with her eyes open, a deed making over the crown
of Scotland, in the event of her own death without heirs, to the
French King. The 'old alliance' of Scotland and France was
MARY QUEEN OF .SCOTS 73
already tottering and this deed was enough to shatter it. When
Mary Tudor died later in that same year, Mary and her husband
took the title of King and Queen of England and Ireland in addition
to that of Scotland, and on the death of Henry I I in 559 the title of
France was naturally added. Elizabeth, however, promptly protested
against the former assumption, and interfered in Scotland to such
effect that the Scottish Lords repudiated their Queen's claims on
England by the treaty of Edinburgh, x56o. And at the end of that
),ear, by the death of her first husband, Mary ceased also to be
Queen of France. Could she hope even to retain Scotland? It
seemed doubtful, for the Protestant Lords were negotiating for a
marriage betxveen Elizabeth and Mary's heir presumptive, the Earl
of Arran. Yet much xvould depend upon the young Queen herself.
In August t56t she returned, a widow of nineteen, to rule the most
turbulent country of Europe. For four years she set herself the
task of conciliating enemies and strengthening friendships, and by
no means xvithout success. Though officially and by upbringing
the champion of the Catholic faith, Mary was no fanatic, and though
she was often insulted by Knox and other fanatic Protestants, and
though all the offices in Scotland were filled by avowed Protestants,
she succeeded by politic measures in retaining for herself the use of
the Mass in her chapel. It is quite possible therefore that, but for
her constant hopes of the English crown, Mar)" might have proved a
good Scottish Queen. But from the first the idea of either dethroning,
or at all events succeeding the 'bastard' Elizabeth was dominant in
her breast ; and this she could only expect to realize by the help of
some great Catholic power. So Mary hawked herself, and was
hawked by her friends, about the marriage-market of Europe quite
as much as Elizabeth hawked herself, and we ought to allow a great
deal of weight to the mere personal rivalry betxveen two handsome
xvomen which such a quest engendered, although it must be admitted
that Elizabeth had the advantage, in that she did not intend to
marry, whereas Mary did. At the end of this first period, that is to
74
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
say in 565, Mary was fairly firm on her throne and fairly good friends
with Elizabeth. Then she fatally embroiled her cause by marrying,
against the advice of all her best friends in France and Scotland,
Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, the great-grandson of Henry VII
and next-best heir after herself to the English (though not to the
Scottishl throne. It was a deliberate challenge to the English
settlement; and Elizabeth was furious and alarmed. Yet, could
Mary's ov,-n violent passions have been kept in restraint, it might
in time have become possible for the Catholics to have espoused
the cause of herself and Darnley with some effect. But after a few
months of real affection, Mary discovered that her new husband
was vicious, a poltroon and a fool, and grew to hate him intensely.
Elizabeth played skilfully on Mary's half-brother the Earl of Moray,
who ,,',,as head of the Protestant interest, and got him to raise an
insurrection, which vhen it was easily suppressed she disavowed.
Then in rapid succession followed the great acts in the tragedy.
Darnley murdered Mary's Italian secretary Rizzio, March I566;
her only child, Prince James, was born in June; Darnley himself
was murdered, at least with her connivence, in February i567;
in April the Queen threw herself into the arms of his principal
murderer, the Earl of Bothwell, and married him in May; Scotland
rose against her and Bothwell in June, such troops as she could
raise were beaten at Carberry Hill, and before the month was out
the Queen was a prisoner in Lochleven Castle. There she signed
an act of abdication in favour of her infant son, who was crowned as
James VI, and the Catholic cause in Scotland was dead for ever.
Ten months later Mary escaped from the island-fortress, and
the family of Hamilton raised some troops for her cause. These
were beaten at Langside in May 568, and the Queen fled to
England, to seek from Elizabeth not an asylum but vengeance on
her rebel lords. That astute female had no intention of granting
her prayer. For nearly nineteen years Mary remained in confine-
ment, more or less close, in various castles in the north of England,
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS 75
while, as James grew into youth and manhood, the waves of the
tempest she had raised in Scotland gradually subsided. But in
England her presence was an incessant source of such danger that
we can hardly blame Elizabeth if she took any and every means of
neutralizing it. At first she professed to allow an inquiry to be
held into the question of Mary's guilt in the murder of Darnley:
it was then that the Scottish lords, who appeared against their
Queen, produced copies of the famous ' casket letters', said to have
passed between her and Bothwell ; but, when enough had been dis-
closed to blacken Mary's character, Elizabeth stopped the inquiry.
Several eligible Catholics from time to time presented themselves
as candidates for the prisoner's hand, the most serious being the
Duke of Norfolk in 1569; Don John of Austria, nine years later,
was another. But Elizabeth and her watchful ministers outwitted
them all, and outwitted also several successive murder-plots in
which, unfortunately for her fame, the Queen of Scots was engaged.
As England drew nearer and nearer to open war with Spain and
to friendship with France, the King of Spain became more and more
Mary's one hope, and to him, as the tragedy drew to its close, she
finally bequeathed her claims upon the British Islands.
The end came in this way: an Association to protect Elizabeth's
life and to revenge her death, if she were murdered, was signed by
all leading Englishmen in 584 . An Act of Parliament ratified it,
and declared that any person in whose favour any attempt at such
murder were made, should be deprived of right to the succession
and should be brought to trial before a special Commission. In
October I586 , such a Commission sat to try Mary on such a charge
in Fotheringhay Castle, and unanimously pronounced her to be
guilty. After long hesitation Elizabeth signed her death-warrant
and Mary was beheaded on February 8, 587, meeting her fate with
consummate dignity and bravery. One can hardly be surprised
at her attitude during the years of her captivity, but for the fatal
deeds of 567 it is difficult to find any excuse.
7 6
JOHN KNOX
(5o5-5721
son of Vrilliam Knox and Margaret Sinclair, was born at Hadding-
ton and educated there and at the University of Glasgow; but,
though he once lamented his ignorance of Hebrew, there is no
evidence that he knew an 5" Greek or that he was in any special degree
a scholar. His literary fame, such as it is, is owing to his vigorous
use of vernacular Scots, which became in his hands the most power-
ful and picturesque of languages. He appears to have taken minor
orders early, and to have acted as a notary-public, which profession
would indicate some knowledge of the Civil law. Our main
information about his career is always his own 'History of the
Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland', the first
part of which was published in x584 and the remainder, with
Buchanan's glosses, sixty years later.
He was acting as tutor to some young gentlemen in x544-5-6
when he made the acquaintance of Wishart the reformer, burned
for heresy in the latter year by Cardinal Beaton, who three months
later was murdered in revenge for this execution. The murderers
held Beaton's castle of St. Andrews against a siege and were there
joined by Knox, who was 'called' to preach to them. In 547 the
castle capitulated to a French siege and to the 'Regent of Scotland,
and Knox was sent to the French galleys, where he remained for
eighteen months. His labours with the oar could not have been
severe, as he was able to write letters and theological pamphlets while
on board. On being released he came to England and held forth to a
congregation of the reformed faith at Belavick. In i55 he was made
JOHN KNOX
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown
Face/. 76
JOHN KNOX
77
a royal chaplain, took part in the revision of the Prayer Book [I552
and was offered the Bishopric of Rochester, which he 'scrupled'
and finally spurned. At the end of i553 (after six months of Queen
Mary} he fled to France with his wife Marjory Bowes, whom he had
married in the previous July. Early in i554 he made his way to
Geneva and Zurich, where he met Calvin and Bullinger. From
one of these retreats, or from France, he issued in July i554 his
' Faithful Admonition to the Professors of Gods faith in England',
directed against Mary Tudor's Spanish marriage. At Frankfort in
the latter half of that year he received a 'call' to preach to a
congregation of English refugees, but got into dispute with a
certain Dr. Cox and was obliged to return to Geneva. In I555 he
was again at Dieppe in France, and thence made a nine months'
preaching-tour in Scotland, where, during his absence, the Reforma-
tion had made great strides. He now became acquainted with the
leading Scottish nobles, whose zeal for Protestantism was quickened
by the prospect of dividing the spoils of the old Church; and, during
the same time, he fatally undermined the influence of the Regent,
Mary of Guise. Whether increasing danger from her side, or a
fresh 'call' from Geneva urged him, he quitted Scotland in the
summer of I556, and the trembling Scottish bishops were reduced
to burning him in effigy; and in Geneva he principally remained,
maturing at the feet of Calvin his ideas of Church discipline until
his final return to Scotland in i559 . Once at least, he was in-
vited by the Scots lords to return, got as far as Dieppe and then
thought better of it. From Geneva he issued in I558 his 'First
Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of Women'
directed at the address of the Queens of England and Scotland and
the Queen-Dowager-Regent of the latter country. He forgot that
Elizabeth might soon be Queen of England; Elizabeth did not
forget the ' First Blast'. Finally he came back to Scotland in
April i559, organized the Protestant party for open war, preached
publicly the destruction of idols and idolatry and saw before his
JOHN KNOX 79
with a rod of iron. During his last years he was in constant ill
health, and used to get up from his bed only to preach ; when once
in the pulpit, however, his strength seemed to return, and at the
end of the sermon he seemed 'lyk to ding that pulpit in blads and
flee out of it '. He died in his home in the High Street, Edinburgh,
in I572; his first wife had died in i56o, and early in 564 he had
married Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree: from one
of his daughters by her the wife of Thomas Carlyle was lineally
descended.
Knox's character is a perfectly simple one : he was quite fearless
and honest in his intolerance; he was ready to condone murder if
he believed it were for the benefit of ' Christ's Kirk'; he was the
champion, although perhaps not such an extreme one as some of
his successors, of the supremacy of that Kirk over the State; in
private life he was often humorous and occasionally tender; he
did not condemn all amusements and was sometimes known to
play golf.
WILLIA I CECIL
(1520-I59
first Lord Burghley, son of Richard Cecil and Jane Heckington,
was born at Bourne in Lincolnshire. His grandfather had risen,
in the service of Henry VII and Henry VIII, to the position of
a rich country gentleman, and his father, in the service of the latter
King, was further enriched with a good deal of monastic land in the
North-Eastern midlands. William entered as a student of St. John's
Cambridge in 1535 and resided six years at the University. He
became an excellent scholar and a warm friend of John Cheke, the
greatest ' Grecian ' of his time. In 54I he left Cambridge for the
bar, and in the same year married Mary Cheke, the sister of his
friend. She died in 544, and in 545 Cecil married another lady
famous for her learningnMildred Cooke, daughter of Edward VI's
preceptor, and sister of Anne Cooke who became the mother of
Francis Bacon. The Duke of Somerset made Cecil his private
secretary in i547 and reposed complete trust in him. Soon after
Somerset's fall in I55o, Cecil, who was for a moment involved in his
ruin, made his peace with Warwick, was made Secretary of State in
i55o , knighted in 155 and became Chancellor of the Garter in 552.
Though he outwardly complied with the measures of the detest-
able government of the last three years 6f Edward VI, his private
journal enables us to see how much he loathed his masters. He
signed, with the rest of the Council, the document by which Edward
attempted in June i553 to change the succession, but by a certain
amount of quibbling contrived to reconcile himself to Mary after the
failure of the scheme. He held no office but incurred no disgrace
WILLI.\3I CECIL, FIRST BARON BURGHLEY, K.G.
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, attributed to 5larcus Gheeraerts
WILLIAM CECIL
thoroughly. So, during the last ten years of his long life, he ap-
peared to the younger generation of 'Elizabethans' as the drag on
the wheel. His second son, Robert Cecil, afterwards first Earl o!
Salisbury, succeeded to Walsingham's Secretaryship and carried
out his father's policy of caution. Burghley died in x598. When
one examines the history of the reign, one is driven to the con-
clusion that, whether his was the brain that planned or merely the
hand which executed the measures, internal and external, religious
and secular, by which England was rescued from the dangers and
disgraces of Mary's reign, enormous credit is due to him. Few
statesmen ever had a harder task and few have displayed greater
foresight and resolution in carrying it out.
In private life Lord Burghley, who became on his father's death
in x559- a very rich man, was noted for the splendour and elegance
of his buildings and gardens, for his love of books, for his inde-
fatigable industry and for his wise and tender affection for his family.
The only weakness of which he is accused is his passion for
manufacturing for the house of Cecil a pedigree which could not
be proved.
83
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE
{d. I596 }
was probably born in Devonshire about i54o, and was almost
certainly of kin to a gentle family of Drakes of that county. Hardly
anything certain is known of him until he appears as engaged in
the trade to the Guinea coast in I565; two years later, he leaped
into fame as commander of a ship in the squadron of his kins-
man Hawkins, trading, in defiance of prohibitions, to Spanish
America. Hawkins and Drake were treacherously set upon in the
harbour of St. Juan de Lua and all their vessels but two were
destroyed; on their return they moved the English government
to demand redress, but, failing in this, decided to recoup them-
selves by 'piratical' expeditions against Spanish commerce. In
i57 o, i57I, I572, Drake made three successive voyages to the West
Indies, and, on the third of these, took and sacked the town of
Nombre de Dios, then the Atlantic d6p6t of the gold and silver from
the mines of the Pacific coast. Much of the plunder of the town had
to be abandoned owing to a severe wound received by Drake in the
attack, but much was gained and brought home, and it was upon
this voyage that Drake for the first time saw from the top of a great
tree the Pacific Ocean and vowed to sail an English ship on it. In
I577, therefore, he undertook, in his famous ship the lZ'elfcan or
Golden Hind of oo tons, and with four smaller vessels, the
passage to the 'South Seas' by the Straits of Magellan. In the
course of this voyage, in which he was deserted by one ship, lost
another in a storm, and had to break up the other two as unsea-
worthy, Drake successfully accomplished the dangerous passage,
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE 85
and greater exertions by sea. In the ' Counter Armada' of 589 he
was less successful, but managed to burn the shipping and part of
the town of Coruna. Troops were landed for an attack on Lisbon,
which failed, and Drake was accused of staying outside the harbour
picking up prizes. For the next five years there is little trace of his
activity, and his last expedition {595) with Sir John Hawkins to the
West Indies was utterly unsuccessful. The Spaniards were fore-
warned and every port in America was fortified. Hawkins died off
Porto Rico and Drake off Porto Bello ; he was buried at sea.
Drake was essentially the greatest of all the Elizabethan sailors,
a man ready for any adventure, beloved and followed by his men,
yet absolute master on his own deck: a man, moreover, of the
highest practical intelligence in all walks of life, and of this no
better example can be given than the 'leat' xvhich still bears his
name and still carries the pure water of Dartmoor to the town
of Plymouth. His letters are models of shrewd common sense,
and many picturesque touches in them are still remembered.
86
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
son of Walter Raleigh and Katharine Champernoxvne, was born
about 552 at Hayes, near Budleigh Salterton in Devon, being of
kindred to the leading Devon families and half-brother of Sir
Humphry Gilbert. He spent, it is said, three years at Oriel
College, Oxford, but, as he was about the same time fighting in the
Huguenot wars in France, it is difficult to see where he picked up
his extensive and accurate knowledge of classics, mathematics and
natural science. But by some means or other he became, as his
History of the Vorld proves, one of the most learned men of a learned
age. He took part as commander of a vessel in Sir Humphry
Gilbert's piratical expedition of 578, and on his return made the
acquaintance of Leicester, who probably then first introduced him at
Court. Most of I58O- he spent in Ireland helping to put down
the ' Desmond' rebellion in Munster, and his favour with the Queen
dates from his return from Ireland at the end of the latter year.
That favour appears to have been, in Raleigh's case more than
in that of many others, especially disastrous: Elizabeth loved to
have him at her side, and showered gifts and offices upon him,
although never to an extent to satisfy his ambition and his need for
money: again and again she prevented him from going to the wars
or on expeditions to America, and indeed it would not be far wrong
to accuse her of having' spoiled' one of the finest characters that her
age produced. She recognized his ability at once, and he became
her principal adviser as to the affairs of Ireland, where he received
enormous grants of land, and where he pushed on the scheme of
' plantations', a scheme which really led him to his great idea of the
88 SIR WALTER RALEIGH
and we gradually become aware that, rightly or wrongly, Raleigh
was the most unpopular man at the English Court. James on his
accession received him with marked coldness and at once deprived
him of his office of 'Captain of the Guard'. In his rage at this
treatment Raleigh may have known more than he should of obscure
plots against the new King, in which his friend Lord Cobham was
certainly involved; he was therefore brought to trial for high
treason, and, after being told that he was a 'viper with a Spanish
heart' and other unpleasant untruths, was condemned to death,
respited and sent to the Toxver for twelve years, i6o3-I 5. There
he was at least treated as leniently as was compatible with restraint,
and there he began that magnificent torso called the ttlistory of
}IZorld, the first volume of which, extending to i3o B.c., was alone
completed. It is famous far more for its skill in portraiture and
its philosophical conception than even for its enormous mass of
facts collected and well assimilated; and by itself it lifts Raleigh
to a very high place among men of letters, as his few poetical
remains do among poets. But the great adventurer was for ever
longing, as old age drew on, to realize his conception of the wealth
of Guiana or at least to strike one more blow at the effete colossus
of Spain, and in i6i 5 he managed to persuade the King to give
him his liberty and to allow him to try his luck once more on the
Orinoco. James must have known, and did know perfectly well,
that Raleigh would infringe the Spanish claim to monopolize the
American coasts; in fact James betrayed the whole scheme to his
friend the Spanish ambassador. The Guiana voyage was a compIete
failure from the first; Raleigh's crews were mutinous scoundrels,
no gold mine was found, Raleigh's eldest son was killed, and, when
the fleet returned, James was quite willing to send its commander
to Madrid to be hanged as a pirate. The English Council, though
hostile to Raleigh, would not stand this, and Raleigh, who had never
received a pardon for his 'high treason' of i6o3, was beheaded
without further trial in i618.
\VILLIA3I SHAKESPEARE
From the Bust at Stratford-on-Avon
'ace ;. o
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
91
Lucy of Charlecote. But his unrivalled knowledge of the human
heart and his divine power of expressing the same in immortal verse
was a gift which he held directly from Almighty God.
In his nineteenth year Shakespeare married Ann Hathaway,
the daughter of a small farmer, eight years older than himself, and
his elder daughter Susanna was born within six months of the
marriage. Twins, Hamnet and Judith, followed in 1585, and in that
year the future poet disappeared from his home for eleven years.
It seems probable that he went to seek his fortune in London,
perhaps in the train of a company of players who may have been
visiting Stratford. He is first known to have been in London in
i587, and almost certainly began, perhaps in some very humble
capacity, an apprenticeship to the stage. But in spite of the ac-
quaintance with low and even wild life which some of his plays
indicate, in spite of the exceedingly bad reputation of theatrical
persons at the time, in spite of powerful tradition that he was occa-
sionally a hard drinker, all the evidence which we possess goes to
show that Shakespeare was an eminently shrewd man, who went to
London to make a competent fortune, and lived frugally until and
even after he had made it ; that his thoughts were ever turning back
to his native Stratford, which he began to revisit regularly as soon as
his fame and some money had been won {I596 ). In that year he
relieved his struggling father, and in the next year purchased the
most substantial house in the town, called New Place, to xvhich in
later years he added several other substantial if small properties,
and in which he finally came to reside 'as a gentleman' in I611 till
his death. That he was helped towards the purchase by his patron
the Earl of Southampton is traditionary and probable. Thus the
great poet was before all things a practical man, so practical that
some people have found it impossible to believe that such divine
genius could have gone hand in hand with such a mercenary spirit.
Attempts have even been made, mostly, it is true, by half-educated
Americans, to prove that Lord Bacon wrote the plays attributed to
9 2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare; such theorists forget that the innate baseness ot
Bacon's character renders his authorship far more improbable than
that of the sturdy Warwickshire yeoman of whom nothing mean
is recorded.
In London Shakespeare quickly acquired a reputation as a
useful actor and a ready playwright, and came to be at last a sub-
stantial shareholder in the most popular theatre of the day, and
a member of the company of actors which both Elizabeth and James
specially delighted to honour and to reward. In the twenty years
between 1591 ' the date of Love's Labour's Losl, and I6II, the date
of The Ycmlbesl , he produced on an average two plays a year,
almost every one of which has to be reckoned as immortal, and
which, taken together, constitute the supreme literary treasure of the
English language and the greatest literary inheritance of the English-
speaking peoples. That he worked quickly, revised not at all, was
careless of fame ; that he borrowed his plots, that he adapted inferior
work for the stage, here lending his splendid gifts to transform
somebody else's sordid tragedy (Titus Andronicus), here spoiling
his own most immortal creation of Falstaff to please the Queen
Ullcrry IVives of IVindsorl, evidently seemed small matters to him:
every one else did the like; but no one ever came near to him in
his own craft, and if envy sometimes snarled at him, as his fellow
dramatist Greene did, we may well believe that he passed it by with
a smile. As Ben Jonson, who was too great not to trample down
the envy he must have felt, tells us, 'he was indeed honest and of
an open and free [xve should now say of a sunny] nature'. But
to a man who saxv life as xvhole as Shakespeare saw it, the sun
could not be always shining; and this great master of the human
heart never showed his mastery so completely as in contemplating
the tragedy which underlies all earthly life. No better division of
his plays has ever been made than that of the ' four periods' allotted
by Professor Dowden : 'in the workshop'; 'in the world'; 'out of
the depths'; 'on the heights.' Yet no division can be exact; some
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
93
of the tenderest and finest comedy is found in the early plays as
well as some of the deepest tragedy; it seems as if it was quite as
much in art as in comprehension of life that the poet grew from
year to year; and besides the plays we have to consider as early
works not only Vcttts and Adonis and Lucrece, but the mysterious
Sonnets, which contain the finest lyric poetry in our language.
Shakespeare made his will in February and died in April 6t6 ;
he is buried in the parish church of Stratford: his last living
descendant, a granddaughter, died in 67o.
94
IARGARET OF ANJOU
Queen of Henry VI, fourth child of Rn, Duke of Anjou, and
Isabella of Lorraine, was born at Nancy (?). Her father became
successively Duke of Bar, Duke of Lorraine, Duke of Anjou, Count
of Provence and titular King of Naples and Sicily. The young lady
was therefore much sought after as a bride, and, in I444, the Earl of
Suffolk headed an embassy to ask her hand for his master, Henry VI :
a marriage by proxy took place in that year and the consent of the
King of France to the arrangement was obtained. She brought no
dowry to the already impoverished English Crown, and it was believed,
though xvithout evidence, that Suffolk had agreed in the marriage
contract to terms surrendering some of the fortresses xvhich England
still held in France. In i445 she crossed the Channel and was
married to Henry at Titchfield. Once in England, though only
fifteen years old, she became a violent partisan of Suffolk and
Beaufort against Gloucester and the war party; when these were
gone txvo successive Dukes of Somerset became her favourites,
and the policy of the Court, against the Duke of York, became
her policy. Her only child, Prince Edward of Lancaster, was
born in i453, at the very time when her husband was suffering from
his first mental and bodily collapse. She xvould never agree to
the compromises and peaces xvhich Henry was, on more than one
occasion, ready to conclude with the Yorkists. When Margaret
got the upper hand in the field she used her victory without
mercy, and understood how to pack a Parliament which attainted
her enemies wholesale. After Henry's defeat at Northampton she
xvas found xvandering on the borders of Wales, and xvas at least
MARGARET OF ANJOU 95
once in danger of her life from robbers. From Wales she made
her way in I46I to Scotland, and surrendered Berwick to the Scots
as the price of help. She was not present when her army of
Northerners won the battle of Wakefield, but she rejoined her
friends after the victory and advanced upon London xvith a large
army which won the second battle of St. Albans. There, however,
for some reason unknown, she stayed her hand, fell back northwards,
and saw her forces annihilated and dispersed by Edward IV at Tow-
ton. She and Henry escaped from that field to Scotland, xvhence in
i46a she embarked for France to seek French help. King Louis XI
was friendly and lent her a small force, with which she returned to
Scotland. But it seems to have been of little use, for Margaret and
her husband were soon reduced to the direst straits; and it was
then, while wandering in a Northumbrian forest, that she met a
ferocious robber and threw herself upon his generosity, not in vain,
by revealing to him her rank and that of her young son. She was
again on the Continent in the autumn of I463 , and received some
rather unwilling charity from the Duke of Burgundy. She remained
in Lorraine, a costly burden upon her father's charity, waiting
always a chance to strike again at England, and occasionally travel-
ling as far as the coasts of the Channel, until i47o, when the Earl of
Warwick, who had finally broken xvith Edward IV, was reconciled
to her by the mediation of Louis XI of France : but while Warwick
sailed, in the Lancastrian interest, almost at once to England,
Margaret delayed too long, and so allowed Edward IV, whom her
friends had driven out, to return and reoccupy London. She finally
landed at Weymouth in April I47I, the very day on which her new
friend Warwick was beaten and slain at Barnet ; Edxvard by a forced
march fell upon her small army at Texvkesbury, annihilated it and
slew her son. Margaret remained his captive in various English
castles till i475, when Louis XI stipulated for her release. Thence-
after she lived in the province of Anjou in extreme poverty until
her death in I48z, and was buried in the cathedral of Angers.
9 6 MARGARET OF ANJOU
Margaret was learned and fierce, a far truer product of the
clever and cruel Angevin house than her gentle and scrupulous
father, Ren6 ; she was devoted to hunting as well as to reading, and
even in the days of her comparative prosperity vas an importunate
beggar of everything which she desired. Her career in England,
vhose rights and vhose fortunes she was ready to sell to any one
who would help her cause, was accompanied by unvarying misfortune
for the Lancastrians, and most of all for her gentle and uncomplaining
husband.
97
HUMPHRY DUKE OF
GLOUCESTER
139-447)
called'the good' (but ought to have been called'the bad') Duke
Humphry, youngest son of Henry IV and Mary Bohun, was edu-
cated at Balliol College, and derives whatever good repute he has
solely from his love of letters and his patronage of learning. For
while he possessed in a pre-eminent degree, even in that bad age,
the vices of licentiousness, excessive quarrelsomeness and popularity
hunting, while his blind selfishness wrecked the policy of Henry V
after that monarch's death and opened the way for the Wars of the
Roses, he was an indefatigable collector of books, and began at
Oxford the magnificent foundation on which Sir Thomas Bodley alter-
wards built his library. The main alley in the great reading-room of
that library is still called after him, though hardly any of the books
which he gave are now there. Italian as well as French and English
scholars found in the Duke a patron--among them Aretino, who
translated for him Aristotle's Politics into Latin. He even called one
of his own bastard daughters by the classic name of Antigone.
As regards his political career, he was made a Duke by his
brother, Henry V, fought and was wounded at Agincourt and fought
through the second and third campaigns in the French war ; acted as
deputy for his brother Bedford, whom the Council appointed virtually
to act as Regent in the minority of Henry VI, and, during the next
twenty-five years, incessantly quarrelled with Cardinal Beaufort, his
rival in his nephew's Council. By his foolish marriage with a princess
HUMPHRY DUKE OF GLOUCESTER
called Jacqueline of Hainault, Gloucester dealt the first blov to
the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, and tried to grab the province of
Hainault for himself. Failing in this, he deserted Jacqueline for
Eleanor Cobham, and in I48 got his first marriage annulled. By the
death of his brother Bedford in x435 he became heir to the throne;
but his bolt was already shot. He allowed his wife Eleanor to be
accused of witchcraft and to be compelled to do penance in the
streets of London; and he acquiesced, though with a bad grace,
in Henry VI's marriage with Margaret of Anjou, which meant the
triumph of his rival's policy of peace with France. Although his
death, which took place suddenly at Bury St. Edmunds three days
after his arrest for high treason in February I447, was unquestion-
ably mysterious, and although suspicions of foul play were instantly
raised against Queen Margaret, the Earl of Suffolk and the aged,
and now dying Cardinal Beaufort, yet no evidence sufficient to
warrant these suspicions has ever been brought forward.
GEORGE DUKE OF CLARENCE
decisively on the side of Richard. Clarence was present at Edward's
futile campaign in France in 475, and during the next three years
appears to have been steadily heaping up causes of complaint
against himself, largely by his frequent interference with the
ordinary processes of justice in the law-courts, an offence known as
' maintenance'. Whether the King's jealousy was more stimulated
by his wife's relations or by Richard of Gloucester is uncertain;
but in January 478 Clarence was attainted in Parliament of high
treason, and 'disappeared prix'ately' at the Tower in February.
'False, fleeting, perjured Clarence,' Shakespeare's verdict, probably
sums up his character well.
MARGARET BEAUFORT
IO3
her foundation of the two Colleges of Christ's and St. John's at
Cambridge, and of the ' Lady Margaret' professorships of Divinity
at both Universities. She was instigated to these foundations by
the advice of John Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, one of
the glories, as indeed Margaret herself also was, of Renaissance
learning in England. Margaret was an ardent patron of the
Early English Press, and her grandson Henry VIII's love of learn-
ing and books xvas no doubt a direct inheritance from her.
zo4
ELIZABETH OF YORK
(I465-z5o3)
Queen of Henry VII, the eldest child of Edward IV and Elizabeth
Woodville, was born at Westminster. The first marriage that was
arranged for her was with George Neville, but, when the Neville
family deserted Edward's cause, this was broken off, and in 1475
she was solemnly promised to the Dauphin of France. The
thought of this splendid alliance was no doubt one of the reasons
which induced Edward to conclude the somewhat shabby peace
of Pecquigny; and, when it became obvious that the French King
had no intention of allowing it to be carried out, pure displeasure
is said to have hastened his death. At the date of that death
{April 1483 } the Princess was with her mother, her younger brother
and sisters in the Sanctuary at Westminster; and she remained
there till March I484, when Richard I I I, who had murdered her
brothers, Edward V and Richard of York. and usurped the throne,
induced the ladies to trust themselves to him: he is even said
to have suggested that, when his own Queen died, he would marry
Elizabeth. But the obvious marriage for her was that with the
exiled heir of the House of Lancaster, Henry Earl of Richmond,
and all peace-lovers, especially Bishop Morton of Ely, vere con-
stantly scheming for that end. There is some evidence that the
Princess herself, who was in Yorkshire at the date of Henry's
landing, was working secretly in his favour. It might almost
be said to be a part of Henry's ' contract with the English people'
that he should marry Elizabeth and so unite the rival Houses
of York and Lancaster; but he was particularly anxious not to
ELIZABETH OF YORK 705
appear to owe his crown to his wife, and therefore did not marry
her until January i486. From that time they remained a devoted
and loving couple until Elizabeth's death.
Elizabeth bore to Henry seven children, four of whom lived to
grow up : she died at the Tower in 5o3, and was buried in ' Henry
VII's Chapel' in Westminster Abbey.
lO6
JOHN COLET
{1467-15191
Dean of St. Paul's, son of Sir Henry Colet, Lord Mayor of
London, and Elizabeth Knevet, was born in London and educated
at Magdalen College, Oxford. He travelled to Italy in I493, and
there picked up some acquaintance with Greek; there also he
became acquainted with Ficino, with Pico della Mirandola and
perhaps with Savonarola himself. He returned to England in i496,
took orders and at Oxford in the years i497-8 delivered that
remarkable course of lectures upon the Epistles of St. Paul, which
laid the foundation of all sound Scriptural criticism. He and
Erasmus first met in i498; Colet did all he could to induce the
great scholar to take up his residence in England, and when, on
his father's death, he became a rich man 115o51 he gave Erasmus a
pension. In i5o 4 Colet was made Dean of St. Paul's, and in that
capacity first became intimate with Thomas More, though it is
probable that they had already met in Oxford. The large fortune
which Colet inherited from the deceased Lord Mayor was prin-
cipally expended by him in the foundation of St. Paul's School,
the first Public School of the New learning, in which Greek and
classical, as opposed to ecclesiastical Latin were to be the main
sub.iects of study. The foundation was commenced in 15o 9 and
completed in I518, the 3"ear before the Dean's death. Colet took
the most elaborate pains both to compile and to get compiled
sound school-books for its boys. His sermons in St. Paul's Cathedral,
in which he openly denounced the unblushing corruption of his
clerical contemporaries, had meanwhile got him into trouble with
JOHN COLET Io7
the Bishop of London, who instituted a prosecution for heresy
against him; it was even alleged that Colet had been so daring
as to translate the Lord's Prayer into English! Archbishop
Warham at once quashed the prosecution. In t5I:3 Colet preached
before the Court and King, on the iniquity of war, and in particular
of the French war in which Henry VIII was then engaged; but,
when his enemies sought to rouse the King's wrath against him,
Henry rewarded him by making him a royal chaplain. In xSi 4
Erasmus, who was again in England, accompanied Colet on a
pilgrimage to Becket's shrine at Canterbury, where the Dean
openly ridiculed the supposed virtue of the horrible relics of that
'martyr' which he was expected to venerate. Colet died in peace
xsxg, but it has always been an interesting question whether, had
he lived fifteen years later, he would have been found on the side
of his friend More, or with the more thoroughgoing reformers
such as Latimer. Perhaps of all the early leaders of the movement
his theological position came nearest to that of the Protestants.
He entirely disbelieved in masses for the soul, image worship,
pilgrimages and relics ; he sought to free learning from the traditions
of the 'Schoolmen' and to take his stand upon the doctrines of
the ' Fathers' of the primitive Church.
lO8
THOMAS LI NACRE
(d. I524}
the great scholar and the first physician of the English Renaissance,
was probably born at Canterbury about 146o. He was educated
under William Selling, the pioneer of Greek learning in England,
and in 1484 he appears as a Fellow of All Souls College, in Oxford ;
we do not know where his undergraduate career was passed.
Soon after this he travelled to Italy and remained, perfecting
himself in the study of Greek and of medicine, for some six years.
He had the honour, on his return to Oxford, of teaching Greek
to More, while Erasmus and Colet became his friends. In 15Ol he
was made Tutor to Prince Arthur, and in I523 to the Princess
Mary; he also took holy orders and held successively several rich
livings, though none of them for any long period. In these various
occupations he acquired a large fortune, which he destined for the
foundation of medical lectureships at both Universities. It was not,
however, until long after his death, in the reign of Edward VI, that
the lectureships were founded ; the present ' Linacre professorship'
at Oxford is the outcome of the old scholar's foundation. He was
almost as great a student of the ancient tongues as of medicine, and
wrote voluminous works on both subjects; his main service to the
latter is the recall of that study to the traditions of the Greek
physicians and especially of Galen, man 3" of whose works he
translated into Latin.
xo9
WILLIAM TYNDALE
reformer and martyr, came of a Gloucestershire family which had
originally migrated from the North of England. He is found as a
student of Magdalen Hall, at Oxford, as early as 5o: he took his
M.A. degree in I5 5 and then removed to Cambridge, where the
recent Greek teaching of Erasmus was bearing excellent fruit; but
we have no certain evidence that at either University be had directly
committed himself to the cause of reform. It is, however, probable
that the seeds of this had been sown in his mind, for we find him
preaching with vigour at Bristol in 5,,, and about that date he
translated the Etchiridion of Erasmus. In 53 he went to London,
where he met John Frith, one of the early English martyrs, and in
the next year to Germany. Here he visited Luther at Wittenberg
and worked at his Translation of the New Testament, which he
may have begun even before he came to London. The printing
of the book commenced at Koln, but orders were issued from
England to search for and buy up the sheets before it was com-
pleted, and it was finished on another press at Worms, the first
copies probably reaching England in 5,6. Even such a good man
as Archbishop Warham could not tolerate the idea of the New
Testament in English. Tyndale was hunted about the Continent
by various agents of Wolsey and other English bishops, and spent
some time at Marburg under the protection of the Protestant Land-
grave of Hesse, his opinions rapidly developing from Lutheranism
to Zwinglianism. At Marburg he published in I53 The ObcdicJtce
of a Christian ]llaJt, vindicating the Reformers from the charge of
xo WILLIAM TYNDALE
civil disobedience. The Erastian tone of the book drew praise
from Henry VIII, who might have protected the author had he not
also fiercely attacked the Divorce in The PracO'se of Prelates (53o).
Meanwhile Tyndale was pressing on his Translation of the Old
Testament, of which, however, he lived to print only the Pentateuch
and the Book of Jonah. Sir Thomas More fell upon him in the year
i5_ 9, and the two enjoyed down to i53 one of the most famous
theological controversies on record. Henry, in x53x, tried to seize
Tyndale's person on a charge of spreading sedition, and once managed
to make him fly from Antwerp, to which city, however, he returned in
i534 ; there he powerfully influenced John Rogers, one of the subse-
quent authors of the Authorized Version and the protomartyr under
Mary. In I535 Tyndale was decoyed by a scoundrel named Phillips,
arrested by Charles V's order, and sent to prison at Vilvorde, where
in I536 he was burned.
There is now no doubt that Tyndale's translation of those parts
of the Bible which he completed is, if not the direct parent, at least
the grandparent of our own Authorized Version. It was made from
the original Greek and the original Hebrew, of both of which, as of
Latin and all civilized modern languages, its author was a master;
and it was not, therefore, as has been sometimes asserted, a copy
of Luther's German version, from which, however, beyond doubt,
Tyndale derived assistance. And there is reason to believe that
Rogers, who was the editor of'Matthew's Bible', the first version
licensed in England, used in that version portions of Tyndale's
unpublished translation of other books of the Old Testament.
vo TE,mr, Xlrjrro |IEc llOtl iIFrATEVCHO IN VEP, II .C.I..A TI-LJ'|'EIEIIDO OPFI,.FI IIA,-.IT 'JIGI_I,.
WILLIA3I TYND.\LE
From the portrait at Hertford Collcge. Oxford
III
EDWARD STAFFORD
THIRD DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM
(I478-I52I)
son of Henry Stafford, second Duke, and Katharine Woodville, was
a direct descendant of Edward I I I, and was therefore a possible
object of jealousy to the first two Tudor kings. His father's head
had been cut off by Richard IlI. Henry VII at once restored his
lands and title, and, during his minority, he was a ward of the King's
mother, Lady Margaret, who is likely to have given him a good
education. He appears as a splendid noble, holding high position
at the Court of Henry VIII, whom he once entertained at his house
of Penshurst; and he served abroad in the campaign of i5i 3. He
was connected by marriage with the Percys, Poles, Howards and
Nevilles, and may have been used by these families as the mouth-
piece of their jealousy against Wolsey, to whose malice popular
tradition ascribed, perhaps wrongly, his fall. In 5z he was accused
of conspiring the death of Henry ; the evidence against him was both
suspected and flimsy, but he was condemned to death by a court
of seventeen peers and beheaded on Tower Hill. In character he
was vain, weak and excessively fond of dress.
CHARLES BRANDON
DUKE OF SUFFOLK
(d. 485
was the son of William Brandon, standard-bearer to Henry VII,
who vas killed at Bosworth. The date of his birth is unknown, and
nothing at all is known of him until the accession of Henry VIII,
when he immediately emerges as the King's favourite courtier and
friend. In 513 he became Viscount Lisle and next year Duke of
Suffolk. He was in command of the English army at the siege of
Therouenne in I53, of that vhich invaded Picardy in 53 and
of that which captured Boulogne in 544. He seems to have been
as remarkable for matrimonial entanglements as his master, for he
had already had more than one wife, and one at least was living,
when he courted Margaret of Flanders in I5X 4, and when in the
next year he married Henry's younger sister, the widowed Queen
Mary of France. This marriage took place secretly, and Henry
was only appeased by the gift of all his sister's plate and jewels.
For a fev years Suffolk and the Princess lived quietly in the
country, but by I5I 7 he was back in favour, and was Henry's right-
hand man for the rest of his life. Vigorous, patriotic, bluff and
immoral, he bore, both in character and person, a remarkable like-
ness to his royal master.
.!
MARGARET T U DOR
(489-x54 )
the elder daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was born
at Westminster and was married at the age of fourteen to James IV
of Scotland: from this union came ultimately the inheritance of the
crown of England by the Stuart kings. Margaret's son, James V, xvas
born in 52, seventeen months before his father's death at Flodden.
Though left as Regent by her husband's will, Margaret had little
real power, for all Scotland was at heart devoted to the French
alliance. She married in 514 Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus,
but thereby lost all hold on the Regency, which passed to the Duke
of Albany. In I5 7, after a visit to England, she quarrelled with her
new husband, and was believed to have relations with more than
one of the Scottish nobles. Her brother Henry, who had hoped
to sway Scotland through her, found her as unstable in politics as
she was faithless in matrimony, and wrote letters scolding her on
both subjects. She was finally divorced from Angus in 527, and
in the next year declared her marriage to Henry Stewart, after-
wards Lord Methven; and though she tried hard to divorce him
in 537 she never succeeded. She had by Angus one daughter,
Margaret Douglas, afterwards Countess of Lennox and mother of
Henry Lord Darnley. She was, in character, probably the worst
specimen of the great House of Tudor.
II 4
.lI ARY TUDOR
(496-533)
Queen of France, afterwards Duchess of Suffolk, the second sur-
viving daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was a highly
educated, beautiful and accomplished lady. She was betrothed and
even married by proxy in x5o8 to Prince Charles, afterwards the
Emperor Charles V, and as late as x54 Charles seems to have
regarded her as his affianced bride. But in that year Wolsey con-
cluded with France a treaty by which this girl of eighteen was to
wed immediately old Louis XII, then aged fifty-two. She is said
to have been so devoted to dancing and to late hours at night that
her husband succumbed to the consequent gaieties on the first day
of the next year. She immediately married her brother Henry's
friend, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, but without the consent
of the said brother or his Council. After some wrath and much
grumbling a reconciliation was effected, and Mary's only surviving
child, Frances, who became the mother of Lady Jane Grey, was
born in x5x7 . She seems to have been a warm partisan of Queen
Katharine and to have hated Anne Boleyn bitterly. She died in
Suffolk in her thirty-seventh year.
II 5
\VI LLIAM \VARHAM
{I45O-I532)
Archbishop of Canterbury, was educated at Winchester and New
College, Oxford, where he resided as Fellow till I488. He became
an ecclesiastical lawyer, was employed by Henry VII on several
diplomatic missions, and was rewarded in I494 with the Mastership
of the Rolls, in i496 with the Archdeaconry of ttuntingdon and in
i5o2 with the Bishopric of London. In I5o4 he became Archbishop
and Chancellor. He was Chancellor of Oxford University from
i5o6 until his death, and in this capacity showed himself a munifi-
cent patron of the New learning, and especially of Erasmus, who
owed much to his bounty. He crowned Henry VIII and Queen
Katharine in i5o9, but his influence soon gave way to Wolsey's,
to whom in I5 5 he resigned the Chancellorship. Though Wolsey's
office of Legate superseded the 'natural' legation enjoyed by
Warham, as by all Archbishops of Canterbury, and though many
disputes of an official kind arose between them, their personal
relations seem to have remained amicable and even cordial. Iike
Wolsey, Warham was no persecutor, and seems to have thought very
little of complaints that were often made to him of the increase of
heresy: thus on one occasion he protected Colet, who was in real
danger from his diocesan of London. Warham was obliged,
probably against his will, to manifest an interest in Henry's
proceedings for the divorce, and sat on various commissions in
connexion with it; and it seems probable that he really believed
the union with Katharine to be an unlawful one. In the Parlia-
ment which met in I529, Warham, now a very old man, was not
I2
116 WILLIAM WARHAM
in a position to make much resistance to the ecclesiastical changes
proposed, but it was he who, in 53, suggested to Convocation
to accept the proposed Royal title of' Head of the Church' with
the amendment 'quantum per Christi legem licet'. He died in
1532 , and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral.
JOHN FISHER
(d.535
Bishop of Rochester, came of a substantial merchant's family of
Beverley, Yorkshire, where there was an excellent school attached
to the Minster. He passed for an old man at the time of his death
but, as he did not take his B.A. at Cambridge till 487 nor his M.A.
till I49, it is not likely that he was more than seventy years of age.
He became Master of his College {Michaelhouse) in 497, and had
already made the acquaintance of Lady Margaret Beaufort, with whom
as a benefactor to learning his name was to be for ever associated,
for in that same year he became her confessor. It was he who
carried out or perhaps suggested her noble foundations of Christ's
College (5o5j and St. John's (5, after her deceaseI, and he had
already helped her to found the Divinity Professorships which bear
her name at both Universities, becoming himself the first occupant
of the Cambridge chair. For many years he was also Chancellor
of his beloved University. Without laying claim to be a great
Greek scholar, he was an ardent patron of the New learning, and
of what would now be called the 'higher criticism' of the Scrip-
tures; though he detested heretics and waged a long controversy
with Luther himself, he is supposed to have had leanings to the
Lutheran doctrine of justification, and he was an avowed enemy
of Wolsey, whose private life was an offence to him. In all matters
of ceremonial, in belief in Papal authority and on the sacramental
question, he was conservative of the conservatives ; and his fearless
character led him to oppose Henry on the divorce question, and
to oppose the anti-clerical party in the Parliament of 5a9, as
i8 JOHN FISHER
strongly as he had opposed Wolsey in that of 523 . He was the
leader of Convocation in its resistance to the Erastian title, x53, was
the confessor and councillor of Queen Katharine, and was involved,
even more deeply than his friend More, in the imposture of the
Nun of Kent. For this he was attainted in Parliament in x534,
but allowed to compound for his offence. Shortly afterwards he
refused, with More, to swear to the ",','hole of the Succession Act,
and was committed to a rigid imprisonment. \\'bile he was in prison
the Act of Supremacy was passed, and he refused to swear to this
also. Henry might perhaps have spared him had not Paul III
sent him a Cardinal's hat while he was in prison. But there
is no doubt--and under the circumstances no wonder--that he
was also in correspondence with the Emperor Charles V, with
a view to the latter striking some stroke in favour of Katharine
and her daughter Mary. In short, he had committed treason, and
of a kind for which he might have suffered even under a more
merciful king than Henry VIII. But when he was executed, in
June x535, the civilized world was almost as horrified as at the
death of More a fortnight later.
KATHARINE OF SPAIN
{485-536
commonly called Katharine of Arragon, first Queen of Henry VIII,
was the youngest child of Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen
of Spain. She had an excellent and learned education, and was
married in 5o to Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII, but she never
lived with him as his wife. The Prince died in the following April
at the age of sixteen, and Katharine xvas betrothed in 5o3 to his
brother Henry. A Papal dispensation was procured from Pope
Julius II to hallow this more than doubtfully lawful union. In
5o5, when the marriage was to have taken place, Henry, then aged
fourteen, registered, by his father's advice, a protest against its
completion; and it is clear that Henry VlI's main object in the
whole business was to retain possession of one half of the very
considerable dowry of the Princess. Ferdinand, on his side, was
anxious not to have to pay the other half, which, hoxvever, Hen W
at last extorted from him. Katharine's life must have been a very
miserable one until 5o9, when Henry VII died, and Henry \'Ill,
who seems to have been really fond of her, married her two
months after his accession. He left her as Regent when he went
to fight in France in I513, and during her regency the Battle of
Flodden was won against the Scots. Her father's continuous
treachery towards his English allies may have weakened the
King's affection for Katharine, but it seems more probable that
it was the successive deaths of four children, and the fact that
only one girl survived from their union, that gradually cooled
her husband's affection, and led him to question the original
KATHARINE OF SPAIN 2
Everything that we know of Queen Katharine is to her credit :
she was a loyal and grossly injured wife, an affectionate friend and
mother, and a faithful subject of her adopted country. In the
exercise of the strictest piety according to the practices of the
Roman church, she found, in the days of her misfortune, her only
consolation.
122
ANNE BOLEYN
(I507-I._536}
second Queen of Henry VIII, was the daughter of Sir Thomas
Boleyn, afterwards Earl of Wiltshire, and Lady Elizabeth Howard.
Anne was thus a niece of Henry's courtier-statesman, the Duke of
Norfolk. She spent some years at the French Court before 522,
when she first seems to have attracted the notice of Henry VIII ;
her elder sister Mary was for a short time the King's mistress at
about that date. She was sought in marnage by the heir of the
Percys, and was perhaps privately contracted to him: by 1525 the
King was secretly courting her, but at what date she actually be-
came his mistress we do not know for certain. From I527 onwards
it was publicly known that Henry was seeking a divorce from
Katharine, and it soon became evident that, in spite of Wolsey's
remonstrances, he intended Anne to take her place as Queen. She
travelled about with him, and had magnificent apartments fitted up
for her wherever he was until her marriage with him, which took
place privately some time in January 533- We do not even know
where the marriage took place or by whom it was celebrated. But
it was made public at Easter, and Cranmer, as Archbishop, held an
inquiry into its validity, in favour of which he pronounced. Anne
was crowned with great magnificence on Whit Sunday. The hatred
of all but the most servile courtiers for her and for all the Boleyns
was open and avowed. Her only surviving child, afterwards Queen
Elizabeth, was born in September. But Henry was already tired of
her, and it is pretty clear that she was but a vulgar coquette of
neither wit nor accomplishments, and, strange to say, without any
ANNE BOLEYN
123
extraordinary beauty. As to her chastity both before and after
her marriage it is difficult to pronounce vith certainty. Acts of
adultery and even of incest were alleged against her on her trial,
which took place before a court of peers, with her uncle, the
Duke of Norfolk, as president, in May 1536; but, though sentence
was unanimously given against her, it could hardly be called
a fair trial, as some of her alleged accomplices had been pre-
viously convicted and put to death. She was beheaded on Tower
Hill, May 19 , 1536.
126
ICATHARINE HOWARD
{1521-1542}
fifth Queen of Henry VIII, was the daughter of Lord Edmund
Hovard and Joyce Culpeper: she was brought up by her grand-
mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, in whose household she vas very
carelessly looked after, and she seems to have allowed herself to
grov accustomed to acts of impropriety. In the year 154o she
was brought to Court, perhaps with the intention of captivating
Henry, by the agency of the Catholic party, then swayed by
Bishop Gardiner; and she was secretly married to the King in
the July of that year. Early in August Henry acknowledged her
as Queen. Her conduct in this capacity vas light-minded, if not
wicked: before the next year was out she was having secret
intern'iews with some of her old lovers, one of whom she actually
made her secretary. Henry was utterly taken aback when he
discovered evidence of this and of the immorality of his wife's past
life, but vhen confronted with this evidence Katharine admitted her
previous guilt, though she denied that she had ever been unfaithful
to Henry: she was attainted of high treason in January I542 and
executed on February 13 .
127
KATHARINE PARR
sixth and last Queen of Henry VIII, was the daughter of Sir
Thomas Parr and Maud Green. Her father was Controller of the
Household of Henry VII I at the beginning of his reign. Katharine
and her brother William, afterwards Marquis of Northampton,
received an excellent education, and she became one of the most
learned ladies of the age. She was twice married before her royal
wedding, the first time to Lord Borough, who died in 1529 , and the
second time to Lord Latimer, who died in 1543 . Being sought
in a third marriage by Sir Thomas Seymour, the brother of the
late Queen Jane, she vas about to accept his hand when Henry
intervened and married her himself in July I543. She was an
excellent woman, already inclined towards the reformed doctrines,
and successfully interceded for many so-called 'heretics', who
would otheravise have suffered death: she also induced Henry to
restore to royal rank the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, whose
legitimacy his remarkable matrimonial arrangements had left in
doubt. Henry named her Regent when he designed an expedition
to France in 1544 . Her main functions in the last two years
of the reign were those of nurse to her husband, who suffered
agonies of pain from an ulcer in his leg. There is a famous story
told in Foxe's Boob of Martyrs to the effect that the Catholic party
had planned her ruin, and were actually about to arrest her as
a heretic when Henry intervened and saved her.
After Henry's death Katharine took as her fourth husband
her old lover, Thomas Seymour, now Lord Seymour of Sudeley,
a scoundrel of the worst type, who ill-treated and perhaps poisoned
her, for he had designs to marry the Princess Elizabeth. She died
in child-birth at Sudeley Castle, in Gloucestershire, in 1548.
28
\VI LLIA I PAGET
(I5O5-I563
first Lord Paget of Beaudesert, was of humble origin, probably from
Wednesbury in Staffordshire. He was educated at St. Paul's School
and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and it was in the latter place that
he became known to Stephen Gardiner, who employed him in the
' King's business' of the divorce in I529. This at once recommended
him to Henry VII I, into whose favour he rapidly rose; after holding
several minor offices he became Secretary of State in i543, and
probably was Henry's most trusted adviser during the last four
years of his life. He attached himself in 547 to the Protector
Somerset, gave him good advice which the impetuous Protector too
often neglected, was raised by him to the peerage in 549, and
very nearly shared his ruin and his fate in I55I. He was indeed
stripped of many of his offices and of much wealth {like other
successful Tudor courtiers he had feathered his own nest pretty
welll in 1552; but had made his peace with Northumberland suffi-
ciently to appear as a signatory to Edward VI's 'devise' of the
succession in favour of Jane Grey in the summer of the next year.
It is clear, however, that he never intended to abide by this, and he
was one of the leading agents in putting Mary on the throne. Mary
never trusted him, although he played a leading part in furthering
her marriage with Philip, for his religious vieves were of the laxest.
Thus he made a gallant stand, in two successive Marian Parliaments,
against Gardiner's statutes for persecuting ' heretics'; but when the
statutes had been forced through he tacitly acquiesced, and he
continued to hold his office of Lord Privy Seal. This he resigned
on the accession of Elizabeth, and there is not much evidence that
he possessed any influence under her. But her settlement of
religious affairs was probably quite to his mind: for, though
without any moral elevation of character or any serious religious
views, he was evidently a convinced Erastian and a champion of
moderation in all things.
MARY OF GUISE
(1515-56ol
Queen of James v and mother of Mary Queen of Scots, was
the eldest child of Claude, Duke of Guise, and Antoinette Bourbon.
Her first husband was the Duc de Longueville, who died in 1537,
and in the next year she married James V. Her only surviving
child, Mary, was born a week before King James's death, and
the regency of Scotland was at first vested in the Earl of Arran,
the heir presumptive to the Crown. But Mary had on her side
an able champion in David Beaton, Cardinal and Archbishop of
St. Andrews; indeed, the railings of John Knox, which may be
safely dismissed as utterly without foundation, accused her of
undue familiarity with the Cardinal. Though she did not carry
Beaton with her entirely in her French policy, or in her desire to
wed her infant daughter in France, she knew that she could rely
on him to be hostile to ttenry VIII, who was proposing, in and
out of season, a betrothal of little Mary to Edward VI. Beaton's
candidate, on the other hand, was to be the son of Arran ; but on
Beaton's murder in i546 the French interest became supreme
among the Scottish patriots, and Mary of Guise was left their leading
champion; and so, after the disastrous Battle of Pinkie, she suc-
ceeded in betrothing her daughter to the Dauphin of France and
in sending her off for safety to the latter country in 1548. In 1550
she paid her a visit in France, and, being a good woman, seems
to have been disquieted at the sight of the godless society in which
the child was growing up at the Court of Henry II ; she visited
Edward VI, with whose government Scotland had already made
t3z MARY OF GUISE
peace, on her return journey. In I554 she succeeded Arran as
Regent, or 'Governor', of Scotland, and went through some sort
of coronation ceremony at the Parliament of Edinburgh, which
ratified this. The Reformation was, hoxvever, making great strides
in Scotland, and the Regent's task, at which she strove with a
conciliatory skill worthy of high praise, xvas a very difficult one.
All her efforts at last proved vain; when Mary Tudor joined Spain
in the war of t557 against France, Mary of Guise was unable to
get the unruly Scots nobles to invade England in the French
interest ; and at the end of that year Knox organized the Protestant
'Lords of the Congregation of Christ Jesus' into a dangerous
body as much pledged to enmity to the French alliance as to
the extirpation of the Catholic faith. All over Southern and
Eastern Scotland in the folloxving 5"ear the Protestant propaganda
went on, and there xvas practically civil war. Mary's one hope
of resistance lay in getting French troops; and these xvere just
what her friends in France seemed unable to send in sufficient
numbers. She maintained a most gallant losing fight throughout
t558- 9, but it became hopeless when, in the spring of t56o, the
new English Queen, Elizabeth, threxv her weight on to the side
of the rebels; Mary's own health was already far broken, and
she died in June in the castle of Edinburgh, while it was still
holding out for her against the English and Scottish Protestant
lords.
HUGH LATIMER 35
and his parables from rural life more survive than in the case of an3"
other sixteenth-century divine ; and it is only in Bunyan's Pzlgrzm's
.Progress that we find anything to which we can compare his style.
On Mary's accession the shrewd old man saw what was coming;
and, though even his enemies seem to have desired that he should
fly to the Continent, as most of the ' hot gospellers' of the previous
reign did, he declined to take advantage of their kindness, and, in
September I553, he took up ' his old lodgings', as he called them, at
the Tower again. In the following March he was sent to Oxford
as a prisoner together with Cranmer
was soon after held with them in
professed himself, owing to old age
dispute, said his memory was gone,
the fire; all he knew was that there
in the Bible'. Even though they
disputation, nothing could be done to
ment of the anti-heretical statutes in
and Ridley, and a disputation
St. Mary's Church. Latimer
and sickness, quite unable to
and appeared to be eager for
was 'nothing about the mass
were excommunicated at this
the prisoners until the re-enact-
the early winter of I554; and
it xvas not till September 3o-October i, I555, after a weary separate
imprisonment in which all books were denied them, that Ridley and
Latimer were again examined. On the x6th they were burned at
the same fire, in the dry moat of the city called Canditch, opposite
the present gate of Balliol College.
Latimer, though he lived to be an old man, seems never to have
enjoyed strong health, and as his servant said that he rose every
morning at two in order to study, he is not likely to have improved
it by his manner of life.
NICHOLAS RIDLEY
I37
London charities of Christ's Hospital, St. Thomas's and Bethlehem.
It also led him to preach openly in favour of Jane Grey's title,
in spite of the hostility of the Londoners to Jane's cause. When
that cause was lost, instead of attempting to escape to the Continent
he went straight to Mary and surrendered to her mercy. She sent
him at once to the Tower, whence as long as he was allowed pen
and ink he stoutly defended the Reformed Faith. In March x554
he was taken to Oxford vith Latimer and Cranmer, and a mock
disputation was held with them in St. Mary's Church. l|is
opponents knew well enough that, as a controversialist on the
doctrine of the Primitive Church, Ridley could have turned the whole
of them inside out, and he was excommunicated without being really
allowed to speak. A long imprisonment till the autumn of 555
did not weaken his courage, and he was burned at the same fire
as Latimer on October x6.
Of the three great Oxford martyrs he has left upon posterity
less impression than his fellov sufferers: yet it is hard to say why;
in power he seems to have been as merciful and as lovable as
Cranmer, and in adversity as dauntless as Latimer.
I38
ED IUND BONNER
d. i569)
Bishop of London, about whose origin nothing certain is known,
had a career almost exactly parallel with that of his famous fellow
persecutor, Stephen Gardiner. He was a member of Broadgates
Hall (nmv Pembroke Collegel, Oxford, in 151_? ' and took degrees
in canon and civil law. Like Gardiner he became an able
canonist, like him entered the service of Wolsey and like him
,,,,'as employed by Henry VIII on missions in connexion with the
divorce. It was Bonnet who carried to Pope Clement VII Henry's
final appeal to a General Council, 1533. After various small prefer-
ments in reward for these services, Bonnet was nominated to the
Bislopric of Hereford in 1538 and to that of London in the next 3"ear.
He acquired fame as a persecutor from his rough treatment of
'heretics' in the days of the ' Six Articles' 11539-46t, but he always
seems to have done his best to persuade them to recant, and to
have been willing to accept very easy recantations. In spite of the
diatribes of his enemies the same was the case when he had to
condemn a far larger number of martyrs to the stake in Mary's
reign. The truth is that he was a coarse, vulgar creature, who could
jest at inopportune moments, and, besides, his diocese of London was
the most enlightened in the kingdom; but the cruelty that he had to
administer was probably by no means to his taste. In Edward VI's
reign he follmved Gardiner's course almost exactly: that is to say,
he was first imprisoned for refusing to admit the authority of the
Visitors of 1547 , released by Somerset's influence, imprisoned
again for preaching against the authority of the Privy Council and
r4o
JOHN HOOPER
{d. I555}
Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, and afterwards martyr, was
of Somersetshire extraction, possibly educated at Merton College,
and possibly a monk at Gloucester. An early convert to the
doctrines of the Reformation, though rather of the Svdss than the
Lutheran school, he fled from England in 1539 , married, though in
Holy Orders, at Basle in 546, and spent the next two years at Zurich,
in close intercourse with Bullinger. He returned to England in
1549, already the champion of a more radical school of Protestantism
than could find favour with Cranmer: but this was pleasing to
Edward \7I and the Earl of \Varwick, who gave him the See of
Gloucester. He made a great disturbance about the unlawfulness
of '`'`'earing episcopal vestments at his own consecration, but ,,',,as
ultimately persuaded to yield on the subject. In I55 , the See of
Worcester ,,'`'as added to his See of Gloucester, and in both dioceses
he went the utmost length in his zeal for reform: but he xvas
exceedingly charitable to the poor, and seems to have been very'
popular at Gloucester. On the accession of Mary he '`',,as at once
deprived and soon afterwards imprisoned. In January 1555 he
was tried for heresy, on the crucial question of the Sacrament,
and burned at Gloucester on February 9.
WI LLIAM I IAITLAN D
OF LETHINGTON
(d. i573t
son of Sir Richard Maitland and Mary Cranstoun, and secretary to
Mary Queen of Scots, was educated at St. Andrews and abroad. He
was first employed by Mary of Guise in 554, and, from that time
till his death, appears, both as diplomatist and statesman, to have
done his best to maintain the independence of Scotland: the task
was, however, beyond human power, and Maitland died in prison in
the power of the anti-national party. To trace in detail the missions
upon which he was employed, or the attitude which he took towards
the successive turns of fortune's wheel, would be to rewrite the
history of Elizabeth's relations with Mary; but we may note that
he was successively the author or supporter, on the Scottish side, of
the treaty of Edinburgh 56o, of the recall of Mary to Scotland in
I56I, of the constant schemes by which Mary hoped to be recog-
nized as heir to Elizabeth, of the moderate attitude of Mary towards
religious parties in Scotland up to 565, of Mary's scheme to
marry Don Carlos of Spain, of her marriage with Darnley, of the
murder of Rizzio, whose favour was undermining his own, of the
murder of Darnley. But from this time his influence declined: he
had to acquiesce in the Queen's marriage with Bothwell, though
Bothwell was undoubtedly hostile to him : he had to acquiesce in her
imprisonment in Lochleven : he had to appear at York as one of the
Scottish commissioners at the inquiry into the question of Darnley's
murder. While there, however, he entered into secret communication
4 _o \VILLIAM MAITLAND OF LETHINGTON
with his Queen, and favoured the project of her marriage with the
Duke of Norfolk. In 571 he joined Kirkcaldy of Grange, who was
holding out in Edinburgh Castle against the English party, and who
actually held out until May i573. He died in prison at Leith, about
three xveeks after the surrender, perhaps by his own hand, but his
health had been seriously broken for some years past, and a natural
explanation of his death is possible.
Maitland's aim, to reconcile and unite all Scotsmen in the
national interest, xvas frustrated, first by Mary herself, whom he had
continually to attempt to save from the results of her own violent
passions, and secondly by the hostility of Knox and other fanatics,
xvhose influence his sceptical mind underrated: each party in fact
regarded him as a traitor, because he xvas attached to none ; and it
must be admitted that he was entirely unscrupulous as to the means
he employed and the deeds at xvhich he connived in order to gain
his end.
JA IES
EARL
STE\VART
OF MORAY
(53-57 o}
Regent of Scotland for James VI, was the natural son of James V
and Margaret Erskine, and is famous both for his headship of the
Protestant interest during the reign of his sister Mary, and for the
subtlety with which he concealed his deep personal ambition. He
appears first as holding the Priory of St. Andrews, but there is no
evidence that he ever contemplated taking orders. He accom-
panied his infant sister to France, and visited France on a later
occasion for purposes of study; and his education was certainly
far above the average of that of the unlettered Scottish nobles of his
day. As early as 555 he was known to Knox as a sympathizer with
the doctrines of reform, and he probably owes the fair reputation,
which unscientific Protestant historians have allowed him, to his
lifelong friendship with that famous preacher. But it is quite
evident that behind the mask of the devout Puritan lay a most
unscrupulous ambition, which in all probability aimed at the Crown.
Thus, while ostensibly desiring a peace with the Regent, Mary of
Guise, in x558-6o, he vas thwarting her and playing into the hands
of Elizabeth, and he was the main author of the treaties of Berwick
and Edinburgh : vhile professing to the other Scots lords to desire
the marriage of Elizabeth and Arran, which would have excluded
Queen Mary, he was really working for his sister's return, at which
event he might hope to rule Scotland in her name. The adroitness
with which, at the commencement of her rule, he embroiled that
sister with her best friends the Gordons, in order to get for
himself the Earldom of Moray, is a fine sample of his methods.
When he found that Mary was one of the few people clever
t44 JAMES STEWART, EARL OF MORAY
enough to see through him, he became, always without showing
any trace of his person in the details, the principal agent of her
ruin: and, in the matter of her marriage with Darnley, he might
almost be called an agezt proz,ocateur. For he knew that such a
marriage would fatally embroil Mary with Elizabeth as well as with
the Kirk, and yet he allowed it to take place xvithout anything more
than remonstrance sufficient to encourage the Queen to pursue it.
For a moment, indeed, he made a false step when, to ingratiate
himself with Elizabeth, he raised a flag of rebellion after the
marriage, and had to fly to England, where his patroness scolded
him in public but applauded him in private; but as soon as he
discovered that the marriage was a failure from Mary's point of view
he returned to Scotland, and secretly abetted the successive murders
of Rizzio and Darnley; abetted, even more secretly, having pre-
viously betaken himself to France, the dreadful marriage of Bothwell
and Mary. Thence he returned, according to his own story sordy
against his will, to take up the Regency for James VI when Mary
was imprisoned at Lochleven. After Mary's escape, defeat and flight
to England, he betrayed secretly to Elizabeth whatever evidence ot
Mary's guilt could be collected, while to herself and her friends he
was pretending to desire her marriage with the Duke of Norfolk.
Of his ultimate designs, either in the event of Mary's restoration, or
of her continued imprisonment, we have no knowledge, for he was
assassinated at Linlithgow by a Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh in
January 157o. So adroitly did this remarkable politician play his
game throughout his life that it is perfectly possible to represent him
not only as a godly religious leader, but as a real patriot whose selfish
aims were, fortunately for him, not irreconcilable xvith the welfare
of Scotland ; and that is the usual light in which he has been repre-
sented. But on the other hand, the mere fact that, at such a critical
period of Scottish history, James Stewart remained for twelve years
the devoted and intimate ally of Elizabeth, renders every act of his
liable to be scrutinized with the utmost suspicion.
145
IATTHEW PARKER
(5o4-.575)
Archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Norwich of a mercantile
family, and became a member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge;
he took his M.A. degree as a Fellow of that College in 528 ; there
he knew Latimer and several of the more advanced reformers of
the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. But all his studies in
patristic lore, which were very deep, failed to make him more than
a moderate reformer, and a moderate he remained to the end of
his days. He passed a great deal of Henry's reign in study at a
small collegiate foundation called Stoke, in Suffolk, though he had
actually been appointed chaplain to Anne Boleyn in the year before
her death. But in 544 he was nominated Master of Corpus, and
in that capacity proved himself perhaps the best head of a college
that ever lived. In the reign of Edward he continued to reside
mainly at Cambridge, though he was presented in 55--- to the
Deanery of Lincoln; but in Mary's reign he went into hiding, and
shifted from place to place with such skill that he was never
discovered. Elizabeth, or Cecil, to whom he was already known as
a man of immense learning and no fanaticism, surprised him by
selecting him, much against his will, to fill the See of Canterbury in
December i558 ; but the consecration did not take place till a year
afterwards, owing to the great difficulty of finding four bishops
properly qualified to perform the rite. The Catholics did not scruple
to say that this rite when performed was invalid; but Parker was
careful to leave on record ample proofs both of its validity and
its publicity.
146 MATTHEW PARKER
From the first the position of the Archbishop was one of great
difficulty and perplexity. He had to meet the greed of Elizabeth's
courtiers, who were perpetually grasping at Church property, and
the open hostility both of Catholics and Puritans, the former
refusing to accept the Reformation settlement at all, and the latter
refusing to use the legal ceremonies ordained in the Prayer Book.
The Queen's support to him, though not always given in the most
gracious way, was unwavering, and he was courageous enough
to remonstrate with her upon many occasions, especially upon
some of her ecclesiastical appointments. Parker had little share
in the revision of the Prayer Book, but the leading share in
drawing up the Thirty-nine Articles, and in editing the great
Bible of Elizabeth known as the 'Bishops' Bible', the leading
share also in preparing the new Statutes of I57O for the govern-
ment of the University of Cambridge. In mere politics, though
often in attendance at the Privy Council board, where he con-
ciliated every one by his modesty, Parker seems to have taken
little or no interest. Apart from the serx, ices he rendered to
England by his wise government of the Church in its great
crisis, we owe to Parker another inestimable debt; for it was he
who first set about collecting and preserving on a serious scale
the memorials of our religious and secular history. He ransacked
the buildings of the dissolved monasteries and the bookshops of
Europe for manuscripts of Early English chronicles, many of
which he edited himself, while for some he supervised the work
of other editors. He got Saxon types founded, and he projected
a dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon language. He was himself the
learned author of voluminous works on the early history of the
Church in Britain, and was especially the historian of his own
see. At his death he bequeathed his own magnificent library to
his beloved college at Cambridge.
I47
JOHN WHITGIFT
{d. I (o4
Archbishop of Canterbury, son of Henry Whitgift and Anne
Dynewell, was born at Grimsby about 53 o, and was a member in
his youth of Queens', Pembroke and Peterhouse at Cambridge.
There he fell under the influence of Ridley and Bradford, the
Marian martyrs, and, during the Marian persecution, was protected
by the Master of Peterhouse. He took orders in 56o, and became
successively Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Master of Pem-
broke, Regius Professor, Master of Trinity and Prebendary of Ely.
He had much to do with drafting the Elizabethan Statutes for
the government of the University. After some slight leaning
towards the anti-episcopal views then being disseminated in
Cambridge by Cartwright, who had succeeded him in the Divinity
chair, he conclusively took his stand on the ground which he
maintained all the rest of his life, namely Calvinism in doctrine,
and episcopal government in discipline; and it is impossible to
doubt his utter sincerity. When he became Bishop of Worcester,
577, and Archbishop of Canterbury, 583, he rigorously enforced the
legal ceremonies of the Prayer Book even upon men whose doctrinal
views he entirely shared. His private wealth, inherited from his
father, a rich merchant, enabled him to restore to the See ot
Canterbury something of its ancient splendour, and he was perfectly
fearless in standing up to the Queen's most favoured courtiers
against all spoliation of Church property. That he was the author
and virtual creator of the permanent Court of High Commission,
which persecuted 'Puritans', and of the severe decrees of 586 in
L2
I50 HENRY LORD DARNLEY
minded party, which murdered Mary's Italian secretary, Rizzio; he
actually held the Queen while the deed was committed at her feet ;
she never forgave him, though she pretended to do so, in order to
get him completely into her power ; nay, she sided with some of the
very men who had made him their tool, in order to use them as
agents against him. So powerless and so much hated did he feel
himself to be that he was on the eve of leaving Scotland for
good, when he was murdered at Kirk o' field, outside Edinburgh, on
February o, i567. Mary's own guilt in this matter can hardly
be considered doubtful.
I5I
JAMES HEPBURN
FOURTH EARL OF BOTHWELL
(d. I578)
son of Patrick, third Earl of Bothwell, and Agnes Sinclair, was
probably born in 537- He was hereditary Admiral of Scotland as
well as hereditary Sheriff of Berwickshire, East Lothian and Mid-
lothian. He first appears in history as a firm patriot and nationalist,
who, despite his Protestantism, energetically championed the anti-
English policy of the good Regent, Mary of Guise; he was also a
bitter rival of the Earl of Arran. He was sent on a mission to
Queen Mary in France in September 56o, and this was the first
occasion of their meeting; and he returned in her full confidence
in February 56. But his quarrelsome disposition was always
involving him in scrapes, especially with the family of Hamilton;
and he was an object of profound suspicion to Mary's half-brother,
Moray, who in I564 betrayed him to the English government, which
shut him up in Tynemouth Castle and then let him go to France.
We find him back in Scotland after various adventures, in the autumn
of ,565, in the confidence of the Queen and acquiescent in her
marriage with Darnley, yet reckoned by all honest men as a most
dangerous fellow and a fit instrument of any violence or coup d'glat.
In February 1566 he married a Catholic lady, Jean Gordon, sister of the
Earl of Huntly, yet he remained a Protestant. He had no connexion
with the murder of Rizzio, and, when Mary pardoned and caressed
her husband, it was on Bothwell's help and following that she relied ;
for a few months he was the greatest man in Scotland. We cannot
I52 JAMES HEPBURN
tell at what time the Queen's personal infatuation for him began, or
when the first steps towards getting rid of her husband were taken ;
but in February J567 Bothxvell undoubtedly had the main hand in
the murder of that husband, and protected the immediate agents
in it. In spite of popular accusations and a protest of the Earl of
Lennox, no real trial of Bothwell took place, and in April he carried
off the Queen to his castle of Dunbar, almost certainly with her
own consent: he obtained a doubtfully lawful divorce from his wife
and married the Queen in May, when she created him Duke of
Orkney. This was more than even those who had helped Both-
well to murder Darnley could stand, and civil war at once broke
out. The troops of the guilty pair deserted them at Carbery Hill;
the Queen was captured and the Earl rode away. He soon re-
paired to the Shetland Islands and embarked on the career of a
pirate, fled to Norway, where he was ill received by the Danish
government, and died many years afterwards in close confinement
m prison.
I53
SIR HENRY SIDNEY
(I529-I582)
son of Sir William Sidney and Anne Pagenham, and father of the
famous Sir Philip, was born in London, and, by his father's services
to the first two Tudor sovereigns, early marked out for a career
of distinction. This he was to find under Queen Elizabeth in the
ungrateful task of being thrice Lord Deputy in Ireland. He ",,,,as
an intimate friend of Edward VI, who died in his arms; and he
was already married to Northumberland's daughter Mary, by
which marriage he became the brother-in-law of Elizabeth's
favourite, Leicester. Sidney was in some danger at the acces-
sion of Queen Mary, but found afterwards means of recom-
mending himself to her Spanish husband, who stood godfather to
his son. Towards the end of Mary's reign he served his apprentice-
ship in the cruel Irish service under the Earl of Sussex, and was
left by him as Lord Justice in his absence. Elizabeth made him
Lord President of the Marches of Wales, an office which neces-
sitated his residence at Ludlow; he ruled Wales with conspicuous
ability, and retained the office, which during his three viceroyalties
in Ireland he executed by deputy, till his death. Though belonging
to the ' faction' of Leicester at the English Court, he was able, from
1571 at any rate, to keep on the best of terms with Lord Burghley ;
but it is curious that, while of all Elizabeth's Irish governors he
was the most diligent, the most honest and the most far-sighted,
the Queen never really extended her favour to him, recalled him
twice on critical occasions and constantly complained of the ex-
pense which his government entailed. The only mistake of which
we can accuse him in Ireland is that he never sufficiently trusted
to the Earl of Ormond, who was probably the most loyal of the
Anglo-Irish nobility; but, on the other hand, Ormond's kinsmen
were not by any means loyal. Sidney was recalled for a third
time in 1578 and, worn out with hard service, died at Penshurst four
years later.
I54
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
son of Sir Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley, was born at Penshurst,
and is famous as the typical chivalrous gentleman of the Elizabethan
age. As a nephew of the Earl of Leicester he was 'born in the
purple' to the trade of courtier, but among all the temptations of
Court life he kept his honour entirely unstained. Educated at
Shrewsbury and Christ Church, Oxford, he made, while at the latter
place, an intimate friend of his future biographer, Fulke Greville.
The vain and frivolous Earl of Leicester shoxvs at his best in the
constant care which he extended to his nephew, who xvas always
in want of money; tbr Sir Henry Sidney was spending most of
his own fortune in the thankless task of trying to govern Ireland.
Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, was another early
patron of the precocious boy. Philip Sidney left England in I57a
tbr a prolonged tour on the Continent, during which, notwithstanding
his youth, his passion for learning and the letters of recommendation
which he took with him procured him admission to the houses of
the most illustrious scholars of Europe, and his oxvn personal charm
xvorked wonders evewwhere. The chief of these foreign friends xvas
Hubert Languet, a Huguenot scholar, for whom Sidney contracted
a warm affection. But wherever he went it was the same story:
Paul Veronese painted his portrait at Venice; some leading Poles
are believed to have offered to crown him King of their unhappy
country. On his return to England, I575, he fell in love with
Penelope Devereux, to whom his series of sonnets known as
Aslrophd altd Sldla is written; but this famous coquette became
Lady Rich shortly before Sir Philip married Frances Walsingham,
583}. Meanwhile Sidney had been sent upon courtly embassies
to Heidelberg and Vienna, made the acquaintance, notwithstanding
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY I55
his own ardent Protestantism, of the Catholic hero, Don John, and
a warm friendship with William the Silent of Orange. In I577
a new friend was added in the Huguenot leader, du Plessis-
Mornay; next year it was the turn of Gabriel Hervey and Edmund
Spenser, the latter of whom dedicated to Sidney his Shepherd's
Calendar. In that 3,ear Sidney wrote his Apology for Poeh-y in
defence of the nascent English drama, and in i58o , during a
temporary disgrace at Court, he composed at Wilton, where his
sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, reigned queen of beauty and
letters, the most celebrated, of his works, Arcadta, a long and
somewhat tedious set of 'romantic' episodes freely interlarded
with mediocre verse. Arcadia, however, remained the chief in-
tellectual pabulum of learned and elegant courtiers down to the
Restoration. Philip sat in one Elizabethan Parliament, that of
I581 ; in 1583 he was knighted and married; in I584 he made
the last of his famous friendships, that with the great philosopher,
Giordano Bruno, and in 1585 he accompanied his uncle Leicester
on that expedition to the Low-Country wars which ended in his
own death with immortal honour on the field of Zutphen.
The real interest of Sidney's life lies in the enormous im-
pression which he made upon his contemporaries, themselves men
and women of the most intellectual society that England has ever
known. Indeed all Europe, whether friendly or hostile in politics
or religion, wept for him; and his funeral in St. Paul's Cathedral
was one of the 'sights' of the sixteenth century. Not a single note
of discord was struck then, or has ever been struck since, as to
the nobleness and beauty of his character. As to his literary merits,
Spenser in poetry and Camden in prose singled him out as the
marvel of his age; and Shakespeare as well as Spenser did him
the supreme honour to 'crib' freely from his .drcadia. Yet none
of his three famous books was printed in Sidney's own lifetime,
and of no one of them can we be certain that he would ever have
printed it as it stands.
156
ROBERT DUDLEY
EARL OF LEICESTER
[I532-I588}
favourite and courtier of Queen Elizabeth, vas the fifth son of
John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and Jane Guildford. At
the age of eighteen he married his first wife, Amy Robsart, whom
he has been so often accused, but without sufficient evidence, of
murdering in order to marry Elizabeth. He supported his father
in the vain attempt to place Jane Grey on the throne in July I553,
xvas condemned to death for doing so, but pardoned in October
554, went abroad and distinguished himself with his brother in
the campaign against France in i557. He received some kind-
ness from Philip II, but his real fortunes began when Eliza-
beth on her accession made him her Master of the Horse. That
she loved him and continued to love him in spite of frequent
quarrels is a theory quite tenable; but the opposite theory, that
she loved no one at all and merely employed Lord Robert as
a stalking-horse against other suitors, is also tenable. Lady Amy
Dudley died suddenly in I56O at Cumnor, near Oxford, in circum-
stances that were at least suspicious, and part of the suspicion
involved not only Lord Robert but the Queen as well. It is certain
that the Queen carried open, but perhaps never secret flirtation
with her Master of the Horse to the verge of impropriety; him
almost alone of her courtiers she rewarded by really rich gifts of
Crown lands, and him, in a moment of weakness, she named Protector
of the realm in the event of her death, when she had her only
ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER 57
recorded illness in i562. That he on his part set himself to marry
the Queen by all means in his power admits of no doubt; he
told Spanish ambassadors that he would bring England back to
Catholicism if Philip would help him to her hand; and he must
have been considerably flabbergasted when the Queen gravely
proposed him as a husband for her rival, Mary Queen of Scots.
In order to fit him for the post she created him in I564 Earl of
Leicester. Of Cecil, as of the old Catholic nobles, Leicester, as
prime favourite, was the incessant bugbear and terror; yet he was
obliged sadly to confess that Cecil could do more with his mistress
in an hour than he could do in seven years; and so he gradually
pulled away from his temporary connexion with the Catholics, and
began to court the rising Puritan party in Church and State:
thus he was always more friendly with Walsingham than with Cecil,
and Walsingham's steady friendship is perhaps a point in his
favour. Leicester certainly knew of the conspiracy of the Northern
Earls in 569, and may perhaps have been thinking of providing
for his own safety in the event of its success; but, on its failure,
he had no difficulty in proving to Cecil that he had betrayed the
conspirators. In i57 he privately married a widow, Lady Sheffield,
but never acknowledged the marriage; and seven years later mar-
ried another widow, Lady Essex, thus becoming the step-father of
Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's last favourite.
All this time Leicester professed to be supporting the successive
pretensions of the two French Valois princes to Elizabeth's hand.
In I585 Elizabeth's fondness induced her to entrust him with the
English army sent to succour the Protestant Netherlands in their
struggle with Spain. The Earl displayed great extravagance and
great incompetence; he allowed the States-General to name him
to the Governorship of the Provinces, and thereby incurred much
scolding from his mistress, and wasted much time, which would
have been better employed in fighting the Spaniards, of which
business Leicester did very little. He was recalled in November
I58 ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER
587, but his failure did not prevent the Queen from entrusting
him with the command of her troops at Tilbury in August i588 '
when the defeat of the Spanish Armada was yet hardly known.
Early in the following month Leicester died suddenly. Perhaps
the best thing that can be said for him is that he was a considerable
patron of literature.
SIR CHRISTOPHER H,\TTON
From the portrait in the possession of the Earl of Winchilsea and .Nottingham
ace ],. $3
1.59
SIR CHRISTOPttER HATTON
Lord Chancellor, son of William Hatton and Alice Saunders, was
born of an ancient family at Holmby or Holdenby, Northampton-
shire, was educated at St. Ma W Hall, Oxford, and became a student
at the Temple. In I564 he 'commenced courtier', and, favoured
by a handsome person and a quick wit, rose rapidly in the graces
of Elizabeth :-
His bushy beard and shoe-strings green,
His high-crowned hat and satin doublet
Moved the stout heart of England's Queen,
Though Pope and Spaniard could not trouble it.
He appears to have been a faithful and on occasion an out-
spoken servant to the tyrannical mistress, who showered gifts of
land and plate on him, and quarrelled with him less often than
with any other of her statesmen-courtiers. Some indignation was
expressed when, in 587, he xvas preferred to be Lord Chancellor,
but it xvas soon readily admitted that he made a very good one;
he died, however, four years after his promotion, and his main
service to the Crown was, perhaps, that he had been the constant
exponent of the viexvs of the Queen in the House of Commons,
without ever losing the favour or encroaching on the privileges of
that assembly.
i6o
RICHARD HOOKER
(#. x6oo)
son of Roger Vowell, alias Hooker, was born at Exeter probably at
the beginning of Queen Mary's reign. His ancestors had held
important municipal offices at Exeter, but his father was poor,
and he would not have been able to extend his education beyond
Exeter Grammar School but for the patronage of good Bishop
Jewel, of Salisbury, who sent him to Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, ",','here he was afterwards elected a scholar. He became
a profound student of Greek, Hebrew and theology, held for a
short time the Mastership of the Temple, but preferred to retire
in 595 to a country living IBishopsbourne, in Kent) for the purpose
of study. Here he finished his notes for his famous work on the
Laws oj" Ecclesiastical PoliO, of which the first four books were
published in x593, and the fifth in 597- The work was advertised
to be completed 'in eight books', and at several dates during the
seventeenth century books purporting to be the remaining three
were issued, of which it is now agreed that the seventh and eighth
are really from Hooker's notes, but that the sixth is an interpola-
tion. It appears that, though several transcripts of the notes for
the missing books were made by pupils of Hooker during his life-
time, the perfect copies, if they were ever finished, were destroyed
by his wife immediately after his death. She seems to have been
a domestic termagant as well as a violent Puritan. The great glory
of the first five books is that they vindicate, against the narrow
scriptural and the narrow traditional views of the basis of a Church,
respectively maintained by Puritans and Catholics, the reasonable-
ness of the Anglican position, and incidentally the reasonableness of
civil society as resting on the consent of the community. Hooker
was an emaciated little man, bowed and in ill health owing to con-
stant study, and in character of the most profound humility and
piety.
I63
CHARLES BLOUNT
EARL OF DEVONSHIRE
( 563 - 16o61
better known as Lord Mountjoy, was the son of James, Lord
Mountjoy, and Katharine Leigh. He first appeared at Court in his
twentieth year, and his handsome person at once attracted Eliza-
beth's attention, a fact vhich produced a duel with another courtier,
Essex, afterwards Blount's greatest friend. He fought in the Lmv
Countries and in France, succeeded his father in the peerage in
I594, and accompanied the expedition to the Azores, 597. In the
early days of 6oo he was chosen to retrieve Essex's mishandled
venture at suppressing Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland, and he
performed that task so well and thoroughly that Ireland remained
quiet for forty years. While defeating Tyrone, Mountjoy had
also to deal with a serious Spanish invasion, which had occupied
Kinsale, but the Spaniards soon capitulated owing to his energetic
measures. Mountjoy received the submission of Tyrone a few
days after the Queen's death. He was in high favour with James,
who in I6O4 gave him an earldom, but he died in I6o6. He lived
in open adultery vith Penelope Devereux, the wife of Lord Rich
and sister of Essex, and eventually married her in the last year
of his life.
I64
SIR JOHN HA\VKINS
I532-I59}
was born at Plymouth, and bred as a sailor; it is possible that
his father was a naval commander in the reign of Henry VIII.
John appears in command of a 'venture' in I562, trading to the
Guinea coast for negroes which he sold in the West Indies, and
therefore the credit, or discredit, of founding the English slave-trade
must be ascribed to him. In spite of quarrels with the Spanish
authorities, this voyage was so profitable that in I564 a second was
undertaken, in which the Queen of England ,,,,'as directly interested,
with results of even greater profit; on this voyage Hawkins also
explored the coast of Florida. A third voyage, in 1568, in company
with his kinsman, Francis Drake, led to a direct collision with the
Spaniards at St. Juan de Lua, from which Hawkins and Drake with
difficulty escaped with the loss of five ships out of their flotilla of
six. and with a heavy loss of the capital invested in the voyage. In
i573 Hawkins became Treasurer and Controller of the Na'` T, and
thereby practically held the office of chief adviser on naval con-
struction in the government dockyards: it ,,'`,as alleged, but not
proved, that, while holding this post, he had made large private profit
by fraudulent practices. If that was the case, much may be forgiven
to the man who built the first-rates which pounded the Spanish
Armada to matchwood in Ia788. Hawkins commanded the Vicloj,
in the great fight of that year, and distinguished himself by such
valour that he was knighted by the Lord High Admiral during
the battle. After the victor3" he appears as one of the founders
of the charitable institution for old sailors known as the 'Chest at
Chatham', where he also built a hospital. He was with Drake on
the last voyage to the Indies in 1595, and died off Porto Rico in
the November of that year.
65
ED,XI U N D SPENSER
{d. I599)
was born in London, but of an old and gentle Lancashire family,
about the year 552. His father, John, was engaged in the clothing
trade in London. Edmund was educated at Merchant Taylors'
School, from whence he ,,vent to Pembroke I-Iall, Cambridge, as a
sizar in I569. He there became a first-rate and elegant scholar both
in Latin and Greek, and, with the exception of Milton, he is the
most learned of all our poets. He was also deeply read in French
and Italian. He took his M.A. degree in 576, and, after a sojourn
in Lancashire, where he fell hopelessly in love, he appears in 1579
as an inmate of Leicester's household in London. Here, after some
coquetting with the scheme, he successfully resisted his friend
Gabriel Hervey's plan for writing English poetry in classical metre
and according to the classical rules of prosody. Here also he
formed a warm friendship with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip
Sidney; and here he conceived and began to write the Fagry
Oueo. Leicester seems to have employed him upon some small
diplomatic missions, one of which took him to Ireland. The qlzcp-
lwrd's Cale,zdar, perhaps after the Fai"ry za'c, his most famous
work, also belongs to this period and is avowedly xvritten to Sidney-
it is replete with the spirit of the pastoral poetry of the ancient
world, and at once made the writer's reputation as a poet of the
highest order. In x58o Leicester got him an appointment in Ireland
as secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, who was putting down the
rebellion of the Earl of Desmond, and in that capacity he met for
the first time Sir Walter Raleigh. Like so many contemporary
o
167
HENRY WRIOTHESLEY
THIRD EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON
(I573-624)
a distinguished courtier of the reign of Elizabeth and of .]ames I,
is most famous as being the first and only known patron of
Shakespeare, the object of the dedication of the poet's two great
poems of lo**ts aim ,4dog, is and L,wrece, probably the anonymous
friend to whom the immortal Sonnets were written, and traditionally
the patron who gave his friend a thousand pounds to enable him
to purchase his house at Stratford. Besides Shakespeare, the
Earl befriended Nash, Barnes, Markham and Florio, and vas
an ardent lover of the drama in all its forms. He vas a warm
ally of the impetuous and unfortunate Earl of Essex, beside
whom he had fought at Cadiz and with vhom he engaged in
the abortive rebellion of February 6o; both Earls were con-
demned to death, and Southampton, though respited, remained in
the Tower for the rest of the Queen's reign. James I at once
liberated him and employed him in numerous vays. He was an
early and intelligent patron of colonization and trade, and a share-
holder both in the Virginia and East India Companies. But,
passionate and headstrong, and devoted to the memory of Essex,
he was always regarded vith hostility by Essex's old enemy, Lord
Salisbury, and in later years he refused to 'kotow' to the favourite
Buckingham, protested against the proposed Spanish match, and
died of fever in the Low Countries, whither he had gone to serve
as a volunteer against the Spaniards in I624. Licentious in early
life, and vain of his extreme personal beauty, he did much to redeem
these defects by his high sense of honour and his spirited oppo-
sition to measures of which he did not approve.
68
SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHA I
son ot James Walsingham and Joyce Denny, and nephew of Sir
Edmund Walsingham, who was Henry VIII's Lieutenant of the
Tower, was probably born about 53 o. He was entered at King's
College, Cambridge, though he seems never to have taken a degree,
and he was a member of Gray's Inn in the last year of Edward VI.
During Mary's reign he took refuge abroad, as did many other
zealous Protestants, and during his exile became an accomplished
linguist and student of human nature. From the accession of
Elizabeth, when he returned to England, he became a zealous
member of the House of Commons, and was able through his foreign
correspondents to keep Cecil informed of many important events on
the Continent. He was employed upon several diplomatic missions
by Elizabeth; in particular he negotiated the Treaty of Blois with
France in 1572 , and was in Paris as ambassador at the date of the
massacre of St. Bartholomew. But none of his missions were
crowned with special success, because his outspoken Protestant zeal
led him to under'alue the results obtained by the Queen's policy of
vacillation. He never ceased to remonstrate with her on this sub-
ject, and one is surprised vhen one reads the remonstrances which
she tolerated from his pen. In 573 he became Secretary of State
in succession to Cecil, now Lord Burghley, and it is no exaggera-
tion to say that on his skill in unravelling plots, and on that
alone, the life of the Queen, and with that life the future of an
independent Protestant England, really depended. In particular it
SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM 169
was his pertinacity in tracking out the Babington Conspiracy of
I585 that brought Mary Stuart to the block. His methods were
neither more nor less subtle or cruel than those of his contem-
poraries abroad: he had spies in every Court and in half the
mercantile communities of Europe; and on occasions he did not
spare the rack in order to extract evidence.
He died in 59 o a poor man who had spent his private fortune
in the service of the State and received almost no reward for doing
so; but in spite of his poverty he was a benefactor to both Univer-
sities and an eager patron both of literature and exploration. His
only daughter became successively the xvife of Sir Philip Sidney
and of the Earl of Essex.
7o
ROt3ERT DEVEREUX
SECOND EARL OF ESSEX
11567-I6ol1
the last of Queen Elizabeth's favourites, was the son of V'alter
Devereux, first Earl of Essex, and Lettice Knollys. On his father's
death, 1576, Lord Burghley became his guardian, and his mother
married the famous Earl of Leicester. He entered at Trinity,
Cambridge, when only twelve years of age, but does not appear to
have been regular in his residence, though he became a fair scholar.
He was early presented at Court, where the Queen did her best
to 'spoil' him; and from his twentieth and her own fifty-fourth
5"ear she indulged in many flirtations with him, but also in many
quarrels, in the course of which his hot temper and jealousy ahvays
allowed her to get the better. But the Queen's affection for him
was genuine, and, at bottom, more of a maternal than of an amatory
character; she was always in anxiety when he went to the wars,
which he often did Isometimes against her express command), and
in which he ahvays behaved himself with conspicuous daring.
Thus he was knighted on the field of battle at Zutphen, where
Sidney fell ; he ' ran away' and joined the ' CounterArmada' of 1589,
and he was ahvays crying out for open war with Spain and for an
efficient army. But he was also perpetually quarrelling with his
rivals at Court or in camp; now with Raleigh, now with Blount,
now with the Cecils; and his idea of a quarrel was, if possible, to
fight a duel to the death. 1,1 59 o he incurred for a time the Queen's
severest displeasure by marrying Sir Philip Sidney's widow, the
ROBERT DEVEREUX '7
daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham; next 3-ear we find him
commanding, with more valour than discretion, a small English
force sent to France to succour Henry IV against the Catholic
League. Whenever he is abroad, he is always complaining, and
with reason, of the way in which his rivals, especially Robert Cecil,
are undermining his influence at home. One of the most curious
episodes in his life is the friendship he formed with the two Bacons,
Francis and Anthony; it seems probable that the former, believing
Essex to be the 'coming man', deliberately attached himself to
the Earl's fortune and gave him good advice, which Essex was too
impetuous to take. Essex was perpetually soliciting the Queen, but
in vain, for preferment for his new friend. In i596 came the
expedition to Spain, in which Essex commanded the land forces
which stormed Cadiz, while, against his advice, the sailors let the
Spanish treasure-fleet escape; but in his next expedition, known as
the ' Islands' voyage' to the Azores, Essex was not so successful.
Finally all Essex's enemies were rejoiced when he teased his fond
mistress into giving him command of the great expedition to Ireland
in x599. Ireland was the grave of his brilliant father's reputation
and of that of many more. The Earl's preparations were extensive
and well planned ; but he had to face the worst rebellion yet known
in the island and the certainty that Spanish help to it was not far
off. Once in Ireland he seems to have lost his head; instead of
driving straight at Ulster and at the Earl of Tyrone, the leading
rebel, he made a senseless progress through Munster, and, when
at last he turned northwards, he allowed himself to be entrapped
into a parley by the wily Irishman, the result of which was that
he concluded a wholly unauthorized truce, and undertook to
present Tyrone's demands to the English government. The Queen
was absolutely furious, and her favourite made matters worse by
deserting his army and hurrying to England. He was not imme-
diately imprisoned, but kept in 'seclusion' for nine months: in
June 6oo he was brought to trial before a special court, and it
72
ROBERT DEVEREUX
is characteristic of Francis Bacon that he, who had advised the
Earl to apply for the Irish command, and hoped to make his own
fortune by him, appeared against him on his trial. No actual
sentence beyond dismissal from his offices and imprisonment in his
own house was recorded against Essex, and he was set at liberty
in August. But he had lost the favour of the Queen for good, and
this disgrace was one under which his restless nature could not
be quiet. He knew well that Cecil and other courtiers were his
sworn enemies, and he now entertained the absurd idea of an
appeal to force. He intrigued with James VI to induce him to
support a rising, and with his friend Lord Mountjoy, who had
succeeded to his command in Ireland, imploring him to land troops
in Wales; but his only real accomplice was Shakespeare's patron,
the Earl of Southampton. The rash Essex was a bad head for
any insurrection, and the London mob, with whom he was really
popular, was not so foolish as to rise against Queen Elizabeth.
There was, however, actually something like a small riot when
Essex and Southampton were seized and sent to the Tower. The
former was beheaded on February-".5, 6o, and there is good
reason for believing that the Queen broke her aged heart when she
signed his death-varrant.
Vain and rash beyond any one of his age, lacking any real
measure of statesmanship, Robert Devereux had been lifted by the
accidents of his birth into a position for which he was wholly
unfitted; yet he possessed in a marked degree qualities which
endeared him even to those with whom he quarrelled most--utter
frankness, warm affection and generosity, and in war the courage of
a Paladin of romance.
IR T. GRE.%H.\M
Fr,m the portrait by Sir Anthonis Mor in the
National Portrait Gallery
I73
SIR THOMAS GRESHAM
(d. 15791
son of Sir Richard Gresham, Lord Mayor of London, was born
before I522, educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge,
and followed his father in a mercantile career, but always upon a
magnificent scale. He was an excellent scholar and linguist (accom-
plishments to-day unusual among rich young 'men in the city '1, and
xvas several times employed by Henry VII I upon diplomatic or other
business abroad. During the reign of Edward VI he was frequently
residing at Antxverp, negotiating with foreign bankers and merchants
for loans to his government, and, after a temporary removal owing to
his strong Protestant convictions, Mary's ministers were obliged to
beg him to resume his good offices on the Queen's behalf. The
restoration of English credit under Elizabeth, after the disastrous
debasement of the coinage practised by the last three sovereigns,
was very largely carried out on plans laid down by Gresham; he
also became the Queen's most valued political agent in the Low
Countries, which he constantly visited, and gave her early notice of
dangerous Spanish moves. He was knighted in 1559. He xvas not
above stealing arms, powder, &c., from the Spaniards and sending
them over to England in cases labelled 'velvet', and the like. In
1569 he came to reside permanently in England, having no doubt
made a handsome private fortune out of his transactions with his
own and foreign governments. After the loss of his only son he
devoted a great part of his wealth to the erection of the Royal
Exchange in London, on the same site as the present building. He
also planned, and in part carried out, another foundation--a College
on the model of the Cambridge Colleges to be established in London.
Gresham died in i579, the greatest merchant-prince of the sixteenth
century, and the forerunner of many great merchant-financiers of
later times.
174
ANTONY WOODVI LLE
SECOND EARL RIVERS
(d. 14831
son of Richard Woodville, first Earl Rivers, and Jacquetta, Duchess
of Bedford, was the brother of Edward IV's Queen ; he first appears in
146o as fighting on the Lancastrian side, but transferred his allegiance
and, after his sister's marriage, was loaded with wealth and honours
by the Yorkist King. He was a curious product of that bloodstained
age, for not only was he a considerable scholar and author, the
earliest patron of Caxton and the translator of the first book printed
in England, but also, in the last twelve years of his life, a devotee
and an ascetic. He was incessantly going upon pilgrimages, and
throwing up secular offices to do so, and after his execution a hair
shirt was found next to his skin. On the death of Edward IV
he was at Ludlow with his nephew Edward V, and at once started
for London, intending to confront and probably to overthrow Richard
of Gloucester, who had become Protector; but that astute murderer
was too quick for his rival, and, after an apparently friendly meet-
ing, arrested the Earl and sent him to be beheaded at Pontefract,
June 1483 .
]75
WILLIAM OF \VAYNFLETE
0395-486}
son of Richard Patten and Margery Brereton, both of gentle blood, vas
born at Waynflete, Lincolnshire, educated at Winchester and New
College, Oxford, and patronized by Cardinal Beaufort. He took
orders in 4zo, was one of the first batch of Fellows of Eton College,
44 o, Head Master in z44" and Provost in the next 5"ear. He suc-
ceeded Beaufort as Bishop of Winchester in x447, and immediately
set about his great foundation of Magdalen College at Oxford. This
task he pursued, through all the changes of the political horizon of
that stormy time, with single-hearted and generous devotion ; and at
the end of his long life he entertained, in the earliest completed
buildings of that architectural miracle, two successive Kings of
England--in x48x Edward IV and in July I483 Richard III, when
that amiable monarch was busy arranging, or had just arranged, for
the demise of his nephews in the Tower of London. The Bishop
had been left executor to Sir John Fastolf, who by will charged
him to found a College at Caistor ; but, by means of a Papal bull,
he was able to divert Fastolfs estates to his ovn foundation at
Magdalen. He was also a lnunificent benefactor to Eton, to Nev
College and to Winchester.
In politics he had been a convinced and warm supporter of
the Lancastrian dynasty, implicitly trusted by the sainted Henry
VI, whose Great Seal he held as Chancellor from 456 to 46o ; on
the first fall of the Lancastrian dynasty the Bishop was for nearly
a year in grave danger and in hiding, but reconciled himself to the
new govermnent by the end of 46I and thenceforward selwed all
governments, even, as we have seen, Richard III's. It was probably
the only thing that a man whose whole heart was wrapped up in his
collegiate foundations could do in that age; and it is evident that
Waynflete earned the respect of all good men of both parties.
I76
HENRY CHICHELEY
d. I443)
Archbishop of Canterbury and Founder of All Souls College,
Oxford, was born, probably about I36__., of good yeoman stock on the
father's side and of gentle blood on the side of his mother, Agnes
Pyncheon. He was educated at Nexv College, Oxford, and devoted
himself to the study of civil and canon law. After holding various
livings and being employed by the Crown on various missions, he
was nominated to the See of St. Davids in i4o8, was present as Eng-
lish Envoy at the Council of Pisa, I4o 9, and became Archbishop in
i4t 4. In this capacity he combated, successfully as long as Henry V
lived, the extravagant pretensions of the Papacy, moderated the cruel
persecution of the Lollards, which his predecessor had instituted,
and kept a firm hand on the would-be legate and would-be cardinal,
Henry Beaufort, Bishop of \Vinchester. But after the death of his
royal friend the Archbishop was constantly assailed by the most
monstrous claims of Popes Martin V and Eugenius IV, xvho, having
overcome councils and disunited nationalities, were in a position to
make the power of the Roman See more felt than it had been for
over a century. Beaufort of course supported the Pope, which some-
times led Chicheley to support Beaufort's rival, the unworthy Duke of
Gloucester, though as a rule he aimed mainly at reconciling the two
English factions. In I44o the Pope raised Kemp, Archbishop of
York, to the Cardinalate, merely in order to tease the loyalty of the
national-hearted Primate, whom he at last worried into an offer to
resign, in the eightieth year of his age, the burden of his See.
Chicheley, however, died before this could be accomplished.
The good Archbishop was a munificent benefactor to the
University of Oxford and to his native village ; and his name is for
ever connected with his great foundation of All Souls College, which
he happily lived to see completed and dedicated in the last year of
his life. Lyndwood, the greatest English authority on canon law,
was his vicar-general at Canterbury.
77
ELIZABETH WOODVI LLE
[d. i492 )
Queen of Edward IV, daughter of Sir Richard Woodville, first Earl
Rivers, and Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, of the great house of
Luxemburg, was probably born in I437. Her first husband was
Sir John Grey of Groby, a Lancastrian, who fell at St. Albans in
i46I. By him she had two sons, Thomas and Richard, and it was
when she was supplicating King Edward IV for the restoration of
their estates that he fell in love with her. He married her privately
in 1464 , and, when the marriage had to be declared, it at once provoked
the hostility of the family of Neville, which had put Edward on the
throne. The rivalry of the Nevilles with the Woodvilles soon suc-
ceeded to that of the Yorkists and Lancastrians, for Elizabeth was
a greedy, unscrupulous woman who insisted on the King showering
lands and wealth on all her relations. She bore Edxvard numerous
children, the best of whom was her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, after-
xvards Queen of Henry VII: the best known were the 'Princes in
the Toxver', Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, after-
wards murdered by their uncle Richard III. The elder of these
boys was born while Edward was in exile in i47o and the Queen
had 'taken sanctuary' at Westminster. On the death of Edward
IV the unpopularity of the whole Woodville family xvas at once
manifest, and the Queen had to take sanctuary again. The most
extraordinary point in her career xvas reached when the wily Richard
tempted her to come to his Court again, and she went through some
sort of reconciliation with him, the murderer of her sons. Henry
VII never trusted her, and in i487 she went to reside in the
nunnery at Bermondsey on a pension. The refoundation of Queens'
College, Cambridge, in the beautiful gallery of xvhich there is an
authenticated portrait of her, is the only good thing recorded
of her.
178
HENRY GREY
DUKE OF SUFFOLK
(d. i554)
eldest son of Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, and Margaret
Wotton, succeeded his father in the Marquisate in 53 o. He
married Frances, elder daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of
Suffolk, and Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, and became the
father of the Ladies Jane and Katharine Grey. He was a weak,
unprincipled creature, who owed his importance entirely to his
marriage and his wealth. He followed Northumberland, who gave
him in 55 the Dukedom of Suffolk, was involved in the attempt of
that schemer to change the succession in June i553, and displayed
cowardice when the plot failed and the lives of himself and his
daughter Jane were in grave danger. For the moment he escaped
with a fine, but, when Wyatt's revolt broke out, he fled to the
Midlands and tried to raise his own tenantry against Queen Mary.
This attempt collapsed ; he went into hiding, was discovered, found
guilty of high treason and executed in February 554- The best
thing that can be said for him is that he was a firm Protestant, and
he met his death with courage.
HENRY GREY. DUKE OF SUFFOLK
From the portrait by Joannes Corvus in the
National Portrait Gallery
EDW-kRD COURTENAY. EARL OF DEVON
From the portrait in the possession of the
Earl of Deton
Fat./. 178
ARfIIUR, PRINCE OF \V.\I.E.'3
From the portrait belonging to the King at
\Vindsor Castle
THOI.\S HOWARD
SECOND DUKE OF .NORFOLK. K.G.
From the portrait in the possession of the
Duke of Norfolk, K.G.
I79
ARTHUR, PRINCE OF WALES
(I486-I5O21
eldest son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was born at
Winchester and christened after the mythic Hero-King of Britain.
His tutor from his tenth year was Bernard Andreas, and the Prince
gave early signs of high intellectual attainments. Negotiations for
his marriage with a Spanish princess began when he xvas txvo,
but the marriage xvith Katharine 'of Arragon' only took place
in November I5oI, when he was just fifteen. The young couple
went to Ludlow Castle, but Arthur died in the following April,
leaving Katharine a virgin bride to be betrothed to his brother,
Prince Henry.
182
LORD WILLIAI I HOWARD
(tStO-t573
first Lord Hoxvard of Effingham, was the son of Thomas Hoxvard,
second Duke of Norfolk, and was constantly employed in the latter
years of Henry VIII both in diplomacy and war. In the reign of
Edward VI he was for one year Captain of Calais, and was the
protector of Mary against the wiles of Northumberland in the
summer of 1553 . That Queen created him High Admiral, and
he defended the city of London valiantly against Sir Thomas
Wyatt. He was sent in command of the English fleet to fetch the
Prince of Spain to marry Mary, and would have been more trusted
by the Queen than he ,,,,'as in her later years had he not been such
a resolute champion of the rights of succession of the Princess
Elizabeth. He was so disgusted with the bloodshed of the last year
of Mary that he resigned his office of Admiral. Under Elizabeth
he negotiated the peace with France in 1559 and, though a faithful
Catholic, valiantly took the royal side against the rebel earls in
i56 % thus closing a public life of unblemished loyalty by a supreme
exercise of that virtue.
I83
THOMAS HO\VARD
THIRD DUKE OF NORFOIK
(I473-I554I
eldest son of Thomas, second Duke, and Elizabeth Tilney, was
married in I495 to the Princess Anne, daughter of Edward IV.
He fought valiantly in the early wars of Henry VIII, including
the Battle of Flodden, shortly before which he had married, as
his second wife, a daughter of the last Duke of Buckingham. He
succeeded in I522 to his father's office of Lord Treasurer, and two
years afterwards to his Dukedom. He was the implacable enemy
of Wolsey and the chief agent in using his own niece, Anne Boleyn,
to upset that minister. Yet in i536 he presided over Anne's trial,
and became the pliant agent of Henry's will. He successfully put
down the Pilgrimage of Grace in I537 and avenged it with bloody
executions ; but in the latter years of Henry's reign he was closely
li with Stephen Gardiner and the reactionary Catholic party.
His second niece, Katharine Howard, was an even more unsuc-
cessful venture as Queen than his first. From the marriage of
Henry with Katharine Parr, in 1543, the influence of the Howards
was on the wane, and the indiscretion of Norfolk's son Surrey,
who had unquestionably talked treason, if he were not prepared
to act it, led to the arrest of father and son and the death of the
latter. Early in 1547 the Duke was attainted and condemned;
Henry had signed his death-warrant and his head was to have
fallen on January 8, but during the night before the King
died. Norfolk remained peaceably in the Tower during the
reign of Edward, and was among the prisoners released by Mary
at her accession. He had the satisfaction of presiding at the trial
of Northumberland; was sent to check the insurrection of Wyatt
on the Kentish road lFeb. I554), but failed to do so, and retired to
die on his East Anglian estates.
In private life he was brutal and of ill repute: in public, a
merely pliant tool of his great but brutal master.
184.
THOlXlAS SEYlXlOU R
LORD SEYMOUR OF SUDELEY
d 549)
son of Sir John Seymour and Margery Wentworth, was probably
born about 15o8. He xvas the brother of Queen Jane and of
Edvard, Duke of Somerset, Protector at the beginning of the reign
of Edxvard VI. He courted Katharine Parr in 1543, but Henry VIII
took her to wife first, and Thomas married her only after the King's
death. He distinguished himself in Henry's last French war, and
was successively Master of the Ordnance and an Admiral in 1544;
Lord High Admiral and a peer on the accession of Edward. But he
at once began to intrigue against his brother the Protector, got hold
of two ladies of royal blood, the Princess Elizabeth and Jane Grey,
and began a violent flirtation with the former, now aged fifteen, to
the great horror of his new wife, the widmved Queen Katharine, xvho
soon died, perhaps of ill-treatment. Further, he tried to corrupt the
young King and to alienate his affections from the Protector. He
appears to have gone about threatening every one whom he disliked,
and he fortified his own castles in an alarming fashion. Among
his other eccentricities, he entered into a bargain with some famous
pirates of the Scilly Islands for a share in their prizes. Somerset
did all he could to wean his brother from these dangerous courses,
but was at last obliged to arrest him; he was attainted of high
treason and executed in the spring of I549. No one had a good
xvord to say for such a thorough scoundrel.
I8 5
HENRY FITZALAN
TWELFTH EARL OF ARUNDEL
(i z58o)
son of William Fitzalan, eleventh Earl, and Anne Percy, was probably
born about I5I. He is one of the most interesting of the Tudor
nobles, because, though of older creation than any one who played
a leading part at the Courts of Edward, Mar 5" and Elizabeth, his
attitude and aims seem closely to have resembled those of the ' new
nobility'. He succeeded to his title in I544 , and distinguished
himself greatly in Henry VIII's last French xvar. He bore very
high office at the Court of the next three sovereigns, and was in close
attendance on their persons. Not over friendly to Somerset while
Somerset held the Protectorate, he was from the first an object of
suspicion to Warwick (Northumberlandl, who had him fined and
imprisoned in I55o and again, under a false charge of conspiracy
with Somerset, in 55--. He protested as long as he could against
the proposed change in the succession in 553, and, when he at last
agreed to it, did so with the avowed intention of betraying its
author, Northumberland, on the first opportunity. Thus he xvas one
of the main agents in seating Mary on the throne, and during her
reign was the constant defender of Elizabeth's right of succession.
He protested, with Paget, in the Marian Parliaments against the
reintroduction of the persecuting statutes. Elizabeth, though con-
firming him in all his offices, was unable to put much confidence
in a man of such avowed Catholic and pro-Spanish proclivities.
She repeatedly visited him and received magnificent presents from
him, but could hardly avoid looldng on him as a 'dangerous man'.
186 HENRY FITZALAN
Thus he was closely lid with the Duke of Norfolk, who was his son-
in-law, and was a steady enemy of Cecil's. At one time there was
talk of him as a possible bridegroom for the Queen. But in 569 he
was undoubtedly implicated in the rebellion of the Northern Earls,
was a champion of the Queen of Scots, and was therefore confined
to his own house for many weeks; and again confined in zS7Z-2
after the failure of Ridolfi's plot. He died in retirement in x58o. He
was a great benefactor to his native county of Sussex, for it was
he who conceived and carried out the scheme for making the river
Arun navigable.
HUGH O'NEILL, EARL OF TYRONE
From the portrait in the South Kensington Museum
THOIAS ,V YATT
From a portrait in the possession of the
Dowager Countess of Romney
GEORGE BUCHANAN
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown
;'a . 88
ISAAC CASAUBON
From the portrait in the Bodleian Library
Oxford
18 9
SIR THOMAS WYATT
1554)
son of Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet and Elizabeth Brooke, succeeded
to his father's property in Kent in 1542. He was a friend of the
turbulent young Earl of Surrey, who was beheaded in the last year
of Henry VIII, and distinguished himself in Henry's last French
war. He was absent in France during the early part of Edward's
reign, and suddenly appeared in arms in January 1554 in his native
county of Kent, as a protester against the proposed Spanish marriage
of Queen Mary. It is probable that he was instigated to this by
Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, and it is said that after his arrest
he vainly urged Courtenay to exculpate him. The main point about
his insurrection is that it was very nearly successful, and gave a very
rude shock to Queen Mary's throne, vhich vas only saved by the
devotion of the loyal Londoners and the energy of Lord William
Howard. Wyatt, after winning over to his side the first royalist
army sent to arrest him, advanced up the Dover-London road in
great force, but was unable to cross the bridge from Southvark,
and had to go up the river as far as Kingston before he could
get over; and this gave the government time to arm against him.
He surrendered at Ludgate on February 8, vas condemned and
executed.
9 o
GEORGE BUCHANAN
tutor of King James VI and I and historian of Scotland, was born
of poor but gentle parents in Stirlingshire, and educated at the
Universities of Paris and St. Andrews. He narrowly escaped the
persecution of David ]3eaton at the end of James V's reign and fled
to Bordeaux, where he lectured and became the tutor of Montaigne.
After a further residence at Paris, in Portugal and in Italy, he
returned to Scotland some time before 562, and was one of the
leaders in the establishment of the Scottish Reformed Church, acting
once as Moderator of the General Assembly (567 and as Principal
of St. Leonard's College at the University of St. Andrews. He was
already acknowledged as one of the first of European scholars, and
did much for the establishment of sound traditions of scholarship in
Scotland. At the date of Queen Mary's flight into England, and at
the 'conferences' held at York and Westminster about her guilt,
Buchanan was present as an agent of the Earl of Moray and has
been accused of having forged the celebrated casket letters; cer-
tainly he believed in Mary's guilt. In 569 he was appointed tutor
to little King James, who always acknowledged the immense services
which 'Mr. George' had rendered to him. In 579 he published
De Jure l?cgni, a defence of Ivery muchl limited monarchy, which,
from its learning, its elegant Latinity and its fearless logic, proved
to the Whig writers of the seventeenth century an inexhaustible
quarry of their political principles. A few months after his death
was published his Hisloria colorum, which he had continued
almost to his own time, and which, though its author swallowed
all the early legends, remains perhaps the best and most trust-
worthy history of Scotland for the three centuries preceding the
Reformation. Buchanan was an ardent partisan and a man of hot
temper, who has been suspected of garbling facts in his writings,
but this is an allegation difficult to prove.
I SAAC CASAU BO N
{I559-I6141
born at Geneva of Gascon Protestant parents, became at an early
age one of the greatest Greek scholars that ever lived. He ap-
pears to have studied principally by himself at Geneva. Poverty
oppressed him all his early life, even after his introduction to
Scaliger, but in 1596 he received a professional appointment at
Montpellier in France: from thence he moved to Paris, where
many efforts were made to convert him to Catholicism. In I6IO,
finding his own theological position more in accordance with the
English than with the Genevan or Roman churches, he accepted a
prebend at Canterbury and became a naturalized Englishman. He
at once entered into a warm friendship with the good Bishop
Andrewes; the King also delighted in his learned conversation and
gave him a pension. He xvas a most voluminous commentator on,
and translator of classical authors, such as Strabo, Polybius, Theo-
phrastus, Suetonius and especially of Athenaeus, as well as of the
Greek and Latin fathers of the Church, and an acute controversialist
on the errors of Catholic historians. He died worn out with hard
study in 1614 .
EDMUND GRINDAL
From the portrait at Lambeth Palace
HENRY CAREY, FIRST LORD HUNSDON
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown
193
HENRY CAREY
FIRST LORD HUNSDON
(d. I596
son of William Carey and Mary Boleyn, and so first cousin of
Queen Elizabeth, was born about 524, and received his peerage
at the beginning of the Queen's reign. He was busy during most
of his life in keeping the peace upon the Scots border, for he
first was Warden of the Eastern Marches, and afterwards of all
the Scottish Marches. He was most successful in this capacity,
helped to suppress the rebellion of I569, hung scores of border
thieves and pacified King James after the execution of Queen
Mary. He was also Lord Chamberlain to the Queen, and kept
the greedy courtiers in order. He was an honest, rough, un-
cultured man, but a faithful servant to his Queen and country.
THOMAS SACKVILLE, FIRST EARI. OF DORSET
From the portrait in the possession of Lord Sackville
JOHN FOXE
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown
.Face l'o I94
GEORGE WISHART
From the portrait belonging to Glasgow University
I96
GEORGE WI SHART
{d. 1546
born about i5i 4 of a gentle family settled near Montrose, was
educated at Aberdeen and taught Greek, which he learned from
a Frenchman, Marillier, in a school at Montrose. In 538 he was
accused of heresy, fled the country and visited England and Germany.
In 1543 we find him at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but he
was probably not the George Wishart who was an agent of Henry
VIII for the assassination of Cardinal Beaton in I544; in that }'ear,
however, we find him preaching at Montrose, and it was then that
Knox became his disciple. During the next two years we find him
preaching at many places in Scotland open defiance of Rome,
Cardinal Beaton and all their works ; his zeal, eloquence and courage
were undeniable, but it would have been impossible for any
government vehich held the views of Beaton to tolerate such attacks,
and Wishart was arrested and burned at St. Andrews in March
546. Beaton was soon afterwards murdered, avowedly in revenge
for Wishart's death.
I97
SIR NICHOLAS BACON
(5o9-579}
son of Robert Bacon and Isabella Cage, was Lord Keeper of the Great
Seal during the first twenty years of the reign of Elizabeth : he was
also, by his second wife, the learned Anne Cooke, the father of the
illustrious Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, and the brother-in-law of
Lord Burghley. He had been educated at the Abbey School of Bury
St. Edmunds and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, became
a law student at Gray's Inn, and was patronized by Cromwell.
A zealous and honest Protestant, he was greatly enriched by gifts
of monastic land, although he had vainly pleaded that the revenues
of that land should be devoted to the cause of education. His
first important legal office was that of Attorney of the Court of
Wards (i546, and this he retained through the reign of Edward VI
and, in spite of his opinions, through that of Mary. He was the warm
and life-long friend of Cecil and of Matthew Parker, his Cambridge
contemporaries. Elizabeth on her accession at once knighted him
and made him Lord Keeper, and his Chancery judgements were
famous for their soundness as well as for their wit. He was more
than once in temporary disgrace with Her Majesty for his out-
spoken championship of the Protestant cause abroad, but she
reposed great trust in him and visited him at his fine country
house at Gorhambury. Bacon was a man of enormous fatness,
which in connexion with his name was a subject of great mirth
to himself as well as to his friends; he was also a man of great
learning, good humour and spotless integrity.
x9 8
SIR THOMAS SMITH
{53-577
son of John Smith and Agnes Charnock, was born at Saffron Wal-
den and educated at St. John's and Queens' Colleges, Cambridge.
He became one of the most accomplished scholars of his day,
particularly in the Greek language, our present pronunciation of
which is due to his efforts- he was Public Orator in 538, and one of
the people who successfully pressed on Henry VIII the foundation
which became Trinity College. He travelled in France and Italy,
and in I544 became Regius Professor of Civil Laxv; he had already
taken minor orders and held several ecclesiastical preferments,
among them, in the reign of Edward VI, the Deanery of Carlisle and
the Provostship of Eton. He "was, however, a sound if moderate
Protestant, and a warm friend of the Protector Somerset, to whom
he clave even in his disgrace. Somerset made him Secretary of
State, an office which he again held for a short time under Elizabeth
(I572). On Sonerset's fall he was imprisoned in the Tower ; on his
release he interested himself to save his fellow prisoner, Gardiner,
who therefore protected him during Mary's reign, although he had
to resign Eton and Carlisle and go into retirement. On Elizabeth's
accession he became one of her most trusted counsellors, and was
twice sent on diplomatic missions to France. His learning was
immense, especially in the domain of classical antiquities and politi-
cal philosophy, and his greatest work is De t?cpublica 4glorum ; tlze
nlallCr of Govcrlmzclzt or Policy of the Reah,z of JElgla1,d, written
in France about i564. It is the soundest defence of the Tudor
system of government ever published. Smith died universally loved
and respected at Theydon, Essex, in 577-
I99
SIR MARTIN FROBISHER
( 595)
Arctic explorer, of a Yorkshire family, was probably born about
I535. He is known to have been on a voyage to the Guinea Coast
in I554: he was suspected of piracy in i566 ' employed by the
government off the Irish coast in 57--, and in 576 started upon
the first of his famous three voyages to the Arctic regions, with
three ships, two of twenty-five and one of ten tons respectively, in
search of the North-West Passage in favour of which Sir Humphrey
Gilbert had written ten years before. This voyage lasted only three
months, but the explorer believed that he had found the entrance to
a great strait 'between America and Asia'. He also believed that
he had discovered gold in the pyrite rocks. On the second voyage,
in i577, Frobisher laded his ship with two hundred tons of this rock,
but, when it came to be tested, it was reported that no heat could be
got sufficient to melt it: and, after a similar load had been brought
home from a third voyage in i578, the mistake was discovered and
further exploration in this region ceased for some years. Frobisher
afterwards had high command and fought valiantly against the
Armada and on other occasions against the Spaniards. He died
of his wounds in 595-
OXFORD
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