CORRIGENDA.

Page 122, dele note. The speaker was Peter Wentworth.

Page 160, Letter to a Bishop, &c.: this letter is, in the Calendar of State Papers, conjecturally dated March, 1573.

INTRODUCTION

I.

GENERAL SURVEY: THE MONARCHY AND THE NATION.

THE Tudor monarchy attained its zenith in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Henry VIII was more tyrannical than his younger daughter, but it does not follow that he was more firmly seated on the throne. Under him, the abuses of arbitrary power were doubtless more flagrant, and the direct influence of the royal will more obvious, while his statutory powers were in some respects larger and his financial resources, at least after the submission of the clergy and the dissolution of the monasteries, more abundant. But the Tudor monarchy, unlike most other despotisms, did not depend on gold or force, on the possession of vast estates, unlimited taxation or a standing army. It rested on the willing support of the nation at large, a support due to the deeply-rooted conviction that a strong executive was necessary to the national unity, and that, in the face of the dangers which threatened the country both at home and abroad, the sovereign must be allowed a free hand. It was this conviction, instinctively felt rather than definitely realized, which enabled Henry VIII not only to crush open rebellion but to punish the slightest signs of opposition to his will, to regulate the consciences of his subjects, and to extend the legal conception of treason to limits hitherto unknown. It was this which rendered

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it possible for the ministers of Edward VI to impose a Protestant régime upon a Romanist majority, and allowed Mary to enter upon a hateful marriage and to drag the country into a disastrous war. It was this, finally, which enabled Elizabeth to choose her own line in domestic and foreign policy, to defer for thirty years the war with Spain, and to resist, almost single-handed, the pressure for further ecclesiastical change.

The Tudor monarchy was essentially a national monarchy. It was popular with the multitude, and it was actively supported by the influential classes, the nobility, the gentry, the lawyers, the merchants, who sat as members of parliament at Westminster, mustered the forces of the shire as Lords-Lieutenant, or bore the burden of local government as borough-magistrates and Justices of the Peace. Had these classes been recalcitrant, had they even been lukewarm in their support, the crown would have been practically powerless. If proof of this were required, it would be found in the fact that, while the Tudors, in spite of countless difficulties, retained their ascendency for upwards of a century, the Stewarts, who had in their hands all the despotic agencies and twice the wealth of their predecessors, lost it in one generation.

Now if this fundamental popularity may be predicated of the Tudors in general, it belonged in an especial degree to the last of the race. A strong monarchy was beneficial in the days of Henry VIII, but it was indispensable in those of Elizabeth. Henry VII had prospered, chiefly because his marriage put an end to the evils of a disputed succession. Had Elizabeth died before 1587, the disasters of the fifteenth century would inevitably have recurred. The dangers of political disorder could not in the reign of the childless queen be long absent from the minds of thinking men. No previous reign, for a century and a half before her accession, had been free from plot and rebellion, and ten years after she came to the throne the outbreak of the northern earls showed that baronial anarchy might

yet again raise its head. During Elizabeth's reign, this danger was immeasurably enhanced by religious differences. If national unity and the maintenance of law and order depended on the strength of the government in 1530, how much more was this the case a generation later, when Anglicans and Romanists nearly balanced each other, in weight if not in numbers, and when the extreme Protestant sects were introducing an element of discord unknown before the Reformation? The religious wars and massacres in France and the Netherlands, the hostile leagues of Germany, the religious animosities which distracted Scotland and Ireland-all these were warnings which no one who who was not a fanatic could disregard. Moreover, in the time of Henry VIII, the Papacy was discouraged and disorganized in that of Elizabeth it had not only rallied but was beginning to recover its earlier position. How should the Protestants of England hope to make head against the returning tide except by submitting themselves, like an army in the field, to the stern discipline of undivided control? What had they to expect if Mary of Scotland should become, by the death of her cousin, not merely the heir but the rightful claimant of the English crown? It is difficult to over-estimate the strength conferred upon a sovereign by the consciousness that her life alone stands between her subjects and anarchy.

To these considerations was added a new fear, the fear of foreign invasion and conquest. For centuries this danger had been unknown. English armies had repeatedly invaded France, and the foreigner had been unable to retaliate except by occasional raids upon our coasts. Now, for the first time for many generations, England was exposed to great and imminent danger from abroad. No power comparable with. the new monarchies of France and Spain had existed a century before. Either of them, taken singly, was more than a match for this country: had they combined their forces, nothing could have saved English independence. In the days of Elizabeth's father the chance of such a combina

tion was hardly appreciable: in the days of Elizabeth it was not merely a chance but a probability. And here again the political danger was doubled by religious hostility. Spain was actively propagandist; France might become so at any moment. England had already learnt to her cost, in the preceding reign, what was meant by Spanish domination, and what Spain had once obtained by marriage she was only too likely to attempt by conquest. In the face of such a danger as this, it is not to be wondered at if the representatives of the nation voted without reluctance whatever taxes were required, and abstained from criticisms or demands which might have hampered some delicate combination or encouraged the enemy by the semblance of disunion.

It is needless to go beyond this to account for the ease with which Elizabeth handled the difficult machine of parliamentary government. Royal influence was, no doubt, applied to guide parliamentary elections, and to deflect the tide of debate from inconvenient channels; but there is no reason to suppose that this influence was excessive or unpopular. The parliaments of Elizabeth were neither packed nor servile. They had a mind of their own, and could on occasion show it. But they knew what the national interest demanded, and in supporting the crown they acted in accordance with that interest. This attitude was confirmed, as time went on, by the successes of a long and prosperous reign, by a growing confidence in the wisdom of the government, and by that chivalrous form of loyalty which encircles a woman on the throne. Elizabeth, on her side, fully

She

understood both the sources and the limitations of her power, for, extensive as it was, it had its limitations. was aware of the value set upon her life, but she was not misled by this knowledge into a false estimate of her position. She knew that she could not sacrifice or endanger the national interests without losing the goodwill of her people, on which alone her liberty of action depended. Her differences with her parliaments were never serious, and