of Scots in the February of that same year, had recovered his ascendancy over the Queen so soon as Leicester retired to Buxton to be treated for the gout. He was indeed too late to stop Drake from starting, but from that moment the country which had been sailing merrily into conflict returned to its normal path of equivocal negotiation. For a few months it seemed possible that his counsels might once again avail to leash the dogs of war, though he himself cherished no illusions as to the grave state of public affairs. The situation, as he pointed out, had been profoundly modified by two acts, the wisdom of which he considered very doubtful. Mary's execution had provoked her son to adopt an attitude of dangerous hostility, whilst in the attack on Cadiz the King of Spain had suffered an insult which even a lesser monarch could not have afforded to leave unavenged. There lay a fearful peril in the possibility of an alliance between Spain and Scotland. The Queen ought therefore to abandon her temporizing policy in respect of James and give him that assurance of the English succession which alone could make him her loyal supporter." *

There is the truth. In no other written sentences, I believe, has there been compressed so much that is indicative of the relative places which Burghley and Leicester should occupy in the minds of their later countrymen-yet has history been so written that their respective positions have been exactly reversed.

Burghley is not only credited with all that Leicester and his enthusiastic adherents secured for England, but Burghley now enjoys credit for all that even his Queen accomplished—when, as a matter of fact, Burghley opposed with all his might everything that brought about the break with Spain and transferred the Crown of the World from her brow to that of England. Leicester impelled Elizabeth to send Drake to attack Spain. Burghley did everything he could to keep Drake at home. Leicester told the Queen again and again that England needed no friends, that she could take care of herself. Burghley tried his best to make the Queen believe that this was untrue. Burghley tried to get Elizabeth to secure James's co-operation in her plans for joining the two kingdoms by promising him the succession. Elizabeth believed-and she proved correct-that the way to secure James was to promise him nothing, but to threaten him from time to time with loss of the succession if he did not behave himself. Burghley believed the execution of Mary a great error.

A Life of Robert Cecil, pp. 19 et seq., by Algernon Cecil, London, 1915.

b

Leicester had urged it for years; and the results show that this course was the only right one. Yet Froude has the hardihood to

say:

"She (Elizabeth) never modified a course recommended to her by Burghley without injury both to the realm and to herself. She never chose an opposite course without plunging into embarrassments, from which his skill and Walsingham's were barely able to extricate her. The great results of her reign were the fruits of a policy which was not her own, and which she starved and mutilated when energy and completeness were needed." *

If Froude had said that "the great results of her reign were the fruits of a policy" which was opposed at every step by Burghley, he would have been much nearer the truth. Everything in England's policy that was venturesome, that was daring, that was new, was opposed by Burghley all his life; everything in England's policy that was venturesome, that was daring, that was new, was fought for by Leicester all his life-and it was the venturesome, daring new policies that during the time of Elizabeth raised England from a third-rate power to the first power of the globe, and enabled the Great Queen, with that vision which was one of the most characteristic marks of her genius, to prophesy that James VI. "would, one day, become King of Great Britain," her tongue for the first time, I believe, thus calling the mighty empire that she was founding and leaving to her people-a fact which three hundred years later seems unknown to every one of them.

Leicester's overpowering figure has been encountered at every turn by every historian of the Golden Age. They all praise without stint the remarkable penetration of Elizabeth when choosing her chief colleagues in the Government. Yet with all her ability in this direction, Leicester deceived her as to his talents for thirty consecutive years!

All historians agree that she loved her country and passionately maintained its interests. Yet, worthless fop that Leicester was, it is to him that she entrusts the direction of the most important effort she ever made on foreign soil-when she sends him to command in the Low Countries; and when, several years later, the Armada was on its way, and she and England

* Froude, Hist. of England, vol. xii. p. 559 (1870 ed.).

were in hourly danger of utter destruction, it was the worthless Leicester whom she placed in supreme command of her army at Tilbury-upon which, if the invaders landed, she and the kingdom must alone depend for their very existence. And when she did this she was fifty-five years of age!

We see her on horseback-an immortal picture-riding, with Leicester beside her, up and down the lines of the great English army; and when she addresses the men she has the hardihood, at this most historical, solemn, and sacred moment of all her long life, to tell them orally: "My Lieutenant-General shall be in my stead, than whom never Prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject "—this Leicester who was reputed brainless, whose mistress she was said to have been for more than thirty years!

A woman of mature years who, in her high place, could have acted thus could have had no sense of dignity, nor of pride, nor of public opinion. We recall no parallel for such shamelessness. Can a more pitiful, ridiculous position for a queen be imagined?

Yet all historians agree that Elizabeth was entirely dependent for her power upon public opinion, that she had a most remarkable knowledge of its currents, that she was very proud, ever most careful to cultivate and preserve her dignity and the respect and affection of her subjects; and more, that she succeeded in all these aims to an unprecedented degree. And yet, when the danger from the Armada was averted, she planned that her greatest reward for the victory should go to Leicester, despite the fact that none of the historians shows that he had played any important part in bringing about the happy outcome! She had ordered letters patent made, conferring on this good-for-nothing scapegrace the Lieutenant-Generalship of England and Ireland, thus giving him more power than had previously been delegated to any subject by any English monarch. Truly, if this be history, Elizabeth was an old fool!

But this anomalous and, indeed, impossible position gives little disquiet to the historians. They handle it by not handling it at all. So far as the Tilbury speech is concerned, it is either suppressed in its entirety, or given in the phrases already quoted. Froude, of course, omits the whole text; but by misdating it he is able to use the incident of its delivery as the basis of a striking phrase which cannot be made to coincide with the known facts. Still, we have the striking phrase.

So, going their way, the historians leave Leicester in his resplendent position; and, after all that can be done by neglect, misrepresentation or detraction, there he stands, growing greater and greater the more the world learns of the details of Elizabeth's reign.

Leicester is the very heart of its mystery, and I hope to see my biography of him reinstate him in the incomparable place he occupied during his lifetime. If for any reason I be not permitted to complete the volume, the work will still be done, for neither the history of Elizabeth nor of her times can be adequate until the life of the chief man of her Court and councils has been probed and completely written. The task should be easily done even by one new to it, for nothing that pretends to be a life of him has yet been printed. He has had, with scarcely a line published in his defence, to submit to three centuries of continuous vilification.

Oxford has had its share in this-Oxford which, at the most critical period in all its history, when (to quote its first historian, Anthony à Wood) it "became empty," helpless, and gasping for very life, was resuscitated and set upon its feet once more by that Leicester to whom in its agony it had appealed, and who for the remainder of his life, twenty-four years, was its one and most powerful patron and Chancellor. It is that University which inflicts on its preserver the deepest stab of all through the pen of its graduate and teacher of history, Froude, in his Protestant history of a time when Leicester was the best sword and buckler that the Puritan and Protestant had at Court.

If Leicester could have known this, surely we might say: "Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel,

He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel."

To the ample evidence as to Leicester's true position set forth in the coming volume, I shall now add: that of all the historical scholars who have dealt with Leicester, only two, except Mr. Hume, as already mentioned, appear to have seen the first glimmering of the truth. The names of these two will be unknown to most of my readers. They are Richard Congreve and Professor Edward Spencer Beesly, late Professor of History at University College, London, both of whom have since passed away. These three alone appear to have been capable of approaching Leicester with common sense and an unprejudiced mind.

It is rare to find an English historian who, unbiassed by the religious controversies of the Reformation period, can take an impartial view of its actual facts, for church controversy is still a militant factor in English national life; learned men spend their lives in insisting that the points of ecclesiastical difference shall be even more sharply defined or insisted upon; the ancestors of most English families risked their lives for their Protestantism or Catholicism, and the wrongs committed by both sides are even to-day too poignant to permit of an unprejudiced view by either party. A simple inquiry to-day of any Catholic priest as to the character of Queen Elizabeth, or of any Protestant priest as to that of Mary Stuart, will elicit a response, if he speak freely, which will probably require considerable expurgation.

So, when we find Froude carefully omitting-to cite only one typical example of his bias-the story of the martyrdom of the eleven English Catholic bishops (all there were when the Reformation began), we cannot be surprised-he was a Protestant clergyman. When Lingard-to take a typical example of his bias omits to say that in the last letter of Mary Stuart to the Pope (just before her execution) she urged him to foment an armed revolution and invasion of England with the object of dethroning Elizabeth, we cannot be surprised-he was a Catholic clergyman. He did not, however, in this case certainly violate his principle of telling what was sure to be discovered; for up to that time the Vatican, which then had possession of the MS., would not permit its publication.

It is much to be regretted that by such practices these famous writers should have impugned the reliability of their works and thus made it impossible in the true and discriminating sense of the term, to refer to either of them unqualifiedly as an historian. Lingard should always be designated as the Catholic historian, and Froude as the Protestant historian. Each wrote for only one object to glorify his own side of a life and death controversy *— and woe will be the part of the student who does not make due allowance for this fact!

Lingard, to give him his due, was by far the fairer of the couple. He was willing to state, as a rule, as we have just

"In my account of the reformation I must say much to shock protestant prejudices; Whatever I have said or purposely omitted has been through a motive of serving religion." Lingard to Rev. J. Kirk, December, 1819, from MS. at St. Cuthbert's, Ushaw.