the whole South-east of England. Meanwhile troops from Wales and the West were to march towards the capital. The balance between Spain and France on the Continent was at this time so uncertain, that Henry II. of France was not inclined either strongly to assist or wholly to discourage the conspirators. A midnight meeting was held in Paris, and assistance promised them. But this was too ostentatious a manner of conspiring not to reach the ears of Wotton, the English Ambassador; information was at once sent to England. An intended robbery of the Treasury, to the amount of £50,000, which was to supply the fund for the expedition, was also betrayed. The effect was the immediate apprehension of such of the chiefs of the conspiracy as were to be found in England, while the rest were proclaimed traitors. No mercy was shown to the offenders; neither rack nor gallows was spared, but, though some of the conspirators turned King's evidence, Throgmorton, whose knowledge was the most extensive, bore bravely up against the torture. Renewed This conspiracy was followed by an increased vigour of persecution. The diary of Machyn, a citizen of London, is little else persecution. than a dismal list of poor wretches brought to the stake, or criminals hanged wholesale; for the restoration of Church discipline seems to have had no effect upon the morals of the country. The Government had fallen into the hands of a few of the Queen's particular friends-as Rochester, Englefield and Jernyngham. The Lords of the Council, and real statesmen of England, held aloof from the wretched tyranny. The exiled gentlemen sought refuge in France, and were there welcomed by the King, from whom the complaints of Mary could obtain nothing but the most transparently false disavowal of all intentions to assist them. The very ships which were said to be sent to suppress the rovers-for the exiles had taken to privateering-really acted as their consorts. They preyed chiefly on the trade of Spain, between which power and France war was again imminent, and whose interests were identical with Mary's. These young gentlemen had a sort of chivalrous worship of the Princess Elizabeth. On her the eyes of the younger and more stirring part of the people had been fixed throughout the reign, and now, amid the general wretchedness, all parties, except the extreme Catholics, fixed their hopes on her. The younger men conspired, and lost the national confidence by seeking the aid of France; the wise old statesmen, who saw in her something of her father's love of order, were content to wait till a few years should of necessity close the Queen's life, for her health was Many young Englishmen fly to France.! 1557] WAR WITH FRANCE 459 quite broken; she was a prey to the dropsy, and the absence of her husband tended to increase her misery. France sup 1557. The French support of the English exiles was not wholly politic. For some little time there had been a truce between the French nation and Spain. But Caraffa, Paul IV., was French in all his views; he was anxious too to expel the Spaniards from Naples, and was constantly urging Henry II. to break ports them. the truce. He had now induced him to do so, and it would have been prudent to have allowed the English to hold aloof from the war, as was their anxious wish. Henry's injudicious support of the exiles did for Philip what he never could have done for himself. The Spanish King had brought himself to revisit the country and the wife he detested, for the purpose of embroiling England in his continental quarrels. This was contrary to the treaty of marriage between himself and Mary, and his visit had proved useless. But the assistance given by Henry to a wild expedition to the North of England headed by Sir Thomas Stafford, the grandson of the Duke of Buckingham whom Henry VIII. had beheaded, forced the nation into war. Stafford landed with thirty Eng Consequent war. lishmen and one Frenchman at Scarborough, but was shortly taken prisoner, with the whole of his followers, who, with the exception of one, were put to death. War with France was declared. As this war was chiefly in the Pope's interests, the bulk of the French army was poured into Italy under the Duke of Guise. It was there destroyed by disease, and the Pope had to make his submission to Alva, Philip's lieutenant. But the absence of the French army in the South had given Philip an opportunity, of which he had taken advantage, of striking a blow from the Netherlands. His army, under Philibert of Savoy, had advanced to St. Quentin, the garrison of which was reinforced by Coligny, who then took the command. To relieve his nephew, and to save a city which barred the road to Paris, Montmorency collected what troops he could, and hurried northward. These troops consisted mainly of the reserves of the country, nobles and their feudal followers. The French suffered a disastrous defeat. Their loss was 4000 killed; and the Constable, Montmorency himself, and many of the chief nobles of France were among the prisoners. The English were not present, though arriving on the ground soon enough to have a share in the ruthless pillage of the town. The Duke of Guise, irritated at his want of success in Italy, thought to gratify the French people and establish his popularity by winning back Calais, the other Battle of st. Quentin. Aug. 10, 1557. Loss of Calais. defences of which had been much neglected, and which the French nation ardently desired to possess. The last reign had been one of great extravagance and waste, and Northumberland and his Council, in the midst of the financial pressure which was always weighing upon them in England, had neglected the supplies and the fortifications of Calais. Mary's reign had been less wasteful, but, as has been seen, she had felt it her duty to divest the Crown of a large portion of its revenue and to restore it to the Church. She too had therefore been obliged to be penurious. The Calais Pale comprised three forts-Calais itself, and the two outlying forts, Guisnes and Hammes. Of these, Guisnes was about three miles from Calais, connected by a line of fortresses; Hammes lay between the two. In these three places there were about sixteen or seventeen hundred men. Grey had a thousand of these at Guisnes, while Wentworth garrisoned Calais with some five hundred, not nearly enough to man the works thoroughly. The commanders knew well that an attack was intended. They wrote urgent letters to England for assistance, and it was resolved that they were too weak to move out of their strongholds till reinforced. Troops were hurriedly collected, and upon some rumour of the falseness of the previous report, as rapidly disbanded. Meanwhile an army of twenty thousand men was encamped at Boulogne, and thirty or forty vessels, with all the apparatus for a siege, were collected at Ambleteuse. On the 1st of January 1558, Calais, on the land side, was invested. The sea was still open, and the entrance to Calais harbour was covered by a castle on the Rysbank, the end of a line of sand mounds which fronted the sea. The other approaches to the sandhills were covered by a bulwark called the Sandgate and a fort called Newnham bridge. On the 2nd of January an attack on Newnham bridge was repulsed, but the Sandgate was captured. The country should have been put under water, but the sluices were out of order, and would have let the salt into the wells. So Wentworth wrote in haste for more assistance, but before he had well finished his letter the Rysbank was attacked from the sea and captured, and the defence of Calais was virtually over. Guisnes might perhaps have been saved, but extraordinary mismanagement prevented the reinforcements from being embarked. The Queen's ships were unseaworthy, and when a transport fleet was collected a storm scattered it; and when Philip of Spain replaced it with a fleet from the Low Countries, the army in despair had disbanded. So Guisnes went with Calais, and the English hold upon France was destroyed. The loss of Calais was a heavy 1558] LOSS OF CALAIS 461 blow to England and to Mary. The nation was for the moment roused; money was rapidly voted by Parliament or borrowed abroad; but the persecution, which still continued, had shaken the loyalty of England, and the musters which were collected could not be trusted. One brief success was won by the fleet, with which Clinton had a share in securing the victory for Count Egmont at the battle of Gravelines. But the feeling was growing both in France and Spain that it was time, if the march of Protestantism was to be checked, to put an end to their internecine struggle and to join in the suppression of heresy. The death of Charles V., the old enemy of France, rendered this the more easy. To the French indeed, if they could but retain Calais, a peace brought nothing but advantage, Negotiations for and they offered Philip peace almost on his own terms a European if he would throw over his allies. As he still had hopes Sept. 1558. of drawing England to his side by means of the friendship of Elizabeth, even if he could not join it to his kingdom by a marriage with that Princess, he refused to desert his allies, and in the midst of the negotiations the death which had been long threatening Mary came. She died on the 14th of November. Three days afterwards she was followed to the grave by Pole, who, by an almost grotesque turn of fate, had been removed from his position as Legate a latere by the present Pope upon a charge of unsoundness of doctrine. Both he and Mary proved their orthodoxy to the end by vigorous persecution. peace. Death of Mary. STATE OF SOCIETY. 1485-1558. Ν IN order rightly to appreciate Henry VIII.'s character, and to un derstand the position which he occupies in history, it is necessary to understand also the character of the period in which he lived. His greatness consisted in the manner in which he guided England through 0. period of revolution, and is enhanced when we contrast his reign with those of his immediate successors, nor is it till character of his daughter Elizabeth completed his work by following in his footsteps that we again see order re-established in the distracted kingdom. The period was one of revolution. It was revolutionary in all directions—in the constitution of the nation, in the social life of the nation, in the religion of the nation. Revolutionary the period. Change in the Throughout Europe the idea of the royal power had changed. The feudal notion of the king being a suzerain among peers had given place to a more modern conception of royalty, which regarded him as the arbitrary master-in some degree the proprietor of the nation which he ruled. In England this idea found its complete expression first in Henry VII., whose notions of the royal prerogative were so high that the quaint tale is told of him, that he had his mastiffs killed for venturing to bait their royal master the lion :-"the like he did with an excellent falcon because he feared not hand and hand to match with an eagle, saying it was not meet for any subject to offer such wrong to his lord and superior." Personal government thus became the hereditary view of the Tudor sovereigns. Its establishment implied the destruction of feudalism, and of the power and prestige of the old feudal nobility. This change was much accelerated by the bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses. The heaviest part of the destruction wrought by them had fallen on the nobility. It is plain that, though they had |