A Child's History of England

by Dickens, Charles

  arms, and with the sailors in their ships, the country waited for

  the coming of the proud Spanish fleet, which was called THE

  INVINCIBLE ARMADA. The Queen herself, riding in armour on a white

  horse, and the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Leicester holding her

  bridal rein, made a brave speech to the troops at Tilbury Fort

  opposite Gravesend, which was received with such enthusiasm as is

  seldom known. Then came the Spanish Armada into the English

  Channel, sailing along in the form of a half moon, of such great

  size that it was seven miles broad. But the English were quickly

  upon it, and woe then to all the Spanish ships that dropped a

  little out of the half moon, for the English took them instantly!

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  And it soon appeared that the great Armada was anything but

  invincible, for on a summer night, bold Drake sent eight blazing

  fire-ships right into the midst of it. In terrible consternation

  the Spaniards tried to get out to sea, and so became dispersed; the

  English pursued them at a great advantage; a storm came on, and

  drove the Spaniards among rocks and shoals; and the swift end of

  the Invincible fleet was, that it lost thirty great ships and ten

  thousand men, and, defeated and disgraced, sailed home again.

  Being afraid to go by the English Channel, it sailed all round

  Scotland and Ireland; some of the ships getting cast away on the

  latter coast in bad weather, the Irish, who were a kind of savages,

  plundered those vessels and killed their crews. So ended this

  great attempt to invade and conquer England. And I think it will

  be a long time before any other invincible fleet coming to England

  with the same object, will fare much better than the Spanish

  Armada.

  Though the Spanish king had had this bitter taste of English

  bravery, he was so little the wiser for it, as still to entertain

  his old designs, and even to conceive the absurd idea of placing

  his daughter on the English throne. But the Earl of Essex, SIR

  WALTER RALEIGH, SIR THOMAS HOWARD, and some other distinguished

  leaders, put to sea from Plymouth, entered the port of Cadiz once

  more, obtained a complete victory over the shipping assembled

  there, and got possession of the town. In obedience to the Queen's

  express instructions, they behaved with great humanity; and the

  principal loss of the Spaniards was a vast sum of money which they

  had to pay for ransom. This was one of many gallant achievements

  on the sea, effected in this reign. Sir Walter Raleigh himself,

  after marrying a maid of honour and giving offence to the Maiden

  Queen thereby, had already sailed to South America in search of

  gold.

  The Earl of Leicester was now dead, and so was Sir Thomas

  Walsingham, whom Lord Burleigh was soon to follow. The principal

  favourite was the EARL OF ESSEX, a spirited and handsome man, a

  favourite with the people too as well as with the Queen, and

  possessed of many admirable qualities. It was much debated at

  Court whether there should be peace with Spain or no, and he was

  very urgent for war. He also tried hard to have his own way in the

  appointment of a deputy to govern in Ireland. One day, while this

  question was in dispute, he hastily took offence, and turned his

  back upon the Queen; as a gentle reminder of which impropriety, the

  Queen gave him a tremendous box on the ear, and told him to go to

  the devil. He went home instead, and did not reappear at Court for

  half a year or so, when he and the Queen were reconciled, though

  never (as some suppose) thoroughly.

  From this time the fate of the Earl of Essex and that of the Queen

  seemed to be blended together. The Irish were still perpetually

  quarrelling and fighting among themselves, and he went over to

  Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, to the great joy of his enemies (Sir

  Walter Raleigh among the rest), who were glad to have so dangerous

  a rival far off. Not being by any means successful there, and

  knowing that his enemies would take advantage of that circumstance

  to injure him with the Queen, he came home again, though against

  her orders. The Queen being taken by surprise when he appeared

  before her, gave him her hand to kiss, and he was overjoyed -

  though it was not a very lovely hand by this time - but in the

  course of the same day she ordered him to confine himself to his

  room, and two or three days afterwards had him taken into custody.

  With the same sort of caprice - and as capricious an old woman she

  now was, as ever wore a crown or a head either - she sent him broth

  from her own table on his falling ill from anxiety, and cried about

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  him.

  He was a man who could find comfort and occupation in his books,

  and he did so for a time; not the least happy time, I dare say, of

  his life. But it happened unfortunately for him, that he held a

  monopoly in sweet wines: which means that nobody could sell them

  without purchasing his permission. This right, which was only for

  a term, expiring, he applied to have it renewed. The Queen

  refused, with the rather strong observation - but she DID make

  strong observations - that an unruly beast must be stinted in his

  food. Upon this, the angry Earl, who had been already deprived of

  many offices, thought himself in danger of complete ruin, and

  turned against the Queen, whom he called a vain old woman who had

  grown as crooked in her mind as she had in her figure. These

  uncomplimentary expressions the ladies of the Court immediately

  snapped up and carried to the Queen, whom they did not put in a

  better tempter, you may believe. The same Court ladies, when they

  had beautiful dark hair of their own, used to wear false red hair,

  to be like the Queen. So they were not very high-spirited ladies,

  however high in rank.

  The worst object of the Earl of Essex, and some friends of his who

  used to meet at LORD SOUTHAMPTON'S house, was to obtain possession

  of the Queen, and oblige her by force to dismiss her ministers and

  change her favourites. On Saturday the seventh of February, one

  thousand six hundred and one, the council suspecting this, summoned

  the Earl to come before them. He, pretending to be ill, declined;

  it was then settled among his friends, that as the next day would

  be Sunday, when many of the citizens usually assembled at the Cross

  by St. Paul's Cathedral, he should make one bold effort to induce

  them to rise and follow him to the Palace.

  So, on the Sunday morning, he and a small body of adherents started

  out of his house - Essex House by the Strand, with steps to the

  river - having first shut up in it, as prisoners, some members of

  the council who came to examine him - and hurried into the City

  with the Earl at their head crying out 'For the Queen! For the

  Queen! A plot is laid for my life!' No one heeded them, however,

  and when they came to St. Paul's there were no citizens there. In

  the meant
ime the prisoners at Essex House had been released by one

  of the Earl's own friends; he had been promptly proclaimed a

  traitor in the City itself; and the streets were barricaded with

  carts and guarded by soldiers. The Earl got back to his house by

  water, with difficulty, and after an attempt to defend his house

  against the troops and cannon by which it was soon surrounded, gave

  himself up that night. He was brought to trial on the nineteenth,

  and found guilty; on the twenty-fifth, he was executed on Tower

  Hill, where he died, at thirty-four years old, both courageously

  and penitently. His step-father suffered with him. His enemy, Sir

  Walter Raleigh, stood near the scaffold all the time - but not so

  near it as we shall see him stand, before we finish his history.

  In this case, as in the cases of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen

  of Scots, the Queen had commanded, and countermanded, and again

  commanded, the execution. It is probable that the death of her

  young and gallant favourite in the prime of his good qualities, was

  never off her mind afterwards, but she held out, the same vain,

  obstinate and capricious woman, for another year. Then she danced

  before her Court on a state occasion - and cut, I should think, a

  mighty ridiculous figure, doing so in an immense ruff, stomacher

  and wig, at seventy years old. For another year still, she held

  out, but, without any more dancing, and as a moody, sorrowful,

  broken creature. At last, on the tenth of March, one thousand six

  hundred and three, having been ill of a very bad cold, and made

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  worse by the death of the Countess of Nottingham who was her

  intimate friend, she fell into a stupor and was supposed to be

  dead. She recovered her consciousness, however, and then nothing

  would induce her to go to bed; for she said that she knew that if

  she did, she should never get up again. There she lay for ten

  days, on cushions on the floor, without any food, until the Lord

  Admiral got her into bed at last, partly by persuasions and partly

  by main force. When they asked her who should succeed her, she

  replied that her seat had been the seat of Kings, and that she

  would have for her successor, 'No rascal's son, but a King's.'

  Upon this, the lords present stared at one another, and took the

  liberty of asking whom she meant; to which she replied, 'Whom

  should I mean, but our cousin of Scotland!' This was on the

  twenty-third of March. They asked her once again that day, after

  she was speechless, whether she was still in the same mind? She

  struggled up in bed, and joined her hands over her head in the form

  of a crown, as the only reply she could make. At three o'clock

  next morning, she very quietly died, in the forty-fifth year of her

  reign.

  That reign had been a glorious one, and is made for ever memorable

  by the distinguished men who flourished in it. Apart from the

  great voyagers, statesmen, and scholars, whom it produced, the

  names of BACON, SPENSER, and SHAKESPEARE, will always be remembered

  with pride and veneration by the civilised world, and will always

  impart (though with no great reason, perhaps) some portion of their

  lustre to the name of Elizabeth herself. It was a great reign for

  discovery, for commerce, and for English enterprise and spirit in

  general. It was a great reign for the Protestant religion and for

  the Reformation which made England free. The Queen was very

  popular, and in her progresses, or journeys about her dominions,

  was everywhere received with the liveliest joy. I think the truth

  is, that she was not half so good as she has been made out, and not

  half so bad as she has been made out. She had her fine qualities,

  but she was coarse, capricious, and treacherous, and had all the

  faults of an excessively vain young woman long after she was an old

  one. On the whole, she had a great deal too much of her father in

  her, to please me.

  Many improvements and luxuries were introduced in the course of

  these five-and-forty years in the general manner of living; but

  cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and bear-baiting, were still the

  national amusements; and a coach was so rarely seen, and was such

  an ugly and cumbersome affair when it was seen, that even the Queen

  herself, on many high occasions, rode on horseback on a pillion

  behind the Lord Chancellor.

  CHAPTER XXXII - ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE FIRST

  'OUR cousin of Scotland' was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in

  mind and person. His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his

  legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull goggle-eyes

  stared and rolled like an idiot's. He was cunning, covetous,

  wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer,

  and the most conceited man on earth. His figure - what is commonly

  called rickety from his birth - presented a most ridiculous

  appearance, dressed in thick padded clothes, as a safeguard against

  being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), of a grassgreen

  colour from head to foot, with a hunting-horn dangling at his

  side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather sticking over one

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  eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as he happened to toss it

  on. He used to loll on the necks of his favourite courtiers, and

  slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks; and the

  greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign himself in his letters

  to his royal master, His Majesty's 'dog and slave,' and used to

  address his majesty as 'his Sowship.' His majesty was the worst

  rider ever seen, and thought himself the best. He was one of the

  most impertinent talkers (in the broadest Scotch) ever heard, and

  boasted of being unanswerable in all manner of argument. He wrote

  some of the most wearisome treatises ever read - among others, a

  book upon witchcraft, in which he was a devout believer - and

  thought himself a prodigy of authorship. He thought, and wrote,

  and said, that a king had a right to make and unmake what laws he

  pleased, and ought to be accountable to nobody on earth. This is

  the plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest men

  about the court praised and flattered to that degree, that I doubt

  if there be anything much more shameful in the annals of human

  nature.

  He came to the English throne with great ease. The miseries of a

  disputed succession had been felt so long, and so dreadfully, that

  he was proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth's death, and was

  accepted by the nation, even without being asked to give any pledge

  that he would govern well, or that he would redress crying

  grievances. He took a month to come from Edinburgh to London; and,

  by way of exercising his new power, hanged a pickpocket on the

  journey without any trial, and knighted everybody he could lay hold

  of. He made two hundred knights before he got to his palace in

  London, and seven hundred before he had been in it
three months.

  He also shovelled sixty-two new peers into the House of Lords - and

  there was a pretty large sprinkling of Scotchmen among them, you

  may believe.

  His Sowship's prime Minister, CECIL (for I cannot do better than

  call his majesty what his favourite called him), was the enemy of

  Sir Walter Raleigh, and also of Sir Walter's political friend, LORD

  COBHAM; and his Sowship's first trouble was a plot originated by

  these two, and entered into by some others, with the old object of

  seizing the King and keeping him in imprisonment until he should

  change his ministers. There were Catholic priests in the plot, and

  there were Puritan noblemen too; for, although the Catholics and

  Puritans were strongly opposed to each other, they united at this

  time against his Sowship, because they knew that he had a design

  against both, after pretending to be friendly to each; this design

  being to have only one high and convenient form of the Protestant

  religion, which everybody should be bound to belong to, whether

  they liked it or not. This plot was mixed up with another, which

  may or may not have had some reference to placing on the throne, at

  some time, the LADY ARABELLA STUART; whose misfortune it was, to be

  the daughter of the younger brother of his Sowship's father, but

  who was quite innocent of any part in the scheme. Sir Walter

  Raleigh was accused on the confession of Lord Cobham - a miserable

  creature, who said one thing at one time, and another thing at

  another time, and could be relied upon in nothing. The trial of

  Sir Walter Raleigh lasted from eight in the morning until nearly

  midnight; he defended himself with such eloquence, genius, and

  spirit against all accusations, and against the insults of COKE,

  the Attorney-General - who, according to the custom of the time,

  foully abused him - that those who went there detesting the

  prisoner, came away admiring him, and declaring that anything so

  wonderful and so captivating was never heard. He was found guilty,

  nevertheless, and sentenced to death. Execution was deferred, and

  he was taken to the Tower. The two Catholic priests, less

  fortunate, were executed with the usual atrocity; and Lord Cobham

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  and two others were pardoned on the scaffold. His Sowship thought