Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/509

A.D. 1580.] worship. The inmates were put under strict watch, till they had been searched and interrogated; and many were driven nearly or wholly out of their senses by the rudeness and the insults they received from brutal officers. Lady Neville was frightened to death in Holborn, and Mrs. Vavasour was deprived of her reason at York.

In July, Campion was taken at Lyfford, in Berkshire, and was committed to the Tower; and Persons, seeing no prospect of long escaping pursuit, contrived to get over again to the Continent. Campion was repeatedly racked, and under the force of torture and the promises that no injury should be done to his entertainers, he related the whole course of his peregrinations in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Denbigh, Northampton, Warwick, Bedford, Buckingham, &c., and the names of those who had given him hospitality. No sooner, however, had the Council the names than they summoned all those who had harboured him up, and fined some and imprisoned others.

In November Campion, with twelve other priests and a layman, were put upon their trial, and were charged with a horrible conspiracy to murder the queen and to overturn Church and State. Rome and Rheims were declared to be the places where this direful plot had been organised. The astonishment of the prisoners, several of whom had never been out of England, was extreme. Not an atom of evidence was produced to authenticate these charges, yet the whole were pronounced guilty. One of them was saved by an alibi established by Lancaster, a Protestant barrister; the rest were executed as traitors, except those who were still kept prisoners. On the scaffold Campion lamented that the weakness of the flesh on the rack had forced him to disclose the names of some of his entertainers, by which they had been brought into trouble.

The Anabaptists, who had created great scandals and disturbance in Germany, made repeated visits to London under pretence of belonging to the Dutch Church. They denied the propriety of infant baptism; that Christ assumed the flesh of the Virgin; believed it wrong to take an oath, or to accept the office of a magistrate. In some of these tenets they resembled the Society of Friends which afterwards rose, and their creed did not necessarily interfere with the quiet of the State; yet numbers of them were imprisoned, ten of them were sent out of the kingdom, and two, Peeters and Turwert, were burnt in Smithfield in July, 1575. Again, in 1579, Matthew Hammond, a ploughman, was burnt at Norwich.

From these persecutions we come back to the captive Queen of Scotland. Elizabeth had long felt punishment for her faithless and unjust conduct to Mary. By detaining her she had, so far from securing her own tranquillity, surrounded herself with perpetual disquiets and alarms. Mary, who, restored to her throne and supported there by the powerful co-operation of her English cousin, might have contributed to her strength and glory, now existed inevitably as the centre of plots and conspiracies. Elizabeth was never free from alarms and suspicions of all around her. She was compelled to maintain an incessant and expensive system of espionage, and grew so sensitive that she was fearful of even those who directed the movements of her spies. Though the Earl of Shrewsbury had proved himself so safe a gaoler, Elizabeth was continually in terror lest the much-vaunted fascinations of the Scottish queen should seduce him from his duty. She was always urging fresh vigilance, always devising fresh measures of safety, and placing spies on all his actions, not only in the neighbourhood, but in his very establishment. The unfortunate nobleman, with all his houses, could not be said to possess a home, or a moment's privacy. His fine mansions and castles were converted into so many gaols, and he saw men constantly about him, at his board, whom he knew that he maintained to keep strict watch over his every action and look, and report them to the queen. So much was this the case, that when his daughter-in-law was confined, he christened the child himself, lest he should be accused of admitting a stranger in the person of the clergyman.

In the growing misery of this jealousy of the Royal captive and of all around her in the mind of Elizabeth, the Scottish queen was subjected to ever augmenting rigour and indignity. The number of her attendants was reduced; allowance for her table was curtailed; almost every person, except her guards, was excluded from her presence; she was allowed to write and correspond only that her letters might be intercepted, and the motions of her mind and of her friends thus discovered. At Sheffield Park, where she now was, she was never suffered to quit her apartments except for a promenade in the courtyard or on the leads, for which indulgence she had to give an hour's notice, that the earl or countess might attend her. But at length there was no danger of her escaping, for the closeness and the anxieties of her confinement prostrated her health; and she was either confined to her bed, or only able to quit it for support in a chair, in which she was carried to and fro. Not even Burleigh, who would gladly have seen Mary in her grave, could preserve himself from suspicions of intriguing with Mary. Buxton, in the Peak of Derbyshire, had recently become celebrated for its waters in the relief of gout; and Burleigh, who was suffering from that complaint, made two journeys thither. Suddenly it flashed on the busy brain of Elizabeth, or was suggested by some of her host of spies, that the real object of her minister was not ease from the gout, but to carry on some scheme with the Scottish queen. She charged him roundly with the fact, and bade him take heed what he was doing, and long retained in her soul the appalling suspicion. That Burleigh did correspond with her keeper, Shrewsbury, unknown to Elizabeth, is proved by his letters in Lodge, where we find him detaining an epistle a whole week before he could, with all the means at his command, find a person in whom he had sufficient confidence to entrust it to.

In no quarter had Elizabeth for a long time any security except in Scotland. There Morton was her faithful ally, inasmuch as she held fast the King of Scots, and so guaranteed the chief means of his own tranquil enjoyment of power. But Morton's rule was not such as any country would long tolerate. He was essentially a base and selfish man, and his severity and rapacity alienated the public from him more and more. He debased the coin, multiplied forfeitures to enrich himself, appropriated to himself the estates of the Church, and at the same time was so subservient to Elizabeth, that the national pride resented it. In 1578, Atholl and