Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/580

566 Of the foibles of her character we say little. Her vanity, her irresolution, her belief in astrology, her thousand dresses which were discovered at her decease in her wardrobes, her being painted up in her old face, neck, and arms, her numerous heads of false hair, or even her cursing, swearing, and beating with her own lusty fists her maids of honour and her very ministers, may be passed over. But we will quote two paragraphs from the historian Lingard in proof that we have taken no singular view of the real character of Elizabeth and her reign:—"The historians who celebrate the golden days of Elizabeth have described with a glowing pencil the happiness of the people under her sway. To them might be opposed the dismal picture of national misery drawn by the Catholic writers of the same period. But both have taken too contracted a view of the subject. Religious dissension had divided the nation into opposite parties of almost equal numbers—the oppressors and the oppressed. Under the operation of the penal statutes many ancient and honourable families had been ground to the dust; new families had sprung up in their places; and these, as they shared the plunder, naturally eulogised the system to which they owed their wealth and their ascendancy. But their prosperity was not the prosperity of the nation, it was that of one half obtained at the expense of the other.

"It is evident that neither Elizabeth nor her ministers understood the benefits of civil, and religious liberty. The prerogatives which she so highly prized have long since withered away. The bloody code which she enacted against the rights of conscience has ceased to stain the pages of the statute-book; and the result has proved that the abolition of despotism and intolerance adds no less to the stability of the throne than to the happiness of the people."

Autograph of Queen Elizabeth.

  CHAPTER XVII.

THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION.

century of which we have just traced the events was a period marked by vast progress, and by changes which were the springs of still more wonderful progress in after ages. Though the character of the Tudors was essentially despotic, no dynasty since the days of Alfred and Magna Charta wrought out such revolutions in the constitution of England. These revolutions were effected by the very efforts of the Tudor monarchs to establish their own power and gratify their own self-will. They were wrought by Providence: and Providence works in his great scheme of the world's progress, by bending the stiffest spirits and the most tyrannical aspirations under the weight of those influences of the universe which are at the moment predominant. These revolutions extended not only into the political constitution of the nation but into its religious one; into its literature, its philosophy, and its morals; and that simply because the spirit of the age was of that tone and strength, that though outward powers could agitate it, nothing but its own momentum could direct its tendency. Henry VII., with an indifferent title, succeeded to the crown because the nation was weary of the long conflicts of the York and Lancaster monarchs, and longed for peace, which his disposition promised. Cold, cautious, and penurious, he took care not to raise a fresh race of powerful barons in place of that which the Wars of the Roses had destroyed, but hoarded up money; and beyond the injustice practised in its collection, left his people to pursue their trades and their agriculture, and thus renew their strength. Henry VIII., violent, passionate, sensual, and intensely arbitrary, but fond of parade, and in his youth boastful of his prowess, gratified the pride of the nation whilst he ruled it with a rod of iron. In the gratification of his lusts he did not hesitate to renounce allegiance to that great spiritual power which for above a thousand years had ruled haughtily over Europe and all its kings and warriors. By this act he set free for ever the mind and conscience of this nation. In vain did he endeavour to bind them down in a knot of his own making. Though he hurled his fiercest terms against those who claimed a universal liberty which he intended only for himself, he had broken the mighty spell of ages—a power and a mystery before which the world had bowed in impotent awe; and no chains which he could forge, no creed which he could set up, no hierarchy which he could frame, could possess more than the strength of the fire-scorched flax against the will of the enfranchised people. He had let loose the flood of religious desire, which had age-long been dashing moodily against the old mounds of superstition; and he might as well have attempted to stem the current of the Thames with a hurdle as to re-imprison the public mind. It had tasted that sweetness which never again dies from the palate; it had breathed that air which makes the memory of the dungeon atmosphere intolerable: and though he struck lustily right and left whenever the million-headed apparition of free-will showed itself—though he gave full employment to the headsman, the hangman, and the bigot with his fiery stake he succeeded only in teaching the national will to seek shelter from the passing tempest, well assured that it must blow over. He only deluded himself; his triumph was hollow and unreal. Beneath the hushed roofs and the closed shutters of the dwellings of the people, outwardly wearing an aspect of obedience, there lived unbroken and glowed uncrippled the freedom of the heart and the resolution to be free. The moment that he perished, the soul of the nation showed itself alive. The very Reformers around his throne, who had cowered beneath the fell and deadly ire of the tyrant, rose, with Cranmer at their head, and under the mild auspices of the religious Edward, gave free vent to the spirit and the 