САМЕО her own sake but that of her brothers." The gentle Louise assured her that all was long forgiven and forgotten, they embraced, and Marriage of Louise was left to compose herself, dress and prepare for the reception of the Marquis de Guast, who had brought her Henri's ring. Henri III. 1575. In three days more, she was escorted by the whole family to meet the King at Rheims, and be married to him immediately after his coronation, which was fixed for the 20th of February, 1575, the anniversary of his consecration as King of Poland. He travelled in a carriage, Henri of Navarre riding beside it as a special commander of his body guard, and was received by the chief citizens and the Cardinal of Guise. He rose at five on the morning of his coronation day, but wasted so much time in having his robes and jewels, and those intended for his bride, newly arranged, that the ceremony had to take place so late in the day that the Te Deum was omitted, and the uncanonical act committed of High Mass being said late in the afternoon. Many of the high nobles and hereditary officers of State were in exile, captivity, or rebellion. The Duke of Montpensier had quarrelled about precedence with the Duke of Guise, and had absented himself; others of the nobles had been so ruined by civil wars that they could not afford to be present at the pageant, and it was a dull and dreary coronation; but what was taken as the worst token of all was that, when the Cardinal of Guise placed the crown on the King's head, he complained that it hurt him, so loud that every one heard, while he started so violently that the crown fell forward, and was caught by the Cardinal with both hands. Two days later, he was married to the gentle, flaxen-haired, submissive Louise de Vaudémont, having himself arranged her jewels, and set in order her white satin robe and violet velvet mantle, powdered with gold fleurs de lys, and with a train twelve yards long, which was borne by the Princess Catherine of Navarre. After the espousals, the King placed a diadem on his consort's head, a great banquet ensued, and thus was inaugurated the most contemptible reign under which France ever suffered. The Poles had too much sense to await the will of their runaway king. They chose the Waiwode of Transylvania, Stephen Bathory, who married their princess, and reigned over them. Henri had ceased to be King of Poland before the end of 1575, though he never dropped the title. It is amusing to find that La Mothe Fénélon was kept in England to break the tidings of Henri's marriage to Elizabeth, who had been put into very ill humour by hearing that Queen Catherine was wont to amuse herself with the two dwarfs, who mimicked the Tudor father and daughter to the great diversion of the court. The ambassador had had great difficulty in pacifiying her by the boldest asseverations of the respect and admiration in which she was held, and now he had to inform her of that which few ladies ever hear with complacency, that her rejected suitor had consoled himself, and with one of the hated house of Lorraine. With the Queen-Mother's full consent, he laid all the blame of the match upon her, though she certainly was quite guiltless of it, having been most unwilling to enthrone another of that dreaded house. Elizabeth professed wonder at Catherine's choice for her son of a daughter-in-law of so little consideration among princely families, but she allowed herself to be talked once more into toleration of what she could not prevent. The Huguenots were up in arms again, and had been joined by the Politiques, of whom, during the captivity of Montmorency, his brothers Damville and Thoré were the acknowledged leaders. Indeed, Thoré and his younger brother Meux were actual Huguenots, and the whole family were the more determined because Damville had found that all Henri's speeches at Turin amounted to nothing, and that his eldest brother remained a prisoner. Damville had actually seized Aigues Mortes, and was trying to come to terms with the King, when his desperate illness and death were reported at court. Catherine had really taken steps to have him poisoned, and, thinking him dead, she had his brother much more closely confined, and removed his trusty servants. Montmorency knew what this betokened, and said, "The Queen-Mother need not use so many manœuvres, I will swallow whatever she likes to send me.' However, the next comer brought word that Damville was alive and prosperous, upon which the marshal's guards were bidden to watch him less closely, and his servants were restored. The year 1576 saw the death of the only truly tolerant sovereign in Europe, the good Emperor Maximilian II., who died at Ratisbon. Some suspected that he had been poisoned by the Jesuits. His son Rudolf was much under their influence, and was also such a prey to superstition that he would not marry, nor let any of his five brothers do so, because astrologers had declared that he would die by the hand of a kinsman of the next generation. САМЕО XIV. Death of Maximilian. 1576. CAMEO XV. Persecution Priests. 1573. THE horrible deeds in France and Flanders could not but strengthen the anti-Catholic feeling in England, and add tenfold to the difficulties there had always been in dealing with the Puritans. The people of of Seminary England were in three great divisions—the Roman Catholics, the AngloCatholics, and the Puritans. All were forced to yield a species of outward conformity, appearing at times in the parish church, or being fined if they omitted to do so; indeed, for this and the two next reigns fines from wealthy Romanists were a source of revenue to the Crown. Those who could afford it sent their sons abroad for education. Dr. William Allen, a priest of Queen Mary's time, had taken up his abode at the University of Douay and commenced a college, where he had at one time a hundred and fifty young Englishmen preparing for the priesthood, and returning from time to time, in the spirit of missionaries and martyrs, to minister to their families. These were called Seminarists, and were as much dreaded by the nation at large as they were cherished and revered by their own people. Scarcely an old Roman Catholic family was without a priest's chamber, devised in the thickness of the wall, where the guest could be hidden from all dangerous eyes. For though they might be holy, humble, devout men, yet it was certain that they came bound to blind obedience to a hierarchy that sanctioned all means of destroying a heretical, illegitimate sovereign, and which had approved wholesale butchery in France and savage persecution in the Low Countries. CAMEO XV. and the Puritans. 1570. The Anglicans were divided into those who cared for ancient Catholicity, with Archbishop Parker at their head, and the Puritans. On the latter side ranged themselves all those persons who were either Cartwright anxious to keep Elizabeth as the avowed champion of the Reformation, or who abhorred the Spanish and French corruption and cruelty so as to fly to the opposite extreme. Burleigh and Leicester were political Puritans; Philip Sidney and his friend Edmund Spenser, chivalrous ones; and among the clergy, Thomas Cartwright, the Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, was the most noted. He had been at Geneva, where he became intimate with Theodore Beza, and came home in 1570 full of objections, declaring Bishops on a level with presbyters, denouncing fast and festival days, declaring the cross in Baptism, and the kneeling at the Holy Communion, the ring in marriage, the surplice of the minister and the churching of women, remnants of Rome to be proscribed and renounced, in fact reinforcing the old Calvinist notions brought home originally by the Marian fugitives. He lost his professorship in 1570, but Cambridge had been thoroughly imbued with his doctrine. While the master of St. John's College was absent, 300 of the members came to the chapel in their ordinary dress, and in the country there were many persons who endeavoured to omit all these rites and observances. Oxford was for the most part free from these errors, but every day the Church was becoming more and more markedly divided into these two camps, and the Puritan one was the stronger, both as the most aggressive, and because the outrages on foreign Calvinists threw generous feeling upon their side. In 1571 the Puritans began to form secret congregations, and their party was so strong that in the Parliament of 1571 a petition was presented to the Queen for a reform of the Prayer-book, leaving out all these things, and also the consecration of Bishops. The Queen and Archbishop Parker however stood firm, and the more violent Puritans actually formed a separation. At Wandsworth, in May 1573, began the first Nonconformist congregation. Eleven clergy calling themselves elders were enrolled in its registry, but they kept their proceedings secret as being a statutable offence. At the same time in Northampton, Norfolk, and Suffolk, the magistrates licensed prophesyings—namely, expositions in the churches of some text, by one person after another, each for an hour at a time. They were apt to be on controversial subjects; the Queen thought them perilous, and ordered their suppression by the Archbishop; but the diocesan, Dr. Parkhurst, resisted his authority, and when Parker appealed to the Privy Council, Leicester stood up for the prophesyings, and persuaded the Queen to withdraw her support from the Archbishop, though the brave old man declared that he should carry out her Majesty's commands against her apparent wishes. She was affronted at first, but the Earl of Sussex upheld Parker, explained matters, and pacified the Queen, who had really been only talked over by Leicester. CAMEO XV. Parker. 1574. She respected Parker more than any one else, and he ventured more with her, even daring to show his disapproval of those follies with Archbishop regard to Leicester of which her enemies made such a scandal; and he was grievously harassed by the open attacks of one set of Puritans, the flat disobedience of the other-to whom he gave the name of Precisians-and the vacillating support the Queen gave him. She expected him to keep them down, yet, partly in jealousy of her prerogative, partly in deference to her Precisian minister and favourite, partly in dread of alienating her people, she failed him in the hour of need; and the old man was almost worn out, though he had a suffragan for the episcopal requirements of Kent. He had recently lost his wife, an excellent woman, for whom he had waited seven years, and had married as soon as in Edward VI.'s time, the celibacy of the clergy ceased to be enforced. So excellent was she, that Bishop Ridley was said to have asked whether she had a sister, as if one like her would have overcome his intention of remaining single. A year or two later the Archbishop lost his eldest son, and it was long, before he again aroused his energies. Elizabeth did not love Bishops' wives, and it was not till after Mrs. Parker's death that she first came to visit the Archbishop at Lambeth, where she spent the Wednesday in Holy Week, the 2nd March, 1574, and she and all her court heard an open-air sermon in the quadrangle, the Queen in a gallery overlooking the Thames! The next day she went to Greenwich and kept her Maundy, washing the feet of thirteen poor women with her own hands, and giving them clothing and silver pennies. She visited the Archbishop again at Croydon, his summer palace, where Bowyer the comptroller of her household had much ado to squeeze in all her ladies; and in September she made him a visit at Canterbury, when she was making a progress through Kent. The head boy of the Canterbury Grammar School welcomed her in a Latin speech, and there were splendid festivities and addresses everywhere; but the tradition of Folkestone is that the Mayor, having prepared a poetical address, sat down on a joint stool to deliver it at his leisure, and had gone as far as "Thou great Queen! when she cut him short with "You great fool! Get off that stool." She was much annoyed by a secret marriage being disclosed between Charles Stewart, brother to Darnley, and thus her next heir after the little Scottish James, and Elizabeth Cavendish, the step-daughter of Mary's keeper, Lord Shrewsbury. Mary had been fond of Lady Elizabeth, and the intrigue was ascribed to her; but the marriage was probably due to the ambition of Bess of Hardwicke, the Countess of |