It had been a part of the commendation of Elizabeth, that in her public appearances, of whatsoever nature, no sovereign on record had _acted_ the part so well, or with such universal applause. But on this memorable and momentous occasion, when,--like a second Boadicea, armed for defence against the invader of her country,--she appeared at once the warrior and the queen, the sacred feelings of the moment, superior to all the artifices of regal dignity and the tricks of regal condescension, inspired her with that impressive earnestness of look, of words, of gesture, which alone is truly dignified and truly eloquent.

Mounted on a n.o.ble charger, with a general's truncheon in her hand, a corselet of polished steel laced on over her magnificent apparel, and a page in attendance bearing her white-plumed helmet, she rode bare-headed from rank to rank with a courageous deportment and smiling countenance; and amid the affectionate plaudits and shouts of military ardor which burst from the animated and admiring soldiery, she addressed them in the following short and spirited harangue.

"My loving people; we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed mult.i.tudes, for fear of treachery; but, a.s.sure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear: I have always so behaved myself that, under G.o.d, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down for my G.o.d, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms: To which, rather than any dishonor should grow by me, I myself will take up arms; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

"I know already by your forwardness, that you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do a.s.sure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the meantime, my lieutenant-general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more n.o.ble and worthy subject; not doubting by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valor in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my G.o.d, of my kingdom, and of my people."

The extraordinary reliance placed by the queen in this emergency upon the counsels of Leicester encouraged the insatiable favorite to grasp at honor and authority still more exorbitant; and he ventured to urge her majesty to invest him with the office of her lieutenant in England and Ireland; a dignity paramount to all other commands. She had the weakness to comply; and it is said that the patent was actually drawn out, when the defeat of the armada, by taking away all pretext for the creation of such an officer, gave her leisure to attend to the earnest representations of Hatton and Burleigh on the imprudence of conferring on any subject powers so excessive, and capable even in some instances of controlling her own prerogative. On better consideration the project therefore was dropped.

It is foreign from the business of this work to detail the particulars of that signal victory obtained by English seamanship and English valor against the boasted armament of Spain, prodigiously superior as it was in every circ.u.mstance of force excepting the moral energies employed to wield it. While the history of the year 1588 in all its details must ever form a favorite chapter in the splendid tale of England's naval glory, it will here suffice to mark the general results.

Not a single Spaniard set foot on English ground but as a prisoner; one English vessel only, and that of smaller size, became the prize of the invaders. The duke of Parma did not venture to embark a man. The king of Scots, standing firm to his alliance with his ill.u.s.trious kinswoman, afforded not the slightest succour to the Spanish ships which the storms and the English drove in shattered plight upon his rugged coasts; while the lord-deputy of Ireland caused to be butchered without remorse the crews of all the vessels wrecked upon that island in their disastrous circ.u.mnavigation of Great Britain: so that not more than half of this vaunted _invincible armada_ returned in safety to the ports of Spain.

Never in the records of history was the event of war on one side more entirely satisfactory, and glorious, on the other more deeply humiliating and utterly disgraceful. Philip did indeed support the credit of his personal character by the dignified composure with which he heard the tidings of this great disaster; but it was out of his power to throw the slightest veil over the dishonor of the Spanish arms, or repair the total and final failure of the great popish cause.

By the English nation, this signal discomfiture of its most dreaded and detested foe was hailed as the victory of protestant principles no less than of national independence; and the tidings of the national deliverance were welcomed, by all the reformed churches of Europe, with an ardor of joy and thankfulness proportioned to the intenseness of anxiety with which they had watched the event of a conflict where their own dearest interests were staked along with the existence of their best ally and firmest protector.

Repeated thanksgivings were observed in London in commemoration of this great event: on the anniversary of the queen's birth a general festival was proclaimed and celebrated with "sermons, singing of psalms, bonfires, &c." and on the following Sunday her majesty went in state to St. Paul's, magnificently attended by her n.o.bles and great officers, and borne along on a sumptuous chariot formed like a throne, with four pillars supporting a canopy, and drawn by a pair of white horses. The streets through which she pa.s.sed were hung with blue cloth, in honor doubtless of the navy, and the colors taken from the enemy were borne in triumph.

Her majesty rewarded the lord-admiral with a considerable pension, and settled annuities on the wounded seamen and on some of the more necessitous among the officers; the rest she honored with much personal notice and many gracious terms of commendation, which they were expected to receive in lieu of more substantial remuneration;--for parsimony, the darling virtue of Elizabeth, was not forgotten even in her grat.i.tude to the brave defenders of her country.

Two medals were struck on this great occasion; one, representing a fleet retiring under full sail, with the motto, "_Venit, vidit, fugit_;" the other, fire-ships scattering a fleet; the motto, "_Dux faemina facti_;" a compliment to the queen, who is said to have herself suggested the employment of these engines of destruction, by which the armada suffered severely.

The intense interest in public events excited in every cla.s.s by the threatened invasion of Spain, gave rise to the introduction in this country of one of the most important inventions of social life,--that of newspapers. Previously to this period all articles of intelligence had been circulated in ma.n.u.script; and all political remarks which the government had found itself interested in addressing to the people, had issued from the press in the shape of pamphlets, of which many had been composed during the administration of Burleigh, either by himself or immediately under his direction. But the peculiar convenience at such a juncture of uniting these two objects in a periodical publication becoming obvious to the ministry, there appeared, some time in the month of April 1588, the first number of _The English Mercury_; a paper resembling the present London Gazette, which must have come out almost daily; since No. 50, the earliest specimen of the work now extant, is dated July 23d of the same year. This interesting relic is preserved in the British Museum.

In the midst of the public rejoicings an event occurred, which, in whatever manner it might be felt by Elizabeth herself, certainly cast no damp on the spirits of the nation at large; the death of Leicester.

After the frequent notices of this celebrated favorite contained in the foregoing pages, a formal delineation of his character is unnecessary;--a few traits may however be added.

Speaking of his letters and public papers, Naunton says, "I never yet saw a style or phrase more seeming religious and fuller of the streams of devotion;" and notwithstanding the charge of hypocrisy on this head usually brought against Leicester in the most unqualified terms, many reasons might induce us to believe his religious faith sincere, and his attachment for certain schemes of doctrine, zealous. On no other supposition does it appear possible to account for that steady patronage of the puritanical party,--so odious to his mistress,--which gave on some occasions such important advantages over him to his adversary Hatton,--the only minister of Elizabeth who appears to have aimed at the character of a high church-of-England man. The circ.u.mstance also of his devoting during his lifetime a considerable sum of ready money, which he could ill spare, to the endowment of a hospital, has much the air of an act of expiation prompted by religious fears. As a statesman Leicester appears to have displayed on some occasions considerable acuteness and penetration, but in the higher kind of wisdom he was utterly deficient. His moral insensibility sometimes caused him to offer to his sovereign the most pernicious counsels; and had not the superior rect.i.tude of Burleigh's judgement interposed, his influence might have inflicted still deeper wounds on the honor of the queen and the prosperity of the nation.

Towards his own friends and adherents he is said to have been a religious observer of his promises; a virtue very remarkable in such a man. In the midst of that profusion which rendered him rapacious, he was capable of acts of real generosity, and both soldiers and scholars tasted largely of his bounty. That he was guilty of many detestable acts of oppression, and pursued with secret and unrelenting vengeance such as offended his arrogance by any failure in the servile homage which he made it his glory to exact, are charges proved by undeniable facts; but it has already been observed that the more atrocious of the crimes popularly imputed to him, remain, and must ever remain, matters of suspicion rather than proof.

His conduct during the younger part of life was scandalously licentious: latterly he became, says Camden, uxorious to excess. In the early days of his favor with the queen, her profuse donations had gratified his cupidity and displayed the fondness of her attachment; but at a later period the stream of her bounty ran low; and following the natural bent of her disposition, or complying with the necessity of her affairs, she compelled him to mortgage to her his barony of Denbigh for the expenses of his last expedition to Holland. Immediately after his death she also caused his effects to be sold by auction, for the satisfaction of certain demands of her treasury. From these circ.u.mstances it may probably be inferred, that the influence which Leicester still retained over her was secured rather by the chain of habit than the tie of affection; and after the first shock of final separation from him whom she had so long loved and trusted, it is not improbable that she might contemplate the event with a feeling somewhat akin to that of deliverance from a yoke under which her haughty spirit had repined without the courage to resist.

Leicester died, beyond all doubt, of a fever; but so reluctant were the prejudices of that age to dismiss any eminent person by the ordinary roads of mortality, that it was judged necessary to take examinations before the privy-council respecting certain magical practices said to have been employed against his life. The son of sir James Croft comptroller of the household, made no scruple to confess that he had consulted an adept of the name of Smith, to learn who were his father's enemies in the council; that Smith mentioned the earl of Leicester; and that a little while after, flirting with his thumbs, he exclaimed, alluding to this n.o.bleman's cognisance, "The bear is bound to the stake;" and again, that nothing could now save him. But as it might after all have been difficult to show in what manner the flirting of a thumb in London could have exerted a fatal power over the life of the earl at Kennelworth, the adept seems to have escaped unpunished, notwithstanding the accidental fulfilment of his denunciations.

CHAPTER XXII.

FROM 1588 TO 1591.

Effects of Leicester's death.--Rise of the queen's affection for Ess.e.x.--Trial of the earl of Arundel.--Letter of Walsingham on religious affairs.--Death of Mildmay.--Case of don Antonio.--Expedition to Cadiz.--Behaviour of Ess.e.x.--Traits of sir C. Blount.--Sir H. Leigh's resignation.--Conduct of Elizabeth to the king of Scots.--His marriage.--Death and character of sir Francis Walsingham.--Struggle between the earl of Ess.e.x and lord Burleigh for the nomination of his successor.--Extracts of letters from Ess.e.x to Davison.--Inveteracy of the queen against Davison.--Robert Cecil appointed a.s.sistant secretary.--Private marriage of Ess.e.x.--Anger of the queen.--Reform effected by the queen in the collection of the revenue.--Speech of Burleigh.--Parsimony of the queen considered.--Anecdotes on this subject.--Lines by Spenser.--Succours afforded by her to the king of France.--Account of sir John Norris.--Ess.e.x's campaign in France.--Royal progress.--Entertainment at Coudray--at Elvetham--at Theobald's.--Death and character of sir Christopher Hatton.--Puckering lord-keeper.--Notice of sir John Perrot.--Puttenham's Art of Poetry.--Verses by Gascoigne.--Warner's Albion's England.

The death of Leicester forms an important aera in the history of the court of Elizabeth, and also in that of her private life and more intimate feelings. The powerful faction of which the favorite had been the head, acknowledged a new leader in the earl of Ess.e.x, whom his step-father had brought forward at court as a counterpoise to the influence of Raleigh, and who now stood second to none in the good graces of her majesty. But Ess.e.x, however gifted with n.o.ble and brilliant qualities totally deficient in Leicester, was on the other hand confessedly inferior to him in several other endowments still more essential to the leader of a court party. Though not void of art, he was by no means master of the profound dissimulation, the exquisite address, and especially the wary coolness by which his predecessor well knew how to accomplish his ends in despite of all opposition. His character was impetuous, his natural disposition frank; and experience had not yet taught him to distrust either himself or others.

With the friendships, Ess.e.x received as an inheritance the enmities also of Leicester, and no one at court could have entertained the least doubt whom he regarded as his princ.i.p.al opponent; but it would have been deemed too high a pitch of presumption in so young a man and so recent a favorite as Ess.e.x, to place himself in immediate and open hostility to the long established and far extending influence of Burleigh. With this great minister therefore and his adherents he attempted at first a kind of compromise, and the noted division of the court into the Ess.e.x and the Cecil parties does not appear to have taken place till some years after the period of which we are treating. Meantime, the death of Walsingham afforded the lord-treasurer an occasion of introducing to the notice and confidence of her majesty, and eventually to the important office of secretary of state, his son Robert, whose transcendent talents for affairs, joined to the utmost refinement of intrigue and duplicity, immediately established him in the same independence on the good will of the new favorite, as the elder Cecil had ever a.s.serted on that of the former one; and appears finally to have enabled him to prepare in secret that favorite's disastrous fall.

With regard to Elizabeth herself, it has been a thousand times remarked, that she was never able to forget the woman in the sovereign; and in spite of that preponderating love of sway which all her life forbade her to admit a partner of her bed and throne, her heart was to the last deeply sensible to the want, or her imagination to the charm, of loving and being beloved. The death therefore of the man who had been for thirty years the object of a tenderness which he had long repaid by every flattering profession, every homage of gallantry, and every manifestation of entire devotedness, left, notwithstanding any late disgusts which she might have entertained, a void in her existence which she felt it necessary to supply. It was this situation, doubtless, of her feelings which led to the gradual conversion into a softer sentiment, of that natural and innocent tenderness with which she had hitherto regarded the brilliant and engaging qualities of her youthful kinsman the earl of Ess.e.x;--a change which terminated so fatally to both.

The enormous disproportion of ages gave to the new inclination of the queen a stamp of dotage inconsistent with the reputation for good sense and dignity of conduct which she had hitherto preserved. Nor did she long receive from the indulgence of so untimely a sentiment any portion of the felicity which she coveted. The careless and even affronting behaviour in which Ess.e.x occasionally indulged himself, combined with her own sagacity to admonish her that her fondness was unreturned; and that nothing but the substantial benefits by which it declared itself could have induced its object to meet it with even the semblance of grat.i.tude. As this mortifying conviction came home to her bosom, she grew restless, irritable, and captious to excess; she watched all his motions with a self-tormenting jealousy; she fed her own disquiet by listening to the malicious informations of his enemies; and her heart at length becoming callous by repeated exasperations, she began to visit his delinquencies with an unrelenting sternness. This conduct, attempted too late and persisted in too long, hurried Ess.e.x to his ruin, and ended by inflicting upon herself the mortal agonies of an unavailing repentance.

Lord Bacon relates, in his Apophthegms, that "a great officer about court when my lord of Ess.e.x was first in trouble, and that he and those that dealt for him would talk much of my lord's friends and of his enemies, answered to one of them; 'I will tell you, I know but one friend and one enemy my lord hath; and that one friend is the queen, and that one enemy, is himself.'" But rather might both have been esteemed his enemies; for what except the imprudent fondness of the queen, and the excess of favor which she at first lavished upon him, was the original cause of that intoxication of mind which finally became the instrument of his destruction?

But from observations which antic.i.p.ate perhaps too much the catastrophe of this melancholy history, it is time to return to a narrative of events.

The Spanish armament incidentally became the occasion of involving the earl of Arundel in a charge of a capital nature. Ever since the treachery of his agents, in the year 1585, had baffled his design of quitting for ever a country in which his religion and his political attachments had rendered him an alien, this unfortunate n.o.bleman had remained close prisoner in the Tower. Such treatment might well be supposed calculated to augment the vehemence of his bigotry and the rancor of his disaffection; and it became a current report that, on hearing news of the sailing of the armada, he had caused a ma.s.s of the Holy Ghost and devotions of twenty-four hours continuance to be celebrated for its success. This rumor being confirmed by one Bennet, a priest then under examination, and other circ.u.mstances of suspicion coming out, the earl, on April the 14th, 1589, was brought to the bar of the house of lords on a charge of high treason. Bennet, struck with compunction, addressed to him a letter acknowledging his testimony to have been false, and extorted from him solely by the fear of the rack.

But it appears that this letter, still extant among the Burleigh papers, was intercepted by the government; and the prisoner, by this cruel and iniquitous artifice, was deprived of all means of invalidating the testimony of Bennet, who was brought into court as a witness against him. By a second violation of every principle of justice, the matters for which, as contempts, he had already undergone the sentence of the Star-chamber, were now introduced into his indictment for high treason, to which the following articles were added;--that he had engaged to a.s.sist cardinal Allen in the restoration of popery;--that he had intimated the unfitness of the queen to govern;--that he had caused ma.s.ses to be said for the success of the armada;--that he had attempted to withdraw himself beyond seas for the purpose of serving under the duke of Parma;--and that he had been privy to the bull of Pope Sixtus V.

transferring the sovereignty of England from her majesty to the king of Spain.

To all these articles, which he was not allowed to separate, the earl pleaded Not guilty; but afterwards, in his defence, confessed some of them, though with certain extenuations. He a.s.serted, that the prayers and ma.s.ses which he had caused to be said, were for the averting of a general ma.s.sacre of the English catholics, alleged to be designed; and not for the success of the armada. The aid to the catholic cause, which he had promised in his correspondence with cardinal Allen, he declared to refer only to peaceful attempts at making converts, not to the encouragement of any plan of rebellion. He acknowledged a design of going to serve under the prince of Parma, since he was denied the exercise of his religion at home; but he argued his innocence of any view of cooperating in plans of invasion, from the circ.u.mstance, that his attempt to leave England had taken place during the year fixed by cardinal Allen and the queen of Scots for the execution of a scheme of this nature.

The crown-lawyers, in order to make out a case of constructive treason, urged the reconcilement of the prisoner with the church of Rome, which they held to be of itself a traitorous act; his correspondence with declared traitors; and the high opinion entertained of him by the queen of Scots and cardinal Allen, as the chief support of popery in England.

They likewise exhibited an emblematical picture found in his house, representing in one part a hand shaking off a viper into the fire, with the motto, "If G.o.d is for us who can be against us?" and in another part a lion, the cognisance of the Howard family, deprived of his claws, under him the words, "Yet still a lion." On these charges, none of which, though proved by the most unexceptionable witnesses, could bring him within the true meaning of the old statute of Edward III., on which he was indicted, the peers were base enough to p.r.o.nounce an unanimous verdict of Guilty; which he received, as his father had done before him, with the words "G.o.d's will be done!" But here the queen felt herself concerned in honor to interpose. It had ever been her maxim and her boast, to punish none capitally for religious delinquencies unconnected with traitorous designs; and sensible probably how imperfectly in this case the latter had been proved, she was pleased, in her abundant mercy, to commute the capital part of the sentence against her unhappy kinsman for perpetual imprisonment, attended with the forfeiture of the greater part of his estate.

In 1595, this victim of the religious dissensions of a fierce and bigoted age ended in his thirty-ninth year an unfortunate life, shortened, as well as embittered, by the more than monkish austerities which he imagined it meritorious to inflict upon himself.

From the period of the abortive attempt at insurrection under the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, the whole course of public events had tended to increase the difficulties and aggravate the sufferings in which the catholics of England found themselves inextricably involved.

Their situation was thus forcibly depicted by Philip Sidney, in a pa.s.sage of his celebrated letter to her majesty against the French marriage, which at the present day will probably be read in a spirit very different from that in which it was written.

"The other faction, most rightly indeed to be called a faction, is the papists; men whose spirits are full of anguish; some being infested by others whom they accounted d.a.m.nable; some having their ambition stopped because they are not in the way of advancement; some in prison and disgrace; some whose best friends are banished practisers; many thinking you an usurper; many thinking also you had disannulled your right because of the pope's excommunication; all burthened with the weight of their consciences. Men of great numbers, of great riches (because the affairs of state have not lain on them), of united minds, as all men that deem themselves oppressed naturally are."

A further commentary on the hardships of their condition may be extracted from an apology for the measures of the English government towards both papists and puritans, addressed by Walsingham to M. Critoy the French secretary of state.

"Sir,

"Whereas you desire to be advertised touching the proceedings here in ecclesiastical causes, because you seem to note in them some inconstancy and variation, as if we sometimes inclined to one side, sometimes to another, as if that clemency and lenity were not used of late that was used in the beginning, all which you impute to your own superficial understanding of the affairs of this state, having notwithstanding her majesty's doing in singular reverence, as the real pledges which she hath given unto the world of her sincerity in religion and her wisdom in government well meriteth; I am glad of this occasion to impart that little I know in that matter to you, both for your own satisfaction, and to the end you may make use thereof towards any that shall not be so modestly and so reasonably minded as you are. I find therefore her majesty's proceedings to have been grounded upon two principles.

"1. The one, that consciences are not to be forced, but to be won and reduced by the force of truth, with the aid of time, and use of all good means of instruction and persuasion.

"2. The other, that the causes of conscience, wherein they exceed their bounds, and grow to be matter of faction, lose their nature; and that sovereign princes ought distinctly to punish the practice in contempt, though coloured under the pretence of conscience and religion.

"According to these principles, her majesty, at her coming to the crown, utterly disliking the tyranny of Rome, which had used by terror and rigor to settle commandments of men's faiths and consciences; though, as a prince of great wisdom and magnanimity, she suffered but the exercise of one religion, yet her proceedings towards the papists was with great lenity, expecting the good effects which time might work in them. And therefore her majesty revived not the laws made in the 28 and 35 of her father's reign, whereby the oath of supremacy might have been offered at the king's pleasure to any subject, though he kept his conscience never so modestly to himself; and the refusal to take the same oath without further circ.u.mstance was made treason. But contrariwise her majesty, not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did overflow into overt or express acts or affirmations, tempered her laws so as it restraineth every manifest disobedience in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her majesty's supreme power, maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction. And as for the oath, it was altered by her majesty into a more grateful form; the hardness of the name and appellation of supreme head was removed; and the penalty of the refusal thereof turned only into disablement to take any promotion, or to exercise any charge, and yet with liberty of being reinvested therein if any man should accept thereof during his life. But when, after Pius Quintus had excommunicated her majesty, and the bills of excommunication were published in London, whereby her majesty was in a sort proscribed; and that thereupon, as a princ.i.p.al motive or preparative, followed the rebellion in the North; yet because the ill-humors of the realm were by that rebellion partly purged, and that she feared at that time no foreign invasion, and much less the attempt of any within the realm not backed by some potent succour from without, she contented herself to make a law against that special case of bringing and publishing any bulls, or the like instruments; whereunto was added a prohibition, upon pain, not of treason, but of an inferior degree of punishment, against the bringing in of _agnus Dei_, hallowed bread, and such other merchandise of Rome, as are well known not to be any essential part of the Romish religion, but only to be used in practice as love-tokens to inchant the people's affections from their allegiance to their natural sovereign. In all other points her majesty continued her former lenity: but when, about the twentieth year of her reign, she had discovered in the king of Spain an intention to invade her dominions, and that a princ.i.p.al part of the plot was, to prepare a party within the realm that might adhere to the foreigner; and after that the seminaries began to blossom, and to send forth daily priests and professed men, who should by vow taken at shrift reconcile her subjects from their obedience, yea, and bind many of them to attempt against her majesty's sacred person; and that, by the poison which they spread, the humors of papists were altered, and that they were no more papists in conscience, and of softness, but papists in faction; then were there new laws made for the punishment of such as should submit themselves to such reconcilements, or renunciations of obedience. And because it was a treason carried in the clouds, and in wonderful secresy, and came seldom to light, and that there was no presupposition thereof so great, as the recusants to come to divine service, because it was set down by their decrees, that to come to church before reconcilement was absolutely heretical and d.a.m.nable.

Therefore there were laws added containing punishment pecuniary against such recusants, not to enforce conscience, but to enfeeble and impoverish the means of those of whom it resteth indifferent and ambiguous whether they were reconciled or no. And when, notwithstanding all this provision, this poison was dispersed so secretly, as that there were no means to stay it but by restraining the merchants that brought it in; then, lastly, there was added another law, whereby such seditious priests of new erection were exiled, and those that were at that time within the land shipped over, and so commanded to keep hence on pain of treason.

"This hath been the proceeding, though intermingled not only with sundry examples of her majesty's grace towards such as she knew to be papists in conscience, and not in faction and singularity, but also with an ordinary mitigation towards offenders in the highest degree committed by law, if they would but protest, that in case the realm should be invaded with a foreign army, by the Pope's authority, for the catholic cause, as they term it, they would take part with her majesty and not adhere to her enemies." &c.

The country sustained a heavy loss in 1589 by the death of sir Walter Mildmay chancellor of the exchequer, one of the most irreproachable public characters and best patriots of the age. He was old enough to have received his introduction to business in the time of Henry VIII., under whom he enjoyed a gainful office in the court of augmentations.

During the reign of Edward he was warden of the mint. Under Mary, he shrowded himself in that profound obscurity in which alone he could make safety accord with honor and conscience. Elizabeth, on the death of sir Richard Sackville in 1568, advanced Mildmay to the important post of chancellor of the exchequer, which he held to the end of his life; but not so, it should appear, the favor of her majesty, some of his _back friends_, or secret enemies, having whispered in her ear, that he was a better patriot than subject, and over-popular in parliament, where he had gone so far as to complain that many subsidies were granted and few grievances redressed. Another strong ground of royal displeasure existed in the imputation of puritanism under which he labored.

Generously sacrificing to higher considerations the aggrandizement of his children, Mildmay devoted a large share of the wealth which he had gained in the public service to the erection and endowment of a college;--that of Emanuel at Cambridge,--an action little agreeable it seems to her majesty,--for, on his coming to court after the completion of this n.o.ble undertaking, she said tartly to him; "Sir Walter, I hear you have erected a puritan foundation." "No, Madam," replied he; "far be it from me to countenance any thing contrary to your established laws; but I have set an acorn, which, when it comes to be an oak, G.o.d alone knows what will be the fruit of it." That this fruit however proved to be of the flavor so much distasted by her majesty, there is good evidence.

"In the house of pure Emanuel I had my education, Where some surmise I dazzled my eyes With the light of revelation;"