THE REFORMATION AND THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (1528-1603) Wolsey did not fall through any opposition to reform ; nor was he opposed to the idea of a divorce. Indeed, both in France and Spain he was credited with the authorship of the project. But he differed from Henry on the question of Catherine's suc cessor. Wolsey desired a French marriage to consummate the breach upon which he was now bent with the emperor; and war, in fact, was precipitated with Spain in 1528. This is said to have been done without Henry's consent ; he certainly wished to avoid war with Charles V., and peace was made of ter six months of passive hostility. Nor did Henry want a French princess; his affections were fixed for the time on Anne Boleyn, and she was the hope of the anti-clerical party. The crisis was brought to a head by the failure of Wolsey's plan to obtain a divorce. Originally it had been suggested that the ecclesiastical courts in England were competent without recourse to Rome. Wolsey deprecated this procedure, and application was made to Clement VII. Wolsey relied upon his French and Italian allies to exert the necessary powers of persuasion ; and in 1528 a French army crossed the Alps, marched through Italy and threatened to drive Charles V. out of Naples. Clement was in a position to listen to Henry's prayer; and Campeggio was commissioned with Wolsey to hear the suit and grant the divorce.
No sooner had Campeggio started than the fortunes of war changed. The French were driven out of Naples, and the Impe rialists again dominated Rome; the church, wrote Clement to Campeggio, was completely in the power of Charles V. The cardinal, therefore, must on no account pronounce against Charles's aunt ; if he could not persuade Henry and Catherine to agree on a mutual separation, he must simply pass the time and come to no conclusion. Hence it was June 1529 before the court got to work at all, and then its proceedings were only preparatory to an adjournment and revocation of the suit to Rome in August. Clement VII. had, in his own words, made up his mind to live and die an imperialist ; the last remnants of the French army in Italy had been routed, and the pope had perforce concluded the treaty of Barcelona, a sort of family compact between himself and Charles, whereby he undertook to protect Charles's aunt, and the emperor to support the Medici dynasty in Florence. This peace was amplified at the treaty of Cambrai (Aug. 1529) into a general European pacification in which England had no voice.
So far had it fallen since 1521.
In every direction Wolsey had failed, and his failure involved the triumph of the forces which he had opposed. The fate of the papal system in England was bound up with his personal fortunes. It was he and he alone who had kept parliament at arm's length and the enemies of the church at bay. He had interested the king, and to some extent the nation, in a spirited foreign policy, had diverted their attention from domestic questions, and had staved off that parliamentary attack on the church which had been threatened 15 years before. Now he was doomed, and both Campeggio and Cardinal du Bellay were able to send their Gov ernments accurate outlines of the future policy of Henry VIII. The church was to be robbed of its wealth, its power and its privileges, and the papal jurisdiction was to be abolished. In October Wolsey was deprived of the great seal, and surrendered many of his ecclesiastical preferments, though he was allowed to retain his archbishopric of York which he now visited for the first time. The first lay ministry since Edward the Confessor's time came into office ; Sir Thomas More became lord chancellor, and Anne Boleyn's father lord privy seal ; the only prominent cleric who remained in office was Stephen Gardiner, who succeeded Wolsey as bishop of Winchester.
Dissolution of the Monasteries.—It was Cecil's opinion years later that, but for the dissolution, the cause of the Reforma tion could not have succeeded. Such a reason could hardly be avowed, and justification had to be sought in the condition of the monasteries themselves. The action of Wolsey and other bishops before 1529, the report of a commission of cardinals appointed by Paul III. in the subsequent experience of other, even Catholic, countries give collateral support to the conclusions of the visitors appointed by Cromwell, although they were dictated by a desire not to deal out impartial justice, but to find reasons for a policy already adopted in principle. That they exaggerated the evils of monastic life hardly admits of doubt; but even a Henry VIII. and a Thomas Cromwell would not have dared to attack, or succeeded in destroying, the monasteries had they retained their original purity and influence. As it was their doubtful reputation and financial embarrassments enabled Henry to offer them as a gigantic bribe to the upper classes of the laity, and the Reformation parliament met for its last session early in to give effect to the reports of the visitors and to the king's and their own desires.
But it had barely been dissolved in April when it became neces sary to call another. In January the death of Catherine had rejoiced the hearts of Henry and Anne Boleyn, but Anne's hap piness was short-lived. Two miscarriages and the failure to produce the requisite male heir linked her in Henry's mind and in misfortune to Catherine ; unlike Catherine she was unpopular and not above suspicion. The story of her tragedy is still one of the most horrible and mysterious pages in English history. It is certain that Henry was tired and wanted to get rid of her; but if she were innocent, why were charges brought against her which were not brought against Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves? and why were four other victims sacrificed when one would have been enough? The peers a year before could acquit Lord Dacre ; would they have condemned the queen without some show of evidence? and unless there was suspicious evidence, her daughter was inhuman in making no effort subsequently to clear her mother's character. However that may be, Anne was not only condemned and executed, but her marriage was declared invalid and her daughter a bastard. Parliament was required to establish the succession on the new basis of Henry's new queen, Jane Seymour. It also empowered the king to leave the crown by will if he had no legitimate issue; but the illegitimate son, the duke of Richmond, in whose favour this provision is said to have been conceived, died shortly afterwards.
Fortunately for Henry, Queen Jane roused no domestic or foreign animosities; Charles V. and Francis I. were at war; and the pope's and Pole's attempt to profit by the Pilgrimage of Grace came too late to any effect except the ruin of Pole's family. The two risings of 1536 in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were provoked partly by the dissolution of the monasteries, partly by the collection of a subsidy and fears of fresh taxation on births, marriages and burials, and partly by the protestantizing Ten Articles of 1536 and Cromwell's Injunctions. They were con servative demonstrations in favour of a restoration of the old order by means of a change of ministry, but not a change of dynasty. The Lincolnshire rising was over before the middle of October; the more serious revolt in Yorkshire under Aske lasted through the winter. Henry's lieutenants were compelled to tem porize and make concessions . Aske was invited to come to London and hoodwinked by Henry into believing that the king was really bent on restoration and reform. But an impatient outburst of the insurgents and a foolish attempt to seize Hull and Scarborough gave Henry an excuse for repudiating the concessions made in his name. He could afford to do so because England south of the Trent remained stauncher to him than England north of it did to the Pilgrimage. Aske and other leaders were tried and exe cuted, and summary vengeance was wreaked on the northern counties, especially on the monasteries. The one satisfactory out come was the establishment of the Council of the North, which gave the shires between the Border and the Trent a stronger and more efficient government than they had ever had before.
The "Six Articles."—Probably the Pilgrimage had some effect in moderating Henry's progress. The monasteries did not benefit and in 1538-39 the greater were involved in the fate which had already overtaken the less. But no further advances were made towards Protestantism after the publication and authorization of the "Great" Bible in English. The Lutheran divines who came to England in 1538 with a project for a theological union were rebuffed; the parliament elected in 1539 was Catholic, and only the reforming bishops in the House of Lords offered any resistance to the Six Articles which reaffirmed the chief points in Catholic doctrine and practice. The alliance between pope, emperor and French king induced Henry to acquiesce in Cromwell's scheme for a political understanding with Cleves and the Schmalkaldic League, which might threaten Charles V.'s position in Germany and the Netherlands, but could not be of much direct advantage to England. Cromwell rashly sought to wed Henry to this policy, proposed Anne of Cleves as a bride for Henry, now once more a widower, and represented the marriage as England's sole protec tion against a Catholic league. Henry put his neck under the yoke, but soon discovered that there was no necessity; for Charles and Francis were already beginning to quarrel and had no thought of a joint attack on England. The discovery was fatal to Crom well; after a severe struggle in the council he was abandoned to his enemies, attainted of treason and executed. Anne's marriage was declared null, and Henry found a fifth queen in Catherine Howard, a niece of Norfolk, a protegee of Gardiner, and a friend of the Catholic church.
Nevertheless there was no reversal of what had been done, only a check to the rate of progress. Cranmer remained arch bishop and compiled an English Litany, while Catherine Howard soon ceased to be queen ; charges of loose conduct, which in her case at any rate were not instigated by the king, were made against her and she was brought to the block; she was succeeded by Catherine Parr, a mild patron of the new learning. The Six Articles were only fitfully put in execution, especially in and 1546; all the plots against Cranmer failed; and before he died Henry was even considering the advisability of further steps in the religious reformation, apart from mere spoliation like the confiscation of the chantry lands.
But Scotland, Ireland and foreign affairs concerned him most. Something substantial was achieved in Ireland; the papal sover eignty was abolished and Henry received from the Irish parlia ment the title of king instead of lord of Ireland. The process was begun of converting Irish chieftains into English peers which eventually divorced the Irish people from their natural leaders; and principles of English law and government were spread beyond the Pale. In Scotland Henry was less fortunate. He failed to win over James V. to his anti-papal policy, revived the feudal claim to suzerainty, won the battle of Solway Moss (1542), and then after James's death bribed and threatened the Scots estates into concluding a treaty of marriage between their infant queen and Henry's son. The church in Scotland led by Beaton, and the French party led by James V.'s widow, Mary of Guise, soon reversed this decision, and Hertford's heavy hand was laid on Edinburgh in revenge. France was at the root of the evil, and Henry was thus induced once more to join Charles V. in war . The joint invasion of 1544 led to the capture of Boulogne, but the emperor made peace in order to deal with the Lutherans and left Henry at war with France. The French attempted to retaliate in 1545, and burnt some villages in the Isle of Wight and on the coast of Sussex. But their expedition was a failure, and peace was made in 1546, by which Henry undertook to restore Boulogne in eight years' time on payment of 800,000 crowns. Scotland was not included in the pacification, and when Henry died (Jan. 28, 1541) he was busy preparing to renew his attempt on Scotland's independence.
His administration was singularly unsuccessful. In 1547 he won the great but barren victory of Pinkie Cleugh over the Scots, and attempted to push on the marriage and union by a mixture of conciliation and coercion. He made genuine and considerable concessions to Scottish feeling, guaranteeing autonomy and free dom of trade, and suggesting that the two realms should adopt the indifferent style of the empire of Great Britain. But he also seized Haddington in 1548, held by force the greater part of the Lowlands, and, when Mary was transported to France, revived the old feudal claims which he had dropped in 1547. France was, as ever, the backbone of the Scots resistance ; men and money poured into Edinburgh to assist Mary of Guise and the French faction. The protector's offer to restore Boulogne could not purchase French acquiescence in the union of England and Scot land; and the bickerings on the borders in France and open fight ing in Scotland led the French to declare war on England in Aug. 1549. They were encouraged by dissensions in England. Somerset's own brother, Thomas Seymour, jealous of the pro tector, intrigued against the Government ; he sought to secure the hand of Elizabeth, the favour of Edward VI. and the support of the Suffolk line, secretly married Catherine Parr, and abused his office as lord high admiral to make friends with pirates and other enemies of order. Foes of the family, such as Warwick and Southampton, saw in his factious conduct the means of ruining both the brothers. Seymour was brought to the block, and the weak consent of the protector seriously damaged him in the public eye. His notorious sympathy with the peasantry further alienated the official classes and landed gentry, and his campaign against enclosures brought him into conflict with the strongest forces of the time. The remedial measures which he favoured failed ; and the rising of Ket in Norfolk and others less important in nearly all the counties of England, made Somerset's position impossible. Bedford and Herbert suppressed the rebellion in the west, Warwick that in Norfolk (July–Aug. • They then combined with the majority of the council and the discontented Catholics to remove the protector from office and imprison him in the Tower (October).
Establishment of Protestantism.—The Catholics hoped for re action, the restoration of the mass, and the release of Gardiner and Bonner, who had been imprisoned for resistance to the pro tector's ecclesiastical policy. But Warwick meant to rely on the Protestant extremists; by Jan. 155o the Catholics had been ex pelled from the council, and the pace of the Reformation increased instead of diminishing. Peace was made with France by the surrender of Boulogne and abandonment of the policy of union with Scotland (March 155o) ; and the approach of war between France and the emperor, coupled with the rising of the princes in Germany, relieved Warwick from foreign apprehensions and gave him a free hand at home. Gardiner, Bonner, Heath, Day and Tunstall were one by one deprived of their sees ; a new ordinal simplified the ritual of ordination, and a second Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer (1552) repudiated the Catholic interpretation which had been placed on the first and imposed a stricter conformity to the Protestant faith. All im pediments to clerical marriage were removed, altars and organs were taken down, old service books destroyed and painted windows broken; it was even proposed to explain away the kneeling at the sacrament. The liberal measures of the protector were re pealed, and new treasons were enacted; Somerset himself, who had been released and restored to the council in 155o, became an obstacle in Warwick's path, and was removed by means of a bogus plot, being executed in Jan. 1552; while Warwick had him self made duke of Northumberland, his friend Dorset duke of Suffolk, and Herbert earl of Pembroke.
But his ambition and violence made him deeply unpopular, and the failing health of Edward VI. opened up a serious prospect for Northumberland. He was only safe so long as he controlled the government, and prevented the administration of justice, and the knowledge that not only power but life was at stake drove him into a desperate plot for the retention of both. He could trade upon Edward's precocious hatred of Mary's religion, he could rely upon French fears of her Spanish inclinations, and the success which had attended his schemes in England deluded him into a belief that he could supplant the Tudor with a Dudley dynasty. His son Guilford Dudley was hastily married to Lady Jane Grey, the eldest granddaughter of Henry VIII.'s younger sister Mary. Henry's two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, the descendants of his elder sister Margaret, and Lady Jane's mother, the duchess of Suffolk, were all to be passed over, and the succession was to be vested in Lady Jane and her heirs male. Edward was persuaded that he could devise the crown by will, the council and the judges were browbeaten into acquiescence, and three days after Edward's death (July 6, , Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen in London. Northumberland had miscalculated the temper of the nation, and failed to kidnap Mary. She gathered her forces in Norfolk and Suffolk, Northumberland rode out from London to oppose her, but defection dogged his steps, and even in London Mary was proclaimed queen behind his back by his fellow-con spirators. Mary entered London amid unparalleled popular re joicings, and Northumberland was sent to the scaffold.
It required all Elizabeth's finesse to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; but she was, as Henry III. of France said, la plus fine femme du monde, and she was ably seconded by Cecil who had already proved himself an adept in the art of taking cover. Nevertheless, English policy in their hands was essentially aggressive. It could not be otherwise if England was to emerge from the slough in which Mary had left it. The first step was to assert the principle of England for the English ; the queen would have no foreign husband, though she found suitors useful as well as attractive. Spanish counsels were applauded and neglected, and the Spaniards soon departed. Elizabeth was glad of Philip's sup port at the negotiations for peace at Cateau Cambresis (1559), but she took care to assert the independence of her diplomacy and of England's interests. At home the church was made once more English. All foreign jurisdiction was repudiated, and under the style "supreme governor" Elizabeth reclaimed nearly all the power which Henry VIII. had exercised as "supreme head." The Act of Uniformity (1559) restored with a few modifications the second prayer-book of Edward VI. The bishops almost unanimously refused to conform, and a clean sweep was made of the episcopal bench. An eminently safe and scholarly archbishop was found in Matthew Parker, who had not made himself notorious by resistance to authority even under Mary. The lower clergy were more amenable; the zoo who alone are said to have been ejected should perhaps be multiplied by five ; but even so they were not one in seven, and these seven were clergy who had been promoted in Mary's reign, or who had stood the celibate and other tests of Into the balance must be thrown the hundreds, if not thousands, of zealots who had fled abroad and returned in 1558 59. The net result was that a few years later the lower house of convocation only rejected by one vote a very puritanical petition against vestments and other "popish dregs." The next step was to expand the principle of England for the English into that of Britain for the British, and Knox's reforma tion in 1559-60 provided an opportunity for its application. By timely and daring intervention in Scotland Elizabeth procured the expulsion of the French bag and baggage from North Britain, and that French avenue to England was closed for ever. The logic of this plan was not applied to Ireland; there it was to be Ireland for the English for many a generation yet to come ; and so Ireland remained Achilles' heel, the vulnerable part of the United King dom. The Protestant religion was forced upon the Irish in a foreign tongue and garb and at the point of foreign pikes ; and national sentiment supported the ancient faith and the ancient habits in resistance to the Saxon innovations. In other directions the expansion of England, the third stage in the development of Elizabeth's policy, was more successful. The attractions of the Spanish Main converted the seafaring folk of south-west England into hardy Protestants, who could on conscientious as well as other grounds contest a papal allocation of new worlds to Spain and Portugal. Their monopoly was broken up by Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, and scores of others who recognized no peace beyond the line ; and although, as far as actual colonies went, the results of Elizabeth's reign were singularly meagre, the idea had taken root and the ground had been prepared. In every direction English influence penetrated, and Englishmen before 1603 might be found in every quarter of the globe, following Drake's lead into the Pacific, painfully breaking the ice in search of a north-east or a north-west passage, hunting for slaves in the wilds of Africa, journeying in caravans across the steppes of Russia into central Asia, bargaining with the Turks on the shores of the Golden Horn, or with the Greeks in the Levant, laying the foundations of the East India company, or of the colonies of Virginia and Newfoundland.
Mary, Queen of Scots.—This expansion was mainly at the expense of Spain; but at first Spain was regarded as Elizabeth's friend, not France. France had a rival candidate for Elizabeth's throne in Mary Stuart, the wife of the dauphin who soon became king as Francis II. ; and Spanish favour was sought to neutralize this threat. Fortunately for Elizabeth, Francis died in 156o, and the French Government passed into the hands of Catherine de' Medici, who had no cause to love her daughter-in law and the Guises. France, too, was soon paralysed by the wars of religion which Elizabeth judiciously fomented with anything but religious motives. Mary Stuart returned to Scotland with nothing but her brains and her charms on which to rely in her struggle with her people and her rival. She was well equipped in both respects, but human passions spoilt her chance; her heart turned her head. Elizabeth's head was stronger and she had no heart at all. When Mary married Darnley she had the ball at her feet; the pair had the best claims to the English succession and enjoyed the united affections of the Catholics. But they soon ceased to love one another, and could not control their jealousies. There followed rapidly the murders of Rizzio and Darnley, the Bothwell marriage, Mary's defeat, captivity, and flight into England (1568) . It was a difficult problem for Elizabeth to solve; to let Mary go to France was presenting a good deal more than a pawn to her enemies ; to restore her by force to her Scottish throne might have been heroic, but it certainly was not politics; to hand her over to her Scottish foes was too mean even for Elizabeth ; and to keep her in England was to nurse a spark in a powder-magazine. Mary was detained in the hope that the spark might be carefully isolated.
But there was too much inflammable material about. The duke of Norfolk was a Protestant, but his convictions were weaker than his ambition, and he fell a victim to Mary's unseen charms. The Catholic north of England was to rise under the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, who objected to Elizabeth's seizure of their mines and jurisdictions as well as to her proscrip tion of their faith; and the pope was to assist with a bull of deposition. Norfolk, however, played the coward; the bull came nearly a year too late, and the rebellion of the earls (1569) was easily crushed. But the conspiracies did not end, and Spain began to take a hand. Elizabeth, partly in revenge for the treatment of Hawkins and Drake at San Juan de Ulloa, seized some Spanish treasure on its way to the Netherlands (Dec. 1569). Alva's opera Lions were fatally handicapped by this disaster, but Philip was too much involved in the Netherlands to declare war on England. But his friendship for Elizabeth had received a shock, and hence forth his finger may be traced in most of the plots against her, of which the Ridolfi conspiracy was the first. It cost Norfolk his head and Mary more of her scanty liberty. Elizabeth also began to look to France, and in 1572, by the treaty of Blois, France instead of Spain became England's ally, while Philip constituted himself as Mary's patron. The massacre of St. Bartholomew placed a severe strain upon the new alliance, but was not fatal to it. A series of prolonged but hollow marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and first Anjou (afterwards Henry III.) and then Alencon (afterwards duke of Anjou) served to keep up appearances. But the friendship was never warm ; Elizabeth's relations with the Huguenots on the one hand and her fear of French designs on the Netherlands on the other prevented much cordiality. But the alliance stood in the way of a Franco-Spanish agreement, limited Elizabeth's sympathy with the French Protes tants, and enabled her to give more countenance than she otherwise might have done to the Dutch.
War with Spain.—Gradually Philip grew more hostile under provocation; slowly he came to the conclusion that he could never subdue the Dutch or check English attacks on the Spanish Main without a conquest of England. Simultaneously the counter Ref ormation began its attacks; the "Jesuit invasion" took place in 1580, and Campion went to the block. A papal and Spanish attempt upon Ireland in the same year was foiled at Smerwick. But more important was Philip's acquisition of the throne of Portugal with its harbours, its colonies and its marine. This for the first time gave him a real command of the sea, and at least doubled the chances of a successful attack upon England. But Philip's mind moved slowly and only on provocation. It took a year or two to satisfy him that Portugal was really his; not until 1583 was the fleet of the pretender Don Antonio destroyed in the Azores. The victor, Santa Cruz, then suggested an armada against England, but the English Catholics could not be brought into line with a Spanish invasion. The various attempts to square James VI. of Scotland had not been successful, and events in the Netherlands and in France disturbed Philip's calculations. But his purpose was now probably fixed. After the murder of William the Silent (1584) Elizabeth sided more openly with the Dutch; the Spanish ambassador Mendoza was expelled from England for his intrigues with Elizabeth's enemies (1586) ; and on the discovery of Babington's plot Elizabeth yielded to the demand of her parliament and her ministers for Mary's execution (1587) ; her death removed the only possible centre for a Catholic rebellion in case of a Spanish attack. It also removed Philip's last doubts; Mary had left him her claims to the English throne, and he might, now that she was out of his path, hope to treat England like Portugal. Drake's "singeing of Philip's beard" in Cadiz harbour in 1587 delayed the expedition for a year, and a storm again postponed it in the early summer of 1588. At length the armada sailed in July under the incompetent duke of Medina Sidonia; its object was to secure command of the narrow seas and facilitate the transport of Parma's army from the Nether lands to England. But Philip after his 20 years' experience in the Netherlands can hardly have hoped to conquer a bigger and richer country with scantier means and forces. He relied in fact upon a domestic explosion, and the armada was only to be the torch. The miscalculation made it a hopeless enterprise from the first. Scarcely an English Catholic would have raised a finger in Philip's favour ; and when he could not subdue the two provinces of Holland and Zealand, it is absurd to suppose that he could have simultaneously subdued them and England as well. English armies were not perhaps very efficient, but they were as good as the material with which William of Orange began his task. Philip, however, was never given the opportunity. His armada was severely handled in a week's fighting on its way up the Channel, and was driven off the English ports into the North Sea; there a south-west gale drove it far from its rendezvous, and completed the havoc which the English ships had begun. A miserable rem nant alone escaped destruction in its perilous flight round the north and west of Scotland.
The defeat of the armada was the beginning and not the end of the war; and there were moments between 1588 and 1603 when England was more seriously alarmed than in 1588. The Spaniards seized Calais in 1596; at another time they threatened England from Brest, and the "invisible" armada of 1599 created a greater panic than the "invincible" armada of 1588. It was not till the very end of the reign that what was in some ways the most dangerous of Spanish aggressions was foiled at Kinsale. Nor were the English counter-attacks very happy; the attempt on Portugal in 1589 under Drake and Norris proved a complete failure. The raid on Cadiz under Essex and Raleigh in 1596 was attended with better results, but the "Islands" voyage to the Azores in 1597 was a very partial success. Still it was now a war upon more or less equal terms, and there was little more likelihood that it would end with England's than with Spain's loss of national independence. The subjection of the Netherlands was now almost out of the question, and although Elizabeth's help had not enabled the Protestant cause to win in France, Henry IV. built up a national monarchy which would be quite as effectual a bar to the ambitions of Spain.
Elizabeth had in fact safely piloted England through the strug gle to assert its national independence in religion and politics and its claim to a share in the new inheritance which had been opened up for the nations of Europe ; and the passionate loyalty which had supported her as the embodiment of England's aspirations somewhat cooled in her declining years. She herself grew more cautious and conservative than ever, and was regarded as an obstacle by the hotheads in war and religion. She sided with the "scribes," Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, against the men of war, Essex and Raleigh; and she abetted Whitgift's rigorous per secution of the Puritans whose discontent with her via media was rancorously expressed in the Martin Marprelate tracts. Essex's folly and failure to crush Hugh O'Neill's rebellion (1599), the most serious effort made in the reign to throw off the English yoke in Ireland, involved him in treason and brought him to the block. Parliament was beginning to quarrel with the royal prerogative, particularly when expressed in the grant of monopolies, and even Mountjoy's success in Ireland (16o2–o3) failed to revive popular enthusiasm for the dying queen. Strange as it may seem, the ac cession of James I. (March 24, 1603) was hailed by Shakespeare, and minor writers, as heralding a new and gladder age.
(A. F. Po.)