unscrupulous dexterity of Walsingham had now procured evidence against her of direct complicity in the design to murder the queen. In September 1586, she Trial and execuwas taken under close custody to Fotheringay tion of Mary, Castle, near Peterborough, where, in October, Queen of Scots. she was tried on this charge, and con

1586-87.

demned, though she vainly protested that Elizabeth could exercise no jurisdiction over a crowned queen. This conviction cut her off from the succession, under the Act of Association, but Parliament, which met in the end of October, urged the immediate execution of her death sentence. "We have seen," said the Lords and Commons, "by how manifold, most dangerous and execrable practices Mary, commonly called the Queen of Scots, hath compassed the destruction of your Majesty's sacred person, bringing us and this noble crown back again into the thraldom of the Romish tyranny, and utterly ruinating and overthrowing the happy state and commonwealth of this realm. We therefore humbly beseech your Highness to take speedy order to execute the sentence, because we cannot find any means to provide for your safety, but by the speedy execution of the said queen." Even these strong words could not induce the queen to order Mary's execution. After long and pitiable hesitation, she signed the death-warrant, but soon after she was cowardly enough to urge Sir Amyas Paulet, the gaoler of the Queen of Scots, to murder her privately, so that the odium of a public execution might be avoided. Paulet refused to do this, and the Council, losing patience, directed Davison, the Secretary of State, to despatch the warrant to Fotheringay.

On February 7th, 1587, Mary was ordered to prepare herself for execution on the following day. She made ready to meet her fate with that admirable courage which had not been impaired, even by the weary years of imprisonment that had aged her before her time. Next morning she was taken to the great hall of the castle, where the scaffold had been erected. She played her part with consummate power, and turned a deaf ear to the clumsy exhortations of the Dean of Peterborough. "I die," she said, a true woman to my religion, to Scotland, and to France. I have always wished the union of England and Scotland. Tell my son I have done nothing prejudicial to the dignity of his crown." Her remains were buried at Peterborough, hard by the tomb of Catharine of Aragon. There they rested until her son, after his accession to the English throne, transferred them

to a nobler tomb at Westminster. Elizabeth loudly protested that the execution was carried out despite her wish, and made the unlucky Davison the scape-goat of her excuses to James. But it was she who profited most by the deed. There was no longer any object in forming plots to murder Elizabeth, when the next successor to the throne was the Protestant King of Scots. The worst dangers to Elizabeth and Protestantism passed away with the tragedy at Fotheringay.

CHAPTER VII.

The Elizabethan Seamen and the Triumph of Elizabeth. 1587-1603.

1. Up to the middle of the sixteenth century, England was distinguished neither for its trade nor its seamanship. Englishmen seemed to foreigners to be an unadventurous.

Trade and adventure in Mediæval England.

easy-going, moody, and contemplative people, careless of progress and neglectful of commerce, but loving good living, hard knocks, booty won in war, and, in the intervals of fighting, living lazy and inactive lives on their fields at home. Until the fifteenth century the foreign trade of England had been largely in the hands of foreigners, such as the Venetians and the Germans from the Hanse towns, these latter having a factory in London called the Steelyard. It was a step in advance when Englishmen began to open up foreign markets for themselves, and when the restlessness of the early sixteenth century broke down the traditional system of farming, and left many either to shift for themselves or to starve. Yet few saw any remedy for the woes of England except in bringing back the good old times, and fewer still looked to any new occupations to take away the hands that were no longer wanted on the land. There was a slight development of manufacturing industry when the persecution of Alva drove many of the weavers of Flanders and Brabant to take refuge in England and teach their new countrymen a little of their own rare skill. But the first beginnings of the new impulse are to be seen in adventure rather than in trade, and, even when successful adventure opened out new avenues of commerce, in trade rather than in manufactures.

1496-1498.

2. The revelation of a new world by Columbus and Vasco da Gama had hardly affected England at all, though conspicuous among those who followed on Henry VII. and the track of Columbus was John Cabot, a the Cabots, Venetian settled in Bristol, who had been sent on two voyages of discovery by the foresight of Henry VII. (1496-1498). Cabot discovered the coasts of Labrador and Nova Scotia, but nothing practical came of his enterprise, and his son, Sebastian, finding The dawn of little encouragement, save fair words and activity. promises from Henry VIII. and Wolsey, quitted the country of his birth, and took service with the Emperor Charles V. With little help from the state, the undaunted Bristol merchants sent out under Henry VIII. various expeditions of discovery, that first gave England a share, however small, in the Newfoundland fisheries and the trade with West Africa. The stirrings of the new impulse became stronger under Edward VI., soon after whose accession, Sebastian Cabot was tempted back to England. The London merchants were suffering from severe depression of trade and the competition of the foreign merchants of the Steelyard. Cabot remedied some of the grievances of the English merchants against the Steelyard, and was made governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, the chief English society of traders. In 1553, at Cabot's suggestion, an expedition was sent out with Expedition of Sir Hugh Willoughby as admiral and Richard Willoughby and Chancellor as pilot, with the object of opening Chancellor, 1553. up trade with the strange countries of the north and east, and, if possible, of discovering a North-East passage to China through the Arctic seas. The little squadron was assailed by a great tempest off the Norwegian coast, in which Willoughby, with two of the ships, was separated from the rest of his company. The admiral sought to winter in the north of Russia, but, after a long series of misfortunes, the whole of both crews were starved or frozen to death. Chancellor had better luck with the remaining ships, successfully reaching the White Sea, and establishing friendly relations with Russia. Chancellor visited Ivan the Terrible at his capital in Moscow, and opened out a trading connection with Russia, so successfully that a Muscovy or Russia Company was started, and in 1556 he set forth on a second voyage, during which he perished in shipwreck off the coast of Scotland. The Russian trade at once became important, and the friendship of the Czar was highly prized

by Elizabeth. But Chancellor's greatest fame was that he was the first Englishman who made a name as a discoverer, and the true precursor of the Elizabethan mariners.

3. The impulse to seamanship and navigation was the direct result of the great stirring of men's minds that The Reformation followed the Reformation. The restless adventurers who took to the sea were of a class

and seafaring

adventure. which was specially open to the new doctrines, and, though careless of theology and reckless in their lives, they were sound Protestants and great haters of the Pope. Greed of gain was even more powerful with them than religious enthusiasm, and in those days when even the narrow seas of Europe were swarming with robber craft, the line between the peaceful trader and pirate was by no means a hard and fast one. Already in Mary's reign some of the fiercer Protestant refugees took to the sea, and, working from the French coasts, despoiled the ships of Philip and Mary with special zest. Before long, the English adventurer began to look further afield. While England had been asleep, Spain and Portugal had conquered great empires in the New World, though neither country had great love of colonising, and Spain had not even skill in commerce or seafaring. The English mariners found that it was easier to make money by robbing the richly-freighted galleons of Spain than to trade honestly on their own account, or run the risks and dangers of experiments in distant colonisation. The wealth and defencelessness of the Spanish trading-ships made them an easy prey, and religious zeal excused cupidity by reckoning it a merit to despoil Papists. Moreover, the Spaniards kept their American colonies under strict tutelage, and they retained for the mother country an absolute monopoly of trade with them. The dearness and scarcity that flowed from monopoly made the Spanish colonists themselves welcome the heretic free-traders, who cheapened commodities and brought them the stores of which they stood in need. Partly as pirates, partly as smugglers, English mariners were beginning to make a name for themselves, and side by side with these lawless traders went more legitimate commerce and love of adventure.

4. Among the most daring of English seamen in the days of Henry VIII. was William Hawkins of Plymouth, who made three voyages to the Guinea coast and Brazil, and opened up the first trade between England and South America. His second son, John Hawkins (1532

In

The three slavetrading voyages of John Hawkins, 1562, 1564, and

1567.

1595), followed in his father's footsteps, making, when still a young man, voyages to the Canaries, where he learnt "that negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that they might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea." 1562, he equipped a squadron of three ships, and freighted them with negro slaves obtained in West Africa by violence and purchase. These he sold to excellent advantage to the Spanish planters of Hispaniola, who were at their wits' end for want of suitable labour. So enormous were Hawkins' profits, that in 1564 he started on a larger expedition for the same purpose, the Queen lending him his chief ship, the Jesus. He again obtained his miserable cargo of slaves, though this time with more difficulty, but the Spanish officials were forewarned, and strove to prevent the bold smuggler from selling his wares in America. Hawkins answered that they must either fight him or buy his cargo, whereupon the Spaniards allowed him to dispose of the negroes without further trouble. He reached home laden with wealth, and was henceforward a famous man. In 1567 he started on a third voyage, but this time he met with disaster. Attempting to force the inhabitants of San Juan de Ulloa (the modern Vera Cruz, the port of Mexico) to buy his slaves, he was entrapped in the harbour by a strong Spanish fleet. A desperate encounter was fought in the narrow port, in which Hawkins was ultimately overborne by numbers. He lost his profits and most of his ships, and got back to England with the greatest difficulty. Hawkins was a shrewd, keen-sighted trader, aiming simply at filling his purse by fair means or foul, malicious, rude, covetous, and false. But he was terribly efficient at his work. By opening out the slave trade, he changed the whole future of tropical America, making possible the planter-aristocracy, enriched by negro labour, which now rapidly succeeded the gold-seekers and adventurers of the early days of Spanish settlement, and pointing the way to a traffic which heaped up unhallowed gains on English merchants for more than two hundred years. No one then thought of the wickedness and cruelty of the trade.

5. The Spanish Government bitterly resented Hawkins' interference with their monopoly of trade, no less than his demonstration of the military weakness of their Development of colonial power. Many lesser men followed the adventurous his example; and the Spaniards retaliated by spirit after 1572. laying violent hands on English seamen and handing them over to be tried and burnt as heretics by the Inquisition. This state of things grew up when Philip and Elizabeth were comparatively friendly. After 1572 the attacks on Spanish trade became more constant, as the revolted Dutch joined hands with the English marauders, and even surpassed them by their skill and dexterity in opening up avenues of commerce. As time went on, the greedy commercial spirit was in somewise ennobled by romantic love of adventure, and a sort of crusading enthusiasm. The enthusiasm for