to oppose her accession if they had expected that she would venture to disturb the established order of things. The members of the lower house were now called up, and informed of what had been done by Archbishop Heath, the chancellor. He concluded by saying that, since no doubt could or ought to be made of the Lady Elizabeth's right of succession, the House of Peers only wanted their consent to proclaim her queen. A vote to that effect immediately passed by acclamation; and, as soon as the houses rose, the proclamation took place. Elizabeth came to London on Wednesday, the 23rd: she was met by all the bishops in a body at Highgate, and escorted by an immense multitude of people of all ranks to the metropolis, where she took up her lodgings at the residence of Lord North, in the Charter House. On the afternoon of Monday the 28th she made a progress through the city in a chariot to the royal palace of the Tower: here she continued till Monday the 5th of December, on the morning of which day she removed by water to Somerset House.

One of Elizabeth's earliest acts of royalty, by which, as Camden remarks, she gave proof of a prudence above her years, was what we should now call the appointment of her ministers. She retained of her privy council thirteen Catholics, who had been of that of her sister, including Heath, Archbishop of York, the lord chancellor ; William Paulett, Marquis of Winchester, the lord high treasurer; Edward, Lord Clinton, the lord high adıniral ; and William, Lord Howard of Effingham, the lord chamberlain. But with these she associated seven others of her own religion, the most eminent of whom was the celebrated William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, whom she appointed to the office of secretary of state, which he had already held under Edward VI.

The be

ginning of Burghley's connexion with Elizabeth has been related in our memoir of that statesman. Soon after, Nicholas Bacon (the father of the great chancellor) was added to the number of the privy councillors, and made at first lord privy seal, and next year lord keeper of the great seal, on the resignation of Archbishop Heath.

Cecil became lord high treasurer on the death of the Marquis of Winchester in 1572, and continued to be Elizabeth's principal adviser till his death in 1598, when he was succeeded by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (afterwards made Earl of Dorset by James I.). Of the other persons who served as ministers during Elizabeth's long reign, the most worthy of note were Sir Francis Walsingham (who was principal secretary of state from 1573 till his death in 1590, and was all the time they were in office together the confidential friend and chief assistant of Cecil the premier, under whose patronage he had entered public life), and Burghley's son, Robert Cecil (afterwards Earl of Salisbury), who succeeded Walsingham as secretary of state, and held that office till the end of the reign. Among the other persons of ability that were employed in the course of the reign, in different capacities, may be mentioned Sir Nicholas Throckmorton; "a man," says Camden, "of a large experience, piercing judgment, and singular prudence, who discharged several embassies with a great deal of diligence and much to his praise, yet could he not be master of much wealth, nor rise higher than to those small dignities (though glorious in title) of chief cupbearer of England and chamberlain of the Exchequer; and this because he acted in favour of Leicester against Cecil, whose greatness he envied; Sir Thomas Smith, the learned friend of Cheke, who had been one of the secretaries of state along with him under Edward VI., and held the same office again under Elizabeth for some years before his death in 1577; and Sir Christopher Hatton, who was lord chancellor from 1587 till his death in 1591, and whom Camden, after having related his singular rise from being one of the band of gentlemen pensioners, to which he was appointed by the queen, who was taken with his handsome shape and elegant dancing at a court masque, characterizes as a great patron of learning and good sense, and one that managed that weighty part of lord chancellor with that equity and clearness of principle as to be able to satisfy his conscience and the world too."

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The affair to which Elizabeth first applied her atten

tion on coming to the throne, and that in connexion with which all the transactions of her reign must be viewed, was the settlement of the national religion. The opinions of Cecil strongly concurred with her own in favour of the reformed doctrines, to which also undoubtedly the great mass of the people was attached. For a short time however she kept her intentions a secret from the majority of the council, taking her measures in concert only with Cecil and the few others who might be said to form the cabinet. She began by giving permission, by proclamation, to read part of the church service in English, but at the same time strictly prohibited the addition of any comments, and all preaching on controversial points. This however was enough to show the Catholic party what was coming; accordingly, at her coronation, on the 15th of January, 1559, the bishops in general refused to assist, and it was with difficulty that one of them, Oglethorp of Carlisle, was prevailed upon to set the crown on her head. The principal alterations were reserved to be made by the parliament, which met on the 25th of this month. Of the acts which were passed, one restored to the crown the jurisdiction established in the reign of Henry VIII. over the estate ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolished all foreign powers repugnant to the same; and another restored the use of King Edward's Book of Common Prayer, with certain alterations, that had been suggested by a royal commission over which Parker (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury) presided. In accordance with this last statute public worship began to be performed in English throughout the kingdom on WhitSunday, which fell on the 8th of May. By a third act the first-fruits and tenths of benefices were restored to the crown; and by a fourth, her majesty was authorized, upon the avoidance of any archbishopric or bishopric, to take certain of the revenues into her own hands; and conveyances of the temporalities by the holder for a longer term than twenty-one years or three lives were made void. The effect of these laws was generally to restore the church to the state in which it was in the reign of Edward VI., the royal supremacy sufficing for such fur

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ther necessary alterations as were not expressly provided for by statute. A strong opposition was made to the bills in the House of Lords by the bishops; and fourteen of them, being the whole number, with the exception of Anthony, Bishop of Llandaff, who, Camden says, the scourge of his diocese,” were now deprived for refusing to take the oath of supremacy. About a hundred prebendaries, deans, archdeacons, and heads of colleges, were also ejected. The number of the inferior clergy however that held out was very small, amounting to no more than eighty rectors and other parochial ministers, out of between nine and ten thousand. On this subject

it is only necessary further to state that the frame of ecclesiastical polity now set up, being in all essential particulars the same that still subsists, was zealously and steadily maintained by Elizabeth and her ministers to the end of her reign. The Church of England has good reason to look upon her and Cecil as the true planters and rearers of its authority. They had soon to defend it against the Puritans on the one hand, as well as against the Catholics on the other; and they yielded to the former as little as the latter. The Puritans had been growing in the country ever since the dawn of the Reformation; but they first made their appearance in any considerable force in the parliament which met in 1570. At first their attempts were met on the part of the crown by evasive measures and slight checks; but, in 1587, on four members of the House of Commons_presenting to the house a bill for establishing a new Directory of public worship, Elizabeth at once gave orders that they should be seized and sent to the Tower, where they were kept some time. The High Commission Court also, which was established by a clause in one of the acts for the settlement of religion passed in the first year of her reign, was, occasionally at least, prompted or permitted to exercise its authority in the punishment of what was called heresy, and in enforcing uniformity of worship with great strictness. The determination upon which the queen acted in these matters, as she expressed it in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, was, "that no man should

be suffered to decline either to the left or to the right hand, from the drawn line limited by authority, and by her laws and injunctions." Besides the deprivation of their livings, which many of the clergy underwent for their refusal to comply with certain particulars of the established ritual, many other persons suffered imprisonment for violations of the statute of uniformity. It was against the Catholics however that the most severe measures were taken. By an act passed in 1585 (the 27 Eliz. c. 2) every Jesuit or other popish priest was commanded to depart from the realm within forty days, on pain of death as a traitor, and every person receiving or relieving any such priest was declared guilty of felony. Many priests were afterwards executed under this act.

It was the struggle with popery that moved and directed nearly the whole policy of the reign, foreign as well as domestic. When Elizabeth came to the throne, she found the country at peace with Spain, the head of which kingdom had been her predecessor's husband, but at war with France, the great continental opponent of Spain and the Empire. Philip, with the view of preserving his English alliance, almost immediately after her accession offered himself to Elizabeth in marriage; but, after deliberating on the proposal, she determined upon declining it, swayed by various considerations, and especially, as it would appear, by the feeling that, by consenting to marry her sister's husband on a dispensation from the pope, she would in a manner be affirming the lawfulness of her father's marriage with Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his brother Arthur, and condemning his subsequent marriage with her own mother, the sole validity of which rested on the alleged illegality of that previous connexion. A general peace, however, comprehending all the three powers, and also Scotland, was established in April, 1559, by the treaty of Cateau Cambresis. By this treaty it was agreed that Calais, which had been taken by France in the time of Queen Mary, and had formed the only difficult subject of negotiation, should be restored to England in eight years, if no hostile act should be committed by Elizabeth within that period. Scarcely