favour of Leicester to their design against him, who ventured to lay their complaints, as the complaints of the country, before Elizabeth, representing the clamour against the measures of Cecil, and the belief that his policy was prejudicial to her reputation and injurious to the interests of the realm, as universal. Elizabeth defended her favourite minister with zeal; but the politic Cecil was struck with a degree of alarm at their combination, which might have eventually proved formidable, had they not stumbled on the scheme of marrying Norfolk to Mary. The results of that scheme, however, we must postpone till we have noticed some anterior affairs. We have seen how Elizabeth assisted the Huguenots in France. In the Netherlands she was not the less active. The commercial natives of these countries had not only grown rich under the mild sway of the Dukes of Burgundy, but they had exercised privileges which did not accord with the bigoted and despotic notions of Philip II. Not only Protestants but Romanists murmured at his harsh and arbitrary government. The latter complained that opulent abbeys in the possession of natives were dissolved to form bishoprics for Spaniards. The Protestants groaned under a stern persecution, and every class of subjects beheld with horror and disgust the Spanish Inquisition introduced. Not only Protestants but Papists united in a league to put down this odious institution. The league, from including both religious parties, was named the Compromise, and the Prince of Orange and the Counts Egmont and Horne took the lead in it. The Duchess of Parma, who governed the country, gave way to the storm, and abolished the Inquisition, which had the effect of separating the Roman Catholics from the Protestants. The latter deemed it necessary, when thus deserted, to conduct their worship with arms in their hands; and the duchess, alarmed at this hostile attitude, issued a proclamation, forbidding all such assemblies. In Antwerp, and other cities where the English and German Protestants greatly abounded, no notice was taken of her proclamation; but it was resolved no longer to remain on the defensive, but to carry the war into the enemy's quarters.
The people, assembling in April, 1567, in vast crowds, proceeded to demolish the images and altars in the churches, and even to pull the churches down. On the feast of the Assumption, as the priests were carrying an image of the Virgin through the streets, the crowd made terrible menaces against it, and the procession was glad to hasten back to the church whence they bad set out. But a few days after the people rushed to the cathedral, which was filled with rich shrines, treasures, and works of art, and closing all the doors, set systematically to work to smash and destroy every image that it contained. Amongst them was a famous crucifix, placed aloft, the work of a famous artist, which they dragged down with ropes, and knocked in pieces. The pictures, many of them very valuable, they cut to shreds, and the altars and shrines they tore down and utterly destroyed. From the desecrated cathedral they proceeded to the other churches, where they perpetrated the same ruin, and thence to the convents and monasteries, driving the monks and nuns destitute into the streets. The example of Antwerp was zealously followed in every other province in the Netherlands, except in the Walloons. The iconoclasts were at length interrupted in their work by the Duchess of Parma, who fell upon them near Antwerp, and defeated them with great slaughter. Philip dispatched the notorious Duke of Alva to take vengeance on the turbulent heretics, and overran the Netherlands with his butcheries. The Prince of Orange retired to his province of Nassau, but Horne and Egmont were seized and cast into prison.
The Huguenots in France, alarmed at this success of Alva, and believing that he was appointed to carry into execution the secret league of Bayonne, for compelling the Protestants of France, Spain, and Flanders, to give up their religion or their lives, rose under Condé, and attempted to seize the king, Charles IX., at Monceaux. Charles, however, was rescued by his Swiss guards, who, surrounding him in a body, beat off the Huguenots, and conducted him in safety to Paris. There, he was, nevertheless, a prisoner, till he was released by the defeat of the Huguenots at the battle of St. Denis, where his principal general, the constable Montmorency, was killed. Condé had fallen in the battle of Varnac. Norris, the English ambassador, was accused of giving encouragement and aid to the insurgents, and the king was compelled to make a treaty with his armed subjects.
In the spring of 1568, 3,000 of these French Huguenots marched into Flanders, to join the Prince of Orange, who had taken the field against Alva. After various successes, the prince, at the close of the campaign, was obliged to retreat across the Rhine. Throughout these struggles, both in France and Belgium, Elizabeth lent much aid and encouragement in the shape of money; but, with her usual caution, she would take no public part in the contest, and all the while professed herself the friend of Philip, and most hostile to all rebellions.
The summer of this year was distinguished by a remarkable scheme for the marriage of the Duke of Norfolk to the Queen of Scots, which ended fatally for that nobleman, and increased the rigour of Mary's incarceration. The scheme was said to have originated in the ever busy brain of Maitland. Murray fell into it, probably under the idea that Mary would then content herself with living in England, and leave the government of Scotland in his hands; or it might have entered into his calculations that it would, on discovery, so exasperate Elizabeth, as to lead to what it did, the closer imprisonment of the Queen of Scots, which would be equally acceptable to him. Elizabeth was not long in catching the rumours of this plot, and she burst out on the duke in her fiercest style; but Norfolk had the art to satisfy her of the folly of such an idea, by replying that such a thing had, indeed, been suggested to him, but that it was not a thing likely to captivate him, who loved to sleep on a safe pillow. The plan, however, went on, and from one motive or another, it eventually included amongst its promoters the Earls of Pembroke, Arundel, Bedford, Shrewsbury, Northumberland, and Westmoreland. Leicester and Throckmorton were induced to embrace it, and even Cecil was made aware of it, and favoured it. In Scotland, Murray, Maitland, the Bishop of Ross, Lord Boyd, were favourable to the measure; and Mary was sounded on the subject, and professed her readiness to be divorced from Bothwell; but as to marriage, from her past sorrowful experience, would
