mining element in the history of
the second half of the sixteenth century. His great object, the
re-establishment and extension of the Catholic religion, he never
leaves out of sight for a moment; but yet he pursues it only in
combination with his own special interests. He is accustomed to weigh
all the chances, to proceed slowly, to pause when the situation
becomes critical, to avoid dangerous enterprises. Open war is not to
his taste, he loves secret influences.

In November 1569 a rebellion broke out in England, not without the
connivance of the Spanish ambassador, but mainly under the impression
made by the Catholic victories in France, as to which Mary Stuart also
had let it be known that they rejoiced her inmost soul. It was mainly
the Northern counties that rose, as had before been the case in 1536
and 1549. Where the revolt gained the upper hand, the Common
Prayer-book and sometimes the English translation of the Bible as well
were burnt, and the mass re-established. Many nobles, above all in the
North itself, still held Catholic opinions. At the head of the present
insurrection stood the Percies of Northumberland, the Nevilles of
Westmoreland, the Cliffords of Cumberland; Richard Norton, who rose
for the Nevilles, venerable for his grey hair, and surrounded by a
troop of sons in their prime, carried the Cross as a banner in front
of his men. The nobility did not exactly want to overthrow the Queen,
but it wished to force her to alter her government, to dismiss her
present ministers, and above all to recognise Mary Stuart's claim to
the succession--which would have given her an exceedingly numerous
body of supporters in England and thus have seriously hampered the
Queen. But now the government possessed a still more decided
ascendancy than even in 1549. It had come upon the traces of the
enterprise in time to quell it at its first outbreak, and had at once
removed the Queen of Scots out of reach of the movement. The commander
in the North, Thomas Ratcliffe, Earl of Sussex, one of the Queen's
heroes, who bore himself bravely and blamelessly in other spheres of
action as well as in this, and has left behind him one of the purest
of names, encountered the rebels with a considerable force, composed
entirely of his own men; these the rebels were the less able to
withstand, as they knew that still more troops were on the march. As
the ballad of a northern minstrel says, the gold-horned bull of the
Nevilles, the silve