given them credit. Some entered the ranks as volunteers;
others armed and encouraged their tenantry and dependants for the
defence of their country; several even fitted out vessels at their own
expense, and intrusted the command of them to protestant officers on
whom the government could entirely rely.

After the defeat of the Armada, the prisoners at Wisbeach-castle, having
signed the submission required by law of such as had offended in hearing
mass and absenting themselves from church, petitioned the privy-council
for their liberty; but a bond for good behaviour being further demanded
of them, with the condition of being obedient to such orders as six
members of the privy-council should write down respecting them, they
refused to comply with such terms of enlargement, and remained in
custody. As the submission which they had tendered voluntarily was in
terms apparently no less strong than the bond which they refused, it was
conjectured that the former piece had been drawn up by their ghostly
fathers with some private equivocation or mental reservation; a
suspicion which receives strong confirmation from the characters and
subsequent conduct of some of these persons,--the most noted fanatics
certainly of their party,--and amongst whom we read the names of Talbot,
Catesby, and Tresham, afterwards principal conspirators in the
detestable gunpowder plot[98].

[Note 98: Life of Whitgift, by Strype.]

The ships equipped by the nobility and gentry to combat the armada
amounted in the whole to forty-three, and it was on-board these vessels
that young men of the noblest blood and highest hopes now made their
first essay in arms. In this number may be distinguished George Clifford
third earl of Cumberland, one of the most remarkable, if not the
greatest, characters of the reign of Elizabeth.

The illustrious race of Clifford takes origin from William duke of
Normandy; in a later age its blood was mingled with that of the
Plantagenets by the intermarriage of the seventh lord de Clifford and a
daughter of the celebrated Hotspur by Elizabeth his wife, whose father
was Edward Mortimer earl of March. Notwithstanding this alliance with
the house of York, two successive lords de Clifford were slain in the
civil wars fighting strenuously on the Lancastrian side. It was to the
younger of these, whose sanguinary spirit gained him the surname of the
Butcher, that the barbarous murder of the young earl of Rutland was
popularly impute