The French Court Favors the Roman Catholics

We have observed that a remnant of Ribault's company who abandoned Port Royal were picked up at sea by an English vessel, and taken to the presence of Queen Elizabeth. She was the daughter of Henry the Eighth and the beautiful Anne Boleyn, and had succeeded her half-sister Mary as sovereign of Great Britain in 1558, when she was twenty-five years of age. She had not been long on the throne when these Huguenots were brought into her audience-chamber. They were treated kindly, for Elizabeth was in theological sympathy with them. She had always been a Protestant at heart, but to avoid many personal perils and even death during the reign of her half-sister, who was wife of Philip of Spain, she had so deported herself with singularly adroit hypocrisy, that she was only suspected of heresy. So completely did she deceive everybody, that only the day before she ascended the throne as queen, the Spanish ambassador at the British court wrote to his royal master: "She is a true Catholic; she declares that she prays to the Virgin and acknowledges the real presence [of the real body and blood of Christ] in the sacrament." That was at the middle of November. On Christmas she placed herself at the head of the Protestant world, by refusing to hear mass in the Royal Chapel; and yet, only three weeks later, when she was crowned in Westminster Abbey, the religious ceremonials were all in accordance with the liturgy of the Church of Rome, and she partook of the sacrament at the hands of a Romish Archbishop. She was simply an adroit politician, and was moved altogether by political motives. For years she endeavored to gain the favor of all her subjects, Romanists and Protestants, by favoring both; and there was a ludicrous mixture of the two ceremonials in the public worship of the realm.

At the time the distressed Huguenots were brought into the presence of Elizabeth, she was on the point of affording aid to their co-religionists in France and the Netherlands. She favored Coligni's scheme for colonization in America, and she listened with elight to the accounts given by these castaways of the beauty of the country, the amenities of the climate, and the fertility of the soil of the mysterious land peopled by a mysterious people, which they had been compelled to abandon. The enlightened and sagacious queen readily perceived the glory and advantages she might win for her country, by carrying forward Coligni's plan, with her own countrymen and the French Huguenots as the materials for a powerful colony. She felt a strong desire to do so, but she was then too deeply engaged in more important state work, and her desires did not ripen into action until several years afterward, although they grew in intensity. From her subjects who went over to France in considerable numbers to fight under the Prince of Conde and Coligni, she continually heard more and more of the grandeur and richness of the warmer regions of North America. From none of them came more vivid pictures than from Walter Raleigh, a young Devonshire gentleman who came from an ancient family, was well educated, and who was one of a small body of troops sent by his queen to assist the Huguenots in France. He served five years under Coligni, and then proceeded to the Netherlands to fight the Spaniards, under the banner of the Prince of Orange. He was in that service abroad when De Gourges returned from his foray in Florida, and Raleigh heard much of that region from the lips of the Chevalier. To his friends at home and to his court, he wrote letters filled with accounts of the wonders of the West, and when he returned to England he found the minds of many of the leading men of the realm, as well as that of his queen, filled with projects for making settlements in the warmer regions of North America.

Meanwhile, English navigators had been again trying to solve the question which Cabot had failed to do more than half a century before, namely, the existence of a northwest passage to Asia from the British Isles. Among them was Martin Frobisher, a Yorkshireman, whose zeal and patience were remarkable. He spent fifteen years in fruitless endeavors to get up an expedition to accomplish that object, when he was fortunate enough to secure the patronage of Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The queen and her government took a lively interest in the undertaking, and early in June, 1576, Frobisher sailed from Deptford, on the Thames, with two barks of only twenty-five tons each and a pinnace of ten tons, with the avowed purpose of making the discovery or to die in the attempt. When the little flotilla passed by the palace at Greenwich, the queen, who was watching its movements from an open window, leaned out and waved her hand toward the commander in token of her good-will and a farewell.