[187] The council appear in general to have been as resolute against tolerating the exercise of the catholic religion in any husband the queen might choose, as herself. We find, however, that several divines were consulted on two questions: 1. Whether it were lawful to marry a papist. 2. Whether the queen might permit mass to be said. To which answers were given, not agreeing with each other. Strype, ii. 150, and Appendix 31, 33. When the Earl of Worcester was sent over to Paris in 1571, as proxy for the queen, who had been made sponsor for Charles IX.'s infant daughter, she would not permit him, though himself a catholic, to be present at the mass on that occasion. ii. 171. [188] "The people," Camden says, "cursed Huic, the queen's physician, as having dissuaded the queen from marrying on account of some impediment and defect in her." Many will recollect the allusion to this in Mary's scandalous letter to Elizabeth, wherein, under pretence of repeating what the Countess of Shrewsbury had said, she utters everything that female spite and mistrust could dictate. But in the long and confidential correspondence of Cecil, Walsingham, and Sir Thomas Smith, about the queen's marriage with the Duke of Anjou, in 1571, for which they were evidently most anxious, I do not perceive the slightest intimation that the prospect of her bearing children was at all less favourable than in any other case. The council seem, indeed, in the subsequent treaty with the other Duke of Anjou, in 1579, when she was forty-six, to have reckoned on something rather beyond the usual laws of nature in this respect; for in a minute by Cecil of the reasons for and against this marriage, he sets down the probability of issue on the favourable side. "By marriage with Monsieur she is likely to have children, _because of his youth_;" as if her age were no objection. [189] Camden, after telling us that the queen's disinclination to marry raised great clamours, and that the Earls of Pembroke and Leicester had professed their opinion that she ought to be obliged to take a husband, or that a successor should be declared by act of parliament even against her will, asserts some time after, as inconsistently as improperly, that "very few but malcontents and traitors appeared very solicitous in the business of a successor."--P. 401 (in Kennet's _Complete Hist. of England_, vol. ii.). This, however, from Camden's known proneness to flatter James, seems to indicate that the Suffolk party were more active than the Scots upon this occasion. Their strength lay in the House of Commons, which was wholly protestant, and rather puritan. At the end of Murden's _State Papers_ is a short journal kept by Cecil, containing a succinct and authentic summary of events in Elizabeth's reign. I extract as a specimen such passages as bear on the present subject.