ABSTRACT
The queen's difficulties with her parliaments also continued, though the older problems caused little stir at this time. As has been seen, Morrice's bills of 1593 were the only positive reminder of the old puritan tactics in parliament. Free speech did not again become an issue, but this was because its champion, Peter Wentworth, had discovered another outlet for his furious energies. He picked on the question of the succession, decently interred for some twenty years, but now-he thought-urgent again because the queen was growing old. Wentworth did not stand alone in thinking about the succession-it would be fair to say that few politicians thought of much else as the 1590S drew on-but only he dreamt of bringing it up in parliament. As early as 1587 he became convinced that unless the queen agreed to settle the succession on safely protestant lines, the danger of a catholic claimant would grow potent. He composed his Pithy E~t:hoTtation to her Majesty for Establishing the Succession in which, with his usual freedom of language, he urged the queen to regard the country's interest. Only an unaccustomed touch of caution, or failure to find a printer fool enough, prevented him from publishing the pamphlet. In 1591 his agitation got him into trouble with the council who rewarded his zeal with six months in prison. Baulked out of parliament, Wentworth returned to his proper sphere of action in 1593. But he discovered that his day was past. With much energy and ingenuity he did his best to organise a campaign on the succession issue; yet even Morrice, himself ready to brave the queen's anger on other matters, tried to dissuade him. Nearly thirty years had passed since Norton and his fellows had fought tooth and nail on this issue; if anything, the queen's age made
Wentworth's agitation more reasonable than theirs had been. But no cock crew. His scheming outside parliament during the session constituted a constitutional impropriety-faction making-and the outcome was his last imprisonment in the Tower. There he survived until 1597, undauntedly refusing to give the promise to cease his agitation which would have released him and still writing on the state. Seventy-three years old he died, undefeated and unvictorious, a crotchety nuisance but also a martryr in a cause which a subsequent generation was to understand better. His violence and rigidity had deprived him of real influence in parliament; not only privy councillors thought him a needless complication. But he had raised the issue of free speech to the high pinnacle of principle which it deserved; he had begun the deliberate organisation of opposition; and he had lived and died for his beliefs in a manner which makes him a fit forerunner of the seventeenth-century parliamentarians.
