Europe: A History (111 page)
The result was four more wars. In 1521–6 the imperialists first attacked French Burgundy, before concentrating on the Italian campaign which ended with Pavia and the Treaty of Madrid (1526). In 1526–9 the Emperor overstretched and disgraced himself, signing the Ladies’ Peace at Cambrai (1529). In 1536–8 and 1542–4 he was embroiled with the Turks and the German Protestants as well as the French, and was constrained to sign the Treaty of Crépy-en-Valois (1544), which created an interval permitting the opening of the Council of Trent, and the long-delayed attack on the Schmalkaldic League. In 1551–9, under Henry II, the French conspired with the German Protestants to occupy the three archbishoprics of Lorraine—Metz, Toul, and Verdun—thereby launching the ‘March to the Rhine’ and a frontier struggle not ended till 1945. (See Appendix III, p. 1281.) The Habsburgs responded in the Low Countries with the occupation of Artois, and with an English alliance that instantly inspired the French to forget their religious differences and to capture Calais (7 January 1558). Mary Tudor, whose proxy marriage to Philip II was the price of this brief Habsburg-Tudor
rapprochement
, exclaimed: ‘When I die, you will find Calais engraved on my heart.’ By the general peace of Câteau-Cambrésis, France kept Lorraine and Calais, the Habsburgs kept Artois, Milan, and Naples. England was shut out of the Continent for good. The main issue was postponed, not solved.
[NOSTRADAMUS]
The British Isles
, increasingly dominated by the English, were taken closer to the unification which had beckoned once or twice already. Having lost its foothold on the Continent, the Kingdom of England turned its energies into the affairs of its immediate neighbours and into overseas ventures. A typical composite polity of the era, consisting of England, Wales, and Ireland, it lacked the national cohesion which Scotland already possessed. But under the Tudors it manifested great vigour. Notwithstanding the religious conflicts of the age, Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) and his three children—Edward VI (r. 1547–53), Mary I (r. 1553–8), and Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603)—created the Church of England, the lasting symbiosis of monarchy and Parliament, and the Royal Navy.
[BARD]
The Stuarts, who had ruled in Scotland since 1371, accepted the Personal Union of Scotland and England (1603) after the Tudors ran out of heirs. They had much to gain. Deceived by its Continental alliances, Scotland had lived in England’s shadow since the bloody disaster of Flodden Field (1513). Anglo-Scottish relations were badly shaken by the intrigues of the deposed Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87), who died on an English scaffold. But Mary’s son, James I and VI (r. I567(1603)–1625), succeeded by general consent to the inheritance which had
escaped his mother. He, his son Charles I (r. 1625–49), and his grandson Charles II (r. 1649(60)–85), ruled from Holyrood and from Whitehall in parallel. James I talked to his first Parliament at Westminster of
NOSTRADAMUS
T
HE
royal summons arrived at Salon in Provence early in July 1556. The Queen of France, Marie de’ Medici, wished to speak to the author of a book of prophecies published the previous year. One of its verses appeared to predict the death of the Queen’s husband:
Le lion jeune le vieux surmontera
(The young lion will overcome the older one)
En champ bellique par singulier duelle
.
(In a field of combat, in single fight.)
Dans caige d’or les yeux lui crevera
.
(He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage.)
Deux classes une, puis mourir, mort cruelle
.
(Two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.)
1
Within a month, speeded by royal horses, the author was ushered into the Queen’s presence at St Germain-en-Laye. He calmed her fears by saying that he saw four kings among her four sons.
But three years later King Henri II was killed in a tournament. The splintered lance of his opponent, Montgomery, Captain of the Scottish Guard, had split the visor of the King’s gilded helmet, piercing eye and throat, and inflicting wounds which caused death after ten days of agony.
Michel de Nostredame (1503–66), called Nostradamus, was well known in the Midi as an unconventional healer. He came from a family of Jewish
conversos
at St Rémy-en-Provence, and had graduated in medicine at Montpellier. He was learned in potions and remedies, concocting an elixir of life for the Bishop of Carcassonne and a diet of quince jelly for the Papal Legate. He worked in plague-stricken Marseilles and Avignon when all other doctors had left, refusing to bleed patients as was customary, and insisting on fresh air and clean water. More than once, as a suspected wizard, he attracted the notice of the Inquisition and fled abroad. On one such journey in the 1540s he is said to have met a young Italian monk and former shepherd, Felice Peretti, whom he addressed without hesitation as ‘Your Holiness’. Forty years later, long after Nostradamus’s death, Peretti was elected Pope as Sextus V.
The prophecies of Nostradamus were composed late in life with the help of magical, astrological, and cabalistic books. They were written in quatrains and organized in centuries. They were published in two parts, in 1555 and 1568, and were an immediate sensation. One year after their full publication, Marie de’ Medici’s eldest son, King Francis II, husband to Mary Queen of Scots, died suddenly at the age of 17 years, 10 months, and 15 days:
Premier fils, veuve, malheureux mariage
(The first son, a widow, an unhappy marriage)
Sans nul enfant; deux isles en discorde
,
(Without children; two islands in discord,)
Avant dixhuit incompetant eage
(Before eighteen years of age, a minor)
De l’autre prés plus bas sera l’accord
.
(Still younger than the other will be betrothed.)
2
In that same year the youngest brother, later Charles IX, aged 11, was betrothed to an Austrian princess.
This posthumous success ensured the reputation of the Prophecies for all time. They have been endlessly reprinted, and applied to almost every known event, from submarines and ICBMs to the deaths of the Kennedys and men on the moon. Nostradamus correctly named the family Saulce, where Louis XVI lodged during the flight to Varennes. He convinced both Napoleon and Hitler, who figures as ‘Hister’, that their careers had been foreseen in the stars. The quatrains are wonderfully suggestive and obscure, and can be made to fit all manner of coincidences. But many come too close for comfort:
Quand la licture du tourbillon versée
(When the litters are overturned by whirlwind)
Et seront faces de leurs manteaux couvers
(And faces will be covered by cloaks)
La République pars gens nouveaux vexée
(The Republic will be troubled by new people.)
Lors blancs et rouges jugeront
á
l’envers
.
(At that time, Whites and Reds will rule inside out.)
3
In 1792 the Republic did arrive in France, and the Reds did overturn the Whites.
And, as a short description of life in the twentieth century, the following is uncanny:
Les fléaux passées diminue le monde
.
(Plagues extinguished, the world becomes smaller.)
Long temps la paix terres inhabitées:
(For a long time, there is peace in empty lands.)
Seur marchera par ciel, terre, mer et onde;
(People will walk safely by air, land, sea, waves.)
Puis de nouveau les guerres suscitées
.
(Then again wars will be stirred up.)
4
BARD
S
HAKESPEARE
wrote his plays in the short interval after post-Reformation England had severed her direct links with the Continent but before she had acquired an overseas empire. His main dramas were written in the same decades when the first English colonies were being founded in America. His voice was to reign supreme in the English-speaking world, and, as far as one knows, he never set foot outside England. The universality of his genius would not be generally recognized in Europe until the Romantic era.
Yet the settings of the plays suggest that the Swan of Avon was in no way a Little Englander. He may even have been a secret Catholic. The Tudor censorship may well have inhibited politically sensitive material. Yet of thirty-seven titles, only ten were set in whole or in part in England; and the historical series has a strong admixture of French locations.
The Merry Wives
is set in Windsor,
As You Like It
in the Forest of Arden. The three dark stories of
Macbeth, King Lear
, and
Cymbeline
are placed in ancient Celtic Britain; and eight classical dramas in Athens, Rome, Tyre, or Troy. The fantastic fables of
Twelfth Night, A Winter’s Tale
, and
The Tempest
unfold in a mythical Illyria, in a sea-girt Bohemia, and on ‘an uninhabited island’. But the rest are manifestly Continental:
| | Much Ado About Nothing | Messina | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Athens |
| | The Merchant of Venice | Venice | Romeo and Juliet | Verona |
| | The Taming of the Shrew | Padua | Hamlet | Denmark |
| | Measure for Measure | Vienna | Othello | Venice |
| | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Navarre | All’s Well that Ends Well | Roussillon Paris, Marseilles Florence |
The countries which Shakespeare avoids are Ireland, Russia, which was barely known, Poland, except for passing references in
Hamlet
, Germany, and England’s prime enemy in his day, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands.
As for where exactly these countries lay, Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, was in two minds. Sir John Falstaff wanted to describe himself as ‘the most active fellow in Europe’. But Petrucchio, wooing the Shrew, calls her ‘The prettiest Kate in Christendom’.
1
‘Christendom’ and ‘Europe’ were still virtually interchangeable.
England and Scotland now in the… fullness of time united… in my Person, alike lineally descended of both the Crowns, whereby it has now become like a little World within itself, being fortified round about with a natural, and yet admirable, pond or ditch …
The integration of the dependent principalities did not proceed so smoothly. Wales, which was shired by Henry VIII, entered the community of English government without demur. The Anglo-Welsh gentry were reasonably content with their lot. But Ireland, whose parliament had virtually broken free of English control since the Wars of the Roses, was only reined in with difficulty. In 1541— after both the Church of England and the counties of Wales had come into being in 1534—Henry VIII declared himself ‘King of Ireland’. He was storing up trouble for his successors. The policy of turning Irish chiefs into Earls and Barons was little more than a palliative, especially when Irish customs and language were curtailed. Resentment against the Crown was soon mixed with resentment against the Protestant Reformation, fuelling a series of revolts. The Nine Years’ War, 1592–1601, was waged round the Ulster Rising of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. It closed amidst the devastating reprisals of Queen Elizabeth’s lieutenant, Lord Mountjoy, who removed the distinction between the Pale and the native lands, abolished Irish law, and started a policy of systematic colonization. A prosperous decade of reconciliation in the 1630s under the Earl of Strafford was to be followed by a further insurrectionary decade in the 1640s, when the Irish profited from England’s troubles to introduce religious toleration and an independent parliament. Ireland was brutally conquered by Cromwell in 1649–51, and effectively annexed. (See Appendix III, p. 1279.)
[BLARNEY]
England’s power and prosperity were visibly on the increase, not least through its oceanic adventures. The new colony in Ulster was largely peopled by Scots Presbyterians, seeking the same sort of refuge offered by the English colonies across the Atlantic, in Virginia and New England. The foundation of Maryland (1632) was followed by Jamaica, which was seized from Spain in 1655, the Carolinas (1663), New York, formerly Dutch New Amsterdam (1664), and New Jersey (1665). The Navigation Act of 1651, passed by Cromwell’s Rump Parliament in the aftermath of Dutch independence, insisted, among other things, that Dutch ships salute the English flag. It was a sign of England’s growing arrogance.
Scotland was the scene of bitter religious and political conflicts which eventually provoked the ‘British Civil Wars’ of the mid-seventeenth century. Knox’s Presbyterian Kirk had been founded on the Genevan model, and was designed by its Calvinist founders as a theocracy. But a resentful court party repeatedly trimmed its aspirations. In 1572, the year of Knox’s death, a regent forced the Kirk to accept bishops, thereby causing ceaseless strife between Church and State. In 1610, to safeguard the apostolic succession, James VI had three Scottish bishops consecrated by their English counterparts. In 1618 he imposed his five Articles,
which insisted on a number of practices such as kneeling at communion. At each step he suspended the General Assembly of the Kirk until it submitted, thereby arousing intense popular anger. In 1637 Charles I imposed a modified version of the Anglican liturgy and prayerbook. He did so by personal order, and without reference to a General Assembly, and sparked a rebellion. When the liturgy was first introduced at St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh on 23 July, it caused a riot. In due course it led to the formation of ‘the Tables’, a revolutionary committee of all estates, and in February 1638 to the signing of ‘the Covenant’. The covenanters recruited an armed league which was sworn, Polish-style, to defend its statutes to the death. They sought to protect the Presbyterian Kirk from the King and bishops and Scotland from the English. They were soon claiming the allegiance of all true Scotsmen, and set up a parliament without royal warrant. In August 1640 the first of several armies of covenanters crossed the Tweed, and invaded England.
