The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (37 page)

The Act of Uniformity passed in the House of Lords by only three votes. A uniformity in religion for which none of the clergy had voted was imposed upon them. The clergy were bound to use the Book of Common Prayer, and the laity commanded to attend church on Sundays and holy days. Ever severer sanctions were imposed upon those who disobeyed. By law, every man and woman in every parish in England and Wales was to be at prayer, using the same Prayer Book, every Sunday. This was a uniformity easier to order than to impose. Nevertheless, in England this ‘Church by law established’ became the touchstone of stability; an inclusive Church which brought domestic peace and saved it, for the while, from its own religious wars. Yet England’s schism brought other dangers. In the reign of Elizabeth’s father, England had stood on the margin of Europe. Henry VIII had indulged his chivalric martial ambitions confident that the Catholic powers, embroiled in their own quarrels, would not retaliate. But through one terrifying year England had faced the prospect of a Catholic league against her. Now twenty years later, as Elizabeth led England away from Rome again and made England the leading Reformed nation, would another Catholic league assail her? Her watchful councillors believed so.

European wars were now fought for possession of souls as well as for lands and taxes; the struggle against oppression would be for religious as well as other liberties. The lines were being drawn between a perfervid missionary Calvinism and a newly dogmatic militant Catholicism. The General Council of the Church which had been held in the northern Italian city of Trent sat in its final session between 1561 and 1563. In the courts of Europe the nobility fought not for power alone but for the faith, Catholic or Reformed, and urged radical action in political circumstances in which neutrality grew harder to sustain. This was still a cold war, with all its attendant uncertainties. Protestant fears of a universal Catholic conspiracy grew after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis of April 1559, which brought to an end the long war between the greatest Catholic powers, France and Spain (and, incidentally, gave England peace, but peace without glory, without Calais). This novel amity freed Henry II of France to plan his mission against heresy; not
only to suppress the proliferating Calvinist churches in France but also, in time, to wage war against the Calvinists in Scotland, that quasi-French province.

In December 1557 five Scottish magnates had subscribed the first Band of the Lords of the Congregation, a bond – a contract of alliance – and religious covenant ‘to strive in our Master’s [Christ’s] cause, even unto the death’ in order to advance the Protestant cause in Scotland, then deadlocked and isolated. The accession of Elizabeth gave hope to Scotland’s Protestants, but also ended any toleration for them. In May 1559 the Congregation of Christ Jesus, the religious and political community of Scotland’s reformers, led by John Knox, newly returned from exile, promised the French Catholic Regent, Mary of Guise, that the threat to their religion would compel them ‘to take the sword of just defence’. Here was a call to arms; incipient revolution. To the Pope, Henry II pledged religious war against the Scottish heretics. In truth, that war was not only against heresy, not only to protect the Stewart dynasty, whose Queen was newly married to the Dauphin of France, but also to pursue Mary Stewart’s claim to the throne of England. Was not this a Catholic duty? A French invasion of Scotland threatened the return of ‘strangers’ to England, this time through the ‘postern gate’ in the North.

The sudden death of Henry II in July 1559, after a jousting lance pierced one of the eyes with which he had vowed to watch the heretic Anne du Bourg burn, removed the imminent prospect of a Catholic crusade. ‘God shows Himself from heaven,’ rejoiced John Calvin. Ominously, the dying Henry had commended his son the Dauphin to Philip II: a last request which the so-dutiful King of Spain never forgot and could later use to legitimize his interventions in the chaos of France in the name of religion. The death of Henry opened the way for civil war in France because the accession of the boy King Francis II turned the French court into a snakepit of noble feuds. The rival Catholic Guise faction and the House of Bourbon, patrons of Reformed religion, fought for control of Francis II and his second body, ‘the body politic’ of France. The dynastic ambitions of the Guises were limitless: claiming direct descent from Charlemagne, the Duke dreamt of the Crown, while his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, had designs on the papal throne. Their Catholicism was as fervent as their ambition, and their enemies claimed that these ‘thugs of Antichrist’ advanced their tyranny not only to capture the King but also to suppress the Reformed Church. In
turn, the Catholics accused the French Protestant Huguenots of ‘secret practices’ and subversion. Since the Huguenots came to justify resistance to an ungodly prince in God’s name, and to claim that legitimate resistance must be led by the ‘magistrates’, the princes of the blood, the accusations were just. The ‘captive King’ was married to a daughter and niece of the Guises, Mary, Queen of Scots. The royal pair were willing, if hapless, instruments in the Guises’ designs. France, England’s ancient enemy, became more inimical than ever as the Guises denied Elizabeth’s right to the throne and sought to have her declared illegitimate by the papacy. Claiming a third kingdom, the young King and Queen quartered the arms of England with those of France and Scotland.

For Philip of Spain the cause of militant Catholicism was a matter of conscience before expediency. What no one could know in 1559, or later, was how many of the overwhelming resources in men or money of his world empire Philip would invest in the Catholic crusade, which was driven from Madrid and Rome. When Philip left Brussels in his Low Country domains in July 1559 it was for the last time. Thereafter, immured in his palaces around Madrid, he remained the overlord of a Spanish and Catholic empire, ruling, to the simmering resentment of his subject lands, in Castilian interests. Most resentful of all were his subjects in the Low Countries. Down the centuries these provinces had revolted to assert their ancient ‘liberties’ and privileges. They would be forced to do so again, but now they fought in defence of religious, as well as constitutional, freedoms. In 1559 Philip, adjured by the papacy, sought to impose new bishoprics through the Netherlands, in an attempt to undermine local autonomy and to combat heresy. Soon the Dutch began to sacrifice their blood and their purses in what came to be seen as a war against Catholic tyranny, and their cause would become the rallying point for the Protestants of Europe.

England was acutely vulnerable to any disturbance of the status quo in the Low Countries, for her trade and her safety depended upon those maritime provinces and that Channel seaboard. Economic blockade or even invasion remained fearful prospects. Fear of French control of the Netherlands had preoccupied England for centuries, but it was now Spanish domination which threatened. As Elizabeth’s reign began, England and Spain were allies in their war with France. Philip, who had protected Elizabeth from enemies within England during Mary’s reign, now protected her from external threats, including a papal interdict against her. Despite Spanish apprehension that England would revert to
schism, the greater threat was of French conquest of England through Scotland and, by French control of the North Sea and the Channel, French encirclement and conquest in the Netherlands also. This was the nightmare which haunted Philip for years and which held Protestant England and Catholic Spain, for the while, in an ambivalent friendship.

English politics were often driven by events outside the realm as well as within, but Elizabeth found, in the loyalty of her subjects to causes outside the realm, a grave disloyalty to herself. As the struggle between the faiths came to assume cosmic proportions, the supranational obligations which their religious commitments often commended to her subjects might assert a more powerful claim. Most dangerous of all were the enemies within who might find a higher loyalty to enemies without. Any hostile power would patronize malcontents in a rival kingdom: support of a neighbouring kingdom’s rebels might be cheaper and more effective than waging open war. The Queen of England was Queen of Ireland too, but from the first the allegiance of many of her Irish subjects lay elsewhere. In Edward’s reign the Gaelic lords, led by O’Neill, had pledged their support to the French King with whom England was at war. ‘Their quarrel was the maintenance of religion’, the religion of their fathers, so at least they claimed, and in this quarrel ‘they were determined either to stand or to die’. Under a Protestant queen they might well be in the vanguard of any Catholic conspiracy. Already in 1564 a papal agent was sent to fish in these troubled waters.

How would Catholics in England and Wales respond to the second break with Rome? Were they, as they repined and daydreamed of a lost world, waiting for better times or were they working for them? To these questions the most gloomy Protestants found stark answers. There began then that perennial fear among English Protestants of Catholic retribution and plot. In 1563 the House of Commons revealed a visceral hatred of a ‘faction of heretics’ within the realm; ‘contentious and malicious papists’ who ‘lay in wait to advance some title under which they may renew their late unspeakable cruelty’. Memories of Mary’s reign were vivid: ‘their unkindness and cruelty we have tasted’. Although the Catholic people had, almost universally, unquestioningly answered the question of allegiance in favour of the Queen, not Rome, that commitment would be for a long time unknown, untested. The vision of a Catholic restoration was not fantastic, and the fear was that that restoration would come by force and terror. In a world where the religion of the prince was the religion of the people, the forcible reversal
of religion could be accomplished by means only very few could contemplate. ‘We see nothing to withstand their [the Catholics’] desire but only your life,’ so the Commons prophesied alarmingly to Elizabeth. No one knew better than Elizabeth the peril to the monarch of an heir-presumptive of opposed religion, for that was what she had been under Mary. Now her own putative heir, by closest hereditary right, was the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. To her supporters, Mary was the rightful occupant of the English throne and Elizabeth a usurper. From that claim Mary never wavered. Mary’s ambitions, Elizabeth’s virgin state, and the unresolved succession created a permanent political crisis.

For Cecil and others in the Council, whose sense of Catholic conspiracy and threat governed their political thinking, England’s security lay in the creation of a united and Protestant British Isles which could stand alone, ready to resist invaders. Divine providence had set the islands apart from the rest of the world by encircling seas, ‘a little world by itself’. For God’s purpose to be accomplished, England and Scotland must share their island in amity, ending their long wars, and Ireland must be peaceful and Protestant. Lessons had been learnt from Edward’s reign, when the vision of an island defined and united by Protestant religion, sharing a language and culture, had been blighted by the aggressive means of its realization.

Cecil’s constant study of the maps of the three kingdoms made him painfully aware of England’s vulnerability. In Gough’s map of Ireland of 1567 the proximity of Kintyre and Ulster was graphically clear; a strategic advantage if England and Scotland were allied, a source of danger if they were not. Ulster was the ‘very foster mother’ of all rebellions in Ireland and could be used as a bridgehead for invasion. Its coast, and that of Wales and the west of England, lay undefended. England’s boundaries and priorities had changed with the loss of Calais which was, though no one knew it, permanent. England’s southern border was now the sea. Where once England had a territory within France, now France had an enclave within the British Isles, for Mary of Guise was Regent of Scotland and her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, was Queen of France. The Guises looked to extend the power of France and of Rome in Scotland.

In the summer of 1559 the Lords of the Congregation rebelled and appealed in the name of religion to England, Scotland’s old enemy, for
aid against the French. If the Lords failed, the French army sent to put down their revolt might move south to put Mary Stewart on the English throne. Here was a moment of great danger; it was also a great opportunity, which would not come again, to forge a permanent alliance with Scotland. Both prospects were considered, in Cecil’s memoranda to himself and before the Council, in the winter of 1559. By early December Cecil was convinced, and convincing his colleagues, that military intervention on behalf of the rebel Lords was vital. More difficult was to persuade the Queen, who was already averse to grand designs, to a foreign policy predicated upon religion. At first she rejected their advice. Yet faced with the immediacy of the threat, she saw the need for preventive war against France, while never accepting the religious and revolutionary claims of the Lords. In February 1560, in the Treaty of Berwick, England’s claim to superiority and sovereignty over Scotland ostensibly forgotten, English aid was offered without strings. As an earnest of their mutual cooperation, it was agreed that the Earl of Argyll would help to reduce Ulster to obedience. The English army, besieging Leith, was defeated, but the English navy successfully blockaded the Firth of Forth and prevented the arrival of French reinforcements. The Treaty of Edinburgh of July 1560 ensured the departure of French troops from Scotland. The ‘Auld Alliance’ was broken, and the Lords, now governing in Edinburgh, completed the overthrow of the old religion. The remarkable chance for alliance between England and Scotland was disrupted by Mary’s refusal to ratify a treaty she knew that she could not keep (she was not always to be so scrupulous), and by her return to Scotland. In August 1561 she came home, as a widow and dowager Queen of France, for her young husband, Francis II, had died the previous December. She returned to divide, not to rule. English hopes lay, for the while, not in a united Reformed Britain, but in a prospect of two cousin Queens reigning in harmony. This suited Elizabeth, who always gave primacy to a foreign policy founded upon dynastic principles.