The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (46 page)

In 1577 John Dee, the mathematician, magician and theorist of empire, had in his
General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation
illustrated the Queen at the helm of the imperial ship Europa. His hope was that she would seize the chance to establish a Protestant British empire. Yet if Elizabeth was the pilot, no one was sure which course she had set. In hope also, the godly lauded Elizabeth as ‘the woman clothed with the Sun’ from the Book of Revelation, but it was evident that she did not share the evangelical enthusiasms of her advisers; indeed she grew violently impatient with them. In 1578 a puritan divine saw the deaths of the godly bishops Pilkington, Jewel and Parkhurst as signs portending the end of the world, and, ominously, with each new appointment to the episcopal bench – Aylmer, Freke, Piers, Young, Whitgift (especially Whitgift) – the Supreme Governor signalled reaction. The elevation of Edmund Grindal, a fervent reformer and former exile, to the see of Canterbury in December 1575 had soon come to seem aberrant. Elizabeth, always likely to see the disruptive rather than the evangelical possibilities of preaching, thought that three or four preachers sufficed for a shire. This was held to be dereliction in a godly Queen, and the lack of evangelical progress in her reign was, so Grindal told her, ‘lamentable’.

The war between reaction and further reform came soon, when battle was joined over the issue of ‘prophesyings’ self-help groups among local clergy for the exegesis of scripture. These had caused excitement in the shires, revealing the chasm between the godly and the rest, as radical clergy, excluded from the Church, dared to discuss matters political as well as divine, and lay people listened. After disquieting reports in the summer of 1576, Elizabeth determined to end them. Charged to violate his evangelical principles, Grindal responded with a
challenge to the Queen from which his victory could be only moral: he must choose, so he told her, ‘rather to offend your earthly majesty than to offend against the heavenly majesty of God’. In May 1577 he was suspended and sequestered, never to be restored. The Queen willed no less than the deprivation of her archbishop. Should her will prevail, so the puritan Sir Francis Knollys warned, then ‘up starts the pride and practice of the papists’; ‘King Richard the second’s men’ (the archetypal flatterers of the tyrant) ‘will flock into court apace’. The disgrace of Grindal was cause and consequence of a bitter and growing rift at Elizabeth’s court.

England’s godly saw terrible dangers at home and abroad as international Catholicism grew more menacing. While lamenting the paucity of England’s support for the common cause of religion, they acknowledged that she had done enough to fear retribution. They saw Spain’s seeming friendship as treachery: the Queen was seduced by ‘Spanish compliments’ while their ‘secret practices’ ripened. In a world devoted to horses, the dangers of ‘unbridled’ Spanish power were explained in equestrian metaphor: ‘The Spanish jennet champs on her cakebread snaffle.’ In France, Henry III had succeeded Charles IX in 1574. Guided variously by his mother Catherine de Medici (‘the Jezebel of her age’, according to Philip Sidney), the Guises, and Philip II, he supported the drive to extirpate the Protestant Church. Scotland, always a potential passage to England’s destruction, had been safe through most of the 1570s under the regency of James Douglas, Earl of Morton, but in the spring of 1578 he was overthrown. Whether Scotland’s future lay with Protestant England or Catholic France lay once more in the balance. Still in custody, Mary, Queen of Scots dreamt of marriage to Don John of Austria, the brilliant victor of the sea battle of Lepanto against the Turks, and from 1576 Governor-General of the Netherlands.

The Netherlands remained the focus of the hopes and fears of the Protestants of England and Europe. Holland and Zeeland had pursued their revolutionary course under the leadership of William of Orange, but by the autumn of 1575 the cause was in great danger. Attempts to bring peace between Spain and the rebel provinces had failed, and now, without aid, the Netherlands would be prey to France or Spain. Only the Queen failed to see the gravity of the threat or the greatness of the chance; a chance which would not come again, said the prescient. The Netherlands’ danger was England’s danger; their defence, England’s defence, so insisted Orange and the Queen’s advisers, as they looked on
the growing power of Spain. But Elizabeth always baulked at openly aiding her Spanish ally’s rebels and at spending money she did not have. In 1575 she proscribed Orange and his supporters. It was said she ‘meaneth not to be a dealer’. In January 1576, in a fury of indecision, she boxed the ears of her gentlewomen and locked herself in her Privy Chamber away from the clamour of her councillors. Always preferring diplomacy to war, she sent ambassadors instead of the men and money needed.

Yet the course of the revolt changed in 1576 just when Spanish victory in Zeeland seemed certain. A reign of terror by mutinous, murderous Spanish troops, demanding ‘Gelt, gelt’ from a bankrupt Spain, created an uneasy alliance between the rebel provinces of the north and the loyalists of the south, a union made formal by the Pacification of Ghent in November 1576, which followed the apocalyptic Spanish fury when the troops laid waste Antwerp and massacred thousands. The States General, composed of mostly reluctant revolutionaries, convened itself and became the central organ of government of a united Netherlands. In January 1577 Don John of Austria signed the Perpetual Edict of Peace with the States, which was intended to restore the old religion throughout the Netherlands. William of Orange never consented to it, and Don John kept it, not perpetually but only for six months. There could be neither unity nor peace where Reformed religion and Catholicism could not coexist.

Orange, born great and with greatness thrust upon him, was recognized as the
pater patriae
, now leader of patriots not desperadoes. Between themselves, Elizabeth’s advisers compared his Stoic constancy with the irresolution of their Queen, a failing they thought intrinsic to her ‘womanly’ nature. Her endless ‘stays and resolutions’, her uncertainty – ‘sometimes so, sometimes no’ – vitiated her actions and their counsel and led them to weary despair. By the late summer of 1577 her leading councillors, even cautious, circuitous Burghley, united in insisting that she intervene in the Netherlands and keep Orange ‘in heart and life’. In St Paul’s – London’s talking shop as well as cathedral – all ‘honest men’ urged aid to the Dutch. At last the Queen was persuaded to send an expeditionary force under Leicester. She gave her promise. And she broke it. In January 1578 Don John, ignoring the paper peace, routed the States’ army. It was a desperate moment for the cause. Surely the Queen would not leave the Dutch ‘in the briars’. She would. She did. As before, she chose the security of mediation, of delay, of doing nothing,
or almost nothing, to action. When she did send troops they were under the command of Duke John Casimir of the Palatinate (in what was, for Leicester, the unworthy stead of himself). Elizabeth’s betrayal drove Orange to do as he had warned; to ally in August 1578 with the French in the dubious person of Francis, Duke of Anjou (formerly Duke of Alençon). Early in 1579, with the Protestant Union of Utrecht in January (which committed the rebel provinces to fight for total victory against Spain) and the Catholic Union of Arras in May (which recognized the full authority of Philip II), the Netherlands were divided; divided forever, when England’s aid might, just might, have kept them united.

At this despairing moment, with ‘all the world’ her enemies at once, something surprising was going on in that uncertain centre of policy which was the royal mind. Determining to be the Virgin Queen no longer, Elizabeth chose the worst suitor in Europe; the faithless, feckless Duke of Anjou, his reputation as blemished as his pock-marked face. The Catholic heir-presumptive to the French throne, half the Queen’s age – she was forty-five – was nowhere trusted; not in France, not in England. Slowly it dawned on Elizabeth’s councillors that this suit, which had been so repellent to her in 1572, was by 1578 no dalliance. Hers was the policy; hers the pursuit. Supported by Burghley and Sussex, she saw only the advantages: marriage to Anjou was a way of ending England’s diplomatic isolation and present danger, a means of asserting control over France by diplomacy and of finding protection against an increasingly aggressive, aggrandizing Spain. Elizabeth believed that she could use Anjou to contain Spanish reconquest in the Netherlands, while also preventing him from annexing them for France, or for himself. She might even ensure the succession by bearing an heir. Diplomatic imperatives gave way to emotional ones as she committed herself to this courtship, which would be her last. Early in 1579 the court watched in horror Elizabeth’s romantic raptures with Simier, Anjou’s agent, ‘Monsieur’s chief darling’. In August Anjou, the original ‘frog he would a-wooing go’, arrived in unprepossessing person.

The marriage proposal divided the court and Council, and threatened to divide the politically aware among the nation. Many saw only danger in the marriage to a ‘stranger, a born enemy’. While Elizabeth lived, English interests would be subordinate to French; she would be drawn not into a Protestant but a Catholic league. Should she die – which was only too likely if, at her age, she did conceive a child – the Catholic Anjou might share the English throne with Mary Stewart. Once king of
France, Anjou would rule England through a viceroy as a French province. This marriage, so the godly feared, must be ‘the overthrow of religion’. Memories of the persecution which followed Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip of Spain and of the ‘massacring marriage’ at Paris haunted Protestant minds. The prospect of the match was not quite unspeakable, for some dared speak out. For his pamphlet
The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed
, John Stubbs had his right hand cut off before a silent, horrified, crowd. Philip Sidney wrote warning Elizabeth against marriage to a stranger. Behind Sidney’s quarrel that month with the malignant 17th Earl of Oxford, ostensibly over precedence on the tennis court, there lay more than wounded pride and personal loathing, for Sidney spoke for the forward Protestants to whom the Queen would not listen, and Oxford was part of the ‘faction then reigning’ of Catholic and crypto-Catholic noble malcontents, who told her what she wished to hear. The brilliant and unquiet Lord Henry Howard now dared to joke of his favour at court in the sacred terms of ‘the chosen’ and ‘reprobation’. That autumn Elizabeth thought of introducing four Catholics into the Council. Leicester had seen the hopes of the ‘papists’ rising; they were ‘upon their tiptoes’, never in such ‘jollity’ since Queen Mary’s days.

The marriage proposal revealed the distance between Elizabeth and her Council. Leicester, who had most to lose by the match, had remarried secretly in 1578. When Elizabeth discovered this from his enemies she banished him in fury. The Queen could justly protest that the Council, having always urged her to marry, were now thwarting her when she at last acceded. Without their support she could not act, and by the end of 1579 she tearfully bowed to this new exigency. She understood the extent of her power, the force of her will, but now learnt their limits. She had resisted the image of Protestant champion which her godly people wished upon her, but dared not tarnish it by so unpopular a marriage.

The fiction of negotiations for the marriage was not yet abandoned. In October 1580 Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, the brilliant successor to Don John as Governor-General of the Spanish Netherlands, contemptuously described Elizabeth’s proceedings as ‘the weaving of Penelope’. She undid every night what was done the day before; and all with no conclusion, save to weary her councillors, and lose the trust of anyone who dealt with her. Yet the need for alliance with a great power was now compelling. England and the rest of Europe watched impotently
as Philip annexed the Portuguese throne. ‘How idly we watch our neighbours’ fires,’ lamented Philip Sidney. In Scotland, the ‘postern gate’ was open once again to England’s enemies, for the powerful and personal hold of the Guise emissary Esmé Stewart, Sieur d’Aubigny, over the young King James VI augured the renewal of the reactionary Catholic ‘auld alliance’. In the face of these threats, the Anjou match began to find support even among its inveterate enemies as the only way to security. In the summer of 1581 Walsingham was sent to Paris with an impossible task: to secure an offensive-defensive league against Spain, but to avoid the marriage which would alone secure it. The French fear was that without the marriage Elizabeth would ‘slip the collar’ and leave France to fight Spain with herself as spectator. Henry III could be persuaded neither of their common danger nor of Elizabeth’s good faith. As the negotiations failed, Walsingham dared to tell her that there was not a councillor who did not wish himself in the ‘farthest part of Ethiopia’.

The Protestant nightmare of a militant Catholic league of ‘mighty potentates that have bent themselves against God’ did not go away. How could it when Parma seemed set to reconquer the Netherlands for Spain and for Rome? Yet English Protestants in the 1580s looked to the enemy within. The ‘cold-starved papists’ had been disappointed in their hopes of royal favour at the time of the Anjou match, but they might find salvation elesewhere. Catholics claimed that their religion was no treason. ‘We travelled only for souls; we touched neither state nor policy,’ insisted Campion at Tyburn. But his fellow Jesuit, Persons, turned to more sinister methods. In Paris in May 1582, Persons conspired with the Duke of Guise, the papal nuncio, Mary Stewart’s ambassador and William Allen to plan an ‘enterprise’ – the invasion of England through Scotland. Accepting that the assassination of Elizabeth was the logical preliminary to the accession of Mary, Queen of Scots, Persons had begun to work towards it. That plan was aborted when in the Ruthven Raid of August 1582 the Earls of Gowrie and Mar kidnapped James VI in order to rescue him from the malign influence of Esmé Stewart, and Stewart retreated to France. Another ‘practice’ was conceived. In November 1583 Francis Throckmorton, a Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire was betrayed and arrested. Papers discovered in his study, and confessions extracted upon the rack, provided evidence of a treasonable conspiracy for invasion. Lists of English Catholic sympathizers were uncovered, among them the Earls of Northumberland and
Arundel and the malcontent Lord Henry Howard, who was a pensioner of the King of Spain. The plots were revealed in time by a surveillance network of spies and agents controlled by Walsingham. Men who had once been Catholics themselves knew best how to watch, infiltrate and suborn. Walsingham’s turned men stalked the conspirators, but they could not know them all. To kill a queen only needed one assassin, one accurate dagger or bullet.