The Tudors (71 page)

The next pope, Pius IV, announced his intention to reconvene the council almost as soon as he was elected but quickly ran up against complications old and new. Many German states repeated their refusal
to participate and their condemnation of what had been done thus far; the new Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I demanded that an entirely new council be assembled in some city other than Trent; the French continued to complain and to stay away; and there was no possibility of involving Elizabeth’s new regime. When Pius went ahead anyway and the council’s members gathered in Trent early in 1562, the problems persisted. Bishops from France arrived for the first time that November, but their presence was very much a mixed blessing: they tried, though without success, to get the council to reconsider its earlier prohibition of pluralities. Despite much turmoil and intrigue, the nine sessions of this last of Trent’s three periods led to a grand culmination. New decrees laid out rules of conduct for religious men and women of all types and at all levels from cardinals to lay brothers, and it was agreed that every diocese must establish seminaries for the education of its priests. Church doctrine was set forth in detail on subjects ranging from matrimony to the veneration of saints, from purgatory to the necessity of an ordained priesthood. The council even dealt, finally, with the issue that had triggered the Lutheran explosion: indulgences. To the scorn of Protestants, it affirmed the pope’s authority to issue indulgences but ruled that they must never be sold or made conditional on the giving of alms. The council’s last decrees were approved by 215 participants, among whom were six cardinals, three patriarchs (leaders of non-Roman rites that accepted the pope as head of the universal church), twenty-five archbishops, 167 bishops, seven abbots, seven generals of orders, and nineteen absent dignitaries voting by proxy. They closed the council on a note of jubilation, confident that their church had been put on a new course. Through their work that church had repudiated the Reformation conclusively, had explained its doctrines more systematically and comprehensively than ever before, and had made a repetition of the lapses and abuses of recent history all but impossible. Pius IV confirmed the council’s decisions in the year of life that remained to him, put sanctions in place to enforce compliance, and introduced further reforms of his own that would be carried still further by his successors.

From start to finish the council had taken eighteen years and spanned the reigns of five popes. Its members had spent more than four years actively engaged in their deliberations, with much work ongoing between the twenty-five formal sessions. Those who rejected the very idea of a
universal church headed by the bishop of Rome naturally dismissed the results as flawed and exclusive at best, as yet another abomination perpetrated by the Whore of Babylon at worst. Even some within the Catholic community saw the council as an overreaction, one that went too far in giving conclusive answers to difficult questions and made the church too rigidly triumphalist in its claim to be the sole source of religious truth and salvation.

What cannot be doubted is that the council contributed mightily to stopping the unraveling of what remained of Catholic Europe. From the point at which its work was concluded, Protestantism made few geographic gains of any significance. In the four and a half centuries since then, except with limited and short-lived exceptions, the kind of internal disorder that had made the council necessary never recurred. There has never been another pope whom any reasonable person could accuse of moral corruption in the mode of the Renaissance papacy. Almost certainly, Trent made the transformation of England into a thoroughly Protestant nation a more difficult challenge, a bloodier process, than it otherwise would have been.

The Succession, Again

R
eligion was not the only great question pressing in on the new queen. Another, just as thorny in its very different way, cried out for an answer almost from the first day of Elizabeth’s reign. It was a question that, like the future of the church, was resurfacing with undiminished force every time one Tudor monarch died and was succeeded by another. It was the matter of the succession.

At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, as for a long time thereafter, the solution appeared to be matrimony. In the main line of Tudor descent, now that Henry VIII’s only son and elder daughter were in their tombs, no one remained but this one young woman. There were cousins of royal blood, the few living descendants of Henry VIII’s two sisters. But the most senior of these cousins had been born in Scotland and absorbed into the French royal family and was a Roman Catholic, making her suspect in the eyes of many Englishmen and absolutely unacceptable to the evangelicals. The others were the Protestant younger sisters of the late Lady Jane Grey and therefore objectionable, although no more so than Elizabeth herself, to the Catholics. The Tudor family tree remained a worrisomely thin organism, and if Elizabeth were to die childless the result was sure to be confusion and could be civil war. If on the other hand Elizabeth married and had children—at least one son, preferably, to end this awkward business of female rulers—the problem would disappear.

That the queen would follow her sister’s example and take a husband seemed inevitable. To the extent that Mary’s decision had become a source of trouble, the problem lay in her choice of the Spanish Philip. His status as ruler of Spain and the Netherlands and so much else made him an alien in the eyes of many of his wife’s subjects, and not the evangelicals alone. But if Mary had not married Philip, those same subjects would have expected her to marry
someone
. The five years between Mary’s accession and Elizabeth’s did nothing to alter the universal conviction that it was unnatural for any woman not to be subordinate to some man (even nuns were “brides of Christ”), or for a queen to rule alone. Elizabeth herself, though she never forgave John Knox for his attack on
The Monstrous Regiment of Women
, never challenged this belief. She took the position, rather, that though her reign was a departure from the natural order of things, God had permitted it as a necessary means of restoring the gospel in England and preserving the kingdom’s autonomy.

When Elizabeth took the throne she was an attractive young woman, with the fair skin and red-blond hair of the Tudors, her mother’s dark eyes and slim body, and more than a dash of the Boleyn sexual magnetism. The men who dominated her first Privy Council thought themselves to have been blessed by God with a Protestant monarch, and naturally they hoped that she would become the progenitor of a long line of rulers of her religious persuasion. All this focused them on finding a marital answer to the succession question. For Elizabeth, the prospect of marriage was nothing new. As a king’s daughter and the sister of a king and a queen, she had occasionally been in play on the market for royal brides, though in her case even more than in Mary’s, illegitimacy had had a dampening effect on her value. We have seen Philip II, from the time of his arrival in England, protecting Elizabeth as a counterweight to Mary, Queen of Scots. He tried at one point, during his time in England, to marry her to his kinsman Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. Elizabeth herself could see no advantage in such a match: the duke was little better than a displaced person of high distinction, having lost his ancestral lands to France, and he labored under the additional disadvantages of being Catholic and related to the Hapsburgs. Her lack of enthusiasm contributed to keeping the negotiations from getting serious, and shortly after she became queen Philip offered
to marry her himself. She gave him no answer while consolidating her position—getting a new administration up and running, making preparations for her first Parliament. Rather than pressing the issue, Philip betrothed himself to a continental Elisabeth, a fourteen-year-old daughter of the king of France.

In February 1559, just two weeks after Elizabeth’s coronation, a select committee of the House of Commons (it was “select” in the sense of being essentially a creature of the Privy Council) presented her with a formal request that she marry without undue delay. That such a step was taken so early in the reign is a good measure of how important the issue seemed to senior members of the new government. Elizabeth’s not-unfriendly response to this intrusion into an otherwise intensely personal matter demonstrates that she, too, understood the question to be one in which her council, the Parliament, and indeed the nation had a legitimate stake. New candidates for her hand, meanwhile, were soon sending emissaries (and rich gifts) to explore the queen’s availability. Among the suitors were King Erik XIV of Sweden and two young princes of the House of Hapsburg, sons of the emperor Ferdinand I and cousins of Philip of Spain. Efforts were made to arrange for one of the Hapsburg candidates, the archduke Charles, to travel to England, but when Elizabeth would not commit to the betrothal in advance of his visit the project collapsed. The fact that any Hapsburg would be a Catholic was a difficulty but obviously not an insuperable one. What mattered was finding a husband who could save England from being threatened, as seemed possible at this juncture, by an alliance of France and Scotland, or even
Spain
and France and Scotland.

Events with momentous consequences for England were meanwhile taking place in France. King Henry II arranged a lavish celebration both of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis—under which France, Spain, England, and Scotland all were pledging to bring their war-making to an end—and of his daughter’s marriage to Philip II. Henry participated in the jousting that was part of the festivities and suffered a slow, painful death (lingering in agony for ten days) after a sliver from an opponent’s lance entered his eye and exited through his ear. He was succeeded by his eldest son, who took the throne as Francis II. The change proved to have far-reaching consequences in spite—or because, really—of the fact that Francis II was a frail and feeble fifteen-year-old and utterly incapable
of taking charge. His accession meant that his bride of less than a year, Mary Stuart, the queen of Scotland and Catholic heir presumptive to the crown of England, was queen of France as well. Mary, now seventeen years old, had been raised in France while her mother, Marie of the House of Guise, one of France’s most powerful families, remained in Scotland as regent. The bond between France and Scotland grew all the closer as young King Francis fell under the domination of his bride’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and his brother Charles of Lorraine, a cardinal. Both countries were effectively under Guise control.

The contract under which the child Mary Stuart had been betrothed to Francis specified that if the couple had a son he would inherit France and Scotland as a single unified kingdom. For England this was an intolerable prospect, one that lifted the girl Mary to a position of stupendous geopolitical importance. But for Philip the situation was even more ominous: if Mary went on to succeed her cousin Elizabeth—such a development was far from impossible, considering the high mortality of the time and the fact that the queen of Scots was the younger of the two by almost a decade—he would be in grave danger. His Spanish base would be separated from his possessions in the Netherlands by a wall of hostile kingdoms extending from the islands north of Scotland to France’s Mediterranean coast. The English Channel, the nautical highway connecting Spain and the Netherlands, would become a gauntlet lined on both sides by the seaports of his rivals. From Elizabeth’s perspective, Philip’s worries had a brilliantly positive aspect: they meant that Spain, with its vast European and global empire, needed the friendship of England at a moment when she, too, was urgently in need of friends. As long as Mary Stuart remained queen of France, there could be no possibility of a French-Spanish crusade to pull Elizabeth from her throne. As in Mary Tudor’s reign, the existence of Mary Stuart gave Philip all the reason any king could have needed to want Elizabeth to survive.

The French-Scottish union would remain conditional, however, until Mary gave her husband a son. And no such thing was in the cards. Francis II, so unlike the vital and virile grandfather whose name he bore, lost his tenuous grip on life after only a year on the throne, almost certainly without having consummated his marriage. His death broke the power of the Guises over the government of France, and when his ten-year-old brother took the throne as Charles IX, control passed into the hands of
their mother, Catherine de’ Medici. The tall and rather beautiful Mary Stuart found herself an entirely superfluous second dowager queen, no longer wanted at a court that had been her home since childhood but was now dominated by the enemies of her Guise relatives.

Mary had little choice, really, except to return to the one place where she really was queen. But Scotland, too, had recently been convulsed by radical change and was no longer the kind of kingdom that her mother had struggled for years to preserve for her. Marie of Guise, not long after becoming regent, had found herself embroiled in a civil war with a party of Scottish noblemen, the “lords of the congregation,” who were determined to install a Protestant government and establish a Protestant national church. Under the leadership of radical reformers such as John Knox, who had returned from the continent by ship after being denied permission to travel overland across England, evangelicalism had become popular and potent in Scotland’s lowlands. Its adherents seethed with hatred for a Roman church that, long used as a source of spoils by the Scottish elite (King James V, Mary’s father, had secured lucrative bishoprics for several of his illegitimate sons while they were still boys), had descended to levels of corruption never approached in England. Outnumbered and lacking in resources, despised for her foreign origins in spite of being honest, courageous, and by no means a mere agent of her French kinsmen, Marie of Guise had fought a protracted defensive action that might have been successful if not for two strokes of profoundly bad luck. Her health began to decline precipitously—she was dying, probably of heart disease, though still in her early forties—and England abruptly intervened on the side of the Protestant lords.