The Tudors for Dummies (AvaxHome Download) (31 page)

other lords ran for cover. In the event, Mary married nobody.

Triggering revolt

The far north of England had a reputation for being difficult, ignoring com-

mands from London and doing their own thing. Thomas Percy, the earl of

Northumberland, and Charles Neville, the earl of Westmoreland, were known

Catholics and owned the lands that ran right up to the Scots Border.

Uniting against Cecil

By 1569 William Cecil was in the driving seat alongside the queen but he was

unpopular for a number of other reasons:

The old nobility regarded him as an upstart (he wasn't Lord Burghley

yet).

Some didn't like the religious settlement that he, as much as Elizabeth,

represented.

Some blamed Cecil for ordering the attack on the duke of Alba's pay ships

at the end of December 1568 (in fact, this had been the queen's idea). Chapter 13: Choosing the Middle Way between Protestants and Catholics 229

In the Council, Norfolk, Northumberland and Westmoreland were conspiring

against Cecil, as was Leicester until he chickened out and confessed all to the

queen (see Chapter 12). Their idea was to stage a protest, get the queen to

kick Cecil out, go back to the Church `as king Henry left it' and perhaps even

name Mary of Scots as Elizabeth's heir.

The earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland were left exposed by the

attack on Cecil. Northumberland had the largest following of any nobleman �

over 200 household servants as well as tenants all over the north who'd been

loyal to his family for generations.

The earl of Sussex, president of the Council of the North, got wind of the

plan and he arranged a meeting with the potential rebels to clear the air. The

peace talks failed, and Sussex asked the Council of the North to appear at

Court in London, they got their people together ready for a fight.

Burning themselves out

As they moved south in mid November, the rebel Earls realised how small

their support base was and desertions increased daily. As with Kett's

Rebellion (flip back to Chapter 8), the rebels weren't happy leaving their own

area and by the time they were within 50 miles of Tutbury in Staffordshire,

where Mary of Scots was being held, the whole movement began to crumble.

By 25 November the rebels were back in Durham and three weeks later

they crossed the border into Scotland. Various noblemen took advantage of

Sussex's arrival to welcome his pursuing army and tell him how loyal they

were to the queen.

The plot within the plot Richard Norton and Robert Tempest were rabid Lords of Congregation). The rebels had around Catholics working for the northern Earls. They 10,000 men and they marched on Durham, took wanted to kick Elizabeth out, replace her with the city and publicly tore up the copies of the Mary of Scots and bring back (yet again!) the Book of Common Prayer in the cathedral. The old faith. They tried to link up with the pope, earl of Sussex, sent north with an army, pro- the duke of Alba and the Catholic Leaguers of claimed them all traitors on 13 November. Scotland (who opposed the government of the

The only skirmish of the rebellion was fought on 20 February 1570 when Lord

Dacre, a disgruntled nobleman who'd just lost his family inheritance, took

on Lord Hunsdon and was defeated. Dacre called himself `Lord of the North',

which was building up his part a bit, and Hunsdon was a member of the Privy

Council and a cousin of the queen. The Scots clansmen who were supposed

to be joining Dacre never materialised and he fled to the Highlands for safety.

Strengthening the Crown

The collapse of the Northern Rebellion proved two things:

Not even the most anti and backward part of the country was willing to

go to the wire against the new religious set-up or the queen.

Philip II wasn't willing to wade in; neither (directly) was the pope.

The failure of the rebellion was good news for Elizabeth, strengthening her

claim to the throne and putting a big tick for success on the first ten years

of her reign. It also, however, prompted the pope to get heavy with his atti-

tude towards Elizabeth and indirectly perhaps sparked off other attempts to

remove the queen permanently (see Chapter 14).

The North was reorganised, the earldoms of Northumberland and

Westmoreland were reduced or abolished and the Dacre inheritance went to

the Crown in 1572. Hundreds of executions took place and the writing was on

the wall for the duke of Norfolk, who went to the block too.

Assessing the Decade: Girl Done Good?

A lot of historians like to divide up long reigns to make sense of them, and

Elizabeth's first decade as queen does stand alone because in 1570, partly

because of Pope Pius's excommunication (see Chapter 14), Elizabeth's

England went in a rather different direction. So how did the queen do in her

first ten years?

She was too slow to get involved in Scotland but what happened there

settled Anglo�Scots relations for the next 40 years.

She shouldn't have encouraged Robert Dudley in the marriage stakes

(see Chapter 12) although in the end this only affected her � and him �

personally and didn't cut much ice with anybody else.

She behaved badly over her marriage: shilly shallying, dipping out, teas-

ing and ignoring � all of this led to the end of the Tudor line.

Backing John Hawkins (see Chapter 12) was a mixed blessing. Yes,

she got a large slice of his profits and broke Philip II's stranglehold on

Spanish/American trade. But she also cranked up the tension levels,

which eventually led to open war with Spain (see Chapter 15). Chapter 13: Choosing the Middle Way between Protestants and Catholics 231

Until 1572 she was generous enough to welcome refugees from the Low

Countries seeking sanctuary in England.

She sat on fences, endlessly delaying on decisions in the hope that prob-

lems would go away.

She seemed obsessed by her father, copying his dominance. Her reli-

gious settlement was based partly on Henry VIII's and partly on brother

Edward's with hardly a glance at the `new' Reformation ideas coming

back with exiles from Europe.

Check out the moment in Young Bess when Jean Simmons strikes the Hans

Holbein pose of Henry VIII � hands on hips and legs thrust defiantly apart.

Three hundred years after the Tudors, the poet Rudyard Kipling wrote `Bess

was Harry's daughter', and he was right.

Historians shouldn't look back with hindsight, but they can't help them-

selves. No one at the time (least of all Elizabeth herself) knew how where

England was headed, but looking back we can see that a lot of her policy

made sense:

If she'd married a European prince, England would have been dragged

into the swamp of European politics and `Englishness' would have been

lost. And giving birth, particularly later in life, carried dangers in a time

of high infant and maternal mortality (see Chapter 1).

Keeping her councillors guessing meant that the queen stayed in con-

trol. Parliament was getting more powerful in Elizabeth's reign (see

Chapter 14) but was nowhere near governing like in today's democracy.

In religion Elizabeth's middle way Church of England upset Catholics

at one extreme and Puritans at the other. The bottom line was that

Elizabeth had to go with her own beliefs and the knowledge that the

majority of her people were very conservative, illiterate and supersti-

tious, and she had to lead gently. The ravings of John Knox (see `Landing

right in it', earlier in this chapter) wouldn't have gone down well in

England.

Most of the criticisms of Elizabeth, whispered in her first decade and mut-

tered more loudly as the years went by, is that she was a woman so was

swayed by female emotions. She should have been married and she should

have been bringing up children, tied to the kitchen sink (even if the sink

was scrubbed by her scullions); leave government to the men. Saying that

Elizabeth was a women's libber isn't right; she was more an honorary man. 232 Part IV: Ending with Elizabeth

Gunning for Elizabeth In This Chapter

Plotting for Mary of Scotland

Lighting the powder keg: Ireland

Posturing with Parliament

Dealing with Puritans

Getting magical with witchcraft

A s Chapter 13 explains, the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign had mixed

reviews. Then, she was feeling her way along while carrying all the

baggage of the earlier Tudors. But between 1570 and 1590 the queen found her

feet and became a legend, even though these were dangerous years � a time of

plots and intrigue, international tension and the rise of two new phenomena �

pushy parliaments and prickly Puritans.

Attempting to Remove Elizabeth

Pope Pius V had been a shepherd in his early life and became grand inquisi-

tor under Paul IV (see Chapter 13). He lived on vegetable soup and shellfish

and wore a friar's hair shirt under his papal robes. He hated Spain, Jews and

heretics and aimed his beady eyes (check out his portrait in the Vatican in

Rome) at the highest profile heretic in Europe � the queen of England.

Pius V published Regnans in Excelsis on 27 April 1570, which told all good

Catholics that they had no need to obey `the English Jezebel'. The papal bull

was virtually a declaration of war.

The Bull caused a conundrum for Catholics, forcing them to choose between

their monarch and their faith:

If you obeyed the pope (as good Catholics should) you couldn't regard

Elizabeth as your lawful queen.

If you obeyed your queen (who, after all, had been put there by God)

you couldn't be a good Catholic. 234 Part IV: Ending with Elizabeth

Those loyal followers of the pope who opted to obey him had a choice of two

ways to get rid of Elizabeth:

Mount a Catholic rebellion � not likely after the attempt by the northern

earls. Most Englishmen of whatever religious persuasion stayed loyal to

her.

Send out hit men to kill her.

The first casualty in this religious war was John Felton, who pinned a copy

of the pope's Excommunication Bull to the bishop of London's palace gates.

Felton was tortured and executed, the first of several martyrs to die in the

cause of removing Elizabeth.

In the meantime, Mary of Scots' adventures in Scotland (see Chapter 13) had

led to her imprisonment in England from 1568, and a number of plots against

Elizabeth were hatched in Mary's name.

In the 16th century the powers that be would usually obtain information about

plots through torture. Not only would this be inadmissible in any Western

court today, but it means we can't rely on the information being true.

Bring back the rack

By the early 16th century barbaric torture con- For the Tudors, the rack was the ultimate torture

traptions had almost disappeared from England, implement. In England it was called the Duke of

but they made a big comeback under the later Exeter's Daughter. Skeffington's Gyves, an iron

Tudors. Only the monarch of the day could hoop that constricted the body and crushed the

allow their use. chest, was popular too.

Margaret Clitherow, a devout Catholic, was Elizabeth's top torturer was Richard Topcliffe,

pressed to death in the Tollbooth, York on the member of Parliament for Beverley in

25 March 1586. She was tied to posts on the Yorkshire. He used the Iron Maiden (a sort of

ground and a stone placed under her back. coffin with spikes on the inside) and strappado

Then her executioners piled stones on top of (hanging people up by their thumbs) as well

her so that her ribs broke and pierced the skin. as thumbscrews in the Marshalsea and Clink

She died in about 15 minutes. prisons in London. It was ironic that Topcliffe

was using the same objects used by the hated

The rack was a frame on which you were tied

Inquisition (see Chapter 10) , which was banned

that stretched until your joints were dislocated.

in England. Chapter 14: Gunning for Elizabeth 235 Plotting with Ridolfi, 1572 Mary of Scotland's first serious attempt to oust Elizabeth took place with the backing of Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine banker living in London. As with all plots before and since Elizabeth's time, it involved very prominent people and was half-baked and high risk.

The Ridolfi Plot involved (in theory) Philip of Spain, the duke of Alba, the pope, the duke of Norfolk, as well, of course, as Mary and Ridolfi himself. The idea was that Alba would land at Harwich on the Essex coast with 6,000 men and march on London. The duke of Norfolk, who'd already been implicated in the Northern Rebellion (see Chapter 13) and was lucky to have kept his head, would grab Elizabeth and a cold war standoff would ensue; the rebels would trade the queen for Mary. Then Mary would marry Norfolk, rule over England and Scotland and restore the old faith, knocking the hated Protestant John Knox off his pulpit and probably having Elizabeth executed.

How much of this version of the plot is based on reality is difficult to say. Norfolk had, for all his dodgy dealings in the north, agreed to Elizabeth's new Church, and the pope put a lot of restrictions on his offer of help and claimed to speak for Philip of Spain, which of course he couldn't.

Ridolfi was his own worst enemy. He shot his mouth off, and Mary's spymas- ter Walsingham (see the nearby sidebar `Enter a spy') intercepted his letters between Mary, Norfolk and the pope and broke their code.

Luckily for him, Ridolfi was out of the country when his plot was discovered, so he just vanished over the horizon and kept going. The duke of Norfolk was less fortunate: he was held in the Tower until 2 June 1572, when he was beheaded on Tower Green.

Norfolk is a rather sadder character than the scheming villain played by Christopher Ecclestone in Elizabeth. All three of his wives had died in child- birth and he may have had some sort of breakdown as a result.

Not only had the plot to remove Queen Elizabeth failed, but from now on her men would watch Mary of Scotland like a hawk.

Dodging the bullet There were several one-off attempts to kill Elizabeth after 1570. In one, the half-mad Welsh spy and traitor William Parry got the queen on her own in the gardens at Richmond Palace and was only prevented from killing her by seeing a sudden resemblance to fellow Welshman Henry VII, the queen's grandfather, in his sovereign's face. Perhaps Parry was more than half mad, but he was executed in 1585 nevertheless. 236 Part IV: Ending with Elizabeth

Enter a spy

The plots against Elizabeth failed largely universities and were licensed to kill on behalf

because of the attention to detail of Francis of the queen � men like Christopher Marlowe

Walsingham, the queen's spymaster. As a 16th- (see Chapter 17). Intelligencers were lesser fry

century `M' (think 007) he employed agents who listened at keyholes and behind curtains,

both in England and in Europe who fed back passing all sorts of useful gossip to their mas-

vital information to him. Projecters were the ters upstairs. Walsingham's intelligence system

rough equivalent of James Bond. They were was probably better than anything run by any

often multi-lingual, had been recruited from the other country at the time.

Elizabeth sometimes slept with a drawn sword by her bed � bearing in mind,

for example, how the Scots had interrupted their queen's supper parties (see

Chapter 13), but she refused to cancel any public appearances. True, she was

always surrounded by courtiers (and the men were always armed), but none

of them could stop a bullet and in Elizabeth's time firearms were improving.

She was once travelling along the Thames in London in the royal barge when

somebody fired at her from the shore. One of her oarsmen was hit in the arm

(goodbye, career!) but she calmly gave him her handkerchief (hello, very flog-

gable present!) to staunch the blood. `Be of good cheer,' she said to the oars-

man, `for you will never want. The bullet was meant for me.'

You didn't actually have to physically attack the queen to feel the rope

in Elizabeth's day. Coining (counterfeiting money) was a hanging offence

because it not only debased the value of the currency � something only the

Government was allowed to do � but it literally defaced the queen. And in 1583

three Catholics were executed in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk because they'd

daubed graffiti on the royal coat of arms in St Mary's Church. Okay, the graffiti

was tasteful � a quote from the Bible � but it equated the queen with the harlot

Jezebel, so goodbye, that's all they wrote.

Plotting with Throckmorton, 1583

The next Catholic conspiracy after Ridolfi's involved Francis Throckmorton

who worked with the clever and dodgy Spanish ambassador Bernardino de

Mendoza.

The idea was pretty old hat really � a rising of English Catholics timed to

coincide with a joint Franco�Spanish invasion. It's not clear how much Mary

of Scots knew about this plot, but Secretart of State Cecil, Walsingham and

the Council were taking no chances. They had Throckmorton watched and

his houses seized and ransacked. The searchers found incriminating evi-

dence (surprise!) and under torture Throckmorton confessed everything. Chapter 14: Gunning for Elizabeth 237

Rooting out Gregory's Jesuits

Plots and rumours of plots came thick and fast during the 1580s, especially

as tensions grew between England and Spain over the Low Countries (today's

Netherlands; see Chapter 15).

In October 1584 Cecil and Walsingham drafted a document called the Bond

of Association, which asked all loyal subjects (in practice, important men) to

pursue plotters to the death and never to back a claim to the throne of anyone

who'd made an attempt on the queen's life. This was clearly aimed at Mary

of Scots. Four months later Parliament agreed a modified version of the Act,

which also got tough with Jesuits (Catholic priests whose mission it was to

win England back to the old faith) and seminary priests, who'd been arriving

in England since 1580.

By 1580 the Pope was Gregory XIII, an ex-lawyer with a bastard son. He

unleashed two Jesuits on England � Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons. A

two-man mission might not seem very impressive, but they led a larger team

and Campion in particular was brilliant at appearing and disappearing at will,

leading the authorities a merry chase.

Campion went north from Dover in Kent through Oxfordshire into the north of

England, while Parsons hit the counties of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.

They held the mass in secret in people's houses and one justice of the peace

complained, `This brood [the Jesuit missionaries] will never be rooted out.' People

were hiding priests in their homes (see the nearby sidebar `The priest holes'.

Walsingham's men were pretty thorough, however. Of an estimated 13-strong

Jesuit mission eventually sent by Pope Gregory, only one, Parsons, got away.

Campion was caught in July 1581 and racked three times before they hanged

him. At his trial at Westminster Hall he was too weak to hold up his hand to

plead and had to be helped. The Council were impressed by his courage � `It

was a pity he was a Papist'.

The priest holes Anybody who lives in an Elizabethan house will In 1592 the Council ordered Richard Brereton, a tell you it once had a priest hole. This is an exag- justice of the peace in Cornwall, to examine `all geration but they certainly existed. Towneley rooms, lofts, studies and cellars, keeping an eye Hall in Burnley, Lancashire once had nine! open for secret and suspicious places'. Priest holes were small spaces, often under

The previous year in Baddesley Clinton in stairs, below floorboards or in toilet crevices,

Warwickshire, ten men hid for four hours in a where nervous householders stashed Jesuits

dank dark pit while their pursuers ransacked on the run.

the floors over their heads. 238 Part IV: Ending with Elizabeth

Plotting with Babington, 1586

This plot involved the Guise family, who were still in Scotland (see Chapter

13), a Franco�Spanish invasion (every good plot has to have one) and a very

silly young gentleman called Anthony Babington.

A Catholic priest, James Ballard, persuaded Babington to send a letter to

Mary of Scots, now imprisoned at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire, to back

the plot that would put her on Elizabeth's throne. It didn't take long for

Walsingham's people to find the incriminating letters smuggled in and out

of the house via beer barrels and the inevitable torture and confessions

followed.

London rejoiced at Babington's execution on 20 September � it was party

time and a specially high gallows was been built on Tower Hill so that the

crowd could have a good view.

Counting the costs of the plots

The cunning plans of the popes, the Jesuits, the disgruntled gentlemen and

the just plain madmen all came to nothing. In fact, they backfired. Elizabeth

became even more popular each time a plot was uncovered. Mendoza, the

Spanish ambassador, was kicked out in January 1584 and wasn't replaced.

And Mary of Scots was shown to be up to her neck in murder attempts on

Elizabeth and the clamour to kill her grew.

What a way to go!

The official method of execution for treason executioner cut through the joints of the victim's

under the Tudors � and it survived until 1820 � arms and legs and horses pulled him in four

was hanging, drawing and quartering. First, the directions.

victim was shown the implements that the exe-