Heretic Queen (45 page)

The potential solution came too late. Elizabeth was already ailing. At the beginning of March 1603, she took a turn for the worse. The sixty-nine-year-old Elizabeth, queen for over forty-four years, was dying. She had stood at her privy chamber window embrasure for two solid days, refusing food, running her index finger along her sore gums, staring blankly. Worn out by the burdens of office and age, disappointed by the loss of all those who had died before her, and stricken by the execution of Essex forced upon her, Elizabeth had simply given up the will to live.

In the gray morning hours of Thursday, March 24, 1603, Tudor England expired with Elizabeth. Too weak to name her successor, she pointed her hand to her head and nodded as the name of James VI of Scotland was read out by Sir Robert Cecil. James VI of Scotland, the only child of Mary Queen of Scots, was duly proclaimed James I of England. Satisfied, Elizabeth Tudor finally allowed herself to slip away.

 

TWENTY-SIX

Epilogue

The King of Scotland has succeeded quietly.

—Venetian ambassador to the doge

James VI of Scotland, now James I of England, waited until after Elizabeth's state funeral to make his progress into England. With him came his Danish wife, the daughter of Frederick II, Queen Anne, and his son and heir, Prince Henry. His younger son, Charles, remained at home in Scotland for the time being. Two months earlier, Father Henry Garnet, who had been the soul of the Jesuit mission to England since 1586, had written to James assuring England's new king that he would never have cause to distrust his fellowship or the Jesuits' “love, fidelity, duty and obedience.”
1

On April 19, 1603, James rewarded Thomas Gerard, Father John's brother, for the family's loyalty to his mother and bestowed a knighthood on him. Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Howard, heir to the executed Duke of Norfolk, were sworn in to James's Privy Council at Whitehall later that month. The Venetian ambassador wrote to the doge in Venice that “the King continues to support those houses … who were oppressed by the late Queen.” William Weston, the former Jesuit superior, and other captured Jesuit priests were released from their captivity. There had been every reason for the Catholic population to hope for a new era of future royal favor.
2

James saw a wealthy realm in England, impoverished by years of religious war. If only the Catholic population had known before he became king that he had written to Sir Robert Cecil, “Jesuits, seminary priests, and that rabble where England is already too much infected … I would be glad to have both their heads and their bodies separate from this whole land, and safely transported beyond seas.”
3
James wanted peace, but he wanted the riches England could provide him with more.

*   *   *

Sir Robert Cecil
would be the man to give these to him. Cecil maintained his iron grasp on government until his death in 1612, having been elevated to Earl of Salisbury in May 1605. It was to Salisbury that Lord Mounteagle brought word of a plot to blow up the houses of Parliament in October 1605, later known as the Gunpowder Plot. William Shakespeare had lampooned Cecil in 1593 when he wrote his
Richard III
using the Tudor myth of Richard's deformity and molding it to Cecil. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, died a hated, avaricious man, whose epitaphs proclaimed, among other things, that he had gone to hell to raise the devil's rent. Nonetheless, Cecil's great achievement was the arrangement of the smooth transition from Tudor to Stuart England.

Raleigh had remained Cecil's steadfast enemy and was imprisoned in the Tower for high treason against the new king, his lands confiscated in Virginia as well as Ireland, for allegedly plotting to put Arbella Stuart on the throne. Only the pleading of Queen Anne and Prince Henry succeeded in saving Raleigh's life—for a time. During his many dreary years in the Tower of London, Raleigh wrote his great work
History of the World
and some of his best poetry, including “The Lie.” Desperate to find his freedom, he promised James that he would locate the fabled golden El Dorado. James allowed him one final chance to find America's riches. When Raleigh failed, he returned to England a broken man, ready for the executioner's block. As he readied himself for the ax to fall, he famously said, “'Tis a sharp remedy, but a sure one for all ills.”

Cecil's cousin Francis Bacon, who had betrayed the Earl of Essex, went on to become a great Stuart statesman who by 1621 had risen to become Lord Verulam, Viscount St Albans. His dream of becoming Lord Chancellor was fulfilled in 1618.

The schisms in both the Protestant and Catholic faiths grew. The self-imposed exiles like the Brownists of Elizabethan England had returned from Leiden in the Netherlands from a lifetime abroad, hoping for a new start in Stuart England. James was not prepared to grant one. So these Puritan separatists, better known today as the Pilgrim Fathers, chartered a 180-ton merchant ship, the
Mayflower
, from a London merchant adventurer and sailed for the colony of “Northern Virginia” in Massachusetts Bay in 1620. Only thirty-seven colonists were “Leiden Separatists,” with sixty-five additional passengers and crew seeking a life free from religious intolerance in the New World.

James's “transportation policy” for Catholics originally intended for Northern Virginia was moved farther south. During the reign of James's heir, Charles I, Lord Baltimore, founded the “great city” of Baltimore as a Catholic enclave promoting Catholic ideals. The state of Maryland was named after Charles's queen, Henrietta Maria, the youngest child of Henry IV of France.

*   *   *

The Catholic plea
for toleration in England never faded. Peace was finally declared with Spain in 1604 at the Conference at Somerset House. The Catholics were betrayed not only by James but also by Spain. Economic imperatives at last took precedence over saving souls. Angered at their betrayal, a small group of men agreed that the only way to be rid of such traitorous leaders was to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the terror plot known as the Gunpowder Plot.
4

By the end of the seventeenth century, it became illegal in statute for the reigning monarch to be Catholic after James's grandson, James II, was deposed. England preferred to import other distant and Protestant Stuart cousins, William III and Mary II, from the Netherlands as its rightful monarchs. The religious tensions rumbled on well into the twentieth century.

Is it possible that Elizabeth thought that a Stuart dynasty might be an untrustworthy and dangerous one for the English? Unfortunately, we shall never know. Still, James was the best choice for her successor. Just as religion haunted Elizabeth from the outset of her reign in 1558, so did the issue of the succession. It was a Tudor curse established in the reign of Henry VIII and laid to rest in Elizabeth's.

*   *   *

In her Golden Speech
to Parliament on November 30, 1601, Elizabeth expressed her lifelong ambition for the legacy of her rule: that she had been God's “instrument to preserve you from envy, peril, dishonour, shame, tyranny, and oppression.”

That is how she would have liked to be remembered.

 

NOTES

Abbreviations

Prologue: The Sacrificial Priest

    
1
. James A. Galloway, Derek Keene, and Margaret Murphy, “Fuelling the City: Production and Distribution of Firewood and Fuel in London's Region, 1290–1400,”
Economic History Review,
n.s., 49, no. 3 (August 1996): 447–72. Oliver Rackham,
The Illustrated History of the Countryside
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 32–45.

    
2
. Norman Jones, “Living the Reformations: Generational Experience and Political Perception in Early Modern England,” in “The Remapping of English Political History, 1500–1640,” ed. A. J. Slavin, special issue,
Huntington Library Quarterly
60, no. 3 (1997): 273–88.

    
3
. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds.,
The London Encyclopaedia
(London: Papermac, 1983), 789–90. The quote “rich and strange” comes from Ariel's song to Ferdinand in Shakespeare's
The Tempest
(act 1, scene 2).

    
4
. Lacey Baldwin Smith, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
15, no. 4 (October 1954): 471–98.

    
5
.
CSP, Domestic, Mary
, no. 140.

    
6
.
CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary
, ed. W. Turnbull (1861), undated letter thought to be late August 1553, 2: 196.

    
7
. Linda Porter,
Mary Tudor: The First Queen
(London: Portrait, 2007), 280.

    
8
. For further information on Elizabeth's imprisonment in the Tower and later at Woodstock, please refer to Lord Bedingfield's “Articles” on his custodianship of the princess in “State Papers Relating to the Custody of the Princess Elizabeth,” ed. C. R. Manning (Norfolk: Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 1855).

    
9
. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Warwick, had seized power from Somerset during King Edward VI's minority and had been behind the disinheritance of Mary and Elizabeth in the succession. Lady Jane Grey, aged only seventeen, had been married off to Northumberland's son Guildford, to ensure that the duke would retain his position as the right hand of the monarch.

  
10
.
ODNB,
“John Rogers.”

  
11
. David Knowles,
The Religious Orders in England,
vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 421.

  
12
. Part of the battleground between the Vatican and the Protestant church was the notion that the Bible should remain solely in Latin and not in the spoken language or vernacular of the country. According to the Vatican, the people needed to hear God's word as “interpreted” to them through the priest.

  
13
.
CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary,
125.

  
14
.
ODNB,
“John Rogers.”

  
15
. Gardiner was one of the most successful Tudor statesmen in the sixteenth century. His uncanny ability to survive earned him the nickname of “wily Winchester” from John Foxe in his
Acts and Monuments,
and he was undoubtedly a man of great intellect and guile. A staunch Catholic, Gardiner had found a way—except in the reign of Edward VI—to maintain loyalty to both the crown and the papacy.

  
16
. John Foxe,
Acts and Monuments,
3 vols. (London: George Seeley 1853–1855), 1: 249–251.

  
17
.
CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary,
139.

One: The New Deborah

    
1
. John Nichols,
The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (collected from original manuscripts, scarce pamphlets, corporation records, parochial registers etc.) 3 vols.
(London: London Society of Antiquaries, 1823), 1:34.

    
2
.
CSP, Venice,
7:12.

    
3
. Nichols,
Progresses of Queen Elizabeth,
1:60.

    
4
.
CSP, Venice
, 12. See also Nichols,
Progresses of Queen Elizabeth
, 1:34–35.

    
5
.
The Passage
is reprinted in A. F. Pollard, ed.,
Tudor Tracts, 1532–88
(London: Constable, 1903), 365–95. See also Nichols,
Progresses of Queen Elizabeth,
38.

    
6
. Nichols,
Progresses of Queen Elizabeth,
1:39.

    
7
. Ibid., 39–40.

    
8
. Ibid., 44.

    
9
. Ibid., 49.

  
10
. Ibid., 35, 50.

Two: The Realm and the Ministers of Lucifer

    
1
.
CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary,
no. 152.

    
2
. Toby Green,
Inquisition: The Reign of Fear
(London: Macmillan, 2007), 128. See also Salazar de Miranda,
Vida y sucesos prósperos y adversos de Don Fr. Bartolomé de Carranza y Miranda
(Madrid, 1788), 30.

    
3
. Green,
Inquisition,
128. See also Salazar de Miranda,
Vida
, 192–96.

    
4
. J. E. Neale,
Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments,
2 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 1: 22.

    
5
. This illness recurred at irregular intervals and is thought to have been a type of influenza. It killed Henry VIII's elder brother, Arthur. It had returned with a vengeance in 1558–9, rivaling the worst plague years of Elizabeth's reign. Paul Slack,
The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 70.