The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (40 page)

In May 1568 Mary Stewart fled Scotland, defeated and deposed, and sought refuge in England. She appealed to her fellow sovereign and cousin for aid to restore her to her kingdom. So shocked was Elizabeth by the violence, and by the violation of the right of a sovereign which no subject could challenge, that she was tempted to try and restore Mary unconditionally to her realm and to subdue the rebel lords who had forced the abdication. In the Council, Mary’s opponents saw her flight to England as an opportunity to sequester this most dangerous enemy in a safe oblivion. Yet the Queen and her advisers found no answer to the problem posed by the cuckoo royal visitor. So compromised was Mary that Elizabeth could neither aid her nor receive her; neither restore her, nor allow her her freedom. Whether in England or in Scotland or in France, Mary posed a perpetual menace, for she always pressed her claim to the English throne, and sought by any means to free herself from a protection which became captivity. Elizabeth agreed that the charges which had brought Mary to her forced abdication should be tested before a commission of leading English and Scottish nobles, although it was doubtful in law how to proceed against a queen who was subject to none in her own country and not bound by the law of another, nor bound to answer. The commission sat between October and December at York and Westminster. Uncertain whether it could pass judgement upon her, or what would follow if it did, the Scottish regent, the Earl of Moray, hesitated to produce the most damning evidence against Mary; the ‘casket letters’ – partly forged but partly genuine – which showed her complicity in her lover’s plot to murder her
husband. The case against her neither proved nor disproved, Mary was disgraced.

The Scottish Queen was now sequestered in the heart of England indefinitely. But she was not forgotten, nor forgetting. Desperate for her release, never wavering in her claim to the English throne, she became practised in conspiracy, finding friends wherever she could. As Queen of Scotland she had not sought to reverse the Reformation, contenting herself with being the only Catholic allowed to hear Mass, but as captive Queen in England she presented herself as ‘the fairest daughter of the Pope’. She looked to Spain and France and the papacy for aid, and fatefully to her fellow Catholics in England. In the North, the hearts of the nobility had leapt at news of her arrival. Court and Council were divided between those, like Cecil, who thought she must be shunned, and a larger number who thought that, since Elizabeth had vowed never to marry, they must look to the future. One way to tame Mary was to marry her safely. This was the dynastic solution to Anglo-Scottish relations, which Elizabeth favoured. In 1564 she had even proposed that Mary should marry Leicester. In October 1568, as Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk rode out hawking with William Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s secretary and the ‘Michael Wylie’ [Machiavelli] of Scottish politics, they talked of a marriage between Mary and the Duke. This was not treason, or not yet.

After a decade England’s fragile friendship with Spain was faltering. The alarm caused by Alva’s campaign of blood and iron was heightened by lurid accounts brought by fugitives from his persecution. Both England and Spain now sent each other ambassadors who could only worsen relations between them: an uncompromising Protestant to Madrid, a fervent Catholic to London. In the Spanish Indies the viceroy of Mexico’s fleet engaged John Hawkins’s privateers, and reports of the disaster and news of English losses came slowly home. In the Narrow Seas, privateers bearing letters of marque from the Huguenot princes and William of Orange marauded freely in the name of holy war. Into stormy weather and this threat of pirates sailed a hapless flotilla of Spanish ships in November 1568, seeking shelter in West Country ports. The ships carried bullion from Genoese bankers to pay Alva’s troops. Elizabeth granted her protection to the convoys, but Cecil had other plans: the Queen must take the money herself. In swift retaliation, Alva seized English property and subjects in the Low Countries, and in turn Spaniards in England, including de Spes the ambassador, were arrested and
their goods sequestered. Here was a diplomatic crisis which portended worse. Cold war turned tepid.

For this terrifying provocation which had brought England and the greatest power in Europe to the brink of war, Cecil was rightly blamed. He had listened to those who saw a chance to diminish Spain and aid fellow Protestants in their distress, but he took an unwarranted risk. If the spring of 1569 was a turning point for England, so it was for Cecil as his enemies conspired with the aim of overthrowing him. To ambassadors observing the political scene, this was a move by the ancient Catholic nobility against the heretic upstarts who had usurped counsel. They were partly right, and in this contest the year would see great losses for the nobility, and Cecil secure.

Norfolk’s plan to marry Mary, Queen of Scots was not treason, but it was conspiracy, for it was secret from the Queen. In his lonely eminence as England’s only duke, prince of East Anglia, Norfolk could hardly be greater, but he would not be less. He thought now to be consort to a queen; not because as a Protestant he thought Scotland worth a Mass but, he said, to rescue Mary from some ‘papist prince’. With Leicester and Pembroke as brokers for the match, and Mary urging him to protect her, he had by the summer of 1569 gone too far in honour to turn back. Not until September did Elizabeth hear of the proposed marriage from the ‘women of the court who’, according to William Camden, ‘do quickly smell out love-matters’, and from the belated confession of Leicester ‘with sighs and tears’. She forgave her favourite, but warned Mary to beware lest those on whom she most depended ‘hop without heads’. Was it then that Elizabeth wrote her poem?

As Norfolk’s noble allies deserted him he left court without leave; an act of rash defiance. He bolted to the Howard estate in Norfolk, where the gentry rallied to him, and where he was armed and unassailable. But summoned to London, his nerve broke, and he returned and found himself by October where he most dreaded being, the Tower.

Norfolk had believed that he had ‘friends enough’ if it came to an ‘open quarrel’ with the Queen. Who were the friends; what the quarrel? The quarrel was in part to settle the unsettled succession. His friends were among the ancient nobility who were determined to restore their
lost power and (to them) rightful pre-eminence. Some of these friends – Lord Lumley, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke – were placed under close arrest. But Norfolk’s great hopes lay with the nobility of the North. Mary, too, believed that the great northern lords – the Earls of Northumberland, Westmorland, Derby, Shrewsbury and Cumberland – would rally to her cause, for they were ‘of the old religion’. Mary Tudor had restored the titles and lands of Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, but the pre-eminence of the ancient houses of Percy and Neville had been abruptly lost under Elizabeth, who doubted their loyalty. Their ancient blood slighted, their revenues diminished, their rightful offices given to southerners, they waited their time. As Norfolk rode back to London in October 1569, he sent warning to the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland not to rise. His defection, the news that their friends at court ‘fell from them and gave them over’, precipitated a rebellion that arose out of desperation and which could only fail.

Forlorn and isolated, the Earls had heeded extreme counsels. They claimed to be rising in the name of the old faith. Northumberland had been reconciled to Rome in 1567, and was convinced that the Queen, as a heretic, had forfeited her dominion. As before in 1536, the rebels marched behind banners of the five wounds of Christ, but no longer behind the banner of St Cuthbert, because the wife of the Calvinist Dean of Durham had burnt that banner which legend had told was indestructible by fire. The rebels destroyed the Book of Common Prayer when they found it in the churches on their route, and set up altars instead of Communion tables, but this was often by the Earls’ command, not of their followers’ own enthusiasm. The rebels rallying to the Earls may have been inspired as much by traditional deference and, in truth, by offers of money as by traditional faith. In the brutal aftermath of the revolt hundreds of tenants paid with their lives for their loyalty to their lords. Few now would rally to so lost a cause, and most of the nobility and gentry of the North sent troops to the Crown rather than against it. In its failure, the rising swept away the great families: the last Nevilles to perpetual exile as Spanish pensioners; the Percys to confinement in the South; the 3rd Earl of Cumberland to distant voyages or to become a ‘carpet knight’ of the tournaments. Their lands were confiscated; their clientage leaderless. Though no one knew it, the Borders would never again rise in feudal array.

The rebellion of the northern earls was fateful for all English Catholics. When so few had answered the call to rise for the old faith, it seemed
certain that if the Catholic Church were to be restored to England, it would not be by rebellion. Yet the crisis of 1569–70 transformed all those who thought of themselves as Catholics into potential enemies of the realm: traitors within. For a decade the Catholics had been quiescent, and had posed no danger. There had been no persecution, few tests of faith. This queen, who desired no windows into her own soul nor into those of others, expected the passage of time to atrophy the traditional faith. She believed that the Catholic Church militant existed only outside her kingdom, despite the warnings of her counsellors and jeremiads from her House of Commons. If Catholics prayed outwardly in the Church of England (even if praying inwardly against it) there was no secular penalty. Attendance at church, with whatever reservations, was the minimum, minimal, test of obedience to the Supreme Governor, and through the 1560s most Catholics passed it. Without the spiritual leadership of the Marian bishops, who had all, bar one, been deprived of their office, and who remained in prison; without lay leadership until the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots; without martyrs to stiffen their resolve, most English Catholics conformed, and became thereby schismatic from Rome. Whether they partook of Communion – a heretic rite – is much less certain. If and when they asked the Pope, distant in Rome, whether attendance was permissible for a Catholic, the answer was unequivocal: no matter what the danger, it was not. But most did not ask and chose not to know. For a decade the papacy had been strangely silent. Then in 1570 Pius V issued a bull of momentous consequence.
Regnans in excelsis
declared the heretic Elizabeth to be no queen, and commanded all her Catholic subjects to withdraw their allegiance. Would they now disobey her and call Mary, Queen of Scots their rightful queen?

Memories of the rising of 1569 were a long time fading. An almost atavistic fear grew among English Protestants of Catholic retribution and plot. Sometimes the plots were chimerical, but not the one which ‘God by His providence’ revealed in 1571. Among a half-world of spies and papal agents, Cecil uncovered a conspiracy orchestrated by Robert Ridolfi, a Florentine banker and papal agent in England. With papal money and Spanish troops and the help of ‘friends in England’, Mary Stewart was to be placed on the English throne. Letters in cipher had been directed to the great lords ‘30’ and ‘40’. ‘40’ was the Duke of Norfolk, who had never abandoned his communications with Mary Stewart, nor retreated from his promise of marriage and had sent money
to the Marian party in Scotland. Like his father, the Earl of Surrey, and his great-grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham, he had stood too close to the throne and must suffer for it. Tried by his peers for treason, the guilty verdict was inescapable. Norfolk was condemned in January 1572. The Queen, paralysed between her princely duties of clemency and justice, ordered stay after stay of execution, and Norfolk lived on between hope and fear in the Tower. As so often in a personal monarchy, private decisions and indecisions brought public danger. The Queen was bountiful with what was not hers to give: her subjects’ safety.

Parliament, summoned so rarely and reluctantly in Elizabeth’s reign, was called in May 1572 to meet the emergency which the treason presented. This was an extraordinary meeting, summoned not for money but to provide for the Queen’s safety. Both Houses called for ‘Justice, justice’. Norfolk was sacrificed to these demands, but his death removed only the lesser danger. Unless and until the ‘late Scottish Queen’ were tried and condemned, Elizabeth might find her realm conquered and herself deposed. The double objection that as an ‘absolute princess’ she was subject to no law, and as a ‘stranger’ not bound by English law, was implacably rejected. Be she kin or no kin, stranger or citizen, justice must be done. She was Elizabeth’s ‘unnatural sister’, and only the ‘late Queen’, for she was rightfully deposed. The language of politics became the language of religion. Mary was a ‘serpent’, a ‘dragon’; images of Antichrist. There were ardent Protestant spirits in the Commons, but the bleakest warnings came not from radical laymen but from the lord bishops. The Old Testament gave examples enough of God’s judgements upon princes who disobeyed His commandments to execute justice upon the wicked. ‘Thy life shall be for his life, and thy people for his people.’ If Elizabeth did not ‘cut off’ Mary, they said, she would lose her throne at the hands of God, and He would plague her people.

CHURCHES MILITANT IN ENGLAND
,
IRELAND AND EUROPE
, 1570–84

England’s Protestant godly never doubted that God was continually at work in His creation. Nothing happened in the world unless He willed it, for God was no ‘momentary creator’, sitting idly in heaven. So John Calvin had taught, and what Calvin and his fellow reformed theologians taught was the inspiration of the religion of most thinking Elizabethan Protestants. By God’s providence, His ‘secret counsel’, He superintended and cherished all His creatures, ‘even to a sparrow’. Had not Christ said that every hair on a man’s head was numbered? What seemed to the unregenerate understanding to be pure chance was to the eye of faith the secret impulse of God. For the godly, there was no such thing as chance, no possibility of coincidence. To imagine otherwise was to doubt divine omnipotence. Christian believers should find in this never-failing Providence an assurance: certainty that Satan, the enemy, was curbed, and that they were not subject to arbitrary fortune. Helpless before divine grace, believers should submit themselves utterly to God and follow His commandments, knowing that no harm would befall them unless God willed it, and that adversity was sent for a purpose; to chasten, to correct, and to encourage faith. God’s ways are not men’s ways, His time not their time, and Providence was never calculable. God so often confounded human expectations. ‘Victory,’ Sir Francis Walsingham wrote to William Cecil (now Lord Burghley) in August 1571, ‘is in the hands of God, who many times disposeth the same contrary to man’s judgement.’ Had not the God of the Israelites given victory to little David over Goliath? In ignorance of God’s purposes for them, those of lively faith must exert themselves to do God’s work, always seeking guidance through prayer, and subjecting every action to the tutelage of scripture. This was no quiescent faith: God helps those who help themselves.