The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (42 page)

Into this deadly house of Valois Elizabeth looked to marry. From the end of 1570 delicate negotiations had been conducted for the Queen to marry Anjou (the future Henry III). Dynastic alliance promised protection for England; and for Catherine de Medici it offered support in her struggle with the Cardinal of Lorraine for control of the Council and of Anjou himself. This was no dalliance, so Elizabeth insisted: she was ‘firmly and fully resolved to marry’. Yet there could be no compromise over religion. Anjou could not ‘make shipwreck of conscience’ by conforming to Protestant rites, and Elizabeth could not allow Anjou the private Mass which she forbade her subjects. As the marriage negotiations faltered, Walsingham feared that the Guises would work towards the conquest of Ireland and the advancement of Mary, Queen of Scots. By the end of 1571 Anjou had proposed instead that Elizabeth marry his (even) younger brother, the Duke of Alençon. If not a marriage, then Elizabeth looked for a treaty with France.

Alliance with France marked a transformation in England’s diplomacy, for her defence had traditionally lain with the Burgundian alliance with the Habsburgs. But now that the Netherlands were in revolt, to whom should England look for allies? No longer to Philip of Spain, who had conceived the ‘enterprise of England’, the proposed invasion of 1571,
as God’s ‘own cause’. Neither could Elizabeth easily countenance alliance with his rebellious subjects in the Netherlands, for how could one sovereign aid the rebels of another? Elizabeth waited to be persuaded that Spain, so long England’s ally, was friend no longer. But her councillors now saw the domination of Spain as the greater threat. At the discovery of the Ridolfi plot in 1571 Walsingham had hoped that ‘the proud Spaniard (whom God hath long used as the rod of his wrath) would be cast into the fire’. Alva’s army waited just across the Channel, ready to invade. If conscience did not impel the Queen to intervene in the Netherlands, where the battle between liberty and tyranny, true and false religion, was being fought, pragmatism must. Such was the insistent argument of one wing of her Council and of the Prince of Orange. The Netherlands would be the first victim of Spanish tyranny if help did not arrive, and England the next. Disaster for the Dutch would be England’s disaster too.

In exile from the Low Countries since the rout of their invasion forces in 1568, William of Orange and his brother Louis of Nassau planned a new campaign against Alva. Only by armed invasion, and with foreign aid, could his tyranny be overthrown. Throughout 1569 the brothers had fought with the Huguenot armies in France, and when peace was made in 1570 they hoped to benefit from the reconciliation and looked to Charles IX as the unlikely champion of the Netherlands’ freedom. For the French king the ‘enterprise of Flanders’ offered the prospect of glory and expansion, and he was persuaded by promises of easy conquest there. In August 1571 Nassau came to the French court and proposed a grand alliance of France, England and the German Protestant princes to rid the Netherlands of Alva’s armies. Victorious, they would partition the Low Countries between themselves. Surely, wrote Walsingham, God had raised up Louis as an ‘instrument for the advancement of His glory’. There were times, he told Burghley in August, when ‘nothing can be more dangerous than
not
to enter wars’, when wars ‘for safety’s sake’ were imperative. The enterprise of Flanders waited upon Elizabeth’s decision. But Burghley saw only dangers; no solutions. England might gain by conquest in the Netherlands, but thereby lose a kingdom in Ireland, for Ireland was as easy for Spain to seize as it was for England to defend. Any alliance with France, he feared, would be transitory. Surely, he told Elizabeth on 31 August, the remedy of her perils lay ‘only in the knowledge of Almighty God’.

France was moving inexorably to war, but whether it would be war against Spain in the Netherlands or civil war no one knew. When in
September Admiral Coligny returned to the French court, where his enemies awaited him, civil war seemed more likely. Walsingham feared that the ‘devilish practices’ of the Guises would lead to Catholic resurgence and renewed amity between France and Spain. But Coligny urged war against Spain, and Charles was persuaded. In early 1572 a treaty was signed between England and France binding the ancient enemies to mutual defence. But the aggrandizement of France had never been part of Elizabeth’s strategy, nor the loss of her faltering friendship with Spain. As the plans for multilateral invasion of the Netherlands went ahead that spring Elizabeth’s ambivalence unsettled her supposed allies, who could never be sure of England’s action, or inaction.

Nassau had feared that the ‘rash enterprise’ of extremists would jeopardize his grand strategy. So it proved. The Sea Beggars, a vigilante navy for the Dutch rebels in exile, were expelled from their English haven in March 1572, as too provocative to harbour. In desperation, they fled before the wind to the Zeeland coast where on 1 April they captured the Dutch port of Brille. By giving the rebels a bridgehead, access to the coast and command of the Channel, they changed the course of the revolt. Their action precipitated the invasion ‘untimely’. It was now or never, so Orange proclaimed on 14 April. At the end of May Nassau seized Valenciennes and Mons in the south and attempted the capture of the Duke of Alva in his viceregal capital. Events propelled England, Spain and France towards a war which none dared enter or knew how to prevent. Elizabeth and Burghley, who must halt the extension of French or Spanish power in the Low Countries, needed all their guile and judgement now. If Alva could contain the rebels, then England would not intervene; if not, and if the French proved ‘too potent neighbours’, then Alva could have – secret – assurance of English aid, if Philip would end the oppression of his subjects in the Low Countries. Sir Humphrey Gilbert was sent, supposedly a ‘volunteer’, to hold Flushing, but Elizabeth’s covert aid was not for the Protestant cause, not to protect the Low Countries from tyranny, but to prevent either Alva or the French from controlling the coastline. By midsummer all Holland, save Amsterdam, was in open revolt.

Charles IX was now ‘so far forward’ that nothing could hide his provocation of Spain, and Coligny was given royal permission to depart for the Netherlands on 25 August. But he never left. In Paris, Coligny and the Huguenot nobility gathered in mid July for a marriage which was intended to unite Navarre and Valois. This ended as a ‘massacring
marriage’; celebration turned to carnage. The vendetta of the Guises against Coligny was ended by the Admiral’s assassination on St Bartholomew’s Night, 23 August. In the days which followed, the Huguenot leaders were cut down and thousands upon thousands of Protestants throughout France slaughtered in a spontaneous wave of popular Catholic violence; ‘the saints of God led to the shambles’, their mutilated corpses thrown in rivers. In Paris, Walsingham and Philip Sidney, the courtier and poet, looked on. Neither they, nor any Protestant in Europe, could remain untouched by the tragedy, and in time Sidney would die for the Protestant cause.

Some sought vengeance against the papists, but most bowed to God’s judgement. Did not the godly expect persecution? Cecil told Walsingham: ‘I see the Devil is suffered by Almighty God for our sins to be strong.’ The English people must call themselves to repentance. In Scotland, the General Assembly of the Kirk ordered a ‘public humiliation of them that fear God’ to mitigate God’s wrath upon them for their sins. Protestants everywhere looked for further violence, and certainly the Pope, who had had a medal struck to celebrate St Bartholomew’s Night, would have sanctioned it. In Geneva they awaited catastrophe. In the Netherlands the massacre was a disaster for Orange and his cause, for now Coligny would never come, and through the autumn and winter of 1572 the towns which had declared for Orange suffered Alva’s terrible retribution; they were sacked and their inhabitants put to the sword. Orange fled, not now to Germany, but to Holland, vowing to ‘make that province my tomb’.

There were wars of religion in France, in the Netherlands, in Scotland. Could England escape them? As Elizabethans watched the civil wars in neighbouring states, they regarded with gratitude the peace within their own kingdom, recognized ‘that restless care’ with which the Queen governed, the love she inspired among her subjects, and the justice she gave. They compared their own benign political institutions with the tyranny and oppression suffered by their neighbours. Yet sometimes they wondered whether those troubles might extend to England. In 1579 Philip Sidney reminded the Queen that her subjects were ‘divided into two mighty factions… bound upon the never-ending knot of religion’, and he feared that one faction might rise against the other.

Walsingham had doubted that there could ever be peace in France
while there were so many aspirant kings. There was an aspirant queen in England too, for Mary Stewart still fretted and plotted in captivity in distant Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Yet there was only one Queen at the English court, and Elizabeth, as she entered her fifth decade, was at her most commanding, her royal will most imperative. She saw herself as a Senecan princess: constant, unswayed by shifts of fortune. Her councillors saw her otherwise, regretting her vacillations and that a Stoic princess should have such tantrums. In the perennial battle between will and counsel, they found her dismayingly immovable, and planned concerted campaigns of persuasion to make her act at all. In dark moments they feared that though they failed to move her, others might; that even Elizabeth could fall prey to the corrupt counsel of flatterers, which was the prevailing vice of princes and the slippery slope to tyranny. The forward Protestants, who blamed evil counsel for the slaughter and persecution of the wars of religion, were not always confident that the Queen would listen to advice, or to the right advice; theirs. Peter Wentworth had warned in the House of Commons in 1576 that ‘no estate can stand where the prince will not be governed by advice’. ‘Always or commonly,’ complained Walsingham in 1578, thinking of Elizabeth’s counsels, ‘the persons that wish best, and the causes that work best are most misliked.’

Yet so much in Elizabethan politics was conducive to stability. Those murderous divisions in Council and court, and among the nobility, which brought assassination, plot and civil war in France and Scotland, were absent from England. There could be no deadly feuds over control of Elizabeth, who jealously guarded her independence. No noble at Elizabeth’s court went in fear of his life as Coligny had done in France. In October 1573 the Queen’s favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, was attacked, but the assailant had mistaken his victim, and was anyway demented. The old quarrel between the Earls of Sussex and Leicester could still disrupt the court: on 15 July 1581 ‘the disaster fallen out yesterday betwixt two great planets’ was reported by Sir Thomas Heneage, the Vice-Chamberlain. Yet the earls knew ‘their Jupiter, and will obey her majesty’.

The Elizabethan nobility, though jealous of their honour and quick to defend it, and as predatory of power and office as their rank demanded, seemed to have learnt to look no longer to baronial revolt as the way of advancement. The 7th Earl of Northumberland, and the 4th Duke of Norfolk had been sent to the block to teach others that lesson. But the
ancient Catholic nobility did not see themselves, nor were they seen by worried Protestant contemporaries, as part of a dissolving feudal order. The new courtly nobility which the Tudors had created and patronized quickly chose to forget the novelty of their elevation, and for some of them their noble independence fitted uneasily with ideals of courtly service. While wars were being fought for great causes many lamented being ruled by a queen whose politic virtues were the female ones of mercy and prudence, but who by her nature lacked martial courage and constancy of fixed purpose. Serving at her court became irksome and intolerable for those, like Philip Sidney, who aspired to active virtue. In 1578–9 Hubert Languet, a peripatetic diplomat serving the Protestant cause, observed to Sidney that life at the Elizabethan court seemed less ‘manly’ than he had hoped; that the nobility there sought reputation rather by ‘affected courtesy’ than by those virtues which were ‘wholesome to the state’. Leicester chafed under his dependence upon the Queen, who would be goaded into calling him a ‘creature of our own’, and aspired to the magnificence of a Renaissance prince, glorious in war and peace, extravagant in display and patronage. His ambition was to lead his forces in European war, and he had marshalled armaments in his strongly fortified castle at Kenilworth. Yet he also used Kenilworth to stage elaborate pageants for the Queen, and it was inconceivable that he would use his military power and raise his following – as his father had done before, and his stepson would do later – for his private purposes rather than the Crown’s.

There was, from the early 1570s until a palace revolution threatened towards the end of the decade, an unprecedented unity over policy and purpose at court and in the Council. No Catholic voice was heard, and Protestant influence was paramount. Even puritans found patrons in the highest places. The advance of Protestantism at home and abroad was the aspiration of most of the Council, even if there were marked differences over ways and means; Burghley usually aligned himself against Walsingham and Leicester, and the Queen remained distressingly intransigent. Disagreements remained, yet the silken arts of courtiers were used to pretend that friendship which the Queen demanded. Irony replaced invective. The court was the centre of all political life and advancement. To leave it without permission became, as the Duke of Norfolk had discovered, almost treason; and to be exiled from it, worse than disgrace. By keeping the advocates of rival policies around her, Elizabeth contained conflict.