The Watchers (7 page)

Elizabeth and her advisers knew that they would have to fight for England's security. The survival of the Tudor monarchy could not be assumed. Quite apart from the fact that it depended only upon the life of one woman – a fragile thing in the sixteenth century – there were at least two other significant factors. The first was Spain. True, his sacred Catholic royal majesty King Philip at first gave friendly guidance to Elizabeth. He even reluctantly offered her marriage; she politely but firmly declined it. But Philip, who at the age of thirty-one already prided himself upon his tactical acuity, would always put the interests of Spain first.

The second factor was the most important of the two. Elizabeth was not in 1558 the only plausible candidate to the English throne. She had a blood kinswoman, the daughter of King James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise of France, and the wife of the French dauphin, Francis, of the royal house of Valois. This young woman's uncles of the house of Guise were some of the most powerful men in Europe. Through her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, she was the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII of England. By his last will and testament, confirmed by an act of parliament, Henry VIII had ignored the claim to the English throne of Mary's family, the Stuarts of Scotland. But no one could dispute the fact that she had Tudor blood.

So Mary Stuart, a Catholic, was a credible royal counter-claimant to a Protestant and, in Catholic eyes, an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. Significantly, Henry's Succession Act of 1544 had confirmed Elizabeth's place in the royal succession but it did not restore to her the legitimacy of birth that had been stripped away when Prince Edward was born. That was only done by Elizabeth's first parliament in 1559. Her enemies quickly grasped the point: she was a bastard. Predictably, Elizabeth's advisers were outraged to discover within months of her accession that the dinnerware of Mary and Francis of France was stamped with the royal arms of England. Very tall with hazel eyes, auburn hair and a fair complexion, the great-niece of Henry VIII, kinswoman of Elizabeth Tudor, and dauphine of France, Mary Stuart was in November 1558 a month away from her eighteenth birthday. Before everything else she was
Regina Scotorum
, Queen of Scots rather than Queen of Scotland, using the traditional style of the rulers of Scotland from the twelfth century. But she wanted to be Queen of England too.

This was the broad landscape of Elizabeth's reign. Its contours were formed by the balance of military power in Europe, the clash of religious faiths and the collisions of royal dynasty. Elizabeth, a queen blessed by God's providence who wanted to follow her own path, faced the seemingly immovable object of Spanish power and the fact of Mary Stuart's claim to her throne. No one in 1558, least of all Elizabeth and her advisers, knew how these forces would act upon the politics of Elizabeth's reign, or indeed how long her reign would – or even could – survive.

Elizabethan England was defined by its Protestant faith. It stood resolutely – to many offensively – apart from most of the kingdoms and states of Europe. Between the years 1559 and 1603 the Queen's subjects worshipped with an English book of common prayer and an English Bible. Elizabeth, whose royal arms could often be seen displayed in England's churches, had the care of the souls as well as the bodies of her people. She was God's lieutenant on earth, his deputy and vicegerent, his handmaiden, the giver of his justice. Anyone who professed to be a loyal subject obeyed Elizabeth's proclamations and the laws made by her parliaments, but they also believed in their conscience that she possessed the spiritual authority that for Catholics could be exercised only by a pope. The laws of England allowed for no other interpretation of the powers of heaven and earth.

Elizabethan Protestants commonly called their faith the ‘true' religion. Reinterpreting centuries of Christian history, English theologians believed that the English polity, which fused together the authority of a spiritual and a temporal ruler, was the best possible form of Christian monarchy. No other kingdom in Christendom, they believed, was so well established in law and justice. In the early months of the new reign Elizabeth's government proceeded very carefully, keeping to the letter of Mary's laws. England remained for the time being a Catholic country. But within six months of the queen's accession, after difficult and fractious debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, parliament in Westminster passed an Act of Supremacy and an Act of Uniformity.

The first of these laws stated that the queen was unequivocally ‘the only supreme governor of this realm … as well in all spiritual or
ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal', setting out the words of an oath of supremacy to be sworn by any man holding office in Church and State. The Uniformity statute established in law the Elizabethan book of common prayer and protected it from any kind of public criticism or ridicule. Parliament recognized and defended Elizabeth's historical right as an English monarch to govern her Church solely and without question, and anyone who dissented from this position publicly could be prosecuted. The parliamentary settlement of 1559 was a revolution in Church and State. Elizabeth's supremacy was also a powerful international statement of the independence of Tudor England and Ireland. As her father had done in the 1530s, Elizabeth Tudor dismissed the Pope's authority. To English Protestants, Elizabeth had once again freed their country from the shackles of papal tyranny. But in the eyes of Catholic Europe, struggling to know what to do about Elizabeth, England was a dangerous and infectious pariah of Christendom.

The new settlement of Protestant religion in England was profoundly shocking to a generation of Elizabethans. Nor was it for Elizabeth's Church and government an easy settlement to enforce: a popularly Protestant England was never inevitable. For English Catholics the royal supremacy was at best a conscientious difficulty, but to many it was a monstrous heresy that turned the authority of the Pope and centuries of Church tradition upside down. After the years of division in the reigns of Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, Catholics found in Mary's rule the reconciliation of painful schism, the English Church once again returned to the universal Catholic Church. Defined by the burnings of Protestants, Mary's Catholic reformation offered to Europe a model for the suppression of pernicious Protestant heresy. But Mary's Catholic reformation was torn to pieces by Elizabeth's government. Catholic churchmen in parliament in 1559 fought the new religious settlement as best they could. They hated the new doctrine, preached from the pulpits by Protestant theologians recently returned home from foreign exile. The Abbot of Westminster called these hated exiles the ‘preachers and scaffold players of this new religion'. The Archbishop of York, who was soon enough replaced, was staggered by the bizarre notion that a woman could be head of Christ's Church.

When the new laws came into force, in the early summer of 1559,
English Catholics faced the choice either to reconcile themselves to Elizabeth's Church in ways that were not yet clear to them or to go into exile. Most remained loyal subjects who balanced their consciences and civil obligations as well as they could. Some resisted. Many young students and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge chose exile, leaving England to study in the Catholic universities of continental Europe; Louvain was a popular choice and later Rheims. As one spy wrote in 1571, ‘divers fugitives are thought to lurk in Louvain as students and scholars there'. Some of these committed and clever young men began to fight the heresy of their homeland with their pens. Heavy works of Latin theology showed what they believed to be the nonsense of Protestant belief. Shorter works of polemic, combative pamphlets written in sharp vernacular English, attacked the government of Elizabeth's ministers. Many of these works were smuggled into England in great numbers, annoying and harrying the English authorities and keeping government spies and informants very busy indeed.

Later émigrés, forced into foreign exile in the Low Countries of modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands by an uprising against Elizabeth in the north of England in 1569, threw their energies into the rescue of their country by war and invasion. Their numbers were somewhere between fifty and seventy; but given that these fugitives and outlaws were of the English nobility and gentry they carried immense weight in a society acutely conscious of the importance of rank and social hierarchy. By 1579 one spy's catalogue of the English Catholic émigré community in France and Italy – priests, students, merchants and other travellers, some paid modest pensions by the Pope – put their number at just short of three hundred. How many Catholics there were in England the government could only guess at, but Elizabeth's bishops and advisers knew that few of the justices of the peace charged with enforcing the statutes on religion were enthusiastic supporters of those laws. The government perceived many potential enemies of the queen both within and without the kingdom.

Most Catholics decided to live in England as peaceably as they could in good conscience; others decided publicly and politically to fight for their country's recovery. But whatever an individual chose to do, one fact was plain. Elizabethan England was a confessional state
in which religious beliefs and political loyalties were impossible to separate from each another in any straightforward way. The government held that a truly loyal subject worshipped as the law expected him or her to do in the Church of England. Anyone who resisted the English prayer book risked severe punishment. In the later years of Elizabeth's reign Catholic ‘recusants' – a word derived from the Latin
recusans
, a refuser – were fined huge amounts of money and regularly imprisoned for refusing to attend church services. Members of the grandest gentry and noble families in England were held under suspicion by the authorities and were sometimes under active surveillance. The power of the state was turned upon the private and now illegal activities of some of Elizabeth's most important subjects. Some men and women were prosecuted for sheltering Catholic priests who came secretly into England from the 1570s. In these conditions, spies and informants thrived. Throwing everything into very sharp relief was the severity and extent of Tudor treason law. Like Henry VIII and his ministers, Elizabeth and her government believed that determined resisters of royal authority were most probably traitors. The suspicion and even the scope of treason deepened and broadened in the Elizabethan years as the battleground of religion and politics became for many a more dangerous and desperate place.

So what were the Catholic powers of Europe to do about Elizabeth? In quieter times, kingdoms like France and especially Spain may have wanted to leave her alone, balancing the realities of diplomacy and politics against the imperatives of religion. But that was never likely after 1558 because of a complicated interplay of three forces at work in Europe in the later sixteenth century. The first was the religious division caused by the Reformation and the regular outbreaks of violence between Protestants and Catholics. The second was Spanish military power and the global ambitions of King Philip of Spain. The third was Mary Queen of Scots and her claim to the Tudor crown. What is more, Elizabeth's government quickly began to pursue a surprisingly active policy of military support for fellow Protestants abroad, and to do so in a way that seemed calculated to annoy the great powers of Catholic Europe. Though in fact against the queen's instincts, her advisers pressed hard to support Protestant opponents of French regency government in Scotland in 1560. Two years later English
troops crossed the English Channel to support Protestant Huguenots in the first of the unrelenting religious wars and disturbances that consumed France in the later sixteenth century. The first intervention was a great success, securing an Anglophile Protestant government for Scotland that could help to protect England's vulnerable northern border. It was possible because the Queen of Scots was in France. But the death in 1560 of Mary's husband, by then Francis II of France, meant that she returned to her homeland in 1561, so causing enormous complications for Elizabeth's government: the Queen of Scots, a blood kinswoman of Elizabeth, was once again in Scotland, with an eye to the Tudor royal succession. Whether she was an active conspirator herself – and on this point historians have disagreed profoundly over the centuries – Mary Stuart was at the very least a focus of what for Elizabeth was plainly treason against the Tudor crown.

When the Count of Feria spoke to Elizabeth a few days before her accession as queen, he feared for the future of Catholic England and told King Philip so plainly. With Elizabeth Philip played a careful diplomatic hand. As the most powerful Catholic king in Europe, he found the heresy of Elizabeth and her government deeply offensive. As the ruler of a global power whose resources were stretched to their limits by years of war in western Europe against France and in the eastern Mediterranean against the Ottoman empire he could not, however, afford financially and militarily to fight England. As late as 1568, Philip hoped that Elizabeth might be brought to her senses. It was a hope against experience. Very early on cracks began to show in Anglo-Spanish relations. Elizabeth's ambassador in Spain was an outspoken Protestant who made offensive remarks about the Catholic faith and called the Pope ‘a canting little monk'; not surprisingly, he found himself expelled from Philip's court. In 1568 Elizabeth's government detained Spanish treasure ships that had been forced by pirates into the safety of an English port. The bullion was taken ashore, causing the Spanish ambassador in England to protest that the queen had confiscated it. The treasure ships were helping to fund Philip's tough military campaign led by the Duke of Alba in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands. This campaign alone, conducted against Dutch Protestants, caused Elizabeth's government profound disquiet. Quite apart from the persecution of men and women of the same faith, what if Alba
were directed to take his troops across the English Channel? Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth's secretary, wrote in a policy paper in 1569 that England was ‘most offensive both to the King of Spain and the French King for sundry considerations and specially for succouring of the persecuted': by this time, many Protestant refugees fleeing from war in France and the Low Countries were settling in towns and cities in southern England. Elizabeth's kingdoms seemed to stand alone against its enemies. Considering the international politics of the moment, Cecil employed a surgical metaphor: the queen was a patient being operated upon by the King of Spain and the Pope, who used Mary Queen of Scots as their scalpel.