The Watchers (8 page)

Over the years of the 1560s Philip of Spain's patience wore thin. But for all of the problems that existed between England and Spain by 1570 – diplomatic spats, English support for those Spain called rebels and an increasingly frosty trade war between the two kingdoms – Philip held back from isolating Elizabeth completely. Pope Pius V was, however, less forgiving of Elizabeth Tudor's errors and not as patient as Philip was in playing a long international political game. In February 1570, by publishing a bull called
Regnans in excelsis
(‘He that rules in the heavens above', the opening words of the bull), Pius excommunicated Elizabeth from the Catholic Church and faith. She was, he said, merely the pretended Queen of England who had usurped ‘monster-like' the spiritual authority of the Pope. With her kingdom in miserable ruin, Elizabeth was a heretic and a favourer of heretics, now cut off from the unity of the body of Christ. More significantly for Catholics, in an action that made their obedience to the queen very difficult to prove beyond doubt, Pius freed Elizabeth's subjects from loyalty, duty, fidelity and obedience to the Tudor crown.

When Pius V's bull was nailed to the gates of the Bishop of London's palace near St Paul's Cathedral in London, in one of the most public precincts of the city, Elizabeth's government responded robustly. In 1571 parliament passed a Treasons Act and a law to prohibit and punish the bringing into England of bulls and other instruments from Rome. To deny Elizabeth's right to the throne, to claim that anyone else should be king or queen, to call Elizabeth a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper: all, whether expressed on paper or spoken out loud, were, if proved by a court of law, offences of treason. So,
too, was the reconciliation of any English subject to the Church of Rome by means of a papal bull or document. Loyalty to the English Church and the English state became impossible to disentangle one from the other. Both sides – the Pope in
Regnans in excelsis
, Elizabeth's government in treason law – had marked out the lines of the long battle ahead.

To Elizabeth's advisers Pius V's bull was hardly unexpected: they were used to what they called the malice of Rome. But what made it especially sinister was the fact that
Regnans in excelsis
was published within weeks of the suppression of the Northern Rising, the first major rebellion of Elizabeth's reign. Late in 1569 two English Catholic noblemen of the border country with Scotland, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Nevill, sixth Earl of Westmorland, raised their tenants against the government. Militarily it was an insubstantial rising that was soon put down by a royal army. But its significance lay in the rebels' aims. After only a few years of disintegrating personal rule in Scotland, in 1568 Mary had sought sanctuary in England and found herself an unwanted guest put under restraint. One of the rebels' objects was to free Mary Queen of Scots from this English captivity. The rebellion in the north was also a Catholic rising, marked by the symbolism of a mass celebrated in Durham Cathedral.

The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland failed. Both men forfeited their titles and lands. Westmorland and his wife, the sister of the fourth Duke of Norfolk, escaped to the Netherlands from Scotland. Northumberland, also an escapee to Scotland, was eventually handed over to the English government, which executed him in 1572. To Elizabeth's advisers the message of the Northern Rising was as clear as the government's judicial response was savage. Responding to a military assault against the queen's rule, it determined that those rebels who had been captured should be hanged by martial law, their bodies left to rot on the gibbets as a warning to the men and women of the north. Church bells that had rung to raise rebellion would be pulled down. Those fifty or so rebels who were able to escape abroad with their families were fugitives and outlaws, marked for the rest of their lives.

To Elizabeth's government there were obvious connections between the military ambitions of Philip of Spain, Pope Pius V's excommunication of the queen, the objectives of Mary Queen of Scots and her
supporters, the fact of open rebellion in England and the known plottings of English Catholic nobility. They were shown in exact detail by the discovery in 1571 of a conspiracy against Elizabeth in favour of the Queen of Scots funded by the Pope and encouraged by the Spanish ambassador at Elizabeth's court. The principal conspirator was Roberto di Ridolfi, a merchant of Florence who had lived in London for a number of years.

The story of the plot begins in 1569, the year Ridolfi, on the face of it a respectable businessman, was caught bringing money into England from the Pope. For a time, in December of that year, he was held under house arrest by the Elizabethan authorities. They discovered that Ridolfi's bills of foreign exchange were for the Bishop of Ross, Mary's ambassador at Elizabeth's court, and for Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. This was clearly suspicious, but nothing certain was proved either way. Only in 1571 did all the elements of Ridolfi's plot come properly to light. Because of the arrest at Dover of a courier working for the Bishop of Ross, Elizabeth's government discovered that Ridolfi had been working as a contact between the Spanish government and English Catholic noblemen sympathetic to the cause of the Queen of Scots. Chief among them was the Duke of Norfolk, who had plotted to free and then marry Mary and to encourage a Spanish invasion of England. In unmasking Norfolk as a traitor to Elizabeth, the Ridolfi Plot struck a blow to the heart of the Elizabethan state. The duke's beheading in 1572 was the price Elizabeth had to pay for resisting pressure from her Privy Council and a very angry parliament to execute the Queen of Scots herself.

One of the profoundest problems facing Elizabeth's advisers was that of Mary's asylum in England. For nearly nineteen years, between 1568 and her execution in 1587, she was Elizabeth's guest both uninvited and unwanted. She was believed by the English government to be complicit in the murder of her second husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, in 1567. She was obviously hostile to Elizabeth and wanted her kinswoman's crown; she plotted with foreign powers in Europe on behalf of her own royal claim to England. Elizabeth, nervous of killing a fellow monarch even by justice, refused to put Mary on trial for her life. Equally, it would have been madness for Elizabeth to send her back to Scotland: the consequences for England's security, and for
a friendly Protestant government in Scotland, were unthinkable. To return her to France was much too dangerous a prospect. At least in England she could be held at Elizabeth's pleasure. So Mary was isolated, moved between houses and castles in the midland counties of Warwickshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire, her movements and household controlled as much as possible by the English government. But Elizabeth's ministers could not cut her off from Europe completely, much as they tried – from Spain and King Philip's ambassadors in London, from her Guise kinsmen in France or from Rome. It was known that secret letters passed between Mary, her secretaries and her friends at home and abroad. Eager English Catholic gentlemen volunteered to act as her couriers.

To English eyes it was clear as daylight (though of course concealed in shadow and secrecy) that the Queen of Scots was determined by hook or by crook to get for herself the Tudor crown. They believed that she sat at the centre of a web of European Catholic conspiracy. This toxic fear of Mary provoked in 1585 the Act for the Queen's Surety, one of the most extraordinary and menacing laws ever passed by an English parliament. This statute set out how any action against Elizabeth ‘by or for' a pretender to the English crown would be tried by a special commission of privy councillors and lords of parliament. Anyone found guilty of such a conspiracy against the queen – and also the pretender with whose knowledge or assent the conspiracy was planned – could on being found guilty by the commission be hunted down and ‘pursued to death'. The statute, in other words, sanctioned vengeance against Mary by private subjects authorized to do so by an act of parliament. True, her name did not appear in the act, but nevertheless the statute was clearly and obviously aimed squarely at the Queen of Scots. Indeed it was the very law that took her to the executioner's block at Fotheringhay Castle two years later.

The Act for the Queen's Surety spoke of ‘sundry wicked plots and means … devised and laid … to the great endangering of her highness' most royal person'. This was the greatest anxiety of the Elizabethan political establishment. The preamble of the act spoke with painful eloquence to their fears, which were real. This is not to deny that Elizabeth's advisers could be ruthless and cynical; often they were. But from the beginning they saw how precarious England's
position was, and they believed the dangers. To discover a plot like Ridolfi's confirmed a suspicion or exposed a danger previously unforeseen. Evidence became tangled up with suspicions, suspicions in turn influenced the reading of future evidence: it was a familiar pattern of thinking for Elizabethan politicians. Treason was cumulative, a self-sustaining and self-nurturing fear, incident building upon incident over many years, a great pattern of conspiracy. And the queen's advisers were absolutely right to believe the truth of plots and conspiracies and plans for invasion and assassination, for those conspiracies and plans certainly existed. What Elizabeth's councillors tended to do, however, was to overestimate their enemies' intelligence, cunning and organization. But the fear was there, and it was painted in the vivid colours of divine providence. Elizabethans believed they were engaged in a great war for truth against lies, light against darkness, Christ against Antichrist, Protestant against Catholic. The ravaged countries of sixteenth-century Europe bore the scars of that terrible struggle.

It was, however, too easy in this Reformation world of absolutes, of the high politics of monarchs and states, to lose the human scale of things. Some men and women in Elizabeth's reign were born to play the martyr. Many others were not, like Charles Bailly, the young courier and servant of the Bishop of Ross whose capture led to the unravelling of the Ridolfi Plot in 1571. Bailly was interrogated and threatened with torture by Elizabeth's government. After two years in the Tower of London he was released and banished from England, leaving a record of his imprisonment in the Beauchamp Tower. The inscriptions of others were all around him, for one of the few unofficial privileges of a state prisoner was to make a mark on the walls, to carve a name, a symbol, a statement of faith, of hope and expectation, even a declaration of innocence. Bailly carved his inscription in the recess of the northernmost window in his cell, from which he had a view of the executioner's scaffold on Tower Hill:

Wise men ought circumspectly to see what they do; to examine before they speak; to prove before they take in hand; to beware whose company they use; and above all things, to [consider] whom they trust.

He added a line in Italian, ‘Gli sospiri ne sono testimoni veri dell'angoscia mia': ‘My sighs are true witnesses to my sorrow.' Poor
Charles Bailly reminds us of the human cost of the long secret war fought by Elizabeth's servants for peace, security and religion.

In late October 1572 Elizabethans earnestly prayed for their deliverance from the queen's enemies and the work of the Devil. Elizabeth instructed parsons and curates to encourage as many people as they could exhort to come to church on Sundays, on holy days, on Wednesdays and on Fridays to say special prayers. From the pulpits ministers told the people to behave themselves reverently and to go down on their knees to pray to a merciful God for his protection from the plagues and punishments racking Christendom. In return for repentance they asked for defence against their enemies. And they did so seeking to make sense of the most shocking act of religious violence in sixteenth-century Europe. The people of England knew all too well what had happened in Paris and other towns and cities in France a few months earlier, on the feast of Saint Bartholomew and in the weeks following, when thousands of Protestant men and women were murdered by their Catholic neighbours. There was, in the view of Elizabeth's advisers, no more atrocious practical demonstration of Catholic evil.

Even Elizabethans used to a life that was harsh and often violent were horrified by the massacre in Paris. It was provoked in late August 1572 by the assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, one of the leaders of France's Protestant, or Huguenot, community. The French religious civil wars of the 1560s had come to an uneasy peace, but bitter resentments continued to fester, with short nasty bursts of violence breaking out on the streets of Paris. Coligny was first of all shot and only wounded; but taking advantage of the moment, the leading Catholic noblemen in Paris met their king, Charles IX, the son of Catherine de' Medici, to plan with great care the killing of leading Protestants in the city. On Saturday, 23 August, they drew up a list of names of those who would be murdered. Just before dawn on the following day Admiral Coligny was killed in his bed. Henry, Duke of Guise, who led the killing party, was present when Coligny's corpse was thrown from the window of his house into the street below. Duke Henry was a first cousin of Mary Queen of Scots, and the eldest of the three Guise
brothers; they were members of one of the most powerful political dynasties in Europe; and they were uncompromisingly Catholic.