We are beginning to lose [our] reputation by deferring so long to provide a remedy for the great grievance done by this woman to my subjects, friends and allies.
[God’s] holy religion may be restored . . . and the Catholics and good Christians thus rescued from the oppression in which they live.
In case her obstinacy and hardness of heart may continue, you will take into your consideration the best direction to be given to this.
We think here that the best course will be to encourage, with money and secret favour, the Catholics of the north and to help those in Ireland to take up arms against the heretics and deliver the crown to the Queen of Scotland, to whom it belongs by succession.
Philip was hardly delighted that Mary Queen of Scots, with her close ties to the French monarchy, could now become Queen of England – but his unqualified fidelity to Holy Mother Church overrode such diplomatic misgivings. Her accession, he declared, ‘would be very agreeable to the Pope and all Christendom and would encounter no opposition from anyone’.20
Back in England, despite their retreat, the northern rebellion was still alive and kicking. In the first week of December, more than 4,500 rebels besieged Sir George Bowes, a grizzled veteran of the Scottish border wars, in Barnard Castle where he suffered a mass desertion by troops of his garrison who jumped over the low walls of his defensive outworks, some killing themselves in the process. Others treacherously opened his gates to the insurgents and he was forced to surrender on generous terms that permitted him to take four hundred of his men unmolested into Yorkshire.21 Another rebel victory came with the easy capture of the port of Hartlepool, where the ruinous defensive walls had collapsed in places. The rebels hoped that Spanish troops would soon land there as reinforcements. These were forlorn hopes indeed.
Elizabeth’s revenge was drawing ever nearer.
Advance elements of her ten-thousand-strong army reached the freezing banks of the River Tees on 16 December and the demoralised earls stood down their infantry and fled first to Hexham, then across the Scottish border, seeking sanctuary from their queen’s retribution. Cecil wrote to Sadler on Christmas Day, employing a contrived hunting analogy to describe the royalist forces’ pursuit of the fugitives:
The vermin flee into a foreign covert where I fear thieves and murderers will be their hosts and maintainers of our rebels until the hunters be gone and then they will pass [overseas].22
Even now, there was optimism amongst England’s enemies that this flight was merely a timely strategic withdrawal. The Venetian ambassador in France, Alvise Contarini, reported as late as mid-January 1570 that the insurgents were marching on the border town of Berwick to establish a winter base there ‘and seeing that every day their forces continue to augment, they expect to be stronger . . . by the spring’.23 De Spes in London soon realised the bleak truth: ‘The Catholics are . . . ashamed that their enterprises should have turned out so vain . . . [They] are lost by bad guidance and although they are undertaken with impetus, they are not carried through with constancy,’ he admitted ruefully.24
The brutal aftermath was that Northumberland was betrayed to the Earl of Moray and ignominiously handed over to the English authorities in return for £2,000 in coin. He was beheaded at York in 1572.25 Westmorland fled to the Spanish Netherlands and, his estates forfeited, survived only on hand-outs from Spain.26 Elizabeth jubilantly informed the French ambassador that she had completely defeated the rebels and pardoned the population in Yorkshire and Durham,27 claiming to ‘have always been of our own nature inclined to mercy’. But behind the polite language of diplomacy, she had demanded bloodshed and urged her generals to put to death, under martial law, any captured rebels. More than eight hundred were executed, mainly those ‘of the meanest sort’.28
Sussex feared it was taking too long to hang the miscreants and dreaded that ‘the queen’s majesty will find cause [for] offence’. He told Bowes on 19 January that ‘the queen does much marvel . . . that she does not hear from me that the executions [are] not ended. Therefore I heartily pray you to expedition for I feel this lingering will breed [her] displeasure to us both.’ The scale of vengeance was such that Sir Thomas Gargrave suspected that these judicial killings ‘will leave many places naked and without inhabitants’.29 The fearful destruction visited upon the homes and property of the insurgents ensured that the economy of this part of England would not recover for almost two centuries.
The danger to the crown posed by Mary Queen of Scots may have been averted but Cecil knew it remained dormant and ever-present. Elizabeth’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, lived up to his reputation for plain-speaking by warning her bluntly on 30 January 1570:
Assure yourself that if you do not take heed of that Scottish queen, she will put you in peril . . . for there are many practices [conspiracies] abroad.30
As in much of the Vatican’s dealings with the Tudor monarchy, Pope Pius V acted too slowly to assist the abortive Catholic uprising. On 25 February 1570 he signed the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated Elizabeth – ‘that servant of all iniquity’ – and deprived her of any ‘pretended right’ to the English throne that she had so ‘monstrously usurped’. This was not only a religious sanction but also a very personal attack. Pius carefully catalogued Elizabeth’s every sin in a veritable litany of heresy and cruelty. By ‘main force’ she had destroyed the true religion; oppressed ‘the professors of the Catholic faith’; compelled her subjects ‘to submit to her accursed laws to abhor the authority of the Roman pontiff and to acknowledge herself alone as mistress in both temporal and spiritual matters’. She had ‘cast many bishops and prelates into prison, where after many sufferings they had miserably perished’. Furthermore, Pius declared:
We command and interdict all and every one of her barons, subjects, people and others that they shall not dare to obey either her, or her laws and commandments, and he who shall do otherwise shall incur the same sentence of malediction.31
So, in wielding his sword of anathema, the Pope had instructed Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects that to obey her or her laws would automatically invoke their own excommunication – ‘utter separation from the unity of the body of Christ’. With this admonition, the Holy Father had sown sedition in the green fields of England and made every English Catholic a potential traitor in the eyes of the queen’s ministers. Some, they reasoned, could become her assassins.
Publication of the bull was naturally prohibited in England but a few months later, a copy was cheekily nailed on to the garden gate of the Bishop of London’s home in St Paul’s churchyard in the small hours of the morning. The perpetrator was John Felton of Southwark, a prosperous Catholic gentleman whose wife had been a maid of honour to Mary I. Felton, a ‘man of little stature and of a black complexion’, was arrested within twenty-four hours, tortured, and executed near where he pinned up the felonious document. He reportedly cried out Jesus’ name when the public hangman held aloft his still beating heart, as the grim sentence meted out to traitors – hanging, drawing and quartering – was bloodily carried out.32
New penal laws were passed in April 1570 to isolate and prosecute the religious zealots. The Second Treasons Act of Elizabeth’s reign broadened the crime of treason to encompass the ‘imagining, inventing, devising, or intending the death or destruction, or any bodily harm’ to the queen ‘or to deprive or depose her’ from the ‘style, honour or kingly name of the imperial crown of this realm’. It also became treasonous to claim that Elizabeth was ‘a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or a usurper of the crown’.33 A second Act of the same Parliamentary session criminalised the importation of papal bulls or ‘writings, instruments and other superstitious things from the See of Rome’.34 Non-attendance at church services was now viewed in more sinister light and regular worship according to Protestant rites became a test of loyalty.35
The papal attack on Elizabeth coincided with another plot to overthrow her. Within days of the Duke of Norfolk’s release in August 1570 from the Tower into house arrest a
t his London townhouse at the former Carthusian monastery in Charterhouse Square, he was reluctantly embroiled in a plot involving the Florentine double agent Roberto Ridolphi, who begged him to write to the Duke of Alba, to seek assistance for Mary Queen of Scots. She was still outwardly keen to wed Norfolk, encouraging him to escape on 31 January 1571 – ‘as she would do [herself], notwithstanding any danger’ – so that they could be swiftly married.36
On 12 April, Charles Bailly, a young Fleming in her service, was arrested in the Channel port of Dover and found to be carrying seditious books from Catholic exiles. Two letters, ‘hid behind his back secretly’, were addressed to one of Mary’s agents, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, and sent from Ridolphi, now safely living in Brussels. Under torture, Bailly admitted that the Italian had departed England on 25 March carrying Mary’s appeals to Alba, Philip and the Pope urging a Spanish invasion of England. A copy of the invasion plan had been lodged with Norfolk, together with a damning list of forty nobles, identified as Mary’s secret supporters. Alongside each name was a number, to be used in coded correspondence by the duke.37
Ridolphi’s loquacious efforts to convince Alba to invade England fell on stony ground. During a somewhat one-sided conversation, he talked enthusiastically of how Spain should supply six thousand men equipped with twenty-five cannon to reinforce an English Catholic army (led by Norfolk) which would free Mary and seize Elizabeth. Alba was singularly unimpressed, reporting to Philip that Ridolphi was a ‘great babbler’ and had learned his lessons ‘parrot fashion’. A better strategy, he suggested, would be that Spanish military assistance should be provided only after the English Catholics had risen and when Elizabeth was already ‘dead . . . or else a prisoner’. He added: ‘We may tell [Norfolk] that these conditions being fulfilled, he shall have what he wants.’38
Agents working for Cecil, now raised to the peerage as Lord Burghley, scoured Norfolk’s London home, Howard House, for evidence of his guilt, watched haughtily by a silent but fretful duke. Their search was soon successful: his codebook was discovered hidden under some roof tiles, and deciphered documents were found beneath a rug outside the duke’s bedchamber. Sir Ralph Sadler warned a ‘submissive’ Norfolk that for ‘his obstinate dealing and denial of his great faults, her majesty was sore offended . . . and had determined to use him more severely’.39
The duke was duly returned to the Tower. As Norfolk sat desolately considering his fate, his retainers were questioned in less salubrious accommodation within the grim fortress. Old William Barker, one of the duke’s secretaries, was ‘three or four times examined but hitherto showed [himself] obstinate and a fool’, Sadler reported. Threatened with the terrors of the rack, Barker’s resistance and loyalty disappeared like snow melting in the sunshine. This hellish contraption was the first choice of torture in the sixteenth century to persuade obdurate prisoners to cooperate. It had two windlasses or capstans positioned at each end of a long wooden table, attached to chains and shackles for the victim’s arms and legs. Turning them agonisingly stretched and dislocated the limbs of those undergoing interrogation. The first Elizabethan rackmaster was Thomas Norton, a lawyer turned playwright and poet, nicknamed with Tudor black humour, ‘the pincher with pains’. He enjoyed his work and was later accused of leaving the Jesuit priest Alexander Briant ‘one good foot longer than ever God made him’ after a sess ion on the rack.40 The Spanish ambassador in London reported that it was also common practice to drive iron spikes between the fingernails and the quick – a torture that his countrymen imagined ‘would be employed by the Anti-Christ, as the most dreadfully cruel of all’.41
No wonder that Barker talked, his words tumbling out in his anxiety to please his questioners. The old man revealed Ridolphi’s pie-in-the-sky plans for invasion: Spanish troops would land at Dumbarton in Scotland, at Leith, near Edinburgh, and at the Essex port of Harwich.42 Perhaps Scottish Protestants were going to taste Spanish Toledo steel as well as their English cousins.
Norfolk was doomed. Only the grim formalities of legal process stood between him and the scaffold. He was found guilty of treason by his peers at Westminster Hall on 16 January 1572, despite his claims of perjured evidence by his servants, and he was executed on Tower Hill on 2 June that year – mercifully with just one blow of the headsman’s axe. He had told the crowd around the scaffold:
I take God to witness, I am not, nor never was a Papist, since I knew what religion meant. I have never been addicted to Popery . . . but have always been averse from Popish doctrines . . . Yet, I cannot deny but that I have had amongst my servants and familiars some that have been addicted to Popish religion.43
De Spes, the Spanish ambassador, was expelled from England after Elizabeth admonished him angrily that he was ‘secretly seek[ing] to inflame our realm with firebrands’.
Notwithstanding the vehemence of Pius V’s rhetoric, Elizabeth and her council were opposed to persecuting her Catholic subjects on the basis of their religion alone. Their policies drew a sharp distinction between the fanatical papist who worked assiduously to return England to Rome’s jurisdiction and those who secretly professed the Catholic faith and did not acknowledge the queen’s spiritual supremacy but remained passive, or at best neutral, about papal authority.44
Despite this relatively moderate stance, by 1572, the substantial number of Catholics imprisoned in London was beginning to trouble Elizabeth’s Privy Council, which feared that hotbeds of Catholic disaffection were being created within the capital’s many gaols.45 Banishing obstinate recusants overseas would only provide unfettered opportunity for them to plot against queen and state. The solution was to establish what today we would recognise as internment camps to hold potential troublemakers at times of especial danger to the state. This plan, first tabled in March 1572, suggested the dilapidated Wisbech Castle, in the Isle of Ely, as a suitable prison.46 There Catholics could be confined under guard, and as Elizabeth was always reluctant to dip into her exchequer, they would have to pay for their own accommodation and food.
Internationally, England had now become a beleaguered Protestant bulwark off the coast of Europe. The Spanish reign of terror against Protestants in the Low Countries increased forebodings within Elizabeth’s government, which felt isolated and under constant threat from the Catholic powers. Her spies in the Netherlands reported that Alba was determined to assist English Catholics,47 and de la Mothe Fénelon, the French ambassador in London, believed Alba’s agent in the city was in constant touch with prominent Catholic families.48 More than fifty people within the royal court were said to be in his pay.
Catholic exiles were also actively working against Elizabeth, supported and encouraged by the governments that sheltered them. A Treatise of Treasons, published at Louvain (in modern-day Belgium) in 1572, declared that heresy alone was creating disorder in England and would eventually lead to the destruction of all civilisation there. As a riposte, Burghley’s proclamation of 1573 was the first to employ a palpable national threat as a means of appealing to the patriotism of Elizabeth’s subjects:
Certain obstinate and irrepentent traitors, after their notorious rebellion made against their native country, have fled out of the same and remained in foreign parts with the continual and wilful determination . . . to contrive all the mischief that they can imagine, to impeach and subvert the universal quietness and peace of this realm . . .49
Some exiles were baffled why Spain had not yet attacked England to restore their faith. The Welshman Maurice Clenock, one of the colony in Louvain, explained their willingness to accept foreign invasion:
They are not to be listened to who would persuade us that the English cannot be forced under the yoke of foreign domination.
The oppression is so severe and grows still more severe daily that the confessors of the true faith hope for freedom from foreigners alone.
Better to attain eternal blessedness under a foreign lord than to be cast into the nethermost hell by an enemy at home.50
His eagerness for an invasio
n was probably atypical among English Catholics. Although they sought foreign assistance in their cause, most remained suspicious of the motives in providing such help. Niccolò Ormanteo, Papal Nuncio to Spain, acknowledged that they ‘refuse all aid from abroad which might bring them under subjection, but desire only just sufficient for the overthrow of their selfstyled queen and for replacing her by the other one from Scotland’.51
An embittered memorandum in the Vatican archives, written in September 1570, probably by an exile living in Brussels, illustrates graphically both their consuming hatred for Elizabeth and the resentful frustration of a lost existence amongst strangers in a lonely foreign land:
Verily, she is the whore depicted in the Apocalypse with the wine of whose prostitution the kings of the earth are drunk.
Seeing that meanwhile she is drunk with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, significant indeed is the figure of that whore and yet more confirmed in that belief would they be who knew that in the time of Queen Mary52 of happy memory, she would have lost her life for complicity of treason, but that one of the chief nobles of the land intervened to save it.53
Therefore, seeing that Elizabeth is now of evil odour – not only with God but also with men – we demand . . . that Catholic princes cease to accord her regal honour.
The Spanish Armada Page 4
