The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  On 14 November 1569 they marched on Durham. They occupied the cathedral and destroyed the prayer books, bibles and the Communion table set up by the dean and Mrs Whittingham; 794 people were counted by worried government observers crowding in to hear Mass sung once more.17 But it was not just in the cathedral, or just in Durham, that people took matters into their own hands. At Sedgefield, for example (later in history Tony Blair’s parliamentary constituency), they re-erected the stone altar in the church. (They had done so once before in 1567 and it had been destroyed by visitors.)18 The government of Elizabeth and Cecil in London faced the nightmare possibility of a religiously enflamed civil war, such as had torn apart Scotland and France. And the woman who had been queen of both of these countries was now in the North of England, with an army willing to fight to make her their queen also. Only two things could save Elizabeth’s position now: the weakness of the rebels’ power-base, especially in the South; and a complete ruthlessness in securing out-and-out defeat of the rebellion.

  As we have seen, Norfolk caved in before the rebellion even started. Even those you might expect to have supported it were lukewarm in their enthusiasm. The recusant priests in exile – Robert Parsons, the Jesuit, and Cardinal Allen – were dubious about the prospect of putting Mary Stuart on the English throne at this point.19 Richard Norton was an old veteran of the Pilgrimage of Grace, when he had worn the badge of the Five Wounds of Christ. He was wearing the old badge again at Durham for the rebels’ Mass in the cathedral. Norton it was who wrote a letter to Northumberland ‘leaking’ the fact that Spanish troops were on their way to reinforce the northerners. It was designed to strengthen morale and – for he knew the letter would be intercepted – to worry the government. It merely insured for Norton, when the rebellion was over, a particularly grisly end at Tyburn. The rebels’ hopes, that Philip II would supply them with military aid, were a groundless fantasy. Philip did not want the daughter-in-law of the hated Guise family as Queen of England. Mary herself, at this point, did not wish it, being far more concerned to be released from her imprisonment.20

  In the event, when they saw that their cause was lost, the rebels were dispersed almost without a fight. They marched south to rescue Mary from her incarceration at Tutbury, but by the time they reached Tadcaster, they found she had already been transferred to Coventry. By the end of November, Northumberland and Westmorland had fled over the border to Scotland.

  The army that marched north to put down the rebellion was under the command of the Earl of Sussex, who as President of the Northern Council was responsible for the security of the North of England. The most the rebels could muster was 4,000 foot-soldiers and 1,800 horsemen. The government was eventually to assemble an army of more than 12,000 men, under the command of the Earl of Warwick and Lord Clinton. Their armies could get the pickings of victory without having to fight for it. ‘Others beat the bush and they have had the birds,’ said the Governor of Berwick, Lord Hunsdon.21

  He was the only government commander who saw any really dangerous fighting. Henry Carey, as he was born, was a first cousin to the Queen, and one of the very few men she ennobled – she made him Baron Hunsdon two days before her coronation, and he became a Knight of the Garter on 18 May 1561. His mother, Mary Boleyn (married to Henry III’s Esquire of the Body, William Carey), and Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, were sisters. The governorship of Berwick was among the many privileges, manors and estates that Elizabeth gave him, and at the time of the earls’ rising he was in his mid-forties (his probable date of birth was 1524).

  It was after the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland had fled that the London government, and Hunsdon, realised there was one major troublemaker left: Leonard Dacre. For most of the autumn of 1569 he had been in London fighting a lawsuit against the Duke of Norfolk over the duke’s wardship of Dacre’s children. He had fortified his castle at Naworth, and raised 3,000 men, purportedly in defence of Queen Elizabeth against the northern earls. When he realised his cover was blown, he summoned the Scottish borderers to his aid, and Hunsdon knew he must act. He summoned an army of 1,500 men and set out from Hexham on a very cold February night – 19 February 1570.

  Hunsdon and his army knew they were marching through enemy territory. Beacons flared on every high hill, and through every darkened valley that they marched they could hear the noise of horsemen gathering. They reached Dacre’s fortified castle at Naworth at dawn. Dacre was waiting with an army twice the size of Hunsdon’s. It was not the moment to give battle. Hunsdon marched onwards to Carlisle, and Dacre, with his wild army, who knew the country much better, pursued Hunsdon’s men to a precipitous cliff overlooking the little River Gelt. Here the whooping borderers could have massacred Hunsdon’s forces, but the Queen’s cousin stood firm. The infantry resisted the charge of the border horsemen. Then Hunsdon’s cavalry came round to their flank. Dacre panicked and fled to Liddesdale, and the thousands he had assembled were scattered like so many mountain goats. If Hunsdon had not shown such resolution, and if his tired, cold army who had been marching all night had not been so courageous, the Northern Rebellion could have flared up again. As it was, it was now decisively over. The victory over the rebels was so overwhelming that there was no need for heavy reprisals. Elizabeth, however, felt that punishment was in order, and asked that 600 northerners should be hanged, pour encourager les autres. Hunsdon, luckily, and the local magistrates saw to it that far fewer were in fact executed.

  In her own elegant hand, Elizabeth wrote as a postscript to Cecil’s official commendation:

  I doubt not, my Harry, whether that the victory given me more joyed me, or that you were by God appointed the instrument of my glory. And I assure you that for my country’s sake the first might suffice; but for my heart’s contention, the second more pleased me. It likes me not a little that, with a good testimony of your faith, there is seen a stout courage of your mind, that trusted more to the goodness of your quarrel than to the weakness of your numbers.’22

  She had the gift of intimacy. ‘My Harry’ – such a good vocative. He had been named after another Harry, her father, and in her response to the Northern Rebellion she showed herself, not unfrighteningly, a chip off the old block.

  Part Two

  1570s

  9

  St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

  PIUS V HAD been elected Pope in January 1566. His election was a victory for the most uncompromising champions of the Counter-Reformation. Michele Ghislieri had been born in poverty at Bosco, near Alessandria. He was a shepherd before he joined the Dominican Order (Order of Preachers). When he became Pope he did not modify in any particular the extreme asceticism of his life. In Rome, and in the Papal States, he did his utmost to expunge public immorality and blasphemy. He enforced the holiness of the Sabbath and of holy days. Romans complained he was making their city into a monastery. Financial considerations compelled him to retain some Jews in the ghettos of Rome and Ancona, but the others he expelled. He enforced the Inquisition, building a special palace to house its officers and earnestly attending the trials of heretics. A flavour of his spirituality can be caught in his Bull setting out appropriate punishments for the violation of the Sabbath and for blasphemy. For the rich, there should be fines. The common man, who was unable to pay, should be made to stand before the church door for a whole day, with his hands tied behind his back, for the first offence. ‘For the second he should be whipped through the city; for the third, his tongue should be bored through and he should be sent to the galleys.’ For comparable authoritarian violence among religious leaders in modern times it would be necessary to think of the theocratic leaders of Islamic brigand states.1 Pius V was determined to put into practice every decree of the Council of Trent. In accordance with that Council’s wishes, he issued a uniform breviary (the prayer book of monasteries and priests) and a uniform missal (prayers for the celebration of the Eucharist) so that for the first time in history loyal Catholics everywhere would pray in exactly the same format without loc
al variations. This is the rite nowadays called Tridentine.

  As part of his programme of reform, this pope was especially eager to attack those secular powers who took it upon themselves to control ecclesiastical affairs. On Maundy Thursday 1568 he promulgated a new Bull, In cena Domini (At the Lord’s Supper . . .) in which he especially had within his sights the King of Spain and the doges of Venice. It was symptomatic of the ‘need’ for such a Bull, from the Pope’s point of view, that the Spanish bishops would not publish it until they had permission from the King of Spain.2 (Pius V was frightened by the rumours that Philip’s son, Don Carlos, was a Protestant who supported the rebels in the Low Countries. It probably was not true, but even if it had been, Philip II had his own reason for getting rid of his son: Don Carlos was mad, and after his father had him arrested, he died in prison on 24 July 1568.)

  If the King of Spain or the Doge of Venice were guilty of Caesaropapism, what of the Queen of England who was, if the accounts reaching Rome were to be believed, an unrepentant heretic, who had declared herself the Supreme Governor of her Church; who had authorised a vernacular liturgy, appointed her own bishops and had now put down with the utmost severity a rebellion against her by those who wanted the return of Latin Mass to English churches and the return of England to papal obedience?

  The Roman Catholic enthusiasts who had supported the Northern Rebellion included those who called for Elizabeth to be excommunicated by the Pope. If this were to happen, they believed that all those who missed the old Mass in Latin, all those who wanted the rift with Rome to end, all those who deplored the narrowness and the vandalism of the Puritans, would rise up and, in a great populist conservative movement, return England to the Faith. Nothing could have been more short-sighted. However much Catholics (whether recusant Roman Catholics or ‘church papists’) might dislike the Church of England, this was not a reason for wanting to have Mary Stuart as Queen – Mary Stuart who had murdered her husband and exacerbated Scotland’s internecine religious divisions. The will of Henry VIII had been enacted in law, and Mary was quite simply not legally entitled to the throne. For the Pope to excommunicate Elizabeth and dispense his English followers from loyalty to their sovereign was to place English Catholics in an intolerable position. They must choose between their religious scruples and their civic duty. Merely to be a Roman Catholic in the traditional sense would automatically become potentially treasonable.

  This is what the fanatical Pope Pius V proceeded to do. On the Feast of Corpus Christi (2 June) 1570 he issued his Bull Regnans in excelsis. It called not merely for Elizabeth’s excommunication, but her deposition. No wonder the Elizabethan Prayer Book had attached to it the 39 Articles of Religion, a sort of manifesto for the National Church, the thirty-seventh of which declares, ‘The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England.’ During one night a copy of the Bull was secretly affixed to the door of the Bishop of London. It was the first copy of the Bull seen in England.

  The perpetrator was named John Felton, a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, and the nailing to the door was a witty parody, presumably, of Luther nailing his celebrated Treatises to the door of the church at Wittenberg. Felton’s wife had been a maid of honour to Mary Tudor, and a childhood playmate of Queen Elizabeth, but this jape was meant in deadly earnest. Felton had received two copies of the Pope’s Bull at Calais, and he gave one copy to another barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, one William Mellowes. (The Inns of Court were full of Catholic recusants.) Felton and friends were calling for the overthrow of the English Crown and constitution. The government intelligence service, with Cecil at the centre of its web and Sir Francis Walsingham as its proficient spy-master, quickly found Felton out. (Mellowes had been arrested and tortured on the rack at the Tower of London.) Felton was himself arrested, tortured and half-hanged. Before he was quite dead, the hangman took him down and tore out his heart. Felton’s daughter claimed that while the heart was in the hangman’s hand, Felton was uttering the Holy Name of Jesus.

  It is difficult to know how much to believe of such gallows legends. (My own favourite such story is of the seventeenth-century regicide who, when he heard the hangman holding up his internal organ with the words ‘Behold the heart of a traitor’, is reputed to have replied, ‘Thou liest.’) Felton was duly beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1886 (‘Blessed John Felton’) and of his courage and piety there need be no doubt. He died for the ‘old religion’. When his turn for martyrdom came, the Jesuit Edmund Campion told his judges that he was merely defending the religion of their ancestors.

  But was the truth more complicated? Had the Reformation and the extreme Catholic reaction against it – the Counter-Reformation – in fact changed both sides in this painful argument? Was the religion of Pius V and Carlo Borromeo really the same as the religion of the Venerable Bede and Dame Julian of Norwich? Or had everyone moved on, and were the extremists in both camps the ones now forcing more moderate Christians into positions of hostility with which they did not feel comfortable? For England, with its new National Church (too Protestant in some eyes, too Catholic in others), where should it stand in relation to the great Catholic powers, France and Spain, or in relation to the Dutch resistance-war against the Habsburgs, or the powerful Huguenot faction in France?

  Opinion at court and in the Council was divided between Puritans, who were isolationists, and those such as Cecil who felt the country’s best interests were served by forging an alliance with one of the great European Catholic powers against the other. In some senses it did not matter which power was chosen, as was seen by the fact that a royal marriage with either a Habsburg (the Archduke Charles of Austria) or a member of the French royal family was considered. After the crisis of the Northern Rebellion, however, the alliance with France was clearly one that it was in English interests to cultivate. If, as Cecil hoped, the Queen could be persuaded to marry one of the French principals, a double advantage would be served: England would have an ally against Spain in the Low Countries, and would undermine Mary Stuart’s machinations. (The Scottish queen could hardly expect help from the Valois in deposing one of their own sons from the English throne.) Moreover there was still a chance, if Elizabeth were to marry (she was thirty-seven in 1570), that the longed-for heir could be born, and the succession question settled.

  It was to further this political aim that Francis Walsingham was prepared to subsume his Puritan sympathies in religion when he became English Ambassador in Paris in succession to Sir Henry Norris. He had been much more moderate in his religious views than Walsingham, and moreover his wife was one of Elizabeth’s favourite attendants, so that he had a hotline3 to the Queen which cut out the influential Mr Secretary Cecil. Walsingham went to Paris not merely as an ambassador to the Queen, but as a spy-master for the Cecil faction.

  The Queen could not marry the King of France, Charles IX – he was already married to Elizabeth of Austria. There remained his two younger brothers, Henri, Duc d’Anjou (born 1551) and François, Duc d’Alençon (born 1555). They were both young enough to be Elizabeth’s sons, but since all three boys lived under the formidable dominance of their mother, Catherine de’ Medici, this would not necessarily have constituted a problem for either of them. Negotiations began for a marriage with the elder boy, d’Anjou, but he was adamant that he would not accept Elizabeth’s (to him) incomprehensible religious position, and the negotiations foundered. Attention now turned to the third son, the diminutive pockmarked teenager, François.

  Cecil urged Walsingham upon his arrival in Paris to obtain a portrait of the youth to send back to London. No one could pretend that the Queen was contracting a love match, but they did not want a repetition of what happened when Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had taken one look at his fourth bride, Anne of Cleves, and brutally concluded that she was a Flanders mare. The portrait in paint not being found, Walsingham resorted to mere words, and they were the grovelling, circumlocutory words of a man who queasily knew that if his grotesque mission were successful, the
tiny duke would become the King of England. ‘In structure,’ wrote Walsingham, ‘by judgment of others that viewed us together, he was esteemed three fingers higher than myself.’ As for the deep pockmarks of the duke’s acned face, ‘in complexion somewhat sallow, his body of very good shape, his leg long and small, but reasonably well-proportioned’.4 It would have been a strange match indeed, had it come to anything. Preposterous as it seems with hindsight that the two should have married, it remained a possibility, on and off, throughout the decade, and even when events appeared to scupper the chances of a French match for ever in 1572, the marriage with François became something that clearly excited Elizabeth herself in 1579.