Yet it was far from being a matter of personal fulfilment, still less of love. The Alençon match, if it took place at all, would have been a matter of politics, a diplomatic alliance played out against the volatile religio-political climate of Europe in the 1570s. The diplomatic preliminary to an Anglo-French marriage was painstakingly worked out in the Treaty of Blois (April 1572): the English tried to make the French accept the Earl of Mar as rightful regent of Scotland and to drop their support for the restoration of Mary Stuart; both sides agreed to supply as much as 6,000 troops and eight ships in defence of the other, in the event of their being attacked by Spain. England and France were now at least notionally allied against Spain. But the treaty had scarcely been signed before the flaw was shown in the alliance: the lack of religious sympathy between the ruling French dynasty and England. The Duke of Alva put down a Protestant rebellion with the utmost severity in the Netherlands, and Elizabeth offered covert help to the Dutch Protestants. It is not as if the Dutch Protestants had no allies in France; but, rather, that the obvious preference of Elizabeth, Cecil and the great weight of opinion in the Council were with these Huguenots – and completely at odds with the family of her suitor.
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a prominent Huguenot, urged his government to make war against the Spaniards in the Low Countries. It would have been a brilliant tactic as far as France was concerned – witness the anxiety occasioned by the very idea in England. In June 1572 Cecil wrote to Walsingham warning that French control of Flemish ports would mean severe restrictions on English trade. The next month Queen Elizabeth sent Sir Humphrey Gilbert with more than 1,000 volunteer soldiers to occupy the Zeeland towns of Flushing and Sluys against the Spanish, to prevent their occupation by the French. It was a typical example of Elizabeth not wishing her left hand to know what was being done by her right, since the expedition was unofficial and, if it failed, Gilbert knew that the Queen would disown him.
Meanwhile in France, Catherine de’ Medici had cold feet about the war, and worried about the influence that the Huguenots were having on French foreign policy. (Clearly, to defeat Spain in the Low Countries would be to strengthen Dutch Protestants and was in the interests of their prince, William of Orange.) The King of France married his daughter, Marguerite of Valois, to the Protestant Prince of Navarre, an alliance that was deeply unpopular with Catholics. (A generation would pass before the young man, as Henri IV, would convert to Catholicism with the cynical observation that Paris is worth a Mass.)
Four days after the wedding, on 22 August 1572, Coligny was walking along the rue de Béthisy after meeting the Duc d’Anjou at the Louvre. He bent to adjust an overshoe that he wore as protection against the filth of the Parisian street, and the action saved his life. At that very moment a bullet from an arquebus was fired at the admiral from the iron grille of a window in the house of Canon Pierre de Pille, former preceptor to the Duc de Guise. The would-be assassin escaped through the cloister of the nearby church, and Coligny, who had been hit, was carried home with a shattered left elbow, bleeding profusely.
Playing tennis in the Louvre, the King had heard the gunshot. When he heard of the assassination attempt he feigned anger and sent his physician, Ambrose Paré, to tend to the wounded man. But the King knew what was planned for the capital’s Protestant population, of whom Coligny was a figurehead.
At dawn on the feast of St Bartholomew, 24 August, the tocsin was rung and the well-primed mob were set to their task. Coligny was the first to die, stabbed in the chest as he lay in a bedroom supposedly guarded by royal troops. His murderer was a Bohemian follower of the Ducs de Guise, known as Dianovitz or Besme. Coligny’s body was thrown out of the window into the street. The Duc de Guise himself and the bastard brother of the King, the Duc d’Angoulême, watched as Coligny’s head was hacked from its body, which was hung from chains on a public gibbet at Montfaucon. A dozen other Huguenot leaders were murdered in swift succession. François, Comte de La Rochefoucauld, who had been chatting and joking only hours before with the King, was stabbed. The Seigneur de la Force and one of his sons had their throats slashed.
By now the mob was busily at work, looting Huguenot houses and killing Protestants. No accurate tally has ever been made of the exact count of those slaughtered. It seems as though at least 3,000 were killed in Paris alone. As the carnage, lasting two or three months, spread to other parts of France – to Toulouse, to Bordeaux, to Lyons, Rouen and Orléans – some say that 10,000 were killed.5 A recent history places the death count as high as 70,000.6 Certainly, France had never seen such an orgy of violence, and it would wait until the Terror of 1793–4 until it saw such a thing again. (Thereafter periodic internecine massacres have been a bloody feature of French life, as in the Paris Commune of 1870 and the retributory epidemic of murder after the Liberation in 1944.) The massacre lived in the French collective psyche, a terrible smoking crater, never quite extinct, ever likely to erupt with hate-filled destruction. (Three years before the Terror itself began, there was a massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Montauban, prompting the pamphleteers to see it as ‘la nouvelle Saint-Barthélemy’,7 but it was Robespierre’s full-blown Terror that truly reminded the French of the terrible legacy of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572.)
‘But yet, O man, rage not beyond thy needs.’ This was the advice to kings and tyrants given by Philisides in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia:
Deem it no gloire to swell in tyranny
Thou art of blood; joy not to make things bleed.8
Sidney knew what he was talking about. As a young man just down from Oxford and about to start his Grand Tour of the continent, he was staying with Walsingham (as it happens, his future father-in-law) in the English Ambassador’s residence on the quai de Bernadins in Faubourg Saint-Germain. Walsingham eventually managed to smuggle his wife and infant daughter Frances, then aged about five, out of the city, but not before they had witnessed scenes of blood in which friends were killed. The Huguenot general François de Beauvais, Sieur de Briquemault, tried to take refuge with the Walsinghams, but was dragged out of the house by royal troops and later hanged.9 A new friend of Sidney’s, Pierre de la Ramée, a distinguished logician, tried to take refuge in a bookshop in the rue Saint-Jacques. After two days it seemed as if the coast was clear, but when he returned to his lodgings at the Collège de Presles, he was repeatedly stabbed as he knelt at prayer.10 In the mayhem three Englishmen were killed. Others were forced by the mob to ride through the streets of Paris to admire the piles of corpses of their fellow Protestants, and to see them floating in the Seine.11
Timothy Bright was a young Englishman who was staying at the embassy at the same time as Sidney. Bright, then a medical student, was the first Englishman to invent a system of shorthand. Fourteen years after the Paris massacre, he was to publish a classic Treatise on Melancholy, as well as an abridgement of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He was one of the many Englishmen who had reason to regard Foxe’s book – ghoulish as it may seem to modern taste – to be no more than an accurate account of the Counter-Reformation, red in tooth and claw. He owed his life to Walsingham, to whom he wrote, ‘Many of my countrymen, partly of acquaintance and partly of the noble houses of this realm . . . had all tasted of the rage of that furious tragedy, had not your honour shrouded them.’12
Walsingham, throughout his negotiations over the potential marriage of Queen Elizabeth to the Duc d’Alençon, had tried to convince himself that the King of France and Catherine de’ Medici had been genuine in their protestations of friendship. Now, Paris and several other French towns were awash with blood. Englishmen had been killed. The reaction of the new Pope, Gregory XIII (Ugo Boncompagni, elected 14 May 1572), was to order a solemn Te Deum to be sung in St Peter’s and a medal to be struck, depicting an angel holding a cross in one hand and a drawn sword in the other, with which he was massacring Protestants.13 Of King Charles IX, Walsingham wrote to Burghley, ‘I never knew so deep a dissembler.’14
Walsingham protested to the French court about
the killings, and to the Council in London he reported back:
Seeing the King persecuteth that religion with all extremity that her Majesty professes . . . seeing that they that now possess his ear are sworn enemies unto her Majesty . . . seeing that the King’s own conscience . . . maketh him to repute all those of the religion, as well at home as abroad, his enemies . . . I leave it to your Honours now to judge what account you may make of the amity of this crown. If I may without presumption or offence say my opinion, considering how things presently stand, I think less peril to live with them as enemies than as friends.15
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the possibility of the Queen of England marrying the duc d’Alençon looked less than inviting. It dimmed Elizabeth’s hopes for an Anglo-French alliance. English foreign policy now switched from a slightly false flirtation with the House of Guise to more or less open encouragement of any Huguenot rebellion against the French Crown.
More immediately unsettling than events abroad was the threat posed by the Counter-Reformation to English stability at home. ‘Can we think,’ Walsingham asked, ‘that the fire kindled here in France will extend itself no further? . . . Let us not deceive ourselves but assuredly think that the two great monarchs of Europe together with the rest of the Papists do mean shortly to put in execution . . . the resolutions of the Council of Trent.’16
Since one Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, and his successor celebrated the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre two years later with a Te Deum, there could be no doubt of the threat. This was felt especially warily in the North, so recently a scene of Roman Catholic insurgency. Sir Thomas Gargrave, Speaker of the House of Commons, was Vice President of the Council of the North, where he was considered ‘a great stay for the good order of these parts’ by the Earl of Huntingdon.17 He wrote to Burghley from the North, a month after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, ‘The people here are, as I think, like others in other parts of the realm; one sort is pleased with the late affront in France, another sort lament and are appalled at it; others would seem indifferent, and those be the greatest number; they are dissemblers, and yet many of them obedient subjects, and to be led by authority, and by their landlords and officers.’ In a ‘List of the principal gentlemen in the East, North and West Ridings of Yorkshire’ Gargrave reckoned that ‘26 are Protestants, 15 doubtful or neuter, of more or less evil, and 11 of the worst sort’.18
It just was not possible to know, any more than the government of a Western nation today knows how many, among its potential terrorist population, are ‘more or less evil’ – that is, intent on murdering their fellow citizens for the sake of religion, and how many are ‘obedient subjects’. The idea of the Elizabethan Settlement in religion was that Catholics and Protestants should be prepared to come together in one national Church, which was both Catholic and Reformed. By 1572 it was by no means easy to tell how successful the experiment had been, and how much religious conformity was really a cloak for a set of divisions that could at any moment turn into an English version of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
No wonder even moderate men such as Matthew Parker wanted Mary, Queen of Scots beheaded. He was less outright in his demand for it than was the Bishop of London,19 but in wanting this they were asking not for vengeance against Catholics so much as the lancing of a dangerous boil. An anonymous correspondent of Leicester’s begged the Queen to remove Mary Stuart:
For God’s sake, my Lord, let not her Majesty in these great sorrows forget the greatest danger. Let her Highness be prayed to remember conscience and eternity. Let her not bring on England murders, rapes, robberies, violence, and barbarous slaughters, and the damnation of so many seduced souls by the advancement of papistry; and all for piteous pity and miserable mercy in sparing one horrible woman, who carries God’s work wherever she goes.20
One of Burghley’s correspondents at the end of that terrible year, 1572 (‘Wrytten by Mr Carleton, sent by Tho. Cecil to me’), reckoned that ‘the realm is divided into three parties, the Papist, the Atheist and the Protestant. All these are alike favoured; the first and second because, being many, we dare not displease them; the third because, having religion, we fear to displease God in them. All three are blamed, the Papist as traitor, the Atheist as godless, the Protestant as a precisian.’ [It means a stickler for form, and was a synonym for Puritan.] The correspondent realised that the precarious balance which stopped these parties fighting hinged on one fact – the life of the Queen. She alone could hold it together. He argued that ‘such Protestants as do not like the Queen’s form of religion be encouraged to go to Ireland and settle in Ulster’. Meanwhile, those who did like the Queen’s form of religion should arm themselves. He suggested a permanent stand-by force of armed horsemen in the twenty counties near London, and for the nobility to be in a state of constant readiness for the defence of ‘the gospel, and preservation of the State, and the Queen’s person’.21
The cruelty with which the recusants were treated by Walsingham’s spy network and torture-chambers has never been forgotten, not least because so many of the victims were at a much later date declared to be saints of the Church. The martyrologists on both sides on the painful argument polarised opinion until our own day, and continue to do so. Opinions at the time must often have been nuanced, and heavily influenced by such untheological questions as personal liking, or disliking, and family kinship. Philip Sidney is a case in point. He was the nephew of Leicester – that ‘captain general of the Puritans’22 – and his work, in poetry and prose, is often seen as the quintessential expression of ‘Protestant chivalry’.23 He witnessed the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day at first hand. Yet five years later when he found himself in Prague he renewed his acquaintance with Edmund Campion (1540–1581). They probably first met at Oxford in 1566 when Sidney, an eleven-year-old Shrewsbury schoolboy, had been taken out of school to witness the royal visit to the university in the company of the Chancellor, Leicester, and two other uncles – the Earl of Sussex and the Earl of Warwick.24 A high point of the visit had been when Campion, a brilliant Fellow of St John’s College in his mid-twenties, had welcomed the Queen on behalf of the university and taken part in a Latin disputation in the Queen’s presence. Elizabeth had especially commended Campion’s eloquence and he became something of a protégé of Leicester. Yet though persuaded to take deacon’s orders in the Church of England by the most Catholic-minded of the bishops – Edward Cheyney of Gloucester – Campion could not shake off the conviction that, in severing itself from the papacy and the parent-stem of the Roman Catholic obedience, the Church of England had ceased to be the Church.
Sir Henry Sidney asked him to Dublin in 1569 to revive the idea of funding a university there. Campion was to have a major role to play, had it not been for his religious scruples. By the time Pius V had issued his denunciation of Elizabeth, Campion had cut loose. The trial in London in 1571 of Dr Storey,25 who was executed in June, confirmed Campion in his desire to become a Roman Catholic priest, and it was as a Jesuit that he met Philip Sidney in Prague in 1577.
The two men – Sidney aged twenty-three, Campion aged thirty-seven – clearly liked one another. Sidney heard Campion preach before the Emperor and they had a number of meetings and conversations. Clearly, the Catholics felt that Sidney, not merely a brilliant ‘Renaissance man’ – poet, swordsman, linguist, soldier – but also a nephew of some of the most powerful men in England, would have been a useful convert. It is difficult to know how much to credit their belief that he was tempted. Robert Parsons, Campion’s fellow Jesuit, certainly thought so, and Campion himself wrote to another recusant Fellow of St John’s, Oxford, now in exile:
a few months ago Philip Sidney came from England to Prague, magnificently provided. He had much conversation with me – I hope not in vain, for to all appearance he was most eager. I commend him to your sacrifices [that is, remember him at Mass] for he asked the prayers of all good men and at the same time put into my hands some alms to be distributed to the poor
for him, which I have done. Tell this to Dr Nicholas Sanders, because if any one of our labourers sent into the vineyard from the Douai seminary has an opportunity of watering this plant, he may watch the occasion for helping a poor wavering soul. If this young man, so wonderfully beloved and admired by his countrymen, chances to be converted, he will astonish his noble father, the Deputy of Ireland, his uncles the Dudleys and all young courtiers, and Cecil himself. Let it be kept secret.26
The conversations show how seriously a young Protestant intellectual took Campion’s arguments. How could any Westerner who believed in Christianity not take these arguments seriously? Apart from any heresy that might have been promoted in the Reformed churches, you had only to witness the dissensions, wars, quarrels and killings which had ensued since Luther nailed his Theses to the church door at Wittenberg to wish that Christians could unite under one shepherd. And anyone who witnessed the fervour and heroic courage of the Catholics who risked ruin, imprisonment, torture and death for their faith would have been insensitive indeed not to be impressed.
Likewise, however, viewed from a narrowly English, or narrowly British, point of view (as religion increasingly was with the unfolding century), the activities of the European Catholic powers were, to say the least, alarming. Walsingham and his spies and torture-instruments made life unpleasant for their few hundred victims. The Inquisition, the Pope, the Kings of France and Spain had slain their tens of thousands. And was it an evil that men and women could hear God’s word read and preached in their own language, rather than mumbled incomprehensibly in dog-Latin?
The 1570s saw the arrival of thousands of Huguenot refugees in England. In Threadneedle Street in London, the Huguenot church was a bastion of Calvinism and greatly strengthened the hands of English Puritans who had been arguing for a generation that the work of the Reformation was only half-done. The arrival of the French refugees could provide their English hosts with the double pleasure of resenting their arrival and crowing at the barbarity that had led to it. So, as early as February 1567, ‘there was a great watch in the City of London . . . for fear of an insurrection against the strangers which were in great number in and about the City’.27 The Huguenots were blamed for the increase in London’s population, and for inflating the value of property. ‘They take up the fairest houses in the city, divide and fit them for their several uses and take into them several lodgers and dwellers.’ At the same time, disagreeable as Londoners might say they found the French Protestants, there was an eager readership for horror stories about the abominations perpetrated by French Catholics. The publisher Henry Bynneman brought out five editions (three Latin, one French and one English) of De Furoribus gallicis in 1573. Its anonymous author was François Hofman, a jurisconsult then living in exile in Geneva because he ‘detested both the Roman law and the Roman church’. He also wrote a highly popular biography of Coligny, The Lyffe of the most godly valiant and noble Captaine . . . Colignie Shalilion, published in 1576. Thomas Vautrollier was a Huguenot publisher who settled in London and was responsible for many massacre pamphlets and accounts of Roman Catholic abominations. Among the army of hack-translators on Vautrollier’s books was a really distinguished one: Arthur Golding, who was the uncle of the Earl of Oxford. He dedicated his translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Calvin’s Offences to Leicester, and translated a very hostile biography by Bullinger of Pius V. For a time, he actually lived in Burghley’s house in the Strand.
The Elizabethans Page 16
