by Lisa Hilton
Interpretations of Elizabeth’s aim to push Mary into marriage with Leicester vary. Some argue that this was yet another diplomatic game, a means of encouraging Mary to think that Elizabeth had her interests at heart while buying time to keep more powerful suitors at bay. Others cast this as Elizabeth’s first venture into controlling her own policy and judge it as “a terrible miscalculation.”9 On balance, the former view seems more probable, but in wasting time on the Leicester negotiations, Elizabeth was making a misjudgment in that she neglected the threat of a far more dangerous family than the Dudleys. Elizabeth’s disgust with Katherine Grey’s behavior also played into her misunderstanding of Mary’s character. She simply never counted on Mary behaving in an unqueenly fashion. She could control herself, why could not Mary? Unlike Katherine, they were both born royal. And perhaps this is the key to Elizabeth’s consistent bafflement, over the following years, at Mary’s behavior. No matter how much Elizabeth strived to create herself as the serene, all-powerful monarch of the Armada Portrait, a part of her always remained that contained, wary princess. The difference between their childhoods manifested itself in their endless frustrated communications—in a fashion, Elizabeth never took her status for granted while Mary, uncontested queen, darling of the French court before her seventh birthday, took it equally for granted that rules just did not apply to her. Her hasty, passionately incautious marriage to Henry, Lord Darnley, was a disastrous case in point.
Elizabeth’s cousin Margaret Douglas was the daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor. She was married to Matthew, Earl of Lennox, one of the most powerful Scots magnates. Margaret Douglas was given to vociferous meddling—her incautious remarks about uniting the Tudor blood of her eldest son, Henry Darnley, with that of Mary, Queen of Scots, had already landed her under house arrest and her husband in the Tower—yet, despite this, in April 1564, Elizabeth apparently considered that the Earl of Lennox could be useful to her in Scotland. He travelled the same month as Robert Dudley was granted his earldom, but Elizabeth was “hopelessly behind the game.”10 Five months later, his son followed him. Darnley was vicious and rampantly ambitious, but all Mary saw when she set eyes on the “properest and best proportioned long man” she had ever seen was, to put it baldly, sex. She experienced a complete coup de foudre.11 By the following July, with flagrant disregard for Elizabeth’s wishes, they were married, though not before Mary had recklessly, and without the support of her Parliament, had her darling proclaimed Prince Henry, Duke of Albany, “King of this Kingdom.” And on 24 June the next year, the news arrived in London that another couple with claims to the English crown had been blessed with a male child. As Elizabeth’s second parliament assembled in London that winter, Mary was contriving a spectacular display of dynastic magnificence for her son’s baptism at Stirling. Her message could not have been more pointed: “Our leader has transposed Mars ablaze with civil war into peace in our time… . The crown of Mary awaits her grandsons.”12 It seemed that the Scots queen had triumphed, “the importance of kingship is eternal,” and she, not Elizabeth, had produced it.
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WHEN ELIZABETH WAS crowned in 1559, she received congratulations from reformed religious communities all over Europe, including that of the Consul and Senate of Bern, Switzerland, announcing their rejoicing at the news that the queen “has recalled those persons who have been exiled for the cause of Gospel truth … and has resumed the work of evangelical reformation commenced by her brother Edward.”1 For the remainder of her reign, Protestant leaders were to encourage, exhort, and frequently despair at Elizabeth’s reluctance to commit herself, practically and ideologically, to the reformist cause at large. Elizabeth may have been determined to ensure the security of her own Church, but it was to be many years before she grudgingly conceded any help beyond words to the protection of anyone else’s. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the English approach to the conflict between Holland and Spain which had begun early in the century, and which was to have profound effects on both the English economy and the nation’s contumacious relationship with the great power of Spain.
The Seventeen Provinces of the Spanish Netherlands had been inherited by the Hapsburg Empire in 1482. Imperial-Dutch relations had proved fraught from the outset, with the Dutch objecting to heavy taxation, the neglect of clear governance on the part of the huge and unwieldy empire, and an oppressive religious regime, which, in 1523 under Charles V, outlawed the “heresy” of reform and saw more than a thousand people executed over the following forty years. When Charles V abdicated in 1555, his Spanish territories descended to Philip of Spain (soon to be technically King of England), whose commitment to the Counter-Reformation saw him revive these anti-heresy statutes which under his father’s later reign had been less stringently applied. While the temporary exhaustion of the powers of France and Spain meant that Elizabeth began her rule within a diplomatic context which was generally desirous of peace, and which meant that initially English policy towards persecuted Dutch reformers was extremely circumspect, the importance of the economic relationship between England and the Netherlands soon exemplified the improbability of Elizabeth’s government being able to distinguish between spiritual and secular issues.
In 1559, Philip appointed his illegitimate half-sister, Margaret of Parma, to the governorship of the Netherlands, a position previously filled, for a collective total of forty-eight years, by Margaret’s great-aunt and aunt, Archduchess Margaret and Mary of Austria. Elizabeth sent warm congratulations to her fellow female ruler, which Margaret “gratefully” received, and heard from her envoy, Sir Thomas Challoner, of the great “wealth of prince and subject” of the Seventeen Provinces. Despite the fact that Margaret’s own accession had prompted a wave of fearful Protestant emigration to England from the Netherlands (in which Elizabeth personally saw no reason to rejoice, as she disliked fanatical Protestants quite as much as she despised dogmatic Catholics), it was this wealth which immediately concerned English policy. Since her grandfather Henry VII had agreed to a trade policy with the then Duke of Burgundy in 1496, the Netherlands, and Antwerp in particular, had been central to the English cloth trade, while loans raised on the Antwerp exchange were crucial to the English government in permitting a relative degree of independence from the need to raise funds through Parliament. Yet it was beyond the government’s control to dictate a confessionally justified argument which was being fought out at sea. Challoner’s correspondence is full of fearful details of the persecutions enacted by the Spanish Inquisition, known as the Holy Office, which Philip refused to counter. Anglo-Spanish merchants were particularly vulnerable to charges of heresy and ever more convoluted justifications for their arrest and the confiscation of their goods, and English privateers now began a counter-attack on Iberian vessels. By 1563, some four hundred such ships, containing 25,000 sailors, were reported to be at large. In January 1564, Philip ordered that all English ships in Basque ports be seized and their crews imprisoned. Margaret’s envoy to London, Christophe d’Assonleville, appeared before Elizabeth with a list of grievances against the privateers and an increase in English customs duties, and was given a soothing reception. Anxious to preserve accord with the Flanders trade, Cecil wrote to the Earl of Sussex:
This matter of resort of pirates, or, if you will so call them, our adventurers, that daily rob the Spaniards and Flemings … is a matter of great long consequence. For God’s sake I require you to employ some care therein, that some might be apprehended and executed.2
Unappeased, Margaret closed her ports to English vessels in November 1564. Elizabeth in turn demanded that unless the ban was lifted, and all English shipping and mariners released from Spain, she would suspend all trade with the Netherlands. What began as economic bravado on both sides—each wishing to prove their mercantile independence from the other—developed into something far more consequential in terms of the Spanish king’s attitude towards Elizabeth. As the Flanders cloth trade collapsed for lack of English raw materials, dispo
ssessed and starving workers became more susceptible to the incendiary preaching of Calvinist divines. For Philip, the Flemish Protestants were not only heretics; they were a manifestation of a highly disturbing social revolution. The delicate and complex social fabric which had kept the Seventeen Provinces in such excellent fiscal order was being threatened by a reformed doctrine which encouraged ordinary men and women to disregard the rulings not only of priests but of kings. Elizabeth’s grand gesture provoked a degree of civil unrest which Philip viewed as an ungrateful return on his relatively tolerant attitude thus far to the heretic queen. Elizabeth had never intended to present herself as a Protestant champion; indeed, she would maintain her resistance to that role for decades to come, but Philip was coming to see England as irremediably associated with his Flemish subjects’ insurrection. It was the beginning of a cold war.
In the summer of 1566, Calvinist rebels succeeded in bringing Margaret of Parma’s government to a standstill. The concessions the regent granted in the face of such widespread civil unrest, which included freedom of worship for Protestants, were impossible for Philip to admit. Margaret did succeed in restoring Hapsburg authority, but her brother’s patience had snapped. A year later, the Duke of Alba arrived in the Netherlands with ten thousand Spanish troops. Where once Elizabeth had been worried about the possibility of French domination in the region, she was now confronted with a far more effective military power, and one far more concerned with expunging heresy. Moreover, the closure of the Antwerp exchange seriously affected her access to borrowing. Amidst shocking news of Alba’s persecutions and ever more urgent scrambling for credit, Elizabeth chose to make another inflammatory gesture.
In 1562, the English captain John Hawkins had undertaken a small expedition to Sierra Leone, where he had successfully traded several hundred slaves, returning with a profit so impressive that Elizabeth herself, along with her Lord Admiral and the Earls of Leicester and Pembroke, was prepared to invest in a further voyage. The fact that this amounted to a direct usurpation of Spanish prerogative did not deter her, and by 1568, despite frequent assurances of Hawkins’s loyalty to the Spanish king and a good deal of diplomatic fudging to disguise the queen’s involvement, three further voyages had been undertaken. Elizabeth was behaving in a willfully provocative manner, choosing to remind Philip that she was his equal, but given the situation in the Netherlands, she underestimated the diplomatic impact of profiting from illegal trade. As Alba’s persecutions in the provinces mounted, fleets of “Sea Beggars”—Protestant refugees, dispossessed members of the Netherlands aristocracy, plain criminals, and numerous enterprising English sailors (encouraged by Elizabeth issuing commissions legitimizing the harassment of French Catholic ships under cover of assisting the Huguenots) were attacking Spanish traders and disrupting Alba’s supply lines. Elizabeth clearly felt financially secure enough at this point to ignore Spanish displeasure—Hamburg had proved a viable alternative to Antwerp for the cloth trade, and a recent alteration in customs duties had produced an excess—so when in November 1568 four Genoese ships carrying monies to pay Alba’s troops limped into Plymouth Harbor after escaping pursuit by the Sea Beggars, Elizabeth decided to help herself to the funds. Technically, this was not illegal, as the £85,000 the ships carried had not been made over to Alba, and its Italian owners were at liberty to lend the money to whomsoever they chose, but Philip’s most recent, and deeply hostile, envoy, Don Guerau de Spes, did all he could to equate it with aggressive English policy and Elizabeth’s active harboring of heretics. Before Elizabeth had confirmed that she intended to retain the monies, de Spes’s machinations prompted Alba in December to detain English ships and their cargoes in Netherlands’s ports and imprison their crews. For both sides, short of an outright declaration of war, escalation now seemed the only possibility—a staring contest in which both Elizabeth and Philip waited to see which of them would back down first.
As the Genoese ships nosed into port, a tribunal was sitting at Westminster Hall. Its task was to determine the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots. Since the triumph of her son’s christening the previous year, Mary’s rule had been sliding into anarchy. The marriage with Darnley was a disaster, the Scots magnates increasingly resentful and ungovernable. On 9 February 1567, a conspiracy led by James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, had quite literally exploded at a house at Kirk o’Field in Edinburgh, where Mary’s husband was convalescing from an illness. Darnley was murdered as he tried to escape from the burning ruin. By 15 May, Mary was married to Bothwell. By June, civil war had broken out in Scotland, and Mary found herself an abandoned prisoner at Lochleven Castle. In July, utterly broken-spirited, she signed away the rights to her crown in favor of her son, who was proclaimed on the 29th with Mary’s half-brother Moray as regent. Once the darling of European royalty, Mary had demeaned herself to the status of a homeless, stateless adulteress, one, moreover, who was accused of cooperating in the murder of her second husband. Elizabeth’s personal sympathy for her kinswoman is perhaps best expressed by the fact that on the day Mary wrote to her, almost a year later, begging her to take pity on her “good sister and cousin,” Elizabeth was inspecting a collection of pearls which had been sent south from Mary’s collection by Regent Moray. Alongside six cordons strung “paternoster” style (that is, looped like prayer beads) were twenty-five “black Muscades,” the size and color of the grape, which Elizabeth, gloating covetously as she viewed them with Leicester, pronounced to be “unparalleled.” She had them for 12,000 crowns, having the additional pleasure of besting Mary’s former mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, to the bargain. Sisterhood did not count for much when it came to stones.
Quite what was to be done with the once Queen of Scotland was initially uncertain, but Mary helped matters along in her own dashing way by escaping from Lochleven a few days after Elizabeth received the pearls and heading an army against Moray. Her troops were defeated, and on 16 May 1568, Mary arrived in Cumbria by fishing boat. As she never ceased to remind Elizabeth for the rest of her life, she had arrived not as a captive but as an anointed queen in search of succor. The best possible solution for Elizabeth’s government, though, was to lock her up, which they did, for the next nineteen years. Challenging the legality of Mary Stuart’s imprisonment is fairly easy. Primarily, she was a queen and therefore subject only to God. She had come of her own free will to England after being herself illegally condemned by her subjects for Darnley’s murder, to which she had been given no opportunity to answer personally or through Parliament. She had, if nothing else, the right to defend herself and claim restitution. To limit the rights and wrongs of the argument to the extremely hazy province of sixteenth-century laws concerning absconding monarchs, though, is rather to miss the point. As far as many of Elizabeth’s ministers were concerned, Mary was the deadliest enemy their state possessed.
Mary Stuart embodied a new perception of Catholicism which was actively propagated in England in the 1560s and 1570s, in terms of both domestic and foreign policy. Elizabeth’s Church was still new, vulnerable, and unformed. The Catholic faith had to be repositioned as something foreign, something other, as opposed to what it had been until very recently, the accepted mode of worship for the majority. Confessional control was becoming part of statecraft: “In all sixteenth-century Christian states, non-conformity had profound political as well as spiritual implications: in England, it was a de facto assault upon the ineluctable premise by which government defined every aspect of its authority.”3 When Cecil analyzed the situation in 1569, he identified the pope and the monarchs of France and Spain as the enemies of England, and their instrument as Mary: “The Catholic powers of Europe were operating on Elizabeth like surgeons, using Mary Stuart as their scalpel.”4 As far as Cecil was concerned, if the government waited for a Catholic revolution, it would already be too late to stop it.
The Moray regime had no interest in English support for Mary’s reclamation of her throne. Elizabeth, it seemed, was, however, personally inclined to hear her cousin out.
To counter this, Moray conveniently produced a collection of letters, known as the Casket Letters, which supposedly proved both Mary’s adulterous relationship with Bothwell and her acquiescence to Darnley’s murder, described by Cecil as “a full fardel of naughty matter tending to convince the queen as devisor of the murder and the Earl of Bothwell her executor.” It was pathetically obvious that the letters had been tampered with and in part downright forged, but it suited the government to make use of them. After an initial tribunal at York, the case was brought at Westminster, where Elizabeth agreed that, should the evidence against Mary stand up, she would recognize Moray’s government and give her up. When the commissioners met in the Painted Chamber at Westminster on 18 November, the letters were produced, but only when Mary’s envoys were out of the room. Only “copies” of the letters were seen by them, and at a second meeting at Hampton Court a month later, it was stated before Elizabeth that there was no discrepancy between the two versions. Mary, very effectively, was framed. In part, the reduction of her standing was a gesture to other powers, a performance of justice. It was also an effective means of justifying an imprisonment that began at Tutbury Castle and continued for nearly two decades. Cecil and his colleagues sincerely believed that Mary could only ever be a threat to England, and arguably in doing so, they brought about what they feared. The politics of Elizabeth’s reign were consistently those of opposition to an overwhelmingly threatening foreign status quo. Whether Mary was indeed an enemy of Elizabeth’s state at this point is moot. In 1569, she was the enemy it needed.
