by David Loades
The seriousness of Philip’s intentions in this respect may be measured by the fact that he recruited two formidable ladies to his team of persuaders, and was followed to England by Christina of Denmark, the widowed Duchess of Lorraine (who had once rejected an advance from Henry VIII), and his own half-sister, Margaret, Duchess of Parma.[338] Whether it was Elizabeth whom they were supposed to persuade, or Mary, or both, is not clear. In any case the campaign failed. Philip could have simply ordered the princess to accompany him on his return to Flanders, and it was widely believed that he intended to do that. Once out of the country, and away from her political supporters, Elizabeth might have found it impossible to sustain her resistance. But a forced marriage of that kind would have been a poor solution. Not only might it be repudiated if the circumstances changed, but it would have deeply offended his English subjects and reluctant allies. Mary’s feelings towards her sister in 1557 can only be deduced, but everyone who commented upon the matter believed them to be very hostile – and heartily reciprocated. ‘Although it is dissembled,’ wrote Surian, ‘it cannot be denied that she displays in many ways the scorn and ill-will she bears her.’[339] Mary was baffled and deeply distressed that so many of her subjects accepted this creature as her natural heir – and even more distressed that her husband was now doing the same. It may have been partly because Philip wanted to secure Elizabeth’s marriage as ‘the heir of England’ that Mary was so deeply opposed to the idea.
In matters religious, there was good and bad news. Although Pope Paul had renewed Cardinal Pole’s legatine commission with words of commendation soon after his election, the only positive thing that he had done for the English Church was to issue the papal bull Praeclara in June 1555. This had canonically extinguished the religious houses dissolved by Henry VIII, and thus finally put an end to any prospects of their reclaiming property.[340] It was in a sense just a tidying-up operation after the settlement of January, but at least it demonstrated that the new pope, for all his hostility to Philip, had no intention of repudiating the settlement.[341] It also meant that any religious houses established under the existing dispensation in England would be new foundations. There would be no legal continuity. However, the war that had broken out in September 1556 had led to a virtual breakdown of relations with England, and on 9 April Pole was recalled to Rome. It was understood that he was to face investigation upon ‘certain charges’, by which heresy was generally understood. When Sir Edward Carne, Mary’s ambassador in Rome, protested against this decision, Paul was conciliatory. Of course he recognised that England was a special case and needed a legate, but he made no move to reinstate Pole. Perhaps, Carne suggested, a personal appeal from the queen would be in order. On 21 May Philip and Mary duly wrote, protesting the damage that would be done to the English Church by the cardinal’s departure, and professing themselves perfectly satisfied with his diligence – and his orthodoxy.[342] Four days later Pole penned his own protest. At about the same time the English council also wrote to the same effect: the English Church was like a convalescent patient, and the pope’s action would remove its physician. Paul was unmoved. He had long suspected Pole of unorthodox sympathies, and had strongly resented the advice that the cardinal had recently given him on settling his differences with Philip. The pope had also had enough of humanist intellectuals who favoured reconciliation with the Protestants, and who equivocated over fundamental issues such as justification.[343] On 31 May the cardinal protector of England (and Pole’s main contact in the curia), Giovanni Morone, was arrested and sent to the castle of San Angelo. On 14 June the pope repeated his demand for Pole to return to Rome.
At about the same time Paul announced that out of a fatherly concern for the wellbeing of the English Church, he would name a new legate – making an exception to his general rule. The man he named was William Peto. Carne was stunned, and declared openly that he dared not communicate such a decision to England. Peto was an Observant Franciscan who, twenty years earlier, had made a name for himself as a preacher and writer against Henry’s divorce and had earned a spell in exile as a result. He had been appointed by the pope to the see of Salisbury in 1543, but had never secured possession. He was personally known to Paul, having spent some time in Rome during his exile, but by 1557 was over eighty and in feeble health.[344] When the Franciscan house at Greenwich was restored in 1556, he had retired there with every intention of spending his last years in prayer and meditation. It may be that the pope, who was an octogenarian himself, did not see age as any handicap, but he should have known that Peto was not up to the job, either physically or mentally. Mary was outraged, regarding such an appointment as little short of an insult, and when the nuncio bearing the news arrived at Calais on 3 or 4 July, he found himself anticipated. Mary refused him admission to the realm.[345] At the same time Peto himself declined the proffered appointment on the grounds of his age and unsuitability. In Rome it was believed that the English schism was about to be renewed, but there was never any question of that, and Paul held back from imposing sanctions. What he did do was studiously ignore English business, whether public or private. Consequently, when Bishop Robert Parfew of Hereford died on 22 September 1557, although a successor was named, he was not installed before Mary herself died. The same happened with Robert King of Oxford and Henry Man of the see of Sodor. Two or three other bishops died in 1558, and none of them was replaced, so the bench was about six or seven short when it came to fight its corner in Elizabeth’s Parliament of 1559.
Pole was deeply distressed. Papal authority was one of the sheet anchors of his faith, and if he had been free to choose he would have returned to Rome, and no doubt to incarceration in a papal prison. In the middle of June the Inquisition was known to be examining his activities – a somewhat ironic situation, given that Pole himself was busy persecuting heretics.[346] However, he was not free, and Mary absolutely forbade him to go. This ban was fully endorsed by Philip, who understood and appreciated the stabilising effect that the cardinal had on his wife. Because Pole had appealed against his recall, it has been suggested that there was some uncertainty as to whether the office of legate continued or not, but he himself was in no doubt.[347] His legatine synod, which stood adjourned at the time of his recall, was not reconvened, and although it had made some useful decrees, particularly on the subject of clerical education, it never completed its work, and because Mary died less than two years later its decrees were effectively dead letters. Both Philip and Mary wished him to carry on as though nothing had happened, Mary particularly praising his zeal and application, but that was hardly possible for so conscientious a servant as Pole. What he was able to do, for the time being, was to use his metropolitan authority as Archbishop of Canterbury to maintain the momentum of his reform programme. The Count of Feria’s wellknown comments about his being ‘a dead man’, and about the lukewarm never going to heaven, were not only unfair to Pole, but also tell us a good deal more about the count’s aggressive evangelical agenda than they do about what was actually going on.[348] He seems to have regarded the country as a mission territory in the same sense as the American colonies.
On 12 September Pope Paul was finally forced out of the war. His resources were quite inadequate to resist Alba’s armies, and the French were unable to offer sufficient assistance. The peace was greeted with bonfires and a Te Deum in London, but it made very little difference to the pope’s attitude to England, and none at all to his perception of Pole. Carne found it increasingly difficult to secure any audience at all, and the only positive result of months of diplomatic pressure was to recover the legatine status of the see of Canterbury. This eased the problems of the Church, and perhaps explains why Pole’s servants continued to refer to him as ‘legate’; but it was no consolation to the man himself. He continued to remonstrate in letters, and even invoked the intercession of Cardinal Carlo Carafa, the nuncio in Brussels, and a man for whose personal qualities he can have had little respect. Paul, however, was convinced that the Cardinal of Engl
and was a long-standing heretic, and had for years been the mastermind behind a great conspiracy against the Church in which Morone, Priuli, Pate, Flaminio and Vittoria Colonna had all been involved. It was a paranoid and quite unjustified vision, which lent every episode of Pole’s career a sinister twist, but, in spite of numerous representations to the contrary, the pope remained implacable.[349] Because Pole was never formally arraigned, we do not know what the actual charges against him may have been, but they seem to have focused on his alleged Lutheran sympathies over justification. As long as Pole remained out of reach in England, however, there was little the pope could do. William Peto died in March 1558, and no attempt was made to replace him. By that time Paul had accepted, although with a very bad grace, that he was not going to get his way over the English mission. From April to June 1558 he was in retreat at the Belvedere. All papal business was hopelessly in arrears, and those in England who had looked expectantly to Rome to infuse new life into the Church were becoming increasingly disillusioned.
In the past, war with France had automatically meant trouble with Scotland, and since Mary Stuart’s French mother, Mary of Guise, had been regent north of the Border since 1554, the same was anticipated on this occasion. Mary, however, was not entirely in control of the situation, and the French ascendancy was not popular in Scotland. There is some evidence that the two governments considered themselves to be belligerents, and on 1 August the council in London informed the wardens of the marches that the Scots ‘have already entered into wars with us’ but nothing happened.[350] Almost at the time of the formal declaration of war, the commissioners for the settlement of the endemic minor disputes of the border were in session. Hearing the news of the breach, the Earl of Westmorland said to his Scottish counterpart, the Earl of Cassilis: ‘My lord I think it but folly for us to treat now together, we having broken with France, and ye being French for your lives.’ That provoked the unexpected response: ‘By the mass, I am no more French than ye are a Spaniard.’ Westmorland replied carefully that he was indeed ‘a Spaniard’ as long as Philip was king, but the point was taken.[351] Although Mary made careful provision for the defence of the north, even resurrecting the earldom of Northumberland for Sir Thomas Percy to that end, and a mobilisation was ordered in Scotland, there was no incursion. Instead, Mary of Guise was soon facing a rebellion that effectively tied her hands.[352] The significance of Scotland in the ensuing conflict was rather different. Having exposed England to the danger of war in the north, the English council was of the opinion that the least that Philip could do as King of Spain was to declare war on Scotland himself. This the king consistently refused to do, to the embarrassment of Feria and the detriment of his relations with England. His Flemish subjects had considerable trading interests in Scottish ports such as Leith, and the only incentive for such a declaration would have been to gratify the English – which he was not inclined to do.
When Philip left England early in July, he was accompanied by an English expeditionary force under the command of the Earl of Pembroke. This was reported to number 10,000, and that may have been its theoretical strength, but the muster rolls disclose only 7,221 actual ‘effectives’.[353] Pembroke did not have much experience, but he was high in the king’s confidence. His officers were a much more dubious bunch. Many of them were only recently reconciled to the regime, and Surian had probably been right when he wrote that the war was being used as an excuse to get them out of England. On the other hand, they all had something to prove, and that could have its advantages. As soon as they reached Calais, the king pressed on to join his army at the siege of St Quentin. Pembroke, however, did not go with him, because his commission also included a general oversight of Calais and its environs. For several weeks he was occupied there, reorganising and reinforcing the garrisons.
At the beginning of August both Philip and Pembroke were making progress slowly, Philip probably because he wanted his army to take the town before he appeared for a triumphal entry, and Pembroke (apparently) because his artillery train had been delayed and he was reluctant to advance without it. By 10 August he had reached Cambrai. That same morning, the constable of France, advancing incautiously to the relief of St Quentin, was ambushed and routed by the besieging army. This was a thumping victory, which left many French nobles and over 5,000 soldiers as prisoners of war. Philip himself (to his great chagrin) could claim no personal credit as he was still several miles off at the time. The town held out until 27 August, which gave the tardy English time to arrive, but after the defeat of the constable its fall was inevitable. Even so, it did not surrender, but was stormed, the English troops doing something to redeem their reputation by fighting conspicuously well.[354] It would have been ungracious, in the wake of such victories, to criticise his allies publicly, but privately Philip blamed Pembroke severely for the tardiness of his advance.
The French field army having been temporarily destroyed, and the winter not far off, Philip was not interested in further campaigning, but rather in consolidating his hold upon the environs of St Quentin, which embraced several lesser but strategically important towns. The English could now go home. They mustered on 15 September and began to leave piecemeal soon after. By 10 October only 500 were left, and they departed within a few days. The treasurer of the campaign was William Whightman, the receiver of the office of augmentations for south Wales, and it is from notes that he left that we learn that this campaign cost £48,000, the whole of which was found by Philip, £37,000 from his Continental revenues and £11,000, rather mysteriously, from the ‘King’s moneys in England’. Because of this, Whightman never accounted through the English system, and if his original account now survives, it has not been found.[355]
It was probably the defeat at St Quentin that forced the pope out of the war a few days later, because he now knew that he could expect no further help from Henry. By October 1557, although his finances were in a bigger mess than ever, Philip had every reason to be satisfied. Not only did he have the upper hand both in Italy and the Low Countries, but the anticipated ‘second front’ from Scotland had not materialised, which eased the pressure for any decisive action there. On 15 August the news of the first victory was greeted in London with Te Deums, processions and so forth. The Archdeacon of London (John Harpesfield) preached a ‘godly sermon’, in the course of which he declared ‘how many were taken, and what noblemen they were’.[356]
Perhaps the decisiveness of this victory reconciled some of the doubters to the war. The number of soldiers required had not been enormous, and all those who responded seem to have been volunteers. There was also a certain amount of bonding among the military gentry from which Philip benefited. On the other hand there was a mutiny of unknown seriousness in the fleet, and orders were issued to magistrates in the south-west to round up men who had been pressed to serve and who had then run away.[357] The late summer weather was bad again, and the harvest, although not as disastrous as those of the two preceding years, was again inadequate. It was perhaps inevitable that these acts of God should be blamed by official preachers on the people’s faithlessness, but there was good mileage in the counterargument that the Almighty was obviously displeased with the government itself.[358] Moreover, in spite of the fact that Philip had borne the cost of Pembroke’s army, the government was swiftly in financial difficulties. By heroic efforts over the previous three years, the crown debt had been reduced from about £180,000 to under £100,000. Now all those gains were to be jettisoned. On a war footing, the fleet alone was costing £70,000–£80,000 a year, to say nothing of the escalating costs at Berwick in the north and at Calais. In September a privy seal loan was launched, which raised nearly £110,000 over six months, but there was plenty of resistance and a procession of gentlemen were hauled before the council for attempting to refuse their assessed contributions. In virtually every case the intimidation seems to have worked – but it did not make the regime any more popular. Moreover the shortage of money betrayed the council into a false economy that it was
soon to regret. Having decided that the campaigning season was over for that year, and that in any case the French were in no condition to make any ‘attempt’, the extra troops who had been sent to Calais and Guisnes in July were withdrawn, leaving the garrisons seriously depleted.
In fact the weakness of France, although real enough in September 1557, did not last very long. Aware that his north-eastern flank was dangerously exposed, Henry decided to cut his losses in Italy and recalled the Duke of Guise to the north. They were both suffering from reputation fatigue, and on the lookout for some feasible counterstroke. By the end of October Philip had mopped up the small towns around St Quentin, and although his field army was in winter quarters, his position there was rightly judged to be too strong to be attacked. There was, however, Calais. Henry had good agents there, and was not short of information about its condition. Most of the fortifications had been extensively repaired during Henry VIII’s last war, just over ten years earlier, and although little had been spent on them recently, they were in reasonably good condition. This was not, however, true of the castle, which was less exposed to attack from the landward side, but whose condition was close to ruinous. When he learned in November that the garrison had been reduced, the French king could hardly believe his luck.
As November turned to December, French troops began to filter into Picardy. This was noticed by Philip’s spies, but the weather was exceptionally cold, and there was a general reluctance on the Imperial side to believe that any serious campaign was intended. Nevertheless Philip also picked up a warning that the target was Calais, a warning that he duly passed on to London, at least as early as 22 December. Lord Wentworth, the governor of Calais, also had his own independent sources of information, and these convinced him that the French objective was Hesdin – a suspicion that he duly passed on to Philip.[359] He did, in fact, ask for assistance before Christmas, and then withdrew the request, causing considerable confusion. By 27 December the council at Calais was at last convinced that an attack was imminent, and that it did not have sufficient force to defend the whole Calais Pale. If (or when) the attack came they would have to pull all the available troops back to the town itself, and even then would have barely enough to defend it. On the 29th the council in London decided to send the Earl of Rutland to Wentworth’s assistance, with whatever force could be immediately available.[360] The country had been for several months in the grip of a serious influenza epidemic, and this meant not only that fit men were hard to find, but also that there was a reluctance to summon them together for fear of spreading the infection. It was not until 2 January that Rutland had enough men to embark a relief expedition, and by then it was too late. Having ignored Philip’s earlier warnings, on 31 December Wentworth had finally sent an urgent plea to Philip for assistance. Philip duly despatched 200 arquebusiers, but by the time they reached Calais the town had fallen. Thus ended English control of any part of mainland France.
