Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Spain was another matter. Thanks to the Habsburg–Tudor alliance that dated back to Henry VII and Ferdinand and Isabella, England and Spain had generally been partners in earlier sixteenth-century conflicts. The Anglo-Spanish alliance, renewed by Mary, survived even the more-or-less Protestant religious settlement of 1559: so long as France remained strong and aggressive, Spain relied on England to help protect its valuable possessions in the Netherlands. But as the French began to decline into disunity and Spanish power grew in the 1560s, cracks began to appear in the edifice of Anglo-Spanish friendship.

  England and Spain divided in part because of the very wealth and power that otherwise made the Spanish such attractive allies. Thanks to the Habsburg genius for advantageous marriages, the discoveries of Columbus, and the conquests of captains like Hernán Cortez (1485–1547) and Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1471–1541), Philip II ruled an empire that included not only Spain but most of Southern Italy, the Netherlands, and all of Central and South America, apart from Portuguese Brazil (see map 8). That empire supplied the Spanish government with vast wealth, mostly in the form of Mexican and Peruvian silver, mined by Native American and (increasingly) African slaves, and transported across the Atlantic in biannual treasure fleets. This wealth paid for the greatest army in Europe. Elizabeth’s government worried that, given Philip’s devout Catholicism, he might, sooner or later, be tempted to use these resources to take advantage of the presence of Mary Queen of Scots in England. Philip’s government worried that, given the wealth and vulnerability of his empire, English mariners might, sooner or later, be tempted into piracy.

  Map 8 Spanish possessions in Europe and the Americas.

  In fact, every European power looked greedily upon the Spanish Empire and its trade monopoly. But English sailors actually took steps to break into it. One way to do that was to acquire and sell African captives to Spanish landowners in the New World, who would employ them in slave labor. In 1568 Spanish vessels attacked a “peaceful” English slaving fleet, commanded by John Hawkins (1532–95) and secretly authorized by Queen Elizabeth, at San Juan de Ulúa in the Caribbean. Only two English ships escaped: Hawkins’s and one commanded by a young mariner named Francis Drake (1540–96). Allowing Drake to escape was a big mistake, for he would forever after harbor a deep hatred against Spain. That hatred was fanned by stories that the Inquisition brutally mistreated captured English Protestants, and often sentenced them to hellish conditions as oarsmen in Spanish Mediterranean galleys. (The poetic justice that those conditions were just deserts for the atrocities committed on their African slave cargoes was, of course, lost on all concerned.)

  As we shall see, Elizabeth responded to the incident of 1568 by confiscating Spanish ships which blew into English ports and by turning a blind eye to the piracy of men like Hawkins, Drake, and Sir Martin Frobisher (1535?-94). She even granted them privateering commissions which, in effect, allowed them to make their own personal war on the Spanish seaborne empire. Sometimes she invested in their voyages, as did Leicester, Walsingham, and other important courtiers. In 1573 El Draque (the dragon), as the Spanish called him, daringly raided the isthmus of Panama, netting a cargo worth the phenomenal sum of £20,000.11 In 1577–80 he grew even bolder, sailing his ship, the Golden Hind, across the South Atlantic to the east coast of South America, through the Straits of Magellan, up the west coast as far north as California, across the Pacific, around the Cape of Good Hope, and back north to England – plundering Spanish shipping, raiding Spanish towns, and reading to his crew from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs all along the way. They became only the second expedition (Ferdinand Magellan, 1480–1521, had commanded the first) and the first Englishmen to circumnavigate the globe. Not that Drake could be sure of a hero’s welcome upon his return: arriving at Plymouth in September 1580, he is said to have asked local fishermen if the queen still lived. If Elizabeth had died and Mary Queen of Scots had succeeded her while he was away, his adventure would have been viewed as piracy and his life and treasure forfeit. But the queen did still live. That spring she knighted him on the deck of the Golden Hind – and claimed her cut of treasure, at least £264,000. Of course she did this more or less in secret. Publicly, she denounced the depredations of her sailors just as a modern state sponsor of terrorism might do.

  Philip knew better, but, in the interest of peace (and the increasingly distant hope that Elizabeth might die or declare herself a Catholic), he decided that Spain could afford to absorb these occasional English pinpricks. The second area of conflict between the two nations was far more serious: Spain’s holdings in the Netherlands (see also map 9, p. 143). Charles V had given the Netherlands to Philip, his son, in 1554; two years later Philip ascended the throne of Spain. Despite Spanish-Catholic rule, much of the Low Countries had been attracted to Calvinist Protestantism. In 1566 a group of Dutch and Flemish noblemen, both Catholic and Protestant, led by William of Orange (1533–84, also known as “William the Silent”), formed a league to oppose Spanish influence and, in particular, any future imposition of the Spanish Inquisition on the Netherlands. The following year, Philip attempted to do just that, sending Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Alva (1508–83), and 20,000 troops to ensure order. Instead, the arrival of the Inquisition backed by the occupying army incited a revolt against Spanish rule which would drag on for decades.

  Once again, Elizabeth faced a dilemma. Should she support Philip as her ally and fellow monarch and, in so doing, allow the Dutch rebels to wither away? Or should she support her fellow Protestants, and risk undermining the Great Chain of Being, disrupting trade, and inviting war with Spain? Toward the end of 1568 she was pushed to a decision after bad weather and privateers forced a Spanish fleet carrying £85,000 in gold bullion for Alva to shelter in English ports. The Spanish, assuming that Elizabeth would seize the bullion, arrested the English merchants trading in the Netherlands and impounded their ships and goods. This, combined with the news of the attack on Hawkins’s fleet noted above, gave the queen an excuse to fulfill Spanish expectations by confiscating the bullion in retaliation. It should be obvious that rising levels of distrust and duplicity between the two powers were destroying their alliance, despite the absence of overt acts of war. Henceforward, the queen secretly supplied the rebels with money and offered a safe haven in English ports to Dutch privateers, known as “the sea-beggars.” In public, she condemned the revolt just as modern states do when they fund proxy wars. Philip was not fooled. In response, he closed the port of Antwerp, England’s main cloth entrepôt in Europe, for five years. He did not want war any more than Elizabeth did, but events seemed to be moving in that direction. In any case, the presence of a Catholic minority and, from 1568, a Catholic heir in England meant that two could play at Elizabeth’s game: Philip II began to wage a secret war of his own.

  Plots and Counter-Plots

  In the late 1560s the pope began to encourage an English Catholic revival. As we have seen, the Roman Catholic Church had responded slowly to the Reformation. That response, sometimes referred to as the Counter-Reformation, was formulated at the Council of Trent, which met, on and off, from 1545 to 1563 in Trent, Italy. This assemblage of churchmen pursued a thorough inquiry into Catholic dogma and practice. In the end, it rejected most of Luther’s doctrinal and structural criticisms of Catholicism. It reaffirmed the efficacy of the seven sacraments and good works, transubstantiation, Purgatory, even the granting of indulgences. Organizationally, it reasserted the authority of the pope and bishops and the sanctity and celibacy of the priesthood. On the other hand, the council tacitly conceded Luther’s point about corrupt churchmen. It called for reforms of pluralism, absenteeism, and in the education and behavior of priests. The establishment of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, in 1540 is yet another sign of the Church’s desire to reinvent itself. This order of priests, supremely well educated and organized according to military discipline by a former soldier, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), was well equipped to engage in theological controversy, preaching, missionary a
nd pastoral work in order to combat what Catholics saw as Protestant heresy. And they targeted England.

  By the late 1560s, the small group of English Catholic priests who refused to conform to the new religious settlement was dying out – and so was Roman Catholicism. In 1568 Fr. William Allen, a Catholic exile (1532–94), sought to remedy the shortage of priests by founding a seminary for the training of English Catholic clergy at Douai, France. In 1579 the Jesuits founded another such seminary at Rome. From the mid-1570s a steady stream of seminary priests began to filter back into England and Wales. In 1580, Allen arranged the first Jesuit mission to England in the persons of Frs. Edmund Campion (1540–81) and Robert Persons (1546–1610). Their avowed purpose was to maintain the preaching and teaching of Catholic doctrine in order to preserve the English Catholic minority in its faith, not to convert Protestants, nor to foment rebellion against Elizabeth. But the actual record of these early missionary efforts is ambiguous. In the 1560s and 1570s the largest concentrations of Catholics in England were to be found in the remote North and Welsh Marches, often among fairly isolated and humble communities. Yet, the seminary priests concentrated their activities in the Southeast, ministering to aristocratic Catholic families who could provide a chapel and, if needed, a place to hide. They seem to have believed that the only hope for a Catholic restoration lay with the powerful and wealthy gentry of the South, not the peasants of the North and West. This may help to explain, first, why Catholicism continued to die out among the general populace and, second, why these religious missionaries soon found themselves embroiled in plots against the throne.

  It was probably inevitable, given the queen’s apparent sympathy for Protestantism, her Scottish cousin’s presence in England, the Jesuits’ courage and zeal, and Spain’s wealth, power, and sense of grievance, that some Catholics, including, eventually, the pope, would call for violent action, even a Holy Crusade against Elizabeth. In 1568 Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk (1538–72), a nominal Protestant but the leader of the most powerful Catholic family in England, devised a plot to wed Mary,12 purge Cecil and other Protestants from the Council, and dictate terms to the queen. His scheme had the support of several disgruntled northern Catholic peers whose local power had been reduced by the Tudors, most prominently Thomas Percy, earl of Northumberland (1528–72), and Charles Neville, earl of Westmorland (1542/3–1601). More surprisingly, some avid Protestants, including the earl of Leicester, also promoted the plot, in its early stages at least, hoping to break Cecil’s hold on power. At the crucial moment, late in 1569, Norfolk lost his nerve and failed to go through with the plan. But when the court summoned Northumberland and Westmorland to explain themselves, they concluded that they had already passed the point of no return. They raised their affinities, marched south, entered Durham Cathedral (November 14), ripped the English Bible into pieces, and celebrated a Latin mass before large crowds. They then continued south, bearing the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ last seen in the Pilgrimage of Grace, with 3,800 footsol-diers and 1,600 cavalry. But the Catholic nobility of Yorkshire and Lancashire, whether out of loyalty to the queen, a lack of direction from Rome, fear, or inertia, refused to join them and the farmers who made up the rebel army began to drift home. In the end, the duke of Norfolk was seized and imprisoned in the Tower. The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland fled to Scotland. Westmorland eventually made it to the continent, but the Scots handed Northumberland to the English early in 1570, who executed him along with about 450 of their followers. This was virtually the last popular Catholic rebellion in English history.

  One alleged reason for the failure of the Northern Rebellion of 1569–70 was Rome’s ambiguous stance toward the queen. Too late to aid the revolt, in February 1570 Pope Pius V (1504–72; reigned 1566–72) issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating Elizabeth, absolving her subjects of allegiance to her, and calling for her deposition in favor of Mary Queen of Scots. This move was, in fact, a blunder. It put Catholics in the terrible position of having to choose their faith and pope over their State and queen. Most, even priests, tacitly chose Elizabeth by refusing to take up arms against her. Nevertheless, to Protestants, the papal bull of 1570 was one more sign of an international Catholic conspiracy against England, its queen, and Church.

  Their fears received additional confirmation in the following year in the so-called Ridolfi Plot. In 1571 Roberto di Ridolfi (1531–1612), a Florentine banker and Catholic agent, secured the endorsement of Pope Pius, Philip II, Mary Queen of Scots, and the imprisoned duke of Norfolk for another plot against the queen. The king of Spain, however, refused to send troops until English Catholics actually rebelled; those Catholics who might have acted would not do so until they saw Spanish troops. In the meantime, Secretary Walsingham had infiltrated the Catholic movement with spies. This enabled the government to uncover the plot, arrest the conspirators, and execute Norfolk in 1572.

  These events had no effect on who wore the crown, but they did produce two other developments. First, they solidified anti-Catholic feeling in England. After 1569 all JPs were made to swear an Oath of Supremacy. In 1571 Parliament, over the queen’s objections, revived the old Henrician treason statutes, making it a capital crime to call the queen a schismatic or a heretic, to question her title to the throne, or to promote in speech, writing, or deed her death or removal. Another Act made it treason to distribute, receive, or possess papal documents. In 1581, following the arrival of the first Jesuits, an Act was passed against recusancy. Absence from church services now cost the offender £20 per month. This was an impossible sum for cottagers and artisans earning, at best, a pound a month; these fines were meant to cripple the Catholic elite. It also became illegal to convert anyone from his or her allegiance to the Church of England, or to allow oneself to be so converted. Finally, in 1585, Parliament made it treason to be a Catholic priest in England and otherwise tightened the existing treason laws in order to further secure the queen’s safety. These measures drove the Catholic missionary movement and the community it was supposed to sustain even further underground. The queen liked to say that she prosecuted Catholics for their subversive political activities, not their religious beliefs, but Jesuits attacked this distinction as hypocrisy. It is true that, in practice, the government persecuted few Catholic lay people for breaking the law against recusancy. Butin the last two decades of the reign Elizabeth’s regime executed roughly 120 priests and 60 lay Catholics for treason. By starving Catholics of priests and proscribing missionary activity, the government was slowly eradicating Roman Catholicism from England. By 1603, only about 35,000 Catholics remained in the kingdom with perhaps the same number of “church papists” – Catholics who conformed outwardly to the Church of England but remained true to the Old Faith in their hearts.

  Marital Diplomacy II

  The plots against Elizabeth almost certainly convinced both her and Philip that a war between their two nations was all but inevitable. But not yet. Throughout the 1570s one group in the council, led by the earl of Leicester and Secretary Walsingham, advocated aggressive support for the Dutch rebels as part of a Protestant crusade against Philip II. But Secretary Cecil (Lord Burghley from 1571 and lord treasurer from 1572), Lord Sussex, and their supporters persuaded the queen that England was simply not ready, either financially or militarily, for war against the most powerful empire on earth. Rather, they urged her to negotiate and, if possible, to avoid an expensive and bloody conflict; if that proved impossible, to buy time to build up England’s first line of defense against invasion, the Royal Navy.

  Elizabeth pursued these suggestions on two fronts. First, she toned down her support for the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands and became more secretive about her encouragement of privateers like Drake. Second, the Virgin Queen spent the 1570s and early 1580s pursuing a series of negotiations for a diplomatic marriage. The most serious of these involved François, duke of Alençon and Anjou (1554–84), brother to Henry III of France, who visited England in 1579 and 1581–2
. Evidence suggests that, for a time in 1579, the queen was in love – if not, perhaps, with Alençon (she called the pock-marked prince her “ape” and her “frog,” but these seem to have been terms of endearment), then with the idea of marriage. Perhaps she realized that this was her last chance at domestic bliss. Whatever her feelings, Elizabeth wanted to convince the Catholic powers that war might be unnecessary. Why invade when she and her realm might be conquered peacefully, through love?

  The queen’s double game worked remarkably well for a time. But by the mid- 1580s it was clear that a Catholic marriage was unpopular not only with her council but with her people as well. Moreover, the continued weakness and division in France would have rendered such a union of limited diplomatic usefulness to England as it faced growing Spanish power. In 1580 Spain annexed Portugal, thus adding Brazil and much of the Far East to Philip’s already immense holdings. In the summer of 1584 a Catholic fanatic assassinated William of Orange and the Dutch revolt came close to collapse. Over the course of the next year, town after town fell to the Spanish army, now commanded by the veteran Alexander de Farnese, duke of Parma (1545–92). It was now or never: Elizabeth had to decide whether or not to prop up the Protestant revolt on a grand and public scale. For once, driven by events to a decision, she struck boldly, sending six to seven thousand troops to the Spanish Netherlands under the command of her beloved Leicester.

  This, Philip could only regard as an act of war. The ensuing conflict, fought against the superpower of the age, would be the greatest challenge faced by the Tudor State. In the first half of Elizabeth’s reign, her regime had tried to settle England’s religion and place on the international stage. Now that settlement would be threatened by the mightiest empire on the planet. The Tudor State would rise to the challenge, but at the cost of the internal stability that the queen and her advisers had fought so hard to achieve.