Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

  Leicester was Elizabeth’s host for the week’s disputations and debates. While most monarchs would have shuddered at the prospect, Elizabeth shared her councillors’ love of learning and was keen to see Oxford again at the vanguard of education alongside the Italian universities. Seventeen hundred students attended the week’s intellectual deliberations. In keeping with the royal favor Elizabeth was bestowing, prizes were offered to the most worthy of the disputants. On Tuesday, September 3, a young man from St. John’s College triumphed over his opponents when he argued that the tides are caused by the moon’s motion. He had no idea that within fifteen years, Elizabeth herself would be worshipped as Cynthia, the goddess of the moon, the “wild ocean’s empress.” Nor could he have known that Sir Walter Raleigh would compose the Book of the Ocean to Cynthia portraying his agonizing relationship with the queen. The young man so warmly favored by Elizabeth was immediately offered patronage of both Cecil and Leicester. His name was Edmund Campion.

  On Thursday, the Divinity Disputation took place. Elizabeth’s council selected the rather hot topic of “Whether subjects may fight against wicked princes?” in the hope that dissident students could be weeded out. It would have taken a foolhardy student to compare Elizabeth to a wicked prince, particularly when examples in Scotland were so fresh in their minds.

  By the end of the disputations, Edmund Campion won his court patronage, while Tobie Matthew of Christ Church won the coveted Queen’s Scholar prize. Matthew would eventually become archbishop of York. Campion would become a traitor.

  * * *

  Yet the term “traitor” had come to mean something of a movable feast in the previous twenty years. In Mary I’s reign, Henry VIII’s archbishop Thomas Cranmer had been burned at the stake in Oxford for “treacherous heresy.” St. Mary Hall’s college head, Dr. William Allen, described Cranmer as a “notorious perjured and oft relapsed apostate recanting, swearing and foreswearing at every turn.”11 As university proctor, Allen had been deeply involved in the Marian purges at the university in 1556–57 against the “new religion.” This made him a traitor in Elizabeth’s time.

  By 1561, William Allen had exiled himself from the university he so adored, for fear of meeting the same fate as those he had purged. He drifted with other English Catholics to the Low Countries and the University of Mechlin, continuing his theological studies there. Allen supplemented his meager income as a private tutor to a young Irish nobleman. Yet when Allen returned briefly to his family in Lancashire due to illness, he was appalled to see how many “good” Catholics attended church services and conformed outwardly to the Elizabethan settlement.

  A brief stint at Oxford before returning to the Low Countries in 1565 converted Allen to activism for the preservation of English Catholicism. Ordained in the priesthood at Mechlin that year, Allen published A Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churchies Doctrine, Touching Purgatory in response to Bishop Jewel’s Apology.12 It was a work that had already singled him out for the Elizabethan regime’s special investigations by the time Elizabeth visited Oxford.13

  Allen, far from being “exiled” and bereft of like company, found himself in the middle of a thriving English Catholic diaspora. Over a hundred senior fellows and masters from Oxford alone were dispersed throughout the Low Countries at its universities, particularly at Louvain and Douai. Still, Allen fretted that their lack of a proper English institution to afford them the “regiment, discipline and education most agreeable to our Countrymen’s natures” was a terrible burden. These thoughts, echoed in his Apologie, gripped Allen in the autumn of 1566. While Elizabeth was at Oxford, Allen resolved to redress this wrong. He would establish a truly English Catholic seminary on the Continent.

  Still, there were other Elizabethan traitors in Oxford’s midst who remained unknown to the queen. The university would produce thirty-seven seminary priests in the years to come. One of them, Gregory Martin, would become the translator of the Rheims-Douai Bible of the 1570s. Two months after Elizabeth left Oxford for the battles that lay ahead with her Parliament, Magdalen College would take on a new, seemingly unremarkable tenant in the shadow of Oxford Castle at number 3 Castle Street. The tenant was a twenty-six-year-old carpenter named Walter Owen, accompanied by his wife and young family. His four sons would eventually join the mission to save England for Catholicism. His toddler son, Nicholas Owen, would die taking the secrets of his most enigmatic craft of “hide-making” for Catholic priests to the grave.

  * * *

  Their roles in this history were still far in the future. After Elizabeth’s Oxford visit that autumn, Parliament was duly convened, and the anticipated revolt of godly members in both houses occurred. Not only did the Commons refuse to consider the Act for Apparel, addressing the existing sumptuary laws as well as church ornaments and vestments; they refused any action whatsoever until they had the queen’s solemn reassurance that she would marry. They were deeply suspicious about the seriousness of the planned marriage to Archduke Charles, a Catholic and a Hapsburg. Besides, the Commons felt it held the whip hand to force Elizabeth into action regarding a lasting solution to the succession by withholding a sizable parliamentary subsidy until its demands were met. They had not reckoned on the queen’s iron will and anger. Elizabeth lashed out at them and forbade any further discussion about the private matter of her marriage.

  By November, Elizabeth struck at the House of Lords for allowing the Commons to run roughshod over them, calling those members of both houses who tried to dictate to her “those unbridled persons whose mouth was never snaffled by the rider.” Foremost among these “unbridled persons” was the godly Paul Wentworth. On the day Parliament convened following her interdiction to speak about her marriage, he rose to ask three questions: “Whether Her Highness’ commandment, forbidding the lower house to speak or treat any more of the succession and of any their excuses in that behalf, be a breach of the liberty of the free speech of the House or not?” The second question asked “whether her ministers, in pronouncing her commandment to the house in her name are of authority sufficient to bind the House to silence in that behalf.” Finally, he asked if her commandment was not in breach of the liberty of the House or sufficient to bind the House, then “what offence is it for any of the House to err in declaring his opinion to be otherwise?”14

  Paul Wentworth was alarmed. By not discussing Elizabeth’s marriage plans and thereby the succession, the Protestant settlement, imperfect though it was, remained too precarious. He decided to use democratic reasoning to try to keep the issue under debate, calling upon the “liberties,” or freedom of speech within Parliament, when addressing the queen. Other godly voices were raised in support of Wentworth’s reasoning as well. For the first time, a new voice was heard on the side of the godly: Francis Walsingham. It was a grueling session and, despite all the heartfelt arguments, ended in stalemate.

  Elizabeth’s Bill on Apparel aimed at closing all discussion about church vestments was withdrawn. She had browbeaten the Commons into voting her two-thirds of the subsidy for the good of the realm, without designating her successor in the event of her death. The burning matter of her marriage was declared by Elizabeth as being personal and therefore closed. She fulminated at her privy councillors, including Leicester and Cecil, who had been part of the “godly conspiracy,” and she refused to allow them in her sight. The drama ended with her reassurance to the House on the prickly issue of the succession, with Elizabeth uttering the sour words that she would “deal therein for your safety,” making her anger known in no uncertain terms when she added, “For it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head.”15

  Elizabeth, disgusted and enraged, dissolved Parliament on January 2, 1567, with a devastating broadside aimed at members and her Privy Council:

  I love so evil counterfeiting and hate so much dissimulation that I may not suffer you depart without that my admonitions may show your harms and cause you shun unseen peril. Two visors have blinded the eyes of the lookers-on in this present s
ession … Under pretense of saving all they have done none good … They have done their lewd endeavor to make all my realm suppose that their care was much when mine was none at all.16

  From Elizabeth’s perspective, only she could protect her people against the armed insurrections that plagued her neighbors. Her steadfastness against the adversities ahead changed England forever.

  TEN

  The Iconoclastic Fury

  If the Low Countries are lost the rest of the Monarchy will not last long.

  —Governor of Milan to Philip II, 1566

  A week before Elizabeth entered Oxford, and only months after the murder of Mary’s secretary, Rizzio, the Low Countries were once again in a state of open revolt. This province of the Hapsburgs, stretching from modern-day Belgium and Luxembourg to the Northern Netherlands, had come to Philip through his inheritance as Duke of Burgundy. A hodgepodge of languages, customs, and natural borders, it was also the economic powerhouse of northern Europe. Only twenty years earlier, the Low Countries had been amalgamated into one administrative province from seventeen smaller ones by Philip II’s father.

  Charles V had also revamped the States-General (the representative assembly) comprised of the great nobles from each smaller province to self-rule, subject, of course, to the king’s will. Unwittingly, Charles had taken a disparate, often quarrelling multilingual group of provinces and molded them into a fledgling nation in the name of easing his personal administrative burden. Within a few years, the Netherlanders spoke of their patrie (fatherland) rather than the town or province they hailed from. When Charles had the States-General pass the “Pragmatic Sanction” in November 1549, ensuring that on his death or abdication the provinces would continue to obey his chosen heir under the same central institutions of his reign, he had also enshrined the Netherlanders’ “ancient rights” forever.1

  By 1566, the Low Countries had undergone a remarkable transformation. Densely populated, with some three million people to England’s five million, covering an area a bit larger than England and Wales, the country was renowned for its exceptional artisans, particularly weavers, and abilities to create enormously profitable commerce as middlemen. So when, in Philip’s eyes, Elizabeth infringed on his right to dominate trade in the Baltic and the Caribbean, he sparked off a trade war with England, temporarily closing off the staple market of Antwerp to the English. Elizabeth sought another staple town at the Hanseatic town of Emden, but it was always a pale and poor alternative to Antwerp.

  The heartland of the Netherlands was the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Flanders, Brabant, and Hainault, where the population was at its most dense in the large towns of Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Lille, Valenciennes, and Amsterdam. As India would one day become the jewel in the British crown of empire, so the Low Countries had already become the glittering prize in Spain’s. These provinces were known for the beauty of their cities and architecture, incredible engineering feats in holding back the seas by an intricate system of dikes, and artists and musicians far ahead of their time. Yet the Spaniards most appreciated the Netherlanders for their ability to generate vast sums of money through commerce to help Charles, then Philip, in their holy wars against the enemies of Roman Catholicism—be they Protestant or Muslim.

  In the 1560s, the regent in the economic powerhouse of the Netherlands was Margaret of Parma, Philip’s half sister, aided by his trusted minister, Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle. Nonetheless, Granvelle was an untrustworthy pair of hands to hold such a jewel. Philip, long ensconced in Spain, had forgotten about the deal struck for “ancient rights” by his father. He was angered by the blackmail extorted by the States-General where in return for a loan of 3.6 million ducats to fight the Ottoman Turk in the Mediterranean, Philip would agree to remove three thousand of his crack tercios troops from the country.2 Worse still, Philip allowed the poisoned pen of Granvelle to further color his thinking.

  On Granvelle’s advice, Philip responded to the Netherlander arrogance by working tirelessly with the pope on a secret plan to redraw the religious map of the Low Countries. With the administration of the heartland of the States-General in the hands of just three men dedicated to the Netherlanders’ ancient rights—Stadtholders William of Orange, the Count of Egmont, and the Count of Horn—it was a dangerous policy for Philip to pursue, much less administer. Elizabeth, as ever kept abreast of events by her able factor to the Low Countries, Sir Thomas Gresham, prayed for peace. Emden could never replace Antwerp, and without peace in the Low Countries, returning there would be impossible.

  It was a vain hope. The heavy hand of Rome fell hard. The pope published the new religious map of the Low Countries, augmenting the bishoprics from four to fourteen following linguistic borders. He made the archbishopric of Mechlin the most powerful and wealthy of them all. Naturally, the papal appointment for Mechlin went to Cardinal Granvelle. Of course, the exiled English Catholic community, including William Allen of Oxford, was at Mechlin at the time.

  * * *

  The new religious map thinly disguised Philip’s endgame: to bring the Inquisition to the Low Countries. Antwerp was the first to rise up, threatening the prosperity of the entire Netherlands. Granvelle became the hated “king’s man,” for his falsity in pretending to be on the Netherlanders’ side. After these first uprisings, Granvelle wrote to Philip that “people here universally display discontent with any and all Spaniards in these provinces.”3

  Elizabeth and her councillors were utterly dismayed. She had already forged strong links with Protestants in the Netherlands, Sweden, Scotland, and France, as well as the Lutheran princes and electors in the German lands. Secret diplomatic correspondence was replete with references to her exiled English Catholics and their efforts on behalf of Catholicism. She especially noted wisely that William of Orange had married Anna, daughter of the Lutheran elector of Saxony, and that Philip had clearly opposed the match. Though Orange remained Catholic and had no plans to change faiths, his religious outlook was more akin to Elizabeth’s than Philip’s, seeking to unite his people through religion rather than divide them. Even Orange, however, was powerless to stop Philip and Granvelle in their first onslaught.

  The feared Inquisition came, and thousands of Dutch citizens fled to England, where they were welcomed. These were no poor immigrants but skilled merchants and artisans and could only add to the wealth of the realm. Naturally, Orange, Egmont, and Horn sent an ultimatum to Philip, explaining that his Inquisition was impoverishing the Netherlands and demanding the removal of Granvelle. If Philip refused, they would resign from the States and the council.

  While this seemed appealing, Philip knew nonetheless that these three men had been maintaining law and order in both the States and the council previously. So Philip hesitated. It was Horn who forced the situation. A member of the French Montigny family, Horn decided on a solemn league against Granvelle, suggesting that each member—whether nobleman or servant—should dress himself in a livery of a single color with the badge of a fool’s cap and a bell, parodying the cardinal’s hat. They held a number of outrageous meetings and banquets with Granvelle as the brunt of their joke, demanding that he leave the Low Countries at once. The cardinal seemingly retaliated, branding them all “Beggars”—les Gueux. Their “beggarly” insult soon became their battle cry, and all who followed Horn became known as “Beggars.”

  Eventually, Philip refused, and as threatened the three noblemen replied in July that they would stay away from court in Brussels. At the same time, the States of Brabant refused to pay their taxes to their Spanish king until Granvelle left the country. Margaret of Parma knew that rebellion was in the air and tried to persuade Philip to recall Granvelle, sending her secretary to Spain to plead with him. If he removed the cardinal, she argued, the king would remove the symbol of the hated Inquisition, which would bizarrely allow them to get on with their work of eradicating heresy.4

  Still, the Beggars were not Granvelle’s only enemies. Spaniards vying for Philip’s favor in Madrid finally broke the
king’s will. Granvelle was recalled from Brussels on March 13, 1564, never to return. With his departure, the incorporation plan of the various bishoprics was dropped, as was the Inquisition. The 700 persecutions against heretics in Flanders alone fell to 250 that year, then down to 175 six months later.5 The Beggars again took up their natural roles at the States-General and at court, working closely once more with Margaret, who praised their cooperation repeatedly in her letters to her brother. In fact, they were so cooperative that the Brussels government was able to impose an open-ended ban on the importation of English goods until such time as Elizabeth controlled her piratical rovers in the Channel. Elizabeth hadn’t foreseen that result, especially in light of their shared Protestant views held with the Netherlanders.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, there were hotter wars in the Baltic that threatened English trade with other Protestant countries. Denmark had declared war on Sweden and the Hanseatic towns, decimating England’s remaining staple trade at Emden. Poland and Russia soon joined in the fray, and the Baltic was essentially closed to the English.

  That winter of 1564–65 was one of the harshest of the sixteenth century. Widespread starvation and unemployment were rampant. The Dutch artist Pieter Breughel painted his masterpiece Hunters in the Snow with its evocative background depicting the vast frozen wastes and icebergs blocking the port of Delfshaven on the Maas, a centuries-old reminder of the desperate times.

  The harsh winter was followed by a ruined harvest. In Catholic Ghent, the magistrates recorded that “the evident danger from the dearth of corn and the large number of paupers, coupled with the arrival in this town of about 300 people from the region of Armentières who, it is feared, are infected with heresy” spoke volumes. Farther north in Holland, people were “murmuring and voicing criticisms which might tend towards sedition, and also singing songs with the same end.” As in England, ballads spread the word. In the south at Brussels, a government minister wrote, “If the people rise up, I fear that the religious issue will become involved.”6 The link between hard times and the rise of Protestantism is unmistakable.