by Susan Ronald
Incomprehensibly, Mary flatly refused to be a coplaintiff with her father-in-law. In fact, she upheld the decree that Lennox could only come into Edinburgh with six armed men, while it was widely known that Bothwell had over four thousand adherents swarming in the town. Lennox shrank from entering Edinburgh without men to protect him. Bothwell, deprived of facing his accuser, was acquitted.
Disgusted with his sister, Moray headed for London. He told the English court that Bothwell “had always been his enemy” and was now in a position of absolute power. He also said that he would not return to Scotland unless and until Mary punished those responsible for her husband’s murder. By mid-May, Mary was positively courting disaster. She married the Earl of Bothwell on May 15, only days after he divorced his wife.
Elizabeth immediately offered asylum to the young Prince James as pandemonium broke out in Scotland. Cecil himself wrote, “Scotland is a quagmire … The most honest desire to go away, the worst tremble with the shaking of their conscience.”5 Maitland remained loyal to Mary and was in constant correspondence with Cecil detailing the events as they unfolded. Arms were taken up by the Protestant Lords against Mary and her third husband, who were summarily defeated at Carberry Hill only one month after their wedding day. Bothwell escaped overseas, while Mary was taken through the streets of Edinburgh to the cries of “burn the whore” and “burn the murderess of her husband.” Mary spat back at them that she would crucify the lot of them.6 Two days later, she was bundled off to her island prison at Lochleven Castle. The Earl of Moray returned home to join Maitland and the other Lords of the Congregation in restoring order.
Before leaving England, Moray had asked Elizabeth for help, and she flatly refused. Though she recognized the dire state of Scotland’s affairs, Elizabeth explained, she could never set herself up against an anointed queen in favor of those who had seized her throne. Nonetheless, she sent Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to Scotland to see if he could smooth the way for Mary’s restitution and bring Prince James to England for safety. Throckmorton was too late to be of any real value aside from warning Elizabeth and Cecil of their “great peril” in abandoning the Protestant Lords to their cause. By the end of the summer, the Scottish Parliament had decided to establish a regency of nine nobles, naming Moray as regent, and procured Mary’s abdication and her consent to the coronation of her son. Mary would remain indefinitely imprisoned at Lochleven Castle.
* * *
Elsewhere, another regent sat uncomfortably next to her son, the king. Catherine de’ Medici, for her part, was deeply concerned about the “iconoclastic fury” on her border with the Netherlands. Worse still, her son, Charles IX, had grown desperately fond of the Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who had also become the king’s mentor. With the Huguenots in ascendance in France, and the Netherlander Calvinists standing their ground against the might of Spain, the situation for France’s Catholic established order seemed grim. Nonetheless, Catherine could be happy that Mary’s Guise uncles had withdrawn from court and were temporarily cut off from their niece.
Of course, the French Huguenots pressed home their advantage with the young king in the absence of the Guises. Coligny tried to persuade Charles that if they successfully ejected Philip from the Low Countries, it could only serve France’s national interest. Catherine wisely resisted. The very last thing she cared to do was to alienate Philip and bring down the wrath of Spain on France. Nevertheless, Philip tested her mettle, requesting that Alba be able to march his crack troops the length of France to the Low Countries, as it was the most convenient route for his invasion forces. Catherine, naturally, failed Philip’s test, unequivocally refusing an outlandish suggestion that would “set fire to the kingdom.”7
The route was changed, but not without Catherine fearing reprisals from Philip’s soldiers in the future. After all, with most of the Low Countries in revolt in the south, the Spaniards would be billeted on France’s border. Catherine ordered a reinforcement of the northern defenses and hired six thousand Swiss mercenaries as a deterrent against potential Spanish aggression. Garrisons along the Netherlands borders in Piedmont, Champagne, Toul, Metz, and Verdun were reinforced.
In 1567, these tensions coincided with the burning issue from England’s viewpoint. Would the French return Calais in accordance with the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis? Catherine’s response came soon enough. Since Elizabeth had broken the peace between France and England by taking Newhaven in 1562–63, France was quite content to maintain its current and natural borders. Calais would never be returned.
* * *
While Catherine was battling to save the fragile peace of France, Cecil’s spies and ambassadors in Ireland discovered that Shane O’Neill, that bellicose Ulster chieftain who had kept his territories in a state of perpetual war, had appealed for five thousand troops from France to fight the English. He was politely refused. Simultaneously, O’Neill donned a diplomatic mantle and traveled from southern Ireland to Edinburgh and on to Rome, seeking aid for his cause while claiming to be saving Ireland for Roman Catholicism.8 Naturally, Mary was in no position to offer succor to O’Neill at a time when her very throne was crumbling beneath her. Nonetheless, Pius V in Rome was prepared to lend a ready ear.
Sometime in the spring of 1567, the disreputable papal appointee, Armagh’s Archbishop Magrath, wrote to Pius V for the establishment of the Holy Inquisition in Ireland. He urged the pope to grant this most serious request since Ireland’s heretics “under form of sound doctrine yet by merry tales and pretty conceits disseminate many and diverse empty and profitless matters repugnant to the Catholic faith … [and] utter derisive and unseemly words even against God’s holy church.” Naturally, the pope agreed that such a Holy Inquisition should be established under the “sway and jurisdiction of the Most Illustrious and Catholic Prince O’Neill.”9
This seemingly earnest plea was an outright lie. The number of “heretics” in Ireland was small, even ten years after Elizabeth’s Act of Settlement. Shane’s Catholicism was more a political tool to elicit support from Scotland, Spain, or the papacy than a matter of faith. The Anglo-Irish settlers professed the religion more or less as decreed by Elizabeth as the head of the Church of England. Not surprisingly, no pope had appointed any Catholic archbishop or bishop to any Pale diocese in Elizabeth’s lifetime.10 The Pale dioceses of Dublin, Kildare, Meath, and Armagh were fully Anglo-Irish in worship. Other Pale dioceses in Limerick, Cork, Ferns, Tuam, and Clonfert acknowledged Elizabeth’s Royal Supremacy but continued to worship as traditional Catholics, with Elizabeth’s full knowledge. Yet Ireland was rapidly becoming a battleground for religious and political tensions.11
Though a thief, bully, murderer, and cheat, Shane O’Neill maintained an iron grip on Ulster. Leicester, taking charge of the degenerating situation there, persuaded Elizabeth without too much argument that his brother-in-law, Sir Henry Sidney, would make an ideal Lord Lieutenant to replace Sussex. A tall, elegant, and likable man, Sidney had always been popular with Elizabeth’s nobility. That he was also Leicester’s favorite made his initial popularity with the Palesmen, Anglo-Irish, and Celtic chieftains (who called him “Big Henry of the Beer”), even more remarkable. Having only taken up his post in 1566, Sidney found that his support to stop O’Neill was nearly universal. Perhaps this groundswell of support for the English Lord Lieutenant is not so strange when considering that O’Neill had been terrorizing the Irish for over fifteen years—burning fields and villages, pillaging livestock and valuables, kidnapping whosoever stood in his way, and murdering at will.
Still, deciding to eliminate Shane O’Neill was one thing; succeeding was quite another. As the weeks became months, Sidney’s obsession with routing O’Neill grew. Stuck between the divergent demands of the Celtic chieftains, the faction-ridden Anglo-Irish, the power-hungry Palesmen, and the English merchant adventurers, Ireland seemed more akin to a “Wild West” of native warring tribes and con men than a civilized nation. Sidney found his position as governor rapidly eroded, a
nd by the spring of 1567, he had had enough. “For God’s sake,” Sidney begged Cecil by letter, “take me out of this world.”12
Sidney hadn’t been able to provide the Irish with a quick-fix solution to O’Neill. At the end of the day, it was the O’Donnells, who dominated Tyreannell in northwest Ulster, who handled matters. Though Elizabeth had voted Sidney a staggering £35,000 to mount a devastating force against O’Neill, few in Ireland had confidence that this time Sidney would prevail. As Sidney made his way northward from Dublin, the O’Donnells set aside their internal differences and joined forces with one another to repel O’Neill. Attacking Shane’s encampment at Farsetmore, the O’Donnells literally forced O’Neill’s men back into the swollen River Swilly. Hundreds of men drowned, while others willingly abandoned the once omnipotent O’Neill. Nonetheless, Shane had somehow escaped.
O’Neill desperately needed new allies. Unable to count on his own clan, who were already vying to take over from him on his death, O’Neill knew he would have to surrender to Sidney or make peace with the other Scotsmen in Ireland, the MacDonalds. Shane opted for the MacDonald solution, as he had already kidnapped their chief, Sorley Boy. On May 31, negotiations were opened in a large field in County Antrim, far away from their armies. Shane offered Sorley Boy’s release in exchange for Scottish mercenary reinforcements. The MacDonalds pondered and said they’d consider the matter. Two days later, the MacDonalds gave Shane O’Neill their reply. They cut his throat and hacked him to pieces.
When Edmund Campion, the Oxford student who had so impressed Elizabeth, compiled his History of Ireland in 1569–70, he wrote, “Thus the wretched man ended, who might have lived like a Prince, had he not quenched the sparks of grace that appeared in him with arrogancy and contempt against his prince.”13
Shane’s body was buried at Glenarm initially. Yet Sidney remained dissatisfied that O’Neill was indeed dead. To placate Sidney, the chieftain’s body was exhumed and his head sent “pickled in a pipkin” to the Lord Lieutenant, who promptly had it mounted on a pole over Dublin Castle as a lesson to all the “wild” Irish.
* * *
By the end of the summer of 1567, Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned at Lochleven Castle; Shane O’Neill was dead; Philip’s crack commander, the Duke of Alba, had marched into Brussels; France teetered on a fresh outbreak of religious violence; and England knew that to recover Calais it would need to go to war. It is little wonder Elizabeth felt the international situation was grave.
At home, the universities remained hotbeds of discontent, whether from Catholic or Protestant factions. Though Cambridge was emerging as the more “churchy” of the two universities, Oxford was seemingly overrun with the more conservative or Catholic society. While Cambridge overwhelmed Oxford in the sheer numbers of godly preachers, Oxford more than made up for the town’s Catholic leanings with its own extreme ministers among its graduates in men like John Field and Thomas Wilcox. Both men, after just a few months in London, had already found themselves exiled.14
Cecil from his base at Cambridge and Leicester at Oxford instituted their own miniature secret services to provide intelligence to the queen for potentially serious threats. The most useful “agents” of both men within the universities invariably changed with the passing years, but more often than not, it was the students themselves that proved the most fruitful path for discovering dissident attitudes. After all, Elizabeth and her privy councillors knew that the Catholic students and their professors found refuge in the classrooms and universities at Louvain and Mechlin. Though these university spy networks had their roots in the controversies of the 1560s, they would continue until the end of Elizabeth’s reign, with consequences far beyond the sphere of religious upheaval.
In the autumn of 1567, there were over twenty-seven Catholic exiles at Louvain from New College Oxford alone.15 Their writings and books sent back illicitly to England had done “incalculable good in spreading the growth of the Faith,” the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip. The Spanish king’s reply was a resounding endorsement for the “Apologetic School of Louvain,” urging the ambassador to explore any opportunity to encourage the work of the Catholic English exiles.16
Yet, despite numerous warnings, Elizabeth refused to believe that these men represented a clear threat to her or England. Her preoccupation remained with the civil wars on the Continent. With thousands of tercio troops in the Low Countries led by the world’s most competent general threatening to murder its Protestants, naturally, she was right.
The arrival of the Duke of Alba and his army on September 1 in Brussels heralded a new era. His first act was to demobilize those “Lutheran” mercenaries whose loyalty Margaret of Parma had purchased to quell the fury of the Calvinists. Only five days later, Alba issued his patent creating the tribunal he called the “Council of Troubles.” Before long, it would be known as the “Council of Blood.” Orange, Egmont, George de Lalaing, count of Hoogstraten, and Horn had all traveled to Germany in the summer to regroup, but by September 9 Horn, Egmont, and their secretaries had returned at Margaret’s specific invitation.
The moment they arrived, the Spanish soldiers swooped, and they were arrested. All their papers were seized. Margaret, though still regent, had not only lost the confidence of Philip but was now directly implicated as Alba’s accomplice. Bewildered and disgusted, she resigned her post on December 30, but not before swearing in the Duke of Alba as captain-general of the Spanish forces and governor-general of all the Low Countries. Undaunted by Margaret’s sudden resignation, Alba wrote to Philip that “there is a new world to be created here.”17
Over the next six months, Alba terrorized the country. He transferred executive power to his own trusted Spanish and Italian ministers from the local nobility. Spanish and Italian lawyers represented the Low Countries internationally, even running the chief towns as magistrates, or corregidors. Whenever a Netherlander died or resigned, a Spaniard took his place. What mattered was loyalty, or, as Alba called it, “a spotless character,” and to possess such a thing one had to be either Spanish or Italian.
That was only the beginning. By Lent 1568, thousands of people had been arrested, tried, and executed for their part in the “fury.” The swiftness and efficacy of the Council of Troubles was awe-inspiring. Those who had signed the petitions against Cardinal Granvelle in 1563 were hunted down. Albert van Loo, a revenue collector for the king, tried to commit suicide, fearing he would be blamed for the disorders in his jurisdiction. Orange, Culemborg, and Hoogstraten were summoned to appear before the court in January that year. They refused. They were, of course, tried in absentia, and all their property and possessions remaining in the Low Countries were forfeit. In all, over twelve thousand people were tried, and nine thousand condemned to lose most of their worldly possessions. Over one thousand were executed.
Orange and his followers were left no alternative: To recover their lost lands and property, they would need to invade the Low Countries at the head of an army. With Egmont and Horn imprisoned and other leaders under house arrest or dead, William of Orange emerged as the undisputed leader of the opposition to the Duke of Alba and his Council of Troubles. Alba’s forced forfeiture of his hereditary title was illegal; and as the ruler of the principality of Orange and all its possessions, Orange was constitutionally within his rights to enter his lands to wage war on his enemies. Alba, suspecting reprisals, kidnapped Orange’s eldest son, Philip William, then studying at Louvain. Orange, however, remained undaunted, vowing to rid the Low Countries of its scourge, Alba. The Calvinist movement had won over its unwilling leader, who also happened to be a Catholic. Orange would never see his son again.
That autumn and winter, Catherine de’ Medici, too, faced a new rebellion. Catherine’s nerves hadn’t been the only ones to have jangled at the thought of Alba marching through France and settling on its northeastern border. The Huguenot leaders, the Prince de Condé and Admiral Coligny, had become convinced that Catherine was in league with Philip to exterminate them as part of
the plan to eradicate the Calvinists from the Low Countries. When Charles IX and Catherine refused to either attack Alba or release their mercenary soldiers, suspicion erupted into conflict. Word of savage attacks by Huguenots against Catholics surged in from the countryside. Near Toulouse, monks were reportedly killed and Catholics beaten or run out of town without any possessions.
Yet despite Catherine’s best efforts to assuage the Huguenot leadership, France was heading for its second religious civil war in five years. Moving the court to the fortified town of Meaux in late September, Catherine had sent word for her Swiss mercenaries to come to their aid just as the towns of Melun and Péronne were attacked by rampaging Huguenots. When the Swiss troops arrived, Catherine and the king escaped amid a “forest of Swiss pikes” along with the senior members of the court and made a dash for Paris. Finally Catherine saw that the days for reconciliation were over. As the city of Paris was surrounded by the Huguenot army, and supplies blockaded along roads and by the River Seine, Catherine sent out appeals to those she hoped would send help, including Philip and Pius V. Under the signature of Charles IX, Elizabeth received a letter “praying and exhorting her to make no move, and show the Huguenots no favor.”18
