Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

  Campion’s remark about “heretics” to Stanihurst was odd for a deacon of the Church of England to make to a loyal subject of the crown, but he knew what few in London did. The Stanihursts and the Barnewalls had turned to Catholicism, as many families of the Irish Pale had also done. Though their homes were built from the bricks of the dissolved monasteries, and both families had supported the Royal Supremacy, they were in the growing majority who felt that England’s influence had become destructive to Ireland. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the alteration of church policy. Remote from London and court, these staunchly Anglo-Irish families felt that they and Ireland had been swept aside for the furtherance of the Protestant cause.

  * * *

  Campion’s joining the exiled Catholic community at Douai was not an unusual thing for a young man of conscience to do. Since the early days of Elizabeth’s reign when Sir Francis Englefield emigrated, thousands of others had joined him. Their primary concern was for the survival of English Catholicism. Just as Elizabeth felt that the only way to make the English understand her “middle way” was to educate the population and teach them to read and write, so the exiled Catholics felt that it was only by proper training of priests in seminaries that they could continue to carry the Word to the people.

  Still, the first concern was how to clothe and feed these penniless Catholic nobles, academics, and gentry émigrés. As early as 1561, Margaret of Parma wrote to her half brother Philip II for a Spanish pension and money to erect religious houses.3 By 1568, Dr. William Allen had founded his English College at Douai with money garnered from the pope and Spain. When Edmund Campion joined their ranks, the college hosted over one hundred young men. Within that number “it is well worthy of remark how very large a proportion of the early members of the college were graduates of the English Universities, especially Oxford … They brought with them the traditions of English University and collegiate life, and among these a high esteem for learning.”4

  Remarkably, despite this grand exodus from England and its universities, Elizabeth and her government had paid little heed to these exiles in the first ten years of her reign. What changed her attitude was the papal bull of 1570 and the certain knowledge that many received ayudas de costa, or Spanish pensions. Elizabeth recognized the danger in these men becoming pensioners of the Spanish state, particularly as the northern rebel lords Dacre, Neville, Northumberland, Westmorland, and their families were now among them.

  The queen had no wish to create Catholic martyrs while she was attacking the ever-present threat posed by the brazen godly and their print campaign inside England. However, Elizabeth’s wishes were the last concern on the minds of all those who practiced apostasy. Their separate paths along a Catholic and Puritan Via Dolorosa to the hanging tree at Tyburn were already etched in the activists’ souls.

  * * *

  The year 1575 proved a decisive turning point. After nearly ten years of uncertainty, peaceful trade was restored between the Spanish Low Countries and England. The replacement of the Duke of Alba two years earlier by Don Luis de Requesens, who had previously been the governor of Lombardy in Italy, was crucial to the resumption of trade. Requesens, prematurely aged by fulfilling his duties for Philip in northern Italy, had hoped for a quiet retirement, but Philip wouldn’t hear of it. Alba’s strong-armed political policies in the Low Countries had been seen at last as bankrupt, and only a diplomat of Requesens’s skill might be able to put things right, Philip believed.

  An equally important factor to the peace was that without English trade, Philip’s available treasury to maintain a steady state of war in the Netherlands and elsewhere was clearly diminished. Only a year earlier Philip wrote to his ministers, “I think that the Netherlands will be lost for lack of money, as I have always feared … We are running out of everything so fast, that words fail me.”5 What Philip had also failed to understand was that another threatened royal bankruptcy would do little to endear him to the Netherlander merchants.

  Elizabeth grasped the nettle for resumption of trade and peace with Spain, quickly sending Dr. Thomas Wilson to resolve any outstanding obstacles. Requesens was taken off guard when Wilson put forward Elizabeth’s demand that the English Catholics taking refuge in the Spanish Netherlands should be expelled prior to any final agreement being reached on trading matters.

  It was an apparent masterstroke. Not only was Elizabeth about to conclude a peaceful trading relationship once again with the Spanish Netherlands, but she could appear to ensure that through this rapprochement, Spain would stop harboring her wayward Catholics, whom she regarded as rebels as well. Eventually Requesens agreed to expel the English Catholics from the Low Countries, but on condition that Elizabeth would no longer give shelter to Dutch rebels in England. Requesens kept his end of the bargain. Elizabeth did not, despite issuing a proclamation against Orange and his followers.

  At the same time, William Allen recognized that the college at Douai could not continue without the political and financial aid of Spain and the Holy See. On April 5, 1575, Gregory XIII granted the college an annual pension of 1,200 crowns—increased to 2,100 crowns six weeks later—to safeguard its future. Nonetheless, the seminarians were literally starving. Much of their suffering was caused by Elizabeth’s squeeze on all forms of apostasy at home, which in turn had been brought on by the plots hatched by Mary Queen of Scots and her followers. The series of penal laws that followed made it illegal to send cash to all Catholics overseas.

  By 1575, the business of England’s Catholic émigré community in the Netherlands had become a primary government concern. Indeed, a proposal was made in the Privy Council to open and copy all correspondence between Catholic exiles on Spanish pensions and their friends and families at home.6 Though impracticable, the idea was gleaned from several successful networks of informants, spies, and traitors living among the exiles who had proved valuable intelligence sources about the exiles’ correspondents in England.

  * * *

  Despite Gregory XIII’s seeming generosity, it was too late to save the college in its current incarnation at Douai. On March 1, Requesens gave the order for the exiles to withdraw from the Spanish Netherlands. Though the people of Douai were mainly Catholic, they joined in the government’s efforts to rid the city of the seminary. It is understandable why. Commerce had been ruined by the religious wars that now divided the country, and in the Spanish-held, Catholic territories. Reprisals against the general population were only a heartbeat away from the latest show of boldness from dissidents. Those who demonstrated against the seminarians did so for self-preservation in this life, perhaps at the risk of their eternal souls in the next.

  Many of the students dispersed finally to Cambrai and Liège on the border with France. Yet finding themselves in a small, powerful diaspora, these men of the cloth were surreptitiously approached with sudden offers of money and full restitution of their lands and possessions in England by those working in the Elizabethan spy community. The price they would have to pay for the newfound English generosity would be to inform on their fellow seminarians.7 Few accepted.

  * * *

  Requesens was as good as his word. The expulsion from Douai was only the beginning. Brussels, Antwerp, Mechlin, and Louvain soon followed. Those exiles who wished to remain in the seminary were forced to remove themselves to Rheims, where under the protection of the new French king, Henry III (formerly Duke of Anjou), they could be assured of a warm, if at times difficult, welcome. As the Huguenots saw the mass immigration of Catholics to the northern French city, their disquiet grew. They had not forgotten Henry’s role in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Thus the sparks of the seventh French civil war were ignited.

  Meanwhile, a tense situation also developed in England. Archbishop Parker, who had helped Elizabeth carry out her vision for the Church of England, was dying by April 1575. Burghley immediately proposed the noted moderate archbishop of York, Edmund Grindal, to replace him. After all, Grindal had had ample experience of dealing with
crypto-Catholics in the north and was widely thought to be able to speak in a language familiar to the Puritans in the south, which would help these firebrands to “keep the humble and straight course of a loving … minister of Christ’s gospel.”8

  In other words, Grindal was a transparently good man who could traverse the hot rhetoric on both sides of the religious divide. Though Parker died that May, it would take Elizabeth until December to name Grindal in his place. Whether the queen had a sixth sense about what would follow shall forever remain a mystery, but certainly she had her doubts about Burghley’s favourite candidate, Grindal.

  No time was lost, however, in trying to win over the seventy-first archbishop of Canterbury. Grindal received a letter from a privy councillor, thought to be either Sir Walter Mildmay or Sir Francis Walsingham, that was most revealing of the Puritan view of the Anglican Church:

  It is greatly hoped for by the godly … that your lordship will prove a profitable instrument … in removing the corruptions of the Court of Faculties which is one of the greatest abuses that remain in this Church of England … I could wish your lordship to repair hither with as convenient speed as ye may … that there may be some consultation … [on] how some part of those Romish dregs remaining … may be removed.9

  Like the Catholics in exile, Elizabeth and her councillors Leicester, Walsingham, and Mildmay were fully cognizant of “the unlearnedness of the Anglican ministry, abuses of excommunication, want of discipline, dispensation and tolerations for non-residency and such like.”10 By the time Parliament convened in 1576, legislation had been written to deal with these abuses. Those bills touching the regulation of ordinations, admissions to benefices, and licenses to preach, as well as educating the inferior clergy, would take priority. Elizabeth wanted to end the dissemination of any literature that attacked her church and the regular use of godly prophesyings involving both the local clergy and the laity. For Grindal, and to some extent Elizabeth, a further abuse existed in the Court of Faculties of the Anglican Church. Grindal was adamant that it must stop all Romish abuses like holding incompatible plural offices, nonresidency in the parish, receiving orders under canonical age, or marrying people in the forbidden seasons.11

  Yet Grindal refused to halt reform there. He directed four leading members of the laity and ecclesiastical judges to look into abuses in the three other church courts: the Court of Audience, the Arches, and the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. In this, he had the full support of Leicester, Walsingham, Huntingdon, and Mildmay. Unusually, he also asked the panel of judges to suggest workable reforms. Unwittingly, Grindal had set out on his journey along his personal Via Dolorosa.

  For Elizabeth, this smacked of the reforms proposed in 1571, reforms she had vetoed. Now, five years on, the bishops took the initiative once again and introduced Grindal’s proposals to the House of Lords. Among the intended reforms was one to enforce church attendance, including the levying of fines. It would be another five years, however, before the recusancy laws would be enshrined in the 1581 Parliament.12

  While the 1576 Parliament debated legislation, Elizabeth surveyed the state of religion throughout the realm as portrayed to the Privy Council. Public and church prophesyings were on the increase. By this time, they were a regular part of life in England’s market towns, where Puritan preachers not only taught the gospel to the clergy but also invited the laity to join in. After these conferences, or classes, there would be a group supper, where the Puritan teachings were allowed to take root in the natural setting of dinner-table conversations.

  It was these prophesyings that Elizabeth feared most. For her, these were not a means to better educate the clergy but smacked instead of public gatherings that could easily turn into public demonstrations of discontent. By 1576, reports reached court that there were civil disorders in the Midlands as a result of these prophesyings, or conventicles, as they were also known. Seeing that the wind was blowing in the direction of the godly among her most trusted advisers, Elizabeth decided single-handedly she was having none of it. So on June 12, she summoned Grindal to her presence and demanded he put a halt to them.

  From that moment on, Grindal tried, not unlike Elizabeth herself, to plow a middle way through the religious quagmire. He felt it was his duty to protect the prophesyings not only from the Puritans’ abuse but also from the unwanted though well-intended attentions of the queen. He collected testimonies about the prophesyings, wrote a scholarly treatise called Tractatus de exercitiis, and finally composed his Orders for reformation of abuses about the learned exercises and conferences among ministers of the Church.13 This six-thousand-word manifesto defended preaching as the crucible of faith and civil order, for “where preaching wanteth, obedience faileth,” and fear of the prophesyings was “only backward [to] men in religion [who] do fret against it.” Grindal took the final step onto his Via Dolorosa with his conclusion to the queen:

  I am forced, with all humility, and yet plainly, to profess that I cannot with safe conscience, and without the offence of the majesty of God, give my assent to the suppressing of the said exercises: much less can I send out any injunctions for the utter and universal subversion of the same … Bear with me, I beseech you Madam, if I choose rather to offend against your earthly Majesty than to offend the heavenly majestey [sic] of God.14

  Grindal should have known that the best way to pacify Elizabeth was not to oppose her openly. His friends on the council tried to protect him, but to no avail. Elizabeth, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, felt compelled to send out the order directly to the bishops, ordering the suppression of the prophesyings. Her command was even obeyed in Grindal’s own diocese. His Privy Council friends arranged for the archbishop to make an appearance before the council in the hope that he would recant his stance. Grindal attended but disappointed everyone when he replied that he couldn’t recant since “a second offence of disobedience, [is] greater than the first.”15

  Grindal was sequestered at Lambeth Palace in May 1577. By November Elizabeth had refused his choice of “sufficient persons” to take his place to fulfill his duties. He would never again officiate fully as archbishop of Canterbury yet never ceased hoping to do so. Though he did carry out some minor church functions, and acted as an arbitrator between Queen’s and Merton colleges, Grindal remained in disgrace. Yet while he did, Elizabeth’s church seemingly crumbled around them.

  In Sussex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, the queen’s bishops engaged in political and religious wrangling with the gentry—both Catholic and Puritan. London’s Bishop Sandys quarreled openly with his successor, Bishop Aylmer, whom he described as “coloured covetousness, an envious heart.”16 Grindal’s failing was not to see the political dimensions to the Puritan cause. Elizabeth’s was going into battle with the moderate and tolerant archbishop.

  What Elizabeth failed to understand in her extreme anger against Grindal was that at the time when her church needed strong, personal, and moderate leadership while it was under threat from Puritans and Catholics alike, she had effectively cut off its spiritual head. This was, however, no personal vendetta or skirmish. Far more was at stake. Grindal, like Leicester, cringed at the prospect of the proposed marriage of Elizabeth to Francis of Anjou (formerly Duke of Alençon) and, like Leicester, did not hesitate to make known his views on the potential disastrous consequences of such a match.

  * * *

  Why had Elizabeth reconsidered marrying the runt of Catherine de’ Medici’s litter after refusing him so many times in the past? Though she was cooed at and wooed by Anjou’s envoy, followed hotly by Anjou himself, Elizabeth hadn’t lost her touch for the political imperatives of the day. Privately, she recognized that she had made a mistake only a few years earlier when she ignored William of Orange’s pleas for military and financial assistance in his war against Spain.

  Despite Orange’s phenomenal successes in taking back his provinces of Holland and Zeeland from Alba, Elizabeth had misjudged her options and chosen the surer, safer policy decision of a rapp
rochement with Spain and an agreement with Requesens. Naturally, her hidden reason for the Spanish option was to have her rebellious English Catholics expelled from the Spanish-held Low Countries. Similarly, Elizabeth’s unwillingness to help Orange compelled him to find an ally elsewhere. Only one man, however, appeared over the horizon with military and financial aid: Francis of Anjou, heir to the throne of France.

  Despite Leicester’s jaw-dropping spectacle at Kenilworth given for Elizabeth during her summer progress of 1576, where he implored the queen through weeks of feasting, allegorical plays, and set pieces not to marry Anjou, Elizabeth held fast to her French “frog,” as she called him.17 This was not for love, as the queen would have everyone believe. It was for politics. Anjou had emerged from nowhere as a force to be reckoned with, and William of Orange, in his desperation for an end to the bloodshed and restoration of the Dutch to their ancient liberties, was willing to make Anjou effectively king of Holland and Zeeland. With the death of Requesens in March that year and the announcement of the new governor in September as Don John of Austria (Philip II’s only brother and the victor against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571), Orange needed a powerful ally—quickly. Anjou was his man.

  This was the point when politics and religion collided as strange bedfellows. Though Elizabeth was minded to assist Orange and his fellow Beggars, she could not do so without risking war with Spain. The sham of a love match between the queen and Anjou served a treble purpose. Elizabeth could seemingly have lost her senses to love. She could give sustenance to Orange underhandedly through Anjou. Yet most significantly from her perspective, she could dissimulate with Philip, who feared a rapprochement with France would result from her love for her “frog.” Philip would need to think twice if he went ahead with his proposed Catholic League with Pope Gregory XIII against England, as France stood geographically, militarily, and politically between them. With Anjou—heir to the throne of France—as Elizabeth’s fiancé, France would need to remain neutral.