Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

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  Rumors of this Catholic League had begun to trickle back to England through Walsingham’s network of ambassadors and informers in Italy as early as the end of 1575. When the seminary at Douai had been forced to close its doors that year, Dr. Allen and Francis Englefield traveled to Rome to present an enticing prospect to Pope Gregory XIII. In their written memorial they demonstrated that England could easily be won back to Rome by a mere five thousand musketeers under the command of the renegade adventurer Thomas Stukeley (who just happened to be exiled in Rome). The invasion force could sail from Italy direct to Liverpool, which was a known stronghold of English Catholicism.

  Gregory XIII embraced the bold plan and termed it “the Enterprise of England.” He discussed it with the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See, Juan de Zuñiga, who thought it a marvelous undertaking; particularly as it would only cost the Spanish crown 100,000 ducats and the king’s blessing. Though Philip sent half the subsidy required, he realized that the convoy needed to bring the ships engaged in the Enterprise out of the Mediterranean would vastly weaken Spain’s fighting force there and risk the rise once again of the Ottoman Turks. To make matters worse, it was frankly an imprudent financial exercise, as Philip was about to declare bankruptcy yet again.

  Still Gregory XIII bombarded Philip with pleas to persevere with the Enterprise. Philip’s ministers sang the same tune. “The worst is that the queen now knows,” Zuñiga lamented, “what we had planned and feels the same indignation as if the enterprise had taken place.”18

  Zuñiga was absolutely right. Philip II and Gregory XIII were playing a treacherous game with Elizabeth. For years she had refused to offer financial and military assistance to William of Orange. She had consistently suggested that she act as a mediator between Spain and its rebellious subjects in the Low Countries. It was a suggestion Philip and his governors persistently ignored. When she had heard that Don John of Austria was giving sustenance to the exiled seminarians and allowing them to return to the Low Countries, she toyed with the prospect of helping the Calvinists under Orange. Yet on hearing that Allen, Englefield, Stukeley, and the pope had hatched this Enterprise of England she feared that the time to resolutely take sides might have come at last. Nonetheless, she made one final effort to mediate between the warring parties. On December 20, 1577, she wrote to Philip:

  The sorrow we feel for the calamities and miserable events which have befallen your Serenity’s Netherlands, the excessive and terrible shedding of Christian blood, and our desire in all sincerity to promote your honour and advantage … As the destruction and desolation of dominions hinders kings themselves from founding their power and glory on the opulence of prosperous citizens, and the diminution of public wealth strikes at the basis of the power of those who govern, so is it unworthy of the regal office and dignity to judge harshly those who love and strive for us … our object being to endeavour to arouse in your breast the same compassion for your subjects which has been aroused in ours, and to testify how sincerely and straightforwardly we desire to act.19

  Most likely, before this letter was sent to the Spanish king, Elizabeth had already chosen sides. Through Anjou, she would help Orange and his Calvinists. After all, Dr. Allen and Francis Englefield had been the first to draw blood with their scheme for the Enterprise of England. Now the security of the realm depended on destroying them.

  PART III

  The Years of Religious Terror, 1580–1591

  EIGHTEEN

  God’s Outriders

  The expense is reckoned.

  The enterprise is begun.

  —Edmond Campion, 1580

  Dr. William Allen and Francis Englefield believed heart and soul in the pope’s right to depose Elizabeth. With the expulsion of the seminary from Douai, Allen had procured papal approval for a second seminary at Rome where students reportedly flooded, “daily coming, or rather flying to the college.” Many were said to be the “best wits in England,” with several plucked from Oxford University.1

  The seminarians’ sentiments were hardly a secret. What Elizabeth and her councillors needed to analyze, however, was the role that Gregory XIII, Philip II, and even the queen of Scots had planned for these missionaries in training. Allen’s correspondence with the pope and Philip had already been detected, but as yet, his friendship with Mary Stuart had only been widely assumed. After considerable consultation with Elizabeth, it was agreed that the threat to the realm was so palpable that infiltrators would need to be sent to the new college in Rome.

  Walsingham was the natural person to be put in charge of the exercise, as he had received full credit for unveiling the Italian side of the Ridolfi Plot in 1571. The very people who had worked for him then were still available all these years later. The two most influential of “Walsingham’s moles” in Rome were a former stationer’s apprentice, Anthony Munday, and his friend Thomas Nowell. They were welcomed into the English College in Rome on the feast of Candlemas on February 2, 1579, joining forty-two other seminarians. Among their number was a young and as yet unknown would-be priest named Robert Southwell.2

  While at the college, Munday kept a diary, the first surviving record of a memoir of a spy. In it he claimed that the seminarians held competitions for who could utter the worst insults against Elizabeth and her ministers. Francis Bacon appears in the diary as “the Butcher’s son, the great guts, oh he would fry well with a Faggot.”3 On the surface this was a pun for “frying bacon” coupled with the meaning that Francis Bacon was a great Protestant, since to “fry a faggot” meant to burn a heretic alive at the stake. However, Bacon was a person of precisely no significance at the time. He was not a minister, or even in the pay of the crown. So why mention him at all?

  The only possible reason must be that Munday had come across the sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon—the elder Anthony and younger Francis—during his travels in France and disliked Francis intensely. While his own diary brings much of what Munday wrote into disrepute on the one hand, it also shows that he might well have been aware of another thorn in the papal side, a spy code-named “Fagot.” The elusive Fagot was a mole in the French ambassador’s household in London in the late 1570s and early 1580s who leaked intelligence back to Burghley and Walsingham, including damning information against Mary Stuart.

  Munday’s diary may well have been embellished to discredit men against whom he held grudges, like Bacon, but his descriptions of the dedication of the seminarians to their faith nonetheless rings true today. Munday wrote about self-flagellation as part of the toughening up of the seminary priests. The penitent, who could have been anyone within the student body, would dress in a long canvas robe with a hole cut in its back. The hood of his garment would be raised over his head to shield his identity. He would then walk up and down in the dining refectory whipping himself with a short-handled whip with “forty or fifty cords at it, about the length of half a yard: with a great many hard knots on every cord … and some of the whips have through every knot at the end crooked wires, which will tear the flesh unmercifully.”4 The crooked wires, much like fishhooks, would make the blood run quicker, tearing at the flesh of the penitent’s back. This form of self-scourging was a popular means of mortification among the more ascetic orders of the Catholic Church and highly reminiscent of the Flagellants, who sprang up in the aftermath of the Black Death in the thirteenth century.

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  As early as 1576, Allen’s missionaries had begun to take the Catholic Word back to England and reinfiltrate the land of their birth. Cuthbert Mayne was one of the eighteen chosen to make the journey back home in this first wave. They were warned by Allen that it would be a mistake to underestimate the dangers they would face. Organized shire watches scoured the countryside for signs of sedition, religious or otherwise. Catholic families were under surveillance by their servants and neighbors. If the forces supporting the government did not apprehend the missionaries, there were always sturdy beggars and an army of vagrants who thronged the highways and byways eag
er to undertake the task for a paltry reward. Highway lawyers, footpads, rufflers, or upright men—all names for highway robbers—were commonplace. For a lone priest, as each of the seminarians was meant to be, officiating at his peripatetic Mass was a very precarious life, as Cuthbert Mayne would soon discover.

  When Richard Grenville, the pirate adventurer and high sheriff of Cornwall, rode with a hundred men to the home of Sir Francis Tregian, Cuthbert Mayne was asked to identify himself. Defiantly, Mayne responded, “I am a man.” Grenville was furious. He ripped open the priest’s doublet and found an Agnus Dei case hanging from his neck. These were wax disks made from Easter candles, and each had the image of a paschal lamb pressed into it. Most significantly, they were blessed by the pope. The penalty for possessing one in England, since the Parliament of 1571, was death.

  Rather than swear that Elizabeth was head of the Church of England to avert his punishment, Mayne chose death. Just before his execution in early December, he asserted that England would be restored to the true faith by the “secret instructors” of Douai, and should “any Catholic prince … invade any realm to reform the same to the authority of the See of Rome, that then the Catholics in that realm … should be ready to assist and help them.”5 Despite his defiance, Mayne’s executioner showed him mercy, sixteenth-century-style. He was hanged and allowed to die before he was disemboweled and quartered. Sir Francis Tregian, as punishment for harboring Mayne and hearing Mass, was held in captivity for twenty-five years, and his lands were forfeit to Sir George Carey, the queen’s cousin.

  Seven months later, on June 21, 1577, the bishop of London wrote to Walsingham: “I have had conference with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and we have received from divers of our brethren, bishops of this realm, news that the Papists marvellously increase both in numbers and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves, from the church and the service of God.”6 A conference of bishops and councillors was summoned that July to discuss how to address recusancy. The result was a government paper proposing that known ringleaders, the old diehards upon whose advice “consciences of recusants depend,” should be banished or imprisoned, “corrupt schoolmasters” should be removed, and obstinate offenders of the laws of England should be restrained, isolated, and punished.7 This is the first paper written by the government on how to deal with the perceived threat of recusancy in England. Its author was Francis Walsingham.

  For Elizabeth, it was one thing to hold fast to Catholicism; it was quite another to pray for an invasion by a Catholic prince as Mayne had done. What she had perhaps hoped was that Mayne’s death would serve as a reminder to her people that as long as they quietly followed their faith and did not “intermeddle” in politics, she would remain true to them by not making “windows into their souls.” She could not allow or forgive priests who were uncommonly well versed in politics to pronounce upon her steering at England’s helm.

  What Elizabeth had forgotten was her church history: Mayne and the hundreds of others who would soon follow him to England would delight in wearing their martyrs’ crowns. Until the Mayne mission, Burghley’s primary concern had been recusancy among the gentry. Catholic priests in England were by and large old men of the Marian period, too old to become crusaders once more.

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  The first inkling that Burghley and Elizabeth had that the pope might import younger, more vigorous priests came with the ill-fated voyage of Thomas Stukeley from Civita Vecchia to Ireland under the papal banner in 1578. Fortunately, Stukeley never got any nearer than Portugal.8 With Stukeley’s mission came the broader realization that the Enterprise of England, though somewhat hazy, contradictory, and convoluted, was already under way.

  Nonetheless, the alarm was sent out in Ireland, fearing that Stukeley’s stop at Lisbon was only to take on more men and arms. The Lord Deputy of Ireland sent frantic appeals to Burghley for money, men, and ships, but Elizabeth shrugged off Stukeley’s invasion as a pipe dream and refused to allow it to be discussed in the council’s meetings. She was right to do so. Stukeley was a swashbuckler, not the admiral of an invading army, as Elizabeth had already found out to her cost through his misadventures as a tax collector in Berkshire, her spy in Ireland, and leader of her expedition to Florida.9 Before leaving Lisbon as a captain in King Sebastian’s army for Morocco, Stukeley, characteristically iconoclastic, said that Ireland provided nothing for anyone but poverty and lice.10 Given that Gregory XIII’s plan was to crown his “nephew” Giacomo Boncompagni king of Ireland, Stukeley had proved more than a bitter disappointment.11

  Within the year, the pope and Philip II found a more suitable replacement for the untrustworthy Englishman. The exiled James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, first cousin of Gerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond, was selected by His Holiness to head up the Irish invasion. James Fitzmaurice had become the putative head of the Fitzgerald clan in Ireland when his cousin the earl had been imprisoned in the 1570s. The Desmonds, also known as “Geraldines,” under the command of James Fitzmaurice, were responsible for much of the unrest in Ireland in the 1570s as they struggled for supremacy in Munster against the Earl of Ormond’s Butler family.

  The pope had chosen his man well. James Fitzmaurice was a man of great faith and courage and a bitter enemy of English rule in Ireland. In line with the brutality that scarred Ireland forever, James Fitzmaurice looted towns, slaughtered garrisons, and stripped civilians (including housewives) of the clothes on their backs and sent them literally naked into the enemy’s camp.12 Fitzmaurice had been a fine choice indeed, made even better by the selection of the Englishman Dr. Nicholas Sander as the papal envoy for the mission. Sander had been Elizabeth’s nemesis since he had been one of the few exiled Englishmen to defend Pius V’s bull of excommunication in his work Regnans (1570). Fearing unspeakable reprisals against the college at Douai, William Allen demanded that Regnans be suppressed. Sander seems to have agreed, though in 1571 he printed the papal bull in full in his De visibili monarchia and praised as a martyr John Felton, the man who nailed it up on the doors of Lambeth Palace in London.13 With the valiant Fitzmaurice arrayed alongside the pulpit and eloquent pen of Sander, both the pope and Philip had every reason to believe in their collective victory in Ireland. From there, England was only a stone’s throw away.

  Though English, Dr. Sander had long reflected on the suffering of the Irish under English rule, believing that many of their ills were due to its unlucky geography at England’s “postern gate.” In fact, Ireland had been in Sander’s heart as early as 1573, when as papal envoy he endeavored to sway Philip II to the Enterprise of England. Four years later, he wrote to William Allen, “The fate of Christendom depends upon the stout assailing of England.”14

  Then, in April 1579, the Spanish ambassador to England, Bernardino de Mendoza, the suave archplotter and key player in much of what was to come to pass, wrote to the Spanish ambassador in Paris:

  An Englishman has arrived here … to tell the Queen that his Majesty had ordered the stopping of all ships on the Biscay and western coasts, and that Dr. Sanders [sic] and a brother of the earl of Desmond, James Fitzmaurice, Irishmen [sic], were fitting out ships. This has aroused some suspicion, because she has seized a letter written by some of the principal people in Ireland … telling James Fitzmaurice how glad they will be for him to come.15

  On July 17, Fitzmaurice and Dr. Sander sailed into Dingle Bay in the far southwest of Ireland. Together Fitzmaurice and Sander proclaimed the inspiration and purpose of their invasion: to fight against the “she-tyrant which refuseth to hear Christ, speaking by his vicar [the Pope].” Within days, an English privateer, Captain Courtenay, had seized and led away Fitzmaurice’s tiny fleet. Burghley’s man in Ireland, the Earl of Ormond, agreed to send five hundred men to meet Fitzmaurice and his troops. Though valiantly fought, it was all over by the end of October, and Fitzmaurice was dead. Despite a two-year-long relentless pursuit, Dr. Sander escaped capture, only to die alone in a wood, starved and frozen with his breviary and Bible under his arm. The “Secon
d Desmond Rebellion” unleashed by Fitzmaurice and Sander turned into tribal warfare, which only ended with the death of the Earl of Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, in 1583.

  A third attempt to invade England through its postern gate of Ireland was hatched in January 1580. An English merchant, John Dunne, who was trading in Bayonne, France, at the time, bribed a Spanish monk into telling him that Spanish forces were being raised for Ireland with the pope’s blessing. He informed Walsingham at once. On verification by Walsingham’s own agents, the secretary of state learned that eighteen ships were made ready, carrying twenty thousand men. With the pope’s financial aid, this force grew to at least forty ships.

  Elizabeth responded by sending reinforcements and her rapscallion adventurer William Winter with four ships to guard the Irish coast. At the end of the day, only two invasion ships made landfall at Smerwick and attempted to make a bridgehead. Within three days, they laid down their arms and surrendered. Nearly all were slaughtered in cold blood.16

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  The three failed papal-sponsored invasions did have one unintended success. Elizabeth’s steady policy of balancing European power that had prevailed for the first twenty years of her reign now wavered. The Catholic Enterprise of England had failed so far, and it was obvious that there would be other attempts. England needed the protection of a stronger partner, and so Elizabeth sought a new rapprochement with France and a reopening of the marriage treaty with Henry III’s brother, Francis, Duke of Anjou.