Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

  On April 19, 1603, James rewarded Thomas Gerard, Father John’s brother, for the family’s loyalty to his mother and bestowed a knighthood on him. Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Howard, heir to the executed Duke of Norfolk, were sworn in to James’s Privy Council at Whitehall later that month. The Venetian ambassador wrote to the doge in Venice that “the King continues to support those houses … who were oppressed by the late Queen.” William Weston, the former Jesuit superior, and other captured Jesuit priests were released from their captivity. There had been every reason for the Catholic population to hope for a new era of future royal favor.2

  James saw a wealthy realm in England, impoverished by years of religious war. If only the Catholic population had known before he became king that he had written to Sir Robert Cecil, “Jesuits, seminary priests, and that rabble where England is already too much infected … I would be glad to have both their heads and their bodies separate from this whole land, and safely transported beyond seas.”3 James wanted peace, but he wanted the riches England could provide him with more.

  * * *

  Sir Robert Cecil would be the man to give these to him. Cecil maintained his iron grasp on government until his death in 1612, having been elevated to Earl of Salisbury in May 1605. It was to Salisbury that Lord Mounteagle brought word of a plot to blow up the houses of Parliament in October 1605, later known as the Gunpowder Plot. William Shakespeare had lampooned Cecil in 1593 when he wrote his Richard III using the Tudor myth of Richard’s deformity and molding it to Cecil. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, died a hated, avaricious man, whose epitaphs proclaimed, among other things, that he had gone to hell to raise the devil’s rent. Nonetheless, Cecil’s great achievement was the arrangement of the smooth transition from Tudor to Stuart England.

  Raleigh had remained Cecil’s steadfast enemy and was imprisoned in the Tower for high treason against the new king, his lands confiscated in Virginia as well as Ireland, for allegedly plotting to put Arbella Stuart on the throne. Only the pleading of Queen Anne and Prince Henry succeeded in saving Raleigh’s life—for a time. During his many dreary years in the Tower of London, Raleigh wrote his great work History of the World and some of his best poetry, including “The Lie.” Desperate to find his freedom, he promised James that he would locate the fabled golden El Dorado. James allowed him one final chance to find America’s riches. When Raleigh failed, he returned to England a broken man, ready for the executioner’s block. As he readied himself for the ax to fall, he famously said, “’Tis a sharp remedy, but a sure one for all ills.”

  Cecil’s cousin Francis Bacon, who had betrayed the Earl of Essex, went on to become a great Stuart statesman who by 1621 had risen to become Lord Verulam, Viscount St Albans. His dream of becoming Lord Chancellor was fulfilled in 1618.

  The schisms in both the Protestant and Catholic faiths grew. The self-imposed exiles like the Brownists of Elizabethan England had returned from Leiden in the Netherlands from a lifetime abroad, hoping for a new start in Stuart England. James was not prepared to grant one. So these Puritan separatists, better known today as the Pilgrim Fathers, chartered a 180-ton merchant ship, the Mayflower, from a London merchant adventurer and sailed for the colony of “Northern Virginia” in Massachusetts Bay in 1620. Only thirty-seven colonists were “Leiden Separatists,” with sixty-five additional passengers and crew seeking a life free from religious intolerance in the New World.

  James’s “transportation policy” for Catholics originally intended for Northern Virginia was moved farther south. During the reign of James’s heir, Charles I, Lord Baltimore, founded the “great city” of Baltimore as a Catholic enclave promoting Catholic ideals. The state of Maryland was named after Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, the youngest child of Henry IV of France.

  * * *

  The Catholic plea for toleration in England never faded. Peace was finally declared with Spain in 1604 at the Conference at Somerset House. The Catholics were betrayed not only by James but also by Spain. Economic imperatives at last took precedence over saving souls. Angered at their betrayal, a small group of men agreed that the only way to be rid of such traitorous leaders was to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the terror plot known as the Gunpowder Plot.4

  By the end of the seventeenth century, it became illegal in statute for the reigning monarch to be Catholic after James’s grandson, James II, was deposed. England preferred to import other distant and Protestant Stuart cousins, William III and Mary II, from the Netherlands as its rightful monarchs. The religious tensions rumbled on well into the twentieth century.

  Is it possible that Elizabeth thought that a Stuart dynasty might be an untrustworthy and dangerous one for the English? Unfortunately, we shall never know. Still, James was the best choice for her successor. Just as religion haunted Elizabeth from the outset of her reign in 1558, so did the issue of the succession. It was a Tudor curse established in the reign of Henry VIII and laid to rest in Elizabeth’s.

  * * *

  In her Golden Speech to Parliament on November 30, 1601, Elizabeth expressed her lifelong ambition for the legacy of her rule: that she had been God’s “instrument to preserve you from envy, peril, dishonour, shame, tyranny, and oppression.”

  That is how she would have liked to be remembered.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations

  BL

  British Library

  CSP

  Calendar of State Papers

  CW

  Marcus, Leah, Janel Muller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

  EEBO

  Early English Books Online

  ODNB

  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

  SP

  State Paper

  Prologue: The Sacrificial Priest

  1. James A. Galloway, Derek Keene, and Margaret Murphy, “Fuelling the City: Production and Distribution of Firewood and Fuel in London’s Region, 1290–1400,” Economic History Review, n.s., 49, no. 3 (August 1996): 447–72. Oliver Rackham, The Illustrated History of the Countryside (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 32–45.

  2. Norman Jones, “Living the Reformations: Generational Experience and Political Perception in Early Modern England,” in “The Remapping of English Political History, 1500–1640,” ed. A. J. Slavin, special issue, Huntington Library Quarterly 60, no. 3 (1997): 273–88.

  3. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds., The London Encyclopaedia (London: Papermac, 1983), 789–90. The quote “rich and strange” comes from Ariel’s song to Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (act 1, scene 2).

  4. Lacey Baldwin Smith, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15, no. 4 (October 1954): 471–98.

  5. CSP, Domestic, Mary, no. 140.

  6. CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary, ed. W. Turnbull (1861), undated letter thought to be late August 1553, 2: 196.

  7. Linda Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen (London: Portrait, 2007), 280.

  8. For further information on Elizabeth’s imprisonment in the Tower and later at Woodstock, please refer to Lord Bedingfield’s “Articles” on his custodianship of the princess in “State Papers Relating to the Custody of the Princess Elizabeth,” ed. C. R. Manning (Norfolk: Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 1855).

  9. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Warwick, had seized power from Somerset during King Edward VI’s minority and had been behind the disinheritance of Mary and Elizabeth in the succession. Lady Jane Grey, aged only seventeen, had been married off to Northumberland’s son Guildford, to ensure that the duke would retain his position as the right hand of the monarch.

  10. ODNB, “John Rogers.”

  11. David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 421.

  12. Part of the battleground between the Vatican and the Protestant church was the notion that the Bible should re
main solely in Latin and not in the spoken language or vernacular of the country. According to the Vatican, the people needed to hear God’s word as “interpreted” to them through the priest.

  13. CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary, 125.

  14. ODNB, “John Rogers.”

  15. Gardiner was one of the most successful Tudor statesmen in the sixteenth century. His uncanny ability to survive earned him the nickname of “wily Winchester” from John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, and he was undoubtedly a man of great intellect and guile. A staunch Catholic, Gardiner had found a way—except in the reign of Edward VI—to maintain loyalty to both the crown and the papacy.

  16. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 3 vols. (London: George Seeley 1853–1855), 1: 249–251.

  17. CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary, 139.

  One: The New Deborah

  1. John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (collected from original manuscripts, scarce pamphlets, corporation records, parochial registers etc.) 3 vols. (London: London Society of Antiquaries, 1823), 1:34.

  2. CSP, Venice, 7:12.

  3. Nichols, Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, 1:60.

  4. CSP, Venice, 12. See also Nichols, Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, 1:34–35.

  5. The Passage is reprinted in A. F. Pollard, ed., Tudor Tracts, 1532–88 (London: Constable, 1903), 365–95. See also Nichols, Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, 38.

  6. Nichols, Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, 1:39.

  7. Ibid., 39–40.

  8. Ibid., 44.

  9. Ibid., 49.

  10. Ibid., 35, 50.

  Two: The Realm and the Ministers of Lucifer

  1. CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary, no. 152.

  2. Toby Green, Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (London: Macmillan, 2007), 128. See also Salazar de Miranda, Vida y sucesos prósperos y adversos de Don Fr. Bartolomé de Carranza y Miranda (Madrid, 1788), 30.

  3. Green, Inquisition, 128. See also Salazar de Miranda, Vida, 192–96.

  4. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 1: 22.

  5. This illness recurred at irregular intervals and is thought to have been a type of influenza. It killed Henry VIII’s elder brother, Arthur. It had returned with a vengeance in 1558–9, rivaling the worst plague years of Elizabeth’s reign. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 70.

  6. Margaret Spufford, The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Seventeenth Century Journal 1, no. 1, 1986, p. 31.

  7. CSP, Foreign, 1:51, no. 144.

  8. Philip had discovered by January 1555 that Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa) had signed a secret treaty with France negotiated by the cardinal of Guise (maternal uncle of Mary Queen of Scots) to wrest the Kingdom of Naples away from the Spanish Empire in what would become known as the Carafa War of 1556–57. When the pope was told that his plan had been discovered, he sent his nephew Carlo, Cardinal Carafa, on a “peace mission.” The Spanish representative at the talks, Francisco de Vargas, claimed that Carlo Carafa “has always been and always will be pure poison, an enemy of their Majesties [Charles V and Philip II] and a Frenchman body and soul, full of mischievous ideas.” CSP, Spain, Philip and Mary, p. xviii.

  9. CSP, Rome, 1:1, no. 2.

  10. Mary Stuart had been married earlier in the year to the Dauphin Francis of France. As the future queen of France and the queen of Scotland, she embodied a formidable threat to Elizabeth.

  11. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1:34.

  12. Ibid., 35.

  13. Ibid., 36–37.

  14. Ibid.

  15. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I (London: Folio Society, 2005), 55.

  16. Ibid. See also CSP, Spain, vol. 1, no. 37.

  17. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1:54.

  18. Ibid., 60.

  19. Ibid., 64–67.

  20. Ibid., 72. See also Commons Journal, 1:59.

  21. Ibid., 74–75. See also Zurich Letters, 1:24, and Parker Correspondence (Parker Society), 66.

  22. This was first tested by Sir Thomas More in 1523.

  Three: Determined to Be a Virgin Queen

  1. Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 198.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Chris Laoutaris, Shakespearean Maternities: Crises of Conception in Early Modern England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 62.

  4. Ibid., 27. See also C. D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), 161–62 of the Fabrica (1543).

  5. Ibid., 28.

  6. Castiglione, Baldesar, The Book of the Courtier, tr. George Bull (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 217.

  7. It was deemed incestuous because Henry had slept with Anne’s sister, Mary.

  8. Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth, 138–39.

  9. Her mother, Mary of Guise, had been regent of Scotland since she was a week old, her father having been slain at Flodden by Henry VIII’s army.

  10. Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Folio Society, 2004), 68.

  11. Ibid., 69. See also Hume Brown, Early Travellers in Scotland (Edinburgh: James Thin, 1973), 75.

  12. CW, 52.

  13. Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, 216.

  14. Mary Queen of Scots had been sent to the French court to live from the age of six as the future wife of Henry II’s eldest son, Francis. Mary’s mother was manipulated by her powerful Guise brothers in France—the cardinal of Lorraine and Francis, Duke of Guise—to do as they bid. Henry II never fully trusted the Guise family but appreciated them as a powerful force at court and was pleased to have such a crucial pawn as Mary Queen of Scots as his daughter-in-law.

  15. Roger Collins, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven (London: Phoenix, 2010), 346.

  16. Ibid., 386.

  17. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1:86.

  18. CSP, Spain, 1:1.

  19. CSP, Rome, 1:15.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Pius IV was pope from December 25, 1559, to December 9, 1565.

  Four: Many an Uneasy Truce

  1. Collins, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven, 363.

  2. Nicholas Crane, Mercator (London: Phoenix, 2003), 42–45.

  3. H. de Vocht, “Thomas Harding,” English Historical Review 35, no. 138 (April 1920): 233–44.

  4. Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1976), 59.

  5. Ibid., 235.

  6. Collins, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven, 362.

  7. Naturally, this process led to other abuses by other heads of state, with the Holy Roman Emperor demanding the same “sweetener” as his nephew Philip. Later, from the time of Henry IV of France (1589–1610), the French kings would join in as well, making an utter farce of the conclaves electing the pope. The practice was only abolished by Pius X after the conclave electing him in 1903.

  8. Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 93.

  9. Mary had two Guise uncles, Francis of Guise and Louis I of Guise. Francis was the military leader; Louis was the second cardinal of Guise. Both also adopted the title “of Lorraine,” i.e., Francis of Lorraine and cardinal of Lorraine for Francis and Louis, respectively.

  10. J. Lynch, “Philip II and the Papacy,” Transactions of the Royal History Society, 5th ser., 11 (London, 1961): 24.

  11. As part of the “deal” with Charles V, the papacy also relinquished the right to appoint the clergy to their benefices.

  12. Lynch, “Philip II and the Papacy,” 26–27.

  13. See Parker, Grand Strategy of Philip II, chapters 1, 2. Also CSP, Rome, 1:21–26; Ronald, Pirate Queen, chaps. 1–4.

  14. CSP, Rome, 1:20.

  15. Ibid., 22.

  16. Ibid., 24.

  17. CSP, Foreign, 2:98, no. 229.

  18. Ibid., no. 231.
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br />   19. Ibid., no. 246.

  20. Ibid., 2:144, no. 334.

  21. Ronald, Pirate Queen, 35. See also CSP, Foreign, 2:313, no. 623.

  22. CSP, Foreign, 2:188 (excerpt from December 21 letter from the Duchess of Parma to Philip II from MS Paris. Angl. Reg. xxi Teulet, 1. 467).

  23. France followed Salic Law, which automatically excluded any female issue from becoming a queen regnant.

  24. Reputed to be why the French Protestants were called “Huguenots.” Another interpretation is that they named themselves after Hugues Capet, father of the French Capetian Dynasty.

  25. Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France (New York: Fourth Estate, 2003), 135.

  26. Ibid., 136. Also, N. M. Sutherland, “Queen Elizabeth and the Conspiracy at Amboise, March 1560,” English Historical Review 81, no. 320 (July 1996): 474–89; J. Dureng, “La Complicité d’Angleterre dans le complot d’Amboise,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 6, no. 4 (1904–05): 249–56. Note that this last article has created some furore and has often been quoted as a source proving that Queen Elizabeth was implicated in the plot. Having read the article, I agree with N. M. Sutherland that its research is questionable and conclusion spurious.

  27. In Henry VIII’s will, which was approved by Parliament, he effectively disowned his elder sister Margaret’s descendants from her marriage to the Scots king in favor of his younger sister Mary’s heirs by the Earl of Suffolk. Catherine was Lady Jane Grey’s younger sister.

  Five: The Battle for Hearts and Minds

  1. Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth, 228.

  2. Tracy Borman, Elizabeth’s Women (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 244. See also CSP, Spain, 1:116.

  3. CSP, Foreign, 4:312, no. 550 (5).

  4. Castligione, Book of the Courtier, 199.

  5. Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth, 229.

  6. The second-largest city in England at the time was Norwich, followed by Bristol and the other port cities. Water remained the preferred mode of transport for goods and people whenever possible.