The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Even without the aid of occult predictions it was evident that trouble was coming. Musters had been held in the summer, and some sixty thousand men had come forward to pledge themselves to arms in the service of their lords, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland. And in this feudal north country, where the ties between lords and their vassals and tenants had not been diluted by that overriding loyalty to the sovereign that prevailed farther south, the musters created in effect a private army.

  The queen had been only too aware of the sharpening of discontent in the north. That craggy, wild land with its barren moors and its rough-hewn, secretive people was foreign to her, but its heritage of rebellion was not. When she was a child of three the Pilgrimage of Grace had erupted in the north country, uniting into one massive rising angry feudatories, countrymen crushed by inflation and ardent Catholics who yearned to restore the old faith. Her father had moved swiftly and vengefully to crush the rising, yet its mystique had seized the folk imagination and its symbols—chiefly the image of the Five Wounds of Christ—remained compelling.

  Now, with Mary Stuart in England to rekindle the Catholic cause, Elizabeth became justly alarmed. As in 1536, religious enthusiasm threatened to coalesce with political grievances and local ambitions to engender revolt. Her commander Sussex analyzed the dangerous attachments of her discontented northern subjects. "Some specially respect the duke of Norfolk," he wrote, "some the Scottish queen, and some religion, and some, perhaps, all three."

  The forces the queen was able to put into the field should rebellion come were untried and ill-prepared. There were no professional soldiers, only manorial and county levies, and recent musters had revealed their inadequacy. Summoned in haste from their labors in the fields and villages, the disorderly ranks could not discipline themselves or follow commands or handle arms—when arms were available. Many men were listed in the muster rolls as "naked," meaning they had neither armor nor weapons, and if called up suddenly to defend their districts against rebels they could be expected to brandish nothing more menacing than pitchforks. Few in these makeshift bands could be expected to stand their ground courageously in the face of better-armed opponents; many, their commanders candidly advised, were likely to prove disloyal.

  Elizabeth had no illusions about her fighting forces. A determined chal-

  lenge from a strong authority with a tincture of legitimacy could melt them away or turn them against her. If Norfolk married Mary Stuart, Elizabeth confided to Leicester, she herself would be a prisoner in the Tower within four months.

  It was a difficult passage, for the choice lay between seizing the initiative, and thus forcing potential traitors to show themselves, and waiting in fear for them to choose their own best moment—which might, of course, never come. Under the circumstances, caution seemed foolhardy. In September of 1569 the queen set her defenses in motion, entrenching herself behind the thick stone walls of Windsor Castle and ordering her militia to arms.

  Predictably, the conspirators were flushed out, and in the end were weakened because Elizabeth had chosen the time. Norfolk, who as rumor had it was indeed deeply implicated in plans to determine the succession, capitulated and threw himself on the queen's mercy in October, and the two principal conspirators in the north, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, showed such misgivings that they had almost to be shamed into action by their hardier womenfolk and bellicose gentry.

  But once the earls at last determined to act revolt was for a time at flood tide. Thus it was that in mid-November, after the conspiracy had lost its most prominent supporter, Westmorland's and Northumberland's soldiers marched from Durham to Darlington to Ripon to Tadcaster and on toward York, following the antique banner of the Five Wounds of Christ.

  The assault on Durham Cathedral, with its spectacular destruction of Protestant furnishings and its Bible-burnings, was a high point of the rising. The fervent iconoclasm unleashed a torrent of Catholic piety. Worshipers in town after town came by the hundreds to be absolved from the excommunication they had brought on themselves by conforming to official Protestantism. The priests who absolved them were themselves penitents, for they too had conformed to Elizabeth's church, to their heartfelt regret. The outpouring of pent-up sentiment was if anything more formidable than the political defiance. Masses were sung, prayers raised, sermons expounded with great fervor and devotion; the prodigals had returned to the fold.

  To be sure, not all of those who knelt to join in the Catholic celebrations came voluntarily; some were herded in at swordpoint. One of the queen's partisans, an eyewitness, described how the rebels swept into a town, exhorted the people to join them in their cause of freeing the queen from those who had "misused her," and then, when they did not respond with sufficient heartiness, resorted to bribes and threats. 1

  But reports reaching Cecil indicated that between the appeals to piety and to patriotism and the frank promises of reprisals against those who did

  not take up arms the rebel force was numbered in the thousands, and growing. The Catholic rumormongers who strutted self-importantly up and down the aisles of St. Paul's in London, claiming to have the latest and best information of the situation in the north, boasted of the rebels' strength. Elizabeth and her councilors grew solemn. They did not dare to underestimate the danger, especially as Sussex, president of the royal executive body in the north parts, the Council of the North, was sending disconcerting messages about the trouble he was having raising troops to quell the rising.

  Despite his urgent appeals, Sussex wrote on November 18, he had been able to raise no more than four hundred horsemen; the local landholders and communities were jealously holding on to their own men, in self-defense. The ranks of footsoldiers were thin too, and those at the Berwick garrison at least were shamefully feeble. The queen's cousin and commander Lord Hunsdon looked them over, and found many to be elderly veterans or near cripples incapacitated by wounds acquired in earlier conflicts. They were "meeter for an almshouse than to be soldiers," he reported scornfully.

  And they were mutinous, or close to it. Sussex's men "found fault with the weather," complaining of the snow and rain and frowning up at the sky to look for signs of storms, at the same time making no secret of their resentment at being drafted for the queen's service. The men of Berwick had to be cautioned sternly not to "utter any misliking of the queen's most royal person or her most gracious proceedings," or to so much as hint at favoring the ideals or designs of the rebels. 2 Meanwhile the rebels, at Ripon, were said to be descending on the town with five thousand foot and twelve hundred horsemen, staunch behind their banners, invoking the aid of the townspeople and the saints.

  For ten years and more Catholicism had slumbered in England. But the outward acquiescence to the established church was misleading, not only in the north but throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands, conceivably even a majority of the English, were still Catholics. The public devotions of the northerners in 1569 were carried out regularly by their coreligionists elsewhere in secret. Clerics led their congregations in the Protestant services, then retired to say private masses. The faithful said their prayers and observed the traditional offices in their bedchambers, where they could read Roman devotional books undisturbed.

  Some parishioners even took their Catholic primers to church, Protestant preachers complained, "and prayed upon them all the time when the Lessons to be reading and in the time of the Litany." Many of the elderly, who had been brought up in the pre-Reformation church, insisted on saying their iosaries during the communion service, and went on saying them under their breath when the clergy took their beads away. 3

  The government may have had little to fear from grandmothers stubbornly repeating their rosaries but it had much to fear from the Catholic powers of Europe who might be expected to lend English Catholics their aid. The conspirators in the north had already benefited from this aid. A papal agent in London, a nefarious Florentine banker named Ridolfi, had supplied Westmorland and Northumberland with a large
sum of money to buy arms and equipment. The French king Charles IX (or rather his mother, Catherine de' Medici, for Charles was a minor) had promised to send five thousand of his soldiers to aid in restoring Mary Stuart—and the Roman faith—in Scotland and, if possible, England as well. And the Spanish, not to be outdone, had assured the earls that they too would send men in the spring of 1570—which had been the conspirators' planned season for their rising—and as proof of their firm intentions had sent an envoy to London who, when the time came, was under orders to abandon his diplomatic pose and command the Spanish troops. 4

  But at the heart of the danger lay Mary Stuart. Demanding, scheming, utterly beguiling, she fretted restlessly at Tutbury Castle under the nervous supervision of Elizabeth's cousin Francis Knollys. She was in effect an English prisoner.

  Mary's recent past had been a bloody season of impetuous romances, fearsome passions, and murder. The young, "lady-faced" lad Darnley, whom Mary had married impulsively in 1565, had proven to be a thoroughly contemptible husband, drunken and bestial and insufferably arrogant, and Mary, very unwisely, had turned to another man for companionship. He was David Riccio, a lowborn Italian musician who served Mary as French secretary. Like Leicester at the English court, Riccio had charmed his way to wealth and honors overnight, and in the eyes of the Scots advisers whom he supplanted—not to mention the snarling Darnley —the Italian deserved death, especially as it was widely believed that the child the queen was carrying was his.

  One night as the pregnant Mary sat at supper with Riccio and one of her ladies, Darnley and an accomplice burst in and seized Riccio, stabbing him again and again and provoking the gasping, dumbfounded Mary to cry for revenge. The result was another assassination: the house in which Darnley was staying was blown to pieces in a huge explosion, and Darnley himself was discovered dead in a nearby garden. The queen was blamed, and universally despised. She had provided the kingdom with an heir—the infant James Stuart—but her misconduct with Riccio and her barbarous murder of Darnley were intolerable. But there was worse to come.

  Darnley's death had been planned by yet another of Mary's admirers— though a far from gentlemanly one—James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell.

  Bothwell was young, lecherous, brutal, and married. He wanted Mary, and took her; impatient for power, he then kidnapped her and, after a speedy divorce, married her. Within days of her wedding Mary was reduced to suicidal despair by Bothwell's abuse; not only did he treat her cruelly, he made threats against her infant son, swearing he would prevent him from growing up to avenge his father's death. It was almost a deliverance when the Scots nobles rebelled and took Mary captive, forcing her to renounce her throne in favor of the child James. Her half-brother, the earl of Murray, was made regent.

  After nearly a year in captivity, in May of 1568 Mary escaped to England where, to her chagrin, she became a captive again. Mary might be a royal personage who had suffered the gravest indignities, and a young woman in need of protection besides, but in the eyes of the world she was guilty of murder and adultery, and could expect no royal honors until her innocence was proved. Elizabeth lectured her (by letter), housed her, and set in motion an inquiry into her guilt. Meanwhile the English got their first real taste of the notorious queen of Scots.

  Mary's keeper, the outspoken and highly moral Francis Knollys, found Mary to be every bit as passionate and intense as the queen of England, but without the latter's restraining wariness of action. Her womanly attraction gave her an undeniable advantage—"she hath withal an alluring grace, a pretty Scottish accent, and a searching wit, clouded with mildness," an Irish visitor wrote—but it was her sheer physical energy and implacable determination to defeat her enemies that made her truly dangerous. Knollys watched apprehensively as she rode out hunting, galloping with breakneck abandon through the fields in pursuit of game, and recalled that not long before she had ridden at the head of her soldiers, dashing to the forefront of the troop and exhorting the saddle-weary men to follow her untiring example. 'The thing that most she thirsteth after is victory," he wrote to Cecil in June of 1568, "so that for victory's sake, pain and perils seemeth pleasant unto her."

  Unlike Elizabeth, who had learned at an early age to avoid decisiveness and was making an art of judicious irresolution, Mary saw things in black and white and acted boldly. She admired, and imitated, courage and daring. In her confinement she paced and fumed, complaining about the shabby gowns Murray had provided for her in her exile—fit only as "coverings for saddles"—and about her tedious inactivity. She spent the long, dark winter days shut in the castle, doing embroidery hour after hour until it gave her a pain in the side, but in her imagination she was ever active. As she sewed, she schemed, with her supporters in Scotland and with the dissatisfied

  English lords who in their exasperation with Elizabeth flirted with treason and finally embraced it.

  "I have made great wars in Scotland, and I pray God I make no troubles in other realms also," Mary warned Knollys as her patience with the English wore thin. She "played her highness with thunderings and great countenances," and as the year 1569 advanced she drew a web of conspiracy around her.

  Mary's attraction as a focus of rebellion, at least on political grounds, would have been far less had Elizabeth's grip on her council and her government been firm. But in fact Elizabeth faced a severe challenge to her authority. 5 Her advisers, having reluctantly indulged her spinsterly authority for more than ten years, had in 1569 finally decided to override it.

  Luck alone, it seemed to these aggressive, masterly men, had brought England through ten years of female rule. Accustomed to complete obedience from women—and accustomed to cursing all those who were less than obedient as obstinate, wilful shrews—they were affronted by their queen's stubborn blindness to the inappropriateness of her dominance over them. Dominion belonged to men, not to women; God had ordained it so. In contravening this self-evident law Elizabeth was acting unnaturally, and adding the risk of divine vengeance to the already great risk posed by her own innate incompetence as a woman.

  Knollys burst out in a letter to Cecil, complaining that Elizabeth seemed to desire to be "the ruler or half-ruler" of her realm—instead of the meek and passive figurehead through whom her councilors governed. That he could write such words—and others said similar things—after observing for a decade the day-to-day rulership of his strong-willed, astute, clever sovereign says much about the extent of this deep-seated axiom of male mastery. It was not merely that Elizabeth had failed to prove herself worthy of being sole ruler: as a woman she could never be worthy. And as an unmarried woman she gave profound offense to her advisers, and indeed to all men and to God.

  It was the radical inappropriateness of her unmarried state, almost as much as the need for a successor to the Tudor throne, that galled several of her councilors to take on themselves the responsibility of settling the succession issue in their own way. Anointed queen she might be, but Elizabeth was also an erring woman in need of correction. She, and her kingdom, had to be saved from her own folly.

  The menacing configuration of the Catholic powers on the continent made prompt action essential. In France, there was renewed danger that

  the Catholic Guise faction, with its everpresent aspirations to use Mary Stuart to seize Scotland and possibly England, might return to power. Throughout 1569 the country was shaken by civil war, and Cecil and many others believed that the outcome of the struggle would be a strong Catholic resurgence.

  At the same time Spain, a sleeping dragon throughout most of the past decade, was stirring to militant life. In 1567, Spain's leading soldier, the duke of Alva, brought ten thousand hardened Spanish infantrymen to the Hapsburg Netherlands, and summoned some twenty-five thousand Germans, Italians and Walloons to back them up. In a few short months the land might of Spain was concentrated in Flanders, garrisoned just across the narrow English Channel from Dover, two days away—or less, with a favorable wind—from London.

  An invading army, at least in p
otential, was camped on England's doorstep. Alva was closer to London than Mary Stuart was, and infinitely better equipped to seize Elizabeth's throne.

  This was tolerable, if hardly reassuring, so long as England and her traditional Hapsburg ally remained on amicable terms. But early in 1569 there was a bitter and costly quarrel between them. Five Spanish ships carrying some eighty-five thousand pounds—money loaned to Philip II by Genoese bankers to pay Alva's troops—were driven to seek haven in English ports, and Elizabeth, in need of money herself, confiscated their precious cargo. The Spanish made vehement protests, and retaliated by seizing English ships and goods and declaring an embargo on the Netherlands trade, but in law Elizabeth was within her rights. She assumed the Genoese loan, and countered Alva's embargo by seizing Netherlands ships and goods in England.

  It was a checkmate, but only an illusory one, for the nearness of Alva's army made the English counterthreat meaningless. Any thought that Elizabeth's soldiery could turn back the Spanish hordes seemed, to Cecil at least, a vain hope. 'This realm is become so feeble by long peace," he wrote, "as it were a fearful thing to imagine, if the enemies were at hand, of what force the resistance would be." And Cecil, good Protestant that he was, had ever before his eyes the prospect of a Catholic crusade against England, prompted not by petty commercial quarrels but by religious zeal. Many English men and women shared his grim vision. People whispered to one another, as the year advanced, that before long Alva and his mail-clad minions would be saying mass in St. Paul's.

  Given the hazards England faced, Elizabeth must either marry immediately and conceive a successor—something that, at thirty-five, she could