not tolerate his behindhand propaganda. If he had been to any degree responsible for the Stubbs pamphlet, then he must be made to feel her displeasure.
Elizabeth had said that Stubbs, his printer and his publisher would be hanged, but when it came to charging them there was a dispute over the illegality of what they had done. Was it really unlawful to raise arguments against a prospective bridegroom before the queen married him? The lawyers had not had to face this issue for a generation, not since Mary Tudor had been forced to provide protection to her hated husband Philip of Spain. Some found Elizabeth's vengefulness against Stubbs intolerable; one judge resigned rather than join in the verdict.
On the appointed day in early November the author and his publisher were brought to face their punishment—the printer was pardoned—on a scaffold built in the marketplace at Westminster. There was a large crowd, and people waited uneasily for the cruel spectacle they were to witness, stamping their feet and hugging their arms to keep warm. The weather was unseasonably cold; it would be a harsh winter. Already there was talk of the unusual frosts and storms, and of what they might foretell. Throughout September there had been extremely heavy rains and floods, stopping up the "crannies, pores and vents" in the ground and impeding the earth's customary "windy exhalations and vapors." A comet had been sighted in October, and this, combined with the climatic aberrations, was clearly a portent. It was not difficult to infer its meaning: it foretold a dark event —the death of a great personage, war or natural calamity, or perhaps an ill-omened marriage between the English queen and the French duke.
Stubbs and his publisher William Page had been sentenced to lose their right hands. Stubbs came forward, baring his wrist and placing his hand on a wooden block. His wit did not fail him. "Pray for me," he was heard to say, "now my calamity is at hand." The hand was "cut off with a cleaver, driven through the wrist by the force of a mallet," and the victim, reeling from the shock of the blow and from the sight of his own gushing blood, pulled off his hat with his sound hand and cried loudly, "God save the queen!" Then he fainted.
"The multitude standing about was deeply silent," wrote an eyewitness, "either out of an horror at this new and unwonted kind of punishment, or else out of commiseration towards the man, as being of an honest and unblameable repute, or else out of hatred of the marriage, which most men presaged would be the overthrow of religion." Or, he might have added, out of disbelief at Elizabeth's bloody spite.
Her behavior was indeed erratic as she struggled with her recalcitrant councilors, now commanding, now cajoling them, weeping with vexation
one minute and the next squabbling angrily with whoever opposed her. What the Spanish ambassador Mendoza called "her little witcheries," which often brought her the outcome she desired, failed her utterly. Instead the men of the council played on her fears and anxieties. "Knowing her pusillanimity and fear of any adversity," they tried to alarm her with threats of invasion and treachery. How could she possibly think of marrying a Catholic, Knollys cried, when she had forbidden her Protestant subjects to do so? She glared at him; she had not forgotten his complicity in Leicester's marriage to his daughter, nor did she forget that he was a Puritan like Stubbs. "He might pay dearly for the zeal he was displaying in the cause of religion," she said. This was "a fine way to show his attachment to her, who might desire, like others, to have children." 5
She exasperated Cecil, and quarreled so bitterly with Hatton that he had to stay out of her sight for a week. Walsingham, who spoke his mind as usual and told her flatly what his objections to the marriage were, she dismissed peremptorily. He was good for nothing, she said, but to be a protector of heretics, and she sent him away. Her moods grew more and more unstable, and for the three months following Alencon's departure in August she was crotchety, imperious and demanding. And when for all her moodiness and insistence she found her councilors as adamant as ever in their refusal to endorse her marriage, she became "extremely sad" and was "so cross and melancholy that it was noticed by everyone who approached her."
As for the beleaguered councilors themselves, it was all they could do to put up with their sovereign. Their ranks had thinned. By 1579 many of the names familiar from the first decade of the reign—Pembroke, Northampton, Arundel, Norfolk—had been struck off, with death or retirement or, in Norfolk's case, execution accounting for the absence. Others were aging, and growing querulous with age. Sussex, whose advice was still valuable, complained of being slighted by Elizabeth; he was treated like an old broom, he said resentfully, useful enough when needed but then thrown outside the door and left to rot. 6 Knollys was becoming prim, and strident on the subject of court morals. He wished aloud for "that realm where virtue is honored and vice is bridled," and had to be humored on moral issues. Hatton, now coming into his own as a suave and skillful reconciler of factions and mediator between opposing points of view, gave place to the efficient secretary Walsingham and to Cecil, who still anchored the council with his moderate opinions.
Cecil was getting on in years. He had his ailments, and wore his doublets "cut and voided in the back" for fear of the stone. For years his government work had kept him in "a continual agitation both of body and mind," and
as he got older he took more and more pleasure in such undemanding pastimes as telling stories to his grandchildren around the supper table and "riding privately in his garden upon his little mule." Yet Elizabeth continued to rely on him. He was thoughtful, sober, wise. What he called his "dullness" she prized as balanced judgment, a quality she needed when her thoughts were, as she told him once, "in a labyrinth" and needed unraveling.
Leicester was in a kind of limbo, superficially reconciled to the queen yet not restored to anything like his former place in her regard. She had thought better of her initial reaction to the discovery of his marriage, when in cold anger she had ordered him imprisoned. He had spent a week in involuntary isolation, but it was given out that he had merely been shut away to take medicine, and after the week was over he left court to stay at one of his own houses.
Clearly he had forfeited a measure of that sentimental concern Elizabeth had always felt for him, and he feared to lose his power and perhaps his wealth besides. He wrote to Cecil, lamenting his loss of favor and predicting morosely that having sacrificed his youth and liberty to the queen he was about to give up "all his fortune" besides. 7 He felt wronged, a victim of his enemies' malice and a martyr to his own selfless devotion to his unap-preciative sovereign. For twenty years he had "faithfully, carefully, and chargeably" served Elizabeth, and had been honorable in all his acts and intentions, he told Cecil. Yet now she had "grown into a very strange humor, all things considered," and her bitterness knew no bounds. He felt like a faithful dog being whipped by an ungrateful master; all in all, he had little to show for twenty years of service. Leicester's capacity for self-pity, which had always been great, was now at its height, and his counsel was not likely to be of much use to the queen or anyone else in the near future.
After weeks of frustrating and stormy deliberations Elizabeth broke through to action. On November 20 she ordered the marriage articles put into final form, and a few days later Simier, who had stayed on after his master Alencon's departure in order to conclude the diplomatic formalities, left England, taking the articles with him.
The thing was done. If the council members had meant to call Elizabeth's bluff, they found she had all along been sincere. She did not dare face the Commons. Parliament, scheduled to meet in October, was prorogued, and popular opposition continued unabated. Through the bitter winter months, when an "unlooked for great snow" froze the rivers and piled in high drifts along the roads and in the towns, Puritan preachers as usual exhorted their congregations to eschew evil and reject the French marriage. The queen swore she would have them whipped, but forbore. In
tender letters to her sweetheart Francis the Constant she confessed to a growing concern about his religion. He was her very dear Frog, and she would rather spend the rest of her life
with him than with any other prince in the entire world, she wrote, yet her subjects would have no king who professed the Catholic faith. Unless a way around this obstacle could be found, their infatuation might never come to fruition.
Was it the first sign of a rift? Observers in England and elsewhere watched the queen's behavior closely. One observer had never been convinced that all the lovemaking, all the negotiations had been anything but a ruse. "I have always looked upon the idea of a marriage between the queen and Alencon as a mere invention," King Philip wrote from Madrid to his ambassador Mendoza in England. 8 "I nevertheless believe they will continue to discuss it, and even may become reconciled for the purpose, but I believe that she herself is the person who will refuse."
Some gentler passions slide into my minde, For I am softe, and made of melting snowe; Or be more cruell, Love, and soe be kynd, Let me, or flote, or sinke, be high or lowe; Or let me live with some more sweete content; Or dye, and soe forget what love ere meant.
I
n April of 1581, King Philip went to his coronation in Lisbon. He was dressed entirely in black, for he was in deep mourning for his wife, but his doublet was cut of rich brocade and his few ornaments were kingly. He stood solemnly before the altar at the coronation mass, decorous and reverent, as he was invested with the crown of Portugal and with Portuguese lands stretching across the known world from Brazil to the East Indies to the Persian Gulf. Spain had brought him the wealth and treasure of the New World; Portugal brought him added riches, riches enough to conquer what lands and kingdoms he did not already possess.
King Philip had reached the summit of his power. No European sovereign had ever ruled over so much land or commanded so much wealth. Yet beneath the carapace of royalty stood a shrunken figure with a gray beard and sad eyes. 'They want to dress me in brocade, much against my will," he wrote later to his daughters, describing the coronation. Finery was alien to him; it went against his deep-seated asceticism. But he had resigned himself dutifully to the expectations of his new Portuguese subjects. "They tell me it is the custom here," he explained.
Philip came to his newfound might in a mood of infinite resignation. Adult life had brought him much more sorrow than joy, and he had only recently lost his most cherished companion, his fourth wife Anne of
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Austria. Her tight-lipped self-denial had matched his—"she never leaves her rooms, and her court is like a nunnery," a visitor to the palace had noted —and since her death her bereaved husband had aged noticeably. He had now buried four wives in all, and two heirs to his throne as well. Few of Anne of Austria's many children had survived, and those that had the king treasured with a fiercely paternal concern tinged with fatalism. He clung to all the people he loved, yet stood ready to yield them up should God desire it, for he had learned to look on his private griefs as oblations offered by a humble soul to an inscrutable providence. It was the same with his triumphs. They were not his, but God's, and he accepted them reverently but with a devout indifference.
Contemplation of his worldly dominion brought Philip far less satisfaction than his enemies thought. Others were more quick than he to calculate the benefits of his Portuguese conquest: vast lands in Africa, the New World and the Far East, treasure so incomparably rich it made him wealthier than all the European sovereigns combined, twelve great Portuguese fighting galleons, with the dockyards to service them and the skilled mariners to sail and man them. Already the colossus of the known world, in 1580 Spain was becoming even more gigantic, and those who feared her might counted up her men and arms and warships and tried to imagine what was in the abstracted, austere old king's mind to do with them.
To the pope, to Catholic English exiles in Spain and elsewhere on the continent, the answer was clear. Philip should turn his immense fighting forces against "that guilty woman of England," Elizabeth. He who had conquered Portugal, through his great general Alva, in only a few weeks, he whose fleet had crushed the naval forces of Islam at the battle of Lepanto and was indisputable master of the world's oceans—save for an occasional loss to English pirates—should not hesitate to snuff out England. It was not even a question of calculating the military odds. The suppression of Protestant heresy in England was a holy obligation, part of a larger spiritual war between the forces of the church and the forces of the devil. With all the visionary impracticality of homeward-yearning emigres the English conspirators dreamed of a grandiose "Enterprise," a voyage of conquest in which Spanish arms would unseat Elizabeth and put Mary Stuart on the throne to restore Catholicism.
But it was not the impractical English exiles alone who urged the Enterprise on Philip; it was the pope himself. Gregory XIII, the fiery, impatient leader of Catholic Christendom was inordinately devoted to the annihilation of the "wicked Jezebel" who ruled England, and as the 1580s opened he had begun to attack her on several fronts. He had sent military expeditions to Ireland, the last of which, landing in the summer of 1579, had
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succeeded in gaining a foothold in the country and defending it against the English for more than a year. He was sending missionaries into England to revive the Roman faith—and with it the determination to change the government. And he had persuaded himself, with a sophistry common in the later sixteenth century, that to condone the assassination of a ruler who was an enemy to the true faith was to act correctly in the sight of God. Through his secretary of state, the cardinal of Como, Gregory XIII had proclaimed that since Elizabeth was the cause of such injury to the church of Rome and was responsible for the loss of so many Catholic souls, anyone who "sent her out of the world" would not be committing any sin.
Philip was certainly in agreement, in principle, with the cause of destroying Protestant England. He had never approved of Elizabeth, either as a sister-in-law or a prospective wife or a fellow sovereign. He had promised the pope that he would rescue Mary Stuart from her captivity and help her to gain her rightful place as queen of England, and he had made, and honored, in part, a pledge of financial support for an invasion. Self-interest too urged action against Elizabeth, and a desire for revenge. For years she had been opposing him in the Netherlands, financing rebellion there and causing him untold trouble and expense. Her captains harassed his treasure fleets and stole his silver—which she then sent to pay the Dutch rebels— and her vigorous wooing of the heir to the French throne played havoc with the precarious peace between Hapsburg and Valois. And if he wanted revenge, it was now in his grasp, for with the combined fleets of Spain and Portugal at his disposal he could at last confront Elizabeth's small but powerful navy in an invasion launched from his own Portuguese coastal ports.
All this Philip knew, yet as he sat at his plain wooden desk, pen in hand, pondering the state of Christendom and praying for guidance, he often became distracted and slipped into a sort of pious reverie. His servants noted the vacant gaze and bemused expression, and worried over their master's health, for he was frequently melancholy and had difficulty taking pleasure in anything but his children and his great womblike palace.
The Escorial was an outward expression of Philip's wayward inner moods, a dark, cavernous edifice whose core was a monastery. The king's own small and sparely furnished rooms faced down onto an ornate, cathedral-like chapel; lying in his simple bed he could watch the mass being performed and hear the choir intone the ethereal anthems of his court composers. He bought masterworks of medieval art for the palace, and commissioned sumptuous new pieces by gifted craftsmen, but all in the service of faith, not beauty.
The Escorial was as much a gigantic reliquary as it was a Renaissance
palace; the king applied the same meticulous care to correspondence with relic merchants as he did to government dispatches, reading every word with squinting slowness and writing comments in the margins with a careful and deliberate hand. He was amassing an unusually complete collection of venerable bones and skulls. He found such objects of devotion consoling; like the countryside around the palace, they helped to "elevate his s
oul and sustain his pious meditations."
The Protestant English, indeed Protestants everywhere, imagined King Philip far differently than this—not as a nearsighted, bemused old man frowning over his relics, but as a dark conqueror brooding in his secret fortress. What they knew of him was ugly rumor: that he had murdered his son Don Carlos, that he was "more papal than the pope," and murderously bigoted, that his cruel soldiers in the New World had killed millions of Indians, chaining them like dogs and starving them to death or torturing them by searing their skin with hot bacon grease.
They heard, through the reports of spies or ambassadors abroad, how Philip presided in grim majesty over the mass burnings of heretics. In an open square at the center of Valladolid or Madrid a high wooden structure was erected where the king sat on his throne, surrounded by the terrifying inquisitors of the Holy Office. He spoke gravely to the crowd, swearing to defend the pure faith against all who would corrupt it, then gave the signal for the awful spectacle to begin.
The bells of the city's churches began to toll as the mounted escort appeared leading the procession of the condemned. They dragged along in their hundreds, wretched figures broken by miserable confinement and wasted from lack of food, wearing the black tunic of prisoners sentenced to execution. On their heads were high conical caps painted with grimacing devils and leaping red flames—images of hell—and on their wrists and ankles they wore chains, or the wounds and welts where chains had been.
As the king and the vast crowd looked on, a preacher delivered a long and chastening sermon. Afterward, with the spectators on their knees and the executioners heaping wood and straw around the heavy stakes to prepare them for the torches, the grand inquisitor intoned the final rites of absolution and condemnation. Then, stern and remote on his high throne, Philip watched as the victims were tied to the stakes and the fires were lit under them.
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