The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Hatton, ever the queen's faithful, moonstruck suitor, was inconsolable to think he had lost his love—and to a man who would bring her only ruin. Throughout Alencon's courtship Hatton had continued his own, offering thoughtful advice, eloquently expressed, sending charming letters ("I love yourself. I cannot lack you," he wrote disarmingly), giving gifts of clothes and jewels and purses of coins. He was solicitous of her health, and in plague season sent her a ring which "had the gift of expelling infectious airs." It was to be worn, he explained, "betwixt her sweet breasts, the chaste nest of pure constancy."

  It was because he cherished the queen so dearly that he hated to see her take the foolhardy step of making an unpopular marriage. When he saw her pledge herself to Alencon he took the scene so much to heart that he spoke to her "with great boldness and many tears" about it. She could only bring trouble to England, he said, and by going so forcefully against her subjects' wishes she was provoking rebellion—and quite possibly deposition and even death. Perhaps because Hatton was so visibly moved, she listened to what he had to say with uncharacteristic mildness. Or, more likely, she restrained herself from interrupting him because she saw now that the thing he feared would never really happen.

  The longer Alencon stayed in England the more obvious it became that marriage to him was neither the political expedient Elizabeth clutched at in moments of fear nor the sentimental epiphany she dreamed of. The end of the year found her no closer to formal alliance with Henry III than before, partly, to be sure, because she had begun to press for such impossible conditions as the return of Calais and a virtual declaration of war against Spain. At the same time she was discovering how ugly and truculent her Frog could become when thwarted—a sobering foretaste of what married life with him might be like.

  His veneer of lustful gallantry wore thin, and revealed the money-hungry adventurer beneath. He demanded larger and larger payments, thirty thousand pounds, fifty, a hundred. He demanded war subsidies, guarantees of future sums, finally a huge monthly pension. She owed him this, he said, his tone acid with spite. She had toyed with his affections and given him nothing in return. Everyone was bound to laugh at him, and it was her fault. In public the duke kept up his sugary speeches, as she did her warmth and rapt attention to them, but in private the honeyed words dissolved into bullying and blackmail.

  And the hypocrisy of his "burning desire" for her was only too obvious. Even as he swooned, or appeared to swoon, with passion and to yearn inconsolably for "the sweet consummation that he desired more than his life," he was finding abundant consolation in the arms of the London whores, some of whom made off with most of the official papers in his lodgings and sold them to the English diplomats.

  And what of the quaint, old-fashioned pledge of marriage? Alencon had taken it as seriously as everyone else—except possibly the bride—and had written to his brother immediately to say that he was wedded to Elizabeth as surely as he, King Henry, was wedded to his wife the queen. How could he have written that? Elizabeth asked Sussex. Surely, knowing her intention as he did, he must have realized that the pledge was conditional on completion of the French alliance.

  "No, no, madam, you are mine," Alencon cried out in exasperation as he saw everything the English had led him to expect, including a fortune in English pounds, slipping away. "You are mine, as I can prove by letters and words you have written to me, confirmed by the gift of the ring, of which I have sent intelligence to the king my brother, my mother, and the princes of France." 6 He had witnesses, he had documents, he had everything but the ultimate means to make Elizabeth do what he wanted.

  "If I cannot get you for my wife by fair means and affection I must do so by force, for I will not leave this country without you." Whatever he may have meant by that—elopement, kidnapping, or more likely simply blackmail—the threat crushed what remained of the romance.

  "I grieve, and dare not show my discontent," Elizabeth wrote, beginning a poem on the occasion of Alencon's departure. "I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate." She was two selves, of two minds, not so much about this surly, insistent little man she had loved but about love itself. Though there was a public pretense that Alencon's stay abroad would be brief, and that he would soon return to England to resume his ever-hopeful vigil at the shrine of his beloved, the truth was evident: he was Elizabeth's last hope for marriage, and he was leaving for good.

  With him went her long flirtation with the dream of domesticity, her longing to have what remained of her beauty fully, enduringly appreciated by a lover who was also a husband. Whatever his faults, and she had only begun to uncover them, Alencon had brought out in her the sort of cozy intimacy she had never enjoyed with anyone else except Leicester. She had been able to idle away time with him, shut up happily in a small room hour after hour. She had visited him in bed, carrying little cups of soup to him and possibly feeding him herself. As his wife she might have been able to cheat time, to recover through his youthfulness the lost decades of her spinsterhood.

  That Elizabeth was at all times hardheaded about the political dimension of her love affair takes nothing away from the poignancy of her loss as Alencon sailed away out of sight in February of 1582. Not that she really wanted him back, for she had had terrible trouble getting rid of him, but once he was really gone her profound disappointment spent itself in a fury of irritability. She scolded her women rudely, no doubt adding slaps and body blows to the insults she shouted at them. She swore mightily and articulately. She greeted everyone who entered the privy chamber with exceeding ill temper, and had a phenomenal battle with Leicester, accusing him of treason and likening him to his faithless, luckless father and grandfather.

  Her wound was very deep, but not fatal. She saw the absurdity as well

  as the poignancy of her last love, and she saw, too, the way to turn it to her advantage in her subjects' eyes.

  Having worried the English for years about her desire for Alencon, she soothed and relieved them with her ultimate decision to send him away. Her rhetoric, as usual, did not fail her.

  "O what may they think of me," she had thundered on the eve of Alencon's arrival, "that for any glory of my own would procure the ruin of my land!" Let none think that, like some foolish girl, she had considered even for a moment putting her own personal interests before the well-being of England. No marriage could possibly mean more to her than her people's love. "My mortal foe can no ways wish me a greater loss than England's hate," she announced with solemnity, "neither should death be less welcome unto me than such mishap betide me." 7

  But in her poetry she struck a different tone. "I am and am not; I freeze, and yet am burned," she wrote, "Since from myself, my other self I turned." She was forty-eight, and her life had indeed reached a new turning. At an age when most women were ending their fruitful years, Elizabeth Tudor's greatest challenge was just beginning.

  With brinish teares, with sobbing sighes, I, Englande, plunge in paine,

  To see and heare such secret sectes amongst my people mine.

  A

  few months before Alencon left England, three Roman Catholic priests were brought out from their imprisonment in the Tower and taken to Tyburn to be hanged. They were tied to a low wooden sled which sank into the mud under their weight. Horses dragged the sled through the streets to the place of execution, through Cheapside and Holborn and on westward along the Strand. Crowds gathered to watch the holy men pass, their gaunt faces shining and smiling despite the suffering to come. A priest who saw them go by wrote later that, as they neared the scaffold, the condemned men actually broke into laughter. "But they laugh!" the onlookers were heard to say. 'They don't care for death!"

  The joyous fortitude of the Jesuit Edmund Campion, Father Alexander Bryant and Father Ralph Sherwin came as no surprise to the hundreds who gathered to witness their final agony, for already there was talk of miracles. At Campion's trial, with his condemnation a foregone conclusion, the judge had taken off his glove and found his hand all bloody, though he had felt
no wound. Bryant, during his wretched Tower imprisonment, had begun to receive divine revelations. His ecstatic visions had fortified him, it was said, as he lay far below ground in a black and airless pit, his body useless from repeated torture and his spirit tested sorely as he was denied sleep and food. Clearly all three men had withstood pain so intense and so

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  interminable that the life had been all but bled out of their rag-shrouded bodies, yet, miraculously, they lived on.

  They lived—so that they might die in this way, their sacrifice a potent instrument of conversion. The Catholics in the huge crowd drew nearer to the scaffold, clutching jars and mugs and other vessels in which to catch a few drops of the blood of these holy martyrs when the dismemberment and disemboweling began. A lucky few would be able to snatch bits of hair or torn flesh or scraps of clothing, but this was dangerous, as rank on rank of armed footmen stood by and mounted guards as well. To show any sympathy for the sufferers, to shout out encouragement to them, or utter prayers, or to try to touch them or their remains was to be tainted with their treason, and so to risk death.

  For officially these were traitors, and nothing else. That they were Catholic priests was, if not exactly incidental to their treason, extrinsic to it. Francis Knollys and several other royal servants announced this from the scaffold before the executions began, assuring the crowd in stern language that the spectacle they were about to see had nothing to do with religion; it was to be the just punishment of convicted traitors, enemies to the queen.

  Yet to Catholics the radiant faces of the three men, pale and emaciated yet lit with fervor, belied Knollys' words, as did Campion's scaffold speech. "If you esteem my religion treason," he told them, "then am I guilty; as for other treason, I never committed any, God is my judge." His voice was reasonable, his words both cogent and persuasive. Some of those who heard him knew that his interrogation in the Tower had been interrupted several times so that he could take part in public disputations, for he was learned and well-spoken. Then he had been denounced as "an unnatural man to his country, degenerate for an Englishman, an apostate in religion, a fugitive from the realm, unloyal to his prince." Then, as now, he had answered the accusation in the moderate, logical fashion that had made him an outstanding scholar at Oxford and won him the personal patronage of the queen. He had discriminated carefully between his faith and his political conscience, between his priestly work—the conversion of souls—and the darker labors of political subversion, "from which he did gladly restrain and sequester his thoughts." His loyalty to Elizabeth was absolute. He wished her, he told the crowd, "a long quiet reign with all prosperity." It was noted as Campion spoke that he had no fingernails; iron spikes had been driven up under his nails until they were torn off.

  Campion, Shervvin and Bryant were not the first priests to be sentenced to death in Elizabeth's reign, but their executions had far-reaching significance. For one thing, they came at a time—early in December of 1581 — when it was generally believed that the queen was about to marry the

  Catholic Frenchman Alencon, and when in consequence there was heightened ill feeling between the hopeful Catholics and the outraged, outspoken Protestants, especially the Puritans.

  More important, they coincided with a sudden resurgence of the Catholic faith in England, as astonishing in its swiftness as in its scope.

  In the late 1570s English Catholicism awoke, roused from within in response to the unaccountable rhythms of popular piety and from without by a new generation of fiery young priests schooled for martyrdom in the seminaries of Douai and Rome.

  That the immemorial religion of the English should revitalize itself after two generations of dormancy—with brief irruptions of vitality during Mary's reign and in the Northern Rebellion of 1569—was perhaps to be expected. Among the common people Protestantism was still the "new religion," though its newness had in fact worn off in the reign of Henry VIII. A surprisingly large number of elderly priests, some of whom had been quietly, devoutly performing masses without interruption since King Henry's days, kept alive the memory of the old Catholic realm, while the legal profession, the peerage, even to an extent the royal court were all strongholds of the ancient faith. It was impossible for even the most scrupulous Puritans to avoid contacts with Catholics, for they were everywhere—in the law courts, where they occasionally defended the archbishop of Canterbury and the queen, at the social gatherings of the aristocracy, serving as officers in noble and ecclesiastical households, in the House of Lords and, of course, crowding the jails and grinning from the gibbets. 1 Of the sixty peers in 1580, twenty were Catholic. Of the others, Leicester and his brother aided Catholics, Cecil had Catholic relatives (as did Walsing-ham, who boasted of his peerless Protestant son-in-law Philip Sidney but said little of his Catholic son-in-law the earl of Clanricarde). Given the close-knit Tudor networks of kinship and alliance, confessional enmity was imperfectly sustained. Protestant courtiers gave advance warning of raids and investigations to their Catholic intimates, and the queen herself occasionally lent her protection to her Catholic friends.

  There were Catholics everywhere, and in the late 1570s and on into the 1580s their numbers grew rapidly, and their attitude changed from one of tacit complicity in the rituals of established Protestantism to militant refusal to conform. They became recusants—subjects of the queen who would not follow the usages of the queen's church. They stayed away from the service, they did not take communion, they did not listen to the sermons. In secret, they heard mass instead.

  They gathered wherever there was a priest to sing mass, in the countryside where several hundred might come together in the open air, in caves

  or barns or the lofts of houses, in the jails, in the capital where they ran great risks and where many were seized while worshiping and taken to prison. With them were seized the articles of worship that nourished their devotion—"their superstitious stuff," the queen's agents called these objects scornfully, "their abominable relics, their vile books." Shiploads of religious pictures, manuscripts, rosaries and images blessed by the pope were confiscated at English ports, with the bones and garments of the saints among the contraband.

  And there were new relics to bolster the faith and confirm the recusancy of believers: the remains of English martyrs whose growth in numbers kept pace with the increasing population of nonconforming Catholics.

  A priest was executed in July of 1580, and to the many recusants who came to see him die his suffering was particularly edifying. His conversion, or "reconciliation," to the Catholic church three years earlier had been a triumph for the resurgent faith, for until then he had been a Protestant minister. Following his conversion he had gone to Douai to study, had become a priest, and then had decided to return to England to work among the imprisoned Catholics. In the midst of this spiritual labor he had been seized and interrogated, his captivity made nearly intolerable by filth and hunger and vermin; finally he had been brought to his execution, dying with "invincible constancy and fortitude, greatly to the edification of the Catholics," a coreligionist wrote, "and the surprise of the heretics."

  So eager were the devout onlookers to participate in the holy death that they caught up every drop of the dead man's blood, wiping it from the boards on which the body was laid and scooping it out of the earth beneath the scaffold. Every trace of the martyr was spied out and preserved, either by believers impelled by devotion or by opportunists eager for profit. "Two days after his martyrdom," it was noted, "there was not a bit of ground left which had been touched by his blood, it having been taken by the faithful, who also offered large sums of money for his garments." 2

  It was this voracious, all-consuming piety that alarmed the queen and her councilors most, for behind it was an ominous fatalism, a commitment to death as well as to religious truth. Seminarists studying for the priesthood at the Douai college—a vital agency of the Catholic renaissance which by 1580 had sent a hundred priests to England—lived and worked in expectation of martyrdom; t
he college walls were painted with graphic depictions of torture chambers and grisly torments, beatific faces on rent bodies. Ecstasy through carnage: that, in crude terms, was the watchword of the priestly vanguard, and if to the individual this meant simply self-sacrifice in imitation of the crucified Christ, to the queen and her government it

  was more reminiscent of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre than of the life of Jesus.

  To care so little for life, to glory in self-destruction, made the priests and the lay Catholics to whom they ministered natural candidates for extremism, or so royal officials presumed. The pope had exonerated in advance anyone who assassinated Elizabeth, and assassination was already becoming the supreme political weapon of the enemies of Protestantism. Even if this fearsome possibility could be forestalled, an armed rising threatened, more widespread and far more harmful than the Northern Rebellion, with its adherents stiffened by uncompromising leadership and made ruthless by their resolute faith.

  Where there was one staunch Catholic in 1559, now there are ten, Cecil confided glumly to a colleague. Their fortitude seemed all but unbreakable —though some did, of course, break, and many died. Pain and delirium drove a few to reveal what they knew of the underground church, and even to offer to serve as spies for the government. But to the treasurer these turncoats were highly exceptional, for his informants told him of fresh conversions in staggeringly large numbers. A single priest could reconcile as many as eighty former Protestants a day to Catholicism, and there were many priests at work. The scale of the religious transformation "almost exceeded belief." It had to be stopped, and immediately.

  Urgent and thoroughgoing enforcement of the laws against recusancy reached new heights in the summer of 1580. Royal agents spread out through the countryside, raiding houses and buildings suspected to be centers of recusancy, hunting down priests, arresting any Catholics reported to be staying away from the Protestant services and subjecting them to a variety of punishments. At the very least, they were fined—twenty pounds for every month of absence from church, two hundred pounds for a year's absence—and ordered to resume attendance or risk more severe retaliation. "Constant" recusants were interned in castles or other fortified places, their goods forfeit to the government unless they agreed to conform. During August the council stepped up its campaign, sending new orders to every county demanding heightened activity on the part of local officials and notifying all Catholics who had been released from prison on bail to return at once.