by John Guy
These later years had a dark side. The war against the Catholic powers would engulf multiple theatres: the Netherlands, northern France, the Atlantic and, latterly, Ireland. And, all the while, the queen was ageing. Her grandfather Henry VII had died at the age of fifty-two, her father at fifty-five, her half-brother at fifteen and her half-sister at forty-two. Many of her advisers, too, were growing old, and as they fell sick and died, a new and less scrupulous breed of courtiers and bureaucrats would come to the fore.
As Elizabeth approached her late sixties, it seemed to her councillors and Parliaments as if the looming question of the succession, for which she consistently refused to make adequate provision, could be postponed no longer. For all that, she jealously refused to yield. The question would stir up destructive bouts of rivalry, ideological conflict and mutual suspicion among the members of her innermost circle. The border between loyalty and treachery would gradually start to blur, as men looked to what would happen after the queen’s death and began their preparations.
With the years taking their inexorable toll, Elizabeth would find herself tormented by insomnia, arthritis, digestive ailments, bad dreams and what she claimed was the insolence and insubordination of her younger, prettier attendants. Outwardly, she would seek to bridge the mismatch between her queenly role and her appearance by a mixture of spin and cosmetics. Inwardly, she struggled to assert her will and retain her grip on power as her courtiers battled for place and position and her newly emboldened subjects called for the monarchy to be made accountable to Parliament.
Truly, this would be the beginning of something new.
1. A City in Fear
On Wednesday, 23 September 1584, Mr John Spencer, the sheriff of London, was savouring the prospect of the end of his term of office in just a few days. New sheriffs, both for London and the adjacent county of Middlesex, had already been elected and would be sworn in at the Guildhall by the mayor on Michaelmas Eve.1 A wealthy merchant whose aggressive tactics had netted him an enviable fortune from importing raisins, spices, olive oil, iron and wine, Spencer found his civic responsibilities irksome and looked forward eagerly to returning to trade.2 Wearing his violet gown and gold chain of office, he set out with his constables on what he sincerely hoped would be one final, uneventful inspection of the city streets.
Such random patrols had become depressingly frequent. In the years since the bloody slaughter in Paris and a dozen other French towns of some thirteen thousand Huguenots – the name given to French Protestants – in the fortnight after St Bartholomew’s Day in August 1572, there had been recurrent large influxes of refugees fleeing from religious persecution to the safety of London. Immigrant communities, chiefly French and Flemish but also German and Italian, were by now firmly entrenched, creating severe tensions with the local population, especially those in the clothing trade, as immigrant workers routinely flouted the rules laid down by the craft guilds. This made the mayor and aldermen determined to curb vagrancy, crime and the black economy and to keep immigrants in check.3
Alongside street patrols, security crackdowns had become as much a part of civic life in recent years as clearing animal dung from the streets and queuing for bread at the baker’s shop. Tension and fear were everywhere. The threat level had first been raised in 1570, after Pope Pius V published a decree excommunicating Elizabeth and declaring her to be deposed on the grounds that she was a heretic, a schismatic and a tyrant, the bastard offspring of Henry VIII’s unlawful second marriage. Nailed to the front door of the bishop of London’s Thames-side palace at Fulham just a few weeks after a dangerous insurrection in the north of England was brutally crushed, the decree made her a legitimate target for any Catholic assassin. Before the pope proclaimed his decree, Catholics who refused to conform to the queen’s Protestant Religious Settlement had been largely left alone. Parliament had imposed fines of a shilling a week to the use of the poor on anyone refusing to attend their local parish church, but enforcement was patchy. All this changed after the papal decree, when the assumption was increasingly that Catholics were traitors if they failed to come to church and instead harboured Catholic priests in their houses or frequented illicit Masses.
The Northern Rising had shown just how fragile the fledgling Protestant state really was. Carrying the Cross and the banners of the Five Wounds of Christ, the six thousand or so rebels had set out from Durham Cathedral and marched through North Yorkshire to Wetherby and Selby, besieging Barnard Castle in Teesdale and celebrating the Mass wherever they went. They saw themselves as defenders of the commonwealth, claiming that they wanted to save Elizabeth from a ‘lawless faction of Machiavellians’. By this, they meant that they aimed to purge Burghley – they called him ‘King Cecil’ – and his Protestant friends from the Privy Council and Parliament. They would replace them with good Catholic noblemen loyal to the queen.4
Aghast at the scale of this dissent, Elizabeth had been ruthless in her response. The revolt itself was brought under control without significant bloodshed, but the reprisals were vicious. Mistrustful of her military leaders lest they show undue mercy, she turned to someone closely bound to her by family ties. Her aunt Mary Boleyn had married William Carey, and it was their son Henry, Elizabeth’s first cousin – she called him ‘My Harry’ and had raised him to the peerage as Lord Hunsdon within days of her accession – whom she chose.5 Hunsdon sent six hundred or more rebels to the gallows, leaving their bodies rotting there ‘for terror’. Sixty more, mostly the younger sons of wealthy gentry families, escaped over the frontier into Scotland before fleeing abroad, mainly to Paris or Rome. There they joined eight hundred or so English Catholic exiles and Jesuits, who at once began to scheme and plot how best to put the pope’s decree into effect.
The earliest and most threatening of these plots, the memory of which was still fresh in Sheriff Spencer’s mind as he patrolled London’s streets in 1584, was to make the career of the man who would soon become Burghley’s most driven and effective colleague in the Privy Council. Francis Walsingham, tall, thin, sallow-cheeked, with brown hair and moustache and a ‘lean and hungry look’, like Cassius in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was about forty years old, twelve years younger than Burghley. An ardent Protestant converted, like Burghley, to the new faith as a student at Cambridge, Walsingham was appointed to be Elizabeth’s resident ambassador to France in 1570. Two years earlier, in his first letter to Burghley, he had set out his political creed, warning the chief minister of ‘the malice of this present time’, before urging that ‘there is less danger in fearing too much than too little and . . . there is nothing more dangerous than security,’ by which of course he meant ‘the lack of security’.6
In 1570, Walsingham suspected a slippery Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi, of conspiring to enforce the pope’s decree with the Catholic exiles and with the notoriously hawkish Don Guerau de Spes, Guzmán de Silva’s replacement as the Spanish ambassador in London. The conspiracy had many twists and turns, but its inspiration was an offer first made on the eve of the Northern Rising by the highest-ranking English nobleman, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to marry the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. Once the marriage had taken place, an invading Spanish army would kill Elizabeth and make Norfolk king and Mary queen of the whole of the British Isles.7
Ridolfi’s trump card was that Mary was conveniently close at hand. The daughter of James V of Scotland and his second wife, Mary of Guise, she was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, and thus Elizabeth’s first cousin once removed. Known for her charisma and for her talent for making anyone she spoke to believe they were the only person in the world that mattered to her, she had the virtue of being incontestably legitimate, whereas Elizabeth’s parents’ marriage when she had been conceived was clandestine and bigamous, if indeed they were married at all.8 Mary had made a highly promising start when she returned from Paris to Edinburgh in August 1561 as an eighteen-year-old widow, after the death of her first husband
, Francis II of France. But her rule disintegrated in 1567 after her second husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, fell foul of her nobles and was assassinated in a gunpowder plot. In desperation, Mary took James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, as her protector. He exacted marriage as the price, and it turned out just as catastrophically. Taken prisoner and forced to abdicate or be tied up in a sack and drowned, Mary fled the following year across the Solway Firth to seek asylum in England.9
Since then, Mary had been a queen in exile, an unwelcome guest living as a cuckoo in Elizabeth’s nest. Her household was supported largely at the English queen’s expense, under conditions of stringent security. Held mainly at Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Sheffield in Yorkshire, well away from London or the coast, Mary was in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the few nobles apart from Hunsdon whom Elizabeth trusted unreservedly. Armed guards were always close at hand, most especially when Mary was allowed to ride out with a handful of her attendants for exercise. And yet, for all that, both Norfolk and Ridolfi had been able to convey messages to her secretly.10
There was no sterner, more assiduous defender of his political inheritance and the Catholic faith than Philip II, but after briefly flirting with Ridolfi he shied away from seriously backing the plot. The Spanish king had spent just over sixteen months living at Whitehall Palace and Hampton Court when he was married to Mary Tudor. He had personally inspected stocks of artillery and weapons during a visit to the Tower of London, and had been given regular briefings on the state of the kingdom’s finances and defences as recently as 1557. He knew only too well how large a force of men and ships would be required to bring to fruition such a grandiose invasion plan as Ridolfi’s.11
From the vantage point of Paris throughout the long, hot summer of 1571, Walsingham helped Burghley to uncover the full extent of the Ridolfi Plot, rendering it dead in the water. Confronted by a web of conspiracy that involved some of the country’s leading Catholic noblemen, Elizabeth took her opportunity to revive her father’s draconian, much-criticized treason laws, making it a capital offence merely to ‘imagine’, let alone ‘invent, devise or intend’ her overthrow, even by words alone. Pressed hard by Burghley, she then brought the Duke of Norfolk, England’s premier peer, to trial for his part in the conspiracy, and he was found guilty of high treason.12
• • •
In a frenzy over the Ridolfi Plot, Parliament met in May 1572 to debate Elizabeth’s ‘safety’. When Norfolk was convicted and sentenced to death, Elizabeth wavered over his execution, on the grounds of his noble status, whereas Burghley and Walsingham wanted Mary as well as Norfolk dead. Burghley’s overriding aim was to push through a bill of attainder by which Mary would be declared a traitor and executed by Act of Parliament, thus avoiding the trouble of a trial or of marshalling proof of her guilt. To advance his plan, he organized an underhand campaign to denounce her in print as a Catholic murderess and sorceress. For him, the only ‘good’ Mary was a dead one. Elizabeth’s mistake, he privately told Walsingham, was her inveterate willingness to give her cousin the benefit of the doubt.13
But could Mary, an anointed queen and a foreigner (since Scotland was still an independent country) commit treason in England? Elizabeth did not yet think so. Regicide was anathema to her. And so, to appease the terrified Protestants in the House of Commons, she sacrificed Norfolk, yielding to Burghley’s pleas that she execute him. It was still not enough. Burghley wrote a letter in his own hand complaining shrilly to Walsingham of how the ‘highest person’ in the realm (meaning Elizabeth) had failed to slay the serpent Mary, too, and so had brought shame on her councillors. He lambasted Elizabeth towards the end of this letter for her ‘errors’ and ‘follies’ in dealing with Mary, ‘and yet they must be suffered to be endured for saving of the honour of the highest’.14
Elizabeth was curiously ambivalent about her Catholic cousin, whom she called ‘sister’ and whom in 1562 she had excitedly planned to meet.15 Where the succession was concerned, she kept religion and politics apart. She had first suggested as much in 1561, when she had confided to William Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s principal secretary, that if she should die, then Mary would have a near-invincible claim as the rightful heir: ‘I for my part know none better nor that myself would prefer to her or, to be plain with you, that case occurring that might debar her from it.’16 Blood mattered more to Elizabeth than particular forms of worship.
Threateningly from Burghley’s viewpoint, many middle-of-the-road Protestants, not just Catholics – there, he maintained, was the greatest danger – believed that Mary could offer them dynastic security, for unlike Elizabeth, she had produced a male heir, the young Prince James. Ever since she had married Darnley in 1565 and become pregnant, Burghley had been haunted by this fear, freely admitting to himself late at night in memo after memo that an alarmingly high number of Elizabeth’s subjects favoured Mary despite her Catholic faith. The ‘people of England’, he had declared then, would begin to ‘favour all devices and practices that should tend to the advancement of the Queen of Scots’. They would be ‘alienated in their minds from their natural duties’ to Elizabeth, giving Mary the opportunity to stage a coup d’état and re-establish Catholicism.17
Burghley and Walsingham were ideological Protestants possessed of an apocalyptic, almost messianic vision of Protestant England’s role in history. Fearful of a hydra of conspiracy centred around King Philip, the pope, Mary, the Jesuits and the Catholic exiles in Paris, they were adamant that the succession should pass only to a Protestant, and if this meant proscribing or disqualifying Catholics by Act of Parliament, then so be it.
But if her leading councillors put Protestantism ahead of hereditary right, Elizabeth took the opposite approach. When, as it seemed, the queen’s life – and thus England’s security as a Protestant state – hung by a thread, as Sheriff Spencer knew it did in 1584, this really mattered. Both Burghley and Walsingham had lived through the dark days of Mary Tudor’s reign, when Burghley had been forced to conform to what he regarded as popish idolatry and Walsingham had fled into exile. Rather than risk a martyr’s death, Elizabeth had also conformed, but while Burghley and Walsingham were determined never to see a Catholic on the throne again, Elizabeth was unshaken in her belief in the primacy of dynasty over religion.18
• • •
By 1584, when Spencer set out with his constables on his last official tour of London’s busy streets, a still more dangerous point of contention than Mary Stuart divided England and Spain. In the Netherlands, the Calvinists had been in open rebellion against their Spanish overlords since the late 1560s. Spanish power in these rich trading territories was relatively new. The region had been largely self-governing even after 1516, the year that Philip’s father, Charles, had left Brussels to assume the throne of a united Spain. The Netherlands, where Charles was born, had been very dear to his heart, but when he abdicated in favour of his son in 1555, the relationship between Spain and the Netherlands changed dramatically. Most of the seventeen provinces were Dutch-speaking, chiefly those in the north. French (or Walloon) was spoken only in the south. But all seventeen were handed over to Philip, who promptly absorbed them into the wider Spanish empire, to be ruled through a regent.
The commercial bonds linking England and the Netherlands had always been strong, and they strengthened further after Elizabeth’s Religious Settlement, when Antwerp became the only European money market where she could readily borrow money. When the Dutch Calvinists burst into open revolt in 1566, Burghley and Walsingham closely monitored events across the North Sea. They watched with growing apprehension as Philip made the most far-reaching choices of his life. Coolly and deliberately, he decided to unleash the Catholic Inquisition against the Calvinist heretics, then sent his finest general, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, over the Alps at the head of a newly recruited Spanish Army of Flanders,* with orders to fuse the seventeen provinces into a unitary state with Brussels as its capital.19
Elizabeth was hardly a natural ally of the Dutch rebels, whom she infuriated with lectures on their duties of obedience to lawful princes and on the dangers of insurgent republicanism. But she was seriously alarmed: if Philip imposed his will on the Netherlands by force, then a victorious Spanish army, the finest and best equipped in Europe, would be just a short sea voyage away from London. She had met Philip face to face when he was married to her half-sister, Mary Tudor, and had personal experience of his methods. While he had helped to save her when Mary accused her of treason, he had treated her as no more than a diplomatic pawn, a dynastic asset to be exploited at will in the interests of Spain.20 He had ridden roughshod over English interests by forcing his wife into an unpopular war against France, losing Calais, the country’s bridgehead into Europe and last continental possession. Shortly before or just after Elizabeth had been crowned queen, he had floated the idea of marrying her, but he then ditched her without even waiting for her reply, choosing Elizabeth of Valois, a French princess, as his bride.21
For almost ten years, Elizabeth had watched helplessly as contingents of brave English volunteers had died fighting in the Netherlands in support of their fellow Protestants. And yet, when an embassy from the States of Holland and Zeeland arrived at Hampton Court in January 1576 with an offer to make her their sovereign, she declined. In these years, her aims were to reconcile the rebellious provinces to Philip’s obedience, to persuade him to restore their ancient liberties and to keep the Netherlands free from an occupying foreign army – no more and no less. She felt no obligation to assist the Dutch simply because they were Protestants.22
Then, in November, came a watershed moment, when mutinous Spanish troops brought fire and slaughter to the economic and cultural hub of Antwerp. Like the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when thousands of Protestants were murdered in Paris and nearly six hundred houses looted, the sack of Antwerp stirred Elizabeth into action. Keen to work through a third party in her search for a broad settlement, she turned to Francis, Duke of Anjou. The brother and heir of King Henry III of France, Anjou was a moderate Catholic and so largely acceptable to Spain and the pope.23 In shaping this policy, Elizabeth bypassed Burghley and Walsingham, both of whom were frantically lobbying her, if in slightly different ways and at different speeds, to offer the Dutch immediate financial and military aid.24
