After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  To our right trusty and well beloved Cousins and Councillors, our Keeper of our Great Seal of England, our High Treasurer of England, our Admiral of England, and our Principal Secretary for the time being. [my emphasis] . . . For answer to the contents of your letter, we would have you remember, that you may perceive by our former letters that we never urged your personal repair to us further or sooner than our a fairs there would permit you . . . But that now being altered, we desire that you do not remove from the charge in hand . . . Touching the jewels to be sent for our wife, our meaning is not to have any of the principal jewels of state to be sent so soon nor so far o f, but only such as, by the opinion of the Ladies attendant about the late Queen our Sister, you shall find meet for the ordinary apparelling and ornament of her the rest may come after, when she shall be nearer at hand. 85

  The Councilors were left in no doubt that their decisions had put their jobs at risk. James intended to enter York the following day and the city government and citizens of York continued a frantic rush of activity as they prepared for his visit. At a public meeting on 30 March the Recorder had “declared unto the said commoners and others assembled” that every inhabitant should “remove all clogs . . . dung hill and filth out of the streets, and shall also paint the outside of their houses with some colours.” Vagrants were to be sent to Hull en route for the army in the Low Countries and the newly cleaned streets were to be strewn with “rushes, flowers and herbs.”86 Lord Burghley added orders for the citizens to hang tapestries and painted cloth in the streets James was to pass through. A York schoolmaster called Smith was commissioned to write a welcoming speech based on the advice of Alderman Askwith, the man who had been sent to Newcastle with the loan. The traditional gifts for a visiting monarch were also ordered: a double gilt silver cup, “having the City arms on it,” and a hundred pounds in gold. Similar but lesser gifts were ordered for the King’s favorites and chief officers.87 Lord Burghley, anxious about where they were to be housed, had asked to be informed “how many beds my Lord Mayor and every Alderman and other citizens have, and are able to make and furnish . . . for the placings of the nobles and other attendants upon the King’s Majesty at their houses.”88

  But just as everything seemed to be coming together, Lord Burghley issued new demands. No one was to carry arms, save a rapier. The ceremonies were to be held in open places, “and the press or crowd kept as far and wide from [the King] as may be, so that he may have space and room to stir his horse up and down and not to stand still.”89 Trusted people were to be employed to stand at the front and hold back the press. Heads of households were to be instructed that all weapons should be taken to the mayor, and to ensure they had done so, houses were to be searched. Finally, the areas around James’s lodgings were to be kept free of people. Burghley had been advised to “tell the mayor it is for avoiding of heat, evil air, and that the King may be better seen, and what other colours it shall please your Lordship [to] allege.” 29 It was an insult to the citizens of York that their loyalty should be considered suspect, and James’s fear of assassination suggested an estrangement from his subjects that Elizabeth had never shown, even with a papal bull of excommunication on her head.90

  On 16 April James was dutifully met on the east end of York’s Skip Bridge by scarlet-gowned sheriffs attended by “all the gentlemen and the best sort of yeoman (which are men of comely personages and such as have decent and good apparel and good horses).”91 They presented James with their white staffs of office. Half a mile further, the rituals continued as Lord Burghley and the knights and gentlemen of the shire greeted James and, with a blast of trumpets, the sergeants at arms delivered up their maces. A waiting coach carried James to the city gates, where the schoolmaster’s oration was delivered. The mayor stood on a platform attended by a footman in a new coat embroidered with the city’s arms. Those citizens who stood nearby also had new clothes made in accordance with orders that they should look their best.

  The mayor gave James the usual gilt cup filled with gold, together with the city’s sword and keys. He expected to then be given the sword of state to carry in front of James through the city. It was, however, handed instead to George Clifford, the third Earl of Cumberland, in an effort to honor the nobility, after the feelings James had displayed at Lumley Castle. The public celebration began after a service in York Minster as James was escorted under a canopy to the Manor of St. Mary’s. A fountain featuring a mermaid, designed by Mr. Rawlings, ran with wine and York’s “butteries, pantries, and cellars” were “held open in great abundance for all comers.”92 Lord Home, Sir George Home, Sir Thomas Erskine, Sir Roger Aston and Sir John Ramsay were presented with personal gifts from the city of gilded cups, bowls and jewels. James, pleased and relieved by the welcome, declined the offer of a coach the next morning, saying “the people are desirous to see a King, and so they shall, for they shall see his body as his face.” It was an unfortunate consequence that James was to find himself face-to-face with a Catholic priest.

  As James walked back to his lodgings from another religious service, a man dressed as a gentleman stepped forward. His name was Thomas Hill, a priest considered to be a troublemaker, even by the Vatican. He had been condemned by Pope Clement VIII in 1597 as a “factious man” and subsequently had been refused papal permission to carry out his priestly functions, but he was intent on delivering a petition on behalf of England’s Catholics. James had already been presented with a number of petitions from Catholics. Typically they pointed out that Puritans and atheists were tolerated in England and asked for the same treatment, drawing attention to the good effects of religious toleration in France. This one, however, had a very different tone. Hill’s petition demanded the suppression of penal laws and compared the lot of England’s Catholics to that of the Israelites under King Jeroboam, whose tyrannies had given them “a just occasion to leave their due obedience.”93 In short, Hill’s petition threatened treason.

  James asked Hill what college he was from. Hill replied “that he belonged to the true college of Christ, and that in this kingdom he had forty thousand of his religion.” James quipped back, “Well then, amongst so many, have you never found a chief to take ten of your tribes and lead them elsewhere?”94 Hill was arrested soon after and hauled off to the Gatehouse prison in London.

  That evening was James’s last in York, but Cecil’s arrival had been delayed “by his fat horses failing him.”95 He was carrying a number of papers from his fellow Councilors, some of whom had considerable anxieties about their futures. Edward Bruce of Kinloss had advertised that James wanted half the Council to be Scots, provoking Councilors and noblemen to complain to the Venetian ambassador that “no one but Englishmen should hold honours and office in England.”96 Cecil, however, had already accepted the inevitable and was working to ingratiate himself with the Scots favorites.

  Although Cecil knew that the Treasury was almost empty, he had found £1,000 in state funds as a gift for Sir George Home—an astute move.97 The contemporary Scottish historian Spottiswoode described Home as a man of deep wit and few words who achieved the most difficult political tasks without noise. The restoration of episcopacy in Scotland had been one such and James trusted him completely. Home’s friendship would prove central to the success of Cecil’s future career. Cecil had also fawned over Home’s fellow countryman, Kinloss, writing to James when Kinloss had arrived in London on 10 April to beg humble thanks for the King sending a Scot who was “already so good an Englishman.”98 The phrase was significant because James had asked the Council to naturalize all Scots— something that would enable him to give them English land as well as English offices. The Council had been horrified by the proposal but did not dare oppose it openly and their reply suggested a middle road. The naturalizing of all Scots would require an Act of Parliament, but in the meantime, they suggested, individuals could be provided for under the Great Seal.99 Cecil’s letter had implied that Kinloss would be particularly welcome to English citizenship.

  Cec
il was also carrying the Council’s instructions to settle the dates for Elizabeth’s funeral and James’s coronation. They had suggested a joint coronation with Anna, as this would save an estimated third of the costs. It was to take place about a month after the funeral, which they hoped could be held the Friday after Easter. Elizabeth had already lain unburied for long enough. The shoddy work of the embalmers and the warm spring weather had allowed the Queen’s body to deteriorate with horrific consequences. Elizabeth Southwell described how as the ladies were kneeling by the dead Queen one night they heard a crack. It was discovered on investigation that the wood of the coffin, the lead underneath it and the cerecloth had split as the fumes from the decomposing corpse had burst out. In the morning the body “was fain to be new trimmed up . . . but no man durst speak of it publicly for fear of displeasing Secretary Cecil.”100 There was a danger that reports of such horrors would be taken as an ill omen for the future or a judgment against James’s accession.

  When Cecil eventually arrived in York it was night and James was asleep. The next morning, however, Cecil was given an hour of James’s time before he went for breakfast with the city’s mayor. His first impression cannot have been far removed from that of his cousin Sir Francis Bacon. Reporting back to the Earl of Northumberland, Bacon describes a prince the farthest from the appearance of vainglory that may be, and rather like a prince of the ancient form than of the latter time. His speech is swift and cursory, and in the full dialect of his country; and in point of business, short; in point of discourse, large. He a fects popularity by gracing such as he hath heard to be popular, and not by any fashions of his own. He is thought somewhat general in his favours, and his virtue of access is rather because he is much abroad and in press, than that he gives easy audience about serious things.

  Bacon was unable to have any private conference with James and, he complained, “no more has almost any other English.” The King was surrounded by Scotsmen and would not even talk to the Attorney General without Sir George Home’s say-so. Nor did he appear too sensitive about English national feelings. Bacon warned Northumberland: “He hastens to a mixture of both kingdoms and nations, faster perhaps than policy will conveniently bear,” and added, “I told your Lordship once before, that (methought) his Majesty asked counsel of the time past than of the time to come.”101

  James’s reluctance to listen to advice was in stark contrast with what Cecil was used to with Elizabeth, but the meeting began well. James agreed to the Council’s suggestions on the dating of Elizabeth’s funeral. He also agreed that there should be a joint coronation on 25 July. When Cecil suggested that no immediate announcements should be made regarding posts given to Scots, however, he discovered that James had already paired the two Gentlemen Ushers who had come up from London with two Scots. James also made it plain that he was not prepared to wait long before more significant offices were split between the two nations.102

  With the meeting over James had his breakfast with the mayor and rewarded him with a knighthood. It was no longer the honor it had been a month earlier. People were discovering that a payment to one of James’s Scots favorites was all that was required of those who wished for a knighthood. James made a dozen more that afternoon at Grimston, the house of the High Sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Edward Stanhope. One of those James dubbed was Thomas Gerard, brother of the notorious Jesuit John Gerard. James made much of the fact that Gerard’s father had been imprisoned after trying to help Mary, Queen of Scots, escape from imprisonment in 1571. “I am particularly bound to love your family on account of the persecution you have borne for me,” he told Thomas. The Jesuit was infuriated by what he recognized as James’s attempt to seduce his brother into loyalty to the crown at the expense of loyalty to the Catholic Church. He railed in his memoirs that to be made a knight by James “was to him no advancement whose ancestors had been so for sixteen generations”—but Thomas would also accept the newly invented title of baronet from James in 1611 and have James’s arms carved on the chimneypiece in the hall of the family house.103

  The mood as James set out on the second leg of his journey was captured by the seventeenth-century historian Arthur Wilson: “Now every man that had but a spark of hope, struck fire to light himself in the way of advancement, though it were to the consumption both of his estate and his being. The court being a kind of lottery, where men that venture much may draw a blank, as such as have little may get the prize.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “HOPE AND FEAR” Winners and Losers, April–May 1603

  The head of the Jesuit order in England, Henry Garnet, had shown several soldiers the papal edict calling on Catholics to defy the accession of a Protestant—among them the future gunpowder plotter Robert Catesby. But since resistance to the proclamation declaring James king had proved negligible a new response was called for. Within days of Elizabeth’s death, the stocky, flaxen-haired priest had written to “a Catholic nobleman,” probably the Earl of Worcester, asking him to tell James that the Jesuits offered him “all the love, fidelity, duty and obedience which can be desired or yielded by any Christian heart.”1 It was a strategic response: they had no choice but to accept James’s fait accompli, and in secret they would continue to seek means and opportunities to advance their cause of restoring the Catholic faith.

  While the Jesuits had never supported James’s accession, and nothing he was likely to do was therefore going to disappoint them, many of the Catholic secular clergy had backed James’s candidature and they now realized their mistake. The royal pardons that had left Catholics in prison alongside murderers had put paid to the lie that James had ever intended to offer religious toleration. Catholics such as the Howards might be allowed to play a leading role in government, but they would not be allowed the free exercise of their faith; the price of their power was to risk their souls. As James left York the Venetian ambassador Scaramelli reported that James’s Scots agents had confirmed that the most Catholics could hope for was the remission of recusancy fines—and he warned that even that was in doubt.2

  In the winter James had told Cecil that he expected the seculars to be expelled from England along with the Jesuits. He was not interested in “the distinction in their ranks”; both were subject to the authority of the Pope and he wanted both “safely transported beyond the seas, where they may freely glut themselves on their imagined gods.” 3 Cecil was now trying to work out how this could be best achieved. It was important that people not feel inclined to pity the Catholic clergy or resent their treatment. The most effective way to achieve that was for them to be tarnished by treason. In the past plots had been “wakened” by corralling malcontents into actions against the state and there was an outstanding candidate to play such a part now: the most vocal of James’s supporters within the seculars had been a short, cross-eyed priest called William Watson, whose personal history is illustrative of the extraordinary bitterness between the Jesuits and those who sought to compromise with the state.

  The story of the Elizabethan Catholic priesthood was not straightforwardly one of Catholic priests versus a savage absolutist state: sometimes it was one of Catholic priest against Catholic priest. Watson, now in his thirties, had left England at the age of sixteen to train as a priest at Douai, a Catholic college founded by William (later Cardinal) Allen, which was then at Rheims. He returned to work as a missionary in June 1586, when Mary, Queen of Scots, was the outstanding candidate for the succession. Just eight months later she was dead. In common with most moderate Catholic opinion, the secular clergy accepted that this ended all likelihood of a Catholic monarch succeeding Elizabeth and restoring their faith. They hoped that instead proofs of loyalty would eventually earn them a place as an accepted minority. The Jesuits, however, remained doggedly determined that England should have a Catholic monarch.

  The Society of Jesus, founded earlier in the century by the Basque-born soldier and courtier Iñigo López de Loyola,4 was informed by a strongly Spanish mentality, one shaped by hundreds of years spen
t fighting the Moors. Their intellectual rigor and personal determination stood them in good stead in the battles of the Counter-Reformation and their English members demonstrated particular discipline and courage in the face of torture and death. Each grim butchering on the scaffold at Tyburn and elsewhere was advertised as a martyrdom and used as propaganda for their cause. Indeed, by the turn of the century they were claiming that the penal laws in England were the basis of all their success at home and abroad, and they were certain that they could bring England back into the fold of the mother church. It had taken the Spanish 800 years to erase Islam from Spain. The Jesuits were not going to give up England to heretics after less than seventy.

  Most Jesuits had supported Philip II’s Armada, whereas the secular students at the English College in Rome had greeted the news of its defeat with cheers. Five years later the Jesuits had been behind the Doleman book advocating the candidature of the Infanta, while the seculars had condemned it as “the most pestilential thing ever written,” claiming that its main achievement had been to inflame Protestant fears of Catholics and bring greater persecution.5 Hitherto the English government had barely differentiated between the two sides—both John Gerard, SJ, and William Watson were imprisoned and tortured during the 1590s—but by the end of the decade Cecil had become aware that there was virtual civil war between them.

  Ironically, the issue that set their conflicts alight arose out of Pope Clement VIII’s attempts to impose discipline on his quarreling flock. Before the Reformation the secular, or diocesan, priests would have been subject to bishops, but the last member of the ancient hierarchy of English Catholic bishops, Goldwell, Bishop of St. Asaph’s, had died in 1585, and persecution had since made it impossible to replace him. The Pope’s solution was to impose an archpriest to oversee the English missionaries. The seculars, however, complained that the title “Archpriest” was unknown to canon law and they distrusted the man appointed to the post, George Blackwell, a tactless individual who was close to Henry Garnet. The seculars appealed against Clement’s decision, but despite this, on 6 April 1599, the Pope confirmed Blackwell in his new position. The Jesuits had then accused the Appellants—as the faction of the appealers became known—of schism. If such a charge was proved, the Appellants would have faced the choice of obedience to Blackwell and his Jesuit allies or being excommunicated. As they saw it, treason could be made an article of faith. In the autumn of 1600 Thomas Bluet, one of around thirty priests imprisoned at Wisbech Castle on the Isle of Ely, told his jailer that he feared the Jesuits would “swear all priests to be true to the Infanta of Spain,” and that he was ready to be “starved to death in the Castle of Wisbech before he would take such an oath.” The incident was reported to the authorities and from this point on Cecil became involved, taking a close interest in events as they unfolded.