The Elizabethans (38 page)

Campion was arrested, through the treachery of a servant, in July, at a manor house at Lyford in Berkshire, not far from Oxford. He was taken to the Tower of London and imprisoned in the narrow dungeon known as ‘Little Ease’. Then, after four days, the guards took him from the Tower to the Earl of Leicester’s house. Here he was questioned, not merely by Leicester, but by the Earl of Bedford and by two Secretaries of State; but not, as was once supposed, by the Queen. It made such a good story – Elizabeth slipping secretly into Leicester’s house and confronting Campion’s eager, tortured faced with the question: did he think she was the Queen of England? It implies that she doubted it herself! Alas, the tale is ‘no more than a figment of the imaginations of Campion’s biographers’.

No one questioned Campion’s virtue, or his impressiveness. His demeanour throughout the inquiry converted Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, to Roman Catholicism. Howard was canonised in October 1970. He died in the Tower of London. The Queen had offered him restitution of all his estates and entitlement to the Dukedom of Norfolk, if he would only conform to the Church of England, and he bravely refused. His imprisonment seems harsh, but then he had been in cahoots with the exiled Cardinal Allen, and a fellow prisoner in the Tower, a priest named William Bennett, did admit that Arundel had asked him to say a votive Mass for the success of the Spanish Armada. His wife lived on until 1630, and the Queen gave her a pension of £8 per year.
²²

Howard died mysteriously – some said he was poisoned. Campion’s end was gruesome: he died repeating his claim that his faith was not treasonable and that he and his fellow Catholics were loyal to the Queen. Many must have regarded with disgust the attempts to assassinate Campion’s character during his trial, and deplored the disgusting manner of his death – hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Among them, it has convincingly been argued,
²³
was Sir Philip Sidney, who almost certainly modelled the brutal cross-examination of Pyrocles in the
Arcadia
by Philanax on the cruel interrogation of Campion by Edmund Anderson, QC.

Although Campion’s mission as a Jesuit was based on a belief that it was possible to convert the people of England to Roman Catholicism by prayer, by argument and by example, this optimistic attribution was abandoned by his fellow Jesuit missionary Robert Parsons and by the exiled Cardinal Allen.

Parsons, a Balliol man, was the son of the village blacksmith from Nether Stowey in Somerset. A great bruiser of a man, he was tireless in the writing and printing of seditious pamphlets. Campion’s death was one of the factors which persuaded this fanatic that war alone could solve the Catholic dilemma. From 1581 onwards Parsons looked to Spain, and a Spanish invasion of England, as the only viable option. Shakespeare encapsulated the recusant position, their willingness to support treason and war and Gunpowder Plots on the one hand, and their personal heroism on the other:

To this I witness call the fools of time

Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.
²⁴

17

Sir Philip Sidney

THE BIRTH OF
the nation known (somewhat oddly) in English as Holland was one of the most prodigious political consequences of the Protestant Reformation. When the Emperor Charles V abdicated in 1556 he was the last dynast with plausible aspirations to rule over a pan-European dominion. He divided his empire between his brother, Ferdinand I – who inherited the title of Holy Roman Emperor and the broad land-mass of the Palatinate (roughly, the area covered by modern-day Germany, Austria, northern Italy and Hungary) – and his son, Philip II, who was given Spain and the Low Countries – modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Holding his arm as he took this momentous step of renunciation was the remarkable man known to history as William the Silent (1533–84 ) – or
le Taciturne
. (The soubriquet did not mean that this eloquent figure never spoke, but that he kept his own counsel.) William of Nassau-Dillenburg, or William of Orange as he could also be known, was one of the richest noblemen in Europe. In essence a German, he was the child of two generations of dynastic marriages, which made him the heir to the sovereign principality of Orange, on the left bank of the Rhône, just north of Avignon; of Nassau, a duchy on the banks of the Rhine; and of large tracts of northern Brabant. He was also heir to the defunct kingdom of Arles. Though his father was Lutheran, William was brought up by a Catholic at the imperial court. It was only when Philip II took over control of the Netherlands from his imperial father, and made it clear that he was intending to place the Dutch under Spanish rule, that the stirrings of independence among the states radicalised William the Silent. He became the champion of the movement for Netherlandish independence. There were seventeen provinces of the Low Countries, all with their own local laws, aristocracy and privileges. The seven northern provinces, backed by William, declared for independence – demanding religious toleration for their largely (not exclusively) Calvinist population. This was the origin of the modern Netherlands, of which Holland is one state or county. It would not enjoy full political independence until the seventeenth century, but from the moment these states were destined to make an extraordinary impact on the world they would become a great maritime power. Their pioneering republicanism was ground-breaking. They were to become a cradle of science and philosophy and they invented modern capitalism. Spinoza and Rembrandt were the sons of this political wonder.

Philip II was determined to strangle the infant states at birth, and the struggles of William the Silent and the Dutch against their Spanish oppressors became the great ideological battle of late sixteenth-century Europe, comparable in the twentieth century to the much shorter and bloodier civil war in Spain. In the war between General Franco and the Republic, Europeans saw a titanic struggle for their soul, between Left and Right. In the fight in the Low Countries the question was partly a matter of local sovereignty versus Habsburg bullying. And there were plenty of Dutch Catholics who resisted Philip II. But as attitudes hardened and the fight became bloodier, it became an emblematic struggle between the Counter-Reformation, represented by Spain, and the Protestant aspiration. It was a struggle between a vast machine and a collection of individuals: between a papalist system that insisted upon obedience as a condition of salvation, and a new attitude to life, expressed by men and women who placed their consciences above a system. Deep things, therefore, were at stake, which is why so many English enthusiasts for the Reformation went to fight for the independence of the Dutch States.

The Catholic powers plotted constantly for a military and political defeat of the independent or hierarchical states, preceded by the assassination of the key figure in each drama. The Earl of Moray in Scotland had been assassinated. Admiral Coligny in France was killed at the behest of his own queen. The Pope urged the English to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. And in July 1584 William the Silent was shot at Delft, by a marksman called Balthasar Gérard. His sister, the Countess of Schwarzenburg, held his hand and asked him, ‘Do you die reconciled to your Saviour Jesus Christ?’ He was able to answer ‘Yes’ before he died.
¹

William had been the one man with the intelligence and the unflappability to hold together the quarrelsome states. There had always been many exasperating moments. When the burghers of Antwerp had refused him the means to save Maastricht from the Prince of Parma, William had sat with his head in his hands.
²
But he knew how to lead them. Without William, the people of the Netherlands desperately needed help, and they looked to the Queen of England to supply it.

English involvement in the Low Countries was something about which Queen Elizabeth nursed ambivalent feelings. In the years 1585–6 the English soldiers serving there, and the people of the Netherlands, suffered acutely from an excess display of all her worst character traits – vacillation, tight-fistedness, hysterical rages. Presumably the ill-fated campaigns in which thousands of Englishmen, including Sir Philip Sidney, perished coincided with her menopause. That being said, events were moving in such a way that any English monarch in the circumstances would have been jittery.

The case for maintaining peaceable relations with Spain was a strong one. Philip II was the most powerful monarch in Europe. He was Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, and it was no secret that he believed that if anyone succeeded Elizabeth, it should be himself rather than Mary, Queen of Scots – too much under the influence of her French relations – or her son James, who was being brought up in Scotland as a heretic. Philip had no wish to antagonise the English people, whose king he aspired to become. Therefore he wanted peace with them, peace with their queen. He insisted to Pope Sixtus V, for example, that Elizabeth posed no real threat to the Catholic faith and that she could be talked out of her heresies. Everyone was playing an ambivalent game, however. The Pope promised Philip two million gold ducats –
Dos millones de oro
– if he invaded England and brought it back to the faith. Philip, for his part, disturbed the Pope with his pro-French bias. (Sixtus excommunicated Henry of Navarre in 1585, but when Henry converted to Catholicism on the celebratedly pragmatic grounds that ‘Paris is worth a Mass’, the Pope refused to ride with Philip in his attempts to limit French power.)

Moreover Elizabeth, as well as being unwilling to risk an expensive, bloody war with Spain on Dutch soil, was temperamentally unattracted to their cause. The Dutch sought her protection against the religious intolerance of Spain; but she herself did not practise religious tolerance in her own country and she intensely disliked the Calvinist creed of the Dutch States.

Walsingham and the advanced Protestants in the Queen’s entourage took a different view. The Protestant struggle was
their
struggle, whether in Antwerp or in London. Moreover, however much Elizabeth wanted a peaceful life, the Spanish (who had spies everywhere, including in the Queen’s own Council) had to be resisted. To conquer them in the States would be to put a check on their power and hugely reduce the chance of a Spanish invasion of England. The united fleets of England and the States would make a formidable navy and would secure the English Channel for the Protestant allies.

While the Queen dithered between the two opinions, and while the States openly asked her to become their governor, the Spanish took matters out of Elizabeth’s hands. On 29 May 1585 a decree went forth from Madrid that any English vessel found near the Spanish coast should be arrested and appropriated: the crew imprisoned; the guns commandeered for the Armada that was being assembled at Cadiz. Hundreds, certainly, and perhaps as many as thousands
³
of English sailors and merchants found themselves heaving oars as galley-slaves or languishing in the prisons of Seville. One Englishman wrote, ‘Our countrymen are still in prison and in great misery; except there be better order taken, better for men to stay at home than raise the price of corn in our country to bring it hither to so ungrateful a nation.’
⁴

Elizabeth’s reaction to this was highly characteristic. She allowed Walsingham, and her friends in the Low Countries, to remain in suspense. She said she would undertake to pay for 4,000–5,000 men in the Low Countries until the end of the war, but when this army had been dispatched, reinforced by 2,000 volunteers, they awaited her instructions and received mixed signals. Antwerp fell to the Spanish in August. It was time for a big military operation, and for an English figurehead who could match the legendarily successful general Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma. The all-but-universal view in England was that the Earl of Leicester was that man. One of the only important figures to dissent from this view was the Queen herself. When Lettice, Leicester’s wife, came down to London to join her husband, the Queen threw a tantrum and said that she would send someone in Leicester’s place to the Low Countries; or send no one. On 26 September Walsingham wrote to Leicester, ‘Unless God give her Majesty another mind, it will work her and her subjects’ ruin.’
⁵
Already the Dutch States were in anarchy. The troops who had been sent out there were without pay, food or equipment. The companies who had been intended to garrison the town of Flushing had no commanding officer. They were kept in open boats exposed to the October rains and storms, and hundreds died before a bedraggled remainder marched into Flushing to replace the Flemish soldiers who had earlier defended the town.

One reason for Elizabeth permitting this deplorable state of affairs was her indecisiveness. Another was that she had a secret up her sleeve, which she did not wish to disclose to Burghley, Walsingham or any of the respectable members of her government. Whereas one side of her mercurial nature wished to make peace with Spain, and even to suggest – through the backstairs emissaries who moved between the two powers, London and Madrid – that she would contemplate conversion to Catholicism and make Philip II her heir, another aspect of her nature wanted adventure. Elizabeth the Pirate Queen wanted revenge for her imprisoned merchants and sailors. She secretly licensed Francis Drake, who was the dread of the Spanish, to wreak havoc on the Spanish coast. Elizabeth loved this sort of adventure. If it went wrong, she could disclaim responsibility. If it worked, and Drake came home with a shipload of loot, she could bag her share. The great Spanish admiral, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, spoke for his country when he said that ‘England had many teeth’, and that the man who with a single barque and a handful of men could take a million and a half of gold from under the eyes of the Viceroy of Peru might go anywhere and everywhere with such a squadron as he now had at his back.
⁶
By 14 September Drake and his fleet were in Vigo Bay – to offer freedom to the English merchants marooned there, and to loot the place. In the churches Drake’s soldiers took pleasure not merely in stealing anything valuable, but in stripping the statue of the Virgin of her clothes and treating her with indignity. Chalices, copes, patens and an enormous cross were collected by Drake’s pirates as so much plunder. He met with almost no resistance in Spain before sailing off to the West Indies. En route he sacked the towns of Santiago and Porto Praya in the Cape Verde Islands. By the middle of December they had reached the Antilles. In San Domingo he took the Spaniards completely by surprise and extracted money from the inhabitants by hanging two friars
per diem
until they surrendered 25,000 ducats. Drake – this was typical of his humour – asked the Spaniards to translate for him the Latin inscription over Philip II’s royal arms carved over the grand staircase:
Non sufficit orbis
– the world is not big enough for him. After calling at a plague-ridden Cartagena, he sailed home via the infant colony of Virginia and reached Plymouth harbour on 28 July 1586. In one voyage he had demonstrated what an English land army in the Low Countries could not do: that Spain was vulnerable.