Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (57 page)

Yet Elizabeth was not so sure. She disliked the fact that the people of the United Provinces had risen against their lawful sovereign, and she had no reason to welcome the substitution of Spanish forces by French ones. Her policy, as always, was one of caution touched by compromise. If the duke of Alva seemed likely to prevail, or at least to avoid defeat, then she should allow the protagonists to fight on; it suited her policy to have her neighbours at each other’s throats. As Lord Burghley put it in a paper of advice to her, ‘let both sides alone for a time’. But if the French began to take over the entire coast and the frontiers, under cover of their alliance with the Netherlanders, then Elizabeth would assist Philip ‘in the defence of his inheritance’ and even join with him on condition that he restore religious liberty to his subjects and ‘deliver them from the fear of the Inquisition’. To this policy she adhered. The Spanish ambassador at the English court even reported that the queen was ready to take possession of Flushing,
in apparent support of the Orange cause, and then surrender it back to the Spanish.

Her deliberate ambiguity was not to the taste of those who espoused the cause of radical Protestantism but it reflected the pragmatism which she brought to all the affairs of state. It was not necessarily with displeasure, therefore, that she heard news of victories by the duke of Alva against the rebels; the French had fallen back in disorder, and Charles IX faced the unwelcome prospect of war against Spain without the help of any ally.

In these difficult circumstances the providential alliance between the French Catholics and the Protestants of the United Provinces could not endure. When the French leader of the Huguenots, Gaspard de Coligny, became the victim of an attempt at assassination, the queen regent, Catherine de Medici, took fright at the possible retaliation of his supporters. So she ordered the pre-emptive destruction of the Huguenot leaders, among them Coligny himself, whose body was thrown out of the window of his lodgings. Unfortunately the bloodshed was contagious and on that same St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572, the mobs of Paris began their murderous work on any Huguenots they could find. They believed that they were attacking the enemies of God; neighbour turned upon neighbour in an atmosphere of frenzy as the Huguenots were stabbed, hanged or beaten to death. It was said that some of the boys of Paris strangled babies in their cradles. The bodies were piled into carts and taken down to the Seine; it was in flood that day and by the grace of God, as the Catholics said, it was better able to wash away the traces of heresy. The emblem of St Bartholomew was the knife as a symbol of his murder by flaying; the knife now ruled.

Cardinal Orsini had told the French king that not one Huguenot should be left alive in France and, although the advice could not be followed in practice, thousands died in Paris and in the provinces. The country was now divided by a religious hatred far outweighing that within England. The occasion itself became known as the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and did more than any other event in sixteenth-century history to discredit the Catholic cause. It showed the people of England, for example, their possible fate if a Catholic queen once more reigned over
them. In Rome the bells rang in celebration, however, and Pope Gregory walked with his cardinals from shrine to shrine in grateful procession.

The queen was still at Kenilworth, enjoying the festivities that Leicester had displayed in her honour, when news of the massacre came to her. She had been discussing with the French ambassador the never-ending question of her marriage to a French prince. Then, on 3 September, a messenger arrived from Paris while she was out hunting. His report broke off any negotiations with the ambassador. A Spanish agent in London informed the duke of Alva that the queen has ‘sent all her musicians and minstrels home, and there are no more of the dancers, farces and entertainments . . .’ The pageants were suddenly ended, leaving not a rack behind.

The earl of Leicester, eager to support the Protestant cause in Europe, wrote that ‘I think no Christian since the heathen time has heard of the like . . .’ It was partly his urgent persuasions that moved Elizabeth to come to the aid of William of Orange; privately she sent him £30,000, and permitted 6,000 men to be raised in his cause. She now feared that the massacre was only a prelude to a general assault by the Catholic powers against herself and the other Protestant princes. The people feared this also. The bishops sent her a message requesting that any Catholic priests held in prison should immediately be put to death. The bishop of London urged Burghley to rid the court of all Catholics and to send Mary Stuart to the block.

In the middle of September the French ambassador was allowed to return to court, by now resident at Woodstock. The queen was dressed in mourning, as were all the members of her council and her principal ladies; they were standing in a semicircle and they received the envoy in silence. Elizabeth took him over to a window and asked him if the deplorable reports happened to be true. He replied that there had been a conspiracy against the French king, orchestrated by Coligny himself. So the king had in effect sanctioned the massacre in retaliation for a plot against his life? The envoy could only bluster. After a few more words, she left him.

Nevertheless she maintained her policy of careful neutrality in
public. She dispatched the earl of Worcester, a notably Catholic nobleman, to Paris for the baptism of the French king’s daughter; Elizabeth herself had agreed to be the infant’s godmother, much to the dismay of her Protestant councillors. How could an English earl go in an official capacity to the city that had been the scene of the most appalling massacre in sixteenth-century Europe? The queen also claimed that she could take no part against her dear brother, the king of Spain, despite the fact that she had sent troops and money to his enemies. One Spanish courtier, in a letter to the duchess of Feria at the beginning of 1573, established the facts very well when he informed her that ‘the queen has promised to supply funds for six thousand men in the coming spring. If it be so, you can force his Majesty to see the profound cunning with which she is acting. She pretends to be unresolved upon her answer, when she had already consented to what the States [the United Provinces] ask of her . . .’

So Elizabeth was playing a double part, dexterously trying to contrive to keep in balance with all of her neighbours. Yet genuine hesitation also held her hand. This hesitation, close to procrastination, emerges in small as well as in great matters. She was urged to give a small royal manor, Newhall, to the earl of Sussex. She listened kindly to the proposal, said that she would like to give it to him, but then changed her mind. All things considered, it was proper to let him possess it but then, on the other hand, her father had built it at such expense. Burghley asked her if she had a final reply but ‘she would give no resolved answer, yea or nay’. She was in any case rarely in the giving mood. When Mary Stuart sent her a present of nightcaps she remarked that ‘when people arrive at my age, they take all they can get with both hands, and only give with their little finger’.

A courtier complained to Cecil, on another matter in the same period, that ‘it maketh me weary of my life . . . I can neither get the other letter signed nor the letter already signed permitted to be sent away, but day by day and hour by hour deferred, till “anon, soon, and tomorrow” ’. Her godson, Sir John Harrington, wrote that ‘when the business did turn to better advantage she did most cunningly commit the good issue to her own honour and understanding; but when aught fell out contrary to her own will and
intent, the council were in great strait to defend their own acting and not blemish the queen’s good judgement’. She was happy to accept the praise, in other words, and refused to shoulder the blame.

In most of the affairs of state, her preferred stance was one of inaction. And who was to say that this was not the wisest policy? Doing nothing is better than acting foolishly. When chance or fortune largely determined the ways of the world, what point was there in moving forward too quickly? Despite the blandishments of Cecil and Leicester, therefore, she refused to place herself at the head of a Protestant League in Europe. It would expose her to too many risks. In any case she was in sympathy with established monarchs and with the prevailing regimen of law and order; she saw no reason to endanger it.

It may also be that she did not comprehend the fierce religious enthusiasms of the Calvinists in the Netherlands or of the Catholics in France; as far as she was concerned, all such matters could be resolved by calculation or compromise. She could profit from the pious zeal of others, however. With the Spanish engaged in protracted hostilities against the Netherlanders, and with the French close to civil war, England could be regarded as a place of safeguard and stability. It might even be able to act as an arbiter in the fortunes of Europe. Elizabeth decided to remove the English volunteers from the Netherlands, in a gesture of goodwill towards Philip, and in the spring of 1573 a treaty with Spain was agreed. Commercial benefits were bound to follow. By the middle of April the ports of Spain and of the Low Countries were formally open to English merchants who were no longer obliged to fear the attentions of the Inquisition.

More distant events were to play a part in larger and longer conflicts. In the previous year Sir Francis Drake had landed on Panama, the strategic bridge between the silver mines of Peru and the ports of the Caribbean from where the Spanish ships set sail. It was feared by Spain that Drake and his men would form an alliance with the runaway slaves of Panama, and thus control all of the traffic of the isthmus. If Madrid were to be deprived of its gold and silver, it could not afford to fight in the Netherlands or anywhere else.

In 1578 John Hawkins, the quondam slave-runner, was enrolled
as treasurer of the navy, in which capacity he laboured hard to prepare an ocean-going fleet; the ships were no longer to resemble floating fortresses but to be slimmer and faster, with the emphasis upon guns and cannon for long-range battle. Within fifteen years of his appointment the country possessed twenty-five fighting ships and eighteen ocean-going pinnaces.

At the end of 1577 Drake set sail once more with a fleet of five ships led by the
Golden Hind
, then known as the
Pelican
; he sailed down the coast of Africa, taking such foreign vessels that came in his way, and then sailed across the Atlantic to the New World before passing through the Strait of Magellan and entering the Pacific. He became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. In that same year John Dee, Elizabeth’s favourite astrologer, published
General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation
; its title page displayed an English fleet embarking from a well-defended shore under the benediction of the queen. Dee advocated the formation of a British empire founded on sea power, and his work heralded all of England’s imperialist aspirations among the merchants and the more adventurous courtiers. Martin Frobisher, for example, was the English seaman who joined forces with Sir Christopher Hatton and John Dee in a deeply laid scheme to discover the North-West Passage that he believed would lead him to Cathay.

It has been said of Richard Hakluyt, the great memorialist of English sea voyages, that the span of his life from 1552 to 1616 matched the rise of a greater England – ‘an England stretching fingers of empire to East and West’. Hakluyt himself wrote that ‘in this famous and peerless government of her Majesty, her subjects, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth’. The first English colony in America, Roanoke, was established in modern North Carolina by 1585. This is not the ‘empire’ that Henry had envisioned when he wore the imperial crown, but it derived ineluctably from the same ambition, drive for power and pursuit of profit. Yet so far the struggles between Spain and England on the seas were confined to the New World rather than the Old.

A religious complication now further embarrassed relations between Spain and England. At the beginning of 1574 the first seminarians arrived. A seminary of English Catholic priests had been established at Douai, in the Spanish Netherlands, and from here three priests sailed secretly to England to begin work among the faithful. The Catholics of England had by this date organized a network of connections, with their own priests to provide them with the sacraments, all the time hoping for assistance from the Catholic exiles abroad. Some Catholic priests had become private chaplains; others had compromised by accepting the introduction of the new faith while at the same time celebrating the Mass in secret with the chosen few.

After the arrival of the three priests, more followed across the sea; over the next twenty-five years some 600 were sent to England. They were not missionaries. They came only to sustain the adherents of the old faith rather than to convert those who had embraced Protestantism. Nevertheless they were a potent source of unrest in the kingdom, largely because they opposed the claims of one whom they considered to be an unlawful monarch. The leader of the community at Douai, William Allen, told his superiors in Rome that the priests were commanded ‘to preach and teach (though not openly but in private houses, after the old example of the Apostles in their days) the Catholic faith, and administer the sacraments to such as had need . . .’ The seminarians were to hear confessions, absolve schismatics and strengthen the faith of those tempted to conform. In previous years the authorities had treated the Catholics with a certain amount of caution, maintaining Elizabeth’s wish to preserve peace and order at all costs, but the presence of the priests was considered to be an unwarrantable intrusion into domestic affairs. A harsher policy soon prevailed.

The pious of another persuasion were also provoking trouble. In the spring of 1575 a congregation of Anabaptists was discovered in Aldgate. This was the sect most despised and most feared. Although they were of Dutch nationality they were tried before the bishop of London in St Paul’s Cathedral for the most horrible offences of heresy and blasphemy; five recanted and were saved. They paraded with lighted faggots in their hands and abjured the
doctrines that Christ had not ‘taken flesh’ of the Virgin Mary, that infants ought not to be baptized, that a Christian ought neither to be a magistrate nor bear a sword, and that no Christian should take an oath. Fifteen of their companions were shipped overseas, and five were condemned to death by burning. Only two of them were in fact consigned to the fire, John Weelmaker and Henry Toorwoort, and at Smithfield they died ‘in great horror with roaring and crying’ as the concourse of people applauded their punishment. It was the first blood spilt for religion in the reign of Elizabeth.