Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (58 page)

No burnings had taken place for seventeen years and John Foxe, the historian of the martyrs under Mary, remonstrated with the queen in a letter about their unhappy return. Elizabeth called him ‘my father Foxe’ and so he had some licence to preach to her. ‘I have no favour for heretics,’ he wrote, ‘but I am a man and would spare the life of man. To roast the living bodies of unhappy men, erring rather from blindness of judgement than from the impulse of will, in fire and flames, of which the fierceness is fed by the pitch and brimstone poured over them, is a Romish abomination . . . for the love of God spare their lives.’ The call was not heeded.

The death of Archbishop Parker in May 1575 led to a change in the general direction of the Church. Parker had left behind great wealth, and it was believed that he had been generally corrupt in the duties of his office. His successor, Edmund Grindal, was known for his piety as much as for his learning; he had been favoured by Lord Burghley and was indeed of a stricter sort. An anonymous admirer wrote to persuade him that ‘there may be consultation had with some of your brethren how some part of those Romish dregs remaining, offensive to the godly, may be removed. I know it will be hard for you to do that good that you and your brethren desire. Yet (things discreetly ordered) somewhat there may be done.’ The task was ‘hard’ because Elizabeth herself much disliked any further change or meddling. She was a religious conservative, and soon enough Grindal would earn her displeasure.

Elizabeth was alarmed, for example, by the rise in events that became known as ‘prophesyings’ or exercises. These were meetings, attended by the lesser as well as the more senior clergy, in which
passages of Scripture were discussed and the lesser clergy were instructed in the art of the sermon and other matters. The laity were sometimes allowed to attend the sessions, and the day usually ended with a supper at a local inn when points of doctrine were pronounced and debated. The term ‘prophesyings’ derived from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in which he urged that ‘the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge . . . for ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn and all may be comforted’.

These events were welcomed by those of an evangelical persuasion. The attendance of all ranks of clergy did much to erase the hierarchical degrees of the established Church, and the emphasis on preaching and debate also offered ample opportunity for the more open and informal discussion of doctrine beyond the confines of the Sunday service. The prophesyings in fact became popular among the general population and were soon being attended in the Midlands, East Anglia, London, Devon, Kent and Surrey.

The queen came to hear of the matter as a result of some local quarrels between conformists and nonconformists. She had also been told that certain priests, suspended from their duties for their more radical opinions, had participated in the events. So she asked Archbishop Grindal to bring them to an end; with an inveterate dislike for any form of religious zeal, she also ordered him to restrict the number of preachers in each shire to three or four. In response the archbishop proposed a code of practice, an offer of compromise that she rejected. He then wrote her a letter, in which he quoted the example of the biblical prophets who had not scrupled to offend or rebuke the kings.

It was his solemn duty to speak plainly to her. Without the preaching of the Word of God, the people would perish. The prophesyings had been introduced for ‘the edification, exhortation and comfort of the clergy’, and he went on to say that ‘I cannot with a safe conscience and without the offence of the majesty of God give my consent to the suppressing of the said exercises’. He was willing to disobey the queen who was also the governor of his Church. ‘Remember Madam,’ he wrote, ‘that you are a mortal creature.’ The somewhat impertinent letter was met with royal silence. Five months later a decree was issued from the court
forbidding ‘inordinate preachings, readings, and ministerings of the sacrament’; the people had left their parishes in order to attend ‘disputations and new devised opinions upon points of divinity, far unmeet for vulgar people’. The prophesyings thereby came to an end.

Archbishop Grindal himself had incurred the severe displeasure of the queen. She had wanted to chase him from office, but Cecil and Walsingham persuaded her that this would create an unhappy precedent. Any open scandal would also bring comfort to the Catholics. So she excluded him from any real authority and confined him to his palace at Lambeth, where he was allowed to perform only the most routine duties. A time came when he was ready to resign, by mutual agreement, but his death prevented that further compromise.

Parliament was summoned in February 1576, and almost at once a supporter of the Puritan cause, Peter Wentworth, delivered what was considered to be a most indelicate address. He demanded freedom of speech in parliament, especially in matters of religion, even at the risk of incurring the queen’s displeasure. He argued that parliament was the guardian of the laws, and that it ought to be able to discharge the trust with impunity; even the monarch was constituted as such by the law. It was intolerable that religious debate was curtailed because of a rumour that ‘the queen’s majesty liketh not of such a matter; whosoever preferreth it, she will be much offended with him’. It was equally intolerable that ‘messages’ could be sent from the court inhibiting debate. ‘I would to God, Mr Speaker, that these two were buried in hell: I mean rumours and messages.’ And he went on to say that ‘none is without fault; no, not our noble queen . . . It is a dangerous thing in a prince unkindly to entreat and abuse his or her nobility and people, as Her Majesty did the last Parliament. And it is a dangerous thing in a Prince to oppose or bend herself against her nobility and people.’

His colleagues in the Commons immediately denounced him for promoting licence rather than liberty, and in particular condemned him for introducing a question about the prerogatives of the sovereign. He was sequestered from the chamber and committed as a prisoner to the sergeant-at-arms. He was then brought
before a committee of the council, and excused his references to liberty of speech on the grounds that the queen’s ‘messages’ to parliament explicitly forbade debate on the vital matters of religion. This was not a tolerable position. Wentworth was confined for a month before the queen, by special ‘grace and favour’, restored him to his liberty. There was as yet no presumption of free speech in parliament.

Once more the business of the queen’s marriage was introduced, in this parliament, and once more she demurred with an ambiguous reply. In her speech at the end of the session she declared that ‘if I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm, whereby my private person might be little set by, I would not forsake that poor and single state to match with a monarch . . . yet for your behalf, there is no way so difficult that may touch my private person, which I will not content myself to take’. She preferred to remain unmarried, in other words, but would bow to the consideration of the great matters of state.

The queen thought so much of this speech that she sent a copy of it to her godson, John Harrington, with a covering letter. ‘Boy Jack,’ she wrote, ‘I have made a clerk write fair my poor words for thine use, as it cannot be such striplings have entrance into the Parliament House as yet . . . so shalt thou hereafter, perchance, find some good fruits thereof, when thy godmother is out of remembrance.’ Her undertaking, to respect the greater matters of state, would soon enough be put to the test.

Towards the close of 1576 the Netherlands were exposed to what became known as ‘the Spanish fury’, when many of the unpaid Spanish forces mutinied against their officers; a massacre of the civilian population was the consequence, with 8,000 murdered in Antwerp alone. That city never regained its former prominence. The outrage deeply disturbed the people of the Netherlands, then comprising what is now Holland and Belgium, and even the Catholic provinces joined forces with the rebellious provinces of Holland and Zeeland in their determination to curtail the powers of their Spanish overlords. Hence arose the Pacification of Ghent signed just four days after the massacre; this was a proposal grudgingly accepted by the new governor, Don John of Austria, younger half-brother of Philip II, among the terms of which was the demand that all of the Spanish troops should be removed. There was now a common front among the provinces of the Netherlands, ratified by the Union of Brussels at the beginning of 1577.

Elizabeth was once more enmired in caution and hesitation. Sir Walter Raleigh is reported to have said of her that she ‘does everything by halves’. Yet this was for England a time of peace. It lasted for twenty-six years, from 1559 to 1585, and, as the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, told the Commons, ‘we
be in quietness at home and safe enough from troubles abroad’. There was no room for complacency, however, and he warned that ‘we ought in time to make provision to prevent any storm that may arise either here or abroad’. So why then should the queen risk raising any ‘storm’ by meddling directly or militarily in the affairs of the Spanish Netherlands?

She sent £20,000 to the Netherlands and arranged for the later dispatch of a similar sum, on condition that she was repaid in full within eight months; she justified this action to the Spanish on the grounds that she was merely providing funds to pay for the arrears of the Spanish army. By the summer of the year the occupying army was on its way home. Then, at the beginning of 1578, all was changed. The army of the Low Countries was destroyed in an engagement at Gembloux, when Don John’s forces poured back over the frontier. The United Provinces looked to Elizabeth at this juncture for much-needed aid, but they looked in vain. The queen did nothing.

‘If Her Majesty do nothing now,’ her envoy wrote a week after the defeat, ‘it will in the judgement of the wisest bring forth some dangerous alteration.’ A month passed without any sign of action from Elizabeth. It was rumoured that she was about to send an army under the earl of Leicester to fight the Spanish, but this was wishful thinking on the part of the Protestants. The envoy wrote once more that ‘hesitation is cruel and dishonourable. If she say no, she will not escape the hatred of the papists. If she say yes, she still has great advantages for the prosecution of the war; but it must be one or the other and swiftly.’ Elizabeth was the last person on earth to whom such advice would be profitable or welcome. Instead she sent a further £20,000, with terms for prompt repayment. William Camden, a contemporary, wrote that ‘thus sate she as an heroical princess and umpire betwixt the Spaniards, the French and the States; so as she might well have used that saying of her father,
cui adhaereo praeest
, that is, the party to which I adhere getteth the upper hand. And true it was which one hath written, that France and Spain are as it were the scales in the balance of Europe, and England the tongue or the holder of the balance.’

Her influence upon France was further strengthened by another bout of matrimonial politics, when once more she invited
the attentions of Francis, duke of Anjou. He was the unfortunate youth, then duke of Alençon, the reports of whose personal attractions were the object of many jokes at the English court; his face was pitted with the scars of smallpox, and he had a slight deformity of the spine which belied his nickname of ‘Hercules’. He was also twenty-one years younger than the English queen, which might leave Elizabeth herself open to ridicule. In these unpromising circumstances the negotiations began once more. Her resolve might have been further strengthened by her discovery that her favourite, the earl of Leicester, had remarried. In the spring of 1578, at a secret ceremony in Kenilworth, he had joined himself with the countess of Essex; it was said that ‘he doted extremely on marriage’, and he purchased for her a manor house at Wanstead, in Essex, where he might see her away from the eyes of the world.

Leicester then came to London but declared himself too ill to attend the court. But the queen was informed of his arrival soon enough. The Spanish ambassador reported that, on 28 April, while she was taking the air in the royal garden, she found a letter that had been left in the doorway. After reading it she went at once to Leicester House, and remained there until ten in the evening. It is possible that Leicester had written the letter, hoping to turn away the royal wrath. Or it may have been an anonymous denunciation of his marriage. Whatever the cause, the effect was the same. It was said that she had wished to commit Leicester to the Tower of London, but then relented. In the following month, however, she opened negotiations for her marriage to the young duke.

The French were suspicious of her motives. It may be that she wished only to draw Anjou away from a possible alliance with the rebels of the Low Countries; the duke was possessed by an appetite for greatness in military affairs, and the prospect of the English crown was the only means of diverting him. Together the French and the English might then be powerful enough to bring Spain and the rebels to peace. So the French court was cautious. The king of France believed that there was more artifice than desire in the proposal. Anjou himself entertained her offer but urged speed and expedition. To the French ambassadors she was benign if not exactly coquettish; she even professed to be unconcerned about the difference in age between herself and the young duke. She would
treat him as a son as well as a husband. No one knew if she was sincere in these blandishments; perhaps even she was not sure of her own intentions.