Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (61 page)

The duke of Anjou had returned to England at the time of Campion’s arrest and trial. It might have been unfortunate timing for a Roman Catholic duke to be seeking the queen’s hand once more, but he was immune from such embarrassments. Anjou was on the tennis court, about to begin a game, when a French
abbé
approached him and asked him to intercede with the queen on Campion’s behalf. He hesitated for a moment and stroked his face; then he turned away and called out ‘Play!’

This was his last chance to win the game. He had already been appointed as sovereign of the Netherlands, as a result of his intervention against Spanish rule, but now he was after a larger prize. If he could also gain the crown of England his power might be a match for that of his brother, the French king, and even for Philip. Yet the queen was as irresolute as ever. He stayed for three months, after his arrival in the autumn of 1581, and there was much closeting and whispering. The French court painter arrived to execute a full-length portrait of the queen. ‘You must’, she said, ‘paint me with a veil over my face.’ Veils were, in these negotiations, in plentiful supply.

Anjou required money to pursue his campaign against Spain in the Netherlands; she promised him £60,000 but paid him £10,000. She wanted at all costs to stay clear of any explicit involvement
whereby she might provoke war with Philip. Yet at the same time she wanted to alarm the Spanish king with the threat of an Anglo-French alliance, so that he might cease his meddling in Ireland. It was an infinitely difficult balancing act.

‘What shall I do?’ she asked the archbishop of York. ‘I am between Scylla and Charybdis. Anjou grants all that I ask. If I do not marry him he will be my enemy and if I do, I am no longer mistress within my own realm.’ She would eloquently announce her intention to marry, but it was believed that her sincerity could only be judged by the tone of her voice; if she spoke in a low and unimpassioned way, she was being serious. By this standard she was not being serious about Anjou. She was practising what the Spanish ambassador, Bernadino de Mendoza, called her ‘gypsy tricks’.

On one occasion the queen kissed the duke on the lips and promised in public to marry him, but many considered her to be acting a part. She may have made the espousal before witnesses as a way of conciliating the French court before making it clear that the opposition to the marriage, in the council and in the nation, was too powerful for her to withstand. The duke’s frustration was immense. At the end of 1581 he declared that, sooner than leave England without her, he would prefer that they both perished. The queen was alarmed and entreated him not to threaten ‘a poor old woman in her own kingdom’. This is reported by the Spanish ambassador.

‘No, no, Madame, you mistake; I meant no hurt to your blessed person. I meant only that I would sooner be cut in pieces than not marry you and so be laughed at by the world.’ With these words he broke down in tears, and Elizabeth was obliged to lend him her handkerchief. ‘Try to think of me,’ she said, ‘as a sister.’ Philip of Spain, to whom this drama was narrated, wrote ‘
Ojo
’ in the margin of the letter. This meant ‘Pay attention’ or ‘Look out!’

It was clear enough to all that Anjou had become something of an embarrassment in the English court. Elizabeth would not marry him. ‘I am an old woman,’ she told her courtiers, ‘to whom paternosters will suffice in place of nuptials.’ She was forty-nine years old. When in February 1582 he eventually parted from her at Canterbury, tears were plentiful. But it was said that she danced for joy in her private chamber.

The European imbroglio was further complicated by the ascension of Philip to the throne of Portugal; his navy was thus at a stroke greatly enlarged. Philip was already displeased with Elizabeth for the assaults of Sir Francis Drake upon Spanish ships, and for the plunder of Spanish treasure, in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. It was likely that the booty would eventually arrive in England and Philip ordered his ambassador to ‘advise me instantly when you hear the pirate has arrived’.

The merchants of London were anxious that their trade with Spain would be curtailed, but they were told by the privy council that Drake was a single adventurer and could not bring the wrath of Spain upon England. The queen invited the ambassador to a bear-baiting where, in the intervals, she discussed with him the affairs of Europe. Was it true that Philip had taken up 6,000 more seamen? ‘
Ut quid tot sumptus?
’ – ‘What can such an expense be for?’ Mendoza had a ready reply. ‘
Nemo novit nisi cui Pater revelavit
’ – ‘No man knows except he to whom the Father has revealed it.’ ‘Ah,’ the queen said, impressed by his Latin, ‘I see you have been something more than a light dragoon.’ Mendoza was Philip’s master of the horse.

The rumours of invasion and war were still circulating, and the fleet was being prepared at Chatham. Mendoza once more was received by the queen. ‘I found her in such alarm of his Majesty’s fleet, and so conscience-stricken by her own complicity [in the seizure of plunder], that when I entered her cabinet she bounded half a dozen paces from her sofa to receive me. Before I could say a word she enquired if I was come as a king-at-arms to declare war.’ He believed her to be ‘timid and pusillanimous’ in private, whatever her bravura in public.

Just as Philip helped to promote rebellion in Ireland, so Elizabeth decided to match him by fomenting dissent in his newly acquired kingdom of Portugal. ‘We think it good,’ she wrote, ‘for the king of Spain to be impeached both in Portugal and also in the Low Countries; whereto we shall be ready to give such indirect assistance as shall not be a cause of war.’ Covert hostilities, accompanied by effusive diplomatic gestures, were the order of the day.

Mary Stuart was of course still waiting in the wings, engaged
in clandestine intercourse both with Madrid and with Rome; she was the likely successor to Elizabeth, and it was only natural for her to press her suit. But there was no great appetite for her rule, even among the Catholics. The Spanish ambassador told his master that ‘on no account should any declaration be made to them, and they should not even be sounded, as they are quite paralysed with fear, and no good end would be gained by doing so’. Only on the death of Elizabeth might an attempt be made. Even the faithful and favoured courtier Sir Christopher Hatton sent word that on the instant of his mistress’s demise he would ride to Sheffield, where Mary was imprisoned, and declare her to be queen.

In the summer of 1583 John Whitgift was appointed archbishop of Canterbury; unlike his predecessor, Edmund Grindal, he had set his face against the Puritan tendency that had been manifested at its extreme end by the Brownists and Barrowists. Walsingham’s secretary, Nicholas Faunt, himself of a Puritan persuasion, wrote that ‘the choice of that man at this time to be archbishop maketh me to think that the Lord is even determined to scourge his Church for their unthankfulness’. In his inaugural sermon, preached at Paul’s Cross in the centre of London, he inveighed against the three kinds of disobedience manifested by papists, Anabaptists and ‘our wayward and conceited persons’; in the latter class he would have placed the stricter type of Puritan. Faunt reported that Whitgift had launched all his bitterness and vehemence against ‘such as loved reformation’.

The archbishop promulgated six articles to which all of the clergy were obliged to assent, among them strict adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles and to the Book of Common Prayer; as a result of his order 200 ministers were suspended or obliged to resign. New laws were also set in place against Catholic recusants. He relied for his investigation and his discipline on the High Commission, an ecclesiastical court that worked swiftly and secretly in pursuit of heresy and schism, error and vice. It demanded an oath that obliged anyone brought before the court to answer all questions, in defiance of the principle that no one is obliged to accuse himself or herself. ‘This corporal oath’, wrote one Puritan, ‘is to
inquire of our private speeches and conferences with our dearest and nearest friends . . .’

Those ‘conferences’ had a more precise meaning. The parish church in the village of Dedham, in Essex, was already known as a place for ‘schismatic sermons and preachings’. In the autumn of 1582 approximately twenty ministers of the neighbourhood organized an assembly or ‘conference’ in which a time was devoted to preaching and a time to scriptural exposition; parochial business was also discussed. Should the child of an unmarried couple be baptized? Should one of the ministers accept a chaplaincy in a great house?

The ‘members’ gathered for three hours on the first Monday of each month; they met in secret, moving from house to house in order to avoid discovery. They sometimes consulted their learned brethren at Cambridge, but they were in general completely separate from other churches. They became, however, an inspiration for other such conferences. ‘Let’s go to Dedham,’ the people of Ipswich said, ‘to get a little fire!’ This early assembly, therefore, can have some claim to shaping the Presbyterian movement that was to bear such unexpected fruit in the next century of English history. Neither Whitgift nor the High Commission proved an impediment.

Henry Barrow, the founder of the sect that bore his name, was himself summoned before the commission.

Ten years later Barrow would be executed for publishing seditious literature. Whitgift himself was implacable. When a Kentish delegation of ministers came to remonstrate with him on the severity of his measures he impugned them as ‘boys, babes, princocks, unlearned sots’. He shouted down one more assertive complainant with ‘thou boy, beardless boy, yesterday bird, new out of shell’.

Burghley, quietly sympathetic to the Puritan cause, remonstrated
with Whitgift about his articles of examination which were ‘so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstances, as he thought the inquisitors of Spain used not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their preys’. At a time when there was such a lack of learned clergy, and with the threat of resurgent Catholicism, he believed that the bishops ‘take a very ill and unadvised course in driving them from their cures’.

Whitgift’s methods, however, were entirely congenial to the queen; she called the archbishop ‘my little black husband’. She had been alarmed by the spread of preachers calling for more reform, and appreciated all of Whitgift’s efforts to curb nonconformity. The archbishop himself declared that she had given ‘straight charge’ for his policy. Whitgift, the first of what might be called the truly Elizabethan bishops, was eventually obliged to curb his attacks upon the more moderate of the Puritans; but he did succeed in imposing order and uniformity upon the Church, largely by removing the Catholics and the stricter Puritans from the embrace of the state religion.

Some of the clerics of a more severe persuasion often continued their ministry, for fear that their flock might otherwise be lost or scattered. We must, as one said, labour on ‘bearing so much as with a good conscience we may’. A text from Revelation was set up beside the royal arms in the parish church of Bury St Edmunds, with the words ‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold not hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ So much for Elizabeth.

When on Sunday 12 January 1583 a stand of the bear-pit in Paris Garden collapsed, killing many spectators, it was deemed to be a judgement of God on the profanity of London. In the summer of that year a comet appeared above the city and was supposed to be the portent of the death of a great person. Many pointed to the queen. She was in her palace at Richmond at the time. She ordered the windows to be thrown open so that she might more clearly see the ominous light. She called out ‘
Jacta est alea
’ – ‘The dice are thrown’.

In the following month an attempt was made upon her life. John Somerville resided with an old Catholic family, the Ardens
of Park Hall in Warwickshire; he seems to have been of an excitable disposition and fervently supported the cause of Mary Stuart. There had been more than one plot devised against the queen on behalf of that lady, but Walsingham had managed to foil them all. Somerville began to speak of the queen as a witch and a spawn of the devil, and he told friends that he was riding to London to assassinate her; he hoped ‘to see her head set upon a pole, for she was a serpent and a viper’. He wore the emblem of the lamb of God as an amulet, and then set out for the capital. Touched by insanity, perhaps, he bragged to people on the road concerning his divine mission and word of his conduct reached London before he did; he was intercepted and taken to the Tower. He confessed to his intent upon the rack and at the same time incriminated his father-in-law, John Arden, and their house-priest. Arden was hanged at Tyburn, while Somerville managed to strangle himself in his cell; the priest agreed to act as a spy in other Catholic families.

At the same time another conspiracy had been formed against Elizabeth. Francis Throgmorton, of an old Cheshire family, owned a house in London at Paul’s Wharf; here he acted as an intermediary between Mary Stuart and the Spanish ambassador. He was often seen leaving the ambassador’s house by the secret agents of the Crown, and Walsingham waited for the right moment to arrest him and search his house. In the middle of writing a ciphered letter to Mary when the officers arrived, he managed to destroy the incriminating document. But other papers were found, among them a list of prominent English Catholics and the sketched plans of harbours suitable for the landing of a foreign force. A treatise in defence of the title of the queen of Scots was also seized together with ‘six or seven infamous libels against Her Majesty, printed beyond seas’.