11 Dickens, ‘The first stages of Romish Recusancy in Yorkshire’, pp.163 and 166.
12 Prudently, Mary had been moved further south to Tutbury from Bolton Castle, North Yorkshire, in late January 1569 to forestall any attempt to free her by Catholic supporters in northern England.
13 Elizabeth was surprised that Sussex doubted the fidelity of her people as she believed she had ‘many faithful and loyal subjects in that country’. However, if any person incited mutiny within the royalist ranks she recommended ‘the speedy executions of two or three’ as a salutary example. Sharp, Memorials of the Rebellion of 1569, p.50.
14 Sharp, ibid., p.189; Fletcher & MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, p.151.
15 BL Harleian MS 6,990, f.44. Printed in Sharp, op. cit., pp.42–3. The proclamation was also published at Staindrop, Co. Durham, and Richmond, north Yorkshire.
16 Fletcher & MacCulloch, op. cit., p.98.
17 De Spes to the Duke of Alba; London, 1 December 1569. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 2, p.213.
18 The removal of Northumberland’s accoutrements was intended ‘that all others, by his example, for evermore hereafter beware how they commit or do like crime or fall in shame or rebuke’. BL Cotton MS Vespasian C, xiv, f.583.
19 De Spes to Philip II; London, 3 December 1569. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 2, p.213. More than two weeks later, he reported the unruly return home of the London levies – ‘miserable fellows’ – who had ‘slashed and cudgelled Captain Leighton, one of [their] leaders who has come [back] to court badly wounded to complain of his own soldiers’. Ibid., p.218.
20 Philip II to the Duke of Alba; Madrid, 16 December 1569. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 2, p.217.
21 Aside from the deserters, Bowes lost only five killed and sixty-seven wounded during the siege.
22 Sharp, op. cit., p.119.
23 Contarini to the Doge and Signory; Angers, 17 January 1570. CSP Venice, vol. 7, p.439.
24 De Spes to Philip II; London, 9 January 1570. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 2, p.225.
25 Northumberland was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in May 1895. William Tessimond appeared before a court in York in 1572 for possessing the relic of hair from Northumberland’s beard which he cut off while the head was displayed in the tollbooth. See: Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation . . .’, p.794.
26 Westmorland died at Nieuport in the Netherlands on 16 November 1601.
27 Contarini to the Doge and Signory; Angers, 17 January 1570. CSP Venice, vol. 7, p.439.
28 These included a Durham alderman, a priest called Plumtree, forty constables and fifty serving men in Durham. BL Harleian MS 6,991, ff.31–3. Three hundred and twenty were executed in that county.
29 McCall, ‘Executions after the Northern Rebellion’, pp.85 and 87.
30 Sharp, op. cit., p.170. Henry Carey, First Baron Hunsdon (1526–96), was the son of Elizabeth’s aunt, Mary Boleyn, and William Carey, an esquire of the body to Henry VIII. Mary, of course, was Henry’s mistress before Anne Boleyn and there has been persistent speculation that Carey and his sister Catherine were the king’s illegitimate children.
31 CSP Venice, vol. 7, pp.448–51.
32 Felton was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886.
33 13 Elizabeth cap. 1. This was repealed on 28 July 1863 but until as late as 1967, it remained treason under the Succession to the Crown Act 1707 to maintain that Parliament could not control the succession. The first Treason Act of Elizabeth’s reign was in 1558 (1 Elizabeth cap. 5).
34 13 Elizabeth cap. 2.
35 Parmiter, ‘The Imprisonment of Papists in Private Castles’, p.16.
36 BL Harleian MS 290, f.88.
37 Williams, A Tudor Tragedy, pp.199–200. Bailly (1542–1625) was released from the Marshalsea prison, probably in 1573, and died in Belgium.
38 Robinson, The Dukes of Norfolk, p.63; Williams, op. cit., pp.200–2.
39 Hutchinson, House of Treason, p.192.
40 CSP Domestic Elizabeth 1581–90, p.48. On 3 May 1581 the Privy Council had ordered Norton to examine ‘a Jesuit naming himself Briant and if he refuses to confess the truth, then to put him to torture and by the pain and terror of the same, to wring from him the knowledge of such things as shall appertain’.
41 See: Merriman, American Historical Review, vol. 13, fn. p.484.
42 HMC Salisbury, vol. 1, p.526.
43 BL Add. MS 48,027, ff.80–125v; Hutchinson, House of Treason, p.201.
44 Merriman, op. cit., p.481.
45 Parmiter, op. cit., p.16.
46 APC, vol. 8, p.73. Wisbech Castle, originally constructed by William the Conqueror, was largely rebuilt in brick in 1478–83 and was surrounded by a moat. It was later demolished and a house built on the site in 1816. Other castles identified by Sir Francis Walsingham probably in the spring of 1579 as locations to imprison recusants were: Banbury, Oxfordshire; Framlingham, Suffolk; Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire (where Katherine of Aragon died); Portchester in Portsmouth harbour; Devizes, Wiltshire; Melbourne, Derbyshire; Halton, Cheshire; Wigmore, Herefordshire and Barnard Castle, Co. Durham. See: BL Harleian MS 360, art. 38 (ff.65r and v).
47 Fénelon, Correspondance Diplomatique, vol. 3, p.27.
48 Ibid., p.27.
49 Brennan, ‘Papists and Patriotism . . .’, p.6.
50 Meyer, England and the Catholic Church . . ., p.242.
51 Carini, Mons. Niccolò Ormaneto, nunzio alla corte di Filippo II, pp.84 et seq.
52 Queen Mary I, Elizabeth’s predecessor.
53 Elizabeth was implicated in the conspiracy that led to Wyatt’s Rebellion in 1554 because of her relationship with two of the ringleaders, Sir William Pickering and Sir James Crofts. The treason case against her was dropped through the intervention and influence of her great-uncle, William Howard. See Somerset, Elizabeth I, pp.47–55.
54 CSP Vatican, vol. 2, p.551.
55 Duffy, Fires of Faith, p.93.
56 Loomie, Spanish Elizabethans, p.8.
57 Marble Arch, on the edge of Hyde Park, is the site of Tyburn. Story was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886.
58 13 Elizabeth cap. 3.
59 Meyer, op. cit., pp.239–40.
60 Elizabeth kept a crucifix and candles on the altar of the Chapel Royal to the fury of her chaplains and bishops who regarded these objects as ‘dregs of popery’. See: Rex, The Tudors, p.186.
61 Stählin, Sir Francis Walsingham und seine Zeit . . ., fn. p.527.
62 CSP Vatican, vol. 2, p.45.
63 Fénelon, op. cit., vol. 4, p.330.
64 Gregory had become Pope on 13 May 1572 on the death of Pius V, who was canonised by Pope Clement XI in May 1712. Gregory probably believed that the Huguenots were involved in a coup d’état and was seemingly unaware of the extent of the massacre, so subsequent criticism of him may be a little harsh. He is best remembered for introducing the Gregorian calendar into Catholic countries in 1578.
65 See E. Howe, ‘Architecture and Vasari’s Paintings of the Massacre of the Huguenots’, Jnl Warburg & Courtauld Institute, vol. 39 (1976), pp.258–61.
66 Merriman, op. cit., p.484.
67 Walton, Intelligence Analysis . . ., p.50. These responsibilities span the activities of today’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Security Service (MI5) the police Special Branch and the electronic eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
68 More than 1,310 seminary priests landed in England between 1574 and 1588 but no more than 150 were active in any one year, even in the peak year of 1585. See: McGrath & Rowe, ‘Anstruther Revisited’, pp.2 and 6–7.
69 See: Law, ‘Cuthbert Mayne and the Bull of Pius V’, pp.141–4. Mayne was executed at Launceston, Cornwall on 29 November 1577. He was canonised by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970.
70 TNA, SP 12/114/22. See also: Parmiter, op. cit., p.18.
71 TNA, SP 12/141/29.
72 23 Elizabeth cap. 1.
73 De Mendoza to Philip; London, 6 April 1581. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 3, p.97.
74 Twelve seminary priests, headed by the Jesuit William Weston, staged exorcisms at Peckham’s home in Denham in 1585–6, when several of his servants and adolescents were said to be possessed by demons. They used the girdle worn by the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion (executed in 1581) to cause the ‘devils excruciating pain’. One witness believed that five hundred people were reconciled to the Catholic faith because of this incident; others estimated the number at three to four thousand. See: Walsham, op. cit., pp.800 and 802–3.
75 Merriman, op. cit., p.497.
76 The Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) conquered the Aztec empire in present-day Mexico in 1519–21.
77 CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 3, pp.384–5; Merriman, op.cit., pp.492–9.
78 Soldiers armed with a harquebus, an early form of musket.
79 CSP Vatican, vol. 2, p.19.
80 Ibid., p.54.
81 CSP Vatican, vol. 3, p.208.
82 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.130.
83 A Jesuit witness reported Throckmorton ‘made a very holy and edifying end. He would not ask pardon of the Queen . . . at the hour of his death [he] said she ought to ask pardon of God for her heresy and misgovernment in allowing innocent men to be killed every day’ (Edwards, Plots and Plotters . . ., p.99). Lord Hunsdon corroborated this account: ‘He died very stubbornly, never asking Her Majesty’s forgiveness nor would willingly have anybody to pray of them’ (TNA, SP Scot. 52/35/18).
84 See: A new Ballade declarynge the dangerous shootyng of the Gunne at the Courte . . . by ‘W.E.’ – William Elderton.
85 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.126.
86 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.127. The Spanish ambassador claimed that Edward Arden, his wife Mary and the priest Hugh Hall were to be executed; however, the woman’s body would not be quartered as this was illegal under English law. Her sentence was deferred because she was pregnant. CSP Foreign Elizabeth, vol. 18, pp.651–2. See also: Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham, vol. 2, fn. p.381.
87 BL Cotton MS Caligula B v, f.159. A brief on the issues contained in the Bond for Parliamentary debate, drawn up by Walsingham’s clerk, is in ff.222–3v.
88 Hatfield House CP 13/177 and BL Add. MS 48,027, f. 251v.
89 27 Elizabeth cap. 1.
90 TNA, SP 12/176/22. See: Graves, Profiles in Power, p.94. Burghley had drawn up similar plans in October 1562 when Elizabeth was suffering from a dangerous smallpox infection which deprived her of speech for some time.
91 BL Add. MS 48, 027, ff.242–47v.
92 BL Lansdowne MS 43, article no. 3; 3ff.
93 Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spymaster, p.146.
94 A broadsheet written by Thomas Deloney and printed in London by Richard Jones in 1586, celebrated the event. Entitled A joyful song made on behalf of all her majesties faithful subjects of the great joy which was made in London at the taking of the late traitorous conspirators, it included crude woodcuts of the conspirators and carried this snappy verse:
O Englishmen with Roman harts what Devil bewitch you
To seek the spoil of Prince and Realm like Traitors most untrue
Why is your duty forgot unto your Royal Queene?
That you your faith and promise breake O viperous band uncleane . . .
Blessed be God who knew your thoughts had brought your treasons out.
(Society of Antiquaries of London, Broadsides, Henry VIII–Elizabeth, 1519–1603, f.83.) STC 6557.
95 For more on Elizabeth’s cynical plan to avoid responsibility for Mary’s death, see: Read, ‘The Proposal to Assassinate Mary Queen of Scots’.
96 For a full account of Mary Queen of Scots’ trial and execution, see my book Elizabeth‘s Spymaster, pp.169–202. An eye-witness account of the section by Richard Fletcher, dean of Peterborough, is in BL, Add. MS 48,027 ff.653–8v with a sketch of the scene at f.650. Other accounts are in Cotton MS Caligula B, v, ff.175v–6 and Hatfield House CP 16/17 and 164/170.
CHAPTER 2: Rumours of War
1 Murdin, Collection State Papers, vol. 1, p.592.
2 Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico, was founded by Hernán Cortés after landing there on Good Friday 1519, naming it Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. Villa Rica (‘rich village’) came from the abundance of gold found by the Spanish – and Vera Cruz (‘True Cross’) a reference to the religious festival held on the day he came ashore.
3 This was Hawkins’ third slaving voyage. The first Englishman known to have traded in slaves was the London merchant John Lock who brought five slaves from Guinea back to England in 1555.
4 Mattingly, Defeat of the Spanish Armada, p.85. There were insufficient supplies in Minion to feed the survivors of the attack, so one hundred crewmen volunteered to be put ashore elsewhere on the Mexican coast – where they were later taken prisoner.
5 Somerset, Elizabeth 1, p.416.
6 Ibid., p.537.
7 On uninhabited Grand Cayman, in the Caribbean, the English killed twenty alligators: ‘There were crocodiles, which did encounter and fight with us. They live both in the sea and land. We took divers and made very good meat of them. Some of the same were ten feet (3.05 m) in length.’ Corbett, Spanish War, pp.22–3. For an account of Drake’s planned campaign, see BL Lansdowne MS 100, f.98.
8 Martin & Parker, The Spanish Armada, p.91.
9 Mattingly, op. cit., p.82.
10 Ibid., p.82.
11 Martin & Parker, op. cit. pp.95–6. Escalante published one of the first geographies of China in Seville in 1577, entitled: Discourse of the Navigation made by the Portuguese to the Kingdom and Provinces of the Orient and the existing Knowledge of the Greatness of the Kingdom of China. In contrast to the ponderous title, the book was only two hundred pages long, a reflection of how little was known about China at the time. Six years later, Escalante published his Discourses on the Military Art.
12 Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.96.
13 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.11.
14 Corbett, Spanish War, pp.61–3.
15 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, pp.305, 323, 324. In 1583, English merchants had reported that Santa Cruz had been ordered by Philip to command two hundred and fifty galleys for an invasion, to be launched from Cherbourg in France ‘and there receiving aid from the French king to cut over to Portsmouth’. Hatfield House CP 162/148.
16 There were also riots on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent that February. In Sussex, markets were reported well supplied with grain but ‘the prices are high, wheat being at 3s 4d (17p, or £441 in 2013 spending power) a bushel (a dry measure of volume, equivalent to 9.9 litres). CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, pp.305 and 323. The famine continued: on 2 January 1587 a proclamation was published, ‘foreseeing the general dearth of corn and other victuals, partly through the unseasonableness of the year past’, ordering markets to be supplied with foodstuffs ‘at reasonable prices’. It also criticised the ‘uncharitable greediness of such as be great corn-masters’. BL Lansdowne MS 48, f.120 and STC 8161.
17 Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham, vol. 3, p.219.
18 BL Harleian MS 6,993, f.125; Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spymaster, p.205.
19 Read, op. cit., vol. 3, p.220.
20 Poyntz was the brother-in-law of Sir Thomas Heneage, treasurer of Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber, and a student of the Inner Temple in London. He was an acknowledged double agent and was used by Walsingham to feed disinformation to the Spanish government. He worked for Mendoza, now Spanish ambassador in Paris.
21 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.340.
22 Martin & Parker, op. cit., pp.96–8.
23 Philip II to Count de Olivares; Madrid, 11 February 1587. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.16. The Infanta was the ten-year-old Isabella Clara Eugenia, Philip’s daughter by his third wife, Elizabeth of Valois. She eventually married Albert VII, Archduke of Austria, but died in 1633 without issue. Mary’s will, written by her secretary Claude Nau, with corrections in her own hand, was drawn up in February 1577 and is in BL Cotton MS Vespasian C xvi, f.145. An e
xtract, with notes by Robert Beale, clerk to Elizabeth’s Privy Council, is in BL Add. MS 48,027, f.530.
24 Mattingly, op. cit., p.83.
25 Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.104.
26 See, for example, estimates of Spain’s annual revenues drawn up in c.1584–9 in BL Add. MS 63,742, ff.99–105.
27 Welwood, Most Material Transactions . . ., pp.8–9; Read, op. cit., vol. 3, fn. pp.285–6 and the ‘Life of Sutton’ in Biographia Britannica, or the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons who have Flourished in Great Britain, six vols (London, 1747–66), vol. 6, pp.3, 852. There is no mention of Sutton’s involvement in this conspiracy in the twenty-seven folios of his Life, written in the seventeenth century and now in BL Lansdowne MS 1,198.
28 CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.127. Sixtus was the first pope to declare that abortion was homicide.
29 Meyer, England and the Catholic Church . . ., p.329.
30 CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.51.
31 Ibid., p.114.
32 Ibid., pp.116–18. The king noted on the memorandum: ‘The papers that came did not say that [Mary’s] letter was written in her hand, although considering the quality of the matter and the way that it is dealt with, it may be inferred that it was so. If Don Bernardino [Mendoza] has the original, it would not be bad to see how it can safely be brought hither, as I do not believe it is here now. But we have a copy . . .’
33 Sir Francis Englefield to Philip II; Madrid, 17 June, 18 June, 22 June, 1587. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.112.
34 The English spy codenamed ‘B.C.’ reported that initially Philip awarded Dudley a pension of six crowns a day. ‘If I had my alphabet [his cipher for use in a letter-substitution code] I would say more touching his lewd speech.’ (BL Harleian MS 295. f.190.) Did the youth grow into the ‘Mr Dudley’ whom the exiled priest Robert Persons mentions in 1590 as being one of the seminary priests being sent to England that year? (HMC Salisbury, vol. 4, p.69.) Conversely, in BL Lansdowne MS 53, article 79, is an account of Anne Burnell who claimed in London that she was the daughter of Mary I and Philip. Bizarrely, she had the arms of England tattooed on her back. However, she was shown to be insane, caused ‘by her great misery and penury’ and having been ejected by her husband.
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