by Lisa Hilton
The contentiousness and subversion which surrounded the Campion case were very much products of Renaissance thought, and they demanded a peculiarly Renaissance solution. It was no longer the case, as an earlier Elizabethan scholar has suggested, that “the dominant ruling idea of Renaissance England … was the belief in a cosmic order which governed both human institutions and natural phenomena.”4
ELIZABETH MAY HAVE held her power by divine right of that “cosmic order,” and she believed utterly in the concept, but she saw that different measures were required to secure that right’s continued exercise. If Machiavelli is “the single best source of that Renaissance view of politics which exalted cunning and cruelty over Christianity,” then Elizabeth’s treatment of Campion is a perfect exemplar of that view.5 The rift created by reform was too deep to any longer accommodate scholastic debate. To use a modern term, the government saw the missionary priests as spiritual terrorists, and, like governments today, declared themselves unprepared to have dealings with them. Yet the extent to which Elizabeth’s readiness to kill her enemies was fostered by genuine fear or by a ruthless determination to preserve her state is further confused by the debate as to the extremity England really faced. Was the Catholic threat as fearsome as it was perceived to be, or was that fear a product of the very vigilance upon which the government both insisted and depended? The corpses, though, are irrefutable.
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ELIZABETH HAD NEVER sought to become the champion of the Protestant cause in Europe. Confessional divisions in the 1570s were causing her enough trouble at home; moreover, she was extremely averse to the risk and expense that foreign intervention entailed. She was, however, prepared to support her French counterpart, Charles IX, in his aim of healing the religious breach that had already cost France so many grueling and destructive years of war. Charles’s plan was threefold—Elizabeth was to marry his brother the Duke of Anjou, thus creating an Anglo-French alliance against Spain; his sister Margot was to marry the Bourbon-Valois Henri of Navarre; and, finally, the rift between two of his most powerful subjects, the pro-Catholic Duc de Guise and the Huguenot Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, had to be repaired. Coligny and Guise had once been friends, described as the “two diamonds of France,” but years of vicious religious factionalism had set them at odds. Not only did Charles’s efforts at peace-making fail, but the enmity between the two men would result in the “greatest imponderable of sixteenth-century history,” the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.1
In late 1571, Elizabeth’s envoy Sir Thomas Smith arrived in Paris to begin negotiations. Unfortunately, the Duke of Anjou had no interest whatsoever in marrying a thirty-eight-year-old woman he described as a balding heretic, but his mother, Catherine de Medici, tactfully proposed her eighteen-year-old youngest son, then Duke of Alençon, as a replacement. Sir Thomas approved of the suggestion, writing to Elizabeth that Alençon was not only less obstinate and bumptious than his brother, but also less fervently Catholic and “foolish and restive like a mule.” To his disadvantage, Alençon was practically a dwarf, with a complexion repulsively ruined by smallpox, though his mother added protectively that he was growing a beard, which would conceal the worst of it. On 19 April 1572, England and France signed the Treaty of Blois, a defensive alliance agreement, but events in the Netherlands rendered the union frustratingly inadequate.2
Since the previous July, the rebel provinces of the north of Holland had recognized William, Prince of Orange, as their leader. Protestant leaders in France had been trying to persuade Catherine de Medici that France would benefit by assisting in the Netherlands’s liberation from Spain, supported by the Dutch envoy Louis Count of Nassau, Orange’s brother (an ally of Coligny). Charles IX and his mother had at least two secret meetings with Nassau, and though Charles was prepared to lend covert support to Nassau’s campaign in the southern provinces, he would not take the definitive step of declaring war. England’s perspective was key, but Blois held Elizabeth to no martial commitment in the circumstances, while the marriage with Alençon had made no progress. Without a firm commitment from Elizabeth, Catherine de Medici was not prepared to intervene. The royal council in Paris was in disarray—Catholics, supported by the Duke of Anjou, refused to countenance a war in favor of heretics, while the Coligny party argued that only intervention now would prevent a worse conflict in the future. If Spain was provoked, the Catholic party countered, Philip II might well invade from Italy and the Pyrenees. To Elizabeth, Walsingham wrote of the state of suspense in the city, and it was her refusal to engage—supported by the moderate party on the French Privy Council—which left Coligny defeated. Ironically, just as Elizabeth, fearful of potential French domination in the Netherlands, was considering a rapprochement with Alba (it was even proposed in council that England back him in the event of a French invasion), Philip was holding Elizabeth responsible for the whole mess:
The king is informed [wrote a correspondent at Madrid to Cecil] that if it had not been for the Queen’s Grace of England, Flanders had not rebelled against the Duke of Alba … there be many Englishmen come into the Low Countries, of whose coming both the Queen and her Council do well know … so that the King is very angry with the Queen’s grace, and … that he hath sworn that he will be revenged in such sort, as both the Queen and England shall repent that ever did they meddle in any of his Countries.3
Coligny, who had sworn a private oath to support the house of Orange, nonetheless felt himself bound in conscience to support the Dutch rebels, describing the Spanish, in a letter to Cecil, as the “servants of Satan.” As Protestant magnates from the south gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henri of Navarre and Princess Margot, Coligny announced that he intended to leave the city on 25 August with a company of fifteen thousand men. On 22 August, he left the Louvre at about 11 a.m. to cross the river to his home. As he reached Saint-Germain, a shot was fired. Coligny survived, losing a finger and suffering a fractured arm, but who was it that wanted him dead?
In the days that followed the assassination attempt, Coligny was murdered in his bed by Guise’s men. But Guise was not acting alone. Saint Bartholomew’s Day was a massacre far beyond the scale of Wassy. Between two and six thousand Protestants were killed. More than six hundred homes in Paris were pillaged, women and children were horrifically slaughtered, and for once, the cliché that the streets ran with blood was all too appallingly accurate. Charles IX, attempting to save the French monarchy’s face in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, gave out to his ambassadors that it “happened through a private quarrel long fostered between … two houses,” which has often given rise to the interpretation that the massacre was the consequence of a Guise/Coligny vendetta, but the massacre and the feud were two separate, though overlapping disasters. Guise was exonerated by Walsingham, himself an eyewitness to the terrible events of those few days: “The duke of Guise is not so bloody, neither did he kill any man himself… . He spake openly that for the admiral’s death he was glad, for he knew him to be his enemy, but he thought for the rest that the King had put such to death as if it had pleased him might have done him very good service.” Evidence suggests that Guise was acting in collusion with Catherine de Medici and the Duke of Anjou, to prevent Coligny’s departure and the civil war they believed would ensue. Once the assassination attempt failed, a series of late-night council meetings decided that the moment to move against the Protestant leadership had come and a list of seventy men was collated. What turned this horribly violent but specifically concentrated plan into a general massacre was the Paris militia. Formed after the Wassy massacre to control religious tensions in the city, the militia had been infiltrated by ultra-Catholics, and in the impossibly tense summer atmosphere of the capital, it took one unfortunate phrase from Guise to produce a bloody explosion. As his men left Coligny’s home in the early hours of 24 August, leaving the admiral’s corpse to be mutilated by the mob, Guise called out, “Let us go on to the others, for the king commands it.” He meant the others on
the original list of seventy, but the militia understood differently. Their war cry was chillingly plain: “Kill, kill!”
English responses to the massacre are epitomized by the reaction of Edmund Grindal, the generally moderate future Bishop of London, who demanded that all English Catholics be detained and that Mary Stuart’s head be severed immediately. As descriptions of the horrors perpetrated on French Huguenots continued to reach England—for the original massacre soon spread to the French provinces—Grindal’s demand for crisis measures spoke for many. Francis Walsingham, who had sheltered fleeing Huguenots in his home during the crisis, passed on a list of the names of the murdered to the Privy Council. Like many Protestants, Walsingham believed that Rome and Madrid were now colluding in what our century might understand as a “final solution.” It was a view that would gain credence over the following years, in that Saint Bartholomew indicated that a negotiated solution was no longer tenable and that offence was the only possible strategy for the preservation of the Protestant faith.
In terms of international policy, there could be no immediate question of proceeding with the French accords; conversely, Charles IX, now completely cut off from his Protestant polity, needed England more than ever. If Elizabeth hoped to counter both the long-term imperial ambition of Spain and the apparently “genocidal” policies of the ultra-Catholic parties in France and Rome, then she needed time, and for that the Spanish had to be conciliated. Both Elizabeth and Philip of Spain were now prepared to turn back from the impasse of the late 1560s. At the Treaty of Bristol in 1574, trade embargoes between England and the Netherlands were lifted. Elizabeth spent three days in the port city, arriving in a procession on a horse saddled in emerald green, trimmed with gold fringing. The saddle survives, having enjoyed considerably greater longevity than the treaty, which signaled the last brief period of peace between England and Spain for the remainder of the century.
Elizabeth’s strategy towards Spain and the Netherlands during the next decade initially appears contradictory, if not self-defeating, a game of Red Light, Green Light, with tentative appeasements to either side being proffered and then suddenly withdrawn. Whether the queen liked them or not (and mostly she did not), cutting off the Dutch Protestants entirely was inconceivable. Spain could not be allowed to suppress them altogether, yet this had to be accomplished while simultaneously avoiding a direct confrontation with Philip, which would have escalated aggression to a position from which neither side could escape. Elizabeth continued grudgingly to channel funds to the Netherlands while claiming to the Spanish that her “neutrality” was maintained in the hope of a settlement which would preserve both monarchical authority and a vague concept of “ancient liberties.” Philip made some gestures towards the acknowledgement of the Orangist confederation, known as the States General, and the ultimate withdrawal of his armies, but by 1578, when the Protestants were defeated at Gembloux, their cause looked hopeless to English eyes unless Elizabeth was prepared to intervene, which both Leicester and Walsingham pressured her to do. Moreover, Don John was not discreet about his support of proposed papal measures to replace Elizabeth with Mary Stuart, which Gregory XIII was promoting with a view to marrying the Scots queen to a suitable Catholic candidate. Don John naturally saw himself as this candidate, and though his romance with Mary was never to be—he died of plague soon after Gembloux—the return of Spanish fortunes in the Provinces looked menacing.
Even more so was Philip II’s accession to the throne of Portugal in the autumn of 1580. That he was the rightful claimant, through his mother, Queen Isabella, was no comfort to the Portuguese, who initially claimed they had no intention of accepting Spanish sovereignty, but the arrival of the energetic Alba with fifty thousand troops soon changed their minds. Philip now controlled not only the vast Spanish wealth of the New World but Portuguese possessions there, too, as well as the Portuguese Navy. Both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were effectively under Spanish control, which meant that much of European trade was also. Philip was crowned in Lisbon in September, at the same time as Francis Drake sailed into Plymouth Harbor, having successfully circumnavigated the globe.
Anglo-Spanish confrontations at sea had not ceased with the Treaty of Bristol. Elizabeth had forbidden attacks on Spanish vessels south of the equator for three years, while turning a blind eye to the lucrative (and to the Spanish more sensitive) operations of privateers to the north. John Hawkins funded several Caribbean expeditions, while Francis Drake made his personal fortune with a raid on a bullion fleet in Nombre de Dios during his third piratical voyage in 1572–73. Drake’s propensity to bawl “Victory to the Queen of England” during his raids looked bad for Elizabeth’s professions of ignorance. In 1577, Elizabeth abandoned the pretense and, along with several members of her council, provided funds for Drake’s attempt at circumnavigation. Drake’s achievement was tremendous, as Elizabeth recognized when she welcomed him triumphantly on board his ship and knighted him, but the voyage had also exposed a weakness in Spain’s Pacific possessions, one which Elizabeth declared herself openly to be ready to exploit. She announced to a seething Ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza that she had every intention of keeping her £140,000 share of Drake’s booty, and that moreover, Philip had no one but himself to blame, since “the Spaniards had provoked unto themselves that evil through their injustice towards the English, in hindering against the right of nations, their negotiations.”4 She continued grandly that she was perfectly entitled to state her right to “bring in colonies” in regions where Philip had as yet no subjects living, since “prescription without possession is of no validity.” In case Mendoza failed to understand her, she wore the jewels Drake had presented to her under the ambassador’s nose at her New Year’s gift-giving.
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EVEN SCHOLARS WHO resist the notion of a “cult of Elizabeth” often fall under her spell. Due to a noted “aversion of English historians for all things Continental,” theories about Elizabeth’s governance frequently circle obsessively around the figure of the queen, their orbit excluding the much wider trajectories described by the currents and counter-currents of sixteenth-century statecraft. The “Throckmorton plot” is an instance of this. The conspiracy with which Elizabeth had to contend in 1583 represented more than another plan to usurp a heretic ruler; it evolved not from the English succession crisis but from the French. “They [English historians] refer to the invasion project as the ‘Throckmorton plot’ as if Francis Throckmorton was something more than a parochial cog in a much bigger international mechanism” is an accurate dismissal.1 The religious crisis which had begun in France with the massacre at Wassy had arrived at the doors of the royal palace—confessional divisions were now to determine the next ruler of France. It was the beloved project of the Guise, the Franco-British empire, which lay at the heart of a Europe-wide conspiracy.
Henri III, the third of Catherine de Medici’s sons to ascend to the French throne, had succeeded his brother Charles in 1575. A year later, he had signed the Edict of Beaulieu, which restored significant concessions to the Huguenots, but, under pressure from the Catholic League founded by Guise, had subsequently revoked the majority of them. Relations between the Guise family and Henri had thus been slowly deteriorating for some years. At his accession, the king had been anxious to conciliate his most powerful subjects, and had maintained them in apparent favor, but Henri had favorites of his own, a group of court dandies known as the mignons, who succeeded in driving the Duke of Anjou from the French court in 1578 before turning their ire on the Guise.2 The duke was prepared to watch his rivals, mostly members of the minor southern nobility, promoted, in the belief that the king would make him Constable of France, but as it became clear that Henri had no such intentions, Anjou’s toleration evaporated. On the part of the childless king, there was suspicion that the Guise had ambitions to claim the throne of Navarre. Armed squabbles broke out between Guise retainers and those of the mignons, and by Easter 1582, Guise had decided to retire from court. To his ultra-Catholic
enemies, Henri III of France was a puppet in the hands of the English queen. Elizabeth, meanwhile, saw Henri as harboring her “mortal enemy,” the Duc de Guise, of whom she spoke words so “foul” to the Spanish ambassador Mendoza that he felt unable to quote them to his master. With the Duke of Anjou now in the Netherlands, the Spanish feared that he would raise an army to come to the aid of the Dutch rebels, and they therefore sought allies at the French court. The Duc de Guise, under the exciting new code name “Hercules,” was prepared to offer his support, but he believed Scottish politics could determine the new direction of Europe’s religious affinities.
Henri III spent the spring at Fontainebleau, while Guise remained in Paris. On 14 May Guise attended a meeting at the house of the papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Castelli. Also present were Claude Matthieu, the rector of the Professed Jesuits; the Archbishop of Glasgow, James Beaton, who represented Mary Stuart; and a Scots Jesuit, William Crichton. Crichton was connected with the Catholic League in Normandy, where he had first met Guise in late 1581, and was preparing to leave for Scotland to meet Esme Stuart, Duke of Lennox. That summer, Lennox had succeeded in usurping the trust of James VI in his Protestant regent, the Earl of Morton, leading the government himself when Morton was executed in June.