by Susan Ronald
Despite her anger with Knox over his interpretation of women as “the weaker vessel,” Elizabeth stayed focused on the political imperative dictated by the signing of the peace treaty at Cateau-Cambrésis in the spring of 1559. She knew full well that this treaty wasn’t so much a declaration of peace as a “time-out” from active combat. Mary Tudor had lost England’s staple town of Calais needlessly in what Elizabeth and the country viewed as the king of Spain’s war to none other than France’s commander of the action, the warrior Francis, Duke of Guise—uncle of Mary Queen of Scots. The loss of Calais alone made England economically vulnerable.
For William Cecil, an alliance to the right man through marriage could serve to protect England’s interests abroad. Such an alliance, Elizabeth thought, needn’t take the irrevocable step into marriage. After all, France, not Spain, represented the greatest threat to England’s security. There were thousands of French troops massing on England’s northern borders with Scotland. Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, since the age of one week Mary I of Scotland, had been a creature of the French court since she was six years old, transforming Scotland into almost a vassal state of France.9
Indeed, Mary had taken her first husband just a year earlier, on April 24, 1558, amid tremendous splendor and fanfare in Paris. The Scottish queen—one of the most “imperfect creatures” in so many ways—had wed the sickly Francis of Valois, the dauphin of France. Mary was only fifteen years and four months of age. This marriage, carved from the model of so many medieval child marriages among royalty, allied her impoverished realm to one of the most glorious in Europe. Although the young Scots queen knew she was marrying for the good of her realm; nonetheless, to observers she seemed simply ecstatic.
Had Elizabeth looked on in wonder from her exile at Hatfield then, envying Mary, who had been compared to Helen of Troy in beauty, the fabled Lucrece in chastity, the Athenian goddess Pallas in wisdom, Ceres in riches, and Juno in power?10 Or did Elizabeth take good heed of one of the wedding eulogies by Estienne Perlin dedicated to the French king’s sister, the Duchess of Berry, observing, “How happy oughtest thou to esteem thyself, O kingdom of Scotland, to be favored, fed and maintained like an infant on the breast of the most Magnanimous king of France … for without him thou would’st have been laid in ashes, thy country wasted and ruined by the English, utterly accursed by God”?11
There were plenty of women in history, from Eleanor of Aquitaine four hundred years earlier up to Mary’s wedding day, to show Elizabeth to beware of a groom. So, in her speech delivered to the House of Commons on February 10, 1559, Elizabeth clearly stated her marital intentions for her reign:
And albeit it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage, yet it is not to be feared but He will so work in my heart and in your wisdoms as good provision by His help may be made in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir that may be a fit governor, and peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me … And in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.12
Though frequently accused of inconstancy and vacillation by the men surrounding her, ultimately Elizabeth remained steadfast to this stated aim. While the full-blown “Cult of Elizabeth” was some years off, Elizabeth clearly sought to confound everyone’s notions of womanhood, and most particularly of her. She would play off one faction of men against the other with a studied system of male favorites throughout her reign. She would keep her councillors guessing with her infuriating prevarication and dissimulation designed to make her mistress of all she surveyed. Above all, she would create her own image of what she thought a queen should be.
Though it would be another twenty years before she was called “Gloriana,” the seeds for the Cult of Elizabeth were planted at the outset of her reign. She would start as she meant to go along. In the English translation of The Book of the Courtier by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561—two years after Elizabeth’s affirmation to Parliament—the character Magnifico takes up the cause of women at court as enlightened, seeking education, magnanimity, temperance, and virtuousness, before going on to ask, “Don’t you think that we might find many women just as capable of governing cities and armies as men?”13 This was the way Elizabeth was determined to be known and remembered, not as some Jezebel, brood mare, or harlot.
* * *
Consequently, before the ink was dry on the treaty parchment of Cateau-Cambrésis, Elizabeth apparently complied with Cecil’s ultimatum and sent word to King Henry II of France that she favored a French match. His second-eldest son, also Henry, was a mere child, but that didn’t seem to matter to either side. As Philip II had recently married Elisabeth of France, daughter of Henry II, conforming to the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, something had to be done to prevent a Franco-Hapsburg alliance against England, even if it meant pretending to be interested in marrying the French child and heir.
Naturally, the prospect of acquiring England through marriage proved too tantalizing for Henry to resist. Elizabeth welcomed the French envoys with jewels and gifts and pomp and ceremony when they came to discuss the match in May 1559. If the match couldn’t be concluded, then Henry could always contemplate Mary’s own fair claim to England’s throne. Either way, Henry felt he had a strong hand.14
So, where did the papacy stand in this power struggle in northern Europe? While the pope, as the head of a disintegrating Catholic Church, wielded secular power in Italy through the Papal States, which had fought Philip unsuccessfully in a fruitless war only a few years earlier, the pope was in a relatively weak position to rule on Henry’s demand to declare Elizabeth illegitimate. Philip of Spain was against it, so the pope prevaricated.
Since Paul IV believed there was little hope of the return of the Protestants to the Catholic fold, alienating Elizabeth mattered little to him. Still, he owed a great deal to the kingdoms of France and Spain, which had been battling for supremacy with the papacy for hundreds of years. To make matters worse, the Spanish and French kings guarded their titles as “Most Catholic” and “Most Christian” kings jealously as treasured tokens of their own place in the hierarchy of Christendom.
Paul IV knew from bitter experience that it did not pay to cross these mighty monarchs. When Pope Clement VII vexed the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (Philip’s father), he paid for it dearly. Charles’s army occupied Rome from 1527 to 1528, sacking and burning the city repeatedly. Even the pope’s protectors—the famous Swiss Guard—seemed to turn against the papacy by deserting Catholicism for one of the newer Protestant sects. France’s king, then Francis I, Henry’s father, offered the papacy safety at Avignon, which Pope Clement VII knew he’d have to refuse.15
Paul IV held a vivid recollection of these events and, as a native Neapolitan, felt that the Spanish remained an occupying force in Naples. Even more galling, Paul personally loathed the Spanish king, feeling that Philip had slighted him when he had served as legate in Castile. It was this loathing that led the pope into one of the many Franco-Hapsburg wars on the side of the French, later known as the Carafa War of 1556–57 (Carafa was the pope’s family name). The pope ill-advisedly invaded Naples, and papal forces were roundly defeated by Spain’s viceroy and Europe’s best military commander, the Duke of Alba. All this meant that while Pope Paul IV’s heart told him to issue the bull against Elizabeth as Henry II requested, he could ill afford to alienate the Spanish king yet again.16
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So Henry II failed to oust Elizabeth as England’s just ruler in the eyes of Catholic Europe. Henry also failed to understand that the alleged great claim of his daughter-in-law to England’s throne was suspect. As a “foreigner,” despite her assertion as next in line for the throne, Mary was not eligible to become queen of England under English common law without an act of Parliament, something Elizabeth was hardly prepared to approve. Even more damning for Mary’s claim was that she had been
excluded from the succession by Henry VIII’s will, which had been passed by an act of Parliament.17
Though these impediments were seen as an adequate safeguard for England’s new Protestant ruling classes, England’s Catholics who were still loyal to Rome promoted an alternative view: Mary was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret, and the great-granddaughter of Henry VII. Mary had not been born of an “incestuous” marriage as Elizabeth had been. Henry VIII’s self-proclaimed divorce from Catherine of Aragon had never been recognized by the Catholic Church, and as Catherine was still living when Elizabeth was conceived and born, she was a “bastard” to all who continued to believe in papal authority in England.
For all these negatives, even Elizabeth’s shortcomings could be overlooked if she took the right husband. For Catholic Europe, the most obvious candidate was England’s former king consort, Philip of Spain; or at least, so he thought. As early as the end of 1558 Philip’s emissary in England, de Feria, had written to the Spanish king urging him to propose marriage to Elizabeth. It was in Philip’s interests to remain king of England as a counterbalance to the French Guise interests in Scotland. Certainly his policy of containment of the French would be easier if Elizabeth Tudor would have him. So Feria wrote to Philip on November 20—only three days after his wife, Elizabeth’s half sister, died—affirming:
I therefore wish your Majesty to keep in view all the steps to be taken on your behalf, one of them being that the Emperor should not send any ambassador here to treat of this … even if he took the tidbit from your Majesty’s hand, but … I know for certain they will not hear the name of the duke of Savoy mentioned as they fear he will want to recover his estates with English forces and will keep them constantly at war. I am very pleased to see that the nobles are all beginning to open their eyes to the fact that it will not do to marry this woman in the country itself.18
While de Feria’s intelligence pandered to the king’s ego, he was right in one respect. The Holy Roman Emperor, Philip’s uncle Ferdinand, also had thought Elizabeth Tudor a prize worth having. Ferdinand had proposed his younger son, the Duke of Savoy, as a prospective bridegroom but tried to dress up the match in other ways as recompense. Still, as a younger son who had little money and less land, the duke was not deemed to be of sufficient standing for the queen of England, particularly as he was a good Catholic to boot. His only redeeming feature, so it seemed, was that he was not Spanish.
Despite talk of her “incestuous” parentage, other kings and noblemen sought Elizabeth’s hand as a gilded prize, too. Prince Eric of Sweden had proposed marriage. His main attraction was that he was Protestant. Still, Parliament had voiced a desire for Elizabeth to marry an Englishman—but not Dudley, and preferably the Earl of Arundel or her father’s courtier Sir William Pickering. While they all bickered, Elizabeth cavorted with her handsome Master of the Horse; studiously setting aside any plans others had for her to wed.
So when, in March 1559, Henry II wrote to Elizabeth officially proposing his second son, Henry, Duke of Anjou (later Henry III of France), as her groom, Elizabeth, inexperienced though she was, saw the perfect way to halt this barrage of suitors and get what she wanted. It would be years before Henry of Anjou would be old enough to wed, and by then, so much else could happen.
Without her usual prevarication, Elizabeth wrote to Philip advising him of the French offer, tacitly asking for the Spanish king’s protection against Valois threats, expressed or implied. Naturally, the last thing that Philip would have wished was for the English queen to marry one of the Valois heirs and create a union between France and England—between the second in line to the throne and a queen regnant. So Philip acceded to Elizabeth’s requests for protection, pledging his loyalty to her and his former realm of England before quickly agreeing to the most significant condition of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. The Spanish king took his third wife, Elisabeth of France, daughter of Henry II, as a safeguard against future French aggression.
It was a veritable whirlwind of marriage proposals, refusals, and counterproposals—all happening in the spring of 1559. Where did the outcome leave England in the rapidly changing political landscape? Precisely where Elizabeth wanted: living off the prospect of marriage without ever delivering the promise. As hard as it was for the men surrounding her to believe, Elizabeth had actually meant what she had been affirming for years already: that she was happy in the estate of spinsterhood. Unlike the men advising her, Elizabeth knew full well that should she marry, her husband would become the focus of power, draining it away from her as surely as if he had opened her veins. Given Elizabeth’s determined character, this would remain the ever constant cornerstone of her personal rule.
Nevertheless, having a queen lead the “kingdom of England relapsed into schism and heresy” was not a matter that Pope Paul could leave to fate. A scheme was hatched and presented to him in the early days of summer 1559. A trusted intermediary to deal directly with the queen for her return to the Holy See was proposed in the person of Sir Francis Englefield, who planned to spend that winter at Padua, through another sympathetic Englishman, whose name was George “Nevel”:
They might be commissioned to impart the Pope’s good intention to the said Inghilfeildt [sic], for his encouragement to persevere in the true religion, and that he may keep up the spirits of the Catholics that are still in the kingdom. And likewise he might be authorized to tell “Inghilfeildt,” that, if he should be minded to apprise his Holiness, by writing or messenger, of the course of affairs, there is a person at this Court with whom he may communicate without risk of being discovered and incurring the displeasure of the Queen. Nevel, who is just about to join “Inghilfeildt,” is a worthy gentleman and a kinsman in some degree of Cardinal Pole.19
The scheme to provide Pope Paul with intelligence from England continued by proposing that “certain Catholic prelates and priests who have been deprived of their churches and benefices for refusing to follow the new religion” and were in need of funds should be provided for from revenues of the English Hospital in Rome.20 Such priests would undoubtedly show their gratitude in some way in the years to come, the letter implies.
Then, quite abruptly, the political and religious landscape veered off course again that summer. The French king was killed in a jousting accident, dying ten days later on July 10. Pope Paul IV followed to his own grave on August 18. By the time the new Pope Pius IV was elected by the convocation of cardinals, it was Christmas Day 1559.21
Mary Queen of Scots was now queen of France. By Christmas Day, Mary and her husband, Francis II, had amassed some thirty-five thousand troops on the Scottish borders. The Scottish Protestants who had refused to fight for Mary of Guise as early as 1557 had now taken up arms against her French troops on the open fields between Edinburgh and Leith. Their rout could only mean one thing: invasion of England.
The temporal world seemingly couldn’t wait for a new pontiff to be elected and spiraled ever closer to either world domination by Spain or another war with France. How odd, Cecil mused, that the choice of the next pope was perhaps the only hope of averting any of these unpalatable outcomes for England.
FOUR
Many an Uneasy Truce
The injurious pretenses made by the Queen of Scots to this realm proceed from the principals of the house of Guise, who now have the chief governance of the crown of France … and that neither the French king … nor the Queen of Scots, his wife … have imagined such an unjust enterprise.
—Proclamation by Queen Elizabeth, March 24, 1560
The conclave that elected Gian Angelo de’ Medici as Pope Pius IV took place once peace had been restored to the eternal city of Rome. His predecessor, Paul IV, had been hated almost as much as he loathed those around him. On Paul’s death, violence broke out, with the headquarters of the Roman Inquisition destroyed by rioters and its prisoners released. Jews who had been isolated in the ghetto in Rome were allowed at last to reintegrate into society. However, peace could only return onc
e the Vatican took its retribution against the papal nephews for their sins. Accused officially of heresy and murder, they were tried by a commission of eight cardinals and executed in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Philip II of Spain looked on with grim satisfaction at a most fitting end to Paul’s anti-Hapsburg regime.1
In the absence of a legitimately elected pontiff, the proposed “intelligence use” of English Catholic exiles by the papacy was usurped by Philip himself, who set up Sir Francis Englefield and others at Louvain in the Low Countries. Sir Francis had, of course, been known to Philip as one of his dead queen’s privy councillors, and the Spanish king claimed a loyalty to the exiled Englishman for that reason alone. Still, the truth was far more sinister.
Philip had inherited one of Europe’s premier university cities in Louvain. Rising high above the River Dyle in Flanders, Louvain’s four colleges that comprised its university were a magnet for all scholars who sought an academic life, regardless of nationality, so long as they espoused the Roman Catholic faith. By the 1530s, the general college, known as the Castle, attracted students for the study of medicine, canon law, civil law, and theology. The likes of the great mapmaker Mercator, Charles V’s physician Vesalius, Mary Tudor’s beloved teacher Juan de Vives, and the politician-turned-theologian Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle all studied there. By 1560, when Philip II of Spain had the brain wave to use Louvain to his own ends, the university had already celebrated its one hundredth anniversary.2
This “Belgian Athens,” as Louvain was sometimes called, was so sought after that only Paris could rival it in its voracious quest for top professors, and in the 1560s, English professors were the flavor of the moment for Louvain’s putative benefactor, Philip of Spain. Through the good offices of Sir Francis Englefield, Louvain’s ranks swelled with Catholic professors from Oxford and Cambridge, one of the most notable of whom was Oxford’s professor of Hebrew, Thomas Harding.3 These English Catholic exiles, who nicknamed Louvain the “Catholics’ Oxford,” would serve their new master Philip in many ways. Often they kept tabs on the thousands of young, troublesome intellectuals speaking every European language crammed into Louvain’s city walls and reported their gossip back to their master. Sir Francis was particularly well qualified to carry out this task. After all, while Englefield was a privy councillor in Mary Tudor’s reign, he learned from Nicholas Bacon’s template* how to improve universities and create an education system for the masses.4