by Susan Ronald
Even if Norfolk had been sympathetic, with such overwhelming evidence against de Quadra, he was left no alternative but to do as the queen wished in the circumstances. The Spanish ambassador was offered suitable quarters—without a water gate—elsewhere in London, while Elizabeth wrote a scathing letter recounting the whole disgraceful affair to Philip. She demanded he either put a stop to de Quadra’s ceaseless plotting or recall him at once. It had taken three separate incidents to completely neutralize the Spaniard: the pseudo-Catholic plot of Arthur Pole in 1562, the affairs of Borghese Venturini, and, finally, the refugee assassin.
For the sin of having been discovered and humiliated, Philip made the uncharitable decision of leaving de Quadra in London but without further pay. When the Spaniard died in August 1563, he was so heavily in debt that local tradesmen took possession of the body, refusing to release it until they were paid. Two years after he died, his body was secreted back to Spain for burial.
* * *
While Cecil was unmasking the Spanish ambassador in the autumn of 1562, the news from France was bleak. Rouen was in danger of falling, and Dieppe’s weak fortifications meant that the likelihood of its holding out was remote. All Huguenot efforts would be reduced to the sole stronghold of Newhaven, where the English reinforced Coligny’s men. Throckmorton had entered Condé’s service, allegedly as a free agent, but reported back to Elizabeth in December that “the Prince is weary of warfare and inclineth wholly to the Queen Mother’s affections.”11
Elizabeth ordered that Warwick and his men must remain within the walls of Newhaven, since if they were to break out and relieve Dieppe or even Rouen, it could be construed as an overt act of war against an anointed king, Catherine’s young son, Charles IX. So that her intervention should not be misunderstood, Elizabeth sent word to her ambassador in Spain, Thomas Chaloner, to explain to Philip II England’s worries and why she had been obliged to intervene in French affairs.
* * *
Then disaster hit. Elizabeth was struck down with smallpox. For three weeks she hovered between life and death. To the entire court’s distress, she named Robert Dudley as Lord Protector in the event of her death. So they prayed for her survival. While she personally believed in and felt his loyalty, others in power remained extremely doubtful. The English people, too, held bad memories of “protectorship” at the hands of Dudley’s father, Northumberland. They, too, prayed loudly for the queen’s full recovery. For the English, it was their act of faith and prayer that allowed Elizabeth to survive unscathed.
* * *
By the time the queen had recovered, relations between the allies were near breaking point. The Huguenots had finally lost Rouen during her illness, and they blamed Elizabeth personally for her impossible order to keep her forces within Newhaven’s city walls. Both Condé and Coligny turned against the garrison. They looked to Catherine de’ Medici to sue for peace. Abandoned by their untrustworthy allies, the English were left to face an exceptionally harsh winter under constant threat of attack from disgruntled Huguenot forces or the French, both funded by the king of Spain.
Then the Battle of Dreux took place. The Prince of Condé was taken prisoner along with the former ambassador Throckmorton. Command of the Huguenot forces fell to Admiral Coligny, who was a far superior soldier to his predecessor. He persuaded Elizabeth in short order to supply more money and men, and this time, Elizabeth agreed immediately. However, by the time the money to pay Coligny’s mercenaries arrived in February 1563, it was all over. The leader of the Catholic forces, Francis, Duke of Guise, had been assassinated by a Huguenot sympathizer named Poltrot de Mérey, who may well have been in the pay of Coligny.12
* * *
The political, if not religious, landscape had changed. Catherine de’ Medici was doing all in her substantial power to woo the Huguenots back to the crown of France without the able command of Francis of Guise. On March 10, Condé, while still a prisoner of the French crown, came to terms with the queen mother, ignoring all that Coligny hoped to achieve, and leaving the English in charge of the fortress town of Newhaven, uncertain of their role.
Elizabeth eventually ordered Ambrose Dudley to surrender, but only if England could regain Calais. By June, even that bluster was nothing but a hollow threat. Plague had struck the garrison, and the English were dying at a rate of seventy-five men a day. They were out of food, and their communications to the rest of France had been cut off. A rescue by sea had been hoped for but never came. Finally, on July 27, Elizabeth authorized Warwick’s surrender. The French allowed him and his surviving men to return home. Though abandoned by the Huguenots and decimated by plague, the English had held out, but their return would spread the plague along the south coast of England up to London as if by some divine retribution for the invasion of France.
From London, Elizabeth composed her “Prayer Wisdom in the Administration of the Kingdom” in which she begged the Lord to “send therefore, O inexhaustible Fount of all wisdom, from Thy holy heaven and the most high throne of Thy majesty, Thy wisdom to be ever with me, that it may keep watch with me in governing the commonwealth, and that it may take pains, that it may teach me, Thy handmaid, and may train me that I may be able to distinguish between good and evil, equity and iniquity.”13
Elizabeth had learned the most valuable lesson of her reign. Wars were costly in men, money, and matériel and were to be avoided at all costs. Most importantly, their outcome could never be reliably predicted.
SEVEN
Christ’s Soldiers
The Pope is so affected by the pitiable plight of the Catholics of England that the greater are the persecutions which they suffer, the more he is moved to compassionate [sic] them, and desire to succour and aid them by all possible means.
—Cardinal archbishop of Milan to the papal nuncio in Spain
While Elizabeth’s eyes were turned toward the Catholic threat symbolized by the papacy, France, and Spain, another home-grown menace emerged. Scorned as “precisians,” “gospellers,” “scripture men,” or even “saints,” these men and women are branded “Puritans” by history. All these epithets were hurled at them by a Christian community that derided their chosen path. The common complaint against these “godly people” is best expressed by sayings like “I perceive you are a Puritan outright: you are one of these new men that would have nothing but preaching.” Then there was the alternative exclamation “It was never a merry world since that sect came first among us.”1
In the 1560s, the godly, or “professors” as they liked to call themselves, were a minority of Protestants in England. Like their French counterparts, the Huguenots, they were seen as a troublesome sect on the rise whose evangelistic message would no doubt rock the fragile religious boat with Catholics and Protestants alike. They were heavily reliant on pastors capable of enthralling and preaching the Word, breathing hellfire and damnation. Demographically, the godly were sprinkled lightly in rural areas with the mainstay of their strength in the populous regions of London, Essex, East Anglia, and the Weald of Kent—in other words, in the areas that held the greatest power in the realm.
The poor, uneducated and disenfranchised, sought whatever religion they could from their local customs, which were more akin to magic than religion. However, the profile of the godly, or Puritan, is more difficult to assess. Generally, they derived from a broad cross-section of society that was in the main economically independent. Minor courtiers, aristocrats, aldermen, and merchants could be counted among the elite Puritan brethren. They shunned the alehouses—“a little hell” to them—as well as bowling alleys and bearbaiting. Later in the reign, they would embark on an all-out war against the theater.
Their leisure time was devoted to religious “exercises” where like-minded godly folk gathered together across parishes as “gadders” to hear sermons. These exercises became so prevalent that “the preaching might be only upon the Sabbath day,” one Essex man complained, “but now they run in the week-days and leave their business and beggar themsel
ves.”2 Soon, their gatherings would spill out of churches into house-meetings, which became known as “night conventicles,” where the great Puritan writers of the day would engage them in discussion of the proper way to celebrate the Sabbath.
It was these Puritans who held the strongest prejudices against Elizabeth’s desire to please all her people. They railed against the continued use of the surplice in the Church of England, known as the Vestments Controversy. Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, when licensing ministers to preach, asked them to “exhort the godly so to frame their judgments that they conceive no offence.” However, it was the Puritans’ mission to proselytize that saved England’s wayward flock, so they believed, and Grindal’s instructions were ignored. For them, the English were doomed to an eternity in purgatory, unless they mended their ways. “There is but one way to prevent the danger that may be feared from this generation and their practices,” John White, an outspoken Lancashire preacher, wrote, “that sin be severely punished and a preaching ministry settled, as much as possible, in all places of the land, and painful preaching effectually maintained against the manifold discouragements of this iron age.”3
Even if the licensed preachers hadn’t ignored Grindal, by the mid-1560s the godly Puritans had begun to abandon England’s churches for the meetinghouses “to turn to the Lord in all sincerity.” The family home was rapidly becoming the new Puritan parish, out of reach of the authorities. Within twenty years, Robert Browne and his small sect of Brownists would take this to an extreme and find themselves exiled in the Low Countries.
* * *
Still, the most dangerous of the godly Puritans to the Elizabethan settlement were not mere merchants, aldermen, aristocrats, or lesser courtiers but rather the godly members of Parliament like Paul Wentworth and his elder brother Peter. Paul, the more outspoken of the two, became troublesome to Elizabeth in her Parliaments of 1563 (reconvened in 1566) and 1572. For him, the 1560s was a pivotal decade. The early part of the decade had been devoted to the Elizabethan settlement, the counterattack by the papacy at the Council of Trent, and the proliferation of English seminaries on the Continent. Like-minded godly professors, including the Wentworth brothers, believed that Elizabeth had ignored the great Catholic threat. The Catholic nations had convened their Council of Trent, to which England and other Protestant nations sent no representative. When it was suspended in December 1563, it was, of course, no closer to a solution regarding schism. So Puritan voices rose ever louder in alarm. Indeed, the battle lines had been drawn, with each side of the religious divide working ceaselessly to promote its own interests. As the decade progressed, the sense of general unease grew, along with the Wentworths’ earnest Puritan zeal for England.
At the same time, Trent debated the issues surrounding schism and heresy, Elizabeth convened her Parliament of 1563 to fulfill its primary function: the granting of much-needed money following the debacle at Newhaven. It was a heated session, with Elizabeth steadfastly refusing to countenance marriage or discuss the succession, as “there is no need to prate about my death,” she said.4 The fact that she had come perilously close to death the preceding year had been quite forgotten by the queen. However, the Commons was determined that Elizabeth should name either Catherine Grey, still imprisoned for marrying without royal assent, or the Scots’ queen, Mary, as her successor. The Puritan faction strongly favored Mary.
Though surprising, it did make sense. Scotland had officially become a Protestant realm when the edict of Parliament was passed at Edinburgh in August 1560. By the time Mary returned to Scotland, being a Roman Catholic had become a dangerous thing. The proselytizing, godly John Knox grudgingly agreed to tolerate Mary, as “content to live under Your Grace as Paul was to live under Nero.” Knox knew he held great sway over the hearts and minds of the Presbyterian Scots with his ubiquitous sermons repeated in print and on the lips of the devoted. On meeting Mary, Knox recognized a shrewd and calculating mind. He told his friends that “if there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit and an indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgment faileth me.” At least, that’s what he wrote to Cecil.5
Knox was intolerant, but he saw at once Mary’s ability to master the ungovernable. He could not fail to be impressed with Mary’s desire to tame the “wild Scots” of the Highlands and understand the workings of Scottish society. In fact, she had learned a great deal about her kinsmen in precious little time. The swaggering Scots magnates; the feudalistic notions of kinship and clans; the “manrent” of formal bonds between the population and their lairds, who granted protection in exchange for service; primitive communications; widespread villainy and piracy; and a land divided by geography and language with wild Highlanders speaking Gaelic—“that language of savages”—all conspired to make Scotland virtually ungovernable for any monarch, much less a young woman who had only lived in the country as a toddler. Naturally, when an opportunity arose to gracefully “export” some of her troublesome clansmen to Ireland, Mary showed herself a master of Machiavellian politics. Of course, there was a dual benefit to the maneuver: She would be rid of the clansmen in Scotland while destabilizing Elizabeth’s troubled province of Ireland.
* * *
The Scots entered Ireland fomenting their own brand of lawlessness in Ulster, but this most remote part of Elizabeth’s realm had always harbored a troubled soul. Only five years earlier, when Philip of Spain was also king of England, the first plantations in Laois-Offaly, comprising Englishmen and Anglo-Irish settlers, were reported to be at peace. This was considered quite a coup as the chaos of the Irish clan system (known as “septs”), and in particular the O’More and the O’Connor clans of the region, had continually wrought havoc. Even in the previous year, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, claimed smugly that “all the rebellions which I found in Ireland be now subdued, the knots and maintenances broken, the principal persons of the realm brought to acknowledge such obedience as heretofore they have not done, and all the realm remains in quiet.”6 Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Sussex had erased the “bad boy” of the Irish chieftains during this period, Shane O’Neill, from the picture. When Shane’s father died in 1562, he was elected “the O’Neill”—head of the Ulster clan—but did not receive his father’s English title of Earl of Tyrone. Ambitious and hungry for power, Shane viewed the withholding of the English title as an intolerable slight. He also knew that so long as Sussex remained Lord Lieutenant, he would never receive it. After all, Shane had been inciting trouble with his allies, the Scottish “redshanks” MacDonald and McDonnell clans, in the province since 1548.7
In an attempt to circumvent Sussex, O’Neill wrote to Elizabeth that his “rude uncivil and disobedient people will fall to civility and hereafter be faithful obedient and true subjects” should England’s queen recognize his power through the granting of his father’s lapsed English title.8 Sussex, however, argued strongly against him and prevailed. He convinced Elizabeth that Shane was a villain who sought to turn the Gaelic chieftains in Ireland against her, but it was Sussex’s argument that Shane could equally employ the strength of the Catholic Church and Europe’s Catholic monarchs against England that finally won over the queen.
This made the daunting task of ruling Ireland all the more difficult for Elizabeth. Shane O’Neill, for all his bravura, bullying, and murderous ways, was no less an exceptionally capable leader of men and outstanding military strategist. He transformed his lordship of the sprawling and most Gaelic of Ireland’s provinces, Ulster, into a battleground in the coming years that employed thousands of Scots mercenaries. Shane’s capture of the O’Donnell chieftain and his family allowed him to extend his stronghold into Tyrconnell. Once the province was captured, Shane summarily divorced his own wife and forced O’Donnell’s daughter, Mary, into a vile marriage that was only cemented by the threat of torturing and killing her parents if she did not accede to his every wish, which included maintaining Mary’s mother, Katherine, as his
mistress. Sussex was apoplectic with rage and made the subjugation of Shane to the English crown his overwhelming priority.
Shane, too, was outraged. “You began with a conquest in my land without cause,” Shane wrote to Sussex. “And so long as there be any English man in my country against my will, I … will send my complaint in another way to the Queen’s Majesty to declare unto Her Grace how you interrupted my going.”9 Sussex’s reply to Elizabeth warned, “If Shane be overthrown all is settled, if Shane settle all is overthrown.”10
Yet Elizabeth saw the bigger picture. With Mary freely exporting her own troublesome clansmen to Ireland as mercenaries, Ireland was becoming an unbearable threat to England’s security from its western back door, or, as Elizabethans called Ireland, “the postern gate.” It was more important to have Shane openly submit to Elizabeth’s will than to withhold the title of Earl of Tyrone he so coveted. Sussex, she reasoned, would need to be overruled. Cecil suggested that the queen have the Earl of Kildare treat with Shane to broker a settlement. It was reached at a cost of the earldom and £2,000 to defray the expenses of his journey to court and a pardon with safe conduct.
When, at last, Shane and his “Gallowglass” warriors appeared at court, their presence caused quite a stir, “with their bare heads, ash-coloured hanging curls, golden saffron undershirts, if not the colour of infected human urine, loose sleeves, short tunics, and shaggy lace.”11
Yet, true submission to England was far from the Irish chieftain’s mind. While Shane put his case for his Earldom of Tyrone to the queen, he mingled with the archplotter de Quadra and openly worshipped at the Catholic Mass held in the Spanish embassy. On learning of his treachery, Elizabeth and her councillors deemed O’Neill to be nearly more dangerous in London than he had been in Ireland.