Foxe also created a new history of the Reformation in which the English Church had restored the ‘old ancient church of Christ’ that had been all the time concealed within the Roman communion. ‘The time of Antichrist’, beginning in approximately ad 1100, had at last been purged. He declared that ‘because God hath so placed us Englishmen here in one commonwealth, also in one church, as in one ship together, let us not mangle or divide the ship’. In this period the commonwealth had connotations of the body politic and the general good; it was the vision of a community that transcended self-interest and the bitterness of faction, with an idealized and productive union between all of the estates of the realm. The aim was a ‘godly commonwealth’.
The English were once more an elect nation. By creating a Protestant historiography Fox had effectively given form and meaning to the newly established religion. The book went through five editions in the reign of Elizabeth and became, after the Bible, the most popular and indispensable of all books of faith. Eventually the order came that it should be placed in every parish church alongside the Paraphrases of Erasmus.
Many of the more avid reformers were dissatisfied with the settlement of religion and waited for a day when further reforms were implemented. One of them, the dean of Wells Cathedral, trained his dog to snatch off the papistical square caps from any conforming clerics who chose to wear them. In the 1560s these radicals still formed part of the restless and dissatisfied Elizabethan Church, but they were already beginning to assert their identity. It was in this period, for example, that the Puritan movement began to be distinguished from the broader Church. One hundred London clergymen had been convoked at Lambeth where a clergyman was paraded before them in the orthodox dress of four-cornered cap, tippet and scholar’s gown. When asked if they would wear the same dress, they were dismayed. ‘Great’, says one observer, ‘was the anguish and distress of those ministers.’ They exclaimed: ‘We shall be killed in our souls for this pollution!’ Eventually sixty-one agreed to don the vestments, and the other thirty-nine were suspended from their duties and given three months to conform.
Other measures were now taken, at the queen’s command, against the stricter Protestants. No licence to perform divine service would be given to anyone who refused to sign a declaration of conformity. As a result many godly preachers retired into private life as lawyers or even doctors; some migrated to the more welcoming air of Scotland, or travelled once more overseas to Zurich or to Geneva. A number of pamphlets and books of sermons espousing the Puritan cause prompted an injunction from the Star Chamber forbidding, on pain of three months’ imprisonment, the publication of any treatise ‘against the queen’s injunctions’.
The radical sectarians, believing themselves to be persecuted, clung more tightly together. They adopted the book of service used by the Calvinists at Geneva as their model, discarding the conventional English liturgy used by what they called ‘the traditioners’. They were especially active in London. John Stow wrote, in 1567, that ‘a group who called themselves puritans or unspotted lambs of the lord . . . kept their church in the Minories without Aldgate’. At various times the godly met on a lighter in St Katherine’s Pool, in Pudding Lane, and in a goldsmith’s house along the Strand.
They entertained various opinions on such matters as baptism and predestination but they were united in their fervour for preaching and for the propagation of the Word; they stressed the paramount importance of Scripture; they detested the relics of popery still present within the established religion, and pressed hard for the sanctity of the Sabbath while denouncing the general licentiousness of the age. The essence lay in individual faith mediated by grace and not by any priest. It might be said that the godly emphasized a spiritual, while the traditionalists preferred a visible, Church.
In June 1567 a group of the godly hired Plumbers’ Hall in Chequer Yard, London, ostensibly to celebrate a wedding; in reality they wished to enjoy a day of sermons and of prayers. Word of their plans had reached the city authorities; they were surrounded and some of them were arrested by the sheriffs and taken before the bishop of London. Twenty-four were committed to prison, where they remained for some time. Here perhaps we may glimpse the origin of those religious quarrels that were eventually to divide the nation.
The godly had supporters among the highest in the land. Many of the bishops were naturally sympathetic to their cause. The earl of Leicester was only the most prominent among the nobles who supported the radical reformers; William Cecil was believed to be of the same party, together with other of the queen’s councillors. At the university of Cambridge, too, a prominent group of Puritans began to gather. The queen herself was unmoved. She did not intend to impose orthodoxy, but she demanded conformity. In this, she believed, the peace of the realm consisted. She would not be pushed into doctrinal reform. She did not relish religious change of any kind.
Others were equally sanguine. In The Apology of the Church of England John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, declared in 1562 that ‘we are come as near as we possibly could to the ancient apostolic faith’. He rested this trust upon the fact that ‘we have searched out of the Holy Bible, which we are sure cannot deceive, our sure form of religion’. These modest reformers believed that they had recovered an ancient truth long lost in the quagmire of popery. Slowly, in the course of this reign, Protestantism became the acquired faith of the majority of the people; they may have conformed out of fear or indifference, but that conformity became by degrees the traditional religion of England. Within a few years none had known any other form of worship. This uniquely monarchical Church was at the turn of the century given the name of Anglican, the product of England.
There was a further reformation for which the queen and her council can claim a certain credit, the reformation of money. Elizabeth called in the debased coin and reduced the quantity of cheap metal used in minting it; for the first time in many years the worth of the coin was now equivalent to its face value. The queen had reversed the decline that had begun in her father’s reign, and such was the achievement that it was commemorated on her tomb. In her epitaph it is listed as her third greatest success after the religious settlement and the maintenance of peace. Piety, peace and prosperity were not to be separated.
29
The rivals
The queens of Scotland and of England were still single, and that unusual state presented complications to both women. Mary Stuart was now actively seeking a French or Spanish match; it was rumoured that she might marry Don Carlos, the son of the Spanish king, or even her brother-in-law, Charles IX of France. The power of her country would thereby be redoubled and the threat to her neighbour increased. In an extraordinary act of audacity Elizabeth suggested to the Scottish commissioners at her court that their queen might consider marriage to her own earlier suitor, Robert Dudley; it was even proposed that the two queens might then share a household, with Elizabeth providing the funds. Mary considered the offer for a moment, as another way to the English throne, but she was never really prepared to take up that which Elizabeth had cast off. She was happy to appease her rival with vague promises, but in reality she was looking for a foreign prince.
This led Elizabeth in turn to revisit the question of her own marriage. Once more the prospects of Archduke Charles of Austria were revived, and at the beginning of 1564 she wrote to the Habsburg court that ‘she was ever in courtesy bound to make that choice so as should be for the best of her state and subjects’. She had taken the words of parliament to heart. The great difficulty lay, however, with the archduke’s religion; he was a devout Roman Catholic who would brook no impediment to the practice of his faith. Robert Dudley was created earl of Leicester in the autumn of 1564 but his new status did not materially assist his suit. He was still the great favourite of the queen, her true knight ‘without fear and without reproach’. At the ceremony itself, in which Dudley received the honour, it was noted by the Scottish ambassador that ‘she could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck to tickle him�
�. If the queen should take a husband, however, this intimacy would of course be severely curtailed.
So he seems to have determined to thwart the queen’s possible alliance with the archduke. He intrigued with the French to put forward the young Charles IX, but the disparity in age between the fourteen-year-old boy and the thirty-one-year-old woman would have caused only ridicule and disquiet. She said that it would take only a few years for him to desert her, leaving her a discontented old woman. When the Spanish ambassador asked her if she was about to marry the French king, she ‘half hid her face and laughed’.
On the failure of this plan Leicester objected to the archduke on the grounds of his religion, and it is perhaps no coincidence that in this period he emerged as the protector of the true Protestant faith; he supported ‘godly’ ministers, for example, in their remonstrance against the papistical elements of the Book of Common Prayer. In his stance against the marriage he was opposed by Cecil as well as the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Sussex; Sussex himself had travelled to Vienna in order to expedite the union. So there was a division at the heart of the court and of the queen’s council. The retainers of Sussex and of Leicester carried arms ‘as if to try their utmost’; the Sussex party wore yellow ribbons while the supporters of Leicester sported purple. The queen ordered them ‘not to meddle with’ one another and to lay down their weapons. Nevertheless, Leicester continued to gather ‘great bands of men with swords and bucklers’. There came a point when the two great nobles exchanged ‘hard words and challenges to fight’, at which point the queen ordered them to ride together through the streets of London in a show of amity. Sussex was eventually created lord president of the council of the north, thus removing him to York. The fracas is a reminder, however, of the tensions between the great nobles that had been so prominent in previous centuries. The court was still in part a medieval institution. It is probable, too, that the presence of a female queen encouraged the greater nobles around her to assert their masculine power; they were still warlords but they were also in a sense putative lovers competing for her favour.
The negotiations between the courts of London and Vienna continued at a painfully slow pace; but the delays and disputes over religion were acceptable to Elizabeth if they deferred any final decision. It meant also that she was still on conciliatory terms with both branches of the Habsburg empire, represented by Philip II of Spain and the new emperor Maximilian II. Philip himself was assured of her suitability as a bride to his cousin; his ambassador bought information from the queen’s laundresses about her menstrual cycle.
At this time, too, attempts were made to standardize her painted image. At the end of 1563 William Cecil had drafted a proclamation which criticized the depiction of the queen ‘in painting, graving and printing’; these unflattering or unsophisticated portraits provoked ‘complaints among her loving subjects’. It had been decided that ‘some cunning [skilful] person’ would create a great original on which all other portraits might be modelled. Since portraits were also often used in marriage negotiations, the queen might have desired a more perfect image. In this decade, too, she began to entertain hopes of an alchemical elixir of life that would maintain her youth and beauty; William Cecil noted in his diary that Cornelius Lanoy, a Dutchman, ‘was committed to the Tower for abusing the queen’s majesty, in promising to make the elixir’.
Yet her negotiations with the Habsburgs were overshadowed by the devices of Mary Stuart. The Scottish queen’s attention had turned to a young man, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; he had been born in Leeds, but his father was the fourth earl of Lennox, a prominent Scottish nobleman who had been forced into exile by a rival faction. Yet more pertinently Darnley was the grandson of Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, and cousin to Mary Stuart herself. On the Scottish side, he was directly descended from James II. Any alliance with him would immensely strengthen Mary Stuart’s claim to the throne after the death of Elizabeth. Darnley was also a Catholic, and the clergy of the Scottish kirk feared above all else the renewed prospect of Catholic supremacy. The young man was given a passport to visit Scotland, where of course he paid his respects to his cousin the queen. She saw him ‘running at the ring’, a chivalric game for horsemen, and soon enough they became inseparable. Mary had become genuinely infatuated with him, almost at first sight. She was in many respects quixotic and impulsive, relying upon her instinct rather than her judgement; she did not have her rival’s gift of calculation.
In the course of these marital games the Scottish ambassador, Sir James Melville, was obliged to haunt the court of Elizabeth in search of information or gossip. In his memoirs, written in the early years of the seventeenth century, he left certain vignettes concerning the conversation and behaviour of the queen that throw an interesting light upon her character. She discussed with him the female costume of different countries, and told him that she possessed the ‘weeds’ of every civilized country. She proved the point by wearing a fresh set of clothes every day.
She asked him ‘what coloured hair was reputed best, and whether my queen’s hair or hers was the best, and which of the two was the fairest’? He replied, in the manner of the Sibylline oracle, that ‘the fairness of both was not their worst fault’. She pressed for a more direct response. ‘You are the fairest queen in England and ours the fairest queen in Scotland.’ Still she was not satisfied with his answer. He was obliged to make a judgement. ‘You are both the fairest ladies in your courts; you are the whitest, but our queen is very lovely.’
‘Which of us,’ she now asked him, ‘is of the highest stature?’
‘Our queen.’
‘Then she is over high, for I am neither too high nor too low.’
When Elizabeth asked him about Mary’s pastimes, he told her that his mistress liked sometimes to play on the lute or virginals. She then asked him whether the Scottish queen played well.
‘Reasonably well,’ he replied, ‘for a queen.’
There then followed a contrived piece of showmanship. After dinner the queen’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, invited Melville to a retired gallery where he promised him some enchanting music. He whispered, as if imparting a secret, that it was ‘the queen playing on her virginals’. The ambassador listened for a moment and then very boldly put aside a tapestry that hung before the doorway of a recess, to see the great queen at her virginals. Her back was to him but she turned her head and seemed surprised to find him there; she rose from her instrument, affecting embarrassment and alleging that ‘she used not to play before men, but when she was solitary, to eschew melancholy, and asked “How I came there?” ’
Melville replied that he had been drawn by the sweetest melody, which gracious answer pleased the queen. She sat down upon a cushion, while he knelt. She then provided him with a cushion to place beneath his knee. It was a breach of etiquette but the queen insisted. She demanded to know ‘whether she or the Queen of Scots played best?’ Melville gave the palm to her. She then spoke to him in French, Italian and Dutch as a sign of her proficiency.
Two days later she decided that the ambassador must see her dance. At the end of the performance she once again wished to know which queen danced best. He replied that ‘my queen danced not so high or disposedly as she did’. By this he meant that Elizabeth’s dancing was more mannered and deliberate than that of Mary.
It is not at all clear that Melville’s recollections are always accurate. Yet he is surely right to have emphasized the implicit rivalry or jealousy between the two queens. When he returned to his native country, Mary asked him if he believed that Elizabeth’s words of affection for her were genuine. He replied that ‘in my judgement there was neither plain dealing nor upright meaning, but great dissimulation, emulation and fear that [Mary’s] princely qualities should over soon chase her out and displace her from the kingdom’.
In the early spring of 1565 Mary was so enamoured of Darnley that she helped to nurse him through an attack of measles that may in fact have been a manifestation of syphilis. An English en
voy wrote to Elizabeth that ‘The matter is irrevocable. I do find this Queen so captivate either by love or cunning – or rather to say truly by boasting and folly – that she is not able to keep promise with herself, and therefore not able to keep promise with your Majesty in these matters.’ Her desire and wilfulness had outrun her discretion. Darnley was twenty, and she three years his senior.
By May they had made a secret engagement and, in July, they were married without waiting for the papal dispensation from Rome allowing the first cousins to unite. She then proclaimed him king of Scotland without asking the advice of her parliament. She had married in haste, but she would soon repent it. Darnley was as vain as he was unbalanced; he was arrogant and dissolute; he was weak-willed; within a short time he had managed to offend most of the Scottish nobility. ‘The bruits here are wonderful,’ the English envoy wrote at the time, ‘men’s talk very strange, the hatred towards Lord Darnley and his house marvellous great, his pride intolerable, his words not to be borne . . .’ He added that in token of his ‘manhood’ Darnley is eager to ‘let blows fly where he knows they will be taken’. He was, in other words, an egregious bully.
The young queen was herself no stranger to conflict. Her illegitimate half-brother, James Stuart, first earl of Moray, espoused the Protestant cause and sought to lead a group of rebels against her. Mary summoned 5,000 of her supporters, and from summer to autumn of 1565 mercilessly harried her enemies in a series of skirmishes that became known as the Chaseabout Raid. ‘I defy them,’ she said, ‘what can they do, and what dare they do?’ She rode fast and furiously; she wore a steel helmet and carried a brace of pistols at her side. Eventually she chased her half-brother over the border into England, and in her triumph declared that she could lead her troops to the walls of London. She was a formidable opponent.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 37