Under interrogation Norfolk denied knowing Ridolfi, but then conceded that he had indeed met the man; he then stated that the Florentine banker had suggested treason to him but that he had refused to listen. One by one his falsehoods were exposed. The earls of Southampton and Arundel were also arrested, together with the lords Cobham and Lumley and associated gentry. Burghley had flushed out the Catholics at court.
On 16 January 1572 the duke of Norfolk was put on trial. He was charged with the crime of ‘imagining and compassing the death of the queen’. He denied the charge but, in the sixteenth century, it was very difficult to withstand the prosecution of the Crown. He was denied counsel and deprived of all books and papers. From his chamber in the Tower he wrote that he was as crushed ‘as a dead fly’ or ‘a dead dog in this world’.
He was duly convicted but the queen prevaricated over the sentence. Twice she signed the warrant for execution but then at the last moment revoked it. Norfolk was the premier nobleman in England, after all, and closely related to her. She told Burghley that ‘the hinder part’ of her brain did not trust ‘the forward sides of the same’; her passion, in other words, overruled her judgement. She was in such distress of mind that she collapsed in pain; Burghley and Leicester sat by her bedside for three nights. The same indecision and nervous perplexity had ruined the negotiations for her marriage to the duke of Anjou.
Eventually she signed the third warrant in the early summer and, after much earnest persuasion by her councillors, she did not rescind it. Norfolk went to the scaffold. It was the first execution of a nobleman, by beheading, in the whole course of Elizabeth’s reign; the scaffold on Tower Hill was derelict, and another had to be raised in its place. When told of the news Mary, queen of Scots, burst into tears; she was said to be inconsolable for days. But she was still plotting, ever plotting. Burghley would now direct his attentions towards the lady. It was his opinion that the axe should strike at the root.
The whole plot had been so clumsily handled that some historians have concluded that Ridolfi himself was a double agent in Burghley’s employment chosen to entrap Mary, Norfolk and the other Catholic conspirators. It is an unlikely, but not wholly implausible, scenario. Ridolfi himself had already fled to Paris, after the arrest of his messenger at Dover, and never returned to England; he died in his native city more than forty years later.
A new parliament assembled in May 1572, just after the Ridolfi plot had been uncovered. The Commons were indignant at the likely role of Mary in the affair. The advice of one speaker was ‘to cut off her head and make no more ado about her’, an opinion to which the majority assented. Another member, Thomas Digges, urged ‘the shunning of that sugared poison bearing in outward show the countenance of mild pity’. Beware of pity. It was not her ‘private case’ but one that affected the safety of the entire realm. It was then agreed with the Lords, in committee, that Mary should be attainted with treason. The convocation of the senior clergy reached the same decision, arguing that the ‘late Scottish queen hath heaped up together all the sins of the licentious sons of David – adulteries, murders, conspiracies, treasons and blasphemies against God’. Yet Elizabeth, in an unrecorded speech, managed to turn away their murderous wrath.
The Lords and Commons then proposed a bill that took away Mary’s title to the throne and made it a treasonable offence to advocate the same. The queen refused to sanction it, employing the ancient formula ‘La royne s’advisera’ – the queen will consider the matter, the queen will think of it, the queen will advise upon it. It meant that the queen was likely to do nothing at all. She may have felt some remaining sympathy with her relative; Elizabeth had once been in confinement, too. So she took counsel, and all was lost in a mist of words.
Just before the parliament of 1572 was prorogued a pamphlet was addressed to its members that dared to question the constitution of the church. An Admonition to the Parliament declared that ‘we in England are so far off being rightly reformed, according to the prescript of God’s word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same’. The authors, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, wished to found all church teaching and organization on the basis of Scripture. The Book of Common Prayer was ‘an unperfect book, culled and picked out of the popish dung-hill, the Mass-book of all abominations’. There should be no archbishops and no bishops; an ‘equality’ of ministers should govern the Church with ‘a lawful and godly seignory’ in every congregation. Field and Wilcox were promptly sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for violating the Act of Uniformity, but their words reached more attentive ears; in the early 1570s we can trace the rise of the Presbyterian movement.
Just as parliament was becoming more radical, with the entire absence of Catholic members from the Commons, so also were others in authority. At Cambridge, two years before, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity had given a set of lectures in which he propounded the same measures as those laid out in the Admonition; he had been deprived of his chair and had gone into exile at Geneva, but his followers still remained in the universities. ‘I am no parson,’ a Cambridge graduate exclaimed after his ordination. ‘No, I am no vicar. I abhor these names as Antichristian. I am pastor of the congregation there.’ The Puritan clergy of England were largely created at the universities.
In London and elsewhere, individual congregations also set up a cycle of preaching and catechizing on the Puritan model; certain popular preachers were immune to the wrath of the bishops and continued to pronounce ‘God’s truth’, often with the support of noblemen and gentry. The earl of Leicester was known to favour the Puritan cause. Lord Burghley himself, at a slightly later date, said of the Puritan clerics that ‘the bishops, in these dangerous times, take a very ill and unadvised course in driving them from their cures’.
The rudiments of a system known as the ‘classis’ soon began to emerge, with the ministers and lay elders of the churches in assembly. A republican union of ministers was established south of London, in the neighbourhood of Wandsworth, and called itself a ‘presbytery’; Wandsworth then became known as a haven for religious refugees, from the Protestant Dutch of the 1570s to the Huguenots who fled there in the early seventeenth century. The example had already been set by the ‘refugee churches’ established in the capital where Protestant exiles were also accustomed to worship. Yet it was not always safe to be one of the ‘stricter’ sort. In this year a young carpenter from Sussex, Noah by name, walked 6 miles from his village of Hailsham to Warbleton, where he intended to remove the maypole on the village green as a symbol of idolatry; one of the locals then killed him by shooting him through the neck.
Burghley was soon joined in the queen’s counsels by Francis Walsingham, a subtle and resourceful finder of secrets; it was said of him that he heard, at his house in Seething Lane, what was whispered in the ear at Rome. He became one of the first in a long line of ‘spymasters’ in the world of European diplomacy. He had begun his career as Elizabeth’s envoy at the French court, but in 1573 she appointed him to be one of her secretaries of state.
A group of men had now emerged about the throne who were firmly allied to the Protestant cause and, with their business managers in parliament, were opposed to the pretensions of Mary Stuart and to the Catholic powers of Europe; it may be supposed that they had guided the anti-papist measures of the last parliament. The most illustrious of them were Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester and Francis Walsingham. They had the full confidence of the queen but they were not afraid to question her judgement and, if necessary, to nudge parliament in their direction. It was said that they listened to the queen’s commands, but then quietly proceeded as before. Elizabeth herself seems to have been genuinely fond of them; she called Walsingham ‘Moor’, perhaps because of the darkness of his clothes, and Burghley was her ‘Spirit’. Leicester was her ‘Eyes’.
Another favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, emerged in this period. He was primarily a courtier of handsome address, with a genius for dancing. In that capacity he attracted the attentio
n of the queen. He became a gentleman pensioner and then captain of her bodyguard before rising ever higher until he was appointed chancellor of Oxford and lord chancellor of England. It was said that he had danced his way into office. His nickname was ‘Lids’ or ‘Sheep’ that soon became ‘Mutton’.
A measure of the queen’s attentiveness can be found in a peremptory letter that she wrote to the bishop of Ely. Hatton was covetous of some garden-land owned by the bishop, on Holborn Hill and Ely Place, but the divine was not willing to give way to the courtier. The queen insisted, however, and sent the following message to him. ‘PROUD PRELATE, You know what you were before I made you what you are now. If you do not immediately comply with my request, I will unfrock you, by God. ELIZABETH.’ The bishop then of course surrendered his lands, with the proviso that he and his successors could have free access to the gardens and leave to gather 20 bushels of roses every year.
A much stranger transfer of land is noticed by the chroniclers of the period. A piece of ground in Hertfordshire, 26 acres about an eminence known as Marlech Hill, ‘burst from its station, and moved with a groaning noise, carrying with it cattle, sheepcotes, trees etcetera full forty paces the first day’. After four days it ceased to move, forming a hill of 72 feet in height. It had overturned a local chapel in its progress and left a hollow 30 feet in depth, 160 yards wide and 400 yards in length.
Another marvel was reported. At the beginning of 1572 the earl of Leicester presented Elizabeth with a jewelled bracelet in which was set a miniature timepiece. The queen of England wore the first-ever wristwatch.
32
The revels now are ended
As part of her summer progress Elizabeth often visited the home of the earl of Leicester, Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. It was here that in succeeding years she was entertained with pageants and with plays. On her procession through the park gates one summer, the porter came attired in the robes of Hercules and delivered to her a speech of welcome. A large pool acted as a moat for one side of the castle, where the queen was greeted by nymphs who seemed to walk on the water. The greatest pageant of welcome was conducted in the base court of the castle, where seven pairs of pillars had been constructed from which the gods and goddesses of Greece offered her various gifts. When she entered the inner court and alighted from her horse, all the clocks of the castle were stopped; no one was to be aware of the time while the queen stayed at Kenilworth.
On the following day, Sunday, she went to church; but the afternoon was filled with music and dancing. The queen was not of the stricter sort.
In particular she loved dancing. One painting shows her engaged with a courtier, thought to be Leicester, in La Volta. In this dance the male partner takes the female and twirls her around in the air, as her feet swing out. She also danced the galliard. She took five steps, leapt as high into the air as she might, and then beat her feet together on returning to the floor. Elizabeth insisted that the dance should become more intricate and challenging, in which pursuit her older or more staid councillors did not follow her.
Other diversions were followed at the castle over successive summers. A ‘wild man’ from the Indies sang her praises while the goddess Echo redoubled them. Italian allegories, Roman myths and chivalric romances were heaped one upon another. She was shown the local prodigies, such as a giant boy and a monstrous sheep. She enjoyed the hunt and rode with the men in pursuit of the hart. She was delighted by bear-baitings, where twelve or thirteen bears would be set upon by a pack of dogs. Tumblers and fireworks were mingled. In the hot weather she drank wine mixed in equal parts with water. While on progress she also touched for ‘the king’s evil’ by laying her hands on the throat or jaw of the person afflicted with scrofula.
So it was that, in the summer of 1572, she was diverted by an entire world of Tudor entertainment in which the pastoral and the classical were mixed with all the prodigality of an English romance. Peace was in the air. A treaty between France and England had been agreed only five months before. The Treaty of Blois was the indirect result of the long process of unsuccessful negotiations over a French marriage for the queen. It was essentially a defensive treaty against the power of Spain but it had the additional merit of putting an obstacle to further French meddling on behalf of Mary. A painting attributed to Lucas de Heere, The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession, is most likely to be a celebration of the treaty. It was presented by Elizabeth to the man who more than any other had fashioned the agreement, Francis Walsingham, and on a panel at the bottom edge of the work was the inscription:
THE QUENE TO WALSINGHAM THIS TABLET SENTE MARK OF HER PEOPLES AND HER OWNE CONTENTE
The painting shows in allegorical form the Tudor line, from Henry to Elizabeth herself, but it also shows the queen leading forward the figure of Peace who is carrying an olive branch in her left hand while trampling underfoot the weapons of war.
Yet the tidings of war were never far away. In the earlier part of this year the people of the Netherlands rose up against their Spanish overlords and the forces of the duke of Alva; they were led by William, prince of Orange, whose admiral had previously taken refuge in England among his co-religionists. In the spring of 1572 the admiral had sailed from Dover with a small fleet and had overpowered the town of Brielle at the mouth of the Meuse. The other ports of Zeeland, Holland and Utrecht all rose up and expelled the Spanish garrisons. Their sailors became known as the ‘sea beggars’, at a time when piracy and patriotism were often conflated. The prince of Orange himself raised an army in Germany while the forces of the French, animated by hostility to Spain, seized Hainault.
The fervour in London grew as the European Protestants and their French allies began to win victory after victory over the Catholic forces of Philip of Spain. This was the conflict that the English reformers had been waiting for; collections of money in the churches were soon turned into guns and powder while many volunteers crossed the North Sea to join the offensive. Parliament, and many of the bishops, urged Elizabeth herself to participate and to declare war upon the Spaniards in the United Provinces. A blow would be struck for England but also for God.
Yet Elizabeth was not so sure. She disliked the fact that the people of the United Provinces had risen against their lawful sovereign, and she had no reason to welcome the substitution of Spanish forces by French ones. Her policy, as always, was one of caution touched by compromise. If the duke of Alva seemed likely to prevail, or at least to avoid defeat, then she should allow the protagonists to fight on; it suited her policy to have her neighbours at each other’s throats. As Lord Burghley put it in a paper of advice to her, ‘let both sides alone for a time’. But if the French began to take over the entire coast and the frontiers, under cover of their alliance with the Netherlanders, then Elizabeth would assist Philip ‘in the defence of his inheritance’ and even join with him on condition that he restore religious liberty to his subjects and ‘deliver them from the fear of the Inquisition’. To this policy she adhered. The Spanish ambassador at the English court even reported that the queen was ready to take possession of Flushing, in apparent support of the Orange cause, and then surrender it back to the Spanish.
Her deliberate ambiguity was not to the taste of those who espoused the cause of radical Protestantism but it reflected the pragmatism which she brought to all the affairs of state. It was not necessarily with displeasure, therefore, that she heard news of victories by the duke of Alva against the rebels; the French had fallen back in disorder, and Charles IX faced the unwelcome prospect of war against Spain without the help of any ally.
In these difficult circumstances the providential alliance between the French Catholics and the Protestants of the United Provinces could not endure. When the French leader of the Huguenots, Gaspard de Coligny, became the victim of an attempt at assassination, the queen regent, Catherine de Medici, took fright at the possible retaliation of his supporters. So she ordered the pre-emptive destruction of the Huguenot leaders, among them Coligny himself,
whose body was thrown out of the window of his lodgings. Unfortunately the bloodshed was contagious and on that same St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572, the mobs of Paris began their murderous work on any Huguenots they could find. They believed that they were attacking the enemies of God; neighbour turned upon neighbour in an atmosphere of frenzy as the Huguenots were stabbed, hanged or beaten to death. It was said that some of the boys of Paris strangled babies in their cradles. The bodies were piled into carts and taken down to the Seine; it was in flood that day and by the grace of God, as the Catholics said, it was better able to wash away the traces of heresy. The emblem of St Bartholomew was the knife as a symbol of his murder by flaying; the knife now ruled.
Cardinal Orsini had told the French king that not one Huguenot should be left alive in France and, although the advice could not be followed in practice, thousands died in Paris and in the provinces. The country was now divided by a religious hatred far outweighing that within England. The occasion itself became known as the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and did more than any other event in sixteenth-century history to discredit the Catholic cause. It showed the people of England, for example, their possible fate if a Catholic queen once more reigned over them. In Rome the bells rang in celebration, however, and Pope Gregory walked with his cardinals from shrine to shrine in grateful procession.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 42