still hope to do, if so inclined—or her advisers must arrange for Mary Stuart's recognition as heir, preferably as Norfolk's wife. (Her marriage to Bothwell would presumably be annulled, or declared invalid.) Elizabeth seemed further than ever from marriage: so it must be Mary, and Norfolk.
The duke of Norfolk seemed destined to play a major role in any intervention the councilors might make in determining the succession. He was England's only duke, the natural spokesman for her nobility, and if his leadership capacity was not equal to the task, his ambitions were.
Norfolk was a great peer who lived in the feudal manner. His Howard ancestors had served all the Tudors, conspicuously—if not always with conspicuous loyalty. He was closely related to three queens: Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Elizabeth herself, and on his sprawling manorial lands, where several thousand of his tenants occupied some six hundred square miles, he was himself almost a king. Five hundred mounted retainers escorted the duke wherever he went, and from among his own tenants alone it was said he could put a force of nearly two thousand armed men into the field. From this formidable base he was building up his power further, allying himself with other great families through marriage (he had survived three wives) and buying up huge tracts of land to add to his private domain.
Heir to a great name and a great fortune, Norfolk glimpsed, however shakily, an even greater destiny, as consort of the queen of Scots and perhaps, should Mary succeed Elizabeth, as king of England. In 1569 he was only thirty-one, just coming into his maturity; the hour, the political timing of others and the ripeness of his own ambition combined to make Norfolk a focus of conspiracy.
It was Leicester who provided the prompting, and orchestrated the intrigue. Pembroke, Arundel and Sussex stood behind the earl, and the Scots regent Murray too gave his approval to the scheme of marrying Mary Stuart to Norfolk. In a letter to Mary in May, 1569, Leicester offered a tempting bargain. If Mary would agree to wed Norfolk, maintain the reformed religion in Scotland, forgive her political enemies and promise perpetual friendship with England, Leicester and his allies would work to restore her to her Scots throne and recognize her as Elizabeth's official heir. She accepted the terms. Norfolk, now her fiance, pledged his hand to her with a diamond ring.
In the sequel Norfolk, Leicester and the others bungled their work and showed clearly that, however great their indignation at Elizabeth's perverse autonomy as queen, in fact they were no match for her politically. Leicester, having set the stage, withdrew into the wings and waited there, making excuses for his inaction and hanging back from further decisive steps.
Norfolk, having committed himself too extensively to back out, lost his nerve. Afraid to confess—except, foolishly, to Cecil—and equally afraid to act, he did nothing, and so incriminated himself.
For Elizabeth, sensitive to the dissatisfactions and scheming temperaments of her advisers, knew that conspiracy was under way, though she did not know its precise shape. She gave Norfolk every chance to come forward, and when he failed, and finally in September took refuge on his estates, she gambled on his ultimate cowardice and forced him to capitulate. Leicester had done so several weeks earlier, relying, correctly, on Elizabeth's weakness for him to guarantee her forgiveness. The others—Arundel, Pembroke, Sussex—saw that they were beaten and resumed their disgruntled loyalty to the queen.
But there was much more at stake than pretensions to power by a handful of noblemen. Added to the enticing presence of Mary Stuart and the spur of international Catholic intrigue, Norfolk's alignment with the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland ignited popular insurrection in the north. Dormant forces stirred to life—feudal instincts, religious sentiments centuries old, ancient lusts for revenge. A month after the duke was imprisoned in the Tower, his northern allies went ahead with their defiance, unleashing to rebellion a populace in which the crosscurrents of violence ran turbulent and deep.
"We, Thomas earl of Northumberland and Charles earl of Westmorland the queen's true and faithful subjects, to all the same of the old Catholic religion," the rebel leaders proclaimed loudly from the steps of the Market Cross at Durham, "know ye that we with many other well disposed persons as well of the nobility as others have promised our faith in the furtherance of this our good meaning." The queen was being deceived by "evil disposed persons" bent on destroying the Catholic faith and the ancient nobility, the proclamation announced. "We therefore have gathered ourselves together to resist by force and the rather by the help of God and you good people to see redress of things amiss."
So ran the official statement of the rebels' avowed purpose. The old church and the old social order; these, and the crushing of the queen's "evil disposed" advisers—by whom the earls meant Cecil—were the stated aims of the rising. All was to be undertaken for Elizabeth's sake, not in defiance of her. Simple people harangued by the earls' subordinates were told that in fighting for Westmorland and Northumberland they would be rallying to arms for their queen, and some of them, no doubt, believed this. Others responded with devout reverence to the red crosses the rebel forces wore on their shoulders, and believed them to be crusaders caught up in a holy cause.
There was a near-total merging of armed insurrection with militant religion. The earls went to mass at Durham Cathedral accompanied by a display of force and by the time-honored symbols of the country people's cause borne on banners. A cordon of priests led the procession into the church, carrying the banner with the Five Wounds of Christ. After them came the earls and their ladies, then rank on rank of fighting men in white armor, following the ensigns of the great northern feudal families, and after these a company of footsoldiers armed with bows and arrows, bills and spears. Another tall banner waved over their heads, bearing an image of a plow and the words "God speed the plough." The singing of Catholic hymns and the chanting of the priests mingled with the clank of armor and the clatter of wood on steel as the holy company made its way toward the altar of the huge church to hear mass.
Many of the rank and file among the rebels had no difficulty choosing between loyalty to the queen and their higher loyalty, as Catholics, to the pope.
A serving man who sided with the queen encountered three rebels riding along a country road, their faces swathed in mufflers to protect their identities. Recognizing one of them, a man called Smith, he hailed him and asked him why he was so afraid that he had to disguise himself.
Smith replied that, having intended to support Mary Stuart, he was afraid of capture and imprisonment for attempting to alter the succession. He rode about in secret, he said, and "lodged warily." When Norfolk was taken captive, he explained further, the goal of the conspirators changed. Since then "the setting up of religion, meaning papistry, is our purpose."
"How can that be when you shall be rebels to our queen, and so do against your consciences?" was the serving man's question.
"No, that is not so," came Smith's firm reply, "for the pope has summoned this land once, and if he summon it again, it is lawful to rise against the queen, and do it if she will not; for the pope is head of the church." 6
Such logic prevailed in the minds of the Catholics of the north country. The queen's officers, impatient with this casuistry, condemned the common rebels as "ignorant, superstitious and altogether blinded with the old popish doctrine," while attacking their leaders as vice-ridden, irreligious hypocrites "pretending to popish holiness" as an excuse for treason. 7
But the earls, not the queen, drew the greater popular support. Thousands threw in their lot with the rebels, and when the royal commanders appeared in the towns and villages to claim fighting men for the queen's service they came away with far fewer soldiers than they expected. Gentlemen remained loyal to the crown but sent their sons to fight with the rebels.
Villagers hid in the woods to avoid the queen's officers, then came out of hiding later to put on the crusading tunic of the Catholics.
Worse still, the men who did come forward to serve in the queen's army were strongly divided in mind.
Their fathers and brothers and friends were on the rebels' side, where, they suspected, good Catholics and northern men belonged. Furthermore, the rebels would be sure to punish disloyal queen's soldiers like themselves by destroying their horses and stealing their cattle. And what if, as looked likely, the rebels won? Surely it would be better to desert to them, the moment their victory began to seem certain. One of Elizabeth's most reliable informants on the state of the north, Sir Ralph Sadler, reported to her that she could not count on the fidelity of any of her fighting men, so profound was their ambivalence. "Though their persons be here with us," Sadler wrote, "their hearts are with them."
Sussex, the lord lieutenant, shook his head over the ill-equipped army he had assembled. He had enough men, he thought, or nearly enough—he could use more horsemen—but the mounted men had no spears, the footsoldiers no corselets or pikes. There were neither arquebuses nor the powder to fire them. Meanwhile reports reached him that the rebel army was gathering in "great strength," their numbers at least as large as the royal bands and their weaponry far superior. He dared not risk a confrontation; he waited nervously for munitions and reinforcements to reach him from Lincolnshire and Leicestershire to the south.
Meanwhile the damp, dark days grew shorter and the winter closed in. The looming escarpments of the Pennines were white with snow, and with each new snowfall the drifts grew higher in the dales and pastures of the rocky uplands. The few roads were all but impassable now, and few or no bridges spanned the swollen rivers and streams that veined the sullen landscape.
Sussex could not easily communicate with the court, or even with his own subordinates. The rebels patrolled the icy highroads, seizing royal messengers and even royal troops on their way northward. At Tadcaster, a band of a hundred and fifty footsoldiers was kidnapped by rebel horsemen and impressed for service in their own ranks. 8
By early December the inactivity of the queen's forces was lending the rebels an air of invincibility. The gentlemen "stood dutifully by the queen," but the common soldiers were wavering, and "dangerous to trust." When the earls' troops besieged the loyalists at Barnard Castle the rank and file of the royal garrison deserted by the hundreds, in the most spectacular fashion. They "daily leapt over the walls in great number to go to the rebels," and several dozen "broke their necks, legs or arms in the leaping." When some two hundred men deserted, including those that were holding
the castle gate against the enemy, the commander, Sir George Bowes, was forced to surrender.
Bowes's faithfulness, in contrast to the faithlessness of his men, was affecting, for the rebels had made him pay dearly for his loyalty to the crown. "I am utterly spoiled of all my goods, my corn and cattle carried away, my houses defaced by pulling away the doors and windows," he wrote. "I have nothing but my horse, armor and weapons, brought out of Barnard Castle—which I more esteem than twenty times as much of other things, because thereby I am enabled to serve my good queen."
Barnard Castle fell in mid-December. By then, however, the rebel forces were actually in retreat, their half-frozen, hungry men "wearied with lagging from place to place," and angry that the pay and spoils promised them had never come. Many simply dropped their arms and corselets and went home; those that remained said "they would rather be hanged than serve the earls any more."
From the start the earls had pinned their hopes on a swift and decisive campaign whose aim was the capture of Mary Stuart at Tutbury. They had marched their men due south from Durham, bypassing York—which they could hardly have taken, as they had no heavy guns—and finally reaching Selby, some fifty miles from Tutbury, on November 24. The next day, however, Mary was escorted another thirty miles farther south, to Coventry, where her guard was increased so that the chances of liberating her were slight.
Cheated of their main object, the rebel leaders had no workable alternative strategy. They had seized the port of Hartlepool, in the hope that Alva might send them troops by sea, but the queen's ships had moved in to block the harbor. Meanwhile the same difficulties that were plaguing Sussex at York harassed the earls: icy roads, miserably cold weather, poor communications. And they had little food for their men, and no money to buy more, or to distribute as pay.
Finally on December 11 the first body of reinforcements and supplies sent from the southern army reached Sussex, and he set out for Durham intending to give battle. The earls, their forces rapidly melting away into the hills, fled northward toward the Scots border. The army of the Five Wounds of Christ was no more. There were only two disloyal earls and some hundreds of their mounted retainers, desperate to get to safety among the lawless population of the borderlands.
Sussex, zealous to prove himself after weeks of inaction, was close on their heels. On December 19 he had them almost within his grasp. They were at Hexham, he at Newcastle, a day away. Weary but eager to seize his prey at last, he sat down at midnight to write to Cecil.
"I shall set forward towards Hexham tomorrow," he reported, "and will remove them or make them pay dearly.'' Should some part of the earls' force elude him there, he would pursue them to the last man, he swore, "wheresoever they fly, over hills, wastes, or water, until I have either given them the overthrow, or put them out of the world."
Fie away, fie away! fie, fie, fie! No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not I! I'll live a maid till I be forty.
S
ussex chased the rebel earls and their horsemen energetically, but in vain. They rode hard for the border and, with the help of the outlaw lords who controlled that lawless region, crossed it on the night of December 20, 1569, disguised as local men.
Hundreds of gentlemen who had joined the rising simply melted into the landscape, hidden away in mountain retreats or in the lofts and barns of country people willing to risk death for the cause of Catholicism and Mary Stuart. On Christmas Day there was good news. The earl of Northumberland was captured by the Scots, who eventually returned him to England. The Scots regent Murray was as alarmed as his Protestant coreligionist Cecil at the presence of the Catholic leaders on his southern border, and feared for the security of his own government, not to mention the everpre-sent hazard that continental powers might become involved. 'This matter no doubt has branches yet unknown," Murray wrote to Cecil in a dark mood, "extending, peradventure, to the furthest marches of both realms." The "malice of foreign adversaries" was not far to seek.
The exasperated Sussex turned to the grisly task of punishing the disloyal north. Little blood had been shed in the brief course of the rebellion, but in its aftermath many hundreds lost their lives. Sussex ordered his provost marshal Sir George Bowes to "make very great example" of the laborers and
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husbandmen who had made up the majority of the rebel army, and Bowes set to his work with chilling efficiency. He and his men traveled from one village to the next, assembling the luckless population, selecting a suitable number of victims from among the "meanest of the people," then hanging them from a hastily erected gallows. Except in the case of men captured in the fighting field, it was difficult to tell the collaborators from those loyal to the queen; Cecil suggested imprisoning townsmen at random and starving them until, "being pinched with some lack of food," they confessed or named the offenders. But this took time, and the queen, though pleased with the thoroughness of the executions, was impatient to expedite the punishment so that she could disband her costly forces and send them home.
By January there were corpses in every northern village and town. In Durham, where the revolt had begun, eighty men were hanged. The ghastly display had its effect—or so it seemed to the provost marshal. The people, he reported, were "in marvellous fear, so that I trust there shall never such thing happen in these parts again." Those who escaped hanging were forced to pay crushing fines to the queen's governors—a harsh duty in a poor region—and to make that duty even more bitter the English soldiers were ordered to lay waste the cultivated lands of the north. Winter food supplies were destroyed, grain and animals confiscated and store
houses plundered of everything of value. Some among Sussex's captains wondered that the queen's own subjects, however great their disloyalty, should be crippled by such merciless devastation.
But the savage revenge did not bring peace. Just over the Scots border the fugitive English rebels, along with several thousand borderers intent on pillage, massed for an immense counterassault. They swarmed across into England, harrying the countryside as vigorously as the queen's soldiers had done farther south, driving off sheep and cattle, taking prisoners, and treating women and small children with a barbarity that left even hardbitten military men shaking their heads in sorrow. "It would pity any English heart," one of them wrote, "to see the state of the country."
The real heartbreak of the tragic borderland conflict was that it was endless. There were occasional military victories. Hunsdon engaged and defeated a large rebel force in February, and some five hundred of the rebels were killed or taken prisoner. But the battle was not decisive. The crosscurrents of Catholic against Protestant, English against Scot were too inveterate to be eradicated. The border folk, hating and hated, seemed forever poised to continue the ancient bloodbath, and the continual shifts and changes in politics on both sides of the border continued to guarantee them cause.
Elizabeth's reaction to her cousin Hunsdon's brief triumph was a trumpet-call of rejoicing. "I doubt much, my Harry, whether that the victory were given me more joyed me, or that you were by God appointed the instrument of my glory," she said in a handwritten note appended to a formal letter of congratulations, "I assure you that for my country's good the first might suffice, but for my heart's contention the second more pleased me." 1
The warmth and candor of this note almost mask its egocentricity. Hunsdon was "the instrument of her glory." Her greatness, her invincibility, as much as England's, were at stake on the battlefield. At thirty-six, Elizabeth's truculence and assertiveness had, in her finest moments at least, matured into regality. To her people she was "our most dread sovereign lady," as well as being a beloved and familiar figure.
The first Elizabeth Page 31