Elizabeth
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Just as Elizabeth had failed to offer assistance or support to her brave mariners and soldiers after the 1588 Armada campaign, she gave no thought, shockingly, to Norris’s men, or to the ordinary foot soldiers in Essex’s field army still stranded in Normandy. Rather than ordering their repatriation with their officers, she cheerfully left them to return home under their own steam or else forage off the land in northern France until she needed them again. By never giving them their arrears of pay, she left them destitute. Six months would pass before she offered any of these soldiers the prospect of a passage home. Instead, all of her attention was on the Duke of Parma, who had once again marched into Picardy, at the head of a new, crack Spanish division. The fear was that he was making his way towards Aumale, on Normandy’s eastern border, which made it almost certain he was heading for Rouen.
Intent on a set-piece battle, Henry rode out with seven thousand cavalry to confront his old enemy, but he positioned himself badly and was shot in the groin while leading his troops across a bridge. Within ten days, he would recover sufficiently to mount his horse, but his brief incapacity gave Parma the opportunity he needed. The Spanish forces pressed ahead towards Rouen, which they successfully relieved on 10 April after ambushing Biron’s camp. Any lingering hope Elizabeth had of capturing Rouen was now gone.53
Henry attempted several times to force Parma into a pitched battle, but failed. Then, while besieging Caudebec, a fortified town on the Seine, Parma was himself shot by a musketeer. The bullet entered his right arm below the elbow and lodged above the wrist. As the wound gradually began to fester, he withdrew his army, hotly pursued by Henry. By early June, he was safely back in the Netherlands, but five months later he died of heart failure.54
The Dutch celebrated Parma’s death with fireworks and dancing in the streets. While the Duke had been absent in France, the armies of their new leader, Count Maurice, ably reinforced by Vere’s auxiliaries, had stormed Steenwijk in Overijssel. Now they laid siege to Geertruidenberg in north Brabant. Henry, meanwhile, had another obstacle to overcome. With Norris no longer in command of the English forces in Brittany, Henry’s army there was heavily defeated. Once again, it seemed as if Spain might take control of the entire province. When Henry appealed for Norris’s return, Elizabeth prevaricated.55 Only on receiving credible intelligence that Philip II might stake a claim to Brittany for his daughter, the Infanta Isabella, did she relent, sending Norris back with money and fresh supplies to begin a guerrilla campaign against the Spanish bases around Blavet.
On 30 June, after tense negotiations, Elizabeth entered into another treaty with the French king. She promised to supply him with four thousand more troops, some artillery and a large quantity of munitions. In return, he agreed to repay her costs, which were estimated at £3,200 a week.56
Then, as in a Greek tragedy, more bad news came. Spanish forces had captured Épernay, on the left bank of the Marne, enabling them to dominate an area crucial to the provisioning of Paris. Desperate to recover the town, Henry had ridden out after supper along the opposite riverbank to reconnoitre. Against orders, Biron followed him, but a cannonball fired from a tower set off an explosion of blood and bone that left him among the dead. It was, Henry informed Elizabeth in ciphered French, ‘one of the very worst blows I could have had’.57
In the ensuing year-long stalemate, Elizabeth’s relations with Henry were scarred by mutual mistrust. He saw her as unreasonable, stingy and half-hearted; she came to fear that he would never repay his debts. She suspected that, to defeat the Catholic League and recover control of the whole of his kingdom, he could before long be tempted to betray her by fulfilling his promise to the dying Henry III of converting to Catholicism.
Outwardly, she maintained good relations, sending the French king a portrait miniature of herself by Nicholas Hilliard and a scarf she had supposedly embroidered. In return, he sent her an African elephant to join the lions, tigers and a porcupine in her menagerie at the Tower. She regarded the elephant as a massive inconvenience: its food – some had to be specially imported – cost her around £150 a year. Shirking the expense, she quickly farmed out the animal to its Flemish keeper: in exchange for paying for its upkeep, he was allowed to keep all profits from exhibiting it to the public.58
• • •
By the spring of 1593, Elizabeth could only watch from the sidelines as events in France slid out of her control. Vast tracts of Normandy and the area around Paris would be devastated by the rival armies. With food becoming scarce and peasant revolts more frequent, Henry’s subjects were weary of the civil war and longed for peace.59
Philip II took his chance. For the very first time, he made a direct personal intervention in French politics, audaciously suggesting that the Infanta should marry the eldest son of the assassinated Duke of Guise. The Estates-General would then elect them king and queen of France in place of Henry, who would be declared a heretic and a usurper like Elizabeth.60
Henry decided he had had enough. And he saw a way out. On Sunday, 15 July 1593, St Swithin’s Day, he solemnly processed into the royal Abbey of Saint-Denis, the burial place of the kings of France for eight hundred years, and was received into the Catholic Church. Clad all in white and carrying a candle, he knelt at the entrance to the choir and was escorted to the high altar by the archbishop of Bourges. There, he professed that he would live and die in the Catholic religion, after which he attended Mass. And as a great bonfire was lit on the hill of Montmartre to announce his conversion to the citizens of Paris, he issued a proclamation in which he recognized the Catholic Church as the ‘true church of God’.61 Not forgetting the loyal supporters who had sacrificed so much for him on the battlefield for so many years, Henry took pains to induce many Catholic noblemen to sign a document promising never to raise arms against the Huguenots. Although sceptics on both sides of the religious divide mocked him by falsely attributing to him the cynical aphorism ‘Paris is well worth a Mass’, his move cut support for the League by three quarters as moderate Leaguers all over France switched sides.62
For more than a year, Lorenzo Guicciardini, the chief adviser of Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had dropped hints to Elizabeth that her ally might convert. A loyal Catholic, but notoriously anti-Spanish, the Grand Duke had already spoken of marrying his sister or niece to the French king and of providing a dowry of 4 million gold pieces and 600,000 crowns a year.63 Alerted in this way nine months before the day of the ceremony in Saint-Denis, Elizabeth had cautioned Henry about the dangers of his possible apostasy: ‘If a ruler does not have his eyes firmly fixed upon the King of Kings without any distraction, how can he expect to achieve either success or stability in his affairs?’64
When the blow fell, it struck her like a sudden bereavement all the same. Her reaction showed that she really did believe that God had been on her side when the Armada was defeated. Henry’s conversion now put that in jeopardy. Confronted by the news, she was in denial for months, simply stunned. ‘Ah quelles douleurs! O quels regrets!’ (‘Ah what griefs! Oh what regrets!’) she exclaimed. She then berated the French king for a decision that she believed flew in the face of God:
Is it possible that any worldly respect should efface the terror with which the fear of God threatens us? Can we with any reason expect a good outcome from an act so iniquitous? He who has preserved you many years by his hand – can you imagine that he would permit you to walk alone in your greatest need? Ah, it is dangerous to do evil to make good out of it; I still hope that a sounder inspiration will come to you.65
Three months later, Elizabeth ordered the rump of her forces in northern France to embark for home, declaring herself to have been shamefully abused by her faithless ally. Then, after intense lobbying by Burghley, she modified her instructions. Now, only the sick and wounded were to return. The able-bodied from Brittany were to remain there, to help repel another two thousand Spaniards who had recently landed at Blavet, and those still in Normandy w
ere to be shipped first to Sandwich in Kent, where they were to be held strictly under guard, ‘lest those that remained should run away’, before being sent to Ostend to reinforce the English auxiliaries in the Netherlands.66
Elizabeth had found the French campaign deeply frustrating. In 1588, with her policy of peace at any price in tatters and the Spanish fleet sailing for the Channel, she had largely, and wisely, left Lord Admiral Howard and Sir Francis Drake to combat the threat on their own terms. By contrast, she had never fully trusted Essex and had thought she could govern him at a distance. In this she was wrong. Despite incurring bills for the war effort on land exceeding £100,000 (worth £100 million today), she had found herself powerless to exert the degree of control that she had expected.67
For if Essex had been an unbridled horse, so, too, had Henry. That she considered herself the senior partner in their alliance as the more established and experienced monarch did not mean he would follow her instructions. In Scotland, King James had several times gone his own way; now Henry was doing the same. At this moment, she was quite unsure what her future relationship with him would be. Revealingly, she had signed her last letter to him, ‘Your most assured sister if it be of the old fashion; with the new I have nothing to do’.68
As for her daredevil young favourite, the fiasco at Rouen did not necessarily mean the end of his military career. Elizabeth might long to dismiss him for insubordination in the same way as, thirty years before, she had yearned to call Burghley to account for his thinly veiled attempts to force her into marriage or into naming an heir in Parliament, but she could not quite bring herself to do so. Unable yet to cut him adrift, still prepared to reward and support him, granting him fresh resources even as he wasted her money, she seemed blind to the trouble she was fomenting.
One thing, though, she had learned the hard way: recent events in France had cured her of any notion that an aggressive European land campaign could work in her best interests. She would think harder and longer next time.
11. ‘Good Queen Bess’
In the City of London, the summers of 1592 and 1593 were long, hot and turbulent. With overseas trade and domestic demand for goods and services gravely depressed by the effects of the long war with Spain and its ally the Catholic League, unemployment began to soar throughout the country, especially among the young. Economic stagnation was made worse by sharply rising prices and the hefty taxes needed to pay for the war effort. In the years of peace, taxes had been low, but with Leicester’s expedition to the Netherlands and the coming of the Armada, they soared to unprecedented levels. It was almost inevitable that, before long, the anguish and frustration of those struggling to make ends meet would explode into violence.1
Trouble began at eight o’clock on a sultry Sunday evening in early June 1592, when, with almost two hours to go before dusk, an angry crowd of feltmongers’ apprentices armed with cudgels and daggers swarmed out of Bermondsey High Street in Southwark and joined forces with a disgruntled rabble of young unemployed men and war veterans. Only the quick thinking of London’s mayor, Sir William Webb, saved the day. Rushing from his house and crossing London Bridge with the sheriff and his constables, Webb arrested the ringleaders and dispersed the throng. Writing to Burghley next day, he argued for leniency, claiming that the spark had been an apprentice’s wrongful arrest. Debt collectors had burst into the man’s lodgings with daggers drawn and dragged him off to the Marshalsea in front of his terrified landlady, who stood clutching a baby in her arms. The rioters had planned to storm the prison and free the inmates. Webb believed the best way to calm the situation was to rectify the injustice done to the young man as quickly as possible.2
Suspicion that a further riot was planned for Midsummer’s Day was strong enough to warrant the proclamation of a curfew. In an effort to stifle further disorders, the Privy Council closed playhouses and other places of public entertainment such as bear-baiting rings and bowling alleys until the New Year, and charged the justices of the peace for Middlesex and Surrey (the counties adjacent to London) to coordinate their patrols with those of the mayor and aldermen.3 Writing again to Burghley, Webb urged the queen’s chief minister to be on his guard against racial and ethnic tension caused by foreigners who had migrated to London for purely economic reasons. He pointed to the Dutch Calvinists who had recently arrived and set up businesses in the city, although many were already free to practise their religion and trades at home.4 His warning chimed with one of the city’s longest-standing grievances, namely that second-generation Huguenot immigrants posed a threat to English merchants. Whereas their parents, fleeing France after the St Bartholomew Day’s Massacre in 1572, had been happy to integrate fully into London society, these younger Huguenots were rediscovering their national identity as Frenchmen and discriminating against true-born Englishmen. After serving apprenticeships and becoming freemen in their adopted city, they would take on their own, exclusively immigrant apprentices before selling on lower-priced goods they had imported directly from their French relatives, so putting Englishmen out of their jobs. And as if that were not enough, they had begun investing in residential property, forcing up prices and dividing their properties into tenements to maximize rents.5
Six weeks later, in the scorching heat of August, plague struck the city, silently killing its victims as, finally, sick and wounded soldiers returned home in droves from the war zones in Normandy and Brittany. Once back on English shores, they gravitated to the capital, most of them lacking their arrears of pay, only to roam the streets, desperately seeking work or charitable relief and spreading diseases they had picked up while in France. For this menacing new threat, the queen and her advisers were utterly unprepared.6
As summer turned to autumn and the heat abated, the Privy Council forbade discharged soldiers from entering the city and ordered the Lord Mayor’s Feast to be cancelled. Almost as fearful of contagious diseases as her father, although less of a hypochondriac, Elizabeth threw a cordon sanitaire around her Court, restricting access to a radius of two miles. Only her privy councillors, their clerks and a reduced number of her own servants were to be allowed in, whether she was in London or on one of her summer progresses. Anyone else attempting entry could be imprisoned.7 Heralds read out royal proclamations in Cheapside and at the gates of Whitehall, closing the central law courts at Westminster and ordering the judges to hear only the most urgent cases, at Hertford Castle, some twenty-five miles north of the city.8
• • •
For a time, these measures helped to control the epidemic, reducing deaths to some thirty a week, but the following spring the heat and the plague returned, turning London into a nursery of infection. At Elizabeth’s insistence, plague orders were published, requiring houses afflicted by disease to be quarantined, their street doors marked clearly with a red cross. The Privy Council shut the theatres again, for fifteen months this time. Other than royal command performances, plays were to be staged only outside a radius of seven miles (later cut to five) from St Paul’s – and, even then, only if the neighbourhood was free of the pestilence.9
In an effort to reduce tension after an outcry in Parliament about the plight of the war veterans, Elizabeth reluctantly offered temporary relief to the most badly maimed. They were granted the sum of two shillings weekly, almost enough to buy bread and some cheese, and those too weak or crippled to claim the money in person could send nominees to collect it. But to cut dramatically the numbers of discharged soldiers and mariners in London and its suburbs, this relief was made payable to them only at their birthplaces.10 The measure helped, but the underlying disquiet remained. The threat of violence returned in April and May when young unemployed men began to roam the streets in gangs, threatening bloodshed against foreigners. Under cover of darkness, they began distributing what the authorities regarded as a vicious wave of seditious libels, which were either handed out as broadsheets to passers-by or pasted up on walls or nailed to posts at street corners as printed ‘placar
ds’. Crammed with slogans and doggerel verses, these so-called ‘libels’ stirred up xenophobia by turning immigrants into convenient scapegoats for poverty and recession. Some even had pictures of gallows with immigrants hanging from them with ropes around their necks, their feet dangling in the air.11 They revived memories of Evil May Day, a notorious episode early in Henry VIII’s reign when more than a thousand young English-born apprentices driven by just such xenophobia had run riot, wielding cudgels and ransacking houses and warehouses in the immigrant communities. Principally, their target had been the hated money-lenders from Lombardy in northern Italy, whom they attacked, until they were famously called to order by Sir Thomas More, then undersheriff of London. His eloquence alone, according to the London chroniclers, had stemmed the worst of the violence.12
The summer of 1593 would turn out to be the hottest and driest of the century. Just in London alone, some eighteen thousand people – roughly a tenth of the urban population – died over the course of the year, two thirds from plague. Such high mortality was merely the tip of an iceberg: twice as many were known to have succumbed to infection but managed to survive. In the Tower, several prisoners died in their cells from heat exhaustion.13 Wealthy merchants and their families sought refuge in the country, closing the city for business. Elizabeth herself would shortly flee with a small group of women and courtiers to the safety of Windsor Castle. Even there she could not feel completely secure: she was terrified when a page of Kate Carey’s younger sister, Philadelphia, Lady Scrope, died of plague in the castle keep.14