Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  As it was, it was still too much for the conservative Lords. They boldly rejected the first bill that Cecil submitted. In the end, what came out of Parliament in the spring of 1559 was more a mingle-mangle than ever. The final act affirmed Elizabeth as Supreme Governor of the Church of England (not Supreme Head: a small theological and diplomatic concession to Catholics, and the Catholic powers abroad); it replaced the Latin mass with the vernacular litany of Edward’s 1552 Prayer Book; it left matters of church ornaments and priestly vestment up to the Queen. To assuage the consciences alike of those who believed and disbelieved in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, a modification was introduced in the service: to the Protestant 1552 version, “Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee,” commemorative and symbolic only, was added the traditional Catholic formula, “The body of Our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life,” which distinctly implied otherwise. Something for everyone: if it baffled the common man, it has baffled theologians ever since. The Queen, for her part, was content to opine, “In the sacrament at the altar, some thinks one thing, some other; whose judgment is best God knows.”

  The whole package was a formula that could please no one, an attempt to keep a lid on internal pressures while doing nothing to defuse them. It passed the Lords in the end by a vote of only twenty-one to eighteen, with two of Elizabeth’s own Privy Councilors voting against.

  The Queen’s conservatism was honestly come by, at least. The Protestant instruction she had absorbed in her youth left her not with the zeal of a conversion on the Road to Damascus that the pioneers of the Reformation experienced but, rather, with the mild feeling that it was all just rather ordinary common sense. The purpose of reform was just that, ridding the church of its worst abuses and superstitions. Elizabeth’s religious defenders always took pains to cast her settlement as no innovation, simply a return to the purity of the primitive church, a stripping away of the accretions and usurpations of popery. The role of the prince as governor of the church in his realm was ordained by God himself; the prince’s authority depended neither on the Pope nor on the individual consciences of worshippers over esoteric points of doctrine. A “vain love of singularity” would only lead men to dispute, to undermine the church’s authority and provoke schism. Elizabeth liked the trappings of the church that reinforced its majesty, the vestments, candles, ornaments, stone altars; she forbade women to live in cathedral closes and tried to discourage priests from marrying; she distrusted preaching if not strictly regulated.

  The deeply religious, Catholic and Protestant alike, were equally unenthusiastic. The Queen blithely insisted to the Spanish Ambassador that the rites of the Church of England were virtually the same as those of the Church of Rome, only a matter of three or four things in the mass, she asserted. True Catholics, needless to say, thought otherwise. The Puritans, for their part, were not about to be mollified until all the myriad remnants of “cloaked papistry” were extirpated.

  And as for the common men and women, the mystery and magic that the old church had at least had going for it—the intonations of the Latin mass, the cult of saints and their relics, the pilgrimages to shrines and wells, the ringing of bells for the souls of the dead on All Hallows’ Eve, the harvest and Yuletide processions, the blessings of the plows, the anointing of sick cows with holy water, the prayers for rain, all the “Judaical and heathenish rites,” as the Puritans scorned them—these were now gone, gone without even the hot evangelical zeal of the new religion to replace them.

  The old clergy mostly conformed; no more than a hundred or two were removed for refusing to accept the Prayer Book or royal supremacy. But they were a sorry lot, “loitering lubbers” who “seek not the Lord Jesus but their own bellies”; “some shake-bucklers, some ruffians, some hawkers and hunters, some dicers and carders, some blind guides and can not see, some dumb dogs and will not bark,” as one famous Puritan preacher denounced them to be. The Puritans were naturally hard on these holdover priests—“mass-mongers” was the favorite term of opprobrium—but, even discounting Puritan bias, they were a sodden and illiterate bunch. Most priests did not even know the Bible; one bishop a few years before had found that over half of his priests could not recite the Ten Commandments, one in ten could not even name the author of the Lord’s Prayer. It was a rather basic failing in a Christian clergyman, given that the author was Jesus himself.

  Priests who had just managed to get through the set rites of the Catholic Church, their deficiencies hidden under the aura of magical powers they exercised and the unquestioning obedience the rituals themselves presumed, were at a loss when it came to preaching the word and inspiring congregations. Many did not try; instead—“ill workmen, sleepy watchmen,” the Puritans again railed—they resorted to stumbling through preprinted homilies. The services were perfunctory, unedifying: the minister “posteth it over, as fast as he can gallop… . They toss the Psalms in most places like tennis balls.” The English-language Prayer Book was supposed to bring congregations closer to the word of God, but there is sometimes something to be said for mystery and incomprehension; most found the new service sterile, dull, tedious, and talked, slept, walked about, or even brawled in church.

  In some dioceses, churchwardens were instructed to appoint four to eight large men of the parish to keep order during divine service.

  Of course, there was the rather inescapable fact that Protestantism embodied dissent, authorized dissent, was dissent: the Queen was swimming against a tide of her own creation. The tide began with religion, but it lapped at farther shores.

  Later Protestant triumphalists would credit the Reformation with everything from capitalism to public education to democracy; they exaggerated, but they had a point. Protestant preachers urged both men and women to become literate so they could read the Bible, and literacy blossomed in Elizabeth’s reign. People who read the Bible could read other things, too; and, what was more dangerous, write things. “Every gross brained idiot is suffered to come into print,” fumed an English scholar. The Queen and her Council were less concerned about the idiots than about the pamphleteers, the propagandists, the critics: this was something new.

  But she, and her father, had truly brought it on themselves. Henry’s very act of securing parliamentary approval for royal authority over the church had authorized people to have an opinion on the right ordering of religion. The Queen might insist on obedience and storm against “vain love of singularity”; she tried to separate the question of inner conscience from outward obedience, doing away with prosecutions for heresy, demanding only that people attend church, not that they stand questioning about their beliefs; but the inner conscience had been recognized and licensed, the door opened to challenging authority in ways unthinkable before.

  For Protestantism assumed at its very core that its job was to persuade, not just to command. The Geneva Bible, an English translation begun by the refugees who had fled Mary’s reign to that city, and which became the standard household Bible in England for a century, included not just the text but “arguments” and explanatory notes and marginal glosses. The religious debates within Protestantism everywhere were incredible in their passion and violence: hairsplitting points of theology accompanied by an obbligato of personal invective, insult, slander. The English government practiced censorship as a matter of course, as did every government; but two-penny pamphlets poured forth from secret presses that eluded the authorities and their searchers, who combed the back streets and cellars of London. Authors were discovered and thrown in jail; from their prison cells they carried on their work unrepentant.

  Some defenders of the conservative order looked to Scotland and the Netherlands, where the full political implications of Protestantism were vividly on display, and saw which way the wind was blowing, and shuddered. “God keep us from such visitation as Knox have attempted in Scotland, the people to be orderers of things,” the Archbishop of Canterbury warned in 1559. And another,
thinking particularly of the Netherlands: “Unhappy is the country where the meaner sort hath the greatest sway… . God keep England from any such confused authority, and maintain us with our anointed sovereign, whose only power under Christ is the safety of us all.”

  They might as well have tried to stop the wind from blowing. “These heretics neither fear God nor obey their betters,” the Spanish Ambassador concluded, after watching Parliament dare to instruct the Queen on the wisdom of her marrying. Public opinion could be watched, and sniffed out, its pulse discreetly taken; it could be shaped and molded subtly, with rumors planted, counter-propaganda deftly insinuated; but once it arose to haunt a society it could never be exorcised.

  The divine right of kings was all well and good: a prudent king kept a weather eye to the eddies of this new force that was springing forth from its own divine right.

  The last years of Mary Tudor’s reign had been marked by famine and plague, two disastrous harvests followed by a mysterious epidemic. But 1558 and 1559 had brought good, even abundant harvests. The mystery ailment vanished: a good omen, to those looking for good omens. The Bishop of Winchester, now confined to the Tower, had plainly doubted whether God was prepared to grant peace and prosperity to England under Elizabeth; but now peace had seemed to arrive almost as swiftly as prosperity, and by April of the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, treaties had been signed ending the seemingly endless small wars with Scotland and France. With Spain, Europe’s most powerful empire, England was officially at peace, too.

  Yet barely beneath the surface was a gnawing fear in Elizabeth’s inner circles, fear born of the certain knowledge that England was powerless, utterly naked against the threat of invasion should any of these ancient enemies and rivals decide once again that war and conquest were more to their interests than peace. England was an eerily empty land, barely three million people in a country that in the fourteenth century, before the great plague, had had twice as many. In sheer numbers Spain and France simply overwhelmed England: Spain’s population was three times that of England, France’s five times.

  Scotland was tiny but a nightmare, Protestant in the lowlands but still Catholic in the highlands, heavily under the sway of France: a French regent—the sister of the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, no less—ruled; three thousand French troops were there. From London, the Spanish Ambassador reported that “it is incredible the fear these people are in of the French on the Scottish border.”

  And then there was Scotland’s half-French, and all-Catholic, heir, Mary Queen of Scots: betrothed to the heir of the French crown, with a claim to the succession of the English throne better than Elizabeth’s as far as the French were concerned. In Paris, the English Ambassador was constantly picking up threads of Guisean intrigues aimed against England through the French foothold in Scotland: he referred to the Cardinal of Lorraine as the “Minister of Mischief.”

  Peace with Spain had been secured through Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip II—not that it had been much of a marriage, and not that it had sat well with most Englishmen, who in their guts never liked a foreigner, especially a foreigner who had the additional ill-favor of being a Spaniard. Elizabeth’s accession had brought proforma expressions of continued mutual goodwill between the two realms, but only a fool could ignore the underlying enmity and conflict of interests between the two seafaring nations. Cecil warned that, with Spain ruler of the Netherlands, and two-thirds of English exports going to Antwerp, Philip’s power to “annoy this realm” even short of war was vast and daunting. Nor were the Spanish above dropping hints about what else they could do. Philip’s regent in the Netherlands, Cardinal Granvelle, struck a note like that of any none-too-subtle tough when he asked the English Ambassador: “What present store of either expert captains or good men of war ye have? What treasure? What other furniture for defense? Is there one fortress in all England that is able one day to endure the breath of cannon?”

  And, as Cecil noted in a memorandum to the Queen in August 1559, the Guises and their intrigues aside, the French Crown had hardly abandoned its ambitions toward England. The French King had recently sought to have the Pope formally declare Elizabeth illegitimate, had made certain alarming military and naval preparations, had even served dinner at the French Court to the English Ambassador on plates bearing the English arms: a brazen assertion of claim to the title of Elizabeth’s realm. Other English envoys warned that England might be reduced to another of those prizes that the two great continental powers, France and Spain, tussled over, as they did various Italian states. Or, worst of all: that they might join forces and divide England between them.

  From the very start, Cecil argued that neither open war nor neutrality would answer. England was too weak to dare provoke a direct conflict; but to do nothing would be to cede to the enemy the license to strike at the time and place most favorable to him. And so Cecil’s plan for Scotland, laid out in a long and masterly memorandum, was to secretly aid a group of pro-English Protestant lords who had rebelled against the Regent Mother. To Elizabeth’s objection that “it is against God’s law to aid any subjects against their natural princes,” Cecil chiefly argued necessity. England simply lacked the men or the arms or the military leaders or the money to assemble even a credible deterrent force if the rebels should be defeated and the French lodge a large army in Scotland. It would be far less expensive to spend a bit now than to endure such a calamity later. And if it came to an invasion of England, well, “it will move all good English bloods,” but not necessarily in the way she might hope: “some to fear, some to anger, some to be at their wits end.”

  The Queen gave her reluctant assent, and £3,000 was secretly delivered to the rebels as a first step. She did not like aiding rebels; she did not like the implications that religious rather than national interests might be guiding her policy toward other nations; but just as the weakness of her government to impose its will at home had made the gathering of knowledge and the subtle use of influence the only weapons at her disposal, so the same inescapable logic arose in answer to the problem of Scotland. And so, too, France, where aiding the Huguenot Protestant rebels seemed to offer the best promise of recovering Calais and the other Channel ports that England had lost; and so, too, in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands, where aiding the Dutch Protestant rebels seemed to offer the best hope of keeping Spain occupied.

  Keeping Spain occupied, like keeping France occupied, remained a matter of national rather than religious policy throughout the 1560s; but there were straws in the wind of a new alignment of forces between religion and politics that neither Cecil nor Elizabeth could escape. The growing cold war between England and Spain, for now at least, seemed confined to matters of trade and treasure and military threats; rising tensions over English laws favoring English shipping and banning imports of many articles from the Spanish Netherlands had led, in 1563, to severe reprisals in the form of a temporary embargo on English trade with Antwerp. But everywhere there were religious overtones.

  There was the Spanish Ambassador in London, Bishop de Quadra, who, Cecil complained, “seemeth to neglect all other affairs and rather serveth, as may appear, like a nuncio of the Pope than the King’s ambassador.” De Quadra’s interference in English domestic matters, in particular his attempts to champion the cause of English Catholics, had led to a formal protest by Elizabeth to Philip, and a warning she would ask for his recall if he persisted. Only de Quadra’s unexpected death in August 1563 averted an immediate diplomatic crisis.

  And in the Spanish Netherlands the rebels, nobility and merchants chafing under Spanish rule and oppressive taxes, vented their anger with an outburst of iconoclastic attacks on Catholic churches in 1566. Philip had sent the Duke of Alva from Italy to suppress the revolt, and he and his eight thousand “blackbeards,” as the fearsome Spanish troops were known, supplemented by forty thousand mercenaries, had done so with especial violence and brutality. Now this menacing army was two hundred miles from London. It didn’t help that the new Spa
nish Ambassador in London, Guzmán de Silva, though in general far more urbane and polished than his predecessor, thought it fitting to celebrate Alva’s slaughter of a thousand Protestant rebels with a great bonfire. He also set out two hogsheads of fine claret, and two of beer, for all to drink. Urbane or not, he, too, was soon expressing his revulsion at having to live among so many “heretics” and was asking for a transfer.

  When English merchant seamen began trading in Spanish America, that, too, had religious repercussions; Spain protested that it had a monopoly granted by the Holy See; Cecil retorted, “The Pope had no right to partition the world and to give and take kingdoms to whoever he pleased.”

  And then, finally: an absurd but potentially far more grave rupture over a point of diplomatic protocol occurred in 1567, when the English Ambassador to Spain, Dr. John Man, was forbidden the use of his religion in his own household and forced to attend mass. Shortly thereafter he was expelled from Spain for having remarked at a dinner party that the Pope was “a canting little monk.”

  5

  A MOST UNWELCOME GUEST

  It was perfectly fitting, in retrospect, that the events that would cascade toward the sundering of Europe along irrevocable lines of religion, that would force even the most reluctant to identify the cause of England with that of the Protestant faith and her enemies with Catholicism, that would define the personal nemesis whom Francis Walsingham would pursue through most of two decades to come, began with an explosion.