Heretic Queen (18 page)

Since many of the Puritan preachers exiled from the capital had been trained at either Oxford or Cambridge, it made sense to include the most troublesome of these cities on her progress. Though it was not previously on her route, Elizabeth decided she should visit the university city of Oxford, ostensibly to show her support for its educational prowess. In fact, it was to gauge the mood of the students and their masters and allow them to see firsthand the magnificence and munificence of their anointed queen, particularly since two of the rebellious preachers who had recently been denied their benefices in London had just come down from Oxford. Besides, the Earl of Leicester had confirmed privately that there were other contentious souls to be found. Elizabeth's decision to travel there was not so much a whim as a matter of state security.

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Early in Elizabeth's reign,
the mayor of Oxford had advised the Privy Council that “there were not three houses in [Oxford] that were not filled with papists.” He was admonished by the queen's councillors and told never to repeat such malicious gossip. Yet the mayor knew that at the Mitre Inn on the High Street and at the Catherine Wheel and the Swan Inn, Catholics swarmed into their cellars to meet secretly to celebrate forbidden Catholic rites.
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Like London, Oxford had always been a reluctant follower of the Elizabethan settlement; hence Elizabeth had the Earl of Leicester appointed as its chancellor. Trusted eyes and ears were required in every corner of the realm, but nowhere more than in Oxford and Cambridge, and who better to keep a watchful eye in these university cities than Leicester in Oxford and Cecil at Cambridge? Besides, Leicester had been responsible for the promotion of at least eight of Elizabeth's most outspoken émigré bishops from Geneva and Frankfurt and had been instrumental in making her vision for the Anglican Church a reality. Though the appointments of these bishops had run counter to the queen's conservative instincts, Elizabeth was hardly in a position to be choosy at the outset of her reign. With most Marian bishops refusing to confirm their acceptance of the Act of Settlement, her selection list was rather slim.

Still, Leicester was not the only privy councillor to put forward former exiles to carry out Elizabeth's wishes in her new church. Sir Nicholas Bacon was equally involved in attempting to tame these Continental firebrands. Archbishop of Canterbury Parker lamented that Bacon “intruded into such room and vocation” as to finally break down his own reluctance to conform. Bacon found a willing helpmate at home with his second wife, Ann, who was also the sister of Cecil's equally godly wife, Mildred.
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Yet Oxford, having
suffered the Elizabethan purges of Puritan radicals and popish priests, remained a city of decidedly Catholic leanings. Though the “secret and forbidden” Mass was not heard in the city's cathedral or churches, word of its hidden adherence to the “old faith” had spread widely. Heinrich Bullinger, the Swiss Protestant divine activist, had been told that the university was “as yet a den of thieves, and of those who hate the light,” and so declined to send his son there. The bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, lamented that only two of the university's colleges were of “our sentiment.” Nicholas Saunders, a fellow of New College, claimed that the college failed to ask for the Oaths of Supremacy and Uniformity required of graduates due to the overwhelming number of dissenters among its fellows.

Oxford's headmaster was a Marian survivor who eventually became a casualty of the Elizabethan “visitors.” At Corpus Christi, Magdalen, and Trinity, the bishop of Winchester, who had acted as their visitor, knew that a blind eye would be best for implementing the observance of the Elizabethan settlement. There was much “winking” among visitors at Oxford's transgressions. Even more worryingly, it had been noted by Leicester that there was a steady exodus of Oxford's students and its masters to other Catholic seminaries overseas.
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Elizabeth had tried to visit Oxford two years earlier, but an outbreak of plague prevented her at the last minute. Now, with the world situation in turmoil, London in a Puritan mood, and her closest advisers questioning whether Catholics or the godly were the enemies of the state, it was essential for the queen to lay on a charm offensive to woo Oxford's troublesome university population.

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So, on Saturday,
August 31, in the late afternoon, the royal procession was heralded into the city. The Earl of Leicester, in his gowns as chancellor of the university, and then the mayor and his aldermen led the queen's procession. As Elizabeth entered the medieval city, her magnificence seemed heart-stopping to onlookers:

Her head-dress was a marvel of woven gold, and glittered with pearls and other wonderful gems; her gown was of the most brilliant scarlet silk, woven with gold, partly concealed by a purple cloak lined with ermine after the manner of a triumphal robe. Beside the chariot rode the royal cursitors, resplendent in coats of cloth of gold, and the marshals, who were kept busy preventing the crowds from pressing too near to the person of the Queen … The royal guard … were about two hundred … and on their shoulders they bore … iron clubs like battle-axes.
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Leicester was Elizabeth's host for the week's disputations and debates. While most monarchs would have shuddered at the prospect, Elizabeth shared her councillors' love of learning and was keen to see Oxford again at the vanguard of education alongside the Italian universities. Seventeen hundred students attended the week's intellectual deliberations. In keeping with the royal favor Elizabeth was bestowing, prizes were offered to the most worthy of the disputants. On Tuesday, September 3, a young man from St. John's College triumphed over his opponents when he argued that the tides are caused by the moon's motion. He had no idea that within fifteen years, Elizabeth herself would be worshipped as Cynthia, the goddess of the moon, the “wild ocean's empress.” Nor could he have known that Sir Walter Raleigh would compose the
Book of the Ocean to Cynthia
portraying his agonizing relationship with the queen. The young man so warmly favored by Elizabeth was immediately offered patronage of both Cecil and Leicester. His name was Edmund Campion.

On Thursday, the Divinity Disputation took place. Elizabeth's council selected the rather hot topic of “Whether subjects may fight against wicked princes?” in the hope that dissident students could be weeded out. It would have taken a foolhardy student to compare Elizabeth to a wicked prince, particularly when examples in Scotland were so fresh in their minds.

By the end of the disputations, Edmund Campion won his court patronage, while Tobie Matthew of Christ Church won the coveted Queen's Scholar prize. Matthew would eventually become archbishop of York. Campion would become a traitor.

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Yet the term “traitor”
had come to mean something of a movable feast in the previous twenty years. In Mary I's reign, Henry VIII's archbishop Thomas Cranmer had been burned at the stake in Oxford for “treacherous heresy.” St. Mary Hall's college head, Dr. William Allen, described Cranmer as a “notorious perjured and oft relapsed apostate recanting, swearing and foreswearing at every turn.”
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As university proctor, Allen had been deeply involved in the Marian purges at the university in 1556–57 against the “new religion.” This made him a traitor in Elizabeth's time.

By 1561, William Allen had exiled himself from the university he so adored, for fear of meeting the same fate as those he had purged. He drifted with other English Catholics to the Low Countries and the University of Mechlin, continuing his theological studies there. Allen supplemented his meager income as a private tutor to a young Irish nobleman. Yet when Allen returned briefly to his family in Lancashire due to illness, he was appalled to see how many “good” Catholics attended church services and conformed outwardly to the Elizabethan settlement.

A brief stint at Oxford before returning to the Low Countries in 1565 converted Allen to activism for the preservation of English Catholicism. Ordained in the priesthood at Mechlin that year, Allen published
A Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churchies Doctrine, Touching Purgatory
in response to Bishop Jewel's
Apology.
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It was a work that had already singled him out for the Elizabethan regime's special investigations by the time Elizabeth visited Oxford.
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Allen, far from being “exiled” and bereft of like company, found himself in the middle of a thriving English Catholic diaspora. Over a hundred senior fellows and masters from Oxford alone were dispersed throughout the Low Countries at its universities, particularly at Louvain and Douai. Still, Allen fretted that their lack of a proper English institution to afford them the “regiment, discipline and education most agreeable to our Countrymen's natures” was a terrible burden. These thoughts, echoed in his
Apologie,
gripped Allen in the autumn of 1566. While Elizabeth was at Oxford, Allen resolved to redress this wrong. He would establish a truly English Catholic seminary on the Continent.

Still, there were other Elizabethan traitors in Oxford's midst who remained unknown to the queen. The university would produce thirty-seven seminary priests in the years to come. One of them, Gregory Martin, would become the translator of the Rheims-Douai Bible of the 1570s. Two months after Elizabeth left Oxford for the battles that lay ahead with her Parliament, Magdalen College would take on a new, seemingly unremarkable tenant in the shadow of Oxford Castle at number 3 Castle Street. The tenant was a twenty-six-year-old carpenter named Walter Owen, accompanied by his wife and young family. His four sons would eventually join the mission to save England for Catholicism. His toddler son, Nicholas Owen, would die taking the secrets of his most enigmatic craft of “hide-making” for Catholic priests to the grave.

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Their roles in
this history were still far in the future. After Elizabeth's Oxford visit that autumn, Parliament was duly convened, and the anticipated revolt of godly members in both houses occurred. Not only did the Commons refuse to consider the Act for Apparel, addressing the existing sumptuary laws as well as church ornaments and vestments; they refused any action whatsoever until they had the queen's solemn reassurance that she would marry. They were deeply suspicious about the seriousness of the planned marriage to Archduke Charles, a Catholic and a Hapsburg. Besides, the Commons felt it held the whip hand to force Elizabeth into action regarding a lasting solution to the succession by withholding a sizable parliamentary subsidy until its demands were met. They had not reckoned on the queen's iron will and anger. Elizabeth lashed out at them and forbade any further discussion about the private matter of her marriage.

By November, Elizabeth struck at the House of Lords for allowing the Commons to run roughshod over them, calling those members of both houses who tried to dictate to her “those unbridled persons whose mouth was never snaffled by the rider.” Foremost among these “unbridled persons” was the godly Paul Wentworth. On the day Parliament convened following her interdiction to speak about her marriage, he rose to ask three questions: “Whether Her Highness' commandment, forbidding the lower house to speak or treat any more of the succession and of any their excuses in that behalf, be a breach of the liberty of the free speech of the House or not?” The second question asked “whether her ministers, in pronouncing her commandment to the house in her name are of authority sufficient to bind the House to silence in that behalf.” Finally, he asked if her commandment was not in breach of the liberty of the House or sufficient to bind the House, then “what offence is it for any of the House to err in declaring his opinion to be otherwise?”
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Paul Wentworth was alarmed. By not discussing Elizabeth's marriage plans and thereby the succession, the Protestant settlement, imperfect though it was, remained too precarious. He decided to use democratic reasoning to try to keep the issue under debate, calling upon the “liberties,” or freedom of speech within Parliament, when addressing the queen. Other godly voices were raised in support of Wentworth's reasoning as well. For the first time, a new voice was heard on the side of the godly: Francis Walsingham. It was a grueling session and, despite all the heartfelt arguments, ended in stalemate.

Elizabeth's Bill on Apparel aimed at closing all discussion about church vestments was withdrawn. She had browbeaten the Commons into voting her two-thirds of the subsidy for the good of the realm, without designating her successor in the event of her death. The burning matter of her marriage was declared by Elizabeth as being personal and therefore closed. She fulminated at her privy councillors, including Leicester and Cecil, who had been part of the “godly conspiracy,” and she refused to allow them in her sight. The drama ended with her reassurance to the House on the prickly issue of the succession, with Elizabeth uttering the sour words that she would “deal therein for your safety,” making her anger known in no uncertain terms when she added, “For it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head.”
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Elizabeth, disgusted and enraged, dissolved Parliament on January 2, 1567, with a devastating broadside aimed at members and her Privy Council:

I love so evil counterfeiting and hate so much dissimulation that I may not suffer you depart without that my admonitions may show your harms and cause you shun unseen peril. Two visors have blinded the eyes of the lookers-on in this present session … Under pretense of saving all they have done none good … They have done their lewd endeavor to make all my realm suppose that their care was much when mine was none at all.
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