Heretic Queen (30 page)

By June 1573, Elizabeth had had enough. The international Catholic League had pushed long and hard against England's door, and now more and more Englishmen were deserting
her
church to worship at public Puritan prophesyings or in stranger churches. Even her beloved Leicester attended the French church from time to time. With her middle way seemingly eroded daily, Archbishop Parker wrote to Burghley that he must warn the queen that “both papists and precisians [Puritans] have one mark to shoot at, plain disobedience.” In response Elizabeth issued a proclamation commanding her subjects to use only the Anglican prayer book and hand over all Puritan writings in their possession to their bishop or diocese or to the Privy Council.
21
When virtually none were returned by October 1573, she issued another proclamation to bishops and magistrates condemning them for lax enforcement of her June law, threatening imprisonment of anyone who spoke out against the Act of Settlement and Uniformity.

Elizabeth had managed to keep the chaos of religious civil war that plagued so many countries on the Continent at bay, but she feared in the first half of the decade that she would lose control. In her personal prayer for wisdom in the administration of the realm, she prayed:

Send therefore, O inexhaustible Fount of all wisdom, from Thy holy heaven and the most high throne of Thy majesty, Thy wisdom to be ever with me, that it may keep watch with me in governing the commonwealth, and that it may take pains, that it may teach me, Thy handmaid, and may train me that I may be able to distinguish between good and evil, equity and iniquity, so as rightly to judge Thy people, justly to impose deserved punishments on those who do harm, mercifully to protect the innocent, freely to encourage those who are industrious and useful to the commonwealth.
22

Whether she believed it was possible for those prayers to be answered at the beginning of 1574 remains a mystery.

 

SEVENTEEN

Via Dolorosa

It is so difficult in these times to know the difference between seeming and being.

—Elizabeth to Anjou, 1580

A new wave of religious exiles now joined the old. Many of those Puritans in London's underworld who had turned to the printed word to build their reformed church were hunted down and thrown unceremoniously into its prisons. London's Bishop Sandys, attacked alongside Archbishop Parker and others in these Puritan manifestos, described Newgate, the Marshalsea, and London's other jails as “filthy and unclean places, more unwholesome than dunghills, more stinking than swine sties.”
1
Many of the godly succumbed to the infections rampant in London's prisons, becoming pestilential martyrs to their cause. Of course, whatever happened in London was replicated throughout the realm a hundredfold.

Somehow, the preacher Thomas Cartwright escaped to Heidelberg, most likely with the assistance of one or more of the wives of the privy councillors who corresponded regularly with him. During his time at Heidelberg, the printing presses worked overtime disseminating the Word, as the city and its university had become the throbbing crucible of a Calvinist state welcoming French, Dutch, and now English Puritan refugees demanding to be heard.

Others were not so lucky. Edward Dering and others remained behind in London, suffering prolonged interrogations by the council's feared Star Chamber for sedition. Dering wrote of his relief that his wife, Anne Locke, had remained untouched despite her long devotion to the godly cause. He himself eventually escaped rough justice through the good offices of the Earls of Huntingdon and Leicester, possibly as it was widely known that he was dying of tuberculosis.

*   *   *

Where the godly
like Dering had champions within the Privy Council—despite the witch hunts against others of their ilk—English Catholics had none. Their steady exodus from England's shores throughout the first twenty years of Elizabeth's reign is etched in history as a catalog of admirable faith and strength, impossible heroism and foolhardiness, tremendous sadness, and misguided political will.

Perhaps the most stirring of all the individual stories among the English Catholics is that of Edmund Campion. The Oxford graduate who had so impressed Elizabeth and Leicester during her 1564 progress had taken Holy Orders in the Church of England and was a deacon of Elizabeth's church. Leicester had recognized Campion's exceptional talent and oratory skills since that time and made the young man his protégé. Tall and well built, with a commanding yet soft voice, Campion inspired those around him as a man of great promise with a gift for language. When he left England in the summer of 1569 to visit his Oxford friend Richard Stanihurst at the family home in Dublin, even Leicester had no idea of Campion's troubled soul.

Campion's apparent attraction to the Stanihurst home was its library. He browsed its shelves with the intention of dedicating his history of Ireland to Leicester. Though he never completed it, Campion's work would be finished and eventually included in the great history of the British Isles undertaken by Ralph Holinshed entitled the
Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland.
The work would be authored under Richard Stanihurst's name. Whether Campion knew at that stage that it would be a history of Britain as seen through Tudor propagandist eyes is probable. Whether this influenced what was to follow is not.

From August 1569 until March 1570, Campion toiled away on his history. He knew his host family had served the Tudors for generations with distinction. In fact, Richard's father, James Stanihurst, had been the Speaker of the 1560 parliament that passed the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity that consigned Catholicism to the past. Campion's friend Richard seemed to be following in his father's footsteps and was poised to propose marriage to Janet Barnewall, the daughter of another great Anglo-Irish family noted for serving the English crown faithfully. There was nothing to indicate that Campion's choice of host family or the timing of his visit was in any way nefarious to the crown. The only blot on Campion's record so far was that he had recently engaged himself as tutor in the household of Lord Vaux, the notoriously Catholic peer, before leaving England.

Though relatively insignificant, this was enough to raise the suspicions of Ireland's Lord Lieutenant, Sir Henry Sidney. After Campion had been with the Stanihursts for seven months, the Dublin Pale authorities suddenly came to interview him but found he had already decamped. What they hadn't realized was that Campion had found shelter with the Barnewalls, some dozen miles distant from the Stanihursts in Dublin. In thanking James Stanihurst for his hospitality and excusing his sudden need to escape, Campion wrote quite openly that he had been in danger from “the heretics of Dublin.”
2
Weeks later, Campion was spirited out of Ireland through Drogheda and back into England. It was 1571. Within a few months, he left England to join his friends at the Catholic seminary in Douai in the Netherlands.

Campion's remark about “heretics” to Stanihurst was odd for a deacon of the Church of England to make to a loyal subject of the crown, but he knew what few in London did. The Stanihursts and the Barnewalls had turned to Catholicism, as many families of the Irish Pale had also done. Though their homes were built from the bricks of the dissolved monasteries, and both families had supported the Royal Supremacy, they were in the growing majority who felt that England's influence had become destructive to Ireland. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the alteration of church policy. Remote from London and court, these staunchly Anglo-Irish families felt that they and Ireland had been swept aside for the furtherance of the Protestant cause.

*   *   *

Campion's joining the
exiled Catholic community at Douai was not an unusual thing for a young man of conscience to do. Since the early days of Elizabeth's reign when Sir Francis Englefield emigrated, thousands of others had joined him. Their primary concern was for the survival of English Catholicism. Just as Elizabeth felt that the only way to make the English understand her “middle way” was to educate the population and teach them to read and write, so the exiled Catholics felt that it was only by proper training of priests in seminaries that they could continue to carry the Word to the people.

Still, the first concern was how to clothe and feed these penniless Catholic nobles, academics, and gentry émigrés. As early as 1561, Margaret of Parma wrote to her half brother Philip II for a Spanish pension and money to erect religious houses.
3
By 1568, Dr. William Allen had founded his English College at Douai with money garnered from the pope and Spain. When Edmund Campion joined their ranks, the college hosted over one hundred young men. Within that number “it is well worthy of remark how very large a proportion of the early members of the college were graduates of the English Universities, especially Oxford … They brought with them the traditions of English University and collegiate life, and among these a high esteem for learning.”
4

Remarkably, despite this grand exodus from England and its universities, Elizabeth and her government had paid little heed to these exiles in the first ten years of her reign. What changed her attitude was the papal bull of 1570 and the certain knowledge that many received
ayudas de costa,
or Spanish pensions. Elizabeth recognized the danger in these men becoming pensioners of the Spanish state, particularly as the northern rebel lords Dacre, Neville, Northumberland, Westmorland, and their families were now among them.

The queen had no wish to create Catholic martyrs while she was attacking the ever-present threat posed by the brazen godly and their print campaign inside England. However, Elizabeth's wishes were the last concern on the minds of all those who practiced apostasy. Their separate paths along a Catholic and Puritan Via Dolorosa to the hanging tree at Tyburn were already etched in the activists' souls.

*   *   *

The year 1575
proved a decisive turning point. After nearly ten years of uncertainty, peaceful trade was restored between the Spanish Low Countries and England. The replacement of the Duke of Alba two years earlier by Don Luis de Requesens, who had previously been the governor of Lombardy in Italy, was crucial to the resumption of trade. Requesens, prematurely aged by fulfilling his duties for Philip in northern Italy, had hoped for a quiet retirement, but Philip wouldn't hear of it. Alba's strong-armed political policies in the Low Countries had been seen at last as bankrupt, and only a diplomat of Requesens's skill might be able to put things right, Philip believed.

An equally important factor to the peace was that without English trade, Philip's available treasury to maintain a steady state of war in the Netherlands and elsewhere was clearly diminished. Only a year earlier Philip wrote to his ministers, “I think that the Netherlands will be lost for lack of money, as I have always feared … We are running out of everything so fast, that words fail me.”
5
What Philip had also failed to understand was that another threatened royal bankruptcy would do little to endear him to the Netherlander merchants.

Elizabeth grasped the nettle for resumption of trade and peace with Spain, quickly sending Dr. Thomas Wilson to resolve any outstanding obstacles. Requesens was taken off guard when Wilson put forward Elizabeth's demand that the English Catholics taking refuge in the Spanish Netherlands should be expelled prior to any final agreement being reached on trading matters.

It was an apparent masterstroke. Not only was Elizabeth about to conclude a peaceful trading relationship once again with the Spanish Netherlands, but she could appear to ensure that through this rapprochement, Spain would stop harboring her wayward Catholics, whom she regarded as rebels as well. Eventually Requesens agreed to expel the English Catholics from the Low Countries, but on condition that Elizabeth would no longer give shelter to Dutch rebels in England. Requesens kept his end of the bargain. Elizabeth did not, despite issuing a proclamation against Orange and his followers.

At the same time, William Allen recognized that the college at Douai could not continue without the political and financial aid of Spain and the Holy See. On April 5, 1575, Gregory XIII granted the college an annual pension of 1,200 crowns—increased to 2,100 crowns six weeks later—to safeguard its future. Nonetheless, the seminarians were literally starving. Much of their suffering was caused by Elizabeth's squeeze on all forms of apostasy at home, which in turn had been brought on by the plots hatched by Mary Queen of Scots and her followers. The series of penal laws that followed made it illegal to send cash to all Catholics overseas.

By 1575, the business of England's Catholic émigré community in the Netherlands had become a primary government concern. Indeed, a proposal was made in the Privy Council to open and copy all correspondence between Catholic exiles on Spanish pensions and their friends and families at home.
6
Though impracticable, the idea was gleaned from several successful networks of informants, spies, and traitors living among the exiles who had proved valuable intelligence sources about the exiles' correspondents in England.

*   *   *

Despite Gregory XIII's
seeming generosity, it was too late to save the college in its current incarnation at Douai. On March 1, Requesens gave the order for the exiles to withdraw from the Spanish Netherlands. Though the people of Douai were mainly Catholic, they joined in the government's efforts to rid the city of the seminary. It is understandable why. Commerce had been ruined by the religious wars that now divided the country, and in the Spanish-held, Catholic territories. Reprisals against the general population were only a heartbeat away from the latest show of boldness from dissidents. Those who demonstrated against the seminarians did so for self-preservation in this life, perhaps at the risk of their eternal souls in the next.