Heretic Queen (5 page)

At last, the royal procession came to the boundary between the City of London and Westminster at the River Fleet and Fleet Street. Upon the pageant stage there was a great palm tree under which sat a “meet personage” in “Parliament robes” with a scepter in her hand and a golden crown upon her head. Above her head was inscribed “Deborah the judge and restorer of the House of Israel, Judic. iv.” Again, Elizabeth could be in no doubt as to her subjects' message: She was the new Deborah, responsible for judging wisely while rebuilding her House of Tudor and the commonwealth over which she reigned.

The message in each pageant built upon those that had passed before. The people had spoken. As Albion's Deborah, Elizabeth would rebuild their common house, bend it to her will, and rule with the love of her people. Yet to do that, she would need to dissimulate—to act as a player upon a stage. It was the only way she could marry the disparate religious and political wills of her court to her people, confused by twelve years of religious extremism inflicted on the realm by her royal siblings. It was the only way she could assuage the French, the Spanish, and the pope into believing that she meant them no harm. It was how she would remain mistress of her own and her people's destinies.

It was the task that Elizabeth Tudor was born to undertake.

 

TWO

The Realm and the Ministers of Lucifer

The Wolves be coming out of Geneva and other places of Germany and hath sent their books before, full of pestilent doctrines, blasphemy, and heresy, to infect the people.

—Bishop White of Winchester, January 1559

The pomp and ceremony of Elizabeth's coronation festivities painted a fragile veneer over the serious problems facing her realm. The queen was in no doubt that the country had been brought to misery in the preceding reigns and that England's very survival depended on her successes in the first months of her rule. In the twelve years since her father's death, neither Edward's nor Mary's reign had redressed the damaging effects of Henry's Great Debasement of English currency. Nor had her siblings sought to enhance England's credibility or credit with merchant bankers or princes abroad. Calais, that cornerstone of the English wool industry—the country's number one export—had been lost. Instead, both her siblings had been concerned with saving English souls, allowing English purses to fall into decay.

For Edward VI, “soul saving” meant the nation's conversion to a Lutheran style of Protestantism. Mary, naturally, had to set this to rights. Within three months of Cardinal Pole's arrival in London, Mary and Philip wrote to the saber-rattling Pope Julius III that they had repealed all Henry VIII's and Edward VI's laws and had returned her people to the true faith.
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Recognizing the danger of disobeying Mary's zealous Roman Catholic—called “popish”—religious reform, even Elizabeth had been forced to conceal her Protestant convictions. As queen, she was well versed in the traumas and trials of someone who had to dissemble, and she would soon avow that she wished to spare her people a similar fate.

For Elizabeth, who had also known life as a political prisoner suspected of treason, the issue of religion needed to be resolved in a way that would unite her people behind her while allowing them freedom of conscience. Part of the problem was that tolerance was a revolutionary concept and an adventurous and uncomfortable step into the unknown, and the more Elizabeth displayed tolerance, the less it was understood. Some would conclude that Elizabeth had little religion; others that her flexible attitudes meant she had little conviction. Both were far from the truth.

Their confusion was understandable. In her sister's time, Cardinal Pole and Bishop Bonner had enforced the papal will with iron fists, under the guiding influence of Philip's bishop, Bartolomé Carranza.
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It had been Carranza who infused Mary Tudor's reign with the blood of her fellow Englishmen and -women, and Carranza who had insisted on executing Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer for heresy.
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England, under the sure Spanish hand of Carranza—nicknamed “the black monk”—had donned the mantle of Roman Catholicism uncomfortably.

Yet Elizabeth felt that regardless of the individual will of her people in matters of religion and worship, the English had been cowed into compliance. The sway held by Philip's Spanish clerics over English affairs had been bitterly resented. Hundreds of Tudor “new men” and their families had exiled themselves in the Low Countries, Germany, or Switzerland rather than conform to Mary's Catholic vision. Others, like Sir William Cecil, conformed outwardly but refused to make themselves available to the crown as ministers of state. Had Cardinal Pole persuaded the monarchy to recover church lands from those who had benefited from the Dissolution of the Monasteries, surely they “would rather get themselves massacred than let go [of their properties],” the imperial ambassador affirmed to Philip.
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Now these very men were returning to Elizabeth's England in droves. In the time they had been away, poverty had risen sharply, and with it, so had crime and vagrancy. The “sturdy beggar” had become a common feature of urban and rural life. Poor harvests and recurrent bouts of plague and the “sweating sickness” had decimated the country.
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For the largely illiterate rural population, the worlds of the “new” religion and the “old” had become confused. The country customs of maypoling, wise women, the alehouse, the cunning-man, ballads and broadsides, dancing, Sunday sports, tabling and dicing, bowling and cards, and cakes and ale stood to be lost to Protestant ministers of the Good Book with their solemn Sabbath observance, sermon-gadding and repetition, sobriety, chastity, respectability, and thrift. In effect, magic, the supernatural, and the “old” Catholic religion had become intertwined with these essential country pastimes.

If Elizabeth's England were to move forward with the new religion again, the queen would have to ensure that her people appreciated that being Protestant did not mean that they would lose their cherished touchstones.
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What Elizabeth understood all too well was that the rhythm of life had become dependent not only upon the seasons and weather but also on the vagaries of a weakened economy, the social inversion brought about by the Tudor new men, confusion and lawlessness, a dread of change, and a realm divided by religious schism.

The other bogey of English life, xenophobia—always a concern for peace at home and trade abroad—was rife. With most of the returning English having adopted Continental ways in their worship, these loyal subjects of Elizabeth's seemed foreign to those who had stayed at home. While England had just shed its Spanish king, albeit as Mary's consort, the wounds were still raw.

Yet England was heavily reliant on overseas trade for the sale of its number-one finished exported product: broadcloth. France had overrun Calais in the recent war, and Elizabeth needed to find a new staple town quickly. With no peace agreed, the French king's claim of friendship to Elizabeth on December 30, 1558, might have been welcomed, if it had been heartfelt:

She knows how sincere and perfect is the amity and affection which he always felt towards her, of which she has already had sufficient proof and security. This friendship and esteem which he has had during his whole life has been nothing diminished by the war which to his great regret had sprung up between the late Queen of England, her sister, and himself, and by the great and incredible damages he had received from her.
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However, it was a sham. While begging pity and understanding from Elizabeth, Henry II made an official plea to his friend Pope Paul IV to recognize his daughter-in-law Mary Queen of Scots as queen of England, too. Paul IV, who was always willing to strike a blow against Philip II for trying to block his election, was sanguine.
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He wrote in the papal diary that same December: “The French in view of the Queen of England's death [Mary Tudor] grew lukewarm about the peace and hopeful of detaching that kingdom from King Philip or uniting it with that of Scotland, and (among other means to that end) were instant [
sic
] with the Pope that he should declare Queen Elizabeth illegitimate, and as it were, of incestuous birth, and consequently incapable of succeeding to the throne, whereby they pretend that the crown would belong to the Queen of Scotland.”
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Clearly, Henry II was playing a double game. He hoped that if he could get the pope to agree to Elizabeth's “illegitimacy” and put forward his daughter-in-law as the only surviving legitimate Tudor heir to the throne, he could gain suzerainty of England without bloodshed.
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In fact, his machinations were hardly necessary. Henry VIII's 1544 statute declaring Elizabeth illegitimate still stood. Naturally, Mary Tudor had left this section of the act active, since she had always maintained that Elizabeth was the offspring of a marriage the Catholic Church regarded as incestuous. Until and unless Elizabeth called her first Parliament and had the act struck off the statute books, Mary Queen of Scots already had the best legal claim to England's throne as the great-granddaughter of Henry VII.
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Both Elizabeth and Philip II of Spain were acutely aware of this.

From Philip's perspective England's monarch was a matter of utmost significance. He, of course, was no longer king consort of England. He had had a long and bloody rivalry for French territories in northern France and a prior history over Naples with Henry II and the Vatican. Pope Paul IV had excommunicated him in 1556 over the Naples debacle. By the end of 1557, the war with France had caused Philip's first bankruptcy, compelling him to come to the bargaining table with Henry II for peace talks at Cateau-Cambrésis. Despite their mutual Catholic affinity—for Philip had been endowed with the title of “His Most Catholic Majesty” and Henry “His Most Christian Majesty” by the Vatican—neither monarch had much cause to trust the other.

For Philip, any official union between Scotland and England, in conjunction with Mary Stuart's undoubted role as France's future queen, was an absolute anathema. Elizabeth had become, as a result, his most important potential ally in northern Europe. Without her friendship and protection, and England's, the sea route to his tremendously wealthy colonies of the Low Countries could be cut off. Inevitably, with this at the forefront of his political thinking, Philip had cast himself in the role of Elizabeth's—and England's—protector from the moment he realized that his wife, Queen Mary, would never conceive. Somehow, Philip would have to reconcile his vision for the Spanish Empire with his title of “His Most Catholic Majesty” and make Elizabeth his de facto ally. Simon Renard's warning to Philip four years earlier, in 1554, “
secure, caute et lente festinare
”—security, caution, and hasten slowly—remained his watchwords.

*   *   *

Renard's cautionary words
also applied to Elizabeth. Death had fortuitously silenced English Catholicism's most eloquent spokesman, Cardinal Pole, and his queen, Mary Tudor, on the same day. Furthermore, the hated Spanish influence on English religious affairs in the previous reign had done much to muddy the religious and political pictures in the people's minds, making Mary Tudor less popular with each passing day. Notwithstanding this, Elizabeth knew that the people loathed change and was cognizant of the many dangers in making any dramatic changes in the religious practices of her realm. Besides, that was what both France and Spain had anticipated, and Elizabeth meant to confound their expectations.

The queen saw herself as the monarch of all her people and equally knew that fully satisfying the extreme right or left in the religious spectrum—a kaleidoscope of Christian beliefs, which now included not only the broader terms of Roman Catholic and Protestant but also Zwinglian, Calvinist, and Lutheran, among others—would alienate the majority of Englishmen, who placed their beliefs in the Christian middle. Though she would never have used the word “tolerance,” preferring the less controversial term “compromise,” tolerance was at the outset the cornerstone of her decision to walk a middle road.

To implement her vision, Elizabeth needed to carefully select her ministers who could carry the day for her in the Commons and the Lords. The most enduring and important of these was Sir William Cecil. Like the queen, Cecil was a moderate Protestant; and, like Elizabeth, he was against forcing England's Catholic population into an unpalatable solution. As her principal secretary, and later Lord Treasurer as Lord Burghley from 1572, Cecil would become Elizabeth's “significant other” in politics throughout her long reign. Their remarkable relationship would last, if not always flourish, until Cecil's death in 1598.

Sir Nicholas Bacon, Cecil's brother-in-law, a great believer in mass education, became the queen's Lord Privy Seal in January 1559. Sir William Paulet, Marquis of Winchester and Lord High Treasurer, and Lord William Howard, first Baron Howard of Effingham—both good Catholics—remained privy councillors as they had been in Mary Tudor's reign. In maintaining some of her sister's more gifted advisers, Elizabeth had intimated how she wished to govern: There would be no new brooms to sweep Mary's Catholic advisers from power. Talent and loyalty alone would bring advancement.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth sought other learned opinions with regard to the religious settlement she knew she would have to impose as soon as practicable. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, an old hand at Tudor politics who was also held prisoner in the Tower after the Wyatt Rebellion, wrote to the queen that she must “succeed happily through a discreet beginning … to have a good eye that there be no innovations, no tumults or breach of orders.”
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Throckmorton's advice was echoed by Armagil Waad—a Tudor diplomat who had served both Henry VIII and Edward VI—in his paper
The Distresses of the Commonwealth, with the Means to Remedy Them
. Waad began with the most succinct assessment of Elizabeth's position when he wrote, “The Queen poor; the realm exhausted;… division among ourselves; wars with France and Scotland; the French King bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland; steadfast enmity but no steadfast friendship abroad.” Elizabeth, he warned, would need great powers of dissimulation and cunning if she were to succeed in religious reform while maintaining unity among her people. Waad recommended “that you would proceed to the reformation having respect to quiet at home, the affairs you have in hand with foreign princes, the greatness of the Pope, and how dangerous it is to make alteration in religion, specially in the beginning of a prince's reign.”
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