The Elizabethans (35 page)

When Don John of Austria, Habsburg Governor General, died in 1578, his successor Alexander Furnese, Duke of Parma, began a campaign of reconquest of the Low Countries.

Queen Elizabeth was in a perpetual state of uncertainty about the Netherlands. Very unwillingly she donated money to John Casimir for his army, but as far as he was concerned, it was not enough. ‘It is better,’ said Thomas Wilson, Walsingham’s fellow Secretary of State, ‘to annoy by offence than to stand at defence, and to begin war than to withstand war.’
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Elizabeth was not so sure. For one thing, she never shared the ‘forward Protestants” love of the Dutch Calvinist religion. In fact, she hated it. For this reason alone, apart from her innate distaste for war, she tried to avert her gaze from the obvious: namely, that Europe was poised for a great religious war. In fact it was not fought until a generation later – the Thirty Years War – but the war in the Netherlands was in some sense a dress rehearsal for it. The new Pope had repeated his predecessor’s condemnation of Elizabeth. Gregory XIII was determined to give the Counter-Reformation a yet more militant slant. Don John of Austria had been in favour of an invasion of England on purely religious grounds. William Davison, Elizabeth’s envoy in the Low Countries, warned her in 1578 of the ‘holy league of Catholic princes . . . long since projected, often reformed, and now like to be put in execution . . .’ to secure the ruin of ‘the reformed religion’. England was the strongest of the Protestant powers. Davison told the Queen that the Catholic powers held ‘it for a maxim that if she, being the chief protectrice of our religion, were once supplanted, they should the more easily prevail over the rest’.
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If this were true, there could be no standing back from the fighting in the Netherlands. In the government of Elizabeth there were, broadly speaking, two views. The forward Protestants – of whom Walsingham and Leicester were the chieftains – saw no need or possibility of compromise. The Protestants of the Low Countries, the Huguenots of France and the English should all stand together against a common foe. The Roman Church had shown its hand – in the torture and enslavement of Hawkins’s sailors in the Caribbean, as in the fires of Smithfield and the slaughter initiated on St Bartholomew’s Day 1572. So their sentence was for open war.

Another, more politic view, was adopted by Lord Burghley and – much of the time – by the ever-vacillating Elizabeth. This was to ally themselves with the young Duc d’Anjou. The advantage of this plan was that it would drive a wedge between ‘the league of Catholic princes’. By playing upon the French hatred of the Habsburgs and encouraging the self-interest of the Valois in the Low Countries, was there not a possibility of playing the game of European power-broker? As Gascoigne had reminded readers, the war was an ugly, horrible affair. If it could be averted by politics, or even better by the combination of politics and a royal matrimonial alliance, would not this be the best possible outcome?

So it was the situation in the Netherlands that prompted the Queen, in 1578, to revive the idea of marrying François, Duc d’Alençon/Anjou (he had become Duc d’Anjou when his brother, previous holder of the title, became King Henry III of France in 1574). The larger plan, congenial to William of Orange, was that Anjou would be offered the sovereignty of the Netherlands, and that the good Protestants of the Low Countries, protected by France and England, could at last see off their Habsburg oppressors. That was how it might have seemed in the big European power-game that Elizabeth and Cecil were perhaps playing. But the truth is, historians remain puzzled to this day by Elizabeth’s behaviour over the match: both by her return to the notion in 1578 and by her apparently capricious abandonment of it in 1580–1.

Clearly one element in the bizarre episode was the fact that Elizabeth would, on 7 September 1579, celebrate her forty-sixth birthday. Even if she had no intention of marrying Leicester, her old love, his marriage to the dowager Countess of Essex on 21 September, while the court was returning from the progress in East Anglia, must have played its part in her decision to promote the Anjou courtship for all it was worth.

It was indeed the duke’s Master of the Wardrobe, who had been sent to England to woo Elizabeth on Anjou’s behalf, who broke the news to her that Leicester had remarried. Jean de Simier, a fawning courtly Osric, whom the Queen nicknamed her ‘monkey’, misplayed his hand. True, the disclosure of the Leicester–Lettice Knollys marriage gave him a moment of power over Elizabeth. She was wounded both by the news and by the fact that Leicester had not given it to her himself. In her highly predictable fury she temporarily transferred her favours and affections to the monkey, who was wheedling and flirtatious. The monkey, however, did not have as many cards to play as Leicester. He did not reckon on the strength of the Protestant cause in England, that party of which Leicester was the chieftain. Simier did not realise how profoundly his master’s religion was hated, how keenly his part in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was remembered, and how ludicrous both he and the Queen appeared in the eyes of the court while the flirtation between them was at its embarrassing height.

Simier crept into the Queen’s bedroom and stole one of her nightcaps so that his master could sleep with it. The gesture charmed her and caused irritation and alarm to the court. Simier, as his luck apparently held, confided in a French friend, ‘I have every good hope, but will wait to say more till the curtain is drawn, the candle is out, and Monsieur in bed. Then I will speak with good assurance.’
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He claimed, perhaps accurately, that whenever ‘Monsieur’ was mentioned, her face lit up. ‘
Elle est plus belle, plus gaillarde, qu’il y a quinze ans
,’ exclaimed the French Ambassador. ‘Not a woman or a physician who knows her, who does not hold that there is no lady in the realm more fit for bearing children than she is.’
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This optimistic diagnosis is not borne out by a study of the obstetric statistics. Lady Anne Somerset, in her biography of Queen Elizabeth
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, points out that the Queen’s grandmother, Elizabeth of York, two of her stepmothers (Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr) and all three of the Duke of Norfolk’s wives had died in childbirth. Although the Queen was still menstruating – as Burghley had made it his business to find out from her ladies – there was the greatest possible danger for a woman of her age giving birth. The number of rich or upper-class children who died in childbirth, and the number of women who died giving birth to them, was much higher than among the poor – principally because the poor were spared the attention of Elizabethan doctors.
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The poor did not have to endure such quack treatments as having their bellies wrapped in the fleece of a freshly skinned sheep or the skin of a hare flayed alive. ‘Poor women, hirelings, rustics and others used to hard labours, also viragoes and whores, who are clandestinely delivered, bring forth without great difficulty, and in a short time after rising from their bed return to their wonted labours.’ The Elizabethan poor, in other words, had natural childbirth. The richer women had midwives whose standard practice was to stretch and dilate the genital parts, cutting or tearing the membranes with their fingers where this was deemed necessary. Deaths from sepsis and puerperal fever followed with unsurprising frequency.

Perhaps the Queen, mindful of these things, had no intention at a deeper level of going through with the marriage. If so, she certainly succeeded in concealing any such reluctance during the summer of 1579, both from her French wooer and from his English detractors. On 16 August the duke himself arrived from France, very early in the morning. The twenty-year-old was no beauty. Tiny, puny and pockmarked, he had a nose ‘so large it amounted to deformity’, in Elizabeth Jenkins’s vivid phrase.
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The Queen did not appear to notice his defects. Did this give some of her courtiers grounds for hope that she was merely play-acting as she threw herself into cringe-making displays of affection for her ‘frog’. At a court ball on 23 August Anjou was posted behind an arras while the forty-six-year-old Queen danced, making supposedly ‘secret’ amorous gestures to her concealed lover. As he pushed his spotty face round the edge of the tapestry, the courtiers pretended not to see, while the Queen went into raptures.

Four days later he went back to France, writing her letters as he went. Their ardour, said Maurissière, the French Ambassador, would have set fire to the water. What the public thought was conveyed by the revival and adaptation of an old folk-song:

A frog he would a-wooing go

Hey-ho! says Rowley.

A frog he would a-wooing go

Whether his mother would let him or no

With a rowley-powley-gammon and spinach

Hey-ho! says Anthony Rowley.

The mother in question was the woman Philip Sidney called ‘the Jezebel of our age’,
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the formidable Catherine de’ Medici, mastermind behind the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, who had given Elizabeth a superb diamond for her betrothal ring.

The Council, which met daily, did not mince their words. ‘The doubt that her Majesty may not have children or that she may be endangered in childbirth’ was how Burghley’s polite memo summarised fears that one old councillor, Sir Ralph Sadler, expressed more bluntly: ‘Few old maids escape.’

The extreme unpopularity of the French match with the public was reflected in a pamphlet by John Stubbs, an ardent Puritan, who entitled his warning
A Gaping Gulphe wherein England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage
. The Queen’s response was her usual one to publications to which she took exception – writer, printer and publisher were arrested and had their right hands chopped off. Even the barrister who had had the temerity to take on Stubbs’s case and defend him in court was imprisoned. The sentences were carried out ‘in the market-place at Westminster’. William Page, a gentleman-servant to the ultra-Protestant Earl of Bedford, who was an MP and who lost his hand for distributing fifty of the offending pamphlets, cried out to the crowd, ‘I have left there a true Englishman’s hand.’ Stubbs himself, when his turn came, exclaimed, ‘God save Queen Elizabeth!’ and suggested to the crowd that the blood pouring from his veins was unstaunchable. In any event, the effect of his words could not be easily staunched, and the French terms were extremely unlikely ever to have found favour with the English Council, or the nobility of the realm, or with Parliament and people: (1) Monsieur to be crowned King of England immediately after the marriage; (2) to share jointly with the Queen the authority to grant all benefices, offices and lands; (3) to have an annual income of £60,000 during the marriage and during the minority of any child being heir to the throne.
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It is interesting that when it was all over, and the little duke was casting all the blame on Simier for the failure of the match, he singled out for particular censure the monkey’s having antagonised the Earl of Leicester.
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The duke had enough experience in the Netherlands of Leicester’s power and influence to know that the monkey’s trick, of infuriating the Queen with the news of Leicester’s marriage, had been a fatal mistake. By antagonising Leicester, said Anjou, ‘the greatest and most powerful friend he had’, Simier had ‘prevented him from influencing the Queen as he desired’.

There were many complicated strands woven into the somewhat grotesque tapestry of the Alençon match. Had she married him, and established a dynastic alliance with France, the whole position of Spain, England and the Netherlands would have been very different, and Elizabeth would have been in a stronger position vis-à-vis the Scottish queen. But there was no doubt that she encouraged his wooing, in part as a salve for the hurt caused her by Leicester and Lettice Knollys. She had given Leicester her heart in youth, and he was the great love of her life. The possibility that she would marry Leicester had always been there, since the death of Amy Robsart. Now it was removed.

Hindsight makes it obvious that the Anjou match was a farcical idea. Some of the less percipient courtiers and privy councillors were surprised by the Queen’s tears when it all unravelled. But it was obvious why she wept. Her woman’s body wept. However remote the possibility, that body had held out the hope of the physical embrace of a man and the birth of a child. She had passed her forty-sixth birthday. The chance would not come again. From now onwards the Virgin Queen would come into her own. The decade that was about to begin was the glory age of the reign. But she knew more acutely than anyone that a price had been paid.

Part Three

1580s

16

Religious Dissent

ON EASTER DAY
1575 there was a police raid on a house in Aldgate, East London. About thirty Dutch Anabaptists had assembled there to commemorate the Passion and Triumph of Christ. The point of the name, or nickname, ‘Anabaptist’ was that the adherents to this brave Protestant group did not believe in baptising babies. Baptism for them (as it had been for all Christians in the first 300 or 400 years of the religion’s existence) was something to set a seal upon a mature person’s decision to dedicate a life to Christ. They always rejected the ‘Anabaptist’ label. They had begun in Germany, and had spread across most of those European countries where Protestantism had taken root. They did not believe that any of the visible institutions on Earth corresponded to the ideal Church of Jesus Christ, of which pious and hopeful glimpses illuminate the New Testament. These idealistic dreamers, dubbed fanatics by all who disagreed with them, were vigorously persecuted wherever they testified. The thirty Dutch Anabaptists in London’s Aldgate were not doing any obvious harm. Unlike those Catholics who supported the Pope’s call for the deposition of the Queen, they were not plotting anyone’s death, still less the overthrow of the state. They were not even English. In so far as they were Dutch Protestants who had fled the Low Countries, and Spanish persecution, they could be said to have been on the same side as the Elizabethan government, which more and more overtly funded the war of resistance by the Dutch against imperial Spain.