The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (39 page)

In fact to begin with Mary Queen of Scots’ only ill-judged action was her bid to be declared the childless Elizabeth’s heir. But Elizabeth, who was irritated by reports of her cousin’s glamour, and her Council were adamant that her claim should not be acknowledged. The pope had never authorized Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, so to believing Catholics Elizabeth was not the legitimate ruler of England. The true claim was that of Mary Queen of Scots. As a Catholic, Mary might well become a rallying point for Catholics in England–as indeed she eventually proved to be.

As long as Mary remained a widow, all went well. But in 1565 she fell in love with Lord Darnley and determined to marry him, thus enraging both Moray and Elizabeth, for Henry Darnley was the grandson of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, a relationship that would strengthen Mary Queen of Scots’ own claim. Moreover, Darnley was one of the leaders of the English Catholics. Elizabeth and Cecil issued a declaration that the marriage would be ‘perilous to the amity between the queens and both realms’, and provided a safe haven in Newcastle for Moray and the other Protestant lords. They had revolted against the marriage and, after a short civil war in which Mary and Darnley triumphed, were expelled from Scotland. The marriage went ahead as planned.

Only a few months were needed for Mary to find out the quality of the man she had married. She began to detest him, as he was weak, cruel and a drunk. Moreover the twisted and treacherous Darnley had no intention of merely being a consort of the queen. He decided to make a bid for the crown himself, with the support of the queen’s enemies, Moray and the Protestant lords in England. In a hideous plot which may have been intended to make the pregnant queen miscarry, her private secretary, the Italian David Rizzio, was murdered before her eyes in March 1566 at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh by twenty heavily armed men. These were no common assassins. They included not only important nobles but the queen’s husband himself. Somehow, despite her horror, Mary Queen of Scots managed to keep a cool head and persuade Darnley to abandon his fellow plotters. Once again the conspirators were expelled from the country. Meanwhile Mary seems to have begun planning her revenge, having conceived a passion for the dashing James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell.

Bothwell was an unscrupulous border lord who was to become her third husband. There seems little doubt that Mary was involved in the explosion at a house south of Edinburgh called Kirk O’ Field which killed Darnley, though it was masterminded by Bothwell. Before long, however, the Scottish lords who had been Bothwell’s allies turned on him in fury. Moray and the Lords of the Congregation then returned from exile and at knifepoint forced the queen to renounce the throne in favour of her thirteen-month-old son James (whose father was Lord Darnley). In 1568, she escaped and fled in a humble fishing boat to England, determined to throw herself on her cousin Elizabeth’s mercy.

Mary Queen of Scots’ arrival in England put Elizabeth and Cecil in an extremely difficult position. If she remained in the country, she could still be a focus for Catholic plots. On the other hand it would be foolish to allow her to depart for France where she might raise troops to assert her claim to the English crown. Faced with this conundrum, Elizabeth elected to play for time. She announced an investigation into Mary’s connection with Darnley’s murder. This allowed her to keep the queen in captivity indefinitely.

In England the Queen of Scots indeed became a magnet for Catholic conspiracies, particularly after a new pope, Pius V, took up her cause in 1570, excommunicating Elizabeth and calling for her to be removed from the English throne. Twelve months after Mary’s arrival in England there had been an ill-thought-out rising by the northern earls, the ancient houses of Percy and Neville, on whose lands Catholicism still flourished. Even though it ended in miserable failure, thereafter a new plot was discovered almost every year for eighteen years until Mary’s death. Meanwhile the fourth Duke of Norfolk, the son of the poet Earl of Surrey, was drawn into a new conspiracy headed by an Italian banker in the pay of Philip of Spain named Ridolfi. On every tide letters went to Spain from Norfolk, Ridolfi and Mary herself devising ways to seize power, backed by Spanish troops crossing from the Netherlands under the Duke of Alva.

But working with Cecil was Elizabeth’s exceptional foreign minister Sir Francis Walsingham. A combative Puritan Walsingham was not only waging a war against England’s enemies; he considered himself to be fighting a global battle against Catholicism. Like a great spider he sat at the centre of an amazingly complicated and secret espionage system which covered the whole of Europe. His network of spies soon obtained enough evidence to have Norfolk arrested and executed for treason in 1572. Though the House of Commons demanded the Queen of Scots’ head as well, Elizabeth held them off. For another fifteen years the prematurely ageing Mary lived in Staffordshire at Tutbury Castle never quite losing hope–especially when Moray was assassinated–that she would be returned to her throne. It was not to be.

Mary Queen of Scots’ imprisonment in England coincided with a resurgence of Roman Catholicism, what is known as the Counter-Reformation. Rejecting attempts to come to an accommodation with Protestantism, Catholicism reorganized itself. The Jesuit order was founded expressly by St Ignatius Loyola to attack the new faith in Protestant countries. Following his example, a Lancashire Catholic named William Allen established a seminary at Douai in Philip II’s territories in the Netherlands to send back priests to England to revive the Catholic religion. They were to promote an uprising of English Catholics in conjunction with a Spanish invasion, which Allen and his followers saw as the only solution.

From the 1570s onwards the priests from Douai started to flood back secretly into England as missionaries, hiding in special rooms called priest-holes, constructed for them in English country houses Although to celebrate the Mass and thus deny the queen’s supremacy was treasonous, until the 1570s the letter of the law tended not to be enforced. But the arrival of the seminary priests, and the Jesuits’ success in prodding Catholic consciences awake, suddenly posed a genuine threat to English security.

There began an unspoken hostility between England and Spain which in episode after episode nudged both countries nearer to open conflict. Since Elizabeth wished to avoid going to war at all costs and Philip had plans to invade only when the time was right, England remained at peace until 1587. But if the queen refused publicly to acknowledge Spain as the enemy, her seamen had no qualms about doing so. The English Channel and the oceans of the New World became the two countries’ unofficial battleground, where Englishmen enriched themselves and did their bit for Protestantism by attacking any Spanish ship that hove into view.

By the late sixteenth century Englishmen had recovered all the zest for maritime adventure they had lost since the time of their Viking forebears. The discovery of the New World kindled a taste for exploration among English merchants everywhere. The Company of Merchant Adventurers headed by Sebastian Cabot, the son of the John Cabot who discovered Labrador, had for some time been breaking into new markets in the Baltic.

But the most celebrated of all these explorers in their time were the Elizabethan adventurers and master mariners Francis Drake and John Hawkins, who combined their voyages of discovery with terrorizing the Spanish Main. Nowadays Drake’s cousin Jack Hawkins is held in low esteem as he was the founder of the English slave trade, supplying Africans to labour in the tropical heat of the West Indies and South America–a terrible traffic in human cargo which was to make so much money for him and other English merchants over the next 200 years.

Francis Drake was Elizabethan England’s greatest popular hero. He was also the English seaman most feared by the King of Spain for his bravado and his burning commitment to Protestantism. Drake came from a strongly Protestant Devon family and dedicated his every waking moment to making trouble for the Spanish. Any Spanish shipping that ventured into the Channel, even if it were carrying Spanish grandees, was considered fair game. In 1572, granted a privateering commission (which licensed him to make private war against the Spanish), Drake embarked on an expedition to seize the bullion of the Spanish fleet, and landed at Panama. Having got a glimpse from there of an unknown ocean, the Pacific, he became obsessed with sailing into that sea. It was all part of the national campaign to beat the Spanish at their game of controlling the New World. Five years later he set off again from Plymouth with five ships in which the queen and much of the court had shares.

Following Magellan’s route of fifty years before, Drake sailed down the east coast of South America plundering Spanish shipping as he went and braving immense storms, one of which lasted fifty-two days. He finally got through the turbulent straits at the foot of South America which Magellan had discovered, and then navigated northwards up the length of South and Central America, hugging its west coast. But where Magellan had turned west and cut through the Pacific Ocean to die in the Philippines, Drake carried on all the way up to California and landed at San Francisco, a Spanish settlement, which he renamed Drake’s Bay. He attacked the Spanish treasure ship called the
Cacafuego
, seized jewels and silver worth millions today and returned home in triumph, only the second seaman since Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. He was to be knighted ostentatiously by the queen on the deck of his own ship, the
Golden Hind
.

Elizabeth had no scruples about benefiting from plundered Spanish bullion. She had enough piratical spirit in her to take shares in many of Drake’s expeditions, to refuse to hand him over to the Spanish authorities as they frequently demanded and in effect to treat Spain as the enemy. But as yet she had no wish to take on a man as wealthy and powerful as Philip of Spain, who had the silver of the Americas at his back and who in 1580 would add Portugal to his dominions.

Thus on the official level Elizabeth was still keen to appear in a placatory light to Philip of Spain, even when in the momentous year 1572 the cause of Protestantism seemed to require its champions to stand up and be counted. Shortly after the Ridolfi plot, the hatred the Netherlanders felt for the Spanish occupying army of General Alva erupted in revolt. To the astonishment of Europe, under the leadership of William of Orange the seven courageous northern Protestant provinces threw off the iron hand of Spain, their overlord since the Emperor Charles V received them as part of his inheritance through his Burgundian grandmother. Goaded beyond endurance by the bloody executions of their leaders, the destruction of their ancient political liberties and the torture of the Inquisition, they called themselves the United Provinces. Only the ten provinces of the Catholic south–which approximates to the area of modern-day Belgium–stayed loyal to Spain and became known as the Spanish Netherlands. In France, by contrast, things went less well for the Protestants. On 24 August, the Feast of St Bartholomew, all the Huguenots (Protestants) assembled in Paris for the wedding of their leader Henry of Navarre to the French king’s sister were murdered in their beds, possibly by order of Catherine de Medici, the queen mother. It seemed that the aggressive Counter-Reformation might triumph at last in France.

The plight of these beleaguered Protestants aroused the strongest feelings in England, particularly in the royal Council. But Elizabeth would not permit her ministers to rush to the aid of the Protestant cause in Holland when there was a likelihood of it creating war with Spain, a Spain strengthened by the triumph of Catholicism in France. For all her own Protestant sympathies and enjoyment of Drake’s antics at Spain’s expense, her innate caution would not allow England to go in for heroics. The massacre of the Huguenots made her all the more keen to settle with Philip and begin trading again with the Netherlands.

But Elizabeth was prepared to send aid for the Huguenots who had been forced to take refuge in the massive fortress of La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast. Now that there was a real likelihood of the ultra-Catholic or Guise party triumphing in France and allying with Spain to invade England, it made sense to distract the French by forcing them to deal with a serious revolt at home. Elizabeth therefore secretly despatched arms and ships to help the people at La Rochelle.

Nevertheless, though the queen was anxious to stop England being dragged into a religious war, battle lines along a Protestant–Catholic axis were increasingly being drawn in Europe. With the accession of a new ultra-Catholic king Henry III in 1574, France began edging towards an alliance with Spain that ten years later was an accomplished fact. Only the threat of English and German Protestant troops being sent to the Huguenots under the Prince of Condé slowed down the process by which France was succumbing to the Counter-Reformation.

The arrival of a more successful commander in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma, gave rise to fears by 1579 that the north would soon be subdued, and to rumours that the soldiers gathering there from Spain would be used to invade England. Fear that the Spanish presence would impede access to Antwerp, England’s largest trading centre, made it imperative to seek a stronger alliance with France. There was no better way to secure it than by the queen’s marriage.

An elaborate pavane of two years’ duration ensued between the fifty-year-old Elizabeth and the younger brother of Henry III, the Duke of Anjou, which many hoped would result in her marrying at last. For twenty-five years Elizabeth had held off against all the gentlemen of the English court–such as Robert Earl of Leicester, who won her heart and was said to have killed his wife for her–just as she had resisted the repeated requests from the House of Commons for her to marry. Anjou, who was twenty years younger than Elizabeth, became the queen’s ‘little frog’ and the object of many endearments. But he was a poor soldier who made a mess of an attempt (with English money and French troops) to aid the seven northern provinces, which continued to hold out against Spain. Like all the queen’s marriage projects it came to nothing, and Anjou returned to France. But at least he was a bulwark of Protestantism in the face of a French government growing daily more pro-Spanish.