The increasing pressure on Catholics in the later 1570s and 1580s was imposed upon the queen on account of the worsening international situation, which was to culminate in open war between England and Spain. This was certainly not a conflict that Elizabeth wanted. As with so much in her life, her actions were driven by circumstance, and policies were forced upon her. The emerging conflict itself was not primarily a religious war, yet the religious gulf between Catholic Spain and Protestant England was what drove the reorientation of English foreign policy by which a new enmity with Spain was substituted for the traditional enmity with France. It was the combination of this religious division and the clash of interests between England and Spain in the Netherlands (and to a lesser extent on the high seas) that led inexorably to conflict.
Philip II of Spain had serious problems in the Netherlands, one of his hereditary territories, where Lutheran, Anabaptist and Calvinist brands of Protestant reformation had by the 1560s made significant inroads among one of Europe’s most urbanised and educated populations. Of course, Catholicism also retained a very considerable following. But the fragmented nature of local political authority in the Netherlands often impeded effective repression of religious dissent (except when backed by overwhelming and expensive military force), with the result that at many times there was almost a free market in religion. Philip wished to eliminate religious diversity in the province. Any sustained attempt to do this was likely to be bad for trade as well as for Protestantism, and English interests in the Netherlands were primarily in trade, and secondly in solidarity with their Protestant co-religionists. Refugees from the Netherlands were often allowed to settle in England, where ‘strangers’ churches’ (churches providing worship according to foreign rites) were sometimes made available to them.
While English attempts to muscle in on Atlantic trade in the 1560s led to distant battles with Spanish vessels, these marine equivalents of border incidents, involving privateers rather than the queen’s navy, did not seriously upset relations between the two kingdoms. However, the seizure of Spanish bullion in December 1568, when
Treasure ships en route for the Netherlands had to take refuge at Southampton from storms and pirates, might at other moments have been tantamount to a declaration of war. This sudden move, indeed false move, is somewhat out of keeping with Cecil’s usual caution and Elizabeth’s habitual hesitation. Cecil, who was mostly responsible, was driven by a deep-seated suspicion of Spain arising from his strongly anti-papal (if theologically simple, even naive) version of Protestantism. Elizabeth’s consent, if indeed it was properly obtained before the treasure was taken ashore, seems to have been motivated more by the prospect of some easy financial gain. As the bullion had not yet been delivered to the Netherlands, it could still in some sense be regarded as the property of the Genoese bankers who were lending it to Philip II, so her government was in a strong position to negotiate a loan on favourable terms. The Spanish reacted quickly, perhaps over-reacted, by impounding English ships, and trade between England and the Netherlands broke down. In the event, things did not turn out as badly for England as they might have done. Trade returned to normal in about a year, and while the evident hostility of the English government led to Spanish complicity in the Northern Rising of 1569, and in the plots focusing on Mary Queen of Scots, the financial costs inflicted on both sides did long-term damage only to the Spanish in the Netherlands. The Duke of Alva’s mission to ‘pacify’ the Netherlands was impeded at a crucial moment by the English coup.
The contacts of the Spanish ambassador with the rebel earls in 1569, and his involvement in the Ridolfi plot the following year, led to his dismissal from court and return home. Diplomatic relations between the two countries ceased for a few years. Again, this damaged Spain more than England. More disaffected subjects of Philip from the Netherlands took refuge in England, among them pirates who harried Spanish shipping in the Channel. Ironically, it was an English decision in 1572 to curtail their hospitality to these ‘Sea Beggars’ that led them to raid Brill in search of a base back on their home territory - an event which sparked off rebellion throughout Holland and Zealand. Philip’s problems with the Netherlands had moved onto a new and more troubling level. Despite Elizabeth’s protestations of sympathy with the Spanish predicament - as ever, she had a gut reaction against any kind of rebellion - many of the Dutch refugees in England were permitted to rush home to join the rising. For the rest of the decade, Elizabeth and her ministers could enjoy the spectacle of successive Spanish governors floundering in the murky waters of Dutch politics, while the Protestant Reformation, in the form of Dutch Calvinism (sufficiently close to the Church of England in theology, although not in Church government) made headway. Meanwhile, English privateers harried and plundered Spain’s Atlantic shipping.
Spain’s problems in the Netherlands were an open invitation to France, which had for centuries striven to expand into the confusing patchwork of civic privileges and feudal principalities which lay on her northern borders. For a brief moment, some of Elizabeth’s advisers even contemplated an offensive alliance with France against Spanish interests there, as in their turn the young king of France, Charles IX, and his mother, Catherine de Medici, flirted with the Huguenot princes and nobles with a view to reducing the power of the Guise dynasty. The brief moment passed when the flirtation turned unexpectedly into a bloodbath. At the instigation of Catherine de Medici, the Huguenot leaders were assassinated at the French court in the ‘Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day’ (24 August 1572), and the Catholic people of France, following the royal lead, butchered Huguenots in towns and cities across the country.
The massacre was one of the decisive moments in English as well as French history. It probably shocked English Protestants even more than the rising of the Northern Earls in 1569, and it vindicated the very worst suspicions and fears of the bloodthirstiness and untrustworthiness of ‘papists’. There were, inevitably, renewed calls for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Spanish repression of Protestants in the Netherlands and Catholic massacres of Huguenots in France now looked very like a conspiracy, and minds harked back to the meeting of Catherine de Medici with the Duke of Alva at Bayonne in 1565. The Protestant imagination was particularly open to the apocalyptic, and this was the kind of thing they expected to herald the end of the world. More to the point, it heralded a new phase in the civil wars of France. Spain could act in the Netherlands with less fear of French interference. The cause of the Reformation was under threat, and many in England saw it as their mission to succour their co-religionists abroad. In seeking to understand the English Protestantism of Elizabeth’s reign (though not that of Elizabeth herself), it is crucial to realise that the bishops and theologians of the Church of England identified their cause with that of continental Calvinism, even if Elizabeth was far from agreeing with them.
The paradox of Elizabethan diplomacy in the 1570s was the need to maintain, as far as possible, good relations with the Catholic power which had perpetrated the massacre, while simultaneously maintaining good relations with the Huguenots. England’s only card, now looking a little dog-eared, was the queen’s marriage. The suggestion was that she might marry Francis, the youngest brother of the French king. Francis, Duke of Alengon and later (once his elder brother Henry became Henry III of France in 1576) Duke of Anjou, came closer than anyone else to securing Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. It is still difficult to believe that Elizabeth ever had any intention of going through with it, but, as Spanish fortunes in the Netherlands revived in the later 1570s, under the vigorous generalship of Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, the political value of friendship with France drove the negotiations on.
Political opposition to the Anjou match in England made Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip of Spain look popular. Pamphlets were published against it, argued in violent and apocalyptic terms. To the fear of a foreign prince was now added fanatical hatred of his religion. The best-known opponent of the marriage is John Stubbs, whose Discovery of a Gaping Gulf laid out the arguments in lucid and lurid terms. Elizabeth had reacted furiously on previous occasions when Parliament had dared debate her marriage and the succession, regarding their interference as an infringement of her prerogative. Her reaction to the colossal impertinence of
George Gascoigne depicted presenting a book to Queen Elizabeth. She is seated in her Chamber of Presence on a throne beneath a ‘cloth of estate’, a formal sign of her royal status.
Being told what to do, in public, by a Puritan commoner from Norfolk, was savage. Stubbs and his printer were prosecuted under a statute from the previous reign, and were sentenced to lose their right hands. The silence of the crowd as this sentence was executed - Stubbs bravely waved his stump and shouted ‘Long live the queen’ before fainting from shock - was widely interpreted as a vote of sympathy for the victim. The Spanish ambassador thought the people would rise up if the marriage went ahead. His knowledge of the people may have been restricted to London, but London mattered. As some lawyers reckoned the statute under which Stubbs’s sentence was imposed was no longer in force, and as the arguments which Stubbs deployed reflected remarkably closely those being urged against the marriage by members of the Privy Council, the impetus behind the prosecution and the execution of this cruel punishment can only have come from the queen herself - a rare false move from a woman who was so skilled in public relations.
World History
