SCOTLAND

Religious concerns dominated the politics of Elizabeth’s reign from start to finish. Elizabeth’s regime was as keen as those of Edward and Henry before it to encourage the Reformation cause in Scotland as a means of closing England’s back door to potential enemies. With Mary Queen of Scots married to the Dauphin Francis, the prospect that the French might invade through Scotland was a very real one, raised in the ‘Device for Alteration of Religion’ as one of the potential obstacles to be faced in returning the Church of England to the Protestant fold. When, a few months after the alteration of religion in England, Henry Il’s death in a jousting accident placed the young Dauphin on the throne of France as Francis II, the Scottish problem assumed menacing proportions. Francis was politically in the pocket of his wife’s powerful uncles, the militantly Catholic Duke of Guise and his like-minded brothers. It was Guise who had retaken Calais, and now that the English were heretics as well as enemies, he would be doubly keen to renew hostilities against them. The response to the Scottish threat was essentially that adumbrated in the ‘Device’, namely ‘to help forward their divisions, and especially to augment the hope of them who incline to good religion’.

In the meantime, and despite Elizabeth’s obstructive attitude, John Knox had returned to Scotland in May 1559, and had fomented widespread religious unrest. In this troubled context, the Protestant ‘Lords of the Congregation’, a band of lords united by a formal bond to promote their religious cause through political action, moved to overthrow the French Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, in October. However, Scottish politics remained typically tumultuous, and the case for English intervention, which Cecil put forward in a policy paper of August 1559, was strong. Cecil argued that swift financial and military assistance to the rebel lords would be decisive in securing religious change in Scotland and breaking the French connection. In the religiously divided context of European politics, England and Scotland would be drawn together by their shared Protestant commitments, and their time-honoured enmity would be turned into lasting friendship.

Queen Elizabeth, however, was not so easily convinced, and the Scottish crisis of 1559-60 was the first of many episodes in which we can see the tortuous emergence of policy from the complex relationship between Elizabeth and her trusted chief minister and other advisers. Where Cecil’s approach was a curious blend of religious principle and realpolitik, notable earlier in the reign for a real breadth of strategic vision, Elizabeth’s was compounded of caution, parsimony and an ideology which privileged the values of kingship over the values of the gospel to the extent that they might compete. On those occasions when her instincts and Cecil’s did not immediately converge, the result was hesitation. In this early case, the hesitation was compounded by the fact that Cecil, although clearly Elizabeth’s chief minister, had not as yet established the dominant position on the Privy Council that he was to hold in later years. There were other, more cautious voices to whom the queen seemed inclined to listen, maintaining that the dire financial straits of the Crown ruled out intervention in Scotland. She herself now first displayed the reluctance she often showed later for interfering in the domestic affairs of other kingdoms. She had a high view of the duties of obedience which subjects owed to their princes. This had, after all, been the relentless message of English preaching throughout her childhood, and was at the core of the whole concept of the royal supremacy. So she was far from relishing the evident hypocrisy in encouraging the subjects of other monarchs to commit what she condemned as mortal sin in her own.

The resurgence of the Regent’s party in Scotland, which retook Edinburgh in November, brought matters to a head. Cecil had already extracted some grudging financial aid for the lords. Now direct military assistance was called for. But Elizabeth remained so set against it that Cecil asked to be relieved of the burdens of office. Only this threat, it seems, changed her mind. First her navy and then, in March

1560, an army of a few thousand men went into action on behalf of the Protestant faction in Scotland. The forces engaged were hardly adequate to the task, but fortune smiled on the English. Religious tensions in France prevented effective aid from that quarter, making the English contribution decisive. William Cecil himself was sent north to Scotland to negotiate a peace, and his task was facilitated by the death of Mary of Guise on 11 June. The Treaty of Edinburgh, signed on 6 July, removed almost all French troops from Scotland and excluded Frenchmen from high Crown office. The Lords of the Congregation took over, and in August 1560 pushed a Protestant Reformation through Parliament, repudiating the papacy, suppressing the monasteries, and prohibiting the Mass. There was no clear doctrinal statement - but then England itself had not yet seen the Thirty-Nine Articles. However, with John Knox dominant in the kirk, a fully Calvinist settlement was only a matter of time. The solution was not ideal from the point of view of England and of Elizabeth. There was no royal supremacy, and while bishops were not actually abolished, they were marginalised. Moreover, the death of Francis II in December 1560 made Mary Stuart’s eventual return inevitable, which in turn posed a new threat to the stability of the settlement. Nevertheless, the Protestant regime in Scotland had nowhere to turn for support other than England.

The triumph in Scotland sealed Cecil’s place at the heart of Elizabeth’s government. Although Elizabeth, as a monarch and a woman, continued to see the world from a very different perspective from his, she would never treat his advice with disdain, and for the rest of his long life (he died in 1598) no one challenged his primacy in policy advice.

The complex interplay of religion and politics was just as evident in the second foreign policy venture of Elizabeth’s reign, an attempt to exploit growing religious conflict in France in order to regain Calais. In 1562 the Protestant party in France, known as the Huguenots, sought English financial support in the civil war which everyone could see was coming. By the Treaty of Hampton Court (August 1562), England agreed to provide men and money in return for the cession of Dieppe and Le Havre (then known in English as Newhaven) until such time as Calais was handed back. Elizabeth was more enthusiastic for this venture than she had been for the Scottish expedition. Again, this was a matter of the royal perspective. Elizabeth shared to the full her sister’s sense of national disgrace at the loss of Calais, calling it ‘a matter of continual grief to this realm’. She was therefore understandably attracted by the dream that she might ‘have this our Calais returned to us’, not just for honour but for the sake of enhancing still more the contrast between herself and the late Mary Tudor. Cecil, on the other hand, was less keen, already on record as judging Calais a drain on the exchequer and its loss a blessing in disguise. Support for Elizabeth came from her favourite, Robert Dudley, whose brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, was put in command of the troops which occupied Le Havre and Dieppe in October 1562.