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Wars of Religion

CHURCHES MILITANT IN ENGLAND, IRELAND AND EUROPE, 1570–84

England’s Protestant godly never doubted that God was continually at work in His creation. Nothing happened in the world unless He willed it, for God was no ‘momentary creator’, sitting idly in heaven. So John Calvin had taught, and what Calvin and his fellow reformed theologians taught was the inspiration of the religion of most thinking Elizabethan Protestants. By God’s providence, His ‘secret counsel’, He superintended and cherished all His creatures, ‘even to a sparrow’. Had not Christ said that every hair on a man’s head was numbered? What seemed to the unregenerate understanding to be pure chance was to the eye of faith the secret impulse of God. For the godly, there was no such thing as chance, no possibility of coincidence. To imagine otherwise was to doubt divine omnipotence. Christian believers should find in this never-failing Providence an assurance: certainty that Satan, the enemy, was curbed, and that they were not subject to arbitrary fortune. Helpless before divine grace, believers should submit themselves utterly to God and follow His commandments, knowing that no harm would befall them unless God willed it, and that adversity was sent for a purpose; to chasten, to correct, and to encourage faith. God’s ways are not men’s ways, His time not their time, and Providence was never calculable. God so often confounded human expectations. ‘Victory,’ Sir Francis Walsingham wrote to William Cecil (now Lord Burghley) in August 1571, ‘is in the hands of God, who many times disposeth the same contrary to man’s judgement.’ Had not the God of the Israelites given victory to little David over Goliath? In ignorance of God’s purposes for them, those of lively faith must exert themselves to do God’s work, always seeking guidance through prayer, and subjecting every action to the tutelage of scripture. This was no quiescent faith: God helps those who help themselves.

God’s absolute sovereignty over men extended not only through this world but the next. At the heart of Protestant divinity lay the doctrine of double predestination, absolute and immutable. ‘Before the foundations of the world were laid’, according to the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563, the confession of faith of the Church of England, God had decreed ‘to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He had chosen in Christ out of mankind’. All the rest He passed by – so Calvin and all who followed him read in scripture – and these were ordained not to eternal life but, as ‘vessels of wrath’, to eternal damnation. Despite mankind’s natural depravity after the Fall, God of His mercy had saved some, though in justice He might have damned all. Only God knew whom He had elected to salvation and whom He had damned. Once called, the elect believer could stumble but never finally fall from grace. In their studies, and in university lecture halls, learned divines debated the order of the divine decrees, asked whether God foreordained as well as foreknew; compelled men or allowed them freedom to choose. These debates were as old as Christian theology, but were conducted with a new urgency as the century wore on. Although these were questions too abstruse for most – certainly for all those sunk in rustic ignorance, the ‘common sort of Christians’ – preachers preached upon these great themes, and many read scripture with anxiety as well as devotion, and looked to their preachers as prophets.

To the godly, Christ’s kingdom was not of this world. Yet, convinced of their election, they must live their lives in such a way as to vindicate God’s choice. They were warned against the presumption of identifying themselves in this world as a band born to predestinate grace. The Bible disclosed that the division between the elect and the reprobate would not be made until the Last Day; until then sheep and goats must graze together. The faith of the godly was an evangelical one: all must be brought to the truth of God’s Word and hear His promise, though not all who heard would receive it. That evangelical necessity grew more urgent with the sense that the Last Day approached.

Elizabethan Protestants saw the whole of history as a divinely predestined drama, with themselves living in the last act. They read in the Book of Revelation of the reign of Antichrist, Satan’s last and deadliest agent, and saw that calamity would precede Christ’s return. Finding prophetic meaning in contemporary events, their sense of apocalyptic crisis grew in the 1570s as they awaited the fulfilment of the struggle between the True Church and its satanic parody, the Church of this world. That conflict had changed little through its long history: the True Church, which served God, had always been marked by suffering, exile and persecution, since Cain had murdered Abel; the False served Satan in idolatry and sin. That False Church was easily identified with the Roman Church by Elizabethan Protestants, not because every Catholic was outside God’s grace, but because the papal Antichrist had perverted doctrine.

God, who elected individuals, might also elect nations. He had chosen Israel as the bearer of His promise. England’s godly, like the Dutch, read scripture with patriotic intent, and for them England was Israel, London was Jerusalem. But there was no place for complacency. As Israel had, England tempted God by its disobedience, unthankfulness and continuing idolatry, and must expect punishment, just as punishment had fallen on Israel. Christ wept now over London, as once over Jerusalem. In John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days touching matters of the Church, better known as his Book of Martyrs, English Protestants read of their own part in the history of the True Church throughout the world, of their part in God’s plan, as the end drew close.

England’s godly had come to believe that the Queen and her people were living dangerously. When Elizabeth had ascended the throne, a Deborah to Israel, they had been jubilant. Preachers then had promised victory ‘to the little ones of the weak flock of Christ against the tyrants of the world’. In 1562 a London crowd had taunted a Catholic priest with ‘Dominus vobiscum [God be with you]’, because He was not. A decade later, in the emergency Parliament of 1572, the Speaker told of the miraculous change since God’s ‘merciful providence’ had brought Elizabeth to the throne: instead of war, there was peace; hypocrisy had given place to the Gospel; the persecution was ended; the currency restored. God had ‘inclined’ the Queen’s heart to defend His afflicted Church throughout Europe. But there were many who could not believe that the Gospel was truly planted, or that England’s peace and prosperity were any more than delusory. Walsingham had warned Cecil in 1568 that ‘there is nothing more dangerous than security’. There were dangers within and without, and the Queen, so one member of Parliament warned the House of Commons in 1572, was oblivious, ‘lulled asleep and wrapped in the mantle of her peril’. What sort of peace could England enjoy while her Protestant neighbours in Europe were beleaguered and persecuted? England’s godly must consider ‘the calamities of other Churches, and the ruins of ours, with the heavy judgements of the Lord which hang over us’, insisted Thomas Cartwright, whose aims for the English Church were revolutionary.

The Church of England no longer suffered persecution, but it was assailed in other ways. The Gospel had been in England for two generations, but it was still in bondage to anti-christian ceremonies. Further reformation was needed. By the 1570s evangelicals had grown disillusioned and impatient, believing that a false sense of security was sapping the Church of its vigour and that the survival of popish remnants was leading to the revival of popery. Which were those remnants? The vestments – the ‘conjuring garments’ which ministers were still forced to wear, making them look like priests; praying towards the East; private Communion and baptism; holy days dedicated to saints; bowing at the name of Jesus; the churching of women after childbirth; candles; the sign of the cross in baptism; the ring in marriage. All these ceremonies and symbols might have seemed trivial, indifferent, but to the godly they were not, for they were the idolatrous means by which Satan tried perpetually to seduce the faithful.

The contention was not – said John Field, a London minister and most ardent reformer – over ‘a cap, a tippet, or a surplice’, but for great matters concerning a ‘true ministry and regiment of the Church according to the Word’. During the 1560s the controversy between the Church establishment and its more radical opponents had centred on the issue of vestments. These symbols of popery could not be worn by shepherds in the True Church. Why should the godly make concessions to barely reconstructed papists? Yet vestments were enjoined by royal injunction and neither bishops nor, more importantly, the Supreme Governor could compromise. The Queen wrote sternly to Archbishop Parker in January 1565 demanding ‘one rule, one form and manner of order’. The vestiarian controversy raised fundamental questions of religious liberty and authority, of private conscience and public order. For Protestant radicals Christian liberty lay in total conformity to God’s Word, but that liberty conflicted with obedience to the Lord’s anointed. So much was clear by the mid 1560s. London was, as before, the heartland of religious radicalism and crowds gathered to defend defiant ministers and taunt their oppressors. Pulpits were silenced and nonconformists suspended or imprisoned. The Prayer Book itself they judged papistical: it enjoined superstitious ceremonies; it contained prayers that all may be saved, which no Calvinist could admit as true; it constrained the essential preaching function of the clergy whereby the elect were called. Reviling the Prayer Book, some godly congregations ceased using it, in defiance of statute.

Their opponents found new names for these radical spirits: ‘unspotted brethren’, ‘precisians’ and, increasingly, ‘puritans’. According to John Stow, London’s chronicler, they called themselves ‘unspotted lambs of the Lord’, ‘puritans’. But they did not: these were the names of their enemies, the language of sectarianism. Stow himself was a Catholic, who had been under suspicion after the Northern rising. Among such neighbours, understanding would be difficult. These ‘hotter sort’ of Protestants recognized each other and others recognized them by the intensity of their religious life, the extremity of their spiritual effort.

There could be no concessions, said radicals like John Field, to the crypto-Catholic remnant within the Church: ‘If all the world might be gained with a little breach of God’s Word, it were not to be done.’ If the Church would not reform itself, how would reform come? Reformers looked to Parliament, and found sympathy among some, but no answer. William Strickland, who led the puritan campaign for the reformation of the Prayer Book, was sequestered from the House of Commons and silenced in 1571. Puritans pinned their hopes upon the Parliament of 1572, but a message came from the Queen that the Commons must not ‘deal in any matters of religion’ unless proposed by the bishops. ‘The Lord of Hosts, great in counsel and infinite in thought… was the last session shut out of the doors’, lamented Peter Wentworth in the Parliament of 1576. In London, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, impatient for reform, wrote An Admonition to the Parliament and ‘A View of Popish Abuses’ in 1572. Intending to show how far the English Church diverged from the True Church, they now advocated not reform, but revolution; ‘altogether [to] remove whole Antichrist’. The Admonition attacked the whole hierarchy – archbishops, bishops, cathedral clergy: ‘that proud generation whose kingdom must down’ – because their ‘tyrannous lordship cannot stand with Christ’s kingdom’. Instead of the old hierarchy, it proposed a system of presbyterian synods and elders in every congregation. An austere form of public prayer would replace the Prayer Book. The ‘ancient presbytery of the primitive Church’ and Calvin’s Geneva were the models for this Church on a hill. A long controversy followed this presbyterian challenge, conducted from the pulpit, in Parliament, through the press and petitions. The University of Cambridge was divided by the controversy: John Whitgift answered and Thomas Cartwright defended. The godly despaired as further reformation was thwarted: this was a sign of the sins of the time, a punishment for a people ‘so far from God’s blessings’.

Not doctrine, but discipline divided the godly; Protestants, puritans and presbyterians. Yet any division among the godly was dangerous. Protestants must be united if militant Catholics were to be defeated. In France and in the Netherlands persecuted Calvinists understood that imperative, and in 1571 their Churches, in both countries, held national synods which defined doctrine and discipline and, attesting a common faith and consensus, provided an organization to sustain a ‘Church under the cross’. They looked to their Protestant brethren abroad for the aid which must save them, and looked first to the leading Protestant nation, England. There the godly ‘cause’ had captured so many of the establishment, but not, crucially, the Queen.

England’s peace had been preserved so far not, as Elizabeth liked to think, by policy, but, said the godly, by ‘God’s special favour’. ‘Calamities’ had beset the great Catholic powers, but as their troubles ceased to distract them, England had better beware. This was the fear of many Elizabethans. They never forgot the menacing meeting of the Duke of Alva and Catherine de Medici at Bayonne in 1565, believing that a pact had been made there to extirpate the Gospel and advance the power of Rome. Against that threat, the only recourse was the ‘common cause of religion’ throughout Europe, a Protestant league to defend the faith. The ‘defence of His afflicted Church’ should prevail over all other considerations in foreign policy; not just through principle but through pragmatism. If Elizabeth allowed the Protestants of France and the Low Countries to be destroyed, then her turn was next. The sea that was England’s wall could not protect her. Elizabeth remained unpersuaded by such arguments. While some within her Council urged principle, she preferred to let policy rest upon contingency. Not for her the great cause, the adventure for conscience. For her, the course urged by the ideologues, the forward Protestants – including Leicester, Walsingham, Mildmay and Sir Francis Knollys, Treasurer of the Chamber – offered, through terrifying escalation, a war easy to begin but impossible to end. When the threats on all sides were so great, and defence so difficult, when costs in men and money were incalculable, why seek war when temporizing could deflect it? Elizabeth came to regard the arguments of these forward Protestants at first with indifference, then with cold hostility.

Innately conservative, Elizabeth remained mesmerized by the threat from the ancient enemy, France. Yet the power of France, devastated by three civil wars in a decade, was hard to calculate; it was harder still to know how she would use it, especially when the wars were interrupted in August 1570 by a fragile truce. The leaders of the Huguenot and Catholic factions played upon the hatred between the royal brothers Charles IX and his heir Henry, Duke of Anjou in order to advance rival policies of momentous consequence: intervention in the Netherlands, thereby provoking war with Spain; or amity with Spain and the advance of the Roman faith. ‘I will have no other champion [of Catholicism] here but myself,’ vowed Charles IX in July 1571, as the Guises prepared Anjou for that role. Yet Charles’s equivocation made French politics ever more precarious, for he was himself under the influence of the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny. By the end of 1571 the fraternal enmity which even the machinations of their mother, Catherine de Medici, could hardly prevent threatened to turn to fratricide. A foreign war would at least distract the French nobility from the renewed civil war which always threatened so long as no end was found to the long vendetta between the Guises and Coligny except death.

Into this deadly house of Valois Elizabeth looked to marry. From the end of 1570 delicate negotiations had been conducted for the Queen to marry Anjou (the future Henry III). Dynastic alliance promised protection for England; and for Catherine de Medici it offered support in her struggle with the Cardinal of Lorraine for control of the Council and of Anjou himself. This was no dalliance, so Elizabeth insisted: she was ‘firmly and fully resolved to marry’. Yet there could be no compromise over religion. Anjou could not ‘make shipwreck of conscience’ by conforming to Protestant rites, and Elizabeth could not allow Anjou the private Mass which she forbade her subjects. As the marriage negotiations faltered, Walsingham feared that the Guises would work towards the conquest of Ireland and the advancement of Mary, Queen of Scots. By the end of 1571 Anjou had proposed instead that Elizabeth marry his (even) younger brother, the Duke of Alençon. If not a marriage, then Elizabeth looked for a treaty with France.

Alliance with France marked a transformation in England’s diplomacy, for her defence had traditionally lain with the Burgundian alliance with the Habsburgs. But now that the Netherlands were in revolt, to whom should England look for allies? No longer to Philip of Spain, who had conceived the ‘enterprise of England’, the proposed invasion of 1571, as God’s ‘own cause’. Neither could Elizabeth easily countenance alliance with his rebellious subjects in the Netherlands, for how could one sovereign aid the rebels of another? Elizabeth waited to be persuaded that Spain, so long England’s ally, was friend no longer. But her councillors now saw the domination of Spain as the greater threat. At the discovery of the Ridolfi plot in 1571 Walsingham had hoped that ‘the proud Spaniard (whom God hath long used as the rod of his wrath) would be cast into the fire’. Alva’s army waited just across the Channel, ready to invade. If conscience did not impel the Queen to intervene in the Netherlands, where the battle between liberty and tyranny, true and false religion, was being fought, pragmatism must. Such was the insistent argument of one wing of her Council and of the Prince of Orange. The Netherlands would be the first victim of Spanish tyranny if help did not arrive, and England the next. Disaster for the Dutch would be England’s disaster too.

In exile from the Low Countries since the rout of their invasion forces in 1568, William of Orange and his brother Louis of Nassau planned a new campaign against Alva. Only by armed invasion, and with foreign aid, could his tyranny be overthrown. Throughout 1569 the brothers had fought with the Huguenot armies in France, and when peace was made in 1570 they hoped to benefit from the reconciliation and looked to Charles IX as the unlikely champion of the Netherlands’ freedom. For the French king the ‘enterprise of Flanders’ offered the prospect of glory and expansion, and he was persuaded by promises of easy conquest there. In August 1571 Nassau came to the French court and proposed a grand alliance of France, England and the German Protestant princes to rid the Netherlands of Alva’s armies. Victorious, they would partition the Low Countries between themselves. Surely, wrote Walsingham, God had raised up Louis as an ‘instrument for the advancement of His glory’. There were times, he told Burghley in August, when ‘nothing can be more dangerous than not to enter wars’, when wars ‘for safety’s sake’ were imperative. The enterprise of Flanders waited upon Elizabeth’s decision. But Burghley saw only dangers; no solutions. England might gain by conquest in the Netherlands, but thereby lose a kingdom in Ireland, for Ireland was as easy for Spain to seize as it was for England to defend. Any alliance with France, he feared, would be transitory. Surely, he told Elizabeth on 31 August, the remedy of her perils lay ‘only in the knowledge of Almighty God’.

France was moving inexorably to war, but whether it would be war against Spain in the Netherlands or civil war no one knew. When in September Admiral Coligny returned to the French court, where his enemies awaited him, civil war seemed more likely. Walsingham feared that the ‘devilish practices’ of the Guises would lead to Catholic resurgence and renewed amity between France and Spain. But Coligny urged war against Spain, and Charles was persuaded. In early 1572 a treaty was signed between England and France binding the ancient enemies to mutual defence. But the aggrandizement of France had never been part of Elizabeth’s strategy, nor the loss of her faltering friendship with Spain. As the plans for multilateral invasion of the Netherlands went ahead that spring Elizabeth’s ambivalence unsettled her supposed allies, who could never be sure of England’s action, or inaction.

Nassau had feared that the ‘rash enterprise’ of extremists would jeopardize his grand strategy. So it proved. The Sea Beggars, a vigilante navy for the Dutch rebels in exile, were expelled from their English haven in March 1572, as too provocative to harbour. In desperation, they fled before the wind to the Zeeland coast where on 1 April they captured the Dutch port of Brille. By giving the rebels a bridgehead, access to the coast and command of the Channel, they changed the course of the revolt. Their action precipitated the invasion ‘untimely’. It was now or never, so Orange proclaimed on 14 April. At the end of May Nassau seized Valenciennes and Mons in the south and attempted the capture of the Duke of Alva in his viceregal capital. Events propelled England, Spain and France towards a war which none dared enter or knew how to prevent. Elizabeth and Burghley, who must halt the extension of French or Spanish power in the Low Countries, needed all their guile and judgement now. If Alva could contain the rebels, then England would not intervene; if not, and if the French proved ‘too potent neighbours’, then Alva could have – secret – assurance of English aid, if Philip would end the oppression of his subjects in the Low Countries. Sir Humphrey Gilbert was sent, supposedly a ‘volunteer’, to hold Flushing, but Elizabeth’s covert aid was not for the Protestant cause, not to protect the Low Countries from tyranny, but to prevent either Alva or the French from controlling the coastline. By midsummer all Holland, save Amsterdam, was in open revolt.

Charles IX was now ‘so far forward’ that nothing could hide his provocation of Spain, and Coligny was given royal permission to depart for the Netherlands on 25 August. But he never left. In Paris, Coligny and the Huguenot nobility gathered in mid July for a marriage which was intended to unite Navarre and Valois. This ended as a ‘massacring marriage’; celebration turned to carnage. The vendetta of the Guises against Coligny was ended by the Admiral’s assassination on St Bartholomew’s Night, 23 August. In the days which followed, the Huguenot leaders were cut down and thousands upon thousands of Protestants throughout France slaughtered in a spontaneous wave of popular Catholic violence; ‘the saints of God led to the shambles’, their mutilated corpses thrown in rivers. In Paris, Walsingham and Philip Sidney, the courtier and poet, looked on. Neither they, nor any Protestant in Europe, could remain untouched by the tragedy, and in time Sidney would die for the Protestant cause.

Some sought vengeance against the papists, but most bowed to God’s judgement. Did not the godly expect persecution? Cecil told Walsingham: ‘I see the Devil is suffered by Almighty God for our sins to be strong.’ The English people must call themselves to repentance. In Scotland, the General Assembly of the Kirk ordered a ‘public humiliation of them that fear God’ to mitigate God’s wrath upon them for their sins. Protestants everywhere looked for further violence, and certainly the Pope, who had had a medal struck to celebrate St Bartholomew’s Night, would have sanctioned it. In Geneva they awaited catastrophe. In the Netherlands the massacre was a disaster for Orange and his cause, for now Coligny would never come, and through the autumn and winter of 1572 the towns which had declared for Orange suffered Alva’s terrible retribution; they were sacked and their inhabitants put to the sword. Orange fled, not now to Germany, but to Holland, vowing to ‘make that province my tomb’.

There were wars of religion in France, in the Netherlands, in Scotland. Could England escape them? As Elizabethans watched the civil wars in neighbouring states, they regarded with gratitude the peace within their own kingdom, recognized ‘that restless care’ with which the Queen governed, the love she inspired among her subjects, and the justice she gave. They compared their own benign political institutions with the tyranny and oppression suffered by their neighbours. Yet sometimes they wondered whether those troubles might extend to England. In 1579 Philip Sidney reminded the Queen that her subjects were ‘divided into two mighty factions… bound upon the never-ending knot of religion’, and he feared that one faction might rise against the other.

Walsingham had doubted that there could ever be peace in France while there were so many aspirant kings. There was an aspirant queen in England too, for Mary Stewart still fretted and plotted in captivity in distant Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Yet there was only one Queen at the English court, and Elizabeth, as she entered her fifth decade, was at her most commanding, her royal will most imperative. She saw herself as a Senecan princess: constant, unswayed by shifts of fortune. Her councillors saw her otherwise, regretting her vacillations and that a Stoic princess should have such tantrums. In the perennial battle between will and counsel, they found her dismayingly immovable, and planned concerted campaigns of persuasion to make her act at all. In dark moments they feared that though they failed to move her, others might; that even Elizabeth could fall prey to the corrupt counsel of flatterers, which was the prevailing vice of princes and the slippery slope to tyranny. The forward Protestants, who blamed evil counsel for the slaughter and persecution of the wars of religion, were not always confident that the Queen would listen to advice, or to the right advice; theirs. Peter Wentworth had warned in the House of Commons in 1576 that ‘no estate can stand where the prince will not be governed by advice’. ‘Always or commonly,’ complained Walsingham in 1578, thinking of Elizabeth’s counsels, ‘the persons that wish best, and the causes that work best are most misliked.’

Yet so much in Elizabethan politics was conducive to stability. Those murderous divisions in Council and court, and among the nobility, which brought assassination, plot and civil war in France and Scotland, were absent from England. There could be no deadly feuds over control of Elizabeth, who jealously guarded her independence. No noble at Elizabeth’s court went in fear of his life as Coligny had done in France. In October 1573 the Queen’s favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, was attacked, but the assailant had mistaken his victim, and was anyway demented. The old quarrel between the Earls of Sussex and Leicester could still disrupt the court: on 15 July 1581 ‘the disaster fallen out yesterday betwixt two great planets’ was reported by Sir Thomas Heneage, the Vice-Chamberlain. Yet the earls knew ‘their Jupiter, and will obey her majesty’.

The Elizabethan nobility, though jealous of their honour and quick to defend it, and as predatory of power and office as their rank demanded, seemed to have learnt to look no longer to baronial revolt as the way of advancement. The 7th Earl of Northumberland, and the 4th Duke of Norfolk had been sent to the block to teach others that lesson. But the ancient Catholic nobility did not see themselves, nor were they seen by worried Protestant contemporaries, as part of a dissolving feudal order. The new courtly nobility which the Tudors had created and patronized quickly chose to forget the novelty of their elevation, and for some of them their noble independence fitted uneasily with ideals of courtly service. While wars were being fought for great causes many lamented being ruled by a queen whose politic virtues were the female ones of mercy and prudence, but who by her nature lacked martial courage and constancy of fixed purpose. Serving at her court became irksome and intolerable for those, like Philip Sidney, who aspired to active virtue. In 1578–9 Hubert Languet, a peripatetic diplomat serving the Protestant cause, observed to Sidney that life at the Elizabethan court seemed less ‘manly’ than he had hoped; that the nobility there sought reputation rather by ‘affected courtesy’ than by those virtues which were ‘wholesome to the state’. Leicester chafed under his dependence upon the Queen, who would be goaded into calling him a ‘creature of our own’, and aspired to the magnificence of a Renaissance prince, glorious in war and peace, extravagant in display and patronage. His ambition was to lead his forces in European war, and he had marshalled armaments in his strongly fortified castle at Kenilworth. Yet he also used Kenilworth to stage elaborate pageants for the Queen, and it was inconceivable that he would use his military power and raise his following – as his father had done before, and his stepson would do later – for his private purposes rather than the Crown’s.

There was, from the early 1570s until a palace revolution threatened towards the end of the decade, an unprecedented unity over policy and purpose at court and in the Council. No Catholic voice was heard, and Protestant influence was paramount. Even puritans found patrons in the highest places. The advance of Protestantism at home and abroad was the aspiration of most of the Council, even if there were marked differences over ways and means; Burghley usually aligned himself against Walsingham and Leicester, and the Queen remained distressingly intransigent. Disagreements remained, yet the silken arts of courtiers were used to pretend that friendship which the Queen demanded. Irony replaced invective. The court was the centre of all political life and advancement. To leave it without permission became, as the Duke of Norfolk had discovered, almost treason; and to be exiled from it, worse than disgrace. By keeping the advocates of rival policies around her, Elizabeth contained conflict.

Could there have been a massacre at London as there had been at Paris? The same text – Deuteronomy, Chapter 13 – which had stirred the citizens of Paris to slaughter was cited by the lord bishops at Westminster in 1572: death to those who incited the people of God to false worship. The Bishop of London – who, so he said, was ‘always to be pitied’, so unruly was his flock – feared that the French treachery would ‘reach over unto us’, and that the Londoners would be excited to violence by young preachers of more zeal than wisdom. London was the heartland of the radical puritan movement. Here presbyterian ringleaders found patrons and audiences. The religious enthusiasm of the Londoners was a powerful impetus to reform, but it was also a deterrent because of the division it brought. When the episcopal reaction came, as it did again in 1573, repression was most marked in London. But even though London’s governors constantly predicted trouble because religious passions were often so inflamed, there was no major religious riot in Elizabethan London; no bodies in the Thames nor blood in the streets because of religion. Government in London worked; diffused as it was through all the parishes, wards, precincts, companies, and households. Those who held divergent beliefs usually managed to worship together, work together and trade together. The wars in the streets were only wars of words.

Yet the ‘civil wars of the Church of God’ continued. The contention was between ‘zeal’ and ‘policy’; between those of the older generation who remembered how far they had come through persecution and exile, how hard it was to keep what they had; and the younger generation, who saw only the deformity and degeneration of the Church, so distant still from the True Church. The more radical bishops always hoped for better times and further reform, but they were, however uncomfortably, servants of a conservative mistress; commissioners for a Supreme Governor who was resistant to change and terrified of disorder. As the bishops stood in the way of reform, the presbyterians thought that they must go. ‘What is your judgement, ought there to be any bishops in the churches of Christians?’ they asked. Archbishop Matthew Parker, seen as ageing and antediluvian, despaired. In 1574 puritan satirists argued that seventy archbishops of Canterbury had been enough: ‘As Augustine was the first, so Matthew might be the last.’

Puritan satirists? The godly were not usually associated with satire, with fun. Puritan jokes were more often made against them than by them; against their behaviour as sanctimonious, censorious, holier-than-thou, hypocritical. As the godly few sought increasingly to impose their will upon the profane multitude the jokes became more bitter. Since the Fall, when humanity lost the divine likeness, every Christian had fought a lonely battle against sin but, because Protestantism stressed human depravity, that battle must now be fought with greater urgency. The godly led a campaign against the drunkard, the blasphemer and the lecher in order to create a society more conformable to God’s Word. From the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, as Protestantism won over the establishment, and godly magistrates aligned with godly ministers began to tighten their grip upon many a provincial town, puritanism came to be identified with moral and social repression. The old moral discipline of the ecclesiastical courts the godly thought no discipline at all. What punishment was it for fornicators to be ‘turned out of a hot sheet’ to stand in the white sheet of penance? Paternalist puritan Justices, driven by scripture and righteous indignation, exercised stern rule in their petty sessions. In 1578 the Justices in Bury St Edmunds drew up a new penal code. Women found guilty of fornication would receive thirty lashes ‘well laid on till the blood come’. The Old Testament punishment for adultery was death, and the most extreme godly fundamentalists called for its return. Even licit wedded love, they believed, might derogate from the reverence due to God alone. For a husband to vow ‘with my body I thee worship’ was to make an idol of his wife, said John Field. Romantic love might even fuse adultery and idolatry. ‘Let not my love be called idolatry, nor my beloved as an idol show,’ wrote William Shakespeare, playing upon that temptation.

In these ways the godly might be at war with what it was to be human. A chasm opened between the old permissive culture of neighbourliness and good fellowship and the godly code of discipline and restraint. The festivities which had bound the traditional community now began to divide it, for the godly denounced church ales, bridal wakes, morris dancing and maying as ‘idle pastimes’ and ‘belly cheer’. It was on Sunday – the only day free from labour, but also the day consecrated to God – that the carnal and the godly were especially at odds. The people, especially young people, were drawn to ‘heathenish rioting’, drunken cavorting, and dancing that led to debauchery, while the godly spent their time at sermons and reading scripture. So preachers alleged. In the heroic early days of the Reformation reformers had not been at war with music and drama: far from it. The ballad and the interlude had been the medium of the evangelists’ message. Protestant playwrights then had used bawdy jokes for a godly purpose, and scripture songs and psalms had been sung to ballad metre in alehouse singsongs.

In the mid 1570s all this started to change. Religious songs could no longer be sung to the tune ‘Greensleeves’. Sacred and secular music were divorced, and even sacred music viewed with suspicion, its beauty seen as part of the Devil’s wiles to seduce people from true worship. The writer of the most sublime Elizabethan choral music was William Byrd, a Catholic. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the old religious drama of the mystery plays had continued, but in the mid 1570s the York, Wakefield and Chester cycles were suppressed, for it was thought idolatrous for a man to play God; and polluting for divine truths to be the toy of human imagination. War was declared against drama just as it was about to enter its most brilliant age. Theatres were banished from London in 1575 as ‘seminaries of impiety’, ‘houses of bawdery’.

Were the godly fighting a losing battle? A trumpet blast would summon a thousand to some ‘filthy play’, while an hour’s tolling of a bell would gather only a hundred to a sermon, so preachers complained. But it was always an uphill struggle to save people from themselves. The godly knew that the greater part of humanity – if not precisely which part – were damned, whatever they did. Scripture showed that Christ’s promise of heaven was only for His ‘tiny flock’; that strait was the gate, narrow the way, ‘and few there be that find it’. The question that exercised them, as a matter of practical divinity, was whether the community of those who made Calvinist beliefs the heart of their lives should make that fellowship real and visible by dividing themselves from a national Church composed mostly of papist changelings and carnal worldlings. It was hard for the godly to contemplate communion with the ungodly, but though despairing of the Church of England they stayed within it. The restraint and the impulse to obedience of England’s godly should not be underestimated. England’s only massacre for religion in 1572, as France ran with blood, was of a Sussex boy who was shot dead as he sawed down a maypole.

Christian religious metaphors are often of war and battle. As Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, died an exemplary Christian death, he called out: ‘Courage, courage! I am a soldier that must fight under the banner of my saviour Christ.’ This Christian soldier died in Ireland, which he had known would be the death of him, where he, like others, had used the unchristian methods of betrayal and massacre.

If there were no wars of religion yet in England, could they be averted in Ireland? In 1569 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald had risen in the name of the Pope and preached a crusade against the ‘Hugnottes’. After his eventual submission in 1573 he fled to France and then to Spain to raise Catholic forces for a new holy war against the heretic Queen in Ireland. The godly, as they sought to beam evangelical light into the ‘dark corners’ and to make every city Jerusalem, faced no greater challenge than in Ireland, for here the new faith had hardly penetrated. A prudent Elizabeth chose not to unsettle and provoke her fragile polity in Ireland by ‘curious inquisition of men’s consciences’ and determined imposition of religious change. Although the statutes of supremacy and uniformity had established Protestantism as the official state religion in Ireland under the royal governorship of the Church, allegiance was hardly tested, nor was non-conformity punished, even in Dublin and the Pale. When Edmund Campion, newly and dangerously received into the Catholic faith in England, sought refuge, it was to Dublin that he came in 1570, to stay in the houses of James Stanihurst and Sir Christopher Barnewall, leading figures of the Pale.

If there were to be rebellion in the name of religion again, it was likely to be in Ireland. But it was not Catholicism which led Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords to rebel against Elizabeth in the 1570s, nor ardent Protestantism which drew the English to serve and settle in Ireland in the later sixteenth century, though it was often in the language of the Old Testament that the English governors came to speak of the suppression of Irish rebellions. ‘It must be fire and sword and the rod of God’s vengeance that must make these stubborn and cankered hearts yield for fear,’ wrote Ralph Rokeby, Chief Justice of Connacht, in 1571. Sir Edmund Butler, who had with his brother joined their Geraldine enemies in rebellion in 1569, spoke for many when he said: ‘I do not make war against the Queen, but against those that banish Ireland, and mean conquest.’ But to ‘banish Ireland’ was still the purpose only of a very few hardliners.

English governors saw a congruity between their defiance of Spanish oppression in the Netherlands and their crusade for the extension of English law and forms of government in Ireland. Burghley supposedly said, ‘The Flemings had not such cause to rebel by the oppression of the Spaniards as it is reported by the Irish people [who were so oppressed by their lords].’ Those who supported the Dutch in their just resistance against the tyrant Spain also came to fight in Elizabeth’s western kingdom. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who went, he said, ‘with Gideon’s faith’ to help make the inhabitants of Flushing ‘owners of themselves’ in 1572, had served in Ireland. But there his war of liberation took a summary, sanguinary form in 1569 when he put down the Munster rebellion with what seemed a terrible finality, and proposed wholesale confiscation and colonization there. Philip Sidney, son of the chief governor Sir Henry Sidney, had watched with despair the loss of liberty on the Continent through the 1570s, but argued for an extension of the royal prerogative in Ireland. In justification, he claimed that there liberty was already lost: ‘Under the sun there is not a nation which lives more tyrannously than they do one over the other.’ The tyrants were the Irish lords, not the English governors. Neither ‘wicked Saracen nor yet cruel Turk’ so pillaged the ‘poor commons’ as did the Irish lords who imposed their arbitrary rule. When Edmund Spenser, secretary to the Lord Deputy in 1581, wrote allegorically in his prophetic epic The Faerie Queene of the evil force to be conquered in Ireland by the Christian knight Artegall and his iron page Talus, it was Grantorto, the tyrant. Contemporary annotations associated Grantorto, the model of injustice, with members of the Geraldine Desmond family. English claims to own and rule were stronger where the Irish had forfeited theirs, so it came to be argued. Yet although the English saw themselves as liberators they were rarely seen as such by those they came to liberate.

When they thought about the nature of Irish society, with its ‘wild shamrock manners’ (as John Derricke, the pamphleteer, called them), the English were bewildered. Hopes remained that exotic Gaelic customs would disappear with the extension of English law and ‘civility’. The ending of the ‘savage life’, wrote Rowland White (an Anglo-Irish merchant and proponent of reform) to William Cecil in 1569, ‘shall enforce men to civility’. The reformers still believed, in the 1570s, that the Irish people could be won to English ways and that conciliation would be more effective than coercion. Sir William Garrard, the Lord Chancellor, arriving in Ireland in 1576, was clear that the sword was limited as an instrument of civility. ‘Can the sword teach them [the “English degenerates”] to speak English, to use English apparel, to restrain them from Irish exactions and extortions?’ It could not: ‘It is the rod of justice that must scour out these blots.’ Of course, a judge would believe that the common law must be the instrument of reform, and to deny that justice was a way to reform was like denying the virtue of education. Justices did go on assize; commissions were sent forth from the Dublin Council into distant regions; statutes were published. Sir Henry Sidney had been Lord Justice before his first period as chief governor (1565–71), and his commitment to judicial reform marked his office. He presided over extended assizes in 1565, travelling with judges in Leinster and conducting sittings in Munster. Yet many of those charged with governing Ireland came to despair that justice could effect reform, and were pessimistic of finding impartial juries in Irish society. If justice failed to bring order, overawe local lords and extirpate the ‘savage life’, then a military presence must be extended and law must follow the sword. It was less certain whether that military force should take the form of garrisoning or a campaign army.

The superiority of the English system of law was usually evident only to the English. English bewilderment about Ireland turned to disillusion as, through the 1570s, the Irish lords became not more ‘civil’ but more rebellious. In most of Ireland the people observed the ‘old religion’ still, followed local lords, and spoke the Irish language. The complexity of Irish society made it difficult to impose uniform regulations. Everything about Gaelic Ireland seemed to the English archaic, anarchic and conditional. This was, so they heard, a land of werewolves and blood oaths, where poets could rhyme a man to death and men would starve themselves to death at the doors of their enemies. The Gaelic lords had promised fealty to the English sovereign and taken feudal titles but, as they moved as freely in and out of these agreements as they did with those they had with each other, hopes that this would ensure their loyalty faded. Conn O’Neill had become the 1st Earl of Tyrone, but within a confused generation tanistry was reasserted, and after the murder of Shane O’Neill, Turlough Luineach was chosen as the O’Neill and inaugurated with what Sir Henry Sidney called ‘brutish ceremonies’. The first Earls of Clancar, Clanrickard, and Thomond renounced their English titles in protest against the actions of the English governors and, as signal of their revolt, the Earl of Clanrickard’s sons – the Mac an larlas – discarded their English dress and threw it in the Shannon. Even family allegiances might be temporary and opportunistic in Gaelic Ireland. Fosterage could create stronger bonds than kinship, and the practice of ‘naming’ children – affiliating the offspring of temporary liaisons to their fathers – created mighty alliances. Marriage, too, might be impermanent; an alliance broken, like others, when it no longer suited. Women chiefs could be as redoubtable as the men. Grania O’Malley, the pirate queen of the west, chose her own husband, ‘Richard in Iron’ Burke of Mayo, and, said Sir Henry Sidney, ‘was as well by sea as by land more than Mrs Mate with him’. To the English the Irish came to seem hardly Christian, sunk in papistry and paganism.

But these exotic, transient ways, condemned by the English governors, had the power to seduce. ‘Lord, how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures,’ wrote Spenser. For those who thought like Spenser, the Anglo-Irish lords of the original conquest had, long before, become ‘degenerate’, fallen from their race. By fostering and marrying the Irish, speaking their language, using brehon law, they had, as the proverb went, ‘grown as Gaelic as O’Hanlon’s breeches’. Yet the Anglo-Irish community maintained a long tradition of loyalty and obedience to England which was not easily ended. The Anglo-Irish were neither purged from government nor alienated from its policies in the first decades of Elizabeth’s rule, and there had been no radical estrangement between the English born in Ireland and the new generation of planters and soldier-settlers who arrived from England. But a difference of interest and attitude between the Anglo-Irish and the new settlers became clearer. In September 1577 Sir Nicholas Malby, President of Connacht wrote of the ‘division among us Council’, between ‘we of the English’ and those of ‘this country birth’. By the 1580s a sense grew among the Anglo-Irish community of their dispossession and alienation.

As their way of life was threatened, those with a double loyalty – to England and to Ireland – might be forced to choose between the two. Between 1560 and 1580 all the greatest Anglo-Irish lords – Desmond, Ormond, Kildare and Clanrickard – either rebelled themselves or were in collusion with rebels. As they moved towards rebellion again in 1574, the 15th Earl of Desmond and his Countess adopted forbidden Gaelic dress and reinstated brehon law. The 11th Earl of Kildare, half-English leader of the Geraldines, had been brought up in exile in Italian Renaissance courts. ‘A perfect horseman’, he had become Master of the Horse to Cosimo de’ Medici. As a loyal defender of Mary during Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554, he had been restored to his great lands and title, and entrusted with the defence of the Pale. Yet he still spoke Irish and used coyne and livery. He was accused of dealing with James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald in 1569, and in the early 1570s he shored up his newly restored power in Leinster by suspicious alliances with the unruly O’Byrnes, O’Mores and O’Connors. On his new fireplace at Kilkea he inscribed the ancient war cry of the Geraldines, ‘Cromaboo’.

Mystified by the Irish, the English began to resort to primitive ethnology to explain what they came to see as irredeemable barbarism. Although mostly sceptical about their own foundation myths, the English chose to be credulous about fantastic mythic Irish origins and to believe that Irish savagery stemmed from their ancient Scythian ancestry. The claim that Ireland was part of Britain’s Arthurian empire before the Anglo-Norman conquest and the now embarrassing papal grant gave Arthur’s Tudor descendants the right to complete the conquest. To many charged with governing Ireland, the Irish were a ‘savage nation’: they were ‘wild beasts’ to be ‘herded’, ‘hunted’, and ‘tamed’; colts to be ‘bitted’, ‘bridled’, ‘broken’. A proposal in 1570 to establish a university for the ‘reformation of the barbarism of this rude people’ foundered, like so many Elizabethan schemes in Ireland, until Trinity College, Dublin was established in 1591. Some came to adopt a pessimistic determinism, seeing the whole nation as unregenerate and recognizing that barbarism did not easily fade under the influence of civility. Even Sir Henry Sidney, twice chief governor (1565–71 and 1575–8), and the one who understood the Irish best, as he left Ireland for the last time allegedly boarded his ship reciting Psalm 114: ‘When Israel departed out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from a barbarous people.’

‘There lies some mystery in this universal rebellious disposition,’ lamented Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam in 1572. That most of the island was still peaceful was little consolation to English governors charged with quelling the unrest which seemed endemic. The ‘universal rebellion’ of Munster, Ulster and Connacht of 1569–72 threatened to recur in the spring of 1574. Yet the causes of Irish turbulence were no mystery; they lay in the increasing ambivalence and contradictory nature of English policy in the last third of the century. The Queen and her advisers still spoke of reform by peaceful means, of the advance of law and civility and of the freedoms of her Irish subjects, yet reform was often undermined not only by Irish rebellion, but by the very governors charged with implementing it. As each chief governor in turn was betrayed by rivals at court and in Ireland, they betrayed the strategy of reform by failing to be thoroughly committed to it. The instructions that came from the cautious and impecunious Queen were often erratic and contradictory, as events not only in Ireland but in Europe forced her to vary her commitment.

In July 1574 Elizabeth wrote to Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, then in Ireland: ‘You allure that rude and barbarous nation to civility rather by discreet handling than by force and shedding of blood.’ Yet Essex was countenancing widespread expropriation and colonization.

There had been desultory projects of plantation during the reign of Queen Mary. In Leix and Offaly in Leinster uneasy garrisons had been established at Philipstown and Maryborough; citadels of English influence around which stalked the displaced and hostile O’Byrnes, O’Mores and O’Connors, waging intermittent guerrilla war. Adventurers with greater ambitions came to Ireland under Elizabeth, seeking easy gain, and were countenanced by a government which saw private plantations as a cheap solution to the perennial problem of how to order Ireland without prodigious expense. The arrival of Sir Peter Carew in 1568 to lay claim to lands lost since the first conquest of the twelfth century engendered fears of the general dispossession of the Irishry, not least because this chancer’s venture was not opposed by the Chief Governor. In 1569 Sir Warham St Leger and other adventurers projected a plantation for south-west Munster which was predicated upon the clearance of the native population as though they were all proclaimed traitors; which they were not, or not yet. This failed, and in Munster expropriation by the English led to rebellion in 1569–71. Lord Deputy Sidney was driven from Ireland, and if he had ever supported colonization, he did so no longer. Parliament’s posthumous attainder of Shane O’Neill in 1569, and the confiscation of O’Neill lands, offered the chance for the ‘enterprise of Ulster’; the establishment of private schemes to colonize this turbulent province and to drive out the Scots once and for all.

With the ‘enterprise of Ulster’ and the royal grant of the Ards and South Clandeboye to Sir Thomas Smith and his son in 1571, and of the Glynns and North Clandeboye to the Earl of Essex in 1573, all the lords of Ulster were threatened with expropriation. The colonists’ promise to those who joined their venture of a ‘land that floweth with milk and honey’, but which was ‘waste’, ‘desolate’ and ‘uninhabited’, did not impress the Irish who inhabited it, and who now resisted their own part in the colonial scheme, which was to become the colonized. The ‘enterprise’ forced not only the Gaelic underlords, who had recently sought English protection from the depredations of Shane O’Neill, but also independent lords like Sir Brian MacPhelim O’Neill of Clandeboye and O’Donnell of Tirconnell, into a ‘knot to rebel’, and as before they looked to the O’Neill, now Turlough Luineach, for leadership. Gaelic unity in Ulster was – ominously – restored. Within a month of his arrival in August 1573 Essex had learnt not to trust the Irish. Essex was no speculator, but a feudal overlord; his services, said the Queen, were ‘grounded not upon gain, but upon honour and argument of true nobility’. But in this world of cattle raids, flooded fords, broken promises and guerrilla attacks, his project failed. Betrayed at home – by his wife and ‘back friends’ at court – his finances in ruins, and denied the highest office in Ireland which might have saved his honour, he despaired. He had vowed never to ‘imbrue his hands with more blood’ than necessity required, but his methods turned sanguinary. In November 1574 he invited Brian MacPhelim, his family and followers to a feast which ended in their slaughter. At Rathlin Island the next summer Essex found a final solution to the Scottish presence: to massacre the MacDonnells. His vengeful troops hunted down survivors in cliffs and caves. For his ‘rare constancy’ and ‘true temperance’ the Queen thanked him.

Returning to Ireland at the end of 1575, as chief governor for the second time, Sir Henry Sidney moved to placate the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic lords of Munster; he also made a truce with Turlough Luineach in Ulster, and took the submissions of the rebellious Burkes and O’Connors. If Sidney had ever been optimistic about assimilating Ireland to English ways, he was not now. He pursued, with relentless energy and some impetuousity, policies which veered between conciliation and coercion. Bound by an impossible promise to the Queen that he would make the government of Ireland pay for itself, and undermined still by enemies at court, he needed immediate results. For him, provincial presidencies and councils were the way of providing an alternative to the exclusive military powers of the great lords, whose maintenance of private armies supported by coyne and livery was the source of perennial instability and oppression; and also a means of providing justice in distant regions, distinct from brehon law and the private jurisdictions of Desmond and Ormond. The presidents were to be military men, provided with the armed force to prevent violence in their provinces, as well as being charged with the maintenance of justice. That the first presidencies had, in the way of reform attempts in Ireland, mutated from their original purpose when, in the face of rebellion, Gilbert in Munster had ruled not by common law but the law of the sword, and Fitton in Connacht had not ruled at all, did not deter him. In 1576 Sir Nicholas Malby became President in Connacht.

The new presidencies of the later 1570s were to be financed by composition; a scheme whereby the old military exactions demanded by the Gaelic and Gaelicized lords and the ‘cess’ (levy) exacted by the English garrisons would be surrendered and replaced by an annual rent charge based on land. The defence of the territory would no longer rest with the lords alone, but with them in alliance with the presidents and their forces, to whom lesser landowners could now look for protection. There would be a certainty – both military and financial – in the new system which was lacking in the old. In a great perambulation throughout Ireland in 1575–6 Sidney negotiated composition agreements with many of the great lords, even in restless Connacht, and was assured of their obedience. But peace talks in Ireland did not generally last. Rumours spread of Sidney’s rapacity; rumours that he had, said the Queen, taken ‘our whole land to farm’. There was widespread discontent and a general call to resistance. The Mac an Iarlas, fearing the ruin of the Clanrickard lordship, and hating the English even more than they hated each other, rebelled again in 1576. In the following year the hitherto loyal Palesmen refused the cess – the imposition to pay for the Queen’s unlovely soldiers in Ireland – as a burden they would no longer carry, and they would not countenance composition. This crisis provoked Sidney’s second recall.

Rebellion threatened again, but now when it came it was in the guise of holy war. Sidney had warned the Queen that most of the Irish were ‘Papists… body and soul’; and ‘Romish’ not only in religion, for they looked for a prince of ‘their own superstition’. In July 1579 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald returned, leading an expeditionary force from Catholic Europe, and raised the papal banner in the far west. He promised to deliver Ireland from the excommunicate ‘she-tyrant’, Elizabeth. Those who joined him might have had motives less elevated. The Geraldine swordsmen, humiliated by the pacific new world of composition which was intended to turn military retainers into husbandmen, rallied. In August 1579 John of Desmond murdered an English official and precipitated the House of Desmond into a revolt which its tormented head, the Earl of Desmond had little choice but to lead. A war between loyal and disloyal Munster lords ensued, with Ormond, Desmond’s old enemy, leading the Crown’s forces. The following summer a Catholic confederacy formed in the Pale, led by James Eustace, Viscount Baltinglas, a nobleman of the Pale. In the name of the Pope, he called upon the leaders of Anglo-Irish society to join his ‘holy enterprise’ and to ‘take the sword’ against the unnatural and unjust supremacy of the Queen. The sons of some leading Pale families joined his cause, and paid with their lives, yet most of the Pale community was, although loyal to Rome, loyal to the Queen also, and did not rise. But the discovery that even a Dublin alderman had been involved in the conspiracy led to alarm that religious dissidence might turn to open defence of Catholicism, and to a new and minatory atmosphere. The rebellion offered the chance for the Gaelic septs of Leinster to prey upon the Pale, and in August the new, and as yet unwary, chief governor, Lord Grey de Wilton was ignominiously defeated by Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne at Glenmalure Pass in the Wicklow Mountains. In Ulster, Turlough Luineach was always ready to menace the English.

The Desmond rebellion destroyed the House of Desmond, disgraced the Earl of Kildare, alienated Ormond from the Crown, and devastated Munster. The English strategy had been to ‘prey, burn, spoil and destroy’, and it had worked. In the early 15 80s Munster was truly waste and ready for colonization. The rebel remnant, wasted by famine, crept out of woods and glens; ‘anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves’. This was the approving description of Edmund Spenser, the prophet poet. The papal garrison at the Fort of Gold at Smerwick in the far west of Kerry was massacred in November 1580, its appeals to the laws of nations and the customs of war unheard. One great Elizabethan poet and courtier, Walter Ralegh, was executioner; another, Spenser, was recorder. Poetry was for camps as well as courts. According to Lord Deputy Grey, who ordered the garrison to be cut down, the Irish ‘addiction’ to ‘treachery and breach of fidelity’ was due to their Catholic religion which ‘dispenses’ with oaths from ‘advantage’.

A harder spirit entered English policy. Sir Nicholas Malby warned that if the Queen did not ‘use her sword more sharply, she will lose both sword and realm’. All private quarrels in Ireland, so he told Leicester in August 1580, were now converted into ‘a general matter of religion’. The Irish might now make Catholicism the symbol of national identity and turn Ireland into a battleground of the Counter-Reformation. Ominously, the new battle cry of the rebels was ‘Papa abo [The pope above]’. What had not begun as a war of religion might become so at last. If the Pope could send an invading army into Ireland, might he send one into England too?

Catholics had in the ‘days of darkness’ at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign been quiescent and acquiescent. Their hierarchy overthrown, their churches usurped and their faith outlawed, most had responded by continuing to attend their parish churches as the law demanded, and as no Catholic authority yet insistently forbade. Most Catholics found ways of retaining both their hearts’ allegiance to Rome and their obedience to their sovereign; still performing their public duty, sitting on the magistrates’ bench and in their accustomed pew in church. Those who took the understandable path of least resistance and celebrated according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer while longing for the Latin ones still thought of themselves as Catholics. Yet for the more uncompromising, they were not; they were schismatics, lost souls. This form of surrender would turn them from half-hearted ‘Catholics’ into half-hearted ‘Protestants’, and would lead to the loss of the old faith in their children’s generation. All Catholics, a great part of the English population, hoped that the Protestant ascendancy was temporary, and that they would not forever be banished in their own land. Many shared a vision that the Church, invincible through history, would be restored. A few began to think that better times would come not by waiting but by working. The lives of would-be loyal and peaceful Catholics could not remain untouched by the increasing militancy of Catholicism at home and abroad. Nicholas Sanders, the most virulent of the polemicists in exile, wrote of the Church on earth arrayed as an army under its papal captain, and he himself sailed as papal emissary to the Fort of Gold in Ireland. A state of warfare between the Churches came to be acknowledged.

The papal bull Regnans in excelsis (February 1570) and its consequences in England had made confrontation more likely. When the Pope demanded that Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects withdraw their allegiance he had created a fateful link between loyalty to Rome and disloyalty to the Queen. Stark choices faced Catholics once it became harder to maintain that their conforming attendance at church was other than schism and sin. In the shadow of the Northern rebellion of 1569, the leaders of every shire had been charged to declare their assent to Prayer Book services and to take Communion. Some in conscience could not. Open refusal to attend church was recusancy, and the refusing Catholics, the recusants, were subject to increasing penalties. In 1571 a House of Commons full of vengeful Protestants – the first Parliament to exclude admitted Catholics by the administration of an oath which they could not in conscience swear – extended the treason laws to include all those who imported papal bulls or sacred Catholic objects, who reconciled others to Rome or who were reconciled themselves. Priests were the agents of reconciliation. Some among the Catholic clergy who had remained in their parishes since Mary’s reign had been urging the spiritual duty of withdrawal from heretic services, envisaging a separated Catholic community; some, of more agile conscience and with a just fear of the consequences of refusal, had said Prayer Book services in public and sung Mass in private. For many Catholics any crisis of conscience might have been passing, as long as sympathetic clergy continued to celebrate something that looked like the Mass, and while ‘papist’ midwives assisted childbirth with Latin invocations and illegal baptisms. But from 1574 these efforts to sustain the Catholic faithful were inspired by priests of another kind.

Almost a thousand years after St Augustine’s mission to England another mission was launched. By the mid 1570s the young exiles at William Allen’s English College at Douai in Flanders (founded in 1568) were studying the Jesuit spiritual exercises along with doctrine, and in 1574 the first seminary-educated missionary priest arrived in England. The mission of the seminary priests was less to convert than to rescue conforming Catholics from schism: to be pastors in the spiritual wilderness. They came to insist that recusancy was the spiritual duty of every Catholic, and to sustain them, illegally and secretly, for as long as was necessary. Although Catholic polemic was uncompromising, priests, faced with human weakness and troubled times, might temporize. The missionary priests did not invent the idea of a separated recusant Catholic community, but their arrival made that prospect more likely.

Without priests as agents of sacramental grace, Catholics could hardly be Catholics. But the arrival of the seminary priests brought not only new hope but new danger. Reconciling the faithful to Rome was treason; abetting it was scarcely less so. Priests were fugitive and needed shelter, so Catholic gentry who protested sincerely their loyalty to the Queen found themselves sheltering outlawed priests in their households, for to protect a priest was a duty hard for any Catholic to refuse when the faith depended upon it. Priests disguised as lay stewards, servants, teachers and soldiers, moved from house to house saying Mass, always in danger of betrayal and detection. In 1577 Richard Grenville, the Protestant Sheriff of Cornwall, arrived at the house of a Catholic neighbour, Francis Tregian, whom he disliked for more than religion, and found Tregian’s steward in the garden wearing a forbidden Agnus Dei. This was Cuthbert Mayne, a Douai priest. Priests, if caught, were faced with a single choice: apostasy or death. Martyrdom was the risk they knowingly took at ordination. In the English College at Rome scholars read chapters from their martyrologies at dinner, telling of the saints executed at Tyburn. Mayne was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1577, the first of more than 200 Catholics martyred during Elizabeth’s reign.

The Catholic mission was spiritual. Yet the priests, as emissaries of the Pope who had used his deposing power against the Queen, were enemy agents and traitors. Elizabeth and her Council knew that the overwhelming majority of her recusant Catholic subjects were, as they themselves insisted, loyal, anxious for a quiet life, obedient to the Queen in everything save church attendance, obedient to the Pope only in spiritual matters: what they could never know, until the test came, was precisely which Catholics were loyal and which might not be. Until and unless they knew, all Catholics were under suspicion; an enemy within. Until the late 1570s Catholics were treated with a remarkable latitude: ‘By a merciful connivance [they] enjoyed their own service of God in their private houses’, wrote the historian William Camden. The Queen remained reluctant for violence to be offered to consciences.

The arrival of the first English mission sent by the Society of Jesus, under Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, the Pope’s ‘white boys’, in June 1580 changed things. But how could two Jesuits, however brilliant and compelling, threaten so entrenched a Protestant establishment? There was no doubting their power to inspire. Campion vowed that the Jesuits would persevere in their mission ‘while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun.’ Campion’s audacity in travelling through England, celebrating the sacraments and writing controversial tracts, intensified the search for him. In July 1581 he was arrested, and in the Tower he disputed with his opponents. On 1 December he went to Tyburn. But the Jesuits had been sent to England as leaders of a special mission, not as martyrs; to keep the faith alive, not to die for it. To do their job, they must live. Hence the Jesuits’ need for worldliness and their development of the art of casuistry – the answering of interrogators’ questions subtly enough to escape and thereby to continue to catechize and to celebrate.

The arrival of the Jesuit mission coincided with a crisis for the godly. By the later 1570s England’s Protestants feared that all their gains were illusory. English Catholics were, after twenty years, not retreating but resurgent. They were protected by friends in the highest places, and Masses were celebrated even in the heart of London. Early in 1575 there were rumours that Philip II would persuade Elizabeth to allow four Jesuits to preach in England; an advance guard of militant Tridentine Catholicism, the faith redefined and strengthened by the Council of Trent. Catholics, and especially the Jesuits, were believed to have wiles to win over even the wary. Spenser’s tale of the easy seduction of the kid (the simple, faithful Christian) by the guileful (papist) fox in his Shepherd’s Calendar was written in 1579, a dark period for England’s godly, when some feared that even the Queen might succumb to flattering Catholic counsels.

In 1577 John Dee, the mathematician, magician and theorist of empire, had in his General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation illustrated the Queen at the helm of the imperial ship Europa. His hope was that she would seize the chance to establish a Protestant British empire. Yet if Elizabeth was the pilot, no one was sure which course she had set. In hope also, the godly lauded Elizabeth as ‘the woman clothed with the Sun’ from the Book of Revelation, but it was evident that she did not share the evangelical enthusiasms of her advisers; indeed she grew violently impatient with them. In 1578 a puritan divine saw the deaths of the godly bishops Pilkington, Jewel and Parkhurst as signs portending the end of the world, and, ominously, with each new appointment to the episcopal bench – Aylmer, Freke, Piers, Young, Whitgift (especially Whitgift) – the Supreme Governor signalled reaction. The elevation of Edmund Grindal, a fervent reformer and former exile, to the see of Canterbury in December 1575 had soon come to seem aberrant. Elizabeth, always likely to see the disruptive rather than the evangelical possibilities of preaching, thought that three or four preachers sufficed for a shire. This was held to be dereliction in a godly Queen, and the lack of evangelical progress in her reign was, so Grindal told her, ‘lamentable’.

The war between reaction and further reform came soon, when battle was joined over the issue of ‘prophesyings’ self-help groups among local clergy for the exegesis of scripture. These had caused excitement in the shires, revealing the chasm between the godly and the rest, as radical clergy, excluded from the Church, dared to discuss matters political as well as divine, and lay people listened. After disquieting reports in the summer of 1576, Elizabeth determined to end them. Charged to violate his evangelical principles, Grindal responded with a challenge to the Queen from which his victory could be only moral: he must choose, so he told her, ‘rather to offend your earthly majesty than to offend against the heavenly majesty of God’. In May 1577 he was suspended and sequestered, never to be restored. The Queen willed no less than the deprivation of her archbishop. Should her will prevail, so the puritan Sir Francis Knollys warned, then ‘up starts the pride and practice of the papists’; ‘King Richard the second’s men’ (the archetypal flatterers of the tyrant) ‘will flock into court apace’. The disgrace of Grindal was cause and consequence of a bitter and growing rift at Elizabeth’s court.

England’s godly saw terrible dangers at home and abroad as international Catholicism grew more menacing. While lamenting the paucity of England’s support for the common cause of religion, they acknowledged that she had done enough to fear retribution. They saw Spain’s seeming friendship as treachery: the Queen was seduced by ‘Spanish compliments’ while their ‘secret practices’ ripened. In a world devoted to horses, the dangers of ‘unbridled’ Spanish power were explained in equestrian metaphor: ‘The Spanish jennet champs on her cakebread snaffle.’ In France, Henry III had succeeded Charles IX in 1574. Guided variously by his mother Catherine de Medici (‘the Jezebel of her age’, according to Philip Sidney), the Guises, and Philip II, he supported the drive to extirpate the Protestant Church. Scotland, always a potential passage to England’s destruction, had been safe through most of the 1570s under the regency of James Douglas, Earl of Morton, but in the spring of 1578 he was overthrown. Whether Scotland’s future lay with Protestant England or Catholic France lay once more in the balance. Still in custody, Mary, Queen of Scots dreamt of marriage to Don John of Austria, the brilliant victor of the sea battle of Lepanto against the Turks, and from 1576 Governor-General of the Netherlands.

The Netherlands remained the focus of the hopes and fears of the Protestants of England and Europe. Holland and Zeeland had pursued their revolutionary course under the leadership of William of Orange, but by the autumn of 1575 the cause was in great danger. Attempts to bring peace between Spain and the rebel provinces had failed, and now, without aid, the Netherlands would be prey to France or Spain. Only the Queen failed to see the gravity of the threat or the greatness of the chance; a chance which would not come again, said the prescient. The Netherlands’ danger was England’s danger; their defence, England’s defence, so insisted Orange and the Queen’s advisers, as they looked on the growing power of Spain. But Elizabeth always baulked at openly aiding her Spanish ally’s rebels and at spending money she did not have. In 1575 she proscribed Orange and his supporters. It was said she ‘meaneth not to be a dealer’. In January 1576, in a fury of indecision, she boxed the ears of her gentlewomen and locked herself in her Privy Chamber away from the clamour of her councillors. Always preferring diplomacy to war, she sent ambassadors instead of the men and money needed.

Yet the course of the revolt changed in 1576 just when Spanish victory in Zeeland seemed certain. A reign of terror by mutinous, murderous Spanish troops, demanding ‘Gelt, gelt’ from a bankrupt Spain, created an uneasy alliance between the rebel provinces of the north and the loyalists of the south, a union made formal by the Pacification of Ghent in November 1576, which followed the apocalyptic Spanish fury when the troops laid waste Antwerp and massacred thousands. The States General, composed of mostly reluctant revolutionaries, convened itself and became the central organ of government of a united Netherlands. In January 1577 Don John of Austria signed the Perpetual Edict of Peace with the States, which was intended to restore the old religion throughout the Netherlands. William of Orange never consented to it, and Don John kept it, not perpetually but only for six months. There could be neither unity nor peace where Reformed religion and Catholicism could not coexist.

Orange, born great and with greatness thrust upon him, was recognized as the pater patriae, now leader of patriots not desperadoes. Between themselves, Elizabeth’s advisers compared his Stoic constancy with the irresolution of their Queen, a failing they thought intrinsic to her ‘womanly’ nature. Her endless ‘stays and resolutions’, her uncertainty – ‘sometimes so, sometimes no’ – vitiated her actions and their counsel and led them to weary despair. By the late summer of 1577 her leading councillors, even cautious, circuitous Burghley, united in insisting that she intervene in the Netherlands and keep Orange ‘in heart and life’. In St Paul’s – London’s talking shop as well as cathedral – all ‘honest men’ urged aid to the Dutch. At last the Queen was persuaded to send an expeditionary force under Leicester. She gave her promise. And she broke it. In January 1578 Don John, ignoring the paper peace, routed the States’ army. It was a desperate moment for the cause. Surely the Queen would not leave the Dutch ‘in the briars’. She would. She did. As before, she chose the security of mediation, of delay, of doing nothing, or almost nothing, to action. When she did send troops they were under the command of Duke John Casimir of the Palatinate (in what was, for Leicester, the unworthy stead of himself). Elizabeth’s betrayal drove Orange to do as he had warned; to ally in August 1578 with the French in the dubious person of Francis, Duke of Anjou (formerly Duke of Alençon). Early in 1579, with the Protestant Union of Utrecht in January (which committed the rebel provinces to fight for total victory against Spain) and the Catholic Union of Arras in May (which recognized the full authority of Philip II), the Netherlands were divided; divided forever, when England’s aid might, just might, have kept them united.

At this despairing moment, with ‘all the world’ her enemies at once, something surprising was going on in that uncertain centre of policy which was the royal mind. Determining to be the Virgin Queen no longer, Elizabeth chose the worst suitor in Europe; the faithless, feckless Duke of Anjou, his reputation as blemished as his pock-marked face. The Catholic heir-presumptive to the French throne, half the Queen’s age – she was forty-five – was nowhere trusted; not in France, not in England. Slowly it dawned on Elizabeth’s councillors that this suit, which had been so repellent to her in 1572, was by 1578 no dalliance. Hers was the policy; hers the pursuit. Supported by Burghley and Sussex, she saw only the advantages: marriage to Anjou was a way of ending England’s diplomatic isolation and present danger, a means of asserting control over France by diplomacy and of finding protection against an increasingly aggressive, aggrandizing Spain. Elizabeth believed that she could use Anjou to contain Spanish reconquest in the Netherlands, while also preventing him from annexing them for France, or for himself. She might even ensure the succession by bearing an heir. Diplomatic imperatives gave way to emotional ones as she committed herself to this courtship, which would be her last. Early in 1579 the court watched in horror Elizabeth’s romantic raptures with Simier, Anjou’s agent, ‘Monsieur’s chief darling’. In August Anjou, the original ‘frog he would a-wooing go’, arrived in unprepossessing person.

The marriage proposal divided the court and Council, and threatened to divide the politically aware among the nation. Many saw only danger in the marriage to a ‘stranger, a born enemy’. While Elizabeth lived, English interests would be subordinate to French; she would be drawn not into a Protestant but a Catholic league. Should she die – which was only too likely if, at her age, she did conceive a child – the Catholic Anjou might share the English throne with Mary Stewart. Once king of France, Anjou would rule England through a viceroy as a French province. This marriage, so the godly feared, must be ‘the overthrow of religion’. Memories of the persecution which followed Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip of Spain and of the ‘massacring marriage’ at Paris haunted Protestant minds. The prospect of the match was not quite unspeakable, for some dared speak out. For his pamphlet The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed, John Stubbs had his right hand cut off before a silent, horrified, crowd. Philip Sidney wrote warning Elizabeth against marriage to a stranger. Behind Sidney’s quarrel that month with the malignant 17th Earl of Oxford, ostensibly over precedence on the tennis court, there lay more than wounded pride and personal loathing, for Sidney spoke for the forward Protestants to whom the Queen would not listen, and Oxford was part of the ‘faction then reigning’ of Catholic and crypto-Catholic noble malcontents, who told her what she wished to hear. The brilliant and unquiet Lord Henry Howard now dared to joke of his favour at court in the sacred terms of ‘the chosen’ and ‘reprobation’. That autumn Elizabeth thought of introducing four Catholics into the Council. Leicester had seen the hopes of the ‘papists’ rising; they were ‘upon their tiptoes’, never in such ‘jollity’ since Queen Mary’s days.

The marriage proposal revealed the distance between Elizabeth and her Council. Leicester, who had most to lose by the match, had remarried secretly in 1578. When Elizabeth discovered this from his enemies she banished him in fury. The Queen could justly protest that the Council, having always urged her to marry, were now thwarting her when she at last acceded. Without their support she could not act, and by the end of 1579 she tearfully bowed to this new exigency. She understood the extent of her power, the force of her will, but now learnt their limits. She had resisted the image of Protestant champion which her godly people wished upon her, but dared not tarnish it by so unpopular a marriage.

The fiction of negotiations for the marriage was not yet abandoned. In October 1580 Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, the brilliant successor to Don John as Governor-General of the Spanish Netherlands, contemptuously described Elizabeth’s proceedings as ‘the weaving of Penelope’. She undid every night what was done the day before; and all with no conclusion, save to weary her councillors, and lose the trust of anyone who dealt with her. Yet the need for alliance with a great power was now compelling. England and the rest of Europe watched impotently as Philip annexed the Portuguese throne. ‘How idly we watch our neighbours’ fires,’ lamented Philip Sidney. In Scotland, the ‘postern gate’ was open once again to England’s enemies, for the powerful and personal hold of the Guise emissary Esmé Stewart, Sieur d’Aubigny, over the young King James VI augured the renewal of the reactionary Catholic ‘auld alliance’. In the face of these threats, the Anjou match began to find support even among its inveterate enemies as the only way to security. In the summer of 1581 Walsingham was sent to Paris with an impossible task: to secure an offensive-defensive league against Spain, but to avoid the marriage which would alone secure it. The French fear was that without the marriage Elizabeth would ‘slip the collar’ and leave France to fight Spain with herself as spectator. Henry III could be persuaded neither of their common danger nor of Elizabeth’s good faith. As the negotiations failed, Walsingham dared to tell her that there was not a councillor who did not wish himself in the ‘farthest part of Ethiopia’.

The Protestant nightmare of a militant Catholic league of ‘mighty potentates that have bent themselves against God’ did not go away. How could it when Parma seemed set to reconquer the Netherlands for Spain and for Rome? Yet English Protestants in the 1580s looked to the enemy within. The ‘cold-starved papists’ had been disappointed in their hopes of royal favour at the time of the Anjou match, but they might find salvation elesewhere. Catholics claimed that their religion was no treason. ‘We travelled only for souls; we touched neither state nor policy,’ insisted Campion at Tyburn. But his fellow Jesuit, Persons, turned to more sinister methods. In Paris in May 1582, Persons conspired with the Duke of Guise, the papal nuncio, Mary Stewart’s ambassador and William Allen to plan an ‘enterprise’ – the invasion of England through Scotland. Accepting that the assassination of Elizabeth was the logical preliminary to the accession of Mary, Queen of Scots, Persons had begun to work towards it. That plan was aborted when in the Ruthven Raid of August 1582 the Earls of Gowrie and Mar kidnapped James VI in order to rescue him from the malign influence of Esmé Stewart, and Stewart retreated to France. Another ‘practice’ was conceived. In November 1583 Francis Throckmorton, a Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire was betrayed and arrested. Papers discovered in his study, and confessions extracted upon the rack, provided evidence of a treasonable conspiracy for invasion. Lists of English Catholic sympathizers were uncovered, among them the Earls of Northumberland and Arundel and the malcontent Lord Henry Howard, who was a pensioner of the King of Spain. The plots were revealed in time by a surveillance network of spies and agents controlled by Walsingham. Men who had once been Catholics themselves knew best how to watch, infiltrate and suborn. Walsingham’s turned men stalked the conspirators, but they could not know them all. To kill a queen only needed one assassin, one accurate dagger or bullet.

The assassination of William of Orange in July 1584 dismayed not only the Dutch. The consciousness of the Queen’s mortality, the sense of the frailty of the thread on which her subjects’ safety hung, were rarely spoken of publicly, but never forgotten. During the Anjou crisis, Leicester’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, dared to write in his Old Arcadia, under cover of pastoral convention, of the Queen’s death and its consequences. Surely Elizabeth would never marry now, never bear a child: she was the last of her line. In France, after the death of Anjou in June 1584, mourned only by Elizabeth and by his mother, war over the succession threatened, because the heir to the throne was now the Protestant Henry of Navarre. In England in the autumn of 1584 thousands of the political nation, of the Protestant nation, foreseeing disaster, swore to a Bond of Association. Binding themselves as ‘one firm and loyal society’, they vowed to defend the Queen and, should she be killed, to put to death the person for whose sake she had been murdered; Mary Stewart. This was vigilante justice, the politics of fear and vengeance, and showed the dark side of the passions aroused by religious division. Elizabeth and England were now left alone to face Spain at the zenith of its power.