Religious questions and the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots

Elizabeth restored England to Protestantism. The Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament and approved in 1559, revived the antipapal statutes of Henry VIII and declared the queen supreme governor of the church, while the Act of Uniformity established a slightly revised version of the second Edwardian prayer book as the official order of worship. Elizabeth’s government moved cautiously but steadily to transfer these structural and liturgical reforms from the statute books to the local parishes throughout the kingdom. Priests, temporal officers, and men proceeding to university degrees were required to swear an oath to the royal supremacy or lose their positions; absence from Sunday church service was punishable by a fine; royal commissioners sought to ensure doctrinal and liturgical conformity. Many of the nobles and gentry, along with a majority of the common people, remained loyal to the old faith, but all the key positions in the government and church were held by Protestants who employed patronage, pressure, and propaganda, as well as threats, to secure an outward observance of the religious settlement.

But to militant Protestants, including exiles from the reign of Queen Mary newly returned to England from Calvinist Geneva and other centers of continental reform, these measures seemed hopelessly pusillanimous and inadequate. They pressed for a drastic reform of the church hierarchy and church courts, a purging of residual Catholic elements in the prayer book and ritual, and a vigorous searching out and persecution of recusants. Each of these demands was repugnant to the queen. She felt that the reforms had gone far enough and that any further agitation would provoke public disorder, a dangerous itch for novelty, and an erosion of loyalty to established authority. Elizabeth, moreover, had no interest in probing the inward convictions of her subjects; provided that she could obtain public uniformity and obedience, she was willing to let the private beliefs of the heart remain hidden. This policy was consistent with her own survival strategy, her deep conservatism, and her personal dislike of evangelical fervor. When in 1576 the archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, refused the queen’s orders to suppress certain reformist educational exercises, called “propheseyings,” Grindal was suspended from his functions and never restored to them. Upon Grindal’s death, Elizabeth appointed a successor, Archbishop Whitgift, who vigorously pursued her policy of an authoritarian ecclesiastical regime and a relentless hostility to Puritan reformers.

If Elizabeth’s religious settlement was threatened by Protestant dissidents, it was equally threatened by the recalcitrance and opposition of English Catholics. At first this opposition seemed relatively passive, but a series of crises in the late 1560s and early ’70s disclosed its potential for serious, even fatal, menace. In 1569 a rebellion of feudal aristocrats and their followers in the staunchly Catholic north of England was put down by savage military force, while in 1571 the queen’s informers and spies uncovered an international conspiracy against her life, known as the Ridolfi Plot. Both threats were linked at least indirectly to Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been driven from her own kingdom in 1568 and had taken refuge in England. The presence, more prisoner than guest, of the woman whom the Roman Catholic Church regarded as the rightful queen of England posed a serious political and diplomatic problem for Elizabeth, a problem greatly exacerbated by Mary’s restless ambition and penchant for conspiracy. Elizabeth judged that it was too dangerous to let Mary leave the country, but at the same time she firmly rejected the advice of Parliament and many of her councillors that Mary should be executed. So a captive, at once ominous, malevolent, and pathetic, Mary remained.

The alarming increase in religious tension, political intrigue, and violence was not only an internal, English concern. In 1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and absolved her subjects from any oath of allegiance that they might have taken to her. The immediate effect was to make life more difficult for English Catholics, who were the objects of a suspicion that greatly intensified in 1572 after word reached England of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants (Huguenots) in France. Tension and official persecution of recusants increased in the wake of the daring clandestine missionary activities of English Jesuits, trained on the Continent and smuggled back to England. Elizabeth was under great pressure to become more involved in the continental struggle between Roman Catholics and Protestants, in particular to aid the rebels fighting the Spanish armies in the Netherlands. But she was very reluctant to become involved, in part because she detested rebellion, even rebellion undertaken in the name of Protestantism, and in part because she detested expenditures. Eventually, after vacillations that drove her councillors to despair, she agreed first to provide some limited funds and then, in 1585, to send a small expeditionary force to the Netherlands.

Fears of an assassination attempt against Elizabeth increased after Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed in 1580 that it would be no sin to rid the world of such a miserable heretic. In 1584 Europe’s other major Protestant leader, William of Orange, was assassinated. Elizabeth herself showed few signs of concern—throughout her life she was a person of remarkable personal courage—but the anxiety of the ruling elite was intense. In an ugly atmosphere of intrigue, torture and execution of Jesuits, and rumors of foreign plots to kill the queen and invade England, Elizabeth’s Privy Council drew up a Bond of Association, pledging its signers, in the event of an attempt on Elizabeth’s life, to kill not only the assassins but also the claimant to the throne in whose interest the attempt had been made. The Association was clearly aimed at Mary, whom government spies, under the direction of Sir Francis Walsingham, had by this time discovered to be thoroughly implicated in plots against the queen’s life. When Walsingham’s men in 1586 uncovered the Babington Plot, another conspiracy to murder Elizabeth, the wretched Queen of Scots, her secret correspondence intercepted and her involvement clearly proved, was doomed. Mary was tried and sentenced to death. Parliament petitioned that the sentence be carried out without delay. For three months the queen hesitated and then with every sign of extreme reluctance signed the death warrant. When the news was brought to her that on February 8, 1587, Mary had been beheaded, Elizabeth responded with an impressive show of grief and rage. She had not, she wrote to Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, ever intended that the execution actually take place, and she imprisoned the man who had delivered the signed warrant. It is impossible to know how many people believed Elizabeth’s professions of grief; Catholics on the Continent wrote bitter denunciations of the queen, while Protestants throughout the kingdom enthusiastically celebrated the death of a woman they had feared and hated.

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For years Elizabeth had cannily played a complex diplomatic game with the rival interests of France and Spain, a game comparable to her domestic manipulation of rival factions. State-sanctioned privateering raids, led by Sir Francis Drake and others, on Spanish shipping and ports alternated with conciliatory gestures and peace talks. But by the mid-1580s it became increasingly clear that England could not avoid a direct military confrontation with Spain. Word reached London that the Spanish king, Philip II, had begun to assemble an enormous fleet that would sail to the Netherlands, join forces with a waiting Spanish army led by the duke of Parma, and then proceed to an invasion and conquest of Protestant England. Always reluctant to spend money, the queen had nonetheless authorized sufficient funds during her reign to maintain a fleet of maneuverable, well-armed fighting ships, to which could be added other vessels from the merchant fleet. When in July 1588 the Invincible Armada reached English waters, the queen’s ships, in one of the most famous naval encounters of history, defeated the enemy fleet, which then in an attempt to return to Spain was all but destroyed by terrible storms.

At the moment when the Spanish invasion was imminently expected, Elizabeth resolved to review in person a detachment of soldiers assembled at Tilbury. Dressed in a white gown and a silver breastplate, she rode through the camp and proceeded to deliver a celebrated speech. Some of her councillors, she said, had cautioned her against appearing before a large, armed crowd, but she did not and would not distrust her faithful and loving people. Nor was she afraid of Parma’s army: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,” Elizabeth declared, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” She then promised, “in the word of a Prince,” richly to reward her loyal troops, a promise that she characteristically proved reluctant to keep. The scene exemplifies many of the queen’s qualities: her courage, her histrionic command of grand public occasions, her rhetorical blending of magniloquence and the language of love, her strategic identification with martial virtues considered male, and even her princely parsimony.