The 1570s: the Catholic mission and the last courtship

The Sieve Portrait by
Quentin Metsys.
Elizabeth as the Vestal Virgin, Tuccia
Pinacoteca Nazionale (Siena)

The years 1568-1572 had been a period of intense crisis in Europe. The four main events (as far as England was concerned) were 

• the arrival of Mary Queen of Scots in England
• the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pius V
• the revolt of the Netherlands
• the St Bartholomew Massacre

All these events pointed to a Europe increasingly divided over religion. They also confirmed England’s dangerous isolation, as it increasingly saw itself as a beleaguered Protestant island surrounded by hostile Catholic powers. Elizabeth herself, however, was usually pragmatic, and tried to resist the demands of her more ideological councillors and members of parliament (a) to help the Dutch rebels, and (b) to execute Mary Queen of Scots. 

Elizabeth’s Councillors

Leicester: The rivalry between Cecil (created Baron Burghley in 1571) and Leicester was one of the factors Elizabeth had to live with. In the late 1560s Leicester had been involved in the plot to marry Norfolk to Mary Queen of Scots, but by the 1570s he had become the chief patron of the Puritan party within the Church. He was a ‘hawk’ in foreign policy, his goal being to lead an expeditionary force against the Dutch.  From being (probably) Elizabeth’s preferred choice of husband, he was now her companion - nicknamed her ‘Eyes’.

In July 1575 Elizabeth visited Leicester's home at Kenilworth Castle, where she was entertained with great magnificence. However, she left in a huff when she learned that he had been having an affair with the Countess of Essex, her cousin once removed, Lettice Knollys. When the Earl of Essex died, Leicester and Lettice married secretly in September 1578. Elizabeth was furious when she learned and for a time wanted to send him to the Tower: he couldn't marry her, but she didn't want him to marry anyone else!

Burghley: Leicester’s influence never matched Cecil’s (a much more trustworthy character). He was raised to the peerage as Baron Burghley in February 1571 and when the Marquis of Winchester died in June 1572 Elizabeth appointed him Lord Treasurer. There was a bond of trust between him and Elizabeth, though she never shared his visceral hatred of Catholicism or his implacable enmity towards Mary. Queen of Scots. She named him her ‘Spirit’.

Sir Francis Walsingham: was the son of a Kentish family. He was ambassador to Paris at the end of 1570 and Secretary of State in 1573 (in effect, Foreign Secretary). A dark-visaged man, Elizabeth named him her ‘Moor’. His politics were dominated by a single-minded, intense anti-Catholicism. In the developing crisis of foreign policy, he was the steady advocate of intervention in France and the Netherlands and he was outspoken in his hostility to Spain.  He was the most single-minded ideologue on the Council. 

Christopher Hatton (1540-91): became captain of the queen’s bodyguards in 1572, and entered the Council in 1577. He had been for some years an established royal favourite, Leicester’s rival.  HAs the queen’s junior by seven years he cast himself, in the Renaissance tradition of courtly love, as the perpetual suitor, paying court to an adored but inaccessible mistress. His letters to her were signed as her ‘(eye)Lids’ or her ‘Sheep’.

New, rising young men included Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester’s nephew and putative heir and Sir Walter Raleigh, the, son of a small Devonshire squire, who, like Hatton, rose through personal magnetism. Neither of these ever reached the inner sanctum. 

Elizabeth's counsellors were ambitious politicians, frequently divided along ideological lines, but they did not pose a threat to the monarchy. England was far more stable than France or Scotland, two countries rent apart by rivalries among the nobility. The failure of the Northern Rising and the execution of Norfolk had confirmed the fundamental strength of the Tudor monarchy. 

Elizabethan Catholicism

In the reign of Elizabeth, Catholicism became a minority religion. The religious settlement of 1559 meant that the Marian bishops were unable to accept its terms and they resigned en masse. It was a foretaste of what was to happen. It has been estimated that by the time Elizabeth died there were some 40,000 Catholics, less than one per cent of the population. 

Elizabethan Catholicism was a religion of country houses where landowners and their servants practised their faith, often unobtrusively. They included old-established families like the Bedingfields of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, and the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall, Northamptonshire. Women were at the heart of what has been called 'seigneurial Catholicism'. They held households together, and hid priests who were fleeing from the authorities.

The Act of Uniformity (1559)  established the twelvepenny fine on those who failed to attend their parish church, but made no specific legislation against the Mass. At first, a large proportion of English Catholics, known as 'church papists', continued to attend their parish church. This comparatively lax situation changed when Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth. This seemed to force Catholics to choose between religious and political allegiance.

In reaction the Parliament of 1571 passed ‘an Act against bringing in and putting in execution of bulls and other instruments from the see of Rome’, making it a treasonable offence to promulgate a papal bull. Anxious Protestants perceived Catholicism as a growing danger. In 1575-76, efforts were made to weed out any Justices of the Peace suspected of entertaining Catholic sympathies, and the surviving Marian bishops were taken into custody. In 1579, special detention centres were set up for Catholics, the most important of which was Wisbech Castle.

The English mission: In 1568 an exiled priest, William Allen,  founded a college at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands. The response to the foundation of the college went far beyond what Allen had expected, and by the mid 1570s it had developed into a nursery for missionaries for England.

In November 1577, Cuthbert Mayne was executed for treason at Launceston in Cornwall in November 1577, the first of the 146 missionary priests to be executed by 1603.

The Jesuits: In 1540 a papal bull gave recognition to a new religious order, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). It was like no other in the Catholic Church. It was based on military principles, governed by a ‘Superior-General’ elected for life. Under him were ‘provincials’ who governed a region, and ‘rectors’ who ruled individual houses. Each Jesuit took a direct vow of obedience to the pope.

In June 1580, the mission to England took a new turn when two Jesuits, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, arrived in England. The Jesuit mission to England coincided with a Spanish-inspired Catholic insurrection in Ireland. This made it look as though Campion and Persons were papal-Spanish agents, and gave their mission political overtones. 

From a safe house in London, Campion issued a statement - known as 'Campion's Brag' -  vowing 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 cause is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God and cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it must be restored.

The government saw this as a political as well as a religious challenge. The Jesuit condemnation of the ‘church papists’ meant that new legislation was required to meet a new threat. The Act of 1581 decreed that 

1. anyone who attempted to withdraw the Queen’s subjects from their allegiance and to convert to Catholicism with intent to withdraw subjects from their allegiance would be committing high treason.
2. recusancy fines were increased to £20 a month, and failure to pay within three months of conviction would lead to imprisonment. The maximum annual fine would be £460, the average income of a landed gentleman. 
3. recusant schoolmasters were banned from teaching.

But the Act was milder than Parliament wanted, as the Queen insisted on a distinction between political and religious Catholicism. Several of her counsellors, including Leicester and Burghley, took the view that her attitude to the Catholics was far too lenient. Certainly she lacked personal hostility and went out of her way to protect individual Catholics within her court circle, most notably the composer, William Byrd.

Campion was discovered in a secret hiding place at Lyford Grange in Berkshire. He was taken to London, interrogated, and found guilty under the Treason Act of 1351, rather than the 1581 Act. (The government was keen to stress that his condemnation was for political rather than religious reasons.) He was executed at Tyburn on 1 December 1581.

Edmund Campion with the
instruments of his death,
the rope and the disembowelling knife.
National Portrait Gallery
Creative Commons

Between 1580-1 the ‘Bloody Question’ was put to a group of 103 recusants: how would Catholics respond to a papally-sanctioned invasion? Nearly 50 per cent of those examined admitted that they would support an invasion or would not defend the queen if one took place. Most Catholics were loyal to the Crown  - but not all.

The Alençon courtship

The Catholic mission took place against the background of continuing pressure on Elizabeth to marry. In September 1573 she turned forty; time was running out. But her ministers kept hoping that she was still fertile and that she would find the right husband. 

François, Duke of Anjou and Alençon,
Elizabeth's 'little frog'.
Public domain.

The Queen now had her own candidate, a Frenchman, François, Duke of Alençon, the youngest son of Catherine de’ Medici. In 1574 he became duke of Anjou in place of his brother, who became King Henri III (a former suitor of Elizabeth's), but for convenience he is often referred to by his former title. Alençon’s ambitious policy was to put himself at the head of the Dutch revolt, even though he was a Catholic. He offered England the tempting prospect of an Anglo-French-Dutch alliance against Spain. In June 1578 he began tentative marriage negotiations with Elizabeth. He was twenty-four, she was nearly forty-five.

François, Duke of Alençon.
Unknown artist.
Public domain.

In January 1579, his Master of the Wardrobe, Jean de Simier, arrived at the English court; the Queen promptly dubbed him her ‘Ape’. For the first time in the history of her courtships, she gave every sign of wanting the marriage, with none of her usual procrastinations. She laid on lavish entertainments and hinted at a wedding before Easter. 

On 17 August the duke arrived incognito at the English court, the only one of Elizabeth's suitors who actually travelled to England. His identity was soon disclosed and was reported with great concern by the Spanish ambassador. He was bandy-legged and pock-marked, and the queen promptly nicknamed him her ‘Frog’. When he left, Simier remained at court.

In October she turned to her Council for advice. Leicester and Walsingham were against. But Burghley was undecided. He could see the diplomatic advantages of the marriages, but Elizabeth's age and Alençon's Catholicism were complicating factors.

Matters were complicated still further when the lawyer, John Stubbe,  published A gaping gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage if the Lord forbid not the bans by letting Her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereo. Stubbe and his bookseller, Page, had their right hands chopped off by a cleaver in front of a silent crowd, who then dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood. 

After she delivered an emotional diatribe to her Council, Elizabeth’s ministers sullenly agreed to the marriage - if the queen favoured it. They had no legal power to stop her. On 10 November, wearing a veil patterned with fleurs de lys, she told her principal councillors that she was determined to marry and a committee of the privy council began to discuss the terms of the treaty. 

However, in 1580 the Spaniards conquered Portugal, and Elizabeth feared to antagonise the European super-power. In October 1581 Alençon arrived in England again. In November Elizabeth announced that she was going to marry him, but she offered the French such negotiators extremely limited terms that they could not accept. In February 1582 the duke left England for the last time. There were to be no more courtships.

Conclusion

1. During the 1570s, as a result of the papal bull, new laws were passed against Catholics and their position became more difficult. Catholic priests were executed for treason.
2. The failure of the Alençon marriage was a decisive moment in the reign, showing Elizabeth the limits of her power. She dared not challenge the image of Protestant champion that was being thrust on her by marrying a Catholic - even an anti-Spanish one. 
3. The failure of the negotiations and the fact that she was now middle-aged, meant that Elizabeth would never marry. She was inescapably the Virgin Queen, and her iconography, such as the 'Sieve Portrait' would reflect this fact.
4. At Elizabeth’s accession, England had been nominally a Catholic country. Now it was firmly Protestant.