The King had been one of the most fanatical Catholics of his day, and as Henri Martin, the French historian, says: ‘All Protestant Europe hailed the arm of the Almighty in this thunderbolt which had struck down the persecuting king in the midst of his impious festivities.’
Whether the reformers were right or wrong Henry’s death, in the height of his vigour and authority, was a profound calamity for France and for his family, for it ushered in thirty years of bloody anarchy which saw towards its end the final disappearance of the house of Valois. At his bedside through his last days and when he died were two of the most famous women of the century. His young daughter-in-law, the Queen elect, was Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. His wife was Catherine de’ Medici. It is generally overlooked that Mary Queen of Scots, although a Stuart by name, was by blood just as much a Tudor as a Stuart. Her grandparents were James Stewart, Margaret Tudor, Claude of Guise and Antoinette of Bourbon. Elizabeth was the granddaughter of Henry VII. Mary was his great-granddaughter.
Although her childhood was not as traumatic as Elizabeth’s, it contained more than its share of tension, shock and high drama. She was born in December 1542, nine years later than her English cousin, and her father, James v of Scotland, died a week after her birth, at the age of thirty. She was not expected to live but she was crowned Queen when she was nine years old, and her mother, the French Mary of Lorraine, became Queen Regent. She did live, and, there being no question of her legitimacy, was quickly put on the marriage market as a political pawn of great importance. Before she was sixteen she married the Dauphin of France, and while she was yet sixteen she became Queen of France.
After her shaky start in life Mary grew to be a tall girl, and a very attractive one, but her husband, the first of Catherine de’ Medici’s three sons to reign, was thin and undeveloped, small in stature and of low intelligence. During the short time that she was on the throne, Mary surrounded herself with courtiers, artists, musicians and poets, and gave herself over to the pleasure of being young and sought-after and gracious and charming; the affairs of the nation were left to her uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine and Francis, Duke of Guise. It would have been virtually impossible for her to have done otherwise. Her husband was not yet sixteen, and of retarded development. Behind her two uncles, though not yet the formidable figure of later years, was her mother-in-law.
Mary might have developed into a considerable political force in France as she grew older and Francis grew older, for she already had almost complete dominance over him; but she was not given the chance. Francis reigned only sixteen months and then died from an abscess in the ear. Mary was left a beautiful young widow with no future at the French court. Her mother-in-law disliked her and was jealous of her, and schemed to take over the regency on behalf of the next of her sons, Charles, who was only ten. Mary hesitated for a while, surveying the European scene, and then proposed that she should next marry Don Carlos, the heir to the Spanish throne.
This proposition, coming from a glamorous, high-spirited girl in her teens, casts an interesting light on her character. Don Carlos was about the same age as herself, but was one of the most unprepossessing young men in Europe. Apologists of Mary have always argued that she eventually brought about her own ruin by allowing her heart to rule her head. Whatever happened later, on this occasion there was no sign of such a failing.
But the proposal was vetoed by Catherine de’Medici, who feared for her own daughter Elizabeth’s precedence in Spain, and opposed by the other Elizabeth, who saw danger for England in such a marriage; so nothing came of it. In August 1561 Mary accepted an invitation from the Scottish parliament to return to take up her crown, and arrived on the 19th of that month in Leith.
It could hardly have been a more unpropitious time, for religious war had only ceased the year before on the death of her mother, and in the interval the Scottish Protestants had embraced the doctrines of Calvin in their most extreme form. Mary was greeted apparently in expectation that she would instantly give up her Catholic faith, dropping it as it were overboard like an unwanted valise before she landed, and when she did not the fury of her parliament and council knew no bounds.
Nevertheless, in spite of her precarious hold on the country she imported courtiers, musicians and furnishings from France, gave balls, dinners and receptions of considerable taste, and, as a side issue, dispatched an envoy to the court of Elizabeth requesting that Elizabeth should recognize her as the next successor to the English throne. Elizabeth, while expressing the warmest sentiments, politely refused. ‘Would you,’ she asked, ‘require me in my own life to set my winding sheet before my eyes? Princes cannot like their own children, those that should succeed them. How then shall I like my cousin being declared the Heir Apparent? I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present Government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.’
Elizabeth at this stage, and all through the long quarter century ahead, was far more favourably disposed towards Mary than the English Privy Council or general public opinion. They would have had her blood long before. Mary indeed tried to arrange a meeting with Elizabeth, hoping not unreasonably that her charm would work towards a closer understanding of her rights to the succession; but one crisis after another supervened and it never took place.
Mary had still not abandoned the hope of marrying Don Carlos, and her envoy in England constantly treated with the Spanish Ambassador to this end. Perhaps to take Mary’s mind off the more formidable power politics in which she was engaged, the young Lord Darnley was permitted to travel up to Scotland. Elizabeth ‘allowed’ it, rather in the way she allowed Drake and others to sail on their expeditions to the Spanish Main. Permission by absence of prohibition, while officially looking the other way, was a technique she brought to perfection in her long reign.
Mary met the handsome young man, for the first time in four years, at Wemyss Castle on the rocky coast of Fife, and this time instantly fell in love with him. In spite of ‘ official’ opposition from England, they quickly married. Darnley was another great-grandchild of Henry VII, but his Tudor blood, like Mary’s, was diluted with more feckless strains. Although their son eventually was the means of unifying England and Scotland, the marriage was an unmitigated disaster for both parents. Within four years Darnley had been found strangled in the garden of Kirk o’Field House, Mary had married Bothwell, who in the revolt which followed was forced to fly the country to save his life, and Mary, to save hers, had entered English territory and asked Elizabeth for sanctuary.
So began the long imprisonment – though imprisonment is a harsh word to describe a confinement in which Mary was throughout allowed an entourage of forty, and was permitted to hunt and to visit the local spa to take the waters. During it she never ceased to intrigue – or listen to intrigues – against Elizabeth’s life and throne. This situation, which was dangerous to Elizabeth and frustrating and exasperating for Mary, persisted through two generations before it ended on a cold grey February morning in the great hall of Fotheringhay.
Elizabeth was no killer, especially not of another Queen, especially not one of Tudor blood. She resisted her Council to the very last, and then at the very last sought to evade the responsibility. Mary was not a compulsive martyr, not like Thomas à Becket, or her own grandson, Charles I. But, for all her many other qualities, she was a compulsive schemer and, in the context of the time, the outcome was bound in the end to be the same.
During these two decades, geographically between Spain, which remained rigidly Catholic in the iron grasp of the Inquisition, and England, which, first from choice and then for self-preservation, became steadily more Protestant, religious war ravaged Europe. In the Netherlands, with Calvinism providing the explosive force, this became increasingly a nationalistic war to free the Low Countries from Spanish occupation. In France, under a succession of weak kings, it was always a dynastic conflict – at least at the top – with great Catholic families striving against gr
eat Protestant families to control the country.
The mother of the kings, Catherine de’ Medici, was constantly struggling, scheming, working to preserve the Valois dynasty into which she had married. Despised by the French nobility, neglected during her husband’s lifetime for his mistress Diane de Poitiers, without Elizabeth’s intellect or royal blood, and lacking the charm of Mary Queen of Scots, she yet contrived to remain a power behind the throne and to perform an intricate pas de deux with each of her sons in turn, while she played off against one another the three great families of France: the Guises, the Bourbons and the Montmorencys.
The resultant civil war was not the consequence of her intrigues but the consequence of their failure. Time and again she conspired with one side or the other in an attempt to bring peace to France – while Huguenots stormed Catholic monasteries and compelled the monks to hang each other, while Catholics tore Huguenots to pieces and threw the pieces into the sewer, while whole villages and towns were put to the sword indiscriminately by either side.
The wedding of Henry of Navarre, a Protestant and a Bourbon, with the King’s sister Marguerite, a Catholic and a Valois, was planned with a political reconciliation in mind – rather as Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian, had married Elizabeth of York. But Catherine de’ Medici and her younger son the Duke of Anjou had long found Admiral Coligny’s brusque influence over the King intolerable, and planned to have this leader of the Huguenots assassinated. The attempt failed and the twenty-two-year-old King Charles IX of France was then persuaded, after hours of resistance, to sanction a massacre in order, as he was told, to save his throne from the avenging Protestants.
So from the morning of the 24th August, with hysterical savagery the slaughter began, running its course for four days, spreading to the provinces, and not finally expending itself until mid-September, when the Protestant dead are likely to have numbered about thirty thousand men, women and children.
Such was the religious tolerance of the time that, when the news reached the Pope, he ordered that fireworks should be set off and bonfires lit for three nights to celebrate the deed and a commemorative medal struck. Pope Gregory further said that news of this slaughter was a hundred times more welcome than the news of the great naval battle of Lepanto in which the Christian navies had defeated the Turks. Te Deums were sung and a great number of little children danced in the streets ‘blessing God and praising Our Lord who had inspired King Charles IX to so happy and holy an undertaking’. Some recent historians have sought to excuse the Catholic reaction by explaining that all these rejoicings were instituted as a thanks giving that Charles had escaped a supposed attempt at assassination; but a study of the records of the time shows this to be completely untrue. It is an apologia dreamed up in more sensitive centuries.
In Madrid Philip was startled out of his customary melancholy dignity. When the news reached him he ‘ began to laugh’ and demonstrated his extreme pleasure and content. Even his closest intimates were astounded at the extent of his joy. He wrote to Catherine congratulating her on possessing such a son and to Charles on possessing such a mother. But of course Philip, as was not unusual with him, was able to associate religious fervour with political gain.
In England news of the massacre and the arrival of a few terrified survivors brought a shock of dismay, an intense hardening of feeling against Rome and a cold anger which expressed itself as always through its Queen. A treaty had just been concluded with France and a marriage between Elizabeth and Catherine’s favourite son, the Duke of Anjou, was in the air. (Never more than ‘in the air’ with Elizabeth, but now it was definitely out of the air.) For some days the Queen would not see La Mothe-Fénelon, the French Ambassador. When at length he was summoned to Richmond, he passed in utter silence through a court in which everyone was dressed in black, until he reached the person of the Queen. There he was told in undiplomatic language that this was ‘a most horrible crime’ … ‘a deed of unexampled infamy’. Sir Thomas Smith wrote to Walsingham: ‘Grant even that the Admiral and his friends were guilty of such a plot against the King’s life, what did the innocent men, women and children at Lyons? What did the suckling children and their mothers at Rouen and Caen and elsewhere? Will God sleep?’
The Protestants all over Europe were determined that God must not be allowed to sleep.
Philip’s satisfaction was understandable, for at a stroke Charles of France had not only destroyed the heretics but had made himself a prisoner of the Catholics at his court. Furthermore Admiral Coligny had been pressing Charles IX to furnish an army to go to the support of William of Orange; now the risk of Alva’s Spanish army being trapped between two enemies was removed for good. Thirdly, the murder of so many of France’s leading soldiers meant a weakening of her military strength for years to come.
Little wonder it was a happy day for him.
Now married, for the fourth time, to his niece Anne of Austria, he was finding his days increasingly preoccupied with the problems of his Netherlands possessions. The Duke of Alva, sent there to subjugate by terror, had succeeded only in setting all the provinces aflame. And it was not a matter of small concern, for, apart from the high cost of the war, this loose federation of small disparate states was the most densely populated trading centre in Europe; and the revenue from the taxes levied upon them was vital to the prosperity of Spain. No amount of treasure from the gold and silver mines of the New World was sufficient to make up for this loss. As fast as a victory against the rebels promised an end of the war, a new wave of revolt would break out. Massacring whole townships and burning the buildings to the ground so that nothing was left only served to harden the resistance and provoke reprisals. Even the Duke of Alva, who was now well into his sixties, was discouraged and suffering from ill-health and exposure to the cold and damp of campaigning.
What also galled Philip was the part his sister-in-law was playing. Troops in France not so long ago to aid the Protestants in the civil war there. A flow of volunteers in the Netherlands – whole regiments, in fact – discreet loans where most needed, protection for the rebel navies. During the years he had watched her somewhat shaky progress in her efforts to keep the English crown and the English religion on an even keel. He had seen her besieged by suitors – up to ten at one time – as quite the most eligible match in Christendom; but while she appeared to enjoy the courtship she did not seem able to surrender her person to a foreign prince. In a poem that she wrote herself she said:
When I was fair and young, and favour graced me,
Of many was I sought, their mistress for to be;
But I did scorn them all, and answered them therefore,
Go, go, go seek some otherwhere.
Importune me no more!
As for the English suitors, they too were numerous; yet none of the successive Spanish ambassadors, who had paid spies close to the Queen, could find proof to confirm the rumours. Even the Venetians, who sometimes leavened their perceptions with imagination, could not produce the evidence for which all the Catholic world waited.
It may of course be that Elizabeth was not highly sexed. A. L. Rowse has pointed out that all the Lancastrian kings, Henrys IV, V, VI, and VII, were singularly moral, being men of affairs rather than womanizers, and that Henry VIII took after his grandfather, the Yorkist Edward IV. Most historians have argued that a daughter of Henry VIII could not fail to be highly sexed; but it is very possible that in this respect she took after her Lancastrian forbears, and particularly her grandfather. Certainly she did not fall into the same trap as Mary Queen of Scots when she married Bothwell. Yet, only thirty-nine in the year of St Bartholomew, Elizabeth was still capable of marrying someone and bearing an heir to the throne; and she was under great pressure from her ministers and from Parliament to do so. If she died or was deposed, Catholic Mary was still the obvious successor, and a plot directed at marrying Mary to the Duke of Norfolk and putting them on the throne together had been formulated only the previous year by a Florentine banker called Ridolfi. The plo
t had collapsed, but it had received Spanish support, and as a consequence de Spes the Spanish Ambassador had been told to leave the country.
For fifteen years Philip had cautiously favoured Elizabeth’s occupancy of the throne in preference to a queen of his own beliefs who had such close ties with France. Now he was gradually coming round to the view that, with France so riven by civil war and with England steadily gaining in strength and confidence, it was better to have a friend of the Valois on the throne of England than a friend of William of Orange.
Cumulatively events were pushing Philip and Elizabeth into opposition. But neither yet contemplated outright conflict. Elizabeth hated war: she felt that it seldom solved anything, and it was so expensive. Her incursions into France to help the Protestants had met with little success – or indeed thanks – and had cost her heavily in both money and men. Philip resented the slights and the insults put upon his countrymen from time to time, but he had his hands full in Europe and a vast empire to consider. Time would tell. He bided his time.
But other events apart from those in Europe were rubbing at the edges of patience and prudence. A new generation of English seamen was progressively challenging Spanish power wherever it was met. English ships, under new and ever more venturesome captains, were exploring the oceans for discovery, for trade, for plunder. Where one of their objectives failed they chose another, and since Spain and Portugal were the two great colonial powers, it was their property that usually came back to England in the holds of the little 60 to 100-ton barques and enriched the investors who sent them.
They went out too in a spirit of Evangelical fervour. To them the Scarlet Woman of Rome – who was indistinguishable anyhow from the imperial house of Spain – was the anti-Christ to be set upon and destroyed; and naturally if there was profit in the destruction who were they to complain? It is improbable that Elizabeth with her tolerant and humanist eye at all understood this fervour, or approved of it. Although there were notable exceptions, when she took the initiative, for the most part she was pulled along, following in the wake of her aggressively Protestant and self-reliant people, ever nearer to the abyss of war.