Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

Now Cecil’s ideal was one of sober and opulent respectability; he was not troubled with any notion that the Pope was the Scarlet Woman; he held generally to the view that subjects ought to conform to the religion prescribed by Government. But where the views which he himself held were not prescribed but proscribed, decency compelled sympathy with the sufferers. Besides, the suppression of Protestantism outside of England would inevitably mean its suppression in England also, in course of time. He was thoroughly satisfied that Protestantism was best for England, and thus, although he had no abstract interest in what might be good for other countries, for England’s sake he was satisfied that Protestantism must not be suppressed elsewhere. This was the mark up to which he had to keep the Queen—who, for her part, was quite aware that the security of her throne depended on her sustaining the part laid down for her. But Cecil’s minimum was her maximum, whereas his maximum—with which she would have nothing to do—was the minimum that would have satisfied her other great minister, Walsingham.

Elizabeth, we may put it, felt that Protestantism was a political necessity for her personal government. She did not feel strongly that it would still be a necessity for England when she should be in her grave. Cecil did; while for Walsingham it was a necessity per se. Therefore, to Elizabeth the settlement of the succession was a political counter of which she did not choose to be deprived; while to her ministers the delay of it was a perpetual nightmare, because it meant a constant fear of the accession of Mary Stewart—a prospect even more threatening after she had left Scotland than while she was a reigning queen. Herein is to be found one of the reasons why Elizabeth was not anxious to get rid of a prisoner round whom—dangerous though Mary might be—she could weave intrigues and negotiations as well as her opponents; whereas Cecil and Walsingham would always have been pleased to find any decent excuse for eliminating the Scots Queen from the situation. In the same way, the ministers wanted their own Queen to make a suitable marriage, whereas she herself used matrimonial negotiations merely as tricks for circumventing crises, and probably never at any time really intended to wed any one among the numerous suitors, of whom the last did not finally disappear till she was in her fiftieth year. There is no practical doubt that at one time, early in the reign, Cecil was himself so much perturbed on the question of the succession as to have made a move in co-operation with Nicholas Bacon to get Katharine Grey—sister of Lady Jane, and now married to Lord Hertford—recognised officially as heir presumptive in accordance with the terms of the will of Henry VIII.; for which he very nearly got into serious trouble. Also, it was many years before the Secretary really felt thoroughly free from the fear, which Elizabeth enjoyed holding in suspense over his head, that she might some day throw policy to the winds and court ruin by marrying Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

VI
ELIZABETH’S SECOND PERIOD

The year 1568 and those immediately following had a very material effect on the general situation. In the first place, the Queen of Scots delivered herself into Elizabeth’s hands, having already forfeited some of her chances of foreign support by her marriage with Bothwell. In the second place, the disaffected provinces of the Netherlands were driven into open revolt. Broadly speaking, it may be said that from this time forward Philip always wished to crush Elizabeth, while he would not involve himself in war with England until he could reckon on crushing her decisively. There was always the possibility of an Anglo-French combination, involving Huguenot predominance in France; and in that event the fleets of the two Powers would command his only line of communication with the Netherlands. So that on the one hand Spaniards are found, throughout Mary’s captivity, engaged in plot after plot for her liberation and enthronement in England; while on the other, Philip is obliged to swallow one affront after another, and to vary threats of utter destruction with elaborate efforts to placate the Queen of England. Cecil—Lord Burghley, as he became in 1571—was no less anxious to avoid war, but was also determined to go as far as might be, short of war, in support of the insurgent provinces; while steadily accumulating the evidence of Spanish complicity in Marian plots, to be produced as an effective answer to any complaints that England was abetting treason in the Netherlands, or her seamen committing acts of war in the Spanish Main or the West Indian Islands.

The Protestantism of the Government stiffened inevitably with the development of Catholic plots centring on Mary, the atrocities perpetrated by Alva in the Netherlands, the cruelties practised by the Spanish Inquisition on English sailors who fell into its hands, and the blundering Papal Bull of deposition—which, in fact, embarrassed Philip a good deal more than it injured the Queen of England. This singularly impolitic act of the Roman Pontiff, emphasising the direct antagonism, not to say the irreconcilability, of loyalty to the Throne and loyalty to the Church, sufficed in itself to bring all Catholics under suspicion of being at heart traitors—in the technical sense; pledged by their faith to desire, if not actively to compass, the overthrow of the reigning queen. Preceded, as it was, by the insurrection of the northern Catholic Earls in Mary’s favour, and followed by the Ridolfi conspiracy, it is difficult to perceive how the Queen’s government could have done otherwise than assume that to be a Catholic was to be disaffected. Nor is it possible to imagine that, after the appalling St. Bartholomew massacres of 1572, anti-Catholic sentiment in the country was not intensified to a white heat.

The people of England had a further grievance against Spain, inasmuch as she had taken possession of the wealth of the New World, and meant to keep it for herself—whereas the English desired a share. Throughout the later sixties and the seventies, English adventurers were engaged in making good their claims, in spite of nominal peace and law, by force of arms, raiding Spanish settlements or compelling local authorities to allow them to trade in defiance of all injunctions from headquarters. Technically, at least, these proceedings amounted to piracy, and if the Spaniards had been content to treat their perpetrators as pirates, it would have been extremely difficult to protest. Having an almost incontrovertible case, the Spaniards elected to put themselves in the wrong by punishing their prisoners—when they caught them—not as pirates but as heretics, gratuitously introducing the religious factor. Even in 1568 English sailors, under such captains as John Hawkins, had learnt to feel that ship for ship they were very much more than a match for Spanish galleons. Thus the most adventurous and most irrepressible class in the community was athirst to measure its strength with the Spaniard, and found no difficulty in convincing itself that to do so was a religious duty. The spirit of rivalry, greed of wealth, and sheer love of adventure, formed a sufficiently strong combination of motives; zeal against the persecutors of true religion gave them a colour which satisfied any but the most fastidious consciences.

Now, it will be easy to see from the foregoing paragraphs that already in 1568 enough had occurred to inflame popular feeling against Spain. There were the doings of the Spanish Inquisition in respect of English sailors. There was, amongst other grievances, the attack on John Hawkins at San Juan d’Ulloa. There was Alva’s tyranny in the Netherlands. In France, no one could tell whether Huguenots or Catholics were going to get the upper hand; but Philip was fully committed to the suppression of heresy within his own dominions, and outside them as well so far as it might lie in his power. During the next four years, every event of importance went to intensify the sentiment against Spain, to which, and not to France, the Ridolfi plot pointed as Mary’s ally. On the other hand, it was evident at once, when Elizabeth was able to detain in her own ports for her own use the treasure which was on its way up channel to help Alva, that for the time Philip was too heavily hampered to be able to turn his full strength against England; and as time went on it became increasingly clear that Spain could not, with the Netherlands revolt on her hands, contemplate an English war with equanimity. Even Saint Bartholomew did not divert the hostile sentiment in the direction of France, since still after the massacre it was difficult to say whether the French nation should be identified with the party of the perpetrators rather than with that of the victims.

At the lowest estimate, then, there was a mass of feeling in the country which could very easily have been fanned into a blaze of indignation, imperatively demanding open defiance of Spain, vigorous support of the Netherlands and of the Huguenots—in short, immediate war instead of the chance of war in the future. But the Queen and Burghley were determined to avoid war; and for nearly twenty years they succeeded. Burghley’s own primary conviction was that amity between Burgundy and England was of such enormous importance to both that considerations of policy would prevent Philip, as they had prevented his father, from being dragged into war by considerations of religious zeal. Protestantism—so much of it, at least, as was necessary—could be saved, probably without adopting heroic courses; and in any case, if a duel should ultimately prove inevitable, every year that it was deferred would tell in favour of England, which was daily growing in wealth, in stability, and in efficiency; and against Spain, which was constantly subjected to the exhausting strain of war in the Low Countries and war with the Turk.

Ultimate friendship with Spain, on the basis of immunity for unaggressive Protestantism, mutual toleration, and unfettered trade, was broadly the ideal for which Burghley worked; to achieve it, he was ready to bring to bear any amount of pressure which would not actually precipitate war. But it was part of the policy always to make sure that there was, at any rate, technical justification for everything done by the English Government. This technical correctness is particularly characteristic of the man. While Elizabeth herself and nearly every man in her court, were all shareholders, or in some degree interested, in the privateering expeditions of Drake and other captains, Burghley held himself rigidly aloof from them, and never made a penny of personal profit in that way. He had no moral qualms about seizing the Genoese treasure in 1568—that was merely an arrangement by which the bankers lent to England money which they had intended to lend to Spain; if it inconvenienced Spain, Spain should not have seized the English ships in her harbours. But when Drake came home after sailing round the world, with vast quantities of captured treasure in the Golden Hind, Burghley stigmatised the whole proceedings as piratical, declined any share of the spoil, and would have had it restored to Spain.

In this connection, the Lord Treasurer’s[E] aversion to these raiding expeditions was so strong that when Drake’s great voyage was in contemplation the utmost pains were taken to keep the matter out of his knowledge. But there were very few things that Burghley did not succeed in being aware of; and one of the gentleman-adventurers who sailed in that expedition, Thomas Doughty, was in personal communication with him before it started. This man was executed by Drake at Port St. Julian, in Patagonia—one of the grounds on which he was held guilty of treason towards the “General,” Drake, being that he had admittedly revealed as much as he knew to Burghley. The fact that inquiry into that execution was carefully shirked, while the recorded evidence is somewhat contradictory and inconclusive, has led to the formation of various surmises to the disfavour of Drake, of Burghley, of Doughty, or of the witnesses, according to the point of view of the critic. The most natural interpretation would seem to be that in the first place Drake and the sailors in general suspected gentleman-adventurers at large of being an objectionably insubordinate and troublesome element; and the General may very possibly have been injudicially ready to condemn one of them on insufficient evidence—evidence which satisfied him but did not amount to legal proof—and fancied that collusion with the antagonistic Lord Treasurer implied certainly ill-will and probably treachery to the commander. Applying those current rules of evidence which repeatedly sufficed to condemn men for treason at home, the case for executing Doughty was quite strong enough to act on, though exceedingly awkward to make public. It would show, of course, that the sailor was very suspicious of the designs of the statesman from whom the Queen wanted to have the thing concealed; it also suggests that Elizabeth liked to do behind the minister’s back, if she could manage it, the things which she knew he would disapprove. But it does not involve anything outrageous on Drake’s part, or any real discredit to the Lord Treasurer.