Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

IV
ENTANGLEMENTS

Burghley as Secretary had been so heavily worked that he was in danger of breaking down; to prevent such a catastrophe, he was made Lord Treasurer, Walsingham on his return to England being appointed joint Secretary of State with Sir Thomas Smith. Leicester continued to be Burghley’s chief rival with Elizabeth on the Council, owing to his personal favour with her; and his political line was the same as Walsingham’s, though the Secretary supplied the brains. Walsingham was neither the rival nor the follower of either; it was never in his mind to supplant Burghley either himself or by Leicester; but his counsels and those of the Lord Treasurer were often in disagreement in so far as his Protestantism was more energetic, and as he had no sympathy with the idea of amity with Spain, being thoroughly convinced of Philip’s fundamental hostility to England as a Protestant Power.

For some years the Protestant policy was out of court so far as Spain and the Netherlands were concerned; the comparative moderation of the new Governor, Requesens, giving plausibility to the hope that a modus vivendi might be arrived at—that Philip’s maximum of concession and Orange’s minimum of demand might prove capable of adjustment. In Scotland, however, Walsingham and Burghley both recognised the necessity of maintaining friendly relations with the capable but sinister Regent, the Earl of Morton. It was impossible to ignore the danger of a reconstruction of parties there, which might again result in French intervention being invited; a consummation equally abhorrent to the Treasurer and the Secretary. Elizabeth’s parsimony here proved too strong for her policy. Burghley and Walsingham both believed that liberal but judicious expenditure would prove economical in the long run. But the Queen would not relax the purse-strings; the unrest of Scotland continued to be a thorn in her side, and to be also a perpetual strain on the anxiety of her ministers and a drain on her Exchequer.

Requesens died in 1576; before his successor, Don John, arrived, the Spanish soldiery—whose pay was in arrear—got completely out of hand; and the autumn saw the hideous butchery in Antwerp known as the “Spanish Fury.” The whole of the provinces—Catholic as well as Protestant—were united thereby in a solid demand for the restoration of their old constitutional privileges, and the withdrawal of Spanish troops; and in a flat refusal to admit the new Governor or recognise his government, until their main demands were conceded. Don John made provisional terms and was admitted in the spring following; but he was known to be harbouring audacious designs against England, the Hollanders suspected his good faith, and the old state of serious tension was renewed. Drake was planning his great voyage, to the entire satisfaction of the anti-Spanish party—but with an obvious certainty of giving extreme offence to Philip, which caused them to make a vain attempt to keep the thing secret from Burghley; while Elizabeth—who liked playing with fire and was also greedy for money—made her own bargain with the adventurer. Thus, in 1578 a curious state of affairs arose. Philip, jealous of his half-brother, and still extremely anxious to avoid a rupture with England, once more accredited an ambassador to the English Court, Bernardino de Mendoza, whose business was to be conciliation; Elizabeth’s Council swayed to the views of Walsingham and Leicester, while Burghley seemed to be outweighted. The Queen started on one of her most exasperating pieces of political jugglery, snubbing Orange on the one hand, and on the other reviving the Alençon marriage project; while Alençon himself was now posing as a would-be figure-head for the Huguenots, and at odds with his brother Henry III., who had succeeded Charles IX. two years after St. Bartholomew.

To his own intense disgust, Walsingham was despatched to the Netherlands on the most thoroughly uncongenial task that could be conceived: one, moreover, which it would have been quite impossible for him to accomplish even if his heart had been in it. He was to urge the Protestant States to accept the Spanish terms, which would have deprived them of the exercise of their religion; he was to refuse the promised issue of the bonds on which they were relying for the sinews of war; in effect, he was to represent England in what he himself looked upon as an act of betrayal. Of course, the mission was a failure. Betrayed or not, Orange and his party would never accept the Spanish terms; they would rather take the risk of a French Protectorate, or die fighting. Walsingham loathed the job, and wrote home in very bitter terms of the shame the whole of the proceedings were bringing on the name of England. The only glimmer of satisfaction he extracted from it was in the retraction of the monstrous breach of faith about the bonds. It was bad enough that Elizabeth’s name should be made a by-word for falsehood; it was only less bad that France, instead of England, should become for her own ends the friend and protector of the Low Countries; it was sickening that he, of all men, should be made the agent of such perfidy, held personally responsible for it abroad, and rewarded by his mistress with abuse because it failed. “It is given out,” he wrote, “that we shall be hanged on our return, so ill have we behaved ourselves here: I hope we shall enjoy our ordinary trial—my Lord Cobham [his colleague] to be tried by his peers, and myself by a jury of Middlesex.... If I may conveniently, I mean, with the leave of God, to convey myself off from the stage and to become a looker-on.”

Elizabeth, however, was far too keenly alive to his value to allow him to become a looker-on; nor could Burghley have spared him, however their views might differ on some points. The Queen might ignore his advice, but she relied on his penetration and his loyalty, and was more afraid of his righteous indignation than of the Lord Treasurer’s sober disapprobation. Neither minister would countenance what they accounted perfidy, and in act she never in the long run degraded her honour as much as she repeatedly threatened to do. Both of them spoke their minds. She knew they were in the right; she resisted, abused, flouted, defied them; but she always yielded enough, and in time, to save some shreds of credit.

The death of Don John about the end of September was followed by the appointment of Alexander of Parma, a statesman and soldier of the first rank, as his successor; who at the outset skilfully severed the union between the northern or Protestant and the southern or Catholic provinces. If Burghley could have had his own way untrammelled, he would have dealt straightforwardly with Orange, giving him support enough to keep him from calling in France, and still hoping to bring about an accommodation with Parma possible of acceptance by both parties. Neither he nor Walsingham now had any belief in joint action with France, in which their confidence had been permanently blotted out by the Paris massacre. Neither of them, therefore, saw good in the Alençon marriage as a genuine project, while both saw infinite danger in merely playing with it. They differed, as it would seem, only as to the length they were prepared to go in helping Orange, Burghley drawing the line at the point where he thought Philip might be driven into a declaration of open war, while the Secretary would have taken bigger risks, accepting open war if Philip chose. The Queen’s object was the same as Burghley’s, but she elected, according to her habit, to seek it not by straightforward, but by crooked, courses. She would give Orange the minimum of help, but she would, by playing with Alençon, either keep France out of it, or else embroil France and Spain, keeping herself out of it till she could strike in as arbiter. To do which, she had to induce every one to believe that she probably meant marrying, while trusting to her own ingenuity and the chapter of accidents to effect, if the worst came to the worst, an escape not too ruinously ignominious. If she really did know what she wanted, it was more than any of her Council did, and she drove them almost to despair.

So the juggling went on; the Queen blew hot and cold with Alençon, and tried to inveigle France into a league without a marriage; the French tried to get the marriage secured as preliminary to a league. Drake came home, his ship loaded with spoils; but the remonstrances of Mendoza were met by complaints of the assistance given by Spain to the Desmond rebellion in Ireland. Walsingham was flatly opposing the marriage, and the Puritan element in the country at least was with him to a man. Parsons and Campion, and the Jesuit propaganda, had set Puritans and Catholics alike in a ferment. In the summer of 1581 Alençon was still dangling, France was still waiting to have the marriage question settled, Philip had just annexed Portugal, and Burghley himself was despairing of a peaceful outcome.

Under these circumstances, Elizabeth again chose to despatch Walsingham on an embassy to Paris. He was to get the Queen out of the marriage without upsetting the French. He was to get France to espouse the cause of Orange, while England was only to render secret pecuniary aid. Whether, in the last resort, the Queen would accede to the marriage for the sake of a secret league, or would accede to an open league to escape the marriage, or would positively on no condition have either marriage or open league, or would still keep the marriage unaccomplished but unrejected if she could, Walsingham did not know; for whatever instructions he received were liable to be contradicted in twenty-four hours. He was to extract his mistress from the tangle in which she had involved herself, and might understand that whatever means he found for doing so would be angrily condemned.