Elizabeth had visited Theobalds in 1564 and 1571. On this occasion her stay extended over three days, and the domestic biographer of Burghley thus refers to this amongst other visits: “His Lordship’s extraordinary chardg in enterteynment of the Quene was greater to him than to anie of her subjects, for he enterteyned her at his house twelve several tymes, which cost him two or three thousand pounds each tyme.… But his love for his Sovereign, and joy to enterteyn her and her traine, was so greate, as he thought no troble, care, nor cost too much, and all too little.”
Whilst Elizabeth slowly made her way from one great house to another, by Gorhambury,[355] Dunstable, Woburn,[356] and so to Kenilworth, the correspondence on the negotiations for the Alençon match became warmer and warmer. Agents and messengers speeded backwards and forwards with portraits and amiable trifles, particularly from the side of England.
There was a good reason for this. Before even the treaty of alliance was signed, Burghley had deplored that Charles IX. and his mother were cooling in the agreement for France and England jointly to aid the Flemish rebels. The Pope and the Emperor were trying their hardest to withdraw Charles and his mother from the compromise into which he had entered with Elizabeth; and already the young King and Catharine de Medici were discovering that Coligny and the Huguenots, when they had the upper hand, could be as domineering and tyrannical as the Guises themselves. Paris was in seething discontent that the beloved Guises were in disgrace, and Charles found his throne tottering. To add to his fears from the Catholics, the Huguenot force that had entered Flanders under Genlis had been routed and destroyed by the Spaniards (19th July), and it was clear to Catharine and her son, that if they did not promptly cut themselves free from Elizabeth’s attack on Spanish interests, they would be dragged down when the Huguenots fell. The very day that the news of Genlis’ defeat arrived in Paris, a young noble named La Mole was sent flying to England, ostensibly to confer with the Queen on the Alençon match. There was no particular reason for roughly breaking off that, and so offending Elizabeth; but the sending of a mere schoolboy like La Mole with only vague instructions about the proposed joint action in Flanders would show that Charles IX. did not intend to take any further responsibility in that direction.
La Mole arrived in London on 27th July, and had a long midnight interview with Burghley at the French Embassy. He ostensibly only came from Alençon—not from the King—and when, a few days afterwards, he saw the Queen privately at Kenilworth, though he was full of fine lovelorn compliments from Alençon, he could only say from the King that the latter could not openly declare himself in the matter of Flanders. He suggested prudence, and fears of a league of Catholic powers against him. He talked about the strength of Portugal and Savoy, and generally cried off from his bargain. This was ill news for Elizabeth, for there were hundreds of Englishmen in arms in Holland, and brave Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his band were besieging Ter Goes. But the English Queen made the best of it, and sought to redress matters by pushing the Alençon match more warmly than ever, and petting and caressing La Mole, who accompanied her on her progress towards Windsor. Burghley and the experienced Smith seem to have been as firmly convinced as young La Mole himself, that the Queen was in earnest, and would really, at last, make up her mind to marry Alençon. In her conversations with La Mole and Fénélon she smoothed away all difficulties. Walsingham had made a great mistake, she said, in declaring that Alençon’s youth was an insuperable difficulty; and much more to the same effect. But it is curious that all this artless prattle, all this coy coquetry of the Queen, so spontaneous in appearance, had in substance been carefully previously drafted by Burghley, and the drafts are still at Hatfield. Whilst Charles IX. was hesitating and looking askance at the dominant Huguenots, the latter were assuring Burghley and Walsingham that all would be well directly. Henry of Navarre was to be married to the Princess Margaret, and this would give them a pretext for gathering so strong a force of their party that they could make the King do as they pleased.[357]
But Elizabeth and the Huguenots had no monopoly of cunning, and whilst the billing and cooing with La Mole went on, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was being secretly planned, and every effort was being made by the French King to draw England into a position of overt hostility to Spain, whilst he remained unpledged. The Ambassador, Fénélon, and young La Mole, left the Queen, and returned to London on the 27th August. On the same day there arrived at Rye two couriers from Paris, one from Walsingham to the Queen and Burghley, the other to the French Ambassador. The French courier was detained, and his papers sent forward with Walsingham’s despatches to the Queen. The news of the great crime of St. Bartholomew fell upon Elizabeth and her court like a death-knell; for it seemed that at last the threatened crusade against Protestantism had begun, and that England was struck at as well as the Huguenots. All rejoicings were stopped, mourning garb was assumed, and the gay devices of masques and mummeries gave way to anxious conferences and plans for defence. Affrighted Protestants by the thousand came flying across the Channel in any craft that would sail; from mouth to mouth in England ran the dreadful story of unprovoked and wanton slaughter, and on every side the old English feeling of hatred and distrust of the false Frenchmen came uppermost again. On the 7th September, La Mothe Fénélon was received by the Queen at Woodstock in dead silence, and surrounded by all the signs of mourning. He made the best of a bad matter: talked of a plot of Coligny and the Huguenots to seize the Louvre, urged that the massacre was unpremeditated, and hoped that the friendship between France and England would continue uninterrupted. But Elizabeth knew that such a friendship could only be a snare for her whilst the Guises were paramount, and she dismissed the Ambassador with a plain indication of her opinion.
Two days afterwards Burghley penned a long letter from the Council to Walsingham, dictating the steps to be taken for the protection of English interests; and he accompanied it by a private note, in which the Lord Treasurer’s own view is frankly set forth. “I see,” he says, “the devil is suffered by Almighty God for our sins to be strong in following the persecution of Christ’s members, and therefore we are not only vigilant of our own defence against such trayterous attempts as lately have been put in use there in France, but also to call ourselves to repentance.… The King assures her Majesty that the navy prepared by Strozzi shall not in any way endamage her Majestie; but we have great cause in these times to doubt all fair speeches, and therefore we do presently put all the sea-coasts in defence, and mean to send her Majesty’s navy to sea with speed, and so to continue until we see further whereunto to trust.”[358]
Not many days after the massacre, Catharine de Medici saw the mistake she had made in allowing the Guises a free hand, and she and the King did their best by protestations to Walsingham, and through Fénélon and Castelnau de la Mauvissière, to draw closer to Elizabeth again. Alençon did much more. He went to Walsingham, swore vengeance upon the murderers, and expressed his intention of escaping from court and secretly flying to England. By an emissary of his own he sent an extravagant love-letter to the Queen, and ostentatiously took the Huguenot side, whilst Anjou was on the side of the League. Elizabeth did not wish to break with France, for her safety once more depended upon avoiding isolation; but she was still deeply distrustful. Smith, in sending the Queen’s answer to Walsingham, quaintly defines her attitude towards the French: “You may perceive by her Majesty’s answer, that she will not refuse the interview nor marriage, but yet she cometh near to them tam timido et suspenso pede, that they may have good cause to doubt. The answer to De la Mothe is addulced so much as may, for she would have it so. You have a busie piece of work to decypher that which in words is designed to the extremitie, in deeds is more than manifest; neither you shall open the one, nor shall they cloak the other. The best is, thank God, we stand upon our guard, nor I trust shall be taken and killed asleep, as Coligny was. The greatest matter for her Majestie, and our safety and defence, is earnestly of us attempted, nor yet achieved, nor utterly in despair, but rather in hope.”[359]
For the next few months this firm attitude of watchfulness was maintained, whilst the outward demonstrations of friendship between Catharine and Elizabeth became gradually more cordial, thanks largely to the influence in the English court of the special envoy Castelnau de la Mauvissière. Elizabeth consented to act as sponsor for the French King’s infant daughter; Alençon’s envoy, Maisonfleur, with the knowledge of Burghley, sent to his master a plan for his escape to England with Navarre and Condé, and assured him that the Queen would marry him if he came. But all this diplomatic finesse did not for a moment stay the grim determination of the Queen and her Council to provide against treachery, from whatever quarter it might come. All along the coast the country stood on guard. Portsmouth, Plymouth, the Thames, and Harwich were swarming with shipping, armed to the teeth for the succour of stern Protestant Rochelle against the Catholics, and to aid the Netherlanders in their struggle.[360] The Huguenots of Guienne, Languedoc, and Gascony had recovered somewhat from the shock of St. Bartholomew, and were arming for their defence; and to them also went English money, arms, and encouragement. At Elizabeth’s court the Vidame de Chartres and the Count de Montgomerie were honoured guests and busy agents, whilst in France the young Princes of Navarre and Condé were daily being pledged deeper to the cause of Protestantism and England. The German princes, too, as profoundly shocked at the treacherous massacre as Elizabeth herself, drew nearer to the Queen, who was now regarded throughout Europe as the head of the Protestant confederacy.
It was soon seen that, though St. Bartholomew had given more power to the Guises, it had also strengthened and consolidated the reformers rather than destroyed them. Month after month Anjou, at the head of the Catholic royal army, cast his men fruitlessly against the impregnable walls of Rochelle, well supplied as the town was with stores by Montgomerie’s fleet from England, until at last in the spring of 1573 it was seen by Catharine and her sons that they had failed to crush the reformers of France, and they were glad to make terms with the heroic Rochellais, where the besiegers, plague-stricken, starving, and disheartened, were in far worse case than the beleaguered. Anjou, to his brothers’ and mother’s delight, was elected to the vacant throne of Poland, and a full amnesty was signed for the Huguenots (June 1573); complete religious liberty being accorded in the towns of Rochelle, Montauban, and Nismes, whilst private Protestant worship was allowed throughout France.