1560-1]

The invitation to Trent

583 or no (and this will never be known) behaved as if she had thoughts of marrying him, and showed little regard for what was said of his crime. One reading of her character, and perhaps the best, makes her heartless and nearly sexless, but for that reason indecorously desirous of appearing to the world as both the subject and the object of amorous passions. Also she was being pestered to marry the Archduke Charles, who would not come to be looked at, or Arran who had been looked at and rejected. Then (January, 1561) there was an intrigue between the Bishop of Aquila and the suspected murderer. Philip was to favour the Queen's marriage with the self-made widower, and the parties to this unholy union were thenceforth to be good Catholics, or at any rate were to subject themselves and the realm to the authority of the General Council.

There was superabundant falsehood on all sides. Quadra, Dudley, Cecil and Elizabeth, were all of them experts in mendacity, and the exact truth we are not likely to know when they tell the story. But the outcome of it all was that a papal Nuncio, the Abbot Martinengo, coming this time with Philip's full approval, arrived at Brussels with every reason to believe that Elizabeth would favourably listen to the invitation that he was bringing, and then, at the last moment, he learnt that he might not cross the Channel. There are signs that Cecil had difficulty in bringing about this result. Something stood in his way. He had to stimulate the English Bishops into protest, and to discover a little popish plot (there was always one to be discovered) at the right moment. It is conceivable that Dudley and Quadra had for a while ensnared the Queen with hopes of a secure reign and an easy life. It is quite as likely that she was employing them as unconscious agents to keep the Catholics quiet, while important negotiations were pending in France and Germany. That she seriously thought of sending envoys to the Council is by no means improbable; and some stout Protestants held that this was the proper course. But while Quadra and Dudley were concocting their plot, she kept in close alliance with foreign Protestants. Arrangements for a reply to the Pope were discussed with the German Protestant Princes at Naumburg (January, 1561); and strenuous endeavours were made through the puritanic Earl of Bedford to dissuade the French from participation in the Tridentine assembly. The end of it was that the English refusal was especially emphatic, and given in such a manner as to be a rebuff not only to Rome but to Spain. An irritating reference to a recent precedent did not mend matters: King Philip and Queen Mary had repulsed a Nuncio. Another reason could be given. In Ireland the Elizabethan religion, which had been introduced there by Act of Parliament, was not making way. In August, 1560, the Pope, who had already taken upon himself to dispose of two Irish bishoprics, sent to Ireland David Wolfe, a Jesuit priest, and conferred large powers upon him. He seems to have slipped over secretly from Britanny, where

584 England and the First French War of Religion

[1562

he had lain hid. Elizabeth could say, and probably with truth, that his proceedings were hostile to her right and title. As to a Council, of course she was all for a real and true, "free and general" Council; all Protestants were; but with the papistical affair at Trent she would have nothing to do. Pius had thought better of her; her lover's cryptoCatholicism had been talked of in high places.

The papal Legate at the French Court, the Cardinal of Ferrara, had some hope of succeeding where others had failed: "not as Legate of Rome or the Cardinal of Ferrara, but as Hippolito d'Este," an Italian gentleman devoted to Her Grace's service. There were pleasant letters; cross and candles were commended; she was asked to retain them "even as it were for the Cardinal of Ferrara's pleasure"; but hardly had the Council been re-opened at Trent (January 18, 1562) than Elizabeth was allying herself with the Huguenots and endeavouring to form a Protestant league in Germany. The dream of a France that would peacefully lapse from the Roman obedience was broken at Vassy (March 1, 1562), and the First War of Religion began. In April Sechelles came to England as Condé's envoy and was accredited by Hotman to Cecil. The danger to England was explained by the Queen's Secretary:-The crown of France would be in the hands of the Guisians; the King of Spain would help them; the Queen of Scots would marry Don Carlos; the Council would condemn the Protestants and give their dominions to a Catholic invader (July 20). On the other hand, Calais, Dieppe, or Havre, "perhaps all three," might be Elizabeth's, so some thought; indeed “all Picardy, Normandy, and Gascony might belong to England again." The Queen had been thinking of such possibilities; already in June, 1560, an offer of "certain towns in Britanny and Normandy" had been made to her. She hesitated long, but yielded, and on the 20th of September, 1562, concluded the Treaty of Hampton Court with the Prince of Condé. She was to help with money and men and hold Havre, Dieppe, and Rouen until Calais was restored. It was a questionable step; but Philip was interfering on the Catholic side, and Calais was covetable. Of course she was not at war with Charles IX; far from it; she was bent on delivering the poor lad and his mother from his rebellious subjects, who were also "her inveterate enemies," the Guises. Of religion she said as little as possible; but the Church of which she was the Supreme Governor affirmed in prayer that the Gallican Catholics were enemies of God's Eternal Word, and that the Calvinists were persecuted for the profession of God's Holy Name. The expedition to Havre failed disastrously. After the battle of Dreux (December 19, 1562) and the edict of Amboise (March 19, 1563), all parties in France united to expel the invader. The Earl of Warwick (Ambrose Dudley) and his plaguestricken army were compelled to evacuate Havre after a stubborn resistance (July 28), and the recovery of Calais was further off than ever. Elizabeth had played with the fire once too often. She never after this thought

1563]

Elizabeth's Second Parliament

585

well of Huguenots; and friendship with the ruling powers of France became the central feature of her resolutely pacific policy. However, when at the beginning of 1563 she met her Second Parliament, and the Reformed Church of England held its first Council, all was going well. Since October an English army had once more been holding a French town; a foolhardy plot devised by some young nephews of Cardinal Pole had been opportunely discovered, and the French and Spanish ambassadors were supposed to have had a hand in it. Some notes of Cecil's suggest effective parliamentary rhetoric:

1559 The religion of Christ restored. Foreign authority rejected . . . 1560 The French at the request of the Scots, partly by force, partly by agreement, sent back to France, and Scotland set free from the servitude of the pope. 1561 The debased copper and brass coinage replaced by gold and silver. England, formerly unarmed, supplied more abundantly than any other country with arms, munitions and artillery. 1562 The tottering Church of Christ in France succoured

The Queen, it is true, was tormenting her faithful subjects by playing fast and loose with all her many wooers, and by disallowing all talk of what would happen at her death. It was a policy that few women could have maintained, but was sagacious and successful. It made men pray that her days might be long; for, when compared with her sister's, they were good days, and when they were over there would be civil war. We hear the preacher : "How was this our realm then pestered with strangers, strange gods, strange languages, strange religion, strange coin! And now how peaceably rid of them all!" So there was no difficulty about a supply of money, and another turn might be given to the screw of conformity. Some new classes of persons, members of the House of Commons, lawyers, schoolmasters, were to take the oath of Supremacy; a first refusal was to bring imprisonment and forfeiture, a second death. The temporal lords procured their own exemption on the ground that the Queen was "otherwise sufficiently assured" of their loyalty. That might be so, but she was also sufficiently assured of a majority in the Upper House, for there sat in it four-and-twenty spiritual Lords of her own nomination.

The Spanish ambassador reported (January 14, 1563) that at the opening of this Parliament, the preacher, Nowell, Dean of St Paul's, urged the Queen "to kill the caged wolves," thereby being meant the Marian Bishops. Nowell's sermon is extant, and says too much about the duty of slaying the ungodly. Hitherto the Reformers, the men to whom Cranmer and Ridley were dear friends and honoured masters, had shown an admirable self-restraint. A few savage words had been said, but they had not all come from one side. Christopher Goodman desired that "the bloody Bishops" should be slain; but he had been kept out of England as a dangerous fanatic. Dr John Story, in open Parliament, had gloried in his own cruelty, and had regretted that in Mary's day the axe had not been laid to the root of the tree. At a time when

586

Elizabeth and the Catholics

[1563-6 letters from the Netherlands, France or Spain were always telling of burnt Protestants, nobody was burnt in England and very few people lay in prison for conscience' sake. The deprived Bishops seem to have been left at large until Parpaglia's mission; then they were sent to gaol. Probably they could be lawfully imprisoned as contumacious excommunicates. Martinengo's advent induced Cecil to clap his hand on a few "mass-mongers," and on some laymen who had held office under Mary. But in these years of horror it is a small matter if a score of Catholics are kept in that Tower where Elizabeth was lately confined; and her preachers had some right to speak of an unexampled clemency. Rightly or wrongly, but very naturally, there was one man especially odious to the Protestants. When the statute of 1563 was passed, it was said among the Catholics that Bonner would soon be done to death, and the oath that he had already refused was tendered to him a second time by Horne the occupant of the see of Winchester. The tender was only valid if Horne was "Bishop of the diocese." Bonner, who, it is said, had the aid of Plowden, the most famous pleader of the time, threatened to raise the fundamental question whether Horne and his fellows were lawful Bishops. He was prepared to dispute the validity of the statutes of 1559 to dispute the validity of the quasi-papal power of "supplying defects" which the Queen had assumed to attack the very heart of the new order of things. Elizabeth, however, was not to be hurried into violence. The proceedings against him were stayed; her Bishops were compelled to petition the Parliament of 1566 for a declaration that they were lawful Bishops; their prayer was not granted except with the proviso that none of their past acts touching life and property were to be thereby validated; and eleven out of some thirty-five temporal Lords were for leaving Dr Parker and his suffragans in their uncomfortably dubious position. Elizabeth allowed Lords and Commons to discuss and confirm her letters patent; she was allowing all to see that no Catholic who refrained from plots need fear anything worse than twelve-penny fines; but she had not yet been excommunicated and deposed.

:

A project for excommunication and deposition was sent to Trent from Louvain, where the Catholic exiles from England congregated. Like Knox and Goodman in Mary's reign, those who had fled from persecution were already setting themselves to exasperate the persecutor. The plan that found favour with them in 1563 involved the action of the Emperor's son, the Archduke Charles. He was to marry Mary Stewart (who, however, had set her heart on a grander match), and then he was to execute the papal ban. Englishmen, it was said, would never again accept as King the heir to the throne of Spain; but his Austrian kinsman would be an unexceptionable candidate or conqueror. The papal Legates at Trent consulted the Emperor, who told his ambassadors that if the Council wished to make itself ridiculous, it had better depose Elizabeth; he and his would have nothing to do with

1562-3]

Elizabeth and the Council of Trent

587

this absurd and dangerous scheme (June 19). Soon afterwards he was allowing his son's marriage, not with the Catholic Mary, but with the heretical Elizabeth, to be once more discussed, and the negotiations for this union were being conducted by the eminently Lutheran Duke of Württemberg, who apparently thought that pure religion would be the gainer if a Habsburg, Ferdinand's son and Maximilian's brother, became King of a Protestant England. Philip too, though he had no wish to quarrel with his uncle, began seriously to think that, in the interest of the Catholic faith and the Catholic King, Mary Stewart was right in preferring the Spanish to the Austrian Charles; and at the same time he was being assured from Rome that it was respect for him which had prevented Pius from bringing Elizabeth's case before the assembled Fathers. She was protected from the anathema, which in 1563 might have been a serious matter, by conflicting policies of the worldliest sort. The only member of the English episcopate who was at Trent, the fugitive Marian Bishop of St Asaph, might do his worst; but the safe course for ecclesiastical power was to make a beginning with Jeanne d'Albret and wait to see whether any good would come of the sentence. Ferdinand, however, begged Elizabeth to take pity on the imprisoned prelates, and she quartered most of them upon their Protestant successors. The English Catholics learnt from the Pope, whom they consulted through the Spanish ambassadors at London and Rome, that they ought not to attend the English churches (October, 1562). As a matter of expediency this was a questionable decision. It is clear that the zealous Romanists over-estimated the number of those Englishmen whose preference for the old creed could be blown into flame. The State religion was beginning to capture the neutral nucleus of the nation, and the irreconcilable Catholics were compelled to appear as a Spanish party secretly corresponding with the Pope through Quadra and Vargas.

Simultaneously with the Parliament a Convocation of the province of Canterbury was held (January 12, 1563), and its acts may be said to complete the great outlines of the Anglican settlement. A delicate task lay before the theologians: no other than that of producing a confession of faith. Happily in this case also a restoration was possible. In the last months of Edward's reign a set of forty-two Articles had been published; in the main they were the work of Cranmer. In 1563 Parker laid a revised version of them before the assembled clergy, and, when a few more changes had been made, they took durable shape and received the royal assent. A little more alteration at a later day made them the famous " Thirty-nine Articles." To all seeming the leaders of English theological thought were remarkably unanimous.

A dangerous point had been passed. Just at the moment when the Roman Church was demonstrating on a grand scale its power of defining dogma, its adversaries were becoming always less hopeful of