History of England 1-6

The agreement came too late, however, to save Antwerp; the city had fallen to the duke of Parma three days before. In the previous months the duke had occupied Flanders and much of Brabant, while Bruges and Ghent had surrendered to him. The queen had finally come out into the open, however, after years of covert negotiation and secret alliances. Yet she did not wish to become queen of the Low Countries; that would open her to fresh dangers and fresh expense. She merely wished to uphold their liberties under Spanish rule. She would be their protector rather than their sovereign.

In the early autumn of the same year she also helped to finance Sir Francis Drake in a voyage to the West Indies, with the purpose of rifling Spanish vessels and Spanish-held towns of the region. His force numbered twenty-nine ships and 2,300 men. He captured St Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, with the pillage from that town filling the holds of his vessels. He then went on to Cartagena, on the Spanish Main, and held it to ransom for 107,000 ducats. He was about to set sail for Panama, when an epidemic of yellow fever among his men prevented him.

The conflicts of the Old World had therefore been transferred to the New and, although it would be anachronistic to speak of a global strategy, there is no doubt that Drake and his fellow adventurers knew that Philip might be seriously weakened in the Netherlands by the capture of his shipments of gold. It was said by Philip’s secretary, at the time of the Armada, that the object of the invasion was ‘no less the security of the Indies than the recovery of the Netherlands’. Open warfare with Spain, therefore, could not now be indefinitely delayed. The new pope, Sixtus V, declared that Elizabeth ‘is certainly a great queen, and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the empire, by all.’ In this year Burghley commissioned a painting of the queen, known as the ‘Ermine’ portrait, which displays a sword placed beside her on a table. As lord treasurer, he was in charge of the finances of war.

On 17 November 1585, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the proclamation of her sovereignty, the queen rode in a gold coach through London; it was an open coach but it carried a canopy embroidered with gold and pearls. She was dressed entirely in white, and at frequent intervals she would call out ‘God save my people!’ The people knelt as she passed and replied ‘God save your Grace’. Behind the coach rode the earl of Leicester, while it was preceded by Burghley and Walsingham. Leicester and Burghley had been with Elizabeth from the beginning of her reign, while Walsingham had joined them eleven years later. She exemplified her motto ‘semper eadem’ – ‘always the same’.

In the following month the earl of Leicester was sent to the Low Countries as her lieutenant general. He was eagerly awaited as the ‘new messiah’, one of the leaders of the international Protestant cause, and so great were the expectations that he was offered the post of governor-general; much to the queen’s fury and consternation, he accepted the title. When at the beginning of 1586 he was confirmed as ‘absolute governor’ she became incandescent with rage. It would seem to the world that she was indeed queen and that Leicester was her viceroy; her ‘storms’ and ‘great oaths’ alarmed her councillors, some of whom she accused of being part of the plot to undermine her purposes. She threatened to make peace with the duke of Parma, thus emasculating Leicester in turn.

When her choler had subsided she left Leicester in command of the English forces, in alliance with those of the Netherlands; but his campaign did not prosper. He found it hard to coordinate the counsels of the allies, and was obliged to request more money and more men. One commander wrote to Burghley that ‘the havoc which has been made of the soldiers is lamentable, which must be supplied and enlarged presently before my Lord can do anything’. He could not contain the quarrels between the various states, such as Holland and Zeeland, nor could he satisfy their suspicions of his actions. Although he had been warned by Walsingham to beware ‘charges’, he increased the pay of his officers (including his own) and overlooked the problems of bribery and general corruption. The war had led also to a marked diminution of English exports, with the consequent loss of employment; the situation was exacerbated by a disastrous harvest in 1586 that led directly to malnutrition, disease and death. When we turn from the affairs of the great to the smaller lives of England, we often find misery and discontent.

It was no wonder, in any case, that the queen had grown alarmed at the costs of conflict. She was fundamentally averse to war; she had no skill or interest in it. It was rumoured now that she would make peace with Spain, and recall Leicester from the ill-starred enterprise; it was also reported that one of the conditions of that peace was her surrender of the sea-towns to Philip II. Religion was not to be a difficulty. If Spain could guarantee the Low Countries their ‘ancient liberties’, it would be enough. Burghley believed that any peace granted on these terms would be a lasting dishonour. He told her that he wished to resign his office and retire into private life; she was for the moment moved by him, but then continued on the course which he described as ‘very absurd and perilous’. Walsingham agreed with him, fearing that everyone would say that ‘there is no court in the world so odious and uncertain in its dealings as ours’. So with the council at variance, and Elizabeth herself uncertain, the war in the Low Countries continued. The whole ill-starred enterprise was rendered more dramatic by the death of Sir Philip Sidney after a skirmish at the siege of Zutphen. He had taken off his leg armour, in heroic emulation of a fellow soldier, but then received the arrow wound that killed him; it was an example of the romance and bravado that characterized him. ‘I am weary,’ Leicester wrote to Walsingham, ‘indeed I am weary, Mr Secretary.’

By the summer of 1586, however, the queen was once more on intimate terms with her favourite. In one letter she reveals her affection for him with ‘Rob: I am afraid you will suppose from my wandering writings that midsummer moon hath taken possession of my brains this month.’ She concluded with ‘now I will end that do imagine I talk still with you and therefore loathly say ô ô [her symbol for Eyes, his nickname] though ever I pray God bless you from all harm and save you from all foes with my million and legion of thanks for all your pains and cares. As you know, ever the same, E.R.’ Her moods were as always mercurial and mysterious.

With Elizabeth braving the wrath of Spain, however, this was a time of maximum peril. She feared the machinations of Mary, and in February 1586 it was reported in the French court that she had fainted; it was said that she had remained unconscious for two hours. In the early summer of that year she had been walking to the royal chapel in stately progress when suddenly she was ‘overcome by a shock of fear’; she went back to her apartments, according to a Spanish agent, ‘greatly to the wonder of those present’.

She was perhaps wiser than they knew. A conspiracy was even then being formed against her, guided by a Jesuit priest, John Ballard, and by Mary’s agent in Paris. They had courted a rich young Catholic, Anthony Babington, and he had in turn recruited six courtiers who at the appropriate moment would rise up and assassinate Elizabeth. Walsingham was, meanwhile, closely watching Mary. The queen of Scots was moved to another house, Chartley Manor. It can be said with some certainty that Cecil was happy to allow the conspiracy to develop, disorganized and chaotic as it was. It was to be hoped that Mary would enter a traitorous correspondence that would end her life. And so it proved. On 12 July Babington wrote to Mary Stuart outlining the plan for her liberation and for her ascension to the throne. They must choose a landing place for the invading Spanish troops. The ‘usurping competitor’ would then have to be ‘dispatched’, and he had nominated the men to undertake ‘that tragical execution’.

The letter had of course been diverted to Walsingham before it was sent on to Mary; he employed a code-breaker to help him decipher the clandestine correspondence. An elaborate scheme had been set up by the spymaster, by means of which a double agent had persuaded Mary to smuggle out letters concealed at the bottom of beer barrels. Mary pondered on her response to Babington. Her guard, Sir Amyas Paulet, wrote to Walsingham that ‘she could see plainly that her destruction was sought, and that her life would be taken from her, and then it would be said that she had died of sickness’. What, then, had she left to lose?

A few days later Mary replied to Babington’s message. She went through his plan in detail and wrote that ‘when all is ready, the six gentlemen must be set to work, and you will provide that on their design being accomplished, I may be myself rescued from this place’. Walsingham received this epistle, also, but before sending it on to its intended recipients his code-breaker forged a postscript in Mary’s hand asking for the names of the six assassins.

And then they waited, wanting to test the Scottish queen to destruction. Elizabeth now knew of the plot and had been told that ‘the beast was to be removed that troubled the world’. It is said that Babington was so sanguine of his chances that he commissioned a portrait of himself in the company of the six courtiers. They and their supporters were seen drinking and eating in taverns, quite unaware that they were being followed. In August 1586, Walsingham ordered that John Ballard be arrested on the charge of being a covert priest. The others, taking fright, fled London; yet fourteen were arrested. Babington, his face ‘sullied with the rind of green walnuts’, was found concealed in St John’s Wood; 300 of the most prominent recusants in the north of England were then taken to London under guard.

One more significant conspirator remained. Mary Stuart was arrested and detained while her rooms at Chartley were searched. A key to sixty different ciphers was discovered, together with the lists of her supporters in England; there was, for example, a record of all the nobles who had pledged allegiance to her. This list was shown to Elizabeth who, after reading it, burned it. ‘Video taceoque,’ she said. ‘I see and I am silent.’

The conspirators were slaughtered in the usual manner of traitors, Babington being one of the first. But one notable plotter had not yet been brought to the scaffold. It was clear enough now that Mary had been involved in schemes against the queen’s throne, and therefore the queen’s life, for the past eighteen years. In the summer of this year, by the Treaty of Berwick, Elizabeth and James VI of Scotland were bound in a permanent embrace; the two monarchs agreed to maintain the Protestant religion in their separate realms, and to help each other in the event of an invasion. James also received a pension of £4,000 per year and it was clear enough that he was the favourite to succeed to the English throne. His mother was no longer considered. What was to be her fate now?

35

The dead cannot bite

When Mary Stuart was led back to Chartley Manor, after her most secret documents had been taken from her apartment, she was greeted by a crowd of beggars. ‘I have nothing for you,’ she cried out to them, ‘I am a beggar as well as you. All is taken from me.’ She turned to her escort and, weeping, said to them ‘Good gentlemen, I am not witting or privy to anything intended against the queen.’ Many had good reason to doubt that. Her gaoler, Paulet, was asked to keep her in as much isolation as possible. The privy council met each day at Windsor to ponder the situation, but it seemed inevitable that the queen of Scots would be obliged to stand trial for her intrigue against Elizabeth. In the autumn of 1586, in her forty-third year, she was taken from Chartley to Fotheringhay Castle.

Mary had at first protested against her removal. Since she was not an English subject, she could not be brought before the jurisdiction of an English court. To her protest Elizabeth sent a firm reply that ‘you have in various ways and manners attempted to take my life and to bring my kingdom to destruction by bloodshed. These treasons will be proved to you and all made manifest. It is my will that you answer the nobles and peers of the kingdom as if I myself were present … Act plainly without reserve and you will then sooner be able to obtain favour of me.’

Burghley made a rough sketch of the chamber of presence at Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary was tried on 14 and 15 October. The earls, barons and privy councillors – those who would act as judges in the matter – were seated around the walls. Mary was given a chair in the middle of the hall, immediately opposite a throne beneath a cloth of estate; the empty throne represented the absent queen. It was of course a trial for her life, the parliamentary Act for the Queen’s Safety having declared that any attempt to injure the queen was to be ‘pursued to the death by all the Queen’s subjects’. Mary knew this well enough, and declared to the duke of Guise that she was ready to die in the cause of her religion. She would not be a murderer, but a martyr. In that respect her death would be sanctified.

She may in any case have secretly relied upon Elizabeth’s reluctance to impose upon her the extreme penalty; that was why the English queen held out the possibility of ‘favour’ to her. The lawyers had no precedent for her case; she was an anointed queen who did not recognize the court to which she had been taken. She was also a rightful claimant to the English crown. So she had some cause for confidence. She relied, too, upon her personal presence before her judges. She had a sharp wit and a ready tongue; she also had the aura of majesty. She would not easily be put out of countenance. Burghley and a small party of the commissioners went to her privy chamber at Fotheringhay. ‘I am an absolute queen,’ she told them. She would not bargain with them. ‘My mind is not yet dejected, neither will I sink under my calamity.’ Then she warned them to ‘remember that the theatre of the whole world is wider than the kingdom of England’. She was reminding them that the Catholic princes of Europe might revenge her death.

She entered the chamber of presence, on the morning of 14 October, in a gown of black velvet and sat down upon the seat offered to her: the commissioners took off their hats as a mark of respect to her rank. She was described as a ‘big-made’ woman with a face ‘full and fat, double-chinned and hazel-eyed’; after years of imprisonment, her plumpness was only to be expected. The charges against her were read out, in which she was accused of conspiring for the destruction of the queen and her country. She replied that she had come to England as a suppliant, but had been held in confinement ever since. She was an anointed queen and could be judged by no earthly tribunal. She was, however, ready to refute any falsehoods made against her. Babington’s letters to her were then read aloud. ‘It may be that Babington wrote these letters,’ she replied, ‘but let it be proved that I received them.’ The confessions of her two private secretaries were also recited, in which they confirmed her complicity in the writing of ciphered letters. Once more Mary simply repeated her denials of any involvement in a conspiracy against the queen. She also claimed that the word of a prince could not be challenged. She was entirely calm and self-possessed; Paulet wrote to Walsingham that ‘she was utterly void of all fear of harm’.

It was clear to all others that she could not be allowed to evade the charge. On the second and final day of the trial, Burghley told her that she should not complain of her imprisonment. Only her own mistakes had kept her in confinement. ‘Ah,’ she told him, ‘I see that you are my adversary.’ ‘Yes, I am adversary to Queen Elizabeth’s adversaries.’ Burghley then prorogued the commission for ten days, on the express command of the queen. She did not wish to be seen to rush to judgment.

The commissioners met in the Star Chamber at Westminster on 25 October, where, in the absence of Mary, they reviewed the evidence. The queen of Scots was then found guilty. When she received the news, Elizabeth knelt down in prayer for fifteen minutes. She demurred at any public declaration. She was not yet certain of her next move. When Mary heard the verdict she lifted up her eyes to heaven and thanked God for it. The stage was set for her final scene.

When parliament assembled four days later, the Lords and the Commons bayed for Mary’s blood. Burghley had so arranged matters that it rang with accusations against her. On 3 November one of the queen’s favourites, Sir Christopher Hatton, denounced the practices of Mary as ‘most filthy and detestable’. A commission of the Lords and Commons was appointed, while at the same time a petition for her execution was drawn up. After the queen had heard it, in her chamber of presence, she responded very carefully. She warned those assembled that ‘we princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed’. Just as Mary had warned the commissioners about the possibility of the vengeance of Catholic princes, so now Elizabeth warned her parliament that there were large matters at stake. If she and Mary had been only milkmaids, ‘with pails on our arms’, she would not consent to her death in the same circumstances. But the queen of Scots had her ‘favourers’ in a pattern of alliances and interests that were ready to act against England; it was not the person of Mary, but what she represented, that threatened the country.

On 24 November Elizabeth once more prevaricated with them. ‘I have strived more this day, than ever in my life,’ she told them, ‘whether I should speak or use silence.’ As for their petition ‘I shall pray you for this present, to content yourselves to an answer without answer; your judgement I condemn not, neither do I mistake your reasons, but pray you to accept my thankfulness, excuse my doubtfulness, and take in good part my answer answerless …’ She allowed her speech to be published, in a copy approved by her.

The queen had indeed fallen into agonies over the decision. It was whispered to her that ‘the dead cannot bite’, but did she have the right to execute an anointed queen? Could she execute her cousin? The kings of France and Scotland, near to Mary in blood, were eager to rescue her from death; she had, after all, once worn the crown of France and was the mother of the Scottish sovereign. Philip of Spain had the highest interest in her as a Catholic princess and, however remote the chance, still a potential successor to Elizabeth. It was also possible that her execution would dissolve the bonds that held together the Protestants and Catholics of England in a frail unity. Might her death precipitate the civil war that was always to be feared? So Elizabeth told the Lords and Commons that ‘I am not so void of judgement as not to see mine own peril, nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat’. Her dilemma could not have been better expressed. William Camden, Elizabeth’s first historian, relates that she sat many times ‘melancholic and mute’. Two phrases occurred to her: Aut fer, aut feri – ‘Bear with her or smite her’ – and Ne feriare, feri – ‘Strike lest thou be stricken’.

In the first week of December the news of Mary’s guilt was finally proclaimed in London to the sound of trumpets. Bonfires were lit in the streets and the church bells tolled for twenty-four hours. After the delivery of the verdict the chair of state, and the canopy above it, was removed from her. Writing to Scotland, she said that the act was ‘to signify that I was a dead woman, deprived of the honours and dignity of a queen’. She feared that, according to the articles of the Bond of Association, any loyal Englishman had the duty to kill her. This may also have been the private wish of the queen, who would thereby be relieved of the responsibility of ordering her execution. So in these final weeks Mary went in constant fear of assassination. In a last letter to Elizabeth she requested that her corpse be taken to France, where she might lie beside her mother, Mary of Guise, at the convent of Saint-Pierre at Rheims.

Parliament had reassembled on 2 December, two days before the reading of the proclamation, but now Elizabeth prorogued it until the middle of February. She wanted ten weeks to steady her nerve for the final decision. Rumours and counter-rumours flew around London in January 1587; it was whispered that Mary had escaped confinement, and that the Spaniards had launched an invasion. The council may have encouraged such false reports, however, in order to force Elizabeth’s hand. A ‘plot’ was revealed to Walsingham, involving a poisoned saddle to be given to Elizabeth; the enterprise is likely to have been concocted further to frighten the queen. She could afford no more delay; the feelings of the country could not with impunity be ignored. All of her councillors declared that Mary must be executed.

At the beginning of February the queen was at Greenwich. She asked her secretary, Sir William Davison, to carry to her the warrant for Mary’s execution. He brought it to her chamber, mixed with other papers. She commented to him on the brightness of the morning, and signed the papers given to her without paying any particular attention to the warrant. But then she mentioned it to him. She had delayed for so long in the matter to demonstrate her unwillingness to act against Mary. Was he not sorry to see such a paper signed? He replied that it was best that the guilty should suffer before the innocent.

Elizabeth then told him to get the warrant sealed by the chancellor as quickly and as quietly as possible; it was then to be sent, without proclamation of any kind, to the commissioners. She asked him to inform Walsingham, who was then lying sick; the grief, she said sarcastically, would probably kill him. Davison was about to leave her presence when she called him back. What if a loyal subject, a member of the Bond of Association, would commit the deed? She mentioned two such subjects, one of whom was Mary’s gaoler, Amyas Paulet. By these means she might be able to avoid censure and the unfavourable attention of rival powers. She did not wish to incur the guilt of regicide. She asked Davison to raise the matter with Walsingham; he agreed reluctantly to do so but told her that it was a labour lost. No official would contemplate such an act without the queen’s express commandment.

Burghley summoned the council and informed his colleagues that Elizabeth had at last signed the warrant. It was now necessary to act secretly and swiftly. The warrant was quickly on its way to Fotheringhay, and the necessary letters were sent to the principal commissioners. Elizabeth did not mention the matter. She asked no questions. When she read Paulet’s response to her letter, refusing her request to kill Mary without a warrant, she exploded in rage; she called him a ‘precise’ fellow who pledged himself to her but would do nothing to protect her safety.

Her caution and her patience, two days later, had worn thin. Had Davison expedited the matter? Was the warrant sealed? Davison, in his own narrative, described her as ‘swearing a great oath, it was a shame for them all that it was not already done’. Mary’s self-confidence had returned. She had sent another letter to Elizabeth protesting her innocence and asking for a private interview; she received no reply but Leicester said that her letter ‘hath wrought tears’. On 4 February the principal executioner travelled to Fotheringhay Castle dressed as a serving man; the axe was concealed in his trunk. On Tuesday 7 February, the commissioners arrived at Fotheringhay and, when they were admitted into Mary’s presence, they informed her that they had received an instruction under the Great Seal; she was to be executed on the following morning.

She refused to believe them at first; then she became agitated. She called for her physician and began to discuss money owed to her in France. At that point she broke down. She asked to see her Catholic chaplain, but the commissioners did not want to turn her execution into the martyrdom she so much wished for; instead they offered her the presence of a Protestant dean. She sent a note to her confessor and asked him to pray for her that night; in the morning, when she was led to her death, he might see her and bless her.

At eight o’clock, on the morning of 8 February, the provost-marshal of Fotheringhay Castle knocked on the door of her apartments; there was no response at first, prompting fears that the queen of Scots had taken her own life. Suicide was a mortal sin, however, and Mary did not wish to stain her personal glory. The door was opened. She stood on the threshold, wearing a robe and jacket of black satin trimmed with velvet. Her hair was arranged in a coif; over her head, and falling over her back, was a white silk veil. A crucifix of gold hung from her neck. In her hand she held another crucifix of ivory.

As she passed into the chamber of presence, where she had been tried, the master of her household knelt and wept. ‘Melville,’ she told him, ‘you should rejoice rather than weep that the end of my troubles is come. Tell my friends I die a true Catholic.’ She asked for her chaplain; he had been forbidden to attend, for fear of some religious demonstration. Then she looked around for her women. They also had been kept back as a precaution against unseemly scenes; they might scream, or faint. Yet Mary needed her courtiers to send an authentic account of her death to her admirers, at home and abroad; in the end it was agreed that she could choose six of her closest followers to attend her. ‘Allons donc,’ she told them when they were assembled. ‘Let us go then.’ She descended the staircase to the great hall.

The hall had been cleared of its furniture, and at the upper end stood the scaffold, 12 feet square and 2½ feet in height; it was covered with a black cloth, and railed. A black cushion had been placed before it, together with a black chair. The axe had been put against the rail. A wood fire blazed in the chimney. Present in the hall were 300 knights and gentlemen of the neighbourhood, to witness the memorable occasion, and thousands had gathered outside the castle. The news of her imminent execution had soon spread.

Quite calm and giving no sign of fear, she sat down in the chair made ready for her, in front of the block, and listened to the reading of the warrant against her. The earl of Shrewsbury approached her. ‘Madam, you hear what we are commanded to do.’

‘You will do your duty.’ She then prepared herself to kneel and to pray, when the dean of Peterborough tried to forestall her; but he stuttered his words. ‘Mr Dean, I am a Catholic, and must die a Catholic. It is useless to attempt to move me, and your prayers will avail me but little.’ There was a slight altercation. When she knelt down he began to call out an English prayer in which the assembly joined. So she recited in a loud voice the penitential psalms in Latin, striking the crucifix against her bosom.

The executioners, dressed in black, stepped forward to ask her forgiveness for the duties they were obliged to perform. ‘I forgive you,’ she told them, ‘for now I hope you shall end all my troubles.’ They began to arrange her dress for the final scene, and she looked at the earls close to her. ‘Truly, my lords, I never had such grooms waiting on me before.’ She laid her crucifix on the chair; the principal executioner took it up, as a prize of his office, but was commanded to leave it. Her silk veil was then removed, together with the black robe and the black jacket. Beneath them she was wearing underclothes of crimson velvet and crimson satin. She was now blood-red, the colour of the martyr.

She knelt upon the cushion as her ladies sobbed around her. ‘Adieu,’ she said, ‘au revoir.’ One of her entourage then bound her eyes with a handkerchief. She recited the psalm In te, Domine, confido, before feeling for the block, ‘I trust in you, my Lord God.’ She whispered, ‘In manus tuas, Domine, commendo animam meam’ – ‘Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’ As she stretched forward one of the executioners held her while the other raised the axe. But his aim was awry and the blade fell on the knot of the handkerchief. He raised the axe again and, this time, he was successful; he severed the head, with the exception of a small shred of skin. The coif and the false hair fell off, and when he picked up the head to show to the spectators it was that of a withered and nearly bald grey-haired old woman.

The dean stepped forward. ‘So perish all enemies of the queen.’ The assembly called out ‘Amen’. It was over. Then a lapdog was found concealed in her clothes and, yelping, it slid in her blood. It was taken away and carefully washed. Anything touched by Mary – the scaffold, the handkerchief, even the beads of her rosary – was now burned in the great hall. No relics were allowed to survive. Yet she had played her final part to perfection, and the story of Mary, queen of Scots, has remained in the public imagination ever since.

On the morning of 9 February Elizabeth went out riding and, when she returned to the palace at Greenwich, she heard the bells of London ringing. She asked for the reason. ‘I never saw her fetch a sigh,’ Elizabeth’s young cousin, Robert Carey recalled, ‘but when the queen of Scots was beheaded.’ It was more than a sigh. It was a rant, an explosion of guilt and rage. She became almost hysterical, accusing those closest to her of deceit and duplicity. She had never intended that her dear cousin should die. She commanded Burghley from her presence, and refused to allow him back to the court for two months. She admitted to signing the warrant but claimed that she had asked Davison to keep hold of it. Now she wanted Sir William Davison’s life in revenge. She was persuaded out of this impolitic course, and instead Davison was tried in the court of the Star Chamber for abusing the confidence of the queen; he was committed to the Tower, but was released a year later. He, too, had played his part.

Within four days of Mary’s execution Elizabeth had written to James VI, denying any involvement in the act. ‘My dear brother,’ she wrote, ‘I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen …’ It is true that she had been placed under intolerable pressure by her councillors, principal among them Walsingham and Burghley, and she may have persuaded herself that she had acted against her will. Her ministers had conspired behind her back to hasten Mary’s death. But her distress may also have been caused by the pangs of an awakened conscience.

The threat to her reign now grew stronger. By the spring of 1587 reports reached the court of Spanish preparations at Cadiz and at Lisbon; a squadron of ships was then assembled at Plymouth under Sir Francis Drake’s command with orders to sail to Spain. Knowing the inconstancy of his mistress, Drake made haste to leave the shores of England before she could countermand her previous orders. Sure enough the order to cease and desist came through but, by then, Drake was far away. He sank many store-ships and transports at Cadiz before moving on to Cape St Vincent, where he might confront any Spanish invasion force.

Thwarted of this goal he sailed to Corunna, where he cleared the harbour of the store-ships assembled there; he destroyed half of the stores accumulated for the Armada against England. It had been said previously that there was enough bread and wine to feed 40,000 men for a year, but those preparations were now wasted. Drake then completed a triumphant campaign by seizing a carrack loaded with booty from the East Indies. The Spanish had reason to feel themselves humiliated, while the confidence of the English was thereby increased.

The debacle delayed Philip’s plans for an invasion of England a further year. Elizabeth had been granted more time for what was now the inevitable struggle with Spain.

36

Armada

The depredations of Sir Francis Drake had been swiftly repaired and by the winter of 1587 a great Spanish fleet, the greatest ever seen in Europe, was floating out to sea by the mouth of the Tagus. At the same time the Spanish army in the Netherlands, under the command of the duke of Parma, had been further strengthened. It was planned that the navy, under the command of the marquis of Santa Cruz as lord high admiral, would make for the Thames estuary and anchor by Margate; the Spanish ships would then command the Strait of Dover, giving the duke of Parma time and opportunity to land his forces at Thanet. Their path to London would then lie clear. Yet the naval forces were not adequately prepared and the autumn winds began to blow. Philip of Spain had reluctantly to postpone the expedition for more clement weather.

The duke of Parma had not been informed of the delay, and his troops suffered in the rain and freezing conditions upon the hills above Dunkirk. When a letter arrived from the king, remonstrating with him for not launching an invasion, he was naturally irate. He had been told to wait for the arrival of the Spanish fleet. ‘To write to me as if I should have acted already in direct contradiction to your instructions is naturally distressing to me. Do me the signal kindness to tell me what to do, and no difficulty shall stop me, though you bid me cross alone in a barge.’ The disagreement did not bode well for the enterprise. The finances of Spain were ailing. The troops were on short rations. To compound an already difficult situation, Santa Cruz died. His successor, the duke of Medina Sidonia, knew next to nothing about service at sea. Delays and frustrations once more bedevilled the proposed Armada.

News reached England in the spring, however, that the vast preparations were almost complete; the Spanish authorities let it be known that the fleet was destined for the West Indies, but no one was deceived.

On 18 May 1588 the Spanish fleet finally sailed out of the Tagus; but it was scattered by a heavy storm. Medina Sidonia recommended that the expedition be once more postponed. Philip replied that ‘I have dedicated this enterprise to God … Get on then, and do your part.’ So on 12 July the Spaniards set sail again. The church bells of Spain rang out. On board were printed copies of the papal bull confirming Elizabeth’s excommunication and calling on all faithful Catholics to rise up against her. The Armada consisted of approximately 130 large ships of war, carrying 19,000 soldiers and 8,000 sailors. The Spanish, the Italians and the Portuguese made up the various contingents, with the Spanish themselves divided into squadrons of Gallicians, Andalusians, Catalans and Castilians. There were also 600 monks on board, to maintain religious devotion and to care for the wounded. Gambling and swearing were forbidden. All of the Spanish forces were confessed and then received holy communion, in this religious crusade against the heretics. The royal standard of the Armada had, as its motto, ‘Exsurge, Domine, et judicia causam tuam!’ – ‘Rise up, oh Lord, and avenge Thy cause!’ As the fleet sailed for England Philip remained kneeling before the Holy Sacrament, without a cushion, for four hours each day.

The English were now fully aware of the imminent danger. A division of the fleet was watching the harbours under the control of Parma while the principal body made itself ready at Plymouth. The Elizabethan navy consisted of twentyfive fighting galleons, but at this time of peril it was enlarged by other vessels furnished by the city of London and by private individuals. Some other ships and coasters had to be hired. The queen had relied upon Sir Francis Drake and other privateers. It has been estimated that the English fleet consisted of 197 various vessels (not all of which were suitable for combat).

The trained bands and the county militia of England were as prepared as their somewhat rickety organization allowed; they would be joined by the surviving retinues of the nobles, drawn from their major tenants. It was said that 100,000 men were ready to fall to arms, but that may be an overestimate. If they had encountered the duke of Parma and his men, in any case, they would have met the finest military force in Europe. The coastal companies were told to fall back where the enemy landed, removing the corn and the cattle; they were to wait until reinforcements from other companies had arrived. The musters of the Midland armies, 10,000 strong, were to form a separate force in defence of the queen herself.

On 19 July the Spanish fleet was sighted off the Lizard in the Channel. ‘The Spanish Armada,’ Camden wrote, ‘built high like towers and castles, rallied into the form of a crescent whose horn was at least seven miles distant, sailing very slowly though under full sail, as the winds laboured and the ocean sighed under the burden of it.’ When it was sighted from the topmast of the Ark Royal, the crew shouted for joy. The moment of battle between Spain and England had arrived.

The story goes that Drake received the news while playing bowls at Plymouth, only remarking that ‘we have time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too’. The words are probably apocryphal but he may have said something quite like it; he would have to wait for the tide to turn before he made his way out of the harbour. A contemporary observer noted that ‘the country people, forthwith, ran down to the seaside, some with clubs, some with picked staves and pitchforks …’ It is perhaps fortunate that their fighting skills were not tested.

The rest of the world remained neutral, looking on with interest. The Venetians believed that the English would win, and the French merely suggested that they would be able to hold off their enemies at sea. ‘For the love of God,’ the vice-admiral wrote to Whitehall, ‘and our country, let us have with speed some great shot sent us of all bigness.’ On 21 July William Hawkins, mayor of Plymouth, wrote that ‘the Spanish fleet was in view of this town yesterday night and my lord admiral [Lord Howard] passed to the sea before our said view and was out of sight’. The English fleet had the wind on their side and on that Sunday morning a skirmish ensued between the two parties that lasted two hours. Philip’s treasure ship was badly damaged, and was taken by its captors into Dartmouth.

On 23 July the two fleets were off Portland Bill and were engaged in a general struggle; the English had the advantage, with their smaller ships and larger guns. The Spanish vessels wished to close up and grapple with their adversaries, allowing their soldiers to take over the fight. But they were not allowed to come too close. The English relied largely upon seaworthiness and speed. Eventually Medina Sidonia broke off and resumed course to his supposed meeting with the duke of Parma. In the fighting of that day Howard had almost run out of ammunition; there was only store enough for one more large engagement. The Spanish were in worse case; they too were running low on bullets, and their vessels had been more severely damaged. A galleon and a flagship drifted as wrecks to the French coast. For three days, sailing towards Calais, Medina Sidonia sent increasingly urgent messages to the duke of Parma. Meanwhile the English forces were receiving reinforcements from the coastal ports and castles. ‘The enemy pursue me,’ Sidonia told Parma. ‘They fire upon me most days from morning till nightfall; but they will not close and grapple. I have given them every opportunity. I have purposely left ships exposed to tempt them to board; but they decline to do it, and there is no remedy, for they are swift and we are slow.’ So the English were able to drive the Spanish forward ‘like sheep’ until Medina Sidonia reached the haven of Calais.

Yet it was not a haven for long. At midnight on Sunday 28 July, Howard directed eight fire-ships upon the Spanish fleet at anchor; the vessels frantically cut loose their cables before drifting into the sea and the night. On the following morning the Spanish commander collected his fleet together, just off Dunkirk; the English, now seizing their good fortune, went on the attack. The battle of Gravelines was decisive. The English went in among the Spanish, and wrought havoc with their guns and cannon. Three galleons were sunk or captured, along with a host of smaller ships. ‘I will not write unto her majesty before more be done,’ Howard wrote to Walsingham. ‘Their force is wonderful great and strong; and yet we pluck their feathers by little and little.’

The feathers were indeed plucked. The Spanish had already lost eight galleons in the course of the conflict, and many men were dead or dying. No English vessel had suffered any serious harm. The duke of Parma could not move; he was marooned in Nieuport, and the Armada was in no condition to make a rendezvous. The Dutch navy, hostile to Parma, also kept him enclosed. The wind then changed to west-south-west, sending the Spanish fleet away from the shoals into the North Sea. The English had no ammunition left to hinder them but instead ‘put on a brag countenance’ by pursuing them up the coast. On 31 July Sir Francis Drake wrote that ‘we have the army of Spain before us and mind … to wrestle a pull with him … I doubt it not but ere it be long so to handle the matter with the duke of Sidonia as he shall wish himself at St Mary Port among his orange trees.’

It was at this moment that the queen came down from London for the review of the army at Tilbury. She arrived by barge and, as she landed at the blockhouse, the cannon were sounded in her honour. She was met by an escort of 1,000 horse and 2,000 foot, and on the following day she took part in the formal review when she passed among the men ‘like some Amazonian empress’. In her speech she told them that she had been advised to take care of her person, but she scorned any such protection; she could rely on the trust and devotion of her people. She is then supposed to have said that she was resolved ‘to live and die among you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ It is a matter of debate whether she used these precise words but the gist of the speech, recounted later, is no doubt accurate. There was a great shout from her soldiers at the end of the oration. She then retired to Leicester’s tent at noon for her dinner.

The Spanish fleet, battered and defeated, was even then making its way along the Scottish coast. It was noted at the time that the Scottish king had kept his word to the queen and had not even covertly supported Spain; James had told the English ambassador at his court that ‘all the favour he expected from the Spaniards was the courtesy of Polyphemus to Ulysses, that he should be devoured the last’.

When they reached the north coast of Scotland the commanders were ordered to make the best way they could to Spain. Four or five men died each day from starvation, and all the horses were thrown overboard to save water. When the Spanish ships reached the Irish Sea a great storm blew up and threw them against the coast of Ireland. The loss of life by shipwreck was enormous but it was compounded by the loss of life on shore. One Irishman, Melaghin McCabb, boasted that he had dispatched eighty Spaniards with his gallowglass axe. The English ambassador in Paris told his Venetian counterpart that nineteen vessels had been wrecked, with the loss of 7,000 men; other reports put the fatalities higher. Only half of the Armada returned to Spain, less than half of the men. Philip himself remained calm, or impassive. It was, he said, the Lord’s will. Secretly he raged, and vowed on his knees that one day he would subdue England even if he reduced Spain to a desert by the effort.

The celebrations attendant on victory had a more sombre note. In the streets of the Channel ports thousands of sailors were dying of typhus or the scurvy; they had conquered the enemy but they could not vanquish disease. The lord admiral wrote to Burghley, after the destruction of the Armada, that ‘sickness and mortality begins wonderfully to grow among us’ and asked for the resources to purchase food and clothing. But, after the expense of warfare, Elizabeth’s purse was now closed. She left her men to their fate.

Another casualty of the war touched her more deeply. The earl of Leicester, worn out by his campaign in the Netherlands, was ‘troubled with an ague’ that became ‘a continual burning fever’. His death was not greatly mourned by anyone except the queen herself. He was considered incompetent and vainglorious; a contemporary historian, John Stow, wrote that ‘all men, so far as they durst, rejoiced no less outwardly at his death than for the victory lately obtained against the Spaniard’.

Elizabeth kept the last letter he had written to her in a little wooden casket; it was found by her bed after her death. Yet distress at his death did not mitigate her practical temper. He had died indebted to her exchequer and so she ordered his goods to be sold at public auction to reimburse her for loss. There were other rewards. When she sat for her famous ‘Armada’ portrait by George Gower, where she exults in the victory with an imperial crown beside her, she is wearing the pearls that Leicester had bequeathed to her.

On 26 November she was drawn by two white horses in a richly decorated chariot to St Paul’s Cathedral for the final celebration; there had not been such a spectacular procession since her coronation almost thirty years before. In the following year Edmund Spenser completed the first three books of his verse epic The Faerie Queene, in which Elizabeth herself is transmuted into Gloriana.

Towards the end of 1588 a young man ran down the Strand calling out to the people, ‘If you will see the queen, you must come quickly.’ It was said that she was about to appear in the courtyard of Somerset House. So the crowd rushed to the area. It was five in the evening, and already dark, but then in a blaze of torchlight Elizabeth suddenly appeared.

‘God bless you all, my good people!’

‘God save your Majesty!’

‘You may well have a greater Prince, but you shall never have a more loving Prince!’

The queen had been raised to new heights of glory and prestige, but the defeat of the Armada wrought other wonderful consequences. The myth of English sea power now became a more striking aspect of national consciousness, linked as it was to the defeat of Catholicism and the defence of true religion. Drake and Hawkins were new types of Protestant hero, fighting on behalf of national liberty. The papal curse had been lifted in the most striking possible manner. Elizabeth herself wrote to the duke of Florence that ‘it is as clear as daylight that God’s blessing rests upon us, upon our people and our realm, with all the plainest signs of prosperity, peace, obedience, riches, power and increase of our subjects’.

The pope tried to excuse himself by saying that he always knew the Spaniards would be defeated. The Spanish ambassador then congratulated him on his gift of prophecy. The pope merely ‘turned up the whites of his eyes and looked piously towards heaven’. Spain could no longer be considered to be the resolute champion of Catholicism in the world, and the papacy mitigated its own pretensions. The Catholics of England now accommodated themselves to the established Church or were the object of more determined persecution.

The death of Leicester helped to forward the career of another court favourite. Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, was twenty-two years old at the time of the Armada. He had been the ward of Burghley ever since the untimely death of his father in Ireland; Sir Walter Devereux had died of dysentery in 1576. Two years later Leicester had married the widow, the countess of Essex. Leicester was then the stepfather, as well as the godfather, of the young man. So the young Essex was doubly blessed.

He was always restless and ambitious, striving for power as well as for glory. It was said that ‘he was entirely given over to arms and war’; yet he was also eloquent and highly intelligent. He believed, or professed to believe, in the importance of ‘virtue’ in both a martial and an ethical sense; manliness was to be joined with piety, valour with clemency and justice. He pursued what he later called ‘the public use for which we are all born’. He supported the Protestant cause, naturally enough, and was known to favour the more godly sort. He was impulsive and energetic, too, making a contrast with the older and more staid councillors of Elizabeth’s realm. He was ‘soft to take offence and hard to lay it down’; he could ‘conceal nothing’ and ‘carried his love and hatred on his forehead’, and was sometimes the victim of nervous prostration. It has been said that the court was now so changed that it seemed to herald a new reign. In truth it was simply entering a darker and more sequestered phase, of which Essex himself would eventually become the victim.

37

Repent! Repent!

It had not gone unnoticed that a large proportion of the forces that fought the Armada were of a Puritan persuasion. The Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote that ‘the puritan part at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other, that is to say, most ardent, quick, bold, resolute, and to have a great part of the best captains and soldiers on their side, a point of no small moment’.

The Puritans could now muster a considerable following in the country, especially after the defeat of the papists at sea, and it is certain that they commanded the loyalty of many members of the Commons. Their strength had already emerged two years previously, in the parliament of 1586; the Commons introduced several bills to curb the power and authority of the bishops, at which point the archbishop of Canterbury wrote in alarm to the queen. She had many times in the past warned parliament not to meddle in religious affairs. She now sent a message to the Commons reprimanding them for disobeying her and for venturing upon her supremacy. She commanded the Speaker ‘to see that no bills concerning reform in ecclesiastical causes be exhibited and, if they were exhibited, not to read them’. ‘Specifically,’ the Speaker told the Commons, ‘you are commanded by Her Majesty to take heed that none care be given or time afforded the wearisome solicitations of those that commonly be called Puritans …’

But the Commons refused to be cowed and introduced a petition to abolish all existing laws that concerned ecclesiastical government. A ‘new directory for prayer’ was also proposed as a replacement for the familiar liturgy. No more sweeping measure had ever been put forward by a parliament, and it suggested that the Puritan cause was now being asserted in a more forceful and methodical manner. Yet it had reached its apogee and would now recede.

On a motion for the reading of the new directory the Speaker declared that the sovereign had already commanded the members to keep silence on religion. He predicted her severe displeasure and, sure enough, another message from the palace reached him. She ordered him to send her the petition and the book, but she also dispatched several of the more zealous MPs to prison. ‘I fear me,’ one of the members complained, ‘we shall come shortly to this, that to do God and her Majesty good service shall be accounted Puritanism.’ It was another phase in the relationship between sovereign and parliament.

The Puritan cause was further advertised in a series of tracts. The Martin Marprelate tracts, as they came to be known, were written anonymously; ‘Martin’ launched a series of attacks, in seven separate works, upon ‘petty antichrists, proud prelates, intolerable withstanders of reformation, enemies of the gospel and covetous wretched priests’. Yet ‘Martin’ was witty and animated as well as being pugnacious; he addressed the ecclesiastical hierarchy as ‘right poisoned, persecuting, and terrible priests. My horned masters, your government is antichristian; your cause is desperate; your grounds are ridiculous.’ He wished to undermine the bishops by portraying them as simply absurd. ‘I will spare [bishop] John of London for this time, for it may be he is at bowls and it is pity to trouble my good brother, lest he should swear too bad …’

In response the supporters of the established Church published tracts with titles such as ‘A Sound Box on the Ear for the Idiot Martin to hold his Peace’ and ‘A Whip for the Ape. Martin Displayed’. One of them was reported to be ‘printed between the sky and the ground, within a mile of an oak, and not many fields off from the unprivileged press of the ass-signees of Martin junior’. Richard Bancroft, treasurer of St Paul’s who was later to become archbishop of Canterbury, accused the Puritan party of promoting schism and dissension within the Church. ‘Her majesty is depraved [abused]. Her authority is impugned and great dangers are threatened. Civil government is called into question. Princes’ prerogatives are curiously scanned.’ The Puritan party was close to becoming a Church within the Church, with all the rivalries that implied.

The Martin and anti-Martin texts represented the high point of acrimony in Protestant debate, and we may date from this time the portrayal of Puritans on the Elizabethan stage as figures of fun; in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Malvolio, a ‘sort of Puritan’ according to Maria, anticipates by twelve years Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. ‘Down with Dagon, down with Dagon … I will no longer endure your profanations … that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam, nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam; an exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rhymers, and morris-dancers …’

The Marprelate texts in particular soon became the talk of London, while enormous efforts were made to hunt down the writer and the printer. One secret press was discovered in Northamptonshire, but others escaped detection. Some of those involved were found before being fined or imprisoned, but the identity of ‘Martin Marprelate’ is still not certainly known. His high spirits and inventiveness, however, may have been a mark of desperation. There now seemed to be little chance that the principles of Puritanism would have any effect upon the Elizabethan polity. Marprelate’s levity may have been a sign that there was little left to lose.

The godly found in Archbishop Whitgift a profound and determined enemy. ‘The name Puritan’, he wrote, ‘is very aptly given to these men not because they be pure … but because they think themselves to be mundiores ceteris, more pure than others.’ Throughout 1589 and 1590 the leaders of the Puritan cause were arrested and silenced. Some were even imprisoned for refusing to take the ex-officio oath; they refused to swear that, in a court of religion, they would answer all questions truthfully. It was a form of self-entrapment. In the spring of 1589 the members of the High Commission, the authorities on religious matters, delivered an injunction that no London parish should allow the preaching of the stricter sort. One of the leading Puritans, Thomas Cartwright, was imprisoned in the Fleet and eventually came before the Star Chamber. As a contemporary noted in the following year, ‘these sharp proceedings make that sect greatly diminish’.

So it had come to this. The Puritans in parliament had proved unable to advance their cause and to secure further reformation. The Puritan presses were one by one closed down, and the hunt for the Marprelate presses had become a general pursuit of the Puritan movement. There followed a decade which has been called one of stabilization or normalization, in which orthodox pieties came to the fore, but it may be more accurately seen as a time of secret and silent antagonism played out in various churches and meeting places. Puritanism ceased to be a public movement or campaign, but instead retreated to the confines of the household or the soul of the individual in the hope that better times might follow. The cause of the godly was indeed revived at the beginning of the next reign.

Yet the religious aspirations of the minority must be set against the neutrality or indifference of the population. A report was sent from Lancashire to the privy council in which it was asserted that the churches were still largely empty and that the county contained ‘multitudes of bastards and drunkards’. This could be the condition of England at any time. The preachers were few, and the parsons unlearned, but in any case the preachers were not needed for lack of auditors. The churches ‘generally lie ruinous, unrepaired, and unfurnished’ while the chapels of ease, built for those who could not easily attend the parish church, ‘are many of them utterly destitute of any curates, and thereby grow into utter ruine and desolation’. The people ‘swarm in the streets and alehouses during service-time’. Many of these people were in fact unreformed Catholics who delighted in ‘wakes, ales, greenes, May games, rushbearings, bearbaits, doveales etcetera’. Those who did attend the services were often prompted by convention rather than devotion; they talked, made jokes, or slept during the ceremonies.

Others were simply weary of religious dissension and doctrinal debate; they were secularists in the sense that they wished for stability and security above all else. Immune from enthusiasm of any kind, they were not particularly interested in any new form of Protestant spirituality. If they conformed to the current religion it was simply because they were obliged so to do. Thus the Anglican Church, as it would become known, was slowly being established.

‘Repent! Repent!’ The call went up in the streets of London. A yeoman named Hackett had proclaimed himself to be king of Europe and the New Messiah. ‘Tell them in the City that Christ Jesus is come with his fan in his hand to judge the earth. And if any man ask you where he is, tell them he is at Walker’s house by Broken Wharf!’ He also said that Elizabeth had forfeited her crown. He soon reached the gallows where he cried out with his dying breath for God to deliver him from his enemies. ‘If not,’ he said, ‘I will fire the heavens and tear Thee from Thy Throne with my hands.’ The spectators, horrified, called out for his disembowelment to be protracted. It is a vignette of the Elizabethan world.

Philip II, despite the destruction of the Armada, was still a most powerful enemy. He controlled an empire that must count as one of the most splendid in human history; he ruled Spain, Portugal and much of the Netherlands; he commanded Milan and Sicily while many of the states of Italy were wholly dependent upon him. He was the sovereign of the Philippines as well as the coastal settlements of Malabar and Coromandel. He was lord of the spice islands of Indonesia. And of course he was the master of the New World on both sides of the equator. The gold of the Americas meant that his revenue was ten times as large as that of Elizabeth. He had a standing army of 50,000 men, where Elizabeth had none. The emperor of Germany was a member of Philip’s House of Habsburg. France was divided by religious schism.

Sir John Puckering, the lord keeper, addressed both Houses of Parliament on the naval power of the Spanish king five years after the Armada; he warned the members that ‘how great soever he was before, he is now thereby manifestly more great … He keepeth a navy armed to impeach all trade of merchandise from England to Gascoigne and Guinea.’

Yet this was the power that England now dared to provoke and abuse. In the spring of 1589 Drake conceived a scheme to strike at Portugal. Elizabeth became a shareholder in what was essentially a joint-stock company; she had neither the money nor the men to equip an armada of her own. The fleet was supposed to sail against Santander but instead made its way to Corunna, where it delayed for a fortnight. Its commanders also failed to provide adequate supplies.

In May they set sail for Lisbon, against orders, and were joined on the way by the young earl of Essex; the English were hoping that the Portuguese would rise against their new Spanish masters. But the attack on Lisbon proved to be a failure, and the anticipated insurrection never took place. It was reported at the time that 6,000 men had perished on ‘this miserable action’, as one captain called it; of the 1,100 gentlemen on board, only 350 returned. Elizabeth was by now thoroughly displeased and ordered the recall of Essex.

The expedition, promising so much and achieving so little, made its way back to Plymouth. Drake remained in disgrace for some years. He had alarmed Philip of Spain without causing him much damage, thus achieving the worst of both worlds. The maritime future for the rest of the queen’s reign was confined to private raids for the capture of booty; privateering thereby became a business, with syndicates of shareholders and freely available capital resources.

Sir Richard Hawkins has left a very interesting set of notes on the campaign against the Spanish navy; his Observations recall a journey into the South Sea in 1593. Of the scurvy, for example, he reports that the disease can be deduced ‘by the swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a man’s finger … others show it with their laziness, others complain of the crick of the back etcetera’. He records ‘the seething of the meat in salt water’ and the corruption of victuals by ‘the vapours of the sea’.

By means of his observations we get closer to the real nature of sea warfare in the sixteenth century. He notes, for example, the obstinacy of the English sailors who ‘apprehending a conceit in their imaginations, neither experiment, knowledge, examples, reasons nor authority can alter or remove them from their conceited opinions’. When he labours to convince them they were wrong in wishing to attack two Spanish ships, they ‘break out, some into vaunting and bragging, some into reproaches of want of courage, others into wishings that they had never come out of their country’.

Hawkins warns other commanders not to trust their men in the extremities of battle. Too much wine, for example, ‘infused desperate and foolish hardiness in many who blinded with the fume of liquor, considered not of any danger, but thus and thus would stand at hazard; some in vainglory vaunting themselves; some others railing upon the Spaniards; another inviting a companion to come and stand by him, and not to budge a foot from him; which indiscreetly they put in execution, and cost the lives of many a good man’.

It is the folly of the English sailor to prefer to fight without armour. The Spaniard, being of more temperate and sober disposition, was happy to don armour in order to protect himself. But the English cast it off, ‘choosing rather to be shot through with a bullet, or lanced through with a pike, or thrust through with a sword, than to endure a little travail and suffering’. In some sea battles, Hawkins reports, ‘I have seen the splinters kill and hurt many at once, and yet the shot to have passed through without touching any person’.

He condemns those who denounce the English sailors as pirates, since ‘the English have neither peace nor truce with Spain; but war; and therefore not to be accounted pirates. Besides Spain broke the peace with England, and not England with Spain; and that by Embargo, which of all kinds of defiances is most reproved and of least reputation …’

The temporary disgrace of Essex did little to calm the fevered atmosphere at court, and in the summer of 1589 one observer remarked that ‘there was never in court such emulation, such envy, such back-biting as is now at this time’. Still in the ascendant was Burghley. As a clerk of the signet put it to a suitor, ‘Old Saturnus is a melancholy and wayward planet, but yet predominant here, and if you have turn thus to do, it must be done that way; and whatsoever hope you have of any other, believe it or not.’ Burghley was also actively and assiduously promoting the prospects of his son, Robert Cecil, who at the times of his father’s incapacity through illness took on much of the business of government. He was of uncommon appearance. One contemporary described him as ‘a slight, crooked, hump-back young gentleman, dwarfish in stature, but with a face not irregular in feature, and thoughtful and subtle in expression, with reddish hair, a thin tawny beard and large, pathetic greenish-coloured eyes, with a mind and manners already trained to courts and cabinet’. The queen called him ‘my elf ’ or ‘my pigmy’.

Cecil and Essex had both been brought up in the household of Lord Burghley, one as son and one as ward, but they continually quarrelled with each other. Their rivalry became all the more strenuous after the death of Elizabeth’s trusted servant Walsingham, in the spring of 1590. Essex favoured an aggressive foreign policy that supported the cause of international Protestantism; Cecil and his father preferred to pursue a more defensive strategy, with the aim of keeping Spain at arm’s length. Essex represented noble and martial valour; Cecil was essentially a career courtier. War for Essex was a form of sport or game; for Cecil it was a source of expense and danger.

So they were rivals for power and for the queen’s favour. It was not a competition that the impulsive Essex could ever win. One of his retainers wrote that ‘Sir Robert Cecil goeth and cometh very often between London and the Court, so that he comes out with his hands full of papers and head full of matter, and so occupied passeth through the presence [chamber] like a blind man, not looking upon any’. This was a courtier upon whom the queen could rely. Soon enough he was knighted and appointed as a member of the privy council. More than any other man he would control the last years of her reign.

38

The setting sun

The queen asked her carver, at dinner, what was in a certain covered dish. ‘Madame,’ he replied, ‘it is a coffin.’ A ‘coffin’ was then the word for a certain type of pie.

‘Are you such a fool,’ she shouted at him, ‘to give a pie such a name?’ She was now approaching her sixtieth year, and becoming fearful of her mortality. Her eyes had sunk a little, and she had lost teeth on the left side of her mouth that sometimes made her diction blurred and indistinct; her skin was plastered white and her wigs were a deep red. In 1593 she began to translate from sixth-century Latin The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, perhaps as an antidote to the signs of weariness and age all around her.

Over the years she had acquired more expertise than anyone around her. When one of her servants ventured to speak to her about the affairs of the Netherlands, she rebuked him: ‘Tush, Brown! I know more than thou doest.’ And when he made a remark about France she again interrupted him: ‘Tush, Brown! Do not I know?’

The earl of Essex had at last been called to her privy council. He had recruited two very brilliant brothers, Francis and Anthony Bacon, to advise him on matters of state. Anthony Bacon had previously been in the employ of Walsingham, and had established a network of agents across the continent working in the Protestant cause. So Essex could supply the queen with useful information. He believed that astute patronage materially increased his power. Yet he found it impossible to break into the inward circle of influence represented by Burghley and his son. In time this would breed resentment and suspicion.

Elizabeth had governed for the last four years without a parliament, but her depleted treasury needed the supply of fresh revenue. So she summoned an assembly for the middle of February 1593, when she told them through the mouth of her chancellor ‘that they were not called together to make new laws, or lose good hours in idle speeches, but to vote a supply to enable her Majesty to defend her realm against the hostile attempts of the king of Spain’.

The Commons then made their customary request for freedom of speech as well as liberty from arrest. She granted the request with the significant comment that ‘wit and speech were calculated to do harm, and their liberty of speech extended no further than “ay” or “no” ’. The Commons then proceeded to defy her attempt to silence discussion by framing a petition that she should settle the question of royal succession. She sent the two members responsible to the Fleet prison. As she grew older, she became more despotic.

Parliament now bowed to the inevitable, and voted the subsidies to her exchequer as well as passing a bill ‘for keeping her Majesty’s subjects in better obedience’. Having demonstrated the power of her will, she dismissed them on 10 April with a speech in which she mentioned the proposed invasion by the king of Spain. ‘I am informed, when he attempted this last measure, some upon the sea-coast forsook their towns, leaving all naked and exposed to his entrance. But I swear unto you, by God, if I knew those persons, or may know them hereafter, I will make them know what it is to be fearful in so urgent a cause.’ In her contempt, she could be magnificent.

She also made an important statement about her purpose in the management of foreign affairs: ‘It may be thought simplicity in me that all this time of my reign I have not sought to advance my territories and enlarge my dominions; for opportunity hath served me to do it … And I must say, my mind was never to invade my neighbours, or to usurp over any; I am contented to reign over mine own and to rule as a just prince.’ She was making an implicit contrast between herself and the Spanish king. Her central aim was simply peace at home and security from foreign threat.

The bill that parliament had passed for ‘better obedience’ was designed to curb the activities of papists and sectaries. Attendance at conventicles and unlawful assemblies was now considered to be the equivalent of hearing Mass, so that Catholic recusants and the more fervent Protestants were equally liable to imprisonment. It was also enacted that anyone over the age of sixteen who refused to attend public worship over the space of a month should be imprisoned; a second offence would result in banishment from the realm; a refusal, or a return from banishment, would be punished by death. It was further enacted that no Catholic should stray more than 5 miles from his or her residence. For papists England had become a kind of open prison.

This assault upon Catholics and Puritans alike is the appropriate context for the most important religious treatise of the period. Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity – the first four books of which were published in 1594 – is an eloquent and magisterial account of what may be described as the middle way of England’s settlement.

He declared that much religious controversy was over things of no account. He rebuked the Puritans for their excessive reliance on Scripture, which was a standard for doctrine but not a rule for discipline. It was not necessary to follow the practice of the apostles as an invariable model. The English Church, like other forms of human society, may make the laws for its own government as long as they are not contrary to Scripture, and human authority may intervene where Scripture is silent. The Puritan belief in sola scriptura – that the Bible contains all that is needed for salvation – was unwarranted. The Church may therefore institute its own ceremonies. All those born within the domain or district of an established Church should conform to it. It was the mother of all.

The visible Church was not perfect – it must of necessity contain sinners as well as saints – but it existed in an imperfect world. The pursuit of certainty on matters that could not be adequately understood in this life was not fruitful; debates on predestination were unnecessary and harmful, since the truth could never be revealed on earth. The congregation of worshippers must depend upon prayer, and the sacraments, as the fortifications of their faith. These were the foundations of the community.

As to the Calvinism of Geneva, Hooker remarked that ‘our persuasion is, that no age ever had knowledge of it but only ours; that they which defend it devised it; that neither Christ nor his Apostles at any time taught it, but the contrary’. He granted that the Church of Rome was still part of the family of Jesus Christ but one defiled ‘by gross and grievous abominations’; the English Church was the true Church purged of this dross.

He stated further that Church and State make up the fundamentals of the Commonwealth, and that both must accord with the natural law of God as understood by the general reason of humankind. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is not explicitly announced in the Bible, and must be deduced from the act of reasoning. These interacting societies, of Church and State, may thereby both be ruled by the Christian prince. The community of Christians is a visible Church, held together by prayer and sacramental worship. Hooker, then, provides the foundation for the Church of England. Anglicanism really did not exist before the advent of his work.

Thomas Fuller, in his Church History of Britain, written two generations later, remarked that ‘Mr Hooker’s voice was low, stature little, gesture none at all; standing stone-still in the pulpit, as if the posture of his body were the emblem of his mind, immovable in his opinions’.

Essex, with the assistance of the brothers Bacon, was now in command of all intelligence. He was in fact instrumental in uncovering another plot against the queen. António, the claimant to the Portugese throne, had taken refuge in England. When it was discovered that some of his supporters were selling secrets to the Spaniards, Essex was asked to investigate. In the course of his enquiries he discovered, or professed to discover, that Rodrigo Lopez, the queen’s Portuguese physician, was seeking to poison her. Although Lopez outwardly conformed as a Protestant, he was in fact a Jew; the suspicion of him was therefore part of that anti-Semitic atmosphere in which Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta thrived.

Robert Cecil, who in important matters was not inclined to support Essex, informed the queen that there was no evidence against her doctor. Whereupon Elizabeth called Essex ‘a rash and temerarious youth’. In the face of this reproof Essex redoubled his efforts in the determination to justify himself. That is when he uncovered the plot. Lopez was taken to the Tower where, under torture, he confessed his guilt. He was sentenced to death. Essex had therefore acquired the additional glory of saving the life of his mistress; in the words of a contemporary, he had ‘won the spurs and saddle also’.

Yet all the glory in the world could not conceal a rising sense of disquiet at Elizabeth’s councillors. In the last five years of the sixteenth century a disastrous series of harvests was responsible for an extraordinary rise in the price of essential commodities. The four successive years from 1594 witnessed the worst living conditions of the Elizabethan era, and the price of flour tripled from 1594 to 1597. In the latter year real wages plunged lower than at any time since 1260. The proportion of families without sufficient land to feed themselves was growing all the time; the number of vagrants, forced to wander in order to find work, also increased. Many people did not have enough money to buy food; the dearth caused famine, and created the conditions for diseases such as typhus and dysentery on a wider scale than had previously been seen in the country. The records for the city of Newcastle, in the autumn of 1597, record the burial at municipal expense of twentyfive ‘poor folks who died for want in the streets’. This is the context for Titania’s complaint to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed at some point in 1595 or 1596:

The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock.

It was therefore a time of general unrest and disaffection. The mayor of Norwich received an anonymous letter in 1595 warning him that 60,000 London craftsmen were waiting for the call to rise in revolt. In the summer of that year Sir Thomas Wilford was appointed as provost-marshal of London with orders to seize any riotous people and, according to the justice of martial law, to execute them openly and speedily on the gallows. This was a case of the royal prerogative overturning the principles of common law.

An Essex labourer was arrested for complaining that corn was being taken on ships and sold to the enemy. ‘I will be one of them that shall rise and gather a company of eight or nine score and will go to fetch it out … and if we were such a company gathered together, who can withstand us?’ A Kentish man said that ‘he hoped to see such a war in this realm to afflict the rich men of this country to requite their hardness of heart towards the poor’. In the autumn of 1596 the earl of Bath wrote to the privy councillors that they should order the gentry of Devon to return to their estates ‘to be at hand to stay the fury of the inferior multitude, if they should happen to break out in a sudden outcry for want of relief, as without good circumspection they may and will do’. A rising in Oxfordshire, in 1596, was led by an instigator who declared ‘it will never be well until the gentry are knocked down’.

With the genuine fear of insurrection in the air, a steady increase in criminal indictments is evident in the 1590s. The ‘inferior multitude’ was regularly being castigated now for being feckless and idle, with the threat from below adding to a general mood of pessimism that is evident in the last years of the queen’s reign. By the end of the decade a body of Poor Law legislation had been enacted that placed the burden of responsibility for the poor upon the parish, with the costs of maintaining the distressed and the unemployed to be provided by a parish poor rate. The justices of the peace were to nominate ‘overseers’ of the poor who were also to run the parish workhouse. This framework of social legislation became an important aspect of national life for 250 years, remaining in place until the new Poor Law of 1834. It may have been one of the principal reasons for the absence of a social or political revolution; it represented a bedrock of stability.

The queen and her council were nevertheless at the time blamed for indecision and misgovernment. Thomas Wilson, in a collection of papers entitled The State of England Anno Dom. 1600, complained that the privy councillors ‘suffer very few to be acquainted with matters of state for fear of divulging it, whereby their practices are subject to be revealed, and therefore they will suffer few to rise to places of reputation’. And in truth the queen was growing old. In this year, 1596, she reached the feared climacteric of sixty-three years. Bishop Rudd, of St Davids, preached the Lenten sermon before her, in which he congratulated her for her good fortune in living so long. He delivered some reflections on sacred arithmetic, with seven times nine leading to sixty-three. He also quoted the passage describing old age in Scripture ‘when the grinders cease because they are few and those that look out of the windows be darkened’.

Elizabeth was not amused. She opened the window in her private oratory when the sermon was over and told him that ‘he should have kept his arithmetic to himself ’. But then, she added, ‘I see that the greatest clerks are not the wisest men.’ A few days later, at court, ‘she thanked God that neither her stomach, nor strength, nor her voice for singing, nor fingering for instruments, nor, lastly, her sight was any whit decayed’. She refused to allow court painters to use shade in any portraits of her since shade ‘was an accident and not naturally existent in the face’. The privy council now forbade the circulation of any unauthorized portraits. Any paintings that depicted her as in any sense old, ‘to her great offence’, were cast into ovens. Nicholas Hilliard was commissioned to produce a formalized or mask-like visage that could be copied by those less skilful. English art was still essentially conservative. The mood is caught in Francis Davison’s poetical rhapsody:

Time’s young hours attend her still,

And her eyes and cheeks do fill,

With fresh youth and beauty …

Still the shadows were growing longer. Her long-serving courtiers were dying around her; in this year, for example, Puckering, the lord keeper, Sir Francis Knollys, and Lord Hunsdon, were taken from her service to the grave. It was against this background that Essex helped to plan a great expedition against Cadiz, in order to singe the beard of the king of Spain once more. It was said that he had grown tired of life at court, surrounded by old men. His sister described him as ‘the Weary Knight’, since he was ‘always weary and longing for the change’. It was within his power to renew the energy, and revive the honour, of the court.

At the beginning of June 1596, a large English armada left England for Spanish waters; a total of eighty-two ships was under the command of three men, one of whom was Essex. The French king, Henry IV, joked that Elizabeth would not want Essex to be very far from her petticoats. There was some truth in that. She was never very convinced by his assertion of martial prowess. But in fact the expedition to Cadiz was a great success; the Spaniards were taken entirely by surprise, and the city was seized in a swift assault. Essex had intended to remain there indefinitely but the problem of supplies obliged him to return with his forces to England.

Another prize was won. The authorities of Cadiz were forced to sink the Spanish fleet in their harbour, for fear of its falling into the hands of the enemy; the cost to Philip of Spain amounted to 12 million ducats. It had been a great victory, reinforcing England’s claim to mastery of the sea. Essex became the hero of the hour to everyone except the queen, who remarked that the expedition had been more of an ‘action of honour and victory against the enemy and particular spoil to the army than any profitable to ourself ’. She was not at all interested in martial glory; she wanted the Spanish gold that had been distributed among the successful English troops, and she was furious that Essex had not reserved it for her. She was heard to remark that previously she had done his pleasure, but now she would teach him to do hers.

So Essex was still sensitive to the point of distraction. When Lord Howard of Effingham was created earl of Nottingham, with a citation of his services in Cadiz, Essex perceived a slight to himself. He raged furiously at the honour and asked the queen to rescind it. His protégé, Francis Bacon, counselled him to mitigate his temper. The queen would otherwise regard him as ‘a man of nature not to be ruled, that hath the advantage of my affection and knoweth it’. That is why she continued to favour his great rival. At the very time of the Cadiz operation, Robert Cecil was appointed to be her secretary of state.

It became clear that Essex was no longer her pre-eminent favourite, but just one among her councillors in a court that was described as ‘dangerously poisoned with the secret stings of smiling enemies’. Her principal councillor was still Lord Burghley, but he was growing old. He was reported by the French ambassador to be ‘very proud and presuming in his words’; he possessed ‘a kind of crossing or wayward manner’ with ‘a tone of choler’.

Elizabeth herself seems naturally to have become more irate. In the spring of 1597 one courtier, William Fenton, reported that the queen ‘seemeth more forward than commonly she used to bear herself towards her women, nor doth she hold them in discourse with such familiar matter, but often chides for small neglects, in such wise as to make these fair maids often cry and bewail in piteous sort’.

One of these ‘fair maids’, Lady Mary Howard, had a gown that threatened to rival those of the queen in its finery. Elizabeth sent for the dress and secretly put it on. It was too short for her. She went into one of the household chambers and asked the ladies ‘how they liked her new-fancied suit’. She was met by an embarrassed silence, and she went up to Lady Mary herself and asked her ‘if it was not made too short and unbecoming’. The lady agreed. ‘Why then,’ she said, ‘if it become not me, by being too short, I am minded it shall never become thee, as being too fine; so it fitteth neither well.’ The gown was never worn again.

She showed her anger, too, against the ambassador from Poland at an audience in 1597. In an address to her he seems to have been more bombastic than suited the company, and as a result she stormed at him. Cecil reported to Essex that ‘her Majesty made one of the best answers ex tempore in Latin that ever I heard’. She began with ‘Expectavi orationem, mihi vero querelam adduxisti!’ – ‘I expected an oration. But you have brought a complaint against me!’ ‘Surely,’ she went on to say, ‘I can hardly believe that if the king himself were present, he would use such language!’ And so she harangued him. At the end she paused and then turned to her court. ‘God’s death, my lords, I have been enforced this day to scour up my old Latin, that hath long lain rusting.’ ‘God’s death’ was an oath she used frequently in these days.

A French envoy from Henry IV was given an audience with her, and he reported that ‘all the time she spoke she would often rise from her chair and appear to be very impatient with what I was saying; she would complain that the fire was hurting her eyes, though there was a great screen before it and she six or seven feet away, yet did she give orders to have it extinguished’. Yet still she maintained her regimen of daily exercise. She would ride or walk every day, even in the rain or frost. Her ladies, careful of their own health as well as that of their mistress, asked Whitgift to intervene. The archbishop implored the queen to stay within doors during inclement weather, but she paid no regard to his advice.

The Spanish danger had not passed with the success of the mission against Cadiz. Philip of Spain dispatched a new armada a month or two after that city’s fall; it was supposed to sail to Ireland where it would assist the rebels there. But the storms of Cape Finisterre ended the expedition. Elizabeth was now thoroughly discomfited and in 1597 ordered a new attack, led by Essex and the newly ennobled Nottingham, designed to scatter the Spanish fleet and to intercept the treasure ships in the Azores. The expedition did not altogether go as planned, however, and the English never came near the Spanish gold that escaped them with impunity. They returned in October, but were able before reaching shore to turn back another armada against England that Philip had launched in a last gamble. Her relief that the threat of invasion had been lifted was matched only by her anger with Essex for failing to take the treasure. He was caught in a cycle of defeat and dismay that would soon have disastrous consequences.

39

A disobedient servant

One day in the summer of 1598 a few close courtiers were closeted with the queen, discussing who should be the next lord lieutenant of Ireland; that country was in a state of revolt, and needed careful handling. In the royal closet that day were Essex, Howard, Cecil and one or two others. Elizabeth named Sir William Knollys for the post. Essex, knowing that the choice had been suggested by Cecil, opposed it with great bluster and vehemence. The queen made a sarcastic comment of some kind and Essex, offended and with a contemptuous expression upon his face, gave mortal offence by turning his back upon her. The queen, telling him to ‘go and be hanged’, boxed his ears.

Essex then grasped his sword-hilt. Howard rushed between them, and thereby prevented the earl from drawing his sword against his sovereign; it would have been a capital offence. Essex swore an oath, however, ‘that he would not have taken that blow from King Henry, her father, and that it was an indignity that he could nor would endure from anyone’. He muttered some words about ‘a king in petticoats’ before rushing from the royal presence and withdrawing from the court.

The chancellor, Egerton, implored him to write a letter of submission to the queen. But he demurred, stating that ‘if the vilest of indignities is done to me, does religion enforce me to sue for pardon? Cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Let Solomon’s fool laugh when he is stricken …’ He now raged even more furiously against Robert Cecil, demanding of Lord Cobham, for example, ‘to declare myself either his only or friendly to Mr Secretary, and his enemy; protesting that there could be no neutrality’. To create factions, however, was to risk the dangers of isolation.

This was the period in which Lord Burghley was dying. Elizabeth sent one of her ladies for news of him every day, bearing with her a cordial. She said that ‘she did entreat heaven daily for his longer life, else would her people, nay herself, stand in need of cordials too’. Her ‘saucy godson’, John Harrington, observed that ‘the lord treasurer’s distemper doth marvellously trouble the queen’. He died, at the age of seventy-seven, on 4 August. Harrington also reports that ‘the queen’s highness doth often speak of him in tears, and turn aside when he is discoursed of, nay, even forbiddeth his name to be mentioned in the council’.

In the following month Philip II, king of Spain, died covered with putrefying sores. So in quick succession the two men who helped to define Elizabeth’s reign were gone. Elizabeth, however, did not necessarily replace her deceased councillors. They had now been reduced to ten, only half the number who had surrounded her at the beginning of her rule. Essex himself did not appear at court for five months after his precipitate withdrawal; he returned, in the autumn of the year, when he wished once more to display his martial skills. Ireland was in the balance. A native revolt, led by Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, had ambushed an English army sent out to defeat him; as a result the territory held by the English was left undefended. No English estate was safe and most of the settlers fled. Only Leinster remained to the English Crown. It was considered to be ‘the greatest loss and dishonour the queen hath in her time’.

Essex now saw his opportunity of redeeming himself in her eyes, and he sent her a letter offering his services. Before he received a reply he had hurried to London, but the queen refused to see him. ‘I stay in this place,’ he said, ‘for no other purpose but to attend your commandments.’ ‘Tell the earl,’ she replied, ‘that I value myself as at great a price as he values himself.’ A period of silence was followed by tense negotiations in which Essex finally received the post he had requested, that of lord deputy of Ireland. One courtier wrote that ‘if the Lord Deputy performs in the field what he hath promised in the council, all will be well …’

The relations between the sovereign and the earl were still strained, however, and the easy affection of earlier years did not return. They argued over the size of the army to be sent to Ireland. At one moment of low spirits he wrote that ‘how much so ever Her Majesty despiseth me, she shall know she hath lost him who, for her sake, would have thought danger a sport and death a feast’. True to his mercurial temper, he even thought of abandoning the idea of Ireland altogether. Yet he knew well enough that ‘his honour could not stand without undertaking it’.

At the end of March 1599, he set off with an army of 16,000 men, the largest ever to be dispatched to Ireland. He had decided to attack Tyrone in the north, both by sea and by land; unfortunately both ships and horses were in short supply and so, while awaiting reinforcements, he launched an expedition against Munster and Limerick. He occupied two months in this pursuit but achieved very little. Elizabeth was now growing impatient; time, for her, meant money. She was also angry at Essex for appointing the earl of Southampton to be the general of his horse, against the queen’s express order; he had also exercised his right of making knights, which she deemed to be a privilege reserved for herself. Was he trying to become a king? Elizabeth sent a peremptory letter to him, ordering him to seek out the principal enemy. Why was Tyrone, ‘a base bush kern’, now accounted to be ‘so famous a rebel’?

So at her instigation he marched north with 4,000 men to confront Tyrone. The Irish leader countered with a much larger force and, at a ford on the River Lagan, Essex agreed to meet him for a private conference without the presence of witnesses. It is therefore not known what was discussed or agreed but, when the reports of the meeting reached London, the enemies of Essex were only happy to spread rumours of treachery. Tyrone and Essex had indeed agreed a truce, but the rest is silence. He now persisted in disobeying her commands. He had been ordered to remain with his men, but on 24 September he left Dublin and sailed back to England.

As he had feared and anticipated, his ill-omened expedition had been beset by rumour and suspicion at court. His enemies had taken advantage of his absence to spread malicious reports about his conduct. Even before he left Ireland he wrote a querulous letter to his mistress. ‘But why do I talk of victory or success? Is it not known that from England I have received nothing but discomfort and soul’s wounds? Is it not spoken in the army that Your Majesty’s favour is diverted from me and that already you do bode ill both to me and to it?’

It was said that he planned to stay in Ireland at the head of his troops until the queen’s death; he could then return as the conquering hero. The queen herself believed that he had colluded with Tyrone. She told Francis Bacon that ‘his proceedings were not without some private end of his own’. Some of the rivals of Essex had also prospered in his absence. The queen promoted Robert Cecil to be master of the Court of Wards, a lucrative post that Essex himself had hoped to occupy. Cecil’s older brother became president of the council in the north, another enviable position.

Essex was anxious to reach the court, now at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, as quickly as possible. Four days after his departure from Dublin he arrived at the palace and ran to the privy chamber, where Elizabeth was ‘newly up, her hair about her face’. Essex knelt before her while they conducted a conversation that seemed to comfort him. Yet her mood changed to anger after his departure. When her godson, John Harrington, knelt before her she complained ‘By God’s Son, I am no queen! That man is above me! Who gave him command to come here so soon? I did send him on other business.’

Essex was summoned before the privy council and questioned by Robert Cecil about his conduct in Ireland. The councillors accused him of disobeying the queen’s direct orders and deserting his command in Ireland; he was berated for making too many ‘idle’ knights, and for intruding without permission into the queen’s bedchamber. His responses were then relayed to the queen, who said that she ‘would pause and consider of his answers’. He was meanwhile committed to the charge of the lord keeper at York House while the queen herself removed to Richmond. A contemporary, Rowland Whyte, wrote that the servants of Essex ‘are afraid to meet in any place, to make merry, lest it might be ill taken’. Meanwhile the enemies of Essex dined happily together.

A courtier wrote, in the autumn of 1599, that ‘it is a very dangerous time here, for the heads of both factions being here a man cannot tell how to govern himself towards them. For here is such observation and prying into men’s actions that I hold them happy and blessed that live away.’ It was Whyte again who named the members of the factions. With Sir Robert Cecil were the earls of Shrewsbury and Nottingham and the lords Howard and Cobham, together with Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir George Carew. With the earl of Essex were the earls of Southampton, Worcester and Rutland, together with the lords Mountjoy and Rich. It might be surmised, therefore, that the queen’s grasp upon the life of her court was not as firm as it once had been. The courtiers were no longer a coherent body following her will.

By the beginning of 1600 the temperature of the court was rising. Somebody had scrawled on Cecil’s door ‘here lieth the Toad’. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a letter to Cecil in which he warned him not to be ‘mild’ with Essex. ‘The less you make him, the less he shall be able to harm you and yours; and if her Majesty’s favour fail him, he will again decline to a common person …’ Essex in turn wrote to Elizabeth that ‘as if I were thrown into a corner like a dead carcass, I am gnawed on and torn by the basest creatures upon the earth’. When in February Mountjoy was sent to Ireland in place of Essex, Francis Bacon argued to the queen that his master was still the person most fitted for the service. ‘Essex!’ she replied. ‘When I send Essex back into Ireland, I will marry you. Claim it of me.’

In June 1600, a special court met at York House to examine the case of the earl of Essex. He was asked to kneel at the lower end of the council table; after a while he was allowed a cushion; he was then permitted to lean against a cupboard and eventually he was granted leave to sit upon a stool with his hat lying beside him on the floor. One courtier wrote that ‘it was a most pitiful and lamentable sight to see him that was the minion of fortune, now unworthy of the least honour he had of so many. Many that were present burst out into tears at his fall to such misery.’

He was charged with ‘great and high contempts and points of misgovernance’ in Ireland; he was acquitted of disloyalty but found guilty of ‘contempts’. Whereupon he was suspended from his offices and ordered to remain a prisoner in his own house at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He now seemed destined to remain in private life for the rest of the queen’s reign. On an ally’s pleading with him to seek her pardon he replied that his enemies would ‘never suffer me to have interest in her favour’. When at a dance in the summer of the year one of the ladies took on the role of ‘Affection’, Elizabeth said to her ‘Affection! Affection’s false.’ In that summer, by order of the privy council, all engravings of Essex and of other noblemen were called in. A further command ordered ‘that hereafter no personage of any nobleman or other person shall be ingraven and printed to be put to sale publicly’.

On Michaelmas, at the end of September, the licence that Essex held for the customs revenue from imported sweet wine fell due; it was not renewed, thus depriving him of a substantial income. Elizabeth is reported to have said that ‘an unruly horse must be abated of his provender, that he may the more easily and better be managed’. He was already deeply in debt, with his creditors waiting to claim the money from any of his servants. He fell into a fury in which, according to Harrington, he ‘shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason …’

The word ‘rebellion’ was a dangerous one. Essex wrote to James VI of Scotland proposing that they act together to remove from England Robert Cecil and Walter Raleigh; he told the Scottish king that ‘now am I summoned on all sides to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country that groans under their burden’. James seems to have responded with caution. It is likely that Elizabeth and Cecil had some warning of these manoeuvres, but they did nothing; they were waiting, perhaps, for more open treason. Essex heard, for example, that the council was already interrogating certain prisoners in the Tower who had been allied with him. Elizabeth danced the coranto at court that Christmas.

At the beginning of 1601 Essex began to draw up further plans with the more vainglorious of his supporters whom he met at Drury House, the London residence of the earl of Southampton. He had conceived a plan whereby he and his followers would seize the guard of the palace at Whitehall in order to allow him to enter the queen’s presence; Essex would then, with the threat of force behind him, ask her to remove his enemies from the court. If this were not successful he would demand the recall of parliament to give him justice.

Elizabeth and her councillors watched events with some trepidation. Would Essex strike more quickly than they anticipated? Harrington reported that ‘the madcaps are all in riot, and much evil threatened … she is quite disfavoured and unattired, and these troubles waste her much. She disregards every costly cover that comes to the table, and takes little but manchet [fine wheat bread] and savoury pottage. Every new message from the city disturbs her, and she frowns on all her ladies.’ He reported on a later occasion that ‘she walks much in her privy-chamber, and stamps with her foot at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword, at times, into the arras, in great rage’. The last touch is worthy of Shakespeare.

On 7 February Essex was summoned to appear before the privy council, but he declined the invitation. On the following morning, a Sunday, he gathered 300 of his supporters at Essex House; his plan was to proceed with them to Paul’s Cross, where the Londoners were accustomed to hear sermons on this day. He hoped to persuade the citizens and apprentices to join his forces, no doubt on the cry that he would ‘save the queen from her evil councillors’. To his intimates he had said that ‘the old woman was grown crooked in her mind as well as in her body’. There was a spy in his camp, one Ferdinando Gorges, who betrayed the scheme to Cecil. The lord mayor of London was ordered to keep the people of London within their houses, and the palace of Whitehall was given a double guard.

At approximately ten o’clock in the morning the lord chancellor and other royal officers arrived at Essex House and demanded admittance; after a delay, they were allowed to enter. Essex was asked why his supporters were gathered in arms, and he replied with an account of the wrongs to which he had been subject. ‘You lose time,’ his supporters urged him. ‘Away with them! They betray you.’ Essex then took the unfortunate step of imprisoning them within his house and, with his allies, of riding out into the streets. They wielded pistols and rapiers, calling out ‘England is sold to Spain by Cecil and Raleigh! Citizens of London, arm for England and the queen!’

The citizens of London did not respond. The streets were quiet. Essex rode to Ludgate Hill, where he ordered a charge. Yet now his supporters, realizing their desperate plight, began to desert him. The queen had been given news of the tumult, and reacted calmly. While her attendants were in some disarray she proposed that she should go into the city and confront her opponents and that ‘not one of them would dare to meet a single glance of her eye’.

The confrontation was not necessary. Discomfited by his failure to raise the citizens, Essex rode on to Queenhithe, where he took a boat to Essex House; he then discovered that Ferdinando Gorges had released his prisoners. The house was soon surrounded by the royal forces and, after some tense negotiations from the leads of the mansion, he surrendered himself to the lord admiral. He and his principal supporters were taken to Lambeth Palace and on the following day were removed downriver to the Tower. Elizabeth told the French ambassador that ‘a senseless ingrate had at last revealed what had long been in his mind’. She issued a proclamation on the day after the failed rebellion, thanking the people of London for their loyalty.

Some residual support for Essex still existed in the purlieus of the court. Thomas Leigh, who had served under him in Ireland, proposed that four or five resolute men should force themselves into the queen’s presence and obtain from her a warrant for the release of Essex and Southampton. Leigh was denounced and arrested that night outside the queen’s supper room. On the following day he was tried, convicted and executed. In the middle of February the queen issued another proclamation in which she ordered all vagabonds, idlers, newsmongers and tavern frequenters to leave London on pain of death.

On 19 February Essex and Southampton were tried by their peers in Westminster Hall. Both men denied the charge of treason, but their guilt was taken for granted. They argued with their prosecutors, but to no avail. Essex, dressed all in black, declared ‘I have done nothing but that which by the law of nature and the necessity of my case I was enforced into.’ These were not concepts recognized by common law, and seem to be borrowed from what might be called the chivalric code. They could not save him. After sentence of execution was passed against him, he remained calm enough. ‘Although you have condemned me in a court of judgment,’ he told his judges, ‘yet in the court of conscience you would absolve me.’ Two days later Cecil and some other councillors were asked to visit Essex in the Tower. They found him much changed, declaring himself to be ‘the greatest, most vilest and most unthankful traitor that has ever been in the land’. He admitted that, while he lived, the queen would not be safe.

It was the last of the aristocratic risings of England, like that of the Percys in the early fifteenth century; Essex did not have the same level of regional or territorial support, but the complex motives of honour and of valour were the same. It was almost a medieval event. As the earl of Southampton had said to Sir Robert Sidney in the final siege of Essex House, ‘You are a man of arms, you know we are bound by nature to defend ourselves against our equals, still more against our inferiors.’ A band of brothers, many of them related by blood, Essex and his supporters were aroused by the old and noble code of honour but, in the court of Elizabeth, it was no longer enough.

The admission of Essex that he had committed treason came too late. Elizabeth graciously consented to his private execution by beheading, and at the same time she commuted Southampton’s sentence to that of life imprisonment. On 25 February Essex was brought to a scaffold that had been erected in the courtyard of the Tower. He was wearing doublet and breeches of black satin, covered by a black velvet gown; he also wore a black felt hat. He always played his part. At the last moment he turned his neck sideways and called out, ‘Executioner, strike home!’ It took three strokes to sever his head from his body. ‘Those who touch the sceptres of princes,’ the queen observed, ‘deserve no pity.’

40

The end of days

After the execution of the earl of Essex, some criticized the queen for her hardness of heart. It was said that the people were weary of an old woman’s rule and that her public appearances were not greeted with the old jubilation. One Kentish man was summonsed for saying that it ‘would never be a merry world until Her Majesty was dead’. When a constable told a yeoman to obey the queen’s laws, the man replied, ‘Why dost thou tell me of the queen? A turd for the queen!’

When she summoned her last parliament in the autumn of 1601, it became notable for its fractiousness and confusion. The customary calls of ‘God save your majesty’ were subdued. When passing a group of irritable members of parliament, she moved her hand to indicate that she needed more room.

‘Back, masters,’ the gentleman usher called out.

‘If you will hang us, we can make no more room,’ one member replied. Elizabeth looked up at him, but said nothing.

The matter of taxation was the cause of much turmoil. The cost of Mountjoy’s campaign against Tyrone in Ireland was high, compounded by the dispatch of Spanish troops to that country in the rebel cause. The subsequent financial burden on the English was considered onerous, with the poor having to sell their ‘pots and pans’ to meet the price of the subsidy. When one member remarked that the queen ‘hath as much right to all our lands and goods as to any revenue of her crown’ the commons proceeded to ‘hem, laugh and talk’. Bad temper was in the air. Speakers were ‘cried or coughed down’ and the voting provoked pulling and brawling. In the end, however, Elizabeth received the subsidy she had asked for.

The other contentious issue was that of monopolies. These were patents granted to individuals which allowed them to manufacture or distribute certain named articles for their private profit. It was a device by which Elizabeth could confer benefits on favoured courtiers without putting her to any personal expense. ‘I cannot utter with my tongue,’ one member said, ‘or conceive with my heart the great grievances that the town and country which I serve suffereth by some of these monopolies.’ Another member began to list the articles so protected, from currants to vinegar, from lead to pilchards, from cloth to ashes:

‘Is bread not there?’

‘Bread?’

‘Bread?’

‘This voice seems strange.’

‘No, if order be not taken for these, bread will be there before the next parliament.’

The queen had heard of these complaints and summoned the Speaker. She told him that she would reform the procedure on monopolies; some would be repealed and some suspended. None would be put into execution ‘but such as should first have a trial according to the law for the good of the people’. She had anticipated a crisis and had resolved it.

Parliament sent a deputation to thank her, and at the end of November she addressed her grateful Commons in the council chamber at Whitehall. She told them that ‘I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set on worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good’. She added that ‘it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good’. It was not the last of her public speeches but it was one of the most memorable.

There was little, if any, mention of the succession during this parliament. It is likely, to put it no higher, that she had come to believe that James, the son of Mary, queen of Scots, should ascend the throne after her. She may not have known that Robert Cecil, now her most prominent councillor, had been engaged in secret negotiations with him; she must have suspected, however, that he was now the favoured heir. But she kept her silence. Although she was often accused of indecision or prevarication, there were occasions when she simply wished to conceal her intentions.

In April 1602, at the age of sixty-eight, the queen took part in the energetic dance known as the galliard. At the beginning of the following month she rode out to Lewisham for ‘a-Maying’. She told the French ambassador that ‘I think not to die so soon, and am not as old as they think’. She continued to ride as often as the opportunity occurred. When one of her relations, the second Lord Hunsdon, suggested that she should no longer ride between Hampton Court and Nonsuch, she dismissed him from her presence and refused to speak to him for two days.

Yet the signs of ageing were unmistakable. Her eyesight was becoming weaker and she was growing more forgetful. She could remember faces, but sometimes not names. After she had gone riding her legs were often ‘benumbed’. Sometimes she needed help to mount her horse or to climb stairs. She told one of her ladies, Lady Scroope, that one night she had seen a vision of ‘her own body, exceedingly lean and fearful in a light of fire’. ‘I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck,’ she told the earl of Nottingham. ‘I am tied, I am tied, and the case is altered with me.’

When in the early spring of 1603 another of her relations, Sir Robert Carey, came to greet her he found her in chastened state. ‘No, Robin,’ she told him, ‘I am not well.’ She described her indisposition to him, a narrative that was punctuated with many sighs. On 19 March the French envoy told his master that for the last fourteen days she had eaten very little and slept very badly. Another contemporary reported that she ‘had fallen into a state of moping, sighing, and weeping melancholy’. She was asked by one of her attendants whether she had any secret cause for her grief. She replied that ‘I know of nothing in this world worthy of troubling me’.

For four days she sat upon cushions in her privy chamber, gazing down at the floor and rarely speaking. She was by now unclean and emaciated. ‘I meditate,’ she said. Robert Cecil remonstrated with her.

‘Madam, madam, to content the people you must go to bed.’

‘Little man, little man, the word must is not to be used to princes.’

On the third day she put her finger in her mouth and rarely removed it. Eventually she grew so weak that her doctors were able to take her uncomplaining to her bed. When an abscess burst in her throat she recovered a little and sipped some broth. But then she declined once again and lay without seeming to see or notice anything. Knowing that the end was coming, the councillors asked her if she accepted James VI of Scotland as her successor. She had lost the power of speech and merely made a gesture towards her head which they interpreted as one of consent.

At six o’clock on the evening of 23 March the archbishop of Canterbury was summoned to her deathbed. He prayed for half an hour beside her and then rose to depart; but she gestured for him to continue. He continued his prayers for another hour and, whenever he mentioned the joys of heaven, she would clasp his hand. She lost consciousness soon after, and died in the early hours of the following morning. Her coronation ring, deeply sunk into the flesh of her finger, had to be sawn off.

As soon as he heard the sounds of her women weeping, Sir Robert Carey took horse and galloped towards the Great North Road. He was on his way to Edinburgh, where he would break the news to James VI that he was now king of England. Thomas Dekker, in The Wonderful Year, wrote that ‘upon Thursday it was treason to cry God save king James of England and upon Friday high treason not to cry so. In the morning no voices heard but murmurs and lamentation, at noon, nothing but shouts of gladness and triumph.’ The long rule of the Tudors had come to an end.

41

Reformation

We return to the great theme of this volume. The reformation of the English Church was, from the beginning, a political and dynastic matter; it had no roots in popular protest or the principles of humanist reform. No Calvin or Luther would have been permitted to flourish in England. Reformation was entirely under the direction of the king. The English Reformation had other unique aspects. In the countries of continental Europe that espoused Protestantism, all the rituals and customs of Catholicism were abolished; there was to be no Mass, no Virgin Mary and no cult of the saints. Yet Henry, in all matters save that of papal sovereignty, was an orthodox Catholic. The monasteries may have been destroyed, and the pope replaced, but the Mass survived. Nicholas Harpsfield, the historian and Catholic apologist, described Henry as ‘one that would throw down a man headlong from the top of a high tower and bid him stay when he was half way down’. Yet somehow the king managed this miracle of levitation. He carried out the work of change piece by piece so that no one could contemplate or guess the finished design; that was the reason it worked. Henry himself may not have known where he was going.

Those who supported the king’s cause were, in large part, of a practical persuasion; they wanted the lands and revenues of the Church for themselves. They were lawyers and courtiers. They were members of parliament, which voted in accordance with the king’s will throughout this period. Only for a few scholars and divines was the theology of the Reformation important. The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was a man of piety rather than of principle; he was as much an ecclesiastical lawyer as a divine who saw his way forward through compromise and conciliation. The refining of Church doctrine under Edward, and the reversal of practice under Mary, serve only to emphasize the slightly incoherent framework of the religious polity.

The Elizabethan settlement created what Lord Burghley called a ‘midge-madge’ of contradictory elements that was soon to pass under the name of Anglicanism. It was as alien to the pure spirit of Protestantism, adumbrated in Zurich or Geneva, as it was to the doctrines of Rome. The English liturgy contained elements old and new, and the perils of religious speculation were avoided with a studied vagueness or ambiguity. The Book of Common Prayer is also animated by a spirit of piety rather than dogmatic certainty.

England therefore became Protestant by degrees, and by a process of accommodation and subtle adjustment. The people acquiesced in the new dispensation. Time and forgetfulness, aided by apathy and indifference, slowly weakened the influence of the old religion beyond repair. If, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, England had become a Protestant nation, therefore, the nature of that Protestantism was mixed and divided; we may only say, perhaps, that England was no longer Catholic. The passage of time had accomplished what the will of men could not work.

We may see the enduring effects of the Reformation in the emphasis upon the individual rather than upon the community. Private prayer took the place of public ritual. Manuals addressed to the personal devotional life abounded. Justification by faith alone, one of the cardinal tenets of the new religion, was wholly private in character. The struggles of individual consciences, with the constant awareness of sin, now became the material of the religious pamphlets of the period. We may suspect the influence of the reformed religion, too, on the conditions that made possible the birth of the modern state; the word itself emerged towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth. The Protestant calendar was devoted to the celebration of a new national culture, with such holy days as the queen’s birthday and the defeat of the Armada. It became a civic and courtly, rather than a religious, timetable.

The separation from Rome and from continental Catholicism also encouraged the belief that England was in some sense an ‘elect’ nation; this in turn led to a redefinition of Englishness that excluded, for example, the Catholics of the nation. Bishop Gardiner, in De Vera Obedientia, composed immediately after the executions of John Fisher and Thomas More, declared that ‘in England all are agreed that those whom England has borne and bred shall have nothing whatever to do with Rome’. Popular preachers such as Hugh Latimer apostrophized the entire nation. Oh England! England! Latimer wrote also that ‘verily God hath showed himself God of England, or rather the English God’.

The belief in divine providence, one of the blessings of the Protestant spirit, led to submission and obedience to the secular authorities. Where once the monks had taken responsibility for the indigent, their place had been taken by parish officers; the overseers of the poor, and the workhouses, became the solutions to what was now regarded as a social problem rather than an ordinance of God. When the House of Commons took over the former royal chapel of St Stephen’s in 1549, it was the mark of a larger transition; the law of God ultimately gave way to the statutes of parliament. The idea of good governance emerges most fully in the sixteenth century, and the state itself was deemed to have a formative role in social and economic policy.

The cultural effects of the Reformation were no less profound. New forms of history were composed after the demise of the monkish historians; Hall’s Chronicle, devoted to the Tudor cause and in spirit anti-clerical, replaced Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon. In a more general sense the destruction of church buildings, and the stripping of church art, led to an indifference towards the past among many people. The sense of continuity and kinship was broken just as the old ties of the community were severed. In a society that had previously been heavily dependent upon custom and tradition, the effects must have been profound. It might be said that the memory of history was erased in order to take the next leap forward.

The demise of the mystery plays and the whole panoply of religious drama, which had possessed so strong a hold over England for many centuries, led ineluctably to the secularization of the drama and the rise of the London playhouses. The great efflorescence of the English drama in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be regarded as one of the consequences of the Reformation. In literature, too, the translation of the Bible into English inspired writers as diverse as Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan. In a more general sense the new place of the English language encouraged the growth of literacy among the population. This may in turn help to account for the great increase in educational provision through the period; in the 1550s forty-seven new school foundations were made, and in the following decade a further forty-two.

The abolition of the rituals of the Catholic faith may have had more profound, although less easily observed, consequences. The Rogationtide processions, in which the boundaries of the parish were delineated with bells and crosses, had been an important element in the English sense of sacred place; the land was, in a sense, now secularized. The holy wells and springs of the landscape were largely forgotten, and land itself became a commodity rather than a communal possession. Just as the communion of the living and dead enshrined in the old Church was being dissolved, so the common fields of the realm became the property of private individuals. When Christopher Saxton produced his series of maps in the 1570s the old shrines and paths of pilgrimage were omitted; his maps were primarily designed as surveys for the new landowners. Yet the commercial spirit claimed its own victims, and William Cobbett once wrote that the wretchedness of the landless labourer was the work of Reformation.

The abandonment of public rituals in the streets and open places of the towns led in the course of time to social fragmentation. When popular pastimes were curtailed and despised, the richer sort tended to think of themselves as a class apart. Seats were soon supplied in churches for families of local stature. We may see the change from another perspective. It has been estimated that the number of alehouses doubled in the fifty years after 1580; with the demise of the guild fraternities, the pageants and the church-ales, there had to be an alternative source of refreshment.

Yet arguably all of these matters – the growing emphasis upon the individual, the dissolution of communal life, the abrogation of custom and tradition – were the necessary conditions for the great changes in the spirit and condition of the nation that were still to come.

THE END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this second volume.

THE REFORM OF RELIGION

Aston, Margaret: England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988).

—— Faith and Fire (London, 1993).

Baskerville, Geoffrey: English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (London, 1937).

Beard, Charles: TheReformation of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1883).

Bernard, G. W.: The King’s Reformation(London, 2005).

Betteridge, Tom: Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (Manchester, 2004).

Bossy, John: The English Catholic Community(London, 1975).

Brigden, Susan: London and the Reformation(Oxford, 1989).

Burnet, Gilbert: The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, three volumes (Oxford, 1829).

Carlson, Eric Josef (ed.): Religion and the English People (Kirksville, Miss., 1998).

Chadwick, Owen: The Reformation (London, 1964).

Collinson, Patrick: The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982).

—— Godly People (London, 1983).

—— The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988).

Constant, G.: The Reformation in England (London, 1934).

Davies, Horton: Worship and Theology in England (Princeton, 1996).

Dickens, A. G.: The English Reformation (London, 1964).

Doran, Susan and Durston, Christopher: Princes, Pastors and People (London, 1991).

Duffy, Eamon: The Stripping of the Altars (London, 1992).

—— The Voices of Morebath (London, 2001).

—— Marking the Hours (London, 2006).

Elton, Geoffrey (ed.): The Reformation (Cambridge, 1958).

—— Reform and Reformation (London, 1977).

Gairdner, James: A History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1902).

—— Lollardy and the Reformation in England, two volumes (London, 1908).

Gasquet, F. A.: Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (London, 1906).

Haigh, Christopher (ed.): The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987).

—— English Reformations (Oxford, 1993).

Heal, Felicity: Reformation in Britain and Ireland(Oxford, 2003).

Heath, Peter: English Parish Clergy (London, 1969).

Hughes, Philip: The Reformation in England, three volumes (London, 1956).

Hurstfield, Joel (ed.): The Reformation Crisis (London, 1965).

Hutton, Ronald: The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994).

King, John N.: English Reformation Literature (Princeton, 1982).

Knappen, M. M.: Tudor Puritanism (London, 1939).

Knowles, David: The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge, 1959).

Lake, Peter and Dowling, Maria (eds): Protestantism and the National Church (Beckenham, 1987).

MacCulloch, Diarmaid: Thomas Cranmer (London, 1996).

—— The Later Reformation in England (London, 2001).

—— The Reformation (London, 2003).

Maitland, S. R.: Essays on the Reformation in England (London, 1849).

Marshall, Peter: The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994).

—— (ed.): The Impact of the English Reformation (London, 1997).

McConica, James Kelsey: English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965).

Morgan, John: Godly Learning (Cambridge, 1986).

O’Day, Rosemary: The Debate on the English Reformation (London, 1986).

Pollard, A. E.: Thomas Cranmer (London, 1905).

Powicke, Maurice: The Reformation in England (Oxford, 1941).

Randell, Keith: Henry VIII and the Reformation in England (London, 1993).

Read, Conyers: Social and Political Forces in the English Reformation (Houston, 1953).

Rex, Richard: HenryVIII and the English Reformation (London, 1993).

Rosman, Doreen: From Catholic to Protestant (London, 1996).

Rupp, E. G.: The Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge, 1966).

Scarisbrick, J. J.: The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984).

Shagan, Ethan H.: Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003).

Smith, H. Maynard: Pre-Reformation England (London, 1938).

—— Henry VIII and the Reformation (London, 1948).

Walker, Greg: Persuasive Fictions (Aldershot, 1996).

Whiting, Robert: The Blind Devotion of the People (Cambridge, 1989).

Wooding, Lucy: Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000).

Youings, Joyce: The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London, 1971).

THE REIGN OF HENRY

Anglo, Sydney: Images of Tudor Kingship (London, 1992).

Bernard, G. W.: Power and Politics in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2000).

—— Anne Boleyn (London, 2010).

Brewer, J. S.: The Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1884).

Brigden, Susan: New Worlds, Lost Worlds (London, 2001).

Brown, Andrew D.: Popular Piety in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1995).

Byrne, M. St Clare (ed.): The Letters of Henry VIII(London, 1936).

Coby, J. Patrick: Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament (London, 2006).

Coleman, Christopher and Starkey, David (eds): Revolution Reassessed (Oxford, 1986).

Davies, C. S. L.: Peace, Printand Protestantism(London, 1977).

Dodds, Madeleine Hope and Dodds, Ruth: The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Exeter Conspiracy, two volumes (Cambridge, 1915).

Elton, Geoffrey: Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972).

Erickson, Carolly: Great Harry (London, 1980).

Fox, Alistair and Guy, John: Reassessing the Henrician Age (Oxford, 1986).

Froude, James Anthony: History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, twelve volumes (London, 1862–70).

Galton, Arthur: The Character and Times of Thomas Cromwell (Birmingham, 1887).

Graves, Michael A. R.: Henry VIII (London, 2003).

Guy, John: The Cardinal’s Court (Hassocks, 1977).

—— The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997).

Gwyn, Peter: The King’s Cardinal (London, 1990).

Hoak, Dale (ed.): Tudor Political Culture(Cambridge, 1995).

Hoyle, R. W.: The Pilgrimage of Grace (Oxford, 2001).

Hutchinson, Robert: Thomas Cromwell (London, 2007).

Ives, E. W.: Anne Boleyn (London, 1986).

Jones, Whitney R. D.: The Tudor Commonwealth(London, 1970).

Lingard, John and Belloc, Hilaire: The History of England, eleven volumes (New York, 1912).

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (ed.): The Reign of Henry VIII (Basingstoke, 1995).

Pickthorn, Kenneth: Early Tudor Government (Cambridge, 1951).

Pollard, A. F.: Wolsey (London, 1929).

—— Henry VIII (London, 1934).

Randell, Keith: Henry VIII and the Government of England (London, 1991).

Rosenthal, Joel and Richmond, Colin (eds): People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester, 1987).

Scarisbrick, J. J.: Henry VIII (London, 1968).

Smith, Lacey Baldwin: Henry VIII (London, 1971).

Starkey, David (ed.): Henry VIII: A European Court in England (London, 1991).

—— The Reign of Henry VIII (London, 2002).

—— Henry, Virtuous Prince (London, 2008).

Watts, John L. (ed.): The End of the Middle Ages?(London, 1998).

Weir, Alison: The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London, 1991).

—— Henry VIII (London, 2001).

Williams, C. H.: England under the Early Tudors (London, 1925).

—— The Tudor Despotism (London, 1928).

Williams, Penry: The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979).

Wooding, Lucy: Henry VIII (London, 2009).

Zeeveld, W. Gordon: Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948).

THE REIGN OF EDWARD

Alford, Stephen: Kinship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002).

Aston, Margaret: The King’s Bedpost (Cambridge, 1993).

Beer, Barrett L.: Rebellion and Riot, Popular Disorder in England during the Reign of Edward VI (Kent, Ohio, 2005).

Bush, M. L.: The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (London, 1975).

Constant, G.: Introduction of the Reformation into England, Edward VI (London, 1942).

Gasquet, Francis Aidan and Bishop, Edmund: Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1890).

Heard, Nigel: Edward VI and Mary (London, 1990).

Hoak, D. E.: The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 1976).

Jones, Whitney R. D.: The Mid-Tudor Crisis(London, 1973).

Jordan, W. K.: Edward VI, the Young King (London, 1968).

—— EdwardVI: The Threshold of Power (London, 1970).

Loach, Jennifer: Edward VI (London, 1999).

Loach, Jennifer and Tittler, Robert (eds): The Mid-Tudor Polity (London, 1980).

MacCulloch, Diarmaid: Tudor Church Militant, Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999).

Mackie, J. D.: The Earlier Tudors (Oxford, 1952).

Pollard, A. F.: England under Protector Somerset(London, 1900).

Skidmore, Chris: Edward VI (London, 2007).

THE REIGN OF MARY

Duffy, Eamon: Fires of Faith (London, 2009).

Duffy, Eamon and Loades, David (eds): The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006).

Edwards, John and Truman, Ronald (eds): Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: the achievement of Friar Bartolome Carranza (Aldershot, 2005).

Erickson, Carolly: Bloody Mary (London, 1978).

Loach, Jennifer: Parliament and the Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor (Oxford, 1986).

Loades, David: Mary Tudor (Oxford, 1989).

Miller, James Arthur: Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction (London, 1926).

Porter, Linda: Mary Tudor: the First Queen (London, 2007).

Prescott, H. F. M.: Mary Tudor (London, 1940).

Richards, Judith M.: Mary Tudor (London, 2008).

Schenk, W.: Reginald Pole (London, 1950).

White, Beatrice: MaryTudor (London, 1935).

Whitelock, Anna: Mary Tudor (London, 2009).

THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH

Adams, Simon: Leicester and the Court (Manchester, 2002).

Alford, Stephen: The Early Elizabethan Polity (Cambridge, 1998).

—— Burghley (London, 2008).

Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Goldring, Elizabeth and Knight, Sarah: The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2007).

Black, J. B.: The Reign of Elizabeth (Oxford, 1936).

Collinson, Patrick: Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994).

—— The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967).

Doran, Susan: Monarchy and Matrimony (London, 1996).

—— Queen Elizabeth I (London, 2003).

Doran, Susan and Freeman, Thomas S. (eds): The Myth of Elizabeth (London, 2003).

Dunn, Jane: Elizabeth and Mary (London, 2003).

Elton, G. R.: The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge, 1986).

Graves, Michael A. R.: Burghley (London, 1998).

Greaves, Richard L. (ed.): Elizabeth I, Queen of England (London, 1974).

Guy, John (ed.): The Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1995).

—— My Heart is My Own (London, 2004).

Haigh, Christopher (ed.): The Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1984).

—— Elizabeth I (London, 1988).

Hammer, Paul E. J.: The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics (Cambridge, 1999).

Haugaard, William P.: Elizabeth and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1968).

Hibbert, Christopher: The Virgin Queen (London, 1990).

Hurstfield, Joel: Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London, 1973).

Jenkins, Elizabeth: Elizabeth the Great (London, 1958).

Jones, Norman: The Birth of the Elizabethan Age (Oxford, 1993).

Levin, Carole: The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 2002).

Levine, Joseph M. (ed.): Elizabeth I (London, 1969).

MacCaffrey, Wallace: The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (London, 1969).

—— Elizabeth I (London, 1993).

McClaren, A. N.: Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1999).

Mears, Natalie: Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005).

Meyer, Arnold Oskar: England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth (London, 1967).

Neale, J. E.: Queen Elizabeth I (London, 1934).

—— Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958).

Palliser, D. A.: The Age of Elizabeth (London, 1983).

Rex, Richard: Elizabeth I (Stroud, 2003).

Strickland, Agnes: The Life of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1906).

Strong, Roy: Gloriana (London, 1987).

Weir, Alison: Elizabeth the Queen (London, 1998).

Williams, Penry: The Later Tudors (Oxford, 1995).

SOCIETY

Bindoff, S. T.: Tudor England (London, 1950).

Bindoff, S. T., Hurstfield, J. and Williams, C. H. (eds): Elizabethan Government and Society (London, 1961).

Byrne, M. St Clare: Elizabethan Life in Town and Country (London, 1925).

Chambers, J. D.: Population, Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial England (Oxford, 1972).

Cheyney, Edward P.: Social Changes in England in the Sixteenth Century (Pennsylvania, 1895).

Clark, Peter (ed.): The Early Modern Town(London, 1976).

—— The Cambridge Urban History of England, Volume Two, 1540 –1840 (Cambridge, 2000).

Clay, C. G. A.: Economic Expansion and Social Change, England 1500–1700, two volumes (Cambridge, 1984).

Collinson, Patrick (ed.): The Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 2002).

Coward, Barry: Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England (London, 1988).

Cressy, David: Birth, Marriage and Death (Oxford, 1997).

Dodd, A. H.: Life in Elizabethan England (London, 1961).

Ellis, Steven G.: Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power (Oxford, 1995).

Elton, G. R.: England Under the Tudors (London, 1955).

Guy, John: Tudor England (Oxford, 1988).

Jack, Sybil M.: Trade and Industry in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1977).

James, Mervyn: Society, Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1986).

Polito, Mary: Governmental Arts in Early Tudor England (Aldershot, 2005).

Ramsey, Peter H. (ed.): The Price Revolution in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1971).

Robertson, H. M.: Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (Cambridge, 1933).

Rowse, A. L.: The England of Elizabeth (London, 1950).

—— The Expansion of Elizabethan England (London, 1955).

Sharpe, Kevin: Selling the Tudor Monarchy (London, 2009).

Simon, Joan: Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1967).

Sommerville, C. John: The Secularisation of Early Modern England (Oxford, 1992).

Tawney, R. H.: The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912).

Thurley, Simon: The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (London, 1993).

Walsham, Alexandra: The Reformation of the Landscape (Oxford, 2011).

Wernham, R. B.: Before the Armada (London, 1966).

Williams, Penry: Life in Tudor England (London, 1964).

Index

abbots: and dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; translated to diocesan bishoprics, ref 1; executed, ref 2

Absolute Restraint of Annates Act (1534), ref 1

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st baron, ref 1

agriculture: changes, ref 1

alehouses: numbers increase, ref 1

Alençon, Francis, duke of see Anjou, Francis, duke of

Aler, Madame d’, ref 1

Alesius, Alexander, ref 1

Allen, Cardinal William, ref 1, ref 2

Alva, Ferdinand de Toledo, duke of: command in Netherlands, ref 1; seizes English warehouse in Antwerp, ref 1; on Ridolfi plot, ref 1; and Netherlands revolt, ref 2; and Elizabeth’s reaction to St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1

Alva, Maria, duchess of, ref 1

Amadas, Mrs, ref 1

Ambsworth, Margaret, ref 1

Ammonius (Andrea Ammonio), ref 1

Anabaptists, ref 1, ref 2

Anglican Church see Church of England

Anjou, Francis, duke of (earlier duke of Alençon): as Elizabeth’s suitor, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; invades Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2; visits England, ref 1, ref 2; death, ref 1

Anjou, Henry, duke of see Henry III, king of France

Anne Boleyn, queen of Henry VIII: Henry meets and courts, ref 1, ref 2; and Henry’s divorce, ref 1, ref 2; gives Simon Fish pamphlet to Henry, ref 1; religious liberalism, ref 1; popular hostility to, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; made marquess of Pembroke, ref 1; pregnancy and birth of Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; marriage to Henry, ref 1, ref 2; crowned queen, ref 1; and Henry’s infidelity, ref 1, ref 2; succession settled on children, ref 1; on Mary’s refusing oath of Succession, ref 1; miscarries male child, ref 1; threatens Mary, ref 1; accused of infidelity, ref 1; deteriorating relations with Henry, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Anne Boleyn (ship), ref 1

Anne of Cleves, queen of Henry VIII: marriage and divorce from Henry, ref 1; separation from Henry, ref 1; and Cromwell’s fall, ref 1; on Henry’s marriage to Katherine Parr, ref 1

Anne, Queen, ref 1

Anselm, St, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

anti-Semitism, ref 1

António, Don (pretender to Portuguese throne), ref 1

Antwerp: trade, ref 1; unrest, ref 2; Spanish massacre in, ref 1; falls to Parma, ref 2

Aquinas, St Thomas, ref 1

architecture, ref 1

Arden family, of Park Hall, ref 1

Arden, John, ref 1

Ardres, treaty of (1546), ref 1

Arthur, prince (Henry VIII’s brother), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Arundel, Henry Fitzalan, 12th earl of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Arundel, Philip Howard, 13th earl of, ref 1

Ascham, Roger, ref 1, ref 2

Aske, Robert: leads Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; Henry meets, ref 1; tried and hanged, ref 1

Askew, Anne, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Athelney, abbot of, ref 1

Audeley, Lady, ref 1

Augmentation, Court of, ref 1, ref 2

Austin Friars, London, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Babington, Anthony, ref 1, ref 2

Bacon, Anthony, ref 1

Bacon, Francis: on Elizabeth’s religious discretion, ref 1; recruited by Essex, ref 1; counsels Essex, ref 1; and Essex’s conduct in Ireland, ref 1; argues for Essex’s appointment to Ireland, ref 1

Bacon, Sir Nicholas, ref 1

Ball, Alice, ref 1

Ballard, John, SJ, ref 1

Bancroft, Richard, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1

Barnes, Robert, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Barrowe, Henry (and Barrowists), ref 1, ref 2

Barton, Elizabeth (Nun of Kent): prophecies, ref 1, ref 2; investigated and beheaded, ref 1

Bath, John Bourchier, 2nd earl of, ref 1

Bath, William Bourchier, 3rd earl of, ref 1

Beaufort, Margaret, countess of Richmond and Derby, ref 1

Beaumaris, Anglesey, ref 1

Becket, St Thomas: shrine desecrated and demoted, ref 1, ref 2

Bedford, Francis Russell, 2nd earl of: in Elizabeth’s privy council, ref 1; supports Elizabeth in 1569 rebellion, ref 1

Bedingfield, Sir Henry, ref 1

Bendlowes, Serjeant, ref 1

benefit of clergy, ref 1

Bennet, Dr, ref 1

Berthelet, Thomas, ref 1

Berwick, treaty of (1586), ref 1

Bible, Holy: translated, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; English version distributed, ref 1; public reading forbidden, ref 1; Geneva version, ref 1; Puritan idealization of, ref 1

Bigod, Sir Francis, ref 1

Bill of Deposition against Henry, ref 1

Bilney, Thomas, ref 1, ref 2

Bisham abbey, ref 1

bishops: draw up statement of belief for Henry, ref 1; appointed by king’s letters patent, ref 1

Bishops’ Book, The see Institution of a Christian Man, The

Blois, treaty of (1572), ref 1

Blount, Elizabeth (Bessie), ref 1

Blount, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Bocher, Joan see Joan of Kent

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy, ref 1

Boleyn, Mary: liaison with Henry VIII, ref 1

Bolton Castle, ref 1

Bond of Association, ref 1, ref 2

Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London (‘Bloody Bonner’): interrogates Anne Askew, ref 1; protests at religious reforms, ref 1; abuses Cranmer, ref 1, ref 2; persecutes reformers, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; decrees Church forms and services, ref 1, ref 2; absent from Elizabeth’s arrival in London, ref 1; imprisoned, ref 1

Book of Common Prayer: provokes Western Rising, ref 1, ref 2; publication (1549), ref 1; overrides other prayer books, ref 1; revised (1552), ref 1, ref 2; in Elizabeth’s reign, ref 1; unpopularity in North, ref 1; proposed reform, ref 1; criticised, ref 1; clergy required to assent to, ref 1; piety, ref 1

Booner, William, ref 1

Bothwell, James Hepburn, 4th earl of: in plot to murder Darnley, ref 1; relations with Mary Stuart, ref 1; tried and acquitted, ref 1; made duke of Orkney, ref 1; marriage to Mary, ref 1; and inquiry into Darnley’s murder, ref 1; Mary’s ‘casket letters’ to, ref 1; imprisoned in Denmark, ref 1; death, ref 1

Boulogne: siege of (1544), ref 1; Henry occupies for eight years, ref 1; Somerset plans to reclaim, ref 1; Henry II of France besieges, ref 1; returned to French, ref 1

Boxley Abbey, Kent, ref 1

boy bishops, ref 1

Bradford, John, ref 1

Brereton, William, ref 1

Brocke, Edward, ref 1

Browne, Robert (and Brownists), ref 1, ref 2

Brussels, Union of (1577), ref 1

Bryan, Sir Francis, ref 1

Bucer, Martin, ref 1

Buckingham, Edward Stafford, 3rd duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Bunyan, John, ref 1

Burghley, Sir William Cecil, baron: on popular unrest, ref 1; as privy councillor under Edward VI, ref 1; and accession of Mary Tudor, ref 1; as Elizabeth’s principal secretary of state, ref 1; supports reformed faith, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; and Parker’s reluctance to accept archbishopric, ref 1; negotiates treaty of Edinburgh, ref 1; threatened by Elizabeth’s relations with Dudley, ref 1; on Elizabeth’s suitors and marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; on Elizabeth’s ill health, ref 1, ref 2; promotes parliament’s petitions to Elizabeth, ref 1; drafts succession bill (1563), ref 1; and multiplicity of religious practices, ref 1; informs Elizabeth of birth of Mary Stuart’s son, ref 1; and threat of Mary Stuart’s succession, ref 1; on state of Scotland at marriage of Mary and Bothwell, ref 1; confronts Spain, ref 1; writes to Moray on escape of Mary Stuart, ref 1; annotates Mary Stuart’s casket letters, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s vacillations over Mary Stuart, ref 1; complains of excess of luxury goods, ref 1; distrusts Mary Stuart, ref 1; opposition to, ref 1; and end of Rising of the North, ref 1; learns of Ridolfi plot, ref 1; and arrest of Catholic plotters, ref 1; ennobled, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s nervous collapse, ref 1; on war in Netherlands, ref 1; and popular reaction to St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s procrastinations, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s refusal to head Protestant League, ref 1; favours Edmund Grindal as archbishop, ref 1; dissuades Elizabeth from dismissing Grindal, ref 1; as patron of Campion, ref 1; praises torture, ref 1; rebukes Whitgift, ref 1; hopes to destroy Mary Stuart, ref 1; and threat of invasion, ref 1; drafts Bond of Association and ensures Protestant succession, ref 1; accompanies Elizabeth on 27th anniversary of accession celebrations, ref 1; commissions portrait of Elizabeth, ref 1; and financing of force in Netherlands, ref 1; opposes peace proposals for Netherlands, ref 1; and trial of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s signing Mary’s death warrant, ref 1; Elizabeth ostracizes after death of Mary, ref 1; dominance at court, ref 1, ref 2; ageing, ref 1; death, ref 1; on religious changes, ref 1

Burning of Heretics, Act for (1414): revoked, ref 1

burnings at the stake: described, ref 1; revived under Elizabeth, ref 1

Bury St Edmunds, ref 1

Butts, Margaret, Lady (née Bacon), ref 1

Cabot, Sebastian, ref 1

Cadiz, ref 1, ref 2

Caius, Dr John, ref 1

Calais: in English hands, ref 1; and English invasion of France (1544), ref 1; French besiege and capture (1557–8), ref 1, ref 2; English attempt to repossess, ref 1; Elizabeth gives up claim, ref 1; Spanish Armada reaches, ref 1

Calvin, Jean: doctrines and practice, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Calvinism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Cambridge: colleges founded, ref 1

Camden, William, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Campeggio, Cardinal Lorenzo, bishop of Salisbury, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Campion, Edmund, ref 1, ref 2

canon law: subordination to common law, ref 1

Canterbury: Becket’s shrine dismantled and plundered, ref 1, ref 2

Carberry Hill, battle of (1567), ref 1, ref 2

Cardano, Hieronymus, ref 1

Carew, Sir George, ref 1

Carew, Sir Peter, ref 1

Carey, Sir Robert, ref 1, ref 2

Carlisle: Mary Stuart flees to, ref 1

Carlos, Don, prince of Asturias, ref 1

Carthusian friars: refuse oath upon Act of Succession, ref 1; executed, ref 1, ref 2; properties destroyed, ref 1; emigrate to continent during Edward VI’s reign, ref 1

Cartwright, Thomas, ref 1

‘casket letters’, ref 1

Castle Acre priory, Norfolk, ref 1, ref 2

cathedrals: survive after dissolution of monasteries, ref 1

Catherine de Medici, regent of France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Catholic Church: flourishes in England, ref 1; calls for reform, ref 1, ref 2; and heretics, ref 1, ref 2; and king’s jurisdiction, ref 1; and anti-clericalism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; reforms, ref 1, ref 2; Wolsey controls in England, ref 1; attacked in parliament, ref 1; and Henry’s claims to supremacy, ref 1; Commons petition against, ref 1; offers concession to Henry, ref 1; and transubstantiation, ref 1; Henry wishes for reform, ref 1; members emigrate during Edward VI’s reign, ref 1; seasonal festivities silenced under Edward VI, ref 1; revival under Mary Tudor, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and persecution of Protestants, ref 1; followers persecuted under Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; subordinated under Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; popular following, ref 1; and excommunication of Elizabeth, ref 1; discredited by St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; extremism in France, ref 1; seminarians in England, ref 1; English statutes against, ref 1; members restricted in movement, ref 1; Hooker on, ref 1; and Protestant reformation, ref 1; rituals abolished, ref 1; see also religion

Catholic League, ref 1

Cavendish, George, ref 1, ref 2

Cecil, Sir Robert (later earl of Salisbury): career and appearance, ref 1; rivalry with Essex, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; supports Lopez, ref 1; appointed secretary of state, ref 1; Essex abuses, ref 1; as master of Court of Wards, ref 1; questions Essex on conduct in Ireland, ref 1; heads court faction, ref 1; imprisoned by Essex, ref 1; informed of Essex’s rebellion plan, ref 1; in negotiations with James VI of Scotland over succession, ref 1; Elizabeth rebukes for personal advice, ref 1

Cecil, William see Burghley, Sir William Cecil, baron

Chancery, court of, ref 1

chantry foundations, ref 1

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: succeeds Ferdinand as king of Spain, ref 1; conflicts with Francis I, ref 1; succeeds as emperor, ref 1; Wolsey negotiates with, ref 1; meets Henry in England, ref 1; Pavia victory, ref 1; Mary Tudor betrothed to, ref 1; Henry makes treaty against Francis I, ref 1; released from betrothal to Mary, ref 1; and Henry’s seeking divorce from Katherine of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2; sacks Rome and imprisons pope, ref 1; Henry’s breach with, ref 1; as potential threat to Henry, ref 1; Henry warns of Cardinal Pole, ref 1; invasion threat to England, ref 1; proposes duchess of Milan as wife for Henry, ref 1; fails to form alliance with France, ref 1; Henry forms alliance against France, ref 1, ref 2; relations with papacy, ref 1; treaty with France (1544), ref 1; persecutes Protestants, ref 1, ref 2; and plot to depose Somerset, ref 1; supports Mary Tudor, ref 1, ref 2; prospective war with, ref 1; and Mary Tudor’s prospective marriage, ref 1; intends to abdicate, ref 1

Charles IX, king of France: minority, ref 1; as prospective husband for Mary Stuart and Elizabeth, ref 1; and religious wars, ref 1; protests at bull excommunicating Elizabeth, ref 1; and prospective war against Spain, ref 1

Charles, archduke of Austria, prospective marriage to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Charterhouse see Carthusians

Chartley Manor, ref 1

Chaseabout Raid (Scotland, 1565), ref 1

Chaucer, Geoffrey, ref 1

Cheapside Cross: destroyed, ref 1

Cheke, John, ref 1, ref 2

Christ’s Hospital (school and orphanage), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Church of England: Henry declared supreme head of, ref 1; survey of worth (1535), ref 1; Ten Articles (of faith), ref 1, ref 2; bishops’ statement of faith, ref 1; and Act of Uniformity (1549), ref 1; liturgy and practices, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; use of English language, ref 1; orders of clergy, ref 1; statues and images limited, ref 1; plate and possessions expropriated, ref 1; compulsory attendance, ref 1; ecclesiastical laws, ref 1; and Thirty-Nine Articles, ref 1, ref 2; Mary heads, ref 1; convocation (1563), ref 1; doctrine of faith established, ref 1; named Anglican, ref 1; rules under Whitgift, ref 1; and Puritan criticism, ref 1; conformity to, ref 1; and Hooker’s policies, ref 1; reformation, ref 1; see also Book of Common Prayer

Churchyard, Thomas, ref 1

Clement VII, pope: and annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, ref 1, ref 2; Henry’s campaign against, ref 1; and Henry’s pose as defender of the faith, ref 1; confirms Cranmer as archbishop, ref 1; threatens bishop of London, ref 1; declares Henry’s marriage to Katherine still valid, ref 1; bull of interdict and deposition against Henry, ref 1

clergy: character of, ref 1; and heretics, ref 1; under law, ref 1; hostility to, ref 1, ref 2; attacked in parliament, ref 1; charged with praemunire, ref 1; repudiate Commons petition against grievances, ref 1; submit to Henry, ref 1, ref 2; self-indulgent and immoral behaviour, ref 1, ref 2; executed after rebellion, ref 1; move on dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; punished and executed after dissolution, ref 1, ref 2; in Church of England, ref 1; shortage of reformed, ref 1; obliged by Whitgift to assent to articles, ref 1; see also benefit of clergy

Clyst St Mary, Devon, ref 1

coach: introduced to England, ref 1

Cobbett, William, ref 1

Cobbler, Captain, ref 1

Cobham, Henry Brooke, 11th baron, ref 1

Cobham, William Brooke, 10th baron, ref 1

coinage: debased, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; debasement reversed, ref 1

Colchester abbey, ref 1

Colet, John, ref 1, ref 2

Coligny, Gaspard de, ref 1

Collectanea satis copiosa, ref 1

Commons, House of see parliament

Company of the Mines Royal, ref 1

Condé, Louis, prince of, ref 1, ref 2

Confession of Augsburg, ref 1

consubstantiation, ref 1

convents: dissolved, ref 1

Corunna, ref 1

countryside: changes and decay, ref 1

Courtenay, Lord Edward (later earl of Devonshire), ref 1, ref 2

Coventry cathedral, ref 1

Coverdale, Miles, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Cox, Richard, ref 1

Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury: meets at White Horse tavern, ref 1; supports Henry in divorce negotiations, ref 1; and relations between king and pope, ref 1, ref 2; sees portent in sky, ref 1; on Elizabeth Barton, ref 1, ref 2; appointed archbishop, ref 1; and constitutional changes, ref 1; crowns Anne Boleyn, ref 1; and More’s refusal to take oath, ref 1; on reformation, ref 1, ref 2; doubts over Anne Boleyn’s guilt, ref 1; draws up articles of faith, ref 1; and Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; on Henry’s triumph over enemies of reform, ref 1; proposes collegiate school at Canterbury, ref 1; supervises Henry’s corrected statement of belief, ref 1; letter from Melanchthon, ref 1; and religious reforms, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; sends family into exile, ref 1; on Six Articles, ref 1; supports Cromwell, ref 1; as senior counsellor, ref 1; investigates Katherine Howard’s infidelities, ref 1; supports reform and accused of heresy, ref 1; modifies beliefs, ref 1; and death of Henry, ref 1; grows beard, ref 1; Latimer lives with, ref 1; frames Act of Uniformity, ref 1, ref 2; turns against Somerset, ref 1; advises Edward VI to appoint reformers to council, ref 1, ref 2; detained and tried, ref 1; celebrates burning of Joan Bocher, ref 1; degraded, ref 1; recantations, ref 1; burnt and denies recantations, ref 1; Book of Homilies, ref 1, ref 2; A Code of Ecclesiastical Constitutions, ref 1; A Collection of the Articles of Religion, ref 1

crime: increase in 1590s, ref 1

Cromwell, Oliver, ref 1

Cromwell, Thomas: on affairs of parliament, ref 1; background and career, ref 1; opposes invasion of France, ref 1; devotion to Wolsey, ref 1; rise to power, ref 1, ref 2; and Norfolk’s threat to Wolsey, ref 1; and constitutional changes, ref 1; and secrecy of Dunstable ecclesiastical court, ref 1; investigates Elizabeth Barton, ref 1; recruits Latimer, ref 1; system of supervision and control, ref 1; and More’s refusal to take oath, ref 1; appointed viceregent, ref 1; supervises collection of Church revenues, ref 1; and fate of Fisher and More, ref 1; on visitation of monasteries, ref 1; religious reforms, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; and Henry’s infidelities, ref 1; on commission into treason, ref 1; disagreements with Henry, ref 1; and Anne Boleyn’s downfall, ref 1; warns Mary Tudor, ref 1; orders dissolution of monasteries, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and rebellions in North, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; Aske attacks, ref 1; appropriates monastic lands and possessions, ref 1; threatens defiant friar, ref 1; and burning of John Forrest, ref 1; decrees possession of English Bible in every church, ref 1; introduces parish registers, ref 1; military preparations against papal threat, ref 1; supports Anne of Cleves as wife for Henry, ref 1, ref 2; arrested and charged with treason, ref 1; created earl of Essex, ref 1; beheaded, ref 1

Crowley, Robert: The Way to Wealth, ref 1

Culpeper, Thomas, ref 1

custom: replaced by law, ref 1

Dacre, Gregory Fiennes, 10th baron, ref 1

Darcy, Thomas, baron: opposes Pilgrim of Grace, ref 1, ref 2; tried and beheaded, ref 1

Darnley, Henry Stuart, earl of: Mary Stuart’s infatuation with, ref 1; character, ref 1; marriage to Mary, ref 1; marriage difficulties, ref 1; plot against Mary, ref 1; murdered, ref 1; inquiry into murder, ref 1

Darvel Gadarn, St, ref 1

Davison, Francis, ref 1

Davison, Sir William, ref 1, ref 2

Dedham, Essex, ref 1

Dee, John, ref 1; General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, ref 1

Dekker, Thomas: The Wonderful Year, ref 1

Denny, Sir Anthony, ref 1, ref 2

Dereham, Francis, ref 1

‘Device for the Alteration of Religion’, ref 1

Digges, Thomas, ref 1

diseases, ref 1

Dispensation and Peter’s Pence Act (1534), ref 1

Displaying of the Protestants, The, ref 1

Dissolution of Monasteries, Act for (1536), ref 1, ref 2

Doncaster: and Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; Adwick le Street parish, ref 1

Dormer, Jane see Feria, duchess of

Douai, ref 1, ref 2

Douglas, Lady Margaret, ref 1

Drake, Sir Francis: voyages to West Indies, ref 1; in Panama, ref 1; circumnavigates globe, ref 1; attacks Spanish ships, ref 1; given command of squadron against Spain, ref 1, ref 2; opposes Spanish Armada, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; sails against Portugal, ref 1

drama: development, ref 1

dress and costumes, ref 1

Dreux, ref 1

Dryffield, Revd Thomas, ref 1

Dudley, Amy: death, ref 1

Dudley, Sir Edmund, ref 1, ref 2

Dudley, Sir Henry, ref 1

Dudley, John see Northumberland, John Dudley, duke of

Dudley, Robert see Leicester, earl of

earthquake (1580), ref 1

Edinburgh, treaty of (1560), ref 1, ref 2

education: after dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; and English language, ref 1

Edward III, king, ref 1

Edward VI, king: birth, ref 1; upbringing and education, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; portrait, ref 1; in family portrait, ref 1; appearance and manner, ref 1; religious reformism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8; Henry bequeaths crown to, ref 1; regency, ref 1; told of father’s death, ref 1; coronation, ref 1; betrothal to infant Mary Stuart, ref 1; and Protector Somerset’s invasion of Scotland, ref 1; founds schools, ref 1; Thomas Seymour attempts to influence, ref 1; and social divisions and unrest, ref 1, ref 2; rumoured death, ref 1; and Somerset’s downfall, ref 1; attends council meetings, ref 1; relations with Dudley (Northumberland), ref 1; differences with Mary Tudor, ref 1; and Somerset’s execution, ref 1; administration, ref 1; ill with smallpox, ref 1; health decline, ref 1; succession to, ref 1; death, ref 1; funeral, ref 1

Edwards, Arthur, ref 1

Egerton, Sir Thomas (later Viscount Brackley), ref 1

Elizabeth I, queen: birth, ref 1, ref 2; paternity questioned, ref 1; education and learning, ref 1, ref 2; in family portrait, ref 1; love of music, ref 1; in succession to Henry, ref 1; on Katherine Parr’s marriage to Seymour, ref 1; relations with Thomas Seymour, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; enters household of Katherine Parr, ref 1; declared illegitimate, ref 1; and Mary Tudor’s accession, ref 1; Protestantism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; and Wyatt’s rebellion, ref 1; confined in Tower, ref 1; moved from Tower to Woodstock, ref 1; Catholics persecuted under, ref 1; relations with Mary Tudor, ref 1; and Dudley conspiracy, ref 1; as heir apparent to Mary, ref 1; succeeds at Mary’s death, ref 1; progress to London on accession, ref 1; coronation, ref 1; and privy council, ref 1; condition of England on accession, ref 1; relations with Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, ref 1, ref 2; women courtiers, ref 1; religious opinions and policy, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; remains unmarried and childless, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; ascendancy and exercise of power, ref 1; relations with parliament, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; cult of, ref 1; keeps crucifix, ref 1; assassination plots against, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; dislikes war, ref 1, ref 2; suitors and marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; smallpox, ref 1; hopes to meet Mary Stuart, ref 1; supports Protestant cause in France, ref 1; succession debated in parliament, ref 1; guided by council, ref 1; scarred by smallpox, ref 1; summons parliament infrequently, ref 1; portraits, ref 1; questions Melville about Mary Stuart, ref 1; fluency in languages, ref 1, ref 2; plays virginals, ref 1; ill with flux, ref 1; on Darnley’s murder of Rizzio, ref 1; illness (1566), ref 1; writes to Mary on murder of Darnley, ref 1; deprecates Mary’s marriage to Bothwell, ref 1; supports Mary on imprisonment, ref 1; on Mary’s escape and flight to England, ref 1; and inquiry into Darnley murder, ref 1, ref 2; undertakes progresses, ref 1, ref 2; vacillations over Mary Stuart, ref 1; defends Cecil, ref 1; and proposed marriage of Mary Stuart and Norfolk, ref 1; northern earls rise against (1569), ref 1; excommunicated by Pius V, ref 1; accession date celebrated, ref 1; marriage negotiations with dukes of Anjou, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; Norfolk supports Ridolfi plot to depose, ref 1; ulcerous leg, ref 1, ref 2; on Mary and Ridolfi plot, ref 1; nervous collapse on condemnation of Norfolk, ref 1; resists parliament’s condemnation of Mary Stuart, ref 1; favours counsellors, ref 1; entertained at Kenilworth, ref 1; love of dancing, ref 1, ref 2; touches for ‘king’s evil’, ref 1; reluctance to support war in Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; sends aid to William of Orange, ref 1; told of St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; procrastination, ref 1; ungenerosity, ref 1; declines to head Protestant League in Europe, ref 1; alarmed at ‘prophesyings’, ref 1; peace under, ref 1; image as Virgin Queen, ref 1, ref 1; suffers fits and toothache, ref 1; orders restrictions on ruffs and rapiers, ref 1; portrait by Metsys, ref 1; meets Campion, ref 1; relationship with Anjou ends, ref 1; favours Whitgift, ref 1; moves to recognize James VI as king of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2; mourns death of duke of Anjou, ref 1; dislikes Burghley’s plans to ensure Protestant succession, ref 1; portrait cameos manufactured, ref 1; selects small number of counsellors, ref 1; signs treaty with Netherlands (1585), ref 1; celebrates twenty-seventh anniversary of accession (1585), ref 1; ‘Ermine’ portrait, ref 1; anger at Leicester’s appointment as governor of Netherlands, ref 1; fainting fit, ref 1; Babington’s conspiracy against, ref 1; and trial of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1; uncertainties over decision about Mary’s fate, ref 1; signs Mary’s death warrant, ref 1; reaction to Mary’s execution, ref 1; Tilbury speech (1588), ref 1; Gower’s ‘Armada’ portrait, ref 1; forbids parliament to engage in religious affairs, ref 1; ageing, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; on foreign affairs, ref 1; translates Boethius, ref 1; late portraits, ref 1; deprecates Essex’s Cadiz expedition, ref 1; growing irascibility, ref 1; daily exercises, ref 1; assaults Essex, ref 1; and Essex’s campaign in Ireland, ref 1; court factions, ref 1; and humbling of Essex, ref 1; and Essex’s rebellion, ref 1; reforms procedure on monopolies, ref 1; succession to, ref 1; riding in later years, ref 1; decline and death, ref 1

Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII, ref 1

Eltham Palace, ref 1, ref 2

Ely, bishop of, ref 1

Empson, Sir Richard, ref 1

enclosure (of land), ref 1, ref 2

England: Catholic religious practices, ref 1; war with France (1513), ref 1; depopulation in counties, ref 1; taxation, ref 1; war against France (1523), ref 1; threat of rebellion, ref 1; treaties with France: (1525), ref 1; (1546), ref 1; (1572), ref 1; (1573), ref 1; trading development, ref 1; executions for treason (1534–40), ref 1; under supervision and control, ref 1; prophecies and portents, ref 1, ref 2; Franco–Spanish invasion threat against Henry, ref 1; war with Scotland (1542), ref 1; invades France (1544), ref 1; religion at time of Henry’s death, ref 1; European Protestant divines visit, ref 1; religious reforms under Edward VI, ref 1; legislation under Edward VI, ref 1; social divisions and unrest under Edward VI and Somerset, ref 1, ref 2; Henry II of France declares war on, ref 1; food and eating, ref 1; described by French and Spanish, ref 1; Protestant exiles flee to Europe, ref 1; declares war on France (1557), ref 1; coach introduced, ref 1; naval development and sea power, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; rift with Spain, ref 1; development of world trade, ref 1; material improvements, ref 1; industrial development, ref 1; Catholic invasion threat, ref 1; voyages and colonies, ref 1; period of peace (1559–85), ref 1; trade with Spain, ref 1; Spanish Armada and invasion threat, ref 1; strength of fleet against Armada, ref 1; seamen’s behaviour, ref 1; unrest (1596), ref 1; see also North of England

English language: Bible translated into, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; litany under Edward VI, ref 1; in Church of England, ref 1; used for psalms under Elizabeth, ref 1

Erasmus, Desiderius: opposes war, ref 1; on unhygienic conditions, ref 1; translates New Testament, ref 1; religious reforms, ref 1; on fear in England, ref 1; humanist learning, ref 1; on Becket shrine at Canterbury, ref 1; Mary Tudor translates, ref 1, ref 2; De Servando Conjugio (‘On Preserving Marriage’), ref 1; Paraphrase of the New Testament, ref 1

Erik, prince of Sweden, ref 1

Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of: character and career, ref 1; as Elizabeth’s favourite, ref 1; on expedition against Portugal, ref 1; belligerence, ref 1; rivalry with Robert Cecil, ref 1, ref 2; as ward of Burghley, ref 1; in privy council, ref 1; controls intelligence, ref 1; uncovers Lopez plot against Elizabeth, ref 1; leads expedition against Cadiz, ref 1; leads second attack on Spain (1597), ref 1; offends Elizabeth, ref 1; sent to Ireland as lord deputy, ref 1; withdraws from court, ref 1; returns to England from Ireland, ref 1; examined by special court and found guilty of contempt, ref 1; disgraced, ref 1; plans rebellion, ref 1; imprisons Cecil, ref 1; armed revolt and surrender, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Essex, Sir Walter Devereux, 1st earl of, ref 1

Eucharist, ref 1, ref 2; see also transubstantiation

Europe: religious wars and troubles, ref 1

Evil May Day (1517), ref 1

excommunication, ref 1

Exeter: in Western Rising, ref 1; workhouse established (1553), ref 1

Exeter, Henry Courtenay, marquess of, ref 1

faith, ref 1

Familists (Family of God), ref 1

famine, ref 1

fashion, ref 1

Faunt, Nicholas, ref 1

Felton, John, ref 1

Fenatus (tooth drawer), ref 1

Fenton, William, ref 1

Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, ref 1

Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, ref 1

Ferdinand, king of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Feria, Jane Dormer, duchess of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Field of Cloth of Gold (1520), ref 1

Field, John and Thomas Wilcox: An Admonition to the Parliament, ref 1

Fish, Simon: A Supplication for the Beggars, ref 1

Fisher, John, bishop of Rochester: resists Henry’s demands, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; proposes Spanish invasion of England, ref 1; arrested, ref 1; refuses oath on Act of Succession and consigned to Tower, ref 1; trial and execution, ref 1, ref 2

Flodden Field, battle of (1513), ref 1, ref 2

Flower, Thomas, ref 1

food and diet: changes, ref 1

Forrest, Fra John, ref 1

Foster, Thomas, ref 1

Fotheringhay Castle, ref 1, ref 2

Foxe, John: on killing of Hunne, ref 1; reports incidents of iconoclasm, ref 1; on Supremacy Act (1534), ref 1; on Katherine Parr, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; on Henry’s mistrust of Gardiner, ref 1; on accession of Edward VI, ref 1; on Marian persecutions, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s meeting with Mary Tudor, ref 1; and martyrdom of Latimer, ref 1; recounts history of Reformation, ref 1; protests to Elizabeth at resumption of burnings, ref 1; Book of Martyrs, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

Foxe, Richard, bishop of Winchester: as lord privy seal, ref 1; promotes Wolsey, ref 1

France: Henry’s hostility to, ref 1, ref 2; Holy League formed against, ref 1; war declared against (1512), ref 1; Henry’s expedition against (1513), ref 1; Henry invades (1523), ref 1; treaties with England: (1525), ref 1; (1546), ref 1; (1572), ref 1; (1573), ref 1; Henry visits with Anne Boleyn, ref 1; Henry allies against with Charles V, ref 1, ref 2; alliance with Scotland, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; invasion (1544), ref 1; renewed invasion threat from, ref 1; force lands at Leith (1548), ref 1; peace with England, ref 1; supports Dudley conspiracy, ref 1; ships attack Scarborough, ref 1; England declares war on (1557), ref 1; threatens invasion of England (1558), ref 1; Elizabeth seeks peace with, ref 1; and plots to kill Elizabeth, ref 1; garrison at Leith resists English, ref 1; rivalry with Spain, ref 1; troops leave Scotland, ref 1; wars of religion, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; support for Mary Stuart, ref 1; seizes Hainault, ref 1; war against Spain in Netherlands, ref 1; Catholic extremism, ref 1; disunity, ref 1

Francis I, king of France: accession, ref 1; conflicts with Charles V, ref 1; Wolsey negotiates with, ref 1; at Field of Cloth of Gold, ref 1; Mary Tudor betrothed to, ref 1; Henry and Charles V’s (1521) treaty against, ref 1; Henry’s alliance with, ref 1; delays publication of pope’s bull against Henry, ref 1; invasion threat to England, ref 1; fails to form alliance with Charles V, ref 1; detests Cromwell, ref 1; welcomes Scots’ war with England, ref 1; seeks peace with Henry and Charles V (1544), ref 1

Francis II, king of France: marriage to Mary Stuart, ref 1; accession, ref 1; renounces claim to English throne, ref 1; death, ref 1

friaries: destroyed, ref 1, ref 2

Frobisher, Sir Martin, ref 1

Fuller, Thomas, ref 1, ref 2; The Church History of Britain, ref 1

Gardiner, Stephen, bishop of Winchester: chides pope, ref 1; on revolt in North, ref 1; Barnes preaches against, ref 1; campaign against heretics, ref 1; and accusations against Cranmer, ref 1; as Purveyor General to army in France, ref 1; favours peace over war, ref 1; Henry complains to of Katherine Parr’s religious reformism, ref 1; in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, ref 1; investigates Katherine Parr, ref 1; Henry mistrusts, ref 1, ref 2; excluded from court and regency council, ref 1, ref 1; religious conservatism, ref 1; discounted by Edward VI, ref 1; protests at Edward VI’s religious reforms, ref 1; preaches after release from prison, ref 1; rearrested and confined in Tower, ref 1; restored under Mary Tudor, ref 1; as adviser to Mary Tudor, ref 1; interrogates Courtenay over plot, ref 1; urges acceptance of Philip of Spain, ref 1; restores Act on burning of heretics, ref 1; death, ref 1; De Vera Obedientia, ref 1

Garrett, Thomas, ref 1

‘gathered’ churches, ref 1

Gembloux, battle of (1578), ref 1

Gerard, Father, SJ, ref 1

Germany: uprising (1525), ref 1; Henry seeks Protestant support from, ref 1, ref 2

Ghent, Pacification of, ref 1

Glass of the Truth, A (tract), ref 1

Glastonbury abbey, ref 1, ref 2

Golden Hind (earlier Pelican; ship), ref 1

Gorges, Ferdinando, ref 1

‘gospellers’, ref 1

Gower, George, ref 1

Gravelines, battle of (1588), ref 1

Great Harry (ship), ref 1

Greenwich Palace, ref 1

Gregory VII, pope: reforms, ref 1

Grenville, Sir Richard, ref 1

Grey, Lady Jane: background, ref 1; and death of Edward, ref 1; proclaimed queen, ref 1, ref 2; beheaded, ref 1

Grey, Lord John, ref 1

Grey, Lady Katherine (Countess of Hertford), ref 1, ref 2

Grey, Lady Mary, ref 1

Grindal, Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1, ref 2

Guise, Francis, duke of, ref 1

Guise, Henry I, duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Guise, house of, ref 1; see also Mary of Guise

Habsburg dynasty: dominance, ref 1

Hackett (yeoman pretender), ref 1

Hakluyt, Richard, ref 1

Hall, Edward, ref 1, ref 2; Chronicle, ref 1, ref 2

Hallam, Henry, ref 1

Hambleton Hill, ref 1

Hampton Court, ref 1, ref 2

Hardwick House, ref 1

Harold Harefoot, ref 1

Harpsfield, Nicholas, ref 1

Harridaunce, John, ref 1

Harrington, Sir John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Harrison, William, ref 1, ref 2; Description of England, ref 1

harvest failures: (1549), ref 1; (1551), ref 1; (1555), ref 1; (1586), ref 1; (1594–7), ref 1

Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, ref 1

Hatton, Sir Christopher: in Commons, ref 1; as favourite of Elizabeth, ref 1; scheme to discover North–West Passage, ref 1; commissions portrait of Elizabeth, ref 1; on prospect of Mary Stuart succeeding to English throne, ref 1; denounces Mary Stuart, ref 1

Haughton, John, Carthusian prior, ref 1

Haukes, Thomas, ref 1

Hawkins, Sir John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Hawkins, Sir Richard: Observations, ref 1

Hawkins, William, ref 1

Heere, Lucas de: The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory (painting), ref 1

Heneage, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Henry II, king of France: aims to recover Boulogne, ref 1, ref 2; alliance with Scotland, ref 1; declares war against England (1549), ref 1; and succession of Mary Tudor, ref 1; promises help to English insurgents, ref 1, ref 2; Philip declares war on, ref 1

Henry III, king of France (earlier duke of Anjou): marriage negotiations with Elizabeth, ref 1

Henry IV (of Navarre), king of France, ref 1, ref 2

Henry VII, king: death and funeral, ref 1; supposed wish to marry Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; claim to throne, ref 1; bequest to Henry VIII, ref 1; challenges Church, ref 1; and Wolsey’s downfall, ref 1

Henry VIII, king: accession and coronation, ref 1; marriage to Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; musicianship, ref 1; upbringing and education, ref 1; appearance, ref 1; sporting activities, ref 1; character and temperament, ref 1; hostility to France, ref 1, ref 2; infidelities and mistresses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; inheritance, ref 1; pilgrimages to holy places, ref 1; religious faith and observance, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; joins Holy League, ref 1; expedition against France (1513), ref 1; intervenes in Hunne heresy case, ref 1; and Henry Standish case, ref 1; birth of daughter Mary, ref 1; rivalry with French king and emperor Charles V, ref 1; pardons London rioters, ref 1; and religious controversy, ref 1, ref 2; designated Defender of the Faith (Fidei Defensor), ref 1; reads and counters Luther, ref 1; protects Wolsey, ref 1; in France for Field of Cloth of Gold, ref 1; renews claims to French crown, ref 1; meets and courts Anne Boleyn, ref 1, ref 2; and Wolsey’s failure, ref 1; desire for legitimate son, ref 1; seeks divorce from Katherine of Aragon, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; takes over administration of country, ref 1; claim to spiritual supremacy, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; reads Fish’s Supplication, ref 1; acts against clergy, ref 1; recognized as supreme head of Church in England, ref 1; renounces Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; accepts submission of clergy, ref 1; seeks support of parliament, ref 1; honours and elevates Anne Boleyn, ref 1; visits France with Anne Boleyn, ref 1; as absolute ruler, ref 2, ref 3; marriage to Anne Boleyn, ref 1, ref 2; marriage to Katherine declared invalid, ref 1; declared supreme head of Church of England, ref 1; Clement VII issues bull against, ref 1; attends Reformation Parliament (1536), ref 1; on death of Katherine of Aragon, ref 1; stunned in fall from horse, ref 1; and Anne Boleyn’s infidelity and execution, ref 1; marries Jane Seymour, ref 1, ref 2; daughter Mary submits to, ref 1; succession question, ref 1, ref 2; draws up articles of faith, ref 1; and settlement of Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion, ref 1; meets Aske, ref 1; suppresses rebellion in North, ref 1; and dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; pope publishes Bill of Deposition against, ref 1; revises bishops’ statement of belief, ref 1; opposes unorthodox religious doctrine, ref 1; and son Edward, ref 1; ulcerous legs, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and invasion threat from continent, ref 1; moves from religious reform, ref 1, ref 2; marriage to and separation from Anne of Cleves, ref 1; and Cromwell’s downfall, ref 1, ref 2; supervises public affairs, ref 1; marriage to Katherine Howard, ref 1; progress to north, ref 1; informed of Katherine Howard’s infidelities, ref 1, ref 2; obesity, ref 1, ref 2; protects Cranmer against accusations of heresy, ref 1; final marriage to Katherine Parr, ref 1; and invasion of France (1544), ref 1; withdraws from France, ref 1; in family portrait, ref 1; deplores differences in religion, ref 1; and Church reform, ref 1; deprecates Katherine Parr’s religious reformism, ref 1; signs treaty of Ardres (1546), ref 1; pardons Katherine Parr for religious views, ref 1; health decline and death, ref 1; rages, ref 1; will, ref 1, ref 2; funeral, ref 1; in allegorical de Heere painting, ref 1; executions under, ref 1; Harpsfield on, ref 1; Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, ref 1

Henry Imperial (ship), ref 1

Heresy Act (1555), ref 1

heretics: condemned and executed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; growing numbers, ref 1; suppressed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Hertford, Edward Seymour, 1st earl of

see Somerset, 1st duke of

Hertford, Edward Seymour, earl of (son of above), ref 1

Hever (house), Kent, ref 1

Hexham abbey, Northumberland, ref 1

Heywood, John, ref 1

Higden, Ranulph: Polychronicon, ref 1

Hilliard, Nicholas, ref 1

history: effect of Reformation on, ref 1

Hoby, Lady Elizabeth, ref 1

Holbein, Hans, ref 1, ref 2

Holinshed, Raphael, ref 1, ref 2

Holt Castle, Worcestershire, ref 1

Holy League: formed against France, ref 1

Hooker, John, ref 1

Hooker, Richard: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ref 1

Hooper, John, bishop of Gloucester, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Horsey, William, ref 1

hospitals, ref 1

Hours of the Blessed Virgin, ref 1

Howard de Walden, Thomas Howard, 1st baron (later 1st earl of Suffolk), ref 1

Howard of Effingham, 2nd baron see Nottingham, 1st earl of

Howard, Lady Mary, ref 1

Howard, Lord Thomas, ref 1

Huguenots, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

humanism, ref 1, ref 2

Humble Supplication unto God, ref 1

Humfrey, John, ref 1

Hunne, Richard, ref 1

Hunsdon, George Carey, 2nd baron, ref 1

Hunsdon, Henry Carey, 1st baron, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

iconoclasm: early incidents, ref 1; at dissolution of monasteries, ref 1

imperium, ref 1

Inquisition, Holy, ref 1, ref 2

Institution of a Christian Man, The (The Bishops’ Book), ref 1

Ireland: Catholic soldiers land in, ref 1; Philip promotes rebellion in, ref 1; lord lieutenancy, ref 1, ref 2; Tyrone’s revolt (1598), ref 1, ref 2; Essex leads army in, ref 1; Mountjoy’s campaign in, ref 1

Isabella, queen of Castile, ref 1, ref 2

James IV, king of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2

James V, king of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2

James VI, king of Scotland (James I of England): birth and appearance, ref 1; at Stirling Castle as infant, ref 1; as prospective successor to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; proclaimed king of Scotland, ref 1; Elizabeth moves to recognize, ref 1, ref 2; exempted from reprisals in Bond of Association, ref 1; and Treaty of Berwick, ref 1; Elizabeth writes to denying involvement in Mary’s death, ref 1; inaction during Spanish Armada engagement, ref 1; Essex appeals to, ref 1; succeeds on death of Elizabeth, ref 1

Jane Seymour, Queen of Henry VIII: Henry courts, ref 1; marriage, ref 1; traduced in ballad, ref 1; in Corpus Christi procession, ref 1; death following birth of son, ref 1, ref 2; son Edward keeps mementoes, ref 1; in royal family portrait, ref 1

Jericho (house), Essex, ref 1

Jesuits: missionaries in England, ref 1, ref 2; captured and tortured, ref 1; put to death, ref 1

Jesus Christ: and real presence in Eucharist, ref 1

Jewel, John, bishop of Salisbury: The Apology of the Church of England, ref 1

Joan of Kent (Joan Bocher), ref 1, ref 2

John of Austria, Don, ref 1

Jonson, Ben: Bartholomew Fair, ref 1

Joye, George, ref 1

Julian of Norwich, Dame, ref 1

Julius III, pope, ref 1

Katherine of Aragon, queen of Henry VIII: marriage to Henry and coronation, ref 1; and Henry’s infidelity, ref 1; stillbirths and false pregnancies, ref 1; favours war against France, ref 1; Henry blames for failure of Spanish expedition, ref 1; and defeat of Scots (1513), ref 1; Henry’s disenchantment with, ref 1, ref 2; Henry seeks divorce from, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; popular support for, ref 1; Henry withdraws from and renounces, ref 1; marriage to Henry declared invalid, ref 1; status reduced, ref 1; Clement VII declares marriage to Henry still valid, ref 1; on execution of Fisher and More, ref 1; death, ref 1; Mary repudiates, ref 1; supported by Observant friars, ref 1; Edward VI requests to hand royal jewels to Somerset’s wife, ref 1; discusses rituals with daughter Mary, ref 1; marriage ruled legitimate, ref 1

Katherine Howard, queen of Henry VIII: marriage to Henry, ref 1; infidelity and lovers, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Katherine Parr, queen of Henry VIII: favours religious reform, ref 1, ref 1; marriage to Henry, ref 1; as regent in Henry’s absence, ref 1; and upbringing of prince and princesses, ref 1; influence suspected, ref 1; under suspicion for religious views, ref 1; Gardiner intrigues against, ref 1, ref 2; Henry prevents arrest, ref 1; nurses Henry, ref 1; marriage to Thomas Seymour, ref 1; death, ref 1; Elizabeth enters and leaves household, ref 1; The Lamentations of a Sinner, ref 1

Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, ref 1, ref 2

Kenninghall, Norfolk, ref 1

Kent, Nun of see Barton, Elizabeth

Kett, Robert, ref 1

King’s Book, the see Necessary Doctrine, A

Kingston, Sir William, ref 1, ref 2

Kirk o’Field (house), ref 1

Knollys, Sir Francis, ref 1, ref 2

Knollys, Sir William, ref 1

Knox, John, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, ref 1, ref 2

Lambert, John, ref 1

land: change of use and ownership, ref 1, ref 2; in Church hands, ref 1

Langland, William, ref 1

Langley priory, ref 1

Langside Hill, battle of (1568), ref 1

Lanoy, Cornelius, ref 1

Latimer, Hugh: preaching, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; joins court, ref 1; appointed bishop of Worcester, ref 1; attends Reformation Parliament, ref 1; attacked by clergy, ref 1; disparages rebels, ref 1; encourages education of children, ref 1; reads sermon at John Forrest’s execution, ref 1; resigns from Worcester, ref 1; released under Edward VI, ref 1; on Thomas Seymour in Tower, ref 1; on social and economic unrest, ref 1; on behaviour in church, ref 1; detained and interrogated, ref 1; degraded and burnt at stake, ref 1; on religion in England, ref 1

law: changes, ref 1; and canon law, ref 1

Lee, Henry, ref 1

Leges Anglorum, ref 1, ref 2

Le Havre, ref 1

Leicester, Lettice, countess of (earlier countess of Essex), marriage to Leicester, ref 1, ref 2

Leicester, Robert Dudley, earl of: appointed Master of the Horse, ref 1; relations with Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; as prospective husband for Elizabeth, ref 1; wife Amy’s death, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s illness, ref 1; supports radical religious reformers, ref 1; Elizabeth proposes as husband for Mary Stuart, ref 1; earldom, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1; as protector of Protestant faith, ref 1, ref 2; on imprisonment of Lanoy, ref 1; Elizabeth attacks, ref 1; hostility to Cecil, ref 1; supports Norfolk–Mary Stuart union, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s nervous collapse, ref 1; favours Puritan cause, ref 1; presents wristwatch to Elizabeth, ref 1; Elizabeth visits at Kenilworth, ref 1; on St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s refusal to head Protestant League, ref 1; dissuades Elizabeth from dismissing Grindal, ref 1; as prospective commander in Netherlands, ref 1; remarries (Lettice), ref 1, ref 2; opposes Elizabeth’s Anjou marriage, ref 1, ref 2; as patron of Campion, ref 1, ref 2; accompanies Elizabeth on 27th anniversary of accession celebrations, ref 1; commands in Netherlands, ref 1; on Mary Stuart’s letter to Elizabeth protesting innocence, ref 1; ague and death, ref 1

Leigh, Thomas, ref 1

Leith, Scotland: French force at, ref 1

Leland, John: Itinerary, ref 1

Lennox, Matthew Stuart, 4th earl of, ref 1

Leo X, pope, ref 1, ref 2

Lewes: priory destroyed, ref 1, ref 2; Marian martyrs, ref 1

Lewis, Hugh, ref 1

Leyton, Richard, ref 1

Lincolnshire: rebellion (1536), ref 1

Lisbon, ref 1, ref 2

Lisle, Honor, viscountess, ref 1

Little Waldingfield, Suffolk, ref 1

Lodge, Thomas, ref 1

Lollards, ref 1, ref 2

London: anti-clericalism, ref 1; radicalism and unrest, ref 1, ref 2; low life and conditions, ref 1; plagues, ref 1, ref 2; Marian martyrs, ref 1; as financial and trade centre, ref 1; damaged by earthquake (1580), ref 1; unrest (1595), ref 1

London, Dr John, ref 1

London, treaty of (1518), ref 1

Lopez, Rodrigo, ref 1

Lord of Misrule: restored under Mary, 677

Louis XII, king of France, ref 1

Louth, Lincolnshire, ref 1

Low Countries see Netherlands

Lucius I, ‘king’ (legendary hero), ref 1, ref 2

Lumley, John, 1st baron, ref 1

Luther, Martin: reform doctrines and teachings, ref 1, ref 2; declared heretical and books burned, ref 1; Henry reads and writes treatise against, ref 1, ref 2; tracts smuggled into England, ref 1, ref 2; influence on Tyndale, ref 1; denounced by English rebels, ref 1; told of Henry’s indifference to religion, ref 1; believes in real presence, ref 1

Lutheranism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

luxuries: increase in, ref 1

McCabb, Melaghin, ref 1

Machyn, Henry, ref 1

Malory, Thomas, ref 1

manorial system, ref 1

Manox, Henry, ref 1

Mar, James Stuart, earl of, ref 1

Margaret of Navarre: The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, ref 1

Margaret Tudor, queen of James IV of Scotland, ref 1

Marlech Hill, Hertfordshire, ref 1

Marlowe, Christopher: The Jew of Malta, ref 1

Marprelate, Martin: tracts, ref 1

Marshall, Cicely, ref 1

Martyr, Peter, ref 1

Mary I (Tudor), queen: birth, ref 1; childhood betrothals, ref 1; as prospective successor to Henry, ref 1; released from betrothal to Charles V, ref 1; household, ref 1; dances before father, ref 1; illnesses, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; stripped of princess title on birth of Elizabeth, ref 1; refuses oath of Succession, ref 1; mother reassures, ref 1; Anne Boleyn threatens, ref 1; learns of mother’s death, ref 1; and death of Anne Boleyn, ref 1; signs declaration of submission, ref 1; Pilgrimage of Grace demands legitimacy of, ref 1; frees Edward Courtenay, ref 1; education and learning, ref 1, ref 2; in family portrait, ref 1; Edward’s regard for, ref 1; interests and activities, ref 1; translates Erasmus, ref 1, ref 2; in succession to Henry, ref 1; on Katherine Parr’s marriage to Seymour, ref 1; hears Masses, ref 1; Thomas Seymour writes to from Tower, ref 1; rumoured involvement in Kett rebellion, ref 1; in plot against Somerset, ref 1; asked to submit to Act of Uniformity, ref 1; calls off flight abroad, ref 1; differences with Northumberland, ref 1; differences with Edward, ref 1; and Edward’s health decline, ref 1; declared illegitimate, ref 1; and Edward’s death, ref 1; accession, ref 1; promotes and restores Catholicism, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; government and advisers, ref 1; as queen regnant, ref 1; marriage prospects, ref 1; relations with parliament, ref 1; betrothal to Philip of Spain, ref 1; piety and devotions, ref 1; and Wyatt’s rebellion (1554), ref 1; voice and manner, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s confinement in Tower, ref 1; marriage to Philip, ref 1; childlessness, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; pregnancy, ref 1; welcomes Pole on return to England, ref 1; as head of Church of England, ref 1; religious persecutions under, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; relations with Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; and Philip’s departure from England, ref 1; armed conspiracy against (1555), ref 1; and burning of Cranmer, ref 1; supports Philip in war against France, ref 1; and fall of Calais, ref 1; makes will, ref 1; Knox attacks, ref 1; death, ref 1; embroiders image of cat, ref 1; reverses religious reforms, ref 1

Mary Boleyn (ship), ref 1

Mary of Guise, queen of James V of Scotland: as dowager queen of Scotland, ref 1, ref 2; death, ref 1; grave, ref 1

Mary Imperial (ship), ref 1

Mary of Portugal, ref 1

Mary Rose (ship), ref 1

Mary (Stuart), queen of Scots: birth, ref 1; betrothal to Edward as infant, ref 1; betrothal to French dauphin, ref 1; in hands of Henry II of France, ref 1; as successor to English throne, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; as queen of France, ref 1; and renunciation of claim to English throne, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; as threat in Scotland, ref 1; and death of Francis II, ref 1; character, ref 1; declines to sign treaty of Edinburgh, ref 1; returns to Scotland, ref 1; seeks meeting with Elizabeth, ref 1; and parliamentary debate of succession to Elizabeth, ref 1; marriage prospects, ref 1; infatuation with Darnley, ref 1; questions Melville about Elizabeth, ref 1; harries Moray in Chaseabout Raid, ref 1; marriage to Darnley, ref 1; denies Elizabeth’s title as queen, ref 1; marriage difficulties with Darnley, ref 1; and murder of Rizzio, ref 1; pregnancy and birth of son, ref 1; ostracizes Darnley, ref 1; and plot to murder Darnley, ref 1; Bothwell abducts and ravishes, ref 1; marriage to Bothwell, ref 1; pregnant by Bothwell, ref 1; imprisoned on Loch Leven, ref 1, ref 2; escapes, ref 1; miscarriage, ref 1; detained in England, ref 1; flees to England after Langside Hill defeat, ref 1; and inquiry into Darnley’s murder, ref 1; and ‘casket letters’, ref 1; prospective marriage to duke of Norfolk, ref 1, ref 2; confined in Tutbury Castle, ref 1; corresponds with Norfolk, ref 1; moved to Coventry in 1569 northern rebellion, ref 1; remains under house arrest, ref 1; and Ridolfi plot, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; condemned by parliament, ref 1; on execution of Norfolk, ref 1; sends gift of nightcaps to Elizabeth, ref 1; in collusion with Spain and Italy, ref 1; plots and intrigues, ref 1; and Throgmorton, ref 1; in Sheffield Castle, ref 1; commissioners visit, ref 1; plan to execute in event of Elizabeth’s assassination, ref 1; pleads for life with Elizabeth, ref 1; rebukes son James, ref 1; returns to Tutbury Castle, ref 1; in Babington plot, ref 1; taken to Fotheringhay Castle, ref 1; appearance, ref 1; tried and found guilty, ref 1; Elizabeth signs death warrant, ref 1; told of execution plans, ref 1; executed, ref 1

Mary Tudor, duchess of Suffolk (formerly queen of Louis XII; Henry VIII’s sister), ref 1

Mary, Virgin: as intercessor, ref 1

Matilda, queen of Henry I, ref 1, ref 2

Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor: Henry allies with (1513), ref 1; death, ref 1; Wolsey negotiates with, ref 1

Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor: relations with Elizabeth, ref 1

Medina Sidonia, Don Alonso, 7th duke of, ref 1, ref 2

Melanchthon, Philip, ref 1, ref 2

Melville, Sir James, ref 1; Memoirs, ref 1

Melville, Robert (later 1st baron), ref 1

Mendoza, Bernadino de, ref 1

Merchant Adventurers, ref 1, ref 2

Merlin the magician, ref 1

Metsys, Quentin (attrib.): portrait of Elizabeth, ref 1

Milan: Francis I captures, ref 1

Milan, Christina, Duchess of, ref 1

Mildmay, Sir Walter, ref 1, ref 2

Milton, John, ref 1

monasteries: life at, ref 1; visitations on, ref 1; shrines and relics, ref 1; dissolution, ref 1, ref 2; Cromwell controls, ref 1; despoiled and suppressed, ref 1, ref 2; lands and possessions appropriated and sold, ref 1; effect of dissolution on education, ref 1; images and relics destroyed, ref 1; revenues appropriated, ref 1