LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

apprehensive. They heard about Masses in Mary’s chapel and were frightened by what her militant and ultra-Catholic kin in France, the Guises, might be planning. Reformists and conformists at Court comprehended how completely the fate of their faith “apperteineth to the emperiall office.” So they tried to exclude Mary from the succession and to prevent the two royal cousins from meeting.⁵⁵

      William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, later Lord Burghley, and his ardently reformist colleagues at Court were determined to ruin Mary Stuart’s chances and were assisted, to that end, by the Queen of Scots herself, who, husband hunting, set her sights on the son of King Philip II of Spain. Philip had married Mary Tudor more than fifteen years before and was thus associated with her persecution of the realm’s religiously reformed subjects. Hence, he was terribly unpopular in Elizabeth’s England. Moreover, Mary Stuart’s suspected complicity in her second husband’s murder and her affair with a married man who became her third scandalized Elizabeth. Reports execrating the Queen of Scots spread south, where English Scots-watchers learned about her “outragious crueltie,” “unappeisabill haitrent,” and “plane trecherie.” Cecil, one sees, had help.⁵⁶

      Mary Stuart fled to England in 1568, following her partisans’ defeat in the Scottish civil wars. She could not be repatriated without discouraging England’s allies there who had seized the advantage over the pro-French faction—sure beneficiaries, if the Queen of Scots were to go home. But her residence (or, to be precise, her confinement) in the north of England created problems for Elizabeth’s government and church. Catholics there showed signs that Mary’s presence had them looking past Elizabeth. Neither she nor her Council, particularly Cecil, appreciated having a rival so close.

      Shakespeare was too young to have taken in Mary Stuart’s having been taken in, but certainly what followed—intrigue, romance, rebellion, and death—was talked about long after. Schemes to rescue her proliferated from the time of her arrival to that of her execution in 1587. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, meant to marry her, acquire immense influence as lover of the next-in-line, and displace William Cecil as Elizabeth’s most trusted. Mary liked the idea and applied to the pope to have her most recent (third) marriage annulled, but Elizabeth, who learned of her cousin’s courtship late in the game, thought that Cecil was not the only one whom the two planned to displace. And Tudor courtiers may have thought the planned usurpation plausible rather than preposterous, knowing what historians have lately rediscovered—specifically, that Elizabethan Catholicism was “vigorous” and not “moribund.”⁵⁷ Norfolk’s friends in the north, fearing that they would become casualties when their queen turned on the duke and his intended, rose preemptively in rebellion in 1569 and were swiftly routed. Trials of the propertied, papist rebels were delayed while Elizabeth’s lawyers and Bishop Pilkington of Durham squabbled about the spoils of war, but hundreds of humbler rebels promptly were executed.⁵⁸

      Norfolk did not directly participate in the insurrection, so he was released soon after his arrest. But Mary’s overtures continued, and after Elizabeth was excommunicated in 1570, King Philip II of Spain stepped smartly into the conspiracy. He promised to ferry a small army from the Netherlands to reinforce the English Catholics once Elizabeth was captured or killed, Mary freed, and Norfolk wed to her.⁵⁹ But Norfolk was rearrested and executed. Mary was spared, inasmuch as Cecil was unable to shake Elizabeth’s conviction that evidence of her cousin’s complicity was insufficient to kill a queen.

      The Queen of Scots remained in custody for the next sixteen years. Cecil and Francis Walsingham, who became what we might call the realm’s foreign secretary and secretary of defense as well as the regime’s chief intelligence officer, tried to isolate her diplomatically while doubling their efforts to find Elizabeth a suitable husband. The best candidate was Henry, Duke of Anjou and younger brother of France’s King Charles IX, although their indomitable mother, Catherine de Medici, mistrusted the English. And the English Calvinists mistrusted the French, particularly Anjou, who had quartered with Mary Stuart’s Guiscard uncles, regarded by many on both sides of the Channel as Henry’s “handlers.” Nonetheless, Cecil warmed to the possibility of a wedding and a French alliance, whereas influential others on Elizabeth’s Council were opposed to it.⁶⁰

      Treasuring “the quieteness” of her estate, which depended, she thought, on her religiously reformed subjects’ obedience, the queen made a point of refusing consent to Anjou’s stipulation that, “at his coming,” he and his attendants be permitted to hear Masses. But Elizabeth enjoined Walsingham to be emphatic during prenuptial negotiations so that there might be “no misconceiving gathered of our answer whereby the duke might hope of a sufferance.” Word got out, and public debate followed. One anonymous pamphleteer, who favored the Anjou match, inferred from the apostle Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians to “give no offense” that the queen “may tolerate Mass” to indulge the weak. But Elizabeth concluded differently. She agreed that other rituals might be observed if Anjou’s attendants were discreet; they “shall not be molested,” she pledged, but the Mass was “repugnant to the Church of God,” “to the Word of God.”⁶¹

      Elizabeth was not in an ecumenical mood. She restated her terms: as soon “as Monsieur will forbear the Mass, she will assent to the marriage.”⁶² But Monsieur would not “forbear,” and when the duke dug in, his mother and brother supported him. Then, startlingly, Queen Catherine offered her youngest son, François Hercule, Duke of Alençon. Elizabeth was twenty years older than the new Valois candidate, who, being further down the line of succession in France, might be persuaded that a realm across the Channel was worth relinquishing the Mass. But the English Calvinists may have had a different reason for welcoming Alençon to England. Mary Stuart wrote letters to Elizabeth and others that made it clear what the realm would get, should some mishap carry off the reigning queen. Mary confided that the Catholic Church was her chief consolation in 1571.⁶³ Predictably, the religiously reformed at Court, unconsoled by Mary’s consolations, believed that a young, impressionable French husband was preferable to a robustly aggrieved Scottish Catholic queen. The Earl of Leicester, for one, was encouraged to perceive a “full determination in her Majestie to like of” her new option.⁶⁴

      “Full determination”? We know that Elizabeth lavishly entertained French envoys who formally put Alençon’s proposal, but there is no telling how close she came to accepting it, for, as Shakespeare neared adolescence, she was learning to become a grand master of matrimonial deliberations.⁶⁵ Her conduct mystified her courtiers at the time and scholars thereafter, although she gave every indication of anticipating a first meeting with François Hercule when a shocking “accident” in France left thousands of Calvinists dead. Thomas Smith, from Paris, referred to the slaughter in August 1772 as an accident, to suggest that the murders were sudden and unpremeditated.⁶⁶ The French Court expressed outrage, yet word circulated in France and across the Channel that Catherine and King Charles approved the massacre and might also have orchestrated it. English reformists thought the Valois capable of such cruelty—“beastlie butcherie.”⁶⁷ Whatever the extent of Valois complicity, refugees arriving in England told stories of French Calvinists’ suffering that put conversations with Alençon’s agents on hold.

      From the English Protestants’ perspective, the massacres put the Valois Court on the wrong side of the Reformation, and that development moved the Earl of Leicester, patron of some of the realm’s outspoken reformists, to press his suit. He staged erotic entertainments during Elizabeth’s visit in 1575 to his castle at Kenilworth, fifteen miles from Stratford and young Shakespeare, entertainments that probably passed then—and are regarded now—as an “elaborate allegorical proposal of marriage.”⁶⁸

      But the queen rejected Leicester’s offer and encouraged her young French suitor to try again. For Alençon’s stock was rising steeply among the religiously reformed in England. He became the new Anjou as soon as his brother succeeded Charles as King Henry III, and he was known to have helped French Calvinists extort Valois concessions. True, he was also infamous for subsequently abandoning them, but English reformers were unprepared to despair of him as an altogether unsuitable suitor. For one thing, he was much less resolutely Roman Catholic than his brother Henry had been during previous prenuptial negotiations. Alençon/Anjou, moreover, was making friends of the Calvinist

Скачать книгу