LITMIR.BIZ

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Philip’s forces and regents could convert the new Anjou, promising him power he could never hope to possess while his brother lived.⁶⁹ It seemed necessary to preoccupy the Spanish in the Netherlands, because any peace favorable to Spain there would tempt Philip and his most aggressive regent, Don John of Austria, to send troops to England to liberate Mary Stuart.⁷⁰ She was waiting for just that, berating would-be rescuers who, to her mind, had been “deferring the matter so long.” Her letters—reprimanding, pleading, and coaxing—were often intercepted. In late 1578, “confidences” she composed helped Cecil, Leicester, and Walsingham dramatize the danger to Elizabeth and impress upon her the need to increase her “gracious assistance” to the Dutch. Gradually and grudgingly, those three advisors—Walsingham, last of all—also came to see the advantages of having Anjou participate, as Elizabeth’s surrogate, across the Channel.⁷¹

      But developing indifference to her Valois suitor’s Catholicism and the English Court’s effort to sanitize his reputation, which perplexed expatriate Catholics on the Continent, worried ardent reformists in England.⁷² After all, the new Anjou was “a spark” from the French “family which hath been a firebrand in Europe”—no friend to advocates of reformed religion and utterly untrustworthy in foreign affairs. So said John Stubbs in what Walsingham called a “lewde booke lately published”; Stubbs’s implacable, influential critic thought the book subversive as well as lewd because it was sure to provoke reformist preachers to “intermeddle” in “matters of state not incident to their profession and callinge.”⁷³ Perhaps at her Court’s urging, Elizabeth invited Anjou for an intimate interview and suggested secrecy. The duke came incognito but word got out, and the anti-Anjou literature did as well, warning that England was being “swallowed” by France. Stubbs made much of the secrecy; he complained that the new Anjou was practicing an “unmanlike, unprincelike . . . fearful, suspicious, disdainful, needy, French kind of wooing.” His “lewd book” claimed that the proposed marriage “was the straightest line that can be drawn from Rome to the utter ruin of our church.”⁷⁴ Richard Cox, bishop of Ely, who experienced firsthand the disagreements dividing reformers during the Marian exile, on their return, and for the next twenty years, claimed that the match would be yet another doloris causa, another reason for Calvinists to grieve.⁷⁵

      Cox was discreet. Stubbs published and had his hand severed as punishment for sedition. Philip Sydney ventured to protest—but delicately. His appeal to Elizabeth mentioned “the knot of religion” in England that, for nearly three decades, all but choked the realm, until Elizabeth, after sifting the “two mighty factions,” committed herself to the cause of reform. From the 1560s, her realm’s religiously reformed had counted on her leadership. How could she, “without excessive trouble, pull out of the party so long maintained”? It had developed into “your chief, if not your sole strength,” Sidney told her. “How [Calvinists’] hearts will be galled, if not aliened when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman and a papist.”⁷⁶

      When the queen finally ended the decade-long courtship with François Hercule d’Valois, she expressed regret that enduring opposition from the reformed “faction” had trumped her great affection for her suitor. But Spain’s ambassador to England, Bernard de Mendoza, detected little regret and hardly any affection; there had been more feigning than feeling, he reported, when the queen and duke discussed and dissolved their engagement.⁷⁷ Many reformists were relieved to see the back of the latter, although they favored his ambitions to continue campaigning against Spanish forces in the Low Countries. (Their feelings were shared by the Dutch commander, Prince William, long after Anjou’s imprudence and impatience—as well as the Francophobia in several parts of the Low Countries—made him something of a liability.)⁷⁸

      Elizabeth seemed content with the result. She turned churlish when her subjects presumed to offer premarital counseling.⁷⁹ And conversations about the succession, which invariably accompanied speculation about plausible husbands, were unwelcome. They were especially untimely during “doubtfull tymes,” that is, after Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped to England—and while “seminarie men” and “massing priests” traveled through the realm and agitated against Elizabeth’s settlement of religion. She and Calvinists at Court were convinced that expatriate priests returned to England in the late 1570s and the 1580s to implement regime change. Young Shakespeare may have heard about their intrigues—or have heard them intrigue—as they passed through Warwickshire on their way to more hospitable territory to the north. One of their Northamptonshire hosts, Thomas Tresham, tried to calm government fears. Expatriates—many of them Jesuits—had more to fear from the late Tudor administration, he said, than Tudor officials had to fear from them: “massing priests” and missionaries, Tresham elaborated, were “lambs among wolves.”⁸⁰

      Perhaps Tresham knew that Jesuit missionaries’ commissions explicitly prohibited them from commenting on England’s politics, on the road and even in reports they sent to Rome. But the realm’s reformers equated the Jesuits’ mission with espionage. To refortify the old faith was to discountenance the new and to sabotage church reform and political regime. Before Tresham offered his line on “lambs,” pamphleteer William Charke announced that whoever “smiteth our [reformed] religion woundeth our commonwealth.”⁸¹ Richard Bancroft explained that Jesuits were executed for “moving her Majestie’s subjects to rebellion,” not for religious conviction.⁸²

      Captured Jesuits were said to be particularly dangerous. During interrogations, they pretended to be curious about the arguments for reform to get interrogators to identify texts they trusted, whereupon the interrogated would smuggle the titles to eager collaborators who relayed them to Rome so that the next Catholic council could condemn the authors and burn their books. And, during arguments, Jesuits and other missionaries allegedly challenged religiously reformed interrogators to demonstrate that doctrinal declarations that the “true” church was invisible did not preclude responsible management of congregations’ affairs. When proof was provided and valued, visible leaders of reformed congregations on the Continent were named, the Catholics passed along that information as well, turning admired advocates of reform into targets. The conclusion to be drawn from such tales: the missionaries and “massing priests” were shrewd, treacherous villains, even when apprehended.⁸³

      On the loose, they were doubly dangerous predators who stalked entire households and “devour[ed] parents, children, masters, and servants.” A comprehensive crackdown was called for, according to Bishop Tobie Matthew; how sad, he said, that conformists and reformists in the realm relentlessly quarreled with each other while England was infested with papists! How could the religiously reformed watch without wailing (ingemiscere) while predatory missionaries made a meal of the realm’s families and turned them back to Catholicism?⁸⁴

      Enough wailing survives in sermons and pamphlets to suggest that it was an important part of the reformed religion around the realm. And the regime considered it necessary to keep close watch on prominent Catholics’ estates to prohibit politically subversive cults from forming, even when Jesuits and other missionaries were not present. The queen’s bishops’ agents combed the countryside for mementos of the expatriates’ missions, cherished in Catholics’ households as if they were relics of saints. Might Catholic families compose “a partie strong at home” ready to assist invaders—“divers princes Catholike”—to free the Queen of Scots from prison and place her on the throne?⁸⁵ To prevent that fifth column from rising, the queen’s Council routinely “call[ed] principall recusantes out of their country” and settled them far from neighbors. Thomas Tresham, for example, was taken from his home and confined in Ely, where the bishop’s facilities, along with Nicholas Bacon’s castle, were converted into prisons.⁸⁶ The wardens there and elsewhere were warned to “abstain from angry and opprobrious words,” for insults would only stiffen the prisoners’ “obstinacie,” which recusants misconstrued as “constancie,” as divinely inspired courage and thus as proof of the rectitude of the Catholics’ cause.⁸⁷ Elizabeth received at least one memorandum urging moderation as well; it promised that Jesuits’ “credit will soone quaile” if the realm’s authorities, “from the highest counselor to the lowest constable,” would only see to it that laws requiring subjects to attend reformed churches and

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