Foundations of the Anglican Church XCIV

Philip II, say what you 

will, a snappy dresser

Another follow-up on the saga of Mary, Queen of Scots.  I am grateful to all who sent me messages that they do like the postings that deal with more distant history and in particular for those who like the series on the history of the Anglican Church.  I must admit that I have found it very beneficial myself to work on this series as my own understanding of the history of Anglicanism and, in particular the issue of continuity in the Church of England before and after the various reformations of the sixteenth century, has helped me think more clearly about complex issues such as the Apostolic Succession and the “validity” of sacraments.   And we have a long way to go in the history of the Church of England as we still have the Jacobean Church, the Civil War and the Dissenters, the Restoration, the Enlightenment, the Hanoverians, the Oxford Movement and a long string of complicated and at times contradictory histories. 

Be that as it may.  Let’s look at the impact that the execution of Mary Stuart, the Catholic Queen of Scots, had on England and English Society—Society, of course, including the Church of England. 

The Spanish monarch, Philip II, was deeply involved with the plots to overthrow Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne—plots that led to Mary’s 1587 execution.  Elizabeth’s England—Protestant of the Calvinist variation, though Episcopal in structure—supported the Dutch rebels—Protestant of the Calvinist variation, though Presbyterian in structure—in their revolt against Philip who, in addition to being King of Spain, was the ruler of the Netherlands.  Philip needed to remove the English support for the rebels if he was to secure his authority in the Netherlands and so wanted to replace Protestant Elizabeth with Catholic Mary.  It was not unreasonable.  The old nobility (pre-Tudor) was still overwhelmingly Catholic (and resentful of the loss of power and influence to the new nobility created by the Tudors and overwhelmingly Protestant) and were anxious to support Mary’s ascendency to the throne.  In addition to the nobility, Catholicism survived strongly—even perhaps a majority among the gentry and peasantry—in the North and the West. These Catholics were anxious to see the old religion restored and they were encouraged in their rebellion by the Papal Bull, Regnans in Excelcis, of Pius V that absolved them of any loyalty to Elizabeth.   This Catholic commitment to regime change led to a number of plots, most especially the Ridolfi and Babington Plots, all of which failed and which ultimately led to Mary’s execution to put down the threat of a Catholic rebellion that would put Mary on the throne in place of Elizabeth.  When Mary’s death put her out of the way, Philip had no choice in his campaign to end England’s aid to the Dutch rebels but to invade England and get rid of Elizabeth and her Protestant government.

As if the execution of  Mary were not sufficient grounds in and of itself for Philip to want to strike against England, the English privateer, Sir Francis Drake, raided the Spanish port of Cadiz only two months after Mary’s death, burning ships and seizing supplies. 

Philip drew up bold plans for the retaliatory invasion of England but some of his advisors had strong reservations about their likelihood to be successful.  Anti-English courtiers prevented the critiques from reaching Philip, however, confident that this Catholic mission against Protestant England was God-ordained.   This was a crusade.  In fact, Pope Sixtus V permitted Philip to levy crusade-taxes to finance the expedition and the expedition’s banner was consecrated in a ceremony modeled on the blessing of the banner of the Christian forces against the Turks in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto.  Regardless of the political issues of English support for the Dutch rebels, this was a religious war. 

The Spanish fleet consisted of 130 ships, 8,000 sailors, 18,000 soldiers, and 2,500 canon.  They were to be joined by the Duke of Parma’s armies from the Netherlands for the invasion.  This was a serious threat to England. 

In the event, the English bested the much larger and better-equipped Spanish fleet in a series of initial battles.  On August 2, 1588, Elizabeth herself rode out to Tilbury to encourage her army preparing to resist Spanish attempts at invasion and, wearing a somewhat ridiculous breastplate of silver and equally ridiculous, with a page holding her silver helmet, gave her famous speech. 

My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes for fear of treachery; but, I do assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself, that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects; and, therefore, I am come amongst you as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all – to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, 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, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour should grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, for your forwardness, you have deserved rewards and crowns, and, we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

 This is considered one of the best speeches in the English language.  It certainly served its purpose and rallied the English people.  But note her: to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust.

And we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

This was for Elizabeth, and for the English, a battle of religion.  To be English was to be Protestant; to be Catholic was to be Spanish.  This marks a turning point in English religious history where not only by law, but in the English political imagination, to be Catholic was to be something other than English.  And so Lord Grantham would say in season 4 of Downton Abbey: "There seems to be something of the Johnny Foreigner about Catholics."  Yes, there does—ever since the Armada.  In many ways the Armada was the deathblow to English Catholicism as the surviving faithful in the rural areas of the North and the West gradually shifted from their foreign religion to the far more English Church of England.
 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XCIII

Sir Francis Walsingham

Elizabeth's spymaster

I have noticed that when I write about the synod or about our friends among the katholic krazies, I get four times as many visits to my blog as when I deal with the more distant history.  While I must admit it is more fun to write about history in the making than in the past, and obviously more readers find it more fun to read about current developments in the life of the Church, I am disappointed that my ardent love for the past doesn’t translate into blog popularity.  Nevertheless, I write this for my satisfaction, and not yours, beloved readers, so let me return—at least occasionally—to our saga of the Church of England.

In this posting I want to pick up on Garrett Mattingly’s essay on the execution of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.  I really am sorry that relatively few readers looked at that entry as it is, I believe and as I wrote in the introduction, the single best written piece of historical narrative that I have come across.  Mattingly knows how to make serious history read like a dime-store novel.  Mattingly honed his literary style writing sonnets.  Supposedly he wrote a sonnet every day of his adult life.  It taught him the discipline of saying as much as possible in as few words as were probable to the sonnet format.  But it isn’t his style that I want to comment on today but his thesis that Mary was, alas, no Catholic martyr. 

Yes she died in the faith but, despite her efforts to appear the martyr, she did not die for it.  Her cousin, Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England and daughter of Henry VIII has a reputation for being a rabidly blood-thirsty Protestant hell-bent on exterminating English Catholicism by hunting down and judicially murdering each and every adherent to the “old faith” in England.  But that simply was not the truth.  Elizabeth had a number of Catholics in her court and employ.  William Byrd, the composer and organist in her chapel, was a devout Roman Catholic and she granted him and fellow Catholic composer, Thomas Tallis, a monopoly on the publication of polyphonic music. Her attempts to secure her control over Ireland meant that she needed to have good relationship with the Irish nobles, most of whom remained in the “old faith.”  Several of the foreign princes with whom she flirted about marriage were Catholics.  Moreover many of the peers of her own realm, especially in the North, were Catholics as were many of the wealthier gentry families—it was fashionable to be Catholic to show you were an “old blood” family and not Tudor parvenus.  Elizabeth had no interest in troubling the consciences of her subjects and was, by and large, willing to let sleeping dogs lie in the comfort of their own preferred religion as long as they were politically loyal to her.   The problem was that many Catholics, instead of being content to remain in the background under a Protestant Queen, wanted to replace her with a Catholic one and regain the political ascendency.  The Bull of Pius V, Regnans in Excelcis, which absolved English Catholics of their allegiance to their Protestant Queen, threw fuel on this fire.   The convenience of Mary Stuart being both a Catholic and the next, by blood, in line to the English throne proved to be too great a temptation and in the 1570’s and 1580’ several plots were hatched to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne.  Mary was foolish enough to get herself involved in some of these plots and it led to Elizabeth’s Council demanding Mary’s execution. 

The final straw was a plot led by Sir Anthony Babington to murder Elizabeth and replace her with Mary.  Mary wrote a letter explicitly condoning the assassination.  The letter was intercepted by Thomas Phelippes, an agent of Sir Francis Walsingham who directed Elizabeth’s spy network.  Unfortunately for the integrity of their case, Phelippes, who was a master forger, was also instructed to add a forged document to the letter, but Mary’s complicity in the plot was established (and for historians remains established) nonetheless. 

Elizabeth asked Sir Amias Paulet, Mary’s gaoler to dispose of Mary’s discreetly, but Paulet—a convinced Calvinist and a man of the highest integrity—refused to be involved in a murder.  It forced Elizabeth to consider a trial, conviction, and judicial execution.  Mary was tried and convicted in October 1586, but Elizabeth remained reluctant to sign the warrant for her execution.  Mary was an anointed Queen and it would not be a good precedent for the Lord’s Anointed—even a Catholic Lord’s Anointed—to be put to death.  Both Parliament and the Privy Council pushed Elizabeth to sign the warrant and yet she hesitated.  Finally she was convinced to sign it but not to authorize its being carried out so that, should something untoward happen to her (Elizabeth), Mary would be executed and prevented from ascending the throne.  On February 1, Elizabeth signed the death warrant.  Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief advisor, summoned the Privy Counci without Elizabeth’s knowledge and the Council decided to have Mary executed.  On February 7, 1587 Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle as Mattingly so well described in this blog’s entry of October 21^st.  Elizabeth claimed to be most angry that the warrant was carried out contrary to her instructions that it be held until such time that she should decide.

Was Elizabeth sincere or was she playing a double game?  Most historians—as indeed thought also most of Elizabeth’s contemporaries—think that Elizabeth was attempting to play innocent in Mary’s execution.  Yet, Elizabeth did have strong qualms about where this would lead.  Mary’s grandson, Charles I of England and Scotland would end up being beheaded (1649) after being tried for treason by the Parliamentary party in the English Civil War.  The French would bring to trial and execution their King and Queen in 1793.  The Russian Imperial Family would be murdered in 1918.  The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, would also bring danger to Elizabeth and to her England, but she would prevail and the Protestant faith would remain the established religion.

Foundations of the Anglican Church XCII

Mary, Queen of Scots

I want to share with you what I have found to be the best piece of historical writing that I have come across in my forty some years of historical reading and research.  It is the prologue for Garrett Mattingly’s Armada (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1959).  Mattingly begins his account of the 1588 attempt by Spain to invade England with this narrative of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.  There is still much to be written about the recent Synod on the Family and I will do several entries about it over the next two weeks, but I want to get back on track with a more distant history and in particular with our episodes on the Church of England.  Mattingly was a professor at Columbia and while a serious scholar could write historical narrative that would read with the dramatic style of a novel.  In 1960 Mattingly won a Pulitzer for the Armada.   I will use this wonderful piece of writing as a frame of reference for the role that Mary, Queen of Scots, played in the saga of Elizabethan Catholicism. 

Curtain Raiser

Fotheringhay, February 18, 1587

 

      Mr. Beale had not brought the warrant until Sunday evening but by Wednesday morning before dawn out-lined its high windows, the great hall at Fotheringhay was ready.    Though the earl of Shrewsbury had returned only the day before, nobody wanted any more delay. Nobody knew what messenger might be riding on the London road. Nobody knew which of the others might not weaken if they waited another day.
        The hall had been cleared of all its ordinary furniture.  Halfway along its length a huge fire of logs blazing in the chimney battled against the creeping chill.  Towards the upper end of the hall they had set up a small platform, like a miniature stage for traveling actors, jutting twelve feet into the hall, eight or nine feet wide and less than three feet high. At one side a pair of stairs led up to it, and the fresh wood of the scaffolding had been everywhere decently covered in black velvet. On the platform, in line with the stairs, stood a single high-backed chair, also draped in black, and three or four feet in front of it a black cushion. Next to the cushion and rising above it something like a little low bench showed where the velvet imperfectly concealed an ordinary wooden chopping block. By seven in the morning the stage managers were satisfied, the sheriff's men trying to look soldierly in morion and breastplate and to hold their halberds stiffly had taken their places, and the chosen audience, two hundred or more knights and gentlemen of the neighborhood peremptorily summoned for that early hour, had filed into the lower end of the hall. The star kept them waiting more than three hours.  In the almost thirty years since she had wedded a future king of France in the glittering, devious court beside the Loire she had failed repeatedly to learn some of the more important lessons of politics, but  she  had  learned  how  to  dominate  a  scene.   She entered through a little door at the side, and before they saw her was already in the great hall, walking towards the dais, six of her own people, two by two, behind her, oblivious of the stir and rustle as her audience craned forward, oblivious, apparently, of the officer on whose sleeve her hand rested, walking as quietly, thought one pious soul, as if she were going to her prayers.  Only for a moment, as she mounted the steps and before she sank back into the black-draped chair, did she seem to need the supporting arm, and if her hands trembled before she locked them in her lap, no one saw.  Then, as if acknowledging the plaudits of a multitude (though the hall was very still), she turned for the first time to face her audience and, some thought, she smiled.
       Against the black velvet of the chair and dais her figure, clad in black velvet, was almost lost. The gray winter daylight dulled the gleam of white hands, the glint of yellow gold in her kerchief and of red gold in the piled masses of auburn hair beneath. But the audience could see dearly enough the delicate frill of white lace at her throat and above it, a white, heart-shaped petal against the blackness, the face with its great dark eyes and tiny, wistful mouth. This was she for whom Rizzio had died, and Darnley, the young fool, and Huntly, and Norfolk, and Babington and a thousand nameless men on the moors and gallows of the north. This was she whose legend had hung over England like a sword ever since she had hastened across its borders with her subjects in pursuit.  This was the last captive princess of romance, the dowager queen of France, the exiled queen of Scotland, the heir to the English throne and (there must have been some among the silent witnesses who thought so), at this very moment, if she had her rights, England’s lawful queen. This was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. For a moment she held all their eyes, then she sank back into the darkness of her chair and turned her grave inattention to her Judges.  She was satisfied that her audience would look at no one else.
       The earls of Kent and Shrewsbury who had entered with her almost unobserved, had seated themselves opposite, and Mr. Beale was standing, clearing his throat and crackling the parchment of the warrant he had to read. He need not have been nervous. One doubts whether anyone was listening. "Stubborn disobedience . . . incitement to insurrection . . . against the life and person of her sacred Majesty. . . high treason . . . death "
       Nothing in .the phrases could have mattered to Mary Stuart or to any person in the hall. Everyone knew that this was not the sentence for a crime. This was another stroke in a political duel which had been going on as long as most of them could remember, which had begun, indeed, before either of the enemy queens was born. Sixty years ago the parties had begun to form, the party of the old religion, the party of the new, and always by some trick of fate, one party or the other, and usually both, had been rallied and led by a woman. Catherine of Aragon against Anne Boleyn, Mary Tudor against Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth Tudor against Mary of Lorraine, and now, for nearly thirty years, Elizabeth Tudor against Mary Stuart, the prisoner on the scaffold. The shrewdest politicians might wonder how for almost two decades England had managed to contain both these predestinate enemies and keep them both alive.
  Whatever Elizabeth had done, Mary Stuart had, of course, sought by every means in her power to destroy her cousin and bring her low. In a duel to the death like theirs there were no foul strokes. When the arms of strength had fallen from her hands she had used whatever weapons weakness could grasp: lies, tears, evasions, threats and pleadings, and the hands and lives of whatever men her crowns, her beauty or her faith could win to her cause. They had proved two-edged weapons at last; but if they cut her now, she had dealt wounds with them, and kept her cousin’s realm in greater turmoil from her English prison than ever she had been able to do from her Scottish throne. And she meant to strike one blow more. She turned a bored chin on Mr. Beale's concluding phrases.
      The dean of Peterborough was even more nervous than Mr. Beale. She let him repeat his stumbling exordium three times before she cut him contemptuously short. "Mr. Dean," she told him, "I shall die as I have lived, in the true and holy Catholic faith. All you can say to me on that score is but vain, and all your prayers, I think, can avail me but little."
      This, she was sure, was the one weapon which would not turn in her hand. She had been closely watched at Fotheringhay, but not so closely that she could have no word from the daring, subtle men who slipped in and out of the Channel ports in disguise. The north was Catholic, they said, and the west, and even here in the heretic's own strongholds, even in the midlands, even in London, more and more turned daily to the ancient faith.  While the heir  to  the  throne  was  a  Catholic,  likely  to succeed  without a struggle on her heretic cousin's death, those thousands had been quiet, but now, should the heretic  slay her orthodox  successor, surely they would rise in their wrath to sweep away all this iniquity. And there were Catholic kings beyond the seas who would be more eager to avenge the Queen of Scots dead than ever they had been to keep her alive.
       That Mary herself was a devout Catholic is one of the few things about her not open to dispute, but it was not enough for her simply to die in her faith. The duel would go on. All men must know that she had died not only in her faith, but for it.  Perhaps she had not always been its steadiest pillar. Perhaps her dubious intrigues had sometimes harmed her cause more than her devotion had helped it. Now the glittering sweep of the axe would cut off forever the burden of old mistakes, silence the whispered slanders, and her blood would cry out for vengeance on her enemies more unmistakably than her living voice could ever have done again. For years she had favored an ambiguous motto, "My end is my beginning." Martyrdom might make good both the promise and the threat.  She had only to play this last scene well.
      So she held the crucifix high, visible all down the long hall as she flung defiance at her judges, and her voice rose with a kind of triumph above the voice of the dean of Peterborough, always higher and clearer than his rising tones, arching over the vehement English prayers the mysterious, dominating invocations of ancient faith. The queen's voice held on for a minute after the clergyman had finished.  Her words were in English now; she was praying for the people of England and for the soul of her cousin Elizabeth; she was forgiving all her enemies. Then for a moment her ladies were busy about her. The black velvet fell below her knees revealing underbodice and petticoat of crimson silk and she stepped forward, suddenly, shockingly, in color of martyrdom, blood red from top to toe against the somber background. Quietly she knelt and bowed herself low over the little chopping block. "In manus tuas, domine . . ." and they heard twice the dull chunk of the axe.
     There was one more ceremony to accomplish. The executioner must exhibit the head and speak the customary words.  The masked black figure stooped and rose, crying in a loud voice, “Long live the queen!" But all he held in his hand that had belonged  to the rival queen of hearts was a kerchief, and pinned to it an elaborate auburn wig. Rolled nearer the edge of the platform, shrunken and withered and gray, with a sparse silver stubble on the small, shiny skull was the head of the martyr. Mary had always known how to embarrass her enemies.

Catholic writers have romanticized Mary into a martyr for the faith and as Mattingly points out so well, Mary herself orchestrated the foundations of this myth.  In fact, her death was the result of a complicated political scheme which had a religious element—indeed a very strong religious ratio—but which is far too complex to reduce to the story of a martyrdom.  Enjoy Mattingly’s superb writing—I wish I could write as well as he—and in several  postings yet to come we will look more in depth into the enigma of Mary, The Queen of Scots, Dowager Queen of France, and Queen Pretender to the Throne of England.