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  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: The Sacrificial Priest

  Part I: A Wounded and Divided Land, 1558–1566

  One: The New Deborah

  Two: The Realm and the Ministers of Lucifer

  Three: Determined to Be a Virgin Queen

  Four: Many an Uneasy Truce

  Five: The Battle for Hearts and Minds

  Six: Untrustworthy Allies

  Seven: Christ’s Soldiers

  Eight: Mary Stuart, the Great Catholic Threat

  Part II: The Catholic Ascendancy, 1566–1580

  Nine: Betrayal amid Dreamy Spires

  Ten: The Iconoclastic Fury

  Eleven: Two Murders and Mayhem

  Twelve: An Ill-Conceived Escape and Rebellion

  Thirteen: Regnans in Excelsis

  Fourteen: The English State, Plots and Counterplots

  Fifteen: Massacre in Paris

  Sixteen: The Puritan Underworld of London

  Seventeen: Via Dolorosa

  Part III: The Years of Religious Terror, 1580–1591

  Eighteen: God’s Outriders

  Nineteen: The Ungodly Witch Hunts

  Twenty: Frustrating the Designs of Our Enemies

  Twenty-One: A Long-Awaited Execution

  Twenty-Two: God’s Obvious Design

  Part IV: A House Divided, 1591–1603

  Twenty-Three: The Norfolk Landing

  Twenty-Four: Marprelate, Puritans, Catholics, and Players

  Twenty-Five: Elizabeth’s Eminence Grise and the Final Battles for England

  Twenty-Six: Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  Also by Susan Ronald

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All authors have a team of active and apparently silent supporters that help to make their books possible. My outstanding agents, Peter Robinson and Michael Carlisle, stand in the first row of those who must be thanked, followed closely by my U.S. editor, Charles Spicer, my excellent copy editor, India Cooper, and the entire team at St. Martin’s Press.

  I am enormously grateful to the bishop of Coventry for our illuminating chat at Stratford-upon-Avon about the similarities and differences between Roman Catholicism and the Elizabethan settlement. I also thank Alan Brooke, Lady Antonia Fraser DBE, Sarah Gristwood, Alex Hoyt, Chris Laoutaris, Hugh Van Dusen, Alison Weir, and the teams of librarians at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the London Library, and the British Library. Above all else, I thank my long-suffering husband, Doug Ronald, for his forbearance and unswerving support and to my mother for her belief in me. I dedicate this book to you, Mom.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Religion was high politics in the Elizabethan era. From the time of the Lollards in the fifteenth century, religious tensions steadily rose in England and elsewhere, resulting in the Reformation—that smooth, seamless expression that most of us feel we understand. What is clear to me is that the Reformation was the biggest social, political, religious, and even economic change to hit European civilization, ever.

  In our increasingly secular age, it is difficult for us to imagine just how much was demanded of the average English person living then. A stark choice between allegiance to the monarch or to the church and your immortal soul was laid before you. Patriotism and survival in this life or religious belief, custom, and the hereafter became the battleground for the hearts and minds of every English man, woman, and child. This invidious choice led to a series of wars—some hot, others cold—that were waged on battlefields and the high seas; in the countryside, cities, and towns; from church pulpits and places of work; at court and most especially in the home. It led to a new concept—patriotism. It affected everyone living then, and the outcome made England, the rest of Britain, and the Elizabethan and Jacobean colonies in North America what they were to become.

  Elizabeth’s middle way—neither Catholic nor Puritan—was a solution that pleased very few. Yet it was a solution that she maintained throughout her forty-five-year reign. For a queen renowned among her advisers for prevarication for its own sake, Elizabeth’s Anglican vision shows her remarkable tenacity. She knew in her heart and mind that any wavering might mean civil war. After all, during her reign France was plagued with over thirty years of civil wars, and the Netherlands began its civil war to protect its ancient religious privileges—a war that lasted eighty years. Elizabeth believed that if she gave in to the reforming “godly” Puritans or Presbyterians on the one hand, or her Catholic population on the other, civil war could not be far behind. So she held fast.

  Heretic Queen will bring new people and faces from the Elizabethan era to populate its pages. Some familiar names like Mary Queen of Scots are central characters, though in Mary’s case, I stress her links to France as a crucial part of the story. William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Robert Dudley (first Earl of Leicester), Francis Walsingham, and others will appear in their usual leading roles as privy councillors. Yet they will also wear new faces and don new clothing in their roles within the Catholic, Protestant, and Puritan leaderships. Foreign places and wars not often thought of as “Elizabethan” are also present, most notably the troubles in France and the Netherlands. These had a great bearing on Elizabeth’s domestic, foreign, and religious policies. The generally unremarked turning point in Elizabethan international religious affairs was the arrival of the Duke of Alba in Brussels in August 1567, ostensibly to quell Philip’s rebellious Calvinist subjects, but in effect to wage holy war. The background to this is essential to understanding the rest of the story.

  What you, the reader, should try to do is to suspend the stereotypes of Tudor film and literature, and allow yourself to drift back to a time when religion was everything. Imagine yourselves in a world where before having breakfast you would have prayed once already. Imagine a daily routine based on religious rules and habits: a world where even the art on your walls—whether a cheap “stained” cloth or a ballad torn from a book or an expensive tapestry—had a religious theme; a world where your reading recreation was the Bible or a cheap chapbook that gave you access to the spellbinding sermons of Thomas Cartwright or Edward Dering; and a world where holding a different belief and preaching it could end very badly. Ultimately, it was a world where if you plotted against the queen’s vision for England—even for the salvation of your soul—you would be imprisoned and probably executed on the grounds of treason.

  * * *

  One of the most graphic ways in which religion was high politics relates to the date. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar that is still in use today. In October 1582, all Catholic countries of Europe moved their dates forward by ten days, which is sometimes termed New Style by authors, with the Julian calendar dates termed Old Style. By 1587, most of Europe used the Gregorian calendar. England, however, remained steadfast to the Old Style due to continued papal meddling in its internal affairs; that is, until 1752, when Britain finally accepted the change to the Gregorian calendar. While New Year’s Day was on March 25 in Elizabeth’s time, in the book New Year’s Day is January 1 for ease of understanding. Also, from 1587, I’ve converted New Style dates to Old Style where necessary since the primary act
ion takes place in England. Spelling has been modernized for ease of reading, into American English, save in the titles of books. People who were ennobled are known afterward by their new titles; for example, Sir Robert Dudley becomes the Earl of Leicester, or simply Leicester.

  Heretic Queen is the result of my historical study into the complex and fascinating issues surrounding religion and its influence on the politics of the day—fundamental issues that are not terribly different from those facing our world now. Those who thought they were “freedom fighters” were viewed as “terrorists” by governments throughout Europe, be they in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, or Spain. Tolerance was an alien notion to all but the Dutch and would remain so until the eighteenth century. Ultimately there was right and wrong on both sides.

  What made the choices so stark came down to two main and juxtaposed belief systems. The Puritans believed that the Lord’s Word was precise and that there were only black and white in the broad spectrum of color that the Christian faiths were rapidly becoming. The absence of the notion of “tolerance” in the Elizabethan era made the religious settlement that the queen strived for a dream of a utopia yet to exist. Elizabeth effectively attempted to establish a tolerant regime that would not “make windows into men’s souls”; her solution proved imperfect, yet inspired for her day. It was a valiant attempt at creating a tolerant society, swimming against the tide of religious fundamentalism to the right and left.

  A century later, Charles II would try to create a tolerant regime commencing with his Declaration of Breda just before he was restored to England’s throne, and he failed as well. The issue of a Protestant or Catholic England rumbled on well into the nineteenth century. The fault was not in the flawed philosophies or policies of either Elizabeth I or Charles II but rather in the fundamentalist creeds of the English on both sides of the divide.

  * * *

  We all have different histories and biographies depending on who is looking at us and how the author chooses to write about us. My last book, The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire, concentrated on how a genuine, terrifying domestic need for cash generated a swashbuckling foreign policy that gave birth to the British Empire. This existed alongside the burning religious issues of the day, with virtually all of the swashbucklers and their courtly patrons leaning toward the Puritan persuasion.

  In Heretic Queen, I show how religion was high politics and how domestic policy was ruled by the religious imperatives of the Reformation, often overruled by other monarchs and a temporal papal authority beyond England’s shores. I continue to explore how Elizabeth coped in a man’s world, how she ruled so successfully, what motivated her, and in fact, what has made Elizabeth so unique in our hearts and minds for the past four-hundred-plus years. Above all else, Heretic Queen is the story of a monumental struggle of ideology and survival on all sides. Together these two books form my single biographical history of Elizabeth’s reign.

  It is my sincere hope that you will see Elizabeth better as a result. I also hope you can get a sense of what it was like to live in Elizabethan England through a new looking glass, offering you a fresh perspective of our now distant ancestors. It was an extraordinary period, not so different from our own. Above all, I do hope you enjoy the book.

  Of course, any errors contained herein are entirely my own.

  —SUSAN RONALD

  Oxford, April 2011

  PROLOGUE

  The Sacrificial Priest

  The London of Mary Tudor’s reign—like most times past—was truly another country. Rich woodlands and coppice woods of lime, ash, oak, elm, holly, beech, hornbeam, and maple carpeted the capital’s county of Middlesex, stretching northward nearly twenty miles to the Essex and Hertfordshire borders. Some of these highly prized woods had belonged to the Oxford and Cambridge colleges ever since the universities had been founded hundreds of years earlier. Others, equally well maintained, had been the property of Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral or other church establishments. That is, until the time of King Henry VIII. With the dissolution of England’s monasteries under Henry beginning in 1536, all the valuable woodland that had once belonged to the Catholic Church reverted to the crown. Since then, much of England’s managed woodland had been passed on to Henry’s nobles, in thanks for their help in plundering and destroying papal monetary authority in England.

  Yet it was the yeoman tenants and peasants of the woods who “farmed” these as renewable sources of fuel and building timber. At the autumn coppice harvest, the wood gatherers would cut the poles, or new shoots, trim and divide these into one- or two-inch bundles of a hundred evenly sorted sticks called fagots, tie these together, and bring them to the woodmongers for sale. Though fagots were mainly used for kindling in small kilns, they were an essential part of the wood trade: literally fueling homes, bakeries, forges, and brewhouses. That is, until February 4, 1555.

  * * *

  Woodland, coppice, heresy, and treason were linked for the first time in Queen Mary’s reign on February 3, 1555, when an eight-foot solid oak stake around ten inches in diameter was driven into the ground at Smithfield Market just outside the city walls. Long known as the place of execution for traitors, Smithfield offered particular benefits to Queen Mary’s advisers, as it was close enough to the Thames to haul such timber from the Essex borders at an advantageous price. Yet whether the oak stake or the fagot bundles originated from royal forests or former church lands remains a mystery. Whether the ten bundles of fagots needed to carry out the dastardly deed were all brought to Smithfield on the same “shout,” or riverboat, we shall never know.* Whether the oak stake or the fagots had been stored at the wharves at Queenhithe or Timberhithe or at the ones just below London Bridge near Wood Street was never recorded.1

  What mattered for the people was that the “whispering times” had returned. No one dared speak out openly against the imposition of the English prayer book in the previous reign, or the seizure of local chantries. The “old blindness” of Catholicism among the family elders had been restored with Mary’s reign, and the younger generations would soon discover, just as their elders had done, that it was dangerous to meddle in God’s word, or the word of their anointed monarch.2 For those who had any doubts that the “whispering times” were back, the local criers shouting out that an execution for heresy would take place the following day at Smithfield convinced them. The victim’s name shocked everyone and made them wonder if anyone could be truly safe again.

  Even the choice of Smithfield Market as a place of execution was an inspired and elegant one. The fact that Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, had met the boy king Richard II at Smithfield and that John Forest, prior of the Observant Convent at Greenwich, was caged like a wild animal and roasted alive there in 1538 by Henry VIII resonated in the people’s minds. To them, these were fables from another world, another country, that was both “rich and strange.”3 These historic events held a symbolism that Queen Mary’s councillors sought to drive home, striking terror into the hearts of her people. It would be this fear that would transform the once beloved queen’s fledgling reign, for ill and forever.

  * * *

  It took three men to dig the hole in the frozen February ground that day, and three more to raise the oak stake while the others secured it. Four armed guards were ordered to stand watch around the stake overnight—in case some unrest should be fomented. The ten bundles of one hundred sticks of kindling each would be placed around the stake on the morning of the execution. These were held under lock and key overnight in a rick-cart nearby.

  What was most striking to average Londoners was the name of the victim. They were simply incredulous. Surely it could not be true that such a holy man as he would meet his death by burning at the stake? Not since the time of Mary’s father had there been such widespread alarm. It was the kind of fear that confirmed to them that, if a man or woman spoke contrary to the new articles of rel
igion, even if they were entirely ignorant of the charge against them, they would be condemned to death and suffer their due pains as appointed by law.4 The “whispering times” had indeed returned.

  * * *

  Seemingly, no one attempted to persuade Queen Mary—England’s first anointed queen regnant—that this execution was anything except righteous in the eyes of the Lord. Even Mary’s husband, Philip II of Spain, had believed that executions for heresy in England could only bring misfortune upon his wife’s rule, but Mary and her closest advisers, who included the papal legate, knew best. After all, it was the Privy Council, headed by Mary’s bully-boy Stephen Gardiner, Lord Chancellor and bishop of Winchester, that had interrogated the unfortunate sinner. It was Gardiner and the archbishop of Canterbury who were closeted with the queen to determine the just punishment for his crimes. It was the bishop of London who raised his hand high to become their instrument of torture for future heresies in the city. The more reasoned council voices grew mute and obeyed their dread queen’s wishes.

  Mary, by now visibly swollen “with child” in the first of her phantom pregnancies, had already become mistrustful of her large council. Though fervently believing that the execution of heretics was the right path to follow, she feared the displeasure of her people. Still, above all else, the law must be seen by the people to be served. At the outset of her reign in 1553, Mary had plainly instructed her council:

  that good preaching may overcome the evil preaching in time past, and that no evil books be printed, bought or sold without punishment. I think … punishment of heretics ought to be done without rashness.5

  Nonetheless, London was a particular worry to the queen. It was London that held the mood of the country and the will of the people. It was essential that those living in the capital feel that Mary was acting justly—not only according to the laws of religion but also according to the laws of the land. “Especially in London I would wish none [heretics] to be burnt without some of the council’s [sic] presence,” Mary ordered, “and everywhere good sermons at the same [executions] … So I account myself bound to show such example that it may be evident to all this realm how I discharge my conscience.”6