As Elizabeth rode out of Oxford the following day, surrounded once again by her glittering procession and by a city liberally hung with verses expressing grief at her departure, she had done much to heal the old wounds left by her father and her brother’s brutal and bullish enforcement of religious change. Her leave-taking was as sincere as it was warm: ‘Farewell, the worthy University of Oxford; farewell, my good subjects there; farewell, my dear Scholars, and pray God prosper your studies.’ Few could have done better under the circumstances. The only problem was it had all taken place several years too late.
Five years before Elizabeth’s visit a twenty-nine-year-old Lancastrian, a one-time student of Oriel College and former principal of St Mary’s Hall, had left Oxford for Flanders and the Low Countries. There, he was a welcome addition to the exiles of Louvain. And there, just seven years later, at the university town of Douai in the province of Artois, he would rent a ‘large…and very convenient’ house from where he would attempt to turn the ebbing fortunes of English Catholicism. ‘We cannot’, he would later write, ‘wait for better times; we must act now (to make them better).’ If the recalcitrant students of Oxford were to be summarily expelled from college whenever Europe threatened and if the men and women of England were to continue compromising their salvation in the name of political survival, then Dr William Allen had found the answer: use the former to educate the latter. It was a simple solution and it would prove devastatingly effective.35
* When Thomas Cromwell was made Chancellor of Cambridge in 1535, on the execution of Cardinal John Fisher, Oxford graduates saw Government preferment steered past them towards the students of Cambridge.
* Each college was provided at its foundation with an external ‘visitor’—part trouble-shooting ombudsman, part spiritual inquisitor.
* De Feria believed that the leading Catholics, in both the Commons and the Lords, had failed to put up a convincing fight during the crucial parliamentary debates from which the settlement sprang. However the Catholics were also under-represented in these debates: ten out of the twenty-six bishoprics were empty when Parliament opened on 25 January.
* Mrs Williams of the Swan was more than usually defiant in receiving Catholic priests: her husband was a justice of the peace and a city alderman.
* England’s sense of growing isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of these entanglements, features strongly in the State Papers of the time. The Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip II a speech made by Sir William Cecil to the House of Commons in 1563, in which Cecil declared, ‘They had no one now to trust but themselves, for the Germans, although they had promised the Queen great things, had done nothing and had broken their word.’
* She is depicted as such in the Rainbow Portrait of c.1600 and was the subject of Walter Ralegh’s Book of the Ocean to Cynthia, in which he describes the anguished nature of his relationship with the Queen.
† Cecil’s own choice of suitably non-controversial debating matter for the week ahead was ‘Why is ophthalmia catching, but not dropsy or gout?’
* At the start of the sixteenth century Erasmus had placed English learning second only to that found in the Italian universities. Elizabeth’s concern over the standard of education in England extended as far as exempting schoolmasters from paying tax.
‘The very flower of the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, was
carried away, as it were, by a storm, and scattered in foreign lands.’
Edward Rishton, 1585
THE 1560S ENDED with a warning clap of thunder, audible across France and all the way to distant Spain. Rebellion! As the Catholic nations of Europe listened in, England rang to the sounds of revolt.
The uprising was led by the powerful northern earls Percy and Neville, names guaranteed since the Wars of the Roses to strike fear into the heart of any English monarch, let alone one as vulnerable as Elizabeth. Their rebellion marked the last dying gasp of the old feudal order. More than that, it was the angry response of a disgruntled aristocracy, shouldered out of its long-held place in the sun by middle-class arrivistes like the Queen’s chief minister Sir William Cecil. The Percy/Neville proclamation raged against those ‘evil disposed persons, about the queen’s majesty, [who] have, by their subtle and crafty dealing to advance themselves…abused the queen, disordered the realm, and now, lastly, seek and procure the destruction of the nobility’.1
But to rally supporters to their cause the rebels cloaked themselves in the flag of Catholicism. They marched to Durham Cathedral where they tore up the new English Prayer Book and Bible, demanding the restoration of ‘the true and catholic religion’. If this was what it took to spur the slumbering northern counties into action behind them then Percy and Neville were more than happy to make it their campaign slogan—neither man felt any long-standing loyalty to the new Church. Hidden further down the list were their more sought-after demands: the immediate arrest and trial of Cecil and the release from prison of the disgraced Duke of Norfolk.2
Elizabeth’s response was swift and uncharacteristically brutal. Between 500 and 800 men, all of very little account, were rounded up and executed. Percy and Neville fled the country and the decade closed on a note of queasy anticipation. It did not help that since 1568, Mary Queen of Scots had been living in England as Elizabeth’s prisoner. This was the Mary, half Scottish, half French, wholly Catholic, who had claimed Elizabeth’s crown as her own some ten years earlier. Mary had lost her French throne on the death of her first husband, her Scottish throne on the murder of her second. Now separated from her third husband, there were many who thought that, as Elizabeth’s presumed heir, she was entitled to another throne yet—England’s.
Then in February 1570 a new Pope, Pius V, a fanatical firebrand of great zeal but uncertain common sense, took it upon himself to fuel the conflagration further. He issued his bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating ‘Elizabeth, pretended queen of England’, releasing English Catholics from their allegiance to her, and openly encouraging her overthrow, an appalling concept in a world that believed in a monarch’s divine right to rule. And the rulers of Europe were duly appalled, particularly as none was at present in the position to make good Pius’s threat. Philip II of Spain refused to let the bull be published anywhere in his dominions, openly reassuring Elizabeth that he had no intention of breaking the Anglo-Spanish amity. Privately, he complained that the Pope had ‘allowed himself to be carried away by his zeal’. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian fired off an angry