The Scottish queen became the focal point for English fears of an anti-Protestant ‘holy league’, headed by Philip II and Mary’s relatives, the powerful Guise family, which dominated France’s ultra-Catholic faction.48 Despite Mary’s strong personal commitment to Catholicism she had managed at first to work reasonably well with Scotland’s Protestant establishment. But the murder of her husband – the weak and scheming Lord Darnley – in 1567, her marriage to his probable killer the earl of Bothwell, and her evident desire to restore Catholicism and the Franco-Scottish alliance had lost her the support of her Protestant subjects, and in 1568 she had been deposed and fled to England. Kept under house arrest while Elizabeth explored ways of restoring her without endangering the Protestant ascendancy in Scotland, Mary soon became involved in an English court plot to remove the queen’s chief councillor, William Cecil, and seek a rapprochement with Spain. When this plot failed, two of Mary’s fellow Catholics among England’s northern nobility rose in rebellion to put her on the throne and restore the old religion. The Northern Rising of 1569 proved but a faint echo of the Pilgrimage of Grace, however, and quickly collapsed, although it might have attracted greater popular support if the government had not whisked Mary beyond the reach of a rebel rescue party.
Although the events surrounding the Rising would result in the disgrace or execution of her leading supporters at court, Mary continued to dabble in Catholic plots to overthrow Elizabeth. Most of these intrigues interwove schemes for Elizabeth’s assassination, an English Catholic uprising, and an invasion of England by the Spanish army in the Netherlands. With Cecil pulling the strings, the English Parliament of 1572 called for Mary’s execution, or at least for legislation excluding her from the succession – ‘an axe or an acte’ as one MP succinctly put it.49 Another MP charitably wished that Mary might ‘have her head cut off and no more harm done to her’.50 But Elizabeth, with her high sense of the reverence due to anointed sovereigns, angrily forbade any public discussion of Mary’s fate or her own dynastic responsibilities.
Plots against Elizabeth’s life seemed to confirm Protestant propaganda that England’s Catholics took their orders from Rome and Madrid. The pope put his English flock under even greater suspicion from the government in 1570 by issuing a papal bull pronouncing Elizabeth a heretic and usurper and absolving her subjects from allegiance to her. Protestant fears of a Catholic fifth column intensified still further from the mid-1570s as missionary priests and Jesuits began arriving from the Continent to minister to the Catholic community and to work for the reconversion of England. This English Mission produced some of the Counter-Reformation’s most effective propagandists, and was seen by men like Cecil as the spiritual vanguard of the Spanish army in the Netherlands. A government crackdown against Catholicism began in the 1570s, and over the next few decades hundreds of priests and their lay abettors would be executed as traitors. Tudor and Stuart England would end up killing more Catholics for their religion than any other European country. Protestant paranoia notwithstanding, the number of professed Catholics was quite small. Furthermore, most of these dévots were able to reconcile their religion with their allegiance to the crown. Catholics loudly protested their loyalty even as the Armada sailed up the Channel in 1588; some even offered to fight in the front line against the invaders. But the connection between Catholicism and unEnglishness was too deeply ingrained by this stage. The government ordered the internment of prominent papists, prompting one local official to lock up his own Catholic grandmother.
In trying to exorcise the demon of popery the English effectively conjured it into existence in Ireland. Given Ireland’s largely illiterate, Gaelic-speaking population and its poorly funded Church, it was never going to be easy introducing Protestantism there, especially as the crown faced a constant struggle just to defend the Pale, let alone impose its authority on the Gaedhealtacht. Perhaps with more effort and sensitivity the Elizabethan government might have won over enough of Ireland’s elite – particularly among the Old English, who accounted themselves true subjects of the crown – to stimulate a grass-roots Reformation. Instead, it prioritised short-term security in promoting English ‘civility’ – of which Protestantism became the central feature – by force. Elizabeth virtually guaranteed the failure of a political solution in Ireland by farming out Irish affairs to court syndicates composed largely of Protestant hardliners like Cecil and the government spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1532–90), who tended to see Ireland not as a legally constituted kingdom but as a colony, ripe for exploitation. Their remedy for Ireland’s problems was more plantations, more English colonists, and more soldiers to defend them. It was no accident that Ralegh and several others involved in privateering and colonising ventures in the Americas had used Ireland as a test-bed for their money-grubbing and land-grabbing schemes.
The ‘New English’, as the Elizabethan settlers became known, colonised not only Irish land but also the places in the Dublin administration formerly reserved for the Old English. The effect of this aggressive Anglicisation was to erode some of the historic barriers between the Old English and the Gaelic Irish. Both communities suffered as the crown increasingly equated Catholicism with disaffection and unEnglishness. A wave of rebellions hit Ireland from the late 1560s, unprecedented in the savagery shown by both sides. One notoriously brutal English commander made the Irish who submitted to him walk through ‘a lane of heddes’ that had been severed from their ‘dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freendes’.51 Lord Grey, a friend of Walsingham’s, admitted that during his two years as lord deputy (1580–2) he had summarily executed almost 1,500 men, and that was ‘not accounting . . . killing of churls [Gaelic peasants], which were innumerable’.52 The draconian methods of Grey and his like were similar to Alba’s in the Netherlands, and had much the same effect, transforming specific grievances among the natives into ‘faith-and-fatherland’ resistance. By the 1590s, Protestantism had become indelibly associated in Irish Catholic eyes with English colonial oppression.
England’s Protestant Conquistadores reaped the whirlwind in Ireland, although, typically, they regarded the unfolding tragedy there as further evidence of a Spanish-led design to subjugate all of Christendom. Like their fellow Calvinists on the Continent they were convinced that the Habsburgs and the pope aspired to build a universal tyranny upon the graves of Europe’s Protestants. A powerful clique at court – led by Leicester and Walsingham – argued that open war with Spain and her allies was inevitable, and that unless Elizabeth joined with the Dutch and anti-Spanish elements in France in a pre-emptive strike against Philip II, his forces would subdue the Netherlands and then invade England. The decline of France and the growing might of Spain certainly made such counsel sound sensible. Indeed, it may have represented an early formulation of the balance-of-power strategy that would dominate English foreign-policy thinking from the later seventeenth century. But the belief of Leicester and his friends in an international Catholic alliance where none existed (at least formally) before the 1580s, and their ambition for England to champion the Protestant cause, were inspired not by realpolitik but an apocalyptic world-view that saw European politics in terms of a cosmic struggle between Protestantism and the popish Antichrist. Leicester and his like were ideologues, not pragmatists, their political agenda, like that of the pietistical Philip II, driven by religious conviction.
Furthermore, in pressing for full-scale intervention in the Netherlands, the ‘forward’ party at court was gambling that England had the resources and military capability for a prolonged war against Spain. This was a wager that Elizabeth was very reluctant to make, for besides the costs and dangers of such a strategy she needed convincing that Spain was ultimately more threatening to English interests than France. When the leader of the Netherlands rebels, William of Orange, had concluded an alliance with the French king in 1572 she had even considered sending troops to assist Alba! The queen wanted the Netherlands