Yet the resident Catholics’ quiescence in 1588 only imperceptibly, if at all, caused their stock to appreciate. Religiously reformed officials were still unsure that the reformed status quo was secure. The very next year, as Shakespeare was settling in London, local constables scoured the city from Holborn to Hampstead looking for papists.105 The Calvinists who continued to count Catholics among their friends made certain when they visited them that they were long gone before their hosts made preparations to hear Mass. And the more ecumenically inclined among the religiously reformed, if we may take Edmund Spenser as representative, were concerned that intrepid “prestes . . . will undoo” their Catholic colleagues.106 Hunts for missionaries, or “seminarie men,” in the countryside persisted. Catholic recusants there were only allowed enough weaponry to defend their properties; if a fifth column were to arise, authorities wanted to ensure it would be lightly armed.107
English Catholics abroad were undaunted, insisting that their families at home would welcome and amply assist the next invasion. Student orations at Valladolid, the new base on the Continent for the English mission in the 1580s, referred to King Philip as the perfect candidate to “take [God’s] quarrel in hand.” He alone was ready to “cut down and exterpate the proud and murthering mindes of the bloody Lutherans and Calvenists.”108 Leading resident recusants may have been anticipating as much. On occasion, constables stumbled across Catholics concealing thousands of pounds of gunpowder “against the day of the invasion.”109 Would Philip, Parma, and their fanatical English friends succeed in ridding the realm of its “innocent maiden queen, whose glorious life hath . . . dishonourably been sought and thirsted after, these many years”?110
Elizabeth’s counselors urged her to make the Spanish threat her foremost concern. Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was one of the most insistent.111 He had been to war with Spain, having accompanied Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and his stepfather, to the Netherlands in 1585. Essex’s Apologie, written in 1603, describes England’s “great actions” abroad, celebrating the heroics of his comrades in arms, particularly those of Philip Sidney, who was killed in battle and promptly “canonized” as a Protestant martyr. Sidney left Essex his sword, and, years later, Essex married Sidney’s widow. In the interim, he tended to go off chasing an elusive, decisive engagement with Spain.112 Endlessly cash-strapped, he was drawn by Francis Drake to the Iberian coast. Dutch mariners joined the expedition, giving it the appearance of a Calvinist crusade against Philip, “the principal maytener of papal religion.”113 Essex’s critics claimed that desperation, specifically fears of bankruptcy, rather than selfless religious devotion led him to war. But his admirers did not pause to probe for motives; Anthony Wingfield, for one, marveled at the earl’s “exceeding forwardness,” by which Wingfield meant courage under fire or daring—not greed or impudence.114
But Essex was impudent and, on his return to England, imprudent. Shakespeare would have heard of it, for Essex was inclined to offend everyone who advocated improved relations with Spain. He was notorious in London during the early 1590s and the most controversial figure frequenting Elizabeth’s Court. He opposed William Cecil, by then Lord Burghley, the queen’s principal secretary, who suggested that the Spanish should be humored and used to keep French ambitions on the Continent in check. Elizabeth concurred with Cecil, yet Essex refused to relent. He wanted Spain robbed of its American treasures and wholly disabled. He appealed to panicky English preachers apprehensive about parishioners “falling away into poperie” once a second Spanish armada was sighted.115 Finally, his efforts and his partisans’ apprehensions won over Elizabeth and Cecil, who grew concerned that “overmuch toleration” of English Catholicism could, on Spain’s second coming, result in “the great defection of [her] subjects.”116
In 1596, Elizabeth and Cecil approved Essex’s plans for an expedition, a preemptive strike at what appeared to be Spanish preparations to invade England the following year. Lord Admiral Howard commanded the fleet; at Cadiz, Essex stormed ashore and took the city in an afternoon. Historian R. B. Wernham now describes the skirmish as “improvised” and “untidy,” although Howard was hyperbolic—“I do assure you,” he said, “there ys not a braver man in the worlde than the erle is.”117 But Essex was disappointed. He wanted to make Cadiz the English Calais in Spain, “to dwell in a port of the enemies,” to sink or capture their treasure ships at will, and to humiliate the enemy, adding the insult of an English presence to injuries that would keep Philip from funding another invasion of England or Ireland.118 But English troops wanted to go home, and Essex deferred to their wishes—obeying also a directive he received from queen and Council to return to the realm.
The next summer, he was off again, yet with too few men to garrison a port. Hence, he remained at sea, tacking around the Azores and hoping to intercept Spain’s treasure fleet. The result, he hoped, would enable England “to make warr upon him with [Philip’s] owne money.”119 But when Essex found the galleons snug in harbor, their cargo safely ashore, he had no choice but to return to England to face his rivals in government carping at his failure, yet again, to do Spain “asmuche hurte as myght have [been] don.”120 And Essex was criticized for conversing with radical reformists, the more stubborn of whom were suspended from their ministries for refusing to answer questions under oath or, as commonly, for refusing to swear oaths to reply truthfully to accusations, the origins of which were kept secret.121
Conformists defended their subpoenas. Liturgical nonconformity was reason enough, they said, to inquire further into reformists’ conscientious objections to the established church’s Prayer Book, to the pace and trajectories of the realm’s religious changes, and to the oath itself. Secrecy was appropriate, because there was no telling to what extremes overzealous reformists might go. “If zeal not be governed, it inclineth verye quicklie to vices,” so accusers ought to be shielded from reprisals. And who could argue that regimes had neither the right nor the duty to discover how its critics intended to “allure the people” and turn the multitude against the prevailing church government—against its courts, sanctions, and bishops?122
It looked as if conformists, with their accusations, inquiries, and oaths, were lining up England’s more stubborn dissidents so that bishops and their commissioners could run the table and clear the realm. Reformists, who had wanted to become their bishops’ consultants, to assist diocesans to “discerne” which of their judgments “be just and agreeable to God’s word,” could only have been disappointed by the unflinching enforcement of conformity that, they predicted, would discourage worthy candidates for the ministry and “disgrace” many conscientious clerics already in service.123 The oaths proved to be their undoing, and some seceded from the established church. A number of their radically reformist colleagues, however, censured them for their secession. Eusebius Paget pointed out that the apostle Paul had not forsaken the Corinthian church because it had “blemishes.”124 Humphrey Fenn, preaching at Coventry, fairly close to Stratford, when not in prison, pledged to press for liturgical and polity reforms, only “so far as the laws and peace of the present estate of our church suffer it.”125 Thomas Cartwright “signed” that pledge and declared a truce of sorts with conformists, “notwithstanding we be of different judgment in some controversies of our church”; George Gifford, in Essex, declined to talk with radicals who refused to pray alongside him.126
Conformists do not seem to have been terribly impressed by reformists’ recoil from the radicals, for the separatists’ critics continued to criticize what they saw as the “misgovernment” of their dioceses. Some reformists, without diocesan executives’ authorization, convened local and regional conferences, over which mere ministers presided as if they were bishop-substitutes-in-waiting, waiting for current bishops to be removed—as one would remove “blemishes”—from the church.127 Furthermore, conformists’ suspicions about a significant subversive faction were no doubt corroborated by depositions of witnesses who had heard Thomas Cartwright and other reformists at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1589 proclaim that they were wholly “against the superioritie and government of bishops.”128
Perhaps