Authors: Susan Ronald
By autumn 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne, Philip II and Henry II had begun their peace negotiations. Military operations had ceased, and both realms were determined to make a lasting peace primarily due to their own financial chaos and religious strife in the Spanish-held Low Countries and France. Besides, Philip had wars of religion he was fighting against the Turks in North Africa and the western Mediterranean, and internally, against the Moriscos in Spain. The last thing he could literally afford was to fight a powerful Catholic monarch like the king of France. For Philip, matters of religion always took precedence over temporal matters, and it was essential that Catholic governments unite against the very
real expansionist threat of the Turkish Empire and the spread of Calvinism. Elizabeth and Cecil, who both had known Philip well when he had been king consort of England, did not need to listen to the incessant distortions swirling on the winds to know that the greatest danger they faced would be a Catholic League against a Protestant monarchy in England. What they agreed (though few at the time believed that Elizabeth and Cecil could carry out) was to turn Philip’s religious zeal into a concern for his empire, by exploiting the opportunities that came their way—or that they could create—with whatever weapons they could conjure for their English arsenal. The potential threat of an invasion from France, or from the French in Scotland, was very real, and the only way Elizabeth saw to forestall this was to pander to Philip’s paranoia.
The scene was now set. The negotiators were united at Cateau-Cambrésis to hammer out a lasting peace, and Elizabeth steadfastly held on to the hope of not ceding Calais, ostensibly due to the loss of England’s pride and the commercial staple there. Another and more understandable reason was military; with Calais only twenty-six miles across the Narrow Seas, or Straits of Dover, and the French in control of Scotland, Henry and his belligerent dukes represented a potent threat to England’s security. The silent reason for her obstinacy—which would later become one of her trademarks—was simply that she was stalling for time to see how best to play upon the mutual jealousies of the Spanish Habsburg and French Valois kings.
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She did not have long to wait. It was Henry II who gave her the first breakthrough. Through an Italian merchant of considerable standing and knowledge of England, Guido Cavalcanti, Henry secretly suggested that if Elizabeth would marry someone “of whose friendship France could feel assured,” great amity between their realms would ensue.
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It was understood that the “someone” was Henry’s younger son, Henry, Duke of Anjou (later Henry III). Naturally, the queen made Philip II aware of the offer, thereby guaranteeing the King of Spain’s protection against the Valois threats, either expressed or implied.
In the meantime, Elizabeth knew that she needed to rally around her people as well as her noble lords to protect her borders. Both groups would understand the force of arms and the potential threat
that France represented. It was Cecil’s job to ensure that word of the threat was whispered into the right ears at the right time. The queen needed money for soldiers’ pay and arms, he explained, and she needed it urgently if the French invasion came. But Elizabeth had just heard that the treasury was virtually empty, thanks in large part to Philip. As king consort to Elizabeth’s sister he had made use of England’s treasury as if it were his own to fight his Continental wars, and had declared his loans “forfeit” to the merchant bankers in Antwerp only the year before. The use of England’s exchequer particularly rankled with the parsimonious Elizabeth since Philip had been expecting two treasure fleets from Tierra Firme, or New Spain, in the Americas, with the first treasure fleet due in March 1558 and the second in May of the same year. This made the loss of Calais in January burn more brightly in her mind: England’s exchequer had provided the men, money, and arms for the Spanish war machine in the Low Countries, lost Calais in the process, and had failed to secure any reimbursement from the treasure fleet.
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When Elizabeth’s new lord treasurer, Sir Walter Mildmay, who took up his post at the end of December 1558, reported that the exchequer was, for all intents and purposes, empty, we can only imagine the queen’s despair. The year’s consignment of gold and silver from the two treasure fleets had arrived and remained in Spain, and there was no offer to replenish England’s depleted coffers.
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Mildmay’s report to the Privy Council showed how deeply the queen’s sister had embroiled the country in Philip’s wars: in her last year as queen, Mary spent unprecedented sums on her navy alone, amounting to £1,073,844 ($401.3 million or £216.9 million today).
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Certainly most galling of all for Elizabeth was the fact that she now found herself in a position of relying heavily for the country’s security on the very man who bankrupted the realm.
But rely on him she did. She, of course, knew of his intentions. Her court was from its earliest days a beehive of espionage and intrigue, and the queen knew that Philip also feared that the French wanted to make England another province of France as Scotland effectively was. With the Spanish king now firmly on her side, all Elizabeth had to do was wait for an opportunity to press home her advantage. As early as March 1559, Henry II was militating with the pope to declare Elizabeth illegitimate and excommunicate her. On hearing
this, the young queen sprang into action, though she hardly needed to prevail upon Philip to impose his will upon the pope to successfully forestall Henry’s efforts. Henry retaliated, this time hitting the mark with Elizabeth, by allowing his new seventeen-year-old daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, Dauphine of France, and his son, Francis, to bear the arms and style of Queen and King of England. While Elizabeth railed against the Stuarts, Guises, and Valoises in a Tudor tirade in England, Philip took more decisive action: he proposed marriage himself to his former sister-in-law. And all this occurred at a dizzying pace, during the peace negotiations at Cateau-Cambrésis in the first quarter of 1559.
Fortunately for Elizabeth, the Count of Feria had the temerity to show his royal instructions to some of the queen’s ladies regarding the king’s marriage proposal, and Elizabeth knew without doubt from that moment that Philip was a reluctant suitor. Yet she still needed to weigh up the possibility that when she rejected him, Philip, a widower for a second time without an heir to his vast dominions, could well take a Valois bride. This would at a stroke make him England’s enemy, and secure a more lasting peace with France. An obvious choice even presented itself: Henry II’s daughter, Elisabeth of France.
So, before Mary was cold in her grave, Secretary Cecil and her other councillors were all advising Elizabeth on how she should best play her own marriage card to keep Philip from concluding a Valois pact that would endanger England’s very existence. Her first parliament of 1559, on the other hand, was solely urging the queen to marry and have children as was her duty as a woman, thereby putting the Catholic threat of Mary Queen of Scots at one remove from the crown.
Any pretense that Elizabeth had made to marry Philip, or that Secretary Cecil had made on her behalf, was undoubtedly another stalling tactic. The country would not tolerate a return of Philip as their king. The strength of feeling for Elizabeth and against Philip, and even Mary, can best be summed up in a speech believed to have been delivered at York when news of her accession was announced: “Queen Elizabeth, a princess, as you will, of no mingled blood of Spaniard or stranger, but born mere English here among us and therefore most natural unto us.”
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Even setting aside her personal
inclinations to remain a “spinster,” the last thing England’s young and handsome queen needed was a hated husband. What she did need was time, as well as money, and the only way she could prevent Philip from casting around Valois France for a bride was to pretend she was interested herself. The Count of Feria was thus fed a ripe diet of misinformation, and fortunately for the English, swallowed it with gusto.
Philip was, nonetheless, the most powerful monarch in Europe of the day. His father, Charles V, had abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor, splitting his dominions between his brother Ferdinand, who became Holy Roman Emperor in his stead, and Philip, who took direct control of all the lands and provinces outside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, from the Americas to the Low Countries and much of Italy. Elizabeth had fortunately charmed him during his brief stint at her sister Mary’s side; but, more important, had learned a great deal about how he thought, and how best to handle him. She knew better than any other prince alive that Philip was “more Catholic than the Pope”
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and would not delegate his authority to anyone. She knew that he had his hand in every act, every letter of the Spanish Habsburg Empire; that he gave each order; oversaw all policy; and above all else was paranoid about the jealousy others felt when he wielded his power. Elizabeth and her councillors had been dealing with Philip for five years in England, and had developed a strategy at the outset to help protect her fledgling rule.
Just as Philip’s father, Charles V, had been feared and hated, Philip perceived that the world outside Spain, and his Spanish dominions, was to be mistrusted at the very least, and treated as an enemy given the slightest provocation. His weakest—and yet strongest—ally was none other than the pope himself. His dominions surrounded the Papal States, which also depended heavily upon Philip’s Habsburg Sicily for its grain. The sack of Rome in 1527 by Charles V was not allowed to become a distant memory, since Philip himself had ruthlessly used force and threatened to starve out Pope Paul IV in 1556–57 to demonstrate his own might. The popes knew to mistrust Philip’s temporal power, and much later he wrote to the pope that, “Most of the misfortunes that have befallen my possessions have occurred because I have tried so hard to defend the church and
extirpate heresy. But the greater these [misfortunes] have become, the more your Holiness has forgotten them!”
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For all these reasons, Philip—and Elizabeth’s relationship with him and his Spanish Habsburg Empire—would dominate Elizabethan politics and economic aspirations for her entire forty-four-year reign. Elizabeth’s government decisions would be dictated by and large throughout her rule by the ever-pressing considerations of security of the realm (defense), revenue generation, official court favor, and court intrigue.
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Central to that theme in the early years was trade and plunder, and London was the heartbeat and brain of trade.
The City of London merchants made up about 75 percent of the tax revenues, and paid duties to the queen on goods imported or exported. They comprised different “companies” divided into mercers, staplers, goldsmiths, or merchant adventurers dependent on their specific trade and charter. The West Country ports of Plymouth and Bristol were also active contributors to the treasury, and Southampton with the Isle of Wight had already become an important naval outpost, but even when bundled together, they could not touch the powerhouse that was London.
The members of the twelve great livery companies of London comprised the administrative substructure of the city, and citizenship at London—or the freedom of the City—could only be acquired through membership of one of these companies. Membership, in turn, was gained only through a long period of apprenticeship, even if the new entrants were entitled to join by following the trade of their fathers.
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This meant that London, unlike Antwerp or other great commercial centers, was run by men who had been engaged in business since they were old enough to work, and virtually always by men who belonged to one of the livery companies. The most powerful of these companies at the time of Elizabeth’s accession was the Merchants Adventurers, who derived much of their wealth from the export trade in cloth to Antwerp, and the importation of luxury goods from the East and West Indies.
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And it was the relationship between the Merchants Adventurers and the crown that would dominate government policy for the next several years.
But trade was only one side of the coin. Treasure, irrespective of its
provenance, was the special passport to royal favor, since the queen expected her Merchants Adventurers and other trading corporations and societies to put their ready funds at her disposal for the security of the realm. The same sacrifices were demanded of her gentlemen adventurers at court as well. There was no doubt that Elizabeth’s reign was a time when all who wanted power needed to put their money where their ambitions lay, and only then could success be richly rewarded.
And so it was at the beginning of 1559 that the queen found her realm in less than shipshape order. She was literally assailed on all sides and had to unite her country behind her. The first concrete step she took to that end was to set about to create the illusion of power and wealth to dazzle her enemies and give the false impression of a glorious beginning at her coronation in January of that year. It was this illusion that would give the queen her enduring nickname of “Gloriana,” and fooled posterity into believing that there had always been some grand mercantile and imperial strategic plan.
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But the only “grand plan” that Elizabeth had at that stage was security of the realm. Her vision was clear, and she had the mental acuity and deft touch of a chess grandmaster, always seeing five or six moves ahead of the game, more often than not leading her adversary into the path she wished him, or her, to take. Though she had no money, she had the courage, conviction, advisors, and “stomach of a king” to help her through the task ahead. And at the heart of this illusion in her “grand plan” to save England was the very real world of gentlemen and merchant adventurers, corsairs and pirates. Without them, England could not survive.