Acknowledgements
I first started the research that has produced this book in 2001. Initially, I was working on certain strands of Catholic political analysis and commentary. Noticing how often the Wars of the Roses provided a template for the analysis of Elizabethan succession issues and, indeed, for thinking about politics more widely conceived, I started to work on various history plays from the period, with a view to writing one book on plays, pamphlets, and succession politics. However, it rapidly became obvious that I had far too much stuff for one book and the work on the plays turned into a discrete project on Shakespeare’s history plays and the politics of the 1590s, the results of which will, I hope, be published by Yale University Press.
As for the Catholic materials, I had initially intended to write one book that stretched from the Treatise of treasons at least to the fallout from The conference about the next succession, and perhaps even to the Archpriest Controversy. But when I received the invitation to give the Ford lectures, upon which this book isbased, I realized, first, that, within the compass of six lectures, that would be impossible, and second, that if the lectures were to have any chance of retaining the audience’s attention, they had to be more than an account of a version of Catholic political thought that bumped along from one tract to the next and then stopped. Rather, they had to take the form of a dialogue, an admittedly highly schematic and perhaps overly selective, political narrative of the give and take, the almost dialectical exchanges, between the Elizabethan regime and its Catholic critics.
To get this material into six lectures I decided to stop at the death of Mary Stuart, thus replicating the structure of Patrick Collinson’s ‘Elizabethan exclusion crisis’, which, along with his concept of ‘the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I’, was (and is) central to the argument of both the lectures and this book. However, when I came to write the book of the lectures, it seemed to me that that was not the best place to stop, since I do not think that many of the highly combustible materials that rendered Collinson’s exclusion crisis so frightening to contemporaries simply went away with Mary Stuart, but rather morphed into something we might conceive of as a succession crisis waiting to happen; a crisis in potentia that, despite the fact that it never did happen, was just as alarming to contemporaries, and played just as prominent a role in shaping events, as Collinson’s ‘exclusion crisis’.1 Consequently, I did not want simply (albeit sometimes negatively) to replicate the structure of Collinson’s argument, or to limit the book to the chronological framework produced by that problematic. At first I contemplated taking the story through the Archpriest Controversy, but some months working on that topic taught me that that was not viable within the confines of one book, however long. And so, since perhaps the central theme of both the lectures and the book was a
1 For the dynamics of which, now see Susan Doran and Pauline Kewes, eds., Doubtful and dangerous: the succession question in late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014).
Acknowledgements
certain sort of libellous secret history, organized around the motif of evil counsel, the Catholic tracts of 1592 that have come to be known collectively as ‘Cecil’s commonwealth’, and the immediate response thereto, seemed to provide the obvious end point, or rather caesura.
What follows, then, is a considerably expanded version of the lectures. The Introduction and Conclusion are slightly expanded versions of parts of lectures 1 and 6. Chapters 1–3 are slightly expanded versions of the first two lectures. Chapters 4 and 5 are expanded versions of lecture 3. Chapters 6 and 8 are expanded versions of lecture 4. Chapters 10 and 11 are expanded versions of lecture 5, and Chapter 12 an expanded version of the first half of lecture 6. With the exception of the material on the bond of association, Chapters 7 and 9 are new, as are Chapters 12–17. These take the story through the Catholic responses to the death of Mary Stuart and the Armada and the official response to that response (in Part V), the subsequent Catholic reversion to the evil counsellor mode, and to the (now admittedly rather attenuated) claims to loyalism that that mode always enabled (in Part VI), and finally (in Part VII) to the immediate official response to all of that. The book stops before Parsons’ great tract The conference about the next succession ushered in, or perhaps rather better, announced, a political and polemical scene dominated, in novel ways, by the question of the succession and increasing internal tensions within both the Elizabethan establishment and amongst English Catholics. I hope to treat that next part of what I think is still essentially the same story—a story that culminates in the Archpriest Controversy—in a separate book.
In what sometimes feels like the interminable course of working on what has turned out to be multiple projects, I have, of course, contracted many debts. I began the research on the 1590s tracts in earnest, and made my initial forays into the history plays, while on a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare library in 2002–3 and finished the first draft of the Shakespeare material and of a good deal of the 1590s stuff at the Huntington in 2006–7. In between I held a visiting Mellon professorship at Keele University, where I was able to present some preliminary versions of this material and benefited a great deal from the generous hospitality and intellectual engagement of Ann Hughes, Julie Sanders, and Ian Atherton, amongst others. Both the Folger and the Huntington provide ideal environments in which to research and write and I have to express my deep gratitude to both for allowing me the privilege of working there for extended periods. Those sojourns and later time spent researching and writing both lectures and book took place while I was the beneficiary of the very generous sabbatical policies of first Princeton and then Vanderbilt Universities.
There are many reasons to miss Princeton University, but Bill Jordan is undoubtedly the best of them. Bill did not read any of this stuff; from previous experience I found that he was (very understandably) almost entirely allergic to my prose style, but a great deal of the work on these projects was greatly eased by his wit, friendship, and support. While a fair bit of the work for this book was done while I was at Princeton, it has been completed in the almost unbelievably congenial environment provided by the history department at Vanderbilt and I should like to thank my friends and colleagues there, in particular Paul Lim, Jim Epstein, and
Acknowledgements
Joel Harrington, for their kindness, encouragement, and tolerance over the past few years.
A whole range of people have helped me come to terms with this material. Tom Cogswell read a draft of the lectures and was always prepared to listen to me bore on about subjects peripheral to his own interests, as were, as usual, Ann Hughes and Richard Cust. Alex Gajda has been incredibly generous with her time, knowledge, and insight. She has read and commented on far more of my prose than any single person ought to have to do and let me read the typescript of her excellent book well in advance of publication. Paul Hammer has also been a source of very good advice and a great deal of information over the years, all of which has proved formative for the present study and the wider project/s. Alastair Bellany gave advice and encouragement for years on end and offered me the opportunity to try some of this stuff out at a conference on libels at Rutgers in 2012. At Princeton I inflicted a good deal of this material on various graduate students and graduate classes, and I should like to acknowledge, in particular, the forbearance, good humour, and even better advice of Bill Bulman, Rupa Mishra, and Matt Grohowski. Neal Younger has also been very generous with his time, advice, and very considerable knowledge of aspects of the Elizabethan polity in which I will always be a neophyte.
I have a special debt to Freddy Dominguez, whose work on Parsons in Spain and Rome, and in particular on the different versions and recensions, in different languages, of the De origine and the Conference about the next succession as political interventions in a transnational political system centred on Madrid and Rome, Paris and London has been of enormous help. Because of his linguistic skills and remarkable scholarly range he has been able to go to places (linguistic, geographical, and conceptual) that I simply cannot. When his findings are printed, our knowledge of a central feature of the dynastic and confessional crisis that engulfed western Europe in the late sixteenth century will be transformed. Throughout the process which produced first the lectures and then the book, Freddy has been enormously patient and generous with his time, expertise, and advice.2
Latterly, as I was writing and giving the lectures, Noah Millstone was a source of stimulation and of really useful criticism and advice. We have been working on slightly different periods but share interests in politique modes of political analysis and the whole notion of the libellous secret history, and Noah has been extraordinarily generous in sharing his insights and material with me. His work on manuscript separates, both as medium and message, will transform our knowledge of early Stuart political culture. Although we work on different periods, I have always found even the most bibulous of my conversations with Jason Peacey to be of the greatest value. When working on the edge of one’s competence, as I am, for most (if not all) of this book, one relies heavily on the advice of others, but one also inevitably makes mistakes and misjudgements that remain all one’s own work.
2 Freddy Cristobal Dominguez, ‘ “We must fight with paper and pens”: Spanish Elizabethan politics, 1585–1598’, (PhD thesis, University of Princeton, 2011).
Acknowledgements
There are, however, three other people who require particular thanks. The first is Michael Questier, without whom I would never have started working on things Catholic. Without his advice and support I would not have dared enter this field and it is to Michael’s extraordinary knowledge and generosity that I owe my interest in, and a great deal of what I know about, postReformation English Catholicism. Michael continues to provide a level of advice and stimulation that goes quite beyond the call of duty. Over the last fifteen years or so, we have been engaged in a joint project to reintegrate certain Catholic materials into the socalled mainstream of postReformation English history. Catholic studies is now a thriving cottage industry, but we both think a good deal remains to be done to prevent this becoming, or indeed remaining, a subfield, reduced to a form of confessional navelgazing, all too often hermetically sealed off from other areas of historical inquiry. We are, of course, now far from alone in this project and the present book is best regarded as a small contribution to that wider effort—an effort which owes a very great deal to Michael’s scholarship, independence, and generosity.
The second is Simon Adams, whose work on Elizabethan political history over the last thirty or so years has transformed the subject. Simon is one of my oldest friends and I am more than aware that in this book I am trespassing on topics of which he is a master and about which I know little, indeed in comparison to him, next to nothing. Nevertheless, he has been extremely generous in listening to me witter on about these subjects. Not only that, he read the lectures in their entirety and gave me extremely detailed and penetrating comments. Since he does not suffer fools gladly, and is allergic to discourse speak, I am not sure he always found it a pleasure. I am also not at all sure that he will entirely approve of the result, but that result has been immensely improved by his criticisms and comments and, as with Michael, I can safely say that the lectures and this book would not have been written, and certainly would not have taken the form that they have, without the stimulation and provocation, criticism, and encouragement, provided over the past several decades by Simon’s work and his friendship.
Third, I would like to acknowledge a very considerable, and more or less lifelong, intellectual debt to the work of Patrick Collinson. These lectures continually play with and off his linked notions of the ‘monarchical republic of Elizabeth I’ and ‘the Elizabethan exclusion crisis’. I refer, perhaps too much, to the ‘Elizabethan regime’, as a handy shorthand term, and in doing so I am employing it in the sense that Collinson appropriates from Wallace MacCaffrey, who used the term, Collinson says, to refer to ‘the coming together and settling down together of a group of politicians to form a collective, quasiorganic and, for some considerable time, stable governing group’—a group who, in their role as councillors to the queen, did not always find themselves in agreement with their royal mistress.3
My engagement with Collinson’s notions of ‘the monarchical republic’ and the ‘exclusion crisis’ is not entirely uncritical, or rather I much prefer certain versions of them to others, and, typically, Collinson’s own work contains, allows, indeed,
3 Patrick Collinson, ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Elizabethan essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57; quotation from p. 40.
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perhaps even invites, different readings and applications of the core concepts and concerns encapsulated in those catchphrases. But simply disagreeing with Collinson is, and always has been, a bit of a mug’s game and what follows is not best seen, and is certainly not intended, as criticism of, still less as simple disagreement with, Collinson’s work. Rather, it is an attempt to develop and build upon his initial insights, in large part by following those insights into a place that Collinson himself never cared to go—the thoughts and actions of certain English Catholics. I retain, however, a very considerable intellectual debt to Patrick Collinson, whom I continue to regard as perhaps the greatest of the historians of postReformation England active since the Second World War.
But, of course, final thanks must go to the people who invited me to give the lectures, and in particular to Felicity Heal, who did a great deal to make my stay in Oxford as interesting and congenial as it was. I should also like particularly to thank the participants in a seminar convened after the last lecture to discuss the whole project. As you deliver these things to what can seem to the slightly paranoid lecture giver a decidedly stony faced and inscrutable audience, some of whom appear to be either concentrating very hard indeed or to have lost consciousness altogether, it is very hard to know what, if anything, is happening out there. That seminar showed me that at least some people had been listening and, if not agreeing with me, then at least not dismissing what I was saying completely out of hand. For that, and for some very cogent comments and criticisms that have proved extremely useful as I tried to turn the lectures into a book, I am very grateful.
I also want to thank the warden and fellows of All Souls, who elected me to a visiting fellowship during the term in which I delivered the lectures. I could not imagine a more congenial place in which to suffer the trauma of giving the Fords. In particular I would like to thank Robin Briggs, Ian MacClean, and Noel Malcolm for making me feel welcome in what might otherwise have proved a rather, if not forbidding, then certainly formidable, setting.
My wife, Sandy Solomon, not only came with me to Oxford to provide moral support, and suffer the experience of hearing the lectures, but she also worked really hard on getting said lectures into something like shape. She read and edited multiple drafts and listened to me read them out more than once. These exchanges were not without their moments of fractiousness—all of them, of course, always already, my fault. I would like to conclude by thanking her for her remarkable tolerance, affection, and support throughout the sometimes tortuous process that produced first the lectures and then this book. However much the prose might suck, she still manages to be nice to me, for which I remain extremely grateful.
I. THE MARIAN MOMENT
1. Libellous Politics and the Paradoxes of Publicity: The Case/s For and Against Mary Stuart 19
2. Plots, Pamphlets, and Parliament
3. The Treatise of Treasons in Context/s
II. THE CATHOLIC LOYALIST MOMENT
4. The Anjou Match and its Consequences
5. Getting Your Retaliation in First: Leicester’s Commonwealth in Context/s
6. Challenge and Response: Leslie, Allen, and Parsons and the (Catholic) Origins of the ‘Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’
III. BURGHLEY’S COMMONWEALTH
7. ‘Monarchical Republicanism’, or the Vain Pursuit of Burghley’s Commonwealth
8. Replying in Practice and in Theory: The Strange Fate of William Parry and a Very Long Tract by Thomas Bilson
9. Beyond Monarchical Republicanism
IV. ROGUE STATES AND UNIVERSAL MONARCHS
10. How to Answer a Libel, or French Pamphlets and English Politics
11. Going Papal
V. THE REGICIDAL MOMENT
12. Killing a Queen, and its Consequences
13. Burghley (and the Queen) Tell the World What They Really Think
VI. RESISTANCE AND COMPROMISE?
VII. RIPOSTES AND
Introduction
At its most basic, the purpose of this book is to recuperate a strand of Catholic polemical commentary on Elizabethan politics. It is prompted by four recent trends in the historiography. The first is the revisionist account of the Reformation, which, in emphasizing the slow, uneven, and much-resisted course of the English Reformation/s, has done two things: it has placed renewed emphasis on the prevalence and importance of bodies of opinion which might (in a variety of ways) answer to the name of ‘Catholic’ and it has reminded us that not only was the triumph of Protestantism not inevitable until, at the very least, well into Elizabeth’s reign, but also that contemporaries, on both sides of the confessional divide, remained very much aware of that fact. However much one may agree or disagree with the fine detail of the revisionist case, and I have been one of its sharper critics over the last few years, one has to acknowledge the absolutely central importance of those insights, the implications of which have still not been fully worked through for the history of the post-Reformation period.1 This book is intended as a small contribution to that wider process.2
The second is the (linked) emphasis on the existence, and more particularly on the perception, of the popish threat and on the role of anti-popery as both a complex ideological form and a central force in the politics of the period. The result, as Patrick Collinson has shown, was a pervasive sense amongst contemporaries of the
1 Of many works on this theme by Christopher Haigh, see especially ‘From monopoly to minority: Catholicism in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 312, (1981), pp. 129–47; ‘The continuity of catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present, 93 (1981), pp. 37–69, reprinted in C. Haigh, ed., The English reformation revised (Cambridge, 1987); idem, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the people’, in C. Haigh, ed., The reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 195–220. Haigh’s position is summed up in his English reformations: religion, politics and society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993). Also see J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English people, (Oxford, 1984) and Eamon Duffy’s magisterial summation of the revisionist case, The stripping of the altars (London, 1992).
2 For just a few of the works concerned to reintegrate things Catholic back into the mainstream religio-political narrative, see Michael Questier, ‘What happened to English Catholicism after the English Reformation?’ History, 85, (2000) pp. 28–47; idem, Catholicism and community in early modern England: politics, aristocratic patronage and religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006); and, with Peter Lake, The trials of Margaret Clitherow: persecution, martyrdom and the politics of sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011); Alison Shell, Catholicism, controversy, and the English literary imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999); idem, Oral culture and Catholicism in early modern England (Cambridge, 2007); Arthur F. Marotti, ed., Religious ideology and cultural fantasy: Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses in early modern England (Notre Dame, Ind., 2005) and idem, ed., Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in early modern English texts (New York, 1999); Lowell Gallagher, ed., Redrawing the map of early modern English Catholicism (Toronto, 2012); Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Aldershot, 2014).
extreme fragility of the Elizabethan Protestant state in the face of an unmarried queen, an unsettled succession, and the prospect of the accession of the Catholic Mary Stuart.
And here is the third historiographical context for these lectures: Collinson’s account of the quite remarkable expedients that various pillars of the Elizabethan establishment adopted, or rather thought very seriously about adopting, in order to avert that (to them) disastrous outcome. This general situation Collinson termed the ‘Elizabethan exclusion crisis’, and the expedients adopted to meet it, ‘the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I’.3
And this leads very easily into the fourth historiographical context, the recent stress on what we might term public politics, the politics of representation and of pitch-making, which some historians, including myself, have suggested constituted something we might want to call a post-Reformation public sphere.4
While, over the past thirty years or so, ‘monarchical republicanism’ has proven a remarkably fecund, flexible, and, ultimately, rather illusive, concept,5 one thing which unites nearly all the subsequent studies of the nature, significance, and indeed existence of ‘the monarchical republic’ is the complete absence of any sustained attention to, or even much interest in, the thoughts or actions of the very group which all this activity and anxiety was designed to frustrate, marginalize, and ultimately to disappear—English Catholics.
The resulting silence is so deep and pervasive as to require some explanation, which, I think, can be found in the still prevalent tendency to see Catholics as an increasingly peripheral group, doomed to irrelevance, and as such to be excluded from the ‘mainstream’ of English history. On this account, Catholic history is something that can be safely left, if not to Catholic historians—although there has been a good deal of that over the years—then at least to dedicated historians of Catholicism who can be safely allowed to preside over their own subfield, to be consulted by the rest of us on a strictly need-to-know basis, when, during fleeting moments of crisis, Catholics appear on centre stage, before being thrust back to the margins to which the march of history is taken to have been busily and inevitably consigning them. In so far as Catholicism has been mainstreamed over the last couple of decades, it has been relegated to the sedulously apolitical realm described by a certain sort of cultural history and thus to the (often very) longue durée.6
3 Patrick Collinson, ‘The monarchical republic of queen Elizabeth I’, initially published in 1987 in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 69, (1987), pp. 394–424, and now most conveniently available reprinted in his Elizabethan essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57. His other essay on this topic, ‘The Elizabethan exclusion crisis and the Elizabethan polity’, was originally published in 1994 in the Proceedings of the British Academy, 84, (1994), pp. 51–92, and is most conveniently available in his last collection of essays, This England (Manchester, 2011), pp. 61–97.
4 Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, The politics of the public sphere in early modern England (Manchester, 2007).
5 For an important recent collection of essays critically evaluating its impact, see John McDiarmid, The monarchical republic of early modern England: essays in response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, 2007).
6 For some of the best work in a culturalist mode, see the essays collected in Walsham, Catholic Reformation
This book is an attempt to argue that that is mistaken, if only because, as Collinson ought by now to have taught us, in a personal monarchy, in which the religious settlement of the church and political dispositions of the state turned on the religious proclivities and political judgement of the monarch, the sorts of contingencies whereby the peripheral might become central, and the central peripheral, were, if not perennial, then at the very least only a funeral or a couple of marriages away—something that, in the case of Catholicism, remained true until at least the early eighteenth century. And, of course, for a great deal of Elizabeth’s reign the dynastic uncertainties attendant upon personal monarchy were compounded by cold and then hot war with the greatest power in Europe. Moreover, even if, over the long haul, the Catholics ‘lost’, telling the story from the perspective of the victors is a bad habit of which historians must continually struggle to break themselves, and, in the current context, that means that we really ought to stop simply taking the denizens of the monarchical republic at their own estimation of themselves.
But that, I would argue, is what a great deal of recent writing on Elizabethan politics amounts to. The attempt to see the world as contemporaries saw it is, of course, always a good thing and, of late, historians have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to get inside what we might call ‘the official mind’ of the Elizabethan state—in effect, all too often, the mind of William Cecil. But however much scholarly energy and effort has been required to effect entry thereto, it is probably not a good idea, having successfully crawled inside the head of William Cecil or Thomas Norton, simply to stay there.7 It is, in short, high time to have a look at both the ‘Elizabethan exclusion crisis’ and the ‘monarchical republic of Elizabeth I’ from the perspective of the persons whom they were designed to silence and exclude. This means taking the Catholic materials, even those produced by ‘extremists’—the term is Collinson’s and there is scarcely a more damning epithet in his lexicon8—far more seriously than they have been taken.
The still prevailing attitude is exemplified best by Collinson himself, who, in a remarkable passage, at once encapsulates and trivializes the ‘Catholic extremists’’ version of the reign in an anecdote about Elizabeth’s body exploding in her coffin. The source of that story was Elizabeth Southwell, one of the queen’s maids of
7 I refer here most obviously to the work of what one might term the Eltonian school, for representative examples of which, see Michael Graves, Thomas Norton: the parliament man (London, 1994); idem, Burghley: William Cecil Lord Burghley (London, 1998); John Guy, My heart is my own (London, 2004); Stephen Alford, The early Elizabethan polity: William Cecil and the British succession crisis (Cambridge, 1998) and idem, Burghley: William Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I (London and New Haven, Conn., 2008).
8 Patrick Collinson, The history of a history man (London, 2011), pp. 144–5. On either side of the confessional divide it is in fact far more difficult to tell ‘moderates’ from ‘extremists’ than Collinson’s usage would allow. For instance, both his Protestant and some of his Catholic contemporaries were at one in regarding Robert Parsons as an ‘extremist’ but, as we shall see in Part VI, Resistance and Compromise?, Parsons could deploy both extreme, or radical and moderate, ‘loyalist’ modes of discourse when it suited him, sometimes within the same text. And however highly we might rate Parsons’ political and rhetorical skills, he was far from alone in that capacity. We need to pay attention to what all contemporaries were saying without marginalizing them as ‘extremists’, or indeed as ‘moderates’, and certainly without valorizing our own version of the soggy middle, or as Collinson might put it, the ‘mainstream’ as the locus of all things sensible, worthy, and important.
Bad Queen Bess?
honour, who, Collinson explains, ‘turned Catholic, made a bigamous marriage to Sir Robert Dudley and took up residence in Florence’, before telling this tale to Robert Parsons. Quite which of these dreadful fates is worse is left unclear, but, lest his readers waste too much time wondering, they are then immediately instructed to ‘regard that as a diversion. Back to the mainstream’. Well, that is a diversion, but it is one of Collinson’s own making, expressly designed to serve his own (Protestant) 9 interpretive purposes, and it just won’t do. Moreover, the supreme irony is that the mainstream to which Collinson wants us to return is dominated by Camden, whose account, as Simon Adams has shown, and as Collinson himself well knew, was profoundly shaped by that ‘extremist’ Catholic text, Leicester’s commonwealth. 10
Another way to put this is that, as Christopher Haigh and others have taught us, the identification of England as a Protestant nation was a fraught and contested political and ideological project, not an inevitable process, and historians should treat it as such.11 One of the best ways to do that is to take what Catholics were doing and saying about themselves and their place in the world seriously. And thus large parts of this book will be concerned to recuperate, to animate and inhabit imaginatively and intellectually, certain sorts of Catholic political thought, political commentary, and pretty much contemporary politick history.12
But that does not mean that the current study is to be taken as an exercise in ‘the history of Political Thought’, at least as that enterprise has conventionally been defined and practised.13 Parts of what follow do indeed concern themselves with topics traditionally at the centre of that scholarly subfield and they do so because some of the writers, polemicists, and men of business whose activities form the subject of much of this book were indeed, at times, practising at least a rudimentary version of ‘Political Thought’; that is to say, they were addressing, in relatively formal terms, questions about the nature and origins of political authority, the right to resist, and the proper relations between the church and temporal authority. And I hope due attention is given in what follows to their efforts to think and
9 Cf. Patrick Collinson, The history of a history man (London, 2011), pp. 53–4.
10 Patrick Collinson, This England, p. 151.
11 See, for instance, his English reformations (Oxford, 1993), or his earlier essays ‘The continuity of English Catholicism’ Past and Present, 93, (1981), pp. 37–69 or ‘From monopoly to minority; Catholicism in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 31, (1981), pp. 129–47.
12 Here the great inspiration has been the work of Michael Questier. See especially his Catholicism and community in early modern England (Cambridge, 2006) and ‘What happened to English Catholicism after the English reformation?’, History, 85, (2000), pp. 28–47.
13 There have been rather good books on the subject of ‘Catholic Political Thought’ and there is little point in simply going over much of the same ground again, even if that ground were being viewed from a slightly different perspective. On this, see Thomas Clancy, Papist pamphleteers: the Allen-Persons party and the political thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago, 1964) and Peter Holmes, Resistance and compromise: the political thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, 1982). In what follows I owe a very considerable debt to both of these books. Resistance and compromise is one of those texts that gets better and better the more often you return to it and the more you know about the subject. It was one of the first books I ever reviewed and, while I remember being perfectly nice about it at the time, I really did not realize then what a masterly piece of compression and precise analysis it is.
argue in that vein. But almost none of them was indulging in that sort of argument at the highest levels of abstraction or intellectual ambition. Rather they were seeking to make cases for and against particular political outcomes, which they wished either to further or frustrate. In so doing, they were not primarily concerned to think new or significant thoughts, or even to think things through from the most basic of first principles, but rather to win the argument at hand, by shuffling the pack of existing positions, arguments, and authorities, of moves and countermoves, in order to serve their purposes of the moment. And they were doing so in self-conscious dialogue with one another. And so, one of the things that this book tries to do is analytically reconstruct the ensuing exchanges.
But the texts I will be discussing here were not only or even primarily concerned with that we might term ‘Political Thought’. Rather they were attempts to ‘think about politics’; to come to terms with, to describe and analyse, the conduct of contemporary politics as a process, a series of interactions, undertaken in distinct institutional, ideological, and social locales, between and amongst groups of political agents or actors intent on realizing their own particular ends and interests. For all that most of these groups were defined by, and often sought legitimation in terms of, questions of confessional allegiance and religious identity, a good many of the texts under discussion here were concerned to see politics in what we might term politique terms, as a struggle for advantage, for power and position. They claimed to be pulling back the veil of moral and religious cant that ‘the official version’ was attempting to cast over events and in so doing to be revealing to the world what was really happening.
In the process, they did, in fact, innovate, as it were, generically, developing and introducing into English political discourse a genre that I want to term the ‘libellous secret history’, that is to say, a way of narrating and analysing the course of recent history in terms of the secret manoeuvres of various political agents, all driven, despite their frequent assertions to the contrary, by the will to power, money, and status, rather than by any commitment to the (always already linked) causes of true religion and the commonweal.
A central element here was the notion of evil counsel, which, as John Watts has shown,14 played a crucial role in the political argument and propaganda of the very Wars of the Roses that these tracts invoked so often to explain the current conjuncture and warn about the desperately dangerous times into which the misguided policies being pursued by the regime were plunging the realm. That trope, which pictured an innocent, deluded, indeed, an often seemingly gormless monarch being sequestered and systematically misled by a clique of evil counsellors, allowed the Catholic critics of the English Protestant state to emphasis that the policies to which they objected were emanating not from the queen but from ‘the regime’,
14 John Watts, ‘Ideas, principles and politics’ in A. J. Pollard, ed., The Wars of the Roses (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 110–33, 234–47; idem, ‘Polemic and politics in the 1450s’ in Margaret Kekewich, Colin Richmond, Anne Sutton, Livia Vissa-Fuchs, and John Watts, The politics of fifteenth century England: John Vale’s book (Stroud, 1996), pp. 3–42; see also the edition and discussion of the ‘Somnium vigilantis’ in J. P. Gilson, ‘A defence of the proscription of the Yorkists in 1459’, English Historical Review, 26, (1911), pp. 512–25.
pictured as a self-interested clique of Machiavellian and atheistical evil counsellors. This enabled said Catholic critics to assert their own loyalty to the crown or monarch, even as they excoriated many of the defining policies of the Elizabethan state.
But the libellous secret history was by no means a Catholic monopoly. Indeed, the first group to have systematic recourse to it was located near the centre of the Elizabethan establishment. They integrated Buchanan’s libellous account of Mary Stuart’s personal rule in Scotland into the propaganda effort subsequent to the northern rebellion, authored and orchestrated (surely with official, Cecilian backing) by Thomas Norton and John Day. A translated version of Buchanan’s tract took its part in a concerted attempt to defame, discredit, and, finally, to bring to the block, the Scottish queen; a campaign that culminated in the parliament of 1572 and provoked The treatise of treasons, the first great Catholic exercise in the genre. And later that Puritan denizen of the Protestant establishment, John Stubbs, turned to essentially the same means and mode to explain just what was happening in the Anjou match.
As Buchanan’s text (amongst others) shows, the line dividing a libellous secret history organized around the notion of evil counsel and one directed straight at the person of the monarch could be paper-thin. On the Catholic side of the argument, various authors or factions, and in some cases even particular texts, might slip and slide, with relative ease, between accounts of tyranny centred on evil counsel, and alternatives centred on the very personal rule and malign will of the ruler/tyrant in question.
Of course, to the modern eye it is all too easy to impute simple insincerity, mere machination, and manipulation to those deploying the evil counsellor trope. And indeed, the ease and readiness with which the likes of Allen and Parsons (and their allies and hangers-on) did indeed shuffle between the twin polarities of evil counsel and tyranny talk, in Peter Holmes’s terms, between compromise and resistance, does reveal more than an element of calculation. The rapid shift of gears from Leicester’s commonwealth to the De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani certainly argues as much, as does the relative instability of Parsons’ Philopater tract, which, while it hewed relatively closely to the evil counsellor mode, also hinted throughout at a far more aggressive Elizabeth-centred account of the enormities being perpetrated in her name by the English Protestant state. Indeed, by comparing Parsons’ Philopater and its offshoots in English with, on the one hand, the explicitly tyrantand Elizabeth-centred rant that suffused Thomas Stapleton’s Apologia, and, on the other, with the insistently loyalist Supplication of Robert Southwell, we can not only see how much there was in common between the discourses of Catholic loyalism and resistance, but also observe the relative ease with which the existing pack of arguments, authorities, and poses could combined and recombined to fit the various exigencies and the target audiences of what was essentially the same political and polemical moment.
However, the evil counsel mode of discourse was more than a convenient means to talk out of both sides of your mouth at once, enabling the Elizabethan state to be denounced in no uncertain terms as a tyranny while leaving both the person of the monarch and your own claims to uber-loyalism unscathed; it was also a way to
appeal to wider bodies of opinion than could be engaged or mobilized by straightforward incitements to resist a tyrant, and one of the purposes served by the case study of Dr Parry in Chapter 8 is to illustrate the extent to which even a wellconnected and well-informed contemporary might find him or herself trapped within the contradictions and dynamics of evil counsellor speak, with, for Parry, tragic, if also slightly farcical, consequences.15
Thus, if what follows is not a conventional exercise in ‘Political Thought’, neither, despite its focus on things and persons Catholic, is it an exercise in Catholic history. Rather it is an attempt to see what certain central strands in Elizabethan political, religious, and cultural history look like with at least some Catholics not merely left in, but put at the front and centre of the account, where, I would contend, they belong. Luckily this is not hard to do. There is a great deal of Catholic response to and comment upon the ‘monarchical republic’ and its doings to be found lying about, as it were, in plain sight, in a remarkable series of printed tracts stretching from the Treastise of treasons of 1572/3 to the group of texts known collectively as Cecil’s commonwealth from the early 1590s. And at bottom, this book is framed by the emergence of that genre in response to the government’s propaganda push against Mary and her English Catholic supporters in the late 1560s and early 1570s and by its late efflorescence in the early 1590s, in response to the great antiCatholic proclamation of 1591.
However, my aim is not merely or only to isolate and delineate a particular mode of Catholic discourse, as it were, for its own sake. In addition to an exercise in discourse analysis or ideology critique, this book is intended to be a species of political history. I want to offer an admittedly somewhat episodic and schematic political narrative, in which the central texts with which I shall be concerned are related both to the events, the particular political conjunctures, which produced them and to which they were in turn addressed, and to the efforts by the Protestant state (or at least of central elements within that state) to use almost identical modes of discourse to wrest the same conjunctures, the same sets of alternately threatening and hopeful contingencies, in their own, rather than in the Catholic, interest.
What emerges is a dialogue between the elements within the establishment and its Catholic critics and enemies; a series of exchanges in which various initiatives undertaken by the state, or at least by the hot Protestant clique at its core, can only properly be understood when they are set in a tensely dialogic relationship with what certain Catholic ideologues and interest groups were doing and saying.
Perhaps the best example of that is the way in which the bond of association, the act for the queen’s safety, and the anti-Catholic legislation of 1585—that is to say, the very foundation documents of Collinson’s ‘monarchical republic’—emerge as a response to a concerted Catholic propaganda drive of the summer of 1584, involving the production, in rapid succession, of Leicester’s commonwealth, an English edition of John Leslie’s defence of Mary’s claim to be regarded as Elizabeth’s next successor, and Allen’s response to Burghley’s Execution of justice in England.
15 This is an aspect of Parry’s career that is largely omitted from the most recent account of his fate in Stephen Alford’s The watchers; a secret history of the reign of Elizabeth I (London, 2012).
On this account, therefore, what the Catholics were doing and saying is interesting and significant not merely when taken on its own terms and studied, as it were, for its own sake, but also because the actions of other contemporary political agents are at best only partially intelligible, unless and until the Catholic materials are factored into the account.
But the resulting narrative is not or rather cannot just be a dialogue between (perfect Protestant) elements in the regime and certain Catholic factions and discourses. It has to be at least a three-way conversation, indeed sometimes a threeway struggle, between those two parties and the always shadowy figure of the queen herself. I say shadowy because for all the dominance of the reign, and indeed of so much of the historiography, by her image and person, at times it is extraordinarily difficult precisely to attribute personal political agency or specific political intervention to the queen herself. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to nail down Elizabeth’s personal political or religious views. Her career seems almost deliberately to refuse most of the conventional labels which historians habitually use to divide up and analyse contemporary opinion, identity, and allegiance. In many areas of policy and patronage her personal role is often occluded or even invisible, and at times that has led historians either (with Collinson) to marginalize or (with Neale) to overestimate her influence, in what are not always entirely helpful ways. These difficulties are a function not only of the calculated absences, the deliberately ambiguous performances and statements, of the queen herself, but also of the sources generated by personal monarchy, with the voluminous papers of her servants and agents overwhelming the comparatively exiguous archival deposits created by the queen herself. Monarchs, of course, do not, on the whole, need to write memos either to themselves or to their counsellors, and court, and even conciliar, politics was almost by definition a face-to-face affair, conducted through word of mouth, and even gesture, far more than through script.
It is this state of affairs that has prompted certain scholars to elevate the notion of the monarchical republic from the level of ideology or aspiration to that of political and/or institutional fact; if not always overtly to argue that, then certainly sometimes to write as though, Elizabethan England actually was a monarchical republic.16 This is remarkable, since the documents that prompted Collinson to come up with that formulation in the first place were records of failure—failure not merely to make the initial proposals for an interregnum, put together by Digges and Burghley, legislative facts, that is, to convert bills into acts, but even to persuade the queen to allow them to bring these proposals before parliament in the first place. There followed, as we shall see later, in Chapter 7, a series of attempts to achieve, by other means, some of the same ends that Burghley and Digges’s proposals had been designed to realize, most of which, in their turn, failed.
Amongst those ‘failures’ are two replies to John Leslie’s defence of Mary Stuart’s claim to the English throne, neither of which made it into print. These can usefully be compared both with one another and with Thomas Bilson’s True difference
16 For a somewhat triumphalist, even self-congratulatory, account of these trends, see Collinson, This England, pp. 158–61.
between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion of 1585. This was a reply to another of the Catholic tracts published in Rouen over the summer of 1584, Allen’s Defence. In marked contrast to the two replies to Leslie, Bilson’s effort not only got printed but emerged from the press complete with a dedication to the queen herself. The differences between the suppressed and censured manuscript drafts and Bilson’s printed tract may well amount to the difference between an account of the English monarchical polity that the queen would swallow and one that she would not. All of which may allow us to catch at least a glimpse of certain disagreements, discussions, and debates taking place within the regime between the queen herself (and some of her clerical conformist advisors) and the more enthusiastically monarchically republican of her lay councillors and their largely Puritan agents and men of business. Similarly, the, in many ways, parallel, and, within the structure of this book, twinned, cases of Drs Parry and Lopez reveal the queen once more at odds with the basic political instincts and purposes of many of her councillors. Even when, in the instance of Lopez, we start with Essex and the Cecils at cross purposes, or worse, we find the underlying dynamics of the situation creating yet another occasion in which the core of the council came together to get the queen to act, or rather in, this instance, to desist, and let Lopez go to his fate and the war with Spain continue.
Given my earlier strictures on the dangers of getting stuck inside the world view and self-presentation of Lord Burghley and his circle, it is ironic, even chastening, that none other than Burghley, and various of his associates, helpers, clients, and hangers-on turn out to have such a consistently central presence in what follows. But the aim remains not to write their story, or even a story viewed largely or solely from their point of view, but rather to produce a dialogic account of a struggle, some thirty years long, between these people and their Catholic enemies; a struggle to control events by explaining them to a series of wider publics, both at home and abroad, through the medium of printed polemic and commentary, and the penumbra of rumour, gossip, and libel out of which much of this material was in fact composed and back into which it was designed to feed. At stake was the conversion of rumour and libel into secret histories, sustained accounts of what was really happening behind the veil of official ideology and royal rhetoric, shocking and often overwrought accounts of who the real villains of the piece were, and of how their dastardly schemes had succeeded in the past and might best be frustrated, if not in the present, then in the very near future.
By the phrase public politics, I mean an ideological politics of pitch-making, whereby various bodies of opinion, various publics, were to be called into being, appealed to, and mobilized.17 Sometimes, those publics were highly specific and precisely targeted, but rather more often they were promiscuously general, limited only by the reach of the texts themselves—printed but also sometimes disseminated in manuscript—and of the gossip and news networks of their readers. The
17 See P. Lake and S. Pincus, eds., The politics of the public sphere in early modern England (Manchester, 2007), esp. chapters 1 and 3. For a later period, see Jason Peacey, Print and public politics in the English revolution (Cambridge, 2013).
Bad Queen Bess?
struggle between these various rival secret or libellous histories was constitutive of the politics of the post-Reformation public sphere, as a variety of publics were asked to choose between these rival versions of what had just happened, was happening, or might be about to happen next.
Central here were issues of decorum, or, if you prefer, of plausible deniability; questions of how to get down and dirty in the libellous politics stakes whilst still preserving at least the appearance, on the Catholic side of the question, of disinterested virtue and loyalty to the queen and ‘England’, and, on the official side of the argument, of a suitably monarchical and conciliar gravitas and control. Often the same or similar text in different versions of itself—epitomized and redacted, edited, and translated into another language—could be made to do double or even triple duty, appealing to multiple audiences or publics, both at home and abroad.18
Here, on the Catholic side, the best example is perhaps the relations in and between the various English and Latin tracts of 1592/3, and in particular between the abbreviated and redacted English versions of Parsons’ longer Latin original, discussed in Part V of this book. On the Protestant, official, side, the relation between the libellous secret histories of recent events in France produced—with official connivance, if not blessing—in London, throughout the 1580s and 1590s, and the official endorsement given to what was essentially the same view of the current conjuncture—first, rather haltingly in January 1590, in Lyly’s play Midas and then with considerable polemical aggression in the proclamation of 1591—makes the same point. As, of course, does the furious response to that proclamation produced, at the behest of Phillip II, by Parsons, Verstegan, Stapleton, and Creswell, but with no outward sign of such official initiative, still less endorsement.
While I will be dealing with the analysis of mostly printed, but sometimes also manuscript tracts, this is not intended to be simply a study of printed propaganda. The pitches being made here were not only, or perhaps even primarily, being made through print. To take the government side of the equation, the spread of rumour and the uses of various sorts of more or less choreographed performance, ranging from the pulpit to the stage, from the parliamentary speech to the show trial and the public execution, were all central to the ways in which they sought to get their message across.
One of the central features of what follows is an analysis of parliament as a sort of sounding board or echo chamber in and through which certain opinions could be expressed and validated. Parliament sucked in both opinion and persons from the provinces and wider political nation and then dispatched them back out again, having, in the interim, been exposed to and infused by not only the opinions expressed in both Houses of Parliament, but also those circulating in the gossipand rumour-drenched space of the capital. The claim is that central elements in the regime became increasingly sophisticated in their use of parliament for this purpose, using ‘men of business’, clients, agents, and allies, like Thomas Norton, to
18 Freddy Cristobal Dominguez, ‘ “We must fight with paper and pens”: Spanish Elizabethan politics, 1585–1598’, (PhD thesis, University of Princeton, 2011).
form opinion in ways that turned out not always to be exactly congruent with their own immediate interests or purposes, but which were consistently shaped by a coherent set of overarching purposes and values that united the likes of Norton with his employers and patrons. A central feature of the analysis here will be the almost systematic way in which the open expression in the Commons of what we might term legitimist and loyalist, crypto-Catholic, pro-Marian, and/or stridently anti-Puritan sentiments was rendered, if not impossible, then extremely hazardous and constrained, as the various fates visited upon Francis Alford, Arthur Hall, and William Parry all attest.
None of this involved print. And yet the government and its Catholic critics did become increasingly skilled in the use of print and both made increasingly frequent recourse to it in order to get their side of the story across. Thus, while this book attempts to trace a series of printed exchanges, stretching from the late 1560s to the early 1590s, between central elements in the Elizabethan state and that state’s Catholic critics, it also insists that these printed exchanges be set within a wider network of circulating manuscript and orally transmitted news and rumour, which is by definition, particularly in this period, much harder to reconstruct.
One of the defining features of the libellous secret history was the way in which it embodied this relationship between print, manuscript, and rumour in its own forms. Not only were the great examples of the genre, Buchanan’s An detection, The treatise of treasons, and Leicester’s commonwealth, not to mention the bunch of tracts known collectively as Cecil’s commonwealth, actually composed of rumours, but they derived much of their credibility from the way in which they organized a variety of things that people already knew, thought they knew, or at least had heard, into coherent, self-confirming, and therefore convincing narratives. Moreover, they often actively adverted to that very process in and through their own structures. Thus Leicester’s commonwealth presented itself as a manuscript account of a debate or conversation between three interlocutors, only one of whom—the most politically naïve and least well-informed of the three—was a Catholic. The ‘conversation’ was made up in part of pre-existing rumours about the earl of Leicester, rumours and tall tales upon which the tract proceeded vastly to improve. The tract organized these diverse elements into a coherently sinister account, not only of the politics of the reign to date, but also of the future—if, that is, Leicester were allowed to continue to have his evil way with the queen. Again, various of the tracts of the early 1590s presented themselves as newsletters, manuscript accounts of similar debates, or even as well-intentioned warnings sent, more in sorrow than in anger, to Lord Burghley himself to inform him about the dreadful things that were being said about him abroad and in print, all of which had only accidentally found their way into print. This was to give generic and material printed form to what I want to argue was the real interrelationship operating between rumour, manuscript, and print. That point is, of course, driven home by the fact that Leicester’s commonwealth owed a great deal of its very considerable afterlife to the circulation of large numbers of manuscript copies of the original printed text. While the focus will remain on the creation of, and appeal to, English publics, I shall also be paying considerable, albeit passing, attention to the ways in which
these dialogues between the Elizabethan state and its Catholic critics took place before, and were addressed to, a number of overlapping international audiences or publics; to how, say, a message addressed to a largely continental audience in Latin might be modified, when pitched in English to a domestic one, or how a text, originally written in English, for a cross-confessional domestic audience, could be made in translation to bear rather different meanings before different foreign (often Catholic) audiences. While attention will be focused on the public nature of the resulting exchanges, on the address of the various printed pitches to promiscuously popular audiences, limited only by the reach of the text and of the news and gossip networks of its readers, it also needs to be remembered that at times the intended audience was primarily courtly, indeed royal; that we are dealing here with texts that, in addition to being appeals to the ‘people’, were also lobbying documents, intended to be read and to resonate at the highest levels of political power.19
Central to the account is the effect of confessional division and religious conflict on the conduct of politics, but, in these texts at least, the result was not a vision of politics dominated by religious conviction and confessional identity, but rather, as often as not, an account of politics as a process of calculating the odds in a struggle for power and advantage, an account almost entirely secular in its interpretative commitments and ends. While these texts project a view of the political process in many ways centred on the fact of religious division and confessional conflict, many, indeed most, of them at least affected to take a distanced, a-confessional, view of the resulting conflicts, proffering, instead of inflamed religious tirades about the nature of true religion and the enormities of heretical error, largely politique accounts of the political realm. The result was a series of texts that, while they were designed to further the interests of variously religiously defined groups, were by no means simply works of religious polemic, but rather political commentaries, designed not merely to preach to the choir, but rather to appeal to audiences outside the confessionally committed groups, and often mutually antipathetic factions, of godly professors to be found on either side of the Protestant/Catholic divide. In so doing, these texts were seeking to exploit (largely ‘political’ or ‘secular’) anxieties and resentments that were consequent upon, but by no means simply constituted by, the confessional conflicts of the period.
19 From a slightly later period, Parsons’ Conference about the next succession provided another excellent example of this syndrome. In its English version, the Conference represented a form of black propaganda, designed to destabilize further an already unstable English political scene, while in Latin (and in manuscript) and in Spanish (in manuscript, but perhaps also in print) it represented a lobbying document, intended for altogether more constricted and ‘official’, both royal and papal, audiences; designed, in fact, to persuade the pope and the king of Spain that there was still all to play for in the succession stakes and thus to back courses of action conducive to what Parsons and his mates took to be the English Catholic interest. Not that Parsons’ view on that score commanded the enthusiastic assent of anything like all English Catholics, some of whom, during the Archpriest Controversy— with the active encouragement of the Elizabethan regime—took to the medium of printed polemic to explain to the world just why that was. But that is another story, to which I hope to return in another book altogether. On this Dominguez, ‘ “We must fight with paper and pens” ’ is by far the best guide. See also the groundbreaking monograph by Katy Gibbons, English Catholic exiles in late sixteenthcentury Paris (Woodbridge, 2011), esp. chapter 3.
The texts under discussion here were thus consistently concerned not only to define and distinguish between, but also to recombine and manipulate, to mix and miscegenate, the categories of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’. It is, of course, a commonplace that the post-Reformation was a period in which ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ were integrally, indeed inextricably, linked, and much modern scholarship has been in consequence dogged by debates between historians who either want to argue that consequently there really is no point in trying to distinguish finally between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and others who persist in the claim that we can and must make such distinctions and that one of the crucial tasks of the early modern historian is to decide which events were really religious in their motivation or causes and which were not. Perforce, such historians habitually write as though they can decide, with relative ease, which factors, beliefs, or practices were ‘religious’ and which ‘secular’ or ‘political’. Perhaps worse still, others have been determined to distinguish hard between the ‘religious’ and the ‘political’, because they are convinced that only secular factors and ideas really mattered then, or indeed matter now. The latter sort of historians have tended to be those self-consciously concerned with the really ‘Big Questions’ about the origins of ‘modernity’, while the former have tended to be ‘revisionists’, anxious to expel all traces of such a problematic from the study of the post-Reformation. The results have not, on the whole, been entirely happy ones for the configuration of the field, which has tended to resemble a looped tape, forever turning back on itself in interminable debate about a series of either/or propositions that do not easily offer themselves to resolution.20
What has been less frequently tried, and what appears to me to be crucial to any attempt even to start usefully addressing such questions, is to pay rather more attention to the ways in which contemporaries sought to make such distinctions themselves, and then to apply them to, or indeed, embody them in, their own actions and experience, often deploying the resulting normative claims polemically in order to justify their own policies and positions, while excoriating those of their opponents.
Luckily, many of the texts under discussion in this book were designed to do precisely that, and in so doing were forced into self-conscious reflection about what we might call (perhaps somewhat anachronistically) the relation between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, or the ‘church’ and the ‘state’, or what contemporaries conceived as the temporal and the spiritual, the secular and the eternal, the right relation between the rights and powers of the clergy and those of the prince or secular magistrate. And so, in what follows, a good deal of attention will be paid to the ways in which contemporaries, on both sides of the confessional divide, struggled to distinguish, clearly and finally, between those different domains, before employing their particular take on that issue to justify their own position, and condemn that of their opponents.
20 For a commentary on the cyclical, indeed circular, tendencies within the resultant historiography, see my article ‘From revisionist to royalist history, or was Charles I the first Whig historian’, forthcoming in the Huntington Library Quarterly.
Again, the emphasis will not be placed on the search for conceptually significant new thoughts so much as on the dynamics of the resulting dialogue, as each side struggled to worst the other. At each turn of the argument, both sides gave hostages to fortune and were thus often forced to confront (again and then again) the actual or potential, the real or alleged, contradictions in their own position, even as they sought to excoriate their opponents for what was portrayed as the gaping holes and glaring contradictions in theirs.
It is, after all, one of the abiding fascinations of the debates between the Elizabethan state and its Catholic critics and victims that much of the ensuing discussion did indeed turn on different versions of what was ‘religious’ and what ‘political’ and that the ways in which the various theoretical positions adduced and occupied by both sides became embedded in particular institutional, political, and indeed geopolitical situations and structures rendered, and indeed still renders, it all but impossible to arbitrate the resulting disputes in favour of one side or the other. All of which, now that ‘modernity’ turns out not to be so determinedly ‘secular’ after all, lends these disputes of the post-Reformation a certain contemporary resonance, and even perhaps relevance, but being, in intention at least, a work of history, those are topics with which this book will not be concerning itself.
One might think that the adoption of such a distanced, sceptical tone, and such an intermittent but persistent recourse to the politics of public pitch-making, was undertaken by the Catholics precisely because, isolated, out of power, increasingly under the cosh of official repression and Protestant opprobrium, they lacked other, more direct, means to effect their ends. On such a view, we would be dealing here with the ‘weapons of the weak’, even with inherently oppositional modes of political manoeuvre and discourse.
There would, of course, be more than a little truth in such a view. After all the two tracts—The treatise of treasons and Leicester’s commonwealth—in which many of the central characteristics of the mode of discourse that I will be discussing originated, were both responses to turning points that did not turn; political moments structured by the prospect of royal marriages—the first between the duke of Norfolk and Mary Stuart, and the second between queen Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou—that never happened.
The tracts sometimes clumped together under the catch-all title of ‘Cecil’s commonwealth’, were also reactions to failure; not only to the very spectacular failure of the Spanish Armada, but also to the very considerable damage done to the Catholic cause by the ideological risks taken by the likes of Allen and Parsons, as they anticipated the success of Spanish arms and sought to legitimate the return of true religion to England in the baggage train of a conquering Spanish host. The strains involved in returning from the overtly papalist resistance- and tyranny-talk of the De origine and Allen’s Admonition to the loyalism of evil counsellor-speak arguably shook the mode of political discourse at the heart of this study to pieces, and it is to a close examination of that process that the penultimate section of the book is dedicated.
Both of the marriage proposals that frame the first two parts of this book, those between Norfolk and Mary and Elizabeth and Anjou, originated within the
Elizabethan establishment, and both seemed to offer Catholics, if not a formal toleration, then certainly a considerable redistribution of political influence and greatly improved (spiritual or religious) terms of (political) allegiance. In both cases, not only were the matches in question never made, but the outcome left the Catholic cause in a far worse state than it had been before. Similarly many of those who had hoped to gain most from the marriages—most of them Catholics or crypto-Catholics—were variously left disgraced, discourted, exiled, or even (in the cases of the duke of Norfolk or Edmund Campion) dead. Both The treatise and Leicester’s commonwealth represented attempts to come to terms with those failures, to explain what had happened, why it had happened, and to frame a response to the newly darkened prospect before them.
In the case of that second conjuncture, the one if not centred on, then certainly opened up by, the Anjou match, Catholic hopes for some sort of renegotiated settlement with the regime were sustained, perhaps even heightened, throughout 1583/4 by the scheme to associate Mary with James in the government of Scotland. The pursuit of such a rapprochement between the two queens was driven by English loss of control over James VI and the threat that, as he turned towards Catholic, crypto-Catholic, and Marian support in Scotland, that country might become a base of operations for various Catholic attempts to destabilize the regime and even to install Mary on the English throne.
The result was what has emerged from the work of John Bossy as a sort of ‘Catholic loyalist moment’; a period in which a vision of an alternative future for the Elizabethan state opened up; one based on an (either explicit or implicit) embrace of Mary and the Stuart claim; on the opening up of the inner circle of influence and power under the crown to crypto-Catholics, church papists, Catholic loyalists, and scions of the ancient nobility like Henry Howard or the earl of Northumberland; on greatly improved terms and conditions of allegiance, at least for a certain sort of English Catholic; and, one would imagine, on a decisively antiPuritan turn in both ecclesiastical and foreign policy. In many ways, such an outcome would have represented the triumph of the view of the regime and its best interests adumbrated in such texts as The treatise and Leicester’s commonwealth. And, while it was based on certain central or emergent aspects of royal policy, and sought to echo many of the queen’s widely acknowledged proclivities, prejudices, and preferences, this vision of the future of the Elizabethan state was the very antithesis of how the likes of Leicester, Walsingham, and Burghley and their circles envisaged the same.21
However, such a negotiated settlement was only one half of the bipolar strategy being pursued by Mary Stuart and, as we might imagine, by William Allen and Robert Parsons, whose preferred outcome remained total victory, that is to say, a seizure of power by a Counter-Reformation Catholicism red in tooth and claw, to
21 For that, I take it, is the strong implication both of Bossy’s early and late phases; that is to say both of his article on ‘English Catholics and the French marriage, 1577–81’, Recusant History, 5, (1959), pp. 2–16, and of his Under the molehill (London and New Haven) of 2001. In that part of my argument I take myself to be in some way channelling, I hope accurately, the only partially stated purport of Bossy’s work. Either way, my discussion of these topics is deeply indebted to Bossy’s work.
be achieved (if necessary) by violent means, that is, by some combination of conspiracy, assassination, insurrection, and invasion; the threat of which also doubled as perhaps the crucial inducement to the regime to negotiate with Mary in the first place.
This, of course, was to play a desperately dangerous double game and, as we shall see later in the text, the set of expedients that pass under the name of ‘the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I’ was in fact designed to use this Marian and Parsonsian propensity to conspire, even as they offered to negotiate, in order definitively to close down the Catholic loyalist moment. And, from the marketing of the Throckmorton conspiracy, through the bond of association and into the 1584/5 parliament, that involved a series of public pitches made to variously construed and constructed, godly but not only godly, publics to induce the queen to turn her face definitively against the alternative future for her regime that the Catholic loyalist moment seemed to offer. As we shall see, that was one reason why William Parry had to die. A similar moment of political tension and choice was to claim the life of Dr Lopez, for precisely parallel reasons.
It would, therefore, be a mistake to regard the modes of public politicking under discussion here as either inherently oppositional or distinctively Catholic. On the contrary, the regime and its allies and hangers-on could themselves resort with considerable enthusiasm and ruthlessness to precisely such methods of political manoeuvre, public case-making, and modes of political analysis. The result was a series of dialogic exchanges between the regime and its enemies and erstwhile victims, an ideological struggle which it is the purpose of this book to chart.
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could not explain how the ranks of the regular army were to be filled, and his objections took no practical form. The bill passed without a division, and February 6 was approved by the President.
In this matter Congress, without absolutely rejecting Cheves’s doctrine, evaded a decision; but another subject remained which was not so gently treated. From the first, the Republican party had opposed a navy. The United States owned five or six frigates, but not one ship-of-the-line; New York or Philadelphia might be blockaded, perhaps ransomed, at any time by a single seventy-four with a frigate or two in company. To seafaring men, the idea of fighting England without ships seemed absurd, but the Republican party was pledged by every line of its history not to create a navy. The dilemma was singular. Either the Republican party must recant its deepest convictions, or the war must be fought without ships except privateers, and England must be left with no anxiety but the defence of Canada.
Once more Langdon Cheves took the lead. January 17, after the House voted on the Volunteer Bill, Cheves as chairman of the Naval Committee asked an appropriation to build twelve seventy-fours and twenty frigates at a cost of seven and a half million dollars.
“I know,” he began, “how many and how strong are the prejudices, how numerous and how deeply laid are the errors which I have to encounter in the discussion of this question, errors and prejudices the more formidable as they come recommended by the virtues and shielded by the estimable motives of those who indulge them I have been told that this subject is unpopular, and it has been not indistinctly hinted that those who become the zealous advocates of the bill will not advance by their exertions the personal estimation in which they may be held by their political associates ”
In few words Cheves avowed that while he preferred to act with the Republican party, he was in truth independent, and he warned his friends that on the subject of a navy they must in the end either conquer their prejudices or quit office.
After this preamble, Cheves struck once more at the foundations of his party. His argument, as a matter of expediency, was convincing; for every American ship-of-war, even when blockaded in
port, would oblige the British to employ three ships of equal or greater size to relieve each other in blockading and watching it. The blockading service of the American station was peculiarly severe. England had no port nearer than Halifax for equipments or repairs; in general all her equipments must be made in Europe, and for only three months’ service; in winter she must for months at a time abandon the blockade, and leave the coast free. No method could be devised by which, with so small risk and so little waste of money and life, the resources of England could be so rapidly drained as by the construction of heavy war-vessels. Once at sea, an American seventy-four had nothing to fear except a squadron; and even when dismantled in port, she required the attention of a hostile fleet.
The House had submitted with slowly rising ill-temper to each successive demand of the war it would have preferred to avoid; but this last requirement threw it into open revolt. Cheves found himself for a time almost alone. Even Richard M. Johnson, always ardent for war, became mournful with prophecies of the evils that Cheves was about to bring upon the country. “I will refer to Tyre and Sidon, Crete and Rhodes, to Athens and to Carthage.” Plunder, piracy, perpetual war, followed the creation of every navy known to history. Armies might be temporary, but navies were permanent, and even more dangerous to freedom. “Navies have been and always will be engines of power, employed in projects of ambition and war.”
These were the old and respected Republican doctrines, still dear to a large majority of the party. William Lowndes came to the support of his colleague, and ridiculed Johnson’s lessons from ancient history; Henry Clay protested against the unreasonable prejudice which refused naval assistance, and which left New York and the commerce of the Mississippi at the mercy of single British ships; but when the committee of the whole House came to a vote, Cheves found a majority opposed to him on every motion for the building additional ships of any sort whatever. The House continued the debate for several days, but ended, January 27, by refusing to build frigates. The division was close. Fifty-nine members voted for the frigates; sixty-two voted against them. While Cheves, Lowndes, Calhoun, Troup, Porter, and the Federalists voted for the ships,
Ezekiel Bacon, Grundy, R. M. Johnson, D. R. Williams, and the friends of the Administration in general voted against them.
By the middle of February, Congress reached a point of disorganization that threatened disaster. The most ardent urged immediate war, while not a practical step had yet been taken toward fighting. Such was the chaos that Peter B. Porter, who had himself reported the Army and Volunteer bills, asked for a committee to raise another provisional army of twenty thousand men, for the reason that the two armies already provided were useless,—the regular force, because it could not be put into the field within the year; the volunteers, because they could not lawfully be used for offensive war. “What force have we given the President?” asked Porter. “We have made a parade in passing laws to raise twenty-five thousand regular troops, and fifty thousand volunteers; but in truth and in fact we have not given him a single man.” The House refused to follow Porter’s advice; but as usual the war Republicans were obliged to coalesce with the Federalists in order to maintain themselves against these Executive reproaches. What Porter said was mainly true. With the exception of the peace establishment consisting of nominally ten thousand men, and the vessels of war actually afloat, the President had not yet been given means of defending the coasts and frontiers from hostile forces which, in the case of the northwestern Indians, were already actually attacking them.
In the midst of this general discouragement, February 17, Ezekiel Bacon brought in fourteen Resolutions embodying a scheme for raising money. Gallatin’s measures were expected to be harsh, but those proposed by Bacon seemed more severe than had been expected. The customs duties were to be doubled; twenty cents a bushel were laid on salt, fifty cents a gallon on the capacity of stills; licenses and stamps in proportion; and a direct tax of three million dollars was to be apportioned among the States. A loan bill for eleven millions at six per cent was easily passed, but all the force of the war feeling could not overcome the antipathy to taxation. The Resolution for doubling the customs duties met little resistance; but February 28 the House refused, by sixty to fifty-seven, to impose a duty on imported salt, and for the moment this vote threatened to
ruin the whole scheme. The House adjourned for reflection; and on the following Monday a member from Virginia moved to reconsider the vote. “It now seems,” he said, “that if the article of salt is excluded, the whole system of taxation will be endangered. We are told in conversation, since the vote on the salt tax, that the system which has been presented by the Committee of Ways and Means is a system of compromise and concession, and that it must be taken altogether, the bad with the good; that if we pay the salt tax, the eastern and the western country will suffer peculiarly by an increase of the impost, and by the land tax.” In short, he thought it better to take the whole draught even if it were hemlock.
This view of the case did not find easy acceptance. Nelson of Virginia exhorted the majority not under any circumstances to accept the impost on salt; and Wright of Maryland, a man best known for his extravagances, took the occasion to express against Gallatin the anger which the friends of the Smiths, Giles, and Duane had stored. Gallatin, he said, was trying to fix the odium of these taxes on Congress in order to disgust the people and chill the war spirit; he was treading in the muddy footsteps of his official predecessors, in attempting to strap around the necks of the people this odious system of taxation, for which the Federalists had been condemned and dismissed from power. The salt tax would destroy the present as it had destroyed the old Administration; the true course was to lay taxes directly on property. Probably most of the Republican members sympathized in private with the feelings of Wright, but Gallatin had at last gained the advantage of position; the House voted to reconsider, and by a majority of sixty-six to fifty-four accepted the duty of twenty cents on imported salt.
The salt duty distressed the South, and in revenge many Southerners wished to impose a tax of twenty-five cents a gallon on whiskey, which would be felt chiefly in the West; but this was no part of the Treasury scheme. Grundy and R. M. Johnson succeeded in defeating the motion; and after deciding this contest, the House found no difficulty in adopting all the other Resolutions. March 4 the committee was instructed to report by bill; Bacon sent the Resolutions to the Treasury, and the secretary waited for events.
Every one admitted that while war was still uncertain, the financial policy undecided, and a Presidential election approaching, only the prospect of immediate bankruptcy would outweigh the dangers of oppressive taxation.
Four months of continuous session had passed, and spring was opening, when the Legislature reached this point. The result of the winter’s labor showed that the young vigor of this remarkable Congress had succeeded only in a small part of the work required to give Jefferson’s peaceful system a military shape. Although the nominal regular army had been raised from ten thousand to thirtyfive thousand men, the Act of Congress which ordered these men to be enlisted could not show where they were to be found; and meanwhile the sudden strain broke down the War Department. Rumor pointed at Secretary Eustis as incompetent, and the chances were great that any secretary, though sufficiently good for peace, would prove unequal to the task of creating an army without men or material to draw from. Whether the secretary was competent or not, his situation exposed him to ridicule. He had hitherto discharged the duties of Secretary of War, of Quartermaster-General, CommissaryGeneral, Indian Commissioner, Commissioner of Pensions, and Commissioner of Public Lands; and although Congress promised to create a quartermaster’s department, and had the bill already in hand, the task of organizing this department, as well as all the other new machinery of war, fell on the secretary and eight clerks, not one of whom had been twelve months in office. Any respectable counting-house would have allowed some distribution of authority and power of expansion; but the secretary could neither admit a partner nor had he the right to employ assistance. Adapted by Jefferson, in 1801, to a peace establishment of three or four regiments, the Department required reorganization throughout, or Congress would be likely to find the operations of war brought to a quick end.
Had Congress undertaken to wage war on the ocean, the same difficulty would have been felt in the navy; but this danger was evaded by the refusal to attempt naval operations. At all times the Republicans had avowed their willingness to part with the five
frigates, and these were perhaps to be sent to sea with no great hope in the majority for their success; but the Navy Department was required to make no other exertion. Secretary Hamilton, like Secretary Eustis, was supposed to be unequal to his post; but his immediate burden amounted only to fitting out three frigates in addition to those in actual service, and the expenditure of two hundred thousand dollars annually for three years toward the purchase of ship-timber.
To meet the expenses thus incurred for military purposes, in the absence of taxes which, if imposed, could not be made immediately productive, Congress authorized a loan of eleven million dollars at six per cent, redeemable in twelve years.
An army of thirty-five thousand regulars which could not be raised within a year, if at all, and of fifty thousand volunteers who were at liberty to refuse service beyond the frontier, promised no rapid or extensive conquests. A navy of half-a-dozen frigates and a few smaller craft could not be expected to keep the ports open, much less to carry the war across the ocean. Privateers must be the chief means of annoyance, not so much to British pride or power as to British commerce, and this kind of warfare was popular because it cost the government nothing; but even the privateers were at a great disadvantage if the ports were to be closed to their prizes by hostile squadrons. Such means of offence were so evidently insufficient that many sensible persons could not believe in the threatened war; but these were only the most conspicuous weaknesses. Armies required equipment, and the United States depended on Europe, chiefly on England, for their most necessary supplies. The soldier in Canada was likely to need blankets; but no blankets were to be had, and the Non-importation Act prevented them from coming into the market, whatever price might be offered.
Not only was the machinery of government unsuited to energetic use, but the Government itself was not in earnest. Hardly one third of the members of Congress believed war to be their best policy. Almost another third were Federalists, who wished to overthrow the Administration; the rest were honest and perhaps shrewd men, brought up in the school of Virginia and Pennsylvania politics, who
saw more clearly the evils that war must bring than the good it might cause, and who dreaded the reaction upon their constituents. They could not understand the need of carrying into every detail a revolution in their favorite system of government. Clay and Calhoun, Cheves and Lowndes asked them to do in a single session what required half a century or more of time and experience,—to create a new government, and invest it with the attributes of old-world sovereignty under pretext of the war power. The older Republicans had no liking for such statesmanship, and would gladly have set the young Southerners in their right place.
By force of will and intellect the group of war members held their own, and dragged Congress forward in spite of itself; but the movement was slow and the waste of energy exhausting. Perhaps they failed to carry their points more often than they succeeded. Energetic as their efforts were, after four months of struggle they had settled nothing, and found themselves in March no further advanced than in November. War should already have been declared; but Congress was still trying to avoid it.
Federalists had much to do with causing the confusion of Republicans. Their conduct could seldom be explained on rational grounds, but in January, 1812, they seemed to lose reason. Their behavior, contradicting their own principles, embarrassed their friends still more than it confused their enemies. The British minister wrote to his Government constant complaints of the dangerous course his Federalist allies were pursuing.
“The Federal leaders,” Foster wrote Dec 11, 1811,[130] “make no scruple of telling me that they mean to give their votes for war, although they will remain silent in the debates; they add that it will be a short war of six or nine months. To my observations on the strange and dangerous nature of such a policy, they shrug their shoulders, telling me that they see no end to restrictions and non-importation laws but in war; that war will turn out the Administration, and then they will have their own way, and make a solid peace with Great Britain.”
To this policy Federalist leaders adhered. As the weeks passed, Foster’s situation grew more difficult. Disgusted equally by the obstinacy of his Government and by the vacillations of Congress, he
found his worst annoyances in the intrigues of his friends. Toward the close of the year he wrote:[131]—
“The situation that I find myself thus unexpectedly placed in is, I must confess, exceedingly embarrassing I am aware that H R H the Prince Regent wishes to avoid a rupture with this country, and yet I see that the efforts of a party, hitherto the most adverse to a war with Great Britain, are united with those of another, which till now has been supposed the most considerable in point of numbers, for the purpose of bringing it on; while Government, although wishing for delay, are yet so weak and little to be depended on that it is to be feared if the two Houses were to decide on hostilities, they would not have resolution enough to oppose the measure.”
January 16, 1812, he wrote again.[132] Somewhat encouraged by the evident difficulties of the war party in Congress, he was then disposed to look less severely at Federalist tactics:—
“The opposition know the embarrassment of the President, and endeavor to take advantage of it by pushing for measures so decisive as to leave him no retreat. It has been told me in confidence more than once by different leaders, that if the Orders in Council are not revoked he must eventually be ruined in the opinion of the nation. Some individuals have even gone so far as to reproach us for not concerting measures with them for that purpose, observing that the French have managed this country by concert with a party; and that unless Great Britain do the same, the French party will always be predominant I should mention to your Lordship that the Federalists are by no means united From twelve to sixteen vote for peace measures, while eight only, though of the leaders, vote the contrary way ”
February 1, a fortnight after this letter was written, two Federalist leaders, whose names Foster wisely suppressed, called on the British minister to give him their advice as to the best course his Government could take “in order to produce a thorough amalgamation of interests between America and Great Britain.” Their conversation, which seems to have been in no way invited by Foster, was reported by him to Lord Wellesley without comment of any kind. [133] Had the two Federalists foreseen the scandal to be caused, six weeks later, by the publication of John Henry’s papers, they would hardly have dared approach the British minister at all; and they
would at least have been reminded that such advice as they gave him was not only forbidden by law, but bordered closely upon treason.
“The sum of these suggestions was that we should neither revoke our Orders in Council nor modify them in any manner They said this Government would, if we conceded, look upon our concessions as being the effect of their own measures, and plume themselves thereon; that they only wanted to get out of their present difficulties, and if we made a partial concession they would make use of it to escape fulfilling their pledge to go to war, still however continuing the restrictory system; whereas if we pushed them to the edge of the precipice by an unbending attitude, that then they must be lost, either by the disgrace of having nearly ruined the trade of the United States and yet failed to reduce Great Britain by their system of commercial restrictions, or else by their incapacity to conduct the government during war. These gentlemen declared they were for war rather than for the continuance of the restrictory system, even if the war should last four years. They thought no expense too great which would lead to the termination of the irritating, fretful feelings which had so long existed between the two countries They animadverted on the peevish nature of the answers given in the affairs of the ‘Chesapeake’ and to my note on the Indians, and whenever any spirit of conciliation was shown by Great Britain, and told me it would ever be so until the people felt the weight of taxes; that nothing would bring them to a right sense of their interests but touching their purses; and that if we did go to war for a time, we should be better friends afterward. In short, they seemed to think that Great Britain could by management bring the United States into any connection with her that she pleased.”
The President, as his office required, stood midway between the masses of his followers, but never failed to approve the acts and meet the wishes of the war members. Early in March, at a moment when they were greatly embarrassed, he came to their aid by a manœuvre which excited much feeling on all sides, but especially among the Federalists engaged in abetting the war policy. He seemed to have fallen on the track of a conspiracy such as had overthrown the liberties and independence of classic republics, and which left no alternative but war or self-destruction; but the true story proved more modern, if not less amusing, than the conspiracies of Greece and Rome.
CHAPTER IX.
J H , whose reports from Boston to Sir James Craig at Quebec had been received with favor in 1808 and 1809 both in Canada and in London, not satisfied with such reward as he received from the governor-general, went to England and applied, as was said, for not less than thirty-two thousand pounds, or one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, as the price he thought suitable for his services and his silence.[134] Whatever was the sum he demanded, he failed to obtain it, and left England in ill humor on his return to Canada, carrying his papers with him and an official recommendation to the governor-general.
On the same ship was a Frenchman who bore the title of Count Edward de Crillon. His connections, he said, embraced the noblest and highest families of France; among his ancestors was the “brave Crillon,” who for centuries had been known to every French child as the Bayard of his time. The Count Edward’s father was the Duc de Crillon; by marriage he was closely connected with Bessières, the Maréchal Duc d’Istrie, Napoleon’s favorite. Count Edward de Crillon had fallen into disfavor with the Emperor, and for that reason had for a time quitted France, while waiting a restoration to the army. His manners were easy and noble; he wore the decoration of the Legion of Honor, received and showed letters from his family and from the Duc d’Istrie, and talked much of his personal affairs, especially of his estate called St. Martial, “in Lebeur near the Spanish border,” and, he took pride in saying, near also to the Château de Crillon, the home of his ancestors. He had met John Henry in London society. When he appeared on the Boston packet, a friendship arose between these two men so hardly treated by fortune. Henry confided his troubles to the count, and Crillon gave himself much concern in the affair, urging Henry to have no more to do with an ungrateful government, but to obtain from the United States the money that England refused. The count offered to act as negotiator, and use his influence with Serurier, his minister, to approach the Secretary of State. The count even offered to provide for Henry’s subsequent
welfare by conveying to him the valuable estate at St. Martial in consideration of the money to be obtained for Henry’s documents. At St. Martial, under the protection of the Crillons, John Henry would at last find, together with every charm of climate and scenery, the case of life and the social refinement so dear to him.
Henry entered into a partnership with the Frenchman, and on their arrival at Boston Crillon wrote to Serurier, introducing himself, and narrating the situation of Henry, whose papers, he said, were in his own control.[135] Serurier made no reply; but Crillon came alone to Washington, where he called on the minister, who after hearing his story sent him to Monroe, to whom he offered Henry’s papers for a consideration of $125,000. Serurier liked Crillon, and after some months of acquaintance liked him still more:—
“His conduct and language during six weeks’ residence here have been constantly sustained; the attention shown him by this Government, the repentance he displayed for having incurred the displeasure of his sovereign, the constant enthusiasm with which he spoke of the Emperor, the name he bore, the letters he showed from his sister and from the Maréchal Duc d’Istrie, the decoration of the Legion he carried, and finally the persecution he suffered from the British minister and the party hostile to France,—all this could not but win my regard for him.”[136]
Yet Crillon did not owe to Serurier his introduction into society, or his success in winning the confidence of Madison and Monroe. Indeed, the French minister could not openly recommend a man who admitted himself to be banished from France by the Emperor’s displeasure. On the contrary, the favor that Crillon rapidly won at the White House served rather to establish his credit with his legation. The President and Cabinet ministers were civil to the count, who became a frequent guest at the President’s table; and the services he promised to Serurier’s great object were so considerable as to make the French minister glad to assist him. No French comedy was suited with a happier situation or with more skilful actors. During several weeks in January and February, 1812, Count Edward de Crillon was the centre of social interest or hostility at the White House, the State Department, and the French and the British Legations.
The negotiation through Serurier was successful. Henry was secretly summoned to Washington, and consented to desist from his demand for $125,000. Secretary Monroe agreed to give him $50,000, and to promise that the papers should not be made public until Henry himself was actually at sea, while Crillon received the money, delivering to Henry the title-deeds to the estate of St. Martial. The money was paid, February 10, out of the contingent fund for foreign intercourse. Henry left Washington the next day to sail from New York for France in a national ship-of-war, but the Count Edward de Crillon remained. March 2 Serurier reported,[137]
“The Administration has decided to publish Henry’s documents. The order has been sent to New York that in case the ship which was to give him passage has not arrived, he is to be embarked on a merchant-vessel; and then all the papers are to be sent to Congress by special message Much is expected from this exposition The conduct of M Crillon since his arrival here has never ceased to be consistent and thoroughly French It has drawn on him the hatred of the British minister and of all the British party; but he bears up against it with the noblest firmness, and sometimes even with an intrepidity that I am obliged to restrain He keeps me informed of everything that he thinks of service to the Emperor; and his loyalty of conduct attaches the members of the Administration to him. I have personally every motive to be satisfied with him, and I hope that the service he has just rendered, the sentiments he professes on all occasions, his so enthusiastic admiration for the Emperor, his devotion, his love of his country and his family, will create for him a title to the indulgence of his sovereign and the return of his favor. He will wait for them here, and I pray your Excellency to invoke them on my part.”
The President waited only for the news that Henry had sailed, before sending to Congress the evidence of British intrigues and of Federalist treason; but as soon as this news arrived, Saturday, March 7, Monroe sent for Serurier:[138]—
“The Secretary of State asked me to come to his office to inform me of the determination He asked me if I did not agree with him that it was better not to mention me in the Message, as such mention might injure its effect by giving it a French color I told Mr Monroe that I should leave the President entirely free to follow the course he thought best in the matter He might say that the documents had come into my possession, and that I had at once sent them to him as
interesting the Republic exclusively; or he might restrict himself to the communication of the papers without detail as to the route they had followed That I had taken no credit, as he could remember, in regard to the service I had been so fortunate as to render the Administration; and that I had on my own account no need of newspaper notoriety or of public gratitude ”
Monday, March 9, the President sent Henry’s papers to Congress, with a message which said nothing as to the manner of acquiring them, but charged the British government with employing a secret agent “in fomenting disaffection to the constituted authorities of the nation, and in intrigues with the disaffected for the purpose of bringing about resistance to the laws, and eventually, in concert with a British force, of destroying the Union and forming the eastern part thereof into a political connection with Great Britain.” Serurier reported that the Administration had great hopes through this discovery of deciding the result, inflaming the nation, and throwing it enthusiastically into the war:—
“The American people recalls to me the son of Ulysses on the rock of Calypso’s isle; uncertain, irresolute, he knows not to which of his passions to yield, when Minerva, flinging him into the sea, fixes his fate, leaving him no other choice than to overcome by his courage and strength the terrible elements she gives him for an enemy.”
When John Henry’s letters were read in Congress, March 9, 1812, the Federalists for a moment felt real alarm, for they knew not what Henry might have reported; but a few minutes of examination showed them that, as far as they were concerned, Henry had taken care to report nothing of consequence. That he came to Boston as a British agent was hitherto unknown to the Federalists themselves, and the papers showed that he never revealed his secret character to them. His letters were hardly more compromising than letters, essays, and leading articles, sermons, orations, and addresses that had been printed again and again in every Federalist paper in Boston and New York. Here and there they contained rows of mysterious asterisks, but no other sign of acquaintance with facts worth concealing. The Federalists naturally suspected, what is evident on comparison of the papers bought by Madison with the originals in the Record Office at London, that Henry intended to sell
as little as possible at the highest price he could exact. His revelations told nothing of his first visit to Boston in 1808, nor was one of the letters published which had been written in that year, although his documents incidentally alluded to information then sent; but what was more singular and fatal to his credit, the letters which he sold as his own were not copies but paraphrases of the originals; the mysterious asterisks were introduced merely to excite curiosity; and except the original instructions of Sir James Craig and the recent letter from Lord Liverpool’s secretary, showing that in view of an expected war Henry had been employed as a secret agent to obtain political information by the governor-general, and that his reports had been sent to the Colonial Office, nothing in these papers compromised any one except Henry himself. As for the British government, since war was to be waged with it in any case for other reasons, these papers distracted attention from the true issue.
After a night’s reflection the Federalists returned to the Capitol convinced that the President had done a foolish act in throwing away fifty thousand dollars for papers that proved the Federalist party to be ignorant of British intrigues that never existed. Fifty thousand dollars was a large sum; and having been spent without authority from Congress, it seemed to the Federalists chiefly their own money which had been unlawfully used by Madison for the purpose of publishing a spiteful libel on themselves. With every sign of passion they took up the President’s personal challenge. A committee of investigation was ordered by the House, and found that Henry, with the Government’s privity, had already sailed for Europe. Nothing remained but to examine Crillon, who gave evidence tending to prove only such facts as he thought it best that Congress should believe. In the Senate, March 10, Lloyd of Massachusetts moved a Resolution calling on the President for the names of any persons “who have in any way or manner whatever entered into, or most remotely countenanced,” the projects of Sir James Craig. Monroe could only reply that, as John Henry had mentioned no names, the Department was not possessed of the information required. The reply made the Federalists only more angry; they were eager for revenge, and fortune did not wholly refuse it. They never learned that Henry’s disclosure was the result of French intrigue, but they learned
enough to make them suspect and exult over some mortification of the President.
Soon after Count Edward de Crillon gave his evidence to the investigating committee, news arrived that France was about to make war with Russia, and although Crillon had decided to wait in Washington for his recall to the Emperor’s favor, he became suddenly earnest to depart. March 22, Serurier wrote:[139]
“At the news of a possible rupture with Russia, the blood of M. de Crillon, always so boiling, has become hotter than ever, and he has decided to return to France without waiting an answer from your Excellency; he wants to throw himself at the Emperor’s feet, tell him what he has done, invoke pardon for his errors, and go to expiate them in the advance guard of his armies.”
April 1 Crillon left Washington bearing despatches from Monroe to Barlow, and from Serurier to Bassano. Neither he nor John Henry is known to have ever again visited the United States, and their names would have been forgotten had not stories soon arrived that caused the Federalists great amusement, and made President Madison very uncomfortable. Barlow wrote to the President that Count Edward de Crillon was an impostor; that no such person was known to the Crillon family or to the French service. Private letters confirmed the report, and added that the estate of St. Martial had no existence, and that Crillon’s draughts in Henry’s favor were drawn on a person who had been five years dead.
“The President, with whom he has often dined,” continued Serurier, [140] “and all the secretaries, whose reception, joined with the political considerations known to your Excellency, decided his admittance to my house, are a little ashamed of the eagerness (empressement) they showed him, and all the money they gave him For my own part, Monseigneur, I have little to regret I have constantly refused to connect myself with his affairs; I sent him to the Secretary of State for his documents; the papers have been published, and have produced an effect injurious to England without my having bought this good fortune by a single denier from the Imperial treasury; and I have escaped at the cost of some civilities, preceded by those of the President, the motive of which I declared from the first to be the services which the Administration told me had been rendered it by this traveller.”
Serurier continued to declare that he had honestly believed Crillon to be “something like what he represented himself;” but he could not reasonably expect the world to accept these protestations. He had aided this person to obtain fifty thousand dollars from the United States Treasury for papers not his own, and instead of warning the President against an adventurer whose true character he admitted himself to have suspected, the French minister abetted the impostor. Although the truth was revealed only at a much later time that Crillon was an agent of Napoleon’s secret police,[141] no Frenchman, who had enjoyed the advantages of a diplomatic education, could have been wholly deceived in regard to the character of a person so evidently suspicious.
That the President should be mortified was natural, but still more natural that he should be angry. He could not resent the introduction of a foreign impostor to his confidence, since he was himself chiefly responsible for the social success of the Count Edward de Crillon; but deception was a part of the French system, and Madison felt the Crillon affair sink into insignificance beside the other deceptions practised upon him by the government of France. He was as nearly furious as his temperament allowed, at the manner in which the Emperor treated him. Before Crillon appeared on the scene, Madison used language to Serurier that betrayed his extreme dissatisfaction at being paraded before the public as a dupe or tool of France. At Savannah a riot took place between French privateersmen and American or English sailors; several men on both sides were killed; the privateers were burned; and Serurier complained in language such as Napoleon might be supposed to expect from his minister in regard to a violent outrage on the French flag. At the White House on New Year’s day, 1812, the French minister renewed his complaints, and the President lost patience.
“The President,” wrote Serurier,[142] “answered me with vivacity, that doubtless such indignities were subject for much regret; but it was not less distressing to learn what was passing every day in the Baltic and on the routes from America to England, where some American ships were burned, while others were captured and taken into European ports under French influence and condemned; that such proceedings were in his eyes hostilities as pronounced as were those
of England, against whom the Republic was at that moment taking up arms.... Mr. Madison ended by telling me that he wished always to flatter himself that Mr Barlow would send immediate explanation of these strange measures, and notice that they had ceased; but that for the moment, very certainly, matters could not be in a worse situation ”
Disconcerted by this sharp rebuff from the President, Serurier went to Monroe, who was usually good-humored when Madison was irritable, and irritable when Madison became mild. This process of alternate coaxing and scolding seemed to affect Serurier more than it affected his master. Monroe made no reproaches, but defended the President’s position by an argument which the Republican party did not use in public:—
“He urged that the captures of these ships, though perhaps inconsiderable in themselves, had the unfortunate effect of giving arms to the English party, which obstinately maintains that the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees has not taken place; ‘that repeal,’ he added, ‘on which nevertheless the whole actual system of the Administration is founded, and which, if it be not really absolute, would render the war we are undertaking with England very imprudent and without reasonable object ’”
This admission, although made in private, seemed humiliating enough; but as weeks passed, Monroe’s complaints became stronger. March 2 Serurier reported him as avowing that he considered Barlow’s mission fruitless;[143]
“After delays that have lasted three months beyond what we feared, we have as yet received only projects of arrangements, but nothing finished that we can publish.... You are witness to our embarrassment. Our position is painful. We will treat with England on no other ground than that of withdrawing the Orders in Council, and nothing promises this withdrawal. We are then decided for war. You see us every day making our preparations. If these meet with obstacles, if they suffer some delay, if Congress seems to grow weak and to hesitate, this slackening is due to the fact that we come to no conclusion with France.”
Ships were still captured on their way to England. “If your decrees are in fact repealed,” asked Monroe, “why this sequestration?” Serurier strove in vain to satisfy Monroe that the decrees, though repealed in principle, might be still enforced in fact.
He failed to calm the secretary or the President, whose temper became worse as he saw more clearly that he had been overreached by Napoleon, and that his word as President of the United States had been made a means of deceiving Congress and the people.
Had the British government at that moment offered the single concession asked of it, no war could have taken place, unless it were a war with France; but the British government had not yet recovered its reason. Foster came to Washington with instructions to yield nothing, yet to maintain peace; to threaten, but still conciliate. This mixture of policy, half Canning and half Fox, feeble and mischievous as it was, could not be altered by Foster; his instructions were positive. “Nor can we ever deem the repeal of the French hostile decrees to be effectual,” wrote Wellesley in April, 1811, “until neutral commerce shall be restored to the condition in which it stood previously to the commencement of the French system of commercial warfare.” Wellesley hinted that the Decrees of Berlin and Milan were no longer important; they were in effect superseded by Napoleon’s tariff of prohibitions and prohibitive duties; and until this system of war was abandoned, and neutral rights of trade were respected, Great Britain could not withdraw her blockades. In obedience to these instructions, Foster was obliged to tell Monroe in July, and again in October, 1811, that even if the repeal of the decrees were genuine, it would not satisfy the British government. Not the decrees, but their principle, roused British retaliation.
When the President in his Annual Message represented Foster as requiring that the United States should force British produce and manufactures into France, Foster protested, explained, and remonstrated in vain; he found himself reduced to threats of commercial retaliation which no one regarded, and his position became mortifying beyond any in the experience of his unfortunate predecessors. Compelled to witness constant insults to his country, he was still ordered to maintain peace. As early as Dec. 11, 1811, he notified his Government that unless its system were changed, war was likely to follow. The suggestions offered by the Federalist
congressmen, February 1, could hardly fail to show the British government that at last it must choose between war and concession. Feb. 26, 1812, Foster wrote again that war might be declared within a fortnight. March 9 the revelations of John Henry gave the minister another anxiety, and called from him another lame disavowal. Yet throughout these trying months Foster remained on friendly and almost intimate terms with Monroe, whom he described as “a very mild, moderate man.”[144]
Matters stood thus till March 21, 1812, when Washington was excited by news that Foster had received recent instructions from his Government, and the crisis of war and peace was at hand. “The anxiety and curiosity of both Houses of Congress,” reported Foster, April 1,[145] “to know the real nature of the despatches was so great that some of the members on committees told me they could not get the common routine of business at all attended to. The Department of State was crowded with individuals endeavoring to obtain information from Mr. Monroe, while I was questioned by all those with whom I happened to be acquainted.” A report spread through Washington that the Orders in Council were repealed, and that an immediate accommodation of all differences between England and the United States might be expected.
Foster would have been glad to find his new instructions composed in such a sense; but he hardly expected to find them so positive as they were in an opposite spirit. Lord Wellesley’s despatch of Jan. 28, 1812,[146] which may be said to have decided the declaration of war, was afterward published, and need not be quoted in detail. He remonstrated against the arming of merchant vessels, and ordered Foster to speak earnestly on the subject “for the purpose of preventing a state of affairs which might probably lead to acts of force.” The pretended revocation of the French Decrees, said Lord Wellesley, was in fact a fresh enactment of them, while the measures of America tended to occasion such acts of violence as might “produce the calamity of war between the two countries.” This usual formula, by which diplomacy announced an expected rupture, was reinforced by secret instructions warning Foster cautiously to “avoid employing any suggestions of compromise to the American
