Free The Watchers by Stephen Alford

protect England’s vulnerable northern border. It was possible because the Queen of Scots was in France. But the death in 1560 of Mary’s husband, by then Francis II of France, meant that she returned to her homeland in 1561, so causing enormous complications for Elizabeth’s government: the Queen of Scots, a blood kinswoman of Elizabeth, was once again in Scotland, with an eye to the Tudor royal succession. Whether she was an active conspirator herself – and on this point historians have disagreed profoundly over the centuries – Mary Stuart was at the very least a focus of what for Elizabeth was plainly treason against the Tudor crown.
    When the Count of Feria spoke to Elizabeth a few days before her accession as queen, he feared for the future of Catholic England and told King Philip so plainly. With Elizabeth Philip played a careful diplomatic hand. As the most powerful Catholic king in Europe, he found the heresy of Elizabeth and her government deeply offensive. As the ruler of a global power whose resources were stretched to their limits by years of war in western Europe against France and in the eastern Mediterranean against the Ottoman empire he could not, however, afford financially and militarily to fight England. As late as 1568, Philip hoped that Elizabeth might be brought to her senses. It was a hope against experience. Very early on cracks began to show in Anglo-Spanish relations. Elizabeth’s ambassador in Spain was an outspoken Protestant who made offensive remarks about the Catholic faith and called the Pope ‘a canting little monk’; not surprisingly, he found himself expelled from Philip’s court. In 1568 Elizabeth’s government detained Spanish treasure ships that had been forced by pirates into the safety of an English port. The bullion was taken ashore, causing the Spanish ambassador in England to protest that the queen had confiscated it. The treasure ships were helping to fund Philip’s tough military campaign led by the Duke of Alba in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands. This campaign alone, conducted against Dutch Protestants, caused Elizabeth’s government profound disquiet. Quite apart from the persecution of men and women of the same faith, what if Albawere directed to take his troops across the English Channel? Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary, wrote in a policy paper in 1569 that England was ‘most offensive both to the King of Spain and the French King for sundry considerations and specially for succouring of the persecuted’: by this time, many Protestant refugees fleeing from war in France and the Low Countries were settling in towns and cities in southern England. Elizabeth’s kingdoms seemed to stand alone against its enemies. Considering the international politics of the moment, Cecil employed a surgical metaphor: the queen was a patient being operated upon by the King of Spain and the Pope, who used Mary Queen of Scots as their scalpel.
    Over the years of the 1560s Philip of Spain’s patience wore thin. But for all of the problems that existed between England and Spain by 1570 – diplomatic spats, English support for those Spain called rebels and an increasingly frosty trade war between the two kingdoms – Philip held back from isolating Elizabeth completely. Pope Pius V was, however, less forgiving of Elizabeth Tudor’s errors and not as patient as Philip was in playing a long international political game. In February 1570, by publishing a bull called
Regnans in excelsis
(‘He that rules in the heavens above’, the opening words of the bull), Pius excommunicated Elizabeth from the Catholic Church and faith. She was, he said, merely the pretended Queen of England who had usurped ‘monster-like’ the spiritual authority of the Pope. With her kingdom in miserable ruin, Elizabeth was a heretic and a favourer of heretics, now cut off from the unity of the body of Christ. More significantly for