Free Sir Francis Walsingham by Derek Wilson

dangerous to England’s independence as their hostile assaults. 13
    The lesson Elizabeth drew from this was that her best course was splendid isolation. Her inclination was to keep out of continental squabbles, using such diplomatic influence as she had (principally the bait of a marriage treaty) to encourage foreign princes to seek her support. She was a past mistress at prevarication, keeping her brother monarchs and their envoys dangling.
    Unfortunately for such a cost-saving policy, detachment was hard to achieve and would ultimately become impossible. During her first ten years the queen was overtaken by events which progressively restricted her freedom of manoeuvre. We must now survey those years. The narrative may be told as a tale of three cities – Rome, Paris and Edinburgh.
    We begin with Rome because it was the nerve centre from which impulses spread throughout every nation of Europe, producingpolitical results which became more and more extreme. After more than four decades of ineffectual response to the spread of Protestantism the papacy had finally got its act together. Pope Pius IV summoned the Council of Trent to reconvene in 1562. This council had been on and off since 1547, bedevilled by internal disputes and the limited support of the major Catholic powers. Europe’s rulers were concerned about two things – the power of the papacy and the internal peace of their own dominions. How they chose to deal with the spread of heresy affected both. The failure to eradicate by torture, fire and military might the beliefs of Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists and fringe sectaries had led governments to hope that some theological accommodation could be made but successive popes had set their faces against compromise and when the final session of Trent ended in December 1563 every major tenet of Protestant belief had been vehemently rejected. To cheers and applause from the assembled bishops and cardinals (most of them from Italy and Spain) the pope closed the final session with the ringing cry, ‘Anathema to all heretics! Anathema! Anathema!’ There was to be no truce, no peace treaty. Nothing was contemplated but ultimate victory; the restoration of religious unity and uniformity. It was a declaration of total war. In pursuing it, loyal sons and daughters of mother church were urged to set aside all political, diplomatic and even moral considerations.
    The principal focus of Rome’s ire was England. In recent decades Habsburg and Valois monarchs had limited the power of the papacy in their lands and drawn into their own hands many of the ecclesiastical powers wielded within their borders. But the King of England had gone much further. He had expelled the pope, severed all links with Rome, appropriated church property and presumed to proclaim himself head of a breakaway heretic church. The failure of Mary Tudor’s counter-reformation only served to rub salt into the wound. Now this renegade nation was under the rule of Henry Tudor’s bastard daughter. Rudolph Gualter accurately identified the Roman strategy which had become absolutely clear to England’s political leaders and their friends abroad:
    [I]t is sufficiently evident that the Roman antichrist is employing all his power and exertions towards this object, namely, that the carrying into effect the council of Trent may at length produce its intended result. Your neighbours [France and Spain] make no secret of this; and though they are restrained by ancient treaties . . . and the terms of a general peace, in which provision is made that no one shall give any trouble to another on account of diversity of religion, yet they are making many attempts, by which it plainly appears that they are seeking an occasion of disturbance. 14
    Had the papacy, after Trent, fallen back into the decadent, worldly, luxury-loving habits of the Borgia and Medici popes, who were more concerned about Italian politics than the purity of the faith, the campaign of the