Sir Francis Walsingham Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the face of overwhelming military odds. The sudden change of fortune took everyone by surprise. ‘Not a soul imagined the possibility of such a thing . . . When the proclamation was first cried out the people started off, running in all directions and crying out, “the Lady Mary is proclaimed Queen!”.’ 2 On 3 August Mary rode into her capital among scenes of general rejoicing.
    General but far from universal. Convinced Protestants and people who had been closely connected with the previous regime had good cause for anxiety. That constituency certainly included Francis Walsingham. He continued quietly with his studies but kept a wary eye on the course of events. In order to quiet her confessionally divided nation Mary declared that she had no intention of forcing men’s consciences but those who knew her and her closest advisers were in no doubt that they were bent on a full restoration of the Catholic faith. For men like Stephen Gardiner, now appointed Lord Chancellor, Mary’s accession was just the latest phase in a struggle between true faith and heresy that had been going on for a quarter of a century.A reluctant parliament was dragooned into repealing the ecclesiastical legislation of the previous reign. Cranmer, Ridley and other architects of religious change were imprisoned. Throughout the country churches were instructed to return to unreformed liturgy. Hard-pressed churchwardens, who had but recently paid for objects of superstition to be removed now had to pay for them to be put back again. The bulk of the queen’s subjects accepted all this with either relief or irritation. It was when Mary announced her intention to marry her Spanish first cousin once removed that she pushed her people too far.
    England’s politicians and diplomats were extremely wary of the Habsburg Empire, a superpower the like of which had not been seen in Europe for seven centuries. Charles V ruled an empire that embraced Spain, the Netherlands, southern Italy and central Europe from Burgundy to the troubled Hungarian border region where Christian West faced Ottoman Muslim East. (The German lands acknowledged the overlordship of an
elected
Holy Roman Emperor but the Habsburgs had effectively annexed this title and position.) Added to this were Spain’s New World possessions, widely believed to be supporting Habsburg pretension with untold stores of gold and silver. Charles V, for political reasons, was eager for his son and heir Philip, soon to be invested with the crown of Spain, to marry Mary Tudor. To many Englishmen the thought of their country being absorbed by the monolithic Habsburg state was anathema.
    But there was also a clash of ideologies. Charles saw himself as God’s appointed vicegerent, the latest in a line of Christian emperors whose prime duty it was to ensure the triumph of militant Catholicism. He was imbued with the spirit of the
reconquista,
which had seen the last Moors expelled from Spain. He vigorously defended his eastern boundary against the Turk. This crusading zeal extended to internal affairs. Ever since Innocent III, in the thirteenth century, had called on temporal rulers to launch the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southern France, emperors had assumed the responsibility of extirpating heresy from their dominions – by force if necessary. Throughout most of his reign Charles fought – and finally lost – a war against the spread of Lutheranism in Germany, and hisNetherlands territories were so affected by the Reformation that the execution of over 2,000 martyrs failed to rid the region of heresy. The attraction of the English match for Charles was that it would guarantee his ships safe passage through the Narrow Seas, enabling him more effectively to defend the commercially important Low Countries from French expansionism and religious innovation.
    Philip had been well trained in the duties of a Christian monarch. Lacking his father’s political acumen, he fell back on rigid dogma