The Christmas festivities of 1580 were a fateful moment for the
Vere-Howard Court faction and for Catholics in the realm of England. The history of it and all that followed tends
to be viewed by historians through a wide variety of lenses representing
political interests to this day. What
can be said with certainty is that the events of those festivities marked the
end of religious tolerance in England under Queen Elizabeth.
I quote from my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare by way of
setting the scene:
126. However much his move to London and turn
toward literary matters may have comforted him, De Vere was still as much courtier as writer. On the 16th
of December, he reacted with violent words to a perceived affront at Court from
Phillip Howard, the Earl of Arundel, and threatened to be revenged on all the
Howard clan. His fury may have calmed by
Christmas night but fate would keep the feud alive. During the Court celebrations, De Vere
informed Charles Arundel, a close member of the Vere-Howard faction, that a
warrant had been issued for Charles Arundel’s and Henry Howard’s arrests. Henry Howard seems already to have assumed
that this might be a result of De Vere’s threatened revenge and had begun
encouraging his fellow crypto-Catholics to turn the spotlight on their
adversary, and away from themselves, by colluding to bear witness to every
“monstrous” activity they could declare or contrive.[1]
What wasn’t contrived was Vere’s accusation that Howard and Arundel
were secretly practicing Catholics.
Seven years before, their faction’s leader, the Duke of Norfolk, had
been executed for planning to marry the Catholic Mary Stuart and to usurp the
throne. Now the two were supplying
information to the French ambassador, Mauvissiere, representative of her Catholic
frenemy, Mary's brother-in-law, the French King.
First Secretary to the Queen, Sir Francis Walsingham, had been
pressing the Queen since at least the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, in
France, in 1572, to recognize that Catholicism was, by its nature, unalterably inimical
to her person and her throne. She had
remained remarkably tolerant in spite of his dire warnings. Catholics continued to go about their lives
so long as they recognized that, in England, they owed their allegiance to
their monarch who was the unchallenged
head of the true church.
Vere escaped punishment for his brief flirtation with the Catholic
host. In the process, however, he was
revealed to have deflowered one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Anne
Vavasour. Vavasour was soon delivered of
a child. Vere was briefly imprisoned
following which he was exiled from Court for 2+ years.
The Christmas affair and investigations to follow finally convinced
the Queen that Walsingham was wise to advise her to actively pursue Catholics
as traitors by virtue of their religion alone. While she continued to be blind
to the religion of some members of the nobility and of her chapel musicians, so
long as they remained absolutely silent about their faith, the rest of her
subjects stood to lose everything including their lives.
Earlier in 1580, Walsingham’s fierce rooting out of all “treason” had
resulted in the arrest of William Carter, a Catholic printer, for publishing “A
Treatise of Schism”. The book contained
a call to all “catholike gentlewomen” to follow the Biblical example of Judith
that
…they might destroye Holofernes, the master hereticke, and amase
all his retinew, and never defile their religion by communicating with them in
anye smale point.
In this passage, Walsingham detected a tropological directive for
the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting of Catholic leanings to look for an opportunity
to murder her.
Already, in 1579, Pope Gregory XIII had sent an invasion force to support
insurrection in Ireland in hopes of a base from which to harry, if not invade, England
and remove the “heretic Queen”. Walsingham
and Burghley’s European informants were reporting continuous planning to
assemble an invasion force in Spain with sufficient power to destroy the English
navy and march on the Cinque Ports and London.
At that time, the Spanish navy was considered far-and-away the most powerful
in the world.
Under these conditions Elizabeth’s desire for toleration was swept
away. Walsingham’s every word became scripture. Every publication and play was closely
checked for hidden calls to depose the Queen.
The author and publisher of a work in which such a call was detected was
in grave danger of suffering a horrifying fate.
[1]
Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last theproof. Richmond, VA: The Virtual
Vanaprastha, 2013. 126.
- Why Did Queen Elizabeth Fear Richard II So? September 10, 2018. ‘Interestingly, the infamous “deposition scene” in the play, in which Richard concedes his unfitness for the crown, did not appear in the 1597 first quarto. It did not appear until after Queen Elizabeth’s death when the third quarto was published in 1608.’
- Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
- Shakespeare’s King Richard II as Prequel. August 06, 2018. “It is for the same reason, more or less, that we must accept that Richard II was written before Henry V. When the players replied to the Essex conspirators “that of King Richard as being so old and so long out of use” would not attract an audience, they were indeed referring to Shakespeare’s Richard II. And they knew what they were talking about.”
- Amurath III and The True Tragedy of Richard III. June 11, 2018. “So then, when Professor Mott honed this information, in his 1921 paper, the shock it created was not because verities were shattered.”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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