New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors by Susan Brigden
Author:Susan Brigden
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141941547
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-14T10:00:00+00:00
European wars were now fought for possession of souls as well as for lands and taxes; the struggle against oppression would be for religious as well as other liberties. The lines were being drawn between a perfervid missionary Calvinism and a newly dogmatic militant Catholicism. The General Council of the Church which had been held in the northern Italian city of Trent sat in its final session between 1561 and 1563. In the courts of Europe the nobility fought not for power alone but for the faith, Catholic or Reformed, and urged radical action in political circumstances in which neutrality grew harder to sustain. This was still a cold war, with all its attendant uncertainties. Protestant fears of a universal Catholic conspiracy grew after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis of April 1559, which brought to an end the long war between the greatest Catholic powers, France and Spain (and, incidentally, gave England peace, but peace without glory, without Calais). This novel amity freed Henry II of France to plan his mission against heresy; not only to suppress the proliferating Calvinist churches in France but also, in time, to wage war against the Calvinists in Scotland, that quasi-French province.
In December 1557 five Scottish magnates had subscribed the first Band of the Lords of the Congregation, a bond – a contract of alliance – and religious covenant ‘to strive in our Master’s [Christ’s] cause, even unto the death’ in order to advance the Protestant cause in Scotland, then deadlocked and isolated. The accession of Elizabeth gave hope to Scotland’s Protestants, but also ended any toleration for them. In May 1559 the Congregation of Christ Jesus, the religious and political community of Scotland’s reformers, led by John Knox, newly returned from exile, promised the French Catholic Regent, Mary of Guise, that the threat to their religion would compel them ‘to take the sword of just defence’. Here was a call to arms; incipient revolution. To the Pope, Henry II pledged religious war against the Scottish heretics. In truth, that war was not only against heresy, not only to protect the Stewart dynasty, whose Queen was newly married to the Dauphin of France, but also to pursue Mary Stewart’s claim to the throne of England. Was not this a Catholic duty? A French invasion of Scotland threatened the return of ‘strangers’ to England, this time through the ‘postern gate’ in the North.
The sudden death of Henry II in July 1559, after a jousting lance pierced one of the eyes with which he had vowed to watch the heretic Anne du Bourg burn, removed the imminent prospect of a Catholic crusade. ‘God shows Himself from heaven,’ rejoiced John Calvin. Ominously, the dying Henry had commended his son the Dauphin to Philip II: a last request which the so-dutiful King of Spain never forgot and could later use to legitimize his interventions in the chaos of France in the name of religion. The death of Henry opened the way for civil war in France because the accession of the boy King Francis II turned the French court into a snakepit of noble feuds.
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