25 research outputs found
Queen Elizabethâs Leadership Abroad: The Netherlands in the 1570s
In 1576, after Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, presumed to lecture Queen Elizabeth on the importance of preaching and on her duty to listen to such lectures, his influence diminished precipitously, and leadership of the established English church fell to Bishop Aylmer. Grindalâs friends on the queenâs Privy Council, âforwardâ Calvinists (or ultra-Protestants), were powerless to save him from the consequences of his indiscretion, which damaged the ultrasâ other initiativesâ chances of success. This paper concerns one of those initiatives. From the late 1560s, they urged their queen âactivelyâ to intervene in the Dutch wars. They collaborated with Calvinists on the Continent who befriended Prince William of Orange and who hoped to help him hold together a coalition of religiously reformed and Roman Catholic insurgents in the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries. The English ultra-Protestants would have their government send money, munitions, and men in arms to the Netherlands, to tip the balance against viceroys sent by King Philip II of Spain. Grindalâs setback undermined the English Calvinistsâ efforts to form an Anglo-Dutch alliance which, they assumed, would boost the prospects for an international Protestant league. Yet Elizabeth did assist the Dutch as they wrestled with decisions forced on them by developments in the Netherlands during the 1570s, and she did so more consistently and more cleverly than many historians of Tudor diplomacy have thought.
Two competing assessments determine the way questions are formulated in the study of the queenâs and regimeâs Dutch diplomacy. The general consensus is that she was indecisive and inconsistent. Paul Hammer characterizes Elizabethâs responses to the crises in the Low Countries as a âzigzag of differentâ (âeven contradictoryâ) maneuvers. Wallace McCaffrey and R. B. Wernham agree that Englandâs âhesitations and gyrationsâ do not pass as coherent, creditable policy. Charles Wilson scolds Elizabeth for being timid and tepid--incapable of enthusiasm for âa great cause.â But David J.B. Trimâs striking counterthrust depicts the queenâs overtures to Netherlanders as part of her courageous â and âconfessionally drivenâ â foreign policy; Trim replaces âhesitationâ and âzigzagâ with a coherent âProtestant programme of action prioritized by the Elizabethan governmentâ with the aim of improving prospects for âCalvinist internationalism.â
What follows is an alternative to all these characterizations, one that, as noted, finds evidence for greater consistency and coherence in Elizabethâs leadership and less confessional âdrive.â That she would have been uneasy around religious extremists ought not to astonish us; her fatherâs, step-brotherâs, and step-sisterâs reigns as well as the start of her own were disturbed by zealous subjects, who were bent on shoring up or dismantling the realmâs religious settlements