Loyalty of Parliament during the Struggle

Whenever Elizabeth was confronted by a great crisis like this, she was fond of summoning parliament, in order to show to other powers how well her acts were upheld by the English nation. In 1571 she called her third parliament. This body, like its predecessors, was composed mainly of Protestants, partly because the queen had requested that Protestants be elected, partly because honest Roman Catholics, unable conscientiously to take the oath of supremacy, could not sit as members.

Parliament passed certain acts that were intended as a reply to the great Catholic conspiracy. The first of these made it high treason to compass the queen's life, to claim the throne during the lifetime of the queen, or even to support such a claim; a second made it high treason for any one to bring into England, or to put into use there, any decree or bull of the pope; while a third sanctioned the Thirty-nine Articles already adopted by convocation as containing the doctrine of the Anglican church. The fourth parliament, which met in 1572, imposed the penalty of death upon all who should attempt to seize or destroy any of the queen's fortresses or castles, or should conspire to set at liberty any one imprisoned for treason."

Although these measures show that Elizabeth's parliaments were devoted to her cause and policy, yet it must be remembered that they did not represent the whole of England. They were composed in the main of Protestants from the south, and included no members either from the north, where, as in the days of the Pilgrimage of Grace, lay the chief strength of Catholicism, or from Ireland, where at this time the Geraldines were in full revolt, fighting for Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church.

It should be noticed, furthermore, that though not yet in the modern sense a representative body, parliament was gradually becoming more modern as regards the class of men who sat in it, the questions it discussed, and the powers it exercised. Instead of country squires and others representing the agricultural life of the country, merchants, traders, and lawyers were becoming members. Though party organization was as yet unknown, the members were becoming more outspoken in their support of, or opposition to, governmental measures, and were gradually establishing certain parliamentary rights, such as freedom from arrest, freedom of speech, and freedom of access to the sovereign. No measure proposed by the queen could become law without their consent, and they controlled all appropriations of money. Yet, on the other hand, the powers of the queen were very great. She named the speaker, appointed new peers, created new boroughs, and, by means of the right of initiative, exercised control of the bills to be brought before parliament. She was also supreme executive, and through the Privy Council, the ministers, the Star Chamber at Westminster, the Councils of the North and of Wales, and some other bodies, controlled the actual administration of the government.

Period of Shifting Diplomacy in Foreign Relations (1572 1580)

The revolt of the northern nobles and the Ridolfi plot had induced Elizabeth to seek an alliance with France. But in 1572 an event took place in that country that nearly severed these friendly relations. On St. Bartholomew's Day, Catherine de' Medici, alarmed at the influence obtained by the anti-Spanish party in France over the young king, Charles IX, took up the cause of the Catholic party and caused thousands of Huguenots to be massacred in Paris and the provinces. But Elizabeth made no change in her policy. Assured by Catherine that this massacre did not mean the return of the Guises and Catholics to power, she adhered to the French alliance, and when the duke of Anjou refused to marry her, accepted as a suitor, though she had little intention of marrying him, the youngest brother of the king, the duke of Alencon. This coquetting with France had a double consequence: by exasperating Catherine de' Medici, who did not like to be played with, it almost caused a breach between the two countries; and it offended the Puritans at home, one of whom, Stubbs, wrote a famous book, The Discovery of a Gaping Gulph; the French marriage, for which he suffered the loss of his right hand.

In 1574 the duke of Anjou became king of France as Henry III, and, hating Protestantism, revived the old hostile policy against England. For the moment Elizabeth considered Burghley's plan of friendship with Spain; but this plan was rendered impossible by the Spanish Fury in Antwerp in 1576, when the unpaid and mutinous Spanish soldiers, by devastating and ruining the fairest cities of Flanders, drove the Flemish nobles over to the side of William of Orange and the Dutch. Elizabeth, aroused against Spain by this act, and desiring, as English sovereigns had always desired, to keep on good terms with those who seemed likely to control Flanders, sent four hundred thousand crowns to aid the Flemish. Philip retaliated by sending aid to Desmond in Ireland, by encouraging the Catholics in England, by despatching Requesens and afterward Parma, two able and conciliatory regents, to win back Flanders, and by fitting out a fleet in 1580, apparently for the conquest of England.

Thus England had both France and Spain against her. It began to look as if, in her fickleness, Elizabeth, who alone was responsible for the policy of this period, had succeeded in injuring her popularity at home and in endangering her relations abroad to such an extent as to isolate England, a contingency that Burghley for twenty years had sought strenuously to avoid.