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The intrigues surrounding a possible marriage of Elizabeth to Rob Dudley grew weirder and weirder. Henry Sidney, Dudley’s brother-in-law and a courtier close to the queen, soon was approaching the Spanish ambassador about a possible deal in which Philip II would support the marriage and England would once again be reconciled with the Roman church. The context in which this astounding scenario was discussed—with Dudley, Cecil, and the queen herself all involved—was predictably complex. In 1559 the combative Pope Paul IV, that great hater of Hapsburgs and heretics, had died and been succeeded by Pius IV, a placid soul in comparison with his predecessor and more inclined to seek an understanding with schismatics than to condemn them out of hand. It would have seemed distinctly likely that this new pope would be receptive to an arrangement that had the endorsement of the king of Spain and promised to heal the breach with England. Pius was just then making preparations to reconvene the Council of Trent. He intended to invite England, hoping (against hope, one might think) to bring it back into the fold as a partner rather than a rival in reform.
Other parts of the background were the aforementioned deaths of Marie of Guise and young Francis II of France, Mary Stuart’s demotion from queen consort to widow and dowager, and the consequent unraveling of the connection between France and Scotland. These developments had, from the Spanish perspective, put Mary’s claim to the throne of England in a new and more attractive light. Philip II began exploring the possibility of making Mary the wife of one of his Austrian cousins, or even his own son by his first marriage, the boy Don Carlos. Such a union would have transformed the Queen of Scots, once such a threat to Hapsburg interests, into an immensely useful asset. In dangling her own possible marriage to Dudley in front of Philip, Elizabeth may have merely been attempting to draw his attention away from Mary Stuart. This seems a stretch, however; Elizabeth certainly understood that Philip was capable of pursuing both matters simultaneously, and the notion that Philip could reconcile England and Rome only by abandoning the idea of bringing Mary into the Hapsburg family makes very little sense. The whole affair remains cloaked in mystery, as do the motives of the participants. The negotiations were conducted in such deep secrecy that they remained unknown to the world until the nineteenth century, when the historian J. A. Froude turned up the evidence while examining Spain’s diplomatic correspondence.
The idea that Elizabeth was merely playing a diplomatic game is undercut by what is known of Cecil’s reaction to the negotiations. He wrote to a confidant that he was, for reasons left unspecified but almost certainly having to do with the proposed marriage, so unhappy with the state of affairs at court as to be considering resignation. At the same time he was continuing to try to disrupt the proceedings by discrediting Elizabeth and Dudley, telling the Spanish ambassador that the two had planned Amy Robsart’s death. These would not appear to be the actions of a man who knew his mistress to be pretending. They are more understandable if Cecil genuinely feared that the queen might be willing to abandon the Protestant cause in order to marry the one man she wanted as a husband. If somehow he was acting in collusion with the queen, the two were playing a game so deep and devious as to be incomprehensible.
What appears to have happened, in the end, is that Cecil frightened Elizabeth into calling the whole thing off. He announced that his agents had uncovered a Catholic conspiracy against the Crown, made some dramatic arrests including that of a fugitive priest, and claimed to have evidence of Catholic perfidy so outrageous as to destroy any possibility of a restored relationship. The queen was persuaded, on the basis of evidence that at a distance of four and a half centuries looks distinctly flimsy, that she could expect no loyalty from her Catholic subjects and that large numbers of Protestants were prepared to rise if she turned her back on them. The papal nuncio responsible for delivering an invitation to Trent was prevented from crossing to England. Though the affair ended with scarcely a whimper, it marked a watershed in Elizabeth’s life. It would be a good many years before she again regarded an offer of marriage as anything more than an opportunity to manipulate and deceive. Dudley would remain her beau ideal, the most important person in her life, but for both of them the hope of marriage had burned down to dead ash. As it became clear that no great royal unions were in the offing and Mary Stuart made preparations for her return to Scotland, the French queen mother Catherine de’ Medici urged the pope to excommunicate Elizabeth. Philip, no longer cast in the incongruous role of enemy of the papacy, persuaded him to do nothing.
Some months later Elizabeth was struck down by smallpox, one of the world’s great killers until modern times, and became so ill that she was not expected to live. Council and court were made more painfully aware than ever of how difficult a predicament they would be left in if she died without a spouse, a child, or a designated successor. When she emerged from unconsciousness, still in mortal danger, she asked her councilors to appoint Dudley lord protector of the realm with an income of £20,000 annually, a sum sufficient to support him in the most munificent style. The request was poignantly romantic and utterly without foundation in reality; the council would never have agreed to anything of the kind. Even if it had consented for the second time in little more than a decade to deliver the whole kingdom into the safekeeping of a Dudley—an improbable development to say the least—Robert’s elder brother would have been the more logical choice. Ambrose by now had been made Earl of Warwick, the title held by John Dudley until he became Duke of Northumberland, while Robert remained a commoner. The comparison was in any case meaningless; only a delirious Elizabeth could have imagined that her council would surrender control to either of the brothers.
The disease passed but left its mark. Elizabeth’s face was badly scarred, and patches of her scalp were left permanently bare. It was a melancholy turn of events for a woman not yet thirty who had always been both attractive and vain. Hardheaded political survivalist though she was, for the rest of her life she would be pathetically susceptible to any sycophant who praised her for a beauty she no longer possessed. It was in a sense doubly cruel that council and Parliament now resumed their appeals for her to marry. But from this point forward the business of finding an acceptable consort and inducing Elizabeth to assent took on a perfunctory character. Fresh attempts were undertaken from time to time, but even those making the effort were never terribly hopeful. The queen herself barely pretended interest unless she could see some diplomatic advantage in doing so. The period after her recovery brought a revival of the candidacy of the Hapsburg archduke Charles, younger brother of the newly elected emperor Maximilian II. Cecil’s support for this possibility shows once again that the desire for an heir could override even the strongest antipathy toward Rome. The pressure was for a while so intense that Elizabeth came close to agreeing. In the end she was saved less by her own unwillingness than by the refusal of the emperor to compromise Charles’s freedom to practice his religion after taking up residence in England.
Eventually the council’s focus shifted from trying to get the queen to marry to the presumably more straightforward task of designating her successor. Here again, however, Elizabeth balked. She did so in spite of the fact that her refusal multiplied the dangers of disorder in the event of her death. And so as the life of her cousin Mary Stuart became one of the most dramatic (and also melodramatic and tragic) in the history of English royalty, it also became heavy with significance for everyone who feared and everyone who desired a restoration of the old religion.
Mary, from the day of her arrival in an Edinburgh that she had not seen since age six, a city now ruled by militant Calvinists with no desire for her return, was herself enmeshed in questions of marriage and succession. Like Elizabeth she was probably a virgin, she, too, would leave behind a chaos of contending factions if she died childless, and almost any husband she chose was certain to bring a baggage train of complications trailing behind him. At first she showed impressive political adroitness, especially for a twenty-year-old dealing with enemies more powerful than herself in what was, essentially, a foreign country. With very nearly no trustworthy advisers to guide her, she accepted the settlement that had delivered Scotland’s government and church into Protestant hands. She refused, however, to ratify Cecil’s Treaty of Edinburgh, because doing so would have involved relinquishing her claim to the throne of England. Using the little power that remained to her, she established religious toleration as Crown policy—the first time that any such thing had ever been attempted in the history of the British Isles. The dignity and restraint with which she handled herself began to erode the distrust with which many of her subjects had received her in 1561 and to build up a store of goodwill.
Mary had no reluctance to marry, and the English court naturally took an interest in her intentions. In 1564, in a bizarre twist that nevertheless made a good deal of sense from the English perspective and offered practical advantages to Scotland as well, Elizabeth offered Mary as bridegroom none other than Robert Dudley, who was made Earl of Leicester to enhance his suitability. Mary replied that she could agree only if recognized as Elizabeth’s heir, but Elizabeth would promise only that Mary and Leicester, once married, would be permitted to live at the English court. That was the end of that. It was also the end of the best part of Mary Stuart’s life. She now plunged headlong into a sea of troubles from which she would never emerge.
While the Dudley proposal was still in negotiation, a young cousin of Mary’s named Henry Stuart, eldest son of the Earl of Lennox and known as Lord Darnley, had arrived at the Scottish court. Like Mary, he was a grandchild of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, who had married twice more and borne a daughter after the death of King James IV. Also like Mary, therefore, he was a blood member of the royal families of both kingdoms; in the event of Mary’s death, in fact, he would have had a strong claim to the Scottish throne. He had grown up in England and become a familiar figure at Elizabeth’s court, his father having had to flee Scotland after supporting Henry VIII’s failed invasions of the early 1540s. On at least two occasions in his youth, undoubtedly at his father’s bidding and for the purpose of winning favor for the family if not specifically for himself, Darnley had traveled to France and met the Queen of Scots there. For reasons that remain obscure, Elizabeth eventually took up the Lennox cause, encouraging Mary to admit her kinsmen back into their homeland and restore their confiscated lands. Mary eventually agreed, her reasons, too, being less than clear, and the consequences were momentous. She was soon smitten with Darnley, who was not yet twenty, and with rather unseemly haste they married. Of the many costly mistakes that Mary would make in the course of an epically difficult life, this was by far the worst, the precipitating blunder from which a torrent of miseries would flow.
Objectively, the marriage offered Mary so many advantages that when news of it reached England Elizabeth was deeply angered. Darnley’s bloodlines were so good as to strengthen not only Mary’s hold on the crown of Scotland but her claim to that of England as well. Formally he was a Catholic, which was important to Mary, but his beliefs, if he had any, were elastic enough to have allowed him to function comfortably at Elizabeth’s court; he was not likely to offend the Protestant lords of Scotland with displays of the faith they despised. The marriage was doomed, however, and its flaw was Darnley himself. He was vain, arrogant, and weak, not merely immature but deeply, dangerously foolish. His wife discovered this soon enough, but by the time she did so she was pregnant. The sequence of calamities that ensued requires attention here because of its bearing on the Tudor succession, but could be dealt with in detail only in a different kind of book. Much of what happened remains open to interpretation; who actually did what, and why, is largely shrouded in mystery.
It began, the worst of it, grotesquely. Mary had a private secretary, a strutting and self-important little Italian named David Riccio who had first come to her court as a musician in search of employment. He alienated the Edinburgh nobles by limiting their access to the queen. (Riccio had many of the same powers as Elizabeth’s secretary Cecil, but gave no evidence of comparable intelligence or skill.) The disaffected lords had no difficulty in convincing Darnley (now the Duke of Albany but disgruntled because Mary would not make him her co-ruler) that his wife and the gnomish Riccio were lovers. They drew him into a scheme in the execution of which he and a little gang of retainers burst in on Mary and Riccio while they, in company with a court functionary, were innocently having supper. Riccio was dragged out of the room, stabbed dozens of times, and thrown down a flight of stairs. Mary was six months pregnant, and the conspirators may have hoped to shock her into premature labor so that the child would die and she with it. That didn’t happen, and early that summer she gave birth to a healthy boy who was given the name of a long line of his royal forebears: James.
There was more, and worse, to come. Almost a year after the Riccio murder, Darnley himself died in spectacular fashion when the house in which he was sleeping was blown up. It was later determined that Darnley was not killed by the explosion but subsequently strangled. Three months after that Mary eloped with James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, an alpha male who had earlier been an important source of support in her struggles with the Scots lords and was probably responsible for killing Darnley; the two were married, surprisingly, in a Protestant ceremony. That is one version of the story and for a time it was the only version anyone heard. Another version, more credible when all the known facts are thrown onto the scales, is that Mary was abducted by Bothwell, acquiescing in the marriage only because he had raped her. Within a few months she was the prisoner of the Protestant lords, who tried to get her to repudiate the Bothwell marriage but were unable to do so, probably because she was pregnant. Told that if she refused to abdicate in favor of her infant son she would be executed, she yielded (though later she would say that she did so only after being secretly advised that an abdication coerced under threat of death could never be upheld as valid). A miscarriage of twins followed, then a nervous breakdown, an escape from prison, defeat in battle, and a flight into England that ended with Mary becoming Elizabeth’s prisoner. She was subjected to a ludicrously unfair judicial inquiry in which she was confronted with the now-notorious “casket letters,” messages to Bothwell that implicated her in the murder of Darnley but were almost certainly artful forgeries. She was, by this time, all of twenty-five years old.
The year when Mary entered England, 1568, also brought the dynastically important death of Catherine Grey. As the younger sister of Jane Grey and the eldest surviving granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, the Lady Catherine had a claim to the throne and was the favorite of many Protestants. But she, like her elder sister before her and her younger sister after, learned what a poisonous legacy Tudor blood could be. In law, because King Henry’s last will had excluded the Scottish branch of the family from the succession, Catherine’s claim appeared to be better than Mary Stuart’s. But when, early in Elizabeth’s reign, Catherine wanted to marry Edward Seymour, son of the brother of Queen Jane Seymour who had become lord protector after Henry’s death, she came up against a statute prohibiting the marriage of anyone of royal blood without the queen’s permission. Catherine and her young beau, fearful that approval would be denied, wed in secret and in doing so committed treason. Elizabeth was furious when she learned of this (it was characteristic of her to go into a rage whenever someone close to her married) and had the newlyweds confined in the Tower. Catherine was pregnant by then and gave birth to a son while in prison. Afterward the lieutenant of the Tower allowed the couple to see each other in secret, with the result that Catherine had a second son and any hope of receiving the queen’s forgiveness was destroyed. Catherine was still in custody, though no longer in the Tower, when she died. Because her marriage was found to be invalid—that was Elizabeth’s doing too—her sons were officially illegitimate and not eligible to inherit the throne. Meanwhile the third Grey sister, the misshapen little Lady Mary, had disgraced herself not only by marrying without permission but by choosing a commoner husband, a widower more than twice her age. That union was broken up before it produced offspring. Thus one of the highest hopes of the Protestants, that the last of the Tudors might be followed by one of the evangelical Grey sisters or a child of one of them, was extinguished.
Attention turned all the more intensely back to Mary Stuart, now almost the only living member of the royal family aside from Elizabeth herself and the mother of a son, albeit a son in the custody of his mother’s enemies in Scotland. Even as a prisoner Mary was strongly supported—not as a rival to Elizabeth necessarily, but as her rightful heir—by two factions. One was headed by the leaders of the most powerful ancient families of the north of England, Thomas Percy, the seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, the sixth Earl of Westmorland, and included the large part of the northern population that continued to practice the old religion. The other was based at court, took its strength from those councilors and courtiers who resented the dominance of Secretary Cecil, and looked for leadership to Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk (whose sister, not incidentally, was married to Westmorland). He was the grandson of the duke who had narrowly escaped execution at the time of Henry VIII’s death and spent Edward VI’s entire reign in the Tower of London.
The next chapters in the Mary Stuart story were as rich in drama as everything that had come before, but their details are less important for present purposes than their results. Percy and Neville secretly allied themselves with the Norfolk faction, took fright when a suspicious Elizabeth summoned them to court, concluded that they had no choice except to fight or flee, and therefore hastily raised the standard of rebellion. They certainly hoped to free Mary and to restore Catholic practice, but whether they aspired to remove Elizabeth from the throne is unclear. In any case their rising was so ill prepared and ineptly managed as to be put down quickly and without great difficulty, the earls finding it advisable to abandon their supporters and escape into Scotland. Before that happened, however, they dispatched to Rome a request that Pope Pius bless their undertaking, send support, and declare Elizabeth excommunicated. By the time this appeal reached Rome the revolt was already over, but Pius had no knowledge of this and was being assured that the people of England were eager to cast off their heretic queen and inhibited only by the fear that rebelling against an anointed ruler would be a grievous sin. Pius issued a bull expelling Elizabeth from the church, absolving her subjects of the obligation of loyalty, and providing grounds in canon law for her fellow rulers to attack and dethrone her. It was perhaps in response to the excommunication that the collapse of the northern rising was followed by some eight hundred executions—extraordinarily savage vengeance for a movement that had petered out before becoming dangerous or even notably large. In fact, the revolt soon proved to have brought immense benefits to the Crown. The centuries-old quasi-independence of the northern nobility came to an end from which there would be no return—the Percys and Neville were only the most prominent of the proud old families ruined—and the administration of the north was put in the hands of officers of Elizabeth’s choosing.
The excommunication of England’s queen was perhaps understandable after ten years in which to be a Catholic in England was very nearly to be an outlaw, and in which Elizabeth and her council had consistently responded with contempt to overtures from Rome. It was a monumental blunder nevertheless, by far the greatest mistake made by either side during the long conflict between the Tudors and the popes, and England’s Catholics paid a high price for it. Immediately their situation was made desperate: they were left with no alternative except to choose between their church and their queen. Overnight it became plausible for the authorities to claim that refusal to take the oath of supremacy really was an act of treason, a declaration of loyalty to foreign enemies committed to making war on England. Intense persecution followed swiftly, beginning with the execution of the bold character who had posted the bull of excommunication outside the bishop of London’s residence. New legislation followed also—a Treasons Act increasing penalties for denial of the supremacy, for example, and an Act Against Papal Bulls. For the radical Protestants who were just now coming to be known as Puritans, these new opportunities to attack Catholics could not have been more welcome. They were exasperated, therefore, when Elizabeth refused to go as far as they wanted, blocking the implementation of statutes that would have made it a crime not to receive communion under the auspices of the Church of England. It was still her hope that she could gradually, with the sustained application of judicious amounts of pressure, nudge Catholicism toward extinction while avoiding a repetition of anything as alarming as the revolt of the northern earls. At the same time, she was refusing to allow the Puritans to reshape her church to fit their agenda, which was becoming so radical as to include demands for the elimination of bishops. She thereby alienated the Puritans to such an extent that they began to regard themselves as outside the established church, to spurn that church as beyond hope of reform, and to direct their energies toward the building of a power base in Parliament. Thus there emerged three major and irreconcilable religious groupings: the Catholics, the Puritans, and an approved church the doctrines and practices of which were determined, essentially, by the queen alone. Only the second two had access to political power, Catholics having been barred from the House of Commons as early as 1563 and the practice of their faith now being unlawful and subject to increasingly harsh sanctions. The Puritans, too, though growing in numbers and clout, felt excluded and persecuted. Out of these divisions came conflicts and grievances that would poison the life of the kingdom for centuries.
Looming over it all, a living symbol of unresolvable conflict, was the forlorn figure of Mary, Queen of Scots. She was Elizabeth’s prisoner though England had no legal grounds for holding her, to the Protestants she was little better than the Whore of Babylon personified, and yet as Elizabeth grew older she remained—a horrible thought for many—the only plausible heir to the throne. In her person the problem of religion and the problem of the succession merged to become a quandary for which there appeared to be no answer.
Background
THE TURKS
IT IS EASY, IN THINKING ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS of the Tudor century, to overlook the fact that there was another major player besides the Hapsburgs, the kings and queens of France and England, and a papacy that at various times became involved as referee, cheerleader, or freelance utility infielder.
Easy, but a serious mistake. Because throughout the entire period a fourth force was at work, one more aggressive, more dangerous, and more powerful overall than any of the others. It was the Islamic empire of the Ottoman Turks, which at midcentury reached the zenith of its six-hundred-year history, controlled eastern Europe south of the Danube, and directly or indirectly was affecting the destinies of all the Christian powers. The fields of force that it projected, like some vast dark star at the edge of the universe of European nations, are a major reason why Elizabethan England was able to preserve its autonomy in spite of being smaller and weaker than France or Spain and potentially a pariah kingdom in the aftermath of its withdrawal from the old church. By sapping the strength of its principal rival, the Hapsburg empire, Ottoman Turkey contributed importantly to the survival of Protestantism across much of northern Europe.
When Elizabeth became queen, the Ottomans either ruled directly or controlled through puppet regimes not just Turkey but Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and much of Hungary. And that was only the European segment of their dominions, which also encompassed Egypt and Algeria and other strongholds in North Africa, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, and some of the most important islands in the Mediterranean. They had been ferociously expansionist since their first emergence among the Turkic-Mongol peoples of Anatolia in the thirteenth century, and generation after generation they had consistently demonstrated their ability to outfight formidable adversaries on land and at sea. In 1453 they captured Constantinople, which had remained the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Orthodox Church for centuries after Rome itself fell, turning it into the principal metropolis of the Islamic world. And because they were Muslims with entirely non-Western cultural roots, their success in pushing northward and across and even beyond the Balkans was seen, not without reason, as a mortal threat to European civilization itself.
The tenth and greatest of the Ottoman sultans, Suleiman I, was in the thirty-ninth year of his reign when Elizabeth began hers. To his subjects he was Suleiman the Lawgiver, having in the course of his awesomely fruitful career rewritten his empire’s entire legal code. Europe called him Suleiman the Magnificent, a title he richly deserved. Like his forebears, he was above all a soldier, having personally led campaigns that crushed a revolt in Damascus, captured Belgrade in Serbia and Buda in Hungary, taken much of the Middle East from the shah of Iran, expelled the Knights Hospitalers from the island of Rhodes, and twice laid siege to the Hapsburg capital of Vienna. But he was also much more than a soldier: an accomplished poet and goldsmith, a lifelong student of philosophy with a particular devotion to Aristotle, the guiding patron of a remarkable efflorescence of Islamic art, literature, and architecture. Impressive and even admirable as he was, however, he should not be sentimentalized. At the heart of his regime—of the entire Ottoman enterprise—lay something worse than barbarism. Suleiman’s father, Selim I, himself a great conqueror who nearly tripled the size of the empire in only eight years as sultan, cleared the way for his favorite son to succeed him by killing his own brothers, his brothers’ seven sons, and all four of Suleiman’s brothers. Suleiman, decades later, would watch through a peephole as his eldest son and heir, a young man much honored for his prowess in war and skill as a governor, was strangled by court eunuchs to make way for a different, younger, and (as time would show) totally worthless son. Fratricide on a grand scale became standard Ottoman practice; each new sultan, upon taking the throne, would have all his brothers and half-brothers murdered and those members of his predecessor’s harem who happened to be pregnant bundled up in sacks and thrown into the sea. Conquered peoples were treated little better. Eventually the viciousness of the regime would lead the whole empire to shocking depths of cruelty and degeneracy and finally, in the First World War, to collapse. But through much of the sixteenth century, under Suleiman, it appeared to be almost invincible. The possibility that it might break through into central Europe, and continue onward from there, not only seemed but was terrifyingly real.
The threat fell first and most heavily on young Charles Hapsburg, who became the seventeen-year-old king of Spain in the same year that Cairo fell to the Turks. By the time he was elected Holy Roman emperor two years later, the Turks had taken Algiers from Spain, the trade routes of Venice and the other seafaring cities of the Italian peninsula were in danger of being cut off by Turkish raiders, and the southern Hapsburg kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were under direct threat. Francis I was king of France by then and Suleiman was about to become sultan, and for the next three decades they and Charles (the three had been born within six years of each other, and all came to power between 1515 and 1520) would be locked in an almost continuous, endlessly complicated struggle. Henry VIII, from his safe haven on the far shore of the English Channel, would join the fray and withdraw from it as the mood struck him and the state of his treasury dictated.
Despite the size of his empire, Charles V usually found himself on the defensive, with Francis repeatedly trying to pry away substantial chunks of Italy and Suleiman both pressing northward out of the Balkans and seeking to clear the Mediterranean of European ships. Charles’s successes were almost always limited and his defeats were occasionally serious, but when the number and strength of his adversaries are taken into account (Germany’s increasingly numerous Protestant states were soon joining forces to oppose him), he merits recognition as one of the great commanders of the age. When Francis launched an attack on Milan in 1525, Charles not only destroyed his army but took him prisoner. But just a year later, with Charles occupied elsewhere, Suleiman invaded northward, inflicted a ruinous defeat on the Hungarians, and seized territories that the Hapsburgs regarded as theirs by ancient right. Next came Suleiman’s 1529 siege of Vienna, which Charles and his brother Ferdinand were barely able to lift after both sides suffered heavy losses, followed by the sultan’s attempt to take the island of Malta from the same order of crusader knights from whom, some years earlier, he had taken Rhodes. Emboldened by his success in saving Malta and killing thirty thousand Ottoman troops in the process, Charles decided to carry the war into enemy territory. He crossed to North Africa and, at Tunis, succeeded in expelling Suleiman’s client regime and installing one of his own.
The contest seesawed back and forth year after year, as Charles and Suleiman traded blows along the Danube and in the Mediterranean but neither could gain a decisive advantage. For a time Henry of England joined with Charles against Francis, later switching sides and finally turning away from the continent to focus on Anne Boleyn and his conflict with the church. One development that shocked many Europeans, who saw in it a betrayal of all Christendom, was Francis’s entry, in 1536, into an alliance with Suleiman and the Turks. Once again he was grasping at Milan, though he like Charles was very nearly at the end of his financial resources. An important side effect was that Henry VIII was left alone and unthreatened as he completed his break with Rome and fattened on the wealth of the church. Under other circumstances a crusade against England’s schismatic king by the Catholic powers of the continent might have been at least possible. Under the circumstances actually prevailing in the mid-1530s, nothing of the kind could be seriously considered. Neither Charles nor Francis was in any position to make trouble for England. Either would have been grateful for Henry’s active friendship.
In 1538 Suleiman’s great admiral Khayr ad-Din, called Barbarossa by Westerners because of his red beard, defeated the Hapsburg navy in a battle so conclusive that it made the Turks dominant in the Mediterranean for the next thirty-three years. In 1541, as Charles tried and failed to restore Algiers to Spanish control, Suleiman resumed offensive operations in the north. He had sufficient success to impose a humiliating peace on the Hapsburgs: Archduke Ferdinand was obliged to renounce his claim to the throne of Hungary and to become a Turkish vassal, pledging to pay an annual tribute for the portion of Hungary he was permitted to retain. In 1542 Charles and Francis were once again at war, and when the French king asked Suleiman for assistance, the sultan cheerfully agreed. He dispatched a fleet of one hundred galleys, warships powered by oars, to France’s south coast, permitting them to pause along the way to pillage Charles’s kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and the city of Nice, also a Hapsburg possession. On all fronts, Suleiman appeared to be gaining in strength.
Fortunately for Europe, Suleiman like Charles had multiple enemies and more than the conflict between their two empires to deal with. By the late 1540s the shah of Iran had recovered much of the power that had been shattered by Suleiman’s father thirty years earlier, and was making himself troublesome. From 1548 to 1550 Suleiman waged war on the shah, and must have been taken aback to find himself making little headway. He settled in for a time at his sumptuous Topkapi Palace, indulging in the pleasures of the court and involving himself in domestic-dynastic intrigues. (It was during this interlude that he had his son Mustafa murdered, so that the son of the Russian slave girl he had made his wife could become heir.) In 1554 he returned with his army to Iran, finally securing a peace in which he received Iraq and eastern Anatolia but relinquished any claim to the Caucasus. By this time his old ally Francis, along with the distant Henry of England, had been dead for seven years. The emperor Charles, spiritually and physically exhausted, was beginning the process by which, over the next two years, he would give the crown of Spain to his son and that of the Holy Roman Empire to his brother and retire to a monastery. Suleiman alone—older than any of the others except Henry—remained vigorous and actively in command. His enemies were not free of him until 1566, when, at age seventy-two, he suddenly died. At the time, he was leading an army northward to Hungary, making ready to reopen the war there. We can only guess at what Europe may have been spared by his passing.
After Suleiman the Ottoman dynasty went into an abrupt decline. His successor, for whose sake the splendid young Mustafa had been eliminated, was a drunkard who reigned in a stupor for eight years before falling in his bath and fracturing his skull. Hissuccessor specialized in copulation, fathering 103 children in his twenty years as sultan, and every Ottoman ruler after him proved to be utterly incompetent or deeply degenerate or both. The empire, however, was slower to decay; its administrative machinery would wind down only gradually over the next three centuries. To the end of Elizabeth’s reign it would remain a formidable presence.
A major turn in Europe’s favor came just five years after Suleiman’s death. In 1571, off the western coast of Greece, the Ottoman navy met the forces of Christendom in what was, for the latter, a desperate last stand. On the Turkish side were 222 galleys supported by numerous smaller vessels and carrying some thirty-four thousand soldiers. Opposing them was a smaller fleet contributed by members of what called itself the Holy League: Venice, Spain, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, the Knights of Malta, the Papal States, and such places as Genoa and Savoy.
It was the last major battle ever fought entirely with ships powered by oarsmen, one of the biggest naval battles in history, and according to some historians the most important since Mark Antony lost the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. and his rival Octavian became master of Rome as the emperor Augustus Caesar. When the Battle of Lepanto was over, all but forty of the Turkish galleys had been captured or destroyed, perhaps twenty-five thousand Turks had been killed or captured, and ten thousand Christian slaves had been freed. The league, by contrast, had lost only twenty galleys and thirteen thousand men. It was not the end of the Ottoman Empire, not even the end of the empire as a great power, but it did bring the empire’s mastery of the Mediterranean to a permanent close. The momentum of Turkish expansion was not yet entirely exhausted—the capture of Cyprus and recapture of Tunis still lay ahead—but the Ottomans would never again be quite the threat they had been in Suleiman’s time, and they had been deprived of the vast opportunities that a victory at Lepanto would have opened to them.
The commander of the Holy League fleet was the twenty-four-year-old Don John of Austria, Charles V’s illegitimate son by a Bavarian girl of common stock. Second in command, himself only twenty-six, was Alessandro Farnese, great-grandson and namesake of Pope Paul III, son of Charles V’s illegitimate daughter Margaret, future Duke of Parma. The two, though scarcely more than boys, had changed the course of history. We will encounter both in connection with another of the great conflicts that shaped the Tudor century.