International Peace and Civil War

Little more than three months after she became Queen, Elizabeth dispatched Sir John Mason to Cateau-Cambresis. His mission was to pour out the vials of her wrath upon the English Commissioners desperately trying to negotiate England out of the war. They had committed the unforgivable offence of allowing the French to question the Queen’s title and to refuse to return Calais. The effect was evidently traumatic. Even Mason was touched by the distress into which the Commissioners were plunged: ‘Poor Doctor Wotton* was fallen into an ague of mind.’ Another Commissioner, the Bishop of Ely, Thomas Thirleby, a Polonius-like figure who, with much wringing of hands, had sold his old friend Thomas Cranmer into perdition, was ‘factus totus stupidus’. The senses of her Ministers’, Mason reported, ‘are taken away by sorrow.’1 But it was too late to do anything. As the Commissioners had mournfully declared in Mary’s time, ‘poor England that begun not the fraye’ was doomed to lose her ‘ Jewell’.2 So Calais was lost. And it was lost because Philip of Spain was not prepared to allow the English claim to Calais to obstruct a speedy peace with France. There was no open breach, but Spain’s coolness and Elizabeth’s rejection of Philip’s advances over a marriage had left an unmistakable chill in the air. Sir Thomas Chaloner, her agent in Brussels, reported to the Queen that the Spaniards in the Low Countries were hostile to England. Philip and Granvelle, his spokesman in the Netherlands Council of State, were giving them the lead, ‘though still dissembling’. In contrast, ‘the gentilmen of theis low partes … take our parte and canne not endure to here us yll spoken of.’3