Chapter 4 - 1585–1590: Biblical Typology and the Catholic Threat

Summary

According to an indictment presented to a grand jury at the Rochester assize in January 1589, John Gardener, a yeoman from Westgate, Canterbury, publicly declared on November 11, 1588:

The pope and his religion muste needes have good success heare in Englande, for that theire religion ys good. And beinge toulde of the repulse of the Spannyards, saide that it was lyes, and we shoulde heare other newes shortly, rejoysinge when any reporte was of theire good succes, and sorroweinge for the contrary.

In the aftermath of the Armada's defeat, Gardener—whose Catholicism is clear from his seditious words—expressed his “sorrow” that Philip II's plan had been thwarted. While a yeoman in Canterbury was of limited concern to the higher echelons of the Elizabethan regime, comments like those uttered by Gardener are representative of the wider fear of Catholics in the mid and late 1580s. The regime did not—and indeed could not—know how many English people remained loyal to Rome, meaning that they could never be sure of the support on which a Catholic invasion force could rely. The attempted invasion of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was intended to coincide with a Catholic uprising in England, which to the great relief of the regime never materialized (this was perhaps less about loyalty to Rome and more about Hispanophobia, however). In a period where the Catholic threat had reached alarming levels, comments like those spoken by John Gardener only reinforced the dangers England faced from “The pope and his religion.”

As has been suggested throughout this book, scholars tend to treat the parallel existence of biblical and classical analogies as some kind of dilemma, with various hypotheses proposed to explain the purported waxing and waning of these analogies across Elizabeth's reign. Such hypotheses tend to focus on the supposed supplanting of biblical figures with classical ones in the latter portion of Elizabeth's reign, as represented by Donald Stump's erroneous claim that “between 1583 and 1603 … I have located only five works containing a total of six references.” This chapter is intended as a case study of the period between 1585, when the Babington Plot was hatched, and 1590, when the threat of invasion had subsided—covering both the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.