Elizabeth I: The Northern Earls Who Asked the Pope to Condemn Her

While Elizabeth demanded their obedience, they appealed to an authority that could tell them to withhold it.

On 8 November 1569, Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, wrote to Pope Pius V asking him to condemn their queen. Elizabeth was thirty-six. The challenge gathering in northern England brought together religious grievances, powerful families resentful of her government, and plans involving another woman with a claim to her throne.

That woman was already in her custody.

Mary, Queen of Scots, had fled into England the previous year, seeking Elizabeth's help after losing her Scottish throne. She had found captivity instead. She was Elizabeth's cousin, a Catholic and a possible successor, and her presence gave opponents of the English queen someone around whom to organise. Elizabeth could keep Mary under guard. Keeping other people from making plans for her was proving rather harder.

One of those plans was a marriage to Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. He was Protestant, but a marriage between an English duke and the Scottish queen could bring together people whose grievances did not otherwise match. Religious conviction, family influence and the succession could all find a place in the same project. By the time the northern crisis became an armed rising, Norfolk was already in the Tower.

Elizabeth's government was Protestant. The religious settlement of 1559 had restored the crown's independence from Rome and imposed a Book of Common Prayer. For Catholics attached to the old worship, the changes reached into the familiar routines of church and parish. But Catholic belief did not make rebellion inevitable. Most English Catholics remained loyal to Elizabeth. The earls were making a choice, not speaking for everyone who shared their faith.

In York, the Earl of Sussex was trying to secure their obedience. His report to Elizabeth on 8 November recorded the answers to a summons: Northumberland had put off coming, while Westmorland had refused. These were men with estates, followers and long-established authority in the north. A refusal from either carried rather more weight than an unanswered invitation.

On 10 November, Elizabeth wrote from Windsor and commanded both men to come to her without delay or excuse. Her letter invoked the "duty of your allegiance". There was little room in that wording for a misunderstanding. Whatever complaints they had about her ministers or her religious policy, she was their queen, and she required them to appear before her.

They did not come.

Instead, the rising made the rejection of her authority visible in the churches where her religious settlement was supposed to govern worship. On 14 November, the rebels entered Durham Cathedral. The communion table was thrown down and the English Bible and prayer books were torn up. Before the month was out, Mass was being sung there again. Objects that had given physical form to the changes under Elizabeth could be removed, broken or burned. For a brief time, the earls could restore the worship they wanted in a cathedral. They had yet to secure the country.

Mary remained beyond their reach. As the rebellion developed, Elizabeth's government moved to put more distance between the Scottish queen and the men who might release her. On 22 November, Elizabeth ordered her removal from Tutbury to Coventry. She arrived three days later.

There was no royal palace waiting there. Mary was lodged at the Black Bull Inn, the accommodation her keepers had been able to find. A woman whose marriage and claim to the throne occupied powerful men across England was still dependent on other people to decide where she could sleep. The rising offered her supporters the prospect of freedom; its immediate consequence for Mary was another guarded lodging, further south.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, could call on forces the earls could not match. The rebellion failed in December, and its leaders fled into Scotland. Hundreds of those caught up in it were executed in the punishment that followed. The queen's government survived, and it enforced obedience through deaths as well as proclamations.

The appeal to Rome was still on its way.

It reached the pope on 16 February 1570, more than three months after it had been sent. Proceedings against Elizabeth were already under way in Rome, so the earls' letter was not the beginning of the process. On 20 February, Pius answered them with encouragement to persevere and face death courageously for their cause. Their rebellion had already been defeated.

Five days later, he issued the bull known as Regnans in Excelsis. It declared Elizabeth a heretic, claimed to deprive her of her royal authority and released her subjects from their oaths of allegiance. It also commanded them not to obey her. For Catholics who accepted the pope's judgement, obedience to their queen now carried the threat of excommunication.

Elizabeth's summons had required the earls to come to her because they owed her allegiance. The answer from Rome challenged the obligation itself, reaching beyond the two men who had written to the pope and into the lives of her Catholic subjects. But it could not undo what had happened in the north. When the pope finally told Elizabeth's subjects not to obey her, the earls who had asked for his intervention were already fugitives.