ABSTRACT
During the earliest years of Elizabeth’s reign Cecil emerged as the Protestant champion at the English court by acting as a keen advocate of intervention in Scotland as an ally of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, a determined opponent of the papal Council of Trent, and a committed enemy of the Spanish ambassador. Yet from early 1563 until late 1567 he was one of the leading promoters of a matrimonial alliance with the Catholic Archduke Charles of Austria, the third son of the Holy Roman Emperor. It was a project that was increasingly to arouse anxieties amongst the most ardent Protestants in England and the Calvinists in Europe. For Cecil, however, there seemed no contradiction or inconsistency in his political behaviour. He wanted Elizabeth to marry to produce an unchallenged Protestant heir, and the archduke was his candidate because in his view Charles was preferable in every way to Robert Dudley. The archduke’s religion was admittedly an inconvenience but to Cecil’s mind it posed much less of a threat to the security of the realm or the Protestant settlement than Elizabeth’s unmarried state. At the outset of the negotiations Cecil seemed unaware of any major religious incompatibilities or difficulties with the projected marriage. Emperor Ferdinand’s decision not to enforce all the Tridentine reforms, his eldest son Maximilian’s sympathy towards Lutheranism and Charles’s known toleration of Lutherans within his own territories caused him to believe that the Habsburgs were far more flexible in religion than was really the case.2 His mistake was all the more understandable given that the Imperial ambassador, Baron Breuner, had deliberately misrepresented Charles’s religious convictions during the 1559 negotiations. As Breuner explained to Ferdinand: ‘Had I expressly averred that my gracious master, the Archduke Charles, was still devoted to the Catholic religion and would ever remain so, the whole affair would have been abruptly terminated and all hopes cut off.’ Instead, he told the English that Charles ‘was born and brought up in the Catholic faith’ but he could not comment what his future intentions might be.3 Consequently until mid-1565 there was a strong belief in England that Charles would convert to
Protestantism immediately upon his marriage to the queen.4 Even after Cecil realised the strength of the archduke’s Catholicism, he still thought that the marriage would not endanger the English Church provided that Charles would agree to conform outwardly to the laws of the realm.5
