Part 1 of 2
IN 1568, King Philip II of Spain borrowed £400,000 from Genoa to fund his government of the Spanish Netherlands, and help the Governor, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba, to reinvigorate the Inquisition there.* But as Philip’s ships entered the Channel, French Huguenots came to the aid of their Dutch neighbours and drove the ships to port in England. Elizabeth impounded Philip’s gold for her Treasury, the latest in a series of provocations by the English Queen, frustrating Philip, Charles IX in France, and Pope Pius V in Italy, in their bid to create a united, Catholic Europe.
So in 1570, Pope Pius took steps. A year before, the Northern Earls’ Rising had failed to unseat Elizabeth and put her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, on her throne.* Pius now wrote to English Catholics giving them carte blanche to rebel against Elizabeth,* and engaged his trusted agent Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine banker with connections throughout Europe, to finish what the earls had started.
The Spanish Netherlands was formed in 1556 when Philip II of Spain, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, inherited the government of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, which had been in the Hapsburg family since 1482. In 1581, a revolt led to the breakaway Dutch Republic to the east under William, Prince of Orange, with its capital at Amsterdam (William’s great-grandson became King William III of England in 1689). The capital of the Spanish Netherlands was Brussels.
Mary Queen of Scots (Elizabeth’s cousin) was currently under house arrest in England, having been turned out of Scotland in 1567 in favour of her infant son James VI following one too many scandals. See Mary Queen of Scots. Mary and Elizabeth were cousins once removed: Elizabeth was Henry VIII’s daughter, and Mary was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret.
The Bull ‘Regnans in Excelsis’ of April 27th, 1570, excommunicated Elizabeth and anyone loyal to her, declared that she was not the rightful ruler of England, and commanded ‘Do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws’. It was a blessing on revolution. For the full text, see Papal Encyclicals Online.
Précis
During the reign of Elizabeth I, Catholic France and Spain pursued a particularly severe crackdown on religious dissent. Elizabeth harboured many victims in England, and in 1570 Pope Pius V and the King of Spain conspired to have her deposed and replaced with her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, engaging banker Roberto Ridolfi as their chief agent. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
RIDOLFI’s brief, assisted by smooth-talking diplomat Giovan Luigi ‘Chiappino’ Vitelli, was to coordinate discontent among English courtiers with a planned invasion from Philip’s Spanish Netherlands, led by the Duke of Alba. Simultaneously, Elizabeth was to be arrested and imprisoned, or worse; but her cousin Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, jailed for his part in the Northern Rebellion, would be Queen Mary’s consort.* England would become a Catholic country again, under Spain’s inquisitorial eye.
For a secret agent, however, Ridolfi was altogether too much of a chatterbox. His boasts to the horrified Duke of Tuscany were instantly relayed to Elizabeth, though they only confirmed what her own spies had already wormed out of the Spanish ambassador. The plot was uncovered, and Howard was executed; Ridolfi was conveniently out of the country. Yet neither King Philip nor Pius’s successors were discouraged, and the Continental conspirators were soon devising another, still bolder plan to bring England into European conformity: the ‘Grand and Felicitous’ Spanish Armada.*
Mary was already married to James Hepburn, her third husband, currently imprisoned for conspiring with Mary to murder her second husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. See Mary Queen of Scots. Mary’s first husband, King Francis II of France, had died of natural causes. Norfolk himself had been married and widowed three times. For the sake of the bigger picture, the Pope had declared himself ready to overlook all this, and even the fact that Norfolk was technically a Protestant.
See The Spanish Armada.
Précis
The Ridolfi Plot centred on getting English subjects to kidnap Queen Elizabeth, while Spain invaded from the Netherlands. However, the plot was discovered after Roberto Ridolfi let his tongue run away with him. The failure of the plot did not, however, mean the end of attempts by the European powers to remove Elizabeth. (53 / 60 words)