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Glyn Parry
This article brings together scattered, but important, new evidence about foreign policy debates in and around the reconvened parliament of early 1576. It demonstrates that co-operative parliamentary management did not exclude principled political differences from the Commons, but nor were members of the Commons trying to ‘seize the initiative’ when they initiated foreign policy discussion. The queen and her privy council, for a variety of reasons, had initially sought parliamentary support for a foreign policy guided by religious solidarity rather than dynastic legitimacy, but when they belatedly abandoned this plan they underestimated the strength of the expectations they had raised. Some zealous protestant members of the Commons felt encouraged to believe that parliament would act as the great council of the realm, to be consulted over important matters of state, and especially whether Elizabeth should accept the recently-offered sovereignty of Holland and Zealand. The retreat from this position began with the arrival of Champagney, envoy of the Spanish viceroy in the Netherlands, Requesens. Champagney exploited the gap between Elizabeth's position and the committed protestants on her council, and especially Burghley's internal debate between his protestant idealism and his economic and strategic realism. Burghley's eventual withdrawal from the proposed arrangement to enlist virulently anti-catholic Commons' members in support of the ambitious foreign policy bitterly disappointed large sections of popular protestant opinion in the ‘public sphere’, who virulently attacked both Burghley and Elizabeth. This enabled conservatives to mount increasingly effective responses against both radical protestantism and its dangerous propensity for foreign entanglements.
