only one during the reign of Elizabeth. Had it taken place nineteen years later, or had the Spanish Armada arrived nineteen years earlier, the co-ordination of internal and external threats might have proven insoluble for the Elizabethan regime, which was absolutist in its ideology but quite limited in its actual means. Indeed, Spanish money and promises of foreign Catholic intervention played a part in encouraging the plotters to rise--though in the event, the Spanish had written off the rising before it occured, and offered it no support.
Because of the lack of effective foreign support, and on account of its swift collapse, the rising of 1569 has been largely relegated to a minor part in Elizabethan history. One recent political biography of Elizabeth I, for example, Elizabeth I: The Shrewdness of Virtue, by Jasper Ridley, devotes less than one full page to the event. The intent of this present study is not to offer a more detailed account of the events of the rising and its suppression, but rather to inquire into the causes of its failure though an examination of the actions, motivations, and characters of the principle players in the rising and the events that surrounded it; and to draw from that discussion some picture of the place of the rising and its failure in Elizabethan history.
The Northern rising of 1569 was a single dramatic episode in a sequence of events that proceeded along several distinct but intertwining threads. One began with the return of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to her own kingdom several years previously, and proceeded through the collapse of her rule in Scotland, her exile to and imprisonment in England, and her emergence as a figurehead around which Catholic opposition to Elizabeth and her policies could coalesce. Another began with the appearance of several Spanish treasure ships in southern English harbors, the siezure of their cargoes by the English government, and the sharp deterio...