August 2008

Parish History Episode 88 - Gilpin Abroad

Bernard Gilpin missed all the excitement of the brief thirteen days’ reign of Queen Jane in 1553, and the short, decisive civil war between the forces of Queen Jane and Queen Mary, as he had left England at the start of the year, both “to travel abroad and to learn”, following the advice given to him by his great-uncle, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham (by now a prisoner in the Tower of London), and also to oversee the printing and publication of his great-uncle’s book on the Eucharist. He was to stay abroad for over three years, spending his time in Paris, where Tunstall’s book was to be published, and in Emden, in East Friesland (now in the extreme North-West corner of Germany), and in Ghent, Brussels, Louvain, Mechlin and Antwerp (all now cities of Belgium, but then part of the Spanish Netherlands).

The most important task undertaken by Gilpin on this tour was that of seeing his greatuncle’s book through the presses in Paris. The book, entitled “Concerning the Reality of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist”, was in Latin, and was aimed at influencing opinion among scholars, not among ordinary people. It is still extant, but has never, to my knowledge, been translated into English. Scholarly books attacking it appeared from time to time, right up until the Nineteenth Century.

As Protestant scholars have condemned it as “papistical”, and Catholic scholars have called it blasphemous and heretical, it may be that Tunstall got the balance just right. In the time of Queen Elizabeth I, some Catholics accused Gilpin of having tampered with the text of the manuscript before delivering it to the printer’s. He always vehemently denied it, and liked to quote a letter from his uncle, thanking him for the diligence with which he had overseen the printing of the work.

Also, while in Paris, Bernard Gilpin met once more his old Oxford friend, Tom Neal. Little else is known about his time in France, though a few edifying anecdotes are told about him, of the sort that are told about many saints.

Once the printing of Tunstall’s book was completed, Gilpin was free to travel and to study, but it would appear that, while he may have returned to Paris from time to time, the greater part of his three years’ sojourn on “the Continent” (1553-1556) was spent in Belgium, then firmly under Spanish rule. A lot of that time he seems to have been engaged in studying old texts in the libraries of the University of Louvain, in the province of Brabant, making his own mind up about the religious revolution which was convulsing Europe. In Mechlin he met up with his younger brother, George Gilpin, then apparently a student at Louvain. George probably threw himself much more deeply into the social life of Brabant than did Bernard, for George seems to have learned Dutch, and he later became Queen Elizabeth’s (unofficial) envoy to the Dutch rebels fighting against Spain.

Bernard Gilpin later wrote that he felt disgusted at the superstitious idolatry of the churches of Brabant, and other provinces of Belgium, under Spanish rule. He also found repulsive the brutal repression of heresy by the Spaniards, with regular burnings of wretches accused, perhaps rightly, of heretical beliefs and practices. It is probable that he made no claim to any priestly status while in Belgium, but passed as an English layman.

He was not, however, a refugee. He had left England before Queen Mary came to the Throne, and he returned while she was still reigning. His only contact with the flood of English refugees, who would soon be fleeing from Queen Mary’s persecutions, was on his visit to Emden, where he mingled with a congregation of English exiles, and probably enjoyed hearing worship offered once again in his own language.

Those exiles had chosen to settle in Emden, partly because of the Count’s generosity towards asylum-seekers, but also perhaps because the closeness of Frisian to the English language made converse between native and stranger relatively easy. However, of the large numbers of English Protestants who fled abroad during Queen Mary’s reign, few lingered in the low lands, opposite the English coasts, bordering the Channel and the North Sea. Most of them pushed on inland, either to the great commercial city of Frankfurt am Main (still today the banking capital of Germany) where merchants and refugees from all over Europe mingled, or still further inland, to the upland cities of Strassburg, Zürich or Geneva, where they hoped to find godly commonwealths, in which they believed purer forms of Christianity had taken root.

Gilpin remained, however, in the low lands, mostly in Northern France and in Belgium. His movements between these two bases were probably complicated by the fact that, for the whole of the time he spent on the Continent, there was war between France and Spain, and the latter Kingdom then ruled over Belgium. Indeed, for the second half of the Sixteenth Century, European politics were to be altered through the temporary rise of Spain, hitherto a land on the fringe of Europe, to pre-eminence, during the long reign of King Felipe II, who was also, for a while, to be the husband of Mary I, Queen of England. We have hardly mentioned England’s relationships with the rest of Europe, since the defeat of our armies by Joan of Arc in the 1420’s. However, the political situation had changed out of all recognition since then, both because of wars fought to sustain “the Balance of Power” - that is, to prevent any one state from becoming dominant in Europe - and because of the formation of new states, largely through dynastic marriages. It will be necessary to recapitulate a bit.

The Dauphin whom Joan of Arc had dragged from Bourges to claim his father’s throne, and whom she had had crowned at Reims, and had then presented him with Paris, is known as King Charles VII of France. After Joan’s capture and execution, he completed her work by expelling the English from all of France, save only Calais and the Channel Islands. His son, Louis XI, went on to build up the strongest professional army in Europe, which he used chiefly to subdue some of the great Duchies which had broken away from Royal control during the English wars.

Chief of these was Burgundy, which had come to rule over an area embracing the modern Low Countries (the Netherlands) and some neighbouring areas; and also much of what is now North-Eastern France; and also part of what is now Switzerland. The French and Swiss between them defeated the Burgundians, and killed the Duke in 1477. The allies each took part of his territories for themselves, the French gaining all the heartland of Burgundy, except for a small area round Besançon, which became known as the Free County (of Burgundy). This Free County, together with the Netherlands, passed to the Duke’s daughter, Marie, who was to marry the Kaiser Maximilian I.

Louis XI died in 1483, and was succeeded by his son, Charles VIII, a king who dreamed of winning martial glory in Italy. His invasion of that peninsula took him to Naples in 1494, but that campaign, as has been mentioned, petered out because of the outbreak of a new plague, syphilis, apparently imported from the New World, just discovered by Columbus. However, later campaigns brought the French for a while to a dominant position in Italy (which was then, of course, not a nation under one king, but rather a collection of disparate duchies and republics, with large areas ruled directly by the Pope).

Most of these Italian states attempted to resist the French, but the invaders would eventually be expelled, not by Italian courage, but by the armies of Spain, which now became the dominant power in the Italian peninsula. If Italy was not yet a nation united under one Throne, Spain itself was a very new creation. Dynastic marriages were, at this time, bringing into existence a number of new unions. Poland and Lithuania joined together as a United Kingdom in 1477, and so in 1490 did Hungary and Bohemia. In Western Europe similarly, the Crowns of Castille and Aragon were united in 1479, through the marriage of Queen Isabella of the former country to King Fernando II of Aragon. The united Kingdom became known as Spain, after the Roman name for the Peninsula, and it was to absorb Granada, the last Moorish Emirate on the European side of the Mediterranean, in 1492 (the same year that Columbus discovered his New World across the Atlantic, a discovery which was to lead to the formation of a new Spanish Empire in the Americas).

After that, in 1512, this new Kingdom of Spain would absorb the Basque Kingdom of Navarre, thus almost completing the unification of the Peninsula; and much later, in 1580, that unification would appear to have been completed by the annexation of the Kingdom of Portugal (though Portugal would regain its independence eighty years later). It was the power and wealth of this new Spanish kingdom that frustrated France’s ambitions to conquer the Italian peninsula. The Union of the Crowns of Castille and Aragon proved permanent, and when Isabella died in 1504, Fernando continued to reign as king in both countries. When Fernando in his turn died in 1516, the Crown should have been inherited by their daughter Joanna, but she was insane and unfit to rule, and her husband, Felipe, had died ten years earlier, in 1506. The Crown of Spain therefore passed to Carlos, the son of Felipe and Joanna.

The deceased Felipe, however, had not only been the husband of the mad Joanna. He was also the son of the Kaiser Maximilian I and Marie of Burgundy. When Maximilian died in 1519, his lands and titles thus passed to his grandson Carlos (Felipe having predeceased his father). Thus the man who had ruled for three years (since 1516) as Carlos I of Spain now (1519) became Kaiser Karl V, the man who, as we have seen, was to preside unwillingly over the course of the Reformation in Germany.

This man, Karl V, now reigned over the greatest collection of territories to be united under one ruler since the time of Charlemagne. From each of his grandparents he had inherited a mighty kingdom. From Maximilian there came the Hapsburg lands at the Eastern end of the Alps (the lands now known as Austria and Slovenia), and also the Imperial title, giving him nominal overlordship over all the German lands. From Marie there came the Burgundian lands, that is the Netherlands (in modern terms, Holland, Belgium, and a bit more) together with the Free County. From Fernando came Aragon, and from Isabella came Castille.

To these were to be added the Crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, when the King of that Dual Monarchy was slain in a Turkish invasion (the Turks had by now conquered the Balkans, and were invading Central Europe). The Estates of both kingdoms invited Karl to be their monarch, to save them from the Turks. He did manage to save Bohemia, but the Plains of Hungary were soon overrun by the Turks, and only the mountainous fringes (modern Slovakia and Croatia) were saved from the invaders.

Such a combination of Crowns as Karl had assembled threatened the Balance of Power much more thoroughly than did the armies of Valois France, and so the Italian Wars turned into the Hapsburg-Valois Wars, in which the French fought to save themselves from being enveloped within the Hapsburg realms - Castille and Aragon in the South, the Netherlands in the North, and the Holy Roman Empire in the East. The Spaniards, who formed the backbone of the Hapsburg armies, were on the whole more successful than the French, and they gained control of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia in Southern Italy, and the Duchy of Milan in the North (So much for any hopes of Italian freedom!), and they also indirectly controlled many other Italian states.

Some of these states the Spaniards needed to take control of, in order to safeguard their lines of communication, particularly between their homeland and the Netherlands. One such state was the Republic of Genoa (which owned Corsica), as otherwise Spain could not have kept contact with Milan; another was the Duchy of Savoy, which then embraced, in addition to Piedmont and modern Savoy, areas of France as far North as Bourg. Bourg abutted on the Free County, and that territory was separated from the Netherlands by the Duchy of Lorraine.

By exercising similar influence over Lorraine to that which they held in Savoy and Genoa (by bribing statesmen, churchmen and dukes, rather than by direct threat of force), the Spaniards thus controlled a belt of territory running along France’s Eastern frontier, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Ardennes in Belgium, and, in the event of war, France faced Spanish armies along all its borders, from Biarritz and the Pyrenees in the South-West to Artois and Picardy in the North.

If the Spaniards could obtain a similar control over England, then, it would appear, France would face enemies on all sides, and would have to accept Spanish hegemony in Europe. The betrothal of the princess known as Catherine of Aragon to, first, one son of King Henry VII, and then to another son, was perhaps the beginning of an attempt at a matrimonial alliance, but it all went wrong when Henry VIII grew tired of Catherine.

Thereafter, Spanish diplomats attempted to look after the interests of the divorced Queen Catherine, and of her daughter, Mary; and, as we have seen, they gave moral support to Mary, when she found herself at war with Queen Jane, and also encouragement to England to revert to her traditional Catholic heritage. But in the long run, perhaps, too much Spanish support for the Old Faith would make Catholicism appear vaguely unpatriotic to the English.

But, for the moment, Spanish diplomatic support for Queen Mary had helped to ensure that Queen’s easy victory over Jane. And Spain and England were soon to come together in a matrimonial alliance, which, if Queen Mary had been able to seal that alliance with the birth of a baby, might well have led to a double victory for Spain. France would have been completely surrounded, and rendered almost impotent; and England would have been saved from Protestantism.

But it was not to be. And Bernard Gilpin, the one-time Catholic champion, still at this time resident on the Continent, was to be one of the agents, who would, at least in some dales of Northumberland, save the Protestant cause.

Dick Toy

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