The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (9 page)

Elizabeth is acutely aware of the dangers of so much power being vested in a group of privy councillors; thus she manipulates them in a number of ways. She does not let any one man monopolise her use of patronage or control access to her presence. She plays one councillor off against another in a policy of ‘divide and rule’ – for instance, she encourages her favourite Robert Dudley to act as a foil to Sir William Cecil, her principal secretary, so that neither man can become too powerful. At times she acts without consulting the whole privy council. When she does not wish anyone to interfere with her Dutch policy in the 1580s, she does not share with her councillors the news she hears from her overseas representatives, nor does she reveal to them her response.
²³

Elizabeth uses her physical presence to demonstrate her royalty. She does this in all the usual places – such as her palaces and in parliament – but she also does it in public. She shows herself off in processions through the city of London, following the example of her half-sister Mary, thereby encouraging the adulation of the people.
²⁴
She demonstrates her royal status by summoning dignitaries to wait on her on specific occasions. Most famously, she goes on long progresses through the country. You will often see her staying in the great houses of courtiers, or travelling between them in long processions of riders, carriages, wagons and carts. Some claim that this is because she loves the countryside, or wants to save money by staying with other people; but these are whimsical explanations. She can see the countryside easily enough from most of her palaces. As for the expense, although these progresses do not cost the royal purse as much as they cost the men who entertain her majesty, they are not mere money-saving measures. The real reason
for her progresses is that she wants the people to see her. Although she never goes to the north or the south-west, where the pro-Catholic gentry are hostile, she uses her presence to reinforce her queenship and Englishness in the eyes of the people.

Elizabeth also governs through her control of money. In 1600 the royal estates yield £123,587. In addition she receives clerical levies and ‘first fruits’ – a tax of the whole first year’s income from an ecclesiastical position, payable within two years of the incumbent taking office. Then there is her ‘extraordinary’ income: money granted to her by parliament or due on customs and sales of assets. The whole royal revenue, including the receipts from the royal estates, therefore amounts to about £300,000.
²⁵
This sounds like a huge sum in an age when a master craftsman earns a shilling per day and a labourer just 4d – except that the queen has to pay for the entire government of the realm. More than one-third of the entire budget is spent on food for the royal household and the court, including stabling and provision for the horses. Wages and salaries of the royal officials amount to £73,167. Elizabeth’s personal jewels, clothes, coaches and barges cost a further £20,000. She gives away no less than £2,000 in alms, and another £4,000 in gifts to visitors and dignitaries. It is estimated that her processions, shows, pageants and triumphs cost £5,000 per annum, and maintenance of the royal castles, palaces, houses and ships requires a further £50,000.
²⁶
On top of all this there is the cost of war. When you consider that the war in Ireland in the years 1599–1603 costs £1.131 million, you can see that it is very difficult to make ends meet. But Elizabeth manages her budgets so well that the national debt is a mere £300,000 when she dies.
²⁷

As mentioned above, Elizabeth is no great fan of parliament. She cannot control the elections of MPs and so it is in parliament that she has to face her largest body of critics. Consequently she only summons parliament ten times in the course of her forty-five-year reign (most monarchs before her summoned one a year). However, although she cannot control who is elected, she can control almost everything else. She addresses MPs directly, with great effect. She stipulates what parliament may and may not discuss, and bans an MP from the House of Commons for introducing legislation that is not to her liking.
²⁸
She influences MPs individually by threatening to withhold appointments and patronage. She appoints the Speaker of the House of Commons, and through him controls the debates.
And if she so wishes, she can simply dismiss parliament. Although in theory the queen runs the country in collaboration with the privy council and parliament, in reality it is governed in line with Elizabeth’s wishes.

THE NOBILITY

In the Middle Ages kings constantly had to watch out for great lords waiting in the wings. These could be the king’s own cousins; sometimes they even were his brothers or sons. Elizabeth does not have this problem. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had no brothers or cousins. He had just two daughters and one surviving son, Henry VIII, who in turn sired two daughters and one legitimate son, Edward VI. As the last surviving child of Henry VIII, Elizabeth is in the extremely fortunate position that she does not have to contend with powerful royal dukes. There is no obvious heir champing at the bit – and that is just how she wants things to remain.
²⁹
She consistently refuses to name a successor, even when parliament demands that she does so. In her first parliament she declares that she will die a virgin and, despite being tempted on more than one occasion to change her mind, she remains unmarried. She knows that, if she were to acknowledge her eldest aunt’s granddaughter, Mary, the Catholic queen of Scots, as her heir, she would only make herself a bigger target for Catholic assassins. When asked to declare her will on the succession, she responds: ‘Do you think I could love my own winding sheet?’ As for her other cousins, she has no qualms about locking up Lady Catherine Grey, as noted above.

Elizabeth has very few over-mighty lords to deal with too. After the Catholic duke of Norfolk is executed for treason in June 1572 (for his part in the Ridolfi Plot), there are no more dukes in England. Like her grandfather Henry VII, Elizabeth has a policy of not creating any new marquesses or viscounts, and she creates very few barons and even fewer earls. The reason is to limit the power of her subjects and thus strengthen the authority of her government. Even the bishops, who used to exercise political opposition to kings in the old days, are politically weak. They are no longer servants of the Roman Church, independent of the king of England, but serve the monarch in her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Rather than
challenging the queen, they find themselves having to preach ‘the doctrine of the godly prince’ – or, in this case, the godly princess.
³⁰
Elizabethan England is thus devoid of private armies, royal dukes and political bishops. Those considering revolt against Elizabeth have no one to turn to for leadership.

Elizabeth’s careful policy means that there is something of a scarcity of noblemen in England. After the execution of the duke of Norfolk, the highest rank in the peerage is that of marquess. Never a common title, there is just one in 1600 (the marquess of Winchester), plus a dowager marchioness (the widow of the last marquess of Northampton, William Parr, who dies in 1571). Third-highest in rank are the earls; there are eighteen of these in 1600.
³¹
Next come the two viscounts, Lord Montagu and Lord Howard of Bindon.
³²
The lowest rank is the baronage: there are thirty-seven barons in all.
³³
In total, just fifty-seven peers are summoned to parliament at the start of the reign and fifty-five at the end (underage heirs are not summoned). Collectively they are all peers of the realm, but the equality suggested by that word ‘peers’ is misleading. Even within each class of title there is a hierarchy, the older titles taking precedence over the more recent ones. There are huge discrepancies of wealth too. Only two or three lords have an income of £10,000 per year; most have over £800, some as little as £300.
³⁴
Thomas Wilson estimates that the earls and the marquess have an average income of £5,000 per year and the barons and viscounts about £3,000.
³⁵
As you will see, the very idea of ‘equality’ is something that Elizabethans reckon only relates to men when they stand before God on Judgement Day. Here on Earth, there is no such thing.

Income does not equate to spending power – not when you are a peer of the realm and can borrow money. Take the example of the young Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland. His father, the eighth earl, has a good income in 1582 (£4,595), but after he dies in 1585 a large part of the estate is apportioned to provide an income for his widow, the dowager countess, leaving young Henry with ‘just’ £3,363. The problem is that Henry proceeds to spend twice that. In his own words: ‘Hawks, hounds, horses, dice, cards, apparel, mistresses; all other riot of expense that follow them were so far afoot and in excess as I knew not where I was or what I did until, out of my means of £3,000 yearly, I had made shift in one year and a half to be £15,000 in debt.’
³⁶
Fortunately for Henry, one of the privileges of being a
nobleman is that he cannot be imprisoned for debt, so he is at least clear of that worry. Other privileges include the right to be judged by his peers, paying very little tax and freedom from torture.
³⁷
Having said this, with Elizabeth on the throne, it is probably best not to rely upon these privileges too heavily. The queen is not like her tyrannical father, Henry VIII, who would get around a lord’s right to be judged by his peers by having the offending man summarily executed; however, not many courts will defy the queen’s wrath. Several peers of the realm spend years imprisoned in the Tower before they even come to trial.

THE GENTRY

Rich and privileged as the nobility are, it is the gentry who own and run England. They are the 500 or so knights with country estates, and approximately 15,000 other gentlemen with an income from land sufficient to guarantee they do not have to work for a living.
³⁸
In this group you have the greatest disparities of wealth – from knights as rich as Sir John Harington (later Lord Harington) and Sir Nicholas Bacon, with incomes of £4,000 or more per year, down to local gentlemen with a thousand acres let out to tenant farmers for not much more than £100. Thomas Wilson declares that to be a gentleman one should have £500 per year in the south of England and £300 in the north.
³⁹
In reality, incomes of more than £200 are rare among the northern gentry. Also, many men who describe themselves as gentlemen have much less than this. When John Webbe, ‘gentleman’ of Frittenden, Kent, dies in 1582 he leaves moveable goods to the value of just £65.
⁴⁰
John Love, ‘gentleman’ of Cranbrook, leaves his widow just £32 of moveable goods and about the same amount in debts in 1590; and Jerman Webbe, ‘gentleman’ of Pluckley, leaves just £27 of goods and £29 of debts in 1593.
⁴¹
Half of all the local ‘gentlemen’ dying in Kent in Elizabeth’s reign leave goods worth less than £167.
⁴²
The relationship of wealth to status is thus complicated. Some people see them as completely separate issues: they think that having a coat of arms is the crucial factor denoting gentlemanly status, armigerous men being descended from knights and thus having the right to call themselves ‘esquire’. It is not surprising, therefore, that families in every county are claiming
coats of arms, whether they truly are entitled to them or not. Heralds (officers of the College of Arms) make regular visitations of the counties to examine these claims. Talk about hierarchy: at a time when there is no national police force, there is a national organisation devoted to policing the right to bear a coat of arms.

You begin to get a sense of the extent of the gentry’s dominant position when you compare their total wealth with that of the nobility. All the earls, barons and other lords have a combined income of approximately £220,000 in 1600. The income of the gentry is at least ten times as much, if not twenty times. And wealth is not the limit of their influence. They control the rural population through governing them, employing them as servants, and directing the majority who are their tenants. There are 1,400 Justices of the Peace (JPs), who sit as magistrates in each county, and all are drawn from the ranks of the gentry. In the absence of a standing army, the defence of the realm is overseen by the Deputy Lieutenants of each county, who have authority over the ‘trained bands’ or militia. Again, these men are drawn from the ranks of the gentry. In Sir Walter Raleigh’s words, ‘The gentry are the garrisons of good order throughout the realm.’ Small wonder, then, that Elizabeth takes such care over the lists of Justices of the Peace. She pores over them and pretends she is personally acquainted with every gentleman in the kingdom. Some courtiers snigger at this behind her back; but, in truth, she does know a great number of them because of her progresses through the country. Displease the queen and you can bet she will remember your name when it comes to scrutinising those lists.

The other area in which the gentry have a large say in running the country is in parliament. They exert influence in two ways. First, they take a major role in electing the seventy-four ‘knights of the shire’ who form approximately one-third of the House of Commons. Second, a large number of gentlemen are sent to parliament as representatives of boroughs, through the patronage of wealthy landowners. The duke of Norfolk, for instance, sends eighteen gentlemen to the House of Commons as representatives of boroughs where he is the major landowner.
⁴³
The gentry’s representation extends to urban areas too. You might have thought that the larger towns would want to be represented by merchants and traders, but often a community will choose a member of the gentry, on the basis that he will have more influence over his fellow MPs.