The Tudors (68 page)

All we will ever know is what the people attending her take the trouble to record. That is not much, and it has no certain meaning, but it does not suggest a spirit at peace. When begged to get some sleep by the faithful old Earl of Nottingham, longtime commander of her navy and husband of another of her Boleyn cousins, Elizabeth answers that if he saw what she sees when she closes her eyes he would suggest no such thing.

She is a pathetic spectacle, all the more so because throughout her reign she has been vain to the point of childishness. Almost inevitably for someone who has lived this long at a time when dentistry is still little more than a sideline for barbers, she has lost a good many of her teeth and those remaining are mostly black. For forty years she has been concealing the loss of hair suffered when smallpox nearly carried her away, but now, with the end obviously at hand, it is pointless to worry about whether the latest wig fits properly or if it is even in place. As for hygiene, suffice it to recall that bathing is considered unhealthful in the sixteenth century, that it is scarcely practical even for royalty during the dark chill months of an English winter innocent of central heating, and that winter was not over when the queen began refusing to have herself attended to even in accordance with the minimal standards of the time.

If her last moments taste of bitterness, nothing could be more understandable. From 1603 she looks back on eighteen years of uninterrupted
foreign war, and on an interminable domestic bloodletting rooted first in the revolution begun by her father and then in the decisions that she herself took in attempting to manage her father’s (and her brother’s, and her sister’s) legacy. Her wars have accomplished little, almost nothing on the whole, and they have laid up much trouble for her successors. Unlike her father’s wars they were undertaken not in pursuit of glory but because she believed they would enhance her security, but like her father’s they have been financial catastrophes. At a time when the Crown’s ordinary revenues still total little more than £200,000 annually, England since 1585 has spent some £2 million to keep a war of rebellion going in the Netherlands, even more to suppress rebellion in Ireland, and untold hundreds of thousands in France and on the high seas. The question of whether all this trouble was avoidable has no simple answer, but there can be little doubt that much and perhaps most of it need never have happened. Even the most glorious event of the reign, the defeat of the Armada in 1588 (a victory owed as much to the weather as to England’s doughty sea dogs), drained the treasury of £160,000 and would never have been necessary if Elizabeth had not persisted in goading her onetime protector and brother-in-law King Philip of Spain until finally his forbearance was exhausted.

The effects on the people of England have been very real and painful. Nearly two decades of war have seriously disrupted trade, especially with the crucial Low Countries markets, and thereby given rise to serious unemployment. Ferocious inflation has combined with falling wages to drive living standards to their lowest level since the mid-1300s. This has led to food riots and crimes of desperation, and then to an almost vicious crackdown by frightened local authorities: in 1598 one hundred and twenty-five sentences of death were pronounced by courts of assize in the London area, nearly double the number of just two years earlier. Repeated crop failures have made everything worse. Anyone disposed to believe that nations prosper or suffer according to whether their rulers enjoy divine favor—and such ideas remain common at the dawn of the seventeenth century—would find it easy to argue that heaven has turned its back on Elizabeth Tudor. She is in every way a spent force, and her people are ready to be quit of her.

To a remarkable extent—one all the more striking in light of how deeply the two sisters always differed, and the determination of the
younger to set herself apart from the elder—Elizabeth’s reign has followed much the same trajectory as Mary’s. Both, upon becoming queen, were welcomed enthusiastically by most of their subjects, England being quite as weary of Mary and her Spanish connection in 1558 as it had been of Edward’s evangelical regime in 1553. Both went on to enjoy a middle period of popularity and success (Mary’s was measured in months, Elizabeth’s in decades), and both ended in exhaustion and disillusion (the dark times having lasted well over ten years in Elizabeth’s case). If Mary was fated to become a largely forgotten figure, remembered as “bloody” when she was remembered at all, and if Elizabeth by contrast came to be celebrated as one of history’s heroines, the difference is largely traceable to factors unconnected to the character of their reigns. No historian today could dispute that Mary was a capable and conscientious queen, or argue that her government killed or tortured or imprisoned as many people as Elizabeth’s. She devoted herself to what she perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be the interests of her subjects, and she might have achieved her objectives if she had reigned even half as long as Elizabeth. The process of winnowing the facts has taken four centuries, but it is clear by now that Mary was the more ambitious of the sisters—that she aspired to much more than her own survival, certainly—and that the reason for her failure may be nothing more mysterious (or shameful) than the fact that at the time of her death she was twenty-eight years younger than Elizabeth would be at hers.

This is not to say, of course, that Elizabeth accomplished nothing. She achieved two very big things that had eluded her father, brother, and sister: a settlement of the question of what England’s established church should be and do and believe, and a degree of internal stability not seen in a very long time. From the end of the 1560s until the end of Elizabeth’s life, and then for decades beyond that, not a single armed rebellion of even marginal seriousness occurred in England or Wales. Such a protracted period of peace had not been seen since before the Wars of the Roses, and if Elizabeth and her ministers don’t deserve credit for that then no one in history should be given credit for anything. Likewise, by 1603 everyone understood what acceptance of the Church of England entailed, and most of the population was conforming. Where persecution was concerned, Elizabeth had differed from her brother and sister only in (much like her father) striking out in two directions simultaneously,
both at the shrinking part of the population that still clung to the old religion and at the growing part that demanded rejection of every vestige of the pre-Reformation church. If she continued to meet resistance from both directions, after the first decade of her reign it posed no serious threat.

Still, both the settlement and the stability were bought at a price that Elizabeth herself was careful to avoid paying. Just below the surface of the uniformity her government imposed, England continued to be troubled by the religious conflicts that her father had first put in motion. The actions she took in managing those conflicts are unintelligible unless seen as part of Elizabeth’s obsessive focus on her own survival. She declined to address virtually any question of religion that could be passed along to posterity, and to avoid trouble in the near term she ignored growing pressure for adjustments of the religious arrangements put in place at the start of her reign. The bill would come due two generations on, with an explosion that not only permanently weakened the monarchy but actually, for a time, obliterated it. If that was at least partly Elizabeth’s doing, however, she took pains to keep it from being her problem.

The England whose queen Elizabeth became late in 1558 was probably not yet halfway along the road from being one of the most devotedly Catholic nations in all of Christendom to one of the most ferociously anti-Catholic. Though of course we have no data on popular religious sentiment as of the start of her reign, much if not most of the population unquestionably continued to be attached to traditional forms of worship, though not to the notion of papal supremacy. Protestantism of the severely Calvinist variety that the evangelicals had attempted to establish during Edward’s reign, by contrast, remained a minority movement even in London and those other places (Cambridge University and various seaports, most notably) where it had struck the deepest roots. Despite the setbacks of the Marian interlude, the evangelical movement remained fervently militant and continued to attract adherents who felt impelled to propound their beliefs in writing and in the pulpit. It was becoming economically formidable as well, finding fertile recruiting ground among the mercantile families of London and other commercial centers as well as those that had risen to the top of the rural gentry thanks to the dispersal of church and Crown lands. Inevitably, the wealth of these rising classes was translating itself into political power.

The regime that Elizabeth inherited was Roman Catholic nevertheless, with the Marian state and church tightly intertwined. In a reversion to long-standing practice, Mary had chosen as her chancellors first Bishop Stephen Gardiner and then, after Gardiner died and Cardinal Pole begged off, Archbishop Nicholas Heath of York. Maintaining the status quo might seem to have been the path of least resistance for Elizabeth, especially as Mary’s arrangements were in no way objectionable to a majority of her subjects. Elizabeth herself had, albeit without great success, tried continually to convince her sister that she was a faithful daughter of Holy Mother Church. In fact, though, the choices facing Elizabeth when she became queen were not at all simple. Quite aside from her own convictions, she had compelling reasons, from the day of Mary’s death, to undertake the fourth religious revolution (or counterrevolution) to be visited upon England in the space of three decades. Practically all of her active political support lay on the Protestant side, and she had been careful to maintain contact with the evangelical community all through the years when many of its members were pretending, for the sake of their positions and possibly their lives, to be orthodox Catholics. She had gone to great lengths, always being as surreptitious as she could, to encourage the Protestants to see her as one of their own, which she undoubtedly was. The Protestants were given good reason to expect that as queen she was going to overturn the Catholic establishment; if she had ignored this hope the Protestants would have been justified in feeling betrayed, and Elizabeth might have found herself without any dependable base of support. To the Catholics, she had always been the bastard child of a schismatic king’s heretic concubine. Queen Mary herself suspected that Elizabeth was the illegitimate daughter not of Henry VIII but of Mark Smeaton, the court musician who had been among those executed on charges of adultery with Anne Boleyn. Certainly both England’s Catholics and Rome would have accepted Elizabeth as queen if she had left the Marian church in place—most of her Catholic subjects did so even after she set out to exterminate their church—but it is not difficult to understand why a wary new queen, taught in a hard school to be cautious about trusting anyone, had no interest in putting her fate in the hands of the Catholics.

What she
did
have in mind, at least at the opening of her reign, is not entirely clear. So many potent forces were in play, and in conflict, that it
has always been difficult to sort out how much of what happened accorded with Elizabeth’s own wishes and how much was imposed on her by circumstance. Essential as it was that she not fail the Protestants who had made her their champion and their hope, she also had to avoid alienating the still-powerful (and still-popular) Catholic party so completely as to provoke it into defiance. An exquisitely delicate balancing act was required, something similar to the one performed by the evangelicals just after the death of Henry VIII, and for an inexperienced monarch not yet twenty-five years old this was an imposing challenge. Elizabeth navigated her way through it with the skill of a master (there is no sure way of knowing, really, how much of “her” policy was actually the work of her canny secretary William Cecil and her other friends on the council), dashing no hopes while keeping everyone uncertain. In the beginning she placated the conservatives by punctiliously observing the established Catholic formalities, not interfering with the saying of mass even at court until a new Parliament could be summoned. Elizabeth herself attended Christmas mass at the end of 1558, some three weeks before her coronation, though when the celebrant followed an ancient practice that the Protestants had long condemned and elevated the consecrated communion host above his head, she exited the church in a theatrical flourish of indignation. She also refused to be escorted, in traditional fashion, by the Benedictine monks whom Mary had restored to residence at Westminster Abbey. In such ways she made it plain that she shared the evangelicals’ revulsion at papist “idolatry” and their scorn for monasticism. No one could doubt where her sympathies lay, but she shrouded her political intentions behind a cloud of ambiguity and left the conservatives with reason not to despair.

The coronation took place on January 15, 1559. Elizabeth spent £16,000 of Crown money on it, a stupendous amount, and the city fathers of London were induced to contribute similarly impressive sums. She was crowned by Owen Oglethorpe, a junior bishop from the distant and unimportant Diocese of Carlisle. He was the newest of Mary’s bishops, and though definitely a conservative, he had throughout his career shown a tendency to bend when put under pressure. Elizabeth chose him to do the honors at least in part because Pole of Canterbury was dead and Heath of York claimed to be too unwell to attend, but she may
also have been demonstrating her disdain for the whole Marian hierarchy and what it represented.

Weeks before the coronation, in an unmistakable sign of the direction of her thinking, Elizabeth had overhauled the Privy Council. Here she was dealing with real power, not symbolism, and everything she did must have been gratifying to the evangelical camp. Within hours, literally, of learning of Mary’s death, the new queen was summoning the council to meet and reshaping it by adding new members and removing more than she added. In short order it shrank from thirty members to nineteen: ten Henrician conservatives (men who accepted the royal supremacy but otherwise were inclined to traditional orthodoxy), nine evangelicals of an Edwardian-Calvinist stamp, no Roman Catholics, and remarkably, no clergy from any faction. The Protestants could take particular satisfaction in the appointment of Cecil as principal secretary, the position from which Thomas Cromwell had taken control of Henry VIII’s government many years before, and of Nicholas Bacon to replace Archbishop Heath as chancellor. Cecil and Bacon, married to sisters, were members of families that had been Tudor loyalists since the start of the dynasty (or even earlier: Cecil’s grandfather, when scarcely more than a boy, had joined the future Henry VII on his march to Bosworth Field). Both were ardent evangelicals whose careers had been in eclipse throughout the Marian years, though Cecil even more than Elizabeth had gone to almost ridiculous lengths to pretend to be a faithful Catholic, showily fingering rosary beads whenever he thought someone with access to the queen might be watching. Both would make plain that they regarded persecution of Catholics—even the torture of Catholics—a necessary means of purging the kingdom of superstition, sedition, and division.