Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (37 page)

Despite the tone of this letter, Elizabeth had to be careful not to alienate Henri while ensuring, so far as she could, that he did not waste the support she offered him. In the late summer of 1594 more troops were sent to Brittany on the understanding that a much larger French force would be assembled and that this joint army would expel the Spanish from the province and move on—but no further into France than Normandy.
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In fact, fewer French troops than Henri promised eventually arrived and Sir John Norris had to act virtually in defiance of his French counterpart, the Marshall d’Aumont, to clear the Spanish from the Crozon peninsula in order to secure the port of Brest. English troops were then withdrawn from Brittany in February 1595 in order to fight in Ireland just after Henri had declared open war against Spain in January.25

The withdrawal of Elizabeth’s troops at such a crucial moment was deeply resented by Henri but it was precipitated by the Irish emergency. It was also, in its way, simply a variant of the traditional Tudor monarchs’ response to French kings indifferent to their demands. Whereas Henry VII and Henry VIII had threatened or actually sent troops to France in order to compel French attention, Elizabeth withdrew hers to similar effect. She explained her present needs and assured Henri of her continuing goodwill but insisted that future assistance would be on her own strategic terms such that “if the enemy shall seek to devour any place of his (Henri’s) where we may have access by sea, he shall find both help and present assistance and neither charge nor danger shall plead for our excuse.”26

Elizabeth’s action does seem to have jolted Henri out of his hitherto benign but rather patronizing attitude toward her. In December 1595, she sent Sir Henry Unton as resident ambassador and with his appointment the rhetoric and ritual of Anglo-French dealings changed register once again to reinforce the message that Elizabeth had to be taken seriously. His instructions emphasized his status as a knight, a gentleman, and a resident ambassador.
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In his background and demeanor Unton, an adherent of the earl of Essex, recalled the soldier-ambassadors of an earlier generation, a fact Henri himself acknowledged—“reputing me,” as Unton reported, “one of his soldiers of the old sort.” Unton was greeted effusively by the king at Coucy-le-Château on February 13, 1596. He reported that Henri was “much conceited of the cause of my coming and very inquisitive of the time of my stay.”
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Unton’s formal discussions with the French royal council about a new alliance went nowhere but Henri himself showed the ambassador every courtesy, walking with him in the royal gardens and hunting with him. This kind of politically significant personal interaction would have been familiar to Unton’s predecessors in the 1520s and 1530s and, incidentally, to his French contemporaries in England entertained by Elizabeth. Such treatment allowed Henri to express esteem for his “well-loved sister,” to assert his own honor and reliability as a prince while simultaneously distancing himself from the intransigence of his councilors who were defending his interests.

Despite his bluff, soldierly persona, Unton was well aware that there was a “courtierly” aspect of his role and that, on occasions, it demanded involvement in the kind of royal “person-to-person” representation familiar to an earlier generation of ambassadors.
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In February 1596 he reported to Elizabeth that during one of his long audiences with Henri, the king suddenly summoned his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées and introduced her to the ambassador. Unton dispraised her to Elizabeth as being not very fair at all and reputedly rather stupid. Henri had insisted that Unton kiss her, which the ambassador did—more from gallantry than inclination, he tactfully informed Elizabeth.
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Later, when Henri had invited him to the royal bedchamber, Henri asked Unton how he liked Gabrielle. Unton said he would prefer to praise his own far more beautiful mistress and intimated that he had on him a picture of her. From other references in his correspondence, it is clear that this was a cameo portrait of Elizabeth apparently intended for the king’s sister. Henri immediately demanded to see it and Unton complied. Gazing intently on the portrait, the king admitted that Unton indeed had the fairer mistress. The king then kissed the portrait two or three times as Unton held it. “Then,” reported Unton, “he snatched at it, to wring it out of my hand. In the end with some kind of contention, he took it from me.”
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Henri later wrote asking Elizabeth’s forgiveness for taking the picture, assuring her that his esteem for her had prompted him.32

This coup de théâtre was intended to persuade the ambassador, and the queen to whom he knew his gesture would be reported, of his own chivalrous and honorable regard for her. More interesting perhaps is Unton’s self-conscious decision to communicate this curious episode to Elizabeth. He excused himself for mixing “toyes” with serious matters and said nothing whatsoever about it in a letter written to Burghley the same day. Unton evidently appreciated the importance of personal interactions between sovereigns and saw how they might be used to evade, subvert, or reinforce the conduct of formal relations between their governments. Unton may also have been trying to flatter Elizabeth into a more sympathetic attitude toward Henri. Paul Hammer has suggested that like Essex, his patron, Unton favored greater action on Henri’s behalf in the face of Burghley’s opposition. His description of this encounter is certainly framed by dire warnings of what Henri might do if Elizabeth refused further assistance.33 The episode was essentially a courtly game in which Elizabeth’s active power was recognized through her being cast as the idealized love-object of a warrior prince and so, in a highly romanticized and gender-adjusted way, the episode looks back to an earlier tradition of Anglo-French chivalric interchanges intended to affirm personal alliance and interdependence.

Sir Henry Unton died in France on March 23, 1596 after suffering a short but violent fever, and Calais was suddenly besieged by a Spanish army under the Cardinal-Archduke Albert, provoking exactly those circumstances in which Elizabeth had recently declared that she would assist Henri. She did begin preparations, committed to the earl of Essex, but then she tried to bargain or bully Henri into accepting English control of Calais as the price of her assistance. Faced with a point-blank refusal of this suggestion, Elizabeth then hesitated in a way that drove even the experienced Burghley to distraction and Calais fell to the Spanish on April 17. Henri, of course, blamed Elizabeth for the loss of the city and indeed it was not her finest hour as military commander.34

In the aftermath of the Calais debacle Elizabeth moved to patch up relations, responding favorably to new French overtures for an alliance, once again using a personal, chivalrous gesture. In May a mutual defensive league was agreed at Greenwich with a secret subsidiary agreement that limited English assistance to 2,000 men to garrison Boulogne and Montreuil or to serve Henri only when he was in Picardy.
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Elizabeth formally promised more troops but, with the Irish rebellion in progress, knew she could spare none. The new alliance was ratified by Elizabeth in August and formally sworn on September 8 at Greenwich. It was sealed by the conferral upon Henri of the Order of the Garter, to which he had been nominated as early as April 1590. At Rouen on October 10, 1596, the earl of Shrewsbury invested Henri with the insignia of the order and with it a statement from Elizabeth about the ancient standing of the Garter and how she, like her predecessors, bestowed it only upon persons dearest to her and of the highest estate.
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Had Elizabeth been a male sovereign there might well have been a mutual exchange of orders as there had been in 1527 when Henry and François sealed their alliance. The documents of 1596 certainly recalled those of 1527 in their splendor.
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The conferral of the Garter and with it news of Essex’s successful attack on Cadiz that summer were designed primarily to reassert Elizabeth’s reputation as a willing and worthwhile ally.

Shortly afterward, 2,000 troops were dispatched to France under Sir Thomas Baskerville. They were used in the fight to regain Amiens, suddenly lost to the Spanish in March 1597, but Henri considered the contribution of such a small number of troops indicative of no serious intent in the war against Spain. He, therefore, began overtures for a peace with Philip. Of this development he informed Elizabeth personally by poetic allusion in a letter brought by his new ambassador to England, André Hurault, seigneur de Maisse:

For myself I shall never tire of fighting for so just a cause as ours, I was born and nurtured in the travails and perils of war; whence also is culled glory, the true food of every truly loyal soul, even as the rose is in the thorns. But I can well tire of the calamities and miseries which my people endure because of this war.38

What Henri really wanted was a clear indication from the English monarch and her council as to whether or not they were for war against Spain. While he waited for Elizabeth’s elusive answer, André Hurault penned several vivid descriptions of the queen’s appearance and her preoccupations at this time. Elizabeth could behave every bit as disconcertingly with French ambassadors as Henri IV occasionally did with English ones. Hurault noted her frequent habit of drawing attention to herself—of denying that she was beautiful while fishing for compliments, using the jewels that she always wore in her hair and about her ears to draw praise. He also noted that on two occasions she received him for audiences in her privy chamber, dressed in what he called night gowns.39

There has been some skepticism about Hurault’s capacity to describe Elizabeth’s clothing accurately at these meetings, but it was not the form of the gowns so much as Elizabeth’s own actions in wearing them that provoked his comment. As he reported, “When she raises her head, she has a trick of putting both hands on her gown and opening it insomuch that all her belly can be seen.”
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Elizabeth’s words and actions in these interviews suggest her familiarity with a mode of diplomacy in which the personal attributes, personality, and even physical appearance of one sovereign might become central and legitimate objects of interest and demonstration in their relations with fellow monarchs. We have already noted Henri IV’s reaction to her portrait.

One has only to recall Henry VIII showing his legs to the Venetian ambassadors or jousting vigorously in front of them in May 1515 in order to ensure a good report of himself in France, to appreciate the physicality with which Tudor monarchs could sometimes take to diplomacy.
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If it was Elizabeth’s similar intention to use her body to make statements about her power to her French counterpart, then she succeeded almost as well with Hurault as Henry did with the Venetians. Just as the youthful Henry was proud of his legs, so the aging Elizabeth allowed the ambassador to see those parts of her body about which she may still have been most confident. In contrast to his remarks about her face and teeth, Hurault’s description of Elizabeth’s “revealed” body was certainly in very favorable terms. Overall, his comments about her appearance and demeanor are realistic but positive. His consistent theme in describing her is that the queen is now aging but “so far as may be she keeps her dignity” and does it rather well.
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The Swiss traveler Thomas Platter, in England in the autumn of 1599, formed a similarly favorable impression of the queen.
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Conscious of her own increasing years as she was, Elizabeth would surely not have been displeased by such reports of her in France and elsewhere.

When talking with Elizabeth, and with her council, Hurault spent much of his time playing down the significance of the Franco-Spanish negotiations that began during the early part of 1598 and culminated in the Peace of Vervins of May. Elizabeth reacted with predictable but impotent fury.
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As she well recognized, peace with Spain meant that Henri had less need of her assistance than ever before. She posed no threat to him and he could capitalize upon the fact that she had effectively isolated herself and yet still needed at least his cooperation in her efforts to keep the Spanish at bay while she fought in Ireland. Henri would genuinely rather have had alliance with her than not, as he frequently and effusively reminded her.
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Nevertheless, the shoe was now firmly on the other foot from the situation in the early 1590s and Henri found Elizabeth to be just as ungrateful and as vexing an ally as he himself had been.

For the remaining years of her reign Elizabeth viewed Henri with a mixture of frustration, resigned disappointment, and grudging admiration. He was a monarch who had fought as hard to obtain his kingdom as Elizabeth, she no doubt felt, had fought to retain hers. The feelings were reciprocated and Jean-Pierre Babelon has observed that Henri worked in concert with Elizabeth as he did with no other head of state.
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For her part, Elizabeth sent more personal letters to Henri IV than to any of his predecessors and the only sovereign to receive more letters from her was James VI of Scotland. She usually wrote to both men using some variant of “my dearest brother” and usually signed herself as “your affectionate (or ‘most affectionate’) sister.” As with those to James, Elizabeth’s letters to Henri often adopted a maternal and a somewhat patronizing tone, at least in the early years of their relationship, but could also be by turns flattering, coquettish, indignant, hectoring, or emollient.
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More than once in her later years, Elizabeth thanked a French envoy for visiting such a “poor woman and a foolish” to whom it was good of the king still to send ambassadors. All duly took their cue and assured her of her continuing radiance.

As early as 1597 the issue of free trade had been identified by Burghley in a memorandum to de Maisse as one of the advantages to all sides of ending the war. After the peace of Vervins, French merchants were entitled to trade with Spain and all its dependencies. England, of course, remained at war and French ships were rapidly caught up in Anglo-Spanish hostilities in the Narrow Sea; something that had concerned Thomas Platter as he crossed to France from England in October 1599.
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Consequently, Elizabeth and Henri were soon engaged in a series of maritime trade and piracy disputes. Henri wrote dozens of letters to Elizabeth demanding the release of ships, cargoes, and crews seized by English mariners. One of the first, dated October 6, 1598, was robust in style and content, demanding that Elizabeth show her authority by restraining her subjects who attacked French traders along the length of the Atlantic coast, “a thing contrary to the good friendship and understanding between us, our realms and subjects.”49