Read Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Online
Authors: Peter Ackroyd
It is characteristic that her progress in the summer of 1578 was beset by confusion. In May it was reported that ‘Her Majesty will go in progress to Norfolk this year, but there is no certain determination thereof as yet’. Leicester was concerned that his good friend, Lord North, would have no time ‘to furnish his house according to his duty and honourable good will’; yet Kirtling Tower, near Newmarket, was refurbished for the occasion. A new inn had to be hastily constructed to cope with the unanticipated numbers of her entourage.
The man chosen to oversee the pageants and revels to take place at Norwich, on the occasion of the queen’s visit to the city, believed that the local magnates had received ‘but small warning’ of the events. In mid-July, even as the progress unrolled, the lord keeper was not sure that Elizabeth would venture into Suffolk, while another courtier reported that it was not clear that the queen would even go to Norwich ‘if the bird sing truly that I heard this day’. On the following day the earl of Northumberland was asking Burghley for confirmation of ‘the certainty of her Majesty’s progress’.
These confusions reflect the divisions within the council, as the various aims and ambitions of the most prominent members clashed. In the pageants themselves carefully coded political messages were introduced into the entertainments, some of them advising against the marriage with the duke of Anjou. It was no accident that, in the pageants of Norwich, the image of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen was first presented to the people. In the course of the tableau Chastity presented the queen with Cupid’s bow as her own special possession since ‘none could wound her highness’s heart’:
Then since O Queen chaste life is thus thy choice
And that thy heart is free from bondage yoke . . .
It is believed that Leicester was the moving spirit of these designs, opposed as he was to the Anjou marriage. All was not sweetness and light; behind the veneer of entertainment and spectacle can be glimpsed fierce conflicts and partisan hostilities.
The queen was also travelling into a most disordered diocese, where Catholics and Protestants – or, as it might be expressed, recusants and reformers – vied for mastery. On the journey to Norwich the queen stopped at Bury St Edmunds where two radical preachers were associated with the practice of prophesying. One of them was interrogated by the council that accompanied the queen; he was left unmolested, and some of the Puritan gentry of the town were knighted.
The queen then went on to stay with a prominent Catholic, Edward Rokewood, at Euston Hall. She granted her favour to this recusant household but, at the end of the visit, an image of the Virgin Mary was found in the hay-house. Elizabeth ordered that the image be burned ‘which in her sight by the country folks was quickly done, to her content, and unspeakable joy of everyone but some one or two who had sucked of the idol’s poison milk’. It is an odd episode. Had the image been planted by those who wished to harm Rokewood? Or was it all part of a planned theatre to emphasize the queen’s distaste for papal superstitions? Rokewood himself was arrested and consigned indefinitely to prison.
While touring the cathedral at Norwich she was informed that the duke of Anjou had invaded the Netherlands and had devised a treaty with the Protestant states in which he was declared to be ‘Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries against Spanish Tyranny’. She was incensed by this unwelcome alliance and exploded with rage against her councillors, although it was her neglect and prevarication that had persuaded the Netherlanders to court the French duke. She sent a letter of support to Philip of Spain while at the same time continuing the marriage proposal to Anjou himself. Soon enough the northern provinces joined in an association or contract. It was only a matter of time before they formally renounced Philip of Spain, with Anjou likely to be their next sovereign.
So the affairs of the court, like the progress, continued by means of inconstant resolutions, turns and half-turns. It is no wonder that some were discontented. Sir Philip Sidney, poet as much as courtier, told friends that, weary of a jaded and servile court, he was ‘meditating some Indian project’; he was considering the voyage to the New World. Walsingham wrote that he wished
‘if I may conveniently, I mean, with the leave of God, to convey myself off the stage and to become a looker on’. Another courtier, Sir Thomas Heneage, complained that ‘neither counsel nor forecast can prevail; if we prosper it must be, as our custom is, by miracle’.
These men lived at the full pitch of responsibility and anxiety, rendered infinitely worse by the unreliability of the queen. The perils of ambition and high position were sometimes dreadful. On 4 April 1578 the earl of Bothwell, Mary Stuart’s tempestuous husband, died; he ended his days raving, while tied to a pillar in the dungeons of Dragsholm Castle in Denmark. His mummified body could until 1976 be seen in a church close to the castle.
The queen was prone to ailments in this period. At the age of forty-five she was once more subject to the leg ulcer that had afflicted her eight years before. In the autumn of the year she suffered from what John Dee called a ‘fit’ that lasted for four hours; on the following day a ‘sore fit’ lasted for three hours. The nature of these fits is unknown but they were described as ‘grievous pangs and pains by reason of the ache and the rheum’. In December she was beset by toothache that was so painful that it kept her without sleep for forty-eight hours. A meeting of the privy council was called to consider the matter, and a tooth-drawer named Fenatus outlined the safest method of removing the offending tooth.
The councillors waited on the queen, together with a surgeon who would perform the operation. Elizabeth herself was fearful and drew back from the ordeal. The bishop of London then stepped forward and volunteered to calm her nerves by losing one of his own few remaining teeth. The surgeon extracted it without the least sign of distress on the bishop’s part and, following his example, the queen submitted with good grace.
The negotiations with Anjou were conducted with even more fervour. Despite the fits and the ulcer her doctors ‘foresaw no difficulty’ in her successfully bearing a child. At the beginning of 1579 the duke’s envoy, Jean de Simier, arrived at court with an entourage of sixty gentlemen; he was perhaps not himself the model of a courtier, having recently murdered his brother for an affair with his wife, but Elizabeth was charmed by him. She called
him ‘Monkey’ and ‘the most beautiful of my beasts’. She gave a court ball in his honour and lingered in his company until it might have seemed that Simier himself was the proper suitor. He was even admitted into the royal bedchamber, where he claimed her nightcap as a love token for his master.
The earl of Leicester was violently opposed to the proposed marriage and accused Simier of practising the black arts of enchantment upon the queen. Even the sermons at court were directed against the French connection, and on the first Sunday of Lent a preacher invoked the evil example of the queen’s half-sister, Mary, and proclaimed that ‘marriages with foreigners would only result in ruin to the country’; Elizabeth stormed out of the royal chapel.
In this year John Stubbs composed a violently anti-Gallican tract,
The discovery of a gaping gulf
, which accused certain evil ‘flatterers’ and ‘politics’ of espousing the interests of the French court ‘where Machiavelli is their new testament and atheism their religion’. He described the proposed union as a ‘contrary coupling’ and an ‘immoral union’ like that of a cleanly ox with an uncleanly ass; the danger of a papist heir was too great to be endured. Elizabeth was in any case too old to bear children, so the marriage was without purpose. The pamphlet was formally burned in the kitchen stove of Stationers’ Hall, but Stubbs was destined for further punishment. He was tried at Westminster and was found guilty of ‘seditious writing’. The queen had wished for the death penalty, but was persuaded that the punishment was too extreme. Instead it was decreed that the offender should lose his right hand. Just before the sentence was carried out he cried ‘My calamity is at hand’, one of the few occasions when a pun has accompanied a violent assault. When the right hand was severed Stubbs took off his hat with his left hand and called out ‘God save the queen!’ before fainting.
Another incident more closely touched Elizabeth. When she and Simier were sailing upon the Thames in the royal barge, one of her bargemen was wounded by a shot from another boat in the river; immediate hysteria followed, with fears of an assassination plot directed against Simier or even against the sovereign herself. Yet it proved to be an accident, and Elizabeth pardoned the
innocent perpetrator with the words that ‘she would believe nothing of her people which parents would not believe of their children’.
The young Anjou himself arrived in the middle of August, so early in the day that he roused Simier from his bed. The duke was eager to begin his courtship at once, but Simier persuaded him to rest. The envoy wrote a letter to the queen, however, in which he explained how he soon ‘got him between the sheets, and I wish to God you were with him there as he could then with greater ease convey his thoughts to you’. Anjou was not yet officially in the country and at a court ball in the following week he was concealed behind an arras; the queen danced and made a number of gestures towards him that the courtiers pretended not to notice. He was gone four days later, on hearing of the death of a close friend, but he had made an impression. She called him her
grenouille
or ‘frog’.
A parliament was due to meet in October, but the queen prorogued it in order to avoid unseemly debate on the matter of her marriage; she was accustomed to the meddling of Lords and Commons, but on this occasion declined to encourage it. Instead she assembled her council in solemn session for the purpose of giving advice; in fact the councillors sat for several days, and on one occasion remained in the council chamber from eight in the morning until seven in the evening without stirring from the room. They were deeply divided, with seven of them against the marriage and five for it; so they attended the queen, and asked for her real opinion on the matter. Only then could they resolve the issue.
Elizabeth burst into tears. She had wanted them to arrive at a definite decision in favour of the marriage, but now she was once more lost in uncertainty. She defended the idea of her union with Anjou and later that day argued cogently on its merits. But she knew well enough that it divided the country just as surely as it divided the council; without the full support of her councillors, moreover, it would be very difficult to gain the acquiescence of a more stridently Protestant parliament. That parliament itself was prorogued for a further three months, but not without much hesitation and indecision. She even signed the articles of marriage, with a proviso that she had two months in which to win over her subjects or give up the attempt.
It seems likely that her tears in front of her councillors were genuine, and that they were evidence of her frustration and unhappiness; her last chance of a married life had been snatched from her. In this period a portrait of her, commissioned by Christopher Hatton and attributed to Quentin Metsys, depicts her beside a pillar that is decorated with medallions of Dido and Aeneas from Virgil’s
Aeneid
. On her other side stands a globe, displaying the maritime ventures of the English. The moral is clear enough. Just as Aeneas must desert Dido in order to fulfil his imperial destiny, so the queen must forfeit the love of Anjou to establish her own empire. This was the time when complex allegorical portraits of the queen, in which virginity and empire stood in equipoise, began to appear. Between 1579 and 1583 no fewer than eleven ‘sieve’ paintings of the queen were finished; the sieve was a symbol of virginity. The perpetually youthful and unassailable queen was thus the emblem of a vigorous and invincible body politic.
Her natural frustrations, however, may have taken a peculiar form. She was incensed that certain of her subjects dared to match the height and dimensions of the royal ruff, at the neck of a shirt or chemise; so an Act of Parliament was passed that permitted certain officers of the court to stand at street corners and, brandishing a pair of shears, to clip all ruffs above the permitted size. She also forbade the rapiers of gentlemen to exceed a certain length. Her own tastes could still be exotic. She purchased six Hungarian horses, to draw the royal coach, before dyeing their manes and tails bright orange.
The English chronicler Raphael Holinshed has another story about the ruffs of 1580 that throws a curious light on the period. A Sussex boy, of eleven years, lay in a trance for ten days; when he awoke he had acquired the character of a divine or moralist. He rebuked a serving man for wearing ‘great and monstrous’ ruffs about his neck, saying that ‘it were better for him to put on sackcloth and ashes than to prank himself up like the devil’s darling’; whereupon the servant wept, took out a knife and tore the ruff from his neck before cutting it into pieces.
In the first week of April 1580, a powerful earthquake shook the whole of south-eastern England; the citizens of London ran from their houses into the streets, in panic fear, while some of the cliffs at Dover were dislodged and fell into the sea. A pinnacle tumbled from Westminster Abbey, and two children were killed by stones dislodged from the roof of Christ’s Hospital. Thomas Churchyard wrote, in a contemporaneous pamphlet, that ‘wonderful motion and trembling of the earth shook London and Churches, Pallaces, houses, and other buildings did so quiver and shake, that such as were then present in the same were tossed too and fro as they stoode, and others, as they sate on seates, driven off their places’. It was supposed to be a sign of divine retribution on a luxurious and wasteful people.
This was the period, in the spring and early summer of the year, when the first Jesuits arrived in England on their mission to maintain, if not to restore, the old faith. They came six years after the first Catholic priests had re-entered the country, but the Jesuits were perhaps more determined. An order, after all, established precisely to combat the Reformation, they were as disciplined as they were devout, with an overpowering desire to proselytize their faith; they became known as ‘the black horsemen of the pope’.