Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (66 page)

The celebrations attendant on victory had a more sombre note. In the streets of the Channel ports thousands of sailors were dying of typhus or the scurvy; they had conquered the enemy but they could not vanquish disease. The lord admiral wrote to Burghley, after the destruction of the Armada, that ‘sickness and mortality begins wonderfully to grow among us’ and asked for the resources to purchase food and clothing. But, after the expense of warfare, Elizabeth’s purse was now closed. She left her men to their fate.

Another casualty of the war touched her more deeply. The earl of Leicester, worn out by his campaign in the Netherlands, was ‘troubled with an ague’ that became ‘a continual burning fever’. His death was not greatly mourned by anyone except the queen herself. He was considered incompetent and vainglorious; a contemporary historian, John Stow, wrote that ‘all men, so far as they durst, rejoiced no less outwardly at his death than for the victory lately obtained against the Spaniard’.

Elizabeth kept the last letter he had written to her in a little wooden casket; it was found by her bed after her death. Yet distress
at his death did not mitigate her practical temper. He had died indebted to her exchequer and so she ordered his goods to be sold at public auction to reimburse her for loss. There were other rewards. When she sat for her famous ‘Armada’ portrait by George Gower, where she exults in the victory with an imperial crown beside her, she is wearing the pearls that Leicester had bequeathed to her.

On 26 November she was drawn by two white horses in a richly decorated chariot to St Paul’s Cathedral for the final celebration; there had not been such a spectacular procession since her coronation almost thirty years before. In the following year Edmund Spenser completed the first three books of his verse epic
The Faerie Queene
, in which Elizabeth herself is transmuted into Gloriana.

Towards the end of 1588 a young man ran down the Strand calling out to the people, ‘If you will see the queen, you must come quickly.’ It was said that she was about to appear in the courtyard of Somerset House. So the crowd rushed to the area. It was five in the evening, and already dark, but then in a blaze of torchlight Elizabeth suddenly appeared.

The queen had been raised to new heights of glory and prestige, but the defeat of the Armada wrought other wonderful consequences. The myth of English sea power now became a more striking aspect of national consciousness, linked as it was to the defeat of Catholicism and the defence of true religion. Drake and Hawkins were new types of Protestant hero, fighting on behalf of national liberty. The papal curse had been lifted in the most striking possible manner. Elizabeth herself wrote to the duke of Florence that ‘it is as clear as daylight that God’s blessing rests upon us, upon our people and our realm, with all the plainest signs of prosperity, peace, obedience, riches, power and increase of our subjects’.

The pope tried to excuse himself by saying that he always knew
the Spaniards would be defeated. The Spanish ambassador then congratulated him on his gift of prophecy. The pope merely ‘turned up the whites of his eyes and looked piously towards heaven’. Spain could no longer be considered to be the resolute champion of Catholicism in the world, and the papacy mitigated its own pretensions. The Catholics of England now accommodated themselves to the established Church or were the object of more determined persecution.

The death of Leicester helped to forward the career of another court favourite. Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, was twenty-two years old at the time of the Armada. He had been the ward of Burghley ever since the untimely death of his father in Ireland; Sir Walter Devereux had died of dysentery in 1576. Two years later Leicester had married the widow, the countess of Essex. Leicester was then the stepfather, as well as the godfather, of the young man. So the young Essex was doubly blessed.

He was always restless and ambitious, striving for power as well as for glory. It was said that ‘he was entirely given over to arms and war’; yet he was also eloquent and highly intelligent. He believed, or professed to believe, in the importance of ‘virtue’ in both a martial and an ethical sense; manliness was to be joined with piety, valour with clemency and justice. He pursued what he later called ‘the public use for which we are all born’. He supported the Protestant cause, naturally enough, and was known to favour the more godly sort. He was impulsive and energetic, too, making a contrast with the older and more staid councillors of Elizabeth’s realm. He was ‘soft to take offence and hard to lay it down’; he could ‘conceal nothing’ and ‘carried his love and hatred on his forehead’, and was sometimes the victim of nervous prostration. It has been said that the court was now so changed that it seemed to herald a new reign. In truth it was simply entering a darker and more sequestered phase, of which Essex himself would eventually become the victim.

It had not gone unnoticed that a large proportion of the forces that fought the Armada were of a Puritan persuasion. The Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote that ‘the puritan part at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other, that is to say, most ardent, quick, bold, resolute, and to have a great part of the best captains and soldiers on their side, a point of no small moment’.

The Puritans could now muster a considerable following in the country, especially after the defeat of the papists at sea, and it is certain that they commanded the loyalty of many members of the Commons. Their strength had already emerged two years previously, in the parliament of 1586; the Commons introduced several bills to curb the power and authority of the bishops, at which point the archbishop of Canterbury wrote in alarm to the queen. She had many times in the past warned parliament not to meddle in religious affairs. She now sent a message to the Commons reprimanding them for disobeying her and for venturing upon her supremacy. She commanded the Speaker ‘to see that no bills concerning reform in ecclesiastical causes be exhibited and, if they were exhibited, not to read them’. ‘Specifically,’ the Speaker told the Commons, ‘you are commanded by Her Majesty to take heed that none care be given or time afforded the wearisome solicitations of those that commonly be called Puritans . . .’

But the Commons refused to be cowed and introduced a petition to abolish all existing laws that concerned ecclesiastical government. A ‘new directory for prayer’ was also proposed as a replacement for the familiar liturgy. No more sweeping measure had ever been put forward by a parliament, and it suggested that the Puritan cause was now being asserted in a more forceful and methodical manner. Yet it had reached its apogee and would now recede.

On a motion for the reading of the new directory the Speaker declared that the sovereign had already commanded the members to keep silence on religion. He predicted her severe displeasure and, sure enough, another message from the palace reached him. She ordered him to send her the petition and the book, but she also dispatched several of the more zealous MPs to prison. ‘I fear me,’ one of the members complained, ‘we shall come shortly to this, that to do God and her Majesty good service shall be accounted Puritanism.’ It was another phase in the relationship between sovereign and parliament.

The Puritan cause was further advertised in a series of tracts. The Martin Marprelate tracts, as they came to be known, were written anonymously; ‘Martin’ launched a series of attacks, in seven separate works, upon ‘petty antichrists, proud prelates, intolerable withstanders of reformation, enemies of the gospel and covetous wretched priests’. Yet ‘Martin’ was witty and animated as well as being pugnacious; he addressed the ecclesiastical hierarchy as ‘right poisoned, persecuting, and terrible priests. My horned masters, your government is anti-christian; your cause is desperate; your grounds are ridiculous.’ He wished to undermine the bishops by portraying them as simply absurd. ‘I will spare [bishop] John of London for this time, for it may be he is at bowls and it is pity to trouble my good brother, lest he should swear too bad . . .’

In response the supporters of the established Church published tracts with titles such as ‘A Sound Box on the Ear for the Idiot Martin to hold his Peace’ and ‘A Whip for the Ape. Martin Displayed’. One of them was reported to be ‘printed between the sky and the ground, within a mile of an oak, and not many fields off from the unprivileged press of the ass-signees of Martin junior’. Richard Bancroft, treasurer of St Paul’s who was later to become
archbishop of Canterbury, accused the Puritan party of promoting schism and dissension within the Church. ‘Her majesty is depraved [abused]. Her authority is impugned and great dangers are threatened. Civil government is called into question. Princes’ prerogatives are curiously scanned.’ The Puritan party was close to becoming a Church within the Church, with all the rivalries that implied.

The Martin and anti-Martin texts represented the high point of acrimony in Protestant debate, and we may date from this time the portrayal of Puritans on the Elizabethan stage as figures of fun; in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
Malvolio, a ‘sort of Puritan’ according to Maria, anticipates by twelve years Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair
. ‘Down with Dagon, down with Dagon . . . I will no longer endure your profanations . . . that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam, nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam; an exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rhymers, and morris-dancers . . .’

The Marprelate texts in particular soon became the talk of London, while enormous efforts were made to hunt down the writer and the printer. One secret press was discovered in Northamptonshire, but others escaped detection. Some of those involved were found before being fined or imprisoned, but the identity of ‘Martin Marprelate’ is still not certainly known. His high spirits and inventiveness, however, may have been a mark of desperation. There now seemed to be little chance that the principles of Puritanism would have any effect upon the Elizabethan polity. Marprelate’s levity may have been a sign that there was little left to lose.

The godly found in Archbishop Whitgift a profound and determined enemy. ‘The name Puritan’, he wrote, ‘is very aptly given to these men not because they be pure . . . but because they think themselves to be
mundiores ceteris
, more pure than others.’ Throughout 1589 and 1590 the leaders of the Puritan cause were arrested and silenced. Some were even imprisoned for refusing to take the ex-officio oath; they refused to swear that, in a court of religion, they would answer all questions truthfully. It was a form
of self-entrapment. In the spring of 1589 the members of the High Commission, the authorities on religious matters, delivered an injunction that no London parish should allow the preaching of the stricter sort. One of the leading Puritans, Thomas Cartwright, was imprisoned in the Fleet and eventually came before the Star Chamber. As a contemporary noted in the following year, ‘these sharp proceedings make that sect greatly diminish’.

So it had come to this. The Puritans in parliament had proved unable to advance their cause and to secure further reformation. The Puritan presses were one by one closed down, and the hunt for the Marprelate presses had become a general pursuit of the Puritan movement. There followed a decade which has been called one of stabilization or normalization, in which orthodox pieties came to the fore, but it may be more accurately seen as a time of secret and silent antagonism played out in various churches and meeting places. Puritanism ceased to be a public movement or campaign, but instead retreated to the confines of the household or the soul of the individual in the hope that better times might follow. The cause of the godly was indeed revived at the beginning of the next reign.

Yet the religious aspirations of the minority must be set against the neutrality or indifference of the population. A report was sent from Lancashire to the privy council in which it was asserted that the churches were still largely empty and that the county contained ‘multitudes of bastards and drunkards’. This could be the condition of England at any time. The preachers were few, and the parsons unlearned, but in any case the preachers were not needed for lack of auditors. The churches ‘generally lie ruinous, unrepaired, and unfurnished’ while the chapels of ease, built for those who could not easily attend the parish church, ‘are many of them utterly destitute of any curates, and thereby grow into utter ruine and desolation’. The people ‘swarm in the streets and alehouses during service-time’. Many of these people were in fact unreformed Catholics who delighted in ‘wakes, ales, greenes, May games, rushbearings, bearbaits, doveales etcetera’. Those who did attend the services were often prompted by convention rather than devotion; they talked, made jokes, or slept during the ceremonies.