All the Queen's Men (6 page)

Another source of self-indulgent extravagance was the introduction of colourful events such as the Accession Day ‘tilts', which were part of the annual nationwide celebration of the Queen ascending the throne, involving spectacular tournaments, re-enacting the jousting of medieval knights in which the more macho members of the Court fought valiantly before their beloved Queen. These events were part of the cult of Elizabeth as Gloriana, which emerged towards the end of the sixteenth century – Venus descended in England's green and pleasant land. These Arthurian antics were supervised by Elizabeth's Master of the Armoury, Sir Henry Lee, who had styled himself Queen's Champion of the Tilts in order to renew a romantic concept of chivalry. They were held before several thousand excited spectators, with the gorgeously attired Queen surrounded by the ladies of her Court in all their finery. Similar events had been held in her father's reign, and Henry had participated energetically in his younger days. In Elizabeth's reign, the accent was more on the elaborate ceremony rather than the skill of combat – the Earl of Essex used Francis Bacon as his scriptwriter, to concoct flamboyant speeches heralding his grand entrance into the arena.

Sir Henry Lee was the enthusiastic patron of one of the most outstanding portrait painters of the Elizabethan era, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Lee resided at Ditchley in Oxfordshire and commissioned Gheeraerts to paint the so-called Ditchley Portrait, one of the classic portrayals of Elizabeth painted around 1592, depicting the Queen in all her glory astride a map of England, in command of her kingdom, Queen and country, one and the same. This work is the largest portrait of Elizabeth ever painted and can now be found in the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 1592 it would have hung in the Long Gallery of Sir Henry's house at Ditchley, when the Queen came to stay with him for a couple of days' elaborate entertainment, which included an allegorical play which Sir Henry had written and in which he also acted. Sir Henry's unruly nephew, Thomas, later took part in the Earl of Essex's abortive uprising against the Queen and was subsequently executed at Tyburn. Marcus Gheeraert's fine portrait of Essex hangs in the Long Gallery at Woburn Abbey. When Sir Henry retired as Champion of the Tilts, his place was taken by George Clifford, the 3rd Earl of Cumberland. Nicholas Hilliard's portrait of the Earl, which is now part of the National Maritime Collection at Greenwich, shows a giant of a man proudly clutching a huge lance and wearing an exotic plumed hat. Cumberland would enter the arena at the head of other challengers such as the Earls of Essex, Sussex and Oxford. The latter had first come to the Queen's attention because of his spectacular performances at the Tilt Yard. Cumberland entered in his guise as Knight of Pendragon, a mythical warrior of legendary reputation. In real-life combat, Cumberland proved considerably less successful as a naval commander whose forays against the Spanish achieved little of military significance, but helped supplement his own purse to some extent, thereby recouping the gambling losses he incurred at Court.

The Tilt Yard tournaments were, like the annual Knight of the Garter ceremonies at Windsor Castle, part of a skilful Tudor public relations exercise that projected an image of the Queen as someone who had become a heavenly creature returned to earth in order to be passionately worshipped by her adoring subjects: ‘all those loves meet to create but one soul. I am of her own country and we adore her by the name of Eliza,'
⁹
enthused the poet Thomas Dekker.

Sunday was always an important day in the life of the Royal Court, an essential time for any aspiring courtier to be in attendance, a day for meeting and greeting, perhaps an opportunity to attract the attention of the Queen herself, albeit momentarily. A magnificent procession would wend its stately way from the Presence Chamber to the Royal Chapel for morning service. First came the nobility in strict order of precedence, then the Lord Keeper bearing the Great Seal, followed by other senior courtiers carrying the Sword of State and the Sceptre. Finally Queen Elizabeth would appear, fabulously befrocked and bejewelled, surrounded by her Ladies-in-Waiting and her Maids of Honour elegantly attired in their Sunday best. This colourful procession moved majestically through crowds of visitors who kneeled reverently as the monarch swept past in shining splendour into the chapel. After the service, dinner would be served promptly at noon. Elizabeth was not a noted gourmet and the food served was known rather more for its quantity than for its quality: plenty of roast meat of every conceivable kind, together with poultry and game, followed by copious helpings of sweet meats and rich puddings, for the Queen was well known for her sweet tooth. Elizabeth ate relatively little and drank even less, preferring beer to wine which she only drank heavily diluted with water. Very often she would dine alone in her private apartments served by her lady attendants, and at the glittering state banquets she was observed to merely pick at her food, pushing it around her plate until the meal was over and the music and dancing began.

Musical entertainment was much more to Elizabeth's liking than wining and dining and the normally economical Queen spared no expense either on her large group of court musicians or her choir which numbered more than fifty singers and whose expert performances greatly impressed the normally sceptical foreign envoys visiting the Court. Like press-ganged sailors, young boys with promising voices would be plucked from the countryside to be brought to the Court for expert tuition before becoming part of the choir. The Queen employed William Byrd and Thomas Tallis as both musicians and composers and Dr John Bull was her chapel organist. Elizabeth played the virginals very proficiently, possessing one of these popular sixteenth-century harpsichords; she practised regularly and diligently whenever the opportunity arose, and enjoyed showing off her skill to visitors at the Court.

Dancing was another of the Queen's great passions, one that was to remain with her throughout her lifetime. As the French diplomat de Maisse reported to King Henry IV towards the end of the sixteenth century:

she takes great pleasure in dancing and music, in her youth she danced very well, and composed measures and music and had played them herself and danced them. She takes such pleasure in it that when her Maids dance she follows the cadence with her head, hand and foot. She rebukes them if they do not dance to her liking and without doubt she is a mistress of the art, having learnt in the Italian manner to dance high.
¹⁰

A painting by an unknown artist hangs at Penshurst Place which shows the Queen dancing in the ‘high style' with her favourite Robert Dudley, watched by Sir Philip Sidney and other members of the Court. The dance is the
Volta
, Italian for ‘running turn', the only dance in Elizabeth's time that involved the man clasping his lady partner in his arms in order to lift her high into the air. The
Volta
caused a sensation the first time it was performed at Court, as it was considered decidedly
risqué
in those days. Elizabeth loved dancing, particularly with Robert Dudley.

The two other most popular dances of the day were the
Gaillard
, French for ‘a gay dance', performed briskly in triple time involving jumps, termed
capriols
from which the word ‘capers' was derived, and the
Pavan
, a processional dance with an underlying marching rhythm. Although there was a fairly elementary format to these dances, the more skilful participants such as Robert Dudley, Christopher Hatton and the clever, rather obnoxious Earl of Oxford would introduce their own more elaborate variations in order to demonstrate their superior expertise as Lords of the Dance. The Queen was to continue to dance almost up to the time of her death in 1603 and it was an activity that was a constant and enjoyable feature of her Court.

In spite of the Queen's well-publicized royal processions around the countryside, Elizabeth never travelled outside southern England. She never visited Wales or Ireland and certainly never went to continental Europe. ‘Foreign parts' definitely began at Calais ever since that last outpost of English territory in France had been recaptured by the French at the end of her half-sister Mary's reign. Unlike other English monarchs, Elizabeth never led a conquering army overseas: ‘. . . my mind has never been to invade my neighbour or usurp any. I am content to reign over mine own and to rule as a just prince,'
¹¹
she was to declare in one of her periodic addresses to Parliament. Unlike her father Henry, there were no elaborate summit meetings with other heads of state, no royal razzmatazz such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold when Henry VIII and François I of France preened and postured before each other in dazzling splendour. Elizabeth was never to meet a ruler of another nation throughout the entire time she was on the English throne, not even her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, who lived in exile in England for nearly twenty years, or Mary's son James VI of Scotland, who was ultimately to succeed her as James I of England.

Elizabeth's main contact with the rest of the civilized world was through her various ambassadors and diplomats stationed in places such as Paris and the numerous foreign envoys who frequented the Royal Court. The fact that Elizabeth had never been abroad presented no handicap to her grasp of foreign affairs or in formulating foreign policy. She had once held a foreign ambassador, visiting her Court for the first time, in open-mouthed admiration as she delivered a lengthy, highly accurate discourse analysing the current political situation, which revealed an astonishing insight into the complex, constantly shifting scene that characterized Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Queen's understanding of events abroad was derived from careful listening to her own overseas emissaries, men such as Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Thomas Smith, together with the various foreign diplomats living in London such as Don Guerau de Spes and Don Bernardino de Mendoza, successive Spanish ambassadors to the Royal Court, also Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon, the urbane French ambassador who professed a high opinion of Elizabeth as Queen while at the same time sneering that she ruled over the dullest Court in the whole of Europe.

Fluent in French and Spanish and well versed in a variety of foreign languages, Queen Elizabeth was in her element during her frequent audiences with these royal representatives, immensely enjoying their visits, chattering effortlessly in their own language. When all else failed, she fell back on her classical education. ‘I swear that Her Majesty made one of the best answers extemporare in Latin, that I have ever heard,'
¹²
declared a highly impressed Sir Robert Cecil to the Earl of Essex in July 1597, following an audience with a visiting ambassador who spoke no English.

Inevitably, these ambassadors were drawn into intrigues within the Royal Court or tempted to meddle secretly in the nation's internal affairs, particularly those that involved the Catholic cause in England. Mendoza never disguised his fundamental contempt for the English nation as a whole and had a particularly active dislike of Sir William Cecil, by then Lord Burghley, one of England's principal ministers throughout most of Elizabeth's reign. In turn, Burghley saw Mendoza as the prototype Spaniard, both arrogant and completely impossible. He was therefore delighted when the Spanish ambassador was ordered to leave England after he had been discovered implicated in the ‘Throckmorton Plot', one of the many Catholic conspiracies to threaten Elizabeth's well-being during her long and eventful reign. The Queen invariably received ambassadors in the Presence Chamber, a room which was often a place of high drama. When Mothe-Fenelon came to present the official French version of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris in which thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered, he had the unnerving experience of being received by the Queen together with her large retinue in total silence. On another occasion, Elizabeth swore loudly at a Polish ambassador in Latin. She could be either imperious or totally charming, flirting with an embarrassed ambassador, while constantly gesticulating with her hands in a highly theatrical manner. ‘She drew off her glove and showed her hand which is very long and more than mine by more than three broad fingers. It was formerly very beautiful but is now very thin, although the skin is still most fair,'
¹³
observed de Maisse, the King of France's envoy towards the end of the sixteenth century. Elizabeth's hands feature strongly in many of her portraits, notably George Gower's celebrated
Armada Portrait
, now in the Long Gallery at Woburn Abbey and William Segar's
Ermine Portrait
, currently to be seen at Hatfield Palace. A visiting ambassador to Hampton Court noted:

In one chamber were several excessively rich tapestries, which are hung up when the queen gives audience to foreign ambassadors: there are a number of cushions ornamented with gold and silver. Here is besides a certain cabinet called Paradise, where besides that everything glitters so with silver, gold and jewels, as to dazzle one's eyes, there is a musical instrument made all of glass, except for the strings.
¹⁴

Sometimes Elizabeth developed a surprisingly close relationship with one of these distinguished overseas visitors to her Royal Court, as appeared to be the case with Monsieur Andre de Maisse towards the end of her reign. The personable, highly impressionable young French diplomat attentively listened to the Queen's long rambling reminiscences, acutely conscious that he was closeted alone with one of the great legendary figures of western Europe, a unique privilege he would treasure to the end of his days. De Maisse's detailed written observations convey a fascinating insight into the state of the English nation during Elizabeth's declining years, when stirring actions were fast becoming faded memories: ‘Her Government is fairly pleasing to the people, who show that they love her';
¹⁵
‘She thinks highly of herself and has little regard for her servants and Council, being of the opinion that she is far wiser than they';
¹⁶
‘When some expense is necessary her Government must deceive her before embarking on it little by little . . .';
¹⁷
such is the hubris of history, as Tudor England was coming to an end, seen through the perceptive eye of Andre Hurault Sieur de Maisse, special envoy of the French King Henry IV, to the Court of Queen Elizabeth I.