All the Queen's Men (7 page)

At all times the Royal Court of Elizabeth I was living theatre, with the Queen centre stage in the starring role surrounded by a huge and glittering cast: ‘A kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene'
¹⁸
as William Shakespeare so memorably observed.

E
lizabeth was twenty-five years old when she first ascended the English throne in the winter of 1558. She had received no formal training for governing her newly acquired kingdom, yet was intelligent and well educated, while the long period of waiting and watching as Mary's health progressively declined had enabled Elizabeth to be psychologically prepared to assume the trappings of power. Few English citizens mourned her half-sister's death: there was widespread optimism in the Court and across the country as Elizabeth inherited the throne. The political climate was right and the nation rejoiced.

In many respects the new young Queen was remarkably like her father, with a naturally regal appearance that positively radiated authority. Elizabeth was physically striking, tall, auburn-haired, extremely charming and highly energetic. Like Henry VIII, she loved hunting, dancing and the undivided attention of the opposite sex. She was also very vain and adored flattery, but shrewd enough not to succumb to it when serious issues arose. Not surprisingly, it was not long before murmurs of approval began to reverberate around the Court, making favourable comparisons with her father who many still fondly remembered.

In reality Elizabeth was no great beauty: ‘her face is comely rather than handsome, but she is tall and well formed; with a good skin, although swarthy; she has fine eyes and above all a beautiful hand',
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reported Giovanni Michael to the Doge in Venice the year before Elizabeth became Queen. She had her father's prominent nose and her mother's lovely dark eyes. She was lively and to her new Court, completely enchanting. It was love at first sight.

The majority of today's art historians consider most of the early portraits of Elizabeth to be desperately mediocre in quality. William Scrots, who had painted the striking picture of the young princess now to be seen at Windsor Castle, had died four years before she came to the throne. Elizabeth chose not to retain the services of the distinguished Flemish painter Hans Eworth, whom Queen Mary had employed as her unofficial court painter and whose powerful rendering of Henry VIII can now be found at Trinity College, Cambridge. So the early years of Elizabeth's reign are recorded by a series of indifferent paintings by unknown and best-forgotten artists. The clearest indication of the physical appearance of the new young Queen rests with the portrait of her that was produced at the time of her coronation on 15 January 1559, crown on head, orb and sceptre to hand, looking confidently straight ahead, relaxed, dignified and supremely assured. This likeness is currently to be found at Warwick Castle.

Elizabeth was the third of Henry VIII's children to become monarch in less than a dozen years. Merely surviving to inherit the throne represented a major achievement, having endured the disgrace of being the daughter of Anne Boleyn, the animosity of her half-sister Mary and imprisonment in the Tower of London. Elizabeth was a complete novice in the affairs of state and had inherited a weak, divided and dispirited kingdom with a long list of problems awaiting a solution. The new Queen, however, was astute, highly conscientious and hard-working, and she immediately demonstrated an instinctive grasp of how to rule a kingdom and motivate its subjects to best effect. Furthermore, whereas her predecessors had ruled by fear, Elizabeth was to reign with love. It was to be a long and successful affair.

Her experiences on the long and perilous journey to the throne had instilled the new Queen with considerable caution and bred an inclination for making a lengthy assessment of any situation before coming to a decision or taking any specific course of action. Impulsive gestures, hasty conclusions or instinctive reactions were simply not part of Elizabeth's character. It was as if she was a new batsman in a game of cricket, determined to settle down and play a long and successful innings, patient, careful and highly focused. The Queen normally listened very carefully to her Privy Council and rarely embarked on a move of any consequence before she had consulted its members often both individually and collectively. Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, exercised a profound influence over her for nearly forty years until he died, still in office, not very long before the end of her reign. However, while Elizabeth was usually appreciative of the advice of her Privy Council, she always knew her own mind and was rarely open to persuasion or prompted to adopt a course of action contrary to her own instincts or which differed from her strongly held beliefs. ‘Though very capable of Council, she was absolute enough in her own resolution, which was ever apparent even to her last',
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a contemporary historian was to note not long after her death.

Mary's short reign, unsatisfactory though it may have been, had at least been advantageous in accustoming the English kingdom to the novel concept of a female monarch, an institution which was becoming increasingly prevalent in Europe. In the initial period of Elizabeth's reign, Catherine de Medici became Regent in France and Mary, Queen of Scots had inherited the Scottish crown. Only Elizabeth, however, possessed the necessary ability as well as the opportunity to be a successful female ruler of a kingdom which, in the second half of the sixteenth century, was essentially a man's world. Elizabeth was able to use her sex as a potent weapon in this overtly masculine society and skilfully turn a perceived disadvantage into one that could be cleverly exploited to both her own and her kingdom's benefit. In particular, she realised that the marriage card was a useful one to hold, leaving the Court to wonder when it might be played and what the possible consequences of such a move might be. Elizabeth shrewdly realized it was not a card to use in a hurry – in many respects, its greatest value lay in it being kept in hand. She was relaxed. Time was on her side. She was young, barely twenty-five years of age, yet old enough to know her own mind. She had a confident and mature outlook, was completely self-possessed and still in the full bloom of youth. The Queen was a woman with no parents or dominant elder brother to command her or put pressure on her to do her duty – she was free to make her own decisions. Furthermore, she was cool and unemotional, rarely one to let her heart rule her head, one characteristic that Elizabeth definitely did not inherit from her father. Henry's younger daughter tended to adopt an altogether more pragmatic approach towards most matters, particularly affairs of the heart.

In many respects, twenty-five was a highly appropriate age to come to the throne as a healthy single person, footloose, if not entirely fancy free. Both her father and her half-brother Edward had been considerably younger when they inherited the English throne, the latter not in the best of health, a characteristic shared by her half-sister, Mary, who had also been a good deal older when she had become Queen. Elizabeth was to enjoy remarkably good health for most of her life, which was not the case in a surprisingly large number of the male courtiers who surrounded her. It was of course an unhealthy age: diseases such as bubonic plague and smallpox were rife and consistently proved fatal. Many other illnesses had no known cure. Medical facilities and treatment were far less sophisticated and even a simple chill could prove fatal, as it was to prove with Roger Ascham and Francis Bacon, two of the great Elizabethan scholars. Ascham was Elizabeth's teacher in her formative years and Bacon became a trusted legal and political adviser who the Queen nicknamed her ‘Young Lord Keeper'. One of Elizabeth's inexplicable traits was a compulsive urge to give those closest to her a pet name; very often this could be one that was at best banal and at worst extremely hurtful, but consideration for men's finer feelings was never one of Elizabeth's attributes.

The Queen was very image-conscious, acutely concerned about how she was perceived at home and abroad. For somebody who always appeared very robust, she could at times be remarkably thin-skinned and susceptible to wounding criticism in an age that specialized in short yet eloquent pithy put-downs, something that a Pope or person such as Catherine de Medici could excel at with devastating effect.

Elizabeth's reign had got off to a solid if unspectacular start when suddenly, in the autumn of 1562, the Queen succumbed to the dreaded disease of smallpox. In the sixteenth century this was often terminal. The wife of the 2nd Earl of Bedford, a member of the Queen's Privy Council, had died of it only a few weeks earlier, so great gloom descended on the entire Court. ‘Last night the people were all in mourning for her as if she was already dead',
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gloated the Spanish ambassador, Alvaro de la Quadra, to King Philip. The Queen lay at Hampton Court Palace for several days with a very high fever, drifting in and out of consciousness, while distraught members of her Council gathered around her bedchamber. Ever practical in the hour of crisis, they discussed in hushed tones possible successors to the Queen, mindful of the awesome, but very real prospect of Elizabeth failing to recover. The Queen suddenly regained consciousness and staring up at their anxious faces, feebly croaked that she would like them to appoint Robert Dudley as Lord Protector of the Realm at a salary of £20,000 a year, a colossal sum in those days. Sensing their astonished reaction to this amazing suggestion, she quickly went on to reassure them that although she loved Robert Dudley dearly and would always do so, there had never been anything untoward in their relationship. ‘The Queen protested at that time that although she loved and had always loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness, nothing improper had ever passed between them,'
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commented the Spanish ambassador. Elizabeth then lapsed back into a coma, leaving her Privy Councillors in stunned silence. ‘Everything she asked was promised but will not be fulfilled,'
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was the Spanish ambassador's cynical comment.

Desperate measures were called for to alleviate the Queen's suffering and, having heard of an ancient remedy which supposedly cured smallpox, the Councillors had the Queen wrapped in a scarlet cloth and laid down in front of the fire which burnt brightly in her bedroom. Miraculously, this improbable sounding cure was successful and Elizabeth made a complete recovery, even her fabled fair skin was left completely unmarked. Her attendant, Lady Mary Sidney, wife of Sir Henry and sister to Robert Dudley, who had been at the Queen's side throughout her illness, was not so fortunate. She too contracted smallpox and although she recovered, Lady Mary was left so disfigured she felt compelled to leave the Court and never show her face again. ‘As foul a lady as the small pox could make her',
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Sir Henry was sadly to tell Sir Francis Walsingham many years later.

This traumatic event made the more far-sighted members of the Council give further serious consideration to the vexed matter of the succession, for, in spite of constant urging, there was still no sign of the Queen's intention to marry. She was approaching thirty, virtually past the time when a healthy child could be delivered safely in an age of high infant mortality. As members of the Council redoubled their efforts to find the Queen an appropriate husband, others were already beginning to contemplate the possibility of her never becoming a bride, and pondering precisely what the consequences of such a situation might be. Some were even evaluating the merits of preserving the status quo. Later, when there was still no obvious successor in sight, Sir William Cecil even drew up plans for the establishment of a republic in the event of the Queen's death, in order to avoid the nation being plunged into political turmoil. If the Queen had died of smallpox in October 1562, posterity would have looked back on an unremarkable reign of no particular consequence; as it was, through a mixture of the Queen's robust nature and strength of purpose, coupled with sheer good luck, she survived to go on to far greater things. This combination of circumstances typified the essential nature of Elizabeth's time on the English throne. As Elizabeth's reign developed and she weathered the initial trials and tribulations, she grew in stature and confidence, her authority no longer based on hopeful anticipation but on solid achievement acknowledged by all her subjects. Both the perceptive Queen and her largely supportive Council shared an awareness of the concept of the divine right of kings, as well as an acknowledgement of Bracton's celebrated dictum of the monarch being subject only to God and the Law. Nevertheless, there was an unspoken caveat which required the monarch to perform satisfactorily as a ruler after ascending to the throne through God's blessing, together with an invisible subtext demanding that the monarch should be seen to be successful – otherwise a replacement would be swiftly found. Elizabeth was acutely aware of the number of occasions in history that a monarch had been replaced, from Edward II to Richard III, usually in painful circumstances for the individuals concerned. The divine right of kings might assist a monarch to acquire the throne but gave no guarantee of maintaining it, something that Elizabeth's Stuart successors ignored at their peril. Even the most forceful of kings, such as Henry II and her father Henry VIII had faced serious insurrection during their time on the throne, something the astute Elizabeth never forgot. She had an almost Churchillian sense of history and her place within it, being extremely determined to rule successfully and leave her mark for posterity.

There was something of a sea change taking place in the England of the second half of the sixteenth century. The population increased by more than a million during Elizabeth's reign, the largest growth being in an expanding middle class, which was better educated and more affluent than in medieval times, and representing an important new strand in the nation's social strata. A perceptible shift was developing in the nation's power base, away from its traditional aristocratic origins towards the landed gentry and prosperous merchants. It was a situation that was later to climax in an explosive confrontation between King and Parliament in the middle of the seventeenth century. While in most respects Elizabeth was the last of the medieval monarchs, she could equally be said to be the first constitutional ruler on the English throne, not by desire, but by force of circumstance. Elizabeth, conservative by nature, did not seek to originate change, but was conscious of its occurrence and acknowledged its significance. She was a great observer and listener and had a good grass-roots appreciation of her kingdom. How fully aware Elizabeth was of the consequences of the sweeping changes taking place throughout her kingdom and the whole of the civilized world is a matter of pure conjecture; what is certain is that the Queen was always careful not to antagonize Parliament and was continually able to retain the goodwill of her people. Elizabeth was always conscientious and industrious, and consistently demonstrated an infallible ability to read the small print of any document or grasp the most minute nuance of debate, together with an appreciation of the implications of the likely outcome of any chosen course of action. To this end, the Queen would sit for long hours studying state papers or mulling over advice she had received. While this undoubtedly avoided unforced errors, it invariably infuriated those who awaited patiently on the monarch's decision. Any attempt to persuade her to hurry or contemplate doing something that was contrary to her basic beliefs was inevitably cut short by one of her notorious temper tantrums. Logical discussion would be abruptly terminated as her advisers were summarily banished from her presence, often for weeks on end, until the royal rage subsided.