All the Queen's Men (8 page)

The Queen could be extremely stubborn and hated the idea of change in the established order of things – she would vacillate endlessly and happily grasp at any straw to avoid making a decision and, while adoring flattery, was rarely open to individual or collective persuasion, unlikely ever to succumb to emotional blackmail or subtle manipulation. Above all, she never gave in to threats or external pressure at times of extreme crisis, always demonstrating great resolution. Queen Elizabeth I was totally in command and needed to be in control and respected. Shrewd men such as William Cecil were always conscious of these facets of Elizabeth's character and acted accordingly. Others less perceptive or more headstrong, such as the Earl of Essex, ignored them at their peril and paid the ultimate price. Few chose the latter path. It led only to the scaffold.

Although Elizabeth was undoubtedly a strong personality, she was rarely dogmatic and remained remarkably devoid of preconceived notions. She consistently approached problems calmly and rationally – solutions were to be reached by the use of logic rather than by force of arms, as she had the traditional feminine distaste of the horrors and vainglories of war. She regarded war as a ridiculously masculine preoccupation, unfailingly costing a great deal of money but achieving little of lasting benefit. Fluttering flags and marching bands, days of greatness and glory were not for her. She urged Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris, two of her more combative military commanders, ‘not to suffer themselves to be transported with any haviour of vain-glory'.
⁷
Elizabeth would not have been impressed by Clausewitz's celebrated military maxim of war being diplomacy by other means, preferring nations to settle their differences by diplomacy. She considered that the Tudor pen should be mightier than medieval sword.

Elizabeth displayed an equal dislike of extremism, particularly in connection with religious beliefs. She constantly chided Sir Francis Walsingham about his extremist Protestant views, while similar ones expressed by another Privy Councillor Sir Francis Knollys led to some blazing rows, regardless of the fact that Sir Francis was her cousin. Conversely, the Queen was not automatically anti-Catholic. Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, and her chapel organist, Dr John Bull, were all Roman Catholics. She employed them for their outstanding musical abilities not their religious beliefs. Her suspicions of Roman Catholicism derived from her experiences and observations during the time her half-sister Mary was on the throne. Subsequently, it was the Pope and Catholic Spain which became antagonistic towards
her
, rather than the other way round.

Elizabeth was equally wary of the rising tide of Puritanism that was threatening to engulf Europe and becoming such a strident voice within her own Parliament. The anti-feminist utterances of the Scottish Presbyterian John Knox were to rouse her to a particular fury. Although Knox's
The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, was essentially directed at Mary, Queen of Scots, the fact that this book had been published in the year that Elizabeth came to the throne meant that she always regarded Knox's diatribe as a personal attack on herself.

More fundamentally, it was the Queen's pragmatic nature, coupled with a deep-rooted conservatism that guided her thinking on religious issues in as far as they affected her kingdom. On the one hand, her personal inclination to adopt a largely secular view on religious matters induced a revulsion towards what she saw as the slavish dogma of Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, her instinctive desire to maintain the status quo on almost everything led her to regard with acute alarm the radical concepts that had first been unleashed in continental Europe by Martin Luther and Jean Calvin.

As her reign progressed, philosophical considerations were overtaken by practicalities as Catholic Spain developed into England's greatest enemy and provided the biggest threat to her national security. The dividing lines between religion and politics became confused and blurred – indeed, both Philip of Spain and Elizabeth's own Principal Secretary, the abrasive Sir Francis Walsingham, regarded the approaching conflict between their respective nations not so much as a titanic military encounter between two major powers but as a new crusade between the forces of goodness and light and those of eternal darkness as ideological adversaries manoeuvred endlessly for the moral high ground.

In many respects, the late 1570s and 1580s represented Elizabeth's finest years, particularly the euphoric period after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The image of Elizabeth at the height of her reign is brilliantly captured in the magnificent icon-like portraits of her painted during this glorious period, pictures such as George Gower's Armada Portrait, the Ermine Portrait by William Segar and Marcus Gheeraert's sumptuous Rainbow Portrait which Sir Robert Cecil had commissioned and has remained in the possession of the Cecil family ever since. Today it hangs at Hatfield House, Robert Cecil's former home. These works, together with Nicholas Hilliard's outstanding miniature painted around 1595, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, all convey a universal glorification of the Queen, full of shimmering imagery, allegorical detail and all-powerful majestic splendour.

Though Elizabeth was essentially the last of the great English medieval monarchs, the last of the nation's rulers able to control the kingdom by sheer force of personality and unchallenged authority, she never had to put that authority on the line. Her success came essentially through adopting middle-of-the-road policies on all the important issues and avoiding extremism or confrontation with her loyal subjects at all costs. Conservative and cautious she may well have been, sometimes to a maddening degree, yet patience, persistence and supreme fortitude in the hour of maximum danger inevitably paid off, as under her guidance England progressively moved from being a medieval kingdom into a modern state. At the same time, pride in the nation and a sense of patriotism became a collective feature of her citizens, particularly in the glory years that followed the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the summer of 1588. This was a major event during Elizabeth's reign, where fortune favoured the brave and victory was achieved as much by luck as judgement. It was a crucial military encounter that was to have monumental significance, in the short term ensuring that the threat of imminent invasion no longer existed. In the long term, the English fleet's epic victory was to have even more far-reaching consequences, as it heralded the beginning of the decline and fall of the Spanish Empire. The eminent twentieth-century Elizabethan historian A.L. Rowse commented succinctly that, as well as Central and South America, the whole of North America might have ended up speaking Spanish, an interesting and altogether plausible theory.

Elizabeth was a ‘drama Queen' in a highly dramatic age: charismatic, inspirational, effortlessly able to motivate otherwise cynical men into glorious achievements for the collective good of her kingdom – to circumnavigate the globe, to defeat the mightiest of her enemies, to create the finest literature the world has ever seen. She had an uncanny ability to inspire not only the great and the good but also the ordinary people in her kingdom, to capture the hearts and minds of her citizens regardless of class or calling. Blessed with the common touch, she captured the affection of those that she encountered on her famous ‘Royal Progresses', when the Queen and all her retinue passed in slow and stately manner across the English countryside in high summer. Though the immediate purpose of these progresses was to visit important towns in her kingdom, it was also part of an elaborate propaganda exercise to project a favourable image of the Queen to her public in the days before the existence of any form of instant wide-scale communication. Although Elizabeth did not invent the concept of ‘the progress', she certainly exploited it to maximum effect throughout her reign. The Queen's temperament was ideally suited to these occasions as she loved an audience. Whereas her half-sister Mary had been rather shy and hated crowds, Elizabeth was in her element. Although a ‘Royal Progress' could be regarded as a piece of cynical stage-management, it nevertheless brought a touch of glamour into the ordinary world, and great pleasure to the local dignitaries of each town the Queen visited. Elizabeth might stop to talk with people in the crowd or out on the open road, a brief moment in time that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. ‘Progresses' could be arduous and even boring for the Queen, dutifully listening to local mayors droning on with tedious orations, or enduring yet another amateurish local pageant. Yet throughout these occasions she behaved impeccably, listening in apparent rapt attention before paying a gracious comment or a word of heartfelt thanks in Norwich, Coventry, Bristol, Southampton or any of the other towns she descended on in a blaze of glory. She cleverly recognized that this was all part of being a successful Queen of England, maintaining the love and loyalty of her subjects.

Even during the normal course of Court activity in London, the Queen's movements appeared highly impressive to the casual observer:

When the Queen goes abroad in public the Lord Chamberlain walks first, being followed by all the nobility who are in Court, and the Knights of the Order that are present walk after, near the Queen's person, such as the Earl of Essex, the Admiral and others. After come the six heralds who bear maces before the Queen. After her march the fifty Gentlemen of the Guard, each carrying a halbard, and sumptuously attired; and after that the Maids and Ladies who accompany them very well attired.
⁸

The French envoy de Maisse's graphic description beautifully conveys the vibrancy of the Royal Court, together with the Queen's love of pageantry on every conceivable occasion, a trait that she had acquired from her father. This endeared Elizabeth to the majority of those who filled her kingdom: the members of her Court were themselves on one long ego trip and appreciated star quality when they saw it, and the ordinary people enjoyed a star that every now and again could sparkle among them. Elizabeth was universally popular as a ‘People's Queen', adored by her friends and impressive even to her enemies. ‘She is a great woman, and were she only Catholic she would be without her match,' enthused her arch adversary His Holiness Pope Sixtus V. ‘Just look at how she governs; she is only a woman, only mistress of half an island and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all.'
⁹

T
he guiding force behind Elizabeth's illustrious reign was her Privy Council, a group of wise men meeting on a regular basis in a room located immediately adjacent to the monarch's private quarters within the royal palace. The Privy Council is said to have been only formally constituted subsequent to the downfall of Thomas Cromwell during the reign of Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII.

The Queen displayed excellent judgement in her choice of Councillors and while she could be excessively demanding, often harsh in her criticism and not particularly generous in her rewards, she nevertheless managed to hold their loyalty. In turn, the Queen returned this loyalty thus creating a unique bond of confidence between Queen and Council, whereby the majority of its key members served for a lifetime, a state of affairs in marked contrast to her father, who disposed of his most prominent advisers, eminent men such as Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, with monotonous regularity. Elizabeth's conduct in Council was altogether different from her half-sister, Mary, who during her mercifully short reign berated them constantly yet ineffectually. Elizabeth's custom was to listen quietly to the debate, but ultimately the decision was always hers and everyone present was under no illusion as to who was in charge.

The Queen's initial Council of 1558 was significantly smaller than Mary's – only some twenty men were chosen, aiming at greater cohesion. She retained ten of its previous members in the interest of continuity, men such as the highly experienced Sir William Petre, a former Secretary of State, and the aged Marquess of Winchester who she maintained as Lord Treasurer. Her new Council was an eclectic mixture of privileged peers, earls like Pembroke, Bedford and Arundel contrasting with self-made professional men such as William Cecil and his brother-in-law, the corpulent Sir Nicholas Bacon, both lawyers. Then there were Elizabeth's relatives including Lord Howard of Effingham, Sir Richard Sackville and Sir Francis Knollys, the Queen's cousin, who shared the Earl of Bedford's rigidly Protestant views. Knollys's extremist religious beliefs, coupled with a somewhat tactless manner, led to some sharp exchanges between himself and the Queen. Unlike previous Councils there was no room for the clergy: the power of the Church, which had been so prevalent in the Middle Ages, was in decline and throughout the whole of Elizabeth's reign the sole cleric to serve in the latter years of her Council was Archbishop Whitgift, whom she dubbed ‘her little black husband'.

The veteran peers, Bedford and Pembroke, had both benefited from Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. Pembroke, originally William Herbert, a minor Welsh squire who had been befriended by Henry, married Katherine Parr's younger sister Anne, and built the magnificent Wilton House on former monastic lands near Salisbury. After, Henry's son, Edward VI, had bestowed an earldom on Herbert. Throughout his life, the Earl remained totally illiterate, something of which he was curiously proud.

Francis Russell, the 2nd Earl of Bedford had been granted Woburn Abbey by Henry. Today the magnificent
Armada Portrait
of Elizabeth can be seen in the Long Gallery alongside a picture of Philip II of Spain, Mary's husband, who was to become the Queen's most formidable adversary, and opposite the Earl of Essex, a royal favourite towards the end of her reign. Their presence at Woburn is due to Lucy Harrington, married to the 3rd Earl of Bedford, who was an avid collector.