Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (28 page)

Her subjects would not have long to wait. In the summer of 1558 Mary thought herself pregnant again. In reality, she was probably suffering from a uterine tumor and dropsy. As late as early November she still hoped against hope for an heir, but the Privy Council began to prepare for the next reign. They persuaded Mary to acknowledge her sister, Elizabeth, as her successor to ensure that the events of 1553 were not repeated. Princess Elizabeth had, up to this point, lived a shadowy and precarious existence. Like Mary, she had been rejected by her father and resented by her sibling on the throne. She had been the focus of a number of Protestant plots, but she had avoided contact with the plotters or any overt act of disloyalty, living quietly, patiently, and hopeful that her time would come. Now, with the smell of death wafting across from Whitehall Palace, Elizabeth began to hold her own court.

Mary died on November 17, 1558. It has been said that her reign was as sterile as she was. Possessing many Tudor virtues, she lacked the most important one of all: a practical flexibility that would have allowed her to respond creatively to the aspirations, anxieties, and quirks of her people. Admittedly, with more time, she might have bent the country to her will as her father had done. But without it, or an heir to continue her policies, they were subject to repudiation by her successor. The resulting clash of competing religious cultures would rock the stability of the English Church and State for over a century. In the end, Mary left her sister a legacy of religious disunity, military defeat, financial exhaustion and economic hardship, even a fatal influenza epidemic that Protestants could blame on God’s displeasure with the popish regime. There was, finally, the baggage of her gender: Mary Tudor had confirmed everything that contemporaries feared about female rule. Few loyal subjects could have been optimistic about another Tudor queen. They were in for a surprise.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Elizabethan Settlement and its Challenges, 1558–1585

The New Queen

Perhaps no figure in English history has inspired more myth than Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603).
¹
She had many personas: the Virgin Queen, Gloriana, Good Queen Bess to her supporters; the bastard and heretic daughter of the whore, Anne Boleyn, to her detractors. In her day, scores of poets and artists promoted these various images (see
plate 7
). Since then, legions of writers, some scholarly, some popular, as well as playwrights and film-makers, have sought to relate the achievements of her reign and explain the mystique she exercised over her people. She herself was well aware of that mystique, cultivating it so effectively that it is almost impossible to pin down the “real” Elizabeth. Still, it is necessary to try, if only because so many of the age’s triumphs and failures were intimately bound up with her words and actions.

One place to begin is with her accession on November 17, 1558. According to legend, all England rejoiced, as if anticipating the glories to come. True, few openly grieved Mary’s passing and committed Protestants, especially in London, celebrated outright, for they had been delivered from the Marian persecutions. Elizabeth’s advisers and supporters proclaimed the dawn of a new, more optimistic and glorious age under a queen who would bring harmony and peace. But such predictions must have seemed hollow given the times. One contemporary summed up the situation inherited by the new regime as follows: “The Queen poor. The realm exhausted. The nobility poor and decayed. Want of good captains and soldiers. The people out of order. Justice not executed. All things dear. The French King bestriding the realm.”
²

Indeed, in 1558 England was still embroiled in a disastrous war with France. Calais had been lost and trouble threatened on the Scottish border. The royal treasury was deep in debt, the coinage debased, trade depressed, the general economy in ruins. The mid-to-late 1550s saw lots of rain, a run of bad harvests, and an influenza epidemic that led to some of the highest mortality rates of the period. Nor was religion of much consolation. The nation lay divided, torn, and almost literally bleeding over how best to worship God. Finally, given contemporary assumptions about the sexes, who could have believed that these problems could be solved by another woman? Mary had failed miserably to disprove the traditional view of female sovereignty. As if to underscore this, in this very year of 1558 a Scottish Protestant preacher named John Knox (ca. 1514–72) published
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,
the argument of which should be obvious.
³

Plate 7
Elizabeth 1
(The Ditchley Portrait), by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, ca. 1592. National Portrait Gallery.

Of course Knox had not figured on the personality or abilities of Elizabeth Tudor. Like her father, Henry VIII, with whom she identified publicly, she was a larger-than-life personality. As with King Hal, this makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. This much is unarguable. Elizabeth was young when she took the throne: 25 years old. She was also good-looking – an advantage that she was not reluctant to exploit. In addition, the new queen was highly intelligent, witty, hardworking, and well educated. She was fluent in Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and, of course, English. She wrote poetry and could speak effectively when she chose to do so. Elizabeth was also, like her father, something of a scholar: she once translated Boethius’s
On the Consolations of Philosophy
into English for her own amusement. She also took after her father in being both musical and athletic. She played the virginals (a primitive keyboard instrument), danced, and hunted with enthusiasm. A final, crucial similarity to Henry VIII was that Elizabeth I was vain and imperious. Men could flirt with her – indeed, she encouraged them – but they had to be careful not to go too far, for she never forgot that she was queen.

If even Mary’s good qualities proved to be counter-productive, Elizabeth’s bad ones sometimes worked in her favor. For example, her imperious nature, quick temper, and sharp tongue probably did much to counteract any assumption that she was weak because she was a woman. The most common charge leveled against her, also linked to contemporary assumptions about her gender, is that she was indecisive. Thus, Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex (1565–1601), complained to the French ambassador in 1597 that “they laboured under two things at this Court, delay and inconstancy, which proceeded from the sex of the queen.”
⁴
Indeed, Queen Elizabeth was capable of making her Privy Council and parliaments wait an agonizingly long time while she made up her mind. In some crucial cases (marriage, what to do about Mary Queen of Scots), it could be argued that she never did so. But it could also be argued that she had been taught by hard experience the dangers of committing herself too early or too definitely. After all, Elizabeth had grown up in a perilous environment in which overt commitment to one side or the other – in politics or religion – could lead to disgrace, even death. As queen, she ruled a country which was seemingly at the mercy of bigger, more powerful neighbors. What often struck her subjects (and later male historians) as indecisiveness now looks like prudence, even a mastery of herself and of the situation at hand. In particular she was a virtuoso at playing two sides off against each other, so that they would not turn against her – or England.

Cecil vs. Dudley

We see this prudence and mastery in her handling of her advisers and the factions which grew up around them. Historians have tended to divide her court and Privy Council into two broad groups. The first was led by William Cecil, created Lord Burghley in 1571. Cecil had been trained as a lawyer, was associated with the Commonwealthmen, and had served as secretary to Lord Protector Somerset. He had proved himself an able and industrious administrator and diplomat under Elizabeth’s brother and sister. Upon her accession she named him secretary of state and, in 1572, lord treasurer of England. Early in the reign he advocated foreign intervention in support of Protestant causes; but as he grew in age, experience, and responsibility, he became, like the queen herself, more prudent and cautious. From about 1570, he tended to favor diplomacy as less dangerous and more frugal than war. Consequently, he saw the need to work with, or at least avoid offending, the Catholic powers of Spain and France. His vast circle tended to attract equally cautious men interested in bureaucratic careers, like Sir Nicholas Bacon (1510–79), Elizabeth’s keeper of the Great Seal; Sir Francis Knollys (1511/12–96), vice-chamberlain, then treasurer of her household; and Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex (1526/7–83), lord president of the North.

Very different was the court circle which assembled around Robert Dudley, from 1564 earl of Leicester (ca. 1532–88). A younger son of the late duke of Northumberland, Dudley was more of a courtier and a soldier than Cecil, so Elizabeth made him her master of the Horse (keeper of her stables and coaches). This was a much more elevated position than it sounds, for it not only paid extremely well but gave Dudley the excuse to attend the queen on horseback when she went outdoors. This was not inconvenient for Elizabeth, for she found Dudley handsome and charming. Where Cecil was sober and careful, surrounded by clerks and accountants, Dudley was fun and exciting and brought with him a circle of soldiers and poets, including the courtly Sir Christopher Hatton (ca. 1540–91), who served her as lord chancellor and parliamentary “mouthpiece”; and the cunning Sir Francis Walsingham (ca. 1532–90), who, as secretary of state from 1573, oversaw her spies and espionage. These men tended to favor an aggressive foreign policy in support of Protestant causes abroad.

Because many of the men in both Cecil’s and Dudley’s circles also held local offices ranging from lord lieutenant down to
JP
, theirs were truly national networks of patronage, Elizabethan counterparts to medieval affinities. Each circle tended to be linked by ties of blood and marriage as well as temperament and religious orientation, and sons succeeded fathers in their service. Usually, these two groups agreed on general aims and they got along well with each other socially. But at times of crisis, they tended to divide. Where Cecil and his allies increasingly urged caution, pacifism, and thrift, Dudley and his followers advocated bold military intervention against what they saw as a growing threat to English interests and the Protestant cause from the Catholic powers. Where Cecil and his circle appealed to the queen’s head, Dudley and his group appealed to her heart. The latter attraction produced a crisis almost as soon as the reign began.

Marital Diplomacy I

The first major issue facing the new queen was that of her own single state. Because contemporary society was uncomfortable with the idea of a woman who was not under the control of a man, because the succession was uncertain as long as the queen had no heir, and because England was desperate for friends, most of Elizabeth’s subjects assumed that she would, as Mary had done, take a husband as soon as possible. Like Mary, she had had few prospects prior to her accession, but once she assumed the throne she became the most eligible single woman in Europe. There was no shortage of potential bridegrooms, foreign and domestic, Catholic and Protestant. Among the contestants were the Habsburg Archduke Charles of Styria (1540?–90?), the boy-king Charles IX of France (1550–74; reigned 1560–74), and King Erik XIV of Sweden (1533–77; reigned 1560–8). Closer to home, there were the earl of Arundel and Sir William Pickering (1516/7–75). Nor was the widower Philip II out of the running. After a decent interval following Mary’s death, he too proposed. After all, the last thing he wanted was a breakup of the old Tudor-Habsburg alliance, leaving England free to cultivate a friendship with France. But Elizabeth, characteristically, hesitated. She probably did so for two reasons: she had seen what Mary’s loveless and unpopular marriage had done to her sister and her country, and she was attracted to someone else.

That someone was the dashing Lord Robert Dudley. As master of the Horse, he had every opportunity to attend Elizabeth and he often did so, contemporaries observed, alone. When they were not alone, it became clear that the queen had great affection for her “sweet Robin,” despite the fact that he was already married to Amy
née
Robsart, Lady Dudley (b. 1532). Speculation that Lord Robert would find some way out of his first marriage turned to scandal when, in September 1560, Lady Dudley was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs in Cumnor Hall, Oxfordshire. Rejected by her husband and suffering from breast cancer, she probably died by accident or, possibly, suicide. But many contemporaries suspected foul play on Dudley’s part in order to make himself available to marry the queen. Cecil and his followers in the council argued vehemently against the marriage. Eventually, Elizabeth came to her senses. In 1566 she finally repudiated any notion of marrying Dudley with the comment, “I will have but one mistress, and no master!”
⁵