Life of Elizabeth I (9 page)

Yet Elizabeth was too much mistress of herself and too great a stateswoman to succumb to the temptations of illicit sex. She was a proud and normally dignified woman who was very conscious of her exalted status and strict about observing propriety, and it is hardly likely that she would have risked her reputation, or the possible security of her throne, for physical pleasure. There was no effective contraception in those days, and a pregnancy outside wedlock would have spelled ruin for her. The very fact that she took no pains to hide her love and admiration for certain men indicates that her relations with them were above reproach. There is no proof to support the gossip. In 1561, when the rumours were at their most rampant, Nils Guilderstern, Chancellor of Sweden, came to England to press the suit of his master, King Erik. Having observed Elizabeth at court, Guilderstern reported: 'I saw no signs of an immodest life, but I did see many signs of chastity, virginity and true modesty; so that I would stake my life itself that she is most chaste.'

This was a view that would be shared by many other ambassadors in the years to come. Most agreed that the rumours were 'but the spawn of envy and malice'. In 1571, the French envoy, de la Mothe Fenelon, informed the Queen of France that Elizabeth was 'good and virtuous', adding that the gossip could not be believed when one had experienced the ethos of the English court, where the Queen, who was watched 'with Argus eyes', both inspired and received such a degree of respect as to preclude any possibility of her being unchaste.

Another French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissiere, having been acquainted with Elizabeth for a quarter of a century, stated: 'If attempts were made falsely to accuse her of love affairs, I can say with truth that these were sheer inventions of the malicious and of the ambassadorial staffs, to put off those who would have found an alliance with her useful.' Most Spanish ambassadors were hostile to the English Queen, but one, de Silva, admitted that he was never able to find any truth in the rumours about her virtue. Elizabeth herself had told him: 'I do not live in a corner. A thousand eyes see all I do, and calumny will not fasten on me for ever.' There was no question in the minds of most of the Queen's subjects that she was inviolably chaste. Years later, the Lord Chief Justice, the brilliant Francis Bacon, described her as 'certainly good and moral; and as such she desired to appear' and his sentiments were echoed by others who knew her well, such as William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham, successive Secretaries of State.

The Queen's much vaunted virginity was a matter, not of personal choice, but of state policy, and in many ways it cost her dear, condemning her to a lifetime of lonely isolation, emotional deprivation and enforced chastity. She did indeed make a virtue of what she saw to be a necessity, and the strain sometimes showed. She may have teased her lovers and allowed them certain liberties - she was undoubtedly of an amorous nature - but never more than that. It may well be that the sex act itself did frighten her in some way, that she was psychologically unable to give herself to a man. But even if this were true, it did not alter the fact that she felt more invincible in the persona of the Virgin Queen than she would have done as a married sovereign. To remain invincible, she must not only bear the name but also play the part with conviction. And that meant that illicit sexual intercourse was forever strictly out of the question, whatever her private feelings about it.

Many people believed, and some still do, that because Elizabeth loved courtship and flirtation she was sexually immoral, but in fact she lived a very circumscribed life - she was hardly ever alone, being (as she said herself) 'always surrounded by my Ladies of the Bedchamber and maids of honour', who slept in her room - and she valued herself and her 
honour highly: it would have been unthinkable tor the Queen of England to become some man's plaything. 'My life is in the open, and I have so many witnesses,' she once said, having learned what was being said about her abroad. 'I cannot understand how so bad a judgement can have been formed of me.' She had, moreover, learned what happened to queens - and, for that matter, princesses - who were suspected of overstepping the bounds of morality, and it had been a grim lesson. Besides, while she remained unattainable, she remained in control of her relationships, and that was how she liked things to be.

Hardly anyone took Elizabeth at her word when she expressed her wish to stay single. Both Parliament and the Council would behave as if only the choice of husband was an issue, and foreign ambassadors would press the suits of their various masters with good hopes of success. Elizabeth played along with this game enthusiastically. She loved nothing better than masculine attention and flattery, and revelled in the rituals of courtship. So well did she play her part that most people were deceived into thinking that she had indeed changed her mind about remaining celibate, and that it was only a matter of time and choice before she gave herself in marriage. This view was given credence by Elizabeth's fondness for discussing her possible nuptials, or declaring that 'She was but human and not insensible to human emotions, and when it became a question of the weal of her kingdom, or it might be for other reasons, her heart and mind might change.' She became, it was said by a courtier, 'greedy of marriage proposals'. It would also prove advantageous to her to have European princes competing for her hand and England's friendship at a time when the country was weak and impoverished. While they believed they stood a chance of success, they would not think of making war or stirring up trouble.

The matter of the Queen's marriage was to dominate English political thinking and policy and provoke endless speculation for a quarter of a century, with many tortuous twists and turns along the way that would cause untold grief and anguish to Her Majesty's beleaguered advisers, most of whom were utterly perplexed by her contrary behaviour. Few, even Cecil, realised that she meant it when she said, as she did on numerous occasions, that she had no desire to marry.

A quarter of a century of queenly prevarication was initiated in February 1559, when Elizabeth received the first marriage proposal since her accesssion. De Feria at last obtained a private audience and informed the Queen of King Philip's hopes. He was disconcerted when she displayed no sense of the honour being done her, and even more so when she responded by delivering a coy speech about the virtues of remaining a virgin. Unimpressed, the ambassador retorted that, if she did not marry 
and produce an heir to sit on England's throne, the King of France would rise against her and place Mary Stuart there instead.

This was a red rag before a bull, and prompted a furious outburst from the Queen, in which she 'began to rave' against King Henry II, the Dauphin, Mary Stuart and the French and Scottish nations in general. So vehement was her anger that, having raged and stormed for a considerable time, she collapsed with fatigue into a chair, telling de Feria that she needed time to think about King Philip's proposal.

A few days later, she was more rational, although she did point out the objections that could be made against such a marriage. The King's marriage to her sister had placed herself and Philip within the forbidden degrees of affinity; although the Pope would hardly be likely to refuse Philip a dispensation, this would be controversial in England, for had not Henry VIII been so 'scrupulous' as to question the Pope's right to issue a dispensation allowing him to marry his brother's widow? An English court had declared that marriage invalid, and it was likely that the validity of a marriage between Elizabeth and her sister's widower would be similarly disputed. The Queen quoted the Book of Leviticus to de Feria to prove her point, saying that she could never accept a papal decree which contravened the Word of God. For these reasons, she went on, she could not marry her sister's husband without dishonouring her father's memory.

However, all was not lost. She would, she promised, lay the matter before Parliament and the Council, and in the meantime the ambassador could assure King Philip that, if she married at all, she would prefer to take him before all others.

For the next month she considered the matter, while de Feria grew daily more optimistic. But the Queen's councillors, when they heard of the proposal, were aghast that their mistress could even contemplate accepting it, and in heated discussions did their best to dissuade her from doing so. She assured them that she would do nothing prejudicial to England's interests: 'I am descended by father and mother of mere English blood, and not of Spain, as my late sister was,' she told them. Nevertheless, it would not be politic to turn down King Philip with unflattering haste, because England still needed Spain's friendship, especially since a peace with France had not yet been concluded. For the time being, therefore, de Feria might continue to hope for a favourable answer.

Chapter 3

'Disputes over Trifles'

Queen Elizabeth had from adolescence been imbued with the beliefs and teachings of the Cambridge reformers who tutored her, yet although she grew up in and professed the Protestant faith, she was no reformer herself; it was the traditional ritual and ceremony of religion, the glorious anthems and motets sung by her choristers, and the intellectual satisfaction of theological literature that appealed to her. She knew that literature well, informing Parliament in 1566 that 'I studied nothing but divinity till I came to the Crown.' Furthermore, in an age in which people were burned for their beliefs, she held surprisingly enlightened views. 'There is only one Jesus Christ,' she declared to one French ambassador, Andre Hurault, Sieur de Maisse. 'The rest is a dispute over trifles.'

Unlike her sister, she was no fanatic, and hated fanaticism in others, both Catholic and Protestant, just as she had little time for bishops and despised those hard-line Protestant divines who went about calling each other 'my brother in Christ'. She was not above keeping episcopal sees vacant in order to retain their revenues for the Crown.

For her, the arguments of theologians and divines were as 'ropes of sand or sea-slime leading to the Moon'. She told Parliament in 1590, 'I see many overbold with God Almighty, making too many subtle scannings of His blessed will, as lawyers do with human testaments. If I were not certain that mine were the true way to God's will, God forbid that I should live to prescribe it to you.' Early in her reign, she confided to de Feria that she 'differed very little' from Catholics in her beliefs, 'as she believed that God was in the sacrament of the Eucharist, and only dissented from three or four things in the mass'. This, however, was said at a time when she needed Spain's support. She was quite capable of denigrating the old faith, as in 1577 when she referred to it, in a letter to German Protestants, as 'the darkness and filth of popery'.

When she learned that King Philip was persecuting Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands, she wrote to ask him why it mattered to him if his subjects chose to go to the Devil in their own way. She shocked one of Philip's ambassadors by flippantly expressing her hope that she would be saved as well as the Bishop of Rome, as English Protestants called the Pope. Later in the reign, she refused to allow Sir Walter Raleigh's suspected atheism to be investigated, on the grounds that she enjoyed theological arguments with him.

Because of these attitudes, some people accused her of having no religion at all. One Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, observed: 'She is not comfortable with the Protestants, nor with the doctrines of the other side either, and gives ground for the assertion that she is an atheist.' Yet she read the Bible regularly, and at the end of her life averred, 'I have ever used to set the Last Judgement before mine eyes and go to rule as I shall be judged to answer before a higher Judge.' Her views on transubstantiation were perhaps expressed in a doggerel verse traditionally ascribed to her and first printed in Richard Baker's
Chronicle
in 1643:

Christ was the Word that spake it, He took the bread and brake it, And what His words did make it, That I believe and take it.

What she also believed in was the strong hand of a divine Providence, guiding and watching over her and her kingdom. When England faced the great threat from Spain in the 1580s, Elizabeth told the French ambassador, de la Mothe Fenelon, 'I think that, at the worst, God has not yet decided that England shall cease to stand where she does, or at least that God has not given the power to overthrow her to those men who would like to undertake it.'

Sermons - one of the chief features of morning services in Protestant churches - were her particular bugbear, and woe betide those clergymen who preached for more than an hour. She had even less time for those who attempted to instruct her from the pulpit as she sat in the royal closet with its lattice window, which she might have open or shut, according to her mood. 'To your text, Mr Dean! To your text!' she would shout, or she would send a message to the preacher, warning him to desist from an offending theme. In 1565, Dr Nowell, Dean of St Paul's, attacked the recent dedication of a Catholic tract to the Queen, then spoke out against the idolatrous graven images - the crucifixes -which Elizabeth had insisted upon keeping in the royal chapels.

'Do not talk about that!' snapped the Queen, but the Dean ignored her. 'Leave that!' she bawled. 'It has nothing to do with your subject, 
and the matter is now threadbare.'

Another preacher, Bishop Aylmer, who protested about 'the vanity of decking the body too finely', was curtly told to change the subject. 'Perchance', commented the Queen's godson Harington, 'the Bishop hath never sought Her Majesty's wardrobe, or he would have chosen another text.'

In 1596, when Elizabeth attained the age of sixty-three, known in Tudor times as the grand climacteric year, which many could not hope to survive, Bishop Rudd was informed by the Archbishop of Canterbury that Her Majesty 'now is grown weary of the vanities of wit and eloquence wherewith her youth was formerly affected, and plain sermons which come home to her heart please her the best'. The Bishop thus chose for his text the prayer, 'O teach us to number our days, that we may incline our hearts unto wisdom,' and proceeded to discourse upon significant sacred numbers such as three for the Holy Trinity, seven for the Sabbath, then seven times nine for the grand climacteric year, sixty-three. By this time, the Queen was frowning. Panicking, Dr Rudd went on to refer to the Revelatory number 666, 'with which he could prove the Pope to be Antichrist'. When he had finished, Elizabeth leaned forward in her closet and tartly commented 'that he should have kept his arithmetic for himself. I see', she added, 'that the greatest clerics are not the wisest men.'

'Queen Elizabeth', remembered Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester under James I, always insisted 'that she had rather speak to God herself, than hear another speaking of God. She seldom heard sermons, but only in Lent.' Those summoned to preach at court were instructed to cut their address to a minimum and to choose their text from a list of those approved by the bishops. Sir John Harington records that the Queen's mind was capable of wandering during sermons. She once congratulated a divine on preaching on a matter that would have offended her greatly had she been listening to him.

Yet there were more cogent reasons for Elizabeth's dislike of sermons: preaching offered a forum for men to air their opinions, which, given the religious climate of the times, could only lead to disputes and cause public unrest. Those extreme Protestants who would come to be known as Puritans were heartily disapproved of by Elizabeth, not only for their fanaticism, but also because they insisted upon a 'preaching ministry'. Most of her subjects applauded her stand against Puritanism, especially after 1585 when she quashed a Puritan Bill aimed at banning all sports and entertainments on Sundays. The Queen felt that her people had a right to spend their only day of rest enjoying themselves as they pleased, without interference from killjoys. She also refused to agree to the suggestion - again from a Puritan source - that heresy, adultery and 
blasphemy be made criminal offences. In her opinion, those things were matters of conscience, not of law.

Perhaps her most famous triumph over Puritanism came in the field of the arts. The Puritan authorities in several cities, especially London, held the theatre in especial odium, and made strenuous efforts to suppress play-going, as it drew people away from the churches. The Queen sympathised with the theatre-goers: she, too, hated sermons. When, in 1575, she discovered that the renowned Coventry cycle of mystery plays had been banned by the Puritan authorities in that city, she ordered them to be restored. The Puritans in London then began complaining that theatre-goers in the City helped to spread the plague that was endemic each summer. In 1583, the Corporation of London closed the theatres on the Surrey shore, but Elizabeth retaliated by forming her own company of players, who became known as The Queen's Men. The civic authorities backed down, but in 1597 they eventually persuaded the Council to agree to close down the theatres on the grounds that they were hotbeds of subversive propaganda against the government. When Elizabeth heard, she was furious, and the Council hastily rescinded the order. There were no further threats to the theatre in her reign.

The Queen particularly abhorred married clergy, especially bishops and archbishops. Time and again she refused to acknowledge the existence of their wives, and on several occasions she was so rude about Archbishop Matthew Parker's wife that the shocked primate 'was in horror to hear her'. In 1561 he wrote to Cecil: 'Her Majesty contmueth very evil to the state of marriage in the clergy, and if I were not therein very stiff [i.e. in his views] would utterly and openly condemn and forbid it.' She had the septuagenarian Bishop of Ely brought before the Council to be rebuked for having taken a young woman as his second wife. His excuse was that he had married to avoid being tempted into fornication, but this cut no ice with the Queen, whose views were shared by many of her subjects.

Queen Mary had repealed Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, and when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne England was technically a Catholic kingdom under the jurisdiction of the Pope. However, most people expected the royal supremacy to be restored by Parliament, just as some kind of Protestant religious settlement was anticipated. Since her accession, Elizabeth had given only hints as to her intentions regarding the crucial issue of religion, but those hints had led people to believe that England would once again become independent of the Catholic Church'. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, there could only be one head of the Church in England, and that was the monarch. She believed she had been called by the Deity to bring about 'the according and unity 
of these people of the realm into a uniform order of religion, to the honour and glory of God, the establishing of the Church and the tranquillity of the realm'.

One of her chief concerns was that public worship should be conducted in the correct form, in English, and she was to insist - much to the disgust of her stricter Protestant subjects - upon retaining some forms of Catholic ritual. She kept candles as well as crucifixes in her private chapels and insisted that her clergy wore caps, copes and surplices; she nevertheless abandoned the more elaborate ceremonies and practices which smacked of papistry, such as belief in miracles, the system of indulgences, and the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Always sensitive to strong smells, she loathed the scent of incense in churches, and banned it. But the Puritans still found much to complain about in her practice of her religion.

Although the worship of saints was abhorrent to Protestants, she encouraged the popular cult of St George, who was revered as a national symbol and the patron of the Order of the Garter. She continued the Maundy ceremonies - a detailed miniature by the female artist Levina Teerlinc shows the Queen at a Maundy service at the beginning of her reign. Elizabeth also revived the custom of touching sufferers of the skin disease scrofula, 'the King's Evil', which her medieval predecessors had done for three centuries. She took her almost mystical role in this ritual very seriously, steeling herself to lay her hands on the infected places on the supplicants' bodies, in the hope of effecting a cure. She restricted her attendance at chapel to weekly visits on Sundays and during Lent, and she always wore black to church.

Although her reign saw a cruel persecution of Catholics, Elizabeth had no personal antipathy towards them. Despite the ever-harsher laws against Catholics, she welcomed some recusant noblemen at court and sometimes visited them in their houses; she employed Catholics, such as the composer William Byrd, in her household, and rejoiced when her Catholic subjects demonstrated their loyalty to her, as they often did. Once, on progress, a man ran to her litter shouting, 'Vivat Regina! Honi soit qui mal y penseY Turning to the Spanish ambassador, who was present, the Queen told him, 'This good man is a clergyman of the old religion.' On another occasion, during her visit in 1564 to the University of Cambridge, she watched a group of undergraduates perform a masque ridiculing the Catholic mass; when a character dressed as a dog appeared with the Host in its fangs, an offended Elizabeth rose and stalked out, 'using strong language'. The Puritans would later accuse her - with some justification - of being more partial to Catholics than she was to true Protestants like themselves.

The persecution for which her reign became notorious was prompted 
by political necessity, not religious fanaticism, as will be shown in later chapters. The priests who were executed had committed crimes against the state, and were perceived as a very real threat to national security. Queen Mary had ordered the burnings of over three hundred Protestants in three years; fewer Catholics were executed under Elizabeth, and only four people, all Anabaptists, were burned in the whole of her forty-five-year-long reign. Like most of her subjects, the Queen was horrified and repelled by reports of the mass burnings of heretics by the Inquisition in Spain. As far as she was concerned, a man's conscience was his own. According to Sir Francis Bacon, she lived by the maxim, 'Consciences are not to be forced', and she 'would not have any unnecessarily sifted to know what affection they had towards the old religion'. Her Majesty, he wrote, had no 'liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts'. All she wanted from her subjects was loyalty to herself and the state and outward conformity to her laws governing religion.

Parliament now moved towards passing the first of those laws. On 9 February 1559, a bill to restore the royal supremacy over the Church of England was introduced into the Commons, but it was flawed in many respects and, after much debate, was thrown out.