Read Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Online
Authors: Alice Hunt,Anna Whitelock
Tags: #Royalty, #Tudors, #England/Great Britain, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography
Ironically only two officials seem to have suffered for the way they carried out their duties: Richard Browne and Anthony Crane. Browne, who had no previous experience, was appointed to the junior post at the Board of Greencloth in violation of the rules by the earl of Leicester, who as lord steward, was planning a major reorganization shortly before he died.
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Whatever reforming zeal Browne might have had, he soon fell in line and accepted things as they were. As a member of parliament he was called upon to explain and defend the procedures for provisioning the court that were expensive to the queen and hated by her subjects. So heated was his defense of the status quo that he collapsed on the floor of the House with a ruptured vein and died.52
Crane’s case was less dramatic, but perhaps more revealing of the power of entrenched but outmoded procedures. Crane had entered royal service in the waning months of the reign of Henry VIII as the most junior clerk, clerk of the Pastry. He slowly made his way up the hierarchy and after thirty-two years’ service he reached the top of what was available for him when he was named cofferer. But if his steady rise was unusual only in its longevity, his sudden fall broke all conventions, for he was the only one of the queen’s household officials to lose his post for his conduct in office. What is even more unusual is that he was not dismissed for theft or simply not doing his job. These violations were frequently overlooked. Crane’s offense was that he was overzealous in trying to economize, and in doing so he offended powerful lobbies with a vested interest in doing business as they always had. In a letter pleading for reinstatement he explained what had happened.53
Faced with the daunting task of trying to make ends meet in a time of rising prices, he decided that he could economize in the way the vast quantity of beer consumed was acquired. Rather than purchasing it from London brewers, he decided to brew it himself at a brewery he set up at Sion. Unfortunately, in his haste he failed to run tests, and when courtiers drank his beer, they did not find it to their liking. Ruefully, he admitted that it “did not hold the like relish [as] the London brew did.”
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Although Crane’s dismissal can be credited simply to the poor quality of his beer, in actuality it had more fundamental causes. First, he had offended his colleagues of the Board of Greencloth by ignoring their suggestion of running a test by using water from Sion at an established brewery to ascertain “what the goodness of the drinke wold be.”
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More importantly, Crane’s brewery offended his critics in other ways, suggesting that the poor quality of the beer had merely been a convenient excuse. Unfortunately for Crane, although he did have the authority to set up the brewery, he did not have the authority to pay for it without consulting the entire Board of Greencloth. Since he knew they were not in favor of the scheme, he had chosen to break the rules and pay for the brewery by diverting money that had already been allotted to purchase beer from the London brewers, “whereof he was sunndrie tymes warned.” To compound his fault, an inquiry into his conduct in office revealed that he kept the queen’s money at his own house rather than at court, a common practice, but one that was a violation of the rules.56
Perhaps more serious than Crane’s ignoring the “ancient and most necessarie” regulations was the offense he had given to the London brewers whose lucrative contracts he had broken. Although they had long been accused of bribing various officers in the Buttery and Cellar to get their contracts,
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they could now portray themselves as the innocent victims of corrupt officers. With the power of entrenched officials and the Guild of London Brewers against him, Crane did not stand a chance.
Lord Burghley made one last attempt to reform operations in the 1590s. Croft now dead, Burghley persuaded Elizabeth to give Knolly’s duties to a commission while he retained the title. The new commission attempted to sweep away decades of corruption and mismanagement by dismissing six sergeants and reforming procedures for procurement.
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Not surprisingly the sergeants were soon back in their posts.59
VII
Although this essay has not provided the intensive analysis of a single department that Sir Geoffrey called for, it has examined the careers of court servants previously neglected. It has shown that Mary’s goal in her initial appointments was to surround herself with Catholics who had served her previously and who had helped her gain the throne. In doing so she dismissed officials with years of experience, but to her, loyalty was more important than expertise. In contrast, Elizabeth was content to add her men without displacing those appointed by her sister, regardless of their beliefs. However, after the claims of their former servants were satisfied, both were content to let their households follow customary rules and procedures, even when the result was added expense and inefficiency. Theft and corruption were tolerated, and the few attempts at reform produced few lasting results. Routine had triumphed and servants had come to treat their office as a kind of property, to which once appointed they enjoyed life tenure. Despite increasing evidence of the need for reform, bureaucratic inertia had triumphed over economy and efficiency.
Notes
CHAPTER 15
WOMEN, FRIENDSHIP, AND MEMORY
Charlotte Merton
Reliue your sorow for your far jorney with joy of your shorte retorne, and thinke this pilgrimage rather a profe of your frendes, than a levinge of your contrye, the lengthe of time, and distance of the place, seperates not the love of frendes, nor deprives not the showe of good will. A olde sainge whan bale is lowest bote is nerest, when your nide shall be most yow shall finde my frendshipp gretest....My power but small my love as great as the whose giftes may tel ther frendeships tale. Let will supply al other wantes, and ofte sending take the lieu of often sights, your messagers shal not retorne empty, nor yet your desires unaccomplist. Lethes floude hath hire no course, good memory hath greatest streame,...Your loving cousin, and redy frende cor rotto.
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I
Princess Elizabeth’s letter to her first cousin Katherine Carey Lady Knollys dates from 1553.
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Later she would write in similarly affectionate terms to women such as Frances Howard Countess of Hertford (“Good ffrancke”) and Margery Williams Lady Norris (“Mine owne Crow”)
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letters intended to set the minds of her correspondents at rest, to reaffirm her royal favor.
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This early letter, however, is an unequivocal promise of favor to come when things must have seemed very bleak indeed: the princess, the terrified focus of opposition to Queen Mary; and Knollys and her husband, like other wealthy Protestants unwilling to conform, hurrying to take their family into exile on the Continent. And once she was queen, Elizabeth’s memory of their friendship was indeed to determine Lady Knollys’ success, for she became a senior lady of the privy chamber until her death in 1569, the mother of three ladies of the privy chamber, and the woman who put the Knollys family on the political map.
Regardless of the period studied, once the court historian has cleared the initial hurdles of determining who was at court, what they were meant to do while they were there, and what they actually did, much of the work comes down to answering two questions: Who were friends? Who were enemies? Of course, the devil is in the detail, starting with the problem that although almost everyone in any age can agree on a definition of enemy, its antonym is more puzzling. The issue cannot be avoided, however, given that the question “Who were friends?” leads inexorably on to “What was a friend?”
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The nature of friendship is something that has much exercised historians in recent years, with greater or lesser success depending on period and scope. The classicists long held the field, and the early modernists in the shape of Alan Bray and Eva Österberg have made important advances, yet in considering friendships between women there is still perhaps too great an emphasis on finding evidence of what Bray calls “the formal and objective character that friendship could possess that could overlap with the character of kinship.”
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Herein lies the prime confusion when looking at sixteenth-century women, for friendship is usually defined as excluding not only spouses and lovers, but also relations. This poses a problem when looking at the sixteenth-century English court elite, for whom it is no exaggeration to say that each woman was related to all the others to some degree. Moreover, friendship was quite possible within families, especially prolific ones such as the Howards, and was indeed encouraged, despite the considerable variations in status within immediate families: just because people were closely related did not mean that they were of equal social standing; and reading backward, just because they were friends did not mean that they were not related. In sixteenth-century England, “friend” was a much and carefully used term.