Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (14 page)

If Elizabeth’s queenship complicated and defied the positioning of men and women in a circumscribed schema, the ambiguity surrounding women’s rule also allowed her to subvert the paradigm of stratification among men, women, and animals. As queen, Elizabeth did not have to obey an honor-bound father, as did the princess in “The Frog Prince,” or a bestial husband, as did the impoverished brides in “The Pig Prince” or “The Wild Boar.” Elizabeth did not need to be “animalized”: she did not have to humble herself before other men, and she spent considerable energy as queen reminding her male subjects of her place and theirs. Rather than ignoring hierarchical assumptions, Elizabeth’s strategy was to appropriate them to reconfigure and strengthen her female monarchy.

Elizabeth’s brilliant facility with language was integral to her successful queenship. As Ilona Bell notes, “During her lifetime and after her death, Elizabeth was celebrated for her rhetorical and linguistic powers, and she was remarkably outspoken for a women.”
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Elizabeth’s verbal expression evinced the same attention to craft as her writing in speeches, letters, and poetry. She chose her words with deliberation and precision, ever attentive to the power of language to convey and affirm her authority. One of Elizabeth’s means of emphasizing her superiority was her practice of addressing her male favorites, councilors, and suitors through the symbolic use of pet names. Elizabeth’s terms of endearment had the effect of checking their courtly rise on the social ladder. By animalizing this circle of men, she reinforced her own elevated position.

Elizabeth’s penchant for nicknames was well known, though her use of them has received little analysis. One scholar claims that the queen’s use of nicknames was “a reliable token of regal trust.”
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Wallace MacCaffrey briefly notes that Elizabeth “playfully bestowed nicknames” on the “congenial cluster of familiar faces” that surrounded her, and David Loades writes, “She also had that endearing characteristic, a sense of humor, and often addressed her familiars by affectionate nicknames.”
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Elizabeth referred to her dear friend Lady Margaret Norris as “Old Crow,” or “Black Crow”; her advisor Walsingham was her “Moor”; Archbishop Whitgift her “Little Black Husband”; her beloved secretary William Cecil her “Spirit”; and his son and successor, Robert Cecil, her “Pygmy.” Many of these names were derived from a character attribute or a linguistic pun: one of her favorite courtiers, the ambitious and multitalented Walter Raleigh, became “Water,” a name that was not only homophonous but suited his seafaring enterprises.
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Elizabeth’s love of wordplay and her clever wit were well known and frequently employed. In response to a letter Lord Mountjoy had written in 1600 lamenting that his work in Ireland was like the trivial labors of a kitchen wench, Elizabeth wrote back, addressing him as “Mistress Kitchenmaid.” The queen then reassured him that his service was valued: “With your frying pan and other kitchen stuff [you] have brought to their last home more rebels, and passed greater breakneck places than those that promised more and did less.”
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However, many of the nicknames Elizabeth used were more than “playfully bestowed,” particularly those pointing to physical characteristics. Robert Cecil, who was short and suffered from a severe curvature of the spine, did not appreciate what he referred to as the queen’s “sporting name of pygmy,” a reference to his size as well as to a quality of exotic difference or aberration. According to Pauline Croft, Cecil “found her allusion to his deformity distressing and made a discreet protest, although similar sneers were to pursue him throughout his life and beyond the grave.”
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Cecil wrote to another courtier, John Stanhope, “Though I may not find fault with the name she gives me, yet seem I only not to mislike it because she gives it. It was interlaced with many fairer words than I am worthy of.”
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In her examination of the many sneers and slurs Cecil endured throughout his career, not only from the queen but from allies and enemies at court, Catherine Loomis points out that “by 1597, Cecil’s court nickname had been upgraded to ‘little man’ and by 1601, having made himself indispensable to the elderly queen, Cecil was promoted to ‘Elizabeth’s Elf.’”
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Although these later nicknames may be slightly less disparaging than “pygmy,” they are still intended to belittle. The younger Cecil’s relationship with Elizabeth was complex; as much as she valued his dedicated service, she also found it necessary to remind him of his place. Perhaps Cecil ultimately resigned himself to being figuratively diminished, as he later used an animal term to describe himself. Complaining to his friend Sir George Carew about his onerous administrative work, Cecil wrote, “God knoweth I labour like a Pack horse, and know that if success be nought it wilbe scorne to me.”
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Elizabeth’s nicknames frequently resorted to a quality of otherness, as did the term “Pygmy.” The nicknames of Lady Norris, Archbishop Whitgift, and Sir Francis Walsingham all alluded to “blackness,” albeit for different reasons. We can assume that Lady Norris, the queen’s “Old Crow,” had black hair or a dark complexion, although she and her husband, Sir Henry Norris, responded to the animal connotations of the nickname.
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In Sir Henry’s address to the queen about the four Norris sons who distinguished themselves in the queen’s military service, he told Elizabeth: “The rumour of their deaths has so oft affrighted the crow, my wife, that her heart hath been as black as her feathers.” Norris then continued the avian pun in reference to Elizabeth’s past visits to their estate at Rycote: “And though nothing be more unfit than to lodge your Majesty than a crow’s nest, yet shall it be most happy to us that it is by your Highness made a phoenix nest.”
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Archbishop Whitgift’s nickname—“Little Black Husband”—presumably derived from the color of his clerical robes, though “black” may also be an inverted play on the first part of his name “whit” or “white.” As for the “husband,” William Sheils offers this explanation: as archbishop, Whitgift had several residences close to London and thus “was particularly prone to visitation by Elizabeth, who stayed with him most years...it was after one successful visit that Elizabeth gave him the famous sobriquet ‘her little black husband.’”
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Whitgift could be the queen’s “husband” because he was nobody else’s: the name was a complimentary allusion to Whitgift’s celibacy, which Elizabeth favored but could not always enforce for clergy. Perhaps even more importantly, the queen once again employs the word “little,” as she did with Robert Cecil, not only to refer to physical size but to underscore her own relative superiority.

Elizabeth’s relationship with her secretary of state and foreign affairs, Sir Francis Walsingham, now popularly referred to as her “spymaster,” was characterized by guarded mutual respect and frequent disagreement.
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Elizabeth referred to Walsingham as her “Moor” or “Ethiopian,” most likely because of his dark complexion or somber clothing, but the nicknames also suggest an association between Walsingham’s espionage work and popular perceptions of northern Africans as mysterious and even dangerous. Walsingham acknowledged the names, once telling Elizabeth when he had to offer some particularly frank and unwelcomed counsel: “The Laws of Ethiopia, my native soil, are very severe against those that condemn a person unheard.”
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Those who received nicknames often participated in the linguistic game and their responses occasionally betrayed full awareness of the pejorative implications of their “sporting names.”

For most of the men who fell within the circle of Elizabeth’s favorites or suitors, she employed a range of animal nicknames that signified not just otherness but their lower status within a hierarchical schema. Elizabeth typically chose diminutive animals rather than large, predatory creatures. As Paul Hammer mentions, these pet names were part of her strategy of managing her various male favorites, and the names were at once “affectionate and demeaning.”
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Robert Dudley, whom Elizabeth eventually created the Earl of Leicester, was arguably the most important of her would-be suitors or favorites. Elizabeth and Robert had known each other since childhood, and it is widely believed that Leicester was the man she loved more than any other. Although their relationship was not without turmoil, Leicester remained Elizabeth’s Master of the Horse and her close confidante and advisor until his death in 1588. Elizabeth’s intimacy with Leicester was bound to make other courtiers and advisors envious—indeed her favoritism appeared to be a strategy for maintaining a certain amount of healthy dissent among her male circle. Other courtiers, who were particularly jealous of Leicester in the earlier years of Elizabeth’s reign, referred to him as the “gypsy,” a reference to his dark complexion but also a derogatory term since gypsies were seen as threatening outsiders in sixteenthcentury England.
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Whether Elizabeth was aware of Leicester’s gypsy nickname is not clear, but she fashioned her own nicknames for her favorite. She called Leicester her “Eyes,” a reference to surveillance and protection, and one that Leicester proudly employed in his letters to the queen, often drawing a “double o” to depict a pair of eyes. But Elizabeth also used an animal name for Leicester—Robin, and often, “Sweet Bonny Robin.”
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Robin was a common diminutive for Robert, but the name also refers to a familiar bird. Furthermore, as Harry Morris demonstrates in his discussion of “Bonny Sweet Robin,” Ophelia’s song in 
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, robin was a common phallic reference.
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Although Elizabeth cannot be charged with consciously exploiting the name’s sexual significance, the animal reference is undeniable. Elizabeth also described her relationship with Leicester to a French ambassador in other animal terms: “He is like my little dog. As soon as he is seen anywhere, people know that I am coming.”
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The reference to Leicester as her “little dog” signals both Elizabeth’s affection for him and her awareness of his relative subservience and insignificance. More importantly, she deliberately denigrated Leicester publicly and officially to a foreign ambassador, knowing that her remarks would most likely be recorded. Perhaps it was with Leicester that Elizabeth most often had to assert her superiority and autonomy since he had the strongest claims on her affections.

If Leicester elicited acrimony and envy from Elizabeth’s other courtiers, particularly in the early years of her reign, Sir Walter Raleigh was even more despised when he rose to prominence in the later years. Stephen Greenblatt describes the deep hatred Raleigh incurred, whether because of the profitable monopolies Elizabeth awarded him or because of his origins in gentry rather than in nobility. But Raleigh’s pride, Greenblatt suggests, was seen as his most egregious fault: “Raleigh’s extraordinary haughtiness is noted by a wide range of contemporary commentators, from the nameless political correspondent of Lord Burghley—‘his pride is intolerable, without regard for any’—to Ralegh’s virulent enemy, Lord Henry Howard—‘Rawlie, that in pride exceedeth men alive.’”
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Just as many fairy tale plots are bent on punishing princesses for their excessive pride, Elizabeth similarly had to check haughtiness and presumption in her courtiers.

Elizabeth referred to Raleigh as “Water,” a play on the pronunciation of his name, but he was also her “dear Pug.” In a poem Raleigh addressed to Elizabeth, “occasioned by the Earl of Essex’s rapid rise,” he laments his fall from the queen’s favour: “Fortune hath taken away my love.”
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Elizabeth’s poem in response chides Raleigh for thinking that Fortune, rather than the Queen herself, controls his fate:

“Ah, silly pug, wert thou sore afraid?

Mourn not, my Wat, nor be thou so dismayed;

It passeth fickle Fortune’s power and skill

To force my heart to think thee any ill.”

Peter Herman points out that the poem is “a remarkable performance, and not the least reason is the contrast between Raleigh’s position as a supplicant...and Elizabeth’s superior position throughout her text.”
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Ilona Bell’s reading of the Elizabeth-Raleigh verse exchange further underscores Elizabeth’s poetic dexterity as well as her emphatic iteration of her own powerful vantage: “Elizabeth’s deflationary rhetoric comprises a withering critique of Raleigh’s conventional public persona, disingenuous rhetoric, and contradictory logic.”
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In the poem, Elizabeth refers to Raleigh twice as “Pug,” a term that applied both to people and to pets, and the name is all the more demeaning when coupled with the adjective “silly,” with its early modern connotations, “weak” or “foolish.”

Christopher Hatton was another of Elizabeth’s most loyal and enduring favorites whose animal nickname was privately and publicly acknowledged. As a young courtier, Hatton garnered the queen’s attention for his skills in dancing and fencing; in 1564, Elizabeth created Hatton one of her 50 grand pensioners and he steadily rose up the court ladder, eventually becoming Elizabeth’s Lord Chancellor.

As we will discuss in chapter 7, in the earlier decades of Elizabeth’s reign, rumors about Elizabeth and Hatton were rampant, but they remained just that—rumors.
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Nonetheless, as MacCaffrey points out, Hatton played the game of “the perpetual suitor, paying court to an adored but inaccessible mistress, forever sighing for her favouring glance, forever her faithful servant.”
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Elizabeth called her loyal servant by several terms of endearment—for example, “Lids,” for eyelids, a reference to his role as her protector, much as Leicester was her “Eyes.” More often, Elizabeth referred to him as “Mutton” or “Sheep,” and Hatton, a prolific letter writer, used these nicknames himself in his many letters to the queen. In one letter, Hatton wrote to Elizabeth about his health, lamenting, “Your Mutton is black; scarcely will you know your own, so much has this disease dashed me.”
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He signed another letter, “Your Majesty’s sheep and most bound vassal,”
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while in a letter Elizabeth dictated to Hatton, she positioned herself as his owner and caretaker, urging him to “remember she was a Shepherd, and then you might think how dear her Sheep was unto her.”
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