The Elizabethans (2 page)

This was the age of Renaissance humanism – a humanism that was not the preserve only of a few intellectuals, as had been the case at the close of the fifteenth century, but which, through the grammar schools founded in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth, disseminated learning and a reasonable attitude to life throughout the land. Shakespeare himself was the product of this grammar-school education. And merely to name Shakespeare is to remind us that the Elizabethan age was indeed a glory age – some would say
the
glory age – of English literature. The reign (especially its last fifteen years) saw a prodigious literary flowering. Who could not revel in times that produced so rich a variety of books as Richard Hakluyt’s
Principall Navigations
, Thomas Nashe’s hilarious, scabrous fictions such as
Pierce Penilesse
or
The Unfortunate Traveller
, the poems and songs of Thomas Campion, the translations by Chapman of Homer, by North of Plutarch, by Harington of Ariosto – even before you mention the poems of Spenser, Sidney and Donne; Sidney’s two prose romances of
Arcadia
; and the dramas of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare himself?

Add to this the music of John Dowland, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and glory is added to glory. Think of the architecture! Apart from the splendour of the great houses – Kirby Hall, Longleat, Hardwick – there were innumerable manor houses of incomparable beauty. So much survives: Elizabethan tombs in small country churches, gatehouses, lodges, schools, guildhalls and corn exchanges, towers, staircases, colleges, often quirky, never ugly.

In this book I hope we shall be basking together in wholehearted appreciation of all this; but it is no longer possible to do so without a recognition of the Difficulty – hence my title for the opening chapter. The Difficulty is really a moral one: things which they, the Elizabethans, regarded as a cause for pride, we – the great majority of educated, liberal Western opinion – consider shameful. Things of which they boasted, we deplore. Earlier generations of British writers looked back at the Elizabethans and either saw simple causes of celebration in their legal, political, naval and military and ecclesiastical achievements. Or, as Virginia Woolf did, in her camp comedy
Orlando
, they saw merely a fancy-dress parade. The best way of blinding oneself to the Difficulty was to write solely from an aesthetic or literary viewpoint. C.S. Lewis did this in his highly readable and scholarly
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama
, first published in 1954. He sidesteps all controversy, unless you consider it controversial that this Ulster Protestant refers throughout his book to Roman Catholics as ‘Papists’. Of Spenser’s
A View of the Present State of Ireland
, Lewis, who was a great Spenserian and who did more than any twentieth-century scholar to help us enjoy
The Faerie Queene
, fights shy of examining the contents of this prose work by the chief poet of the age. ‘The morality of [Spenser’s] . . . plan for the reduction of Ireland has been shown to be not so much indefensible as quotations might make it appear, but any stronger apologia would be a burden beyond my shoulders.’
¹

Such an attitude could not easily be struck by a writer of our generation. We need neither condemn nor construct an ‘apologia’ for Spenser’s programme for the Irish, but merely speaking of his ‘plan for the reduction of Ireland’ scarcely gives to a modern reader who has not read
A View
much idea of what it contains. A modern Irish historian has not unfairly paraphrased Spenser’s book as a programme for the complete destruction of Ireland’s existing political structure. ‘Only when that had been achieved and the Irish had been reduced, through mass starvation, exemplary killing and the imposition of full military repression, to a state of being without a culture at all, could the process of educating them in the ways of the superior English culture commence.’
²

The Irish question will never go away, but it could be said that it is only in our generation that the English have finally rid themselves of the Elizabethan mindset – namely, that Ireland was a beautiful island whose inhabitants would be unable to learn the habits of civilisation until taught them by the English.

Here is a vivid example of what I mean by my suggestion that we – this generation – have lived to see the Elizabethan world come to an end. And here is a vivid example of what I call the Difficulty. It is no longer an option for any Englishman to write as Froude or Rowse did: that is,
defending
the Elizabethan attitude to Ireland and the Irish. On the other hand – and this is what I mean by the ‘Difficulty’ – I do not want this book to be a tedious and anachronistic exercise in judging one age by the standards of another. We have so far, so very far, left the Elizabethan Age behind us that today only the deranged would share, let us say, Sir Francis Walsingham’s views on capital punishment, Sir John Hawkins’s views on Africans or, come to that, Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s implied views on Jews. But we would paint a poor portrait of the Age if all we did was to hold our noses and point fingers of scorn. Because we can see not merely a continuation, but an ending of the Elizabethan story, in our own day, our danger is to be too dismissive, too unimaginatively judgemental. And yet some judgement is inescapable.

In this opening part I have chosen to write first about two areas of life in which the Elizabethan story has continued into living memory, but has now come to a definite end. Each of these areas will be illustrations of the fact that we are both close to the Elizabethans and infinitely far away; we are their heirs, but we have put our ancestry behind us. When these illustrations are complete, we will be in a stronger position to see the Elizabethan world with clear eyes – and that will be the aim of the remaining parts of the book.

Part One

The Early Reign

1

The Difficulty

AFTER THIRTY YEARS
of fighting and more than 3,000 deaths in the province of Northern Ireland, peace was agreed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the Northern Ireland Assembly held democratic elections.

There have been sporadic outbursts of violence since, but most people, in the Republic of Ireland, in Northern Ireland and in the rest of Britain, seem to think that peace has come, and that the compromises on all sides have been worth the peace. The Republic has, in effect, abandoned its claim over the six counties of the North. It has accepted the partition of Ireland. The peoples of the six counties now enjoy, in effect, self-government, with power shared between Catholics and Protestants. The government in Westminster, while keeping a toe-hold in the province, and while retaining a special Minister for Northern Ireland, has given up any notion of ‘making Ireland British’ against its will.
¹

Ireland was Britain’s first, and least willing, colony, the most unsuccessful of all British colonial experiments. The pattern of Elizabethan failure in Ireland was to be replicated at other periods of history: first an attempt to woo the Irish, to persuade the people themselves to adopt laws and customs that were alien to them. Next, this wooing having known only partial success, or abject failure, an attempt at coercion; and one method of such coercion was a resettlement of Irish land by English, Welsh or Scottish incomers. Third, when neither gentle persuasion nor dispossession achieved the desired result – viz. the rule of English law on Irish soil – there was a resort to outright violence and massacre.

It was not, initially at least, a specifically religious matter, though by the end of the sixteenth century the rebels Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell could see themselves as champions of ‘Christ’s Catholic religion’ against the English heretics. The fundamental point of contention, though, was English interference in Irish affairs: English attempts to make Ireland less Irish. As a matter of fact, in the early stages of the Reformation, the Irish went along with Henry VIII’s religious revolution more peaceably than the English did. There was no Pilgrimage of Grace, there were no Irish martyrs for the faith, no Irish Thomas More
²
or Bishop Fisher. More than 400 Irish monasteries and abbeys were sold to Irish laymen during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

The Irish did not protest when Henry VIII made George Browne the Archbishop of Dublin – that was, the former Augustinian friar who performed the marriage ceremony between the King and Anne Boleyn. Perhaps, if a Gaelic Bible and Gaelic Prayer Book had been made available in Ireland, as a Welsh Bible and Prayer Book were in Wales by 1567, Ireland might have remained Protestant. It was not until the beginning of James I’s reign that the Prayer Book appeared in Irish.
³

Outside the Pale – that is, the small area twenty miles to the east and north of Dublin that was English-speaking – Ireland had its own language, literature, culture. The Reformation bishops were bidden to preach to the people in English,
⁴
a language understood by Irish congregations no better than they understood Latin. But it was not Protestantism
per se
that the Irish rejected, it was English cultural imperialism, which had been just as strong in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. It was in 1521 that the Earl of Surrey, as Lieutenant of Ireland, had first proposed
plantation
as a means of subduing the recalcitrant island. That is, removing the Irish from their land and replacing them with English or Scots. George Dowdall, the Catholic appointed as Archbishop of Armagh by Mary Tudor, urged a continuation of the policy. The only solution to the Irish ‘problem’ was, according to the archbishop, to get rid of the Irish: either expel them or kill them, and give their land to the English.
⁵

What made Ireland so ungovernable, so anarchic – not merely in the eyes of English colonists, but also in the eyes of many Irish people themselves?
⁶
Central to the problem was the Irish method of determining both
succession
and property-ownership. Conn Bacach O’Neill (
c
.1482–1559) was proclaimed The O’Neill – that is, head of his tribe or sept – though he was actually the younger son of Conn More O’Neill, chieftain and lord of Tyrone. The English never came to grips with this system of
tanistry
, whereby the clans or tribes chose the new leader on grounds of quality rather than those of primogeniture.

Henry VIII made Conn O’Neill Earl of Tyrone in exchange for his submission to English law and English ideas of land ownership, or as his own people saw it: ‘O’Neill of Oileach and Eamhait, the king of Tara and Tailte has exchanged in foolish submission his kingdom for the Ulster Earldom’
⁷
. When Conn O’Neill died, Shane – his youngest son, by his second wife, Sorcha – was elected O’ Neilll by his sept. By English law, the earldom of Tyrone passed to Conn’s eldest son Matthew, but Shane argued that as head of the sept he should receive the earldom. Queen Elizabeth (anything for a quiet life, as far as her view of Ireland was concerned) wanted her Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, to recognise Shane’s claim. This Sussex was extremely unwilling to do, with the result that within the first year of the Queen’s reign the English Pale was being raided by Shane’s troops, many of them mercenaries from Scotland; and Ulster, the Northern Kingdom, was an anarchy of warring O’Neills, fighting one another.

So within a year of Elizabeth becoming queen were to be seen, in the clash between Shane O’Neill and the Earl of Sussex, many of the key ingredients of the Irish phenomenon. There was the fact, for example, that chiefs such as O’Neill were able to command large private armies of gallowglasses from the Western Isles of Scotland and Redshanks – unsettled mercenaries who sailed the coasts in their galleys plying for hire as soldiers, either in Irish quarrels among themselves or in their wars against the English. In the last years of Mary’s reign and the first of Elizabeth’s, Sussex had secured the consent of the Crown to make naval attacks on the Hebrides to try to cut off the supply of gallowglasses at source.
⁸

While Sussex attempted out-and-out defeat of O’Neill and extirpation of the enemy, the Queen was undermining him by attempting to pacify O’Neill. Here is another ingredient of the Elizabethan story of Ireland: a perpetual tension between the Englishmen on the ground, trying to defend the interests of the Crown, and the Crown itself wishing to avoid trouble and expense. In all this, during Elizabeth’s reign, there was also a strong element of misogyny. Sir Henry Sidney, for example, complained to Walsingham, ‘Three tymes her Majestie hath sent me her Deputie into Ireland, and in everie of the three tymes I susteyned a great and a violent rebellion, everie one of which I subdued and (with honourable peace) lefte the country in quiet.’ Yet he felt himself undermined by the Queen’s allowing herself to be bamboozled – as Sidney thought – by the Earl of Ormond.

(Yet another ingredient in the anarchic mix there! The clash between the old families such as the Ormonds and Desmonds, descended from
Norman
settlers in Ireland and tending to identify with Irish septs and Gaelic culture, and the
new
English settlers.)

Sidney looked back nostalgically to the days when their monarch was male. He had been a courtier to the boy king, Edward VI. ‘Sondry tymes he bountifully rewarded me . . . Lastly, not only to my own still felt grief, but also to the universal wo of England, he died in my armes.’
⁹
Sidney was less overtly misogynistic and disrespectful of the Queen than a later Deputy, Sir John Perrot, a notoriously choleric figure who exclaimed with fury, ‘Silly woman, now she shall not curb me, she shall not rule me now.’ Taking orders from the Queen was, he intemperately believed, ‘to serve a base bastard piss kitchen woman.’
¹⁰
As one who was himself spoken of as a bastard son of Henry VIII, Perrot was perhaps a pot calling a kettle black.