The Elizabethans (8 page)

John Knox (
c
.1514–72), a Scottish clergyman, born at Giffordgate, Haddington (near Edinburgh), was a clever controversialist whose eloquence had so impressed the Duke of Northumberland in 1551 that the Protector had him appointed a chaplain to King Edward VI. Knox was offered the bishopric of Rochester, but turned it down, and while in England he never relented in his zeal to make the court, and the new National Church, conform more fanatically to the Calvinist norms of Geneva. He tried to outlaw the custom of kneeling to receive Holy Communion, but the moderate Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, quietly insisted that this devotional custom remained. (Cranmer aptly described Knox and friends as ‘unquiet spirits’).
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Naturally, when Catholic Mary I came to the throne of England, Knox was obliged to go abroad, where, among a large expatriate community of discontented English and Scottish Protestants, first in Frankfurt, later in Geneva, he poured forth a flood of sermons and controversial prose works. (While in Geneva, he came to realise ‘how small was my learning’ and began a study of Greek and Hebrew.
³
)

While Scotland (and especially today’s Scottish Nationalists) will continue to debate Knox’s legacy in his native land – weighing, for example, his encouragement of education against the unfortunate stereotyping of Presbyterian fervour, which Knox’s rants encouraged – he will always be, for the rest of the world, the man who wrote
The First Blast of the Trumpet
; the man who took on, and beat, Mary, Queen of Scots; who denounced with equal and impartial loathing her mother-in-law, the Scottish regent, Mary of Guise, and her namesake and cousin, Queen Mary Tudor – ‘Our mischievous Maries’ as he called them. Whereas Deborah, the female Judge of Israel in the Bible was a ruler ‘under whom were strangers chased out of Israel’, the mischievous Maries had
delivered
their respective countries into strangers’ hands. ‘England, for satisfying the inordinate appetites of that cruel monster Mary (unworthy by reason of her bloody tyranny of the name of a woman), betrayed, alas, to the proud Spaniard; and Scotland, by the rash madness of foolish governors and by the practices of a crafty dame, resigned likewise, under the title of marriage, into the power of France.’
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Knox wrote his diatribe in Dieppe, and it was published in 1558. Hindsight might suggest that he was unfortunate with his timing. He published his denunciation of female governance in the very year that England gained as its ruler Elizabeth I, perhaps the most successful, the most triumphantly intelligent, ruler the country ever had. You might add to that judgement the postscript that the two periods of history in which England enjoyed not merely commercial and cultural prosperity, but something akin to pure glory, were the long reigns of two women: Elizabeth and Victoria.

But in 1558 most dispassionate readers of Knox’s pamphlet, whether Catholic or Protestant, while perhaps smiling at its intemperate mode of expression, would have found its arguments persuasive. The regency of Mary of Guise had been a disastrous period for Scotland. As for England, five years of Mary Tudor’s reign had brought a catastrophic war with France, the humiliation of the loss of Calais (until then an English outpost on the continent) and a period of gruesome religious persecution – with its 300 Protestant martyrs burned for heresy – which for many Christians in England, and for many generations, would make not merely the King or the Inquisition of Spain, and not merely the Pope, but the very notion of Catholicism a hated thing. Militarily vanquished, diplomatically disgraced, socially divided, spiritually in torment, England after five years of female rule did not have any reason to doubt Knox’s views.

There would be few today, outside the worlds of Islam or extreme Christian evangelicalism, who would endorse Knox’s view that ‘woman in her greatest perfection was
made
to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him’.
⁵

For that reason, we need to remind ourselves that on this point, however much they deplored Knox’s intemperate and revolutionary views of the Church, his contemporaries were very largely agreed. It was against nature – in their view – for women to rule men. Moreover, as modern feminist history shows, Knox, far from being reactionary, was in the vanguard of political thought here. The early Renaissance had, in a few enlightened areas, foreseen a feminist future, whereas the realpolitik of the seventeenth century very decidedly put a stop to this. So at the turn of the fifteenth century Christine de Pisan (born in Venice around 1364) could envisage in
Le Livre de la cité des dames
a great city of ladies built entirely by and for women. But 250 years later the feminist aspirations of Anne Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier, could only conjure up, in her letters with Françoise Bertaut de Motteville, a rural republic where she could rule as queen (the correspondence dates from 1660–1). Whereas Queen Mary I ruled (however badly) as a monarch in her own right (1553–8), Queen Mary II refused any settlement that did not make her husband, William of Orange, King in 1689. She ruled as the ‘and Mary’ appendage in ‘William and Mary’. Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated in 1654 in favour of a man. Queen Elizabeth I named a male as her successor. When Knox wrote in 1558, he was setting an agenda that history would follow. Elizabeth was the great exception to a rule that Western society would, broadly speaking, endorse until the generation of Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meyer.
⁶

There is, moreover, one crucial sense in which Elizabeth’s reign was a paradoxical vindication of Knox’s
First Blast
. We can smile at what appears to be Knox’s grotesquely poor timing, in sounding his
First Blast
in a year that saw the beginning of the great Elizabeth’s political success story. We can smile further when we read that Knox was surprised that Queen Elizabeth did not appreciate his pamphlet. ‘He had advanced proofs from scripture; if they were invalid, let them be answered. If not, as he wrote to her in 1559, “Why that youre grace be offendit at the authore of such ane work, I can perceive no just occasion.”’
⁷

But in one sense Elizabeth was to take the message of Knox’s argument very seriously. For Knox – as for all Elizabeth’s political advisers, every member of her government, her councils and her parliaments – the word ‘woman’ meant, in practical terms, someone married to a man. Even if it did not mean precisely this, it denoted one who could, potentially, be married to a man. Because they were obsessed with the succession question, and dreaded the prospect of another Wars of the Roses, with different factions dividing England with civil conflict about the most basic question of who was in charge, these men saw the young Princess Elizabeth as breeding stock. The body that had been clothed in gold and set upon a throne in January 1559 was not simply a political leader. It was a womb that could be filled with a safe succession of Protestant and, it was to be hoped, male heirs, who could confirm the reformation of Church and state begun by Henry VIII, confirmed by Edward VI and interrupted with such calamitous effect by Mary I.

One of the persistent themes of Knox’s political pamphlets is that royal marriages, so often contracted with foreign princes, allow the foreign power to usurp that of the native-born. ‘Yet most of their glory be transferred to the house of a stranger’, as he put it, not in the
First Blast
, but in his belligerent
Letter to the Regent of Scotland
– that is, to the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots. Scotland, thanks to the death of James V and the marriage of the surviving daughter to the Dauphin of France, was doubly linked to Catholic France and the House of Guise. England, because of the marriage of ‘that cursed Jezebel’ to the Habsburg King of Spain, was likewise automatically subservient.

All manner of reasons have been adduced for Elizabeth’s refusal to marry. They have ranged from the psychological to the brutally anatomical. It has been (plausibly) noted that the daughter of a six-times-married tyrant would not have had a happy role model to follow into the married state, not least when we remember that her own mother’s head had been chopped off. The dread of penetration that has been attributed to Elizabeth must remain a matter of (rather pointless) speculation. That she was, as she so often claimed to be, a lifelong virgin must be accepted as the overwhelmingly probable truth. To remain unmarried had, for her, two powerful political advantages.

First, for all her protestations of love for England, which were no doubt genuine as far as they went, she could always feel, for as long as she was single:
après moi, le déluge
. If England was to have not merely stability, but the sort of stability glimpsed by the Protestant new money, by the 9,000-and-more-strong clergy, by the squires and the merchants, which had begun to come to them with the Reformation, they needed
her
. The very precariousness of the fact – that her death could plunge the country into total anarchy – enormously increased her personal political significance. And if she died and if the anarchy came, then that would be England’s nightmare, not the dead Elizabeth’s.

For as long as she lived, however, she was guided by the very same argument that lay at the basis of Knox’s
First Blast
. ‘Wonder it is that the advocates and patrons of the right of our ladies did not consider and ponder this law before that they counselled the blind princes and unworthy nobles of their countries to betray the liberties thereof into the hands of strangers.’
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This was something Elizabeth would never do. There is almost an echo of Knox’s
First Blast
in Elizabeth’s great speech at the time of the Armada, when she had been on the throne thirty years. For political purposes she would have the spirit and stomach of a man – virginity would allow her, in effect, to be a man; to hold men at home in constant suspense, and to hold the princes of Europe at bay.

With a flair that still dazzles at a distance of five centuries, Elizabeth, aged twenty-five, while using all the charm and caprice of a clever young woman, decided to rule
as if she were a man
. ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a King.’ It would take maturity and a great national crisis in the summer of 1588, when she had reigned thirty years, to bring forth these words. But they had always been true, and the weak and feeble woman paid a great price for possessing that King’s heart and stomach. The very sight of other women having husbands and children was sometimes enough to drive her into frenzies of jealousy and rage. She would say that she wanted to marry, and she would passionately, as a weak and feeble woman, mean it. Yet the King whom she became – and . . . ‘a King of England, too’ – would not allow her to weaken.

All successful political leaders in history, from Julius Caesar to Napoleon, have based their success on believing themselves to be in touch with the
people
, and this Elizabeth did with extraordinary panache from the very beginning. But she also had the politician’s instinct for knowing how the business of government worked. The progresses and visits to different parts of the country, as well as defraying the expenses of the court, enabled her to visit as many areas as possible (in the South), and actually to be seen by as many of her people – I nearly wrote her ‘public’ – as possible. As we shall see at the end of this part of the book, when the magic failed to work and her public did not adore her, she behaved with paranoid ruthlessness.

The system worked, in England and in Wales. Both monarch and people knew that. For as long as the peace held, at home and abroad, England was, in the Prayer Book words, ‘godly and quietly governed’. The country at large was administered by the gentry and the landowners. By modern standards the population was tiny. Even by medieval standards it was small. (The Black Death reduced a population of 4.5–6 million inhabitants to 2 million. In 1547, the year Henry VIII died, it was still only 2.8 million, rising to around 4 million by the close of Elizabeth’s reign in 1603).
⁹
Most of this population was rural. The instruments of control, apart from hunger and the need to work, were found in local law-enforcement – the parish constables – Shakespeare’s Dogberry and the Justices of the Peace, the Justice Shallows. The country was in effect administered by these Justices, who were usually squires, small landowners, owing their allegiance in quasi-feudal fashion to the greater landowners.

Parliament was an important element in Elizabethan governance, but we should not imagine that they had a parliamentary system of government such as began to develop in the following century. ‘Parliaments were called for only the greatest occasions and purposes; at the accession of the sovereign, to give warrant for some great change in national policy, as for example, in religion, or to give support in waging war, and always for the purpose of voting supplies.
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The England of Elizabeth was governed by its Council. At the end of Mary’s reign this had numbered thirty-nine. Elizabeth immediately reduced this number by twenty. Of the nineteen Council members, she retained only ten who had served her sister. Committed Roman Catholics were excluded. She kept seven great noblemen: the Marquess of Winchester, the Earls of Arundel, Derby, Pembroke and Shrewsbury, Lord Clinton and Howard of Effingham. The peerage of Elizabethan England was small and, unlike her father, Elizabeth created very few new noblemen. Of the 250 or so peerages (many of the titles held by the same person), seventy-three were Scottish peerages and thirty-six were Irish; so in reality there were only about 150 noblemen in Elizabethan England.
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