Tudor Queens of England (41 page)

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Parker’s wife and to have expressed a general discontent with married clergy, but it is safe to say that she never allowed any consideration of status to inhibit the promotion of a man who was suitable in other ways. It is quite probable that she preferred her clergy celibate, just as she preferred a modest level of ornamentation in churches, and liked Church music, but none of this inhibited her fi rm commitment to a bench of bishops who often held very different v

iews.19

The one thing that was not negotiable was her personal control over the Church which she had done so much to create.

There were very few biblical images of female power. The Virgin Mary was traditionally the principal female role model in the Church, but she was a symbol of submission and dependence rather than authority. Moreover she was seriously out of fashion in Protestant theology, because of a late medieval tendency to elevate her role as an intercessor – even to equate her with the Godhead. Although it is possible that the Queen’s ‘personality cult’ may have taken over the role vacated by the Virgin in the minds of some laymen, it is safe to assume that that was never part of Elizabeth’s intention. It was consequently the fi gure of Deborah, the Judge of Israel, who was drafted in to serve the Queen’s need of a godly image. This happened very early. During her coronation entry into London in January 1559, one of the pageants portrayed ‘Deborah, with her estates, consulting for the good government of Israel’ and the verses that the child presenter spoke bore obvious reference to the regime change that had recently taken place: Jabin, of Canaan king, had long by force of arms

Oppressed to Israelites; which for GOD’S people went:

But GOD minding, at last, for to redress their harms,

The worthy Deborah as Judge among them sent …

20

This was clearly an attempt, soon to be supported by John Aylmer’s

Harborow
for True and Faithful Subjects
, to fi ght the biblical fi re of Knox’s
First Blast
with an equal and opposite fi re drawn from the same uniquely authoritative source. The Queen’s own attitude to this imagery can only be guessed, but she never attempted to inhibit its use and it must therefore be concluded that she approved. Her own taste in symbolic fi gures ran in a more courtly and classical direction. She was Astrea, Belphoebe, and above all Gloriana – the Fairy Queen of Edmund Spenser’s courtly imagination.

She is the mighty Queen of Faerie,

Whose fair retrait I on my shield do bear,

She is the fl ower of grace and chastity,

Throughout the world renowned far and near,

My life, my liege, my Sovereign, my dear …

21

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It was this kind of imagery that fuelled the Accession Day tilts, those secular celebrations of 17 November that were the creation of Sir Henry Lee in the 1570s. They were intended to be both fantasy and symbolic politics – designed to take the place of those religious festivals now banned by a Protestant government – the mystery plays and Corpus Christi processions. The German observer, Lupold von Wedel described one such joust in 1584:

The combatants had their servants clad in different colours … some of the servants were disguised like savages, or Irishmen, with the hair hanging down to the girdle like women, others had horses equipped like elephants, some carriages were drawn by men, others appeared to move by themselves … Some gentlemen had their horses with them, and mounted in full armour directly from the carriage …

22

Elizabeth loved these celebrations, and the fl attery that was laid on with a trowel. The Count of Feria had observed at the very outset of her reign that she was very vain, and loved the plaudits of the multitude. That did not change as she grew older; only gradually the genuine admiration for a clever and handsome young woman became a kind of sycophantic chorus – a ritual that every courtier was expected to observe. It is not clear that Elizabeth ever noticed the difference. It was not that she was unaware of the passing of the years. No mean poet herself, she wrote with a kind of wry humour, at some time in the 1580s: When I was fair and young, and favour graced me,

Of many was I sought, their mistress for to be,

But I did scorn them all, and said to them therefore,

‘Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere, importune me no more’

But there fair Venus’ son, that brave victorious boy,

Said ‘What, thou scornful dame, sith that thou art so coy,

I will so wound your heart, that thou shalt learn therefore: Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere; importune me no more.

’23

Elizabeth was always acutely aware of her femininity, and never more so than when she was lamenting the high personal cost of keeping her authority and dignity intact.

The saddest postscript to this world of lost opportunity is to be found in the career of the Earl of Essex. Robert Devereux, the second Earl, was the Earl of Leicester’s stepson and was introduced by him to the court in 1584, when he was just short of 18. He was very handsome, had excellent manners and made an immediate impact. He went with his stepfather to the Low Countries in 1585

and it was there that he conceived an unwarranted conceit of himself as a great and dashing soldier. By the spring of 1587 he was clearly the coming favourite.

‘When she [the Queen] is abroad, nobody is near her but my Lord of Essex; 224

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and at night my Lord is at cards, or one game or another with her [so] that he cometh not to his lodgings till the birds sing in the morning.

’24 Lat
er that same year he became Master of the Horse, a position that the Earl of Leicester had resigned for that very purpose, and when Leicester died in the following year, he stepped into his shoes in more ways than one. He was never the Queen’s lover in the sense that Robert had been but he became what would now be known as her ‘toy boy’, fulfi lling an emotional need in an ageing woman, and becoming in a sense the son that she would never have. Unfortunately Elizabeth’s emotional tastes were never as discriminating as her political ones. In government she was served by William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, Francis Walsingham, Christopher Hatton, Mathew Parker and John Whitgift. Only with Edmund Grindal did she make a mistake. However, those to whom she was personally attached were (fi rst and foremost) Robert Dudley, a man of erratic judgement and more charm than good sense, secondly, and briefl y, Francois duc d’Anjou, a disaster in every sense of the word, and fi nally Robert Devereux, a man of monumental conceit and no sense of reality.

Robert made the mistake of trying to turn his personal favour into political power. He believed that he was a great general and a powerful patron, neither of which was true. He had no success in the latter capacity because the Queen (quite rightly) did not trust his judgement but he chose to blame his failure on the machinations of Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley’s son, and set up a damaging feud on that basis. In the former mode his only real success was the taking of Cadiz, which he did his best to ruin by quarrelling with the Lord Admiral. He then painted himself into a corner over the appointment of a new Lord Deputy for Ireland, and got into the position where he could not avoid taking the responsibility himself. He went to Ireland in a foul mood, made a complete mess of his mission and returned to England without the Queen’s leave, taking advantage of his privileged status to invade the Privy Chamber at an unseasonable hour. A more comprehensive programme of self-destruction could hardly be imagined yet he continued to blame his subsequent disgrace on Sir Robert Cecil. For years Elizabeth had been by turns intrigued and exasperated by his behaviour but this time exasperation had scored a defi nitive victory. She refused to renew his sweet wine monopoly, thus ruining his extravagant fi nances and convincing his unstable mind that he was the victim of a diabolical plot. The result was his abortive

coup
d’état
of February 1601, a sequence of events that reveals conclusively how unreal his self-image had become. He seems to have imagined that London would rise in response to the appeal of one who (in 1596) had been its hero. When it did not stir he was left with no alternative to surrender – no doubt hoping that the embers of the Queen’s affection might be rekindled to save him. However, he had

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gone too far. His offence was treason and he paid the price. It was only when he was dead and buried that regrets came fl ooding in upon Elizabeth. It is alleged that she never recovered from the need to execute her one-time favourite and she died about two years later

.25 Esse
x’s fate is an extremely sad postscript to an emotional life that was constantly misjudged and constantly frustrated. It had only been her capacity, not always recognized either at the time or since, to keep her private and public lives separate, which turned Elizabeth’s long reign from potential disaster to effective triumph.

It was Sir John Davies who observed that all affairs of state ‘a stately form of dancing seem to bear’. In other words it was very hard to tell where the charades of courtly entertainment ended and the sober business of politics began. No man could have achieved that blend or overlap in the way that Elizabeth did. Her image, her histrionics and her whole style of government, were uniquely feminine. The men with whom she constantly had to deal were by turns fascinated, bewildered and infuriated by these methods and eventually she was living on borrowed time. By 1603 it had been 50 years since England had had a king and there was a great desire to return from uncertainty to a known quantity. James may have been a foreigner and was not at all warlike but Elizabeth had become a very tiresome old lady. Her paint and her wigs made a brave attempt to retain the beauty and mystery that had been her stock in trade, but those who knew her well were no longer deceived. The important thing is that she succeeded in doing, from the very beginning of her reign, what Mary had conspicuously failed to do and that was to create a distinctively female monarchy. Whether such an achievement could ever have survived marriage, we do not know but the indications are that Elizabeth thought not. At best, marriage would have muddied the waters by power sharing with her consort. At worst it would have turned her into a glorifi ed housewife and mother. Mary had suffered the former fate and although there would have been some advantages in the latter – most conspicuously an heir of her body – it did not correspond with Elizabeth’s sense of duty. At the end of the day, God had given her England to rule and that demanded a total dedication that overrode any personal considerations:

But then I felt straightway a change within my breast;

The day unquiet was; the night I could not rest,

For I did sore repent that I had said before.

‘Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere; importune me no more.’

26

Perhaps, but the rewards had been considerable.

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Epilogue: Queens Since 1603

With the death of Elizabeth ‘the Great Queen’, the monarchy reverted to its masculine mode and so remained until 1689. The queens of James I, Charles I, Charles II and James II were all consorts in the traditional sense. With the possible exception of Henrietta Maria, the consort of Charles I, their political role was negligible. Anne, the Queen of James I, was the daughter of Frederick II of Denmark and had married him in 1589 when he was still James VI of Scotland. The alliance between Scotland and Denmark was a traditional one. By the time that he succeeded Elizabeth in 1603 she had already borne him fi ve children, of whom three were living, and was to bear him two more daughters who died in infancy. Apart from doing her duty as a mother, Anne’s most signifi cant act was her conversion to Catholicism, a move that triggered a modest fashion for Catholicism at court but had no noticeable impact on the King’s public policy. She died in 1619, by which time only two of their children, Charles and Elizabeth, were surviving: he the heir and she married to the Elector Frederick of the Palatinate – a marriage later to be of considerable dynastic signifi cance. James had wanted to use the marriage of his heir to heal the religious split in Europe that resulted in the Thirty Years’ War and had already (in 1619) turned his son-in-law into a fugitive. The idea was to negotiate Frederick’s restoration in return for a marriage between Charles and the Infanta of Spain. However, an ‘incognito’ visit by Charles to Spain in 1623 soon disillusioned him of that possibility. When James died in March 1625, his heir was still unmarried.

On 1 May, however, he wed Henrietta Maria, the 16-year-old sister of Louis XIII of France. Politically this was intended to keep France out of the Catholic Habsburg embrace, which appeared to the squeezing the life out of Protestant Germany. France did indeed remain hostile to the Habsburgs but not for that reason. Unlike her mother-in-law, Henrietta Maria was an enthusiastic proselytizer for the Catholic Church and that was to cause the King a great deal of diffi culty and embarrassment, made worse by the fact that he loved her deeply. She bore him six children, three sons and three daughters and, when the civil war broke out in 1643, went to her home country to mobilize support for him. In that she failed, but she remained in France when Charles was 228

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defeated and received her children as fugitives from the Commonwealth regime. She did not return to England when her son regained his throne in 1660 but died in France in 1666. Her daughter, Elizabeth, and son Henry were both dead by 1660, and daughter Mary was married to William II, Prince of Orange. Charles returned as King, and his brother James as Duke of York. Her remaining daughter, who shared her name, was married to Philip, Duke of Orleans in 1661. Once he was established on his throne, Charles II followed the precedent of his father and grandfather and contracted a diplomatic marriage – to the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of John IV. Although she was a Catholic and a member of an ancient house, her impact on England was virtually confi ned to the fact that she remained childless, which resulted in the Exclusion Crisis over the rights of the King’s Catholic brother, James, to succeed him. James II, who became king on 6 February 1685, married twice. As Duke of York, and still nominally at least a Protestant, he wed Anne Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, in September 1660. That union produced eight children, but only two, Mary and Anne, survived beyond infancy. His fi rst wife died in March 1671, and in September 1673 (by which time he had revealed himself to be a Catholic) he married for a second time, his bride on this occasion being Mary of Modena, the daughter of an Italian Duke. James’s catholicizing policies made him deeply unpopular but at fi rst he succeeded in crushing rebellions both in England and Scotland. However, the birth of the couple’s fi rst son, James, on 10 June 1688