by Helen Castor
By mid-December it had become apparent that neither Mary’s Catholic relatives in France nor her Protestant son in Scotland would intervene to save her. Yet, even now, Elizabeth would not act. Why, she asked Cecil, could one of her loyal subjects not kill Mary in private, as agreed by the bond of association? Backed into a corner by her most dedicated servants, Elizabeth resisted to the last the prospect of taking responsibility for her cousin’s death. On 1 February 1587, after weeks of unrelenting pressure, she took up her pen and signed the order. Cecil immediately had the document sealed and despatched to Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary was beheaded a week later. It was over. But Elizabeth resisted still. She wept and raged, and for days refused to eat or sleep. Cecil, her ‘Spirit’, was banished from her presence for months. William Davison, the royal secretary who had passed the signed warrant to the council, spent almost two years in the Tower for precipitating a deed that the queen declared to the watching world was ‘done against her will’.37 It was the nearest she could come to convincing herself that she had not wanted Mary to die.
Half a century earlier Elizabeth’s mother, an anointed queen consort, had lost her head on the scaffold. Now Elizabeth, an anointed queen regnant, had condemned her ‘sister queen’ of Scotland to the same fate. ‘I must needs make a great complaint … that now the bane of the injurer must be the only cure of my danger. Whereof to think it grieveth me not a little,’ she had told her parliament in November 1586, ‘considering … that by me it should be said hereafter, a maiden queen hath been the death of a prince, her kinswoman. A thing in no sort deserved by me, howsoever by the despite of malice it may be reported of me.’38 That, she would have to find a way to live with. And all the while, despite her advisers’ promises, the threats against her kingdom continued to grow.
4
Semper Eadem
1587–1603
The Queen of Scots was dead, and now the King of Spain claimed the throne of England. Someone had to depose the bastard heretic whore who currently wore the English crown: on that, Catholic Europe was agreed. Philip of Spain was not only the presiding genius of the ‘Enterprise of England’ – as the exiled English Catholic leader William Allen, now a cardinal, called the plan for an invasion by Spain and Rome – but a descendant of the Plantagenet King Edward III via John of Gaunt, whose second wife had been heiress to the Spanish kingdom of Castile. As the leader of a just war, with English royal blood in his veins, Philip had both a right and a duty to act. He already had a vast army across the water from England in the Netherlands. By the summer of 1587, preparations were under way for more than a hundred heavily armed ships to escort those troops to the English coast, and victory.
There had been no formal declaration of hostilities, but then there hardly needed to be. For so long focused on the internal threats of sedition and conspiracy, England’s government found itself facing the clear and present danger of external assault. And nothing exposed the peculiar difficulties of a female monarch quite like war. Elizabeth’s councillors always struggled to understand how she, a monarch who was also a mere woman, might resist or reject their counsel. But when it came to the field of battle, the fact that she had no military experience or training and was disqualified in both theory and practice from the task of leading her troops meant that, even more than was usually the case, her orders seemed to her lieutenants to be mere guidelines rather than unbreachable commands.
Her beloved Dudley, in charge of the English soldiers deployed in the Netherlands in 1585, had already demonstrated how far her captains might go in prioritizing their own judgement over the queen’s express instructions. Within weeks of his arrival, the Dutch States General had offered him the title of Governor of the Netherlands, in the hope that he would provide the rebel provinces with military and political leadership in place of the assassinated William of Orange. Before he left England, Dudley had been explicitly instructed to refuse any such office. If he were to become governor, it would imply that his queen were sovereign there. Elizabeth had repeatedly insisted, both in negotiations with the Dutch themselves and in a widely published Declaration of the Causes Moving the Queen to Give Aid to the Oppressed in the Low Countries, that she would offer protection against Catholic tyranny, but never usurp the authority of a fellow monarch. Now, without consulting her, Dudley accepted. When the news reached London, Elizabeth’s fury was blistering in its intensity. ‘You shall let the earl understand’, she told the envoy she sent to him, ‘how highly upon just cause we are offended with his last late acceptation of the government of those provinces, being done contrary to our commandment delivered unto him both by ourself in speech and by particular letters from certain of our council written unto him in that behalf by our express direction, which we do repute to be a very great and strange contempt least looked for at his hands, being he is a creature of our own.’1
Even so, the resolution of this rift between queen and favourite was no simple matter of a subject submitting to the crown. In play was not only Dudley’s ego, but two mutually reinforcing needs: to sustain the position of his English troops in the Dutch theatre of war; and, given that his acceptance of the governorship was a fait accompli, to represent this defiance of Elizabeth’s authority, in public at least, as error rather than insubordination. As a result, it was Elizabeth who gave ground. By April 1586, she was proposing the characteristically temporizing solution that Dudley should attempt to retain the powers of governor while renouncing the formal title. She also sought to ease the injuries to their personal relationship: ‘for that your grieved and wounded mind hath more need of comfort than reproof,’ she told him, ‘whom we are persuaded (though the act in respect of the contempt can in no way be excused) had no other meaning and intent than to advance our service, we think meet to forbear to dwell upon a matter wherein we ourselves do find so little comfort.’2 By July – with his contested title still in place – she had returned to their old intimacy. ‘Rob, I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month,’ she wrote. ‘Now will I end, that do imagine I talk still with you, and therefore loathly say farewell, ô ô [her sign for her ‘Eyes’], though ever I pray God bless you from all harm, and save you from all foes with my million and legion of thanks for all your pains and cares.’3
In the end, Elizabeth was prepared to acknowledge Dudley’s pains and cares, even though he had contravened her explicit orders. In other cases, however, she found advantage in the possibility of disowning her servants’ activities. Since the early years of her reign, English sea-captains such as John Hawkins and his kinsman Francis Drake had been making a handsome living, not just from trade along the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa and in the New World, but from what became known as ‘privateering’ – an elegant euphemism for piracy. In response to protests from the kingdoms whose ships they seized, Elizabeth loudly slapped wrists and quietly took a share of the profits. Spain had been the foremost of their victims, and in 1585, following a proposal from Walsingham ‘for the annoying of the King of Spain’,4 the queen gave official sanction to a voyage in which Drake attacked Spanish ports and shipping on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, in the spring of 1587, his small fleet sailed again to the Iberian coast to disrupt preparations for Philip’s great ‘Armada’.
Even in the face of such palpable danger, Elizabeth was reluctant to commit to aggression rather than negotiate for peace; Drake had scarcely left Plymouth when the queen sent revised orders licensing action only on the high seas and forbidding any direct assault on Philip’s territories. Her message arrived too late. On 19 April, Drake attacked the port of Cadiz, destroying more than thirty Spanish ships and plundering warehouses, before going on to raid the Portuguese coast and capturing one of Philip’s richly laden merchant ships on his voyage home. Publicly, Elizabeth claimed that this ‘singeing of the King of Spain’s beard’ (as Francis Bacon later called it)5 was carried out ‘unwittingly, yea unwillingly to her majesty’. But the fact t
hat she was ‘as yet greatly offended’6 with Drake did not stop her from pocketing a large cut of the proceeds, or from continuing to exploit his naval expertise.
The pressure of events had removed Elizabeth’s preferred option of creating space by standing still. Now, she was making an art of finding room for political manoeuvre by changing her mind: ordering Mary’s death, then disavowing her decision; sending Drake into action, then revoking her orders once it was already too late. The latter – which allowed Elizabeth to make renewed overtures for peace, even while Philip’s ships burned in Cadiz harbour – was enough to delay the Armada, but not to stop it. On 30 May 1588, after more than a year of preparations, the fleet of 130 ships carrying more than 18,000 soldiers at last set sail from Spanish-ruled Lisbon. They headed up the Atlantic coast to the Channel where, according to Philip’s plans, they would provide cover for another 26,000 troops crossing the sea on barges from the Netherlands.
Almost two decades after the pope had called for Elizabeth’s deposition – eighteen years of suspicion, fraught diplomacy and growing fear – the nightmare of a Catholic invasion of England had finally become reality. In response, the queen ordered the muster of her kingdom’s militias, and deployed the naval resources at her disposal: fewer ships than the Spanish – a little over a hundred, of which twenty belonged to the queen’s navy and the rest were merchant vessels, requisitioned in haste – but all of them formidably armed, and capably commanded by Lord Howard of Effingham, with Francis Drake as his deputy.
Elizabeth had always been brave. She had had much to be brave about in her fifty-four years: the constant familiarity of loss and danger; the shadow of the axe before she became queen, and the threat of the assassin’s blade or bullet afterwards. ‘I am more afraid of making a fault in my Latin than of the Kings of Spain, France, Scotland, the whole house of Guise and all their confederates’, she had remarked to the Scottish ambassador in 1581. ‘I have the heart of a man, not of a woman, and I am not afraid of anything.’7 That thought came back to her now. On 8 August, with the Armada in sight of the English coast, she came to visit the fortified camp at Tilbury in Essex where her soldiers were assembling under the command of Robert Dudley, who had returned from the Netherlands eight months earlier. The next morning, Elizabeth rode out to address her troops. ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,’ she told them, ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too.’ Her instinctive talent for the theatrical had been honed by her decades on display as England’s sovereign, and this was a bravura performance of distilled courage and charisma:
Let tyrants fear: I have so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honour and my blood even in the dust.8
The rhetoric was transparent. A queen, rather than a king, would never find herself facing death in the heat of battle. And yet her words resonated with a deeper truth. Her life was in danger. She had always seen her subjects’ loyalty as the source of her strength. Now she had come to stand among her soldiers, and they loved her for it.
‘We shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God and of my kingdom’, she declared.9 Later that day, she was still in the camp when word came that she was right. Since late July, Howard and Drake had been harrying the Spanish fleet as it pushed towards its intended rendezvous with the troop-carriers from the Netherlands. They succeeded in inflicting a great deal of damage with guns and fireships; and as the Armada reeled under this onslaught, its commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, learned that the orders with which he had set sail were fatally flawed. The Spanish army in the Netherlands was not yet ready to embark, and the barges on which the soldiers were to travel were not suitable for the open sea. Not only that, but the winds as well as English guns were now turning on the Spanish ships, driving them northwards past the rendezvous point and on, helplessly, into the North Sea. On 9 August, news reached Elizabeth at Tilbury that the Spanish were in flight, pursued by Howard and by Drake, attempting to escape by sailing around the north coast of Scotland and on past the west coast of Ireland. By the time the battered remains of Philip’s Armada – scarcely half his ships – limped home, perhaps 15,000 of his men had died in battle or drowned in Atlantic storms.
‘God blew and they were scattered’, read the Latin inscription on a medal struck to commemorate this English triumph.10 Back in 1559, when the Protestant scholar John Aylmer had sought to defend his young queen’s government, he had done so despite the fact that Elizabeth, as a woman, was ‘weak in nature, feeble in body, soft in courage, unskilful in practice’ – and, he added, ‘not terrible to the enemy’. But, he asked, if God ‘be with her, who can stand against her?’.11 Now, in a prayer of gratitude for God’s part in her greatest enemy’s defeat, Elizabeth echoed Aylmer’s conclusions about the providential nature of her rule. ‘I most humbly, with bowed heart and bended knees, do render my humblest acknowledgements and lowliest thanks,’ she wrote; ‘and not the least for that the weakest sex hath been so fortified by Thy strongest help that neither my people might find lack by my weakness nor foreigners triumph at my ruin.’12 That November, banners captured from the Armada’s ships were displayed at St Paul’s Cathedral in London as the queen, dressed all in silver and white, took her place at the centre of a service of thanksgiving and celebration.
Despite the festivities, the threats to Elizabeth and her kingdom were not over. Philip’s mighty resources were not obliterated, while his vast army still stood in the Netherlands. Catholic hostility was not undimmed but intensified by this unlooked-for reverse, coming as it did in the wake of the ‘martyrdom’ of Mary of Scotland. Venomously pornographic depictions of the ‘Jezebel of England’ circulated in print across Europe. Elizabeth was not only the daughter of a whore – the ‘ride of all England’, as one tract called Anne Boleyn13 – but the mother of bastard children by Dudley and most of the rest of her Privy Council; ‘a monster’, another French verse declared, ‘conceived in adultery and incest, her fangs bared for murder, who befouls and despoils the sacred right of sceptres, and vomits her choler and gall at heaven’.14
If Catholic denunciations of the queen’s personal and political corruption were increasing in bile, the riposte in Protestant England was also redoubled. Elizabeth had come to the throne as a woman alone, a virgin queen unless or until she did as the world expected and took a husband. Now, in her mid-fifties, with the last of her courtships a receding memory and all thought of marriage gone, her virginity was no longer contingent but permanent. Now, she was not a virgin queen but the Virgin Queen. Little by little, the Catholic iconography of the queen of heaven was appropriated and brought down to earth in a secularized cult which made of Elizabeth something more than human, an incarnation of her kingdom’s God-given greatness. Gloriana – as she would appear in The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser’s epic poem of the 1590s – could shift her shape in print and paint with dazzling eclecticism. She could take the form of the classical goddesses Diana, Cynthia, Venus or Astraea, or the Old Testament heroines Deborah and Judith. She could be an empress, one long-fingered hand resting lightly on a globe, the Armada foundering, in oils on oak, behind her left shoulder. She could hold a sieve, for virginity, a serpent, for wisdom, or a rainbow, for peace and prosperity. And in each new image she was ageless and changeless, with an unlined, unshadowed face to match the motto inscribed below her coat of arms: semper eadem, ‘always the same’.15
It was a Latin tag that gestured at stability and security as much as constancy. Elizabeth’s mother, when she became queen, had chosen as her own motto ‘the most happy’,16 a phrase for an extraordinary moment of soaring triumph which would be followed by a brutal fall. But Elizabeth’s crown was hers by right, inherited thro
ugh persistence and careful endurance, not grasped by sheer force of will. Now, her chief ambition was to be, not to do; to remain, not to reach beyond the sovereign state she had already achieved. And so time was to be frozen, its changes rejected, the future disowned in favour of a perpetual present. The immortality of England’s queen, it seemed, would stand as an eternal guarantee of her people’s safety.
But Gloriana, for all her powers, was a glorious fiction. Time could not be frozen; nothing remained always the same. Elizabeth had used the phrase in private, as well as in public: in July 1586 she had signed off her ‘wandering writings’ to her adored Rob Dudley with the phrase, ‘As you know, ever the same, E.R.’17 Two summers later Dudley was at her side, as he had been for almost thirty years, when she rallied her troops against the marauding Armada. Less than a month after that, he was dead, killed by a malarial fever at fifty-six. The man who had been her friend since she was eight years old (as he had once told a French diplomat), who had hoped for so long to be her husband, was gone. When the news came, Elizabeth shut herself in her chamber for days until Cecil ordered that the doors be forced open. A queen, after all, could not stay in seclusion for long. But she kept a note Dudley had sent her shortly before his death – ‘his last letter’, she wrote on the folded paper – in a silver-gilt casket beside her bed for the rest of her life.18
Grief had to give way to government, but there was loss in government too. Walsingham’s health, never good, deteriorated alarmingly from the beginning of 1589. Preoccupied as always with the security of the realm, he continued to attend council meetings when he could, and worked from his sickbed when immobilized by his illness. In April 1590, at the age of fifty-eight, he died. This time Elizabeth showed no sign of personal pain: Walsingham and his queen were not close, and had often been at odds over their assessment of the threats England faced and the methods best employed to resist them. The queen was an astute judge of ability, and she had recognized Walsingham’s value, even when she disagreed with his conclusions. But she had also relied on his loyalty, and his willingness to empty his purse in her service. Now, his formidable network of spies atrophied and disintegrated because he was no longer there to manage and pay them; and Elizabeth, with her profound resistance to change, refused even to appoint a new Principal Secretary to replace him.