A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  The image of the androgynous warrior-empress was manufactured time and again in the difficult years that closed the Tudor century, most spectacularly, of course, in the several versions of George Gower’s ‘Armada Portrait’. The men who had brought her to this apotheosis did not themselves long survive it. Leicester died in October 1588. The queen was said to have grieved so bitterly that her locked door needed to be broken down before she could be persuaded to emerge and face the rest of her life. Walsingham died in 1590, and Christopher Hatton in 1591, not before the queen had spoon-fed him cordial in his last days. Cecil (created Lord Burghley in 1571), old and arthritic, died in 1598, having passed on the heaviest burden of state business to his second son, Robert, the hunchbacked ‘pigmy’, as shrewd as his father. For the last decade and a half of the reign, Robert Cecil was locked in battle with his arch-rival, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Leicester’s stepson, with a third commanding figure, Walter Ralegh, more often than not supporting Cecil against Essex. In fact, the 1590s seemed strangely like an echo-chamber of the past, with Cecil playing his father’s part of studious pragmatist and Essex taking Leicester’s role of impetuous belligerent and regal toyboy, constantly in and out of hot water for squandering men and money on mismanaged military campaigns (especially in Ireland), disobeying the queen’s instructions and failing to clock in for the required hours of craven adoration.

  The Elizabethan court had never exactly been a church of sobriety. But in the 1590s the disjunction between social reality and allegorical reverie bordered on the grotesque. Personal feuds were stoked by fashion wars and soap-opera slights. Ralegh and Essex nearly fought a duel when their men showed up for the tilts wearing identical orange livery. Essex began the estrangement that would end in his abortive coup d’état and execution in 1601 when, after a fierce dressing-down from the queen, he turned his back on her and she in turn slapped him, very hard, on the face. This last insult may well have pushed Essex over the edge. For some time he had resented the queen’s refusal to distribute what he believed was adequate patronage to his followers. Genuinely very popular with the people, Essex took this ale-house appreciation for a mandate. When he abruptly returned from Ireland to force himself on parliament and the council, he began his campaign by marching into the queen’s private chamber while her royal face was still in process of being elaborately constructed. Seeing her wigless and toothless, Essex might as well have seen her naked, for he had penetrated the mask, an unforgivable act of lèse-majesté. The punishment for looking on the naked Diana was, of course, death.

  Inevitably, the distance between the mythology of Elizabeth’s ageless body politic and the shrivelled reality of her body natural became more glaring. Surrounded by sycophantic courtiers and image-makers, who pretended she was still a slip of a thing and who turned out panegyrics to the second Golden Age, Elizabeth obliged the fantasists by dressing herself ever more extravagantly in the diaphanous tops that still proclaimed her virginity, and even, on one occasion, going completely topless, and when hot, unbuttoning herself all the way to the royal navel. Fantasists like the astrologer Simon Forman were provoked into feverish dreams of the queen, envisioned as a little old woman but somehow still desirable, trailing her white petticoat in the dirt and rescued from red-haired bravos (like Essex) by the dreamer who announced that he would attend, not under but upon her to make her belly bigger for England.

  It is hard not to feel that there was something a little too strenuously gorgeous about the over-dressed masquerades of the late-Elizabethan world. Was it entirely a coincidence that the unprecedented burst of literary invention for which we most remember this period was devoted to many kinds of make-believe exactly at the time when life in the country and town was becoming most difficult? When the barren regime itself looked shaky and impatient and men like Essex were already looking beyond it for their own fortunes, history was being rewritten to flatter the Tudor view that the dynasty was the consummation of God’s plan for the Protestant nation and that they alone had created union from the warring clans of the late Middle Ages. At a time when social hierarchies had never been more rigid and niceties of rank more likely to provoke violent disputes, the dream-makers conjured up arcadian fairylands in which the sexes traded places, men and immortals mingled, servants talked back to their masters and the mighty got their come-uppance. In 1592 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger painted the most memorable of all the Elizabethan portraits for the recently retired Queen’s Champion, Sir Henry Lee, on the occasion of his last entertainment for his goddess. Her face silvery with moonglow, her dress decorated with the white roses and pearls of chastity, Elizabeth stands with her slippers at the fountainhead of the Thames, close to Lee’s Oxfordshire estate at Ditchley. Queen and country have become literally united, the one an extension of the other. Mapped from a godly altitude, England too looks imperishable: well-watered, little clumps of forest dotting the landscape, neat towns and hamlets studding the space between – a vision indeed of demi-paradise.

  The reality was more prosaic. All the evils that the official histories claimed had been banished by the Tudors were glaringly evident in the 1590s: punitive taxation to pay for endless wars; high unemployment; a succession of disastrous harvests from 1594 to 1597; sky-rocketing food prices. In 1596 there were riots, and magistrates, confronted with a crime wave, sent felons to the gallows in record numbers. Fairyland was strewn with gibbets. In 1598 a Kentish labourer let it be known that he ‘hoped to see such war in this realm to afflict the rich men of this country, to requite their hardness of heart towards the poor’.

  For the first time in many decades, a chorus of complaint about being ruled by a woman – an old woman, it was said, despite the pretence of perpetual youth – became audible, especially in the courts where men were being pilloried or mutilated for abusing the queen. John Feltwell, a labourer of Great Wenden in Essex, was said to have wanted to ‘pray for a king’. When asked why, he replied: ‘the Queene is nothing but a woman and ruled by noblemen . . . so that poor men could get nothing . . . We shall never have a merry world while the queen liveth.’ In 1599 a ‘common wanderer’ called Thomas Vaughan claimed that the youth who had died in 1553 had not been Edward VI at all but someone put in his place and that the real Edward, king of Denmark, had come to Ireland and Wales to save the poor from starvation.

  What England needed, these dangerously outspoken men and women let it be known, was a king who would give them work and ale and bread. What they were getting instead were imperial adventures and castles in the air. For although Gower’s ‘Armada Portrait’ shows the queen with her hand confidently on the Indies, the ocean bed of Gloriana’s empire was littered with the wrecks of crazy projects, many of them dreamed up by makers of literature. The young John Donne went on Essex’s futile voyage to the Azores that was supposed to bring the Spanish empire to its knees. Ralegh’s settlement at Roanoke, Virginia, the original pipe dream, lasted barely two years before being killed off by disease and starvation. Spenser’s extravagant fantasy of a similar ‘Plantation’ in Ireland, where the natives would be rescued from their unfortunate barbarism by the blessings of Anglo-Scottish Protestant virtue, ended in a hideously bloody and prolonged war, which only confirmed to both Gaelic and Old English Ireland how little they had in common with a country that treated them as so many bog-dwelling Calibans.

  The dreams had a nasty way of ruining the dreamers, especially when they got translated into stone and mortar. The most extravagant of the ‘prodigy houses’, with their eruptions of chimneys, pinnacles and gables, were built to receive the queen exactly at the moment when she was restricting her progresses to short journeys. The most prodigious of them all was Wollaton Hall, near Nottingham, which was created for Sir Robert Willoughby by the specialist in exuberant masonry and brickwork, Robert Smythson. Willoughby must have desperately hoped that the splendour of Wollaton would complete his elevation from provincial industrial baron into aristocratic magnate. But all that he and his heirs were left with were mas
sive debts. For the queen never came.

  Of all the stories of thwarted homage and castles in the air, none is more poignant than that of the Northamptonshire master-builder Sir Thomas Tresham. The family had risen quickly, starting as lawyers, one of them making it all the way to attorney-general under Henry V. Sir Thomas’s grandfather, like so many other county gentlemen, had loyally served both Henry VIII and Edward VI, while still remaining a Catholic. For a while Thomas himself had managed to abide by the Church settlement of 1559, just as Cecil and Elizabeth herself had hoped. He had been knighted in 1575, and had married well, fathering ten children. But when Walsingham’s terror and the Jesuit missions had forced a decision on those who wanted to be loyal Catholics, Tresham had decided for faith, throwing off the compromise ceremonies of the Elizabethan regime and undergoing a complete reconversion back to the old Roman Church. He became a recusant, refusing to attend Anglican services, and paying steep fines for his absenteeism. Even so, when called on by the Walsingham regime to declare his allegiance, Tresham never ceased to profess passionate loyalty to Elizabeth.

  Out of that touching confidence in an England that could be European and Catholic as well as Protestant and insular, came Tresham’s resolve to build himself a house that would express what was, in every sense, his good faith. And from that resolution came the most beautiful ruin in Britain.

  Like so many of the grand projects of the Elizabethan twilight, Lyveden New Bield is a pious fantasy. It was the product of a doomed optimism that you could be, at the same time, a Catholic and a loyal country gentleman. Prevented from saying his creed out loud, Tresham decided to have his architecture speak for him: to make the sign of the cross in the ground-plan and the windowframes, and to venerate the Passion in the stone frieze travelling round the exterior walls. The end result looks nothing like any other architecture we habitually think of as ‘English’ or ‘British’ – more an alien classical transplant from France or Italy – but Tresham meant it to be as natural as the Northamptonshire landscape in which it is set. And if there ever was to be a native Anglo-Catholic style, Lyveden New Bield is it.

  It was an astoundingly ambitious project, conceived by a true visionary. In his library Tresham had the great textbooks of classical architecture, Vitruvius, Serlio and Palladio, and had seen those designs come to life in Venice when he visited Italy. At Lyveden, too, there would be rooms of mathematically perfect proportions, gracefully fluted pilasters and a great pantheon-like cupola to crown the house. Since this was meant as a private hermitage for Tresham’s retirement, there would be an oratory for his devotions and a wealth of sacred, emblematic inscriptions and devices carved into the walls.

  Alone on his holy isle, Tresham was unable to work miracles. After Elizabeth died, reality caught up with him and instead of spending his last days in his luminous ante-chamber to paradise, he spent them in the darkness of a prison, locked away for his faith. One son became a Gunpowder Plotter, saving his life only by turning king’s evidence. The family fortunes crumbled, making the completion of Lyveden, much less the beautiful dome that was supposed to crown it, prohibitively impracticable. It was never finished. All that was left of Tresham’s glorious vision were just sad ghosts and the secrets of the stones.

  But perhaps even if Tresham had managed to complete the house, it would still have stuck out like a sore thumb. Because as he was doing his best to reconcile, in his own person, faith and taste, England and classical Europe, history was pushing them apart. In the writings of chroniclers, geographers and playwrights, churchmen and parliamentary antiquarians, what was truly English was being newly and narrowly redefined. What was authentically English was a liturgy in the native tongue; a literature that threw off foreign idioms and mannerisms. And if, as now seems possible, Shakespeare was himself a clandestine Catholic, he could get away with it only by writing the ultimate anthem to the insular separateness of England and putting it in the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt.

  For the first time, too, as anxious panegyrists looked north beyond the Tweed towards the queen’s successor, James VI, the God-blessed island began to be imagined as something more than England, as Britannia, the title of William Camden’s extraordinary compilation of history and geography dedicated to the queen. By the time that Elizabeth died in March 1603 the idea of ‘Britain’ would still have been largely alien and incomprehensible to most of the country. But the old queen herself might well have been one of the few for whom it had some real meaning. For as she lay dying and her ‘wedding ring’ was filed away, she might well have thought that perhaps God did indeed have some sort of plan when he destined her to remain a virgin. For by remaining unmarried she had, in the end, brought about a momentous union: that of Scotland and England, not yet in one kingdom, but in one person; the child of her cousin, enemy and victim, Mary Stuart. She had not been barren then, after all. There had been no greensickness. She had brought forth fruit, the fruit of her body politic. And its name, already, was Magna Britannia: Great Britain.

  The Neolithic sandstone houses of the village at Skara Brae.

  The living rooms of the Skara Brae houses were dominated by large stone dressers.

  The 'Hendy Head' found on farmland in Anglesey. Made of local sandstone, it was probably carved in the pre-Roman Iron Age.

  A small bronze horse mask, first century AD, found in earthworks at Stanwick, North Yorkshire.

  Hadrian's Wall from the air

  Romano-British head, from the pediment of the Temple of Sulis Minerva, Bath.

  The Great Bath, built towards the end of the first century AD and later extended, in Roman Bath.

  Mosaic from the late Roman villa at Bignor, near Chichester, Sussex, fourth century AD.

  Iron helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, dated from before AD 665. The nose and mouth are made of gilt bronze and the eyebrows are cast bronze inlaid with silver wire.

  Events depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry: A mother and child leave their burning house.

  Halley's comet seen above Westminster in April 1066, with ominous longboats in the border below.

  Fyrd men isolated on a hillock and under attack from Normans.

  Pages from the Domesday Book.

  The imposing Norman architecture of Ely cathedral.

  Henry I mourning the death of his only legitimate son, William the Atheling, in the wreck of the White Ship, from a fourteenth-century manuscript.

  Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, the second husband of Henry's daughter Matilda; enamelled grave plate from his tomb in Le Mans Cathedral.

  Becket before Henry II; stained-glass window in the Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral.

  Scenes from the Becket Leaves: Becket departing after his disastrous meeting with the king at Montmirail.

  Becket arriving at Sandwich, while Ranulf de Broc and his henchmen wait on the shore.

  The earliest version of Becket's martyrdom from a Latin psalter, c. 1200.

  Matthew Paris's map of Britain, c. 1250, with Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall clearly visible. 'Scocia' is shown as virtually an island north of the Firth of Forth.

  Effigy of Richard I from his tomb in Fontevrault Abbey.

  Effigy of King John in Worcester Cathedral.

  Detail of a fresco in the chapel of St Radegonde, Chinon, thought to show Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  The shrine tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.

  Bronze gilded effigy of Henry Ill by William Torel, in the chapel of St Edward the Confessor, Westminster Abbey.

  Drawing of Edward I from an Exchequer roll, c. 1297-8.

  Persecuted Jews at the time of their expulsion in 1290.

  The walls of Conwy Castle.

  William Wallace monument, Glasgow.

  The battle of Bannockburn, from the Holkham Bible, 1327-35.

  Edward III grants Aquitaine to the Black Prince.

  A scene from the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter.

  Effigy from the tomb of the Black Prince in the Trinity Chapel, Cante
rbury Cathedral.

  The Three Living and the Three Dead, from the fourteenth-century Psalter of Robert de Lisle.

  John Ball, on horseback, preaching to the rebels, from Froissart's Chronicles, 146D-80.