by Will Durant
The political implications deepened the tragedy. Many of her Catholic subjects believed her sterility a proper punishment for her father’s sins and a promise that Catholic Mary Stuart would inherit the crown. But Parliament and the rest of Protestant England dreaded such a prospect and importuned her to find a mate. She tried, but began by losing her heart to a married man. Lord Robert Dudley, tall, handsome, accomplished, courtly, brave, was the son of that Duke of Northumberland who had died on the scaffold for trying to disinherit Mary Tudor and make Jane Grey queen. Dudley was married to Amy Robsart, but was not living with her, and rumor called him an unprincipled philanderer. He was with Elizabeth at Windsor when his wife fell downstairs at Cumnor Hall and died of a broken neck (1560). He and the Queen were suspected, by the Spanish ambassador and others, of having arranged this clumsy annulment; the suspicion was unjust,26 but it ended for a while Dudley’s hopes of becoming consort to Elizabeth. When she thought she was dying (1562), she begged that he might be appointed protector of the realm; she confessed that she had long loved him, but called God to witness that “nothing unseemly” had ever passed between them.27 Two years later she offered him to the Queen of Scots and made him Earl of Leicester to enhance his charms, but Mary was loath to have her rival’s lover in her bed. Elizabeth comforted him with monopolies, and favored him till his death (1588).
Cecil had borne this romance with dignified hostility. For a time he thought of resigning in protest, for his own plan contemplated a marriage that would strengthen England with the friendship of some powerful state. For a quarter of a century a succession of foreign suitors danced about the Queen. “There are twelve ambassadors of us,” wrote one of them, “all competing for her Majesty’s hand; and the Duke of Holstein is coming next, as a suitor for the King of Denmark. The Duke of Finland, who is here for his brother the King of Sweden, threatens to kill the Emperor’s man, and the Queen fears they will cut each other’s throat in her presence.”28 She must have felt some satisfaction when Philip II, the greatest potentate in Christendom, offered her his seasoned hand (1559), but she rejected this device for making England a Catholic dependency of Spain. She took more time in answering a proposal from Charles IX of France, for France was meanwhile kept on good behavior. The French ambassador complained that “the world had been made in six days, and she had already spent eighty days and was still undecided”; she artfully replied that the world “had been made by a greater artist than herself.”29 Two years later she allowed English agents to propose her marriage to Charles, Archduke of Austria; but at Leicester’s urging she withdrew the plan. When the international situation favored humoring France (1570), the Duke of Alençon (son of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis) was encouraged to think of becoming the sixteen-year-old husband of the thirty-seven-year-old Queen; but the negotiations were wrecked on three obstacles—the Duke’s Catholic faith, his tender youth, and his pockmarked nose. Five years softened one of these deterrents, and Alençon, now Duke of Anjou, was considered again; he was invited to London, and for five years more Elizabeth played with him and France. After a final flurry (1581) this gay courtship petered out, and Anjou retired from the field waving as a trophy a garter of the Queen. Meanwhile she had kept him from marrying the Infanta and thereby allying her two enemies, France and Spain. Rarely has a woman derived so much advantage from barrenness, or so much pleasure from virginity.
IV. ELIZABETH AND HER COURT
There was more satisfaction in being courted by virile Elizabethans than in being bedded by a poxy youth, and the courtship could last as long as marriage did not stifle it. Hence Elizabeth enjoyed perennial adulation and savored it insatiably. Lords ruined themselves to entertain her; masques and pageants allegorized her glory; poets smothered her with sonnets and dedications; musicians strummed her praise. A madrigal celebrated her eyes as war-subduing orbs, and her breast as “that fair hill where virtue dwells and sacred skill.”30 Raleigh told her that she walked like Venus, hunted like Diana, rode like Alexander, sang like an angel, and played like Orpheus.31 She almost believed it. She was as vain as if all the merits of her England were the blessed fruit of her mothering; and to a degree they were. Distrustful of her physical charms, she robed herself in costly dresses, varying them almost every day; at her death she left two thousand. She wore jewelry in her hair, on her arms and wrists and ears and gowns; when a bishop reproved her love of finery she had him warned not to touch on that subject again, lest he reach heaven aforetime.32
Her manners could be alarming. She cuffed or fondled courtiers, even foreign emissaries. She tickled the back of Dudley’s neck when he knelt to receive his earldom.I She spat as she list—once upon a costly coat. She was usually amiable and easy of access, but she talked volubly, and she could be an unanswerable shrew. She swore like a pirate (which, by proxy, she was); “by God’s death” was among her milder oaths. She could be cruel, as in playing cat and mouse with Mary Stuart, or letting Lady Catherine Grey languish and die in the Tower; but she was basically kind and merciful, and she mingled tenderness with her blows. She often lost her temper, but she soon regained control of herself. She roared with laughter when amused, which was often. She loved to dance, and pirouetted till she was sixty-nine. She gamboled and gambled and hunted, and was fond of masques and plays. She kept her spirits up even when her fortunes were low, and in the face of danger she was all courage and intelligence. She was abstemious in food and drink, but covetous of money and jewelry; with relish she confiscated the property of rich rebels; and she managed to get and to hold the crown jewels of Scotland, Burgundy, and Portugal, besides a hoard of gems presented by expectant lords. She was not renowned for gratitude or liberality; sometimes she tried to pay her servants in fair words; but there was a certain patriotism in her parsimony and her pride. When she acceded there was hardly a nation so poor as to do England reverence; when she died England controlled the seas and challenged the intellectual hegemony of Italy or France.
What sort of mind did she have? She had all the learning that a queen could carry gracefully. While ruling England she continued her study of languages; corresponded in French with Mary Stuart, bandied Italian with a Venetian ambassador, and berated a Polish envoy in virile Latin. She translated Sallust and Boethius, and knew enough Greek to read Sophocles and translate a play of Euripides’. She claimed to have read as many books as any prince in Christendom, and it was likely. She studied history almost every day. She composed poetry and music, and played forgivably on the lute and the virginal. But she had sense enough to laugh at her accomplishments, and to distinguish between education and intelligence. When an ambassador complimented her on her languages she remarked that “it was no marvel to teach a woman to talk; it were far harder to teach her to hold her tongue.”34 Her mind was as sharp as her speech, and her wit kept pace with the time. Francis Bacon reported that “she was wont to say of her instructions to great officers that they were like to garments, strait at the first putting on, but did by and by wear loose enough.”35 Her letters and speeches were composed in an English all her own, devious, involved, and affected, but rich in quaint turns, fascinating in eloquence and character.
She excelled in intelligence rather than intellect. Walsingham pronounced her “inapt to embrace any matter of weight”;36 but perhaps he spoke in the bitterness of unrequited devotion. Her skill lay in feminine delicacy and subtlety of perception, not in laborious logic, and sometimes the outcome revealed more wisdom in her feline tentatives than in their reasoning. It was her indefinable spirit that counted, that baffled Europe and enthralled England, that gave spur and color to her country’s flowering. She re-established the Reformation, but she represented the Renaissance—the lust to live this earthly life to the full, to enjoy and embellish it every day. She was no exemplar of virtue, but she was a paragon of vitality. Sir John Hayward, whom she sent to the Tower for giving rebellious notions to the younger Essex, forgave her enough to write of her, nine years after she could reward him:
Now
, if ever any person had eyther the gift or the stile to winne the hearts of people, it was this Queene; if ever she did expresse the same, it was … in coupling mildness with majesty as she did, and in stately stouping to the meanest sort. All her facultyes were in motione, and every motione seemed a well-guided actione; her eyes were set upon one, her ears listened to another, her judgment ran upon a third, to a fourth she addressed her speech; her spirit seemed to be everywhere, and yet so intyre in her selfe, as it seemed to bee noe where else. Some she pityed, some she commended, some she thanked, at others she pleasantly and wittingly jested, contemning no person, neglecting no office; and distributing her smiles, lookes, and graces so artificially [artfully] that thereupon the people again redoubled the testimonyes of their joyes.37
Her court was her character—loving the things she loved, and raising her flair for music, games, plays, and vivid speech to an ecstasy of poems, madrigals, dramas, and masques, and such prose as England has never known again. In her palaces at Whitehall, Windsor, Greenwich, Richmond, and Hampton Court lords and ladies, knights and ambassadors, entertainers and servitors moved in an exciting alternation of regal ceremony and gallant gaiety. A special Office of the Revels prepared amusements that ranged from “riddles” and backgammon to complex masques and Shakespeare’s plays. Ascension Day, Christmas, New Year’s, Twelfth Night, Candlemas, and Shrovetide were regularly celebrated with pastimes, athletic contests, jousts, mummings, plays, and masques. The masque was one of many Italian importations into Elizabethan England—a gaudy mixture of pageantry, poetry, music, allegory, buffoonery, and ballet, put together by playwrights and artists, presented at court, or on rich estates, with complex machinery and evolutions, and performed by masked ladies and gentlemen burdened with costly costumes and simple lines. Elizabeth was fond of drama, especially of comedy; who knows how much of Shakespeare would have reached the stage, or posterity, if she and Leicester had not supported the theater through all the attacks of the Puritans?
Not content with her five palaces, Elizabeth sallied out almost every summer on cross-country “progresses” to see and be seen, to keep an eye on her vassal lords, and to enjoy their reluctant homage. Part of the court followed her, delighted with the change and grumbling at the accommodations and the beer. Towns dressed their gentry in velvet and silk to welcome her with speeches and gifts; nobles bankrupted themselves to entertain her; hard-pressed lords prayed that she would not come their way. The Queen rode on horseback or in an open litter, greeting happily the crowds that gathered along the road. The people were thrilled by the sight of their invincible sovereign, and bewitched to fresh loyalty by her gracious compliments and infectious happiness.
The court took on her gaiety, her freedom of manners, her luxury of dress, her love of ceremony, and her ideal of the gentleman. She liked to hear the rustle of finery, and the men around her rivaled the women in molding Oriental stuffs to Italian styles. Pleasure was the usual program, but one had to be ready at any moment for martial exploits beyond the seas. Seductions had to be circumspect, for Elizabeth felt responsible to the parents of her maids of honor for their honor; hence she banished the Earl of Pembroke from the court for making Mary Fitton pregnant.38 As at any court, intrigue wove many entangling webs; the women competed unscrupulously for the men, the men for the women, and all for the favor of the Queen and the perquisites dependent thereon. Those same gentlemen who exalted in poetry the refinements of love and morality itched in prose for sinecures, took or gave bribes, grasped at monopolies, or shared in piratical spoils; and the avid Queen looked indulgently upon a venality that eked out the inadequate pay of her servitors. Through her grants, or by her permission, Leicester became the richest lord in England; Sir Philip Sidney received vast tracts in America; Raleigh acquired forty thousand acres in Ireland; the second Earl of Essex enjoyed a “corner” on the importation of sweet wines; and Sir Christopher Hatton rose from the Queen’s lapdog to Lord Chancellor. Elizabeth was no more sensitive to industrious brains than to handsome legs—for these pillars of society were not yet shrouded in pantaloons. Despite her faults she set a pace and a course to elicit the reserve energies of England’s worthies; she raised their courage to high enterprise, their minds to brave thinking, their manners to grace and wit and the fostering of poetry, drama, and art. Around that dazzling court and woman gathered nearly all the genius of England’s greatest age.
V. ELIZABETH AND RELIGION
But within the court, and through the nation, the bitter battle of the Reformation raged, and created a problem that many thought would baffle and destroy the Queen. She was a Protestant; the country was two-thirds, perhaps three-quarters, Catholic.39 Most of the magistrates, all of the clergy, were Catholic. The Protestants were confined to the southern ports and industrial towns; they were predominant in London, where their number was swelled by refugees from oppression on the Continent; but in the northern and western counties—almost entirely agricultural—they were a negligible few.40 The spirit of the Protestants, however, was immeasurably more ardent than the Catholic. In 1559 John Foxe published his Rerum in ecclesia gestarum … commentant, describing with passion the sufferings of Protestants under the preceding reign; the volumes were translated (1563) as Actes and Monuments; popularly known as The Book of Martyrs, they had an arousing influence on English Protestants for over a century. Protestantism in the sixteenth century had the feverish energy of a new idea fighting for the future; Catholicism had the strength of traditional beliefs and ways deeply rooted in the past.
In a spreading minority the religious turmoil had generated skepticism—even, here and there, atheism. The conflict of creeds, their mutual criticism, their bloody intolerance, and the contrast between the professions and the conduct of Christians, had made some matter-of-fact minds doubtful of all theologies. Hear Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster (1563):
That Italian that first invented the Italian Proverb against our Englishmen Italianate, meant no more their vanity in living than their lewd opinion in Religion … They make more account of Tully’s offices [Cicero’s De officiis] than St. Paul’s epistles; of a tale in Boccaccio than a story of the Bible. Then they count as fables the holy mysteries of the Christian Religion. They make Christ and his Gospel only serve civil policy; then neither religion [Protestantism or Catholicism] cometh amiss to them. In time they be promoters of both openly; in place again mockers of both privily … For where they dare, in company where they like, they boldly laugh to scorn both Protestant and Papist. They care for no Scripture … they mock the Pope; they rail on Luther … The heaven they desire is only their personal pleasure and private profit; whereby they plainly declare of whose school … they be: that is, Epicures in living, and atheoi in doctrine.41
Cecil complained (1569) that “deriders of religion, Epicureans, and atheists are everywhere”;42 John Strype declared (1571) that “many were wholly departed from the communion of the church, and came no more to hear divine service”;43 John Lyly (1579) thought “there never were such sects among the heathens … such misbelief among infidels, as is now among scholars.”44 Theologians and others wrote books against “atheism”—which, however, could mean belief in God but disbelief in Christ’s divinity. In 1579, 1583, and 1589 men were burned for denying the divinity of Christ.45 Several dramatists—Greene, Kyd, Marlowe—were reputed atheists. The Elizabethan drama, which otherwise so widely pictures life, contains remarkably little about the strife of faiths, but makes a great play of pagan mythology.
In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (IV, iii, 250) are two obscure lines:
O paradox! black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the school of night.
Many46 have interpreted the last phrase as referring to the evening assemblies of Walter Raleigh, the astronomer Thomas Harriot, the scholar Lawrence Keymis, probably the poets Marlowe and Chapman, and some others, in Raleigh’s country house at Sherborne, for the study of astronomy, geography, chemistry, philosophy, and theology. Harr
iot, apparently the intellectual leader of the group, “had strange thoughts of the Scriptures,” reported the antiquary Anthony à Wood, “and always undervalued the old story of the creation … He made a Philosophical Theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament”; he believed in God, but rejected revelation and the divinity of Christ.47 Robert Parsons, the Jesuit, wrote in 1592 of “Sir Walter Rawleigh’s school of Atheisme … wherein both Moyses and our Saviour, the olde and Newe Testamentes are jested at, and the schollers taught … to spell God backwards.”48 Raleigh was accused of having listened to Marlowe’s reading of an essay on “atheism.” In March 1594 a government commission sat at Cerne Abbes, Dorset, to investigate rumors of a set of atheists in the vicinity—which included Raleigh’s home. The inquiry led to no action now known to us, but charges of atheism were brought against Raleigh during his trial (1603).49 In the preface to his History of the World he made it a point to enlarge upon his belief in God.