by Lisa Hilton
Elizabeth’s longstanding engagement with Russia not only throws light on the extent and complexity of the diplomatic and covert intelligence network which the English deployed in eastern as well as western Europe; it was, arguably, one of the foundation stones of English, and then British, imperial dominance in the centuries to come. Leicester’s gift of a sable cloak is a sensuous reminder of the skill, courage, and—why not?—greed which galvanized not only the crafts of shipbuilding, map-making, and navigation for which the English became renowned, but of the beginning of an economic system which has left the City of London as one of the financial powerhouses of the world even today. The Muscovy Company, the Eastland Company, and the East India Company were all founded during Elizabeth’s reign, and “in the trade of these chartered companies … lay the practical and intellectual origins of the … British Empire.”7 One more highly significant charter was also granted, to the Levant Company. And in that instance, Elizabeth would be doing business with the enemy.
23
ELIZABETH I’S SPEECH at Tilbury hardly needs an introduction. Her presence among the troops at Tilbury camp on 8 August 1588 and the words she spoke to inspire them are legendary:
Although I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England too—and take foul scorn that [the Duke of Parma] or any other Prince of Europe dare to invade the borders of my realm.
The speech has taken its place in the English national consciousness as much as John of Gaunt’s “sceptered isle” eulogy in Shakespeare’s Richard II; it echoes through the dauntless valiance of Churchill’s great wartime broadcasts; it tugs the patriotic heartstrings as it establishes for the first time an image of England, that plucky little island facing down a military superpower, which still resonates, both sentimentally and politically, in the twenty-first century. But did Elizabeth ever actually speak these now immortal words? Crucially, there is no eyewitness account of the speech at Tilbury. Certainly, the accessories which successive historians have bestowed upon the queen that day have no origins in fact. One writer speaks confidently of Elizabeth’s “silver breastplate worn over her white velvet dress,” another adds a “helmet with white plumes” to a steel corselet, another adds a white horse, another a silver truncheon. Yet there is no contemporary evidence that Elizabeth wore armor that day, no engraving or painting which reveals her to have been carrying a truncheon, nor any contemporary record of what she said.
Elizabeth and her councilors had been anticipating full-blown war with Spain for some years. Intelligence gathered by Cecil’s network indicated that Philip had determined upon invasion as early as 1585. The execution of Mary Stuart was not a catalyst for the unleashing of the Armada, though it provoked Philip to expedite his plans. A memorandum written up by Cecil in February 1588 assesses the likely tactics of the Spanish, the relative provision of English ships and their capacity to hold off a naval attack, the possibility of Philip persuading—that is, bribing—James of Scotland to assist him, and the overall costs of defense, which Cecil estimated as well into the tens of thousands of pounds. About 140 ships were available: a fleet consisting of Elizabeth’s navy of 40 ships, a further 30 funded by the City of London, and the remainder provided through other port towns, by collectives of merchants as well as private citizens. Cecil was uncertain enough of the strength of this force to consider in his memo the possibility of obtaining further ships from Denmark and Scotland. On 25 April, Pope Pius blessed the Armada banner, and by May, after receiving several direct communications from Drake stressing the importance of acquiring more vessels and suggesting the possibility of a counter-attack, Elizabeth had determined her policy.
The fleet was to muster at Plymouth under the command of Lord Howard of Effingham with Drake as vice-admiral, while Lord Henry Seymour was to deploy forty ships in the Channel. The Armada set sail from Lisbon under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia on 28 May. Between 30 May and 24 June, the English sailed out three times in attempts to engage the enemy, but each time the English ships were driven back to port by bad weather. The Armada was aiming to proceed to the coast of the Spanish Netherlands, where it would meet thirty thousand soldiers under the Duke of Parma, to augment the eighteen thousand already embarked with Medina. The weather conditions also hampered the Spanish, who diverted their course towards England. The beacons which had waited along the coast since the spring were fired on 19 July, as the Armada was sighted off the narrow Lizard peninsula at the tip of Cornwall, and as the alarm burned its way back to London, Drake and Howard maneuvered their ships into position. Two skirmishes between the fleets on 21 and 23 July proved inconclusive, but the English were able to prevent Medina’s ships from entering the shelter of the Solent Strait. The Armada returned to deep water and made for Calais, Parma’s troops being now expected at Dunkirk. However, the Spanish were unable to establish contact with Parma as the Dutch had blockaded the port. Moreover, they were now vulnerable, as there was no harbor deep enough to accommodate the great Spanish warships. At midnight on 28 July, the English sent eight fireships into the Spanish line, and though no enemy ships were burned, many of the panicked crews slashed the anchor cables and fled. Medina’s formation was severely disordered, and at Gravelines the next day, the English had them cornered.
Medina planned to use a technique which had proved successful at the Battle of Lepanto, of bringing his ships in close and having the soldiers board those of the enemy, but Howard and Drake had anticipated this. Their craft were lighter and faster, and they were able to dance around the Spanish, firing on their ships from a safe range. The Armada used relatively little of their ammunition, while the English maintained the bombardment for eight hours. By the time they pulled away, at about 8 p.m., the Spanish had lost five ships, with many more damaged. Their boats scattered and made north for Scotland, with Howard continuing the pursuit until 2 August. While invasion by Parma’s army was still considered a serious possibility, by the time Elizabeth supposedly made her immortal speech at Tilbury, the danger was certainly significantly diminished, if not, indeed, banished.
WE KNOW THAT Elizabeth left St. James’s Palace on the royal barge on the morning of 8 August, catching the tide downriver. We know that she was accompanied by further boats carrying her Gentlemen Pensioners and the Yeomen of the Guard. At Tilbury she was received by Leicester and Lord Grey, with her footmen, guards, and a group of her ladies behind her. We know that she reviewed the troops twice, on the 8th and 9th, before returning to London on 10 August. And, then, we know nothing for twenty-four years.
A painting on the north wall of the chancel at St. Faith’s Church, Gaywood, Norfolk, dated 1588 and commissioned by the then rector, Thomas Hare, shows Elizabeth at Tilbury. A version of the famous speech is painted beneath it. The quotation claims to be from a sermon preached on the Armada by a clergyman named William Leigh, yet the text in question was not printed until 1612. The speaker invokes similar themes to the better-known version, though the words are by no means identical:
I have been your Prince in peace, so will I be in war, neither will I bid you go and fight, but come and let us fight the battle of the Lord.
The enemy may challenge my sex for that I am a woman, so may I likewise charge their mould, for they are but men.
The casting of Elizabeth in the masculine, the playing on the contrast between physical sex and martial gender, is the same rhetorical technique, but the Gaywood version differs sufficiently from the 1612 publication to the extent that it is extremely unlikely that the painted version derived from the subsequently published sermon. It was not until 1623 that the most familiar version of the Tilbury speech appeared, this time in a letter from Leonel Sharp to the Duke of Buckingham, as part of an argument against the proposed marriage of Prince Charles (later Charles I) to the Infanta of Spain. In 1654, part of the letter was reproduced in Cabala: Mysteries of State, with the explanation that it was written after the fruitless eight-month marriage embassy to Spain thirty-one
years earlier. The letter invokes the perfidy of the Spanish in 1588 as a reason to mistrust the alliance: “While they were treating of peace in ’88 they even then did invade us. I pray God they have not used this treatise of marriage to as bad a purpose.”
Of the two possible versions, it seems more likely that the Gaywood/Leigh text is closer to what Elizabeth actually said at Tilbury, concentrating as it does on confrontation with the enemy, rather than Elizabeth’s own feelings and actions. Sharp has further been dismissed as a “generally unreliable” witness.1 Yet one argument in favor of Sharp’s rendition is Elizabeth’s own education as a modern, Renaissance ruler. There was nothing aberrant about her appearance on a battlefield. Women may have been excluded from what was conventionally “a privileged site of patriarchal history,” but queens, in this respect, were not women.2 A century earlier, Marguerite of Anjou, Henry VI’s queen, had led the Lancastrian troops in battle, as had Isabelle of France and Matilda of Boulogne. The fact in itself of a queen rallying an army was not new in English history. But while Elizabeth’s actual presence at Tilbury is well documented and, arguably, customary, her words remain contentious.
In 1549, Elizabeth’s tutor Ascham observed that “She admires, above all, modest metaphors and comparisons of contraries well put together and contrasting felicitously with one another.” The queen was known to dislike wordy orations: in her own utterances she was notably brief—though admittedly not always to the point. Her own rhetorical style was much influenced by Latin, the “male” language of power and privilege, deriving its manner from Cicero and its directness from Seneca. A contemporary audience would have registered (as we do) Elizabeth’s use of synecdoche, the expression of a whole by a part, as well as her employment of “contraries,” comparatio. In almost all of the queen’s speeches where she alludes to her femininity, she makes use of comparatio—acknowledging “yes, I am a woman” then contrasting “but I do (therefore am not) such.” The Tilbury oration in the Sharp version, then, is consistent with Elizabeth’s classically formed style. This does not entirely compensate, however, for the lack of eyewitness accounts of the speech on that August day. Why, then, should Tilbury become the site for the coalescence of so much nationalistic sentiment? Whatever Elizabeth indeed said, and whatever she indeed wore while saying it, the fictions constructed around the queen were essential to her government at the time and to a developing conception of English identity over the following centuries.
Nations are more than territories, peoples, or systems of governance. They are also ideas, collective beliefs about a place’s history or values which create a sense of commonality. The sculpting of the “English” nation was taking place during the Renaissance, and Elizabeth’s self-presentation as queen was very much part of that process. To see this more clearly, it is perhaps worth considering the imaginative projections which surrounded her not only at Tilbury but at a very different stage of her reign, ten years previously.
In 1578, the Anjou marriage discussions had reached their climax. In August of that year, the queen was at Norwich, where she witnessed a pageant, Cupid’s Fall from Heaven, the first public occasion on which she was celebrated as the Virgin Queen. Between then and 1583, as the anti-French party moved against the marriage in council, a curious visual and literary propaganda conflict took form. The poet Edmund Spenser was a Leicester man, and therefore opposed to the Anjou match. In his Shephearde’s Calendar (1579), the April Eclogue features Elizabeth as a “mayden queene,” albeit one surrounded by blooming spring flowers, evoking a paradoxical fertility. Spenser hinted that Elizabeth might be possessed of a holy virginity which could be compared with that of the Virgin Mary, the patron saint of maternity as well as chastity, though since such a comparison could be read as potentially idolatrous, Elizabeth was compared to Venus Virgo, locating the analogy safely within Renaissance classicism. A further reference to Venus Virgo illustrates the frontispiece to the manuscript of Regina fortunata, by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, and here the Marian connection was made plain by means of the book in Elizabeth’s lap, featuring the quotation Pax tibi analla mia (Peace be with you, my handmaiden). This typically Renaissance combination of Marian and pagan motifs allows for Elizabeth’s ambiguous status while the marriage was, theoretically at least, going forward, but a more assertive claim as to the centrality of virginity to Elizabeth’s successful rule was made by John Lyly in Euphues and His England (1580). Notably, Lyly used “prince” as Elizabeth herself did, as a gender-neutral category:
As this noble Prince is endued with mercy, patience and moderation, so is she adorned with singular beauty and chastity… . But such is the grace bestowed on this earthly Goddess, that having the beauty that might allure all to Princes, she hath the chastity to refuse all, accounting it no less praise to be called a Virgin, than to be esteemed a Venus.
Lyly went on to cite the case of Tuccia, the Roman Vestal who proved her virtue by carrying a sieve full of water from the River Tiber to the temple without spilling a drop. The sieve, in turn, is central to a series of portraits of the queen produced amidst the uncertainty of her last venture in the marriage market. The first of these, attributed to George Gower and dated 1579, features Elizabeth holding a sieve in her left hand, with a quotation from Petrarch’s Triumph of Love, describing the “error and dreams” which attend the throne of Cupid. Those who follow him, the poet suggests, will be subject to “false opinion” and bound by force in an “eternal darkness.”
Elizabeth herself had acknowledged the fact that she would now never marry in her sonnet “On Monsieur’s Departure”:
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow,
Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind,
Let me float or sink, be high or low;
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die, and so forget what e’er love meant.
Elizabeth may have genuinely enjoyed Anjou’s company, his charm and his flattery, yet she had never seriously intended to marry him. As ever, the real agenda of their courtship was the leverage England might purchase between France and Spain. Dangling a French alliance before Philip might conceivably keep him out of the Netherlands, and it was therefore in the queen’s interests to protract the negotiations as long as possible.
The poem Elizabeth wrote when Anjou eventually departed played into the official strategy of the queen’s grief—she even managed to weep in front of Leicester and Walsingham, claiming that her life was worthless but for the hope of seeing her beloved “Frog” once more. The poem shows Elizabeth deploying all the skills of a Renaissance ruler—her dexterous talent for courtly idiom is put in play to “humanize” her, to present her as a suffering lover, while glossing over the functional realities of Anjou’s dismissal.
Spenser’s Eclogue of 1579 provides the final aspect of the symbolic virginity which reached a form of apotheosis in the Armada Portrait, even as the Anjou negotiations continued. His allusion is to the Song of Songs:
She is Syrix daughter without spot
Which Pan the shepherd’s God of her begot,
So sprung her Grace
Of heavenly race,
No mortal blemish may her blot.
The poem figures Elizabeth’s parents, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, as Pan and Syrix, dismissing those rumors to which Elizabeth had proved so sensitive, that she was “the bastard child of a licentious coupling.”3 Implicitly, she is immaculately conceived, fathered by Christ himself. The defeat of the Armada, in propaganda terms, vindicated this position—looking backward, Elizabeth’s refusal of her last chance at matrimony foregrounded her triumph as the virgin protectress of her state. Thus the Tilbury speech (whatever Elizabeth actually said) represented the culmination of the role Elizabeth had been creating since she had come to the throne. The army at Tilbury did not go storming into battle after hearing their queen’s rousing words in 1588. Most of them just went home. Effectively, the threat of the Armada was
dissipated by the time Elizabeth, with or without her breastplate, addressed her troops. The Tilbury speech was crucial in that it encapsulated the politics of the queen’s image as they had developed since 1578. Elizabeth’s person was connected with the defeat of the Spanish through her virginity; her body politic was England itself, repelling the violent rape of the Armada and confirming the quasi-divine myth of chaste invulnerability that Elizabeth and her ministers had perpetuated since the collapse of her final marriage negotiations. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that, in terms of imagery, Elizabeth’s hymen protected her nation.
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WHILE THE ARMADA could not truly be claimed as an extraordinary military victory, symbolically it represented the zenith of Elizabeth’s achievements. She barely had time to rejoice. Leicester had left London at the end of August, planning a visit to the spa at Buxton in the hope of relieving a persistent stomach complaint before moving on to Kenilworth. Amidst the outburst of jubilation which overtook the capital in the aftermath of the Armada, he and Elizabeth had seemed replete with a quieter satisfaction, content to watch the victory celebrations together from a window and dining quietly in the evenings. Neither was in the best of health, and perhaps they had a comfortable time together comparing their ailments. Leicester wrote a chatty note to Elizabeth on his journey, from Rycote, “to know how my gracious lady doth, and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good health and long life.”1 He added that he hoped to find his own cure at the springs, but his sickness was worsening, forcing him to pause at Cornbury, near Oxford, to recover. He died there on 4 September.