Elizabeth

by Lisa Hilton

  Elizabeth grieved acutely and privately. For some days she remained shut in her bedroom at St. James’s. Walsingham and Cecil noted that she refused to conduct any business; her women hovered anxiously outside the chamber. Eventually, the story goes, Cecil had the doors broken down. When she emerged, she had suffered a coup de vieux; she was visibly “much aged and spent.” All she said was that she did not want to talk about it. In response to a delicately phrased letter of condolence and congratulation from the Earl of Shrewsbury, she responded:

  We desire rather to forebear the remembrance thereof as a thing whereof we can admit no comfort, otherwise by submitting our will to God’s inevitable appointment. Who notwithstanding His goodness by the former prosperous news hath nevertheless been pleased to keep us in exercise by the loss of a personage so dear unto us.

  Elizabeth did submit her will, as she had often counselled others to do. She continued her round of official duties, yet beneath her rigid “mask of youth,” there was inconsolable grief. The letter was as near as Elizabeth ever came to admitting that she was angry with her God.

  The hint of a personal religious crisis in Elizabeth’s reaction to Leicester’s death suggests that the queen’s piety was not always quite so serenely confident as she would have the world believe. Yet in her relations with the Ottoman Empire, she evinced a degree of certainty of her divine right to mingle piety with pragmatism that shocked even those critics who already dismissed her as a heretic tyrant. Within western diplomatic relations, the papal bull Regnans in excelsis of 1570 had obviously been a political as well as a theological disaster for Elizabeth. Yet in economic terms, her reaction was both shrewd and robust.

  For centuries, and more particularly since the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, generations of popes had confirmed the illegality of Christian trade with the eastern empire, banning the sale of any materials which could be used by the “infidel” to prosecute antiChristian aggression. Based on the Cedex Justianus, successive legislation had threatened excommunication to anyone who exported munitions or foodstuffs to the enemies of the Church. Since the pope had chosen to declare Elizabeth an illegitimate heretic, there seemed no longer any good reason to recognize Rome’s authority in this matter, and English merchants were now effectively freed to profit from the vast Ottoman market. The conquest of Cyprus and the naval defeat at Lepanto had created a need for armaments beyond what the indigenous Ottoman market could supply, so in a wonderfully defiant gesture, Elizabeth’s merchants set about turning the scrapheap left by the Reformation—metal from bells and broken statuary, even the lead from dismantled ecclesiastical buildings—back into gold.

  During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Venice had been the hub of trade with the eastern Mediterranean, with spices, silks, and carpets arriving in England on a merchant fleet of “Flanders Galleys.” Woolen cloth, lead, tin, and rabbit and calfskin were re-exported via Venice from England, so that the notoriously fearsome Janissaries (the armed units recruited by kidnapping non-Muslim boys from within the empire) wore uniforms of English cloth. While the first Turkish trade document issued on behalf of an Englishman was granted by Suleiman I to Anthony Jenkinson in 1553, permitting him to trade throughout the empire, until 1580, the English had traded in the Levant through a customary arrangement with France. Even with nominal legal agreements in place, trade with the east was an extremely risky business: if ships were captured, their crews could be, and were, enslaved. Or worse, in the case of Samson Rowlie, the son of a Bristol merchant, who was castrated by his new owners (though the “English eunuch” made the best of it by converting to Islam and under the name of Hasan Aga rising to become Treasurer to the Beglebeg of Algiers). Between 1562 and 1582, £4,000 had been spent for the relief of English captives from the Ottomans, making the costs of legally dubious expeditions even higher.

  But with Regnans in excelsis, this was about to change. By 1577, when John Hawkins proposed a venture to the Ottoman ports, effective trade had been under way for several years, as confirmed in a report by the Spanish ambassador Mendoza to Philip of Spain. Hawkins’s cargo list included Fernambuck (a hardwood), tin, lead, and cloth, about one-fifth of the cargo comprising those prohibited goods which could be used for arms manufacture. The Turkish market was hungry for such products, as in 1578, the empire began a protracted conflict with Persia, but in her first letter to the Sultan Murad III, Elizabeth, whose political hypocrisy was nothing if not audacious, described herself as “the most invincible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kinds of idolatries, of all that live among the Christians and falsely profess the name of Christ.” Elizabeth was responding to a letter whose “importance and uniqueness … cannot be overemphasized,” that is, the first communication of an Ottoman sultan with England.2 Admittedly, the English traveler Fynes Morrison recorded that when the sultan was shown England on a map, he wondered aloud why the King of Spain did not take a spade, dig it up, and throw it into the sea; nevertheless, he admitted himself impressed by English achievements, particularly in the light of its governance by a woman. Yet Murad had personal reasons for admitting women’s capacity to rule. His own mother, the beautifully named Nur Banu (which means “lady of light”), was a blonde Venetian originally named Cecilia. Some archival conflation has occurred between Nur Banu and another woman of Venetian origin, Murad’s favorite and the mother of his son, Mehmed III, whose name was Safiyye (“the pure”), and with whom Elizabeth was subsequently to correspond, but as queen mother, Nur Banu was very much a force in her own right. The Sultan Murad, described as “minute, pale, huge-eyed and full of melancholy,” was not much interested in government affairs, being “weak and pleasure loving,” and he allowed considerable power to devolve on his mother, whose rule, contemporaries claimed, was “absolute.” Nur was the first woman to achieve political influence at the Ottoman court, and indeed had one Grand Vizier deposed for daring to remark that “emperors do not govern with the counsel of women.” Nur died in 1583, which meant that when Elizabeth’s correspondence with her son was initiated, she was still a considerable authority in the Seraglio. While it is perhaps too far-fetched to suggest that Nur influenced her son in favor of another ruling woman, it is certainly the case that Murad himself did not see Elizabeth’s sex as a reason not to do business.

  Elizabeth’s letter, written at Greenwich in October 1579, went on to request that the sultan extend his protection to all English subjects, hinting heavily at the advantages of a supply of “prohibited goods,”

  the bestowing of which so singular a benefit your Highness shall so much the less repent of by how much the more fit and necessary for the use of man those commodities are, wherewith our kingdoms do abound, and the kingdoms of other princes do want.

  Among the customary exchange of gifts, alongside several mastiffs in red coats, was a clock, decorated with a forest of intarsia silver trees, “among which were deers chased by dogs and men on horseback following, men drawing water, others carrying mine ore on barrows,” an equally unsubtle hint as to the wealth of raw materials available in England.

  By 1580, Murad had consented to a pledge of safe conduct, ahidname, for English merchants in Ottoman ports, an extremely significant development in trade with the Levant and North Africa. In the case of the latter, a clandestine trade in munitions had occurred in Morocco from the 1550s, but this had proved too dangerous and lapsed. Revivified by Murad’s grant, the Turkey Company was formed in 1581, amalgamated with the Venice Company eleven years later to form the Levant Company, while a similar joint-stock venture, the Barbary Company, was given a royal grant in 1585 to trade along the Atlantic coast of North Africa. These developments were of enormous importance to English trade, not only for the new availability of silks, spices, goatskin, cotton yarn, carpets, dates, aniseed, and indigo dye, but for the general augmentation of Mediterranean commerce now that the threat of piracy and slavery was diminished. The ships required to make the journey to the east stimulated the boatbuildin
g trade and added to England’s stock of potential naval power, while an entirely new commercial field was opened by the possibility of exporting goods to northern Europe via England—and English customs houses. And, of course, there was the central profit derived from dealing with the enemy.

  Elizabeth was entirely aware that in the view of her Catholic fellow monarchs, and moreover critics within her own realm, she was guilty “of active collusion with England’s greatest enemy.” She was therefore reluctant to commit to a formal alliance with the infidel through the customary sending of an embassy. Her letter to Murad of 8 January 1580 strikes a very different tone from the initial, rather bombastic confidence of their first exchange. Elizabeth excused her prevarication on the grounds that

  We would have sent some embassy long ago to testify to which advantage and to how much we ascribe to your Imperial Majesty’s goodwill towards us had not princes hostile to us, who are making a disturbance within our Kingdom with their own external soldiery and the influenced minds of certain people who are conspiring for civil destruction, diverted us from that plan and purpose.

  She went on to concede rather plaintively that she has been obliged to “yield a little to these stormy times,” adding with a surprising degree of frank bitterness that “meanwhile he shall keep his affirmed goodwill towards us and account us, merely by the luck of the moment and in no way as just deserts, the least among his allies, or rather the last.” In other words, Elizabeth was conceding her own weakness, as a product of momentary fortune.

  In 1588, William Harborne was succeeded as ambassador to Constantinople by Edward Barton. From the first, Barton’s concern was to promote discord between Turkey and Spain, the policy which had been successfully practiced, on the instructions of Walsingham, by Barton’s predecessor. But as with the Cold War in the twentieth century, the conflict between the two superpowers evolved as a series of skirmishes between satellite client states, and Elizabeth’s government was intricately involved. Elizabeth recognized that eastern Europe was of particular importance in the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and used the influence England had acquired in Turkey to promote both trade and theological war. Intervention in Transylvania, controlled by the Ottomans, had begun as early as 1581, when Peter Cercel, a pretender to the Wallachian throne, had made contact with the English party in Constantinople. Cercel was sent to John Woolley, Elizabeth’s Latin Secretary, to beseech the queen’s protection, and did succeed as voivode (governor) between 1583 and 1585.

  Yet this was only the beginning of a consistent and influential English policy in the region. In 1568, King Stefan Batory of Poland (who had not yet taken the troublesome step of invading Livonia) had granted mercantile privileges to the Eastland Company, giving a strong impetus to trade between England and the Baltic. This trade passed through the state of Moldavia, which between 1588 and 1591 was subject to a campaign of intense Jesuit propaganda. In an attempt to counter this, Barton allied himself with the Greek Orthodox see at Constantinople, denouncing the Spanish Roman Catholics as “idolaters.” He furthered the Protestant cause by sending for preachers from Geneva to officiate in both Constantinople and Chios. When the Catholic leader of Moldavia was deposed, Barton had achieved sufficient leverage via this alliance to prefer his own candidate, Aaron Ferhad, to the throne, on the condition that Aaron carry out a pro-Protestant policy which would smooth the Anglo-Polish trade route. Simultaneously, Barton was active in preventing a truce between Turkey and Spain in January 1590, going on to mediate between Turkey and Poland, who faced a potential war over an alliance between the latter and the Hapsburg Empire. Barton’s deputy, Thomas Wilcox, was sent via Moldavia to the court of the Polish King Sigismund III to work against the treaty, effectively enacting a pro-Turkish policy which furthered advantageous relations between Turkey and Poland while isolating the Spanish. The papal nuncio to Poland attempted to counter-attack, warning Sigismund against the danger of entering into any concords with “such a pernicious woman,” that is, Elizabeth, and Sigismund assured the legate with a smoothness worthy of his ally that he was entirely unaware of any English intervention proceeding from “that pretended queen.”

  Aaron’s reign in Moldavia might have been a coup for England, but the Moldavians took a different view, deposing him in 1592 after a reign described as the most “oppressive and miserable” in the country’s history. Barton’s prestige in Constantinople was severely diminished, but he remained influential enough to persuade the Janissaries (who were key to any enactment of imperial power) to reinstate Aaron, again on the condition that Protestants would be permitted freedom of conscience and their churches restored. Thus, Moldavian Protestants found themselves praying “dailie” for the “long life and good prosperitie” of Queen Elizabeth I. The Archbishop of Lemberg was so alarmed by Barton’s success that he warned the papal nuncio, Germanico Malaspina, that the English were plotting to effect a union between the Greek and Calvinist Churches, and that Elizabeth herself was planning to become a Turk (i.e., convert to Islam) in order to “trouble the state of Christendom.”

  Moldavian affairs might have seemed far removed from the more urgent challenges Elizabeth was facing, but they intersect curiously with both the perceived perennial foreign threats to Elizabeth’s life and the factionalism which in the 1590s the Earl of Essex was beginning to create at her court.

  Even, or perhaps especially, after Leicester’s death, Elizabeth could not bring herself to stomach Lettice Knollys’s company, but for her son, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, she showed an immediate and, to both her contemporaries and subsequent writers, embarrassing, weakness. She never, though, took him as seriously as he did himself, and it was this mismatch between the perceptions of their relationship which was to bring about Essex’s downfall thirteen years after the earl arrived at court in 1584. Leicester, who knew the queen’s tastes perhaps better than anyone, had been quick to promote his stepson, who accompanied him to the Netherlands without having to bear any of the responsibility and consequent disapprobation which fell upon Elizabeth’s first favorite. When Essex returned in 1587, it swiftly became obvious that Elizabeth was utterly smitten. Maybe, just for once, Elizabeth judged that she could afford to behave like a woman, and though (as had also been the case with Leicester) she never loosed the reins of their political relationship, her infatuation has attracted far more squirming contempt than it might have done had the genders of the couple been reversed. Essex was pretty, and naively grand, but he was also intelligent and witty, perfect company for Elizabeth in the aftermath of Mary Stuart’s execution and in dealing with the complex grief of Leicester’s death.

  Essex was not a dancing man, but in every other respect he was the model of the Renaissance swain. Despite the fact that they were a generation apart, he participated apparently unselfconsciously in the courtship rituals which were the accepted paradigm for intimacy with the queen. Elizabeth was not averse to advancing his career, giving him his stepfather’s office of Master of the Horse when she promoted Leicester to Lord Steward in late 1587, and giving him Leicester’s former apartments at Whitehall after the latter’s death, but she was impatient with his hasty, untried ambition, which constantly set her against the old guard of her trusted ministers.

  Dr. Roderigo Lopez was a victim of precisely this ambition. Lopez had longstanding connections with the swarm of Catholic plots and counter-plots that massed around the queen. The son of a Portuguese marrano (one of the many Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity in Spanish dominions), Lopez was a skilled medical practitioner by the standards of the time. In 1571, he had cured Sir Francis Walsingham of kidney stones while he was living in Paris, and also assisted in helping Walsingham to develop “invisible” inks to pass secret messages. Walsingham clearly recognized his utility, since Lopez not only went on to become physician to Elizabeth in 1586, but took a place in the intelligence network operated by Walsingham and Lord Burghley. Like many of the spies they used, Lopez was a double agent. He
had been commissioned as an intelligencer by the ambassador to France; Mendoza passed on his reports, destined for the king of Spain, through a third party, a fellow Portuguese named Manuel de Mandrada. In 1591, Mandrada was arrested, and Burghley sent Lopez to push forward his interrogation. Mandrada confessed, and with Lopez’s encouragement was “turned,” on threat of his life, into counter-spying for the English. Lopez remained in his post, as Burghley could make use of his reports on Spanish intelligence and the information he provided through the marrano community. It may seem extraordinary that Burghley should have permitted a known agent to enjoy such privileged and physically intimate access to the queen, but clearly it suited him to do so. Yet when the Earl of Essex accused Lopez of treason in 1594, Burghley was ruthlessly prepared to sacrifice his protégé to politics.

  The atmosphere around the queen in the 1590s was paranoid and febrile. The Catholic threat was nothing new, but with the country again at war and the succession of the aging queen still unsettled, it provoked an aggressive hysteria. In London, Christopher Marlowe had just premiered The Massacre at Paris, a gory reminder of the slaughter on Saint Bartholomew’s Day two decades earlier, while at court, the Earl of Essex was determined to assert his supremacy over the Cecils. While the dangers were real enough, this visceral political contest might be cast as a gruesome form of chivalric quest, with the rival heroes battling to save their lady from mortal danger, a tiltyard masquerade where the combatants played for horribly real stakes. Essex worked for three months to bring down Lopez, eventually claiming that his own care and diligence had unmasked a plot whereby the doctor would poison the queen for 50,000 Spanish crowns. “I have uncovered a most dangerous and desperate treason,” the earl crowed in a letter.3 “The point of conspiracy was Her Majesty’s death. The executioner should have been Dr Lopez, the manner poison.” Elizabeth herself was alarmed but unconvinced. She chastised Essex, calling him “a rash and temerarious youth” and claiming that she was personally convinced of Lopez’s innocence. Characteristically, Essex sulked until Elizabeth conceded that he might pursue the inquiry.