by Lisa Hilton
Essex had chosen to make his denunciation while Burghley was ill and incapacitated, but Burghley moved swiftly to prevent his rival claiming credit for Elizabeth’s rescue. Disregarding both the extreme unlikeliness of the plot and his own knowledge of Lopez’s intelligence activities, Burghley enlisted Thomas Phelippes to turn government reporting of the case to his own ends. The helpless Lopez was publicly accused of confessing his intention to poison Elizabeth with “physic,” encouraged by Mandrada, and of receiving a gold jewel set with diamonds and rubies as a token. Under questioning in the Tower, Lopez admitted that he had “spoken of this matter and promised it,” but added that it had all been to fool the King of Spain—precisely as Burghley had wished him to do. Yet Burghley could not afford to seem any less zealous than Essex for the royal security, and Lopez, a Jew and a foreigner, was too pathetically easy a target. Robert Cecil was a witness at Lopez’s trial for treason in February 1594, and declared himself satisfied that the “vile Jew” was guilty “in the highest degree.” Burghley’s secretary, Henry Maynard, wrote up the official account of the proceedings, which conspicuously failed to mention Essex. The plot had been discovered by “the great diligence and carefulness of one of the Lords of Her Majesty’s Privy Council.”
Even with Burghley’s endorsement and the verdict of the jury (who calmly ignored Lopez’s protests that his confession had been made under torture), Elizabeth was unable to bring herself to send Lopez to the gallows. In the three months before she signed the warrant, Alvaro Mendas, an agent of Don Solomon, the Duke of Mytelene, arrived in London. He claimed to wish to report on the involvement of Edward Barton in the affair of the Moldavian throne, and, further, to offer intelligence on the advantages which England might gain from the war between Turkey and the Hapsburgs in Hungary. In fact, he had been sent to free Lopez. Does this mean that Lopez was indeed guilty, or that the double-agent cover which Burghley had so mercilessly ignored was so successful that the Spanish were still convinced he was their man? How much Elizabeth knew is uncertain, yet she permitted Lopez’s widow to retain a property which in law ought to have been attaindered to the crown after the doctor was finally executed on 7 June. The presence of Mendas demonstrates the extent and complexity of clandestine Elizabethan diplomacy, of which Lopez so cruelly found himself the victim.
BACK IN CONSTANTINOPLE, Edward Barton found himself in an awkward position. In 1593, a second English present had been offered with tremendous ceremony to the Sublime Porte. The Sultana Safiyye wrote to Elizabeth in just the kind of terms the queen adored:
The most gracious and glorious, the wisest among women and chosen among those which triumph under the standard of Jesus Christ, the most mighty and rich governor and most rare among womankind in the world … I send Your Majesty so honourable and sweet a salutation of peace that all the flocks of Nightingales with their melody cannot attain to the like.
Elizabeth replied on paper scented with camphor and ambergris, in ink perfumed with musk, her letter accompanying a gift of eight chests of cloth, including scarlet, violet, and “sad green” colors, bottles, silver and gilt flagons, and rabbit skin, as well as a jeweled picture of herself for the sultana, set with rubies and diamonds, three “great pieces” of gilt plate, two pieces of fine Holland cloth, ten garments of cloth of gold, and a case of glass bottles “richly ornamented” in silver. In turn, she received a Turkish-style costume consisting of an upper gown of cloth of gold, an under gown of cloth of silver, and a girdle in the Turkish manner.
This gracious exchange had gone very well, but three years later, on the accession of the new sultan, Mehmet, Barton desperately needed to provide similar gifts in order to ensure English privileges under the new regime. Technically, though, Barton was not employed directly by Elizabeth’s government but by the Turkey Company, which meant that, with characteristic stinginess, Elizabeth was able to regulate her ambassador’s diplomatic ventures without troubling herself over paying for his maintenance. It was therefore to the Turkey Company that Barton was obliged to apply for his gift, but the merchants balked. He resorted to creating a “dodgy dossier” designed to persuade Elizabeth to assist the company with a suitable present.
Elizabeth received a detailed document, transcribed in Italian by one Salomone, “the Jewish man,” describing the former sultan, Murad, and the circumstances of the accession of the new. Compared with an account of the same events delivered by the Venetian ambassador, Marco Venier, it is apparent that Salomone’s rendition had been doctored. The altered version presented the situation in Constantinople as considerably more precarious, with the aim of persuading Elizabeth to pay up for the required gift. A promise was evidently forthcoming, as Barton was permitted to accompany Mehmet on campaign in Hungary the same year. Eventually, in 1599, one Hector arrived with Thomas Dallam, who had constructed a mechanical organ for the sultan’s pleasure, along with a gilded carriage for Sultana Safiyye.
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IN THE YEARS following the scattering of the Armada, Elizabeth appeared to have achieved the serene sovereignty promised by the monarch of the eponymous portrait. The Spanish threat was vastly diminished, Mary Stuart was gone, the reform of religion was firmly established. As Elizabeth approached her sixties, her status as Virgin Queen might have appeared as both unique and unassailable. But the mask was corroding even as it fixed: “The very years which provide the strongest evidence of a cult at its zenith also produced reactions of negativity and even iconoclasm towards the Queen.”1 Elizabeth had faced down many challenges to her authority over the years, but in the 1590s, she confronted a different kind of threat—the sexual misdemeanors of her own court. The strain between duty and desire was one that Elizabeth had known personally all too well, and in the queen’s view, succumbing to emotion over obligation was not only a shameful weakness but also a threatening one. Renaissance culture has been characterized as “obsessively taken up with the kaleidoscopic aspects of transgressive sexuality, most particularly the insistent pull of family relationships and the counterweight of desire,” and Elizabeth’s response to those who elevated feeling over duty had always been strict.2 In 1574, she had so far forgotten herself as to break the finger of her lady Mary Shelton with a candlestick when it was discovered that she had secretly married John Scudamore. One witness to her fury observed, “She hath dealt liberal both with blows and evil words… . I think in my conscience never woman bought her husband more dear than she [Mary] hath done.”3 Mary was ultimately restored to favor, and Elizabeth in fact did promote what she considered to be suitable marriages among her maids, but she has nevertheless been left with a reputation for violent sexual jealousy; in the phrase of one critic, an “anger with love.” Yet seeing Elizabeth as a sexually thwarted creature who manifested her frustrations on those who enjoyed what she had never had is to neglect the importance of monarchs’ roles in regulating both marriage and sexual conduct at their courts. What Elizabeth’s actual feelings about sex were we cannot know, as she never expressed them on record. Her poem on Anjou’s departure contains erotic imagery—gentle passions sliding into soft snow—but to read sexual jealousy into her reaction to the exceptional number of scandals which beset the court in the 1590s is as rational as suggesting that the queen’s enthusiasm for riding was a form of sublimated sexual gratification.
Forbidden liaisons were a test to Elizabeth’s princely and personal authority, and their increase was a disturbing signal of its decline. Women rulers, as has been noted, were particularly susceptible to charges of licentious misconduct at their courts (hence, for example, those excessively positive accounts of the propriety of Anne Boleyn’s). The decency, or not, of a court was seen as deriving from its ruler, so women needed to distance themselves from this negative stereotype as a means of reinforcing sovereignty. Promiscuity could produce political discord, as in the case of Henri III’s notorious mignons, if not actual violence. When the Earl of Oxford, the husband of Cecil’s daughter Anne, seduced the fifteen-year-old Anne Vavasour in 1580, Elizab
eth imprisoned the pair of them, but his offence provoked a series of duels and aggressive encounters among retainers which continued for years. Elizabeth saw herself as a substitute “mother” to her maids, for whom she was responsible in loco parentis, and conceivably where this dynamic was threatened, her role as “mother” to the nation was also undermined. Court life had always been sexually charged—the combination of young men and women closeted in physical proximity without a great deal to do, combined with the prestige of “courtly love” exchanges, could not but lead to intrigues—yet in the 1590s, there was practically a sexual revolution.
Not all the women at court met such a disgraceful end as Lucy Morgan, who had served Elizabeth in the 1570s and 1580s. Lucy was abruptly expelled from court, after which she found a new career as a bawd in Clerkenwell, reappearing in the records beating hemp in Bridewell, the prostitutes’ prison, in 1600. But sex was very much in the air. In 1590, the Earl of Essex secretly married and impregnated Sir Philip Sidney’s widow. Two years later, Walter Ralegh was exposed in a secret marriage with Elizabeth Throckmorton. In 1594, Lady Bridget Manners secretly married Robert Tyrwhit, whom Elizabeth imprisoned, placing his wife in the custody of the Countess of Bedford. In 1595, Essex’s relationship with Elizabeth Southwell was revealed when she gave birth to his son, while three years later, Elizabeth Vernon was pregnant by the Earl of Southampton. Essex, meanwhile, began an affair with Elizabeth Stanley in 1596. Elizabeth was Cecil’s granddaughter, the child whose paternity Oxford had denied in the Vavasour scandal. Mary Fitton became pregnant by the Earl of Pembroke in 1601. He refused to marry her and ended up in the Fleet Prison. By this time, Lady Rich, who had started an affair with Lord Mountjoy in 1590, had given birth to several of his children (she had fourteen in total, six of whom were Mountjoy’s).
The case of Elizabeth Stanley was particularly compromising. Lady Anne Bacon wrote disapprovingly of Essex “infaming another man’s wife and so near about Her Majesty.” Elizabeth was the queen’s goddaughter, married by royal invitation to William Stanley, Earl of Derby, at Greenwich in 1595 (one suggestion as to the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream connects it, appropriately enough, with this wedding). Elizabeth Stanley was ordered to retire to her husband’s estate, but her affair caused such outrage that three correspondents, Lord Cobham, the Countess of Warwick, and Lady Ralegh, all wrote to her husband about it, and only Cecil’s personal and highly embarrassing intervention prevented a divorce. Essex continued in his shameless career as a seducer. Two of the queen’s maids were discovered to have crept secretly through the palace galleries to watch a group of male courtiers, including Essex, playing sport in their shirts—“the Queen of late hath used the fair Mrs. Bridges with words and blows of anger and she with Mrs. Russell were put out of the Chamber” (the girls were taken in for three nights by Lady Stafford). Ten months later, Essex was still in love with his “fairest B”—either Elizabeth Bridges, Lord Chandos’s daughter, or Elizabeth Russell, Lady Russell’s.
Essex’s conduct was all the more scandalous as by 1590, he was a married man. His bride was Frances Walsingham, the daughter of Elizabeth’s closest councilor after Cecil, and the widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Their first child, named Robert (who grew up to command a parliamentary army against Charles I), was born in 1591. Given that Frances was mentioned in her father’s will in December 1589 by her first married name, Sidney, and that the boy was born just a year later, the union may have been hastened by Frances’s pregnancy. Elizabeth expressed weary outrage when she learned of the marriage, though this did not prevent her continuing favoritism towards Essex.
On and on it went. Mr. Vavasour, who had challenged Oxford to a duel over his sister Anne (making him the uncle of Elizabeth Stanley), was imprisoned for impregnating Mrs. Southwell. Robert Dudley Jr., Leicester’s illegitimate son by his lover, Lady Douglas Sheffield, was engaged to Frances Vavasour, who jilted him to make a secret marriage with Sir Thomas Stanley, who had been having an affair with Frances, Lady Stourton, Robert Cecil’s sister-in-law. Dudley consoled himself with Margaret Cavendish, and he, too, was imprisoned when they were caught. He went on to marry Margaret, then Alice Leigh, in 1596, before eloping with Elizabeth Southwell. Mrs. Jones, the “mother of the maids,” found herself in the Tower with Francis Darcy, who had secretly married Katherine Leigh. Altogether, Elizabeth despaired of girls such as her carver, Lady Howard (née Carey), who was more interested in flirtations than her duties, once being otherwise engaged when it was time for her to bring the queen’s mantle when she wished to walk out, being late to serve at table in the Privy Chamber, and then being absent entirely when she was due to accompany Elizabeth to chapel. In 1591 alone, half of Elizabeth’s maids of honor were dismissed for scandal, “all of which doth so disquiet Her Highness that she swore she would no more show … any countenance, but out with such ungracious flouting wenches.”4
It is easy to have sympathy with the maids. Their mistress was highly demanding and often querulous. Even she had behaved indiscreetly with Leicester in those impossibly long-ago days when she had, it was rumored, been young. And, after all, the whole purpose of their presence at court was to find suitable husbands, while the queen herself was mistress par none of the art of flirtation. Outside the supposedly chaste atmosphere of Whitehall, London in the 1590s was full of prostitutes, directed to eager clients by “guidebooks” such as Robert Greene’s Notable Discovery of Cozenage. Even gently bred Protestant misses could hardly avoid the sight of these women and their customers in the streets, not to mention the rotted faces and collapsed eyes which their exchanges often produced—for the city was at the time in the grip of a syphilis epidemic. Sex was dangerous, not only because of the risks of childbirth but because even virtuous wives risked contracting the pox from straying husbands. And danger is always alluring to adolescents—many of Elizabeth’s maids were still in their teens. Sometimes the girls took revenge on the double standard which kept them so strictly enclosed while their male contemporaries were granted so much license. Sir William Knollys, the comptroller of the royal household, was a well-known old goat, given to complaining at the “disturbances” caused by the maids, whom he enjoyed peeping at by night. On one occasion, he appeared in their chamber, naked but for a pair of spectacles, attempting to shock them by reading pornographic passages from Aretino. The girls nicknamed him “Party Beard,” for the stripes of white, yellow, and black in his whiskers, and responded to his invasion by making up rude ditties about him.
Elizabeth needed her maids. It was they, after all, who were practically responsible for the construction of Gloriana—the wigs, the make-up, the lacing of the gowns, the placing of the jewels, and perhaps her reaction to their rebellious indiscretions was less erotic envy than a sense of outraged vulnerability. These young, attractive women knew her in her diminished physical self, an aging, wrinkled woman with bad teeth and sagging breasts. Their fecundity underlined her own childlessness, but that in itself was a source of power, what made her exceptional. Their flouting of her authority rendered her politically sterile, as it represented a refusal to collude with an image whose falseness to which only they knew the intimate extent.
Elizabeth was not always hard on girls who strayed. When Abigail Heveringham became pregnant, she was found a husband in Sir George Digby, while Emilia Bassano, who had been Lord Hunsdon’s mistress, was respectably married off to one of the royal musicians. Elizabeth despised sexual incontinence where it threatened order, but in the highly charged atmosphere of the court of the 1590s, she made one notorious exception—the Earl of Essex.
THE DEFEAT OF the Armada had not put an end to the war with Spain, and while the iconography associated with Elizabeth continued to present her as a victorious bringer of peace, the 1590s saw a period of conflict on various fronts. The Netherlands remained one theatre, which was expanded by war in France, where Henri IV was attempting to overthrow the Catholic League and retain the succession, while in Ireland, which increasingly attracted the
interest of Spain as the decade progressed, English resources were as overstretched as English rule was threatened. Not only did this require a delicate juggling of limited military powers, it created serious divisions within Elizabeth’s council. Two main strategies were pursued, on land and at sea. At sea, the aim between 1588 and 1594 consisted mainly of privateering, with the objective of raiding Spanish funds to finance English expeditions and to protect the Channel ports, while on land, the Spanish were repelled in both the Netherlands and France, whence Elizabeth committed twenty thousand troops between 1589 and 1595. However, in neither case did Elizabeth have any effective long-term ambition on the Continent—her aim was simply the preservation of England. Essex thought differently. He wished to pursue a more aggressive strategy in the Netherlands, which would give more active help to the Dutch Protestants. This was countered by the supporters of Cecil, and increasingly of his son Robert, his right-hand man, who believed that action at sea was both more flexible and less costly.
From 1589, England had had little choice but to support the cause of the Protestant pretender to the French crown, Henri of Navarre. News of Mary Stuart’s execution had reached Paris on 1 May 1587. So violent was the reaction to her death that the preacher of Saint-Eustache (possibly the queen’s former confessor René Benoiste) was obliged to leave the pulpit before concluding his sermon, as it had practically caused a riot. On 13 November, a Mass was said for Mary at Notre-Dame, but the Duc de Guise did not attend. Mary had been practically useless to the Guise attempt to gain control of French politics for some time, but now she could become a serviceable martyr. It was rumored that Henri III had acquiesced in the execution, and anti-royalist Catholic preachers were encouraged to speak out against the king.