Elizabeth

by Lisa Hilton

  Why does Sartorius burn with love for Bibula? If you shake out the truth, it is the face he loves, not the woman. Let three wrinkles make their appearance, let her skin become dry and flabby; let her teeth turn black, and her eyes lose their lustre: then … “Pack up your traps and be off! You’ve become a nuisance.”

  Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s works represent a tide of viciously satirical literature which emerged in the 1590s, which suggests that the rich brocade of royal allegory was wearing rather thin. Or, bluntly, the Virgin Queen was past her sell-by date. The currency of Diana was death; unlike the Holy Virgin, Elizabeth had produced no offspring. Her legacy, so the murmurings of dissent which emerged at the end of the reign suggested, was a risible barrenness. Elizabeth, her Church, and her government had survived against extraordinary odds, and to do so they had employed a politics of “raw survival.”8 Yet was all the struggling, all the vigilance, all the compromise to now be rendered futile by Elizabeth’s ultimate and stubborn refusal to preserve the future of her state?

  Elizabeth’s opponents had their own solutions to the reversion crisis. Robert Persons, safely ensconced at the English College at Rome, produced A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England in 1594. Interestingly, of the fourteen claimants discussed in the tract, which was banned in England, Persons favored the Infanta Isabella, once proposed as the Queen of France, “a princess of rare parts, both for beauty, wisdom and piety.” The only feasible Protestant candidate remained James VI of Scotland, with whom Elizabeth had been conducting a personal correspondence since the mid-1580s. In her relationship with James, Elizabeth invoked the split between her “two bodies,” as she had done at the time of Mary Stuart’s execution, capitalizing on contemporary expectations of her “body natural” to create a fiction of political sympathy.

  Intercession had always been an important trope of English queenship, the means by which a king could exercise clemency without diminishing his authority. Since in Elizabeth’s case she was both king and queen, she was obliged, rhetorically, to absorb both aspects, of supplicant and gracious bestower of mercy. She had entirely ignored Mary’s message after her trial, but in her two speeches to Parliament, she exercised both her “natural” “feminine” inclinations, stressing her sorrow, her kinship with Mary, and their shared gender, while simultaneously acceding to the demands of her mystical body in respecting the Instrument of Association by signing the death warrant. A widely circulated propaganda text, The Copie of a Letter to the Right Honourable Earl of Leicester … and Her Majesty’s Answers Thereunto by Herself Delivered, which appeared in French in 1587, gestured towards the intercession trope with its mention of Elizabeth’s “abundant gracious natural clemency and Princely magnanimity” (italics mine). Writing to James, Elizabeth elided the fact that she had sliced off his own mother’s head by casting herself as a surrogate maternal figure, stating after the execution that “since you first breathed, I regarded always to construe it as my womb it had born you.” James took part enthusiastically, signing himself “brother and son” to his “dearest mother,” and claiming that he trusted Elizabeth as “a good mother.”

  Still, James had no guarantee of his claim. At this point, Robert Cecil took charge, using that remarkable Catholic survivor, Lord Henry Howard, as a go-between. Between March and June 1601, he began a secret, coded correspondence with James, insisting that Elizabeth should know nothing of it, since “her age and orbity, joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her.”9 During the following two years, Robert slowly slotted the provisions for the succession into place. Instructions were prepared, to be sent to the county lieutenants; the London watches were to be augmented; the Privy Council were alerted to summon the nobility. Robert even had the draft for James’s proclamation at the ready, with a plan drawn up as to where it should be read.

  Only Robert’s father could have claimed to have been a more seasoned politician than his queen, yet his decision to treat her like a woman, protected from political realities which would distress her, reflects the mood of sterility and decay which was expressed in the 1590s by a renewed focus on Elizabeth’s decaying natural body. As the image of immortality inevitably cracked, Elizabeth found herself the object of even cruder sexual rumors than the satire of Venus and Adonis. In 1592, a Lincolnshire priest, Thomas Pormort, complained to the Privy Council about allegations he had claimed to have heard from Elizabeth’s “rackmaster,” Richard Topcliffe. Topcliffe, he claimed, had stated that he had seen and felt Elizabeth’s legs, that she had “the softest belly of any of womankind,” and that he had also fondled her breasts and neck. The queen had supposedly asked him whether “be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?” and when he assented, he received a gift of white silk stockings. Imprecations on the queen’s chastity were by now surely beyond belief, but it is a measure of Elizabeth’s declining power that people felt free to make them. In Essex, a couple were arrested for claiming that Elizabeth had had several children by Leicester, who had been stuffed into a chimney to kill them, while in Dorset, one Edward Francis claimed that Elizabeth had given birth to three illegitimate offspring.

  The absurdity of such present accusations only rendered them more cruel. Elizabeth was neglecting her appearance, barely eating, and England’s Amazon now walked with a cane. Sometimes the queen appeared disoriented, her “lonely, diminished state” painfully emphasized by her new habit of pacing her chamber with a rusty old sword, “stamping her feet at bad news and thrusting her … sword into the arras in great rage.” On better days, though, the queen still rode out, and she showed a flash of spirit at an inept sermon preached by Dr. Rudd before her seventieth birthday. “I said ye are Gods but ye shall all die like men,” quoted the doctor, to which Elizabeth snapped, “Mr. Rudd, you have made me a good funeral sermon, I may die when I will.” By 1603, it was clear that this was indeed what the queen wished.

  THAT SPRING, THE court moved from Whitehall to Richmond. By March, it was apparent that Elizabeth was ailing. She was not yet ill but suffering from dreadful insomnia and almost unable to eat. On 15 March, she was diagnosed with an inflammation of the breast and throat but persisted in refusing any medicine. The throat abscess burst, and she found some relief in having her temples bathed with rosewater. Anxiously, the ambassadors exchanged what news they could glean—she had been given up, she was sleeping again, she had lost her mind, she was suffering from confusion, she was exhausted and refused to stir from her floor cushions, where she spent hours staring into space and sucking her finger. Perhaps the best indication of Elizabeth’s real state was that Robert Cecil began the operation for the succession. Even as the Earl of Shrewsbury was being instructed to “suppress all uncertain and evil rumours” concerning the state of the queen’s health, the government was rounding up vagrants and potential troublemakers, claiming that they were being sent to serve in the Netherlands. Five hundred “foreigners” were escorted to Holland, and numerous Catholics imprisoned. Theatres and ports were closed, Elizabeth’s jewels and plate were sent to the Tower, and the royal guard around Richmond was doubled.

  By 19 March, Elizabeth was so weak that she could not attend chapel, instead hearing the service from cushions laid on the floor of the Privy Chamber. The rhythm of life in the capital slowed to mimic the queen’s struggling breaths. One priest locked up in the Tower described the atmosphere: “A strange silence descended on the whole city, as if it were under interdict… . Not a bell rang out, not a bugle sounded.” Elizabeth had by now given up changing her clothes or washing, lying in a torpor on the floor of her chamber, surrounded by her ladies. Ben Jonson claimed that for years, Elizabeth had not viewed her own reflection, that the women of her chamber had smashed their looking glasses rather than allow the queen to catch a glimpse of her raddled features, but now, she called for a glass and contemplated her face “then lean and full of wrinkles … which she a good while very earnest beheld, perceiving thereby how ofte
n she had been abused by flatterers.” It was not her countenance which distressed her. Years before, Elizabeth had written a poem in her French psalter:

  No crooked leg, no bleared eye

  No part deformed out of kind,

  Nor yet so ugly half can be,

  As is the inward suspicious mind.

  Elizabeth refused to go to bed because, as she explained to her Lord Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham, as he coaxed her to take some rest, “If you were in the habit of seeing such things in your bed as I see in mine, you would not persuade me to go there.”10

  By 23 March, Elizabeth was beyond speech, locked in with her ghosts. When the Privy Council attended her, she was able, by a movement of her hand, to signal her acceptance of the succession of James of Scotland. She died quietly among her women the next morning.

  THE IMAGE WE have of Elizabeth as she looked in the years before her death is not one which would have flattered her notorious vanity. The posthumous Allegorical Portrait of 1620 does not show the fresh young queen of the Three Goddesses portrait, nor the triumphant empress of the Armada depiction, but someone else entirely. The Elizabeth who slumps dejectedly at the center of the allegory looks like what she was—a tired old woman. The lines of the composition echo those of the Coronation Portrait, with the old queen’s arm following the curve of the ermine of the young queen’s robe; the hand that proudly held the scepter taut in the first is now curved, in the second, to support her weary head. Behind her leers Death, come to claim her; on her right, Time sleeps, his hourglass tumbled and forgotten. Above her pearled false curls, two putti descend, preparing to set a crown upon her head. For this picture, in its way, shows a triumph. The queen will transcend death, it tells us; she will be immortal in eternity. This may be the end for the “body natural”—Elizabeth’s eyes are hollow, her elegant fingers seem barely to have the strength to hold the book in her left hand—yet the strongly modelled contours of the worn face are possessed of a beauty quite absent in the other, more stringently controlled visions of the queen. Here, Elizabeth, at last, is human.

  Epilogue

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  THREE YEARS AFTER Elizabeth’s death, King James held a series of entertainments for King Christian of Denmark at her old home at Hatfield. The hollow, spectral atmosphere of the last years of the Elizabethan court was filled with a rambunctious vivacity, the pinched, cobwebby ghost of the old woman who had stalked and muttered through her last years was laid. Convention had returned: in the pageant, the Queen of Sheba was to pay tribute to King Solomon; things were as they had always been. As the Queen approached the royal dais, carrying gifts for His Majesty, she missed her step, collapsed at his feet, and tipped her caskets into the Danish king’s lap. He attempted to rise but was so inebriated that he too fell down and had to be carried to his bed of state, much besmeared with jelly, cream, and custard. “The entertainment and show went forward, and most of the presenters went backwards, or fell down, as wine so occupied their upper chambers.” Three maids of honor, as Faith, Hope, and Charity, made their entrance, but Hope was beyond speech, only able to murmur an apology for the brevity of her performance. Faith staggered from the royal presence, leaving Charity to remark that her gifts were futile as heaven had already given its all to King James. She joined Hope and Faith in the lower hall, where all three were sick. Victory made no appearance at all, having dozed off in the antechamber, leaving Peace to beat the remaining courtiers about the heads with her olive branch.

  Appendix

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  Elizabeth’s Coronation Oath

  ON 31 JANUARY 1547, in the first known proclamation to deal with the succession of the reign, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer altered the form for Edward VI’s coronation in line with the 1534 Act of Supremacy. Conventionally, a king had been “elect chosen and required … by all three of the estates of the realm to take upon him the Crown and royal dignity of England.” Cranmer’s adaptation stated that “the laws of God and man” had already made Edward heir to “the Royal Dignity and Crown Imperial,” therefore announcing that Edward was King of England and Supreme Head of the Church by divine, rather than human, agency, an argument which was reinforced by the recasting of the ceremony itself, where it was stated that “kings be God’s anointed not in respect of the Oil the bishop useth, but in consideration of their power, which is Ordained, and … their Persons which are elected by God.”1 Since the fourteenth century, the coronation oath had elaborated five requests to the monarch on behalf of their subjects—to confirm the laws and liberties that previous kings had granted to the English people; to do likewise in respect to the liberties of the clergy; to promise peace and concord to clergy, Church, and people; to practice justice and mercy; and to observe the laws “as shall be chosen by your people.” Cranmer altered this so that the constitution of law, liberty, peace, and concord was determined by the crown to the Church and the people, but not to the clergy; abandoned the second clause altogether; and amended the fifth so that it was the people, not the king, who were to consent to new laws. At first consideration, this seemed an affirmation of the ruler’s divine right, but in legal terms, it meant something different.

  The Edwardine reform of the Church was “momentous” in that it was accomplished not by royal prerogative but by statute, thus changing the form of the law itself.2 Acts of Parliament became not only “declaratory statements or definitions of the law as it was thought to exist,” but new laws in their own right, and thus the potential of statute was no longer limited in its authority. That is, the legislation which created a new and Protestant order was not the will of the king but generated by Parliament. So the casting of Deborah as a parliamentary ruler in the Fleet pageant was less a comment on the limitations of female authority than a recasting of royal authority in general. If the truncated reforms of Edward’s reign were to pass smoothly into law under Elizabeth, it was legally essential that she be crowned in the same fashion as her nine-year-old brother had been, to reassert the royal supremacy in a manner which would constitutionally permit the continuation of that reformation by her advisers.

  This legal nicety explains the confusion surrounding the coronation oath sworn by the queen. After processing in her crimson coronation robes from Westminster Hall to the Abbey on a blue carpet a third of a mile long, Elizabeth was conducted to a stage in the center of the Abbey “crossing” with the high altar to the east and the choir to the west. Bishop Owen Oglethorpe asked if the people would have her as queen from each of the four corners of this stage, and when the enthusiastic cries had died down, Elizabeth offered at the altar, then seated herself in a chair of estate to hear the sermon, then knelt for the Lord’s Prayer. There was then some rather awkward maneuvering with books. The queen gave a book to “a lord” who handed it to the bishop, who gave it back and read from another book, after which Cecil popped up and handed a further “booke” to the bishop, who then read from it. One historian suggests that Elizabeth swore the oath “in the usual form” and suggests that the “booke” was probably the Latin text of the coronation pardon.3 Yet to know what Queen Elizabeth actually swore, it is necessary to look forward in time, as there is no record of the words she spoke.

  Given the constitutional redirection explained above, it is highly unlikely that Elizabeth swore the same oath as Mary, who had emphatically not used the 1547 form at her coronation. One clue as to the words comes from the 1644 trial for treason of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Laud claimed that he had not altered the coronation oath of Charles I in order to enhance royal prerogative at the expense of parliamentary statute. Whatever alterations had been made, he stated, had occurred under Edward VI and Elizabeth I. We know that Charles I used the same oath as Elizabeth’s successor, James I (with an amendment restoring the pre-Reformation formula that the king was to observe existing laws). Yet James’s oath contained one formula found nowhere in any extant text, hence Laud’s attribution to the 1547 or 1559 ceremony. But since this was not used in 1547, it can only have be
en added in 1559, that is, expressly for Elizabeth. In Cecil’s articles for the coronation before 18 December 1558 is a reminder to provide a copy of the oath for the queen, and when her coronation began, Oglethorpe had no copy at all. The unique clause with which Cecil emerged at the vital moment was that, in respect of the law, the sovereign was to act “according to the laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel established in the kingdom.” So there was nothing “usual” about the vow Elizabeth made to her people in the Abbey that day; on the contrary, her oath was, like her, unique. And while such focus on the words she spoke might appear a nicety, her coronation “forced the political culture of the Tudor monarchy into a new mould,” one which would have a profound impact on Elizabeth’s queenship and the future governance of the nation.

  Notes

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