The queen thought so much of this speech that she sent a copy of it to her godson, John Harrington, with a covering letter. ‘Boy Jack,’ she wrote, ‘I have made a clerk write fair my poor words for thine use, as it cannot be such striplings have entrance into the Parliament House as yet . . . so shalt thou hereafter, perchance, find some good fruits thereof, when thy godmother is out of remembrance.’ Her undertaking, to respect the greater matters of state, would soon enough be put to the test.
33
The frog
Towards the close of 1576 the Netherlands were exposed to what became known as ‘the Spanish fury’, when many of the unpaid Spanish forces mutinied against their officers; a massacre of the civilian population was the consequence, with 8,000 murdered in Antwerp alone. That city never regained its former prominence. The outrage deeply disturbed the people of the Netherlands, then comprising what is now Holland and Belgium, and even the Catholic provinces joined forces with the rebellious provinces of Holland and Zeeland in their determination to curtail the powers of their Spanish overlords. Hence arose the Pacification of Ghent signed just four days after the massacre; this was a proposal grudgingly accepted by the new governor, Don John of Austria, younger half-brother of Philip II, among the terms of which was the demand that all of the Spanish troops should be removed. There was now a common front among the provinces of the Netherlands, ratified by the Union of Brussels at the beginning of 1577.
Elizabeth was once more enmired in caution and hesitation. Sir Walter Raleigh is reported to have said of her that she ‘does everything by halves’. Yet this was for England a time of peace. It lasted for twenty-six years, from 1559 to 1585, and, as the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, told the Commons, ‘we be in quietness at home and safe enough from troubles abroad’. There was no room for complacency, however, and he warned that ‘we ought in time to make provision to prevent any storm that may arise either here or abroad’. So why then should the queen risk raising any ‘storm’ by meddling directly or militarily in the affairs of the Spanish Netherlands?
She sent £20,000 to the Netherlands and arranged for the later dispatch of a similar sum, on condition that she was repaid in full within eight months; she justified this action to the Spanish on the grounds that she was merely providing funds to pay for the arrears of the Spanish army. By the summer of the year the occupying army was on its way home. Then, at the beginning of 1578, all was changed. The army of the Low Countries was destroyed in an engagement at Gembloux, when Don John’s forces poured back over the frontier. The United Provinces looked to Elizabeth at this juncture for much-needed aid, but they looked in vain. The queen did nothing.
‘If Her Majesty do nothing now,’ her envoy wrote a week after the defeat, ‘it will in the judgement of the wisest bring forth some dangerous alteration.’ A month passed without any sign of action from Elizabeth. It was rumoured that she was about to send an army under the earl of Leicester to fight the Spanish, but this was wishful thinking on the part of the Protestants. The envoy wrote once more that ‘hesitation is cruel and dishonourable. If she say no, she will not escape the hatred of the papists. If she say yes, she still has great advantages for the prosecution of the war; but it must be one or the other and swiftly.’ Elizabeth was the last person on earth to whom such advice would be profitable or welcome. Instead she sent a further £20,000, with terms for prompt repayment. William Camden, a contemporary, wrote that ‘thus sate she as an heroical princess and umpire betwixt the Spaniards, the French and the States; so as she might well have used that saying of her father, cui adhaereo praeest, that is, the party to which I adhere getteth the upper hand. And true it was which one hath written, that France and Spain are as it were the scales in the balance of Europe, and England the tongue or the holder of the balance.’
Her influence upon France was further strengthened by another bout of matrimonial politics, when once more she invited the attentions of Francis, duke of Anjou. He was the unfortunate youth, then duke of Alençon, the reports of whose personal attractions were the object of many jokes at the English court; his face was pitted with the scars of smallpox, and he had a slight deformity of the spine which belied his nickname of ‘Hercules’. He was also twenty-one years younger than the English queen, which might leave Elizabeth herself open to ridicule. In these unpromising circumstances the negotiations began once more. Her resolve might have been further strengthened by her discovery that her favourite, the earl of Leicester, had remarried. In the spring of 1578, at a secret ceremony in Kenilworth, he had joined himself with the countess of Essex; it was said that ‘he doted extremely on marriage’, and he purchased for her a manor house at Wanstead, in Essex, where he might see her away from the eyes of the world.
Leicester then came to London but declared himself too ill to attend the court. But the queen was informed of his arrival soon enough. The Spanish ambassador reported that, on 28 April, while she was taking the air in the royal garden, she found a letter that had been left in the doorway. After reading it she went at once to Leicester House, and remained there until ten in the evening. It is possible that Leicester had written the letter, hoping to turn away the royal wrath. Or it may have been an anonymous denunciation of his marriage. Whatever the cause, the effect was the same. It was said that she had wished to commit Leicester to the Tower of London, but then relented. In the following month, however, she opened negotiations for her marriage to the young duke.
The French were suspicious of her motives. It may be that she wished only to draw Anjou away from a possible alliance with the rebels of the Low Countries; the duke was possessed by an appetite for greatness in military affairs, and the prospect of the English crown was the only means of diverting him. Together the French and the English might then be powerful enough to bring Spain and the rebels to peace. So the French court was cautious. The king of France believed that there was more artifice than desire in the proposal. Anjou himself entertained her offer but urged speed and expedition. To the French ambassadors she was benign if not exactly coquettish; she even professed to be unconcerned about the difference in age between herself and the young duke. She would treat him as a son as well as a husband. No one knew if she was sincere in these blandishments; perhaps even she was not sure of her own intentions.
It is characteristic that her progress in the summer of 1578 was beset by confusion. In May it was reported that ‘Her Majesty will go in progress to Norfolk this year, but there is no certain determination thereof as yet’. Leicester was concerned that his good friend, Lord North, would have no time ‘to furnish his house according to his duty and honourable good will’; yet Kirtling Tower, near Newmarket, was refurbished for the occasion. A new inn had to be hastily constructed to cope with the unanticipated numbers of her entourage.
The man chosen to oversee the pageants and revels to take place at Norwich, on the occasion of the queen’s visit to the city, believed that the local magnates had received ‘but small warning’ of the events. In mid-July, even as the progress unrolled, the lord keeper was not sure that Elizabeth would venture into Suffolk, while another courtier reported that it was not clear that the queen would even go to Norwich ‘if the bird sing truly that I heard this day’. On the following day the earl of Northumberland was asking Burghley for confirmation of ‘the certainty of her Majesty’s progress’.
These confusions reflect the divisions within the council, as the various aims and ambitions of the most prominent members clashed. In the pageants themselves carefully coded political messages were introduced into the entertainments, some of them advising against the marriage with the duke of Anjou. It was no accident that, in the pageants of Norwich, the image of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen was first presented to the people. In the course of the tableau Chastity presented the queen with Cupid’s bow as her own special possession since ‘none could wound her highness’s heart’:
Then since O Queen chaste life is thus thy choice
And that thy heart is free
from bondage yoke . . .
It is believed that Leicester was the moving spirit of these designs, opposed as he was to the Anjou marriage. All was not sweetness and light; behind the veneer of entertainment and spectacle can be glimpsed fierce conflicts and partisan hostilities.
The queen was also travelling into a most disordered diocese, where Catholics and Protestants – or, as it might be expressed, recusants and reformers – vied for mastery. On the journey to Norwich the queen stopped at Bury St Edmunds where two radical preachers were associated with the practice of prophesying. One of them was interrogated by the council that accompanied the queen; he was left unmolested, and some of the Puritan gentry of the town were knighted.
The queen then went on to stay with a prominent Catholic, Edward Rokewood, at Euston Hall. She granted her favour to this recusant household but, at the end of the visit, an image of the Virgin Mary was found in the hay-house. Elizabeth ordered that the image be burned ‘which in her sight by the country folks was quickly done, to her content, and unspeakable joy of everyone but some one or two who had sucked of the idol’s poison milk’. It is an odd episode. Had the image been planted by those who wished to harm Rokewood? Or was it all part of a planned theatre to emphasize the queen’s distaste for papal superstitions? Rokewood himself was arrested and consigned indefinitely to prison.
While touring the cathedral at Norwich she was informed that the duke of Anjou had invaded the Netherlands and had devised a treaty with the Protestant states in which he was declared to be ‘Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries against Spanish Tyranny’. She was incensed by this unwelcome alliance and exploded with rage against her councillors, although it was her neglect and prevarication that had persuaded the Netherlanders to court the French duke. She sent a letter of support to Philip of Spain while at the same time continuing the marriage proposal to Anjou himself. Soon enough the northern provinces joined in an association or contract. It was only a matter of time before they formally renounced Philip of Spain, with Anjou likely to be their next sovereign.
So the affairs of the court, like the progress, continued by means of inconstant resolutions, turns and half-turns. It is no wonder that some were discontented. Sir Philip Sidney, poet as much as courtier, told friends that, weary of a jaded and servile court, he was ‘meditating some Indian project’; he was considering the voyage to the New World. Walsingham wrote that he wished ‘if I may conveniently, I mean, with the leave of God, to convey myself off the stage and to become a looker on’. Another courtier, Sir Thomas Heneage, complained that ‘neither counsel nor forecast can prevail; if we prosper it must be, as our custom is, by miracle’.
These men lived at the full pitch of responsibility and anxiety, rendered infinitely worse by the unreliability of the queen. The perils of ambition and high position were sometimes dreadful. On 4 April 1578 the earl of Bothwell, Mary Stuart’s tempestuous husband, died; he ended his days raving, while tied to a pillar in the dungeons of Dragsholm Castle in Denmark. His mummified body could until 1976 be seen in a church close to the castle.
The queen was prone to ailments in this period. At the age of forty-five she was once more subject to the leg ulcer that had afflicted her eight years before. In the autumn of the year she suffered from what John Dee called a ‘fit’ that lasted for four hours; on the following day a ‘sore fit’ lasted for three hours. The nature of these fits is unknown but they were described as ‘grievous pangs and pains by reason of the ache and the rheum’. In December she was beset by toothache that was so painful that it kept her without sleep for forty-eight hours. A meeting of the privy council was called to consider the matter, and a tooth-drawer named Fenatus outlined the safest method of removing the offending tooth.
The councillors waited on the queen, together with a surgeon who would perform the operation. Elizabeth herself was fearful and drew back from the ordeal. The bishop of London then stepped forward and volunteered to calm her nerves by losing one of his own few remaining teeth. The surgeon extracted it without the least sign of distress on the bishop’s part and, following his example, the queen submitted with good grace.
The negotiations with Anjou were conducted with even more fervour. Despite the fits and the ulcer her doctors ‘foresaw no difficulty’ in her successfully bearing a child. At the beginning of 1579 the duke’s envoy, Jean de Simier, arrived at court with an entourage of sixty gentlemen; he was perhaps not himself the model of a courtier, having recently murdered his brother for an affair with his wife, but Elizabeth was charmed by him. She called him ‘Monkey’ and ‘the most beautiful of my beasts’. She gave a court ball in his honour and lingered in his company until it might have seemed that Simier himself was the proper suitor. He was even admitted into the royal bedchamber, where he claimed her nightcap as a love token for his master.
The earl of Leicester was violently opposed to the proposed marriage and accused Simier of practising the black arts of enchantment upon the queen. Even the sermons at court were directed against the French connection, and on the first Sunday of Lent a preacher invoked the evil example of the queen’s half-sister, Mary, and proclaimed that ‘marriages with foreigners would only result in ruin to the country’; Elizabeth stormed out of the royal chapel.
In this year John Stubbs composed a violently anti-Gallican tract, The discovery of a gaping gulf, which accused certain evil ‘flatterers’ and ‘politics’ of espousing the interests of the French court ‘where Machiavelli is their new testament and atheism their religion’. He described the proposed union as a ‘contrary coupling’ and an ‘immoral union’ like that of a cleanly ox with an uncleanly ass; the danger of a papist heir was too great to be endured. Elizabeth was in any case too old to bear children, so the marriage was without purpose. The pamphlet was formally burned in the kitchen stove of Stationers’ Hall, but Stubbs was destined for further punishment. He was tried at Westminster and was found guilty of ‘seditious writing’. The queen had wished for the death penalty, but was persuaded that the punishment was too extreme. Instead it was decreed that the offender should lose his right hand. Just before the sentence was carried out he cried ‘My calamity is at hand’, one of the few occasions when a pun has accompanied a violent assault. When the right hand was severed Stubbs took off his hat with his left hand and called out ‘God save the queen!’ before fainting.
Another incident more closely touched Elizabeth. When she and Simier were sailing upon the Thames in the royal barge, one of her bargemen was wounded by a shot from another boat in the river; immediate hysteria followed, with fears of an assassination plot directed against Simier or even against the sovereign herself. Yet it proved to be an accident, and Elizabeth pardoned the innocent perpetrator with the words that ‘she would believe nothing of her people which parents would not believe of their children’.
The young Anjou himself arrived in the middle of August, so early in the day that he roused Simier from his bed. The duke was eager to begin his courtship at once, but Simier persuaded him to rest. The envoy wrote a letter to the queen, however, in which he explained how he soon ‘got him between the sheets, and I wish to God you were with him there as he could then with greater ease convey his thoughts to you’. Anjou was not yet officially in the country and at a court ball in the following week he was concealed behind an arras; the queen danced and made a number of gestures towards him that the courtiers pretended not to notice. He was gone four days later, on hearing of the death of a close friend, but he had made an impression. She called him her grenouille or ‘frog’.
A parliament was due to meet in October, but the queen prorogued it in order to avoid unseemly debate on the matter of her marriage; she was accustomed to the meddling of Lords and Commons, but on this occasion declined to encourage it. Instead she assembled her council in solemn session for the purpose of giving advice; in fact the councillors sat for several days, and on one occasion remained in the council chamber from eight in the morning until seven in the evening without stirrin
g from the room. They were deeply divided, with seven of them against the marriage and five for it; so they attended the queen, and asked for her real opinion on the matter. Only then could they resolve the issue.
Elizabeth burst into tears. She had wanted them to arrive at a definite decision in favour of the marriage, but now she was once more lost in uncertainty. She defended the idea of her union with Anjou and later that day argued cogently on its merits. But she knew well enough that it divided the country just as surely as it divided the council; without the full support of her councillors, moreover, it would be very difficult to gain the acquiescence of a more stridently Protestant parliament. That parliament itself was prorogued for a further three months, but not without much hesitation and indecision. She even signed the articles of marriage, with a proviso that she had two months in which to win over her subjects or give up the attempt.
It seems likely that her tears in front of her councillors were genuine, and that they were evidence of her frustration and unhappiness; her last chance of a married life had been snatched from her. In this period a portrait of her, commissioned by Christopher Hatton and attributed to Quentin Metsys, depicts her beside a pillar that is decorated with medallions of Dido and Aeneas from Virgil’s Aeneid. On her other side stands a globe, displaying the maritime ventures of the English. The moral is clear enough. Just as Aeneas must desert Dido in order to fulfil his imperial destiny, so the queen must forfeit the love of Anjou to establish her own empire. This was the time when complex allegorical portraits of the queen, in which virginity and empire stood in equipoise, began to appear. Between 1579 and 1583 no fewer than eleven ‘sieve’ paintings of the queen were finished; the sieve was a symbol of virginity. The perpetually youthful and unassailable queen was thus the emblem of a vigorous and invincible body politic.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 44