But the Commons refused to be cowed and introduced a petition to abolish all existing laws that concerned ecclesiastical government. A ‘new directory for prayer’ was also proposed as a replacement for the familiar liturgy. No more sweeping measure had ever been put forward by a parliament, and it suggested that the Puritan cause was now being asserted in a more forceful and methodical manner. Yet it had reached its apogee and would now recede.
On a motion for the reading of the new directory the Speaker declared that the sovereign had already commanded the members to keep silence on religion. He predicted her severe displeasure and, sure enough, another message from the palace reached him. She ordered him to send her the petition and the book, but she also dispatched several of the more zealous MPs to prison. ‘I fear me,’ one of the members complained, ‘we shall come shortly to this, that to do God and her Majesty good service shall be accounted Puritanism.’ It was another phase in the relationship between sovereign and parliament.
The Puritan cause was further advertised in a series of tracts. The Martin Marprelate tracts, as they came to be known, were written anonymously; ‘Martin’ launched a series of attacks, in seven separate works, upon ‘petty antichrists, proud prelates, intolerable withstanders of reformation, enemies of the gospel and covetous wretched priests’. Yet ‘Martin’ was witty and animated as well as being pugnacious; he addressed the ecclesiastical hierarchy as ‘right poisoned, persecuting, and terrible priests. My horned masters, your government is anti-christian; your cause is desperate; your grounds are ridiculous.’ He wished to undermine the bishops by portraying them as simply absurd. ‘I will spare [bishop] John of London for this time, for it may be he is at bowls and it is pity to trouble my good brother, lest he should swear too bad . . .’
In response the supporters of the established Church published tracts with titles such as ‘A Sound Box on the Ear for the Idiot Martin to hold his Peace’ and ‘A Whip for the Ape. Martin Displayed’. One of them was reported to be ‘printed between the sky and the ground, within a mile of an oak, and not many fields off from the unprivileged press of the ass-signees of Martin junior’. Richard Bancroft, treasurer of St Paul’s who was later to become archbishop of Canterbury, accused the Puritan party of promoting schism and dissension within the Church. ‘Her majesty is depraved [abused]. Her authority is impugned and great dangers are threatened. Civil government is called into question. Princes’ prerogatives are curiously scanned.’ The Puritan party was close to becoming a Church within the Church, with all the rivalries that implied.
The Martin and anti-Martin texts represented the high point of acrimony in Protestant debate, and we may date from this time the portrayal of Puritans on the Elizabethan stage as figures of fun; in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Malvolio, a ‘sort of Puritan’ according to Maria, anticipates by twelve years Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. ‘Down with Dagon, down with Dagon . . . I will no longer endure your profanations . . . that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam, nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam; an exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rhymers, and morris-dancers . . .’
The Marprelate texts in particular soon became the talk of London, while enormous efforts were made to hunt down the writer and the printer. One secret press was discovered in Northamptonshire, but others escaped detection. Some of those involved were found before being fined or imprisoned, but the identity of ‘Martin Marprelate’ is still not certainly known. His high spirits and inventiveness, however, may have been a mark of desperation. There now seemed to be little chance that the principles of Puritanism would have any effect upon the Elizabethan polity. Marprelate’s levity may have been a sign that there was little left to lose.
The godly found in Archbishop Whitgift a profound and determined enemy. ‘The name Puritan’, he wrote, ‘is very aptly given to these men not because they be pure . . . but because they think themselves to be mundiores ceteris, more pure than others.’ Throughout 1589 and 1590 the leaders of the Puritan cause were arrested and silenced. Some were even imprisoned for refusing to take the ex-officio oath; they refused to swear that, in a court of religion, they would answer all questions truthfully. It was a form of self-entrapment. In the spring of 1589 the members of the High Commission, the authorities on religious matters, delivered an injunction that no London parish should allow the preaching of the stricter sort. One of the leading Puritans, Thomas Cartwright, was imprisoned in the Fleet and eventually came before the Star Chamber. As a contemporary noted in the following year, ‘these sharp proceedings make that sect greatly diminish’.
So it had come to this. The Puritans in parliament had proved unable to advance their cause and to secure further reformation. The Puritan presses were one by one closed down, and the hunt for the Marprelate presses had become a general pursuit of the Puritan movement. There followed a decade which has been called one of stabilization or normalization, in which orthodox pieties came to the fore, but it may be more accurately seen as a time of secret and silent antagonism played out in various churches and meeting places. Puritanism ceased to be a public movement or campaign, but instead retreated to the confines of the household or the soul of the individual in the hope that better times might follow. The cause of the godly was indeed revived at the beginning of the next reign.
Yet the religious aspirations of the minority must be set against the neutrality or indifference of the population. A report was sent from Lancashire to the privy council in which it was asserted that the churches were still largely empty and that the county contained ‘multitudes of bastards and drunkards’. This could be the condition of England at any time. The preachers were few, and the parsons unlearned, but in any case the preachers were not needed for lack of auditors. The churches ‘generally lie ruinous, unrepaired, and unfurnished’ while the chapels of ease, built for those who could not easily attend the parish church, ‘are many of them utterly destitute of any curates, and thereby grow into utter ruine and desolation’. The people ‘swarm in the streets and alehouses during service-time’. Many of these people were in fact unreformed Catholics who delighted in ‘wakes, ales, greenes, May games, rushbearings, bearbaits, doveales etcetera’. Those who did attend the services were often prompted by convention rather than devotion; they talked, made jokes, or slept during the ceremonies.
Others were simply weary of religious dissension and doctrinal debate; they were secularists in the sense that they wished for stability and security above all else. Immune from enthusiasm of any kind, they were not particularly interested in any new form of Protestant spirituality. If they conformed to the current religion it was simply because they were obliged so to do. Thus the Anglican Church, as it would become known, was slowly being established.
‘Repent! Repent!’ The call went up in the streets of London. A yeoman named Hackett had proclaimed himself to be king of Europe and the New Messiah. ‘Tell them in the City that Christ Jesus is come with his fan in his hand to judge the earth. And if any man ask you where he is, tell them he is at Walker’s house by Broken Wharf!’ He also said that Elizabeth had forfeited her crown. He soon reached the gallows where he cried out with his dying breath for God to deliver him from his enemies. ‘If not,’ he said, ‘I will fire the heavens and tear Thee from Thy Throne with my hands.’ The spectators, horrified, called out for his disembowelment to be protracted. It is a vignette of the Elizabethan world.
Philip II, despite the destruction of the Armada, was still a most powerful enemy. He controlled an empire that must count as one of the most splendid in human history; he ruled Spain, Portugal and much of the Netherlands; he commanded Milan and Sicily while many of the states of Italy were wholly dependent upon him. He was the sovereign of the Philippines as well as the coastal settlements of Malabar and Coromandel. He was lord of the spice
islands of Indonesia. And of course he was the master of the New World on both sides of the equator. The gold of the Americas meant that his revenue was ten times as large as that of Elizabeth. He had a standing army of 50,000 men, where Elizabeth had none. The emperor of Germany was a member of Philip’s House of Habsburg. France was divided by religious schism.
Sir John Puckering, the lord keeper, addressed both Houses of Parliament on the naval power of the Spanish king five years after the Armada; he warned the members that ‘how great soever he was before, he is now thereby manifestly more great . . . He keepeth a navy armed to impeach all trade of merchandise from England to Gascoigne and Guinea.’
Yet this was the power that England now dared to provoke and abuse. In the spring of 1589 Drake conceived a scheme to strike at Portugal. Elizabeth became a shareholder in what was essentially a joint-stock company; she had neither the money nor the men to equip an armada of her own. The fleet was supposed to sail against Santander but instead made its way to Corunna, where it delayed for a fortnight. Its commanders also failed to provide adequate supplies.
In May they set sail for Lisbon, against orders, and were joined on the way by the young earl of Essex; the English were hoping that the Portuguese would rise against their new Spanish masters. But the attack on Lisbon proved to be a failure, and the anticipated insurrection never took place. It was reported at the time that 6,000 men had perished on ‘this miserable action’, as one captain called it; of the 1,100 gentlemen on board, only 350 returned. Elizabeth was by now thoroughly displeased and ordered the recall of Essex.
The expedition, promising so much and achieving so little, made its way back to Plymouth. Drake remained in disgrace for some years. He had alarmed Philip of Spain without causing him much damage, thus achieving the worst of both worlds. The maritime future for the rest of the queen’s reign was confined to private raids for the capture of booty; privateering thereby became a business, with syndicates of shareholders and freely available capital resources.
Sir Richard Hawkins has left a very interesting set of notes on the campaign against the Spanish navy; his Observations recall a journey into the South Sea in 1593. Of the scurvy, for example, he reports that the disease can be deduced ‘by the swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a man’s finger . . . others show it with their laziness, others complain of the crick of the back etcetera’. He records ‘the seething of the meat in salt water’ and the corruption of victuals by ‘the vapours of the sea’.
By means of his observations we get closer to the real nature of sea warfare in the sixteenth century. He notes, for example, the obstinacy of the English sailors who ‘apprehending a conceit in their imaginations, neither experiment, knowledge, examples, reasons nor authority can alter or remove them from their conceited opinions’. When he labours to convince them they were wrong in wishing to attack two Spanish ships, they ‘break out, some into vaunting and bragging, some into reproaches of want of courage, others into wishings that they had never come out of their country’.
Hawkins warns other commanders not to trust their men in the extremities of battle. Too much wine, for example, ‘infused desperate and foolish hardiness in many who blinded with the fume of liquor, considered not of any danger, but thus and thus would stand at hazard; some in vainglory vaunting themselves; some others railing upon the Spaniards; another inviting a companion to come and stand by him, and not to budge a foot from him; which indiscreetly they put in execution, and cost the lives of many a good man’.
It is the folly of the English sailor to prefer to fight without armour. The Spaniard, being of more temperate and sober disposition, was happy to don armour in order to protect himself. But the English cast it off, ‘choosing rather to be shot through with a bullet, or lanced through with a pike, or thrust through with a sword, than to endure a little travail and suffering’. In some sea battles, Hawkins reports, ‘I have seen the splinters kill and hurt many at once, and yet the shot to have passed through without touching any person’.
He condemns those who denounce the English sailors as pirates, since ‘the English have neither peace nor truce with Spain; but war; and therefore not to be accounted pirates. Besides Spain broke the peace with England, and not England with Spain; and that by Embargo, which of all kinds of defiances is most reproved and of least reputation . . .’
The temporary disgrace of Essex did little to calm the fevered atmosphere at court, and in the summer of 1589 one observer remarked that ‘there was never in court such emulation, such envy, such back-biting as is now at this time’. Still in the ascendant was Burghley. As a clerk of the signet put it to a suitor, ‘Old Saturnus is a melancholy and wayward planet, but yet predominant here, and if you have turn thus to do, it must be done that way; and whatsoever hope you have of any other, believe it or not.’ Burghley was also actively and assiduously promoting the prospects of his son, Robert Cecil, who at the times of his father’s incapacity through illness took on much of the business of government. He was of uncommon appearance. One contemporary described him as ‘a slight, crooked, hump-back young gentleman, dwarfish in stature, but with a face not irregular in feature, and thoughtful and subtle in expression, with reddish hair, a thin tawny beard and large, pathetic greenish-coloured eyes, with a mind and manners already trained to courts and cabinet’. The queen called him ‘my elf ’ or ‘my pigmy’.
Cecil and Essex had both been brought up in the household of Lord Burghley, one as son and one as ward, but they continually quarrelled with each other. Their rivalry became all the more strenuous after the death of Elizabeth’s trusted servant Walsingham, in the spring of 1590. Essex favoured an aggressive foreign policy that supported the cause of international Protestantism; Cecil and his father preferred to pursue a more defensive strategy, with the aim of keeping Spain at arm’s length. Essex represented noble and martial valour; Cecil was essentially a career courtier. War for Essex was a form of sport or game; for Cecil it was a source of expense and danger.
So they were rivals for power and for the queen’s favour. It was not a competition that the impulsive Essex could ever win. One of his retainers wrote that ‘Sir Robert Cecil goeth and cometh very often between London and the Court, so that he comes out with his hands full of papers and head full of matter, and so occupied passeth through the presence [chamber] like a blind man, not looking upon any’. This was a courtier upon whom the queen could rely. Soon enough he was knighted and appointed as a member of the privy council. More than any other man he would control the last years of her reign.
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The setting sun
The queen asked her carver, at dinner, what was in a certain covered dish. ‘Madame,’ he replied, ‘it is a coffin.’ A ‘coffin’ was then the word for a certain type of pie.
‘Are you such a fool,’ she shouted at him, ‘to give a pie such a name?’ She was now approaching her sixtieth year, and becoming fearful of her mortality. Her eyes had sunk a little, and she had lost teeth on the left side of her mouth that sometimes made her diction blurred and indistinct; her skin was plastered white and her wigs were a deep red. In 1593 she began to translate from sixth-century Latin The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, perhaps as an antidote to the signs of weariness and age all around her.
Over the years she had acquired more expertise than anyone around her. When one of her servants ventured to speak to her about the affairs of the Netherlands, she rebuked him: ‘Tush, Brown! I know more than thou doest.’ And when he made a remark about France she again interrupted him: ‘Tush, Brown! Do not I know?’
The earl of Essex had at last been called to her privy council. He had recruited two very brilliant brothers, Francis and Anthony Bacon, to advise him on matters of state. Anthony Bacon had previously been in the employ of Walsingham, and had established a network of agents across the continent working in the Protestant cause. So Essex could supply the queen with useful information. He believed that astute patronage materially increased his
power. Yet he found it impossible to break into the inward circle of influence represented by Burghley and his son. In time this would breed resentment and suspicion.
Elizabeth had governed for the last four years without a parliament, but her depleted treasury needed the supply of fresh revenue. So she summoned an assembly for the middle of February 1593, when she told them through the mouth of her chancellor ‘that they were not called together to make new laws, or lose good hours in idle speeches, but to vote a supply to enable her Majesty to defend her realm against the hostile attempts of the king of Spain’.
The Commons then made their customary request for freedom of speech as well as liberty from arrest. She granted the request with the significant comment that ‘wit and speech were calculated to do harm, and their liberty of speech extended no further than “ay” or “no” ’. The Commons then proceeded to defy her attempt to silence discussion by framing a petition that she should settle the question of royal succession. She sent the two members responsible to the Fleet prison. As she grew older, she became more despotic.
Parliament now bowed to the inevitable, and voted the subsidies to her exchequer as well as passing a bill ‘for keeping her Majesty’s subjects in better obedience’. Having demonstrated the power of her will, she dismissed them on 10 April with a speech in which she mentioned the proposed invasion by the king of Spain. ‘I am informed, when he attempted this last measure, some upon the sea-coast forsook their towns, leaving all naked and exposed to his entrance. But I swear unto you, by God, if I knew those persons, or may know them hereafter, I will make them know what it is to be fearful in so urgent a cause.’ In her contempt, she could be magnificent.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 50