She also made an important statement about her purpose in the management of foreign affairs: ‘It may be thought simplicity in me that all this time of my reign I have not sought to advance my territories and enlarge my dominions; for opportunity hath served me to do it . . . And I must say, my mind was never to invade my neighbours, or to usurp over any; I am contented to reign over mine own and to rule as a just prince.’ She was making an implicit contrast between herself and the Spanish king. Her central aim was simply peace at home and security from foreign threat.
The bill that parliament had passed for ‘better obedience’ was designed to curb the activities of papists and sectaries. Attendance at conventicles and unlawful assemblies was now considered to be the equivalent of hearing Mass, so that Catholic recusants and the more fervent Protestants were equally liable to imprisonment. It was also enacted that anyone over the age of sixteen who refused to attend public worship over the space of a month should be imprisoned; a second offence would result in banishment from the realm; a refusal, or a return from banishment, would be punished by death. It was further enacted that no Catholic should stray more than 5 miles from his or her residence. For papists England had become a kind of open prison.
This assault upon Catholics and Puritans alike is the appropriate context for the most important religious treatise of the period. Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity – the first four books of which were published in 1594 – is an eloquent and magisterial account of what may be described as the middle way of England’s settlement.
He declared that much religious controversy was over things of no account. He rebuked the Puritans for their excessive reliance on Scripture, which was a standard for doctrine but not a rule for discipline. It was not necessary to follow the practice of the apostles as an invariable model. The English Church, like other forms of human society, may make the laws for its own government as long as they are not contrary to Scripture, and human authority may intervene where Scripture is silent. The Puritan belief in sola scriptura – that the Bible contains all that is needed for salvation – was unwarranted. The Church may therefore institute its own ceremonies. All those born within the domain or district of an established Church should conform to it. It was the mother of all.
The visible Church was not perfect – it must of necessity contain sinners as well as saints – but it existed in an imperfect world. The pursuit of certainty on matters that could not be adequately understood in this life was not fruitful; debates on predestination were unnecessary and harmful, since the truth could never be revealed on earth. The congregation of worshippers must depend upon prayer, and the sacraments, as the fortifications of their faith. These were the foundations of the community.
As to the Calvinism of Geneva, Hooker remarked that ‘our persuasion is, that no age ever had knowledge of it but only ours; that they which defend it devised it; that neither Christ nor his Apostles at any time taught it, but the contrary’. He granted that the Church of Rome was still part of the family of Jesus Christ but one defiled ‘by gross and grievous abominations’; the English Church was the true Church purged of this dross.
He stated further that Church and State make up the fundamentals of the Commonwealth, and that both must accord with the natural law of God as understood by the general reason of humankind. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is not explicitly announced in the Bible, and must be deduced from the act of reasoning. These interacting societies, of Church and State, may thereby both be ruled by the Christian prince. The community of Christians is a visible Church, held together by prayer and sacramental worship. Hooker, then, provides the foundation for the Church of England. Anglicanism really did not exist before the advent of his work.
Thomas Fuller, in his Church History of Britain, written two generations later, remarked that ‘Mr Hooker’s voice was low, stature little, gesture none at all; standing stone-still in the pulpit, as if the posture of his body were the emblem of his mind, immovable in his opinions’.
Essex, with the assistance of the brothers Bacon, was now in command of all intelligence. He was in fact instrumental in uncovering another plot against the queen. António, the claimant to the Portugese throne, had taken refuge in England. When it was discovered that some of his supporters were selling secrets to the Spaniards, Essex was asked to investigate. In the course of his enquiries he discovered, or professed to discover, that Rodrigo Lopez, the queen’s Portuguese physician, was seeking to poison her. Although Lopez outwardly conformed as a Protestant, he was in fact a Jew; the suspicion of him was therefore part of that anti-Semitic atmosphere in which Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta thrived.
Robert Cecil, who in important matters was not inclined to support Essex, informed the queen that there was no evidence against her doctor. Whereupon Elizabeth called Essex ‘a rash and temerarious youth’. In the face of this reproof Essex redoubled his efforts in the determination to justify himself. That is when he uncovered the plot. Lopez was taken to the Tower where, under torture, he confessed his guilt. He was sentenced to death. Essex had therefore acquired the additional glory of saving the life of his mistress; in the words of a contemporary, he had ‘won the spurs and saddle also’.
Yet all the glory in the world could not conceal a rising sense of disquiet at Elizabeth’s councillors. In the last five years of the sixteenth century a disastrous series of harvests was responsible for an extraordinary rise in the price of essential commodities. The four successive years from 1594 witnessed the worst living conditions of the Elizabethan era, and the price of flour tripled from 1594 to 1597. In the latter year real wages plunged lower than at any time since 1260. The proportion of families without sufficient land to feed themselves was growing all the time; the number of vagrants, forced to wander in order to find work, also increased. Many people did not have enough money to buy food; the dearth caused famine, and created the conditions for diseases such as typhus and dysentery on a wider scale than had previously been seen in the country. The records for the city of Newcastle, in the autumn of 1597, record the burial at municipal expense of twentyfive ‘poor folks who died for want in the streets’. This is the context for Titania’s complaint to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed at some point in 1595 or 1596:
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock.
It was therefore a time of general unrest and disaffection. The mayor of Norwich received an anonymous letter in 1595 warning him that 60,000 London craftsmen were waiting for the call to rise in revolt. In the summer of that year Sir Thomas Wilford was appointed as provost-marshal of London with orders to seize any riotous people and, according to the justice of martial law, to execute them openly and speedily on the gallows. This was a case of the royal prerogative overturning the principles of common law.
An Essex labourer was arrested for complaining that corn was being taken on ships and sold to the enemy. ‘I will be one of them that shall rise and gather a company of eight or nine score and will go to fetch it out . . . and if we were such a company gathered together, who can withstand us?’ A Kentish man said that ‘he hoped to see such a war in this realm to afflict the rich men of this country to requite their hardness of heart towards the poor’. In the autumn of 1596 the earl of Bath wrote to the privy councillors that they should order the gentry of Devon to return to their estates ‘to be at hand to stay the fury of the inferior multitude, if they should happen to break out in a sudden outcry for want of relief, as without good circumspection they may and will do’. A rising in Oxfordshire, in 1596, was led by an instigator who declared ‘it will never be well until the gentry are knocked down’.
With the genuine fear of insurrection in the air, a steady increase in criminal indictments is evi
dent in the 1590s. The ‘inferior multitude’ was regularly being castigated now for being feckless and idle, with the threat from below adding to a general mood of pessimism that is evident in the last years of the queen’s reign. By the end of the decade a body of Poor Law legislation had been enacted that placed the burden of responsibility for the poor upon the parish, with the costs of maintaining the distressed and the unemployed to be provided by a parish poor rate. The justices of the peace were to nominate ‘overseers’ of the poor who were also to run the parish workhouse. This framework of social legislation became an important aspect of national life for 250 years, remaining in place until the new Poor Law of 1834. It may have been one of the principal reasons for the absence of a social or political revolution; it represented a bedrock of stability.
The queen and her council were nevertheless at the time blamed for indecision and misgovernment. Thomas Wilson, in a collection of papers entitled The State of England Anno Dom. 1600, complained that the privy councillors ‘suffer very few to be acquainted with matters of state for fear of divulging it, whereby their practices are subject to be revealed, and therefore they will suffer few to rise to places of reputation’. And in truth the queen was growing old. In this year, 1596, she reached the feared climacteric of sixty-three years. Bishop Rudd, of St Davids, preached the Lenten sermon before her, in which he congratulated her for her good fortune in living so long. He delivered some reflections on sacred arithmetic, with seven times nine leading to sixty-three. He also quoted the passage describing old age in Scripture ‘when the grinders cease because they are few and those that look out of the windows be darkened’.
Elizabeth was not amused. She opened the window in her private oratory when the sermon was over and told him that ‘he should have kept his arithmetic to himself ’. But then, she added, ‘I see that the greatest clerks are not the wisest men.’ A few days later, at court, ‘she thanked God that neither her stomach, nor strength, nor her voice for singing, nor fingering for instruments, nor, lastly, her sight was any whit decayed’. She refused to allow court painters to use shade in any portraits of her since shade ‘was an accident and not naturally existent in the face’. The privy council now forbade the circulation of any unauthorized portraits. Any paintings that depicted her as in any sense old, ‘to her great offence’, were cast into ovens. Nicholas Hilliard was commissioned to produce a formalized or mask-like visage that could be copied by those less skilful. English art was still essentially conservative. The mood is caught in Francis Davison’s poetical rhapsody:
Time’s young hours attend her still,
And her eyes and cheeks do fill,
With fresh youth and beauty . . .
Still the shadows were growing longer. Her long-serving courtiers were dying around her; in this year, for example, Puckering, the lord keeper, Sir Francis Knollys, and Lord Hunsdon, were taken from her service to the grave. It was against this background that Essex helped to plan a great expedition against Cadiz, in order to singe the beard of the king of Spain once more. It was said that he had grown tired of life at court, surrounded by old men. His sister described him as ‘the Weary Knight’, since he was ‘always weary and longing for the change’. It was within his power to renew the energy, and revive the honour, of the court.
At the beginning of June 1596, a large English armada left England for Spanish waters; a total of eighty-two ships was under the command of three men, one of whom was Essex. The French king, Henry IV, joked that Elizabeth would not want Essex to be very far from her petticoats. There was some truth in that. She was never very convinced by his assertion of martial prowess. But in fact the expedition to Cadiz was a great success; the Spaniards were taken entirely by surprise, and the city was seized in a swift assault. Essex had intended to remain there indefinitely but the problem of supplies obliged him to return with his forces to England.
Another prize was won. The authorities of Cadiz were forced to sink the Spanish fleet in their harbour, for fear of its falling into the hands of the enemy; the cost to Philip of Spain amounted to 12 million ducats. It had been a great victory, reinforcing England’s claim to mastery of the sea. Essex became the hero of the hour to everyone except the queen, who remarked that the expedition had been more of an ‘action of honour and victory against the enemy and particular spoil to the army than any profitable to ourself ’. She was not at all interested in martial glory; she wanted the Spanish gold that had been distributed among the successful English troops, and she was furious that Essex had not reserved it for her. She was heard to remark that previously she had done his pleasure, but now she would teach him to do hers.
So Essex was still sensitive to the point of distraction. When Lord Howard of Effingham was created earl of Nottingham, with a citation of his services in Cadiz, Essex perceived a slight to himself. He raged furiously at the honour and asked the queen to rescind it. His protégé, Francis Bacon, counselled him to mitigate his temper. The queen would otherwise regard him as ‘a man of nature not to be ruled, that hath the advantage of my affection and knoweth it’. That is why she continued to favour his great rival. At the very time of the Cadiz operation, Robert Cecil was appointed to be her secretary of state.
It became clear that Essex was no longer her pre-eminent favourite, but just one among her councillors in a court that was described as ‘dangerously poisoned with the secret stings of smiling enemies’. Her principal councillor was still Lord Burghley, but he was growing old. He was reported by the French ambassador to be ‘very proud and presuming in his words’; he possessed ‘a kind of crossing or wayward manner’ with ‘a tone of choler’.
Elizabeth herself seems naturally to have become more irate. In the spring of 1597 one courtier, William Fenton, reported that the queen ‘seemeth more forward than commonly she used to bear herself towards her women, nor doth she hold them in discourse with such familiar matter, but often chides for small neglects, in such wise as to make these fair maids often cry and bewail in piteous sort’.
One of these ‘fair maids’, Lady Mary Howard, had a gown that threatened to rival those of the queen in its finery. Elizabeth sent for the dress and secretly put it on. It was too short for her. She went into one of the household chambers and asked the ladies ‘how they liked her new-fancied suit’. She was met by an embarrassed silence, and she went up to Lady Mary herself and asked her ‘if it was not made too short and unbecoming’. The lady agreed. ‘Why then,’ she said, ‘if it become not me, by being too short, I am minded it shall never become thee, as being too fine; so it fitteth neither well.’ The gown was never worn again.
She showed her anger, too, against the ambassador from Poland at an audience in 1597. In an address to her he seems to have been more bombastic than suited the company, and as a result she stormed at him. Cecil reported to Essex that ‘her Majesty made one of the best answers ex tempore in Latin that ever I heard’. She began with ‘Expectavi orationem, mihi vero querelam adduxisti!’ – ‘I expected an oration. But you have brought a complaint against me!’ ‘Surely,’ she went on to say, ‘I can hardly believe that if the king himself were present, he would use such language!’ And so she harangued him. At the end she paused and then turned to her court. ‘God’s death, my lords, I have been enforced this day to scour up my old Latin, that hath long lain rusting.’ ‘God’s death’ was an oath she used frequently in these days.
A French envoy from Henry IV was given an audience with her, and he reported that ‘all the time she spoke she would often rise from her chair and appear to be very impatient with what I was saying; she would complain that the fire was hurting her eyes, though there was a great screen before it and she six or seven feet away, yet did she give orders to have it extinguished’. Yet still she maintained her regimen of daily exercise. She would ride or walk every day, even in the rain or frost. Her ladies, careful of their own health as well as that of their mistress, asked Whitgift to intervene. The archbishop implored the queen to stay within doors during inclement
weather, but she paid no regard to his advice.
The Spanish danger had not passed with the success of the mission against Cadiz. Philip of Spain dispatched a new armada a month or two after that city’s fall; it was supposed to sail to Ireland where it would assist the rebels there. But the storms of Cape Finisterre ended the expedition. Elizabeth was now thoroughly discomfited and in 1597 ordered a new attack, led by Essex and the newly ennobled Nottingham, designed to scatter the Spanish fleet and to intercept the treasure ships in the Azores. The expedition did not altogether go as planned, however, and the English never came near the Spanish gold that escaped them with impunity. They returned in October, but were able before reaching shore to turn back another armada against England that Philip had launched in a last gamble. Her relief that the threat of invasion had been lifted was matched only by her anger with Essex for failing to take the treasure. He was caught in a cycle of defeat and dismay that would soon have disastrous consequences.
39
A disobedient servant
One day in the summer of 1598 a few close courtiers were closeted with the queen, discussing who should be the next lord lieutenant of Ireland; that country was in a state of revolt, and needed careful handling. In the royal closet that day were Essex, Howard, Cecil and one or two others. Elizabeth named Sir William Knollys for the post. Essex, knowing that the choice had been suggested by Cecil, opposed it with great bluster and vehemence. The queen made a sarcastic comment of some kind and Essex, offended and with a contemptuous expression upon his face, gave mortal offence by turning his back upon her. The queen, telling him to ‘go and be hanged’, boxed his ears.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 51