by Derek Wilson
But if the queen felt deeply about marriage, the nature of divine kingship, the duty of subjects and religious uniformity, so did most of her people and especially those who belonged to the Protestant intelligentsia. At the summit of this group stood the Earl of Leicester’s circle which embraced Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Thomas Digges, John Dee, Thomas Norton and a variety of scholars, poets, dramatists and preachers who set the course for the Elizabethan literary Renaissance. (Shakespeare was only ten years younger than Sir Philip Sidney.) This creative coterie might almost be thought of as a cult, committed to a philosophy which drew upon history, the Bible, Platonism, alchemy, astrology and the arts of navigation to evolve an elaborate mission statement for the queen and her nation. (Elizabeth and even the level-headed Burghley encouraged Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelly, in their quest for the philosopher’s stone. The secret of turning base metals into gold had a distinct appeal to the cash-strapped English queen.)
The immense pressures of political and religious isolation produced a diamond seam of Protestant nationalism, a defiant vision of a new Albion embarked on a divine crusade. It was stated most clearly in a book by the polymath, Dr John Dee, published in 1577. The General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Arts of Navigation was much more than a manifesto for overseas exploration. Dee presented Elizabeth as the direct descendant of the heroes of classical Rome and of the legendary King Arthur. She was called upon to fulfil an inescapable destiny, to carry the standard of reformed religion into Europe and, through the development of the navy, the discovery of new lands and sea routes (such as the North-West Passage and the North-East Passage) and energetic mercantile endeavour, to the ends of the earth. This was a vision for a time of crisis, for a nation hemmed in by foes and opposed by enemies determined to undermine the politico-religious foundations. It was a morale-boosting philosophy for a people who seemed to have their backs to the wall. Such, at least, was the view of the international situation held by committed Protestants like Francis Walsingham.
Their frustration arose from the fact that Elizabeth showed no enthusiasm for donning the heroic mantle. She had no dream of a greater England. She was not proactive. Her political philosophy, such as it was, was based on survival – of herself, first of all, and then of the Crown. That being the case, poets, playwrights and preachers could not avoid offering criticism. Court entertainments were important vehicles for making political points. As well as the entertainments offered to Elizabeth as she progressed around the mansions of her wealthier subjects, members of the inns of court regularly performed plays and masques before the queen. Leading courtiers and councillors were closely involved in these dramatic presentations and assiduously oversaw their scripting. Flattery was de rigueur and any proffering of advice or reproof had to be wrapped up in heavy allegory but, throughout the reign, political dissatisfaction was a recurring leitmotif in court entertainment. To understand this is to see more clearly the reverse face of the Gloriana mythology. The radiant Virgin Queen dazzles us from the head side of the coin but the design on the tail side is much darker.
Two works which had their origins in the Leicester circle were Gorboduc and Arcadia. Gorboduc was performed at the Inner Temple in 1561 and subsequently at court. In 1570 it was published for a wider audience. Its authors were Thomas Norton and his companion at the inn, Thomas Sackville (later Lord Buckhurst and Cecil’s successor as treasurer). Gorboduc, the ruler of a mythical golden-age Britain, spurns the advice of his wise councillors and hands over his realm to his two sons. As a result of their rivalry the country descends into civil war, anarchy and foreign invasion. The moral is that only weak rulers abandon their responsibilities, foremost among which is careful provision for the succession.
Arcadia was not published until thirty years after Gorboduc but its underlying theme is little changed. Its author, Philip Sidney, wrote what was, on the face of it, a pastoral idyll, a poem about shepherds and princes set in an idealized world. The work went through several changes under Sidney’s hand and appeared in variant forms after his death, as the Old Arcadia and the New Arcadia. The work had its genesis at a time when Sidney was frustrated and angry at having received, in his estimation, scant reward for his diplomatic services and no promotion. He was also strongly opposed to the Anjou match and in 1579 wrote A Letter to Queen Elizabeth touching her Marriage with Monsieur. The letter circulated in manuscript at the same time that John Stubbe’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf was published and certainly did not improve his relationship with the queen.
The political sub-text of Arcadia concerns the bad decisions of the ruler, Basilius, who declines to accept the good counsel of Philanax (possibly meant to represent Walsingham). Like Gorboduc, King Basilius retires from his regal position to seek sylvan seclusion. This provides the opportunity for Cecropia, former heiress to Arcadia but debarred by Basilius’ late marriage and begetting of children, to launch a bid for power. Amidst the confusion and disarray which follow Basilius mistakenly takes a sleeping draught and appears to the other characters to be dead. Sidney presents Basilius as a tyrant, not because he is cruel or vindictive – no one could be more amiable than this ageing monarch – but because he is governed by his own will rather than by reason or law. It was the same message that Walsingham had delivered to the young James VI: when monarchs regard themselves as absolute ‘they leave to be kings and become tyrants’.12 The parallels with the state of England are obvious: the threat of a rival queen, the rejection of sound advice, the inability to make decisions. (Elizabeth’s dithering suggests that she might as well, like Basilius, be drugged.) Sidney even makes a more direct comparison between Elizabeth and his fictional monarch, for, when Basilius is crossed by his advisers, he tends to fly into petulant rages.
It is ironic that Sidney, who came to be regarded as a paragon courtier/poet/warrior, in reality held the Elizabethan court in contempt. He despised its flattery and factionalism. He resented the queen’s ingratitude, especially as demonstrated towards his own family, and also that poverty which prevented him from taking what he conceived to be his proper place at the centre of affairs. Together with other members of Leicester’s circle he was profoundly anxious about the disastrous future towards which England seemed to be drifting. Walsingham, from his own perspective as councillor rather than courtier, reached almost identical conclusions. We might remind ourselves of the long letter he wrote to the queen in 1581 from the depths of his concern over the Anjou match:
I cannot deny but I have been infinitely grieved to see the desire I have had to do your Majesty some acceptable service (in the present charge committed unto me) so greatly crossed. But I will leave to touch my particular though I have as great cause as any man that ever served in the place I now unworthily supply, being at home subject to sundry strange jealousies and in foreign service to displeasure, though I dare make the greatest enemy I have the censurer of mine actions and proceedings in such foreign actions as have been committed unto me. If either ambition or riches were the end of my strife my grief would be the less. But now to the public, wherein if any thing shall escape my pen that may breed offence, I most heartily beseech your Majesty to ascribe it to love, which can never bring forth evil effects, though sometimes it may be subject to sharp censures.
Having reflected unfavourably on the queen’s decisions on major policy issues he concluded:
If this sparing and unprovident course be held still, the mischiefs approaching being so apparent as they are, I conclude therefore, having spoken in heat of duty, without offence to your Majesty, that no one that serveth in place of a Councillor, that either weigheth his own credit, or carryeth that sound affection to your Majesty as he ought to do, that would not wish himself in the farthest part of Ethiopia rather than enjoy the fairest palace in England.13
As we have repeatedly seen, the queen and her councillors were frequently at loggerheads. Elizabeth used and abused her advisers by failing to give a clear lead, by thrusting them into impossible situations, by
blaming them for policy failures and by going over their heads in diplomatic negotiations. They responded by ganging up on her, by going behind her back and sometimes by simply staying away. Having read so many complaints by Walsingham, Burghley and various of their colleagues, we may wonder why they soldiered on. Of course, the queen was the fount of patronage and there were perks to be had. But so often the servants of this niggardly sovereign found themselves out of pocket, having been obliged to fund government expenditure from their own resources. Certainly in Walsingham’s case when we examine the balance sheet of his ‘business’ with Elizabeth we have to conclude that she was his debtor many times over. What he gained from his exhausting endeavours over two decades in no way reflected his value to the regime. It is trying to understand this tense and troubled relationship that really takes us to the heart of political and, indeed, national life in the last decades of the sixteenth century.
We can, I am sure, take it as read that Walsingham, Cecil, Dudley and Elizabeth’s other close advisers were devoted patriots. They were as one in acknowledging that ‘there was never so dangerous a time as this’ and they had a duty to support the Crown in such dark days. They stayed at their posts because their sovereign was a woman who could not be expected to govern unaided, because she was manifestly in need of the wisest counsel the nation could provide and because the very survival of the Protestant state was at stake. Thomas Norton told the Commons in 1571, ‘her Majesty was and is the only pillar and stay of all safety, as well for our politic quiet as for the state of religion . . . therefore that for preservation of her estate, our care, prayer and chief endeavours must be.’14 But we need to set our plough to dig deeper if we would know what other convictions motivated councillors and why it was that they felt constrained to save the queen – often from herself.
Although they were her subjects, there was also a sense in which she belonged to them. It was the same Thomas Norton who, in one of his treatises, having in mind Elizabeth’s unwillingness to deal, once and for all, with Mary Stuart, pointed out that ‘princes who expose their persons to perils’ are ‘liberal of that which is not their own to give . . . the prince is not a private but a public person’.15 Lawyers like Norton and Walsingham were fully aware of the current debate in legal circles about the rights and responsibilities of monarchy and the relationship between prince and people. These were complex issues whose importance was greatly magnified by the succession crisis. Elizabeth insisted that she and she alone would decide whom she would pass the Crown to. The legal fraternity disagreed. Henry VIII had made a will excluding the Stuart line of succession. Edward VI had also tried to prevent either of his sisters taking the crown. This royal ‘right’ was disputed by many lawyers, who insisted that kings could not by mere will (in all senses of that word) take decisions which would profoundly affect the commonwealth. In an attempt to define the relationship between monarch and state, legal experts had come up with the concept of the queen’s ‘two bodies’:
for the purposes of law it was found necessary by 1561 to endow the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic . . . the body politic was supposed to be contained within the natural body of the Queen. When lawyers spoke of this body politic they referred to a specific quality: the essence of corporate perpetuity. The Queen’s natural body was subject to infancy, infirmity, error and old age; her body politic, created out of a combination of faith, ingenuity and practical expediency, was held to be unerring and immortal.16
What may seem to us a piece of sophistical word play was, in fact, an attempt to deal with an urgent constitutional problem for the centralized state created by the Tudors. No one, not even the most dedicated Calvinistic admirer of the Geneva system, would have contemplated any other kind of government than a divinely anointed monarchy, but the repeated failure of the Tudor dynasty to perpetuate itself forced politicians and legists to consider how the Crown might be passed on without the kind of conflict which had made the previous century so bloody. The framers of the Bond of Association had devised a Council which should be the custodian of Elizabeth’s body politic, defending her from harm and, in the event of her sudden death, transferring that mystical entity to a successor. It is not surprising that the queen, though professing gratitude to all the signatories of the Bond, distanced herself as far as possible from its underlying philosophy. It implied some limitation of royal absolutism and that she would never concede. In 1582 Walsingham wrote a letter on his mistress’ behalf to the Earl of Shrewsbury, because his prisoner, Mary Stuart, had communicated directly with the Council:
Of which [misconception] of the said Queen and misunderstanding of the absoluteness of her Majesty’s government, she thinketh meet she should by your Lordship be better informed: For although her Highness doth carry as great regard unto her Council as any of her progenitors have done, and hath just cause so to do in respect of their wisdom and fidelity, yet is she [ie Mary] to be [made to] understand that they are Councillors by [royal] choice and not by birth, whose services are no longer to be used in that public function than it shall please her Majesty to dispose of the same.17
If councillors, claiming the greater interest of the commonwealth, were allowed to meddle with succession issues, on what other areas of prerogative might they not also encroach, using the same excuse?
The very same problem presented itself to the advisers of the ‘impossible’ woman who occupied the English throne. Sir Francis Knollys expressed it to the assistant secretary Thomas Wilson in these terms:
I do know that it is fit for all men to give place to her majesty’s will and pleasure, and to her [passions], in all things that touch not the danger of her estate; but I do know also that if her majesty do not suppress and subject her own will and her own [passions] unto sound advice of open counsel in matters touching the preventing of her danger . . . her majesty will be utterly overthrown.18
For Walsingham and his Puritan colleagues there was only one basis for ‘sound advice’. In 1586 Mr Secretary confided to Leicester, the queen ‘greatly presumeth [on] fortune, which is but a [very] weak foundation to build upon. I would she did build and depend upon God, and then all good men should have less cause to fear any change of her former good hap’.19 Genuine as was Walsingham’s loyalty to Elizabeth, he had a higher commitment to the cause, and it was this that emboldened him to speak plainly to the queen. God’s truth was enshrined in Protestantism. It was the onward march of the Gospel against papist superstition and rank unbelief which was always his prime concern. The difference between his own motivation and the queen’s was very succinctly stated in that throwaway line in his letter to Leicester. Elizabeth did, indeed, trust to fortune. She did not possess and, therefore, could never understand the religious passion which both powered Walsingham’s life and informed his political philosophy.
Elizabeth would have been furious to know that her close attendants believed she did not trust in God. She was regular in attendance at her chapel. She often carried a little book which contained her own hand-written prayers. Part of one reads:
Create in me, O Lord, a new heart and so renew my spirit within me that Thy law may be my study, Thy truth my delight, Thy Church my care, Thy people my crown, Thy righteousness my pleasure, Thy service my government, Thy fear my honour, Thy grace my strength, Thy favour my life, Thy Gospel my kingdom, and Thy salvation my bliss and my glory. So shall this my kingdom through Thee be established with peace; so shall Thy Church be edified with power; so shall Thy Gospel be published with zeal; so shall my reign be continued with prosperity; so shall my life be prolonged with happiness; and so shall myself at Thy good pleasure be translated into immortality.20
Yet however Elizabeth may have regarded her own piety, to her Puritan advisers (who, after all, knew her very well) she was not their kind of Christian. ‘Popish dregs’ adorned her chapel. She employed Catholic musicians to perform the divine office. She favoured celibate clergy. She was lukewarm (at best) in her support of persecuted Protestants abroad and
in her prosecution of Catholics at home. She was more concerned with outward uniformity than the building of a holy nation. Above all, she had no love of a preaching ministry, the principal tool, as the Puritans saw it, for winning the hearts and minds of the people.
Historians have debated whether Elizabeth was indifferent to religion or even atheistical. The truth is more subtle and revolves around two fixed points. The first was her conviction that the royal authority achieved in both state and church by her father must be safeguarded at all costs. The second was her own religious upbringing. Like most people, Elizabeth’s basic attitudes were formed by the time she reached her mid-teens. In Catherine Parr’s entourage she had been influenced by what might be labelled ‘humanistic Lutheranism’. When English Protestantism moved on in the decade after 1547 Elizabeth did not move with it. Therefore she could do nothing but oppose, both temperamentally and intellectually, the Calvinistic and Zwinglian trends of the progressives. Sensing herself to be at odds with her most trusted advisers, she could not commit herself to a clearly thought out religious policy. This was Walsingham’s understanding of the situation. In a memorandum of 1578 he identified the three major ills which plagued the nation:
First, discontentment in the subjects for that her Majesty seeketh neither by marriage nor establishing of succession to provide for the continuance of the happy quiet they enjoy under her blessed government.