by Jane Dunn
To Jezebel, that English whore;
Receive this Scottish chain
As presages of her great malheur [misfortune]
For murdering our queen.
Where the Edinburghers were louring and full of vengeance, the Londoners were in a merry mood, intent on the kind of noisy celebrations that exacerbated the outrage of the Scots and French. As Shrewsbury’s son had ridden through the city with the news of Mary’s death, ‘instantly all the bells were rung, guns discharged, fires lighted in all the streets, and feasting and banquets and every sign of joy’.49 This came from the report of the French ambassador who witnessed one of the street fires too close for comfort. When he refused some local revellers’ request for wood for a bonfire, they retaliated by lighting a great bonfire against his own house door, which burned for two hours. But her own people’s exuberance was not enough to lift Elizabeth’s spirits.
The warlike rumours from Scotland, however, soon died down, and James VI seemed willing to return to business as usual. To save his own face with his people he demanded a scapegoat, ‘necesse est unum mori pro populo’. That scapegoat was Davison, but he did not have to die: he was released from the Tower after the defeat of the Armada when Elizabeth had recovered her confidence and was no longer desperate to hang onto the allies she had.
Henri III of France also registered his protest forcefully and threatened the English ambassador with similar violence from the Paris mob should he venture from his house. He refused for some months to receive Walsingham as Elizabeth’s envoy, come to explain the execution of the Queen of Scots. They put on an impressive show of mourning for their dowager queen, with her Guise family as prominent mourners, while angry crowds vowed vengeance on the ‘Jezebel’ across the water. But the French too did not have the stomach for war. Philip II, however, was being exhorted even by his confessor to attack England, ‘to avenge the wrongs done to God and to the world by that woman, above all in the execution of the Queen of Scotland’.50
While Mary lived, Elizabeth’s isolation as a regnant queen in a world of men was relieved; there was a sympathy between them and, until James’s birth, they were among the closest blood relations that either had left in the world. Although temperamentally opposed and living their lives to different ideals, Mary had insisted on stressing this familial female relationship: mother, daughter, sister, cousin; in every one of her multitude of letters over the years she reminded Elizabeth of their blood connection. There was an attraction too in opposites, a fascination with those who lived out the unlived side of oneself. Mary had recklessly pursued her heart in a way Elizabeth would never contemplate and Elizabeth had assumed authority in government that had won the world’s grudging respect. Elizabeth and Mary had offered to each other a different way of seeing, a point of identity and contrast. In their solitary queenship, the existence of the other, a cousin too, meant each was not entirely alone.
And yet Elizabeth, pressured by the male world, had sacrificed Mary, a member of her royal and human family. Perhaps it was not too fanciful to think that Mary, representing carnal femininity and motherhood, a queen who had produced a male heir, reminded Elizabeth of her own mother, bloodily put to death in the same way, by the will of men, for giving birth not to that precious son, but to Elizabeth herself, the undervalued girl.
These months after Mary’s death were the emotional crisis of Elizabeth’s life. For twenty-eight years she had reigned, proud of the peace of a kingdom kept by a queen averse to bloodshed, shy of commitment and prevaricating in her dealings. She had now been forced to draw her sword, and in the blood sacrifice of her close relation had been initiated into becoming a bolder sort of queen. In the struggle of these months she had to leave behind the woman of hesitation and equivocation, born of the insecurity and fear of her youth, and embrace a larger, more active vision of herself. Elizabeth faced the consequences of her actions.
The English Catholics had lost the focus for their hopes, their alternative queen. As the internal threats diminished, however, the long-feared shadow of Philip II stretched across the Channel. Within a year, all eyes would be turned outwards to a greater foe: for most of Mary’s English supporters hatred of the Spanish was a more motivating force than antagonism to their Protestant queen. Mary’s death had meant Elizabeth would have to remove her frugal coat and don the panoply of war.
Elizabeth and England stood alone. In the spring of 1588, she was fifty-four but still full of vitality. She had her great ministers around her, Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham, but they were ageing now, their health failing, although their prodigious work rate did not flag. To this great triumvirate was added Sir Christopher Hatton, her new Lord Chancellor. Her court had an injection of new blood too in the form of the next generation of favourites, Sir Walter Ralegh, Leicester’s beautiful stepson the Earl of Essex, and Burghley’s brilliant son Robert Cecil: all these helped maintain the sense of family connection and continuity around the increasingly solitary queen.
There had been rumours for the past four years or more of the amassing of a great Spanish Armada. Ships were being built in every allied port, food stockpiled, munitions and items of clothing ordered tens of thousands at a time, and men recruited across the empire. There was a sense of danger looming like a storm cloud over England. The exchequer was chronically short of money and Elizabeth was desperate to conclude some sort of peace in the Low Countries with the Duke of Parma. Her fear of all-out war with Spain had made her weak and vacillating but even while she sued for peace, she was forced into action by the news that the fearsome Armada had set sail at last.
It was May and England was thrown into a frenzy of activity, preparing to repel a full-scale invasion. Bad weather and good fortune played their part and by the time the English and Spanish fleets met it was 20 July. Camden’s description of that first sighting of the Spanish fleet in the Channel was vivid with the eyewitness’s excitement and awe. The galleons ‘with lofty turrets like Castles’ were spread out before them in a crescent, extending some seven miles, ‘sailing very slowly, though with full Sails, the Winds being as it were tired with carrying them, and the Ocean groaning under the weight of them’. The Armada consisted of 130 ships, ‘the best furnished … of any that ever the ocean saw, and called by the arrogant name of Invincible’.51 During the following week there were various running battles up and down the Channel, with numerous acts of heroism and derring-do, a great deal of noise from the ordnance, and not much loss of men or ships on either side. Then on 28 July, the Spanish fleet were anchored just outside Calais, and the English selected eight of their least seaworthy vessels as fireships, ‘besmeared with Wild-fire, Pitch and Rosin, and filled with Brimstone and other combustible matter’, and sent them downwind at dead of night towards the unsuspecting Armada. The burning ships were reflected in the water, ‘the whole Sea glittering and shining with the Flame thereof’ and so panicked the Spanish that their fleet scattered, pursued by the lighter, faster English ships. A sudden storm caught the great Spanish galleons as they fled north to try and reach Spain around Ireland and Scotland’s shores.
The fear of Spanish aggression that had accompanied the first thirty years of her reign was now confronted. In facing the spectre of invasion and defeat, Elizabeth rose magnificently to her new role as a warrior queen, no longer the ever-watchful, ambiguous Janus, but Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. Cecil’s son Robert was amazed at the reaction of this new Elizabeth to the news of the fleets’ first engagement: ‘how great magnanimity* her Majesty shows, who is not a whit dismayed’.52
Two major armies were assembled, one at St James’s to protect the Queen and the other at Tilbury, at the mouth of the Thames, to repel the first invaders. Leicester was in charge of these 22,000 men and 1000 horse, and invited Elizabeth to visit the camp and show herself to the troops. She accepted with alacrity and on horseback rode among them with a staff in her hand. Some said she wore a breastplate of steel, others suggested it was gold – that was how she appeared invin
cible to her cheering, adoring troops.
The speech she gave to her army, in the full expectation that the Armada would reform and threaten her island once more, became as famous as any in English:
My loving people, I have been persuaded by some that are careful of my safety to take heed how I committed myself to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery. But I tell you that I would not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear: I have so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chieftest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and a king of England too – and take foul scorn that Parma or any other prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm. To the which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will venter [venture] my royal blood.53
This marked the apogee of her reign. Elizabeth, in embracing action and sharing danger with her people, inspired the popular imagination with the vision of a goddess of war. The Armada had been sent by Philip to visit God’s punishment on her for her religion, her support of Spain’s enemies and her execution of a Catholic queen. In repelling the greatest military power in Europe, she had proved herself as great as any king, perhaps even to herself. The pope, Sixtus V, on the eve of the Armada and hoping for victory, had renewed his bull of excommunication, yet even he could not hide his admiration: ‘Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all.’ Elizabeth was elated by her country’s unexpected victory, exhilarated by her own success. That same month, she wrote to Mary’s son: ‘this tyrannical, proud and brainsick attempt … hath procured my greatest glory that meant my sorest wrack [direst destruction]’.54
The relationship of Elizabeth and Mary continued even after Mary’s death. In effect compassed by both of them, Mary’s execution had allowed her to fulfil her spiritual aspirations. Courting the death sentence rather than begging for mercy, she ensured her transcendence into myth. For Elizabeth, the Armada, launched partly in Mary’s name, provided the greatest challenge of her reign. Mary’s death had demanded that Elizabeth rise to a greater authority and through that demonstrate her magnanimous power. In facing down Spain, she too was elevated to an idealized majesty.
But these moments of transformation marked the point when both queens became less recognizable in their individual characters, as they were overlaid increasingly with the projections of others: their natures distorted to support opposing narratives and adorn the romance of kings. But it is in their relationship with each other, as women, cousins and rivals, that their inward experiences were illuminated, in all their complex humanity. In their struggle as queens to overcome the expectation of failure in a male-dominated world, they chose quite different destinies. Their natural sympathy and solidarity evaporated as they became polarized in a lethal opposition where one of them had to die. Yet in death they achieved an extraordinary compromise that was impossible in life. Mary’s ambition had been to inherit the throne of England and Elizabeth’s to maintain independence, and the religion her father had established in order to legitimize her birth. Both wished for Scotland and England to be united under their rule. In Mary’s son this ideal became reality. In the process both Mary’s blood and Elizabeth’s Church triumphed. Great Britain was born as a Protestant state under a Stuart king, James I.
* * *
*Her prosecutors only had the copies made by Walsingham’s secretary, Phelippes. In order not to arouse the suspicions of the writers and recipients, the letters were intercepted, deciphered, copied, and then resealed and sent on.
*Esther interceded with Xerxes, the Persian king, to save the Jews, whereas Judith cut off the head of the Babylonian general Holofernes in order to save her people.
*Lord Edward Zouche (?1556–1625) was only twenty when he bravely and uniquely set himself apart from his fellow peers and sovereign in this sensational trial. In youth he considered himself feckless and his passion for creating gardens had apparently helped lose his patrimony. In old age he seems to have attained more conventional honours, including in 1620 being one of the first members of the New England council in Virginia. He was buried in a vault connected to his wine cellar, a fact which inspired this from his friend Ben Jonson: ‘Wherever I die, oh, here may I lie/Along by my good Lord Zouche/That when I am dry, to the tap I may hie/And so back again to my couch.’
*Patrick, Master of Gray (d. 1612), became another of James VI (and I)’s favourites, apparently invulnerable despite a lifetime of double-dealing, intrigue and betrayals. He was part of Mary Queen of Scots’ inner circle while she was in France and a close colleague of the Duc de Guise, who rewarded him handsomely. He returned to Scotland, probably with Esmé Stuart in 1579; both were agents of the Duc de Guise. Gray betrayed Mary’s secrets to James and then to Elizabeth, who always saw through him, despite his being thought the handsomest man of his time, with exquisite French manners and a brilliant wit. After Mary’s execution he was tried and found guilty of treason on a number of charges. James saved his life, welcoming him back to court after only two years’ exile, where Gray continued to intrigue and betray. He still managed, however, to die in his bed.
*In early modern English magnanimity, literally greatness of spirit, meant above all a noble courage. The concept goes back to Aristotle, and was seen as one of the most important virtues, seldom applied to anyone other than men.
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