Elizabeth
Page 15
Far from the market being flooded with official images of her, it was Elizabeth’s courtiers, not Elizabeth herself, who commissioned the overwhelming majority of her most famous portraits, usually to display to her when she stayed at their houses on her summer progresses as a pledge of their loyalty. And many of the most widely reproduced images were not of a particularly high standard. When the ‘Armada’ portraits were painted, consumer demand for the royal likeness vastly outstripped the number of official types that could be produced, creating the quite different problem of the manufacture of debased images. In 1563, when he had attempted to draft a proclamation regulating artists, Burghley had made a concerted effort to persuade Elizabeth to commission an official facial image of herself that could be used as a pattern by artists unable to work from life but, for some reason, Elizabeth blocked the idea.27
• • •
After the service at St Paul’s, Elizabeth thanked Howard and his senior officers for their part in the victory, greeting them by name and praising them as ‘men born for the preservation of their country’. All who had served in the campaign, she declared ‘well merited of her and the Commonwealth’. And yet, a fawning report Camden printed in his Annales, saying that ‘those that were wounded and indigent she relieved with noble pensions,’ is demonstrably false.28 The opposite is true. She had promised at Tilbury to reward her men for their loyalty and service and gave them her word as a Prince that she would never fail them. But it was not a promise she would keep.
In this, Burghley, as Lord Treasurer, eagerly colluded. The Exchequer, as he was several times forced to remind the queen, was empty. Debts were fast mounting, and he was struggling to raise huge loans, using as an intermediary the Genoese financier Horatio Palavicino, who had negotiated the largest of Leicester’s borrowings. To secure credit from German lenders, Burghley told Palavicino he was willing to pay an interest rate of up to 10 per cent. His response to demands that he should settle the arrears of pay due to the brave mariners and soldiers, both living and dead, was savage. ‘I marvel’, he told Walsingham callously, ‘that where so many are dead on the seas the pay is not dead with them or with many of them.’29
Elizabeth knew that the fatality list from the campaign far exceeded the hundred or so mariners who had been killed in the fighting itself. Thousands more had died from a virulent typhus epidemic that had begun on the 700-ton royal navy ship Elizabeth Jonas and had swept through the rest of the fleet. This one ship alone had a crew of five hundred: by the end of August, all but a handful of them were dying in the gutters of Margate.30
Howard did what he could to help the survivors, paying for their food and beer from his own purse and selling his gold and silver plate to buy them clothing. He warned his fellow privy councillors that the epidemic was so virulent and widespread it would soon threaten the queen’s safety more than the might of Spain. The men, ‘who well hoped after this so good service to have received their whole pay and finding it to come but this scantly unto them’, were near to mutiny. At Tilbury, Elizabeth had been feted by her soldiers. Now, Howard said, they cursed her: such neglect ‘breeds a marvellous alteration’. To Walsingham, Howard remonstrated, ‘It were too pitiful to have men starve after such a service . . . and if men should not be cared for better than to let them starve and die miserably, we should very hardly get men to serve.’31
When his pleas went unanswered, Howard appealed to Elizabeth directly. ‘The infection’, he explained, ‘is grown very great and in many ships, and now very dangerous, and those that come in fresh are soonest infected. They sicken the one day and die the next.’ But her ears were shut.32 Determined to brook no opposition, she ordered her privy councillors to arrest and hang a company of soldiers who had walked, limping and barefoot, to London to demand their pay. One victim, as he climbed the hangman’s ladder and the rope was put about his neck, shouted out angrily to the crowd: ‘The gallows are the pay they give us for going to the wars.’33
Most of those who took up arms for the queen would never receive a penny. Such behaviour contrasts strikingly with that of King Philip, who paid in full his soldiers’ arrears of pay almost without fail, even if settlement could often be tardy. Unlike Elizabeth, Philip considered payment to be a moral obligation, a matter of honour. He also, through his agents, paid large sums by way of ransoms to Englishmen who had snatched Spaniards from the Armada ships they had successfully boarded.34 Of course, for Elizabeth, the harsh reality was that she had little to give, other than what she could raise by slashing her personal expenditure. This she did not do. In fear of a mass insurrection, Burghley issued several threatening proclamations on her instructions, imposing martial law and ordering the apprehension of ‘all soldiers, mariners and vagrant persons’ as should be found wandering about the countryside. Such ‘disloyal persons’ were to be punished ‘with all convenient extremity’.35
• • •
Suddenly, a new scare began. Pope Sixtus was still attempting to convert the young Scottish king, James VI, to Catholicism, and alarm bells rang loudly in London when Walsingham discovered that the Duke of Parma had proposed a fresh attack on England by way of Scotland. As bait, he offered James the prospect of a Spanish bride, with a view to landing six thousand Spanish troops on the shores of the Firth of Forth in readiness for a coup d’état.36
In July 1586, when James had ratified the terms of his league with Elizabeth in exchange for a handsome pension, she had extracted a promise from him not to marry ‘without her advice and privity’. It was a tactic she had tried before in Scotland: in 1564, her clumsy attempts to marry James’s mother off to Leicester as a way of controlling her for the rest of her life had spectacularly misfired. The idea then had been that the newly-weds would live at Court with the English queen in a ménage à trois.37 It was the silliest notion Elizabeth ever had. But steering James into a marriage favourable to England was a policy that might just work. Clearly, it was the candidate that counted: find the right one, and the Scottish problem could be solved, perhaps for ever.
A marriage between James and Anne, the younger daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark and his wife, Queen Sophie, had first been mooted in 1584, when James was eighteen. The Danes proved receptive, but Elizabeth lobbied for Catherine of Navarre, sister to Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot claimant to the French throne. She wanted to bind James into her policy of backing Henry against the Cardinal of Bourbon and the Guises in the succession struggle in France.38 By late 1587, she was pushing insistently for Catherine.
But she met resistance from several quarters. As Walsingham’s agent reported, ‘This king is not as Her Majesty is: any [of] his subjects being gentle or noble may speak his mind frankly to him.’ Not only could they, they often did, and at all hours of day or night. Opposition came chiefly from those Scottish lords who loathed the English for their handling of Mary Queen of Scots. ‘Have they not cut off your mother’s head?’ they demanded shrilly of James. ‘Marry, sir, they will give you a poor pension to make Your Majesty their pensioner to your more disgrace and shame to all princes that know it . . . You were better not [to] live to be a king than to receive such shame.’39 They knew that the ever-impoverished James was reluctant to risk his English pension. Money was a continually tricky issue for him: without bribes or rewards, it was hard for him to balance or defeat the competing factions.40
Despite the death of the hard-drinking, hunting-mad King Frederick early in 1588, most likely from alcohol poisoning, it looked for a time as if things might go Elizabeth’s way. On paper, Catherine of Navarre was by far the stronger candidate. But, by Christmas, the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction after the Edinburgh Parliament granted James £100,000 Scots (around £25 million sterling in modern values), dropping the strongest of hints that he should seek a Danish bride.41 To counter Anne’s advantage, Elizabeth piled on the pressure after Walsingham found proof that the Earl of Huntly, a Catholic opponent of the Anglo-Scottish league and one of Jame
s’s leading favourites, was deeply implicated in the Duke of Parma’s continuing plots to land Spanish troops in Scotland.42
Elizabeth forwarded the incriminating documents straight to James, but he refused to react.43 Now almost twenty-three, he was too insecure not to keep open lines of communication to the Catholic powers.44 He wanted Huntly close to him, and some were whispering that his interest was of a more personal nature. When, to silence Elizabeth, he did at last send Huntly briefly to prison, he visited him every day, brought him dinner and kissed him.45 Rumours of his sexual predilections quickly reached London. As Burghley’s man in Edinburgh warned, anyone sent north across the frontier to reason with James ‘should be no young man’.46
Uncertainty about Scotland continued, but worse was to come. On 30 July 1589, a courier arrived from France with the shocking news that, eight days earlier, King Henry III had been assassinated. Driven more than fifty miles from Paris by the forces of the Duke of Guise, while Elizabeth had been preoccupied with the Armada, Henry had reached a temporary truce with the Catholic League, but then struck back. Early in the morning of 13 December 1588, he had summoned Guise to his study at Blois and had him cut down by the royal guards and his body burned to ashes and thrown into the Loire. Next day, Louis of Lorraine, Cardinal of Guise, the Duke’s brother, was strangled. Now just over seven months later, Henry had been fatally stabbed in retaliation in his army camp at Saint-Cloud, six miles west of Paris, by Jacques Clément, a Dominican monk. He died around two o’clock the next morning.47
A civil war was erupting in France, with Philip II planning to throw his weight behind the forces of the Catholic League to wipe out the Huguenots. Elizabeth was desperate to assist Henry of Navarre, whom Henry III had named as his heir on his deathbed, on the condition that he would soon convert to Catholicism. James, meanwhile, had decided to marry Anne. He had been warned that Catherine, who was thirty, was ‘old and crooked and something worse if all were known’.48 Anne, it was pointed out to him, was just fourteen. A stunningly beautiful, sensual girl who loved music and dancing and was already a fluent linguist, she was said to be itching to marry him.49 From James’s viewpoint, this was exactly the sort of woman who could help him to quash the burgeoning rumours of his sexual tastes.50
• • •
Burghley did his best to persuade James to put ‘in some suspense’ his plans to make a Danish marriage.51 When he failed, Elizabeth accepted defeat with unusual grace. Chiefly, this was a matter of keeping up appearances. As Walsingham cautioned her, she should not allow it to become known how far she had opposed the match with Anne, since this would upset Denmark as much as James.52 In any case, once Henry of Navarre was forced to commit all of his resources into fighting to secure the throne of France, he was obliged to draw on his sister’s personal revenues of 40,000 crowns a year. Without the attraction of a pension or a substantial dowry from France, James was hardly likely to marry Catherine. And as Burghley’s Scottish agent succinctly explained, if the king had given his word to the Danes, it had to be kept.53
The paradox was that James had committed himself to marrying Anne but could not afford the costs of his wedding garments or the necessary refurbishments to Scotland’s dilapidated palaces to welcome his bride. As Burghley’s man scoffed, ‘His plate is not worth £100, he has only two or three rich jewels and his guard is unpaid.’54 If he were not to be disgraced, he needed Elizabeth’s help.
With frosty hauteur, Elizabeth declared that she would ‘allow’ James’s Danish marriage, because the Scots were ‘resolved’ to go through with it: in reality, she did not have the power to stop it.55 She agreed to present James with gold and silver plate worth £2,000, along with a small allowance to help him make his mother’s old apartments at Holyrood ready for Anne.56 Her strategy was to control James through the power of the purse, after which she would work directly on Anne.
Anne’s journey to Scotland took far longer than anyone could have envisaged. Her wardrobe and entourage were huge: sixteen ships would be needed to transport them. According to an eyewitness, one of her coaches was so fine it had ‘no iron in it but all silver’.57 But after her flotilla left harbour on 5 September 1589, it was battered by storms. Three times she set sail for Scotland, and three times she would be driven back. At last, after fifty days of agonizing seasickness, she was cast ashore on the coast of Norway and took refuge in Oslo. There, she resolved to postpone her voyage until the spring while her ships were repaired.
Unaware that Anne had not arrived at Holyrood as planned, Elizabeth handed over her gifts of gold and silver plate to the Scottish ambassador, spitefully timing their delivery so as to ensure that they would not arrive in Edinburgh until just after what she still believed was the intended wedding day. She then sent James a letter signed, ‘Your most assured loving sister and cousin’, in which she upbraided him for the unexpected ‘speed’ of his ‘bargain’ with the Danes. Unable to resist swiping at him, she informed him that he had only himself to blame for a situation in which ‘my messengers come after the solemnities.’58
James wisely did not rise to the bait: with the wedding postponed, Elizabeth’s sarcasm, in any case, backfired. Instead, in what seemed to the uninformed to be a spontaneous romantic gesture, he left at once for Oslo to pledge his love to Anne. His madcap dash across the North Sea in the thick of the equinoctial gales has often been seen as a supreme act of chivalry. In reality, his intention was to thwart fresh, highly embarrassing rumours that the delay in Anne’s arrival was because she had somehow discovered that he was virile with men but impotent with women.59
Barely had James left Scottish waters than the country was ablaze with rumours that Huntly and his friends were now eagerly plotting a coup, to be bankrolled by Parma. Letters, it was said, had been sent to Spain, and promises made ‘for subversion of religion within the realm’.60 The rumours were false, but the Scottish Council’s assurances did not satisfy Elizabeth. Believing Huntly to be a dangerous threat, she wrote to James, scolding him and urging him in the strongest terms to order his officers to ‘apprehend in time (I pray God not too late) all such as any way they may suspect or know to be partakers of this faction’. Her letter concluded with a stark warning: ‘Believe no more to dandle such babies as may, ere they come to honesty, shake your chair.’61
James would not listen. He had no intention of becoming the English queen’s poodle. His attentions were fixed on Anne, and on 23 November they were married in the Great Hall of the Old Bishop’s Palace at Oslo.62 When the long Nordic winter was finally over, James prepared to lead his bride back to Scotland, by which time he had already spent more than a third of her considerable dowry of £150,000 Scots. Their ships finally set sail on 21 April 1590, and Anne was crowned and anointed Queen of Scotland in the abbey church at Holyrood on Sunday, 17 May. Even before the newly-weds had arrived, Elizabeth was writing to Anne, assuring her of her affection and declaring how ‘it will give me singular pleasure to gratify you in whatever manner I may know to be agreeable to you.’63
Shortly after Anne’s coronation, Elizabeth wrote to her again, to tell her that she would presently be sending the Earl of Worcester to Edinburgh. One of very few noblemen under the age of fifty she unreservedly trusted, he was sent to inform James that he was to be admitted to the much-coveted Order of the Garter. But Worcester would also be carrying a special message for Anne.64
The ploy clearly worked, since the teenager was soon replying in gratitude, neatly signing herself, ‘Your most affectionate sister and cousin, Anna R’, and declaring:
If it please you to do us the honour to employ us in any thing which may turn to your contentment, as you may freely do, as well in respect of the near neighbourhood of the kingdoms wherein God has established us, as of the sex which is common to us both . . . we shall endeavour by all good and honourable effects and offices to show you the desire that we have, not only to entertain, as hereditary, that friendship begun between the late King our
father of happy memory and you, but to increase it and render it closer and more assured, for the universal good of this island.65
Anne’s letter could not have pleased Elizabeth more. At last, as it now appeared to her, Scotland had a queen with whom she could do business: someone who was both Protestant and compliant; someone she felt she could rely on to keep James up to the mark. For all his waywardness, James was still best qualified by dynastic right to succeed to the English throne. When she had fenced with him over his refusal to deal quickly and effectively with the Catholic factions in Scotland, she believed it was only because she had his own best interests at heart. Anne, she imagined, would surely see this, even if he could not.
As the summer of 1590 approached, it seemed to Elizabeth that James had married the right wife after all, and that a fresh chapter was about to open in relations with Scotland, one in which she could finally put to rest her fears about the influence of King Philip and the Jesuits. Such hopes would later prove to be unfounded, but for quite different reasons from those anyone at the time might have supposed.
7. On the Attack