by John Guy
This was hardly a glowing testimonial but, on Burghley’s advice, Essex swallowed his pride and wrote at once to thank the queen for her ‘gracious letter to the king in my behalf’.69 Aware that Burghley had played a prominent part in his nomination through his dealings with Beauvoir and in his daily audiences with the queen, Essex continued to show him ostentatious deference and respect.70 Unfortunately, after the Earl arrived in France, not even Burghley would be able to rescue him from an imbroglio that would surpass even that of Drake and Norris in Portugal. And when the newly chosen queen’s Lieutenant returned to Court, he would find a disquietingly changed landscape, one that he came increasingly to resent and would strive with his whole being to disrupt.
A whole new phase was about to begin, one in which, step by step, the lines would begin to be laid down for a deadly, destructive feud between Essex and his rivals. And Elizabeth would be unable to stop it.
8. The Visible Queen
When on Elizabeth’s Accession Day in 1590 Essex had made his dramatic entrance into the tiltyard in a chariot driven by a coachman dressed as ‘gloomy Time’, the mise en scène was meant to glorify the watching queen. Based on a well-known scene in Petrarch’s I Trionfi, a standard allegorical sequence in Renaissance pageantry, the message was that carnal Love is overcome by Chastity, and Death itself by Fame, Time and Eternity.1
The celebrations in 1590 saw the idea of the Virgin Queen, first tentatively glimpsed in the Norwich entertainments scripted in 1578 by Thomas Churchyard, move towards a fully fledged ‘cult’ of Gloriana. Sir Henry Lee, the chief theatrical impresario of the tilts, who within two years would commission the famous ‘Ditchley Portrait’ of Elizabeth, in which a comparatively lifelike image of a fast-ageing monarch was successfully wedded to an icon of cosmic power, had decided to retire.2 As his replacement, the queen had chosen the younger, dapper, fitter Earl of Cumberland, who had brought the news of the Armada’s defeat to Tilbury. Lee staged a magnificent closing ceremony to mark his departure, one that sought to deify the post-menopausal queen both as a ‘Vestal Virgin’ and a goddess incarnate. As a vestal maiden she could be both pure and sexually alluring, but as a goddess she was a ‘Virgin Mother’, a second Madonna, ‘whom neither time nor age can wither’.3
Lee’s inspiration was a recently established portrait type of Elizabeth holding a sieve, of which the most explicit realization is a version found rolled up in an attic in the Palazzo Reale, Siena, in 1895. Based on a face pattern taken from a chalk drawing done from life by the Italian Mannerist Federico Zuccari during a visit to London in 1574, the ‘Siena Portrait’ was commissioned in 1583 by Sir Christopher Hatton from a Flemish artist, Quentin Metsys the Younger. (Hatton makes a cameo appearance in a small courtly scene in the upper-right-hand corner of the painting, wearing his distinctive white hind badge on his cloak.)4
The sieve was a well-known emblem of virginity. When her chastity was questioned, one of the Roman vestal virgins, the beautiful Tuccia, had proved her purity by carrying water in a sieve from the Tiber to the Vestal Virgin Temple in the Roman Forum without spilling a single drop. Lee’s achievement was to interweave this theme with the idea of Elizabeth’s quasi-divinity. In his version of the story, Tuccia’s victory over her sexuality became a victory over the Fall and its consequences, even over death itself. Elizabeth’s motto was Semper Eadem, ‘Always one and the same’. Now, Lee would give that motto an entirely fresh spin.
As the closing ceremony began, Lee moved slowly forward towards the open-air gallery in which the queen sat with her god-daughter Aletheia, ready to surrender his staff of office and armour to Cumberland. To the sound of ravishingly sweet music played and sung by Robert Hales, the queen’s favourite lutenist, a trapdoor opened in the floor before them to reveal a pavilion formed from a hundred yards of white taffeta, rising, as if by enchantment, from the void. An exact scale model of the Vestal Virgin Temple, operated by hidden clockwork and complete with what looked like columns of porphyry, the pavilion was round, with oil lamps burning before an altar bedecked with the finest cloth of gold. By the door of the pavilion stood a crowned pillar entwined with eglantine, from which was suspended a placard inscribed in golden letters with a Latin prayer ‘Of Eliza’ composed by Lee:
Pious, powerful, most blessed of virgins, defender of faith, peace and nobility, to whom God, the stars and Virtue have a devotion exceeding every other. After so many years, so many jousts, this old knight, his soul prostrate at your feet, fastens on his sacred armour. He prays, by the blood of his Redeemer, that you might have a life of peace, empire, fame, eternity, immortality. You have moved the farther column of the Temple of Hercules. A crown surpassing all other crowns, for she to whom the heavens most happily bestowed a crown at birth, will, on her death, be borne beatified into heaven.5
Everything in this ceremony interlocked. In Italian Renaissance iconography, the crowned pillar beside the temple door stood for chastity, fortitude and empire, and eglantine for virginity. On the altar were ‘certain princely gifts’ which three vestal virgins, clad all in white, presented to the queen. As the Roman poet Horace had made plain, these maidens were synonymous with the safety and longevity of the City of Rome.
Lee’s choreography, taken from an Italian theatrical handbook by Vincenzo Cartari, rested on the assumption that, when the Temple of Vesta was founded, four virgins were chosen. Now, the fourth and most celebrated of them all, Tuccia with her sieve, was to be Elizabeth herself.6
Lee knew his queen. She had no difficulty in understanding and appreciating the abstruse imagery in this spectacular entertainment. Lee adored Elizabeth and genuinely sought to honour her, but his sycophantic iconography would soon be cynically exploited by younger courtiers in the hope of advancing their careers. The promise of gaining offices, perquisites and grants of land was well worth the effort of hypocritically flattering an ageing spinster.
• • •
In the spring of 1591, Elizabeth began to plan the route for her most grandiose summer progress since a tour of East Anglia she had undertaken with Leicester in 1578. Besides leisure and recreation, her aim was to make herself visible to friends and foes alike, while saving money, since it was the ‘privilege’ of hosts to entertain their queen in style. At the same time, her privy councillors could investigate issues of concern in each locality at first hand.7
Conventionally, these itineraries began a week or two after the hay harvest in May, when the roads were dry and there would be enough food for the queen and her courtiers’ many horses. They ended a fortnight or so before the law courts at Westminster reopened for business in the first week of October. Distances travelled were restricted for practical reasons: Elizabeth and her nobles rode in coaches pulled by six horses capable of moving up to 400lbs over makeshift tracks or highways pitted with deep potholes. She took her own bed, tapestries, bed hangings and linen, gold and silver plate, household goods and cookery utensils with her everywhere she went. These, and her courtiers’ vast quantities of luggage and the clothes, tents and equipment needed by a small army of her servants were transported on up to three hundred carts. As a result, rarely could the royal entourage travel more than ten or twelve miles per day.8
The queen’s grandfather, Henry VII, had gone as far north as Lincoln, Nottingham and York on his first and most ambitious progress in 1486, and as far west as Gloucester and Bristol. Her father, accompanied by an even larger retinue, had paid a visit to York in 1541, but Elizabeth never crossed the River Trent. At various times she intended to go to York, and also to Ludlow on the borders of Wales, but the furthest north she ever reached was Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire in 1566 and Chartley in Staffordshire in 1575.
When travelling between his network of palaces and hunting lodges, Henry VIII would rely on the monasteries to provide him and his entourage with overnight lodgings. After he expelled the monks and seized their lands between 1536 and 1540, he stayed at the houses of the nobility and gentr
y, a policy Elizabeth followed. It was considered to be a great honour to entertain the monarch: Hatton would wait almost twenty years in vain for the woman he called his ‘holy saint’ to visit his palatial mansion at Holdenby in Northamptonshire.9 But it was also ruinously expensive, costing a minimum of £1,000 a week. Apart from the vast quantities of beef, lamb, veal, game, fish, wine, beer and other victuals of all types needed to feed the hungry courtiers and their servants, costly gifts and rewards had to be presented to the queen and her principal officers. And in the evenings, candlelit masques and pageants were expected, followed by exotic banquets replete with sweet white wine and sugar candies in the shape of everything from mermaids, lions and pigeons to drummers, forts and vipers.
If Elizabeth decided to go hunting, the costs could substantially increase. While staying at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire in 1574, she had spitefully decided to humiliate her host, Henry, Lord Berkeley, with whom Leicester had quarrelled. She particularly loathed Berkeley’s wife, Katherine, the sister of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, who had been executed in 1572 after the Ridolfi Plot. Katherine had made the serious mistake of bludgeoning her henpecked husband into outbidding the queen for a lute of mother-of-pearl that both women coveted. Piqued by the mere sight of the Berkeleys once she arrived at their castle, Elizabeth went out hunting in their deer park and, instead of shooting a token number of her host’s stags, as was the polite custom, she slaughtered his entire herd. Faced with such losses, Berkeley had no option but to convert the land to other uses as soon as she and her courtiers had departed, as he could not afford to restock it with deer.10
• • •
In early May 1591, Elizabeth took herself off to Burghley’s estate at Theobalds, where she stayed for ten days. Once a manor house surrounded by a moat, the property had been transformed over twenty years of building works into one of the grandest stately homes in England. Burghley had purchased it in 1564, partly to create an estate for his younger son, Robert Cecil, since Burghley House, near Stamford, the family’s principal ancestral seat – it, too, had been totally rebuilt – was earmarked for Robert’s elder, less talented brother, Thomas.
Theobalds advertised Burghley’s wealth and power; above all, his position as the queen’s chief and longest-serving adviser. Complete with a grand Italian-style stone loggia adjoining the Great Hall with tower staircases at either end, the living accommodation consisted of three principal courts, the finest and innermost of them named the Conduit, or Fountain Court. A near-perfect quadrangle with four square towers, this was where the recently completed state apartments intended for Elizabeth’s use could be found.11
Burghley had created two superlative gardens at Theobalds: a Great Garden, its most remarkable feature an Italianate grotto coated on the inside with shimmering metallic ore and studded with crystals; and a Privy Garden, complete with neo-classical arcades, fountains, pools and water courses, even a ‘great sea’ with an island graced with a swan’s nest at its summit. The secret weapon of his head gardener, John Gerard, was the hothouse, of which there were many, filled with exotic plants and shrubs shipped in from places as far away as Brazil, Peru and Japan. Thanks to Gerard, Burghley could enjoy multiple varieties of roses, carnations and pinks, along with oleander, yucca and hibiscus plants grown from seed. He imported orange, lemon and pomegranate trees from southern Europe, and Burghley (not Ralegh, as legend has it) would be the first man in England to serve Elizabeth with a dish of sweet potatoes, home grown from New World seed.12
Arriving on 10 May, Elizabeth was greeted with a pageant and shown to her apartments. These included a vast new Presence Chamber, sixty feet in length and thirty wide, with a jewelled fountain from which fresh water gushed into ‘a large circular bowl or basin supported by two savages’. On the ceiling were the signs of the zodiac, beneath which the sun and planets rotated, driven by a (silent) mechanical device. Around the walls were replicas of trees with birds’ nests hidden in their branches, so artfully contrived that when Burghley’s steward opened the windows to let in the fresh air, real birds flew into the room, perched themselves on the branches and began to sing.13
Burghley, his beard and hair now white, had gone to such vast expense because this was no ordinary visit by the queen. He was seventy-one and horribly overworked: ever since Walsingham’s death, he had craved retirement. So frequent and painful had his attacks of gout now become, he was regularly confined to bed, unable to travel, or even sometimes to write, for two or three days on end. He had to ride around his gardens on a mule to admire the ornamental trees and plants.14 But before he could retire, he wanted to secure a leading role at Court, preferably as Walsingham’s successor, for his twenty-eight-year-old son Robert, who was married to the queen’s god-daughter Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Lord and Lady Cobham. (That had been a wise marriage as much for Burghley as for Robert, since the Cobhams were among the chief minister’s most dependable allies in Elizabeth’s Privy Council and Bedchamber.)15 With the Earl of Essex’s efforts to thrust William Davison into Walsingham’s vacant position thwarted, the door seemed open for Robert.
To advance his suit, Burghley worked hand in glove with his son and a hired poet to devise the pageant to greet the queen on her arrival. When she reached the gates of Theobalds, an ‘actor’ dressed as a Hermit stepped forward. ‘I am a Hermit’, he declared, ‘that this ten years space/ have led a solitary and retired life/ here in my cell, not past three furlongs hence.’ He spoke a ‘Welcome’ in blank verse, playfully explaining how Burghley was no longer able to receive the queen himself, as he had retired to a hermit’s cell on account of his worldly grief and cares. Instead, he had yielded pride of place to his son Robert. ‘Therefore, I wish for my good founder’s sake’, the actor concluded, ‘That he [Robert] may live with his first-born son/ Long time to serve Your Sacred Majesty/As his grandfather faithfully hath done.’16
As Burghley knew all too well, Elizabeth hated surprises, so he had warned her to expect something along these lines. Unfortunately for the ailing statesman, forewarned is forearmed: she was afflicted by one of her recurrent migraines during this visit, so answered the actor with a prepared speech of her own in the form of a mock ‘charter’, giving full vent to her own peculiar brand of sardonic humour. Read aloud on her behalf, the ‘charter’ addressed the Hermit as ‘the disconsolate and retired Sprite, the hermit of Theobalds’, with the clear implication that her message was aimed less at the ‘actor’ than at Burghley – ‘Sprite’, meaning ‘Spirit’, was a pun on her chief minister’s nickname. Taking the form of a legal judgement in the Court of Chancery, the gist was that the actor-hermit should retire to his cell, ‘too good for the forsaken, too bad for our worthily beloved Councillor’, and Burghley should return to his post. She had no intention of allowing him to retire. For all their many differences over the years, she preferred to keep working with the devil she knew. As queen, she would have to soldier on to the end, and she saw no reason why he should not do the same. It was the price he would have to pay for the many benefits he had enjoyed for so long.17
All the same, age and experience had brought a high degree of mutual respect to them both. Elizabeth did, accordingly, grant Burghley something of what he asked for. After breakfast on the final day of her stay, she knighted Robert Cecil, a move generally taken to mean that, before long, she would advance him to the Privy Council, if not quite yet to Walsingham’s more senior position of principal secretary, for which she clearly thought him too inexperienced. That did not stop Burghley, who had to continue to share the load of much of Walsingham’s former role with Hatton, from continuing to drop the broadest of hints. As a prelude to the ceremony in which Robert was dubbed a knight, he arranged for a second pageant, in which a postman carrying letters for the queen from the Emperor of China knocked at the door and asked for ‘Mr Secretary Cecil’.18
• • •
Elizabeth decided that from July to September she would tour Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire
with a view to a possible rendezvous with Henry IV in Portsmouth, if Burghley could arrange it. By 10 July, Lord Hunsdon, whom she had made her Lord Chamberlain in 1585, was busy organizing the stops she would make along the way.19 On the 19th, she visited Burghley’s house on the Strand to watch Essex parade his cavalry before departing for France.20 Then she moved the Court to Nonsuch, in readiness for the first of the more extended visits she would make this year.
On 2 August, the day before she left Nonsuch for Sir William More’s house at Loseley in Surrey, Elizabeth admitted Robert Cecil to the Privy Council. In the end, it was Hatton’s intervention that brought this about. Described by Sir Henry Unton in a letter from Dover as Cecil’s ‘chiefest undertaker’, Hatton had been lobbying the queen on his behalf for several months in the hope of winning her round.21
After a brief stop at Farnham, the queen reached her first major destination, Viscount Montague’s house at Cowdray in Sussex, on the 14th. There, she would be entertained in several hastily landscaped garden settings for six days, but all was not quite what it appeared to be. Her motive for the stay, normally taken by her biographers as a vote of confidence in her host, was in fact closer to the opposite. Her marginalization of Montague, one of the most prominent Catholics in the realm and a man at the centre of a clandestine network of those loyal to the old faith, had begun as early as 1559, when he had made a defiant speech in Parliament attacking Burghley’s proposals to dismantle Mary Tudor’s reunion with Rome and replacing it with a Protestant Religious Settlement.22 The gulf had widened in 1570 after the Northern Rising and the pope’s decree declaring the queen to be excommunicated and deposed, when all Catholic peers were viewed by her with the greatest suspicion. By carefully distancing himself from the Jesuits and by regularly accompanying Elizabeth in procession to chapel at one or other of her palaces (although he never stayed for the services), Montague had warded off disaster. But he occupied a no-man’s-land. As a pro-Spanish peer who was an outspoken critic of the Dutch, his position further deteriorated after 1585, when he was dismissed from his leadership role in county government.23