by John Guy
Elizabeth arrived at Cowdray ‘with a great train’ at eight o’clock precisely on Saturday evening, just in time to frustrate the illicit weekly Mass that Montague allowed to be celebrated in his private chapel for the Catholic members of his household and others living nearby. She was greeted by loud music and a pageant in which one of the Viscount’s retainers, clad in armour and standing between two gatekeepers ‘carved out of wood’, made a speech comparing the walls of Cowdray to the walls of Thebes. The retainer held a club in one hand and a golden key in the other. The choreography was a scaled-down version of a show Leicester had put on in 1575 for Elizabeth at Kenilworth, when she had famously been welcomed by a ‘gatekeeper’ dressed as Hercules, who had at first attempted to deny her entry but then yielded to her ‘rare beauty and princely countenance’, handing over both his club and his key. Montague’s gatekeeper acted rather differently: he relinquished his key but held firmly on to his club. Whether this was just a faux pas on the man’s part or whether the Viscount deliberately meant to signal to the queen that he was far from powerless and deserved to be treated with greater respect has been debated ever since.24
After rising late on Sunday morning, Elizabeth ate a hearty breakfast of roast fowl and beef; her entourage managed to get through three oxen and 140 geese just for this one meal. The next day, she went hunting in the park with the Viscount’s sister Mabel. Both women shot with a crossbow from a stand at deer herded into a fenced enclosure, while serenaded by singers who performed verses set to music in the background. The verses flattered the queen as the ‘goddess and monarch of this happy Isle’ whose ‘eyes are arrows, though they seem to smile.’
Behold her locks like wires of beaten gold,
Her eyes like stars that twinkle in the sky,
Her heavenly face not framed of earthly mould,
Her voice that sounds Apollo’s melody,
The miracle of time, the whole world’s story,
Fortune’s queen, Love’s treasure, Nature’s glory.25
The highlight of the queen’s stay came later in the week. On Wednesday, in the cool of the evening, she strolled through the gardens to the sound of sweet music and was led to a ‘goodly fishpond’, where she saw an actor dressed as an ‘angler’ engaging in a fierce debate with a second ‘fisherman’ about the evils of society. Following a tirade from the ‘angler’ against unscrupulous London merchants and rack-renting landlords, the second ‘fisherman’ praised the queen as a goddess whose ‘virtue doth make envy blush’, after which he loyally laid all the fish of the pond at her feet.26 On Thursday, she and her courtiers feasted, seated in the ‘privy walks’ and ‘alleyways’ of the gardens, the queen served at a separate table while her courtiers ate together at a table forty-eight yards long.27 Once the plates were cleared, a group of ‘country people’ – largely Montague’s tenants – danced before her until dusk ‘in a pleasant dance with tabor [small drum] and pipe’. In an intriguing breach of protocol, the Viscount joined in, a move clearly meant to paint him as no ‘carp’ or rack-renter but as an old-fashioned aristocrat whose ‘good lordship’ made him a pillar of his local community.28
When Elizabeth departed early on Friday morning, heading for Portsmouth, all seemed to be well. She even instructed Lord Admiral Howard to knight Montague’s second son and son-in-law before she left. But, conspicuously, two rising Sussex gentry were knighted at the same ceremony, zealous Protestants who, unlike the Viscount’s kinsmen, would be sworn in as county magistrates within the year, completing Montague’s political eclipse.29
Behind closed doors at Cowdray, the Privy Council had agreed the texts of two of the harshest royal proclamations against Catholics of Elizabeth’s reign.30 When finally published in October, they would trigger a purge of prominent individuals, male and female, nobleman or commoner, suspected of sheltering or protecting Jesuits and seminary priests or smuggling them in or out of the country. Such ‘venomous vipers’ – Montague and his extended family had provided safe-houses for Catholic priests for many years – were no longer merely to pay their now hefty monthly fines for failing to attend church (these fines had been increased by Parliament in 1581 to £20 a month), they were to be locked up in prison as ‘the abettors and maintainers of traitors’.31
Reflecting on the queen’s stay after her departure, Montague remarked wryly, ‘It hath been told Her Majesty that it was dangerous coming for her to my house, and she was advised at her peril to take heed how she came to me to Cowdray this summer past.’32 In fact, no sooner had the courtiers left than the vultures pounced. Within weeks, Burghley would receive a letter from a shady informer, one ‘Robert Hammond alias Harrison’, who boasted how he had infiltrated the Viscount’s retinue, only to find many Catholics there ‘whose secret malice to Her Majesty and [the] State I can well witness’. Hammond offered to testify for the queen, and soon royal commissioners would be nominated for the county of Sussex, who were to interrogate under oath all those suspected of infringing the new proclamations and report their findings to Burghley. Escape for Montague came just in the nick of time, when he died of natural causes at the age of sixty-three a week after the two proclamations were published.33
• • •
Around eight o’clock in the evening on 26 August, Elizabeth reached Portsmouth, where she hoped to rendezvous with Henry IV for at least a few hours.34 But she would be disappointed. After waiting in vain for two full days, she rode out in her coach to view the Downs from a specially constructed platform, then moved five miles north to Southwick. From there, she went on to examine the fortifications at Porchester Castle, before at last abandoning hope of a meeting and setting out for Southampton. Once there, she terrified her privy councillors by emphatically announcing that on 6 September she would make an impromptu visit ‘with very few’ of her attendants to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, sailing across the choppy waters of the Solent in a pinnace. To Burghley’s immense relief, she changed her mind the night before.35
Gradually retracing her steps and on something of a whim, Elizabeth made a three-night stay at the Earl of Hertford’s house at Elvetham in Hampshire, arriving in the late afternoon of Monday, 20 September. Despite having barely six weeks’ notice of her arrival, Hertford was determined to receive her in princely style.36 As with her visit to Cowdray, the queen’s motives deserve close scrutiny. A royal visit to Elvetham was fraught with hazard for Hertford, since the place was never his principal home, merely one of several smaller manor houses he happened to own, set in grounds ‘of no great receipt’ and without a deer park. In fact, all of the facilities needed for the lodging and entertainment of a vast royal entourage were lacking.37
Although he was one of Burghley’s protégés and a staunch Protestant, Hertford was deeply suspect. Shortly before Christmas 1560, he had secretly married Katherine Grey, sister of the ill-fated Jane Grey and the next of the so-called ‘Suffolk’ line with a claim to the throne under Henry VIII’s last will. Katherine owned up to the marriage in August 1561, by which time she was heavily pregnant. In a fury, the queen sent the couple to the Tower, where their elder son, Edward, Lord Beauchamp, was born and a second son, Thomas, conceived, despite strict royal instructions to their gaoler that the couple be kept apart. In 1562, their marriage was annulled and their children declared illegitimate (and thus barred from the succession) by Archbishop Parker, who had reluctantly investigated the case at the queen’s command. The annulment, pronounced in the Court of Arches, was justified on the technical grounds that the officiating clergyman could no longer be found and that the one witness to the wedding other than him was now dead. Urged on by the queen, the Court of Star Chamber fined Hertford the punitive sum of £15,000 the following year for his presumption in ‘deflowering’ a royal virgin.38
In 1571, three years after Katherine had starved herself to death while held in isolation under closely guarded house arrest, Hertford was partially rehabilitated and his fine reduced. He was
allowed to return to Court, where he fell in love with Frances, sister of Lord Admiral Howard and sister-in-law of Kate Carey. For almost seven years they would secretly live together. In 1585, after a number of failed attempts, Howard successfully interceded with Elizabeth on his sister’s behalf. ‘Many persuasions she used against marriage,’ the happy bride-to-be informed her betrothed when given the good news, saying also ‘how little you would care for me’.39 But despite briefly promising to do what she could for Hertford, the queen was only marginally less grudging about his second marriage than about the first.
Once made aware that Elizabeth would stay at Elvetham, Hertford and his wife lost no time in setting three hundred labourers to work preparing the house and its grounds for the royal visit. In just over a month they turned the estate into the equivalent of a film set. To house the courtiers, some twenty-two temporary (mainly timber) structures of various kinds were hastily erected and decorated with boughs and flowers, notably a ‘room of estate’ for the nobles and a large hall ‘for entertainment of knights, ladies and gentlemen of chief account’. For the queen herself, an elaborate walled annexe with its own courtyard and a separate wardrobe building were constructed, with a ‘long bower’ attached to it for her guards.40
Outdoors, an Arcadian scene was created through a mixture of hasty landscaping and illusion. At its heart was a huge artificial lake, freshly dug in the shape of a crescent moon and surrounded by potted trees and foliage. Large enough to encompass three islands, a pinnace and several smaller boats, the lake was five hundred feet wide. According to an official description later printed for Hertford and sold in London – complete with a woodcut illustration of the lake – the islands alone had a combined surface area of ten thousand square feet.41
The lake was to be the stage for an ingenious water pageant, although the spectacle was almost spoiled by torrential rain. Fortunately, the sky lightened at the last minute and the rain stopped. After dining in her ‘room of estate’, Elizabeth came down to the lake, where actors dressed as the gods of woods and waters first declaimed cringingly fawning verses, then engaged in a farcical mock-battle in which they either somersaulted into the water or were ducked. Afterwards, Elizabeth (now addressed as ‘sacred Sybil’) was called upon to christen a ship that would sail in Her Majesty’s name and ‘attempt a golden fleece’.42
All this was said to be in honour of Cynthia, or Phoebe (or Belphoebe, as Spenser calls her in The Faerie Queene). Both were alternative names for the moon goddess Diana. Cynthia, now extolled as ‘the wide Ocean’s Empress’, was commonly represented by a crescent moon, hence the shape of the lake. In classical literature the moon was firmly linked with virginity, sexual allure and female power. During the Middle Ages it became a standard motif in the iconography of the Virgin Mary and a symbol of the Immaculate Conception.43
The controlling idea of the ‘lake’ entertainment was that Cynthia’s worth ‘breeds wonder; wonder holy fear;/ And holy fear unfeigned reverence’.44 Elizabeth is ‘Beauty’s queen’. Her lunar power can excite erotic desire: in this context, she is the sexually provocative Venus, who (according to one version of the myth) was born from the severed genitals of Uranus that were cast into the sea. But she is also Gloriana, invested, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, with the sun-like brightness of majesty. In this mode, she is a ‘second sun’, whose warmth fuels a golden age free from storms, doubts and fears, like the Woman Clothed with the Sun in the Book of Revelation, who has the moon under her feet and a crown of seven stars on her head. As an actor in the pageant declaimed:
What second sun hath rays so bright,
To cause this unacquainted light?
Tis fair Eliza’s matchless grace,
Who with her beams doth bless this place.45
As Gloriana, Cynthia and Venus all rolled into one, therefore, Elizabeth guarantees Elysium and at the same time both sparks and freezes erotic desire. Transcending age and time, she combines an idyll of eternal happiness with perfect love and perfect chastity in a mystically divine union.46
• • •
On the penultimate day of her stay, Elizabeth was awoken at nine o’clock in the morning by three musicians dressed in rustic attire who sang a May Day greenwood ditty outside her window. In the afternoon, she watched a game of five-a-side volleyball. Later that evening, she was treated to a breathtaking firework display, followed by a sumptuous ‘banquet’ of white wine and sugar candy, served in a gallery in the garden lit by a hundred torches.47
On Thursday morning, once Elizabeth was fully dressed and made up, a spellbinding masque was performed in a privy garden below her apartments that may have been an inspiration for Titania’s scenes in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After a fanfare of cornets, the Fairy Queen and her acolytes appeared. Dancing before Elizabeth, they offered their homage, after which the fairies sang a six-part song accompanied by a lute and a consort of viols:
Eliza is the fairest Queen
That ever trod upon this green.
Eliza’s eyes are blessed stars,
Inducing peace, subduing wars.
Eliza’s hand is crystal bright,
Her words are balm, her looks are light.
Eliza’s breast is that fair hill,
Where virtue dwells, and sacred skill,
O blessed be each day and hour,
Where sweet Eliza builds her bower.
So delighted was Elizabeth by this performance, she twice asked for it to be repeated.48
Shortly afterwards, she climbed into her carriage, and the royal entourage began its weary journey back to the capital. As she passed by the lake on the way out, she was met by a poet who delivered farewell verses. ‘For how can summer stay, when the sun departs?’ was his constant refrain.49
For their sheer extravagance and variety, the Elvetham pageants surpassed any other entertainments on Elizabeth’s summer progresses, apart from the awesome spectacles Leicester had laid on for her at Kenilworth. On that famous occasion, an entire village had to be demolished to make way for the construction of a vast artificial lake, and dozens of workmen toiled for weeks, applying a special gum to the needle-like leaves of thousands of rosemary plants so they could be individually coated with gold leaf to glint in the torchlight.50
Hertford’s hospitality and building works, whose combined costs exceeded £6,000 (£6 million today), were a triumph. And yet he gained nothing for his trouble. At their parting, the queen had assured him that ‘his entertainment was so honourable, as hereafter he should find the reward thereof in her special favour.’51 If her intention had been to make him and his wife feel inconsequential, he had overcome the challenge in style. But neither honours nor rewards ensued. On the contrary, to Burghley’s dismay, she would put Hertford back in the Tower within four years on suspicion of reviving his family’s claim to the throne, leaving his wife Frances – ‘very meanly attired’ and said to have gone ‘stark mad’ – begging Elizabeth for mercy at the outer door of the privy lodgings at Whitehall Palace but refused an audience.52 This time, her brother and her sister-in-law could not help her; only later did Elizabeth write Frances a letter reassuring her that she did not regard her husband’s offence as ‘more pernicious [and] malicious than as an act of lewd and proud contempt against our own direct prohibition’. She addressed Frances in familiar terms as ‘Good Francke’, but how comforting that was to a distraught wife she left entirely to the imagination.53
This was indeed a visible queen, but a visible queen with bite; an ageing one maybe, but one keen to show that she was still very much in control. And no one, from long-serving councillors to lesser courtiers, would ever be allowed to forget it.
9. The Enemy Within
On Monday, 6 July 1590, after returning to Greenwich in her coach from a three-day stay at Lord Chancellor Hatton’s London house at Ely Place, Elizabeth, decidedly jittery about the issue she was about to broach, wrote a lette
r in her very best handwriting to James VI in Edinburgh:
Let me warn you that there is risen, both in your realm and mine, a sect of perilous consequence, such as would have no kings but a presbytery and take our place while they enjoy our privilege with a shade [i.e. with the colour, with the pretence] of God’s Word, which none is judged to follow right without by their censure they be so deemed. Yea, look we well unto them. When they have made in our people’s hearts a doubt of our religion and that we err if they say so, what perilous issue this may make I rather think than mind to write.1
Elizabeth had been rattled by Hatton’s report to her of the existence of a highly organized group of Protestant sectaries who called themselves presbyterians. They had not merely dared to criticize her Religious Settlement, they had set out to replace it with a more radically Calvinist alternative. In her opinion, these so-called divines, all second-generation Calvinists, many of them trained or inspired by Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at the academy in Geneva, were heretic schismatics who threatened the values of God-appointed monarchy. Just as much as Philip II and the pope, they sought to turn loyal subjects into traitors.
The presbyterians’ chief distinguishing tenet was their belief that the church should be governed on a quasi-democratic basis by pastors, doctors, elders and deacons elected by their congregations, and that all ministers of the Gospel were of equal status. For them, no place existed in the church hierarchy for the queen as the ‘Supreme Governor of the Church’, as the 1559 Settlement had established, or even for archbishops and bishops. Such opinions, Elizabeth claimed, would turn the church into a social leveller, subverting her authority.