Elizabeth
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A shortage of victuals combined with a disagreement as to the Armada’s final destination sowed further confusion. Was the fleet to undertake the slower, much riskier Atlantic route to Ulster around the west coast of Ireland or the quicker, safer one to the southern coast between Cork and Waterford? If the former, food would be short. If the latter, Águila’s troops would be left with the almost impossible task of marching across the hostile terrain to join up with the rebels.14
As luck would have it, a storm decided the issue by scattering the fleet. Not until the evening of 21 September, after an atrocious journey lasting more than three times longer than anyone had predicted, would Águila make dry land, at Kinsale to the south-west of Cork. By then, he had only 1,700 men and they were on half-rations. After a week, the number rose to 3,400, as the stragglers drifted in. Sir George Carew, a fine soldier and Cecil’s key informant in Ireland, was the closest of Mountjoy’s senior officers to the invading Spaniards and he marched from Cork to assess the threat. Soon Mountjoy followed him. On the 29th, the Lord Deputy rode with a few of his men to reconnoitre the area around the town of Kinsale, which the Spaniards had fortified. It took him a month to pull together his field army but, by the end of October, he had laid siege to the hungry Spaniards with seven thousand men, who would soon be reinforced by two thousand raw conscripts and three hundred cavalry from England, with another three thousand conscripts to follow.15
Tyrone would first try ravaging Leinster in an attempt to force Mountjoy to abandon the siege of Kinsale.16 When that failed, he continued to march southwards, elated to find a new threat ravaging the English ranks – an unidentified zoonotic disease that killed 2,500 soldiers and put 2,000 more out of action. Carew wrote to Cecil in dismay: it was beginning to look as if Mountjoy could end up trapped in a pincer movement between the Spaniards and the Ulstermen with a much-reduced fighting force.17
Carew’s fears proved to be unwarranted. Although Tyrone had almost 10,000 men at his disposal, the Spaniards would dwindle to fewer than 2,500 fit for combat. With his proud soldiers soon thinking themselves lucky to be eating dogs and cats when they could find them, Águila appealed to Tyrone not to delay. And, shortly after dawn on Christmas Eve, the battle began.18 Caught between firm ground and a bog by an English cavalry charge that broke his lines, Tyrone would have no choice but to flee. Seeing that the rebels’ cause was in tatters, the Spaniards declined to sally forth from Kinsale, fearing a massacre. By dusk, a thousand Irish lay dead and eight hundred were wounded, as against only a handful of English.19
• • •
Elizabeth’s last Parliament assembled on Tuesday, 27 October 1601 in the dark shadow of these events. She had summoned Parliament for one reason alone, and that was to secure the ‘subsidies’ (taxes) she needed to continue Mountjoy’s campaign.20 She needed money more desperately now than ever before. Despite her financial accord with the Dutch, the States General had just saddled her with another bill for £385,000 to pay for the auxiliaries who continued to fight for Count Maurice, while Tyrone’s revolt had so far cost her in excess of £1 million. In 1593, as Cecil recalled in a starkly worded memo, Parliament had granted her £486,000. In 1597, it offered almost as much, some £474,000 over three years. All this and more was spent. The queen had paid the difference partly by selling some of her jewels, partly by selling Crown land, partly by imposing forced levies on wealthy foreign merchants.21
When she had summoned Parliament, it was her firm intention that the session should be over by Christmas.22 It would be, but if she thought all would go smoothly, she was mistaken. Barely had the Commons elected John Croke, the new Recorder of London, as their Speaker, when some of the bolder members, weary of struggling to cope with the severe impact of the economic recession in their constituencies, began to complain about abuses of power in high places.23 They would consider the queen’s request for money, they said, but first they expected their grievances to be redressed.24
Mindful of the queen’s desire for speed, Cecil urged members not to trouble themselves ‘with any fantastic speeches or idle bills’, but he was soon forced to eat his words.25 Several speakers protested that the poor had been forced to suffer while venality, embezzlement, tax evasion and bribery thrived among courtiers and the elite. Among other scandals, it had recently come to light that Burghley, while Lord Treasurer, had covered up a whole raft of financial improprieties. One, in the Exchequer, involving the teller Richard Stonely, had cost the queen tens of thousands of pounds. Another, in the Court of Wards, had cost £20,000. A third, probably the largest fraud to be detected, centred around Sir Thomas Sherley, the queen’s treasurer of war in the Netherlands, who was believed to have siphoned off sums approaching £20,000 a year for almost fifteen years to fund his high living and private speculations. When the queen finally caught up with him, he was already bankrupt.26
Ralegh joined those criticizing such abuses. ‘I like not’, he said, ‘that the Spaniards our enemies should know of our selling our pots and pans to pay subsidies. Well may you call it policy . . . but I am sure it argues poverty in the state.’ He then proceeded to attack courtiers and wealthy landowners for tax cheating. Estates worth £3,000 and £4,000, he alleged, were being routinely undervalued by their owners for tax purposes as being worth no more than £30 and £40 – ‘it is not the hundredth part of our wealth.’27
To this, Cecil, himself now known to be one of the courtiers fiddling his taxes, replied evasively:
Touching the Spaniards’ knowing of the sale of our pots or pans, which should be a matter of policy, to which the gentleman on my left hand (Ralegh) took exceptions: I say it’s true; and yet I am mistaken, for I say it is good the Spaniards should know how willing we are to sell our pots and pans and all we have to keep him out. Yet I do not say it is good he should know we do sell them; that is, I would have him know our willingness to sell (though there be no need) but not of our poverty in selling, or of any necessity we have to sell them, which I think none will do, neither shall need to do.28
Members then turned their attention to the explosive issue of Elizabeth’s monopoly grants. While some monopolies took the form of genuine patents or copyrights to protect new inventions or industrial processes, most were designed simply to corner the market in lucrative commodities, causing prices to rocket. Others granted their beneficiaries exclusive rights over certain types of trade that enabled them to extort large payments for the sale of licences to genuine craftsmen. The queen gave these grants as rewards to courtiers or as payments in lieu for services to the Crown. But they were frequently used also to make debt repayments to her creditors or else shamelessly sold to the highest bidder for an annual rent.29
Among the more notorious examples were monopolies for the brewing of beer for export, for the import of currants, for the manufacture of paper, glass, starch, stone pots and bottles, saltpetre or felt hats. Some monopolists controlled the sale and distribution of such essentials as lead, tin, salt, aniseed, vinegar and blubber oil. Others regulated the trades in leather tanning, charcoal burning, the smoking of pilchards, the salting and packing of fish, and so on. Grants Elizabeth had specifically given as rewards to courtiers included Ralegh’s lucrative monopoly on the retail sale of wine and the licensing of vintners, one for the import and sale of certain frequently prescribed drugs given to Dr Lopez and a third for the import, manufacture and sale of playing cards given to Edward Darcy, the groom of her Privy Chamber who had carried her final instructions for Essex’s execution to the Tower.30
The queen’s grants rested exclusively on the royal prerogative, so could not be challenged in the ordinary courts of law without her consent. Over the winter of 1597–8, she had called in some fifteen monopolies for scrutiny after receiving numerous complaints, but nothing was done. Instead, the critics were forced to apologize and plead for their pardon on the grounds that her royal prerogative was ‘the chiefest flower in her garland and the principal and head pearl in her crown�
��.31 The beneficiaries had the strong arm of the Privy Council and the Star Chamber behind them. Shortly before Parliament met in 1601, a test case challenging the lawfulness of Darcy’s monopoly for the sale of playing cards had been filed in the Court of Common Pleas. When Darcy reported this to the queen, she immediately ordered her privy councillors to send a so-called ‘Letter of Assistance’ to Sir Edmund Anderson, the chief justice of the court, ordering him to cease the hearings. The case was stopped in its tracks.32
• • •
The attack on monopolies turned ugly when several members of the House of Commons submitted draft bills to reform them, then demanded to have them read. When the Speaker tried to smother them, tempers flared until finally a bill was allowed to go forward.33 As Francis Moore, a Berkshire lawyer, declared, ‘I cannot utter with my tongue, or conceive with my heart, the great grievances that the town and country for which I serve suffer by some of these monopolies: it bringeth the general profit into a private hand; and the end of all is beggary and bondage to the subject.’ Moore came perilously close in his speech to criticizing the queen: ‘Out of the spirit of humility, Mr Speaker, I do speak it: there is no act of hers that hath been, or is more derogatory to Her own Majesty, or more odious to the subject, or more dangerous to the Commonwealth, than the granting of these monopolies.’34
Richard Martin, a London lawyer and member for Barnstaple, rose in his support. ‘I speak for a town that grieves and pines, and for a country that groaneth under the burden,’ he began. ‘The principal commodities both of my town and country are engrossed into the hands of these bloodsuckers of the Commonwealth.’ ‘What shall become of us’, he asked, when ‘the fruits of our own soil, and the commodities of our own labour, which with the sweat of our brows (even up to the knees in mire and dirt) we have laboured for, shall be taken from us by warrant of Supreme Authority, which the poor subject dares not gainsay?’35
Martin’s speech was echoed time and time again over the next few days. To prick Cecil’s complacency, Sir Robert Wroth, one of the most experienced members of the House, read out a list of the monopolies granted in the last three years. Barely had he begun than a quick-thinking young lawyer, William Hakewill, interjected, ‘Is not bread there?’ ‘No,’ he said at once, answering his own question, ‘but if order be not taken for these, bread will be there before the next Parliament,’ which forced Cecil hurriedly to concede that some change would be essential.36
What made this session of Parliament so sinister in Elizabeth’s eyes, however, was not just what was said in the Commons chamber, but the fact that a noisy public demonstration, one that seemed suspiciously well organized, took place in the lobby outside. Sir Edward Hoby, a member for Rochester – he was one of Cecil’s cousins but no government stooge – complained of ‘a multitude of people at the door who said they were Commonwealth’s men’. These agitators, he said, shouted for members ‘to take compassion of their griefs, they being spoiled, imprisoned and robbed by monopolists’.37
Ordered by the Speaker to disperse, the protesters refused. Sir William Knollys, newly made a privy councillor, was sent to deal with them. As they left the precincts, Cecil stood up in a great passion, demanding, ‘What meaneth this? Shall we suffer it?’ But nobody rose to second him. Finding himself isolated, so united was the House against the monopolists, he had little choice but to sit down again.38
The idea that royal policy could be shaped by popular protests in the streets or demonstrations outside Parliament was Elizabeth’s ultimate nightmare, and yet she now had little choice but to bend if she wanted her taxes for the war in Ireland. But she would bend in her own way. On Wednesday, 25 November, therefore, the Speaker came to the House to deliver a message she had given him. It had come to her attention, she began, that ‘divers patents that she had granted were grievous unto her subjects’. It had, she insisted, never been her intention to allow any grant that was bad in itself. ‘And if in the abuse of her grant, there be anything that is evil . . . she herself would take present order for reformation thereof.’ She meant to do this by issuing a proclamation.39
Cecil rose from his seat again to confirm what the Speaker had just said. To loud cheers, he promised that no more ‘Letters of Assistance’ would be granted. Cleverly slithering into the idioms of his opponents, Cecil now stigmatized the monopolists. ‘Why’, he asked, should anyone seek to ‘give anything in reason for these caterpillars’ satisfaction?’40
Before sitting down, Cecil delivered an impassioned warning to members against allowing what was discussed in Parliament to become known outside the House. ‘I fear’, he remonstrated, ‘we are not secret within ourselves. Then must I needs give you this for a future caution. That whatsoever is subject to public expectation cannot be good, while the Parliament matters are ordinary talk in the street. I have heard myself, being in my coach, these words spoken aloud: “God prosper those that further the overthrow of these monopolies.”’ There were evil men in London, he continued, who ‘would be glad that all sovereignty were converted into popularity’.41
This, undoubtedly, was Elizabeth speaking. Since the beginning of the session, fresh riots had thrown London and Kent into turmoil over military conscription for Ireland, nursing her fears that the embers of Essex’s uprising were still smouldering. For fear of a surprise attack on Whitehall, she had begun carrying a sword inside the palace.42 And now, for the very first time in her life, she was being forced to bow to public pressure and account to Parliament for her actions and those of her courtiers and ministers, and over a matter that she believed belonged exclusively to her royal prerogative.
But all was not yet lost. She planned to satisfy the Commons’ grievances in a purely minimalist way. She neither intended to allow them to continue with their bills to reform monopolies, nor did she intend to promise to make no more grants.
• • •
The queen’s proclamation, published three days later, simply rescinded twelve of the most widely detested monopolies. They included those for starch, salt, vinegar, pots and bottles, blubber oil and the salting and packing of fish. All the rest were to remain in force exactly as they were before. As Cecil had promised, no more ‘Letters of Assistance’ were to be issued. Beyond that, the queen retained the principle of her prerogative power intact: she was free to make as many more grants of monopoly in the future as she chose. If anyone should ‘seditiously or contemptuously’ call that into question, she said, she would enforce her power to the extremity of the law. And that meant a show trial in the Star Chamber.43
In response, the House decided to send the Speaker to her, accompanied by a dozen or so members, to express their thanks for listening to their grievances. Cecil announced that she would receive this deputation on the afternoon of Monday, 30 November. ‘And, if it please you’, she had said, ‘to come with a convenient number of forty, fifty or a hundred, they shall all be welcome.’44
Elizabeth meant to grasp this opportunity with both hands and deliver a speech they, their children and grandchildren would always remember. This was not, however, purely to smooth over the unrest. What most concerned her was that the Commons had not as yet granted her the taxes she so badly needed. To win them over, she would need to sweet-talk their deputation. She found the whole idea of pandering to Parliament utterly repellent, but it would have to be done.
She first sketched out a rough draft of her speech, later sending a handwritten fair copy to Sir Henry Savile, Provost of Eton, with whom she had been reading some Greek texts.45 Then, shortly after three o’clock on Monday afternoon, the eighty or so members of the Commons’ deputation crammed themselves into the Council Chamber at Whitehall. The Speaker began by expressing their gratitude for the recent proclamation. ‘We come not, Sacred Sovereign,’ he began obsequiously, bowing three times, ‘one of ten to render thanks, and the rest to go away unthankful; but all of us . . . do throw down ourselves at the feet of Your Majesty.’46
In reply
, Elizabeth gave her speech, famously known by her biographers as her ‘Golden Speech’. And yet, what exactly she said depends largely on who is reading the sources. Unlike the Tilbury speech, where the differences between the competing versions are less pronounced, this one exists in no fewer than seven radically different texts. Three are from the seventeenth century. One was printed in 1628 during the parliamentary struggle with Charles I over the Petition of Right, when it was intended to be a model of how a ruler should defer to Parliament. Another was reputedly found in the study of William Dell in 1642, when he was secretary to Archbishop Laud.47 A third version, Camden’s in the Annales, is an invention, despite being printed as if it were a verbatim report.48
The text that can be linked most closely to the queen is her own first draft.49 She liked it well enough, once the speech had been delivered, to send it to her official printer, Robert Barker, who published it as a pamphlet emblazoned with the royal arms.50 In that edition, it masquerades as ‘being taken [down] verbatim in writing by A. B. as near as he could possibly set it down’.51 But this is a common literary device and means little – ‘A. B.’ is likely to be a phantom. The only member of the Commons with these initials was Anthony Blagrave, an obscure country gentleman, and member for Reading.52
Surprisingly, the language of this officially published text is leaden rather than golden. Unlike Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury, it retains the royal ‘we’ until just over halfway through, rather than slipping colloquially into the first person singular from the outset. The style is ornate and old-fashioned. ‘As nothing is more dear to us than the loving conservation of our subjects’ hearts,’ she begins, ‘we trust there resides in their conceits of us no such simple cares of their good whom we so dearly prize that our hand should pass aught that might injure any, though they doubt not it is lawful for our kingly state to grant gifts of sundry sorts to whom we make election.’ Things barely improve as she gets into her stride. ‘You must not beguile yourselves, nor wrong us’, she continues, ‘to think that the glozing [gilded, flattering] lustre of a glittering glory of a king’s title may so extol us that we think all is lawful what we list, not caring what we do.’53