While old men who failed to calibrate age and sexuality were judged severely, aging queens elicited more generous responses then than now. Modern scholars often encourage contempt for Elizabeth I by emphasizing the delusional quality of her feminine vanity. The discrepancy between the queen’s actual age and her apparent age in famous portraits forms a cornerstone of these arguments, which derive from Sir Roy Strong’s observation that this “withered, vain old lady of seventy” was painted with an “astoundingly rejuvenated face.”42 Like Christopher Martin, I think the focus on “the ‘mask of Youth’ convention” has “come to overdetermine modern judgments.”43 The adjective “vain,” with its implications not just of excessive pride but also of futility, recurs with such frequency that it has become an epithet.44 Yet, Janet Arnold demonstrates, the hard evidence fails to substantiate this charge: “the story of Elizabeth’s vast wardrobe turns out to be one of careful budgeting and good organization, not wild extravagance and vanity.”45 And if Elizabeth’s “visual . . . rhetoric” sometimes did endow her with the “mask of youth,” her verbal rhetoric conveyed a different picture, acknowledging and taking pride in her age.46 In response to a 1586 parliamentary petition urging the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth finds that she has “lived many years” but that after “twenty-eight years’ reign I do not perceive any diminition of my subjects’ good love and affection towards me.” In such moments, she construed her advancing age as an asset.47
Indeed, Elizabeth routinely and with evident self-satisfaction called attention to the length of her reign. Her correspondence with male suitors often refers to her age. She self-deprecatingly describes herself to the Duke of Alençon as “the poor old woman who honors you”; she threateningly reminds James VI of Scotland that “we old foxes can find shifts to save ourselves by others’ malice”; she gently admonishes the Earl of Essex that “eyes of youth have sharp sights, but commonly not so deep as those of elder age.”48 Elizabeth also deployed her age to rhetorical purpose with foreign dignitaries, including the Polish Ambassador whom she rebuked in Latin for his—and his king’s—youthful presumption. This particular occasion in 1597 prompted much admiration from English courtiers. Montrose cites the line about how “the Queen was cankered, and that her mind had become as crooked as her carcass,” attributed to the Earl of Essex by his rival Sir Walter Ralegh, as evidence of contempt for the aging Elizabeth.49 Here is Essex, on the same body and mind, in a different tone: “what a princely triumph she had of [the Polish ambassador] by her magnanimous, wise and eloquent answer! . . . And sure her majesty is made of the same stuff of which the ancients believed their heroes to be formed: that is, her mind of gold, her body of brass . . . when other metals break and rust and lose both form and color, she holds her own—her own pure colors which no other of nature can match or of art imitate.”50 Essex’s assertion that other metals would have rusted by now references Elizabeth’s advanced age, even as it records her transcendence of it. We are here in the realm of Lyly’s Cynthia, “a mistress of ripe years and infinite virtues, great honours and unspeakable beauty . . . whom time cannot touch because she is divine” (1.1.59–67). Such paradoxical praise acknowledges the queen’s age, only to dismiss it as irrelevant to the force of her charisma, conveying an altogether different reaction to Elizabeth’s aging than do the more frequently quoted statements, which involve either the fictitious suppression of her age or the contemptuous insistence on it.
The latter are not representative of what we might call more immediate reactions to the queen.51 To be sure, her courtiers were well aware that “despite the majestie and gravitie of a scepter, borne 44 yeare,” it pleased the queen “to be told, that shee looked younge.” When, in 1596, Bishop Rudd, calculating her age at sixty-three, “enterlard[ed]” his sermon with “some passages of Scripture, that touche the infirmities of Age,” she was not pleased with his “arithmetick.” Elizabeth recovered quickly, though, and found “the good bishop was deceaved in supposing she was so decayed in her limbs and senses, as himselfe, perhaps, and others of that age are wont to be.”52 Her contemporaries bore frequent witness to her extraordinary vitality; in 1600, the hunting queen, intent on killing “many stags and bucks,” challenged her attendants because her “body endures more travel that they can.”53 Most contemptuous comments about Elizabeth’s age are mediated by distance (the exiled Allen’s tract), time (famous comments made by Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Godfrey Goodman, or John Clapham after her death), or third parties (the words that Ralegh and others attributed to Essex).54 While Elizabeth’s death may have licensed a franker discussion of the depredations that age had inflicted, these posthumous anecdotes also show a tendency toward revisionism, influenced perhaps by the events surrounding Essex’s rebellion. Although Elizabeth’s age exacerbated concerns about the succession, it does not seem to have inspired contempt until the “troubles” with Essex “waste[d] her muche.”55 In 1599, Thomas Platter reported that the queen “was most gorgeously appareled, and although she was already seventy-four, was very youthful still in appearance, seeming no more than twenty years of age. She had a dignified and regal bearing.”56 Platter’s comment is typical in drawing attention first to the queen’s advanced age (ironically, Elizabeth was only sixty-six at the time) and then to her successful transcendence of it by means of her splendid “bearing.”
Although modern critics often find that the queen’s age poses an insurmountable obstacle to continued attractiveness or enhanced authority, those around her did not necessarily find the “fiction” of love hard to sustain as the Elizabethan age, and its brightest star, waned. The “language of love . . . [that] strengthened the bonds of affective allegiance” between the queen and her subjects had always been inseparable from the “demonstration of her fitness to rule.”57 While Elizabeth’s long reign may have eroded her physical charms, it bore compensatory witness to her political acumen, a factor that accounts for the expressions of affection that she continued to inspire. The ever-astute Sir John Harington yoked the queen’s ability to provoke affective responses in her subjects—to keep them in Allen’s “wonderfull thralldom”—to the soundness of her political judgment:
When she smiled, it was a pure sun-shine, that every one did chuse to baske in, if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike. I never did fynde greater show of understanding and lerninge, than she was bleste with.
The first sentence is sometimes quoted as evidence of the queen’s capriciousness even though Harington construes her “show” as evidence of acumen. Where Harington doubts the authenticity of Elizabeth’s emotions, he is categorical about the emotions she inspired: “we did all love hir, for she said she loved us, and muche wysdome she shewed in this matter.” Nor did these feelings preclude an erotic dimension. Harington records one occasion in 1594, when the “Queene stoode up, and bade me reache forthe my arme to reste her thereon. Oh what swete burden to my nexte songe!—Petrarcke shall eke out good matter for this businesse.”58 Judging by the “swete” confusion that she inspired in the caustic Harington, Elizabeth knew how to turn her frailty into erotic and political advantage.59
A self-described old fox, Elizabeth may have been something of a cougar avant la lettre. Perhaps the best evidence of the queen’s enduring appeal, and of her own attitude toward her age, is to be found in the journals of Ambassador de Maisse—the source that critics rely on to generate their unflattering portraits of the aging queen. Montrose notes with wonder that, despite the queen’s “bizarre” and age-inappropriate erotic provocations, de Maisse “eschews the opportunity for maliciously misogynistic commentary that his private medium allowed him.”60 This is an understatement. Not only do the journals avoid the judgments that Montrose makes, they testify to Elizabeth’s lasting charisma. The journals clarify that the queen did not strive to pass herself off as young; rather, they show Elizabeth’s “larger refusal to surrender to prejudice” about the impact of age “on h
er person or capacities.”61 Elizabeth never disguised her age from de Maisse: “she often called herself foolish and old,” he recounts, “saying she was sorry to see me there, and that, after having seen so many wise men and great princes, I should at length come to see a poor woman and a foolish.”62 Anna Riehl argues that de Maisse understood this self-denigration to be an invitation to praise.63 Instead of denying the queen’s age, as we might expect, the ambassador urged the well-established correlation of age to wisdom. Pleased, Elizabeth replied “it was but natural that she should have some knowledge of the affairs of the world, being called thereto so young, and having worn that crown these forty years.” These are not the words of a woman striving to pass herself off as younger than she is. If Elizabeth used age to trump gender in the matter of wisdom, she also exploited both age and gender for their association with vulnerability: she begged de Maisse “to consider the position in which she was placed; that she was a woman, old and capable of nothing by herself.” Whatever the queen made of her age, she insisted on it, and on shaping de Maisse’s perceptions of it to her own advantage.
Aware of the queen’s rhetorical manipulation, de Maisse nonetheless fell under her spell. His familiarity with Elizabeth bred not contempt but admiration; the longer he stayed in England, the more unequivocal his praise of its queen became. Here is a typical passage: “When anyone speaks of her beauty she says that she was never beautiful, although she had that reputation thirty years ago. Nevertheless she speaks of her beauty as often as she can. As for her natural form and proportion, she is very beautiful” (emphasis added). On another occasion, he notes, “It is a strange thing to see how lively she is in body and mind and nimble in everything she does . . . She is a very great princess who knows everything.” Still later, he tells her “that she did wrong to call herself old so often as she did” and notes to himself that “verily, save for her face, which looks old, and her teeth, it is not possible to see a woman of so divine and vigorous disposition both in mind and body.”64 The signs of age are recorded but subordinated syntactically and conceptually; what matters is Elizabeth’s “divine and vigorous disposition both in mind and body.”
The queen’s reminders of her age prompted the French ambassador to consider her transcendence of the limitations that age imposes. Machiavelli holds that “princes become great when they overcome the difficulties and obstacles that are imposed on them,” and that, if necessary, a “wise prince” eager to acquire “prestige” will contrive such problems in order to crush them.65 By figuring her age as an obstacle, Elizabeth preempted criticism and generated an impression of her own greatness. Ever her student, Shakespeare adapted this strategy for his Richard III, who first labels his body as inadequate for wooing and then overcomes that obstacle when he woos his enemy’s widow. The impression of greatness produced by such means depends on the politics of presence—on the virtuosity of the physical performance, on the audience’s willingness to overlook, as it were, the visible infirmities of the body and to “see . . . a vigorous disposition” instead. These transactions entail a willing suspension of disbelief, the successful suppression of simple truth (the queen’s actual age) in favor of more complex truths (her ability to act “no more than twenty years of age”). The paradoxical praise that Elizabeth earned from a range of men suggests that this theatrical strategy, far from being vain, was effective at least some of the time. Like Enobarbus at the court of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, or Endymion at the court of Lyly’s Cynthia, de Maisse found that age could not wither this queen, even though she described herself as wrinkled deep in time.
The same cannot be said for the men around the queen, and de Maisse notes with discomfort the advanced age of Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in the country, who, in contrast to the vigorous dancing queen, had to be carried around in a chair.66 Celebrations of Elizabeth’s transcendent beauty often mention her aging attendants by way of contrast, in a way that brings to mind Ovid’s Tithonus. In Christopher Marlowe’s popular translation, this “aged swain” complains that the goddess of dawn flees his bed, whilst “the moon sleeps with Endymion every day.”67 Although Ovid’s Endymion remains eternally youthful, Elizabeth’s lovers were not so lucky. An epilogue attributed to Shakespeare and performed before Elizabeth in 1598 praises her ability to make “new when old are gon,” and imagines “the children of these lordes / sitting at [her] counsell bourdes” turning “grave & aeged” in her presence, for example.68 Francis Davison’s “Ode to Cynthia” similarly claims that “Times yong houres attend her still,” while “All her lovers old do grow, / But their hearts they do not so.”69 Where Davison allows Elizabeth the wisdom of age in a youthful-seeming body, her male “lovers” retain youthful emotions even as they age, a far more problematic proposition, or so Marlowe’s elegy suggests. Even a cursory survey of the relevant court literature indicates that the “conundrum” of the aging male body proved as challenging to court discourses as that of the aging female body. To cite a relevant example, Lyly departed from his sources to make his Endymion initially as vulnerable to the passing of time as Marlowe’s Tithonus. Like Ralegh, who complained about having given up “our youth, our joys, and all we have” to be repaid with “age and dust,” Endymion sacrifices his “golden years in hopes, waxing old with wishing” (2.1.23–24).70 The charge of vanity—leveled against Elizabeth I by modern scholars—is often reserved for such aging courtly lovers, whose “long pursuit and vain assay” defy orthodox conceptions of masculine virtue.71
The disjunction between superannuated male bodies and the youthful feelings they harbored was a topic that critics of the court also broached in detail. Courtiers like Leicester and Hatton had always been vulnerable to slanders that characterized their promotions as violations of social hierarchies.72 As they aged, their “services” transgressed other hierarchies as well. Allen’s tirade against Elizabeth’s “cheif councellers,” guilty of “publike piracie and robberie bothe by sea and lande,” culminates, for example, in an indictment of that
speciall extortioner, whom she tooke up first of a Traitor & woorse then naughte, only to serve her filthy luste, whereof to have the more fredom and intrest, he (as may be presumed, by her consent) caused his owne wife cruelly to be murthered, as after warde for the accomplishement of his like brutishe pleasures with an other noble dame it is openly knowne he made awaie her husband; who now of an amorous minion advaunsed to highe office, degree, & excessive welthe, is becum her cheife leader in all her wicked and unwonted course of regiment.
In the Cardinal’s view, the upstart earl owed his social standing to his prolonged devotion to the “filthy luste” of his queen. Although the “amorous” Leicester’s behavior is excessive, it is also representative, since the queen has “abused her bodie” with “divers others.” As “cheife” minion, the earl epitomizes the “brutishe” sexuality endemic at court.73
That an effeminate and animalistic subjection to women’s desire could result in social and political elevation is one of the fundamental paradoxes of Elizabethan political life. Leicester embodied that paradox for a number of reasons, including biographical ones. The position of “male favourite to a virgin queen was without precedent,” as Simon Adams puts it, so that Elizabeth and Leicester wrote the “job description . . . between them.”74 Although there is a tendency nowadays to distinguish Leicester from more obviously arriviste favorites like Hatton or Ralegh, the earl owed his status as a member of the nobility to the queen’s “favor and countenance,” a point not lost on the contemporaries who doubted that he was a “mette man” for high office and categorized him as an arrogant upstart.75 These critics pointed out that Leicester was “noble only in two descents and both of them stained with the block.”76 And indeed, Leicester’s father and grandfather—Edmund Dudley (ca.1462–1510) and John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland (1504–1553)—were among the so-called “new men” promoted by Elizabeth’s father and grandfather. When angered, Elizabeth reminded Leicester of his dependence on her favor, describi
ng him contemptuously as “a creature of our own . . . that hath always received an extraordinary portion of our favor above all other subjects even from the beginning of our reign.”77
The queen gave all her favorite creatures animal names (Leicester was her robin, Hatton her sheep, and Ralegh her fish), a rhetorical move by which she monopolized the category of the human, thus trumping normative gender hierarchies and establishing herself as dominant.78 Burghley, whom she nicknamed her “Spirit,” was the one major courtier allowed the emblematic victory over animal passions crucial to the successful maintenance of early modern masculine identity.79 But even his status was subject to revision. When he complained about other courtiers, Elizabeth teased her “Sir Spirit,” noting that “your kinde (they say) have no sense, but I have of late seen . . . that if an ass kicke you, you feele it too soone. I will recant you from being my spirit, if ever I perceive that you disdaine not such a feeling.”80 The habitual and often comical references in court letters to the queen’s monikers indicate that her practice was well publicized (not unlike that of a recent American president). Her disgruntled subjects followed suit by deploying animal “comparisons” to produce the derisive laughter described by Castiglione.81 The counterfeiter John Pole allegedly described Leicester as “the common bull of the Courte,” for example, and numbered him with Ralegh and Hatton among the “carped [carpet] knights” who earned their keep because they “coulde doe beste & have been best weaponed.”82 As the bovine metaphor suggests, in the fevered imagination of less favored subjects, Leicester became an incongruous mixture of the hypermasculine and the submasculine. Age tilted the balance toward the latter view; by the late 1580s, English subjects had compared the earl to a whole menagerie of beasts, including bulls, robins (because of the queen’s nickname), and bears (because of the Dudley family crest of the bear and ragged staff; see figure 1).
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