Elizabeth

Christopher Haigh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317874638
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The reign of Elizabeth I was one of the most important periods of expansion and growth in British history, the so-called 'Golden Age'. This celebrated and influential study of Elizabeth reconsiders how she achieved this and the ways in which she exercised her power.

Chapter 1 The Queen and the Throne

DOI: 10.4324/9781315837697-2

The monarchy of Elizabeth I was founded upon illusion. She ruled by propagandist images which captivated her courtiers and seduced her subjects – images which have misled historians for four centuries. The first illusion was that Elizabeth had inherited chaos and disaster; the second was that she inaugurated a golden age of national harmony and achievement. The themes were set out almost immediately she ascended the throne. On 14 January 1559, eight weeks after her accession, the new Queen’s coronation procession took place through London. It passed by a carefully orchestrated series of pageants and tableaux, which provided the capital with a visual manifesto for the new government. The tableau at Cornhill showed a child, representing Elizabeth, supported by four characters dressed as virtues, who crushed down their opposite vices. As the official account of the procession, rushed out by the government printer, put it, ‘pure religion did tread upon superstition and ignorance; love of subjects did tread upon rebellion and insolency; wisdom did tread upon folly and vainglory; justice did tread upon adulation and bribery’. The glories of the future triumphed over the failures of the past. Elizabeth’s supporters had, by press and pulpit, been rubbishing her predecessor’s government for some weeks: now, all was going to be different – and better! In the pageant at Fleet Street the promise of truth and harmony was declared for all to see: a queen dressed in Parliament robes sat consulting the estates of her realm, under the biblical slogan ‘Deborah, the judge and restorer of the house of Israel’.¹ Elizabeth was signalling – and justifying – a decisive break with the past.

For, although it suited her to exaggerate the extent, Elizabeth’s really was a new regime. Under the pretence that Mary’s Privy Council had been too large and factious, Elizabeth dismissed two-thirds of its members and replaced them with her own relations, servants, and political allies – led by William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, and Thomas Parry. In the royal Household, in the Court, the change-over was even more marked: Elizabeth surrounded herself with those she knew she could trust, her late mother’s relatives and her own domestic staff. Robert Dudley and his brother Ambrose, sons of the late Duke of Northumberland, provided the necessary muscle, with the Dudley military clientele remaining intact. The Queen had created a rather narrowly based government, defined by personal loyalty to herself and ideological loyalty to Protestantism – for in dismissing the Marians she had dismissed most of the Catholics, and in reappointing some of Edward VI’s ministers she had recruited Protestants. But the novelty and homogeneity of the regime should not be overemphasised: Elizabeth’s ‘new men’ were mainly experienced administrators from Edward’s era, and the realities of political power had forced her to retain some conservative councillors. Some of the less partisan of Mary’s bureaucrats – Winchester, Mason, and Petre – stayed in office, and, more importantly, so did the great regional magnates, the Earls of Derby, Shrewsbury, Pembroke, and Arundel. It was a government which typified Elizabeth’s approach to politics: under the banner of novelty she assembled an alliance of experienced men, and behind the public face of Protestantism she made the necessary compromise with conservatism. The rhetoric of monarchy was one thing: the politics of power was quite another.

But the continuities in power were masked by the rhetoric of reform, and the public image was one of sparkling novelty. Elizabeth sought support by discrediting her predecessor’s rule and dissociating herself from it. The problems of the realm were determinedly blamed upon the previous government, and its reliance upon Catholicism and Spain; a change of ruler would bring solutions. Elizabeth had to differentiate her regime from Mary’s because they had something very obvious in common: they were both women, and some men had related the difficulties of Mary’s reign to her sex. Thomas Becon had cried to God in 1554, ‘Thou hast set to rule over us a woman, whom nature hath formed to be in subjection unto man, and whom thou by thine holy apostle commandest to keep silence and not to speak in the congregation. Ah, Lord! to take away the empire from a man, and to give it to a woman, seemeth to be an evident token of thine anger toward us Englishmen.’ Becon then republished his words in 1564, with no indication that a Protestant queen was any better than a Catholic, or that Elizabeth was any less of a punishment than Mary had been. Rule by a woman was the antithesis of proper order, and was bound to lead to disaster. ‘Queens were for the most part wicked, ungodly, superstitious and given to idolatry and to all filthy abominations’, wrote Becon, picking out Jezebel, Athalia, and Herodias as typical examples.²

Elizabeth, like Mary before her, had an image problem – what was the appropriate image of a female ruler? In sermons and prescriptive literature, sixteenth-century Englishmen propounded an ideal of womanhood, and it was an ideal which left little room for an unmarried female ruler: a woman should be a wife, and she should be silent, obedient, and domestic. A woman might rule her own kitchen, but surely not her own kingdom; outside the kitchen, she should be under the authority of a man, because she was physically, intellectually, and emotionally inferior to men. A woman’s role was essentially passive and subservient; throughout Elizabeth’s reign, the preachers continued to insist that it was contrary to nature for a woman to exercise authority over men in a family. If a woman could not rule a household, how could Elizabeth rule a realm? John Aylmer argued in 1559 that if she married, Elizabeth the woman could not be head of her own family, but Elizabeth the queen could head the realm. Still, there was a male Council and a male Parliament to run things, so ‘it is not in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler as men take it to be’.³

Elizabeth I was dogged by the fact that she was ‘only’ a woman. The men she worked with saw her in terms of the stereotype female, flawed and ineffective: they expected her to be emotional, indecisive, capricious, and feeble, and they interpreted her actions and inactions accordingly.⁴ In 1560, William Cecil was furious when a messenger discussed with the Queen a dispatch from her ambassador in Paris, ‘being too much for a woman’s knowledge’. In 1592, it was discovered that a former Lord Deputy in Ireland had been abusing her roundly: ‘This fiddling woman troubles me out of measure’; ‘Ah, silly woman, now she shall not curb me, she shall not rule me’; ‘God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base, bastard, pissing kitchen woman! If I had served any prince in Christendom, I had not been so dealt withal.’⁵ When things went wrong it was the Queen’s gender that was often blamed: in 1597, the Earl of Essex told the French ambassador that ‘they laboured under two things at this Court, delay and inconstancy, which proceeded from the sex of the queen’. Lower down the social scale, ordinary people found it difficult to believe that they could be – or should be – governed by a female. In Sussex, Joan Lyster declared in 1586 that ‘the Council makes a fool of the Queen’s Majesty, and because she is but a woman she ought not to be governor of a realm’. In 1591, an Essex man was claiming that she was no more than a puppet – ‘the queen is but a woman, and ruled by noblemen’. A little later, a London woman saw Elizabeth for the first time and exclaimed, ‘Oh Lord, the queen is a woman!’ – how could it be?⁶

Elizabeth herself sometimes affected the ‘mere woman’ role. She described herself to the 1563 House of Commons as ‘being a woman, wanting both wit and memory’, and admitted that reticence would be ‘a thing appropriate to my sex’. In 1576 she told an emissary from the Spanish Netherlands that his master thought ‘he has only to do with a woman’, and, a few years later, in her own private prayers, she was ‘a weak woman’.⁷ This was, of course, conventional rhetoric and tactical role-play, but even the Queen could not flout the convention and ignore the required role. However the issue was obscured, there was a contradiction between the ideal of a monarch and the ideal of a woman: a monarch should rule, a woman should obey. John Knox had found the contradiction so blatant as to make the rule (or ‘regiment’) of a woman ‘monstrous’, an unnatural perversion of the right order of things. In 1558 he had published The First Blast of the Trumpet to argue his case and justify the deposition of Mary, and was considerably embarrassed when another woman succeeded to the English throne. Knox wriggled around his earlier argument, writing that, although female rule was unnatural, God had made an exception so that Elizabeth could restore the Gospel. There was a heavy hint that Elizabeth’s religious policy might compensate for her gender.⁸ John Calvin had a similar view: sometimes God gave a woman special qualities above her sex to serve his divine plan. This was an argument which Elizabeth herself was to use: she was not a ‘mere’ woman, she was a special woman, an exception from the rules binding ordinary females. Perhaps this was how William Cecil came to see her, as an exception, an interruption of the natural flow of things. But the proper flow would be restored: he prayed that God would ‘send our mistress a husband, and by time a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession’.⁹

One consequence of the Tudor ideal of woman was the assumption that Elizabeth would marry – that was what women did. It was agreed that Elizabeth needed a husband. Philip II of Spain charitably offered himself, to relieve his sister-in-law of the burden of rule: ‘It would be better for herself and her kingdom if she would take a consort who might relieve her of those labours which are only fit for men.’¹⁰ Some historians, especially recent feminist writers, have seen the pressure to marry as the result of male chauvinism, a determination that Elizabeth should marry herself to a king who could then rule for her. This is probably untrue: William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, and the others who urged her to marry had nothing to gain, and much influence to lose, from a king. If they judged that Elizabeth herself could not govern, they would rather govern for her than hand over power to another man. When marriage to a foreign prince was considered, Elizabeth’s councillors based negotiations upon the 1553 marriage treaty between Mary and Philip of Spain, which had deliberately excluded the husband from rule. They sought not a consort for the Queen but a father for her son – not a sovereign, but a stud.

A husband for the Queen was a means to an end; the end was a secure succession, and the necessary means was a marriage. In 1559 the House of Commons petitioned Queen Elizabeth to marry and produce an heir – and then went on to discuss the limitations to be placed on the powers of her husband. In 1563 the House of Lords asked ‘that it please your Majesty to dispose yourself to marry, where you will, with whom you will, and as shortly as you will’ – but, after a token reference to the Queen’s happiness, the reasons for marriage related to the production of an heir. Also in 1563, the Commons beseeched ‘God to incline your Majesty’s heart to marriage, and that he will so bless and send such good success thereunto that we may see the fruit and child that may come thereof’.¹¹ The Parliaments of 1566 and 1576 again petitioned for marriage, but again for the same reason, an heir to the throne. A royal husband was an unfortunate necessity: the real aim was a royal son.

At least for tactical purposes of public argument, Queen Elizabeth accepted that she had a duty to marry for the good of the realm. In 1563, 1566, and 1576, she told Parliament that, although for herself she preferred the single state, yet for the sake of her subjects she would marry. In 1576, Lord Keeper Bacon declared that ‘Her Majesty hath called me to say that, albeit of her own natural disposition she is not disposed or inclined to marriage, neither would she ever marry if she were a private person, yet for your sakes and for the benefit of the realm she is contented to incline and dispose herself to the satisfaction of your humble petition, so that all things convenient may concur that be meet for such a marriage.’¹² But by then it was unlikely that anybody believed her, and probable that she did not believe herself. By 1576, and perhaps by 1563, the Queen’s marriage had become her chosen weapon in diplomatic intrigue, rather than her chosen solution to the succession problem.

But, early in the reign at least, there was no shortage of volunteers to sire the Queen’s anticipated heir. Elizabeth was, as Secretary Walsingham put it later, ‘the best marriage in her parish’,¹³ and some had high hopes of winning her. In the first weeks of her reign, the Earl of Arundel borrowed heavily from an Italian merchant, and used the money in lavish entertainments and to bribe Elizabeth’s women friends and servants to persuade her to marry him. In May 1559, Sir William Pickering was making a bid for the Queen’s affections, and when Elizabeth fussed over him Londoners were soon wagering four to one he would be king. Eric XIV of Sweden sent his brother to plead for Elizabeth’s hand and to throw money about to get it – and there were more restrained early enquiries from the Earl of Arran, the Dukes of Holstein and Saxony, and the Archduke of Austria. In 1561 the London Stationers’ Company was ordered to confiscate any printed pictures of Elizabeth with a suitor, especially those with King Eric. Although royal suitors endorsed the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s rule, the queue of candidates had become a diplomatic embarrassment and the Queen’s courtships something of a scandal. But most disreputable of all was the Dudley affair, which for a while cast Elizabeth as the trollop of Europe, and threatened the political stability of England. Either the Queen was very foolish in the extent of her flirtation, or she seriously contemplated marriage to Robert Dudley. But she pulled back – or was forced back – twice within a few months.

In August and early September 1560, with Robert’s wife apparently dying (probably of breast cancer), Elizabeth and Dudley were widely thought to be planning marriage. William Cecil made preparations to resign as Secretary of State if they married, but he also struggled to defeat the project. He spread a rumour that Amy Dudley was not really...