The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

  At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, in any case, the mystery, miracle, and morality plays were still a central, much-loved element in English community life, and professional theater was becoming increasingly popular both in London and in every place where local authorities would permit touring companies to put on shows in exchange for money. The new queen’s council, its evangelical members especially, was uncomfortable with theater of any variety and decided almost before doing anything else that limits had to be imposed. The main problem with the religious plays was their traditional—meaning Catholic—content. As for the newer, more secular performances, the Puritans believed that, even if their content was not idolatrous or superstitious, they wasted time that could better be devoted to work or prayer. Secular theater suffered also from a growing perception on the part of the evermore-respectable middle classes that the kinds of people who engaged in it were distinctly undesirable. Such opinions were not entirely unfair. Plays were presented, usually, in neighborhoods where rents were cheap and houses of prostitution and bear-baiting pits were leading forms of diversion.

  Officialdom’s first response was a 1559 proclamation to the effect that no plays were to be presented anywhere unless licensed either by the mayor of a city or town or by a titled nobleman. The sternest of the Puritans undoubtedly would have preferred simply to ban all theater outright, but this was rendered impossible by the inconvenient fact that drama had established itself at court. Those responsible for providing amusements for the queen and her courtiers were learning that hiring a company of players to perform works already written and rehearsed was easier—and vastly less expensive—than developing new entertainments from scratch. Queen and courtiers, for their part, responded enthusiastically to theatrical performances—to the best of them at least.

  Theater continued to be regarded as intrinsically disreputable, however. The Privy Council observed it through narrowed eyes, imposing increasingly firm controls. Eventually it limited the authority to license companies to the titled nobility, in part, no doubt, because nobles were far fewer in number than mayors and judicial officials and more easily monitored and subjected to pressure from the Crown. But another reason must have been the fact that England’s increasingly well-educated nobility found pleasure in quality theater, displayed a willingness to support it, and would not have accepted its elimination without complaint. By the 1560s the Earl of Leicester, the same Rob Dudley who stood first among Elizabeth’s favorites, was sponsoring one of the most successful companies. This weighty endorsement was given even more force by Dudley’s status as a prominent evangelical.

  As the 1560s proceeded, men more puritanical than Dudley were moving into positions of leadership in cities and towns including London. Such men were repelled by the traditional religious theatricals so loved by their neighbors, and they refused to issue licenses except for scripts cleansed of all vestiges of the old religion. Finally they refused to license the productions altogether, and though resistance was widespread and persistent it was itself unlawful and ultimately fruitless. Cycles tailored to the feast of Corpus Christi were still being performed in Kendal in the north in the late 1580s, and in distant Cornwall even in the 1590s, but by the end of the century they were gone. The tradition they expressed was fading. Henceforth the story of English theater was the story of secular drama exclusively. And it, far more than the old religious plays, was concentrated in London.

  The capital was becoming the biggest city in Europe; by the end of the century it would have 200,000 residents, four times as many as in 1500. It was a boiling, brawling cauldron of tradesmen and nobles, clerics and domestic servants, sailors and soldiers, idlers and whores and fortune-seekers from every corner of Europe, most of them hungry for entertainment and many with at least a penny or two to spare. Such a place was a magnet for the traveling companies of actors that, as they put on performances in the courtyards of inns and other rented spaces, found themselves attracting large and lucrative audiences. Necessarily, such performances were almost invariably presented in daytime, and naturally they attracted the sorts of people who were free in the daytime—prostitutes, sailors, and other visitors in search of a good time, workers willing and able to slip away from their jobs. The city fathers, appalled, appealed to the council to purge London of such decadence and refused to issue licenses. The theater people responded by moving to downmarket suburbs beyond the reach of city law. Respectable England’s attitude toward the whole phenomenon is apparent in the name of the bill with which Parliament, in 1572, sought to impose order: An Act for Punishment of Vagabonds. Now licenses could be granted only by nobles or two “judicial dignitaries of the realm.” In due course the lord chamberlain was made responsible for approving dramatic works—which meant banning any play of which he disapproved—and the stationers’ guild for preventing the printing of banned works.

  None of this even dented the popularity of the theaters. Audiences continued to grow, and venues grew with them. Impresarios stopped renting space and began to build theaters instead; these were ramshackle affairs at first but soon were more substantial, and by the 1580s the largest could hold three thousand people. Admission was a penny in the large roofless amphitheaters, twopence if you wanted a place to sit, while more exclusive indoor performances might charge as much as sixpence per seat—a sum beyond the means of most people. The revenues thus generated were more than sufficient to encourage the construction of increasingly impressive theaters. The frequency with which many people went to the theater created a voracious market for new material, and the licensing restrictions tended to concentrate the best talent in a small number of companies. For many such reasons London’s theatrical world not only expanded but grew more accomplished at an extraordinary pace. Its leading figures became almost respectable. Queen Elizabeth herself became patron of a company in 1583, and in 1594 the lord chamberlain was authorized to select two companies to perform within London itself. By then young Shakespeare had been on the scene for five years, having come up to the city from Warwickshire in the hope of making his way as a writer. The hunger for talent was so strong, and the rewards for exceptional talent so great, that when the grand Globe Theatre was built on the south bank of the Thames in 1598, Shakespeare would be one of its five principal shareholders.

  24

  A Torrent of Miseries

  The intrigues surrounding a possible marriage of Elizabeth to Rob Dudley grew weirder and weirder. Henry Sidney, Dudley’s brother-in-law and a courtier close to the queen, soon was approaching the Spanish ambassador about a possible deal in which Philip II would support the marriage and England would once again be reconciled with the Roman church. The context in which this astounding scenario was discussed—with Dudley, Cecil, and the queen herself all involved—was predictably complex. In 1559 the combative Pope Paul IV, that great hater of Hapsburgs and heretics, had died and been succeeded by Pius IV, a placid soul in comparison with his predecessor and more inclined to seek an understanding with schismatics than to condemn them out of hand. It would have seemed distinctly likely that this new pope would be receptive to an arrangement that had the endorsement of the king of Spain and promised to heal the breach with England. Pius was just then making preparations to reconvene the Council of Trent. He intended to invite England, hoping (against hope, one might think) to bring it back into the fold as a partner rather than a rival in reform.

  Other parts of the background were the aforementioned deaths of Marie of Guise and young Francis II of France, Mary Stuart’s demotion from queen consort to widow and dowager, and the consequent unraveling of the connection between France and Scotland. These developments had, from the Spanish perspective, put Mary’s claim to the throne of England in a new and more attractive light. Philip II began exploring the possibility of making Mary the wife of one of his Austrian cousins, or even his own son by his first marriage, the boy Don Carlos. Such a union would have transformed the Queen of Scots, once such a threat to Hapsburg interests, into an immensely usefu
l asset. In dangling her own possible marriage to Dudley in front of Philip, Elizabeth may have merely been attempting to draw his attention away from Mary Stuart. This seems a stretch, however; Elizabeth certainly understood that Philip was capable of pursuing both matters simultaneously, and the notion that Philip could reconcile England and Rome only by abandoning the idea of bringing Mary into the Hapsburg family makes very little sense. The whole affair remains cloaked in mystery, as do the motives of the participants. The negotiations were conducted in such deep secrecy that they remained unknown to the world until the nineteenth century, when the historian J. A. Froude turned up the evidence while examining Spain’s diplomatic correspondence.

  The idea that Elizabeth was merely playing a diplomatic game is undercut by what is known of Cecil’s reaction to the negotiations. He wrote to a confidant that he was, for reasons left unspecified but almost certainly having to do with the proposed marriage, so unhappy with the state of affairs at court as to be considering resignation. At the same time he was continuing to try to disrupt the proceedings by discrediting Elizabeth and Dudley, telling the Spanish ambassador that the two had planned Amy Robsart’s death. These would not appear to be the actions of a man who knew his mistress to be pretending. They are more understandable if Cecil genuinely feared that the queen might be willing to abandon the Protestant cause in order to marry the one man she wanted as a husband. If somehow he was acting in collusion with the queen, the two were playing a game so deep and devious as to be incomprehensible.

  What appears to have happened, in the end, is that Cecil frightened Elizabeth into calling the whole thing off. He announced that his agents had uncovered a Catholic conspiracy against the Crown, made some dramatic arrests including that of a fugitive priest, and claimed to have evidence of Catholic perfidy so outrageous as to destroy any possibility of a restored relationship. The queen was persuaded, on the basis of evidence that at a distance of four and a half centuries looks distinctly flimsy, that she could expect no loyalty from her Catholic subjects and that large numbers of Protestants were prepared to rise if she turned her back on them. The papal nuncio responsible for delivering an invitation to Trent was prevented from crossing to England. Though the affair ended with scarcely a whimper, it marked a watershed in Elizabeth’s life. It would be a good many years before she again regarded an offer of marriage as anything more than an opportunity to manipulate and deceive. Dudley would remain her beau ideal, the most important person in her life, but for both of them the hope of marriage had burned down to dead ash. As it became clear that no great royal unions were in the offing and Mary Stuart made preparations for her return to Scotland, the French queen mother Catherine de’ Medici urged the pope to excommunicate Elizabeth. Philip, no longer cast in the incongruous role of enemy of the papacy, persuaded him to do nothing.

  Some months later Elizabeth was struck down by smallpox, one of the world’s great killers until modern times, and became so ill that she was not expected to live. Council and court were made more painfully aware than ever of how difficult a predicament they would be left in if she died without a spouse, a child, or a designated successor. When she emerged from unconsciousness, still in mortal danger, she asked her councilors to appoint Dudley lord protector of the realm with an income of £20,000 annually, a sum sufficient to support him in the most munificent style. The request was poignantly romantic and utterly without foundation in reality; the council would never have agreed to anything of the kind. Even if it had consented for the second time in little more than a decade to deliver the whole kingdom into the safekeeping of a Dudley—an improbable development to say the least—Robert’s elder brother would have been the more logical choice. Ambrose by now had been made Earl of Warwick, the title held by John Dudley until he became Duke of Northumberland, while Robert remained a commoner. The comparison was in any case meaningless; only a delirious Elizabeth could have imagined that her council would surrender control to either of the brothers.

  The disease passed but left its mark. Elizabeth’s face was badly scarred, and patches of her scalp were left permanently bare. It was a melancholy turn of events for a woman not yet thirty who had always been both attractive and vain. Hardheaded political survivalist though she was, for the rest of her life she would be pathetically susceptible to any sycophant who praised her for a beauty she no longer possessed. It was in a sense doubly cruel that council and Parliament now resumed their appeals for her to marry. But from this point forward the business of finding an acceptable consort and inducing Elizabeth to assent took on a perfunctory character. Fresh attempts were undertaken from time to time, but even those making the effort were never terribly hopeful. The queen herself barely pretended interest unless she could see some diplomatic advantage in doing so. The period after her recovery brought a revival of the candidacy of the Hapsburg archduke Charles, younger brother of the newly elected emperor Maximilian II. Cecil’s support for this possibility shows once again that the desire for an heir could override even the strongest antipathy toward Rome. The pressure was for a while so intense that Elizabeth came close to agreeing. In the end she was saved less by her own unwillingness than by the refusal of the emperor to compromise Charles’s freedom to practice his religion after taking up residence in England.

  Eventually the council’s focus shifted from trying to get the queen to marry to the presumably more straightforward task of designating her successor. Here again, however, Elizabeth balked. She did so in spite of the fact that her refusal multiplied the dangers of disorder in the event of her death. And so as the life of her cousin Mary Stuart became one of the most dramatic (and also melodramatic and tragic) in the history of English royalty, it also became heavy with significance for everyone who feared and everyone who desired a restoration of the old religion.

  Mary, from the day of her arrival in an Edinburgh that she had not seen since age six, a city now ruled by militant Calvinists with no desire for her return, was herself enmeshed in questions of marriage and succession. Like Elizabeth she was probably a virgin, she, too, would leave behind a chaos of contending factions if she died childless, and almost any husband she chose was certain to bring a baggage train of complications trailing behind him. At first she showed impressive political adroitness, especially for a twenty-year-old dealing with enemies more powerful than herself in what was, essentially, a foreign country. With very nearly no trustworthy advisers to guide her, she accepted the settlement that had delivered Scotland’s government and church into Protestant hands. She refused, however, to ratify Cecil’s Treaty of Edinburgh, because doing so would have involved relinquishing her claim to the throne of England. Using the little power that remained to her, she established religious toleration as Crown policy—the first time that any such thing had ever been attempted in the history of the British Isles. The dignity and restraint with which she handled herself began to erode the distrust with which many of her subjects had received her in 1561 and to build up a store of goodwill.

  Mary had no reluctance to marry, and the English court naturally took an interest in her intentions. In 1564, in a bizarre twist that nevertheless made a good deal of sense from the English perspective and offered practical advantages to Scotland as well, Elizabeth offered Mary as bridegroom none other than Robert Dudley, who was made Earl of Leicester to enhance his suitability. Mary replied that she could agree only if recognized as Elizabeth’s heir, but Elizabeth would promise only that Mary and Leicester, once married, would be permitted to live at the English court. That was the end of that. It was also the end of the best part of Mary Stuart’s life. She now plunged headlong into a sea of troubles from which she would never emerge.

  While the Dudley proposal was still in negotiation, a young cousin of Mary’s named Henry Stuart, eldest son of the Earl of Lennox and known as Lord Darnley, had arrived at the Scottish court. Like Mary, he was a grandchild of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, who had married twice more and borne a daughter after the death of King James IV. Also
like Mary, therefore, he was a blood member of the royal families of both kingdoms; in the event of Mary’s death, in fact, he would have had a strong claim to the Scottish throne. He had grown up in England and become a familiar figure at Elizabeth’s court, his father having had to flee Scotland after supporting Henry VIII’s failed invasions of the early 1540s. On at least two occasions in his youth, undoubtedly at his father’s bidding and for the purpose of winning favor for the family if not specifically for himself, Darnley had traveled to France and met the Queen of Scots there. For reasons that remain obscure, Elizabeth eventually took up the Lennox cause, encouraging Mary to admit her kinsmen back into their homeland and restore their confiscated lands. Mary eventually agreed, her reasons, too, being less than clear, and the consequences were momentous. She was soon smitten with Darnley, who was not yet twenty, and with rather unseemly haste they married. Of the many costly mistakes that Mary would make in the course of an epically difficult life, this was by far the worst, the precipitating blunder from which a torrent of miseries would flow.