The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  Six days after her accession there was the first of the great processions, from Hatfield to London. It was a cavalcade of more than a thousand people. She stayed a fortnight at Lord North’s House and, among other things, received the foreign ambassadors. It was here that she received, via Gomez Suarez de Figuerosa, Count de Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, a proposal of marriage from her brother-in-law, the King of Spain. She could have done worse than accept this honour. It would have avoided much political speculation, and it would have aligned England with the greatest power in the world against France, the second-greatest. But she declined the honour. When de Feria expressed Philip’s hope that she would be very careful in her handling of religion, she gave the equivocal reply that it would be very bad of her to forget God, who had been so good to her. So Catholics and Protestants were left none the wiser about the direction of her religious policy.

  When she met the judges of England, she proclaimed, ‘Have a care over my people . . . they are my people. Every man oppresseth them and spoileth them without mercy. They cannot revenge their quarrel nor help themselves. See unto them, see unto them, for they are my charge’.6

  Then, on 28 November, she moved in slow procession, so that as many Londoners as possible could see her, from Lord North’s house to the Tower – her old prison, now her bastion. The journey was broken by several pauses.

  When the Recorder of London presented her with a purse containing 1,000 gold marks, she said:

  I thank my Lord Mayor, his brethren and you all. And whereas your request is that I shall continue your good lady and Queen, be ye ensured that I will be as good unto you as ever Queen was unto her people. No will in me can lack, neither do I trust shall there lack any power. And persuade yourselves that for the safety and quietness of you all I will not spare if need be to spend my blood. God thank you all.7

  What made this an electrifying speech was that it was true. Elizabeth, like her father, was every inch a political creature. She could be devious, stubborn, difficult. But (unlike her political rival, Mary, the Scottish queen) she was in many ways very straightforward. She did, passionately, want to be the queen of England, to be a good queen; and it was her primary wish. She would do anything to be a good queen, and she did have the interests of the country at heart. One of the reasons for her prodigious success as a political ruler was that she would undoubtedly have been prepared to die in order to be queen in her own way and on her own terms. Her own mother had died on the block. She knew that she was living in an age when this would be the price of failure – either a failure to keep at bay the threat of foreign invasion, or the failure to stave off any rival claimants to the throne. She was lucky enough to have only one plausible rival, in Mary.

  By open chariot she was driven to Cripplegate, preceded by the Lord Mayor, who carried her sceptre, and by the Garter King of Arms beside him; next came Lord Pembroke, carrying the sword of state in a gold scabbard laden with pearls. Then the sergeants-at-arms surrounding the tall, pale redhead, who was dressed in a purple velvet riding habit. At fixed points along the route children’s choirs burst into song. In the distance, the roar of cannon had already begun to thunder out from the Tower. The first splash of pageantry, and the first showing of herself to the people, had been triumphantly successful. They loved her.

  From the Tower she sent her favourite, and childhood friend, Lord Robert Dudley, to the mathematician and astrologer Dr John Dee to determine the most propitious day for her coronation. The answer came back from the Sage of Mortlake that it should be held on 15 January 1559.

  Before the crowning itself in Westminster Abbey, there was a series of highly elaborate pageants and ceremonies in the City of London, designed as ritualised manifestos for the coming reign.8 Lest the meaning of these ceremonies should be missed, the Corporation of London – largely Protestant, and representative of the mercantile class who would determine how well the country came out of the grave financial crisis of Mary’s reign – commissioned the MP for Carlisle, Richard Mulcaster, to write an account of them. Mulcaster, an Old Etonian and a Renaissance humanist, whom we shall meet in a later chapter as an eminent grammarian and educationalist, was paid forty shillings for his work, which was first published nine days after the coronation and was so popular that it was reprinted soon afterwards. The publisher was Richard Tottel, who paid the licence fee of two shillings and fourpence to print the work, at the Hand and Star, situated on Fleet Street within the Temple Bar. Throughout the Tudor period, but especially in the reign of Elizabeth, publication was strictly under the control of the state and nothing could be printed without licence. The Passage of our most drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to Westminster the day before her coronacion gives us the most vivid sense not only of those heady few days, but also of the huge importance to the Elizabethans of ceremonial. Shakespeare’s Henry V could ask before his Coronation, ‘And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?’ Cranmer, at the coronation of the nine-year-old Edward VI, could remind the adults present that the oil of anointing ‘if added is but a ceremony’.9 But the Elizabethans, and especially the Protestants, who were inventing new ceremonies rather than merely re-enacting the medieval ceremonials of the Church, rediscovered the enormous importance of ritual.

  In his pageant allegory-poem about his own age, The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser describes the coronation of Una in Booke One:

  Then on her head they sett a girlond greene

  And crowned her twixt earnest and twixt game.10

  This is the perfect phrase for the successful use of ceremony which has marked its place in English public life from the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth to the reign of the second. There is always a small element of playfulness in it, so that, for example, the Victorian lampoons of public ceremony in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan are only just lampoons, and are certainly nothing so strong as satire. They merely bring out some of the inherent absurdity in rituals that are ‘but a ceremony’. Nevertheless, ceremonies can make statements which remain in the memory, which stir the eye and the heart. And this was something that Queen Elizabeth I and her advisers understood through and through.

  Mulcaster’s The Passage of . . . Quene Elizabeth presents Elizabeth’s ride through London, with its many pauses to watch plays and tableaux, as a piece of theatre, ‘So that if a man should say well, he could not better tearme the citie of London that time, than a stage wherein was showed the wonderfull spectacle of a noble hearted princesse toward her most loving people.’ So she set off, this consummate actress and political genius, on the afternoon of Saturday, 14 January 1559, from the Tower of London. She was dressed in a cloth-of-gold robe. Her hair streamed over her shoulders. On her head she wore a small circlet of gold. She sat on cloth-of-gold cushions in a rich, satin-lined litter, open at all sides with a canopy at the top, carried by the four barons of the Cinque Ports. As she entered the City by Fenchurch Street she was greeted by the first pageant, a child in costly apparel, welcoming her from a ‘richely furnished’ stage. Then, on to Gracechurch Street, where she saw a pageant of the uniting of the Houses of Lancaster and York. This highly elaborate display depicted the Queen’s descent. It had representations of her father Henry VIII, her mother Anne Boleyn and herself, wearing the Imperial Crown. And on it went, and at each stopping post, attended by huge crowds, there would be a little play or display, here representing the Virtues, there the Beatitudes in St Matthew’s Gospels. At the Little Conduit at the bottom of Cheapside there had been erected two hills. On one was a ruinous state – a Respublica Ruinosa. On the other, a well-founded state, the Respublica bene instituta, there was a cave. Old Father Time came out of the cave, leading his daughter Truth. This child presented Elizabeth with a Bible on which was inscribed ‘Verbum Veritatis’ – the Word of Truth.

  Mulcaster, in his commentary on all these events, was intent to bring out their meaning for the readers. It is Mulcaster, and not the script of the pageant (which survives), who brings out the Protestantism
of this scene – that it is an English Bible.

  When the childe had thus ended his speache, he reached hys boke towards the Quene’s majestie, which a little before, Trueth had let downe unto him from the hill, whiche by maister Parrat was received, and delivered unto the Quene. But she as soone as she had received the booke, kissed it, and with both her hands held up the same, and so laid it upon her brest, with great thankes to the cities therefore’.11

  Like the great schoolmaster he was to become, Mulcaster made the ‘passage’ a learning process, not only for the readers, and for the crowds witnessing the ceremonies, but also for the Queen herself, who, in his narrative, does not move on from one spectacle to the next until she makes it clear that she has grasped its meaning.

  Moreover, this series of secular pageants – seen by a far greater number than those who would file into the Abbey to witness the coronation – provided intelligible ceremonial with a very distinct religious and political agenda: Elizabeth, in all her new and gorgeous garment majesty, was to be the protectress of the rising generation of the Protestant mercantile class; she would support learning, she would uphold virtue and justice. The highly popular text is not propaganda. It was a manifesto that one very powerful, and very new, section of society was presenting to the Queen and hoping she would follow. Mulcaster is distinctly a parliamentarian rationalist humanist. For example, in the pageant representing the Old Testament judge Deborah, the chronicler Richard Grafton sees it as signifying Deborah’s gender – ‘This was made to encourage the Quene not to feare though she were a woman: For women by the spirite and power of Almightye God, haue ruled both honourably and politiquely, and that a great tyme, as did Debora, whiche was there sett forth in Pageant’; but Mulcaster interpreted the pageant to mean that Deborah was a good ruler who listened to her parliaments.

  Elizabeth was quite intelligent enough to realise that monarchy, even that of an absolute monarch such as herself, was a matter of contract. It was not possible for one individual to impose her will on the people unless she were to carry with her a sufficient group of the Powerful, and unless she had the good will of the people too. The crucial few weeks and months at the beginning of her reign triumphantly made her popular with the people of London, and she would be able to exercise this charm over crowds throughout her reign. She was a monarch much on the move, showing herself to the people; and had she ever travelled north of the Trent, the story of her reign might have been very different. Her often-vaunted popularity, which is widely attested, whenever she appeared before crowds, was a southern phenomenon. Protestantism, if that is a satisfactory word for the religion that the City of London hoped she would espouse and promote, was primarily a religion of the South.

  The ceremony of the coronation itself in the Abbey would provide the first test, and a very crucial test, of how Elizabeth could reconcile the warring Protestants, who had supported the full-blown continental-style Reformation of Edward VI’s reign, and the Roman Catholics, who had rejoiced at the return of the Latin Mass, and perhaps even rejoiced at the smell of roasting human flesh and the screams of dying heretics who were burned alive near the butchers’ market in Smithfield. This most contentious question lay at the nub of the Abbey service. Would it be Roman Catholic? Would it be Protestant? Would the new Queen show her hand?

  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, had died shortly after Mary Tudor and not been replaced. The Archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, had declined to crown her. The ceremonies were in the hands of the Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe. Already at Christmas there had been something of a stir in the Royal Chapel. The Mass had been conducted in the traditional form, in Latin; but the Queen had left in the middle – at the Offertory.

  She could scarcely walk out halfway through the coronation ceremony. Here was an occasion when she would have to make clear, in emblematic and symbolic style, whether she intended to preserve the old religion or go with the Reformers. She had given Oglethorpe various directions for adapting the ceremony. The Epistle and the Gospel were to be read in English as well as Latin. With this stipulation, the Bishop complied. He was also told that he must not elevate the Host at the time of Consecration: that is, at the moment of the Mass when traditionally minded people might have believed that the bread changed its substance and became the Body of Christ, Oglethorpe was not to hold it up for veneration. He defied Elizabeth in this request. But where was she while he was doing it? At this point in the ceremony she had withdrawn into the Closet, a curtained area in the transept of the Abbey where she would receive Communion. Such is the Welsh ambiguity of Elizabeth’s situation that to this day no one quite knows what happened at this stage of the ceremony, with some maintaining that she did receive Communion, but in both kinds – that is, she received both the Host and the Chalice (Roman Catholic custom decreeing that she should only receive the Host); others maintaining that she did not receive Communion at all.12

  She had managed to get away with a coronation ceremony which gave out the signals that she wanted the people to read, and not the signals that the Church wanted. That is, the coronation said: I am your Sovereign Lady the Queen. I shall maintain the stability and strength of the realm, and as for religion – well, wait and see. Was there really so much difference between my coronation Mass and that of my sister? Would the skies really fall if I continue to maintain the religion of my father Henry VIII – Catholicism without the Pope?

  These were the cunning questions posed by the coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth I.

  An older school of historical and political thinking liked to speak as if the Protestant Establishment, or Queen Elizabeth herself, somehow cunningly substituted the Cult of the Virgin Mary for the Cult of the Virgin Queen, offering to the Mariolatrous multitude the worship of Elizabeth as a substitute for Our Lady of Walsingham, rather as addicts in ‘rehab’ might be offered methadone as way of breaking the heroin habit. The picture suggests, perhaps, a populace that is more docile than any crowd has ever been.

  What happened was perhaps more subtle, and more interesting. From the very beginning, the ceremonial surrounding Elizabeth became ever more inventive. It became a way of expressing what the Queen and those around her hoped was going to grow out of the reign. It grew out of reading, and it also grew, as it were, organically – the ceremonies of tilt, masque, procession and drama having an almost organic life of their own: what ‘worked’ on one ceremonial occasion becoming part of the repertoire and feeding the mythology, the symbolism. So Elizabeth, in portraiture, in drama, masque, political pamphlets and songs, was to become Cynthia, the Moon Goddess, she would be Diana the Virgin Huntress, she would be Gloriana and Belphoebe.

  From pagan times, Europeans had believed in Four Ages of history. Ovid tells of them in his Metamorphoses, for example: the Golden Age was that of humanity’s springtime; followed by a Silver Age, a Brass Age and an Age of Iron, when war, tyranny and chaos were unleashed upon the historical scene. During this Iron Age, the Virgin Justice left the Earth and took up her position in the sky as the constellation Virgo. Spenser in The Fairie Queene, during the procession of the months, tells us:

  The sixt was August, being rich arrayd

  In garment all of gold downe to the ground

  Yet rode he not, but led a lovely Mayd

  Forth by the lilly hand, the which was cround

  With eares of corne, and full her hand was found;

  That was the righteous Virgin, which of old

  Liv’d here on earth, and plenty made abound;

  But after Wrong was lov’d and Justice solde,

  She left th’ vnrighteous world and was to heauen extold.13

  Astraea, the Virgin symbol of Justice, was also a figure of Empire. In the many ceremonial ways in which Elizabeth presented herself, and in which the people responded to her, they wished to see her as the Virgin who had left the Earth with the coming of the Age of Iron. Her reign would usher in a time of righteousness and justice, but also of ‘British Empire’ – it was the
age in which this phrase was first used, and it was a coinage of her astrologer, Dr Dee.

  So, rather than thinking of the pageants as some kind of con-trick played on the people, or as a substitute for religion, it is perhaps more helpful to think of them as an extraordinarily public display, in that age of displays, of England’s emerging self-consciousness; England being guided in part by the acute intelligence of its monarch. It is England set to music, England tripping a fantastic dance, England making a tableau. Into this picture of a country coming to life – after a century of civil war, confusion, economic depression – comes this vision of a young Virgin Sovereign who can lead it on to a different existence: an existence where it expands beyond the seas, where it plumbs new areas of learning, where it builds great houses, where it pioneers new literary forms. Much of the ritual was done as a conscious parody of, or imitation of, the imperialist rituals surrounding the Emperor Charles V on the continent,14 but this was itself a revelation: rather than seeing itself as dependent upon the great empires of the world, Elizabethan England saw itself as a fledgling empire.

  Elizabeth, with her ceremonies, her tournaments, her progresses, brought a palpable sense of optimism to her people, an extraordinary sense that, as a whole, the nation was now capable of creativity and expansion that had somehow previously not been possible.

  This was apparent with the Accession Day Tilts, which became an annual ceremony every November of the reign. On these occasions, every detail was charged with symbolism. The colours worn by the Queen for masques and pageants would have had significance. Red symbolised prowess, yellow joy, white innocence, green hope . . .15 The jewels presented to the Queen by courtiers, especially the jewels given as New Year gifts, reflected the classical origins of her cult – a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard shows her wearing a jewelled crescent moon in her hair, to show her as Diana the Virgin Huntress; Sir Francis Drake once gave the Queen a fan ‘of fethers, white and red, the handle of gold inamuled, with a halfe moone of mother-of-perles, within that a halfe moone garnished with sparkes of dyamondes, and a few seede perles on thone side, having her Majesties picture within it, and on the backside a device with a crowe over it’. Once again, the crescent moon emphasising her virgin status. Other mythological subjects reflected in her jewellery would have been Elizabeth as Astraea, or Elizabeth as a Vestal Virgin.