The Queen raised Cecil to the peerage, as Baron Cecil of Burghley, on 25 February 1571 and the following year she appointed him Lord Treasurer in succession to the Marquess of Winchester. Walsingham succeeded Cecil as Secretary, but Burghley was always the Queen’s right hand. He was never a favourite to be petted or given nicknames. He was no courtier. He never asked the Queen for a dance – and by now, with the onset of gout, that would not have been a possibility.28 He was the spider at the centre of the government’s web, the Argus who saw all, the patient administrator who ensured that everything ran efficiently. And now he was presiding as Treasurer over the Exchequer Court, as well as being master of the Court of Wards, two very lucrative as well as time-consuming offices. The money enabled him to acquire and extend Theobalds, the manor house in Hertfordshire that he converted into a palace worthy to receive his royal mistress.
To receive the Queen into one’s own home was the highest possible accolade, but it was one that cost dear. Sir Nicholas Bacon was sharply told by his monarch, when she consented to step over the threshold of his substantial manor at St Albans Gorhambury, that his house was too small. ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘my house is well, but it is you that have made me too great for my house.’
William Sitsylt of Stamford, so lately descended from a modest family of minor Welsh gentry, could not afford to make the same mistake when he acquired Theobalds, a moated Hertfordshire manor house not far from Bacon’s St Albans, and some fourteen miles from London. No expense was spared. Visitors crossed an imposing bridge, into a courtyard. There was a chapel and a great hall, extensive gardens, and a ‘his’ and ‘hers’ wing – for Cecil continued through the 1570s to hope that his monarch would marry. During the late 1560s Cecil was spending well in excess of £1,000 each year on his building projects at Theobald’s. Cecil himself was the architect, and the architectural historian John Summerson wrote of Theobalds:
As a piece of architecture Theobalds has been totally forgotten [this was because it was demolished and rebuilt by James I as a royal palace in the early seventeenth century], yet I do not think it too much to claim that it was, with the possible exception of Longleat and Wollaton, the most important architectural adventure of the whole of Elizabeth’s reign. Certainly it was the most influential of all. Both Holdenby and Audley End directly derived from it. Castle Ashby, Hardwick, Apethorpe, Rushton and Hatfield seem to owe it much. Slight as our knowledge of the house must necessarily remain . . . I do not see that the history of Elizabethan architecture can be written without some consideration of the part played by William Cecil.29
As outstanding as the buildings at Theobalds were the gardens, with walks and fountains stretching for two miles. A German visitor recalled:
From the place one goes into the garden encompassed with a moat full of water, large enough for me to have pleasure of going in a boat and rowing between the shrubs. Here are great variety of trees and plants, labyrinths made with a great deal of labour, a jet d’eau with a basin of white marble and a table of touch-stone. The upper part of it is set round with cisterns of lead into which the water is conveyed through pipes so that fish may be kept in them and in the summer time they are very convenient for bathing.30
The gardener was none other than John Gerard, who dedicated his celebrated Herball to his employer in the year before his death.31
From this paradise, the fourteen-mile road to London led almost directly to his other palace, Cecil House in the Strand, where there was more of the same – courtyards, a chapel, great offices of state and gardens stretching down to the River Thames. If these two stupendous architectural demonstrations were to have survived, we should perhaps have an even more vivid sense of what a powerful man Cecil was – how, indeed, the England of Elizabeth’s reign could be described as Cecil’s England as much as it was Elizabeth’s. And the power and influence of the Cecils in English life is one of the symptoms of how forcefully Elizabethan England continued. We began this book by stating that the England of Elizabeth survived into living memory – a Church of England and a Parliament and a set of colonies, which were all the creation of Elizabeth and Cecil. At the heart of this England was the Cecil family themselves. The family that provided Queen Elizabeth I with her most powerful right hand gave birth to Queen Victoria’s last great Prime Minister, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. After the debacle of the Suez crisis in 1956 there was nothing so undignified as an election for the new leader of the Conservative Party. The two possible contenders were Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler. ‘Each member of the Cabinet was summoned singly and in turn to the room of the Lord Chancellor. Beside Kilmuir was seated the traditional kingmaker of the Conservative party, Lord Salisbury. One question only was put to the visitor – “Who is it to be, Rab or Harold?”’32 As told orally, it is usually rendered ‘Wab or Hawold’. This was England in 1956. Even half a century later, when the political complexion of Westminster has been altered out of all recognition, the aristocracy of Elizabeth’s reign are still figures of wealth, owning much land and, in so far as money always wields power, still wielding power: Cavendishes in Derbyshire and Yorkshire and London as Dukes of Devonshire; Russells as Dukes of Bedford; and Cecils at Hatfield.
Cecil House in the Strand, like Theobalds in the country, was a parable in stone and horticulture of Cecil’s power. Its tennis courts and bowling alleys (the tennis court had a huge red-and-white brick floor) and its extensive library, housing Cecil’s collection of books, paintings and Roman coins (the envy of Archbishop Parker, the other great bibliophile at the centre of Elizabethan affairs), were not simply pleasure grounds. The statues of Roman emperors that Cecil bought from Venice in 1561, and the copy of Cicero On Duties, which Cecil carried with him at all times, were symbols of his political belief. He was a monarchist in the sense that he recognised that power resided in his sovereign. He was the master of living with her caprice, her wavering moods, her tantrums. He knew when to tap into her high intelligence and her political perspicacity. He also knew how to neuter her occasional follies. She had the power to cut off his head, and his enemies at court and in the Council came close on occasion to getting him removed – at least imprisoned in the Tower. But she had enough political nous to recognise that she needed this man.
We find here, of course, the origins of what will be English republicanism in the next reign but one. Elizabeth was not an absolute monarch, in the sense that Charles I wished to become. She was reliant on Parliament for money, but also on her ministers for advice. The Elizabethan aristocracy exercised power through their monarch, but it was real power, and it was theirs. We find this fact reflected in Sidney’s Arcadia, which as well as being a romance about love, and an adventure story in which knights tilt for honour, and a moral tale in which intelligent people express their belief in rational religion and morality, is also a barely coded political handbook. It is a manifesto of aristocratic political power. The two young men who are at the centre of the story, Pyrocles and Musidorus, are the son and nephew respectively of a good ruler – therefore named Good Rule or Euarchus in Greek. But Arcadia, into which they have strayed in pursuit of love, is ruled over by an irresponsible duke, with the Greek name for king – Basilius – who has to be saved from his own follies by the wise counsel of old Philanax. Sir Philip Sidney’s great-uncle, Northumberland, had been Lord Protector of England. His aunt, Jane Grey, had been queen for a week. His uncle, the Earl of Leicester, lost no opportunities of perpetuating the power and influence of the Dudley family. Cecil, always disliked by the Dudleys, hoped to tap into their power-source by marrying one of his daughters to Philip Sidney. When Anne Cecil was twelve and Sidney was fourteen, Cecil and Sir Henry Sidney drew up a marriage contract between them.33 Why this marriage never went ahead remains a mystery. In the event, Anne married the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
It was a disastrous marriage. Oxford, as well as being a poet (some people absurdly believe him to have been the author of Shakespeare’s plays), was a highly ambitious courtier. He ha
d more or less grown up in Cecil’s household. When he was twenty-three years old, in 1573, it was reported that the Queen ‘delighteth more in his personage, and his dancing, and valiantness than any other’.34 But he was not the stuff of which real courtiers are made. John Aubrey immortalised him as an essentially comic figure: ‘This Earle of Oxford, making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.’35 His absences from court were in fact caused by his unfaithfulness to Anne Cecil. Leaving court without permission and fathering illegitimate children caused him to be imprisoned more than once in the Tower. He monstrously accused Anne of having another lover, whom he claimed was the father of their daughter.
The Queen became involved in the terrible wranglings between the couple. Burghley, with considerable heaviness, insisted that Oxford accompany his wife to court and display ‘that love that a loving and honest wife ought to have’ – or supply evidence of her wrongdoing. No such evidence existed. As time went on, Oxford quarrelled with all his friends, including Philip Sidney, fathered a child by one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Anne Vavasour, and his marriage to Anne Cecil existed only in name. It was a serious worry to Burghley that he might lose the royal favour because of it. In 1582, when he was grievously ill, Francis Walsingham came to his bedside to assure him that Elizabeth had commended the marriage of Burghley’s other daughter, Elizabeth, to William Wentworth and ‘used so gracious speeches of me, my wife, and my daughter in such effectual sort, as thereby she hath increased and stablised his liking, as could not by my purse be redeemed: and therefore Her Majesty therein hath increased my daughter’s value above my hability’.36 The marriage with Wentworth lasted just eight months. He sickened and died aged twenty-three, leaving Elizabeth Cecil a widow at eighteen.
Through all these painful scenes of domestic failure, Burghley continued to exercise his influence on events, and Cecil House was the power-house of Elizabeth’s government. At his desk, Burghley read and wrote hundreds of letters each year. There was barely any public matter, however trivial, in which he did not take an interest – appointments to academic posts, appointments of JPs, matters of legislation coming before Parliament, there was little that escaped his attention. When one sees his spidery, forward-slanting hand, one senses his intelligent and unblinking eye on almost every aspect of life in the England of his day.
Yet it would be a mistake to think of Burghley as a purely political figure. The young William Cecil, who had imbibed the Reformation theology and skills in the Greek language, imparted at Cambridge by Sir John Cheke, was still there, beneath the wrinkled countenance and costly subfusc gown of the sexagenarian master-statesman in Cecil House. The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day had confirmed everything Burghley had been taught at Cambridge to believe about the Church of Rome. As a statesman, he saw it as his primary duty to protect his sovereign, who was God’s anointed servant. Her enemies abroad, and her enemies in England itself, had to be crushed. The great threats – such as that posed by the continued existence of the Scottish queen – were threats not merely to Elizabeth in her person, but to the survival of what Cecil deeply believed to be the true version of the Christian religion.
Elizabeth herself, with her Henry VIII-inspired Anglo-Catholic faith, was less interested in the Reformed theology than Cecil, but when it came to a choice – whether to support the Protestants or the Catholic powers in the Netherlands, for example, or how to treat Catholic rebels at home – she was always guided by Cecil. The Pope’s Bull Regnans in excelsis was a fatwa that offered the English no choice but to resist or submit politically. The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day showed what the Roman Catholics were capable of doing to their enemies. Whether Elizabeth liked it or not, she and her loyal subjects were now ipso facto the Pope’s enemies. Burghley’s policy was simply, and daily, to do anything that strengthened his queen and weakened her enemies. And he remained convinced, deep into the 1570s, that one way of strengthening her was for her to marry.
10
Elizabethan Women
WHEN THE QUEEN had passed child-bearing age, it could comfort her subjects to make her into a Virgin-Goddess. Until that point had been reached, the country could mythologise its sovereign and figurehead less neatly. It was hard to forget the most basic function of her gender, the fact that she could be, like the country itself in John of Gaunt’s imagination, ‘this teeming womb of royal kings’.1
Most of the celebrated historians of the Tudor Age, even into our own day, have been male. It is only fairly recently, in the last couple of generations, that we have become accustomed to imagine what life was like for the female population of Elizabethan England. Mention has already been made of Elizabeth’s learning, and this was something she had in common with a privileged handful of Englishwomen – Mildred, the second wife of William Cecil, with her fondness for reading the early Greek Fathers of the Church in their original tongue; Margaret Parker, who could converse with her husband the archbishop in Latin. Though in the larger towns there were Dames’ Schools at which girls might receive a basic education, they would not have been allowed to attend the newly founded grammar schools, which had sprung up all over England since the Reformation. Learning, for the great majority of women, would only have been seen as a useful accomplishment to make them more charming or useful wives, rather than being something worth pursuing for their own good alone. Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, might have endowed a Cambridge College (for men), but nearly four centuries would pass before that university allowed women to take degrees.
The Elizabethan woman was not necessarily uneducated. In his Scolemoster Mulcaster suggests that girls should study drawing, writing, logic, rhetoric, philosophy and languages, as well as housewifery. How many did so is another matter. More than fifty women between the years 1524 and 1640 were published authors, either separately or in anthologies and collections. Elizabeth Carew’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Jane Anger’s Protection for Women, Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomas (a spirited reply to the misogynist Joseph Swetnam) show that there were plenty of clever, educated women in England at this period, as would a recitation of such names as Mary Sidney (Philip’s sister), Margaret How Aschman, Jane, Countess of Westmorland, Esther Inglis and Elizabeth Legge.2 But they were in a minority, as clever people (not to say clever women) always are.
The Queen, as a learned single woman in her thirties, would in no sense have appeared to her female subjects as a role model. Many Englishwomen of her age in the 1570s, when Elizabeth was between thirty-seven and forty-seven, would have been grandmothers. Shakespeare’s Juliet is, as her nurse reminds us, ‘not fourteen’.3 For Westerners of the twentieth century this would make her a Lolita, far too young to be viewed as marriageable. But for Elizabethans, fourteen was an ideal age to be married. Sir Philip Sidney’s sister Mary became Countess of Pembroke at that age. Compass says to Parson Pilate in Ben Jonson’s The Magnetick Lady (1631) that a particular girl is one ‘who strikes the fire of full fourteen, to-day ripe for a husband’.4 The disadvantages of such early marriages were obvious even then. Alexander Niccholes in A Discourse, or marriage and wiving: and of the greatest Mystery therein contained: How to choose a good wife from a bad (1615) was worried by ‘forward Virgins’ being married at such an age: ‘the effects that, for the most part, issue thereafter, are dangerous births, diminution of stature, brevity of life and such like, yet all these pains will they adventure for this pleasure’. There would still have been many who would have shared the view expressed in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women (1545) when Zenobia says she married at twenty, and Candidus says she waited too long.
Modern marriage customs in twenty-first century Europe and America (taking ‘marriage’ here to cover all shared domestic lives, and especially those that involve the bringing up of children) presuppose that the principal protagonists in the household
are grown-ups. In Tudor England this is not to be taken for granted. Little as our contemporary morality might like it, this surely explains why so many Elizabethan reflexions upon the married state – whether comic or serious, in plays, handbooks, jokes or sermons – speak of wives as if they were recalcitrant children who need to be kept under control. Very often, they were children. As the century progressed, however, the average age for marriage increased.
The Elizabethans Page 17
