12
Kenilworth
ON 30 SEPTEMBER 1562 Henry Machyn, the old parish clerk of Holy Trinity the Less in the City of London, looked out of his window and saw an ugly street fight. Machyn’s diary, as befitted a parish clerk, began as a record of heraldic funerals, and extended to bring a compendium of news, crimes, executions and gossip, as well as such city ceremonies as the Lord Mayor’s Show. But this street fight, which he witnessed in the penultimate year of his life, was remarkable not least because both the participants were gentlefolk, and one of them was a (in his day) celebrated poet: ‘The sam day at nyght be-twyn viii and ix was a grett fray in Redcrosse stret between ii gentyllmen and ther men, for they dyd mare [i.e. marry] one woman, and dyvers were hurt; thes wher ther names, master Boysse and master Gaskyn gentyllmen.1
The accident-prone George Gascoigne was, when this affray took place, a member of Gray’s Inn, though he appears to have spent as much time there involved in his own personal litigation, some of it with his own father, as he did in legal work on others’ behalf. Gascoigne was the son of minor but prosperous gentry2 in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, MP for Bedfordshire (1542, 1553 and 1558), commissioner of the musters, justice of the peace and almoner at the coronations of both Edward VI and Mary I. At the time of Elizabeth’s coronation Sir John was ill, and George, then about twenty, deputised for him. Gascoigne’s mother was a northerner – Margaret, daughter of Sir Robert Scargill of Thorpe Hall, Richmond, Yorkshire: perhaps a kinswoman of Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers at the time of Margaret Thatcher. It seems as if George Gascoigne spent some of his childhood in the North. He attended both Oxford and Cambridge, or so he says, though no college in either university has record of his attendance. He arrived at Gray’s Inn in 1555, and it was his obsessed aim, as a young man, to become a courtier. He wrote later that he had ruined himself financially in the attempt.
It was, presumably, with the aim of mending his fortunes that Gascoigne married a rich widow, Elizabeth Bacon Breton, on 23 November 1561 at Christ Church, Newgate. She was a remote cousin of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and marriage to her would have helped to advance his career at court, had it not been for Gascoigne’s innate tendency to bad luck. (As he wrote in ‘Gascoigne’s wodmanship’, he shot away at everything.) Elizabeth had five children, one of whom was the poet Nicholas Breton. Upon the death of her husband in 1559 she had married Edward Boyes of Nonington, Kent, but this was not a success and after lengthy and, for Elizabethan times, most unusual legal proceedings, she was divorced from Boyes. Unfortunately, the divorce was not finalised when she married Gascoigne, who thereby became implicated in a bigamy.
In May 1562 Gascoigne and his wife leased a farm at Willington in Bedfordshire, but the two years they spent there were far from being a bucolic idyll. He involved himself in a legal dispute with the Earl of Bedford from whom he leased his land, and with his brother John over the lease of a parsonage left to John by their father in his will. George Gascoigne claimed that his brother stole his sheep; John countered that he was merely recovering lambs stolen from his own mother, Margaret Scargill. By 1569 George Gascoigne was in Bedford gaol (ninety-one years later it would host John Bunyan, so it has a distinguished literary heritage) for debt. Somehow, in spite of the outrageous irregularity of his financial affairs, George Gascoigne followed in his father’s footsteps and served as a Member of Parliament. When his right to do so, as a debtor, was questioned, there was yet more legal argy-bargy. A letter to the Privy Council complained that ‘he is indebted to a great number of personnes for the which cause he hathe absented himself from the citie by a longe time and now beinge returned for a burgesse of Midehurste in the countie of Sussex, doethe shewe his face openlie in the despite of all his creditors’.3 Gascoigne’s name was accordingly struck off the list of MPs drawn up on 8 May 1572.
It was a good moment to cut loose. Gascoigne joined Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ill-starred expeditionary force in the Netherlands. It was very much an independent operation, with Queen Elizabeth always insisting to the Spanish that she did not sanction English support for the Dutch rebels, while privately hoping that they would drive the French out of Flushing and overthrow Spanish hegemony in Holland. Gascoigne served as a soldier in the Netherlands, probably from July 1572 until the second siege of Leiden in May 1574. He returned to England from time to time – he attended the funeral of Reginald Grey, 5th Earl of Kent, at St Giles, Cripplegate on 17 April 1573 – but was able to observe the war at close hand. Being Gascoigne, he had plenty of complaints and quarrels. He was shocked by the incompetence of Gilbert and the other leaders and by the ineffectualness and downright cowardice of the English and Scottish mercenary troops. After the naval battle of Flushing (26–7 August 1573) Gascoigne quarrelled with his colonel about the lack of discipline in the regiment and resigned his captain’s commission. There was then another highly characteristic dispute as he waited to get paid at Strijen. But Gascoigne, who quarrelled freely with his incompetent English commanders, impressed the Prince of Orange with his soldierly qualities. Although he took a break at Christmas to return to England on leave, Gascoigne rejoined Prince William to lend his support during the siege of Delft. The Prince paid Gascoigne 300 gulden above his pay for his part in the Spanish surrender of Middelburg. Gascoigne’s last spell of active service was his participation in the siege of Leiden in early 1574. The Dutch edgily feared that the English were colluding with the Spanish, and Gascoigne himself was accused of treacherously surrendering to the Spanish; 400 English mercenaries were taken prisoner and led to Haarlem. It seems as if Elizabeth did a deal with Philip II. In exchange for sparing the lives of these prisoners, she allowed the Spanish fleet to revictual in England. Among the released prisoners was George Gascoigne.
How so it were, at last we were dispatcht,
And home we came as children come from schoole,
As gladde, as fishe which were but lately cacht,
And straight againe were cast into the poole:
For by my fay I coumpt him but a foole,
Which would not rather poorely live at large,
Than rest in pryson fedde with costly charge,
as he wrote in his rather deft verse account of the expedition, ‘The fruites of warre’ or ‘Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’, a Latin motto all too apposite to politicians of our own day as well as to the warmongers of the sixteenth century: that war seems a good idea to people who do not know anything about it.
Gascoigne skilfully represented himself as one such, who has returned from the battlefields of the Netherlands disgusted by war. Brave as ‘our English bloudes’ have been in the fighting (and Gascoigne writes the poem partly to repair his own reputation and to rebut the rumours of his treachery), he left his readers in no doubt that war is a bloody business. He ended the poem with a ‘Peroratio’ to Queen Elizabeth, urging her (she hardly needed urging, all her instincts were those of the sensible peacemaker) not to get involved in unnecessary war:
Your skilfulle minde (O Queene without compare)
Can some conceive that cause constraynes me so,
Since wicked warres have bredde such cruell care,
In Flanders, Fraunce, in Spaine and many mo,
Which reape thereby none other worth but wo . . .
The Peroration contains apostrophes not merely to Queen Elizabeth, but also to the Earl of Bedford, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Kent, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Law Lords (‘You gemmes of Justice, chiefe of either bench’) and the merchants of London. Clearly, it was a penitent Gascoigne who returned from the Netherlands, resolved to make friends with many of his former enemies, and desperate for advancement. And in 1575 his luck turned. He published a revised version of his war and other poems, this time under his own name (A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the anonymous volume of 1572/3, became The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire of 1575). He revised and republished his amusing novel, Master F.J. He advertised his own reformed char
acter by translating and publishing a version of a Dutch play based upon the parable of the Prodigal Son (The Glasse of Government) and put together a collection of prose and poetry on a subject, which he knew to be close not only to his own heart, but to the heart of the Queen: The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting . . . Translated and collected for the pleasure of all Noblemen and Gentlemen. The source of Gascoigne’s work was a French book, Jacques du Fouilloux’s La Vénérie, and it reflects the delight in the hunt, which has been the passion of countrymen and women in France and England since the Middle Ages. The new, moralistic Gascoigne cannot resist pointing out that the real devious foxes were not Mr Reynard who was chased over the fields, but human beings who are as cunning and devious as a fox!
But shall I say my minde? I never yet saw day,
But every town had two or three which Rainard’s part could play,
So that men vaunt in vaine, which say they hunt the Foxe
To kepe their neighbours poultry free, & to defend their flockes.
When they them selves can spoyle, more profit in an houre,
Then Raynard rifles in a year, when he doth most devoure.
Although Gascoigne dwells on fox-hunting and badger-hunting (‘I have lent a Foxe or Badgerd ere nowe, a piece of my hose, and the skyn and fleshe for companie, which he never restored agayne’), his chief concern in The Noble Arte of Venerie was with hunting the deer: the Queen’s great passion. He showed himself an adept, even of such tricky situations as hunting a hart ‘at bay’ in a stream when the animal will not come out of the water. If a huntsman finds himself in this situation: ‘let him get a boate, or if he can swymme, let him put off his clothes, and swymme to him with a Dagger readie drawne to kyll him . . . It hath beene my happe oftentimes to kyll in this sorte verie great Hartes, and that in sight and presence of divers witnesses, and afterwardes I have guided their deade bodyes to the banke swymming.’4
There is some comedy in the fact that Gascoigne should have described himself as ‘friend to al Parkes, Forress and Chases’ when most of his experience of ‘venery’ had been as a poacher. He illustrated the work himself with woodcuts, which boldly showed him kneeling before no less a hunting enthusiast than the Queen herself. One of the woodcuts shows a shooting picnic. Another shows a dead hart at the foot of Queen Elizabeth, and the kneeling Gascoigne about to ‘breake’ it up with a knife. (Did Landseer know this woodcut when he painted a remarkably similar scene of a Highland ghillie presenting a slain deer to Queen Victoria?) Another delightful woodcut demonstrates ‘How to slee the Hearon’, with a heron falling out of an English sky towards the Queen and a group of noblemen.
These woodcuts are probably intended to be illustrations of the Earl of Leicester’s lavish summer entertainments for the Queen at Kenilworth in 1575. That summer’s royal progress had been the most extravagant of the reign, and Leicester was determined that Elizabeth’s sojourn with him should be longer and more splendid than her visits anywhere else.
Burghley spent in the region of £3,000 each time the Queen visited Theobalds, and the sum was nearly ruinous – in his private capacity. In 1588, in his public capacity as Lord Treasurer, between £8,000 and £9,000 paid the wages of every mariner in the Royal Navy.5
By 1563, Leicester had spent £60,000 on extensions and improvements to the castle and by the time of the Queen’s 1575 visit – her third to Kenilworth – it was spoken of as one of the three most splendid estates in the country. In addition to all the new buildings and the newly planted parks Leicester had created, in readiness for Elizabeth’s arrival, there was an Italianate garden, with a (fake) jewelled aviary and a (real) marble fountain. The garden was like a theatrical set designed especially for the Queen and her court. Yet although it was spoken of for centuries afterwards as one of the most splendid extravaganzas ever to occur on English soil, there was something lacking in the entertainments. She stayed for a shorter time than Leicester had hoped. Nineteen days were long enough to be ruinously expensive for him and she did not actually insult him by leaving earlier. But neither of them could hide from the other that there was now something a little sad about their relationship, and she never visited Kenilworth again.
A number of factors dampened the hoped-for exuberance. One was that Elizabeth’s digestion, never very strong, was upset even before she arrived. She had stopped on her way through Oxfordshire at Grafton, where she had a house of her own. It was a hot July, and when she arrived at Grafton ‘there was not a drop of good drink for her’. The local beer was too strong for her. She liked a very weak ‘small beer’ and, upon being presented with the stronger stuff, threw one of her tantrums.
Leicester’s entertainment of the Queen at Kenilworth was intended to be momentous. Was there even the hope, or the thought, in the minds of the host (or of the royal guest) that they might revive their old love of fifteen years earlier? Or if this thought is too sentimental, was there the hope in Leicester’s mind that it was not too late, even now, for the Dudleys to resume their all-but-regal status by his marriage to Elizabeth? In so doing he would not only advance himself, but also put an end to her capricious suggestion that she might after all marry François, Duc d’Alençon. This prospect – of Elizabeth marrying into the family that had initiated the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre – was a nightmare of the forward Protestant party in government, of which Leicester was the figurehead, the ‘captain-general of the Puritans’.6
Kenilworth marked for many a turning point in their perceptions of Elizabeth. And perhaps for Elizabeth and Leicester it marked a turning-point in their perceptions of one another. Their relationship was, and remains, a puzzle. The likeliest explanation of the puzzle is that it was never quite clear, even to Elizabeth and Leicester themselves, exactly what they wanted or needed from one another. In July 1575 they were both forty-two years old. He had begun to go bald, and florid in complexion. Relatively tall, he was able to carry off the increase in his weight, and he was never – as was claimed in libellous Catholic pamphlets, such as ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ – gluttonous or obese. But health problems dogged him throughout this decade and in the later 1570s he had swellings in his legs, for which he paid visits to Buxton and Harrogate. He prided himself upon his active life, as a sportsman and a countryman, and in 1573 had lectured the Queen, ‘So good a medycyne I have alway found exercise with the open good ayre as yt hath ever byn my best remedye ageynst those dellycate deceases gotton about your deynty city of London’. When she was in the right mood (an important conditional), she was able to allow herself to be lectured by him in this way. And she, the stingiest of monarchs and patrons, was always generous to her beloved Robin.
Throughout the 1570s she lavished him with large estates, adding to his holdings in 1572 with the lordships of Arwystili and Cyfeiliog, and the lordship of Denbigh. She let him have a ten-year lease on the farm of the customs on sweet (Mediterranean) wines – he collected the tax on wines such as Marsala and pocketed it. Thousands of tons of wine were imported yearly. Over the previous two centuries England (thanks to global cooling) had ceased to be a wine-producing country, and the English had become especially fond of Bordeaux wines, which they called claret, and of sherry sack from Spain. (The wine of Jerez, sack, was an Anglicisation of sec = dry, but by modern tastes all these wines would have tasted sweet.) They loved all sweet alcoholic drinks: mead, which had gone out of fashion in the late-medieval period, became popular again, and hippocras – sweet mulled wine with spices and hot pear or apple cider.7 So having the tax on sweet wine was a huge concession to Leicester. She also lent him £15,000. Leicester was not a notably extravagant man except in the matter of clothes. He would appear to have spent most of his money on patronage, ensuring that he had a finger in every pie. He was high steward of ten boroughs (Bristol, Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, Abingdon, Windsor, Reading, Wallingford, Tewkesbury, St Albans and Evesham). He was an active, and popular, Chancellor of Oxford University. At least ninety-eight books were dedicated to him, which made him one of
the most active literary patrons of the reign. He was a keen backer of explorations and voyages, from which, obviously, he hoped to profit – investing in Frobisher’s voyage of 1576, Hawkins’s second voyage and Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. From the Drake voyage he would have profited, but he also sank money in losers, such as the voyage of Fenton in 1582.
And another drain on his pocket was Kenilworth.
We who are used to reliably fresh water to drink, and who have tea and coffee whenever we like it, need to make a mental adjustment when we travel in our imaginations to sixteenth-century England, reminding ourselves that it was not safe to drink the water and, even if you were the Queen, there were some occasions when there was nothing to drink but beer. The crisis passed; ‘God be thanked, she is now perfect well and merry,’8 said Leicester on the day that he was due to bring her to Kenilworth. But it was not a good start. At the ‘ambrosial banquet’ prepared for her, Leicester had ordered more than 300 dishes. ‘Her majesty eat smally or nothing; which understood, the coorsez wear not so orderly served and sizely set doun, but wear by and by az disorderly wasted and coorsly consumed, more courtly the thought then courteously,’ said one observer. The next sweltering day, the Queen spent the entire time in the castle, ‘for coolness’.9
The Elizabethans Page 22
