Most of the food at an ‘ambrosial banquet’ such as this would have been sweet. The 300 dishes would have been chiefly sweetmeats of a kind that have now disappeared altogether from the English table, or would only be served with fruit and nuts for a ‘dessert’ at a formal dinner in, say, an Oxford college or a city Livery Company. Even savouries, if they formed part of the banquet, would have had sweet admixtures. Their herring pies were made with currants, raisins and minced dates;10 capons would come roasted with orange peel, sugar and prunes;11 a chicken pie would contain brown sugar and raisins.12 All disgusting to a modern palate. Vegetables, if served at all, would be overcooked and, yet again, sweetened. Their artichoke pie was made with sherry, sugar, orange peel and raisins. The English critic Walter Pater thought all art aspired to the condition of music. All Elizabethan cooking aspired to the condition of marmalade.
The splendour of pageantry, and the jangling lack of harmony between the two great protagonists at Kenilworth – Elizabeth and Leicester – are perhaps both recalled in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The gunfire and fireworks that greeted the Queen’s arrival at the castle were seen and heard more then twenty miles away,13 so they would surely have been seen and heard five miles away in Stratford-upon-Avon. Only ten miles north-east of Stratford, at Long Itchington, Leicester put on a stupendous hunting picnic for the Queen, and she spent much of her time at Kenilworth, in the cool of the late summer afternoons and early evenings, pursuing the deer. She loved hunting. (She personally killed six deer during this visit, as the surviving game-books show.14)
A modern visitor might have found the Kenilworth pageants and games spectacular, even the deer-hunting. The one activity that would surely not appeal even to the most thick-skinned time-traveller would have been the bear-baiting in the outer wood of the castle. It is good to know that even in Elizabethan times there were those who abominated this gratuitous cruelty. Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses (1583) asked, ‘What Christian heart can take pleasure to see one poor beast to rend, tear and kill another, and all for his foolish pleasure?’ The answer to this rhetorical question must be: the Earl of Leicester and his guests, including – we must presume – Queen Elizabeth herself, for he would surely not have had his hounds slavering at the prospect of fighting and tormenting the bears if he had not thought this would be diverting for his monarch?15
Even the hunting parties were punctuated with pageantry. As she came riding home one evening, she was met by Gascoigne dressed as the Savage Man. On another evening he was Sylvanus, god of the woods, who told her that all the forest-dwellers, the fauns, dryads, hamadryads and wood-nymphs were in tears at the rumour that she might be about to leave. In one of his entertainments it would seem that Gascoigne blundered. Most of his verses and entertainments at Kenilworth seem to have been written spontaneously, but the masque of Zabeta had been commissioned long in advance. The reason given for the Queen’s refusal to see this masque was that the weather had broken and the banquet in a temporary partition had to be called off. But it could have been rescheduled for another night. Clearly the Queen had cast her eye, at least once, over an argument of the masque and had censored it. The show was to have been acted by James Burbage and Leicester’s own players, and Diana the Virgin-Goddess was to have lamented the loss of [Eli]zabeta her famous nymph, seventeen years ago – that is, the exact length of time [Eli]zabeta had been on the throne. But Gascoigne’s clumsy text reminded the nymph of her captivity under Queen Mary, attributed her preservation to the Dudley family and told her:
A world of wealth at wil
You henceforth shall enjoy
In wedded state, and there with all
Holde up from great annoy
The staffe of your estate.16
The ‘staff’ is the heraldic device of the Dudleys. The masque was offering Elizabeth one last chance to marry her Robin. No wonder she did not wish to cringe her way through this appalling ‘entertainment’, and moved the royal progress on from Kenilworth only a week later.
Like many with a strong love of ceremony, Elizabeth also possessed a keen sense of the absurd. One evening at Kenilworth the Queen stood on the bridge by Mortimer’s Tower and watched a pageant on the lake where a mermaid swam, drawing her tail through the water, and Harry Goldingham (a Bottom-like comic actor) was performing the role of Arion astride a splendidly constructed dolphin. After a melodious six-part song emanated from the belly of the dolphin, Harry/Arion took off his mask and declared that ‘he was none of Arion not he, but honest Harry Goldingham’. The Queen broke into peals of laughter and afterwards said this had been the best part of the show.17
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon says to Puck:
thou rememb’rest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
Yet Oberon’s memory of the pageantry was of Cupid’s arrow-shot misfiring:
That very time, I saw but thou couldst not
Flying between the cold moon and the earth
Cupid all armed; a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal thronèd by the west
And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts . . .
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound
And maidens call it love-in-Idleness.18
As well as admiring the fireworks, the floating islands, the jousting, the bear-baiting, the feasting and all the other spectacles at Kenilworth, the Warwickshire locals (including the Shakespeare family) would have gossiped freely about the Queen and Leicester and his other amours. What great ones do the lesser prattle of. It has long been acknowledged that Oberon’s words contain some memory of the Kenilworth pageant and its prodigious floating islands, mermaids and musical dolphins. It is not too fanciful to go further and see in the contentious, playful, spiteful and sexually frustrated relationship between Oberon and Titania the flavour of what common gossip had to say concerning Elizabeth and Leicester.
But with Leicester, as with his new protégé Gascoigne, Elizabeth was prepared to be indulgent. She did not banish either of them. They accompanied her on her progress when the court left Kenilworth and moved on to the Earl of Essex’s house at Chartley in Staffordshire. Essex (Walter Devereux19) was in Ireland. Leicester had probably by now begun an affair with Lady Essex – an earlier affair, with Douglas Sheffield, having seemingly petered out in this or the previous year. The affair with Douglas Sheffield began in 1570–1 when she would have been about thirty. She was the daughter of William Howard, first Baron Howard of Effingham (1510–73), a cousin of the Dukes of Norfolk and widow of a Lincolnshire nobleman, Lord Sheffield. She had two legitimate children. With Leicester she certainly had one, Sir Robert Dudley, who was born on 7 August 1574. Gossip at court that suggested there had also been a daughter born stillborn was something Lady Sheffield vigorously denied. Her sister Frances was also said to be ‘very far in love’ with Leicester. Douglas Sheffield married Sir Edward Stafford in 1579. He was a friend of Leicester’s, but there is no evidence that Leicester ‘arranged’ the marriage. The evidence would suggest that both Howard sisters were free-and-easy girls who could be expected to have colourful and varied love lives. No one knows why Leicester did not marry her. Perhaps he was still holding back in the hope of marrying the Queen, or perhaps the relationship with Douglas Sheffield was simply too volatile to turn into a marriage. In the only surviving personal letter among Leicester’s correspondence, he advised her, before 1574, to break off relations with him and find someone else:
For you must think hit ys some marvellous cause . . . that forceth me thus to
be cause almost of the reigne of my none [own] hovse; for ther ys no likelyhoode that any of our boddyes of menkind like to have ayres; my brother you se long maryed and not lykke to have Children, yet resteth so now in myself, and yet such occasions ys ther . . . as yf I should marry I am seure never to have favour of them that I had rather yet never have wife than lose them, yet ys ther nothing in the world next than favour that I wold not gyve to be in hope of leaving some children behind me, being nowe the last of our howse.20
The Queen, if she knew of Leicester’s affair with Lady Sheffield, chose to turn a blind eye. She was so close to her ‘sweet Robin’ that she must have guessed that something was ‘up’ and this had probably been one of the factors in her sudden and capricious adoption of a new favourite, when the Leicester–Douglas Sheffield amour was at its hottest. She had lighted upon the rather comical figure of Sir Christopher Hatton (1540–91).
He was an excellent dancer, and he appeared to be without irony when it came to his ability to flatter. These are two useful qualities in a courtier. ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel,’ said the canny Victorian.21 Hatton did not need such counsel. He naturally worshipped Elizabeth. He spoke of himself as an everlastingly frustrated suitor in love with an unattainable goddess. ‘This the twelfth day’, he wrote to her, ‘since I saw the brightness of the sun that giveth light unto my sense and soul I wax an amazed creature.’22
He was her ‘happy bondman’. She called him ‘sheep’. Tall, thick-bearded, unmarried – one imagines ‘very unmarried’ in Betjeman’s useful phrase – Hatton was a perfect distraction for the Queen and she would go on basking in his adoration for two decades. The court first noticed that Hatton had gratified her vanity in 1572 when Leicester’s affair with Lady Sheffield was at its most involved. At the annual exchange of New Year gifts between courtiers and sovereign, Hatton, who had already been made Keeper of the Parks of Eltham and Home and had been given the keepership of Wellingborough, received 400 ounces of silver plate from the Queen, about twice what others of his rank received. By July 1572 he was a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and captain of the Yeomen of the Guard. He sat as MP for Higham Ferrers. Amazingly, this lightweight lawyer of the Inner Temple would end up in 1587 being made Lord Chancellor of England: it was an appointment greeted with outrage23 by the legal establishment. He lived in enormous grandeur that he could ill afford, building himself a never-finished palace in his ancestral manor of Holdenby, Northamptonshire, as well as buying nearby Kirby Hall. When in town he occupied the former palace of the Bishops of Ely. He said he would never visit the rebuilt Holdenby until his royal saint – that is, Elizabeth – had set foot in it. There were two great courts, one 128 feet by 104 feet, covering two acres. It was the size of Hampton Court. The saint never did visit, probably aware that she would ultimately have paid for the privilege. When Hatton died aged fifty-one he owed her £18,071 – a colossal sum by any standards, but stratospheric by those of the cheeseparing Elizabeth. She who jibbed at paying her army in Ireland, and who was so unwilling to equip the navy against the Armada, was prepared to spend the price of several fighting ships in order to cosset the vanity of a fawning flatterer.
Elizabeth had known of Leicester’s interest in his next lover for a long time. Lettice Devereux, the Countess of Essex who entertained the Queen when she progressed from Kenilworth in the summer of 1575, was a Boleyn cousin – a great-niece of Anne Boleyn. Her mother, Katherine Knollys, was good friends with her cousin Elizabeth. Lettice Knollys was appointed Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber at the very beginning of the reign when she was only eighteen or nineteen. She was one of the beauties of the age, with thick curling auburn hair, mischievous dark eyes and full, sensuous lips. In her portrait she looks like Big Trouble, the sort of Trouble men yearn for. She married Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, in 1560 and withdrew from court in order to have five children in as many years. This did not stop her flirting, and when in 1565 the Queen heard of Leicester’s fascination with Lettice, she flew into a major rage.
The fascination was an abiding one. Ten years later, when the grand entertainments at Kenilworth were performed and her husband was in Ireland, Lettice was more or less installed in Warwickshire as Leicester’s resident mistress. The rumours were very public, but, astonishingly, they had not yet reached the ears of the Queen. And although the matter was ‘publicly talked of in the streets’, it was not safe to be known as a party to the gossip. Leicester was a powerful, ruthless man whom it was unsafe to cross. For the Kenilworth entertainments he asked the local gentry to array themselves in his livery, the blue coat with a silver badge of a bear and ragged staff. One neighbour refused. This was Edward Arden of Park Hall, Warwickshire, who had been High Sheriff of the county the previous year. Moreover, Arden unwisely made comments touching the Earl’s private access to the Countess of Essex, and called Leicester ‘a whore-master’. These remarks were not forgotten. Eight years later a spy handed Arden over to the authorities. He was a Catholic. His son-in-law, who lived with him, was a simpleton called John Somerville. The ‘gardener’ at Park Hall was a disguised priest called Hall. Somerville had apparently bragged that he would go to London and shoot the Queen and put her head on a pole because she was a ‘serpent and a viper’. Although neither Hall nor Arden were violent men, all three were arrested. It seems as if Hall was a double agent, for he was spared at Leicester’s intercession. Arden was put to death for treason. His lands were escheated to the Crown and some of them were immediately given to Leicester. No one who spoke slightingly of the great earl could expect to do so with impunity.
Then the court moved on to Woodstock where the host was the Queen’s Champion, Sir Henry Lee.24 The Kenilworth entertainments had been an extravagant but ultimately incoherent business. Leicester had been determined that his show should be the showiest and the most expensive to date, but his complicated amatory situation, his driving political interest and his fundamental coarseness could not stop the Kenilworth display spilling over into meaningless vulgarity. Lee, however, was a man who raised royal ceremonial into an art-form. And, indeed, was strongly influential on the art-forms of others – notably portraiture and literature. He had a high forehead, curly hair, dark laughing eyes, a long nose and a mouth that looked as if it had just closed having made an elaborate compliment, but might open at any moment to make an equally elaborate joke. His portrait of 1568 by Anthonis Mor shows a playful obsessive, a humorist, but one who was a true homo ludens, a man who took masques, tilts, tableaux and displays as seriously as Burghley took the economy or the wars in the Netherlands. In that age of display, Lee was a figure of immense significance, helping the Elizabethans towards a definition of themselves, which was appropriate in a man who could legitimately claim kinship with so many key figures of the age: Burghley, Leicester, the Earl of Essex, even the Queen herself. Her mythic status owed much to his creative pageantry.
As she approached Woodstock, the Queen and her entourage encountered two knights, Contarenus and Loricus, engaged in combat. The hermit Hemetes (played by our old friend Gascoigne) came forward and dissuaded the knights from fighting. The hermit’s somewhat rambling speech went down extremely well with the Queen – she asked for a copy of it. Hemetes said he had once been a famous knight beloved of ladies. He told of how Loricus loved a lady of high degree, but, as was the courtly-love convention, he had hidden his love and pretended devotion to another. A sibyl had foretold that Loricus (one of the knights – it was a name used more than once by Lee for himself) would come at last after many sad wanderings to the best country in the world, governed by the best of rulers, ‘best Ladie and most beawtyfull’.25
When the tale was over, the hermit conducted the Queen and her suite to a banqueting house built especially on a hill in the wood, roofed with turf, bedecked with flowers and ‘spanges of gold plate’, which glimmered magically. Above them soared a great oak. The two tables, one round and one a half-moon, were turfed with grass, and t
hen, as the food was served, music struck up in the summerhouse and there appeared, probably for the first time in Elizabethan literature, the Fairy Queen. It is generally recognised that the elaborate tilts in the revised edition of the Arcadia are an allusion to actual tournaments in which Philip Sidney and Henry Lee took part. In the Woodstock entertainment of the Fairy Queen we can see an inspiration for Spenser’s great epic. Sidney, who had been present at the Kenilworth entertainments, would have been all but certain to have followed the court to Woodstock on the royal progress. Certainly his twelve-year-old sister Mary was there, the future Countess of Pembroke, the one for whom he wrote the Arcadia. She was handed a posy from the oak above the banqueting hall in the wood during the masque in which the Faerie Queene made her arrival.26 This was almost certainly the first appearance of the ‘Faerie Queene’ in Elizabethan literature.
Richard Corbet (1582–1635), poet Bishop of Oxford in the reign of James I – High Church, boozy, whimsical, and later Bishop of Norwich – is chiefly known for one lyric, the first line of which Rudyard Kipling appropriated for one of his volumes of Puck stories: ‘Farewell rewards and fairies . . .’
Corbet identifies the fairies with the Roman Catholics. In Queen Mary’s time, they had footed ‘rings and roundelays’:
But since of late, Elizabeth,
And later James came in,
They never danc’d on any heath
As when the time hath bin
By which we note the Fairies
Were of the old profession,
Their songs were Ave Maryes,
Their dances were procession.
But now, alas! They all are dead
The Elizabethans Page 23
