The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

Or gone beyond the Seas

  Or farther for Religion fled,

  Or else they take their ease.27

  Pace Corbet’s charming and well-known ballad, however, the two greatest works of fairy literature – The Faerie Queene and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – belong to that heyday, the late Elizabethan Age. It is central to the fairy-mythos that they are a threatened species who either just have departed or are just about to do so: Tolkien’s Grey Elves enforce this tradition when they disembark with Frodo at Grey Havens.

  The cult of the Faerie Queene, both in pageant and in the great epic of the age by Spenser, the Elizabethan Virgil, was yet another example of the reinvigorated archaism of the collective Elizabethan collective imagination. Just as they revived the cult of St George, in all the Garter ceremonies, at the Queen’s insistence, so Spenser made St George, his Redcrosse Knight, an emblem of Protestant virtue. The tourneys and tilts, in Spenser’s poetry, as in Sidney’s revised polyphonic narrative of his Arcadia, are a deliberate throwback to the age of chivalry. Yet all this was not done to deny the fundamental breaks with the past that the Elizabethan Age represented – a new National Church cut loose from the parent-stem of Rome; a new aristocracy composed of families such as the Herberts and the Cecils, who had been little more than minor Welsh squires during the Wars of the Roses; new learning; new fashions; new geographical horizons; a new politics. Even in the cult of the Virgin Queen, the Fairie Queene, the National Saviour, there was an element of the new taking over a novel form and subverting it. Obviously one element of this was the religious one. The language used is so exalted that the modern reader is half-shocked, half-amused. It takes a while to get eye and ear adjusted to the tone. ‘The Kingdom of Saturn and the Golden world is come again, and the Virgin Astraea is descended from heaven to build her seat in this your most happy country of England,’ said Jan van der Noor, a Dutch refugee from Spanish persecution in his book translated as A Theatre for Worldlings (1569).28 A song in John Dowland’s Second Book of Airs says:

  When others sing Venite exultemus!

  Stand by and turn to Noli emulari!

  For Quare fremuerant use Oremus!

  Vivat Eliza! For an Ave Mari!29

  You could not find a more specific substitution than this. There is an engraving of Elizabeth with her device of the phoenix, below which is written, ‘This Maiden-Queen Elizabeth came into this world, the Eve of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and died on the Eve of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, 1602.’

  She was, she is (what can there more be said?)

  In earth the first, in heaven the second Maid.30

  In life she had taken precedence even over Mary in the worship of the faithful; in death she was second only to the Blessed Virgin herself. Even the cults of personality of the most megalomaniac twentieth-century dictators never went as far as this. We are here almost in the territory of the idolatrous worship of divine Roman emperors. Or so it would seem.

  But here is another case of imagery being subverted. Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight is not the St George of medieval devotion. He is a new, Neoplatonic symbol of Protestant virtue. The Virgin Elizabeth is not a mere ‘substitute’ for the Virgin Mary, still less does the cult of the quasi-divine Elizabeth imply that the Queen enjoyed absolute power.

  13

  Ireland

  IN THE 1570S the confused and violent condition of Ireland continued to be confused and violent. The Irish lords continued to feud among themselves for dominion over patches of land. The English increasingly came to regard Ireland as a colonial problem, which it was their job to solve. And even though these confusions and resentments long antedated the Reformation (Mary Tudor was, if anything, more interventionist in Ireland than Elizabeth in the early years of the reign, and Mary’s settlement of Maryborough and Philipstown in Leix and Offaly were ‘plantations’ every bit as invasive as anything devised by later Protestants), the Counter-Reformation gave everyone the excuse to be more belligerent, and less compromising. (By the end of the decade in Munster, for example, it was the boast of the Earl of Desmond that he would defend the Catholic faith and oppose Englishmen who ‘go about to overrun our country and make it their own’.) Having abandoned his castles, Desmond (Gerald Fitzjames Fitzgerald) took to the woods and became an outlaw, to the discomfiture of the English military governor of Munster, Sir Thomas Malby. But was Desmond’s action motivated by Catholic piety, or by age-old anxiety to get his hands on the lands and properties of those ancient enemies of the Fitzgeralds, the Butlers?

  It was not easy to say. The Pope’s Bull of 1570, which both excommunicated and deposed the Queen of England, could only delight Irish malcontents, even those who had hitherto been prepared to accept the Reformation and help themselves to former monastic properties. Such Irish lords as James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald wrote to Maurice Fitzgibbon, the papally recognized Archbishop of Cashel, and between them, in 1570, they sought to include King Philip in making Don John of Austria the King of Ireland: ‘If we had a king like other nations none would venture to attack us.’ Quite how it was in the gift of the Fitzgeralds, or the archbishop, to bestow crowns upon an Austrian prince (or indeed whether Ireland possessed, legally, an independent monarchy) was not likely to be a question that held them back from joining with other Irish lords, not in a struggle against ‘the legitimate sceptre and honourable throne of England’ – that is, an imagined English power – but against the actual government, ‘Elizabeth, the pretensed queen of England’, a ‘she-tyrant’ who had ‘deservedly lost her royal power by refusing to listen to Christ in the person of his vicar’, the Pope.1

  ‘In spite of their relationship to Leicester, the Queen does not seem to have much liked the Sidneys.’2 If proof were needed of these words of Dr A.L. Rowse, look no further than the fact that Elizabeth made Sir Henry Sidney the Lord Deputy of Ireland not once, but twice – 1566–71 and 1575–8 – even though Ireland was a country that, in his own words, he ‘cursed, hated and detested’.3 She did not send Sidney as a punishment, but rather because he had shown himself to be so able an administrator. Such was the intractable problem of Ireland, however, that it could be said that the more able the English administrator, the less the Irish were prepared to accept his administration. Whereas the Irish had one set of visions about how their country should be governed, or not governed, the English had another, so much at variance, that it could never succeed. By the end of the 1570s the English aim was ‘the Anglicisation of that island, namely the full acceptance, at least by the Irish elite, of English institutions, social, political and legal’.4

  As we noted in the opening chapter of this book, it is difficult for modern readers, who have lived through thirty and more years of ‘troubles’ in Ireland, and who no doubt have their own perspectives, to see any of the participants in the sixteenth-century Irish calamity with unbiased eyes. Most non-English readers will see the story as a disastrous example of the colonial mindset. Ireland, it would be clear to the huge preponderance of human beings at present thinking about the issue, should have been left to the Irish to work out. (Quite who ‘the Irish’ in this sentence are – whether, for example, they include the old Norman families the Desmonds and the Butlers – is a matter of taste.) Those who read with a sympathetic eye those English historians of Ireland, from Froude to Rowse, who cheer on the colonisers are in a distinct minority. This minority might still ask, ‘What else could the Elizabethan administrators have done?’ They might have behaved with less violence; that is for sure. When Francis Drake did a brief spell of duty in Ireland, he served under John Norreys and took part in the wholesale massacre of the inhabitants of Rathlin Island in July 1575. Not only did they kill the small army of Gaelic mercenaries – the so-called Redshanks who came from the Hebrides to fight for any Irish warlord who would hire them – but they killed everyone: women and children included. As late as 1972 an English biographer of Drake could describe this as ‘an unpleasant episode’ . . . A glowing picture of this cruel event was conveyed
to the Queen by the Earl of Essex, a nobleman to whom she had farmed out the task and profits of the Irish ‘purification’. In the end, the Irish business broke her heart.5

  Henry Sidney’s idea was to plant colonies of Englishmen all over the island of Ireland. He saw the possibility of Spain using the dissatisfaction of the Irish lords in Munster, for instance, ‘to restore them to their ancient tytells of honner, lybertie and papistrye’.6 Sidney’s colonies were to consist of 3,000 people made up of three distinct elements: 1,500 men between twenty-five and thirty-five years ‘brought up as servants in husbandry’; after three years’ service in Ireland these English agricultural workers could claim copyhold of sixty acres of land. The second group would be 750 married men who were yeomen, would-be gentlefolk, ‘having no freeholdes in England and being mete to have husbandry holdes of iiii ploughlands’ – or 360 acres. The third group would be wage-earners, tradesmen, ploughwrights, fishermen. They would be leased enough ground to feed three cattle and two horses and to sow a garden.7 For their own protection these colonies would always be established near military garrisons.

  Sidney’s colonial policies were resented, naturally enough, by many strands of Irish life. They were also more expensive than any plausible system of taxation could maintain. Elizabeth herself, always parsimonious, was self-destructively mean in Ireland. Sidney believed, surely correctly, that his scheme depended upon the establishment of local presidencies, gauleiters who would in the fullness of time be paid for by local taxes, but who in the meantime needed to be paid by the Crown. Elizabeth reluctantly agreed8 to this, but she was in general unwilling to fund sufficient troops, transport and supplies, let alone administrative cash, to fund the Irish enterprise.

  Hardly a year passed in which there was not fighting of some kind in Ireland. In 1576, Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex (1541?–76), was appointed Earl Marshal of Ireland. (Was Elizabeth being kind to the Earl of Leicester and sending Essex abroad while his wife and Leicester conducted their by now rather public affair?) Essex, nicely described by Penry Williams as ‘a nobleman with modest estates and high ambitions’, had no choice but to accept the marshal post, but he plaintively asked his monarch, ‘Why should I, wear out my youth in an obscure place without the assurance of your good opinion?’9

  When he set out for Ireland in July 1576, aged thirty-something, Essex was accompanied by the twenty-one-year-old Philip Sidney, and later in the month they joined Sidney’s father Sir Henry on one of his tours of duty. After a period of rebellions in the west, matters were becoming quiet again and the Privy Council had written to Sir Henry sending their ‘most hearty thanks . . . for his diligence and execution of justice in all places’. Walsingham perhaps went implausibly far when he wrote to Sir Henry, ‘your very Enemyes can not but commend you’. Sidney senior reported back to the Council optimistically that the whole of Ireland could now be considered pacified.10

  It was during this spell of peace that the Sidneys, together with Essex, went to Galway. Their visit coincided with the arrival on the shore of that celebrated Amazon of the Ocean, Grania O’Malley. Did she so impress Philip that she suggested in his mind the men who dressed up as women in the Arcadia in order to pass themselves off as Amazons?

  One of the more hilariously improbable explanations given by young Pyrocles – in The Old Arcadia – for his having invaded that confused scene in ‘drag’ was:

  a journey two years ago I made among the Amazons, where having sought to try my unfortunate valour, I met not one in all the country but was too hard for me; till, in the end, in the presence of their queen Senecia, I (hoping to prevail against her) challenged an old woman of fourscore years to fight on horseback to the uttermost with me: who, having overthrown me, for saving of my life made me swear I should go like an unarmed Amazon till the coming of my beard did with the discharge of my oath deliver me of that bondage.11

  Grania O’Malley, like her husband, commanded a ship, and sometimes more than one, and became a celebrated smuggler and privateer. Sir Henry Sidney recalled:

  There came to me also a most famous feminine sea-captain, called Granny O’Malley, and offered her services unto me, wheresoever I would command her, with three galleys and two hundred fighting men, either in Ireland or Scotland. She brought with her her husband, for she was as well by sea as by land more than master’s mate with him. This was a notorious woman in all the coast of Ireland. This woman did Sir Philip Sidney see and speak with. He can more at large inform you of her.

  Back in Dublin, the Earl of Essex succumbed to dysentery. The archbishop, Adam Loftus, wrote graphically to Walsingham that the earl was ‘sorely vexed with the flux . . . having every day and night no less than twenty, thirty or sometimes forty stools through which being sore weakened and natural strength diminished’. Essex died on 22 September.12

  14

  Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation

  FRANCIS DRAKE, SOME kind of cousin of John Hawkins, had taken part in Hawkins’s ill-fated slaving voyage from West Africa to the Caribbean, and had escaped from the battle of Ulua rather than fall into the hands of Spain. That experience, in 1568, was an object lesson, as far as Drake was concerned, in Spanish duplicity and cruelty. Don Martin Enriquez, the Viceroy of New Spain, had promised the English sailors friendship and assistance as they sailed their leaky slavers into Spanish waters. He had then attacked the old Jesus of Lübeck, Henry VIII’s purchase from the Hanseatic League, which had been abandoned. Many English sailors were either killed or tortured, or compelled into galley-slavery. Years later, Drake told a Spaniard that if he ever met Martin Enriquez he would teach him how a gentleman should keep his word.

  The unhappy experience confirmed all the fiercest prejudices of Drake, the Devon man, against Roman Catholics. He was born – perhaps in 1543, it is not certain – in Crowndale, near Tavistock. His father, who had also been a sailor, had settled as a yeoman farmer on land belonging to Francis Russell – afterwards Earl of Bedford. Drake was named after Francis Russell. Edmund Drake, his father, belonged to the first generation of Englishmen to hear the new doctrines of Protestantism, and he absorbed them greedily, ardently. When the conservative Catholics of the West Country rose in protest, in 1549, against the introduction of Edward VI’s first Prayer Book, the mob hated the Drakes for their Protestantism. The Drakes had their farm trashed, and they escaped to Gillingham in Kent, where Edmund Drake housed his family in an old ship. Edmund, who later took Holy Orders and from 1560 was the vicar of Upchurch, Kent, appears to have been a freelance preacher to the sailors and shipwrights in the new dockyards that the Admiralty of Edward VI was creating on the Medway. This was the origin of the great Chatham yard which played so big a role in British naval history – it is also, as it happens, where Charles Dickens was born and, anachronistic as it may sound, there is something Dickensian about Drake’s childhood in the decayed old ship at Gillingham. It presaged the life that was to come, the life of one of the greatest mariners the world ever saw, and an Englishman who changed the destiny of his country. The ‘great man’ or ‘great woman’ theory of history is regularly dismissed, whether by Tolstoy, who sought to diminish Napoleon by an assertion of a sort of Hegelian inevitability to his defeat in Russia; or by Marx, another Hegelian (albeit an Hegelian heretic), who explained the movement of history in terms of economic necessity and dialectical materialism; or by more recent historians who wish us to take account of the social and economic conditions in which so-called geniuses or ‘great’ human beings functioned. The thrilling thing about the history of Elizabethan England is that the technicoloured personalities of the chief participants really compel us to think again. If Mary Tudor’s younger sister had been a silly, weak-charactered girl like Lady Catherine Grey, do we really think that sixteenth-century English history would have been no different from the way it was with the wise, courageous and often ruthless Elizabeth as Queen? If she had appointed a fool or a sycophant, rather than Cecil, as Secretary, would things have been no different? Likewis
e, Francis Drake was one of those rare individuals who influenced events, who changed things radically.

  After his experience on ‘the third troublesome voyage of Master John Hawkins’, Drake returned to England. He married, in 1569, a Mary Newman at St Budeaux, but he did not stay at home for long. Late in 1570 he sailed from Plymouth in a 25-ton ship, the Swan, which was probably paid for by Hawkins and his partner Sir William Winter.1 He was accompanied by another ship from Plymouth, the 70-ton Pasco. All the crews were young – there was only one man of them over the age of thirty. Drake’s aim was an adventure of the utmost boldness. The Spanish, who mined the gold and other treasures of Peru, conveyed it by the Pacific coast to the Panama Isthmus (no Panama Canal until 1914). Drake’s plan was to dock at the Atlantic sea-port of the Panama Isthmus, Nombre de Dios (Name of God). There were actually very few Spaniards in the city. In the wooded hills of the Isthmus there were several thousand escaped African slaves, known as Cimarrones, who were, with their wives and children, in the process of making themselves into a nation. Drake’s idea was to make common cause with the Cimarrones, cross the fifty miles or so of the isthmus and waylay the Peruvian gold, share it out with his Cimarrone allies and sail for home one of the richest men in England. Needless to say, the Queen, who was technically not at war with her brother-in-law the King of Spain, could not openly encourage the venture, but she knew of it, and as she said to Drake on another occasion, ‘The gentleman careth not if I disavow him.’

  Drake had studied maps of Nombre de Dios and, although he had never been there in his life, by the time he had crossed the Atlantic he knew the whole layout of it; he knew the depths of the harbour, he knew every street and battery. As they entered the Spanish Main they captured and plundered a number of Spanish vessels, and Drake pumped captured Spaniards and their African slaves for information. The one vital piece of information which he had not gleaned was that the town was empty of treasure. It had sailed some time before. The hope that Drake might simply lift the Peruvian gold – or silver ingots – from Nombre de Dios was dashed upon arrival.2 Drake, moreover, was shot during his unsuccessful raid upon the port. With great resourcefulness, he decided to sail down to Cartagena, let his wounds heal and wait for the next treasure train to arrive at Panama in January 1573. With a party of Cimarrones, Drake made his way across the isthmus with the intention of intercepting a fourteen-mule load of gold. The plot was uncovered and he was compelled to return to base camp, where he joined forces with a French pirate, one Guillaume Le Testu. The next raid was luckier, and they were able to intercept the mule train and overpower the Spanish guards. Le Testu was killed. Drake was able to sail home a rich man, with booty of £20,000. They reached Plymouth harbour at sermon time on Sunday, 9 August 1573. The parson watched his church empty as word spread through the pews and the people ran down to the quay to praise ‘the evidence of God’s love and blessing towards our gracious Queen and country, by the fruit of our captain’s labour and success’. There stood Drake on his quarterdeck, sturdy,3 of slightly stocky build, with red hair, beard and curly moustaches, a high colour, bright, intelligent green eyes. The crowds cheered him as a hero. Modern prudery can denounce what he did as an act of simple piracy, but the next great maritime achievement cannot be so lightly dismissed.