The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  The cleric – or ex-cleric, if you believe in Drake’s power to defrock the clergy – was obliged to remain below deck and, upon pain of death, to wear upon his arm a label that read, ‘Francis Fletcher the falsest knave that liveth’.

  And so they went on their way rejoicing. On 8 February they reached Baratina, where they could take in much-needed food supplies. The next port of call was Java. They took on board plantains, coconuts, sugarcane, chicken, cassava and beef. Drake paid an astounding £4,000 for this revictualling. By 26 March the Golden Hind was sailing west-south-west for the Cape of Good Hope, and by July they had sailed up the west coast of Africa as far as the Guinea coast.

  Drake had a clear run home, but three political or legal hazards threatened his ultimate triumph. They were all summed up by the famous question that he asked, of a fisherman bobbing about in those Devonian waters, on 26 September, when he finally dropped anchor in Plymouth harbour: Does the Queen still live?

  If, in his absence, England had been conquered by France or Spain, or reverted to Roman Catholicism under Mary Stuart, Drake’s position would have been uncertain indeed. Already, dispatches from the Viceroy of Peru and the President of the Court of Panama and the Viceroy of New Spain had reached Europe. Philip II knew of Drake’s piratical antics in Panama and South America, and the Spanish Ambassador in London, Mendoza, had demanded restitution. So the first hazard was that Elizabeth might be dead. The second was the possibility that, dreading a war with Spain, Elizabeth might disown Drake and his adventure. A third danger was that John Doughty, brother of the unfortunate Thomas, would demand full legal retribution for what was an illegal killing.

  Luck, as so often, was on Drake’s side. Queen Elizabeth was a mercurial and far from dependable patroness, but there was in her nature something of the pirate queen. She took a gamble. Although Spain was still England’s chief trading partner – with many merchants and ships and perhaps as many as 2,500 sailors around the Iberian peninsula – and although Philip II sent 800 mercenaries to fight in Ireland, Elizabeth gambled that he would not declare outright war because of Drake’s adventure. As for the grievances of John Doughty, who attempted to get Drake prosecuted for murder in the Earl Marshal’s court, he looked as if he would be successful. Once again, Drake was lucky. Drake contested Doughty’s claim at the Queen’s Bench, submitting that the Earl Marshal could not exercise jurisdiction in the case. The Lord Chief Justice ruled against him. Conveniently the Queen delayed appointing a Lord High Constable when the position became vacant. He would have been the judge responsible for the offences committed outside the realm. John Doughty meanwhile, driven half-mad by the delay, conspired with a Spanish spy to have Drake murdered. He was arrested – his drunken conversation having been overheard – and died in prison.

  Queen Elizabeth loved a rogue, and she loved treasure. On New Year’s Day 1581 she appeared at court wearing a crown of emeralds and a diamond cross that Drake had presented to her. The Spanish Ambassador, who knew that she was dripping with loot from the Spanish Main, priced the cross at 50,000 ducats.12

  The precise details of how much of the stolen treasure was presented to Elizabeth, and how much remained at Drake’s disposal, were left deliberately vague. Those who had invested in his voyage of circumnavigation were rewarded handsomely. In 1638 Lewis Roberts claimed to have seen a paper written in Drake’s hand certifying that all his backers had received a dividend of £57 for every £1 invested. Since the expedition had cost £5,000 to furbish, the yield (if Roberts’s figures were right) would have been £285,000, more than the Queen’s entire annual revenue. Mendoza thought Drake had plundered £450,000, while other Spanish sources placed it at 950,000 pesos or £332,000. Whatever the exact figures, the gains were prodigious, the equivalent not of the personal fortunes of individuals, but of entire nations.13 Drake bought Buckland Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery near Plymouth, which had been converted into a private estate when Henry VIII suppressed the religious houses. By April 1581 – when the people of the Netherlands had decided to depose their Spanish ruler, Philip II, and nominate François Hercule, Duc d’Alençon, as their ‘prince and lord’ – Elizabeth was prepared to revive the ridiculous idea of her marriage, and as a further act of defiance to Spain she conferred a knighthood on Francis Drake.

  At her request, the Golden Hind was taken to Deptford. She accepted Drake’s invitation to dine on board. £10,000 of looted Spanish silver was spent on the feast. The ship had been repainted and revarnished. A huge crowd gathered. A gilded sword was produced, and the Queen joked as she took it in her hands that she was going to use it to cut off Drake’s head. She was sparing with honours. This knighthood, and the arms and privileges that went with it, were of the utmost significance. The message given to Spain, and to the world, was that Elizabeth herself endorsed Drake’s (and by extension the other privateers’) adventures on the high seas. England was a pirate kingdom, prepared to enrich herself at the expense of the rest of the world. If, by stealing silver and gold and jewels, mined by slaves for Catholic colonists of abominable cruelty, these buccaneers implied a gesture of defiance to the Pope and the Inquisition, so much the better. And if there was the implication, in the declaration of trade agreements with far-away potentates in the Indian Ocean, that England was now a world trader, a colonial power in the making, then better still – better and better.

  When the Italian poet Ariosto, in his chivalric epic Orlando Furioso, included a prophecy of the Emperor Charles V, he called to mind Charles’s famous heraldic device, the two columns and the words Plus oultre. The columns were the Pillars of Hercules. The motto, ‘more – even further’ was presumably at the back of A.C. Benson’s mind when he wrote ‘Land of Hope and Glory’: ‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’. When Sir John Harington (Queen Elizabeth’s godson) translated Ariosto, he rendered the prophecy in these words:

  Yet I foresee, ere many ages passe,

  New mariners and masters new shall rise,

  That shall find out that erst so hidden war,

  And shall discover where the passage lies

  And all the men that went before surpasse

  To find new lands, new starres, new seas, new skies,

  And passe about the earth as doth the sunne,

  To search what with Antipodes is done.

  A marginal note by Harington speaks of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. Harington transfers to Drake those maritime exploits which the prophetess in Ariosto had seen as the portent of a coming universal Empire.14 Drake’s exploit was thereby seen to be something much more than a stupendous exploit by an individual. It made a significant contribution to the National Myth.

  15

  A Frog He Would A-wooing Go

  BY THE LATE 1570s the Cold War that existed in Europe – between France and the Habsburgs, between England and the Habsburgs, between Catholics and Protestants – began to look as if it would turn into a real war. And the theatre of that war was to be found in the Low Countries: modern-day Belgium and Holland. All Queen Elizabeth’s instincts were for peace, and for saving money: both were reasons, from her point of view, not to be involved with the troubles in the Low Countries.

  Fighting had continued there intermittently throughout the 1570s, with terrible loss of life. William of Orange, the Protestant champion, a convinced Calvinist, had successfully led the Northern Provinces in rebellion against the Spaniards. But victories were followed by reversals (12,000 lives had been lost in the siege of Haarlem in the winter of 1572–3). The Pacification of Ghent in 1578 looked like a victory for Dutch independence. In conceding that the Spanish king was de jure their absentee sovereign, the states united under William of Orange, and it was agreed that there should be religious toleration. Everyone knew, however, that the peace was fragile, and the resentments of the Catholic Belgians in the south against the (largely) Protestant Dutch in the north was only one factor in a volatile situation that could at any minute plunge not merely the Low Countries, but Europe as
a whole, into war.

  Among those foreign powers willing, and even eager, to become involved, were John Casimir, the brother of the Elector Palatine, who led an army of German mercenaries to protect the Protestants into Mons at the beginning of 1578, and the Duc d’Anjou – formerly the Duc d’Alençon, who, though a Catholic, was anxious to exercise power in some sphere, and was happy if this could be combined with causing agitation to the Spanish. (The great nineteenth-century American historian of the Dutch Republic, Motley, said of the duke that he was ‘ferocious without courage, ambitious without talent, and bigoted without opinions’.1)

  When Don John of Austria, Habsburg Governor General, died in 1578, his successor Alexander Furnese, Duke of Parma, began a campaign of reconquest of the Low Countries.

  Queen Elizabeth was in a perpetual state of uncertainty about the Netherlands. Very unwillingly she donated money to John Casimir for his army, but as far as he was concerned, it was not enough. ‘It is better,’ said Thomas Wilson, Walsingham’s fellow Secretary of State, ‘to annoy by offence than to stand at defence, and to begin war than to withstand war.’2

  Elizabeth was not so sure. For one thing, she never shared the ‘forward Protestants” love of the Dutch Calvinist religion. In fact, she hated it. For this reason alone, apart from her innate distaste for war, she tried to avert her gaze from the obvious: namely, that Europe was poised for a great religious war. In fact it was not fought until a generation later – the Thirty Years War – but the war in the Netherlands was in some sense a dress rehearsal for it. The new Pope had repeated his predecessor’s condemnation of Elizabeth. Gregory XIII was determined to give the Counter-Reformation a yet more militant slant. Don John of Austria had been in favour of an invasion of England on purely religious grounds. William Davison, Elizabeth’s envoy in the Low Countries, warned her in 1578 of the ‘holy league of Catholic princes . . . long since projected, often reformed, and now like to be put in execution . . .’ to secure the ruin of ‘the reformed religion’. England was the strongest of the Protestant powers. Davison told the Queen that the Catholic powers held ‘it for a maxim that if she, being the chief protectrice of our religion, were once supplanted, they should the more easily prevail over the rest’.3

  If this were true, there could be no standing back from the fighting in the Netherlands. In the government of Elizabeth there were, broadly speaking, two views. The forward Protestants – of whom Walsingham and Leicester were the chieftains – saw no need or possibility of compromise. The Protestants of the Low Countries, the Huguenots of France and the English should all stand together against a common foe. The Roman Church had shown its hand – in the torture and enslavement of Hawkins’s sailors in the Caribbean, as in the fires of Smithfield and the slaughter initiated on St Bartholomew’s Day 1572. So their sentence was for open war.

  Another, more politic view, was adopted by Lord Burghley and – much of the time – by the ever-vacillating Elizabeth. This was to ally themselves with the young Duc d’Anjou. The advantage of this plan was that it would drive a wedge between ‘the league of Catholic princes’. By playing upon the French hatred of the Habsburgs and encouraging the self-interest of the Valois in the Low Countries, was there not a possibility of playing the game of European power-broker? As Gascoigne had reminded readers, the war was an ugly, horrible affair. If it could be averted by politics, or even better by the combination of politics and a royal matrimonial alliance, would not this be the best possible outcome?

  So it was the situation in the Netherlands that prompted the Queen, in 1578, to revive the idea of marrying François, Duc d’Alençon/Anjou (he had become Duc d’Anjou when his brother, previous holder of the title, became King Henry III of France in 1574). The larger plan, congenial to William of Orange, was that Anjou would be offered the sovereignty of the Netherlands, and that the good Protestants of the Low Countries, protected by France and England, could at last see off their Habsburg oppressors. That was how it might have seemed in the big European power-game that Elizabeth and Cecil were perhaps playing. But the truth is, historians remain puzzled to this day by Elizabeth’s behaviour over the match: both by her return to the notion in 1578 and by her apparently capricious abandonment of it in 1580–1.

  Clearly one element in the bizarre episode was the fact that Elizabeth would, on 7 September 1579, celebrate her forty-sixth birthday. Even if she had no intention of marrying Leicester, her old love, his marriage to the dowager Countess of Essex on 21 September, while the court was returning from the progress in East Anglia, must have played its part in her decision to promote the Anjou courtship for all it was worth.

  It was indeed the duke’s Master of the Wardrobe, who had been sent to England to woo Elizabeth on Anjou’s behalf, who broke the news to her that Leicester had remarried. Jean de Simier, a fawning courtly Osric, whom the Queen nicknamed her ‘monkey’, misplayed his hand. True, the disclosure of the Leicester–Lettice Knollys marriage gave him a moment of power over Elizabeth. She was wounded both by the news and by the fact that Leicester had not given it to her himself. In her highly predictable fury she temporarily transferred her favours and affections to the monkey, who was wheedling and flirtatious. The monkey, however, did not have as many cards to play as Leicester. He did not reckon on the strength of the Protestant cause in England, that party of which Leicester was the chieftain. Simier did not realise how profoundly his master’s religion was hated, how keenly his part in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was remembered, and how ludicrous both he and the Queen appeared in the eyes of the court while the flirtation between them was at its embarrassing height.

  Simier crept into the Queen’s bedroom and stole one of her nightcaps so that his master could sleep with it. The gesture charmed her and caused irritation and alarm to the court. Simier, as his luck apparently held, confided in a French friend, ‘I have every good hope, but will wait to say more till the curtain is drawn, the candle is out, and Monsieur in bed. Then I will speak with good assurance.’4 He claimed, perhaps accurately, that whenever ‘Monsieur’ was mentioned, her face lit up. ‘Elle est plus belle, plus gaillarde, qu’il y a quinze ans,’ exclaimed the French Ambassador. ‘Not a woman or a physician who knows her, who does not hold that there is no lady in the realm more fit for bearing children than she is.’5

  This optimistic diagnosis is not borne out by a study of the obstetric statistics. Lady Anne Somerset, in her biography of Queen Elizabeth6, points out that the Queen’s grandmother, Elizabeth of York, two of her stepmothers (Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr) and all three of the Duke of Norfolk’s wives had died in childbirth. Although the Queen was still menstruating – as Burghley had made it his business to find out from her ladies – there was the greatest possible danger for a woman of her age giving birth. The number of rich or upper-class children who died in childbirth, and the number of women who died giving birth to them, was much higher than among the poor – principally because the poor were spared the attention of Elizabethan doctors.7 The poor did not have to endure such quack treatments as having their bellies wrapped in the fleece of a freshly skinned sheep or the skin of a hare flayed alive. ‘Poor women, hirelings, rustics and others used to hard labours, also viragoes and whores, who are clandestinely delivered, bring forth without great difficulty, and in a short time after rising from their bed return to their wonted labours.’ The Elizabethan poor, in other words, had natural childbirth. The richer women had midwives whose standard practice was to stretch and dilate the genital parts, cutting or tearing the membranes with their fingers where this was deemed necessary. Deaths from sepsis and puerperal fever followed with unsurprising frequency.

  Perhaps the Queen, mindful of these things, had no intention at a deeper level of going through with the marriage. If so, she certainly succeeded in concealing any such reluctance during the summer of 1579, both from her French wooer and from his English detractors. On 16 August the duke himself arrived from France, very early in the morning. The twenty-year-old was no beauty.
Tiny, puny and pockmarked, he had a nose ‘so large it amounted to deformity’, in Elizabeth Jenkins’s vivid phrase.8 The Queen did not appear to notice his defects. Did this give some of her courtiers grounds for hope that she was merely play-acting as she threw herself into cringe-making displays of affection for her ‘frog’. At a court ball on 23 August Anjou was posted behind an arras while the forty-six-year-old Queen danced, making supposedly ‘secret’ amorous gestures to her concealed lover. As he pushed his spotty face round the edge of the tapestry, the courtiers pretended not to see, while the Queen went into raptures.

  Four days later he went back to France, writing her letters as he went. Their ardour, said Maurissière, the French Ambassador, would have set fire to the water. What the public thought was conveyed by the revival and adaptation of an old folk-song:

  A frog he would a-wooing go

  Hey-ho! says Rowley.

  A frog he would a-wooing go

  Whether his mother would let him or no

  With a rowley-powley-gammon and spinach

  Hey-ho! says Anthony Rowley.

  The mother in question was the woman Philip Sidney called ‘the Jezebel of our age’,9 the formidable Catherine de’ Medici, mastermind behind the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, who had given Elizabeth a superb diamond for her betrothal ring.

  The Council, which met daily, did not mince their words. ‘The doubt that her Majesty may not have children or that she may be endangered in childbirth’ was how Burghley’s polite memo summarised fears that one old councillor, Sir Ralph Sadler, expressed more bluntly: ‘Few old maids escape.’