A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  As an ardent Protestant, Walsingham would hardly be expected to be sympathetic to Mary’s plight. In his view, as long as she was alive, wherever she was, she was trouble. Exiled to France, she was trouble. Sent back over the Tweed to Scotland, she was big trouble. Under lock and key in England – the holding strategy – she was still trouble, for, as Elizabeth’s presumptive heir, she would attract the disaffected like flies to a honey-pot. Walsingham may have been the classic secret policeman – coldblooded, devious, single-minded – but he was not paranoid, for overnight Mary did indeed become a magnet for conspiracy. The most dangerous was a plan to spring her from prison and marry her to the premier peer of the realm, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, who, three times a widower, was now freshly available. Nor was this a plot hatched by some marginal gang of Catholic fanatics and dreamers. It came from men close to the very heart of government, including Arundel, who had once set his cap at Elizabeth herself. They were men of broad acres and massive patronage who had had enough of Cecil’s growing dominance of the queen, and their number included Dudley himself, despite the fact that he and Norfolk had had a bitterly prolonged feud ever since a tennis match in which Dudley had taken a kerchief from the watching queen and wiped his brow with it, an action deemed so presumptuous and unseemly by the duke that he threatened to hit Leicester with his racket.

  In hindsight, the scheme might look crackpot, but at the time it had something going for it. Norfolk, like all the Howards, may have been Catholic at heart, but officially he was Protestant, conforming to the Elizabethan Church. Leicester, Sussex, Arundel and the rest of them might even have imagined that the marriage of Mary and Norfolk was a way to bind up the wounds of religious schism that were far from healed in England. At a stroke, all the old divisions – between the English and the Scots; the Protestants and the Catholics; the north and the south – would disappear. A new and better Britain would be the result, and Cecil would drop off its map.

  Not surprisingly, Elizabeth did not see it this way. Mischievously, she asked Norfolk whether the rumours of his marriage to the queen of the Scots were true? ‘I prefer to sleep on a safe pillow,’ was his reply. Elizabeth was not fooled, however. Norfolk’s father had been executed as a traitor by her father, and she sensed an annoying characteristic about the Howards: their undeserved conviction that they were somehow the betters of the Tudors. The queen gave Norfolk every opportunity to tell the truth about the plan, but in the end it was a panicky Leicester who came clean – and got royal thanks rather than punishment. It was Norfolk who went to the Tower in October 1569.

  The liberation of Mary, though, was not just the business of court politicians like Arundel and Leicester. Or, rather, those same court politicians and councillors were, in another guise, great regional magnates, masters of money, acres and men. And the blueprint for a different England, a British England, meant most to the people furthest away from London and the choruses of adoration that attended the progresses of the queen. In the north and west, where Catholicism had not only not been uprooted but where it was flourishing on the resentments of the great Marcher dynasties, the Dacres and the Percys, the temptation to exchange Mary for Elizabeth was especially strong. They had been there in Northumberland and Westmorland, they told themselves, when the Tudors were still in the brewing trade in Wales, and they were by now heartily sick of being told by some jumped-up quill-pusher from the south what they could or couldn’t do, either in the government of their shires or their religion. For these people Mary Stuart was not just a successor. She was a replacement.

  When the southern branch of the revolt caved in, there was a pause for thought. But then the women took charge, especially the Duchess of Westmorland, who just happened to be Norfolk’s tougher sister. ‘What a simple man, the duke [her brother] is,’ she wrote witheringly, ‘to begin a matter and not go through with it.’ When the northern earls received a summons to go to London and explain themselves to council, the duchess persuaded the northern nobles that their choice was now either outright resistance or a craven walk to the block.

  So they fought, the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland leading the rebellion in November 1569. And for a while it even looked as if they might win, at least in the north. For although Tudor power looked very impressive as a show of spectacle, much of it was a precarious façade, and the further north you went in England, the shakier that façade became. Against the rebels, the government could produce at first only some hundreds of mounted knights and a thousand or so of men-at-arms. The army of the north, marching beneath the old banner of the Five Wounds of Christ that had last been seen during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7, swept through its homeland, in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Northumberland. In November 1569 Durham Cathedral was reconsecrated for Rome. English Bibles were rounded up and destroyed. The stone altar was restored, and the Latin mass sounded again through the chevron-striped columns of the vast Norman basilica. It must have seemed that the Church of the English saints had been reborn. And the rebels believed that if they could sit tight through the winter, Spanish help would be on its way in the spring.

  But Elizabeth’s government now understood the gravity of the situation and that another act of the English wars of religion was being played out. Mary was moved, in the nick of time, from Tutbury, where a flying squad of the northerners was coming to get her, and taken instead to the massively defended Coventry. After some initial chaos, a formidable, overwhelmingly southern army of 12,000 men was mobilized, adding more to its numbers once it reached the north. The rebellion was brutally crushed, the earls fleeing over the border to Scotland. With those who were caught, Elizabeth was disinclined to be lenient. Norfolk, who luckily for him was in the Tower when the rising peaked, was spared, but the queen’s directives for reprisal and punishment were so savage that local justices of the peace decided on their own account, and to avoid generations of bitter recrimination, not to carry them out to the maximum letter of retribution. Even so, 450 were executed, three times the number Henry VIII had condemned after the much bigger Pilgrimage of Grace. Men of low rank were hanged, cut down while still alive and disembowelled.

  The terror worked. The rising of the northern earls was the last serious insurrection to disturb Tudor England. Looking at the massive dispossession of rebel estates and the transfer of property to loyalist southerners, the discontented were made to see that there was too much at stake to hazard another attempt to change the regime. For the most passionately Catholic, however, 1570 brought a terrible dilemma. In that year, with poor timing, the pope, Pius V, published a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and calling on the faithful to rise up and depose their heretic queen, if necessary lethally. The Catholics of England now had a choice of betrayals: their Church or their monarch?

  Some, inevitably, chose the latter. In 1571 a plot organized by the Florentine banker Roberto Ridolfi was discovered. Its aim had been to liberate Mary through the combined force of an uprising in England and a Spanish army of invasion, sent from the Netherlands. Elizabeth was to be killed and Mary enthroned in her place. Astoundingly, the Duke of Norfolk, who had been released from the Tower on good behaviour, had allowed himself to be drawn into the plot. Did the man never learn anything? Even with utterly damning evidence against him, Elizabeth flinched from her own subconscious taboo against cousin-killing and procrastinated over Norfolk’s trial. Despite parliament demonizing the queen of the Scots as ‘the monstrous and huge dragon and mass of the earth’, Elizabeth was even less ready to have Mary attainted or even, at that stage, removed from the line of succession. But a sacrifice was necessary lest the queen appear to her subjects to be her own and their worst enemy. Norfolk was finally tried by a jury of his peers, unanimously condemned and beheaded at the Tower like his father before him, joining the gang of the headless beneath the flagstones at St Peter ad Vincula.

  At the end of the northern rising Cecil wrote: ‘The Queen’s Majesty hath had a notable trial of her whole realm.’ He and she both knew that for al
l the fanfares and flowers, the line between glory and disaster was never more than razor-thin.

  For a time in the mid-1570s it must have seemed that trouble was somewhere else. Across the North Sea in the Netherlands, the Dutch and the Spanish were at each other’s throats. Cities were being starved into submission or burned to the ground. In Paris Protestants (including, it was reported, women and babes in arms) had been slaughtered in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 and the bodies thrown into the Seine. ‘The greatest crime since the Crucifixion,’ was Cecil’s comment.

  But that was Abroad. At home the Bishop of Salisbury declared that never was England ‘better in worldly peace, in health and body, in abundance of victuals’. The word ‘abundance’ came easily to the celebrants of Elizabeth’s England, as if the country had only one season: golden high summer. The queen herself might not have borne fruit (though she wore cherries as earrings), but her reign had. Flanders’ disasters had been England’s gift, with the influx of capital and skilled labour. And Elizabeth, in imitation of Antwerp’s bourse, opened the country’s first stock exchange. The economy underwent spectacular, if erratic, industrial expansion. All kinds of manufactured goods, from tin and iron, linen and lace, glass, soap and salt, were now made in England rather than imported. It became common to install glazed windows in even fairly modest houses, and pewter replaced wood for tableware and utensils. It was a country in the throes of a profound transformation. Of course, the horn of plenty did not drop its bounty into everyone’s lap, for there was also an abundance of people: 5 million of them by the century’s end (against about half a million Scots). The period saw the greatest population explosion since the years before the Black Death. There were more bodies to feed, but there was less work to go round, less bargaining power and lower wages for those who could get it. In the countryside the enclosure of common land, usually for profitable flocks of sheep, closed off the possibility of self-sufficient subsistence for countless numbers of villagers, who were either depressed to landless wage-labourers or took to the roads to join the legions of the transient poor. In response, the Elizabethan parliaments passed poor laws providing alms for the disabled, residential poor but savage penalties for ‘vagabondage’: whipping and boring through the ear for first offenders, hanging for recidivist vagrants.

  In Warwick in 1575 the human eyesores were made to disappear, one way or another, when the queen’s progress was imminent. Instead, she could persuade herself of the clemency and charity of her government by looking at the special home for aged military veterans established by Dudley, Earl of Leicester. But for the burgesses of Warwick, who were faced with the immense cost of a royal visit, it might have been hard to decide which lot of travellers, the beggars or the courtiers, was more trouble. As cartloads of the unwashed were moved out, 200 cartloads of the court baggage moved in. Each wagon was pulled by a team of six horses. That meant a great deal of stable room and a great deal of hay. A week before the day of arrival men from the Office of Purveyors would have descended on Warwick, buying up everything in sight at prices they decided were about right. No wonder some houses and towns had mixed feelings when they heard that they had been selected for a visit, for there was much that could go wrong. The ladies and gentlemen of the court, so many visions in satin and pearls, might be displeased by the entertainment and make their displeasure known. And then there was Queen Bess herself, a gem-encrusted apparition, a goddess on earth, but like most of those immortals as frightening as she was majestic. One might suppose that the town official selected to deliver a public speech might have been shaking in his shoes, but his long disquisition on the history of the town – ‘We read in old writings and authentical chronicles the fame to have been a city or walled towne in the time of the Britons, then called Carwar . . . ’ – suggests he was well up to his job. The most scared man appeared to be the recorder, who was required to say something to the queen but who, at the crucial moment, was evidently stricken by tongue-tied panic, giving Elizabeth, with her perfect timing, a chance to touch his life with a drop of magic. ‘Come hither little Recorder,’ she is reported to have said. ‘It was told me that you would be afraid to look upon me or to speak boldly, but you were not so afraid of me as I was of you and I now thank you for putting me in mind of my duty.’ ‘And so thereupon,’ continues the Black Book of Warwick, ‘showing a most gracious and favourable countenance to all the burgesses and company said again, “I most heartily thank you all my good people”.’

  Things could still go amiss. A great firework display had been planned by the Earl of Warwick, complete with guns and squibs he had brought from the Tower of London where he was warden. But flames from the dragon’s mouth set fire to four houses at the end of the town and ‘suburbs were on fire at once whereof one had a ball come through on both sides and made a hole as big as man’s head’. The next morning, with the town smelling a little of saltpetre, Elizabeth had the old couple whose house had caught fire while they were still in bed brought to her, and she gave them money to make up their losses. It was, of course, money got from her courtiers. The queen was generosity itself with other people’s money. But dunning her courtiers only made the good burgers of Warwick love her even more.

  They were not the only ones. The 1570s was the decade in which the religion of Elizabeth was being inaugurated. Her accession day, 17 November, became the greatest of all national holidays, more sacred than all the events on the heathen papist calendar. On that holy day there were bonfires and bells, and two days later there were the great tilts, where Sir Henry Lee, the Queen’s Champion, jousted for her honour and crowds admitted to the spectacle for a shilling could voice their acclaim. Made by exiled Flemish artists, like Marcus Gheeraerts, and massively reproduced in prints, miniatures and medals, her image was everywhere. In defiant response to the papal excommunication, her nobles and gentlemen wore the miniature as a badge on their costumes. And as hopes of her marriage waned, the cult of her virginity (making the best of a bad thing) took off. Many of her subsequent symbolic personifications – the phoenix, the ermine, the crescent moon, the rose and the pearl – had been emblems of the Madonna and were now transposed to the Virgin Queen. She also appeared as the chaste Diana and Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin (who proved her chastity by carrying a sieve of water without spilling a drop), or with a snowy white ermine or the pelican which, according to sacred iconography, sacrificially fed its young from the blood of its own breast. Or again Elizabeth might be the sun, whose radiance gave the beams of the rainbow their colours. She was everything, and as the eyes and ears on the ‘Rainbow’ portrait make clear, she heard and saw everything. For those who were unable to see the paintings at court or in the great country houses – the ‘prodigy houses’ – built to receive her, she would appear in illustrations to histories, like Edward Hall’s chronicle of the miraculous rise of God’s own Protestant Commonwealth and its consummation in the reign of the chaste queen.

  Even those in the know, who could, if they wanted, plainly see the elaborate scaffolding from which the image of Gloriana was projected and who knew that the pale moonglow of the queen’s face was just so much pulverized borax, alum and millwater, were still hopelessly captive to the cult. Christopher Hatton, for example, a Northamptonshire gentleman and obscure member of parliament who had caught Elizabeth’s eye at a masque when Leicester was out of favour, became so drastically infatuated that he seemed close to losing his mind when separated from her presence. When Hatton fell sick and Elizabeth sent him to a spa for his own good, he wrote back like a teenager in delirious torment: ‘Would God I were with you one hour . . . My wits are overwrought . . . I love you. I cannot lack you . . . Bear with me most dear sweet lady. Passion overcometh me. I can write no more. Love me for I love you . . . Ten thousand farewells . . . ’

  Hatton was just another casualty of Bessiemania. But then there was something slightly unhinged about the razzle-dazzle of the ‘prodigy’ years: houses like Hardwick, ‘more windows than walls’; ballrooms the size
of football fields (for there was Elizabethan football); libraries with acres of unread classics; even a bathing pool, on Lord Bacon’s property, where the walls and floor were studded with jewels that would sparkle through the water. In contrast to the relative sobriety of the first half of the century, Elizabethan glamour called for jewellery; some of it from exotic sources like topazes and emeralds from Brazil, or peridots and chrysoberyls from the East. The extraordinary ‘Cheapside hoard’, representing the stock of a London jeweller towards the end of the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth, makes it clear how the jewellery habit had spread out from the court into the wealthier sections of the mercantile classes. Leicester’s New Year’s gifts to the queen invariably featured colossal gems, as big and gaudy as his own personality.

  By rights, Leicester’s involvement in the Norfolk–Mary marriage plot ought to have finished him, but Elizabeth’s soft spot for her old paramour was large and deep. In 1575 she let him stage an enormous entertainment for her benefit at Kenilworth Castle, which she had given to him. By this time, he and the queen were playing an elaborate game. He would pretend to be, still, her ardent lover, and she would pretend to tolerate his excessive adulation. The fact that Leicester had a son by his mistress, Douglas Sheffield, was neither here nor there. That was a different kind of game, so the entertainment at Kenilworth in 1575 was, in effect, their last great date, with a cast of thousands looking on. Leicester had added an entire wing to the castle in which the queen could reside on the few occasions when she came to stay. There was scarlet leather on the walls, blue Turkey rugs and thousands of candles glittering at night; there were crystal chessboards, an aviary stocked with dazzling exotic birds and white marble fountains, filled with marble, naked, kissing nymphs in imitation of the Venetian nymphaea; and a banquet of 300 dishes. A field in front of the castle was flooded to make a huge artificial lake, on which floated an island with boys dressed as girls piping a greeting as the queen arrived. Hairy wild men emerged from arcadian woods, and fireworks exploded so exuberantly that as Kenilworth’s gatekeeper wrote: ‘the waters surged, the castle shook and made me, hardy as I am, very vengeably afeared.’