by Lisa Hilton
THE RIDOLFI PLOT reveals much about Elizabeth as a political strategist. From its inauguration, we see her working closely with Cecil, meeting with Ridolfi himself, her communications half protective, half threatening. We see her agreeing to the threat (and possibly the use) of torture on Bailly and Norfolk’s servants. We see her going about her public business, meeting ambassadors, progressing through her realm, all the time patiently waiting for the threads of a conspiracy against her life to weave together. Yet in the days preceding Ross’s interrogation, the strain was beginning to tell—Elizabeth suffered from painful bilious attacks which could only be relieved by emetics, the “purging” cure the queen usually despised. The effort required to maintain the mask of majesty under such circumstances demanded tremendous self-discipline, particularly as Elizabeth had been as duplicitous as her Secretary in engaging in a plot whose consequences could have been disastrous. Whether Ridolfi was indeed a stooge or just a chancer who loved intrigue can never fully be known, but Elizabeth was prepared to gamble with her own safety in order to bring down her enemies.
THE CHURNINGS OF the Ridolfi conspiracy illuminate Elizabeth’s attitude towards Scotland the previous year, when the assassination of the regent, Moray, on 23 January 1570, provoked a crisis. With the Protestant regime north of the border thrown into further disarray, Elizabeth was also under pressure from France to declare her intentions as to what she planned to do with Mary. At a meeting with the French ambassador on 6 February, Elizabeth asserted that she had “used the Queen of Scots with more honor and favor than any prince having like cause would have done, and though she was not bound to make account to any prince of her doings, yet she would impart to the King, her good brother, some reasonable consideration of her doing.”10 No such “reasonable consideration,” however, was forthcoming until April, when Sir Henry Norris was instructed to take a firm line in his statement to Catherine de Medici and her son. After detailing the incidents of the Norfolk marriage plot, the failure to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, and the rebellion in the north, Elizabeth’s envoy declared,
If the requests that are made to us to aid her to our power to restore her forthwith to her realm shall be applied to the former things preceding, no indifferent person of any judgment will or can think it in conscience reasonable to move us to commit such a dangerous folly, as to be the author ourself to hazard our own person, our quietness of our realm and people.11
Personally, Elizabeth was still uncertain as to how she ought to proceed, and, despite the resolve of her Privy Councilors, who firmly opposed Mary’s restoration, the queen held a meeting at Hampton Court that same month to discuss the matter once again. Elizabeth’s indecisiveness at this point has been read as typical of her character, as evidence of the “feminine” nature of her governance, or, more realistically, as an inability to contemplate the enormity of striking at another of God’s anointed. Yet given Elizabeth’s personal engagement in the early stages of the notorious plot, it is possible to consider that her diplomatic stalling was based upon the assurance that Mary might soon be trapped by her own schemes.
THE EVENTS OF 1571 produced two further pieces of legislation, prompted in part by Regnans in excelsis and in part by the Ridolfi conspiracy, which further compromised the loyalty of Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects and delineated the opposing sides in what was now an overt confessional conflict within the realm. The Treasons Act made it illegal to deny Elizabeth’s right to the throne: to call her a heretic, a tyrant, an infidel, or a usurper was treason. The Act Against Fugitives over the Sea posed a more practical problem. Catholics who chose exile rather than conformity (expressed as leaving England without license and failing to return within six months) were termed “fugitives, rebels and traitors.” All English Catholics were now suspected of the treason which Catholic militants promoted, which is not to say that there were many among them who attempted to find a way out of the theological labyrinth the pope and the Queen had created between them. Many Catholic gentry were content to become “Church papists,” outwardly conforming to the requirements of the Act of Supremacy while holding to a certain freedom of conscience; others actively sought a place for loyal Catholics within the structure of the English state; still others maintained Catholicism as a system of social and cultural rather than strictly religious practice: scholars working on the distinctions and interactions between these groups have ascertained considerable degrees of variation. Nor is it correct to assume that Elizabeth was staunchly opposing a monolith of Catholic conformity, however mighty the ultra-loyalist Hapsburg Empire at times appeared. For example, the French had never accepted the ruling of the 1563 Council of Trent which endorsed the pope as the bishop of the universal Church, hence “Gallicanism,” as it became known, was increasingly influential in continental politics as the century drew on. Gallicanism argued for the ecclesiastical independence of Catholic kingdoms, especially, but not exclusively, in France, thus the English government was not unique in proposing that subjects should obey a monarch of a different confession than their own.12 Many English Catholics saw “ultramontanism,” the assertion of the power of Rome over all other authorities, as a perversion of their faith, giving the temporal precedent over the spiritual. Anthony Copley, a Catholic polemicist writing at the end of the Elizabethan period, exhorted, “All English Catholics as well for that we are Catholics as English, explode and prosecute this doctrine … as impostural and disloyal.” As France descended into spiritual civil war, Gallican tracts became increasingly popular among English Protestants, with 130 such works having been translated and published by 1595. Dogmatic militancy no more universally obtained among European Catholics than insurrection among their English counterparts: the challenge Elizabeth faced was from an extremist minority.
Elizabeth’s fine, supple intellect was in many ways brilliantly suited to the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of rainbow loyalties which formed Renaissance politics, but increasingly she was obliged to concede that her government could not afford to recognize subtleties, as the moral landscape was ineluctably reduced to black or white. Post-Regnans legislation denied to English Catholics a position which both Elizabeth and Cecil had assumed during Mary’s reign. Each in their own way had claimed that loyalty and conscience were not incompatible. Dying for one’s beliefs had begun to look rather old-fashioned to these skillful proponents of a new political ideology, yet as the positions of both sides hardened, there were increasing numbers of Catholic idealists prepared to rush in where pragmatists feared to tread.
For Norfolk, then, there could be no quarter. According to Cecil, Elizabeth was mindful of the duke’s nearness of blood and superiority of honor, and the death warrant was signed and rescinded four times before Elizabeth could bear to allow the execution to proceed. If Elizabeth had been engaged in the planting of Ridolfi, this would suggest that she was as eager as her ministers to learn the scope of the plots against her, but this did not mean she could easily reconcile herself with the consequences of that information. Yet she was even more reluctant to move against Mary Stuart than against Norfolk, and her parliament would not permit her to spare them both. In late 1570, Dr. Thomas Wilson, a Cambridge lawyer, had been commissioned by Cecil to “translate” a work by George Buchanan, the tutor to James of Scotland. A Detection of the Doings of Mary Queen of Scots, a brutal summary of Mary’s activities, had been sent to London by Elizabeth’s ambassador in Scotland, Thomas Randolph, in 1568. Now Wilson doctored the text to make it appear that it had been written in “handsome Scottish,” after which it was sent to the French court with the aim of destroying what was left of Mary’s reputation there. The text sums up the views of the Commons, who were determined on Mary’s blood:
When rude Scotland has vomited up a poison, must fine England lick it up for a restorative? Oh vile indignity… . Oh ambition fed with prosperity, strengthened with indulgence, irritated with adversity, not to be neglected, trusted, nor pardoned.13
Installed as ambassador in France, Walsingham added his opi
nion that “so long as that devilish woman lives, neither Her Majesty must make account to continue in quiet possession of her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives.”
In the May Parliament of 1572, member after member stood up to denounce this “horrible adulteress” and “subverter of the state.” It is notable that Mary’s marital transgressions were conflated with her political treason, invoking the ancient association between sexual sin and perverted government, an association which anti-Elizabeth propaganda was also to adopt. Elizabeth pressed hard for a moderation of the House’s wishes, pressing for a bill which would exclude Mary from the succession rather than the bill of attainder which would cost the Scots queen her life, a mercy which was very grudgingly accepted. In return, Elizabeth finally agreed that Norfolk should go to the block. Mary heard the news in tears, and spent much time in private prayer for her lost suitor, but one does wonder whether she was truly grateful.
Norfolk was executed on Tower Hill on 2 June. The following evening, Cecil approached Elizabeth with a report from Walsingham containing research on the opinions of significant French Protestants on the Queen of Scots, but Elizabeth waved him away after a few moments, confessing that she was too distracted by her sadness over Norfolk’s death to talk business. On 25 June, the moderated bill which Elizabeth had requested was read for the third time in the House of Commons. It stated that Mary Stuart had no right to the dignity, title, or interest of Elizabeth’s crown, and that if she should claim it, or seek to provoke any kind of war or invasion, that she would be a traitor and could be tried as such by the peers of England. If condemned, she would be executed. But Elizabeth did not give her assent, without which the bill was useless. She requested that it be deferred until the next parliamentary sitting in November. All that she permitted was a delegation to Sheffield Castle to read the brazenly unrepentant Mary yet another severe lecture on her treacherous ingratitude, a visit which had much the same effect as all its predecessors.
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THE ELIZABETHAN COURT has often been criticized for its artistic “backwardness.” It is a “commonplace that the adoption of an Italian Renaissance style came late to Britain, adopted tardily and only in part.”1 Similarly, the second half of the sixteenth century is often viewed as a period of “contraction,” if not stultification. With regard to Elizabeth herself, such criticisms might at first appear to be justified. Her approach to artistic patronage was decidedly niggardly—“It takes her very long, as she always gives with her words sure hopes to the petitioners that they will obtain what they desire but in fact without constant reminders and complacent friends and protectors one can hardly obtain anything which she doubts might cost her something from her purse,” sniffed Ubaldini. While it is true that Elizabeth’s summer progresses around the south of England not only served a political purpose, a visual reinforcement of her authority to the people, but inspired the emergence of “prodigy houses” such as Hardwick, Longleat, and Holdenby, she herself built no palaces. And while the queen may equally have inspired some of the greatest poetry in English during England’s greatest poetic age, the books she actually owned represent a paltry legacy. Curiously, for such a self-styled and selfconscious intellectual, Elizabeth owned relatively few books. The Royal Library catalogue of 1760 assigns her 1,600, but of these only about 300 were actually hers. “The contents of the library of Queen Elizabeth I,” concludes a bibliographical historian crisply, “are as enigmatic as the rest of her personality.”2
Elizabeth’s Tudor predecessors to an extent confirmed their self-images through their books: Henry VIII saw himself as a “Davidian” king, the spiritual leader of his subjects, as his earnestly learned marginal annotations on Luther’s Latin Commentary on the Psalms support. Edward VI was styled as a Protestant David: he possessed, among other works referencing the comparison, a translation from the Hebrew of the book of Job by Acasse d’Albric, which described him as “Petite fleur d’esperance admirable / Petit David de Goliath vainceur.” Mary Tudor made a statement with her ownership of François de Billon’s 1555 Le fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminine, while her insistence on the (futile) republication of the work of Joannes Genesius, a scholar who had been one of the most significant defenders of Katherine of Aragon during the divorce, connects her with the queenly tradition of memorialization through literature begun by Matilda of Scotland with the Life of Saint Margaret. Elizabeth’s books are in the main distinctly unrevealing. She may well have owned her famous prayer book emblazoned with the Tudor rose between enameled gold clasps, but if so, she did not use it much. The only poetry is some Latin verse by Thomas Drant, whose literary legacy is as familiar today as his name. Foreign literature is poorly represented, and of the two hundred or more books containing dedications to the queen, she seems to have retained them more on the basis of their bindings than their contents. Many of the books attributed to Elizabeth in the catalogue belonged to her favored courtiers, such as Christopher Hatton, or to her beloved tutor Roger Ascham. Of these, the most pleasingly significant is perhaps a 1495 Venetian edition of Aristotle’s collected works in Greek, which displays on the title page a handwritten inscription believed to be the entwined ciphers of Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
Equally, what paintings Elizabeth commissioned were strongly medieval in tone, with their eye on replication rather than innovation; altogether the summation of the principal scholar on Elizabethan portraiture leads to the conclusion that “the culture of Elizabeth I cannot bear comparison with … the aggressive splendor of Henry VIII.”3 This image of Elizabeth as a reluctant and inadequate “Renaissance” monarch, however, depends on several misconceptions: first, an overemphasis on the importance of Italy; second, a particular inherited concept of what art meant to the Renaissance; and third, a neglect of the interiority, or “psychological,” revolution which has been identified as perhaps the primary characteristic of Renaissance thought. Elizabeth’s England was not only very much part of the Renaissance currents which were transforming Europe; she and her court were as capable as any other major dynasty of displaying the magnificenza necessary to the sovereign dignity of a prince. The closeness with money which is one of Elizabeth’s best-known characteristics concealed a different side to the queen and her court:
By many she is deemed generally reluctant and tight fisted, because only some of those closest to her and who can deal with her nature have earned not little by being patient, but with the foreign personalities sent by Princes she has always proved magnificent and munificent, as suits her dignity and royal condition.4
While Italian culture was deeply influential, both politically and aesthetically, at Elizabeth’s court, a deeper comprehension of its Renaissance qualities also requires the consideration of Burgundy. Elizabeth’s great-great-aunt Margaret of York had been Duchess and Regent of Burgundy, while her great-grandfather Edward IV had been exiled there during the Wars of the Roses, spending an influential period as the guest of the magnate Lord Gruuthuse. Burgundy was one of the capitals of luxury and learning of the fifteenth-century world, and Edward had returned to England intent on imitating its magnificence. The royal protocols which Elizabeth’s paternal great-grandmother Margaret Beaufort had codified for the court, many of which were still in use in Elizabeth’s day, were derived from the reorganization of Edward’s household in the 1470s. Edward’s guide was Olivier de la Marche, commissioned by the king to produce L’état de la maison de Charles de Bourgogne.
The relationship of the Burgundian dukes, who so dominated the cultural landscape of the fifteenth century, to French Renaissance art has been compared to that of the Romans to the Greeks. The extraordinary refinements of Burgundian culture were adopted from the French court, but then adapted and melded with the urban culture of the Netherlands to produce a distinctive artistic expression of political ascendancy. What Edward IV absorbed during his sojourn in Burgundy was a whole system of princely living which incorporated hierarchies of status
into every aspect of court life—not just ceremony or dress but furnishings, food, the objects which were used and touched, tapestries, plate, music, even the layout of space. Edward’s building projects, still extant in Elizabeth’s time, showed explicit Burgundian influence, just as his court ceremony was derived from that of Charles the Bold. The staircase to the royal apartments at Nottingham was modelled on that of the Prinsenhof at Bruges, while at Eltham, Edward used Burgundian models in the construction of the gallery and raised garden overlooking the river. Burgundian arts also influenced Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, who rebuilt Richmond Palace in 1501 with the “donjon” design for the royal apartments, enclosed gardens, and loggia-galleries. During the queenship of Elizabeth’s grandmother Elizabeth of York, royal pageants directly imitated the displays of the Burgundian court, with elaborate floats featuring costumed dancers and musicians and, of course, the huge model beasts.
This is not to say that Edward IV was a unique innovator in bringing Burgundian arts to England. Italian and French influences had been consistently important for centuries, but the Renaissance had effectively been arrested in its English progress by a century of civil war—the first generation of Tudor subjects had lived far closer to a more barbaric, violent age than to the refinements of Italian urbanity, but prior to the Wars of the Roses, Richard II had presided over an aesthetically sophisticated court culture of delicate fashions and elegant food, of scented bathwater and refined interiors. Like Elizabeth, Richard presided over a literary renaissance (though like her, he functioned more as a dedicatee than a direct patron of writers such as Chaucer and Gower), and as Elizabeth was to do, he made his own magnificence and splendor the center of all celebrations.
