by Lisa Hilton
Or perhaps, while Elizabeth was content to position herself within the complex allegorical celebration of her queenship, which presented her as the savior of her people’s faith, she simply objected to being pressured to act. Although Kenilworth has often been interpreted as a week-long proposal, featuring a “rustic wedding” among the amusements, it may also be understood as a site of conflict between Leicester’s agenda and that of the queen. The armor Leicester wears in the portrait by Zuccaro he commissioned for the pageants is replete with Protestant imagery, and Elizabeth apparently disliked his self-presentation as a captain who would defend his faith in the Spanish Netherlands. The gauntlet of Lee’s armor, featuring the motto Defensor fidei, was less pointed and more acceptable.
Fifteen years later, at Henry Lee’s retirement tilt of 1590, Sir Henry and his successor, the Earl of Cumberland, presented themselves to Elizabeth at her gallery window in front of a crowned pillar inscribed with Latin verses praising the Virgin and her empire. The pastoral allegories instituted at Woodstock and continued in the intervening tilts implied that Elizabeth had returned her nation to a golden age, indeed an arcadia, conflating her through Protestant chivalry with Mary the Virgin. As Lee approached the queen,
Her Majesty beholding those armed knights coming towards her did suddenly hear a music so sweet and secret as everyone thereat greatly marveled. And hearkening to that excellent melody, the earth as it were opening, there appeared a pavilion made of white taffeta … being in a proportion like unto the sacred temple of the Virgins Vestal … arched like a Church, within it many lamps burning.
The enchanted pavilion of the Fairy Queen had been transformed into the sacred enclosure of the Virgin. Lee’s verse address to Elizabeth combined the chivalrous pastoral with courtly love and religious worship:
My helmet now shall make a hive for bees
And lovers songs shall turn to holy psalms… .
And so from court to cottage I depart
My Saint is sure of mine unspotted heart.
Tournaments were one of the few forms of pageantry which survived from pre-Reformation times. That the tilts were consciously organized as a substitute for the old feasts of the Church is articulated in the manuscript for the last entertainment Lee gave for Elizabeth, at Ditchley, where the “Curate” “showed his parishioners of a holiday which passed all the Pope’s holidays, and that should be on the 17th day of November.” The Ditchley fete was nostalgic in temper, recalling Woodstock fifteen years before. An “old Knight” was awakened by music and explained that “Not far from hence nor very long ago / The Fairy Queen the Fairest Queen saluted.” He then spoke of the tilts, which had been the annual tributes of “Loricus’s” love for his Queen—casting the tournaments as yearly installments in a fifteen-year narrative of chivalrous romance. It is a beautiful image, one which encapsulates all the gleaming shimmer of Elizabethan magnificenza, yet by the time Lee delivered his last tribute, Elizabeth had begun to learn the cost of such fanciful posturings as they played out in the real world. The poetry of Elizabeth’s knights might come to represent a golden age, yet the reality of Elizabeth’s rule as perceived in much of Europe was of a tyrannical, paranoid, repressive regime of torturers, a jarring contrast to the idealized dream worlds of the tilt.
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AS A RENAISSANCE ruler, Elizabeth was adept in the language of iconography. Courtiers who wished to flatter, persuade, celebrate (and, indeed, insult) the queen had a huge range of iconographic analogies—classical, biblical, cosmographical—upon which to draw, producing a sometimes bewildering range of overlapping or contradictory imagery. Comparisons between Elizabeth and Diana are a case in point. Diana was the virgin goddess who asked Jupiter that she might retain her virginity; her iconography, with its symbols of bows and crescent moons, became something of a cult around the French royal mistress Diane de Poitiers. A tapestry commissioned by Diane for the Château d’Anet in 1550 shows Diana making her request to the gods, that she might not only be free from lust but actively able to fight against it. Game was not the hunter-goddess’s only quarry—according to the Anet inscription, she also pursued “unreasonable appetite,” that is, anything which threatened the social order. Allusions to Elizabeth as Diana are relatively sparse early in her reign, when, in theory at least, the queen was still contemplating marriage, though in the Rainbow Portrait and Hilliard’s miniatures of the 1590s, the crescent moon decorates her hair, and she received jewels which echoed Diana’s imagery. While the virginal aspect of Diana, and her commitment to chastity in order to preserve social equilibrium, was appropriate to Elizabeth after the end of her last diplomatic courtship, there was also a darker side to the goddess. In some classical sources, Diana is the goddess of vengeance and death (the horrible fate of Actaeon, who spied on the bathing goddess and was transformed into a stag and ripped apart by her hounds, was alluded to in relation to Philip of Spain’s early proposal to Elizabeth), since her virginity meant that her only currency was extinction. Elizabeth’s resistance to becoming a figurehead for the Dutch Protestant cause is encapsulated in a particularly shocking reference to her as Diana, Pieter van der Heyden’s 1584 Queen Elizabeth I as Diana and Pope Gregory XIII as Callisto. Callisto’s story is a tangle of macabre eroticism—the goddess’s favorite nymph is raped by Jupiter in the form of his daughter Diana, and when her pregnancy is revealed, Diana banishes her, then, when she gives birth to a son, Jupiter’s wife, Juno, turns her into a bear. In the Heyden engraving, Elizabeth is shown, naked, as Diana, while at her feet the pope, as Callisto, gives birth to a litter of monsters, his pregnant stomach exposed by the figures of Time and Truth, while the nymphs behind Elizabeth represent the Dutch provinces. Unsurprisingly, the composition failed to achieve its aim of persuading Elizabeth to become a more active champion of the Dutch. Elizabeth herself never appears to have identified personally with Diana, preferring, if at all, the more pacific lunar imagery of the moon goddess Selene, but for many English Catholics, relating her to Diana as the symbol of vengeance and death was becoming all too appropriate.
As the Heyden satire makes clear, Elizabeth could not avoid being drawn into theological war games. Unlike her sister, Elizabeth never burned men for their faith. She tortured and hanged them for treason. A publication of 1583, A Declaration of the Favourable Dealing of Her Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed for the Examination of Certain Traitors and of Tortures Unjustly Reported to Be Done on Them for Matters of Religion, authored by one Thomas “Rackmaster” Norton, attempted to make this clear. Norton claimed that only guilty prisoners were tortured; that no man was racked for his conscience, only his treason; and that, besides, no such activity could be carried out without a warrant signed by at least six Privy Councilors. In the minds of many of the queen’s advisers, this was a necessary evil, but the perennial conditions of crisis and war which accompanied the European Reformation also created an atmosphere of conspiracy and fear which served to encourage the very threat it hoped to suppress—“for all the uncertainty and unpredictability facing Elizabeth’s England, it seems plain that the queen’s ministers hypnotized themselves with fear.”1 Hindsight is a poor rationale upon which to judge the actions Elizabeth took against her Catholic subjects—we know that she survived, she believed she might not. The priest of the English College at Rome who denounced Elizabeth as “that proud usurping Jezebel” and expressed his wish that “I hope ere long the dogs shall tear her flesh, and those that be her props and upholders” was speaking for the majority of Europe. The Virgin Queen might have turned her face with relative serenity to the moon of chastity, but as her power as Protestant leader accrued around her, she had little choice in becoming not only an instrument of vengeance but, in modern terms, a tyrant.
The sixteenth-century term for the trade on which Elizabeth’s security depended was spiery, the grimy underside of the magnificent cloak which overlaid Renaissance governance. Several writers have compared the queen’s mentality to that of a double agent, not only for her ability t
o preserve her privacy while living such an intensely public life but for her dogged commitment to her own survival at all costs—an essential lack of interest in the merits of a cause so long as it advantaged her. Elizabeth just grasped, as Mary Stuart, for example, did not, that this was the new reality of the emergent modern state. Here Elizabeth is a true Machiavellian, not in the stereotypical sense of duplicitous, but more profoundly, as a ruler who fully apprehended that primary duty to self and state.
The passing of the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in 1559 had produced a confessional state in which political and religious loyalty were necessarily intertwined; they also produced a tension between these two elements which, from the 1570s onwards, gave disproportionate influence to a relatively small number of Catholic recusants (from the Latin recusans, one who refuses) whose activities were the source of obsessively paranoid attention. Elizabeth had little choice but to give ear to the endless revelations of conspiracy, which involved her in a denial of those principles which were so much part of her self-presentation as a model of tolerance and peacefulness. Francis Walsingham encapsulated this necessity in his maxim, “there is less danger in fearing too much than too little.” Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s codemaster, often used the modern-sounding phrase “the security of the state,” and security and suspicion were twins—lose the latter, Elizabeth’s ministers argued, and the former would vanish too. The darker tempo which beat beneath the glittering rhythm of Elizabeth’s magnificent public life was one of perpetual, thudding terror.
In 1579, it was estimated that the number of Catholic émigrés at large in Italy and France was some three hundred. This does not seem like many, but the majority were from gentry or upper-class backgrounds, with networks of connections and means which stretched back behind them to England. Their champion was William Allen, who in 1568 had founded the Catholic seminary at Douai, which later moved to Reims, while Allen himself travelled on to the English College at Rome. Propagandist accounts such as Anthony Munday’s 1582 Mirror of Mutabilitie attempt to paint as sinister a picture as possible of the atmosphere of the college. Munday, a young spy posing as a Catholic sympathizer, detailed the incessant conversations about the need for a “stout assaulting of England,” while describing the macabre penances the Jesuit seminarians undertook in the refectory. Wearing hooded but backless cloaks, they lashed themselves with cords of wire until the blood ran on the floor. These faceless fanatics were plotting to destroy the Church of England, bring down the government, and unseat the queen from the throne. Allen argued that his priests were freedom fighters, their mission being merely to save endangered Catholic souls. The pope did indeed support their mission, but it was a pastoral one, aimed at the succor of Catholic souls, not the overturning of governments. In 1580, a priest named John Hart was interrogated about papal recognition of the bull Regnans in excelsis, promulgated a decade before. Hart confirmed that the bull as enacted under Pius was still legal, but that Pope Gregory, his successor, had made a dispensation permitting Elizabeth’s subjects to respect her authority without threat to their souls. The government chose to ignore this. Hart, like so many of his fellows, was racked.
So far as the law was concerned, Norton’s Declaration makes a distinction between faith itself and the means by which that faith was to be conveyed to England. Torture was necessary not to persecute Catholics but to “understand of particular practices for setting up their religion by treason or force against the Queen.” And so, by the 1580s, torture was normalized. Alongside Rackmaster Norton, the government made use of the skills of Richard Topcliffe, who had been in Elizabeth’s service since at least 1578. Described as a “one man Stasi,” Topcliffe’s relish for his work was such that his name became a verb: in the correspondence of Catholic exiles in Italy, topclifizare was synonymous with the practice of torture.2 Yet so far as the eager schools of hopeful martyrs were concerned, even torture was no deterrent. In the text which became known as “Campion’s Brag,” written in Southwark at the beginning of his English mission in 1580, Edmund Campion, a one-time Oxford favorite of the Earl of Leicester, affirmed that Jesuits were “never to despair of your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments or consumed with your prisons.” Campion’s trial and execution are emblematic of the theological and legalistic ellipses and evasions which coalesced into Elizabeth’s policy of state security.
Campion’s geographical progress inscribes the development of his commitment to the Catholic faith. From Oxford he had travelled to Douai, where he taught in Allen’s seminary, and thence to Rome, where he was received as a Jesuit, after which he performed missionary work in the German states before arriving back in England, disguised as an Irish jeweler, in 1580. Accompanied by a fellow Jesuit, Robert Persons, Campion moved cautiously around the south of England, preaching in secret at Smithfield a fortnight before he composed his letter, intended for the council in the event of his apprehension. Among the numbered list of intentions which summarized his mission, Campion made two key statements. He claimed that his charge was “to … preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors—in brief, to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance.” Further, Campion claimed that “I never had in mind, and am strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of state or policy of this realm, as things which appertain not to my vocation.” Officially, Campion maintained the same stance as Allen and Hart, that his presence in England was the fulfilment of his pastoral role as priest.
The “Brag” was soon in wide circulation, and Elizabeth’s printer, Christopher Barker, was quickly busy producing counter-propaganda. In January 1581, a proclamation was issued calling for the arrest of all Jesuits then in England, and for all members of seminaries on the Continent to return. Given Pope Gregory’s dispensation, it was not strictly necessary that Catholics automatically be declared disloyal subjects, but the government was determined to make this so—loyalty to the Church of England and the crown were indissoluble. Once it was made high treason for a priest to reconcile a subject to Rome, converts were placed beyond the law and hence vulnerable, without recourse, to its strictest punishments.
In this atmosphere, Campion became a trophy, a latter-day Most Wanted, and Walsingham’s spiery network was on his trail. George Eliot, a recent Catholic apostate who offered his services to Leicester, was among them. Eliot had recently confessed to knowledge of yet another conspiracy, in which a group of fifty men, selected by William Allen and another priest, John Payne, would assault Elizabeth on progress and kill her, Cecil, Leicester, and Walsingham. Whether this was true or a fabrication of Eliot’s designed to demonstrate his willingness to betray Catholic families in which he had previously served, Eliot was authorized in mid-July 1581 to travel to Lyford Grange in Oxfordshire, where there was suspicion that Campion was hiding. Campion was discovered on the morning of the 17th, when a spike was driven through a hollow wall to reveal the “priests hole behind.” Campion was barely delivered to the Tower before rival presses were whizzing off triumphalist accounts of his impending martyrdom. There then began a curiously horrible process in which Campion was alternately tortured and vivaed, one day disputing scholarly points with the four commissioners appointed to try him at Westminster Hall, or even the Dean of St. Paul’s, the next strapped to the rack. This continued until the trial proper commenced in November. Now that Campion’s case was an international cause célèbre, the government had to prove that he was a traitor, not a victim of confessional persecution. The 1581 act stated that
all persons [who] shall pretend to have power to absolve, persuade or withdraw any of the Queen’s majesty’s subjects from their natural obedience to her Majesty, or to withdraw them to that intent from the religion now by her Highness’s authority established within her Highnesses’ dominions shall be to all intents judged to be traitors and being thereof lawfully convicted, shall have judgment, suffer
and forfeit as in cases of high treason.
This was not the law that condemned Campion. The recent legislation was still not quite sufficient to prove that the Jesuit was on trial for treason, not faith, so the commissioners returned to an earlier statute of 1352 which made it treasonable to compass the king’s death, excluding religion altogether. They claimed that Campion and his fellows had “in divers other places … beyond the seas” conspired to “deprive, cast down and disinherit” the queen, to encourage her enemies to war, and to produce insurrection and rebellion in the realm. To prove the case, Walsingham was obliged to bring in his spies from the cold, so that Londoners, eagerly awaiting every scrap of news, were treated to a vignette of the double agents, secret dossiers, and coded communications on which their safety as Elizabeth’s subjects depended. Or so the printers told them. From Rome, William Allen called the trial “the most pitiful practice that ever was heard of to shed innocent blood by the face of justice.”
Campion was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on 1 December 1581. He prayed for Elizabeth from the scaffold. Elizabeth was absent, largely, from these proceedings carried out in her name. Supposedly, Lord Howard dared to confront her with the accusation that she had executed an innocent man, to which she replied that justice had been done according to the law. Her own feelings about the dirtiness of her government’s hands cannot be known, while her behavior in what amounted to her private life suggests that she had no particular personal hatred of Catholicism. And yet, she was the pious product of Katherine Parr’s reformist court, happy to be associated, in pageantry at least, with the enemies of the Papal Antichrist. She signed the torture warrants and the death warrants. She was anxious that the trials of Catholics should have the force of law, while being aware that in the eyes of Catholic states, her authority to pass such law was in itself illegitimate. In 1559, she had acceded to the “Device for the Alteration of Religion” with awareness of its consequences. Campion’s trial was a gift to Catholic propagandists, so much so that even Walsingham reportedly commented that it would have been better for the queen to throw away 40,000 gold pieces than to execute him publicly. The missionaries’ cause was, if anything, enhanced by the threat of persecution; writing in 1597, one Jesuit observed that “the rigor of the laws … has been the foundation of our credit.”3 In Campion’s case, both sides claimed victory in loss.
