by Lisa Hilton
And Elizabeth was furious. She learned of Mary’s death on the evening of 9 February. According to Davison, this was what she had wished. In their first interview after Elizabeth had signed the warrant, on 1 February, she had told her secretary that she did not wish for any further discussion of the case until Mary should be dead, “she for her part [as she said] performed all that in law or reason could be required of her.” The next day, Davison affirmed that when represented with the warrant, the queen appeared uncertain but “still resolved to proceed therein according to her former directions.” Elizabeth, though, denied that such a conversation had taken place. In her version, she had indeed requested Davison to take the signed warrant to Bromley, but then sent one of the gentlemen of her chamber, William Killigrew, to find Davison, and, had he not already found Bromley, to return with the warrant to await further instructions. Davison was apparently nowhere to be found, and when he eventually informed Elizabeth that the warrant had been ratified by the Lord Chancellor, she berated him for his precipitancy. And yet, six days went by when Elizabeth knew the warrant was at large, and she did nothing. Had she actually wished to stay Mary’s execution, she could have done so. In a letter dated 26 January 1587, that is, just days before she signed the warrant, James of Scotland had warned Elizabeth that the projected events at Fotheringhay would prejudice her “general reputation, and (almost) universal misliking of you, may dangerously peril both in honor and utility your person and estate.” Elizabeth knew this perfectly well. So she perpetrated an act actless, a gross hypocrisy which left her own hands technically clean. She stormed and raged at the councilors who had gone behind her back, refused to see Cecil, condemned poor Davison to the Tower (where he remained until 1598, though he was not restored to her service even after his release), and thus, quite neatly, followed the Machiavellian principle that crime, where necessary, is best delegated to others. Moreover, in giving out that her ministers had acted without her full consent, she conceded just the necessary amount of authority to conscience. The assessment of Cecil’s principal biographer that “for all the evasions, contradictions, omissions and fabrications in the accounts … of the events leading to Mary’s execution, there is really no doubt that [Cecil] and his colleagues acted in effect on their own authority” is quite correct.13 They did, which was just what Elizabeth, with magnificent cynicism, wished them to do.
22
AT THE NEW YEAR’S gift-giving of 1585, Elizabeth’s present from Leicester was “a sable skin, the head and four feet of gold, fully furnished with diamonds and rubies.” As was the way with formal Renaissance presents, this magnificent piece was loaded with meaning. It was in a sense a parting gift, a forget-me-not. Leicester had been pressing for years to lead an expedition to the beleaguered Protestants of the Netherlands, and, after Elizabeth had reluctantly signed the Treaty of Nonsuch the previous August, he had finally taken up his commission in late December. It was also a timely reminder not only of the contribution made by the Dudley family to the important Russian trade but, in this time of crisis, of the significance of the alliance with the Russian imperial family, which had been imperiled since the sudden death of Tsar Ivan (the Terrible) the previous year.
Until 1553, there had been no diplomatic contact between England and Russia. The mysterious empire to the north had been a place of legend, the “Russland” of the masquerade performed for Henry VIII in 1509. This changed with the arrival of the Edward, captained by Richard Chancellor, at Novgorod on the shores of the White Sea. Leicester’s father, Northumberland, had been instrumental in correcting “our former gross ignorance in maritime causes,” and it was his involvement in the voyage which promoted the growth of “a genuine maritime culture, founded on the scientific understanding of maps and astronomy [which] had laid the basis for the flowering of English enterprise under Queen Elizabeth.”1 It was this culture, in turn, which was to prove so crucial in England’s engagement with the Armada in 1588. It was Northumberland who recognized the lack of indigenous expertise in shipbuilding and navigation during his time at the Admiralty under Edward VI, and he who imported craftsmen from Normandy and Brittany, many of them Huguenot refugees, to instruct their English counterparts in, for example, the art of making the sail canvases known as “poldavies.” It was also Dudley who recognized the potential of the “joint-stock” company in financing merchant exploration of a possible trade route to the north. The company which financed the 1553 voyage was the first of its kind, shrewdly exploiting the venturesome mood of the economy in the 1550s. The dissolution of the monasteries had created a new class of wealthy men, and a concurrent demand for luxury goods. Dudley was aware of Italian joint-stock practices through his protégé, the navigator Sebastian Cabot, and the Muscovy Company, as it became, allowed for a novel form of investment—raising capital to finance expeditions with relatively small individual outlay (the share price for the first voyage was fixed at £25) and potentially huge returns. One of the last joyful sounds the dying boy-king Edward heard was the cannon fire from the Edward, the Bona Speranza, and the Bona Confidenzia as they set sail from Greenwich on 10 May, just a few months before Northumberland’s fall.
Chancellor’s crew eventually made contact with the imperial court at Moscow, and left many extraordinary recollections of the customs and sights of the Kremlin, not least Ivan himself. After impressing the tsar with samples of English cloth, they returned from their first voyage with an agreement that English merchants might trade freely, and with the tsar’s protection, within his vast domains. Thus began a diplomatic and economic relationship which endured throughout Mary’s reign, and then Elizabeth’s. More than ninety letters survive from the English government to the Russian between 1554 and 1603, and Elizabeth herself corresponded with three tsars, Ivan himself, his son Feodor Ivanovich, and the regent and then usurper Boris Godunov. The Muscovy Company proved hugely successful, but Elizabeth’s interest in Russia was more than merely commercial. The empire, and, curiously, its Orthodox religion, took on new significance as the queen began to engage in both mercantile enterprise with the Ottomans and pro-Reformation diplomacy with eastern European states. There was also a cultural element. Ivan was keen to modernize his court through contact with the west (in opposition to the Poles and Danes, who wished precisely to prevent it), requesting Elizabeth early in their correspondence to send “an architect to build castles, towns and palaces, a doctor, an apothecary and other artificers such as can seek for gold and silver.”2 And Ivan was interested in something else as well as artisans—arms. In his strategy of expanding his lands and defeating the Muslim khans on his eastern borders, Ivan recognized that English raw materials could provide him with a much needed advantage, so in a profitable relationship which prefigured her dealings with the Sultan at Istanbul, Elizabeth set about providing them.
From the first, Elizabeth had to balance the essential protection of her merchants’ privileges (and persons) with the insistent and often mercurial demands of Ivan for a closer political alliance. In 1569, she promised the tsar her “eternal friendship,” and in 1570, in a letter co-signed by ten members of the Privy Council, including Leicester, she agreed to receive Ivan and his family in England if insurrection obliged them to go into exile. She resisted, however, his demands for a formal alliance, citing the reluctance of Parliament as her reason, but here the two rulers reached an impasse. Ivan was unable to comprehend the function of Parliament, or of any form of consensual politics, and wrote in frustration to the queen: “We had thought that you had been a ruler over your land and had sought honor to yourself and profit to your country… . Now we perceive that there be other men that do rule … and you flow in your maidenly estate like a maid.”3 (Only Ivan the Terrible had the nerve to refer to Elizabeth I as an actual woman!) In a fit of pique, the tsar suspended English privileges, which Dutch and French merchants were by now eagerly pursuing, and confiscated the Muscovy Company’s goods, but Elizabeth’s response was cool: “Our ambassador will tell you in all truth that no
merchants are governing the estate and our affairs, but that we rule ourselves with the honor befitting a virgin queen appointed by God.”
By 1572, Elizabeth had succeeded in smoothing over the misunderstanding; the impounded goods were returned, the imperial protection re-obtained, and she declared herself satisfied with Ivan’s respect for her wishes. Two years later, the alliance was again proposed, and discussed in a memorandum “certain notes touching the benefit that may grow to England by the traffic of English merchants into Russia,” but by 1576, Ivan had lost patience and announced that he intended instead to conclude a treaty with the Holy Roman Empire. Since the Emperor Maximilian (and subsequently Rudolf, who succeeded him the same year) controlled territories from Romania to the Adriatic, this could potentially open Russian trade routes to Italy and the east, greatly to England’s disadvantage. Elizabeth was anxious and dispatched an embassy to Russia, but unfortunately the ambassador, Sylvester, was killed suddenly by a stroke of lightning at Kolonogori just as he was trying on the yellow satin suit he had ordered for his audience with the tsar, an incident which the deeply superstitious Ivan interpreted as an unfavorable sign from God. Discussions were once more suspended. But in 1580, Ivan sent an Englishman living in Russia, Jerome Horsey, to Elizabeth with a request for military supplies concealed in a flask hidden in his horse’s mane. Elizabeth obliged the next year, sending Horsey back with thirteen ships loaded with arms.
The munitions trade with Russia had proved almost as lucrative as the Muscovy Company’s declared interest in furs. During Mary’s reign, a company employee named Thomas Alcock had been arrested in Poland and charged with supplying “thousands of ordnance, as also of harnesses, swords, with other munitions of war, artificers, copper and many other things.” Alcock denied it, but subsequent correspondence with Ivan confirmed that Elizabeth had provided him with materials “which Her Majesty does not suffer to be transported forth of her realm to no other prince of the world.” This was not quite true. By 1580, Elizabeth had become a serious arms dealer, supplying not just Russia but the Ottoman Empire, and it is here that her secretive dealings with Ivan connect with the broader politics of the Counter-Reformation.
After Horsey’s delivery, Ivan gave out that he was considering an English marriage, with Lady Mary Hastings selected as the lucky bride. Mary was a kinswoman of Elizabeth’s, of Plantagenet descent, and Ivan declared himself enthusiastic at an English royal marriage. Mary may have been less so, since the tsar was by now on his seventh wife, whom he proposed to discard to make Mary the eighth. In 1582, Ivan sent two ambassadors, Pissemski and Neovdatcha, to inspect Lady Mary, who remained unmarried in her late twenties (Cecil having snatched her intended husband, his ward, the Earl of Oxford, for his own daughter Ann). Elizabeth was positive, as she hoped that the marriage might secure exclusive English rights to the port of St. Nicholas. Mary was duly inspected, walking in a garden accompanied by Leicester’s sister Katherine, and found satisfactory, but Elizabeth then instructed her new ambassador, Sir Jerome Bowes, to dissuade the tsar from the match, as Mary was scarred from smallpox and professed herself reluctant to convert to Orthodoxy and abandon her English relatives. Confusingly, having first apparently desired the marriage, Elizabeth had made the ambassadors wait eight months to see Mary, and then again scotched the alliance. Poor Mary, who had to endure being referred to as the “Empress of Muscovia” by court wags, never married at all, but her putative betrothal had concealed quite another level of diplomatic intrigue.
Since the early 1580s, Elizabeth’s intelligence network had been active in Poland, which was believed to be a supporter of the claim of Mary Stuart to her throne and, more generally, a Counter-Reformation ally of Rome and Spain. Until 1582, Poland had been at war with Moscow, in part over the disputed territory of Protestant Livonia. In 1577, Ivan had invaded Livonia, which was seen by Catholics as a “bulwark for European states,” and his success there was not only viewed as a “calamity” by the emperor but directly attributed, according to the English ambassador at Antwerp who had canvassed the rulers of the German principalities, to “the furniture of ammunition which the English sent to the Russians.”4 In a counter-gesture, Magnus of Livonia recognized the rule of Poland and its king, the Catholic Stefan Batory. With the help of a truce with the Ottoman Empire, Batory succeeded in claiming much of Livonia’s territory back from Ivan at the end of the war, which both Moscow and Protestant Sweden viewed with alarm. The German Protestant rulers, according to a report to Walsingham, “are suspicious of the king of Poland and dread his prosperity and greatness.” The marriage negotiations with Lady Mary were therefore a smokescreen for a different project, an alliance against Poland.
Ivan’s ambassadors arrived in England in September 1582. On 23 January 1583, Elizabeth conducted a “secret meeting” with Pissemski, and in April held a series of banquets for the envoys, in the presence of Francis Walsingham, Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Sir Philip Sidney.5 Mary was finally viewed at her garden walk in May, and the ambassadors departed, but in June, Prince Albertus Laski appeared at court. Laski was an odd character, one of the flotsam thrown up by the religious storms engulfing Europe. He was a descendant of a prominent Polish Protestant, John Laski (whom Cecil had covertly assisted in escaping the Marian persecutions in 1555), for a time a member of the Polish Calvinists, and the author of several Latin treatises on religion. Laski has been described as an impoverished magnate who was “honourably received” at Elizabeth’s court before being obliged to flee in the face of his debts, but his time in England was divided between Winchester House and Oxford, where he toured the colleges and enjoyed, or endured, the usual entertainment of verses and disputations. On 23 June, accompanied by Philip Sidney, he was rowed by the queen’s men in a barge draped in her colors and to the music of her trumpeteers down the river to Mortlake, the home of John Dee.
Dee was another Cambridge man, an alumnus of St. John’s and a friend of John Cheke, with whom he shared an ambition to promote the study of mathematics, a much neglected subject at the time of his residency at the college in the 1540s. By his own account, Dee devoted eighteen hours a day to his studies, in science as well as the ancient languages, which former interest he subsequently pursued during wide travels in Europe. Returning to England in 1551, Dee was introduced by Cheke to Cecil, through whom he gained an entrée at both Edward VI’s court and later Elizabeth’s. Often described as a “magus,” Dee was an extraordinary polymath, proficient in mathematics, astronomy, geography, history, and theology, as well as the more occult studies which in later life aroused dangerous suspicions of witchcraft. To Elizabeth, he was “her philosopher.” Although Dee’s reputation was dogged by accusations of sorcery, Elizabeth was alert to the suspicions provoked by ignorance of Dee’s studies, and in his own words, “promised unto me great security against any of her kingdom that by reason of any my rare studies and philosophical exercises unduly seek my overthrow.”6
Elizabeth was a frequent visitor to Dee’s house, where he had built up the largest library in England, and she was eager to meet Laski on his arrival. Although Laski had impeccable Protestant credentials, he had recently converted to Catholicism, which makes the warmth of his reception, and Elizabeth’s gift to him of a Protestant Bible with a pair of her gloves inside, rather curious. Laski was a spy, a very effective one, and Catholicism was part of his cover. His connections included the secretaries to the Polish cardinal, the papal nuncio, the King of Poland, and perhaps most importantly Antonio Possevino, a Jesuit priest with vehemently anti-English views who was close to Batory’s nephew, who was serving with the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands. Poland was advocating military and naval action against England to prevent further intervention against Spain in the Netherlands. Laski was therefore able to provide Elizabeth with details of an east-west Catholic front, for which she rewarded him on several occasions before his departure for Poland in September 1583. He travelled with John Dee, whom he intended to present to Batory as a “conjuror,” w
ith a view of placing a spy at the center of the Polish court. Laski was not entirely reliable—Dee described him as “a wanton and very prone to sin”—and somehow the men lost one another, with Dee eventually ending up alone in Prague. He made several visits to Poland but never succeeded in getting close to Batory, who died in late 1586.
The continuance of English trade with Russia now depended on a more malleable candidate for the Polish throne, and here Laski was more useful. Since 1582, Elizabeth had supported the candidacy of Sigismund Vasa of Sweden, the nephew of her old suitor King Erik, despite the fact that he had been raised as a devout Catholic. A friendly Catholic in Poland was better, in her view, than a hostile one in Sweden, a view shared by her Swedish Protestant allies and also by Ivan. (Sigismund did eventually become King of Sweden in 1592.) Laski was active in promoting Vasa, who became King of Poland in 1587. Just when it appeared that the Poles had been outmaneuvered and the Russian trade secured, though, Ivan died.
Elizabeth continued her correspondence with the new tsar, Feodor, and with the regent, his brother-in-law Boris Godunov, but now it was Feodor who was interested in a political alliance. In a reversal of a contemporary situation, the English merchant community in Moscow was criticized for living in high style, parading in silks and velvets, racing horses, buying pedigree hunting dogs, and provoking such hostility that the ambassador, Sir Jerome Bowes, was imprisoned by rioters in his home and barely made it back to England alive. New trading privileges were denied, and by 1589, Elizabeth’s letters complained of the damage done to her monopoly by the encroaching Dutch. By April 1590, she was claiming that the enormous sum of 60,000 rubles was owed to her, having been lost to the English through Ivan’s fault during his reign. When Feodor was usurped by Godunov, Elizabeth wrote to congratulate him and the privileges were renewed, though she continued to grumble that the Muscovy Company was being denied its due. Godunov grumbled in turn that England was now too engaged with Polish politics and Ottoman trade, for during the previous decade, Elizabeth had made another exotic, and lucrative, alliance.
