The apothecaries presented Elizabeth with medicines on New Year's Day, and the grocers spices—boxes of ginger and nutmegs and a pound of cinnamon. The chief clerk of the spicery came forward with pomegranates and apples, and boxes of comfits—sugar candies in various flavors. The most fanciful of the edible gifts were the huge structures built of marzipan. One of the yeomen of the chamber wheeled in his "very fair marchpane made like a tower, with men and sundry artillery in it." The master cook presented his with a flourish—a marzipan made like a chessboard, the different squares different flavors. And the surveyor of the works, an architect, surpassed all with his giant sugared construction of St. Paul's Cathedral, its steeples reproduced with loving exactitude in candied paste. The latter gift had a touch of nostalgia about it, for the great steeple—by far the tallest spire in London—had only recently been struck by lightning and the church destroyed by fire, obliterating a venerable link with London's medieval past.
There were incidental pastimes in plenty at Elizabeth's court. Card-playing, gambling, fortune-telling and tennis were among the indoor amusements; when the weather was fine, there was riding and hunting as well. Every well-bred gentleman studied fencing, while ladies took music lessons and did embroider)'. Both men and women spent many hours with their tailors and dressmakers and other outfitters. And both perfected their dancing, an art much regarded at Elizabeth's court.
When she was not performing herself, the queen liked to watch her courtiers dance, settling herself on cushions in her presence chamber and beating time as the musicians played. The men she watched with particular pleasure, as they handed their swords to the nearest page and took their places in line. There were prizes for the best dancer, and less immediate
rewards as well. Grace on the dance floor was an advantage when it came to preferment to office, and the hours spent learning the fashionable Italian steps and polishing one's leaps and pirouettes paid well in career advancement.
Revelry in the early years of Elizabeth's reign was modest. There were none of the costly spectacles that had drained the treasury of Henry VIII, and whenever possible the queen encouraged and attended large-scale pageantry paid for by others. The London festivities of May-games and midsummer musters she gladly attended, and often, of course, she had plays performed at court. (These might or might not find favor; one group of players that appeared before her in 1559 "acted so disgraceful, that they were commanded to leave off.") Masking as such was limited, at least in the first half of the reign, both because of its expense and, at times, because the great halls of the palaces were not in sufficiently good repair. At Hampton Court one Christmas the revels master struggled manfully against the elements, hampered by gaps in the walls and drafty windows. In desperation, he ordered the toils master to provide him with large tents "to keep away the wind and snow from driving into the hall." 5
The most lavish occasions at Elizabeth's court were feasts and masques given in outdoor "banqueting houses" especially constructed for these entertainments. Compared to the barnlike indoor halls of the royal palaces, which averaged a hundred feet or more in length, the outdoor banqueting houses were huge pavilions three or four hundred feet in circumference, their thick canvas walls held up by great ship masts forty feet high. In June of 1572, when an important French envoy visited the court, a vast banqueting house was constructed and some five hundred workmen were hired to decorate it with birch boughs and ivy and roses and honeysuckle. The canvas walls were cunningly painted to look like stone, and the ceiling was a phantasmagoria of painted foliage and heavenly bodies and pendant artificial flowers and vegetables—pomegranates, melons, cucumbers, grapes, carrots—"spangled with gold, and most richly hanged." Three hundred "lights of glass" sparkled overhead on the night the banqueting house was inaugurated, and the effect was magnificent. Though built to be temporary, this structure was still in use twelve years later, in 1584, and by then birds had moved into the boughs and overhanging greenery and sang as if in a forest while the feast went on below. 6
To live moderately and sensibly in so vast a setting as a royal palace, amid outsized backdrops and surrounded by gargantuan excess, must have called for steely self-discipline and extraordinary mental poise. Court life, with its hundred temptations to greed, to gluttony, to ruthless betrayal and hidden vice, pulled its victims in many directions and often left them rudderless.
"Inside their heads is a perpetuum mobile," a visiting foreigner wrote of the English courtiers. Another found them so befuddled and naive in their blind greed that they were "like children, who gladly exchange the precious stone for a single apple." 7
Edgy, off balance, their nerves in rags, those who lived at court were easily seized by fads and fancies, particularly in dress. Appearance was everything: it was no wonder that they strove to outdo one another, as in the game of preferments and politics, in the cut of their doublets and the modish elegance of their shoes and hats.
It was the men who took the lead. Their trousers, or hose, once short and moderately full, grew to knee-length and bulged like stuffed pockets, while their lace-trimmed, jewel-buttoned doublets too grew longer and more elaborately ornamented. Everything—doublet, hose, coat, cloak, and the dozen accessories no gentleman of fashion went without—had to match or harmonize with everything else, and the scores of yards of golden brocade and crane-colored silk and murrey velvet that went into a complete suit of clothes could far outstrip the wearer's income.
But there was more: bright silk stockings, garters fringed with gold or shining spangles, shoes of soft perfumed leather or velvet, covered with rosettes of ribbons and lace, an ornamented rapier or dagger sheathed in an embroidered velvet scabbard. Velvet hats set off the costume, perhaps with long feathers in their brims which swept out an arc two feet wide. Scented gloves, "sweet as damask roses," dripping tassels and Venice gold, a large and beautiful handkerchief, held in the hand, jeweled rings, a heavy watch, a protective amulet, perhaps a locket enclosing a curl of hair from a favorite lover—all these and more freighted down the well-dressed courtier and must have made him insufferably self-conscious.
His earrings, coiffure and rouged cheeks must have contributed even more to this narcissism. A jewel or pearl at the earlobe enhanced a gentleman's carefully shaped curls, clipped coquettishly short or grown long into a ruff-length page boy. His mustache too was often kept long, and his beard —washed, combed, plaited into braids or bound with bands—was the object of infinite attention. Only yokels let their beards grow in their natural contours; men of fashion chose the shape that made the most of their painted faces. Lean, pinched faces could be made commanding and broad, fat faces narrow, with the help of a clever barber. Satirists joked at the expense of "weasel-beaked" men whose well-meaning barbers left too much hair on their cheeks until as a result the ill-formed gallants "looked like big hens, as grim as geese."
But beards were not only styled—they were also dyed, in a myriad of colors to match a man's coloring and clothes. From Nordic blond to fiery
Irish red to amber or auburn, any hue was possible, along with the startling, but undeniably trend-setting, shades of purple and orange and speckled yellow.
Women departed less spectacularly at first from the conventions of dress that had prevailed in Queen Mary's reign. The time-honored layering of stiffened farthingale, then petticoats, then kirtle, then gown was preserved, but the bodices became more rigidly shaped—the shape supplied by an interior scaffolding of wood or steel—and sleeves became tight and straight, ending in wrist-ruffs. The farthingale, which could stand alone on its whalebone or cane hoops, ballooned out until in its English version it surpassed its French original, which by law could be no more than four feet wide.
In 1564—a year of deliverance for hundreds of overworked laundrymaids and chamber servants—Mistress Dinghen Vanderplasse came to England and taught the English how to make starch. The huge ruffs that were coming into fashion, made of yards and yards of cambric or lawn, were fragile constructions held out fro
m the face by hundreds of sticks of bone or wood, all carefully put in place one after the other by frustrated servants. They could be worn only once; in order to be re-used ruffs had to be laboriously washed and ironed and folded and re-shaped, the tiny wooden stays inserted afresh. With Mistress Vanderplasse's formal instruction in starching and starch-making the laundry and chamber staff were able to save days of tedious work.
Starched, the great ruffs stood out from the face on their own (or over a wire framework); if treated with care, they could be worn several times at least if freshened with a hot "poking stick" inserted between the folds. Of course, they were still vulnerable. The wearer had to keep away from walls and hangings and other people's ruffs; a slight jostling could disarrange his neckwear fatally. And, of course, he had to avoid candles and torches —and wet weather. Great ruffs, in the rain, were said to "strike sail and flutter like dish-clouts."
Preoccupation with dress and personal adornment, far from being an incidental oddity of life at Elizabeth's court, was in the mid-i56os becoming central to that court's affect and mental outlook. The lust for ever costlier fabrics and ever more conspicuous fashions, the willingness, even eagerness, of the courtiers to be squeezed and stuffed and strapped into rigid and confining garments that forced them to move with stiff awkwardness while holding their heads "monstrous steady," the perverse determination with which women pulled their hair into labyrinthine knots which gave them headaches and men sweated and strained before their tailors until they fainted from exhaustion—all these were symptoms of a characteristic
malaise of Elizabethan society that was to become more and more pronounced.
"In these days," the historian Camden wrote, "a wondrous excess of apparel had spread itself all over England." The craze for new, exaggerated, garish clothing "grew into such contempt, that men by their new fangled garments, and too gaudy apparel, discovered a certain deformity and arro-gancy of mind whilst they jetted up and down in their silks glittering with gold and silver, either embroidered or laced."
Ascham, a close observer of this "deformity and arrogancy of mind" at Elizabeth's court, wrote at length in The Scholemaster of the misordered manners that had overtaken the courtiers along with their huge hose and outrageous doublets. They were braggardly, aggressive, unblushingly self-assertive in every situation. Men "unknown to the court" they shoved aside, haughtily facing them down and trying to appear "big, dangerous of look, talk and answer." To their betters they "bore a brave look" and affected warlike oaths and swaggering gestures. They loved to hear themselves speak, Ascham asserted, especially some "brave proverb" or foul vulgarity borrowed from the London underworld. And always, no matter how small their incomes or how costly the fashion, they had to have some "new disguised garment or desperate hat," and they must be the first to have it, before the fad went stale and their pride shriveled with it. 8
To be sure, Ascham was aging, made cantankerous by chronic fevers and indulging, in part, an old man's contempt for the young. But others less prejudiced by their own circumstances described the same phenomenon; the elderly humanist was merely the most articulate critic of a generally deplored trend. "Innocency is gone, bashfulness is banished," Ascham wrote in his Latinate style, "much presumption in youth, small authority in age, reverence is neglected, duties be confounded, and to be short, disobedience doth overflow the banks of good order, almost in every place, almost in every degree of man." Englishmen had become infected with "Italianate" ways, their insolence extending even into the spiritual realm. They mocked both the pope and the Protestant divines, following no authority save themselves.
And the same grotesque garb and braggardly misbehavior that tainted the "great ones" of the court had begun to infect their social inferiors. In London the "misorder of mean men" was so great that a watch was set at every city gate to seize "misordered persons in apparel." But the effort was futile: not only did the worst of the swaggering courtiers side with their sartorial imitators in the capital but the queen herself, when confronted with extravagantly dressed Londoners in the presence chamber, seemed rather to enjoy than to disapprove of them.
The queen herself: in fact, she was the heart of the problem. For however much she might complain about the money her courtiers wasted on silks and jewels, about disregard for the sumptuary laws and of the acts against outlandish apparel, she herself was the most conspicuous exemplar of splendid excess. Ascham might rage against "Italianate" manners and Parliament deplore the Florentine and Milanese merchants who "licked the fat from English beards," but Elizabeth liked Italians and Italian ways. "I like the manners and customs of the Italians better than those of all the rest of the world," she boasted in 1564, "and I am, as it were, half Italian." 9
Her wardrobe was a fantasy world of modish extravagance—gowns of elegant black satin and regal purple velvet and silks and brocades in the flattering shades she favored—russet, tawny, peach, marigold, lady blush. Each gown bore a fortune in ornament: aglets or knots or tassels of gold, gold or silver braid, pearls, garnets, even rubies in profusion. When she moved she sparkled as brilliantly as a diamond with refracted light, or threw back the warm gleam of pearls.
Her jeweled necklaces, pendants, rings and bracelets were yet another layer of coruscating richness. She wore proudly all the great gemstones her father had brought into his jewel house when the monasteries surrendered their wealth, and to these she added hundreds of others, until they hung from every inch of her outer garments and blazed from her ears, fingers and hair.
Every kind of fashionable trinket hawked by foreign merchants Elizabeth bought—dozens of pairs of embroidered gloves, cauls and hoods of every design, muffs, earpicks, scissors, jeweled watches made like flowers or reliquaries, brooches, pins, and a great many jeweled fans, their feathers a billowing rainbow of hues, their handles of gold or ivory studded with shining stones.
And just as Elizabeth's continuous display of costly adornment taught her gentlemen and ladies to crave fashion and court ruin, so her colorful, unpredictable and usually indecorous behavior gave them a model of raucous disobedience.
She swore, she shouted, she forgot her manners and swaggered unconscionably before the abashed visitors in the presence chamber. "God's death!" she roared when a luckless councilor or official offended her; she swore, in fact, "by God, by Christ, and by many parts of his glorified body, and by saints, faith, troth, and other forbidden things," and she seemed to like it when those around her swore too—though they swore at her, surely, to their peril.
Of all the maidenly virtues modesty was, perhaps, the least in evidence in Queen Elizabeth. She thumbed her nose and shook her fist at the great
r
powers of her time and, when driven to it, sent her soldiers against them as well. Like the self-vaunting gentlemen Ascham despised, she professed reverence for nothing and looked to herself in everything. She loved the sound of her own voice. "It is her wont," wrote a diplomat much wearied by the queen's torrent of language, "to make long digressions and after much circumlocution to come to the point of which she wishes to speak." "As a rule," wrote another, "she speaks continuously." 10
Truculent, violent, disagreeable, arrogant, always majestic: such was the queen of Hampton Court. Her loud, authoritative voice echoed fearsomely down the long galleries of the great palace, and the hive of mighty and lowly subjects who served her there, however they plotted and cursed her for the stubborn woman that she was, trembled at the sound.
PART FOUR
A Very Strange Sort of Woman'
#
The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,
And Wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine
annoy, For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects' faith doth ebb, Which would not be if Reason ruled, or Wisdom wove
the web; But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds, Which turn to rain of late repent by course of changed
winds. The top of hope supposed, the root of ruth will be, And fruitless all the
ir grafted guiles, as ye shall shortly
see.
O.
n November 14, 1569, three hundred armed horsemen rode to Durham Cathedral and, bursting into the sanctuary, overturned the communion table and broke it in pieces. They snatched up the Protestant service books and English Bible, and burned them in a huge bonfire. As crowds gathered they destroyed or defaced every other symbol of Anglican worship they could find, until the great Norman cathedral stood as it had a generation earlier, a Catholic shrine.
A makeshift altar was erected, and as the soldiers watched, their arquebuses and daggers at hand, high mass was sung. The crowd grew until the vast nave was filled, and the worshipers knelt to be absolved of the Protestant heresy to which they had, against their consciences, acquiesced.
It was a dramatic hour. Many wept, and gave thanks for the restoration of the faith they had never ceased to nourish in secret. But amid their rejoicing they were apprehensive, for what they were doing, however pleasing it might be to God, was treason against the queen.
The Catholic north had been brewing rebellion for many months. Mary Stuart, still Elizabeth's presumed heir, had taken refuge in England from her hostile Scots subjects, and her presence put heart into dissatisfied Catholics, especially when they heard that she was to marry the duke of Norfolk, the leading peer. Rumors and prophecies fed the religious resur-
235
gence. The queen's council was said to be divided, her power ebbing. Political unrest was written in the stars. Predictions circulated that the coming year "would witness much trouble and difficulty, and that there was danger of a great change." Those who dared cast the queen's horoscope, and read there uncertainty and peril.
The first Elizabeth Page 29
