She could not, however, keep to herself the legend that was growing up around her, the legend of a woman, unchaste and unmarried, insatiable in her sexual appetites and imperious in gratifying them.
The days were long past when Elizabeth was seen as an infatuated young woman dallying with her handsome suitor Leicester. That image was almost innocent compared to the stories circulating in the 1570s. Now the queen was looked on as a practiced, hardened voluptuary. "Every man had a tale to tell" about her unchastity, and about the vice-ridden court she had gathered around her. At Norwich, in August of 1570, several persons were tried—and some executed—for treasonable slander. "My lord of Leicester had two children by the queen," they insisted, and set out a proclamation "touching the wantonness of the court." A rural parson harangued his congregation with tales of how Elizabeth "desireth nothing but to feed her own lewd fantasy, and to cut off such of her nobility as were not perfumed and court-like to please her delicate eye." 5
When a parliamentary act limited the succession to the queen and "the natural issue of her majesty's body," the phrase led to endless jokes, for "natural children" were bastards, and though no one had ever actually seen any of Elizabeth's supposed children by Leicester there was very strong suspicion that some existed. The earl, it was said, had influenced the phrasing of the act so that, at least, he could "thrust upon the English some bastard of his own as the queen's natural child." 6
At the European courts elaborate stories circulated about the bawdy English queen. The Venetian ambassador in Spain told how she had thirteen natural children, one of whom she was planning to marry to Cecil's son. The Spanish ambassador De Spes wrote offensive libels about her. The French called her "the hackney of her own vassals," who rode her at their pleasure; they had used the same phrase about Elizabeth's aunt Mary Boleyn half a century earlier, when she and her younger sister Anne had served as nubile young companions to King Francis I and his nobles. 7 When there was talk of a marriage between Elizabeth and the French Prince Henry one of the French courtiers suggested that a sophisticated sort of arrangement might be made in which the queen would wed the prince, while the queen's lover Leicester could inherit the prince's mistress, Mademoiselle Chateauneuf.
Leicester's own reputation was becoming blacker than ever. While it had long been common tavern gossip that "the Lord Robert did swive the queen," and that he was the murderer of his own wife, it was now being said that he was a lecherous philanderer who had murdered the husband of his mistress Douglas Sheffield. John, Baron Sheffield had died in 1568 leaving his twenty-four-year-old widow to the attentions of the lascivious
Leicester. A story circulated that, before Baron Sheffield's death, the earl had written to his beloved assuring her that he was determined to remove "that obstacle which hindered the full fruition of their contentments." In other words, he intended to murder the baron. He summoned his Italian physician, a man skilled in poisons, the story went on, and ordered him to prepare a lethal draft. Shortly afterward the baron was found dead. 8
But it was not only Leicester who was widening his circle of conquests. Elizabeth too, it was said, was seducing handsome young men and keeping them under surveillance by her well-paid spies when they were not in amorous attendance on her. Prominent among these favorites was Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, a boyish, hazel-eyed young courtier whose expression combined poetic languor and aristocratic superciliousness. Oxford excelled at those courtly graces Elizabeth admired. He was athletic and acquitted himself brilliantly in the tiltyard, dashing fearlessly, lance lowered, against any and all comers and retiring the victor despite his youth and slight build. He was an agile and energetic dancer, the ideal partner for the queen, and he had a refined ear for music and was a dexterous performer on the virginals. His poetry was unusually accomplished, and his education had given him a cultivated mind, at home with the antique authors Elizabeth knew so well.
He was an ideal companion for her—except, perhaps, for the seventeen-year age difference that separated them—and she was said to "delight more in his personage and in his dancing and valiantness than any other." Rumormongers speculated about Oxford's talents in the bedchamber, and whispered that he was gambling all, including his marriage, on becoming her preferred lover. He was no longer sleeping with his wife, the gossips said, for fear of losing the preferment he hoped to gain by making love to the queen. 9
But Oxford, at least, was a willing paramour; Christopher Hatton had been taken by force—or so the poisonous Bess of Hardwick and others said. 10 Elizabeth threw herself at him in public, putting him in such an unendurably awkward position that he had to leave her presence—though he returned often enough in private, and joined Leicester in satisfying her prurient desires. Hatton "had more recourse unto her majesty in her privy chamber than reason would suffer if she were so virtuous and well-inclined as some noiseth her," an irate clergyman shouted in 1571, adding more "vile words" that could not be committed to writing by the mortified informant who reported the sermon to Leicester. 11
A dark, very good-looking man, "of a comely tallness of body and countenance," Hatton came under suspicion in part because of the suddenness of his rise to favor. He was a lawyer, and an intelligent, capable one. But
it was as a dancer, the gossips said, that he earned the queen's attention. She made him captain of her gentlemen pensioners, and kept him near her as a dancing partner and reassuringly lovesick admirer. For whatever tales might be told about them, Hatton was much more uxorious than lecherous; he was hopelessly infatuated, indeed almost intoxicated, with Elizabeth, and she nourished his dedicated fondness by calling him her "Mutton" and, eventually, making him lord chancellor.
Yet whatever the truth, the appearance was that Hatton had joined the ranks of the queen's lovers. Her reputation continued to spiral downward. Henry VIII's daughter she might be to her people, with Henry's personal fire and hearty courage, yet she was Henry's daughter too in bawdiness and wayward passion, and this they could not stomach. She seduced men away from their wives or, as with Hatton and Leicester, kept them from marrying at all (a sore point with Leicester, whose family would die out if he had no son, as his brother Ambrose Dudley was childless). She turned the royal court into a perfumed harem, sending away the dignified nobles of the old school and replacing them with dancing fops and lechers. She was wanton and flirtatious, fondling her favorites in full view of the court and encouraging looseness in others by her unmaidenly behavior. Nearing forty, Elizabeth had left young womanhood behind without entering respectable ma-tronhood as a married woman. She was a disquieting anomaly at best; at worst she was a whore.
The archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, became so deeply concerned about Elizabeth's reputation and its broad consequences that he wrote to his old friend Cecil "in bitterness of soul" in 1572. A man had been seized at Dover, the archbishop informed Cecil, who "uttered most shameful words" against the queen. Leicester and Hatton, the slanderer said, were "such toward her, as the matter is so horrible, that they [the man's examiners] would not write down the words." The incident prompted Parker to write for several reasons. First, he felt some responsibility toward Elizabeth and her long-dead mother Anne Boleyn. He had been Anne's chaplain during the last two years of her life, years in which she had been abused and ill-treated by her fickle and vindictive husband and subjected to the same sort of slander now directed against her daughter. He remembered vividly how Anne spoke to him about her little girl, and the memory moved him to speak out about the ugly situation he saw brewing.
Second, he spoke as primate of the church—its head, that is, under the defender of the faith and governess of the church, Queen Elizabeth. It was his duty as archbishop to unburden his conscience and to complain, not exactly about immorality—for the accusations against the queen were un-
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proven, and came from others—but about the almost incontrovertible appearance of immorality being built up around her.
To be sure, it was all but impossib
le to stop the wagging tongues and rolling eyes of Elizabeth's lusty-minded subjects. Inquiries by the leading courtiers, arrests, rigorous and sometimes painful examinations, imprisonment, ultimately the threat of execution: all these remedies were at hand, and were being used, against slanderers. Often they had their tongues or ears cut off as well. But as long as Elizabeth continued her present behavior there was no erasing the impression she made. She damned herself. The woman Elizabeth was defiling the sacred person of the queen, the sacred person of the head of the church. And if she was not very careful, Parker felt, she would so undermine her royal authority that she would be overwhelmed by her enemies.
For the slanderer taken at Dover had not stopped at imputing sexual impurity to the queen. He had gone on to predict civil war, with ''as many throats cut here in England, as be reported to be in France," where in this year of 1572 internal conflict reached new heights of slaughter with the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Catholic would rise against Protestant, he predicted. Within a year Elizabeth's government would be uprooted and a Catholic regime installed, and then would begin a religious persecution that would make Queen Mary's burnings of Protestants seem gentle by comparison. Elizabeth would be murdered or executed, her bones "openly burned in Smithfield" along with those of her father. 12
It was a gruesome picture, made particularly intense by the recent news from France, where the full horrors of religious warfare were beginning to unfold. The warfare there between Catholic and Protestant was unlike any European conflict since the age of the crusades. There were none of the chess-game maneuverings, interminable sieges and genteel chivalric conquests and surrenders of feudal war. This was relentless slaughter, carried out by desperate men and women driven by inner conviction to annihilate, root and branch, all those who opposed them in matters of religious conscience. This was the moral against the immoral, good against evil, virtue against sin. And nothing short of mass butchery would please the vengeful God who commanded the killing.
A realm with an immoral sovereign on its throne in this grimly intolerant climate was a realm in peril, particularly when that realm had no firm allies among the other powers of Europe and relied for its security on its geographic isolation alone. It was with this broader danger in mind that the archbishop recorded his "fearful opinion" about the impact of Elizabeth's worsening repute in the eyes of Christendom. He had heard, he warned
Cecil, that the slanderer had not been imprisoned, but had been turned loose to make mischief again. "Sir, if this be true," he ended his letter, "God be merciful to us." He could only hope that somehow Elizabeth would be rescued in her hour of crisis; having told what he knew, he felt he could do nothing but consign her to divine mercy and protection. "God defend her majesty," he wrote with fervor, "and all her trusty friends."
PART FIVE
"That GuiltyWoman of England"
Ring out your hels!
What should yow doe els?
Stricke up your Drums for joy!
The Noblest Queene
that ever was seene
In England doth Raigne this day.
T
he twelfth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth being now happily expired," the historian Camden wrote, "all good men throughout England joyfully triumphed, and with ringing of bells, running at tilt, and festival mirth began to celebrate the seventeenth of November, being the anniversary day of the beginning of her reign." This they did, he added, "in testimony of their affectionate love towards her."
The bells rang out in long and loud peals across the land, in villages and towns, chiming in chorus "in rejoicing of the queen's prosperous reign" until the ringers were exhausted and had to call for bread and drink. The celebration was spontaneous, and was quickly absorbed into the national life, so that by the time the next anniversary of Elizabeth's accession rolled around bonfires and orations and pageantry were added to the ringing, and the entire day was given up to public merrymaking and thanksgiving.
Each community celebrated in its own style. At York all the town officials marched in procession to church, at Liverpool the mayor ordered a huge bonfire to be lit in the market square and smaller ones in the courtyards of private houses. The people of Maidstone shot off a salute and, while all the bells rang noisily, enjoyed a great feast of roast venison in the open air. At Oxford, musicians played and there was a sermon, and in token
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of the queen's own liberality alms were distributed to prisoners and bread to the poor. 1
The most elaborate rejoicing was in the capital, where the tilting grounds at Westminster were the scene of gilded pageantry and athletic competition among the younger courtiers. The cycle of the itinerant court was adjusted to highlight these events, with Elizabeth making her triumphant annual return to London from her long summer progress in the countryside in mid-November, then settling in for the winter with the tilting as a display of welcome.
The groundswell of conspicuous thanksgiving was in part a collective sigh of relief. Rebellion had erupted and had been swiftly quelled. The treachery in the council and the discontent in Parliament had tested, and proven, Elizabeth's ultimate authority. The most severe crisis yet faced by the queen and her government had been surmounted, and whatever troubles might lie ahead, they would surely be faced with an extra measure of confidence.
For more than a decade, even the most sanguine of the English had predicted ultimate disaster for a poorly defended realm governed by an unmarried queen. Yet now that the crisis had come it had not shaken the realm, nor had it, as yet, opened the way to foreign invasion. And Elizabeth, who seen in one light was still entirely unsatisfactory in her role as a woman, was taking on the lineaments of a heroine in her role as queen.
The thanksgivings were more than this, however. The church bells— Protestant church bells—were being rung in defiance of the pope. For Elizabeth had at last been excommunicated and—in the eyes of the Catholic world—deposed. From now on her Catholic subjects owed her no allegiance, and in fact, owed it to their consciences to turn their backs on her as a heretic and to rebel against her. In 1571, another conspiracy took shape (mostly in the imaginative mind of the chief conspirator) to replace Elizabeth with Mary Stuart, a Catholic conspiracy invented by the Florentine banker Ridolfi and drawing in the gullible, spineless Norfolk and the imprisoned queen of Scots. Ridolfi's scheme collapsed for want of support in Rome and Madrid and, most crucially, for want of backing from the prepotent Alva in the Netherlands. The proven impotence of yet another Catholic scheme against Elizabeth, climaxed by the execution of Norfolk in June of 1572, lent added force to the Protestant jubilation on Accession Day.
So too did several other events. One was the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which brought home to many of the English the peril faced by their coreligionists on the continent. Elizabeth and her courtiers went into mourning when they heard the news of the relentless butchery in Paris, and
when the French ambassador came to court he found the assembled company in somber black, the queen as disapproving as she was incredulous at the inhumanity of the French Catholics toward the Huguenots. Then too there was Elizabeth's illness in the spring of 1572, which again plunged the kingdom into doubt for her survival and reopened the long-unsettled succession debate.
When she recovered, the recovery seemed, in the light of recent events, to be providential. It was as if God himself had spared his chosen handmaiden to lead his chosen people. In the 1570s what had been an implicit religious ethos was becoming a warmly stated militant credo: dare others what they might, Protestant England was in God's hands.
And a new popular ideology was gathering force: the cult of the queen. To the venerable sanctity of monarchy was now being added the worship of Elizabeth as a Protestant symbol, a symbol of deliverance from evil. She was coming to be seen as a national talisman, a luck-bringing treasure, and her physical frailty and lack of an heir only served to make her all the more precious.
On one of Elizabeth's coins, the double ros
e noble, was a reminder that she had survived to reach the throne by the slimmest of chances. 'This is the Lord's doing," the coin read, in abbreviated Latin, "it is marvelous in our eyes." This was the prayer the young Elizabeth exclaimed on learning that her half-sister was dead and that, after so many hazards, she was finally queen. Yet in the years since 1558 the same providential guidance could be discerned; it marked her whole life. She was blessed, and her people were blessed through her. From now on they would see her through a mist of extraordinary veneration, as a being as miraculous for her heavenly protection as for the sacred anointing she had undergone at her coronation.
The biblical precedents for female rulers were recalled, and Elizabeth was now seen as another like them. To be sure, as Calvin wrote to Cecil, female rulership was "a deviation from the original and proper order of nature," "to be ranked no less than slavery among the punishments consequent upon the fall of man." Yet now and then women appeared "so endowed that the singular good qualities which shone forth in them, made it evident that they were raised up by divine authority." Such a one was the English queen, who had come to the throne "for the better setting forth of his own glory."
The first Elizabeth Page 34
