It was a startling paradox that Elizabeth's subjects continued to regard their unique ruler from two opposing viewpoints throughout her long reign: on the one hand, they viewed her ill-reputed personal life with extreme distaste, on the other, they cheered her as their luck-bringing champion, as brave as she was, for a woman, unconventional.
Certainly she had a princely courage. In 1572 the courtiers gathered in fearful knots to prognosticate about the catastrophes that were sure to follow the appearance of a "blazing star," or comet, visible in the skies over England. There would be an earthquake, some said; others feared war, or the death of a ruler, or that in some terrifying climatic convulsion their "bodies should be parched and burned up with heat." No good could come from looking at the awful phenomenon, and many tried to persuade Elizabeth to avert her eyes. But "with a courage answerable to the greatness of her state," an observer recorded, "she caused the window to be set open, and cast out this word: 'facta est alia, the die is cast.' " Caesar-like, she challenged the heavens—and lo and behold, the year passed with no worse calamity than an unusually cold summer.
Nothing did more to spread and enrich the cult of the queen than her summer progresses. When London became hot and unhealthy the court took to the countryside, in a snakelike procession miles in length with the queen smiling and nodding at its rear. Over the forty-five years of her reign she crossed and recrossed the Midlands, East Anglia, Kent, Sussex and the West Country, visiting hundreds of towns and villages and staying in the royal manors and great noble houses in her path. Thousands of her subjects saw her in the flesh; many of these heard her speak, or watched her wave her hand in their direction and smile winningly. Even those deprived of the sight of her heard about her visit from others; the story spread in ever-widening circles of notoriety until almost nothing else was talked of.
To the dull-eyed, thick-featured country folk the arrival of the queen was an enchantment, touching their leaden lives with the sparkle of faery. When they heard she was coming they scanned the highroad, watching for the first sight of that glittering company that formed her retinue. For hours they saw only a straggling line of overloaded carts and wagons, hundreds and hundreds of them, carrying the indispensable goods and furnishings and miscellaneous baggage of a royal court on holiday. Finally, though, the first of the outriders appeared, clearing the way and making certain there were no dangers or unforeseen impediments and alerting the populace to the imminent arrival of the queen.
She came in a cloud of dust and a shimmer of gold. Sitting regally in her gilded coach, resplendent in silk and brocade, jewels at her throat and in her hair, she appeared "like a goddess such as painters are wont to depict." Her servants and guardsmen and equerries rode immediately ahead of her, her privy councilors behind, followed by another liveried company of tall guardsmen and two dozen maids of honor, "bravely mounted and beautifully attired." It was as if Elizabeth's coronation procession had somehow
found its way into rural Kent or Suffolk, bringing all the pageantry of the capital along a country road.
When she passed through a town the citizens gave her as magnificent a welcome as they could afford, and went to great lengths to make a good impression. The main street was swept clean of garbage and sewage, and the pickpockets and prostitutes were locked up or sternly warned to seek other districts for the duration of the royal visit. Idiots were kept discreetly out of sight, and the town gallows dismantled. Laborers were put to work improving the fronts of houses and churches and public buildings; householders cleared their courtyards and put their poultry in cages or behind locked gates. The market cross was painted, the ringers alerted to stand ready, at the royal party's arrival, to ring a lusty peal of bells. Carpenters threw together a platform for the costume plays and presentations and speeches of welcome, while the nervous pupils at the grammar school made heroic efforts to memorize the flowery, singsong poetry their headmaster produced to honor their sovereign's visit. Then, with food and drink prepared and musicians and dignitaries assembled, the queen at last arrived— more or less on schedule—and the fanfares and ringing and sonorous speeches began.
When Elizabeth visited the town of Worcester on progress in 1575 she found the usual provincial welcome. 2 Noisy crowds of excited townspeople surged toward her, drowning out the fanfares and churning the well-swept streets into quagmires. It was raining, but Elizabeth graciously paid no attention to the weather, shouting her thanks to the people who wished her well and showing great interest in the formalities of greeting and gift-giving that protocol demanded. As she stood watching the schoolboys' pageant the storm broke in earnest, but rather than let the "foul and rainy weather" deter her Elizabeth "called for her cloak and hat, and tarried to the end." Her consideration for the performers was noted, and the townspeople loved her for it. She seemed to take in everything: the headmaster's strained couplets, the marvelous tall pear tree that had been uprooted from its bed the night before her arrival and transplanted in the square for her to see and appreciate, the overlong speech of Mr. Bell, the orator, whose peroration was less a paean to the queen than a thinly disguised plea for her to relieve the town's economic woes.
Worcester, Mr. Bell solemnly informed her, had always served England's rulers as a rock-solid bulwark against troubles to the west in Wales, and had been favored by Elizabeth's father "of famous memory" Henry VIII and her brother, "that prince of greatest hope," Edward VI. (Queen Mary Mr. Bell tactfully referred to only as "your highness' dearest sister"; he dared not praise her.)
Yet the flourishing craft of weaving which was Worcester's sole industry had recently fallen into severe decline. Where once "in good and fresh memory of man," three hundred and eighty great looms had been kept working, providing employment and prosperity to eight thousand weavers and their families, now the industry had fallen to less than half its former size. Worcester's wealth, he lamented, was "wasted and decayed, the beauty faded, the building ruined, the three hundred and fourscore looms of clothing come to the number of one hundred and three score." Five thousand weavers were out of work, their families impoverished. "There is here," he said, gesturing dramatically to indicate the rain-soaked town around him, "almost nothing left but a ruinous city, or decayed antiquities."
Merchants had done it, the orator went on. Grasping merchants, and restraint of trade by the government, and "the number of pirates on the seas," which reduced exports and inevitably led to idle looms. The queen could alter these evils; the town looked to her to do so. Mr. Bell's eloquence gradually wound to an end.
Elizabeth's stay in Worcester was brief. She was lodged at a town mansion called The White Ladies, where she occupied a rather small and cramped room and her attendants bedded down in uncomfortable heaps on the floor. Somehow grazing was provided for the fifteen hundred horses in the royal caravan, though the town fathers remarked ruefully afterward that Elizabeth left "without paying anything therefor."
Still, when the time came to leave Worcester and move on the queen managed to put the townspeople in a mood to transcend such inconveniences. It was her turn to make a speech, and her words were memorable.
"Misters, I thank you all very heartily for your pains," she began, "and I thank you for the great cheer you made to my men, for they talk greatly of it. And, I pray you, commend me to the whole city, and thank them for their very good will and pains." With every sentence the people cheered loudly and wished her long life and prosperity, so that she felt she had to acknowledge their clamor. "And, I assure you," she concluded, "you all pray so heartily for me, as I fear you will by your prayers make me live too long."
"God save your majesty! God save your majesty!" The outcry was renewed as Elizabeth rode away toward the outskirts of the town, turning back to wave her gloved hand and shout her thanks for their good wishes. "I like as well of them as I have liked of any people in all my progressive time in all my life," she confided later to the bishop of Worcester, and her affection was returned with a fervor verging on adoration. The little room s
he had slept in at The White Ladies, the cup she drank from there, a jar
she had used—all were carefully preserved untouched for centuries and shown to visitors as among the most precious treasures of Worcester. The black pear tree she had admired was from that year on incorporated into the town's coat of arms.
Elizabeth's patient and appreciative response to the formalities at Worcester may have sprung more from political instinct than from excessive enjoyment, for her visit to the town must have been an anticlimax of a very high order. She visited Worcester in August of 1575; during most of July, she had been feted and banqueted and sumptuously lodged at one of the grandest houses in the kingdom, Leicester's palatial mansion of Kenilworth.
So lavish was the three-week royal holiday at Kenilworth that the 'Verses, proses, poetical inventions and other devices of pleasure" offered her there were published, in a work called 'The Princely Pleasures at the Court at Kenilworth," in the following year. 3 Everything that could give the queen delight was provided: fair, sometimes hot summer weather, with only a few days of showers; good hunting in the chase—'Vast, wide, large and full of red deer and other stately game"; diverting merrymaking by the local populace, endless spectacles and music and other pastimes in the huge house and grounds. "Things so rich, so rare, and in such abundance" were offered to Elizabeth during her stay that ordinary life seemed suspended. At enormous cost, Leicester made Kenilworth into a fantasy world in which his dearly loved lady and sovereign could revel and recreate and savor the beauties of her countryside.
Kenilworth was an ancient castle. Tradition linked it with the reign of King Arthur, though in fact it began as a Norman fortification. John of Gaunt had enjoyed and beautified it, and Henry V had added a "plaisance," or summerhouse, on the shore of the large artificial lake which stretched away to the west of the castle grounds. Leicester added his own large block of buildings, in the light, high-windowed style Elizabethan noblemen were adopting for their magnificent houses in the 1570s. The effect was stupendous. Robert Laneham, one of Elizabeth's gentleman ushers and a man who owed his preferment to Leicester, described the earl's mansion in the most glowing terms: "every room so spacious, so well belighted, and so high-roofed within, so seemly to sight by due proportion without; by daytime, on every side so glittering by glass, by night, by continual brightness of candle, fire, and torch-light, transparent through the lightsome winds." In the evening the radiance from the great house was spread over the landscape like a shining beacon, and the light had never shone brighter than on the night the queen arrived.
She approached amid an ear-splitting peal of guns and a sky-rending
explosion of fireworks. The heavy towers and aged battlements of the outworks loomed up before her in the dusk, and then from somewhere high in the leads six trumpeters blew a regal fanfare. The sound seemed to come from giant players, "much exceeding the common stature of men in this age," holding "huge and monstrous trumpets" to their lips. They were meant to be Arthurian heralds, their pasteboard bodies grotesquely lifelike in the waning light. Other fantastic figures greeted her, including the "Lady of the Lake," riding serenely on a movable island in the moat, and a sibyl "comely clad in a pall of white silk," who prophesied prosperity, health and felicity for the queen.
In the following days the chase echoed with the blasting of huntsmen's horns and the baying of dogs as Elizabeth hunted the hart. She was a skilled and eager huntswoman, delighting in the excitement and activity of bringing a swiftly fleeing deer to "take soil," or plunge desperately into water to save himself. She brought down more than one "goodly deer" during this holiday, but spared at least one; with regal magnanimity she ordered her watermen to cut off the ears of this swimming beast "for a ransom" and then let him go.
In the courtyard, thirteen bears were baited by snarling mastiffs as she looked on from a safe vantage point. The dogs were bred for ferocity and fearlessness, and rushed in yowling packs on the tethered bears. The bears in turn waited to catch the dogs off guard, swatting them away with their huge paws and clawing at their hides in a "great expense of blood and leather." The Elizabethans found the frenzied struggles of the injured bears comical—how "with biting, with clawing, with roaring, tossing and tumbling" they tried to free themselves from the tenacious mastiffs that tore open their flanks and leaped for their throats. To see the great beasts shake their heads violently, their snouts smeared with "blood and slaver," amused Elizabeth and "was a matter of a goodly relief" to all.
One day was set aside for queenly ceremony. Five young men were knighted, including Cecil's son Thomas, and afterward Elizabeth received nine men and women afflicted with the "king's evil," scrofula. These she attempted to heal, drawing on the curative power believed to inhere in her as queen. The ritual was one she carried out often. First she knelt in prayer, then, having purified herself, she "pressed the sores and ulcers" of the sufferers, "boldly and without disgust," confident that many of them would find the ministrations beneficial.
Among the open-air spectacles Elizabeth enjoyed at Kenilworth was a tilting match with a historical theme, the tilters representing the Danish conquerors of medieval England and their English subjects. Two companies of mounted lancers dashed into the courtyard, their horses at a full
gallop, and clashed head on, their alder poles snapping into splinters. The combat "grew from a hot skirmish unto a blazing battle," and when the knights were unhorsed they fell to fighting on foot, giving "good bangs on both sides." The Danes threatened to carry the field, but the English finally prevailed, to the cheers of the onlookers, and the defeated foreigners were "beaten down, overcome, and led captive." The queen "laughed well" at the tilting, and gave the performers a generous purse of coins.
One Sunday there was country pageantry in all its oafish charm. It was a rustic bride-ale, with the "lusty lads" of the parish marching in to lead the procession. They were dressed in mismatched finery, hats, caps, doublets and jerkins together, some in boots without spurs, others in spurs without boots, and all with a blue bridelace tied around a sprig of green broom. The bridegroom wore a straw hat, set "steeple-wise" on his head, and harvesting gloves, symbols of his able husbandry; a pen and inkhorn were slung over his back, for he had learned to write a little, and wanted it known. (Later he lost these, and looked "ready to weep" for frustration.)
There was a morris dance, performed "after the ancient manner," and then the bride was led in. She was an unsavory maiden of thirty-five, "ugly, foul and ill-favored," with a muddy complexion and an overpowering stench. Her bridesmaids matched her in "fashion and cleanliness," yet they thought themselves the most radiant damsels to be found anywhere, as they danced before the queen.
Evenings at Kenilworth were devoted to grander and more professional interludes. An Italian contortionist performed remarkable feats of agility, his bones seeming to melt as he twisted and turned himself inside out, springing and somersaulting "with sundry windings, gyrings and circum-flexions." Out of doors, firework displays went on hour after hour, the bursts of sparkling light timed to coincide with "great peals of guns"—no doubt the work of Leicester's brother Ambrose Dudley, earl of Warwick, who was Elizabeth's master of ordnance. The shooting squibs and balls of fire defied nature in that they could not be quenched by water. They fell into the moat and artificial lake, and were submerged, yet before long they shot up out of the water again and seemed to burn even more furiously. To those who had seen battle the display was exhilaratingly warlike, and it pleased the queen very much indeed.
The dining offered to the royal party was fit for the gods—an extravagance all the more impressive in that Elizabeth's own very spare appetite was well known. She ate "smally or nothing," but the three hundred different dishes served at one memorable banquet were set upon and devoured by her household and courtiers. Their gluttony, and the somewhat casual and stretched-out serving of the many courses, meant that the
afternoon banquet was still being ''wasted and coarsely consumed" at midnight, or near it. A
masque, unparalleled "for riches of array, of an incredible cost," had to be canceled because of the late hour.
Next to the hunting and the noisy fireworks displays, it may be that what Elizabeth enjoyed most about Leicester's palatial mansion were the gardens. Brisk walks through the gardens of her palaces were a part of her usual daily routine, and the gardens of Kenilworth, with their long expanses of fine grass and shady fruit trees and stone obelisks, made her feel at home. Care had been taken to choose only the most fragrant flowers and herbs, so that the sweet savors of carnations and stocks and violets and many varieties of roses followed her wherever she went. A massive Italianate fountain, festooned with stone figures of Neptune and Thetis and other classical deities, stood at the center of the garden, its stonework a roiling fantasy of "whales, whirlpools, sturgeons, conchs and whelks."
Besides being ornamental, the fountain was "occupied to very good pastime," as it was equipped with a mechanism to squirt water over bystanders when they least expected it. There was also a huge aviary, "beautified with great diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires," and populated with exotic birds from Europe and Africa, "delightsome in change of tune, and harmony to the ear."
When the time came for Elizabeth to leave her departure drew sighs and doleful poems from a new set of allegorical figures. On her last day of hunting Sylvanus, god of the woods, appeared and urged her "forever to abide in this country," running along beside her horse and promising to double the number of deer in the chase and to make a continual spring in the gardens if only she would consent never to leave. Deepdesire, a messenger from the "council-chamber of heaven," addressed her in verse and, while a consort of musicians played in the background, sang his sad madrigal:
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