The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Having built his great house, the nobleman moved his family and servants into it and waited, often a very long time, for the queen to come and visit him there. Letters to the lord chamberlain helped, as did gifts to the waymaker and the influence of friends at court. Finally the hoped-for, dreaded moment came. The royal harbingers appeared, to announce that the house was on the progress route and would be used, if found suitable. They were shown through the house, their queries answered deferentially and their requests noted. No, they were assured, there had been no plague among the servants or in the neighboring villages. Their business done, the harbingers remounted and prepared to leave for the next manor house on their list. Before they left they indicated a date for the queen's arrival.

  Right away the owner of the house moved himself and his family out; they would stay with neighbors or at an inn for the duration of the royal visit. Workmen were summoned who would make repairs and major alterations so that the house would be fit to receive the queen. Servants were sent to request extra plate and furnishings from friends and neighbors, and to buy up all the available oxen and sheep and chickens in the region before the queen's purveyors took them. Wardrobes had to be refurbished. When Elizabeth visited East Anglia in 1578 the fine cloth was bought up overnight. "All the velvets and silks were taken up that might be laid hands on and bought for money, and soon converted into such garments and suits of robes that show thereof might have beautified the greatest triumph that was in England." To stock the deer in the hunting park, an age-old ritual was enacted. Peasants marched into the forest and began to lure out stags by playing on "flutes and other instruments of music." Then, playing continuously, they led the great antlered beasts into the park, where the huntsmen took note of them and marked their lairs; when the queen arrived they would be driven within range of her crossbow.

  Next the host summoned his servants. There were certain to be dozens of them; the larger houses had hundreds. He spoke to them, like a preacher

  to his flock, informing them of the honor the house was to receive and of the special duties they would be expected to undertake. If he was a good master, he was brief and effective, "putting them in mind what quietness and what diligence they were to use." They were to be clean, orderly, attentive, soundless, invisible. As long as they did their work and avoided provoking the servants of the queen, all would go well.

  Yet though he might be poised and masterful with his own staff, the host himself was bound to suffer inner torment. The "great trouble and hindrance" of hospitality weighed heavily on him, the cost, the frustrations, the worry over whether or not the arrangements would prove satisfactory. He worried greatly over the timing of the queen's stay, for it was common knowledge that she often arrived later than announced—indeed she occasionally failed to arrive at all—and that she frequently overstayed her welcome. "I trust your lordship will have in remembrance to provide and help that her majesty's tarrying be not above two nights and a day," the earl of Bedford wrote to Cecil as he waited for Elizabeth at Woburn Abbey, "for so long time do I prepare." For so long, and no longer, the earl might have added; he simply could not find food and fodder and fuel enough for more than his allotted time.

  There were more serious aggravations. Elizabeth's courtiers seemed to look on progress season as a time of license, when the everyday rules of conduct could be disregarded and they could feel free to make destructive nuisances of themselves. While staying at a country house they rode roughly through the lawns and gardens, tearing through flower beds and churning up the carefully tended lawns. They stripped the orchards of their fruit and trampled the planted fields until they were "despoiled, wasted and spent," and did not stop there. After they had gone, linens and pewter and even heavy pieces of furniture were found to be missing, and hundreds of pounds' worth of goods had to be replaced.

  And there was often malice behind the destructiveness and theft. During progress time in 1574 Leicester led a party of his friends and followers on an unplanned hunting party. They left their designated lodging and rode to Berkeley Castle—giving no warning of their coming—and spent the day slaughtering Lord Berkeley's prize deer. They took twenty-seven deer in all, leaving the infuriated Berkeley to sputter in impotent rage; cheated of other retaliation, he failed to restock the hunting park and let it return to a wild state. Elizabeth was displeased, as Leicester had hoped she would be. Behind it all was the earl's plan to acquire Berkeley Castle for himself by putting its current owner into disfavor.

  The issue of political loyalty was uppermost in everyone's mind when

  Elizabeth visited Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, at Elvetham in 1591. Early in the reign he had provoked the queen's anger and suspicion by marrying Catherine Grey, and had spent nine long years in the Tower for his offense. Now he was being given an opportunity to demonstrate the depth of his fidelity to his rightful sovereign, and his trouble and expense were judged to be a measure of his trust.

  Seymour hired three hundred workmen "to enlarge his house with new rooms and offices." Elvetham was a medieval manor, far too small to lodge the traveling court, so regiments of carpenters and glaziers and joiners labored night and day to erect new structures, built in record time, to house the visitors. A cluster of temporary buildings sprang up on a hillside, at a little distance from the manor house, within the park. A mock "room of estate" for the nobles, with a withdrawing place for Elizabeth at one end, was made like a forest bower, its walls covered on the outside with boughs and clusters of ripe hazelnuts, and hung on the inside with tapestries, its roof entwined with ivy, its floor covered with rushes and sweet-smelling herbs. There was another building "for her majesty's footmen, and their friends," and another long bower for her guardsmen. A large hall was designated "for knights, ladies, and gentlemen of chief account," and alongside were other spaces for Seymour's own servants and Elizabeth's staff. A labyrinth of specialized quarters for food and supplies ranged around the outside—a pantry equipped with five ovens, "some of them fourteen foot deep," for baking bread and cakes and meat pies, a boiling house, a lodging for the cook, and two cavernous kitchens where succulent meat and game turned slowly over the fire on long spits and waiters stood by to serve all comers.

  Beyond these quarters for eating and sleeping were other creations: a "ship isle," a hundred feet long and eighty feet wide, with trees for masts, built in a lake, a "snail mount" made of four tiers of privet hedges spiraling upward, and boats full of musicians, one of them "a pinnace full furnished" with masts, yards, sails, anchor, cables and great guns. The lodging, the banqueting, the music and elaborate masquing that Seymour arranged against the backdrop of the ship isle and the snail mount all pleased Elizabeth very much indeed. The earl had gone to immense trouble and expense; he must be among her most loyal subjects. Her frown of suspicion turned into a dazzling smile of approval—though at the first sign of questionable behavior from Seymour the frown would be certain to return.

  Though his loyalty had never been in question Cecil too outdid himself in making extensive arrangements and rearrangements in his great house in order to please the queen. She let it be known that her private chamber

  there was too small, and at once Cecil gave orders for it to be enlarged. It was decorated in the grotesquely eclectic style which Elizabeth and her contemporaries favored. The ceiling was a celestial clock like the famous one at Hampton Court, with the stars in their zodiacal clusters marching across the heavens by "some concealed ingenious mechanism." A fountain gushed at one end of the room, the water falling from a rocky wall "of all colors, made of real stones," into a dish held by sculpted "savages." The most charming feature of the room was the artificial oak trees which lined the walls, so real in appearance that when the windows were opened, birds flew in and perched on their boughs, singing as loudly as they did in the wild.

  The principal discomfort of the royal progress, when all was said and done, was the cost. To be sure, there was much competition for the privilege of entertaining the queen—partly b
ecause, in the case of individuals, such an opportunity opened the way for royal patronage and increased wealth. In such cases the expense was an investment which, if all went well, offered a substantial return. But few noblemen were wealthy enough—or felt secure enough in their wealth—to take lightly the outlay required, not to mention the aggravation of unexpected increases in cost that were the bane of all extensive entertainment.

  In actuality the charges ranged from perhaps three hundred and fifty pounds to as much as a thousand, for a stay of from four or five days to a week or more. This was the basic expense; added to it were payments for the spectacles, for temporary buildings, for a lavish gift to the queen (an inescapable, and often heavy, expense) and for substantial rewards to officers of her household, for new clothes and liveries, and for such freakish extras as payment for food imported from abroad—as when Lord Buck-hurst, waiting for the queen at Wytham, found that his neighbors had used up all the provisions for miles around and had "to send to Flanders to supply him, the others having drawn the country dry." Such were the immediate costs. But the long-term expense was that of staffing and maintaining an enormous mansion which stood empty for most of the year, and of repairing and refurbishing it, year after year, in the hope that eventually Elizabeth might make use of it. This was ruinously expensive, and obviously wasteful.

  But it was wasteful only from the narrowest of viewpoints, that of a clerk or comptroller. There was another logic evident in the workings of the royal progress. It had the character of a pilgrimage, or rather of a pilgrimage in reverse, in which the saint herself instead of the worshipful pilgrim moved from shrine to shrine. Seen in this light, the great and small houses along

  the route and the towns and inns that decked themselves to offer hospitality were like expensive wayside chapels, seldom used yet ever available, their cost inconsequential when weighed against their function.

  Cecil once described Hatton's house at Holdenby as "consecrated" to the queen. Present or absent, she was its ruling deity, its sole reason for being. To reckon too closely the use she made of it, or the charges that resulted, would have been sacrilege.

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  Come over the born Bessy, Come over the born Bessy, Swete Bessey come over to me; And I will the take, And my dere Lady make Before all other that ever I see.

  J ean de Simier, master of the wardrobe to Francois, duke of Alencon, arrived in England in the first days of 1579. He was a dark, dapper French aristocrat, sleek and smooth-tongued, and as simian as his name; Elizabeth, who had pet names for everyone, called him her "Monkey."

  Simier was the duke's "chief darling," and close friend, and his coming was significant. Alencon, who was the younger brother of the king of France, Henry III,* had been proposed once before as a husband for Elizabeth, but the discussions had been allowed to lapse. During 1578 they had been revived, with Alencon and Elizabeth carrying on an increasingly ardent courtship, by letter and through intermediaries. Now their mutual flattery, seduction and bargaining had reached a point where some of the English, at least, were saying that despite the age-old enmity between England and France the time had come to join hands in order to "get the queen married." 1 Simier's coming was the last formality to be observed— the final stage in the ritual wooing—before the expected arrival of the eager bridegroom himself.

  The duke could hardly have chosen a more persuasive envoy. In Simier's

  Trancois became duke of Anjou on his brother Henry's accession in 1574, but continued to be known, and referred to in official papers, as duke of Alencon.

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  presence Elizabeth bloomed. He was a master of erotic flattery—"most exquisitely skilled in love-toys, pleasant conceits, and court-dalliances," as the historian Camden wrote—and his whispered messages made her blush and gasp and smile like a girl of twenty—and indeed she looked younger than she ever had in the last fifteen years, the French ambassador Mauvis-siere noted. She was radiant, spirited, altogether lovely—an enchanted being, utterly transformed by the power of love.

  The transformation was so profound, in fact, that it left everyone quite bewildered. Could it be that the little Frenchmen, with his "fine knowledge of the delights of love," had become the queen's lover? Was he introducing her to the refinements of French passion, as a way of tempting her to agree to wed his master? Certainly they were in and out of one another's bedchambers often enough. Elizabeth broke in on him early one morning as he was dressing—just as Thomas Seymour had broken in on her long ago at Chelsea—and insisted that he talk with her "with only his jerkin on." He, in turn, raided her bedchamber and took her nightcap to send to Alencon, who already had a handkerchief belonging to her and several other relics from her person.

  The infatuation deepened, fed by candlelit banquets and intimate suppers; there were romantic letters and love tokens from the duke, and the thrilling expectation of a meeting. An extravagant ball was held at court, whose chief entertainment was an imitation tournament, an allegory of the romantic battle of the sexes. Six gentlemen were the challengers at the tilt, six ladies defended. In the end the gentlemen capitulated, and the ladies won the day. In this tournament between the French and English, Elizabeth meant to emerge the victor, and the prize—unthinkable though it seemed to those who had watched her avoid commitment for so long—was to be her fine white hand in marriage.

  No one was more dumbfounded by the apparent sincerity of Elizabeth's wooing than Leicester, who knew better than anyone how she looked when she was in love. As the weeks passed he continued to play the highly visible political role required of him—that of principal adviser to the queen and gracious host to Simier and eager promoter of the French marriage—yet in private he spread a story that Simier was using "drinks and unlawful arts" to turn Elizabeth's head, and that these love potions alone were responsible for the otherwise unaccountable change in her. (Had he known anything of Simier's private life he would surely have gossiped about that too, for the Monkey was at the center of a particularly sordid and violent recent scandal. Simier's brother had seduced his wife; the Monkey had had his brother murdered, and the wife, wretched with grief and hatred, had swallowed poison.)

  Yet enchanted or not, Elizabeth seemed to have her feet firmly on the ground. She was devoting her abundant energies to the practical matters attending a marriage of state, including that most delicate of them all, her fertility. She was forty-five; could she safely bear a child? Within days of Simier's arrival she had called together her physicians to "decide whether she could hope for progeny," or so the Spanish ambassador Mendoza reported. They "found no difficulty"—a prognosis that may well have been more political than medical, given the queen's history of illness and frailty, not to mention the predictable dangers of middle-age childbirth. 2 Cecil, who saw his dream of marriage for Elizabeth at last coming true, was quick to add his optimistic view to that of the royal doctors. In a carefully thought-out memorandum he reminded Elizabeth that women older and less well-endowed by nature than she was had safely given birth. Why should not she, "a person of most pure complexion, of the largest and goodliest stature of well-shaped women," repeat their example? "In the sight of all men," he concluded loyally and gallantly, "nature cannot amend her shape in any part to make her more likely to conceive and bear children."

  As telling a sign of the serious intent of the queen was her postponing of Parliament to allow time for the marriage negotiations to mature. It had been set to convene on January 22; now the date was pushed ahead to March, by which time detailed discussions were well under way. Meanwhile the French king and his mother wrote to give their blessing to the match, with King Henry offering to agree "to any alliance or treaty the queen wished in order to bring it about." 3 While the privy council met hour after hour, Simier pranced and preened, and distributed some twelve thousand ducats in jewels among the leading courtiers to appease any dislike they showed toward him. Elizabeth assured him that once the duke came to England, "the business would be carried through," a
nd as if eager to conclude it quickly, before she changed her mind, she began to talk of having the wedding immediately after Easter. 4

  But could she really go through with it, once she saw him? Francois d'Alencon was very short, very much younger than she, and very, very ugly. People would be certain to laugh at the two of them together, the tall, thin, middle-aged queen and her dwarfish, puny little husband of twenty-five. His nose was large and bulbous to the point of deformity, and smallpox had left his face a hideous battleground of pits and scars. Francis Walsingham, formerly Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris and now her principal secretary, reported after seeing Alencon some years earlier that the pock-holes were "no great disfigurement," adding clinically that they were thick rather than "deep or great." "They upon the blunt end of his nose," however, were

  both great and deep, "how much to be disliked may be as it pleaseth God to move the heart of the beholder." It was a tactful if devastating evaluation, and did not quite succeed in disguising the Puritan Walsingham's extreme distaste for both the stunted little duke and the lascivious, decadent French court that had bred him.

  A portrait of Alencon painted at age thirty, some six years after his wooing of Elizabeth, reveals an undersized, boyish man with a furtive look in his small eyes. A thin mustache barely brushes a young, weak mouth and chin. There is a hint of guilty sweetness in the face, but neither maturity nor virility; if he was a great lover, Alencon hid it well.

  He was indisputably a fighter, though, and a scrappy individualist with a family and political history that had much in common with Elizabeth's own early life. As a boy he had been an unloved youngest son, the runt of the family, and he had grown up a hellion, plotting against his royal brother King Henry (who was their mother's favorite) and intriguing, with an unscrupulous abandon Elizabeth would relish, with Protestants and Catholics alike. Alencon was clearly not a man of principle, but he had sworn a dramatic oath to his followers, "that none of them would ever return while his brother reigned, who treated him with so little dignity." The queen had to admire, sight unseen, such panache from a man who was well under five feet tall.