The first Elizabeth
Page 39
The frog brooch shone from her bodice, the diamond ring gleamed on her finger. For her part, Elizabeth said, choosing her words with care, "she would not prevent his being her husband."
The King of France shall not advance his ships in
English sand, Nor shall his brother Francis have the ruling of the land: We subjects true unto our queen the foreign yoke defy, Whereto we plight our faithful hearts, our limbs, our lives
and all, Thereby to have our honour rise, or take our fatal fall. Therefore, good Francis, rule at home, resist not our
desire; For here is nothing else for thee, but only sword and fire.
A
lencon was barely off on his homeward journey—pausing at Dover to write his sweetheart Elizabeth four passionate love letters, and at Boulogne to write three more—when a pamphlet was published which denounced him as a scheming, debauched opportunist.
John Stubbs, a lawyer and country gentleman who spoke for the stern, uncompromising reformers known as Puritans, published The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf W^ereunto England is Eike to Be Swallowed by Another French Marriage if the Eord Forbid Not the Bans by Letting Her Majesty See the Sin and Punishment Thereof. The treatise was as infelicitous as its title, yet its plain-spoken arguments were forceful.
What sort of sordid lovemaking was this, that linked a scurvy young lecher to a gaunt old maid of forty-six? (The pamphlet's appearence coincided unflatteringly with the queen's birthday.) Everyone knows the true purpose of "these younger men that seek their elder matches," Stubbs insisted; they are always deceiving rogues, out to steal the woman's money —or in Elizabeth's case, her kingdom. She herself was a pitiable victim; he hated to see "our dear Queen Elizabeth (I shake to speak of it) led blindfold as a poor lamb to the slaughter."
And slaughter it would surely be, for a woman of her years to submit to the agonies and hazards of childbearing. True physicians would certainly
306
confess, if they were candid, "how exceedingly dangerous they find it by their learning for her majesty to have her first child at these years, yea, how fearful the expectation of death is to mother and child: I fear to say what will be their answer." (Cecil, only a few months earlier, had fully satisfied himself from information provided by the queen's physicians and waiting women that she had "no impediment . . . nor lack of natural functions in those things that properly belong to the procreation of children." Her "aptness to have children" was to him beyond doubt; indeed the physicians predicted another six years of fertility, and added that the process would most likely prove rejuvenating.)
The thought of Elizabeth's fleshly union with the disease-ridden Frenchman was repellent to Stubbs. She who exercised a "princely priesthood in Christ Jesus" ought never to touch a man scabrous with venereal disease, "God's punishment on flesh and bones," a man whose immoral pleasures had brought on him the "inevitable plagues" that follow overripe lusts.
Above all the queen must not be deluded about Alencon's true motive: "to seduce our Eve, that she and we may lose this English Paradise." Just as the hated King Philip had once brought to England a swarm of greedy, slovenly Spaniards when he married Mary Tudor, so Alencon hoped to invade English shores with his train of "needy, spent Frenchmen, the scum of the king's court, which is the scum of all France which is the scum of Europe." They would attach themselves like horseleeches to the prosperous English, until they drew off all their wealth and all their strength, then, with Elizabeth under her husband's command, unable to resist, they would complete the conquest in earnest.
The Gaping Gulf was monarchical insult of a high order. Stubbs's condescension toward Elizabeth was as maddening as his language was offensive; he assaulted her sovereignty, her judgment, and her statecraft as well as her nubility—and the latter alone was enough to warrant severe punishment. She ordered all copies of the Gaping Gulf to be burned, and ordered Stubbs, his printer and his publisher to be hanged.
In reacting as strongly as she did Elizabeth was responding not merely to one outrageously offensive pamphlet, but to an outspoken and influential group of her subjects. By punishing Stubbs she meant to punish all Puritans, and to rebuke their insolence and self-righteous presumption. They were an affront to her rule, for they answered to no authority but the Bible, as they interpreted it, and they did not hesitate to serve as arbiters of morality to anyone and everyone around them, including the queen.
The church Elizabeth had established at the beginning of her reign was a church built on compromise and concessions, politically workable but spiritually insipid. It was inoffensive to the indifferent, but to men and
women of fervid religion it was a stale and bland thing, its rituals a hollow if eloquent exercise, its clergy few and mediocre, its doctrine too remote to nourish warm belief.
Many Catholics never accepted it at all, though most of them conformed outwardly to its usages; many Protestants began early in the reign to form a Puritan "counter-church" within it, dedicated to the moral transformation of the entire society. Earnest Puritan ministers met weekly to devote themselves to Bible study and prayer, and strove to purge every vestige of sin from their lives. Inspired lay parishioners joined these weekly "prophesy-ings," and became consumed by a holy mission to uncover and correct wrongdoing in themselves and others.
The strength of the Puritan movement lay in its radical, uncompromising view of the human condition. Nothing short of absolute commitment to godliness must be tolerated; there must be no accommodation with Satan. Life was a battleground where good struggled with evil, and only those ironclad with righteousness and profoundly serious of purpose could come through the fray unscathed. "Satan is roaring like a lion, the world is going mad," one Puritan wrote to a likeminded friend in 1578. "Antichrist is resorting to every extreme, that he may with wolf-like ferocity devour the sheep of Christ."
Seen from this grim perspective, ordinary events took on the magnified proportions of omens and portents, signs of things to come. Ominous times called for preternatural vigilance. Therefore there must be, in every parish, men who spied out the sins of the erring and wrote them down for correction at the weekly meeting. "Notorious blasphemy, whoredom, drunkenness, railing against religion, scolds, ribalds and such like"—all must be reported, and the perpetrators admonished. But this was only the beginning. Prayers, attendance at endless, hair-raising sermons, long Sundays filled with heart-searching meditations, Bible study and church services: these were the rudiments of the godly life, to be lived in agonized expectation of the end of the world. Puritan children carried their spiritual burden in their names: Reformation, Tribulation, Dust, Deliverance. Flee-Sin kept company in the nursery with Praise-God and Be-Thankful; the baptismal records of the 1570s and 1580s are a theological lexicon of pious names, with Repent and Eschew Evil and Faint-Not frequent among them. 1
The more frivolous Elizabethan pastimes drew disapproving Puritan frowns. Players were chased out of town, morris dancers forbidden to dance. Seasonal festivals were outlawed when it was found that the pageantry drew greater crowds than the sermons which competed with them. Everywhere the unregenerate complained of Puritan clergy "too sour in preaching away their pastime," everywhere the lighthearted music of pipe
and drum was drowned out by the mighty sound of fervent hymns. The Puritans managed to exert far more influence and attract far more attention than their numbers warranted, perhaps because they felt, and looked, alien and out of place among ordinary, worldly men and women. Their faces were compressed into masks of self-denial and censure; they held themselves rigid, and walked with unswerving purpose. Unadorned, plainly dressed, their clothes were a mortification of the flesh and a warning to the gaudy.
Nowhere were they more conspicuous than at Elizabeth's court, where their dull black gowns stood out from among the flashing, gem-encrusted doublets of the other courtiers. The unruly, shoulder-length hair of the redeemed made a strong contrast to the well-tended coiffures of fashionable men, who "frounced their hair with curling iron
s" and wore long "love locks" tied with ribbons or silk favors. Exaggeration vied with exaggerated plainness, flamboyance with exaggerated sobriety. And the Puritan emerged the more memorable.
Courtly pastimes came in for particular condemnation. Drinking, gambling, dining on dainty foods and indulging illicit lust all brought forth God's wrath and the preachers'. Dancing the violent, exhausting Elizabethan dances, "with disordinate gestures, and with monstrous thumping of the feet, to pleasant sounds, to wanton songs, to dishonest verses," the Puritans decried as contrary to Scriptural law, while swearing was a dishonor to God and an abomination to the Christian community. The queen, who was unusually gifted at both dancing and swearing, was not spared her measure of censure. Her language was especially reproved.
"Your gracious majesty," a Puritan named Fuller told Elizabeth in a book he left for her to read, "in your anger hath used to swear sometime by that abominable idol the mass, and often and grievously by God, and by Christ." She swore, in fact, by Christ's wounds, his death, his head and other venerated organs, and by all the saints, forgetting entirely about the biblical injunctions against such blasphemy. And her subjects imitated her. "By your majesty's evil example and sufferance," Mr. Fuller wrote reproachfully, "the most part of your subjects and people of every degree, do commonly swear and blaspheme, to God's unspeakable dishonor, without any punishment."
This same tone of personal reproach was taken by Puritans in Parliament, where they formed a strong and formidable opposition group. Their strident voices were raised in long-winded and often keenly perceptive diatribes against the clerical hierarchy of bishops and archbishops—"a thing introduced into the church by Satan"—against the Book of Common Prayer—"an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dung-hill the breviary and mass book"—and in particular against Elizabeth's head-
ship of the church. On this issue, and on Elizabeth's general fallibility, the Puritans became increasingly vehement in the later 1570s. At Easter of 1579 a preacher addressing the lord mayor and magistrates of London railed at the queen so violently that he had to be seized and removed from his pulpit. In Parliament, the Puritan leader Peter Wentworth began a tirade against the queen's ineffectual efforts to reform her church. He went on and on, exceeding the bounds of his subject and attacking Elizabeth with unprecedented impropriety. ''Certain it is," he shouted, "that none is without fault, no not our noble queen, since her majesty hath committed great faults, yea dangerous faults to herself." He would have said more, but the Commons members themselves, "out of a reverend regard for her majesty's honor, stopped Mr. Wentworth before he had fully finished." 2
Wentworth was sent to the Tower, yet he and his coreligionists in Parliament were valuable to Elizabeth's government, for along with their fearless criticism went unfeigned admiration for their Judith, their Deborah, their treasured Gloriana. Elizabeth was a sinful, fallible woman whose political judgment failed her when it came to matters of conscience; she was also the Protestant figurehead of her Protestant realm, the ruler evidently chosen by God to lead her people. With their bluff forthrightness the Puritans were among the loudest in pledging to support their queen with their lives and goods, and in articulating that cult of the queen which grew throughout the 1570s. The eternal struggle between good and evil was in the late sixteenth century embodied in the struggle between England and her Catholic enemies, in the Puritan view; it was their clear duty to stand behind their queen in her hour of danger. There was a tenderness in their fervent protectiveness. "It makes my heart leap for joy to think we have such a jewel," one Commons member said of his sovereign, adding that "it makes my joints to tremble for fear, when I consider the loss of such a jewel." 3
Much as she valued their patriotism and cherished their affection Elizabeth was wary of the Puritans, for their visionary fanaticism often led them astray. At Cambridge, where the movement had its intellectual stronghold, students disobeyed college rules en masse when they went against Puritan beliefs, and smashed windows and pulled down monuments in an upsurge of iconoclasm. Apoplectic Puritan preachers lost control of themselves, until their shrill invective came close to hysteria. Misguided individual believers were driven to acts of madness. One day, while the service was being performed in Elizabeth's chapel in the palace, there was a frightening interruption. A man ran up to the altar, beside himself with rage and shouting "heretical and shameful words." Before anyone could stop him he had thrown down the cross and candlesticks—the ornaments which to
Puritans represented Catholicism—and crushed them by stomping on them with his boots, cursing and swearing at the top of his lungs as he did so. He was crazed, but not with ordinary madness, and instead of being locked away as a simple madman he was brought before the royal council and questioned. Why had he done this thing? they asked him. He held up a Bible, an English translation of the New Testament. "That book had made him," he said. There was no need to say more. 4
Vehement, irrational, socially disturbing, the Puritans were as much an abomination to Elizabeth as her swearing was to them. Their way was one of ultimatums and absolutes; hers was one of approximations and evasions. They were clearly "dangerous to kingly rule," and she meant to halt the rapid spread of their influence.
The weekly "prophesyings" must stop. She ordered her archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, to command the bishops to end them. But Grindal demurred. The clergy needed revitalizing, he said; why should she want to suppress a movement that was so beneficial to spiritual life? He could not bring himself to do it. She could remove him from his see if she liked, but the prophesyings would go on. And while he was on the subject, Grindal went further. Elizabeth's attempts to govern the affairs of her clergy, he said, were dangerously reminiscent of the pope's attempts to control his priests. "Remember Madam that you are a mortal creature," Grindal warned, "and although ye are a mighty prince, yet remember that he which dwelleth in heaven is mightier." There was a strong Puritan flavor in the archbishop's final admonition. Let Elizabeth take heed that she not repeat the error of the biblical king Joash, who "when he was strengthened, his heart was lifted up to his destruction, and he regarded not the Lord."
The queen ignored her archbishop's righteous growlings and, angrily noting his disobedience, sent out her own command to the bishops that the prophesyings must cease. Grindal was suspended from exercising his jurisdiction, but there was no major scandal, for if she had reacted strongly every time one of her servants showed sympathy with the Puritans she would have had leisure for little else. Not only Grindal but Cecil and Leicester aided them and sided with them on occasion; Knollys and Walsingham were Puritans themselves, and in fact it was the inscrutable, sardonic principal secretary whom she suspected of being behind the publication of Stubbs's Gaping Gulf.
Francis Walsingham, who had been principal secretary for the last six years, presented Elizabeth with a unique problem. Of all her councilors, he was least likely to allow anything to dissuade him from speaking his mind, and she valued his candor. Yet when he did voice an opinion she had difficulty deciding whether it was the Puritan ideologue speaking or the
cultured, sophisticated diplomat and man of the world. For Walsingham was a paradox, a stern, inflexible follower of the purer religion who was at the same time a well-rounded Renaissance courtier. He looked at life through a narrow apocalyptic lens, yet he was capable of delivering his judgment upon it in facile and cultivated French or Italian or German or Spanish. His superb education—he had studied with John Cheke at Cambridge—had been deepened by two years of travel and study on the continent, and he was as adroit and subtle an ambassador as Elizabeth possessed.
But if she relied on Walsingham to draw on his wide knowledge of foreign courts and tongues in advising her she had always to keep in mind that his views were those of a Marian exile, a grim enemy of what he saw as the Satanic forces of popery. He was at his best in seeking out devious plots at home and abroad, while when it came to the feints and tergiversations and half-truths of Elizabet
han statecraft he was somewhat ill at ease, especially when to him the way of godliness seemed overwhelmingly clear.
Walsingham's perception of England's situation left no room for ambiguities. The Catholic powers of Europe, he believed, with overmighty Spain in the vanguard, would soon launch a military assault on Protestant England. They would be certain to involve Mary Stuart—who represented a grave danger to Elizabeth and should have been put to death years ago —and would rely heavily on seditious Catholic subjects within England to accomplish their purpose. Since Armageddon must come, Walsingham argued, it would be best to go out armed to meet it. England must fight vigorously and wholeheartedly against Spain and the powers of darkness on every holy frontier—in the New World, in France where the Huguenots fought the Catholics, in the Netherlands where Dutch Calvinists struggled to oppose Spanish arms. An alliance with Alencon, heir to the Catholic throne of France, was from this point of view unthinkable; it was tantamount to an alliance with Satan. Elizabeth must not marry him, no matter what the cost to her personal happiness or to the continuity of the Tudor line.
That Walsingham was the most determined opponent of her proposed marriage Elizabeth felt sure. Yet much as she would have liked to discount his views as those of a blind and bigoted fanatic, she could not; she had too much respect for his intelligence and sophistication. To be sure, he had said, "I wish God's glory and next the queen's safety," putting religion before patriotism and personal loyalty, but in this he was typical rather than idiosyncratic. No, she would continue to rely on his prescience, his indefatigable energy—he worked harder, and for longer hours, than almost anyone else in her government—and on his dark vision of reality. But she would