The horrors of the Inquisition were graphically described in Protestant propaganda, and the English had no difficulty envisioning the moans and screams of the dying, the acrid, smoke-filled air, the snorting and neighing of the guardsmen's horses and the solemn bells. It was said at Elizabeth's court that such open-air burnings were common in Spain. Early in his reign
Philip reportedly ordered two thousand people apprehended for heresy— men, women and children—and though a great many of these escaped death, hundreds had suffered.
The Spanish conquest of Portugal came at a time when Philip's fortunes were rising elsewhere. The American silver mines that financed Spain's war machine suddenly boosted their yield. The war in the Netherlands looked more hopeful than it had for years, and the papal adventuring in Ireland had shown how vulnerable England was in the north, and had tested her military resources. The Irish rebellion had attracted substantial Scots support, forcing the government to reinforce the garrison at Berwick and to muster five thousand fighting men.
If nothing else, the improving leverage of Spain in the European arena caused increased uncertainty in London, where after two years the outrage of the queen's French wooing had not died down. Elizabeth had counted on the chaos in the Netherlands to continue to distract and drain Philip's energies and treasury, but now a breakthrough seemed possible. And another safeguard had been removed, albeit a shaky and impermanent one. Civil war had been resumed in France, making it unlikely that the French would be able to intervene to block Philip's advance, should he decide to launch the Enterprise of England after all.
Like it or not, the English would have to choose between the menace of Spain and the distasteful prospect of a French prince as Elizabeth's husband. As King Philip submitted to his coronation in Lisbon, Elizabeth unfolded the most lavish and extensive entertainment yet offered to visitors from abroad. Her guests were envoys of Francis the Constant, still her long-suffering suitor and devoted slave—or so his letters said—weary of waiting for his elusive bride-to-be but ever hopeful nonetheless.
There were more than five hundred in the French suite, including many nobles of the highest rank, and one of Elizabeth's own houses was emptied to lodge the grandest of them. London and Westminster were crowded with servants and petty knights and liveried retainers, for in addition to the hundreds of French servitors all the English peers had been ordered to come to the capital and to bring their full trains with them. If there was to be a minor invasion of Frenchmen it was just as well to have a countervailing English force close at hand. Leicester, as conspicuous as ever among the principal councilors, was amassing kinsmen and servants with frantic urgency, eager to make the most ostentatious display possible to impress the French.
A fortune had been spent on a newly built banqueting house at Whitehall. Forty tall, thick ship masts held up the canvas roof, which was painted and gilded with clouds and stars and gleaming sunbeams. Three hundred
glass lanterns lit the huge open hall, illuminating fantastic ornaments bright with paint and shining with gilt. The entire structure was completed in three weeks, with two of the nearly four hundred workmen breaking their legs in the process, and at a cost not much less than two thousand pounds.
This expense, plus the cost of feeding and lodging the hundreds of guests and distributing some ten thousand pounds' worth of silver plate among the official marriage commissioners, should have severely strained the English treasury. But in fact it was Spanish, not English, silver that was being paid out, Spanish treasure captured by Francis Drake on his way around the world.
Only six months earlier Drake had sailed into Plymouth harbor, his ship leaking badly and riding low in the water, weighed down by her precious cargo. During his three-year voyage he had not only circumnavigated the globe but also shattered the myth of Spanish dominion of the seas. To contemporaries this, and not the unprecedented feat of seamanship and navigation, was Drake's principal achievement. He had sailed freely in waters swept by lofty Spanish galleons and heavy-laden treasure ships. He had cruised the coastal lanes, raiding shipping and stealing from the unprotected colonial ports, walking off with jewels and bars of silver. The treasure ship Cacafuego had fallen to him, its hold full of silver in such quantities as to be almost incalculable.
This treasure—the many tons of silver, the pearls and rubies and rare priceless emeralds, the chests of gold and plate—had been stored in the Tower, for though Drake's share in it made him a very wealthy man the profits of the voyage belonged to the shareholders: among others, Hatton, Leicester, Walsingham and the queen.
Elizabeth had backed Drake from the start, and many of her leading courtiers had helped to finance the voyage. John Dee, her astrologer and adviser who by the 1580s had become one of the most eminent mathematicians and scientists in Europe, may have been the moving spirit of the enterprise. 1 Dee's profound knowledge of cosmography and navigation— he was a close friend of the globe-maker Mercator, a teacher of explorers such as Frobisher and later of Humphrey Gilbert—was coupled with a kind of antiquarian imperialism. The fascination he and many other Elizabethans had with King Arthur was closely tied to their exploring venture, for Arthur was looked on as a conqueror whose claims to New World kingdoms Elizabeth inherited. Through Drake, Dee reasoned, England was destined to resurrect the Arthurian empire, and in time to overthrow the empire of Spain.
The Spanish ambassador Mendoza wrote sourly to King Philip that Elizabeth was cheerfully dipping into the stored Spanish treasure to pay for
the French entertainments. Everything was being financed "from the bars brought by Drake," he wrote, adding that, as if to emphasize the insult to the Spanish, Elizabeth was going out of her way to show personal favor and approval to the adventurer. He was seen entering her apartments frequently, and envious rivals took note of how she seemed never to go out in public without speaking to him. Drake and the queen walked together often in her private garden, and Mendoza's informants told him that they were plotting to raise a new fleet to harass Spanish shipping. 2
Of course, the ambassador had officially protested Drake's piracy and demanded the return of the treasure, but nothing came of it. Why should Elizabeth return valuables worth £160,000—which was a sum equal to what Parliament ordinarily granted her, and which represented some nine months' customary crown revenue—when it was so much easier to acquire the income this way than through cajoling Parliament or collecting crown debts? Besides, by keeping King Philip's money, she accomplished two further purposes. She interrupted his expected revenue, inconveniencing and hampering the operations of his government, and what was more important, she did grave harm to his credit. The bankers of Antwerp could no longer be certain that the treasure ships from Peru would reach Seville in safety; the English might seize them. Therefore they would have to raise the interest rates they charged the Spanish crown, to compensate for the added risk, and even then they would be reluctant to make new loans. Damaging Philip's credit meant damaging his ability to wage war, and she was more than willing to face Mendoza's indignation and Philip's frowning anger far away in the Escorial for the sake of forestalling war.
Elizabeth had Mendoza convinced, once the French arrived, that nothing could be less important to her than affairs of state. Leaving the marriage negotiations to her advisers, she concerned herself solely with "whether there were any new devices in the joust, or where a ball was to be held, or what beautiful women were to be at court," and so on. She wanted her ladies and gentlemen to look their handsomest; their finery should compare favorably with that of the tasteful and elegant French. The most practical way to ensure this was to lower the price of luxury cloth, and so she commanded all shopkeepers to sell their velvets and silks and fine metallic weaves at a one-quarter reduction. 3
The queen's long-smoldering passion for Alencon seemed to leap again into flame with his envoys' coming. She sent her beloved a "wedding ring," and said loudly and fervently that "every hour's delay seemed like a thousand years" until she should have h
er Frog by her side again. Certainly the little duke was rising in the world's esteem, and no doubt in Elizabeth's. He had been offered, and accepted, sovereignty over the Netherlands by
the Protestant rebels, and it looked, for the moment at least, as though he might take on the much larger sovereignty of France. His brother Henry III was said to be "much broken" in health, perhaps near death.
If this was true, the courtship took on a much more serious dimension. If Alencon was soon to become king of France, it was not only essential that his suit to Elizabeth be continued—it was essential that he be kept from looking elsewhere for a bride. As king of France the duke would inherit a Catholic throne, and might think better of taking a Protestant bride. Xot long before, his mother Catherine had talked of matching him with a Spanish princess, a nightmare eventuality that must have complicated Elizabeth's attitude toward Alencon and clouded her own emotions.
The French were entertained with fairytale magnificence. There was feasting in the extravagant banqueting house, with Elizabeth presiding in a golden dress ornamented with flashing jewels. There were smaller banquets given by the councilors, more intimate but no less superb in the quality of the food and wines. And there was elaborate jousting in which the young paragons of the court, among them Philip Sidney, rode to their sport in fantastic costumes of glittering engraved armor and metallic lace and stiff feathers of gold and silver. The jousting was an allegory of seduction, in which the chaste Fortress of Beauty, representing the queen herself, was besieged by Desire, or the ardent wooer Alencon. The Fortress was assaulted with mock cannons shooting perfumed water and "sweet powder," and the attackers threw flowers against the walls, but no assault on the queen's purity, however metaphorical, could be allowed to succeed. Desire's siege was turned back, and he was instructed by one of the actors in the pageantry to "content himself with a favorable parley, and wait for grace by loyalty."
There were parleys in plenty, but none completely favorable. By early June a marriage treaty had been drafted, but the English had insisted that it contain a clause making it inoperable until Alencon himself returned to England to sign it.
The French envoys went home, overfed and disgruntled, and Elizabeth sent Walsingham to France to press for a military alliance as an alternative to marriage. She had learned that Henry III was not gravely ill after all; this gave her time to explore a fresh diplomatic initiative. But Walsingham, imposing though he was with his sober talk of the need for France and England to join together to oppose Spain before all opposition became futile, could not move the French king or his mother to commit themselves. They mistrusted Elizabeth, and insisted that she mam- Alencon to prove her good faith. She would have to continue her intervention in the
Netherlands no matter what they did, after all; it was in England's interest to go on supporting the rebels' cause, with or without a strong ally.
The recent exchange of envoys had strained relations between the two courts, for King Henry was offended that after sending nearly six hundred of his courtiers to England he got. only one, Walsingham, in return. (The secretary sent word to Elizabeth in cipher that the king had been overheard to threaten his life.) What was worse, Alencon had become completely unmanageable and haughty. He had an interview with Walsingham— whom he knew to be a long-standing opponent of Elizabeth's marriage— at La Fere in Picardy, with the dowager queen Catherine present. When Walsingham raised the all-important issue of popular dissatisfaction with the French marriage among the English, the duke nearly exploded. He refused to listen to anyone but Elizabeth herself on the subject of their marriage, and he refused, furthermore, to consider an alliance between Elizabeth and his brother to be in any way a political alternative to it. Had his mother not been there, Walsingham told Elizabeth, the little duke would have become far more vehement. As it was, he said flatly that, if an alliance were to be formed, he would personally break it—unless Elizabeth married him. 4
Obviously Alencon had to be mollified, and Elizabeth immediately sent off a loving letter in which she expressed her affection "most sweetly" and tried to soothe her admirer's wounded vanity. She also sent him the sum of thirty thousand pounds, "brought out from the Tower, in gold, secretly at night by water," with which to mount a new campaign, and he lost no time in putting the money to use. Levying fresh troops he seized Cambrai from the Spanish, leaving the mighty commander Parma disconcerted and, for the moment, in retreat.
Fresh from this victory Alencon sailed for England, arriving at the end of October, out of money but in buoyant spirits. For three years he had pursued the elusive queen of England, convinced of her passion for him and convinced, too, that in time her passion would overcome her political caution. It could no longer be said that he lacked either maturity or manliness; he had proven himself, he was the conqueror of Cambrai. And he was impatient to put an end to Elizabeth's coyness and to demand that she demonstrate the sincerity of her love by pledging herself to become his wife. After all this time his honor was at stake, and his military future as well, for he relied almost entirely on English gold to finance his warmaking.
Soon after his arrival he wrote confidently to his brother and mother, his letter full of hopes. Elizabeth had come privately to meet him when he disembarked, "in order that he might catch sight of her before he arrived,"
and this romantic meeting made him more optimistic than ever. They spent the better part of each day together, either alone or out of earshot of the councilors and the queen's women, and in private, Mendoza believed, she "pledged herself to him to his heart's content, and as much as any woman could to a man." To everyone's surprise Leicester was not only affable to the duke but ostentatiously servile, waiting on him as he dined and remarking "that there seemed to be no other way for the queen to secure the tranquillity of England but to marry Alencon."
Walsingham too abandoned his Puritan distaste for the queen's Frog, nodding sagely in agreement with Leicester and complimenting Alencon on his abilities and intelligence. "His only fault," the secretary said archly, in the queen's hearing, "was his ugly face."
"Well, you knave!" she blurted out, "why have you so often spoken ill of him? You veer round like a weathercock!" 5
After ten days of apparent bliss and high spirits Alencon was unnerved when Elizabeth suggested that he take another thirty thousand pounds and return to Flanders. He balked. He would not leave England—indeed he would not set foot outside his apartments in the palace—until she gave an unequivocal response to his proposal of marriage.
Suddenly on November 22 the response came, and in a far more dramatic form than anyone had expected.
It was midmorning, and Elizabeth and Alencon were walking together down a long gallery in the palace. Leicester and Walsingham were nearby —Cecil was in bed suffering from gout—and were keeping watch, from a distance, on the royal pair. By now they had become a familiar sight, she tall and spare, he short and small, she smiling and joking in her broad French, he returning her witticisms with flowery compliments and gallantry. Their exchanges must have been more pointed than usual that morning, since on the previous day the duke and his followers had seemed quite disenchanted with the vacillating English, and discontented to the point of anger with the queen's failure to make up her mind to the marriage.
The French ambassador came into the gallery and spoke to Elizabeth. He was on the point of writing to King Henry, he said, and needed to hear from Elizabeth herself precisely what her intentions were. Her face brightened. Impulsively she turned to her little companion and cried out, "You may write this to the king: that the duke of Alencon shall be my husband!"
Then, to the astonishment of Leicester and Walsingham, she took off one of her rings and gave it to Alencon, and kissed him on the mouth. The meaning of the ritual was clear to everyone present. It was the ritual of marriage by ring and pledge, the time-honored ceremony of union in
medieval Europe going back centuries to a time when men and women married without the presence of a priest, merely by pr
omising themselves to one another.
Delighted and amazed, Alencon took the ring and, pulling off one of his own, handed it to Elizabeth. With this they had fulfilled the prescribed formalities of marriage according to the old custom. They were man and wife.
Quickly the queen summoned all the courtiers in the presence chamber into the gallery and repeated her verbal pledge to the duke "in a loud voice." Their excitement at the announcement must have been very great, not only because of its spontaneity—a rare phenomenon at a soporifically overceremonialized court—but because it was a romantic and even an erotic gesture. Traditionally, couples pledged to one another by promise began to sleep together, even if they planned to repeat their vows later before a priest.
This thought may have been behind Leicester's indignant reaction to the dramatic scene in the gallery. His courtly attentions to the duke, which had been so marked before the exchange of rings took place, ceased abruptly, and when he confronted Elizabeth about what she had done a few days afterward he asked her, rather rudely, "whether she was a maid or a woman." Was she sleeping with the man she had informally made her husband?
No, she was still a maid, she told him, adding that she was likely to remain a maid since the condition under which she had given Alencon her pledge—that King Henry would agree to her new extravagant demands in the marriage bargaining—was not likely to be fulfilled. The question was of course a rhetorical one. Like the queen's impetuous embracing of Alencon, Leicester's outburst was largely for show, though in both cases a strong undertone of heartfelt sentiment went into the display. Nothing that had happened between them in the course of their lifelong infatuation—certainly not Leicester's marriage—had weakened his sharply proprietary affection for Elizabeth, and he was jealous of the strutting young duke.
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