Courtly corruption, never suppressed, now flourished with unprecedented venality. Men came to the royal court, joined its ranks, learned its rules and mastered its unsavory politics for only one reason: to make a fortune. (Women came to marry men with fortunes.) It was understood that money was to be made through sophisticated bureaucratic practices involving bribery and theft. To gain an audience with the queen, the lord
chamberlain or any other official the suitor had to present "gifts" of money or valuables; lucrative appointments were acquired through favoritism, and favoritism had to be purchased, usually at a very high price.
But once the courtier found a place, however insignificant, within the governmental hierarchy he could begin to broaden his leverage and sharpen his acquisitive powers. Even the most minor posts offered opportunities for graft and embezzlement and large-scale misappropriation of funds. For if official salaries were small, the perquisites that came with them were profitable. Most profitable of all were monopolies, which put into private hands what under another system would have been state regulation of trade and manufacturing. Armed with the power to regulate, the courtier could also bend the regulations—if paid enough to make it worth his while. Conspicuous examples of profiteering were offered by Leicester, Ralegh and Hatton, all of whom were ostentatiously, lavishly guilty of enriching themselves through bureaucratic theft—with the queen's indulgent help.
No group at court, it might be thought, was in a better position to advance their own and others' fortunes than the queen's waiting women. But in practice their influence was limited. They were 'like witches," Ralegh said, "capable of doing great harm, but no good." They could tarnish reputations but not enhance them, and only the latter power could be turned to substantial profit. So unlike other highly placed court officials the great ladies and maids of honor had to be content with such modest profits of office as the queen's cast-off gowns and perfumed shoes, and with what fees they could earn by selling information about Elizabeth's private life and habits to foreign ambassadors and their agents.
Theirs was a frustrating role, made more frustrating by their mistress's unforgiving scrutiny and bad temper. It was no wonder that, when an opportunity for real malice and revenge against the queen presented itself, they took advantage of it, and did great harm indeed.
By early February the news from Flanders—a good deal of which reached Elizabeth through her waiting women—was becoming alarming. Leicester had made himself Absolute Governor of the United States of the Netherlands, a blunder which greatly increased English obligations to the Dutch and which was bound to escalate Spanish belligerence. Worse still, he had failed to send a letter of explanation to Elizabeth, or a personal envoy who could make her understand why he had gone against her orders. (In fact, Leicester had dispatched his servant William Davison to do just that, but foul weather was delaying Davison's crossing.)
But what increased Elizabeth's "extreme choler and dislike" tenfold were the rumors—entirely without foundation—about Lettice Knollys.
Lettice was preparing to join her husband, to cross to Flanders and take her place as wife of the Absolute Governor. Her pride and presumption knew no bounds. She was planning to take with her ''such a train of ladies and gentlewomen, and such rich coaches, litters, and side-saddles," that she would seem more a queen than Elizabeth herself, whose own gilded vehicles would seem mean by comparison. Lady Leicester was to be nothing short of a second queen, in effect, with "such a court of ladies as should far pass her majesty's court" in England. 7
The image of the handsome, auburn-haired Lettice Knollys, ever Elizabeth's despised rival, at the head of a competing court was unbearable. It was no good telling the queen that the rumors were "most false," that Lettice, as surprised as anyone when the story reached her, grew pale and trembled with fear, knowing what Elizabeth's anger could lead to. The malicious rumors had their effect, and they not only caused the queen endless vexation but nearly wrecked Leicester's entire campaign.
All the furies were let loose. Those who thought they had seen the full extent of the terrifying Tudor wrath now saw that they had been mistaken. She shouted her rage, at Leicester's unimaginable arrogance, at his traitorous disobedience, at the unforgivable insolence that had led him, ingrate that he was, to think that he could drag his unmentionable wife across the Channel to play at being queen while he played king. The hand which had created Leicester an earl, which had raised him from dishonor to position and wealth, could "beat him to the dust." Every day she drew up new plans to abort his military mission and order him home; every day Cecil, braving her fury, besought her to "suspend her judgment" until she heard from Leicester directly, or through an envoy.
She drew up a peremptory letter blasting him for his unheard-of effrontery. "We could never have imagined, had we not seen it fall out in experience, that a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favored by us above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment, in a cause that so greatly touches us in honor," she wrote imperiously. "So great a wrong," she went on, should not remain "in silence unredressed." Leicester was to obey the bearer of the letter—who would insist on his immediate return—without fail, or he would surely "answer the contrary at his uttermost peril."
But Cecil and his fellow councilors detained the bearer of the letter until after the belated arrival of Leicester's servant Davison, who undertook the unenviable task of placating the deeply injured queen. The incident had stirred up all her old grievances against Leicester, and she recited them one after another in "long and tedious" fashion. Her bitterness overflowed;
clearly it would take more than soothing words from a subordinate to assuage her mood. (Hatton sent word to Leicester that an expensive gift —bought, of course, from the military funds—would help.)
Eventually Davison and the councilors wore her down, and persuaded her, with some difficulty, that the stories about Lady Leicester were nothing more than the inventions of troublemakers. By June all talk of recalling Leicester ended. But by then his campaign was dissolving in enmity and squalor, and the beleaguered earl was wishing he had never left Harwich.
Even before the long honeymoon of feasting and pageantry had ended, he had found himself in conflict with the Dutch, who continued, much to his bewilderment, to oppose and hamper his authority while they looked to him to save them from the armies of Spain. Despite himself he was swept into the vortex of religious and political faction, while constantly called on to make peace between his captains and their fractious counterparts among the local forces. Elizabeth was more angry with him than she had ever been since his rash marriage, yet he was at a loss to know how to satisfy her, for her instructions had warned him "rather to make a defensive than an offensive war," and "not in any sort to hazard a battle without great advantage." Heavily outnumbered as he was by Parma's troops, he could hardly expect to stumble into a situation where "great advantage" would be his; even more discouraging was word from England that the queen was undermining his warlike posture by trying to negotiate peace terms with the enemy. He was condemned to preside over an expensive, ignominious stalemate, and the realization broke his morale.
The one military effort he launched, a daring assault on a fort dominating the town of Zutphen, resulted in a loss that broke his heart. His nephew Sidney died of wounds suffered in the assault, and the elaborate hero's funeral Sidney was later accorded could not disguise the relative insignificance of the English gain.
"Forget not money, money," Leicester wrote to Walsingham, and the plea echoes plaintively throughout his correspondence with the court. Elizabeth promised further funds, but did not keep her promises, especially after she learned that Leicester had flouted her parsimony by increasing his own and his soldiers' rate of pay. But she was far away in London; he was on the scene, and knew that the excess money was needed if the men were to have enough food, not to mention boots and cloaks and arms. He had come to lead stalwart soldiers into battle; instead he
was forced to listen while "sick, lame and shrewdly enfeebled" men cried out to him for help. He contributed what he could from his own money, but as he had gone deeply into debt his ready funds were small. He did what he could; mean-
while the summer campaigning season ended, and in the fall the Absolute Governor was quietly summoned back to his sovereign's court.
Leicester made the return journey from Flushing in as disheartened a mood as he had ever known. Glory had been within his grasp, and then had been denied him. He found the courage to face the queen, but his tired eyes were full of self-pity. He had failed her, and whatever her share of that failure, the blame must be his. Unutterably weary, he made a brief appearance at court, then left Elizabeth in a monumental quarrel with her advisers and made his way to Bath to take the waters.
But sorrow and plagues for their offences, Battle and famine, and all pestilences, As a desolate land, brought it shall be; What shall be more, none know but He.
E
ngland in the 1580s was a land ravaged by profound unease. There was cause for anxiety everywhere: in the war, and rumors of war, that took on substance when Leicester sailed for Flanders; in the shouted exigencies of the Puritan preachers, exhorting men and women to hold firm against the devil; in the alarming rise in the number of witches, so virulent they threatened to "overrun the whole land"; in the severe food shortages that drove people to riot and curse the times, the gouging middlemen, and the queen.
Certainty had vanished. There were only guesses, conjectures, troubled whispers. Elizabeth warned her subjects in a proclamation "not to be moved by murmurers and spreaders of rumors, the dissemination of which is to be punished as the spreading of sedition." 1 Yet the rumors persisted, for this was an age with no consensus of received fact, and without such a consensus to rely on, hearsay was more comforting than fearful ignorance. Prophecy, however grim, was most comforting of all, for it made the future the product of past foresight, a preconceived, and therefore tamed, prospect.
The queen would live only a few years—or a few months—more. The queen would die a violent death. An invasion was imminent. (It would have taken a very poorly informed prophet indeed not to predict this.) A Dread-
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ful Dead Man was coming, who would rise from his grave to overturn the present order and install a new one. These pronouncements were made, sometimes with the aid of a large folio book of "painted pictures of prophecy," to villagers hounded by worry over their failed crops and hungry children. 2 Grim as the prognostications were, they were eagerly received, for they offered a glimpse of something transcendent, something visionary and otherworldly, that lifted the burden of everyday want and brought a sense of awe and wonder.
The credulity of Elizabeth's subjects gave their anxieties very broad scope. They were fearful not only for the future, but that in some occult fashion history might reverse itself, forcing them to contend again with the past. Many associated the Dreadful Dead Man of prophecy with the late king Edward VI, and imagined that he would soon return to them. "Up Edward the Sixth, the time is come," began one prophetic saying, and in response to expectations held by "great multitudes of the simpler sort," he did indeed return—in the form of several impostors. The impostors were seized and locked away, but not before many people had seen and heard them, and they had helped to strengthen the widely held conviction that the boy-king lived on. There was nothing in King Edward's tomb but a lump of lead, an Essex blacksmith said. A soldier returning from the Low Countries swore that Edward was alive and well in Spain, or perhaps it was France. Another man, a "very simple person," told the authorities the same story he told his neighbors. King Edward had not died in 1553; instead a substitute boy had been put to death in his place, while the king himself was taken secretly to Denmark, where he became the reigning monarch. 3
The unsettled past returned in many forms to haunt the Elizabethans. There were stories of a child born to the childless Mary Tudor, smuggled out of England to be raised to adulthood on the continent, where he awaited the propitious moment to claim his throne. Tales had been told since the start of Elizabeth's reign about the children she had with Leicester; currently, in the 1580s, a boy representing himself as their son was making himself known at Catholic courts abroad. Imagination merged with sacrilege in the disordered mind of an Englishman calling himself "Emmanuel Plantagenet," who was brought before Cecil in 1587. He was the son of Queen Elizabeth by God the Father, the madman told the treasurer haughtily. And greater than the Archangel Gabriel's was his authority in heaven.
The ultimate prophecy was that the end of the world was near. History was clearly in its "last days," people told one another, for the signs and wonders predicted in the biblical Book of Revelation were everywhere apparent. There were comets and eclipses in the skies, and downpours and
snowstorms and heavy flooding on the earth. There was even groaning and travail under the earth, for during Easter week of 1580 a mighty earthquake shook southern England, tearing huge gashes in the walls of castles and knocking down chimneys and church towers. 4
A loud noise like roaring thunder broke over Kent, and then the earth jerked and heaved with a "wondrous violent motion, and shaking of all things." In London stones fell from venerable buildings onto the heads of people rushing into the streets, and the playhouses swayed so violently that playgoers leaped down out of their seats into the pit for safety. New prayers were introduced into the litany for protection from earthquakes, but the disaster was feared less for its own sake than as a portent "terrible in signification of things to come."
Three years later, on an April Sunday in 1583, the same crowds that had fled the great earthquake were watching the heavens, waiting in fascinated terror for "some strange apparition or vision in the air" that would signal the end of the world. Saturn and Jupiter were in conjunction, and the astrologers predicted "either a grievous alteration of empires" or "an utter destruction of this world." Many had made an effort to cleanse their lives in expectation of Christ's Second Coming. A contemporary noted how they "talked very religiously, seeming as though they would become sanctified people," and their faces were very pious as they turned them toward the sky.
But as the day went on and the heavens failed to open, the expressions of innocent piety gave way to cynical smirking and by nightfall the crowds were jeering at the astrologers for their "extreme madness and folly." Yet hope, or dread, lived on. For every scornful voice there was a voice of expiation: the calculations were off by a few years, there were other factors to be considered besides the exact positions of the planets. New calculations produced new expectations. The world would end in 1588. It was "most certain."
But for the queen, time might run out sooner than that. In the 1580s, fears were redoubled that she might be assassinated.
The risk had been there since the early years of the reign, when in response to rumors that an Italian poisoner had infiltrated the royal household Elizabeth dismissed all the Italians currently in her service. Another alarm led her to confiscate every key to every door leading to her privy chamber, and to ensure that "great care" was taken by the officers of her guard. She might take consolation from her archbishop of Canterbury, who assured her that no harm would come to her "so long as Virgo," her birth sign and informal regal symbol, "was in the ascendant," but every time word came of new designs on her life there were fresh fears. Wax replicas
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of the queen and two of her councilors were found in the house of a Catholic priest, who meant to use them to end her life by magical means. One of her chamber ladies was accused of trying "by witchcraft" to discover Elizabeth's life span; from there it was but a small step to shortening it.
In the 1580s the attacks increased in numbers and in gravity, prompted by a macabre fashion for political assassination on the continent and by the violent and uncertain climate of the age. These were the years of the rack and the torture chamber, of the English spy network which set snares for Catholics and conspirators but
terrorized the entire population. Londoners became habituated, though hardly immune, to "general searches" undertaken by justices and agents of the queen, who threw the city into panic by going from house to house and routing out wanted or suspected persons. Any "unknown men"—those without certain employment or reliable friends or connections—were seized and locked in churches while the raid went on to its end. The searches themselves were only part of a broader campaign of fear; Walsingham's men "prepared the people's minds" for the raids weeks in advance, by spreading talk of "great stirs" and dangerous foreigners abroad in the capital.
London life was a pattern of alarms and ghoulish horrors: wild shouting in the streets in the middle of the night, torchlit interrogations, the clump of boots on cobblestones. And, in growing numbers, hangings, and their grisly aftermath, the display of heads and chunks of flesh on London Bridge.
In the fall of 1584 there was a particularly ghastly execution. Eighteen people, "among them two women and two young lads," were hanged at one time, and the butchery was rounded out by a barbarous act of mercy. The victims' friends, wrote a visitor to the capital present at the executions, "went up to the gallows, tugged at their legs and struck them over the breasts in order to hasten their death." 5
The attempts on the queen's life were in keeping with the mode of disordered violence. A Warwickshire man fell into a "frantic humor" and started off, glassy-eyed, for the court where he meant to shoot the queen. Elizabeth was a "serpent and viper," he shouted to anyone who would hear him. He wanted "to see her head set upon a pole." Catholic animus had shaped his thinking—a priest was sheltered in his household—but what pushed him to undertake his desperate mission is less clear. When captured and tried, he strangled himself in his cell.
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