by John Guy
Books by the same author include
Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame
The Children of Henry VIII
The Tudors: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edition)
Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim. A 900-Year-Old Story Retold
A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More
‘My Heart is My Own’: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots
The Tudor Monarchy
Tudor England
Contributor to
The Oxford History of Britain
The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain
The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Sixteenth Century
The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2016 by John Guy
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Illustration credits appear here.
ISBN 9780670786022 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781101609019 (ebook)
Version_1
Contents
Also by John Guy
Title Page
Copyright
Genealogical Tables
Descendants of Edward III: Yorkist Line
Descendants of Edward III: Lancastrian and Tudor Lines
Maps
England, Scotland, and Wales
Northern France and the Netherlands
Ireland
Author’s Note
Preface
Introduction: A Virgin Queen
1. A City in Fear
2. Crisis and Betrayal
3. Brave New World
4. Armada of the Soul
5. No Warrior Queen
6. A Funeral and a Wedding
7. On the Attack
8. The Visible Queen
9. The Enemy Within
10. Catastrophe in France
11. ‘Good Queen Bess’
12. The Quest for Gold
13. Conspiring against the Queen
14. Games of Thrones
15. A Counter-Armada
16. One Last Chance
17. Seeking Détente
18. Opening New Fronts
19. Defying the Queen
20. ‘I am Richard II’
21. The Queen’s Speech
22. On a Knife’s Edge
23. The Final Vigil
Epilogue
Illustrations
Abbreviations
Notes and References
Illustration Credits
Index
Acknowledgements
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Author’s Note
Dates are given throughout this book in the Old Style Julian Calendar in use in England during the sixteenth century, but the year is assumed to have begun on 1 January, not on Lady Day, or the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March), which then by custom was the first day of the calendar year. The New Style Gregorian Calendar, advancing the date by ten days, was issued in Rome in 1582 and adopted in Italy and by Philip II throughout Spain, Portugal and the New World in October that year. France followed in December, as did Brabant, Flanders, Holland and Zeeland in the Netherlands. The Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire followed in 1583. England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark and Sweden retained the old calendar until the 1700s, as did Friesland, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Netherlands. For obvious reasons of consistency, dates given in primary sources using the new Gregorian Calendar are converted to match the Julian Calendar used elsewhere.
Spelling and orthography of primary sources in quotations are for the most part given in modernized form. Modern punctuation and capitalization have also been provided where none exists in the original manuscript.
Units of currency appear in the pre-decimal form in use until 1971. There are twelve pence (12d.) in a shilling (modern 5 pence or US 8 cents), twenty shillings (20s.) in a pound (£1 or US $1.60), and so on. Modern purchasing equivalents for sixteenth-century figures are extremely difficult to calculate, as the effects of inflation and huge fluctuations in the relative values of land and commodities render them misleading, but rough estimates may be obtained by multiplying all numbers by a thousand.
Preface
Elizabeth was born at Greenwich Palace shortly after three o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, 7 September 1533. The granddaughter of Henry VII, the Tudor dynasty’s founder, and daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, she was the last of her father’s children to inherit the throne. After a run of chastening, sometimes terrifying experiences during her Catholic half-sister Mary Tudor’s reign, she was proclaimed queen by the heralds on the early morning of Thursday, 17 November 1558. Anointed and crowned in Westminster Abbey at the age of twenty-five, she ruled for forty-four years, longer than any of her adult predecessors apart from Edward III, a considerable achievement in itself.
With so many years to cover, Elizabeth’s biographers have tended to flag once she passed the age of fifty. Having established a pattern for the years of peace before the arrival of the Spanish Armada of 1588, they either skate over the years dominated by war or fall back on the convenient short cut of William Camden’s monumental Annales (he wrote in Latin), completed in 1617 and published in two unequal instalments between 1615 and 1627. The book, now better known as The History of Elizabeth, is a mini-archive in itself. But it is a treacherous guide.
Despite Camden’s claim to have written an unbiased history firmly rooted in the archives, a forensic comparison of his quotations with the original documents shows that he regularly doctored his sources to fit his theories. His account institutionalized a whole raft of hoary myths full of reverential nostalgia for the dead queen. To insulate her from criticism, he drew a veil over her vanity and her temper tantrums. Most conspicuously, he glided over topics that were still politically explosive when he was writing. Usually, this meant anything connected to the question of the succession and particularly to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whom, sensationally, Elizabeth had executed. Anxious not to offend the new king of England, Mary’s watchfully indolent son James I, whose re-interment of his mother in a spectacular marble tomb at Westminster Abbey was taking place even as the earliest draft of the Annales was approaching completion, Camden was also eager to protect the reputation of his former patron, Sir William Cecil, who had served Elizabeth faithfully (if in his own way) from the time she was barely sixteen.1 Since Cecil, promoted in 1571 to be Baron of Burghley and the next year to Lord Treasurer, had been Mary’s nemesis, Camden declined to pry into what – like the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus before him – he called the arcana imperii, or ‘mysteries of state’.2
Worse still, Camden’s bestselling translator, the gunner and mathematician Robert Norton, barely an adult when Elizabeth died, cheerfully proceeded to bowdlerize the Annales while preparing the English version most commonly available today. Between 1630 and 1635, years during which Charles I’s suitability to rule first began to b
e seriously challenged by critics of the monarchy, Norton inserted many spurious interpolations into his three English editions of Camden’s text. With the barely cloaked intention of using Elizabeth as a stick with which to beat her Stuart successors, Norton spun fresh legends, chiefly concerning the (allegedly) spontaneous outpourings of love and devotion to ‘Good Queen Bess’: he has her devoted subjects ‘running, flying, flocking to be blessed by the sight of her glorious countenance as oft as ever she came forth in public’.3
Deeply versed in such apocryphal material, the biographers writing after the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 raised Elizabeth to dizzy heights of veneration. After personally nursing her divided people through a Protestant Religious Settlement in 1559 that commanded wide assent (or so these authors believed), the fiery, red-haired heroine who shaped England’s destiny went on to stride boldly where her advisers feared to tread. A cultural icon who presided over the greatest flowering of literature and art that the country had ever seen, she was the woman who had chosen to live her life as a ‘Virgin Queen’, ‘marrying her realm’ (as her propagandists liked to say) and so dedicating herself to the welfare of the people she loved so dearly, despite the personal cost.
The Victorians were followed unashamedly down this path in the twentieth century by Sir John Neale. Consciously striving to make Elizabethan history popular, Neale wrote his highly influential Queen Elizabeth (1934), a classic biography notching up sales of more than a million copies throughout the English-speaking world and enchanting generations of readers. In his hands, Elizabeth became an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-honourable monarch and an ‘affable prince’: the problems she faced as a woman in government were brushed aside. Thus emerged the Queen Elizabeth we think we know today from her ‘Coronation Portrait’ in the National Portrait Gallery. That tree-ring analysis proves this painting was not begun until after she was dead, and that there is evidence the image is based on a face pattern which is not really hers, are inconvenient facts readily ignored by biographers mostly content to recycle the old myths.
A flurry of adulatory films, among them Fire over England (1937), starring Flora Robson, and the 1970s television series Elizabeth R, starring Glenda Jackson, peddled the same story. In the years of peace, Elizabeth spared her people from the turmoil of the Wars of Religion, which were devastating large areas of France and then the Netherlands. In the face of war, when it finally arrived, she became a warrior queen, defiantly confronting the threats posed by her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots,* King Philip II of Spain and the pope, and marshalling her forces to defend her country, the Church of England and herself. Brave, patriotic seafarers like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh could dream of reinventing England as an overseas imperial power thanks only to Elizabeth, England’s first truly visionary queen.
• • •
In revolt against such idealistic complacency, James Anthony Froude, the scourge of romantic sentimentality, had drawn a line in the sand. Writing in the 1860s and later shunned by Neale, he dared to argue that Elizabeth, almost from the moment she was crowned, was little short of a liability. Habitually vain, she was unable to control her temper and was mean, short-sighted and indecisive. Her relationship with her leading (male) advisers was consistently adversarial, and by refusing to marry and have children to continue the dynasty or otherwise name her successor, she acted selfishly and irresponsibly, putting the nation and her father’s Reformation in the greatest peril. In Froude’s narrative, Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief minister, was her redemption and the power behind the throne. He alone had the courage to save her from herself. It was his vigilance and, later, that of his younger colleague Sir Francis Walsingham, a man always clutching a pen and famous for his black skullcap, large white ruff and obsession with state security, which kept the country safe.
Froude’s coruscating attack had some solid basis in fact but was itself misleading. A pioneer of the research methods the best historians still use today, Froude had toiled for years equally in the dusty archives of Simancas, Paris and London, where he soon came to realize that the unpublished state papers graphically illustrate how far the younger Elizabeth could find herself startlingly at odds with councillors who were confident that they knew much better than she did. In what amounted to a hatchet job on the queen, Froude was over-schematic. And yet he brilliantly captured the seismic fault line between Elizabeth’s unflinchingly old-fashioned ideas about monarchy and religion and those of her more radical Protestant advisers.
Like so many others, Froude wrote only about the earlier years of Elizabeth’s reign, the years of peace. He had nothing whatever to say about the later, forgotten years of war. At first he announced his absolute determination to consider them. But after spending more than a decade trawling through the vast piles of barely catalogued, often illegible material, much of it unseen since it was first filed away, he found himself so wearied and demoralized that in the end he omitted these last years, completing his encyclopaedic twelve-volume narrative history of the Tudors in 1588 with the coming of the Spanish Armada. As a result, very few people know that Philip II and his son sent not just one invasion fleet against Elizabeth, but five.
It was left to Lytton Strachey, a doyen of the Bloomsbury set, whose zest for popular biography was to inspire Neale, to pick up the baton in the bestselling Elizabeth and Essex (1928). For Strachey, the darkest, most intriguing aspects of Elizabeth’s entire life story were not the threats posed by Mary Queen of Scots and the European Catholic powers but the tumultuous inner conflicts she endured as, inexorably, she began to age: ‘As her charms grew less, her insistence on their presence grew greater.’ There were no transitions: ‘only opposites, juxtaposed. The extraordinary spirit was all steel one moment and all flutters the next.’
A masterpiece of cinematic life-writing, liberally spiced with hefty doses of Freudian psychology and sparkling wit, Strachey’s biography was a glorious contradiction of the Victorian view that for an ageing spinster to survive as a war leader she was obliged to divest herself of all human emotions. Instead, Strachey turned Elizabeth into a woman with deep sexual urges. Tragedy, he argued, struck when a frustrated elderly virgin, a woman with a feverish, hopeless wish to be eternal and whose thickly applied layers of cosmetics were engaged in a losing battle to achieve that desire, became infatuated with the handsome young courtier Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Secretly harbouring unfulfilled novelistic ambitions, Strachey could speak of ‘the spectral agony’ of Elizabeth’s last years and unleash his imagination by saying of her flirtations, ‘Her heart melted with his flatteries, and, as she struck him lightly on the neck with her long fingers, her whole being was suffused with a lasciviousness that could hardly be defined.’4
Fresh from his critical successes with Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), Strachey was never a biographer to be intimidated by royalty or reputation. But as Virginia Woolf pointed out in her classic essay ‘The Art of Biography’ (1938), Elizabeth and Essex was a triumph of dramatic art but a failure of history. Biography, in Strachey’s hands, Woolf cuttingly remarked, never had a fairer chance of showing what it could do, but whereas in Queen Victoria every statement was verified, every fact authenticated and new facts brought to light, in Elizabeth and Essex ‘facts’ were nebulous or wrong, even sometimes invented, and fact and fiction obstinately refused to mix.5
The reverberations of Strachey’s intervention still echoed as late as 1953, when the opening night of the world premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, specially commissioned by the Royal Opera House to mark Elizabeth II’s coronation and staged in her presence, scandalized her courtiers as much as it reputedly bored the new queen. Yet for all his flaws, Strachey could always distinguish what really mattered from the inconsequential. He saw clearly what Camden and his successors had failed to see for almost four hundred years: that ‘the reign of Elizabeth falls into two parts’. After some twenty-five years, ‘the kaleidoscope shifted; the old
ways, the old actors, were swept off with the wreckage of the Armada.’6
• • •
My aim is to strike out from where Strachey blazed a trail and get closer to the truth about the ageing Elizabeth. Just as with my 2004 biography of Mary Queen of Scots, the rationale relates closely to the method. I have chosen to tell this most fascinating story by returning to the original, handwritten letters and documents in the archives rather than by recycling familiar anecdotes culled from unreliable memoirs or from the well-worn printed abstracts in the dozens of weighty volumes of Calendars of State Papers begun by the Victorians which so often omitted large chunks of the material and were themselves compiled as much to perpetuate as to engage with the myths.7 By turning only to the original, unexpurgated versions of Elizabeth’s letters and those of her leading advisers, and by separating out those passages recording her verbatim words from those drafted or inserted by others, I have made it my aim to scythe through spin and legend and come closer to her ‘authentic’ voice. When this is done, vivid glimpses of the real Elizabeth, so often carefully screened from our gaze, at last emerge from the shadows.
It would have come as a momentous shock to Lytton Strachey – he complained volubly to Virginia Woolf and others about the dearth of original sources for the 1590s and worked entirely from a narrow, randomly selected collection of printed texts – to learn that, despite the ravages of time, fire, flood and hungry rodents, such documents survive in daunting quantities. This fact ought to be better known. As Froude discovered, there was an exponential increase in the volume of handwritten state papers after 1580, but only a small fraction of the source material from the official State Paper collections in what is now the National Archives at Kew has ever been printed for the post-Armada years, and next to nothing beyond selected domestic or Scottish and Irish correspondence after December 1596.8 Vast tracts of handwritten state papers to do with England’s relations with the wider European and Mediterranean powers have been left almost untouched. Overall, there are up to a quarter of a million manuscript pages to search, not counting large parchment rolls, chiefly Elizabeth’s Chamber accounts, which I managed to photograph parchment by parchment in the spring of 2013. (The Chamber accounts are the only continuous source from which Elizabeth’s day-to-day movements and those of her chief advisers can most fully be worked out.)9
