Elizabeth
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Of the queen’s senior women, three or four regularly served in the Bedchamber and six or seven in the Privy Chamber. Below them were three or four chamberers of the Privy Chamber, usually women in their twenties or thirties, and six maids of honour in the Bedchamber, teenagers working under the supervision of the ‘mother of the maids’, who was responsible for their welfare and discipline. All these women were handpicked by the queen and worked to a precise set of written instructions or ‘Ordinances’.29
Beginning early in her reign, Elizabeth received petitioners and held formal audiences with her advisers or visiting ambassadors in the Privy Chamber, where she also spent much of her time reading or playing the virginals, at which she was notably accomplished. She greatly enjoyed card games, chiefly Primero, in which the players would be dealt four cards from a forty-card pack and would then bet on the combination of cards they were given. Arriving for an audience in 1563, the French ambassador Paul de Foix found Elizabeth deeply absorbed in a game of chess.30 Sometimes she danced or listened to her favourite musicians, twenty or more of them Italian, including two female lutenists.31 And in the long summer evenings she would sit up until late outdoors, reading or conversing while eating marzipan or sugar ‘comfits’ (candied fruits) and drinking ‘hypocras’ (sweet white wine flavoured with spices). She especially loved marzipan: in 1562, the New Year’s gifts she received included a model of Old St Paul’s Cathedral and a full-size chessboard, both made of ‘marchpane’, or marzipan.32
To entertain her at dull moments, troupes of dark-skinned Italian actors and dancers – friends of her musicians – performed impromptu for her. Once, she allowed a troupe of female acrobats to put on a show, leading to sharp criticism of ‘the unchaste, shameless and unnatural tumbling of the Italian women’.33 At other times, a female fool amused her. Early in the reign, this was a midget known as Ipolyta the Tartarian, to whom Elizabeth gave a pewter doll; later, it was Tomasin de Paris, described as a ‘woman dwarf’, to whom she gave some of her old clothes to sell. The most curious of Elizabeth’s domestic indulgences was a black African page-boy. She dressed him in a coat of white taffeta, trimmed with gold-and-silver stripes, a matching doublet with fine silver buttons, a pair of knitted white stockings and a pair of white shoes and exhibited him to visitors as a conversation piece.34
The predominantly feminine environment of the Privy Chamber and Bedchamber put Elizabeth at a distinct political disadvantage. Unlike her father and grandfather, she could not easily gather her advisers around her or quiz them on affairs of state unless she summoned them formally first, whereas in the exclusively masculine environment of her father’s reign, trusted servants could routinely enter the Privy Chamber and Bedchamber, or even sometimes the ‘secret lodgings’, at almost any time when the king was awake. For Elizabeth, it would be unthinkable for male advisers, other perhaps than her chief physician, to see her if she were wearing her night-gown, cap and velvet slippers, which she sometimes kept on during the day and into the evening if not going out, or if her women were applying her make-up or curling her wigs.35
Burghley began work at six o’clock in the morning. He was always on call, but Elizabeth was a late riser. On one notable occasion in her mid-forties, she told a suitor who had thought it safe to turn up at eleven to return the next day after dinner (then eaten shortly after midday), adding, ‘You know I am no morning woman.’36 Her late rising apart, it took her women upwards of two hours to dress her. Merely fixing her starched ruff in position and pinning the flounce or lining of her skirts around the edge of a drum-shaped farthingale could take over an hour. Behind her back, male courtiers joked that it was quicker to rig a royal navy ship than dress the queen.37
The reduced casual access Elizabeth was able to offer her privy councillors outside formal audiences meant that she had far fewer opportunities than her father to hold them strictly to account.38 She met Burghley in daily audience, sometimes late at night, but how was she to know whether he told her all she needed to know? It was, after all, he who controlled access to the state papers, he who routinely briefed her ambassadors, he who negotiated with foreign embassies, he who supervised her correspondence and drafted royal proclamations. More alert to the attempts of her advisers to gang up on her as the years went by, Elizabeth began teaching herself how to seek independent sources of intelligence when she suspected subterfuge and to play off her privy councillors against one another.39 On a memorable occasion in 1570, as Burghley was leaving the room at the end of an audience, she ostentatiously turned for a second opinion to Sir Thomas Heneage, a smooth-tongued gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Burghley later gave Heneage a ferocious dressing-down, said by its mauled recipient to be ‘a blast’. In his defence, Heneage protested that it was the queen herself who had initiated the conversation. What else was he to do but answer her?40 From her side, Elizabeth found this sort of showdown immensely satisfying, as it helped to disabuse Burghley of the notion that her dependence on him was absolute. Some said she had begun to ‘smile’ on Heneage in revenge for Burghley’s underhand dealings to force her to marry and settle the succession in Parliament.
• • •
The bureaucratic system Elizabeth presided over was heavily weighted against a woman ruler. Her father in the 1540s had established a tightly knit Privy Council of between eleven and nineteen members who were to take charge of the bulk of routine administration, leaving him alone to decide the key questions of state. Despite his jealous protection of his prerogative, Henry did not attend any of the regular meetings of his privy councillors, waiting instead for his principal secretary to report to him afterwards. Since none of his councillors would dare to mislead him or keep him in the dark, he could be sure of getting accurate information. The challenge faced by a woman ruler was that, unless her male councillors chose to involve her fully in their business and keep her properly informed, she had no ready means of checking what they were up to other than by quizzing them individually then comparing what they said and how it related to what Burghley was telling her. Mary Tudor had encountered precisely this problem when several of her privy councillors preferred to report to her consort, King Philip, despite legislation that had declared her to be as much ‘solely and sole queen’ after her marriage as she had been before it.
Convening several mornings a week at nine o’clock and dominated by Burghley, Elizabeth’s privy councillors organized their routine largely as they themselves wished. When weighty matters arose, the queen might specifically request that they be considered, but it was mostly left to Burghley to report on the councillors’ deliberations at his daily audiences with her. For the more important of these, he would prepare memos or sheets of headings with summaries of the arguments for or against a particular course of action.41 Occasionally, he would present her with a formal written document known as a ‘Consultation’, setting out the Council’s agreed position.42 Otherwise, he spoke from memory. The clerks of the Council kept minutes of the proceedings, but beyond recording attendances these tended to be cursory, since most of the Council’s administrative work was done by letter. The full record of what was said and decided in the Privy Council was kept only in the memories of those present. And, all too frequently, Elizabeth’s councillors confronted her with decisions already stitched up.
She did not even draft all her own letters, although most biographers conveniently assume that she did. Elizabeth usually wrote important letters to foreign princes in her own hand, as well as letters of condolence to loyal servants who had suffered bereavements. Her favourite godson, John Harington, records how on one occasion she contrived to handwrite one letter, dictate another and talk all at the same time.43 And yet, time and time again, her letters or her instructions to her resident ambassadors abroad, full of those resonant phrases we might otherwise believe to have come from her own pen, turn out, when the provenance of the early drafts is checked, to have been ghostwritten by Burghley or another senior councillor and merely awaiting the qu
een’s signature.44
How exactly this worked was explained in 1567 by Diego Guzmán de Silva, the resident Spanish ambassador in London, who witnessed the queen in action while waiting in the queue for an audience. A letter, he says, was to be sent to the queen’s accredited representative in Scotland. ‘I have seen it,’ he added, ‘although I could not read it.’ One of Elizabeth’s privy councillors, her long-standing favourite and Master of the Horse Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had dictated it to a clerk before Guzmán’s astonished eyes while in the same queue, ‘and he took it to the queen for signature in my presence.’45
In a revealing note of 1565 to Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury, Burghley fumed that she was likely to try and alter the draft of a letter he was preparing for her signature ‘more than I shall allow’. This was almost exactly the phrase he had used earlier when threatening to resign, an indication that he felt himself to be very much in control.46 Only once in her earlier years in a situation like this is Elizabeth known for certain to have put her foot down and bypassed completely her meddling advisers. In 1566, she scribbled a letter to her newly appointed Lord Deputy in Ireland that its anxious recipient was ordered to conceal:
Let this memorial be only committed to Vulcan’s base keeping. Without any longer abode than the leisure of the reading thereof, yea, and with no mention made thereof to any other wight. I charge you as I may command you. Seem not to have had but secretaries’ letters from me.47
Unpicking who precisely wrote which of the fifteen thousand or so surviving letters or warrants sent out in Elizabeth’s name during the forty-four years she reigned turns out to be a huge and laborious task. At a rough estimate, no more than 2,400 of them were handwritten by the queen or dictated by her.48 Far too much paperwork was flying around her Court for her to vet all of it, and for the first twenty or so years her councillors, led by Burghley, drafted the most secret and important letters to individuals or ambassadors on her behalf after receiving purely verbal instructions. Sometimes they exploited this lack of scrutiny for their own ends. On a few scandalous occasions in the 1560s, chiefly where Mary Queen of Scots was concerned, instructions to ambassadors would be sent out only after lengthy exchanges between Elizabeth and Burghley, which the latter regularly won.49 In a similar vein, her ambassadors abroad would write sanitized reports to her, sending fuller and more explicit briefings to Burghley by the same courier.
Of course, it was not just the young queen’s inexperience or the sheer volume of paper circulating around the Court that encouraged this murky system. Such laxity could suit Elizabeth as much as it did Burghley and his friends, as it enabled her to disavow what she had herself done. In 1570, two years after she had taken shameless advantage of a gale in the Channel to seize for herself 155 chests of Genoese treasure being shipped to the Netherlands to pay Philip II’s troops, she sent a message to Philip’s fourth wife, Anne of Austria,* explaining, ‘Although there hath of late time happened some show of unkindnesses . . . betwixt us and the king of Spain’, this was to be attributed entirely to the ‘mishap of evil conditioned ministers’.50 She was determined to shift the blame for the deterioration in Anglo-Spanish relations on to the shoulders of others.
Elizabeth had first learned to keep her fingerprints off her most politically explosive choices while in her early twenties. Then, she had been the focus of at least two plots to unseat her Catholic sibling, Mary Tudor, the more threatening of which was the Protestant Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554. The day after Wyatt was convicted of high treason, a delegation of Mary’s councillors came to arrest Elizabeth and charge her as an accessory to the revolt.51 They wished to know why she had made preparations suddenly to move from Hertfordshire to her property at Donnington Castle in Berkshire, where the keeper was one of Wyatt’s closest friends. But they could never prove she had personally endorsed Wyatt’s conspiracy or ordered the proposed move: her communications with Wyatt had been at arm’s length. She managed to blame her underlings, one of whom was Sir John Harington, father of her godson of the same name, for an excess of zeal on her behalf. Mary Tudor promptly sent him to the Tower.52
Understandably, Elizabeth took this lesson to heart. Her favourite classical tags for the rest of her life would be Video et Taceo (‘I see and keep silent’) and Semper Eadem (‘Always one and the same’), which she made her motto.53 In her hands, the art of queenship would not simply be the art of statesmanship. It would involve surreptitious convolutions geared towards increasing her power and decreasing her vulnerability.
• • •
Elizabeth’s war years, for all the drama and colour of the 1588 Armada campaign, are the forgotten years. Generally neglected by her biographers, or else discussed in a more or less perfunctory way, with the most crucial explanations of the decision-making process culled from Camden’s Annales rather than directly from the archives, they are years when an ageing spinster, engaged in mortal combat with time and death, sought to uphold her most cherished ideals. Relatively little has been written about them, certainly in comparison to the years of peace, when the queen’s Religious Settlement and her dynastic duelling with Mary Queen of Scots and with her own privy councillors over her marriage negotiations were at the top of the agenda.54
The year 1584, when Prince William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Calvinists in their heroic struggle against the Catholic Philip II of Spain, was assassinated, is a clear turning-point. It marked the onset of the great pan-European and Atlantic crisis that would threaten to bring the queen and her country to their knees. Elizabeth found herself propelled into a military and ideological collision with a global superpower, one with vast resources and a worldwide empire. She would not see peace again in her lifetime: the war would last longer than the First and Second World Wars combined. The year 1584 would also mark the moment when everyone finally, grudgingly, came to accept that she had passed the age of childbearing: grudgingly, because that recognition also meant that they had accepted she could never have a biological successor.
During the years of peace, Elizabeth’s vulnerability had been much increased by the unrelenting pressure of her councillors and Parliaments to persuade her to marry. After 1584, by comparison, certainty about her biological inability to bear children liberated her, because no one could any longer dispute that she had an unchallenged right to exercise alone both the masculine and feminine responsibilities of the monarchy: there could be no point in marrying her off if she was barren. Although for her it was an uncomfortable reminder of the passage of time, it was also a moment of empowerment. Confronted by the worst national emergency the country had experienced since her father’s break with Rome, she determined that from this point onwards she must rule as well as reign. In such perilous times, she must assert her authority more firmly and more consistently than before. This was her calling, her solemn duty, and she believed that God expected no less of her.
She would not always be successful: clashes were bound to arise between her, her privy councillors and her military and naval commanders over long-term strategy, short-term tactics and the ever-escalating costs of such a long war. Her much-vaunted relationships with her last two favourites – the mercurial, charismatic, daredevil Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and, to a lesser extent, the swashbuckling Sir Walter Ralegh – can be properly understood only within the wider frame of the rows between them over military and naval strategy. But Elizabeth would be far more interventionist and much harder to handle than before. At the same time, she was forced to face up to her own mortality, as her hair and good looks succumbed to the ravages of time. No wonder she cultivated the impression that she was ageless, timeless, perennially young.
To make it appear that she was not yet a post-menopausal woman, she allowed and then actively encouraged her courtiers to reinvent her as a Virgin Queen. Contrary to the firmly entrenched belief of the Victorians (based on a misread sentence in Camden’s Annales), she had not until then
spun herself as such. Only in the summer of 1578, when she had led her Court on a slow progress through East Anglia, had this enduring concept of her later years made its first brief and somewhat tentative appearance.55 Like her father, she travelled with a reduced Court around the countryside of (mostly) southern England once a year, sometime between late May and mid-September, for leisure and recreation. And, as part of an evening’s entertainment at Norwich, the soldier-poet Thomas Churchyard had scripted a series of masques and pageants at the request of the civic leaders, in one of which the central theme was that Elizabeth could earn immortality only through her sexual purity. If she stayed single, she could enjoy a special status as a ‘Virgin Queen’, who by resisting the temptations of the flesh would also prevent its decay.56
At the time, the masque made no real impression on the queen’s iconography. But once it was plain that she had entered the menopause, the conceit snowballed, until portrait painters and scriptwriters were exploiting it on an industrial scale. In the 1590s, it would explode into the ‘cult’ of Gloriana, seen with all its pomp and pageantry during the queen’s Accession Day tilts, reaching its zenith in the airbrushed, stylized images crammed with the eulogistic, distracting symbolism that we know so well and culminating in the celebrated ‘Rainbow Portrait’, now at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.