The Elizabethans (31 page)

For you must think hit ys some marvellous cause . . . that forceth me thus to be cause almost of the reigne of my none [own] hovse; for ther ys no likelyhoode that any of our boddyes of menkind like to have ayres; my brother you se long maryed and not lykke to have Children, yet resteth so now in myself, and yet such occasions ys ther . . . as yf I should marry I am seure never to have favour of them that I had rather yet never have wife than lose them, yet ys ther nothing in the world next than favour that I wold not gyve to be in hope of leaving some children behind me, being nowe the last of our howse.
²⁰

The Queen, if she knew of Leicester’s affair with Lady Sheffield, chose to turn a blind eye. She was so close to her ‘sweet Robin’ that she must have guessed that something was ‘up’ and this had probably been one of the factors in her sudden and capricious adoption of a new favourite, when the Leicester–Douglas Sheffield
amour
was at its hottest. She had lighted upon the rather comical figure of Sir Christopher Hatton (1540–91).

He was an excellent dancer, and he appeared to be without irony when it came to his ability to flatter. These are two useful qualities in a courtier. ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel,’ said the canny Victorian.
²¹
Hatton did not need such counsel. He naturally worshipped Elizabeth. He spoke of himself as an everlastingly frustrated suitor in love with an unattainable goddess. ‘This the twelfth day’, he wrote to her, ‘since I saw the brightness of the sun that giveth light unto my sense and soul I wax an amazed creature.’
²²

He was her ‘happy bondman’. She called him ‘sheep’. Tall, thick-bearded, unmarried – one imagines ‘very unmarried’ in Betjeman’s useful phrase – Hatton was a perfect distraction for the Queen and she would go on basking in his adoration for two decades. The court first noticed that Hatton had gratified her vanity in 1572 when Leicester’s affair with Lady Sheffield was at its most involved. At the annual exchange of New Year gifts between courtiers and sovereign, Hatton, who had already been made Keeper of the Parks of Eltham and Home and had been given the keepership of Wellingborough, received 400 ounces of silver plate from the Queen, about twice what others of his rank received. By July 1572 he was a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and captain of the Yeomen of the Guard. He sat as MP for Higham Ferrers. Amazingly, this lightweight lawyer of the Inner Temple would end up in 1587 being made Lord Chancellor of England: it was an appointment greeted with outrage
²³
by the legal establishment. He lived in enormous grandeur that he could ill afford, building himself a never-finished palace in his ancestral manor of Holdenby, Northamptonshire, as well as buying nearby Kirby Hall. When in town he occupied the former palace of the Bishops of Ely. He said he would never visit the rebuilt Holdenby until his royal saint – that is, Elizabeth – had set foot in it. There were two great courts, one 128 feet by 104 feet, covering two acres. It was the size of Hampton Court. The saint never did visit, probably aware that she would ultimately have paid for the privilege. When Hatton died aged fifty-one he owed her £18,071 – a colossal sum by any standards, but stratospheric by those of the cheeseparing Elizabeth. She who jibbed at paying her army in Ireland, and who was so unwilling to equip the navy against the Armada, was prepared to spend the price of several fighting ships in order to cosset the vanity of a fawning flatterer.

Elizabeth had known of Leicester’s interest in his next lover for a long time. Lettice Devereux, the Countess of Essex who entertained the Queen when she progressed from Kenilworth in the summer of 1575, was a Boleyn cousin – a great-niece of Anne Boleyn. Her mother, Katherine Knollys, was good friends with her cousin Elizabeth. Lettice Knollys was appointed Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber at the very beginning of the reign when she was only eighteen or nineteen. She was one of the beauties of the age, with thick curling auburn hair, mischievous dark eyes and full, sensuous lips. In her portrait she looks like Big Trouble, the sort of Trouble men yearn for. She married Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, in 1560 and withdrew from court in order to have five children in as many years. This did not stop her flirting, and when in 1565 the Queen heard of Leicester’s fascination with Lettice, she flew into a major rage.

The fascination was an abiding one. Ten years later, when the grand entertainments at Kenilworth were performed and her husband was in Ireland, Lettice was more or less installed in Warwickshire as Leicester’s resident mistress. The rumours were very public, but, astonishingly, they had not yet reached the ears of the Queen. And although the matter was ‘publicly talked of in the streets’, it was not safe to be known as a party to the gossip. Leicester was a powerful, ruthless man whom it was unsafe to cross. For the Kenilworth entertainments he asked the local gentry to array themselves in his livery, the blue coat with a silver badge of a bear and ragged staff. One neighbour refused. This was Edward Arden of Park Hall, Warwickshire, who had been High Sheriff of the county the previous year. Moreover, Arden unwisely made comments touching the Earl’s private access to the Countess of Essex, and called Leicester ‘a whore-master’. These remarks were not forgotten. Eight years later a spy handed Arden over to the authorities. He was a Catholic. His son-in-law, who lived with him, was a simpleton called John Somerville. The ‘gardener’ at Park Hall was a disguised priest called Hall. Somerville had apparently bragged that he would go to London and shoot the Queen and put her head on a pole because she was a ‘serpent and a viper’. Although neither Hall nor Arden were violent men, all three were arrested. It seems as if Hall was a double agent, for he was spared at Leicester’s intercession. Arden was put to death for treason. His lands were escheated to the Crown and some of them were immediately given to Leicester. No one who spoke slightingly of the great earl could expect to do so with impunity.

Then the court moved on to Woodstock where the host was the Queen’s Champion, Sir Henry Lee.
²⁴
The Kenilworth entertainments had been an extravagant but ultimately incoherent business. Leicester had been determined that his show should be the showiest and the most expensive to date, but his complicated amatory situation, his driving political interest and his fundamental coarseness could not stop the Kenilworth display spilling over into meaningless vulgarity. Lee, however, was a man who raised royal ceremonial into an art-form. And, indeed, was strongly influential on the art-forms of others – notably portraiture and literature. He had a high forehead, curly hair, dark laughing eyes, a long nose and a mouth that looked as if it had just closed having made an elaborate compliment, but might open at any moment to make an equally elaborate joke. His portrait of 1568 by Anthonis Mor shows a playful obsessive, a humorist, but one who was a true
homo ludens
, a man who took masques, tilts, tableaux and displays as seriously as Burghley took the economy or the wars in the Netherlands. In that age of display, Lee was a figure of immense significance, helping the Elizabethans towards a definition of themselves, which was appropriate in a man who could legitimately claim kinship with so many key figures of the age: Burghley, Leicester, the Earl of Essex, even the Queen herself. Her mythic status owed much to his creative pageantry.

As she approached Woodstock, the Queen and her entourage encountered two knights, Contarenus and Loricus, engaged in combat. The hermit Hemetes (played by our old friend Gascoigne) came forward and dissuaded the knights from fighting. The hermit’s somewhat rambling speech went down extremely well with the Queen – she asked for a copy of it. Hemetes said he had once been a famous knight beloved of ladies. He told of how Loricus loved a lady of high degree, but, as was the courtly-love convention, he had hidden his love and pretended devotion to another. A sibyl had foretold that Loricus (one of the knights – it was a name used more than once by Lee for himself) would come at last after many sad wanderings to the best country in the world, governed by the best of rulers, ‘best Ladie and most beawtyfull’.
²⁵

When the tale was over, the hermit conducted the Queen and her suite to a banqueting house built especially on a hill in the wood, roofed with turf, bedecked with flowers and ‘spanges of gold plate’, which glimmered magically. Above them soared a great oak. The two tables, one round and one a half-moon, were turfed with grass, and then, as the food was served, music struck up in the summerhouse and there appeared, probably for the first time in Elizabethan literature, the Fairy Queen. It is generally recognised that the elaborate tilts in the revised edition of the
Arcadia
are an allusion to actual tournaments in which Philip Sidney and Henry Lee took part. In the Woodstock entertainment of the Fairy Queen we can see an inspiration for Spenser’s great epic. Sidney, who had been present at the Kenilworth entertainments, would have been all but certain to have followed the court to Woodstock on the royal progress. Certainly his twelve-year-old sister Mary was there, the future Countess of Pembroke, the one for whom he wrote the
Arcadia
. She was handed a posy from the oak above the banqueting hall in the wood during the masque in which the Faerie Queene made her arrival.
²⁶
This was almost certainly the first appearance of the ‘Faerie Queene’ in Elizabethan literature.

Richard Corbet (1582–1635), poet Bishop of Oxford in the reign of James I – High Church, boozy, whimsical, and later Bishop of Norwich – is chiefly known for one lyric, the first line of which Rudyard Kipling appropriated for one of his volumes of Puck stories: ‘Farewell rewards and fairies . . .’

Corbet identifies the fairies with the Roman Catholics. In Queen Mary’s time, they had footed ‘rings and roundelays’:

But since of late,
Elizabeth
,

And later James came in,

They never danc’d on any heath

As when the time hath bin

By which we note the Fairies

Were of the old profession,

Their songs were Ave Maryes,

Their dances were procession.

But now, alas! They all are dead

Or gone beyond the Seas

Or farther for Religion fled,

Or else they take their ease.
²⁷

Pace
Corbet’s charming and well-known ballad, however, the two greatest works of fairy literature –
The Faerie Queene
and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– belong to that heyday, the late Elizabethan Age. It is central to the fairy-mythos that they are a threatened species who either just have departed or are just about to do so: Tolkien’s Grey Elves enforce this tradition when they disembark with Frodo at Grey Havens.

The cult of the Faerie Queene, both in pageant and in the great epic of the age by Spenser, the Elizabethan Virgil, was yet another example of the reinvigorated archaism of the collective Elizabethan collective imagination. Just as they revived the cult of St George, in all the Garter ceremonies, at the Queen’s insistence, so Spenser made St George, his Redcrosse Knight, an emblem of Protestant virtue. The tourneys and tilts, in Spenser’s poetry, as in Sidney’s revised polyphonic narrative of his
Arcadia
, are a deliberate throwback to the age of chivalry. Yet all this was not done to deny the fundamental breaks with the past that the Elizabethan Age represented – a new National Church cut loose from the parent-stem of Rome; a new aristocracy composed of families such as the Herberts and the Cecils, who had been little more than minor Welsh squires during the Wars of the Roses; new learning; new fashions; new geographical horizons; a new politics. Even in the cult of the Virgin Queen, the Fairie Queene, the National Saviour, there was an element of the new taking over a novel form and subverting it. Obviously one element of this was the religious one. The language used is so exalted that the modern reader is half-shocked, half-amused. It takes a while to get eye and ear adjusted to the tone. ‘The Kingdom of Saturn and the Golden world is come again, and the Virgin Astraea is descended from heaven to build her seat in this your most happy country of England,’ said Jan van der Noor, a Dutch refugee from Spanish persecution in his book translated as
A Theatre for Worldlings
(1569).
²⁸
A song in John Dowland’s
Second Book of Airs
says:

When others sing
Venite exultemus
!

Stand by and turn to
Noli emulari
!

For
Quare fremuerant
use
Oremus
!

Vivat Eliza
! For an
Ave Mari
!
²⁹

You could not find a more specific substitution than this. There is an engraving of Elizabeth with her device of the phoenix, below which is written, ‘This Maiden-Queen Elizabeth came into this world, the Eve of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and died on the Eve of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, 1602.’

She was, she is (what can there more be said?)

In earth the first, in heaven the second Maid.
³⁰

In life she had taken precedence even over Mary in the worship of the faithful; in death she was second only to the Blessed Virgin herself. Even the cults of personality of the most megalomaniac twentieth-century dictators never went as far as this. We are here almost in the territory of the idolatrous worship of divine Roman emperors. Or so it would seem.

But here is another case of imagery being subverted. Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight is not the St George of medieval devotion. He is a new, Neoplatonic symbol of Protestant virtue. The Virgin Elizabeth is not a mere ‘substitute’ for the Virgin Mary, still less does the cult of the quasi-divine Elizabeth imply that the Queen enjoyed absolute power.