The Elizabethans (6 page)

Yet if the Protestantism that had been brought in by Anne Boleyn’s adultery scandalised the Catholic majority, the attempt at a Counter-Reformation by Henry’s daughter Mary Tudor, during her short reign (1553–8) had antagonised many of her subjects. Against the advice of her husband, she had introduced the hated heresy-hunts of the Inquisition, and more than 300 people had been roasted alive for their thought-crimes. There must have been very many conservative-minded English men and women in 1553 who had their doubts about the Reformation; who regarded Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, as a fine man who had been wrongly executed by King Henry; who deplored the wreckage of the monasteries, and even more, detested the bullying persecution of such saintly figures as the monks of the London Charterhouse; who yet disliked the fanaticism of continental Calvinists and missed the outward trappings of old Catholic England – May poles, Mystery Plays, Corpus Christi processions – and who felt revulsion at the human bonfires of Smithfield. Mary Tudor, in her zeal for the Catholic faith of the Counter-Reformation, made many a convert to the fledgling Church of England.

Yet, as the young Queen Elizabeth knew, and her close advisers perhaps knew even better, she was a ruler of questionable legitimacy, becoming the queen of a realm divided against itself. The ceremonies that were put in hand from the very hour of her accession were therefore designed to reinforce in the populace a sense of reassurance, a sense of national unity, a sense of her sacred place in the life of a revivified nation.

The news came to her at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, some twenty miles from the capital. It was 17 November 1558. Elizabeth Tudor was twenty-five years old: she had been born at Greenwich on 7 September 1533. Her appearance is more familiar, perhaps, than any other character in English history, and one of the reasons for this is that her ritualised portraits were painted so often, and their messages were so carefully plotted. The coronation portrait, for example, of which a copy survives in London’s National Portrait Gallery, shows her holding orb and sceptre, and crowned in state. Her robe is emblazoned with Tudor roses. This is a picture that is almost all regalia. It is stating her claim to continue the dynasty begun by her ‘good grandfather’, as she called him (not everyone would have applied that epithet to the brilliantly devious Welshman Henry Tudor), Henry VII. But the regalia are not all that we remember from the portrait. We remember the long, red-gold hair, fine and loose over her ermine-clad shoulders. We remember the very distinctive long, white hands (the genes shared with Mary, Queen of Scots produced the same attractive feature, which often seems to accompany high intelligence); and there is the face. She was very recognisably Henry VIII’s daughter, with the same aquiline nose, the same shape of brow; but the shape of the face, long and oval, was much more like her mother, Anne Boleyn. Whereas Anne had been dark and sallow, however, Elizabeth had all the Tudor Welsh lightness of skin. One observer – Robert Johnston in
Historia Rerum Britannicarum
– noted that her skin was more than white, it was of a glowing paleness. Her eyes were golden, too, and large-pupilled from short-sight – exacerbated from much reading. She read and spoke fluently in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian and English and had a little Welsh.

This was a formidably clever, and slightly frightening, young person who had never fully opened her heart to anyone – not to her terrifying monster of a father; not to Catherine Parr, who had been such a wise stepmother, and certainly not to Parr’s reprehensible husband Thomas Seymour, whose scandalous cuddlings and attempts to make love to the young princess had caused public outrage. Nor had Elizabeth ever opened her heart to her brother, her sister or her tutors. From the moment of her accession she would rely, with a mixture of profound intelligence, flirtatious recklessness and Welsh canniness, on a succession of differing, nearly always male, advisers. But there was never one person who could claim to be her sole educator, her one love or her only counsellor. The deftly captured coronation portrait by Guillim Stretes, though it survives only in a copy, reveals a face that is alive with intelligence. England – like most other countries – has flourished when governed by intelligent people. Queen Victoria’s prime ministers, from Peel to Salisbury, were some of the cleverest men in the country. The only other period of comparable expansion and prosperity in English history is the reign of Elizabeth, when the head of state, and her surrounding court, were first-class brains.

By the time the Council had reached Hatfield, Elizabeth was waiting for them – the ‘news’ having evidently been broken to her by an earlier outrider. She was walking in the park, and stood beneath a leafless oak when they told her that she was the Queen of England. She knelt down in the grass and said, ‘
A domino factum est et mirabile in oculis nostris
’, a quotation from the 118th Psalm – ‘It is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.’ When she stood, the councillors could see that she was ‘indifferent tall, slender and straight.’

As well as being one of the most intellectually accomplished rulers who had ever occupied the throne of England, Elizabeth was also gifted with a peculiar political intelligence and the ability to empathise with, and understand, and manipulate, crowds. Her poor sister Mary, with her rather gruff mannish voice, her poor skin, her tiny eyes and her shyness, totally lacked these qualities. She had never engaged with the People at all. From the moment of her appearing in the London streets, Elizabeth knew how to work the crowd. The economy of England had been left, by Mary Tudor’s incompetence and by the failures in the French wars, in a terrible condition. There were debts of more than £266,000
⁴
. Elizabeth – one of her least amiable characteristics – was extremely parsimonious and ‘retentive’, unwilling to spend, even when national emergency depended upon it. But in this matter of selling herself to the people, she was prepared to part with more than £20,000 for the ceremonies alone. Yet it is not fair to think of her solely as a skinflint in economic terms. Early in the reign, 1560–1, she would issue a new coinage, which restored the value of the currency.
⁵
Walsingham considered this her finest achievement.

Six days after her accession there was the first of the great processions, from Hatfield to London. It was a cavalcade of more than a thousand people. She stayed a fortnight at Lord North’s House and, among other things, received the foreign ambassadors. It was here that she received, via Gomez Suarez de Figuerosa, Count de Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, a proposal of marriage from her brother-in-law, the King of Spain. She could have done worse than accept this honour. It would have avoided much political speculation, and it would have aligned England with the greatest power in the world against France, the second-greatest. But she declined the honour. When de Feria expressed Philip’s hope that she would be very careful in her handling of religion, she gave the equivocal reply that it would be very bad of her to forget God, who had been so good to her. So Catholics and Protestants were left none the wiser about the direction of her religious policy.

When she met the judges of England, she proclaimed, ‘Have a care over my people . . . they are my people. Every man oppresseth them and spoileth them without mercy. They cannot revenge their quarrel nor help themselves. See unto them, see unto them, for they are my charge’.
⁶

Then, on 28 November, she moved in slow procession, so that as many Londoners as possible could see her, from Lord North’s house to the Tower – her old prison, now her bastion. The journey was broken by several pauses.

When the Recorder of London presented her with a purse containing 1,000 gold marks, she said:

I thank my Lord Mayor, his brethren and you all. And whereas your request is that I shall continue your good lady and Queen, be ye ensured that I will be as good unto you as ever Queen was unto her people. No will in me can lack, neither do I trust shall there lack any power. And persuade yourselves that for the safety and quietness of you all I will not spare if need be to spend my blood. God thank you all.
⁷

What made this an electrifying speech was that it was true. Elizabeth, like her father, was every inch a political creature. She could be devious, stubborn, difficult. But (unlike her political rival, Mary, the Scottish queen) she was in many ways very straightforward. She did, passionately, want to be the queen of England, to be a good queen; and it was her primary wish. She would do anything to be a good queen, and she did have the interests of the country at heart. One of the reasons for her prodigious success as a political ruler was that she would undoubtedly have been prepared to die in order to be queen in her own way and on her own terms. Her own mother had died on the block. She knew that she was living in an age when this would be the price of failure – either a failure to keep at bay the threat of foreign invasion, or the failure to stave off any rival claimants to the throne. She was lucky enough to have only one plausible rival, in Mary.

By open chariot she was driven to Cripplegate, preceded by the Lord Mayor, who carried her sceptre, and by the Garter King of Arms beside him; next came Lord Pembroke, carrying the sword of state in a gold scabbard laden with pearls. Then the sergeants-at-arms surrounding the tall, pale redhead, who was dressed in a purple velvet riding habit. At fixed points along the route children’s choirs burst into song. In the distance, the roar of cannon had already begun to thunder out from the Tower. The first splash of pageantry, and the first showing of herself to the people, had been triumphantly successful. They loved her.

From the Tower she sent her favourite, and childhood friend, Lord Robert Dudley, to the mathematician and astrologer Dr John Dee to determine the most propitious day for her coronation. The answer came back from the Sage of Mortlake that it should be held on 15 January 1559.

Before the crowning itself in Westminster Abbey, there was a series of highly elaborate pageants and ceremonies in the City of London, designed as ritualised manifestos for the coming reign.
⁸
Lest the meaning of these ceremonies should be missed, the Corporation of London – largely Protestant, and representative of the mercantile class who would determine how well the country came out of the grave financial crisis of Mary’s reign – commissioned the MP for Carlisle, Richard Mulcaster, to write an account of them. Mulcaster, an Old Etonian and a Renaissance humanist, whom we shall meet in a later chapter as an eminent grammarian and educationalist, was paid forty shillings for his work, which was first published nine days after the coronation and was so popular that it was reprinted soon afterwards. The publisher was Richard Tottel, who paid the licence fee of two shillings and fourpence to print the work, at the Hand and Star, situated on Fleet Street within the Temple Bar. Throughout the Tudor period, but especially in the reign of Elizabeth, publication was strictly under the control of the state and nothing could be printed without licence.
The Passage of our most drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to Westminster the day before her coronacion
gives us the most vivid sense not only of those heady few days, but also of the huge importance to the Elizabethans of ceremonial. Shakespeare’s Henry V could ask before his Coronation, ‘And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?’ Cranmer, at the coronation of the nine-year-old Edward VI, could remind the adults present that the oil of anointing ‘if added is but a ceremony’.
⁹
But the Elizabethans, and especially the Protestants, who were inventing new ceremonies rather than merely re-enacting the medieval ceremonials of the Church, rediscovered the enormous importance of ritual.

In his pageant allegory-poem about his own age,
The Faerie Queene
, Edmund Spenser describes the coronation of Una in Booke One:

Then on her head they sett a girlond greene

And crowned her twixt earnest and twixt game.
¹⁰

This is the perfect phrase for the successful use of ceremony which has marked its place in English public life from the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth to the reign of the second. There is always a small element of playfulness in it, so that, for example, the Victorian lampoons of public ceremony in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan are only just lampoons, and are certainly nothing so strong as satire. They merely bring out some of the inherent absurdity in rituals that are ‘but a ceremony’. Nevertheless, ceremonies can make statements which remain in the memory, which stir the eye and the heart. And this was something that Queen Elizabeth I and her advisers understood through and through.

Mulcaster’s
The Passage of . . . Quene Elizabeth
presents Elizabeth’s ride through London, with its many pauses to watch plays and tableaux, as a piece of theatre, ‘So that if a man should say well, he could not better tearme the citie of London that time, than a stage wherein was showed the wonderfull spectacle of a noble hearted princesse toward her most loving people.’ So she set off, this consummate actress and political genius, on the afternoon of Saturday, 14 January 1559, from the Tower of London. She was dressed in a cloth-of-gold robe. Her hair streamed over her shoulders. On her head she wore a small circlet of gold. She sat on cloth-of-gold cushions in a rich, satin-lined litter, open at all sides with a canopy at the top, carried by the four barons of the Cinque Ports. As she entered the City by Fenchurch Street she was greeted by the first pageant, a child in costly apparel, welcoming her from a ‘richely furnished’ stage. Then, on to Gracechurch Street, where she saw a pageant of the uniting of the Houses of Lancaster and York. This highly elaborate display depicted the Queen’s descent. It had representations of her father Henry VIII, her mother Anne Boleyn and herself, wearing the Imperial Crown. And on it went, and at each stopping post, attended by huge crowds, there would be a little play or display, here representing the Virtues, there the Beatitudes in St Matthew’s Gospels. At the Little Conduit at the bottom of Cheapside there had been erected two hills. On one was a ruinous state – a
Respublica Ruinosa
. On the other, a well-founded state, the
Respublica bene instituta
, there was a cave. Old Father Time came out of the cave, leading his daughter Truth. This child presented Elizabeth with a Bible on which was inscribed ‘
Verbum Veritatis
’ – the Word of Truth.