The Elizabethans (7 page)

Mulcaster, in his commentary on all these events, was intent to bring out their meaning for the readers. It is Mulcaster, and not the script of the pageant (which survives), who brings out the Protestantism of this scene – that it is an English Bible.

When the childe had thus ended his speache, he reached hys boke towards the Quene’s majestie, which a little before, Trueth had let downe unto him from the hill, whiche by maister Parrat was received, and delivered unto the Quene. But she as soone as she had received the booke, kissed it, and with both her hands held up the same, and so laid it upon her brest, with great thankes to the cities therefore’.
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Like the great schoolmaster he was to become, Mulcaster made the ‘passage’ a learning process, not only for the readers, and for the crowds witnessing the ceremonies, but also for the Queen herself, who, in his narrative, does not move on from one spectacle to the next until she makes it clear that she has grasped its meaning.

Moreover, this series of secular pageants – seen by a far greater number than those who would file into the Abbey to witness the coronation – provided intelligible ceremonial with a very distinct religious and political agenda: Elizabeth, in all her new and gorgeous garment majesty, was to be the protectress of the rising generation of the Protestant mercantile class; she would support learning, she would uphold virtue and justice. The highly popular text is not propaganda. It was a manifesto that one very powerful, and very new, section of society was presenting to the Queen and hoping she would follow. Mulcaster is distinctly a parliamentarian rationalist humanist. For example, in the pageant representing the Old Testament judge Deborah, the chronicler Richard Grafton sees it as signifying Deborah’s gender – ‘This was made to encourage the Quene not to feare though she were a woman: For women by the spirite and power of Almightye God, haue ruled both honourably and politiquely, and that a great tyme, as did Debora, whiche was there sett forth in Pageant’; but Mulcaster interpreted the pageant to mean that Deborah was a good ruler who listened to her parliaments.

Elizabeth was quite intelligent enough to realise that monarchy, even that of an absolute monarch such as herself, was a matter of contract. It was not possible for one individual to impose her will on the people unless she were to carry with her a sufficient group of the Powerful, and unless she had the good will of the people too. The crucial few weeks and months at the beginning of her reign triumphantly made her popular with the people of London, and she would be able to exercise this charm over crowds throughout her reign. She was a monarch much on the move, showing herself to the people; and had she ever travelled north of the Trent, the story of her reign might have been very different. Her often-vaunted popularity, which is widely attested, whenever she appeared before crowds, was a southern phenomenon. Protestantism, if that is a satisfactory word for the religion that the City of London hoped she would espouse and promote, was primarily a religion of the South.

The ceremony of the coronation itself in the Abbey would provide the first test, and a very crucial test, of how Elizabeth could reconcile the warring Protestants, who had supported the full-blown continental-style Reformation of Edward VI’s reign, and the Roman Catholics, who had rejoiced at the return of the Latin Mass, and perhaps even rejoiced at the smell of roasting human flesh and the screams of dying heretics who were burned alive near the butchers’ market in Smithfield. This most contentious question lay at the nub of the Abbey service. Would it be Roman Catholic? Would it be Protestant? Would the new Queen show her hand?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, had died shortly after Mary Tudor and not been replaced. The Archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, had declined to crown her. The ceremonies were in the hands of the Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe. Already at Christmas there had been something of a stir in the Royal Chapel. The Mass had been conducted in the traditional form, in Latin; but the Queen had left in the middle – at the Offertory.

She could scarcely walk out halfway through the coronation ceremony. Here was an occasion when she would have to make clear, in emblematic and symbolic style, whether she intended to preserve the old religion or go with the Reformers. She had given Oglethorpe various directions for adapting the ceremony. The Epistle and the Gospel were to be read in English as well as Latin. With this stipulation, the Bishop complied. He was also told that he must not elevate the Host at the time of Consecration: that is, at the moment of the Mass when traditionally minded people might have believed that the bread changed its substance and became the Body of Christ, Oglethorpe was not to hold it up for veneration. He defied Elizabeth in this request. But where was she while he was doing it? At this point in the ceremony she had withdrawn into the Closet, a curtained area in the transept of the Abbey where she would receive Communion. Such is the Welsh ambiguity of Elizabeth’s situation that to this day no one quite knows what happened at this stage of the ceremony, with some maintaining that she did receive Communion, but in both kinds – that is, she received both the Host and the Chalice (Roman Catholic custom decreeing that she should only receive the Host); others maintaining that she did not receive Communion at all.
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She had managed to get away with a coronation ceremony which gave out the signals that she wanted the people to read, and not the signals that the Church wanted. That is, the coronation said: I am your Sovereign Lady the Queen. I shall maintain the stability and strength of the realm, and as for religion – well, wait and see. Was there really so much difference between my coronation Mass and that of my sister? Would the skies really fall if I continue to maintain the religion of my father Henry VIII – Catholicism without the Pope?

These were the cunning questions posed by the coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth I.

An older school of historical and political thinking liked to speak as if the Protestant Establishment, or Queen Elizabeth herself, somehow cunningly substituted the Cult of the Virgin Mary for the Cult of the Virgin Queen, offering to the Mariolatrous multitude the worship of Elizabeth as a substitute for Our Lady of Walsingham, rather as addicts in ‘rehab’ might be offered methadone as way of breaking the heroin habit. The picture suggests, perhaps, a populace that is more docile than any crowd has ever been.

What happened was perhaps more subtle, and more interesting. From the very beginning, the ceremonial surrounding Elizabeth became ever more inventive. It became a way of expressing what the Queen and those around her hoped was going to grow out of the reign. It grew out of reading, and it also grew, as it were, organically – the ceremonies of tilt, masque, procession and drama having an almost organic life of their own: what ‘worked’ on one ceremonial occasion becoming part of the repertoire and feeding the mythology, the symbolism. So Elizabeth, in portraiture, in drama, masque, political pamphlets and songs, was to become Cynthia, the Moon Goddess, she would be Diana the Virgin Huntress, she would be Gloriana and Belphoebe.

From pagan times, Europeans had believed in Four Ages of history. Ovid tells of them in his
Metamorphoses
, for example: the Golden Age was that of humanity’s springtime; followed by a Silver Age, a Brass Age and an Age of Iron, when war, tyranny and chaos were unleashed upon the historical scene. During this Iron Age, the Virgin Justice left the Earth and took up her position in the sky as the constellation Virgo. Spenser in
The Fairie Queene
, during the procession of the months, tells us:

The sixt was August, being rich arrayd

In garment all of gold downe to the ground

Yet rode he not, but led a lovely Mayd

Forth by the lilly hand, the which was cround

With eares of corne, and full her hand was found;

That was the righteous Virgin, which of old

Liv’d here on earth, and plenty made abound;

But after Wrong was lov’d and Justice solde,

She left th’ vnrighteous world and was to heauen extold.
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Astraea, the Virgin symbol of Justice, was also a figure of Empire. In the many ceremonial ways in which Elizabeth presented herself, and in which the people responded to her, they wished to see her as the Virgin who had left the Earth with the coming of the Age of Iron. Her reign would usher in a time of righteousness and justice, but also of ‘British Empire’ – it was the age in which this phrase was first used, and it was a coinage of her astrologer, Dr Dee.

So, rather than thinking of the pageants as some kind of con-trick played on the people, or as a substitute for religion, it is perhaps more helpful to think of them as an extraordinarily public display, in that age of displays, of England’s emerging self-consciousness; England being guided in part by the acute intelligence of its monarch. It is England set to music, England tripping a fantastic dance, England making a tableau. Into this picture of a country coming to life – after a century of civil war, confusion, economic depression – comes this vision of a young Virgin Sovereign who can lead it on to a different existence: an existence where it expands beyond the seas, where it plumbs new areas of learning, where it builds great houses, where it pioneers new literary forms. Much of the ritual was done as a conscious parody of, or imitation of, the imperialist rituals surrounding the Emperor Charles V on the continent,
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but this was itself a revelation: rather than seeing itself as dependent upon the great empires of the world, Elizabethan England saw itself as a fledgling empire.

Elizabeth, with her ceremonies, her tournaments, her progresses, brought a palpable sense of optimism to her people, an extraordinary sense that, as a whole, the nation was now capable of creativity and expansion that had somehow previously not been possible.

This was apparent with the Accession Day Tilts, which became an annual ceremony every November of the reign. On these occasions, every detail was charged with symbolism. The colours worn by the Queen for masques and pageants would have had significance. Red symbolised prowess, yellow joy, white innocence, green hope . . .
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The jewels presented to the Queen by courtiers, especially the jewels given as New Year gifts, reflected the classical origins of her cult – a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard shows her wearing a jewelled crescent moon in her hair, to show her as Diana the Virgin Huntress; Sir Francis Drake once gave the Queen a fan ‘of fethers, white and red, the handle of gold inamuled, with a halfe moone of mother-of-perles, within that a halfe moone garnished with sparkes of dyamondes, and a few seede perles on thone side, having her Majesties picture within it, and on the backside a device with a crowe over it’. Once again, the crescent moon emphasising her virgin status. Other mythological subjects reflected in her jewellery would have been Elizabeth as Astraea, or Elizabeth as a Vestal Virgin.

In the Second Book of Sidney’s revised
Arcadia
we read of the elaborate annual jousts held on the anniversary of the marriage of the Iberian queen. Young knights from the court of Queen Helen arrive. Of her, we are told:

For being brought by right of birth, a woman, a yong woman, a faire woman, to governe a people, in nature mvtinously prowde, and always before so used to hard governours, as they knew not how to obey without the sworde were drawne. Yet could she for some years, so carry her selfe among them, that they found cause in the delicacie of her sex, of admiration, not contempt; and which was notable, even in the time that many countries were full of wars . . . yet so handled shee the matter, that the threatens ever smarted in the threatners . . . For by continuall martiall exercises without bloud, she made them perfect in that bloudy art.
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Sidney was describing in more or less precise detail the tilts in which he himself took part and which were choreographed by his friend Sir Henry Lee, the Queen’s Champion – who appears in the
Arcadia
as Lelius. The games were indeed a paradoxical expression of a ‘bloudy art’ for peaceable means. The Elizabethan governing classes – the aristocracy, the gentry, the higher clergy, the emerging merchant class, the universities – were all united with their queen in wanting to live in peace and prosperity. There were a number of significant threats to this hope: from Ireland, from Scotland, from France, and ultimately from Spain. But the greatest threat was from within. As Shakespeare’s great historical dramas would rehearse in the last decade of the reign, England had taken a long time to learn how to be governed. Tudor statecraft had been a hit-and-miss affair with King Edward, much of the time, a child monarch ruled by rival aristocratic cliques every bit as dangerous and unpopular as those who fought in the fifteenth-century civil wars. Mary’s reign had been a disaster of a rather different kind – Mary just was a very bad queen, with poor advisers and worse luck: under her supervision, Ireland erupted into even worse chaos than usual, the French war was lost, the populace at large was poised for a civil war on religious lines. The pageantry of Elizabeth’s reign, from the very beginning, wanted to say that a new page had been turned. But it would require great patience and skill to emerge from the mistakes of the past. Governance was an art, and much would depend upon Elizabeth’s choice of political advisers.

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Men in Power

ONE OF THE
most celebrated titles of a sixteenth-century prose work is John Knox’s
The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
. Indeed, it is one of those works, such as
On Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
, whose titles are so powerful that the contents could never hope to match their promise. Rendered into modern English, the phrase ‘Monstrous Regiment of Women’ would be ‘the unnatural government of women’. For what John Knox was arguing was that the very idea of allowing a woman to rule over men is unnatural – monstrous. ‘To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to His revealed will and approved ordinance and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’
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