The Elizabethans (9 page)

It was a small country governed by a tiny élite.

The principal officer of Elizabeth’s state and household was the Lord Chancellor, Nicholas Bacon in 1558 (succeeded in turn by Sir Thomas Bromley in 1579, Christopher Hatton in 1587, Sir John Puckering in 1592 and Sir Thomas Egerton in 1596). Many Elizabethan Lords Chancellor also occupied the great medieval administrative office of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.

The major change that Elizabeth made to the way the country was governed was in her elevation of the status of Principal Secretary. Until 1558 this had been an office of the royal household and was not necessarily of any political significance. Elizabeth gave this office to her trusted friend William Cecil and thereafter the Secretary became ‘the natural channel for exercising the Queen’s prerogative for superintending communications between the Crown and the Privy Council and for co-ordinating the activities of the Queen’s foreign secretaries and ambassadors, becoming in effect the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs’.
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This meant, in practice, that from the moment of her accession Elizabeth was an absolute monarch and, for that reason, near-absolute power was exercised by the men in whom she placed the greatest trust.

Two men, from the very beginning of the reign, were of central importance to Elizabeth, and to the Elizabethan Age. Both men were present at Hatfield House to watch Queen Mary’s seal of office, the great emblem of authority, being surrendered, the day after the accession, to the new Queen. But both men, as well as being extremely strong characters in their own rights, were emblems. One was William Cecil, who had already been working as secretary to the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth for weeks at Hatfield House. He would become her Secretary in office and would remain at the heart of office and power in Elizabethan England for the next forty years. The other was Robert Dudley, a young nobleman who had known Elizabeth since childhood, had ridden to Hatfield immediately after Mary I’s death mounted on a snow-white horse and beautifully and extravagantly attired. Dudley was not made a member of the Council in 1558. He was appointed Master of the Horse, a role in the household which ensured that he would need almost daily contact with the Queen. His dark, flirtatious eyes made it natural for her to nickname him ‘Two-eyes’, and he would often write to her signing himself simply
ōō
. But his were not the only sharp eyes at court.

The older man, Cecil, was measured, calculating, seeming older than his thirty-eight years. His sharp, dark, intelligent eyes beneath those quizzical, almost triangular eyelids saw everything, gave little away. His very long, almost anteater nose was a symbol of his ability to sniff out intrigue, mischief and danger to his royal heroine. He had studied at Cambridge with the scholar John Cheke. He had married Cheke’s sister, though she was only the daughter of a poor wine-seller and it was, as Mandell Creighton drily remarked, ‘the only trace of romance in Cecil’s life’.
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She died after only three years and his second wife, Mildred, was a decidedly unromantic-looking woman, with a thin humourless face, a rat-trap mouth and a pointed chin – the daughter of a lawyer and courtier. From his mid-twenties William Cecil had played the dangerous role of a public servant to the Tudor dynasty. He had been in the entourage of Protector Somerset in the reign of Edward VI. At Edward’s court he learned the business of government, and came to love it. When Elizabeth acceded to the throne, Cecil, her Secretary and right-hand man, knew intimately how government worked, and he would be the man, more than any other, who taught her the day-to-day business of statecraft. A trimmer he was, when political expediency required it. A coward he was not. He had the political ability to take risks for genuinely held principles and the political nous to abandon, or
appear
to abandon, his principles if his neck was in danger.

Such was his commitment to the Protestant cause that, when King Edward died, Cecil had been one of those who swore allegiance, not to Queen Mary, but to Lady Jane Grey. With the collapse of the attempted Protestant coup, however, in the summer of 1553, Cecil had cunningly managed to distance himself from the hardcore Jane-ites. He submitted himself to Queen Mary with ‘all lowliness that any heart can conceive’. Unafraid to ditch his former friends at this point, he had told Mary that he might ‘feel some difference from others that have more plainly offended and yet be partakers of her highness’s bountifulness and grace’. He kissed Queen Mary’s hand (‘a tiresome bluestocking’ according to the Spanish Ambassador de Feria).
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Feria was right when he wrote in his dispatches back to Spain that Cecil would be ‘secretary to Madame Elizabeth. He is said to be a virtuous man, but a heretic.’
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Quite so.

Cecil was part of the delegation sent to bring back Reginald Pole (pronounced Pool), the great-nephew of Edward IV, to serve as (England’s last – as it happened) Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. As high steward of Cardinal Pole’s manor of Wimbledon in Surrey, Cecil and his wife Mildred were careful to be seen going to confession and receiving Communion at Easter. Cecil let it be known that he had paid for the bread, wine, tapers and oil necessary for the Easter ceremonies at Wimbledon, and Lady Mildred very publicly went down the Thames by barge to St Mary Arches Church in the City of London to hear Pole preach. Yet although Cecil was a consummate politician, the Catholics were undeceived, and there was never really any variation in Cecil’s core beliefs. These were: the need for a stable monarchy; the forwarding of the Protestant Reformation; the protection of the realm of England from incursion by the French. From these stemmed all his patient exposition of foreign and domestic policy to his new queen – his suspicions of Scotland and his growing obsession with a desire to get rid of the Scottish queen; his preparedness to form alliances with the Catholic power of Spain, if it kept France in check; his suspicion of the Catholic nobility. Every day of his life Mr Secretary Cecil, as he had now become, was Elizabeth’s political manager. Especially over the question of Scotland, her apparent lack of caution made him consider resignation. But in reality he was the rock on which her strength as a political leader of genius depended. His spidery handwriting survives in hundreds – possibly thousands – of memos and documents, ranging from the approval of minor appointments to major statements of policy, from draft letters to the Queen of theatrical sycophancy to tersely destructive character-assessments of his rivals, either to her affection or, same thing, to political power. The spidery hand is the reverse of weak. It is forward-thrusting, indicative of an absolute and very male confidence. There is, in Cecil’s life, much deft use of retreat as well as advance; an astute mastery of the art of when to bow, as well as when to make a display or when to insist. But never for an instant do we sense him doubting himself. He had the ultimate strutting male self-confidence disguised beneath the Polonius manners, the quasi-clerical dark gowns and scholar’s black caps.

He was supremely and unmistakably Welsh, the most successful member of what Dr David Starkey calls ‘the Tudor Taffia’.

It was a good time to be Welsh. Elizabeth possessed immediately recognisable Welsh features. On market day in a Welsh town you will pass between ten or twenty women with something of a ‘look’ of Queen Elizabeth. She herself owed her temperamental similarity to ‘my good grandfather’, as she called that canny Welshman Henry VII. Elizabeth’s household was dominated by the Welsh. As a young princess she had entrusted her cofferer, Welshman Thomas Parry, with some of her closest secrets and missions – he was the man who had to defend her to the Council when she was accused of improper conduct with Lord Admiral Seymour. Parry’s daughter Blanche was chief Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber, one of the Queen’s closest intimates. Her apothecary was Welshman Hugh Morgan.

The Tudor Age saw the rise of the great Welsh dynasty of Herberts. The legitimate line of Herbert Earls of Pembroke had perished in the Wars of the Roses. Henry VIII had elevated the illegitimate line, making them Earls of Pembroke of the second creation and settling them at Wilton, where we shall meet them later in this book – the 2nd Earl, and his wife Mary, sister of Sir Philip Sidney, the nexus of a great literary world; writers and poets themselves and patrons of such as Ben Jonson, George Chapman and Shakespeare. The larger family produced Lord Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert the poet-priest, and many less famous but distinguished figures.

And in this age so conducive to the advancement of Welshmen we see the rise of the Cecils, or Sitsylt as they still spelt the name when David Sitsylt resided at Alltyrynys, a Welsh-speaking area of south Herefordshire. He had done well out of the Wars of the Roses and fought on the side of his fellow Welshman, Henry Tudor, at the Battle of Bosworth (1485). He settled at Stamford in Lincolnshire where, a little mysteriously, he accumulated considerable riches. His son Richard Cecil continued the rise in wealth and fortune; he was a minor figure at the court of Henry VIII, present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold as a ‘yeoman of the chamber’; Keeper of Warwick Castle and – eventually – a Member of Parliament. He had a house in Cannon Row, Westminster, and estates in Rutland and Lincolnshire.

Like many members of the new rich in the Tudor Age, the Cecils had profited from the coming of Protestantism. When the nunnery, the priory and the friary in Stamford were wound up at the behest of Henry VIII, Richard Cecil was able, in 1544, to buy most of their land at a concessionary price. The Cecils literally had a vested interest in the Reformation. Richard sent his son William Cecil to Cambridge, where he came under the Protestant influence of John Cheke, followed by a spell studying law at Gray’s Inn in London, before entering the service of the Protector Somerset in the reign of Edward VI.

Costive, devious, patient, the master of detail, all but humourless, and dependably sensible, William Cecil was the lynchpin of Elizabeth’s administration. And as a male – and one who dreaded above all things an undoing of the Reformation and the inevitable takeover by Mary, Queen of Scots, and the French, and the Pope – Cecil was the most persistent of those voices that urged the young Queen to marry and to produce an heir. This would undoubtedly have been the ‘sensible’ course of action, though as we have seen, in our reflections upon John Knox, marriage would mean subservience or compromise with some foreign power. For so long as she did not marry, Elizabeth could not sustain her emotional life by sensible political deliberations with that dry stick Cecil alone.

Like a great artist, Queen Elizabeth was a multifaceted personality. The men and women who were important in her life drew out different aspects of her mercurial nature, and almost became symbols of her self-contradictions. If her realm, and her court, depended for their security on the patience, common sense, piety, deviousness and doggedness of Cecil, they found much of their colour, exuberance, callowness, energy and display exemplified in the figure of Robert Dudley – Lord Robert Dudley as he would become, as soon as he was able to reclaim the titles of which the previous queen had deprived him.

For his father, John, the Duke of Northumberland, had been executed for treason on 22 August 1553 by Mary Tudor, for attempting to place on the throne of England his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey. The children of aristocrats arraigned for treason are automatically stripped of their titles. John Dudley had effectively been in charge of Edward VI’s government, and it made sense to speak of the Dudleys as ‘the uncrowned Kings of England’.
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Guildford Dudley – Robert’s brother – would have become King, had the coup been successful that attempted to make Guildford’s wife, Lady Jane, the Protestant queen. Guildford, like his father Duke John, paid the price with execution. And on Palm Sunday 1554 the Princess Elizabeth was brought to the Tower of London and made – under vigorous protest – to pass through Traitors’ Gate, although she denied any part in the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger, which (in the absence of Lady Jane Grey) had tried to make Elizabeth the Protestant queen.

When she was imprisoned in the Tower she was twenty-one years old, very much enfeebled by a recent illness and reduced to a nervous collapse. When her frail condition was reported to the Council, the young Elizabeth was permitted to get fresh air and exercise by walking upon the leads of the roof of the Bell Tower where she was immured. Tiptoeing between her armed escort in the narrow trough between the battlements, on the one side, and the gables of the King’s House and the Yeoman Gaolers’ house on the other, she would have been able to look out over London, the unbuilt-upon stretches of Thames shoreline and the clear stretches of the Essex marshes. As she turned, however, she would be only a few feet away from the ever-locked door of the Beauchamp Tower, where Queen Mary had imprisoned the surviving sons of John Dudley – John, former Viscount Lisle, Earl of Warwick; Ambrose, who would inherit these titles after John was executed; Henry; and Robert. To beguile the time before he was beheaded, John carved a pareil bordered with leaves and flowers and representing the heraldic beasts that had supported their former devices: the bear and the ragged staff, the double-tailed lion.

Yow that these beasts do wel behold and se

May deme with ease wherefore her made they be

with borders eve wherein [there may be found]

4 Brother’s names who list to serche the ground.

He carved roses for Ambrose, honeysuckle for Henry, gillyflowers for Guildford and oak leaves (Latin
robur
= oak) for Robert. The brothers in the Tower were under sentence of death for fourteen months until Philip II, Mary’s husband, persuaded her to release them.

There were many bonds that tied Elizabeth and Robert Dudley together. He was electrifyingly attractive – tall, dark, dashing and with the unashamed braggartry of the ‘wide boy’. He dressed fashionably and extravagantly. In later years he admitted, ‘I have lived always above any living I had.’
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In youth he had already developed the exuberant dress sense that we find in an order to Antwerp in the late 1570s: ‘touching the silks I wrote about, I wish you to take up and stay for me 4,000 crowns worth of crimson and black velvet and satins and silvers of other colours. And if there be any good cloth of tissue or of gold or such other pretty stuff, stay for me to the value of £300 or £400, whatever the charge shall be . . .’
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He dazzled, and added to the young Queen Elizabeth’s early court a fizz and an air of danger that it would certainly have lacked, if it had been dominated entirely by Cecil or by the old aristocrats on the Council. Deeper, perhaps, than the sexual frisson that Elizabeth and Dudley enjoyed exhibiting to shocked or prurient old observers was the sense of what they had been through together during Mary I’s reign. Elizabeth would say that she had been Daniel in the lion’s den while her unsympathetic sister was on the throne. Even if she and Dudley did not actually meet during the nine weeks of Elizabeth’s imprisonment in the Tower (she was later transferred to effectual house-arrest at Woodstock), it was a shared experience. During the years when Cecil had been a trimmer to the Catholic regime of Mary, Dudley had been a marked man, and Elizabeth a marked woman. It had only been King Philip II’s desire to build up the Anglo-Spanish alliance (against France) that had tempered Queen Mary’s implacable distrust and saved Elizabeth and Robert Dudley from the block. They could both live from now on like birds that had escaped the snare of the fowler.