All the Queen's Men (24 page)

Ascham possessed beautiful handwriting, so elegant that he was employed by Cambridge University to produce their official correspondence. He was able to pass on to Elizabeth his talent in the art of calligraphy, an ability that is manifestly evident in the documents depicting her handwriting that can be seen today in places such as Hatfield House, the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He was also a passionate advocate of the English language.
The School Master
, to which he devoted the last years of his life, is an excellent example of Ascham's belief in the merits of ‘The Englyshe Tonge', and he did a considerable amount to advance its cause;
Toxophilis
portrays a remarkable contemporary example of Elizabethan English prose, a passionate plea for its more extensive usage which eventually was fulfilled as a result of Shakespeare's literary genius.

In addition to always being short of money, Ascham invariably suffered poor health. He contracted a bad chill in the winter of 1568 while staying up late at night in order to compose a special poem for the Queen. He never recovered. Elizabeth was greatly saddened to learn of the death of someone who had taught her so much and had been one of the great English scholars of her lifetime.

Another leading intellectual who had a profound influence on Elizabeth was Dr John Dee, who had also been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and one of the inaugural Fellows at Trinity College when Henry VIII founded it in 1546. Dee was a remarkable scholar who miraculously managed to combine mathematics, astrology and alchemy, while also finding time to dabble in the mysteries of the occult. He was widely travelled and at various times had visited Antwerp, Venice and Hungary, where he had met and greatly impressed Maximilian, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Dee found favour with many of the European rulers of the day, and it is said that the Tsar of Russia had offered him a post, but this had been graciously declined. While travelling in Europe Dee had encountered three of the most outstanding continental scholars of the day: Abraham Ortelius, Gemma Frisius, the Court Astrologer to Charles V, and most importantly, the illustrious Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, who was to become a great personal friend of Dee. Mercator had devised the first truly modern atlas, one that was to prove invaluable in compiling navigational charts. Dee was able to return to England with the first astronomer's staff and ring, a gift from Frisius, together with two globes that had been constructed by Mercator. These were the first astronomical instruments to be seen in England and were to prove invaluable in the advancement of the knowledge and practice of navigation by the early Elizabethan mariners. Dee is reputed to have taught this art to some of the first English explorers such as Chancellor, Jenkinson, Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert. His eclectic circle of friends also included the chronicler John Stow, antiquary William Camden, and Richard Hakluyt, the author of
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
.

John Dee could well have provided the inspiration for Christopher Marlowe's
Dr Faustus
, and during the reign of Queen Mary had been imprisoned on the suspicion of heresy and attempting to poison the Queen. Miraculously, the intrepid doctor was able to escape indictment of both of these grave charges. In the sixteenth century, the borderline between science and sorcery was often perilously narrow. Sir Walter Ralegh and his circle of friends practised sorcery at his infamous ‘School of the Night', at his home at Sherborne in Dorset.

Lord Robert Dudley and the Earl of Pembroke introduced Dee to Elizabeth, and he was able to find favour with the new sovereign when he selected a propitious date for her coronation, as a result of which she made him her official Court Astrologer. Dee was destined to have a powerful influence over the impressionable monarch for the rest of her reign and was summoned into her presence many times. On one particular occasion, Elizabeth is said to have listened to him in rapt concentration for the best part of three days while he eloquently held forth on the significance of a new comet whose sudden appearance over England had terrified the Court. Elizabeth was also in the habit of visiting Dee at his house in Mortlake beside the River Thames in London.

John Aubrey, the early seventeenth-century antiquary, described Elizabeth's Court Astrologer as having ‘a very fair clear rosy complexion, a long beard as white as milke . . . a gown like an artists with hanging sleeves and a slit. A mighty good man was he.'
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While Aubrey's graphic description is borne out by Dee's portrait which can now be seen in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, not everyone viewed him in such a favourable light. In 1584, while he was travelling in Europe, an angry mob, believing Dee to be a sorcerer, ransacked his house, destroying many of his valuable books and papers in the process. Dee claimed to have the power to turn base metal into gold; he was also a hugely prolific writer and is reputed to have been the first person to use the term ‘British Empire'.

In the 1580s, most of Europe decided to adopt the Gregorian calendar. Dee was commanded by the Queen and her Council to examine the merits of adopting it in England. However, this alternative method of measuring the year had been originated by the Pope in Rome and therefore its introduction in England was violently opposed by the Church, the ultra-Protestant Edward Grindal being Archbishop of Canterbury at the time. This resulted in the nation continuing to use the Julian calendar until 1752, remaining ten days out of step with continental Europe, thereby demonstrating that there is nothing new in England's dislike of perceived interference from the European mainland: ‘The French are wiser than they seem and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are,'
⁴
said that Elizabethan Eurosceptic, Francis Bacon. Although he was born in 1527, Dee was to outlive Elizabeth by more than five years, finally dying in 1608 aged eighty-one, a remarkable age for those days and a truly remarkable man.

John Dee's friend, Richard Hakluyt, came from a family with Flemish origins, his father a lawyer and businessman who was friendly with both William Cecil and Francis Walsingham. Hakluyt acquired his Bachelor and Master of Arts at Christchurch, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney, the hugely talented Elizabethan courtier who was later to be killed at the Battle of Zutphen in Flanders. After coming down from Oxford, Hakluyt took Holy Orders and became Chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris and brother-in-law to the Queen's relative, Lord Howard of Effingham, commander of the English fleet, who fought and defeated the Spanish Armada. It was the discovery of a map lying on a table that led Hakluyt to decide to devote the rest of his life to the study of geography – in the process he became a friend to the great cartographers Mercator and Ortelius. As Hakluyt recalled, ‘. . . it was my happe to visit the chamber of M. Richard Hakluyt, my cosin a Gentlemen of the Middle Temple, well known to you . . . at a time when I found lying open upon his boord certeine bookes of cosmographie with a universall mappe: He seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof, began to instruct my ignorance. . . .'
⁵

Hakluyt was a tremendous patriot, a prime voice in urging English expansion overseas beyond the blue horizon to Africa, the Orient and the New World. He translated the French explorer Jacques Cartier's stirring account of his discoveries in Canada and included these in his
Principal Navigations
. Today Hakluyt is regarded more as an editor and a researcher than an original writer: ‘The silent man, seated in a dark corner, who is content to listen and remember', according to the nineteenth-century author Walter Ralegh, a descendant of the original Elizabethan courtier and Hakluyt's biographer. Richard Hakluyt's
magnum opus
was his magnificent
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
which was first published towards the end of the sixteenth century and dedicated to his patron Sir Francis Walsingham, who had employed him in a variety of activities including that of secret agent. Some one and a half million words portray a vivid contemporary account of the pioneering voyages undertaken by illustrious Elizabethan sea captains, men like Drake, Hawkins, Gilbert and Frobisher as seen through the eyes of the actual seamen involved at the time, the words of those who took part in great adventures and survived to tell the tale: ‘Upon Monday, the second of October 1567. The weather being reasonably faire, our Generall, M. John Hawkins, having commanded all his Captaines and Masters to be in readiness to make saile with him . . .'.
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Hakluyt was the archetypal Renaissance scholar, a man of vision, articulate, acutely inquisitive, passionate about everything he did. He was fluent in an impressive variety of languages and above all was a man who helped to put science into the ancient art of discovery and map-making, which had traditionally involved following a star or gazing at a map with vague terms like ‘here be monsters', conveniently and artistically filling the gaps in the cartographers' knowledge. As that other eminent Elizabethan scholar, Francis Bacon, stated, ‘this proficiency in navigation and discoveries may place also an expectation of the further proficiencies and argumentation of all sciences'.
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Hakluyt's exploits ranged from lecturing in cartography at Oxford University to being appointed the expert geographical adviser to the newly formed East India Company. Most importantly, Hakluyt's brilliant writing superbly portrays the majesty of Elizabeth's reign and the exuberant vitality of her kingdom.

Francis Bacon, the younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's venerable Lord Keeper of The Great Seal, was conceivably the greatest scholar of the age, his dazzling range of attributes undoubtedly make him the essential Renaissance man. His legal expertise enabled him to rival Sir Edward Coke, the most outstanding lawyer in sixteenth-century England, while his effortless command of language has subsequently led some academics to speculate that it was Bacon rather than Shakespeare who was responsible for the works attributed to the Stratford bard, an idea later advanced by the late eighteenth-century writer James Wilmot, in his book
The Baconian Theory
, first published in 1785. Though this idea may be rather fanciful, Francis Bacon was indeed a literary genius, his marvellous ‘Essays' sparkle with wit and wisdom mixed with memorably waspish sentiments such as ‘new nobility is but the act of power, but ancient nobility is the act of time'. This was possibly a not-too-subtle side swipe at his uncle, Lord Burghley, his one-time friend and mentor, who had turned against Bacon thereby thwarting his political ambitions and causing him to join forces with his elder brother Anthony and Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, archrival of both Lord Burghley and his ambitious son Robert Cecil.

Bacon was also to establish an enviable reputation as one of the foremost philosophers of Elizabethan England, while his pioneering concepts on the application of scientific knowledge are succinctly expressed in such seminal works as
The New Atlantis
which was first published in 1626, some time after his political career had been ruined. He had been heavily fined for taking bribes and had even endured a brief spell in the Tower of London, not something that the fastidious Bacon would have enjoyed very much.

Francis Bacon had originally been born in London in 1561 and had studied law at Trinity College, Cambridge, from the tender age of twelve. Today his marble bust can be seen in the college library together with other distinguished members such as fellow scientist Sir Isaac Newton and the poet Alfred Tennyson. Bacon continued his law studies at Gray's Inn in London, which in his day was bordered by green fields. He worked closely with Queen Elizabeth, both in a legal capacity as her learned counsel and as a political adviser. This work gave him an invaluable insight into the intricacies of the Elizabethan Court and its policies, providing valuable information that he was able to convey to his friend and patron, the Earl of Essex, who was seeking to boost his own influence with the Queen at the expense of his deadly rivals, William and Robert Cecil. Essex lobbied both the Queen and William Cecil ceaselessly yet unavailingly in an attempt to secure important political posts for Bacon. Bacon later defended his denouncement of Essex at the latter's treason trial in his book
Apologie, certain imputations concerning the late Earle of Essex
, written in 1604, the year after Elizabeth's death. Bacon's conscience was clear: he felt he had given the reckless Essex more than sufficient warning as to precisely where his foolhardy behaviour would eventually lead. However, the early eighteenth-century poet and satirist Alexander Pope was later to brand Bacon as ‘the wisest, brightest and meanest of mankind'.
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It is perhaps unfortunate that Francis Bacon's political aspirations for high office were to come to nothing during Elizabeth's lifetime, largely because he had elected to hitch his wagon to a rising star destined to plunge so spectacularly back to earth. Bacon's hopes were only to be fulfilled later during the reign of James I and proved short-lived, yet political disgrace belatedly enabled him to parade the full dazzling array of his scholastic ability, achievements that outlive this hugely talented yet often mercurial individual.

Elizabethan scholarship reached new heights with the publication of William Camden's
Britannia
, in 1586, which together with his later
Annals of Queen Elizabeth
, are the impressive works of a man who became headmaster of Westminster School and lived throughout Elizabeth's long and glorious reign.
Britannia
is dedicated to William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, who greatly encouraged Camden's work and always made his extensive library available to him together with access to a wide range of official papers, Burghley being particularly keen that there should be a comprehensive, contemporary account of Elizabeth's reign. The
Annals
proved to be the first truly authoritative biography of Elizabeth, having been written in the early seventeenth century, thus very close to her lifetime.
Britannia
is a panoramic account of the nation as it appeared to Camden's perceptive eye in the second half of the sixteenth century, originally written in Latin as Camden hoped it would circulate widely elsewhere in Europe.
Britannia
is masterly, far-reaching, an academic overview redolent with evocative prose. Camden's obvious love of the English countryside shines out of
Britannia
, the fields of Bedfordshire ‘smelling sweet in summer of the best beans'.
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