All the Queen's Men (28 page)

Robert Peake was another prolific Elizabethan artist who maintained a considerable studio where he employed a large number of assistants; he was later to flourish under James I. It was Peake who was to produce the celebrated
Procession to Blackfriars
, which depicts Elizabeth being carried in splendour by a number of adoring courtiers, accompanied by Garter Knights including Lord Howard of Effingham, the Earl of Cumberland, Edmund Sheffield, later Earl of Mulgrave, and Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury carrying the Sword of State. William Segar was another Elizabethan artist who was later to benefit from the favours of King James, being made Garter King of Arms in 1603 and subsequently knighted by Elizabeth's Scottish successor. Segar's great masterpiece is the Ermine Portrait, a painting of the Queen created shortly after the epic defeat of the Spanish Armada, which can also now be found at Hatfield House.

An appreciation of Elizabethan art has always been inhibited by being sandwiched between the eras of Holbein and Van Dyck; it is only in recent years that it has gained the recognition it fully deserves as an outstanding period of English art, largely through the efforts of Sir Roy Strong.

The Queen's connection with architecture is more tangential as she declined to build any royal palaces during her reign or commission any great public buildings on account of the expense to the royal purse. Elizabeth was not to provide the nation with any English equivalent of Versailles or Fontainebleau. At the same time, the Church had also ceased to provide patronage for the visual arts as it had in medieval times, the reasons being a combination of economic and theological considerations. Elizabeth's father's actions in the dissolution of the monasteries had left Church revenues severely depleted, a state of affairs that Elizabeth was to maintain as she diverted funds away from the Church in order to reward favoured courtiers. At the same time, rigid Protestant intellectual thinking progressively came to associate the visual arts with idolatry, resulting in both Church and Court taking a far greater interest in music and literature than painting, sculpture or architecture.

Architecture did not have the same standing in Elizabethan society as it enjoys today, nor did it attract the same level of interest as in continental Europe. Instead, architecture was regarded more as a craft, though Elizabethan craftsmen enjoyed a far greater status than the present day. The term ‘architect' was little used in the sixteenth century: it was the master mason who drew up the plans and supervised the construction of buildings under the eagle eye of an owner who invariably would constantly change his mind while construction was under way. In Tudor times, there was no formal training for becoming an architect – even a century later, Christopher Wren, who had been the Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University when Charles II appointed him to be Surveyor of the Royal Works, was effectively his chief architect but still using a title which dated from the Tudor era.

The Renaissance in the visual arts had been slow to arrive in England, again primarily because of the actions of King Henry VIII. After the break with Rome, it was no longer advisable either to journey to Italy or to be seen to be influenced by ideas from a Catholic country. Conversely, no major continental architect was likely to risk papal wrath by accepting commissions in England, thereby jeopardizing potential employment in his own country. So while King François I was able to entice the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Serlio to France, no foreign architect of comparable note dared to venture across the English Channel. These factors continued during the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth: it was left to a young set designer named Inigo Jones, working in the theatre at the end of her reign, finally to introduce Renaissance architecture permanently to England in the seventeenth century.

Though the prospects for architectural advancement in England did not therefore appear auspicious, significant building activity did occur in Elizabeth's kingdom for a completely different reason. A favourable combination of peaceful conditions and more broad-based wealth existed within England during the first half of the Queen's reign. This meant that wealthy inhabitants no longer needed to defend themselves in a castle or fortress and a considerable number of recently self-made men wished to demonstrate their newly acquired wealth and social standing to society in an appropriate and instantly recognizable manner. Consequently, magnificent new country houses came into existence, not so much as an expression of architectural reverence but as status symbols par excellence for all to see and admire, resulting in the creation of Burghley in Lincolnshire, Longleat and Corsham Court in Wiltshire, Derbyshire's Hardwick Hall and Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire. These splendid houses were financed by ‘new money', acquired through prosperous Tudor times after a considerable amount of land and building material had become available subsequent to the dissolution of the monasteries. Elizabeth's prosperous courtiers continued to build these great houses out of the wealth which she had helped them acquire. They hoped that they might gain that ultimate social cachet, a visit from the Queen, so that they could entertain her in suitably sumptuous style. She liked to live well, particularly at somebody else's expense, and encouraged this egotistical line of thinking to her own advantage. Thus Sir Christopher Hatton built Holdenby in Northamptonshire, Lord Burghley constructed Theobolds in Hertfordshire and the Earl of Leicester updated Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, virtually as additional royal palaces where their beloved Queen could be royally entertained. The Earl once entertained Elizabeth at Kenilworth for nearly three weeks of continual feasting and pageantry; on another occasion the Queen spent almost two weeks at Theobolds as Lord Burghley unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the sovereign to appoint his son Robert to be her Secretary of State. The Queen visited Theobolds on more than a dozen occasions during her time on the throne.

Elizabeth became well accustomed to visiting her wealthy courtiers:

Her Highness hath done honour to my poor house by visiting me, and seemed much pleased at what we did to please her. My son made her a fair speech, to which she did give most gracious reply. The women did dance before her, while the cornets did salute from the gallery, and she did vouchsafe to eat two morsels of rich comfit-cake and drank a small cordial from a golden cup.'
²

Thus wrote Sir Robert Sidney after one of Elizabeth's visits to Penshurst Place in Kent, his description fully conveying the pleasure and excitement of entertaining the monarch at home.

Elizabeth's successor, James I, was later to fall in love with Theobolds, which by then had been inherited by Sir Robert Cecil following the death of his father, the King acquiring it in exchange for Hatfield. Cecil replaced the old Tudor palace with the magnificent edifice seen today using the designs of Robert Lyminge and possibly Inigo Jones. Cecil never lived there himself as it was not completed during his lifetime.

Thus Renaissance architecture crept into England virtually by the back door, in a rather oblique yet nevertheless effective manner, the Queen having stimulated a widespread desire among her most prominent and wealthy courtiers to build in order to impress. Compared to earlier private residences, these new homes for the
nouveaux riches
were enormous, huge prestigious glittering palaces built out of faced stone or brick rather than the half-timbered domestic buildings of earlier times. Like their owners they were flamboyant, brimming with confidence, and marvellous expressions of the mood of the nation in the halcyon years of Elizabeth's time on the English throne. Three key examples – Longleat, Hardwick Hall and Wollaton Hall – are the work of one man, Robert Smythson, who has only recently achieved the recognition he so richly deserves. Longleat, now the home of the 7th Marquess of Bath, is widely regarded as an outstanding example of English Renaissance architecture, its exterior remaining virtually identical to the time the Queen visited its original owner Sir John Thynne in 1574. The magnificent tapestries in the Great High Chamber and Long Gallery at Hardwick were originally purchased the year before the defeat of the Armada. Elizabeth never visited Hardwick though a fine portrait of her, attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, hangs in the Long Gallery.

Smythson built across the English landscape between the early 1560s and 1614, the year of his death at nearly eighty. His work was then continued by his son John, and grandson Huntingdon, for a further three-dozen years. Smythson first achieved prominence when he came to Longleat after it had been devastated by fire in the spring of 1568. He had been recommended to Sir John Thynne by the Queen's master mason Humphrey Lovell: ‘According to my promes I have sent unto yowe this bearer Robert Smythson, freemason, who of laytt was with Master Vice Chamberlaine, not doubting hem but to be a man fett for your worshipe.'
³
Smythson virtually single-handedly personified the development of Elizabethan architecture as he constructed Longleat, Hardwick and Wollaton, together with other masterpieces such as Worksop Manor for the Earl of Shrewsbury, whom the Queen had appointed the gaoler of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was also the fourth and last husband of the formidable Bess of Hardwick, the creator of Hardwick Hall.

During Smythson's lifetime, architecture in Elizabethan England evolved from a mere imitation of the continental Renaissance, ‘after the Italian modell',
⁴
to a more robust style which established an essentially English identity, blending the classical concepts of the Renaissance with more traditional Late Perpendicular features dating from the end of the Middle Ages. Houses such as Burton Agnes in Yorkshire and Montacute in deepest Somerset reflected this more national expression of architectural endeavour and displayed the confidence and sense of patronism that Elizabeth had created in her kingdom towards the end of the sixteenth century. This revival in Gothic interest intensified in the last quarter of Elizabeth's reign, as instanced in the popularity of jousting tournaments, the publication of Spenser's
The Faerie Queene
and Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia
together with Gower's neo-medieval
Armada Portrait
of the Queen. This almost Hollywood-style fantasy, which embraced so enthusiastically the concepts of medieval chivalry, even led to the building of mock castles such as Lulworth Castle in Dorset and Bolsover in Derbyshire, finally climaxing in the extravagant style of the Jacobean period subsequent to Elizabeth's death in 1603.

England had sniffed the cool breeze of Renaissance architecture and then firmly shut the door again in order to retreat happily once more into a nostalgic past, something which in architectural matters the nation has tended to do ever since. It was left to Inigo Jones to revive Renaissance interest much later in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Robert Smythson made a decisive mark across the landscape by creating some of the greatest houses in England today – it could be said that English architecture came into its own in Elizabeth's time as it began to establish a truly distinctive national identity, instead of slavishly imitating continental trends.

The rapid rise in educational standards across England during Elizabeth's reign had a particularly significant impact on literature and drama. The Queen and her Council had made considerable efforts to improve standards of literacy across England in order to facilitate the reading of the Bible on a far wider scale. Both the Old and New Testaments had been published in English and their contents made readily available in every parish church throughout the nation. The translation of the Bible was itself a literary masterpiece, and its creation was the publishing sensation of Tudor England. At the same time, the Queen's determination to ensure that its contents reached the widest possible audience, coupled with her continuing actions to improve her citizens' learning abilities, made them anxious to read as much as possible. Technological advancement in printing facility created a print culture that had much the same impact on Elizabethan society as the Internet in the latter half of the twentieth century. Suddenly, a huge amount of European literature became available in England as both scholars and authors were able to read Italian drama and French poetry. This happy state of affairs considerably enriched English cultural life and had a profound influence on the creative minds of Elizabethan England, particularly poets and playwrights as they devoured the latest work of their continental counterparts. Shakespeare for one was to benefit considerably from this situation, being always on the lookout for raw material that he could rapidly recycle into yet another masterpiece. Virtually all Shakespeare's comedies and some of his tragedies were largely based on Italian material which had been translated into French and then become freely available in England. So
Romeo and Juliet
,
The Merchant of Venice
and
Othello
were all drawn from Italian novellas, while Petrarch inspired the Roman plays such as
Julius Caesar
and Holinshed provided material for the great historical dramas such as
Henry V
and
Richard III
: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York. . . .'
⁵

Elizabethan dramatists were not impeded by the laws of copyright and completely uninhibited by any thoughts of plagiarism. Rival versions of
Richard III
and
Henry V
ran happily at adjoining theatres and there was at least one version of both
Hamlet
and
Romeo and Juliet
in existence before those now associated with Shakespeare, who displayed no qualms in taking memorable phrases from other sources. Thus Antony and Cleopatra's ‘. . . barge she sat in, like a burnished throne . . .' is essentially Sir Thomas More's translation of Petrarch transposed into verse. Elizabethan audiences placed far less importance on originality than today – style and sheer entertainment value were the qualities they most appreciated.