Quarrel with the King (11 page)

Roger Ascham, the humanist and educationalist, correspondent of Anne Parr, had described the men of the first earl's generation, admiringly, as “grave, steadfast, silent of tongue, secret of heart.” Perhaps, in his shouting tempers, those words do not quite fit the first earl, but the seriousness and secrecy of purpose, the care with which the willow had to bend with the wind, the self-limitation, the imposition of will: all of that describes the making of the Pembroke fortunes; and all of it was transformed in the following generation into something that was very nearly its opposite.

You can see what happens in the portraiture. The shape of people's mouths, from the tight drawn line in the world depicted by Holbein, the unforgiving straightforwardness of eye and jaw, the sense that each face is a mask over a mind of fixed intent, gives way, particularly in the second half of Elizabeth's reign, to something far less certain. The faces portrayed by the Elizabethan miniaturists turned from that unaccommodating and manly blankness, the defended façade of a calculating mind, to something subtler, more nuanced, and more penetrable, colored by doubt and delicacy, a feminization of the ideal. Men's clothes became gay and brilliant; shoulders were no longer held foursquare to the viewer; a doubting finger rose to the lips; the sobriety and resistance of the difficult years had been left behind. Fineness replaced assertion as the definition of nobility. The wars, threats of war, revolts, and religious struggles engaged in by the makers of dynasties in the years of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary now became
play wars in the ever more elaborate shows of tiltyard and tournament, even longed-for wars, wars not as the necessary assertion of social and political dominance but as the fulfillment of personal destiny.

Life for the Elizabethan élite was strung between these ideals: the elegance of an existence without war, increasingly nostalgic for the days of chivalry, combined with a sense that sweetness was not enough, that the world had turned away from manliness and truth and toward the honeyed, jewelled toys, the pearl-embroidered doublets, the glamour houses from which the lights at night glimmered through the branches of the surrounding woods “not unlike the beams of the Sun through the crannels [crevices] of a wall.” The medium for any quarrel with authority had moved from the reality of armies and rebellion to the realms of art and elegant display.

The height of this Elizabethan dream-glory was the moment in 1575 when the queen went to visit Kenilworth Castle, decorated by her favorite and sometime lover, the Earl of Leicester, and lit up like a liner sailing through the Warwickshire woods:

At its most self-loving moments, it seemed as if the sun had come to rest in Elizabethan England, to spend the night there, its beams steal
ing out from the bedroom windows and into the surrounding night, illuminating it like the candles and torches at a feast.

At the end of September 1574, Elizabeth came to Wilton, and Wilton put on its most entrancing show. A full five miles away from the house, Henry Pembroke met her in her carriage out on the beautiful downland grass, “accompanyed with many of his honourable and worshipfull friends, on a fayre, large, and playne hill, having a good band of men in all their livery coates.” As a boy, Henry had been there when his father had done the same for Philip of Spain, en route to his wedding with Mary Tudor. Henry knew what to do:

This was landscape as theater, the cast cleverly disappearing behind the scenes, only to appear, magically, at the next glorious display. As the queen arrived at the house, riding in through the gateway to the first outer courtyard,

It might have looked like the assembling of the affinity, the great gathering of the magnate's forces, the reenactment of noble power, gracefully welcoming a sovereign; but everyone would have known the reality. Henry was a functionary. His offers to raise his troops for the defense of the kingdom would not be taken up by the Privy Council. He received letters from them telling him to attend more closely to his duties in Wales, was instructed “to reside half the year at Ludlow”—the headquarters of royal government in the Welsh marches—an instruction Henry resented “as though I wanted discretion to discharge the like trust which had been committed to all others [who had held the post previously]; or were unworthie to have any regard had of my health.”

All he really wanted was “some princelie bountie,” which he didn't really need and which never came. In these letters one can see something that might otherwise feel quite intangible: the growth of the state, the concentration of power in the hands of the crown, and the converting of the aristocracy into agents of regal power.

Meanwhile, the Wilton show rolled on, with the sugared crust over the rather different underlying realities. “Her Highnesse lay at Wilton house that Friday night, the Saturday and Sunday nightes following;
and on Monday after dinner her grace removed to Salisbury; during all which time her majesty was both merry and pleasant.”

That final phrase carries within it the expectation that she might have been neither. Elizabeth had been schooled in the same world where the first earl had learned the lessons of survival. Her enormous and defended authority, reserving all options from foreigners and rivals for power, whether in England or abroad, was the great iceberg around which the world of Arcadia was framed. Arcadia looked for openness, mutuality, and a sense of power residing not in the crown but in the balanced organism of the commonwealth, of which the crown was merely the head.

The first earl had been appointed in 1553 to the office of warden and keeper of the park of Clarendon, to the east side of Salisbury, “that delicious parke (which was accounted the best in England),” according to Aubrey, as well as launder, or keeper, of the grazing there and lieutenant of the conies, the keeper of the rabbits. Henry had inherited the post, and the entire party went over there at the weekend. It had been the queen's decision.

The atmosphere of this hunting party was not the red-cheeked, pink-coated high spirits we might associate it with now. There was
something much more consciously elevated about this Elizabethan hunt, a heightening of the world rather than a coarsening of it, as if on the hunting field, or at least in the huge hunting world of the Wiltshire Downs and their long horizons, one could taste some element of an Arcadian reality.

Inside the park, the pursuit and killing of the delicate fallow deer—an animal from the east, which had been kept in parks in Persia when England was little but mud and wildwood, and which had traveled to Europe via Minoan Crete and Norman Sicily—was an engagement with nature on the most refined and feminine of levels. Here, with bow and arrow, is where the women of the household, or the unathletic and scholarly men, would pursue the hunt, often shooting deer that had been driven by men and hounds into convenient corners for them. They might not even engage in the hunt itself, but simply watch as the animals were killed before them.

The hunting park was in that way conceived as a place of delicious femininity, full of an erotic charge, heightened by its sense of enclosure, of a nature shut in but still quite wild. It was never more seductively or entrancingly expressed than by Shakespeare's slightly fat, slightly old, slightly overheating Venus, trying again and again to persuade her lovely young beardless Adonis to enter the sweetness of the enclosure she had to offer. She is lying next to him on a primrose bank.

To that extent, deliciousness was what the park was for. It was a place full of the ambiguities of Arcadia—power and delight, freedom and control, simplicity and sophistication—all overlapping and intersecting in the richest possible cultural landscapes. Every aspect of that Arcadian complex would have been in play when the queen came to be merry at Wilton, and in the rainy enclosures of Clarendon Park. The earl was merely her ranger there, her servant. But he derived huge income from the post, one, anyway, that he had inherited from his father. He was in control but he was there to serve her. He provided the deer for her to shoot at, but the deer were hers anyway, his hounds her hounds, his standing her standing. His need of her was more than hers of him. He might have been surrounded by hundreds of men in his livery, but he wore her collar; she certainly didn't wear his (although she did like to wear, on occasion, a miniature of Robert Cecil, her Secretary in her last years, on her shoe).

And yet, overlying this picture of dominance, which would be less nuanced if Elizabeth had been a man, was a small charged theater of the erotic, of Diana the huntress queen, her taunting and powerful virginity somehow set in play by her role as huntress, a merging and muddling of genders and potencies. James I expressly forbade his queen, Anne, from hunting deer, but a queen regnant was different. She was, in her womanliness, even more removed from those around her than a king would be. Perhaps because of the necessary distance to be kept between male power brokers and her body, any sense of intimacy with her power was stilled at birth. No man could get close
enough to be anything less than emasculated in her presence. And that denial of access to power was one of the conditions in which an appetite for Arcadia—which was the absence of tyranny—would thrive.

The Countess of Pembroke's elder brother Philip Sidney was a proud, clever, often slightly touchy, ambitious, well-traveled, fiercely protestant, ingenious, funny, storytelling, highly educated, charming, and occasionally violent man. He once told his father's secretary that he would “thruste my Dagger into yow” because the secretary had been opening the young man's letters. But he was a complex figure, and Dr. Muffet, his friend and the Pembrokes' physician at Wilton, thought Sidney “possessed a gentle, tender disposition.” One thing Sidney hated was hunting, thinking it an unnecessary and tyrannical act of brutality. According to his friend Edmund Spenser, he was capable of melancholy but he was also “made for merriment/Merily masking both in bowre and hall.”

He had been born in 1554 and was his father's treasured son. As a young man he had swum into the mainstream of English cultural life. Sir Walter Raleigh; Raleigh's half brother the adventurer and explorer Humphrey Gilbert; Dr. Dee, the great mathematician and cartographer of Elizabethan England; the historian William Camden; Richard Hakluyt, the chronicler of English expansionism across the world ocean; Francis Walsingham, the Protestant zealot and spymaster; the poets Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, and Edward Dyer—all were part of Sidney's circle, which was literate, literary, politically and materially ambitious, highly Protestant, courtly, and chivalric. Sidney had traveled through Europe, where he had fallen in love with the works of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese and had himself painted in the modern Italian style, and across northern Europe, where had conversed at length with Protestant princes and scholars as if he were their equal. It was the training for a life of significance.

But Sidney wasn't much liked at court and was distrusted by the
sage heads around the queen for an immoderate turn of mind, a readiness to argument, and an inflated idea of his own importance, derived from his connections to his uncle the Earl of Leicester and from the respectful treatment he had received from Protestant leaders abroad. They saw in him possibilities of an Englishman who might lead England into the religious wars against the Roman Catholic powers of the Continent. Nothing could have been more unwelcome to the queen.