The Elizabethans (23 page)

We find here, of course, the origins of what will be English republicanism in the next reign but one. Elizabeth was not an absolute monarch, in the sense that Charles I wished to become. She was reliant on Parliament for money, but also on her ministers for advice. The Elizabethan aristocracy exercised power through their monarch, but it was real power, and it was theirs. We find this fact reflected in Sidney’s
Arcadia
, which as well as being a romance about love, and an adventure story in which knights tilt for honour, and a moral tale in which intelligent people express their belief in rational religion and morality, is also a barely coded political handbook. It is a manifesto of aristocratic political power. The two young men who are at the centre of the story, Pyrocles and Musidorus, are the son and nephew respectively of a good ruler – therefore named Good Rule or Euarchus in Greek. But Arcadia, into which they have strayed in pursuit of love, is ruled over by an irresponsible duke, with the Greek name for king – Basilius – who has to be saved from his own follies by the wise counsel of old Philanax. Sir Philip Sidney’s great-uncle, Northumberland, had been Lord Protector of England. His aunt, Jane Grey, had been queen for a week. His uncle, the Earl of Leicester, lost no opportunities of perpetuating the power and influence of the Dudley family. Cecil, always disliked by the Dudleys, hoped to tap into their power-source by marrying one of his daughters to Philip Sidney. When Anne Cecil was twelve and Sidney was fourteen, Cecil and Sir Henry Sidney drew up a marriage contract between them.
³³
Why this marriage never went ahead remains a mystery. In the event, Anne married the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.

It was a disastrous marriage. Oxford, as well as being a poet (some people absurdly believe him to have been the author of Shakespeare’s plays), was a highly ambitious courtier. He had more or less grown up in Cecil’s household. When he was twenty-three years old, in 1573, it was reported that the Queen ‘delighteth more in his personage, and his dancing, and valiantness than any other’.
³⁴
But he was not the stuff of which real courtiers are made. John Aubrey immortalised him as an essentially comic figure: ‘This Earle of Oxford, making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.’
³⁵
His absences from court were in fact caused by his unfaithfulness to Anne Cecil. Leaving court without permission and fathering illegitimate children caused him to be imprisoned more than once in the Tower. He monstrously accused Anne of having another lover, whom he claimed was the father of their daughter.

The Queen became involved in the terrible wranglings between the couple. Burghley, with considerable heaviness, insisted that Oxford accompany his wife to court and display ‘that love that a loving and honest wife ought to have’ – or supply evidence of her wrongdoing. No such evidence existed. As time went on, Oxford quarrelled with all his friends, including Philip Sidney, fathered a child by one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Anne Vavasour, and his marriage to Anne Cecil existed only in name. It was a serious worry to Burghley that he might lose the royal favour because of it. In 1582, when he was grievously ill, Francis Walsingham came to his bedside to assure him that Elizabeth had commended the marriage of Burghley’s other daughter, Elizabeth, to William Wentworth and ‘used so gracious speeches of me, my wife, and my daughter in such effectual sort, as thereby she hath increased and stablised his liking, as could not by my purse be redeemed: and therefore Her Majesty therein hath increased my daughter’s value above my hability’.
³⁶
The marriage with Wentworth lasted just eight months. He sickened and died aged twenty-three, leaving Elizabeth Cecil a widow at eighteen.

Through all these painful scenes of domestic failure, Burghley continued to exercise his influence on events, and Cecil House was the power-house of Elizabeth’s government. At his desk, Burghley read and wrote hundreds of letters each year. There was barely any public matter, however trivial, in which he did not take an interest – appointments to academic posts, appointments of JPs, matters of legislation coming before Parliament, there was little that escaped his attention. When one sees his spidery, forward-slanting hand, one senses his intelligent and unblinking eye on almost every aspect of life in the England of his day.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of Burghley as a purely political figure. The young William Cecil, who had imbibed the Reformation theology and skills in the Greek language, imparted at Cambridge by Sir John Cheke, was still there, beneath the wrinkled countenance and costly subfusc gown of the sexagenarian master-statesman in Cecil House. The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day had confirmed everything Burghley had been taught at Cambridge to believe about the Church of Rome. As a statesman, he saw it as his primary duty to protect his sovereign, who was God’s anointed servant. Her enemies abroad, and her enemies in England itself, had to be crushed. The great threats – such as that posed by the continued existence of the Scottish queen – were threats not merely to Elizabeth in her person, but to the survival of what Cecil deeply believed to be the true version of the Christian religion.

Elizabeth herself, with her Henry VIII-inspired Anglo-Catholic faith, was less interested in the Reformed theology than Cecil, but when it came to a choice – whether to support the Protestants or the Catholic powers in the Netherlands, for example, or how to treat Catholic rebels at home – she was always guided by Cecil. The Pope’s Bull
Regnans in excelsis
was a fatwa that offered the English no choice but to resist or submit
politically
. The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day showed what the Roman Catholics were capable of doing to their enemies. Whether Elizabeth liked it or not, she and her loyal subjects were now
ipso facto
the Pope’s enemies. Burghley’s policy was simply, and daily, to do anything that strengthened his queen and weakened her enemies. And he remained convinced, deep into the 1570s, that one way of strengthening her was for her to marry.

10

Elizabethan Women

WHEN THE QUEEN
had passed child-bearing age, it could comfort her subjects to make her into a Virgin-Goddess. Until that point had been reached, the country could mythologise its sovereign and figurehead less neatly. It was hard to forget the most basic function of her gender, the fact that she could be, like the country itself in John of Gaunt’s imagination, ‘this teeming womb of royal kings’.
¹

Most of the celebrated historians of the Tudor Age, even into our own day, have been male. It is only fairly recently, in the last couple of generations, that we have become accustomed to imagine what life was like for the female population of Elizabethan England. Mention has already been made of Elizabeth’s learning, and this was something she had in common with a privileged handful of Englishwomen – Mildred, the second wife of William Cecil, with her fondness for reading the early Greek Fathers of the Church in their original tongue; Margaret Parker, who could converse with her husband the archbishop in Latin. Though in the larger towns there were Dames’ Schools at which girls might receive a basic education, they would not have been allowed to attend the newly founded grammar schools, which had sprung up all over England since the Reformation. Learning, for the great majority of women, would only have been seen as a useful accomplishment to make them more charming or useful wives, rather than being something worth pursuing for their own good alone. Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, might have endowed a Cambridge College (for men), but nearly four centuries would pass before that university allowed women to take degrees.

The Elizabethan woman was not necessarily uneducated. In his
Scolemoster
Mulcaster suggests that girls should study drawing, writing, logic, rhetoric, philosophy and languages, as well as housewifery. How many did so is another matter. More than fifty women between the years 1524 and 1640 were published authors, either separately or in anthologies and collections. Elizabeth Carew’s
The Tragedie of Mariam
, Jane Anger’s
Protection for Women
, Rachel Speght’s
A Mouzell for Melastomas
(a spirited reply to the misogynist Joseph Swetnam) show that there were plenty of clever, educated women in England at this period, as would a recitation of such names as Mary Sidney (Philip’s sister), Margaret How Aschman, Jane, Countess of Westmorland, Esther Inglis and Elizabeth Legge.
²
But they were in a minority, as clever people (not to say clever women) always are.

The Queen, as a learned single woman in her thirties, would in no sense have appeared to her female subjects as a role model. Many Englishwomen of her age in the 1570s, when Elizabeth was between thirty-seven and forty-seven, would have been grandmothers. Shakespeare’s Juliet is, as her nurse reminds us, ‘not fourteen’.
³
For Westerners of the twentieth century this would make her a Lolita, far too young to be viewed as marriageable. But for Elizabethans, fourteen was an ideal age to be married. Sir Philip Sidney’s sister Mary became Countess of Pembroke at that age. Compass says to Parson Pilate in Ben Jonson’s
The Magnetick Lady
(1631) that a particular girl is one ‘who strikes the fire of full fourteen, to-day ripe for a husband’.
⁴
The disadvantages of such early marriages were obvious even then. Alexander Niccholes in
A Discourse, or marriage and wiving: and of the greatest Mystery therein contained: How to choose a good wife from a bad
(1615) was worried by ‘forward Virgins’ being married at such an age: ‘the effects that, for the most part, issue thereafter, are dangerous births, diminution of stature, brevity of life and such like, yet all these pains will they adventure for this pleasure’. There would still have been many who would have shared the view expressed in Sir Thomas Elyot’s
The Defence of Good Women
(1545) when Zenobia says she married at twenty, and Candidus says she waited too long.

Modern marriage customs in twenty-first century Europe and America (taking ‘marriage’ here to cover all shared domestic lives, and especially those that involve the bringing up of children) presuppose that the principal protagonists in the household are grown-ups. In Tudor England this is not to be taken for granted. Little as our contemporary morality might like it, this surely explains why so many Elizabethan reflexions upon the married state – whether comic or serious, in plays, handbooks, jokes or sermons – speak of wives as if they were recalcitrant children who need to be kept under control. Very often, they
were
children. As the century progressed, however, the average age for marriage increased.

Modern research into marriage licences in the diocese of Canterbury in the seventeenth century – between 1619 and 1660 – found that the average age for women to marry was twenty-four, and for men twenty-eight. The Elizabethans inherited a tradition of child-marriages and adapted it to a different convention. Whereas medieval and early Tudor people accepted child-marriages, Elizabethans increasingly expected the married couple to take responsibility for their own households, to farm their own plot of land, to run their own business, to be independent. This meant that whereas the landed classes could afford to continue marrying very young, the yeoman, the baker, the shopkeeper, the craftsman would have to wait until he could afford to be master of a household, however modest.
⁵
Marriage, for the huge majority, meant marriage for life, and if life was in many cases shorter, it was not invariably so, and Elizabethans paid as much attention as other generations that married mistakes be kept to a minimum. Elizabethan marriages usually came about in two stages: the espousal or contract, in which the partners (and their families) would agree upon the match, and then the marriage itself.

Espousals could take two forms –
in verbis de futuro
(‘I shall take thee to my wife’) or
in verbis de praesenti
, when the two people would say ‘I do take thee’ or similar words. ‘I N doe willingly promise to marrie thee N. If God will, and I live, whensoever our parents shall thinke good, & meet till which time, I take thee for my only betrothed wife, and thereto plight thee my troth. In the name of the Father, the Sonne, and the Holy Ghost: So be it’ is how a contract
in verbis de praesenti
is set out by Robert Cleaver in his
A Godlie Forme of Household Government
(1598). Once such a formula has been undertaken, although the partners were not yet married in law, the couple could consummate their union. In
Twelfth Night
, Olivia apologises to Sebastian for hurrying along their union, but she wants to become informally espoused in the presence of a priest:

Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well,

Now go with me, and with this holy man,

Into the chantry by; there, before him,

And underneath that consecrated roof

Plight me the full assurance of your faith,

That my most jealous and too doubtful soul

May live at peace.
⁶

In John Webster’s
The Duchess of Malfi
(1623), the Duchess says to Antonio:

I have heard lawyers say, a contract in a chamber

Per verba de presenti is absolute marriage

Bless, heaven, this sacred Gordian, which let violence

Never untrue.

The vagueness during this period about what exactly constituted a legally valid contract between partners is one reason why we find a very low illegitimacy rate in Elizabethan England. There must have been many in the position of the eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare, who found his lover/future wife Anne Hathaway to be pregnant before a formal marriage was solemnised. Whether Shakespeare and Hathaway had undergone an informal espousal or
in verbis de presenti
we do not know. Customs varied in different quarters of the British archipelago, with far more illegitimate children in Gaelic society – either in the Highlands of Scotland or in Ireland.
⁷
Edmund Campion, in his
Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland
, complained of the Irish ‘strumpets’ who were used by noblemen to increase the numbers of descendants carrying their name. ‘He that can bring most of his name into the field, base or other, triumpheth exceedingly; for increase of which name they allow themselves not only whores, but also choice and store of whores. One I hear named which hath (as he called them) more than ten wives in twenty places.’
⁸
In general, Campion thought that the Irish ‘much abased’: