The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (8 page)

If you reach fifty, you are one of the lucky ones. This is the age at which Elizabethans start to describe one another as ‘old’.
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That doesn’t mean people of fifty are frail; if you live to thirty, you can expect to live to sixty.
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At fifty you will be expected to work just as hard as you always did, and men up to sixty are expected to fight in the militia. At fifty many of your generation will be dead, and even if you do not feel old, you are certainly old-fashioned in your tastes and habits. Men grow physically weaker. A woman may acquire a reputation as a ‘wise woman’ from about the age of fifty. At sixty, you are definitely regarded as old.

Many factors influence survival beyond sixty. Wealth is one – poor people die younger due to the cost of fuel, food and medical help. The countess of Desmond, Katherine Fitzgerald, is said to have walked to London with her ninety-year-old daughter in 1587, and will supposedly die after falling out of a nut tree early in the next reign, at the age of 140. She is indeed an old lady, but hardly any more than a hundred, if the truth be told.
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But wealth in itself is not a guarantee of long life. In Norwich in 1570 there are five paupers in their nineties
and two who claim to be over a hundred.
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Richard Carew declares that in Cornwall ‘eighty or ninety years is ordinary in every place … one Polzew, lately living, reached unto 130, a kinsman of his to 106’.
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Whether you believe these extremes or not, it is evident that Elizabethan people
can
live to be centenarians.

Social Order

William Harrison is of the opinion that there are four sorts of men in England: gentlemen, prosperous townsmen, countrymen (yeomen, husbandmen and labourers) and artificers (craftsmen). His contemporary, Thomas Wilson, who also writes a description of England a few years later, states that there are five types: nobles, townsmen, yeomen, artisans and countrymen; and he further divides these groupings into smaller sections, according to title, income and land ownership.
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From this alone you can see that the social order is not simple. Some knights are richer than lords; a rich husbandman can be more respectable than a poor yeoman; and a spinster born into an ancient gentry family with a coat of arms might look down on a merchant with ten times as much income. Class distinctions in England are a little like the age brackets of ‘young’ and ‘old’ – self-perception does not always agree with general perception, and only the extremes can be described without fear of contradiction. One thing is certain: the queen is without peer at the top of the whole pile – in terms of social respectability, wealth, authority and divine grace.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

The Swiss visitor Thomas Platter writes of the queen in 1599:

The English esteem her not only as their queen but as their God, for which reason three things are prohibited on pain of death. Firstly none may enquire whether she is still a virgin, for they hold her too holy to admit of doubt. Secondly no one may question her government or estates, so completely is she trusted. And lastly it is forbidden on pain of death to make enquiries as to who is to succeed her on her decease, for fear that if it were known, this person in his lust for government might plot against the queen’s life. For they love their queen and fear her mightily, for she has ruled her kingdom for so long and kept the peace against all schemers; nor can she bear any other person besides herself to be popular with the people.
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It is a revealing description in many ways. Platter stresses how much the people
love
their queen, and at the same time how much they
fear
her. Her status is compared to that of a divine being and yet there is evidence of the queen’s insecurity: not only is she unable to bear the thought of anyone else being more popular than her, but she will not tolerate discussion of her successor in case it leads to a threat to her life. Her position is delicate, occupying seemingly contradictory positions.

Elizabeth is the second regnant queen of England, following her half-sister Mary who reigned from 1553 to 1558. Her kingdom includes Wales, the Channel Islands, large parts of Ireland (despite a rebellion there in 1593) and, later in the reign, a few short-lived settlements on the North American continent. It does not include Scotland, which is still independent. She still calls herself queen of France in her title, in pursuit of a claim first made by her ancestor Edward III; but this is merely formulaic. Far more controversial is the matter of her sex. Traditionally, monarchs are assumed to be male and expected to perform two basic functions: to lead the kingdom in battle, and to exercise the law fairly and justly. A queen is traditionally expected to be a king’s consort: to provide him with heirs, obey him and implore him to show mercy when he bestrides his vanquished enemies as a conquering hero. A regnant queen is thus doubly challenged: she is neither in a position to be a king nor to be a traditional queen. She cannot lead an army into battle; nor is the exercise of law a straightforward issue, for women are barred from holding any legal office. It is a paradox that a woman can hold the very highest office, that of sovereign, but none of the lesser ones – and thus be barred by her sex from professionally interpreting her own laws.

The legal position of a queen regnant is not the only problem. Elizabeth is queen of England ‘by the grace of God’ and her divine selection itself creates further anomalies, for it gives her spiritual authority over her subjects. The queen is the Supreme Governor of
the Church of England, and appoints all the archbishops and bishops in England and Wales; but, as a woman, she is barred from holding any religious office within the Church. How can she then interpret the word of God? If you consider her ecclesiastical and legal position, it appears that to be a successful queen in the sixteenth century requires the most extraordinary array of skills: she has to overcome many social prejudices in addition to ruling well.

Fortunately, Elizabeth has all the qualities one could hope for. As she says of herself: ‘I am your anointed queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I would be able to live in any place in Christendom.’ At a time when most people cannot even read, she can write in Latin and Greek as well as French, English and Italian. Late in life, when on the receiving end of a bombastic speech in Latin by the Polish ambassador, she does not call for a translator, but leaves the diplomat stunned by replying – in fluent Latin. Her bravery and her coolness under pressure are striking. During her half-sister Mary’s reign she is the ‘second person’ in the realm (to quote her own phrase), and suspected of being complicit in Thomas Wyatt’s plot to assassinate Mary. She never forgets the subsequent experience of being locked in the Tower: she knows what it is to be a suspect and a prisoner. It is laudable therefore that, where her father tended to execute people who disagreed with him, Elizabeth listens to them. She is politically confident, and willing to upbraid even her long-standing principal secretary Sir William Cecil, when he compromises on her diplomatic ambitions. Similarly she has no qualms about telling parliament that its members are not at liberty to discuss certain matters – such as the royal succession. Even the archbishop of Canterbury can expect the occasional dressing-down from her.
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She is peace-loving and inclined to seek agreement wherever possible, while not failing to support military engagement if that is in the nation’s interest. Her logic is quite ruthless: she will opt for an aggressive foreign policy, if that seems the best course.

Not only does the queen claim to love England in her speeches, but she demonstrates it in her actions. She has a portrait painted showing her standing on a map of England; another depicts her with her victorious warships in the background after the defeat of the Armada. Her political responsibilities are more exclusively English than those of her
predecessors; the kingdom’s very last Continental possession, Calais, is lost a few months before her accession. Thus the kingdom of England in 1558 is more independent from Europe than it has been since Saxon times.
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In addition, the break from Rome means that England is no longer part of a wider Catholic Church. So Elizabeth is cut off from Europe politically, territorially and spiritually. She is cut off dynastically too. Unlike medieval kings, whose mothers were normally from Continental ruling houses, Elizabeth’s father was of predominantly English stock, with only two of his eight great-grandparents born on the Continent and one born in Wales. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was entirely English – all eight of Anne’s great-grandparents were born in England – so Elizabeth’s Englishness contrasts with the Continental character of her half-sister Mary, whose mother was Aragonese and husband Castilian. It is easy for Englishmen and women to see in Elizabeth someone like themselves. By birth, she is one of them.

There are very few weaknesses in her character. Given her enormous political responsibilities, she can hardly be condemned for being secretive and manipulative. Similarly it is difficult to blame her for her determination to take personal responsibility for political decisions, and for wanting to influence most aspects of government. She is, after all, the queen: ruling is not just her job, it is the reason for her existence. Her only significant shortcomings are a certain stubbornness, which makes life difficult for her advisors and councillors; and a sense of insecurity, arising from her experiences as ‘second person’ in her youth, which makes her react sharply against anyone who questions her authority. She strongly identifies herself with the figure of Richard II – a king who was deposed and murdered – so much so that, in 1599, she personally accuses the lawyer John Hayward of sedition for daring to write a book about Henry IV, the king who deposed Richard II. Hayward is accordingly locked up in the Tower for the rest of her reign.
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It could have been worse. In 1579 John Stubbs writes a pamphlet entitled
The Gaping Gulf
in order to draw attention to the dangers of a marriage between Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou, the heir to the French throne. The queen has Stubbs arrested and orders his right hand to be cut off – and that of his publisher too. When her cousin Lady Catherine Grey (sister of Lady Jane Grey) becomes pregnant, having married Lord Hertford in secret, she has the newly weds locked up in the Tower, fines Lord Hertford the colossal sum of £15,000 for seducing a virgin
of the royal blood, and has their children declared officially illegitimate (although she has no authority to do so). As her godson Sir John Harington declares after her death, ‘when she smiled, it was pure sunshine that everyone did choose to bask in, if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike’.
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Clearly, crossing Queen Elizabeth is something you do at your peril.

This helps to explain why some Elizabethan people do not have a glowing opinion of their queen. As we will see in the next chapter, her personality is the key to the religious changes of the age, which are the most fundamental that England has ever seen. Puritans as well as Catholics despise her. Parliament is threatened by her wilfulness – she has very little time for parliamentary privileges and no respect for MPs’ freedom of speech. There are a number of revolts against her, some led by Catholics and others by members of the nobility who do not have faith in her leadership. Several northern lords take up arms in 1569 (the Northern Rebellion). Assassination attempts are thwarted in 1571 (the Ridolfi Plot), 1581 (Anthony Tyrrell’s plot), 1583 (two plots: the Throgmorton Plot and the Somerville Plot), 1584 (Dr Parry’s plot) and 1586 (the Babington Plot). One of her physicians, Dr Rodrigo Lopez, is hanged for trying to poison her in 1594. The earl of Essex is sentenced to death for plotting against her in 1601. In addition, seditious rumour-mongers are to be found in every town. In 1576, Mary Cleere of Ingatestone, Essex, is burnt at the stake for high treason: she has declared that the queen is baseborn and therefore not rightly queen, and that a woman cannot make knights.
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Other people whisper about the queen’s virginity, circulating the rumour that Elizabeth has given birth to children by Robert Dudley in secret and has had them killed and burnt.
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Her status as a paragon of virtue is by no means universally acknowledged by her contemporaries.

How does Elizabeth actually govern? This subject would keep you entertained for hours if you could be a fly on the walls of the royal palaces – for instance, watching the nuances of her favour, displayed with a terse quip or a shrug of the shoulder, a smile or a cold stare. However, for present purposes, it is sufficient to be aware of five elements to her governance: the five Ps – the privy council, patronage, the royal presence, the royal purse and parliament.

Elizabeth’s preferred method of governing is through her privy
council. In the first half of the reign this body consists of nineteen men and sits three or four times a week, conducting most routine business on Elizabeth’s behalf and directing extraordinary business in accordance with her instructions. In the 1590s she reduces their number to fourteen, and sometimes just ten or eleven, and asks them to meet every day. Routine business includes orders for the army and navy, diplomatic instructions, directions to the clergy, sheriffs and local officials, appointments of Justices of the Peace, and hearing petitions. The privy council also sits as a court of trial, the Star Chamber, in which role it exercises the monarch’s judgement. Other roles include advising the queen on policy and exercising her power of patronage.