Life of Elizabeth I (39 page)

A typical example of male prejudice occurred when a French envoy asked for the Council to be present at his audience with the Queen, implying that the matters of state he had come to discuss were beyond female understanding. Back came a furious answer from Her Majesty: 'The ambassador forgets himself in thinking us incapable of conceiving an answer to his message without the aid of our Council. It might be appropriate in France, where the King is young, but we are governing our realm better than the French are theirs.'

Elizabeth herself was no early feminist; she accepted the creed of her day, that women had serious limitations, speaking of herself as 'a woman wanting both wit and memory'. In a self-composed prayer, she thanked God 'for making me, though a weak woman, yet Thy instrument'. To combat prejudice and underline her position, she invariably referred to herself as a prince, comparing herself with kings and emperors, and with some success, for according to William Cecil, she was 'more than a man and, in truth, something less than a woman'. 'My experience in government', she told Henry IV of France at the end of her reign, 'has made me so stubborn as to believe that I am not ignorant of what becomes a king.'

'Although I may not be a lioness', she was fond of saying, 'I am a lion's cub, and inherit many of his qualities.' Her apologists felt bound to point out that her reign fulfilled one of the ancient prophecies of Merlin: 'Then shall a Royal Virgin reign, which shall stretch her white rod over the Belgic shore and the great Castile smite so sore withal that it shall make him shake and fall.' The 'great Castile' was, of course, Philip of Spain, whose kingdom incorporated that of Castile.

By exploiting 'my sexly weaknesses', Elizabeth converted them into the strengths she needed to survive in a man's world. She used her femininity to manipulate the men who served her and make them protective of her. Her calculated flirtatiousness kept her courtiers loyal, and by playing off one against the other, she preserved a balance of 
power at her court. She established the convention that, as sovereign, she was above normal social mores. She asserted before the Venetian ambassador, 'My sex cannot diminish my prestige.'

So effective was she as a ruler that she managed to overcome the prejudice, and her subjects came to regard her as one of their most successful monarchs. She was certainly one of the best loved.

Being a woman was to Elizabeth's advantage when it came to creating her own legend, because then she could assume the allegorical and mythological personae assigned her by chivalrous courtiers, writers and poets. She was the
'Rosa electa',
the chosen rose, around whom a cult of adoration flourished, and who came to be regarded as little less than divine. By the end of her reign she was being referred to in Acts of Parliament as 'Her Sacred Majesty'. The composer John Dowland wrote a song entitled 'Vivat Eliza for an Ave Maria', which plainly showed how the worship of the Queen had replaced the people's need for a female deity in the post-Reformation years.

Elizabeth herself, making a virtue of a necessity, promoted the image and cult of the Virgin Queen who was wedded to her kingdom and people. She took for her personal emblems those symbols of virginity that had been associated in earlier times with the Virgin Mary: the rose, the moon, the ermine or the phoenix. She also, like Henry VII, made much of her alleged descent from King Arthur, whose legends were a dominant theme in the pageantry of her reign.

It was the poets and dramatists, however, who did most to promote the cult of Elizabeth. In his epic poem,
The Faerie Queen
(1596), Edmund Spenser referred to her as and 'Belphoebe'. William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Sir Walter Raleigh called her Cynthia or Diana, Diana being the virgin huntress, 'chaste and fair'. Other poets eulogised the Queen as Virgo, Pandora, Oriana, or 'England's Astraea, Albion's shining sun', while the Protestant establishment saw her as a new Judith or Deborah. Throughout her reign, poems, songs, ballads and madrigals sang her praises and called upon God to preserve her from her enemies, or commended her for her virtues and her chastity. No English sovereign, before or since, has so captured the imagination of his or her people or so roused their patriotic feelings.

As well as inspiring her subjects, Elizabeth could be infuriating, as her close advisers often found. A mistress of the subtle art of procrastination, she was marvellously adept at delaying and dissembling, and would usually shelve problems she could not immediately solve. Her courtiers, lacking tier subtlety and not understanding her motives, because she did not normally disclose them, were driven mad by her behaviour, yet they were forced to concede, in the long run, that she had often served her 
country better by deterring decisions than by making them hastily. Whenever she could, she would play for time.

'It maketh me weary of my life,' Sir Thomas Smith, one of her secretaries of state, complained in 1574, when Elizabeth had been particularly difficult. 'The time passeth almost irrecuperable, the advantage lost, the charges continuing, nothing resolved. I neither can get the letters signed nor the letter already signed, but day by day, and hour by hour [it is| deferred until anon, noon and tomorrow.' And Cecil once fumed, 'The lack of a resolute answer from Her Majesty drives me to the wall.'

As she grew older, she became increasingly reluctant to sign any document. Her secretaries would therefore 'entertain her with some relation or speech, whereat she may take some pleasure' to take her mind off what she was doing.

One of the Queen's mottoes, appropriately, was
'Video Taceo'
- 'I see all and say nothing', and like her father, she kept her own counsel. 'For her own mind, what that really was I must leave, as a thing doubly inscrutable, both as she was a woman and a queen,' wrote the courtier Dudley Digges. She had learned early on that it was never wise to show one's hand. Harington recorded that 'Her wisest men and best councillors were oft sore troubled to know her will in matters of state, so covertly did she pass her judgement.' As princess and as queen she never knew what it was to feel secure: there was always the threat of poison or the assassin's dagger, and always enemies seeking to destroy her by one means or another. She knew she might never die peacefully in her bed.

Elizabeth could be resolute and tough when she had to be, and on two known occasions did not shrink from authorising the torture of offenders, which was officially illegal but, in her view, necessary in the interests of national security; in both cases, the victims were involved in plots against the Queen's life, but even so the gaolers in the Tower were aware that her anger would fall upon them if they exceeded their warrant. She hated executions and issued reprieves to condemned felons whenever possible, so long as justice had been seen to be done. She was, as Cecil called her, 'a very merciful lady'. She followed major trials with interest, and intervened if she felt it necessary.

She was in most respects a conservative, who respected the old medieval ideal of hierarchical order within the Christian universe, and cherished traditional notions of 'degree, priority and place'. 'Her Majesty loveth peace. Next, she loveth not change,' observed Sir Francis Bacon. One of her secretaries, Robert Beale, warned his successor to 'avoid being new-fangled and a bringer-in of new customs'.

Her councillors found her infuriatingly unpredictable. For all her 
common touch and geniality, she remained very much on her dignity, and woe betide those who stinted in their outward show of respect towards her or failed to show the proper humility in her presence. Etiquette required that anyone addressing the Queen should do so on bended knees and remain in that position until given leave to rise. No one might sit while she stood, and it was seen as great condescension on her part when, in later years, she permitted Cecil, aged and lame, to sit upon a stool in her presence.

One of the criticisms often levelled against her was that she was mean. In fact, having inherited huge debts from her sister, she was determined not only to clear them but also to live within her means. This meant making stringent economies that were often unpopular, but these measures kept England solvent at a time when most European countries were virtually bankrupt. Out of a relatively small annual income that rarely exceeded - 300,000, she had to defray her own expenses as well as those of the court and the government. In achieving this within her budget, Elizabeth showed that she had inherited the financial acumen of her grandfather, Henry VII, for throughout her reign she managed to accomplish much with very limited resources.

She did not, however, stint on outward show, because in an age of personal monarchy, pomp and splendour were regarded as the visual evidence of power. 'We princes are set as it were upon stages in the sight and view of all the world,' observed the Queen. Therefore no expense was spared on court ceremonial, furnishings and entertainments, nor on the Queen's wardrobe, for these were all aspects of sovereignty designed to impress foreign ambassadors and visitors to the court. It had, indeed, been the policy of successive Tudor sovereigns to maintain a magnificent court that would not only impress but also overawe all who visited it.

In the midst of all this pomp and ceremony, Elizabeth could display a very human face, as when she tickled Dudley's neck as she created him Earl of Leicester. She had the common touch, and was no slave to convention. It was not unusual for her to interrupt solemn addresses and even sermons: she would order the speaker to be quiet if he had rambled on too long for her liking. Yet when it came to an oration she admired, she was quick to praise it, as when she affectionately put her hands around the neck of a new Speaker in the Commons who had delivered an eloquent opening speech. She was sorry, she told her ladies, 'she knew him no sooner'.

Sovereignty in the sixteenth century was still viewed as an almost mystical institution, and Elizabeth I participated wholeheartedly in its ceremonies. Since the thirteenth century monarchs had touched for the 
King's Evil, laying their hands on scrofulous persons whom their touch was believed to cure. At Whitehall and on progress, Elizabeth would regularly 'press the sores and ulcers' of the afflicted 'boldly and without disgust', sincerely believing that she was doing some good.

Each year, just before Easter, clad in an apron and with a towel over her arm, she presided over the Royal Maundy ceremony, and, in imitation of Christ at the Last Supper, washed the feet of poor women (which had been well scrubbed beforehand by her almoners) before distributing to them lengths of cloth, fish, bread, cheese and wine. Tradition decreed that not only the towels and aprons be given to the beneficiaries but also the monarch's robe, but Elizabeth did not want the poor fighting over her gown, and initiated the custom of giving out Maundy money in red purses instead.

When it came to the government of her kingdom, Elizabeth was unusually blessed in her advisers and councillors, whom she selected herself for their loyalty, honesty and abilities, with almost unerring perspicacity. Although she told one ambassador, 'We do nothing without our Council, for nothing is so dangerous in state affairs as self- opinion,' it was she who, after sounding out all her councillors, took the major decisions, especially in the field of foreign policy, which was her prerogative. She did not feel bound to take her councillors' advice, and frequently shouted at them or banned them temporarily from court if they disagreed with her. Many were prepared to risk this minor punishment for the sake of putting their views across.

Nor did the Queen care if she inconvenienced her ministers, for she expected them to be as hard-working, efficient and devoted to duty as she was herself. If they were not, she would demand to know why; she missed nothing, and was an exacting mistress. When Lord Hunsdon outstayed leave from his official duties, the Queen raged to his son, 'God's wounds! We will set him by the feet and set another in his place if he dallies with us thus, for we will not be thus dallied withal.'

Harington records that she would keep Cecil with her

till late at night discoursing alone, and then call out another at his departure, and try the depth of all around her sometime. Each displayed his wit in private. If any dissembled with her, or stood not well to her advisings, she did not let it go unheeded, and sometimes not unpunished.

After these night-time consultations, the Queen would be ready to return to business before the next dawn had broken. She seems to have needed very little sleep, and it would be no exaggeration to state that she 
was, in modern terms, a workaholic. Harington attests that on one occasion she wrote one letter whilst dictating another and listening to a query to which she gave a lucid answer.

Each day she held successive private consultations with her ministers, read letters and dispatches, wrote or dictated others, checked accounts and received petitions. She kept letters, memos and notes in a 'great pouch' hung about her waist, or in her bedroom, and threw them away when they were not needed. She rarely attended the daily Council meetings, knowing that her councillors would try to impose their opinions on her - although she was perfectly capable of arguing the point with them. She preferred to keep a tight rein on affairs from behind the scenes. In the early days of her reign, Cecil tried to prevent her from dealing with matters too weighty, in his opinion, for a woman to cope with, but as the years passed he conceived a deep respect for and trust in her, both as his sovereign and as a shrewd and clever woman.

In day to day matters, Elizabeth delegated the decision-making to her Council, taking the credit herself when things turned out well. If disaster struck, the councillors got the blame. According to Harington, Cecil would 'shed a-plenty tears on any miscarriage, well knowing the difficult part was, not so much to mend the matter itself, as his mistress's humour'. Her temper was notorious: she was not above boxing the Secretary's ears, throwing her slipper at Walsingham's face, or punching others who displeased her, and after flouncing out of a Council meeting in a rage, she would retire to her Privy Chamber and read until she had calmed down, which she invariably did after these outbursts. Nor was she reluctant to admit she was in the wrong, for she would hasten to make amends. Leicester said of her, 'God be thanked, her blasts be not the storms of other princes, though they be very sharp sometimes to those she loves the best.'