The Elizabethans (22 page)

One of Burghley’s correspondents at the end of that terrible year, 1572 (‘Wrytten by Mr Carleton, sent by Tho. Cecil to me’), reckoned that ‘the realm is divided into three parties, the Papist, the Atheist and the Protestant. All these are alike favoured; the first and second because, being many, we dare not displease them; the third because, having religion, we fear to displease God in them. All three are blamed, the Papist as traitor, the Atheist as godless, the Protestant as a precisian.’ [It means a stickler for form, and was a synonym for Puritan.] The correspondent realised that the precarious balance which stopped these parties fighting hinged on one fact – the life of the Queen. She alone could hold it together. He argued that ‘such Protestants as do not like the Queen’s form of religion be encouraged to go to Ireland and settle in Ulster’. Meanwhile, those who did like the Queen’s form of religion should arm themselves. He suggested a permanent stand-by force of armed horsemen in the twenty counties near London, and for the nobility to be in a state of constant readiness for the defence of ‘the gospel, and preservation of the State, and the Queen’s person’.
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The cruelty with which the recusants were treated by Walsingham’s spy network and torture-chambers has never been forgotten, not least because so many of the victims were at a much later date declared to be saints of the Church. The martyrologists on both sides on the painful argument polarised opinion until our own day, and continue to do so. Opinions at the time must often have been nuanced, and heavily influenced by such untheological questions as personal liking, or disliking, and family kinship. Philip Sidney is a case in point. He was the nephew of Leicester – that ‘captain general of the Puritans’
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– and his work, in poetry and prose, is often seen as the quintessential expression of ‘Protestant chivalry’.
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He witnessed the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day at first hand. Yet five years later when he found himself in Prague he renewed his acquaintance with Edmund Campion (1540–1581). They probably first met at Oxford in 1566 when Sidney, an eleven-year-old Shrewsbury schoolboy, had been taken out of school to witness the royal visit to the university in the company of the Chancellor, Leicester, and two other uncles – the Earl of Sussex and the Earl of Warwick.
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A high point of the visit had been when Campion, a brilliant Fellow of St John’s College in his mid-twenties, had welcomed the Queen on behalf of the university and taken part in a Latin disputation in the Queen’s presence. Elizabeth had especially commended Campion’s eloquence and he became something of a protégé of Leicester. Yet though persuaded to take deacon’s orders in the Church of England by the most Catholic-minded of the bishops – Edward Cheyney of Gloucester – Campion could not shake off the conviction that, in severing itself from the papacy and the parent-stem of the Roman Catholic obedience, the Church of England had ceased to be the Church.

Sir Henry Sidney asked him to Dublin in 1569 to revive the idea of funding a university there. Campion was to have a major role to play, had it not been for his religious scruples. By the time Pius V had issued his denunciation of Elizabeth, Campion had cut loose. The trial in London in 1571 of Dr Storey,
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who was executed in June, confirmed Campion in his desire to become a Roman Catholic priest, and it was as a Jesuit that he met Philip Sidney in Prague in 1577.

The two men – Sidney aged twenty-three, Campion aged thirty-seven – clearly liked one another. Sidney heard Campion preach before the Emperor and they had a number of meetings and conversations. Clearly, the Catholics felt that Sidney, not merely a brilliant ‘Renaissance man’ – poet, swordsman, linguist, soldier – but also a nephew of some of the most powerful men in England, would have been a useful convert. It is difficult to know how much to credit their belief that he was tempted. Robert Parsons, Campion’s fellow Jesuit, certainly thought so, and Campion himself wrote to another recusant Fellow of St John’s, Oxford, now in exile:

a few months ago Philip Sidney came from England to Prague, magnificently provided. He had much conversation with me – I hope not in vain, for to all appearance he was most eager. I commend him to your sacrifices [that is, remember him at Mass] for he asked the prayers of all good men and at the same time put into my hands some alms to be distributed to the poor for him, which I have done. Tell this to Dr Nicholas Sanders, because if any one of our labourers sent into the vineyard from the Douai seminary has an opportunity of watering this plant, he may watch the occasion for helping a poor wavering soul. If this young man, so wonderfully beloved and admired by his countrymen, chances to be converted, he will astonish his noble father, the Deputy of Ireland, his uncles the Dudleys and all young courtiers, and Cecil himself. Let it be kept secret.
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The conversations show how seriously a young Protestant intellectual took Campion’s arguments. How could any Westerner who believed in Christianity
not
take these arguments seriously? Apart from any heresy that might have been promoted in the Reformed churches, you had only to witness the dissensions, wars, quarrels and killings which had ensued since Luther nailed his Theses to the church door at Wittenberg to wish that Christians could unite under one shepherd. And anyone who witnessed the fervour and heroic courage of the Catholics who risked ruin, imprisonment, torture and death for their faith would have been insensitive indeed not to be impressed.

Likewise, however, viewed from a narrowly English, or narrowly British, point of view (as religion increasingly was with the unfolding century), the activities of the European Catholic powers were, to say the least, alarming. Walsingham and his spies and torture-instruments made life unpleasant for their few hundred victims. The Inquisition, the Pope, the Kings of France and Spain had slain their tens of thousands. And was it an evil that men and women could hear God’s word read and preached in their own language, rather than mumbled incomprehensibly in dog-Latin?

The 1570s saw the arrival of thousands of Huguenot refugees in England. In Threadneedle Street in London, the Huguenot church was a bastion of Calvinism and greatly strengthened the hands of English Puritans who had been arguing for a generation that the work of the Reformation was only half-done. The arrival of the French refugees could provide their English hosts with the double pleasure of resenting their arrival and crowing at the barbarity that had led to it. So, as early as February 1567, ‘there was a great watch in the City of London . . . for fear of an insurrection against the strangers which were in great number in and about the City’.
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The Huguenots were blamed for the increase in London’s population, and for inflating the value of property. ‘They take up the fairest houses in the city, divide and fit them for their several uses and take into them several lodgers and dwellers.’ At the same time, disagreeable as Londoners might say they found the French Protestants, there was an eager readership for horror stories about the abominations perpetrated by French Catholics. The publisher Henry Bynneman brought out five editions (three Latin, one French and one English) of
De Furoribus gallicis
in 1573. Its anonymous author was François Hofman, a jurisconsult then living in exile in Geneva because he ‘detested both the Roman law and the Roman church’. He also wrote a highly popular biography of Coligny,
The Lyffe of the most godly valiant and noble Captaine . . . Colignie Shalilion
, published in 1576. Thomas Vautrollier was a Huguenot publisher who settled in London and was responsible for many massacre pamphlets and accounts of Roman Catholic abominations. Among the army of hack-translators on Vautrollier’s books was a really distinguished one: Arthur Golding, who was the uncle of the Earl of Oxford. He dedicated his translations of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and Calvin’s
Offences
to Leicester, and translated a very hostile biography by Bullinger of Pius V. For a time, he actually lived in Burghley’s house in the Strand.

The Queen raised Cecil to the peerage, as Baron Cecil of Burghley, on 25 February 1571 and the following year she appointed him Lord Treasurer in succession to the Marquess of Winchester. Walsingham succeeded Cecil as Secretary, but Burghley was always the Queen’s right hand. He was never a favourite to be petted or given nicknames. He was no courtier. He never asked the Queen for a dance – and by now, with the onset of gout, that would not have been a possibility.
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He was the spider at the centre of the government’s web, the Argus who saw all, the patient administrator who ensured that everything ran efficiently. And now he was presiding as Treasurer over the Exchequer Court, as well as being master of the Court of Wards, two very lucrative as well as time-consuming offices. The money enabled him to acquire and extend Theobalds, the manor house in Hertfordshire that he converted into a palace worthy to receive his royal mistress.

To receive the Queen into one’s own home was the highest possible accolade, but it was one that cost dear. Sir Nicholas Bacon was sharply told by his monarch, when she consented to step over the threshold of his substantial manor at St Albans Gorhambury, that his house was too small. ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘my house is well, but it is you that have made me too great for my house.’

William Sitsylt of Stamford, so lately descended from a modest family of minor Welsh gentry, could not afford to make the same mistake when he acquired Theobalds, a moated Hertfordshire manor house not far from Bacon’s St Albans, and some fourteen miles from London. No expense was spared. Visitors crossed an imposing bridge, into a courtyard. There was a chapel and a great hall, extensive gardens, and a ‘his’ and ‘hers’ wing – for Cecil continued through the 1570s to hope that his monarch would marry. During the late 1560s Cecil was spending well in excess of £1,000 each year on his building projects at Theobald’s. Cecil himself was the architect, and the architectural historian John Summerson wrote of Theobalds:

As a piece of architecture Theobalds has been totally forgotten [this was because it was demolished and rebuilt by James I as a royal palace in the early seventeenth century], yet I do not think it too much to claim that it was, with the possible exception of Longleat and Wollaton, the most important architectural adventure of the whole of Elizabeth’s reign. Certainly it was the most influential of all. Both Holdenby and Audley End directly derived from it. Castle Ashby, Hardwick, Apethorpe, Rushton and Hatfield seem to owe it much. Slight as our knowledge of the house must necessarily remain . . . I do not see that the history of Elizabethan architecture can be written without some consideration of the part played by William Cecil.
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As outstanding as the buildings at Theobalds were the gardens, with walks and fountains stretching for two miles. A German visitor recalled:

From the place one goes into the garden encompassed with a moat full of water, large enough for me to have pleasure of going in a boat and rowing between the shrubs. Here are great variety of trees and plants, labyrinths made with a great deal of labour, a jet d’eau with a basin of white marble and a table of touch-stone. The upper part of it is set round with cisterns of lead into which the water is conveyed through pipes so that fish may be kept in them and in the summer time they are very convenient for bathing.
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The gardener was none other than John Gerard, who dedicated his celebrated
Herball
to his employer in the year before his death.
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From this paradise, the fourteen-mile road to London led almost directly to his other palace, Cecil House in the Strand, where there was more of the same – courtyards, a chapel, great offices of state and gardens stretching down to the River Thames. If these two stupendous architectural demonstrations were to have survived, we should perhaps have an even more vivid sense of what a powerful man Cecil was – how, indeed, the England of Elizabeth’s reign could be described as Cecil’s England as much as it was Elizabeth’s. And the power and influence of the Cecils in English life is one of the symptoms of how forcefully Elizabethan England continued. We began this book by stating that the England of Elizabeth survived into living memory – a Church of England and a Parliament and a set of colonies, which were all the creation of Elizabeth and Cecil. At the heart of this England was the Cecil family themselves. The family that provided Queen Elizabeth I with her most powerful right hand gave birth to Queen Victoria’s last great Prime Minister, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. After the debacle of the Suez crisis in 1956 there was nothing so undignified as an election for the new leader of the Conservative Party. The two possible contenders were Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler. ‘Each member of the Cabinet was summoned singly and in turn to the room of the Lord Chancellor. Beside Kilmuir was seated the traditional kingmaker of the Conservative party, Lord Salisbury. One question only was put to the visitor – “Who is it to be, Rab or Harold?”’
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As told orally, it is usually rendered ‘Wab or Hawold’. This was England in 1956. Even half a century later, when the political complexion of Westminster has been altered out of all recognition, the aristocracy of Elizabeth’s reign are still figures of wealth, owning much land and, in so far as money always wields power, still wielding power: Cavendishes in Derbyshire and Yorkshire and London as Dukes of Devonshire; Russells as Dukes of Bedford; and Cecils at Hatfield.

Cecil House in the Strand, like Theobalds in the country, was a parable in stone and horticulture of Cecil’s power. Its tennis courts and bowling alleys (the tennis court had a huge red-and-white brick floor) and its extensive library, housing Cecil’s collection of books, paintings and Roman coins (the envy of Archbishop Parker, the other great bibliophile at the centre of Elizabethan affairs), were not simply pleasure grounds. The statues of Roman emperors that Cecil bought from Venice in 1561, and the copy of Cicero
On Duties
, which Cecil carried with him at all times, were symbols of his political belief. He was a monarchist in the sense that he recognised that power resided in his sovereign. He was the master of living with her caprice, her wavering moods, her tantrums. He knew when to tap into her high intelligence and her political perspicacity. He also knew how to neuter her occasional follies. She had the power to cut off his head, and his enemies at court and in the Council came close on occasion to getting him removed – at least imprisoned in the Tower. But she had enough political nous to recognise that she needed this man.