The Elizabethans (53 page)

Travelling through Europe as a diplomat in his mid-thirties, Lee visited Italy – Rome, Florence, Venice – Germany, and the Low Countries, and it was in Antwerp that he sat for his portrait to the Flemish artist Antonis Mor. The painter has captured with entire plausibility a clever upper-class English face whose type is still to be met to this day in certain diplomats, financiers, army officers, landowners. If you discount the high ruff (which became fashionable in the 1560s), the ribbed, padded velvet doublet and the goatee beard, and substitute a suit cut in twenty-first century Savile Row and a shirt made in Jermyn Street, you could easily be looking at a man who had solved
The Times
crossword in ten minutes and who, after a productive morning at the Foreign Office or in a merchant bank, was going to lunch at his club in St James’s Street. The curly hair, high brow and ironical eyes are instantly familiar. So too is the deceptively thin-lipped smile, which just fails to conceal sensuality. After his wife died, and he had retired, Lee lived openly with his mistress, a raffish figure called Anne Vavasour, who had given birth to an illegitimate child by Lord Oxford. Active in all senses in his retirement, he farmed sheep on a vast scale, making himself heartily disliked in Oxfordshire for his ruthless enclosure of common land and rebuilding his seat – Ditchley Park – to make it a worthy place for his heroine, Elizabeth, to visit; which, in spite of the irregularity of his ménage, she did. (Lee was made a Knight of the Garter in 1597 – a very unusual honour for one who was not a peer.
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)

His flair for the pregnantly meaningful pageant had demonstrated year after year some aspect of their own mood or national aspiration to the courtly classes. One that stood out in memory was his tribute to his dead friend Sir Philip Sidney at the tilt for 1587, when lamentations were spoken over a riderless horse (perhaps an emblem that 350 years later inspired Yeats’s lines about ‘The high horse riderless / Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode’.
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And so his own last tilt as Queen’s Champion spoke of the extraordinary generation that was now facing old age. They had been born into the England in which Henry VIII was just beginning his ruthless innovations. The monasteries were dissolved during their early childhoods, becoming ‘Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’.
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Henry had strengthened the navy, reinvented the Church and raised up the new rich by giving them lands and revenues snatched from the Church. After his death, the country had lurched from the extreme Protestantism advocated by Edward VI’s advisers to the Marian Counter-Reformation, with the screams of heretics coming from the bonfires of Smithfield. Then had come the relief: the young queen – who was
their age
– an incarnation of so many of their intellectual, religious and political values. And thirty years had passed, thirty years in which England itself had begun to establish the identity that it would retain for centuries to come: an England where the Inns of Court, the universities and the grammar schools, the Church, the landed gentry, the magistracy, provided the framework of life; an England expanding and looking overseas to mercantile, possibly imperial, futures; an England ruthlessly and intransigently embedded in Ireland, callously indifferent to the plight of its own poor, as rigidly hierarchical as the orders of angels contemplated by Hooker on his deathbed, but as socially flexible as the careers of the clever, grammar-school educated could make it. This – Sir Henry Lee’s generation and that of the Queen herself – was the generation now growing old.

Would it age wisely and graciously? The great success of the early years of the reign was that it had been a country given into the hands of clever, imaginative young people. Would they – many of them still holding on to the reins of power – step down, like Sir Henry? Or would they hang on, and try to choke back new intellectual enquiry, new political or geographical endeavours? In the government-inspired murder of Christopher Marlowe, in the cool treatment meted out to their great epic poet Spenser, in their semi-cold-shouldering of Dr Dee, we get warning signals of a gerontocracy tightening its grip. Sir Francis Drake sailing round the world in the late 1570s was a cause for national pride; Raleigh’s voyage to Guiana in 1595 was viewed with suspicion. The ageing queen’s doting on the young Earl of Essex, far from bringing forward a generation of New Talent, was to end in disaster. So the autumn winds that blew through Whitehall, that November of 1590, were bringing troubled times to the closing years of the reign. Some modern historians have seen the 1590s as a ‘second reign’ of Elizabeth – one of meteorological disaster, economic hardship, religious anarchy, escalating crime, Irish horror, and something very close, with the calamity of the Essex rebellion, to the civil wars from which Elizabeth’s ‘good grandfather’ had delivered the country in 1485.

The retirement tilt of Sir Henry Lee had some of the qualities of a glorious sunset flare. Lee could not possibly have guessed, but his imagination might somehow have intuited, what troubles lay ahead; now, therefore, in his scale of values, was a moment of undiluted triumphalism, and of uncritical worship of their Virgin Idol.

The pseudo-medieval knights who rode out into the tiltyard of Whitehall (roughly the site of Horse Guards Parade today) were now all long in the tooth. There was always an element of comedy, as well as of excitement, about these pageants, as a visiting German, Lupold von Wedel, had observed in 1584: ‘When a gentleman with his servants approached the barrier, on horseback or in carriage, he stopped at the foot of the staircase leading to the queen’s room, while one of the servants in pompous attire of a special pattern mounted the steps and addressed the queen in well-composed verses or with a ludicrous speech, making her and her ladies laugh.’
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Now, mingled with the comedy, there was elegy, and as Sir Henry Lee took leave of the Queen, a choir sang verses of his own composing, which were absurd and touching in equal measure:

His golden locks time hath to silver turned

(O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!);

His youth gainst time and age hath ever spurned,

But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing.

Beauty, strength, youth are flowers but fading seen;

Duty, faith, love are roots, and ever green.

His helmet now shall make a hive for bees,

And lover’s sonnets turn to holy psalms;

A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,

And feed on prayers, which are age’s alms.

But though from court to cottage he depart,

His saint is sure of his unspotted heart.
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Whereas other historians saw the last fifteen years of Elizabeth’s reign as a tale of triumph, played out against the backdrop of Gloriana’s golden sunset, we might see something rather different: an oligarchy of diminishing competence, presided over by an ageing and increasingly indecisive queen; an embattled island, continuously at war in Europe; an archipelago in effect at war with itself – with Ireland consumed by violence, with Catholics and Puritans in England at one another’s throats, with the Queen’s closest favourite, Essex, leading a failed coup against her. These are the realities to be set beside the literary glories of Shakespeare’s plays and of Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
. The expansion of Elizabethan England abroad, and the establishment of the colony at Virginia – causes of celebration as they might be, in one way of looking at things – can also be seen as laying the foundation for the most hateful economic and racial exploitations by European over non-European humanity.

But, then, if we are looking to suck the milk of human kindness, we have come to the wrong place in the England of Elizabeth. Thomas Nashe, as so often, sailed near the wind in his picaresque novel
The Unfortunate Traveller
, when he made the protagonist, Jack Wilton, recall the conversations of Erasmus in Rotterdam:

This I can assure you,
Erasmus
, in all his speeches seemed so much to mislike the indiscretion of Princes in preferring of parasites and fools, that he decreed with himself to swim with the stream, and write a booke forwith in commendation of follie. Quick witted Sir
Thomas Moore
traueld in a cleane contrarie province, for he seeing most common-wealths corrupted by ill custome, & that principalities were nothing but great piracies which, gotten by violence and murther, were maintained by private vndermining and bloudshed, that in the cheefest flourishing kindgomes there was no equall or well decided weale one with an other, but a manifest conspiracie of rich men against poore men, procuring their owne vnlawfull commodities vnder the name and interest of the common wealth: hee concluded with himself to lay doune a perfect plot of a common-wealth or gouernment, which he would intitle his
Vtopia
.
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Nashe was bold enough to point out that More’s satire of the England of 1516 had become a reality by the 1590s. Who, witnessing the Queen herself, and her Council members, cashing in on Hawkins’s slave-trade, Drake’s open acts of maritime theft or the enclosure by the New Rich of common land, could fail to see that the whole ‘principality’ was ‘nothing but great piracie’?

Thomas Nashe’s fictions, pamphlets and satirical journalism paint a completely devastating picture of how unremittingly horrendous life was for the majority of the rapidly expanding population. We do not know the exact figures, but during Elizabeth’s reign the population of her kingdom expanded by 1 per cent
per annum
(more than 35 per cent for the period 1558–1603), and this in spite of repeated plagues and actual starvation.
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The 1590s also saw those exceptionally bad weather conditions, attributed by the Fairy Queen Titania to the petulant whim of her husband Oberon:

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.

The fold stands empty in the drownèd field . . .

The spring, the summer,

The chiding autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world

By their increase now knows not which is which.
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The years 1593 and 1594 had bad harvests, 1596 and 1597 actual dearth, with a great increase in the parish registers of burials. The poor and the starving took to crime. In September 1596 Edward Hext, a Justice of the Peace in Somerset, wrote to Lord Burghley to express his fear that social order was breaking down altogether. ‘Rapynes and thefts . . . multiplye daylye.’ The starving vagrants were seen by this gentleman as ‘wicked and desparate’ persons, who ‘beinge putt to any hard labour, will greve them above measure, so as they will rather hazard their lives than work’. Hext reckoned that there were 300 or 400 ‘wandring souldiers and other stout roages’ in every county in England.
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The paradox about the central economic idea of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, whose essay on population gave Charles Darwin the idea of Nature as an everlasting warfare for the survival of the fittest, was that the theory was true more or less until the moment in history when Malthus chose to write it. That is to say, there was a limited amount of edible matter and, when this had been consumed, the population adjusted itself by disease or starvation. Periods of great wealth were those, such as the fifteenth century in England following the Black Death, when the population fell in proportion to the amount of food. In the period following the Industrial Revolution, in spite of cataclysms such as the Irish Famine, Europeans began for the first time to produce enough for an
expanding
population to eat, thereby hugely increasing economic growth.

Elizabethan England, however, remained firmly trapped in the Malthusian lock. The middle decades of the reign were remarkably free from epidemics of plague. Life expectancy rose to an average of forty.
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There was the inevitable increase in food prices and deflation of wages, and a desperate scramble both for foreign markets for English exports and for areas abroad where commodities could be had for cheap – or plundered for free. This is one explanation for the population explosion (from three million to four million during the reign
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), which was only checked by outbreaks of plague. In a ‘good’ year, from a Malthusian viewpoint, such as 1593, London lost 23,236 through plague, a little over 10 per cent of its population.

One way of dealing with the problem of poor ‘roages’, apart from the Malthusian and obvious one of allowing them simply to starve to death, was to draft them into armed service. The wars in the Netherlands and in Ireland needed cannon-fodder. In the county of Kent alone, during the 1590s, 6,000 men were ‘impressed’ – that is press-ganged into the army. That is a huge proportion of the county’s population, which stood at around 130,000.

Inevitably, the indigent drifted towards London. Nashe in
Christ’s Teares over Iervsalem
comments upon the particular meanness of the English mercantile class and the nobility in giving to the poor:

A halfe-penny a month to the poore mans boxe we count our vtter empouerishing. I have hearde trauailers of credite avouch, that in
London
is not gyuen the tenth part of that almes in a weeke, which in the poorest besieged Citty of Fraunce is gyuen in a day . . . Our dogges are fedde with the crumbes that fal from our Tables. Our Christian bretheren are famisht for want of the crumbs that fall from our tables. Take it from me, rich men expressly, that it is not your owne which you haue purchast with your industry: it is part of it the poores, part your Princes, parte your Preachers. You ought to possesse no more than will moderatly sustaine your house and your family.
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