The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (53 page)

Faustus must pay the price for his absolute defiance of heaven. Eternity haunted him: ‘O, no end is limited to damned souls.’ Yet when he thought of heaven, he began to repent and wondered whether paradise was forever lost. The few and feeble forces for good in the play promised grace if he called for mercy, and Faustus was intermittently convinced:

If
. But it was not in the nature of devils to repent. Faustus’s heart was hardened, his will in bondage to evil; he could not will himself to repent:

Faustus chose evil. It was God who, in justice, hardened the hearts of those whom He rejected; who, in His mercy, saved some but not all. On the edge of the abyss Faustus was, with divine irony, vouchsafed a
beatific vision of forgiveness through the blood of Christ: ‘See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!’ Half a drop would have saved Faustus’s soul, but he received instead ‘the heavy wrath of God’. Faustus’s fall was just; the play, with its stern view of salvation, strictly orthodox in doctrine. Yet Faustus, in his alienation and despair, was left with little help. This was no simple morality play, but a work terrifying in its intensity and daring which hinted at a dangerous questioning.

Drama is not life; Faustus was not Marlowe; yet Marlowe courted catastrophe and went to the bad with some of the mocking bravura of Faustus. He created a just God in drama whom he scorned in life, so it was alleged. In an age when homosexual acts were punishable by death, Marlowe portrayed the doomed love and desire between Edward II and his ‘sweet favourite’ Gaveston. Once a Catholic, in 1587 Marlowe went as a double agent in Walsingham’s secret service to spy upon English Catholic exiles in Rheims. The blasphemy alleged against him was extreme; that he jested at scripture; was an atheist; willed people ‘not to be afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins’, and espoused a Machiavellian conception of religion – that it was a device to keep the populace in awe. These allegations came from Thomas Kyd, author of
The Spanish Tragedy
, with whom Marlowe shared a chamber, and from the spies with whom Marlowe consorted. In May 1593 Marlowe was killed in a Deptford tavern during a brawl supposedly over the bill. In the shadows, behind these allegations and Marlowe’s death, there lay the feud at court between Sir Walter Ralegh and the 2nd Earl of Essex.

Marlowe and Ralegh are forever connected poetically. To Marlowe’s exquisite, pagan plea of the ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’:

Ralegh replied, with intimations of mortality and mutability:

The two men were associated in their religion too, or alleged lack of it. Robert Persons, the Jesuit, accused Ralegh in 1592 of keeping a ‘school of atheism’ where young gentlemen scorned scripture. Perhaps it was at this supposed ‘school’ that Marlowe had ‘read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others’. If Marlowe were found guilty of atheism, then Ralegh would be suspect also. If Thomas Harriot’s alleged – though unlikely – heresy regarding the resurrection of the body could be proved, then the beliefs of his master, Ralegh, would be impugned. Ralegh’s dangerous reputation for atheism persisted, though all his sayings and writings disproved it.

On a portrait said to be of Marlowe in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge is a motto; that kind of dark, esoteric message beloved of Elizabethan intellectuals: ‘
Quod me nutrit me destruit
[That which nourishes me destroys me]’. What was it that both nourished and destroyed: love, ambition, knowledge? In the way of late Elizabethan portraiture the uninitiated onlooker was not meant to understand, but surely the sitter followed too many dangerous trains of thought. That kind of portrait, of the young man darkly attired, with folded arms and arcane motto, was the classic portrayal of the melancholic. Melancholy, imported from Italy – like the rapier, the epic, the sonnet, the madrigal, fashionable black, homoeroticism, atheism and Machiavellianism – was the humour associated with the imagination, with genius, and the stance adopted by the young Elizabethan aesthete. Melancholy was in part a mannerism, but also in the 1580s and 1590s a political statement. The melancholic was a malcontent. His (for the malcontent was male) talents unused, his ambition thwarted, his time wasted, he was forced to look on as his rivals seized the rewards rightly (he thought) his. So Sir Robert Sidney, passed over for honour and office like his brother Sir Philip, spent the 1590s in semi-exile in Flushing, the ‘grave’ of his youth and fortune, and wrote wintry, tenebrous poems, full of images of violence and imprisonment.

These were years of political disillusion for the younger generation of the Elizabethan nobility. Allured to court, there to wait – for favour and reward which did not come, for something to happen – in their disappointment and frustration, they turned to the courses of spectacular dissipation that having too much money and all the time in the world allowed. All those vices against which puritan divines and prudent fathers warned they made their own: gambling, duelling, illicit love. They played deeper, gambled for higher and higher stakes, threw down
challenges on the slightest pretexts, were more openly ‘grateful to ladies’, or so it seemed. The prodigal extravagance of a few dazzled the whole court, for these few happened to be leading nobles – the Earls of Essex, Southampton, Rutland, Oxford – who happened also to have been the wards of Lord Burghley (who lived on to see his avuncular counsel flouted). So it was that as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – war, famine, pestilence and death – rode in what the preachers called England’s last days: as the poor starved; and foundlings were abandoned at Christ’s Hospital, their names – Orphan Stonegarden, William Cloister – their only patrimony and a sign of their wretched provenance, a few gilded beneficiaries of an increasingly corrupt system spent recklessly. In 1597, the year of greatest desperation for the poor, one courtier lavished £2,000 on his mistress, and Mrs Ratcliffe, a maid of honour to the Queen, appeared at court in a dress of cloth of silver costing £180.

An Essex labourer who was asked ‘What can poor men do against rich men?’ had answered: ‘What can rich men do against poor men if poor men rise and hold together?’ His answer was rhetorical, for the poor did not rise, save for a few grain riots. Discontent was manifest, but did not turn to rebellion. A rising was planned in Oxfordshire in 1596, intending the assassination of plutocratic local landlords rather than the usual attacks upon property, but it was stillborn. It failed to rally support, for the poor had grievance but not energy enough to rise, and did not know their own strength. Yet the Elizabethan ruling orders began to fear that the poor would learn to know their strength, and use it. Some saw upon how fragile and illusory a structure the political order rested. In the Parliament of 1593 Fulke Greville warned that ‘if the feet knew their strength as we know their oppression, they would not bear as they do’, and urged, radically enough, that the parliamentary subsidy be collected only from those who could afford to pay it. Only the enervation of poverty, the habits of obedience and the arts of power held the poor in order. The cause of poverty was never one for which the nobility, to whom the poor traditionally looked for leadership, would rise. The rebellion, when it came, was that of turbulent nobles. Like the barons ranged against the upstarts in medieval England, of whom they read in epic poetry and saw portrayed in the history plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe, they raged against the monarch as she raised new men, denied them what they saw as their rights, and impugned their honour.

THE LAST YEARS OF ELIZABETH
’
S REIGN

Predicting the Queen’s death was treason. Yet secretly, in 1596 (when she was sixty-three), Thomas Harriot cast Elizabeth’s horoscope and gave the date of her expiry as 1617. Her subjects, awaiting a new reign with apprehensive impatience, both hoped and feared that she would live so long. They behaved as though the Queen must survive; but they knew that she could not live for ever, and were deeply uneasy about who and what would follow. Under a declining prince political morality declined also. Elizabeth was the last of her line, with no dynastic interest, no personal stake in the future; she lived as she had always done, in the short term, content with survival. Yet while she lived, she ruled, her will imperative still. Knowing the constant speculation upon her mortality, she would say wryly that she was
mortua non sepulta
, dead but not buried. She presented herself, and was presented, as changeless, beyond time. There were no mirrors at court to reflect the Queen’s decay, and portraits of her were censored to hide time’s ravages. Only the image of the ‘mask of youth’ was circulated, as a memento to her adoring subjects. An amorous servitude was demanded by the Queen, who pretended that her subjects’ love and duty was their choice rather than her compulsion. Her courtiers, required to worship her this side idolatry, and beyond, played upon that devotion. When Ralegh showed the chieftains of Guiana the Queen’s portrait, he quickly took it away again, he wrote, lest by adoring her they be guilty of idolatry. The cult of the Virgin Queen of England usurped the veneration of the Virgin Queen of Heaven: Elizabeth’s own birthday was celebrated instead of the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. So the Catholics claimed, and Protestant denials rang weakly.

Elizabeth had always had her favourites about her, jealously demanding their utter dependance, their constant presence. There had been Leicester, whose death in September 1588 had been a profound

blow to her (though, to some others, no less a blessing than the Armada’s defeat); there had been Hatton, who died in 1591. These men had been content to share her favour; she content to have one watch over the other. But there came a successor who would not be willing to share pre-eminence, who fought for sole favour, and the consequent battles split the court. This was Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. His nobility was of blood, but also of the
megalopsychia
of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics
, the high-mindedness or proper pride of the superior soul, whose greatness of mind was equalled by his courage. Essex aspired to the active virtue which, cultivated by learning, was to be devoted to the service of prince and commonwealth. His most brilliant rival was Sir Walter Ralegh; the quintessential Renaissance man: scholar, explorer, poet, alchemist and soldier. The Queen had raised him high, and he lived ‘very gallant’, but Ralegh was from a Devon gentry family. ‘I know what he has been and what he is,’ sneered Essex, secure in his ancient lineage.

When Ralegh wrote, ‘Twelve years entire I wasted in this war,’ the war was between the favourites, for the Queen’s favour, and it began in the late 1580s. They fought at first by sonnet and portrait. In 1588 Ralegh was portrayed dressed in the black and white of constancy and purity, the queen’s colours; in his ear, a pearl, her jewel. On his right was his own motto, ‘
Amor et virtute
[Love and by virtue]’; above it, a crescent moon. The moon symbolized Ralegh’s devotion to Cynthia, the moon goddess, timeless lady of the seas, waxing and waning but always the same: the Queen herself. The cult of Cynthia was the personal cult of Ralegh, the self-styled Shepherd of the Ocean, but soon became the cult of the whole nation. At about the same time, a portrait of another young man was painted. Leaning melancholy against a tree of constancy, embowered in eglantine, the Queen’s flower, he too was dressed in black and white. The motto – ‘
Dat poenas laudata fides
[My praised faith causes my suffering]’ – associated him with Pompey, the military commander and darling of the citizens of Rome. The young man was almost certainly Essex, the incandescent favourite; the portrait a private declaration of his painful devotion. The story of his relations with the Queen was already one of quarrels and reconciliations, provocations and forgiveness, for he presumed upon his great favour with her. His identification with Pompey was portentous. Francis Bacon, Essex’s intimate, warned him, unavailingly, that an incited popularity and a dependence on military honour were the wings of Icarus which would draw him fatally close to the sun.