IN THE YEARS following the scattering of the Armada, Elizabeth appeared to have achieved the serene sovereignty promised by the monarch of the eponymous portrait. The Spanish threat was vastly diminished, Mary Stuart was gone, the reform of religion was firmly established. As Elizabeth approached her sixties, her status as Virgin Queen might have appeared as both unique and unassailable. But the mask was corroding even as it fixed: “The very years which provide the strongest evidence of a cult at its zenith also produced reactions of negativity and even iconoclasm towards the Queen.”1 Elizabeth had faced down many challenges to her authority over the years, but in the 1590s, she confronted a different kind of threat—the sexual misdemeanors of her own court. The strain between duty and desire was one that Elizabeth had known personally all too well, and in the queen’s view, succumbing to emotion over obligation was not only a shameful weakness but also a threatening one. Renaissance culture has been characterized as “obsessively taken up with the kaleidoscopic aspects of transgressive sexuality, most particularly the insistent pull of family relationships and the counterweight of desire,” and Elizabeth’s response to those who elevated feeling over duty had always been strict.2 In 1574, she had so far forgotten herself as to break the finger of her lady Mary Shelton with a candlestick when it was discovered that she had secretly married John Scudamore. One witness to her fury observed, “She hath dealt liberal both with blows and evil words. . . . I think in my conscience never woman bought her husband more dear than she [Mary] hath done.”3 Mary was ultimately restored to favor, and Elizabeth in fact did promote what she considered to be suitable marriages among her maids, but she has nevertheless been left with a reputation for violent sexual jealousy; in the phrase of one critic, an “anger with love.” Yet seeing Elizabeth as a sexually thwarted creature who manifested her frustrations on those who enjoyed what she had never had is to neglect the importance of monarchs’ roles in regulating both marriage and sexual conduct at their courts. What Elizabeth’s actual feelings about sex were we cannot know, as she never expressed them on record. Her poem on Anjou’s departure contains erotic imagery—gentle passions sliding into soft snow—but to read sexual jealousy into her reaction to the exceptional number of scandals which beset the court in the 1590s is as rational as suggesting that the queen’s enthusiasm for riding was a form of sublimated sexual gratification.
Forbidden liaisons were a test to Elizabeth’s princely and personal authority, and their increase was a disturbing signal of its decline. Women rulers, as has been noted, were particularly susceptible to charges of licentious misconduct at their courts (hence, for example, those excessively positive accounts of the propriety of Anne Boleyn’s). The decency, or not, of a court was seen as deriving from its ruler, so women needed to distance themselves from this negative stereotype as a means of reinforcing sovereignty. Promiscuity could produce political discord, as in the case of Henri III’s notorious mignons, if not actual violence. When the Earl of Oxford, the husband of Cecil’s daughter Anne, seduced the fifteen-year-old Anne Vavasour in 1580, Elizabeth imprisoned the pair of them, but his offence provoked a series of duels and aggressive encounters among retainers which continued for years. Elizabeth saw herself as a substitute “mother” to her maids, for whom she was responsible in loco parentis, and conceivably where this dynamic was threatened, her role as “mother” to the nation was also undermined. Court life had always been sexually charged—the combination of young men and women closeted in physical proximity without a great deal to do, combined with the prestige of “courtly love” exchanges, could not but lead to intrigues—yet in the 1590s, there was practically a sexual revolution.
Not all the women at court met such a disgraceful end as Lucy Morgan, who had served Elizabeth in the 1570s and 1580s. Lucy was abruptly expelled from court, after which she found a new career as a bawd in Clerkenwell, reappearing in the records beating hemp in Bridewell, the prostitutes’ prison, in 1600. But sex was very much in the air. In 1590, the Earl of Essex secretly married and impregnated Sir Philip Sidney’s widow. Two years later, Walter Ralegh was exposed in a secret marriage with Elizabeth Throckmorton. In 1594, Lady Bridget Manners secretly married Robert Tyrwhit, whom Elizabeth imprisoned, placing his wife in the custody of the Countess of Bedford. In 1595, Essex’s relationship with Elizabeth Southwell was revealed when she gave birth to his son, while three years later, Elizabeth Vernon was pregnant by the Earl of Southampton. Essex, meanwhile, began an affair with Elizabeth Stanley in 1596. Elizabeth was Cecil’s granddaughter, the child whose paternity Oxford had denied in the Vavasour scandal. Mary Fitton became pregnant by the Earl of Pembroke in 1601. He refused to marry her and ended up in the Fleet Prison. By this time, Lady Rich, who had started an affair with Lord Mountjoy in 1590, had given birth to several of his children (she had fourteen in total, six of whom were Mountjoy’s).
The case of Elizabeth Stanley was particularly compromising. Lady Anne Bacon wrote disapprovingly of Essex “infaming another man’s wife and so near about Her Majesty.” Elizabeth was the queen’s goddaughter, married by royal invitation to William Stanley, Earl of Derby, at Greenwich in 1595 (one suggestion as to the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream connects it, appropriately enough, with this wedding). Elizabeth Stanley was ordered to retire to her husband’s estate, but her affair caused such outrage that three correspondents, Lord Cobham, the Countess of Warwick, and Lady Ralegh, all wrote to her husband about it, and only Cecil’s personal and highly embarrassing intervention prevented a divorce. Essex continued in his shameless career as a seducer. Two of the queen’s maids were discovered to have crept secretly through the palace galleries to watch a group of male courtiers, including Essex, playing sport in their shirts—“the Queen of late hath used the fair Mrs. Bridges with words and blows of anger and she with Mrs. Russell were put out of the Chamber” (the girls were taken in for three nights by Lady Stafford). Ten months later, Essex was still in love with his “fairest B”—either Elizabeth Bridges, Lord Chandos’s daughter, or Elizabeth Russell, Lady Russell’s.
Essex’s conduct was all the more scandalous as by 1590, he was a married man. His bride was Frances Walsingham, the daughter of Elizabeth’s closest councilor after Cecil, and the widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Their first child, named Robert (who grew up to command a parliamentary army against Charles I), was born in 1591. Given that Frances was mentioned in her father’s will in December 1589 by her first married name, Sidney, and that the boy was born just a year later, the union may have been hastened by Frances’s pregnancy. Elizabeth expressed weary outrage when she learned of the marriage, though this did not prevent her continuing favoritism towards Essex.
On and on it went. Mr. Vavasour, who had challenged Oxford to a duel over his sister Anne (making him the uncle of Elizabeth Stanley), was imprisoned for impregnating Mrs. Southwell. Robert Dudley Jr., Leicester’s illegitimate son by his lover, Lady Douglas Sheffield, was engaged to Frances Vavasour, who jilted him to make a secret marriage with Sir Thomas Stanley, who had been having an affair with Frances, Lady Stourton, Robert Cecil’s sister-in-law. Dudley consoled himself with Margaret Cavendish, and he, too, was imprisoned when they were caught. He went on to marry Margaret, then Alice Leigh, in 1596, before eloping with Elizabeth Southwell. Mrs. Jones, the “mother of the maids,” found herself in the Tower with Francis Darcy, who had secretly married Katherine Leigh. Altogether, Elizabeth despaired of girls such as her carver, Lady Howard (née Carey), who was more interested in flirtations than her duties, once being otherwise engaged when it was time for her to bring the queen’s mantle when she wished to walk out, being late to serve at table in the Privy Chamber, and then being absent entirely when she was due to accompany Elizabeth to chapel. In 1591 alone, half of Elizabeth’s maids of honor were dismissed for scandal, “all of which doth so disquiet Her Highness that she swore she would no more show . . . any countenance, but out with such ungracious flouting wenches.”4
It is easy to have sympathy with the maids. Their mistress was highly demanding and often querulous. Even she had behaved indiscreetly with Leicester in those impossibly long-ago days when she had, it was rumored, been young. And, after all, the whole purpose of their presence at court was to find suitable husbands, while the queen herself was mistress par none of the art of flirtation. Outside the supposedly chaste atmosphere of Whitehall, London in the 1590s was full of prostitutes, directed to eager clients by “guidebooks” such as Robert Greene’s Notable Discovery of Cozenage. Even gently bred Protestant misses could hardly avoid the sight of these women and their customers in the streets, not to mention the rotted faces and collapsed eyes which their exchanges often produced—for the city was at the time in the grip of a syphilis epidemic. Sex was dangerous, not only because of the risks of childbirth but because even virtuous wives risked contracting the pox from straying husbands. And danger is always alluring to adolescents—many of Elizabeth’s maids were still in their teens. Sometimes the girls took revenge on the double standard which kept them so strictly enclosed while their male contemporaries were granted so much license. Sir William Knollys, the comptroller of the royal household, was a well-known old goat, given to complaining at the “disturbances” caused by the maids, whom he enjoyed peeping at by night. On one occasion, he appeared in their chamber, naked but for a pair of spectacles, attempting to shock them by reading pornographic passages from Aretino. The girls nicknamed him “Party Beard,” for the stripes of white, yellow, and black in his whiskers, and responded to his invasion by making up rude ditties about him.
Elizabeth needed her maids. It was they, after all, who were practically responsible for the construction of Gloriana—the wigs, the make-up, the lacing of the gowns, the placing of the jewels, and perhaps her reaction to their rebellious indiscretions was less erotic envy than a sense of outraged vulnerability. These young, attractive women knew her in her diminished physical self, an aging, wrinkled woman with bad teeth and sagging breasts. Their fecundity underlined her own childlessness, but that in itself was a source of power, what made her exceptional. Their flouting of her authority rendered her politically sterile, as it represented a refusal to collude with an image whose falseness to which only they knew the intimate extent.
Elizabeth was not always hard on girls who strayed. When Abigail Heveringham became pregnant, she was found a husband in Sir George Digby, while Emilia Bassano, who had been Lord Hunsdon’s mistress, was respectably married off to one of the royal musicians. Elizabeth despised sexual incontinence where it threatened order, but in the highly charged atmosphere of the court of the 1590s, she made one notorious exception—the Earl of Essex.
THE DEFEAT OF the Armada had not put an end to the war with Spain, and while the iconography associated with Elizabeth continued to present her as a victorious bringer of peace, the 1590s saw a period of conflict on various fronts. The Netherlands remained one theatre, which was expanded by war in France, where Henri IV was attempting to overthrow the Catholic League and retain the succession, while in Ireland, which increasingly attracted the interest of Spain as the decade progressed, English resources were as overstretched as English rule was threatened. Not only did this require a delicate juggling of limited military powers, it created serious divisions within Elizabeth’s council. Two main strategies were pursued, on land and at sea. At sea, the aim between 1588 and 1594 consisted mainly of privateering, with the objective of raiding Spanish funds to finance English expeditions and to protect the Channel ports, while on land, the Spanish were repelled in both the Netherlands and France, whence Elizabeth committed twenty thousand troops between 1589 and 1595. However, in neither case did Elizabeth have any effective long-term ambition on the Continent—her aim was simply the preservation of England. Essex thought differently. He wished to pursue a more aggressive strategy in the Netherlands, which would give more active help to the Dutch Protestants. This was countered by the supporters of Cecil, and increasingly of his son Robert, his right-hand man, who believed that action at sea was both more flexible and less costly.
From 1589, England had had little choice but to support the cause of the Protestant pretender to the French crown, Henri of Navarre. News of Mary Stuart’s execution had reached Paris on 1 May 1587. So violent was the reaction to her death that the preacher of Saint-Eustache (possibly the queen’s former confessor René Benoiste) was obliged to leave the pulpit before concluding his sermon, as it had practically caused a riot. On 13 November, a Mass was said for Mary at Notre-Dame, but the Duc de Guise did not attend. Mary had been practically useless to the Guise attempt to gain control of French politics for some time, but now she could become a serviceable martyr. It was rumored that Henri III had acquiesced in the execution, and anti-royalist Catholic preachers were encouraged to speak out against the king.
From England, Elizabeth encouraged Henri to go to war against Guise, yet without being prepared to do much to aid him, and by the end of the year, Henri had almost lost control. Protestant supporters of Henri of Navarre arrived on 18 September, adding a further insurrectionary element to the stand-off between king and subject. By May 1588, Paris was in the control of the Guise, whose ally, Philip of Spain, was pushing for a complete rupture with the crown. Guise was delighted to work with him to bring down Elizabeth but balked at the possibility of setting up a Spanish client monarchy in France. Guise and Henri III were therefore forced into uneasy collaboration, convening in October at Blois. Guise now found himself, embarrassingly, at the head of what amounted to a proto-democratic party. In November, deputies of the Third Estate threatened to leave if the king refused to lower taxation, arguing that “the Queen of England, wicked though she is, is not maintained by these means.”5 The English Parliament, they argued, was able to pass resolutions without interference from the royal council. Thus, the ultra-Catholic Guise found himself the spokesman of what was, in effect, an attempt at a constitutional revolution based on the model of his great enemy.
Henri was equally disgusted, and his solution was the murder of Guise. He was assassinated (after a sensible breakfast of Provençal prunes) in the king’s antechamber early on a December morning by the king’s bodyguard. The murder of Guise did not preserve the ailing house of Valois. A month later, the Sorbonne lodged a decree in the French Parliament which deposed Henri III and replaced him with a council. Desperately, the king turned to Henri of Navarre, and the two mounted a campaign against the Leaguers over the summer, but on 1 August, Henri III was murdered by a zealous Dominican monk.
At this point, Henri of Navarre sought assistance from England. His correspondence with Elizabeth proceeded in the conventional language of courtly love, with one of Europe’s most famous philanderers professing to be ravished by the portrait of the fifty-six-year-old queen. Elizabeth was not impressed by Henri’s subsequent gift of an elephant, neither an aesthetically pleasing nor economical choice, but she permitted him to go through the motions of a “courtship” while remaining aware that she had little choice but to assist him. With the Leaguers proclaiming their own candidate, Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, she faced the possibility of a Spanish-ruled puppet state across the Channel, or at best the emergence of two confessionally divided states, Catholic north and Bourbon south. Twenty thousand pounds and four thousand troops were promised to Henri in September, prompting Cecil to remark on the vagaries of political fortune: “The state of the world is marvellously changed when we true Englishmen have cause for our own quietness to wish good success to a French King and a King of Scots.”6
France was the first site of Essex’s ambitions. Like Leicester before him, Essex’s ideas of his own military prowess were based more on his lineage and his ability to make an impressive appearance in the tiltyard than on actual soldiering experience. The evidence of the field showed him up as little more than a flouncing amateur. In 1591, Elizabeth sent a small expedition under Sir John Norreys to Brittany, where it met with some success. Essex was given the generalship of the French forces the same year, but his campaigning consisted primarily of dubbing an inordinate number of knights (twenty-four, more than Elizabeth herself had made in a decade) and hanging around waiting for Henri IV, who, despite having given Essex a private interview, without the outraged Elizabeth’s permission, never actually showed up in the field. Trudging round in the mud of northern France was not Essex’s idea of military glory, however much it may have been a realistic experience of actual warfare. Having obtained a seat on the Privy Council in February 1593, the earl set about sowing discord among Elizabeth’s advisers, with the aim of displacing Robert Cecil from what appeared to many as his natural inheritance, now that his father was evidently in declining health. The exposure of poor Rodrigo Lopez was claimed as a victory, but Essex had little understanding of, or interest in, the daily grind of political business at which the Cecils, father and son, so thoroughly excelled. He wanted power, and action, and flash, without having to bore himself too much with the somewhat middle-class business of detail.
The struggle for dominance in France continued for four years, which proved an intolerable strain on Elizabeth’s resources. So when Henri made his peace with Rome on 22 July 1593, at an elaborate ceremony at the royal abbey of St. Denis, her feelings were ambivalent. She described Henri as “the most ungrateful King that liveth” but was encouraged by his promise to continue religious toleration for Protestants.7 In a move which gave the lie to the idea that conservative opinion still rejected the concept of female rule, Philip of Spain was pushing for his daughter, the Infanta Isabella, to succeed instead of Henri. It was Isabella’s foreignness, rather than her sex, to which the French Estates objected in their rejection of the scheme. For her part, Elizabeth did consent in 1594 to support an expedition to oust the Spanish from Brest, though for the next two years she refused any further support for Henri, despite considerable pressure from the more militant among her council.
ELIZABETH’S CHOICE TO make her translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy is notable at this juncture. She began the work, her first major translation since her gifts to her father and Katherine Parr as a princess, at Windsor, shortly after hearing the news of Henri’s conversion. Despite the French king’s compliments on her portrait, Elizabeth knew that, visually, the game was up. She has been criticized for her failure during the 1590s to reposition her symbolic image—“the aged actress looked foolish as she continued to play the part which had once made her famous”—yet the translation may be seen as precisely such a gesture, a reclaiming of intellectual authority.8 Elizabeth’s looks may have been waning; not so her mind. Boethius was a sharp choice, and one which, as we have seen above in her exchange with Ralegh, played to her own self-conception as a divinely appointed monarch. It was also a subtle response to a literary challenge. In 1593, another lady had been at work on a translation. Mary Herbert (née Sidney), Robert Dudley’s niece, had attended on Elizabeth before her marriage to the Earl of Pembroke in 1577. As sister to the courtierpoet Philip Sidney, Mary created an intellectual circle around her home at Wilton which has been described in the most glowing terms of Renaissance comparison as “the English Urbino.” After her brother’s death in the Netherlands, Mary, whose own excellent education had included Hebrew, continued his translation of the Psalms, eventually publishing them in 1599. The Sidneys were allied with the militant party at court, and the Psalms were particularly important to radical Protestants—the Huguenots sang Psalm 68 as a battle hymn. Mary was keen to present her late brother as a Protestant martyr, and her dedication of the work, to both the queen and Philip himself, can be read as a challenge. The expenses of the French campaigns amounted to over £300,000 by the time of Henri’s “apostasy,” and though Parliament wished to reduce subsidies by two-thirds, and Elizabeth had been forced to sell off crown lands to raise funds, many considered that she had not gone far enough in her sup-port for the Huguenots. In counter-translating Boethius, Elizabeth was asserting the authority of her judgment.
Above all, Boethius counselled patience. By implication, Protestant zealotry is to be mistrusted:
Each thing seeks out his own proper course
And do rejoice at return their own
No order given to any remains
Unless he joins to end his first
And so steadies his holy round.
It is by acceptance of God’s (and therefore Elizabeth’s) will that things will return to their true nature; it is presumptuous to seek to illuminate the holy mind. Thus, Elizabeth subtly reminded her reader of the spiritual pride of the Protestants who advocated further armed conflict, and of her own unique status as a channel of communication with God. Contending with the changes in her council, the pressure from militant Protestants, and the frustration of Henri’s conversion, Elizabeth looked for succor in Boethius’s injunction to seek the truth by rising above the pettiness of worldly matters:
Man alone his head upward bends
On high thy mind should raise, lest overweighed
Thy body made aloft, thy mind should
Lower sit.
This rendering reads as a recollection of Sidney’s observation in the Defense of Poesie, then in circulation, that “our erected wit maketh us to know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.” In other words, Mary and her fellow advocates of intervention would do well to remember the thoughts of their pet martyr, that it is the mind which raises us to the quality of divine grace, and excessive dependence on action reduces us to mere bodies.
Just as Henri had employed the vocabulary of courtly love in seeking Elizabeth’s favor, so, more broadly, did Protestant intellectuals in seeking to associate her with the cause of transnational Protestantism. Literature, often in Latin, formed an important connection between Elizabeth’s court and the Protestant centers of northern Europe, another strand of connection between Elizabethan England and the continental Renaissance. Paulus Melissus was another member of the Sidney circle, a German writer and refugee who had known Philip Sidney in Heidelberg in 1573. He arrived at court in 1585, soon after which he dedicated his first poetry collection, Schediasmata poetica, to the queen. His ambition of an official appointment remained unfulfilled, but his work expresses all the hopes of European Protestants that they would find a champion in her, casting himself as the supplicant lover in the mingling of the erotic with the divine which Elizabeth had so successfully arrogated to herself. Elizabeth functions as both lord and lady, sexually idealized as “Rosina” (one can see why the well-read queen balked at giving poor, earnest Melissus a job) and as an armed princeps ignotus, his weapons burnished by heavenly light. True piety, he argued, will only be achieved by a prince worthy of God’s love, couched in the most yearning of courtly terms:
For twenty Mays I have been able to creep through acanthus and often been subjected to pricking thorns and brambles
There the Queen was permitted to gather a gleaming flower which Venus is always accustomed to love above all others
But spring has never had any regard for me and summer glances back towards my face. . . . No rose is to be seen. . . . When will that cup of the rose reach out to me?
Melissus articulated the despair of Protestants who saw Elizabeth as the object of longstanding and fruitless devotion, but Elizabeth had as much regard for the German as spring did, and by the early 1590s, Melissus’s “ideal prince” had mutated into Henri of Navarre.
Henri’s conversion was thus, in a sense, a bitter vindication of Elizabeth’s policies, which she expressed in her own translation, that interfering in the workings of the sacred mind was a vanity, a spiritual puffery which would be thwarted by fortune. Patience was also considerably cheaper.