Elizabeth Read online

  In many ways, Elizabeth was much less a Renaissance figure than her father. She was, unlike Henry VIII, no artistic innovator. She built no palaces, patronized few significant painters, kept an appropriate but not by the standards of the time astonishing court. Her artistic legacy is not startling, though by no means is it so impoverished as might first appear. Yet she did accomplish that primary objective, the securing of her state, in the wake of her father’s revolutionary break from Rome and the brief, bloody restoration of Catholicism during the reign of her older sister, Mary. Whether or not Elizabeth was a strong or a weak ruler; whether she guided the nation successfully through the upheavals of religious and legal reform, or created a cruel religious antagonism which continued for centuries; whether she left England as a strong nation with a new sense of a united identity, or an exhausted and bankrupt country desperate for change, it is in this that Elizabeth remains unique, not only because she survived to govern at all but because she did so sui generis, in a way which had never been seen before.

  WHAT ELIZABETH DID was to negotiate her way between two differing and incompatible ideologies, which we might call “chivalric kingship” and “statecraft,” leaving England a markedly different place on her death in 1603 from her accession in 1558. It is the conflict between these two ways of thinking which is the connective current of Shakespeare’s history plays, and which is resolved, in Henry VIII, by Elizabeth herself.

  The history plays, which begin in the thirteenth century with King John and end in the sixteenth with Henry VIII, represent a chronicle of the passing of the medieval world and its replacement by a new order. Shakespeare’s “notably nostalgic” portrayal of Henry VIII’s reign is haunted by another prince, the most famous of them all—Machiavelli.6 As the culmination of the history cycle, the play contrasts two political systems, the medieval and the modern, or the Christian and the Machiavellian. It was the incompatibility of the latter which Machiavelli’s contemporaries found so shocking.

  What Machiavelli did was to “call the bluff on the belief … that all genuine value systems are compatible.”7 The medieval model, that of “chivalric kingship,” posited that a Christian ruler could govern honorably, according to the tenets of the Church, and that there was no essential conflict between justice and expediency. This is not to say that the medieval monarch did not lie, cheat, and murder (Elizabeth’s own ancestors are ample proof), but that when they did so, their actions were seen as deviations from a code and judged accordingly. Machiavelli did not advocate immorality in the pursuit of gain, but he did argue that apparently immoral actions could, according to circumstance, be ethical. This was not a novel conundrum—it was discussed by many of the classical authors that humanist scholarship was rediscovering. Cicero and Quintilian—writers with whom Elizabeth I was familiar—discussed the idea that “political success demands morally obnoxious acts from anyone seriously engaged in politics,” while the Stoics claimed that there could be no conflict between honestum and utile, the impulse towards truth and necessity, a view which many humanists maintained.8 This was the stance taken, for example, by Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s own tutor, whose disapproval of Machiavelli was expressed in his call for a return to the “days of yore,” an idealized past when the true and the good were less problematically aligned.9 What Shakespeare recognized, and what Henry contends within the play, is that the Renaissance had brought about challenges for rulers for which this traditional model proved inadequate.

  Europe was changing. The superstructure of the Church, which had imposed its hierarchy over the remnants of feudal government, was diminished in authority; indeed, in England that authority was out of favor. The princely state was emerging as the foundation of a very different political order, which required a different set of imperatives for government and which seemed inimical to the older idea of honorable or chivalric kingship. What the Christian ethic could not allow was the “doubleness” of Machiavellian thinking, that a ruler might say one thing and do another. Both Protestant and Catholic writers associated Machiavelli with mendacity, even with the “father of lies,” Satan himself.

  Yet as James I, Elizabeth’s “heir” as referenced in Henry VIII, had it, “a king can never without secrecy do great things.” The Renaissance prince needed The Prince.

  WHILE THERE is no direct evidence that Elizabeth herself owned a copy or read The Prince, it is impossible that she could have been ignorant of its ideas, which had been current in England for some time when she succeeded to the throne. Richard Morison, secretary to her father’s minister Thomas Cromwell, who was in Italy until 1536, has been credited with using Machiavellian doctrines.10 Elizabeth’s ministers Francis Walsingham, William Cecil, and Nicholas Bacon all read Machiavelli; Sir Christopher Hatton owned a copy; and in 1560, a translation of Machiavelli’s The Art of War was dedicated to Elizabeth, a dedication repeatedly included in later editions. “Given [Elizabeth’s] extensive humanist education, her fluency in Italian and her lifelong interest in philosophy, it is highly probable that she was, like most of her councilors, familiar with Machiavelli’s ideas.”11

  Elizabeth was very much a Renaissance ruler in that, like her father before her, she invested a good deal in her self-presentation as a scholar-king. She wrote and translated throughout her life, not only her own speeches, on which she worked closely with a secretary before handing them to her minister William Cecil for checking, but also letters in French, Italian, Greek, and Latin as well as poems and prayers. One couplet references Machiavelli directly:

  Never think you Fortune can bear the sway,

  Where virtue’s force can cause her to obey.

  The central premise of The Prince is the perennial conflict between virtu and Fortune. A ruler, Machiavelli suggests, can control fate through the exercise of virtu. Virtu is not the same thing as virtue, that is, adhering to high moral standards. Virtu, derived from the Latin virtus, in turn from the root vir, “man,” can be understood as a combination of qualities—courage, fortitude, and ingenuity among them—but it differs from virtue, goodness, by the “goals achieved and the results of achieving them.” The ultimate goal for the prince is to “govern Fortune,” which can only be achieved by applying moral flexibility to political expediency. “Only if men could properly discern the demands of the times and adjust their behavior accordingly” is this possible. Different behavior, in different contexts, can achieve the same result.

  Elizabeth I has been described as “one of the most perfect incarnations of the Machiavellian prince.”12 The need to adapt to circumstance, to bow to necessity in order to better control it, was a lesson Elizabeth learned early, and upon which her literal, as well as political, survival may well have depended. The contrast between her reputation and that of her disastrously dogmatic sister Mary is a case in point, while her execution of Mary Stuart, which cost her a good deal of personal struggle, represents perhaps the best example of Machiavellian statecraft over “chivalric kingship.” Knightly ideals, which had, in principle at least, underpinned an older form of politics, had no place in a new ideological age where political assassination was construed as an instrument of divine will.

  That Elizabeth was influenced by Machiavelli is not exactly news, but in the conflict between Fortune and virtu referenced in the couplet, she does something else. The poem was written to Walter Ralegh, in response to the latter’s own complaint that, in the best language of courtly discourse, “Fortune hath taken away my love.” The poem is dated to around 1589, at the cusp of Ralegh’s influence before it began to decline in the face of Elizabeth’s promotion of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Four years later, Elizabeth was to translate one of the most important works of medieval thought, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, and her response to Ralegh’s verse reads like a rehearsal of the dialogue in Boethius between Philosophy and Fortune, but also as a recasting of the gendered categories of Machiavelli’s virtu and Fortune.

  In The Consolation, Boethius suggested that only God could overc
ome Fortune, whose power is limited to the sublunary, or material, world. Elizabeth’s verse advice to Ralegh plays with the conventions of courtly love but also positions the queen as God’s representative. Ralegh’s plea is couched in the conventional courtly terms—he is the swooning knight, she the inconstant mistress. Elizabeth’s answer switches the roles. She portrays herself as Philosophy, or virtu, appropriating the “male” role to herself, while Ralegh is encouraged to recover his “courtly masculinity” (which by implication is compromised). In directing Ralegh towards virtu, she also implies that she has power over Fortune, enhancing her own divine status as God’s representative on earth. Where Elizabeth was truly a Renaissance prince, then, a creature of her times, is in this refashioning of her own right to govern within a new political order which is nevertheless justified by her arrogation of divine power to herself.

  PERHAPS THE STARTING point of the trajectory which was to carry the young woman of the Three Goddesses portrait into the Renaissance was her signature. When Elizabeth Tudor learned to write, she did so as a princess. Her first letters, formed under the tutelage of William Grindal, who taught her between 1544 and 1546, are notable for the clarity of their neat italic hand. Italic script spoke of classical education, associating its user with the erudite tradition of “new learning” so prized by European elites. Yet, “though prestigious in some contexts … [it] seems to have been viewed by some in the later part of the Tudor period as a childish, womanish, second hand skill.”13 When Elizabeth came into her crown in 1558, one of the first things she did to signify her new status as queen was to adopt what she called her “skrating” hand, the runaway script which sprawls across her correspondence like a dancing spider. Like Hamlet, Elizabeth held it “a baseness to write fair and laboured much / How to forget that learning.”14 No longer a polite young lady, eager to please with her accomplishments, the young queen bestowed more attention than any of her Tudor predecessors on her signature, creating a swooping, intricate flourish derived from the huge ampersand displayed in the bottom right corner of her childhood writing manual, Palatino’s Il libro nuovo. Notably, neither of the sample “R’s” the queen melded in her signature were influenced by Palatino’s model of the word Regina; significantly, they are modelled on the letters which begin reverendissimo and rarissimo, that is, in the masculine rather than the feminine form. Elizabeth’s signature is a tiny, poignant window into the mind of a young woman whose path to the throne had been so perilous as to make its completion almost incredible. It is also a measure of her apparently serene certainty of her own destiny. Teenage girls practice signatures, signing themselves into imagined futures with the crush of the week: Elizabeth wrote her future as a monarch. And she chose to do so not as a princess but as a prince.

  Elizabeth’s decision to reinvent her signature shows us two things. First, that she was comfortable enough within the rarefied atmosphere of humanist learning to play with it, to appropriate it to her own ends, and second, in a gesture which foregrounds her much later manipulation of the Machiavellian concept of virtu in her exchange with Ralegh, that those ends involved a dissolution of gender categories.

  Throughout her reign, Elizabeth was to exploit the fluidity of gender categories which, in the perceptual paradigm of her age, surrounded those few exceptional individuals who enjoyed the status of sovereign rulers. This fluidity was represented in language. Elizabeth I referred to herself as a “prince,” as did her kinswoman and fellow Queen Regnant Mary Stuart. Sovereign monarchs were “male,” even when they were female. Perhaps the best analogy is with languages where nouns are gendered: a thing, a table or a book, say, is categorized by an article as male or female. Perhaps the use of the word which most sums up Elizabeth’s character is her glorious riposte to Robert Cecil, “The word must is not used to princes.” Also significant to sovereign status was the distinction between the “body natural” and the “body politic” of a prince. In Elizabeth’s case, these potential biological dualities were central to her authority, which she sought to enforce through a mystic virginity, which confirmed her not only as a head of state but as the quasi-divine figurehead of a new religion.

  Elizabeth’s realization of this role is demonstrated visually in one of the best-known images of her as queen, the Armada Portrait of 1588. It is curious that the cultural legacy of Elizabeth I’s personal rule has been described as being “of the word, not the eye.” No monarch before or since has so effectively stamped an age with his image. Elizabeth constructed her appearance with a precision which might in contemporary terms be called “branding”—the consistent details of red hair, ivory skin, ornate ruff, and elaborately jeweled costume rendering her instantly recognizable. The Armada Portrait, the zenith of Elizabeth’s age, at least so far as propaganda was concerned, fulfils all the iconographic elements which so effectively annealed her image to her reign. The most intact of three versions, in addition to as many as six derivatives, the portrait is nevertheless novel in that it takes a horizontal rather than a vertical perspective, “as though some new and spectacular format had to be invented to match the magnitude of the event.”15 Elizabeth’s hand rests upon a globe, after the manner of a Roman emperor; above it is set the Crown Imperial, equating the status of the Tudors with that of the Holy Roman Empire. Between the columns behind the queen we see the English fireships advancing into the Spanish fleet on the left, and on the right, the enemy’s battered, ignominious retreat to the cruel Scottish coast—images of shipwreck, it should be noted, were at the time used to imply heresy. There is no doubt that the Spanish are being punished by the same God who delivered victory to the queen. All we see of Elizabeth is her face, poised and smooth beneath her pearl-dressed wig, and the long pale hands of which she was proud all her life. Her gown, with its huge puffed sleeves, bows, embroidery, and jewels, is less a garment than a treasure trove, an insistent display of wealth and wonder. This is in no way a representation of a human being; rather, the portrait captures a point of apotheosis, of the translation from monarch to immortal. The atypical perspective of the painting, whereby the chairs and tables which surround the queen are observed simultaneously from differing viewpoints, reinforces the gesture of her hand set upon the globe; this is a ruler who commands not just guns and ships, merchants and soldiers, even, it is implied, storms and sun, but time and space themselves.

  Here, then, are three moments where we might engage imaginatively with Elizabeth—the assiduous student of the new learning, swirling out her future with her quill; the young queen, stepping forward into the sunlight of a dawning age; and the triumphant sovereign, her humanity excised beneath a gorgeous canvas of authority. It is in the gaps between these moments that Elizabeth created herself. In seeing her as a Renaissance prince, this book is just one way of looking at how she did so.

  1

  WHEN THE INFANT Princess Elizabeth awoke in her nursery on 20 May 1536, the landscape of her childhood was imperceptibly but irrevocably changed. Her mother, Queen Anne, had died the previous morning in the Tower precincts, her head struck from her body by the dancing blade of a French swordsman imported from Calais for the task. So many corpses, so many ghosts. Elizabeth’s path to the throne was littered with 150 years’ worth of bodies. Since 1400, when the two strands of the great Plantagenet dynasty which had ruled England since 1154 divided and turned against one another, the preoccupation of the English crown had been heirs. The childless Richard II (with whom Elizabeth was later to identify herself) lost his throne to Henry Bolingbroke, subsequently Henry IV. The death of his son Henry V, the second Lancastrian king, in 1422, left the nation under the nominal leadership of a tiny baby, inaugurating the second phase of the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic conflict which dominated English politics until Henry Tudor seized the throne from Richard III in 1485. With Henry’s accession and celebrated reunion of the two strands of the dynasty in his marriage to Elizabeth of York, the succession seemed assured, though it passed to another Duke of York, Henry VIII, rather than his elder b
rother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. It was hardly surprising, given this legacy of treachery, death, and devastating insecurity that when Henry married his brother’s widow, Katherine of Aragon, he should have been even more concerned than his ancestors with the getting of a male heir, yet this was the one thing which, in his view, God denied him. Henry’s struggles to release himself from his first marriage and wed Elizabeth’s mother, Anne, precipitated the greatest confessional schism Europe had yet seen and set England on the course to Protestant isolation which became such a self-declared part of the emerging nationalist identity of his daughter’s state.

  Elizabeth was the product of that schism, and for two years, officially at least, she was his petted darling, the first child of that godly marriage which would people the courts of Europe with Tudor blood. Yet on 20 May 1536, all the small certainties of her world were severed. Historians have been arguing ever since about the effect this had on Elizabeth, but we cannot know how and when the two-year-old girl was informed of her mother’s death or what her reaction was. This has not prevented generations of writers from imaginatively constructing the consequences of Elizabeth’s loss, but statements such as “Unresolved grief continued through Elizabeth’s childhood … for Anne Boleyn’s name could not be mentioned without provoking a fearful reaction from Henry VIII. Such a situation often leads to excessive mourning reactions on occasions of loss and later melancholia,” are merely speculative and without authority, though not uninteresting.1 That Elizabeth was nurturing a secret guilt at having fulfilled the desire of her Electra complex (the killing of her mother), that she was traumatized into evading marriage in later life, that she promoted a cult of her virginity in order to compensate for her inadequacy as a woman, that she needed to dominate and control those around her, have all been confidently and speciously attributed to the scars left by her mother’s execution. That Anne’s death had some effect on her daughter is reasonable; we simply do not know what that effect was, even if Elizabeth herself did.