Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Read online

  That, too, was the opinion of Elizabeth, though she was never so innocent as to set it down and give her enemies a club to beat her. Reformed by the prudence of Henry VII and the national fervour of Henry VIII, England had won a place in the world. It was Elizabeth’s hard task to prove the reputation of an independent, Protestant island against the enmity of the powerful continental kingdoms. The practice of her ancestors was the only light she needed to guide her on this perilous way. From her grandfather she learnt caution and practicality, and from her father a profound understanding of the mind and the heart of her people.

  She began with the typical Tudor advantages of natural ability trained by a rigorous education. Since the succession was a preoccupation of the Tudor dynasty, and since no one knew where fate might place the crown, all the Tudor children were educated up to the standard of the Renaissance prince. It was said of Elizabeth that ‘her sweet tongue could speak distinctively Greek, Latin, Tuscan, Spanish, French, and Dutch’. Bacon wrote after her death, when there was no longer any reason for flattery, that all her life she set aside certain hours for study. She regarded even the dangers of her early life as a lesson in the arts of government. The execution of her mother Anne Boleyn and her own consequent disfavour, her trials in the reign of her Catholic sister, taught her both the wilful power of the sovereign and also the need for cunning, dissembling and political flexibility. She was prepared to rule, and the wasteful, destructive years of Mary’s reign gave her, on accession, the unlimited goodwill of the country.

  Lady, this long space

  Have I loved thy grace,

  More than I durst well say;

  Hoping, at the last,

  When all storms were past,

  For to see this joyful day.

  That, in the words of the ballad, was the popular sentiment on her coronation. No one knew better than she the value of popularity. She was an adept publicist; by means of pageants, visitations and ‘progresses’ she kept herself in the eye of the people. Her regal presence and her wit enabled her to carry off these occasions in great style. When the time was right she was capable of an impressive democratic rhetoric, as in her famous speech at Tilbury before the attack of the Armada. More than any other English sovereign, she kept the good opinion of most of her people throughout a long and difficult reign. To her poets she was ‘Eternal Virgin, Goddess true’, ‘Blessed Astraea’, ‘Fair Eliza, Queen of Shepherds all’, ‘Cynthia, the Lady of the sea’, their great Gloriana. Staid men in Parliament were as giddy about her as the poets. ‘If I might prolong her Majesty’s life but for one year,’ one said in 1585, ‘I protest I would be content to suffer death with the most exquisite torments that might be devised.’ The common people continued to love her. In 1600 the ballad-maker wrote:

  The noblest queen

  That ever was seen

  In England doth reign this day.

  She became eventually a talisman for the people. Bishop Goodman described how, as a boy in 1588, he was swept along by a rumour that the Queen was to be seen going to Whitehall. After an hour Elizabeth emerged. ‘Then we cried “God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!” Then the Queen turned unto us and said, “God save you all, my good people! … You may well have a greater prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince”.’ The reply was admirably calculated. No wonder the crowd ‘did nothing but talk what an admirable queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her service’.

  This adulation, and the need to cultivate it, left marks on her character. Those who live by popularity learn conceit and eccentricity. Elizabeth, like her father, was extremely egotistical. The German traveller Hentzer noted that she expected the court to fall to their knees before her. Though she was not handsome, she was surprisingly coquettish. The professions of love from ambitious young courtiers, which her wisdom recognized for the flattery they were, still puffed up her tough old heart. As age advanced she covered her plainness with fantastic eccentricity. When de Maisse, the French ambassador, met her for the first time in 1597, she seemed a grotesque fright. Above her thin face, with pinched nose and crooked yellow teeth, she wore a vast red wig, spangled with gold and silver, and with two great curls hanging down to her shoulders. She was much encrusted with jewels, and wore a kind of nightgown of silver gauze cut so low that her breasts were easily seen. This indecorous dress she would from time to time open at the front as if she were too hot. And in their conversation, where the ambassador found her gracious and sharp-witted, she still expected compliments. An old harridan deceived by wilfulness and embittered by sexual frustration.

  No triumph of personality would have compensated for a failed policy. Elizabeth’s command of the country was firmly based on successful government. The outward signs of her rule were those made familiar by the earlier Tudors. She was authoritarian, secret and without conscience. She did not like advice and reminded her ministers of ‘our long experience in government’ which had ‘taught us to discover what were fit for us to do in matters of our state’. Any sign of independent action was sharply checked. She reminded Leicester that she had raised him from the dust. ‘I may not endure’, she told Sir Thomas Sherley, ‘that any man shall alter my commission and the authority that I gave him upon his own fancies and without me.’ Her father used to say, ‘If I thought that my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire.’ She had the same regard for closeness and secrecy. She wrote to her envoy in the Netherlands: ‘We princes be wary enough of our bargains, think you I will be bound by your speech to make no peace for mine own matters without their consent.’ In Tudor polity, the nearer a person was to the throne, the higher the birth and the better the ability, the greater was the danger. Elizabeth advised Henry IV of France that it was a ‘mild severity’ to cut off the head before ambition rose too high. When Leicester was in temporary disgrace, Lord Warwick wrote to him not to trust the oath of the Queen, for her friendship was unreliable and her malice was ‘great and unquenchable’. Essex remarked that the Queen was as crooked in mind as she was in body.

  The policy, however, of this peremptory woman was always cautious and conservative. She moved very slowly and only made up her mind after long deliberation, much to the disgust of her own active ministers. Walsingham, the advocate of an aggressive policy against Spain which the Queen was loathe to follow, declared that she was ‘daily more unapt to embrace any matter of weight’. In the event he was right when he saw that a contest with Spain was inevitable; but the Queen was also right, and wiser, to put off the battle for as long as possible, to gain whatever she could from diplomatic sorties and double-dealing, and at last to make Spain take the initiative and bring the war to England where it would be fought to the English advantage. In all matters where she had a choice Elizabeth’s instinct was to leave things alone, not to upset the established order of things. The changes in the reign of Edward VI, and the extreme reaction to them by Mary, had made England Protestant. Elizabeth by all accounts had no deep faith. Her only interest was to preserve the absolute power of the crown which rested on her father’s legislation. In theology she was content to follow the wish of the people.

  She showed no desire to change the shape of the society she discovered on her accession. She had the usual Tudor distrust for the old aristocracy, and like her father and grandfather chose her confidential ministers from among the ‘new men’. But she also had to a marked degree the sixteenth-century love for hierarchy and insisted that ranks were observed and places kept. When her government did legislate for changing social conditions, it did so only out of a sense of practicality, a grudging and usually tardy recognition of a breakdown in the old order. For most of her reign the vagrancy laws, which aimed to keep a man tied to his birthplace and thus prevented the mobility of labour, were applied with great strictness. Only when enclosures and capitalism had made the old rules quite unworkable were new provisions made to free labour and ease the misery of the poor. But if the Queen was conservative, she was not reactionary. She made
no attempt to stop the profound changes that were already afoot. The gentry, who had begun their rise in the time of her grandfather, continued their spectacular ascent throughout her reign, encouraged by the long years of peace.

  Her economic and commercial policies were also dictated by what she found. She was hardly more successful than her predecessors in dealing with inflation, the bane of the sixteenth century. But her well-known parsimony and her dislike for expensive warfare kept the expenses of her government as low as possible; she still could not prevent James I succeeding to an impoverished crown. If the crown was poor, however, the merchants were not. Her government was naturally suspicious of capitalism, as a newfangled, foreign device, but the conditions of her reign made capitalist commerce thrive. Peace at home was good for trade, and the great expansion of English curiosity beyond the seas was even better. Elizabeth had a double interest in sea voyages, for she expected them to aid her foreign policy and to fill her treasure chests. Where the pirates and the explorer led, the merchant soon followed. A new spirit of commercial enterprise was about and the wealth of the country grew rapidly, from foreign commerce, from speculation, from the traditional business of the wool trade, from new ventures in mining and manufacturing. About 1600 Thomas Wilson, a knowledgeable writer on all aspects of trade, claimed to have known twenty-four aldermen of Norwich who were worth more than £20,000 each. ‘But if we should speak of London’, he added, ‘and some other maritime places, we should find it much exceeding this rate. It is well known, that at this time there are in London some merchants worth £100,000; and he is not accounted rich that cannot reach to £50,000 or near it.’ In 1498 the Venetian envoy had been struck by the prosperity of England; nearly a hundred years later a German traveller received the same impression. He also spoke of the fertility of the land and the variety of animals; he saw the stately mode of living of many yeomen. He concluded: ‘The peasants and citizens are on the average rich people, not to speak of the gentlemen and noblemen.’

  But a critical contemporary might well have wondered what to make of England at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. At home, the Puritans were already contesting the right of the government to decide forms of worship. Parliament was attempting to limit the royal prerogative. The rebellion of Essex, who was executed in February 1601, had indicated discontent in several parts of society. The trading classes were wealthy enough, but those of modest means suffered from stiff inflation. The last Parliament of the reign, which met in the winter of 1601, complained that the Queen’s use of the prerogative to grant objectionable monopolies to her favourites forced up the cost of living, raised prices all over, and threw men out of work. The people cried in the streets: ‘God prosper those that further the overthrow of these monopolies; God send the prerogative, touch not our liberty.’ Abroad, victories over the Spanish in the Netherlands were balanced by the fearful waste of men and money in Ireland. The expenditure in Ireland in the last four years of the reign was some £300,000 more than the total revenue of England for those same years. More lives were lost in Ireland than in the famous naval war against Spain; and the calculated barbarity of the conquerors began the implacable resistance to English rule which has been the constant feature of Irish affairs ever since.

  The Queen was a despot, and acting as such left a poor inheritance to the weak and foolish Stuarts, so that within forty years of her death the country was once more snarled in civil war. But she was an extraordinary despot, one who listened so carefully to her people that she knew, without having to relinquish her absolute rights, when to bend. In 1601, when Parliament in an ugly mood pressed her about monopolies, she knew she must abandon her favourites to save her prerogative, a lesson which the Stuarts never learnt. She cancelled all monopolies and Parliament wept for joy. ‘Though God’, she told the members, ‘hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.’ With her usual acumen, she knew exactly the reason for her success.

  Her minister Sir Christopher Hatton used to say that ‘the Queen did fish for men’s souls, and had so sweet a bait, that no one could escape her network’. Never has a sovereign in England been so caught up in the emotions of the people. It seemed as if there were between Queen and country something in the nature of a mystical union. The Elizabethan poet, with his ear attuned to the inner life of society, perceived this. Sir John Davies saluted her divinity in a Hymn to Astraea:

  Blessed Astraea, I in part

  Enjoy the blessing you impart;

  The peace, the milk and honey,

  Humanity, and civil art,

  A richer dower than money.

  Right glad am I that now I live,

  Even in these days whereto you give

  Great happiness and glory;

  If after you I had been born,

  No doubt I should my birthday scorn,

  Admiring your sweet story.

  When such a strange occurrence happens, a reign cannot be judged merely on political or economic grounds. Elizabeth found a people reborn into a confident and energetic nationalism. She fostered and directed their ideals while these were still pure and generous, and in doing so presided over one of the great ages in the history of the West.

  1 The swan was a royal bird. Only persons with freehold property to the value of five marks a year or more were allowed to own them; all other swans were for the use of the King. Peasants were also excluded, under severe penalties, from the deer-parks of the rich landowners.

  2

  Sir Thomas More

  SIR THOMAS MORE has a reputation almost unequalled in English history, yet few lives of the great have been so plain and straightforward. By his qualities he rose to the highest position in the land. He was just, honest, kindly, courageous, intelligent and good-humoured; but these are ordinary virtues hopefully within reach of every man. It is difficult to see the real greatness of a man so like our better selves. No wonder that Erasmus, for all his learning and wisdom, declared himself not competent to write the history of his friend More.

  Thomas More was a Londoner, born in Cripplegate on 6th February 1478. His father was a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, a member of a city family that had come up from obscure beginnings. And though the Mores were prosperous enough, austerity and discipline were still the marks of the household. Young Thomas was sent to a city school, ‘brought up in the Latin tongue at St Anthony’s in London’, where the ‘Anthony pigs’, as the students were derisively called, learnt their studies by rote from the dictation of the master who alone was likely to have that rare luxury, a printed schoolbook. The aim of this schooling was merely to teach a command of Latin which was dunned into the boys by wearisome repetition and frequent floggings. The method was cruel but effective; by the time More left St Anthony’s, perhaps at the age of twelve, he knew Latin well and his wit had been tested in the schoolboy disputations in Latin held once a year in the churchyard of St Bartholomew, Smithfield.

  After leaving St Anthony’s, More was ‘by his father’s procurement received into the house of the right reverend, wise and learned prelate, Cardinal Morton’. The old-fashioned practice of farming out children of decent families to serve in the households of the great still lingered on in England. This survival from a past age of chivalry was condemned by forward-looking continental visitors to England. ‘The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children’, reported the Venetian envoy; ‘for after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people.’ And the envoy uncharitably attributed this practice to the meanness and selfishness of the English who ‘being great epicures, and very avaricious by nature, indulge in the most delicate fare themselves’, which they were loathe to give to servants and children. Whatever the reason for the custom, More did not regret his time in Morton’s household. The great man was already Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, though not yet a cardinal
, and no-one was more fit to teach good manners and the arts of government. In Utopia, written sixteen years after Morton’s death, More paid an affectionate tribute to his old master: ‘In his speech he was fine, eloquent and pithy. In the law he had profound knowledge, in wit he was incomparable, and in memory wonderful excellent.’ And Morton, it seems, had formed as good an opinion of his young servitor. William Roper, More’s son-in-law and first biographer, relates that Morton, delighted by the ‘wit and forwardness’ of the young man ‘would often say of him unto the nobles that divers times dined with him, “This child here waiting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man”.’

  Morton was a clear-sighted statesman and a very sound administrator; the success of the early Tudor policies was in a large part due to him. He was also a blunt, homely man whose forthright style pleased Thomas More; serving in the household he learnt wisdom and discretion from the prelate’s great experience. Taking note of his good progress, Morton decided to send More to Oxford ‘for his better furtherance in learning’. This favour of a great man was invaluable, but John More, Thomas’s father, was not entirely pleased that his fifteen-year-old son should go to university. Perhaps he thought it time squandered before the boy buckled down to the law, for which Thomas was destined by family tradition: in this period before the Reformation the universities were for the training of churchmen while young gentlemen got their worldly experience at the Inns of Court. Life at Oxford also drew on the family budget. Students were notoriously poor, and John More kept his son as poor as most of them. In later life More praised his father for this austerity, saying that ‘in his youth he did not know the meaning of extravagance or luxury, could not put money to evil uses, seeing that he had no money to put to any uses at all, and, in short, had nothing to think about except his studies’.