A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  Could things have turned out differently? The Steven Ellis argument suggests that they could, and points to the contrasting case of Wales. The Welsh had been conquered by the English Crown in the thirteenth century, and the best of the spoils allotted to New English newcomers much as those of Ireland were under Elizabeth. The native population retaliated with a succession of rebellions, each of which was followed by more savage laws to repress and discriminate against it in favour of English settlers. As a nation, Wales was saved by a complete accident of history: that the English king Henry V left a frisky French widow, Catherine, who fell in love with one of her household, a handsome young Welshman called Owain, son of Maredudd, son of Tudor. The English shortened this to Owen Tudor. They were married, and when the royal family discovered this it was disposed to tolerate it, first because Catherine was now too far from the throne to make her actions seem important, and then because of the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, when the ruling dynasty became glad of all the loyal relatives it could find. The resulting self-destruction of the Plantagenet royal house left Henry Tudor as the only feasible contender for those who wanted to bring down Richard III, and so England duly found itself with a Welshman on its throne. The discriminatory laws against the Welsh were repealed, and they were allowed to come to England, and to the royal court, to make their fortunes. Some did exceptionally well: the Syssell family, Anglicized to Cecil, produced the chief minister of Elizabeth I, while that of Morgan Williams of Glamorgan, which changed its name to Cromwell, was to go on to still greater things in the next century.

  Above all, the Welsh were given control of their own land. When it was incorporated into the English system of government, under Henry VIII, no New English were allowed to flood in to staff the new county offices or be returned for the new parliamentary seats: it was the native gentry who filled most of both. Under Elizabeth, almost all the bishops in Wales were local men, the Bible and Prayer Book were swiftly translated into Welsh, and Jesus College, Oxford, was founded to train Welsh ministers. Welsh religion had been exceptionally free of heresy and insulated from continental Protestant ideas, and the Reformation there was unusually slow in taking off. It was, however, entrusted to the native ruling class, who made it their own. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Wales was both one of the most Protestant parts of the realm and one of the most loyal to the Crown, while still maintaining its own strongly marked national and cultural identity. It is hard to avoid the suspicion, at least, that if Catherine’s love-match had been with somebody called Fitzgerald, or even (to stretch a possibility much further) O’Brien, then the whole history of the British Isles might have been different. By entrusting the Old English wholeheartedly with the Reformation and the spoils of office and of conquest, it seems arguable that the Tudors would have bequeathed a largely Protestant Ireland to posterity. It is, however, impossible to have things both ways in history: and had Catherine’s lover not been a Tudor, then subsequent generations would probably have had to reckon with a rebellious, alienated and largely Catholic Wales.

  Elizabeth’s Reputation

  In popular memory, Elizabeth narrowly beats Queen Victoria as the greatest queen that England has ever known, to judge both from the number of portrayals of her in novels and on the television and cinema screen, and the consistent admiration which she is accorded in them. Her iconic status is further illustrated by the fact that when a pub is called ‘The Queen’s Head’, it is most commonly Elizabeth’s face that is displayed on the board. In the Great Britons poll of 2002 she emerged as the favourite monarch in British history. She is one of those rulers who have left an image which is now pretty well proof against anything that historians may say.

  The process of turning her into a legend commenced soon after her death, and took two different forms. One was to make her the embodiment of aggressive and committed Protestant religion. Elizabeth’s actual record in this respect was shaky, but in comparative terms it was unrivalled. No other English monarch between 1500 and 1700 could match her support for international Protestantism, and her defeat of the Spanish Armada was the greatest English victory over a foreign foe between Agincourt in 1415 and Blenheim in 1704. A perfect blueprint for this portrait of her was left in the work which, next to the Bible, was to become the essential reading of zealous English Protestants: John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Ironically, Foxe knew perfectly well that in reality she did not match his image of her as a godly crusader, and it was intended to rebuke her; but later generations took it for reality. As her immediate successors, the Stuart kings, failed much more completely to live up to the image, her apparent example became a stick with which to beat them, embodied in books, the theatre, sermons, stained-glass windows, prints, poems, monuments and the celebration of the anniversary of her accession as an unofficial national holiday.

  The alternative portrait was one designed for those who wished to look more deeply into the nature of the reign. It was the work of the greatest English historian of the age, William Camden, and was more or less an official history, commissioned by Burghley and completed under the eye of the new king James I. What it showed was a queen with superlative political skills, who pursued moderation in religion and statecraft: admirable but a bit of a cold fish. As a contrast to her, he rehabilitated the king’s mother Mary, Queen of Scots, as a less able ruler but a more human and endearing personality. All the problems of the reign were blamed on the intrigues of loyal but misguided court factions, and especially on the Puritans for trying to overturn the queen’s policies of balance and conciliation. This was an image which perfectly fitted what the new king and court wanted to hear, but was also to some extent based on solid evidence. For almost 400 years it was the history of the reign that was accepted by virtually all intellectuals. It was assimilated neatly into the modern boom in the writing of history, which resulted in more than a hundred biographies of Elizabeth being published between the opening of 1890 and the end of 2002: most of these were based firmly on Camden’s image. The same is true of the representations on film, save that they worry more about it. From Bette Davis in the 1930s to Glenda Jackson in the 1970s to Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren in the 2000s: screen Elizabeths have consciously sacrificed true love and intimacy in order to make a better job of ruling. With Camden’s Queen of England has also come his Queen of Scots: on film, in novels and in ‘pop’ biographies, Mary has emerged as the weaker ruler but the more human, deserving sympathy as Elizabeth merits admiration.

  This great tradition came up for review by professionals in the years of revisionism after 1970, when an unprecedented number of academic historians began conducting research of a novel intensity and indifference to received opinions. The contemporary records were, inevitably, less favourable to Elizabeth than the accounts which had followed her death. They turned out to include the attacks of Catholics, the complaints of Puritans and a series of critiques of the regime, published by disgruntled courtiers between 1572 and 1592, which accused the queen of being the puppet of unscrupulous politicians. When historians worked through the surviving papers of her ministers, they found that most had referred to her at times with exasperation and disrespect. The same ministers were shown up as having some unpleasant traits of their own. Burghley, in particular, who had seemed the exemplary royal servant, loyal, self-effacing and sagacious, was revealed as a Protestant bigot and a master of dirty political tricks, who certainly tried to manipulate his royal mistress whether or not he succeeded. Sir Geoffrey Elton made the first telling assertion by a modern historian that Elizabeth was the instrument of her advisers. His pupil Christopher Haigh produced the first full-bloodedly revisionist biography in 1988, portraying her as somebody who possessed star quality at a distance but at close quarters turned out to be a bundle of hysterics and histrionics, growing into a bossy old bat trying desperately to cling to her youth: Whitehall Palace had become Sunset Boulevard.

  In the same period, between 1970 and 1990, a number of other forces worked against her reputation. A new inte
rest in political culture revealed the skilful way in which the regime had represented itself, in propaganda and image projection, giving historians the impression that by admiring it they were falling for a confidence trick four centuries old. The study of the financial records exposed the dreadful way in which she had allowed the revenue system to run down. Research into the Elizabethan Church turned what had seemed to be an ideal compromise into a constant precarious balancing act which encouraged divisive and disruptive tendencies. Analyses of her rule over Ireland identified her reign as the birthplace for all of the land’s modern troubles. Patrick Collinson noticed that, in their desperate need to preserve a Protestant settlement, in the face of Elizabeth’s failure to produce an heir or name a successor, the queen’s ministers developed ideas which were to be very dangerous to the monarchy. They drew up a plan for an aristocratic republic in the event of the queen’s death, with Parliament choosing the next monarch. They also ensured that Mary was legally tried and executed, whereas Elizabeth would have preferred her to be murdered, to prove that the English could destroy anointed monarchs whom they deemed to have become dangerous. Both set precedents which were to have fatal effects two generations later. Elizabeth appeared increasingly to be a ruler who had achieved short-term success at the expense of all who came after her: a sovereign almost criminally indifferent to a future which did not include her.

  It seemed for a while therefore that she was becoming one of the main casualties of late-twentieth-century historical revisionism. At that point, however, a different ideological force of the period came to her rescue: feminism. She was, after all, an outstanding example of a strong and successful woman, operating in public life on what seemed to be her own terms. At the least this suggested that the new sensitivity to gender issues in history had to be applied to her reign. In its strongest form, it invited any emancipated woman to regard her as a sister. The result has been a general recognition that, however it is rated in relative terms, the issue of Elizabeth’s womanhood has to be accorded considerable importance. A long-lived female monarch, ruling without a husband, was simply an unprecedented phenomenon in England and one that made most people nervous. The degree to which individual historians factor in the issue is, predictably, varied. Some, such as Anne McLaren, see it as fundamental, and make the reasonable point that Elizabeth’s relations with her followers, characterized by their peculiar mixture of intimacy and detachment, stability and tension, were only possible to a single woman. Most subordinate it to religion and politics, arguing with equal cogency that a king who led a Protestant Reformation and then failed to marry or secure a Protestant succession would have called forth similar reactions to those produced by Elizabeth.

  There is at present no consensual or coherent picture of the queen shared even by experts inside Britain. Four recent views seem to me to be particularly revealing. Richard Rex has published a textbook which sums up the revisionist case against her; significantly, it is dedicated to the hundreds of Catholics executed by her regime after the rising of 1569. Susan Doran has accumulated a succession of studies which make her a more straightforward person than others do: more willing to marry, more consistent and devout in her religion, and fairer in her treatment of courtiers. David Starkey has emerged as her greatest current admirer, making a full-blooded restatement of her image as a national heroine. Finally, John Guy, in his prizewinning biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, has given us an Elizabeth who is emotional, erratic, unreasonable, shifty and unpleasant, with Burghley functioning as her evil genius. What is really interesting to me is that each of these positions, bolstered by modern professional scholarship as they are, reproduces one from Elizabeth’s own lifetime. Richard Rex is the ultimate heir of the Elizabethan Catholic view; Susan Doran expresses Elizabeth as the queen portrayed herself; David Starkey has restated Camden’s history; and John Guy the arguments of Mary’s supporters. It seems that professional historians are still as much the prisoners of the past as the servants of the present.

  The Woman at the Centre

  So what does my own Elizabeth look like? I would emphasize four aspects of her character in particular, in order to get as close as possible to the human being beneath the crown. The first is the frustrated spinster, the other face of the Virgin Queen. She seems to have had no objections to marriage as such: she certainly intended to keep control of her realm, but might have wed a husband who had carefully restricted powers. The problem here was one of opportunity. At the opening of her reign she seems to have been genuinely in love with Robert Dudley, but he was clearly unacceptable to her other supporters, and there was never a better domestic candidate. That left her to look abroad, and there no Protestant princes were available of sufficient status to make a match for an English queen. On the other hand, she could find no Catholic royal family which contained an eligible man prepared to forgo the public practice of his religion. In the end she just ran out of options.

  She did, however, have both a passionate nature and a need for affection, and the strain of celibacy and isolation told upon her and those who served her. It certainly showed in her treatment of her maids of honour, who were expected not to marry as well, and were disgraced if they did. One, Mary Shelton, sought her permission to do so, and the queen beat her so hard that she broke a finger. It showed in her attitude towards the Church. As a Protestant, Elizabeth was supposed to favour married clergy, and she certainly permitted them; but she could never bring herself to receive her bishops’ wives with enthusiasm. It also rebounded on the affairs of the nation. For an unusually shrewd and intelligent woman, she had a glaring weakness for handsome and dashing men who excelled in superficial glitter. Four in particular were indulged by her: the aforementioned Robert Dudley, whom she made Earl of Leicester; the French Duke of Anjou; Sir Walter Raleigh; and the second Earl of Essex (son of the butcher of the Irish). All proved to be liabilities when trusted with really important responsibilities, all to some extent disrupted national politics, and in the end she had to cut off Essex’s head in order to save her government.

  Starved of love in the straightforward sense, she compensated by demanding it from her followers and subjects as a whole. She had an insatiable appetite for compliment and adoration. One of her most successful courtiers, Sir Christopher Hatton, remarked that ‘The queen did fish for men’s souls’. She dressed to dazzle: in 1600 she owned 103 robes, 269 gowns, 96 cloaks and 26 fans. Like her father, she loved to gamble on cards; unlike him, she always insisted on winning, so that courtiers had to set up funds to pay their obligatory losses. The other side of this aspect of her nature was revealed in the pet names that she gave her courtiers and the solicitude with which she visited them when they were ill. Possessive and emotionally needy she may have been, but she did win the love or respect of those around her. She also made an impact on a wider public. Sara Mendelson has worked through the records of opinion, made by both government informers and local observers, and found that they testify to an overwhelming affection for her among her subjects. One of the most telling illustrations is found in the private papers of an astrologer called Simon Forman. He was no romantic, being an unscrupulous and hard-bitten lecher, but recorded with joy and pride a dream in which his queen had offered him a kiss.

  The second aspect of her nature to be emphasized here is pathological conservatism. It should not be confused with caution: Elizabeth could and did take some serious risks, both at home and abroad, and it may be remembered that she ended up waging war on a geographical scale never attempted by any previous monarch. Nor was it a love of established ways as such, as she proved by systematically remodelling her predecessor’s government and church. What she hated to do was to change any situation to which she had become accustomed as queen. This has already been illustrated in the major cases of state finance and religion. It also showed in high politics. She found it hard to get rid of familiar figures in the political landscape, showing great reluctance to put to death the nation’s premier peer, the current Duke of Norfolk,
and the Queen of Scots, even when she was persuaded that both had been plotting against her. It was painful for her to acquire the new as well as to remove the old. Her Privy Council got smaller and smaller, and five of its members succeeded their fathers upon it; and none were great nobles who might expect to do so by birth. This all had the benefit of giving the politics of her reign a unique stability in Tudor and Stuart England, with ministers serving longer, and dying more often in office, than under any other ruler. It also narrowed political opportunity dangerously towards the end.

  The same pattern shows up with regard to the bounds of her realm. She was determined to hang on to all territory which she thought as being her rightful inheritance. For a decade she destabilized relations with the French by trying to get back Calais, and her treatment of Ireland derived from her conviction that, as its theoretical queen, she should be able to govern every foot of it. She showed no interest, by contrast, in acquiring any new lands. At times the Dutch were willing to adopt her as their sovereign in return for large-scale and sustained military aid, and had she been inclined to agree, and fortunate enough to survive the consequences, she might have acquired a new domain in the Netherlands to replace the lost medieval one in France. In the event, she never gave the prospect serious consideration. Her interventions in Scotland were made after great hesitation, and only after she became convinced that the security of England depended on them.