This is a fine book by a distinguished Cambridge historian. And since lives of monarchs, let alone of one who has received as much attention as has Elizabeth I (1533-1603), are not exactly in vogue in today’s academe, it is refreshingly old-fashioned.
It is also prodigiously learned. John Guy worked on it for years and is on top of the huge body of secondary works on the queen and her reign. Having started his career in the Public Record Office (now the National Archives), he has been able to master the equally formidable corpus of manuscript material, some of it hitherto unread, much of it difficult to read and/or interpret—because heavily corrected, damaged, faded, or in cipher—in British, Belgian, and Spanish archives. And he has certainly uncovered much new material, debunked, flushed out, cracked open admirably.
It is a big book, just over 500 pages of text, and it covers only the last 20 or so years of Elizabeth's 44 on the throne. Its subtitle calls them "forgotten" ones—which is a bit odd, because they really have had plenty of attention. Perhaps a better subtitle would have been "The War Years" because, having drifted into war with mighty Spain as a result of (initially) surreptitious support of the revolt of Netherlanders against their Spanish overlord Philip II, those years were dominated by relentless and hideously expensive war on land and sea.
Philip and his successor planned no fewer than five seaborne attacks on England—though only the Gran Armada of 1588 came anywhere near success. English soldiers fought in the Low Countries and in France—then racked by civil war—on behalf of the Protestant cause. Famous Elizabethan seadogs such as Francis Drake and William Hawkins ravaged Iberian ports, raided Spanish settlements in Central America, and, lurking usually in the Azores, picked off Portuguese carracks returning home with cargoes of Asian silk, cotton, and spices and Spanish galleons laden with Peruvian silver. And then there was Ireland, where in 1594 the charismatic Earl of Tyrone raised a rebellion, which, with inevitable Spanish support, threatened to deliver the whole island from English rule.
Some of this—the endless wheeling, dealing, and campaigning—may not be an easy read for the beginner. But Guy is an accomplished storyteller. He writes crisp, jaunty prose and is at his best when telling us about Elizabeth herself, her turbulent court, her relations with ministers and favorites.
He has a fine eye for the telling detail: that it took the queen two hours to be dressed and get her makeup on, for instance; that she and her entourage once wolfed three oxen and 140 geese at a single breakfast when visiting a loyal subject; that to woo the Ottoman Turks she sent the sultan a mechanical organ that stood 16-feet tall; that she punched ladies of the bedchamber when they offended her; that she once hit her dazzling favorite the Earl of Essex in the face and told him "to go and be hanged," whereupon he nearly drew his sword to strike her back; that the same Essex gave some books he plundered in Cadiz to a man called Bodley who was starting a library in Oxford; that towards her end, Elizabeth would "[stamp] her feet at ill news and thrust her rusty sword; at times into the arras in great rage" that she suffered for much of her life from migraines and insomnia and, in later age, arthritis; and that she was good at nicknames, some of them cruel (like "pygmy" for the deformed Robert Cecil).
She was highly intelligent, remarkably articulate, musical, fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, and a gifted off-the-cuff orator. She had more than her fair share of courage, and more than held her own in what was still an overwhelmingly man's world. She was probably much more realistic about England's place in the world than male jingoists like Drake and Hawkins, Walter Raleigh and Essex. The first two had been little better than pirates in their early days, then privateers (i.e., licensed pirates). When open war with Spain broke out they, with Raleigh and Essex, launched wild plans for a "counter-Armada" that the queen never wholly approved. She refused to back Raleigh's plan to discover the legendary El Dorado (thought to be somewhere in Guiana) and probably never really believed in his attempts to found an English colony in mainland America. Guy shows how, even as the first armada approached, she was trying to find a way to negotiate peace, and continually thereafter tried to extricate herself from ruinous warfare.
This is the heroic side of the woman. There was another one.
Elizabeth was vindictive, almost always ungrateful, often spiteful and disloyal. She had a ferocious temper, blew hot and cold unpredictably, and had a huge appetite for flattery. Though she wept when he died, the dour Lord Burghley and she had a stormy relationship and each often worked hard behind the other's back. She always needed handsome men around her but was bad at choosing them: the flamboyant Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the larger-than-life Raleigh, and the impossibly vain Essex. Had he not died a sudden natural death, Leicester might well have fetched up in the Tower of London. She sent Raleigh there for awhile, together with his seven-months-pregnant wife, when she heard he had married secretly.
Dashing Essex had nearly destroyed himself by disobediently coming back from Ireland, where he had led the campaign against Tyrone, and bursting into her bedroom to find her without wig (she was almost bald) or makeup. Essex finally did destroy himself by attempting to raise a force in London to unseat the Cecils and, so she thought, even depose her. (That was paranoia. Guy uncovers a fascinating story of how Essex tried to use Shakespeare's Richard II, which tells of a tyrant being overthrown, to rouse Londoners to his cause and how, surely not by chance, Elizabeth saw what was almost certainly the same play a few weeks later and, identifying herself with Richard, finally signed Essex's death warrant.)
When Mary, Queen of Scots, that most fatal of femmes fatales, fled for safety to England in 1568, she created huge problems for Elizabeth—and, perhaps, there was always going to be one way of dealing with them. But Mary was an anointed queen and Elizabeth preached and believed passionately in the divinity that "hedged" a royal person. Yet she signed Mary's death warrant and then tried to put the blame for her death on others. She was supreme governor of the Church of England, source of all its jurisdiction, a Christian leader who was never afraid of invoking the Almighty, but had no hesitation in urging the Turks to press on with their jihad against Christian Spain in the Mediterranean.
Elizabeth knew little of her country. She ventured several times to Kenilworth and elsewhere in the Midlands, but never further north; she scarcely knew East Anglia and never visited Wales or the South-West. Most of her subjects never saw her; many probably did not know her name. She had no desire to be seen, no desire to be "popular." Indeed, she once drafted a proclamation forbidding ordinary folk from coming near her under pain of imprisonment—lest they menaced her.
She had little or no interest in her subjects' welfare. When terrible weather, bad harvests, and plague drove desperate Londoners to riot in the mid-1590s, she responded with a proclamation threatening ferocious punishments. She showed no gratitude to the ordinary soldiers and sailors who had suffered so much in order to defeat the Armada. She left her troops in France and the Low Countries unpaid for months—indeed, so hungry and stranded that many just ran away or died.
She loathed Parliament and summoned it only when she was desperate for new taxation. As far as she was concerned, granting it was its prime function. Certainly it had no right to tell her what to do, let alone to criticize. When Peter Wentworth, a conspicuous Puritan member of Parliament, asked (as many were asking) that she put an end to deeply worrying uncertainty and name her successor, she sent him to the Tower. When, in 1601, a particularly angry House of Commons railed against the egregious abuse of granting monopolies to courtiers and the like on such things as the manufacture of playing cards and the import of currants, Elizabeth backtracked and promised reform—but had no intention of carrying it through, and carried on as before.
She was a haughty autocrat.
In modern parlance, she was also a badly "messed-up kid." She had had a ghastly father who effectively ignored her, though she venerated him, and had never known a mother's love. During her half-sister Mary's hectic reign, she had been a virtual prisoner and feared, sometimes, for her life. Much worse, in the previous reign of her half-brother Edward, in her mid-teens she was almost certainly the victim of sexual abuse by her half-brother's uncle, one Thomas Seymour.
Arguably this scarred her for life, and Guy seems to think that the prime reason why, to her subjects' consternation, she never married was that she could not have abided being a mere queen-consort playing second fiddle to a king. But perhaps there was much more to it than that; perhaps Thomas Seymour was ultimately to blame. There is one intriguing fact, noted by Guy, that could strengthen this suggestion: In her will, Elizabeth ordered that her body should not be embalmed, as royal corpses usually were. Was this because she could not abide the idea of male hands ranging over her corpse? Perhaps.
There is something yet more serious to face. Guy is quite clear, where others have denied or hesitated, that Elizabeth knew about and, indeed, approved at least some of the unspeakable activities of the torturer Richard Topcliffe, a psychopath who reveled in racking prisoners, especially Roman Catholic priests, and/or suspending them by their handcuffed wrists for hours on end until he had extracted "confessions." While racking one priest he had even boasted of having fondled the queen intimately. This was surely salacious fantasy, but there is no doubt now that Elizabeth acquiesced in at least some of Topcliffe's worst atrocities. Guy has uncovered irrefutable evidence in Cecil's papers.
And there is yet worse to come. When carrying out the fearful punishment for treason—hanging, drawing, and quartering—it was customary to wait until the victim was dead before the disemboweling began. But on at least two occasions—the second when the gentle Jesuit (and exquisite poet) Robert Southwell was executed after horrendous torture by Topcliffe—Elizabeth ordered that the butchery should begin immediately after the first "drop": that is, while the victim was still alive and could see the hangman hacking out his bowels and heart. That was sadism.
Guy has unmasked Elizabeth. Of course, the mythology will survive: The Virgin Queen, Good Queen Bess, Gloriana, and so on matter too much to English patriotism and folklore. But we now see the real Elizabeth as never before. Guy did not set out to debunk. He is simply a rigorous, dry-eyed scholar who was never going to be conned by the mythology. And despite everything, he still has a sneaking regard for her—as most of his readers will do.
Yes, Elizabeth I was, indeed, a remarkable woman, but a deeply wounded, flawed, and unlovable one.
J. J. Scarisbrick, professor emeritus of history
at the University of Warwick, is the author
of Henry VIII.