Gloriana: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth I

One of Elizabeth's favorite mottoes was the Latin tag "Semper Eadem, or "always the same." There is a peculiar irony in this motto; sometimes the only predictability about Elizabeth is that she seldom was predictable. However, Elizabeth's alleged waywardness is another of her myths. Although she lived in a series of calculated disguises, yet some aspects of the private woman can be excavated from the royal image she carefully maintained.

For many years (particularly in the late 19th and 20th centuries, when classic biographies of Elizabeth were written by male historians) the queen's changeability was passed over as a fault deriving from Elizabeth's sex. Women were, before and during the Queen's own time, considered to be emotionally unstable, changeable, frivolous, and incorrigibly light-minded. They were unequal to the stern and disciplined demands of politics and war, which only kings possessed. To explain the success of Elizabeth's phenomenal reign, it became commonplace for [male] historians to attribute it largely to her councilors who in spite - not because - of her feminine failings, were able to steer the ship of state without disaster. Down to our own day, there has been a hint of condescension in many author's discussions of Elizabeth's changeability.

Only in recent years has there been a concerted attempt to examine Elizabeth's politics and policy using the same analysis applicable to a male ruler. A different picture emerges, in which it is arguable that Elizabeth often deliberately used the sexual stereotypes of her own times - the flirtatious and frivolous woman who could change her mind a half dozen times in a day - to give her extra flexibility and wiggle room in decades of largely successful international diplomacy. At the same time she had to tread a knife edge of retaining ultimate control over her court and its policies while surrounded by tough-minded male politicians who attempted to keep her in her place and run the affairs of the kingdom by their judgments, not hers. It was a remarkable balancing act that she maintained with artistry throughout her reign.

However, if now we attribute Elizabeth's much-vaunted feminine moods to calculation and theatrics, where is the woman herself? From childhood onwards, Elizabeth was placed on a stage in which she was required to play a part. To her father, brother and sister, the political dangers that swirled around her from birth required she present them the humble and dutiful face of a loyal subject. To her political enemies, it was always more important to seem, rather than to be. The task of separating Elizabeth's statements for political distribution, her tantrums which went to prove a point with her male councilors, her kindnesses which were displayed to her people as an icon of her majesty; to distinguish what was genuine from what was for effect has occupied a wilderness of biographers, not always successfully.

Some genuine features do emerge. Elizabeth "played many parts" during her life, including those below. Some of them must have been authentically her own.

From the age of 5 or 6, when Elizabeth first began to be trained in reading, to the end of her life when, extempore, she could cap any ambassador's comments with lengthy speeches in flawless Latin or Italian, Elizabeth was considered one of the best-educated scholars and intellectuals of her day, particularly in languages and philosophy. A true Renaissance princess, she was reading Cicero and Sophocles in Latin and Greek before she was ten years old and was translating Christian doctrine. She devoured books throughout her life and reign, trying to secure one or two hours each day (particularly in the morning) for quiet, contemplative study. She was not a light-minded reader - we have no hint that she read romances or pulp fiction of the period of the sort Shakespeare would use for his comedies. From childhood and adolescence, her teachers provided her with the classics and with erudite philosophical discussions of holy works including the Bible and the writings of prominent Protestant thinkers of the day. Her first two translations - offered as a tribute to Katherine Parr, her final stepmother - were of intimidating religious and philosophical works. She could show a childish vanity in the excellence of her work and her mind.

With the talent came insecurity and arrogance. She sent a gift to her brother with the statement that she would never need to be ashamed to show her mind. She was aware that she she usually knew more of any given subject than those she was addressing. She was merciless in snubbing intellectual laziness when she faced it and, from childhood on, never suffered fools gladly.

Her haughtiness [which, in a more sympathetic eye, was seen as a regal dignity] might also stem from her awareness that, throughout much of England and Europe, she was considered to be the illegitimate offspring of a slut. Elizabeth could count; she must have been aware that she was born in early September when her parents only married seven months earlier. From an early age, she demanded respect as her right, taking pains with her royal image and icing anyone who dared to be insolent.

Elizabeth apparently discovered religious temperance at an early age, remarkable in a time when both men and women saw religious doctrine in terms of black (damnable heresy) or white (God's true word). It has long been argued by some that she was largely indifferent to religion. These arguments are unpersuasive. Elizabeth's prayers and comments throughout her life suggest that her religion was peculiarly private and that she disliked both personally and politically being forced to excavate hers - or others - for public scan. She was ruthless however, when religious diversity threatened her position. Throughout her reign she apparently felt she owed her elevation from the Tower to the throne solely to the mysterious grace of God who had chosen her as steward for her people. This conviction that - however unworthy - she was God's chosen agent grew and strengthened throughout her reign.

Elizabeth disliked religious cant, the regurgitation of ideas that the individual had simply accepted without rational examination. She became angry when her more zealous ministers tried to lecture her, whether through irritation at their lack of respect for her position or ignorance of her vast religious learning. Although often severe on Catholics, largely for political reasons, she disliked far-left Protestantism, seeing in it a threat to both her kingdom and the very foundation of kingship. She fought efforts by her council or Parliament to force her towards extremes. She was known to call out in the middle of a divine sermon, telling the longwinded Protestant divine to stop infringing her prerogative, as supreme governor of the Church, to set the policy of faith as she saw fit.

To be intellectually brilliant and accomplished is a lonely eminence which few can share, and one suspects that her refuge in learning was a lifelong retreat from the emotional frustrations and forbidden of her political life.

The Flirt

Thousands of pages have been written by historians on the subject of the Queen's true feelings about men, marriage, sex, and children. She obscured her personal thoughts so well that is unlikely anyone ever will disentangle them. From the moment she became Queen, Elizabeth was an incorrigible flirt, and many of the character flaws later historians have assigned to her derive from her peculiar enjoyment, for 25 years, of the sexual dance she led the princes of Europe. As an elderly woman she was still remarkably vain and delighted by gross flattery, even while presenting the embarrassing spectacle of a wrinkled bosom, painted face, and blackened teeth. It says much that she never appeared ridiculous to her subjects.

" "She is so nimble in her dealing and threads in and out of this business [of courtship] in such a way that her most intimate favourites fail to understand her, and her intentions are therefore variously interpreted."

Ambassador Guzman de Silva to Philip II, 1566.
Quoted in Dunn, Elizabeth and Mary, 315.

Some writers imply Elizabeth simply got her sexuality from her mother, as if seduction can be inherited. More likely, Elizabeth enjoyed sexual flirtation for the power it gave her to maneuver men and kingdoms, whether on a personal level or when conducting formal marriage negotiations with kings. While her vanity was flattered, she could also flirt to " fish for men's souls" with a "sweet bait" throughout her life. Elizabeth also delighted, throughout her long life, in the similar sport of the chase, hunting on horseback for the stag or other game. There was exhilaration in the pursuit that must have provided her pleasure beyond the merely healthful exercise in fresh air. Yet in sexual matters, she enjoyed being the pursued only as long as the pursuer didn't get too close. Like her mother, Elizabeth was "wild for to hold." She flirted, but would not deliver. She ran the ambassadors and suitors of Europe ragged for decades, using every feminine ruse, appearing to concede, withdrawing, changing her mind, showing jealousy and resentment, gently forgiving, in a one-woman show that leaves one as confused about her true sexual desires as she probably intended Europe to be.

In a few unguarded moments throughout her reign, however, Elizabeth hinted that there were serious reasons underlying her decision not to marry. From adolescence she frequently stated her desire to live and die a virgin - comments properly ignored by almost everyone, convinced she was simply showing maiden modesty. She very likely meant it. The searing events of her young childhood - her mother's and Catherine Howard's execution for adultery, the twisted sexual teasing by Tom Seymour when she was 14 and the life-threatening danger into which it placed her, possibly personal intimations that she was unlikely to be able to bear children - apparently forever deformed her desire for long-term sexual relationships. In addition, Elizabeth simultaneously loved power and authority and loathed showing personal vulnerability. She may have been too frightened of sexuality to embrace it, however much she might wish to. Her sexual availability as an attractive princess was a political card that she delighted to play, but never intended to use other than as a tool of statecraft. When age made that card no longer playable, she apparently resigned it with some personal regret.

An ambiguous poem is attributed to Elizabeth, penned during one of the last stages of her long marriage negotiations with the Duc d'Alencon of France in her 40's and supposedly addressed to him:

	" I grieve and dare not show my discontent, I love and yet am forced to seem to hate, I do, yet dare not say I ever meant, I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate. I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned, Since from myself another self I turned. My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done. His too familiar care doth make me rue it. No means I find to rid him from my breast, Till by the end of things it be supprest. Some gentler passion slide into my mind, For I am soft and made of melting snow; Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind. Let me or float or sink, be high or low. Or let me live with some more sweet content, Or die and so forget what love ere meant. "
	Elizabeth, Poem to Monsieur

Elizabeth was born of the last successful autocracy in England. The Tudors avoided the failings of the later Stuart dynasty by taking for granted their God-given right to rule their kingdoms without interference. They did not make the Stuart mistake of treating Parliament and people with contempt. Her father, Henry VIII, had consulted with Parliament when he needed money but had dynamically forced his own policies on it. Elizabeth emulated him until she died. Her conviction that she was chosen by God to rule England had a mystical streak in this most hardheaded of women. She had always claimed that her coronation ring married her to her kingdom. When, shortly before she died, the ring became embedded in her flesh and had to be cut away, her health and spirits visibly declined.

Elizabeth's attitude to her power was based on a twofold determination; as God's own minister, she was required to retain control over her kingdom as a good steward. As a woman who had seen how her sister had been manipulated by those around her, she was determined never to give in to her ministers or her people. Although she knew how to compromise when it was forced upon her by parliament or public opinion, she never ceased to fight for her right to set the agenda of her kingdom, govern its religious observances, or crush those who would weaken the power of her autocracy, viewing the monarchy itself as a immutable requirement for the health of the state. Part of her horror in executing Mary Stuart was that she herself had created a precedent in which divine rulers could be tried and executed like ordinary mortals. And she was right to see her action as setting a terrifying precedent - sixty years later, Mary's grandson, Charles II, would be beheaded by his own people. The deposition of James II in 1688 was another stage in the evolution which she helped set in motion.

Most scholars agree that Elizabeth was profoundly conservative in her views of the relationship between prince and people, with essentially medieval views already becoming passé in the last years of her reign. The growth of self-confident assertion by parliaments throughout Europe, beginning in her reign, led to constant power-struggles with her successors in the decades ahead, requiring a Civil War for resolution. Elizabeth's genius was in simultaneously maintaining her authority while giving the monarchy the image of a loving mother caring for her children (a resonant route not available to James I). She created herself as such an icon fairly early in her reign, the glittering prince who could yet be "free and familiar" with the commonest of her people. She used the phrase "my people" constantly, as she publicized herself as their judge and benefactor. It was a triumph of effective public relations that she was able to maintain until the very end of her reign. In her famous "Golden Speech," made to restive members of parliament who sought reforms in her granting of monopolies, she reached the apotheosis of identifying herself as the mother of her country, tenderly and selflessly guarding her people regardless of personal cost:

	" The cares and trouble of a Crowne I cannnot more fitly resemble then to the Drugges of a learned Physitian, perfumed with some Aromaticall sauour, or to bitter Pils guilded ouer, by which they are made more exceeptable or lesse offensiue, which indeed are bitter and vnpleasant to take; and for my owne part, were it not for Conscience sake to discharge the dutie that God hath layd vpon me, and to maintaine his glorie, and keepe you in safetie; in mine owne disposition I should be willing to resigne the place I hold to any other, and glad to be freed of the Glory with the Labors, for it is not my desire to liue nor to reign longer then my life and reigne shall bee for your good. "
	Elizabeth's "Golden Speech," original text, 1602.

One wonders if Elizabeth foresaw that the absolute ruler was a passing concept in England. Perhaps she did not grieve that she would not live to to contend with the new order that would soon challenge the glory of a kingly crown.

A particular quality Elizabeth and her legendary father shared (but which was denied to both Edward VI and Mary I) was, for want of a better phrase, the common touch. From her early '20's, Elizabeth had melded herself into an accessible royal icon; the gracious queen who can speak with affection and simplicity to the least of her subjects as well as crowned heads. She had realized early that her popularity (and, indeed, her accession) was based upon a lifelong love affair with the everyday subjects of her realm and, to the end, she never forgot or ceased to value it. Tales told about her affability and condescension (in the sense of one easily able to bridge the gap between high and low) were legion throughout her reign and told and handed down from those thousands who had personal experience of the Queen's touch. The decades in which, every summer, the entire Court went on royal progress throughout southern England were politically extremely valuable; the Queen could show her magnificence to small towns and ordinary people throughout the realm, and the stories went before her and kept her personal image vivid in the minds of her subjects. As an example, during a visit to Warwick in 1572, the nervous local Town Recorder had, with some pains, made a speech honoring her visit. After thanking the assembly, the Queen called the recorder to her side and offered him her hand to kiss, saying kindly "'Come hither, little recorder. It was told me that you would be afraid to look upon me or to speak boldly; but you were not so afraid of me as I was of you. And now I thank you for putting me in mind of my duty, and that should be in me.' And so thereupon showing a most gracious and favorable countenance to all the burgesses and company, said again 'I most heartily thank you all, my good people.' " Works, p. 110.

In reading about Elizabeth, dozens of snapshots fill the pages of historians; images of the woman which give some imaginative sense of what it would have been like living at her court.

Although Elizabeth, in her teens, made political points by dressing with religious simplicity, she gave rein to her love for fine clothing and jewels as soon as she became queen. Parsimonious in many things, she spent fantastic sums on her wardrobe to create props in her image-making arsenal. In her youth, she adored bright colors, but later she dressed in in white or black, richly ornamented with gold or silver accessories, laces, and trims. She loved fine jewels - she inherited many, but her lust for pearls was such that the Earl of Moray, as soon as Mary, Queen of Scots was taken prisoner, offered the Queen of England her ropes of magnificent Renaissance pearls at a discount. The queen wore the quadruple-strand necklace, long enough to reach to her waist, for the rest of her life. She was given a pair of newfangled silk stockings soon after her accession and swore greedily never to wear anything else - which she never did. At her death, literally hundreds of gowns, farthingales, slippers, mantles, nightgowns, filled her royal palaces, like the prop room of a closed theater.

Elizabeth's health was good in her later life, except for frequent and mysterious ailments in the ten years before she became Queen. As this correlates to a decade of physical danger and mental strain between Henry VIII's death and her own accession, her ailments were possibly psychosomatic. She did suffer throughout her life from bad teeth, particularly from her mid-30's onward. She was known to have a sweet tooth; ingesting sugar worsened her predisposition to bad teeth. The story is told that Elizabeth, raging from toothache, was persuaded by one of her ministers to have the tooth pulled - he did so by offering to have one of his own teeth taken out before the Queen so she could see how easy it was. Unfortunately, the Queen was not convinced and demanded that a second tooth also be pulled - she then agreed to go to the dentist! By the end of her life, she had lost so many teeth that foreign ambassadors had trouble understanding her speech.

As the Queen moved away from the sweet, demure Protestant princess image so carefully cultivated during her sister's reign, she gave vent more and more to assertive behavior it is possible she recalled from her father's glorious reign - including swearing. Elizabeth oaths were unusually colorful but were frowned on by Protestant divines (as well as Catholic) - particularly religious oaths. Elizabeth's favorite oath appears to have been "By Gods' Death."

The Queen also gave increasing vent to her tempers and moods, perhaps because doing so relieved the constant strain of diplomacy, perhaps because, as Queen, she could get away with it. Although, in Mary Queen of Scots' infamous letter to her, Mary claimed rumors abounded of Elizabeth whipping and beating her maids of honor, this is a choice bit of gossip blown up far past documentary evidence. However, there are enough references by sympathetic courtiers, such as her godson, John Harrington, to make it clear she not infrequently resorted to boxing the ears of an unhandy or clumsy maid of honor or one who had displeased her or throwing a slipper or other object at the head of an offending minister (Cecil, in particular, suffered in this respect).

One of Elizabeth's endearing traits is her patronage of the fledgling English theater and, in particular, the company of player-shareholders that included William Shakespeare. Elizabeth had grown up with players and supported them in the face of Puritan intolerance as long as she lived. She also made it fashionable for men like Leicester and others to patronize players' companies, which threw up writers, players and poets like Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, author of "The Faery Queen" (dedicated to Elizabeth), Ben Jonson, Richard Burbage, and Richard Tarleton. Her particular fondness for the Admiral's Men led to their playing before her on multiple occasions; it is a certainty that William Shakespeare and she met, although no one knows just where or when in the period from 1595 to 1602, when they regularly played before her. She apparently enjoyed the lowest clowning as well as appreciated the highest literary oeuvres, based on Latin or Italian models.

Elizabeth was always profoundly irritated at the puritan Protestant intellectuals who condemned plays and playing as morally unfit and refused throughout her reign to permit their many "improvements" to English society, including the banning of Christmas celebrations, the closure of pubs and alehouses, harsher laws against adultery, and other theocratic demands. The swelling impetus of those demanding a "godly state" would see its eventual triumph, then failure, two generations later in the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, but the queen - reactionary to the core - refused to permit the merry England of her father's day from being "improved" during her lifetime.

Elizabeth always ate and drank sparingly. She was far too self-controlled to enjoy the release or wine or alcohol and, towards the end of her life, ate so little that it almost certainly contributed to her decline and death. Besides her natural asceticism, her painful teeth in late years probably contributed to her lack of appetite.

She also seldom bathed, a truism about her age particularly worrisome to modern generations who find it repugnant. In Elizabeth's time, in the absence of either dependable indoor heating or any kind of plumbing except chamber pots, it was common knowledge that bathing was a risky business which exposed the body to dangerous colds and chills. Elizabeth probably bathed more than many poor people - perhaps three or four times per year - and was said to have caught smallpox because, as part of curing a cold, she took a long, hot bath and then walked briskly in the cold garden. However, she did have a nose for smells that was considered unduly "nice" [meaning excessively fastidious.] She always insisted that middens - those combination refuse dumps and open sewers endemic to cities and palaces - be kept far from her discriminating eye or nose and was considered almost unbalanced in her insistence that those about her did not carry foul smells. As a result, her entire court was likely - to our modern noses - to have been drenched in scent.

The Queen also had a wickedly mischievous sense of humor, which she occasionally indulged. A famous Elizabethan story is of a famous courtier who, to his eternal shame, farted loudly upon making a bow when presented to the Queen. He is supposed to have fled court and traveled for two years to escape ridicule. When he finally returned to court, the Queen received him with great ceremony and then said for all to hear, "My Lord, I had forgot the fart." When investing her supposed lover as Earl of Leicester, with ambassadors throughout Europe watching the dignified ceremony, she was seen to stick her hands down his neck and tickle him as he knelt before her.

Elizabeth apparently struggled, largely successfully, with a fatalistic melancholy that was an essential part of her character. She usually banished sadness by activity; hunting, riding, physical exercise of all kinds, even if it was a brisk walk up and down the gardens. An ambassador noted that, when no one was watching, her walk was brisk and businesslike; when she became aware of onlookers, she slowed to a dignified, princely pace. Although she swore throughout her public life that she did not know the meaning of fear, she was apparently afraid of death. In the last year of her life, when illness and depression suggest she had literally lost the will to live, she told her ladies of frightening visions - including seeing her body "lean and fearful in the light of a fire" - and frequent nightmares. But these glimpses of human weakness were few and far between and Elizabeth would have been the first to deny her melancholic streak to her court and - perhaps - to herself.

Elizabeth was a political realist and opportunist and a master equivocator. She permitted the burning of Catholics by her ministry because she understood the Catholic threat to her life and position, but she also permitted particularly loathsome tortures (like those practiced by Sir Richard Topcliffe, her chief torture-master in the Tower, a genuine sadist) and turned a blind eye to abuse if it suited her. She was the product of, and lived in, an age that ignored what would now be considered barbarous cruelty and abuse. She would probably have thought those who winced at the harshly brutal punishments of her time were weak and foolish.

Elizabeth fought a losing battle throughout her reign with the huge waste that burdened the essentially medieval courts of Europe. The basic structures which paid and provided for the Queen's court were centuries old; the mechanics of obtaining monies from parliament for wars and special projects were equally archaic; and Elizabeth had to pay for almost everything relating to herself, her household, and her court from her own resources, derived largely from ownership of lands and estates and their rental or sales income. In her childhood, the affable Thomas Parry had been the controller of her household, and in the Seymour affair it was found, after Parry landed in the Tower, that he had been extremely inept in his handling of the Princess' income and expenses. In addition, until she became Queen at age 25, Elizabeth had always had an adequate but not ample income upon which to maintain herself and all her servants and properties. Finally, when she came to the throne, England (due to incessant wars and political turmoil) was very nearly bankrupt. All these influences, plus an innate distaste for inefficiency and waste, led her to make spasmodic attempts to reorganize, improve, and oversee expenses and created the illusion that she was miserly and ungenerous, which is largely unfair.

Elizabeth was always willing to spend money in certain cases - lavish displays to impress her people or foreign courts, money as bribes to secure alliances or hobble enemies - but she demanded value for money, as her military commanders found to their cost. From Robert Dudley in Flanders, Drake in South America, or the Earl of Essex in Ireland, commanders learned painfully that the Queen considered military funds to be an investment from which military or political victory was the only return. Elizabeth raged when she found herself, as she frequently did, unable to control how her commanders spent or acted in the field. It was the only major area of statecraft from which she was barred, as a woman unable to lead the army.

Some of the more spectacular rages the Queen threw in her later years derived from the dreary unprofitability of the small (but expensive) wars her Council dragged her into. She considered diplomacy and bribery to be frequently cheaper, with more dependable results. In this she shows herself the child of her grandfather, the parsimonious Henry VII, rather than the lavish Henry VIII. Although she had carefully built up a large surplus in the first two decades of her reign, the latter 20 years, which saw increasing military support for Protestants in the Netherlands and in France, to counterbalance the influence of the King of Spain, depleted her surplus and placed severe burdens on the economy of England. Almost without exception, her ministers were indifferent to the economic consequences, but Elizabeth agonized over it. Some scholars suggest that England was almost as close to bankruptcy at the end of her reign as it had been at its beginning, largely because of the constant drains on her and England's treasury in the decades-long "cold war" with Spain.

The Politician

Elizabeth apparently relished the give and take of politics as a great player loves chess. Without the traditional womanly interests of her own time - husband and children - she turned all her energies into controlling her own foreign policy with the authentic Elizabeth touch. If Elizabeth I had lived today, she could be referred to as a "control freak." Unlike princes who left the tedious day-to-day business of statecraft in the hands of able ministers (her father, Henry VIII, comes to mind), Politically, Elizabeth was considered extremely well informed throughout her reign and meddled in any aspect of politics she cared for. She gloried in knowing minute details of current events and being able to effortlessly reel them off to impress foreign ambassadors.

At the same time, she continually struggled with her Council to keep her informed, which her ministers frequently attempted to avoid both from irritation at her delaying tactics or the suspicion that she would not approve. One reason she never particularly warmed to Sir Francis Walsingham was her conviction that he hid many of his covert operations from her, and there is no question that Robert Cecil, as her last Secretary of State, often did. Yet at the same time she bullied the Council to keep her fully informed, she could ruthlessly pillory its members if she wanted to assume plausible deniability in a tough political choice. Her behavior at the death of Mary Queen of Scots and her rather ludicrous insistence that her ministers had tricked and manipulated her into signing the death warrant, was an example of the politician treating her Council as a disposable pawn in the game of intrigue. It drove many of them - particularly Cecil and Walsingham - to distraction, but she frequently wrenched political benefit from the game. By a peculiar combination of intuition, histrionics and domination, she kept control of her Council and its actions for over forty years - just.