The love of gesture and the concern for image which emerge from an analysis of Elizabeth’s apparently ‘revealing’ actions and sayings on the subject of religion offer us the key to her political character. For these same traits were almost always evident in her actions and sayings, whatever the subject. While we can learn something from this, we must be properly humble and realise that we can learn very little more than Elizabeth wished us to learn - and that often these lessons are rather suspect. The queen could be hard to read. Late in her reign an ambassador commented on how, during their conversation, she would often digress from the subject in hand. But he was unsure whether this was done deliberately, in order to gain time, or was simply an unselfconscious part of her character. Life at Elizabeth’s court was carefully stage-managed. The formal manner in which she sometimes greeted foreign ambassadors and visitors was designed to impress them with her wealth, power and security. The splendidly decorated Presence Chamber in her palace, with its throne beneath a cloth of estate to denote her royal rank, the well-built young gentlemen guarding the door, the handful of elegant noblemen and ladies in waiting or maids of honour disporting themselves gracefully around it, and one or two grave councillors on hand to ensure that the proceedings were properly recorded - and of course at the centre of it all, the person of the queen herself, striking and attractive in her youth, bewigged and heavily made-up in her later years, but always gorgeously attired in dresses remarkable for the richness of their cloth, the complexity of their design, the finesse of their workmanship, and the brilliance of the jewels which adorned them - all this carefully co-ordinated display invariably sent the right message to the bedazzled visitor.
There were less formal exercises as well. One ambassador commented on how Elizabeth made her entrance on one occasion in an especially dignified manner, expressly so ‘that I might see her while she pretended not to see me’. Special scenes might be staged for the benefit of ambassadors and their foreign masters. Thus, early in the reign, Elizabeth’s oldest companion, Kate Ashley, threw herself on her knees before the queen in the Presence Chamber, upbraiding her for her familiarity with Dudley and urging her to make an honest woman of herself by
Marriage. Notwithstanding Ashley’s years of intimacy with Elizabeth, it is hard to see her making quite so bold without some strong steer from above. For the scene gave Elizabeth the pretext to explain herself and to defend her good name and her favour for Dudley. Many years later, when the negotiations for a possible marriage between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou were underway, Leicester himself took the starring role in a remarkably similar scene. He appeared before the queen and, with otherwise incredible audacity, demanded whether or not she was still a virgin. It can hardly be thought that, with Elizabeth at the height of her powers, he would have dared question (or even challenge) her in such an intimate matter without her express instructions. But the point was of course to set French minds at rest about the relationship between the queen and her favourite early in the reign. Had Leicester himself slept with her, he would not have needed to ask!
We can detect the hand of the director behind these scenes by comparing them with those plainly unscripted scenes in which unwelcome gestures were made by her subjects, and she in turn was invited to respond with gestures that were far from her purposes. When Sir Richard Shelley, a young Catholic gentleman, dared to cast at the feet of the queen as she walked in her Whitehall gardens a petition seeking a
Queen Elizabeth at the opening of Parliament. In the immediate foreground the Commons stand at the Bar and present their Speaker.
Limited toleration for her Catholic subjects, she did not seize upon the opportunity to dispense mercy as St Louis of France had once dispensed justice, beneath the oak tree, to those who brought him their griefs and grievances. Shelley was put under arrest, thrown into gaol, and left to rot.
Parliament was another target of the queen’s carefully planned displays of personality. She inherited her father’s ability to win round that occasionally wilful and noisy institution. But where he had overawed with his physical presence, Elizabeth employed the power of words, skilfully varying her tone between gentleness and wrath. Although entire history books have been written to document the rise of ‘opposition’ to Elizabeth in Parliament, in fact Elizabeth managed her Parliaments effectively enough. The only serious opposition she ever faced there was over religion, in 1559, and that was soon overcome - and her largely episcopal opponents were soon relieved of their seats in the House of Lords. Far from Parliament opposing Elizabeth, it was far more often that she opposed Parliament. In the course of her reign, many bills failed to become statutes because she took against them and denied them the royal assent. And while this was sometimes because they were politically offensive to her (as with certain proposals for harsher treatment of Catholics), it also seems that at times she did it simply to show who was in charge. Upon other occasions, Elizabeth found herself in receipt of unwanted advice, especially from her loyal House of Commons. The underlying problem here was her status as a woman. It was impossible for a chamber full of politically aware and opinionated gentlemen not to feel that, on a whole range of issues, from religion to economic regulation, they knew better than she did, and it was equally hard for them to deny her the benefit of their superior wisdom.
The occasional imprisonment of recalcitrant MPs, however, combined with the judicious treatment (now conciliatory, now contemptuous) of delegations from the Commons enabled her to maintain an adequate working relationship with Parliament (the Lords, her ‘cousins’ by contemporary etiquette, were never a cause for concern after 1559). At times Elizabeth was excessively anxious about the tendency of the Commons to infringe her ‘prerogative’ by debating matters of high policy without her authorisation. But the high view of kingship which underlay this anxiety was by no means an inexplicable foible. It was simply her memory of the kingship of her father. Like Mary, she knew that she could never have quite the hold over her subjects that he had attained. But she did rather more than Mary to emulate him as far as she could. She was always proud of her physical resemblance to him, evident in her bearing and her red hair. And she frequently invoked his memory, his example and his legacy in her public comments - most famously in her speech to the troops at Tilbury during the Armada campaign, where the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ which she claimed were hidden in her own ‘weak body of a woman’ were most certainly the heart and stomach of Henry.
Elizabeth used her femininity to great effect in the political arena. Of course, it did not exactly compensate for the defect of her birth - not her illegitimacy but her sex. Her repeated comments about her father and her evident pride in being his daughter show that she was a woman who lived always with the consciousness of not being a man. But she made the best of it. Courtly love was the language of her court. She expected as a matter of course to hear from the lips of her male favourites and servants effusions fit for Renaissance sonneteers or nineteenth-century romantic novelists. Throughout her life she fished shamelessly for compliments when conversing with men. The string of handsome and charming youths who shook a nice leg at a dance would not have disgraced a Hollywood starlet. When men such as Leicester found themselves out of favour, they earned their recovery by amorous letters or small talk which became more extravagant as the ageing queen’s charms faded ever further. The conventions of courtly love, in which the social precedence of men over women was inverted by the image of the woman as the dominant, even tyrannical, partner in relationships, and that of the man as the strong made weak and dependent by passion, furnished a handy metaphor for the political inversion in which those involved found themselves, and helped make the unprecedented situation a trifle less unfamiliar.
World History
