The private character of Queen Elizabeth

Front matter

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THE REAL QUEEN ELIZABETH

Untouched enlargement from the original miniature by Nicholas Hilliard in Collection in ihe Victoria and Albnt Museum

Introduction

WHEN, eight years ago, I set aside all other affairs to write a biography of Queen Elizabeth, I planned the usual chronological work that, volume by volume, would unfold her career from her birth to her death — this despite the warning of Sir Anthony Weldon, who, in A Brief History of the Kings of England (1652), omitted all particulars of the reign of Elizabeth with this cryptic explanation: "If why I omit . . . Queen Elizabeth, I answer I have nothing to do with women, and I wish I never had."

I have, however, never been able to control the MS. of this publication. The material for it, as it gradually came to light, demanded a treatment other than that provided by the original scheme ; and in the end I have had to submit to the most radical alterations of it. The same will probably be said of the succeeding volume.

At the outset I was led to a most critical reading of Froude and Lingard — a comparison of their more important statements with the facts, and a weighing of their interpretation and treatment of them.

In this I made the usual error of approaching Froude's twelve volumes from the standpoint of the ordinary reader — that is, as a continuous story of the Reformation period. Taken in this fashion, Froude is irresistible. He has had few equals as a writer of attractive English prose, and as an alluring historian none at all, except Macaulay. His many thousand pages are as fascinating as the best of romances. But even his one biographer admits that if history be the story of things as they were, Froude was not an vi INTRODUCTION

historian.* His basic theme — the attempted sanctification of Henry VIII., probably the most despised monarch of all the ages — is grotesque ; and when he is driven by his task to demonstrate that Anne Boleyn was destroyed by an equitable, justifiable, civilized process, at a time when the Government selected the juries, when Prime Ministers of England — although then under other title— left in their own handwriting minutes ordering the " trial and execution " of inconvenient gentlemen, when heads were falling by mere Act of Parliament whose members were Government minions, he involves himself in a very morass of illusion ; and when Froude's erroneous characterization of the mother was employed by him, and others, to attack the daughter Elizabeth, even fantasy was carried too far.

Moreover, I could not admit a solid basis for Froude's unique theory that Elizabeth was not to be credited with her successes, but only with her failures ; that Cecil was the Great Queen, and Elizabeth merely a figurehead. The fact that everybody the world over among her contemporaries had gathered an exactly contrary impression had not the slightest influence upon Froude. His reasoning powers were as unable to save him from this as from applauding the decapitation of Anne Boleyn mainly, if not wholly, for adultery committed while married to Henry VIII. by a ceremony which he had declared void ab initio !

I am of the opinion that what misled Froude was his inherent belief that — just because she was such — no woman could possibly do what all her contemporaries and all posterity had always said Elizabeth accomplished. When she did the right thing against Burghley's advice and intense, prolonged opposition, as she did in her Scottish policy, which made Great Britain and was one of the greatest glories of her career — and time acknowledges she was indubitably and always correct and Burghley mistaken — Froude,

* " ' It has not yet become superfluous to insist,' said the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge . . . 'that history is a science, no Jess and no more.' If this view is correct and exclusive, Froude was no historian. . . . A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach." — Life of Froude, Herbert Paul, p. 72.

To the same effect is the dictum of Prof. A F. Pollard : " Froude . . . has failed to convince students of the fidelity of his pictures or the truth of his conclusions ; . . .he compares the facts of history to the letters of the alphabet, which by selection and arrangement can be made to spell anything. He derided the claims of history to be treated as a science, and concerned himself exclusively with its dramatic aspect. . . . Froude himself admits that the dramatic poet is not bound when it is inconvenient to what may be called the accidents of facts." — D.N.B., Suppl. vol. ii. p. 261.

INTRODUCTION vii

unable— because he had already detailed Burghley's enmity thereto — to ascribe the victory to that minister, has to say that her policy " was no result of any far-sighted or generous calculation " or « wisdom," but " the fortune which stood her friend so long."

Anybody^ anything, so long as it be not a woman, would serve Froude. He could have denied the ability of any ruler who ever lived, by such pettiness. I cannot find the trace of a modern idea in him.

The unexpected thing is that, while making Elizabeth out to be a fool, he makes her out to be chaste— a choice which, to his astonishment, might not have met with much enthusiasm from the lady most concerned. « The attacks," he says, "of Lingard and others upon her personal purity I believe to be gratuitous and unjust. I intended, as briefly as I could, to undertake her vindication." *

Froude's theory that Cecil was the real queen had, however, one advantage. Other historians were content to account for Leicester's prominence and overpowering success as the result of licentious relations with the Queen ; but, as we have just seen, Froude not being of this opinion, had to find another explanation \ and so, after suppressing, belittling, and misrepresenting everything that Leicester did, Froude accounts for Leicester's astoundingly successful career by making out Elizabeth so devoid of ability as always to have been deceived by him whom everybody else despised and saw through.

If Henry VIII. is to be canonized, Anne Boleyn has to be sacrificed. If Cecil is to be exalted, Elizabeth must be torn down ; and one way of effecting it is to tear down Leicester— an easy task, for Leicester seems never to have cared to justify himself, nor to have been in the least concerned as to what his contemporaries or posterity would say of him. In any case, he has come down to us as a man of little, if any, talent, who secured and maintained his lofty place solely by a liaison with his queen.

The fact that for thirty years Leicester and Cecil were respectively the leaders of the two parties which alternately divided the control of the Queen's Council, and that it was Leicester's personal triumph over both Cecil and the Queen which, after a

• Froude, Preface, vol. i. (,858 ed.). So bad n use of ^'gratuitous " is rare in Froude.

viii INTRODUCTION

steady fight lasting for more than twenty-five years, at last forced the break with Spain, and transferred from that country to England the leadership of the world, is, I can positively assert, unknown to the great mass of his countrymen. And that this Leicester, far-sighted, powerful, patriotic, and adventurous, is at last on the way to regaining that high place in history which was not, save by envy, impugned in his lifetime, is portended by the following statement in the recent life of Cecil by M. A. S. Hume : ,

«* Lord Burghley was thus, after a quarter of a century of striving to keep on friendly relations with Spain, forced by the policy of Leicester, Walsingham, and the strong Protestants, into the contest which he had hoped to avoid." * Mr. Hume is the first man sufficiently courageous to make such an announcement.

Even more convincing confirmation is the following, from the pen of one of the ablest of the living Cecils, Algernon Cecil :

"In desire, perhaps, the Queen adhered to the old English tradition ... of an understanding . . . with ... the Netherlands, which had passed into the hands of Philip of Spain. This was the policy to which Burghley's cautious and conservative disposition naturally inclined, for it was a policy essentially peaceful and diplomatic, was clear of religious fanaticism. ...

" Over against this policy lay one infinitely more congenial to the spirit of the age, because infinitely more daring and infinitely more religious. Almost all the names which have made the Elizabethan age remembered can be cited in its support. Leicester and Walsingham, Essex and Ralegh, Drake and all the host of seamen who followed in his train, were from their standpoints for a policy that was Protestant, bellicose, imperial, productive of spoils and honours, quick in results and boundless in possibilities. The Cecils held back, doubting whether England was yet strong enough, or enough at one with herself, to seize an

" Each year that Elizabeth reigned caused Burghley's policy to appear less necessary and the other more alluring. The fall of Mary Stuart, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the gathering flood in the Netherlands, the tardiness of Philip, the theological affinities of James, tempted Elizabeth little by little to ? bolder and more definite courses, which culminated in Drake's evermemorable attack on Cadiz. . . . Burghley, however, who had been in real or affected disgrace since the execution of the Queen

* The Gnat Lord Burghley, p. 386.

INTRODUCTION *

or Scots in the February of that same year, had recovered his ascendancy over the Queen so soon as Leicester retired to Buxton to be treated for the gout. He was indeed too late to stop Drake from starting, but from that moment the country which had been sailing merrily into conflict returned to its normal path of equivocal negotiation. For a few months it seemed possible that his counsels might once again avail to leash the dogs of war, though he himself cherished no illusions as to the grave state of public affairs. The situation, as he pointed out, had been profoundly modified by two acts, the wisdom of which he considered very doubtful. Mary's execution had provoked her son to adopt an attitude of dangerous hostility, whilst in the attack on Cadiz the King of Spain had suffered an insult which even a lesser monarch could not have afforded to leave unavenged. There lay a fearful peril in the possibility of an alliance between Spain and Scotland. The Queen ought therefore to abandon her temporizing policy in respect of James and give him that assurance of the English succession which alone could make him her loyal supporter." *

There is the truth. In no other written sentences, I believe, has there been compressed so much that is indicative of the relative places which Burghley and Leicester should occupy in the minds of their later countrymen — yet has history been so written that their respective positions have been exactly reversed.

Burghley is not only credited with all that Leicester and his enthusiastic adherents secured for England, but Burghley now enjoys credit for all that even his Queen accomplished — when, as a matter of fact, Burghley opposed with all his might everything that brought about the break with Spain and transferred the Crown of the World from her brow to that of England. Leicester impelled Elizabeth to send Drake to attack Spain. Burghley did everything he could to keep Drake at home. Leicester told the Queen again and again that England needed no friends, that she could take care of herself. Burghley tried his best to make the Queen believe that this was untrue. Burghley tried to get Elizabeth to secure James's co-operation in her plans for joining the two kingdoms by promising him the succession. Elizabeth believed — and she proved correct — that the way to secure James was to promise him nothing, but to threaten him from time to time with loss of the succession if he did not behave himself. Burghley believed the execution of Mary a great error.

* A Life of Robert Cecil, pp. 19 et seq. y by Algernon Cecil, London, 1915.

b x INTRODUCTION

Leicester had urged it for years ; and the results show that this course was the only right one. Yet Froude has the hardihood to say :

" She (Elizabeth) never modified a course recommended to her by Burghley without injury both to the realm and to herself. She never chose an opposite course without plunging into embarrassments, from which his skill and Walsingham's were barely able to extricate her. The great results of her reign were the fruits of a policy which was not her own, and which she starved and mutilated when energy and completeness were needed." *

If Froude had said that " the great results of her reign were the fruits of a policy" which was opposed at every step by Burghley, he would have been much nearer the truth. Everything in England's policy that was venturesome, that was daring, that was new, was opposed by Burghley all his life ; everything in England's policy that was venturesome, that was daring, that was new, was fought for by Leicester all his life — and it was the venturesome, daring new policies that during the time of Elizabeth raised England from a third-rate power to the first power of the globe, and enabled the Great Queen, with that vision which was one of the most characteristic marks of her genius, to prophesy that James VI. " would, one day, become King of Great Britain," her tongue for the first time, I believe, thus calling the mighty empire that she was founding and leaving to her people — a fact which three hundred years later seems unknown to every one of them.

Leicester's overpowering figure has been encountered at every turn by every historian of the Golden Age. They all praise without stint the remarkable penetration of Elizabeth when choosing her chief colleagues in the Government. Yet with all her ability in this direction, Leicester deceived her as to his talents for thirty consecutive years !

All historians agree that she loved her country and passionately maintained its interests. Yet, worthless fop that Leicester was, it is to him that she entrusts the direction of the most important effort she ever made on foreign soil — when she sends him to command in the Low Countries ; and when, several years later, the Armada was on its way, and she and England

* Froude, Hist, of England, vol. xii. p. 559 (1870 cd.).

INTRODUCTION xi

were in hourly danger of utter destruction, it was the worthless Leicester whom she placed in supreme command of her army at Tilbury — upon which, if the invaders landed, she and the kingdom must alone depend for their very existence. And when she did this she was fifty-five years of age !

We see her on horseback — an immortal picture — riding, with Leicester beside her, up and down the lines of the great English army ; and when she addresses the men she has the hardihood, at this most historical, solemn, and sacred moment of all her long life, to tell them orally : " My Lieutenant-General shall be in my stead, than whom never Prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject " — this Leicester who was reputed brainless, whose mistress she was said to have been for more than thirty years !

A woman of mature years who, in her high place, could have acted thus could have had no sense of dignity, nor of pride, nor of public opinion. We recall no parallel for such shamelessness. Can a more pitiful, ridiculous position for a queen be imagined ?

Yet all historians agree that Elizabeth was entirely dependent for her power upon public opinion, that she had a most remarkable knowledge of its currents, that she was very proud, ever most careful to cultivate and preserve her dignity and the respect and affection of her subjects ; and more, that she succeeded in all these aims to an unprecedented degree. And yet, when the danger from the Armada was averted, she planned that her greatest reward for the victory should go to Leicester, despite the fact that none of the historians shows that he had played any important part in bringing about the happy outcome ! She had ordered letters patent made, conferring on this good-for-nothing scapegrace the Lieutenant-Generalship of England and Ireland, thus giving him more power than had previously been delegated to any subject by any English monarch. Truly, if this be history, Elizabeth was an old fool !

But this anomalous and, indeed, impossible position gives little disquiet to the historians. They handle it by not handling it at all. So far as the Tilbury speech is concerned, it is either suppressed in its entirety, or given in the phrases already quoted. Froude, of course, omits the whole text ; but by misdating it he is able to use the incident of its delivery as the basis of a striking phrase which cannot be made to coincide with the known facts. Still, we have the striking phrase.

xii INTRODUCTION

So, going their way, the historians leave Leicester in his resplendent position ; and, after all that can be done by neglect, misrepresentation or detraction, there he stands, growing greater and greater the more the world learns of the details of Elizabeth's reign.

Leicester is the very heart of its mystery, and I hope to see my biography of him reinstate him in the incomparable place he occupied during his lifetime. If for any reason I be not permitted to complete the volume, the work will still be done, for neither the history of Elizabeth nor of her times can be adequate until the life of the chief man of her Court and councils has been probed and completely written. The task should be easily done even by one new to it, for nothing that pretends to be a life of him has yet been printed. He has had, with scarcely a line published in his defence, to submit to three centuries of continuous vilification.

Oxford has had its share in this — Oxford which, at the most critical period in all its history, when (to quote its first historian, Anthony a Wood) it " became empty," helpless, and gasping for very life, was resuscitated and set upon its feet once more by that Leicester to whom in its agony it had appealed, and who for the remainder of his life, twenty-four years, was its one and most powerful patron and Chancellor. It is that University which inflicts on its preserver the deepest stab of all through the pen of its graduate and teacher of history, Froude, in his Protestant history of a time when Leicester was the best sword and buckler that the Puritan and Protestant had at Court.

If Leicester could have known this, surely we might say :

" Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel, He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel."

To the ample evidence as to Leicester's true position set forth in the coming volume, I shall now add : that of all the historical scholars who have dealt with Leicester, only two, except Mr. Hume, as already mentioned, appear to have seen the first glimmering of the truth. The names of these two will be unknown to most of my readers. They are Richard Congreve and Professor Edward Spencer Beesly, late Professor of History at University College, London, both of whom have since passed away. These three alone appear to have been capable of approaching Leicester with common sense and an unprejudiced mind.

INTRODUCTION xiii

It is rare to find an English historian who, unbiassed by the religious controversies of the Reformation period, can take an impartial view of its actual facts, for church controversy is still a militant factor in English national life ; learned men spend their lives in insisting that the points of ecclesiastical difference shall be even more sharply defined or insisted upon ; the ancestors of most English families risked their lives for their Protestantism or Catholicism, and the wrongs committed by both sides are even to-day too poignant to permit of an unprejudiced view by either party. A simple inquiry to-day of any Catholic priest as to the character of Queen Elizabeth, or of any Protestant priest as to that of Mary Stuart, will elicit a response, if he speak freely, which will probably require considerable expurgation.

So, when we find Froude carefully omitting — to cite only one typical example of his bias — the story of the martyrdom of the eleven English Catholic bishops (all there were when the Reformation began), we cannot be surprised — he was a Trotestant clergyman. When Lingard — to take a typical example of his bias — omits to say that in the last letter of Mary Stuart to the Pope (just before her execution) she urged him to foment an armed revolution and invasion of England with the object of dethroning Elizabeth, we cannot be surprised — he was a Catholic clergyman. He did not, however, in this case certainly violate his principle of telling what was sure to be discovered ; for up to that time the Vatican, which then had possession of the MS., would not permit its publication.

It is much to be regretted that by such practices these famous writers should have impugned the reliability of their works and thus made it impossible in the true and discriminating sense of the term, to refer to either of them unqualifiedly as an historian. Lingard should always be designated as the Catholic historia^ and Froude as the Protestant historian. Each wrote for only one object — to glorify his own side of a life and death controversy * — and woe will be the part of the student who does not make due allowance for this fact !

Lingard, to give him his due, was by far the fairer of the couple. He was willing to state, as a rule, as we have just

* " In my account of the reformation I must say much to shock protestant prejudices ; Whatever I have said or purposely omitted has been through a motive of serving religion." Lingard to Rev. J. Kirk, December, 1S19, from MS. at St. Cuthbert'*, Ushaw.

xiv INTRODUCTION

observed, those facts against the Catholics which could not be hidden from the other side.* No such spirit ever touched the dogmatic Froude. To him an incident inconsistent with his theory of what the facts ought to be had no existence at all, and he had no sense of humour to save him. Only Froude could have maintained a straight face as, despite his intimate knowledge of his hero's entire history, he set down such a sentence as this :

" It was a cruel fortune which imposed on Henry VIII., in addition to his other burdens, the labour, to him so arduous, of finding heirs to strengthen the (his) succession." |

Even Lingard's cat, whose physical troubles so worried his master, could have enjoyed the old gentleman's shout of glee when he first saw this solemn pronouncement.

No attempt has been made to challenge Lingard's supremacy as historian on the Catholic side. No rival has contended for the similar leadership of the Protestant faction. The result of this is, that, as many books of travel are written by people whose acquaintance with foreign lands is confined to the Reading Room of the British Museum, so any diligent student may produce an average history of sixteenth-century England merely by taking Froude and Lingard and striking a balance between the two.

This lack of rivalry where Froude and Lingard are concerned leaves the field clear for what claims to be the first study of the private character of her who is, I believe, by far the greatest woman of history ; not only the greatest monarch who has ever occupied the throne of England, but, with the exceptions of Alexander, Napoleon, and Caesar, the greatest monarch who has ever occupied any throne.

* In refuting a complaint that he had recited " the arguments against the religious (Monks), but never for them," Dr. Lingard says : "I cannot possibly conceive to what passages he (the complainant) alludes, unless it be to pp. 229 and 260, where I do mention the charges against them ; and I should have been a fool not to do it, since it has been done by every protestant historian before me. . . . Perhaps he (the complainant) would have had me deny the whole charge altogether. I did, indeed, begin by doing so. . . . The very attempt convinced me that in many instances the charge was founded. ... To have met the charge by denying it (would have been) contrary to sound policy because it might have provoked some one to lay before the public eye in a pamphlet a review of that mass of whoredom and immorality contained in the M. S., Chop : IV." Letter to Rev. J. Kirk, November 25, 1820, from Gillow transcript at St. Cuthbert's, Ushaw. The italicized words are crossed out in the transcript.

t Froude, vol. iii, p. 461 (1858 ed.).

INTRODUCTION ™

As already indicated, I was, at the beginning, in the attitude of the average individual toward the morals of Elizabeth. 1 hope that dignity will not suffer if I illustrate this by the composition of the little English girl, who ended her compulsory impressions of the monarch in this style : " Queen Elizabeth was a very improper person ; but by reason of great tart she succeeded in being called a Virgin Queen after she was dead."

I had never doubted that Elizabeth was the mistress ot Leicester, of Essex, of Ralegh, of Hatton, etc. ; and such is at the present moment the practically unanimous opinion of mankind. Such it has been since the death of Elizabeth's contemporaries, and their immediate posterity ; and, as we shall see, no other verdict could have been expected in the light of the existing histories. . m

It was but a little thing which excited my suspicion that the world might have been misled in this matter. Had I not practised law for many years, I suppose that the significance of the incident would have escaped me, as it seems to have escaped my predecessors. The prosecutor, if we may so call him, was too eager to convict— a frame of mind few prosecutors can avoid.

I do not here anticipate particulars, which will be found in the text, but content myself with the statement that the accidental notice of the questionable use of a single word excited my wonder to such a degree that I spent some days in pursuing the clue to its ultimate source, only to find that my suspicions had been more than justified, and that the entire question of Elizabeth's morals must be examined de novo— -nay, that, strictly speaking, it had never been examined at all. Even the first steps made it obvious that my first volume on Elizabeth was to be very different from the work that had been planned.

Herein will be found the first collection attempted of all the contemporary evidence for and against the morality of Elizabeth. Most of the evidence will be new to all readers ; and much, of the highest significance, has never previously appeared.

Every public and private library that offered hope of harbouring new material has been searched. Not a paper in Rome has been left unseen ; my sole aim has been to exhaust the subject upon both sides, and I can confidently assert that this has been done, so far as regards every probable source of information in this and in every other country. Should other evidence hereafter xvi INTRODUCTION

appear, it can only be in stray documents hidden in unsuspected places. The existence of such documents is not impossible, but can certainly not be considered probable.

As to the volume in general, there is but one more word to be said. After my Royal Institution lectures in 1920, when I first announced some of my discoveries, a well-known historical scholar said that I had developed a new way of writing history. If it be so, it is, I believe, because my main aim has been to set before the reader the evidence itself rather than what I think about it. The solution of the historical problem is thus left altogether to the reader rather than, as hitherto, to the historian.

This effort necessarily results in a book quite different from any that has yet appeared ; but I hope that this will be considered its greatest fault.

I cannot close this page without recording my great indebtedness to Mr. Robert Farquharson Sharp, when Superintendent of the Reading Room of the British Museum, for an unique opportunity of uninterrupted, secluded work ; to his assistant, Mr. A. I. Ellis, and to H. Dyer of the desk in the North Library, who has saved me many hours of the most exasperating labour. Especial acknowledgment is due to Dr. Aksel Andersson, Director of the Kungl. Universitetets Bibliotek, Uppsala, Sweden ; to Dr. Isak Collijn, Director of the Foreign Department of the Royal Library, Stockholm ; to Dr. Charles Bratli, the distinguished historical student of Copenhagen ; to Dr. Juan Montero, Jefe of the Archivo General de Simancas, Spain ; and to Edwin Bonney, Librarian of St. Cuthbert's, Ushaw.