Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess—Unmasked?

A fascinating look at Elizabeth I, under whom a sizeable percentage of the Martyrs of England died for the Faith.

From Catholic World Report

By Dr Jack Scarisbrick

By any standards England’s famous 16th-century monarch was a remarkable human being: intelligent, cultured, charismatic and courageous. But, despite her fame, it is difficult to find much that she achieved.

Elizabeth I was one of England’s longest-reigning monarchs. Edward III outdid her by four years: Queen Victoria by eighteen. Queen Elizabeth II has reigned for nearly 70 years.

She was not the only female monarch of her time. During her first decade or so a forlorn Catherine de Medici struggled to control France. Throughout her first three, her cousin Mary Queen of Scots loomed (for most of the time as an unwelcome refugee in England).

But Elizabeth outlived them—and for nearly forty-five years held her own in a male-dominated world as they never did.

She has been the subject of numerous scholarly (and adulatory) biographies, like those of Sir John Neale and A.L.Rowse, and been celebrated in theatre, opera house and cinema—as Cate Blanchett’s recent Oscar-winning Elizabeth reminds us.

Indeed, no English monarch can match her fame.

Even a pope, Sixtus V (1585-90), rather admired her (even though a sainted predecessor, Pius V, had excommunicated her—in 1570).

And she has deserved all this. By any standards she was a remarkable human being: intelligent, cultured, charismatic and courageous.

And a gifted orator—as that famous speech when the Spanish Armada threatened in 1588 about having ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the stomach and heart of a king—yes, a king of England’, reminds us.

But she was not a very likeable one. In truth, she was devious, aloof, vain, notoriously mean and indecisive.

Furthermore, despite her fame, it is difficult to find much that she achieved.

Yes, the famous ‘Settlement’ of 1558/9 returned England to the Protestant fold—that is, returned it to where it had been when her half-brother Edward died in 1553. It did not innovate—except to make her ‘Supreme Governor’(rather than ‘Supreme Head’) of the new Church of England created by her father.

Otherwise, probably her most decisive actions were the order to behead her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, made after much hesitation, and later, to execute a former heartthrob, but outrageously provocative, earl of Essex.

Though much has been written about them, most of Elizabeth’s Parliaments achieved little more than increasingly fierce persecution of Catholics and left-wing Protestants. She dreaded them and summoned them only when desperate for cash.

She was no great patron of the arts.

Spenser’s mighty Faerie Queen (a work which perhaps more begin than finish) was dedicated to, but not commissioned by, her—and, in the author’s estimation, was insufficiently awarded. Christoper Marlowe was paid for spying for the government in his younger days but not for play-writing later on. Indeed, he was about to be arrested for licentious atheism when he was stabbed to death in a drunken brawl.

As for Shakespeare—she showed as little interest in him as he did in her.

Hillyard’s miniatures are exquisite but no English works match the mighty canvases of such contemporaries as Titian and El Greco. Thomas Tallis and William Byrd were gifted court composers, but both crypto-Catholics. And England’s first Renaissance architect, Inigo Jones, was indeed patronised by a queen of England—James I’s wife, not Elizabeth.

It is more than arguable that a proto-Renaissance, led by Elizabeth’s admirable great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, John Colet, Thomas More, John Fisher, Holbein and Erasmus (not to mention composers like Robert Fayrfax and Thomas Taverner) had been flowering in early Tudor England; but was largely blighted by the Reformation.

Protestantism was no friend of humanism—or polyphony.

Between c.1500 and 1547 a record eight new Oxbridge colleges were founded: two thanks largely to that same Margaret Beaufort (a major benefactress of both universities) and one by a reluctant Henry VIII. Two more were founded in Mary’s short reign—with her support. Only three were founded in Elizabeth’s 45 years: none of them by her.

* * *

Elizabeth showed minimal interest in overseas exploration: and, as is now freely admitted, those famous Elizabethan sea-dogs like Raleigh and Drake were little more than pirates (the latter also a notorious slave-dealer). Their exploits were amateurish compared with what Spanish, Portuguese and soon Dutch sailors were accomplishing every day.

Yes, Elizabeth indeed faced heroically that famous attempt by Philip II of Spain in 1588 to destroy her—because she was a Protestant and persecutor of her Catholic subjects, but also because she had been covertly supporting his rebellious Dutch subjects (despite her lofty views on the obedience due to anointed princes).

But it was a ‘Protestant’ wind, not English guns, that eventually destroyed the Armada: that huge assembly of ships having sailed majestically past southern England despite attempts by a larger force to impede it.

* * *

A final striking fact.

Elizabeth spent much of her time ‘on progress’ around the Home Counties (just a few miles from London) notoriously inviting herself and her large entourage to dine at the homes of wealthier subjects en route. She visited East Anglia several times, but the furthest North she went was Stamford and Wolverhampton in the Midlands. She never got to the South West, let alone Yorkshire, Lancashire or Wales.

So she knew less than a third of her realm—and the great majority of her subjects probably never even saw her.

* * *

Nonetheless she is Good Queen Bess, Virgin Queen, Gloriana and all that. The myth-making began during the reigns of her rather dreary Stuart successors. It has since become an essential part of Britain’s national mythology.

Thus she had personified ‘Englishness’; defied popes and mighty Spain; enabled Britannia to rule the waves; inspired a golden age of English culture; and perhaps most of all, helped create that eminently sensible, and typically English, via media which is Anglicanism.

She had ‘had to’ happen.

* * *

Psychoanalysing historical figures is dangerous. But surely, with a father as ghastly as hers and a mother who had been brutally beheaded at his behest when she was scarcely three years old (and who—probably—had rarely held her in her arms), Elizabeth had not had a good start to life.

Then, bastardised and excluded from the succession by Parliament, she had spent a lonely childhood hidden from any family and public life, while her father continued his hectic matrimonial career and eventually his 9-year-old son Edward, Elizabeth’s half-brother, ascended the throne.

Yet worse, in her early teenage she had been sexually abused by the uncle of that Edward, one Thomas Seymour. The latter, a villainous man with ambitions even to share rule of England with his brother, repeatedly assailed her in her bedroom—even abetted by his wife (Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife and herself now on her fourth husband).

Today we understand better how wounding such abuse can be.

So, when Elizabeth plastered her face with make-up (as she did), was it merely to disguise pox-marks—or to mask deeper scars?

When, famously, she added yet more extravagant dresses to her wardrobe—and posed statuesquely in them—was this as much to display regality as to disguise (or recompense) a body that had been violated and to hide self-disgust?

When, equally famously, she failed to marry, was this simply because no suitable candidate was available?

And was there (perhaps as a result of that abuse) a sadistic streak in her?

She seems to have taken special interest in exacting the full penalty for treason—being hanged till half dead and then butchered—for Catholic priests. Indeed, while he was torturing (abominably) the gentle Jesuit-poet Robert Southwell, the monstrous torturer Richard Topcliffe wrote to her asking if there was any more ‘in her heart’ that she would like him to extract.

And that same sadistic Topcliffe, while torturing another Catholic priest-martyr in the Tower of London, recited to him in detail how the queen allowed him to fondle her intimately. There is no reason to suppose that he was boasting. He was well placed at court and she certainly befriended him all her life.

* * *

On her tormented deathbed she angrily dismissed as ’hedge priests’ the then archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and other prelates who had come to minister to her.

What did she mean by this? In common parlance, a ‘hedge priest’ was an ignorant country cleric—but it could also mean a bogus one.

The Elizabethan Church Settlement of 1558, which abolished the Mass, restored the Book of Common Prayer and established the queen as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, was largely the work Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury. She had chosen him because he had been a chaplain to her mother and kind to her during her childhood—though she strongly disapproved of the fact that he had married.

She had had a ferocious row with his more Protestant successor, Grindal (and had even suspended him for a while).

But the archbishop now at her deathbed, John Whitgift, had been much to her liking -deservedly so. He was flamboyant—on occasion he could travel with a train of 500 horsemen—learned and loyal. You could never call him a rustic. And he was single.

So why were he and the others now ‘hedge priests’?

Was Elizabeth saying that she had seen through them? Was she facing the fact that the breach with Rome, the royal supremacy and all that was largely the work of an angry, vengeful father—not God’s work?

She may not have been very devout (as we have recently been reminded, her Christianity had not prevented her from establishing cordial relations with the sultan of Constantinople, a sworn enemy of Christendom), but she was theologically informed.

Was she now admitting that the claim that Christ had intended His Church to consist of separate national churches ruled by lay monarchs was a ludicrous, outrageous novelty without any scriptural authority: that it rendered unto Caesar things that were God’s?

Had she even been affected also by the constancy of the nearly 200 Catholic priests, like Southwell, and lay men and women whom her regime had put to a hideous death—and the hundreds imprisoned and fined for refusing to attend services they knew were bogus?

Was she now saying what she had known ‘in her heart’ (to quote Topcliffe) that those prelates at her deathbed were frauds—and her title ‘Supreme Governor’ a sham?

Had that mask fallen?

In morte veritas.

***

Dr Jack Scarisbrick is a Cambridge graduate and emeritus professor of History in the University of Warwick. A specialist in Tudor history, he has written acclaimed works on Henry VIII and the English Reformation. He is cofounder of National Chairman of Life, a large prolife English charity.