Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Read Online Free Page B

enabled her to carry off these occasions in great style. When the time was right she was capable of an impressive democratic rhetoric, as in her famous speech at Tilbury before the attack of the Armada. More than any other English sovereign, she kept the good opinion of most of her people throughout a longand difficult reign. To her poets she was ‘Eternal Virgin, Goddess true’, ‘Blessed Astraea’, ‘Fair Eliza, Queen of Shepherds all’, ‘Cynthia, the Lady of the sea’, their great Gloriana. Staid men in Parliament were as giddy about her as the poets. ‘If I might prolong her Majesty’s life but for one year,’ one said in 1585, ‘I protest I would be content to suffer death with the most exquisite torments that might be devised.’ The common people continued to love her. In 1600 the ballad-maker wrote:
The noblest queen
That ever was seen
In England doth reign this day.
    She became eventually a talisman for the people. Bishop Goodman described how, as a boy in 1588, he was swept along by a rumour that the Queen was to be seen going to Whitehall. After an hour Elizabeth emerged. ‘Then we cried “God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!” Then the Queen turned unto us and said, “God save you all, my good people! … You may well have a greater prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince”.’ The reply was admirably calculated. No wonder the crowd ‘did nothing but talk what an admirable queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her service’.
    This adulation, and the need to cultivate it, left marks on her character. Those who live by popularity learn conceit and eccentricity. Elizabeth, like her father, was extremely egotistical. The German traveller Hentzer noted that she expected the court to fall to their knees before her. Though she was not handsome, she was surprisingly coquettish. The professions of love from ambitious young courtiers, which her wisdom recognized for the flattery they were, still puffed up her tough old heart. As age advanced she covered her plainness with fantastic eccentricity. When de Maisse, the French ambassador, met her for the first time in 1597, she seemed a grotesque fright. Above her thin face, with pinched nose and crooked yellow teeth, she wore a vast red wig, spangled with gold and silver, and with two great curls hanging down to her shoulders. She was much encrusted with jewels, and wore a kind of nightgown of silver gauze cut so low that her breasts were easily seen. This indecorous dress she would from time to time open at the front as if she were too hot. And in their conversation, where the ambassador found her gracious and sharp-witted, she stillexpected compliments. An old harridan deceived by wilfulness and embittered by sexual frustration.
    No triumph of personality would have compensated for a failed policy. Elizabeth’s command of the country was firmly based on successful government. The outward signs of her rule were those made familiar by the earlier Tudors. She was authoritarian, secret and without conscience. She did not like advice and reminded her ministers of ‘our long experience in government’ which had ‘taught us to discover what were fit for us to do in matters of our state’. Any sign of independent action was sharply checked. She reminded Leicester that she had raised him from the dust. ‘I may not endure’, she told Sir Thomas Sherley, ‘that any man shall alter my commission and the authority that I gave him upon his own fancies and without me.’ Her father used to say, ‘If I thought that my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire.’ She had the same regard for closeness and secrecy. She wrote to her envoy in the Netherlands: ‘We princes be wary enough of our bargains, think you I will be bound by your speech to make no peace for mine own matters without their consent.’ In Tudor polity, the nearer a person was to the throne, the higher the birth and the better the ability, the