Her distrust of grand military ventures, and their promoters, was not just financially driven, however, but also reflected her predicament as a female ruler in a patriarchal society, surrounded by egotistical men. To prevent her courtiers uniting and coercing her she allowed herself (in Francis Bacon’s words) ‘to be wooed and courted, and even to have love made to her’, playing her suitors off against each other in competition for her favour.64 These ‘love tricks’ generally proved very effective – except, that is, in times of war. Unable to lead her soldiers in person, she had no choice but to delegate command to her court gallants; and once out of their gilded cage and onto a charger or quarterdeck they had the annoying habit of ignoring her orders and seeking glory for themselves. War also brought out the male prejudice that women were constitutionally incapable of acting decisively and should let the men take charge of military matters. Elizabeth had to struggle constantly, and not always successfully, to remind her commanders who called the shots.
Elizabeth’s troubles with her military men, and theirs with her, were epitomised in the person of the 2nd earl of Essex: Leicester’s stepson and protégé. ‘No man was more ambitious of Glory by vertuous and noble Deeds,’ wrote one Elizabethan historian, ‘no man more careless of all things else’ than Essex.65 His youthful good looks caught the attention of the ageing but still vain Elizabeth, and his military expertise and charismatic leadership were invaluable in time of war. His strategic vision, however, differed profoundly from that of the queen and his main court rival Sir Robert Cecil (1563–1612) – like his father, Lord Burghley, a courtier–bureaucrat par excellence. Essex and his circle longed to make mainland Europe tremble once again at England’s military might, though not for mere conquest or dynastic ambition as the Plantagenets and Henry VIII had done, but to defend the ‘libertie of Christendome’, Catholic as well as Protestant, from the designs of Philip II and his successors for ‘universall monarchie’.66 Elizabeth and the ‘Cecilians’, by contrast, strove merely to keep the Spanish at bay at minimum expense. Essex vented his frustration with this cautious strategy by repeatedly flouting Elizabeth’s orders. During his first outing as a general – in Normandy in 1591 – the queen angrily remarked: ‘Where he is, or what he doth, or what he is to do, we are ignorant.’67 True to his aristocratic ideals he put honour in arms before playing the politician, which is why the hunchbacked Sir Robert Cecil would win their rivalry to succeed Burghley as the queen’s chief minister. Essex, unlike Cecil, could not adapt to political realities: to the crown’s financial disabilities, and to Elizabeth’s chronic indecisiveness and suspicion of ‘martial greatness’ and grand imperial designs.
The greatest constraint upon Essex was the will of the monarch. Indeed, most of the queen’s counsellors, Burghley included, chafed under this restriction, particularly when it came to budging Elizabeth on the succession or military intervention on the Continent. Even after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, Elizabeth had refused to name James as her successor, leaving dangerously unsettled the question of who England’s next monarch would be. Burghley wrote a long memo to himself entitled ‘Certain matters wherein the Queen’s Majesty’s forbearing and delays hath produced, not only inconveniences and increases of expenses, but also dangers’.68 The 1584 Bond of Association was just one of several initiatives designed to bend Elizabeth to the will of Protestant public opinion as represented by Parliament and its management team, the privy council. England was envisaged by Burghley and many other leading Protestants as a ‘mixed’ monarchy in which the queen’s ‘imperial’ power was circumscribed by due process, wise counsel and the interests of the ‘commonwealth’ – that is, the public good and the institutional and legal structures that sustained civil (i.e. Protestant) society.
For the enemies of Puritanism, however – anxious to appropriate royal authority in their struggle against the godly – England was not a mixed polity at all but a ‘right and true monarchy’ in which the sovereign’s personal power could not be gainsaid or limited.69 Having grown in number since the 1570s, these zealous upholders of the ecclesiastical order and the queen’s imperial prerogative were winning patrons and royal favour at court by the early 1590s. Anti-Calvinist clerics and court careerists of various stripes now insisted that Elizabeth derived her authority directly from God, and therefore that her crown and Church were beyond the reach of the common law or parliamentary statute. The efforts of a group of godly ministers and propagandists to stir up the people against the episcopal hierarchy and in support of Presbyterianism provoked a government crackdown against the Puritan leadership in the early 1590s. In a conscious attempt to fight fire with fire, senior churchmen employed populist hacks – among them that master of satirical wordplay Thomas Nashe – to wage a propaganda war against the godly, who were portrayed as factious and seditious. The court cleric and future archbishop of Canterbury Robert Bancroft published an influential tract in 1593 in which he argued that the Puritans and Jesuits were as bad as each other, since both were ‘labouring with all their might by railing, libelling and lying to steal away the people’s hearts from their governors, to bring them to a dislike of the present state of our church’.70
The Presbyterian movement was driven underground during the early 1590s, and Puritan ministers confined to the great unfinished work of implanting Protestant doctrine among the profane multitude. But by then the damage had been done. Elizabeth’s failure to impose religious uniformity meant that she would leave a kingdom that was divided between Puritans, anti-Calvinists, prayer-book Protestants and Catholics; and religious pluralism at that time, even the informal kind tacitly allowed by Elizabeth, was regarded as highly dangerous. The earl of Essex was merely stating the obvious, as contemporaries saw it, when he insisted that ‘a pluralitie of religions … is against the pollicie of all states, because where there is not unitie in the Church, there can be no unitie nor order in the state’.71 By failing to stamp out religious dissent, Elizabeth may have spared England a civil war in the sixteenth century, but only perhaps by deferring it until the seventeenth. The dreadful consequences of religious division were all too evident in war-torn France, which was, in Essex’s words, ‘the theater and stage wheron the greatest actions are acted’.72 The French wars of religion would provide a rich source of ideological nutrient for both the supporters and opponents of ‘imperial’ monarchy in Britain.
To the swordsmen and the young, discontented noblemen who flocked round Essex, the ageing Elizabeth and her court seemed increasingly threatening to all but England’s popish enemies. How could English honour and liberties be preserved, they asked, when the queen’s counsels were full of sycophants and ‘base penn clarkes’ such as Sir Robert Cecil?73 The continental vogue for the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56–117) in the 1590s spoke loudly to the Essexians’ concerns. Like most gentlemen of the age they had received a humanist education and turned readily to classical literature for what Essex termed ‘not onely precepts, but lively patterns, both for private directions and for affayres of state’.74 Tacitus’ account of the Claudian emperors – a dark tale of princely virtue corrupted by evil counsellors – validated their jaundiced view of Elizabeth and her court. As royal patronage and political access to the queen contracted during the 1590s, so the court’s reputation for corruption grew. Cecil was regarded as especially venal. ‘You may boldly write for his favour,’ a lawyer advised his client concerning Cecil. ‘You paid well for it.’75
From disillusion with the court and its political culture it was but a short step to more subversive doctrines. Essex’s advisers adapted Huguenot arguments that the nobility could legitimately discipline a monarch who had broken their supposed contract to rule by the consent and for the benefit of the people. Essex was apparently the first man in England to refer to himself in print as a ‘patriot’ – a term that entered the Anglophone world from France, where it was closely associated with a Huguenot reforming agenda. Only a strong and patriotic nobility, the Essexians argued, conscious of its personal honour irrespective of royal favour, and endowed with the formal independent power of the great medieval offices of state such as the earl marshalcy (which Essex was granted in 1597), could preserve the commonwealth against tyranny. Essex and his circle blended several different and seemingly contradictory strands of thinking – Protestant chivalric ideals; medieval baronial constitutionalism; support for Catholic toleration; classical and Renaissance ideas about civic