The Elizabethans Read Online Free PDF Page A

humanity’s springtime; followed by a Silver Age, a Brass Age and an Age of Iron, when war, tyranny and chaos were unleashed upon the historical scene. During this Iron Age, the Virgin Justice left the Earth and took up her position in the sky as the constellation Virgo. Spenser in The Fairie Queene , during the procession of the months, tells us:
    The sixt was August, being rich arrayd
    In garment all of gold downe to the ground
    Yet rode he not, but led a lovely Mayd
    Forth by the lilly hand, the which was cround
    With eares of corne, and full her hand was found;
    That was the righteous Virgin, which of old
    Liv’d here on earth, and plenty made abound;
    But after Wrong was lov’d and Justice solde,
    She left th’ vnrighteous world and was to heauen extold. 13
    Astraea, the Virgin symbol of Justice, was also a figure of Empire. In the many ceremonial ways in which Elizabeth presented herself, and in which the people responded to her, they wished to see her as the Virgin who had left the Earth with the coming of the Age of Iron. Her reign would usher in a time of righteousness and justice, but also of ‘British Empire’ – it was the age in which this phrase was first used, and it was a coinage of her astrologer, Dr Dee.
    So, rather than thinking of the pageants as some kind of con-trick played on the people, or as a substitute for religion, it is perhaps more helpful to think of them as an extraordinarily public display, in that age of displays, of England’s emerging self-consciousness; England being guided in part by the acute intelligence of its monarch. It is England set to music, England tripping a fantastic dance, England making a tableau. Into this picture of a country coming to life – after a century of civil war, confusion, economic depression – comes this vision of a young Virgin Sovereign who can lead it on to a different existence: an existence where it expands beyond the seas, where it plumbs new areas of learning, where it builds great houses, where it pioneers new literary forms. Much of the ritual was done as a conscious parody of, or imitation of, the imperialist rituals surrounding the Emperor Charles V on the continent, 14 but this was itself a revelation: rather than seeing itself as dependent upon the great empires of the world, Elizabethan England saw itself as a fledgling empire.
    Elizabeth, with her ceremonies, her tournaments, her progresses, brought a palpable sense of optimism to her people, an extraordinary sense that, as a whole, the nation was now capable of creativity and expansion that had somehow previously not been possible.
    This was apparent with the Accession Day Tilts, which became an annual ceremony every November of the reign. On these occasions, every detail was charged with symbolism. The colours worn by the Queen for masques and pageants would have had significance. Red symbolised prowess, yellow joy, white innocence, green hope . . . 15 The jewels presented to the Queen by courtiers, especially the jewels given as New Year gifts, reflected the classical origins of her cult – a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard shows her wearing a jewelled crescent moon in her hair, to show her as Diana the Virgin Huntress; Sir Francis Drake once gave the Queen a fan ‘of fethers, white and red, the handle of gold inamuled, with a halfe moone of mother-of-perles, within that a halfe moone garnished with sparkes of dyamondes, and a few seede perles on thone side, having her Majesties picture within it, and on the backside a device with a crowe over it’. Once again, the crescent moon emphasising her virgin status. Other mythological subjects reflected in her jewellery would have been Elizabeth as Astraea, or Elizabeth as a Vestal Virgin.
    In the Second Book of Sidney’s revised Arcadia we read of the elaborate annual jousts held on the anniversary of the marriage of the Iberian queen. Young knights from the court of Queen Helen arrive. Of her, we are told:
For being brought by right