The Elizabethans Read Online Free PDF

of birth, a woman, a yong woman, a faire woman, to governe a people, in nature mvtinously prowde, and always before so used to hard governours, as they knew not how to obey without the sworde were drawne. Yet could she for some years, so carry her selfe among them, that they found cause in the delicacie of her sex, of admiration, not contempt; and which was notable, even in the time that many countries were full of wars . . . yet so handled shee the matter, that the threatens ever smarted in the threatners . . . For by continuall martiall exercises without bloud, she made them perfect in that bloudy art. 16
    Sidney was describing in more or less precise detail the tilts in which he himself took part and which were choreographed by his friend Sir Henry Lee, the Queen’s Champion – who appears in the Arcadia as Lelius. The games were indeed a paradoxical expression of a ‘bloudy art’ for peaceable means. The Elizabethan governing classes – the aristocracy, the gentry, the higher clergy, the emerging merchant class, the universities – were all united with their queen in wanting to live in peace and prosperity. There were a number of significant threats to this hope: from Ireland, from Scotland, from France, and ultimately from Spain. But the greatest threat was from within. As Shakespeare’s great historical dramas would rehearse in the last decade of the reign, England had taken a long time to learn how to be governed. Tudor statecraft had been a hit-and-miss affair with King Edward, much of the time, a child monarch ruled by rival aristocratic cliques every bit as dangerous and unpopular as those who fought in the fifteenth-century civil wars. Mary’s reign had been a disaster of a rather different kind – Mary just was a very bad queen, with poor advisers and worse luck: under her supervision, Ireland erupted into even worse chaos than usual, the French war was lost, the populace at large was poised for a civil war on religious lines. The pageantry of Elizabeth’s reign, from the very beginning, wanted to say that a new page had been turned. But it would require great patience and skill to emerge from the mistakes of the past. Governance was an art, and much would depend upon Elizabeth’s choice of political advisers.

Part Two
    1570s

12
    Kenilworth
    ON 30 SEPTEMBER 1562 Henry Machyn, the old parish clerk of Holy Trinity the Less in the City of London, looked out of his window and saw an ugly street fight. Machyn’s diary, as befitted a parish clerk, began as a record of heraldic funerals, and extended to bring a compendium of news, crimes, executions and gossip, as well as such city ceremonies as the Lord Mayor’s Show. But this street fight, which he witnessed in the penultimate year of his life, was remarkable not least because both the participants were gentlefolk, and one of them was a (in his day) celebrated poet: ‘The sam day at nyght be-twyn viii and ix was a grett fray in Redcrosse stret between ii gentyllmen and ther men, for they dyd mare [i.e. marry] one woman, and dyvers were hurt; thes wher ther names, master Boysse and master Gaskyn gentyllmen. 1
    The accident-prone George Gascoigne was, when this affray took place, a member of Gray’s Inn, though he appears to have spent as much time there involved in his own personal litigation, some of it with his own father, as he did in legal work on others’ behalf. Gascoigne was the son of minor but prosperous gentry 2 in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, MP for Bedfordshire (1542, 1553 and 1558), commissioner of the musters, justice of the peace and almoner at the coronations of both Edward VI and Mary I. At the time of Elizabeth’s coronation Sir John was ill, and George, then about twenty, deputised for him. Gascoigne’s mother was a northerner – Margaret, daughter of Sir Robert Scargill of Thorpe Hall, Richmond, Yorkshire: perhaps a kinswoman of Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers at the time of Margaret