The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A bastardised princess who survived her father's axe, her stepfather's advances and her sister's Tower by keeping her mouth shut and her options open, Elizabeth ruled for forty-four years by refusing to make the irrevocable choices (a husband, an heir, a war, an execution) that men around her demanded, governing through charm, thrift, theatre and lies, and letting others carry the blame when she finally had to act.
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Critical acts
- 1
Outlasting Tyrwhitt (1549)
She did not panic and she did not confess. Tyrwhitt tried flattery, threats and a sympathetic lady-in-waiting. She wept and called Parry a "false wretch," but admitted only to gossip and to talk about her estates, and insisted that she would "never...
- 2
Writing for Her Life: The Tide Letter and the Tower (1554)
The escorting lords told her that "time and tide" waited for no one. She begged leave to write to her sister, and the Earl of Sussex relented. She opened with King John of France's saying "that a king's word was more than another man's oath," reminded Mary of her promise that she would not be condemned unheard, and pleaded not to be sent to "a place more…
- 3
Building a Government in Forty-Eight Hours (November 1558)
She moved fast and quietly. Cecil was at his desk at Hatfield on the first morning, and the accession proclamation, a new councillor's oath and the agenda for the first meeting were ready within hours. On 20 November she swore him in with the charge that defined their partnership for forty years: "This judgment I have of you...
- 4
Giving Up Dudley (1560-61)
She refused to sacrifice Dudley, believing "completely in Dudley's innocence," and she wanted to marry him. For months "she blew now hot now cold." When a patent making him a peer was ready, "she took a knife and cut it in two"; then she relented and patted his cheek: "No, no, the bear and the ragged staff is not so soon overthrown."
- 5
Refusing to Marry or Name an Heir (1563-66)
She refused, in person and in fury. She railed at the nobles, banished Leicester and Pembroke from the Presence Chamber, and called a deputation of both Houses to hear her. "As for my own part, I care not for death; for all men are mortal, and though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had.
- 6
Killing Mary, Then Blaming Davison (1586-87)
She stalled, appealing to Parliament's feelings: "I am not afraid of death. I have had good trial and experience of this world... I have found treason in trust." She asked whether there was no other way, and when they said there was none she gave them "an answer-answerless."
Maxims
Say nothing that can hang you
At fifteen she gave Tyrwhitt nothing but tears, and at twenty she told the Council she could not remember owning Donnington. Both times the only evidence against her was her own mouth, and she kept it shut. See "Outlasting Tyrwhitt."
Write until the tide turns
Ordered to the Tower, she asked leave to write a letter and took so long over it that the boats could not shoot London Bridge. She gained a night and lost nothing.
Choose one honest counsellor and keep him forty years
"That without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel that you think best." Cecil served her until his death in 1598, and she told him he was "Alpha and Omega."
Take counsel; don't take orders
She heard her Council but kept the decision. When the Commons tried "to make, without my licence, an act of my words," she asked whether her words were "like lawyers' books."
Marry no one, and name no heir
A husband would make her "but Queen of England," and an heir would be her "winding-sheet." Both choices were irrevocable, so she made neither, though in 1566 she promised in public to marry "as soon as I can conveniently."
Part IThe Story
The Tide Letter
On 17 March 1554 the Council told the Princess Elizabeth that she was going to the Tower. Wyatt's rebellion had just failed. It had aimed to stop her sister Queen Mary's Spanish marriage and, many believed, to put Elizabeth on the throne. A copy of her letter to the Queen had turned up in the French ambassador's intercepted dispatch. The imperial ambassador Renard was pressing Mary to "rid the world" of her. Lady Jane Grey had been beheaded a month before, and London's gates were hung with traitors' quarters.
The escorting lords told her that "time and tide" waited for no one; the boats had to shoot London Bridge while the water allowed. Elizabeth begged leave to write to her sister, and the Earl of Sussex relented.
She took her time. She opened with King John of France's saying "that a king's word was more than another man's oath," and reminded Mary of her promise that she would not be condemned unheard. She pleaded not to be sent to "a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject." She warned of the fate of the Seymour brothers: "I pray God as evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other." She flatly denied the charges: "as for the traitor Wyatt, he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him."
Then she scored the blank half of the page with diagonal lines, so that nothing could be forged above her signature: "Your highness's most faithful subject, that hath been from the beginning and will be to my end. Elizabeth."
By the time she finished, the tide had turned. She had bought a night.
It is the whole method in one afternoon: a twenty-year-old woman with no army, no allies she could trust and no legal protection, using words, delay and caution to stay alive. The historian David Starkey argues that the years before her accession made her: "The Tower made a good classroom and Lady Jane Grey's scaffold an excellent text." She turned what she saw into maxims "of what she would not do herself and of what she would not do to others," which he sums up as "I will not be like my sister Mary. And I will not rule like her either."
She then ruled England for forty-four years by refusing to make the irrevocable choices that the men around her demanded: a husband, an heir, a war, an execution. Her admiring biographer J. E. Neale says she "could beat the subtlest diplomat at his game of deception." Starkey is sharper on her lies, her vanity and her complicity in plots. Paul Johnson, in Heroes, calls her "a heroine not of romance and tragedy but of real achievement and successful government." She is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, and the record of how she did it includes the scapegoats and the severed hand.
By the Numbers
Gloriana
44 yearsHer reign, November 1558 to March 1603
48 hoursTime to assemble a Council that barely changed in four and a half decades
~40 yearsCecil's service as her chief counsellor
£135,000Her ordinary annual spending, cut to pay off her sister's debts
0 vs 3Her financial crises in 44 years vs. Philip II's bankruptcies
~600Hanged under martial law after the Northern Rebellion
0Husbands; and no named heir until she was dying
A Bastardised Princess
Elizabeth was born at Greenwich on Sunday, 7 September 1533, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Her father had her mother beheaded before Elizabeth was three, and she was declared a bastard. By canon law, and until her first Parliament met, by English law too, she would remain one.
She was educated as a prince. Under Roger Ascham she spent her mornings on Greek and her afternoons on Latin, translating classical authors into English "and then back into the original" by his method of double translation. At sixteen she spoke French and Italian "as well as she does English," Ascham wrote, and "her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up." The learning would become a monopoly. No ambassador spoke English, and because she could talk "with perfect ease in Latin, French, and Italian," she kept diplomacy in her own hands.
They All Sing One Song
At thirteen, after her father's death, Elizabeth went to live with her stepmother, Catherine Parr, and Catherine's new husband, Thomas Seymour, the Lord Protector's brother. Seymour came into her bedchamber in the mornings, "struck her on the back or buttocks familiarly," and once, with his wife's help, cut her dress "into a hundred pieces." Her excuse to her governess was that "she could not strive with all." After Catherine died, Seymour revived his plan to marry the princess while plotting against his brother.
In January 1549 he was arrested for treason. Her governess Kate Ashley and her cofferer Parry were sent to the Tower, and rumour said Elizabeth herself was "in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral." Under her father's will, marrying without the Council's consent would have cost her place in the succession.
Sir Robert Tyrwhitt was sent to Hatfield to break her. He showed her the signed confessions of Ashley and Parry and reminded her "she was but a subject." He tried flattery, threats and a sympathetic lady-in-waiting. She wept and called Parry a "false wretch," but admitted only to gossip and talk about her estates, and insisted she would "never... marry, neither in England nor out of England, without the consent of the king's majesty, your grace, and the council's." Asked by Parry earlier whether she would marry Seymour if the Council allowed it, she had answered: "When that comes to pass, I will do as God shall put in my mind." Starkey calls it the first of her "answers answerless."
"I do assure your grace," Tyrwhitt reported, "she hath a good wit, and nothing is to be gotten from her but by great policy." "They all sing one song," he complained, and suspected a pact "never to confess to death."
Once she saw that the confessions endangered her dignity but not her head, she went on the attack. She demanded that the Protector proclaim the rumours "shameful slanders" and that she be allowed to come to court "that I may show myself there as I am." She refused to name the gossips herself, because it would be "but a breeding of an evil name of me that I am glad to punish them and so get the evil will of the people." Seymour was beheaded on 20 March 1549. Elizabeth was never charged. Starkey notes that her answers answerless were "a matter of life and death - Seymour's death and, as it turned out, Elizabeth's life," and traces her later wariness of marriage to "Seymour's abusive gropings." For the next four years she "carried herself prudently and modestly," and dressed so plainly that Lady Jane Grey's tutor held her up as a model.
Much Suspected, Nothing Proved
Mary came to the throne in 1553. Elizabeth survived her sister's Catholic reign by conforming outwardly. She went to Mass "complaining 'all the way to church that her stomach ached, and wearing a suffering air'," and claimed she was a Protestant only from "ignorance."
Then came Wyatt and the tide letter. Mary refused to see her and was furious with her councillors: "would he were alive again but for a month!" Elizabeth entered the Tower on Palm Sunday, lodged in the very rooms where her mother had awaited trial. She asked whether "the Lady Jane's scaffold were taken away or no."
Under interrogation she used the method she had learned at fifteen. Asked about her plan to retreat to Donnington Castle, she first pretended not to remember owning it ("I never lay in it in all my life"), then went on the attack: "what is that to the purpose, my lords, but that I may go to mine own houses at all times?" Wyatt cleared her from the scaffold, and the judges found "the evidence insufficient for a conviction."
Starkey thinks she was guilty of more than she admitted. She was "the second largest landowner in the kingdom," and arms and provisions had been sent to Donnington, an ideal vantage point for "this game of wait-and-see." But she covered her tracks. Neale's verdict is that nobody can say more "than the words which she was said to have scratched on a window pane: Much suspected by me, Nothing proved can be."
"Let her be prudent, time was her ally," Neale writes of these years. In 1566 she would remind Parliament that none of them had been "a second person in the realm as she had, and tasted of the practices against her sister."
Forty-Eight Hours
Mary died on 17 November 1558, leaving a lost war with France, the loss of Calais, empty coffers and a restored Catholic Church. The new Queen was twenty-five and legally a bastard. Mary, Queen of Scots, wife of the French Dauphin, had a rival claim. The Spanish envoy Feria arrived expecting to manage her and boasted that she owed her throne to Philip II. The men around her assumed a woman ruler would soon hand power to a husband: "The woman-ruler's way lay through political impotence to marriage-itself a state of impotence."
Her first words to Mary's councillors set the tone: "The law of nature moves me to sorrow for my sister; the burthen that is fallen upon me maketh me amazed; and yet, considering that I am God's creature ordained to obey His appointment, I will yield thereto." To Feria she said it was not Philip, "nor yet the nobility who had placed her where she was; it was the people."
She moved fast and quietly. William Cecil was at his desk at Hatfield on the first morning, and the accession proclamation, a new councillor's oath and the agenda for the first meeting were ready within hours. On 20 November she swore him in with the charge that defined their partnership for forty years: "This judgment I have of you... that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the State, and that without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel that you think best."
She told Mary's councillors she would choose only a few, because "a multitude doth make rather disorder and confusion than good council," and she did not say who would be dropped, since "it was prudent to let hopes linger as long as possible." On religion she put "&c." where the title Supreme Head had been, kept Mass in her chapel for the moment, and walked out of a Christmas Mass when the bishop refused not to elevate the host.
Starkey calls the transfer of power "swift, open, legal and unchallenged," the smoothest since 1422. "Within forty-eight hours of her accession she had a council, whose size, shape and personnel changed astonishingly little in the four and a half decades of her reign." It did not make her a puppet. Feria soon wrote that she seemed "incomparably more feared than her sister, and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did." "They run away from me," he complained, "as if I were the devil."
Time Hath Brought Me Hither
On Saturday 14 January 1559, in light snow, a thousand riders set out from the Tower with the Queen in an open litter trimmed with gold brocade. "In pompous ceremonies a secret of government doth much consist," a contemporary remarked, and Elizabeth played every moment.
When an old man turned away and wept, she cried, "I warrant you it is for gladness." She smiled when someone called out "Remember old King Henry VIII," and stopped her litter for "many a simple body." A sprig of rosemary given by a poor woman near Fleet Bridge "was in her litter when she reached Westminster." At Cheapside, given a thousand marks in gold, she promised that "for the safety and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if need be, to spend my blood," and "it moved a marvellous shout."
At the Little Conduit the City had built two hills, one flourishing and one withered, with Time leading his daughter Truth out of a cave carrying an English Bible. "Time!" she exclaimed; "and Time hath brought me hither." She took the Bible, kissed it, held it up in both hands and laid it on her breast.
An annalist wrote that "if ever any person had either the gift or the style to win the hearts of people, it was this Queen." Neale adds that "in part instinctive, it was also conscious and deliberate."
The religious settlement that followed was what Starkey calls a "Goldilocks settlement: neither too hot nor too cold," which "pleased neither the orthodox Roman Catholics... nor the hotter sort of Protestants." To get her Act of Supremacy past a Catholic House of Lords, she exempted the peers from the oath: "So Elizabeth, as she often did, decided to lose a battle in order to win a war." She "wanted no inquisitorial practices, opening windows into men's souls. Outward conformity was enough." She was "determined not to light Roman candles to match the Protestant candles of her sister's reign."
The Bear and the Ragged Staff
In her first year she fell for Lord Robert Dudley, "a magnificent, princely looking person" who was married to Amy Robsart. By April 1559 Feria reported that "her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night." Kate Ashley begged her on her knees to end the scandal. Cecil told the Spanish ambassador he would retire, that "Lord Robert would be better in paradise than here," and that she was abandoning business to hunt with him.
On 8 September 1560 Amy was found dead at the foot of the stairs at Cumnor. The coroner's jury found the death accidental; Neale thinks it was suicide. Abroad, the English ambassador Throckmorton heard men ask, "What religion is this, that a subject shall kill his wife, and the Prince not only bear withal but marry with him?"
She believed "completely in Dudley's innocence," and she wanted to marry him. For months "she blew now hot now cold." When a patent making him a peer was ready, "she took a knife and cut it in two." Then she relented and patted his cheek: "No, no, the bear and the ragged staff is not so soon overthrown." Starkey adds that Cecil "conveyed to Elizabeth that, should Dudley become consort, he would resign."
In the end she stepped back. If she ever married, she later said, "it would be as a Queen and not as Elizabeth." "By the summer of 1561... Elizabeth was proving that her intelligence could control her emotions," Neale writes. "Momentarily she had sacrificed her good name and popularity; that is a measure of her infatuation." Starkey: "she was staring into the same abyss as had Mary. But, unlike Mary, she had the wisdom to pull back." Dudley, later Earl of Leicester, became her "Eyes," and the affair became "a sentimental friendship that played a useful part in the elaborate dynamics of her court and council."
If I Were Turned Out in My Petticoat
In October 1562 she nearly died of smallpox. "Death, as she said, possessed every joint of her," and the Council could not agree on a successor. Thinking herself dying, she asked them to make Dudley "Protector of England."
In 1563, and again in 1566, Lords and Commons petitioned her to marry and to settle the succession. In 1566 they threatened to hold up the money bill and came to blows in the Commons. Cecil privately prayed, "God direct her to marriage in some place," or her reign would be "very troublesome and unquiet."
She refused, in person and in fury. She railed at the nobles, told Pembroke he "talked like a swaggering soldier," banished Leicester and Pembroke from the Presence Chamber, and called a deputation of both Houses to hear her:
— Elizabeth I to a deputation of Lords and Commons, 1566I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.
"Was I not born in this realm?" she asked. "Is not my kingdom here? Whom have I oppressed? Whom have I enriched to other's harm? ... I will be tried by envy itself. I need not to use many words, for my deeds do try me."
When the Commons kept debating she forbade discussion. Then she "stooped to conquer": she lifted the ban and gave up a third of the subsidy, calling the members "her best treasurers." When they tried to write her promise into the preamble of the money bill, she scrawled on the draft: "Are my words like lawyers' books which nowadays go to the wire-drawers to make subtle doings more plain?"
Her reasons were sound. "Think you," she asked Mary, Queen of Scots' envoy Maitland, "that I could love my winding-sheet, when as examples show, princes cannot even love their children who are to succeed them?" She knew people "preferred the rising to the setting sun" from her own past: "I have good experience of myself in my sister's time, how desirous men were that I should be in place." A Scottish envoy saw it plainly: "ye think if ye were married, ye would be but Queen of England, and now ye are King and Queen both; ye may not suffer a commander."
Meanwhile she kept suitors dangling as insurance: Philip II, Eric of Sweden, the Archduke Charles, and later the Duke of Alençon. "Their hopes became a safeguard for her throne."
The cost was a reign under an assassin's threat. A Catholic manifesto argued that she was "without a lawful heir of her own body," so that if she were killed, "most people would hasten to make their peace with Mary." Peter Wentworth went to prison for warning that her body would "lie upon the earth unburied."
The Hind Part of Her Head
"She prayed God to give her grace to govern with clemency and without bloodshed," and Neale calls her reign "singularly clement" because no peer died on the scaffold until 1572. The record is more mixed. After the Northern Rebellion, "some six hundred were hanged" under martial law.
The Duke of Norfolk was the only duke in England and her kinsman. He had schemed to marry Mary, Queen of Scots, and then joined Ridolfi's plot for a Spanish invasion. In January 1572 his peers found him guilty of treason, and Elizabeth "recoiled from signing Norfolk's death warrant." Burghley, as Cecil had become, sighed that "the Queen's Majesty hath been always a merciful lady, and by mercy she hath taken more harm than by justice."
One Saturday in February she signed a warrant for Monday; "suddenly, on Sunday late in the night, she sent for Burghley in great distress and insisted on a warrant being made out that night to postpone it." Lord Hunsdon fumed that if ruin came "by negligence or womanish pity... what she hath to answer for to God, she herself knows." On 9 April she signed again. At two in the morning of the eleventh Burghley received a note in her own hand "to say that the hind part of her head-the seat of the affections-would not trust the forward side of the same. The execution must be countermanded."
In the end Parliament gave her no way out. Unable to get Mary's head, the Commons demanded Norfolk's, and on 2 June he died on Tower Hill. "All that day Elizabeth was sad." The hesitation maddened her ministers. It also shows why she hesitated: an axe once used could not be undone.
A True Englishman's Hand
In 1579, at forty-six, she was being courted in person by the Duke of Alençon, Catherine de Medici's youngest son, whom she called her "frog." Starkey says she "found herself bowled over," and "something of the same desperation" entered her behaviour as had entered Mary Tudor's over Philip.
In September a pamphlet appeared all over London: "The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage." Its author, John Stubbs, a lawyer whose sister had married the leading Puritan divine, warned of the Mass returning and of the danger of childbirth at her age. Elizabeth "was passionately angry." Stubbs, his printer and his publisher were tried under an old act passed to protect Philip, and sentenced to lose their right hands. A judge who called the sentence illegal was jailed. Even Neale writes that "Elizabeth's good sense had deserted her." She pardoned the printer.
At the scaffold Stubbs punned, "Pray for me, now my calamity is at hand." When his right hand had been cut off, "he took his hat from his head with his left, cried 'God save the Queen!' and swooned." The publisher held up his bleeding stump: "I have left there a true Englishman's hand." "A deep silence pervaded the multitude of spectators." Starkey's comment is that she was "oblivious for once to her popularity." The Council would not back the match, and she sent her frog home "loaded with gifts and fair words."
An Answer Answerless
Mary, Queen of Scots had fled to England in 1568 and spent nearly twenty years as Elizabeth's prisoner, the focus of the Northern Rebellion, the Ridolfi plot and the Throckmorton plot. In 1586 Walsingham's double agents read her letter "warmly welcoming the plot and the slaying of Elizabeth" sent by Anthony Babington. Walsingham even forged a postscript asking for the names of the assassins. A commission found her guilty, and Parliament, "with complete unanimity in each House," petitioned for her immediate execution.
Elizabeth stalled. "I am not afraid of death. I have had good trial and experience of this world... I have found treason in trust." She knew how the deed would look: "But we princes are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed." "What will they not now say, when it shall be spread that, for the safety of her life, a maiden queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman?" She asked whether there was no other way, and when they said there was none, she gave them "an answer-answerless."
She signed the warrant on 1 February 1587 and told the new secretary William Davison to inform Walsingham: "The grief thereof will go near to kill him outright!" In the same breath she had Walsingham and Davison write to Mary's jailer, Sir Amias Paulet, to sound him about killing Mary quietly under the Oath of Association. Paulet refused: "God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience." She mocked the "niceness of those precise fellows." The Council sent the warrant without her further word, and Mary died at Fotheringay on 8 February.
London lit bonfires. Elizabeth "could neither eat nor sleep." Then she "declared that she had never meant to send it," and her wrath fell "more heavily on Burghley, most heavily on Davison." According to Johnson, she called Burghley "traitor, false dissembler and wicked wretch." Davison was tried in Star Chamber, heavily fined and imprisoned for eighteen months. Neale cannot decide whether she believed her own story or was "no more than play[ing] a part," but he is clear that it served her diplomacy: "to save the league with Scotland there must be a scapegoat." Neale believes she "had probably foreseen this and prepared for it by leaving the dispatch of the death warrant to others." The fine was later remitted; Johnson notes that she "never again employed him." With Mary dead, the Catholic cause "lost its peculiar menace," because the obvious heir was now the Protestant James VI.
The Heart and Stomach of a King
In August 1588 the Spanish Armada had been driven up the North Sea, but the Duke of Parma's army was still expected to cross from Flanders. A camp was formed at Tilbury under Leicester. On 8 August she "passed like some Amazonian empress through all her army," and the next day, on a stately horse with a truncheon in her hand, she reviewed the troops and spoke.
"My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery. But I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects." She had come "being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all."
— Elizabeth I at Tilbury, August 1588I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.
She promised, "in the word of a prince," that their rewards would "be duly paid you." "The men gave a mighty shout." When news came that Parma might sail on the spring tide, she refused to go back to London. "Thus your Lordship seeth," wrote Walsingham, "that this place breedeth courage."
Then her thrift returned. The army and fleet were stood down with "reckless haste," and disease in the fleet killed thousands. She hated war, "considering it wicked, nearly always avoidable by sensible rulers, and ruinously expensive," and preferred deniable action: of Drake's raid on the West Indies she said, "the gentleman careth not if I should disavow him."
Get Him Gone and Be Hanged
The Earl of Essex, her last great favourite, was the darling of London. In July 1598, arguing over who should be sent to Ireland, he lost his temper and "deliberately turned his back on Elizabeth." She "boxed his ears 'and bade him get him gone and be hanged'." His hand went to his sword. Nottingham stepped between them, and Essex swore he would not have taken it "even at Henry VIII's hands." To the Lord Keeper he wrote: "What! Cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite?"
She sent him to Ireland anyway. He parleyed alone with Tyrone at a ford, agreed a truce, suddenly returned to England, and burst into her bedchamber at Nonsuch "as she was dressing, her hair about her face." She received him calmly, then had him confined. When his letters pleaded for the renewal of his lucrative farm of sweet wines, she is said to have remarked "that an unruly horse must be abated of his provender."
In February 1601 Essex led armed men into the City. He failed, and was beheaded at thirty-four. She called him "a senseless ingrate," but later confessed she "was partly to blame for his fall, having made too much of him." Months later, reading Lambarde's records, she came to Richard II and said: "I am Richard II; know ye not that?"
The Coronation Ring
On 30 November 1601 one hundred and forty members of the Commons came to Whitehall to thank her for ending the monopolies, after she had promised "immediate remedy by proclamation" and the House had "turned from wrath to inexpressible joy. One member wept." They knelt; she made them stand, "for she would trouble them with longer speech."
"Though God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves." "I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strict, fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster." "And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had, nor shall have any that will love you better." It was called her Golden Speech.
Her last year was lonely. Robert Cecil, Burghley's son, was secretly corresponding with James, and courtiers were turning to "the rising sun." She saw it and kept quiet. When Sir John Harington read her his verses she said, "When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less." In February 1603 she rebuked a Venetian envoy: "my sex cannot diminish my prestige." Then her cousin the Countess of Nottingham died, and melancholy took hold.
Sir Robert Carey found her sitting low on her cushions. She wrung his hand, said she was not well, "and fetched forty or fifty great sighs." Her coronation ring, which she had never taken off, "had had to be sawn off, because it was grown into the flesh." She refused physic and food: "princes must not be forced." Having named James, she "turned her face to the wall" and died between two and three in the morning of 24 March 1603. "With perfect statecraft," Neale writes, "Elizabeth maintained her reign-long silence on the succession question" to the very end.
The Heroine of Achievement
Johnson's case for her rests on results and on rules. Her government stood on "nine principles," all drawn from her life "as a much-endangered princess." Among them: "First, never marry ... Her virgin state, and her freedom from a marital tie, were the sources of her vast authority." "Second, she picked wise counselors, and stuck to them"; "she was a first-class picker, the best of any English sovereign," and "nearly everyone she used died in her service or outlived her, still in office." Third, money: she "never got into a financial mess in forty-four years," while Philip II "went bankrupt three times." Neale goes further: "it was in that financial sense of Elizabeth's, her resolute, irritating parsimony that the secret of greatness lay."
Her temperament was, in Neale's phrase, "a wary mind" grafted "upon an impulsive nature." Harington, who knew her old, wrote: "When she smiled, it was a pure sunshine that everyone did choose to bask in if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike." Feria judged her "a very vain and clever woman," and Starkey agrees that her vanity "was indeed colossal," over everything from "her abnormally long thin fingers" to "her defiance of time." Starkey's defence is that the vanity "tended to exercise itself in petty things."
The lies were not petty. Over Scotland in 1559 the situation was "after Elizabeth's own heart, demanding caution, secrecy, and valiant lying," and "the harder it was, the harder Elizabeth lied." The Spanish bishop Quadra gave up: "With her all is falsehood and vanity." Her ministers paid for her delays, Davison paid for her decision, Stubbs paid with his hand, and sailors paid with their lives for her economies. Those costs belong in the account beside the forty-four years of solvency, peace at home and a Church that kept "many tens of thousands" of conservative subjects inside it, because "these were her subjects too."
Part IIThe Playbook
Elizabeth stated many of her principles herself and lived long enough to test them. She inherited illegitimacy, a rival claimant, empty coffers, a lost war and a Council that expected her to marry and obey. The method she built from those constraints is below, with its costs.
The principles
- 1.Say nothing that can hang you.
- 2.Turn your predecessor's mistakes into your rules.
- 3.Choose one honest counsellor and keep him forty years.
- 4.Take counsel; don't take orders.
- 5.Refuse the irrevocable choice you don't have to make.
- 6.Give up the man to keep the kingdom.
- 7.Spend nothing you cannot repay, and count what thrift costs.
- 8.Rule through the people's love, and perform for it.
- 9.Know who carries the blame, and what it costs them.
Principle 1
Say nothing that can hang you
At fifteen she gave Tyrwhitt nothing but tears. At twenty she told the Council she could not remember owning Donnington. Both times the only evidence against her that could have been decisive was her own mouth, and she kept it shut. "Nothing is to be gotten from her but by great policy."
As queen she turned the habit into "a swirling obfuscation of language in which the more she said the less her meaning was clear." When letters of love from English noblemen to Mary, Queen of Scots, turned up, she kept silent, "according to that motto which she used, Video et taceo. that is. I see, but say nothing."
Tactic: Under hostile questioning, confirm only what is already proven and deny the rest plainly. Then move from defence to a grievance of your own. Never volunteer a fact you have not been shown.
Principle 2
Turn your predecessor's mistakes into your rules
"I will not be like my sister Mary. And I will not rule like her either." Mary had burned Protestants; Elizabeth would not "light Roman candles." Mary had married a foreign prince and lost popularity; Elizabeth would not marry. Elizabeth had been the "second person in the realm" herself; she would never name an heir. Mary had left debts; Elizabeth paid them.
Tactic: Write down the specific failures of the person who held your role before you, and turn each into a rule you will keep. Your predecessor's mistakes are the cheapest education you will ever get.
Principle 3
Choose one honest counsellor and keep him forty years
Three days into her reign she swore in Cecil and asked him for one thing: "that without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel that you think best." He served her until his death in 1598, and she called him "Alpha and Omega." Her whole Council was chosen in two days and "changed astonishingly little in the four and a half decades of her reign."
Stability did not mean comfort: he threatened to resign over Dudley, and she raged at him over Mary's death. But she never replaced him.
Tactic: Pick your senior team early, ask each member explicitly to tell you what they think rather than what you want, and then keep them. Continuity at the top is worth more than the marginal improvement of a reshuffle.
Principle 4
Take counsel; don't take orders
"She had said that she would rule by counsel; not that she would be ruled by her councillors. It is an important distinction and one which she enforced ruthlessly." She "generally consulted her councillors individually, on the principle of 'divide and rule'." She compared what each said in private with what he said in council, and Harington saw her "sometimes disprove to their faces what had been delivered a month before." Hatton said, "The Queen did fish for men's souls, and had so sweet a bait that no one could escape her network."
Tactic: Hear your advisers one at a time, where they will say what they really think, and keep a record of what each told you. Keep the decision itself in your own hands.
Principle 5
Refuse the irrevocable choice you don't have to make
"Where Mary was impulsive, Elizabeth had a horror of irrevocable decisions." A husband would make her "but Queen of England." An heir would be her "winding-sheet," because people "preferred the rising to the setting sun." A war was ruinous. An execution could not be undone. So she delayed every one of them, as long as she could. Johnson: she "believed it was better to take no decision than the wrong one. She practiced masterly inactivity." "Where there were doubts," Neale writes, "she preferred indecision."
It drove her ministers to despair: "Who will speedily resolve the doubtful delays? Who will make despatch of anything?" And it had real costs, from an assassin's threat hanging over the whole reign to the agonies over Norfolk and Mary. But time kept bringing her what haste would have spoiled.
⏳
Four Choices She Would Not Make
What the Council demanded, and what Elizabeth did instead.
| The demand | Her answer | The cost |
|---|---|---|
| Marry | Kept suitors dangling as insurance; "lived and died a virgin." | No child to secure the succession. |
| Name an heir | Silence on the succession until she was dying. | A reign under the assassin's threat. |
| Go to war | Deniable agents; refused the Netherlands crown. | War came anyway in 1588. |
| Execute Mary | "An answer-answerless"; signed, then disowned. | Davison ruined; her own reputation for candour. |
Tactic: Sort your pending decisions into reversible and irreversible. Move fast on the first kind. On the second, ask what you lose by waiting another month, and if the answer is little, wait.
Principle 6
Give up the man to keep the kingdom
She loved Dudley. After Amy Robsart's death she could not marry him without wrecking her reign, and for a year she risked it anyway: "Momentarily she had sacrificed her good name and popularity." Then she cut his peerage patent in two and pulled back. If she married, "it would be as a Queen and not as Elizabeth."
She kept Dudley as a friend and a servant, and in time he commanded her camp at Tilbury.
Tactic: When a personal attachment threatens the institution you lead, separate the role from the person. Keep the relationship in a form the institution can bear, and give up the form it cannot.
Principle 7
Spend nothing you cannot repay, and count what thrift costs
"A sense of economy was inbred as well as inborn." She cut ordinary spending to about £135,000 a year to pay off her sister's debts and kept the books healthy through rebellion and war, so that ministers came to "fear to mention 'charges'." Burghley stated the rule: "To spend in time convenient is wisdom; to continue charges without needful cause bringeth repentance." She knew that "no prince's revenues be so great... that they are able to satisfy the insatiable cupidity of men," and rarely tried. While Philip went bankrupt three times, she "could always borrow if she wished."
The price fell on others. After the Armada the fleet was paid off in "reckless haste," and disease killed thousands of sailors.
Tactic: Treat solvency as strategy: the party that can still borrow outlasts the one that cannot. But when the emergency ends, pay the people who saw you through it before you start saving again.
Principle 8
Rule through the people's love, and perform for it
"When it came to choosing between counsel and popularity, she invariably opted for the latter." She told Feria the people had placed her on the throne; she told the Commons in 1601 that "this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves." She knew the condition: "we princes are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world."
So she performed: the coronation, progresses whose accounts "were printed as pamphlets," Tilbury, and speeches to Parliament "prepared ... with great care and cunning, though she made them seem spontaneous." She told a nervous Norwich schoolmaster "Be not afraid!" and afterwards "purchased a loyal heart at the cost of a small lie": "It is the best that ever I heard."
The one time she forgot the audience, with Stubbs, the crowd fell silent. And the North, which never saw a progress, "was left to its own loyalties and the romantic appeal of a rival, captive Queen."
Tactic: Decide which constituency your power ultimately rests on, and show up for it in person, repeatedly, with small specific gestures. Before you punish a critic, ask how the punishment will look to them.
Principle 9
Know who carries the blame, and what it costs them
Elizabeth was expert "to the point of genius" in "secret and underhand ways." In 1560 Admiral Winter destroyed French ships in the Forth while claiming he had no orders. Drake could be disowned. And when Mary, Queen of Scots, had to die, she signed the warrant, sought a quiet murder that would keep her own hands clean, and then punished Davison for sending it.
It worked: the league with Scotland held, and the Catholic cause "lost its peculiar menace." It was also the ugliest thing she did.
Tactic: Be clear about who will carry the consequences of a decision before you make it. If someone else must take the blame for your choice, decide in advance how you will protect them afterwards; the people watching will judge you by it.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Say nothing that can hang you. "Nothing is to be gotten from her but by great policy."
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Write until the tide turns. Ordered to the Tower, she wrote so long that the boats missed the tide. She gained a night and lost nothing.
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Choose one honest counsellor and keep him forty years. "Without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel that you think best."
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Marry no one, and name no heir. Both choices were irrevocable, so she made neither.
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Give up the man to keep the kingdom. "It would be as a Queen and not as Elizabeth."
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When in doubt, wait. "Time hath brought me hither."
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Stoop to conquer. She gave up a third of the subsidy in 1566 and the monopolies in 1601, and was thanked for both.
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Spend nothing you cannot repay. Philip went bankrupt three times. She never did.
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Speak to soldiers as their king, then pay them. She promised "in the word of a prince," and the fleet still died of disease.
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Count the cost of anger before you strike. Stubbs lost his hand for a loyal pamphlet, and the crowd fell silent.
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Don't let a favourite outgrow his place. She admitted she had "made too much of" Essex.
