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SIMON ADAMS Favourites and Factions at the Elizabethan Court SIMON ADAMS Favourites and Factions at the Elizabethan Court in RONALD G. ASCH AND ADOLF M. BIRKE (eds.), Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450-1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) pp. 265–287 ISBN: 978 0 19 920502 7 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 10 Favourites and Factions at the Elizabethan Court SIMON ADAMS As the household of a virgin queen regnant, the court of Elizabeth I was all but unique for the sixteenth century. The limited exceptions of her sister's essentially female privy chamber and the court of Mary Stuart in Scotland between 1561 and 1565 prove, as it were, the rule. In institutional terms, Elizabeth's court was simply a restricted version of its predecessors. The privy chamber, central to the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, was reduced to a feminine inner sanctum similar to that of Mary Tudor. 1 As ifin compensation, however, the reign produced a controversial novelty: the male favourite, whose leading characteristic was his physical and personal attraction for the queen. Unlike the 'favourites' of Henry VIII (or, for that matter, those of Francis I), these men were neither a large nor a transient series of companions. Rather, they were individuals who both occupied the central positions at the court, and enjoyed an apparently unequalled degree of intimacy with and indulgence by the queen. By the end of Elizabeth's reign there was general agreement that there had been four favourites of this rank: Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Sir Walter Raleigh. But 1603 did not bring the era of favourites to an end. The homosexual affections ofJames I led to the rise of two men, Robert Kerr, earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, whose influence and position were as great if not greater than 1 On the structure of the court, see S. Adams, 'Eliza Enthroned? The Court and its Politics', in C. Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1985), pp. 55-77, and P. Wright, 'A Change of Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558- 1603', in D. Starkey (ed.), The English Court from the Wars of the RDses to the Civil War (London, 1987), pp. 147-72. SIMON ADAMS those of their Elizabethan predecessors. 2 By the date of the assassination of Buckingham ( 1628) there had been nearly sixty years of favourites; by then also their role had become both the subject of major controversy and a political issue in its own right.3 This debate has in turn had a major influence on all later comment on the court of Elizabeth I. In a perceptive survey of the present state of Tudor studies, Ralph Houlbrooke has drawn attention to a recent revisionist emphasis on 'harmony' in Elizabethan politics. He refers in particular to the work of Sir Geoffrey Elton and NormanJones on parliament, which has disputed the presence of 'a powerful puritan opposition', and to an earlier essay of mine on the court, which 'denies the existence of destabilising factional rivalries at any time before the 1590s'. The latter, he feels, might have gone 'too far in playing down the volatility of court politics'. The comment is a fair one, for the classic image of the Elizabethan court, as established in such works as Sir John Neale's essay 'The Elizabethan Political Scene' is one of intense rivalry and factionalism.4 Indeed, it has been con- sidered one of Elizabeth's strengths that she was able in the main to 'manage' this factionalism to her own advantage. What has not been sufficiently appreciated, however, is the way in which this image of the court was a product of the contemporary debate on favourites. Even less understood is the way in which the Stuart context of the later stages of the debate came to influence the portrayal of Elizabeth's reign.5 The result has been a confused tapestry in which myth and reality have been deeply interwoven. About one point there is no real controversy. During the 1590s the court was nearly torn apart by a factional struggle of 2 N. Cuddy, 'The Revival of the Entourage: The Bedchamber ofJames I, 1603- 1625', in Starkey (ed.), The English Court, pp. 173-225. R. Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers. First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628 (London, 1g81), pp. 17, 21-2, makes the sexual connection explicit. 3 R. P. Shepheard, 'Royal Favorites in the Political Discourse ofTudor and Stuart England' (Ph.D. thesis; Claremount, 1985), surveys the literature but draws different conclusions to those advanced here. 4 R. Houlbrooke, 'Politics and Religion in Tudor England', The Historian 17 ( 1987- 8), 9-12, pp. 11r-11. See J.E. Neale, 'The Elizabethan Political Scene', in Essays in Eli(.abethan History (London, 1958), pp. 59-84. 5 See, however, Haigh's comments in the introduction to The Juign of Eli(.abeth I, 1- 25, pp. 6--11. Favourites at the Elizabethan Court i67 major proportions that culminated in an attempted coup d'etat. The antagonism between the earl of Essex and Sir Robert Cecil spread into the country at large, and left scars on the English body politic for at least a generation. Less clear, however, is the relationship between the politics of this decade and the three that preceded it. Was the difference one of degree or of kind? If the former, was there a 'controlled' factionalism in the earlier period that degenerated in the latter? If the latter, did the Essex-Cecil rivalry initiate a new political world quite unlike the earlier years? Any study of the Elizabethan court prior to the 1590s must focus on the earl ofLeicester, who, as the leading favourite, was at its centre. Moreover, it was Leicester rather than Essex who inspired the controversy over the favourite. Essentially there were two extreme arguments. Was Leicester an all-powerful, hegemonic, or monopolistic force or was he but one of a number of personalities or factions competing in a more fluid environment? The manner in which these questions were phrased is best revealed if the debate is set in its immediate context, and the ways in which the issues it raised were exploited for later political and polemical ends are examined. Although the debate was primarily concerned with the structure of power at the Elizabethan court, its implications were much wider. At its heart lay the impact of the Reformation on the English political system. I The central document in the controversy is the most notorious of Elizabethan political libels: The Copy of a letter written by a Master ofArts of Cambridge of 1584, better known as 'Leicester's Commonwealth'.6 It was not, however, sui generis. Rather it formed part of a particular strand of Elizabethan catholic polemic that included two other important tracts: A Treatise of Treasons against Q. Elizabeth of 1572, and A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles presupposed to be intended against 6 The excellent recent ed. by D. C. Peck, Leicester's Commonwealth: The Copy of a Letter written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents (Athens, Ohio, 1985), supersedes all earlier ones. 268 SIMON ADAMS England of 1592.7 Like 'Leicester's Commonwealth' these were celebrated enough to receive familiar titles, 'The Papists Commonwealth' and 'Burghley's Commonwealth'. In all three cases the putative author or authors are still disputed. 8 These tracts are distinguished from the main body of Elizabethan catholic literature by their concern with the structure of politics. They share an initial premiss common to many other sixteenth-century catholic interpretations of the Reformation: the argument that heresy had been introduced by new men, whose intentions were political revolution. These men were 'Machiavellian' in the sense made explicit in A Treatise of Treasons: 'it is that I call a Machiavellian state and regiment: where religion is put behind in second and last place, where civil policie, I meane, is preferred before it.' Thus 'to set up a lawless faction of Machiavellian Libertines ... a new religion was pretended' .9 The argument was itself a variant on the old theme of evil councillors. Its significance lies in the identification of the supporters of the Reformation as new men, and the attribution of Machiavellian motives to them. In this way the cause of the catholic Church was linked to that of the 'ancient nobility', an association that had first been made in the 1530s. The attacks on Thomas Cromwell by the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and then by Cardinal Pole in 1539 had made explicit both the threat to the ancient nobility and the Machiavellianism of the new men. 10 The charge was revived during the rebellion of the northern earls in 1569. In the Darlington proclamation 7 A. W. Pollard and G. R.
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