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‘Nature,
that fram’d us of four elements
Doth
teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our
souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The
wondrous architecture of the world,
And
measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still
climbing after knowledge infinite
And
always moving as the restless spheres,
Will
us to wear ourselves, and never rest...’
Marlowe,
The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great
Act
II, SceneVII, lines 18-29
‘In pride, in reas’ning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.’
Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle I, lines 123-126
History is alive in the Individual: the Individual comes to life in History.
The Individual is the unique, the differentiated, the precise leaf, or the single
flower. Commitment, character, courage, love, desire, and delight are aspects
of the Individual. What we are part of but cannot see, what must always lie in
the past, irretrievable and unrepeatable, is our History. In the flow of time
there are moments when Individuality is enhanced. Those moments throw up the
remarkable, the self-contained personality, defined as if by a bounding line.
Often they are moments when the flow of time seems to enter a narrow gorge,
before opening out to flood the plain. Ideas, which have developed in the
depths, and remained submerged, appear suddenly above the surface. They are the
moments of genesis.
England in the 1590’s and early 1600’s is just such a moment. Its atmosphere is
the essence of what we know as the Elizabethan. Essex, Marlowe, Raleigh, Donne
are unique personalities thrown into dramatic relief by the actions and
thoughts of that time. Marlowe and Essex die within the Elizabethan Age, but
Raleigh and Donne live on beyond it to a time when the ideas alive in
Elizabethan England, held in solution in the test tube, suddenly crystallise.
The intellectual ambitions and aspirations of Elizabethan England, transformed,
become the driving forces of the English Revolution.
Out
of the cauldron emerged the new. Parliamentary democracy; secular law and
justice; global trade and commerce; imperialist exploration and acquisition;
naval and military power; individual human rights, and the scientific project.
The former world was overturned. That world of divine kingship; arbitrary
justice; limited horizons; constrained ambitions; the temporal power of
religion; and of knowledge derived from tradition rather than experience.
Essex, Marlowe, Raleigh and Donne, express the
turmoil. Drama in life is paralleled by drama in Elizabethan theatre. The
brilliant literature of the age feeds on and in turn feeds intellectual debate
and popular opinion. Opposing ideas clash. Thoughts conflict within the
same mind. There is a readiness to adopt and discard. In the turmoil there is
often inconsistency. Protagonists say one thing and do another. Equally the
consequences of their actions are often not what they appear to desire or
anticipate.
Essex becomes a symbol of a more glorious England,
full of nationalistic pride, that is past and gone, his death an example of
injustice and arbitrary manipulation of the law. His Protestant allegiance and
anti-Spanish stance is remembered. His failings are forgotten. His execution
causes resentment against Crown and Government, and yet he himself was neither
a democrat nor anti-royalist.
Donne’s early works are subversive, yet he dies an
orthodox servant of the State religion and the King. His espousal of the
Protestant faith is an indication of the social and intellectual fate of
English Catholicism. His Songs and Sonnets with their world of internalised
love poetry, their adaptation of religious concepts of sacredness to private
feeling and eroticism, have no visible influence on the world of revolution, but
become part of the literary underground to re-surface in the sensibilities of
the Romantics. His sermons on the other hand support and confirm Puritan
instincts and social attitudes, and repudiate the early poetry in a transfer of
human to religious love.
Raleigh takes care to explain and confirm both his
loyalty to the Crown and his Protestant orthodoxy. He has been a Courtier,
benefited from monopolistic favouritism, incurred popular disapproval for his
perceived rivalry with Essex, and might seem the very image of a Royalist. Yet
his freethinking intellectualism, which encouraged friendships with men of
wide-ranging views, has also resulted in accusations of atheism, and associated
him with radical thought. His voyages of exploration and sponsoring of colonial
ventures, his experiments and his writings in the Tower, broaden English
horizons, and stimulate scientific effort. With Bacon he can be seen as one of
the great initiators of the scientific project in England. His speeches in
Parliament, and aspects of his writings, make him a respected intellectual
source to Puritan political activists including Cromwell. His anti-Spanish
nationalism has popular support. His achievements in war, on land and sea,
represent the glorious England of the Elizabethan zenith. The injustice of his
trial and execution rankle. The courage he showed can be held up as an example.
His energy, multifarious abilities, and intellectual power are recognised and
his loss regretted. He shines like a light on the gloomy, repressive England of
the Stuarts.
Marlowe seems the most clear-cut. His radical thinking
is highly subversive, and where he seems orthodox there is an ironic stance and
an ambiguous dramatic voice. He is a part of that shadowy underworld of
espionage and mercenary allegiances that is reflected later in the masterless
men of Revolutionary London. His attitudes to sexuality, religion, social
structure, authority, and traditional wisdom are ambivalent and challenging. In
Faustus he creates a symbol of the aspiring individual, ambitious of power
through new knowledge. He plays to religious fears and exhibits the old
learning in his drama, but his connections with the scientific and
free-thinking set around Raleigh, Essex and Bacon suggest that his personal
views are more radically in favour of the scientific project. His key themes
are ambition, and the attainment of power, in a poetry full of the verbal
ecstasies of sensual and aesthetic worldly glory, and in that sense he
represents the deep radical and libertarian undercurrent in English thought
which appears similarly in Shelley.
The four individuals display the consolidation of
Protestantism, even though there is also anticipation of the scientific,
rational, desacralised future. There is the unquestioningly Protestant Essex,
and Donne’s apostasy from Catholicism to a secure position in the Anglican
Church. There is also Raleigh the religious freethinker who nevertheless in his
History of the World demonstrates his underlying orthodoxy. Marlowe alone
verges on atheism yet the ending of his drama of Faustus is still a wholly
religious conclusion appropriate to the age.
Religion was a critical compound, a catalyst, in the
mixture inside the test-tube, strangely present there, as it was in the
Florentine Renaissance, alongside classical reference, and secular originality.
Catholicism represented the old order; hereditary power; royalty, subjection to
foreign authority. It faced developing Puritanism, with its concepts of
unmediated spiritual communication; the equality of believers; the power and
authority of the people; independence and creative newness. In the midst was
the official Protestant Church.
Elizabeth clearly asserted the Protestant religion
maintaining freedom from Rome while at the same time allowing some freedom of
worship. Religious extremism was curbed when necessary. She transferred to
herself the attributes of the Virgin Goddess in courtly masque. A degree of
tolerance was shown towards discreet Catholic allegiance. It has been said that
she maintained the religious balance. It is more accurate to say that she
merely created an authorised centre-ground. The suppression of extremism
effectively marginalised and defused the potency of the Catholic faith, but left
the Puritan radicals to find new strength under her unimpressive successors.
Ironically while upholding hereditary kingship, she was a woman, who died
childless, and of a dynasty which needed all Shakespeare’s skill to argue its
legitimacy. And by suppressing and defusing the mythical elements of
Catholicism she also desacralised the Crown.
All Religion was challenged by sceptical, rational,
pragmatic thought. That thought derived from the Renaissance ferment, from
exploration and experiment, from the experience of living. In Marlowe this
exhibits itself as something close to atheism, and as a Machiavellian realism
about the motives behind power politics. Elizabeth herself and her ministers
encouraged the use of Reason, even though, in a further irony, sceptical
questioning and secular debate was instrumental in fomenting the English
Revolution. In Raleigh, Marlowe, the young John Donne, and among Essex’s set,
it is evident as a wide-ranging intellectual open-mindedness and curiosity.
This ferment was profoundly disturbing. Issues of religion, social order and
moral values deeply affected Donne and also Shakespeare. Their Catholic
background made them perhaps more sensitive to the challenge to human values
that the new thinking represented.
The rituals and the values of the ancient world were
still embedded in Elizabethan society, despite the long historical antagonism
of the Christian Church. Those values incorporated ideas of the sacred; of the
role of love and sexuality; of the relationship of Man to Nature, embodied as
Woman, and worshipped as the Great Goddess. Catholicism, with the myth of the
sacrificed God and the Virgin enshrined within it, was as close to religious
concepts not derived from Judaism or original with Christianity, as it was to
the Protestant religion of Sin and the Fall, of Redemption and Divine Mercy.
However the ancient values, were repressed within all contemporary religion and
often regarded as heretical, and so could only be explored internally, within
the private life and mind. This process is visible in Donne’s early poetry, and
in Shakespeare’s later plays. Ideas are retrieved from the arcane literatures
of Neoplatonism, and the Mystical tradition. Religious terminology is
transferred to a secular context. The Individual becomes a world, a private and
personal world, which can also be a refuge, a temple, where the ancient sacred
marriage and the humane values can continue to be celebrated.
The English Revolution can be presented legitimately
as a battle between Catholicism and Puritanism, Crown and Parliament,
positioned as old order and new order, static and progressive. The situation
was more subtle than that. The Goddess worshipped across the ancient world, as
far back as Paleolithic times, still appeared, though in a weakened and
diminished form, in the person of the Virgin. The Church was inimical to the
Goddess and to unredeemed Nature from its inception, nevertheless the deep
persistence of Goddess worship can be seen by the strength of the cult of the
Virgin in Medieval times. So Catholicism, though it represented stasis,
superstition, mediated authority, and the powerlessness of the individual
trapped in the cycles of eternal ritual, was also a refuge for some of the
ancient human values and attitudes. It revealed a source of respect for Woman
as expressed in the female personalities of the Old and New Testaments and gave
continuing emphasis to female values of love, pity and compassion. Shakespeare
expresses these human values in Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale, where the
ancient temple of the Goddess appears at the crucial final act of the drama, in
the context of reunion, resurrection and redemption, of love and compassion. A
Catholic background and classical knowledge could still make visible the benign
face of the Goddess.
Equally Puritanism by preaching unmediated equality,
the power and independence of the people, and a future destiny for Mankind, was
a religion of social change. It did value friendship highly. It did celebrate Woman,
love and sexuality within the bounds of marriage. But equally there was a
denigration of Woman as Eve the perpetrator of the Fall, a marginalisation of
independent female values within society, and the ruling presence of the male
and militant Old Testament Jehovah. It damaged the view of external nature as
potent and sacred. It placed the power of the female within closed boundaries.
It easily lead to a claustrophobic sin and death oriented darkness of
theological thought, as reactionary, limited and stultifying as
institutionalised Catholicism. Donne’s later life and sermons are only too
often a human but sad expression of this.
Parliament, Crown, and Church are a set of mask-like
surfaces under which the changes moved. Power was transferred to the wider
social structure. Religion began to separate from the Secular State. The
personal and private separated from the public and social. Science opposed
tradition and superstition. Technology and exploration challenged the known and
the accepted. Nature was increasingly divorced from Civilisation as urban
culture developed. Imperialism and Global commerce threatened to again rework
historical identities. Rights and the secular law superseded divine authority.
Self-determination even if severely restricted by class began to replace
inherited order. Economic, and technological, forces became the dominant
drivers of social restructuring with military power as their servant. The
values underlying these changes were institutionalised. The discussion of
alternative values went underground, into art, into philosophy, into radical
opinion and minority movements, into personal conscience, into private thought.
There was the beginning of that immense polarisation
between the external world and the internal world that we have inherited. The
external world has its ambitious projects of exploration, explanation and
exploitation. It is the world of commerce and science. It is the place where
power resides. All things in it are resources, means to a defined end, which
may subsequently appear obsolete or meaningless. The internal world of values,
pleasures, appreciation, awareness, empathy, and compassion, becomes the place
where love resides. All things in that world are individual and unique, sacred and
unrepeatable, ends in themselves, and rich with meaning, but powerless. The
individual lives at their intersection. The more deeply and fully the
individual tries to live the more agonising become the conflicts. It becomes in
extremis the shirt of Nessus that cannot be removed and cannot be endured.
The Elizabethan Age is the moment in England when
these massive changes begin to be felt. It is an earthquake zone, where
Poseidon roars underground, and the surface shakes. All the elements are there,
but confused and uncertain. It is a difficult and dangerous time to live. It
is, though, radically original. That can be seen by contrasting the great
Elizabethan moment, the fifteen years from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
1588 to Elizabeth’s death in 1603, with the next thirty years, which are a
working through of the Elizabethan legacy. In the first period England achieves
a vigorous national identity, creates a brilliant literature and drama, and
tests the possibility of a colonial presence. In the second period there is an
increasingly restrictive stillness, an introspective gloominess, a broad
failure of policy, and repeated Court scandal. Out of that stillness the Civil
war erupts, almost as a war of liberation. The Elizabethan Age contrasted with
this second pre-Revolutionary period had been outward looking, optimistic and
vibrantly alive.
Essex, Marlowe, Raleigh and Donne were precursors.
They lived the possibilities. They shared an ambition to achieve and an ability
to reach out to experience. They had the desire and the nerve to assault the
heavens, in pride and aspiration.
Pride is a high opinion of one’s own abilities, arrogance in attitude or conduct,
awareness of exalted position, a sense of what is appropriate to that position.
To aspire is to desire seriously, to climb towards, to yearn, to covet. As
Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex went to the block shortly after sunrise
on a February morning in 1601, Mars, the soldier’s planet, guardian of his
life’s energies, of his passions, was conjunct the Sun in the watery sign of
Pisces. Icarus had fallen into the sun, into the sea, his waxen wings melted
and destroyed. That same Mars was burning brightly in Leo at his birth. Leo the
sign of a man fixed in his opinions, intolerant, power-hungry, but also
generous, enthusiastic, with a sense of the dramatic, the theatrical. In an age
of theatre his life was lived on stage. Dying at thirty-three he was young
enough to be an Icarus, not falling unnoticed but mourned, in spite of the aged
Queen, by his public. ‘The difficulty my good lord is to conquer yourself’.
Lord Keeper Egerton offers his placatory advice. Icarus in flight gives an
unequivocal reply. ‘What! Cannot Princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is
an earthly power or authority infinite? I can never subscribe to these
principles.’
Or is he Phaethon who rode the chariot of the sun and scorched the earth? Zeus
killed him with a thunderbolt so that he fell into the water, a royal prince
sacrificed in ritual to ensure the safe continuance of kingship. Both analogies
have power. ‘I was ever sorry that your lordship should fly with waxen wings,
doubting Icarus’ fortune’ says Francis Bacon. A subtle analogy. Icarus flies
with wings made for him by his father Daedalus not with his own wings. Icarus
flies too near the sun, and fails, not because of pride, but because of
inability to follow instructions, to control his flight. Yet there is sympathy
with Icarus, he is innocent. The situation is not of his making, but is forced
on him. In the end his journey is beyond his abilities, and he falls foul of
circumstance. Francis Bacon, once faithful supporter, becomes an agent of
prosecution, seeing which way the wind blows, choosing a new course to steer,
aligning himself with power. Clever but not loyal. Wise but not generous. He
too would eventually discover what it was like to fall into the depths.
Pride and aspiration. The Tower is where he dies, where Raleigh dies.
Bran’s castle, the White Hill, the place of the magical severed head. ‘Take my
head,’ Bran said, ‘and carry it to the White Hill in London’ in an early
version of the Grail Legend which is embedded in the Mabinogion. Both are
sacrificed to ensure the continuance of kingship, which is the obverse of the
real or assumed threat to that kingship. Elizabeth and James are terrified of
the challenge to their power, a power, arbitrary, hereditary: terrified of the
challenge to order. Order is divine order in their minds. It is artificial
order in the mind of a Marlowe, the order held by a Tamburlaine, the Scythian
shepherd risen to be God’s scourge, teetering always on the brink of chaos. No
wonder Elizabeth was fearful. The pent-up discontent that leads to the Civil
War is already a pressure building under the surface of her society.
Shakespeare, sharing in that fear, political conformist, holds back that
pressure only by verbal magic in his imaginary kingdoms.
Phaethon was a bad driver. His sun-chariot first flew
too high so that the earth was chilled, then too low till the world was in
flames. Ovid says that he had asked for the reins of his Father Helios’s
chariot for one day, to be allowed, for one day, to control and drive the
wing-footed horses. ‘It is unsuited to your strength or to your years. You are
mortal, and aim at something not granted even to the gods. A firm guiding hand
is necessary.’ Phaethon the rebel, attempting what is beyond his powers.
Inexperience, arrogance, foolishness, inability. That is Elizabeth’s view. The
middle way is safest. Shakespeare’s view. ‘He had not the skill to handle what
had been entrusted to him’ says Ovid ‘He was filled with indecision,
neither able to let go of the reins, nor strong enough to keep hold of them.’
Phaethon was flung headlong and fell through the air, leaving a meteor trail
behind. Ovid describes the subsequent mourning. And England mourned its
Phaethon. ‘Sweet England’s pride is gone’. Elizabeth also mourned.
Icarus was only a sweet lad who died of the mistake
made by his father Daedalus in creating a course of action which set Icarus up
for disaster, which demanded an impossible adherence to his own flight. ‘Follow
me closely, do not set your own course.’ As they flew the shepherds and the
ploughmen gazing upwards mistook them for gods. But when Daedalus looked back,
there was no Icarus, only a scattering of feathers on the surface of the sea.
Phaethon wished to show his sisters what he could be
and do. Penelope Devereux, one of Essex’s sisters, was Sidney’s Stella, whose
hundred and eight sonnets of Astrophil the star-lover, to Stella, the star,
signified the hundred and eight suitors of Penelope in the Odyssey. Phaethon
was too weak to control the fierce white horses. He veered to extremes, before,
like Milton’s Mulciber, ‘he fell from heaven...sheer oe’r the crystal
battlements...dropt from the Zenith like a falling star’. Mulciber, the Son of
Morning, full of that pride which challenged the deity. Ovid says that
Phaethon’s sisters mourned for him so much they were transformed to trees whose
branches shed drops of blood which hardened into amber.
Mars is moving with the Sun, conjunct it on the eighth
of February when his foolish rising comes to nothing, the looked-for popular
support non-existent in the empty streets near the Strand, and still conjunct
it on the twenty-fifth when he goes to his death. Mars rises with the sun on
his dark day, the executioner needing three blows to achieve the ritual murder,
the sacrifice.
Aspiration is also a breathing-in. His birth was in
the early November of 1567, and his astrological chart therefore shows the sun
in Scorpio. Astrology is theatre, just as the Elizabethan period was theatre.
The Elizabethan attitude to it was, like ours, highly ambivalent, suspecting
that it had no substance but intrigued by its symbolism. Astrology is merely
chance pattern but even a random play of images can illuminate, and we can use
it in that way for its ability to highlight aspects of personality. What fits
is useful. What does not fit is discarded. It is in no way a predictive
mechanism. Not science but art.
The Elizabethans themselves frequently use the analogy
of theatre for their age. It was how it seemed to them, and how it seems to us.
Dramatic, often violent, prone to passions, to extremes of anger, envy,
jealousy, and pride. Tragic. Gruesomely comic. Sweetly pastoral. Filled with
the silvery romance of the Renaissance, translated through France from Italy,
to the green countryside of England. There are sharp defining lines. Though we
cannot enter into these people, though they remain opaque, defined more by what
they fail to say, than the words they do say and write, they are brilliantly
coloured. Hilliard and Oliver limn them in jewelled ovals. They themselves drip
jewellery and exhibit costume.
Essex is quintessential aspiration. The Sun and
Mercury combust together at his birth. Jupiter is conjunct both. Expansive,
ambitious, stubborn, conceited, fortunate enough to win a Queen’s favour. A
volatile mind. Pluto the ruler of Scorpio is unaspected, a loose cannon of
fate. His destruction will come from within, from his own unconscious urges and
impulses. Uranus, Neptune and Saturn sit in a tense t-square. There is no need
to believe in astrology as any more than theatre, in order to see the
depressions, moodiness, strain and tension of Saturn square to Uranus, the
self-will, paranoia, involvement with large impractical projects of Neptune
square Saturn, or the emotional intensity of Uranus opposing Neptune. These
three planets activate the signs of Virgo, the Queen, Sagittarius the archer
firing at the stars, and Pisces where the sun will lie on the morning of his
death.
Theatre. ‘What is our life? a play of passion’ says
Raleigh, ‘our mirth the music of division, our mothers’ wombs the tiring houses
be, where we are dressed for this short comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp
spectator is, that sits and marks still who doth act amiss. Our graves that
hide us from the searching sun, are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we playing to our latest rest, only we die in earnest, that’s no
jest’.
Theatre. One of the keys by which we learn to
understand the Elizabethan court and city. A drama played with intensity for
effect. Under it the terrible and terrific tensions of religion, the desire for
money and wealth, the transience of existence, the vagaries of fortune, the
explosion of geographic discovery, the spread of knowledge, the recognition
through the Renaissance and its rediscovery of Rome, of Man, the measure of all
things. The theatre is lifted to a new level by Marlowe, at the same time
as the greater Elizabethan theatre is embroiled in its own drama.
Essex arrives at court in 1584, aged sixteen.
Elizabeth is fifty-one. Raleigh favourite for two years by now is
thirty-two. For neither man is Elizabeth a young goddess newly arrived at
power. She has been queen since 1559, for twenty-five years. We are easily
deceived by imagery and symbolism, and brought to earth by calendar dates and
realities. Was it all flattery then, flattery aimed at power? Flattery of an
older woman to gain a material end?
‘No cause but a great action of your own may draw me
out of your sight’ Essex writes to her later, ‘ for the two windows of
your...chamber shall be the poles of my sphere’. Raleigh writes his Last Book
of the Ocean to Scinthia, the moon-goddess, the Faerie Queen, ‘She is gone, She
is lost, she is found, she is ever fair! ‘A Queen she was to me’, ‘Such
force her angellike appearance had, to master distance, time, or cruelty, such
art to grieve, and after to make glad, such fear in love, such love in
majesty’. Mere words, or was there a reality of emotion and affection, even a
self-delusion, a fanciful transposition of desire and sexual energy? What, in
these men, translated and transmuted itself into their attitude to the woman,
made her the Virgin Queen, the incarnation of Diana the huntress? True, it was
an age of obsequious flattery, those endless dedications, Shakespeare’s among
them, which make us squirm as the greater bows to the lesser, an inordinate
respect for institutionalised authority and power, for the links in the chain,
for level and order. No sign of that in Marlowe though. No obsequiousness
there.
The young Essex stays at Court a while, and then goes
on the Low Countries expedition of 1585, where Philip Sidney dies, after being
wounded at Zutphen, and England loses its courtier-poet. He leaves his
sword ‘to beloved and much honoured Lord, the Earl of Essex’. He also
leaves his mantle of the romantic knight, the perfect gentleman, the
Petrarchean poet (his equivalent of Petrarch’s beloved Laura is Penelope,
Essex’s sister) which Essex cannot fill, and a young wife Frances Walsingham
whom Essex later marries. He steadily becomes Elizabeth’s favourite, gradually
displacing Raleigh, though she rarely trusts him when he is out of sight, and
starves him of resources, playing a cat and mouse game, jealous of her power.
Essex builds a military and political career, bringing
round him a group of able men, among them Francis and Anthony Bacon (Burleigh’s
nephews, sons of Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth’s first Lord Keeper of the Great
Seal), and Henry Wotton. He forges private connections in Europe. Anthony
Bacon’s nest of secret agents will draw in Christopher Marlowe to his service.
Sir Henry Wotton is a friend of John Donne. Essex is seen as material for greatness.
Or as a route to power. He finds difficulty in handling the Queen
diplomatically. Power is too attractive to him. He is not like Raleigh a
well-born but untitled man, risen to greatness through rare talents and
abilities. He is aristocracy, inherited title. His talents are an adjunct to
his greatness.
Essex is ‘a great resenter’. Or is it merely the
transparency of his emotions, which he hides with more difficulty than other
men? ‘He can conceal nothing, he carries his love and hatred on his forehead’.
Never believing that he has what he deserves, is he that Achilles, vain,
spoilt, argumentative, a complainer, petulant, the Achilles that Shakespeare
paints in Troilus and Cressida ‘full of his airy fame’ and ‘dainty of his
worth’? Or is he that Achilles, brave, generous in friendship, doomed to a
short life, cheated by Agamemnon the King, ‘eating his heart out by his
fast ships, nursing his anger’?
Achilles like Essex is defined and limited by that anger, the root of the
Iliad. Both men have that same opaqueness, that definition by their actions, by
their destinies. Either we invent motivations for them that are overly complex,
or we underestimate the intricacy of their lives. We are either too simplistic
or too subtle. They remain in the mind as semi-mythological icons. Both are the
symbols of rebellion, passive in Achilles case, active eventually in that of
Essex. Both are frustrated, ambitious of glory, free energies that need
direction. Both are silent even when they seem to speak, since what they say is
only what we expect them to say. Both have a doom-laden fate hovering over
them, which they run to meet sword in hand. Both hate the idea of a long,
inglorious life.
One imagines Essex, like Achilles, a tall figure
striding helplessly through the Underworld; one who would rather be a live dog
than a dead lion. Like Achilles, Essex sulks, but also like Achilles his blind
courage is indisputable. Though military genius is sadly nowhere in evidence
Essex is never cowardly in physical combat. He is the last great aristocrat
fighting for the crown, at the same time fighting for himself and his country.
He is part of an Old World of amateurs, gifted amateurs, with immense charisma,
brilliant style, open-handed, attractive, loyal. No one ever accuses Essex of
disloyalty until the final period, and then it is a disloyalty, in his eyes, to
a hollow crown.
Like Raleigh he finds himself, in the end, opposed by the
administrators, the lawyers, the bureaucrats, the servants, the ones who have
arrived by professionalism, by intellect, by skill, by craft. Like Achilles one
doubts his competence as a general, it is all amateurishness, but one has
sympathy with him. There is always a suspicion that the unlovable Elizabeth, as
the unlovable Agammenon (both adepts at sacrifice to gain favourable winds) set
up situations and then disown them; cripple their heroes and then accuse them;
show anger instead of placating. The heroes' complaints are tedious. They
whine. But perhaps there is substance behind their complaints, some injustice.
Spoilt favourites they are nevertheless full of promise. Yet with a weakness, a
vulnerability in themselves which allows their ultimate destruction.
So Achilles dies again and again, shining out. The
tall figure sword in hand, who gathers about him an undiminishable brightness,
not justified perhaps by his actions, destroyed at last by the coward who had
stolen Helen, but unassailable in his own wrong-headed magnificence, clothed in
his own exaggerated idea of fame, of heroism, of self, of passion. ‘And so the
famous Achilles was defeated’ says Ovid, ‘If he had to die by a woman’s hand,
he would rather have fallen beneath the axe of an Amazon Queen’.
Anthony Bacon created for Essex a secret service to
rival that of Burleigh, Anthony’s uncle, who in turn had inherited that built
by Sir Francis Walsingham, father of Essex’s wife. Anthony had lived
abroad. He had been befriended by Henry of Navarre, who became Henry IV of
France, the ‘vert galant’. He had been arrested for sodomy at Montauban, but
escaped death through Henry’s intervention. He had known Montaigne whose essays
inspired his brother Francis to create the form in English. Suffering from
chronic gout he had returned to England, after twelve years, in 1592. Living in
his half-brother Edward’s house (leased from the Queen until 1595), Twickenham
Lodge, he worked for Essex, gathering information, employing the dubious agents
of Elizabethan London to investigate Catholics, atheists, plotters, enemies of
the Essex faction and the Crown.
Twickenham Lodge was pleasantly sited on the Thames
opposite Richmond Palace. There was a garden, embellished by Francis, and a
great park. Later Essex had it in his gift and granted it to Francis in 1594 as
a consolation prize for failing to advance him with the Queen. He took it back
in 1601 when Bacon switched allegiance. Twickenham Park is the ‘Ferie Meade’
eighty-seven acres of park and meadow, orchard and wood, alongside the river.
At Twickenham Francis Bacon entertains a group of young men from the lawcourts
who make verses. A poem of John Donne’s survives alongside ones by Bacon and
Henry Wotton that are part of a poetic debate on the merits of life in the
country, City, and Court. Later Donne’s poem Twickenham Garden is set among the
spring breezes there, as he struggles with ‘the spider, love’ and the sighs and
tears at York House.
Anthony’s web extends out to the twilight world of
Frizer, Poley and Skeres, the men who are at Deptford with Kit Marlowe when he
dies, stabbed in the eye. Donne, in the light, Marlowe, in the shadows, touch
on the Essex circle. Anthony himself dies in May 1601 a few months after Essex,
at the age of forty-three.
The Moon has a dark side, which Essex comes to know,
as does Raleigh. Elizabeth is not an emotionally attractive figure. A true
daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn. Once having learnt how to grasp and hang on
to power she was cautious, indecisive when it served her purposes, mean, a
user-up of men and their talents, a woman who traded brilliantly on the power
of the female mythology. Sinthia is demanding and mentally cruel. She exhausts
her servants. She throws them away when they no longer serve her purpose. Like
Artemis, the huntress, she deserts them at the end, since Artemis cannot
‘corrupt her eyes with a mortal’s death throes’ as Euripides says.
It is the myth of Actaeon and Artemis that comes to
mind when one reads of the mad ride Essex made from Ireland in September 1599
after his disastrous campaign there (outsmarted by Tyrone), between Monday the
twenty-fourth and Friday the twenty-eighth. Crossing from Ireland with a few
companions, then riding non-stop through Wales, the Vale of Evesham, the
Cotswolds and Chilterns, he reached the Lambeth Ferry, commandeered a change of
horses, finally rode the ten miles or so to Nonesuch Palace where the Queen was
staying, through the muddied autumn lanes. Rushing in on her ‘she being not
ready, and he so full of dirt and mire that his very face was full of
it’. He was punished for that exposure of the Goddess, like Actaeon who
caught Diana bathing naked, breaking the taboo, and earning a sacrificial
death. Essex catches Elizabeth without her make-up, her artifice, sees the
naked power instead invested in the ugly old woman, ‘crooked as her carcass’ in
his own words.
When Tiresias saw her bathing Athene blinded him.
Actaeon is turned into a stag at bay by Diana, and is brought down by his own
hounds, an image Francis Bacon might have appreciated. ‘Falling to his knees,
as if in prayer’ Ovid says ‘he moved his head about in silence, stretching out
his arms in supplication.’ Essex before the Council. Essex at the block. As
Actaeon, so Pentheus stumbling across the Maenads’ mysteries, pulled down
by the Bacchae. ‘Now he was panic-stricken, now he was less violent; he cursed
himself and confessed his fault.’ ‘Help me, let the ghost of Actaeon move you
to pity me!’ Agave tore the head from his shoulders in blind response, calling
out ‘See this victory, my own achievement.’ ‘Quickly’ says Ovid ‘as a tree is
stripped by the autumn wind, after a deep frost, so those terrible hands tore
him apart’.
Sacrifice is a purification and a re-dedication.
Sacrifice expels the guilty one, and by the ritual of his death brings him back
to his society. What cannot be assimilated, used, digested, has to be expelled
and rejected. When the veil is removed, then there is no way back to innocence
or artifice. The court of law can also appear like a gang, a band of
accomplices designed to destroy. The guilty and the innocent come together and
the mantle of each falls over the other. ‘Her choler did outrun all reason’
said Roland Whyte. His fate was still Phaethon’s, that of a man who tried.
Michael Drayton in verses published in 1603 whose
subject is Edward the Second’s Queen, Isabella, and her lover Roger Mortimer,
First Earl of March, used poetry to make reference to the recently executed
Essex. He affirmed an attitude to Essex, prevalent at the time, that to aspire
and to attempt, to fulfil one’s ambition even if it meant death, was still a
kind of glory, a storming of the sunlit heavens. And he used a historical
analogy with the aspirations of the rebellious Mortimer to do so. He and
Isabella are studying a painting of the Greek myth that is Essex’s analogue.
‘Looking upon proud Phaethon wrapped in fire, the gentle Queen did much bewail
his fall; but Mortimer commended his desire to lose one poor life or to govern
all: What though (quoth he) he madly did aspire and his great mind made him
proud Fortune’s thrall? Yet in despite, when she her worst had done, he
perished in the chariot of the Sun.’
According to Ovid it was the Italian nymphs who buried
Phaethon’s body, inscribing on the rock above his grave: ‘Here Phaethon lies,
who the sun’s journey made - dared all, though he by weakness was betrayed.’
Why was he executed? There is something ridiculous about
his rebellion. Temporarily imprisoning Egerton and his deputation, Knollys,
Popham, Worcester, in Essex House. Wandering through the streets with his few
supporters, easily arrested. Was he a real threat to the Crown? Stating clearly
at his execution that he thanked God he had never been numbered amongst the
friends of Spain, or the Catholics or atheists. Was it necessary, any more than
Raleigh’s execution was necessary? Was it a sop to Spain to further potential
marriage negotiations?
The idea of order in the universe was strong in
Elizabethan thinking, the Medieval idea, challenged but not overturned by the
Renaissance or the new science. Shakespeare is full of it, that ideal order
animating earthly order. There is a corresponding nervousness at disorder. But
the Elizabethans were not appalled by newness. They lapped up new discoveries,
new worlds, new words, plants, drugs, new translations from the Latin and
Greek, new plays, new commerce. There was a tension between religious order,
with the associated beliefs in the Fall and Redemption; and humanism,
experiment, ‘essays’, the re-evaluation of the classics and the Roman and Greek
past. But that tension between authority and freedom was nothing new. It
existed throughout the Medieval period, in the troubadours, in Abelard and
Heloise, and then in the Italian Renaissance itself.
The Elizabethan obsession with order seems to issue
from the Court rather than from society. It is Elizabeth who is so afraid of
trouble, and James after her. A daughter of the usurping Tudor dynasty, risen
to power through battle. The daughter of a king who severed England from Rome.
A woman invested with the symbols of male kingship. It is fear of the boat of
power being rocked that is strongest.
Shakespeare is frenetic in his attempts to bolster the
Tudor legitimacy, and cement the idea of natural order around the monarchy, but
there is also Marlowe, showing the other side, in Tamburlaine risen from
nowhere to be many times king. The tension is acute, but perhaps more so in
Elizabeth’s mind, and those with interests vested in her power, than in some
others.
Where the Florentine Renaissance was blessed with a
certain lightness which Shakespeare’s comedies capture, so Elizabethan England
shares also its intensity of conflict between Reason and Passion, Will and
Authority, the worship of God and the worship of the Goddess. There is an
antagonism between the forces of Chaos and Order, New and Old, which is part of
its deep theatre, its tragic vision. Is Essex a sacrifice to the obsession with
order, with clean endings, a level playing field? Was he disposed of, as one
feels Raleigh was, to make things neater, tidier? It was against the wishes of
the people. He was mourned, we remember. ‘Sweet England’s pride is gone’ He had
written to Elizabeth that ‘ No cause but a great action of your own may draw me
out of your sight.’ ‘When your Majesty thinks that heaven too good for me I
will not fall like a star but be consumed like a vapour by the same sun that
drew me up to such a height’. ‘Therefore for the honour of your sex show
yourself constant in kindness’. She made him, but could not control him? She
made him, and betrayed him, threw him away?
As a woman she was denied the heroic gestures of
action and discovery, a sovereign who no longer went to war. What was possible
for her was the Mind, policy, betrayal. She was an old woman full of fear,
fixed ideas, lacking constancy and forgetting past services when it suited her,
wilful, recalcitrant. She had authoritarian powers.
Perhaps Raleigh had it right? ‘Undutiful words do
often take deeper root than the memory of ill deeds. The late Earl of Essex
told the Queen that her conditions were as crooked as her carcass, but it cost
him his head, which his insurrection had not cost him, but for that speech’.
Actaeon has gone too close, uncovered the nakedness of the Divine power that
was monarchy, lifted the veil.
Whitehall had become less significant as a palace,
more significant now as a place where clever men, toughened by political
infighting and the exercise of power, replaced poetry with administration, the
military centre with a judicial and legislative one. Where trade and goods in
the holds of ships were more important than mythologies however powerful. The
modern world was emerging, and like the genie from the bottle it spelt also the
end of monarchy, the end of nobility, the diminishment of theatre. Elizabeth
and James buy time, but their age is already passing.
It is Raleigh the parliamentarian (‘I think the best
course is to set at liberty and leave every man free’) who is the future. It is
Essex in a different role, as Privy Councillor in 1593 the year of Marlowe’s
death, ‘carrying himself with honourable gravity and singularly liked of both,
in Parliament and Council-table, for his speeches and judgement’ who presages a
different England, though not as directly as Raleigh. The Queen may win, but
the victory is hollow. The Civil War, the Parliamentary forces are only a few
decades away.
He was frustrated with the woman. His military
expeditions are under-funded and controlled by her. She gives him rope and then
hangs him out to dry. He also is an unlucky, if not an incompetent, commander.
There is a kind of desperate charm in his disasters. He is as unlucky as
Actaeon, or Pentheus. Francis Bacon tells him he is presenting the wrong image,
unruly, appealing directly to the affections of the people, a soldier not a
courtier. It is ‘a dangerous image’. He should dissemble more, play the game,
play the Courtier, bow the head more, stop arguing with her.
Then he is underfunded, because England is
underfunded. Four years of poor summers and disastrous harvests, 1594 to 1597;
an increasing population; inflation due to the injection of gold and other
metals into the economy; the poor state of the cloth trade; and the costly
wars. Were the people in the 1590’s bored with the myth, with their Virgin
Queen, with Tudor repression? There is a new scepticism at the end of the
century, the power of the Commons is rising, ‘the new Philosophie’, according
to Donne, ‘calls all in doubt’. Machiavelli is taken more seriously, religion
is bound up with freedom of thought, Copernicus is becoming understood, the
known world is expanding.
Elizabeth seems increasingly mean-spirited,
indecisive, ungrateful. Still, Essex is accident-prone. The expedition to Cadiz
in 1596 is militarily effective. Raleigh is there. So is the young John Donne,
a gentleman adventurer. But the Spanish merchant ships are set on fire and
gutted. There is little plunder. Elizabeth is furious. In 1597 the Islands
Voyage to the Azores is dogged by bad weather. Donne is there again, writing
poems about the storms and calms. Raleigh upstages Essex at Fayal, and the old
rivals fall out again. Still Raleigh, generous as ever towards Essex, writes to
Cecil. ‘God having turned the heavens with fury against us, a matter
beyond the power or wit of man to resist’. The Spanish treasure ship is missed
at Terceira. No money. Elizabeth is furious.
Bad luck, some of it self made, dogs him. Is it the
man or his stars, fate or will? The French Ambassador says in 1598 ‘he is a man
who in nowise contents himself with a petty fortune, and aspires to greatness’.
Roland Whyte in 1597 reports that ‘Her Majesty as I heard resolved to break him
of his will, and to pull down his great heart, who found it a thing impossible,
and says he holds it from the mother’s side.’
When two myths collide there is a conflict. It throws
up strangeness, rawness, incompatibility. It throws up a Leonardo Da Vinci,
where the Christian mystery and the natural reality blend curiously together,
or a Christopher Marlowe merging in himself Latin culture, Medieval Christianity,
and Renaissance thought. Elizabethan England comes late to the Renaissance, is
rushed upon it, as though time has been compressed. Individual man, no longer a
stone in the Gothic Cathedral of the Middle Ages, no longer a degree in the
tuned order of the Deity, but something unique and self-determining, struggles
caught between massive forces. On the one hand an inherited and supposedly
inviolable order, a ladder of being with its path to salvation through worship
of one who ‘died for the world’, so as to redeem man from the sin of the Fall.
On the other a new universe of emerging science, geographic discovery,
questioning rationalism, observation and achievement.
As in the modern world the attempt is made to fit new thought
to old by expanding the terms of religion, but the result is unsatisfactory,
unappealing. The physical world seems to deny the short biblical time span,
there are self-contradictions in theology, free will does not seem to accord
with an all-powerful deity. The very rationalism that the Tudors admire in
their administrators, the conquest of Passion by Mind and Will, of itself
undermines the irrational orders of monarchy and church. Marlowe is an extreme,
but it is the very individuality of men like Essex and Raleigh, which
challenges the state, their curiosity, their wide-ranging interests, their
ambitions, their energy. The free powers of the individual mind meet the
established order in a condition of challenge, a precursor to the great
scientific endeavour where the world becomes explicable in terms of the how
rather than the why, and Occams razor dispenses with deity.
At the same time the Protestant world-view suppresses
and devalues the Goddess, the ancient mythological powers of Nature, makes the
world a mechanism to be wielded rather than a sacred space to be hallowed.
Elizabeth takes on herself the mantle of the Virgin, Catholicism’s transformed
and weakened Goddess image. Elizabeth transfers, from a religion, which no
longer contains it, Nature in its sacred depth, and makes it an aspect of
herself. She is to be the Virgin, without child. She is to be the Moon,
mistress of the tides. By transference the powers of the Goddess are both
secularised and defused. Equally individualism, the Puritan one to one
relationship with the deity, must be strictly controlled and brought within a
rigid and blander ritualisation.
‘ Do not go too low,’ says Helios to Phaethon
‘nor force your way through the upper atmosphere. Drive too high and you will
set heaven on fire, too low and you will scorch the earth. The middle way is
safest.’ Conservatism, caution, is the order of the day. But the enormous
forces of collision are at work. The momentum of individualism gathering speed
since the Middle Ages, re-energised in the Renaissance where, through
Plutarch’s Lives and other works, a world of individuals is regained in Greece
and Rome. That momentum suddenly absorbed by impact with the Medieval world
order, and the Christian myth.
A history created in every moment, meets a history
generated long ago in one supra-historical moment. The fluid meets the
fixed. And this happens in England in a very short space of time, most
intensely in the 1590’s, throwing up individuals who must clash with the order
that Monarchy and Church desperately seek to regain and ensure. Shakespeare
works away at it in nearly every play, the desire for order, an order that is
in doubt.
On the Queen all the power of the nation converges.
Exactly as it converges on Agamemnon in the Iliad. Achilles however is the
Individual. He is ephemeral, short-lived, naked in his vulnerability, lacking
in hereditary authority, not consecrated, not a nexus of power, but unique, and
aware. He is unstable, prone to moody silences, capable of introversion,
reclusiveness, but he is also expansive, formidable, energetic when roused,
fatal. He is a brief flare in the darkness, but one that flawed though it is,
sheds a luminescence on the age.
‘The great Achilles whom we knew’. How can Elizabeth
not fear these younger men whom she raises up, these shining faces full of
grace, talent, wit and energy, whose royalty is within, whose power is only an
individual power, but by its nature self-generated and essentially legitimate?
An Essex, a Raleigh, challenge her to play as a woman, as an intellect, as a
partner, as a friend, as a lover, beyond the rules she sets. Always Elizabeth
has to consciously strive to bring them back to the game, to work within the
rules, within her laws.
It tires her. She is rested by the Burleighs, the
Walsinghams, the Egertons. They are within the circle of her crown. But these
others play outside it. Sulk in their tents, challenge her judgements, dislike
her conditions. But how the safe men bore her! She likes the risk. Where risk
is, the hero is born.
With risk is associated the great prize, the golden
flower stolen from the underworld, the beautiful lover claimed, the Grail
glimpsed. And with risk comes transience, fleeting joy, ultimate sorrow, a
name, and silence. These are men who are attracted to risk, prepared to take
great risks, who succeed through taking them, and who finally fail through
overestimating the humanity and greatness of their enemies. They fall foul of
that banality, that legalistic process, which are judgement but not justice.
The risk taking is another aspect of that collision of
myths. Where more than one order exists then there is no safety anywhere. Where
the laws are incompatible then we must think for ourselves. It all becomes more
difficult, harder to understand. The Goddess becomes the Queen, but the Queen
is illegitimate order, where the Goddess, mute and troubled, is
legitimate, natural order. The Individual must conform by asserting the power
of the impersonal State at the whim of an individual Queen, and while asserting
by their very individuality the ultimate defeat of what they assert.
So the speeches before execution where these men ask
to be forgiven seem to us a sad falling off, yet declare by contrast the deeper
rebellion of their lives. Raleigh’s History of the World in asserting its
orthodox religious views seems antiquated, almost medieval. Yet the man
himself, the prisoner in the Tower, creates an unforgettable, mythic image, and
a symbol of the self-sufficient world to come, the scientist in his laboratory,
the artist in his room, the modern individual life, lived for itself, for its
richness and its transience.
Devereux’s mother is Lettice Knollys, one of those
indomitable Elizabethan women, Bess of Hardwick is another, who live long
lives, and challenge the Queen. Usually they survive in a sufficiently distant
part of the country, Herefordshire, or Derbyshire. They live well north of the
furthest summer progressions of Elizabeth and her entourage, those expensive
visits that help preserve the royal wealth to the detriment of her subjects.
They live sufficiently far away from Court to offer havens to those in distress
(Arabella Stuart for example is sent to Hardwick to the Cavendishes). Lettice
marries four times. Her second husband is the Earl of Essex, Robert’s father,
who dies in Ireland when Robert is a boy. Her third is the Earl of Leicester,
(to Elizabeth’s secret dismay) her fourth Sir Christopher Blount, making this
near contemporary of Essex, and faithful follower, his stepfather. Blount is
executed for his part in Essex’s insurrection.
Lettice stirs Elizabeth up enough to have her ears
boxed and be banished from court, for upstaging Elizabeth. Elizabeth thinks he
gets his ‘high heart’ from his mother. Elizabeth’s own heart is high. She never
lacks courage. In her it is always the war between bravery and caution, between
achieving the crown and risking her mother’s fate. That Anne Boleyn whom Wyatt,
adapting a sonnet of Petrarch, wrote of, a woman dangerous to follow after or
aspire to. ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is a hind...And graven with
diamonds with letters plain there is written her fair neck round about: Noli
me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, and wild to hold, though I seem tame.’
As Queen, Elizabeth must hold the middle way. Bowed
under the weight of the sacred crown, that circle over the head of the monarch
that creates an intercourse with glory and power; an Athene denying her body to
gods and men, blinding those who like Tiresias see her naked; the Goddess
restrains her wildness. She substitutes for it a dalliance with risk-taking
young men, with Odysseus, or Achilles. She is ruthless in the end, helping
them, sharpening their minds and their actions, empowering their swords,
appreciating the quick intelligence, the deft action, the brilliant moment, but
when necessary withdrawing her protection, forcing the hero to attend, to be
aware of her, to have respect, to recognise her power in the everyday and the
banal. ‘I will be here again’ says Essex, ‘and follow on the same course,
stirring a discontent in her.’ ‘I was ever sorry that your lordship should fly
with waxen wings’ Bacon coolly assesses. Essex remains the symbol of all those
promising individuals who outreaching their own capabilities and wisdom fall
out of the sky.
Why are they so attractive to us, these people who
often seem arrogant, wasteful, vain? Because our minds also aspire? Because
they attempted greatness? Because their end completes their beginning, their
sin is expiated by their death, the circuit completed not by the winning
chariot of the sun, but by the blazing meteor that is their transit over the
horizon, their bright fall? Because they stir in us the mythological, the
archetypal? Because their lives illuminate a fascinating story? Because they
fight clear of regret and remorse, and blame, and cowardice? Because even
though they beg for their lives and turn on their followers in extremity, they
make a good end? Because they embrace that transience and that nearness to
death, that risk in living, which touches us all? Because they are not trivial?
They give of their best, and at the last seem cheated. ‘I see the fruits of
these kinds of employment.... and call to mind’ says Essex, ‘the words of the
wisest man who ever lived....Vanity of Vanities.’
The Elizabethan age remains close to the mythic. The
Church replaced the pagan festivals with its own Saint’s days and holy days,
but the pagan gods lived on disguised, or mutilated, like worn Gothic statues,
the Green Men masked in leaves, carved out of stone. It is Shakespeare who
reveals most nakedly the meaning of that loss of sacred Nature, the loss of an
ancient respect for what is Female, the loss of the Goddess. His Catholic
family background left him sensitive to that image of the sacred mother, still
virgin, and of that goddess of the natural world, always silent but the centre
of truth. Artemis, whose shrine was at Delos, who is Diana the huntress, hides
in Nature, surrounded by her virgin companions, she is the silent heart of the
wood, the gleaming of Moon and water. Demeter, the Mother, sees her daughter
Persephone, the Maiden, abducted, raped and abused, condemned through that
forcing of her innocence to a life on Earth, but also a second twilight life in
Hades. Cordelia, likewise, is the Kore, the beloved Delian heart, the ‘coeur
de’ Lear, the silence at the centre of the world, the soul of the protagonist.
Elizabeth appreciated the effect of the severance from
Rome and thereby from the rituals of the Goddess. They were the ancient rituals
of Venus and Adonis, of Attis and Cybele. They were the rituals of the cycle of
the natural year, whereby Nature, the Great Goddess, must see her consort the
sun destroyed and resurrected, buried and brought to life from the ground,
executed and revived, harvested and germinated, dismembered and made whole
again. The Church was forced to assimilate the great myth into itself because
its own myth was a variant, but a crucial variant, on the theme of the god who
dies to save the natural world.
Christianity’s more important messages for the
Elizabethans concerned sin and redemption, the fall of humanity and its potential
salvation, the advent of divine mercy, pity, peace and love, as valid poles of
social as well as private morality. Nevertheless Elizabeth sought continually
to take on herself the mantle of the Virgin, the attributes of the goddess. So
she is poeticised as Belphoebe, Gloriana, Virginia, Artemis, Cynthia the moon
goddess, Astraea the virgin goddess of justice, impartial, wise, severe, but
granting affection. Elizabeth was born under Virgo, and associated herself with
that constellation, which the Greek myth suggests was formed when Astraea,
tired of the crimes of men, climbed to the heavens, to rejoin her father Zeus,
the oak god. Astraea punishes crimes, hates disorder, is intolerant of chaotic
failure, impatient with mankind.
Raleigh writes of her as the Moon Goddess, endlessly.
‘ Praised be Diana’s faire and harmless light’, ‘If Synthia be a Queen, a
princess and supreme’, ‘A queen she was to me, no more Belphebe’, ‘A vestal
fire that burns, but never wasteth’. She was the Faerie Queen in Spenser’s poem
dedicated to Raleigh. For that poem Raleigh wrote his introductory verse, A
Vision. ‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay’. He refers to the vestal
flame, within the temple, Elizabeth outshining Petrarch’s beloved Laura enough
to make Petrarch himself weep. Raleigh calls it a vision ‘upon this conceit of
the Faery Queen’. Does the conceit display a faith, a belief, a genuine love,
or is it merely a Courtier’s tribute, a sophisticated intellectual game? Can
poetry and theatre truly help to transfer the veil of the Goddess to the mortal
woman? Did Raleigh really love this woman twenty years older than
himself, reaching her sixties in the 1590’s when he was in his forties, in his
prime? She was thirty-five years older than Essex. An aged Virgin. But power is
power, and it was focused on her.
Should we be cynical in that way? Raleigh never is.
Essex may well have been. It shows perhaps the difference in age between the
two men, the difference in temperament, the difference in background. She made
Raleigh, but Essex was already nobility. Essex also wrote poetry about her.
Henry Wotton served Essex, before becoming, among other things, ambassador to
Venice and ultimately Provost of Eton College under Charles the First. He said
of Essex that ‘he liked to evaporate his soul in a sonnet’ as Wotton himself,
friend of Donne in his early days, also did. ‘Change thy mind since she doth
change’ wrote Essex in his complaining mode.
Raleigh blames himself or fate, but submits to the
Goddess. He fails to understand his subsequent fall, but his response is not
complaint but lament. Essex prefigures his own future fall in his
dissatisfaction, envy and sense of injustice. ‘Life, all joys are gone from
thee, others have what thou deservest. Oh! my death doth spring from hence. I
must die for her offence.’ Henry Wotton in his verse was more sober, realistic,
and penetrating, understanding political risk and self-deception, writing in
his lines on the fall of Somerset ‘Dazzled thus with height of place, whilst
our hopes our wits beguile, no man marks the narrow space twixt a prison and a
smile’.
In Elizabeth the rational mind is always uppermost,
that intellect which watches, waits, has learnt caution, demands order, duty, control,
is in itself its own power, and wields absolute power over the conscious brain.
The psyche, the soul, the woman herself is in some way suppressed. She takes on
the role of a man, diverts into anger, tantrums, coquetry the irrational part
of her self, the hidden subconscious. She is divorced from her soul. Her answer
to any challenge from her soul is to annihilate it. This is the Puritan reflex.
The need for order, to legitimise the Tudor dynasty, demands that needs are
controlled, that wishes are sublimated. Her femininity is translated into
pageantry, the wit of courtiers, pseudo-worship of the divine queen. The myth
itself, the greater life, of biology, nature, and instinct, of love and truth,
simplicity and beauty, the apolitical life of silence and reverence, is
bypassed, short-circuited, defused. The true Goddess is buried.
The Queen is Virgin, but it is not the sweet, sacred
virginity of the maiden, rather the chilly virginity of Athene, the power which
rules in sterility, demanding obedience but chary of affection. It is for her,
a woman taking on the mantle of divine kingship, an absolute necessity to wear
this mask. It is imposed by male society. It is a condition of maleness. The
mysteries, the private worlds, the internal communions, magic, extremism,
heresy, disorder, rebellion, must be viciously suppressed. It is a condition
demanded of arbitrary kingship, of hereditary, unmerited power, that its
survival, if it is not to be at the whim of the crowd, must be ensured by
oppression and tyranny, by ruthless control, by a continually reiterated call
to duty and responsibility. Uncivilised nature, passion, the attacks of the
body on the mind, of appetite on reason, are inimical to the king.
Since we can only achieve peace by laying down power,
then the position of power is always at odds with peace, with our best
interests, with the interests of the spirit and the soul. Since the king cannot
relinquish command except through self-transformation he must bury deep
everything that does not support the kingdom. So the king must search out the
perfect servant, the uncomplaining aspect of the soul, the Burleigh, who in a
strange sexual reversal is the woman to Elizabeth’s man. This is not to deny
Burleigh his masculinity also. Those aspects of femininity which support the
crown, its love of ornamentation, its coquetry, its sacred distance, its
willingness to serve, its maternal solicitude, its remote chastity, its loyalty
and reliability, are acceptable. Those aspects which undermine the crown,
passion, appetite, irresponsibility, sexuality, desire for power, ambition,
sorcery, promiscuity, generation, violence, heresy, must be destroyed, and
punished.
The man, like Essex, or Raleigh who challenges, who
displays his capability to bear children, who shows ambition, is ungrateful or
petulant, violent or offensive, must be punished, or destroyed. The women who
consort with them Frances Walsingham, Elizabeth Throckmorton, Lettice Knollys
(who married Elizabeth’s Robin, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester) must be
banished from Court as representatives of the irrational alter ego, the vessels
of appetite, of nature, of potential threat.
Those who wear the mask of the Goddess, can never be
ultimately trusted. In a moment the Goddess can alter from her benign to her
malificent aspect, split in two, show her passionate nature, as the emblem of
the total earth of which rationality is only a part. She, visible as he
or she, is daemonic, other-worldly, an amoral witch, a faithless bride, a
forbidden destination for the mind, a hidden soul out of consciousness, a
boiling up from the deep psyche of everything true that is also everything to
be denied and falsified.
The favourite, the blessed one, for whom affection is
shown, on whom gifts are showered, wealth as a substitute for closeness, for
sexuality, for love, is also to be feared. The soul may rise in rebellion,
ambition may become insurrection, aspiration may become lust, affection may
make demands and seek to demonstrate power, love may become treachery.
Elizabeth is the masculine kingship, the force of reason, the source of order.
In that role she must suppress the Goddess, and she does, as Catholicism, as
Mary the rival Queen, as heresy, as sorcery, as deviant ambition. Her tragedy
is that nature denied is barren. The Virgin Queen can have no heir. The
rational mind alone cannot achieve totality of vision, and reconciliation.
Nature and the Goddess conceal the face of Death behind the mask of
conception and birth. The aged body is not immortal.
The irony of her denial of the Goddess in the name of
rational government, is that the destruction of the myth of the Goddess brings
down with it the myth of royalty and kingship. If one is not sacred neither is
the other, since it is from hereditary accident that the power derives. The
generation of nature is also the generation of kings. In the following
centuries the suppressed Goddess will continue to be suppressed, buried below
the surface of society, or openly denied. For the Victorians, Woman is sacred,
because otherwise she is the Goddess in her demonic form. Therefore she splits
in two into the ‘angel in the house’ and the ‘fallen’ woman of the city’s
underworld. Men pay homage to both. This is what we call the Victorian
hypocrisy. For the true Church similarly woman must be the virgin or the lesser
vessel, lest she become Diana of the Ephesians at whose temple women
prostituted themselves on behalf of the Goddess.
.
Elizabeth and Essex show the surface of events, the
visible motivations, the tensions of politics. Behind them though are the
forces and pressures, which may explain their hysteria, their over-reaction to
events, the tragic outcome of those events. The transference of the myth to
herself, which Elizabeth engineered, reacted viciously on the Stuarts who
succeeded her. Paradoxically while it tried to rob the Catholic remnants of the
Goddess myth of their power, it identified the Crown with the myth, correctly,
and thereby guaranteed Puritan opposition to the monarchy if it failed to act
in line with the nation’s aspirations. The one jealous God would not lie down
with the Goddess.
James, whom Henry of Navarre called ‘the wisest fool
in Christendom’, carried on her work, but without her intellect, her instincts,
her balance. Dissenting Mind was now disengaged from the royal myth. It had
passed into the social structure where it would fight the Goddess from below
rather than above, and into the Church which espoused Jehovah and the myth of
sin and redemption, itself not yet understanding the destruction of all myth
which was under way. Catholicism had been defeated but at the cost ultimately
of kingship. Kingship would be defeated, leaving Religion standing as the last
mythical nexus. That awaited the onslaught of science. Through science,
democracy, law and commerce, reason triumphed. At the cost of the myths, at the
price of ejecting Humanity into the Wasteland.
Who decided that Essex should die on Ash Wednesday? It
is the day after Shrove Tuesday and marks the beginning of Lent, the period of
repentance and fasting, commemorating Jesus of Nazareth’s forty days solitude
in the desert. Appropriate then, as a Christian time to repent one’s sins. Ash
Wednesday however is also an ancient festival. The Carnival, the week before
Lent, was a time of riot and indulgence celebrated in festivity in Catholic
countries (the Latin ‘carnem levare’ means to put away meat). The
pre-Christian festival contained rituals that surround the killing of the old
representative of the vegetation god in order to convey the spirit to a new
incarnation. The divine king is killed in order to quicken the fields and to
resurrect the god in a younger and newer form. The original hunting ritual
where the slain god was an animal (Actaeon as a deer, Adonis linked to a wild
boar) continued in the agricultural world. In Provence an effigy called
Caramantran was stoned on Ash Wednesday. In the Ardennes a personification went
through mock execution. In Normandy an effigy was rolled down the hill and then
set alight, before being thrown through the air into the river, a death by all
the elements. In Germany a straw man was formally condemned, beheaded, laid in
a coffin, and buried in the churchyard. And so on. The young god, the former
king, is deposed and executed in order to guarantee the resurrection of the god
at the next turn of the sacred wheel. Why was Essex beheaded on Ash Wednesday?
February-March is the Celtic lunar ash month, the ash
tree being the third letter of the tree alphabet, nion, after birch and
rowan. Ash Wednesday also coincided with the start of the third zodiacal month,
when the sun is in Pisces. It is in Pisces then that the Sun, conjunct Mars,
rises on that February morning. Wednesday is Mercury’s day. Mercury, the mind,
in Aquarius the sign of change, is troubled, squaring Saturn the planet of
constriction and severity in Scorpio Essex’s sun sign. The Sun and Mars, his
life’s energies and selfhood, are debilitated, squaring the Moon as she moves
into Scorpio, his birth sign. Jupiter is setting conjunct his natal Saturn,
signifying the end of good fortune, falling below the horizon in Virgo,
Elizabeth’s sign.
At that sunrise Pluto the planet of fate, is alongside
Uranus the planet of change. Pluto and Mars are the rulers of Scorpio. On the
day of his insurrection, Pluto was conjunct the darkening Moon, while Mars
conjunct the Sun was square his natal Sun in Scorpio and opposed by Neptune
planet of illusion and self-deception. Essex carries out his insurrection in a
failing dream, his fate obscured by the Queen, his energies opposed to his
natural energies. He dies with fading fortune, attacked by the Moon, under the
sign of altered fate.
We know there is no scientific basis for Astrology.
The Elizabethans were taught by their religion that God left human beings with
free will, and that Euripides was in error when he said that ‘What is ordained
is master of the gods and thee’. The chances of finding significant alignments
in any astrological chart are high. Any two planets have better than a one in
eight chance of forming a major alignment, that is a conjunction, opposition,
sextile, trine or square, with each other, assuming that a tolerance of three
degrees is accepted. With sixty-six pairings, from the ten ‘planets’ plus the
ascendant and midheaven, to play with, any chart will therefore show up major
aspects. In addition the wealth of symbolism associated with planets and signs
offers the possibility for endless interpretations. The mind unconsciously
focuses on elements of the chart that ‘fit’ the subject and mutes or discards
the others. As a symbolic pattern however astrology does provide interesting
ways of thinking about personality and character traits, and offers a symbolic
theatre where the game of fate is ‘played’ out. It is this language available
for thinking about personality which is attractive to us in the absence of any
profound alternative. Certainly Freud and Jung and their successors have not provided
an accessible or credible means of describing normal human character and
behaviour. A deep scepticism about astrology is appropriate, and in itself it
can have no predictive power, but the theatre remains strangely attractive.
Perhaps we might say that in the Elizabethan age these
things would have been taken seriously, where in our age it is hard to do so,
and thereby legitimise an astrological view of the events of that time? Essex
‘fits’ his charts. He is the moody, touchy, fatal, attractive Scorpio par
excellence, his birth chart full of tension. Typecast as Sydney’s
successor, courtier, soldier, horseman, he is a part of the aristocratic
culture. He is faced with a new breed of men, rising to that aristocracy, who
were not raised on Castiglione’s ‘The Courtier’, who rarely if ever held a
weapon. He is also a last romantic, an intense personality steam-rollered by a
rising order based on intelligence, cunning and pragmatism. He was doomed to
fail.
The planet Pluto, unknown in Elizabethan times, is now
assigned to Scorpio, and links to the fundamental interior of the psyche. Pluto
is identified in its movements through the skies as the gateway to humility, to
acceptance of greater powers than oneself. Helios warns his son Phaethon that
he must pass the Scorpion’s cruel pincers on his journey through that circuit
where there are no sacred groves, or cities of the gods, past Taurus the white
bull of Mithras, Sekhmet the lion-goddess, the Archer and the Crab, past every
sign of the Zodiac, in order to return. It was a Scorpion that attacked Orion,
in that aggression characteristic of the sign, ruled also by fiery Mars, lord
of violent catastrophes. And Scorpion-men rebelled against Osiris in the
Egyptian myth.
Scorpio erupts from the bowels of the earth, from
underground, from the hidden realm, from the waters of beginning, the moisture
of generation, primal, natural, powerful, and creative. The waters of Artemis’s
sylvan pool, secret and leaf-shadowed become the fearful tears of Actaeon as he
sees his transfigured shape as a deer, and then become the blood and fluids
seeping into the ground from his torn carcass. They are the libation to the
earth, the token of sacrifice, the flesh and blood, the transubstantiated wine
and bread, the veins and flesh. That place of dampness is the place of
offering. From the dark grove in the woods, to the stone altar. In all the
intimate exchanges of life.
Essex is part of the mythological tension and power of
Elizabethan times. They move us because they are close to the archetypal
patterns of existence in a way our times are not. Yet he is also part of that
process of challenge, rebellion, refusal of the crooked conditions, which
destroyed the myths. He and Elizabeth argue. He turns his back on her, she,
furious, boxes his ears. He storms out leaving the spectators dumbfounded. She
is mortal, and mortally offended. He aspires, and is not afraid to challenge
her. Can Essex really be a precursor of the Protestant ethic? Can the last of
the aristocratic challengers be also the forerunner of the Civil War, of the
men who wrested power from the Crown and vested it in Parliament? Can the
receiver of Royal favours, spell also the end of Royal prerogatives? Is Essex,
that sacrifice to ensure the continuity of a reign, the fruitfulness of the
established order, also the revelation of that injustice and arbitrary
despotism which will lead to the execution of a king, and the end of that
order?
Regardless of what he himself thought, his end had
symbolic meaning for others. That is also true of Raleigh. Discontent with the
judgements against them, was added to that simmer of discontent, that desire
for freedom, which is always apparent below the surface of Tudor and
Elizabethan soci