Question; what leader of a nation spent nearly her entire life under threat of assassination, rebellion, and in direct confrontation with the only superpower of her time, and laid the foundations of her country to become a global power?
Answer; Elizabeth The First of England.
Here we have the story of a successful leader who
achieved miracles despite her society. Elizabeth was born the daughter
of Anne Boleyn, which was a political error of great magnitude. After the death
of her father, Henry VIII, and the brief reign of her brother, Edward, she was
subjected to the tender care of her embittered and brutalized stepsister, the
aptly named Bloody Mary. Mary’s relationship with Elizabeth was such that as a
disowned “bastard” daughter she was required to attend as a servant to the baby
Elizabeth, and was treated like an object of abuse by her relatives, in-laws,
and the court. The result was a very hard time for Elizabeth when Mary came to
power.
Things had already become grim by any measure. From the age of fourteen she was subjected
to physical and mental abuse. There is some reason to believe that one of her
“guardians” may have added attempted sexual abuse to the list after Henry’s
death. She, too, had suddenly become a “bastard” and took her turn in the vicious
process. From a successor to the throne to a possible encore at the chopping
block doesn’t seem to have been much of a step. Mary’s accession culminated in
her imprisonment in the Tower Of London, a great way to spend adolescence, if
at this point not necessarily much worse than life outside the Tower had been.
Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion had been the spark for this move, and Wyatt, although
offered a pardon if he would implicate Elizabeth, refused to do so. That was
all that had stood between her and certain death, and was a pretty good
indication of her parlous grip on life.
These were especially brutal times, and a miscellany
of powerbrokers, would-be revolutionaries, and other delightful parasitic
manifestations of humanity were running England like a dying greyhound. The
nation fractured disastrously. Very little was left of Henry’s kingdom. Mary’s
response to this dissolution was to burn Protestants. During this period
Elizabeth was incessantly at risk of immediate death. As a Protestant her
position was parlous, to say the least. She was also a direct threat to Mary as
a possible successor. Many of her friends had been implicated in “plots”, real
or imaginary, to provide an excuse for removing Elizabeth. The Tower was the
last stage before execution; that’s how close she came to oblivion.
This
girl wasn’t just anyone, though, and she was about to prove it. A picture of
Elizabeth at about twelve shows a slender redheaded girl with a set mouth and
intense, clearly focused eyes, with some depth already behind them, as if there
was a world inside. She was a proficient student of languages, and a
particularly gifted pupil. She is attractive, and has a definite presence when
you make the equation between the eyes and the mouth. This image is an
intriguing background to the rest of her life: this is the child who’s going to
remake the world. She was truly her father’s daughter. Henry would have been
very proud of her. The murderous, perverted, environment in which she grew up
gave her tremendous mental and emotional stamina and character. When Bloody
Mary died, to the relief of all, she needed those qualities.
She inherited a ruin. England was on the verge of
financial and political disintegration. There was a supply of domestic
irritants, issues of religion and the succession being the bane of her efforts
to reconcile the nation. Her domestic policy management resembled a person
trying to be dignified and credible while dancing on a stone floor covered in
marbles. That she ultimately succeeded was a testimony to her realism. There
were Catholics to reconcile, after the hideous bloodletting of the past. There
were nobles whose interests were entirely selfish and destructive. The Commons
routinely managed to frustrate her efforts to establish any form of tolerant
religious practice that didn’t automatically result in civil war. As a backdrop
to this extraordinary supply of problems was the general lack of money, which
effectively meant that revenue was at a premium. Elizabeth’s famous parsimony
had a sound basis in fact. You can’t be extravagant with empty pockets.
Foreign associations were complex and largely
cosmetic. The “succession” issue was enough to drive anyone mad. Of all people
on Earth, only a Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII no less, could truly understand
the likely political associations that arose from unwise marriages. The
Commons, however, in its myopic wisdom, knew better, and persisted in raising
this unhelpful ghost at the most inopportune times. The clergy meanwhile
assisted by obstructing her desperately needed and relatively mild reforms, and
creating real problems where there needed to be none.
In brief, anything which the various factions in
England were able to do to undermine her domestic policies was done. Just to
make things a bit more complicated the Scots deposed Mary Stuart, and added the
defence of English interests in Scotland[1]
to the long list of political and military situations the early part of her
reign acquired in addition to its original tale of woes. Image and circumstances
are not the same thing. Elizabeth is the epitome of the contrast.
Despite all this incessant idiot brilliance on the part of her contemporaries,
the single, independent queen of a credible nation is the image we have today.
Foreign interests had soon enough begun to sniff
about at the new queen. Spain was arrogant, France merely perfidious and
hostile, and the Vatican rabidly hostile. Everybody was quite clearly trying to
get into England. It’s worth noting that nobody would have tried this sort of intrusion
on Henry. Elizabeth was originally seen as a transitory and weak monarch, even
in England. She may not have been weak, but England was, her navy a shadow of
her father’s and her army a series of untrained semi feudal levies quite
unsuited to offensive action. Politically, she had no cards to play, and had a
truly feeble domestic economy with which to try to build a nation. In addition
to that, she had a supply of mutinous nobles left over from Bloody Mary’s chaos
to contend with, who were to try to remove her from power themselves. To top
off this list of potential destroyers there was the unlikely and interminable
Mary Stuart, a viviparous puppet with a penchant for disasters.
Great leaders are not fools. Elizabeth promptly
began to prove this. Her survival instincts took on a national character. She
had learned from ugly experience how to judge, and when to trust, whom. She had
also mastered the art of diplomacy in her deadly game with her stepsister. She
found competent people who could run a nation. She dealt with a petulant
Parliament and with untrustworthy bishops, with traitors and with heroes. She
made her foreign policy so ambiguous that Spain, in its insular position, was
unable to even seriously affect her revival of England as a nation. The Spanish
simply didn’t understand her intentions. It was incomprehensible that a small
and very weak nation would try to match Spain. Her policies were based on a
real understanding of her actual situation. The various political dalliances
and possible marriages were a smokescreen and an extremely effective form of
evasion. This was diplomacy as a survival strategy, and none have ever done it
better…..or longer. It was a marathon of finesse.
Even good historians seem to carp on about Elizabeth’s “indecision” regarding her
relationships with Spain, France, Drake’s voyages, marriage, etc. This (to me)
very flawed perspective avoids stringently the fact that any sort of commitment
on these matters would have nailed England to an impossible position. “Decision”
would have removed her ability to maneuver. Her period of history contained
some of the most manipulative and underhanded leaders humanity has ever
produced, and if not subtle they were persistent and dangerous. A good diplomat
never gives any indication of his government’s intentions in times of crisis.
“Decisions” are too obvious, often costly. At the crucial points of her reign,
“indecision”, that wonderful state in which neither opponents nor proponents of
a policy are able to interfere, has a lot to be said for it. It also leaves
foreign governments with nothing to shoot at.
I would point out that anyone really acting subtly
could hardly be famous for it. Posterity has somehow failed to understand the
needs of the time. The idea that her policies and lack of defining allegiances
were “timid” or “vacillating” should be seen in the context of the fact that
Elizabeth’s entire life was a state of conflict with multiple enemies, all
quite able individually to destroy her and her nation, or beggar them both.[2]
I also suggest that of most human beings that have ever lived, or will ever
live, none have never been in such routine mortal danger as Elizabeth.
Of those few that have even approached it, hardly any survived, and far fewer
prospered. Of the nations, the weak were invariably subjugated.
In
practice this indecision was excellent footwork. A good government doesn’t
instantly leap off the nearest available cliff as a matter of policy, either.
England was a fountain of diplomatic obfuscation; France lingered on improbable
alliances, Spain received courteous disinformation with regularity, and
Elizabeth ran rings around her contemporaries and kept her own counsel with
commendable care. Prudence has a very practical side. Her own Court was a
festering supply of information to outsiders, and any lack of discretion would
have been disastrous. She found her way out of the predicament she’d inherited,
played for time and position, and succeeded. She won enough time to build a
navy and shore up the foundering economy. This is a strong intellect at work.
She was certainly far more perceptive, and practical, than her contemporaries
were able to understand, or her enemies to predict.
Consider the possibilities of an openly belligerent
England prior to the revival of the navy by Hawkins. Suicide. An excuse for
invasion, well before anyone could prepare for it, and a “decision” which would
have been irrevocably “decided” in short order. Marriage? A “decision” aligning
England permanently to something, with no way out and a legally recognizable
foreign stake in the country. England as a suburb of France, for example.
Religion? Make one “decision” or another, and half the nation rebels.
It should be noted that as Parliament and the Court
endlessly raised these issues that Elizabeth was clearly trying to keep
passive, there was a real risk that the very fragile health of the nation would
suffer every time they did so. Modern agenda-setters might take note of the
fact that this illustrates how destructive the pushing of a purely local agenda
at the expense of all other considerations can be. In England’s case this
half-witted, repeated, exposure of the nation’s weaknesses was comprehensively
dangerous to foreign policy under truly deadly circumstances.
Elizabeth’s agility in dealing with these regular
confrontations with national obliteration was the basis of survival for
England. Her character added the strength. Character makes itself known in many
ways. In Elizabeth’s case, one word will do as a description, and the word is tough.
She was always a realist, and she was really tough. She did make very short
work of various domestic nuisances, bishops, nobles, and, eventually, after
incredible forbearance, Mary Queen Of Scots. She wasn’t gentle, but she wasn’t
unjust, either. Nevertheless, her domestic enemies were returned to the soil
soon enough. These were not times in which trespasses were forgiven. Her
methods were comparatively lenient, and necessarily lethal. They would have
been much more brutal to her. It may be that having been in that situation for
so long herself, she didn’t find it palatable to deal with others that way. Her
enemies were merely executed.[3]
She had found a good domestic security advisor in
Walsingham, and had had the sense to listen to him. Potential assassins sent
from the Vatican were also summarily removed thanks to his organization.
Economically the nation, finally more or less at peace with itself, and with a
little applied and considered piracy, began to prosper. The navy regenerated, courtesy
Drake, Frobisher and Hawkins, and some military credibility was finally
restored to the nation.
Real leaders listen and learn. They can also handle
dealing with very strong characters like the four gentlemen listed above. No
dispute between her and those parties would have been trivial, and mistakes by
any party would have been mutually fatal. Her sense of national direction must
have been genetic. Henry himself could not have done more to undo the damage to
England so dramatically. It was just as well, too, because the external threats
were by now manifesting themselves as physical facts.
Europe at this time was the Europe of the
Inquisition, the most obscene and prolonged political and religious atrocity in
European history prior to the Holocaust. It’s hard for modern readers to credit
this earlier time for being even worse than our own, but it was. The
Inquisition was human ugliness personified. The Holocaust matches it; that
gives some idea of the scale this misery took.
The Inquisition was the incarnate form of
Elizabeth’s enemies, Spain and the Vatican, which had been trying to kill her
for decades and restore Catholicism to England. Elizabeth’s England had also
received refugees from the persecution, which was of course more grist to the
blood-soaked mill. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris killed 50,000
people in one day. French Huguenots either fought or emigrated. Religious
tolerance simply did not exist.
Spain ceased dithering and began its course to war.
The Vatican in 1570 had merrily demanded the removal of the “heretic queen”,
whose survival to her accession at the age of 25 had already been purely
miraculous. Assassinations were attempted, and failed. Spain, the Catholic
superpower, helpfully decided to find ways of making England a Spanish colony,
with Vatican blessing. Nothing like a bit of religious license for your foreign
policy to encourage anyone. Spain eventually lumbered into action, after its
total failure to stem English piracy and its apparently obsessive desire to
waste years on diplomatic dead ends, however well hidden. It had the resources
of its vast empire, a large navy, and huge army, and a treasury of relatively
unlimited means.
England had a few good new ships, a quirky queen,
and plenty of reason to want to stay free. England was getting its first taste
of prosperity, such as it was, for decades, and if not a democracy, it was a
much safer place to be a Protestant or even a Catholic. England was by any
comparison an enlightened autocracy, as distinct from a multi-level tyranny
with both Church and State happily slaughtering those they thought needed it.
Financially the country was in better shape than any time since Henry.
Spain sent its Armada like a debt collector. It was
big, it was well equipped, it was a supposedly irresistible force. The English
were better sailors and knew their waters and their ships. The Armada acted
like the one trick wonder it ultimately was. It couldn’t do what it was
supposed to do, transport troops to England, because it couldn’t land where it
was supposed to pick them up, and was at risk of being blown onshore. Dealing
with this apparently severe intellectual challenge was evidently beyond the
commanders. The English fleet eventually got its methods right, and it was stampeded
by fire ships at Gravelines. From then on the wheels fell off the whole Armada.
The weather and the ocean currents did the rest.
Elizabeth’s conduct in the crisis ought to be taught
in political science classes.
Her public military leadership was confined to one
appearance on a horse wearing a breastplate and making a speech as laudable in
its content as its brevity and decision. [4]
She didn’t “manage” Drake or his colleagues. She was well aware of their
operational activities, and had the good sense not to try to steer their ships
for them. Such “vacillation” as there was at this level seems more concerned
with ends than means. She found competent people and let them be competent,
taking upon herself the thankless function of trying to fit it all together as
a national strategy. That’s real leadership. It certainly paid off when Drake,
preempting most of his naval successors ever since, dropped in on the Spanish
and destroyed the would-be Second Armada. Exit Spain as a problem, enter the
Royal Navy as one of the defining realities of global politics for the next few
hundred years. Game most definitely over.
She couldn’t have done better. The woman had taken
an almost dead nation and brought it back to life. The navy had returned from
an ignominious decay into a real force, with talented commanders. They
obviously recognized a talented leader when they saw one. The quirky queen’s
quirks included the deep personal qualities which made people like Drake admire
her, and able to work with her. Consider what sort of personality would be
required to achieve that degree of trust from a man who literally terrified the
Spanish empire for years in ships the size of a slightly enlarged tugboat at
her orders, and at tremendous risk.
The defeat of the Armada closed the early chapters
of her reign. History sometimes leaves a clear trail, and Drake’s career was
one of the defining phenomena of the process that created England as a world
power. The future of the nation in peace or war had quite literally depended on
managing the results of those dangerous ventures. That was hardly a predictable
pastime for national foreign policy. Again, in a masterwork of ambiguity,
Elizabeth left her contemporaries to fathom the depths of her thinking. They
failed dismally. England’s stated foreign policy was the ongoing minuet of
formal niceties that “normal” state politics of the time demanded. The reality
was that policy had nothing to do with actual events. The sublime beauty of it
is that nobody knew how to interpret, or how to react. Elizabeth was the shield, the support, the
motive force, and the fulcrum for an extremely dangerous course of action. That
course of action enriched England, and designed and built the navy that was to rule
the seas and colonize the world. The Armada was defeated before it was
built.
Leadership really is a form of risk management. It
could all have gone horribly wrong. That it didn’t is a true portrayal of the
people who made it work. Drake’s very revealing first question, “Does the Queen
still live?” on return from his epic journey around the world indicates beyond
doubt whom he trusted, and why. It also indicates that he was very aware of the
possibilities of a truly dangerous internal and external political situation in
which a certain monarch was always at risk. Trust in those days was a valuable
thing, if one valued one’s life. An interesting combination of people, those
two. I would say that Elizabeth was Drake’s equal, commanding a ship of state
in murderous waters.[5]
The
latter years of her reign were marginally less dramatic, but still tense, and
difficult. Spain schemed on, piracy became a private industry, Ireland dripped
blood. A famine intruded. There were the daily realities, expensive facts. But
it was a very much healthier England than that of her accession, a truly
independent nation free from the ugly beast of European interference. This was
the beginning of empire. Prosperity and trade began their work as engines of
economic growth. England was demonstrably Merrie, for once, and the Elizabethan
period is still a favorite of those who love the culture and the language.
Her personality seems to have become myth without
enough scrutiny. Substance is lacking and adjectives too prevalent. Attempts to
unravel her sex life seem to be considered more “historical” than the blatant
national impossibility she achieved against odds that the most deranged gambler
would avoid. The endless, mindless, simpering innuendo has given her more gaudy
“favorites” with each book, and time has simply cast more shadows by throwing
more light. The founding of modern Britain apparently isn’t as interesting as
400+ year-old gossip.[6]
Perhaps one day some real historian will kindly condescend to establish how she
did all that.[7] We would
certainly learn something.
A late picture of her shows the same face, hidden in
some finery, the eyes now staring far distant, from the same original depths
which have grown much deeper in those lonely, desperate, years. The mouth is
now more than set. It refuses to give away any secrets. Leadership is clearly a
very personal experience. This is a very real person. She created the England
that remade Europe and cast the mould of world history. That’s about as real as
you can expect anyone to be.
God alone knows what personal cost it was to her to
give birth to this child.
[1] The great, and legitimate, worry was that a Catholic Scotland, allied with France, would join with Spain. It was a very unwelcome, and very possible, hostile foothold in Britain from Elizabeth’s perspective. Mary herself was another headache, possibly the world’s most inept conspirator. That this anointed vegetable managed to be the basis of so many plots is one of history’s terrible jokes.
[2] Even one war, the Irish war in her later reign, was a severe strain on English resources, under much more favorable and far less complex conditions than her classic confrontation with Spain.
[3] This is not to pretend that the treatment of enemies was anything less than routinely brutal, but England was a lot more selective about its torture than most of the rest of the world.
[4] That speech, incidentally, is an interesting bridge between the ancient leaders of Britain and the modern.
[5] Drake didn’t indulge in debates about his tactics, either. “Indecisive”…her! What rubbish.
[6] Popular history at its worst, including some strange sort of gynecological speculation which really doesn’t deserve the name of history.
[7] Most of the histories I’ve read seem to insist on the itemized-narrative style of describing her reign, rather than piecing together the mechanics of it. There will be a vast supply of almost-information on one issue, like the succession, at great depth, largely unreadable, thanks to verbosity. This epic will be followed by some word-grinding exercise dealing with “her thoughts about foreign policy”, in which the authors have already made clear they don’t understand the depths of her actions, let alone her reasoning. This was a particularly complex time, and England was a complicated place. Perhaps we need Sharma to take an in depth look. Someone with more on, and in, his mind, than the next book launch, at least. The sources I’ve quoted in the bibliography are at least bearable and well informed on physical events.