Dan Snow's History Hit - Elizabeth I with Helen Castor

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Dan talks to Helen Castor about her book on Elizabeth I and the way she governed.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a treat we've got for you today. We've only got one of the best scholars in town on the pod. It's Helen Castor. It's that time of the week, everybody, where we're rerunning one of our previous episodes that all of you knew. We've had so many new listeners this year that most of you won't have heard the extraordinary beauty that lies within the back catalogue. So we've got Helen Castor talking about Elizabeth I. Elizabeth Tudor. You've heard of her. Well, you can learn a lot more about her now. One of England's most remarkable monarchs. You know what I'm going to say now, everyone? It's Black Friday. It is in the UK. If you're listening to this on the day it is broadcast, Black Friday. That means

we have to make the ridiculous offer that we do this time of year. It breaks my heart to do so. But we're offering History Hit TV, which is like Netflix for history. You can get unlimited historical documents. Well, there is a limit, but it's a very big limit. There's lots of historical documentaries on there. You go over there, you enter the code BLACKFRIDAY, all one word, all lowercase, and you get a month for free and then 80% off your first four months of HistoryHit.tv. You're paying around about a pound a month after that. It is ridiculous.

paying around about a pound a month after that. It is ridiculous. It's less than the price of a pint of beer in the newly reopened pubs of Britain. What a joy that is, by the way, while we're on the subject. In the meantime, everyone, here is Helen Castor. Enjoy. Helen Castor, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Well, we're taking on the big one this time. I mean, do you approach a biography of Queen Elizabeth I with some trepidation? I was terrified. Absolutely terrified.

Even more terrified, I think, than tackling Joan of Arc, who was my last book. Now, she obviously is a saint. She's an icon. And yet the sources dealing with Joan are relatively manageable. You know, there have been endless books written about her, but you can get back to the 15th century sources and really know your stuff with Elizabeth. Where do you start? Where do you finish? And all for a very short book. I knew I was going to have to boil down my portrait of her into something sketch-likelike but that could still stand up.

Well, I must say the book is a total triumph. I couldn't put it down. I read it in one session. I urge everyone to go and buy it. It's fantastic. I think the shortness of the book forced you to be incredibly disciplined with the words. And there is no sentence in that book that is baggy or boring or off the point. I mean, it's just fantastic. Thank you so much. Well, it took a long time to write. I mean, it's one of those examples that proves the rule that the short things take longer to write than long things sometimes, because precisely what you're pointing at, every single word had to earn its place. And I had to work out what each chapter was trying to say within a reign, a life and a reign, that in one sense is action packed.

And yet in another sense, Elizabeth spends a very long time attempting not to do things. So even though there's a lot going on in terms of her actions, it wasn't that I had a hugely driving narrative in terms of she did this and then she did that. Actually, she took up positions and then attempted not to move from them. So there were all sorts of challenges. Yeah, you cast her passivity sometimes as quite an active position to be in. That's absolutely how I came to see it. I wanted this book to be a psychological portrait.

And I knew where I was going to start. I didn't know where it was going to take me. I discovered that as I wrote. And where I wanted to start, I knew where I wanted to start, was the day in May 1536 when her mother walked onto the scaffold and had her head cut off on the orders of her father. And I think that one of the main things I had in mind approaching her life was the sense that we know the story very well. We know the whole story of the Tudors.

We know Henry VIII and his six wives. We know Elizabeth very well, or we think we do. But because we know how everything turns out, I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about the human reality of living through it. And that moment when her mother was killed on the orders of her father before she was three years old, Her mother was killed on the orders of her father before she was three years old. Her mother being the first noblewoman to be executed, to be judicially murdered in England that I could think of at any rate, certainly the first anointed queen. That was absolutely

shocking, absolutely unprecedented. It ushered in a new kind of politics, a kind of politics that became a bit of a bloodbath under Henry VIII. So to try to work out what it was like to grow up, that's the kind of insecurity I'm talking about, not a kind of waking up in the morning full of self-doubt. Elizabeth was not full of self-doubt, but she was trying to negotiate a world that was full of threat from her very earliest days. And it's that context in which her fondness for deciding where to stand and then standing still there and resisting attempts to make her move, I think that then becomes very interesting as an active strategy

rather than just she's not very decisive. I think she was very decisive. It feels like I have read lots of other books about Elizabeth that have taken, sort of criticised her for that. And yet you flipped the whole thing on its head and said, I mean, you absolutely placed, made Elizabeth feel like she was pulling strings rather than being manipulated by various people. And particularly even as a very young woman, some of those early writings and poems that you

talked about just really give you a little insight into the young Elizabeth. I mean, she's very young at that point, in her teens, trying to survive. Very young and confronted with extraordinary danger. There was a letter that she wrote to her brother Edward when he was king, when she was 14. And one line leapt out at me. I mean, it's leapt out at other historians. I'm not the first person to see it, but it just seemed so much an encapsulation of what was already becoming her character, her instinct, her way of dealing with the world. And she said something like, it is in my nature, as your majesty already knows, not to say in words as much as I think in my mind. And that sense of guardedness, of opacity, of such a lot going on, such a lot of strategic thinking, and yet the difficulty that the people around her had in reading what she was thinking and saying and doing. And then actually at the same time, I found myself moving between that sense of how difficult she was to read, which her contemporaries said, you know, that the people didn't know why she was doing what she was doing or how to interpret what she said. And then other times it felt as though she was absolutely standing in plain sight saying exactly what she meant and no one was listening or certainly taking her seriously. Her marriage being a wonderful example of that. Good point. So let's

talk about her as a princess or as a sort of weird princess because her father delegitimized her but also kept her in the line of succession. So talk to me about how she navigated the reign of her brother and sister. With very great care. You're absolutely right about Henry VIII. He is one of the greatest exemplars in history of the man who always wanted to have his cake and eat it. Perhaps we should put him in charge of the Brexit negotiations. But that worked for as long as he was calling the shots,

for as long as he was alive, essentially, for as long as he was alive. Essentially, what it did was store up problems for when he was dead. So to say that both of his daughters were illegitimate and yet to put them in the line of succession meant that there were questions to ask, which no one was brave enough to ask him. But, of course, broke out into the open as soon as he wasn't there. Elizabeth was, broadly speaking okay during her brother's reign. She was a Protestant. She had no choice about being a Protestant given the circumstances of her birth. She was in many ways the physical embodiment of the English Reformation but kept her head down in her books apart from her extraordinary entanglement with her brother's uncle, Thomas Seymour, who

became her father-in-law shockingly quickly after her father's death by marrying Catherine Parr, the Queen Dowager. And Elizabeth was living with Catherine Parr and then with Thomas Seymour when he came to join the household. And how much older was he than her? Oh, he was in his 30s and she was 14 going on 15. Well, 30 is still very young. Very, very young, but not quite as young as her. She carried on living in the household for a while and then rather precipitately left during Catherine Parr's pregnancy. And what came out afterwards was that there had been some really inappropriate behaviour going on in their household. Tickling. Tickling early in the morning when no one's properly dressed yet. Now, Elizabeth was not alone with him. These early morning visits when sometimes just Thomas Seymour and sometimes Thomas Seymour and Catherine Parr would come to see her in the mornings.

She had all her ladies-in-waiting around her. And yet, this was a kind of intimacy that was certainly not proper in the normal sense of the word. And what came out after Catherine Parr's death was that Thomas Seymour had designs on Elizabeth. Thomas Seymour had designs on Elizabeth. He'd married the Queen Dowager. In the end, she died in childbirth. What next marriage would serve his unquenchable ambition? And Elizabeth was clearly taken with him. She, it was said, blushed at the mention of his name. She didn't resist these games, these flirtatious games that got played.

But what she discovered when Thomas Seymour was arrested and accused of treason was just how dangerous that kind of flirtation could be. And she really, on her own at the age of 15, with her closest servants taken into custody for questioning. She had no one else to protect her. She had to stand on her own two feet at that point. And she did so with remarkable aplomb and remarkable strategic flair. She took up a position. She said, yes, maybe marriage had been discussed, but only if the council agreed, and that she had never done anything improper, and she would not budge

from that position. And the man who was in charge of questioning her initially said, yes, I'll have results for you within a day or two. By the end of the week, he was saying, this is impossible. You can't get anything out of her. And presumably that taught a very powerful lesson because she never let herself be compromised like that again or open herself to potential compromise. Well, I think what the lesson was is very interesting. I think she had already, I think we have to factor in what had happened to her before this point.

I think for your father to have married your mother for love and lust, then to have killed her before you were three, then later to have married your mother's cousin and done the same again. In between, you've lost another stepmother to childbirth. Another stepmother got out safe and sound by not actually marrying your father. Another stepmother survived until she too had to give birth. mother survived until she too had to give birth. It's not a very happy set of precedents for the prospect of romantic entanglement, sexual entanglement, marriage. Thomas Seymour may have been an appealing prospect, it seems to me, because at that point she was going to have to

marry someone if she wasn't in charge of her own destiny. And most royal princesses got sent abroad to marry a man they'd never met, never laid eyes on and would never see their home again, in which case someone she did rather like the company of who would allow her to stay at home might well have been a very appealing prospect of the ones that were on offer to her. But at the point when that all crashes and burns, prospect of the ones that were on offer to her. But at the point when that all crashes and burns, yeah, the renewed lesson that love, sex, marriage were dangerous can only have been very powerful.

The other thing that's interesting to me, though, is that she doesn't renounce this completely. She doesn't become a sort of virginal figure who will never be in the company of men. She liked men. She liked charming men. She liked charming, good-looking men. And she did get herself into a spot of trouble as queen with Robert Dudley, her favourite, who she adored. And she adored his company and gossip raced not only around England but also around the whole of Europe about what they might be getting up to. And there's a rather poignant moment, I think, very early in her reign, where one of her closest women servants, Kate Ashley, who had been her governess,

goes to her and says, I'm worried about what you're doing to your reputation by dallying with Robert Dudley in this way. And she says, I have so much sorrow and tribulation in my life and so little joy. Can't I be allowed this pleasure and i felt for her so much because she clearly it wanted that wanted that kind of human contact but couldn't go any further than that i really like the idea you paint her as being an impossible position around marriage because you either marry a foreign prince and then that's the unacceptable prospect of a foreign competitor coming over and

and having this exalted role in English society and in within the state like Philip II had done with her sister or she marries someone domestically and upsets the very finely balanced domestic social and political hierarchy of the country. So it's very hard to see who she could have married and maintained her own position and respect and kept a homogenous ruling class. She could not win. I mean, this was a lose-lose situation, it seems to me. And it's one of the many ways in which being a female ruler confronted her with dilemmas that a male ruler never had to deal with. Who could she marry? If she did marry abroad, as you say, the risk is that a foreigner is coming over here, taking over our government. But also, if you're a woman marrying a foreign prince,

a queen, a queen regnant marrying a foreign prince, you have to marry someone whose status is appropriate to your own. But if you do that, you lock your kingdom into an alliance that's going to be very hard to shift in a way that a king marrying a foreign princess is not making a decision forever. Henry VIII marrying Catherine of Aragon did not mean that he and Spain would forever be locked together. Mary marrying Philip did mean that she and Spain would forever be locked together. So Elizabeth can only keep her options open in terms of diplomacy if she doesn't marry, if she keeps thinking about marriage or saying she's thinking about marriage, but not actually taking the decision, that leaves her space within international diplomacy, space to move, as long as she doesn't actually commit.

You're listening to History Hit. More with Helen Castor after this. You're listening to History Hit. More with Helen Castor after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. We should talk about the religious settlement, which people obviously find a bit tricky nowadays, but it is fascinating because it shows her approach to politics. England had veered between Catholicism, Protestantism, renewed Catholicism.

What did Elizabeth try to do to ensure that everybody could sing from the same hymn sheet? Excuse the bad pun. could sing from the same hymn sheet, excuse the bad pun. She tried to take up a, we need to be careful what we mean by saying this, but a kind of middling position that would create the broadest possible church within which her subjects could gather in obedience to her own sovereignty. England had, England's religious history had, as you say, veered between the religious extremes, and it had done so over a very short time, from the 1530s when Henry's reforms started taking effect to the 1550s when Elizabeth came

to the throne in 1558. That's only 20 years. And so religious change had been massive, religious violence had been massive, and nothing had quite bedded down that, you know, what was the Church of England going to be? The interesting thing about what Elizabeth did in 1559, I think, is that she took up a position doctrinally and in terms of the functioning of her church, that very few other people would actually support. The Catholics, the bishops who were still in position at the end of Mary's reign, obviously didn't support a renewed break from Rome. But the Protestants, who were very pleased to see Elizabeth on the throne, didn't support what she was doing either. They wanted to go much further. And so she took up, in a way very like her father,

she took up a position that was very distinctively hers, that was Protestant. It did break from Rome, but it allowed some room for manoeuvre on the key doctrines, for instance, what was actually happening during communion, what was happening to the bread and the wine. There was some room for manoeuvre on that. She kept a lot of ritual that she was clearly very fond of. Her bishops hated, didn't want to be made to wear all these vestments that she insisted they put on. And she hated preaching. So she was going to put up with as little of it as possible.

And she hated preaching partly, I think, because she didn't like being lectured and partly because preaching to her was dangerous. It was always a whiff of sedition about preaching. Who knows what's being said out there as these congregations are massing around these firebrand preachers giving their unlicensed sermons. So what she wanted was maximum participation and maximum obedience, maximum security, really. And she held that line for a long time. It was a line that got harder and harder to hold, but she absolutely clung to it for as long as she could.

Now, in the book, you do give her a little bit of an easy time about killing and torturing so many people. Well, I wasn't trying to give her an easy time. Again, one of the difficulties is compression. I wasn't trying to give her an easy time. Again, one of the difficulties is compression. What I was trying to do, I think, was to show how this attempt to hold a religious line spirals out of control. Her ministers see danger everywhere.

They see Catholics within England as a kind of fifth column, a sleeper cell waiting to be activated into dreadful, dreadful danger. So they're always pushing for more clampdowns, more restrictive laws and practices against Catholics. Elizabeth does resist that because I think she sees that if you bring in more repressive measures, you force Catholics to choose. She didn't want them to. She wanted loyal Catholic subjects to be able to find a way to keep obeying her, to keep supporting her, to keep upholding her sovereignty. But the more repressive you are, the more they're having to choose between being a Catholic and being an English man or woman. And of course, the Catholic powers on the continent and the Pope in particular, in a sense, don't help her. There's a pincer movement with her own ministers in 1570 at the

point where the Pope excommunicates her. The danger is ramped up and it becomes this kind of vicious spiral where there are more Catholic plots against her, but her ministers are looking for Catholic plots in order to justify more brutal and repressive measures. I'm not letting Elizabeth off the hook. Absolutely, there was appalling violence visited upon Catholic missionaries and Catholic suspects as the plots became ever more pressing. I mean, we're judging her harshly because she's a woman.

I mean, we wouldn't be having this discussion if it was Henry VIII lopping people's heads off all over the place. That is something that absolutely struck me so forcibly, the deeper into the book I got. People at the time and since have written about Elizabeth as being vacillating, emotional, changing her mind. You couldn't pin her down. Yeah, okay, she didn't like taking decisions. She particularly didn't like taking decisions that were going to have very big repercussions. The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots being a prime example, she resisted that to the very last moment and beyond. But it seems to me she had very good reasons for resisting

that. And what happens as soon as you've got rid of Mary, Queen of Scots and all the plotting that she's the centre of? The Armada turns up. And that's not coincidental. Once Mary's gone, her claim to the English throne passes to Philip of Spain. And therefore he launches his armada to invade England and take it over as he is duty bound to do. and changed his mind all the time. I'd be looking at Henry VIII. I would not be looking at Elizabeth. He seems to be one of the most emotional decision makers among England's monarchs taken as a whole. And then, of course, we've got Charles I coming not long after.

Now, OK, so then what about failing to... This issue around air, I understand why she didn't name James VI of Scotland her heir, because suddenly power and influence flows to that reversionary interest, as people call it. But was it a bit dangerous and a bit, could have provoked instability? It was dangerous and it did provoke instability, but there wasn't an option that didn't. That was the problem she was faced with everywhere she looked, religion, marriage, the succession. Yes, one could say, how could she leave this question

hanging for what turned out to be 45 years, the question of the succession? Because of course, it was such an open question. Henry VIII's will, which had seen the dynasty through the end of Edward VI's reign, the attempt to put Jane Grey on the throne, it had supported Mary in taking the throne, and then it had brought Elizabeth to the throne. That was the succession that Henry VIII had wanted, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth. What was to happen after that? How could she leave that hanging? How could she not leave it hanging? If she were going to have an heir of her own body, she would have to decide who to marry. She would then have to survive childbirth. No male ruler ever had to think about physical danger when he thought about having an heir. If your wife died in childbirth,

you'd get another one. You keep going until your heir was safely there and you didn't have to worry about dying at all in part of this process. Elizabeth had seen women die again and again and again, giving birth. So there was that danger. She might end up with no heir and dead, and that would be even worse. As the years went on, and the question of, okay, it's becoming clear that the Queen herself is not going to have a child, how about just naming the obvious heir, which is James? She had been the heir in Mary's reign. And she says this explicitly. She tells her parliament this. She basically says, be careful what you wish for. I was the second person in the reign, in the realm, in my sister's reign. And it isn't a good idea for that person. It isn't a good idea

for the realm. Immediately, that person becomes a focus for plots. So yes, it was dangerous not naming an heir. But she made a very good case for it being more dangerous to name an heir. And what she did, of course, was she tied James into her regime with a generous pension and with the dangling promise that he probably would be her heir. He might be her heir. Yes, she was thinking of him be her heir. He might be her heir. Yes, she was thinking of him being her heir. He was her godson. Yes, she was his mother.

And yes, of course, she had had to kill his actual mother. But they survive even that. You know, the sort of understanding between them, such as it is, survives even that. And I'm sure she knew that her ministers were in touch with him. Her leading subjects were in touch with him, her leading subjects were in touch with him. I like to feel that her vindication was the fact that the succession, in the end, when she finally closed her eyes in 1603, there was not a moment's instability. The succession passed smoothly and peacefully to James of Scotland. And I like to think

that she had made that calculation that that was her best chance. Did you come away from this book, as biographers often do, sort of slightly falling in love with your subject? I mean, do you worry? Where are you now on Elizabeth I and her greatness or otherwise? I think it is a very difficult thing to avoid. It's the classic historian's difficulty that you become the friend of the person

through whose eyes you're trying to see the world. And I'm sure I'm guilty of that. In my defence, I would like to say that I was more and more shocked as I went on by how much many historians before have been the friends of her ministers, have seen, because they've been reading her minister's papers, and have seen her through the frustrated eyes of the men who were attempting to get her to make decisions she didn't want to make. There's a wonderful moment in 1577, I think, where Francis Walsingham, who saw danger everywhere, but saw danger of a

different kind from Elizabeth. He didn't see waiting on making a decision as a suitable response. He wanted her to act, to root out treason and treachery and plotting and so on. He described her elusively as us who are in a deep sleep and heedlessly secure. as us who are in a deep sleep and heedlessly secure. I can't think of a worse description of Elizabeth, a less accurate description of Elizabeth, who apart from anything else, was a lifelong insomniac. Anyone in a deep sleep was not her. She was alert to danger the entire time. So I suppose, yeah, I did come away persuaded of the merits of the position she took. I think she was terrifying. I think spending time in her company must have been a very challenging experience.

I didn't feel sentimental about her. I think she was a deeply unsentimental person. But I came away with renewed admiration for her, I think. Also, on that point, though, about threat, was she under physical threat throughout those decades, particularly following the Pope's bull? She was under physical threat, when you stop to think about it, for most of her life. Her father was not shy about getting rid of people who displeased him. He'd killed her mother, who knew what he was capable of. Moments in her brother's reign,

the whole crisis, the Jane Grey crisis, and then repeated moments in her sister's reign were profoundly dangerous. You know, the blade of the axe was very near at a whole number of points during her first 25 years. And then once she becomes queen, yes, she has many more protections than she did before. But sedition, treachery, the threat of foreign powers were everywhere. And once the threat of foreign powers were everywhere. And once William of Orange, William the Silent, had been assassinated, that was really a wake-up call about how vulnerable rulers could be. He was shot and killed with a gun. Guns, of course, meant that there were new ways of killing rulers, apart from the poison and the daggers that everyone was on guard against. And she was physically very brave. She was a very brave woman, I think. That moment at Tilbury. That moment at

Tilbury. It is a great moment. She had enormous charisma, enormous presence, and enormous courage. And I think there were real threats to be brave about. Different kind of threats from male rulers might have had to get slightly nearer the front line than Tilbury. She was there, maybe in her breastplate, knowing that she talked about being in the heat and dust of battle, but she knew she never was going to be. I think she knew the Spanish Armada

had sailed off in the other direction by that stage as well. Yeah. Come on. The great leaders are all about spin They are, and she was a master at it What lessons does she have for us today, do you think? I think she makes a very interesting study today, actually I think she is a powerful reminder that we have to keep thinking about the ways in which power, government, are shaped for men. They still are. Our assumptions about what the neutral position is for our rulers is that our rulers will be male.

And I don't think we see enough how being female shaped Elizabeth's experience, Elizabeth's rule and reactions to her rule then and now. I think that's a very powerful strand that we have to keep hold of. And I also think it's worth thinking about not doing as a strategy just as much as doing, not doing as a strategy just as much as doing, not leaping into the bold and glamorous action or the over hasty decision. Perhaps that's something we ought to be thinking about, particularly now. It doesn't mean never acting is always the right thing to do, but weighing up what vision actually is, weighing up when to act and when not to act, I think, is a political lesson well worth contemplating. Helen, I'm contemplating now. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. What is the book called? It is called Elizabeth I, A Study in Insecurity.

Very good. It's a very wonderful, short biography. You'll read it in one sitting. Please go out and buysecurity. Very good. It's a very wonderful short biography. You'll read it in one sitting. Please go out and buy it. Hi, everybody. Just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts,

if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.