The court
Spending in cities and towns was magnified when they were the location of a
princely court; even a small Italian towns such as Urbino could be rendered
significant by the presence of a determinedly self-advertising ruler.
Westminster, at this time a suburb of London, and London itself, profited from
the demands of a court. The court was not a glittering adjunct of political
life; it was government, and attendance at court the only means of access to
power and the financial rewards that power brought - financial rewards that
were imperative in order to defray the ruinously expensive costs of being at
court at all. The elaborate ritual of the Renaissance court expressed the
authority of the prince - a ritual that had to be re-devised in Elizabethan
England to embrace the awkward fact that the prince was female.
It was not only the
prince's subjects who were to read the message of this authority; display was a
tool of foreign policy. European states of the 15th and 16th centuries were
dynastic, agglomerations of territory held together by the hereditary rights of
the monarch or prince. Hence diplomacy was much concerned with marriage
alliances. In these alliances women's role was that of a pawn, something which
made the very real power of Elizabeth I difficult to adjust to. In the first
part of the 16th century the most potent of the dynastic states was that
controlled by the Habsburg Charles V, who within Europe held the titles of Holy
Roman Emperor, ruler of the Netherlands, King of Spain. Sheer geography made
this an intensely threatening challenge to France, and hostilities were
exacerbated by furious rivalry for the control of north Italy. Spain had been a
close ally of England at the beginning of the 16th century, but the situation
altered as the Reformation affected political alignment. Henry VIII's divorce
from Catherine of Aragon, and his split with the pope initiated Anglo-Spanish
hostilities which reached their nadir in the confrontation between the
Protestant Elizabeth and Charles V's son Philip II, a hard-line Catholic.
In these circumstances
England's traditional enemy France had reluctantly to be considered as an ally
against Spain. But relations with France were complicated by French support for
the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, who aspired to take the English throne. Hence
reports of Catholic plots, whether real or the projections of agents
provocateurs, persisted throughout Elizabeth's reign; her cash-strapped
government was heavily dependent on spies to forewarn of danger. Even after the
defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, rumours and plots persisted, not least
because of uncertainty over the succession: Elizabeth could only retain her
independence of action by remaining unmarried. By the 1590s the English court
was being destroyed by factions of those ambitious for control after the death
of the Queen.
Associated image links
»
Religious context
»
