Read All the Queen's Men for Free Online

patronage, the result of attaching oneself to a far larger fish in the golden pond. Ralegh had arrived at Court as an unknown soldier fresh from the Irish wars and had been fortunate enough to find favour with Sir Robert Dudley, by then the Earl of Leicester, an ageing yet still highly influential royal favourite. ‘Leicester had then cast in a good word for him to the Queene, which would have done him no harme’. 5 wryly noted a contemporary historian. A more romantic account of how Ralegh came to the Queen’s attention first came to light some forty years after his death:
    This Captain Ralegh coming out of Ireland to the English Court in good habit . . . found the Queen walking, till, meeting with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going thereon, presently Ralegh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground. Whereon the Queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits. 6
    Well, it makes a good tale.
    Francis Walsingham’s political ambitions were greatly assisted by Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, who in turn ensured the rise and rise of his son Robert Cecil. Nepotism and favouritism were both familiar and acceptable in the Royal Court, representing a comfortable tradition practised by everyone from Elizabeth downwards, in which sons followed fathers down the corridors of power, while friends provided favours amid a warm glow of wealth and happiness for the privileged few in the inner circle of power and affluence.
    Favouritism could in turn incur criticism and outright jealousy in the highly competitive Royal Court, where one man’s advancement could be another one’s impediment. The Queen’s obvious enthusiasm for Ralegh was a case in point. ‘He had gotten the Queene’s eare in a thrice . . . which nettled them all’, 7 wrote a contemporary historian, while one of Ralegh’s own poems declared, ‘for those reapes renown above the rest with heapes of hate shall surely be opprest’.
    This incestuous trend of patronage bred and multiplied in the hothouse atmosphere of the Court, particularly as the Queen’s reign lengthened and she became progressively more conservative in her appointments to high office and at the same time less conscious and critical of promotions made by her senior courtiers. As the Queen grew older and the key members of her Council aged with her, fewer fresh faces came on the scene to revitalize a by now jaded Court. Younger courtiers grew frustrated as they found themselves marginalized and their views ignored. This potentially explosive situation led ultimately to the Earl of Essex’s ill-conceived coup in the twilight years of the last of the Tudors. Nevertheless, this Elizabethan system of promotion through patronage had hitherto worked extremely well amid a heady climate of opportunism, greed and the fear of failure.
    Traditionally, the English Royal Court had been wholly male-dominated, but the arrival of a female monarch in 1553, when Mary succeeded to the throne, had led to some very significant changes in the way it was run. Some of the most important functions of the household hitherto carried out by men came to be undertaken by women. Elizabeth was therefore fortunate that when she became queen she was able to inherit arrangements within the sovereign’s private quarters that were very different to those which had operated in her father’s day. Henry VIII’s entourage had included eighteen Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and six grooms. By Elizabeth’s time this had changed dramatically. The Queen only appointed two Gentlemen of the Chamber throughout her entire reign, one of these being the handsome young Thomas Heneage, whom the Queen would flirt with outrageously in order to make Robert Dudley jealous. Heneage was later knighted and went on to become Treasurer of the Chamber and then Vice-Chamberlain and finally a Privy Councillor in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign.
    The large