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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [02:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
- [02:41]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Over the past few weeks I've been taking a closer look at some of English history's royal favourites. I started with Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I's forbidden love. We then jumped into the Stuart age with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the intimate favorite of King James I and sixth and then Sarah Churchill, Queen Anne's closest confidante. I think you'll find Those episodes fascinating, if you haven't listened already. But to round things off, let's return to Queen Elizabeth I, whose favorites, as I mentioned at the outset of this series, were not merely bureaucrats, but emotional companions, symbols of royal grace and lightning rods for factional fury. Another of Elizabeth's favorites was Sir Christopher Hatton. He was also a man of talent, who over his lifetime held positions as gentleman pensioner, Captain of the Queen's Guard, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Vice Chamberlain, High Stock of the University of Cambridge, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Knight of the Garter, Privy Councillor, and eventually Lord High Chancellor of England. Although the Hatton family had a long pedigree, Christopher was the first to rise so high in service to a monarch. After an education at Oxford which he did not complete, he enrolled in the Inner Temple in London, and it was while he was there that he is said to have caught the eye of the Queen in 1561 with his rather spectacular dancing. So how did Hatton come to win her favor? And crucially, what role did he go on to play in Elizabethan politics and religion? What should we make of the rumors put about that he and Elizabeth were lovers, or that he was in love with her, at least? And how did he compare to his contemporaries? Finally, what difference did he make to the Elizabethan regime? And how can we chart this influence? To address these questions and many others, I spoke to Dr. Neil Younger back in January 2023. Dr. Younger is senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the Open University, and his monograph, Religion and Politics in Elizabethan the Life of Sir Christopher Hatton, was published in 2022 by Manchester University Press.
- [04:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I began by asking Dr.
- [04:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Younger precisely how Hatton became one of Elizabeth I's favourites.
- [05:02]
Dr. Neil Younger
Well, I think in the nature of favourites is that they are purely the monarch's choice. There are a variety of ways to power in the 16th century or the early modern period, broadly. One is, of course, through being a noble, because nobles are seen as having the right to give advice to the monarch. One is through being useful at operating the machinery of government, being an administrator or a lawyer. But one is just being the monarch's friend, as it were, someone who the monarch likes. And Hatton appears, from what we can tell, to have come to court simply because Elizabeth liked the look of him. He's often remembered as the dancing Chancellor, as someone who was an accomplished courtier and could do the things that courtiers do, like jousting and dancing and writing to a certain extent. And that seems to have been how he first came to court. But I think it's important to remember that a lot of people come to court initially that way, but it's what they do afterwards that counts, because Elizabeth and early modern monarchs generally winnow them out and pick the more able. And Hatton's certainly at court for a long time before he attains any real power. So he's tested, and Elizabeth clearly spends a lot of time with him and decides, evidently, that he's worth keeping around. So I think the caricature of the dancing chancellor is only the first step of that. And this personal service to the monarch is seen as a completely acceptable way of picking out suitable men to help the monarch in ruling the country.
- [06:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Your book goes on to show that Hatton became more and more prominent in political affairs in the 1570s. Why was it then? Were there contextual reasons? Was it about Hatton's own actions and character? Or are we looking at a combination of the two?
- [06:50]
Dr. Neil Younger
I mean, again, we don't exactly know because Elizabeth, of course, doesn't tell us, and Hatton doesn't leave any clear evidence on this. But I think it probably is a mixture of Hatton getting to be more mature and to be more of a credible age to become influential. Of course, when he comes to the court, he's very young, quite a bit younger than the Queen, and so he's aging into the role, perhaps. It's also a factor, clearly, of the Queen's increasing confidence in him. She always makes her servants wait and sort of tests them over a long period. So I'm sure that's part of it. But it may have had something to do with Hatton's conservative leanings, that Elizabeth wanted to use Hatton, as somebody recognized by Catholics and more conservative people, to be sort of one of them or sympathetic to them. And it may have been that she wanted to promote him, to reassure that strand of opinion in the country that she didn't want to give the impression that her regime was only dominated by hot Protestants who might have been hostile to more conservative people.
- [07:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's talk a little bit more about that, then, because I suppose one of the first questions to ask on this is Hatton presumably left no explicit statements about his religious faith. So how did you find out about the relationship between his religious attitude and the course of Elizabethan politics more broadly?
- [08:10]
Dr. Neil Younger
I think that is incredibly difficult. It does require, I think, a leap of faith to accept that he could have been a Catholic sympathizer. But I think the evidence clearly shows that he does protect Catholics, he does sympathise With Catholics, he does try to prevent them being persecuted where he can. He always tries to encourage them into conformity as well. He's not a supporter of recusancy, and we have to be really careful of confusing Catholicism and recusancy. Recusancy is this practice of refusing to go to the Church, of not just holding inward beliefs, but of refusing to obey the law, which was that you had to go to church. So it takes it from a religious issue to a civil issue as well, an issue of disobedience. So Haddon always wants to encourage people to attend church and obey the Queen's laws and walk this fine line between inward and outward beliefs. I think the evidence shows that he is a Catholic sympathizer, but the question then is how far that then translates into what he does in the political sphere. And obviously he can only do what the Queen will let him. And he can give advice to the Queen about ways in which he thinks she ought to steer the country, but he's limited in that power. But I do think we have this situation in which there's this very powerful, very determinedly Protestant counsellors in Elizabeth's government around Lord Burleigh and the Earl of Leicester and Francis Walsingham and lots of other figures. But I think we need to remember that there is a strand. They're not really a party because they don't work as one, but there's a strand of not so hot Protestant ministers in Elizabeth's government as well, who are just a bit more cautious about a whole range of policies that confront Elizabeth, such as the issue of Mary, Queen of Scots, such as the issue of the war in the Netherlands and whether to support Protestants overseas, such as how to deal with Catholics within England. So Hatton appears to be sort of part of this loose grouping of cautious Conservative ministers who just take a different view to Burleigh and his allies about what England should do. And I think if we look at how the politics of the reign actually plays out, we can see that Burleigh very often doesn't get his way. We think of Burleigh as Elizabeth's prime minister, almost as the person, perhaps, who really called the shots in Elizabeth's England. Certainly a lot of historians have argued that that was the case, but very often his advice isn't followed by the Queen. If it had been up to, certainly, Walsingham, Mary Queen of Scots would have died an awful lot quicker than she did. I mean, she's in England in prison for 20 years. That clearly isn't something that Burleigh and Walsingham liked Elizabeth Waits 20 years before getting involved in the Dutch revolt, in the war in the Netherlands, supporting Protestants overseas. She does do it eventually, but she delays a very long time. Elizabeth doesn't crack down on Catholics nearly as much as Burleigh would have liked. We so often find Burleigh's memos saying we really must crack down on the Catholics, and it just doesn't happen. It happens to some extent, of course, to the most prominent people, but nowhere near as harshly as Burleigh would have liked, I think. So I think we need to look at why it is that those impulses aren't taken into reality by Elizabeth and I think, certainly part of it. My argument is that the support and guidance and advice of people like Hatton is crucial there because they're advising her behind the scenes. And again, it's really hard to prove this, but it seems to me that likely that they are helping Elizabeth to reach these decisions.
- [11:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's a really useful corrective to the historiography. Let's fill in some of the gaps around our knowledge of Hatton. I mean, one of the things that has survived, in part, I suppose, of Hatton is some of his properties. So there was Hatton Garden in London. We don't really have that. There's a little, tiny, tiny bit of Holmby House in Northamptonshire. I mean, all of these were becoming very significant properties under Hatton as he was growing in power. Hornby House is supposed to have rivaled Hampton Court in grandeur and size. Can you give us a sense of him as a property man, what these places look like and what were they intended for and whether he actually lived at them?
- [12:33]
Dr. Neil Younger
Yeah, no, it's incredibly interesting. And as you say, there's not much surviving of any of them. It does serve as a metaphor of Hatton's career and reputation, really, because there's so little left. He comes from a very humble background within the context of Elizabethan politics. He's born a gentleman, but only just. He's at the very lowest level of gentry society. His family only seemed to have owned one small estate in Northamptonshire, near Northampton. It's only when he is given quite a good, lucrative job by Elizabeth late in the 1570s, that he starts to obtain the money to expand on that. And he first, I think, purchases Kirby hall and sort of at roughly the same time, he's starting to build Holmby or Holdenby, which is his ancestral home. And as you say, this is on a colossal scale. It's sometimes referred to as the largest house in England, which I think some people dispute the maths on that. But it is enormously large. It's got this sweeping glass frontage, immense amounts of glass, obviously incredibly expensive inside. It's extremely spacious and is reputed to be extremely richly decorated. Some of the tapestries that still exist in the long gallery at Hardwicke hall, if people have gone there, you can look at the bits where Bess of Hardwicke's monogram is and you can see that they've been replaced on top of Hattons. So, yeah, it is incredibly rich. But of course he isn't really there at all, hardly, because he's always at court. And this is the secret of his success almost, that he does just devote himself to Elizabeth and to amusing her and keeping her company. So he spends the vast majority of his time at court or in London and doesn't go to his houses in Northamptonshire very much at all. He also owns Corfe Castle down in Dorset. So it is a bit of a mystery exactly why he devoted so much care to them. I mean, in a sense, it's what people did. Lord Burleigh, of course, did the same and he didn't spend a huge amount of time there. But of course the difference is that Burleigh had descendants, whereas Hatton didn't, because he never married and he didn't have any children. Possibly he was thinking that he might still marry at some point, perhaps if Elizabeth died or if he fell out of favour, he'd go into the country and get married and leave descendants. He leaves family through his cousins and so on. So the Hattons do continue in Northamptonshire, but no, he doesn't spend much time there at all. And Elizabeth famously never goes to visit him at Holdenby, although she does go to see him in his London house. I mean, again, there's quite a well known story attached to the London house, which is Ely Place, which is the residence of the Bishops of Ely. And Elizabeth basically browbeats the Bishop of Ely to give Hatton a long lease of part of this property and Hatton built himself a new house there. It's all sort of curiously ephemeral because he never goes to visit them and now they're not there anymore and it's almost as if they never were, somehow.
- [15:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can I probe a little bit more on that question of money? Because it's something our listeners have asked. How did courtiers earn money and certainly enough money to run such prestigious places? And this seems a particularly apposite query with Hatton, because you found that he was in Debt to the tune of £10,000 by 1575. So how could he afford to build these virtual palaces?
- [15:49]
Dr. Neil Younger
Yes, I mean, in Hatton's case, because he comes from such a comparatively poor background, it all comes from the Queen. Ultimately. If you're a noble, then you have all of your land and that sets you up to serve at court. But for someone like Hatton, who's risen from the gentry, it comes from the Queen's beneficence, really. I mean, she gives him a certain amount of money outright, but not that much, and she gives him a certain amount of land outright, but again, not that much. But it comes from being given several lucrative rights by the Queen to handle her money, basically. So he has the right to collect the duty on sweet wines that are brought into England, and he also has the right to collect first fruits and tents, which are a particular kind of tax on the clergy. And Hatton is the receiver for these things. And basically he brings in the money, but it doesn't get then passed on to the Exchequer. Elizabeth knows this, of course. She gives him the jobs, precisely with this in mind, because she needs her servants to be able to fund a lifestyle at court, to do all the things that they need to do, to dress appropriately, to have appropriate houses and servants. Because official salaries in this period are negligent, they don't get paid any real money for doing their jobs. So all of this is funding his lifestyle, but with the very clear assumption that eventually the Crown will get the money back, and they do. So Hatton dies owing about 42,000 pounds, which is a completely dizzying amount of money in this period. But the government knows exactly what he's supposed to pay, down to the halfpenny, and they set up these arrangements with Hatton's heirs to pay back the money progressively over time. So it's a slightly crazy way of funding your government, but it does actually work reasonably well.
- [17:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Mary Queen of Scots alleged that Hatton and Elizabeth were lovers. And if you look at some of the extraordinarily ardent letters he sent her, some of the things that survived, it does seem rather like he was either in love with her or just very good at playing the game. Tell us a bit more about this and what you make of the relationship between them.
- [17:58]
Dr. Neil Younger
Yeah, it's a really interesting question, and it is the question that always gets asked, isn't it? Was Elizabeth really a virgin Queen? Certainly. Historians have almost always argued that. I think she probably was. I mean, slightly surprisingly, the only historian who has suggested, very indirectly, that Hatton and Elizabeth were physical lovers is the Victorian editor of Hatton's few surviving papers, Aris Nicholas, who very artfully implies this, which is slightly surprising.
- [18:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I remember when Chakha Kapoor's Elizabeth came out in the 1990s, I think it was 98 or 97. There was a leader in the Telegraph that was so outraged at the suggestion that England's Virgin Queen was not entirely virginal even then in the 90s. I'm very surprised that in the Victorian period anyone would have questioned it.
- [18:49]
Dr. Neil Younger
I was very surprised as well, yeah. But he expresses it so roundaboutly that it took me a while to work out what he was saying. But, I mean, I suppose he was responding to the point that you just made, that the letters do imply that, because he does write what's been called as playing the game of courtly love, he writes these letters which are incredibly over the top, as it seems to us now. Perhaps in a certain way, they were platonic lovers, as it were, inasmuch as favorites like Hatton and Leicester and later on the Earl of Essex, the second Earl of Essex, it's been argued, and it makes some sense to me, I think, that they fill the emotional niche in Elizabeth's life which would otherwise have been occupied by a husband. So perhaps in that sense they are lovers. And it does seem, from the very fragmentary evidence, that around about 1570, after Hatton's been at court for more than five years, it seems like he sort of shoots to suddenly greater heights. And there's a suggestion that maybe he and Elizabeth have had some kind of emotional fling, as it were, that she perhaps has fallen in love with him, and that's why he does come to much greater prominence and really starts on a proper political career. So we don't know, but I think it's certainly possible. You know, Elizabeth does have a lot of favourites, but only a few of them rise to that greater level. And maybe this does respond to a much greater emotional relationship. But I think looking at those letters, and they're very often quoted, actually, as being the perfect example of Elizabethan courtly love discourse as a part of political life. But actually, I think if you look at the messages he's trying to hit, they're very carefully targeted and carefully considered, and they're reassuring in her things that she wants to hear, which are not just emotional, but are actually political as well, because he talks about loyalty, of course. She's had such an incredibly tumultuous emotional life, her young life, before she becomes Queen, particularly this notion of loyalty, reliability, gratitude to her and loyalty to her, specifically to her, the woman, not to the crown. It's not about being loyal to the regime or the government or the abstract crown, but to her as a woman, as an individual. I think all of those things were what she wanted to hear and the things that she found reassuring. He was clearly very good at appealing to her. So if Hatton wrote it, then I think we can assume that it worked. And I think it is really interesting to look at those political messages in there and not just imagine that they're sugar coated romantic fluff.
- [21:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How do you think we should understand Hatton as a favourite by comparison to someone like Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester? Or given that he rose to prominence towards the end of Leicester's life in his contemporaries in the later period, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
- [21:43]
Dr. Neil Younger
They're all slightly different varieties of favourite, aren't they? Leicester wears some other hats as well as the warrior, for example, as the nobleman. And I think probably Lester was an even greater favorite than Hatton. I think Simon Adams has said that Leicester was the love of Elizabeth's life and I think that probably rings true. But I think Hatton is not far behind him, if you like. It's a bit difficult to say whether Hatton or Essex were higher in status because of course their careers don't really overlap very much. But I think that Elizabeth certainly had fewer quarrels with Hatton. For one thing, she has enormous quarrels with nearly all of her senior ministers at one time or another. Leicester, when he accepts the title of Governor General of the Netherlands, and when he gets married, Burleigh, over the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. It doesn't seem like she has anything like so big a falling out at any point with Hatton. And I think the fact that he never marries and does stay loyal just to her, I think that does mean a lot. The pet name for him. Well, various versions of sheep, Mouton and Achora Campi, which is quite a nice one, a biblical reference. So perhaps he's likely in the friend zone, as it were. I'd never thought of it in that way, but he's the slightly less dangerous version of the favorite.
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Dr. Neil Younger
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Dr. Neil Younger
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- [25:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can I pick up on that point you made in a couple of ways. Now that people like Burleigh and Morsingham were sometimes out of step with the Queen. So they are trying to change her mind. They're relying on external pressure to do that, whereas Hatton seems to be maneuvering through her. Through those uncharted conversations, do you think that we see more differences and similarities between Hatton and some of the other advisors or favourites? And do you get a sense of the relationship between them. Was there little love lost between Hatton and Burleigh, say?
- [26:03]
Dr. Neil Younger
Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly interesting trying to track that relationship within the regime, because Elizabeth doesn't like conflict within her government and she seems to want her ministers all to at least act like they like each other and that they're cooperating, even if they're not really. And it's very hard to tell. I suspect that there is a bit more tension than the evidence reveals, because her ministers do work across purposes at times. Elizabeth's ministers, as you say, they use various means, try and persuade her to do this or that, and sometimes, as in Burleigh's case, he's using things like Parliament to try and force the Queen's hand, or using public opinion or the use of print to try and force her to do things. And I think it must be the case that when these grand, elaborate efforts to try and get Elizabeth to do this or that fail, or one side or other is going to lose in this issue, there must have been bad feeling. It's sort of inevitable. So, yes, I do think that there's this sort of air of cordiality about Elizabeth's government, which probably conceals a fair bit of tension. And, I mean, I think they might get on all right, but of course, they are rivals in some senses. Probably some of them don't like each other and so on and so on. But the Hatton, he does still work as a relatively ordinary minister. He becomes a member of the government. I actually went through the records of the Privy Council for the time when he was a member of the Privy Council and counted up how often he attended, and he actually attended more often than Burleigh over the period when they were together on the Privy councils, which was 14 years or something. He comes across much more frivolous than I think he really was. He did put the work in. We don't have the detailed records of what he was doing on paper for the reasons that I was talking about earlier, but he clearly did put the time in. And I think one of his crucial roles is that role of intermediary with the Queen, because he's so intimate with her and friendly with her, and he's bringing messages potentially from the Council to the Queen and back, from individual ministers, from Parliament, from all these other sources of power, and he is the gatekeeper. There's this little anecdote where Leicester's in the Netherlands in the mid-1580s fighting a war, and I think Burleigh's ill and Walsingham's got a cold or something, and Hatton is basically the only intermediary between the Queen's inner rooms and the rest of the world. The power of that position, of being the gatekeeper is phenomenal, really, given this,
- [28:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
and I ask this, thinking of all those A level students, where does this leave you? On Robert Naunton's famous and oft quoted view that Elizabeth ruled by faction and
- [28:43]
Dr. Neil Younger
parties, I do actually think that there's a bit more truth in that than some other historians do. And the recent writing on Elizabeth's government has been that it is very harmonious. If we take a step back here, it used to be argued earlier in the 20th century that the Earl of Leicester and William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, were really factional rivals. Burleigh was the Conservative and Leicester the radical Protestant, and they were working against each other. And then in the 1580s, due to the work of Simon Adams, a great Elizabethan historian, Adams made the case that if you look at the evidence of Burleigh and Leicester, they just don't seem like rivals, they work together really well. And I think he was quite right about that. But what I've argued here is that we do have this really sort of powerful, effective and quite collegial and cordial group of fairly strong Protestants in the regime. But there are some others as well, including Hatton, but a whole range of others right through the rain. And I don't think they're as powerful as the Burleigh Leicester bloc, if we call it that. But I do think they are there and I think they're offering alternative courses of action, which Elizabeth has the option to pursue if she wants to. And I think that the evidence suggests that sometimes they do seem to get their way. And this helps to explain why it is that Mary Queen of Scots is kept alive for 20 years, why it is that Elizabeth delays so long before going to war, and so on and so on. All of these policies on which Burleigh doesn't seem to get his way. It seems to me that this helps to explain a puzzling fact of Elizabeth's reign. And of course, it could be just that Elizabeth herself is making these decisions, but my suggestion is that she's taking advice from different sides. So I don't think it's factions, really, because factions implies very hostile relations, but I do think there's a range of different advice which she's taking within the court.
- [30:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We've mentioned Mary Queen of Scots a few times. What do you make of the suggestion that Hatton promised Mary he'd replace Elizabeth with her. What would his motive have been if this theory were true?
- [30:44]
Dr. Neil Younger
We only have this from Mary's side. But what he was suggesting was that if Elizabeth did die, then Hatton would be more likely to be pro Mary than pro an alternative. So this is the big difficulty for Burleigh et al and co. Who else do you have as successor other than Mary? Because, of course, there are other alternatives, the Grey Sisters and so on. But Mary appears to be a much stronger candidate to a lot of people. And Susan Doran, for example, has argued that Elizabeth probably saw Mary as her most likely successor throughout her reign, and I think probably a lot of people did. So if Hatton did indeed say that he would support Mary as queen if Elizabeth died, then that probably wouldn't be so surprising, really. The scenario we might have been looking at there is exactly parallel to 1553, where you have this sort of Protestant regime, Protestant monarch, but the Protestant monarch dies and the Protestant ministers are in the situation of, shall we go for the extremely obvious successor, who is Catholic, Mary I or Mary Queen of Scots? Or shall we go for this slightly harebrained, not very persuasive Protestant alternative, who is Jane Grey or whoever Burley would have picked if Elizabeth had died suddenly? I don't think it's at all unlikely that if Elizabeth had died suddenly, the Privy Council might have splintered and Hatton may have come out for Mary. But it's very hard to tell how much of a sort of independent position Hatton would have taken in that scenario. It's hard to picture him as standing on the barricades, waving a sword and saying, I will fight for Mary, Queen of Scots.
- [32:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, one person who is known as a Protestant is that Hatton is closely associated with is Sir Francis Drake. How did this come about? And do we have other examples of Hatton exerting patronage like that?
- [32:43]
Dr. Neil Younger
So we don't really know how that does come about, but we know this is clearly a period in which voyages of exploration, which also might well feature attacks on lucrative Spanish ships and so on, were much in circulation. And it was fairly common for the people leading such voyages to seek patronage from major political figures. And Hapden certainly does seem to have been keen on that. It's sometimes been argued that he's sort of an advocate of the British Empire or Elizabeth as Queen of the Seas and so on. I mean, we really don't have much evidence for that, but we do know he does invest in these voyages. It may have been that he was just as much Interested in the money as anything else, because some of them do make a lot of money. But it may have been also that he was interested in exploration the New World. What we do know is that he did have a real interest in cartography and surveying, and we have quite a few instances of him patronizing new techniques of cartography and mapmaking that were increasingly being deployed in Elizabethan England.
- [33:48]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Knowing what we know about Sir Christopher Hatton, can I ask you why you think he's less well known than the others among Elizabeth I's favourites, like Essex, for example, or Robert Dudley?
- [33:59]
Dr. Neil Younger
Well, I think that the big problem really is the lack of sources. It is just his archival problem, because clearly as historians, we're completely dependent on the sources that have been left behind by contemporaries. And if you look at Lord Burleigh, for example, William Cecil, he's incredibly well documented. He's a innate natural record keeper. He writes down everything. We have masses of stuff. Anyone who works on the period will be intimately familiar with his scratchy italic handwriting. The same goes for someone like Walsingham. And the Earl of Leicester writes quite a lot. We have quite a lot of his correspondence too, but for Hatton it's just not there. He didn't, of course, leave descendants to look after his archive, so whatever papers he had in his life were lost. And also, I think he wasn't in the same way a natural record keeper. The way his influence in his political career was deployed was really behind the scenes. It was one on one with the Queen herself. He was a courtier and not a lawyer or an administrator, so all of his conversations with the Queen was where his influence was really put into play. Completely lost to history and we'll never know. In a certain way, Elizabeth herself is the same because she's a very oral person. She doesn't write many letters herself, so all of the best stuff was in face to face meetings and we'll just never know what they said there, unfortunately. So I think that's the big reason it's really hard to write about Hatton and to be certain about an awful lot of the facts of his life.
- [35:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's very true. So I suppose the next question to ask you is, what therefore inspired you to write a biography of Hatton and why write it now?
- [35:33]
Dr. Neil Younger
Well, it was sort of accidental really. I stumbled into it. I just happened to be reading the best previous biography of Hatton, which was from the 1940s, because I was thinking of writing a book on a different subject, so thought, oh, well, I'll just breeze through Hatton and sort of fill in a little gap there. The author just sort of mentioned offhandedly, repeatedly, again and again that Hatton was really friendly with Catholics, with Catholic individuals. And it gets to the point quite late in the book where he describes how Hatton had two servants who were involved in the Babington plot. And this is a plot, as people will know, that was intended to assassinate the Queen. And I thought, oh, well, that's quite strange, really. People close to Elizabeth I aren't supposed to have servants who were trying to assassinate her. That's bad form, to say the least. So I thought, well, I really need to look into this a bit more. And I started digging into Hatton and looking at his networks, his contacts, his friends, his kin, his servants, his associates. It just kept coming up time and again that they were Catholic or crypto Catholic or very religiously conservative. Different shades along this spectrum. And at a certain point I thought, there's something there. And it really just grew from that to try and understand how someone who deviated from one of the most important rules of Elizabeth's government, that is supposed to be a Protestant operation, how he could have such a successful political career, really. And of course, it wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, before Google, basically, before electronic searching and the fact that so much historical source material is available online now. Because the way I started researching it was just by finding every contact of Hatton's that I could and finding out more about them and building up a picture. And that certainly wouldn't have been possible before electronic searching.
- [37:36]
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- [38:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, Hatton died in 1591. Can we try a counterfactual? If he hadn't died then, do you think that the last decade of the Elizabethan regime would have been significantly different?
- [38:43]
Dr. Neil Younger
Yes, I do think the period would have been different. The reason for that is that what we see in the last years of Hatton's life is that he's undertaking his most significant political initiative of his life, as it were, which is a major campaign against Puritanism. As I say, Hatton is always a sympathizer towards Catholics, but one can't make a political program out of that because it is a Protestant regime. But what he does do is support those within the Church who were as close to his position as could be, which was what would later become described as High Church anti Puritans, basically supporters of Episcopal rites and so on. And what Hatton does in the last years of his life is mount this major campaign against Puritanism. By that time he's Lord Chancellor, so that the head of the country's judicial system, and by that point also the Earl of Leicester is dead, Walsy dies. During that period, a lot of pro Protestant Puritan leaning counsellors are dead or dying. Manhattan mounts his campaign across a whole range of fronts. So against Puritan ministers, Puritan writers, Puritan local gentry and local governors, browbeating judges, he's locking up ministers and dragging them into star chamber. All of this is done in collaboration with the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and a range of other supporters and minions and so on, a lot of whom later rise to prominence. And it's very obvious that Burleigh hates this, that he's deeply uncomfortable with it, and he's writing reproachful letters and refusing to turn up to meetings, behaving rather petulantly towards some of the bishops, but he clearly can't stop it. But what we do see is that when Hatton dies, Burleigh is able to stop it, and he stops it literally the next day. So the very next day, he releases one of these Puritans from prison. Either the next day or within two or three days, he issues this Royal proclamation against Catholic recusants. So he's turning the focus of the government's attention away from Puritans, back onto Catholics, where he always wanted it to be. And this happens literally overnight. So I think we have clear evidence there the Burleigh had been wanting to do this, but hadn't been able to. The interesting thing, too, is that this campaign against Puritans very clearly appears to start in 1588, when the earl of Leicester dies. So the Earl of Leicester dies, Hatton is able to start this campaign against Puritans. Hutton dies, barely is able to stop it. It's the favourites. It's Leicester and Hatton whose deaths appear to mark the changes there, and Burleigh comes across there as apparently rather impotent. If Hatton had remained alive throughout the 1590s, I think one has to assume that that campaign against Puritanism would have continued, that he would have tried to continue a regime which was very hostile to Puritans and comparatively rather welcoming to Catholics, which is what Patton had been trying to do all his life. And, I mean, again, we know that people like Burleigh are really rather more hot Protestants than the Queen herself. So I don't think it's implausible that Elizabeth was happy for Hatton to shift things back a bit towards the middle. But I do find it surprising that Burleigh doesn't appear to be able to do anything about this in the face of Hatton's energetic campaign against the Puritans. So there is a bit of a puzzle there about what Elizabeth is doing. Why has she allowed Hatton to do this? Why hasn't she restrained him? Why isn't Burleigh able to stop this? There's one really interesting incident during this period where Burleigh hosts Elizabeth at his house in Hertfordshire, and he puts on one of these performances that he sometimes did, wherein he intimated that he wanted to retire. And Elizabeth plays along with this and she issues a writ to him via the Lord Chancellor. And of course, the Lord Chancellor is Hatton. And in this she basically says that Birley shouldn't retire, and it seems to be a sort of hint that she maybe wants them to work together or. Or that if he does retire, then Hatton will be left in charge and potentially Burleigh wouldn't really have liked that very much.
- [42:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's a very interesting suggestion, though, that we see his presence and his influence by its absence, that we only see that he had the accelerator down when it lifts on his death. That's a fascinating idea. What do you think? It tells us that Hatton was given a state funeral. What appears to be a state funeral anyway, which is an honour, of course, that Burley doesn't receive it is a
- [43:18]
Dr. Neil Younger
marker of his significance, I think, something that we perhaps find difficult to recover now because his period at the really top level is really quite short. It's only in those last few years after Lester was dead and Walsingham as well, that he and Burleigh are really running the show between them. They are clearly the top two ministers, whether they agree or disagree. So it's really only three or four years there. He is really cut off in his prime. He's only about 50 or 51 when he dies. So, yes, I think it is a marker of the height that he's reached and the wealth that he's gathered and also the following that he's gathered, the network that he's gathered around him. We have the notes of those who attended his funeral in the College of Arms. There's an awful lot of them, an awful lot of gentlemen following him from his native Northamptonshire, but from all around the country as well. And I'm sure it's a marker of the Queen's regard as well. And of course, he's famously commemorated by this tomb in St. Paul's which is very large and grand and a lot of Puritans remark that it's far too big and showy and it overshadows the tomb of Philip Sidney and Francis Walsingham, which is nearby. And we have some 17th century doggrel rhymes in which people are sort of complaining about this, but unfortunately it all burned down in the St. Paul's fire.
- [44:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
A surviving memorial to him, finally, is the portrait that the National Portrait Gallery has, where he's holding that cameo picture of Elizabeth in his hand. If we consider his career as a whole, he spent huge amounts of money on property she never visited, he never married, she never gave him a peerage. In many ways, she kept him dancing for his entire career. State funeral aside, do you think he lost more than Elizabeth gained in his service to her?
- [45:02]
Dr. Neil Younger
Well, I think he would probably have been relatively content at the end of his life. He'd had a pretty good ride for the second son of a minor Northamptonshire gentleman. He was cut off in his prime and it is a shame that we never got to see what he might have done otherwise. But he was someone who supported the Queen and served her very faithfully. He clearly gave something valuable to her and I think he was probably fairly satisfied with his life. Looking back on it, we'll never know, unfortunately.
- [45:34]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
My thanks to Dr. Neil Younger for sharing so much much about Sir Christopher Hatton. And rounding off our series on favourites, if you haven't heard them yet, do go back and listen to our recent episodes looking at some other royal favourites. Robert Dudley, Sarah Churchill and George Villiers.
- [45:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb, next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudor from history. Hit.
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