QUEENSHIP AND POWER Series Editors: Carole Levin and Charles Beem This series brings together monographs and edited volumes from scholars specializing in gender analysis, women’s studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, con- stitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strat- egies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents—pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-dominant societies. In addi- tion to works describing European queenship, it also includes books on queenship as it appeared in other parts of the world, such as East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization. Editorial Board Linda Darling, University of Arizona (Ottoman Empire) Theresa Earenfight, Seattle University (Spain) Dorothy Ko, Barnard College (China) Nancy Kollman, Stanford University (Russia) John Thornton, Boston University (Africa and the Atlantic World) John Watkins (France and Italy) Published by Palgrave Macmillan The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History By Charles Beem Elizabeth of York By Arlene Naylor Okerlund Learned Queen: The Imperial Image of Elizabeth I By Linda Shenk High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations Edited by Carole Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves and Jo Eldridge Carney The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe By Sharon L. Jansen The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I By Anna Riehl Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch By Ilona Bell Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth By Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen By Catherine Loomis Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe By William Layher The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I Edited by Charles Beem The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth- Century Europe By Erin A. Sadlack Three Medieval Queens (forthcoming) By Lisa Benz St. John Renaissance Queens of France (forthcoming) By Glenn Richardson T F R HE OREIGN ELATIONS OF E LIZABETH I Edited by Charles Beem THE FOREIGN RELATIONS OF ELIZABETH I Copyright © Charles Beem, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11214-8 All rights reserved. Chapter 7 is a revised version of “Queen Elizabeth I through Moroccan Eyes” by Nabil Matar, originally published in the Journal of Early Modern History 12:1 (2008), pp. 55–76 (22), reprinted with the kind permission of Brill Academic Publishers. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-29427-5 ISBN 978-0-230-11855-3 (eBook) DOi 10.1057/9780230118553 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The foreign relations of Elizabeth I / edited by Charles Beem. p. cm.—(Queenship and power) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1558–1603. 2. Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533–1603. 3. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Europe. 4. Europe—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 5. Islamic countries—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 6. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Islamic countries. I. Beem, Charles. II. Title. III. Series. DA356.F67 2011 327.420099031—dc22 2010041066 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2011 C ONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Notes on Contributors xiii Part I Britain 1 Why Elizabeth Never Left England 3 Charles Beem and Carole Levin 2 Princess Cecilia’s Visitation to England, 1565–1566 27 Nathan Martin 3 The “Song on Queen Elizabeth”: Coins, Clocks, and the Stuff of Political Satire in Dublin, 1560 45 B. R. Siegfried Part II Europe 4 Q ueen Elizabeth’s Reaction to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 77 Nate Probasco 5 T he Tsar and the Queen: “You Speak a Language that I Understand Not” 101 Anna Riehl Bertolet 6 Elizabeth among the Pirates: Gender and the Politics of Piracy in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 125 Claire Jowitt Part III Islam 7 Elizabeth through Moroccan Eyes 145 Nabil Matar vi Contents 8 Elizabeth I and Persian Exchanges 169 Bernadette Andrea 9 Elizabeth and India 201 Nandini Das Select Bibliography 221 Index 229 P REFACE The origin of this project lay in a desire to publish a hand- ful of intriguing papers presented at the annual meet- ing of the Elizabeth I Society in Kansas City, Missouri, in March 2008. In the big picture of Elizabethan foreign relations, the provocative and idiosyncratic essays that formed the core of this volume had little to do with each other except that they all opened portals into areas not usually contemplated or discussed within the conventional parameters of what may be termed “Elizabethan Foreign Relations.” Because of this, the editors of the “Queenship and Power” book series agreed that these papers should be revised in order to form the nucleus for a collection of studies on this generalized topic. That said, this book makes no claim to be, in any sense, a compre- hensive study of Elizabethan foreign relations, and the reader may refer to the works listed in the select bibliography for more compre- hensive discussions of various facets of Elizabethan foreign relations. Instead, collectively, the studies included in this volume are intended to broaden our understanding of the relations between Elizabeth and Ireland, various European nations and rulers, pirates and privateers, and the dynamic Islamic world of the sixteenth century, in which Elizabeth, as an unmarried and long-lived regnant queen who never left her kingdom, was arguably the most globally famous personage of that century. In some ways, the book title suggests a modern sensibility for a subject that may not have been all that easily recognizable to the Elizabethans. The Tudors never really had something they could cogently label foreign policy—there was no recognized foreign min- ister, while virtually anyone could be deputized to serve as an over- seas liaison for the monarch in politics, religion, and commerce. As a second rate European power, England’s sixteenth-century foreign entanglements were far more defensive and reactive than offensive— the major exception to this general rule were the essentially vanity wars that Henry VIII fought in France. For the rest of the Tudors, viii Preface an expansive and aggressive foreign policy was beyond the kingdom’s resources; only when she was convinced that military action was ab- solutely necessary did Elizabeth consent to formal military opera- tions in Scotland, France, The Netherlands, on the high seas, and later in Ireland. This volume brings together a collection of chapters that examine a number of different facets of Elizabethan foreign affairs to further illuminate how Elizabeth I of England perceived her relationships to the world around her, how she interacted with this world, and how the world perceived her. In this book, the contributors describe how Elizabeth and/or her government interacted with a variety of person- ages, pressures, and opportunities to shape a kaleidoscope of policies that add up to something, for lack of a better term, called “foreign relations.” Collectively, these studies reveal a queen and her kingdom much more connected and integrated into a much wider world than usually detected and discussed in the voluminous scholarly works pertaining to the queen and her reign. The chapters included in this volume have been sequenced to follow concentric circles of relations radiating out of England and the British isles to Europe, the Islamic world of North Africa, and western Asia, and India. Charles Beem and Carole Levin investigate a question not usually contemplated in works on Elizabeth and her foreign policy, namely why she never physically journeyed beyond her realm of England. This chapter also discusses how Elizabeth exploited her position internationally as an entirely domestic queen. As such, foreigners who wished to meet her had to travel to England to do so. In the following chapter, Nathan Martin provides a unique microhistory of inter-European relations as he describes the com- plications surrounding the 1565 English visit of princess Cecilia of Sweden, the brother of one of Elizabeth’s erstwhile would-be hus- bands, king Eric of Sweden, underscoring Elizabeth’s international renown in the early years of her reign. B. R. Siegfried concludes the section on Britain with her study of how Elizabeth sought to aug- ment her authority in her Irish kingdom by issuing a new coinage stamped with her image, and by erecting three public clocks in the city of Dublin, events framed in verse, titled, “The Song on Queen Elizabeth.” The second section of the book details foreign relations with var- ious parts of Europe. Nate Probasco revisits the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 in France to offer an explanation of Elizabeth’s compartmentalized yet pragmatic response, while Anna Riehl Preface ix Bertolet contributes a dramatically original and occasionally amus- ing discussion of Elizabeth’s and Russian Tsar Ivan the IV’s “failure to communicate.” This portion of the book concludes with literary scholar Claire Jowitt’s incisive analysis of Thomas Heywood’s play Fair Maid of the West to draw the theoretical connections between Elizabeth and the successful prosecution of piracy. The final section of the book is also the most startlingly original, with groundbreaking discussions of Elizabethan relations with the civilizations of Islam and India. Nabil Matar contributes a powerful essay describing the only account of Elizabeth as perceived by the Morocco of Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur, while Bernadette Andrea offers an account of how Elizabeth learned to communicate with the imperial courts of the sophisticated and cosmopolitan Islamic rivals, Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Persia. Concluding the book is Nandini Das’s essay concerning the efforts of Elizabeth’s government, English merchants, and Richard Hakluyt to begin the process of creating a commercial relationship with Mughal India, an event that presaged the emergence of the seventeenth-century British Empire.