It is a fallacy of inestimable use to the commonplace
historian, that in certain particular individuals may be delineated their
times, every imprint of every compromise and confusion to be endured, read
straight off like sap in a tree ring. But it is not only usefulness, nor
convenience, nor even deep laziness that allows this false notion to thrive.
The will comes into it more steadily and with greater power. Body and mind find
such narratives hard to resist now, and we may, I propose, be sure it was as
hard or more so in the past. Many human beings genuinely worthy of memory, true
potential fulcra of study, who may indeed provide the keys to unexpected
questions, remain, as it were, shrouded in their seeming suitability to their
period. Thus the picturesque illustration of legend, accretion, assumption,
overlays the evidence from which rightly conducted history derives her fatal
substance.
This is what that consummate poser of lies and insomniac
confessor of truths, Marshal Lermontov, meant when, condemning his Tsar to the
rope, he smilingly called him ‘a hero of our time.’ Just such a hero, in his
way, was, I propose, Sir Anthony Standen, secretary of state, ambassador
extraordinary, most skilful, and least loyal, of the servants of Mary, Queen of
Scots and of England.
Skirted about by a typicality he exploited throughout his flexible, but finite
career, he was in fact more idiosyncratic in his personal qualities and
significance than any of his colleagues or adversaries had the wit to guess.
Standen – if we are to believe the hagiographies of his
lifelong enemy, St Francis Walsingham – was born, in 1547, on the same day that
saw Tyburn bespattered with the blood of that too-faithful Regent, the
assiduous and ambitious Prince of the Church, the true founder of my sometime
University, Royal Ipswich; Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. The Standens were a family
of petty gentry who, indeed, grew up not far from the heart of Wolsey’s
influence, living as they did in Molesey, the very sight of their eyes shadowed
by the proximity of Hampton Court.
Edmund Standen, esquire, was an equable soul indeed, never credited with any
deed good or bad in his life, only with the acquisition of four sons, four
daughters, and, presumably, the woman necessary for their generation. The
little clan had never been anything but what they were, never learnt or worked
or been heard of at any trade, accomplishment or activity whatsoever. Insofar
as we trace them at all since the First Crusade took Glastonbury, it is as sensible, uncourageous
mediators, and witnesses to the quarrels of their less predictable social
superiors. The word ‘Surrey’ itself leadens
the eyelid. The Standens of Surrey, until Anthony, brought eyelashes down like
rusty portcullises.
Anthony was the first son, and it is one of the few insights
that the conscientious historian possesses into the character and intellect of
his father that one of his younger brothers was called Anthony, also, the other
two, remaining still closer to the paternal Genius, being named Edmund. The
four daughters’names do not come down to us in reliable forms, instead
asserting their birthright to their mother’s and their ancestresses’ absolute
obscurity; though it is not possible to disprove, either, the supposition that
one might have been the ‘Bell Standing’ who made a cuckold of the Squire of
Ditton in the 1580s. The first of the many poetic conveniences that both assist
and strangely blur Anthony Standen’s memorability, is that both Edmunds
remained in Molesey, just as both Anthonies sought wages, favour and fame on
the wider stage of the state.
Mary, Queen of Scots had come into the inheritance of her
cousin and namesake in 1558, at the age of sixteen, when the Standens were both
unknown young country boys. By the time the two Anthonies entered the service
of her cousin and favourite, young Lord Darnley, she had reigned from Westminster for some seven
years, exercising a domestic policy distinguished by religious toleration and
patronage of the arts, and a foreign policy that veered about drastically,
depending on the disposition of her marriages. Her first husband, passed on
with the rest of the kingdom by her defunct cousin, the previous Queen Mary,
was King Ferdinand II of Spain;
he had produced two sons, before succumbing to the bullet of a Protestant
assassin. Alongside her second consort, Lord Leicester, Mary officially
favoured the reformed religion, but she still liked the company of Catholic
gentlemen about her, purporting to consider their conversation more amusing.
Thus were made the careers of Darnley and the Standen brothers, all lissom
Papist youths not yet in their twenties. The elder Anthony was named as
Darnley’s esquire, the younger his cupbearer.
Robert Fleetwood, an older court figure who disapproved of
the direction affairs were taking under Lord Leicester’s influence, wrote a
secret report in October, 1566, to the chancellery of France, which gives us a brief
impression of the elder Anthony’s importance to and influence over young
Darnley:
His Lordship’s
head is quite hollowed out, as it might be the shell of a peascod, though its
outer habiliments indeed possess such a sheen as to beguile forth a Queen’s
gentleness. Yet withal, this Darnley is too poor a figure to play even, with
over much success, the soldier; all the same, he would be taken for a master of
poesie, a lutanist, a philosophical antiquarie, and I know not how much else.
In all this does the elder Ant. Standen, a quick and serpentine intelligencer,
stand his fast and indisseverable accomplice; so that, perchance, if he and the
said Standen are some day at bowls, and the Queen’s coming is heard abroad, hie
will they from her path, and this Standen doth strum and swither upon the
virginall or suchlike instruments. ‘What lists thou there,’ asks the Queen, and
‘ho,’ say her ladies, with never a glance astray, ‘that is your fair cousin,
Your Majesty, young Lord Darnley labouring as ever on your pleasure.’ And the
Queen smiles as though well pleased; only to my lords Leicester and Lethington
might she murmur, ‘I know very well it is indeed this Anthony, and not young
Caesar, who so plaieth at my heart.’ For the Queen so dubs young Darnley, never
forgetting how near he bideth to her blood and throne.
Fleetwood exaggerates both the Queen’s suspicion of her cousin
and her admiration for his servant, to please his French paymasters; but there
seems little doubt that the elder Anthony was widely considered as a luminous
‘man of parts’, esteemed as that rare thing, a reliable wit.
Of the younger Anthony, the stories were rarely as
creditable. The playwright Edmund Campion may have had him in mind as the
figure of Ganymede, in his 1570s pageant The
Joviall Feaste Daye, and St Francis Walsingham – as we have already seen,
no unprejudiced source – calls him outright the catamite of Darnley. For our,
or at any rate my, purposes, the young Standen figures chiefly as a wearying
encumbrance to the interpretation of his more able elder brother’s fiscal
obligations. Anthony the younger’s death is recorded without unanimity as to
time or cause, but universally placed at ‘The Ravenscote’, an inn on the
Southbank usually regarded as an insalubrious and ambiguous erotic resort.
For all the elder brother’s talents and rising fame,
Standen’s career at court was soon to go awry for reasons quite out of his
power to predict or evade. His master Lord Darnley grew up, unexpectedly, as an
increasing partisan of Leicester, who might have been expected to regard him as
an amatory threat, but instead wisely made of the self-regarding lordling a pet
and a toy. It was by Leicester’s hand that
Standen was knighted, so that he might have sufficient rank to bear an
ultimatum to the governor of Spanish Ireland in 1575. But while he was still at
sea news reached him that the Queen had divorced Lord Leicester, hurling into
bastardy their little son Prince Ambrose, in order to marry her husband’s
nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. When in short order word followed that Lord Darnley
had been found hanged in circumstances beyond comprehension or even decent consideration,
Standen thought it wisest to find a pretext to stay abroad. He sought and
received a commission to find a husband for Queen Mary’s eldest son among the
princes of Italy.
Matters are again complicated by the fact that the younger
Standen, his inglorious nemesis still some years ahead of him, seems to have
visited Venice
for a brief but very extravagant period at about this time, judging by certain
outraged statements in the Vendramin Correspondence. This has misled some
authorities into confecting an idea that the elder Standen was ambassador to Venice, which cannot have been so given his known
movements on the mainland of Italy.
As I have discussed elsewhere, Sir Anthony, as he now was, must have landed at Pisa, and progressed in leisurely steps to the court of
the Medici, at Fiesole.
To this itinerary, I do not hesitate to state even if I
cannot in all mundanity prove, we owe the most exquisite material and visual
legacy Sir Anthony left behind him in all his many travels, Bronzino’s Portrait of a Briton in a Green Doublet,
which I was lately the first, and indeed am still the only authority to attach
to Standen’s name and journeying. I have, however, achieved my object in
offering this suggestion, which was in fact to demonstrate the combination of
verbal prolixity and logical paucity which tends to infect any of my colleagues
when faced with the novel. Give us documents, they say, give us ledgers, lie
columns of figures at the steel-shod toes of the great goddess Provenance.
Well, why should I, when a severer force and motive is my employer and spur?
What is Mentor,
when opposed to Moira? Look at the long face, the crooked angle of Bronzino’s
Briton, the sunburn that resembles a light wound bleeding beyond expectation.
Look at the small eyes and the anxious lunge after fashion, for all the penance
of sweat; and recall, if you will, that to wear green at court was an ancient
perquisite of the Squires of Molesey.
Standen had presence of mind that never deserted him, and he
was now besides at the pinnacle of his solvency, repute, and, the Bronzino
taken as read, somewhat unconventional but undoubted physical charm. Yet his
mission, to find a bride for young Charles of Hapsburg, Prince of Wales and Scotland,
was foiled almost at once, by an unforeseen but ineluctable form of sabotage.
She was a form with a name, one that had snared a great magnate in its time –
Barbara von Blomberg, who had once been the ‘handfast wife’ of the Emperor
Philip the Grim. Exhausted by that worthy but oppressive monarch’s religiose
determination – which did not quite extend to domestic matters – Barbara,
originally a mezzo-soprano singer from Regensburg,
had determined to enjoy more varied fruits throughout her briefly lamented late
protector’s dominions. She was thus a kind of aunt-out-of-marriage of the young
prince whose prospects were under discussion; and she was determined to bring
them to ruin. Besides, like many of his acquaintance before and afterward, she
seems to have a taken a real liking to Standen.
These atavistically simple relations were, however, not a
little entangled by the unfortunate coincidence that Farinata de’ Medici,
Prince of Fiesole, also aspired to the enchanting Barbara’s bed. It should be
noted in a spirit of proportionate admiration that Frau von Blomberg was at
this point almost fifty years of age. However it may be, Prince Farinata and
his wife Ginevra were declared to be dead at the hand of an unknown poisoner on
the same day. Ginevra then recovered long enough to place the sole blame on the
Prince, who, shocked out of his own stupor, blamed Blomberg. Standen’s name
went unmentioned during the scandal, but in point of fact he and Blomberg had
both departed long since, bound back for the familiar disputed territory of Spanish Ireland. The predominant
emotions provoked by the whole unedifying story must, surely, be surprise and
regret that Bronzino never depicted Blomberg.
Not that la Blomberg, however, passed her eventful days
altogether unimmortalised, if my suspicions, and their foundations, whether
empirical, circumstantial, or esoteric, may be trusted. It is my contention
that the eighth shorter sonnet sequence of John Knox, which is often
acknowledged to include a certain amount of spurious material, also contains
one verse of a standard equal to the great Scotch Bard’s, but in quite a
distinct strain. Following several intimations within (and behind) the text
itself, I propose that this remarkable little poem is that very scarce
treasure, a lyric in English at a court of the Rinascimento.
Stay, fatal empress, for that all thy fame
Dearer than spikenard’s
breath or honour’s self
Firmer in sway and
hardier in health
Embanners thee, e’en so,
belay thy game
Of Catilines and catkins
of the same
What cares the Panther
for the corse’s pelf
Who suck and nourishes
gore unto health
And martiall Destinie
accords the lame?
Catiline, of course, is a reference to the Consul and
Triumvir of that name, murderer of the philosopher Cicero and generally
disdained in poetic tradition, who won his greatest victory at Fiesole. The author
addresses a lady as ‘empress’ with such wheedling insistence that a definite
impression is conveyed that she is not truly
of such, or any similar, rank, but that regal and imperial titles nevertheless
have some meaning in her past, or milieu. Furthermore, the final lines seem to
indicate an amoral, but not unimpressive personal credo that favours homicide
above conventional inheritance, and considers the victim’s plight superior to
the dependant position of the comfortable invalid. We may note, at this point,
that Prince Farinata, like many Medici, was rendered almost immobile by
rickets.
Such limbes as thou has cast over this
board,
Such as commingle with
black art and eyes,
Of travail, more than
trusting, I forethought,
And likewise did
forswear the em’rald sward
Steeled, for fresh the
path, but fell the rise
All that thy woundings
and thy gait have taught.
The sonnet has, of course, been commonly read as a rather
stilted and literal account of the famous moment when John Knox abandoned his
minister’s calling and entered the service of Queen Mary, smitten, as a
surprising number of eyewitnesses avouch, by her sheer physical immaculacy. But
I would counter that the muse of this poem is no immaculate, not the sort of
woman who would extract the tribute of fawning hyperbole from even a renegade
priest. On the contrary, she appears, unashamedly, to be a conscious bad lot,
committed to a perilous course and only attractive – irresistible, even? – to a
particular sort of worldly, self-deceived man of affairs. Beside the Catiline
reference, I maintain that this is quite sufficient a pedestal on which to
erect those unusually matched inammorati, Sir Anthony Standen and Frau Barbara
von Blomberg.
The new governor of Spanish Ireland was Don John, son of la
Blomberg and the Emperor Philip, who had been named to the position as
banishment rather than reward, to punish him for his disastrous defeat by the
Turks at Lepanto. His mother thus expected a kindly reception in Dublin for both herself
and her new attachment. The journey took them, however, at first overland,
through Spain,
where Standen posed as a dealer in pictures, adopting the whimsical name of
Pompeio Pellegrini. The Duchess of Medina Sidonia attests in her recollections
that the disguise was a thin one, for ‘Signora Pellegrini’ much resented
remaining incognita in a land where she had once been received with almost
imperial honours.
It was, however, shortly before the Pellegrini pair were to
set sail for Cork from Cadiz that Standen succeeded in passing to a Scots
agent, Buchanan (no relation of the poet and grammarian), a letter admitting
his true identity and assuring Lord Lethington, Queen Mary’s Secretary of
State, of his continuing allegiance and loyalty, despite ‘any outward
apparition or appurtenance of obeisance to any potentate of Spayne or of Erse
partes’. This communication was a well-proportioned example of Standen’s
deviousness and ingenuity, for it was itself concealed in a ‘Pompeio Pellegrini’
missive purporting to offer the Queen first refusal on certain items in the
estate of Giorgione, the supreme Venetian painter who had just perished at a
great age.
A gap then settles, itself indicative of Standen’s
rigorously adaptable temperament, for Sir Anthony is next heard of in 1588, on
the staff of the victorious Earl of Essex. Essex had just routed Don John and
the Spanish from Ireland
after showing himself to be remarkably familiar with the disposition of their
forces. Barbara von Blomberg, a survivor out-survived, vanishes from any
subsequent record; and it seems to me regrettably certain that Standen only
returned to his royal mistress after definitively ridding himself of his
quasi-imperial one.
The Queen had, during Sir Anthony’s adventures abroad,
outlasted Sidney
and two subsequent husbands, the Earl of Oxford and Sir Walter Raleigh. It
seems that Lethington now counselled her to pre-empt any threat from her
victorious commander Essex’s popularity, by adding him to this roll of honour;
and the sudden rise of Standen upon the Queen’s sixth and, as it would turn
out, final marriage leaves us in little doubt that his operations were among
those that greased the progress of the match. 1589 saw his appointment to the
delicate but lucrative Embassy Extraordinary to Paris;
his first duty was to ensure the continued enmity of France
towards Spain,
and vice versa. It is, then, another scarcely – but unavoidably – credible
instance of his complex character, that a Venetian ambassador informed his government
that, three months into the Paris
post, Sir Anthony covertly but personally involved himself in yoking the
Dauphin to an Infanta. This intrigue could have no other name than treason, and
yet it was to redound to the greater glory and security of Britain’s government, and, more
immediately, enable the further ascent of Standen himself.
For it was not the Ambassador Extraordinary who seemed to
most to bear the blame for this fatal combination of enemies, not the Queen,
nor her new husband, but the longest-lasting genius of her council, her
Secretary of State, the faithful Lethington. His execution led to his protégé
Standen’s immediate recall, not for a reprimand, but for a promotion into his
master’s boots. Francis Bacon in discreet company quipped ‘that Sir Anthony had
enjoyed an untroubled crossing indeed, upon the fair wind of his Friend’s last
Breaths.’
The hostile powers of the continent still threatened a time
of dire and unavoidable war, but to the fertile invention of Standen, and the
unscrupulous resolve of his new patron Essex, the solution was ready to hand.
At home the noise was all of pipe and drums and martial footfall; and in a
bitter war to the end, Essex and Standen’s men
suggested, who was the better monarch, a lecherous old woman or a virile,
proven young warrior? Abroad, their agents dripped speeches of syrup, and
dangled an irresistible, if humiliating gift – the total reversal of the
Protestant Reformation which had been so close to the hearts of both Queen
Maries.
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