NOR was her poetic vein less happy in Latin. When, a little before the Spanish invasion in eighty-eight,* the Spanish ambassador, after a larger representation of his master’s demands, had summed up the effect thereof in a tetrastich,* she instantly in one verse rejoined her answer. We will presume to English both, though confessing the Latin loseth lustre by the translation.
“These to you are our commands:
Send no help to th’ Netherlands.*
Of the treasure took by Drake,
Restitution you must make.*
And those abbeys build anew
Which your father overthrew.*
If for any peace you hope,
In all points restore the Pope.”
The Queen’s Extempore Return:—
“Worthy king, know: This your will
At latter Lammas we’ll fulfil.”*
Her piety to God was exemplary; none more constant or devout in private prayers; very attentive also at sermons, wherein she was better affected with soundness of matter, than quaintness of expression. She could not well digest the affected over-elegancy of such as prayed for her by the title of “Defendress of the Faith,” and not the “Defender;”* it being no false construction, to apply a masculine word to so heroic a spirit.*
abridged
* In 1566, the residents of Spanish colonies in the Low Countries rose up against the harsh government of Philip II of Spain and the Spanish Inquisition, and in 1581 they declared the independent United Provinces. Elizabeth somewhat reluctantly stepped in to support her fellow-Protestants, and in 1588 the Spanish Armada was sent to teach her manners.
* That is, The Spanish Armada of 1588.
* A poem in four lines. Fuller translated them with four rhyming couplets, which by accident or design has the effect of making them sound faintly ridiculous.
* Sir Francis Drake (?1542-1596) had wreaked havoc in the Spanish Caribbean in 1584-85 as a ‘privateer’, impounding gold shipments bound for Spain’s war effort. He had followed it up by wrecking the Spanish fleet at Cadiz in 1587, an action disrespectfully remembered as ‘the singeing of the King of Spain’s beard’.
* A reference to the English Reformation, in which Henry VIII wound up the country’s monasteries, selling or gifting their lands to his cronies, and impounding their wealth — some of it donated by believers, some of it earned from farming and industry — to pay for his lavish lifestyle and his wars. Many good men and women were horribly murdered, the poor and sick were robbed of their safety-net and the industrial revolution was set back by over a century. See Charles Dickens on The Dissolution of the Monasteries.
* ‘At the latter Lammas’ means ‘on Judgment Day’, so in practice ‘never’. Lammas on August 1st each year was a day for settling accounts; ‘the Latter Lammas’ was Doomsday, the day when accounts are settled once and for all. In her Latin response, Elizabeth actually said ‘ad Graecas calendas’, i.e. ‘at the Greek calends’. The Roman calendar had days known as Calends, but the Greek did not, so promising to act ‘at the Greek calends’ meant ‘never’. Fuller has substituted a peculiarly English form of words.
* ‘Defender of the Faith’ was a title conferred on Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) on October 1st 1521 by Pope Leo X, who had cause to regret it in 1534, when the Act of Supremacy established the independence of the Church of England. Papal chagrin must have been all the greater when advisers to Henry’s son Edward VI began to turn the Church of England over to Protestant beliefs, while unblushingly parading Henry’s honour as his own — as Edward’s successors on the English throne do to this day.
* Fuller’s words recall Elizabeth’s speech (as later reported) to the seamen of the Royal Navy on August 9th, 1588, shortly before the battle with the Spanish fleet: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”
