Legacy and Final Years

Want to walk the halls of Anne Bleyn's childhood home? or explore the castles that made up Henry VI's English stronghold With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tutor past alongside the world's leading historians and archeologists You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week coovering everything from the ancient world World War II Just visit history hit. com For slash, suubbscribe Hello, I'm Professor Suusanna Lipbskom and welcome to Not Just the Tutors from History Hit A podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, fromom Holbein to the Huguenos, from Shakespeare to Samuraise. Relieved by regular doses of murdders, espionage and witchard In other words, just the tutors But most definitely also the tudors Over the past few weeks, I've been taking a closer look at some of English history's royal favorites. I started with Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I forbidden loveve We then jumped into the Stuart Age with George Viller' Duke of Buckingham The intimate favorite of King James I and S, and then Sarah Churchill Queen Anne's closest confidant 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 first 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 positions as gentleman pensioner ain of the Queen's Guard Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Vice Chamberlain, High Steward of the University of Cambridge, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Knight of the Garter, Privby 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 quQueen in fifteen sixty one, with his rather spectacular dancing. So how did Hatton come to win her favour And crucially, what role did he go on to play in Elizabeth in politics and religion What should we make of the rumours 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 Juner back in january twenty twenty three. Dr. Junger is a senior lecturer in early modern history at the Open University And his monograph Religion and Politics in Elizabeth and England, The Life of Sir Christopher Hatton published in twenty twenty two by Manchester University Press I began by asking Dr. Youunnger precisely how Hatton became one of Elizabeth's first favorites Well, I think in the nature of favorites is that they are purely the monarch's choice. There are a variety of ways to power in the sixteenth 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 happenatten 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 couldu The things that Courties 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 A lot of people come to court initially that way It's what they do afterwards that c becausecause 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 Personal service to the monarch is seen as a completely able way of picking out suitable men to the monarch in ruling the country Your book goes on to show that Hatton became more and more prominent in political affairs in the fifteen seventies Why was it then were the contextual reasons, was it about Hatton's own actions and character, or are we looking at a combination of the two 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 quQeen. and so he's aging into the role, perhaps. It's also a factor clearly of the quQueen's increasing confidence in him. all with 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 patn someomebody 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 strand of opinion in the country, she didn't want to give the impression that her regime was only dominated by hot Protestants who might have been hostile consonservative people Let's talk a little bit more about that then because One of the first questions to ask on this is Patton 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 Elizabeth in politics more broadly? 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 sympathize with Catholics, 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 recusency, and we have to be really careful of confusing Catholicism and recusency. Recusency 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 disobedience. So Hatton always wants to encourage people to attend church and obey the quQueen'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 counillors in Elizabeths goovernment around Lord Burley and the earl of Leicester and Francis Wolsingon 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 goovernment 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 rotestants 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 Burley and his allies about what England should do. And I think if we look at how the politics of the Rign actually plays out we can see that Burley very often doesn't get his way. We think of Burley as Elizabeth's Prime Mister almost as the person perhaps who really called the shot in Elizabeths England. Certainly a lot of historians have argued that that was the case, but very often his advice isn't followed by the quQeen. If it had been up to Cdly Walsingham, Mary Queen of Scots would have died an awful lot quicker than she did. I mean, she's in England in prison for twenty years. That clearly isn't something that Berleam Walssingham likes. Elizabeth waits twenty 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 Burley would have liked. We so often find Burley'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 Burley 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 arguent is that the support and guidance and advice of people like Hatton crucial there because that 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. That's a really useful corrective to the historography. it 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. and all of these were becoming very significant properties under Hatton as. he was growing in power. Holmby 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 lifted them 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 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 in Northampton It's only when he is given quite a good lucrative job by Elizabeth late in the fifteen seventies 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 Homeby or Holdenby, which is his ancestral home. And as you say, this is on a colossal scale. It' 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, immmense amounts of glass, obviously incredibly expensive. Inside, it's extremely spacious, It's reputed to be extremely richly decorated. Some of the tapestries that still exist in the Longaler at Hardwick Hall peopleople have gone there, you can look at the bits where Bessh of Hardwick's monogram is and you can see that they've been replaced on top of hatns 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 Ct or in London and doesn't go to his houses in Northamptonshire very much at all. He also owns Corf 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 Burley, of course did the same and he didn't spend a huge amount of time there, but of course the difference is that Burley had descendants, whereas Hton didn't, because he never married and he didn't have any children posossibly 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 Hattens do continue in Northamptonshire 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 Ey Place, which is the residence of the Bishop of Ey and Elizabeth basically browbeats the Bishop of Ey to give Hatton a long lease of part of this property and Hadt buils 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. probe a little bit more on that question of money because it's something our listeners have asked. How did courtters earn money and certainly enough money to run such prestigious places. and this seems a particularly opposite query with Hatton because you found that he was in debt to the tune of ten thousand pounds by fifteen seventy five. So Could he afford to build these virtual palaces 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 benfificence really I mean, she gives him a certain amount of money outright 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 quQeen 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 F first Rots 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 exchquer Elizabeth knows this, of course. she gives him the jobs precisely with this in mind because she needs her servants to be able to F a lifestyle at court to do all the things that they needed 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 Eventually, the crime will get the money back And they do. So Hatton dies owing about forty two thousand pounds, which is a completely dizzying amount of money in this period. But the government knows exactly what he's both to pay down to the halpenny 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 Mary Queen of Scots alleged that Hatton and Elizabeth were lovers and If you look at some of the extraordinarily ardent letters he sent, some of the things that surviveed It does seem rather like he was either in love with it or just very good at playing the game. Tell us a bit more about this and what you make of the relationship between them Yeah, it's a really interesting question and it is the question that always gets asked, isn't it? Was Elizabeth really a Virgin quQueen? And 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 I remember when Shehekah Cap' Elizabeth came out in theeen ninety seven it was ninety eight ninety seven There was a leader in the telegraph was so outraged at the suggestion that England's virgin queen was not entirely virginal. E then in the nineties, I'm very surprised that in the Victorian period anyone would have questioned it. 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 Cordly loveove, He writes these letters which are incredibly over the top as it seems to us now in a certain way, they were platonic lovers as it were, inasmuch as favorites like Hatton and Leester and later on the Earl of Essex, the secondecond 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 her husband So perhaps in that sense, they are lovers. and it does seem from the very fragmentary evidence. that around about fifteen seventy, 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's 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 favorites, 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 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 herer young life before she becomes quQeen, 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 How do you think we should understand Hatton as a favourite by comparison to someone like Robert Dudeley Earl of Leicester Given that he rose to prominence towards the end of Leicester's life in his contemporaries in the later period, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edward DeVer, El of Oxford They're all slightly different varieties of favouritees, aren't they? Leester wears some other hats as well as the warrior, for example, as the nobleman. And I think probably Leester was an even greater favourite than Hatton I think Simon Adams has said that Leester was the love of Elizabeth's life. And I think that probably rings true, but I think Hhattan 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 I think that Elizabeth certainly have 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. Burley over the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. It doesn't seem like she has anything like so biger 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 name for him or various versions of sheep Muton and Aakora Campai, 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 As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwixt the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit You've made in a couple of ways now that People like Burley and Morsingham were sometimes out of step 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 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? Whatas the little love lost between Hatton and Burley say? 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 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 Burley's case He's using things like Parliament to try and forforce the Queen's hand or using public opinion or the use of print 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. probablyably some of them don't like each other and so on and so on. But Hattan, 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 Cncil for the time when he was a member of the Privy Council and en countered how often he attended. and he actually attended more often than Burley over the period when they were together on the Privy Council, which was fourteen years or something. 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 she was doing on paper for the reasons that I was talking about earlier. 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 brringing messages essentially from the cououncil 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 fifteen eighties fighting a war And I think Bailey is 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 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 Llizbeth ruled by faction and parties do actually think that there's a bit more truth in that than some other historians do and the recent writing on Elizabeth's goovernment been that it is very harmonious. If we take a step back here, it used to be argued earlier in the twentieth century that the Earl of Leicester and William Cecilord Burley were really factional rivals. Burley was the conservative and Leicester the radical Protestant and they were working against each other. And then in the fifteen eighties, due to the work of Simon Adams, a great Elizabethan historian, Adams made the case that if you look at the evidence of Burley 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 Burley Leicester bllock 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 twenty 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 Burley 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 've mentioned MaryQeen 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 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 a big difficulty for Burley, Eet Al and C. whoo else do you have a successor other than Mary? Because of course there are other alternatives, the Gray 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 quQeen 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 fifteen fifty three where you have this sort of Protestant regime, Protestant monarch, where 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 hair brained, not very persuasive Protestant alternative Who is Jane Gray or whoever Burley would have picked If Elizabeth had died suddenly I don't think it's at all unlikely 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 scenario. It's hard to picture him as standing on the barricade and waving a sword and saying I will fight for Maryry Queen of Scots. Now one person who is known as a Protestant Hatton is closely associated with this Shranis Drake. How did this come about? and do we have other examples of Hatton exerting patronage like that. So we don't really know how that does come about But we know this is clearly a period in which Voyagers 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 voyagers to seek patronade from major political figures. And Hapen 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 seeas and so on I mean, we really don't have much evidence for that But we do know he does invest in these voyagers. 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 ronizing new techniques of cartography and map making that were increasingly being deployed in Elizabeth and England Knowing what we know about Sir Christopher Hatton Let me ask you why you think he's less well known than the others among Elizabeth I first favorites like Essex, for example, or Robert Godudley Well, I think the big problem really is the lack of sources. It is just this archival problem because clearly as historians, we're completely dependent on the sources that have been behind by contemporaries. and if you look at Lord Burley, for example, William Cecil, he's incredibly well documented. He's an 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 Walssingham andbel of Lesicester writes quite a lot. We have quite a lot of his correspondence too. But Vaddon, 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 as 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 quQeen herself. He was a courtier and not a lawyer or an administrator. All of his conversations with the quQeen 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 Hatt and to be certain about an awful lot of the facts of his life. 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? 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 nineteen forties because I was thinking of writing a book on a different subject.. For a while I'll just breathe through Hatton and sort of fill in a little gap there The author just sort of mentioned off handandedly, repeatedly again and again that Hatton was really friendly with Catholics Catholic individuals, and it gets to the point quite late in the book where he describes how Patton had two servants who were involved in the Babbington plot And this is a plot as people will know, that was intended to assassinate the quQueen And I thought, oh, well, that's quite strange really. People close to Elizabeth I first 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 cryptoc Catholic or very religiously conservative, different shades along this spectrum att 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 Elizabeths government that it's 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 twenty 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 patterns 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 As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodysiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit. Jin died in fifteen ninety one 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 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, Hutton is always a sympathizer towards Catholics. 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 episcal rites and so on And what Hatten 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 Yeahll L of Leicester is dead Walseam dies during that period. A lot of pro Protestant Puritan leaning councllors are dead or dying. and Hatton mced 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 starred Chamber. All of this is done in collaboration with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Joh Witgift 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 Burley 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 Hattan dies, barely 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 recisants. 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 Burley 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 fifteen eighty eight when the out of Leicester dies. The O of Leicester dies, Hatton is able to start this campaign against Puritans, Hatton dies, Bareley is able to stop it. It's the favorite It's Leicester andhattan whose deaths appeaar to mark the changes there And Burley comes across there as apparently rather impotent if Haten had remained alive throughout the fifteen nineties, 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 Haten had been trying to do all his life. And I mean again, we know that people like Burley are really rather more hot Potestants than the Qeen herself So I don't think it's implausible that Elizabeth was happy for Hatton to shift things back a bit towards the middle I do find it surprising that Burley 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 Burley able to stop this? There's one really interesting incident during this period where Burley 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 Burley shouldn't retire. And it seems to be a sort of hint that she maybe wants them to work together or that if he does retire, then Hatton will be left in charge potentially Early wouldn't really have liked that very much 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. Lifts on his death. That's a fascinating idea. What do you think it tells us that Hatton was given a state funeral? or what appears to be a state funeral anyway? whichich is an honor, of course, that Early doesn't receive. It is a 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 Leicester was dead and Walsingham as well that he and Burley 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 fifty or fifty one. when he dies