ABSTRACT
At the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth declared, ‘I mean to direct all my actions by good advice and counsel’.1 In following this course of action, her intent was to secure her own position as Queen, and to establish England as a sovereign power capable of competing with the two European powerhouses: Spain and France. Public opinion would play a crucial role in the realization of both of these agendas, and Elizabeth not only knew the value of her public image but also how to use that image to her own advantage. Did Elizabeth deserve the throne and how could she safeguard England? Throughout her reign, Elizabeth remained acutely aware of her station, her code of conduct, and her chastity. That Elizabeth participated in a public code of honor is observable in her 1566 speech to Parliament, when she declared, ‘I will never break the word of a prince spoken in public place for my honor sake [sic]’.2 In Tudor England honor resided in the ‘hearts and opinions of other men’; and, as such, the code was a public one. When giving one’s word or oath, honor became a public gesture that had to be upheld in order to preserve one’s honor: ‘By the symbolic rite of “giving one’s word” – the word of honour – promise bound honour itself to a specified position or course of action. Once so bound, withdrawal was possible only at the price of public diminishment. For “steadfastness” required adherence to an honour commitment once taken up.’3 One finds three primary groupings of meaning embodied in the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century concept of honor – that concerned with rank; with reputation, or ‘regulation of conduct’; and with chastity: ‘In general, writers of the period tend to feel that honour is a single complex idea: identity of word is treated as identity of thing, and the various meanings are all felt to be related’.4 Sir William Segar asserts in his treatise on Honor Military and Civil (1602) that ‘Neither are dignities in descents of noble
bloods … enough to advance men unto Honor’; instead, the individual who aspires to an honorable estate must also practice the moral virtues of justice, temperance or modesty, and fortitude. These virtues further demanded the assistance of prudence, without which ‘no other vertue can proceed’. Segar defines the ‘force’ of prudence as ‘a certaine naturall skill to distinguish the good from evill, to desire the one, and detest the other, to say that is fit to be spoken, and conceale that which is unfit to be uttered: to prosecute that which is worthy, and forsake that which is vicious and vile’.5
