Was Elizabeth I Interested in Maps - and Did It Matter?

Was Elizabeth I Interested in Maps - and Did It Matter?Author(s): Peter BarberSource: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 14 (2004), pp. 185-198Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679314 .

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Transactions of the RHS 14 (2004), pp. 185-98 O 2004 Royal Historical Society DOI: Io.Ioi7/Soo8044oIo4ooos3I Printed in the United Kingdom

WAS ELIZABETH I INTERESTED IN MAPS - AND DID IT MATTER?

By Peter Barber

ABSTRACT. It tends to be assumed that Queen Elizabeth was interested in maps and globes, not least because she was frequently depicted in their vicinity. Investigation strongly suggests that this was not the case. It is argued that this did matter. By depriving her of an independent source of spatial information, it made her more dependent on her ministers and, in particular, it meant that the royal estates were not mapped before 1600oo, with long-term financial and possibly constitutional consequences for the crown.

There is probably no English or British monarch who was portrayed more meaningfully in the vicinity of maps and globes than Elizabeth I. This should cause little surprise for in the course of her lifetime the use of maps and globes moved from the fringes into the centre of English life.' In the process, as their practical potential as well as their frequent aesthetic appeal were realised, they aroused an enthusiasm among Elizabeth's contemporaries that was comparable to that which accompanied the appearance of the internet over the past decade.

Many of the most important people in Elizabeth's life are known to have been map enthusiasts. The most prominent and active as a patron from the early 1530s was Henry VIII himself but, within their more limited spheres, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer were not far behind. Those who were young or were growing up in the 1520s and 1530S were particularly likely to be excited by maps. Elizabeth's tutor, Roger Ascham, almost certainly used Ptolemy's maps to instruct his young charge in history as recommended by Sir Thomas Elyot in his influential treatise, The Boke Named the Governour of 1531. Thomas Seymour and his brother Edward, duke of Somerset and Lord Protector to Edward VI,

' Peter Barber, 'England I: Pageantry, Defense and Government: Maps at Court to 1550', and 'England II: Monarchs, Ministers and Maps 1550-1625', in Monarchs, Ministers and Maps. The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, 1992), 26-98. More generally, see David Buisseret, The Mapmakers' Quest -Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2003).

'85



186 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

were adept at using maps for their own purposes.2 The inventories of Leicester House and Kenilworth reveal that Elizabeth's great love, Robert Dudley, had an extensive collection of maps for information as well as display.3 William Cecil first entered Elizabeth's life as surveyor of her lands from 1550.4 His enthusiasm for maps of all kinds of has been extensively documented.5 Other courtiers and ministers were similarly fascinated. Sir Francis Walsingham regularly used them and had his galleries on the Strand adorned with wall maps.6 In 1587-8, Elizabeth's 'Dancing Chancellor', Sir Christopher Hatton, paid Anthony Ashley to translate into English Waghenaer's Spieghel der Zeevaerdt (I584), the first purpose- made printed atlas of sea charts of the coasts of Europe with sailing directions.' Walter Raleigh commissioned Thomas Harriot and the artist John White to map the Virginia colony in America from 1584 and his Irish estates a decade later.8

Elizabeth's wider circle also included numerous map enthusiasts. The polymath, mapmaker and visionary,John Dee, student of Gemma Frisius, and friend of Gerard Mercator, was one of her principal advisers on colonial and navigational matters. Sir Henry Sidney, her long-serving, capable and pragmatic lord deputy in Ireland and the Welsh Marches, the father of Sir Philip Sidney (whose cartographical interests are also recorded), was the patron ofJenkinson's map of Muscovy (1562), the earliest known regional map by an Englishman to be printed in England, and between 1569 and 1572, of Robert Lythe's epoch-making relatively detailed though unpublished mapping of the whole of Ireland.9

With this background it would be natural to assume that Elizabeth took more than a passing interest in maps. The visual evidence strongly suggests this.'0 The best known of the 'Sieve portraits' (that by Quentin Matsys the younger, c. I58o, now in Siena), shows her next to a large

SCalendar of State Papers Domestic, 1547-1553 (repr. 1992), 87, no. 188. Barber, 'England I', 40-2.

3 Cited in Simon Adams, 'The Papers of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester III: The Countess of Leicester's Collection', Archives, 22 (1996), I-27.

4 Susan Doran, Queen Elizabeth 1 (2003), 29. In this case taking its traditional meaning of supervisor and overseer.

SSee particularly R. A. Skelton andJohn Summerson, A Description ofMaps andArchitectural Drawings in the Collection Made by William Cecil, First Baron Burghley. Now at Haffeld House (Oxford, 1970o).

Barber, 'England II', 68--q. 7 Ibid., 65. 8 Ibid., 62-3. 9 Ibid., 67.

"' For the subsequent paragraph: Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (1987), and Susan Doran,'Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I', in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke and New York, 2003), I71-99.



WAS ELIZABETH I INTERESTED IN MAPS? I87

globe with the sun shining on England and ships sailing westwards while the rest of the world is thrown into darkness. The Armada portraits show her with her hand resting over the Americas on a smaller globe. In the Ditchley portrait of about 1592 she is depicted, armillary spheres hanging from her ears, actually standing on a globe, with her feet on an oversized map of England, protecting it from the storms raging to her right over the war-torn European mainland. It was followed in 1596 by Crispin van der Passe's engraving commemorating the sacking of Cadiz. It shows Elizabeth in front of part of a globe representing Spain, with smoke rising from what would seem to be Cadiz and another port." Perhaps the most intriguing cartographic depiction of the queen, however, is to be found as the preface toJohn Case's Sphaera Civitatis of 1588. Elizabeth is shown embracing a version of the Ptolemaic universe containing allegories of her ministers as fixed stars in a genuine court of the Star Chamber, the spheres representing the virtues of her rule, such as prudence, steadfastness, religion, clemency and unbending justice with the queen as the unmoving earthly centre. Older viewers would have recognised that the image was copied from a type of medieval mappamundi showing God as the prime mover embracing the world or universe.'

During the course of her reign, Elizabeth was the dedicatee of at least three highly significant cartographic works. The earliest was Christopher Saxton's atlas of the counties of England and Wales of 1579 with an allegorical frontispiece attributed to Remigius Hogenberg depicting Elizabeth enthroned. It has been argued that Elizabeth was personally involved in its composition even to the extent of insisting on the re- engraving of her robes so that in the second state they appeared to fall more naturally over her knees.'3 In 1591-2 she was the recipient of Emery Molyneux's first terrestrial and celestial globes.14 Engraved by the Flemish 6migr6 mapmaker Jodocus Hondius and with diameters of 62 inches, they were then among the largest printed globes ever to have been produced. Undoubtedly the most outstanding cartographic dedication, however, was of the Atlas of Gerard Mercator, probably the best-known cartographer of all time, on the appearance of its final part in I595. The term Atlas was henceforth to be associated with all such books of maps. The dedication, in 1570, to Philip II of the first true modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by its editor and publisher, Mercator's friend and

" Doran, 'Virginity, Divinity and Power', I79-80. " Cf. British Library, Additional Manuscripts [hereafter BL, Add. MS] 28681, fo. 9V. '3 Ifor M. Evans and Heather Lawrence, Christopher Saxton: Elizabethan Map-Maker

(Wakefield, 1979), 20. '4 Anna Maria Crino and Helen Wallis, 'New Researches on the Molyneux Globes', Der

Globusfieund, 35-7 (1987), 14-15.




rival, Abraham Ortelius, must have made the Mercator dedication all the sweeter.

At court Elizabeth encountered maps at almost every turn. The Privy Gallery in Whitehall continued to be adorned with the maps that had been there in her father's day, including one presented to Henry in 1524 by Girolamo da Verrazzano.'5 To them had been added, since I549, a printed world map by Sebastian Cabot,'6 and by the 1590s the manuscript world map showing the route of Drake's circumnavigation, which Drake had personally presented to Elizabeth on his return.'7 The queen's portrait is found on a small map of England of 1590 byJodocus Hondius'8 and her arms appear on all of Saxton's county maps, associating her and her government with every part of her mainland dominions. Behind the grand galleries maps were brought into use to assist in running the court. A rudimentary but perfectly usable routes plan, for instance, almost certainly derived from Saxton's recently published county maps was drawn up when Elizabeth's progress into Suffolk and Norfolk in 1578 was being planned.'9

Elizabeth's official writings often convey the impression of a genuine interest in maps and an understanding of their potential for government and administration, particularly in the case of Ireland. Throughout her reign, the governance of Ireland abounded in the mixture of distant military, colonial and administrative problems which maps are particularly good at elucidating. A manuscript map of Ireland, probably resembling the 'Goghe' map drawn in that year,'0 was evidently being consulted during the composition of a letter of I I June 1567 in which the queen, condoling Lord Deputy Sidney, on 'your paynfull long journey from the end ofJanuary until the middest of April', proceeded to recite his route through most of central and southern Ireland in considerable detail. Later in the same letter the queen turned to the planting of Protestant English families in Ulster which, following the defeat of Shane O'Neill, was enjoying a brief period of stability. She asked Sidney to inform her 'what contreys there are to be taken and kept by the English people and

'5 Laurence C. Wroth, The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazano 1524-1528 (New Haven, 1970), 167.

'6 Barber, 'England I', 44. '7 Helen Wallis, 'The Cartography of Drake's Voyage', in Sir Francis Drake and the Famous

Voyage, 1577-158o: Essays Commemorating the Qadricentennial of Drake's Circumnavgation of the Earth, ed. Norman Thrower (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 121-63.

'8 Gunter Schilder, 'Jodocus Hondius: Creator of the Decorative Map Border', The Map Collector, 32 (1985), 40-3.

'9 The National Archives (Public Record Office), State Papers [hereafter TNA (PRO), SP] 12/25 fo. 98, reproduced in Catherine Delano-Smith and RogerJ. P. Kain, English Maps. A History (1999), 144.

eo TNA (PRO), MPF 68. There was no sufficiently detailed printed map available at that time. See Andrew Bonar Law, The Printed Maps of Ireland 1612-185o (Dublin, I997).




what be the names of the contreys, the ports, the castells and such lyke', and added as an afterthought:

And if you can speedely cause the situation ofcontrees to be described in platte, and sent by some hable to infourme us therof, you shall therby much satisfy us, for in planting and stablishing of our people in contrees to have perpetuitee we cannot sodenly nor without good information resolve... Sense our determination of writing thus farre, thinking more of the maner of the planting of the people in that contrey of Ulster, we ar very desirous to be infourmid from you what parts in that contrey do properly belong unto us, as our demeane of our Earldome of Ulster, or any other title which we have by inheritance therto. And what be the other parcels that have been the possessions of other Irish and Englishe and yet holden by them of us by any kynde of service and rent... And for the better understanding therof, if you can fynde some skilfull person there that can make a more particular description, then already we have by any card, it wolde helpe us to the under-standing of that which you shall write.2'

Yet, persuasive though this evidence for a genuine interest in and understanding of the potential of maps appears to be at first glance, the reality was rather different. Elizabeth did not commission the Molyneux globes and the grand paintings and the engravings showing her in the vicinity of maps and globes. Far from being an expression of her own inclinations, they were probably intended as a means of flattering a reluctant queen into supporting the policies implicit in the images. The patrons, who to greater or lesser extents selected the imagery and allegories,"2 were almost all strongly Protestant, anti-Spanish and imperial-minded individuals who conspicuously commissioned and used maps.23 Francis Drake is traditionally said to have commissioned the prototype of the Armada portraits (and had himself portrayed, appropriately, with a globe).24 Hatton, the patron of the Siena Sieve portrait, was the dedicatee of Case's tract and employer of the surveyor Ralph Treswell.25 William Sanderson, the wealthy merchant who paid ?I,ooo for the creation of the Molyneux globes was closely linked to

21 Sidney State Papers 565-7o, ed.Tomis O'Laichlin (Dublin, 1962), 61, 69 no. 41I. For similar sentiments see also

7I-2 (no. 42), III (no. 65) (Elizabeth I to Sidney, 6July 1567, 6June I569). 22 Doran, 'Virginity, Divinity and Power', 187, I90. 23J. H. Andrews, Shapes of Ireland. Maps and their Makers 1564-1839 (Dublin, 1997), 57, 58,

80, 83; Sir Henry Lee, ostensibly a 'hermit' from court by 1592, was an exception but he had close links across the political spectrum with known map enthusiasts and with the Board of Ordnance. See E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee (Oxford, 1936).

24 Elizabeth: The Exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, ed. Susan Doran (2003), 231-2, no. 238; Strong, Gloriana, 131-3; Karen Hearn, Dynasties. Paintings in Tudor and Jacobean England

sg5o-r63o (1995), 88, no. 43. Karen Hearn has, however, informed me

(private communication) that recent research suggests that the Tyrwhitt-Drake family only purchased its version of the Armada painting, said to have been commissioned by Francis Drake, in the mid-nineteenth century.

25 Barber, 'England II', 79, 82; Hearn, Dynasties, 85-6, no. 40.




Drake, the Hakluyts and Dee, and was married to Raleigh's niece, while Molyneux himself had served under Drake.26

On closer inspection, there is no evidence that the queen took any particular interest in the maps, globes and the atlas dedicated to her. There is no sign of personal involvement in the course of Saxton's surveying activities, unlike Burghley who was presented with proofs of the county maps as they came off the press. Indeed the incorporation into the royal library presumably after 1598 of the atlas that Burghley constructed around these maps suggests that until then the library had lacked such a comprehensive cartographic survey.'27 The dedication of the maps to Elizabeth I, then, seems to have been a formality.

The dedications on the Molyneux globe and in the preface to Mercator's Atlas also give no hint of the queen's personal interest. They are instead implicit petitions for support from her. The dedication on the Molyneux terrestrial globe, significantly placed over North America, pleads for her to support naval expansion by lauding the extent of the globe controlled by her naval forces.'8 The dedication fronting Mercator's Atlas was addressed to her as the patron of English overseas discovery in the hope that, at a time of increasing wartime censorship and security precautions, she would allow her subjects to communicate information about their discoveries to Mercator's heirs, living though they were as ostensible Catholics in Catholic Europe.'" But perhaps the most significant indicator of Elizabeth's lack of cartographic interest is to be seen in her failure to respond in any way to John Norden's direct address to her for patronage of his Speculum Britanniae series of guidebooks to the English counties illustrated by maps which provided far more administrative and economic information (such as the location of ironworks) than had Saxton's of two decades earlier.30

The contrast with Elizabeth's predecessors and fellow monarchs is striking. Her father's hunger for maps can be read not only in the

26 Crino and Wallis, 'New Researches', 13. 27 Now BL, Royal MS i8.D.III. Skelton and Summerson, Hagield House, 20; Evans and

Lawrence, Saxton, 9-19, 143-7. The only Old Royal Library copy of Saxton's atlas, bound with Robert Adams's charts of the defeat of the Armada (now BL, Maps C.7.c.I), seems only to have entered the Royal Library underJames I (R. A. Skelton, County Atlases of the British Isles 1579-185o. A Bibliography, I: 1579-1703 (Folkestone, 1970), 9, 209).

28 Crino and Wallis, 'New Researches', 14. '9 Most recently, Nicholas Crane, Mercator. The Man who Mapped the Planet (2oo002), 286-7. 30 Frank Kitchen, 'John Norden (c. I547-1625): estate surveyor, topographer, county

mapmaker and devotional writer', Imago Mundi, 49 (1997), 46, 48. The omnibus manuscript volume that he presented to the queen is now BL, Add. MS 31853. I am grateful to Catherine Delano Smith for this observation. Kitchen excuses Elizabeth on the grounds of the other pressures on her ('Ireland... rising prices... rumours of another armada'), but a real enthusiast would have found the money, as did William Sanderson who paid for the publication ofNorden's maps of Hampshire and Sussex in 1595-6.



WAS ELIZABETH I INTERESTED IN MAPS? 191

directives that he sent to the gentry resident on the coasts of England between 1538 and 1540 but also in his dynamic communications with his representatives in France in the mid-I540s, not the least of whom was the military engineer and cartographerJohn Rogers. Geoffrey Parker and Barbara Mundy have described the energy with which Philip II personally commissioned medium- and large-scale surveys of his American and European dominions because - in words that could have been written by Burghley - 'things crop up every day which can only be clearly and properly understood by knowing the distances, the rivers and the borders', even though these ambitious enterprises remained incomplete and in manuscript.3'

Detailed investigation of the drafts of Elizabeth's instructions to Sir Henry Sidney in the National Archives again shows that things were not as they seemed. The basic text is always in a scribal hand and was almost certainly dictated by Burghley. The language and mindset are very similar to those to be found in Burghley's letters to Sir John Norris during the Rouen campaign in 1591.3 Before the final version was prepared Burghley went through the drafts and the particularly cartographic references to surveys, to routes, to plats and to the purposes that they were intended to serve are in his hand. It was only then that the drafts were shown to the queen for approval, usually being returned without further amendments.

This impression of the queen's reliance on Burghley in cartographic matters can be read into John Dee's account of his presentation to Elizabeth of the 'two rolls' containing his arguments for her rights to sovereignty over most of North America. These rolls no longer seem to survive, but a map in the British Library33 is probably derived from them, the endorsements being a summary of the arguments contained in one of the rolls and the autograph manuscript map of the northern hemisphere on the recto, illustrating them, being a copy of the second roll.34 Dee recorded how he had given the rolls to the queen personally while they were in the garden at Richmond Palace in the morning of 3 October I580. The queen arranged to discuss them with him that afternoon in her privy chamber 'where the L. Treasurer also was, who.., did seem to doubt much that I had or could make the argument for her Highness' title so as I pretended'. A week later the queen visited

3' Geoffrey Parker, 'Philip II, Maps and Power', in Geoffrey Parker, Empire, War andFaith in Early Modern Europe (2002), particularly o107 (Philip II to the viceroy of Naples, 1566); Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas (Chicago, 1996).

32 See, for example, List and Analysis of State Papers Foreign Series Elizabeth I: III (September Is59-April 1592), ed. R. B. Wernham (1980), 269, no. 418 (Burghley to Norris, 27July I59i).

33 BL, Cotton MS Augustus I.i.I. 34 William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics ofReading and Writing in the English Renaissance

(Amherst, I995), I83-7.



I92 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Dee at his home in Mortlake, and 'told me that the Lord Treasurer had greatly commended my doings for her title, which he had to examine'.35 A monarch with a known enthusiasm for maps, like her father or Philip II, would probably have found time to look at the maps himself and not have relied purely on his minister's judgement."6

In fact, Elizabeth seems to have lacked the graphic, visual dimension that characterised her father, her favourites and her most trusted minister. In December I545 Elizabeth presented her stepmother, Katherine Parr, with an English translation of Calvin's Institutions. Despite their hostility to the worship of images, Protestant theologians, notably Calvin, were not unconditionally opposed to the arts, and least of all to picture/map making as evidenced by the cartographic illustrations in their Bibles. So Elizabeth would have been under no theological pressure to express her preferences in any particular way. Though doubtless influenced by her tutors, it seems quite likely that she was expressing her own views when in the accompanying letter, she wrote that despite their laudable efforts, painters and sculptors 'could and cannot yet represent or reveal by their works the mind, or wit, the speech or understanding of any person'. By contrast writing and letters 'seems to me the most clever, excellent and ingenious' of the arts 'For through their ordering not only can the aforesaid bodily features be declared, but also (which is more) the image of the mind, wiles and understanding, together with the speech and intention of the man, can be perfectly known.'37 The care she took with her own elaborate signature would further support the importance that she attached to the written word.

If one looks at other indices the impression of a lack of interest in maps grows stronger. Marcus, Mueller and Rose's authoritative edition of Elizabeth's authenticated personal writings contains not a mention of maps in contrast to the later letters of Henry VIII and the letters and annotations on documents of Philip II, Henri IV, Burghley and Sully who regularly mentioned them. Again had Elizabeth been really excited by maps, one might expect someone of her literary ability to utilise Shakespearean-style cartographic allegories in her poems, speeches and prayers.38 Again, there is no sign. One might also expect observers to comment on her excitement about maps, in the way that Laurence

35 The Diaries ofJohn Dee, ed. Edward Fenton (Charlbury, 1998), I1. 36 For examples of Philip II studying maps intensively and critically see Parker, 'Philip II,

Maps and Power', 97-8, II-12. 37 Elizabeth 1: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janet Mueller and Mary Beth Rose,

(London and Chicago, 2ooo), Is. 38 For which see Nigel Morgan, 'The Literary Image of Globes and Maps in Early

Modern England', in English Map Making i5oo-i65o, ed. Sarah Tyacke (1983), 46-56.




Nowell, in 1563, commented on the 'especial pleasure' that Cecil was known to take in maps."39 But no such reference is known.

Someone interested in maps might be expected to commission them for their private use and to treasure them - and even perhaps to draw them. Henri IV of France sketched the plan of a proposed fort, asked for (and was sent) a chart 'diapr6 et dor6' of Drake's circumnavigation in I585 and had the Galerie des Cerfs at Fontainebleau decorated with detailed semi-pictorial plans of his palaces and their surrounding parks.40 Lord Burghley also drew several sketch maps in order to clarify issues for himself.4'

Elizabeth's role, however, was entirely negative as demonstrated by an unfinished manuscript hydrographic atlas commissioned by Mary I for her husband Philip from the Portuguese chart maker Diogo Homem.42 According to an unverifiable tradition, rather than having the atlas completed, as someone with an interest in maps may have done, she gouged Philip's arms out from the royal arms over England. The gesture, if understandable, further suggests a lack of aesthetic sensibility. There is no mention of her having attempted to draw a map. She seems never to have commissioned a map in a private capacity. Elizabeth does not seem even to have looked after the numerous maps that she inherited from her father, many of which disappeared into the private archives of her ministers and notably Lord Burghley.43 Again this contrasts with Philip II who knew perfectly well what maps he owned and attached great importance to them, though he could not always succeed in laying his hands on the particular ones that he wanted.44

One can only conclude that Elizabeth was not excited by maps, though she was well aware that others were and that maps could play a valuable propaganda role. She was evidently familiar with them and was prepared to request them on her ministers' behalf: local corporations and justices of the peace were forced into commissioning and utilising them during her reign because of her privy council's insistence on receiving maps to illustrate any issues that had a spatial element.45 It is quite possible though

39 BL, Lansdowne MS 6, fo. I35, as translated in R. A. Skelton, Saxton's Survey of England and Wales with afacsimile of the Wall-Map of i583 (Amsterdam, 1974), 15-I6.

4o Buisseret, Maps and Monarchs, 107; Wallis, 'Cartography of Drake's Voyage', 123; Peter Barber, 'Maps and Monarchs in Europe I55o-I8oo00', in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott, (Cambridge, 1997), III--I3.

4' Barber, 'England II', 70, 72-3. 42 BL, Add. MS 5414A, illustrated in Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps, ed. April

Carlucci and Peter Barber (200oo1), 54-5. 43 Barber, 'England II', 71-2.

44 Philip II to Francisco de Erasso, 5 July 1568, quoted in Parker, 'Philip II, Maps and Power', 97-8.

45 Peter Barber, History of Cartography III (Chicago, forthcoming).




that Elizabeth herself never voluntarily took a close, analytical look at a map.

Did this really matter? Some of Elizabeth's contemporaries certainly thought it did, because of the value they attached to maps as instruments of government. In June I571 Sir Henry Sidney's secretary, Edmund Tremayne, wrote that Lythe's manuscript map of Ireland would enable Sidney

to describe every part of [Ireland] with their frontiers, and with all the borders, havens, creeks and rivers with other notable commodities. By the same Your Lordship is able to describe every man his country, of what power he is, and what he hath been, and how it is neighboured, what quarrels he hath, and how [in] every war each of them is affected. [Also] how straight you found the English Pale, and how it is now enlarged. The places that be fortified already will appear. And so may you with good commodity thereupon express what your opinion is for fortifications in any other place that your lordship shall think good. And so of the bridge that your lordship hath builded [at Athlone] and any other that you think meet to be builded or repaired. And finally by these means you shall describe what commodity hath grown of such things as are done and what her highness shall embrace by proceeding onward, ever abating cost behind as she shall bestow forward.46

It might be argued that Tremayne was somewhat overstating the case and that Elizabeth's lack of cartographic interest did not matter since in all important matters she could rely on the cartographic enthusiasm and analytical skills of her ministers and courtiers. Yet had she been interested - though, admittedly she would have had to have been a different person - she would have had an independent means of evaluating the advice of her ministers as a basis for reaching decisions herself, particularly in wartime when, as Paul Hammer has pointed out, as a woman her freedom of action was severely limited.47 In these situations, Henry communicated directly with his mapmakers, ordering them to produce maps from which he could evaluate - apparently objectively- the proper site and design of a defensive fort, the line of a border or the strategy to be adopted in a siege.48 Elizabeth's lack of interest in maps deprived her of these advantages. It increased her dependence on her ministers in the detailed formulation and execution of policy. At the same time it reinforced the negative nature of her role in government: delaying decisions and vetoing certain courses of action without being able to suggest positive alternatives (though she clearly personally preferred to be in a position where she could disown or repudiate rather than take responsibility for actions).

Nor could she always rely on the loyalty of her ministers to bring her the benefits of cartographic sophistication. The administration of the crown

46 Quoted from TNA (PRO), SP 63/52/66, by Andrews, Shapes oflreland, 67. 47 Paul Hammer, Eliabeth's Wars: War, Government and Socieqy in Tudor England 544-I6o4

(Basingstoke and New York, 200o3), 6, 59. 48 The History of the King's Works, ed. H. M. Colvin et al., IV (1982), 391-2.




lands was a case in point. Elizabeth derived between 30 and 34 per cent, or about ?86,ooo to ?III,ooo annually of her income from them.49 While a princess in the I550s she had demonstrated a gritty determination to protect and shepherd her private estates in Bedfordshire.5? When at the start of the I56os she was forced to sell sizeable amounts of crown lands in order to finance the war in France, she learnt a lesson in economy that she did not forget5' and it was only during the still more expensive wars of the 1590s that she was reluctantly forced into further mass sales.

It would have been in her interest to have had the crown lands surveyed, particularly after the mid-I570s when estate plans drawn to a consistent scale put in their first appearance.5" These complemented the traditional written surveys in two important ways. First they enabled boundaries and abutments to be depicted with great clarity and with a permanence that could not be matched by the written word. One practical consequence was that encroachments could easily and rapidly be identified. Estate maps would have enabled the crown to dispense with most of the self- interested bounty hunters who secured very favourable leases on the concealed or 'drowned' crown lands which they discovered. Elizabeth could have increased her income and avoided the social conflicts and the unpopularity that attached to the crown as a result of the bounty hunters' activities.53 Secondly estate plans enormously facilitated long- term estate strategy by showing at a glance the most profitable potential land exchanges, purchases or enclosures.

Yet hardly any surveys of the crown lands - let alone mapped surveys - were carried out under Elizabeth. She obtained some maps, such as the plan of the early I56os showing manors in North Dorset, from the archives of episcopal lands that were acquired by the crown.54 Burghley saw to it that the lands of minors, which were being administered by the crown, were sometimes mapped.55 Similarly confiscated lands and those that fell to the crown when a see was empty were sometimes mapped, though

49 David Thomas, 'The Elizabethan Crown Lands: Their Purpose and Problems', in The Estates of the English Crown, 1558-164o, ed. R. W. Hoyle (Cambridge, 1992), 58-9.

5o Doran, Queen Elizabeth I, 29; Elizabeth to the privy council, 31 May 1553, in Collected Works, ed. Marcus, Mueller and Rose, 39-40. 5' Hammer, Elizabeth's Wars, 67, 69. 52 P D. A. Harvey, 'Estate Surveyors and the Spread of the Scale-Map in England i55o-

1580', Landscape History, 15 (i993), 40. 53 David Thomas, 'Leases of Crown Lands in the Reign of Elizabeth I', in Estates of the

English Crown, ed. Hoyle, 18o-2; R. W. Hoyle, '"Shearing the Hog's Back": The Reform of the Estates 1598-1640', in ibid., 211-I2.

5 BL, Add. MS 52522; P. D. A. Harvey, An Elizabethan Map of Manors in North Dorset', British Museum Quarterly, 29 (1965), 82-4 n. 5. See also H. M. T. Cobbe, 'Four Manuscript Maps Recently Acquired by the British Museum', Journal of the Society of Archivists, 4 (1973), 646-52.

55 Skelton and Summerson, Hagield House, 54-5, no. 6o.




not necessarily to scale.6 But apart from a few written surveys of lands in Wales and Cornwall and a plan of Tottenham Court in Middlesex of 1591 by one William Necton, no detailed surveys, written or mapped, of the older Elizabethan crown lands are known.57

This worried some contemporaries. In 1602, Sir Robert Johnson, a skilled estate surveyor and mapmaker58 as well as a loyal servant of the crown, wrote to Robert Cecil that 'whenever I have heard of the sale of Her Majesty's lands, I have observed that the value was seldom known... The chief foundation ofmischiefhas been the want of authentic surveys... of every ten manors, there is not one perfect survey.'59 In 16o6, Henry Woodhouse estimated that the crown had lost ?100,000 since 1583 because it had, through ignorance, sold its estates at valuations far below the ancient rent.6?

Yet it has been argued that the estates did not primarily exist to generate revenue."' Some, notably hunting parks, were not intended to be profitable.6" All were the major source for royal patronage, and as Elizabeth ruefully commented to William Maitland of Lethington as early as 156I, 'no princes revenues be so great that they are able to satisfy the insatiable cupidity of men'.63 Some were granted away, knowing they would immediately be resold, without entry fines being charged.64 Even the administration of the royal estates was a form of patronage and the crown had no alternative but to tolerate the corruption, the gross waste and the failure to collect the monies that were due.65 Indeed any attempt to maximise the return from the estates was likely to provoke social dislocation and resentment from lessees and officeholders (often noblemen and justices of the peace on whom the national administration

56 BL, Royal MS 18. D. III, fos. 91v-92; BL, Add. MS 71126 (map of the Seven Marshland Lordships, c. 1582).

57 Heather Lawrence, 'John Norden and his Colleagues: Surveyors of Crown Lands', Cartographic Journal, 22 (1985), 54; Skelton and Summerson, Halield House, 50 no. 48 (CPM II. 19); Thomas 'Crown Lands', 66, 76.

58 See for example his superb estate atlas of the Welsh lands of the earl of Worcester of 1587 now in the National Library of Wales (Badminton 3)-

59 Quoted by Heather Lawrence, fJohn Norden', 54- 6o Thomas, 'Crown Lands', 67. See also Hoyle, "'Shearing"', 205. 6r Thomas, 'Leases', 173. 62 Thomas, 'Crown Lands', 81-2. 63 Collected Works, ed. Marcus, Mueller and Rose, 66. In the 1580s and 1590s Burghley's

efforts to cut back on patronage won Elizabeth a reputation for 'princely parsimony', but royal revenues from the crown lands nevertheless continued to decline. John Cramsie, Kingship and Crown Finance under James I (Woodbridge, 2002), 29.

64Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1984), I62-3. Despite inflation, average entry fines and rents did not rise after i560 until the late 59os. Ibid., 161-2, 174; Thomas 'Crown Lands', 76.

65 Thomas, 'Crown Lands', 71-2, 74-5.




depended) and their tenants at times when the crown could least afford it.

It has also been pointed out that for much of her reign, Elizabeth did not desperately need the additional sums involved. Until 1576 she had a surplus on her ordinary income and in the I58os she earned enormous profits from her investment in privateering ventures.66 The situation only became critical as the strains of war grew in the course of the 159os - and by the end of the decade the need for money was so pressing that there simply was not the time to survey the crown estates before selling them off - often at prices that were known to be unrealistically low.67 Nevertheless, Elizabeth would undoubtedly have welcomed more income. She managed to keep her accounts in balance for as long as she did only because of the windfall of great confiscated estates that fell to the crown between 1569 and I572 and through the practice of extreme economy and political passivity, which frustrated numerous of her courtiers and ministers if not herself. However, even with regard to the crown estates, she was in the hands of her ministers.

The lord treasurer and the chancellor of the exchequer were responsible for their day-to-day administration and it would seem that the queen trusted them to get on with the work without interference from her.68 Of the holders of these posts in the relevant decades, Burghley was outstandingly cartographically sophisticated. Indeed in 1587 Burghley criticised the master of All Souls College in Oxford for not having commissioned a mapped survey of a piece of land to ascertain a proper valuation for the entry fine before leasing it out."6 Yet he never seems to have recommended a similar course of action to his mistress. But then, as beneficiaries of the prevailing lax regime, as lessees of crown lands, as stewards of crown lands in Lincolnshire and rangers of Enfield Chase,70 he and his family had good reasons for inaction.

Elizabeth was no different from most other landowners of her time in showing a lack of interest in estate mapping.7' Some surveyors, such as John Norden, themselves claimed that it could prove to be an expensive luxury, which achieved no more than far less costly written surveys.7 Nevertheless such considerations would not have deterred a real map

66 Ibid., 78-9; Hammer, Elizabeth's Wars, 80-I. "7 Youings, Sixteenth-Century England, 161-2; Thomas, 'Crown Lands', 85-7. 68 Thomas, 'Crown Lands', 73. 69 Peter Eden, 'Three Elizabethan Estate Surveyors: Peter Kempe, Thomas Clerke and

Thomas Langdon', in English Map Making, ed. Tyacke, 71. 70 Thomas, 'Crown Lands', 63, 71; Hoyle, "'Shearing"', 207-8, 213.

7' Sarah Bendall, 'Estate Maps of an English County: Cambridgeshire, i6oo-s836', in Estate Maps in the Old and ANew Worlds, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, 1996), 70o. In court circles, however, the balance was probably different.

72 Lawrence, 'Norden', 54-5.




enthusiast. By the i58os, however, Elizabeth's essential lack of interest in graphic means of representation was reinforced by her growing conservatism and hostility to such 'newfangleness'73 as the mapping of estates to a uniform scale.

It cost her dear. The essential reason why virtually no action was taken to increase the revenues from the crown estates before 16oo was because, in this rare case and primarily for reasons of self-interest, Elizabeth I's cartographically minded ministers were not prepared to serve their mistress's long-term interests. On her part the queen was not sufficiently cartographically knowledgeable or motivated to take matters into her own hands and to insist on a general survey at a time - the later 1570s and 1580s - when England was (relatively) at peace, the technical expertise was available and the imposition of raised rents and dues could have been justified on patriotic grounds.

It was only after Burghley's death in 1598, and at the instigation of his successors as lord treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, and from 16o8, Salisbury, that the royal estates began to be actively managed.74 Enthusiastically supported by James I, the new approach culminated in the survey of the royal woods, commissioned in 16o7, the surveys of the lands of the duchy of Cornwall and of the honour of Windsor, both commissioned fromJohn Norden, and the 'Great Survey' of the crown lands undertaken from I608. Though mainly written, there was a sizeable cartographic element.75 However, the survey came too late. The additional revenues, limited by custom and by the absence of any overriding patriotic justification, were insufficient to meet the crown's needs. The freshly surveyed lands had to be sold and the king still remained dependent on parliamentary subsidies.

Had the general survey taken place earlier, the increased income generated would have made the prosecution of war in the 1590s easier and less politically damaging to the queen. It might also have spared at least some of the more precious crown lands from the extensive sales at bargain prices in the 1590s and again after 161io that were cumulatively to weaken the monarchy's power base under her successors. In the final analysis, it did matter that Elizabeth was not interested in maps.

73 Speech at the closing ofparliament, 29 Mar. 1585, in Collected Works, ed. Marcus, Mueller and Rose, 183.

74 Hoyle, "'Shang'"', 0o4, 2II--I2, 224.: 75 Ibid., plate 9.1, for the costs of the maps, and p. 2i, for the atlases of estate and woodland maps that were created, though many maps have not survived.



Was Elizabeth I Interested in Maps - and Did It Matter?

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