Making Make-Believe Real by Garry Wills

Author:Garry Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

21 War Games

There is a shrewd wastefulness to personal expenditures that promote not only oneself but one’s country.

—Alcibiades

The England of Elizabeth did not have a standing army. For many years to come, Parliament would avoid funding such a force. One of the legislature’s tools for making a monarch summon it into session was its power to grant money for specific wars. Once the money was granted, local authorities had to gather men to do the fighting—in a process that Falstaff, as knight, was required to perform. The queen had to rely on sufficient integrity in other leaders for them not to become Falstaffs. Using the funds voted by Parliament, these local leaders had to know whom to gather, how to reach them and command their respect, and the means for bringing them to the field. In other words, they had to know local conditions and have some local weight in them. But the queen rarely had to put much reliance on this kind of large mobilization. She intended to avoid most wars, and even then to avoid war expense.

Besides having no standing army, Elizabeth had a severely pinched treasury. Henry VIII and Edward VI’s counselors had been spendthrifts before her, and Mary Queen of Scots strained the realm’s finances by returning some church properties confiscated by her predecessors.1 So a grand war strategy was out of Elizabeth’s financial league. Her country was a third-best to Europe’s two superpowers, Spain and France. Then, to top things off, her ideological allies in other countries were minor Protestant entities beset by Rome’s network of international compulsions.

Elizabeth was wise enough not to aspire to what she could not afford. This means that she had to dangle war steadily and withdraw from it hastily. With no army, little funds, and privateers pretending to be a royal navy, she could indulge mainly in mini-wars or shadow confederacies, using commerce and ad hoc alliances to prevent a joint swoop upon her island from the combined powers of Spain and France. She had to play the two giants against each other, rather than take on either of them singly. Her reign had no real offensive war triumph—in fact, it had only one military triumph at all, and that a defensive one. She fended off the Spanish Armada. She had far more to gain from make-believe war than from real war.

That is why, despite the pacific imperative she lived under, England seemed paradoxically stuffed with martial bombast on the make-believe level. Bellicose rhetoric accompanied her like a background music. Partly this was an exercise in selective memory, as in the glorification of the Black Prince and Henry V. Partly it was an anachronistic dream of medieval tournaments. Philip Sidney and others tried to justify this dramaturgy of war as good training for real war. He presented his real-life queen under the image of the fictional queen of Corinth in Arcadia: “She made her people, by peace, warlike; her courtiers, by sports, learned; her ladies, by love, chaste. For by continual martial exercise, without blood, she made them perfect in that bloody art.

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