#christopher hatton

something else i found out while getting sidetracked during that research wormhole is that this is apparently something that happened

RAVEN'S HOLLOW (2022) Edgar Allan Poe murder mystery soon on Shudder

Hatton had two powerful contacts at court, but his links with each were fairly weak. Firstly, he had some slender links with the Parr family, the most famous member of which, Catherine Parr, was queen of England during Hatton’s childhood. Catherine wrote in 1548 to her then husband, Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, recommending a ‘Master Hatton’, who must at that date have been Christopher’s elder brother Francis, so some meaningful connection clearly existed. Later on, her brother, Marquess of Northampton and a magnate in that county, was prominent throughout the mid-​Tudor period to his death in 1571, but there is no evidence of a relationship between him and Hatton. We have no way of assessing whether Hatton really owed his career to these links or whether they were too remote to be decisive, although it is intriguing that Princess Elizabeth was living with Catherine for the first half of 1548 –​ she might conceivably have become aware of Hatton’s family at that early age. Hatton’s second contact was his cousin Sir Edward Saunders. Saunders was a prominent judge, a former protégé of Thomas Cromwell, appointed Chief Justice of Queen’s Bench by Queen Mary, and a considerable figure in Warwickshire. Saunders was a confirmed Catholic, and accordingly fared less well under Elizabeth, being demoted to Chief Baron of the Exchequer. This naturally limited his utility to Hatton, although it must have been helpful at the Temple. Saunders and Hatton were clearly on good terms: Hatton was named as the overseer of Saunders’s 1576 will (and bequeathed the judge’s best gelding) but since Hatton was by then an important figure, this does not necessarily mean that Saunders advanced his career when he was merely a humble provincial gentleman. Nor is it likely that Saunders was particularly influential at court. Enis speculates that, in view of their Temple connection, Robert Dudley (whose ideological position was then fairly flexible) may have been an early patron of Hatton, but again this cannot be proven. It may well be that one of these contacts helped Hatton to begin his court career.

The extent of Hatton’s links with Catholics inevitably calls for some explanation of how this was possible in a regime which has often been regarded as reflexively anti-Catholic. In many ways the most surprising thing is how little this appears to have affected Hatton’s career. If Hatton indeed was some kind of Catholic, or even simply an unusually strong enemy of the Puritans, what does this say about the regime and Hatton’s place in it? Ultimately, this can only be answered by looking at the Queen herself. In short, Hatton’s career suggests that Elizabeth was not especially concerned if her servants were, or were widely believed to be, either Catholic or something close to it. Hatton’s protection of Catholics was clearly against the spirit of the law, and in some senses a kind of challenge to the authority of the regime, the law and the Queen. Elizabeth promoted him all the same, surely knowing what he was doing and what people said about him. We can surely not regard that as an accident. This might suggest that Elizabeth was simply pursuing a ‘secular, disengaged’ approach to politics, that she was unconcerned about Hatton’s religion and was promoting him because she liked him. This is quite interesting in itself; the notion that we might easily overstate the level of interest that nobles and royals of this period had in religious differences seems quite plausible. However, another possibility is that Elizabeth promoted Hatton (and perhaps others) because of his religious attitudes, using her choice of councillors to send signals to the wider population (Hatton’s prominence as a public face for the regime’s politics is again relevant here). Since this was not a police state, much political activity can be seen as signaling about what was acceptable and what was not at any given moment. Hatton’s prominence demonstrated that Elizabeth was not a bigot, but tolerated Catholics or their favourers. One virtue of using Hatton to demonstrate this was that he was her creation; if Elizabeth acceded to powerful conservative nobles like Norfolk, she looked weak; by using her own man, she could look strong and magnanimous. This also showed that she was not a puppet of the Protestants, of Leicester and Burghley, who were often claimed to be in effect holding her captive, but that she had her own agenda. Hatton was a living demonstration of the Queen’s moderation, and, perhaps, a model of loyal Catholicism. Catholics who behaved themselves, stayed loyal, and were prepared if necessary to roundly criticize the Pope were acceptable, and windows would not be made into their souls. This was of course a marked contrast with Burghley’s approach of drawing clear boundaries between Protestants and Catholics, trustworthy and not, loyal and traitor – as we see in the Bond of Association, the lord lieutenancies and other plans.

“A key question, then, is why Hatton chose to extend his patronage to so many Catholics? A conspiratorial view might be that he sought to infiltrate Catholic circles in order to betray their plotting, yet this would have involved one of the most successful ‘deep cover’ operations in history, and is simply not credible. A slightly more subtle version of this view would be that he sought to police the line between unthreatening non-​conformity and active plotting, and there may be some merit to this, inasmuch as he represented a kind of success story among Elizabethan Catholic sympathisers; yet the involvement of his contacts with the Arden-​Somerville affair and the Babington Plot suggests that any efforts he made along these lines were only partially successful.

… Elizabethan politics was not always all about Lord Burghley, the hot Protestants, and their relationship with the Queen. In some cases, Burghley lost control of major spheres of policy about which he cared very much. In 1591, he only regained it due to a considerable stroke of luck with Hatton’s death. Furthermore, the rise of Hatton’s influence, which very much seems to have coincided with Leicester’s death, suggests that the latter may well have been more influential than is sometimes thought – again reminding us that Burghley was not always as powerful as we might think. Royal favourites mattered.