E IS FOR ELECTRIC SLIDE

    

     You don't have to be so literal about it!  Maybe there was no electric slide, per se, in the 16th century, but those guys killed it when it came to line dances!
     The peasants had line dances

as well as Morris dances, which sometimes involved costumes and mumming (play-acting).

And the merchant classes had some simple circle dances,

but of course, at royal courts, everything got much more elaborate.

 

And the royals had line dances too.  The Pavane, for example, was a slow, stately, processional dance for couple, like so:

     and like so.

Yep, here too, with a smaller crowd.

 

 

     But listen: you can't just Pavane, Pavane, Pavane all the time, am I right?  Bor-ing.  Sometimes you have to kick up your heels!  And that's just what these 16th-century folks are doing, in a lively dance called la Volta:

 

 

 

     Some people claim that's Queen Elizabeth I herself in the upper right, cutting a rug with her "favorite," Robert Dudley, and showing an indecent expanse of leg.  And OMG, where is her partner's hand???  But I don't buy that, and neither do a lot of people more knowledgeable than me.  Sure, Elizabeth had her wild side (and I bet there were plenty of coughing fits among the courtiers any time someone called her "The Virgin Queen,") but she was careful about her image, and she didn't go around making a spectacle of herself just for fun.  This is just a gathering of some other partying aristocrats, whoever they may be.

     So there were some pretty sprightly dances, considering how many pounds of clothing all the dancers were wearing.  La Branle was a 16th-century French style of chain dance which traditionally kicked off the dancing portion of banquets. The coupled-off dancers moved mainly from side to side either in a circle or a line.  It might not sound that thrilling, but there must be reasons why the name of that dance gave rise to the English word brawl! 

     Take that, Electric Slide!!

 

 

 

     

W IS FOR SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM

     Francis Walsingham (c. 1530 - 1590) was born in London to a well-off, well-connected family and educated at King's College, Cambridge and abroad, and was admitted to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1553.  Walsingham leaned Protestant; he left England for Switzerland and Italy when the virulently Catholic Mary Tudor took the throne.  He continued his legal studies at Basel and Padua, and did not return to England until 1558, after Mary had died and her Protestant sister Elizabeth I succeeded her.  In 1559 he was elected to Elizabeth's first parliament.
     By 1569, Walsingham was working with William Cecil to search out and counteract plots against Queen Elizabeth, and he helped to foil the Ridolfi Plot designed to depose Elizabeth and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
   In 1570 Walsingham was appointed ambassador to France, where in 1572 he witnessed the horrendous weeks-long St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which thousands of French Huegenots (Protestants) were slaughtered.  This experience marked Walsingham deeply, and in the future, whenever the opportunity arose, he showed no mercy to Catholics.  He supported the torture of Catholic priests and the extraction of confessions from suspected conspirators by use of torture.  He also supported giving land grants in Ireland to English settlers, who he believed would work the land more productively than the Irish had been doing.  This policy fostered Irish resentment, needless to say, and the eventual result was centuries of horrific English-Irish warfare, a.k.a. "The Troubles."
     Walsingham returned to England in 1573, having earned the Queen's trust by the loyalty and talent he had shown during his years in France.  In December of that year, Walsingham was appointed to the Royal Privy Council, and became the Queen's Principal Secretary (an office later known as Secretary of State).  In that role, he became an indispensable advisor to the Queen, second only to William Cecil, the Lord Treasurer.  Walsingham was in charge of all of Elizabeth's correspondence and decided the agendas of council meetings.  He was a big supporter of British trade and exploration, including Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe (1578-81).  Perhaps most importantly, he became known as Elizabeth's "spymaster;" he employed a master cryptographer, as well as a fleet of "intelligencers" throughout Europe and North Africa that enabled him to foil many and varied plots against the Queen's life.  Walsingham didn't invent spying, but he's the one who raised it to an art form.
     Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Walsingham's lifelong faithfulness to Queen Elizabeth was the fact that the two of them didn't like each other very much, and they both knew it.  His surviving letters (not to her, of course) contain observations such as "I would to God her Majesty would be content to refer these things to them that can best judge of them [i.e., him], as other princes do," and that there was not a councilor in her service "who would not wish himself rather in the furthest part of Ethiopia than to enjoy the fairest palace in England."  But neither of them ever let their personal animosities get in the way of their professional relationship, and they worked together to their mutual benefit for over 20 years.  
     In 1582-83, Walsingham uncovered another plot to kill Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.  The British ringleader was executed and the Spanish ambassador, who had been deeply involved, was expelled from England.  By 1585 Mary, Queen of Scots had been imprisoned, and was tricked into believing that she ha a single means of secret communication with the outside world (letters hidden inside a beer keg).  Those letters enabled Walsingham to prove that she had been engaged in yet another plot against the Queen's life.  Mary was tried, convicted, and in 1587, despite Elizabeth's reluctance, executed.

                          MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS (WITH HEAD STILL ATTACHED)

     From 1586 on, Walsingham began to receive reports from his spies about Spanish plans to invade England.  By keeping himself well-informed on all the preparations, he was able to order counter-preparations, and thus he contributed greatly to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
     Walsingham's health had been in decline since 1571, and became very bad in the late 1580's.  But he continued to work; he attended his last Council meeting two weeks before his death from cancer in 1590.  His political legacy is decidedly mixed, but as a spymaster, he was second to none.