#christopher hatton

[vigilantsycamore]

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

Liz Tudor: Heyyy bestie, I'm gonna give you the Bishop of Ely's house lol

Chris Hatton: omg thnx girl!!!

Bishop of Ely, did not agree to this: ?!?!?!?

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

Sir Christopher Hatton is perhaps the least well known and well understood of major Elizabethan political figures. He rose further in his lifetime than any of his colleagues – from the lower levels of the gentry to become Lord Chancellor. He was a major political figure for twenty years: first from about 1571 as a prominent royal favourite, then from 1577 as a privy councillor. At the peak of his power, during the last few years of his life, he was the Queen’s most important living favourite, he was Lord Chancellor, the most senior layman in England; and he was the regime’s leading spokesman in Parliament, one of its most important public faces. He had not one but two palatial houses in his home county, one of them, Holdenby, the largest house in England. He was a power in the land – and all this in his late forties, before an untimely death barely into his fifties. In terms of his importance in the politics of the reign, he should probably be placed after only a handful of figures – the Queen herself, Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham, Essex and Robert Cecil.

Neil Younger, Religion and politics in Elizabethan England: The life of Sir Christopher Hatton

[moviemosaics]

Raven’s Hollow

directed by Christopher Hatton, 2022

[moviesandmania]

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

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

Raven’s Hollow is a 2022 British mystery horror thriller film based around Edgar Allan Poe’s time as a West Point cadet. Directed by Christopher Hatton (Battle of the Damned) from a screenplay co-written with Chuck Reeves. Produced by Andrejs Ekis, Todd Lundbohm and Caroline Stern. The movie stars William Moseley as Edgar Allan Poe alongside Melanie Zanetti, Kate Dickie (The Witch), David Hayman,…

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[maximumphilosopheranchor]

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.

Neil Younger, Religion and politics in Elizabethan England: The life of Sir Christopher Hatton

I had no idea about anything of this. Such a small Tudor world.

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

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.

Neil Younger, Religion and politics in Elizabethan England: The life of Sir Christopher Hatton

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

“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.

In fact, the most likely explanation for Hatton’s patronage of Catholics is probably the simplest: he did it because he thought it the right thing to do. In some cases, as we have seen, the choice was made for him: he could not choose his family. He could choose his friends, however, and it is hardly possible that the high concentration of Catholics around him was not a reflection of his own attitudes. This issue will be explored in more detail in Chapter 6. He must consciously have decided that protecting Catholics was worthwhile. He may have done so out of fellow-​feeling or confessional solidarity; it may be that a generous and kindly spirit was an element of this, as is often claimed. He may have been trying to recruit a following to bolster his own position.

Taking a broader view, he may have thought that persecution of ordinary Catholics was simply bad policy, a threat to the stability of the State. Such an attitude reflects the Queen’s own disinclination to make windows into men’s souls. This is not a position that can properly be described as politique, since it entailed supporting people who refused to submit fully to the law, but it can be described as a pragmatic stance in support of national unity. Whereas Francis Bacon advised Elizabeth to keep the Catholics down (albeit not desperate) and stick with the Protestants, purely on pragmatic grounds, Hatton may have thought differently. (..)

Hatton’s stance must also mean that he acted as a channel of communication between the regime and the ‘Catholic community’. Given the paucity of Hatton’s archive, there is not much evidence for how this actually worked (it may have been more symbolic and unspoken), but having, for example, Ralph Sheldon to his house for dinner is striking. Surely it was important for the Queen and perhaps the nation that the large constituency of Catholic nobles and gentry had some access to Queen, Council and patron- age. Burghley and Walsingham may not have thought so, but their careers were dependent on the success of Protestantism. Hatton’s was dependent on the Queen. In this sense Hatton was a point of contact between Catholics and government. Some of his followers were not satisfied with their position, of course, and were tempted into more dangerous courses, and this made it dangerous to do what he did. Whether his patronage was sufficient to dissuade others from taking this more extreme view is unknowable.

In the conventional understanding of patronage relationships, it is normally assumed that in return for their loyalty, a patron was able to channel rewards towards his clients. Clearly, Hatton did so in the case of his closer servants and men-​of-​business: Dodge, Flower, Swale and others gained official positions, profitable jobs and so on. In terms of his wider clientele, it seems likely that the main currency was protection from the law, or from the malicious use of the law by local opponents: either Hatton discreetly intervened to protect his followers from persecution, or the very knowledge that they could call on his support shrouded them in a degree of immunity. (..)

Just as Leicester’s following included many who are sometimes called Puritan, but who were actually very much on the moderate end of puritanism, so Hatton’s following contained many moderate, loyal Catholics. One difference may be that the hard core of Leicester’s patronage network seem to have had a fairly conscious shared objective of defending and advancing the forward Protestant cause, whereas in Hatton’s case, there was a more diffuse set of possibilities for what they actually wanted: a full return to Rome, Catholicism without the Pope, or simply a conservative Church of England.

Hatton’s role (or at any rate the courtly and political role of religious conservatives like Hatton) has a longer-​term significance, therefore. It helps to explain how so many Catholics and crypto-​Catholics remained in prominent positions in public life; at the same time as historians write about the persecution of Catholics, they routinely acknowledge that many fairly open Catholics apparently lived very normal lives. Figures like Hatton help square this circle. Hatton and people like him helped to shape the national religious environment, both in practical and in symbolic terms.”

Neil Younger, Religion and politics in Elizabethan England: The life of Sir Christopher Hatton

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

… 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.

Neil Younger, Religion and politics in Elizabethan England: The life of Sir Christopher Hatton