Elizabeth and Mary Page 12

  *Pope Clement VII (1523–34), a Medici prince, nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

  *Alexander Alesius (1500–65) writer and theologian. Born Alexander Alane, he became a canon of St Andrew’s Cathedral but adopted the Greek name ‘Alesius’ (meaning ‘wandering’) to signify his exile from Scotland after the trauma of witnessing his Lutheran mentor, Patrick Hamilton, burned at the stake in 1528. From 1535 he was in England at the heart of the English Reformation and is valued for his lively accounts and reminiscences.

  *One of Anne’s recent biographers, Retha M. Warnicke, has suggested that this miscarried son was in some way deformed; this in a time when monstrous births were considered another fingerpost of witchcraft. But that thesis has to remain speculation.

  *Mary of Guise had been married to the Duc de Longueville in 1534 and had two sons, François born in 1535 and Louis in 1537, a few months after his father’s death. Louis died and François, as the new duke, was left with her Guise relations when she travelled to Scotland to marry James V.

  *Elizabeth was refering to the Pythian Ode: ‘Creatures of a day, what is a man? What is he not? Mankind is a dream of a shadow. But when a god given brightness comes, a radiant light rests on men, and a gentle life’.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Education of Princes

  I was one day present when she replied at the same time to three ambassadors, the Imperial, French, and Swedish, in three languages: Italian to one, French to the other, Latin to the third; easily, without hesitation, clearly, and without being confused, to the various subjects thrown out, as is usual in their discourse.

  Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham to his friend John Sturm in 1562

  She has grown so much, and grows daily in height, goodness, beauty and virtue, that she has become the most perfect and accomplished person in all honest and virtuous things that it is possible to imagine … I can assure you that the King is so delighted with her … she amuses him with wise and witty conversation, as if she was a woman of twenty-five.

  Cardinal of Lorraine to Mary’s mother in 1553 when the Queen of Scots was ten

  IF EXILE IS NOT JUST A PHYSICAL ABSENCE from home but an emotional and spiritual disconnection from one’s earlier self then in the late 1540s both these young queens entered a simultaneous period of exile which would mark them more deeply than anything else in their lives. The reasons, experiences and effects for Elizabeth and Mary individually, however, could not have been more different, or more significant in their differences.

  For Elizabeth, the exile was gradual, a journey towards singularity. At first it was the loosening of familial ties which came with orphanhood, then the spiritual estrangement during her sister’s reign, culminating in the physical constraint on her movements, place of residence and then the denial of her rights to safety, even to life. Her contemporary, John Foxe, expressed his outrage: ‘Into what fear, what trouble of mind, and what danger of death was she brought?’1 The transient nature of her security, prospects and hopes, the unpredictable perils she encountered, toughened Elizabeth’s character, sharpened her wits and gave her a powerful sense of her own autonomy. This exile from certainty and ease made a precocious girl endure the most testing initiation in her journey to become a great queen. Camden realized the value of these unhappiest of years: ‘taught by Experience and Adversity, (two most effectual and powerfull Masters,) she had gathered Wisedom above her age’.2

  For Mary her exile was more clear cut. She was removed to France before she was six years old in what was to be a physical and spiritual severance from her homeland. Already betrothed to the dauphin, her future now was mapped out by foreign interests. She was to be a French princess and then a French queen, with Scotland as her dowry. John Knox considered in retrospect this French exile to be a poisonous inheritance for his young Scottish queen. Hayward, an early chronicler, mourned the loss to her personally: ‘our young Quene is married into France, where she nowe lyveth as a stranger both to them and us …’3 In fact this dislocation and re-education was to prove so complete that Mary, the Queen of Scotland, would come to consider her French years as the happiest time of her life.

  For Elizabeth it was a painful decade which began with the death of her father on 28 January 1547. Her brother Edward was brought to see her at the manor of Enfield and they were told the news together. In a spasm of grief, so the story went, Henry’s two younger children clung together and wept bitterly, then Edward continued on his way to London and the thirteen-year-old princess returned, for the time being, to the studious patterns of her life.

  The new young king, himself only nine years old, wrote to this favourite sister: ‘There is very little need of my consoling you, most dear sister, because from your learning you know what you ought to do, and from your prudence and pity you perform what your learning causes you to know.’ His letter was in answer to one from her seeking to console him and place their loss in the context of her classical and religious studies. She had obviously shown herself to be in control of her emotions for Edward added, ‘I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind.’4

  Elizabeth had never lived intimately with either her mother or her father and essentially both were unknown to her. However, in her governess Catherine Ashley she had the most loyal, if limited, of mother figures who had been with her all her life and was to remain, until her death, the woman Elizabeth cared for most. The death of Henry and her subsequent status as an orphan was not a personal wrench so much as a loss of the idealized father as hero. Practically too, Elizabeth could no longer rely on that powerful umbrella of protection and instead was exposed to the untrammelled ambitions of others. Henry’s death marked the end of a certain status quo.

  Elizabeth’s stepmother, Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife, was an affectionate woman with a talent for nurturing and inspiring the young. Her previous stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, left a glowing affidavit in her will: ‘I was never able to render her grace [Catherine] sufficient thanks for the godly education and tender love and bountiful goodness which I have ever more found in her.’5 On marrying Henry in 1543 Catherine had embarked on her new life as his queen with a sense of vocation and had fulfilled her duties admirably. She was thirty-one, already had been twice married and twice widowed and was a mature woman of considerable character and independent means. Catherine was the first of Henry’s wives to make any real attempt to take responsibility for the royal children and was to be a particularly important influence on the clever, watchful and spirited Princess Elizabeth. Only ten years old at the time, the young princess was already emotionally self-protective, yet avid for experience and knowledge.

  Henry had at least settled the succession before he died. His immediate heir was his son Edward, for whose precious existence he had prayed, plotted and laid waste so many lives, even the foundations of his country’s faith. Edward’s children were to be next in line, followed by Princess Mary – and her heirs – and only then by his second daughter, Elizabeth.* At this time there was every reason to hope that Edward, an intellectually gifted, brave and independent-minded boy, would survive to manhood and have children of his own. For much of her girlhood there was little expectation that Elizabeth would ever be more than a royal princess.

  The death of such a long-reigning despot as Henry VIII inevitably released a ferment of long-suppressed ambitions, for power, wealth and the propagation of the reformed religion in England which Henry’s equivocation had stalled. The powerful men around the new young king, specifically in his Privy Council in whose hands his father had left the governance of the kingdom, were predominantly reformist. The most notable among them were Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and architect of the enduring Edwardian prayer book, John Dudley, and the boy-king’s uncle, Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector, awarding himself the dukedom of Somerset.

  There was a second powerful and ambitious Seymour brother, who was to teach the teenage Elizabeth some malign lessons on the delusions of sexual desire and t
he snares of ruthless men who would be king. Thomas Lord Seymour of Sudeley, at nearly forty years old, still cut a dashing soldierly figure having distinguished himself in diplomatic, naval and military campaigns under Henry. He became Lord Admiral early in the reign of Edward VI under the protectorship of his own elder brother, Somerset. Thomas Seymour had not only been admired by Henry, he had been loved by his queen. In marrying the King rather than this love, Catherine Parr had sacrificed her heart for the sake of duty. However, on Henry’s death her sense of obligation was fulfilled and after only four months of widowhood, Catherine married Seymour. This was considered indecorous haste, especially for a queen – and for a couple well into Tudor middle age. But even more surprisingly the thirty-five-year-old queen, who had remained childless throughout her first three marriages, now belatedly conceived. This could only enhance the self-confidence and reputation of an already proudly virile man. It seemed inevitable that such a man would have sired a son.

  Elizabeth was still only thirteen when her stepmother, of whom she was most fond, married for love. The young princess remained in her care, living principally with her at her dower houses at Chelsea and Hanworth. Ever curious and watchful, Elizabeth could not fail to have noted the effects of the sudden transformation in Catherine Parr’s life. From patient, pious consort of an ailing elderly king she had been transmuted into a lover, desired and desiring. Although not legally her stepfather, Thomas Seymour assumed his role as head of the household and with his manly demeanour and exuberant animal spirits he became for the young princess a charismatic figure of attraction and respect. Some twenty-five years her senior, Seymour in fact was old enough to be her father and the glamour of his varied heroic exploits in war and diplomatic dealings brought a welcome worldly masculinity into Elizabeth’s cloistered female-dominated life.

  Up until now, Elizabeth had never lived in daily proximity with a man other than her tutors and servants. Her father had been a distant, revered, almost superhuman figure to her, someone she strove to impress with something of her own talents and individuality, but it is unlikely that Henry offered her more than the scantest recognition. From the start, there was evidence that Seymour paid Elizabeth most gratifying attention.

  From a purely political point of view, Elizabeth was worthy of this attention for Seymour always had an eye for the main chance and this receptive young woman was a royal princess, third in the line of succession. But Elizabeth was also attractive in her own right, tall with fair reddish-gold hair, fine pale skin and the incongruously dark eyes of her mother, alive with unmistakable intelligence and spirit. She was young, emotionally inexperienced and understandably hungry for recognition and love. She easily became a willing if uneasy partner in the verbal and then physical high jinks in the newly sexualized Parr – Seymour household.

  There can be little doubt too that this perceptive girl noticed a marked change in the energy and manner of her much-admired stepmother. Catherine was scholarly, dutiful, religious, yet courageous and radical in a way that was similar to Elizabeth’s own mother in her promotion of the evangelical reformed religion. She maintained the heretical belief that everyone should have access to a Bible and be able to read the great book for him- or herself, a belief that had brought lesser personages than her to the stake.

  She was also a woman of active feelings and, in following her passion at last and marrying the love of her younger self, both she and Seymour were aware that the prime of their lives was past and there was little time now to lose. This can only have heightened the emotional temperature and in an age when prudery had little place in personal lives it must have been clear to the curious girl that sex and love were powerful, transformative things. They could also prove to be most dangerous if you were a young woman and a princess, without wise counsel or family elders to protect you.

  Events started to become unsettling, and in the end alarming, for Elizabeth when the good-natured horseplay, which in the beginning gratifyingly had included her, turned more serious. Seymour began to focus his boisterous sexual energies on his wife’s young stepdaughter sometime during Catherine’s pregnancy. Elizabeth’s loyal governess Mrs Ashley had always been very taken by Seymour’s charm and even maintained that before Henry’s death he had all but obtained the old king’s approval for a marriage between himself and Princess Elizabeth: ‘that if the King’s Majesty, that Dead is, had lived a little longer, she should have been his wife’.6 This was rather unlikely and, although Seymour surely considered the advantages of his marrying either one of the royal sisters, he knew that once his astute elder brother had become Lord Protector any such political advancement for himself would be strongly resisted.

  The idea persisted, however, not least with Catherine Ashley who, in her limited way, felt such a marriage would be a good one for her much-loved charge. She lost no opportunity to talk of Seymour to Elizabeth, who blushed, with a ‘Countenance of Gladness, when he was well spoken of’.7 But Elizabeth’s governess was also foolishly fuelling romantic fancies and the natural rivalry which any girl might feel for an older woman who had prior claim on a man they both desired: ‘Kat. Ashley told me’, Elizabeth admitted under later cross-examination, ‘after that my Lord Admiral was married to the Queen, that if my Lord might have his own Will, he would have had me, afore the Queen.’8 Even if the young princess at that time had not considered Seymour in a romantic light, given such a provocative piece of information by her trusted governess, it is unlikely that Elizabeth could continue to view Seymour neutrally.

  But it was a respectable marriage for Elizabeth for which Catherine Ashley hoped, and the Lord Admiral seemed to her the most eligible suitor: ‘I would wish her his Wife of all Men living,’9 she had declared. However, when Seymour, as a married man, began behaving over-familiarly with the girl, risking her reputation, Mrs Ashley exhibited all the fierce protectiveness of a mother. On one occasion Seymour had attempted to kiss Elizabeth while she was still in bed and been roundly told off by Mrs Ashley, who ‘bade him go away for shame’.10

  The relationship between the Lord Admiral and the young princess was a gradual progression from playful affection to something intrusive and oppressive, denying her a necessary privacy and sense of safety in her home. In all there was an element of sexual attraction that Elizabeth felt for this flashy man of action, the first of a particular type who, throughout her life, would capture her romantic imagination. But for a young and inexperienced girl, this emotional complicity merely added confusion and guilt to the already potent combination of fear and desire his attentions aroused in her.

  At first, Seymour would appear in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, before she was up and dressed, and tickle her in bed, sometimes slapping her ‘upon the Back or on the Buttocks familiarly’. Other times he would open the curtains of her bed and wish her good morning, ‘and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the Bed, so that he could not come at her.’ It is not clear whether Elizabeth’s shrinking from his threatened embrace was through excitement or alarm, or whether a confusing mixture of both. Certainly Catherine Ashley told of occasions when Elizabeth, wishing to avoid these early-morning incursions, rose earlier from her bed, so that Seymour then found her dressed and at her books rather than vulnerably half-dressed. On another occasion, Elizabeth, caught out and hearing the lock on her door open, rushed from her bed to hide with her women of the bedchamber until Seymour, having tarried a while, gave up and left the room. Mrs Ashley remonstrated with him on this occasion and on another when he came to bid Elizabeth good morning in a state of semi-undress himself, ‘in his Night-Gown, barelegged in his Slippers’.11 He answered the governess’s warnings with anger and self-justification; he meant no harm and to suggest otherwise was to slander him.

  The whole confused business was further clouded by the unexpected involvement of the Dowager Queen Catherine herself in some of her husband’s excesses. There was an episode in the garden at Hanworth when Seymour remonstrated with Elizabeth over something and t
hen cut to ribbons the black gown she was wearing, revealing her undergarments. Elizabeth explained later to her horrified governess that she could do nothing to protect herself because the queen had been holding her down during the whole process. A possible explanation of Catherine’s implication could be that newly married, just pregnant and very much in love with her husband, she was careful to indulge him, afraid of reproving him. Perhaps she harboured some anger at Elizabeth for the continued flirtation between her stepdaughter and him. It was a historic and religious tradition that sexual attraction between a man and woman was invariably seen as the woman’s responsibility, even if she be just a girl and he a much more experienced man, old enough indeed to be her father.

  There came a point, however, when Queen Catherine recovered her confidence and good sense and brought this difficult situation to an end. She had come upon Elizabeth and her own husband in an embrace. This was a traumatic debacle for the young princess and was vividly related by her treasurer, Thomas Parry: ‘I do remember also, [Mrs Ashley] told me, that the Admiral loved [Elizabeth] but too well, and had so done a good while; and that the Queen was jealous of her and him, in so much that, one Time the Queen, suspecting the often Access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, (he having her in his Arms:) wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral, and with her Grace also.’12

  In fact, although the queen did not fall out with either husband or stepdaughter for long, this episode propelled Elizabeth and her retainers out of her stepmother’s house. As Parry continued in his confession: ‘as I remember, this was the Cause why she was sent from the Queen; or else that her Grace parted from the Queen: I do not perfectly remember whether … she went of herself, or was sent away.’13 It was sometime in the summer of 1548 and late in Catherine’s pregnancy and the queen’s tolerance and patience had run out. She certainly lectured Mrs Ashley on her responsibilities in keeping Elizabeth’s behaviour within bounds and her reputation free from scandal. It is evident that she also pointed out to Elizabeth the necessity of guarding her good name and the dangers of indiscreet behaviour giving rise to unwelcome talk.