Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  It was a humiliating and unhappy situation for the fourteen-year-old princess. She had betrayed her stepmother’s kindness and trust and her pride was wounded. Her own feelings for Seymour were distressing and confusing, with elements of fear and desire, of longing and recoil. The chastened girl replied in a letter to Catherine: ‘truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. And albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me; for if your grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way.’14

  Thus in exile from her stepmother’s house for her own unseemly behaviour, Elizabeth was denied any further exposure to this lively intellectual household, where her cousin Lady Jane Grey had also spent some time. Instead she was sent to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire to stay with Sir Anthony Denny and his wife. It was not a particularly lively household for Sir Anthony was a scholar and had been a loyal chief gentleman to her father but now was very near the end of his life. Elizabeth turned increasingly to the consolation of study.

  At the beginning of 1548 her tutor Grindal had died of the plague. This young man had been an inspirational tutor to the princess since she was just eleven years old. The excellence of her grounding in Greek, Latin and foreign languages was so outstanding that his mentor Roger Ascham admitted he did not know ‘whether to admire more the wit of her who learned, or the diligence of him who taught’.15 The commonplace but tragic death of someone so young and close to Elizabeth stripped more security from her life. Both Ascham and Elizabeth’s step-parents had other suggestions for a successor for the talented Grindal, but she insisted, against some resistance, on replacing him with his friend and teacher, Roger Ascham himself. This was the first example of another interesting pattern in Elizabeth’s life. Lacking parents, lacking close family, unmarried as she would remain, and childless too, Elizabeth when queen surrounded herself with brilliant men, loyal advisers and favourites whom she made as close as family to her. When they became too old, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley, or died, like Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, she took on their sons. Although for the old queen, Leicester’s stepson the Earl of Essex was a less happy replacement as favourite, the young princess’s insistence on replacing Grindal with his own mentor and tutor was inspired. This was to prove a most successful marriage of teacher with pupil, with the princess impressing the scholar from the start with her native intelligence, diligence and remarkable aptitude for learning.

  During those difficult months after her banishment Elizabeth’s health suffered ‘an affliction of my head and eyes’16 and she did not like either her governess or her tutor to leave her side. This suggested a kind of nervous collapse; perhaps these familiars provided the only security and family feeling left to her in an increasingly menacing world. On the last day of August, Catherine Parr’s difficult pregnancy came to an end with the birth, not of the expected son, but of a daughter, Mary. However the relief and happiness at a safe delivery were short-lived. Instead a commonplace tragedy was set in motion. Almost immediately the queen started to sicken with a fever. She became delirious as the infection took hold and within six days was dead of puerperal fever.

  Apart from Catherine Ashley’s passing mention that she was sick in the period immediately after the queen’s death, we have no further record of how Elizabeth took this latest loss. She had left her stepmother’s company only a few months before, when she was healthy, hopeful of the birth of her first baby, the ‘little Knave’17 as she called it, full of life and love. But Catherine’s death showed just how dangerous love could be to life. To a clear-sighted logical young woman like Elizabeth there was no denying the evidence that if a woman’s destiny involved sex it was fraught with pain and danger. Her own mother had survived Elizabeth’s difficult birth only to die because the baby was the wrong sex; her brother’s mother, Queen Jane, had died in giving birth to him; now Catherine, the closest the young princess had come to having a mother and a female intellectual mentor, was dead herself, in the process of giving life.

  Given the general sacrifice of young women to their reproductive functions it was understandable that the gods, and even God Himself, was seen to value women less highly than men. Men died prematurely in war as a result of man’s will but the risks to women’s lives through childbirth seemed inextricably bound up with some divine plan. It was not surprising if any clever, perceptive girl came to the conclusion that women were more expendable than men, but only if they succumbed to sexual desire and the usual consequence, childbirth, with its handmaidens of pain and possible death.

  But sexual desire was dangerous for a woman too if it compromised her reputation. Catherine Howard, one of the more racy and fleeting of Elizabeth’s stepmothers, had lost her life for her sexual incontinence and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s own mother, had been vilified with terrible accusations of immorality and incest. Trumped up as they almost certainly were, such charges were enough to merit her death. Princes could be murderous, mad, licentious, fathering bastards at any opportunity, and still continue to rule. Princesses had to be very careful.

  We cannot know what factors contributed to Elizabeth’s decision to remain celibate, despite the stirrings of her own heart and the most telling pressure from her advisers throughout her life. We only know that by the time she ascended to the throne at the age of twenty-five this revolutionary decision had already been made. It is not too fanciful to think that in her mid-teens, steeped in her classical and religious texts, drawing conclusions from sharp observations of society around her, this thoughtful girl was pondering her fate and deciding what she wanted to make of her life.

  There was danger too for Elizabeth in Catherine’s death. Almost immediately Seymour reprised his ambitions to marry her, thereby dragging the young princess into a scandal which rapidly evolved into treason, with all the peril that entailed. Seymour’s jealous politicking against his brother, the Lord Protector Somerset, had alerted the Privy Council to his reckless schemes: ‘the World beginneth to talk very evil favourable of him, both for his Slothfulness to serve, and for his Greediness to get, noting him to be one of the most covetous Men living’.18 It transpired that Seymour had tried to undermine King Edward’s confidence in his elder uncle. He had bribed the boy, who resented how short he was kept of funds, with gifts of money. He corrupted an official at the Bristol Mint fraudulently to raise thousands of pounds in readiness for any possible uprising. He put into action his ambitious wooing of the Princess Elizabeth.

  To be so indiscreet in his rapacity was suicidally risky, for all these activities could be interpreted as treason. Nicholas Throckmorton, in conversation with one of Seymour’s servants, spelt out the danger. ‘My Lord is thought to be a very ambitious Man of Honour; and it may so happen that, now the Queen is gone, he will be desirous for his Advancement to match with one of the King’s Sisters.’ Then in confirmation of the servant’s response that seeking to marry Elizabeth without the consents of the King and his Council would bring upon his master ‘his utter Ruin and Destruction’, Throckmorton replied: ‘it is most true, for the Desire of a Kingdom knoweth no Kindred’.19

  When Thomas Seymour was arrested and sent to the Tower of London in January 1549, Elizabeth’s natural feelings of guilt, fear and shame were intensified: the whole business of the Lord Admiral’s intentions towards her were extracted under oath and spread before the Privy Council. The first she knew of how serious the situation had become for her was when her governess Catherine Ashley and her treasurer Parry were arrested at Hatfield. Elizabeth was left alone to be interrogated by Sir Robert Tyrwhit, an agent appointed for this purpose by the Privy Council. On learning that her two loyal servants had been incarcerated in the Tower too, Elizabeth was momentarily very afraid. ‘She was marvellous abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long Time, demanding of my Lady Browne, whether they had confessed any Thing or not.’20

  Elizabeth was not j
ust frightened for her life, at this point her reputation was almost as precious to her. If she wished to safeguard her place in the succession, or even continue to be considered eligible for a good marriage, she had to remain virtuous and be seen to be virtuous. This was of particular sensitivity in her case because of the traumatic history of her mother’s downfall. These rumours of lascivious relations with a stepfather were too close an echo of the accusations of incest brought against Anne Boleyn and her own brother.

  Elizabeth had been caught unawares. The Lord Protector and the council had their suspicions that Elizabeth herself, aided and abetted by her servants, had been complicit in some of Seymour’s plans, not least the one secretly to marry. Elizabeth needed time to collect herself and edit the story that would best protect her from these serious allegations. At this first interview she was unprepared and alarmed and could not hide her agitation. Tyrwhit reported back to the Lord Protector: ‘in no Way she will not confess any Practice by Mistress Ashley or the Cofferer [treasurer], concerning my Lord Admiral; and yet I do see it in her Face that she is guilty’.21

  Catherine Ashley and treasurer Parry were even more afraid. On facing arrest, Parry had rushed into his wife’s room and said to her in great distress that he wished he had never been born ‘for I am undone, and wrung his Hands, and cast away his Chain from his Neck, and his Rings from his Fingers’,22 as if he expected then and there to be beheaded.

  The following day, Tyrwhit interrogated Elizabeth again, but by now she had composed herself. She appeared to be wholly cooperative but gave only careful, anodyne answers: she could not be certain what Parry or Catherine Ashley had been induced to reveal but she kept her own hand as close as possible to her chest. Tyrwhit thought her calmness and reason meant he was getting round her with his subtle questioning but he did have the intelligence to realize that he was up against a fifteen-year-old girl who was already a formidable advocate: ‘I do assure your Grace’, he wrote to Somerset, ‘she hath a very good Wit, and nothing is gotten off her, but by great policy.’23

  Although Elizabeth’s servants talked more fully as Tyrwhit’s tactics frightened or tricked them, they never revealed anything that could be construed as a conspiracy between their mistress and Seymour. Any marriage involving the princess, they declared, was always dependent on the knowledge and approval of the king, the Lord Protector and the Council. Tyrwhit was suspicious that there was much more to be confessed, but he was frustrated in his investigations by the consistency of their blameless story: ‘They all sing one Song, and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the Note before.’24

  The fear of torture and the discomfort of the conditions in which Elizabeth’s servants were held cannot be underestimated. It was winter and Mrs Ashley had been moved into a windowless dungeon to induce her further to talk. Here during freezing February she could neither sleep at night, the cold was so intense, nor see by day where no light could penetrate. Always too was the ever present threat of death. In fact it was remarkable that everyone managed to keep that one song in tune, despite the threats, cajolery, forged letters and invented confessions which were flung at them during that chilling start to 1549. Eventually Tyrwhit gave up disgruntled. As far as he was concerned Elizabeth was the architect of this resistance: ‘I do believe that there hath been some secret Promise, between my Lady, Mistress Ashley, and the Cofferer, never to confess to Death; and if it be so, it will never be gotten out of her.’25

  After her initial discomposure, Elizabeth’s confidence had grown as the interrogations proceeded. Indeed, she was able to summon a tone of remarkable self-righteousness, an attitude which was to become one of her favourite and most effective stances in negotiations throughout her life when she felt she was on dubious ground. In a letter to the all-powerful Lord Protector Somerset she alternated her tone between imperiousness and submission to achieve her effect: ‘Master Tyrwit and others have told me that there goeth rumours Abroad, which be greatly both against my Honour, and Honesty, (which above all things I esteem) which be these; that I am in the Tower; and with Child by my Lord Admiral. My Lord these are shameful Slanders.’ She then requested urgent permission to come to court and show herself ‘as I am’, distinctly signing herself with the poignant reminder of her youth, her vulnerability and his responsibility, as protector of the realm, towards her, ‘Your assured Friend to my little Power, Elizabeth’.26

  Here was a girl, just turned fifteen, without any powerful guardian to protect her interests, or even her life, reminded in her interrogation that ‘she was but a subject’,27 and how perilous her situation had become. She was bullied, threatened and lied to but had managed to keep her wits about her to such an extent that she was able to get the better of her inquisitor and make demands of him and his master, the Lord Protector. When the council decided they would replace Catherine Ashley with Robert Tyrwhit’s wife, who would keep a closer eye on the young princess, Elizabeth threw a fit: ‘She took the Matter so heavily, that she wept all that Night, and loured all the next Day.’28 Tyrwhit was no match for such a dramatic display of grief. He did allow her to write to Somerset and argue her case (although he grumbled that she would take none of his advice). Through sheer force of will, emotion and logic, Elizabeth got her way. Eventually Tyrwhit’s wife was withdrawn and Mrs Ashley reinstated. Tyrwhit was nonplussed by many things about Elizabeth, not least her devotion to her governess. ‘The Love yet she beareth her is to be wondered at,’ he wrote.29 His own job as interrogator was done and he himself withdrew from the fray, relieved no doubt and uneasy at the thought that somehow he had been forestalled by a mere girl.

  It is impossible to know just how far Elizabeth compromised herself with Seymour, although there is plenty of evidence that she found him attractive, as well as how troubling she found that attraction. But Tyrwit may well have been right that her servants’ loyalty and courage and her own intelligence and coolness under fire prevented something more damaging to Elizabeth’s prospects, even her life, from emerging. Elizabeth was distressed by the fact that even by March, Catherine Ashley was still imprisoned in the Tower and, despite her fears that this might implicate her in any of her governess’s perceived guilt, she wrote another impassioned letter to the Lord Protector:

  My lord:

  I have a request to make unto your grace which fear has made me omit till this time … I will speak for … Katherine Ashley, that it would please your grace and the rest of the Council to be good unto her … First, because she hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty. And therefore I ought of very duty speak for her, for Saint Gregory sayeth that we are more bound to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them – that is, bringeth us into this world – but our bringers-up are a cause to make us live well in it.30

  Elizabeth never forgot the sacrifices of these partners in her first ordeal. On her accession and throughout their lives she treated both with great favour, knighting Parry and making him treasurer of the household and visiting Catherine Ashley on her deathbed in July 1565, mourning her deeply.

  Elizabeth and her servants escaped further punishment but the Lord Admiral Seymour was tried for treason, found guilty and beheaded on 20 March 1549. The whole lethal business had taken just three months. Through this treacherous time Elizabeth had learned some lessons as to the value of circumspection over spontaneity, the necessity of will and intellect ruling the heart. She also learnt about loyalty, the depths of her own, and how her very life could depend on the loyalty and love of her servants, her people. Nothing would make her join in the vilification of Seymour even when she was still under some suspicion herself. ‘She beginneth now a little to droop,’ the disliked Mrs Tyrwhit noted when Elizabeth heard that Seymour’s lands were being divided up and dispersed, but she then added, ‘She can not hear him discommended.’31 However, at fifteen, Elizabeth already had absorbed a wisdom that at forty had e
luded the ambitious, swaggering Seymour. On the day of his execution she is reputed to have made the possibly apocryphal comment, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’32 From that day on, Elizabeth would ensure that no one could ever say that of her.

  While Elizabeth, exiled from safety, protection and power, endured her baptism of fire, her cousin Mary was embarking on her own more literal exile with a cheerful heart. Her mother, Mary of Guise, had got her way at last: her daughter was to be taken to safety, contracted to marry the dauphin to become eventually Queen of France. The marriage treaty was signed on July 7 1548 and with it the alliance with France was strengthened. Mary hoped that now the French would give her much-needed aid in her struggles to protect her daughter’s kingdom from the English.

  These marauding English had seized the town of Haddington, John Knox’s birthplace, in the eastern Borders. The Scottish troops, reinforced with some five thousand or more Frenchmen, were attempting to wrest it back again when Mary, intrepid as ever, just two days after signing the marriage treaty for her daughter, rode to the town to exhort the troops to greater resistance. Accompanied by her entourage of lords and ladies she headed for the nunnery on the edge of town, from there to gain a better vantage point. But unfortunately her party arrived just as the English gunners were perfecting their range. In an immense explosion of dust and smoke sixteen of her accompanying gentlemen and others of her party were mown down, along with their horses, in a scene of terrible carnage. Even for a woman of her fortitude and experience this horror was too much to bear; the dowager queen fainted with shock. Nothing could have convinced her more graphically of the wisdom of the imminent dispatch of her daughter.