Elizabeth and Mary Read online

While Elizabeth pored over her books, often excluded from court, hoping perhaps, but not yet expecting, that one day she would be queen, her cousin Mary was growing up at the very heart of the most glamorous and decadent court in Europe, reminded every waking minute of her destiny as queen. Although there was nothing to suggest that Mary, while a girl, had any direct exposure to the worst excesses of Europe’s most flamboyant court, there was some evidence that her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine was concerned to remove her from the immediate environment of court life. He wanted to extricate her from the immediate influence of Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers, and establish her in her own household. He wrote to his sister, Mary’s mother: ‘I do not forget to keep in mind some care as to what she [Mary] says, but to tell you the truth they [the court] are so immoral that I have a great desire to see her mistress [of her own household] and her fate separated from them.’68

  There is no doubt that a clever inquisitive girl would have been aware of some of the irregularities of behaviour at court given the all-pervasive gossip and the evidence of her own eyes. Even one of her closest adult guardians, the lively and attractive Lady Fleming, her governess from the days she first came to France, had been indiscreet enough to become pregnant by the king and then boast about it around court: ‘God be thanked! … I am with child by the King, and I feel very honoured and happy about it,’69 adding for good measure that the royal blood must have some special ingredients because she found herself in such excellent health. The scandal of her pregnancy and the unhappy business surrounding her dismissal cannot have passed Mary by. There was personal loss too.

  Given the cardinal’s family ambitions and his own opportunism it could be argued that in pushing for the establishment of Mary’s independent household and removing her from the immediate influence of Catherine de Medici, he was keen to maintain his unequalled influence on this valuable political commodity, the royal niece who was to unite the French royal family with the ascendant house of Guise. This he accomplished in January 1554, adding considerable expense to the Scottish exchequer, but drawing the eleven-year-old queen closer into Guise control.

  Being a queen from birth inevitably meant Mary was surrounded by excessive flattery and tainted praise. As a diplomatic pawn of inestimable worth, she was also manipulated by the ambitions and fears of others. Lacking challenges she grew up unaware of her own capabilities and strength of character, cocooned instead in a false security and a fatal detachment from her subjects.

  On the other hand, her cousin Elizabeth, disregarded and in danger for much of her youth, learned that her fate largely lay in her own hands. She had survived through vigilance and quick-wittedness, and a lifelong capacity to connect with her people. In middle age, she herself recognized something of this truth: ‘for those rare and special benefits which many years have followed and accompanied my happy reign, I attribute to God alone, the Prince of rule, and count myself no better than His handmaid, rather brought up in a school to bide the ferula [rod] than traded [trained] in a kingdom to support the sceptre’.70

  The educationalist Vives’s stern admonition to parents and educators of women and princesses, ‘the daughter should be handled without any cherishing [pampering]. For cherishing marreth sons, but it utterly destroyeth daughters’,71 would prove to have poignant echoes in the lives of these two queens.

  * * *

  *It is interesting that in what he hoped was the unlikely event of none of his three children producing children themselves, Henry chose to ignore the better claims of Mary Queen of Scots, granddaughter of his elder sister Margaret, and instead vested the succession in the children of his younger sister Mary, who had married the Duke of Suffolk. Her grandchildren were the ill-fated sisters, Jane, Catherine and Mary Grey.

  *Most significantly Schiller, the great German poet and dramatist, took the stories of both these ill-fated queens and wrote separate blank verse dramas, Don Carlos and Maria Stuart, charting their denouements and violent ends. Verdi, too, moved by Schiller’s dramatization (and historical distortion) wrote his opera Don Carlos, where Elizabeth de Valois is immortalized as its tragic heroine.

  *Where Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, embodied a virginal resistance to marriage and Phaedra was seen as passionate, flashy and unscrupulous.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Apprenticeship for a Queen

  Some have fallen from being Princes of this land to be prisoners in this place; I am raised from being a prisoner in this place to be Prince of this land.

  Elizabeth’s speech at the Tower of London the day before her coronation

  PRINCES ARE BORN; HEROES MAKE THEMSELVES. The hero figure in myth and legend, archetype and fairytale, grows in stature and glory through a series of tests and temperings of character and will. And the prince who would be a hero is in no less need of transformation. Pre-eminent by birth, she has to know the human self within the pomp, and overcome fear, pain, humiliation and loss of faith in the process. A challenge is essential for every hero, to attain superhuman strength and renown; but the heroic prince needs to face her own vulnerability, and in the process grow wise. Early in her life circumstances gave Elizabeth a descent into terror and powerlessness which steeled her character and prepared her for the crown. For Mary the trials came too late and were too extreme for a nature bred on adulation and ease. Their different responses to flattery and menace show the two sides of a harsh Greek truth familiar to them both: , pathei mathos – through suffering learning.* Elizabeth’s triumph was her painful transformation from prisoner to prince: Mary’s tragedy was her headlong reversal of that journey.

  But before Elizabeth could become the great queen of collective imagination, she confronted the fundamental problem that she was a woman. Even the enlightened thinkers of the Renaissance found it contrary to natural law that a woman alone, without the alliance and natural reinforcement of a husband, a brother, a father or son, could be a leader of men. And in her public utterances at least Elizabeth appeared to accept this orthodoxy that women generally lacked the capacity to rule. In speeches and letters she referred often to her innate weakness as a woman before claiming, with the power of antithesis, her unique gifts of courage, of care for her subjects, of genetic inheritance from her father. Her apparent acceptance of female inferiority was certainly in part a rhetorical flourish. It was also a clever political ploy to feign incompetence and thereby lull the opposition. It was an integral part of the greatest diplomatic game she was to play, the virgin open to bids for a dynastic marriage. But this reiteration of female inferiority was an expression too of a not quite unshaken confidence in herself, an inability to discount completely the venerable opinions of her intellectual masters.

  For Elizabeth, however remarkable, was still a woman of her time, brought up in accordance with the prevailing expectations for aristocratic young women of the early sixteenth century and personally deeply influenced by her religious and classical education. Despite her sense of destiny, she cannot have escaped the unanimous message of her education that it was an aberration for a woman to govern – ‘monstriferous’1 was John Knox’s blunt verdict. Worse still, female governance disturbed the natural and sacred order of the universe. Aristotle was cited, as was St Paul, and contemporary statesmen like Sir Thomas Elyot who could call on his depth of scholarship of Renaissance humanism to declare: ‘in the partes of wisdome and civile policy, [women] be founded unapt, and to have litell capacitie’.2 Even reformist theologians like Calvin, adopting as conciliatory a tone as possible in writing to William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary once she was queen, could only see female rule as unnatural, a punishment from God for sin: ‘a deviation from the primitive and established order of nature, it ought to be held as a judgement on man for his dereliction of his rights, just like slavery’.3

  The way Elizabeth philosophically explained the anomaly of female rule was through the medieval theory of the king’s two bodies. This proposed that there was a natural body and a body politic. In Elizabeth’s cas
e the natural body, the corporeal self with all the weaknesses and vitiation that implied, was where her feminine frailty resided. But as queen, she could claim also a body politic, with all the ‘masculine’ virtues of judgement, decisiveness, courage and probity, which her female self was deemed to lack. Three days after she acceded to the throne, in her first speech to her assembled lords, the young queen sought to minimize her disadvantages of youth and sex by invoking this mystical duality:

  considering I am God’s creature, ordained to obey His appointment, I will thereto yield, desiring from the bottom of my heart that I may have assistance of His grace to be the minister of His heavenly will in this office now committed to me. And as I am but one body naturally considered, though by His permission a body politic to govern, so I shall desire you all, my lords … to be assistant to me.4

  Elizabeth learned how to use this ambivalence to her advantage, creating for herself during her long reign an androgynous identity which gave her a unique protean power. She could offer her unbroached female body to invoke the iconic power of the Virgin herself, chosen by God, beyond reproach and distinguished by the characteristic of mercy. She could as readily become the mother of her people when she wished to convey love and careful nurture. She played the lover, outrageous, flirtatious and vain. She played the housekeeper, excusing her legendary parsimony and meanness on the grounds that she was merely doing what any good woman would do. In her political negotiations she could shamelessly trade on the accepted feminine trait of indecisiveness, confounding the schemes of her advisers and enemies with a self-proclaimed female incapacity, while summoning political shrewdness and will.

  However, when it suited her purposes, Elizabeth would claim the maleness inherent in her ‘body politic’. Invoking her kingly majesty, she assumed all the qualities traditionally ascribed to the masculine; the heart of a lion, the mind of a scholar, steadfastness in the face of her enemies, jealousy of her honour and the courage to act militarily in defence of her country and her people.

  Elizabeth was both a virgin and a prince, when virginity was a positive virtue which elevated a woman above her carnal and inferior destiny and a prince was ordained by God and pre-eminent amongst mortals. By maintaining her supremacy in both masculine and feminine roles, Elizabeth made it difficult for her detractors. More often than not they resorted to personal attacks, accusing her of illegitimacy or elaborating rumours of her sexual abnormality and her freakishness as a woman. Mary Queen of Scots, herself, joined in the demeaning innuendo with the so-called ‘scandal letter’ she wrote Elizabeth from her imprisonment in the winter of 1584. In this she catalogued the sexually charged rumours about the queen, suggesting that the consummation of marriage to any man was made impossible because ‘indubitably you were not like other women’.5

  It was difficult for Elizabeth to overcome the established, deep-seated prejudices against female rule. And given the scarcity of examples of women of authority in previous centuries, there was bound to be a certain prejudice and lack of confidence to overcome within herself. Writing a century earlier, a prolific French intellectual and writer, Christine de Pisan, expressed something of the effect on thoughtful women of the accumulation of negative opinion about their own sex. In the introduction to her refutation of misogynist texts, The Book of the City of Ladies, she wrote, ‘[It] made me wonder how it happened that so many different men – and learned men among them – are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour.’ So demoralized did she become by this unremitting prejudice from fine scholars and godly men whose opinion she revered that she ended up ‘detest[ing] myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature’.6

  Although Elizabeth was living a century later and, as a royal princess, could claim a certain distance from the general run of womankind, she was reading the same classical and biblical texts as de Pisan, in which were promulgated the same orthodoxies of women’s unfitness for responsibility outside family life. In England’s long history there had been no regnant queens apart from the twelfth-century Queen Matilda, whose indecisiveness and lack of judgement indirectly caused civil war. And Matilda was never crowned as queen. Now four centuries later there would be four regnant queens in one isle; the first to inherit a throne in her own right in 1542 had been Mary Queen of Scots, but she was not to return to Scotland and her throne until 1561. By then Mary Tudor in 1553 had brushed aside Lady Jane Grey (whose uncrowned nine-day reign barely counted) and succeeded to the English throne. On her death in 1558 she was followed by Elizabeth herself.

  The prejudice against sovereign queens was not so personally troublesome to the two Marys, or indeed to Jane, who mitigated the abnormality of their status by marrying. By following the prescribed pattern of alliance, female rulers were expected to find in their husbands, who on marriage became kings, the statesmanlike qualities and powers denied to them as women. This had its own inherent political problems, but the queens’ advisers and subjects were at least spared the worrying aberration of a woman as sole monarch.

  By refusing all her life to marry, despite the weight of history and consistent, at times almost hysterical, pressure from her advisers, Elizabeth was refusing to accept publicly this view of her implied inadequacies in being a mere queen. This also made her more exposed than her sister and cousin to the perceived unnaturalness of her position. She recognized this vulnerability and invoked revered biblical women in an attempt to appear less alone. In a prayer written in Spanish in the early part of her reign she addressed God, ‘Thou hast done me so special and so rare a mercy that, being a woman by my nature weak, timid, and delicate, as are all women, Thou hast caused me to be vigorous, brave, and strong … persist, in giving me strength so that I, like another Deborah, like another Judith, like another Esther, may free Thy people.’7

  Her prayers are her conversations with God and her people, and in publishing them in volume form she broadcast an affective voice to her subjects. They were not only tracts for private meditation, but also powerful propaganda for herself as her people’s God-ordained queen. In a book of the queen’s prayers, published in 1563, some of Elizabeth’s Latin compositions, although addressed to God, are more clearly promotional literature addressed to the world: ‘I am unimpaired in body, with a good form, a healthy and substantial wit, prudence even beyond other women, and beyond this, distinguished and superior in the knowledge and use of literature and languages, which is highly esteemed because unusual in my sex. Finally I have been endowed with all the royal qualities and with gifts worthy of a kingdom.’8 Her persistence in rehearsing her kingly qualities of mind and character in her prayers, her conversations and her speeches, revealed Elizabeth’s sensitivity to the fundamental prejudices against her sex.

  By refusing to marry, yet holding out the possibility that one day she might, Elizabeth also turned the accepted male orthodoxies on their head and used her self as the main bargaining bait in the wiliest of diplomatic games. In this way she kept the great European powers at bay by playing each off against the other until she was strong enough to dominate her neighbours through intelligence, superior naval power and nearly half a century’s peace and prosperity at home.

  But this strategy was far from formed as Elizabeth stood on the threshold of power, watching her half-sister Mary Tudor seize the initiative and claim her rightful place as queen. It was during her reign that Elizabeth was to suffer the greatest ordeal of her life, the memory of which would never leave her.

  Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary was seventeen years her senior and had endured a different series of ordeals in her progress to the crown. She, like Elizabeth, had been stripped of legitimacy and denied her place in the accession. But it had been Elizabeth’s birth that had blighted Mary’s youth. She was demoted, humiliated and ostracized by her father for her devotion to her mother, Catherine of Aragon. Then as Edward VI faced death, in his desire to maintain the reformed religion he had pro
moted so strongly in his short reign, he diverted the accession from his sisters Mary and Elizabeth to his cousin, the Protestant Lady Jane Grey. This plan was encouraged, if not instigated, by the newly elevated John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who then married Jane to his son, Guildford. On Edward’s death on 6 July 1553, the plan seemed to have succeeded, but then Mary courageously gathered her forces and, buoyed on a wave of popular support for Henry’s rightful heir, faced down Northumberland and was proclaimed queen. Dudley was beheaded for treason the following month, and Guildford and Jane were executed six months later.

  Mary shouldered her responsibilities with appropriate seriousness of purpose. The maintenance of her principles, although lacking in pragmatism and political expediency, had an element of the heroic. But her reign was undermined by two fatal passions. Mary was pathetically devoted to her husband Philip II of Spain, who was unmoved by her and much hated and mistrusted by her people. She was also absolutely committed to her faith and the need to avenge the wounds and humiliations inflicted on her mother, the faithful, and herself in the establishment of the new church. This zealotry resulted in her immediate and forcible restitution of Catholicism, in a country that was beginning to embrace the reformed religion, and value autonomy from the dictates of Rome. In restoring the old heresy laws in 1555, Mary unleashed the persecutions that resulted in an orgy of burnings. These autos-da-fé, some three hundred or so, inspired one of the great emotive tracts of the sixteenth century, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,* in which in lines of poignant verse John Foxe recorded the names and circumstances of the deaths of ordinary, yet extraordinary, people:

  June 16 1557

  When JOAN BRADBRIDGE, and a blind maid,

  APPELBY, ALLEN, and both their wives;

  When MANNING’s wife was not afraid,