Elizabeth and Mary Page 18

But all these Seven did lose their lives.

  When these, at Maidstone, were put to death,

  We wished for our ELIZABETH9

  These pitiful deaths earned the queen the posthumous nickname ‘Bloody Mary’. Not a personally cruel woman, but a passionate and fanatic one, she believed that this purge of heretics would save the souls of the benighted. But she had completely misjudged her people and the spirit of the times. They had welcomed her reign with much rejoicing; many still were sympathetic to and nostalgic for the old faith. But fanatical persecution did not suit the English temperament, and Mary’s personal unhappiness, and her people’s growing misery and fear combined to make her reign a dark one. Its failure was compounded in the last months of her life with the loss of Calais to the French. Of great symbolic moment, both Mary and her people recognized this as a damning verdict on her reign.

  Mary Tudor did little to commend female rule to a suspicious populace, one of its major detriments being her marriage to a foreign prince, and a Spanish prince at that. No foreigner had been King of England since William the Conqueror and there was a visceral fear of ‘strangers’. Queen Mary’s alliance with a Hapsburg prince seemed to its opponents no less than the enemy’s conquest of England by marriage.

  Politically, too, it was feared that such an alliance would make England even more vulnerable to the French who already had assured their passage into the realm via Scotland. For the rest, all the ills of the reign could be blamed on this most unpopular of consorts: ‘Queen Marye’s match with King Phillip, was so farre from enrichinge England, that never prince left it more indebted, both at home and beyond the sea,’10 was the verdict of most of her people.

  In January and February 1554 confirmation of this projected marriage fuelled an uprising of disgruntled gentlemen, several of whom were members of the House of Commons, intent on denying any Spanish influence in England, but concerned too to save the new evangelical religion from suppression by the old. In an extensive conspiracy aimed at involving most of the central and southern counties, Mary was to be bundled from the throne, even assassinated it was whispered, and Elizabeth raised in her stead. Whether Elizabeth knew of this or not it was extremely perilous for her to be implicated, or even mentioned in the same breath, as such deadly treason.

  This dangerous episode became known as the Wyatt Rebellion, after Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger, the son of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt who had loved Anne Boleyn and lost her to the king, yet managed to survive her fall. Sir Thomas the younger was a brave military commander but a reckless and impetuous man. Asked to join the rebellion by Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, who was hoping to marry Elizabeth on the successful outcome of this coup, Wyatt had cheerfully agreed. However, as it transpired, he was the only competent one among them. When all the other conspirators were arrested it was left to him to carry through his part of the insurrection alone. This he did with some success, marching the rump of his four thousand men right into the heart of London, and into a trap.

  Imprisoned in the Tower and examined under torture he refused to implicate Elizabeth in the conspiracy, insisting that he had only ‘sent hir a letter that she shoulde gett hir asfar from the cyty as she coulde, the rather for hir saftye from strangers’.11 For his part, he swore that he had not desired the queen’s death but had been motivated by his patriotism: ‘myne hole intent and styrre [stir] was agaynst the comyng in of strandgers and Spanyerds, and to abolyshe theym out of this realme’.12 But even Wyatt’s stalwart denials could not save Elizabeth. Her sister Mary was heavily reliant on the advice of Renard, the Spanish ambassador, who was implacably opposed to Elizabeth and, like Mary’s Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, deeply suspicious of the religious and dynastic interests that focused around her. Renard’s purpose was unequivocal. He pressed the queen to charge her sister with treason and execute her, even suggesting that Philip’s arrival in the country to take up his marriage vows should be dependent on the dispatch of Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth’s true attitude to religion was a matter of much debate for Mary and her advisers. She had learned young the necessity of expedience, and the value of compromise. At this time of religious and political ferment Elizabeth needed to keep her wits about her and attract as little attention as possible. Fearing her sister’s disfavour for her lack of enthusiasm for Catholicism, Elizabeth requested an audience, and in the presence of the queen threw herself on her knees, weeping. She explained that her religion ‘was excusable, because she had been educated in it, and had never even heard the doctrines of the old faith’.13 To Mary’s gratitude and relief, her sister then asked for books and suitable instruction that might show her the error of her beliefs.

  However, there were more cynical courtiers who thought this but a ploy by Elizabeth and they watched her closely as she attended, or found excuses not to attend, Mass. An atmosphere of suspicion and menace surrounded her. The French ambassador, writing to the King of France, offered his interpretation: ‘Madame Elizabeth, after much solicitation, has been compelled to hear the Mass with the Queen, her sister. Nevertheless, everyone believes that she is acting rather from fear of danger and peril from those around her than from real devotion.’14

  By the end of 1553 she had left court, in part to get away from the spies, malicious gossip and talk of plots and conspiracies that dogged her every movement. Elizabeth had been periodically indisposed since her unhappy removal from her stepmother Catherine Parr’s household some five years before. By the beginning of the new year she was more acutely ill with a debilitating disease, possibly some kind of kidney inflammation, which had weakened her considerably and made her face and body swell with fluid. On the outbreak of the Wyatt Rebellion in February 1554, Mary had summoned her from Ashridge, where she was living in Hertfordshire, to London, but Elizabeth had a genuine excuse for not complying immediately. Once Wyatt was arrested, however, the summons came more forcefully. On 11 February three lords arrived at her gates, with orders to convey her immediately to London, one of whom was William Howard, a kinsman of the Boleyns. Their request was made more compelling by the presence in their retinue of two hundred and fifty men on horseback.

  The queen had also sent two doctors and they confirmed that the journey was not life threatening. Elizabeth was in no position to demur. She was so unwell, however, that she came close to fainting ‘three or four times’ as they got her ready to depart, her household shocked at ‘the careful fear and captivity of their innocent Lady and mistress’.15 Her progress was painful and slow. It took nine days before she arrived in London where she was met by sympathetic members of the court on horseback and a spontaneous crowd of ordinary Londoners, ‘who then flocking about her litter, lamented and greatly bewailed her estate’.16 There were rumours, as there always were with unexplained illnesses, that Elizabeth had been poisoned, ‘because she is so distended and exhausted that she is a sad sight to see’.17

  Ill as she was, Elizabeth was not too weak to notice what was perhaps her first experience of the force of a collective emotion focused on herself. The rough goodwill and human sympathy, faces peering to see, hands outstretched, voices shouting, as the mass of humanity surged towards her: she was their princess, they were her people. Always sensitive to the emotive power of image, she ‘caused her litter to be uncovered, that she might show herself to the people’. Elizabeth knew the effect that the sight of her in such a plight had on them. She was young. She had dressed herself entirely in white, the colour of purity, and her natural paleness had become almost transparent with illness, fatigue and fear. But her expression was, according to the hawkish ambassador to Spain, ‘proud, lofty, and superbly disdainful; an expression which she assumed to disguise her mortification’.18

  Mary was under pressure to send her sister to the Tower, to share her fate with all the other rebels and heretics. Feelings were running high. On 12 February, the day after Elizabeth was sent for, Lady Jane Grey, ‘the nine days’ queen’, had been executed in the Tower, out of sight of the general populace
. Stories had circulated as to her piety and dignity on the scaffold, the pathos of this sixteen-year-old girl, blindfolded and in a fright feeling for the block on which to lay her head. Rather than saving her, her royal blood had been her undoing. Innocent herself, she was executed for her father’s implication in the rebellion. There was every reason to believe that Elizabeth’s life might as easily be tossed away.

  There was general alarm and confusion. Rebel soldiers were being rounded up and hanged in market places throughout the south. At every gate to the city of London gallows were erected. Body parts of rebels who had been hung, drawn and quartered were strung up along the city walls. The prisons were so full that prisoners ‘of the poorest sort’19 were locked up in churches and taken from there to be hanged. The main conspirators were brought to the Tower to be ‘straitly examined’20 and if found guilty then taken to the scaffold on Tower Hill. The French ambassador, who also opposed the Spanish marriage, described Mary’s severe justice. The gibbets hung, he wrote, with ‘some of the bravest and most gallant men that she had in her kingdom’,21 the prisons bursting with the best of English nobility.

  As Elizabeth’s pallid form passed through the emotionally stirred crowd she appeared a powerless innocent in the grip of an avenging government, a daughter of King Harry brought low and vulnerable to suffering as they were. Yet her status made her a ready candidate for heroism, or martyrdom. It was possible, however, that she knew more about the uprising than anyone was telling.

  Elizabeth was closely confined at Whitehall while those implicated in the rebellion were interrogated. The queen, Bishop Gardiner, her Lord Chancellor and Renard, the Spanish ambassador, were keen to extract information that pointed to Elizabeth’s guilt. There is no record of Elizabeth’s feelings during her three-week isolation, but there is no doubt that she was acutely aware of the danger she was in and fearful of what case might be constructed in her absence: ‘I pray God [that] evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other’22 was one of her anxious pleas to the queen.

  But Queen Mary’s persuasions were already set resolutely against her. Michiel, the Venetian ambassador, gave a shrewd and plausible analysis. However much Mary tried to hide it, her ‘hatred … scorn and ill-will’ manifest towards her sister in all kinds of ways, was a direct result of the misery and humiliation she and her mother suffered from Henry’s behaviour during the divorce. ‘But what disquiets [Mary] most of all is to see the eyes and the hearts of the nation already fixed on this lady as successor to the Crown from despair of descent from the Queen.’ Not only was this an embittering reminder of Mary’s own infertility but, Michiel implied, a denial of everything she held most dear – her religion, her mother’s memory, her own legitimacy. ‘It would be most grievous’, he agreed, ‘not only to her but to any one to see the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet, on the point of inheriting the throne with better fortune than herself, whose descent is rightful, legitimate, and regal.’

  Elizabeth’s own behaviour at this point did not help matters. For, insecure in the knowledge of the debatable circumstances of her legitimacy, she armed herself with a fragile but galling confidence. ‘She is proud and haughty, as although she knows that she was born of such a mother, she nevertheless does not consider herself of inferior degree to the Queen, whom she equals in self-esteem; nor does she believe herself less legitimate than Her Majesty.’23

  Regardless of her innocence or guilt in the Wyatt Rebellion, the real danger to Elizabeth lay in the fact that she was a popular focus for every kind of dissent and discontent with her sister’s government. Michiel declared, ‘never is a conspiracy discovered in which either justly or unjustly she or some of her servants are not mentioned’.24 Any hothead or madman might implicate her in his own private fantasy or place her as a figurehead for a full-scale conspiracy against the crown. In a later speech to Parliament she recalled this sinister time: ‘I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me. I did differ from her in religion and I was sought for divers ways.’25

  While she was confined Elizabeth was told of one of the more bizarre manifestations of her value to the opposition. A wildfire rumour had swept through London of the miraculous talking wall that appeared to add supernatural approval for the new religion and Elizabeth as queen. So febrile were everyone’s emotions that by eleven o’clock in the morning ‘more than seventeen thousand people’, according to Renard, had mobbed the house in order to hear what they believed was the voice of an angel. ‘When they said to it, “God save Queen Mary!” it answered nothing. When they said “God save the Lady Elizabeth!” it replied “So be it.” If they asked it “What is the Mass?” it replied “Idolatry.”’26 Elizabeth was quick to dismiss this as a trick, as was the government. It was generally recognized, however, that the people were unhappy about the prosecutions of so many rebels and the increasing intolerance towards adherents of the new religion, now damned as heretics. While she lived, Elizabeth made an obvious and attractive focus for their disparate grievances.

  The arrests and interrogations continued. Despite the lack of hard evidence, Mary’s suspicions remained. Elizabeth’s character ‘was just what she had always believed it to be’,27 she had remarked with some bitterness to Renard. On Bishop Gardiner’s urging the council agreed Elizabeth had to be imprisoned while the investigations continued. On 16 March, Elizabeth was told what she dreaded most, that she was to be incarcerated in the Tower. There could be no more baleful proposition: it was, as she pointed out, ‘a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject’.28 Elizabeth’s own mother, Lord Admiral Seymour and, most recently, Jane Grey, had entered the Tower as a prelude to their grisly deaths. And those who did not die quickly languished there for years suffering the slow death of disease, fear and loss of hope.

  When they came for Elizabeth the following morning she begged to be allowed to see her sister face to face, to protest her innocence for herself. There would be a tragic symmetry when nearly two decades later Mary Queen of Scots would beg to be allowed to present herself before her cousin Elizabeth to plead her innocence. She was to be refused by Elizabeth, just as Elizabeth was now refused by her own sister. Elizabeth then asked for permission to write a letter to the queen instead, as indeed Mary would also do to her.

  Elizabeth’s famous letter, written on the eve of her imprisonment, was perhaps the greatest letter of her life. Composed while she was at her most agitated, the language was straightforward and unadorned. Her life in the balance, Elizabeth’s careful script and measured tone argued for her innocence: ‘I protest afore God (who shall judge my truth, whatsoever malice shall devise) that I never practiced, counseled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person any way or dangerous to the state of any mean.’29 She had stripped her style of all hyperbole. Instead of her usual stately metaphors and classical allusions, Elizabeth mentions only – and revealingly – the example of the Seymour brothers, whose enforced separation when the Lord Admiral was arrested, increased the misunderstandings between them, with fatal consequences. ‘I heard in my time of many cast away for want of coming to the presence of their prince, and in late days I heard my lord of Somerset [the Lord Protector] say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him, he had never suffered. But the persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the admiral lived, and that made him give his consent to his death.’ At this moment of personal strain and danger it was understandable that she should recall the last time she feared for her life, again with accusations of treason hanging over her. But perhaps being so ready to use the example of the Lord Admiral and his fate in a letter pleading for a fair hearing for herself, and possibly for her life, showed too how vividly he remained in her memory.

  The appearance of this letter is eloquent of Elizabeth’s fear. Her anguished plea for an audience and protestations of innocence ended only a quarter of the way down the reverse page.
The remaining empty space Elizabeth filled with heavily scored diagonal lines, fearful as she must have been of any unauthorized inclusions. At the bottom left hand corner, she added ‘I humbly crave but only one word of answer from yourself’ and then signed herself at the opposite corner ‘Your highness’ most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning and will be to my end, Elizabeth’.30 This careful letter had taken Elizabeth so long to write, perhaps intentionally so, that she and her escort missed the tide ‘which tarrieth for nobody’.31 Now they could only travel the following day as the queen had insisted the prisoner be conveyed to the Tower by river. To travel through the city’s narrow streets risked demonstrations and even possible rescue.

  On the morning of Palm Sunday they came for her. Londoners had been told by the council to go to church as usual. So hasty were Elizabeth’s custodians to depart that the barge carrying the princess into captivity had to wait on the river for an hour or so, in the bitter cold and in some danger, before the bargemen were willing to risk the fast flowing water through the narrow races of the old London Bridge. As they approached the forbidding fortress itself, Elizabeth asked her accompanying lords Winchester and Sussex if she could be spared entering by Traitor’s Gate. This was against their orders, they told her. It was raining as she stepped off the barge and one of the lords offered her his cloak, which she turned briskly away.

  Looking up to heaven, Elizabeth addressed the warders and soldiers who lined the entrance, ‘Ohe Lorde! I never thought to have come in here as prysoner; and I praie you all, goode frendes and fellowes, bere me wytnes, that I come yn no traytour, but as true a woman to the quenes majesty as eny is nowe lyving; and theron will I take my deathe.’32 Told by the lords who accompanied her that this was no time to argue her case, she replied smartly: ‘You have said well, my Lords! … I am sorry that I troubled you!’33 The contemporary chronicles of this central drama in Elizabeth’s life convey an immediacy in the reported conversation and singularity of detail which is compelling in their portrait of the princess and her ordeal.