Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  These difficult, secluded years allowed her to focus her thoughts and energies so completely that when at last the call came for her to be queen she could spring, fully armed, to her throne. She saw her life as an apprenticeship and in a prayer she wrote early in her reign, she listed the experiences which brought her to this place:

  Thou hast willed me to be not some wretched girl from the meanest rank of the common people, who would pass her life miserably in poverty and squalor, but to a Kingdom thou hast destined me, born of royal parents and nurtured and educated at court. When I was surrounded and thrown about by various snares of enemies, Thou hast preserved me with Thy constant protection from prison and the most extreme danger; and though I was freed only at the very last moment, Thou hast entrusted me on earth with royal sovereignty and majesty.58

  Although memory of the fear would never leave her, Elizabeth was proud of what she had endured. It had given her a greater confidence in her strength and self-reliance in the process.

  It was extraordinary that Mary Queen of Scots was to suffer a very similar ordeal, imprisoned under suspicion of being a focus for treason, if not a traitor herself, kept isolated in the country, continually watched and physically constrained. Unfortunately, for Mary this period of introspection came too late to teach her lessons about her role as queen and the government of her people. By then her youth was fraying and her time for ruling had passed. It did, however, give her the means to become if not a heroic prince then a heroic martyr. If Mary was to be denied the chance to rule with nobility the least she could do was to die with majesty. With every bit as much of the great actress about her as her cousin, she managed to turn her death into a bravura performance. The judicial execution for treason, which Elizabeth escaped for herself, made Mary a martyr for her country and her faith, far more famous through the ensuing centuries for her dazzling recklessness, executive failures and the manner of her death than if she had been merely a moderately competent monarch who died in her bed.

  Mary’s real apprenticeship for her role as Queen of Scotland was conducted while she was still in France. Henri II’s Queen Catherine de Medici and his mistress Diane de Poitiers were examples to Mary of women wielding power. Although entirely unalike in their natures and their way of dealing with the world, these were women of intrigue and faction. They had no real jurisdiction of their own but exercised great covert power. Seduction and control for the mistress; motherhood and endurance for the wife. These were the obvious female routes of influence, but the intelligence and ambition of both Diane and Catherine had to be hidden, expressed only through their relationships with kings.

  During her time in France, Mary’s Guise uncles were in the ascendancy. It was a period when there was widespread fear that they, not the king, were the effective rulers of France. It served their purposes to encourage their niece and her young husband François to spend their days in courtly amusements: hunting by day (hawking was a particular enthusiasm), and dancing by night. It was true François showed little of the inspiration and drive of the grandfather after whom he was named, but his wife was an intelligent, energetic and curious young woman who would have responded well, perhaps, to serious lessons in statecraft. If not taught formally the business of effective monarchy, Mary cannot have failed to recognize that in the only court she knew moral and sexual laxity did not appear incompatible with religious devotion. Her adoptive father, the king, lived openly with both his wife and mistress. His mistress, as long as the king lived, was treated as a lady of the highest social standing, her daughters’ hands sought in marriage for the scions of aristocratic families.

  As she grew older and more aware of the behaviour of those adults around her, Mary also could not ignore the fact that her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, although by rank a great churchman and by repute a skilful and impassioned preacher was also by far the richest cleric and by nature one of the most rapacious of men. Court life everywhere was rife with gossip, rivalries, passionate liaisons, bitter rifts and rampant opportunism. The French court which Mary inhabited just happened at the time to be more extravagant and more extreme than any of the other European courts of the day. The young queen was to learn that scheming, duplicity and opportunism were the everyday tools of a successful courtier, and the ability to anticipate and out-scheme was the response of a successful queen. While her cousin Elizabeth’s youth was largely spent outside court life with her books and plans, and the occasional visitor to engage her thoughts, Mary’s life from the age of six was lived at the very centre of the most glamorous court in Christendom.

  For a while yet, her star could only grow brighter as everything for which her family had hoped and schemed came to fruition. Mary was still only fifteen, her destiny inexorably in the hands of others more powerful and ambitious than she. She seemed, however, more than happy with the future mapped out for her and in the spring of 1558 made a glorious dynastic marriage by marrying her fourteen-year-old prince.

  Mary’s marriage indicated to herself and the world that she was assuming the role that the expectations of her position and sex had made hers from birth. Her increased status as dauphine brought her closer to becoming the pre-eminent woman in one of the richest and most powerful monarchies in Europe and, superficially at least, this amplified the pleasures of her life at court. George Buchanan,* the great Scottish scholar who knew her well, described some of her future joys in the poem he wrote for her wedding:

  But let not fond regrets disturb your mind,

  Your country, and your mother left behind!

  This is your country too; what wealth of friends,

  What kindred on your nuptual pomp attends!

  All are alike to you where’er you tread,

  The mighty living and the mighty dead;

  And one awaits you, dear beyond the rest,

  Smiles on his lips and rapture in his breast,

  The eldest, gentlest of the royal line,

  Linked in fraternal fellowship with thine.

  Fellowship and rapture may indeed have awaited her, but with such elevation came added responsibility and danger too. Mary was yet to appreciate how her triumph and her complicity in the attendant schemes of her family would open the way to irresolvable conflict with her cousin.

  That autumn Elizabeth’s accession as Queen of England focused in the mind of Mary’s new father-in-law, Henri II, his long-term ambition of constructing a French empire that included Scotland along with the kingdom of England and Ireland. Central to this expansion was Mary’s claim to the English crown. Almost immediately he approached the pope* for clarification as to Elizabeth’s illegitimacy and Mary’s entitlement, as closest legitimate heir, to her kingdom. Camden characterized Henri’s determination with a vivid phrase: ‘the French King did now labour tooth and nail at Rome, that Mary Queen of Scots might be pronounced lawfull Queen of England’. In a letter to Lord Fleming in the January of the following year, Mary and her husband already styled themselves ‘King and Queen Dauphins of Scotland, England and Ireland’.59 This development was watched with as keen interest by Spain, just as determined as Elizabeth that England should not be included in a French empire. As an English agent based in Flanders noted at the time: ‘To make a hard comparison England may be likened to a bone thrown between two dogs.’60

  To transform that bone into a new beast, with flesh and blood and teeth, Elizabeth had to begin work immediately. On 17 November 1558, she ascended to one of the weakest thrones in Europe, but she had arrived there with all her faculties sharpened, her senses acute, ready for the challenge of the only role in life she had ever wanted. At her side as her new Secretary of State was William Cecil who, in covert contact during her perilous years in waiting, had already prepared for this moment. Any death of the old monarch and accession of the new was fraught with danger. Such a momentous transfer of power opened up possibilities of counterclaims and rebellion. It also involved struggles for patronage and influence from the highest nobility and ministers of state through to the
lowliest official. Ambitions were unleashed in aspiring courtiers who strove to be the coming men of the new regime.

  Elizabeth and the contemporaries who would make up her executive were used to the crisis of change. They had lived through the audacious coup that placed Lady Jane Grey on the throne instead of Mary Tudor and could not take for granted that this time the throne would automatically be delivered to Elizabeth. There were various cousins descended from Henry VII waiting in the wings: two Grey sisters remained, Catherine and Mary; the Countess of Lennox’s son, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who although only thirteen was nevertheless a rare Tudor male; and there was Mary Queen of Scots herself, in direct descent from Henry VII’s elder daughter, Margaret, and therefore armed with the most clear-cut claim of them all. Apart from the internal dissatisfactions and domestic ambitions, this transfer of power excited intense interest abroad where the European powers were anxious to augment their advantages and frustrate their enemies.

  Cecil was prepared for any eventuality. He was a man who liked making lists. On Elizabeth’s day of accession he was ready with his ‘Memorial’ of twelve essential tasks, written in his own orderly hand. His first directive was clear: ‘To consider the proclamation; to proclaim it; to send the same to all manner of places and sheriffs with speed; and to put it in print.’ Then he turned to matters of security. The Tower was put in the hands of ‘trusty persons’ and made ready to receive Elizabeth should she need the safety of its defences while she settled her officers and council. He intended to write in Elizabeth’s name to the keepers of all the castles and forts. The ports were temporarily closed, with particular care taken with those places closest to France and Scotland, and money could not be taken out of the country without the queen’s express permission. New justices of the peace and sheriffs would be appointed in each county and all preachers were to be dissuaded, in the short term, from touching on anything doctrinally controversial in their sermons. Cecil’s twelfth and last directive was ‘To consider the condition [disposition] of the preacher at Paul’s cross, that no occasion be given to him, to stir any dispute touching the governance of the realm’,61 where Paul’s Cross was notorious as a platform for rabble-rousing sermons against the establishment. Security at home and abroad was the overriding concern. Faced with an impoverished and demoralized country, Elizabeth quickly moved to conclude peace with France.

  The retrieval of Calais loomed large for the English as a matter of sentiment and principle, but it was clear that England was not in a strong bargaining position, and France had no intention of yielding this prize so easily. Peace mattered to Elizabeth more than anything at this time but she was determined to show that she would lead her country herself, impoverished and disadvantaged as it might be, without the support of foreign interests. ‘Queen Elizabeth, being a Virgin of manly Courage, professed that she was an absolute free Princess to manage her actions by her self or her Ministers’62 was how Camden expressed her resolve. The Spanish ambassador, succinctly characterizing the instability of her inheritance, thought this independence foolhardy: ‘Really this country is more fit to be dealt with sword in hand than by cajolery, for there are neither funds, nor soldiers, nor heads, nor forces, and yet it is overflowing with every other necessary of life.’63 Camden was even more stark:

  the State of England lay now most afflicted, imbroiled on the one side with the Scottish, on the other side with the French War; overcharged with Debt incurred by Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth; the Treasure exhausted; Calice [Calais] and the Country of Oye [the area round Calais], with great Provision for the Wars, lost, to the great Dishonour of the English Nation; the people distracted with different Opinions in Religion; the Queen bare of potent Friends, and strengthened with no Alliance of foreign Princes.64

  In the first set of suggestions from the French was that Calais would be returned to England as the dowry in a marriage contract between the putative offspring of Elizabeth and of Mary Queen of Scots and her husband the dauphin, soon to become king. Whom the new English queen would marry was the subject of the most pressing importance. William Cecil, writing from Edinburgh the following year where he was negotiating the Treaty of Edinburgh with the Scots, showed his own ever-present anxiety on the matter (and a revealing frankness): ‘And we beseach Almighty God bless your Majesty “with fruites of peace, and as we may be bold to wryte, with the fruit of your womb”’.65

  Elizabeth, knowing her opinion already on the possibilities of motherhood, did not find credible the idea of this fantasy marriage contract uniting the children of England and a Scotland subsumed by France. Instead, with urgent pragmatism she agreed that Calais would be restored after a period of eight years, or that financial compensation would be paid to England. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis was signed on 2 April 1559. Although Elizabeth’s subjects did not trust the French to honour any future promises over Calais there was widespread relief that the pointless debilitation of war had ceased.

  Her advisers however were increasingly alarmed and incensed by the pretensions of the French towards the English crown. During the peace negotiations they had claimed insolently that they could not conclude a treaty with Elizabeth, whom they implied was an illegitimate usurper on the throne. They amplified their insult by proclaiming they knew not to whom they should return Calais as they considered the Queen of England to be their own dauphine. The ‘deceits and trumperies of the French’ were dangerous enough in their control over Scotland for, in Cecil’s warning to Elizabeth, they used that country as ‘an instrument to exercise thereby their malice upon England, and to make a footstool thereof to look over England as they may’.66 But this persistent claim by Mary of the title of Queen of England and Ireland was not just humiliating, it was intimidating too. No one was more aware than Elizabeth of the vulnerability of her legitimacy, due in part to her own father’s mendacity when she was declared illegitimate at not yet three years old, prior to her mother’s execution.

  Although agreeing in the peace treaty no longer to style themselves Queen and King of England, Mary and her husband continued to use the English arms at all official occasions. Perhaps the most seriously unsettling for Elizabeth was their making of the Great Seal with the arms of all four countries quartered and the legend ‘Franciscus et Maria, Dei Gratia Franciae, Scotiae, Angliae et Hiberniae Rex et Regina’. This was sent to Scotland, and a matching heraldic device was engraved on all Mary’s silverware, in continuing defiance.

  Elizabeth was not persuaded by the French ambassador’s assurances that this presumption had nothing to do with Mary’s own wishes but was imposed on her by the ambitions of her father-in-law. Cecil delivered the verdict: ‘Her Majesty thinks this excuse very strange or very imperfect.’67 For although Mary was young and could be said to be acting under the authority of her husband, it was pointed out that both continued to use the English title and arms even after the death of Henri II.

  At the ratification of the peace treaty conducted in London that May, Elizabeth set out to dazzle the proud French entourage with the splendour of her hospitality. This was the first occasion of her reign when she could play the grand monarch upon an international stage. It was important to set down her mark. She intended to shake the complacency of the haughty French and the watching European powers with the realization that England was no inferior kingdom, that she was no inconsiderable queen. The French may have chosen to insult her personally and patronize her country but she would have none of them say she did not know how to put on a show. The ambassadors were brought to Whitehall Palace to meet the queen ‘who received them very joyfully and graciously’, before they and their accompanying entourage of courtiers went off to the surrounding royal park to see two deer killed, one by dogs, the other with arrows from a company of archers.

  They all returned to a ‘sumptuous feast’ in the garden under the gallery, decorated with gold and silver brocade and ‘wreaths of flowers and leaves of most beautiful designs, which gave a very sweet odour and were marvellous to behold,
having been prepared in less than two evenings so as to keep them fresh’. Although the table at which the French and English courtiers were to dine was fifty-four paces long, the farthingales worn by the fashionable Frenchwomen were so wide that there was not enough room for everyone at table, so members of Elizabeth’s privy chamber ‘ate on the ground on the rushes’. The ‘precious and costly drinking cups of gold and of rock crystal and other jewels’ were passed around filled with wine. And what of the food? Our Italian eyewitness reported that the joints of meat were large and of excellent quality, ‘but the delicacies and cleanliness customary in Italy were wanting’.

  But it was the newly anointed Elizabeth who drew all eyes. Gone were the days of the circumspect princess, sober in dress, despising – as she told Ascham – all outward adornment and wearing of gold. Instead the twenty-five-year-old queen appeared before them, ‘dressed entirely in purple velvet, with so much gold and so many pearls and jewels that it added much to her beauty’. How well this illustrated her notorious mercurial ability to be all things to all men. Then Elizabeth as resplendent queen contrived to show her mind was just as richly endowed as her person: ‘She took M. de Montmorenci [Constable of France] with her right hand and M. de Vielleville [ambassador] with the left, and they walked in the private orchard for more than a full hour, her Majesty speaking with them most sweetly and familiarly in French, as readily as she does Italian, Latin, and Greek, all which tongues she uses at pleasure, and in so loud a tone as to be heard by everybody.’68 Elizabeth intended her neighbours and rivals to know her full measure, and beware.

  For Mary, the practical preparation for her main role as the Queen of Scotland (with pretensions to becoming the Queen of England too) could well have begun with her husband’s accession to the throne of France. The fact that their short seventeen-month reign occurred at all was due to a freak jousting accident, the futility of which seems symbolic of the ill-fatedness of Henri II and his run of unimpressive sons who followed François I to the throne. Despite the disappointing quality of these later Valois kings, the strength and the unifying central spine of the French monarchy was Catherine de Medici, the true centre of power as queen mother to three kings of France, her influence only ceasing with her death.