Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  Elizabeth’s Privy Council wanted her to make full use of this opportunity to support the Scottish rebels and attempt to expel the French from Scotland. But Elizabeth was not to be bullied or hurried. ‘The joy of the Queen was very great’82 at the news of the French king’s death, as the Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip. There was no doubt she was delighted with the news, for it meant increased dissension and internal rifts within France itself. But she was not a natural warmonger. She had seen how her father’s military exploits, her sister’s ill-judged alliance with Spain against France, had exhausted the exchequer and wasted so many English lives for no lasting good: she argued with her councillors, ‘it is a dangerous matter to enter in war’.83

  The men around her considered that such feminine equivocation, such ‘womanish tolerations’,84 would quickly be overridden when she had taken a husband. They could then deal with the familiar kind of mannish intolerance and, with a masculine hand on the reins of government, wars could be prosecuted without these inconvenient ambivalences. To find a king for this new queen was their ever-present anxiety. But Elizabeth had always had other ideas and she had conducted her life from her earliest days in preparation for this time when she would rule in her own right. As she told her Members of Parliament some quarter of a century later, she had consciously made the hard lessons of her youth her apprenticeship for the greatest job on earth:

  ‘I did put myself to the school of experience, where I sought to learn what things were most fit for a king to have, and I found them to be four: namely, justice, temper[ance], magnanimity, and judgement … as Solomon, so I above all things have desired wisdom at the hands of God. And I thank Him He hath given me so much judgement and wit as that I perceive mine own imperfections many ways and mine ignorance in most things.’85 At that point in her reign there were few in Europe who would not consider her a match for any king.

  * * *

  *Agamemnon, 177. The first printed edition of Aeschylus was published by the celebrated Venetian Aldus Press in 1518.

  *John Foxe (1516–87) was a writer and evangelical cleric, unusual at the time in his abhorrence of burning heretics of any religion. While in exile during Mary I’s reign he started to compile the histories of anti-papal martyrs that he published in 1554 and 1559. His first English edition, called Actes and Monuments, but popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, was published in 1563 and became a huge publishing success. The affecting verses of the lives and deaths of ordinary people were much enlivened by grisly woodcuts, an unusual addition at the time. In 1571, every cathedral and most churches were ordered to have a copy for their congregations to consult.

  *This head mysteriously disappeared on the day that the staunch Protestant, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, was acquitted to general rejoicing. He had argued his case so passionately and effectively the jury refused to convict him, although he was obviously guilty. The council were so incensed at the jury’s independence that they were imprisoned in the Tower and the Fleet prison as punishment, and stayed there for the rest of the year. Having lost at least half of his nine lives on this occasion, Sir Nicholas lived to become a successful ambassador to France under Elizabeth and a friend to Mary Queen of Scots, only to lose another life or two in his supposed complicity in the rebellion of the northern Catholics in favour of Mary. He managed to die, however, in his bed (although rumour had it poisoned by the Earl of Leicester).

  *George Buchanan (1506–82) was a brilliant scholar and writer, tutor to Mary’s eldest illegitimate brother James Stewart, later Earl of Moray, and to Mary herself, both in France and when she returned to Scotland, when they would read Latin together. He also tutored her son James VI. He turned venomously against Mary during the Darnley period and testified that the ‘casket letters’ were indeed written by her. He became a Protestant and anti-monarchist and his Detectio Mariae Reginae (1571) was a devastating and distorted attack on Mary, both personally and politically, implicating her in Darnley’s murder and worse. In De jure regni apud Scotos (1579) he argued for the possibility of a just rebellion against a tyrannous monarch. His great history Rerum Scoticarum Historia was published in 1582.

  *Pope Paul IV 1556–9.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wilfulness and God’s Will

  If she had ever had the will or had found pleasure in such a dishonourable life, from which may God preserve her, she did not know of anyone who could forbid her, but she trusted in God that nobody would ever live to see her so commit herself.

  Elizabeth’s answer to concern about scandalous rumours of her relations with Robert Dudley, as reported by Baron Breuner to the Emperor Ferdinand, 1559.

  AFTER THE URGENT MATTER OF PEACE with France had been concluded, there were two outstanding problems created by Elizabeth’s accession. Whom would she marry and what form would her version of religion take? Both questions were made even more urgent by the spectre of Mary Queen of Scots whose undoubted claim to Elizabeth’s throne was backed by the ambitions and military might of the French. Religion also was inseparable from this rival claim, for Mary represented an inveterate Catholicism, tainted with something of her uncles’ reputation for fanatic enforcement. Elizabeth, of course, was the child of the English Reformation, her conception the impetus for the breach with Rome, and although it was not yet clear how radical her own position might be, she was certainly considered by the whole of Catholic Europe to be of heretical upbringing and cast of mind.

  If Elizabeth’s councillors could persuade the English queen to marry and produce an heir then not only would the direct Tudor succession be more secure, but Mary’s claim would be downgraded, for her lifetime at least. With this security, the new religion could be properly established against the ever-present claims of the old.

  The answer to these problems seemed obvious to everyone: the English queen must marry, and marry soon. The Speaker of the House of Commons made it the central point of his speech, a matter ‘of great importance for the general state of all the realme’, for by her marriage, ‘as well for her owne comfort and contentment, as for assurance to the realme by her royal issue … the feares of her faythfull subjects and frendes, as the ambitious hopes of her enimyes, should cleane be cutt offe’.1 While the whole country expected that Elizabeth would conform to this human and constitutional imperative, the European powers schemed, jockeyed for advantage, watching and waiting.

  But the steps of an extraordinarily compelling courtship dance of advance and retreat, of flirtation and feint, frustration and desire, were already being rehearsed by this most self-possessed and enigmatic of queens. These were to be repeated through the decades of her rule, to the exasperation of everyone involved, and the unique but lonely triumph of Elizabeth herself. The result was the evolution of an image of almost mythological power, etched into the passionate heart of a nation and an age; the Virgin Queen presiding over nearly half a century of unprecedented calm and prosperity for her people. But at the beginning no one, except perhaps Elizabeth herself, could have suspected the exceptional nature of the queen and the singularity of her reign.

  Soon after her accession, the Venetian ambassador recognized something of Elizabeth’s ability to control and disconcert: ‘The Queen is by nature high spirited, and has become yet more so owing to her good fortune and to the many physical and moral endowments which she possesses; so she has lofty designs, and promises herself success in all of them. She has many suitors for her hand, and by protracting any decisions keeps them all in hope. Persuading herself that in her need they will do what they can from rivalry to gain her love and matrimonial alliance.’2

  Just as she would attempt to keep all the possibilities in play as far as her suitors, and thereby her foreign policy, were concerned, so too Elizabeth did not hurry to show her hand in matters of religion. She was the mistress of equivocation. This way she neither panicked the Catholics nor disaffected the reformers, even while they muttered at the slowness of her processes of change. So important were both these issues for the li
ves of her people and the security of the realm that she was watched like a hawk, her every action interpreted by a hundred busy tongues. The English were considered by their European neighbours to be peculiar in their general lack of religious fervour. The Spanish ambassador broadcast his bafflement: ‘These people are so curious that they think the question of religion is of the least importance.’3 In fact the coolness came directly from Elizabeth’s dislike of proscription in spiritual matters, her aversion to opening ‘windows into men’s souls’.

  She was a new and unpredictable force in European politics, and her marital and religious proclivities were of consuming interest in her rivals’ courts. There was even greater interest at home with constant gossip and excitement at court, her nobles vying for attention and favour, the foreign ambassadors seeking preferment over their rivals, everyone wagering the odds on a rotating field of possible contenders. The ambassadors were particularly sharp-eyed in their surveillance and their dispatches to their masters were lurid with surmise and foreboding.

  The Spanish ambassador Feria, bitter at losing the pre-eminence he enjoyed during Mary Tudor’s reign, was the most lively and opinionated: ‘what can be expected from a country governed by a Queen’, he wrote gloomily to Philip II, ‘and she a young lass, who, though sharp, is without prudence, and is every day standing up against religion more openly? The kingdom is entirely in the hands of young folks, heretics and traitors … the old people and Catholics are dissatisfied, but dare not open their lips … Everybody thinks that she will not marry a foreigner and they cannot make out whom she favours, so that nearly every day some new cry is raised about a husband.’4

  Certainly her people hated the idea of Elizabeth marrying a foreign prince. They had seen more than enough of the disadvantages of such an alliance during her sister’s reign. In their eyes England had been impoverished and diminished by becoming a satellite of Spain, embroiled in Spanish wars for Spanish interests. ‘Never prince left [England] more indebted, both at home and beyond sea’, was the common verdict on the unhappy reign of Mary I who had made Philip her king. London had been overrun by wily and over-confident Dons, and the English, notoriously proud, insular and xenophobic even then, could not wait to see the back of them.

  However, the more measured response from Cecil and the other councillors was that marriage with a powerful prince did bring some important benefits. The arguments were rehearsed in a contemporary treatise: ‘Marienge a stranger, she uniteth hir husband’s power unto her, and is thereby backed and strengthened’. But foreigners unfortunately were an untrustworthy lot, ‘more prone to temptation of the flesh, both Italians, French, Spaniards, and Germans, which shadow that fault with their dronkennes’. And there was always the problem of diffused loyalties: ‘In marieng a stranger, and unityng regions, the more trouble, more danger, more charge.’ The emotive examples of queens closely related to Elizabeth were called on to illustrate the undesirable consequences of a foreign match: her sister Mary was the obvious and most painfully recalled, but also Mary Queen of Scots, who had ‘empoverished hir realme by hir match in France, through the oppression of the French’.5 It was implied that both Queen Marys, through marriage, had sacrificed the wealth, pre-eminence and security of their own kingdoms.

  Although marriage to an Englishman kept that precious royal blood undiluted and the affections focused wholeheartedly at home, the argument went that there would be jealousy amongst the noblemen not chosen for this honour. There was also a fear of the perceived diminution of the queen’s own status in allying herself to someone of inferior rank: ‘In marienge an Englishman, she maneth her subject, disparageth hirself.’6 These were the bare bones of the debate which exercised her ambassadors and councillors in all their foreign policy, and periodically gripped the people with alternating bouts of anxiety and hope.

  In the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, the gamblers in her court were putting money on her marrying Lord Robert Dudley, the ambitious, confident and physically magnificent Master of the Queen’s Horse. A contemporary of Elizabeth’s (some said an exact contemporary, claiming they shared the same birthday), Dudley had known her when young and suffered a similarly disrupted, demoted and fearful youth. His brother, father and grandfather were beheaded for treason; he himself spent some years in the Tower and was tried for treason in Mary I’s reign, living like Elizabeth, under an unpredictable threat of death.

  Not only did they share the painful bond of a precarious youth, Elizabeth had strong reason to be grateful to Lord Robert at a time when friends were hard to find. Soon after her accession, however, she felt she had to explain her affection and lavishness towards him: ‘I only show him favour because of his goodness to me when I was in trouble during the reign of my sister. At that time he never ceased his former kindness and service, but even sold his possessions to provide me with funds; and on this account it seems to me but just that now I should give him some reward for his fidelity and constancy.’7 Elizabeth was known for her natural loyalty to the small band of friends and advisers who constituted her inner circle and remained with her for most of her life, but from the start Dudley was the most obviously favoured.

  Certainly, on her accession his career took off like a meteor across the Elizabethan sky. Fuelled by the queen’s love for him and a loyalty forged in a time of youthful suffering, his trajectory barely faltered. Surviving storms, scandals and betrayals, theirs was a lifelong love affair, almost certainly unconsummated but all the more compelling for that.

  Their attraction, mysterious and passionate, fascinated their contemporaries. It was rumoured there was even something supernatural in the enduring bond between such wilful natures. Camden, Elizabeth’s first biographer, was as bemused as the rest. Perhaps it was due to some hidden virtue in Dudley he thought; or their ‘common conditions of Imprisonment under Queen Mary’; or indeed ‘a most strait conjunction of their Minds’, due to the position of the stars at the hour of their births; what that magic ingredient was ‘a man cannot easily say’.8 Perhaps it was just that the male mind could not understand the attraction. All Elizabeth’s chroniclers, councillors and ambassadors were men. The detail and emphasis that comes down through history is filtered through male eyes and interpreted by masculine sensibilities. Robert Dudley’s main appeal to the queen may have been simpler, more visceral. He was a virile figure of a man, as impressive in the saddle, be he in the chase or on the battlefield, as in a courtly dance. ‘A man of flourishing age, and comely Feature of body and lims’,9 he was a man of charismatic sexuality and she, a woman of strong appetites, responded to this magnetism.

  The conduct in public between Elizabeth and Dudley gave cause for much salacious comment and outraged disapproval. Even in an age of general laxity in the behaviour between men and women, Elizabeth’s overt attraction to her handsome Master of the Horse made tongues wag and the wildest rumours fly. It was said, ‘her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night’;10 or that they were already secretly married, that indeed, she was pregnant by him, in fact already had had children by him. The outgoing Spanish ambassador, Feria, although not liking or trusting Elizabeth, recognized her sexual nature and the behaviour that added a certain plausibility to some of these rumours. Writing to his master Philip II he pointed out that Elizabeth was far more likely to have children than her sister Mary I, due to ‘age and temperament, in both of which respects she is much better than the Queen now in heaven, although in every other way she compares most unfavourably’.11

  As a woman there were times in her youth when she appeared to want nothing better than to marry Lord Robert, her ‘sweet Robin’, but as queen, Elizabeth quickly realized that to do so could risk everything. Arrogant, magnificent, duplicitous, ambitious, he epitomized the soul of Elizabethan adventurism, and was as cordially loathed by the people as she was passionately loved. Perhaps he was too closely a mirror of the brazenness of the Elizabethan age and the exorbitant rewards and perils of his kind of high aspiration. He disconcerted those who found
in his reflection something uneasily like themselves. Certainly his fellow noblemen resented his influence, and the high-minded William Cecil suspected his motives. Rumours of his capacity for opportunistic assassination circulated freely, never more so than after the tragic death of his young wife. Yet in an age of treachery and with a queen who made inconsistency high art, Robert Dudley maintained his pre-eminence in Elizabeth’s heart.

  Although he was to remain her favourite, he was by no means the only suitor for her hand, neither was he the only one to believe he had every chance of success. In the early summer of 1559, while Lord Robert was away for a day’s hunting, a handsome nobleman, Sir William Pickering, was brought to the queen’s chambers. An exile since the Wyatt Rebellion, he had returned with the idea that he stood a chance of becoming Elizabeth’s consort, and the next King of England. The Venetian ambassador to Philip II described him: ‘about 36 years old, of tall stature, and handsome, and very successful with women. For he is said to have enjoyed the intimacy of many and great ones.’12

  For a while he held extravagant court amongst the nobles keen to support his suit and thereby scupper Dudley’s, and his dashing manner and smooth Continental ways seemed to flatter the lively affections of Elizabeth. He favoured hosting lavish banquets but, in keeping with his pretensions, insisted on dining apart ‘with music playing’.13 The cunning ambassador Feria reported: ‘In London they are giving 25 to 100 that he will be King. They tell me Lord Robert is not so friendly with him as he was, and I believe that on the first day that the Queen saw him secretly Lord Robert did not know of it, as he had gone hunting at Windsor.’ Superior as ever he added, ‘If these things were not of such great importance, and so lamentable, some of them would be very ridiculous.’14