Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  Elizabeth did not choose Cecil’s obvious solution. Her only recourse against this latest cousin determined on being named her heir was to try and prove Catherine’s own illegitimacy. Failing that, proof of the invalidity of her marriage to Seymour, on the grounds of there being no witnesses, therefore would illegitimize her son. The following year, Catherine’s marriage was declared void and yet she remained in prison, separated from Edward Seymour, although they still managed during one visit to conceive another son. Still under house arrest, Catherine Grey died of tuberculosis in 1568 aged twenty-nine. Her younger sister Mary also married for love without Elizabeth’s approval. She was abnormally short and a hunchback and her husband, Thomas Keyes, a royal serjeant-porter, was abnormally tall. Lady Mary Grey had never been seriously considered as an heir to Elizabeth but this defiance combined with her royal blood nevertheless ruined her life. Both she and her husband were imprisoned and although she was eventually released she died prematurely in 1578, aged thirty-eight.

  Elizabeth’s harshness in her treatment of the Grey sisters might not have been entirely due to her fear of possible claimants to her throne. These young women of royal blood had defied duty and dynastic expectation to marry the men they loved. Elizabeth had just emerged from the lonely struggle between passion for Lord Robert and her duty as queen. Contemporary reports recognized that there was an emotional component to Elizabeth’s reaction. It had been suggested that she had sought to have it ‘decided by law that the Lady Catherine was [Seymour’s] wife, whom he had married for his pleasure, and therefore that she [the queen] might legally marry the Lord Robert for hers’.29 Having decided on duty, however, her feelings for Dudley could not be expected to subside. In fact, such is human nature that the unattainable becomes all the more desirable. For Elizabeth the pleasures of the beloved’s company and his continued exertions to woo her can only have brought home the painful extent of her sacrifice.

  In the Grey sisters, she was faced by two younger cousins who expected to be awarded the prize of succession without being prepared to practise any of the self-discipline that such authority required. Some years later, Mary Queen of Scots was to shock Elizabeth with her reluctance to favour responsibility and duty over the impetuous fulfilment of desire. If self-sacrifice makes a stone of the heart, when faced by these self-indulgent women who aspired to be queen of her kingdom without any costs to themselves, then Elizabeth’s heart was stony indeed.

  Elizabeth’s fear of successors was an overriding consideration in all her dealings with Mary. Mary’s assumption of the arms and title to Elizabeth’s kingdom and its continual rehearsal had dealt a fatal wound to the relationship. It bred suspicion, resentment and insecurity on Elizabeth’s side, and unrealistic ambition and inflated self-importance on Mary’s. Camden recognized it as straightforward rivalry of queens: ‘Emulation growing betwixt them, and new occasions daily arising … For a Kingdom brooketh no Companion, and Majesty more heavily taketh Injuries to heart.’30 The wily Spanish ambassador writing to Philip II was more matter-of-fact: ‘This Queen … bases her security on there being no certain successor to whom the people could turn if they were to tire of her rule’, as he went on to explain just why Elizabeth was fearful of Mary’s choice of husband.31 For the marriage question just added yeast to the already active ferment between the two women.

  For two years since her accession to the throne Elizabeth had been at the centre of a flurry of marriage speculation and proposals. As the most eligible woman in Europe, she had been courted by any man with a grand ambition and half a chance of becoming her consort and king. Picking his way through the marriage bazaar was the most ambitious and physically attractive of them all, Lord Robert Dudley, companion of Elizabeth’s youth and Master of her Horse. But not even his ambition and her love were large enough to persuade her to risk a kingdom in pursuit of heart’s desire. So the charades continued with the embassies of foreign princes trudging to Elizabeth’s door, Cecil and her council tearing at their hair, and foreign policy inadvertently held in convenient suspension.

  Elizabeth’s disdain towards her suitors, however, began to have an undesired effect. After the unexpected death of François II of France and the return to market of his nubile widow, the contrary Queen of England lost her lustre. Nowhere was the abrupt switching of suit more blatant than with the Swedish prince who had now become King Eric XIV. Eric had doggedly pursued Elizabeth’s hand in marriage, so much so that he had become a laughing stock of her court, as they relieved him of his sumptuous presents. But only a month after Mary’s return to Scotland it appeared he had instructed his ambassador to transfer his courtship to the Queen of Scots instead: ‘and though this King had entertained great love for the Queen of England, yet her delays, and the diligence which the Guises used to induce him to espouse their niece, had made him change his mind’.32 The full extent of English concern at any powerful foreign alliance that Mary might make was evident in March 1662. When news that the King of Sweden’s envoy had offered King Eric’s hand to the Queen of Scots, a panicky response saw English warships prepared and troops assembled on the border ready for action.

  In returning to Scotland to take up the reins of power, Mary had cut herself adrift from the powerful triumvirate of advisers, the Duc de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine and Catherine de Medici, who had steered policy when she was their queen consort. In Scotland, she had no loyal minister, no Cecil, whom she could trust to put her interests and the interests of their country before all else. She trusted her bastard half-brother Lord James more than she should, and William Maitland of Lethington, although described by a contemporary as ‘a Scotch Cecil’ was calm and judicious but never acquired the authority and stability of his English counterpart. It became painfully clear to Mary that she was in need of powerful friends both at home and abroad. The old national alliances and enmities on which she had been brought up had been swept aside by her change in status and kingdom, and a new order was in the process of evolving.

  Not only would Mary never see France again, but the powerful protection that country had afforded her from the moment she was born to her Guise mother was also at an end. During the rest of Mary’s life, the two kingdoms most important to her would be ruled by women: France by the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, and England by Elizabeth. Both grew to seem indomitable and died in their seventieth year, Catherine mythologized as the omnipotent mother of impotent kings and Elizabeth as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen. Both were monarchs of craft and intellect who shared a dislike and mistrust of Mary. Consummate pragmatists, they were untroubled by religious conviction and fluid of policy. Having waited so long for power, neither intended relinquishing any advantage to another, and Mary’s histrionics and insinuating charms availed her nothing against their unwavering purpose.

  Marriage was the obvious way for Mary to increase her influence, make new alliances and develop new friendships. However, for different reasons, as a prospective bride she was to prove as difficult to please as Elizabeth. Mary very quickly had made it clear that she would not marry a Protestant ‘even if he were lord of half the world’; nor would she accept ‘a husband less great and powerful than the one she has lost’; certainly she could not contemplate anyone approved by Elizabeth; and ‘would rather die than accept’33 one of her own subjects, for that would lower her status and impair her claim to Elizabeth’s crown.

  The one suitor who seemed to fulfil Mary’s exacting criteria was Philip II’s son and heir Don Carlos who offered her an alliance with the staunchest Catholic power. Mary had been favourable to this match from well before she left France. It was her best chance of keeping the upper hand diplomatically in her negotiations with Elizabeth. On a personal level too, it would unite her with her favourite sister-in-law, Elizabeth de Valois, who was married to Philip II, Carlos’s father. Inevitably Elizabeth and Catherine were more alarmed by the prospect than by any of the other possibilities mooted. Spain, with one foot firmly planted in Scotland and the other poised over England and I
reland, boded nothing but ill for both Catherine and Elizabeth. The weak link in Mary’s plan, however, was the nature of Don Carlos himself.

  Mary was described by the Spanish ambassador, Bishop Quadra, in a letter to Don Carlos’s father as a queen who would make ‘a wife of such excellent qualities … in prudence, chastity and beauty, equalled by few in the world’,34 but there was nothing positive to be said of the personal qualities of the young Spanish prince they wanted her to marry. Already opinions like this were being voiced publicly: ‘he is usually so mad and furious that everyone here pities the lot of the woman who will live with him’.35

  Three years younger than the Queen of Scots, Don Carlos was congenitally deformed, a desperate creature increasingly prone to terrifying episodes of violent insanity, with a reputation for torturing women and small animals. None of the marriage brokers, or the prospective bride herself, seemed to be in the least concerned by what could be interpreted in other circumstances as a major stumbling block. There was every indication that Don Carlos’s mental condition would deteriorate further and a chance too that it was hereditary (due to incestuous marriages, Juana the Mad was his great-grandmother twice). In what might be considered a further disqualification in the marriage stakes, there were rumours that the Spanish prince was impotent and unlikely to sire a future king.

  Despite these personal foibles, however, Don Carlos’s dynastic credentials were so attractive to Mary and her Catholic sympathizers that he remained the prize suitor. Interestingly, Elizabeth was not too dazzled by his political advantages to realize there was something personally ominous about him. Although the Spanish ambassadors tried to keep the full story of the prince’s mental state from the world it was impossible to suppress it in the gossip maelstrom of court life. Certainly one of Elizabeth’s ambassadors was writing to her in the summer of 1562: ‘the appearance of the Prince’s manners and disposition seemed to denote him to be of a Saturny [sullen], cruel mode, much misliked and feared’.36 When Elizabeth spoke to the Spanish ambassador that summer about Mary’s ambitions to marry their prince she had been rudely dismissive about the boy. To Philip II the ambassador wrote in cipher: ‘This was at the time when we had bad news of the health of His Highness, and she used a great many impertinent expressions, which I refrain from repeating, but answered as they deserved.’37 Mary only gave up on Don Carlos as a prospective husband when Philip withdrew his son from the negotiations in 1564: in 1567 the frenzied prince was incarcerated and in 1568, aged only twenty-two, he was dead, poisoned it was rumoured by his despairing father.

  While Elizabeth worried about possible Spanish alliances with her cousin across the border, she was also suspicious of the ambitions of certain of her own nobility at home. Lady Catherine Grey had been dealt with summarily but there was consistent talk too about the machinations of the formidable Margaret, Countess of Lennox. As Elizabeth’s cousin and a favourite of her sister Mary Tudor, she had for a while taken precedence over the Princess Elizabeth in Mary I’s court. Subsequently, when Elizabeth had inherited the throne, the countess had not bothered to hide her contempt for the reformed religion and her doubts about Elizabeth’s legitimacy.

  Most worrying to the queen, however, was the scheme of this most ambitious of women to promote her elder son Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. He too was a cousin once removed to Elizabeth and shared a grandmother with Mary. They were both great-grandchildren of the founder of the Tudor dynasty, Henry VII. Soon after the death of François II in December 1560, with an eye ever alert to the main chance, the countess had dispatched her favoured son to France to re-introduce himself to the newly widowed queen. Darnley was fifteen and Mary just eighteen. Despite her recent bereavement she was already aware of the necessity of her next marriage, although at that point she had wished to marry someone of the highest estate.

  As the Countess of Lennox’s dynastic ambitions became clear she and her husband were placed under surveillance by Elizabeth and eventually imprisoned, separately, for well over a year. Darnley, however, managed to evade the fate of his parents and slipped away to France. Mary’s claim on the English throne was strong enough on its own to worry Cecil and Elizabeth; they did not relish seeing her united with Darnley who had been born within the kingdom and whose royal blood had the added advantage of being English. Elizabeth’s nervousness was evident to everyone, ‘the prison will soon be full of “the nearest relations of the Crown”’,38 an ambassador reported with some irony. And certainly, as with the Grey sisters, the Countess of Lennox’s legitimacy was investigated in an attempt to pronounce her mother Margaret Tudor’s second marriage invalid. But the legitimacy or otherwise of second marriages was dangerous territory for Elizabeth, and the investigation was dropped after an indignant outburst from the countess.

  By the beginning of 1562 Mary’s conciliatory policies, driven by the Protestant Lord James and Maitland of Lethington had resulted in a generally peaceful and successful beginning to her government. Her one failure had been to persuade Elizabeth to agree to name her as her successor. This, together with a natural curiosity and desire to forge a closer friendship, meant she was delighted with the suggestion that the two queens should meet.

  Mary had grown up relying on her personal charm to achieve what she wanted. How could Elizabeth, a kinswoman and a neighbour, fail to grow friendlier when faced with the flesh and blood woman rather than the construct of court rumour and ambassadors’ reports? Lethington writing to Cecil at the beginning of the year expressed Mary’s wishes thus: ‘The Thing in the World she most ernestly desyreth, is to see her good suster, so that by occasion theroff they myght speake and frankly conferre together without Mediatours, and that for no Respect, but only for naturall Affection.’39 In fact it appeared that Mary’s spontaneously warm feelings were suddenly focused on her cousin, and she spoke emotionally about her love for Elizabeth and looked forward to receiving a portrait of her: ‘“Yt wyll”, saythe she, “do my good to have yt, but yt wyll not contente my harte untyll I have bothe seen her and spoken with her.”’40

  This was the one occasion in the power struggle at the heart of their relationship when Elizabeth seemed to desire a meeting as keenly as Mary. Her council, however, had strong reservations about the wisdom of letting Mary travel into the north of England where the Catholic sympathies were strongest. Lethington was anxious himself about the meeting of the queens. He feared Mary might not manage to hold her own in any debate with Elizabeth, for there was ‘no such maturity of judgement and ripeness of experience in high matters in his mistress, as in the Queen’s Majesty [Elizabeth], in whom both nature and time have wrought much more than in many of greater years’.41 Despite the protestations of their advisers, a tentative date was set in August for Mary and Elizabeth to meet in Nottingham, or failing that York, and a safe passage assured for Mary and her train, ‘to the Nombre of one thowsand Persons’.42

  However, all these plans depended on the extent of religious unrest in France where Catherine de Medici was attempting to contain the violence and prevent it escalating into civil war. Elizabeth, like Catherine, feared the return to power of the Guises and she was tempted to send support to the French Huguenots. In fact Bishop Jewel of Salisbury believed that Mary’s warm embrace of Elizabeth was suggested by her uncle, the Duc de Guise, who hoped that the diplomatic manoeuvrings and plans for celebrating their historic meeting would distract Elizabeth from what was happening over the Channel.

  The effusiveness of Mary’s affections and her continued fascination with the minutiae of Elizabeth’s character and mode of life, however, made it more likely that she was genuinely excited by this chance of meeting her at last, hopeful no doubt that face to face she might get her way on the succession. Much to the surprise of the English agent Randolph, Mary slipped a letter she had received from Elizabeth ‘into her boosame nexte unto her schyne [skin]’ and when she read it again and replaced it against her breast with as much intimacy she told him, ‘Yf I could put it nerrer my hart, I wolde.’ During the i
nterview, Mary handed to him a special present for Elizabeth, a ring with a heart-shaped diamond to remind ‘my good syster’ of her love.43 A conversation three weeks later with Randolph conveyed something of her expressiveness. Having just received Elizabeth’s portrait Mary asked ‘How lyke this was unto her lyvelye face’, to which Randolph replied that he hoped she would soon ‘be judge thereof her self, and fynde myche more perfection then coulde be sette forthe with the arte of man’. This was greeted warmly: ‘That is the thynge that I have moste desyered ever since I was in hope therof … and I truste that by the tyme that we have spoken togyther, our hartes wylbe so eased that the greateste greef that ever after shalbe bewene us, wylbe when we shall tayke leave thone of thother; and let God be my wytnes, I honor her in my harte, and love her as my dere and naturall syster.’ In transcribing this conversation verbatim in his letter to Cecil, Randolph obviously thought the Scottish Queen’s professed affection might sound to an English ear a little exaggerated and so added, ‘Believe me I do not feign.’44

  In France the religious conflict went from bad to worse. The Duc de Guise’s responsibility for a massacre of Huguenots at Vassy in March 1562 was the spark that set civil war aflame. Initially Elizabeth tried mediation but the stories of the atrocities committed against the Protestants in other parts of France too, their cries to her for help, and her own desire to get her hands on Calais again persuaded her that she should intervene. Her implacable hatred of the Guises made her fear the threat they posed if they ever regained power to pursue their aggrandizing schemes. Their niece, should they wish to reinforce her claim, was now established at England’s back door.