Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  So it was that on the 17 November 1558, a Thursday, Elizabeth learned the waiting was over and her father’s crown was finally hers. She sank to her knees, apparently momentarily overcome, breathing deeply with emotion. But with the breadth of her learning and her cool self-possession she was not long lost for words: ‘A domino factum est illud, et est mirabile in oculis meis!’ was her first utterance as queen. Quoting part of Psalm 118 she had declared, ‘This is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in my eyes.’15

  Fortuitously Parliament happened to be sitting that day, and when the Lords were brought the news of Mary’s death, in measured tones ‘with joint consent of the whole assembly’ they declared ‘the Lady Elizabeth might forthwith be proclaimed Queen’.16 This was broadcast by the herald-at-arms at the front door of the Palace of Westminster, at the cross in Cheapside and at other prominent places in the city. Weary of bloodshed, fearful of foreign wars, weakened by bad harvests and disease, the people welcomed the new queen. But there was foreboding too as to what the future would bring. Another female monarch, after the last disastrous experiment, seemed to be too risky when England was in need of inspired and powerful leadership. There was a profound cultural and religious acceptance that it was unnatural, indeed impossible, for women to be successfully in command. But the prospect of marriage for Elizabeth also brought the real fear, acted out in Mary’s reign, of alliance with a dominant foreign power. It was not surprising there were mixed emotions beyond the general feeling of relief. Sir John Hayward,* an early historian, wrote: ‘Generally, the rich were fearful, the wise careful, the honestly-disposed doubtful, the discontented and the desperate, and all such whose desires were both immoderate and evil, joyful, as wishing trouble, the gate of spoil.’17

  And trouble was what everyone expected. The transition from old monarch to new was inherently uncertain. Diplomatically too, it upset the status quo between nations. The death of a stalwart Catholic during a period of fomenting religious debate changed the tensions between the ancient neighbours and rivals, France, Spain, Scotland and England.

  The fiery Scottish Protestant John Knox was also to remember 1558 as a year of particular significance. His tract The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published, with unfortunate timing, just as Elizabeth came to the throne. By monstrous regiment he meant unnatural government and his blast was directed against the women rulers in Europe at the time of his writing whom he saw as implacable enemies of the reformed religion: Mary I of England and the Scottish regent Mary of Guise.* Unfortunately, the new Queen of England who could have been his most powerful ally was instead greatly offended. She did not find it amusing to be hectored in his main argument: ‘to promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any Realm is repugnant to Nature; contrary to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally, it is the subversion of all good Order, of all equity and justice’.18

  An intemperate and gifted preacher, Knox was barred from returning from Geneva to England to resume his preaching career. He wrote to Elizabeth trying to ingratiate himself into her favour but even that letter turned into a rant on this most sensitive of subjects, and he never recanted his anti-woman stand, accepting the consequences of his inflexible principles: ‘My First Blast has blown from me all my friends in England.’19 Instead he returned to Scotland in 1559, the most powerful and vociferous opponent of Catholic and French influence, and the mouthpiece of Scottish Calvinist conscience. He remains to this day a brooding, implacable and self-righteous symbol of the Scottish Reformation.

  Knox’s view of the natural and divine order of things, with woman subservient to man, was a commonly accepted one. His stance was uncompromising and his language colourful, but he was not saying anything new. The lower orders knew of woman’s inferiority through the traditions of their lives and the discrepancy between the sexes in simple brute force. The educated aristocracy was imbued with the necessity for this human hierarchy from their readings of classical authors, like Plato and Aristotle, and the thundering metaphors of the Bible. Did not God say to Eve, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’?20 In fact the mortality rate of women in childbirth made it clear that they were the more expendable half of the species, that God and nature put a lower value on womankind.

  The male was the norm and the female a deviation, the mysterious, less adequate ‘other’. For Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart these were accepted philosophical, theological, legal and medical truths that permeated the way the world was interpreted and relationships between people understood. Everything these young women read and were taught informed them of their intellectual and moral limitations and the narrowness of their vision. Classical and biblical texts were ever-present in the Renaissance mind; the myths a ready source of reference. The scientific humanism of Aristotle was highly influential. He had no doubt of the right order of things: ‘Man is active, full of movement, creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and moulds society and the world. Woman, on the other hand, is passive. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active elements are always higher on any scale, and more divine.’ Not only endowed with more of the best qualities, man was also closer to God.

  In classical Greece, women were seen as perpetual minors: worse off even than the disregarded Victorian child, they were exhorted to be neither seen nor heard. A woman’s name was not given in public unless she was dead or of ill repute. In Pericles’s famous funeral speech, Thucydides set out the aspirations of womankind: ‘Your great glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of a woman is to be less talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.’21 Silence best became her.

  This was the philosophical inheritance that informed both Elizabeth and Mary’s view of what it was to be a sixteenth-century woman. Mary’s often quoted saying was, ‘The best woman was only the best of women.’ Elizabeth, while cleverly using her perceived incapacity as a woman to dramatic effect in grand speeches and diplomatic letters, nevertheless in her irony reflected a profound and universally held truth when she spoke in these terms to her Commons: ‘The weight and greatness of this matter [their request that she should marry] might cause in me, being a woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex.’22 These were the prejudices they had to overcome.

  In the most commonly held myth of the birth of Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom springs from the head of her father, Zeus, fully formed, without any contribution from her mother. In this way, the necessarily male source of all that is active and intellectually pre-eminent is not diluted by the female. By stressing all her life her relation to her father, Elizabeth claimed not only some of the lustre of this Tudor Zeus but perhaps also tried to distance herself from the perceived weaknesses of her mother’s (and all women’s) femininity: duplicity, moral deficiency and treachery.

  Both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots were of course regnant queens, monarchs in their own right, ordained by God. A female monarch was in a different relationship with the world: she had a public, political and spiritual contract as ruler of her people, while her personal and private relationship as a woman made her naturally dependent on the male. Elizabeth at least was able to counteract the perceived weaknesses of her sex with the certainty that as a queen she was divinely chosen above all men, ‘by His permission a body politic, to govern’.23 This confidence and certainty she could bolster with the knowledge that she had more intellectual and executive competence than almost anyone of her acquaintance.

  Mary’s sense of herself as queen had been with her from the dawning of her consciousness. It was never disputed or tested, as was Elizabeth’s. This awareness of her pre-eminence was her companion through life, something taken for granted, th
e responsibilities to which she did not apply much profound thought nor, in the end, much value. However, philosophers as various as Knox and Aristotle considered even the God-ordained female ruler to be an aberration of the natural order, a phenomenon that could only bring inevitable disorder and strife to the realm. It was a measure perhaps of Elizabeth’s sensitivity to this pervasive point of view that made her react so uncompromisingly against the author of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.

  But she was assailed too by a potentially more serious discredit than merely being the wrong sex. Just as the death of her sister Mary I transformed Elizabeth’s destiny, so too it altered the course of the life and aspirations of the youthful Queen of Scots. Catholic Europe could not accept Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy and considered his only legal wife to have been Catherine of Aragon. Given this fundamentalist approach, Elizabeth was undoubtedly a bastard born to a royal mistress not to a wife. Consequently much of Europe considered the more direct legitimate heir to be Mary Queen of Scotland and Dauphine of France.

  This fact caused excitement and consternation abroad. Philip II of Spain, acting from pragmatic and political, rather than religious, principles feared his loss of influence in England especially since France seemed to be establishing an increasing presence in Scotland. Even before the death of his wife he had manoeuvred himself into position as a possible husband for her sister. While Mary I had lived, Spain had been an influential ally, but Elizabeth had not the slightest intention of continuing this relationship by accepting him as a husband for herself.

  However, within the triangular tension that maintained a certain balance between England, Spain and France, an outright rejection of Philip would be impolitic. By evading his offer for as long as possible, therefore, Elizabeth could ingeniously sidestep an unequivocal rejection. Then she invoked precedence and the law by pointing out that for her to marry her widowed brother-in-law was no different in fundamentals from the marriage her father had made with his widowed sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon. As had been so crucially argued at the time as the basis of her father’s split with Rome, this was a relationship contrary to biblical law. To accept Philip would in effect be to deny her own legitimacy.

  But it was in the French court, within the grandiose schemes of King Henri II and the Guise family, that the death of the Queen of England raised the greatest ambitions. With Mary as their tool, her uncles and Henri decided to claim the title Queen of England and Ireland for the house of Valois, and quarter Mary’s arms with those of France, Scotland and England. At this time France was seen as distinctly the more powerful country, England as the weakened neighbour under threat. This was particularly marked with the recent loss of Calais and the accession of another woman to a throne already undermined by disastrous female rule. This act of acquisitiveness was not initiated by Mary, but her acceptance and over-riding pursuit of it altered her destiny for ever. It gave her a compelling idea of herself as rightful heir to the English crown, an aspiration she maintained throughout her life. In the end it was a presumption which cost her that life, and this aggressive early claim on Elizabeth’s throne flung down the gauntlet.

  Traditionally English monarchs claimed nominal dominion over France. Mary, however, as Dauphine of France and Queen of Scotland, both England’s old enemies, was in dangerous territory. To claim England and Ireland as her realms too was considered an insult to Elizabeth, not least because it publicly rehearsed all the hurtful insecurities of her cousin’s anxious youth. All those whispered calumnies she had endured during the wilderness years were given a kind of legitimacy of their own. Mary’s claim implied that Elizabeth’s mother was a whore not a wife; that Elizabeth herself was a bastard child and not the legitimate daughter of the King of England; that she had no claim on a divine right to rule but instead had usurped another’s.

  Little over a year later, in the proclamation of her peace treaty with France and Scotland, Elizabeth diplomatically accepted, ‘that the title to this kingdom injuriously pretended in so many ways by the Queen of Scotland has not proceeded otherwise than from the ambitious desire of the principal members of the House of Guise’. And she went on to patronize Mary and her husband François for their youthful folly: ‘the King, who by reason of his youth … the Queen of Scots, who is likewise very young … have [not] of themselves imagined and deliberated an enterprise so unjust, unreasonable and perilous’.24 But these judicious, diplomatic words masked a more troubling recognition that the tacit had been made explicit; the challenge once made could not now be undone.

  The earliest authoritative history, written by Camden, recognized the train of events set off by such over-reaching ambition: ‘in very deed from this Title and Arms, which, through the perswasion of the Guises, Henry King of France had imposed upon the Queen of Scots being now in her tender age, flowed as from a Fountain all the Calamities wherein she was afterwards wrapped’. The protagonists were henceforth acutely aware of each other. There were such networks of vested interests surrounding both queens that gossip and intrigue and misrepresentation found their way into every discussion where direct dealing would have been less divisive: ‘For hereupon Queen Elizabeth bare both Enmity to the Guises, and secret Grudge against [Mary]; where the subtile Malice of men on both sides cherished …’25

  The crowning of the new Queen of England needed to be quickly done, but at an auspicious time too. The country was impoverished by injudicious wars, humiliated by the loss of Calais, vulnerable on the Scottish border and confused and suspicious after the reversals of religious dogma during the previous two reigns. Elizabeth’s potential as a queen was unknown but her popularity among her people was certainly growing. Since her accession she had been the centre of intense activity at Hatfield with the selection of advisers and discussions of policy, but within the week, she began her progress to London. People travelled many miles out of the city to greet her. Her reign began as it so distinctively would continue, with a lively interest in and concern for her people exhibited in an exceptional common touch:

  All her faculties were in motion, and every motion seemed a well guided action; her eye was set upon one, her ear listened to another, her judgement ran upon a third, to a fourth she addressed her speech; her spirit seemed to be everywhere, and yet so entire in herself, as it seemed to be nowhere else. Some she pitied, some she commended, some she thanked, at others she pleasantly and wittily jested, condemning no person, neglecting no office; and distributing her smiles, looks, and graces so [artfully], that thereupon the people again redoubled the testimonies of their joys.26

  A few days later, on 28 November, Elizabeth took possession of the city in style. Alone in her carriage, surrounded by horsemen and the trappings of monarchy, she entered through Cripplegate, to be greeted by fluttering banners of the guilds and excited Londoners hanging from the windows and pushing through the narrow lanes. At the gate to the city she mounted her own horse, on this occasion a striking grey. Elizabeth, dressed in purple velvet, was skilled as a horsewoman and graceful in the saddle. This majestic spectacle of their new queen on horseback was glamorized further by the first sight of her Master of the Queen’s Horse, riding just behind her on a magnificent black charger.

  An excellent judge of horseflesh, Lord Robert Dudley always made sure he had a mount that equalled his own physical splendour. Elizabeth’s friend from her youth, and a lifetime favourite, was a tall, powerful, handsome man, probably the best horseman in England and one of the most ambitious of an ambitious line. Elizabeth’s first biographer pointed out that her ‘rare and Royal Clemency’ meant she had ‘heaped Honours upon him, saving his life, whose Father would have Her destroyed’.27 In fact the consummate ability and ambition of the Dudleys was akin to that of the Guises but, unlike the French, the English peers were strong enough to chop them down. And when the hated Lord Robert was too well loved by the queen for them to harm him, Elizabeth was clever enough to keep him ultimately in check herself.

  To all
who hailed her from the crowd, Elizabeth exhibited the authority and gift of attention that had so distinguished her in her dealings with her subjects so far. A salty humour and an air of God-given majesty seemed to her eager people to be united in Elizabeth Tudor in irresistible combination. She indulged in the kind of direct dialogue and repartee which the French court never encouraged in their monarchs. The Tower was her final destination and as she entered the dark stone portal, she recalled the memories of the last time she had been there as a prisoner, frightened for her life. With genuine emotion and a natural appreciation for dramatic peripeteia she addressed the people around her: ‘Some have fallen from being Princes of this land, to be prisoners in this place; I am raised from being prisoner in this place, to be Prince of this land’, and she thanked God for her elevation.28

  Even a devout Catholic observer, like the Italian Schifanoya,* with a natural bias against her, was in no doubt about Elizabeth’s appeal: ‘… the Queen, by frequently showing herself in public, giving audience to all who would wish for it, and using every mark of great graciousness towards every one, daily gains favour and affection from all her people’.29 Her ability to unite magisterial grandeur with informality was at the heart of her unique attraction to even her humblest subjects. It also discomfited her enemies. The Spanish ambassador related with disapproval how, on her return from the Tower, Elizabeth caught sight of Catherine Parr’s brother, the Marquis of Northampton, watching from a window. He was suffering from one of the periodic malarial fevers which afflicted most of the populace then. The queen pulled her horse out of the procession and rode up to his window and spent a good time commiserating with him about his health, ‘in the most cordial way in the world’.30