Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  But there was still a general uneasiness as to what sort of monarch she would make. When she succeeded to the throne no one was certain even quite what form her religious policy would take. There was a national longing for a strong wholly English king. Despite her many good personal qualities and the great swell of popular support with which she began her rule, Mary I’s reign had been disastrous. Now people wondered if Knox and Calvin, the Classical philosophers and the Bible were all correct in deploring a woman raised beyond her natural estate to be a ruler over men. What if Elizabeth, with all her well-known virtues, was to fail as calamitously as her sister? There was a natural optimism at the prospect of this new reign after the miseries of the last, but everyone from her greatest ministers of state to her lowliest subjects agreed Queen Elizabeth had to marry, and marry quickly. A king was desperately needed, first as her consort, the steadying hand on the tiller of this vast ship of state, and then as the progenitor of a male heir to secure the succession.

  Whom she would marry was one of the major topics of gossip and at times it seemed that any man of noble enough birth was mooted as the chosen one. Apart from Philip II of Spain and Crown Prince Eric of Sweden, there was the Earl of Arundel, although court chatter suggested also younger, more romantic possibilities: ‘a very handsome youth, 18 or 20 years of age* … because at dances and other public places she prefers him more than any one else’.31 But then, it was said, there was also that fine looking young nobleman, Sir William Pickering, still in exile in France because of his religion: the general speculation and excitement was palpable. No one seemed to take seriously Elizabeth’s own often expressed contentment with the spinster state. In fact, in her first speech before Parliament she could not have made it plainer. She was married to her kingdom with all the advantages that conferred on her people. ‘In the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.’32

  Equally serious and compelling to Elizabeth-watchers during the first months of her reign was the subject of religion. She was known to have been brought up in the reformed religion alongside her brother Edward, but her exact beliefs and her intentions so far as the nation’s spiritual leadership were concerned were far from clear. Protestant exiles were beginning to stream back into the country, expecting a return to the pre-Marian state of radical reform. Her Catholic subjects and the Catholic states watched anxiously. When necessary Elizabeth was a master of equivocation. Never was this more evident than in her stance on religion. As Francis Bacon famously said of her, she did not choose to make windows into men’s souls and her soul was conveniently adaptable, and naturally more conservative than any of her closest advisers.

  Court life had revived within the month. Having been secluded for so long, careful to be seen as modest, scholarly and not overly ambitious, Elizabeth now joined her courtiers, feasting and dancing into the early morning. Her physical vitality reminded the older ones present of her father when a young man; but unlike him, her energy and physical fitness lasted well into late middle age when she still could hunt and dance her noblemen to a standstill. Elizabeth began that Christmas to exhibit something of her capacity for epic enjoyment. In another dispatch, Schifanoya was rather disapproving: ‘The Court is held at Westminster, and they are intent on amusing themselves and on dancing till after midnight,’33 he sniffily reported to the Mantuan ambassador at the court of Philip II in Brussels. A month later he was deploring ‘the levities and unusual licentiousness’ at Elizabeth’s court, refusing to detail the profanities acted out on the feast of the Epiphany, traditionally Twelfth Night, when mummers dressed up as crows wearing the habits of cardinals, or as asses in bishops’ regalia and wolves in abbots’ clothing. While the court and the young queen greeted this ribaldry with wild laughter, our devout Italian observer was not amused at the wider implications as to Elizabeth’s intentions towards the true religion: ‘I will consign it to silence.’34

  The timing of the coronation was of crucial moment. With the implicit threat from the French with Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne in their pocket, and the obdurate insistence of two popes that Elizabeth was illegitimate, it seemed politic to claim her crown as soon as possible. By then it was well-established law, ‘that the crown once worn quite taketh away all Defects whatsoever’.35 But these new Elizabethans had a complicated relationship with the supernatural. A teeming spirit world coexisted with the material, and divination, astrology, alchemy and other esoteric beliefs flourished as part of the natural sciences. Nostradamus was closely consulted for his prophecies (Catherine de Medici, the mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots, was a particularly fervent devotee). According to this seer, 1559 was an inauspicious year: to anyone who could read or was susceptible to tavern gossip there was not much better to be hoped for than ‘divers calamities, weepings and mournings’ and ‘civil sedition’36 which would sweep the land. It was not the best omen for the beginning of the reign of another woman and it added to the atmosphere of anxious uncertainty.

  Lord Robert Dudley was entrusted with a mission to seek out Dr John Dee, a remarkable and learned man, who was to become Elizabeth’s own consultant philosopher and who numbered astrology amongst his many accomplishments. Unlike Nostradamus with his mysticism, Dr Dee was known for his more scientific approach to divination by mapping the positions of the planets. His task was to draw up a horoscope of the most auspicious day and time for Elizabeth’s coronation, the formal birth of her reign. Apparently the best astrological augury pointed to 15 January 1559, with Jupiter, the chief god of the planetary system, positioned satisfactorily in Aquarius, to signify a universality to this Jovian power and Mars, the planet of war and assertive action, placed in indomitable Scorpio. That date of greatest promise was what the queen accepted.

  The Christmas of 1558 was even more busy than usual as everyone prepared for the coronation, working ‘day and night both on holidays and week days’.37 There was such a run on crimson silk and cloth of gold and of silver that any sale of it was embargoed until Elizabeth had made her choice for herself and her household. Her noblemen and women were determined to cut a dash and make their mark. With a new reign there was much insecurity and jostling for position and preferment. This was the greatest opportunity for dressing up and showing off, parading one’s wealth or influence, or the wealth and influence to which one aspired. It was a chance to catch the royal eye.

  Across the English Channel cloth of gold was in similarly short supply. Mary was caught up in the flurry of preparations for another grand celebration at court. Only nine months after her own magnificent wedding, she was to be one of the leading guests at the wedding of the king’s second daughter Princess Claude, with whom she had grown up. This girl was not yet twelve years old and was marrying the nominal head of the Guise family, Charles, the young Duc de Lorraine. This was yet another triumph for his uncle the Duc de Guise, ‘le Balafré’, whose family consolidated further its position at the heart of the French royal family.

  Again no expense was to be spared. In a country still struggling under the levies of war, the young duke spent nearly 200,000 crowns, raised in taxes from his people, on the wedding and the week-long jousting and masquerades which were traditional accompaniments to such regal nuptials. Part of his expenditure was on the livery of cloth of gold and silver for his team of twelve jousters and the matching eight or nine dresses of extravagant construction for the main female guests. Mary was presented with one of these creations, richly embroidered in gold and silver and lined with lynx fur against the January weather. There were countless other beautiful gowns offered as gifts to the ladies of the court.

  This display of ostentatious wealth and munificence was commented on even by the worldly-wise Venetian ambassador. Mary herself could not have been oblivious to the grandeur and self-confidence of her family inheritance exhibited at every possible occasion. United in her youthful person was the pride and valour of the Guises with the God-g
iven pre-eminence as both a Stuart queen and – she hoped – a queen of the house of Tudor. This powerful dynastic mix was further enhanced through marriage with the mighty Valois, royal family of France. Born to all this, it was understandable if such a young queen had a share of the hubris of those she had grown up amongst. It made it difficult for her to recognize that even such certainty as her right to be the Queen of Scotland, the kingdom she valued least of all, was not immutable.

  Perhaps the same astrological phenomena Dr Dee used were pored over by French diviners looking for auspicious signs, for this marriage was solemnized on 22 January just a week after the coronation of Elizabeth as the new Queen of England.

  Elizabeth’s coronation managed to be both a grand spectacle and yet intimately involving of her subjects. This ability to combine ‘a superb show’38 with a certain informality at great state occasions seems to have been a characteristic peculiar to the English at the time, differentiating them from the Italians and the French. A perceptive Italian observer in his eyewitness account commented on this, not entirely favourably: ‘the English having no Masters of the Ceremonies … and still less caring about formalities’39 seemed to rely less on pomp and ceremonial. He thought the cheery way Elizabeth answered back to the jocular crowds who clamoured for her after her coronation was equally deplorable. This informality and sensitivity to the popular mood was to appear to her Catholic observers to extend even into her attitude to religious worship and allow a fatal backsliding, they feared, to her brother’s radicalism.

  This ability to unite grandeur with a genuine common touch was memorably displayed in Elizabeth’s state entry into London on the Saturday afternoon, the day before her coronation. The sky was dull with heavy snow clouds, in fact some snow even fell on the waiting crowds, some of whom had been out all night ‘their untired patience never spent, eyther with long expecting (some of them from a good part of the night before) or with unsatiable beholding of the Ceremonies of that day’.40 There was thick mud everywhere, brought on by the rain and churned up by the increased traffic of carts and horses, and each householder had taken it upon himself to strew sand and gravel in front of his house to make the going less difficult. The whole court was present and so brilliantly arrayed the weather hardly mattered. They ‘so sparkled with jewels and gold collars that they cleared the air’.41

  Her court preceeded her on horseback, numbering about a thousand, one eyewitness estimated. Then Elizabeth herself finally arrived in an open carriage entirely upholstered in gold. She was dressed in cloth of gold and on her head over her unembellished hair she wore the simple gold crown of a princess studded with precious stones. Her hands held nothing but her gloves. Around her were her footmen in their crimson velvet jerkins with the white rose of York on their chests and the red Lancastrian rose on their backs. They wore too the letters E R in bold silver gilt relief, the first time the crowd had seen their new queen’s insignia.

  Behind her carriage rode Lord Robert Dudley, resplendent on his fine horse, followed by the Lord Chamberlain and the lords of her Privy Chamber. At the Tower Elizabeth stopped the cavalcade. So deeply impressed had she been by the terror of her two months imprisonment there, and so struck by the subsequent transfiguration of her life, that once more she felt moved to make a heartfelt speech thanking God for delivering her from that place: as ‘he had delivered Daniell from the lyones denne’ so he had ‘preserved her from those dangers wherwith shee was both invironed and overwhelmed, to bring her to the joye and honour of that daye’.42 On her first formal entry into London as queen at the end of November, Elizabeth had expressed a similar gratitude to God for her deliverance from that place. Her tenacity of mind and loyalty of feeling meant that she revisited many times in her speeches the trials of her past as well as the triumphs. In this way she involved her people in an act of sympathetic imagination and in her lifetime created her own biography for them to share.

  What struck the commentators who watched her stately progress through the city was the attentiveness and light-heartedness of her manner to everyone who called out or approached her. She was quick-witted and could be alternately funny and moving in her ripostes to the crowd. Her progress was leisurely; she kept on stopping to receive blessings, appeals and posies of flowers from even the poorest and humblest of her subjects. Her carriage became filled with modest bunches of rosemary and anything remotely flower-like that might have struggled to life through the January frosts. Being short-sighted, Elizabeth had to draw especially close to see those who spoke to her or to accept the gifts she was offered and this added to the sense of attentiveness and intimacy which so charmed the crowds. An eyewitness recalled: ‘her grace, by holding up her hands and merry countenance to such as stood far off, and most tender and gentle language to those that stood nigh to her grace, did declare herself no less thankfully to receive her people’s goodwill than they lovingly offered it to her’.43

  A number of tableaux were acted out for her on her progress, each of which symbolized an aspect of England’s history and the people’s hopes for Elizabeth’s reign. At each was hung a painting of specially composed verses explaining the meaning of the pageant in both Latin and English and, as the queen approached, a child stood forward to recite in English. So excitable were the crowds and noisy the bands of musicians that accompanied each set piece that the queen asked for quiet so that the child could be heard.

  Elizabeth’s face was closely watched as she listened, nodding and smiling, before thanking the child graciously and turning to the crowd with encouraging words. No one was inclined to call her a great beauty. Elizabeth’s colouring was much admired; the pale skin and reddish gold hair were considered closer to perfection than dark hair and olive skin, but her face was thought rather too long, as was her nose with its ‘rising in the middest’,44 for classical beauty. Her eyes though were strikingly dark like her mother’s, and full of intelligence and humour. They had the largeness and the sweetness of expression of the very short-sighted. But what set her apart from all others was the vitality and force of her character and mind. ‘Her vertues were such as might suffice to make an Aethiopian beautifull’,45 where an ‘Aetheopian’ was seen by one of her earliest chroniclers as an example of someone as exotic and rebarbative as it was possible for a late sixteenth-century mind to imagine.

  As the queen approached Gracechurch Street she came upon a tableau set within a triumphal arch, complete with battlements, and a three-tiered stage. Meant to evoke the union of the houses of York and Lancaster, the first tier supported two children representing Henry VII sitting with his wife Elizabeth, their hands joined in matrimony, the king clothed in the red rose of Lancaster and his wife in the white rose of York. Above them the two rose stems twined into one which flowered round the figure of Henry VIII, with his queen Anne Boleyn beside him. Both of these were represented also by children richly dressed and crowned, with a pomegranate between them, symbol of their blessed fertility in producing the precious Elizabeth, and each carrying sceptres, in an obvious reference to Elizabeth’s mother’s legitimacy as Queen of England. The rose stem wound on up to the top tier where sat another child representing ‘the Queen’s most excellent Majesty, Elizabeth, now our most dread Sovereign Lady’.46 The whole edifice was festooned with red and white roses, the royal arms of England and various trophies and symbols. The child orator interpreted it to the queen as a longing in the people for unity and concord: just as Henry Tudor’s marriage with Elizabeth of York had healed the wounds of the War of the Roses, so this new Elizabeth would heal the divisions over the succession and religion of the previous reigns, for now ‘she is the only heir of Henry VIII, which came of both Houses as the knitting up of concord’.47

  Another tableau had characterized Elizabeth as Deborah, ‘The Judge and Restorer of Israel’.48 Deborah was the prophetess and judge of the Old Testament who was used as a convenient example of God confounding his own dictates in sending a woman successfully to rule over men. But by this exemplar, Elizabeth was
also reminded, ‘that it behoveth both men and women so ruling, to use advice of good counsel’.49

  As the day drew to its triumphant close, a final symbolic act from the last of the tableaux involved a Bible, translated into English, let down to her on a silken cord by a child representing Truth. Elizabeth, ever mindful of the visually dramatic, kissed both her hands as she reached out to receive it and then kissed the Bible itself and clasped it to her breast. She promised the expectant crowd she would study and learn from it, but her enthusiastic embrace of a Protestant Bible promised more.

  And so Elizabeth left the city with cheers and blessings in her ears. The extraordinary emotion of the day was like a common exhalation of the anxiety and fear of the last years replaced with an inspiration of hope for what was to come: ‘some with plausible acclamations, some with sober prayers, and many with silent and true-hearted teares, which were then seen to melt from their eyes’.50

  The ancient ritual and solemnity of the coronation on the following day, a Sunday, was charged with even greater moment by the question everyone at home and abroad wanted answered: how would Elizabeth’s preferences on religion be revealed?