Popular opposition to the queen’s marriage was not quelled by Jane’s death. Spain was a hated enemy, and it was unthinkable to many that Mary would import a Spanish prince to rule over them. The Speaker of the House of Commons even dared remonstrate with the queen personally on the matter, but to no avail. Mary had sworn she would wed Philip, and she would never retreat from that vow.
As the queen’s excitement grew to bursting, the prince of Spain finally came to England in the middle of July 1554. Several days before the wedding at Winchester Cathedral, Mary met him for the first time. She was delighted by what she saw, running up to Philip and kissing him when he entered the room. Clearly he had lived up to the dignified portrait by Titian that had so far been the queen’s only contact with the man who was to rule England by her side.
Philip treated Mary with perfect decorum when he met her, but his gentlemen were quite disappointed by her appearance. Years of care and worry had taken their toll. “The queen is not at all beautiful,” one of Philip’s companions wrote. “Small, and rather flabby than fat, she is of white complexion and fair, and has no eyebrows.” As biographer Carolly Erickson noted, Mary “looked exactly what she was: Philip’s maiden aunt.”
The Venetian ambassador was a little bit kinder in his assessment of the queen’s appearance:
She is of low rather than of middling stature, but, although short, she has not personal defect in her limbs, nor is any part of her body deformed. She is of spare and delicate frame, quite unlike her father, who was tall and stout; nor does she resemble her mother, who, if not tall, was nevertheless bulky. Her face is well formed, as shown by her features and lineaments, and as seen by her portraits. When younger she was considered, not merely tolerably handsome, but of beauty exceeding mediocrity. At present, with the exception of some wrinkles, caused more by anxieties than by age, which makes her appear some years older, her aspect, for the rest, is very grave. Her eyes are so piercing that they inspire not only respect, but fear in those on whom she fixes them, although she is very shortsighted, being unable to read or do anything else unless she has her sight quite close to what she wishes to peruse or to see distinctly. Her voice is rough and loud, almost like a man’s, so that when she speaks she is always heard a long way off. In short, she is a seemly woman, and never to be loathed for ugliness, even at her present age, without considering her degree of queen.
Winchester Cathedral, stripped of much of its ornate magnificence by Henry VIII, was temporarily restored to some of its former glory for the queen’s wedding. Rich tapestries and cloth of gold were hung. On either side of the altar were two canopied chairs for the bride and groom (which can still be seen today). Mary’s gown was of black velvet studded with precious stones, over which she wore a mantle of gold cloth matching that worn by Philip. The queen, one observer wrote, “blazed with jewels to such an extent that the eye was blinded as it looked upon her.”
After the wedding a sumptuous feast was held at the bishop of Winchester’s palace. The newlyweds then retired to lodgings specially prepared for them. “What happened that night only they know,” one of the Spanish guests wrote. “If they give us a son our joy will be complete.”
That would never happen, but before Mary was forced to reconcile herself to being barren, among other future woes, she was simply a smitten new wife. The queen wrote to her father-in-law, Charles V, after the wedding to thank him “for allying me with a prince so full of virtues that the realm’s honor and tranquility will certainly be thereby increased. This marriage renders me happier than I can say, as I daily discover in the King my husband so many virtues and perfections that I constantly pray God to grant me grace to please him, and behave in all things as befits one who is so deeply embounden to him.”
Philip was somewhat less enamored with his bride. “To speak frankly with you,” his confidant Ruy Gómez wrote home to Spain, “it will take a great God to drink this cup.” Nevertheless, Philip made the best of it. “He treats the queen very kindly,” Gómez reported, “and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshy sensuality. He makes her so happy that the other day when they were alone she almost talked love talk to him, and he replied in the same vein.”
Several months after the wedding Mary believed she was pregnant, the joy of which was matched by her kingdom’s reunion with Rome. With her husband by her side, and a baby in her belly (or so she thought), Mary began to burn heretics. Hundreds of men and women, many of them poor and uneducated, suffered agonizing deaths at the stake, while the queen solidified her place in English history as Bloody Mary.
During Easter Week, 1555, Queen Mary went into confinement at Hampton Court in anticipation of her delivery, which was expected early in May. The palace was a hive of activity in preparation for the arrival of the precious heir. “I warrant it should be a man child,” Charles V declared confidently. But the due date came and went, followed by fresh calculations by the queen’s doctors that she would deliver in June. Still no baby. As Mary became increasingly more anxious and depressed, people began mumbling that she may not have been pregnant at all. English diplomats searched for explanations for the delayed delivery as their queen was held to increasing ridicule in foreign courts. Another due date passed in July, by which time the doctors and midwives had ceased making calculations. Still, the Venetian ambassador, for one, continued to hold out hope that a miracle would “come to pass in this, as in all her majesty’s other circumstances, which the more they were despaired of according to human reasoning and discourse, the better and more auspicious did their result then show itself.”†
By the end of August there were few believers left; Philip departed for the dominions in Flanders that he was about to inherit from his father. Mary wept as she watched him go. She believed at first that her husband would soon return to her, but as his letters tapered off, and rumors of his philandering began to reach her, she despaired.
As the months went by, Mary became increasingly desperate, even pleading with her father-in-law, the emperor, to make Philip come back. “I beg your Majesty to forgive my boldness,” she wrote, “and to remember the unspeakable sadness I experience because of the absence of the king.” Sadness sometimes gave way to anger, as on the occasion when the queen ordered a portrait of her wayward husband removed from the council chamber, kicking it on the way out. Then there was the resignation that Philip would probably not be coming back. According to one report, the queen “told her ladies, that she had done all possible to induce her husband to return, and as she found he would not, she meant to withdraw utterly from men, and live quietly, as she had done the chief part of her life before she was married.”
As it turned out, Philip did return to England, but only briefly, and not to reconcile with Mary (though there was intimacy, and yet another false pregnancy). He needed her as an ally in a war he was fighting against France. The queen agreed to help her husband, but all she got in return was the devastating loss of Calais, the last of England’s once numerous territories in France. Philip had broken her heart, but, she said, they would find Calais lying upon it when they opened her up after her death.
Bitter and abandoned, with all her hopes for a Catholic dynasty in ruins, Queen Mary I was finally forced to endure the inescapable fact that her hated half sister, Elizabeth, would be the one to succeed her.
* Jane was given the opportunity to save her life if she would convert to Catholicism, but the girl who had been so shocked by the last-minute conversion of her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, resolutely maintained her own strong Protestant faith. On the scaffold, before she laid her head on the block, she reiterated that she looked to be saved “by none other mean, but only by the mercy of God in the merits of the blood of his only son Jesus Christ.”
† It is possible that Queen Mary had a rare condition known as pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy. Not only do those who suffer from the disorder fervently believe they are pregnant, but they have a variety of symptoms
to make it seem so, such as cessation of menstruation, abdominal enlargement, nausea and vomiting, breast enlargement, and food cravings. The condition baffles scientists, but some have suggested that pseudocyesis occurs in patients who desperately want to become pregnant. This would certainly fit Mary Tudor, who fervently prayed for an heir to maintain the Catholic restoration.
5
Elizabeth I (1558–1603): Perils of a Princess
My Lord, these are shameful slanders.
—PRINCESS ELIZABETH, LATER QUEEN ELIZABETH I
She was Gloriana, perhaps the greatest of all England’s kings and queens. But before Elizabeth I came to the throne and presided over that magnificent era bearing her name, she was a princess in almost constant peril. It was only with her formidable intelligence, and a little luck, that the young Elizabeth managed to survive—barely.
In one of fate’s odd twists, Elizabeth Tudor enjoyed the most security of her early life during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. Sure, he was a monster who had her legally declared a bastard after beheading her mother, Anne Boleyn, but mostly the king ignored his precocious redheaded daughter and left her to her books. That kind of benign neglect had its benefits in those dangerous times, and Elizabeth grew up to revere her “matchless and most benevolent” father. After his death in 1547, though, she came under much more intense scrutiny, which nearly proved lethal.
The orphaned princess, just thirteen, was sent to live in the household of her fourth and final stepmother, Katherine Parr, who, after she managed to survive her marriage to Henry VIII, wed the man she had always wanted: the dashing Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral of England and uncle to the new king, Edward VI.
Queen Katherine had always treated Elizabeth with loving kindness, but her new husband’s interest in the girl might generously be described as predatory. Half-dressed, Seymour would steal into Elizabeth’s bedchamber first thing in the morning, rouse the teenager with tickles, slap her rear end, and attempt to kiss her. The princess was at first flattered by the attentions of the older, extremely charismatic man. But adolescent infatuation gave way to probity. To avoid being vulnerable, Elizabeth was forced to wake up earlier and dress fully before Seymour burst into her room. Still, he persisted, and with Katherine Parr’s apparent acquiescence. In one bizarre incident, the queen even held Elizabeth down while Seymour cut her dress to shreds.
Perhaps Katherine genuinely believed that her husband was being playfully paternal with their young charge. He was, after all, gregarious by nature. But her attitude changed abruptly after she reportedly discovered her husband and stepdaughter in an embrace. Pregnant and sick at the time, Katherine sent Elizabeth away with a stern warning about the dangerous effects of scandal. She also promised the mortified girl that she would report to her if her reputation had already been compromised in any way.
A deeply chastened Elizabeth assured her stepmother in a letter from her new residence that she was “replete with sorrow to depart from your Highness, especially seeing you undoubtful of health; and albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evilness that you should hear of me; for if your Grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way at all, meaning the contrary.”
Though the breach with Katherine Parr was quickly healed, the episodes with Seymour would come to haunt Elizabeth and taint her with treason. After he was arrested and imprisoned for having tried to kidnap King Edward (see Chapter 2), Elizabeth was left to answer the charge that he had conspired to marry her. The danger was acute, especially if the princess was found to have cooperated in Seymour’s scheme. And all the more distressing, her devoted governess, Kat Ashley, who had been like a mother to her, and her servant Thomas Parry were sent to the Tower as co-conspirators. Anything Elizabeth said while being interrogated could put the lives of these beloved companions in danger as well.
Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, sent by the council to question Elizabeth, was pleased to report that she was “marvelously abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long time,” upon hearing of Ashley and Parry’s imprisonment. But behind those tears was the fierce determination and superior intelligence that would thwart and frustrate Tyrwhitt throughout his relentless interrogation.
“She hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her but by great policy,” Tyrwhitt conceded. Nevertheless, he remained convinced that he could break the princess. By using “gentle persuasion,” he reported that he had already coaxed Elizabeth into admitting that her cofferer, Thomas Parry, had returned from a financial meeting with Thomas Seymour and had discussed the possibility of the Lord Admiral’s marrying her.
Despite all his threats and cajoling, that was about all Tyrwhitt could get from Elizabeth or her servants. “I verily do believe,” he confessed in frustration, “that there hath been some secret promise between my lady [Elizabeth], Mistress Ashley and the cofferer, never to confess to death.” The interrogator was reduced to informing Elizabeth of the rumors then in circulation that she was in the Tower and pregnant with Seymour’s child. The princess’s composure temporarily broke upon hearing this; her honor was at stake.
“My Lord, these are shameful slanders,” she wrote furiously to Seymour’s brother, Somerset. “For the which, besides the great desire I have to see the King’s Majesty, I shall most heartily desire your Lordship that I may come to court after your first determination, that I may show myself as I am.”
Elizabeth’s plea to vindicate herself publicly was ignored. Meanwhile, Tyrwhitt continued his assault, to no avail. “I … have practiced with my lady’s grace by all means and policies to cause her to confess more than she hath already done,” he lamented, “wherein she doth plainly deny that she knoweth any more than she hath already opened to me.”
Having been outwitted by the crafty teenager, Tyrwhitt settled on a new policy. If Kat Ashley could be made to talk, that would shatter Elizabeth and “make her cough out the whole.” As it turned out, Mrs. Ashley had long fantasized about a marriage between her royal charge and the charming Seymour, rhapsodizing about it endlessly. “If all the Council did agree, why not?” she had asked Elizabeth in the period following Katherine Parr’s death. “For he’s the noblest man unmarried in this land.” Parry, too, shared in the chatter after his meeting with Seymour to discuss Elizabeth’s finances. Now, in the dankness of the Tower, all their dangerous discussions were exposed.
Parry had sworn he “had rather be pulled with horses” than reveal any secrets. But confronted with very real terrors, he broke down and signed a detailed confession. “False wretch!” Kat Ashley cried when Parry and his confession were brought before her. She had languished in a grim dungeon—“so cold … and so dark”—but had said nothing. Now she had little choice but to tell what she knew as well, including details of those embarrassing morning romps in Elizabeth’s bedchamber. She admitted that she had frequently discussed Seymour with Elizabeth, and “hath wished both openly and privily that they two were married together.”
A triumphant Tyrwhitt presented the signed confessions to Elizabeth and reported that she was “much abashed and half breathless” upon reading them. Humiliating as some of the revelations were, though, Elizabeth was quick to recognize that they weren’t damning. Nowhere was she implicated in Seymour’s plot to marry her, and all Kat Ashley had to say about a potential union was merely foolish chatter, not evidence of criminal intent. The council was forced to agree. Only Tyrwhitt remained convinced that Elizabeth and her servants were holding back. “They all sing one song,” he wrote to the Protector, “and so I think they would not do unless they had set the note before.”
In the end only Thomas Seymour forfeited his life. Elizabeth, on the other hand, managed to survive her brother’s brief reign with only her birthright taken away. But she came close to losing much more than that when her sister, Mary, became queen in 1553.
Elizabeth was right by her sister’s side when Mary triumphantly rode into London to claim her crown
after Northumberland’s defeat. But it wasn’t long before the new queen’s deep-seated resentments toward her sister began to aggressively spew forth. It was Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, who had, after all, supplanted Mary’s own mother, Katherine of Aragon, and who had viciously abused Mary, threatening at one point to poison her or “marry her to some valet.” And when Elizabeth was born, Mary was deprived of her rank as princess, declared a bastard, and relegated to a lowly status within her exalted half sister’s household. Her protests were met with Anne Boleyn’s order to “box her ears as a cursed bastard.”
The numerous indignities Mary had endured as a young woman were now heaped upon Elizabeth, whose rank at court was often superseded by lesser royals, like her cousin Margaret, Countess of Lennox.* The queen even questioned whether Elizabeth was really her sister, noting cattily that she had “the face and countenance of Mark Smeaton,” the musician executed as one of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers, “who was a very handsome man.”
Fueling Mary’s animosity toward Elizabeth was Simon Renard, the ambassador of the queen’s cousin Emperor Charles V. Renard perceived Elizabeth and her Protestant base of support as a threat, and was quick to exploit Mary’s innate suspicions about her sister’s loyalty. Elizabeth was “clever and sly,” he insisted, and possessed “a spirit full of enchantment.” Her very presence at court was dangerous, given that she “might, out of ambition or being persuaded thereto, conceive some dangerous design and put it to execution by means which it would be difficult to prevent.” Mary hardly needed convincing.
Behind the Palace Doors Page 4