by Helen Castor
At first, to the casual observer, all seemed peaceful. Early in 1548, Katherine discovered that she was pregnant for the first time in her four marriages. Then, at the end of May, Elizabeth and her servants abruptly left her stepmother’s home to stay instead with Kate Ashley’s sister Joan and her husband, a courtier and privy councillor named Sir Anthony Denny. At the end of August Katherine went into labour and gave birth to a healthy girl – but the delivery left her with an infection that developed into a dangerous fever. On 5 September, she died. Among the mourners at her funeral was her husband’s ward, the young Jane Grey, daughter of the Marquis of Dorset. Elizabeth did not attend.
Four months after that, in January 1549, Thomas Seymour was arrested. For this insistently egotistical man, no advance was sufficiently rapid, no promotion enough. The loss of his royal wife and his inability to accept the need to play second fiddle to his brother in their nephew’s government had precipitated him into a restlessly incoherent series of manoeuvres attempting to build up his political and financial capital. Among them, it was alleged, were plans to marry the young king to Seymour’s own ward Jane Grey – who was herself a great-niece of Henry VIII – and, rumour had it, to remove Edward from the protector’s custody by force. Not only that, but Seymour had a new bride in mind for himself: Elizabeth.
Within days of his detention, Kate Ashley was also a prisoner in the Tower, along with Elizabeth’s financial administrator Thomas Parry. The story that emerged from their interrogations was not an edifying one. Seymour had been flirting with Elizabeth from the moment he moved into Katherine Parr’s household. There had been horseplay of a giggling and boisterous kind, in which the dowager queen had sometimes joined: Kate told of a time when Seymour had cut the skirt of Elizabeth’s black dress to ribbons in the garden at Katherine’s home at Hanworth, while her stepmother – presumably laughingly – held her still. On another occasion, the couple came into Elizabeth’s chamber before she was up and tickled her while she lay in bed. But more often these early-morning visits were from Seymour alone. Either he or Elizabeth might still be in their nightgowns, ‘and if she were up, he would bid her good morrow and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly …’, Kate confessed, ‘and if she were in her bed, he would put open the curtains’ – this despite the presence of her maids and governess – ‘and bid her good morrow and make as though he would come at her, and she would go further in the bed so that he could not come at her’.2
Kate insisted that she had reproved Seymour for his inappropriate behaviour. It also emerged that Katherine Parr’s growing unhappiness with her husband’s interest in her stepdaughter had been the reason for Elizabeth’s sudden departure from her household. But Kate Ashley had not been immune to Seymour’s charismatic machismo. (Their conversations too had been edged with innuendo. One message from Seymour to Kate had been accompanied by an inquiry, ‘whether her great buttocks were grown any less or no?’.) And after the dowager queen’s death, when it became clear that Seymour might have designs on Elizabeth as his next wife, Kate had ‘wished both openly and privily that they two were married together’ – though only, she swore, if the Lord Protector and the council should agree.3
There is every sign that, in wishing so, Kate was encouraging her young charge along a path Elizabeth was far from unwilling to tread. She would blush at the mention of his name, Kate admitted. Other witnesses described her pleasure at hearing him praised, and her resistance if he were criticized. If this was an adolescent crush on a handsome and flirtatiously attentive older man – a father-figure who was not sexually out of bounds, should he ask for her hand – it is only likely to have been intensified by the fact that the prospect of marrying Seymour would spare Elizabeth the usual fate of royal daughters: to be sent abroad, in permanent exile from all that was familiar, to make a new life with a stranger for a husband. And when she spoke of the match to her governess and closest confidante, she was met not with caution, but excited support.
Now, however, it was suddenly evident just how dangerous such daydreams might be. Elizabeth’s cofferer Thomas Parry was reduced to abject terror by his entanglement in Seymour’s plots: ‘I would I had never been born, for I am undone’, he told his wife in panic when he was taken into custody.4 Kate Ashley was braver in the face of imprisonment but, as the investigation went on and the case against Seymour grew, the dark and cold of the Tower and the desperate uncertainty of their situation took a heavy toll on her too. Of them all, the one who maintained the greatest poise was fifteen-year-old Elizabeth.
The man who had been named as her new guardian-cum-interrogator, a former servant of Katherine Parr named Sir Robert Tirwhit, had no doubt that he would soon extract the confession of complicity that the protector and council required. ‘I do see it in her face that she is guilty’, he told Somerset on 22 January, less than a week after Seymour’s arrest. By the following day Tirwhit remained outwardly confident, but had begun to get the disconcerting measure of his new charge. ‘I do assure your grace she has a very good wit’, he wrote, ‘and nothing is gotten off her but by great policy.’ Five days after that, he sounded a great deal more harassed by his lack of progress. Despite bouts of weeping, Elizabeth was immovable: she had not been involved in Seymour’s plans, and there had been no discussion of any marriage without the explicit proviso that the consent of the council was paramount. ‘I do verily believe that there has been some secret promise between my Lady, Mistress Ashley, and the cofferer, never to confess till death’, Tirwhit declared, all complacency gone.5
As he was writing these words, Elizabeth was pressing home her hard-won advantage. In a letter to the protector that same day, she not only asserted her innocence and defended her servants, but railed against rumours that she too was a prisoner in the Tower and pregnant with Seymour’s child. ‘My Lord, these are shameful slanders, 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 the court after your first determinations, that I may show myself there as I am.’6 Somerset was not pleased by her defiance and responded with a rebuke, but Elizabeth would not back down. In another letter a month later – a masterpiece of imperious argument beneath a veneer of obedient humility – she reminded him that she was the king’s sister, and that he had promised her his friendship. ‘And’, she added, ‘as concerning that point that you write – that I seem to stand in mine own wit in being so well assured of mine own self – I did assure me of myself no more than I trust the truth shall try.’7 She already knew she could rely on no one else to protect her.
The stakes could not have been higher. On 20 March 1549, Thomas Seymour was executed as a traitor on Tower Hill. It took two strokes of the axe to sever his head from his body. Tradition has it that Elizabeth, when told of his death, said, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’8 The remark is almost certainly apocryphal, but as a thumbnail sketch of Seymour it can hardly be bettered. Even more than that, its emotional opacity and shrewd intelligence sum up the public persona Elizabeth was developing at speed. A year earlier she had observed, in a formal Latin letter to her brother the king, that ‘it is (as your majesty is not unaware) rather characteristic of my nature … not to say in words as much as I think in my mind’.9 That instinct – along with the decision to take up a defensible position and resist all pressure to shift her ground – had now proved its worth by saving her from real danger. It was a lesson she would not forget.
Others were not so wise, or so fortunate. While Elizabeth retreated into the calm of her books and, in time, gathered Kate Ashley and Thomas Parry back into her service, Protector Somerset found himself caught in the teeth of the political machine with which he had destroyed his brother. By the autumn of 1549, after a summer of violent unrest in England precipitated by his social and religious reforms, the duke had lost the support of his fellow councillors. He gambled everything on a hopelessly misconceived attempt to seize sole cont
rol of the young king, which resulted only in his overthrow. On 11 October, he was taken to the Tower. Initially, the coup was bloodless. In the early months of 1550 Somerset was released and pardoned, and reinstated as a rank-and-file member of the council. But neither he nor his colleagues could reconcile themselves to his new place as a deposed leader in their midst. The toxic effects of mutual suspicion took hold in 1551, and in January 1552 – after months of manoeuvres, rumours and plots, real and imagined – Somerset too lost his head on the block.
Elizabeth hardly needed to learn that proximity to the throne might bring death in its wake. All the same, the executions of the king’s uncles – his two closest male relatives – were a powerful aide-memoire for a girl who was now playing to perfection the role of the dutiful princess. While the godly work of her brother’s Protestant reformation continued under the new head of his government, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Elizabeth took care to demonstrate her public commitment to the reformers’ doctrinal principles. She signalled her modesty and virtue by wearing such plain and sober gowns that the king approvingly called her his ‘sweet sister Temperance’.10 The effect was not only to distance herself from the scandal that had threatened to engulf her after the fall of Thomas Seymour, but also to distinguish herself from her elder half-sister Mary, whose devotion to Rome and her mother’s Catholic faith was unswerving, and who refused to abandon the ornately jewelled costumes she wore along with her rosary.
By the spring of 1553, however, England’s religious settlement – and the shape of Elizabeth’s future along with it – was once again in doubt. The young king had fallen ill the previous year with measles and smallpox, but had recovered quickly, and there seemed no cause for continuing concern about his health by the summer of 1552. But early in 1553 he developed a feverish cold and a nagging cough he was unable to shake off. By the end of May it was clear that Edward – now bed-bound, swollen and coughing up blood – was desperately sick. In public, his councillors maintained that he would soon be well again. In private, they knew he was dying – and that fact created an imminent crisis.
According to their father’s will, first Mary and then Elizabeth stood next in the line of succession. Mary was Catholic. There could be no question that, once crowned, she would dismantle Edward’s Protestant Church of England and destroy the men who had shaped it. However, she and Elizabeth were also still technically illegitimate, thanks to their father’s relentless determination to have his cake and eat it in all questions relating to his marriages and offspring. So behind closed doors, Edward and Northumberland set about using the loophole of their illegitimacy to remove both Mary and Elizabeth from the succession. Instead, the dying king named fifteen-year-old Jane Grey – Henry VIII’s great-niece, and as fierce a Protestant as Edward himself – as his chosen heir. Since Jane had just married Guildford Dudley, one of Northumberland’s sons, she was the perfect vehicle, it appeared, for the seamless continuation of the Edwardian regime in terms of doctrine, policy and power structures.
But that seamless continuation would depend for its success on another internal coup, to silence or eliminate those who might object to its manipulation of political process and its deviation from accepted principles of inheritance. Northumberland’s first weapon was secrecy about the fact of Edward’s agonizing death, which took place on 6 July 1553. Jane herself knew nothing until three days later, when she was summoned to meet the Privy Council and told of her elevation to the throne. She responded with shock, tears and protest that the crown was not hers, until eventually she was persuaded that this was the will of her Protestant God. Reluctantly, she consented to move into the royal apartments at the Tower of London to prepare for her coronation.
Northumberland’s chosen queen was in place; but, despite the duke’s best efforts, Edward’s sisters proved much harder to control. Mary had been waiting at Hunsdon, twenty miles north-east of London, where the paucity of officially sanctioned information about the king’s condition was matched only by the flow of rumour and speculation, along with covert communication from the ambassadors of her maternal cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. When Northumberland’s dissembling summons to Edward’s bedside finally came, Mary knew enough to ride in the opposite direction. And by the time the duke and his son Robert Dudley were both in the field against her at the head of their soldiers, she was safe behind the walls of her great castle at Framlingham in Suffolk, where 10,000 men and more were massing in her support.
As the drama played itself out, Elizabeth remained at her house at Hatfield, twenty miles north of the capital. At once too closely implicated in the crisis to escape and too removed from its central dynamic to act, she waited and watched in silence. She did so with such impenetrable self-control that no evidence survives of anything she said or did within Hatfield’s walls. There was danger everywhere. In an England ruled by Queen Jane, Elizabeth’s Protestantism would be protected but her person at risk: Mary and Elizabeth’s bypassed claims to their father’s throne would make their continued existence a constant threat to Northumberland’s new world order. In an England ruled by Queen Mary, Elizabeth would be heir presumptive unless or until her thirty-seven-year-old sister married and had a child; but there could be no guarantee of safety in a Catholic kingdom for a royal heir whose whole being, from the moment of her birth, was predicated on the break from Rome. Either way, she would be least exposed if she did nothing. She had friends close to the action – perhaps especially the man she had appointed surveyor of her estates, William Cecil, a relative of her cofferer Thomas Parry and a member of Northumberland’s Privy Council. But in the end there was scarcely time to take confidential advice.
Northumberland had miscalculated badly. Few of the dead king’s subjects were yet as devoted to the reformed religion as Edward himself – and even fewer, it turned out, devoted enough to overturn the succession of Henry VIII’s elder daughter in favour of an almost unknown teenage girl. Not only that, but control of the administrative levers of power did not mean control of the country or its people, not if the hands holding the levers were doing so illegitimately. By 19 July – just nine days after Jane Grey’s accession had been announced on the silent and uneasy streets of London – Northumberland’s fellow councillors realized that saving their skins meant abandoning his sinking ship. They proclaimed Mary queen, and the city erupted in delirious celebration. Finally, Elizabeth was free to make a move.
When she did, it was a statement of intent. On 29 July 1553, Elizabeth rode into London with a ceremonial escort of 2,000 armed retainers, all dressed in green and white, the livery colours first adopted by her grandfather, Henry VII. There could be no mistaking that she, as well as Mary, could muster military support, and that she, as well as Mary, could represent the Tudor line of succession. She was once again the heir to the throne, for the first time since her mother’s death. Her sister’s rule would present her with a new configuration of threats, but Elizabeth’s message was that Mary would be ill advised to underestimate her capacity to defend herself.
The new queen set about establishing her rule with significant measures of mercy and circumspection. She ordered the execution of the Duke of Northumberland for his leadership of the failed coup, but spared the lives of his sons Robert and Guildford Dudley and his chosen instrument Jane Grey, who remained prisoners in the Tower. She assembled a council which included not only her own closest and most loyal supporters but also experienced administrators who had served her brother, even though they laboured under the taint of their collaboration with Northumberland. However, the one issue upon which Mary would contemplate no compromise was religion. All her subjects must embrace the true faith of Rome. Yet for every possible reason, personal and political, that was the one thing Elizabeth could not straightforwardly do.
Nor, as the heir to the throne, was hiding an option. But at just twenty, Elizabeth had already learned the value of dissimulation and procrastination, and now she deployed both to the best of her considerable skill. In
September, knowing that Mary was increasingly unhappy with her failure to attend Mass, she sought a private audience with the queen. Weeping, she knelt at her sister’s feet and begged for instruction in a faith of which, she explained, she knew little. Mary seemed pleased – but less so, a few days later, when Elizabeth finally made an appearance at the Chapel Royal, only to complain ostentatiously of a debilitating stomach ache. At the beginning of December, she asked permission to leave court for her house at Ashridge in Hertfordshire. Once there, she wrote to Mary asking for copes, chasubles, chalices, patens and crosses to equip her chapel for Mass. It was a politic request, but observers – including the queen – remained sceptical of her sincerity.
Only weeks later, the sisters’ perennially tense relationship broke down completely. By the beginning of 1554 the celebrations that attended Mary’s accession had given way to alarm, as a queen who had declared herself married to her kingdom announced that she intended, in reality rather than rhetoric, to wed Philip of Spain, heir to her cousin Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Here the unprecedented nature of Mary’s rule as a female sovereign in England worked against her: a wife, contemporaries knew, was subject to her husband by the order of God’s creation. Despite the fact that the treaty being hammered out by Mary and her councillors ensured that Philip would have the title but none of the powers of a king in her kingdom, fears grew that the queen’s marriage would subject England to Spanish rule. On 6 February, an army of 3,000 rebels led by a gentleman of Kent named Sir Thomas Wyatt marched on the capital. Mary stood firm. The revolt was crushed – and, with it, the queen’s magnanimity. It was not easy to be certain exactly what the rebels had intended to achieve, but all possible rivals for Mary’s throne now fell under suspicion. Jane Grey and her husband Guildford Dudley were beheaded less than a week later. Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, one of the last remaining descendants of the fifteenth-century Plantagenet kings, was imprisoned in the Tower. So, too, was Elizabeth.