‘Now’, Elizabeth said to Maitland, as she came to her second point, ‘where you said that by declaring your queen my successor our affection should become more firm. I rather fear it should be the seed of a most bitter hatred.’ How could she trust that a powerful monarch, from a neighbouring country with a long history of enmity to England, would not take advantage of her new position? ‘But’, Elizabeth continued, ‘the third consideration is the most weighty of all.’
Elizabeth remembered how men had looked to her during the previous reign, hoping to use her to replace her Catholic sister. One day, she feared, such men might wish to overthrow her too: ‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed, and naturally there are more that look, as it is said, on the rising than the setting sun.’ In that light, she asked Maitland to judge for himself how dangerous it would be for her to name the Queen of Scots as her heir. ‘I was married to this kingdom, whereof always I carry this ring as a pledge’, she concluded, and ‘howsoever things go I shall be Queen of England so long as I live, when I am dead let them succeed who have the best right.’
As with the issue of her marriage, the safest option for Elizabeth in naming a successor was to stall: ‘let them succeed who have the best right’. If Elizabeth had left few in any doubt that she believed Mary, Queen of Scots had the ‘best right’ she had done so largely to weaken the claim of Katherine Grey who posed the immediate threat. What Elizabeth could not do was prevent the young mother-to-be from carrying out the primary purpose of a royal princess – the delivery of a son. On 24 September Katherine Grey gave birth to a boy: Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp.
Katherine’s newborn baby posed a threat not only to Elizabeth, of course, but also to the Stuart claim, and within a week Margaret Douglas had sent a message to Mary, Queen of Scots. It asked cryptically ‘whether she would keep her promise made in France, or not’.23 Elizabeth’s agents intercepted it. The family competition for the Tudor crown was becoming acute, and Elizabeth would have to decide carefully what to do next.
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ROYAL PRISONERS
ELIZABETH’S INVITATION TO SPEND CHRISTMAS AT COURT PUT Margaret Douglas ‘in great alarm’. Acutely attuned to any indications of political trouble Margaret realised her letters to Scotland must have been intercepted. She feared she could be thrown in the Tower; even that her son Darnley’s life was at risk. Yet she was also defiant. What was wrong, she asked the Spanish ambassador, in giving marital advice to her niece, when a marriage between Mary, Queen of Scots and Darnley would protect England from a civil war on Elizabeth’s death? Quadra knew the answer to that. A childless spinster who was already twenty-eight, Elizabeth based ‘her security on there being no certain successor should the people tire of her rule’.1
The Christmas season came and went with the Lennox family all at court. It must have been grim for everyone, not least Elizabeth, who seemed to spend her life dealing with people planning for what would happen on her death. Beside the Lennox family, there was the danger posed by Katherine Grey’s son to face. On 10 February 1562 Elizabeth set up a Church Commission ‘to examine, inquire, and judge of the infamous conversation and pretended marriage betwixt the Lady Katherine Grey and the Earl of Hertford’.2 According to canon law all that was required for a valid marriage was consent by the bride and groom to marry in the presence of witnesses, followed by intercourse. The death of Hertford’s sister, Jane Seymour, the sole witness to the wedding, along with the disappearance of the priest, simplified the commissioners’ task in deciding the marriage was invalid and Katherine’s son a bastard. This left Elizabeth free to concentrate once more on the threat from the Lennox family.
Cecil had gathered a great deal of incriminating information from Lennox’s former secretary, a professional spy called Thomas Bishop. This information included their contacts with the Spanish ambassador. Margaret, however, suspected Bishop’s disloyalty after spotting one of his men at court, and she launched an attack on Bishop’s character. He was a coward, a sexual reprobate, a thief and a troublemaker, who had even tried to come between her and Lennox in their early marriage, to the fury of Henry VIII, she warned Cecil. Bishop defended himself vociferously, claiming that Margaret had always been determined to damage his reputation in order to ‘rule’ Lennox and that Henry VIII had been so angry over her slanders against him that he had passed her over in his will.3 No one took that claim seriously, but Bishop was throwing a lot of mud at the family – he even claimed that Margaret was behind Mary I’s decision to place Elizabeth in the Tower in 1554 – and some of it began to stick.4
Lennox was placed under guard with the Master of the Rolls, and then sent to the Tower on 11 March. Margaret and her sons were also imprisoned, by 2 April, at the former Carthusian abbey of Sheen. With Lennox and Hertford in the Tower, and their wives and children also locked up, the Spanish ambassador was moved to comment ‘The prisons will soon be full of the nearest relations of the crown.’5 Lennox’s imprisonment was particularly onerous with him kept ‘close’ prisoner while, to Lennox’s irritation, Hertford was granted certain privileges, including having messages carried to Katherine6. Margaret Douglas ascribed this to Lennox’s robust defence of their actions and reputation.7 But it was she who was considered the tougher nut to crack. As Margaret’s interrogators complained, she was ‘very obstinate in her answers to the council’ concerning the new charges that were laid against her that month.8
The fresh accusations could hardly have been more serious. Margaret was said to have committed treason in the recent war in Scotland, of being in secret communication with a foreign monarch (her niece Mary, Queen of Scots), and also with the French and Spanish ambassadors. It was further alleged that there were ‘proofs’ that she did ‘not love the queen’. Servants claimed that she referred to Elizabeth as a bastard and that her fool at Temple Newsam in Yorkshire often roundly mocked Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, who she despised.9 She had described Dudley and his siblings as ‘traitor’s birds’, and Robert Dudley also as a pox-ridden wife-murderer.
The greatest danger to Margaret was, however, that she would be accused of attempting to kill the queen with witchcraft, like the Catholics Cecil had arrested at Easter the previous year. Cecil was already planning to frighten the queen with a more dangerous version of the 1561 plot. His aim was to turn Elizabeth against Mary, Queen of Scots by convincing her that her cousin was at the heart of these satanic conspiracies to end her life. Cardinal Pole’s nephew Arthur Pole (who had been arrested, but released in 1561) was already being lined up to implicate the Scottish queen.10 Margaret was at risk of being used similarly. Not only had it emerged that Margaret was a Catholic who heard Mass said ‘by one little Sir William’, it was also alleged that she was in contact with ‘witches and soothsayers’, even that she had conjured the lightning that had burned down the steeple of St Paul’s in 1561, on the feast of Corpus Christi.11
An atmosphere of fear and paranoia was being stoked in Parliament where witchcraft was, at this very moment, being made an offence in common law. Parliament was similarly reviving a law against ‘fond and fantastical prophecies’, and here too Margaret was in trouble.12 Her servants had revealed that when her first son had died as a baby, she had been comforted by a prophecy that Darnley would one day unite the crowns of England and Scotland.13 Margaret asked to see Elizabeth to defend herself, quoting an old proverb that the greater the distance a person was from the court, the greater the slanders about them could grow. Lennox weighed in, describing their accusers as mere ‘exploiters, hired men and other fantastical persons’.14 But the accusation that most angered Margaret was not that concerning treason or witchcraft, which she rightly thought Elizabeth did not intend to pursue (Elizabeth suspected she was being manipulated), it was the attack on her legitimacy that had been planned for over a year. After Lennox’s disloyal former servant, Thomas Bishop, had described Margaret as ‘a mere
bastard’, she fired off a furious missive to Cecil reminding him ‘Even as God hath made me, I am lawful daughter to the Queen of Scots [Margaret Tudor] and the Earl of Angus which none alive is able to make me other without doing me wrong.’15
No further charges were made against Margaret, but as summer turned to autumn she became increasingly concerned about Lennox’s health. She bombarded Cecil with requests he be placed with her, or that they both be released. This worry was understandable. Her first love, Anne Boleyn’s uncle Lord Thomas Howard, had died in the Tower in October 1537 and he had been a much younger man than Lennox. On 25 October Margaret wrote again, begging Cecil ‘to be a means that the queen shall consider the long time of her husband’s imprisonment . . . especially he being in the Tower and the winter coming on, and that house both unwholesome and cold’.16 Unfortunately Elizabeth was in no state to do anything to help.
On 10 October 1562, when Elizabeth was at Hampton Court, she had begun to feel unwell, with aches and pains in her head and back. She had decided to have a bath and take a short walk to shake it off. When she returned to her chambers, however, she became feverish. A physician was called. To Elizabeth’s irritation he diagnosed the potentially deadly smallpox. Since there were as yet no blisters she refused to accept the diagnosis, but sickness and diarrhoea followed and she became delirious. By 16 October the queen could no longer speak. On the 17th she was unconscious.
Elizabeth had been on the throne almost four years: only a year short of her sister’s reign. If she died, as many feared she would, how would her reign have been remembered? Elizabeth’s religious settlement was not viewed as settled by anyone save the queen. One of her own bishops called it ‘a leaden mediocrity’. In military matters, while Mary I’s loss of Calais is still remembered, Elizabeth’s failed efforts to recover Calais by taking Le Havre and using it as a bargaining tool are completely forgotten. The campaign had ended that August 1562, with the huge loss of 2,000 men. Most troubling at the time, though, was what was likely to happen next. Mary I had named Elizabeth as her heir, despite her personal feelings towards her sister, and so allowed the crown to be inherited peacefully. Elizabeth continued to refuse to name anyone. Instead, when she woke up briefly, believing she was dying, she asked for Robert Dudley to be made Lord Protector with an income of £20,000. Her councillors promised her wishes would be fulfilled, but behind the scenes they had begun to argue furiously how the succession should actually go.
Since Elizabeth’s immediate heirs were all female, some remained willing to look outside the Tudor family in order to pass the throne directly to a man. Cecil was sufficiently concerned about this to have sprung his ‘witchcraft’ trap early. Arthur Pole, and his brother Edmund, who were descended from Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, had been arrested and put in the Tower as an argument against their claims. Others were prepared to consider another of Clarence’s heirs: the Protestant Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon.17 But a far larger proportion of the council looked to the Tudor family rather than to any faded remnants of the white rose.
As the frantic arguments continued, the pox blisters on Elizabeth’s body began to appear. They broke first in her throat and mouth, before spreading outwards to her face and body. But she began to feel better and after a few days she could speak again. On 24 November Lennox was freed from the Tower on the queen’s orders and permitted to join Margaret at Sheen. Having him die in the Tower was an embarrassment Elizabeth wished to avoid now that she faced renewed pressure to settle the issue of the succession once and for all. The council was determined to address the controversy during the coming parliament and Elizabeth remained most concerned about the threat posed by Katherine Grey.
The queen looked magnificent at the procession for the state opening on 12 January, all golden hair and red velvet. It was a wise queen who appeared ‘most royally furnished . . . knowing right well that in pompous ceremonies a secret of government does much consist, for that people are both naturally taken and held with exterior shows. The rich attire, the ornaments, the beauty . . . held the eyes and hearts of men dazzled between contentment and admiration.’ But Elizabeth also bore the scars of smallpox, a reminder that while her life had hung by a thread, so had the fate of her kingdom.
A debate on the succession began immediately with a petition soon drawn up, humbly requesting Elizabeth to marry, while also insisting that even if she did so, she must name an heir. Elizabeth’s reply to the Lords reminded them fiercely that the marks she now had on her face left by smallpox weren’t wrinkles and that, like the aging St Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, she could still have children. If she declared a successor, she warned, ‘it would cost much blood in England’.18 Yet the debates continued, and as they did so the shocking news broke that the twenty-two-year-old Katherine Grey was about to have a second child.
It emerged that in May Hertford had managed to bribe two guards to unlock his door and those to Katherine’s nearby chambers. On the 24th they had spent an hour making love on her bed, with its covers of silk shot damask. Four days later he had returned, and once again they had lain together.19 The guards had then got cold feet, or someone senior had got wind of what had occurred. When Hertford visited his wife on a third night he had found the door to Katherine’s rooms locked.20 He had not been able to return, but evidently those two nights had been enough for Katherine to conceive. It would now be difficult to deny they were married. They had been interrogated by the Archbishop of Canterbury and senior councillors and told them all they considered themselves man and wife. Under canon law such a statement, followed by intercourse, was a legal marriage.
At 10.15 in the morning on 10 February 1563 Katherine delivered another son, Lord Thomas Seymour. Elizabeth ordered the Lieutenant of the Tower be imprisoned in one of his own cells for his failures in keeping Hertford locked up, but ordinary people were demanding ‘Why should man and wife be [prevented] from coming together?’21 Elizabeth persisted, however, in refusing to recognise the marriage, and come the summer, when a virulent plague hit London, Elizabeth took the opportunity to move the couple out of the Tower to separate and far-flung country houses.
Katherine desperately missed Hertford. ‘I long to be merry with you, as I know you do with me, as we were when our sweet little boy [Thomas] was begotten in the Tower’, she wrote of their lovemaking; ‘I wish you to be as happy as I was sad when you came to my door for the third time, and it was locked. Do you think I can forget what passed between us? No, I cannot. I remember it more often than you know . . . such is my boundless love for my sweet bedfellow, that I once lay beside with joyful heart and shall again.’22 Katherine pleaded with the queen for her forgiveness, but she was kept apart not only from Hertford, but also from her elder son.
A miniature of Katherine with the infant Lord Beauchamp, painted at around this time by the female court artist Levina Teerlinc, remains the earliest known portrait of an English mother with her baby: a sad reminder for Katherine of all she had lost. But for others it represented the future: an icon of a Madonna carrying the Lord’s anointed, the next King of England. Copies were made and even after 450 years several still survive. Katherine and Hertford had many friends who hoped that the queen could yet be pressured into naming Katherine, or one of her sons, as her heir.
Amongst Katherine’s supporters was an MP called John Hales who spent the following months composing a book clarifying her succession rights and attacking those of Mary, Queen of Scots. Here, his greatest success was in unearthing a law, dating back to the reign of Edward III, which excluded those born outside the realm from inheriting land in England. Elizabeth’s reaction was compared to a tempest when she learned of Hales’ book in the spring of 1564; he was to spend a year in the Tower and a further four under house arrest for it. She complained particularly about Hales ‘writing the book so precisely against the Queen of Scotland’s title’.23 It interfered with her latest plan of defence, which involved stalling Mary’s remarriage.
Elizabeth
could bastardise Katherine’s sons, but she would have no such ability when Mary, Queen of Scots married – so she had to delay her from doing so for as long as possible, preferably until she was no longer able to bear sons. Elizabeth planned to convince Mary that to gain the English throne she had only to marry the one man she trusted: Robert Dudley. Bringing Mary round to marrying a mere subject of England would take time, and once that was achieved Elizabeth intended to come up with some last-minute impediment to the very marriage she was promoting. Although Elizabeth had accepted she could not marry Dudley herself, she was no less possessive of him than she had ever been.
As a sign of her commitment to the Stuart claim, Elizabeth had begun showering the freed Lennox family with marks of favour. Lennox had been permitted to return to Scotland to pursue the rights lost when he had come to England to serve Henry VIII, while Margaret Douglas and her children had been invited to court. There the thirty-year-old Elizabeth had long given up the modest attire she had worn during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I. In a portrait from this period Elizabeth is wearing a beautiful scarlet dress with the cone-shaped skirts that were then fashionable, glittering with gold thread. A queen was expected to dress like a queen, and Elizabeth now followed her elder sister who had delighted ‘above all in arraying herself elegantly and magnificently’.24
Darnley was greatly flattered by the attention of the glamorous Elizabeth that summer. She made a great show of enjoying his lute playing, and on 29 September he was given a prominent role in the ceremonies in which Elizabeth raised Robert Dudley to the royal title, Earl of Leicester: a necessary move if Dudley was to be considered seriously as an attractive groom for Mary, Queen of Scots.25 Darnley preceded Elizabeth in the procession at St James’s Palace, carrying the sword of state before her into the room where the ceremonies were to take place. There was something spoilt and effeminate about Darnley; ‘a polished trifler’ was the verdict of the French court.26 The Scottish emissary agreed. His view, shared with Elizabeth, was that this tall boy ‘was more a woman than a man, being very lusty, beardless and lady faced’. Mary would surely prefer Robert Dudley as a husband, Elizabeth believed, and when Dudley knelt before her and bowed his dark head, she could not resist ‘putting her hand in his neck to kittle him smilingly’.27
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