by Simon Schama
In February 1603, shadowed by melancholy, Elizabeth was also in severe pain. Throat ulcers made it difficult to spoon anything but a little pottage down her gullet. Her hands had long been racked by rheumatism, and now the fingers that courtiers had stooped to kiss were so badly swollen that a decision was made to file away the queen’s coronation ring, which had become deeply embedded in her skin and flesh. No matter whether she had actually made a show of displaying the ring at her coronation as the wedding band that united her with her people, everyone had for years believed that she had. A ballad writer had her sing to her suitor, Merrie England:
Here is my hand
My dear lover England,
I am with thee both with mind and heart
For ever to endure
Thou mayst be sure
Until death we two do part.
That parting seemed imminent now.
She was supposed to be immortal, of course, semper eadem (always the same), as the motto, taken from her unlucky mother, proclaimed. The older she got, the younger her portraitists made her appear, gillyflowers and pansies perpetually blooming on her stomacher. In 1602, a year before her death, the poet John Davies was gallantly insisting:
Time’s young hours attend her still
And her eyes and cheeks do fill
With fresh youth and beauty.
And the odd thing was that, despite the garish wig and the blackened teeth and the withered breasts (uncovered to the end, as befitted a virgin), foreigners like the Venetian ambassador Scarinelli, who saw her with pearls like pears roped about her brow, did indeed think that Elizabeth’s beauty ‘though past’ had not entirely faded. And the German Thomas Platter swore he had seen behind the mask a young woman, ‘no more than twenty years of age’. When she died on the eve of the Annunciation of the Virgin and ‘so easily’ it was said ‘like a ripe apple [falling] from a tree’ and her undergarments were taken from her body, it was seen that they still fitted the contours of a maid: wasp-waisted, slim-hipped, long-limbed.
This was all the more remarkable since, according to the physicians, women’s bodies that had not fulfilled the purposes for which God had fashioned them ran the danger of infected discoloration, specifically the ‘swart, weasel’ hue that was the sign of the virgin’s disease, chlorosis, or ‘the greensickness’. The condition was the result of unexpended female sperm (which contemporary medicine supposed were stored in the uterus) becoming corrupt and contaminating the upper parts of the body. In 1554 John Lange, who was the first to publish a diagnosis of greensickness, recommended the expulsion of dangerously retained seed through salutary copulation. And there had been a time when the councillors of Elizabeth I had desperately hoped that the queen would avail herself of it, for the sake of the health of her realm as well as herself, for they were one and the same. Elizabeth was meant to have joined herself to a husband and produced an heir to keep the peace and piety of the country secure for posterity. She had not done this. Still, when they laid her body in its tomb few people believed that Elizabeth had failed England. She had been peculiar, certainly, an island unto herself, but she had given everyone due warning. At the very beginning of her reign she had told her people that she had two bodies, one ‘naturally considered’, that of a woman, but the other, by God’s permission, ‘a body politic, to govern’. And she had proceeded to subject her body natural to her body politic, inventing something quite new in the history of the monarchy: the androgynous virgin prince.
She would never escape the politics of sex. Biology had made her mother queen and biology had killed her. In 1542, six years after Anne Boleyn’s death, when Elizabeth was eight years old and certainly beginning to be aware of the revolving door of her father’s court or at least of royal stepmothers who came and went, her Howard cousin, Catherine, was condemned and executed for having sex with another cousin, Thomas Culpeper, while Henry VIII was away hunting. So if women were generally thought to be governed by their lust, rather than their reason, the Howard women seemed to have a particular problem in this area. But Catherine Howard’s sins and crimes had done nothing to mitigate those of Anne Boleyn. She stood forever damned as an incestuous, adulterous witch. It probably didn’t help that Culpeper’s access to Catherine Howard had been abetted by Elizabeth’s aunt, Lady Rochford, her mother’s sister-in-law. Since it was a truism that children inherited characteristics with their mother’s milk, who knew how Elizabeth’s Tudor blood might not be polluted by nursing at the dugs of a sorceress?
So the girl with the red-gold hair was a suspect who badly needed a guardian and one, moreover, who would think the best, not the worst, of her. In her last stepmother, Catherine Parr, Elizabeth finally found just such a protectress. It was Henry VIII’s sixth queen who persuaded him to rewrite his will reinstating both his daughters in the line of succession, and in 1544 an act of parliament made it official. Catherine brought Elizabeth into her household at Chelsea and for a brief time she was able to relax in the warmth of approval and even affection. Her bad-tempered, pachydermal father bestowed favours and smiles on her as he rested his ulcerated leg on Queen Catherine’s lap. She was now the picture of virtue, not a reminder of vice. In 1545 the twelve-year-old presented her father with her own translation, in French, Italian and Latin, of the queen’s exemplary Prayers and Meditations, bound in crimson cloth and embroidered with Henry and Catherine’s intertwined monograms, sewn in silver and gold. Restored to favour, Elizabeth also became close to her brother Edward, who was, after all, just three years her junior. When Henry died in January 1547 the news was given to brother and sister together, and Edward, beside himself, sobbed in his half-sister’s arms. They also shared the same tutors, including the dauntingly learned Cambridge humanist, John Cheke, whose instruction made no concessions to the stereotypes of female light-headedness. Roger Ascham, who taught her in 1548, wrote to a scholarly friend, marvelling that:
her mind has no womanly weakness and her perseverance is equal to that of a man and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up. She talks French and Italian as well as she does English and has often talked to me readily and well in Latin, moderately in Greek. When she writes in Greek and Latin nothing is more beautiful than her handwriting. She delights as much in music as she is skilful in it. In adornment she is elegant rather than showy.
Ascham happened to be much more important than a humble don, flattered by a post at court. He was a master calligrapher, surely responsible for Elizabeth’s exquisite hand, and the advocate of a stern ‘double-translation’ method, which had students take Latin texts that had been rendered into English and translate them back again, unseen of course, into Latin. Ascham was also Public Orator at Cambridge University and it was in this role that he put Cicero’s De Oratore in front of Elizabeth. The outlandish idea was to instruct the teenage girl in a discipline that most thought profoundly unfit for a woman at all: the art of public speech. And although her sister Mary intermittently showed some skill and courage, rhetoric was from the outset the strongest in Elizabeth’s arsenal of political weapons. Her speeches were always by herself and worked painstakingly through several drafts. Although at the beginning of her reign the speeches were read by male speakers, after a while Elizabeth delivered them herself, evidently to extraordinary effect. Her ringing, finely thought-out oratory could strong-arm or seduce, tease or threaten. Whenever she took it out for an airing, her adversaries and critics flinched, for they knew they were in for a very, very hard time.
The portrait of the teenage princess, painted at Edward’s express request, is of a Renaissance paragon: pious and learned. The king called her ‘Sweet Sister Temperance’, and her person is already festooned with the virgin’s pearls that would be her visual autograph. Watchful intelligence describes the face, with its strong set of jaw and the long, rather bony nose, while the index finger of her left hand marks the page of her book as if impatient to continue a grudgingly interrupted reading. Elizabeth already knew her strengths, even when she was being disingenuou
sly modest about her other qualities. ‘For the face I might well blush to offer,’ she wrote to her little brother-king, ‘but for the mind I shall never be ashamed to present.’
She was not yet free of suspicion, though. Until she became queen on 17 November 1558 Elizabeth’s life was finely balanced between vindication and disgrace. Out of the dark Boleyn eyes she watched herself being watched. But she was an adolescent, playful like her mother, and inevitably there were times when her guard was down. One of those times nearly ruined her.
It came when it was least expected. Until they were interrupted by scandal, the first years of Edward VI’s reign were the best times of Elizabeth’s young life. The hitherto unimpeachably Christian queen dowager, Catherine Parr, had raised eyebrows by marrying the man with whom she had been amorously involved before Henry VIII came along, interrupting their own marital plans. He was the Lord High Admiral, Thomas Seymour, Edward VI’s uncle, and the brother of the power in the land, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector. Thomas was thirty-eight, charismatically good-looking and consumed with ambition. Very soon, much too soon for some people, Catherine was pregnant. And that, according to the testimony given against Seymour in 1549, was when the trouble started.
Before he married Catherine Parr, Thomas Seymour had decided that he might himself be a match for Elizabeth, then just fourteen but by the aristocratic standards of the time certainly nubile. His brother, the Lord Protector, had been appalled at the temerity and had forbidden it out of hand. But in the Seymour ménage at Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, where Elizabeth spent some months, the admiral turned horseplay into something dangerously like flirting. According to Elizabeth’s governess, Kat Ashley, he would come into her bedchamber early in the morning ‘before she were ready’ dressed ‘only in his nightgown . . . bare-legged’.
If she were up he would bid her good morrow and ask her how she did, and strike her upon the back or the buttocks familiarly . . . And if she were in her bed he would put open the curtains . . . and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further into the bed so that he could not come at her. And one morning he strave [sic] to have kissed her in bed and this examinate [Kat] was there and bade him go away for shame.
But was Kat Ashley laughing or frowning when she said this? Was the bottom-slapping just innocent merriment in keeping with the improbable English reputation for physical displays of affection? Or was the wicked uncle groping the heir to the throne? For a while, Catherine herself joined in the fun, if that’s what it was, restraining Elizabeth while the admiral slashed a black dress she was wearing to ribbons. Soon Catherine stopped smiling and started scowling. Pregnant and ‘suspecting the often access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace [Catherine] came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone (he having her in his arms) wherefore she fell out both with the Lord Admiral and her Grace also’. The demure Elizabeth, who at twelve had given Catherine a translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s Meditations of a Sinful Soul, with its warnings against fornication with false lovers, had been unmasked as a shocking little tease, or at the very least, a victim of Seymour’s criminal impulsiveness. For everyone’s sake she was sent packing.
The serious business, however, had only just begun. Catherine Parr died in childbirth just a few weeks after Elizabeth’s departure from her house. Undaunted, Thomas Seymour busied himself with a conspiracy to substitute the power of his brother with his own. Edward VI was to be kidnapped and married to Lady Jane Grey. He would be the new Protector. Slightly drunk, he got as far as the king’s bedroom door before Edward’s loyal spaniel did his duty and barked the plot into fiasco. Seymour was arrested, taken to the Tower and charged with thirty-three separate offences. One of them was the design to marry Elizabeth without the consent of council, itself an indisputable act of treason.
Kat Ashley was interrogated along with Elizabeth’s cofferer who had witnessed the goings-on at Sudeley, and although she supplied all the details of the romps in the princess’s bedroom at Sudeley, much to the exasperation of her interrogator Sir Robert Tyrwhit, Kat refused to incriminate the princess in any kind of conspiracy against the king, the council or the state. When Elizabeth was herself interrogated, unsettling memories must have come rushing back – of the stories told about her mother and of cousin Catherine – but, as so often when she was in deep trouble, Elizabeth drew on deep reserves of fortitude. She told the truth plainly, with no attempt to fudge or extenuate, admitting she knew about Seymour’s ambition to marry her but denying that she ever gave him the least encouragement. To the Lord Protector Somerset she protested her innocence of Seymour’s designs on her:
My Lord. Master Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumours abroad which be greatly against my honour and honesty (which above all I esteem) which be these: that I am in the Tower; and with child by my lord admiral. My lord these are shameful slanders for the which besides the great desire I have to see the King’s Majesty I most heartily desire your lordship that I may come to the court after your first determination that I may show myself there as I am.
Written in haste from Atfelde [Hatfield] this 28 January
Your assured friend to my little power
Elizabeth
She was, remember, just fifteen. But it took great art to seem this artless. Scared though she must have been, Elizabeth was sufficiently in command of herself to ask, indeed almost to demand, that the Lord Protector publish a proclamation ‘into the countries’ (counties) ordering people to ‘refrain their tongues declaring how the tales be but lies’. Even though she could have no memory of her mother’s fate, Elizabeth was fighting as Anne could not, to protect her crucial asset: the good name that would preserve her claim to the throne and her claim to a powerful marriage. No one was going to want an unchaste princess for a bride.
In March 1549 the hapless Thomas Seymour was executed. On his last night on earth he used the metal ferrules on the laces that tied his stockings to his doublet to write letters of explanation and sheepish regret to both Elizabeth and Mary. In his idiotic way he was obviously deeply fond of them both. The letters, of course, never reached their destination.
It was a brutally early education in the perils of sexual politics. Elizabeth’s sense of disquiet that any day she might be a victim of innuendo could not have been helped when her half-sister, Mary, had the first parliament of her reign declare lawful the marriage of her own mother Catherine of Aragon with Henry VIII. This made Elizabeth, once more, a bastard. Although no one dared, formally, to annul her place in the succession, she was humiliated by having the daughters of Henry VIII’s sisters given precedence over her at court and by being spied on as a potential focus for Protestant resistance. When Wyatt made his futile attempt to prevent Mary from marrying Philip of Spain, Elizabeth was bound to be in very serious trouble. On the scaffold Wyatt insisted she had had no prior knowledge of the plot, and Elizabeth herself denied ever receiving the letter it was claimed he had sent her. But she was, nonetheless, held in close confinement at St James’s Palace. Then came the ominous order from the queen and council to have her moved to the Tower. Her cousin, Jane Grey, the two-week queen, was still in the Tower, certain to face death on the block. Just beyond the walls, the disembowelled remains of the Wyatt rebels were still hanging from gibbets.
As she was being taken by barge to the prison, Elizabeth suddenly remembered a remark made by Somerset before he, too, had been executed: that if he had allowed his brother, Thomas, a last-minute interview, he probably would not have condemned him to the block. Not unreasonably, Elizabeth now became convinced that only an audience with Mary would save her. So she wrote a letter insisting on her innocence, quoting Somerset’s remorse and imploring the queen to see her. Her state of mind makes its way into her beautiful hand only as the tight, elegant calligraphy of its opening lines gives way to larger swooping letters towards the end as her thoughts and words become more agitated. At the bottom, to forestall any ill-disposed parties adding anythin
g compromising to her own words, Elizabeth drew freehand diagonal lines, flowing down the page like wavelets on the Thames. And as she wrote and wrote, the tidal water of the river rose – so that by the time she was done there was no room beneath London Bridge to take her to the Tower. Who says that good handwriting can’t save your life?
The following day she was rowed again to the Tower, entering not, as legend says, by the Traitor’s Gate but by the tradesmen’s entrance at the side. But this was not a hospitable place to be. Tradition has it that, sitting on the damp stone, her voice barely rising above the tears, Elizabeth said to her little company of servants: ‘I pray you all good friends and fellows bear me witness that I come in no traitor but as a true woman to the Queen’s majesty as any now living.’ Elizabeth spent two months in the Tower. There were quarrels about her food, Queen Mary insisting that she ate from the lieutenant’s table like any other prisoner rather than from her own provisions. She could walk on the leads between Beauchamp and Bell Tower, under close watch. In April 1554 she was released and taken to Richmond Palace, so nervy that she assumed that this was to be the place of her execution. But after a year of house arrest at Woodstock, she finally got her audience with Mary, who was displeased that Elizabeth ‘stiffly persevere[d] in the truth’.