The Children of Henry VIII

by John Guy

  Between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. on the evening of 19 July after the Privy Council split into two rival camps, Mary was proclaimed queen in London. Northumberland and his allies were sent to the Tower. Jane, stripped of the crown jewels and her canopy of state, was led from the royal apartments and put under house arrest at the home of William Partridge, an officer in the royal ordnance within the Tower.

  To celebrate, Te Deum was sung at St Paul’s, bells were rung and bonfires lit.82 Ten days later, Elizabeth entered the city with a heavily armed retinue dressed in the Tudor livery colours of white and green.83 Mary herself arrived on 3 August, riding side-saddle on her palfrey and wearing a magnificent French gown of purple velvet that was thick with gemstones, and entering the city to the sounds of trumpets and cheering crowds. Elizabeth had ridden out to Whitechapel to greet her and rode immediately behind her through streets swathed with streamers and banners of welcome.84

  Northumberland was tried for treason on 18 August and executed at Tower Hill on the 22nd. Jane and her husband Guildford were tried on 13 November. Both pleaded guilty, and Jane, who stood before her judges wearing a plain black gown trimmed with black velvet and reading from a prayer book, was sentenced to be burned at the stake or decapitated.85 Mary was determined to have her revenge on Northumberland, but was inclined to pity Jane, whose mother Frances had always been close to her. It was perhaps Frances who told Mary of Jane’s belief that Northumberland had been the source of all her troubles. ‘He hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition’, she was supposed to have said.86

  Mary’s thoughts of clemency were swept aside by Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion in January 1554. An evangelical reformer whose forces reached Fleet Street in London before they were defeated, Wyatt aimed to overthrow Mary and replace her with Elizabeth.

  On 12 February 1554, Jane and Guildford were executed. With Mary safe on the throne, Elizabeth may have thought that her gestures of support for her half-sister on the eve of her accession might be suitably rewarded.

  But if so, she was sadly deceived.

  CHAPTER 8

  Sisters, Rivals, Queens

  ALTHOUGH only 37 when proclaimed queen, Mary had not worn well. ‘Of low stature, with a red and white complexion and very thin’, as the Venetian ambassador unflatteringly described her, ‘her face is round, with a nose rather low and wide.’ Wrinkles were forming on her cheeks. Her eyes were large, her gaze piercing, her voice ‘rough and loud, almost like a man’s, so that when she speaks she is always heard a long way off.’1

  Regularly ill, her symptoms still included the amenorrhoea, neuralgia and insomnia that had begun when she was 20, to which she had added ‘melancholy’, heart palpitations, poor appetite, chronic indigestion and increasingly poor vision.2 As England’s first queen regnant, the pressure was on her from the outset and she had never coped well with stress. Once the euphoria of her entry into London was over, her advisers—a mixture of her household retainers, co-religionists and those privy councillors not closely associated with Northumberland or Jane Grey—attempted to push through an unprecedented measure to have her claim to the throne confirmed by Parliament before she was crowned.3

  Neither the Royal Book nor the Liber Regalis (the fourteenth-century coronation service book used for all Tudor coronations) made provision for the accession of a woman ruler. Accordingly the Privy Council tried to insist that Edward’s ‘Device’ and last will should first be declared null and void and Henry VIII’s will valid before Mary could legitimately be crowned. A further concern was that the default position after her father’s break with Rome was that she would become Supreme Head of the Church, whether she liked it or not. Some councillors feared a legal muddle, others an assassination attempt if her status was not first clarified.

  The new queen brushed all these objections aside. Her coronation by the bishop of Winchester went ahead at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, 1 October, bypassing Edward’s religious settlement by including a full Roman mass.4 Mary vetted the order of service to ensure that her coronation oath did not mention the new religion. And where Edward’s oath had included a promise to observe ‘the laws and liberties of this realm’, she altered the wording so as to promise to keep ‘the just and licit laws and liberties’. Anxious, lastly, that the chrism Cranmer had used to anoint her half-brother in 1547 was tainted by schism, Mary arranged for three phials of freshly consecrated unction to be imported from France. The only mishap came at the end of the coronation ceremony, when she was handed two sceptres, ‘the one of the king, the other bearing a dove which, by custom, is given to the queen’, a curiously contradictory expression of the status of a queen regnant.5

  Until Mary was crowned, she treated Elizabeth affectionately in public, taking her by the hand as they strolled together, sending for her ‘to dinner and supper’ and going so far as to greet her gentlewomen with a kiss.6 In private, however, she was pressing her to convert to Catholicism. On Thursday, 7 September, to gain some wiggle room, Elizabeth had disingenuously resorted to play-acting. Kneeling before Mary in a gallery at Richmond Palace, she begged her in tears to excuse her ‘ignorance’, saying she ‘had never been taught the doctrine of the ancient religion.’ She professed herself willing to receive instruction from a priest and even to conform to the mass.7

  Mary called in the offer the very next day, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. But at the hour appointed for Elizabeth to arrive at the Chapel Royal, she feigned illness. She did eventually arrive, but ‘complained loudly all the way to church that her stomach ached, wearing a suffering air.’8 And the following week, she skipped Sunday mass completely.9

  Once Mary was crowned, she ‘never dined nor supped’ with Elizabeth, ‘but kept her aloof from her.’ Or as the Venetians put it, ‘from that time forth, a great change took place in Queen Mary’s treatment of her.’10 Where, before, she had kept up appearances, now she snubbed Elizabeth at every opportunity, exactly replicating her behaviour when her father had forced her to live in a joint household with her younger sibling under the authority of Sir John and Lady Shelton while Anne Boleyn was still alive.

  By early December, Elizabeth had been humiliated enough. She pointedly asked to leave Court and return to Ashridge. A few days later, she departed with her baggage train, and no one was fooled when she ostentatiously wrote to Mary asking to borrow copes, chasubles and other items needed for celebrating mass.11

  By then, Mary had got Parliament to declare her parents’ marriage legitimate and uphold Elizabeth’s illegitimacy. She had repealed her half-brother’s religious settlement and brought the Church back to where it had stood at her father’s death. She intended to go much further than this, abrogating the break with Rome and restoring papal authority, even bringing back the monasteries if she could.

  But first, she meant to recreate the dynastic alliance that her parents’ marriage had represented. ‘Being born of a Spanish mother’, said the Venetian ambassador, ‘she was always inclined towards that nation, scorning to be English and boasting of her descent from Spain.’12 Perhaps she remembered the happy days in February 1522 when she was 6 and had taken her cousin Charles V as her ‘valentine’. Since he was now a widower, she may again have considered marrying him, until cautioned by his ambassador that he was prematurely aged at 53, and had retired, crippled by gout, to the monastery of Yuste with the prize items from his art collection.

  So Mary set her heart on marrying Philip, Charles’s son and heir. 26-years-old, fair-haired and handsome, he too had been a widower since 1545 and was already ruling Spain as regent. Soon he would succeed to the sovereignty of Spain, the Low Countries and the Spanish lands in Italy and the New World. Overjoyed at the prospect of adding England to the Spanish empire, Philip ditched his plans to marry the Infanta of Portugal. It was just as well that Mary never knew the degree to which he saw her as an ageing spinster whom he continued to nickname his ‘aunt’.13

  By choosing a husband in the way tha
t she did, Mary split the Privy Council, defying in spirit, if not perhaps quite in the letter, the clause in her father’s will that said she should only marry with the ‘assent and consent’ of the privy councillors he had specifically named. When a parliamentary delegation petitioned her to marry an English nobleman, she declared indignantly that they would not have spoken like that to her father, which was true but missed the point that she was alienating large numbers of her subjects by making Philip her king consort.

  Parliament eventually passed the legislation approving the marriage, but stipulated that the ‘kingly or regal office’ with all ‘its dignities, prerogative royal, power, pre-eminences and privileges’ remained firmly vested in Mary alone.14 Parliament also consistently refused to allow Philip a coronation, which he regarded as a snub.

  It was Mary’s choice of husband that sparked Wyatt’s rebellion, which appealed to the Londoners to rise up and replace her with Elizabeth. Four concerted revolts were planned in different parts of the country, but when news of the conspiracy leaked out, the rebels were not ready. Only Sir Thomas Wyatt succeeded in mobilizing his Kentish forces, which surrendered on 7 February 1554, when the Earl of Pembroke’s cavalry cornered them.

  Ten days later, Mary summoned her half-sister to Whitehall. Fearing the worst now that Wyatt was in the Tower, Elizabeth took her time, claiming ‘such a cold and headache that I have never felt the like.’15

  She arrived on the 23rd, ‘dressed all in white and followed by a great company of the queen’s people and her own’. Always keen to show herself to the citizens and win their support—for there were more Protestants in London than anywhere else in the kingdom—she travelled in an open horse litter.16

  For three weeks, Mary kept Elizabeth on tenterhooks, attended by only twelve servants in a closely guarded quarter of the palace.17 She suspected her of complicity in the revolt after her spies intercepted a courier carrying a bundle of despatches from the French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, that incriminated her.18

  According to the intercepted documents, one of Wyatt’s chief co-conspirators, Sir James Croft, had confided to de Noailles that he was ‘very familiar’ with Elizabeth and her servants. He intended, he said, to visit Ashridge ahead of the rising to warn her to move further away from London into the countryside—and it seems he had done so. Francis Russell, one of Jane Grey’s staunchest supporters, also admitted carrying a letter from Wyatt to Ashridge. Most suspiciously of all, a copy of Elizabeth’s letter explaining her delay in answering Mary’s summons to return to Court after the rising had found its way straight into de Noailles’s postbag.19

  The only doubt in Mary’s mind, a fatal one as it afterwards turned out, was whether Wyatt’s collusion with Elizabeth was directly with her, or indirectly with Thomas Parry and John Ashley. Probably Ashley had been the main point of contact, since shortly after Wyatt’s forces were defeated, he fled with Sir John Cheke to Padua.20

  On Friday, 16 March, the day after Wyatt’s conviction for high treason, the Council came to Elizabeth and charged her as an accessory in the revolt.21 Next day, two privy councillors arrived to escort her to the Tower by river and not through the streets, where her arrest would attract attention. Fearing for her life and determined to play for time, she begged to be allowed to speak to Mary, and if this was not permitted, to write to her. She was grudgingly allowed to write.22

  In composing what has been called ‘the letter of her life’,23 Elizabeth began by quoting the first oration of Isocrates to Nicocles: ‘If any ever did try this old saying that a king’s word was more than another man’s oath, I most humbly beseech Your Majesty to verify it in me.’

  She appealed to Mary’s conscience to ‘take some better way with me than to make me condemned in all men’s sight afore my desert known’, and she asked to ‘answer afore yourself and not suffer me to trust your councillors—yea, and that afore I go to the Tower (if it be possible), if not afore I be further condemned.’

  In a cutting reference to the Seymour affair, she said, ‘I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him, he had never suffered, but the persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived, and that made him give his consent to his death.’

  Not, she added, that the cases were alike (although of course they were). ‘Though these persons are not to be compared to Your Majesty, yet I pray God [that] evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other.’ She denied that she had received letters from Wyatt or given any copies of her own correspondence to de Noailles. ‘He [Wyatt] might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him, and as for the copy of my letter sent to the French king, I pray God confound me eternally if ever I sent him word, message, token or letter by any means, and to this my truth I will stand in to my death.’

  In a postscript she added, ‘I humbly crave but only one word of answer from yourself’, signing herself ‘Your Highness’s most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning and will be to my end. Elizabeth’. Where space was left on the page, she drew eleven diagonal lines to fill the gap and ensure that no forged additions could be made. And after her name, she drew—as she invariably did after she became mistress of her own household—what looks extraordinarily like a looped portcullis, the Beaufort badge adopted by Henry VII as a symbol of royalty, which Margaret Beaufort, her great-grandmother, had festooned over the stonework and woodwork of her Collyweston palace that now belonged to Elizabeth.24

  FIGURE 14 A view of London Bridge as it appeared in c.1632, by the Dutch artist Claude de Jongh. The narrow openings between the stone pillars are clearly visible, and it was the hazards caused by the strong currents swirling through the gaps at high tide that delayed Elizabeth’s passage to the Tower in March 1554, so saving her life.

  Although Mary ignored the letter, it still helped to save Elizabeth’s life. While she was writing it and the queen’s bargemen were standing by for the short journey to the Tower, the spring tide rose so high, ‘it was no longer possible to pass under London Bridge, and they had to wait till the morrow.’25 The bridge was impassable at high tide, since traffic could only go through the narrow openings between its twenty stone pillars. So hazardous was it for boats to pass between the pillars given the swirling currents and the narrowness of the gaps, many safety-conscious passengers routinely disembarked before the bridge even at low tide, walking to the other side of the bridge before continuing their journey.

  By the time Elizabeth disembarked at Tower Wharf on the morning of the 18th, the Privy Council could no longer agree on what to do with her. She entered the Tower as a prisoner across the drawbridge beside the Byward Tower, watched by the guard. As she passed by the Bloody Tower on her way to the royal apartments in the inner ward, she would have caught sight of the scaffold on which Jane Grey had been executed on the other side of the court.26

  Imprisoned in the very same rooms where her mother had been kept for a fortnight before her execution, Elizabeth was searchingly interrogated. Her inquisitors chiefly wished to know why she had made preparations, as it seemed on Croft’s advice, to move on the eve of Wyatt’s revolt to her property at Donnington Castle in Berkshire, where the keeper was none other than Thomas Cawarden, Wyatt’s friend and Elizabeth’s own ‘loving friend’.27 The castle commanded the main road to Marlborough and the west, which just happened to be the route to Herefordshire and the Welsh border, where Croft planned to lead a rising coordinated with Wyatt’s.

  In fending off her accusers, Elizabeth used the same barracking techniques she had turned on Sir Robert Tyrwhit during the Seymour affair, while relying on disunity in the Privy Council to blunt the attack on her.28

  Egged on by the Spanish ambassador, Mary was seriously weighing up whether or not to put her sibling on trial for treason. But she could never prove that Elizabeth had personally endorsed Wyatt’s conspiracy or ordered the proposed move to Donnington Castle. Wit
h the London juries sympathetic to Wyatt’s cause and refusing to convict several of his known accomplices—in one spectacular case returning a verdict of not guilty that flew in the face of the evidence—the Privy Council’s divisions enabled Elizabeth to secure her release, albeit on strict conditions.

  Just after midday on Saturday, 19 May, the eve of Whitsuntide 1554 and two terrifying months after she had first entered the Tower, the Marquis of Winchester and Sir John Gage took Elizabeth by river to Richmond. On arrival, she was held under guard for a week before being taken on to Windsor and from there to Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where she was kept under house arrest with as few attendants as possible.29 Sir Henry Bedingfield, a Catholic loyalist whom Mary had made constable of the Tower and would soon promote to captain of the guard, was made her gaoler, receiving his instructions, signed by the queen, on 26 May.30

  FIGURE 15 The opening page of The myraculous preservation of Lady Elizabeth, nowe Queene of England, from extreme calamatie and danger of life, in the time of Q. Marie her sister. First included in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (or ‘Book of Martyrs’) in 1563 and subsequently expanded, this version is from the 1583 edition and much of the information was supplied by eyewitnesses.

  Bedingfield, a fussy, pedantic Norfolk man who worried about the dangers of not discharging his duties and was not above spying on those in his charge, struggled to impose his will on his royal prisoner. Elizabeth gave him a hard time, demanding an English Bible and insisting on saying the litany in English and not Latin on the grounds that the vernacular litany ‘was set forth in the king my Father his days’.31 But when ordered outright to stop, she gave in and conformed to Catholicism by regularly attending mass.32