by John Guy
Even then, Bedingfield was not satisfied, complaining that she withdrew for two or three hours a day ‘under colour of wishing to pray’, but could well have been plotting.
And her servants were vociferously defiant. Infuriated by Elizabeth Sandes, one of Elizabeth’s gentlewomen and a strident Protestant, who was repeatedly absent from mass, Bedingfield expelled her from the household. He had no compunction either about reporting a male servant to the Privy Council and sending for a priest to threaten another servant with what was tantamount to a heresy trial.33
After almost a year of playing cat and mouse at Woodstock, Elizabeth was commanded to await Mary’s pleasure at Hampton Court. Bedingfield brought her the news on 17 April 1555, and somewhere between the 24th and the 29th she entered the palace by a back door with only three or four gentlewomen, still under guard and occupying the Prince’s Lodging that her father had rebuilt for her half-brother, except the gallery leading to the royal apartments had been sealed off.34
By then, Mary’s marriage to Philip had been solemnized at Winchester and Cardinal Pole had arrived from exile in Rome and absolved the realm from sin. A younger son of Mary’s old governess, the Countess of Salisbury, Pole was made archbishop of Canterbury in place of Cranmer, who was in the Tower. He reunited England with the papacy, assiduously helping Mary to undo the work of Somerset’s iconoclasts. He also helped the queen to restore a handful of monasteries, mainly those closely associated with her mother, Katherine of Aragon.
Against Philip’s advice and better judgement, Mary encouraged Pole to create the equivalent of an English Inquisition, reinforced by Spanish Dominicans, to root out heresy and compel Protestants to attend confession and mass at least once a year. Unflinching and determined, Pole was assisted by Bishop Bonner of London, a man who deplored the laxity of Tudor prisons and kept suspects locked up in his coal-house. Around 284 victims, including Cranmer, were burned at the stake for their heretical beliefs in just under four years.35
It is usually supposed that Elizabeth was brought to Hampton Court because—with her servants’ connivance—she had smuggled the astrologer John Dee into the house at Woodstock to cast horoscopes. The destinies she had tried to have foreseen were her own, Philip’s and Mary’s. Casting a royal horoscope was a dangerous business—Henry VIII had regarded it as tantamount to high treason.
But Mary had not yet found out about the horoscopes when the order was given for Elizabeth to come to Hampton Court. In fact, the warrant for Dee’s arrest was not issued by the Privy Council until 28 May.36
Elizabeth wanted the horoscopes because rumours were rife that Mary, after just eight months of marriage, was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Said to be ‘near her time’ as early as the end of March, she had chosen Hampton Court as the place where she would take to her lying-in chamber. So confident was she that God was on her side, she had shown herself from a window of her apartments to Philip and his fellow Knights of the Garter as they processed in their robes to Chapel on St George’s Day (23 April), contrary to the strict seclusion demanded of an expectant queen by the Royal Book.37
Mary, it seems, had sent for Elizabeth in order to gloat. Once a living child of whichever sex was born, her half-sister would no longer be next in line for the succession and the Anglo-Spanish dynastic union would be permanent. So confident was Mary about her pregnancy that, on 16 May, she and Philip began signing open letters announcing ‘the happy delivery of a prince’ and appointing special messengers to deliver them.38 The parallel with Anne Boleyn when she gave birth to Elizabeth is uncanny.
Except that in Mary’s case it was far worse, since no child was born at all. Mary’s turned out to be a false pregnancy, complete with a swelling of the breasts and lactation, probably caused by a prolactinoma, a non-cancerous tumour of the pituitary gland. This results in too much of a hormone called prolactin in the blood, triggering amenorrhoea in the earlier stages and eventually pseudo-pregnancy, and which, as the tumour expands and starts to press on the surrounding structures such as the optic nerve, accounts for Mary’s other symptoms, notably migraines, vomiting, depression and loss of vision.39
Imagining the birth of her child to be imminent, Mary briefly came to think her sibling posed a much reduced threat. While Elizabeth was still at Hampton Court and about a week after Mary and Philip had signed the letters, the queen sent for her on an impulse at 10 p.m. in an attempt to patch up their differences. Led across the privy garden and up a staircase by Susan Tonge to Mary’s bedchamber, Elizabeth knelt before the queen and protested her loyalty.
But when Mary suddenly upbraided her over her religion, it was clear no reconciliation would be possible. The only positive outcome was that Philip, observing the scene from behind the arras, decided that his sister-in-law was a dynastic asset and therefore best kept alive.40 According to the Venetians, Elizabeth had been making a determined effort at Hampton Court to ingratiate herself with the Spaniards in Philip’s entourage and this was paying off.41
When in August it became clear that Mary’s pregnancy was a phantom, the royal couple returned to Whitehall scarcely on speaking terms. On 4 September, Philip sailed from Dover to Calais on his way to Brussels.42 His departure marked the turning point of the reign, for he would not return until March 1557, and only then for three and a half months to drag England into an unpopular war against France.
Realizing she had been all but deserted, Mary succumbed to fits of hysterics, on one occasion haranguing Philip’s portrait hanging in the Privy Chamber before kicking it out of the room.43 In particular, the royal couple disagreed over what to do with Elizabeth. Now 22, she was tall and shapely, with shining red-gold hair and long, slim-fingered hands. Even if her critics judged her complexion to be ‘sallow’ like her mother’s, she had Anne Boleyn’s dark eyes and a decidedly royal look. Philip, himself notorious as a womanizer, was not slow to see the potential.44
Mary’s instinct was to oust Elizabeth from the succession in favour of her cousin Lady Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. The daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret by her second marriage to the Earl of Angus, Douglas was one of the queen’s closest and oldest friends and the staunchest of Catholics. Already Mary had showered Douglas with gifts of jewels, tapestries and cash, giving her clothes from the royal wardrobe and allocating her spacious apartments at the royal palaces.45 She was even allowed to order her meals directly from Mary’s private kitchen.46 The Spanish ambassador knew that before marrying Philip and once afterwards, Mary had urged that Douglas be named as her successor ‘if God were to call her without giving her heirs of her body’.47
Philip, for his part, understood that excluding Elizabeth from the succession would involve the difficult task of persuading the Privy Council and Parliament to set aside her father’s will. He also had to contend with his own father, Charles V, who—as one of his final acts before he abdicated—wanted to see her safely married off to a nonentity. One candidate was Emmanuel Philibert, Prince of Piedmont and titular Duke of Savoy, who had already made a visit to England from the Low Countries to inspect her. Another was the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria.48
Philip, from the outset, expressed a clear preference for Philibert. A landless aristocrat with royal pretensions whose father had lost his family’s patrimony in supporting Charles against the French, the duke of Savoy was a close ally of Spain, a loyal Catholic, good at languages and not too powerful to appear a threat to the English. But either candidate would ensure that England remained a Spanish–Habsburg dependency should Mary fail to produce a child.49
Shortly before Philip left for Brussels, Elizabeth was allowed back to Hatfield and Ashridge with her household restored to her. Only her chaplain Edmund Allen, who had taken a wife and left for the Continent, and Elizabeth Sandes, who had fled to Geneva, were missing. With Philip effectively shielding his sister-in-law from Mary, even John Ashley felt it safe to return from Padua.
Seeing for the first time a very real prospect that she could succeed t
o the throne if her elder sibling failed to bear a child or died, Elizabeth asked Thomas Parry to seek advice from William Cecil about how she should style herself and to send her word secretly in writing.50 Addressed as ‘the Lady Elizabeth’ after she was stripped of her royal title by her father after her mother’s trial and execution, she clearly wanted something more impressive, if possible to recover her original title of ‘Princess’.
Exactly what Cecil came up with is unknown, but eighteen months later Elizabeth granted him a lease of land from a portion of her Northamptonshire estates once belonging to her great-grandmother. The lease was signed ‘Elizabeth’ and sealed with a personal seal, never previously used as it appears, bearing a Tudor rose and the inscription ‘The seal of Elizabeth, King Edward’s Sister’ in Latin. Curious as it may seem to style herself after her dead brother, it may well be that this was Cecil’s ingenious solution as to how to identify her as a princess without using that word.51
If anyone knew how to negotiate his way around the backstairs of Mary’s Court, it was Cecil. Far from retiring to his estates at Stamford in Lincolnshire or fleeing into exile in Switzerland or Germany like so many of his fellow Protestants after Jane Grey’s execution, he stuck close to London and Westminster, seeking to salvage his Court networks. When, in July 1554, Philip had landed at Southampton for his marriage to Mary, Cecil had laid on temporary lodgings for the king’s secretary, Gonzalo Pérez, at his own London house. Then, in November, he was one of a party sent to meet Cardinal Pole in Brussels and escort him back to England. He used the occasion to ingratiate himself with Pole despite their religious differences and they sometimes dined together at Lambeth Palace.52
Like Elizabeth, Cecil was playing a long game. On New Year’s Day in 1555, he sent a gift of gold to the queen, which he valued in his accounts at £10. And on Easter Day 1556, he and his whole family would make their confessions to a priest and attend a Paschal high mass in their parish church at Wimbledon, complete with tapers and holy oil. Cecil made a special journey by boat to London to purchase supplies of wine, wafers, wax, oil and cream for the mass. He even began learning Spanish ready for a possible assignment as a diplomat.53
Both Elizabeth and Cecil were the sort of Protestants whom John Calvin had begun to dismiss contemptuously as ‘Nicodemites’—for in St John’s Gospel it was said that Nicodemus, for fear, had visited Christ only by night. Both dissembled their true beliefs and conformed (however reluctantly) to the mass when under pressure, preferring to live and fight another day rather than fleeing into exile or joining the Protestant martyrs at the stake.54
Roger Ascham was another Nicodemite, and once Elizabeth was safely back at Hatfield and Ashridge, she was allowed occasional visits from him to read the orations of Demosthenes with her. In 1554, Mary had made Ascham her Latin secretary—it was he who drafted some of the letters announcing the birth of a prince during the queen’s phantom pregnancy.55 Like Cecil, Ascham sometimes dined with Pole, when they discussed the possible whereabouts of a missing work by Cicero, De Republica, known only from quotations made from it by St Augustine. Praising Pole’s kindness to the skies, Ascham presented the cardinal-archbishop with a handsome copy of Jeronimo Osorio’s treatise on civic and Christian nobility, a book he was championing at the time.56
As Ascham enthused to Johann Sturm after his return to Hatfield, ‘Elizabeth and I read together in Greek the orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes.’ She ‘first reads it to me’ and immediately she understands not only the language and the meaning, ‘but also the whole nature of the argument, the decrees of the people, the manners and the customs of the city: she is so intelligent you would be simply amazed.’57
Once more Ascham made his inflated claims to broadcast his own talents as a teacher.58 Blinded by his ego, he overlooks the fact that for Elizabeth to have recalled him after his earlier disgrace, she must already have come to see herself as a queen-in-waiting. The sole purpose of reading Demosthenes, by far the most difficult author she had so far tackled, was to train a future ruler or privy councillor to make speeches ‘aptly’ when addressing a great audience. An author whose work was considered to be the finest training for pure eloquence rather than for promoting religion and moral virtue, Demosthenes represented a traditionally masculine virtue—the art of public oratory—which in a woman was reserved to those in line for the succession to kingdoms.59
In the end, it was almost entirely due to Philip that Elizabeth was able to use the skills she had learned from Ascham and one day address her Privy Council and Parliament as queen of England. Philip had first shielded her from Mary’s vengeance at Hampton Court. He saved her again when, on 18 March 1556, another conspiracy to put her on the throne was discovered.60
Clumsily cobbled together by a Berkshire gentleman with ideas above his station, Christopher Ashton, and a military man, Sir Harry Dudley, fourth cousin of the former Duke of Northumberland, the plotters aimed to steal £50,000 in bars of Spanish silver that were stored in the Exchequer at Westminster to fund an army of mercenaries and Protestant exiles who would invade England, drive out the Spaniards and depose Mary.61 Unmasked when one of them lost his nerve and betrayed the plot, the conspirators turned out to be the pawns of Antoine de Noailles, the French ambassador, who wrote frantically home asking to be recalled before he was put in the Tower himself.62
Part of the plot involved betraying Calais to the French, and Mary was determined to put all those implicated in it on trial for treason. As with Wyatt’s revolt, the trail led straight to Elizabeth’s household, and as soon as de Noailles left the country in May, Mary decided to strike.
Kat Ashley was arrested at Hatfield and put in the Tower, as was Elizabeth’s Italian tutor Giovanni Battista Castiglione and three other female servants.63 Soon, Francis Verney and Henry Peckham, two of the gentlemen-servants, had been arrested too, and an armed guard stationed around Hatfield. A search of Elizabeth’s London house, Somerset Place in the Strand, even led to the discovery of a chest crammed full of imported Protestant books and libels attacking the king and queen.64
Verney and Peckham were found to be in the plot up to their necks. Both were convicted of treason.65 But however much Mary wanted to put Elizabeth on trial for her life, she felt she could not do so without consulting Philip. The Venetian ambassadors in London and Brussels recorded her every move. On 1 June, she sent her confidential courier, Francesco Piamontese, in haste to Brussels, since ‘nothing is done, nor does anything take place, without having the King’s opinion about it, and hearing his will.’66 When the courier returned, Mary discovered, humiliatingly, that her husband wanted Elizabeth’s name kept out of the trials and reprisals and that the investigations into her conduct were to be dropped.67
On 8 June, Mary sent two of her most trusted inner councillors to Hatfield to withdraw the guard placed on her sibling and inform her that Kat, Verney and Peckham in their confessions had implicated her in the conspiracy. The councillors were probably lying—making this an act of deliberate spite on Mary’s part, since in a confidential memorandum another privy councillor, writing anonymously, insisted that Elizabeth’s involvement was hard to credit. She was, he said, known ‘to be of too much honour, wisdom, truth and respect to duty and honesty’ to be complicit. ‘Who’, he asked, ‘can let [i.e. prevent] knaves to say … we hope this of My Lady Elizabeth or of this Lord or this man?’
At the very least, the Privy Council was split again.68 But even if Elizabeth had dabbled in treason in the hope of deposing her sister and gaining the throne, it no longer mattered, since Philip had decided that she was to be deemed innocent.
Thus it was that the two councillors went on to explain to her that, on Philip’s advice, Mary had decided—it was clearly a decision made through gritted teeth—that she was cleared of all suspicion, in proof of which she was to receive a token, a diamond (said the Venetians) worth as much as 400 ducats.
All the same (and this Philip may not have approved) Mary took the opportunity to remodel Eliz
abeth’s household again, putting it under the control of Sir Thomas Pope, a Catholic privy councillor and the founder of Trinity College, Oxford.69
Fortunately for Elizabeth, Sir Thomas was a more agreeable gaoler than Bedingfield. Nor, since he made no secret of how much he disliked his new role, did the change last long. On 19 October, after just four months, Mary discharged Pope and released Kat from the Tower, although she was strictly forbidden to return to Hatfield.
The reason for the sudden reversal was that Elizabeth was to go to Court for Christmas.70 On 28 November, she and her retinue rode in their finery through the London streets to Somerset Place, her gentlemen-servants all arrayed in velvet coats and gold livery chains, behind them some 200 others in red coats cut and trimmed with black.71
Three days later she went to Court and met Mary and Pole, who graciously received her. Except that something went wrong, and on 3 December she unexpectedly retraced her steps to Somerset Place and from there to Hatfield.72
The explanation came when the Venetian ambassador to France met Henry II of France at Poissy shortly before Christmas. The king told him that Mary had sent for Elizabeth to inform her that Philip wished her to marry Emmanuel Philibert without further delay. She had refused, purportedly retorting that ‘the afflictions suffered by her were such that they had … ridded her of any wish for a husband’. Bursting into tears, she declared that she would rather die than have a husband thrust upon her.73
By now, the marriage proposal was the keystone of Philip’s plans to secure England as a Spanish dependency should his wife die childless. Mary still violently opposed it. But he overruled her.74