by John Guy
If the marriage went ahead, Philip meant to have Parliament confirm Elizabeth as the lawful successor, whereas Mary had come to think that, if her half-sister took the throne, she would, as an act of revenge, restore the break with Rome and make England as Protestant again as it had been under Edward, and Philibert would be too weak a man to stop her.75
Mary had now come to hate Elizabeth so much, she was said to have begun claiming her half-sister was not, after all, Henry VIII’s daughter. Did she not look far too much like Mark Smeaton, one of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers, ‘who was a very handsome man?’76
And yet Mary, struggling to come to terms with her own contradictory feelings, believed that her duty lay in obeying her husband. Faced with Elizabeth’s refusal to marry the duke, she threatened again to exclude her from the succession.77 But she had the Privy Council to contend with. If she wanted Elizabeth disinherited, a majority of councillors led by Lord Paget did not.
A political crisis erupted in March 1557, when Philip returned to England to force his wife into joining Spain in a war against France and to bludgeon Elizabeth into marrying Philibert. He succeeded in the first of these aims and failed in the second. When war was declared on 7 June, it began well, but raged in four separate theatres and was universally unpopular despite a spectacular victory at St Quentin in which English troops played a supporting role.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, dug in her heels and refused to be told whom to marry, even when Philip brought his cousins, the Duchesses of Lorraine and Parma, to London in a clumsy attempt to twist her arm. Arriving at Whitehall while Mary was at mass, the duchesses were greeted by Philip and entertained lavishly for a month.78
They failed abysmally to work their magic on Elizabeth, whose resistance the French ambassador had considerably stiffened by sending a message warning her of a possible kidnap attempt. She said she would die before she would allow herself either to be kidnapped or to be forced into marriage.79
The last residue of mutual trust between Philip and Mary collapsed when Philip made his second and final departure for Brussels on 6 July after a stay of just three and a half months. By then, the queen’s depression over her inability to conceive a child had brought her to the verge of despair.80 Matters descended into farce when, in January 1558, she asked Pole to write to Philip to assure him that she was pregnant again.81 In February, she believed she might be delivered later that month, and in March she made her will, directing that the throne was go to ‘the heirs, issue and fruit of my body according to the laws of the realm’, making Philip guardian of both the child and the realm.82
The humiliation of Mary’s second phantom pregnancy was, however, eclipsed by the catastrophe on New Year’s Day, when the Duke of Guise, the leader of the French armies, led a masterful attack on Calais. A severe frost had made it possible for his troops almost literally to walk on water. The surrounding forts were taken after a brief bombardment and, on the 24th, Henry II made a triumphal entry into the town to the sounds of the anthem ‘When Israel came out of Egypt’.
Calais was the last of Henry VIII’s continental possessions. The disaster paralysed Mary’s regime. As even Philip’s diehard supporters slunk away, the government slowly disintegrated. Pole alone continued to enjoy the king’s confidence. When Mary fell grievously ill in October and died in the early morning of Thursday, 17 November, she was mourned only by her innermost Catholic circle and the fact that Pole followed her to the grave within a few hours seemed to the Protestants to be an act of divine providence.
On hearing that his wife’s health was rapidly declining, Philip had sent the Count of Feria, one of his leading councillors and the captain of the Spanish guard, to salvage what Spanish interests he could. Elizabeth, by then, had moved to Brocket Hall, the home of one of her tenants, some two and a half miles to the north of Hatfield, a house more easily defended and from where her cofferer Thomas Parry was working night and day, coordinating her campaign to secure the throne.83
Arriving in London on 9 November, Feria had gone next day to Brocket Hall. He found Elizabeth, as he wrote in his report to Philip, to be ‘a very vain and clever woman. She must have been thoroughly schooled in the manner in which her father conducted his affairs, and I am very much afraid that she will not be well-disposed in matters of religion’. He then added, ‘I see her inclined to govern through men who are believed to be heretics and I am told that all the women around her definitely are.’84
Even as Parry was ordering troops from the frontier garrison at Berwick upon Tweed to march with all speed to Brocket Hall, Elizabeth had made it very clear that she was quite unflustered about her prospects of accession. ‘She puts great store by the people and is very confident that they are on her side’, Feria had continued to Philip. ‘She declares that it was the people who put her in her present position and she will not acknowledge that Your Majesty or the nobility of this realm had any part in it’.85
Elizabeth meant to win the throne without Philip’s help. Her right and title were set out in her father’s will. And miraculously the cards fell into her hand. For even as Mary lay dying, the Privy Council, for the first time united in its wariness of Philip after the loss of Calais, sent a delegation to urge her to recognize her half-sister as her successor. She consented as long as Elizabeth agreed to preserve the Catholic religion and pay Mary’s debts.86
Elizabeth responded to this request in exactly the way her father would have done in the same situation. She said she would, and reneged once she was crowned.87 As Feria saw clearly, ‘She is determined to be governed by no one.’88
CHAPTER 9
Uncharted Waters
ELIZABETH was proclaimed queen of England by the heralds in London between 11 a.m. and noon on the day her half-sister died. Standing beside them was Francis Russell, who had carried a letter to Ashridge on the eve of Wyatt’s revolt.1 A committed Protestant and a close ally of William Cecil, Russell had succeeded his father as Earl of Bedford in 1555 and was about to become one of the linchpins of the new regime.
Cecil had been with the 25-year-old Elizabeth at Hatfield on the day Mary died, already functioning as the new queen’s Secretary of State, even though he would not officially be appointed to the post for another three days. His jottings show how fast and thorough was his grasp of what needed to be done to secure the Tower and its munitions and treasury, the ports, the border with Scotland and the coinage. He sent couriers to Philip and the other European powers with news of Mary’s death, began making arrangements for her funeral and for Elizabeth’s coronation, and took the necessary steps to continue the authority of the judges and certain key officers. He gave orders for the engraving of a new great seal, for the opening of peace talks with France and finally ‘to consider the condition of the preacher at Paul’s Cross that no occasion be given to him to stir any dispute touching the governance of the realm’.2
What followed amounted to a comprehensive remodelling of every aspect of Court and government—it only mildly exaggerates to make a comparison with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. A whole new breed of courtiers and officials linked to the networks that had survived from Katherine Parr’s household and the circle around Cecil and Sir John Cheke in Edward’s reign took over power. Many had declared themselves for Lady Jane Grey, been involved in Wyatt’s revolt or the Ashton–Dudley conspiracy, or else gone into exile in Switzerland or Germany in Mary’s reign. Several were linked to Thomas Parry, now made treasurer of the queen’s household and a privy councillor, or had cut their teeth like Cecil in the service of Protector Somerset or the Duke of Northumberland. Others were Elizabeth’s kinsmen on her mother’s side, such as Sir Richard Sackville, her second cousin, and William, Lord Howard of Effingham, her great-uncle.3
Only Cheke himself was missing from the roll call. Suspected of being the main impresario of the campaign of Protestant exile propaganda against Philip and Mary and (wrongly) said to be the author of the very worst of the libels found in a chest at Elizabeth’s house at Somerset
Place, he had been kidnapped on the road between Antwerp and Malines by Mary’s agents in May 1556 and forced to make a humiliating recantation on pain of being burned for heresy. He died a year later.4
A comparison between the coronation list of Elizabeth’s household and the funeral list of Mary’s shows how drastic a turnover occurred. The cleanest sweep was among the ladies and gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, where devoted Catholics like Susan Tonge, Lady Jerningham, Frideswide Strelley and Jane Dormer were displaced by women with advanced reformist or evangelical sympathies, notably Kat Ashley (now returned in triumph), Blanche Parry, Katherine Carey, Anne Carey, Lettice Knollys and Mary Sidney.5
Mary Sidney was Northumberland’s eldest daughter and the wife of Sir Henry Sidney, a former gentleman of Edward’s Privy Chamber who had been present with the young king’s physicians when he died. It was she who had brought the news to Jane Grey that she was to be queen.
The Careys and Lettice Knollys were among Elizabeth’s nearest kinswomen, whom she was determined to rehabilitate. Katherine Carey, Mary Boleyn’s daughter, was the wife of Sir Francis Knollys, who had attended the Eucharistic debates in 1551 at the houses of Cecil and Richard Moryson.6 When she fled with her husband to Basle and Frankfurt after Jane Grey’s execution, Elizabeth wrote her a sorrowful letter of farewell signed ‘Your loving cousin and ready friend, Cor rotto [i.e. broken heart]’. Anne Carey was Katherine’s sister-in-law, the wife of Henry Carey, Mary Boleyn’s son, whom Elizabeth elevated to the peerage as Lord Hunsdon and to whom she granted lands worth in excess of £4,000 a year. Lettice Knollys was the eldest daughter of Katherine and Sir Francis, and may have served Elizabeth at Hatfield while her parents were in exile.7
For her coronation at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, 15 January 1559, Elizabeth had the cloth of gold and ermine robes worn by her half-sister in 1553 altered by ordering a new, more tightly fitted bodice and pair of sleeves from her tailor. Since she spent a small fortune on her wardrobe for the occasion, it is unlikely that by recycling these robes she had economy in mind. It is sometimes said that she wore Mary’s robes as a gesture of solidarity with her sibling. Far more likely is it, given the rivalry between them, that she was dancing on Mary’s grave.8
In compliance with the Liber Regalis, the anointing went ahead according to traditional Catholic forms, but Elizabeth tweaked the coronation mass to signal some of the religious changes that were coming. The Epistle and Gospel were read in English as well as in Latin. The celebrant, George Carew, the Dean of the Chapel Royal, did not elevate the host and the queen took communion in both the bread and the wine. The last, for the moment, was known only to Carew and herself since, in accordance with the Liber, she took communion inside a ‘traverse’ or temporary closet surrounded by curtains.9
Once crowned, Elizabeth might have supposed that her authority would automatically be accepted, but as an unmarried woman without a husband in view she found herself sailing in uncharted waters. On 25 January 1559, her first Parliament opened with a sermon preached by Richard Cox, Edward’s tutor and one of several draftsmen of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, who had also played a prominent role in proclaiming Jane Grey.10
Chosen by Cecil to preach to the assembled Lords and Commons on the need for reform, an occasion on which he held forth for an hour and a half, Cox signalled a faster pace of change than Elizabeth herself envisaged, calling on her to begin without delay a fresh campaign against idolatry and superstition, which she was bound to do because God had made her queen.11 Never known for his tact, Cox was wrong-footed, perhaps unaware that Elizabeth’s leading councillors and retainers were more Protestant than she was. Or if he did know of the mismatch, then clearly he expected the young queen to suppress her personal preferences in favour of their yearnings. After all, she was ‘only’ a woman and (as the Protestants believed) it was largely through their efforts that she had gained the throne.
Cecil, reading the signals, was determined to move quickly, returning doctrines consistent with the Consensus Tigurinus to the restored Church of England before Elizabeth changed her mind and backtracked. In a paper entitled the ‘Device for the Alteration of Religion’, he concluded that a working party of learned men should be convened to ‘bring a Plat or Book hereof [i.e. for the “alteration of religion”] ready drawn to her Highness’. Names suggested were a handpicked selection of key members of his coterie, whose support for a lightly revised 1552 Book of Common Prayer was all but guaranteed.12 And no alternatives to this ‘Plat or Book’ were to be offered to the queen.
Cecil dealt ruthlessly with the Catholic opposition in the House of Lords, which might otherwise have sought concessions from a young and inexperienced queen. The Earl of Bedford made the lay lords graphically aware of the dire implications of the Marian reunion with Rome for those who had purchased ex-monastic lands. And to remove the ex-Marian bishops from the arena, Cecil and his brother-in-law, Nicholas Bacon, organized a theological disputation at Westminster Abbey at which Cox was one of the leading spokesmen. After Catholic traditions not written in Scripture were excluded from the terms of reference of the debate, the Catholic bishops walked out, enabling Cecil to imprison them for contempt.13
FIGURE 16 Elizabeth kneeling in prayer, with the sceptre and the sword of justice on the floor beside her. A scene in which the queen is depicted in what may be the artist’s imagination of her ‘closet’ or secret oratory at one of her palaces. Off the ‘closet’ was a smaller room fitted with a kneeling desk for the queen. This image first appeared in 1569.
Elizabeth’s own religious creed remained close to the moderate beliefs of Katherine Parr and Edmund Allen, her chaplain in Edward’s reign—whom Cecil prudently nominated for the bishopric of Rochester.14 She visibly hankered after the more ambiguously traditionalist 1549 Prayer Book and had started using this version of the liturgy in the Chapel Royal before pressure from her own supporters forced her to abandon it. Subconsciously, she seems to have associated the 1552 alternative with Edward’s ‘Device for the Succession’, which had made Jane Grey queen and excluded herself.15
Once committed to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, Elizabeth sought to dilute its practical effects by stealth. A last-minute clause was inserted into the Act of Uniformity, stating that until she decided otherwise, the vestments of the clergy and ornaments of the chancel should be those of 1549, which were still largely those of the mass.16
To her dismay, she found that Matthew Parker—whom she made archbishop of Canterbury, believing him to be a natural ally—circumvented her. Colluding with Cox and Cecil, Parker contrived that the Injunctions drawn up for a general visitation of the dioceses later in 1559 specified clerical dress as worn in 1552 and ordered ‘idolatries’ such as images, paintings and candlesticks to be stripped out of the parish churches, ‘to the intent that all superstition and hypocrisy … may vanish’.17
Elizabeth ostentatiously reinstated the crucifix and candlesticks in her Chapel Royal in the autumn of 1559 after the iconoclasts removed them. Thereafter, she expressed her ‘old’ (some say ‘odd’) sort of Protestantism in a variety of different ways. High on her list was her scathing disapproval of the clergy’s right to marry. She particularly loathed married bishops, believing that their low-born wives considered themselves to be noblewomen. And although preaching the Word of God lay at the heart of the Protestant view of salvation, she considered regular sermons to be unnecessary.18
After her early skirmishes over the settlement’s small print, Elizabeth maintained a vice-like grip on the Church of England and on the pace of change. Unlike her father during his anti-papal campaign, she demanded only outward conformity to the new settlement. As a former ‘Nicodemite’ herself, prying into the private beliefs of her subjects as long as they attended church regularly was not on her agenda. As Francis Bacon later said of her, it was not her custom to ‘make windows into men’s souls’, although he added the crucial rider, unless dissent ‘did overflow into overt and express acts and affirmations.’19
/> Unlike in Edward’s reign, when Cranmer, Cheke, Cecil, Northumberland and the young Josiah’s other ‘godly councillors’ debated preaching and the conversion of the nation, Elizabeth after 1559 excluded her privy councillors from almost every matter concerning the ‘further reformation’ of religion. Like her father, she interpreted the royal supremacy to mean sacral monarchy by another name. When Parker’s successor at Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, clashed with her in 1577 over his support for the puritan campaign of sermon-centred piety, she suspended him for daring to suggest that he owed allegiance to God before the queen.
Equally resoundingly, Elizabeth rejected a Calvinist extension of the argument first floated by Roger Ascham that she was an ‘exceptional’ woman whom God had destined for higher things. In a clumsy attempt to justify and exalt her position as an unmarried female ruler, several former Marian exiles, among them John Aylmer, Jane Grey’s former schoolmaster, declared that the new queen had come to her position as a second ‘Deborah’.20 The most celebrated woman prophet in the Old Testament, Deborah, a judge and virtual king in Israel, had delivered the people from the ‘yoke’ and ‘idolatry’ of the Canaanites through her ‘extraordinary’ faith and courage.21
Elizabeth’s reaction is not recorded when she first discovered that ‘Deborah’ had been chosen as an icon of female rule by the City of London’s guildsmen in their pageants on the eve of her coronation. Since the costumes for these pageants had been lent by the queen’s Master of the Revels, it is often assumed that Elizabeth had personally overseen and approved the pageants or their scripts, but this is highly questionable. The Revels Office and royal Office of Works routinely cooperated with the city guilds over loan of costumes, interior decoration, carpentry and the construction of temporary edifices without reference to the monarch or lord chamberlain.22