by John Guy
In any case, after the coronation, Elizabeth repudiated the suggestion that she was a second ‘Deborah’. In April 1559, John Knox joined in the debate, claiming that Elizabeth’s female rule—like Deborah’s—was the result of a ‘miracle’ or an ‘extraordinary dispensation of God’s great mercy’.23 In taking this line, Knox sought to wriggle free of the consequences of his bad timing in publishing a book entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in the spring of 1558, where he had argued the opposite, saying that a woman ruler was a ‘monster in nature’ and unfit to rule. A diatribe against female rule in general, The First Blast had gone on specifically to attack Mary Tudor in England and the regent Marie de Guise, mother of Mary Queen of Scots, in Scotland, openly inciting the subjects of both kingdoms to depose them for their ‘inordinate pride and tyranny’.24
In the spring of 1559, a red-faced Knox was corresponding with Cecil from Dieppe in the hope of making amends and so resuming the career in London he had begun under Edward. His solution was to reshape his arguments in line with Calvin’s opinion that female monarchy, in exceptional instances, was ordained by the ‘peculiar providence’ of God. Women’s rule, according to Calvin, deviated from the ‘proper order of nature’, but exceptionally there were special women—of course, he meant only Protestant women—who were ‘raised up by divine authority’ to rule in order to become the ‘nursing mothers’ of the Church.25 In his First Blast, Knox had already framed the case of Deborah as an ‘extraordinary’ exception to the general prohibition of female rule, an act of God’s ‘inscrutable wisdom’ that, at a key moment in biblical history, had allowed a ‘godly’ woman to be set to rule over men.26
Elizabeth, however, never accepted that her monarchy was the result of a ‘miracle’ or an ‘extraordinary dispensation of God’s great mercy’. She refused to allow a religious test, rather than hereditary right, to set the standard against which the legitimacy of her rule should be judged. Her reasons were not feminist, but dynastic. Her case was summarized in 1563 or 1566 by Thomas Norton, another of Cecil’s coterie. If her title were to be established ‘by God’s special and immediate ordinance’ without any regard to her hereditary right and title, she had insisted, it ‘setteth all her subjects at liberty, who acknowledge no such extraordinary calling.’ Indeed, ‘the pope and papists may as easily say that the queen ought not to be queen though she have right.’27
FIGURE 17 View of Windsor Castle as it appeared in 1582. Substantially constructed mainly during the reigns of Henry III and Edward III, the royal apartments had been modernized by Edward IV, and Henry VII added a new tower and gallery. The castle was the most secure of all the Tudor royal palaces. Although not one of her favourite residences, Elizabeth would retreat to it whenever she felt herself to be in danger.
Confronted by an increasing challenge—not least from Cecil and his fellow privy councillors in and after 1563—that she should marry and settle the succession, Elizabeth found herself living out the very dilemma that her father had flagged up in the preface to A Glasse of the Truthe during his first divorce campaign in 1531. If a woman ‘shall chance to rule’, he had written, ‘she cannot continue long without a husband, which by God’s law must then be her governor and head, and so finally shall direct the realm.’28
Unless from a Nordic or a North German state (and a Lutheran), a foreign prince whom Elizabeth might consider marrying would inevitably be a Catholic as well as a foreigner. She would never forget what had happened to her half-sister after she had married Philip—her Privy Council was divided, the realm scarred by revolt and xenophobia, then finally dragged into an unpopular war, culminating in the catastrophic loss of Calais. The prospect of an absentee husband, such as Philip had become, was a further complication.
Just as powerful an objection was that marriage with one of her subjects would transform a ruling queen’s relationship with her nobles, councillors and people. Elizabeth must have heard the disturbing reports of Jane Grey’s experience after she had been proclaimed queen. Her husband, Guildford Dudley, had demanded to be king. A furious row had erupted between the young couple at the Tower, shortly after Jane was handed the crown jewels. Married in haste to a man she barely knew, Jane spiritedly told Guildford he could only be a duke. His response was to refuse to sleep with her which, had the reign lasted longer and Guildford persisted in his attempt to extort the kingship, would have prevented her from having a child and settling the succession.29 A very similar demand for the kingship would throw Scotland into turmoil and revolt when Mary Queen of Scots married Lord Darnley in 1565, leading within two years to his brutal assassination, followed by her forced abdication and flight to exile in England.30
The one man with whom Elizabeth fell in love as queen and whom she would almost certainly have married if the circumstances had been right, Robert Dudley, may have come closest to the truth about her. In 1566, conversing with the nephew and secretary of the French ambassador, who had asked him whether he thought she was more likely to marry abroad or at home, Dudley confided that his ‘true opinion was that she would never marry’.
Claiming that he knew Elizabeth ‘as well as or better than anyone else of her close acquaintance, for they had first become friends before she was eight years old’, Dudley added that ‘both then and later (when she was old enough to marry) she said she had never wished to do so.’
The difficulty is that Dudley was at pains to qualify his remarks by observing that, ‘if by chance she should change her mind … he was practically assured that she would choose no one else but him, as she had done him the honour of telling him so quite openly on more than one occasion’.31 Was this true, or were all his remarks part of a wider diplomatic smokescreen?
Already identified as one of Elizabeth’s inner circle on the eve of her accession, Dudley had been among the witnesses to the surrender of Philip and Mary’s great seal at Hatfield on the day after Mary’s death, when he was appointed Master of the Horse. Within weeks of her coronation, he was Elizabeth’s most glittering Court favourite, a position he would hold until his death in 1588. Despite opposition from Cecil and the Earl of Bedford, who feared what might happen if she married Dudley, she admitted him as a Knight of the Garter in 1559, created him a privy councillor in 1562 and Earl of Leicester in 1564.
Their relationship caused a scandal. The Count of Feria, who married Jane Dormer and was making ready to return with her to Spain, claimed in April 1559 that Dudley ‘does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night’.32 Cecil was said to have threatened to resign, since Elizabeth would only listen to Dudley and was even making gestures of affection towards him in public. Rumours were rife that she was waiting for Dudley’s wife, Amy, to die, and that Dudley meant to poison her.
In desperation, Kat Ashley fell at her mistress’s feet, begging her ‘in God’s name to marry and put an end to all these disreputable rumours’.33
A furore broke out on 8 September 1560, when Amy was found lying dead at the foot of a small stone spiral staircase while lodged at Cumnor Place, near Oxford, her neck broken but her headdress curiously intact. According to the coroner’s report, she had two serious head wounds, one of them two inches deep. The coroner’s jury reached a verdict of accidental death, but it turned out that the foreman had once been Elizabeth’s servant and that Dudley knew another juror personally. Thomas Blount, Dudley’s agent, had allegedly dined with two other jurors before they reached their verdict.34
Nothing could be proved and Dudley was probably innocent since he strained every nerve to discover the true cause of his wife’s death in an effort to save his reputation. Except he could never overcome the fact that when Amy died, he had not visited her for over a year, and on his few previous visits, he was commanded by Elizabeth to go dressed ‘all in black’ and ‘to say [on his return] that he did nothing with her’.35
When Elizabeth came to realize that she would never be able to marry t
he man she loved and keep her throne, her survival instinct kicked in. Despite allowing nothing to be said against Dudley in her hearing, she decided that marrying him was too risky. Thereafter, her love for him was a powerful emotional barrier preventing her from marrying anyone else.
Of the half dozen or so credible candidates for her hand, the Archduke Charles of Austria, seriously in contention between 1563 and 1567, was the most plausible. But the negotiations collapsed when he insisted on hearing mass regularly in his private apartments, a demand which split the Privy Council. Elizabeth was left in no doubt that a marriage on these terms would be as unpopular as her half-sister’s marriage to Philip of Spain.36
In 1570–1, the courtship of Henry, Duke of Anjou, Catherine de’ Medici’s second son and heir presumptive to the French throne, fared no better. Backed by powerful interests at the French Court, it met an indifferent response in England. Always in two minds about it, Elizabeth worried that at 37, and with some eighteen years between them, she was old enough to be the bridegroom’s mother and that he would spurn her as she grew older. She only considered him in the first place because she needed some serious muscle in dealing with Spain. When Cecil saw that an entente with France could be achieved by other means, the suit fell into abeyance.37
Of the remaining suitors, only Francis, the youngest of Catherine de’ Medici’s sons who succeeded his brother as Duke of Anjou, seemed to catch her attention. When the negotiations opened in earnest in 1579, she greeted Anjou’s agent with a courtesy and coquetry that astonished even seasoned observers. She held lengthy and intimate interviews with the envoy, at which the talk was of love rather than of alliances or treaties. She entertained him at feasts, dances, masques and jousts, and showered him with gifts and love tokens for the duke.
When Anjou himself arrived in England, she played to perfection the role of a woman in love, despite her fear that his unpromising appearance (his face was badly scarred by smallpox) and their twenty-one-year age gap would make him an object of derision. She sported his portrait miniature on her dress or carried it in her prayer book, and sent him letters and a poetic lament on his departure. According to an English account of his final visit in November 1581, she ‘drew off a ring from her finger, and put it upon the Duke of Anjou’s, upon certain conditions betwixt them two’.38 According to a Spanish report, she said before witnesses, ‘He shall be my husband’ and at the same moment turned to him and kissed him on the mouth, ‘drawing a ring from her own hand and giving it to him as a pledge’.39
Was this Elizabeth’s last romance before the menopause? Perhaps, but more likely her outward show of affection was play-acting, an elaborate pretence to clinch a full French alliance and therefore security for the Protestant cause in England and the Low Countries against the menacing threat of Spain. In fact, the scene with the ring had been elaborately staged in response to a message from Henry III and Catherine that they could not allow Elizabeth to draw them into open hostilities with Spain unless she first married Anjou.
Under extreme pressure from Cecil and the Privy Council to marry and settle the succession, Elizabeth delivered the most forthright statement as to her intentions that she would ever make before a delegation of both Houses of Parliament in 1566. Invoking once again the first oration of Isocrates to Nicocles, she declared, ‘I will never break the word of a prince spoken in [a] public place, for my honour’s sake. And therefore I say again, I will marry as soon as I can conveniently, if God take not him away with whom I mind to marry or myself, or else some other great let [i.e. hindrance] happen. I can say no more except the party were present. And I hope to have children, otherwise I would never marry.’40
Her views on the succession had been most candidly expressed in 1561 to the Scottish Secretary of State, William Maitland of Lethington. His mission was to renegotiate a treaty that Cecil had made with France and the Protestant lords in Scotland, which recognized Elizabeth as the rightful queen of England and granted her a right of surveillance over Scotland where religion was concerned. When Mary Queen of Scots returned from France to Holyrood in August 1561 to begin her personal rule, she wanted the treaty (which was agreed behind her back and which she always refused to ratify) amended. As the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret whose first husband was James IV of Scotland, Mary had a strong residual claim to the English throne, and she wanted it to be recognized. Within two weeks of her return, she sent Maitland south to meet Elizabeth, then on her way back to London from her summer progress.
Elizabeth, who always made it her priority to defend the dynastic ideal, told Maitland that she would consider appointing commissioners to review the treaty, but would never be willing to name her successor. Intriguingly, she declared that Mary had the best possible claim to succeed her if she died childless. ‘I here protest to you’, she avowed, ‘in the presence of God [that] I for my part know none better nor that myself would prefer to her or, to be plain with you, that case occurring that might debar her from it.’41 To Cecil’s consternation, it was a view she continued to hold for at least ten more years.
Mary’s dynastic credentials were impeccable. What prevented Elizabeth from naming a successor, she confessed to Maitland, was her fear that identifying a successor by name would hasten her own death. ‘Princes cannot like their own children’, she declared. ‘Think you that I could love my own winding-sheet?’42
She feared chiefly that a debate on the succession would expose deficiencies in her own claim to the throne. ‘I have always abhorred’, she said, ‘to draw in question the title of the crown. So many disputes have been already touching it in the mouths of men—some that this marriage was unlawful, some that someone was a bastard, some other to and fro as they favoured or misliked.’ She then claimed that when she had received her coronation ring in Westminster Abbey and sworn her coronation oath, she had effectively ‘married’ her realm, with the inference that this stood in the way of her taking a husband.
Her killer argument—the one she described as ‘most weighty of all’—was that any attempt to name a successor would incite conspiracies. She told Maitland how deeply she had been affected by the events of her early life. ‘I know’, she said, ‘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’. She then gave Maitland an account of her tribulations in Mary’s reign. ‘I have’, she said, ‘good experience of myself in my sister’s time—how desirous men were that I should be in place and [how] earnest [they were] to set me up. And if I would have consented, I know what enterprises would have been attempted to bring it to pass.’
And she concluded with a conceit. ‘As children dream in their sleep after apples and in the morning, when they awake and find not the apples, they weep, so every man that bear me good will when I was Lady Elizabeth or to whom I showed a good visage, imagineth with himself that immediately after my coming to the crown, every man should be rewarded according to his own fantasy.’ Such men finding themselves disappointed, ‘it may be that some could be content of new change in hope to be then in better case.’
It all, she reflected wistfully, came down to human psychology: ‘No prince’s revenues be so great that they are able to satisfy the insatiable cupidity of men.’43
The tragedy of Henry VIII’s children is that, for all their father’s valiant attempts to produce legitimate heirs who would perpetuate his dynasty, not one of them managed to have even a single child themselves. Each, except possibly Henry Fitzroy, whose horizons were limited by his illegitimacy, had a chequered upbringing. And once Anne Boleyn arrived on the scene, even Fitzroy would be disappointed over his place in the succession and his marriage.
For Mary, Edward and Elizabeth, the highly disturbing or untimely ends of their respective mothers cast a long shadow over their lives. In Mary’s case, despite the kindness of Jane Seymour and the best efforts of Katherine Parr, her mother’s divorce and the backlash against Spain came to dominate h
er life. Elizabeth could only have learned of the terrible fate of Anne Boleyn from the reports of others, but she clearly reflected on it, since one of her most treasured possessions was a ring with a hinged head incorporating miniature enamel portraits of herself and her mother.44
Their father’s succession settlement turned out to be excessively prescriptive and arguably botched in an attempt to freeze the monarchy and the faith of the Church of England in aspic in 1547. It had been found wanting when, in turn, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth (or most notably in Edward’s reign his advisers) sought to interpret Henry’s legacy in dramatically different ways. Even Mary’s own co-religionists did not believe she had an uncontested right to rule or to marry Philip of Spain without confirmation by Parliament. And the manoeuvres that had made Edward Seymour Lord Protector and Jane Grey queen showed how flimsy were Henry’s assumptions that his succession settlement could be made to stick, even when underpinned by legislation.
Of the four children, Elizabeth was the most successful, but also the luckiest. Her encounter as an teenager with Thomas Seymour left her badly bruised, but the experience sharpened her wits and steeled her to weather more dangerous storms than an interrogation from Sir Robert Tyrwhit. She knew better than to incriminate herself directly in Mary’s reign, allowing her servants to act non-attributably on her behalf, although without Philip she might on at least two occasions have been put on trial for her life and executed. Her imprisonment in the Tower—and in the very same rooms where her mother had been a captive—was her most terrifying moment. Even as queen it was said that she shuddered when duty obliged her to visit the Tower or pass by it in her barge.
Her ‘Nicodemism’ was a vital source of strength. Once established as queen, she learned to dissimulate in politics as well as in religion in support of her chief aim, which was to preserve the monarchy and its values largely in the form in which they had been handed down to her from the father she revered. Not for nothing was her motto Semper eadem (‘Always the Same’). Her sole aspiration for change lay in her conviction that the solution to the Reformation divide lay in a moderate form of Protestantism, although her hope that Catholics could be persuaded to conform to it within a generation proved largely a failure.