Elizabeth
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There is something very nasty about Katherine’s collusion in what happened to Elizabeth while the girl was under her charge in her Queen Dowager’s homes at Hanworth, Chelsea, and Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. The arrangement was a practical and sensible provision, as Elizabeth, though she was now a rich young woman in her own right after inheriting £3,000 in her father’s will, with a projected £10,000 dowry, was still too young to live unchaperoned, and she and Katherine clearly had a close relationship. Unfortunately, Elizabeth soon developed another close relationship with Katherine’s new husband. The junior uncle of the king, Thomas Seymour had dared to suggest to his elder brother, Edward, now ensconced as Lord Protector under his new title of Duke of Somerset, that he might marry Elizabeth, but such an audaciously ambitious proposal would never have been sanctioned by the council. Seymour’s proposal to Katherine may have been the best alternative so far as he was concerned, but for Katherine, who had experienced two duty matches, latterly with an old and physically repulsive man, this was love. And clearly erotic love, heady and impassioned, powerful enough to make her forget both her own dignity and her duty to her royal charge.
Katherine Parr soon became pregnant, and Thomas Seymour began to visit Elizabeth in her bedroom. He flirted with her, and Elizabeth flirted back. He teased her by threatening to climb under the bedcovers, saw her barelegged in her shift. Giggling and whispering and the agonizing excitement of “accidental” touches—anyone who was ever a teenager can remember how that feels, and Elizabeth was a teenager who had been starved of easy physical affection. Seymour playfully spanked her buttocks. He kissed her, protesting to Elizabeth’s governess, Katherine Ashley, that it was all in fun. Mistress Ashley reported her concerns to Katherine Parr, who not only dismissed them but began to participate in what modern eyes would regard as very unwholesome sex games. The Seymours teased Elizabeth together, and Katherine even held Elizabeth’s arms behind her back as she struggled while her husband tore her gown “into a hundred pieces.”2 Elizabeth felt encouraged; she became bold enough to allow Seymour to take her in his arms while the household was at Hanworth in the spring of 1548, which, when Katherine saw it, finally seemed to shake her out of her delirium. Elizabeth’s cofferer, Thomas Parry, had already observed the Queen Dowager’s jealousy of the pair; now Katherine stood on what was left of her dignity and ordered Elizabeth from her house. Elizabeth, bewildered, fell into self-righteous protest, but Katherine refused to acknowledge her own part in the whole squalid business, and Elizabeth was packed off several days later to the home of Sir Anthony Denny at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire.
Elizabeth was not the first silly girl to develop a crush on an older married man, and Thomas Seymour was not the first unscrupulous man to exploit it, but he was the Lord High Admiral of England, and she was the king’s sister. Elizabeth’s sophisticated reading had not prepared her for the visceral pull of physical desire, but Seymour knew exactly what he was doing. His suave persuasiveness with women meant that even Mistress Ashley, who had once favored the match between the admiral and her charge, was brought to excuse his threatening and disgraceful behavior. The scandal might have reached no further than the Seymour household had Katherine not died in childbed on 7 September 1548. Elizabeth received the news at Cheshunt, and the measure of her grief may be inferred from the fact that she shortly afterwards fell ill. Mistress Ashley, however, saw her mistress’s loss as a chance to revive Seymour’s scheme, and set about persuading Elizabeth that Seymour would be an excellent husband. Despite her earlier qualms, she was obviously attracted to Seymour herself, and something of his creepy sexiness comes out in his message to her, “whether her great Buttocks were grown any less or no?” Quite what Seymour did to these two intelligent women who were supposed to have Elizabeth’s welfare at heart is impossible to know, but Katherine Ashley now proved herself as much of an idiot as the Dowager Queen had been.
Mistress Ashley wheedled and cajoled on both sides, persuading Seymour to renew his suit and Elizabeth to admit it. Should not Elizabeth write to Seymour? Even if she could not prevent herself from smiling and blushing at the mention of his name, Elizabeth wanted no more to do with him, telling her governess firmly that she would not write, lest it be perceived that she was encouraging him, and moreover that any marriage she made should be the business of her brother and his council. Via Thomas Parry, Mistress Ashley sent an extraordinary message to Seymour, claiming for her own part that “she would her Grace were your wife of any man’s living.” Seymour responded that this would be impossible, but Mistress Ashley, transformed into a kamikaze Emma, gossiped to Parry about the incidents at Hanworth, assuring him that Elizabeth would make a delightful wife for Seymour. Parry was appalled. He disliked Seymour for his treatment of Katherine Parr, describing him as “an evil jealous man,” “covetous” and “oppressive.” Perhaps it was Parry who talked. Certainly by Christmas, Elizabeth’s reputation was in the gutter. She had departed for Cheshunt because she was pregnant with Seymour’s child; she had been meeting him in secret since his wife’s death; they had enjoyed moonlight trysts on the Thames … juicy celebrity gossip about a rich, handsome politician and the country’s most eligible heiress, were it not for the fact that in the claustrophobic world of the Tudor court, words were deadly weapons.
On 17 January 1549, Thomas Seymour was arrested for high treason. His flirtation with Elizabeth was not the principal cause, but it became the most talked about. The Lord Admiral had been using his charms on Elizabeth’s brother, too, persuading the rather joyless little boy that life would be a lot more fun with him as Protector instead of stuffy old Uncle Somerset. What Seymour was accused of compassing was the possession of two Tudors, the king as his charge and Elizabeth as his wife. His rapacious stupidity cost him his head, and nearly cost Elizabeth her position. If Elizabeth had any inkling of the complexities of her mother’s arrest and trial, now, with chilling suddenness, she too was seeing how quickly flirtations, whispers, romantic promises could be turned on an axe edge. Katherine Ashley and Thomas Parry followed Seymour to the Tower. Conspiring to marry Elizabeth without the king’s consent was a treasonable offence, and Elizabeth found herself facing criminal interrogation for the first time. At Hatfield, she was confronted by Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, a member of Katherine Parr’s former household. His wife had served Katherine in her chamber, and had firsthand knowledge of the liaison between Seymour and Elizabeth. By the time Elizabeth was questioned, both Thomas Parry and Katherine Ashley had already signed depositions attesting to Seymour’s dealings with the princess, Parry reporting that he had been drawn into discussions of Elizabeth’s landholdings and finances, and Katherine confessing to the bedroom games in embarrassing detail.
Elizabeth did not blame her servants. She knew that they had resisted for some time, to the extent that, even though they had been questioned separately, Tyrwhitt complained, “They all sing one song, and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the knot before, for surely they would confess or else they could not so well agree.” But Katherine Ashley was moved to a particularly miserable cell, with only straw to stop the window from where she complained piteously that she could not sleep for the cold, nor see in daylight. Eventually, though, she and Parry, terrified by where their meddling had brought them, broke down. Elizabeth was moved to tears by their plight, but Tyrwhitt could not draw her. She admitted that she had had many conversations with Seymour, but had stated repeatedly that she could and would never marry, within the realm or without, without the permission of the king, Somerset, and the council. Tyrwhitt wrote to Somerset that Elizabeth “had a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her but by great policy.”3 Anyone would have been frightened and intimidated in such circumstance; that Elizabeth was able so adamantly to retain her composure evinces an impressive psychological toughness. She was shamefully aware of her imprudence with Seymour, but she would not let that error destroy her. Even under such duress, Ashley and Parry affirmed that she had never said or done anything
of which the council could disapprove, and with this certainty of her innocence, Elizabeth went on the attack. She insisted to Somerset that a proclamation be issued refuting the slanders against her, but refused to implicate any rumor-mongers, lest her reputation among the people be further damaged. Elizabeth was always conscious of her public. In March, she went further, writing to Somerset that Katherine Ashley, who remained in prison, “hath been with me a long time and many years and hath taken great labor and pain in bringing me up in learning and honesty.” She added cleverly that if Katherine’s incarceration continued, it would lead her to conclude that Somerset did not truly believe in her innocence. Ashley and Parry were freed, but Elizabeth was not permitted to retain her beloved governess, who was replaced at Hatfield by Lady Tyrwhitt. Elizabeth sobbed and sulked but the council had no sympathy. Reasonably enough, they considered that Mistress Ashley had been unpardonably careless of her mistress’s reputation and would not countenance her return.
The Seymour affair might have brought Elizabeth’s teenage neck precariously close to the executioner’s block. In fact, relations between Edward and Elizabeth continued untroubled by the scandal. It is impossible to know what Edward felt when his uncle was executed on 20 March, but it is plausible that he felt some sympathy for Elizabeth. They were both extremely young, neither was inured to the brutal realities of Tudor political life, and both had been moved, in their different ways, by Seymour’s charms. Elizabeth’s internalization of the lessons she had learned was reflected in a further change in her appearance. When Mary of Guise, widow to the Scots King James V and mother to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, visited Edward at Whitehall in October 1551, Elizabeth took care to present herself as the modest model of a Protestant princess. In an environment where magnificence was all, where display was a measure of power, Elizabeth conspicuously refused the trappings of court splendor. As John Foxe noted approvingly, the young woman had “so little delight in the glittering gazes of the world, in gay apparel, rich attire and precious jewels,” that she spared barely a glance to those left to her by her father. While the ladies of Edward’s court appeared in silk gowns, with their “double curled” hair falling to naked shoulders, Elizabeth “altered nothing, but to the shame of them all kept her old maidenly shamefastness.” It was a potent statement, and one which Elizabeth had learned could be vital to her very survival. With Seymour, Elizabeth had seen how swiftly even those with every appearance of security and power could be toppled, while in the loss of Katherine, she had learned of the irrelevance of affective bonds when confronted by political power. Moreover, she had also learned that presentation, “image,” could contribute to a defense of innocence. These lessons were to be tried to their limits in her subsequent confrontations with Mary.
For the events of 1548–49 further soured Elizabeth’s relationship with her sister. When their father died, Mary, who was more than old enough to have her own household, had invited Elizabeth to join it. She had been disgusted by Katherine’s hasty marriage, writing to her sister of the “scarcely cold body of the King our father so shamefully dishonored by the Queen our stepmother.” Elizabeth had replied tactfully that she thought it best to submit to Henry’s wishes in the matter, and recalling Mary to the kindness and affection Katherine Parr had shown her. Obviously Elizabeth had no desire to be boxed up with Mary and her priests, but she diplomatically suggested that she ought not to show herself ungrateful. Now Mary had been proved right. Her sister, the daughter of the hated “concubine,” had shown that blood will out in the loose atmosphere of Katherine’s household. Edward, for his part, seemed more concerned with Mary’s religious recalcitrance than Elizabeth’s sexual indiscretion. Mary continued blithely to hear Mass, provoking a severe reprimand from her devoutly Protestant brother: “Your exalted rank, the conditions of the times, all magnify your offence. It is a scandalous thing that so high a person should deny our sovereignty.” He threatened, a miniature version of his father, that he would have his laws obeyed, and any who dared to break them would be “watched and denounced.”4 Once again unwelcome at court, shunted from manor to manor, Mary could find no support in Elizabeth.
Mary had the conviction to deny her brother’s authority and retain her commitment to her faith, a quality which Elizabeth singularly failed to manifest, at least outwardly, in her sister’s reign. Did Mary later feel contempt for Elizabeth’s confessional suppleness, even as she earnestly sought to return her sister to what she believed was the True Faith? Moreover, might Elizabeth’s staunch Protestantism under Edward have been, in some measure, a similar act of hypocrisy to that she demonstrated when she subsequently consented to hear Mass? Elizabeth’s personal faith has best been described as a “discreet evangelicalism,” reformist, yes, but not so austerely so as the Edwardian Protestants might have wished. As queen, Elizabeth insisted on retaining the religious settlement as it had been formulated for her brother in 1552, whereby an essentially Catholic structure was overlaid with Protestant theology, creating a contrary dynamic which perhaps reflected the “unique ambiguity” of Elizabeth’s own views.5 She remained attached, for example, to some aspects of the stately ceremonial worship she had known in the last years of her father’s reign and the first of her brother’s—her Chapel Royal continued to use choral scores from 1549 in the first year of her reign, and she insisted that her own communion table be adorned with a silver cross and candlesticks. She was perhaps less personally sympathetic to Protestant zealots than Catholic diehards, yet on occasion, such as when the Dean of St. Paul’s gave her a heavily decorated prayer book which resembled a Catholic missal, she could react with fury. However, she persisted, and largely succeeded, in resisting further Protestant reform throughout her reign, so that the Church in 1603 remained structurally identical to that of 1559. Elizabeth’s essential piety, though, is not questionable. Her ardent adherence to her father’s Church was both a confirmation of religious belief and an endorsement of her own “royalness,” which was once more to be challenged as Mary came to the throne.
5
THE THREE MOST important men in Elizabeth’s life were William Cecil, Robert Dudley, and Philip of Spain. It is hard to assess which of them had the most significant effect on her queenship, but collectively, with Elizabeth herself, they formed a curious quadrant of political power which, at times, determined the direction of European politics in the later sixteenth century.
Cecil was born in 1520 into a Lincolnshire family with an established tradition of royal service. His Welsh grandfather David had been a military man since the 1490s, and was a client of Elizabeth’s paternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, who assisted his father, Richard, to a post as a page of the King’s Chamber, which enabled him to be present at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. Aged fifteen, William Cecil went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge, founded in Margaret Beaufort’s memory, where he met John Cheke, the Greek scholar who was at the heart of the group of Cambridge divines who guided the Edwardian Church into being. Cecil’s first wife, Mary (who died in 1543), was Cheke’s sister. He also became close to Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor—The Schoolmaster, dedicated to Cecil by Ascham’s widow, opens with a scene in Cecil’s chamber. In 1540, Cecil came to London, where he studied law at Gray’s Inn, before entering the service of the Protector, the Duke of Somerset.
The family connection with reform continued into his second marriage in 1546, to Mildred, the daughter of Anthony Cooke. Another reformist, Cooke was close to Katherine Parr, whose views on women’s education he shared. His daughters, like Elizabeth herself, had been thoroughly schooled in the new humanist curriculum. In terms of Elizabeth’s future relationship with Cecil, this is interesting—Cecil was not uncomfortable with brilliant, educated women, and he was perfectly accustomed to the idea that his own wife (with whom he enjoyed a long and happy marriage) might be his intellectual equal. It was in Katherine Parr’s home, in an atmosphere of piety and feminine learning, that Cecil first met Elizabeth in 1549. When Somerset fell that same ye
ar, Cecil successfully attached himself to Robert Dudley’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, who engaged him to administer a part of Elizabeth’s lands, a connection which continued discreetly through Mary Tudor’s reign. It was to Cecil that Elizabeth turned immediately on her accession, and he was to remain by her side until his death. There are almost as many historical Cecils as there are Elizabeths, but whether he is seen as the cynical manipulator of a weak and indecisive prince, or the tool of a far less scrupulous politician, or any of the variants in between, what is notable is that their relationship is always interpreted symbiotically. However their partnership is assessed, it remained a partnership—Elizabeth “made” Cecil in the worldly sense, but Cecil was also responsible for the making of Elizabeth.
In contrast, Elizabeth’s romance with Dudley, later the Earl of Leicester, her “sweet Robin,” initially appears much more simple, as one of history’s most captivating love affairs. Whether or not the relationship was an affair in the modern understanding of the word is perhaps the least interesting thing about it. “Did they or didn’t they?” is a question to which we will never know the answer, not that this has prevented generations of historians from speculating. The facts stop at the bedroom door. Regardless of who did, or didn’t, put what where, Leicester is one of the most influential figures of the reign, not only because Elizabeth loved and trusted him, which she did, but because of his role in the emergent statecraft of her government. Leicester was the focus of Cecil’s fear and Catholic calumny; he was a shield, a scandal, at times a plaything, and one of the main instruments in Elizabeth’s progress from pretender to legend. It is pleasing to conjure the two lovers, side by side, curling their signatures forever into the works of one of their favorite authors, much more to consider the implications of their choice of book. Leicester was the most active non-royal patron of bookbinders of the sixteenth century, leaving 220 volumes at Leicester House alone on his death, and he was also connected via his father’s patronage of John Cheke to the scholarly circle emanating from St. John’s which played such a part in Elizabeth’s education. John Ashley later recalled the “friendly fellowship” and “free talk” of Elizabeth’s household when she was aged about sixteen, under the tutelage of Ascham; he remembered many “pleasant studies” of Aristotle and Cicero, and it is tempting to imagine the young Robert Dudley participating in these rarefied discussions.1 This was the atmosphere which formed not only Elizabeth’s mind but her faith, and Leicester was to become, along with Cecil, one of the principal proponents of reform. The earl was much more than the sexy swaggerer who famously stole Elizabeth’s heart during the springtime of her queenship; he was a respected scholar and scientist, a patron and much closer in temperament, if not in style, to the other great professional politician of Elizabeth’s reign, Cecil. His efforts at a more traditional type of aristocratic leadership never amounted, embarrassingly, to much more than that; he embodied the tension between old and new styles of governance—chivalry and statecraft—which defined Elizabeth’s rule. His importance to the queen is indicated by her extraordinary request, when she lay ill with smallpox in 1562, that he should be appointed Protector of the kingdom. She also stated vehemently that “as God was her witness nothing improper had ever passed between them.”2 There is no compelling reason not to take her word for it.