by Lisa Hilton
Writing from Paris, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton expressed his mortification:
I am almost at my wits’ end and know not what to say: one laugheth at us, another threateneth, another revileth her Majesty, and some let not to say what religion is this that a subject shall kill his wife and the Prince not only bear withal but marry with him… . Alas that I ever lived to see this day. All the estimation that we had got clean is gone, and the infamy passeth the same so far, as my heart bleedeth to think upon the slanderous bruits I hear.4
Humiliatingly, Elizabeth was obliged to defend herself to another of her suitors, the Duke of Holstein, who had expressed his shock at the allegations that the lovers had conspired to get rid of Amy: “She will consider it a favor if he will believe none of the rumors which he hears, if they are inconsistent with her true honor and royal dignity.”
If Elizabeth had ever had any intention of marrying Robert Dudley, Amy’s death was the worst possible impediment to it. If she were to take him now, she would be considered little better than a murderess. This did not prevent continued talk of the likelihood of that marriage, particularly as they remained extremely close, and Elizabeth continued to heap favors on him to such an extent that, speaking later, she observed that she could not displace him even were she so minded, as he had clients and relatives in every important post in the country. But even five years after the discovery of Amy’s broken body, Cecil wrote in a memorandum of pros and cons he had drawn up against the marriage that Dudley was “infamed by his wife’s death.” Elizabeth was extremely sensitive about any slight to her royal dignity, so to have taken Dudley with this taint upon him, though she herself was entirely convinced of his innocence, was now impossible.
Elizabeth’s care for her princely status was something she never again neglected. Over the pattern of her relationship with Dudley it is notable that their recorded quarrels generally exploded when she felt she had been in some way compromised or diminished by him. In 1562, he received a tart reminder of this when Mistress Ashley, meddlesome as ever, dispatched a servant named John Dymock to the Swedish court with letters to King Erik explaining that she, Katherine, knew that her mistress was “well-minded” towards him. Mistress Ashley was clearly still listening to the persistent rumors of marriage between Elizabeth and Dudley, and the scheme was meant to encourage Erik, but she, and the rest of the court, had Elizabeth’s answer when the queen discovered not only the plan but the fact that Dudley had sent two thugs to apprehend Dymock, who claimed they would watch all night for him, for fear of “losing Lord Robert’s favor forever.” Elizabeth rounded on Dudley and gave him a public tongue-lashing, “with great rage and great checks and taunts,” adding that “she would never marry him, nor none so mean as he.”5 There was her answer, as cruelly plain as could be, though again it took some time for those around her, most of all Dudley himself, to accept it.
The contention that “Amy’s sudden and violent death … and the rumors and scandal that went with it, soon extinguished … hope. Elizabeth, unable to marry the only man she perhaps truly loved, was to remain single the rest of her life, it was the making of the Virgin Queen” is in no way provable.6 Clearly Amy’s death, and the ignominy that came with it, horrified Elizabeth, but to attribute the complex national myth that grew up around her virginity to this one event seems overly reductive. Elizabeth had declared her commitment to virginity long before, both privately and in front of Parliament, while the “cult of the virgin queen” (which some historians do not accept at all) was of lengthy and supple duration, responding flexibly to variant needs, and displaying different motifs, as the reign and the requirements of the nation progressed.
Writing in 1579, Petruccio Ubaldini, an Italian who had served both Elizabeth’s father and brother, and who worked in an unofficial capacity as a writer of diplomatic letters to Italian rulers, produced a detailed pen portrait of Elizabeth in which he compared her to her sister Mary in their differing views on marriage:
Between her sister Mary and her [Elizabeth], there was no little emulation of virtue, but so very inclined her sister always was to marrying, also procuring marriage for the women in her royal service, as she is alien to getting married, which she does not only not seek for herself, as would be suitable, but neither does she for the other women.
Elizabeth’s attempt to keep her maids of honor maids has often been remarked upon—and was often scandalously unsuccessful—and it has been suggested that she sought to retain her own mystique as a virgin by unkindly preventing her ladies from marrying. Equally, though, this may have been better served by surrounding herself with married women, who would be less likely to distract attention from the queen’s famous flirtatiousness with her male courtiers. Elizabeth’s commitment to virginity, and her dislike of marriage among her women, accorded with the endorsement of celibacy supplied by Saint Paul, who, while he recognized the necessity of marriage (to avoid the sin of fornication), affirmed that virginity was a superior state, in emulation of Christ and His Mother. “I say to the unmarried … it is good for them if they so continue.” Virginity was seen as a purer state, one which brought the individual closer to God and freed them from worldly concerns.
This view was reinforced by scholastic divines including Saints Augustine and Jerome: “Death came through Eve, life has come through Mary. For this reason the gift of virginity has poured most abundantly on women, seeing that it was through a woman that it began,” the latter wrote.7 Confirmed by the New Testament, the mystical power of (particularly female) virginity had been endorsed over thousands of years, across pagan, medieval, and humanist tradition, from the sexual purity of the knights of Le morte d’Arthur to the endless iconography of the medieval Church to the work of Ubaldini himself, who published a book on six celebrated women which included a description of Venda of Poland, a pre-Christian warrior queen whose virginity was read as key to her military success. At a primary level, beneath the complex propaganda of the imagery of the Virgin Queen, perhaps lay something more simple, a pious woman’s commitment to what her faith upheld as a holy state, a state which she preferred to see replicated in those around her, and which also had implications for the “chastity” of her court and thus her fitness to rule.
An alternate argument has been posited, which is that Elizabeth did not show any early commitment to virginity, and that her remaining single had more to do with conciliar wranglings—that there was, at no time, any single candidate of whom her ministers could wholeheartedly approve. The image of the Virgin Queen thus became as much a consequence of necessity—making the best of a bad unmarried job—as a conscious decision on the queen’s part. Her later deification as a virgin goddess was created in the absence of any plausible husband. But what if this had been Elizabeth’s intention all along? In addition to what she herself consistently said on the subject of virginity, Elizabeth did make a powerful early statement in her choice of pose for her coronation portrait.
ELIZABETH’S IDENTIFICATION WITH Richard II in the aftermath of the Earl of Essex’s rebellion at the end of her reign has become one of the commonplaces of the Elizabethan narrative, but Elizabeth’s identification with Richard belongs equally to the beginning as the end of her reign. During a conversation with William Lambarde, the royal archivist, the queen mentioned a portrait of Richard II, believed lost but recovered by Lord Lumley. “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” Elizabeth observed. The comment refers to a performance of Shakespeare’s tragedy given before the Essex revolt, but also evokes Elizabeth’s own coronation portrait, which is visible in a seventeenth-century copy and is remarkably similar to the coronation portrait of Richard.
Known as the Westminster Portrait, the painting of Richard dates from the 1390s and is an extremely rare example of individual portraiture in northern Europe for the period. The king is seated full frontal, crowned and wearing a collar and ermine cloak, the orb in his right hand, the scepter in his left. In Elizabeth’s portrait, this is reversed, as is the teardrop effect created by t
he cloaks of both monarchs, which enclose their hands and torsos, emphasizing the symbols of majesty they bear. It is likely that Richard’s face was drawn from a pattern (a practice common in Italy in the fourteenth century and which was employed by Elizabeth’s own court painters), thus, conceivably, the same model could have been used for both. The upright pose, the cast of the hands, the etiolated crowned head, and the impassive, smooth face, as well as the red-gold hair (for, despite later restoration, the face in the Richard portrait is considered to be original), are greatly alike. Both pictures are examples of the medieval divina majestas, the divinely ordained countenance of the ruler, locating them within a tradition of sacred royal images which dates back to the Romans. Both summon a holy presence in their relation to earlier religious icons, and both form part of what has been called the “Renaissance ruler image cult” which was widely disseminated across Europe.8
In invoking this unique image—for there are no other medieval coronation portraits—in her own first representation as queen, Elizabeth is physically modelling herself on the last English monarch with an unquestioned claim to the throne. The pictures create a link that overarches Elizabeth’s bastardization, the contested status of her mother’s marriage, transcending her grandfather Henry VII’s seizure of the throne by conquest, beyond the conflicting claims of York and Lancaster and the Wars of the Roses, beyond the usurpation of Richard by Henry IV: “The painting, in short, iconographically abolishes a century and a half of both English history and royal iconography and returns us to the last moment when the legitimacy of the monarchy was not a problem.”9 The mirroring is revealing in that it not only implies the extent of Elizabeth’s determination on her unqualified right to rule but several further parallels with Richard which serve to illuminate Elizabeth’s conception of herself as a divinely appointed and, crucially, chaste monarch.
In Richard’s relationship with his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, it is possible to detect a commitment to chastity which stretched back to the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, Edward the Confessor, and which adumbrates Elizabeth’s status as Virgin Queen. Soon after the fifteen-year-old Anne’s marriage to Richard in 1382, the young queen had sought a papal dispensation for celebrating the feast day of her namesake Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin. Saint Anne and her husband, Joachim, had waited twenty years for the blessing of a child. Might it be possible that Queen Anne’s veneration of the saint was connected to her own fear that she would have to wait many years for a child? It is mere speculation to assume that Richard and Anne did not enjoy a perfectly normal sex life, but the fact remains that they had no children, and there are several hints that Richard had committed himself to a chaste life. In 1385, when his wife was nineteen, Richard II summoned the last feudal host ever called out in England to ride north against the Scots. About fourteen thousand men, the greatest army England had yet seen, the majority of the English nobility, and the last contingent of fighting priests participated in an expedition whose achievements were in inverse proportion to its magnificence. Richard’s Scots expedition proved feeble and futile, but when he returned he issued a proclamation naming an eleven-year-old boy, Roger Mortimer, as his adoptive heir. Why should he have anticipated that his young and healthy wife would have no children at such an early stage? Richard’s declaration may well have been a political tactic, aimed at neutralizing factional competition, but his certainty that he would produce no heir is curious. Officially, the subject was taboo, as Parliament made clear a decade later in the pugnacious demand, “Who is it that dares say the King shall have no issue?” but even if it had become apparent by then that Queen Anne was unable to bear a child, this could not have been forecast in 1385. Two other pieces of evidence suggest that Richard was committed from the start to a chaste marriage, and that his marriage was indeed never consummated. In 1394, the king gave permission for his close friend Thomas Mowbray to use a badge traditionally reserved for the monarch’s eldest son, displaying a crowned leopard. The use in the grant of the pluperfect tense si quem procreassemus (if we had begotten the same) has been read as indicating that Richard accepted his childless condition. The same year, Richard took delivery of the Wilton Diptych, the “hauntingly exquisite” double-paneled painting which represents one of the great artistic achievements of his reign, featuring himself being presented to the Virgin and Christ Child by a trio of saints: Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon boy-king Edmund, and John the Baptist. Richard’s arms are impaled with those of the Confessor, suggesting that, like his predecessor, he, too, had rejected full marriage for a spiritual union with his country. Indeed, in 1395 Richard altered the royal arms, which he formally adopted on the Confessor’s feast, quartering the fleur-de-lis and lions passant guardant with the Confessor’s, emphasizing his commitment as “a prince of glorious peace,” an aspiration which Elizabeth I also shared.10 Richard’s second marriage, in 1396, was an extraordinary affirmation of his commitment to chastity, given his by then urgent need for an heir. His bride, Isabelle of France, was nine years old, so there could be no hope of offspring for some years. It did, however, accord with his self-conception as a divine figure who ruled as God’s Elect, which was deeply (and presciently, in the case of Elizabeth I) linked to celibacy. If theories as to Richard II’s devotion to a chaste life are correct, then the connection with the coronation portrait signals something more than a shaking out of the wrinkles in the dynastic blanket; it foregrounds him, uniquely, as a prototype of the celibate adult monarch.
THE SANCTITY OF monarchy had been emphasized as never before in Elizabeth I’s coronation, and we have seen how effectively Elizabeth absorbed and exploited the interplay between the formalized erotic desire of the courtly love tradition and religious devotion. Royal divinity was also a key component of Richard’s understanding of his kingship. Chroniclers of the nine-year-old boy’s coronation presented him as a Christ figure, the savior of his troubled people, and several historians have noted in the Wilton Diptych unmistakable tokens of his literal belief in his anointed divinity. Richard was alert to the iconographic power of the royal image, not only in his coronation portrait or the diptych but in the richly visual court culture which he encouraged, a more elaborate and ritualistic backdrop for monarchy than England had ever seen before. As Elizabeth’s later reign was to celebrate her as a virgin goddess, so Richard’s vaunted his divine right. It was Richard who introduced the titles “Your Highness” and “Your Majesty,” which one nervous commentator ventured were not “human but divine honours … hardly suitable for mere mortals.”11
The debacle of the 1385 Scots campaign might have suggested to Richard that war-making was not really his forte, so while he was not averse to arrogating the chivalric aura of his more successful predecessors to his own crown, he preferred to emphasize the more spiritual aspects of the knightly ideal. A fantastically mystical document commissioned from Philippe de Mézières by King Charles VI of France to encourage the match with his daughter conjures a vision of Richard as a second Arthur, the king who would finally lead England to the new Jerusalem. De Mézières connected Richard with the chaste heroes of Arthurian legend, where the Holy Grail may be glimpsed only by the pure, and also implicitly with his Crusader ancestors, for whom the attainment of the Holy City was predicated, in theory at least, on sexual abstinence. There is no way of knowing whether Richard II was a virgin any more than Elizabeth I was, but implicitly or explicitly, the two rulers shared a need to transform that characteristic—which may have begun as a personal idiosyncrasy and developed into a political necessity—into a transcendental destiny.
PERSONALLY, ELIZABETH SEEMED serenely assured of her own divine status. In response to the German humanist Paul Schede’s Ad Elisabetham, where the poet casts himself in the conventional role of Petrarchan pleader—“I place myself beneath your royal yoke / make me your bondsman, lady, and be mistress To a free born slave”—Elizabeth (as ever enjoying the opportunity to show off in Latin) responded, Quem regum pudeat tantum coulisse poetam
Nosex semideis qui facit esse deos? (What king would be shamed to cherish such a poet / Who makes us from demigods to be gods?). The conscious connection with Richard II casts a different light on the romantic career of the Virgin Queen. Alongside her own statements, Elizabeth’s use of her coronation portrait might be read as a commitment to holy virginity, that she would rule not as a woman but that the authority of her kingly body would be reinforced by a commitment to chastity which would elevate even her mortal body to the precincts of the angelic.
12
STABLE RELATIONS BETWEEN Elizabeth and Philip were particularly necessary at this juncture given French ambitions both in Scotland and England itself. Like Elizabeth, Philip viewed the rise of the Guise faction and their protégée, Mary Stuart, at the Valois court with deep suspicion. The alliance between Scotland and France had been a matter of anxious interest for England and Spain since the aftermath of the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh in September 1547, when English troops had defeated the Scots in the last confrontation of the “Rough Wooings,” a series of attempts by the English to amalgamate the two crowns of England and Scotland by force, through the marriage of Henry VIII’s heir Edward to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland in her own right since 1542. The new King of France, Henri II, had other ideas. The loss of Calais had reversed the situation whereby the English had a bridgehead in France; instead, Henri aimed to establish a French outpost in England. He envisaged a Franco-British empire which would ultimately unite the realms of England, Scotland, and France in one immense power bloc. From the French perspective, the prospects of the Tudor dynasty were bleak. Edward was a feeble teenager; his sister Mary Tudor, whose claim to the throne had never been disavowed by Catholic Europe, was thirty-four and unmarried; while Elizabeth herself was dismissed as a bastard. The next heir in French eyes was Mary Stuart, the child of Marie de Guise and James V, whose mother had governed Scotland as regent since her husband’s death. When Mary appealed to France for aid a month after the battle, Henri saw an opportunity to mould his dream. By the treaty of Haddington, on 7 July 1548, French military aid to Scotland was formalized in the dynastic union of little Mary and the heir to the French crown, Henri’s son François. Writing to the Estates of Scotland after Mary’s arrival in France, Henri declared that “in consequence, her affairs and subjects are with ours the same thing, never separated.”1 Henri’s vision was far-sighted. When Edward died, as it increasingly appeared that he would, it might be possible that the combined forces of Scotland and France could enforce Mary Stuart’s claim. In a bellicose letter to the Ottoman Sultan of 1550, Henri boasted: