The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  One of the few Englishmen who might have been a fitting husband for the queen by virtue of his ancient and honorable descent and whom rumor accordingly whirled aloft was the elderly widower Lord Arundel. He was the twelfth earl, his title far older than that of his young son-in-law the Duke of Norfolk; he had been Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain and Mary’s Lord Steward of the Household; but he was not a man of much perception, and as so often happens when a middle-aged man pays court to a young woman, he was made to appear rather silly over his apparent hopes of winning Elizabeth. Feria—understandably, in view of Arundel’s eligibility—was particularly scathing about him.

  In Mary’s reign there had been some talk of a marriage between Elizabeth and Arundel’s heir, Lord Maltravers, but the young man had died in 1556, and perhaps Arundel had cherished secret hopes of wooing Elizabeth for himself ever since the spring day when she was a friendless prisoner in the Tower and he, sent in stern guise to assist at her questioning, had surprised everyone, and probably himself as well, by falling on his knees and exclaiming that she was innocent. At the time of Mary’s death he was in Flanders, taking part in the truce negotiations, but by December 7 he had returned to England, having traveled on the same ship as the suave Spaniard Bishop de Quadra, who had come to assist Feria in the pursuit of Elizabeth. “I believe the tears of the Earl of Arundel floated them into port,” Feria wrote to Philip, “for they say the Earl cried like a child.” Whether seasickness or emotion, or both, caused the earl to weep, his tears were soon dried, and he was to be seen at the palace in fine fettle, “very smart and clean, and they say he carried his thoughts very high.” Though Feria dismissed him as “a flighty man, of small ability,” Arundel continued to play a prominent part in public affairs, and for her coronation Elizabeth appointed him Lord High Steward, a mark of honor which did nothing to dampen the talk of his hopes; at the lavish ceremonials he strutted about “with a silver staff a yard in length,” commanding everybody in great style. “The Earl of Arundel has been going about in high glee for some time, and is very smart,” Feria observed at the end of December 1558; late in the following autumn Arundel’s personal interest in the queen was still smoldering with enough warmth to ignite a violent quarrel between himself and another potential English suitor, Sir William Pickering, an old friend of Elizabeth’s whom she treated with great favor.

  Pickering was not of noble blood such as Arundel’s, but he had other qualities that caught the public eye and appealed to Elizabeth. Like Arundel, he was abroad when Elizabeth came to the throne, but unlike the widower-wooer he was unable to hurry back to present himself before the new queen, as he became ill and was obliged to lie at Dunkirk until the spring. His absence served rather to heighten speculation about him, however, and talk of the “very handsome gallant gentleman” who had “not yet made his appearance” ran so high that in some quarters it was confidently asserted that Elizabeth would marry him when he returned—“it being well known how much she loved him.” Pickering was a man of sophistication and experience, keenly interested in books and learning, and though at forty-two he was still a bachelor, he was reputed to be “very successful with women,” and to have “enjoyed the intimacy of many and great ones.” His popularity with men, however, declined considerably after his arrival at Elizabeth’s court in May 1559.

  The friends of his youth had been the arrogant Earl of Surrey’s dashing young set, and for joining in a rowdy escapade through the streets of London with them in the spring of 1543, he had been briefly imprisoned in the Tower to curb his spirits; sentenced with him was another of the boisterous companions, Thomas Wyatt the younger, son of the poet. Pickering and Wyatt remained friends, and eleven years later, in 1554, they worked together in plotting the rebellion to put Elizabeth and Courtenay on the throne. Dangerous as that gesture of loyalty was to Elizabeth at the time, the fact remained that Pickering had risked his life in her cause, and though, having fled abroad, he subsequently undertook some dubious dealings for Philip and Mary, Elizabeth made him welcome when he finally arrived at her court. “She saw him secretly two days after his arrival,” Feria reported, “and yesterday he came to the palace publicly and remained with her four or five hours. In London they are giving twenty-five to a hundred that he will be King.”

  In fact Elizabeth never seriously considered marrying Pickering, and he knew it, but she enjoyed his company, and as an eligible Englishman he provided a useful weight in the delicately poised scales of the marriage question. She continued to have “long conversations” with him, and ordered him to be given lodgings in the palace—the privilege that her maiden coyness had denied to Feria—and through the spring and summer of 1559 he made the most of his favored position, entertaining lavishly, spending a great deal of money, and dining apart from the other courtiers, “with music playing.” Pickering’s attitude caused considerable resentment at court. In September he and the Earl of Bedford exchanged high words at a banquet, which apparently ended in Pickering challenging Bedford to a duel, and that affray was followed a month later by the quarrel with Arundel. “The other day, when Pickering was going into the chapel, which is inside the Queen’s apartments, the Earl of Arundel came to the door, and told him he knew very well that was a place for lords, and he must go to the presence chamber,” reported the Bishop de Quadra. Contemptuously, Pickering answered “that he knew that, and he also knew that Arundel was an impudent discourteous knave, which the Earl heard, and he went out without answering a word, leaving the other to enter.” Pickering went around telling everyone the story, as though he found it amusing, and he announced that he would not bother to challenge Arundel to a duel “as he held him of small account.” Bishop de Quadra concluded with a trace of pity, “It is right that he should refrain, as the Earl is very weak.”

  Pickering appears to have been one of the few participants in Elizabeth’s marriage dealings who did not take his situation very seriously. It may be that he came closer than any to recognizing her innermost feelings about marriage, which perhaps she herself only half understood at that time; certainly he made a remark that was to prove prophetic during the decades of wooing that followed his own flirtation with the young queen. While Londoners were putting money on his chances of becoming king, Pickering “asked after the Imperial ambassador on the day he arrived, and said the Queen would laugh at him, and all the rest of them, as he, Pickering, knew she meant to die a maid.”

  To Feria, urgently planning his strategy during the first weeks of the reign, there seemed no likelihood of Elizabeth dying a maid. The crucial question was whether her husband would be an Englishman or a foreigner. The supreme offer, of Philip himself, should not be made yet, he felt—“It is not a matter that can be spoken of to the Council until more light is obtained as to her own inclinations”—and he explained that he would have to approach the councillors individually, “to dissuade them from her marriage with an Englishman, and I am moving in this way as cleverly as I can.” Feria believed he was being most subtle in his methods, which he conceived with a view to taking advantage of the weak points in Elizabeth’s character and situation. “On the one hand she complained to me of her sister’s having married a foreigner, and on the other I see she is very vain and as much set against her sister as she was previous to her death. I fancy I can get at her through this feeling,” he informed Philip. His plan was to inveigle her into talking about Philip, and then to remind her that she should not “hold herself less than her sister, who would never marry a subject.” He would tell her that one of the reasons Mary had disliked her was jealousy over Philip, and the fear that if she, Mary, were to die, Philip would marry Elizabeth; then he intended to point out how undignified it would seem for her to marry one of her subjects “while there are such great princes whom she might marry,” after which, much to his own enjoyment, he would “take those whom she might marry here and pick them to pieces one by one, which will not require much rhetoric, for there is not a man amongst them worth anything, counting the married ones
and all.”

  Feria’s view of Elizabeth’s personality was clouded by masculine prejudice. Baffled and infuriated by her apparent capriciousness, her wayward, even frivolous, attitude, and her vanity, Feria did not perceive how skillfully the young queen wielded her weaknesses. “She is a woman very fond of argument,” he noted, and it was as a conventional clever woman, learned and spirited but curtailed by the natural frailties of her sex, that he regarded her, as he sought to gain the mastery in the crucial issue of whom she would marry and conceive her children by. He acknowledged that she evinced an unusual degree of authority; less than ten days after she had become queen, he had informed Philip, “She seems to me incomparably more feared than her sister, and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did.” Yet still he did not grasp how great an adversary he was wooing, and his proposed plan continued: “We can then remind her of the claims of the Queen Dauphine [Mary, Queen of Scots] and the need for her [Elizabeth’s] being allied with Your Majesty or with someone belonging to you,” as though she were a timid woman who might be driven by the French threat into seeking the protection of Spain’s strong embrace.

  “When she is dissuaded,” Feria went on, “if she inclines to Your Majesty it will be necessary for you to send me orders whether I am to carry it any further or throw cold water on it and set up the Archduke Ferdinand, because I do not see what other person we can propose to whom she would agree.” He was convinced that there was no hope for Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy now: “They will not agree to him, for in fact they have a great hatred of war, and they are afraid he may try to recover his estates at the expense of this country.” With the gallant warrior duke thus debarred from the chase, it would not be easy to find another suitable candidate whose loyalty to Spain could be relied on. The archduke Ferdinand was Philip’s first cousin, but since 1556, when Philip’s father, Charles V, had abdicated and the title of emperor had passed to his brother, the archduke Ferdinand’s father, the interests of the two branches of the Habsburg family had become less unanimous, and as Feria had pointed out in his very first letter after Elizabeth became queen: “It would be inconvenient enough for Ferdinand to marry here even if he took the titbit from Your Majesty’s hand, but very much worse if it were arranged in any other way.” However, if Philip were to decline to enter the chase in person, the archduke might be acceptable as the Habsburg representative in Elizabeth’s bed, for in the eyes of the English and the Privy Council he had distinct advantages over the Spanish king. As Feria explained to Philip with his customary bluntness,

  They think he will always reside in this country and have no quarrel with France, and although some of them understand that the power and grandeur of Your Majesty is of great importance to their security, the short time Your Majesty could reside here and your enmity to France turn them against you.

  What mattered above all was that the marriage should go through Philip’s hands, and Feria, complaining, expostulating, warning, increasingly convinced that the heretical English were only fit to be dealt with with “sword in hand,” tried to impress upon his hesitant king the gravity of the situation. “The fact is that these people are going on in a way that will end in their coming to grief, and Your Majesty must get the affair in your grasp,” he urged at the end of December 1558. “We must begin at once to see that the King of France does not get in or spoil the crop that Your Majesty has sown here.”

  The fair, fastidious King of Spain was no ardent suitor to Elizabeth. When, on January 10, he informed Feria that he had made up his mind to “offer to marry the Queen of England,” his proposal was outlined to the ambassador in a manner that was far from flattering to his prospective bride. Misgivings and reluctance cast a gloom over his decision, and the happiest note was that of self-satisfaction in knowing himself to be sacrificing personal inclination so as to serve the Lord. The experience of his marriage to Mary had shaken Philip and his courtiers no less than the English, and as he grimly listed the drawbacks of marrying Elizabeth he stressed “the heavy expense I should be put to in England by reason of the costly entertainment necessary to the people there,” and the difficulties that would again arise from his having to live in his own dominions for most of the year, away from his wife in England, which he knew the English greatly resented. “Besides this such a marriage would look like entering upon a perpetual war with France, seeing the claims that the Queen of Scots has to the English crown,” he wrote regretfully. But there were considerations above these. The “enormous importance of such a match to Christianity and the preservation of religion” flamed in Philip’s soul, fueled by the political danger that without his guiding presence beside Elizabeth on the throne of England, that country would “fall back into its former errors which would cause to our own neighbouring dominions serious dangers and difficulties.” And so, in spite of the many weighty objections, he was “resolved to render this service to God” and present himself, for the second time in five years, as a reluctant bridegroom to an English queen.

  Though Feria did not fully understand the young woman whom the cause of God and Spain obliged him to court, it was plain that Philip had even less grasp of the changing situation in England and the personality of its new queen. When he had known that gray, rain-sodden island kingdom it was under stringent Catholic rule, shuffling penitently back to the old faith, while its leading Protestants burned in city marketplaces or fled abroad to nurture their heresies. When he had known the Lady Elizabeth, watched her and talked with her, down the paneled galleries of Hampton Court, or by the gun-gray Thames, loaded with the rainwaters of that flooded summer of 1555, she had been a pale, taut, quietly dressed girl, cautious as a hunted creature, exerting herself to please him, yet with intriguing sparks of wit and spirit flickering behind her cool demeanor. Riding with her through wet green woods, dancing with her by candlelight to the guttural melodious music of sackbuts and crumhorns, Philip must have found his clever sister-in-law a pleasing companion, a little evasive perhaps, but ever ready to defer to his opinions and respect his wishes in all things. Only the lingering memory of a deferential Elizabeth could have led him to write with such confidence three years later, “She will have to obtain secret absolution from the Pope and the necessary dispensation so that when I marry her she will be a Catholic which she has not been heretofore,” and then to congratulate himself with the words, “In this way it will be evident and manifest that I am serving the Lord in marrying her, and that she has been converted by my act.”

  It was evident and manifest that the King of Spain did not know the Elizabeth who now ruled England. “His Majesty must be informed of the character of the Queen,” Feria wrote worriedly in a memorandum at the end of February. “She is acute, depending upon the favour of the common people, detested by the Catholics. . . .” Dark eyes sparkling against a milk-white skin, bright hair twisted into tiny curls, slender lovely hands displayed, she provoked, encouraged, and frustrated Feria through audience after audience, “very gaily.” No greater match than Philip of Spain could ever be offered to her, and the knowledge that this fair-haired, prim-lipped man of thirty-three, on whose slender shoulders rested half of Europe, was awaiting her consent or rejection must have given Elizabeth’s feminine nature a thrilling sense of power, even while her clear judicious mind was calculating. There could be no question of her changing her religion and embracing Catholicism, but Philip’s suit was of too great a value to be rejected before she had gained as much benefit as she could from it. While Spain’s huge hand was seen to be beckoning towards Elizabeth the French would be less likely to make war on her, and as long as Philip hoped to become Elizabeth’s husband he would use all his influence with the pope to oppose France’s endeavors to have her denounced as illegitimate and heretical; in England the threat from her Catholic subjects would be reduced if they could fasten their hopes on the coming of a Spanish consort rather than on plots and conspiracies. All the “power and grandeur” of Spain could not make Philip an acceptable husband for Que
en Elizabeth, but they made him a most welcome suitor.

  Feria decided it must be the “excitement of her fresh dignity” that was causing Elizabeth to behave with such “offhandedness and independence” in such a grave situation, as though she were blind to her own weakness and the splendor of Philip’s proffered alliance. He found that all his attempts to press the marriage question were somehow parried, so that the discussions went on from day to day without either a formal proposal on his side or a definite sign of rejection on hers, while her first Parliament sat and dispersed again without having received any conclusive decision from the queen on the subject of her marriage, and still the rumors tossed lightly on the air—she would wed Arundel, or the Earl of Westmorland, she was in love with Pickering, she would only marry a great foreign prince, she would take none but an Englishman. “I am afraid that one fine day we shall find this woman married, and I shall be the last man in the place to know anything about it,” Feria sighed.