The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  Encouraging reports of the archduke’s physical appearance were sent to Elizabeth in the summer of 1566, to increase her interest in his wooing. Thomas Dannett, the English agent in Vienna, wrote that the Austrian prince was courteous, affable, just, liberal, and wise, and greatly enjoyed sports; mindful of Elizabeth’s liking for handsome, athletic men, he described him as “for a man, beautiful and well faced, well shaped, small in the waist, and well and broad breasted; he seemed in his clothes well thighed and well legged.” Though he appeared slightly round shouldered, Dannett reported, in the saddle he sat as straight as anyone. It was an attractive enough verbal portrait, but still Elizabeth was determined to see her suitor before she would give him a definite answer. There was little or no doubt in her secret mind as to how the negotiations would end, but as long as they were proving useful—as well as gratifying—she was very willing that they should be prolonged, in spite of her protestations that such matters were not at all to her liking. “She always repeats her dislike to marriage and even to talking of it,” wrote de Silva, who was not taken in.

  It was obvious to him that Elizabeth derived great pleasure from her suitors. Her vanity was not that of satisfied self-assurance, but that of restless uncertainty, ever clutching at compliments, avid for praise. Because she lacked the normal inward satisfactions of sexual love, the external signs and rituals assumed an unnatural importance in her life, developing, over the years, into an ever more elaborate code of pretense. For her maternal instincts she found a just and absorbing outlet in care for her subjects. “Though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all,” she had proclaimed to the Parliament of 1563, and she was to keep that pledge. But for romance she required the glittering sham of her courtships. With Leicester she found an approximation of real loving intimacy, but whatever rank she bestowed on him he would always remain her subject, dependent on her for his very life. As Queen of England she reveled in the purportedly amorous homage of her foreign equals in blood and power. The notion of the Habsburg archduke coming to England to woo her in person held a particular fascination for her—and indeed the one royal suitor who did come over the sea to court her, more than a decade later, was almost to succeed in winning her. Once when she spoke to de Silva of the archduke’s possible visit, the Spanish ambassador teased her by asking meaningfully whether she had noticed an unfamiliar face among the imperial envoy’s retinue, “as perhaps she was entertaining more than she thought, only she must be told so in a way not to disconcert her.” Her reaction was one of real shock. “She turned white, and was so agitated that I could not help laughing to see her,” de Silva recounted. But she recovered her dignity and said, “That is not a bad way for the Archduke to come,” adding untruthfully, “I promise you plenty of princes have come to see me that way.” She seemed to take particular pleasure in listing the great princes who had wooed her and been rejected; she proudly enumerated them on more than one occasion when entertaining envoys. Even though she was perfectly conscious of the political nature of royal courtships, and indeed openly referred to the personal incompatibility that had been so evident in her own sister’s political marriage to Philip of Spain, she nevertheless found real pleasure in such wooings. De Silva reported that she even tried to revive Eric of Sweden’s much-mocked suit early in 1566, saying that “she wished to treat of marriage with him again, so that the Archduke was not the only one.” He went on to say perceptively, “The Queen would like everyone to be in love with her, but I doubt whether she will ever be in love with anyone, enough to marry him.”

  Leicester’s brother-in-law Sir Henry Sidney once told de Silva that he himself “was always sure that the Queen did not mean to marry, and that they were in the most troublous state that ever was known in England, especially if the Queen were to die, as they were all so divided that no three persons were entirely of one opinion.” Elizabeth’s isolation as an unmarried, childless queen was made the more striking by the birth of Mary’s son, James, in June 1566. Now the two chief contenders for Elizabeth’s throne, Lady Catherine Grey and Queen Mary, both had fine baby sons to give their claims additional weight. According to Melville, who was sent in all haste to England with the news, when Elizabeth was told of the birth of the Scottish prince, “all her mirth was laid aside for that night,” and, sitting down, she put her hand to her face, “bursting out to some of her ladies, that the Queen of Scots was mother of a fair son, while she was but a barren stock.” Though she afterwards recovered her equanimity, and “seemed very glad of the birth of the infant,” she would have been less than human had she not suffered a brief pang of envy for her beautiful cousin who seemed to represent every desirable feminine attribute and now had a son, the baby prince that was regarded as the primary purpose of a Queen’s existence. There was no apparent physical reason why Elizabeth should not have children. The whispers of “some womanish infirmity” that would make it impossible seem to have no real foundation. The illness that troubled her throughout her youth and early maturity was probably nephritis, which, among other side effects, can cause a disturbance of the monthly periods, but that trouble would have rectified itself when the acute phase of the nephritis subsided, and as late as 1579, Cecil wrote in a memorandum on the subject of her likelihood of having children that she had “no lack of natural functions in those things that properly belong to the procreation of children.” He of all people would have known if the queen had had anything physically wrong with her. The question of her ability to produce heirs was so central to the matter of her marriage that he could not have afforded to overlook any evidence that she might be unlike other women in that respect. Living surrounded by her attendant ladies as she did, any unusual physical symptom would not have gone unnoticed. In 1566 her own physician swept aside all such speculation as nonsense, and asserted confidently that he would guarantee her having ten children. There was indeed an abnormality in Elizabeth’s ability to become pregnant, but it was seated in the mind, not in the body.

  Melville had accurately diagnosed a great part of the hindrance when he said to Elizabeth that if she were married she would be but Queen of England, whereas now she was both king and queen. “I know your spirit cannot endure a commander,” he had observed perceptively. As the negotiations with the archduke continued it became plain how far the Habsburg prince would expect to have a hand in Elizabeth’s affairs. The emperor made it plain that Charles would naturally expect to “share the pains, cares and exertions of government with the illustrious Queen” and also to “participate in the fruits and benefits of the realm,” and that “as regards the realms and dominions which appertain to the Queen, the Archduke shall in common with Her Royal Highness not only nominally bear and enjoy the honours and titles of royalty, but shall assist the illustrious Queen in her happy administration of these realms and dominions.” For twenty-five years of her life Elizabeth had been subject to the will of others; her desire never to place herself in such a position again was central to her reasoning where marriage was concerned. That was one advantage that marriage with Leicester would bring—unlike a foreign prince, he would be unquestionably her inferior.

  There was all too much of the commander in the attitude of the Parliament that met in October of 1566. The hopes of marriage that Elizabeth had held out to them in 1563 remained unfulfilled, and the succession question was by no means resolved. Elizabeth was now thirty-three years old, and every year that passed was making childbirth a more hazardous prospect for her; she must marry soon, and she must settle the troubled matter of the succession, her people were saying, made bold by fear. In both the Upper and the Lower Houses Englishmen regarded this Parliament as their opportunity to press their case to their curiously recalcitrant queen.

  According to the French ambassador, a council meeting on October 12 set the tone for what was to follow. The Duke of Norfolk, who strongly advocated the Austrian match, addressed the queen on behalf of the nobility, and asked that
Parliament should be permitted to discuss both the question of her marriage and that of the succession. Elizabeth was furious at such presumption. The succession was entirely her concern, she told him; she wanted none of their advice. With passionate conviction she referred to her own situation during her sister’s reign, when she herself, as the heir, had been courted by those who were her sister’s subjects. It was obvious that those times of fear and faint hope were still all too vivid in her memory. She knew what had happened then, and she did not wish to see it happen again, with herself in Mary’s role. As for her marriage, she told the council haughtily that it was not far off.

  Elizabeth’s spirit and power—the Tudor force of personality of her grandfather and father—were rarely so impressively displayed as during this autumn when Parliament threatened to interfere with her royal prerogative. To the deputation from the Lords she “addressed hard words,” which had the more weight for their direct, almost homely flavor. When Pembroke mildly observed that it was not right to “treat the Duke badly, since he and the others were only doing what was fitting for the good of the country, and advising her what was best for her,” she told him “that he talked like a swaggering soldier.” She turned on Leicester and cried reproachfully “that she had thought that if all the world abandoned her he would not have done so.” He answered “that he would die at her feet,” and she snapped “that that had nothing to do with the matter.” When the queen talked later with the Spanish ambassador, he noticed that she was particularly upset about Leicester having joined with the others, after she had shown him so much kindness “that even her honour had suffered for the sake of honouring him.”

  The speech that she drew up for delivery to the Commons was magnificent. “I need not to use many words, for my deeds do try me,” she declared proudly, though there were a good many words in the whole. Towards the end of the part where she spoke of her marriage, she affirmed, “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 some other great let happen.” She went on, “And I hope to have children, otherwise I would never marry.” Many of those present, she observed, would be just as vehement in opposing whomever she might wed as they now were in urging her to marry. Turning to the matter of the succession, she again returned to the crucial factor of her own experiences as heir to the throne during her sister’s reign. Noting acidly that her petitioners seemed unconcerned for her safety, but were thinking only of themselves, she stated, “I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me; I did differ from her in religion, and I was sought for divers ways. And so shall never be my successor.” As usual, she brought her speech to a superbly compelling climax, in which simplicity tempered grandeur with dramatic effectiveness:

  I care not for death; for all men are mortal. And though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage, answerable to my place, as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

  She ended by telling them that she could make no immediate statement about the succession: “But as soon as there may be a convenient time, and that it may be done with least peril unto you—although never without great danger unto me—I will deal therein for your safety.” But, she warned, she would not do so at their request, “for it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head.” The image of society as a body, of which the ruler was the head, was one that Elizabeth’s subjects would hear again later in the reign—flowing not from her pen but from Shakespeare’s.

  Yet the matter did not rest there. It was proposed to print her promise to marry and name a successor as soon as she could. On the bottom of the paper that bore this draft the queen, enraged, wrote her angry comments, furious that “such audacity should be used to make, without my license, an act of my words.” At the end of the session, however, her tone mellowed, as she cautioned them, “Let this my discipline stand you in stead of sorer strokes never to tempt too far a prince’s patience.” She had clearly promised to marry soon, if nothing should hinder the outcome of her negotiations with the archduke; it was a promise she could make with confidence, because it was becoming increasingly obvious that a matter of great importance would almost certainly make the marriage impossible. The “great let,” or obstacle, was the fact that the archduke was a staunch Catholic, and would not relinquish his faith even to win Elizabeth. With her mind still full of the happenings of Mary’s reign, Elizabeth would never bring another Catholic Habsburg into her realm to be King of England, though the existence of her negotiations with him served to show her good faith to her subjects on the matter of marriage.

  As Elizabeth had declared, the weal of the kingdom was in her keeping. Like her ministers and subjects, her care was for England’s good, but in her means of achieving it she differed from them. Whereas the majority of Englishmen believed that the greatest good must come from her marriage, Elizabeth, directed by her emotions, as well as by her mind, saw that her realm might be equally well served by her courtships.

  7

  The Brothers of France

  The French, having got wind of the Archduke’s affair, may wish to divert it by bringing their own King forward,” de Silva observed in the spring of 1565. His tone was justifiably skeptical. The King of France, Charles IX, was then not quite fifteen years old, an undergrown lad, dominated by his widowed mother Catherine de’ Medici; it seemed certain that the marriage negotiations entered into on his behalf were no more than a defensive measure, designed to hinder Elizabeth from concluding a match with the Habsburg archduke—as de Silva expressed it, “The French may be trying to beat her at her own game.” It was an unpromising beginning, yet France’s wooing of the Queen of England was to span the next eighteen years, as, in turn, each of the three surviving sons of the sickly, degenerate brood born to Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici took up the pursuit of Elizabeth, until the suit of the youngest culminated in a whirl of gallantry and feigned romance that almost swept the aging queen into marriage. The disparity of age between the young men and the woman they wooed was almost comically great, but though her personal charms dwindled and faded, her political desirability did not, and the youthful Valois brothers were to dominate the later years of Elizabeth’s courtships.

  When the boy king Charles IX was tentatively put forward in 1565, Elizabeth was nothing loath to add another royal suitor, however unlikely, to her list. She bashfully “held down her head a little and laughed” when de Silva made a pointed reference to rumors he had heard about her marrying the King of France; though she repeated her disinclination for marriage it was evident that she loved to hear her powerful suitors named, just as she enjoyed quite broad sexual teasing if it implied a compliment to her femininity. Joking about the rival suitors, the queen’s jester declared: “She should not take the King of France, for he was but a boy and a babe; but she should take the Archduke Charles and then he was sure that she would have a baby boy.” The imperial ambassador, reporting the incident, added solemnly, “I told the Queen that babes and fools speak the truth and so I hoped that she had now heard the truth, but she only laughed.” Though she was seventeen years older than the young French king, Elizabeth was still only thirty-one, and retained enough of her looks for the endless talk of love and marriage not to seem entirely inappropriate; she had never been a beauty like Mary, Queen of Scots, but with lavish dresses and jewels to set off her white skin and bright hair, flourishing her lovely hands and showing off her wit and spirit, she was a more attractive match for a young bridegroom than her pious half sister Mary Tudor had been. Her own exacting requirements concerning the physical attractions of her suitors had become well known, and in offering her Charles IX, Catherine de’ Medici took care to assure her that she would find as much
to please her in his body as in his mind. The English ambassador in France was more guarded in his description of the boy king’s personal attributes, however, reporting somewhat ambiguously that Charles was likely to grow tall, since his knees and ankles were at present disproportionately large for his legs, and adding uncertainly that his fast, thick speech no doubt denoted a hot and active nature. For Elizabeth there could be little appeal in the match, and the disparity of age was rather an advantage than otherwise, since it provided her from the outset with excellent grounds for her eventual refusal. But for the time being the King of France made a splendid addition to her list of mighty suitors.

  With many sighs she told the French ambassador Paul de Foix that she only wished she were ten years younger. He, primed with bland reassurances, declared that she would have many children, that Charles would come to her in the flower of his youth, and that any disadvantages must be on his side, for she had nothing to lose and would remain all powerful. Difficulties could easily be dealt with in advance by drawing up contracts. At this Elizabeth went a little too far. With an innocent air she asked who would bring the king to justice if he should break them. De Foix became very dignified; taking this to be a refusal, he replied that he could see her affections were engaged elsewhere. Elizabeth certainly did not intend to refuse the Valois king at this stage, however, and so she exerted all her charm to mollify the ambassador; she told him this was not a refusal, she merely wished that the difficulties she foresaw should be pointed out to Queen Catherine, and before the interview ended she had a stool brought for him, and thanked him winningly for the flattering reports of her that he had sent to his king and the queen-regent. There were times when Elizabeth’s motives were transparently clear.