by Jane Dunn
Uncompromisingly Catholic, Feria found Elizabeth and her youthful and brash court hard to stomach. He thought the country having ‘fallen into the hands of a woman who is a daughter of the devil and the greatest scoundrels and heretics in the land’ was fast on the road to hell.15 Everyone was watching Elizabeth intently, and speculating as to her nature and the character of her government. ‘She seems to me incomparably more feared than her sister and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did … she is a woman who is very fond of argument’, was one of Feria’s early verdicts. He still wanted his master to pursue the courtship of this difficult queen and, perhaps with a nudge, reminded him how much Elizabeth loved attention, jewels and presents, ‘and her one theme is how poor she is’.16 Capricious, vain, a maddening tease, she also had a mind like a gin trap and was entirely in control of herself. No wonder Feria’s successor, the urbane Bishop Quadra, after a particularly gruelling discussion with the queen about marriage, had to admit defeat: ‘I am not sure about her, for I do not understand her.’17
The marriage dance continued with other suitors taking the floor. The Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, a narrow Catholic bigot, was one; his younger brother Charles, distinguished by an abnormally large head, was another. Despite first appearances, either prince seemed, to influential men like William Cecil, Sussex and all Dudley’s many enemies at court, to offer a potentially valuable alliance. It was thought that such a match, supported by the Emperor and Spanish interests, would keep the French at a respectful distance.
Elizabeth appeared to be collaborative. She allowed the Spanish ambassador to propose his suit. She tolerated her advisers’ hopeful speculations. She played along with the general optimism that a husband had been found for her at last. She said she could not trust portrait painters and wished to see him in person. When that seemed about to be arranged, she protested ‘he had better not give his master so much trouble in order to see so ugly a lady as she’.18 And so it went on. Elizabeth dancing light on her feet to keep the suits alive but twirling out of reach when anyone came too close. As a final escape she could always return to the old mantra, ‘back again to her nonsense’, as the Spanish ambassador in exasperation called it, and claim ‘she would rather be a nun than marry without knowing with whom’; she ‘did not mean to marry’; ‘she meant to die a maid’.19
Certainly requesting a suitor to turn up in person went against convention, for the humiliation of rejection to his face was too great a risk to his dignity. But Elizabeth did not wish that either; it was just part of her delaying game. So the archduke was not to be sent for, but then neither was he to wait. In a flash of the facetious manner which so discomforted her officials, she told the ambassador that amongst the other princely qualities expected of her future husband ‘he should not sit at home all day amongst the cinders, but should in time of peace keep himself employed in warlike exercises’.20 No wonder nobody but her closest and oldest friends and advisers knew how to deal with her, and even they could suddenly find themselves unexpectedly capsized.
Though certainly no Cinderella, and not quite her Prince Charming, Lord Robert Dudley was gaining in the queen’s affections daily as she imposed increasingly impossible conditions on her suitors. Elizabeth publicly made up to Lord Robert, favouring him so overtly that the gossips could not contain themselves. He was ‘a very handsome young man (giovane bellissimo)’ the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘towards whom in various ways the Queen evinces such affection and inclination that many persons believe that if his wife, who has been ailing for some time, were perchance to die, the Queen might easily take him for her husband’.21
Throughout all these marital manoeuvrings was the ever-present concern with Mary’s claim to the English throne. This was no dormant or academic threat, but a real and present danger given her alliance as Queen of France with one of the great European powers. Elizabeth’s marriage with someone who could summon Spanish might and influence would balance this rival queen politically, but there was the significant problem of religion to be overcome, and the real risk of rousing the antagonism of her people. A compromise position, which appealed to the religious reformers in England, was to try and secure Scotland in the absence of its queen by marrying Elizabeth to their premier nobleman.
The Earl of Arran, son of the Duke of Châtelherault and next in line of succession after Mary, returned secretly to England in July 1559. Driven into exile in Switzerland by a French directive to capture him dead or alive, in order to prevent just such an alliance, he came trailing good political and Protestant credentials. Elizabeth had been offered to him by her father when they were both young children and now that the boy was a man he nursed the hope not only of sharing Elizabeth’s throne but possibly even of deposing Mary and uniting both kingdoms under the reformed religion. His inflated hopes and zealous energies may have been exacerbated by an incipient mania for, sadly, he would go insane within three years.
But just as Cecil favoured this marriage prospect so Dudley opposed it, encouraging the Austrian archduke’s suit, and then transferring his allegiance when the chance to confuse matters further arrived in the form of the Swedish embassy. The Swedes arrived with boatloads of presents, in pursuit once again of a marriage with their prince and heir Eric, who was the same age as Elizabeth, reputed to be one of the best looking men in Europe and soon to become King Eric XIV of Sweden. Dudley’s switching of horses was no more opportunistic than that of anyone else at the time but his flashy ambitions and intimacy with the queen were fuelling ugly rumours to which a tragic event would shortly give the imprimatur of truth. The new Spanish ambassador Bishop Quadra was happy to pass on to Philip II all the latest gossip:
I had heard from a certain person who is accustomed to give me veracious news that Lord Robert has sent to poison his wife. Certainly all the Queen has done with us and with the Swede, and will do with the rest in the matter of her marriage, is only keeping Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words until this wicked deed of killing his wife is consummated. The same person told me some extraordinary things about this intimacy [with the Queen], which I would never have believed, only that now I find Lord Robert’s enemies in the Council making no secret of their evil opinions of it.22
Elizabeth was concerned about these rumours and the effect on her reputation. She had learnt a painful lesson during her girlhood flirtation with Thomas Seymour when it was clear how readily salacious stories gathered a momentum of their own. She had been powerless and vulnerable then. Now she was all-powerful. That meant, however, she was even more closely watched and her reputation all the more eagerly sullied by those who wished merely to entertain themselves, and by others who more seriously intended to do her harm. During one of her fencing conversations with the Spanish ambassador about the possibility of her accepting the Austrian Archduke Charles, she said, only half in jest, that ‘if the Archduke heard any of the idle tales they tell about her’, (‘and they tell many’ the ambassador added), ‘he might take advantage of them to the detriment of her honour’.23
Bishop Quadra diplomatically reassured her. But in fact these rumours were so lurid and persistent that even her own ambassador Sir Thomas Chaloner, then resident at Philip II’s court in the Low Countries, thought it necessary to warn Cecil of what was being scurrilously said abroad: ‘I count the slander most false, so a young Princess cannot be too wary what countenance or familiar demonstration she maketh, more to one than another … This delay of ripe time for marriage, besides the loss of the realm (for without posterity of her highness what hope is left unto us?) ministereth matter to these leud tongues to descant upon, and breedeth contempt.’24
If these scandals were rife in Philip’s austere court then they were enjoyed all the more by the French. Mary Queen of Scots, at this time a devout young woman, a wife most probably still only in name, was privy there to all the discreditable stories of her rival’s unseemly behaviour, much coloured in the telling by ‘the malicious French’.25
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In 1559 these cousins were virgin queens aged almost seventeen and twenty-six. With one, her reputation for chastity and probity was at its height, while the other was embroiled in rumour and vicious innuendo. Many years later, bitter in captivity, having lived a life characterized by even more vivid scandals than those attached to her cousin’s name, Mary was to write an extraordinary letter to Elizabeth. Possibly deflected by Cecil and never seen by his queen, it alluded offensively to continued rumours and accusations about Elizabeth’s lascivious behaviour, as passed on to her by her jailer’s wife, the Countess of Shrewsbury: ‘that one [Robert Dudley] to whom she said that you had made promise of marriage before a lady of your chamber had lain infinite times with you, with all the licence and intimacy which can be used between husband and wife’.26
Then Mary mentioned the slander that seemed to cancel out this first rumour, that Elizabeth was ‘not like other women’ and somehow physically incapable of consummating a marriage. This was the arena where Elizabeth was most personally vulnerable. Having held out for her revolutionary vision of herself as the Virgin Queen, ruling successfully and alone, without the need of a husband for emotional, intellectual and moral support, she opened herself to accusations that she was more a freak of nature than a true woman. It was not her avowed virginity which appeared so perverse. The choice of the celibate life was an honourable, even admirable, course of action in a Christian society then. ‘Virginitie above matrimonie, because followed by Christ … Virginitie, because it is so hard to be kept, is more laudable in princes.’27 The more anarchic and disturbing aspect of Elizabeth’s choice was her freedom from convention, expectation and the supremacy of the male. In a society and a religion that accepted as indisputable fact the innate superiority of men and the foolishness and intellectual weakness of women, their queen’s insistence that she could accept the most powerful position in the land and yet govern alone without a king beside her, flouted this fundamental law of nature.
In this matter, her cousin Mary Queen of Scots claimed a distinct advantage over her. There was no disputing her credentials as a woman. Having lived chastely and free from scandal as an unmarried queen she fulfilled her destiny as a female and as a monarch by marrying young, and continuing to marry. Accepting responsibility for securing the dynasty, she managed to produce a son and heir in the process. All her husbands predeceased her, the last two in tragic and dubious circumstances, and scandal hung round her name. Ultimately she may have failed catastrophically as a sovereign but, unlike Elizabeth, Mary had proved her womanliness and fertility. In accepting the necessity of having a king beside her, she had reinforced the natural order of things and reassured her kingdom. In producing a son and heir she had discharged her constitutional duty and secured the succession.
Failing on all these counts, Elizabeth forged on without precedent to support her. The scurrilous rumours detailed in Mary’s ‘scandal’ letter began their vigorous life during these first few years of Elizabeth’s reign when her passion for Dudley was at its most febrile, and her conduct was at its most flirtatious and abandoned. That it was too dangerous for her to follow her heart was a lesson begun with her experiences with Thomas Seymour. It was to be hammered home by the scandal that engulfed Robert Dudley, and threatened to dishonour her as queen. In all the speculation about Elizabeth’s marrying her Master of the Horse, there was a salient fact that was largely overlooked; Lord Robert Dudley already had a wife. Married in the summer of his seventeenth year to Amy Robsart, the daughter of a Norfolk landowner, Dudley had lived his increasingly glittering life at Elizabeth’s court mostly separated from his wife. The court followed the centuries-old pattern organized on a masculine foundation. The only women present were invited there as attendants on the queen.
It was the inconvenience of his marital status that fuelled the rumours of poison, plotting or divorce. But courtship stratagems and speculative gossip were only two of the major preoccupations of the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. The eternal problem of her relations with Scotland was made more acute with the accession of Mary to the French throne in 1559 and the concomitant elevation of the Guises to ultimate power.
In his judicious memorandum, ‘Discussion of the weighty Matter of Scotland’, written in the summer of 1559, Cecil punctiliously pointed out that through historical precedence the crown of England was superior to that of Scotland and ‘By this title and dignity doth the French Queen, as Queen of Scots, owe homage to the crown of England’. To his considerable disquiet, however, it was obvious that Mary, encouraged by her French family, had not only rejected such reasoning but shown by her assumption of the Queen of England’s arms and by her ‘disdainful speech’ how little respect she had for Elizabeth. It had been reported too that as Mary entered her chapel ushers preceded her with the cry, ‘make way for the Queen of England’. With gloomy prescience, Cecil noted how the malice of Mary and the French towards the English queen had been ‘augmented and taken root, by their false pretended title’. Even in this first year of Elizabeth’s reign Cecil realized that as long as Mary Queen of Scots lived, ‘this quarrel now begun, is undoubtedly like to be a perpetual incumbrance of this kingdom’.28
There was an ancient and deep hostility between England and Scotland, the latter historically providing a valuable bridgehead for England’s enemies into the otherwise seabound kingdom. Mary of Guise was tiring of her efforts as regent to rule the factious, intractable Scots. Her health was failing, the Protestant reformers were becoming more offensive, with mobs rampaging through churches, smashing effigies. Protests had been particularly violent in Perth where monks were hounded from their monasteries. The regent was outraged and alarmed.
The tide of reformation which had rolled with such force through mainland Europe had reached this island outpost, its momentum now irreversible. Confirmation came from across the border where Elizabeth’s careful equivocation over the practice of faith had given way to a more wholehearted endorsement of the reformed religion with legislation authorizing use of the 1552 English prayer book, inaugurated in her brother’s reign. Although the Protestant rebels were careful to proclaim their loyalty to her daughter Mary Queen of Scots and to François, her husband, their king, Mary of Guise believed that religion was just a cloak for her schismatic nobles to undermine the authority of the crown and eject the French from Scottish soil.
Certainly the native Scots had grown increasingly resentful and intolerant of the growing numbers of French in their midst, dominating the best-paid positions, lording it over the locals, insisting on an extravagant standard of living far beyond what this impoverished country could afford. There was no doubt too that these representatives of a powerful and sophisticated court could be arrogant and dismissive of their more modest hosts. Racial prejudice and resentment, similar to that expressed by the English towards the ubiquitous Spanish during the last years of Mary I’s reign, were stirred into the subversive brew. To add to her problems, the ill and weary regent suspected that the new young English queen, bastard-born and raised a heretic as she was, intended to supply secret aid to the Scottish rebels.
In Scotland the summer of 1559 was riotous. The rebel forces gained in confidence and boldness while the troops loyal to the regent quarrelled amongst themselves, the Scots against the French, rival clans against each other, one Scottish interest against another. More monasteries and churches were sacked, the ancient and sacred palace of Scone was looted and burned. Mary of Guise retreated to Dunbar to await fresh French reinforcements. While she waited she heard that Henri II had died on 10 July and her own daughter was now Queen of France. Her long sacrifice was rewarded at last.
The death of the French king and accession of his unpromising fifteen-year-old son was greeted with delight by Elizabeth and deep gloom by the expatriate French who ‘confess that the Scotch affair is lost’.29 Young or weak monarchs made for stronger internal factions. The political and religious divisions in France were gathering force. This meant French eyes and energies were
turned inwards again. Not surprisingly the Protestants in Scotland were greatly encouraged in their ambitions to drive out the foreigners and establish a reformed church.
An influential section of the nobility, banded together as the Lords of the Congregation, were prime movers whose cause was given a blast of fire and brimstone by the return to Scotland of the great reforming preacher John Knox. Twelve years of exile, some of them as a galley slave of the French, had diminished neither his vigour nor his rhetoric. Within little more than a week of Henri II’s death, the Congregation, led by Knox, had written simultaneously to Cecil and to Elizabeth, declaring their desire for union with England and requesting help in resisting the French. Knox declared this new amity with England was based on a shared spiritual foundation rather than any ‘temporall commoditie’, unlike the alliance of Scotland with France which had been ‘maid by worldlie men for worldlie proffett’.30
John Knox was a master of militant self-righteousness and the lofty moral stance. Nevertheless, it was precisely that disdained temporal commodity – cash – which he and his fellow reformers required from Elizabeth. She saw this as an opportunity covertly to weaken French influence across the border and, initially without the knowledge or consent of her full council, she and Cecil authorized £3000 to be smuggled through to the reformers’ cause. Her facility in continuing to deny to foreign ambassadors any involvement with the Scottish rebels was doubly exasperating. The Spanish ambassador Bishop Quadra, writing to Philip II of Spain, could not contain his irritation: ‘I have lost all hope in the affairs of this woman. She is convinced of the soundness of her unstable power, and will only see her error when she is irretrievably lost … her language is so shifty that it is the most difficult thing in the world to negotiate with her. With her all is falsehood and vanity.’31