The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Yet the elder Dudley did not seem well disposed toward Elizabeth in Edward's final months. He kept news of the king's worsening condition from reaching her as best he could, and when she attempted to visit her brother she was intercepted before reaching London and told to turn back.

  Clearly the council was taking steps to strengthen defenses in the event of a crisis. Money was being amassed by Dudley and his supporters, and the sale of church ornaments hastened in order to provide further funds. Meanwhile the chief fortresses, such as Windsor, were made ready and the lords lieutenant alerted for possible service.

  At this juncture, in about mid-May, a document was drafted in Edward's handwriting which excluded both Mary and Elizabeth from the succession and, in its final, amended form, designated Jane Grey as heir. Whose the initiative was in the drafting of this document is uncertain, yet it effected both the king's primary desire—to preserve the Protestant settlement by barring Mary's accession—and Dudley's goal of maintaining power in the next reign. The device represented the convergence of their interests, yet was profoundly unrealistic, as the sequel showed. Probably neither the king nor the duke—Dudley had taken the title duke of Northumberland after Edward Seymour's arrest—had the energy to think through the full implications of the dynastic revolution they were attempting. Edward was debilitated by illness, while Dudley, his own health faltering, was overcome by melancholy. "I have entered into the bottom of my care," he confided to friends; now that the king was dying he went to bed often "with a careful heart and a weary body." 10

  A vital step in implementing the transfer of power was the marriage of the designated heir, Jane Grey, to Dudley's only unmarried son Guildford. The wedding was a magnificent affair, held at Dudley's London house, but

  the rejoicings were incongruous in view of the suffering and humiliations of Jane's childhood playmate, the king. In recent days Edward's head had begun to swell to a melon shape; all his hair was shaved off, and plasters were applied to the naked skull. It was taking him too long to die. Such putrefaction from within, people said, was unnatural. It was a sure sign of poison.

  The marriage of Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley took place on May 21. Six weeks later Edward's agony still continued. He lay corpselike in his high regal bed, hardly able to breathe, his useless body covered with scabs. The physicians and apothecaries had yielded place to a gentlewoman who claimed she could cure the boy if only she were given a completely free hand. Under her ghoulish ministrations he fell into "desperate extremities," his "vital parts mortally stuffed," his pulse failing and his skin changing color.

  Elizabeth, at Hatfield, knew that her brother was dying but was spared the sight and, it may be hoped, detailed knowledge of his slow decay. She must have known something of the succession scheme, and news may have reached her from London that it was now being said Dudley meant to divorce his own wife and marry her. 11

  Mary remained at Hunsdon, as yet undisturbed, though Dudley could hardly afford to allow her to go free much longer. Once Edward died he would move quickly to proclaim Jane queen and to crush all opposition; he could not afford to take the risk that Mary might resist, and would have to take her and keep her under guard. Mary's danger was clear to her, though she may or may not have heard how both the judges and the councilors argued against the altered succession and had to be coerced— by Edward's hoarse deathbed whispers and Dudley's most savage bullying —into signing the formal version of the document. She believed that there were many in the kingdom who would rally to her as soon as Edward died, some from loyalty to the church of Rome, some because they hated Dudley, many out of simple, strong allegiance to the legitimate Tudor line. To these legitimists, Jane Grey, though she was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, was not the rightful heir. Mary, whatever her faith, was their liege. As events were to prove, a generation of ever widening religious divergence had not dislodged Englishmen's adherence to the time-honored order of succession.

  Several days before Edward's death Mary was warned to move to safer quarters. At about the same time both she and Elizabeth were summoned to Edward's bedside. Elizabeth did nothing; Mary at first moved cautiously toward London. Then word reached her late on the evening of July 6 that her brother had finally expired, and at once she called for her small escort

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  and rode northward through the night toward Suffolk, where she had firm supporters among the gentry.

  Over the next two weeks Elizabeth waited at Hatfield while her sister and Northumberland contended for the throne. The duke had nearly every advantage. He held the Tower, arsenal of the kingdom and castle and court of the newly proclaimed Queen Jane. The treasury was his, and all the military forces of the kingdom; his men, ships and artillery seemed invincible. Yet Mary had the people's loyalty, and her own remarkable courage. From her headquarters at Framlingham Castle she rallied dozens, then hundreds, then thousands to her cause. Day after day nobles rode into her camp with their own private bodies of horsemen and footsoldiers. Provisions were contributed, and money, and arms; at the core of the gathering host were "innumerable companies of the common people."

  Dudley had miscalculated. He had sent his son Robert with three hundred men to seize Mary, but she had eluded him. Now an army had to be sent against her. On July 14 the duke himself rode out of London at the head of a hastily assembled force, full of misgivings about the disloyal Londoners and quarreling councilors he was leaving behind. He had not gone far before they betrayed him. News reached the council that Mary commanded a mighty force of 'men, and that sailors on the ships Dudley sent to guard the Norfolk coast had defected to her side. With no strong leader to take command, the councilors panicked, and began to imagine how the victorious Mary would treat them once she confronted them as queen. With Dudley and his army in Cambridge, hesitant to move farther toward Framlingham, on July 18 the council issued a reward for the duke's arrest, and the next day proclaimed Mary queen.

  What Elizabeth knew of this swift, bloodless rebellion no evidence records. She may have heard of the proclamation—unwelcomed by Londoners—of her sixteen-year-old second cousin Jane as queen, and of the fiery preacher Latimer's denunciation of herself and Mary as unfit to rule. She may have marveled at her sister's fortitude and eventual triumph as Dudley's supporters melted away around him. She may well have feared for Robert Dudley, whose abortive effort to capture Mary had been a key part of his father's venture and who was certain to suffer now that it had failed.

  Whatever her private thoughts, as soon as she knew that Dudley had capitulated in Cambridge and that Mary was on her way to claim her throne Elizabeth acted at once to show her loyalty. She wrote Mary a letter of congratulations, and prepared to meet her and ride with her in her triumphant state entry into the capital.

  In the cool of an August evening the new queen came to London, her steadfast soldiers rank on rank around her, her jubilant subjects singing and

  shouting and throwing their caps in the air for joy. She was all in regal purple, and her robes and baldric and headdress glowed with jewels. After more than twenty years of anguish, frustration and intermittent persecution Mary was queen, and there was an unmistakable glint of steely gloating in her eyes as she passed slowly, smiling, amid the crowds. More dangerous, from Elizabeth's point of view, was Mary's absolute conviction that God alone had preserved her for this moment, shielding her from harm and breaking her enemies so that she might restore his Catholic church in England. She whom miracles had brought to power would expect superhuman accomplishments of herself. What might she expect—or fear—from her clever, popular Protestant sister and heir apparent?

  In the dusk Elizabeth rode with her large train of attendants behind Mary, acknowledging the cheers that greeted her, turning to right and left to show off her handsomeness to advantage. She must not take too much attention from Mary on this day, she knew, yet it could do no harm to let the people see her at her best.

  My fortune hangs upon her brow; For as she smiles or frowns on me, So mus
t my blown affections bow.

  ueen Mary began her reign in a fever of dedicated labor. She was up Ey^daybreak each morning, and after dressing and hearing mass she went at once to her desk and began the long day's work of government. She worked straight on through the morning, never stopping to eat or drink, on through the early afternoon. At one or two o'clock she paused for a light dinner, then resumed her tireless perusal of the letters and warrants and other documents that accumulated throughout the day, conferring from time to time with foreign ambassadors, with her councilors and in particular with her chancellor Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester. Fighting off headaches, heart palpitations and what she called "her natural melancholy," she worked doggedly on through the evening, squinting at her papers in the candlelight, until it was time for vespers. Then, having heard the service and attended to her private devotions, she called in her chamber women to undress her and put her to bed.

  What fueled Mary's determined efforts was her conviction that she was doing God's work, not her own; she committed her hours of work, as she had long ago committed her heart and spirit, to the divine master who had brought her to the throne. Her one overriding goal was to make England a Catholic realm once more, as it had been in the untroubled days of her childhood. The mass, the sacraments, the religious customs embedded in

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  popular folklore had all to be restored. Most important, England had to return as an erring penitent to the fold of the pope in Rome.

  Mary's purpose inflated her pride. The ambassador who knew her best, the perceptive, shrewd if somewhat jaundiced envoy of Charles V, Simon Renard, observed that she was "inclined to talk about her exalted station," and that her natural greatheartedness and magnanimity went along with a ferociously regal self-assurance. In appearance too she was flamboyantly, almost overwhelmingly regal, her thin figure swathed in thickly embroidered velvets and heavy, jewel-encrusted cloth of gold and silver, her neck and fingers ablaze with gems. Visitors to court were dazzled by her array of jewels, yet according to the Venetian ambassador she would have bought many more had her treasury not been all but empty.

  As queen Mary enjoyed more personal liberty than she had ever known, and this too made her surgent and kept her at her labors. To be sure, she was surrounded by councilors and statesmen who sought to control her opinions and decisions—and none of whom, in this fall of 1553, seriously believed that she was capable of governing. But to this veteran of helpless suffering and deep sorrows, who by her own admission "had never known what it was to be happy," queenship came like a second birth, a new and auspicious beginning. It was her long-awaited chance to right former wrongs, to set straight what had gone awry, to serve God's purposes. And in serving his purposes she would heal her own wounds; for the first time, she would make her own happiness.

  To Elizabeth the spare, spinsterly queen with her manly voice and myopic frown must have seemed at once fragile and dangerous. Elizabeth had known Mary in many roles: as a bitter, disinherited elder sister, as a generous benefactress who gave her necklaces and brooches, yards of satin for gowns, money to gamble with at cards, as an anxious, beleaguered opponent of her brother and his councilors, as a would-be fugitive, driven in desperation to attempt escape from England. She knew Mary to be in very poor health—although in her early months as queen she seemed to abound in vitality—and to be highly strung and prone to nervousness and, so the men around her said, to hysteria. Yet she knew also that her sister had been immeasurably strengthened, at least in spirit, by her adversity and that she was so fixed in her convictions that to oppose her on matters of faith could be fatal.

  Elizabeth was to find Mary implacable, but not pitiless. She would rely more and more on that saving margin of pity in the months ahead.

  According to the Venetian ambassador Soranzo, Mary had indicated by "very clear signs" during Edward's reign that she did not love her sister. Once she became queen her lack of love became more pronounced, height-

  ened by her immediate danger—she was menaced by assassination threats, which she outbraved by continually showing herself in public—and by the dire warnings of the foreign ambassadors at her court. The French ambassador Noailles, opposed to Mary's pro-Hapsburg regime, tried to stir up the queen's suspicions against her sister as often as he could. Noailles was especially hospitable to English Protestants with plots against the Catholic crown, though he thought little of the schemes they devised, and never ceased to remind Mary that her Protestant subjects looked to Elizabeth as their chief hope. They meant to kidnap the princess, he told Mary, and marry her to some powerful nobleman who would then take up arms on his wife's behalf and put her on the throne in Mary's stead.

  But the French ambassador's warnings were slight compared to the admonitions of Renard, who as the envoy of Mary's imperial cousin Charles V was swiftly becoming the queen's most intimate consultant. Mary had four "certain and open enemies," Renard told her: the Protestants, Dudley's adherents and other rebellious malcontents, the French king, and her sister Elizabeth. That Elizabeth would make common cause with the Protestants created an especially potent danger, but the princess was dangerous enough in her own right. Renard perceived a quality in her—he called it "a power of enchantment"—which gave Elizabeth a strong hold over others and made them do her will. She was, quite simply, charismatic; like her father, she possessed an authority beyond the natural authority of royal lineage and self-confident temperament. She was mesmerizing, and her mesmerizing personality in combination with her shrewd and subtle mind made her dangerous indeed. 1

  What was equally disturbing, Elizabeth clearly had a mind of her own when it came to religion, and was accustomed to the give and take of theological argument. She "not only knows what the true religion is," wrote an ecstatic Protestant contemporary, "but has acquired such proficiency in Greek and Latin, that she is able to defend it by the most just arguments and the most happy talent; so that she encounters few adversaries whom she does not overcome." 2 To Mary, whose chief desire was to bring back the religion England had lost, Elizabeth's readiness to champion the reformed faith in argumentative debate was an unwelcome obstacle. It was bad enough that, for the time being at least, the daughter of Anne Boleyn should be heir apparent, and should share her mother's casual morality (as Mary persisted in believing); it was almost perverse that she should be a tenacious upholder of heresy as well.

  Elizabeth was given the place of highest honor in Mary's coronation procession, riding in a gorgeous litter along with Anne of Cleves. She wore a gown of cloth of silver, which no doubt set off her fresh beauty, and made

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  her easy to distinguish among the dozens of other female attendants, all of whom wore red. There was no hint, either at the coronation festivities or at the coronation itself, that the queen's sister was under any suspicion or out of favor. She dined at the royal table at the banquet on coronation night, watching with impassive interest when Mary's champion, following old custom, rode into the banqueting hall and threw down his gauntlet, challenging all present to dispute the reigning monarch's right to her title. She took her place at court, fulfilling her ceremonial duties while at the same time joining in the gossip (chiefly about whom the queen would marry) and making alliances among the women.

  Yet inevitably Elizabeth stood out, inevitably she was herself the subject of constant gossip, as well as of much deep discussion among the councilors and ambassadors. 'That heretic and schismatic sister," a papal envoy to England wrote of Elizabeth, "is in the heart and mouth of everyone."

  Her position, in fact, could hardly have been more perilous. As heir to the throne Elizabeth was at the mercy of any conspirator bold enough to act, yet she could do nothing to prevent such action nor to protect herself from becoming involved. Anyone could move, as Thomas Seymour had done, to exploit her; anyone could force her to challenge Mary's authority —as Northumberland had forced Jane Grey to do—and if he failed, as Northumberland had failed, Elizabeth would join Jane Grey in the Tower. It cou
ld happen at any moment, without warning. Elizabeth became accustomed to living with dread.

  Then one evening her nightmare became real. She was walking with Mary and a number of other courtiers down a long, dim gallery. They were on their way to vespers, and as they were within the protecting confines of the palace compound they were not accompanied by armed guardsmen. Suddenly they heard a loud voice cry "Treason!" and in an instant the courtiers ran off in all directions, no doubt thinking that it was an assassin's voice they had heard.

  Expecting to hear an arquebus fire next, or to see a body of desperate men come running into the gallery, Elizabeth panicked and stood where she was, trembling violently, her terror visible on her white face.

  Mary, who had developed something of the reckless courage of a combat soldier convinced that he cannot be killed, walked on unperturbed into the chapel to hear the service. After a time, when no further disturbance erupted, the courtiers crept back to their places around the queen. (The alarming cry, they found out later, had been directed to Mary's chancellor Bishop Gardiner and not to the queen herself.) Elizabeth, though, "could not compose her countenance"; her chest heaved from fright and her knees were weak. Mary's leading gentlewoman Susan Clarencieux, who had had

  much experience over the years in calming Mary, came up to Elizabeth and began massaging her stomach. Gradually she relaxed, the color came back into her cheeks and she rejoined the others.