Finding no solace whatever in this response—and Kat knew only too well
how skilled Elizabeth was at speaking many words yet saying nothing—she renewed her entreaties.
For the love of God, she implored, Elizabeth must commit herself to one of the many suitors who hung about the court. Let her settle on a worthy, responsible match, one befitting her rank and pleasing to her kingdom, for if she hesitated longer she would be courting divine punishment. God in his wrath might "call her away from this world before her time," Kat warned as sternly as she could—and having no heir of her own body, her legacy would be strife and chaos.
Elizabeth's response to this was not so sure-footed. She began by arguing loftily that God, who had preserved her and made her queen, would continue to provide for her—and for England—as he always had, her life or death being incidental to his inscrutable plan. But having said that, she turned to defending herself against the gossip that there was "something dishonorable" between her and Dudley, and the more she argued on her own behalf the more heated she became. She had given no one cause to accuse her, she insisted; she hoped she never would. Yet—and here self-pity intervened—"in this world she had had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy." Her implication was clear: surely she had earned what happiness Dudley brought her. And besides, if she showed him favor, he was deserving of it, for his "honorable nature and dealings." And in any case whatever went on between them went on in the presence of her ladies and maids of honor—an assertion which, whether it was true or not, Kat Ashley would probably have been able to confirm or refute.
Then came her final challenge, and it was just such remarks as this one that lent more than a whiff of truth to the rumors of her unchastity. "If she had ever had the will or had found pleasure in such a dishonorable life," Elizabeth said to Kat, "from which God preserve her, she did not know of anyone who could forbid her." 5
It was the last word, the ultimate royal pronouncement. And it must have made Kat despair.
The confrontation was overheard by Elizabeth's personal servants and its contents were reported, or more likely sold, to an agent of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, who along with the other continental sovereigns had a keen interest in the English queen's intimate life. Other information reached the emperor at the same time. All the bedchamber ladies swore that the queen had "most certainly never been forgetful of her honor," and that they had "never noticed anything." Yet Elizabeth continued to heap honors on her horse master, and to caress him "more markedly than is consistent with her reputation and dignity." She made him a Garter Knight, choosing him over the earl of Bedford, which everyone, especially
the earl, found to be a glaring injustice. She gave him several monasteries, a house at Kew, profitable commercial licenses and a princely gift of £12,000 in coins "as an aid toward his expenses."
In the usually parsimonious queen such generosity betokened extravagant love indeed—and extravagant folly. It was no wonder the Spanish ambassador reported that, along with Cecil, Dudley "ruled everything," and that King Philip had best ally himself quickly with the upstart horse master who would surely become king before long. 6
The queen's shameless attachment to a married man was only the most recent—albeit the most startling—evidence of her unpredictability and unconventionality. Was she simply reckless, thoughtless, "naturally changeable," as Feria believed her to be, or was she, at some deep level of cunning, perfectly in control of everything, including her own extravagant passions? "To say the truth I could not tell your majesty what this woman means to do with herself," Feria wrote to King Philip shortly before he left England, "and those who know her best know no more than I do." Feria's successor De Quadra was equally baffled. "I am not sure about her," he reported, "for I do not understand her." 7
What was evident by the spring of 1559 was that, for all her inexplicable proceedings, Elizabeth was having marked success in meeting and overcoming the intricate tangle of problems that faced her in her first six months as queen. Most pressing was the issue of religion, a sore spot on the body politic rubbed more raw by the shock and violence of the Marian burnings.
Protestants were a tiny minority in England in 1559, but many in that minority were in London, and when they massed in their hundreds to sing psalms in unison the effect was of one mighty voice, impassioned and indomitable. By the spring of 1559 the marks of Protestant anger against the Marian church were everywhere: church windows smashed, altars overturned and robbed of their ornaments, crucifixes with their faces cut and scratched, statues of the saints torn from their pedestals and burned or broken to bits. The capital was defaced, "as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city," and visitors noted the abundance of anti-Catholic books and ballads for sale, the plays performed in hostels and taverns which mocked the late queen and her husband and Cardinal Pole, the taunting of the clergy as they walked in procession through the streets. 8
That Elizabeth would placate the fervor of these zealots by restoring the Protestantism of her father and brother was in no doubt, but the situation called for caution. There might be anticlerical mummeries at court—one Epiphany play featured crows in cardinals' habits, asses dressed as bishops and wolves representing abbots—but in Parliament religious legislation had
at first to proceed slowly and conservatively, for the shape of the religious settlement was bound up with England's dangerous passage through the shoals of foreign war.
Once Elizabeth took the fatal step of breaking away from Rome, it was feared, the pope would excommunicate her and leave her realm "a prey to all the princes that will enter upon it." England was poor in soldiers, captains and arms, and lacked even the money to buy them, while her fortresses, Philip's chancellor Granvelle said, were scarcely "able to endure the breath of a cannon one day." With the pope's blessing the French and Spanish would pour into the country and dismember it—unless, of course, they could be persuaded that it could be taken by easier and less costly means.
Here Elizabeth showed her inbred mastery of intrigue. By keeping her ambassador in Rome, keeping the mass (with minor alterations) in her chapel and delaying the religious reform in Parliament she forestalled papal excommunication, meanwhile leading both Henry II in France and Philip in Spain to believe that England was theirs for the wooing. Philip wooed in earnest: he was the first and greatest of all Elizabeth's royal suitors, and for several months she allowed him to think that, despite all, she might marry him. At the same time, however, she was treating secretly with an agent of King Henry—who was said to be hiding in Parry's chambers in the palace—and allowing the French to hope that she might break with her dangerous Spanish ally if only King Henry would be reasonable about the return of Calais.
With the French and Spanish thus distracted she continued to muster men and gather war materials, "scraping money together from all sides, paying nothing and giving nothing to her people, and spending very little" so that she could begin to restore her credit with the moneylenders in Antwerp who might finance her warfare. Early in March the recruiters beat their drums in the streets of London and the muster rolls grew longer, while English agents in Flanders ordered gunpowder and bowstaves and corselets and made solemn pledges to pay for them a month or two hence. Berwick Castle was fortified against the French in Scotland, though the expense of the repairs threatened to imperil the treasury's fragile solvency. 9
In fact Elizabeth had all along been gambling, not on war but on peace, and at the last moment, on Palm Sunday, March 18, word reached her that her negotiators on the continent had arrived at an accommodation to end the hostilities. Calais, unfortunately, was to remain in French hands for at least another eight years; after that, in lieu of returning it to England, the French agreed to pay five hundred thousand crowns as compensation. But there was the hope that the territory might after all be returned, or that
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before then the amity between the French and Spanish might dissolve once again.
With peace
in hand the pace of parliamentary action on the religious settlement quickened, and toward the end of April the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were passed. The queen became head of the church in England—though she preferred to use the title "supreme governor"—and King Edward's second Prayer Book of 1552 (with a few modifications) was reintroduced. To attend mass became a crime punishable by imprisonment —life imprisonment if the offender repeated his crime three times. Catholic England was officially dead, though it was to flourish underground for centuries. It was a day of anger and disillusionment for the Spaniards. "We have lost a kingdom," Feria wrote bitterly, "body and soul." 10
Summer brought a temporary respite from the tensions of statecraft, the first such respite Elizabeth had known as queen. For a week she entertained a delegation of French envoys who came to England to ratify the peace treaties, feasting them so lavishly it was hard to believe she was nearly bankrupt. The magnificent palace of Whitehall became a garden of delights, with hunting parties in the park and sumptuous outdoor banquets. One feast was spread in the palace gardens, the tables laid in an open-air gallery enclosed with hangings of gold and silver brocade and with "wreaths of flowers and leaves of most beautiful designs, which gave a very sweet odor and were marvellous to behold." Elizabeth presided in regal robes of purple velvet, adorned "with so much gold and so many pearls and jewels that it added much to her beauty." 11 The French ladies managed to upstage their hostess; their broad-beamed farthingales, no doubt cut in a fashion not yet seen in England, were so wide that they overflowed the banquet tables, leaving so little room that some of the English had to sit "on the ground on the rushes" to eat. But English robes were of perennial beauty—or so Elizabeth seemed to say when she presented a noble French boy with some of the late King Edward's long unused finery.
June was filled with "musical performances and other entertainments," singing and dancing and, in the evenings, trips on the river in the royal barge. On the twenty-first of June the queen left London to begin her summer journey, or progress, through the countryside, but at first she went no farther than Greenwich, where a vast military spectacle had been arranged.
As the queen looked on, surrounded by the ambassadors and other court notables, some fourteen hundred soldiers marched onto the lawn, "mustering in their arms, all the gunners in shirts of mail." With banners flying and guns and pikes at the ready, they stood to attention while Dudley and others rode up and down reviewing them and dividing them into two
armies for a mock battle. At a signal the skirmishing began, to the martial sound of trumpets and drums and flutes. The soldiers rushed on one another as if in earnest, "the guns discharged on one another, the morris pikes encountered together with great alarm; each ran to their weapons again, and then they fell together as fast as they could, in imitation of close fight." 12 Elizabeth showed herself 'Very merry" at the sight, and let it be known that the muster, and the tilting which followed it, were done "to her great delight and satisfaction."
There were more festivities in the coming days. The queen went to Woolwich to launch a fine new ship for her navy, christened the Elizabeth, and returned to Greenwich to watch more military games—among them a "great casting of fire, and shooting of guns, till twelve at night." The recent peace, these exercises proclaimed, had not dimmed England's warlike spirit; let other nations take warning.
Elizabeth played her part in these events with her customary exuberance, showing particular excitement whenever Dudley rode by in the lists or on the parade ground. Yet her vibrancy had a manic quality; more and more it was nervous energy that fueled her as the strain of a heady romantic passion combined with the increasing pressures of disapproving gossip and demeaning advisers to drain her vitality and lower her spirits. Worry over her health, which had never really been strong, increased the longer she delayed in choosing a husband and settling the succession. Her physicians bled her from the foot and arm in June, though from what cause no one recorded. In August she developed a "burning fever" which continued to vex her for several weeks, its onset coinciding closely with Kat Ashley's scolding, imploring plea that she put Dudley aside and take a suitable husband.
Every day, she confided to one foreign envoy, she was pestered with petitions from her subjects "desiring her for her honor's sake and for the welfare of her kingdom" to give up her single life. Everyone had a case to make—Kat Ashley, Parry, Cecil, her councilors. Some favored a foreign match, others an Englishman, still others, and their numbers were growing, anyone but Dudley. Most anguishing of all, there was pressure from Dudley himself, who wanted not only her heart but a share in her rule, and whose ardent wooing set her at odds with herself and made her want to yield to him her hard-won independence.
By mid-August Elizabeth appeared to be "somewhat dejected," and her ladies confided that she had "been quite melancholy in her room of nights and had not slept half an hour." Never very clear-headed in the mornings, she now showed herself "quite pale and weak" on arising, and the thought of facing the array of English and foreign suitors who thronged her presence
chamber and vied for her attention cannot have soothed her sleeplessness. 13
Besides Dudley, there were two principal English wooers. The earl of Arundel, a fit but unprepossessing man of middle age, was excessively hurried in his speech and ill-considered in his judgments. He had his ancient lineage to recommend him, but little else; Elizabeth could, and did, enjoy his palace of Nonsuch, which her father had leased to him in gratitude for his services, without making him her consort.
The other Englishman was, potentially, a far better match for Elizabeth. Sir William Pickering was a handsome, urbane pleasure-seeker, a man of the world who had traveled widely and knew many languages. In sophistication he was more than a match for the queen; he liked women and was comfortable with them, and was rumored "to have enjoyed the intimacy of many and great ones." In a court full of timid flatterers and ambitious schemers Pickering stood out as a man who went his own way and lived his own life, amiably and somewhat mysteriously. Diplomatic missions kept him on the continent a great deal, but when he was in London it was noted that, despite his small fortune, he "lived at times in great state," "like a prince all alone in a stately house."
It became clear that Pickering intrigued Elizabeth when, on his return to England in the spring of 1559, she met with him privately for some five hours, keeping their meeting a secret from Dudley, who was hunting at Windsor. Dudley sensed the rivalry, and was seen to show less friendliness toward Pickering than in the past; odds-makers at court, accepting bets on all the potential suitors then in residence, were posting Pickering at four to one. 14 But appearances deceived, and in fact Sir William was not a serious contender. He did, however, emerge from his long discussion with the queen to make an insightful observation. He knew women well, and was a good judge of the true intentions that lay behind their coquetry. And Elizabeth, he felt sure, "meant to die a maid." 15
Of the foreign suitors, several, such as the French duke de Nemours and Duke William of Savoy, were not considered worthy of a wager. Others mounted such elaborate displays of courtship that they could not be dismissed, despite their outlandishness. Prince Eric of Sweden—who became King Eric XIV in 1560—sent a delegation of his countrymen to the English court, all of them wearing red robes with badges showing a crimson velvet heart pierced with an arrow. Their wooing was as clumsy and obvious as their liveries, though more welcome: they scattered expensive gifts among the court notables and chief servants, calculating that the sheer weight of their silver would be sufficient to win the queen's favor. Everyone was showered with costly bribes, from the maid of honor who carried a
polite greeting to the Swedish ambassador and came away with a trinket worth three hundred crowns to the queen herself, whose "grand present of tapestries and ermine" was meant only to hint at the "many millions" she could expect to receive if she married Prince Eric.
But the suit was hopeless. To English eyes the bearlike Swedes were ridiculously fu
nny and ill-bred, and thick-headed besides. Their appeals were so earnest and their English so poor that they failed to notice when the courtiers made fun of them, and no one joked more mercilessly or laughed harder at the jokes than the queen herself. In the end, though Prince Eric paid Elizabeth the compliment of sending his younger brother as an envoy, with a large and imposing retinue, she turned the offer down —ostensibly because she found the deportment of Swedish royalty appalling. "How should we ever have agreed to such a difference in manners," she remarked in dismay. "For, however much I might accommodate myself, it is greatly to be feared that they would never give up their habits." Even after the dejected northerners returned home she continued to refer to "the barbaric king of Sweden" with fastidious contempt.
Of course, Elizabeth knew full well that the Swedes were not disinterested wooers, and that what lay behind Prince Eric's professions of love— besides his eagerness to add England to his own lands—was a promise of French support and allegiance. For if the queen chose Eric she would refuse the much more tempting offer of a Hapsburg match—something the French, despite their recent rapprochement with the imperialists, had every reason to oppose.
It was the Hapsburg candidate, in fact, who appeared to stand the best chance of winning Elizabeth's hand. He was Archduke Charles, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand and reputed to be, at least from the standpoint of England's interests in Europe, "the best match in Christendom" for her. His brother Ferdinand she dismissed for his overweening Catholicism and his illegible handwriting—"the worst she had ever seen" —not to mention his large and stocky German concubine. But young Charles was reported to be, "for a man, beautiful and well-faced," with a small waist and a broad chest and "well-thighed and well-legged" besides. His stoop was not noticeable when he was on horseback, and he had come through an attack of smallpox with remarkably little disfigurement. Never mind, De Quadra told her, that others had presented the archduke as a "young monster." The truth was entirely otherwise. He did not have an enormous head, nor was he really as addicted to hunting, or as "unfit to govern," as rumor held. Best of all, he showed marked leanings toward Protestantism, and if the queen liked his portrait well enough, he might be willing to come to England to woo her in person.
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