In fact it was Alencon's audacity and determination to win dignity and, in particular, military glory that had prompted the looming dynastic tie between Tudor and Valois. With a pause in the bloody civil war in France, Alencon had offered to fight with the Dutch Calvinists who were rebelling against Philip II in the Netherlands. The situation there had become extremely volatile. Spanish soldiers had kept a stranglehold on the Low Countries provinces during the first half of the 1570s, but later in the decade the Protestant rebels—aided by English supplies, English volunteers, and large sums of English money—had made headway and achieved a measure of self-government and freedom of religion. Hapsburg power waxed and waned, and each fluctuation offered an opportunity for military adventuring. Leicester, though graying now and pot-bellied, dreamed of renewing in Flanders the exploits of his youth, and boasted that he would soon "lead the greatest army to leave English shores in forty years." 5 Leicester's dreams were thwarted for the present, but Alencon, who had made himself unwelcome in France because of his treachery and troublesome ambition, was free to pursue his, provided he was able to pay for his adventuring himself. With his proposal of marriage to Elizabeth came a request for a loan of three hundred thousand ducats.
From the English point of view, the young duke's enterprise was unset-
tling. Gratified as she might be by any strengthening of the forces opposing Spanish power, Elizabeth did not want the Netherlands to fall to the French, who had never ceased to scheme to use that region as a base from which to take over Scotland and, through Scotland, to take over England. If Alencon was only making a personal bid for glory in Flanders, then he was probably harmless, at least for the moment. But if he was a stalking horse for his brother, then his Netherlands undertaking was a threat, and she would either have to oppose him or—radical solution though it was— marry him.
Easter came and went, and there was no royal wedding. But a marriage treaty was being drawn up, with the old contract between Philip and Mary Tudor used as a model. The same issues arose now as those which had preoccupied the English negotiators when Mary married Philip: Was the bridegroom to be called king of England? What lands was he to have in England, and what dukedoms, and what was to become of him if, as was expected, his wife died before he did? What was to be done about the bridegroom's Catholicism? Was he to be allowed to practice it, and if so, could his foreign servants practice it too?
The councilors attended to their work, distracted by the increasingly vocal opposition to the marriage by the people and by their own political feuds and self-interested aims. They had been liberally bribed by Simier, and a number were in the pay of the Spaniards as well; beyond this, they had to pay heed to what opinions Elizabeth preferred them to hold, for they relied on her to dispense patronage and continue to confer on them the offices that provided their livelihood. (The Catholics among them she slighted, making them better targets for bribes from abroad.) Sussex, who with Cecil favored the marriage, did so almost as much out of revenge against his old enemy Leicester as from loyalty to the queen's wishes. Walsingham, who had become a very important and very opinionated voice in the council, was torn. As a radical Protestant he abhorred the thought of a Catholic consort for Elizabeth, yet as a vehement advocate of English intervention in the Netherlands against the Satanic forces of Spain he had to welcome Alencon for his military ambitions, and for the weight of the Valois name and throne. Leicester was angry, wounded and plainly jealous of Simier. He was moody toward Elizabeth and played on her emotions by taking to his bed with illness just as she was about to issue a passport to Alencon for his journey to England.
Plainly Elizabeth was waiting for the councilors to advise her to marry, as they had, consistently and cantankerously, for twenty years. She was prepared to overlook Alencon's religion (he could worship in private in his chapel), his demand to be crowned king, his insistence that an English port
be given to France and that three thousand French footsoldiers—a small invading army—be allowed to guard it. She did not even express any lasting offense when told that Alencon would change the royal style to "Francis and Elizabeth, King and Queen of England," though at first she did find this reduction in her dignity somewhat hard to accept, and was pointedly rude to Simier in consequence. But her pique was short-lived, and before long her infatuation returned. Suddenly, unaccountably, against all odds Elizabeth was ready to get married, and the last obstacle she expected to encounter was the opposition of her male advisers.
Yet oppose her they did, emerging from wearying discussions that lasted from two in the afternoon till two in the morning without a consensus in favor of the marriage. Most were in fact against it; as a body, all they were willing to do was to summarize the arguments for and against, leaving the ultimate decision to the queen herself. As to the specific terms put forward by the French, the councilors had a definite opinion. They called Simier into the council chamber and told him just how exorbitant they thought his master's demands were. The Frenchman was outraged; he jumped up in a fury and walked out, slamming the door angrily behind him.
The French did not give up, however. Before the week was over they were renewing their efforts to win over the recalcitrant councilors. Alencon sent Leicester two handsome Spanish horses as a gift, and Simier had orders to woo the others with "ever}' possible means," for which he was to have a large sum of money. (The money could not have been more welcome; Simier had spent all he brought with him, and had been reduced to pawning some of his jewels in order to pay for the banquets and gifts he continued to offer the English.)
Elizabeth was far from dissuaded by her advisers' lack of endorsement for her marriage, yet she was noticeably disheartened. Her spirits sank, and for fear of serious consequences several of her favorite ladies were brought to court to keep her company. They were lodged in the palace itself, an unusual if not quite unprecedented practice, and were expected to "entertain" the queen and keep her from depression.
No doubt she was struggling within herself, for though she had everyone convinced of her sincerity in encouraging Alencon's suit it cannot have been easy for her to wait for events to unfold. Her uncooperative councilors frustrated her, as did the drawn-out process of negotiation and the long wait for the sight of her bridegroom's reputedly unlovely face. There was mounting evidence that her subjects were angry over the proposed union with France, and their protests were taking disquieting forms. And even if her choice was politically wise, what would it mean for her personally? Would marriage give her joy and fulfillment, or would it mean humiliating subordi-
nation and the loss of what authority she had built up over two decades as queen?
Privately, in her inner chamber surrounded by her women, Elizabeth reiterated her determination to make Alencon her husband. She was by turns heavyhearted, agitated, truculent and infatuated, "burning with impatience" for the arrival of the one suitor who had actually agreed to come to England to be inspected without insisting that a marriage treaty be signed first. 'They need not think that it is going to end in this way," she said, responding to the negatives from the council chamber. "I must get married." 6
But the closer marriage came, the more dangerous it began to seem. Pamphlets warning Elizabeth of the perils of closer ties with the French appeared mysteriously in her bedchamber, placed there by unseen hands, and with them were theological writings predicting that if the queen did not give up her claim to be head of the church, "God would punish her within the year." Messages and warnings were surreptitiously left where she would be sure to find them. On one occasion she was taking her usual morning walk in the garden and found an unsigned letter "thrown into the doorway"; its contents so disturbed her that she hurried at once to Leicester's house, staying there all day and night and canceling at least one of her palace engagements the following day. 7
In addition to the anonymous warnings there was thunderous disapproval from the preachers who came to court to exhort Elizabeth every Sunday. In sermon after sermon they spoke "very
violently" on the evils of marriage to a foreigner and a Catholic, and to nearly everyone's surprise the object of these perorations tolerated the torrent of denunciation. She tolerated it, that is, until one Sunday when the cleric unwisely chose to remind his sovereign of her late half-sister Mary. What untold harm, he said accusingly, had been done when Mary chose the Catholic Spaniard Philip for her husband! What suffering that foreign union had brought to England, with hundreds of martyrs burned at the stake and thousands more forced into exile for the sake of their beliefs. He warmed to his subject, calling up images of fiery destruction and no doubt reawakening in Elizabeth all her old hatred and resentment of her sister. She was furious that he should touch her sore spot, even more furious that he should suggest any comparison between the suave, ambitious young Alencon and the cold-hearted tyrant Philip II.
Crackling with suppressed anger, Elizabeth did not wait for the sermon to end but rose and left the chapel as soon as the ill-advised preacher had completed his survey of the previous reign. He was still speaking when she and her crowd of attendants swept out, and observers turned to one
another to remark that such an abrupt royal departure had never been seen before.
Criticism was one thing; attempted assassination another. One day when the queen and Simier were in her barge on the river there was the dull crack of a gun. One of the royal bargemen cried out; he had been hit in both arms, and he slumped down in a spreading pool of blood. He had been sitting only a few feet from Elizabeth, and no one doubted that the shot —fired from a neighboring boat—had been meant to hit her, or possibly the Frenchman.
Amid the panic the queen tore the scarf from around her neck and threw it to the bargeman to use as a bandage. She shouted her reassurance, telling him "to be of good cheer," for she would make certain he was well cared for. There were no further shots, and the barge quickly put ashore.
Apparently no one considered the possibility that the gun might have gone off accidentally (though that is what happened, as it turned out). A similar misadventure had marred the lavish entertainments at Kenilworth four years earlier. Elizabeth had been hunting, when an arrow sped past her, barely missing her, and the huntsmen had seized a man with a crossbow, taking him to be an assassin. Then the incident had been variously interpreted, with the crossbowman denounced by some as a traitor and dismissed by others as a harmless hunter who missed his aim while shooting at a deer. 8 Then there had been room for doubt, but now, with the queen about to undertake the most startling gamble of her reign amid threats and protests and dire warnings of imminent peril, she had to assume the worst.
She did not cut herself off from her subjects during these tense months in the first half of 1579, but she did take fewer risks. A special procession through the capital was scheduled, with the queen riding in state over London Bridge—something she had done only once since her accession. The lord mayor was put in charge of ensuring the safety of the royal party and the smooth running of the official and unofficial welcomes. All was in readiness when, the night before she was to make her triumphal entry, a messenger brought the lord mayor a letter from the queen. He must not let a great crowd gather, she wrote; let the citizens turn out in modest numbers to greet her.
Half an hour later another messenger arrived. Let none of the citizens in the streets be armed when she rode past, Elizabeth commanded. Shortly afterward there was a third message. Elizabeth had decided not to come across London Bridge after all; she would go through the city by water, as usual. 9
In the end the greatest act of treachery came not from an anonymous assassin but from the most trusted of the queen's intimates, Leicester.
For years the earl had led a disorderly, unsatisfactory private life, full of intrigue and mired in gossip. He was the last of his line—and a good thing too, many said, considering his disgraceful ancestry—and he wanted a son. Not a bastard son, but a legitimate heir, born of a recognized marriage to a woman willing to live down the inevitable disapproval of the queen. He had a number of liaisons (his enemies counted dozens), and a long-lasting mistress, Douglas Sheffield, who bore him two children, but his preferred choice as a wife was Lettice Knollys, the queen's beautiful cousin. They were secretly married sometime after Lettice's husband died in 1576, and two years later, when she was heavily pregnant with Leicester's child, her father Francis Knollys demanded that a more formal private ceremony take place. It was a great risk, for the queen was sure to discover the truth in time, yet Knollys did not trust the notorious womanizer Leicester to have carried through a valid wedding ceremony; he had to see with his own eyes that his daughter was properly married.
Simier found out about the marriage, and told Elizabeth, only weeks before Alencon was due to arrive in England. She was already tense and overwrought with fear and expectation; the discovery of Leicester's treachery shocked, then enraged her. It was like Leicester to act behind her back, his pusillanimity was as contemptible as his deceit. As for Lettice, that traitorous "she-wolf," no words were harsh enough to describe her. Leicester, though, would have reason to fear for his life. She ordered him seized and shut up in an isolated tower in Greenwich park, to await stricter imprisonment in the Tower of London.
Angry and wounded though she was, and eager for revenge, Elizabeth must have glimpsed a kind of perverse symmetry in the courses her life and Leicester's were taking. It was said among the people that they had been born in the same hour, so that their lives were attuned from birth; now, having reached their mid-forties, both had decided to marry. And just as in fact the earl was a year older than the queen, so he had married the previous year; she would follow in her turn. There was a melancholy appropriateness about Leicester's marriage, for however she might lament his loss as a potential husband his union with Lettice Knollys left her completely free to choose elsewhere. However tenuous her enduring romantic tie to him had been, it was now formally severed. She could marry Alencon with nothing weighing on her heart.
On August 17 Alencon arrived. There was no public welcome, for though the fact of his visit was an open secret, it was unofficial, and no one was allowed to speak of it. The secrecy, and the private, clandestine meetings between Elizabeth and her boyish admirer added a strong erotic overtone to their encounter. No one recorded what went on at their first
meeting, whether the duke played the ardent, aggressive wooer or let Elizabeth set the tone, her warmth and heartiness breaking through the brittle artificiality of her overadorned, overrouged person. They were prepared to find one another at least tolerable; in fact they took pleasure in each other's company, and ended by becoming infatuated.
'The queen is delighted with Alencon, and he with her," the Spanish ambassador Mendoza reported with chagrin. She was "much taken with his good parts," she found him pleasing in manner and, presumably, acceptable in appearance. In short, "she admired him more than any man." Simier was her Monkey, Alencon became her Frog. He presented her with a brooch commemorating his nickname—a golden frog sitting on a golden flower, with the duke's face painted on the frog's back.
To the men of affairs who were accustomed to keeping themselves informed about events at court the near-total privacy of the wooing couple was maddening. Not even the council members were involved. They "shut their eyes and avoided going to court," while letting it be known that they disapproved of the entire proceeding and were disturbed about it. The very fact that the queen was in sole control of her dealings with Alencon and Simier seemed to indicate the uniquely serious character of these marriage negotiations. "Many people who were wont to smile at it now see that appearances are all in favor of its taking place and believe it," Mendoza wrote.
Elizabeth was enjoying every minute of the intrigue, both for its own sake and because it was distinctly unsettling to her councilors. She used Alencon to tease her courtiers, entertaining them at a ball where the duke was hidden, conspicuously, behind a tapestry. As he looked on from his concealment she danced for him—more vigorously and more often than she usually did
—and made secret signals to him that called even more attention to his presence.
The wooing, the game of secrecy and the erotic attentions of the personable young duke energized Elizabeth and drew her further and further along the path toward final commitment. She saw in Alencon the "Defender of Belgian Liberty Against the Tyranny of Spain"—the title the Netherlanders had bestowed on him. He was small but mighty; had he not declared, when warned that the French would never accept him as king if he married Elizabeth, that "he would look upon as his enemy any person who advised him to the contrary"?
She must marry, she had declared. Since she must, let it be this man. There were no more wry smiles, no more self-deprecating remarks. ("What a fine idea for an old woman like me to talk of marriage!" she had said only a few months earlier.) Let the closing stages of the negotiations begin.
Alencon's coming had been private, but his parting with Elizabeth was public, and "very tender." She gave him a handsome jewel, and in return he slipped onto her slender finger a sparkling diamond ring whose worth was estimated at ten thousand crowns. The afterglow of their courtship was vivid. For weeks after the duke's departure Elizabeth talked of his virtues, his ''good qualities," even the goodness of her future mother-in-law Catherine de' Medici, whose character and policies she had always before despised.
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