Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  It is impossible to be certain what had caused Mary’s phantom pregnancy. She had for years suffered menstrual abnormalities and was by this time very thin. Her symptoms are suggestive, however, of autoimmune hyperthyroid disease, which affects a sufferer’s mental state, and this includes documented cases of delusional pregnancy.20

  The public were relieved to see Mary at the end of August when she and Philip rode from Hampton Court through London to Greenwich. They thronged the streets and as she came into view there were great shouts in acclamation. But everything Mary had fought so hard to achieve was now unravelling. Will-power, courage, intelligence, ruthlessness; these could do nothing to change her fertility, or improve her health. No one except Mary now believed it was still possible she would have a child, and it was evident Elizabeth, established in law as Mary’s successor, would one day succeed her.

  Two days later Mary bid farewell to her husband, who was obliged to return to the Continent. His father now wished to end ruling his vast empire and retire into private life. In October 1555 Charles V renounced his sovereignty of the Netherlands in favour of Philip, and in January 1556 the crown of Spain.21 Philip suggested his distressed wife immerse herself in matters of business, but Mary dreaded facing what she knew was coming. Her enemies scented weakness, for without a child Mary’s plans had no future, and soon she would be facing repeated attempts on her throne and her life.

  32

  A FLICKERING LIGHT

  QUEEN MARY WAS RARELY SEEN IN PUBLIC IN THE SUMMER OF 1556. In private, however, she appeared drawn and was sleeping badly. A plot to overthrow her had emerged that spring and left her badly shocked. When a conspirator from inside the exchequer informed on his friends several senior Protestant gentry were exposed. Ten were executed, but it had since emerged that members of Elizabeth’s household had known of the plot. They included Elizabeth’s governess Kat Astley, whom the princess was said to love with a strength ‘to be wondered at’.1 Kat was sent to the Tower for several months, and to Elizabeth’s distress, was then dismissed from service. However, Mary also had to reconsider what to do with Elizabeth.

  Philip wrote begging Mary to do nothing to imperil Elizabeth’s future accession for, in default of her claim, the English throne would pass to Mary, Queen of Scots and into French hands. Mary decided, reluctantly, to try and make amends with her sister. Two servants delivered a diamond ring to Elizabeth as a mark of Mary’s faith in her. But then in July yet another plot was uncovered. A schoolmaster in Yorkshire claimed to be Courtenay and announced his intention to marry Elizabeth. It was a further reminder that Elizabeth was the intended beneficiary of all the plots against Mary. The pretender was executed in short order and the real Courtenay died in Padua in September. But when, in November, a plan by leading Protestants to surrender Calais to the French was uncovered, Mary’s depression worsened. She spent her time, it was said, ‘in tears, regrets and writing letters to bring back her husband’. Philip replied to her in as kindly a manner as he could, but he had his own kingdoms to run and his demands that Elizabeth be married to an Imperial ally were painful reminders of Mary’s childlessness. After reading one such letter she threw her mirror across the room in self-disgust.

  Yet Mary also did her best to do her duty to her husband and her country, calling Elizabeth to court that Christmas. The princess arrived in London with 200 liveried men on horseback and was cheered through the City in scenes reminiscent of Mary’s visit to her gravely ill brother in February 1553. Elizabeth had written telling Mary she wished that there were such ‘good surgeons for making anatomies of hearts that they might show my thoughts to your Majesty’. These thoughts were all loyal, Elizabeth promised, and she assured her sister her deeds would supply what ‘my thoughts cannot declare’.2 Mary was now to take her up on that. Having received her with great honour and displays of kindness, she asked Elizabeth to accept a marriage with Philip’s cousin, the Duke of Savoy.3 Elizabeth would later smile at the memory of her conversation with her sister.4 Mary would not force an unwanted marriage on her and she therefore had the upper hand. Three days later Elizabeth headed back to Hatfield in Hertfordshire, still happily un-betrothed. When Philip wrote insisting Mary try harder to bring Elizabeth round, Mary shot back that perhaps he should come to England to help her achieve this feat. When Philip did at last return, in March 1557, he brought his illegitimate sister, Margaret of Palma, as well as Christina of Denmark, to also set them on the task of Elizabeth’s marriage.

  To Mary, Philip was again the attentive spouse. ‘His manner and character are such as to capitivate anyone’, a Venetian recorded, and in truth ‘no one could have been a better husband to her and so good a one’. Mary saw increasingly, however, ‘that no one believes in the possibility of her having progeny, so that day by day she sees her authority, and the respect induced by it, diminish’.5 While Mary always received Elizabeth ‘with every sort of graciousness and honour’ and never conversed ‘with her on any but agreeable subjects’, it was clear that in seeing her sister Mary was transported back to the humiliations of her youth and was tormented by the knowledge this ‘illegitimate child of a criminal’ held the eyes of the nation as her successor.6 Elizabeth never forgot Mary’s humiliation, or the dangers Mary faced, and she was determined she would never be placed in a similar situation. Meanwhile, to Philip’s continued frustration, Elizabeth easily batted away the enticements of his sister and Christina of Denmark to marry his cousin. She had no intention of limiting her future freedom of action.

  Philip had better luck in his desire to engage his reluctant wife in his war against France. Shortly after his arrival in England there was yet another plot against Mary. A group of between thirty and a hundred Protestant exiles landed at Scarborough from a French ship. The traitors were rounded up and executed with twenty-four others. But Mary had grown tired of French provocation and, encouraged by her husband, she declared war on France that summer. She certainly had a better cause for war with France than her father had ever had.

  There was early success for Mary’s armies with the English capturing Saint-Quentin along with their Spanish allies. ‘Both sides fought most choicely’, a Spanish officer wrote, ‘and the English best of all.’7 But the war had triggered a falling out between Mary and France’s papal ally, Paul IV. This did not amount to a religious division between the papacy and England, but it was a grave political row nonetheless. Born before the battle of Bosworth, Paul IV was an ultraconservative Neapolitan, violently anti-Spanish and so bad-tempered it was said that sparks flew from his heels as he walked. To punish Mary for her war he recalled Cardinal Pole to Rome, intending to try him as a heretic for his past efforts to find an accommodation with the Lutherans on the theology of justification by faith alone. Mary, astonished at the Pope’s ingratitude for all Pole’s work in healing the schism, refused to send him.

  Relations with the Vatican embittered, things also now went badly in France. On New Year’s Day 1558, 27,000 French troops attacked Calais, which was quickly lost. Although Calais had long cost as much to defend as it made in trade, this was a national humiliation; a reminder of all England had lost in France since the death of Henry V, and it marked the beginning of a terrible year. An influenza epidemic struck down a population weakened by successive harvest failures. Up to 18 per cent of the English population succumbed to sickness or hunger in 1557–8: the highest death rate recorded in England for another 200 years and equivalent to about ten million deaths today.8 With Philip absent again in Europe, Mary’s health also worsened with bouts of insomnia, depression, loss of vision, headaches and weakness.9 She had another false pregnancy and in March, when she wrote her will, she bequeathed her throne to the child she insisted she was carrying eight months after last seeing her husband. By then, the more hard-headed Elizabeth was already planning with the surveyor of her estates, the thirty-seven-year-old Sir William Cecil, for Mary’s death and her own accession.

  Aged twenty-four, ‘her forehead large and fair’, her nose ‘so
mewhat rising in the midst’ and the whole ‘compass of her countenance somewhat long’, foreign observers found Elizabeth ‘proud and haughty’. She defended her mother’s honour by arguing that Anne Boleyn had refused to live with the king unless they were married. She also defended her own, claiming that since her parents had believed themselves to be married when she was born, she was legitimate. Above all she ‘gloried’ in her father, ‘with everybody saying she resembled him more than the queen does and he therefore always liked her’.10 She was certainly proving as capable as her father in spotting a good servant.

  Cecil had served as Secretary of State to Edward VI and Jane Grey, and even his enemies thought him ‘able and virtuous’.11 He was a man who inspired confidence, he had a proven record as a talented political operator, and was adept at keeping his hand hidden. Although an ideological Protestant he was often at Mary’s court, playing the Catholic, dining with Cardinal Pole, while keeping Elizabeth abreast of political developments and dangers. He may have been her principal informant during the crisis of Edward VI’s last months and Jane’s accession. He certainly played such a role over that summer of 1558 as Mary’s health declined. By October, when it was accepted the ailing queen was dying, Elizabeth’s and Cecil’s plans were in place.

  Mary did not place any difficulties in her sister’s way. On the contrary she added a codicil to her will on the 28th confirming that her successor was her heir in statute. On 7 November she went further, and named Elizabeth before a parliamentary delegation. Whatever Mary thought of Elizabeth, she had no desire to leave England at risk of civil strife. Elizabeth had sworn she was a Catholic and, although Mary surely did not believe her, she chose to leave the rest to God.

  Philip was unable to come to England to attend on his dying wife. He was caught up in the funeral arrangements for his father Charles V, and dispatched his Anglophile Captain of the Guard, the Count of Feria, in his place. Feria arrived in London on 9 November to find Mary’s councillors very fearful of how Elizabeth would treat them once she became queen. The next day Feria went to see Elizabeth at the house of a neighbour near Hatfield. She was much less serious than Mary: not as personally kind, but funnier, and not as terrifyingly implacable, but shrewd, as the ambassador discovered. They had dinner and ‘we laughed and enjoyed ourselves a good deal’, he recalled. Nevertheless the private meeting he had with her after dinner was a glum experience for the Spaniard. Feria tried to persuade Elizabeth that she owed her crown to Philip, who had protected her life and her place in the line of succession, despite her links to plots against Mary. Elizabeth made it clear, however, that she felt her sister had treated her most unjustly and that she had the ordinary people of England to thank for her present position; neither Philip ‘nor the nobility of this realm had any part in it’.

  Elizabeth had not forgotten the events of 1553 when the ordinary people had backed the Tudor sisters, while the political elite had supported Jane Grey. ‘She is a very vain and clever woman’, Feria concluded, adding perceptively, ‘She is determined to be governed by no one’.12

  Mary died aged forty-two during a private Mass in St James’s Palace on 17 November. Pole, who died the same day, had described her life as ‘like a flickering light buffeted by raging winds for its utter extinction, but always kept burning by her innocence and lively faith’.13 Even Philip, who had not loved her, felt ‘regret’ at her passing. Mary was unlucky that her health had broken down within not much more than a year of her accession and in the very public manner of a phantom pregnancy. She had failed in the essential task of having a child and, as she suspected, Elizabeth would undo much of her religious legacy – but not all. Although England was not to be a Catholic country by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Mary’s Counter-Reformation had restored a Catholic identity that would survive centuries of propaganda and persecution.

  Inevitably Mary’s reputation would suffer from being recorded by the eventual Protestant victors of the English Reformation struggle. The result is that she is remembered better for her failures than her successes. But Elizabeth respected her sister’s abilities as a queen and recognised the difficulties she had faced. Mary’s rule had also set a template for Elizabeth in the role of an English queen regnant.

  Although it is often claimed that Mary lacked Elizabeth’s charisma, her qualities in this regard had been demonstrated before her illness took hold: in 1553, when Mary confronted Jane, and 1554, when her speech at the Guildhall roused London in her defence. Mary had spoken then of her marriage to her kingdom, describing her coronation ring as a wedding band, and her love of her subjects as that of a mother for her children. These were phrases and motifs that Elizabeth would use repeatedly and which became absolutely central to her queenship.

  It was thanks to Mary that Elizabeth could expect to claim the powers of a king, and Elizabeth further intended to shape a religious settlement of her choice, as Mary had. Finally Mary’s reign forewarned Elizabeth of dangers ahead. England was at war with France and while Elizabeth hoped to make peace, Mary, Queen of Scots was now married to the dauphin (and even had dinnerware quartered with the arms of England, claiming it by right over the illegitimate Elizabeth). Mary I had faced the French threat with a Spanish husband, but Elizabeth was highly sensitive to the fact that announcement of the marriage had triggered a revolt. And who else was there as a possible husband? One councillor expressed the view to Feria that for Elizabeth ‘there was no one she can marry either outside the kingdom or within it’ with safety.14 It was a conclusion with which Elizabeth concurred, yet there were still other dangers in ruling alone.

  That summer the Protestant polemicist Christopher Goodman had argued in print that the obedience of a subject was dependent on a monarch obeying divine law, and that this excluded women from rule. The same view would be restated more forcibly a few weeks later in John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. According to Knox, a reigning queen was ‘repugnant to nature; an insult to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’.

  Although many assumed Elizabeth’s anger over her treatment at Mary’s hands meant she would act vengefully when it came to Mary’s burial, no one was more aware than Elizabeth what they had in common as sisters, as Tudors, and now as queens. Elizabeth ordered that King Henry’s funeral book be followed to the letter.

  The final ceremonies of Mary’s funeral began on 13 December when her body was processed from St James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey. The coffin was placed in a chariot surmounted by the traditional carved image of the deceased monarch, dressed in crimson velvet with a crown on its plaster head. Mary’s cousin and friend, Margaret Douglas, acted as chief mourner, dressed in black trailing to the ground. Margaret had served as Mary’s senior lady-in-waiting when Mary was Henry VIII’s heir and had watched Mary’s humiliation as her household was broken up after Elizabeth was born. She had seen Mary’s restoration to her father’s favour, and been close to her, once more, when she became queen. In all those years, a Venetian commented of Mary, she had shown, ‘neither in adversity nor peril . . . any act of cowardice or pusillanimity, maintaining always, on the contrary, a wonderful grandeur and dignity’.15

  At the church door the abbot met Queen Mary’s body. Along with him were four bishops who incensed the coffin. A hundred gentlemen in black coats kept watch that night along with the queen’s guard holding burning torches, as the prayers for the dead were repeated. The next day Mary’s requiem was held, and her obituary sermon was given by John White, Bishop of Winchester, who had been present at her death. ‘She was a queen and by the same title a king also’, he said of her, and it was in ‘this church that she married herself to the realm, and in token of faith and fidelity did put on a ring with a diamond on her finger, which I understand she never took off after in her life’. She had remained until her death careful ‘of her promise to her realm’ and her subjects. He was less
hopeful of the future, however. The bishop could only bring himself to say that Elizabeth held the kingdom ‘by the like title and right’ to Mary, and wished her ‘a prosperous reign in peace and tranquillity’.

  Mary was buried in the Lady Chapel along with her brother Edward VI, her grandparents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. Her wooden effigy was set up on display, the new modern jointed arms and legs allowing it to be enthroned. In life it was said Mary’s eyes were so piercing they inspired not only respect but fear in those on whom she gazed, and her voice was loud enough that she could be heard far off. But in painted wood she was silent, the wide eyes staring blankly in the coming years as the statues, the altars, and stained glass in the abbey were destroyed once more, and a new Protestant order established.

  33

  A MARRIED MAN

  DISTURBINGLY, THE FAMOUS MAGICIAN NOSTRADAMUS, WORKING for the French court, was predicting disaster for Elizabeth’s reign: ‘There shall be difference of sects, alteration, murmuring against ceremonies, contentions, debate, process, feuds, noise, discord . . .’ With a Protestant queen ruling a Catholic country, this seemed all too likely, and in an effort to calm national nerves the council commissioned the magician John Dee to cast a more positive horoscope.