Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family
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The recent discovery of Amy’s post-mortem reveals she had head injuries. These could have resulted from a fall in which she hit the edge of the stone steps. There were reports she had been unwell, and she might have fainted. Equally, they could be the result of deliberate blows inflicted on her. The coroner’s jury, who later viewed the body, brought in a verdict of death by misadventure, which suggests the further possibility of suicide. Amy and Dudley had married as love-struck teenagers, and there had been signs that she had grown unhappy during his absences: Cecil summed up the course of events sourly as ‘a carnal marriage’ which had ‘begun for pleasure and ended in lamentation’. Significantly for Elizabeth and Dudley, however, it had also ended in scandal and the consequence was uproar.
It seems possible that Dudley’s servants had carried out what they assumed would be his wish, but he was under no illusions that Amy’s sudden demise had actually damaged his hopes. He asked a cousin to find out what had happened – his chief concern being ‘how this evil should light upon me, considering what this wicked world will bruit [i.e. gossip]’. At court, in addition to the dismay that the queen might marry a murderer were significant concerns that if she did marry Dudley, he would seek revenge on those who had allowed his father to be made the scapegoat for Jane Grey’s reign in 1553. Tensions ran so high that Ambassador Quadra reported there could be a revolt: ‘The cry is that they do not want any more women rulers, and [the queen] and her favourite may find herself in prison any morning.’ Cecil feared that she was determined to ‘do as her father did’, and marry whom she wished despite public feeling.3 But if so, Elizabeth had to consider how easy she might be to replace.
During the Wars of the Roses, Henry VI had been threatened by his cousin Richard, Duke of York, and he was later overthrown by York’s son. Elizabeth had not only one cousin to fear, but many – a Tudor hydra – although happily all her near heirs were female.4 Of these, three women would dominate the family story and succession issues of Elizabeth’s reign. Elizabeth now had to consider their relative strengths. Her senior heir under Henry VIII’s will, Lady Katherine Grey, was unmarried – an unattractive proposition as a future queen to courtiers angered by Elizabeth’s behaviour with Dudley. Elizabeth’s heir in blood, Mary, Queen of Scots was married, but to the hated King of France, so she too was not a popular choice. And then there was Henry VIII’s senior niece, Margaret Douglas: Elizabeth’s last surviving Tudor first cousin (following the death of the ailing Frances Brandon in 1559).
The passage of time and the birth of eight children had taken its toll on the forty-five-year-old’s once famous beauty, but Margaret’s husband, Lennox, still adored her. Margaret Douglas knew how to charm and the couple had done remarkably well in negotiating the lethal riptides of the changing Tudor courts. Indeed Margaret had matured into a political operator to match her great-grandmother and namesake, Margaret Beaufort. She had been involved for years in intrigues in Scotland, working for the restoration of her husband’s rights as Earl of Lennox, and for her own as the heir to her father, the Earl of Angus (who had died in 1557). But what concerned Elizabeth most was that Margaret Douglas’ two sons were the nearest male heirs in blood to the crowns of Scotland (through their father) and England (through Margaret).
Margaret was well aware she was being closely watched and complained bitterly to Quadra that she felt a virtual prisoner. But Elizabeth had good reason to watch her, as was evident in Margaret’s request for financial aid from Spain in support of her claim.5 Quadra decided he would rather see how things played out. Cecil had told him that in their desperation for an adult male ruler, courtiers were keenly considering a claim outside the Tudor family, a white-rose candidate, Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, who was a Protestant descendant of Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence. Cecil was also working hard, however, to hammer home to Elizabeth that if she married Dudley she would be overthrown.
Elizabeth liked to imagine what it would be like to be a former queen, free of the burdens of her office, and thought she would do rather well: ‘I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom’, she later observed.6 But that was fantasy. Since the deposition of Richard II in 1399, all those who had lost their crown in England had first lost their freedom, and then, later, their life.
Cecil’s dire warnings were convincing, and in October Elizabeth assured him she would not marry Robert Dudley. The pain of this decision was revealed the following month when she had, on her desk, a patent that would have raised Dudley to the peerage – a necessary move if he were to become her husband. Faced with a choice between her happiness and her throne she chose her throne, stabbing and slashing at the patent with a knife. Cecil remained concerned that, nevertheless, Elizabeth had not yet made a final decision on marrying Dudley. And if the immediate danger to the queen had passed, events in France were about to put her in fresh peril.
Francis II had always been sickly, and that November his health deteriorated sharply. For three weeks his young wife tended him but on 5 December he died, leaving Mary, Queen of Scots a widow just three days short of her eighteenth birthday. Whoever now married Mary could one day be King of England, as well as Scotland, and that made her an international prize. In England, Margaret Douglas was amongst those who began calculating the new political possibilities. Margaret’s younger son, Lord Charles Stuart, was still only five years old.7 But the eldest, Henry, Lord Darnley, was already fifteen and Margaret believed he was an excellent choice as a potential groom for her half-niece, the Queen of Scots. Exceptionally tall and good-looking, Darnley was a fine dancer, horseman, musician and poet. He had even contributed to the collection of poetry Margaret and her friends had built up during King Henry’s reign. More significantly, he was English-born, as well as being of royal blood. Marrying him would go some way to answering criticism of Mary’s foreign birth, and so strengthen her claim to the English throne.
Margaret Douglas wrote promptly to the new widow to propose a match.8 By February 1561 there were rumours in Scotland that Darnley was in France. He had, in fact, met Mary, Queen of Scots in 1559, when Margaret sent him to congratulate Francis II on his accession. There is no evidence that he had returned, but at Easter Margaret did send messengers, to both France and Spain, to garner support for her marriage project.9 Six weeks or so later she also made contact with members of the Scottish peerage. That summer of 1561, Mary, Queen of Scots would return to rule the homeland where her late mother, Mary of Guise, had been regent until her death in 1560. When she did, Margaret was ready to contact her again, and her messenger soon arrived at Stirling to see the queen.10
Mary, Queen of Scots had inherited all the height and beauty of her Yorkist ancestors, standing at five feet eleven inches, with slanting eyes, sensuous grace and great personal charm. Walking with the messenger in her chamber, only her maids present, it became clear that she didn’t recall much of her earlier meeting with Darnley in 1559 but she seemed pleased with what she heard now of his ‘stature, age, qualities, ability and friends’.11 Following this successful meeting Margaret Douglas continued her secret correspondence into Scotland, using the code name ‘hawk’ to denote Mary, Queen of Scots.12
William Cecil was, however, already recruiting spies in Margaret’s household. For a zealous Protestant like Cecil, any Catholic heir was a particular danger and Margaret Douglas’ religious beliefs now made her vulnerable to accusations of criminal activity. She obeyed Elizabethan law and attended a weekly Protestant service to avoid a fine, but she also continued to hear Mass in private.13 This had been acceptable to Elizabeth until Easter when Cecil had manufactured a threat to the queen’s life. Several Catholic gentlemen had been arrested and convicted, on charges of plotting with foreign powers to kill Elizabeth by witchcraft. Elizabeth, a firm believer in the occult, had been sufficiently frightened to permit Cecil to then launch the active persecution of English Catholics.14
Elizabeth did not share Cecil’s profound concerns about the religion of her Catholic heirs, however. Indeed she disliked the efforts made by Protestants in the 1550s to associate the nature of ‘true’ kingship with their own beliefs. Rather than attack Margaret Douglas through her religion, Elizabeth preferred to build on Henry VIII’s claim that Margaret was illegitimate. Elizabeth could do nothing about her own bastard status. To have asked Parliament to remove the stain of her illegitimacy would have been to stir up memories of her father’s affair with her aunt, Mary Boleyn. But she could damage Margaret’s status, and to this end information was now being sought in Scotland concerning the marriage of Margaret’s parents.15 As yet, however, Elizabeth feared the claims of her Protestant cousin Katherine Grey far more than she did that of Margaret Douglas. It was, after all, Katherine’s sister, Jane, who had usurped the throne in 1553. Cecil was equally anxious to allay the queen’s fears in this regard. If anything happened to Elizabeth it was likely to be Katherine he would back as queen.
Cecil was deeply concerned when, in the spring of 1561, he learned that the twenty-one-year-old Katherine was spending her time enjoying the ‘company and familiarity’ of the dashing Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford.16 Aged almost twenty-two, slim, and with an aquiline nose, Hertford was the heir of the Protector Somerset, and his mother a descendant of Edward III: in short he was a most appropriate choice as the king consort of a Protestant queen. A marriage between such a pair as Hertford and Katherine would both terrify and anger Elizabeth, so to separate the couple, Cecil arranged a long trip around Europe for the earl. He left in May, leaving Katherine behind to, once again, accompany the queen on a summer progress.
Travelling from Greenwich on 14 July the progress arrived later the same day at Wanstead and Havering, near Romford, Essex. A tour of the eastern counties lay ahead. Elizabeth had requested Hertford to commission a French goldsmith to make jewelled hat feathers, chains and bracelets for her ladies, ‘to be gay in this court, towards the progress’. She was pleased to see the expected package had arrived from France, with everything she had asked for.17 If she also noticed that Katherine was despondent not to have any letter from Hertford herself, the queen did not say so.
On 16 July the progress moved on to Pirgo on the edge of the park at Havering. There Robert Dudley awaited the queen with his servants dressed in a new green livery. She was still in love with him, and Dudley remained with her as the court’s progress continued through Essex and into Suffolk. At Ipswich, a town notable for its enthusiastic Protestantism, Elizabeth was infuriated to discover that church ministers were not wearing surplices for Communion services and that many were married with children. Most Protestants had hoped, in 1559, that her religious settlement was just a first step towards England being cleansed more thoroughly of ‘Popery’. Vestments worn at Communion suggested a belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and so were particularly disliked. But Elizabeth was determined to keep religious policy under her own control, and as far as she was concerned her kingdom’s religion had been settled for the duration of her reign. Although it was permitted for clergy to marry, she didn’t like it, and on 9 August she issued an order forbidding women from living in cathedrals or colleges. As for the matter of surplices, in the future she would make the wearing of vestments a test of obedience to her religious settlement. The abusive term ‘puritan’ would come to describe those who failed that test.
The following morning Elizabeth and her ladies attended a Communion service. There was a great deal of whispering amongst the congregation, but this had nothing to do with surplices or women living in cathedrals, as Elizabeth discovered the next day when Dudley asked to see her. Katherine Grey had visited him the previous night at his lodgings in Ipswich. Dudley’s younger brother, Guildford, had been married to Jane Grey so he was family, and on her knees, Katherine had asked for his help. The pretty twenty-year-old had explained that she had married Hertford in secret before Christmas, and was now eight months pregnant. She had realised by ‘the secret talk she saw amongst men and women’ that morning ‘that her being with child was known and spied out’, and she had begged him, weeping, ‘to be a means to the queen’s highness for her’.18 Her hope that Dudley would be able to mitigate the queen’s anger was to be disappointed.
Elizabeth listened to what Dudley had to say with mounting fear and fury. Katherine’s marriage had taken place in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of the previous autumn, when Robert Dudley’s wife had been found dead. Elizabeth was convinced it was part of a plot to replace her if she had decided to marry Dudley. She was acutely aware that, as an illegitimate daughter, she owed her legal right to the throne to an Act of Parliament that another Act could easily supersede. Katherine was sent under guard to the Tower where she was imprisoned in Jane’s former lodgings, while Hertford was recalled from France, also destined for the Tower.
The subsequent interrogations revealed the story of the young lovers’ feelings for one another. There had been a summer romance in 1558, but they had only fallen deeply in love during the progress of 1559. They had decided to marry in the winter of 1560 with a flurry of secret assignations, a diamond betrothal ring, and a gold wedding band engraved with the promise their union was a ‘knot of secret might’ that no man could break.19 The spinster queen had at her fingertips even the details of the consummation of the marriage. The documents describe them as naked, save that Katherine had kept on a small wedding veil, and for two hours they had lain together, ‘sometimes on the one side of the bed, sometimes on the other’. They had got up from the bed once, but in their passion soon returned, staying until the time came when Katherine had to return to court for supper.20 Elizabeth learned that over the following months Katherine and Hertford had met for sex in half the royal palaces of England, as well as his London house. No proof emerged that anyone of significance was linked to the marriage, but Quadra also suspected there was more to the story than a simple love affair.
One name mentioned to Quadra was that of Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, the flabby, middle-aged nobleman who had courted Elizabeth in the summer of 1559. Having been humiliated in his hopes of marrying the queen he had begun courting Hertford’s nineteen-year-old sister, Lady Jane Seymour. She had died that spring of 1561, but it emerged that she helped the lovers meet and had witnessed her brother’s marriage. The earl had perhaps hoped to become if not a king consort to Elizabeth, then a king’s brother-in-law, with Hertford and Katherine made king and queen on Elizabeth’s fall.21
The most significant name Quadra mentioned was, however, that of William Cecil. He had begun his career as servant to Hertford’s father, the Protector Somerset and was a kinsman of the Grey family. Quadra believed Cecil had arranged the marriage in the immediate aftermath of Amy Dudley’s death, fearing Elizabeth would marry Dudley with the backing of King Philip. He had then dropped the matter when he was back in the queen’s good graces.
Elizabeth, seeing treachery all around her, and knowing nothing could be proved, became deeply depressed. She had been in great danger during the Protectorate of Hertford’s father – and now another Seymour was aspiring to be king! An emissary of Mary, Queen of Scots, who joined the progress at the royal palace of Hertford on 8 September, found the frightened queen ‘extremely thin and the colour of a corpse’.22
Mary, Queen of Scots’ advisers had proposed that Mary renounce her immediate claim to the English throne (a claim based on the grounds she was the senior legitimate descendant of Henry VII) in exchange for formal and binding recognition as Elizabeth’s heir. Mary was working with the incumbent Protestant regime in Scotland, she accepted Protestantism as the national religion while she, in turn, had assurances that she could hear Mass. It was a possible template for a future role as Queen of England, and William Maitland of Lethington, the ‘flower of the wits of Scotland’, had arrived to negotiate the issue with Elizabeth. Cecil feared he might be successful, with Elizabeth moving to dispose of the Grey/Seymour claim once and for a
ll.
Elizabeth began by stating her preference for Mary’s claim. ‘I have noted’, she told Maitland, ‘that you have said to me . . . that your queen is descended of the royal blood of England and that I am obliged to love her as being nearest to me in blood of any other, all which I must confess to be true.’ She dismissed the claim of Katherine Grey, saying that while ‘It is true, that some of them have made declaration to the world that they are more worthy than either [Mary] or I, by demonstrating that they are not barren, but able to have children’, the pregnant Katherine and her younger sister, Lady Mary Grey, were unable ‘to succeed to the crown by reason of their father’s forfeiture’ for treason in 1554. Elizabeth reassured Maitland that ‘despite the recent war with Scotland’ she never ‘meant ill towards’ his queen, and though she had offended her ‘by bearing my arms and acclaiming the title of my crown’, she had blamed others for what had happened.
Elizabeth warned Maitland the succession was not a matter she wished to discuss formally, but as the meeting closed she reiterated her personal support for Mary’s claim: ‘I here protest to you, in the presence of God, I for my part know no better [claim] nor that I myself would prefer to her, or yet, to be plain with you, that case that might debar her from it.’ Maitland hoped that if he pressed Elizabeth, she might offer her direct backing for a parliament’s recognition of Mary, Queen of Scots as her preferred choice. At his final audience, however, Elizabeth gave three reasons why she would never do so.
‘First’, Elizabeth reminded Maitland, the uncertainty caused by changing laws of succession and controversies over marriages ‘lawful and unlawful, of legitimate and base-born children’, had been responsible for a series of crises in England. Elizabeth did not wish to provoke further unrest. This was also why ‘I have hitherto forborne to match with any husband’, she explained. Elizabeth’s reasons for not marrying have long been speculated on. Often it is assumed she had some psychological hang-up associated with her mother’s death, or the execution of Katherine Howard when Elizabeth was at the impressionable age of nine. But there seems to be no reason to disbelieve her own explanation that she didn’t marry because she feared making a divisive choice. Elizabeth had witnessed the damage done to both Jane Grey and Mary I by their marriages, and in the tensions at court following Amy Dudley’s death she had experienced a taste of what would happen if she married Robert Dudley,