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

by Leanda de Lisle

  Margaret wrote her last testament on 26 February 1578, still in ‘perfect mind’ and ‘good health of body’. It asked that when she died the body of her son Charles be moved from his tomb at her house in Hackney, to be buried with her in Westminster Abbey. She had already chosen the spot for her tomb in the Lady Chapel where her grandfather Henry VII was buried. £1,200 was put aside for her funeral and burial expenses. She matched this with a gift of £1,200 for the poor. William Cecil was bequeathed a black enamel ring set with four diamonds, and Robert Dudley a chain of pomander beads netted with gold. She also left him her tablet picture of Henry VIII. Even in death it was important to grease the right palms – especially if you wanted a grand funeral in Westminster Abbey.

  Margaret Douglas died on 10 March and on 3 April she had a funeral appropriate for a royal princess, and with a service of which Elizabeth would approve.12 Nothing had been written in her will that distinguished her as Catholic or Protestant and there were no marks of Catholic belief at her funeral.13 Margaret obeyed the letter of the law, as she was obliged to do and had always done in public. The tomb she had wanted was later set up by her secretary Thomas Fowler. In an echo of the Lennox motto, ‘To achieve I endure’, it celebrated ‘a lady of most pious character, invincible spirit, and matchless steadfastness’ who was ‘mighty in virtue’ and ‘mightier yet in lineage’. Few tombs in the abbey matched the royal ancestors she had listed on her tomb, but she was prouder still to be ‘a progenitor of princes’ in her son Darnley, known as Henry, King of Scots, and in her grandson King James. One day, she had hoped, he too would lie in this abbey, as a King of England.

  38

  THE VIRGIN QUEEN

  WAS IT BETTER FOR A QUEEN WHO COULD NOT MARRY NEVER TO have felt love? In verse Elizabeth begged ‘let me live with some more sweet content/Or die and so forget what love e’er meant’.1 Her father, Henry VIII, had feared it would be hard to find a king consort for a Tudor queen ‘with whom the whole realm could and would be contented’, and so it had proved.2 The anxieties she had expressed to the emissary of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1561, that she could not marry without triggering unrest, had deepened following Mary’s disastrous marriages to Darnley and Bothwell. Elizabeth continued to look publicly for a husband to fulfil national expectations, and surely hoped it was not impossible that she might find someone suitable, but in their absence she had settled for something akin to a celibate marriage with Robert Dudley. It was a kind of ‘sweet content’.

  People always rushed to see Elizabeth and Dudley together. The antiquarian John Stow recalled witnessing them meeting in 1566. Dudley had entered London with a train of 700 lords, knights and gentlemen accompanied by the queen’s footmen, as well as his own. They marched from Temple Bar, through the City, across London Bridge into Southwark while the queen came ‘secretly [across the water] taking a wherry with one pair of oars for her and two other ladies’. When she landed Elizabeth got into a blue coach and as Dudley and his army reached her on the highway, she came out and greeted him with kisses, before she mounted a horse and they rode on together to Greenwich Palace. That night Stow had watched Dudley return to London in advance of the queen, his way lit by the strange glow of the Northern Lights.3

  Nine years later, in 1575, Robert Dudley had prepared a magnificent eighteen days of entertainment for Elizabeth’s visit to his seat at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. When the great day came Elizabeth had enjoyed a feast in a specially built pavilion before Dudley rode with her to his castle, the flickering flames of the candles from the windows reflected in the lake and glittering like a vision from a fairy tale. Over the following two and a half weeks there were masques, pageants and dramas, with the subject of marriage a constant theme. But Elizabeth would turn forty-five in 1578, suitors had come and gone for two decades, and the pretence that she would ever marry was coming to an end.

  One last serious discussion of a match was under way with Elizabeth courted by the twenty-four-year-old brother of the French king Henri III, the Duke of Anjou. The old friendship with Spain had soured over their religious differences and the English piracy of Spanish gold brought back from their colonies in the New World. Elizabeth needed France as a friend, but to England’s beleaguered Catholics the marriage proposal also represented the desperate hope of an end to the increasingly vicious persecution to which they were being subjected.

  On Elizabeth’s accession new legislation had required all clerics, lay office holders and the heirs to large estates to swear an oath denying papal authority. In notable contrast to the Henrician bishops, all but one of the carefully picked Marian bishops had refused to take it and had consequently been deprived of office. In Oxford the head of all but one of the colleges had also resigned or were sacked. This had left Catholics in the parishes largely leaderless, as priests either became Protestant ministers or left their posts.

  Over the following years bewildered congregations had seen remaining rood screens, with their images of Christ, Mary and St John, replaced with the royal arms of the supreme governor of the Church of England. Newly whitewashed walls were decorated only with biblical quotations, there was no holy water with which to cross themselves, no candles, everything was plain and without colour, while elaborate music too was frowned on as a distraction from prayer.

  This cultural revolution was not entirely to Elizabeth’s taste. She employed the Catholic composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd in the royal chapels. She issued proclamations in an effort to protect ancient monuments, fonts and altars from wholesale destruction. Elizabeth believed that rood screens were ‘rather for the advantage of the church’ and she retained candles and a crucifix on the Communion table in her chapel.4 In 1565, when the dean of St Paul’s gave a sermon attacking Catholic writing in praise of the Cross, she interrupted him saying loudly, ‘Do not talk about that.’5 But even the queen’s plain silver crucifix, described as a ‘foul idol’ placed ‘on the altar of abomination’, was twice broken and attacked in sermons by members of her clergy. Her subjects were far less able to protect their churches from zealous iconoclasts.

  In 1562 the Bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, had sneered at his parishioners, imitating them wailing, ‘What shall I do at the church? I may not have my [rosary] beads, [and] the church is like a waste barn; there are no images or saints to worship and make curtsey too . . . there is nothing but a little reading or preaching that I cannot tell what it means. I had as leaf keep me at home.’6 But avoiding church was not permitted, with ever-heavier fines for those who did, with the result that a generation had grown up used both to white walls and to the new pattern in which Morning Prayer replaced the Mass. Some old habits, such as placing crosses on graves, were hard to break, and many remained ignorant of basic Protestant doctrine. Ordinary people continued to believe that good deeds played some part in their salvation and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand the Protestant doctrine of predestination for an elect few. As one contemporary noted, ‘heaps’ of people had ‘cast away the old religion without discovering the new’.7 But by and large acceptance for the new ways of worship was successfully being reinforced by the desire to be loyal to the Crown, by propaganda such as the copies distributed to parishes of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with its descriptions of the deaths of the Protestants burned by Mary I, and also by fear of the consequences of opposition.

  As the Catholic communities had shrunk so they had also become subjected to intense attacks at the hands of the Elizabethan regime. These had worsened dramatically following the 1569 northern rebellion, especially after Pope Pius V had answered a request by the rebel earls to excommunicate the queen, pronouncing her ‘deprived of her pretended title to the . . . crown’. The vast majority of Catholics had remained loyal – and there had been no signs of revolt in counties like Hampshire where Catholicism remained strong.8 Nevertheless it had meant Catholics could be painted as traitors by reason of their faith alone, and in 1577 the first of many Catholic priests to be executed by Elizabeth had been hanged, disem
bowelled while alive, and quartered.

  English Catholics reasoned that Elizabeth’s fears would be greatly reduced if she were married to a Catholic, but their hopes for the Anjou marriage were matched by Protestant opposition. Steeped in dread of the biblical apocalypse and deeply aware of the religious divisions within their own ranks, at home and abroad, pious Protestants greatly overestimated Catholic unity. A massacre of Protestants in Paris by Mary’s Guise relatives in 1572 tapped into fears that they faced possible extinction at Catholic hands, and English priests who had trained in Europe, and who began returning to tend to their abandoned flocks, were seen as a dangerous fifth column. These divisions over the Anjou match were to be played out during the royal progress into East Anglia that summer.

  As usual a book was drawn up of the proposed route of the progress, which the queen would then agree, and she picked the clothes she was to wear. Elizabeth’s face now had the squarer jawline of middle age and her aquiline nose drooped a little at the tip, giving it a hooked appearance. But what she had lost in youth she made up for in the increasing magnificence of her dress. The Spanish-style cone-shaped skirts of the 1560s had given way in the 1570s to much fuller skirts, thickly embroidered fabrics, and still more elaborate ruffs. Elizabeth did not always remember all the clothes, ruffs and jewels she needed for each stop of her progress and she once overheard a carter, who was being sent back on a third trip to the royal warbrobe, slap his thigh, complaining, ‘Now I see that the queen is a woman . . . as well as my wife.’ More than her Tudor predecessors, Elizabeth had a sense of humour, and having asked loudly from her window, ‘What a villain is this?’, she sent him three coins ‘to stop his mouth’.9

  The progress of that summer arrived in Norwich on Saturday 16 August 1578, where amongst the composers of the coming entertainments was a poet called Thomas Churchyard. One of his patrons was Katherine Grey’s widower, Hertford, and a principal theme of his shows was to be the virtues of chastity. He had been rehearsing in Norwich for weeks but he was uncertain when and where his performances could go ahead and the weather was unsettled. When the Monday proved dry, Churchyard was determined to seize the opportunity to put on his opening pageant.

  Sometime before supper the queen was spotted standing at a window with her ladies. As Churchyard’s players swung into action Elizabeth saw an extra ordinary coach appear in the gardens beneath her. It was covered with painted birds and naked sprites and had a tower decked with glass jewels, topped with a plume of white feathers. As the coach rattled by, a boy dressed as Mercury jumped off, made a leap or two and delivered a speech. The subject was God’s desire to ‘Find out false hearts, and make of subjects true/Plant perfect peace, and root up all debate.’ Elizabeth looked pleased – but his show was not over yet.10

  The next day a friend gave Churchyard advance notice of the path the queen was taking to dinner. They set up quickly in a field where a crowd was gathering. Churchyard had a whole morality play organised, in which the forces of Cupid, Wantonness and Riot were ranged up against Chastity and her lieutenants, Modesty, Temperance and Shamefastness. When Elizabeth arrived it unfolded before her, in praise of the celibate life. She acknowledged Churchyard’s efforts politely with ‘gracious words’, unaware as yet of the true significance of what she had just witnessed.11

  The famous phrase the ‘Virgin Queen’ was coined in the parting pageant on Saturday, but Churchyard’s show in the open field was the first to celebrate Elizabeth as such. The sobriquet associated Elizabeth with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and when the Anjou match eventually came to nothing like the others before it, a new iconography was born, with classical as well as Christian associations. A favourite theme in the pictures of Elizabeth that courtiers commissioned was the classical story of the Vestal Virgin who proved her chastity by carrying water in a sieve from the river Tiber to the temple of Vesta. At least eight pictures from the period 1579–83 survive depicting Elizabeth holding a sieve. In several of her portraits icons of empire were included, with the abandonment of the Anjou marriage linked to an aggressive foreign policy in which England would found a Protestant empire. But although these are the images of the great queen we still remember, behind the icon stood an isolated figure.

  Elizabeth is supposed to have written the verses of yearning ‘to live with some more sweet content’ when Anjou left England. But the pain and passion they describe surely have their inspiration in the man she had truly loved: Robert Dudley.

  I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

  I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

  I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

  I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.

  I am, and not, I freeze and yet am burned,

  Since from myself another self I turned.

  My care is like my shadow in the sun,

  Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

  Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done.

  His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

  No means I find to rid him from my breast,

  Till by the end of things it be supprest.

  Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

  For I am soft and made of melting snow;

  Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind.

  Let me or float or sink, be high or low.

  Or let me live with some more sweet content,

  Or die, and so forget what love e’er meant.12

  If Robert Dudley had been the son of a king she would have married him, Elizabeth had told the Spanish ambassador Silva in 1565. But Dudley had long since ceased to dream of being her husband. He was desperate now only for a son to carry on his title and inherit his lands. On 21 September 1578, a month after the ‘Virgin Queen’ sobriquet was coined, Dudley married Mary Boleyn’s granddaughter, Lettice Knollys, the widowed Countess of Essex. The fact that Lettice resembled a younger Elizabeth only added to the queen’s anguish when she heard the news over a year later in the winter of 1579. Reportedly it was the French ambassador who told her, in revenge for Dudley’s opposition to the Anjou match. Dudley was out of favour for weeks and Elizabeth would never forgive Lettice.13

  And there was another unpleasant reminder of the cost to Elizabeth of her spinstershood in the summer and following winter of 1579. It concerned a friend of Robert Dudley, one who was second only to Elizabeth at court in terms of royal blood. She was yet another royal Margaret, the last surviving granddaughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister, the French queen. Born Margaret Clifford, only child of Eleanor Brandon, she was now the Countess of Derby. Under the terms of Henry VIII’s will she had become Elizabeth’s heir following the death of her cousin Mary Grey in 1578. The countess had joined forces with Robert Dudley in opposition to the Anjou match, and in August 1579, when the Duke of Anjou had visited Elizabeth secretly, she made the news public. The countess was arrested and her servants interviewed, in the course of which it emerged that she had employed a magician to cast the queen’s horoscope and discover when she would die. This was reminiscent of Elizabeth’s household when it was apparent that Mary I’s pregnancy was not proceeding normally and they had employed the magician John Dee. Imagining the death of a monarch was treason. But Dee’s activities seemed to have scared Elizabeth more than they had Mary I. Dee had escaped with his life in 1555 and his prophecies would be used into the 1590s by William Cecil, to raise fears of Catholic threats. Margaret Clifford’s magician (she claimed he was only her doctor), on the other hand, was executed. Although the countess lived until 1596, she was never restored to royal favour.14

  There remained, however, the certain knowledge that Elizabeth could not live forever, and her likely successor was a far more dangerous figure than the ambitious and foolish Margaret Clifford. Elizabeth had once been ‘a second person’ to Mary I, and as such, as she often recalled, she had ‘tasted of the practices against my sister’. ‘I did differ from her in religion and I was sought for divers ways [to overthrow her]’, Elizabeth had recalled in 15
66. Such was the position now held by Mary, Queen of Scots, and if the brutal crushing of the northern rebellion of 1569 ensured there would not be further such revolts, there remained the dangers to Elizabeth of assassination and invasion. With the failure of the Anjou match, the shrinking Catholic community split and divided. While the vast majority still sought compromise with the state, hoping for some measure of religious toleration, a few were determined to fight back.

  Members of the Counter-Reformation order of the Jesuits were amongst the priests recently returned from Europe, and they stiffened the resolve of Catholics to refuse to attend Protestant services, even if it meant fines, imprisonment or death. Further executions followed, both of priests and of those who sheltered them. Blood spilt demanded a blood price, and a small number of radicalised Catholics were prepared to do whatever it took to overthrow Queen Elizabeth, including murder.

  39

  THE DAUGHTER OF DEBATE

  ELIZABETH’S COUSIN AND RIVAL, THE THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD MARY, Queen of Scots, was still lovely in 1579 with fashionably curled hair. Nevertheless a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard depicts a fuller face than in her youth. Like her great-grandmother Elizabeth of York, she was growing stout in middle age and this was exacerbated by the sedentary life she was obliged to live as Elizabeth’s prisoner. A woman of great physicality who associated fresh air and vigorous exercise with good health, she had been deprived of both for a decade, and suffered frequent illness. She was grateful when her life was enlivened by the arrival of the lively little Arbella Stuart, in the household of her jailors, the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, Bess.