by David Loades
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would any man have suffered the role confl ict that Mary had to endure. She was in many ways an intensely conventional woman, brought up to be a consort and to fulfi l a supporting role, if circumstances had not thrust her in to the spotlight. Whatever she might pretend in public, she always regarded her sex as a liability and accepted that there were ‘matters impertinent to women’. She complained of having to shout at her Council and suffered periods of almost hysterical emotional collapse. In fact her duty to God, her realm and her husband were in constant tension and the stress may well have shortened her life. She worked like a slave and both Philip and Pole worried about the effect that this was having upon her health. In short, she never reconciled her power with her gender, or thought of the two as being truly compatible. It would require a woman with a much more original mind to see that sex could be a weapon, and one to which the masculine world could fi nd no ready answer.
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The Unmarried Sovereign: Elizabeth I The best known fact about the fi rst Elizabeth is that she never married, but
‘lived and died a virgin’. Whether she was actually a virgin is an interesting speculation but irrelevant in this context. For many years she ignored or evaded the pressing advice of her council – particularly William Cecil – and her parliament, to marry and secure the succession. She drove the political nation wild with anxiety on the latter score and her failure to act was almost universally condemned as irresponsible. With the benefi t of hindsight, it looks like a successful strategy. For over 20 years she was able to use the integrity of her own body as a symbol for the integrity of her realm and, when the time came, to hand over her throne to an adult and Protestant king, who was also the hereditary heir. It is not, however, certain that it was a strategy at all. The chances are that Elizabeth never made a policy decision not to marry. It was just that she was well aware of the risks that such an undertaking would involve and every time a negotiation came to the point of decision, she found a reason to back off. The personal cost of such withdrawals may well have been high, but Elizabeth had no desire to be caught in the trap that had so affl icted her sister – whether to be a good wife or a good Queen. In order to understand Elizabeth’s attitude to marriage, it is necessary to go back a step and to try to assess how she saw her overall position. Like Mary, she believed that God had called her to the throne but unlike her sister she did not feel any compulsion to right the wrongs of an affl icted generation. Instead God, in his mysterious way, had called her to the Royal Supremacy, and put into her hands the government of His Church. God had created her as a woman but, instead of regarding that as a liability, she saw it as an exciting challenge, because God had also given her wit, and a sexuality that enabled her to manipulate the rather conventional males with whom she had to deal. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, there were no matters ‘impertinent to women’; it was just that a woman had to manage things rather differently.
1 She could not imitate her father’s masculine and martial image and she did not try. The female equivalent was beauty and mystery – particularly mystery. So she set out to play the ‘femme fatale’ and to baffl e and bewilder the councillors whom she could not dominate by more conventional methods. Perhaps she was often genuinely unable to make up 210
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her mind, but much of her celebrated procrastination and indecisiveness was deliberately intended to demonstrate her control. She was well aware that only the monarch could make certain important decisions and she had no intention of being taken for granted.
In order to understand Elizabeth, it is necessary to look at her mother. She was only 3 years old when Anne Boleyn was executed, so we are not looking at questions of example and upbringing, but at what was in her genes. Her sharp intelligence could have come from either parent but Henry was not noted for his cool rationality when under stress and her capacity for intellectual detachment came from her mother. She also inherited the feisty sexuality that had served Anne so well in the years of her courtship and so badly when she was Henry’s queen. Elizabeth, like her mother, was an inveterate fl irt, and like her mother used this quality to manipulate men. When Mary spoke of ‘certain qualities in which she resembled her mother’, the chances are that she had a proclivity for heresy in mind, but it was a shrewd observation, none the less. Mary had used the metaphor of marriage to her kingdom but when she took a natural husband that image lost its forc
e.2 Elizabeth used it from the beginning, and it became more telling as time went on. When the House of Commons petitioned her to marry in the spring of 1559, at which time she had been on the throne barely six months, she replied: … when the public charge of governing the kingdom came upon me, it seemed unto me an inconsiderate folly to draw upon myself the cares which might proceed of marriage. To conclude, I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England, and that may suffi ce you …
3 She then showed her coronation ring, as the pledge of that marriage, and concluded ‘reproach me so no more that I have no children, for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children and kinsfolks …’
It was magnifi cent rhetoric, and if it was ever uttered in that form, it was probably received simply as such. We know of it only from Camden’s
Annales, published many years later but it is true to the spirit in which she was acting in 1559, and the sentiment, if not the words, is probably authentic. At the time the speculation ran on whom, not whether, the Queen would marry and many years of fruitless political activity was to be predicated upon that notion until time fi nally foreclosed the option of children in about 1580. It has been frequently noted that Elizabeth was a consummate actress, and extremely conscious of
her image.4 With Mary what you saw was what you got, and her best known portraits show her magnifi cently dressed but grim of face, advancing relentlessly into middle age. Elizabeth was always the Fairy
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Queen, her face beautiful and mask like, unchanging for decades. How many people ever saw these portraits is not known, but they proliferate, often in poor contemporary copies, and it is likely that every gentleman’s gallery and every livery hall displayed one as an expected token of allegiance. So conscious was Elizabeth of their importance that she even drafted a proclamation in 1562, when her real beauty had been marred by the smallpox, prohibiting any further portraits, and Nicholas Hilliard was later given the monopoly rights over the royal image to forestall any unfl attering representations.
5 When Mary shouted at her Council, as she complained, they paid no attention, no doubt putting it down to a touch of hysterics. When Elizabeth threw a tantrum, she boxed a few ears and everyone around her quaked. When they were out of her presence, they no doubt put that down to female eccentricity also but the trouble with Elizabeth was that no one ever knew whether her royal rages were genuine or simulated and if you tested a theory it was liable to cost you dear. Apart from her youth (she was 25 at her accession) and undoubted good looks, Elizabeth had also one other advantage over Mary, which she was at pains to emphasize. She was ‘mere English’. This mattered in 1558, when anti-Spanish feeling was strong, and Mary was (as was pointed out by her enemies) half Spanish by blood and more than half by sentiment. 6 The fact that she had never set foot outside England, and that her spoken Spanish was distinctly inferior to Elizabeth’s did not matter at all. Despite all her struggles to avoid it, her marriage had led to her being represented as a Spanish dependent. It is not surprising that Elizabeth, as Feria put it, ‘gloried’ in her father; he had been a great and English king who had (it could be claimed) defeated the French in three successive wars and dismissed that interfering foreigner Pope Clement VII. But Elizabeth’s mother had also been English. Although trained in France and devoted to peace with that country, she had been purely English by blood – and that was important. Whether any reluctance to impair this
image impeded her marriage negotiations with foreign princes, particularly the Archduke Charles and the two separate Dukes of Anjou, is not immediately apparent. However the last of these, with Francois d’Anjou, was clearly targeted for Francophobe reasons in John Stubbs,
The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf of 1579, which enraged the Queen as much for its implications of ‘selling out to the foreigner’ as for the suggestion that she was not in control of the situation.7 Nevertheless the measure of her rage was the measure of its accuracy and its sentiments corresponded with much of the advice which she was receiving from her council. When it came to the point, the two factors which derailed all these negotiations were a reluctance to reintroduce any element of foreign control over England and its affairs, and an 212
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extreme sensitivity on Elizabeth’s part to any loss of her own sovereignty. If, at the end of the day, it was impossible to be both a wife and a Queen – then Elizabeth would always choose to be a Queen.
There was, however, the possibility that she might marry one of her own subjects. That would eliminate one problem and ease the other. In the fi rst weeks of her reign the Earl of Arundel was thought to fancy his chances, although Feria dismissed him as joke and he turned out to be right. Lord Robert Dudley, however, was not a joke at all. Unlike his foreign competitors he was a known quantity. He was around the Court – Elizabeth knew him well – and so did many others who were less favourably inclined. Unlike her sister, Elizabeth had not reached adulthood without any kind of sexual experience. At the age of 14 she had tangled with Lord Thomas Seymour, the brother of the then Lord Protector. Seymour was a married man at the time, and his wife was pregnant. Both were highly sexed and Seymour was a notorious womanizer, but how far their entanglement went is not known. Soon after there were rumours that ‘she was with child by the Lord Admiral’ but Elizabeth herself always denied intercourse. Of course she would have said that anyway, once it was clear that she was not pregnant, but the chances are that it was tr
ue.8 Recently it has been argued that intercourse did indeed take place, and it was the fact that she did not fall pregnant that convinced Elizabeth that she was ‘a barren stock’. However, that is pure speculation, based on a remark that the Queen made in 1566 on being informed of Mary Queen of Scots safe delivery. What does seem clear is that the young Elizabeth was thoroughly ‘awakened’ by the experience and knew thereafter that she was sexually attractive to men – a quality that Mary never possessed. Her reaction to Lord Robert built on that experience. That she was in love with him in the conventional sense seems certain. In the summer of 1560 she showed every sign of being infatuated and William Cecil, whose great success in Scotland she had virtually ignored, talked seriously of resigning his offi ce. There was, however, one serious snag. Robert was already married and hostile rumours were circulating that he intended to do away with his wife in order to marry the Queen. In September 1560 Amy was found at the bottom of a staircase at Cumnor Park with her neck broken and the obvious conclusion was drawn. So obvious, indeed, that we can be reasonably certain that Lord Robert had no hand in his wife’s death. Elizabeth was devastated. For a few months it had looked as though the woman in her was going to overcome the Queen but this tragedy acted like a bucket of cold water. Her Council, and particularly William Cecil, had been unanimously opposed to Lord Robert’s pretensions, pointing out his lack of experience in government and the fact that, although he was the son of a Duke, his father had been a parvenue who had been executed for high
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treason. If she had found a way to marry him, she would have been inviting kindred rivalries and feuds and an endless battle to defi ne (or limit) the powers of the Crown Matrimonial. All this negative advice now impinged upon her. She managed to get her lover formally acquitted by an inquest but the prospect of matrimony rapidly receded, to the relief of everyone except Lord Robert, who was to maintain his suit, with diminishing prospects, for another three or four years. Elizabeth had wanted Robert, as she was never to want any other man, and the brutal way in which political sense was forced to triumph over emotion, probably scarred her forever. It was not only that he was sexually attractive – she also probably calculated that she could manage him in a way which could not be guaranteed of any of his international competitors. His inexperience in that context was an asset. Perhaps he was so in love with her that he would hardly notice if the Crown Matrimonial meant virtually nothing. Perhaps …
That Robert wanted Elizabeth in the same way that she had wanted him is quite probable but unprovable. He also wanted the dignity and power of being the Queen’s husband, and might very well have found some way to dispose of Amy that would have been short of murder. There would still have been a scandal, of course, but it might have been more manageable. As it was, he had to settle for the long running status of ‘best friend’. His chemistry continued to have an unsettling effect upon her, even when she was so angry with his mismanagement of the Low Countries business in 1585, but politically he gradually became less of a loose cannon. His admission to the Privy Council and elevation to the earldom of Leicester in 1564 made him a conventional magnate and courtier, rather than the Queen’s lover, whose access to the royal ear could never be predicted or controlled. Whether she ever slept with him during those infatuated months in 1560 will never be known but when Elizabeth believed herself to be at death’s door in 1562, in addition to naming him ‘protector’ of the heirless kingdom, she denied that anything of that nature had ever occurred between them. Given the seriousness with which she took her relationship with God, her words on that occasion can probably be trusted.
Elizabeth always swore that she could never marry a man whom she did not know and that adds an air of unreality to the suits of Eric of Sweden, the Earl of Arran, the Archduke Charles and Duke Henri d’Anjou, none of whom she ever met. The only one of her later suitors with whom she had a personal encounter was Duke Francois, whom she met twice, and it was on the second of those encounters in 1581 that she gave one of her most problematic performances. She was 48 by this time and heavily dependent upon cosmetics to repel the advancing years; he was 25, erratic and ambitious. He came to England in a lastditch attempt to save a marriage negotiation that he urgently needed to succeed 214
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for his own reasons but which was already apparently on the rocks. Without the slightest warning, Elizabeth ‘entered into amorous discourse’ with her guest, kissed him passionately and gave him a ring, declaring that she would marry him forthw
ith.9 The Court was scandalized, especially the Queen’s ladies, who were rather a staid bunch by this time, and after a sleepless night of self-examination, she changed her mind and withdrew her pledge – to his infi nite chagrin. The incident is well attested, and of no ultimate signifi cance, but it does reveal that Elizabeth was as vulnerable to ‘hot fl ushes’ as any other woman. It also gives a brief and rather sad insight into what it cost the Queen to keep her political priorities constantly in view when her emotional needs might have pointed in quite a different direction. Elizabeth reigned long and successfully but ultimately at the price of never marrying, and remaining unfulfi lled in that dimension. She never (unlike Mary) considered marriage to be part of her duty to the realm. It could be that, but fundamentally it was a matter of personal inclination against political responsibility, and political responsibility always won. As we have already seen, this was largely a question of control. Elizabeth knew perfectly well, and if she had forgotten John Knox’s First Blast would have reminded her, that it was considered unnatural (and even unscriptural) for women to exercise control over men. 10 The Queen never accepted that, nor its accompanying notion that women were intellectually inferior. She had, and knew that she had, the intellectual edge on all the men about her, which was one reason why she felt confi dent about appointing the ablest servants she could fi nd �
� even if she knew that she would disagree with them. At the same time, she could not overawe them as her father had done but rather had to invent her own methods for keeping them in their place. Women were supposed to be indecisive so she took advantage of that by delaying important decisions far longer than any of her advisers thought wise. Sometimes this was done in the hope that some last minute change in the circumstances would either need to be taken into account, or might make any decision unnecessary. Thus she procrastinated over intervening in Scotland in 1560, in the hope that the Scots would be able to manage without her, and even instructed the navy, which she eventually sent north to act as though independently of her instructions – a subterfuge with which the Admiral, William Winter, would have nothing to do. 11 She dithered and procrastinated about sending offi cial assistance to the rebels in the Low Countries after William of Orange’s assassination in 1584, both in the hope that it would not be necessary and because she disliked rebels, but moved eventually when the whole rebellion appeared to be on the point of collapse. Despite the reams of advice that she was given, Elizabeth always reserved the decisions in such matters to herself, and ultimately played her cards close, because it was not