Game of Queens (42 page)

The example of Mary Tudor offered Elizabeth a dreadful warning, just as, later, would Mary Stuart. Any marriage of a queen regnant offered an insuperable problem: whose would be the mastery? Elizabeth Tudor wrote hastily to fellow sovereigns on her accession to explain that she would not necessarily continue the quarrels of her sister's day. Then, ‘nothing was done on the part of England but with the privity and direction of the Ministers of the said King [Philip]', Mary's husband. The unmarried Elizabeth, by contrast, was ‘a free princess'.

John Aylmer tried to argue:

Say you, God hath appointed her to be the subject to her husband . . . therefore she may not be the head. I grant that, so far as pertaining to the bands of marriage, and the offices of a wife, she must be a subject: but as a Magistrate she may be her husband's head.

She could be his inferior in ‘matters of wedlock' and yet his leader in ‘the guiding of the commonwealth', he claimed. But such a distinction would be almost impossible to make in practical terms.

On 4 February 1559, parliament drafted a petition urging Elizabeth to marry quickly, to ensure the succession. If she should remain ‘unmarried and, as it were, a vestal virgin' it would be ‘contrary to public respects'. She answered that ‘from my years of understanding' – since she first was old enough to understand herself a servant of God – ‘I haply chose this kind of life in which I yet live, which I assure you for mine own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God'. In the end, she said, ‘this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin'.

 

Where other powerful women accepted their coding within the usual social framework, as surrogates for or in at least some ways subordinate to a man, the unmarried Elizabeth Tudor challenged preconceptions to an almost unprecedented degree; Isabella of Castile being, ironically, the great exception to that rule. Perhaps it was in part her controversial position as an unmarried, Protestant, queen regnant, however, that drew Elizabeth towards a centuries-old established image, albeit one so central to the Catholic church: virginity.

Virginity – chastity – had in both ancient and medieval times been seen as offering entry into what was almost a third sex. Its importance was confirmed by St Augustine and St Jerome, by the whole monastic convention, and by early modern writers from Malory, stressing the (male) chastity of the
Morte d'Arthur,
to Petruccio Ubaldini, whom Elizabeth patronised and whose book on six celebrated women included an early female warrior queen whose virginity, like Samson's hair, was crucial to her military success. Medieval Scandinavia likewise had tales of maiden-kings who dressed as men and successfully led armies, until finally overcome by the man they would marry.

Elizabeth Tudor seemed to subscribe to this view of virginity, later writing to Ivan the Terrible (who had dared suggest that ‘there be other men that do rule in England' while ‘you flow in your maidenly estate like a maid') that ‘we rule ourselves with the honour befitting a virgin queen appointed by God'. Not until later in Elizabeth's reign did her status as the virgin queen reach its apogee but even now, at this vulnerable early moment in her reign, she needed something to set herself apart from other women, even if it were the Catholic image of the Virgin Mary.

The religious question distinguished Elizabeth's rule not only from that of her sister but also from any previous female ruler of Christian Europe (unless we count Jane Grey). She was not only a queen regnant but also one who did not see herself as subject in any way to the pope's authority and thus with an almost unprecedented autonomy.

It was obvious from the start that the religious aspect of her role might be a particular stumbling block. The first version of a frankly reforming bill Cecil prepared in the first months of her reign met with outrage, not least because of the role it accorded to Elizabeth. As the Catholic Archbishop of York Nicholas Heath put it: ‘preach or minister the holy sacraments a woman may not, neither may she be Supreme Head of the Church of Christ'. The subsequent amendment declared that Elizabeth, in her humility, wished to be known not as supreme head of the church but as its supreme governor.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Tudor was almost about to fall into the trap that lay in wait for any powerful woman, if (as Anne de Beaujeu had warned and as Anne Boleyn had found) she were the least bit unwary.

 

From the start of Elizabeth's reign, ambassadors had reported her closeness to Robert Dudley. His rise in the first months of Elizabeth's reign was extraordinary; so extraordinary that by November 1559 the outgoing Spanish ambassador, Feria, was reporting that the pair had ‘a secret understanding'. His successor, De Quadra, two months later described Dudley as ‘the King that is to be'.

That idea was dangerous for a queen who needed to preserve her reputation, her support among the English nobility and her foreign allies. Feria put it plainly: ‘if she marry the said My lord Robert, she will incur so much enmity that she may one evening lay herself down as Queen of England and rise up the next morning as plain Madam Elizabeth'. De Quadra said there was not a man in England who did not ‘cry out upon him [Dudley] as the Queen's ruin'. Other factors apart, Robert Dudley was of course a married man, even though he lived largely apart from the woman, Amy Robsart, with whom he had made a youthful match.

As the first year of Elizabeth's reign turned into the second, it is extraordinary how ready everyone seems to have been to assume that Amy Dudley was a problem that could be resolved. Feria had reported rumours that she had ‘a malady in one of her breasts', and natural causes (or the effect of sixteenth-century medication) remains one possible explanation for what was to come. On a more sinister note, De Quadra spoke of Amy's being sent into eternity. This set the scene for what was to prove the first defining moment of Elizabeth's rule. On 8 September 1560, Amy Dudley was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in the Cumnor house where she was staying, her neck broken and with wounds to her head.

She may conceivably have fallen, through sheer misadventure or ill health, although the shallow nature of the steps makes that unlikely. She may have committed suicide; there is circumstantial evidence that she was in a state of desperation, although the same cavil concerning the stairs applies. Or she may have been murdered, either by someone anxious to see Robert Dudley take the blame, or simply by Robert Dudley. On existing evidence, no case can be proven but what matters in this context was the effect on Elizabeth's reputation.

If a sexual scandal was the obvious way to attack a powerful woman, no powerful woman could give a better excuse for an attack. The English ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, wrote of how his very hair was standing on end at the ‘dishonourable and naughty reports' which were being relished by ‘the malicious French'. The French queen, he reported, had joked that the Queen of England was to marry her horsemaster, who had murdered his wife to make way for her. More seriously, ‘the cry is that [the English] do not want any more women rulers'.

Elizabeth's reaction was crucial. She sent Robert away from court, pending an inquiry. When a coroner's court found Amy had died by misadventure, when the scandal had finally died away, still she did not marry him. The question, of course, is why.

In 1560, contemporaries certainly assumed that Elizabeth Tudor wanted to marry Robert Dudley. It is only hindsight that encourages us to ask whether, when it came to it, she really found marriage an emotional possibility. Whether she had been too deeply scarred by the scandal of her youthful relationship with Thomas Seymour, by her mother's fate, by the deaths in childbirth of two of her stepmothers and several of her leading courtiers' wives; or whether she simply saw no way to combine wedlock with the retention of her authority.

Certainly, over the years, she spoke with what sounds very much like a visceral fear of marriage and of childbirth, while in the short term she behaved towards Robert Dudley with an increased freedom, as if the very fact she could not for the moment marry him had perversely given her the freedom to enjoy him more completely.

But in objective terms Elizabeth had behaved correctly, authoritatively, impeccably. Behaved as Margaret of Austria had done over the scandal with Charles Brandon. Behaved in a way designed to set her aside from the scandalous sisterhood John Knox had so vividly described.

 

 

 

*
Aylmer's treatise memorably contrasted Elizabeth with the bulk of womankind: ‘fond, foolish, wanton, flibbergibs . . . in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil's dunghill.'

36

Trouble in Scotland

Scotland, 1558–60

When Elizabeth Tudor acceded to England’s throne, once again English affairs had an effect in Scotland. Marie de Guise’s French-backed rule had become deeply unpopular. In 1557, when Henri II declared war on England’s ally Spain and told Marie he required her to invade the north of England as a diversionary tactic, she had no choice but to agree. She and Mary Tudor, who had been forced into war by her Spanish allegiance, were essentially caught in the same trap at the same moment. Ironically, when in April 1558 Mary, Queen of Scots was married to the French dauphin, some Scots even hoped that in Mary’s teenage husband they would find an alternative to her mother Marie’s governance.

As the Protestant Elizabeth took the English throne, Scottish Protestants took courage. Marie de Guise was convinced that their demands – the right to hold services in the vernacular and to take both bread and wine at Mass – had a political motivation. She herself, like so many of these women, had long been in favour of internal reform of the Catholic church. In 1557, she had appealed for the pope to send a cardinal to reform Scottish abuses. But this was different and, in her eyes, a piece of English-inspired meddling. As her advisor, Sieur d’Oysel, wrote: ‘You can never know here who is the friend or the enemy, for he who is with them in the morning is against them after dinner.’ Both sides felt betrayed: the lords by what they saw as Marie’s determination to make Scotland a virtual French province, Marie by the readiness of those closest to her to side with her enemies.

The winter of 1558–59 saw a series of petitions from the Protestants, including the so-called Beggars’ Summons which, pinned on the doors of the Scottish friaries, called on the inhabitants to vacate the properties. At this all too opportune moment, at the beginning of May 1559, John Knox arrived back from Continental exile, declaring that the deeds of the French queen regent ‘did declare the venom of her heart’. The sermon he preached at Perth on 11 May provoked a storm of rioting that saw locals smashing the church’s images.

Marie de Guise summoned Châtelherault (the former Arran; a title now accorded to his son), saying that it was for him, as ‘second person of Scotland’, to act, since the lords ‘stand in no awe of me because I am but a woman’. Her mixture of force and flattery did the trick, despite Châtelherault’s rumoured Protestant sympathies, and they rode out together at the head of a small army. Too small, as it turned out, to face the forces mustered by their Protestant foes.

A deal was struck but the trouble was not really to be put down in Marie de Guise’s lifetime. Effectively banned from using French troops, fleeing from Edinburgh to Dunbar on the coast, she had to worry more about her safety than about the dwindling chance of exerting her authority. A fresh deal gave Protestants freedom of worship in exchange for bowing to Marie’s civil authority, but Marie was shocked when, in line with the austere tenets of the reformed faith, a revered statue of St Giles was stolen, hurled into the Nor’ Loch, dragged out and burned. She might have been even more distressed had she known that Elizabeth of England was instructing her agent Ralph Sadler to stir up faction and force her to sign a treaty of perpetual peace with England, thus stymying the French.

Throughout the autumn the number of Marie de Guise’s followers diminished almost daily, with Châtelherault chief among the quitters. In October, Marie was forced to flee to Leith, her regency – so the lords declared – suspended. In November, however, she was back in Edinburgh but fell ill with what was probably chronic heart disease, although Sadler reported that rumours of her death ‘are too good to be true’. Her doctors advised her to shun cold damp climates (in Scotland!) and to avoid worry.

In January 1560, eight English warships sailed into the Firth and while Marie ordered Scotsmen to prepare for war with England, the Scottish Lords of the Congregation had other plans. They went south to meet Elizabeth Tudor’s representative and on 27 February signed the Treaty of Berwick, by which Elizabeth took Scotland under her protection and promised military help for the Scottish to expel the French. But Marie was never going to accept a treaty which sidelined her completely.

As an English force crossed the border, Marie de Guise entered the security of Edinburgh Castle on 1 April, the safer for the fact that Elizabeth’s lieutenant, the Duke of Norfolk, believed Elizabeth would never countenance so directly personal an attack on a fellow queen. Stalling for time, writing desperately for French military aid, Marie met the English envoys. ‘Madam, you have composed so many great differences, I beseech you to bring to the settlement of this one all the means in your power’, one of them said.