Life of Elizabeth I (23 page)

Queen Elizabeth was at Hampton Court when, on 10 October 1562, she first felt unwell. Believing, as many did then, that it would effect a cure, she immersed herself in a bath, then took a bracing walk outdoors; as a result, she caught a chill. Within hours, she had taken to her bed, running a high temperature.

Dr Burcot, a respected but irascible German physician, was summoned to examine her. He diagnosed smallpox, but there were no spots, and the Queen dismissed him for a fool. No eruptions appeared, which many believed betokened the onset of a serious attack, and a day or so later the fever grew worse. By 16 October she was very ill indeed, first becoming incapable of speech and then lapsing into an unconscious state in which she remained for twenty-four hours. The royal doctors, fearing that her death was imminent, sent urgently for Cecil to come down from London.

The next night, Elizabeth drifted in and out of consciousness as the crisis approached, and there was a hurried convening of an anxious Privy Council, whose members were all panic-stricken over the unresolved matter of the succession. If the Queen died, as most believed she would, who should succeed her? Over the next few days there were urgent discussions, with the councillors, according to de Quadra, divided in their opinions: extreme Protestants favoured Lady Katherine Grey, 
while moderates supported the Earl of Huntingdon, who had no near blood relationship to the Queen. The rest wanted the judiciary to determine the matter. Not one spoke in support of Mary, Queen of Scots. But a consensus was lacking, which hinted at deep divisions and boded ominously for the future.

As the court prepared to go into mourning, Lord Hunsdon persuaded a reluctant
Dr
Burcot - some said at the point of a dagger - to resume his treatment of the Queen. Following a curative measure first used by the Arabs and recommended by the English medieval physician John of Gaddesden, Burcot ordered that she be wrapped in red flannel, laid on a pallet beside the fire, and given a potion of his devising. Two hours later, Elizabeth was conscious and able to speak.

Fearfully, the councillors gathered around her bedside. She was aware that she was dangerously ill - 'Death possessed every joint of me,' she told a parliamentary delegation soon afterwards - and her chief concern was to make provision for the government of England after her death. Turning
in extremis
to the one man she felt she could trust, she commanded the councillors to appoint Robert Dudley Lord Protector of England, with the magnificent salary of 20,000 per annum. She also asked that his personal servant, Tamworth, who slept in his room, be given a large pension of 500 per annum. Many people thought, then as now, that this was to buy the silence of one who had stood guard while the Queen and Dudley were alone, but Elizabeth, anticipating that adverse conclusions would be drawn, declared 'that, although she loved and always had loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness, nothing unseemly had ever passed between them'. It is hardly likely that one who believed she would shortly be facing divine judgement would have lied over such a matter.

Although the councillors were much dismayed by her commands, 'everything she asked was promised', for nobody wished to distress her with any arguments, since she was 'all but gone', but, according to de Quadra, 'it will not be fulfilled'. It was obvious that the appointment of Dudley as Lord Protector could only provoke a bitter power struggle.

Shortly afterwards, Dr Burcot entered the royal bedchamber with some medicine, and it was at this point that Elizabeth groaned as she noticed that the first red eruptions of smallpox had appeared on her hands.

'God's pestilence!' swore the doctor at his august patient. 'Which is better? To have a pox in the hand, or in the face, or in the heart and kill the whole body?' The spots, he told the anxiously hovering councillors, were a good sign, and indicated that the worst was over. Soon, the pustules would dry out, form scabs and fall off.

From then onwards, to the profound relief of the Council and her 
subjects at large, Elizabeth improved rapidly - Randolph wrote that she was in bed for six days only - but it had been a near thing, and her grateful subjects issued a coin to mark her recovery. Her brush with Death, 'the blind Fury with the abhorred shears', brought home to them as nothing else could that only her life, which could be snuffed out at any time, stood between peaceful, stable government and the uncertainties of a disputed succession, which could easily lead to civil war. The scare left both councillors and Members of Parliament determined to force the Queen to marry and provide the country with an heir without further dithering or fruitless prolonging of courtships and diplomatic negotiations.

Throughout her illness, Elizabeth had insisted that only her favourite ladies attend upon her, and none nursed her more devotedly than her friend, Lady Mary Sidney, wife of Sir Henry, and sister to Dudley. But while the Queen's pockmarks eventually faded, Lady Mary caught the dreaded smallpox and emerged from it so hideously scarred that she never appeared publicly at court again. Sir Henry Sidney was abroad throughout her illness, and later wrote, 'When I went to Newhaven, I left her a full, fair lady, in mine eyes at least the fairest, and when I returned, I found her as foul a lady as the smallpox could make her, which she did take by continual attendance on Her Majesty's most precious person. Now she lives solitary.'

Elizabeth remained friends with Mary Sidney, being truly sorry for her tragedy, and would visit her privately at Penshurst Place in Kent, the Sidney country seat. On the rare occasions when Mary could be persuaded to come to court, she remained in her apartment, and the Queen, abandoning royal precedent and etiquette, visited her there.

As for Dudley, who had very nearly become the ruler of England, on 20 October Elizabeth, having just settled on him a pension of#11000 per annum, finally made him a Privy Councillor; in order to preserve the peace, she bestowed the same honour upon his rival, Norfolk. Although the rivalry between the two men remained as intense as ever, they were now displaying in public a 'close intimacy'. As for Dudley, he was to prove a faithful and diligent councillor, attending more meetings than most right up to the end of his life.

By 25 October, Elizabeth had resumed her normal duties, but she was aware that certain demands would undoubtedly be made of her by Parliament: the mood in the country and the Council left her in little doubt of public feeling. She therefore tried to stall when it came to summoning Parliament, but her councillors were not prepared to suffer her delaying tactics. In November, weeping with rage, she had a furious confrontation with her former suitor Arundel, who stood his ground and defended the right of her lords to interfere in the matter of the 
succession, which touched the whole country. Later that month, Elizabeth, who needed the money that it could vote, had no choice but to summon Parliament.

When Elizabeth's second Parliament met on 12 January 1563, its members were determined to have the question of the succession settled once and for all. The matter was first raised when, during the opening ceremonies, Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul's, at Dudley's behest, castigated the Queen for failing to marry.

Just as Queen Mary's marriage was a terrible plague to all England, so now the want of Queen Elizabeth's marriage and issue is like to prove as great a plague. If your parents had been of like mind, where had you been then?' he asked the Queen. 'Alack! What shall become of us?' Elizabeth never spoke a friendly word to him again.

But the Lords and Commons were unanimous in supporting Nowell, and soon afterwards agreed that lovingly-worded petitions from both Houses should be submitted to Her Majesty, urging her to marry or designate a successor, for 'thereby shall she strike a terror into her adversaries and replenish her subjects with immortal joy'. Cecil supported the petitions, but not openly - 'The matter is so deep I cannot reach into it,' he wrote. 'God send it a good issue!'

Both petitions were couched in humble terms, reminding Elizabeth of the terror felt by her subjects during her illness and warning her what might ensue if she died without naming her successor: 'the unspeakable miseries of civil wars, the perilous intermeddlings
of
foreign princes, with seditions, ambitions and factious subjects at home, the waste of noble houses, the slaughter of people, subversion of towns, unsurety of all men's possessions, lives and estates', attainders, treasons and a host of other calamities.

We fear a faction of heretics in your realm, contentious and malicious Papists. From the Conquest to the present day, the realm was never left as now it is without a certain heir. If Your Highness could conceive or imagine the comfort, surety and delight that should happen to yourself by beholding an imp of your own, it would sufficiently satisfy to remove all manner of impediments and scruples.

Elizabeth always took the view that neither her marriage nor the succession were the business of her subjects, but matters for herself alone, yet she could not afford to alienate Parliament, and therefore resorted to deliberate obfuscation and procrastination. After din.ier on 28 January, she graciously received the delegation from the Commons 
in the gallery at Whitehall Palace. The Speaker, on his knees, presented the Commons's petition, which she 'thankfully accepted' and then delivered 'an excellent oration' in which she assured him and his fellows that she was as worried as they were about the succession, and had been especially so since her illness. She won sympathy by confiding that the matter had occupied her mind constantly as she recuperated. 'Yet desired I not then life so much for my own safety as for yours.'

She laboured, she told them, under an intolerable burden. They were asking her to name a successor, but she could not wade into so deep a matter without weighty deliberation and was more concerned about choosing the right claimant. If her choice led to civil war, her subjects might lose their lives, 'but I hazard to lose both body and soul', she said, being responsible to God for her actions.

It was not their place, she admonished, to petition her on this matter, but she knew the difference between men who acted out of love and loyalty and those who were mischief-makers. She did not wish to hear them speak of her death, for she knew now, as well as before, that she was mortal. She would, she promised, take further advice, and then give them an answer.

'And so I assure you all', she concluded, 'that though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all.'

Two days later she received the deputation from the Lords with their petition, in which they urged her to marry 'where it shall please you, to whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you'. Even if she chose Robert Dudley, he would be better, they felt, than no husband at all. Failing this, they begged her to name her successor, since 'upon the death of princes the law dieth'. The Lords were anxious to have Mary Stuart's claim disposed of: they did not, 'as mere, natural Englishmen', wish to be 'subject to a foreign prince', and Mary was 'a stranger, who, by the laws of the realm, cannot inherit in England'. According to Sir Ralph Sadler, who served four Tudor sovereigns, 'the stones in the streets would rebel' at the prospect of Mary ruling England.

Displaying some irritation, the Queen told the delegation that she had made allowances for the Commons, where she had observed 'restless heads in whose brains the needless hammers beat with vain judgement', but she expected the Lords to know better than to press her on such weighty matters. It was not impossible that she would marry: 'The marks they saw on her face were not wrinkles, but the pits of smallpox, and although she might be old, God could send her children as He did to St Elisabeth, and they had better consider well what they were asking, as, if she declared a successor, it would cost much blood to England.'

Initially, both Lords and Commons were too impressed by her 
graciousness and her powers of oratory to realise that Elizabeth had stalled again; they really believed that she would now take steps to resolve the matters of her marriage and the succession, when in fact she had promised nothing at all. Consequently, Parliament refrained from debating the succession, although by 12 February, the Commons were getting restive, and sent the Queen a humble reminder that they were waiting for an answer. But Elizabeth was biding her time until Parliament had voted the subsidy she wanted.

Parliament had by then proceeded to its other business, that of passing legislation to protect the Anglican Settlement of 1559. These Acts extended the Oath of Supremacy required from all in public life, and imposed penalties upon those who upheld the authority of the Pope and those who opposed the Church of England. In February, Convocation approved the restoration of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Henry VIII (in place of the Forty-Two Articles of Edward VI) in which were enshrined the Church's basic doctrines: these were finally approved by Parliamentin 1571.

When, on 10 April, Parliament assembled for its closing ceremonies, the Queen, who had been voted her subsidy, attended and gave to the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, a handwritten answer, composed by herself, to the petitions of the two Houses. Fuming over her subjects' temerity, she had written two earlier drafts which referred to the 'two huge scrolls' they had given her, but had amended this as her irritation subsided. In the final version she wrote:

If any here doubt that I am, as it were by vow or determination, bent never to trade that way of life [i.e. spinsterhood], let them put out that kind of heresy for your belief therein is awry. For though I can think it best for a private woman, yet do I strive with myself to think it not meet for a prince. And if I can bend my liking to your need, I will not resist such a mind. I hope I shall die in quiet with
'Nunc dimittis',
which cannot be without I see some glimpses of your following surety after my graved bones.