The Children of Henry VIII (30 page)
Read The Children of Henry VIII Online
Authors: John Guy
Her ‘Nicodemism’ was a vital source of strength. Once established as queen, she learned to dissimulate in politics as well as in religion in support of her chief aim, which was to preserve the monarchy and its values largely in the form in which they had been handed down to her from the father she revered. Not for nothing was her motto
Semper eadem
(‘Always the Same’). Her sole aspiration for change lay in her conviction that the solution to the Reformation divide lay in a moderate form of Protestantism, although her hope that Catholics could be persuaded to conform to it within a generation proved largely a failure.
Pan-European events in the 1570s and 1580s were not in her favour. As an almost cosmic battle between Catholics and Protestants played out in France, the Low Countries and on the Atlantic Ocean, the old dynastic monarchies became vulnerable to ideological attacks rooted in religious sectarianism.
F
IGURE
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A letter signed at the top by Elizabeth using her characteristic sign manual, addressed in 1588 to Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, Lieutenant-General and Commander in Chief of the English forces against Spain in the Netherlands, some three months before the arrival of the Spanish Armada.
Against her better judgement, Elizabeth was finally pressured by her privy councillors in 1587 to sign an execution warrant for Mary Queen of Scots, who had been plotting against her. Cecil,
who raised a false alarm that the Spanish Armada had landed a year early in Wales in order to get her to sign, had drafted the warrant in which he called for speedy justice against a woman who was an ‘undoubted danger’ to Elizabeth and the ‘public state of this realm, as well for the cause of the Gospel and the true religion of Christ’.
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But the day after signing it, Elizabeth backtracked, sending a messenger to order her secretary, William Davison, not to have the warrant sealed until he had spoken with her again. When they met later, she railed against his ‘unseemly haste’, with the result that Cecil intervened, directing Davison to hand the warrant (already sealed) to him, and summoning a group of trusted privy councillors to a clandestine meeting in his chamber at the Court at Greenwich. There, Cecil’s cabal decided to force Elizabeth’s hand and press ahead regardless with the execution, and not to tell her ‘until it were done’.
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After the unauthorized despatch of the warrant, Elizabeth went through an emotional trauma that proved to be deeper and more enduring than the crisis that would be brought about by the Armada of 1588. By executing a sovereign queen after a public trial in a court of law, she knew that she had fatally attenuated her father’s legacy. The execution was a regicide, preparing the way for such future events as the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the deposition of James II in 1688, with the corresponding rise to power of those members of Parliament who called for the deposition or execution of Catholic rulers and the selection and approbation of future monarchs on the basis of criteria that members of Parliament themselves defined.
To a queen who was Henry VIII’s daughter, this was abhorrent. The action of Cecil and his fellow privy councillors smacked of
republicanism and the sovereignty of elected assemblies like those of Venice or Holland. Likewise, the flip side of Elizabeth’s decision not to marry was that, when she died a few months short of her seventieth birthday in March 1603, her dynasty died with her and the succession passed to James VI of Scotland.
The waters were indeed uncharted.
In citing manuscripts or printed books, the following abbreviations are used:
APC | Acts of the Privy Council |
Baldwin | T. W. Baldwin, |
BL | British Library, London |
BNF | Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris |
Bodleian | Bodleian Library, Oxford |
Bryson PhD | A. Bryson, ‘“The Speciall Men in Every Shere”. The Edwardian Regime, 1547–1553’, unpublished University of St Andrews PhD (St Andrews, 2001) |
Chronicle | The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary |
CPR | Calendar of Patent Rolls |
CSPD, Edward | Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553 |
CSPD, Mary | Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Mary I, 1553–1558 |
CSPF | Calendar of State Papers Foreign |
CSPScot | Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, 1547–1603, Preserved in the Public Record |
CSPSp | Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Vienna, Brussels, Simancas and Elsewhere |
CSPSp, Supp | Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain, Supplement to Volume I and Volume II |
CSPSp, Further Supp | Further Supplement to the Negotiations Between England and Spain |
CSPV | Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Affairs in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in other Libraries of Northern Italy |
ECW | Elizabeth I: Collected Works |
EHR | English Historical Review |
Ellis | Original Letters, Illustrative of British History |
ESW | Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works |
Fitzroy Inventory | Inventories of the Wardrobes, Plate, Chapel Stuff etc. of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, and of the Wardrobe Stuff at Baynard’s Castle of Katherine, Princess Dowager |
FF | Ancien Fonds Français |
Foedera | Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae et Cuiuscunque Generis Acta Publica inter Reges Angliae et Alios Quosuis Imperatores, Reges, Pontifices, Principes vel Communitates |
Foxe | The first volume of the ecclesiasticall history contayning the actes [and] monumentes of thinges passed in euery |
Green | Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain |
Hall | Henry VIII |
Halliwell | Letters of the Kings of England |
Haynes | A Collection of State Papers Relating to Affairs in the Reigns of King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth From the Year 1542 to 1570 … Left by William Cecil, Lord Burghley |
HEH | Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California |
HJ | Historical Journal |
HO | A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household |
JEH | Journal of Ecclesiastical History |
Lambeth | Lambeth Palace Library |
Leland | Joannis Lelandi antiquarii de rebus Britannicis collectanea. Cum Thomae Hearnii praefatione notis et indice ad editionem primam |
Lisle Letters | The Lisle Letters |
Literary Remains | Literary Remains of King Edward VI |
Lodge | Illustrations of British History, Biography and Manners in the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth and James I |
LP | Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII |
Machyn | The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, From A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563 |
MS | Manuscript |
Murphy | B. A. Murphy, |
NA | National Archives, Kew |
ODNB | The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography |
PPE Elizabeth | Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York; Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth. With a Memoir of Elizabeth of York, and Notes |
PPE Mary | Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess Mary |
Rawdon Brown | Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII: Selections of Despatches written by the Venetian Ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian |
Rogers, | The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More |
Rutland Papers | Original Documents Illustrative of the Courts and Times of Henry VII and Henry VIII … from the Private Archives of His Grace the Duke of Rutland, |
Samman PhD | N. Samman, ‘The Henrician Court during Cardinal Wolsey’s Ascendancy’, unpublished University of Wales PhD (Cardiff, 1988) |
SR | Statutes of the Realm |
State Papers | State Papers during the Reign of Henry VIII |
STC | A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad |
Tytler | England Under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary |
Verney Papers | Letters and Papers of the Verney Family Down to the End of the Year 1639 |
Wiesener | La Jeunesse d’Élisabeth d’Angleterre, 1533–1558 |
Wriothesley | A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, by Charles Wriothesley |
