The House of Tudor (39 page)

The sisters met at Wanstead. It was some time since they had seen one another – possibly not since they had last spent Christmas with Edward in 1547 – but they had continued to correspond and, on the surface at least, had remained good friends. Now Mary greeted Elizabeth affectionately and the two processions joined forces for the Queen’s state entry into London. The royal party reached the village of Whitechapel at seven o’clock on the evening of 3 August and Mary paused only to change her dress before going on to take formal possession of her capital.

They made a poignant contrast, those two daughters of Henry VIII, as they rode together through streets decorated with banners and streamers, the trumpets sounding before them and the citizens cheering themselves hoarse on every side. Mary, wearing purple velvet and satin with a heavily jewelled collar round her neck, was thirty-seven years old and looked her age. As a girl she had been pretty - small and finely made, with a delicate pink and white complexion and the family’s red-gold hair. Now she was painfully thin and although dispassionate foreign observers still described her as ‘fresh-coloured’, the pink and gold had long since faded, leaving a small, sandy-haired, tightlipped woman with myopic grey eyes and a surprisingly deep gruff voice. Elizabeth would be twenty in a month’s time. She was never, even in the full bloom of youth, considered strictly beautiful, but the Venetian ambassador thought her face and figure ‘very handsome’ and her bearing regally dignified. There can be little doubt that to very many people in those welcoming crowds of Londoners it was she who represented all England’s future hope.

When the Queen’s procession reached the Tower, the guns thundering a salute, she was greeted at the gate by three kneeling figures - the old Duke of Norfolk, still lying under sentence of death; Stephen Gardiner, ‘Wily’ Winchester, who had spent most of Edward’s reign in prison for his right-wing opinions, and young Edward Courtenay, grandson of Katherine Courtenay nee Plantagenet, who had spent most of his life in prison for that reason alone. Mary raised the suppliants and kissed them, saying smilingly ‘these are my prisoners’. If she was remembering the time when Norfolk had taken the lead in trying to bully her into submitting to her father, she gave no sign of it. Perhaps, in her moment of triumph, she remembered only that it was his castle at Framlingham which had recently given her shelter.

While her brief, incredulous glow of happiness lasted, Mary was ready to call the whole world her friend, believing innocently that the country in general hated the new ways as much as she did, and that the great mass of the people were only waiting for a lead to return thankfully to the fold of the true Church. Living for so many years in rural retreat, surrounded by her Catholic household, she had completely failed to realize how strongly a nationalistic form of Protestantism had taken root, especially in London and the south-east, during the past decade; and had completely misinterpreted the true nature of the rapturous welcome she had received.

For a time Mary clung to her hopes of a peaceful reconciliation. She told the Council on 12 August that she did not mean to ‘compel or constrain other men’s consciences’, but trusted that God would put a persuasion of the truth into their hearts. Soon afterwards a proclamation was issued in which the Queen expressed her desire that the religion which she herself had professed from infancy would now be quietly and charitably embraced by all her subjects. But while Mary was prepared to be patient and to listen to the advice of those who warned her to be cautious at first in matters of religion, there were some things over which her own conscience would not allow her to be cautious. She had, for example, worried a good deal about Edward’s burial, feeling it would be wrong to let her unhappy, misguided brother go to his grave unhallowed by the rites of Holy Church. In the end, she was persuaded to compromise. Archbishop Cranmer read the new English funeral service over his godson in Westminster Abbey, while the Queen attended a solemn Requiem Mass in the ancient Norman chapel in the White Tower. Mass, although still officially illegal, was being publicly celebrated at Court - not once, as the Emperor was informed at the end of August, but six or seven times a day, with the councillors (whose consciences were conveniently elastic) assisting in force. There was, however, one notable absentee, for the Queen’s sister and heir had not as yet put in an appearance.

In the first two or three weeks of her reign Mary had shown Elizabeth a flattering degree of attention, holding her by the hand whenever they appeared in public together and always giving her sister the place of honour at her side. This happy state of affairs was inevitably short-lived. Mary had inherited all her mother’s inflexibility and stubborn rectitude - none of her father’s magnetism and political acumen. A ‘good’ woman, narrow in outlook, limited in intelligence, embittered by long years of loneliness and unhappiness, and still carrying that terrible burden of guilt, she was to prove a dangerous person to deal with - and especially so for Elizabeth. Mary had never borne malice to the child who had been the innocent cause of so much of her suffering, but it was rapidly becoming clear that she could not bring herself to like or trust the cool, self-confident young woman- the past and its ghosts lay too heavily between the daughters of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. A past for which Elizabeth bore no direct responsibility could scarcely be acknowledged as a reasonable cause for present disfavour but the matter of her religious observance was something else altogether and could, indeed must, be brought into the open without delay.

The religious problem was a particularly tricky one for Elizabeth. Now that Edward was gone and Jane Grey hopelessly discredited, the Protestant party was already turning to her as their figurehead and white hope for the future, and, so far as it is possible to tell, her own private inclinations lay with the Protestant right wing. Elizabeth was never one to make an issue over her religion but it would not do to alienate her friends - a time might well be coming when she would need them all. Apart from this, if she seemed to apostatize too eagerly, she would be tacitly admitting her own illegitimacy. On the other hand, she dared not offend the Catholics too deeply and Mary’s attitude was beginning to show that she would soon have to make some placatory gesture. Early in September the gesture was made, an event which, as Simon Renard of the Imperial embassy reported sardonically, ‘did not take place without a certain amount of stir’.

The Court had now moved out to Richmond and Elizabeth, alarmed by her sister’s sudden coldness, asked for a private audience which took place in one of the galleries of the palace, a half-door separating the participants. The princess fell on her knees and shed tears. She could see only too clearly that the Queen was not well-disposed towards her and could think of no other cause but religion. However, she might surely be excused on this point, as she had been brought up in the way she held and had never been taught the doctrine of the old faith. She asked Mary to send her books ‘contrary to those she had always read and known hitherto’ so that she might see whether her conscience would allow her to be persuaded; ‘or that a learned man might be sent to her to instruct her in the truth.’ Mary had never felt any need to read books about her faith but she granted these requests and Elizabeth apparently found her conscience easily persuadable, for on 8 September, the day after her twentieth birthday, she accompanied the Queen to mass. Simon Renard had no illusions about the worth of Elizabeth’s ‘conversion’ and Antoine de Noailles, the French ambassador, told the King of France on 22 September, ‘everyone believes that she is acting rather from fear of danger and peril from those around her than from real devotion.’

The religious difficulty was only one of the perils surrounding Elizabeth at this time. Mary, accustomed all her adult life to rely on her mother’s relations for advice and support, was now turning as naturally and trustfully to Simon Renard as once she had turned to Eustace Chapuys; and Renard, the shrewd, skilful diplomat who had taken over from Jehan de Scheyfve as the Emperor’s resident ambassador, was dedicated to re-building the Anglo-Imperial alliance. But although the inexperienced Queen listened eagerly to the sage counsel passed on by her cousin’s representative, he soon discovered she was quite unlike any ruler he had ever had to do with before. The Emperor had sent instructions that Mary must be dissuaded from taking too harsh a revenge on her enemies, but it seemed that she had no appetite for vengeance and only three of the Northumberland conspirators - the Duke himself and two of his most notorious henchmen, Thomas Palmer and John Gates, actually went to the block. In Renard’s opinion a number of others, including, naturally, Jane Grey, should properly have gone with them. But over this Mary proved unexpectedly intractable. ‘As to Jane of Suffolk, whom they tried to make Queen’, he wrote, ‘she could not be induced to consent that she should die.’ Jane had written a long letter to Mary, freely admitting that she had done wrong in accepting the crown but denying that she had either consented or been a party to Northumberland’s plot. Mary believed her. She had always been fond of her little cousin in spite of her regrettable heresy - at least you always knew exactly where you were with Jane and the child could not help the way she had been brought up. She told Renard that although Jane must, of course, stand trial and be ‘cast’ as a traitor, her conscience would not permit her to have an innocent young creature put to death. Appalled, the ambassador pointed out that in affairs of state power and tyranny sometimes brought better results than right or justice. Mary was apologetic but immovable. Nevertheless, she did promise to be careful and take all necessary precautions before setting Lady Jane free! Renard could only hope, without much conviction, that the Queen would not have cause to regret her astonishing clemency. But however much he deplored Jane’s continued existence, he regarded Elizabeth as potentially even more dangerous. The Queen’s heretical heir would be an obvious focal point for all discontent, both religious and political, and her name recurs in his despatches with relentless iteration. He told the Emperor that she had a spirit full of enchantment and was greatly to be feared. He told the Queen at every opportunity not to trust her sister ‘who might, out of ambition, or being persuaded thereto, conceive some dangerous design and put it to execution, by means which it would be difficult to prevent, as she was clever and sly.*

The open hostility of Simon Renard was bad enough, but Elizabeth knew she had as much, if not more to fear from his rival, Antoine de Noailles, who professed to be her friend. De Noailles’ business was to prevent too dose an alliance between England and Spam. Such an alliance could only be a threat to France and, as rumours began to circulate that the Queen of England was contemplating marriage with the Emperor’s son, Philip, French alarm increased. The King of France also had close personal reasons for his interest in English affairs. The young Queen of Scots, now a pretty, promising child nearing her eleventh birthday, would soon be ready for her long-planned marriage to the Dauphin and, despite the provisions of her great-uncle’s will, she still possessed, by all the accepted laws of inheritance, a strong claim to the reversion of the English crown. The King of France was naturally much attracted by the idea of seeing his future daughter-in-law as queen of both the island kingdoms and, if only a sufficiently lethal form of mischief could be made between the Tudor sisters, he was not unhopeful of the outcome.

Relations between the Tudor sisters were, in fact, already deteriorating. Mary entertained serious doubts as to the purity of Elizabeth’s motives in going to mass, and before the end of September had asked her if she really believed as the Catholics did concerning the holy sacrament. Elizabeth replied that she was considering making a public statement ‘that she went to mass and did as she did because her conscience prompted and moved her to it; that she went of her own free will and without fear, hypocrisy or dissimulation’. Mary could not believe her and the suspicion that Elizabeth was deliberately using the religious faith which the Queen held sacred as a political weapon did nothing to improve her opinion of the girl.

All the same, by using these rather doubtful methods, Elizabeth was able to maintain a foothold at Court and to secure her proper place at Mary’s coronation, which was scheduled for 1 October. She was partnered by that old friend of the family, Anne of Cleves, still living in England in comfortable retirement. They rode together in a chariot draped with cloth of silver in the procession through the city from the Tower, and later they both dined at the Queen’s table at the banquet in Westminster Hall. But even during the coronation festivities Renard was watching Elizabeth closely and reported that she appeared to be conspiring with the French ambassador. Apparently the princess had complained about the weight of her coronet and de Noailles had answered brightly that she must have patience, for soon this crown would bring her a better one.

Not everyone was so sure of this. Mary’s first Parliament met on 5 October and at once proceeded to repeal the divorce of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, pronouncing their marriage to have been good and lawful. Mary can scarcely be blamed for wanting to vindicate her mother’s memory and doing what she could to right that old wrong, but it was embarrassing for the heiress presumptive to have her bastard state thus emphasized. In fact, and contrary to Renard’s expectations, the re-establishing of Mary’s legitimacy did not affect Elizabeth’s position in the succession. Under the peculiar powers granted to Henry VIII, as long as the 1544 Act of Succession remained in force she was still next in line for the throne if Mary died childless. So far, Parliament, though willing to oblige the Queen up to a point, had shown no inclination to alter this arrangement, but Elizabeth had no illusions about what her sister might do if the opportunity presented itself. In one hysterical outburst that autumn, Mary had cried out that it would be a scandal and a disgrace to the kingdom to allow Elizabeth to succeed, for she was a heretic, a hypocrite and a bastard. On another occasion the Queen went so far as to say that she could not even be sure that Elizabeth was King Henry’s bastard. Her mother had been an infamous woman and Elizabeth herself ‘had the face and countenance’ of Mark Smeaton, the lute-player. No doubt all this was faithfully passed on to the princess and on 25 October de Noailles reported that Madame Elizabeth was very discontented and had asked permission to withdraw from the Court.