The House of Tudor (52 page)

Elizabeth had always suffered from a most un-Tudor-like squeamishness when it came to spilling the blood of her kinsfolk, but she told Parliament in November 1586: ‘I am not so void of judgement as not to see mine own peril, nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat.’ And yet, if she could have found a way of keeping Mary alive, even at that eleventh hour, she would undoubtedly have done so. If it had not been for Elizabeth, Mary would almost certainly have died at the hands of her own subjects in 1567. If it had not been for Elizabeth, she would quite certainly have gone to the scaffold with the Duke of Norfolk in 1572. So why was the Queen of England, that most practical of rulers, so anxious to preserve the woman she had herself recently described as a ‘wicked murderess’?

There were sound practical reasons. For although Mary had come to represent such an intolerable threat to England’s internal security, she also, ironically enough, remained England’s best protection against attack from abroad. While she lived, Philip of Spain was likely to go on hesitating before launching his much-heralded Sacred Enterprise against the Protestant island and its anathematized Queen. The success of the Enterprise might well store up treasure in heaven for the King of Spain, but he would still be lavishing earthly treasure (always in painfully short supply) on elevating the half-French Mary Stuart to the English throne - and that elevation would sooner or later inevitably result in the close Anglo-French alliance which for generations the Hapsburgs had laboured to prevent. Once Mary was dead, the situation would look different to a King who could, after all, prove his own remote descent from John of Gaunt.

But more than the political considerations, more than her inherent dread of committing herself to any irreversible course of action, more than natural compassion for her close kinswoman and sister Queen, that aspect of Mary’s end which upset Elizabeth most and which surely lay beneath her violent, hysterical reaction after the deed had been done, was the superstitious revulsion of one who has violated a sacred mystery. To one of Elizabeth’s heredity and upbringing, there was something unspeakably atrocious in the act of subjecting God’s anointed to the process of earthly trial and judicial executioner. It was the ultimate taboo. It was also setting a grimly dangerous precedent.

Once Mary had gone, the problem of the English succession finally lost its urgency. The Suffolk line had withered away. Margaret Lennox was dead and so was her younger son, Charles; although he had left a daughter, Arbella, the last of those forlorn female descendants of Henry VII whose fate, in the next century, was to closely mirror that of the unfortunate Katherine Grey. Mary Stuart’s son, James, was a man of twenty when his mother died and while Elizabeth, sticking rigidly to her principles, never openly acknowledged him as her heir, it was now generally and tacitly recognized that he would in due time succeed the ageing Queen of England. For Elizabeth, incredibly, was beginning to grow old. In the climactic year of 1588 she celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of her accession. Not that the Queen was prepared to make any concessions to the passage of time, and it would have been as much as anyone’s place was worth to have reminded her of it. Her health remained excellent and she was as energetic as ever, dancing six or seven galliards in a morning and still riding and hunting tirelessly. But, all the same, time was passing and 1588 brought Elizabeth private sorrow as well as public triumph.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had been given command of the citizen army hastily recruited to resist the threatened Spanish landing and it was he who walked bare-headed at the Queen’s bridle hand when she reviewed her troops during the famous visit to Tilbury. It was to be the last time he escorted her in public, so it was fitting that it should have been the most glorious occasion of all. In the middle of August, while the Invincible Armada was being beaten up the North Sea, Robert broke camp and returned to London - a stout, balding, red-faced man in his mid-fifties. He was not at all well, the past few months had been an appalling strain, and he had promised himself a short holiday. He spent a few quiet days with the Queen, dining with her every day, and then left for the country, intending to take the waters at Buxton. On the way he sent Elizabeth an affectionate little note from Rycote Manor, home of her old friends the Norris family, where they had often stayed together in the past. He wanted to know how his gracious lady was - she had been suffering a few twinges lately - ‘it being the chiefest thing in this world I do pray for, that she should have good health and long life.’ As for his own poor case, he wrote, ‘I continue still your medicine and find it amends much better than with any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find a perfect cure at the bath, I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycott this Thursday morning, ready to take my journey...’ He got as far as Cornbury, a few miles from Oxford, and there, on 4 September, he died, possibly from cancer of the stomach.

In the general excitement which followed the defeat of the Armada, the disappearance of this great landmark of the Elizabethan scene passed unmourned and almost unnoticed. At a time when her people expected to see her bathed in the radiance of victory, the Queen could not afford the luxury of giving way to her grief, but she took that note scribbled at Rycote and put it away in a little coffer which she kept by her bed. Across the back she had written ‘His last letter’. Although her relations with Robert had never been quite the same since his second marriage to the widowed Countess of Essex, he was still her brother and best friend’, the man who had been an essential part of her life for almost as long as she could remember. His death, too, tore the first real gap in the ranks of that hand-picked little coterie of intimates whom the Queen honoured with pet names and who ruled England under her supervision.

Robert had been her ‘Eyes’. Francis Walsingham, who died in 1590, was ‘the Moor’ - a reference to his dark colouring. Elizabeth had never really liked Walsingham, he was too much of a left-wing Puritan for her taste, but he had been a faithful and valued servant and he, too, had been around for a long time. Christopher Hatton, ‘Mutton’ or ‘Bellwether’, went in 1591 and Francis Knollys in 1597, but the most irreparable loss came in August 1598 with the death of old William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The Queen missed her ‘Spirit’ bitterly. She would often speak of him with tears and turn her face aside when his name was mentioned. Their partnership had lasted for forty years and to Elizabeth its ending meant a break with the past more complete than anything that had gone before. So many of her old friends had vanished now - even her old enemy, Philip of Spain, died that autumn - and the Queen found the new generation growing up around her difficult to understand and to work with. It is true she had Robert Cecil, carefully groomed by his father to take his father’s place, but it was not the same thing. There was never quite the same trust and confidence between them. Elizabeth had problems, too, with Robert Dudley’s step-son, the young Earl of Essex, whom she was trying hard to train up to take Robert’s place at Court. But Essex proved untameable and early in 1601 he paid the price of his paranoia to the executioner on Tower Hill. The Queen sorrowed for the death of a brilliant and beautiful young man, but she never hesitated over its necessity. Essex had committed the unforgivable sin of attempting to challenge the authority of the crown by violence; and when, nearly forty years before, the young Elizabeth Tudor had told William Maitland that as long as she lived she would be Queen of England, she had meant exactly what she said.

The last decade of the Queen’s reign was overshadowed by the troubles in Ireland, by the protracted and inconclusive war with Spain, by faction within the government and by increasing monetary problems. But although the Queen might be growing old - she was well into her sixties now - she remained in full possession of her faculties and in full command of the political situation both at home and abroad. In December 1597 a French diplomat, Andre de Maisse, came over to London on a special mission from Henri IV and has left an unforgettable picture of Elizabeth as she was.

At his first audience, de Maisse found the Queen
en déshabillé
. A boil on her face had made her feel wretched she told him and, although she apologized for receiving him in her nightgown, the ambassador evidently got the impression of a somewhat outlandish old lady, perpetually fidgeting about and with a disconcerting habit of opening the front of her robe ‘as if she was too hot’, so that he could see the whole of her bosom. Elizabeth was very affable and ordered a stool to be brought for de Maisse but, he wrote, ‘all the time she spoke she would often rise from her chair and appear to be very impatient with what I was saying. She would complain that the fire was hurting her eyes, though there was a great screen before it and she six or seven feet away; yet did she give orders to have it extinguished, making them bring water to pour upon it.’

When de Maisse saw the Queen again a week later, she was feeling better and was rather more conventionally dressed. All the same, he noticed that ‘when she raises her head, she has a trick of putting both hands on her gown and opening it so that all her belly can be seen.’ In the course of conversation Elizabeth often referred to herself as ‘foolish and old’, saying she was sorry de Maisse, who had met so many wise men and great princes, should at length come to see a poor woman and foolish. The ambassador was not deceived by this kind of talk and remarked that the Queen liked to speak slightingly of her intelligence *so that she may give occasion to commend her’. She was pleased when he praised her judgement and prudence, but said modestly ‘that it was but natural that she should have some knowledge of the affairs of the world, being called thereto so young, and having worn that crown these forty years.’ ‘When anyone speaks of her beauty’, wrote de Maisse, ‘she says that she was never beautiful, although she had that reputation thirty years ago. Nevertheless, she speaks of her beauty as often as she can.’

Altogether Elizabeth and de Maisse had about half a dozen interviews. On Christmas Eve the Queen was ‘in very good humour and gay’. De Maisse presented one of his entourage, ‘the secretary Phillips’, and describes how, when Phillips knelt before her, the Queen began to take him by the hair and made him rise and pretended to give him a box on the ears. ‘It is a strange thing’, wrote the ambassador, ‘to see how lively she is in body and mind and nimble in everything she does.’ Elizabeth had obviously taken to de Maisse and talked to him freely on a wide range of subjects, reminiscing and telling him ‘tales of many kinds’. ‘Whilst I was treating with her in the matter of my charge’, he recorded in his journal, ‘she would often make such digressions, either expressly to gain time...or because it is her natural way. Then would she excuse herself, saying, “Master Ambassador, you will say of the tales that I am telling you that they are mere gullery. See what it is to have to do with old women such as I am.” But de Maisse thought that apart from her face, which looked ‘very aged’, and her teeth, which were bad, it would not be possible ‘to see a woman of so fine and vigorous disposition both in mind and body.’ She knew all the ancient histories, he wrote, and ‘one can say nothing to her on which she will not make some apt comment.’ In fact, despite her various little oddities, the ambassador had come to feel an enormous respect for the Queen. She is a very great princess who knows everything’ was his considered judgement.

Andre de Maisse was far from being alone in his opinion of this phenomenal woman. Even Pope Sixtus, who was not normally to be counted among Elizabeth Tudor’s admirers, had been moved to declare shortly before the Armada sailed: ‘She certainly is a great Queen and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by all.’ At the time of the highly successful descent on Cadiz in 1596, the Venetians were exclaiming: ‘Great is the Queen of England! Oh, what a woman, if she were but a Christian!’ After the unfortunate Essex affair, the King of France remarked: ‘She only is a king. She only knows how to rule.’

It cannot be said that the Queen’s temper mellowed with age. She was still quite capable of filling the air with good round oaths and was subject ‘to be vehemently transported with anger’. Elizabeth in a rage could be heard several rooms away and she was not above throwing things - there is a story that she once threw her slipper at Francis Walsingham - or boxing the ears of some unfortunate who had irritated her. Tantrums of this kind, though, were always confined to the family atmosphere of the Court and council chamber, and, more often than not, the Queen’s bark was worse than her bite. ‘When she smiled’, wrote her godson, John Harington, who frankly adored her, ‘it was a pure sunshine.’ Elizabeth could be tricky, exacting and infuriating, and not infrequently drove her long-suffering councillors to the point of nervous breakdown - strong men would totter from her presence in tears and babbling of resignation - but her methods undoubtedly got results and her fascination remained irresistible. Harington remembered that Christopher Hatton was wont to say ‘the Queen did fish for men’s souls, and had so sweet a bait that no one could escape her network.’

Elizabeth kept all her old aversion to the idea of marriage - her own and other people’s - but she did, on one occasion, show some curiosity on the subject. John Harington records that ‘the Queen did once ask my wife in merry sort, how she kept my good will and love.’

My Mall, in wise and discreet manner, told her Highness she had confidence in her husband’s understanding and courage, well-founded on her own steadfastness not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey. Hereby she did persuade her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did command his. ‘Go to, go to, mistress’, saith the Queen, ‘you are wisely bent, I find. After such sort do I keep the good will of all my husbands, my good people; for if they did not rest assured of some special love toward them, they would not readily yield me such good obedience.’