The Men Who Would Be King (13 page)

To her first Parliament, which assembled at the beginning of the year, Elizabeth had given a fair but flexible answer when they “made request for marriage.” Her reply, written and revised in her own handwriting, was read out in the lofty Parliamentary House, where Thomas Seymour had once sworn to bring about “the blackest Parliament that has been seen”; her references to the past, to her sufferings in Mary's reign, still so recent, surely stirred her hearers' sense of chivalry. The literary tradition of the distressed virgin was still vivid in a society whose most popular reading included Malory's
Morte d'Arthur.

If the eschewing of the danger of mine enemies or the avoiding of the peril of death, whose messenger or rather continual watchman, the Queen's indignation, was no little time daily before mine eyes . . . could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me.

So Elizabeth wrote proudly. Neither the fear of Mary's wrath nor ambition for a fine marriage had been able to move her then to change her maiden state, she declared, and she was still of the same mind now. But people were not to think there was anything final about that. Smoothly she proceeded to introduce promising phrases such as “whensoever it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life,” and “whomsoever my chance shall be to light upon,” so that it should be quite plain to her subjects and the world that she was ready to consider matrimony with an open mind. As for the succession question, her response was that if God should wish her to remain in the single state, she believed that he would make provision for an heir to the kingdom—a reminder perhaps that Mary's childlessness had had the happy result of bringing her, Elizabeth, to the throne.

The conclusion and climax to her speech came with the simple yet dramatic force of a vow. “And in the end,” rang her words, in what perhaps she already knew to be prophecy, “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.” The speech was a masterpiece of subtle diplomacy. Elizabeth was left free to flaunt herself before the desiring eyes of the world, for her own delight and for political gain, but at the same time, with her characteristic gift for creating strengths out of her weaknesses, she had provided herself with an unassailably honorable means of retreat.

“So many loose and flighty fancies are about,” Feria sighed, when spring came and Elizabeth was still as uncommitted as ever. With Philip's suit at an end he had now to begin the irksome process of wooing this “baggage” of a young woman all over again, on behalf of the unfamiliar archdukes, which promised long-drawn-out negotiations while other rumors, other ambassadors, jostled him for the queen's attention. There had been a good deal of talk about the King of Denmark's brother Duke Adolphus of Holstein, a devout Protestant who was also said to be remarkably good-looking, and though Feria had done his best to thwart this contender, by putting it about that he was really “a very good Catholic, and not so comely as he is made out to be,” it was said that he intended to come over in person to plead his suit. Pickering had arrived, and was lounging about the court with a supercilious air, spending a fortune on clothes and entertaining, and receiving an inordinate degree of attention from the queen; and meanwhile the Swedish ambassador was still trying to win her for Crown Prince Eric. The Swede tried to profit from having brought her a proposal when she was unsought and out of favor in Mary's reign, but he was as maladroit now as then; when he “told the Queen that the son of the King his master was still of the same mind, and asked for a reply to the letter he brought last year,” Elizabeth gave him the curt reply that “the letter was written when she was Madam Elizabeth, and now that she was Queen of England he must write to her as Queen.” Then, with splendid imperiousness, she added that “she did not know whether his master would leave his kingdom to marry her, but she would not leave hers to be monarch of the world, and at present she would not reply either yes or no.” Unpromising though that may have sounded, it elicited another magnificent present from the hopeful King of Sweden, and although Elizabeth and her court laughed more and more openly at Prince Eric's lavish wooing, his ambassador continued to scatter money and presents in hopes of eventual success. It was with some justification that Feria observed acidly, “If these things were not of such great importance, and so lamentable, some of them would be very ridiculous.”

As he had envisaged, the archduke's suit proceeded very haltingly. “It is very troublesome to negotiate with this woman, as she is naturally changeable, and those who surround her are so blind and bestial that they do not at all understand the state of affairs,” he wrote, profoundly exasperated. His idea was to drive her into the arms of Philip's candidate by first scaring her thoroughly, showing her the terrible weaknesses and danger of her position, and then soothing her by offering the remedy of marriage with the archduke, which would entitle her to the boon of Philip's protection. But Feria could see that she was as empty headed as ever. “Sometimes she appears to want to marry him, and speaks like a woman who will only accept a great Prince,” he reported, but “for my part I believe she will never make up her mind to anything that is good for her.” It was with undisguised relief that Feria left his post at Elizabeth's court at the end of May, and handed over his thankless duties to the suave, supple-tongued Bishop de Quadra. To the end, Feria was taken in by Elizabeth's air of willfulness and inconsequential posturing. Had he known her over the years, observed her progress from difficult childhood through stormy youth to the position she now held, had he been present at Hatfield ten years before, when, as a friendless girl of fifteen, she had triumphed over all the art and experience of her interrogator Tyrwhitt, he might have seen something more than imprudent waywardness behind her present dealings. As it was, he left England with the conviction that the young queen was not merely heretical but an irresponsible minx, who deserved only to be dealt with by force.

At the end of May the emperor's ambassador Caspar Breuner, Baron von Rabenstein arrived, and de Quadra requested an audience for Breuner and himself a few days later. They were received at one o'clock on a Sunday, and found the queen in her presence chamber dressed very elegantly, “looking on at the dancing,” where she kept them for a long while. Then de Quadra began verbally to open the courtship dance with the archdukes that Elizabeth was to pace intermittently, now slow, now fast, for nine years.

“She at once began, as I feared, to talk about not wishing to marry,” de Quadra reported, and so he diplomatically cut her short and left her alone with Breuner. Ambassadors had learned to expect this from Elizabeth when they tried to talk to her of marriage; invariably she would shy away with fine words about preferring her state of maidenhood, so that they were obliged to coax and lure her into negotiating the matter, with the knowledge that she might at any moment retreat to her vantage point of virginity. “We find that we have no wish to give up our solitude and our lonely life,” she was to write to the archdukes' father, the emperor, with exquisite pathos. “There certainly was a time when a very honourable and worthy marriage would have liberated us from certain great distress and tribulation (whereof we will not speak further), but neither the peril of the moment, nor the desire for liberty, could induce us to take the matter into consideration.” Yet her marriageable status was one of her great political assets, and so, as she never failed to add, the matter must remain open to discussion. Slyly she hinted to the emperor, “We cannot safely assert anything for the future, nor wilfully predict anything rash,” so that a world of hope might be pinned onto her pious observation that God might “in his inscrutable wisdom at any time change our thoughts.”

Having left Breuner with Elizabeth, de Quadra, that “clever and crafty old fox,” went outside to exchange a few words with Secretary Cecil. On this occasion Cecil used one of Elizabeth's favorite ploys, innocently telling de Quadra what a great number of suitors the queen had. It seemed to the ambassador that Cecil was now genuinely anxious that she should marry, but the secretary confessed to him that as far as the archduke Ferdinand's suit was concerned, there were certain drawbacks; Elizabeth had been told that he was as devout a Catholic as his cousin Philip, whilst the archduke Charles was commonly said to be quite unfit to rule.

At this point, Breuner, uninitiated in Elizabeth's wayward and elusive manner of negotiating, came out of her chamber, “quite despairing of the business.” De Quadra acted with great presence of mind. He at once returned to the queen himself, and by dint of exceptional skill managed to erase her unfavorable impression of Ferdinand, and win her interest by pretending that she was not being offered Ferdinand at all, but the younger brother, twenty-year-old Charles. It was a masterly stroke. After considerable “demurring and doubting” she came around to the belief that it was indeed Charles, “the younger and more likely to please her,” who was her ardent suitor, and though as de Quadra put it, “she went back again to her nonsense, and said she would rather be a nun than marry without knowing whom and on the faith of portrait painters,” it was settled that Breuner should be called back again, and so the negotiations began in earnest. Though the young queen was evidently apprehensive about marriage, and at times seemed to treat the whole subject of her suitors as a great jest, the question was still whom, and not whether, she would finally bring herself to marry. “For in the natural course of events the queen is of an age when she should in reason and as is woman's way, be eager to marry and be provided for,” Breuner remarked. “That she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.”

Elizabeth's delight in the trappings of romance and flirtation, which was to become her substitute for normal sexual fulfillment, until it cracked into grotesquerie in the raddled old virgin, seemed in the eligible young woman to be mere feminine nonsense—somewhat inappropriate, often irritating, but harmless enough while it appeared that marriage would be the final outcome. “I do not know whether she is jesting, which is quite possible,” de Quadra noted, “but I really believe she would like to arrange for the Archduke's visit in disguise.” It was a fancy that Elizabeth pursued with some resolution. She was insistent that she could not marry a man whom she had not first seen, for she would not put her faith in portraits; perhaps she remembered the cautionary tale of her second stepmother, dull Anne of Cleves, whom Henry VIII had desired in a picture and spurned in the flesh. In audience with Breuner, who was really not quick or subtle enough to partner Elizabeth in these games, she “plied him with a thousand silly stories,” and then said something that he took seriously but that de Quadra interpreted as a broad hint. One of her jesters, she said, had told her that a member of the ambassador's retinue was really the archduke Charles himself, come disguised and unrecognized to cast his eyes in secret on the great queen whom he hoped to win. It is not hard to detect a trace of longing beneath the frivolity of that remark.

Breuner, conscientious but “not the most crafty man in the world,” thought at times that his suit must be progressing well. Elizabeth often made a great fuss of him, and her ladies seemed convinced that she was in earnest. A charming scene took place on the river in June; one evening, after dinner, Breuner took a boat on the Thames, and as he was gliding idly along, past the sprawling palace of Whitehall and the splendid town residences of the nobles, he saw the queen's barge approaching. Voices called thinly across the water, and then the dip and splash of oars began again as he was rowed over to speak to the queen. She was in one of her charming moods, gay and bantering; she spoke to him for a long while, told him to take a place in the Lord Treasurer's barge, and had her own boat laid alongside. Then, with the most fetching air, she began to play to him on her lute.

She was evidently much taken with the pretty scene that she had created, and the following evening, by her wish, it was repeated. “When I arrived there,” Breuner reported, “she took me into her boat, made me take the helm, and was altogether very talkative and merry.” Teasing and chattering on the river on a warm June evening, with the imperial ambassador nervously steering her barge, Elizabeth was evidently enjoying her proxy flirtation with the splendid young archduke whom, if she willed, she could have for a husband. She wanted to be desirable—but she wanted also to be unattainable. When matters became serious, and she saw that she was in danger of being trapped, her attitude changed utterly. Only a few months after her encouraging behavior on the river, when she had long been pressing for the archduke to come over to England in person, de Quadra proposed to her that he should indeed come, just as she had requested. At this she became almost distracted. She insisted with real anxiety that if he came she could not be bound to accept him. “When I pressed her much,” de Quadra recounted, “she seemed frightened, and protested again and again she was not to be bound, and she was not yet resolved whether she would marry.” She kept repeating that she could be put under no obligation, and even demanded that this must be put in writing; when de Quadra took that to be a joke she said agitatedly that she “would write to King Philip herself that he might bear witness that she would bind herself to nothing and had not asked the Archduke to come.” Nothing was certain where Elizabeth's marriage was concerned; ambassadors found themselves hopeful, bewildered, despairing, and confident by turns, and de Quadra wrote exasperatedly towards the end of 1559: “What a pretty business it is to treat with this woman, whom I think must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, notwithstanding that she is for ever telling me that she yearns to be a nun and to pass her time in a cell praying.”