The Men Who Would Be King (3 page)

In Catherine Parr, Elizabeth had a fine example of contemporary womanhood: educated, talented, poised, but ultimately submissive to the opinions and authority of her husband. It was fulsomely said of Elizabeth that, when she was six years old, her knowledge was sufficient to make her a credit to her father even if her education were to progress no further. Schooled according to the standards of the Renaissance, which the blaze of New Learning in Italy had ignited throughout Europe, she eagerly studied languages, the classics, and philosophy—“liberal sciences” and “moral learning”—with music for recreation, and by the age of ten she was an accomplished scholar of French and Italian. “Her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man,” her tutor Roger Ascham was later to report—high praise, to compare a young woman's talents with the superior capabilities of a man. Education could equip a woman to be the intellectual companion of her husband, but as Catherine Parr found, any dispute with him had to be undertaken with cautious meekness; there was no counteracting the natural frailty and inferiority of woman. Husband of one highly educated woman, father of two more, Henry could tersely refuse to permit the Countess of Surrey to join her husband in France in 1545 on the grounds that the situation there was “unmeet for women's imbecilities.” At the beginning of that year the eleven-year-old Elizabeth's New Year's gift to Catherine Parr had been a laborious translation of Margaret of Navarre's mystical work
Le Miroir de l'Ame Pécheresse,
bound in a cover that she had embroidered herself, and accompanied by a tortuously sententious letter. It was early proof that Elizabeth, like Catherine, included scholarship among the womanly adornments that she could offer a husband.

It was not for her personal talents and virtues, however, but for impersonal political gain that the younger daughter of the King of England was sought in marriage from her very earliest years. Before she could even speak English coherently she had been courted as a wife, in an elaborate negotiation that both parties exploited to the full and then abandoned, as though in miniature rehearsal for the courtships of the adult queen. In 1535, when Elizabeth was not yet two years old, it was proposed that she should be betrothed to the Duke of Angoulême, the youngest son of Henry's friend and rival, King Francis I of France. At that time Anne Boleyn was still Henry's “own sweetheart,” and Elizabeth was England's heir presumptive, only just weaned, but the most desirable bride in Europe. Chapuys commented that the king had apparently despaired of begetting sons, and concluded, with ironic accuracy, that “this last daughter may be mistress of England.” One condition of the contract was that the young suitor should be brought over to England and educated in English ways at court. Charles of Angoulême was nearly fourteen, a swaggering, high-spirited boy with blue eyes and fair hair, whom Francis loved far more than his older sons, the cold-natured dauphin and the stolid Duke of Orléans. “He had the favor of his father and the people, child of Fortune,” but he was also highly unstable, liable when drunk to go brawling in the streets of Paris, and at a very early age he took an older woman of the court as his mistress. And it was said that he seemed to be uncertain whether he was a girl or a boy; it was fortunate that Elizabeth, who as an adult liked men to appear aggressively virile, and was scornful of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, for falling in love with the “lady-faced” lad Darnley, was not tied in infancy to such a husband.

Chapuys and his fellow envoy at the English court, the Bishop of Faenza, watched the progress of the affair keenly. So close a link between France and England would be detrimental to the power and political maneuverability of the empire; it was a prime condition of the negotiations that neither Francis nor Henry should afterwards treat with the emperor Charles V. On April 5 Chapuys was maintaining loftily, “I do not attach much credit to it,” but by the end of that month the Bishop of Faenza had come to the conclusion that the betrothal would indeed take place. Then Chapuys reported a reassuring conversation he had had with Thomas Cromwell, during which the king's minister had confided that he “felt almost assured that nothing would be concluded at all, skilful as the French were, who asked of them their daughter for the Duke of Angoulême in order to make their profit of them while she was under age, and when they thought expedient, to break all agreements—which never could last long with them, both by reason of their natural fickleness and because the French support the Church of Rome which [the English] will not hear of.” National pride gave rise to a further problem; the relative status of the prospective consort and how he should be styled were sensitive matters, and to the English stipulation that Angoulême should be educated at the Tudor court Francis was reported to have given the haughty response that he would never send his son to reside in England as “a hostage.” By the end of June the Bishop of Faenza was confident that the affair would come to nothing, and cited the weighty reason that the French refused to defy the pope and defend “the cause of the King's second wife.”

Abortive betrothals of royal children were relatively common; Henry's elder daughter, Mary, had in turn been officially promised to the dauphin, the Emperor of Spain, and the King of France by the time she was eleven years old. But the failure of Elizabeth's first wooing had a prophetic significance, in that at the very start of her long life, in which she was to be courted from cradle to grave, the equivocal circumstances of her religious background thus early served as a hurdle to halt a suitor. Elizabeth Tudor was not only a child of the Reformation, she was
the
child of the Reformation—it was her approaching birth that finally drove the conscience-troubled, heir-craving Henry to defy the pope, complete the rupture with Rome, and effect his own divorce from the menopausal Catherine of Aragon, replacing her with his pregnant love, Anne Boleyn. In orthodox Catholic eyes his actions had no spiritual authority; while Catherine lived she was regarded as his lawful wife and Mary his sole legitimate child, so that Anne Boleyn was “the Concubine,” and Elizabeth “the Little Bastard.” In the Angoulême negotiations Henry stipulated that Francis must give his official approval to the Act of Succession, which flouted the pope and settled the crown on the issue of Anne Boleyn, but, predictably, the Catholic Francis was not prepared to offer such open defiance to the pope for the sake of “the cause of the King's second wife.” The betrothal plan foundered. Angoulême, elevated by the dauphin's death to the second brother's title of Duke of Orléans, died at the age of twenty-three, while serving against the English at Boulogne, in 1545. According to popular report he entered a plague-infested house; swiped about him with his sword; shouted, “Never yet hath a son of France died of the Plague!”; and was dead within three days.

Anne Boleyn's downfall in 1536, a year after the baby princess's halfhearted first courtship, further complicated Elizabeth's personal circumstances. Henry declared his marriage with Anne to have been null, and Elizabeth, like her sister, Mary, was proclaimed a bastard. Henry never revoked their illegitimacy. Both daughters were subsequently recognized and given official status; in the Succession Act of 1544 they were placed in line to the throne after Edward and any children that Catherine Parr might bear to Henry. But the legal flaw in Elizabeth's rank remained unmended, a potential weakness in her royal status.

The instability of Elizabeth's public role during her childhood echoed the emotional stresses that her early years brought. It was a valuable preparation for her future life; she acquired resilience and a strong sense of self-preservation, she learned to “seem tame” despite her fiercely independent spirit. She saw the mortal danger of carnal lusts in women: a policy of
noli me tangere
would have saved the life of Catherine Howard. She saw how her royal father, for whom she was taught utter veneration and admiration, was the embodiment of power and manhood, wielder of fate for the women who married him, and thus she acquired abnormal experience of the impotence and disposability of married women.

The observant, quick-witted, receptive child Elizabeth was eight when her mother's distant death was grimly reenacted in the beheading of her girlish cousin and stepmother, Catherine Howard. Twenty years later the man who was almost successful in the pursuit of the queen, Robert Dudley, told the French ambassador, “I have known her since she was eight years old, and from that time forth she has always said ‘I will never marry.' ”

2

“The Matter of the Admiral”

T
he death of Henry VIII in January 1547 effectively marked the end of Elizabeth's turbulent childhood. She was thirteen years old, gracefully pretty, with pale skin, red-golden hair, and long delicate fingers; the portrait painted in her fourteenth year reveals early maturity, in the shadowy curves beneath her stiff brocade bodice, and in her air of tight, unyouthful guardedness. Attractive, accomplished, confirmed as third in line to the throne by Henry's will, she was a uniquely desirable match for any man of ambition who “list to hunt.”

The upheavals of Henry's marital career had not produced the longed-for strong succession. The only prince, Jane Seymour's son, Edward, was a pallid child of nine—a frail pin on which to hang a great nation's future. Mary, second in line, was an aging maiden of thirty, kindhearted, but dedicated to the restoration of Catholicism in England and deeply attached to her mother's country, Spain. Should Edward die without issue, and Mary succeed, there was every likelihood that supporters of the English Church would revolt in favor of Elizabeth, and the tangled questions of the Tudor daughters' legitimacy and the relative validity of their claims would provide meat in plenty for the monster of rebellion to feed on. It was therefore of immeasurable importance to the security of the nation that Edward should be well protected and guided until he was of sufficient stature to govern as his royal father had.

As the king's life ebbed, factions were forming at court; hopes glowed and flickered like distant torches as men laid plans and whispered of possibilities. “Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster before the breath was out of the body of the King that dead is,” Henry's influential chief secretary Paget later wrote to Edward Seymour, the boy king's senior uncle. “Remember what you promised immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy.” The place that Seymour intended to occupy was that of supreme power. In his will Henry VIII specifically avoided appointing any one man to the dangerously lofty position of Lord Protector of England; instead he delegated sixteen equal councillors, including Seymour and Paget, to share the authority of government. But Seymour made his own arrangements, with discreet efficiency, and in the very first meeting of the new Privy Council, held at the Tower on January 31, 1547, the members of that body, after swearing to carry out “every part and article” of Henry VIII's will, “to the uttermost of our powers, wits and cunnings,” smoothly proceeded to elect Edward Seymour Protector of all the Realms and Dominions of the King's Majesty. He was created Duke of Somerset, and his younger brother Thomas, who had previously been Admiral of the Fleet, became Lord Seymour of Sudeley, Lord High Admiral of England. Within a short time the protector was using the royal
we,
and addressing the King of France as “Brother.” Thomas Seymour formed illustrious connections by other means. In secret he married the king's widow, Catherine Parr; and then he became a clandestine suitor to Elizabeth.

The Seymour brothers had climbed from relatively undistinguished origins. They were the eldest and youngest surviving sons of a Wiltshire knight, Sir John Seymour of Wolf Hall. Edward, the heir, did well at court during the 1520s, and became Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, who evidently liked him, and gambled with him heavily on several occasions, but Thomas merely entered the service of the ambassador to France and received occasional payments for carrying dispatches. The brothers' fortunes changed abruptly, however, in 1536, when their sister Jane Seymour, twenty-six years old and “of no great beauty,” captivated Henry VIII as he turned, wearied, from the neurotic and flighty Anne Boleyn. The worldly Chapuys expressed cynical doubts about Jane Seymour's virginity, but her pose of unassailable virtue seems to have been her chief attraction for the king, and the license for their marriage was taken out on the very day of Anne's execution. Edward Seymour was almost immediately ennobled, and it was as Viscount Beauchamp that he carried the little Lady Elizabeth at the triumphant christening of his nephew Prince Edward in the following year. Three days after the ceremony Edward Seymour became the Earl of Hertford, and Thomas Seymour was knighted. As uncles to England's “chiefest jewel,” the heir to the throne, they had acquired considerable status.