The Watchers (6 page)

Feria tried to make sense of what he had seen and heard so far in his embassy to England. It seemed to the count that King Philip had no influence at all. If Elizabeth had been married off to a safe foreign prince, the situation might have been different. But as matters stood in November 1558 it was plain to Feria that she would marry whomever she pleased, with who knew what dynastic consequences. She would be able to put herself beyond the control of either the Spanish or French ruling families, the Habsburgs or the Valois. Feria was sure that Elizabeth saw herself as the next Queen of England. She believed that she would succeed Mary even if Mary and Philip opposed her succession, which, given Mary's unhappy acquiescence to succession law and the message of Feria's embassy, seemed unlikely. ‘God alone knows,' Feria wrote, ‘how it pains me to see what is happening here.' He felt wretched and asked Philip to send to London an ambassador better able to cope with business of such sensitivity and complexity. The only thing that improved his mood was the nervous manner of poor humble Doctor Núñez. ‘He is my salvation,' Feria wrote, ‘for I find myself having to put up with such annoyances and I am so frequently snubbed here, that it consoles me whenever I see him enter my presence so meek and fearful of what might happen to him.'

Feria believed that there were two things Princess Elizabeth seemed disposed to do as queen. The first was to conclude a peace with France. The second was to maintain good relations with both Spain and France. Feria had noted the names of men he thought likely to have influence in the new government. He suspected many close to Elizabeth to be Protestants. Of one piece of intelligence Feria was certain: it was that Elizabeth's secretary, the man who would run the government machine and be her right hand, was Sir William Cecil, thirty-eight years old, educated at Cambridge University and formerly secretary to King Edward VI. Of Cecil, whom he did not know, Feria wrote:
‘éste dizen que es hombre entendido y virtuoso pero erege'. He was an able and virtuous man but a heretic.

On Monday, 14 November, four days after visiting Elizabeth at Brocket Hall, Feria wrote to King Philip. He was blunt. There was no hope for Mary's life; indeed with the passing of each hour he expected news of her death. He wrote his diplomatic dispatch with a grim resignation. The night before he set to work on it, on the evening of the 13th, Mary, the queen who had returned her Tudor kingdoms so decisively to the universal Catholic Church after the schism and heresy of Henry VIII and Edward VI, received the sacrament of extreme unction, anointed with holy oil in her last illness. ‘Today she is better,' Feria wrote to Philip on the 14th, ‘although there is little hope of her life.'

Feria worked hard on his dispatch to Philip, putting some of its more sensitive passages into cipher. He must have been glad to finish it, for he felt oppressed by his embassy, vital as it was. Snubbed at the court of a dying queen, dispirited and beset by business so complicated he felt overwhelmed by it, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Count of Feria was surely relieved to hand the sealed packet to the courier. The dispatch rider had it by two o'clock and rode off with it to Dover.

On Thursday, 17 November 1558 Sir William Cecil was the busiest man in England, hard at work putting Elizabeth's government together and winding up the affairs of the old court. He wrote paper after paper, long complicated lists of items of business to get through for a peaceful and smooth succession. Queen Mary had died at six o'clock that morning. Sir William, with the anticipation of a skilled royal servant and politician, was already at Hatfield with Queen Elizabeth. While noblemen and gentlemen came to seek audience with Elizabeth at her court, still Sir William Cecil continued to write. There was little relief, but he was quite equal to it. For three years he had been secretary to King Edward VI, and for three years before that he had served in the household of the most powerful man in England, young Edward VI's protector and governor, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Duke of Somerset, Henry VIII's brother-in-law. In Mary's reign Cecil had cultivated good relations with important men at court. But he had also been careful to stay as close as he sensibly could to
Princess Elizabeth, a young woman under suspicion, acting officially as the surveyor of her lands and estates. He had known Elizabeth for many years; and in the early spring of 1558 they had met on a visit she made to Westminster when very probably they had spoken about the office Cecil would soon have in Elizabeth's government.

On 17 November the Count of Feria was still in London. Three days earlier he had written his dispatch to King Philip. In fact it was only a week since he and Elizabeth had talked at Brocket Hall. But now with Mary's death at St James's Palace power had shifted absolutely, and God's anointed resided for the time being in Hertfordshire: the queen was dead, long live the queen. Sir William Cecil set out the business of the new reign, including the dispatch of special messengers informing the Pope and the powers of the Empire, Spain, Denmark and Venice of Elizabeth's accession. It seemed unlikely that the Count of Feria would be called to Hatfield for an audience with the young queen: she had made that as plain as was polite a week before.

The proclamation of the accession of Elizabeth, ‘by the grace of God Queen of England, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, etc.', was read out in Westminster and London within hours of Mary's death. Cecil must have worked on it with remarkable speed; very likely he had the text ready for when it was needed. At the great cross at Cheapside in the city of London officials, accompanied by heralds and trumpets, made the proclamation between eleven o'clock and noon. On the following day Sir William wrote, with his usual brisk economy, ‘done, to Jugge', by whom he meant Richard Jugge, the newly appointed royal printer, busy in his workshop near St Paul's Cathedral in London. Five hundred copies of the proclamation came off Jugge's press at the very modest cost to the new government of twenty-two shillings and sixpence. Within weeks, every corner of England, Wales and Ireland would know that Elizabeth was queen.

Cecil and many of Elizabeth's other close advisers were veterans of the debacle of 1553, when in defiance of the law Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth had been put aside from the royal succession in favour of a young married Protestant kinswoman, Lady Jane Grey, chosen by Edward VI in his last fatal illness. That effort had failed. Shutting itself away in the Tower, Jane's Privy Council had never
imagined that Mary would gather an army to march on London. But she did, and the Council – paralysed by both Mary's resolution and the knowledge that every adviser to the pretender queen had committed treason by disregarding Henry VIII's succession law – collapsed. So the circumstances of Elizabeth's accession were nothing like those of 1553. But still the new government must have been at least a little nervous. The first proclamation was specially composed to sound both dignified and authoritative, to set out the plain facts of Mary's death and Elizabeth's accession, as well as to emphasize the need for peace and order. The new queen made a public formal record of her ‘great grief' at the death of her ‘dearest sister of noble memory'. Mary had chosen to ‘dispose and bestow' the crown upon Elizabeth as her only rightful heir by blood and lawful succession. Subjects were discharged of all their old bonds and obligations, now owing obedience only to Elizabeth; she promised in return ‘no less love and care towards their preservation'. Few words were wasted: from beginning to end the proclamation would have taken a public official a little short of three minutes to read out loud. Richard Jugge's single printed sheet ended with words that must have been shouted by men and women who could only imagine what the future held for Elizabeth, her people and the kingdom: ‘God save the Queen.'

Where in this great whirl of activity was Elizabeth herself? Strangely, she is the one person hidden from easy view: perhaps already she was cloaked by the powerful mystique of Tudor monarchy. Little was recorded of her in those first hours and days of rule. But some of her words have survived, to Sir William Cecil as her secretary, as well as to those noblemen who had come to her at Hatfield. To Cecil she spoke of her trust and his faithfulness to her and to ‘the state', a phrase that would take on a concrete meaning in the coming forty years. To her lords she spoke of a natural sorrow for Mary, and of her amazement at what she called the burden of her office. She understood this royal burden to be God's will.

Like the Count of Feria in conversation with Elizabeth at Brocket Hall a few days before she became queen, we begin to make sense of her. Feria noted her intelligence, and her vanity too. She seemed to be independent, even wilful. Feria thought that she would refuse to be
ruled by anyone. She had smiled at the thought of being married off for the sake of international political convenience; she had laughed when she wanted to and was plain, even sharp, when she had to be; she was able to leave matters unspoken. Now she was queen, Elizabeth drew her authority, not from her father or the law, but directly from God. She was God's representative on earth; her power was blessed by heaven; she was a woman touched by the divine.

Throughout her life the fact of Elizabeth's royalty had always a sharp edge to it. As a girl she had been thrown aside as a bastard when her brother Prince Edward was born, inserted once again into the English royal succession a few years later (though still by law illegitimate) and in Mary's reign imprisoned. There is a suspicion that at least one of Queen Mary's close advisers had counselled Elizabeth's assassination, a notion that, given contemporary thinking on the elimination of dynastic rivals, is not far-fetched. As Elizabeth once said: ‘I know what it is to be a subject, what to be a sovereign, what to have good neighbours, and sometime meet evil willers. I have found treason in trust.' She was not sentimental, but instead resolute in defending the boundaries of her royal authority. If divine providence had seen fit to hand her the crown, then it was her duty, and that of her advisers and servants, to keep it firmly in place upon her head. She had to be kept alive whatever the cost, protected against her enemies: her kingdom and people, as well as the will of God, depended upon it. That, shown in the work of spies and informants and the government's policy of security against those it perceived to be its bitter enemies, is one of the major themes of this book.

Queen Elizabeth shared her royal office with no one else. She was counselled, yet kept her own counsel. When she spoke, often reluctantly and in times of political urgency, it was with the weariness of action, of someone forced just a little into the open. In some ways the character of Elizabeth has about it a spy's elusive quality; she was practised at self-protection. Often she was in the shadows: in the privacy of her private chambers or walking in her gardens, briefed by her advisers, acting through her ministers, or even watched by potential assassins. She was more often offstage than on it but present nevertheless as the source of her officials' power, the object of their efforts at fighting the enemy.

Two competing forces produced within Elizabeth a fascinating tension. As a ruler she spoke insistently about her authority. But as a woman in a world of politics dominated by men she had to build a protective barrier between herself and those who wished her to follow policies she did not want to pursue. She was incisive, sharp and clever; she was also deliberately vague and imprecise; and she used in political life the great weapon of delay. Elizabeth was a controlled paradox, skilled rhetorically at using many fine words to say almost nothing at all, to dizzy and confuse her hearers. Even at her simplest she keeps us on our toes. It is recorded that in Mary's reign Elizabeth scratched into a window at Woodstock, where she was being held under house arrest, the lines

Much suspected by me,

Nothing proved can be.

Quod
[said] Elizabeth the prisoner

Ten years later, as queen, she wrote for a courtier:

No crooked leg, no blearèd eye,

No part deformèd out of kind,

Nor yet so ugly half can be

As is the inward, suspicious mind.

Elizabeth refused to be held to one position, for she was aware like no one else around her of the curious vulnerability of God's anointed.

So here were the first hours of Elizabeth's reign and the beginning of the long fight for the integrity and survival of the Elizabethan state. But nothing was yet certain. To the Count of Feria, Elizabeth was clever, vain and minded to do as suited herself. She had no obligations to the powers and principalities of Europe and no obvious commitments, other than the return to Tudor rule of the town of Calais and the vague promise of friendship with Philip of Spain. The first never happened, the second quickly dissolved away. The young queen was possibly a heretic; certainly some of her courtiers and councillors were. So much was unknown. Philip could only begin to make his political and diplomatic calculations. He, like everyone else, would have to wait for Elizabeth and her advisers properly to reveal themselves.

But Elizabethans faced their own struggles. So far as anyone knew in November 1558 Elizabeth's reign was no more permanent than her brother's or her sister's. Elizabeth trusted in God's providence, but she came to the throne after a bitter and disastrous war and in a time of severe economic strain and virulent sickness. The only useful thing to come of the widespread fever of 1558 was its efficiency in killing off some prominent members of Mary's government who could have caused Elizabeth serious political inconvenience. If Elizabeth and her advisers wanted to break once more with the Church of Rome, as Henry VIII had done a quarter of a century earlier, they faced a fierce political and legal struggle. In the reign of Edward VI the English people had worshipped according to Protestant prayer books. They would soon do so again. International peace was about to return to Europe. But what kind of peace would it be, and how far could the new English government trust Spain, France and the papacy?