Tudor (46 page)

Cecil had served as Secretary of State to Edward VI and Jane Grey, and even his enemies thought him ‘able and virtuous'.
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He was a man who inspired confidence, he had a proven record as a talented political operator, and was adept at keeping his hand hidden. Although an ideological Protestant he was often at Mary's court, playing the
Catholic, dining with Cardinal Pole, while keeping Elizabeth abreast of political developments and dangers. He may have been her principal informant during the crisis of Edward VI's last months and Jane's accession. He certainly played such a role over that summer of 1558 as Mary's health declined. By October, when it was accepted the ailing queen was dying, Elizabeth's and Cecil's plans were in place.

Mary did not place any difficulties in her sister's way. On the contrary she added a codicil to her will on the 28th confirming that her successor was her heir in statute. On 7 November she went further, and named Elizabeth before a parliamentary delegation. Whatever Mary thought of Elizabeth, she had no desire to leave England at risk of civil strife. Elizabeth had sworn she was a Catholic and, although Mary surely did not believe her, she chose to leave the rest to God.

Philip was unable to come to England to attend on his dying wife. He was caught up in the funeral arrangements for his father Charles V, and dispatched his Anglophile Captain of the Guard, the Count of Feria, in his place. Feria arrived in London on 9 November to find Mary's councillors very fearful of how Elizabeth would treat them once she became queen. The next day Feria went to see Elizabeth at the house of a neighbour near Hatfield. She was much less serious than Mary: not as personally kind, but funnier, and not as terrifyingly implacable, but shrewd, as the ambassador discovered. They had dinner and ‘we laughed and enjoyed ourselves a good deal', he recalled. Nevertheless the private meeting he had with her after dinner was a glum experience for the Spaniard. Feria tried to persuade Elizabeth that she owed her crown to Philip, who had protected her life and her place in the line of succession, despite her links to plots against Mary. Elizabeth made it clear, however, that she felt her sister had treated her most unjustly and that she had the ordinary people of England to thank for her present position; neither Philip ‘nor the nobility of this realm had any part in it'.

Elizabeth had not forgotten the events of 1553 when the ordinary people had backed the Tudor sisters, while the political elite had
supported Jane Grey. ‘She is a very vain and clever woman', Feria concluded, adding perceptively, ‘She is determined to be governed by no one'.
¹²

Mary died aged forty-two during a private Mass in St James's Palace on 17 November. Pole, who died the same day, had described her life as ‘like a flickering light buffeted by raging winds for its utter extinction, but always kept burning by her innocence and lively faith'.
¹³
Even Philip, who had not loved her, felt ‘regret' at her passing. Mary was unlucky that her health had broken down within not much more than a year of her accession and in the very public manner of a phantom pregnancy. She had failed in the essential task of having a child and, as she suspected, Elizabeth would undo much of her religious legacy – but not all. Although England was not to be a Catholic country by the end of Elizabeth's reign, Mary's Counter-Reformation had restored a Catholic identity that would survive centuries of propaganda and persecution.

Inevitably Mary's reputation would suffer from being recorded by the eventual Protestant victors of the English Reformation struggle. The result is that she is remembered better for her failures than her successes. But Elizabeth respected her sister's abilities as a queen and recognised the difficulties she had faced. Mary's rule had also set a template for Elizabeth in the role of an English queen regnant.

Although it is often claimed that Mary lacked Elizabeth's charisma, her qualities in this regard had been demonstrated before her illness took hold: in 1553, when Mary confronted Jane, and 1554, when her speech at the Guildhall roused London in her defence. Mary had spoken then of her marriage to her kingdom, describing her coronation ring as a wedding band, and her love of her subjects as that of a mother for her children. These were phrases and motifs that Elizabeth would use repeatedly and which became absolutely central to her queenship.

It was thanks to Mary that Elizabeth could expect to claim the powers of a king, and Elizabeth further intended to shape a religious settlement of her choice, as Mary had. Finally Mary's reign forewarned Elizabeth of dangers ahead. England was at war with France and while
Elizabeth hoped to make peace, Mary, Queen of Scots was now married to the dauphin (and even had dinnerware quartered with the arms of England, claiming it by right over the illegitimate Elizabeth). Mary I had faced the French threat with a Spanish husband, but Elizabeth was highly sensitive to the fact that announcement of the marriage had triggered a revolt. And who else was there as a possible husband? One councillor expressed the view to Feria that for Elizabeth ‘there was no one she can marry either outside the kingdom or within it' with safety.
¹⁴
It was a conclusion with which Elizabeth concurred, yet there were still other dangers in ruling alone.

That summer the Protestant polemicist Christopher Goodman had argued in print that the obedience of a subject was dependent on a monarch obeying divine law, and that this excluded women from rule. The same view would be restated more forcibly a few weeks later in John Knox's
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
. According to Knox, a reigning queen was ‘repugnant to nature; an insult to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice'.

Although many assumed Elizabeth's anger over her treatment at Mary's hands meant she would act vengefully when it came to Mary's burial, no one was more aware than Elizabeth what they had in common as sisters, as Tudors, and now as queens. Elizabeth ordered that King Henry's funeral book be followed to the letter.

The final ceremonies of Mary's funeral began on 13 December when her body was processed from St James's Palace to Westminster Abbey. The coffin was placed in a chariot surmounted by the traditional carved image of the deceased monarch, dressed in crimson velvet with a crown on its plaster head. Mary's cousin and friend, Margaret Douglas, acted as chief mourner, dressed in black trailing to the ground. Margaret had served as Mary's senior lady-in-waiting when Mary was Henry VIII's heir and had watched Mary's humiliation as her household was broken up after Elizabeth was born. She had seen Mary's
restoration to her father's favour, and been close to her, once more, when she became queen. In all those years, a Venetian commented of Mary, she had shown, ‘neither in adversity nor peril . . . any act of cowardice or pusillanimity, maintaining always, on the contrary, a wonderful grandeur and dignity'.
¹⁵

At the church door the abbot met Queen Mary's body. Along with him were four bishops who incensed the coffin. A hundred gentlemen in black coats kept watch that night along with the queen's guard holding burning torches, as the prayers for the dead were repeated. The next day Mary's requiem was held, and her obituary sermon was given by John White, Bishop of Winchester, who had been present at her death. ‘She was a queen and by the same title a king also', he said of her, and it was in ‘this church that she married herself to the realm, and in token of faith and fidelity did put on a ring with a diamond on her finger, which I understand she never took off after in her life'. She had remained until her death careful ‘of her promise to her realm' and her subjects. He was less hopeful of the future, however. The bishop could only bring himself to say that Elizabeth held the kingdom ‘by the like title and right' to Mary, and wished her ‘a prosperous reign in peace and tranquillity'.

Mary was buried in the Lady Chapel along with her brother Edward VI, her grandparents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. Her wooden effigy was set up on display, the new modern jointed arms and legs allowing it to be enthroned. In life it was said Mary's eyes were so piercing they inspired not only respect but fear in those on whom she gazed, and her voice was loud enough that she could be heard far off. But in painted wood she was silent, the wide eyes staring blankly in the coming years as the statues, the altars, and stained glass in the abbey were destroyed once more, and a new Protestant order established.

33

A MARRIED MAN

DISTURBINGLY, THE FAMOUS MAGICIAN NOSTRADAMUS, WORKING
for the French court, was predicting disaster for Elizabeth's reign: ‘There shall be difference of sects, alteration, murmuring against ceremonies, contentions, debate, process, feuds, noise, discord . . .' With a Protestant queen ruling a Catholic country, this seemed all too likely, and in an effort to calm national nerves the council commissioned the magician John Dee to cast a more positive horoscope.

It was Dee whom Elizabeth had employed to cast Mary's horoscope when Mary was supposed to be pregnant in 1555, and it is often said that Dee also picked the day of Elizabeth's coronation. This is not so, but Elizabeth's state entry into London was intended as a kind of manifesto for her reign, a political prophecy.
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The day began at the Tower on Saturday 14 January 1559. The court gathered outside at midday while the queen dined in her apartments. There were flurries of snow and as the light bounced off the tumbling petals of ice a Venetian onlooker thought ‘the whole court so sparkled with jewels and gold collars that they clear the air'. When Elizabeth emerged early in the afternoon the procession began.

Both sides of the street, from Blackfriars to St Paul's, had wooden barricades, on which the merchants and artisans of every trade leant in their long hooded gowns of red and black cloth, standing alongside
their ensigns, banners and standards. The bad weather and crowds of people and horses made the streets muddy, but sand and gravel had been laid – and just as well. The Venetian counted 1,000 horses before the queen appeared ‘in an open litter, trimmed down to the ground with thick gold brocade, and carried by two very handsome mules covered with the same material'.

Elizabeth's strawberry blonde hair hung loose over Mary's old coronation mantle of cloth of gold, and she carried a pair of gloves in her fine long hands. Alongside walked ‘a multitude of footmen in crimson velvet jerkins, all studded with massive gilt silver, with the arms of a white and red rose on their breasts and backs, and laterally the letters ER for Elizabetta Regina wrought in relief'.
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Directly behind the queen rode her Master of the Horse, a handsome man in red cloth of gold, ‘of tall personage, a manly countenance, somewhat brown of visage, strongly featured, and thereto comely proportioned in all lineaments of body'.
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He was a reminder to the people pressing against the barricades, and leaning from windows, that many of the unpopular Edwardian elite were back in power. His name was Lord Robert Dudley; a son of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and an elder brother of Jane Grey's husband, Guildford.

At several points the procession stopped for the queen to admire a series of pageants that her Secretary of State, William Cecil, had helped organise. These colourful exhibitions each signalled a political message directed not only at the people, but also at the queen. The first on Gracechurch Street was a huge triumphal arch, divided into three floors. On the lower level was Henry VII, with a large red rose in front of him, and Elizabeth of York, with a white rose in front of her, both in royal robes. On the second floor was Henry VIII, with a white and red rose in front of him, and Anne Boleyn at his side, as if there had been no divorce or execution. Officially that was to be forgotten. On the third floor of the pageant was Elizabeth's own image, standing alone as if just waiting for her pair. It was a reminder to Elizabeth that her key duty as a sovereign was the establishment of peace and harmony. A
marriage would settle the direction of religious policy and, if there were children, offered the best guarantee of future security.

The next three pageants suggested that under Queen Mary religion had been misdirected, and that the future was going to be greener, happier and more godly under Elizabeth. It was, however, the last pageant, on Fleet Street, that was of most interest to Elizabeth for this offered the official answer to John Knox's attack on female rule. Elizabeth was depicted in parliamentary robes, with figures at her feet representing the three estates: nobility, clergy and commons. This was intended to remind Elizabeth ‘to consult for the worthy government of her people'.
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The theme was expanded in a treatise already commissioned by the council. Entitled ‘Against the Late Blown Blast Concerning the Government of Women' it argued that Elizabeth was far superior to most women, who are by nature ‘fond, foolish, wanton, flibbergibs . . . in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil's dunghill'. Nevertheless a godly queen always ruled with the advice of her male councillors, peers and Members of Parliament, and ‘it is not she that ruleth but the laws'.
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In other words, rule by a woman – even Elizabeth's rule – was allowable only when it was a cipher for male government. But of Elizabeth's response to the pageant's message, we hear nothing. She played her role and kept her counsel. ‘
Video et taceo
', as one of her mottos ran, ‘I see and say nothing'.