Tudor Queens of England (38 page)

She was a great supporter of what she called ‘good preaching’, using one of the heretics’ main weapons against themselves and was an enthusiastic promoter of clerical education, in which she agreed wholeheartedly with Cardinal Pole. She read her Bible, both in English and in Latin, and seems to have protected the former from the assaults of more radical sacerdotalists. She was in every other respect a gentle, merciful soul and her personal servants loved her dearly but she had this one terrible blind spot, and it earned her the name of ‘Bloody Mary’ by which she has been known to generations of English schoolchildren. In August 1558, Mary was ill, perhaps with a mild version of the lethal infl uenza, but appeared to shake it off. Then in early October, she fell ill again, and this time anxiety swiftly mounted. Philip wrote anxiously, because her usual regular letters had ceased but he did not come. Realizing that this illness might well prove fatal, he had no desire to be caught in England at the time of her death. This was not callous indifference but a realization that if he was in the country, his honour would require him to take control of the situation, and that might inhibit the lawful succession. So he stayed away, sending the Count of Feria back to England as his special envoy. By the time that he arrived, on 9 November, the end was visibly approaching:

I … found the queen our lady’s health to be just as Dr Nunez describes in his letter to your majesty. There is, therefore, no hope of her life, but on the contrary, each hour I think that they will come to inform me of her death, so rapidly does her condition deteriorate from one day to the next …

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He then went on to describe the nervous condition of the council, who received him ‘like one coming with bulls from a dead pope’, and to speculate about how Elizabeth would handle the situation. When he wrote, on 14 November, Mary was still clinging to life, but she died early in the morning of 17 November, and within hours Elizabeth had been proclaimed in London. We cannot be sure

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what killed her. It could have been a return of the infl uenza but contemporaries spoke of a ‘dropsy’, which seems to indicate a tumour. Probably the most likely explanation is that she died of cancer of the womb, a disease of which her false pregnancies had been advance warnings. She was interred with full traditional rites at Westminster on 14 December, and Bishop John White of Winchester pronounced the encomium:

She was a king’s daughter, she was a king’s sister, she was a king’s wife, she was a queen and by the same title a king also. What she suffered in each of these degrees before and since she came to the Crown, I will not chronicle; only this I say, howsoever it pleased God to will her patience to be exercised in the world, she had in all estates the fear of God in her heart.

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The chief mourner was Margaret, Countess of Lennox. Mary had wanted Margaret to succeed her, in preference to her bastard and suspect half sister but towards the end had recognized the inevitable – her people would have no one but Elizabeth. So her life ended in bitter failure and her kinsman and great supporter Reginald Pole followed her to the grave within hours. As we shall see, Elizabeth had a remarkably clean start, because Feria had already assured her of Philip’s goodwill and within months he was proposing marriage to her.

It could be argued that Mary’s failure was due primarily to circumstances outside her control, particularly her early death at the age of 43 and the fact that her successor was so different. However, that would be to ignore some very important factors. She did not fail simply because she was a woman. The statute of recognition took care of that disability but her marriage was a serious mistake and from that fl owed much of her misfortune. Marriage was necessary if the succession was to be secured and there was no way in which she could have known how that would work out. But why Philip? He was a Habsburg, represented the traditional Burgundian alliance and was a good Catholic. But in other respects he was a disaster waiting to happen. The Spaniards were seriously unpopular, thanks largely to the ‘black legend’ which was spreading from Italy and the Low Countries. Philip spoke no English, had no knowledge of the country, and was inclined to be contemptuous of its nobility, whom he regarded as venal. He was also the immediate heir to Spain and to its empire in the New World. He would soon have little enough time for England, whatever the expectations. Being married to so great a Prince also undermined Mary to some extent; she was so anxious to please him and yet so conscious of her duties to her own realm. The emotional tensions seem to have torn her apart – and that could (and should) have been foreseen. The answer is that she married Philip largely to please his father, her ancient protector, and that no man would have done. Nor 208

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would any man have suffered the role confl ict that Mary had to endure. She was in many ways an intensely conventional woman, brought up to be a consort and to fulfi l a supporting role, if circumstances had not thrust her in to the spotlight. Whatever she might pretend in public, she always regarded her sex as a liability and accepted that there were ‘matters impertinent to women’. She complained of having to shout at her Council and suffered periods of almost hysterical emotional collapse. In fact her duty to God, her realm and her husband were in constant tension and the stress may well have shortened her life. She worked like a slave and both Philip and Pole worried about the effect that this was having upon her health. In short, she never reconciled her power with her gender, or thought of the two as being truly compatible. It would require a woman with a much more original mind to see that sex could be a weapon, and one to which the masculine world could fi nd no ready answer.

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The Unmarried Sovereign: Elizabeth I

The best known fact about the fi rst Elizabeth is that she never married, but

‘lived and died a virgin’. Whether she was actually a virgin is an interesting speculation but irrelevant in this context. For many years she ignored or evaded the pressing advice of her council – particularly William Cecil – and her parliament, to marry and secure the succession. She drove the political nation wild with anxiety on the latter score and her failure to act was almost universally condemned as irresponsible. With the benefi t of hindsight, it looks like a successful strategy. For over 20 years she was able to use the integrity of her own body as a symbol for the integrity of her realm and, when the time came, to hand over her throne to an adult and Protestant king, who was also the hereditary heir. It is not, however, certain that it was a strategy at all. The chances are that Elizabeth never made a policy decision not to marry. It was just that she was well aware of the risks that such an undertaking would involve and every time a negotiation came to the point of decision, she found a reason to back off. The personal cost of such withdrawals may well have been high, but Elizabeth had no desire to be caught in the trap that had so affl icted her sister – whether to be a good wife or a good Queen. In order to understand Elizabeth’s attitude to marriage, it is necessary to go back a step and to try to assess how she saw her overall position. Like Mary, she believed that God had called her to the throne but unlike her sister she did not feel any compulsion to right the wrongs of an affl icted generation. Instead God, in his mysterious way, had called her to the Royal Supremacy, and put into her hands the government of His Church. God had created her as a woman but, instead of regarding that as a liability, she saw it as an exciting challenge, because God had also given her wit, and a sexuality that enabled her to manipulate the rather conventional males with whom she had to deal. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, there were no matters ‘impertinent to women’; it was just that a woman had to manage things rather differently.

1 She c
ould not imitate her father’s masculine and martial image and she did not try. The female equivalent was beauty and mystery – particularly mystery. So she set out to play the ‘femme fatale’ and to baffl e and bewilder the councillors whom she could not dominate by more conventional methods. Perhaps she was often genuinely unable to make up 210

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her mind, but much of her celebrated procrastination and indecisiveness was deliberately intended to demonstrate her control. She was well aware that only the monarch could make certain important decisions and she had no intention of being taken for granted.

In order to understand Elizabeth, it is necessary to look at her mother. She was only 3 years old when Anne Boleyn was executed, so we are not looking at questions of example and upbringing, but at what was in her genes. Her sharp intelligence could have come from either parent but Henry was not noted for his cool rationality when under stress and her capacity for intellectual detachment came from her mother. She also inherited the feisty sexuality that had served Anne so well in the years of her courtship and so badly when she was Henry’s queen. Elizabeth, like her mother, was an inveterate fl irt, and like her mother used this quality to manipulate men. When Mary spoke of ‘certain qualities in which she resembled her mother’, the chances are that she had a proclivity for heresy in mind, but it was a shrewd observation, none the less. Mary had used the metaphor of marriage to her kingdom but when she took a natural husband that image lost its forc

e.2 Elizabeth used it fr
om the beginning, and it became more telling as time went on. When the House of Commons petitioned her to marry in the spring of 1559, at which time she had been on the throne barely six months, she replied:

… when the public charge of governing the kingdom came upon me, it seemed unto me an inconsiderate folly to draw upon myself the cares which might proceed of marriage. To conclude, I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England, and that may suffi ce you …

3

She then showed her coronation ring, as the pledge of that marriage, and concluded ‘reproach me so no more that I have no children, for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children and kinsfolks …’

It was magnifi cent rhetoric, and if it was ever uttered in that form, it was probably received simply as such. We know of it only from Camden’s

Annales
, published many years later but it is true to the spirit in which she was acting in 1559, and the sentiment, if not the words, is probably authentic. At the time the speculation ran on whom, not whether, the Queen would marry and many years of fruitless political activity was to be predicated upon that notion until time fi nally foreclosed the option of children in about 1580.

It has been frequently noted that Elizabeth was a consummate actress, and extremely conscious of

her image.4
With Mary what you saw was what you got, and her best known portraits show her magnifi cently dressed but grim of face, advancing relentlessly into middle age. Elizabeth was always the Fairy

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Queen, her face beautiful and mask like, unchanging for decades. How many people ever saw these portraits is not known, but they proliferate, often in poor contemporary copies, and it is likely that every gentleman’s gallery and every livery hall displayed one as an expected token of allegiance. So conscious was Elizabeth of their importance that she even drafted a proclamation in 1562, when her real beauty had been marred by the smallpox, prohibiting any further portraits, and Nicholas Hilliard was later given the monopoly rights over the royal image to forestall any unfl attering representations.

5
When Mary shouted at her Council, as she complained, they paid no attention, no doubt putting it down to a touch of hysterics. When Elizabeth threw a tantrum, she boxed a few ears and everyone around her quaked. When they were out of her presence, they no doubt put that down to female eccentricity also but the trouble with Elizabeth was that no one ever knew whether her royal rages were genuine or simulated and if you tested a theory it was liable to cost you dear. Apart from her youth (she was 25 at her accession) and undoubted good looks, Elizabeth had also one other advantage over Mary, which she was at pains to emphasize. She was ‘mere English’. This mattered in 1558, when anti-Spanish feeling was strong, and Mary was (as was pointed out by her enemies) half Spanish by blood and more than half by sentiment.
6
The fact that she had never set foot outside England, and that her spoken Spanish was distinctly inferior to Elizabeth’s did not matter at all. Despite all her struggles to avoid it, her marriage had led to her being represented as a Spanish dependent. It is not surprising that Elizabeth, as Feria put it, ‘gloried’ in her father; he had been a great and English king who had (it could be claimed) defeated the French in three successive wars and dismissed that interfering foreigner Pope Clement VII. But Elizabeth’s mother had also been English. Although trained in France and devoted to peace with that country, she had been purely English by blood – and that was important.

Whether any reluctance to impair this image impeded her marriage negotiations with foreign princes, particularly the Archduke Charles and the two separate Dukes of Anjou, is not immediately apparent. However the last of these, with Francois d’Anjou, was clearly targeted for Francophobe reasons in John Stubbs,

The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf
of 1579, which enraged the Queen as much for its implications of ‘selling out to the foreigner’ as for the suggestion that she was not in control of
the situation.7 N
evertheless the measure of her rage was the measure of its accuracy and its sentiments corresponded with much of the advice which she was receiving from her council. When it came to the point, the two factors which derailed all these negotiations were a reluctance to reintroduce any element of foreign control over England and its affairs, and an 212