Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (21 page)

June turned into July, and still the empty cradle waited. But Mary refused to give up hope, and Sir John Mason in Brussels was ordered to contradict the now widespread gossip that the Queen was not pregnant at all and to assure the Emperor that she was near her time. The doctors and midwives continued to talk about miscalculation and to assure the wretched Queen that she was carrying a child, but hinting that she might not be delivered until August or even September. By this time, though, everyone knew there was no baby. The amenorrhoea and digestive troubles to which Mary had always been subject, and very likely incipient cancer of the womb, had combined with her desperate yearning (which, according to the omniscient Venetians, had even produced 'swelling of the paps and their emission of milk') to create that pathetic self-delusion.

Gossip was growing more and more unkind, and something had to be done to put an end to an acutely embarrassing situation - apart from anything else, the Queen's long seclusion and her refusal to attend to business was bringing the work of government to a virtual halt. So, on 3 August, a reduced household moved away to Oatlands on the pretext that Hampton Court needed cleansing, as indeed it must after four months' crowded occupation. The daily prayers and processions for the Queen's delivery were stopped, and Mary returned painfully to her normal routine, having suffered perhaps the most appalling disappointment and humiliation that any woman could experience. As if that were not enough, she now had to face the bitter fact that her adored husband was planning to leave her. Philip had spent more than a year in a country he disliked, being polite to people he despised and putting up with a good deal of dumb insolence in return. He felt he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him and, since his wife was obviously barren, there was nothing to be gained by staying. He sailed for the Netherlands at the end of the month, but before he went he took the precaution of recommending the Princess Elizabeth to the Queen's goodwill, following this up with written instructions that she was to be treated with every consideration.

Elizabeth was still at Court, and Mary, like an obedient wife, tried hard to conceal her 'evil disposition' towards Anne Boleyn's daughter under a mask of synthetic amiability, only conversing with her about 'agreeable subjects'. Elizabeth, too, was on her best behaviour, but the atmosphere remained thick with strain and mutual animosity, and as soon as she decently could, the Princess asked leave to go home. Back at Hatfield, the house always most closely associated with her early days, she settled down to wait, reasonably confident now about the future.

The last three years of Mary's life were for the Queen years of increasing ill-health, unhappiness and disillusion. For the country at large it was a time of economic depression and political unrest, darkened by the religious persecution which still shadows Mary's memory. The first heretics had gone to the stake in February 1555, and in all some three hundred people, including sixty women, were burned alive. It was not, by contemporary standards, an especially harsh campaign, but it lingers in the mind as a sad and nasty episode - one of its least attractive features being the fact that the great majority of the victims were humble people. The 'better sort' of Protestants either conformed just sufficiently to satisfy the authorities' not very exacting standards or else took themselves and their tender consciences abroad with very little hindrance. Among those who sought sanctuary in Protestant Switzerland or Germany was that outspoken radical Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, and her second husband, young Mr. Richard Bertie.

As head of state, Mary must, of course, bear final responsibility for the acts committed in her name, but to what extent she personally initiated the persecution which earned her her unenviable nickname remains in some doubt. In many ways she was the most merciful of the Tudors - certainly her leniency towards her political enemies bordered on recklessness - but while the Queen found it only too easy to forgive treason against herself, heresy was treason against God, and that was a different matter. Besides, the heretics were not only imperilling their immortal souls, they were infecting and endangering others by their example. To Mary it would have been an unthinkable dereliction of that duty which had been so clearly laid upon her, if she had not tried by every means at her disposal to save her miserable subjects from themselves.

From the point of view of what she was hoping to achieve, her policy was a total failure. The fires which consumed the Protestant bishops Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, who, with Thomas Cranmer, were virtually the only sufferers of note, did indeed light such a candle in England as, with God's grace, never was put out. In the political climate of the time, Catholicism was becoming ineradicably associated with foreign oppression, and the Marian persecution sowed the seeds of an implacable fear and hatred of Rome and all its works. The Queen, naturally enough, could only see that the forces of darkness were more powerful even than she had feared, and together with Cardinal Pole, a high-minded, middle-aged scholar who understood as little as the Queen that politics was the art of the possible, she squandered the last of her strength in a useless struggle against the tide of history.

The Cardinal's sympathetic support gave Mary a little comfort in her loneliness, but she pined for Philip, who sent only promises - promises which were repeatedly and cynically broken - in response to her anguished, self-abasing pleas that he should come back, not just because she loved and needed him but so that their marriage might be fruitful. The months since his departure lengthened into a year, and Mary could only rage and despair by turn as time passed and her stubborn, unquenchable hopes of bearing children were mocked by her husband's absence.

Then, at the end of March 1557, Philip did come back. It was for a brief visit only, with only one objective - to drag England into the everlasting Franco-Spanish feud, just as the more thoughtful opponents of the Spanish marriage had always predicted he would. By July he was gone and, knowing perhaps that she would never see him again, Mary went with him to Dover, down to the water's edge. Philip was too busy now, with the renewal of the war and all the business of taking over from his father (the old Emperor was retiring to spend his last days in a monastery), to have time to spare for English affairs, but one piece of unfinished business continued to nag at the back of his mind. The Princess Elizabeth, now rising twenty-four, was still unmarried, still unfettered to the Spanish interest. It should have been a simple matter, and yet, to Philip's annoyance, the Tudor sisters were proving surprisingly difficult to manipulate. Elizabeth was saying flatly that she had no intention of marrying anyone, which of course was nonsense, but she was in too strong a position now to be easily coerced; and Mary, usually so amenable to her husband's commands, had turned stubborn. Philip wanted the Queen to recognize Elizabeth as her heir without further delay and, at the same time, to arrange her marriage to the Duke of Savoy, a reliable pensioner of the Imperial family. He sent his confessor, Francisco de Fresnada, to explain to Mary how essential this was for the safety of the realm, for the future of the restored religion (despite Elizabeth's dutiful attendance at Mass, no one believed in the sincerity of her 'conversion') and to prevent her from making some quite unsuitable choice of her own. But de Fresnada came up against the blank wall of Mary's bitter, obsessive jealousy. The Venetians heard that he found the Queen 'utterly averse to giving the Lady Elizabeth any hope of the succession, obstinately maintaining that she was neither her sister nor the daughter of the Queen's father, King Henry. Nor would she hear of favouring her, as she was born of an infamous woman, who had so greatly outraged the Queen her mother and herself.' Philip, to whom the old feuds of the Tudor family were a tiresome irrelevance, was profoundly irritated, but Mary, although miserable in the knowledge of his displeasure, refused to budge. A sad, sick woman, faced with the realization that her beloved husband was thinking only of a future in which she would have no share, she was being asked publicly to concede that Anne Boleyn and her daughter had won the battle. She would not do it, not even for Philip, not even for the Holy Catholic Church. Poor Mary, if only things had been different, how she would have enjoyed finding a husband for her sister, fussing endlessly over the details of her trousseau, giving her good advice and standing godmother to her first child. But while Mary Tudor had been called upon to bear many sorrows in the course of her life, many disappointments and humiliations, perhaps the one thing she could not have borne would have been to see Elizabeth make a successful marriage and have the babies Mary herself had craved with all the force of her starved and passionate nature.

Philip had not abandoned his plans for the Princess's future, but it looked as if they would have to be shelved until he had a moment to push the business through in person. Somehow that moment never arrived. By the following summer the Queen was obviously failing, and by the autumn the news was sufficiently grave to make the King send Count de Feria over to England in a last effort to make her see sense. But when he arrived, on 9 November, it was to find that Mary had already suffered her last defeat. Three days earlier the Council had gathered at her bedside and spoken to her 'with a view to persuading her to make certain declarations in favour of the Lady Elizabeth concerning the succession', and Mary had given in, too tired to struggle any longer. A deputation had hurried down to Hatfield with the news, and the Queen was left in peace. She was unconscious for long periods during those last weeks, but once, when she drifted to the surface and saw her ladies in tears, she is said to have comforted them by telling them what good dreams she had, seeing many little children singing and playing before her. Mary had always loved little children, had revelled in weddings and christenings and new clothes, taking a passionate interest in those small domestic matters which filled the lives of ordinary women. She was herself a very ordinary woman at heart, made to be a busy, devoted wife and mother, happily ruling the small kingdom of the home. In the great world where she had been forced to live she could only do what she believed to be her duty, what she believed to be right. She had done her best, and it had not been good enough.

The Queen died at six o'clock in the morning of 17 November 1558, and later that same day Reginald Pole, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, lying ill in his palace just across the river at Lambeth, also slipped away, thus closing a chapter with unusual tidiness. There was little pretence of mourning. The church bells pealed and bonfires illuminated the streets, while the Londoners 'did eat, drink and make merry for the new Queen Elizabeth'.

But although everyone, or nearly everyone, rejoiced at the ending of an inept and unlucky reign, there were those who felt misgivings about the future. After their recent unfortunate experience of petticoat government, there were those who wondered rather uneasily if that uncompromising Scot, John Knox, could perhaps be right in his recent assertion that 'it was more than a monster in nature that a woman should reign and have empire above men'. The new Queen was young and healthy and, in the opinion of the great majority of her subjects, by far the most valuable service she could render them would be to marry without delay and bear sturdy sons to secure their own and their children's future. This, as the Speaker of the House of Commons was soon to assure her, 'was the single, the only, the all-comprehending prayer of all Englishmen'. The new Queen, however, showed no immediate disposition to gratify this very reasonable desire. On the contrary, she continued at every opportunity to reiterate her settled preference for the single life, much to the exasperation of the men around her who found all this coy talk about perpetual virginity thoroughly tiresome.

In the society in which she lived, Elizabeth's outspoken aversion to the holy estate of matrimony and her stubborn refusal to accept her natural role of wife and mother seemed both incomprehensible and more than a little shocking. As she herself once remarked: 'There is a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married, or at all events that if she refrains from marriage she does so for some bad reason.' That Elizabeth Tudor's innermost reason for refraining from marriage was rooted in childhood traumas seems at least a plausible theory. Had not her father killed her mother and her mother's cousin for causes perhaps only dimly understood and yet demonstrably connected with sexual guilt? It would surely not be surprising if a conviction that physical love, shame and violent death were inextricably connected had formed in her subconscious mind by the time she was eight years old - a conviction which could only have been strengthened by her own adolescent experience at the hands of Thomas Seymour. On a less speculative level, Elizabeth had seen marriage bring unhappiness and death to her good friend Katherine Parr and had watched the degrading misery of unrequited love ravage her sister, another reigning queen. Of one thing she could be certain - that to surrender to physical passion, to give herself to a man, to any man, would diminish if not destroy her power both as a woman and as a queen, and Elizabeth lived and throve on the exercise of power. Within a month of her accession it was, noted that she seemed 'incomparably more feared than her sister, and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did'.

Elizabeth was, of course, a phenomenon by the standards of any age. 'Her intellect and understanding are wonderful,' wrote the Venetian ambassador in the year before she came to the throne, and he went on to praise her ability as a linguist. Latin, still the universal language of diplomacy and culture, came as naturally to her as breathing. Her Italian was fluent, and she had 'no slight knowledge of Greek'. In the midst of all her other preoccupations, the Queen kept up her studies, reading with her old tutor Roger Ascham, who said of her during the early sixties: 'L believe that, besides her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week.' Elizabeth maintained this habit of daily study throughout her life, and her capacity for sheer concentrated hard work was always immense.