Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (22 page)

No one who ever had anything to do with her could doubt the quality of her trained and formidable intelligence, but from the first weeks of her reign she also demonstrated that she possessed the precious attribute of personal magnetism. 'If ever any person had either the gift or the style to win the hearts of people, it was this Queen,' wrote the historian John Hayward, and Elizabeth's continuing love-affair with her subjects remains one of the wonders of the age. It was certainly one of her greatest sources of strength.

She was a born ruler and above all a born politician, shrewd, cautious and subtle. In circumstances where Mary had floundered unhappily, Elizabeth moved sure-footed and confident. Instead of meekly accepting her sex as an inescapable infirmity in a male-dominated world, she used it brilliantly and deliberately as a weapon in her life-long battle to avoid domination. Her private resolve to stay single did not for a moment prevent her from zestfully exploiting the advantages attached to being 'the best match in her parish', and for twenty years the Queen's various marriage projects provided her with an invaluable card in the diplomatic poker game. Her subjects would, of course, have preferred her to marry an Englishman but, fortunately for Elizabeth, there was no Englishman available of sufficiently high rank to make him acceptable to his peers. If Edward Courtenay had been still alive, even she might have found it impossible to resist the pressure which would have been brought to bear on her, but Edward Courtenay had died of fever in 1556, and there was no one else. Abroad, virtually every suitable prince was a Catholic, and the Queen at least knew very well that to attempt to introduce another Catholic consort into what had once more become a Protestant country would be asking for trouble of the most lurid kind - especially as the ideological warfare between the two creeds grew fiercer. But since nobody, not even those closest to her, could ever be quite certain what the Queen meant to do (the Queen, always a consummate actress, took care that they should not), negotiations with foreign powers were conducted with every appearance of serious intent and prolonged until they had served their purpose.

While she enjoyed being sought after as much as the next woman, the Queen's famous courtships were political ploys first and last. She found her friends nearer home. Elizabeth was no sexual deviant, at any rate not in any obvious sense. She never lost her eye for an attractive man and enjoyed male company, so long as it was on her own terms. Her obvious preference for the company of Robert Dudley was a cause of acute concern in the early years of the reign, and many people were seriously worried that the Queen might be wasting her time and spoiling her chances by having an affair with a married man. When Robert's wife died in mysterious circumstances, fear that she meant to throw herself away in a demeaning and disastrous marriage reached panic proportions in some quarters.

I wish I were either dead or hence [wrote Nicholas Throckmorton, English ambassador in Paris], that I might not hear the dishonourable and naughty reports that are made of the Queen.... One laugheth at us, another threateneth, another revileth the Queen. Some let not to say: What religion is this that a subject shall kill his wife and the Prince not only bear withal but marry with him? If these slanderous bruits be not slaked, or if they prove true, our reputation is gone forever, war follows and utter subversion of the Queen and country.

There was one man prepared to disregard gossip and slander - a man prepared to disregard everything but the one urgent and fundamental reason for the Queen's marriage. Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, like most of his contemporaries, detested Robert Dudley, but he wrote to Secretary of State William Cecil in the month following Amye Dudley's death: 'I wish not her Majesty to linger this matter of so great importance but to choose speedily; and therein to follow so much her own affection as by the looking upon him whom she should choose, her whole being may be moved by desire; which shall be the readiest way, with the help of God, to bring us a blessed Prince.' If the Queen really loved and desired Robert Dudley, then Sussex, for his part, would be ready to sink his prejudices and love, honour and serve his enemy to the end. But the Earl found no supporters in this humane and generous attitude. Not even for the sake of a blessed prince would the nation stomach a wife-murderer, the upstart son of a notorious traitor, as their king, and pretty well everyone with an opinion on the subject agreed with Nicholas Throckmorton that the result of a Tudor-Dudley marriage would be 'the Queen our Sovereign discredited, condemned and neglected; our country ruined, undone and made prey'.

Robert was publicly exonerated by a coroner's jury, which returned a verdict of misadventure on the unhappy Amye, and he returned to his usual place at the Queen's side. But she did not marry him. Although he was to remain her constant companion until his death twenty-eight years later, Elizabeth always insisted that they were 'just good friends', and no evidence to the contrary has ever been produced. Most probably she was speaking the literal truth. In Robert Dudley she had a good-looking, amusing, sophisticated escort, an old friend who already shared memories with her, an ideal crony now to share her leisure moments. He was, moreover, no mere lapdog but a man of initiative, able and talented, who could hold his own in any company. Yet he was still her creation, dependent in the last resort on her favour. Robert may well have been the only man Elizabeth ever loved, perhaps the only man she ever did seriously consider marrying; but, apart from the obvious political imprudence of such a step, in the end it always came back to one thing, to the basic principle which governed Elizabeth's life: T will have here but one mistress and no master.'

As time passed, the English people gradually became accustomed to the novel idea of a virgin Queen - of a Queen married to her kingdom and belonging to it alone - and most people found they preferred it that way, or would have done if only it had not been for a perpetual nagging worry about the future. No one who thought about the matter at all could fail to be aware that everything they most valued, their newly-established Protestant church, their freedom from foreign interference, the country's growing prosperity and prestige, all depended quite literally on the fragile thread of one woman's life. Fortunately for everyone's peace of mind, Elizabeth normally enjoyed excellent health but not even she was immune from the accidents of fate. At Hampton Court in the autumn of 1562 she succumbed to a virulent strain of smallpox and very nearly died. Not surprisingly the result was a renewed onslaught by a badly frightened Parliament beseeching the Queen to marry, or at least to name her successor.

Out of the dozen or so persons of royal descent who had survived into the 1560s, there were really only two with serious claims to the position of heir presumptive - one was Lady Katherine Grey, sister of the tragic Jane, and the other was Mary, Queen of Scots. Katherine Grey might have commanded quite an influential body of support - she was, after all, a staunch Protestant and an Englishwoman born - but she had unfortunately turned out to be a common-place and foolish young woman and had ruined herself with the Queen by making a clandestine marriage, only discovered when her pregnancy could no longer be concealed. Elizabeth had never thought much of Lady Katherine, and now, King Henry's Will regardless, it was clear that her chances of recognition were nil.

Margaret Douglas, child of Queen Margaret Tudor's marriage to the Earl of Angus, who had married into a collateral branch of the Stuart family and borne two sons - Henry, Lord Darnley and Charles Stuart - was favoured by some English Catholics who regarded her as 'devout and sensible'. According to the Spanish ambassador, her claims had been canvassed during that terrifying day when Elizabeth was thought to be dying of smallpox. But Margaret, an indefatigably ambitious mama, who was twice to incur the Queen's severe displeasure for her match-making activities, was never really a serious contender in the succession stakes. Her niece, the Queen of Scots, had an undeniably superior hereditary right, and in private conversation Elizabeth was perfectly prepared to concede that she regarded her Scottish cousin as her 'next kinswoman' and natural heir. She would not, however, make that concession official. She knew, none better, that the heir to the throne inevitably became a focal point for discontent, and in this case the danger would be of a special kind. There remained in England a minority of committed Catholics who could honestly look on Mary Stuart not merely as the rightful heir but as the rightful Queen, ousted by a bastard and heretical usurper. To recognize her would, therefore, not only alarm and infuriate many loyal Protestants but give the Catholics new hope and even perhaps tempt some among them to hasten the processes of nature. In any case, nothing would budge Elizabeth from her absolute determination never to live in the shadow of her successor, never to risk being 'buried alive' as her sister had been. She was well aware of the other risk she was taking in a society where 'upon the death of princes the law dieth', but her instinct was still to do nothing, to wait and see if the problem would in time resolve itself and, in the meantime, to go on gambling on her own survival. And Elizabeth Tudor, a woman isolated in a world of men, was always ready to back her instinct and her judgement, against every masculine argument of prudence, expediency and plain common sense.

The Queen's refusal to behave like a sensible man, to come to firm, logical decisions and stick to them, not infrequently drove her sensible male councillors to near despair. 'God send our mistress a husband and by time a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession,' wrote William Cecil on one such occasion. But Elizabeth was not to be deflected from her maddeningly devious, capricious and apparently wilful feminine ways; from her habit of leaving the logical decisions (and the logical mistakes) to others; from her guiding principle of flexibility, of always leaving her options open and never, never allowing herself to be manoeuvred into a corner by anyone. The Queen knew what she was doing -even if, quite often, no one else did - and would play the game of statecraft by her own rules or not at all.

The problem of the succession would not, of course, go away, and the closely-related problem of the Queen of Scots was soon to become acute. Mary, widowed at eighteen by the death of her French husband, had returned to her northern kingdom in the autumn of 1561. Six years and two disastrous marriages later, she landed on the coast of Cumberland, a fugitive with nothing but the clothes she stood up in, and the stage was set for another life and death struggle between two women -between the Protestant Queen and her
de facto
Catholic heiress. Mary, that romantic and calamity-prone heroine, was to prove a dangerous and determined enemy. During the long years she spent under restraint in England, she worked out her frustrations and her nervous energy in an apparently unceasing series of intrigues to gain her freedom and her cousin's throne, but, typically enough, Elizabeth consistently refused to take the obvious and logical course of action - action consistently urged upon her by her anxious well-wishers - to cut off the Scottish Queen's head and make no more ado about her. In this case, though, the pressure became, in the end, irresistible. Increasingly threatened by Catholic aggression from without and by fears of Catholic renascence from within, a point was reached when the Protestant state could quite simply no longer contain the Catholic heir. Mary's execution was perhaps the one occasion when Council and Parliament together, backed by a weight of public opinion united as never before, did finally succeed in manoeuvring their slippery sovereign lady into a corner -a fact which probably accounts for some at least of her frantic, hysterical reaction after the deed was done.

But not even Elizabeth could deny that her life was easier without the ever-present shadow cast by the Queen of Scots. For one thing, the problem of the succession had at last resolved itself. In Mary Stuart's Protestant son, a king doubly descended from Henry VII, was the obvious heir, acceptable to everybody but the irreconcilable Catholic fringe and, by all accounts, a likely youth who would be ready to take over when the time came. But the time was not yet. In the 1580s Elizabeth was still very much alive and in command. After the ignominious failure of the long-heralded, much-dreaded Spanish invasion, her own and the country's international prestige had rocketed. To her fellow monarchs the Queen of England was a prodigy, a veritable stupor mind - 'only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by all'. To her subjects she had become a cult figure, the embodiment of every goddess of classical mythology they'd ever heard of; every heroine from their favourite reading, the Bible. She was Judith and Deborah, Diana the Huntress and the Queen of the Amazons, all rolled into one. She was Gloriana and Oriana and a surrogate Virgin Mary, while still remaining their own loved and familiar Queen - especially to the Londoners who naturally saw most of her in her various journeyings about the city and to and fro between the palaces of Whitehall, Greenwich and Richmond.

One young Londoner, living in the Strand near St. Clement's Church, would always remember vividly how, at about five o'clock one dark December evening in the Armada year, he and his friends heard that the Queen had just gone to a Council meeting at Somerset House and were told, 'If you will see the Queen, you must come quickly.'

Then we all ran [he wrote] when the court gates were set open, and no man hindered us from coming in. There we stayed an hour and a half and the yard was full, there being a great number of torches, when the Queen came out in great state. Then we cried, 'God save your Majesty.' And the Queen turned to us and said, 'God bless you all, my good people.' Then we cried again, 'God save your Majesty.' And the Queen said again to us, 'Ye may well have a greater prince, but ye shall never have a more loving prince.' And so the Queen and the crowd there, looking upon one another a while, her Majesty departed. This wrought such an impression upon us, for shows and pageants are best seen by torch-light, that all the way long we did nothing but talk of what an admirable Queen she was, and how we would all adventure our lives in her service.