Behind the Palace Doors (7 page)

Elizabeth was right by her sister’s side when Mary triumphantly rode into London to claim her crown after Northumberland’s defeat. But it wasn’t long before the new queen’s deep-seated resentments toward her sister began to aggressively spew forth. It was Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, who had, after all, supplanted Mary’s own mother, Katherine of Aragon, and who had viciously abused Mary, threatening at one point to poison her or “marry her to some valet.” And when Elizabeth was born, Mary was deprived of her rank as princess, declared a bastard, and relegated to a lowly status within her exalted half sister’s household. Her protests were met with Anne Boleyn’s order to “box her ears as a cursed bastard.”

The numerous indignities Mary had endured as a young woman were now heaped upon Elizabeth, whose rank at court was often superseded by lesser royals, like her cousin Margaret,
Countess of Lennox.
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The queen even questioned whether Elizabeth was really her sister, noting cattily that she had “the face and countenance of Mark Smeaton,” the musician executed as one of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers, “who was a very handsome man.”

Fueling Mary’s animosity toward Elizabeth was Simon Renard, the ambassador of the queen’s cousin Emperor Charles V. Renard perceived Elizabeth and her Protestant base of support as a threat, and was quick to exploit Mary’s innate suspicions about her sister’s loyalty. Elizabeth was “clever and sly,” he insisted, and possessed “a spirit full of enchantment.” Her very presence at court was dangerous, given that she “might, out of ambition or being persuaded thereto, conceive some dangerous design and put it to execution by means which it would be difficult to prevent.” Mary hardly needed convincing.

To placate the zealously Catholic queen, Elizabeth adopted a submissive posture and requested instruction in her sister’s faith so that she “might know if her conscience would allow her to be persuaded.” Mary was at first delighted by Elizabeth’s apparent willingness to convert, but soon she saw how halfhearted it really was. Before her first mass, Elizabeth complained loudly all the way to church that her stomach ached, Renard reported, “wearing a suffering air.”

Mary was furious that her sister would prevaricate on a matter as essential as faith, and grew even more hardened in her mistrust. The queen confided to Renard “that it would burden her conscience too heavily to allow Elizabeth to succeed [her on the throne], for she only went to mass out of hypocrisy, she had not a single servant or maid of honor who was not a heretic, she talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to all
their evil designs, and it would be a disgrace to the kingdom to allow a bastard to succeed.”

Given her sister’s hostility, Elizabeth requested permission to leave court and retire to the country. While she was away, a massive rebellion broke out in opposition to the queen’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain. London was nearly taken over before the rebels were finally subdued. How much Elizabeth knew about the plot to place her on the throne remains a mystery, but as far as Mary was concerned, she was the prime mover. The queen ordered her sister back to London. Elizabeth refused, claiming she was too ill to travel. This only served to heighten Mary’s suspicions, and Elizabeth was practically dragged back. Swollen and pale, she arrived in London on February 22, 1554, less than two weeks after the execution of her cousin Lady Jane Grey. “It was Renard’s fervent hope,” wrote biographer Anne Somerset, “that Elizabeth would shortly suffer the same fate.”

Despite the intensive interrogations of the uprising’s leaders, no evidence against Elizabeth emerged. Still, she was ordered to the Tower as the investigation continued. The queen was convinced of her sister’s culpability in the attempted coup and determined to prove it. Elizabeth’s character, Mary told Renard, “was just what she had always believed it to be.”

Before she was escorted away to the place where her mother had met her doom, Princess Elizabeth begged leave to write her sister, permission for which was reluctantly given by the two peers charged with her removal. It was a letter upon which Elizabeth was certain her life depended. In it, she swore to the queen that she had “never practiced, counseled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person in any way, or dangerous to the state by any means. And therefore I humbly beseech your Majesty to let me answer afore yourself.”

Two specific allegations had been laid against Elizabeth: that she had corresponded with one of the rebel leaders,
Thomas Wyatt, and also with the king of France. Both charges she hotly denied. “As for the traitor Wyatt,” Elizabeth declared, “he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him. And as for the copy of my letter sent to the French King, I pray God confound me eternally if ever I sent him word, message, token or letter, by any means. And this truth I will stand in till my death.”

Elizabeth appealed to Mary to remember her promise—delivered as Elizabeth prepared to remove herself to the country—that she would never condemn her “without answer and due proof, which it seems that I now am.” And she reminded the queen of a situation with which they were both very familiar—that of the Seymour brothers and their lethal conflict during the reign of Edward VI.

“I have heard of many in my time cast away for want of coming to the presence of their Prince,” Elizabeth wrote, “and in late days I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered [allowed] to speak with him he had never suffered; but persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived, and that made him give consent to his death.”

As historian David Starkey noted in his study of Elizabeth’s struggle, Simon Renard was persuading Mary of the threat her sister posed the same way Somerset had been turned against his brother. Indeed, Renard had just written to Charles V: “If [the council] do not punish [Elizabeth] now that the occasion offers, the queen will never be secure.”

Elizabeth was quick to minimize the Seymour parallels. “Though these persons are not to be compared to your Majesty,” she wrote, “yet I pray to God the like evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other, and all for that they have heard false report, and the truth not known.”

Queen Mary was utterly unmoved by her sister’s plea. Her throne, indeed her very life, had been threatened by the rebellion,
and now her hatred for Elizabeth was implacable. She refused to see her sister and was angered that the time given to Elizabeth to write her letter had delayed her imprisonment.

On March 18, 1544, in the midst of a drenching rain, Elizabeth Tudor was conveyed by boat to the Tower. Upon arriving, she refused to disembark, glaring defiantly at those who would dare force her. Then suddenly she stood, made her way to the steps leading into the forbidding complex, and declared dramatically, “Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs.” With that, she plopped down on the cold, wet flagstone and refused to budge. “It is better sitting here than in a worse place,” she answered in response to the pleas for her to come out of the rain. When the affecting scene reduced one of her servants to tears, Elizabeth asserted fiercely that she sat not out of fear or despair but in protest of the injustice she endured. The princess proclaimed that “she knew her truth to be such that no man would have cause to weep for her.” She then rose and swept inside—her Tudor pride intact.

For nearly seven weeks Elizabeth lingered within the Tower walls, constantly in fear that any minute she would be taken away and beheaded. Yet despite her most earnest wishes, Mary could find no way to legally kill her sister. The council and judges were not prepared to take such a drastic step. Furthermore, no evidence against Elizabeth was uncovered, and Wyatt even exonerated her on the scaffold before his execution.

Yet while there was no reason to keep Elizabeth in the Tower, Mary was not willing to let her go. Instead, she would be kept under house arrest at a crumbling manor the queen owned in Woodstock, near Oxford. Sir Henry Bedingfield, who had been placed in charge of the princess, arrived to escort her there, accompanied by one hundred soldiers. The strength of this force led Elizabeth to believe that the time had come for her to die. Anxiously she asked “whether the Lady Jane [Grey’s] scaffold were taken away or no?” The response that she
was merely being moved to Woodstock did little to soothe the young woman’s worry. There was still the fear of assassination.

After leaving the terrors of the Tower, Elizabeth was warmly welcomed by the common people on her way to Woodstock. The princess had always been held in high regard, now all the more so for having survived the persecution of her increasingly unpopular sister. Large crowds gathered in London to wish her well on her journey, while enthusiastic villagers along the route tossed fragrant herbs and other goods into her litter, shouting, “God save Your Grace!” as she passed.

But once she arrived at Woodstock, the popular acclaim Elizabeth enjoyed on the way was replaced by the maddening restrictions of her home confinement. Far from being the assassin she had feared, Bedingfield was instead a rigid bureaucrat fixated on following Mary’s instructions precisely. In the name of the queen, he made Elizabeth’s life hell. She was kept isolated from the outside world, with very little personal freedom—even to possess the Bible of her choice.

In exasperation, Elizabeth wrote a howling letter of protest to her sister. Gone was the humble obsequiousness she had shown the queen in her plea before being remanded to the Tower. Now she had the temerity to address Mary throughout as “You,” a gross breach of etiquette, and insisted upon reaffirming her innocence. The queen was not pleased. She reiterated the grounds for her suspicions about Elizabeth and reminded her sister that she had been treated with “more clemency and favour … than [those] in like matters hath been accustomed.” Mary then stated that in the future she did not wish to be “molested by such her disguise and colourable letters.”

Bedingfield took his cue from the queen and made Elizabeth’s life even more miserable. She would no longer be allowed to write the council, a ban, Elizabeth insisted, that was contrary to her basic rights and that left her “in worse case than the worst prisoner in Newgate.” In such a state, she continued,
“I must needs continue this life without all hope worldly, wholly resting to the truth of my cause.”

Redemption for Elizabeth came from the unlikeliest of sources: Philip of Spain, the same king who would one day launch the Spanish Armada against her. His protection was based solely on self-interest, for if his wife, Mary, should die childless, he would need Elizabeth as an ally. With that in mind, Philip encouraged the queen to bring her sister to court and treat her gently. Mary agreed, but most reluctantly. Her ill feelings had not abated at all.

Elizabeth waited for three weeks at Hampton Court before Mary finally deigned to meet with her. The queen had hoped that the suspense and anxiety leading up to the interview would make Elizabeth crack, but the Tudor princess was made of sterner stuff than that. She bowed humbly before her sister, whom she had not seen in a year, but conceded nothing. Mary was livid. “You will not confess your offence but stand stoutly in your truth,” she growled in her deep, almost manly voice. “I pray God it may so fall out.”

The rest of the interview went no better, with Mary insisting that Elizabeth would proclaim to the world that she had been unjustly punished. “I must not say so, to you,” Elizabeth answered.

“Why then, belike you will to others,” Mary retorted.

“No,” said Elizabeth, “I have borne the burden and must bear it. I humbly beseech Your Majesty to have a good opinion of me, and to think me to be your true subject, not only from the beginning hitherto, but forever, as long as life lasteth.”

Far from satisfied, Mary dismissed her sister “with very few comfortable words.” Elizabeth remained at court, isolated, while the drama of the queen’s false pregnancy played out. Then she was permitted to retire to her childhood home at Hatfield.

Though the queen seethed over her inability to move against
Elizabeth, she remained absolutely determined that Anne Boleyn’s daughter would never succeed her. It would be an abomination, wrote the Venetian ambassador, for Mary “to see the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet on the point of inheriting the throne with better fortune than herself, whose descent is rightful, legitimate and legal.”

Yet as much as the queen chafed at the prospect of Elizabeth’s one day wearing the crown, the inevitability of it became increasingly apparent. Mary proved barren and, in the wake of her fanatical persecution of Protestants, deeply unpopular. Almost as a coda to her disastrous five-year reign, Calais was lost in an ill-advised war. Sick, tired, and in despair, Mary I died quietly on November 17, 1558.

When the news of her sister’s demise arrived at Hatfield, Elizabeth fell to her knees. “This is the doing of the Lord,” she gasped, “and it is marvelous in our eyes.” The Elizabethan age had begun.