The Children of Henry VIII (27 page)

The humiliation of Mary’s second phantom pregnancy was, however, eclipsed by the catastrophe on New Year’s Day, when the Duke of Guise, the leader of the French armies, led a masterful attack on Calais. A severe frost had made it possible for his troops almost literally to walk on water. The surrounding forts were taken after a brief bombardment and, on the 24th, Henry II made a triumphal entry into the town to the sounds of the anthem ‘When Israel came out of Egypt’.

Calais was the last of Henry VIII’s continental possessions. The disaster paralysed Mary’s regime. As even Philip’s diehard supporters slunk away, the government slowly disintegrated. Pole alone continued to enjoy the king’s confidence. When Mary fell grievously ill in October and died in the early morning of Thursday, 17 November, she was mourned only by her innermost Catholic circle and the fact that Pole followed her to the grave within a few hours seemed to the Protestants to be an act of divine providence.

On hearing that his wife’s health was rapidly declining, Philip had sent the Count of Feria, one of his leading councillors and the captain of the Spanish guard, to salvage what Spanish interests he could. Elizabeth, by then, had moved to Brocket Hall, the home of one of her tenants, some two and a half miles to the north of Hatfield, a house more easily defended and from where her cofferer Thomas Parry was working night and day, coordinating her campaign to secure the throne.
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Arriving in London on 9 November, Feria had gone next day to Brocket Hall. He found Elizabeth, as he wrote in his report to Philip, to be ‘a very vain and clever woman. She must have been thoroughly schooled in the manner in which her father conducted his affairs, and I am very much afraid that she will not be well-disposed in matters of religion’. He then added, ‘I see her inclined to govern through men who are believed to be heretics and I am told that all the women around her definitely are.’
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Even as Parry was ordering troops from the frontier garrison at Berwick upon Tweed to march with all speed to Brocket Hall, Elizabeth had made it very clear that she was quite unflustered about her prospects of accession. ‘She puts great store by the people and is very confident that they are on her side’, Feria had continued to Philip. ‘She declares that it was the people who put her in her present position and she will not acknowledge that Your Majesty or the nobility of this realm had any part in it’.
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Elizabeth meant to win the throne without Philip’s help. Her right and title were set out in her father’s will. And miraculously the cards fell into her hand. For even as Mary lay dying, the Privy Council, for the first time united in its wariness of Philip after the loss of Calais, sent a delegation to urge her to recognize her half-sister as her successor. She consented as
long as Elizabeth agreed to preserve the Catholic religion and pay Mary’s debts.
⁸⁶

Elizabeth responded to this request in exactly the way her father would have done in the same situation. She said she would, and reneged once she was crowned.
⁸⁷
As Feria saw clearly, ‘She is determined to be governed by no one.’
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E
LIZABETH
was proclaimed queen of England by the heralds in London between 11 a.m. and noon on the day her half-sister died. Standing beside them was Francis Russell, who had carried a letter to Ashridge on the eve of Wyatt’s revolt.
¹
A committed Protestant and a close ally of William Cecil, Russell had succeeded his father as Earl of Bedford in 1555 and was about to become one of the linchpins of the new regime.

Cecil had been with the 25-year-old Elizabeth at Hatfield on the day Mary died, already functioning as the new queen’s Secretary of State, even though he would not officially be appointed to the post for another three days. His jottings show how fast and thorough was his grasp of what needed to be done to secure the Tower and its munitions and treasury, the ports, the border with Scotland and the coinage. He sent couriers to Philip and the other European powers with news of Mary’s death, began making arrangements for her funeral and for Elizabeth’s coronation, and
took the necessary steps to continue the authority of the judges and certain key officers. He gave orders for the engraving of a new great seal, for the opening of peace talks with France and finally ‘to consider the condition of the preacher at Paul’s Cross that no occasion be given to him to stir any dispute touching the governance of the realm’.
²

What followed amounted to a comprehensive remodelling of every aspect of Court and government—it only mildly exaggerates to make a comparison with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. A whole new breed of courtiers and officials linked to the networks that had survived from Katherine Parr’s household and the circle around Cecil and Sir John Cheke in Edward’s reign took over power. Many had declared themselves for Lady Jane Grey, been involved in Wyatt’s revolt or the Ashton–Dudley conspiracy, or else gone into exile in Switzerland or Germany in Mary’s reign. Several were linked to Thomas Parry, now made treasurer of the queen’s household and a privy councillor, or had cut their teeth like Cecil in the service of Protector Somerset or the Duke of Northumberland. Others were Elizabeth’s kinsmen on her mother’s side, such as Sir Richard Sackville, her second cousin, and William, Lord Howard of Effingham, her great-uncle.
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Only Cheke himself was missing from the roll call. Suspected of being the main impresario of the campaign of Protestant exile propaganda against Philip and Mary and (wrongly) said to be the author of the very worst of the libels found in a chest at Elizabeth’s house at Somerset Place, he had been kidnapped on the road between Antwerp and Malines by Mary’s agents in May 1556 and forced to make a humiliating recantation on pain of being burned for heresy. He died a year later.
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A comparison between the coronation list of Elizabeth’s household and the funeral list of Mary’s shows how drastic a turnover occurred. The cleanest sweep was among the ladies and gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, where devoted Catholics like Susan Tonge, Lady Jerningham, Frideswide Strelley and Jane Dormer were displaced by women with advanced reformist or evangelical sympathies, notably Kat Ashley (now returned in triumph), Blanche Parry, Katherine Carey, Anne Carey, Lettice Knollys and Mary Sidney.
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Mary Sidney was Northumberland’s eldest daughter and the wife of Sir Henry Sidney, a former gentleman of Edward’s Privy Chamber who had been present with the young king’s physicians when he died. It was she who had brought the news to Jane Grey that she was to be queen.

The Careys and Lettice Knollys were among Elizabeth’s nearest kinswomen, whom she was determined to rehabilitate. Katherine Carey, Mary Boleyn’s daughter, was the wife of Sir Francis Knollys, who had attended the Eucharistic debates in 1551 at the houses of Cecil and Richard Moryson.
⁶
When she fled with her husband to Basle and Frankfurt after Jane Grey’s execution, Elizabeth wrote her a sorrowful letter of farewell signed ‘Your loving cousin and ready friend,
Cor rotto
[i.e. broken heart]’. Anne Carey was Katherine’s sister-in-law, the wife of Henry Carey, Mary Boleyn’s son, whom Elizabeth elevated to the peerage as Lord Hunsdon and to whom she granted lands worth in excess of £4,000 a year. Lettice Knollys was the eldest daughter of Katherine and Sir Francis, and may have served Elizabeth at Hatfield while her parents were in exile.
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For her coronation at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, 15 January 1559, Elizabeth had the cloth of gold and ermine robes worn by her
half-sister in 1553 altered by ordering a new, more tightly fitted bodice and pair of sleeves from her tailor. Since she spent a small fortune on her wardrobe for the occasion, it is unlikely that by recycling these robes she had economy in mind. It is sometimes said that she wore Mary’s robes as a gesture of solidarity with her sibling. Far more likely is it, given the rivalry between them, that she was dancing on Mary’s grave.
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In compliance with the
Liber Regalis
, the anointing went ahead according to traditional Catholic forms, but Elizabeth tweaked the coronation mass to signal some of the religious changes that were coming. The Epistle and Gospel were read in English as well as in Latin. The celebrant, George Carew, the Dean of the Chapel Royal, did not elevate the host and the queen took communion in both the bread and the wine. The last, for the moment, was known only to Carew and herself since, in accordance with the
Liber
, she took communion inside a ‘traverse’ or temporary closet surrounded by curtains.
⁹

Once crowned, Elizabeth might have supposed that her authority would automatically be accepted, but as an unmarried woman without a husband in view she found herself sailing in uncharted waters. On 25 January 1559, her first Parliament opened with a sermon preached by Richard Cox, Edward’s tutor and one of several draftsmen of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, who had also played a prominent role in proclaiming Jane Grey.
¹⁰

Chosen by Cecil to preach to the assembled Lords and Commons on the need for reform, an occasion on which he held forth for an hour and a half, Cox signalled a faster pace of change than Elizabeth herself envisaged, calling on her to begin without delay a
fresh campaign against idolatry and superstition, which she was bound to do because God had made her queen.
¹¹
Never known for his tact, Cox was wrong-footed, perhaps unaware that Elizabeth’s leading councillors and retainers were more Protestant than she was. Or if he
did
know of the mismatch, then clearly he expected the young queen to suppress her personal preferences in favour of their yearnings. After all, she was ‘only’ a woman and (as the Protestants believed) it was largely through their efforts that she had gained the throne.

Cecil, reading the signals, was determined to move quickly, returning doctrines consistent with the
Consensus Tigurinus
to the restored Church of England before Elizabeth changed her mind and backtracked. In a paper entitled the ‘Device for the Alteration of Religion’, he concluded that a working party of learned men should be convened to ‘bring a Plat or Book hereof [i.e. for the “alteration of religion”] ready drawn to her Highness’. Names suggested were a handpicked selection of key members of his coterie, whose support for a lightly revised 1552 Book of Common Prayer was all but guaranteed.
¹²
And no alternatives to this ‘Plat or Book’ were to be offered to the queen.

Cecil dealt ruthlessly with the Catholic opposition in the House of Lords, which might otherwise have sought concessions from a young and inexperienced queen. The Earl of Bedford made the lay lords graphically aware of the dire implications of the Marian reunion with Rome for those who had purchased ex-monastic lands. And to remove the ex-Marian bishops from the arena, Cecil and his brother-in-law, Nicholas Bacon, organized a theological disputation at Westminster Abbey at which Cox was one of the leading spokesmen. After Catholic traditions not written in Scripture were excluded from the terms of reference of the debate, the
Catholic bishops walked out, enabling Cecil to imprison them for contempt.
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