The House of Tudor (46 page)

The previous September Providence had thoughtfully removed her most dangerous suitor from the scene. Edward Courtenay had been released from the Tower at about the time Elizabeth was sent down to Woodstock (however doubtful his guilt, he would not have been so fortunate under Henry VIII) and, after a period of detention in Fotheringhay Castle, had been allowed to go abroad. He had wandered across Europe as far as Venice, where he caught a chill, and about a fortnight later the great-grandson of Edward IV died of fever in lodgings at Padua. Peter Vannes, Queen Mary’s agent in Venice, took the precaution of obtaining sworn statements from Courtenay’s servants and the Italian doctors who had attended him, but even so rumours that he had been poisoned soon got about and his death appears to have been the signal for Philip to renew his efforts to get Elizabeth suitably betrothed.

The princess came to Court that December and, so the King of France told the Venetian ambassador, the Queen had made a strong effort to persuade her sister to accept the Prince of Piedmont. But Elizabeth had burst into tears and declared she would rather die. In the autumn of 1557 Philip returned to the attack, sending his confessor, Francisco de Fresnada, to urge the Queen to have the marriage arranged without further delay and, if necessary, without consulting Parliament. Fresnada had instructions to impress on Mary how important this was for considerations of religion, the safety of the realm and to prevent Elizabeth from making some quite ineligible choice of her own. This time, though, opposition was by no means all on Elizabeth’s side, for Philip now wanted Mary not only to get her sister married off to Emmanuel Philibert but to publicly recognize her as her heiress. The Venetian ambassador heard that de Fresnada 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, naturally exasperated by the unreasonableness of his wife’s behaviour, made his annoyance plain; but Mary, although miserable in the knowledge that she was alienating whatever affection he might still feel for her, could not be blackmailed. Old wrongs cast long shadows and for the sad, sick woman, now facing the ruin of all her hopes, the bitter past was as real, perhaps more real than the bitter present. Once she had acknowledged Elizabeth’s right to succeed her, she would have acknowledged that Anne Boleyn and her daughter had won. Not even for Philip, not even for the Catholic Church could Catherine of Aragon’s daughter bring herself to admit that ultimate defeat.

The year 1558 opened with a military disaster. The war in France had begun promisingly with the Anglo-Spanish victory of St. Quentin, then things went less well and finally very badly indeed, culminating in the news that Calais had fallen to the French - ‘the heaviest tidings to London and to England that ever was heard of. The town of Calais and its surrounding Pale might no longer be of much strategic value but, as the last outpost of England’s once great Continental empire, it possessed considerable sentimental value. Its loss was a national humiliation. For Mary it was followed by yet another personal grief During the Christmas holidays Reginald Pole had written to tell Philip that the Queen once again believed she was pregnant. This time she had kept the news to herself for nearly seven months ‘in order to be quite sure of the fact’. Can she really have believed it, or was it just a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to bring her husband back to her? It did not bring him, but Count de Feria was sent over to England, ostensibly bearing congratulations but with instructions to find out if such a thing could possibly be true. It could not, of course, and by April Mary had once again given up hope.

The gloomy spring gave place to a restless, uneasy summer. The Queen was obviously gravely ill, dying most probably of cancer, and a sense of great changes impending rumbled in the air like distant thunder. By October the news reaching Philip in Flanders was sufficiently disturbing for him to send de Feria back to London ‘to serve the Queen during her illness’. He arrived on 9 November only to find there was nothing now that he or anyone else could do for Mary. Three days earlier, the Council, taking advantage of a brief lucid interval, had gathered at the Queen’s bedside with a request that she would ‘make certain declarations in favour of the Lady Elizabeth’ and Mary had given in. She was too tired to struggle any longer and perhaps it no longer seemed to matter very much. A deputation had gone straight down to Hatfield to tell Elizabeth that the Queen was willing she should succeed but asked two things of her - that she would maintain the old religion as Mary had restored it and pay her sister’s debts.

After this Mary was left alone. The road to Hatfield was crowded with courtiers and place-seekers eager to stake an early claim, while at St. James’s Palace the Queen lay waiting for release from the world in which she had known little but sorrow, anxiety and humiliation. She was unconscious for long periods during those last weeks but once, when she drifted to the surface and saw her ladies weeping round her, she is said to have comforted them by telling them what good dreams she had, seeing many little children playing and singing before her. Mary had loved little children, loved christenings and babies (always, tragically, other people’s babies); had revelled in weddings and new clothes, and taken a passionate interest in those small domestic concerns which fill the lives of ordinary women - for Mary Tudor was at heart a very ordinary woman, made to be a busy, devoted, pious wife and mother. She was hopelessly at sea in the world of high politics, where she could only do what she believed to be her duty, what she believed to be right, with inevitably disastrous results. Poor Mary, there was so much that was good in her. She had not deserved to be the most unhappy lady in Christendom.

The end came at six o’clock in the morning of 17 November and later that same day, as if to emphasize the ending of a chapter, Reginald Pole, the Cardinal of England, died too, just across the river in his palace at Lambeth. There was little pretence of public mourning. As the news spread the church bells were rung and presently the November dusk was being illuminated by bonfires, while the Londoners set tables in the streets and ‘did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen Elizabeth’.

Despite Mary’s views on the subject, Elizabeth had long been accepted as the heir to the throne and over the last couple of years she had attracted an increasing amount of interest from the outside world. In 1557 the retiring Venetian ambassador had included a detailed description of the princess in his report to the Senate, and from the evidence of Giovanni Michiel and other contemporaries a picture emerges of a slim, active young woman, slightly above average height. Michiel considered her narrow, sharp-featured face to be ‘comely’ rather than handsome, though she had a good complexion, if a little sallow. He also remarked on her fine eyes, which were probably grey, and on her beautiful hands which she took care to display. Elizabeth had the family colouring. Her hair was more red than yellow and curled naturally, at least in her twenties. Michiel noted, with a faint air of disapproval, that although she knew she was born of ‘such a mother’, she did not consider herself of inferior degree to the Queen. She did not, apparently, even consider herself illegitimate, since her parents’ marriage had had the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘She prides herself on her father and glories in him’, remarked the ambassador, ‘everybody saying that she also resembles him more than the Queen does.’ In view of Mary’s freely expressed opinion about her origins, this must have given Elizabeth a very understandable satisfaction, but in appearance she seems to have resembled her paternal grandfather more than any other member of the family.

About her mental powers no one was in any doubt. ‘Her intellect and understanding are wonderful’, wrote Michiel, ‘as she showed very plainly by her conduct when in danger and under suspicion’ and he went on to praise her proficiency as a linguist, noting that her Latin was better than the Queen’s. Her Italian, too, was fluent and she liked to show it off in front of the Venetians. Roger Ascham, who had recently been renewing his acquaintance with his former pupil, told Dr. Sturm in Strasbourg that they had been reading together in Greek the orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes on the crown and that the Lady Elizabeth ‘at first sight understands everything...in a way to strike you with astonishment’.

The Lady Elizabeth had already proved the quality of her trained and formidable intelligence, and demonstrated that she had inherited her grandfather’s shrewd, cautious, subtle brain. Now, in the first few weeks of her reign, she was to show that she had also inherited all her father’s ability to charm the birds off the trees. ‘If ever any person had either the gift or the style to win the hearts of people’, wrote the historian John Hayward, ‘it was this Queen.’

When Elizabeth made her official entry into London, riding through Barbican and Cripplegate and on to Leadenhall and Gracechurch Street to the Tower, the City literally exploded with joy around her. But beneath all the cheering and pealing bells and crashing salutes from the Tower guns there was a rather desperate optimism. For Elizabeth was the last of King Harry’s children and in that winter of 1558 she looked like being England’s last hope of peace and good government. Certainly a quick glance round the other members of the royal house would not have encouraged anyone seeking an alternative - or a successor.

If King Henry’s will was to be followed, then of course the new Queen’s heir must be sought among the descendants of Mary Brandon. Mary’s elder daughter, the widowed Duchess of Suffolk, was now past forty and had, in any case, already renounced her claim in favour of her daughters. Just as well, perhaps, since Frances Suffolk had wasted no time in mourning and within a month of her husband’s execution in 1554 she had married one Master Adrian Stokes, a flashy, red-haired young gentleman of her household. Her two surviving daughters, Katherine and Mary, became maids of honour to Queen Mary, who went out of her way to be kind to them. Katherine Grey’s marriage to the Earl of Pembroke’s son had been hastily dissolved after Northumberland’s disaster and in November 1558, the two girls, now aged eighteen and thirteen, were still at Court and still unmarried - their future, especially Katherine’s future, the subject of some speculation. The other child of that long-ago Tudor-Brandon marriage, Eleanor Clifford, was more than ten years dead and
her
daughter, Margaret, had been married in 1555, with Queen Mary’s blessing, to Lord Strange, the Earl of Derby’s heir. Some people, including young Lady Strange herself, believed her claim to be purer than Katherine Grey’s -there was, after all, no ‘reproach’ of treason on her side of the family - but although Margaret lived on into the 1590s, her life was to be chiefly remarkable for an unhappy marriage, perpetual quarrels with her in-laws and an unfortunate interest in necromancy.

For those who were of the opinion that the natural laws of inheritance should take precedence over royal, even over royal Tudor testamentary provisions, the next heir could only be the descendant of Margaret Tudor’s marriage to James IV of Scotland and that meant Mary Queen of Scots, now rising sixteen and married seven months previously to the French King’s heir. There were those who believed that by rights Mary Stuart and not Elizabeth Tudor should now be wearing the English crown. The King of France certainly did - or said he did - underlining his point by having his daughter-in-law referred to as Queen of England in official documents and causing her to quarter the English royal arms with her own. But although the pretensions of her Scottish cousin were to create increasingly serious problems for Elizabeth as time went by, very few Englishmen - even those Englishmen whose religion obliged them to regard Henry VIII’s second daughter as a bastard - wished to see Mary displace her. Then there was another body of opinion which, although preferring the senior line, regarded Mary Stuart as a foreigner and therefore automatically disabled. For those who held this view, the alternative was Margaret Tudor’s daughter, the Countess of Lennox, who, thanks to her mother’s precipitate flight from Edinburgh forty-three years ago, had at least been born on the right side of the Border. There were also Margaret Lennox’s two hopeful sons, Henry Lord Darnley and Charles Stuart, now being brought up on the family estates at Temple Newsam in Yorkshire.

It was a varied field and offered plenty of scope for argument, perhaps bloody argument, but everyone devoutly hoped the question would never arise. Elizabeth was a young, healthy woman and in 1558 there seemed no reason why she should not be able to provide her country with a Prince of Wales. It was perfectly true that she had steadily refused all the suitors offered for her consideration during the past five years, saying at regular intervals that she did not want to marry; but naturally no sensible person had believed a word of such nonsense and in January 1559 the Speaker of the House of Commons, with a few selected companions, waited on the Queen to deliver an earnest petition that she would by marriage bring forth children - this being ‘the single, the only, the all-comprehending prayer of all Englishmen’. The petitioners got little satisfaction from their sovereign lady who reminded them sharply that she had already joined herself in marriage to a husband, ‘namely, the Kingdom of England’, and taking the coronation ring from her finger, she flourished ‘the pledge of this my wedlock’ (which she marvelled they could have forgotten) under their perplexed noses. As for children: ‘Do not’, snapped Elizabeth Tudor, ‘upbraid me with miserable lack of children; for every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are children and kinsmen to me.’ After this, the Queen relented sufficiently to give an assurance that if she ever were to consider taking a more conventional husband, it would be someone who would have as great a care of the commonwealth as herself. If, on the other hand, she continued in the course of life she had begun, she had no doubt that, in the fullness of time, God would provide a suitable successor; while she would be more than content to have engraved on her tombstone: ‘Here lieth Elizabeth which reigned a virgin and died a virgin’.