The Men Who Would Be King (26 page)

Nor shall his brother Francis have the ruling of the land:

We subjects true unto our Queen the foreign yoke defy,

Whereto we plight our faithful hearts, our limbs, our lives and all,

Thereby to have our honour rise, or take our fatal fall.

Therefore, good Francis, rule at home, resist not our desire;

For here is nothing else for thee, but only sword and fire.

Stubbs had in truth plighted one of his limbs in what he regarded as the service of the queen. The danger of England falling under “the foreign yoke” as a result of the match seemed very real; as Stubbs had somewhat insultingly pointed out, childbirth might well prove fatal at Elizabeth's age—“the very point of most danger to Her Majesty for childbearing”—and if she were to die giving birth the realm would be left under a French regency, with an infant half-Valois king or queen. For years Elizabeth had been under relentless pressure to take a husband, yet now that she was at last entertaining thoughts of marriage she found herself faced with resistance from her subjects and discouragement from her councillors. With characteristic perception she had foreseen this situation years before; when pressed to marry by the presumptuous Parliament of 1566 she had observed angrily that many of those who were urging her to wed would be equally vociferous in criticizing whomever she chose for her consort—“as ready to mislike him with whom I shall marry as they are now to move it” had been her bitter expression. Now, thirteen years afterwards, the truth of her words was becoming apparent.

Ultimately, Elizabeth's aversion to marriage and the realities of sex was too profound to permit her to accept Alençon or anyone else as a husband, but in the autumn of 1579 she had strong reasons for wishing to dally with the idea of marrying her charming French suitor. Leicester's faithlessness in abandoning his fruitless courtship of her for a normal marriage with another had lowered her morale, and left her, for the time being, without the sense of near-partnership that her relationship with him had given her for so long. But the illustrious prince's impassioned wooing had both provided flattering evidence of her desirability and held out the tempting prospect of intimate companionship with a man who was her equal in blood and power. The idea of entering her old age as the cherished wife of an adoring young prince was very beguiling; even if at heart Elizabeth acknowledged the truth of her past observations about the likelihood that she would be courted for her possessions and not for herself, Alençon's protestations of disinterested love were ardent enough almost to be convincing, and the forty-six-year-old queen found it very sweet to indulge in fantasies of accepting him. It was undoubtedly the last chance she would have of taking a husband and bearing children. After Alençon there would be no more serious suitors to the Queen of England, and she knew it.

Elizabeth appeared wrought-up and emotional at this time; the tensions experienced by any woman approaching menopause were heightened for her by the mingled excitements and anxieties of her final courtship. At the beginning of October she ordered her council to discuss again the question of the Alençon match and give her their opinion of it. Meeting after meeting was held and on one occasion they were closeted in strict secrecy from eight o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock at night, which was most unusual, but all “without proceeding to any full resolution.” Their final decision was that the queen should “do what best shall please her.” It should have been a safe enough verdict, but Elizabeth's mood was not what it had been at the time of the Parliament of 1566. She did not want her councillors to maintain a respectful neutrality, leaving the decision to her, she wanted them to override her doubts and persuade her that it would be right for her to marry Alençon. She “uttered many speeches,” Burghley recorded, “and that not without shedding of many tears” in her disappointment that her councillors should have shown “any disposition to make it doubtful whether there could be any more surety for her and her realm than to have her marry and have a child of her own body to inherit, and so to continue the line of Henry VIII.” She snapped that she must have been a fool to have entrusted them with debating the matter, “for she thought to have rather had a universal request made to her to proceed in this marriage than to have made doubt of it.” The Spanish ambassador reported that after the interview she “remained extremely sad” and “was so cross and melancholy that it was noticed by everyone who approached her.” She told Walsingham, the arch opponent of the match, to get out of her sight, vowing that “the only thing he was good for was a protector of heretics.” There were, indeed, good grounds for believing that he had been involved with the publication of the
Gaping Gulf.
To the Treasurer of the Household, who asked how she could contemplate marriage with a Catholic, she retorted angrily that “he might pay dearly for the zeal he was displaying in the cause of religion, and it was a fine way to show his attachment to her, who might desire, like others, to have children.” The doubts and tacit discouragement of her ministers told her what she least wished to hear—that she was not “like others.” She was not the radiant embodiment of femininity that Alençon's hot wooing implied, but a fading old maid almost past childbearing, whom an eligible foreign prince would only court out of sinister motives. It was not surprising that she should have appeared “cross and melancholy” at this time.

Several times she declared defiantly that she was determined to marry Alençon, and the Spanish ambassador began to think optimistically that God might have ordained this marriage as a means of plunging England into civil war. On November 20 she instructed a select group of Privy Councillors to draw up the conditions of the marriage contract with Simier, and he left England four days later with an agreement. But the negotiations were by no means concluded. Elizabeth insisted that she must have two months in which to win her subjects over, and Simier had to sign a certificate before he departed, acknowledging this stipulation and agreeing that if she could not placate her subjects the marriage articles should be considered null and void. It was a loophole of which Elizabeth intended to take full advantage.

When Simier had gone, the heady romance of her last courtship began to loosen its hold over Elizabeth. The
Gaping Gulf
had sneeringly called it “a very French Popish wooing, to send smooth-tongued Simiers to gloss and glaver,” but it had been a very successful kind of wooing. While Simier remained at her court he had provided a personal link with Alençon, staying by Elizabeth's side to flatter away her doubts with assurances of his master's passion for her, to remind her of all the prince's charms, and to tempt her with talk of future joys; once he had departed, the sensual and emotional warmth went out of the affair. He continued to “gloss and glaver” from a distance, in the lavish letters adorned with pink seals and lovers' knots that he sent Elizabeth day after day, but soon expressions of reproachful uncertainty began to appear among the compliments. Towards the end of January 1580, Simier wrote anxiously that he could tell that the queen's change of heart had been brought about by the interference of those who wished to prevent the marriage, and in a meaningful reference to Leicester, whose coat of arms contained the bear and ragged staff, he begged Elizabeth to protect her monkey from the paw of the bear. He tried to play upon her pride, as well as her affection, musing provokingly, “Who would have thought that a queen of the heavens and the earth, a princess of all the virtue in the world, could be mistaken in her knowledge of certain people who feel neither love nor affection otherwise than ambition for power impels them”—another aspersion on Leicester. But the situation had changed in Simier's absence. Without him beside her to plead Alençon's suit, Elizabeth was turning once more to her former favorite for admiration and companionship. As Leicester returned to her good graces, so did Walsingham, the other great opponent of the match. Lacking the persuasive presence of her suitor's representative, Elizabeth lost her desire for Alençon.

She still had need of her Frog, however, and it suited her purposes to have him poised, breathless with anticipation, on the brink of marriage with her. Philip of Spain was soon to acquire the throne of Portugal, and that increase in his dominions and power would make hostile Spain a still mightier threat to the security of Elizabeth's Protestant kingdom. It was ominous for the French, too, and caused Catherine de' Medici to wish to draw nearer to England, to redress the balance of power; however, marriage with Elizabeth was not the only means by which the House of Valois might be fortified. An alternative was “the alliance of the Duke of Alençon with the King of Spain by marriage, and the joining of their forces to help each other.” If Alençon were to marry one of Philip's daughters, the combined weight of Spain and France, blessed by the pope, might crush England in a triumphant crusade. Walsingham set little store by this threat, pointing out, with justification, that it had caused great fears before, in 1559, when King Philip had married Alençon's sister Elisabeth,
la fille de France
, yet nothing had come of it then, when England was so much weaker and more vulnerable than now. There was, however, no gainsaying the fact that Elizabeth's need for an ally against the rising menace of Spain in the 1580s was very great, and to this end she was fortunate in having an ardent French suitor to entice or rebuff as circumstances required.

She had asked for two months' grace, and before this period elapsed she produced an obstacle to the marriage—religion. In a letter full of verbal caresses she explained tenderly to Alençon that, though there was no prince in the whole world to whom she would rather give herself than him, her
treschère grenouille,
or with whom she would rather spend the years that were left to her, her people were adamant on the subject of religion; they would not tolerate a king-consort who openly worshipped according to the Roman rituals. If he were insistent on that point, Elizabeth wrote, they would have to give up the idea of marriage altogether, and agree to remain faithful friends. The truth was that she knew full well the negotiations would not end at this stage; she could continue to dally for many months more, but with her customary prudence she was establishing a solid obstacle behind which she could take shelter from the pursuit whenever it should become necessary. Alençon was not ignorant of her tactics, but there was little he could do against her pose of duty and conscience. Somewhat stiffly he wrote back that people were saying the Queen of England was merely using religion as a pretext for dismissing him, and that it was well known that her subjects were eager to see her married. In a brief postscript, referring to Elizabeth's envoy Stafford, he showed a measure of his displeasure: “I find Sir Edward Stafford as cold as ice,” he wrote reproachfully.

Although Elizabeth was anxious to remain technically uncommitted, she wanted the negotiations to prosper. The first flame of her excitement over Alençon had died, but she still felt a tendresse for her charming French prince, so that pleasure was mingled with politics. In February 1580 Mendoza reported a discussion among the Queen, Cecil, and the Archbishop of York, during which Elizabeth had asked for advice on her marriage, saying that she was between Scylla and Charybdis; “If I do not marry him I do not know whether he will remain friendly with me; and if I do, I shall not be able to govern the country with the freedom and security I have hitherto enjoyed.” The archbishop, knowing Elizabeth's inflammable moods where marriage was concerned, left the decision entirely in her hands, but Cecil, more forthright, advised her to accept Alençon if she wished, and if not, to put an end to the affair. He had not given the answer the queen wished to hear. “That,” she retorted, “is not the opinion of the rest of the Council, but that I should keep him in correspondence.” Throughout her reign she had profited from a policy of keeping her suitors “in correspondence,” and now she intended to do the same with her dear Frog prince. “For God's sake, Madame, lose no more time,” Simier wrote beseechingly, in April, but envoys and ambassadors had been begging Elizabeth for more than twenty years to lose no more time in taking a husband.

When, later that year, the civil warfare in France was brought to a halt, Henry III turned his thoughts again to forming an alliance with England by marrying his brother to the queen. While he was fighting the Huguenots he could not have encouraged Alençon to become the husband of Elizabeth and master of a Protestant kingdom, but with the French at peace once more he welcomed the opportunity of passing the turbulent prince, with his costly enterprises in the Netherlands, over to Elizabeth. If Alençon were her husband, England would be bound to stand with France against Spain, whose acquisition of Portugal had cast a shadow across Europe. Elizabeth had no intention of becoming irrevocably bound to any person or any course of action, but she had every reason for wishing to cultivate the friendship of the French. Preparations were made for the coming of an immense French embassy, which, with the envoys' trains, would consist of some five hundred people, and shortly before they arrived, in April 1581, Elizabeth paid a symbolic compliment to the Valois when she asked the French agent Marchaumont to perform the act of knighting Francis Drake, on board his little ship
The Golden Hind,
at Deptford. It was on this occasion that Elizabeth's garter slipped down, and was claimed for Alençon. The queen coyly demurred, saying that she needed it to hold her stocking up, and she readjusted it on her leg in full view of the envoy. But afterwards it was sent as a love token to her suitor, and he gave her endless thanks for the
belle jartière,
vowing that it brought him luck.

Elizabeth enjoyed any performance that focused attention on her beauty and desirability, and she was in her element in the spring of 1581, when the French mission arrived in England to settle the marriage terms. A fantastical program of merrymaking had been arranged for them, with the most sumptuous spectacles and diversions the English court could offer. A banqueting hall had been specially built, on the southwest side of Whitehall Palace; the huge edifice, gorgeously painted and decorated, was hung with greenery, the ceiling was painted with stars and sunbeams, and the walls were draped with cloth of gold and silver. The English nobility and members of Parliament were charged to remain in London, and as the time for the visitors' arrival approached, tensions began to mount. People had not forgotten that the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve had begun with a great gathering for a state occasion. Mendoza reported that the nobles were summoning all their kinsmen and followers together, partly for show, partly for protection, and that Leicester was endeavoring to collect the largest band of all. The queen issued a special proclamation ordering her subjects to show great honor to the foreign visitors, and prohibiting any display of violence towards them on pain of death. Londoners who had hated Philip of Spain's Spaniards resented the impending arrival of hundreds of Frenchmen, and the prevailing mood was one of sullen distrust. But the visit went ahead in magnificent style; two hundred guns pounded out a salute as the envoys' barges came gliding up the Thames, and soon the round of extravagant festivities was in progress.