The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (38 page)

As the proxy war against France in Scotland ended, Elizabeth and her Council contemplated a further confrontation. The beleaguered Huguenots (the name given, at first pejoratively, to French Calvinists) sought the aid of their fellow Protestants, and offered in return a port to replace Calais, a chance to avenge the defeat of 1558. The argument of the advocates of a ‘forward’ policy, who worked for the vigorous advancement of Protestantism at home and abroad, was, as it would be throughout Elizabeth’s reign, that the safety of the Queen and her realm
lay in defending fellow Protestants, for their overthrow would leave England open to her enemies. But Cecil, after his first and successful essay in intervention, now turned defensive, thinking first of the risk of engagement. The Queen, too, was cautious. At a moment of decision, in August 1563, Cecil wrote that she ‘sticketh at the matter; one part desire to gain, on the other loath to venture’. But, tempted by the prize of Le Havre, she did venture. It was a costly mistake. Her troops withdrew, bringing the plague home with them. Calais was irretrievably lost.

Elizabeth was confirmed in her distrust of grand ventures in foreign policy. That she had ventured at all owed much to the persuasions of Lord Robert Dudley, the son of the late Duke of Northumberland. He was her friend from childhood, her companion in the Tower in a dark hour, and now her favourite. In November 1562 Dudley was sworn to her Council. Within that Council alignments between those, like Dudley, who urged a forward policy of aid to fellow Protestants, and those, like Cecil, who saw the risk before the opportunity, lasted the reign. Her Council usually worked harmoniously, with a common purpose, but there were differences over means, if not ends. Expressions of friendship might conceal ambivalence; the customary gifts to each other of game might not indicate a love feast. That the hold of Dudley over the unmarried Queen was more than that of councillor, more even than that of favourite, caused alarm.

Within days of the opening of her first Parliament the Lower House petitioned the 25-year-old Queen to marry. It had been and was her wish, she told them, never to marry; to remain in ‘this kind of life in which I yet live’. If God did incline her ‘heart to another kind of life’ she would never marry against her subjects’ interests: ‘therefore put that clear out of your heads’. This reply, gentler and less gnomic than later responses to the same question, was still ambiguous enough for the Commons not to hear what they did not wish to know. She made them a promise that was unwise to make if she could not keep it: if she never married, an heir would be chosen ‘in convenient time’. Tellingly, she told them: ‘And in the end, this shall be for me sufficient that a marble stone shall declare that a queen having lived such a time lived and died a virgin.’ Elizabeth’s celebration as the Virgin Queen did not begin then, because no one believed what she told them.

Elizabeth may have been averse to marriage but she was not without suitors. The princes of Europe came to court her during the first years of her reign, and one by one they failed the tests set; two kings, two archdukes, five dukes, two earls, and some lesser mortals. The Queen flaunted her potential husbands, not through vanity (though that too), but as proof of what many doubted: her right to rule. Some of Elizabeth’s suitors also courted Mary, Queen of Scots. These suitors were not like princes in a fairy tale: their courtships were unromantic, their persons usually unprepossessing. And in real life queenly beggars could not be choosers. Paget had been prescient: he saw in November 1558 that ‘there was no one she could marry, outside the kingdom nor within it’. A foreign marriage meant ‘carpet conquest’ of England, as in Mary’s reign; conquest by gallantry rather than valour, but with the same danger of loss of liberty. Marriage to a subject would bring jealousy among the nobility and small honour to the Queen; for these suitors brought little to the proposed unions except themselves. But marriage, any marriage, gave, at least, the inestimable promise of an heir of the body and averted the prospect of an ‘invasion of strangers’.

First to propose to Elizabeth was Philip of Spain in January 1559, before Mary was two months dead. Declaring himself (though not to the Queen) a ‘condemned man’, he prepared to sacrifice himself in order to convert Elizabeth and to gain the kingdom to God’s ‘service and faith’. He came too late. Elizabeth rejected Philip’s proposal just as the religious legislation made its fraught passage through the Lords, and anyway he had already betrothed himself to a Valois princess. Philip now advanced his preferred plan: for Elizabeth to marry an Austrian Habsburg archduke; it little mattered which one. Archduke Charles pressed his suit from May 1559 through the autumn and into the spring of 1560. Elizabeth did not discourage him. It was not that she thought of marrying him, but she needed Philip to protect her from France and from papal interdict. In September 1559 Duke John of Finland arrived in London to urge the suit of his brother, Eric of Sweden. This courtship cut more ice with London and the court, which benefited from Swedish largesse, than with the Queen. Eric was, at least, Protestant; still Elizabeth refused him.

There were English suitors too: Sir William Pickering, scholar, diplomat and ardent Protestant; and that ancient noble Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, who had sulked and plotted through more than a decade and now sulked still upon his rejection. But to prosper, all her
courtiers had to play the lover. The pretence of being in love with the Queen lay at the heart of Elizabethan politics. The Queen, in turn, employed all those changes of heart and mind, the favours given and withheld, of the mistress as a way to control her courtiers and councillors. Yet if the pretence of love turned to real love there would be trouble. Although their virgin Queen had from the first embraced a virgin state, she soon seemed set to abandon it, and disastrously.

Queens should not marry for love, but there were soon fears that Elizabeth would. Scornful rumours spread at foreign courts that Elizabeth would marry her horse-keeper: Dudley. The Queen was a mighty huntress (she could tell the age of a stag from its droppings), and her Master of the Horse became her constant companion. We may imagine the thrill of the chase and covert embraces in coverts: everyone did then. She could hardly have chosen worse. Dudley’s blood was new, and that attainted. He could trace his family for only three generations, so the ancient nobles scoffed, and there was a traitor in every one. Those who had betrayed his father, the Duke of Northumberland, now feared the son’s revenge; those who had served him looked for reward. Accomplished in all the arts of the courtier, Dudley was also, according to his enemies, ‘a time server and respecter of his own advantages’. There was also the small matter of his being married already: to Amy Robsart, whom Elizabeth had excluded from court. The Queen waited only for her to die to marry Lord Robert, so Philip II heard in the spring of 1559. The crisis in Scotland turned the dutiful Queen’s attention to that other body, the body politic, but from the summer of 1560 the romance was more fervent than ever. On 8 September Amy Robsart was discovered dead at the foot of a staircase, her neck broken. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Death by misadventure, the jury found. Others had darker suspicions. Dudley was ‘in a dream’. Surely the Queen could not marry him now. Why she chose not to marry Dudley, and perhaps never to marry at all, was a mystery. For a Queen, as for any woman, marriage meant loss of power and freedom. Marriage must bring an end to the incessant courtship at court. Perhaps if she could not marry Dudley, she would not marry anyone. Her love for Dudley and her emotional dependence upon him continued until his death; their intimacy celibate enough but close. She never allowed him far from her side. Through the 1560s she watched the catastrophic, and deadly, romantic entanglements of her cousin of Scotland, and saw the consequences if a queen married for love.

The unresolved succession to the throne caused a pervasive dread, for in the Queen’s mortality there lay a natural danger as grave as could be imagined. ‘Oh, how wretched are we who cannot tell under what sovereign we are to live,’ wrote Bishop Jewel in February 1562. Without a husband or children, without a successor named, the safety of the kingdom and the security of religion was vested in the Queen’s own life. Her subjects always remembered that she would die, whereupon ‘the realm were as good also to die’; religion would be altered, England would be there for the taking, prey to her enemies, within and without. Unless and until she named her successor, her heir by right of blood was Mary, Queen of Scots, who would be at the heart of any Catholic conspiracy. Reading chronicle histories, her subjects remembered how often in the past usurpation by force of arms had displaced legitimacy and disputed succession had led to civil war. Yet Elizabeth had a horror of naming her successor: this would expose her to the enmity of a rival; it would be to contemplate her ‘winding sheet’, her ‘hearse’.

In January 1562
The Tragedie of Gorboduc
was played before the Queen. This drama, written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, was a ‘mirror to princes all’, warning them to shun the vices in government it portrayed. As Gorboduc, ruler of a mythical ‘Britain’, abandoned his responsibilities, his realm lay open to invasion and the ‘cruel flames’ of ‘civil fire’. Elizabeth saw enacted the ‘tumults’ which followed without ‘certain limitation in the succession of the Crown’. Councillors were called upon in the play to ensure that the succession would continue in an unbroken course by ‘undoubted right’. In Parliament in January 1563, a year after the performance of his play, Norton read the Commons’ petition for limitation, or designation, of the succession. The Queen listened to her subjects’ pleas for her to marry, or to name her successor, but she, at first politely then less politely, declined to do so.

In December 1562, while the Queen lay sick with smallpox, her councillors and subjects stared into a void. The prospect of a ‘guideless realm’, as portrayed in
Gorboduc
, seemed imminent. A month later Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s, preached of the dangers which faced England, and defended Parliament’s right to counsel and to act. At this moment of great uncertainty and danger, Cecil was forced not only to contemplate but to devise a strategy for governing England without a monarch. In the event of an interregnum, he now proposed, the realm would be governed by a ‘Council of Estate’ (a Privy Council),
endorsed by statute, until Parliament could name a successor. This was the politics of desperation.

Nowell had preached of the dangers of religious war. By the end of 1564 Elizabethan governors were confirmed in their suspicion that most of those who were charged with implementing religious uniformity in the country were themselves at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to the Elizabethan settlement. An enquiry into the religious affiliations of Justices of the Peace revealed that ‘scantly a third part was found fully assured to be trusted in the matter of religion’. If so many of its governors remained hostile to the new Church in England, the situation was worse in ‘her land’ of Ireland, where implementation of the religious settlement, easily passed in the Dublin Parliament in 1560, had scarcely begun.

Elizabeth never doubted the difficulties of governing Ireland. In March 1566 she wrote to her chief governor, Sir Henry Sidney, ‘You are entered into that realm as a world… replenished with ravening beasts.’ Yet even as she commended his desire to ‘labour thoroughly in reformation thereof’, she was reluctant to venture the men and money necessary to effect that reformation. ‘You make mention of a very great sum to be expended,’ she told Sidney, ‘if there be not in the writing some mistaking, as it may be.’ Her governors’ complaints of her parsimony were perennial. Later, ‘Black Tom’, 10th Earl of Ormond, told Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State that her service would go ‘faster forward’ if he could feed soldiers with air, and throw down castles with his breath. The Queen had twice denied him the necessary support, but he would ‘sooner be committed a prisoner by the heels than to be thus dealt with again’. It was not only the despair of serving in Ireland against enemies who hid in woods and caves, or the misery of campaigning in midwinter, of living in cabins made of grass and boughs, of commanding mutinous troops against a hostile nobility, which brought Elizabeth’s viceroys to despair, but the failure of the Queen to support them, and the whispering campaigns of their enemies at the English court.