The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (20 page)

Cecil tried to reconcile himself to the idea that the Queen might yet marry Robert Dudley, although he continued to believe that the marriage had few benefits to England and he favoured a match with the Archduke Charles. He collected his thoughts in a memorandum entitled, ‘
De Matrimonial Reginae Anglia cum extern Principe
’, and in two columns listed, 1. ‘Reasons to move the Queen to accept Archduke Charles’, and 2. ‘Reasons against Earl of Leicester’. In nearly every respect Dudley appeared less desirable: he was of common birth, he would bring nothing to the marriage, his marriage had been childless and he might prove sterile. In the section ‘In likelihood to love his wife’, Cecil wrote: this would be a ‘carnal marriage’ and such marriages begin in pleasure and end in sorrow. If the marriage went ahead, ‘it will be thought that the slanderous speeches of the Queen with the earl have been true’.
12

*   *   *

On 19 June, Sir James Melville set out from Edinburgh Castle with the news that Mary Queen of Scots had given birth to a healthy baby boy.
13
On his arrival in London, Melville went straight to Cecil’s house to tell him, and Cecil immediately went to the court at Greenwich to tell the Queen
.
He arrived at the palace just after supper, as Elizabeth was enjoying her ladies’ dancing. Suddenly, ‘all merriness was laid aside for the night; all present marvelling what might move so sudden a change for the Queen did sit down, with her hand upon her cheek, bursting out to some of her ladies that the Queen of Scots was lighter of a fair son, while she was of barren stock.’
14

When the following morning Melville came to court for his official audience, Elizabeth hid her true feelings. She welcomed Melville with a ‘merry volt’, a French dance, doubtless to demonstrate her extreme jollity, health and vigour. She then proceeded to tell him that ‘Queen her sister’s delivery of a fair son’ was ‘joyful news’ which had ‘recovered her out of a heavy sickness which had holden her for fifteen days’. In vivid detail, Melville then recounted to Elizabeth the Scottish Queen’s long and traumatic labour. It was ‘dear bought with the peril of her life, for I said that she was so sore handled that she wished she had never been married’.
15
This account of the birth was, Melville later admitted, a ploy to put Elizabeth off the idea of marriage and childbirth altogether.

The birth of Prince James, her son and heir, strengthened Mary’s cause immeasurably and Elizabeth, now thirty-three, was besieged by demands to marry and finally settle the succession.
16
One petition entitled
The Common Cry of Englishmen made to the most noble lady, Queen Elizabeth, and the High Court of Parliament
made a dramatic case: ‘If you O Queen do die … void of issue and wanting a known successor and ordered succession, as the case now standeth, what good can continue? What evil shall not come?… This lack is that rack whereon England rubbeth, the same where it sticketh and sinketh daily to destruction.’ It continued: ‘It is uncertain whether you shall marry. It is uncertain whether you shall have issue in your marriage. It is uncertain whether your issue shall live to succeed you, if you have one.’
17
Dr William Huick, Elizabeth’s physician, was accused of having frightened the Queen from marriage by persuading her that childbirth would be hurtful to the constitution and delicate frame of her body, and now he was cursed by certain members of the Commons for being ‘a dissuader of marriage’.
18

On Saturday 12 October, the Privy Council broached the issue of marriage directly with the Queen herself. Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, as the most senior member of the nobility, reminded her of the petitions that both houses had presented to her in Parliament, and that they were still waiting for a response. They begged her to allow the upcoming session of Parliament to discuss both the marriage and the succession. Elizabeth’s response was emphatic: the succession was her business and she had no wish for their counsel. She had no desire to be ‘buried alive’, as she believed her sister Mary I had been in the dying days of her reign, when people flocked to Elizabeth at Hatfield. As to her marriage, ‘they knew quite well that it was not far off’. And with that she left the chamber.
19

When Parliament met it was suggested that the granting of desperately needed funds would be conditional on Elizabeth either agreeing to marry or settle the succession. Elizabeth was outraged. The Commons, she declared, would never have dared attempt ‘such things during the life of her father’. As for the Lords, they had no right to ‘impede her affairs’ and ‘what they asked was nothing less than wishing her to dig her grave before she was dead’.
20
When the Lords and Commons then made a joint appeal to the Queen, Elizabeth lashed out at Norfolk, who presented the petition, calling him a traitor. And when she saw that Dudley was part of the delegation she became distraught, saying she had assumed that even, ‘if all the world would have abandoned her he would not have done so’. She now forbade him to appear before her.
21

Later, Elizabeth complained to de Silva of Dudley’s ingratitude, especially ‘after she had shown him so much kindness and favour that even her honour had suffered for the sake of honouring him’. She was now glad, she admitted, of having ‘so good an opportunity of sending him away’.
22
Her anger with Dudley was, as usual, short-lived; when, with convenient timing, the earl fell ill, Elizabeth softened. By early December she told de Silva that she now believed Dudley had ‘acted for the best, and that he was deceived’. As the ambassador subsequently explained, ‘she is quite certain that he would sacrifice his life for hers, and that if one of them had to die, he would willingly be the one’.
23

Finally Elizabeth responded to Parliament’s petition and before a deputation of some thirty members of the Lords and Commons she delivered what would become one of her most celebrated speeches:

As for my own part, I care not for death; for all men are mortal. And though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage, answerable to my place, as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

Elizabeth made clear that only she would decide if and whom she should marry and whether she named an heir. Marriage and the succession were her prerogative and she would not be browbeaten by her Parliament. She did, however, give some cause to hope:

I will never break the word of a Prince, spoken in public place, for my honour’s sake. And therefore I say again, I will marry as soon as I can conveniently, if God take not him away with whom I mind to marry, or myself, or else some other great let happen.
24

Her words seemed to signal that she would be willing to discuss marriage negotiations with the Archduke Charles, and in June the following year, after several months of delay, an embassy led by the Earl of Sussex left for Vienna to commence talks. Once again religion proved to be a stumbling block though for a time a compromise agreement was sought in which the archduke would hear mass in the privacy of his own chamber and accompany Elizabeth to Protestant church services. However, there was little enthusiasm from either side for such an arrangement and when the prospect of the match was discussed in the Privy Council, the opposition led by Dudley and Sir Francis Knollys left Elizabeth in no doubt that marriage to the archduke would be always vehemently opposed.

By late 1567 the negotiations were ruined and Sussex returned home in the New Year bitter that Dudley and the other opponents of the marriage had used the pretext of religion to cover their own self-interested motives to the detriment of the realm: ‘When subjects begin to deny princes titles for private respects, it seems to me good reason and counsel that the Queen’s Majesty should look to her own surety and make her self strong against such as be so cold in her marriage.’
25

*   *   *

In December 1566 the Scottish court celebrated the baptism of Prince James with spectacular festivities at Sterling Castle. The birth held out the promise of a settled future in Scotland and a stronger claim on the English throne. Yet such hopes for the future belied a far bleaker reality.

In the months following Rizzio’s assassination, James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, had assumed a position of great favour close to the Queen, and her relationship with Darnley had grown steadily worse. On the night of 9 February 1567, a violent explosion resounded throughout Edinburgh. The house in Kirk o’ Field, where Darnley had been sleeping, was blown apart by a huge quantity of gunpowder and razed to the ground. The bodies of Darnley and his servant were found lying nearby in the orchard – not killed by the blast, but strangled. The news quickly spread across the border and throughout the courts of Europe. Suspicions began to be voiced that Mary had been complicit in the murder.

Elizabeth was horrified and wrote immediately to Mary assuring her cousin of her support, ‘Madame, My ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my heart so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your husband and my killed cousin that I scarcely have the wits to write about it.’ She added, ‘I cannot dissemble that I am more sorrowful for you than for him.’ Drawing on her own experience of malicious talk in the wake of Amy Robsart’s death, she wrote earnestly,

I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beseech you to take this thing so much to heart that you will not fear to touch even him which you have nearest to you [Bothwell] if the thing touches him and that no persuasion will prevent you from making an example out of this to the world: that you are both a noble princess and a loyal wife.
26

At this moment of great crisis in Mary’s life, Elizabeth offered her Stuart cousin support and solidarity. ‘Every day,’ de Silva wrote to Philip II, ‘it becomes clearer that the Queen of Scotland must take steps to prove that she had no hand in the death of her husband, if she is to prosper in her claims to the succession here’.
27

Such advice was not to be heeded. Rather than act against Bothwell, one of the prime suspects in Darnley’s murder, just four months after the deed, Mary married him. The ceremony took place in the early hours of the morning on 15 May at the Palace of Holyroodhouse with only a handful of witnesses in attendance.
28
Her decision to wed spelled disaster for her rule in Scotland. Suspicions about her involvement in Darnley’s murder united Catholic and Protestant lords in opposition to her and by July she was forced to abdicate. James became King and a regency council led by the Earl of Moray, Mary’s half-brother, was appointed to rule during his minority.

Mary, meanwhile, was taken to the island fortress of Lochleven. Elizabeth was incensed at the action taken by the Scottish lords against their sovereign Queen, ‘a precedent most perilous for any Prince’, and demanded that her cousin be restored to her throne.
29

20

Wicked Intentions

In January 1568, Katherine Grey fell seriously ill. She had been moved to several different residences since her release from the Tower in 1563, before finally being detained at Cockfield Hall, in Yoxford, Suffolk, home of Sir Owen Hopton. Having been forcibly separated from her husband, she had sunk into a deep melancholy and, hardly eating, her health steadily deteriorated. Elizabeth was finally persuaded to send her own physician, Dr Symondes, to Cockfield Hall where he found Katherine close to death. As she lay dying she petitioned Hopton to deliver messages to the Queen, asking for her forgiveness for marrying without her consent, and begging her to ‘be good unto my children and not impute my fault unto them’.
1
She died on 27 January 1568.
2
As de Silva reported, ‘The Queen expressed sorrow to me at her death, but it is not believed that she feels it, as she was afraid of her.’
3

Four months after Katherine Grey’s death, Mary Queen of Scots, now Elizabeth’s strongest rival for the throne, orchestrated a daring escape from Lochleven Castle, and fled over the Scottish border into England. She crossed the Solway Firth in a fishing boat and eventually landed at Workington in Cumberland. Mary had made her journey to England confident that Elizabeth would show her mercy and restore her by armed force to the Scottish throne.
4
It would prove to be a fateful decision. Elizabeth immediately ordered that Mary should be kept under close guard at Carlisle Castle while she debated with her council over what to do. De Silva summed up the dilemma that Elizabeth now faced: ‘If this Queen has her way now, they will be obliged to treat the Queen of Scots as a sovereign … If they keep her as if in prison, it will probably scandalise all neighbouring princes, and if she remain free and able to communicate with her friends, great suspicions will be aroused.’
5

*   *   *

Mary’s flight into England marked a turning point in Elizabeth’s reign.
6
Her presence at once intensified the succession crisis and sparked off another series of plots and conspiracies; Mary became a focus for disaffected Catholics at home and abroad. Within weeks of her arrival, Sir Henry Norris, Elizabeth’s envoy in France, warned of plans fostered by Mary’s uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine and her other Guise relatives to rescue her and act against Elizabeth. In July, Norris wrote urging Elizabeth to pay special attention to her safety, ‘for there are certain Italians being sent into England by the Cardinal of Lorraine to practise against her’. The cardinal, he reminded Cecil, was ‘a most cruel enemy to the Queen and her country’, and will leave ‘nothing unattempted that may be to her prejudice’.
7