The Watchers (5 page)

As Feria drew up at St James's in the cold of an English November, he must have wondered about the likely success of his mission. How sick was Queen Mary? What were the fears and preoccupations of her
advisers? What, above all, were the intentions of Mary's half-sister Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and the detested Anne Boleyn? Elizabeth was twenty-five years old and already deeply experienced in the ways of court politics. Four years before Feria's embassy, in 1554, she had been implicated in an unsuccessful coup again Mary's government. As a result Elizabeth had been sent to the Tower of London and was later held for a time under house arrest in Oxfordshire. Feria himself had met Elizabeth only once before, when he had been in England in 1554 and 1555 on Philip's grand visit to Mary's court. She was then, he remembered, pleasant and welcoming, though that of course was in her interest: she had been a princess under suspicion. Now, in November 1558, the remarkable fact was that the young woman known as the Lady Elizabeth's grace was queen in waiting.

When Feria and his party arrived at St James's he and the Portuguese physician travelling with him, Doctor Luis Núñez, went straight to see Mary. Throughout her reign her health had been poor, and, though court physicians did not know the precise nature of her disease (it may have been ovarian cancer), it was obvious to Núñez and even to Feria that she was mortally sick. Mary was conscious enough that Wednesday afternoon to recognize the count. She was pleased at his embassy. But when Feria produced a letter for Mary from her husband she was not able to read it for herself. It can hardly have been a cheering audience.

Feria knew that he had not a moment to lose; he felt sure that Mary would soon be dead. That same afternoon he met her Privy Council of advisers and officials. They were polite and proper in receiving so distinguished an ambassador but they were hardly effusive in welcoming him. ‘They have received me well,' he wrote in a dispatch to Philip, ‘but somewhat as they would a man who came to them with bulls [edicts or commandments] from a dead pope.' There was a tangible feeling at St James's that Mary's government, like the influence of Spain in the politics of England, was near to its end.

On Feria's mind were two topics of critical importance. The first was the progress of Philip's negotiations with the King of France for peace. England and Spain had fought together against France, and for England one profound consequence, earlier in the year, had been the
military failure of losing to the enemy the town of Calais, ruled by England for two centuries and the Tudor crown's last toehold on mainland Europe. The psychological effects of this bitter defeat were enormous, and it rocked the Anglo-Spanish dynastic alliance. Mary's advisers blamed Spain for the loss of Calais, while the Spaniards put the disaster down to English military incompetence. Feria's meeting with the Privy Council must have crackled with the powerful energies of anger, grievance and uncertainty. What Mary's councillors feared was that King Philip would make a treaty with France without first agreeing the return to England of Calais by the French. In his meeting with the Council at St James's, Feria was probably as emollient as he could be. Yet Calais was never given back to the Tudor crown, and the suspicion of a Spanish sell-out over the town soured relations between England and Philip for decades to come.

Anglo-Spanish peace with France was of course a subject of immense importance and complexity. But the most pressing business of all at St James's Palace on 9 November 1558 was the English royal succession. The question was this: what would happen to the crown when Mary died? She was childless, and her lawful successor was her half-sister Elizabeth, whom Mary detested. It was reported that, in a vicious swipe at Elizabeth's legitimacy, Mary said that she looked like Mark Smeaton, one of Anne Boleyn's alleged lovers: Elizabeth, in other words, was not even Henry VIII's daughter. This was the charge of a double bastardy, for Queen Anne, after usurping the place of Mary's mother Catherine of Aragon as the king's wife, had gone to the executioner's block for the treason of incestuous adultery.

For Mary and her supporters – and for politically minded English Catholics more generally – Elizabeth, as Anne Boleyn's daughter, personified and symbolized the heresy and schism of Henry VIII's divorce in 1533 and England's break with the Church of Rome. So Mary had fought with all her power to keep Elizabeth off the throne, though significantly she had not changed the law of the royal succession, instead putting her faith in the sure hope and expectation that she would have a child to succeed her. By 1558 that hope was gone.

With a certain irony, it was the dead hand of their father that settled the matter for Mary and Elizabeth in October and November 1558. The key to everything was the Act of Succession of 1544. This statute
is one of the most important documents in the history of sixteenth-century Europe, for it gave the force of law to those clauses of Henry VIII's last will and testament that set out with great care exactly how the Tudor royal succession would proceed in practically every possible circumstance. In 1546, shortly before he died, Henry determined that if Mary died as queen without a legitimate heir, his youngest daughter Elizabeth would succeed her. In 1558 Mary's privy councillors, knowing that she was very seriously ill, urgently petitioned her to accept Elizabeth's claim to the throne. Mary did this on 28 October, only days before Feria's arrival at St James's, by adding a codicil to her will. Queen Mary left the ‘government, order and rule' of the kingdom to her ‘next heir and successor, according to the laws and statutes of this realm'. She recognized that her ‘dear lord and husband' Philip could no longer play any part in the government of England. Elizabeth's actual name was nowhere mentioned. The distasteful thing was done by the time Feria was in Westminster. Facing an obvious fact, the count told Mary's Privy Council that their king supported Elizabeth's succession.

Of course there was really no choice: barring a remarkable upset, Elizabeth would be queen. Henry VIII's law of succession stood. Parliament and the Privy Council were bound by the dead hand of Mary's father. Mary's advisers knew they were yesterday's men. Some of them were plainly afraid of Elizabeth's revenge for her time in prison. What Feria saw with his own eyes was a government crumbling away. He was quite as impotent, the emissary of the most powerful king in Europe who came to Westminster with grand words but could actually change nothing. Feria spoke to Mary's men for his king – and
their
king too, yet a foreigner – who was trying to manage political change it was entirely beyond even his power to control. Philip was King of England by marriage only, and his own English ancestry, which went back to the house of Lancaster, was much too weak to make him a plausible claimant in his own right. For the time being Philip and Mary were still by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol. Theirs was a grand and impressive royal style that extended
far beyond Westminster. It was the manifesto of European Catholic monarchy. But nothing lasts for ever.

The Count of Feria met Elizabeth Tudor, the young woman he knew in his bones would soon be queen, on Thursday, 10 November 1558, the day following his arrival at St James's Palace. She was at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, twenty-five miles north of London, very near to her own estate of Hatfield. She had been at the hall since at least 28 October, the day she wrote to one of her supporters as ‘Your very loving friend Elizabeth'. In Hertfordshire she was surrounded by her ladies and gentlewomen. But for some time Elizabeth had also been recruiting a shadow government of mainly Protestant advisers – a fact to which Feria, deeply suspicious of those men he called heretics, was very alert.

Feria arrived at Brocket Hall in time for the midday meal of dinner with the future queen and her intimate servants. Like Mary's Council, Elizabeth received him politely but without, as Feria could see, very much joy. The young woman he met that day must have been relieved beyond measure. The anxieties of Mary's reign were lifting, though she did not know how easy her accession was likely to be. The fact that she was now so near to inheriting the throne of the Tudor kingdoms of England and Ireland was stunning, for her rule was never written in the stars. In fact, when Henry VIII wrote his will in 1546 it was wildly improbable that his younger daughter would ever be queen. But Edward VI, at fifteen years old, died in 1553, and after only five and a half years as queen Mary too was dying; both were childless. To Elizabeth it was an act of divine providence that the remote prospect she had of becoming queen was now practically a certainty. Feria saw the facts as they were. With diplomatic correctness he spoke to Princess Elizabeth at one point of Queen Mary's recovery. But if he had had any hope of that, he would not have said to Elizabeth what he did that day, or have been so interested in her reactions and responses.

After a relaxed and lively dinner Elizabeth and Feria spoke privately, though he told her, to make an important point, that he preferred the whole kingdom to hear what he had to say. Always guarded in her words, the princess made sure that the two or three
ladies who attended her spoke only English. Feria and Elizabeth probably talked in Italian, though whatever language they used allowed them to have a long discussion. For a woman skilled in hiding her emotions, Elizabeth spoke to Feria with at times startling frankness. On behalf of Philip the count tried to befriend Elizabeth. Sharp and, young as she was, well practised in the arts and dangers of court politics, Elizabeth Tudor knew precisely what Feria was up to.

The count gave Elizabeth a letter from Philip of Spain which the king had written with own hand as a mark of his friendship to the princess. Feria guided Elizabeth through each point Philip made in the letter, just as he had been instructed to do by his master in Arras. The princess was polite. She said she was grateful to Philip for his letter, and that he could be assured she would maintain the good relations that had long existed between Spain and England. Elizabeth told Feria that when she had gone to prison in Mary's reign Philip had helped to secure her freedom. She felt it was not dishonourable to admit that she had once been a prisoner: she believed that the dishonour belonged to those who had put her there; she had been innocent after all. Feria told Elizabeth that she should always consider the king her true brother.

Elizabeth talked much more openly to Feria than he expected her to. He noted one thing above all others: she was very clever. Less flatteringly he said she was also very vain. In a later report to Philip the count wrote that he thought her well schooled in the ways of Henry VIII. This was a warning as much as a compliment. Feria saw that Elizabeth would take as her advisers men suspected of heresy, that is, men who professed the Protestant faith; the count had been told that all the women around the princess certainly were heretics. He was troubled about the future of Catholic England. In what must have been a delicate exchange, Feria told Elizabeth that everyone expected her to be a good Catholic princess. If she abandoned the faith, he said, both God and man would abandon her.

It was obvious to Feria that Elizabeth was very angry indeed at the way she had been treated in Mary's reign: suspected of complicity with rebels, sent to the great fortress and prison of the Tower of London, interrogated and later put under house arrest. To Feria she spoke strong words against senior men in Mary's government. He
tried to calm Elizabeth's anger and said that for her own good and for the kingdom's she should not desire revenge against anyone. She replied that all she wanted to do was to make those councillors admit that they had wronged her, and then she would pardon them. More worrying for Feria and Philip was Elizabeth's belief that she owed her imminent succession to the ordinary English people and not to the nobility, and certainly not to her brother the King of Spain. Feria saw that she had great confidence in her popularity, and also that she was determined to be governed by no one.

Feria explained to Elizabeth that Philip had ordered all those Englishmen whose pensions he paid to serve her when the need arose. She wanted to know who these pensioners were. She answered Feria sharply: he was taken aback and, though he pretended not to catch it, her meaning was clear to him: she wanted to be able to decide whether it was right for her subjects to take money from the King of Spain. Already she was jealous of her sovereignty and proud of her independence. Not surprisingly Feria talked to Elizabeth, as he had spoken to Mary's Council the afternoon before, of the peace negotiations with France. Elizabeth, too, was stung by the humiliation of losing Calais; after all, the Tudor monarchs styled themselves as Kings and Queens of France, remembering the heroic conquests of their Lancastrian ancestor King Henry V in the fifteenth century. How different it all looked over a hundred years later. Elizabeth told Feria frankly that if the English commissioners at the peace conference about to meet in Brussels made an agreement without Calais she would have them beheaded.

The conversation moved to the subject of her marriage. Elizabeth told Feria that Philip had tried very hard to encourage Mary to arrange a marriage for her to Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, and at Brocket Hall that afternoon she smiled at the memory of it. Feria replied that Philip had only ever tried to persuade Mary to accept Elizabeth as her sister and successor. The king had never dreamed of concluding anything without her consent. Elizabeth said in reply, and none too subtly, that Mary had lost the affection of her people because she had married a foreigner. Feria replied lamely that Philip had been well loved in England.

As Feria left Brocket Hall, he told Elizabeth that he would see her
again soon, whether Mary lived or died. If the queen should die he wanted to know what the princess wished him to do. He was minded to visit her. She told him not to do that, but rather to wait till she sent instructions. The English, Elizabeth said with a dash of malicious irony, were resentful of her own partiality for foreigners. That, Feria agreed, was true enough.