Tudor (50 page)

No further charges were made against Margaret, but as summer turned to autumn she became increasingly concerned about Lennox's health. She bombarded Cecil with requests he be placed with her, or that they both be released. This worry was understandable. Her first love, Anne Boleyn's uncle Lord Thomas Howard, had died in the Tower in October 1537 and he had been a much younger man than Lennox. On 25 October Margaret wrote again, begging Cecil ‘to be a means that the queen shall consider the long time of her husband's imprisonment . . . especially he being in the Tower and the winter coming on, and that house both unwholesome and cold'.
¹⁶
Unfortunately Elizabeth was in no state to do anything to help.

On 10 October 1562, when Elizabeth was at Hampton Court, she had begun to feel unwell, with aches and pains in her head and back. She had decided to have a bath and take a short walk to shake it off. When she returned to her chambers, however, she became feverish. A physician was called. To Elizabeth's irritation he diagnosed the potentially deadly smallpox. Since there were as yet no blisters she refused to accept the diagnosis, but sickness and diarrhoea followed and she became delirious. By 16 October the queen could no longer speak. On the 17th she was unconscious.

Elizabeth had been on the throne almost four years: only a year short of her sister's reign. If she died, as many feared she would, how
would her reign have been remembered? Elizabeth's religious settlement was not viewed as settled by anyone save the queen. One of her own bishops called it ‘a leaden mediocrity'. In military matters, while Mary I's loss of Calais is still remembered, Elizabeth's failed efforts to recover Calais by taking Le Havre and using it as a bargaining tool are completely forgotten. The campaign had ended that August 1562, with the huge loss of 2,000 men. Most troubling at the time, though, was what was likely to happen next. Mary I had named Elizabeth as her heir, despite her personal feelings towards her sister, and so allowed the crown to be inherited peacefully. Elizabeth continued to refuse to name anyone. Instead, when she woke up briefly, believing she was dying, she asked for Robert Dudley to be made Lord Protector with an income of £20,000. Her councillors promised her wishes would be fulfilled, but behind the scenes they had begun to argue furiously how the succession should actually go.

Since Elizabeth's immediate heirs were all female, some remained willing to look outside the Tudor family in order to pass the throne directly to a man. Cecil was sufficiently concerned about this to have sprung his ‘witchcraft' trap early. Arthur Pole, and his brother Edmund, who were descended from Edward IV's brother, the Duke of Clarence, had been arrested and put in the Tower as an argument against their claims. Others were prepared to consider another of Clarence's heirs: the Protestant Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon.
¹⁷
But a far larger proportion of the council looked to the Tudor family rather than to any faded remnants of the white rose.

As the frantic arguments continued, the pox blisters on Elizabeth's body began to appear. They broke first in her throat and mouth, before spreading outwards to her face and body. But she began to feel better and after a few days she could speak again. On 24 November Lennox was freed from the Tower on the queen's orders and permitted to join Margaret at Sheen. Having him die in the Tower was an embarrassment Elizabeth wished to avoid now that she faced renewed pressure to settle the issue of the succession once and for all. The council was
determined to address the controversy during the coming parliament and Elizabeth remained most concerned about the threat posed by Katherine Grey.

The queen looked magnificent at the procession for the state opening on 12 January, all golden hair and red velvet. It was a wise queen who appeared ‘most royally furnished . . . knowing right well that in pompous ceremonies a secret of government does much consist, for that people are both naturally taken and held with exterior shows. The rich attire, the ornaments, the beauty . . . held the eyes and hearts of men dazzled between contentment and admiration.' But Elizabeth also bore the scars of smallpox, a reminder that while her life had hung by a thread, so had the fate of her kingdom.

A debate on the succession began immediately with a petition soon drawn up, humbly requesting Elizabeth to marry, while also insisting that even if she did so, she must name an heir. Elizabeth's reply to the Lords reminded them fiercely that the marks she now had on her face left by smallpox weren't wrinkles and that, like the aging St Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, she could still have children. If she declared a successor, she warned, ‘it would cost much blood in England'.
¹⁸
Yet the debates continued, and as they did so the shocking news broke that the twenty-two-year-old Katherine Grey was about to have a second child.

It emerged that in May Hertford had managed to bribe two guards to unlock his door and those to Katherine's nearby chambers. On the 24th they had spent an hour making love on her bed, with its covers of silk shot damask. Four days later he had returned, and once again they had lain together.
¹⁹
The guards had then got cold feet, or someone senior had got wind of what had occurred. When Hertford visited his wife on a third night he had found the door to Katherine's rooms locked.
²⁰
He had not been able to return, but evidently those two nights had been enough for Katherine to conceive. It would now be difficult to deny they were married. They had been interrogated by the Archbishop of Canterbury and senior councillors and told them
all they considered themselves man and wife. Under canon law such a statement, followed by intercourse, was a legal marriage.

At 10.15 in the morning on 10 February 1563 Katherine delivered another son, Lord Thomas Seymour. Elizabeth ordered the Lieutenant of the Tower be imprisoned in one of his own cells for his failures in keeping Hertford locked up, but ordinary people were demanding ‘Why should man and wife be [prevented] from coming together?'
²¹
Elizabeth persisted, however, in refusing to recognise the marriage, and come the summer, when a virulent plague hit London, Elizabeth took the opportunity to move the couple out of the Tower to separate and far-flung country houses.

Katherine desperately missed Hertford. ‘I long to be merry with you, as I know you do with me, as we were when our sweet little boy [Thomas] was begotten in the Tower', she wrote of their lovemaking; ‘I wish you to be as happy as I was sad when you came to my door for the third time, and it was locked. Do you think I can forget what passed between us? No, I cannot. I remember it more often than you know . . . such is my boundless love for my sweet bedfellow, that I once lay beside with joyful heart and shall again.'
²²
Katherine pleaded with the queen for her forgiveness, but she was kept apart not only from Hertford, but also from her elder son.

A miniature of Katherine with the infant Lord Beauchamp, painted at around this time by the female court artist Levina Teerlinc, remains the earliest known portrait of an English mother with her baby: a sad reminder for Katherine of all she had lost. But for others it represented the future: an icon of a Madonna carrying the Lord's anointed, the next King of England. Copies were made and even after 450 years several still survive. Katherine and Hertford had many friends who hoped that the queen could yet be pressured into naming Katherine, or one of her sons, as her heir.

Amongst Katherine's supporters was an MP called John Hales who spent the following months composing a book clarifying her succession rights and attacking those of Mary, Queen of Scots. Here, his greatest
success was in unearthing a law, dating back to the reign of Edward III, which excluded those born outside the realm from inheriting land in England. Elizabeth's reaction was compared to a tempest when she learned of Hales' book in the spring of 1564; he was to spend a year in the Tower and a further four under house arrest for it. She complained particularly about Hales ‘writing the book so precisely against the Queen of Scotland's title'.
²³
It interfered with her latest plan of defence, which involved stalling Mary's remarriage.

Elizabeth could bastardise Katherine's sons, but she would have no such ability when Mary, Queen of Scots married – so she had to delay her from doing so for as long as possible, preferably until she was no longer able to bear sons. Elizabeth planned to convince Mary that to gain the English throne she had only to marry the one man she trusted: Robert Dudley. Bringing Mary round to marrying a mere subject of England would take time, and once that was achieved Elizabeth intended to come up with some last-minute impediment to the very marriage she was promoting. Although Elizabeth had accepted she could not marry Dudley herself, she was no less possessive of him than she had ever been.

As a sign of her commitment to the Stuart claim, Elizabeth had begun showering the freed Lennox family with marks of favour. Lennox had been permitted to return to Scotland to pursue the rights lost when he had come to England to serve Henry VIII, while Margaret Douglas and her children had been invited to court. There the thirty-year-old Elizabeth had long given up the modest attire she had worn during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I. In a portrait from this period Elizabeth is wearing a beautiful scarlet dress with the cone-shaped skirts that were then fashionable, glittering with gold thread. A queen was expected to dress like a queen, and Elizabeth now followed her elder sister who had delighted ‘above all in arraying herself elegantly and magnificently'.
²⁴

Darnley was greatly flattered by the attention of the glamorous Elizabeth that summer. She made a great show of enjoying his lute
playing, and on 29 September he was given a prominent role in the ceremonies in which Elizabeth raised Robert Dudley to the royal title, Earl of Leicester: a necessary move if Dudley was to be considered seriously as an attractive groom for Mary, Queen of Scots.
²⁵
Darnley preceded Elizabeth in the procession at St James's Palace, carrying the sword of state before her into the room where the ceremonies were to take place. There was something spoilt and effeminate about Darnley; ‘a polished trifler' was the verdict of the French court.
²⁶
The Scottish emissary agreed. His view, shared with Elizabeth, was that this tall boy ‘was more a woman than a man, being very lusty, beardless and lady faced'. Mary would surely prefer Robert Dudley as a husband, Elizabeth believed, and when Dudley knelt before her and bowed his dark head, she could not resist ‘putting her hand in his neck to kittle him smilingly'.
²⁷

Elizabeth was confident that Margaret Douglas had been tamed by her imprisonment. Cecil agreed and Margaret had used her considerable charm and intelligence to build up a relationship of mutual respect with him, even playing co-godparent to his daughter, Elizabeth Cecil, in July 1564.
²⁸
Margaret also appeared to have befriended Robert Dudley, whom she had earlier accused of being a pox-ridden wife-killer. Events suggest that it was, in part, at Robert Dudley's persuasion that Elizabeth permitted the trifling Darnley to join his father in Scotland. Elizabeth soon realised, however, that she had made a disastrous miscalculation. Margaret and Robert Dudley had become, if not true friends, then political allies. Dudley was making it evident he had no intention of leaving England, and his supposed match with Mary, Queen of Scots was dead in the water by early 1565. England needed a successor, and Robert Dudley had come down on the side of the Queen of Scots, while leaving open the possibility that he might one day marry Elizabeth.

As it dawned on Elizabeth that she had been persuaded to grant Margaret's son a passport so that she could be pressured into allowing him to marry Mary, Queen of Scots and name them as her co-heirs,
she panicked. To make it quite clear that she would not be bullied into naming any heir, Elizabeth delivered the devastating news to Mary that she had decided not to name a successor until ‘she shall be married or shall notify her determination never to marry'. In doing so, however, she had lost her leverage over Mary, who noted icily, ‘I . . . fear it shall turn to her discredit more than my loss.' The English ambassador begged Mary's advisers to dissuade her from acting hastily, but they cut him short. Mary would marry soon and to her own choice, they told him: ‘The die is cast.'
²⁹

36

MURDER IN THE FAMILY

Q
UEEN
E
LIZABETH HAD ENJOYED HER EVENING AS SHE SAT DOWN
to supper at court, on 5 March 1565. Her cousin, Margaret Douglas, had joined her to watch a joust and a tourney on horses. The combat, with twenty-four challengers and opponents, had been organised by Robert Dudley, who had also taken part in what had proved an excellent competition. He had planned more entertainments to come, and following supper all the guests congregated for a comedy he had set up in the queen's apartments. It featured two goddesses debating the virtues of marriage over those of chastity. ‘All this is against me', Elizabeth commented wearily. It was only when the dancing began that Elizabeth's good spirits returned. There was a masquerade of men dressed as wild gods and satyrs who danced with the ladies, as did the men who had taken part in the combats, still wearing weapons. The evening ended with everyone flushed with excitement, hungry again, and eating from a huge table laden with snacks of herring and other small fish, cakes and sweets.
¹

When the latest Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Guzman de Silva, saw Elizabeth nearly three weeks later, she spoke again about the pressure to marry: ‘I promise you, if I could today appoint such a successor to the crown as would please me and the country, I would not marry. It is something for which I have never had any inclination. My subjects, however, press me to do so. I must therefore marry or
take the other course, which is a very difficult one. There is a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married, or at all events that if she refrains from marriage she does so for some bad reason. They said of me that I did not marry because I was fond of [Robert Dudley] the Earl of Leicester, and that I would not marry him because he had a wife already. Although he has no wife alive now I still do not marry him . . . But what can we do? We cannot cover everybody's mouth, but must content ourselves with doing our duty.'
²