Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens

Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens Jane Dunn This is the first biography of the fateful relationship between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. It was the defining relationship of their lives, and marked the intersection of the great Tudor and Stuart dynasties, a landmark event in British history.Distinguished biographer Jane Dunn reveals an extraordinary story of two queens ruling in one isle, both embodying opposing qualities of character, ideals of womanliness and of divinely ordained kingship. Theirs is a drama of sex and power, recklessness, ambition and political intrigue, with a rivalry that could only be resolved by death.As regent queens in an overwhelmingly masculine world, they were deplored for their femininity, compared unfavourably with each other, and courted by the same men. By placing this dynamic and ever-changing relationship at the centre of the book, Dunn throws new light and meaning on the complexity of their natures. She reveals an Elizabeth revolutionary in her insistence on ruling alone, while Mary is not the romantic victim of history, but a courageous adventurer with a reckless heart. Vengeful against her enemies and the more ruthless of the two, she was untroubled by plotting Elizabeth’s murder. Elizabeth, however, was in anguish at having to sanction Mary’s death warrant for treason.Working almost exclusively from contemporary letters and writings, she lets them speak to us across more than four hundred years, their voices and responses surprisingly familiar to our own, their characters vivid, by turns touching and terrible. ELIZABETH AND MARY Cousins, Rivals, Queens JANE DUNN DEDICATION (#ulink_77888fe5-e841-592c-b08c-e2f69484559f) In memory of a much loved father DAVID ROLF THESEN 1923–2002 ‘out of the strong came forth sweetness’ CONTENTS Title Page (#u4addec86-44bf-54c5-83a1-a9370a8ba03b) Dedication (#ulink_cb143fb4-34b3-51cd-9ccb-20581a1cb036) Chronology (#u8dad56c2-1de6-5cd3-a478-5ac61f47ac80) Preface (#u235b0224-9fa5-565b-9396-b0502cf1fb44) 1 The Fateful Step (#u0c1e27e1-2cdd-510b-a655-81a8a380a948) 2 The Disappointment of Kings (#ud75ff99a-9dbe-5911-8e53-e85f2605e4cf) 3 The Education of Princes (#uf98c45c2-0301-505a-837d-dd17f5f0a1f4) 4 Apprenticeship for a Queen (#litres_trial_promo) 5 Wilfulness and God’s Will (#litres_trial_promo) 6 Complicity and Competition (#litres_trial_promo) 7 Raison de Coeur: Raison d’?tat (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Seeking a Future King (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Outrageous Fortune (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Double Jeopardy (#litres_trial_promo) 11 Singular Foes (#litres_trial_promo) 12 The Consequence of the Offence (#litres_trial_promo) Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) P.S. (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Book (#litres_trial_promo) Read On (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) CHRONOLOGY (#ulink_8a73f9b5-8ebb-5433-8926-ae4963582e83) PREFACE (#ulink_382d6ccc-18c2-57e3-81e2-075bd8991ae0) Four hundred years ago, on 24 March 1603, Elizabeth I died. She was in her seventieth year. Having been propped for days on cushions on the floor in her chamber, she had been persuaded to take to her bed at last. To her Archbishop of Canterbury, silencing his praise, she said, ‘My lord, the crown which I have borne so long has given enough of vanity in my time.’ These words struck to the heart of the tragedy that had befallen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots. This same crown had been the focus of Mary’s ambition too; her claim to Elizabeth’s throne was the obsession of her adult life from which so many disasters flowed. Elizabeth realized that her crown and all the powerful interests that surrounded it were what drew her and Mary together, and yet fatally divided them. Despite possessing the throne of England, with all the pride of a daughter of King Henry, she was haunted by a deep-rooted insecurity as to her own legitimacy. When pressed by Parliament to sign Mary’s death warrant, Elizabeth railed in anguish against the crown that had made this unnatural decision hers alone. Instead she wished that Mary and she ‘were but as two milkmaids with pails upon our arms’, and she regretted, ‘that there were no more dependency upon us but mine own life were only in danger and not the whole estate of [her people’s] religion and well-doings’. It was their royal rather than their human status that had brought these queens to such straits that one had to die. Sixteen years before Elizabeth’s own natural death in old age, Mary was beheaded at the age of forty-four. From that one act of regicide, a queen killing a fellow queen, a mythology of justification, romance, accusation and blame has been spun that retains its force to the present day. Of all the monarchs of these islands it is Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots who most stir the imagination. They divided powerful opinion in their lifetimes and were the focus of passionate debate in the centuries that followed their deaths. Murderess, ‘whore’, daughter of the devil were epithets flung at both queens by their detractors, while their supporters claimed Elizabeth as hero and saviour, Mary as martyr and saint. It was the relationship between them that heightened these extremes of partisan feeling. Even in death, through history and myth, they continued locked together in complex rivalry, somehow embodying the ancestral character and mutual suspicion of their respective kingdoms. In this new millennium, people identify with each queen still, arguing their merits and failures, and thinking they see some likeness in themselves. Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, arguably the greatest monarch we have ever had, is certainly the one who most attracts superlatives. Unfashionable in her belief in self-discipline and sacrifice, she is irresistible as a reminder of England’s past glory and pre-eminence in the world: a phenomenon of her own making, without precedent or successor. And Mary, a queen celebrity, femme fatale and flawed heroine, valuing pleasure over duty and adventure most of all. She even cast her kingdom away for illicit love – what more modern sacrifice could there be? Finally, the brilliant coup de th?atre of her death opened a path back to redemption. And I myself am far from immune from this fascination. When I opened the volumes of State Papers covering their reigns I was amazed by the vivid immediacy of the voices. Both queens, their ambassadors and ministers, all speak to us through the centuries with more forthright, revealing and affecting language than one would ever expect from official documents today. From letters, speeches, prayers, poems, diplomatic dispatches and ministers’ reports, the queens’ voices would explain themselves. By placing them centre stage and writing of their relationship with each other and the world, there was more space to explore their characters through their own words and those of their contemporaries. Consequently, this is not a dual biography of these queens. Instead it is a kind of hybrid, about historical figures but not a history charting every aspect and incident of their lives. Chronological, but not strictly so, it follows the dynamic interaction which shifted as each queen took the initiative by turns, one never entirely dominant, each highly aware of the other. The balance of power was never clear cut: Elizabeth appeared to hold all the best cards, but Mary played those she had to disconcerting effect. There are many fine biographies already of these most written-about queens: for Elizabeth, the classic J.E. Neale, and more recently Anne Somerset’s elegant, authoritative work, Alison Weir’s popular trilogy, and David Starkey’s vivid portrayal of the princess’s youth; for Mary, nothing has superseded in more than thirty years Lady Antonia Fraser’s impressive and sympathetic Life, although Jenny Wormald’s study of Mary as a monarch is marvellous. But the wealth of primary sources is so great that the scope for bringing new illumination to the story is almost boundless. Elizabeth and Mary is about the relationship between the queens, one that seemed, during their lifetimes, to evolve a life of its own, and in the end hold both captive to it and each other. It was the most compelling relationship of their lives, affecting their political policy and personal attitudes. Unlike Elizabeth with Burghley and Leicester, or Mary with Moray, Darnley and Bothwell, this was a relationship neither had chosen, nor could escape, even in death. Elizabeth realized with some despair how their fates were intertwined: when she was ostensibly Mary’s jailer she declared, ‘I am not free, but a captive.’ The indissoluble bond between them was forged by two opposing forces; their shared inheritance and rivalry for Elizabeth’s crown set against their natural solidarity as regnant queens in an overwhelmingly masculine world. They had a fascination and sympathy for each other; they were cousins in an age when family mattered and when, for much of their lives, both lacked closer kin. Mary chose to emphasize her familial relationship with Elizabeth, her letters often supplicating, daughterly, even lover-like. ‘How much better’, she wrote to Elizabeth, ‘were it that we being two Queens so near of kin, neighbours and living in one isle, should be friends and live together like sisters, than by strange means divide ourselves to the hurt of both.’ And Elizabeth responded to these emotional pleas with a tone that was bossy, condescending and, for a while, elder-sisterly in her exasperated care. And yet they never met. This is the great dramatic centre of their story. In the absence of reality a rival grows in stature in the imagination, becoming something superhuman, but also less than human and therefore easier to kill. Their failure to meet also became an expression of frustrated desire and control. Mary never gave up pleading for personal contact, certain that her charm would alter her case with her cousin. Initially willing, Elizabeth then grew increasingly distant and aloof, fearful of what she believed was Mary’s almost magical power to enchant, already exaggerated in her imagination and fuelled with the stories of others. Elizabeth was perplexed: ‘There is something sublime in the words and bearing of the Queen of Scots that constrains even her enemies to speak well of her.’ Part of the drama of their lives is this great opposition between their natures, their earliest experiences and the kinds of rulers they wished to be. All her life, Elizabeth had steeled herself to prove to the world she had the heart and mind of a man, so aware was she of the accepted inferiority of being merely female. She often boasted that in this masculinity her strength resided, yet she had all the passions of a woman, and expressed these most notably in her love for her favourites and her tenderness for her people. Mary was seen as recklessly emotional and liable to nervous collapse, and yet she showed a more ruthless resolve to see her sister queen murdered than Elizabeth could summon up for the judicial execution of Mary herself. So unlike in temperament, these queens nevertheless were well matched in the vigour of their ambitions and their obstinacy of purpose. The weapons they used were different, but each had just as great a capacity for harm. In considering Elizabeth’s and Mary’s lives in relation to each other, illuminating symmetries occur. They both had remarkable mothers who, for different reasons, were lost to them. Anne Boleyn was a clever woman, radical in her Protestant sympathies, courageous and spirited, but a stranger to her daughter through death, and erased through the dangers inherent even in her memory. Mary of Guise, redoubtable queen and role model for Mary, but largely absent and unknown, due to the dynastic ambitions that made both mother and daughter exiles in each other’s land. Each queen was involved in scandal over a favourite possibly implicated in murder, but they dealt with the crises they faced in completely different ways: Elizabeth’s action safeguarded her throne and gave her the moral foundation from which to impose her future authority; Mary’s decision lost her not only the throne but her freedom, and eventually her life. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign it was the English queen who was consistently compared by foreign ambassadors, to her detriment, with her cousin, the Queen of Scotland. Elizabeth was the intractable monarch, the wanton queen, while Mary lived a model life as dauphine, then queen, then dowager queen of the great kingdom of France. Her return to Scotland marked the beginning of the adventures that would reverse these comparisons in epic fashion. From that moment the tension in their relationship mounted. There was a struggle for supremacy and a desire in each to claim the moral high ground. Mary’s marriage and the birth of her son confirmed her conformity with expectations of what it was to be a good queen, while Elizabeth continued to prevaricate and evade her duty to provide for the succession. Then with Mary’s rumoured involvement in the murder of her husband and marriage to the likely murderer, heedless of Elizabeth’s trenchant advice, she set the English and Continental courts agog. There followed civil war in Scotland and humiliation for Mary, then imprisonment, fear for her life, miscarriage, forced abdication, night-time escape and precipitate flight to England. A plaintive existence as a genteel prisoner for seventeen years was enlivened with various plots to attain her freedom, and even her eventual elevation to the throne of England. Even in death Mary sought to wrong-foot Elizabeth. Found guilty of incitement to kill her cousin, she went to her execution nobly insisting she was sacrificed for her faith alone. By dying heroically as a Catholic martyr, she rescued her reputation from the wreckage of her life. Elizabeth, as an old queen dying after more than four decades of transforming rule, was aware instead of the galloping hooves of the messenger’s horse riding north. The next incumbent of her jealously guarded throne would be Mary’s son, James, King of Scotland and now King of England too. This would mark Mary’s final triumph, the succession of the Tudors by the Stuarts. But there was triumph for Elizabeth too, for Mary’s son ruled their newly united kingdoms as a Protestant state. The story of Elizabeth’s and Mary’s relationship is punctuated with reversals of fortune: murder mysteries, sexual intrigue, reckless behaviour, avowals of affection, heated battles and cold war. Fear, heartbreak and tragedy were its underlying strain. Yet surging through natural barriers of prejudice, masculine perspective and vested interest, these two queens emerge evergreen in their importance and fascination: Elizabeth, regardless of her weaknesses, confounding every prejudice against women in power; and Mary, despite her strengths, fulfilling in the end every foreboding, but with astounding boldness and abandon. They are welcome exceptions in the vast congregation of men who jostle for space in their domination of history. That these two remarkable queens should have been contemporaries, neighbours in one small island, is gift enough for any writer. That they should be united by blood but inextricably enmeshed in a deadly rivalry for the same kingdom, the same throne, gives the story of their relationship the brooding force of Greek tragedy. I came to this book as a biographer not a historian, believing that character largely drives events, explains motivation, and connects us to each other through the centuries. These queens lived lives vastly different from our own, but they behaved and felt in a way fundamentally familiar to us now. The outbursts of defiance, the flagging spirit, the pride in achievement and longing for love, all this is expressed in their own clear voices, as are the less familiar qualities of kingly pride, autocratic power and bloody revenge. As a biographer one lives for years exploring the world and the mind of a stranger. For me in this case it was two strangers. Yet in those years these strangers gain a certain sense of intimacy and their lives a foothold in one’s own. In living so closely with these queens, inevitably my ideas and prejudices have changed. I became more aware of the profound loneliness of their role; the fear, the danger and responsibility were daunting, yet they accepted this and even revelled in it. The physical suffering and discomfort of their everyday lives was overlaid with such magnificent show and animated with an enormous zest and appetite for life itself. Above all, it is their characters that have gripped me, with their different energies and ambitions, their distinctive voices and the complexity of their human responses and feelings. Mary was clearly a passionate and impetuous woman, but with a personal charm so disconcerting that even Elizabeth feared to meet her. She emerges a more intelligent and subtle thinker than I had initially thought her to be, and with a courage and energy in action that was breathtaking; her ruthlessness and desire for revenge more Medicean than Stuart in its lack of compromise or pity. Elizabeth, so obviously crafty, clever, and in imperial command of herself and others, also surprised with how tentative she could be, how affectionate, tender, and full of humour and charm. I hope that in these pages will be found some sense of that vitality; that through their own words, and the exploration of their relationship, we can look anew at these remarkable women and redoubtable queens. CHAPTER ONE The Fateful Step (#ulink_199e8192-4caa-5677-abbe-27f13808aa35) ‘I am already bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England’ … Stretching out her hand she showed them the ring. Queen Elizabeth’s first speech before Parliament, 10 February 1559 THESE WERE DANGEROUS TIMES. The second quarter of the sixteenth century had made Elizabeth Tudor and her generation of coming men watchful, insecure, fearful for their lives. Nothing could be taken for granted. Health and happiness were fleeting, reversals of fortune came with devastating speed. This was the generation raised in the last days of King Henry and come of age in a time of religious and political flux. The religious radicalism of Edward VI’s reign had been quickly followed by reactionary extremism and bloodshed in Queen Mary’s. During the political tumult of these years there was no better time for ambitious men to seize position, wealth and honours. No longer was power the exclusive prerogative of old aristocratic blood. When a Thomas Wolsey, son of a butcher, or a Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith, could rise in Henry’s reign to be the mightiest subject in the land, then what bar to ambition during the minority of Edward, the turmoil of Mary, and the unpromising advent of Elizabeth? But vaulting ambition and exorbitant rewards brought their own peril. The natural hierarchy of things mattered to the sixteenth-century mind. Men elevated beyond their due estate, women raised as rulers over men were unnatural events and boded ill. Those with the greatest aspirations could not expect to die peaceful in their beds. God remained at the centre of this febrile and unpredictable world. His will was discerned in every random act. Death was everywhere. It came as sudden sweating sickness and struck down communities of healthy adults. It came as fire to purify heretic beliefs. It came through poison or the deadly thrust of steel to dispose of inconvenient obstacles in the machinery of power. The supernatural had a physical presence, and spirits and magic were natural companions to everyday life. They were part of the grand cosmic scheme which constituted God’s hierarchical universe. Analogy, interconnectedness, fixity were deeply impressive to the Elizabethan mind, mutability and disorder a sign of man out of harmony with God’s plan. Superstition and religion were ways to make sense of suffering, attempts at warding off the apparently random blows of fate. Yet the insecurity of life itself made the living intense, the wits sharper, the senses more acute. For sixteenth-century men and women there was a life after death, for the godly well-mapped and glorious, but life on earth was a precious and precarious thing to be seized and drained to the dregs. At a time of augury and superstition, there was nothing to foretell the events of 1558: no sightings of whales in the Channel; no preternaturally high tide, nor monstrous births nor the mysterious, lingering trajectory of a comet across the northern sky. Even Nostradamus, whose prophecies were consulted by those in a fever of uncertainty, appeared unaware of its significance. The year opened without cosmic fanfare. Yet this was to become one of the momentous dates in every British schoolchild’s history rote. Along with the Battle of Hastings of 1066 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, 1558 was one of the markers of a seismic shift in English experience, to be chanted in schoolrooms through subsequent centuries. It was a year of grand transfers of power, as one reign came to an end and a new era began. It was a time of inexorable religious schism, when universal monopolistic Catholicism was permanently supplanted by the state religion, Protestantism. Scotland’s most recent history had been less convulsive. By the beginning of 1558 it was balanced in a certain equilibrium. A significant number of lords had proceeded informally down the road of religious reformation and the opposing factions had forged an uneasy coexistence. Clan loyalties and rivalries would always be the defining identity which cut across ideology, matters of faith or political allegiance. Rather than a religious cause, any growing unrest and sense of danger came more from Scottish resentment against the increasing presence of the French, garrisoned in various towns and awarded lucrative offices over the heads of the native Scots. As a child ten years previously, Mary Queen of Scots had escaped the clutches of the English and sailed for France. Her French mother Mary of Guise was courageous and just as regent but inevitably favoured her own country with which Scotland was in alliance. This cosy relationship was about to be challenged when, in 1559, the Reformation turned militant and anti-French, and John Knox, the inspired Calvinist preacher, returned home after twelve years’ exile to become its hectoring mouthpiece. At the beginning of 1558, however, both Elizabeth and Mary were poised on the margin between apprenticeship and their public lives as female monarchs. By the end of that year both had embraced their fate. The defining moment for Mary came with a kiss – in effect a marriage. For Elizabeth it came with a death – and an exclusive contract with her people. It was apparent that a woman in possession of a throne must marry, and do so without delay. All biblical and classical texts, with which the educated sixteenth-century mind was imbued, stressed the natural order of the male’s dominion over the female. A female monarch was a rare and unnatural phenomenon which could only be regularized by speedy union with a prince who would rule over her in private and guide her in her public, God-given, role as queen. Only by restoring man’s necessary dominion could the proper balance of the world be maintained. Although her cousin Elizabeth was revolutionary in her lifelong resistance to this obligation, Mary Stuart was more conformable and fulfilled this expectation of her status and sex – not once but three times. In early 1558 she was fifteen and had been a queen since she was six days old. She had never known any other state. First as a queen of Scotland, the land of her birth and a country she did not know: secondly as Queen of France, the country of her heart. Having lived from the age of five at the centre of the powerful French court, Mary had grown into a charming and accomplished French princess, destined to become the wife of the Dauphin of France. Her spectacular dynastic marriage, reinforcing the ‘auld alliance’ between Scotland and France, was set for the spring. Mary would marry her prince on 24 April 1558. Fran?ois, the beloved companion of her childhood and King Henri II’s eldest son, was just fourteen years old. In England, Elizabeth Tudor was twenty-four years old and living quietly in the country at Hatfield some thirty miles north of London. Expectant, and fearful of losing the one thing she desired, she was fearful too of its fulfilment. She had already been bastardized, disinherited, often in danger and always waiting, never certain of the prize. Elizabeth had seen her two siblings (and a cousin, fleetingly) succeed to the throne before her. If any had had children then her position on the sidelines of power would have become permanent. But Edward VI died in 1553, unmarried and childless, aged sixteen. He was followed not by either of his elder half-sisters but by their hapless teenage cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Sacrificed to further the ambitions of her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, she was queen in name only and then barely for nine days. Immediately imprisoned she was executed seven months later. Now in 1558, Henry VIII’s eldest child, Mary I, herself appeared to be ailing. Elizabeth had survived much danger. She knew well how closely scrutinized her actions were and how much she was the focus of others’ desire for power. The previous two decades had seen so many ambitions crumble to dust, so many noblemen and women imprisoned and beheaded, accused of heresy or treason, tortured, tried and burnt, or if a traitor, hung, drawn and quartered, in the terrific ways of judicial death. At the beginning of 1558, Elizabeth and her supporters knew that some great change was in motion. But change brought disruption too and increased danger. Her half-sister Mary Tudor had been queen for nearly five years. Suspicious, suffering, devoutly Catholic and zealous to maintain the supremacy of the old faith, her reign had grown increasingly unhappy. Mary’s worst mistake had been her insistence on marrying Philip II of Spain, for the English hated foreigners meddling in their affairs, and they hated the Spanish most of all. The fanatical purges of heresy by her decree, and the torture and burnings of hundreds of martyrs, would earn Mary the epithet ‘Bloody Mary’ from generations to come. The country grew ever more tired and repelled by the bloodshed. The dreadful spectacles had become counter-productive, alienating her subjects’ affections for their queen and strengthening the reformers’ support. In reaction to the mood of the country, the burnings in Smithfield were halted in June 1558. But nature seemed to be against Mary too, for the harvests also failed two years in succession. In 1556 people were scrabbling like pigs for acorns and dying of starvation. The following year they were ravaged by disease as various epidemics swept through the land. Famine and pestilence – people wondered, was this God’s retribution for the sins of Mary’s reign? By the beginning of 1558, Mary was herself sick and in despair. Still longing for a child and heir, once more in desperation she had made herself believe she was pregnant again. But Philip had not bothered to hide his antipathy to his queen and anyway had been absent from her for too long. Her delusion and humiliation were evident even to her courtiers. Elizabeth, who had waited so long in an uneasy limbo, under constant suspicion, her sister refusing to name her as her heir, would have lost everything if this miraculous pregnancy turned out to bear fruit. No one could know, however, that the symptoms which Mary interpreted as the beginning of new life and hope were instead harbingers of death. The queen’s spirit that cold January had already been broken over the loss of Calais. The last trophy left to the English from their ancient wars with France, this two-century-old possession had been lost in the very first days of the year. Since the previous June, Mary had supported her husband by embroiling her country in an expensive, unpopular and now ultimately humiliating war with France. The loss to their old enemy of Calais, remnant of Plantagenet prowess, was more a symbolic than strategic catastrophe, and it cut her to the heart. This latest humiliation of English pride had been inflicted by Fran?ois, Duc de Guise, nicknamed ‘le Balafr?’, ‘scarface’, after a wound inflicted by the English at the siege of Boulogne fourteen years earlier. A lance had smashed through his face from cheek to cheek but he had overcome all odds and recovered his life, his sight, and even the desire to fight again. He was a brilliant soldier, and the eldest and most powerful of Mary Queen of Scots’ six overweening Guise uncles. The ambition of these brothers knew no bounds. They claimed direct descendency from Charlemagne. Catholic conviction and imperial ambitions commingled in their blood. Their brotherhood made them daunting: they thought and hunted as a pack, their watchwords being ‘one for all’ and ‘family before everything’. Taking advantage of their monarch’s gratitude for the success of the Calais campaign and riding on a wave of popular euphoria, the Duc de Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine agitated for the marriage of their niece to the youthful heir to the French throne. The fortunes of the girl queen and the triumphant family of her mother, Mary of Guise, were fatally intertwined. At this time, the Guises seemed to be so much in the ascendant that many of their fellow nobles resented and envied their power, fearing that it was they who in effect ruled France. Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots had always been aware of each other, of their kinship and relations to the English crown. As cousins, they were both descended from Henry VII, Elizabeth as his granddaughter, Mary as his great-granddaughter. European royalty was a small, elite and intermarried band. As the subject of the English succession loomed again, Elizabeth was acutely conscious of the strength of the Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne. Certainly she knew that if her sister Mary I’s repeal of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy was allowed to stand then her own parents’ marriage would remain invalid and she could be marginalized and disinherited as a bastard. To most Catholics Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn had always been invalid and Mary Queen of Scots was legally and morally next in line to the English throne. If Mary united the thrones of Scotland, France and England then this would ensure that England remained a part of Catholic Christendom. However, if the Acts of Mary Tudor’s reign should be reversed then Elizabeth’s legitimacy was confirmed and she, as Henry VIII’s legitimate daughter, had not only the natural but the more direct claim. She also had popular, emotional appeal. Her tall, regal figure and her reddish gold colouring reminded the people, grown nostalgic and selective in their memory of ‘Good King Harry’, of her father when young. Her surprisingly dark eyes, an inheritance of the best feature of her mother Anne Boleyn, were not enough to blur the bold impression that the best of her father lived on in her. In fact, despite the stain on her mother’s name, it was to Elizabeth’s credit that she was not the daughter of a foreign princess, that unadulterated English blood ran in her veins and that she had been born in Greenwich Palace, at the centre of English royal power. In early peace negotiations with France, Elizabeth had Cecil point out she was ‘descended by father and mother of mere English blood, and not of Spain, as her sister was’. This meant she was ‘a free prince and owner of her crown and people’. (#litres_trial_promo) She was an English-woman, and she knew this counted for much in this island nation of hers. ‘Was I not born in the realm? Were my parents born in any foreign country? Is there any cause I should alienate myself from being careful over this country? Is not my kingdom here?’ (#litres_trial_promo) At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a Venetian ambassador noted the insularity and self-satisfaction of the English even then: the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’, and that ‘it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman’. (#litres_trial_promo) In early 1558 this pride seemed rather misplaced. As the French celebrated their victory over the English at Calais, it was clear that the greater power was with them, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and soon to become Dauphine and eventually Queen of France, basked in this radiance. Meanwhile England was impoverished and demoralized by unpopular government and wasteful war, and the Lady Elizabeth, hopeful successor to the throne, remained sequestered in the country. Both she and the English people seemed overcast by a cloud of stasis and failure, fearful of the past and uncertain of the future. A historian and near contemporary expressed it thus: For every man’s mind was then travailed with a strange confusion of conceits, all things being immoderately either dreaded or desired. Every report was greedily both inquired and received, all truths suspected, diverse tales believed, many improbable conjectures hatched and nourished. Invasion of strangers, civil dissension, the doubtful disposition of the succeeding Prince, were cast in every man’s conceit as present perils. (#litres_trial_promo) The triumphalism of France and the pre-eminence of the Guises were publicly enacted in the spectacular wedding celebrations of the youthful Mary Stuart and Fran?ois de Valois. Both Catherine de Medici, the dauphin’s mother, and Diane de Poitiers, Henri II’s omnipotent mistress, argued that the marriage need not be hastened, that these children should be given more time. There may have been some concern at their youth and the dauphin’s sickliness, but both women were more exercised by the growing influence of the Guises whose power as a result of this union threatened to become insurmountable. Objections were put aside, however, and the day was set for Sunday 24 April 1558. It had been two centuries since a dauphin had been married in Paris, and the streets around the cathedral of Notre Dame were thronged with an excited and expectant crowd. A large stage had been erected so that as many of the public would see the proceedings as possible. Blue silk embroidered with the arms of the Queen of Scotland and gold fleur-de-lis arched above the scaffolded platform to suggest a star-studded sky. The magnificent Gothic cathedral dwarfed the fluttering silk and national flags, its magisterial presence adding spiritual gravitas to the carnival spectacle. The people’s hero, the Duc de Guise, was master of ceremonies. He played to the crowds and waved the bejewelled noblemen aside so that the common people might better see. It was Guise policy always to court the Paris mob even at the expense of their popularity with their fellow noblemen. And what the mob craned to see was the arrival of the wedding procession with Mary Stuart as its cynosure. Leading the assembly was the ubiquitous Duc de Guise closely followed by a band of Scottish musicians dressed in red and yellow, the colours of their queen. Then came a vast body of gentlemen of the household of the French king followed by the royal princes, the bishops, archbishops and cardinals, as brilliantly plumed as parrots. The sumptuous clothes and jewels were a spectacle in themselves. The diminutive figure of the dauphin then arrived, looking younger than his fourteen years, stunted in growth and with the frailty and pallor of a lifelong invalid. Of greatest interest was his young bride, a queen in her own right. The French had taken her to their hearts ever since she had been sent as a child to their shores for safekeeping from the English. She arrived that Sunday morning escorted by the king himself and another of her uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine. Mary had grown up with an unwavering sense of destiny and a natural flair for the theatrical: she knew what was expected of her and to what she had been born. But she had not learnt from her uncle a respect for the power of the people. As a prospective queen of France, she did not need to. The French monarchy was so rich and self-confident that it sought to remove itself still further from its subjects and advertise to all, particularly its competitor monarchs abroad, the extent of unassailable wealth and the power of the crown. Although only fifteen, the young Queen of Scots was already tall and graceful; she and her uncles towered over the young dauphin and were all taller and more impressive than even the king and queen themselves. Mary’s much vaunted beauty was not just a construct of the conventional hyperbole of court poets and commentators, but a beauty that had as much to do with her vitality and vivacity as the symmetry of her features. She had a fine complexion, chestnut brown hair and intelligent, lively eyes beneath prominent lids and fine arched brows. She had a strong active body and was good at sports, loving to ride hard and to hunt the wild animals with which the royal forests surrounding the ch?teaux of her youth were stocked. Dressed in white for her wedding, Mary confounded the usual tradition of cloth of gold; white was more usually the colour of mourning. She trailed a pearl-encrusted cloak and a train of grey velvet. Neither did her jewels disappoint for on her head was a specially commissioned crown studded with gemstones (the canny Scots had refused to let their crown jewels leave Scotland) and round her throat was a grand diamond necklace. This diamond was most probably the ‘Great Harry’ which she had inherited from her grandmother, Margaret Tudor, to whom it had been given by her own father, Henry VII of England. The importance of her Tudor inheritance was embodied in this priceless jewel. Magnificence was the order of the day. Sublimely present, but far removed, Mary made her marriage vows elevated in front of the crowds pressing towards the great doors of Notre Dame. As a symbol of imperial munificence, inviting too perhaps a reciprocal generosity from heaven, the heralds took handfuls of gold and silver coins and threw them amongst the people crying, ‘Largesse! … largesse!’ So desperate was the rush that many were trampled, some fainted and others scrabbled and fought savagely for a salvaged ducat or sou. Fearing a riot, the largesse was prematurely dammed and the heralds’ moneybags stowed away. The young Queen Mary of Scotland and her even younger husband, now known as the King of Scotland, were shown again to the surging crowd. It was the first time Mary was to experience the hysteria of a crowd whose energies were focused wholly on herself. Although this time they were benign and wished her well, there was always something potentially terrifying in the sheer force and power of the mob, crying out, shoving each other, sweating, straining to touch her hand or grasp a passing fragment of her robe, to catch her eye and elicit some recognition or blessing. But the grandeur of French ceremony was aimed at distancing royalty, projecting them to god-like proportions, not just to their subjects but to themselves. It was an inflation that could only make the young dauphin and dauphine think of themselves as close to divine. The populace was excluded from the archbishop’s palace where the extravagant wedding banquet was held. On a day fraught with symbolism, and exhausting in its demands, Mary’s fifteen-year-old head was beginning to ache under the weight of her crown and she was permitted to relinquish it to the king’s gentleman of the bedchamber. Then once the feast was cleared away the ball began, with the king leading out his new daughter-in-law, taller than he was, altogether more regal in her mien and a notably graceful dancer. However, the highlight of the celebrations was yet to come with the removal of the wedding party and guests to the Palais de Justice for a series of fantastical pageants. Twenty-five wicker horses arrayed in cloth of gold, with the young Guise sons and Valois princes on their backs, entered pulling coaches filled with people dressed as pilgrims, singing in praise of God and the young bride and groom. A dozen bejewelled unicorns, the heraldic and mythical symbol of Scotland, more carriages filled with beautiful young women dressed as the Muses, and more celestial music all captured the imaginations of the glittering wedding guests. The pi?ce de r?sistance was kept for last as six gauzy ships, their sails filling with an artificial breeze, appeared to float across a painted, billowing sea. In each was a prince, brilliantly attired in gold and wearing a mask, with an empty throne beside him. As the ingenious fleet approached the great marble table at which the wedding party sat each masked prince disembarked to choose his princess and place her on his throne, to the evident pleasure of both the participants and the spectators. The smallest of them all approached one of the tallest of the young women, as the Dauphin Fran?ois claimed his young dauphine. He and the young Queen of Scots sailed away in a make-believe ship to a fantasy land. These were purposefully extravagant fun and games, full of symbolism and self-indulgent conceit, and executed with peculiarly French stylishness and wit. The country had been brought close to bankruptcy by wars with England and Spain, and riven with religious and political factions. Such pomp was a necessary reassurance to themselves and assertion to their neighbours that the imperial greatness of France remained undimmed. But at heart it was a fairytale confection, an entertaining froth for the diversion of a complacent, self-regarding court. The focus of all this fuss was the fairytale princess herself, undeniably beautiful, intelligent and robust but disabled by the fantasy, and burdened with vain pride. There were many epithalamia written in France and Scotland in praise of the marriage of Mary and Fran?ois, of Scotland with France. The French, not surprisingly, stressed the supremacy of France in the union, some getting carried way with the vision of empire extending into Britain and throughout Europe. More modestly, Michel l’H?pital, in his famous wedding poem of 1558, described proud Scotland as, ‘a kingly crown, a subject land./Light in its weight, in truth, with ours compared’. (#litres_trial_promo) Another song, published by one of the Pl?iade (#ulink_a7fb19e0-b404-5320-aab5-88e9a30882d0) group of poets, Jean de Ba?f, celebrated Mary’s legitimate claim on the English throne: ‘without murder and war, France and Scotland will with England be united’. (#litres_trial_promo) Back in Scotland, the local poets saw the marriage as a union of equals. Sir Richard Maitland characterized the relationship as fraternal, ‘Scots and French now live in unity/As you were brothers born in one country … Defending other both by land and sea’. (#litres_trial_promo) The celebrations too were inevitably a more muted and frugal affair. Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, regent since 1554, ordered the great cannon, nicknamed ‘Mons Meg’, to be fired from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle. But then, with suitable economy, she dispatched a body of men to retrieve the monster shot so that it could be dusted down and used again. When France exacted a tax on the Scottish people to finance the nuptials of the queen who had left their shores as a small child, more than ten years before, there was some muttering. When France then came back for an even larger contribution, resentment became more entrenched. The independent-minded nobles and lairds had largely put up with the influx of French courtiers and advisers around Mary of Guise, particularly if a strong French presence threatened their old enemy England, but no true Scotsman could stomach any sense of their country being annexed in some unequal alliance. Monarchies when women or children inherited were notoriously susceptible to powerful factions and self-seeking ambitions amongst their subjects, and Scotland had had more than its fair share of premature royal deaths and restive noblemen. During Mary Stuart’s minority and absence in France, the reformed religion had flourished with little real curb under the eleven-year governorship of the indecisive Earl of Arran, followed by that of her own mother. Although Mary of Guise was not a natural persecutor of heretics, her family was the pre-eminent force in France and hardline in its Catholicism and antipathy to dissent. The court became thick with Frenchmen, some of whom held lucrative posts, most of whom seemed to the more impoverished and frugal Scots to be arrogant in their manner and wantonly extravagant in their tastes. French interests were seen by the Scots to be increasingly paramount in their increasingly partisan government. In France, the wedding celebrations lasted for days, in part aimed at bolstering the people’s support for their monarchy and in the process uniting some of the alarming and bitter rifts caused by the fiery advance of the reformed religion fuelled from Geneva. But the really important political union was transacted privately in the weeks before the public celebration. Nine Scottish commissioners braved the February storms to sail to France. They survived seasickness and shipwreck in order to be there in person to act on behalf of Scotland and her queen in the negotiations of the marriage treaty. Everything seemed to be generous and convivial enough. Scotland’s independence was assured; Francis would become King of Scotland alongside his queen; if they should have a son he would inherit both realms; if they only had a daughter she would inherit the crown of Scotland alone, being prohibited from claiming the French throne. Henri II also apportioned money and land for Mary’s own use, and if she should be widowed then her rights to that property at least remained. If she and Fran?ois did not produce an heir then the Scottish throne would revert to the ancient line of Scottish succession, (#ulink_e095fc78-f1a3-5e32-9e66-484b8fef92f6) not be absorbed into the French inheritance. The Scottish commissioners could find nothing objectionable in this. However, in an act of gross duplicity by the king and his advisers, Mary was asked that same day, 4 April 1558, to sign further secret documents, without the knowledge of her commissioners, which so compromised Scotland politically and financially that in effect it would have made her country a satellite of France. One signature allowed that if Mary should have no heirs, then Scotland, and also her claim to the English throne, would be inherited by Henri II’s successors. Another document promised virtually a limitless mortgage on the Scottish treasury to repay France’s expenditure in the defence of Scotland against England, even the costs to the French royal house of the hospitality extended to Mary during the time she had lived with them at court. In a final act of perfidy, the French king had this young woman, to whom he had acted as guardian and father figure, sign a further document invalidating any subsequent attempt she might make to modify or nullify these larcenous orders. On the face of it these secret documents, signed by Mary behind the backs of her own commissioners, constituted a betrayal of her country. It is hard to believe that she knew the full meaning of what she was signing. The plea that she was but a young woman of fifteen, keen to please and in awe of her powerful uncles and the fond King Henri, is just enough. Although it excuses her the worst motives, however, it does not do her much credit. Fifteen was not considered as youthful then as it is to modern minds. Fifteen-year-olds were leading men into battle, having children and dying for their beliefs. The Queen of Scots’ political naivety and lack of judgement, even if merely following the advice of these apparently trustworthy men, did not bode well for her political deftness in the future. Her lack of respect for the independence of her own ancient and sovereign kingdom was a failure of education and imagination. In fact the comparison with her cousin Elizabeth at the same age could not have been more marked. When Elizabeth Tudor herself was merely fifteen, she was involved in early 1549 in a political crisis revolving around the ambitions of the Lord Admiral Seymour, the husband of her favourite stepmother, Catherine Parr. Elizabeth was cross-examined about the extent of his relationship with her when she had lived under their roof. As a possible successor to the crown, all Elizabeth’s relationships were considered political. It was dangerous to encourage any overtures not previously sanctioned by the monarch and his advisers. At this time her young brother Edward was king and Seymour’s elder brother, the Duke of Somerset, was Lord Protector. The Seymour brothers were ambitious men. Scurrilous rumours were abroad that Elizabeth and Seymour had been secretly married, were at least sexually involved with each other, even that she was already pregnant. All this was dangerously discreditable to her and potentially fatal for him. Seymour was thrown into the Tower of London and her own closest servants taken into custody. Elizabeth was isolated and at real risk. Yet she conducted herself with remarkable intelligence and self-control and could not be wrong-footed by her experienced interrogator: ‘She hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her but by great policy,’ (#litres_trial_promo) the exasperated man wrote to the Lord Protector. Elizabeth steadfastly maintained her innocence, prevaricated when things became difficult, and in the end prevailed. Mary had been just as youthful at this test of her judgement but, at fifteen, she thought of herself as a French rather than a Scottish queen. Scotland and the interests of her people were a long way from where her heart lay. Although her wits were sharp enough, her ambitions dynastic and her will strong, her characteristic motivation was in action and desire. Decisions would spring always more readily from impetuous feeling. This was to make her attractive as a woman, compelling as a romantic heroine and impressive in command when things went her way. But it made her tragically fallible as a queen. However, there were certain more sinister aspects of political life to disturb Mary’s apparent ingenuousness. News reached her of the tragic return journey of her Scottish commissioners that September. All were stricken with violent sickness and four of them died within hours of each other. Mary’s illegitimate half-brother Lord James Stewart was young enough and strong enough to survive but was left with a constitutional weakness for the rest of his life. Rumours abounded that they had been deliberately poisoned. Subsequent commentators thought the Guises quite capable of such an act if they had thought their private treaty with Mary and the betrayal of Scottish interests had been discovered. Certainly tradition had it that the French and Italians vied with each other for the reputation as Europe’s most artful poisoners. And even though, at the time, any case of sudden death was quickly supposed to be due to the poisoner’s art, for so many adult men to die in such quick succession appeared suspicious indeed. Surprisingly, nothing subsequently was seriously investigated, let alone proved, but back in Scotland it was used by Knox and others as powerful propaganda for anti-French feeling. Mary seemed to be little moved by the tragedy but was generally uneasy. Her husband was away from her in Picardy, with his own father the king, at a camp where sickness was rife: everyone was ready for peace with Spain and England, yet progress seemed to be slow. She expressed her disquiet in a letter to her mother in Scotland. Fearing the factions in the court at that time she was resigned, ‘unless God provides otherwise … because we have so few people of good faith it is no wonder if we have trouble’. (#litres_trial_promo) So 1558 was significant for Mary as the year she married the person she was to love most in her life, albeit with a sister’s affection rather than a sexual love. With that marriage she had fulfilled the ambitions of her mother, her mother’s family and the King of France himself. Her previous ten years in France had prepared her solely for this, to be a princess and eventually queen consort of France. To her family in France, Scotland was of little value or interest except as England’s Achilles’ heel, the gateway for a future French invasion. As she married the heir to the French throne it was clear to her that her greatest duty was to promote the Valois dynasty and to produce the male heir that would continue their dominance of royal power begun in 1328. The lessons of her past were with Elizabeth always. Born an heir to the throne she nevertheless had endured disinheritance, reinstatement, exclusion, humiliation, imprisonment and real fear for her life. ‘Taught by Experience and Adversity, (two most effectual and powerfull Masters)’ (#litres_trial_promo) was how William Camden, (#ulink_64a4a85f-a8a6-5558-9402-9ecb71a871de) Elizabeth’s first chronicler, characterized her cast of mind at this time. She had been alone and without powerful protectors and had learnt patience, circumspection, discipline and the absolute necessity of command. She had also discovered the extent of her own courage and the coolness of her intellect under fire. This gave her a special confidence, proof against any challenge to come. The whole purpose of her life was to inherit what was rightfully hers; the daughter most like her father who most deserved his crown. And she meant to rule like a king. Everything else was secondary to that desire. Yet the question of her own legitimacy, denied by the Catholic powers, upheld by her own people, was an ever-present liability. Although ambitious men would seek her all her life for dynastic alliances, Elizabeth, from a very young age, had rejected the orthodoxy that a woman must marry, that a princess, particularly, had a duty to marry. Given all the human and political circumstances of tradition, expectation, security, and dynastic and familial duty which pressed in upon her, Elizabeth’s insistence that she would not marry was a remarkable instance of revolutionary action and independence of mind. In May 1558, she reminded Sir Thomas Pope that even when Edward VI was king she had asked permission ‘to remayne in that estate I was, which of all others best lyked me or pleased me … I am even at this present of the same mind … I so well like this estate, as I perswade myselfe ther is not anie kynde of liffe comparable unto it … no, though I were offered the greatest Prince in all Europe.’ (#litres_trial_promo) To remain unwed was also a masterly diplomatic ploy for the unfulfilled prospect of her marriage to various foreign princes kept the equilibrium between the great European powers in constant suspension. Part of this determination had to be as a result of experience and contemplation. She was twenty-five and had been through a rigorous training for something much greater than submission to a husband in marriage and sharing her monarchic power with a prince. She had her sister Mary’s sad example in near memory; her father’s ruinous effect on the women he married as a more distant example. Yet to remain unmarried flew in the face of the pleas of her increasingly desperate councillors. Almost every parliament included a petition that she should marry. For a monarch so insistent on her primary concern for her people it seemed perverse to persist in celibacy and risk at her death the eclipse of the Tudors and the possibility of civil war. But to remain unmarried also flouted the hierarchical order of life which kept the nation safe, the universe in harmony. If Elizabeth continued to ignore the immutable laws of interconnectedness and the due place of everything, including herself and her rights and responsibilities as a monarch, then she risked the catastrophe of chaos. In the first years of her reign, her bishops of Canterbury, London and Ely expressed a similar fear ‘that this continued sterility in your Highness’ person to be a token of God’s displeasure towards us’. (#litres_trial_promo) In this decision Elizabeth confounded every shade of opinion. She stood alone and unsupported. How could she not sometimes have faltered? As the year drew to its wintry close, the opportunity Elizabeth had barely hoped for all her life was hers at last. By the beginning of November it became clear that her sister Mary was mortally ill. The swelling in her belly which she had prayed so desperately was a growing child was most probably ovarian or uterine cancer. As Mary slipped in and out of consciousness the courtiers who had danced attendance at her door melted away. They joined the hasty ride from London towards Hatfield, ready to ally themselves to the new source of power and patronage. All her life Elizabeth was to remember her unease at this precipitate turning from the dying monarch to court the coming one. And she was the coming queen. She was Henry’s legal heir, after the deaths of Edward and Mary, as declared by the succession statute of 1544. There was, however, the small matter of an earlier statute when her father had declared her and Mary ‘preclosed, excluded, and barred to the claim’. (#litres_trial_promo) This remained unrepealed, although Mary had taken steps to legitimize herself. Elizabeth chose to rely on the 1544 statute for her legitimacy, but the insecurity she felt when faced with the claim of her cousin Mary Stuart remained. She was however the popular choice, the only choice as far as the people were concerned. The dying Mary had even given her blessing, urged on by Philip of Spain, who feared Protestantism less than the imperial ambitions of France. She had sent two members of her council to Elizabeth to let her know ‘it was her intention to bequeath to her the royal crown, together with all the dignity that she was then in possession of by right of inheritance’. Elizabeth’s reply illustrated partly why the long-suffering Mary found her younger sister so exasperating to deal with: ‘I am very sorry to hear of the Queen’s illness; but there is no reason why I should thank her for her intention to give me the crown of this kingdom. For she has neither the power of bestowing it upon me, nor can I lawfully be deprived of it, since it is my peculiar and hereditary right.’ (#litres_trial_promo) So it was that on the 17 November 1558, a Thursday, Elizabeth learned the waiting was over and her father’s crown was finally hers. She sank to her knees, apparently momentarily overcome, breathing deeply with emotion. But with the breadth of her learning and her cool self-possession she was not long lost for words: ‘A domino factum est illud, et est mirabile in oculis meis!’ was her first utterance as queen. Quoting part of Psalm 118 she had declared, ‘This is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in my eyes.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Fortuitously Parliament happened to be sitting that day, and when the Lords were brought the news of Mary’s death, in measured tones ‘with joint consent of the whole assembly’ they declared ‘the Lady Elizabeth might forthwith be proclaimed Queen’. (#litres_trial_promo) This was broadcast by the herald-at-arms at the front door of the Palace of Westminster, at the cross in Cheapside and at other prominent places in the city. Weary of bloodshed, fearful of foreign wars, weakened by bad harvests and disease, the people welcomed the new queen. But there was foreboding too as to what the future would bring. Another female monarch, after the last disastrous experiment, seemed to be too risky when England was in need of inspired and powerful leadership. There was a profound cultural and religious acceptance that it was unnatural, indeed impossible, for women to be successfully in command. But the prospect of marriage for Elizabeth also brought the real fear, acted out in Mary’s reign, of alliance with a dominant foreign power. It was not surprising there were mixed emotions beyond the general feeling of relief. Sir John Hayward, (#ulink_1dd5ff26-f7f8-50e1-8c8f-e84d82057857) an early historian, wrote: ‘Generally, the rich were fearful, the wise careful, the honestly-disposed doubtful, the discontented and the desperate, and all such whose desires were both immoderate and evil, joyful, as wishing trouble, the gate of spoil.’ (#litres_trial_promo) And trouble was what everyone expected. The transition from old monarch to new was inherently uncertain. Diplomatically too, it upset the status quo between nations. The death of a stalwart Catholic during a period of fomenting religious debate changed the tensions between the ancient neighbours and rivals, France, Spain, Scotland and England. The fiery Scottish Protestant John Knox was also to remember 1558 as a year of particular significance. His tract The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published, with unfortunate timing, just as Elizabeth came to the throne. By monstrous regiment he meant unnatural government and his blast was directed against the women rulers in Europe at the time of his writing whom he saw as implacable enemies of the reformed religion: Mary I of England and the Scottish regent Mary of Guise. (#ulink_46ae841c-ba7f-58be-8f68-f3b7ae32b57f) Unfortunately, the new Queen of England who could have been his most powerful ally was instead greatly offended. She did not find it amusing to be hectored in his main argument: ‘to promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any Realm is repugnant to Nature; contrary to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally, it is the subversion of all good Order, of all equity and justice’. (#litres_trial_promo) An intemperate and gifted preacher, Knox was barred from returning from Geneva to England to resume his preaching career. He wrote to Elizabeth trying to ingratiate himself into her favour but even that letter turned into a rant on this most sensitive of subjects, and he never recanted his anti-woman stand, accepting the consequences of his inflexible principles: ‘My First Blast has blown from me all my friends in England.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Instead he returned to Scotland in 1559, the most powerful and vociferous opponent of Catholic and French influence, and the mouthpiece of Scottish Calvinist conscience. He remains to this day a brooding, implacable and self-righteous symbol of the Scottish Reformation. Knox’s view of the natural and divine order of things, with woman subservient to man, was a commonly accepted one. His stance was uncompromising and his language colourful, but he was not saying anything new. The lower orders knew of woman’s inferiority through the traditions of their lives and the discrepancy between the sexes in simple brute force. The educated aristocracy was imbued with the necessity for this human hierarchy from their readings of classical authors, like Plato and Aristotle, and the thundering metaphors of the Bible. Did not God say to Eve, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’? (#litres_trial_promo) In fact the mortality rate of women in childbirth made it clear that they were the more expendable half of the species, that God and nature put a lower value on womankind. The male was the norm and the female a deviation, the mysterious, less adequate ‘other’. For Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart these were accepted philosophical, theological, legal and medical truths that permeated the way the world was interpreted and relationships between people understood. Everything these young women read and were taught informed them of their intellectual and moral limitations and the narrowness of their vision. Classical and biblical texts were ever-present in the Renaissance mind; the myths a ready source of reference. The scientific humanism of Aristotle was highly influential. He had no doubt of the right order of things: ‘Man is active, full of movement, creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and moulds society and the world. Woman, on the other hand, is passive. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active elements are always higher on any scale, and more divine.’ Not only endowed with more of the best qualities, man was also closer to God. In classical Greece, women were seen as perpetual minors: worse off even than the disregarded Victorian child, they were exhorted to be neither seen nor heard. A woman’s name was not given in public unless she was dead or of ill repute. In Pericles’s famous funeral speech, Thucydides set out the aspirations of womankind: ‘Your great glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of a woman is to be less talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Silence best became her. This was the philosophical inheritance that informed both Elizabeth and Mary’s view of what it was to be a sixteenth-century woman. Mary’s often quoted saying was, ‘The best woman was only the best of women.’ Elizabeth, while cleverly using her perceived incapacity as a woman to dramatic effect in grand speeches and diplomatic letters, nevertheless in her irony reflected a profound and universally held truth when she spoke in these terms to her Commons: ‘The weight and greatness of this matter [their request that she should marry] might cause in me, being a woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex.’ (#litres_trial_promo) These were the prejudices they had to overcome. In the most commonly held myth of the birth of Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom springs from the head of her father, Zeus, fully formed, without any contribution from her mother. In this way, the necessarily male source of all that is active and intellectually pre-eminent is not diluted by the female. By stressing all her life her relation to her father, Elizabeth claimed not only some of the lustre of this Tudor Zeus but perhaps also tried to distance herself from the perceived weaknesses of her mother’s (and all women’s) femininity: duplicity, moral deficiency and treachery. Both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots were of course regnant queens, monarchs in their own right, ordained by God. A female monarch was in a different relationship with the world: she had a public, political and spiritual contract as ruler of her people, while her personal and private relationship as a woman made her naturally dependent on the male. Elizabeth at least was able to counteract the perceived weaknesses of her sex with the certainty that as a queen she was divinely chosen above all men, ‘by His permission a body politic, to govern’. (#litres_trial_promo) This confidence and certainty she could bolster with the knowledge that she had more intellectual and executive competence than almost anyone of her acquaintance. Mary’s sense of herself as queen had been with her from the dawning of her consciousness. It was never disputed or tested, as was Elizabeth’s. This awareness of her pre-eminence was her companion through life, something taken for granted, the responsibilities to which she did not apply much profound thought nor, in the end, much value. However, philosophers as various as Knox and Aristotle considered even the God-ordained female ruler to be an aberration of the natural order, a phenomenon that could only bring inevitable disorder and strife to the realm. It was a measure perhaps of Elizabeth’s sensitivity to this pervasive point of view that made her react so uncompromisingly against the author of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. But she was assailed too by a potentially more serious discredit than merely being the wrong sex. Just as the death of her sister Mary I transformed Elizabeth’s destiny, so too it altered the course of the life and aspirations of the youthful Queen of Scots. Catholic Europe could not accept Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy and considered his only legal wife to have been Catherine of Aragon. Given this fundamentalist approach, Elizabeth was undoubtedly a bastard born to a royal mistress not to a wife. Consequently much of Europe considered the more direct legitimate heir to be Mary Queen of Scotland and Dauphine of France. This fact caused excitement and consternation abroad. Philip II of Spain, acting from pragmatic and political, rather than religious, principles feared his loss of influence in England especially since France seemed to be establishing an increasing presence in Scotland. Even before the death of his wife he had manoeuvred himself into position as a possible husband for her sister. While Mary I had lived, Spain had been an influential ally, but Elizabeth had not the slightest intention of continuing this relationship by accepting him as a husband for herself. However, within the triangular tension that maintained a certain balance between England, Spain and France, an outright rejection of Philip would be impolitic. By evading his offer for as long as possible, therefore, Elizabeth could ingeniously sidestep an unequivocal rejection. Then she invoked precedence and the law by pointing out that for her to marry her widowed brother-in-law was no different in fundamentals from the marriage her father had made with his widowed sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon. As had been so crucially argued at the time as the basis of her father’s split with Rome, this was a relationship contrary to biblical law. To accept Philip would in effect be to deny her own legitimacy. But it was in the French court, within the grandiose schemes of King Henri II and the Guise family, that the death of the Queen of England raised the greatest ambitions. With Mary as their tool, her uncles and Henri decided to claim the title Queen of England and Ireland for the house of Valois, and quarter Mary’s arms with those of France, Scotland and England. At this time France was seen as distinctly the more powerful country, England as the weakened neighbour under threat. This was particularly marked with the recent loss of Calais and the accession of another woman to a throne already undermined by disastrous female rule. This act of acquisitiveness was not initiated by Mary, but her acceptance and over-riding pursuit of it altered her destiny for ever. It gave her a compelling idea of herself as rightful heir to the English crown, an aspiration she maintained throughout her life. In the end it was a presumption which cost her that life, and this aggressive early claim on Elizabeth’s throne flung down the gauntlet. Traditionally English monarchs claimed nominal dominion over France. Mary, however, as Dauphine of France and Queen of Scotland, both England’s old enemies, was in dangerous territory. To claim England and Ireland as her realms too was considered an insult to Elizabeth, not least because it publicly rehearsed all the hurtful insecurities of her cousin’s anxious youth. All those whispered calumnies she had endured during the wilderness years were given a kind of legitimacy of their own. Mary’s claim implied that Elizabeth’s mother was a whore not a wife; that Elizabeth herself was a bastard child and not the legitimate daughter of the King of England; that she had no claim on a divine right to rule but instead had usurped another’s. Little over a year later, in the proclamation of her peace treaty with France and Scotland, Elizabeth diplomatically accepted, ‘that the title to this kingdom injuriously pretended in so many ways by the Queen of Scotland has not proceeded otherwise than from the ambitious desire of the principal members of the House of Guise’. And she went on to patronize Mary and her husband Fran?ois for their youthful folly: ‘the King, who by reason of his youth … the Queen of Scots, who is likewise very young … have [not] of themselves imagined and deliberated an enterprise so unjust, unreasonable and perilous’. (#litres_trial_promo) But these judicious, diplomatic words masked a more troubling recognition that the tacit had been made explicit; the challenge once made could not now be undone. The earliest authoritative history, written by Camden, recognized the train of events set off by such over-reaching ambition: ‘in very deed from this Title and Arms, which, through the perswasion of the Guises, Henry King of France had imposed upon the Queen of Scots being now in her tender age, flowed as from a Fountain all the Calamities wherein she was afterwards wrapped’. The protagonists were henceforth acutely aware of each other. There were such networks of vested interests surrounding both queens that gossip and intrigue and misrepresentation found their way into every discussion where direct dealing would have been less divisive: ‘For hereupon Queen Elizabeth bare both Enmity to the Guises, and secret Grudge against [Mary]; where the subtile Malice of men on both sides cherished …’ (#litres_trial_promo) The crowning of the new Queen of England needed to be quickly done, but at an auspicious time too. The country was impoverished by injudicious wars, humiliated by the loss of Calais, vulnerable on the Scottish border and confused and suspicious after the reversals of religious dogma during the previous two reigns. Elizabeth’s potential as a queen was unknown but her popularity among her people was certainly growing. Since her accession she had been the centre of intense activity at Hatfield with the selection of advisers and discussions of policy, but within the week, she began her progress to London. People travelled many miles out of the city to greet her. Her reign began as it so distinctively would continue, with a lively interest in and concern for her people exhibited in an exceptional common touch: All her faculties were in motion, and every motion seemed a well guided action; her eye was set upon one, her ear listened to another, her judgement ran upon a third, to a fourth she addressed her speech; her spirit seemed to be everywhere, and yet so entire in herself, as it seemed to be nowhere else. Some she pitied, some she commended, some she thanked, at others she pleasantly and wittily jested, condemning no person, neglecting no office; and distributing her smiles, looks, and graces so [artfully], that thereupon the people again redoubled the testimonies of their joys. (#litres_trial_promo) A few days later, on 28 November, Elizabeth took possession of the city in style. Alone in her carriage, surrounded by horsemen and the trappings of monarchy, she entered through Cripplegate, to be greeted by fluttering banners of the guilds and excited Londoners hanging from the windows and pushing through the narrow lanes. At the gate to the city she mounted her own horse, on this occasion a striking grey. Elizabeth, dressed in purple velvet, was skilled as a horsewoman and graceful in the saddle. This majestic spectacle of their new queen on horseback was glamorized further by the first sight of her Master of the Queen’s Horse, riding just behind her on a magnificent black charger. An excellent judge of horseflesh, Lord Robert Dudley always made sure he had a mount that equalled his own physical splendour. Elizabeth’s friend from her youth, and a lifetime favourite, was a tall, powerful, handsome man, probably the best horseman in England and one of the most ambitious of an ambitious line. Elizabeth’s first biographer pointed out that her ‘rare and Royal Clemency’ meant she had ‘heaped Honours upon him, saving his life, whose Father would have Her destroyed’. (#litres_trial_promo) In fact the consummate ability and ambition of the Dudleys was akin to that of the Guises but, unlike the French, the English peers were strong enough to chop them down. And when the hated Lord Robert was too well loved by the queen for them to harm him, Elizabeth was clever enough to keep him ultimately in check herself. To all who hailed her from the crowd, Elizabeth exhibited the authority and gift of attention that had so distinguished her in her dealings with her subjects so far. A salty humour and an air of God-given majesty seemed to her eager people to be united in Elizabeth Tudor in irresistible combination. She indulged in the kind of direct dialogue and repartee which the French court never encouraged in their monarchs. The Tower was her final destination and as she entered the dark stone portal, she recalled the memories of the last time she had been there as a prisoner, frightened for her life. With genuine emotion and a natural appreciation for dramatic peripeteia she addressed the people around her: ‘Some have fallen from being Princes of this land, to be prisoners in this place; I am raised from being prisoner in this place, to be Prince of this land’, and she thanked God for her elevation. (#litres_trial_promo) Even a devout Catholic observer, like the Italian Schifanoya, (#ulink_a18ec3a0-c3f7-556c-b271-f6f62eef0366) with a natural bias against her, was in no doubt about Elizabeth’s appeal: ‘… the Queen, by frequently showing herself in public, giving audience to all who would wish for it, and using every mark of great graciousness towards every one, daily gains favour and affection from all her people’. (#litres_trial_promo) Her ability to unite magisterial grandeur with informality was at the heart of her unique attraction to even her humblest subjects. It also discomfited her enemies. The Spanish ambassador related with disapproval how, on her return from the Tower, Elizabeth caught sight of Catherine Parr’s brother, the Marquis of Northampton, watching from a window. He was suffering from one of the periodic malarial fevers which afflicted most of the populace then. The queen pulled her horse out of the procession and rode up to his window and spent a good time commiserating with him about his health, ‘in the most cordial way in the world’. (#litres_trial_promo) But there was still a general uneasiness as to what sort of monarch she would make. When she succeeded to the throne no one was certain even quite what form her religious policy would take. There was a national longing for a strong wholly English king. Despite her many good personal qualities and the great swell of popular support with which she began her rule, Mary I’s reign had been disastrous. Now people wondered if Knox and Calvin, the Classical philosophers and the Bible were all correct in deploring a woman raised beyond her natural estate to be a ruler over men. What if Elizabeth, with all her well-known virtues, was to fail as calamitously as her sister? There was a natural optimism at the prospect of this new reign after the miseries of the last, but everyone from her greatest ministers of state to her lowliest subjects agreed Queen Elizabeth had to marry, and marry quickly. A king was desperately needed, first as her consort, the steadying hand on the tiller of this vast ship of state, and then as the progenitor of a male heir to secure the succession. Whom she would marry was one of the major topics of gossip and at times it seemed that any man of noble enough birth was mooted as the chosen one. Apart from Philip II of Spain and Crown Prince Eric of Sweden, there was the Earl of Arundel, although court chatter suggested also younger, more romantic possibilities: ‘a very handsome youth, 18 or 20 years of age (#ulink_785f5fe7-5db9-52ef-bc6c-35f97d51ddcf) … because at dances and other public places she prefers him more than any one else’. (#litres_trial_promo) But then, it was said, there was also that fine looking young nobleman, Sir William Pickering, still in exile in France because of his religion: the general speculation and excitement was palpable. No one seemed to take seriously Elizabeth’s own often expressed contentment with the spinster state. In fact, in her first speech before Parliament she could not have made it plainer. She was married to her kingdom with all the advantages that conferred on her people. ‘In the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Equally serious and compelling to Elizabeth-watchers during the first months of her reign was the subject of religion. She was known to have been brought up in the reformed religion alongside her brother Edward, but her exact beliefs and her intentions so far as the nation’s spiritual leadership were concerned were far from clear. Protestant exiles were beginning to stream back into the country, expecting a return to the pre-Marian state of radical reform. Her Catholic subjects and the Catholic states watched anxiously. When necessary Elizabeth was a master of equivocation. Never was this more evident than in her stance on religion. As Francis Bacon famously said of her, she did not choose to make windows into men’s souls and her soul was conveniently adaptable, and naturally more conservative than any of her closest advisers. Court life had revived within the month. Having been secluded for so long, careful to be seen as modest, scholarly and not overly ambitious, Elizabeth now joined her courtiers, feasting and dancing into the early morning. Her physical vitality reminded the older ones present of her father when a young man; but unlike him, her energy and physical fitness lasted well into late middle age when she still could hunt and dance her noblemen to a standstill. Elizabeth began that Christmas to exhibit something of her capacity for epic enjoyment. In another dispatch, Schifanoya was rather disapproving: ‘The Court is held at Westminster, and they are intent on amusing themselves and on dancing till after midnight,’ (#litres_trial_promo) he sniffily reported to the Mantuan ambassador at the court of Philip II in Brussels. A month later he was deploring ‘the levities and unusual licentiousness’ at Elizabeth’s court, refusing to detail the profanities acted out on the feast of the Epiphany, traditionally Twelfth Night, when mummers dressed up as crows wearing the habits of cardinals, or as asses in bishops’ regalia and wolves in abbots’ clothing. While the court and the young queen greeted this ribaldry with wild laughter, our devout Italian observer was not amused at the wider implications as to Elizabeth’s intentions towards the true religion: ‘I will consign it to silence.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The timing of the coronation was of crucial moment. With the implicit threat from the French with Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne in their pocket, and the obdurate insistence of two popes that Elizabeth was illegitimate, it seemed politic to claim her crown as soon as possible. By then it was well-established law, ‘that the crown once worn quite taketh away all Defects whatsoever’. (#litres_trial_promo) But these new Elizabethans had a complicated relationship with the supernatural. A teeming spirit world coexisted with the material, and divination, astrology, alchemy and other esoteric beliefs flourished as part of the natural sciences. Nostradamus was closely consulted for his prophecies (Catherine de Medici, the mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots, was a particularly fervent devotee). According to this seer, 1559 was an inauspicious year: to anyone who could read or was susceptible to tavern gossip there was not much better to be hoped for than ‘divers calamities, weepings and mournings’ and ‘civil sedition’ (#litres_trial_promo) which would sweep the land. It was not the best omen for the beginning of the reign of another woman and it added to the atmosphere of anxious uncertainty. Lord Robert Dudley was entrusted with a mission to seek out Dr John Dee, a remarkable and learned man, who was to become Elizabeth’s own consultant philosopher and who numbered astrology amongst his many accomplishments. Unlike Nostradamus with his mysticism, Dr Dee was known for his more scientific approach to divination by mapping the positions of the planets. His task was to draw up a horoscope of the most auspicious day and time for Elizabeth’s coronation, the formal birth of her reign. Apparently the best astrological augury pointed to 15 January 1559, with Jupiter, the chief god of the planetary system, positioned satisfactorily in Aquarius, to signify a universality to this Jovian power and Mars, the planet of war and assertive action, placed in indomitable Scorpio. That date of greatest promise was what the queen accepted. The Christmas of 1558 was even more busy than usual as everyone prepared for the coronation, working ‘day and night both on holidays and week days’. (#litres_trial_promo) There was such a run on crimson silk and cloth of gold and of silver that any sale of it was embargoed until Elizabeth had made her choice for herself and her household. Her noblemen and women were determined to cut a dash and make their mark. With a new reign there was much insecurity and jostling for position and preferment. This was the greatest opportunity for dressing up and showing off, parading one’s wealth or influence, or the wealth and influence to which one aspired. It was a chance to catch the royal eye. Across the English Channel cloth of gold was in similarly short supply. Mary was caught up in the flurry of preparations for another grand celebration at court. Only nine months after her own magnificent wedding, she was to be one of the leading guests at the wedding of the king’s second daughter Princess Claude, with whom she had grown up. This girl was not yet twelve years old and was marrying the nominal head of the Guise family, Charles, the young Duc de Lorraine. This was yet another triumph for his uncle the Duc de Guise, ‘le Balafr?’, whose family consolidated further its position at the heart of the French royal family. Again no expense was to be spared. In a country still struggling under the levies of war, the young duke spent nearly 200,000 crowns, raised in taxes from his people, on the wedding and the week-long jousting and masquerades which were traditional accompaniments to such regal nuptials. Part of his expenditure was on the livery of cloth of gold and silver for his team of twelve jousters and the matching eight or nine dresses of extravagant construction for the main female guests. Mary was presented with one of these creations, richly embroidered in gold and silver and lined with lynx fur against the January weather. There were countless other beautiful gowns offered as gifts to the ladies of the court. This display of ostentatious wealth and munificence was commented on even by the worldly-wise Venetian ambassador. Mary herself could not have been oblivious to the grandeur and self-confidence of her family inheritance exhibited at every possible occasion. United in her youthful person was the pride and valour of the Guises with the God-given pre-eminence as both a Stuart queen and – she hoped – a queen of the house of Tudor. This powerful dynastic mix was further enhanced through marriage with the mighty Valois, royal family of France. Born to all this, it was understandable if such a young queen had a share of the hubris of those she had grown up amongst. It made it difficult for her to recognize that even such certainty as her right to be the Queen of Scotland, the kingdom she valued least of all, was not immutable. Perhaps the same astrological phenomena Dr Dee used were pored over by French diviners looking for auspicious signs, for this marriage was solemnized on 22 January just a week after the coronation of Elizabeth as the new Queen of England. Elizabeth’s coronation managed to be both a grand spectacle and yet intimately involving of her subjects. This ability to combine ‘a superb show’ (#litres_trial_promo) with a certain informality at great state occasions seems to have been a characteristic peculiar to the English at the time, differentiating them from the Italians and the French. A perceptive Italian observer in his eyewitness account commented on this, not entirely favourably: ‘the English having no Masters of the Ceremonies … and still less caring about formalities’ (#litres_trial_promo) seemed to rely less on pomp and ceremonial. He thought the cheery way Elizabeth answered back to the jocular crowds who clamoured for her after her coronation was equally deplorable. This informality and sensitivity to the popular mood was to appear to her Catholic observers to extend even into her attitude to religious worship and allow a fatal backsliding, they feared, to her brother’s radicalism. This ability to unite grandeur with a genuine common touch was memorably displayed in Elizabeth’s state entry into London on the Saturday afternoon, the day before her coronation. The sky was dull with heavy snow clouds, in fact some snow even fell on the waiting crowds, some of whom had been out all night ‘their untired patience never spent, eyther with long expecting (some of them from a good part of the night before) or with unsatiable beholding of the Ceremonies of that day’. (#litres_trial_promo) There was thick mud everywhere, brought on by the rain and churned up by the increased traffic of carts and horses, and each householder had taken it upon himself to strew sand and gravel in front of his house to make the going less difficult. The whole court was present and so brilliantly arrayed the weather hardly mattered. They ‘so sparkled with jewels and gold collars that they cleared the air’. (#litres_trial_promo) Her court preceeded her on horseback, numbering about a thousand, one eyewitness estimated. Then Elizabeth herself finally arrived in an open carriage entirely upholstered in gold. She was dressed in cloth of gold and on her head over her unembellished hair she wore the simple gold crown of a princess studded with precious stones. Her hands held nothing but her gloves. Around her were her footmen in their crimson velvet jerkins with the white rose of York on their chests and the red Lancastrian rose on their backs. They wore too the letters E R in bold silver gilt relief, the first time the crowd had seen their new queen’s insignia. Behind her carriage rode Lord Robert Dudley, resplendent on his fine horse, followed by the Lord Chamberlain and the lords of her Privy Chamber. At the Tower Elizabeth stopped the cavalcade. So deeply impressed had she been by the terror of her two months imprisonment there, and so struck by the subsequent transfiguration of her life, that once more she felt moved to make a heartfelt speech thanking God for delivering her from that place: as ‘he had delivered Daniell from the lyones denne’ so he had ‘preserved her from those dangers wherwith shee was both invironed and overwhelmed, to bring her to the joye and honour of that daye’. (#litres_trial_promo) On her first formal entry into London as queen at the end of November, Elizabeth had expressed a similar gratitude to God for her deliverance from that place. Her tenacity of mind and loyalty of feeling meant that she revisited many times in her speeches the trials of her past as well as the triumphs. In this way she involved her people in an act of sympathetic imagination and in her lifetime created her own biography for them to share. What struck the commentators who watched her stately progress through the city was the attentiveness and light-heartedness of her manner to everyone who called out or approached her. She was quick-witted and could be alternately funny and moving in her ripostes to the crowd. Her progress was leisurely; she kept on stopping to receive blessings, appeals and posies of flowers from even the poorest and humblest of her subjects. Her carriage became filled with modest bunches of rosemary and anything remotely flower-like that might have struggled to life through the January frosts. Being short-sighted, Elizabeth had to draw especially close to see those who spoke to her or to accept the gifts she was offered and this added to the sense of attentiveness and intimacy which so charmed the crowds. An eyewitness recalled: ‘her grace, by holding up her hands and merry countenance to such as stood far off, and most tender and gentle language to those that stood nigh to her grace, did declare herself no less thankfully to receive her people’s goodwill than they lovingly offered it to her’. (#litres_trial_promo) A number of tableaux were acted out for her on her progress, each of which symbolized an aspect of England’s history and the people’s hopes for Elizabeth’s reign. At each was hung a painting of specially composed verses explaining the meaning of the pageant in both Latin and English and, as the queen approached, a child stood forward to recite in English. So excitable were the crowds and noisy the bands of musicians that accompanied each set piece that the queen asked for quiet so that the child could be heard. Elizabeth’s face was closely watched as she listened, nodding and smiling, before thanking the child graciously and turning to the crowd with encouraging words. No one was inclined to call her a great beauty. Elizabeth’s colouring was much admired; the pale skin and reddish gold hair were considered closer to perfection than dark hair and olive skin, but her face was thought rather too long, as was her nose with its ‘rising in the middest’, (#litres_trial_promo) for classical beauty. Her eyes though were strikingly dark like her mother’s, and full of intelligence and humour. They had the largeness and the sweetness of expression of the very short-sighted. But what set her apart from all others was the vitality and force of her character and mind. ‘Her vertues were such as might suffice to make an Aethiopian beautifull’, (#litres_trial_promo) where an ‘Aetheopian’ was seen by one of her earliest chroniclers as an example of someone as exotic and rebarbative as it was possible for a late sixteenth-century mind to imagine. As the queen approached Gracechurch Street she came upon a tableau set within a triumphal arch, complete with battlements, and a three-tiered stage. Meant to evoke the union of the houses of York and Lancaster, the first tier supported two children representing Henry VII sitting with his wife Elizabeth, their hands joined in matrimony, the king clothed in the red rose of Lancaster and his wife in the white rose of York. Above them the two rose stems twined into one which flowered round the figure of Henry VIII, with his queen Anne Boleyn beside him. Both of these were represented also by children richly dressed and crowned, with a pomegranate between them, symbol of their blessed fertility in producing the precious Elizabeth, and each carrying sceptres, in an obvious reference to Elizabeth’s mother’s legitimacy as Queen of England. The rose stem wound on up to the top tier where sat another child representing ‘the Queen’s most excellent Majesty, Elizabeth, now our most dread Sovereign Lady’. (#litres_trial_promo) The whole edifice was festooned with red and white roses, the royal arms of England and various trophies and symbols. The child orator interpreted it to the queen as a longing in the people for unity and concord: just as Henry Tudor’s marriage with Elizabeth of York had healed the wounds of the War of the Roses, so this new Elizabeth would heal the divisions over the succession and religion of the previous reigns, for now ‘she is the only heir of Henry VIII, which came of both Houses as the knitting up of concord’. (#litres_trial_promo) Another tableau had characterized Elizabeth as Deborah, ‘The Judge and Restorer of Israel’. (#litres_trial_promo) Deborah was the prophetess and judge of the Old Testament who was used as a convenient example of God confounding his own dictates in sending a woman successfully to rule over men. But by this exemplar, Elizabeth was also reminded, ‘that it behoveth both men and women so ruling, to use advice of good counsel’. (#litres_trial_promo) As the day drew to its triumphant close, a final symbolic act from the last of the tableaux involved a Bible, translated into English, let down to her on a silken cord by a child representing Truth. Elizabeth, ever mindful of the visually dramatic, kissed both her hands as she reached out to receive it and then kissed the Bible itself and clasped it to her breast. She promised the expectant crowd she would study and learn from it, but her enthusiastic embrace of a Protestant Bible promised more. And so Elizabeth left the city with cheers and blessings in her ears. The extraordinary emotion of the day was like a common exhalation of the anxiety and fear of the last years replaced with an inspiration of hope for what was to come: ‘some with plausible acclamations, some with sober prayers, and many with silent and true-hearted teares, which were then seen to melt from their eyes’. (#litres_trial_promo) The ancient ritual and solemnity of the coronation on the following day, a Sunday, was charged with even greater moment by the question everyone at home and abroad wanted answered: how would Elizabeth’s preferences on religion be revealed? Nowhere was this more keenly monitored than in France where Henri II, with his eye firmly on his daughter-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots, and the opportunity she presented of further advancing his empire, was attempting to enlist the pope as a powerful ally in his plan to outlaw Elizabeth and annex England. The grandest of Spanish ambassadors was Count de Feria who, in his report to Philip II, saw nothing but doom to Spanish hopes, to the world, if France got its way. ‘Whenever the King of France finds means in Rome to get this woman declared a heretic, together with her bas-tardy, and advances his own claim’, (#litres_trial_promo) Feria believed, France would be able to walk into England, so debilitated was its exchequer and so disabled by having yet another woman ruler, this time of dubious legitimacy. All the French needed was the pope’s authority assuring the support of the English Catholics and the seductive substitute queen, Mary Stuart, as the rightful heir: already he had the one and was working on providing the other. Elizabeth and all her court made the journey from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey on foot. The great church, rebuilt by Henry III as a soaring monument to faith three centuries before, dominated the skyline and drew thousands of the new queen’s subjects from the grandest to the lowliest to witness and participate in this ancient rite. Elizabeth walked in procession to her coronation along a carpet of purple cloth which seemed to melt like snow and disappear the moment her feet had passed, as the crowd grabbed what they could, tearing and cutting it away, for any scrap as a memento of this auspicious day. Tall and slim, Elizabeth followed the procession of lords and ladies of the court and her bishops, her face pale, her hair worn loose and unadorned over her shoulders as a symbol of virginity. As she arrived at the abbey all the church bells in the city were ringing out in a clamour of celebration. Then Elizabeth mounted the high platform raised in front of the altar that exhibited her clearly to everyone and the question was asked of the people whether they wished to have her as their queen. The roared ‘YES’ was followed by a cacophony of ‘organs, fifes, trumpets, and drums playing, the bells also ringing, it seemed as if the world were come to an end’. (#litres_trial_promo) The coronation Mass proceeded to its centuries-old pattern of prayer and elaborate ritual lasting several hours, with Bishop Oglethorpe of Carlisle officiating. Resplendent on her throne, Elizabeth retained all aspects of the ceremony and Mass, except for the crucial elevation of the Host. This was a rite which she had already made clear was distasteful to her; she had ordered once before the same bishop to desist from elevating the Host at his Christmas Day mass and when he had refused she had withdrawn from the service. (#litres_trial_promo) Now at her coronation, when the Host was elevated, with all the concomitant meanings of transubstantiation, a doctrine considered clearly idolatrous by the Protestant reformers, the queen once more withdrew. She only returned to her throne once the offending ritual was over. There was one other modification that would have given her bishops and their Catholic supporters pause for thought. At the end of the coronation ceremony itself, just prior to the Mass, the monarch accepted a ritual homage from her bishops and peers. Traditionally the archbishops headed the queue in order of seniority, followed by the bishops and then the lords. This was the order followed by Elizabeth’s father and the founder of the dynasty, her grandfather Henry VII. It was also followed closely by her sister Mary. Her brother Edward, however, accepted homage first from the Protector, the Duke of Somerset, followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and then all the bishops and peers together with no distinction between his lords temporal or spiritual. Elizabeth instituted a significant change in accepting homage first from her officiating bishop but ‘then the Lordes went up to her Grace kneeling upon their knees and kissed her Grace. And after the Lordes had done, the Bishops came one after another kneeling and kissing her Grace.’ (#litres_trial_promo) This was a clear message to her bishops, and the church they represented, not to take their pre-eminence for granted. The news travelled fast to her Continental neighbours. The Count de Feria, always full of foreboding and implacable in his dislike and suspicion of the English and ‘that woman’ wrote to Philip of Spain in outrage and a sense of doom: ‘I had been told that the Queen [the following continued in cipher] took the holy sacrament sub utraque specie [both wine and bread] on the day of the coronation, but it was all nonsense. She did not take it.’ (#litres_trial_promo) His spirits were lowered further when Elizabeth told him she resented the amount of money that flowed out of the country yearly for the pope’s use and that she considered her bishops to be ‘lazy poltroons’. (#litres_trial_promo) It did not need a Dr Dee to divine that change was going to come. Mary, along with her father-in-law Henri and her own Guise family, was increasingly concerned about the growing strength of the reformed religion in France and the inevitable factions and unrest. A desultory peace process between Spain, France and England had already begun before Elizabeth’s accession to the throne and this progressed slowly throughout the early months of her reign. Mary wrote to her mother with some of her anxieties: ‘We were hoping for a peace but that is still so uncertain … God grant it all turns out well.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The greatest stumbling block in the peace negotiations between France and England was the emotive question of Calais. This was not helped by the insolence of the French negotiators who had stated initially: ‘that they knew not how to conclude a peace with the Queen’s majesty, nor to whom they should deliver Calais, but to the dolphin’s wife, [Mary Queen of Scots] whom they took for Queen of England’. (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth’s Minister of State William Cecil, who had noted this insult in a report written in his own hand, On the Weighty Matter of Scotland, was also concerned by Mary’s manner towards Elizabeth, revealed ‘by her own disdainful speech to diverse persons’. (#litres_trial_promo) The young Scottish queen’s disparagement of her older cousin was not confined to her acolytes at court but rashly had been expressed to some of Elizabeth’s own gentlewomen in France. Mary’s impetuous nature and political naivety had already begun to store up trouble for her in the fast evolving dynamic between the two queens. As Elizabeth left the abbey on her coronation day as Queen of England, wearing her heavy robe of cloth of gold and carrying her orb and sceptre in each hand, she was greeted by the clamour of the crowds, their voices and their musical instruments sounding, and all the city’s church bells ringing. Young, alone, and with her ministers and court processing behind her, she seemed in no way overwhelmed by the solemnity and significance of the occasion. On the contrary, she was beaming so broadly, greeting everyone who greeted her, shouting witticisms back to the crowd, sharing her delight with her exuberant subjects to such an extent that at least one of her foreign, Catholic observers looked on with disapproval: ‘in my opinion she exceeded the grounds of gravity and decorum’. (#litres_trial_promo) It was remarkable indeed that Elizabeth, still young and quite inexperienced, should exhibit such confidence and revel so obviously in the acquisition of power. Her animal high spirits naturally reciprocated her own subjects’ ebullience, and they loved her for it. In fact her ability to be affectionate and informal with the crowd was all the more surprising given that this was a queen who was a natural autocrat of the most self-conscious kind, in all ways the daughter of a ruthlessly autocratic father to whose burnished memory she aspired. With a penetrating intelligence and lively sympathy, Elizabeth was never to be as brutal or warlike as Henry, nor as self-serving, but she was capable of being as princely as Machiavelli could ever have prescribed in her pragmatic ability to do what was necessary. The Spanish ambassador was surprised at how superstitious he found the English to be: ‘so full of prophecies … that nothing happens but they immediately come out with some prophecy that foretold it … serious people and good Catholics even take notice of these things.’ (#litres_trial_promo) And so as Elizabeth walked amongst them on that cold January day, what were the prognostications for her reign? Some Catholics hoped she would only rule for a short time before Philip II of Spain was once more back in power, presumably as her consort; others thought her growing popularity and the promise of change would pacify the discontented; others looked to a French Catholic alliance with Mary Queen of Scots as queen. But most rejoiced in the fact that Elizabeth was a monarch in whose veins ran unadulterated English blood. The Venetian ambassador also noted, ‘She prides herself on her father and glories in him; everybody saying that she also resembles him more than [Mary I did]; and he therefore always liked her.’ (#litres_trial_promo) If this imperious and clever daughter could prove herself even half the man her father was they would be happy. Her sex was a problem, but they consoled themselves with thoughts of Deborah, and God’s trust in her, of Mathilda, Boudicca, even of Cleopatra VII whose courage in holding off the Romans was well known to the educated through their reading of Horace and Plutarch. They had claimed Cleopatra’s conversation rather than her beauty was the secret of her fascination. But even if there were a few precedents for successful female rulers, no one considered that a woman could effectively rule alone. One thing everyone agreed on, from her first minister, William Cecil, to the lowliest beggar in the stocks: the queen must marry, and marry soon. No one seemed to take seriously Elizabeth’s professed contentment with the ring of state she had worn on her marriage finger since pledging herself to the nation at her coronation: ‘bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England’. (#litres_trial_promo) And so with Mary Stuart’s marriage and Elizabeth Tudor’s coronation the two most important celebrations of their lives marked the increasingly divergent yet interdependent paths of the Queen of Scotland and the Queen of England. The one had married her prince to pursue her destiny as a woman. The other had married her people in recognition of her destiny as a queen. Mary’s status as queen also mattered greatly to her but she considered it an immutable right, somehow divorced from any real sense of self-sacrifice and responsibility. Whereas Elizabeth never doubted the awesome responsibilities of her task, ‘the burden that is fallen upon me maketh me amazed’ (#litres_trial_promo) were amongst the first words she spoke as queen to her Lords. The struggles, triumphs and tragedies that followed were a direct result of each woman’s individual decision: the one to put the personal increasingly before the political; the other to sacrifice the personal and place her responsibilities as queen at the centre of her life. A fatal complication ensued when Mary turned her sights on the greater crown of England, believing it her rightful inheritance and a prize worth pursuing. Elizabeth’s fundamental insecurity in her own legitimacy, where the whole of Catholic Europe was ranged against her, the ‘bastard child of a whore’, increased the tension and emotional volatility of the issue. The complex rivalry, the feinting and parrying of their personal relationship, sprang from the challenge Mary had made for Elizabeth’s throne and the unassailable legitimacy of her claim. The powerful passions this relationship engendered in each was a result of their strikingly different natures. The fact they never met allowed their rivalry to inflate in each queen’s imagination, their qualities elaborated upon by ambassadors and courtiers intent on their own ambitions. In a tradition instituted by William the Conqueror, the Champion of England on coronation day would ride up through Westminster Hall and challenge anyone who disputed the right of succession. In front of the newly crowned queen and her peers, the clatter of hooves announced the arrival of the queen’s champion. Sir Edward Dymoke, the latest member of the family who for centuries had enacted this role, rode into the hall in full armour, and flung down his gauntlet, challenging anyone who questioned Elizabeth’s right to the English throne. An uneasy silence fell on the assembly. No voice was raised on this day. But Elizabeth and Mary knew that the question had already been asked, that the contest was engaged, and in a more public arena, with wider repercussions for everyone. A rivalry had been instituted that ‘could not be extinguished but by Death’. (#litres_trial_promo) (#ulink_fb6ec991-c100-5fe6-93c2-ba65ecdf43ff)La Pl?iade was a group of seven French writers, led by Pierre de Ronsard and including Joachim du Bellay, Jean Dorat and Remy Belleau, who aimed to elevate the French language to the level of classical Greek and Latin as a medium for literary expression. They were named after the constellation and are considered the first representatives of French Renaissance poetry. (#ulink_5a149de0-ac63-556e-81e2-bf87cdd3aa93)The Hamiltons became nearest family to the throne when Lord Hamilton married James II’s daughter, Princess Mary, in c. 1474. Their grandson James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, born about 1516, engineered his position as regent and heir presumptive on the death of James V. But Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, was also descended from Princess Mary and so believed he too had a claim to be heir presumptive, possibly even more indubitably legitimate than Arran who was born of a marriage which had followed a divorce. The Hamilton – Lennox rivalry was one of the dynamic power struggles of the reign of Mary Queen of Scots. (#ulink_5cabef35-8520-5777-9cf5-6d6cd62d051e)William Camden (1551–1623) was an antiquary and historian, one time headmaster of Westminster School where Ben Jonson was his pupil and claimed that he owed him ‘all that I am in arts, all that I know’. In 1615 Camden published his ground-breaking and authoritative Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha which marked a new departure in the writing of history with its use of state papers and lively, often first-hand, description, combined with academic detachment and lack of bias. (#ulink_2fc3b018-482a-51d0-8679-99369c4fc6f5)Sir John Hayward (?1564–1627) a historian who was imprisoned by Elizabeth for offending her with his dedication to the Earl of Essex in his history of Henry IV (1599), suggesting Essex was likewise capable of usurping the crown. Hayward subsequently wrote a lively account of the early part of Elizabeth’s reign. (#ulink_398582ea-b746-5a2a-865e-eb06dfe8efb8)The French queen, Catherine de Medici, was yet to assume full regency and exercise her considerable authority and guile in the religious wars which convulsed France. (#ulink_f1c0eee4-527c-5960-bd9c-01a44da9108c)Schifanoya, resident in London at the time, was the author of some descriptive and lively dispatches to the Spanish court in Brussels. (#ulink_a61d0429-7c4e-5489-b9ac-4a715ecfea51)Possibly Charles Howard, a handsome courtier born in 1536 who became Lord Chamberlain and Lord Admiral and eventually was rewarded with the earldom of Nottingham in 1597. CHAPTER TWO The Disappointment of Kings (#ulink_508a71ba-cea0-53fe-add8-b48b3fcd54d8) The primogenity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! Troilus and Cressida, act 1, scene 3 IF THE RIVALRY BETWEEN these two queens would only be resolved through death, the individual significance of their births had a certain symmetry too. Both entered the world as bitter disappointments to their fathers, and the birth of each princess was a contributory factor in the untimely death of a parent. It was all a matter of sex. Both fathers were kings without legitimate male heirs. Had Elizabeth not been a girl but the longed-for, expected prince it is most unlikely that her mother would ever have been executed. It is even possible that Henry’s popular reputation might have rested more on his Reformation, encouraged by his independent-minded reformist Queen Anne, than on his grotesque failures as a husband and father. In the case of Mary Queen of Scots, her birth in 1542 was followed almost immediately by her father’s death. Already sick and humiliated, James V, on hearing his heir was a girl, literally turned his face to the wall like a wounded animal, and waited to die. His valedictory words showed him defeated as much by fate as by life: looking back two centuries to Marjorie Bruce, founder of the Stewart dynasty, he reputedly said to the messenger bringing the news of Mary’s birth: ‘It cam’ wi’ a lass, it will gang wi’ a lass.’ (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, James was as poor a prophet as he was survivor. He died aged only thirty and without seeing his daughter and heir. The Stuart (#ulink_1c3199b3-e8dc-5995-b872-9e2e7222f249) dynasty, however, managed to teeter on for a further century, despite revolution and republicanism, although Scotland’s absolute independence did not survive the reign of his daughter Mary. Nine years separated these two princesses, born in neighbouring kingdoms in an outlying island of Europe. England and Scotland were small and relatively unimportant, impoverished lands, mostly under threat from the many times larger and richer Continental powers of France and Spain, and spasmodically at war with them, and with each other. The newly established and insecure Tudor dynasty was in urgent need of a male heir; the Stewarts, although an ancient race of kings, were ill-fated, desperate for a monarch who could survive to middle age and produce a strong male heir. The last five Scottish kings had been children at their accession, most of them still in the cradle. (Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, were also to succeed to the Scottish throne as infants.) The Stewarts were plagued by their history of monarchs dying violently and dying young (James I and James III were murdered and James II, a murderer himself, was blown up while watching his own cannon being fired) and they were undermined by the subsequent power of factious regents and murderous clan rivalry. When they eventually succeeded at the start of the seventeenth century to the English throne and moved south, their life expectancy improved. The dynasty’s star, however, continued as mismanaged and bloody as ever it was in earlier centuries, with both Mary and her grandson, Charles I, tried and beheaded for treason. Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533 to a father who was already forty-one and who had longed for a healthy son during the twenty-three years of his marriage to the unimpeachable Catherine of Aragon. In despair at producing only one surviving child, Mary, born in 1516 (his other three sons and two daughters were either stillborn or died soon after birth), Henry began to wonder if somehow his lack of male heirs was not a personal punishment by God. He looked across to France at his main rival, Fran?ois I, a chivalrous and extravagant Renaissance king whose reign of thirty-two years corresponded with Henry’s so closely that they even died within two months of each other, in 1547. Henry identified with this athletic, popular, resplendent monarch whose procreative vitality seemed gallingly superior to his own. Fran?ois’s fragile Queen Claude had managed to produce seven live children, three of them sons, before herself dying of exhaustion at twenty-four. In an age of superstition and magic, where God’s agency and the spirit world controlled the elements and directed daily lives, barrenness, and the lack of a son as heir, was never just a matter of chance. There was an uneasiness in kingdoms without male heirs that somehow the natural order of things had been disrupted and disappointment, rupture and discord would ensue. To continue the quote at the head of the chapter of the speech which Shakespeare gave Ulysses on the essential patterning of the universe: The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order: And therefore is the glorious planet Sol In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil, And posts, like the commandment of a king, Sans check, to good and bad. In such a closely ordered world where everything had a reason, and that usually a supernatural one, Henry feared that his virtually barren marriage indicated he had transgressed some article of holy writ. The words of Leviticus particularly troubled him: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Had he not done precisely that in marrying Catherine, the widow of his elder brother Arthur? But Henry was also an opportunist. Although conservative and orthodox in his own religious beliefs he cannot have failed to give thought to the Continental reformers whose disdain for the pope and evangelical zeal for an individual faith drawn directly from the Gospels gave him a different approach to his own immutable church. His troubled conscience, however, his questioning of a possibly invalid marriage, were made all the more insistent by the fact that Henry had long ago tired of his wife and found a determined replacement in an attractive, nubile, lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. It was significant that this clever woman was part of the radical religious faction at court and her own conversation was as tantalising to the king as her physical charms. Emotionally, Henry was a crass and simple man. He could be handled by any adept and resolute woman who managed to withhold from him something he desired. For more than six years Anne drew him close and reeled him out. At times he was driven almost to distraction by her seductive manner combined with her steadfast refusal to become his mistress. Henry had already produced a bastard son by Elizabeth Blount, a boy he was fond of and ennobled as Duke of Richmond and Somerset. But the prize Anne held out to the king was a legitimate son and heir. The longing to secure the succession with a male heir propelled him to marry again. So Henry put in train the momentous events which led him to sweep aside the Catholic Church and proclaim himself supreme head of the newly established Church of England. Spurred on by fear and desire, Henry drove this pragmatic revolution through Parliament. He had the support of the Protestant apologist Thomas Cranmer and his tireless executor Thomas Cromwell. His immovable Lord Chancellor Thomas More, however, paid with his life. By the beginning of 1533, however, Anne Boleyn’s long game seemed to have paid off triumphantly. Showing remarkable self-confidence and independence of mind, she had refused the considerable honour of becoming the king’s mistress (having first been married off for propriety’s sake to a compliant nobleman). She had the presence of mind and the boldness to play for the much higher stakes of becoming his queen. This really was a remarkable ambition given that there was already a genuinely popular possessor of that title in Queen Catherine, and divorce was not an obvious or easy option. It suggested a woman of will and vision who, through force of character, could impart that vision to others. Certainly she did not appear overawed by her evident destiny, believing that God had elevated her to this high estate in a divine intervention of a personal kind: she told the Venetian ambassador that God ‘had inspired his Majesty to marry her’. (#litres_trial_promo) The poet Thomas Wyatt, probably half in love with Anne, certainly arrested in the debacle of her downfall, left a compelling image of her mysterious and self-possessed attraction. His poem envisaged her as a magical deer whom only the king could hunt, her tameness an illusion: Whoso list to hunt? I know where there is a hind, …. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain! And graven with diamonds in letters plain There is written her fair neck round about: ‘Noli me tangere’ [do not touch] for Caesar’s I am And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. (#litres_trial_promo) Anne Boleyn’s trump card was the promise of fecundity. The point of a queen was to produce the male heir, ideally a number of possible heirs to ensure against disease, misfortune and sudden death. In fact, Anne’s resistance to Henry’s sexual desire had been overcome sometime prior to their secret marriage at the end of January 1533. By then, already a month pregnant, she had proved her fertility. Perhaps her strategic surrender was Henry’s reward for ennobling her as Lady Marquess of Pembroke on the first day of September the previous year. With this honour came considerable estates and authority. Or perhaps Anne’s capitulation came little over a month later, after the triumphant diplomatic meetings with the French king King Fran?ois I in Calais and Boulogne which she attended as Henry’s consort and where she gained gratifying recognition from this influential potentate. Whatever the timing, Anne quickly conceived and that boded well for her. Queen Catherine was much more widely loved but by 1533 she was beyond childbearing: for the people to be prepared to accept their new queen, Anne had to provide the hoped-for prince. At her coronation the pageants stressed this contract with the people. One had Clio, muse of history, chant ‘Anna comes, bright image of chastity, she whom Henry has chosen to his partner. Worthy husband, worthy wife! May heaven bless these nuptuals, and make her a fruitful mother of men-children.’ (#litres_trial_promo) It was the first day of June and Anne was already almost six months pregnant. The whole of Christendom had been defied for the sake of this baby; no one seemed to doubt that it would be a boy. But childbirth was dangerous for both mother and baby. It was customary for a woman who had any property to leave, to make her will before entering the dark wood of labour for there was real uncertainty as to whether she would return. But the omens were fair: the late summer weather had been warm and sunny, the harvest was expected to be a good one, there were no epidemics or plagues to disturb the surface calm. Good order was all around: the spirits seemed appeased. There was an underlying uneasiness and dissension, however, in all segments of society. People did not like to see their good queen Catherine, who had behaved with nobility and utmost probity throughout, so humiliated and ill-treated. Henry’s subjects were largely conservative and did not care for the extreme measures he had pursued in order to satisfy his desire to marry again and produce an heir. Happy as they may have been at the thought that the excesses and corruption of the established church in England would be redressed, there was less support for so radical a reform of religion that papal authority was abandoned and spiritual power vested in the king. Certainly the pope’s (#ulink_94188e5d-dfa7-5cc2-92fa-dede0df51a45) excommunication of Henry in July, and the declaration that his marriage to Anne was invalid, was serious and unwelcome to a conservative and still Catholic people. During the summer of 1533, augury and prognostication were more prolific than ever. Most significant perhaps were those of a visionary, Elizabeth Barton, known as ‘the Maid of Kent’, who was well known and respected for her power of prophecy. However when she began prophesying that Henry would cease to be king one month after marrying Anne Boleyn, and that in God’s eyes his status as divinely ordained monarch would be immediately forfeit, there was real consternation. Many eminent churchmen and politicians, amongst them Sir Thomas More himself, considered her to have genuine spiritual authority. But such reckless courage and moral fervour was dangerous. A month after the coronation this young nun was arrested, tortured and imprisoned in the Tower. She and her associates were eventually convicted of high treason and hanged the following spring. So with more weighty anticipation perhaps than accompanied any other royal birth either before or since, Queen Anne settled in to Greenwich, the favoured royal palace and birthplace of Henry himself, to await the event which would seal the fates of many. The expectant father had already chosen the baby’s names, Edward or Henry, and had ordered the elaborate celebrations expected to honour a male heir. Anne seemed to be as certain as Henry was of the desired outcome of her pregnancy. In dismissing a book which claimed that marrying the king would literally be the death of her, she reputedly said: ‘I think the book a bauble; yet for the hope I have that the realm may be happy by my issue, I am resolved to have him [the king] whatsoever might become of me.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth’s birth was not easy. She was her mother’s first child and the labour, according to Anne’s earliest biographer, was particularly painful: the sight of the red-faced infant lacking the prerequisite male genitalia would not immediately have replaced pain with triumphant euphoria. The same biographer mentions that the baby looked more like her father than her mother, which was less surprising given that many newborn babies seem to bear a passing resemblance to Henry VIII, whose features by that time were beginning to sink into his surrounding cheeks and multiple chins. (#litres_trial_promo) ‘The King’s mistress was delivered of a girl, to the great disappointment and sorrow of the King, of the Lady herself, and of others of her party, and to the great shame and confusion of physicians, astrologers, wizards, and witches, all of whom affirmed that it would be a boy,’ (#litres_trial_promo) reported Chapuys, ambassador to Charles V. As a stalwart Catholic representing the Holy Roman Empire whose emperor, Charles, was the nephew of the divorced Catherine, any schadenfreude at the unexpected confounding of Henry’s schemes was only to be expected. The sixteenth-century mind sought significance in everything, made connections between apparently random events and attempted to bring order and understanding to chaos. Anne, confronted with her fundamental failure in bringing forth a daughter, pointed out the fortuitous circumstances of this baby’s birth in an attempt to salvage some divine justification for her life from the critical flaw of her sex. She was born on the eve of the Virgin Mary’s own feast day, and in a room hung with tapestries depicting the histories of the holy virgins, a room which had therefore become known as the chamber of virgins. Anne too would have grown up knowing that Saint Anne, after whom she was named, was the mother of the Virgin herself. So the symbolism of the pre-eminent Virgin, the woman elevated above all others, was associated with Elizabeth from the moment of her birth. None of the mother’s frantic reasonings, however, mitigated the outraged disappointment of the baby’s father. Surely he had done all he could, endured enough penance, prayed night and morning, changed his wife for someone younger and untainted by scriptural ambiguity, even altered the tenets of Christianity. Such a blatant blighting of his hopes had to have some deeper message, and it could not be a comforting one. Eustace Chapuys, admittedly a hostile witness, gave a verdict on Henry’s disappointment which most of Catholic Europe and many of his own English subjects would have shared: ‘God has entirely abandoned this King, and left him prey to his own misfortune, and to his obstinate blindness that he may be punished and completely ruined.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The pageant and jousting which had been organized to celebrate the birth of a son was cancelled, although the elaborate christening and confirmation went ahead as planned three days later in the friars’ church at Greenwich. But there was no disguising the general sense of disappointment underlying the ancient rituals and the lack of spontaneous enthusiasm on the streets. There were even many who were as hostile to this new princess as they were to her mother. They could not accept the sophistry which had transformed Queen Catherine from faithful wife of twenty-four years to Henry’s unwitting concubine, and reduced her daughter from Princess Mary, her father’s heir, to Lady Mary, her father’s bastard. To these sceptics, Anne Boleyn was the impostor queen and Elizabeth her cuckoo in the nest, although the epithets used then were more frequently ‘whore’ and ‘bastard’. Oblivious to all these adult judgements, the baby Elizabeth was carried back from her christening to the palace and to her mother who was traditionally in seclusion until ‘churched’ about a month after childbirth. Certainly Henry was not expected to be present at the christening but there was no mention that he was even at Greenwich that day. As was the custom, a wet nurse was immediately found for Elizabeth, for queens of England and noblewomen generally did not feed their babies themselves. Royal and aristocratic women were mostly of value as brood mares and binding up the breasts of a new mother to staunch her milk would make her sooner able to conceive again, thereby continuing her procreative duty. In fact by the beginning of 1534, just four months or so after Elizabeth’s birth, Anne was thought to be pregnant again. But strain and anxiety were an inevitable part of the pressure to produce, a pressure which the baby Elizabeth’s sex had intensified. By the late summer a miscarriage, or possibly the realization that her symptoms were due to a hysterical pregnancy, had robbed Anne and Henry again of their longed-for prince. Anne had failed twice and her hold on Henry and the throne was beginning to feel precarious. Elizabeth spent only three months in Greenwich Palace with her mother and the court before being sent to the old palace at Hatfield, some thirty miles from London, to establish her own household under her governess Margaret, Lady Bryan. Elizabeth’s day-to-day care was already the responsibility of her women attendants, with the queen’s role more as visitor to the nursery, but this banishment from her mother at such a young age would not have been a conscious wrench. Elizabeth was never to live with her again. At the same time, by orders of their father, Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary was deprived of her own household and sent to become a lady-in-waiting to the new heir presumptive. The manor she had been ordered to leave had been granted to Queen Anne’s brother, George Rochford, and the new governess to whom she was subject, Lady Anne Shelton, was the new queen’s aunt. In this way the influence of the Boleyns extended even into Mary’s most private life and could only seem to her to be all-pervasive and utterly malign. Together with the insults to her much-loved mother, whom since 1531 she had been forbidden to see, these new strictures were particularly cruel humiliations for an unhappy young woman of seventeen. She was to take these hurts, unforgiven, to her grave. Despite her loneliness and misery, however, Mary seems to have been as taken with her baby sister as anyone, commending her to their father when she was three: ‘My sister Elizabeth is in good health (thanks to our Lord), and such a child toward [a forward child], as I doubt not, but your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.’ (#litres_trial_promo) If a girl child was unwelcome as heir to a king, she did have her uses as a future bride in the strategic game of dynastic alliances. When Elizabeth was barely six months old, Henry opened negotiations with Fran?ois I to see if they could reach an agreement to marry his new daughter, and currently still his heir, to Francis’s third son, Charles, Duc d’Angoul?me. The French and Spanish ambassadors were introduced to the baby princess who was presented in full regal apparel: ‘[she] was brought out to them splendidly accoutred and dressed, and in princely state, with all the ceremonial her governess could think of, after which they saw her quite undressed’. (#litres_trial_promo) The undressing of high-born infants, whose health and survival – and sex – were of strategic importance in their families’ marital bartering, was a common enough procedure at the time. Nine years later, the baby Mary Queen of Scots was to be undressed in the coldest of Scottish winters to show her health to Henry VIII’s envoy. Elizabeth, however, was pronounced a healthy and anatomically perfect girl but her father’s demands were excessive and the marriage negotiations eventually came to nought. As the baby Elizabeth thrived in the care of her attendants in the country, a terrible momentum was building which would catch her mother helplessly in its tide. Anne Boleyn had never been a popular queen. And she was too clever and forthright, too vivacious and sexually bold to overcome these natural prejudices against her. A French diplomat reported back from a mission to visit Henry and Anne’s court in the early autumn of 1535: ‘the lower people are greatly exasperated with the Queen, saying a thousand ill and improper things against her’. (#litres_trial_promo) For many years before their marriage and for a short while after, the king had been blatantly obsessed with her. A contemporary Scottish theologian, Alexander Alesius, (#ulink_1dab0eda-902e-5dfc-b80b-d259103c5b25) known for his eyewitness accounts, described the king’s emotional avidity: ‘so ardent was he when he had begun to form an attachment, that he could give himself no rest; so much so that when he was raving about Queen Anne and some of his friends were dissuading him from the divorce, he said he preferred the love of the Queen to half his realm’. (#litres_trial_promo) In a society used to dynastic marriages, brokered by diplomats, and public displays of affection bounded by the etiquette of courtly love, the love-struck middle-aged man was an unsettling sight. When that ageing man was a king, ordained by God, the uneasiness grew, for here was an all-powerful being in thrall to a woman, an omniscient monarch behaving like a fool. In Henry’s case, however, the obvious way to absolve that feeling of unseemliness in the spectator was to blame Anne. The harlot had somehow made him succumb to her wishes through the exercise of her powers, and those were most probably unnatural. Rumour abounded as to the nature of Anne’s hold over him. Gossip, rumour and innuendo are a powerful triad in any royal court when too much power, patronage and money circulates in a closed society of ambitious people with too little to do. In Henry’s court, life was made more treacherous by the sense of the nearness of death – through sudden illness, injury or an inexplicable eclipse from royal favour. At this point in his life, Henry was a sun king turned tyrant, and his whims could be fearsome. This ever-present threat of random violence was made more unnerving by the widespread belief in the supernatural, the practice of necromancy and the ready presence in everyday life of the devil. Rumour and speculation energized idle chatter, but too easily gained a life of its own: whispered puffballs had a habit of turning into stone-shod facts. When those rumours were of bewitchment and sexual depravity then the sixteenth-century victim of these accusations had little chance of restoring any reputation for virtue and probity. She had not much better odds of escaping with her life. The court was full also of the stories of Henry’s new mistresses, one even a cousin of Anne’s. There was talk of the king no longer in thrall to his wife, resentful of her temper, intelligence and assertiveness. The Venetian ambassador reported home that Henry ‘was already tired to satiety of this new Queen’. (#litres_trial_promo) But the bitter accusations and estrangements were followed still by reconciliations with much merriment. Anne continued to view Catherine of Aragon’s existence as a threat and her daughter Mary, whose obstinacy and flagrant rudeness to her new stepmother – whose status she refused to acknowledge – was a constant thorn. Both were a continuing barrier to her own daughter’s inheritance and the further advancement of her ambitious family. A story, aimed at revealing Anne’s ruthlessness and malice, did the rounds of the court and diplomatic reports in the early summer of 1535. Anne was supposed to have paid a man to proclaim – to Thomas Cromwell and even to Henry himself – that he had had a revelation that the queen would not conceive again as long as Catherine and her daughter lived. Lives could hang on threads of trumped-up prophecy, divination and manipulative lies. And rumours could kill. But it was not just Anne’s appearance of sexual boldness which exercised her detractors; her strong evangelical leanings and active promotion of the reformed religion gained her some important enemies who were working always to find a way of diminishing, if not effacing, her influence on the king. Certainly her library was known for its inclusion of radical reform literature from the Continent and she was credited with introducing to Henry the polemical Obedience of a Christen Man by William Tyndale, a copy of whose English translation of the New Testament she owned soon after publication in 1534. All the chaplains she promoted to her service were evangelicals. According to Alesius, however, the interference in religious policy that focused the hostile forces against her was her instigation through Henry of the delegation sent to the German Lutheran princes in 1536. Before they had returned the trumped-up charges against her had been contrived. In fact, Henry’s ruthlessness towards the moral leaders of the opposition to his Reformation, specifically Sir Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was to shock the whole of Catholic Europe. Fisher, whom the pope provocatively had made a cardinal while he was imprisoned in the Tower, was the most bold and implacable of opponents and his downfall came when he refused to take the oath of succession, which placed Elizabeth as her father’s heir over Mary. Incarcerated in the Tower, both men were eventually executed in 1535, along with a number of other Catholic martyrs, as a result of a new treason act, which made ‘malicious’ denial of the king’s title punishable by death. The bluff and hearty Good King Hal had completed his metamorphosis into the paranoid tyrant of his later years. And Anne was blamed by many for the executions. It was even possible that Henry’s uneasiness at having destroyed More, once so close and admired a friend, meant he exorcised some of his guilt by blaming his wife for this too. In this atmosphere of alarm and fear, there was a short respite for Anne, for by the end of 1535 she was pregnant again. Despite the rumour, there was no indication that harm had been done to Catherine or her daughter to ensure this pregnancy. Quite soon, however, the divorced queen was mortally ill. Although her health had been failing for a long time, when Catherine finally died in January 1536 at the age of fifty, there were the inevitable rumours that Anne had succeeded at last in having her poisoned. This story was given some credence at the time by the news that when Catherine’s body was opened up they found her heart was ‘black and hideous to look at’ with a dark growth attached. Subsequent medical experts have stated this was much more likely to be a signature of the cancer which probably killed her. (#litres_trial_promo) The royal lack of sympathy for Catherine was evident up to and beyond death. Right to the end, she and her daughter Mary had been forbidden to see each other, in an act of petty malice. And the news of her death after much suffering was greeted by the king without any show of guilt or sorrow. Anne and Henry celebrated in unseemly delight, with Anne – and possibly the king too – clothed from head to foot in yellow, more the symbolic colour of jealousy and betrayal than of mourning. Elizabeth, just over two years old, was taken to church in grand ceremonial ‘to the sound of trumpets’ and then, in her father’s embrace, shown off to his courtiers. (#litres_trial_promo) Here was his legitimate heir, his actions proclaimed, although Henry still hoped to displace her with a son. This celebration of Elizabeth’s place in the succession, however, was to be short-lived. Rather than consolidating Anne’s position, Catherine’s death left the queen horribly exposed. While Catherine lived Henry would have found it very difficult to cast Anne off in order to marry for a third time. Now that protection was gone. There was a powerful argument, maintained by the conservative Catholic faction and which many in the general populace found sympathetic, that Henry’s marriage to Anne had never been legal and now, with his only true wife dead, he was an unencumbered widower who was free to marry again. But although the momentum was building inexorably against her, Anne still felt a certain optimism and relief: her new pregnancy brought hope. Her personal wheel of fortune she believed must have revolved by now. This time her body had to be nurturing a healthy boy. On this her fate, even her life, depended. What happened next was a catastrophe for Anne. In late January 1536, the precious prince was born, but so premature at just over three months that Henry and Anne’s son was more a miscarriage than a stillbirth. Anne blamed this untimely birth on the shock to her nervous system caused by news that Henry had fallen heavily while jousting and, it was rumoured, lain unconscious for two hours. She also said that her husband’s blatant flirtations, particularly with one of her own ladies in waiting, Jane Seymour, had added to her upset and strain during this precarious time. Anne was desperate to absolve herself from some of the blame for the failure of this last pregnancy. But the tragedy was possibly even graver than the loss of a prince, for Henry articulated the chilling accusation that Anne’s powers sprang from a sinister and supernatural source, and this miscarriage of the longed-for son was her punishment alone, relieving him from responsibility. Chapuys, the busy and hostile Spanish ambassador, reported something the king had said in confidence to one of his courtiers in a serious and confessional tone: ‘that he [the king] had made this marriage seduced by witchcraft, and for that reason he considered it null; and that this was evident, because God did not permit them to have male issue’. (#litres_trial_promo) The fact that it was assumed that Anne was now incapable of producing a healthy male heir could be an expression of the fear that Anne was somehow tainted by her involvement with unnatural practices, like sorcery. (#ulink_4c605ec6-06c3-5b46-ae9e-9341d0bed39c) Her many detractors now had a powerful weapon to use against her. Accusations of witchcraft were easily made and impossible to disprove. The existence of witches was accepted even by the learned and rational. It was self-evident that their powers were malignant and destructive, the result of a supposed secret pact with the devil. They often bore the brunt of the everyday struggle to manage and understand the natural world. It was generally believed that with a few incantations and a sacrifice or two a witch could blight the harvest, turn milk sour, make bonny children sicken and die. She could create a flash flood out of nothing, dry up the wells, invoke a freak storm, kill lambs with a glance and strike land, animals and women barren. It was in the area of sex that the activities of witches were most feared and decried. A witch was represented as the embodiment of the inverted qualities of womankind: where natural women were weaker than men and submissive, witches were harsh, with access to forbidden power; where women had kindness and charm, witches were full of vengeance and the will to harm; where women were sexually passive, witches were voracious in their appetites and depraved. Witches were privy to recipes for aphrodisiacs and could make men fall helplessly in love with the most unlikely of women – even with their own benighted selves. Lust was the domain of witchcraft. Incest and sodomy were intercourse with the devil and witches invariably gave birth to deformed children as a result of these deviant practices. Certainly it was believed that just as a man could be bewitched into illicit sex so he could also be rendered impotent. It was rumoured witches would even sacrifice babies in the pursuit of their terrible power. The fact that proof of witchcraft was spurious was no obstacle to the accusation. It was a powerful and ancient belief which gave a meaning to misfortune in a world of suffering, and a cathartic focus for blame and revenge. Any woman who was somehow eccentric to her immediate society, difficult, lonely, odd in her behaviour, unbridled in her speech – even just the possessor of a cat – was at risk of becoming the scapegoat for her community, her perceived malevolence responsible for all the ills that befell it. Witchcraft was established as a crime in the parliamentary acts of 1542 and 1563 and evidence was a congeries of hearsay, superstition, malice and fear. There were periods when witch-hunts were instigated as a manifestation of the spiritual war between God and the devil. Likely women were sought out and prosecuted, their confessions often extracted under torture. Many were executed as witches, often on the vaguest anecdotes of a neighbour’s ill fortune and a run of unlucky coincidences. Accusations of witchcraft were largely made against poor rural women. But it was a charge that could be levelled against any woman (men were rarely charged) and there were cases of aristocratic women accused of weaving malevolent spells, with mysterious powers to do harm, the crime being maleficium. Anne Boleyn’s confidence and sense of power had been noted as unbecoming in a woman. Now, in her failure for a third time to present the king and his people with the necessary male heir, Anne’s downfall was inevitable. This was all the more brutally so if the failure of her last pregnancy could be used to intimate her gross malevolence and unnatural appetites. The speed and ruthlessness of Queen Anne’s destruction suggest fear of her power amongst the king’s closest advisers, most notably Cromwell, and a growing animus towards her, disgust even, on Henry’s part. Henry was susceptible to his own propaganda, and it was only a small matter to transform convenient surmise into cold reality. There was a widespread belief that a witch bore a mark on her face or body which revealed her true nature: either hidden peculiarities like a third nipple, a hairy birthmark, an odd lump, indentation or discoloration, or outright deformities. In the attempt to defame Anne as a witch, stories gained momentum after her death of an extra finger or some grotesque mole-like growth on her neck. The main published source for details of her disfigurement came from a Catholic priest who never knew or even saw her. Nicholas Sander’s tract De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani, posthumously published in 1585, described her fantastically libidinous life, labelled her marriage with the king as incestuous (claiming Anne was Henry’s daughter) and listed her physical imperfections thus: ‘Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair and an oval face of a sallowish complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the top lip, and on her right hand six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness she wore a high dress covering her throat.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Despite being under the closest scrutiny during her life as consort and queen, none of the contemporary chroniclers of the time mentioned any abnormalities in Anne’s appearance. In fact, the Venetian ambassador who, like his fellow hostile ambassadors, was avid for any disparaging detail to report home, thought her ‘of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised … and eyes, which are black and beautiful’. (#litres_trial_promo) Unable initially to find any legal reason to invalidate Anne and Henry’s marriage, her accusers sought another way to destroy her. Anne was a natural flirt and an accomplished social creature. Emotionally expressive and thin-skinned, her education in the French court had added to her manner a gloss of worldliness and wit that her more stolid compatriots regarded with some suspicion. To charge her with adultery of the most depraved kind seemed an obvious and usefully double-barrelled weapon: if it could be suggested that this last abortive pregnancy was the result of Anne’s moral turpitude with another man (or the devil) then Henry was absolved of any responsibility. The baby was then a punishment of Anne’s behaviour, not of his. The Tudor state could act with expedient ruthlessness. Within only three months of Anne’s miscarriage she and seven men were arrested and sent to the Tower. Of the two who were released one was the poet Thomas Wyatt, an admirer of Anne’s from before her marriage. The remaining five, however, including her own brother George Rochford, were accused of fornication with the queen. Only one, Mark Smeaton, a court musician and a gentle and artistic man, confessed, probably under torture, to this dangerous adultery: ‘The saying is he confessed, but he was first grievously racked,’ it was reported to Cromwell. (#litres_trial_promo) The charges worked up to ensnare the queen and destroy the power of her family, by implicating her brother, involved Anne’s incitement of these men to commit adultery with her. A second charge of conspiring the king’s death was also brought. Again it was Anne’s malignancy, her powers of bewitchment, which were implied in the wording: ‘The said Queen and these other traitors … conspired the King’s death and destruction … And the King having a short time since become aware of the said abominable crimes and treasons against him took such inward displeasure and heaviness, especially from the said Queen’s malice and adultery, that certain harms and perils have befallen the royal body.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The evidence brought against the defendants was so tenuous as to be merely a gesture, an incoherent ragbag of gossip, innuendo and misinterpreted courtliness. She did dance with the king’s chamberlains, but then so did all the ladies of the bedchamber; she did kiss her brother and write to him of her pregnancy but then, as Alesius pointed out, ‘it is a usual custom throughout the whole of Britain that ladies married and unmarried, even the most coy, kiss not only a brother, but any honourable person, even in public’. (#litres_trial_promo) However one piece of evidence was of terrific moment and had also the ring of authenticity. Anne was accused of making an unguarded comment to her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, who had subsequently become a hostile witness against her husband and queen. The rash female confidence was: ‘que le Roy n’estait habile en cas de soy copuler avec femme, et qu’il n’avait ni vertu ni puissance’ [that the king has not the ability to make love to a woman, for he has neither the vigour nor the potency]. This was so sensitive an area of discussion that when Lord Rochford at his trial was asked to comment on this statement he was handed a piece of paper with the words written down rather than have them broadcast to the packed court. (He inadvertently – or otherwise – read them out loud.) To cast aspersions on Henry’s virility was bad enough. To say such things about a king so wilful in his drive for a son and heir, and so ruthless in his actions to achieve that, was dangerous in the extreme. And the danger was doubly reflexive against Anne, for a powerful man’s impotence was readily blamed on the woman. Perhaps the words of the indictment against Anne, that due to her activities ‘certain harms and perils have befallen the royal body’, referred implicitly to that dreaded loss of virility which may well have periodically affected the king. So the net closed in around the queen. She was almost certainly innocent of the gross charges brought against her, as were the men chosen as luckless tools in her downfall. The evidence produced against them was barely plausible let alone proof of anything more than acquaintanceship and, in Lord Rochford’s case, fraternal affection. Pride, reckless indiscretion and ill luck were Anne’s undoing at the hands of a king with absolute power, his fickle heart and tyrannical nature in harness to a fanatic pursuit of a male heir. There was one poignant glimpse of the baby Elizabeth, only two and a half years old, being held up to her father by a distraught Anne for the last time. In his letter to Elizabeth on her accession, Alesius wrote: ‘Never shall I forget the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene Queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard … the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Anne must have been dispatched immediately to the Tower for just as Alesius arrived in London from Greenwich the cannon thundered out, heralding the imprisonment of a person of the nobility or higher. Having collapsed in hysterical terror when first imprisoned, Anne recovered her composure to impress even her enemies at her trial. On 19 May 1536 she was beheaded. As a special dispensation a swordsman was imported from France so that her execution was effected not by an axe on the block but by a sword. His dexterity was so great that Anne appeared unaware of the moment of death and those present thought the whole process looked more like sleight of hand than the gruesome butchery it so often became. Her arrest, trial and execution had all taken place within seventeen days. Three days before she died, the final humiliation was delivered by Archbishop Cranmer, her fair-weather friend. He had managed to elicit from Anne some statement that could be used to nullify her marriage to the king, possibly concerning the contractual status of her previous engagement to Lord Henry Percy. So Anne went to her death, still a young woman but technically no longer a queen. The baby princess’s future also was in the balance. Although she too was to be threatened with a traitor’s death eighteen years later, at this time she was not in peril. Elizabeth’s own status, however, was inextricably bound up with her mother’s and just as the legality of Anne’s marriage was denied, so too was her daughter’s legitimacy. Two months after her mother’s execution, an act removing her from the succession stated she was ‘illegitimate … excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir … to [the king] by lineal descent’. From being the much-vaunted Princess Elizabeth, for a time sole heir to her father’s crown, she now became just Lady Elizabeth, with no clear place in the Tudor succession. Significantly, given the sexual charges against her mother, there was never any occasion when Henry chose to doubt the fact that Elizabeth was his true daughter. Although largely oblivious at the time, for she was not yet three years old and living in a separate household, Elizabeth’s subsequent demeanour and expectations were affected fundamentally by the legacy of Anne’s spectacular fall from favour, her execution for treason and subsequent vilification for obscene acts and rumours of evil. Of all Henry’s wives, her own mother, Anne Boleyn, was to attract the most attention and opprobrium during her lifetime and the most scandalous stories in the centuries which followed. Lurid tales of incest and witchcraft grew with the telling. And witchery was strongly believed to be passed to subsequent generations as a hereditary taint: people born of ‘bad and wicked parents’ were deemed likely to be witches themselves. (#litres_trial_promo) This was a damnation that would fuel her daughter’s enemies and echo in unexpected ways down the years. But even more damaging to Elizabeth’s confidence was her disputed legitimacy and shifting status as one of her father’s heirs – or not – as his own dynastic struggles continued. Even as a small child she appeared to be conscious of her demotion. When the new queen, Jane Seymour, recalled the Princess Mary to court in the spring of 1537, the three-and-a-half-year-old Elizabeth was reputed to have said to the governor of her household: ‘How haps it, Governor, yesterday my Lady Princess, and today but my Lady Elizabeth?’ This insecurity would become a lasting strain in her life, played upon and exacerbated by the indubitable claims on the English throne of her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots. Prior to Mary’s birth and the beginning of her own lifelong competition for the English throne, her father, James V of Scotland, was already locked into a futile arm-wrestling with his uncle and neighbour Henry VIII, both conducting raids and counter-raids of the border lands between their two kingdoms. Although James had managed to wrong-foot his uncle in the marriage stakes by winning the hand of Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, from under Henry’s nose (Henry had her in mind as his fourth wife), he was having less luck with his frontier skirmishes against the English king. Henry had launched spasmodic raids across the border and James, increasingly demoralized by the lack of solidarity from his lords (many of whom were accepting money from the English exchequer), had attempted a counterattack. In 1542, in the bitter end of November, James presided over an ill-judged retaliatory invasion of the Debatable Land, the unruly and ungovernable strip of wild country to the west of Liddesdale. In this godforsaken heath he suffered a humiliating rout of his men by the English troops at Solway Moss. His uncommitted nobles had deserted him and over a thousand Scots were taken prisoner. James was left to ride north, broken in spirit and submerged in deepest melancholy. He was an intelligent, sensual man, a creative builder of beautiful palaces, personally attractive to his people but temperamentally more suited perhaps to the life of an enlightened landowner than to the crown of thorns of the Scottish monarchy. He had a complex character, combining opposing qualities of rapacity and a certain identification with his people. He tried to break the domination of his lords and establish a rule of law but earned the suspicion of both church and nobility with his attempts at raising money from their assets in order to build grand palaces such as Falkland and Linlithgow. Striving to secure a male heir for his dynasty he, nevertheless, was known for his licentiousness and fathered seven or more illegitimate children, at least five of whom were sons. John Knox managed succinctly to sum up his doublesided nature, a polarity that fatally weakened him as a man and a king: ‘Hie was called of some a good poore mans king; of otheris hie was termed murtherare of the nobilitie, and one that had decreed thair hole destruction. Some praised him for the repressing of thyft and oppressioun; otheris dispraised him for the defoulling of menis wiffis and virgines. And thus men spake evin as affectionis led thame. And yitt none spack all together besydis the treuth: for a parte of all these foresaidis war so manifest that as the verteuis could nott be denyed, so could nott the vices by any craft be clocked [cloaked].’ (#litres_trial_promo) After a long night’s ride James arrived at Linlithgow, where Mary of Guise was awaiting the birth of their baby, the much-needed son and heir. Part of the king’s melancholy lay in the recent deaths of his two baby sons and heirs, cared for in separate establishments but dying within days of each other in a tragic synchrony. The timing was so inexplicable and shocking that poison was suggested, as it always was in cases of sudden death. But these deaths mingled natural grief in James’s mind with a supernatural warning. They seemed to give ominous meaning to a nightmare that had haunted him. In his dreams a dead man, possibly his old friend Sir James Hamilton (whose property James V had appropriated after he had been executed on trumped-up charges), approached, brandishing a sword. The animated corpse then cut off both the king’s arms and swore he would return to cut off his head. When, in the late April of 1541, King James’s eleven-month-old heir, James, and the week-old infant, Robert, died it seemed to James as if he had in fact symbolically lost both his arms, as the dream had foretold. All that remained now was for him to lose his head and thereby his life. With the betrayals of Solway Moss followed so closely by the birth of Mary, not the replacement prince who would bring hope for the future but a weak and premature girl, James’s own death seemed to him to be an awful certainty. As the King of Scotland rode further north and collapsed into bed in Falkland Palace, the following day Mary of Guise went into labour at Linlithgow. She cannot have been in a peaceful and optimistic frame of mind. Contemporary reports suggest that the labour was not full term and so the subsequent risk to the child was increased, especially as she was born in the heart of a storm in the deepest of bitter winter. Her husband too had just left her in a state so utterly distraught that she could not be sure when or if she would ever see him again. The country was in dire peril without an effective king and with a ruthless neighbour in Henry threatening invasion and war. Religious divisions were sweeping Europe, the Reformation had a dynamic all its own which James V had resisted, but which focused factions within Scotland and inflamed dissent. And all the while the Scottish nobles were in disarray, captured, bribed by the English, unwilling to serve the crown before their own interests. Scotland that December was especially cold, dark and dangerous. On the 8th of that month a small frail baby entered the world. Unwelcome as she may have been to her father, she was her mother’s fifth child (#ulink_49bc2f3b-19d2-5cec-b281-7f9bad7b7745) and her first daughter. Mary of Guise was a redoubtable woman and a fond mother, with a close relationship with her own mother, and there is every reason to believe that, despite the dynastic disappointment of her child’s sex, she was happy to have given birth to a girl. Both Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart were to become queens regnant in their own right but aware always of the pitfalls and inveterate expectations of their roles. Just as for less exalted women, marriage was their unequivocal duty and procreation the necessary thing. But the marriage contract for princesses and queens traditionally had little to do with personal choice and everything to do with political expedience. Just as the three-month-old Elizabeth had been offered in marriage by her father to a French prince, in order to build an alliance between historic enemies, so the infant Mary, now Queen of Scots, became the focus of a fierce struggle between these same old adversaries. Mary, as a female heir, may have been equally as disappointing as was her cousin, but her marital prospects in 1543 were much more dazzling. For Mary was already a regnant queen while Elizabeth’s chances of inheriting the crown, having been bastardized and disinherited by her father, seemed very remote. It was traditional that the kingdom with the misfortune to be ruled by a queen was considered part of her dowry in the marriage negotiations. The future dispensation of Scotland, therefore, made Mary’s tiny, oblivious form the immediate focus of her ambitious neighbour. Elizabeth’s father, the ageing bully Henry, was determined to annex Scotland and prevent for ever his old enemy France from getting a base from which to invade England. He meant to claim the infant Mary as a wife for his five-year-old son, Edward. On 12 October 1537 Henry had at last been awarded his prince and heir after marrying his third wife, Jane Seymour, within eleven days of the execution of the second. The eruption of happiness in court and country was crowned with the baby’s magnificent christening later that October. Elizabeth, just four years old, was carried to the ceremony by Edward Seymour, uncle to the new prince. The elder of the ambitious brothers of the queen, Edward Seymour was to become Lord Protector on Henry’s death, the most powerful nobleman in the land. But the birth of a male heir came at a high cost. After a gruelling three-day labour, Queen Jane was dead in less than a fortnight of a postpartum sepsis. She died in the midst of her triumph aged only twenty-eight. Henry seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken, writing to Fran?ois I of France, ‘Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of death of her who brought me this happiness.’ (#litres_trial_promo) However, the monarch’s round of marriages, alliances and wars continued with barely a pause. And so, five years later, when his old Scottish adversary, James V, died in the winter of 1542 with a sole female heir, just five years younger than the English male heir, it appeared to Henry to be a God-sent opportunity. The Spanish ambassador considered it a possible double boon for Henry, for the ageing king was in need of a wife himself, caught in an unusual marital lacuna between Catherine Howard, whom he had just executed for adultery, and Catherine Parr, whom he had yet to woo. Certainly, for those with any memory, there was a certain justice in the possibility of Henry finally winning the admirable, and fertile, Mary of Guise, having lost her the first time to his nephew James of Scotland. Such a marriage would have brought the baby Queen of Scots into closest sisterhood with Elizabeth, most probably sharing a similar education and upbringing in England. How different her future would have been. But the idea of marrying the dowager queen did not appear to fire Henry’s imagination as it had five years before. The marriage of his heir to Scotland’s heir was a much more rewarding enterprise. Henry wanted to get his hands on this intractable kingdom and there was no easier way, it would seem, than through such a marriage alliance. The fact that the English provided the male side of the bargain ensured England’s natural superiority in any union with Scotland, just as a husband had dominion over his wife. From the English point of view there was something right and natural about uniting these two sea-bound kingdoms, with England as the senior partner. Such a marriage of neighbours would annex Scotland in an expansion of Henry’s own house and territory and thereby reduce the attrition on the border and, more seriously, close the back door to France. Needless to say, Scotland, with a real pride in her own ancient history and fiercely protected independence, saw the situation rather differently. There was also the small matter of how revenues were raised and where they were spent: ‘if both the realms were under one, all should go to the King of England out of the country of Scotland not to be spent there, whereby Scotland now being poor already should be utterly beggared and undone’. (#litres_trial_promo) But Henry had a fistful of Scottish noblemen captured at Solway Moss, whom he would treat well, bribe with money and promises of patronage, and return to Scotland to work on his behalf to facilitate the marriage contract. Ten of these signed a secret pact recognizing Henry as King of Scotland should Mary Queen of Scots die without an heir. (#litres_trial_promo) This was a shameful precursor of the secret treaty Mary herself, when a young woman, was to sign with the Guises and the French King Henri II, ceding Scotland to France in the event of her death without issue. Initially there were fears for the baby queen’s survival: ‘a very weak child and not like to live’. (#litres_trial_promo) Even two weeks after her birth, Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, was writing that not only the child but the mother too was expected to die. However, the frail baby did thrive and by March the following year, Henry’s ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, had travelled north to oversee the marital negotiations and examine the prize himself. Sadler, a loyal but literal-minded man, was shown into the presence of the dowager queen, Mary of Guise. After discussing the marriage proposals, Mary led Sadler to the nursery to see the new queen. The baby Queen of Scots was not yet four months old. Her mother asked the nurse to unwrap her and show her quite naked for Sadler’s approval. Sadler, a fond husband and father himself, seemed touched and impressed by the sight: ‘I assure your majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the grace of God,’ he reported back to Henry. (#litres_trial_promo) Sadler’s conversations with Mary of Guise and with Arran, the regent, were doggedly relayed back to his master in meticulous letters of epic length which make them an invaluable source of information, conveyed with an immediacy which transcends more than four and a half centuries of intervening history. Sadler was ever puzzled as to whom he should trust. Mary of Guise was charming, intelligent and a skilful stateswoman. She was quite capable of dissembling when need be. Mary gave the impression that the King of England’s plans for her daughter were exactly what she would have hoped, and Sadler was naturally credulous. But Arran had warned him, ‘that I should find her in the end (whatsoever she pretendeth) a right French woman’, with her main motive to keep England at bay and the ancient Scottish alliance with her own country strong. No one could fail to appreciate the incongruous weight of responsibility which had fallen to this unwitting infant. She was already queen in name. One day she would have to become queen in deed of a kingdom of proud, disputatious clans centred on ancient tribal strongholds spread out across a sparsely populated, mostly mountainous, beautiful but inhospitable land. And as Mary lay in her cradle the factions were already entrenched in their rivalries, working for their own advancement and against their foes. The immediate struggle for influence was between Cardinal Beaton, a powerful, worldly, pro-French ally of Mary of Guise, and the Earl of Arran, a vacillating opportunist and the leader of the pro-English tendency. Arran won the first round by wresting the regency from the churchman and declaring himself, as a Hamilton, next in line to the throne after Mary. But even these allegiances were not as they seemed, for Arran was rumoured to be intending to marry his own son to the new queen, and thereby doubly ensure his family’s hold on the crown. This meant that, despite being in the pay of Henry, he was unlikely to be working to promote the English king’s ambitions. On hearing this, Henry decided to offer his daughter Elizabeth to Arran for his son: in return Arran was expected to support the marriage proposal that really mattered to Henry, that between his heir Edward and the baby Queen of Scots. Elizabeth was nine years old at the time, serious, highly intelligent and so well educated that those who met her inevitably remarked on her evident abilities. When she was only six years old her father’s courtier, soon to be secretary, Wriothsley was struck by the small girl’s grace and presence of mind: having been offered the king’s blessing, Elizabeth gave her humble thanks and then ‘[asked] after His Majesty’s welfare, and that with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old’. (#litres_trial_promo) Yet at the age of nine, Elizabeth was unlikely to have been informed of her father’s offer of herself in marriage to Arran’s son, a mere compensation in the hopes that the real prize, Elizabeth’s new cousin, Mary, would be saved for Henry’s grander scheme. But her impromptu place in this scheme showed that in Henry’s mind his illegitimate daughter, by the woman he had hoped to erase forever, was valued rather lowly on the scale of marital barter. Just as in his first abortive negotiations over his daughter Elizabeth’s prospective betrothal, Henry’s conditions for the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to his son were self-defeatingly excessive and heavy-handed. One of the main areas of disagreement was over the immediate possession of the baby queen. Henry, hoping to be supported by his recently released Scottish lords, had demanded that she be put into his hands, to be brought up in England until she was old enough to marry. The Scottish Parliament had met in March 1543 and passed a set of articles agreeing in principle to the marriage, but insisting that Mary should remain in Scotland until she was ten years old, ‘that hir personne be kepit and nurist principallie be hir moder’. (#litres_trial_promo) The same Parliament gave a nod in the direction of the reformed religion by authorizing the reading of the Bible in the vernacular, an activity which previously had been widespread but discreetly done. On 1 July the Treaty of Greenwich allowing for the marriage of Prince Edward and Queen Mary of Scotland was drawn up. But Henry’s influence in Scotland was already on the wane. With a Guise as queen mother and dowager queen, France’s importance, on the other hand, had never been in much doubt. Towards the end of June a fleet of French ships was tracked making their way to the offshore waters of Scotland, lying off Aberdeen and then Arbroath. Rumours abounded; there were 4000 men of war on board, 1000 of them at least were hackbuteers, armed with the fearsome firearm, the harquebus: ‘they come to convoy away the young Queen, and also the old’. (#litres_trial_promo) Sadler was much concerned by this threat as he reported back to the Privy Council, but his fears were partly allayed by Arran who assured him that the Palace of Linlithgow was properly guarded, and anyway the young queen could not be moved ‘because she is a little troubled with the breeding of teeth’. This seemed to be accepted at face value by Sadler who added, ‘by my truth I cannot but see that [governor Arran] tendreth as much her health, preservation, and surety, as if she were his own natural child’. (#litres_trial_promo) As the tenuous thread of the infant Mary’s life was all that stood between Arran and his ambitions as next heir to the kingdom, this observation may have been more an expression of Sadler’s honourable credulity and his own paternal affections than Arran’s careful concern. Under armed escort of more than three thousand men, the seven-month-old queen was moved to safer ground that summer. But she went not to Edinburgh as Henry had demanded but to Stirling Castle, the great medieval stronghold much beautified and domesticated by Mary’s father James. This castle, with its lovely new French-inspired palace building, belonged to Mary’s mother through her marriage contract. Now ensconced there with her daughter, Mary of Guise’s own power was greatly increased. She was keen to appear conciliatory to their powerful neighbour and requested Sadler’s presence at Stirling where she asked him to assure his king ‘that as nothing could be more honourable for her and her daughter than this marriage, so she desired the perfection thereof with all her heart’. (#litres_trial_promo) Again, she wished to show off her daughter, this time with evident maternal pride at how tall she was growing and how advanced she seemed, declaring, ‘that her daughter did grow apace; and soon,’ she said, ‘she would be a woman, if she took of her mother’. (#litres_trial_promo) This, as Sadler reminded Henry, was a reference to the queen mother’s own unusual height, a general characteristic of the physically splendid Guises which was shared too by Mary Queen of Scots. By the beginning of September, Sadler’s much exercised credulity was finally worn thin when the irresolute Arran relinquished his support of the English and reformed religion and joined forces with Cardinal Beaton. The volte-face was further underlined by the Earl of Lennox, home after many years in France fortified with French cash and promises of support, who later that month joined the pro-English party solely to continue in opposition to his arch rival Arran. No imperative was more important to a Scotsman than maintaining the tribal status quo and the Lennox – Hamilton hostility was one of the dynamos of Scottish history at the time. In the midst of all this duplicity, the baby at the eye of the storm was crowned Mary Queen of Scots on 9 September 1543, aged nine months. It was an ancient but modest ceremony, ‘with such solemnity as they do use in this country, which is not very costly’. (#litres_trial_promo) The pro-English noblemen refused to attend. Sadler realised that he could trust no-one when the factions were so opportunistic and shifting, and the noblemen within them motivated by frustrating old enemies rather than consolidating new friends. Nonplussed by the dour Celtic passions which could keep alive ancestral feuds over centuries he expostulated: ‘There never was so noble a prince’s servant as I am so evil intreated as I am among these unreasonable people; nor do I think never man had to do with so rude, so inconsistent, and beastly a nation as this is.’ (#litres_trial_promo) As the baby Mary peacefully continued her life circumscribed by sleep, food and play, the tensions in her kingdom intensified. Although the Treaty of Greenwich, promising her in marriage to Prince Edward of England, had been ratified, albeit belatedly, her mother, desperate to try and lure Lennox back to her pro-French cause, offered the greatest prize of her daughter and the kingdom to him. (#litres_trial_promo) Marriage to the infant Queen of Scots, a marriage that would make him king, thereby obliterating Arran’s power and his rival claim as next in line to the throne, was on the face of it an irresistible offer. There was the small matter of the age gap of twenty-six years but, although Lennox entered into negotiations with the queen mother for a while, he knew the offer was merely a ruse to defuse his capacity for trouble. Already his gaze had alighted on another royal bride, Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor, and niece of Henry VIII, rather closer in age to himself, whose advantages of birth would become immediately available to him. The dream of kingship, however, would be worked out in the subsequent generation. The marriage of Lennox in 1545 with this strong-willed, red-headed Tudor, full of pride in her royal blood, produced an ill-fated son, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. Henry VIII was increasingly impatient with the Scottish lords’ refusal to submit to his demands. He misunderstood the complex loyalties and shifting alliances of interest, which only included him and the English cause to the extent that they could extract more English gold through unsubstantiated promises of support. However his intimidation and threats of reprisals did not force the mettlesome Scots into compliance. In fact it had the contrary effect. In December 1543, their Parliament solemnly annulled the Treaty of Greenwich: the marriage, the peace and the small concessions to the reformed religion were all duly cancelled. It was obvious that the ‘auld alliance’ with France was again pre-eminent and Henry and the English were clothed in their ancient habit of the ‘auld enemie’. Perhaps, in reality, it had ever been thus. Henry’s revenge was to be bloodthirsty and terrible. The first raid he launched was in May 1544. The directions to his executor Hertford were as merciless as they were exact: ‘put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lightened upon [them] for their falsehood and disobedience’. (#litres_trial_promo) The series of invasions, burnings, massacres and lootings that followed were to become known as ‘the Rough Wooing’. But in love as in war, Henry’s judgement had become skewed with illness and age. He would never manage now to unite the two kingdoms in his lifetime, although that possibility tantalizingly remained throughout the lifetime of his children and came to haunt his daughter Elizabeth. At the beginning of 1543, the young Lady Elizabeth was as far away from the English throne as she had ever been. Still illegitimate, still barred from the succession, she and her half-sister Mary, nevertheless, were on warmer terms with their father and now included in court ceremonial. But they remained marginal to the future of the monarchy. However, that spring Henry’s mind turned to the fundamental issue of securing the Tudor dynasty. Perhaps he was beginning to realize that his god-like being was mortal after all. Hugely obese and in failing health, he suffered excruciating pain from a chronically ulcerated leg. In June, Parliament formally restored Mary and then Elizabeth to the succession, to follow their half-brother Edward. However, Henry did not choose at the same time to reinstate the legitimacy of both his daughters, leaving them with a fundamental insecurity and vulnerability to counterclaims on their throne. At this point it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would ever become Queen of England, but her restoration to the succession made the dream at least possible. Aged nearly ten, this clever, watchful, ambitious girl was no longer a child and was beginning instead to think about her own destiny. She was uncritically adoring of her distant father and grateful for the warmth and authority of her new stepmother, Catherine Parr, a mature and intelligent woman who was herself avid for education and self-improvement. That summer Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary had been summoned to court to meet the young widow and then attended as special guests the sixth and last wedding of their father. Closer to him than she had ever been previously, Elizabeth’s most vivid memories of Henry as a father and king would date from these last three years of his life when the turmoil of his private life was over and he turned once more to engage in self-aggrandisement abroad. Ill-judged and costly as these grandiose schemes may have been, they energized the ageing king with something of the charismatic vitality and splendour of his youth. It is impossible to know what Elizabeth knew of her father’s military campaigns against both their Scottish neighbours and the French in the summer of 1544. But he was in her thoughts when, on the last day of July, she wrote her first extant letter, to her stepmother Catherine Parr, and ended this exercise in courtly Italian with the sentiments: ‘I humbly entreat your most excellent highness that in writing to his majesty you will deign to recommend me to him, entreating ever his sweet benediction and likewise entreating the Lord God to send him best success in gaining victory over his enemies, so that your highness, and I together with you, may rejoice the sooner at his happy return.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth was living at St James’s Palace, immersed in her books and study, reading and translating from Latin and Greek the stories of classical battles and mythic heroes. While she laboured at home, her own flesh and blood hero Henry was so revivified by war that he led the siege of Boulogne himself in a last gesture of defiance against the French, his doctors and the approach of death. Eventually he entered the city in triumph in the middle of September. For that moment, perhaps, he felt he had turned back the years. Elizabeth was at Leeds Castle in Kent to welcome him home, an awe-inspiring father and, it would seem to her then, a Hercules among men. Although when she was queen she was to choose equivocation and peace rather than confrontation and war, all her life Elizabeth was to consider it as the highest compliment to be likened to him, the man she loved and admired more than anyone; ‘my own matchless and most kind father’. (#litres_trial_promo) The king she saw in the last years was an ageing old lion but in his young daughter Elizabeth’s opinion, he was ‘a king, whom philosophers regard as god on earth’. (#litres_trial_promo) As queen she was to invoke the glorious reputation of her father whenever she felt at all defensive as a woman with her all-male government ranged against her, or facing military aggression from abroad: ‘though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had’, (#litres_trial_promo) she was to tell her Lords in November 1566, when she was thirty-three and still angrily resisting their pressure to marry or otherwise settle the succession. And writing to her father at the time of his ‘Rough Wooing’ when she herself was only twelve years old, Elizabeth claimed not only kinship with her ‘illustrious and most mighty’ father but also an intimate intellectual and personal bond with him: ‘May I, by this means [the trilingual translation of her stepmother Catherine Parr’s book of prayers], be indebted to you not as an imitator of your virtues but indeed as an inheritor of them.’ (#litres_trial_promo) It took courage and confidence in this girl to place herself on a par with her father, a distant figure of gigantic proportions and terrifying reputation, a tyrant and a divinely ordained king. Her public identification was always with her heroic father, but in private it seems Elizabeth honoured the memory of her mother too. At some point in her life she began to wear a diamond, ruby and mother of pearl ring with a secret compartment which revealed a portrait of Anne, face to face with a companion miniature of her daughter. They folded together when the ring was closed. The vilification of Anne’s reputation and the disputed legality of her marriage, together with the dangerous imputations of witchcraft, incest and depravity attached to her name, meant Elizabeth’s attempt at some identification and intimacy with her mother was necessarily secretive. She did show, however, interest and sympathy for her Boleyn relations, promoting her cousin, Henry Carey, Mary Boleyn’s son, to the baronetcy of Hunsdon. Anne may not have been publicly celebrated by her daughter but she was not forgotten. Although Boulogne was a short-lived victory for Henry and virtually bankrupted his country, it did a great deal for the old king’s morale and his people’s insular pride. Knowing once more the thrill of conquest he could forget the years of domestic frustration and impotence. Scotland and the baby queen were to be casualties of his new energy and belligerence, for he was determined to force the marriage of his heir with Mary, Scotland’s queen. By the autumn of 1545, Henry was furious at the Scots’ continued recalcitrance and once again unleashed his warlord, the Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour. While the almost three-year-old Mary was kept in close confinement by her mother at Stirling Castle, the marauding English rode over the border to burn and destroy crops and towns and particularly the abbeys and religious establishments. Kelso Abbey, Melrose Abbey, and the abbeys of Dryburgh and Jedburgh were all put to the torch, and their inhabitants and the surrounding populace dispersed or killed. As great a destruction as possible was wreaked on the fair and fertile valleys between these towns as Hertford and his troops swept through on their vengeance raids. It was harvest time and Henry wanted the Scots to reap their bitterest for spurning the English alliance. Henry’s counterproductive ‘Rough Wooing’ was to be continued even more ruthlessly after his death in 1547 by Edward Seymour, now the Lord Protector of Edward’s reign. The baby Scottish queen had grown into a bonny child, intelligent and charming who, having outlived the extreme perils of infancy and risks of neonatal disease, now had to face the dangers of her predatory neighbour. So important was it for England to secure Scotland as insurance against her Continental enemies that Somerset remained intent on prising Mary away from her mother and her country to ensure her alliance with the young English king, himself not yet ten years old. On 10 September 1547, a day that became known in Scottish annals as ‘Black Saturday’, Somerset’s troops routed the Scots under Arran’s ineffectual command at Pinkie Cleugh near Inveresk. Once more the flower of Scottish nobility was slain or taken prisoner. Once again the Earl of Arran managed to escape unscathed from the bloody destruction of the best of Scotland’s fighting men. This latest defeat was so devastating that Mary of Guise feared that even Stirling Castle, that great bulwark against attack, might not be able to protect her daughter from the English. Lord Erskine, one of the queen’s guardians, and a man already grieving the loss of his son at Pinkie, suggested he take the precious child into safekeeping and install her on the nearby island of Inchmahome, where the secluded Augustinian priory there was surrounded by the deep waters of the Lake of Menteith. Although Mary was not yet five years old and was only to stay for two to three weeks, the stealth and urgency of her departure from Stirling and the mysterious atmosphere and beauty of the place may well have impressed her with a visceral memory of excitement and tension. Perhaps at this impressionable age Mary’s natural polarity of impetuous courage and nervous sensibility thus was etched deeper in her developing psyche. The atmosphere of isolation and meditation on the mysterious island was far removed from the world from which she had been plucked, of aggressive self-interest, anxious politicking and the alarms of war. The sixteenth century was not a time troubled by modern ideas of child rearing and the fragility of the emergent self, and Mary’s retainers would have talked freely in front of her. Even at so young an age this child not only would have sensed the fear and the excitement of the adults around her but she would have understood intellectually some of the facts of the situation. Within weeks she was back with her mother at Stirling but, at the next invasion of the English, the queen mother dispatched her precious daughter to Dumbarton where the French, for whose help she had petitioned in increasing desperation, could easily arrive by sea and collect her. The new King of France had an infant son and heir, named Fran?ois after Henri’s own illustrious father. This firstborn but sickly boy seemed to unloose a surge of fertility in his mother Catherine de Medici who, after eleven anguished years of childless marriage, suddenly produced ten children in the following twelve years. Mary of Guise had never lost her primary allegiance to her home country and cajoled her lords into allowing her to negotiate a marriage contract between her young daughter and the even younger Dauphin of France. On 7 July 1548 the treaty was signed and Mary’s fate was sealed. Neither England nor Scotland now was to be her home. Instead she was to be brought up as a French princess and would learn to rate her adopted crown of France higher than that of Scotland, and covet for most of her adult life the crown of England. The child queen was made ready for the next poignant journey of her life, as a fugitive from the marauding English and an emotional and political captive of the French. Just as the five-year-old Mary Stuart was beginning to attain consciousness of herself as a queen while imbibing the adrenaline of flight and concealment, adventure and romance, her older cousin Elizabeth Tudor was deep in her studies at various royal manors in the country outside London. Just fourteen, she was polishing her French and Italian, and reading and translating from Latin and Greek. Pindar’s poetry and Homer’s Iliad were among the specific works in her mind when she wrote to her brother Edward in the autumn of 1547: ‘Nothing is so uncertain or less enduring than the life of a man, who truly, by the testimony of Pindar, is nothing else than a dream of shadows.’ (#ulink_dd333458-2b12-52fe-9b6a-e92309b1b3ee) (#litres_trial_promo) Her father had died the previous January and this letter was in elegiac mood. What more telling example could there be of the essential transience of all things than the fact that someone as superhuman and magnificent in life as this omnipotent king had to succumb to death as inevitably as the commonest thief or beggar? In fact Henry’s death was the beginning for Elizabeth of a decade of uncertainty and at times extreme danger. These painful years were the furnace that would temper her nature for good and ill. While Elizabeth learnt her lessons the hard way, Mary was to have the danger of her birthright as Queen of the Scots deferred. Instead she entered her defining decade in the French court, pampered, admired, groomed for the mostly decorative role as Dauphine, then fleetingly Queen of France. John Knox, austerely Calvinist in his sympathies, recognized the decadence of this French courtly inheritance from his experiences at the time as a prisoner and galley slave of the French. His warning of the effect on the young Queen of Scots, growing up away from her country and her people in this artificial and alien air, had a terrible truth: ‘to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor, that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm and for her final destruction’. (#ulink_7cc571e9-60cc-5bbe-bc92-493810fb6e2b)There is some confusion over the spelling of the dynasty. I have opted for Stewart prior to Mary’s accession, and for Mary and her descendants Stuart thereafter. (#ulink_df35d005-b2e1-53e3-9676-2789ea858955)Pope Clement VII (1523–34), a Medici prince, nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent. (#ulink_6d3477ad-8d6d-5476-b2f5-96aff9299f76)Alexander Alesius (1500–65) writer and theologian. Born Alexander Alane, he became a canon of St Andrew’s Cathedral but adopted the Greek name ‘Alesius’ (meaning ‘wandering’) to signify his exile from Scotland after the trauma of witnessing his Lutheran mentor, Patrick Hamilton, burned at the stake in 1528. From 1535 he was in England at the heart of the English Reformation and is valued for his lively accounts and reminiscences. (#ulink_cb85e02a-34f7-58f6-9f69-c3082a399913)One of Anne’s recent biographers, Retha M. Warnicke, has suggested that this miscarried son was in some way deformed; this in a time when monstrous births were considered another fingerpost of witchcraft. But that thesis has to remain speculation. (#ulink_218af0d2-09b2-5e5d-b6c6-48b73829fae8)Mary of Guise had been married to the Duc de Longueville in 1534 and had two sons, Fran?ois born in 1535 and Louis in 1537, a few months after his father’s death. Louis died and Fran?ois, as the new duke, was left with her Guise relations when she travelled to Scotland to marry James V. (#ulink_99d1070c-4a9c-54bc-a2e1-d7b87bd96537)Elizabeth was refering to the Pythian Ode: ‘Creatures of a day, what is a man? What is he not? Mankind is a dream of a shadow. But when a god given brightness comes, a radiant light rests on men, and a gentle life’. CHAPTER THREE The Education of Princes (#ulink_e6225a81-d1ff-5e9e-bd37-27c72e278f0f) I was one day present when she replied at the same time to three ambassadors, the Imperial, French, and Swedish, in three languages: Italian to one, French to the other, Latin to the third; easily, without hesitation, clearly, and without being confused, to the various subjects thrown out, as is usual in their discourse. Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham to his friend John Sturm in 1562 She has grown so much, and grows daily in height, goodness, beauty and virtue, that she has become the most perfect and accomplished person in all honest and virtuous things that it is possible to imagine … I can assure you that the King is so delighted with her … she amuses him with wise and witty conversation, as if she was a woman of twenty-five. Cardinal of Lorraine to Mary’s mother in 1553 when the Queen of Scots was ten IF EXILE IS NOT JUST A PHYSICAL ABSENCE from home but an emotional and spiritual disconnection from one’s earlier self then in the late 1540s both these young queens entered a simultaneous period of exile which would mark them more deeply than anything else in their lives. The reasons, experiences and effects for Elizabeth and Mary individually, however, could not have been more different, or more significant in their differences. For Elizabeth, the exile was gradual, a journey towards singularity. At first it was the loosening of familial ties which came with orphanhood, then the spiritual estrangement during her sister’s reign, culminating in the physical constraint on her movements, place of residence and then the denial of her rights to safety, even to life. Her contemporary, John Foxe, expressed his outrage: ‘Into what fear, what trouble of mind, and what danger of death was she brought?’ (#litres_trial_promo) The transient nature of her security, prospects and hopes, the unpredictable perils she encountered, toughened Elizabeth’s character, sharpened her wits and gave her a powerful sense of her own autonomy. This exile from certainty and ease made a precocious girl endure the most testing initiation in her journey to become a great queen. Camden realized the value of these unhappiest of years: ‘taught by Experience and Adversity, (two most effectual and powerfull Masters,) she had gathered Wisedom above her age’. (#litres_trial_promo) For Mary her exile was more clear cut. She was removed to France before she was six years old in what was to be a physical and spiritual severance from her homeland. Already betrothed to the dauphin, her future now was mapped out by foreign interests. She was to be a French princess and then a French queen, with Scotland as her dowry. John Knox considered in retrospect this French exile to be a poisonous inheritance for his young Scottish queen. Hayward, an early chronicler, mourned the loss to her personally: ‘our young Quene is married into France, where she nowe lyveth as a stranger both to them and us …’ (#litres_trial_promo) In fact this dislocation and re-education was to prove so complete that Mary, the Queen of Scotland, would come to consider her French years as the happiest time of her life. For Elizabeth it was a painful decade which began with the death of her father on 28 January 1547. Her brother Edward was brought to see her at the manor of Enfield and they were told the news together. In a spasm of grief, so the story went, Henry’s two younger children clung together and wept bitterly, then Edward continued on his way to London and the thirteen-year-old princess returned, for the time being, to the studious patterns of her life. The new young king, himself only nine years old, wrote to this favourite sister: ‘There is very little need of my consoling you, most dear sister, because from your learning you know what you ought to do, and from your prudence and pity you perform what your learning causes you to know.’ His letter was in answer to one from her seeking to console him and place their loss in the context of her classical and religious studies. She had obviously shown herself to be in control of her emotions for Edward added, ‘I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth had never lived intimately with either her mother or her father and essentially both were unknown to her. However, in her governess Catherine Ashley she had the most loyal, if limited, of mother figures who had been with her all her life and was to remain, until her death, the woman Elizabeth cared for most. The death of Henry and her subsequent status as an orphan was not a personal wrench so much as a loss of the idealized father as hero. Practically too, Elizabeth could no longer rely on that powerful umbrella of protection and instead was exposed to the untrammelled ambitions of others. Henry’s death marked the end of a certain status quo. Elizabeth’s stepmother, Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife, was an affectionate woman with a talent for nurturing and inspiring the young. Her previous stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, left a glowing affidavit in her will: ‘I was never able to render her grace [Catherine] sufficient thanks for the godly education and tender love and bountiful goodness which I have ever more found in her.’ (#litres_trial_promo) On marrying Henry in 1543 Catherine had embarked on her new life as his queen with a sense of vocation and had fulfilled her duties admirably. She was thirty-one, already had been twice married and twice widowed and was a mature woman of considerable character and independent means. Catherine was the first of Henry’s wives to make any real attempt to take responsibility for the royal children and was to be a particularly important influence on the clever, watchful and spirited Princess Elizabeth. Only ten years old at the time, the young princess was already emotionally self-protective, yet avid for experience and knowledge. Henry had at least settled the succession before he died. His immediate heir was his son Edward, for whose precious existence he had prayed, plotted and laid waste so many lives, even the foundations of his country’s faith. Edward’s children were to be next in line, followed by Princess Mary – and her heirs – and only then by his second daughter, Elizabeth. (#litres_trial_promo) At this time there was every reason to hope that Edward, an intellectually gifted, brave and independent-minded boy, would survive to manhood and have children of his own. For much of her girlhood there was little expectation that Elizabeth would ever be more than a royal princess. The death of such a long-reigning despot as Henry VIII inevitably released a ferment of long-suppressed ambitions, for power, wealth and the propagation of the reformed religion in England which Henry’s equivocation had stalled. The powerful men around the new young king, specifically in his Privy Council in whose hands his father had left the governance of the kingdom, were predominantly reformist. The most notable among them were Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and architect of the enduring Edwardian prayer book, John Dudley, and the boy-king’s uncle, Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector, awarding himself the dukedom of Somerset. There was a second powerful and ambitious Seymour brother, who was to teach the teenage Elizabeth some malign lessons on the delusions of sexual desire and the snares of ruthless men who would be king. Thomas Lord Seymour of Sudeley, at nearly forty years old, still cut a dashing soldierly figure having distinguished himself in diplomatic, naval and military campaigns under Henry. He became Lord Admiral early in the reign of Edward VI under the protectorship of his own elder brother, Somerset. Thomas Seymour had not only been admired by Henry, he had been loved by his queen. In marrying the King rather than this love, Catherine Parr had sacrificed her heart for the sake of duty. However, on Henry’s death her sense of obligation was fulfilled and after only four months of widowhood, Catherine married Seymour. This was considered indecorous haste, especially for a queen – and for a couple well into Tudor middle age. But even more surprisingly the thirty-five-year-old queen, who had remained childless throughout her first three marriages, now belatedly conceived. This could only enhance the self-confidence and reputation of an already proudly virile man. It seemed inevitable that such a man would have sired a son. Elizabeth was still only thirteen when her stepmother, of whom she was most fond, married for love. The young princess remained in her care, living principally with her at her dower houses at Chelsea and Hanworth. Ever curious and watchful, Elizabeth could not fail to have noted the effects of the sudden transformation in Catherine Parr’s life. From patient, pious consort of an ailing elderly king she had been transmuted into a lover, desired and desiring. Although not legally her stepfather, Thomas Seymour assumed his role as head of the household and with his manly demeanour and exuberant animal spirits he became for the young princess a charismatic figure of attraction and respect. Some twenty-five years her senior, Seymour in fact was old enough to be her father and the glamour of his varied heroic exploits in war and diplomatic dealings brought a welcome worldly masculinity into Elizabeth’s cloistered female-dominated life. Up until now, Elizabeth had never lived in daily proximity with a man other than her tutors and servants. Her father had been a distant, revered, almost superhuman figure to her, someone she strove to impress with something of her own talents and individuality, but it is unlikely that Henry offered her more than the scantest recognition. From the start, there was evidence that Seymour paid Elizabeth most gratifying attention. From a purely political point of view, Elizabeth was worthy of this attention for Seymour always had an eye for the main chance and this receptive young woman was a royal princess, third in the line of succession. But Elizabeth was also attractive in her own right, tall with fair reddish-gold hair, fine pale skin and the incongruously dark eyes of her mother, alive with unmistakable intelligence and spirit. She was young, emotionally inexperienced and understandably hungry for recognition and love. She easily became a willing if uneasy partner in the verbal and then physical high jinks in the newly sexualized Parr – Seymour household. There can be little doubt too that this perceptive girl noticed a marked change in the energy and manner of her much-admired stepmother. Catherine was scholarly, dutiful, religious, yet courageous and radical in a way that was similar to Elizabeth’s own mother in her promotion of the evangelical reformed religion. She maintained the heretical belief that everyone should have access to a Bible and be able to read the great book for him- or herself, a belief that had brought lesser personages than her to the stake. She was also a woman of active feelings and, in following her passion at last and marrying the love of her younger self, both she and Seymour were aware that the prime of their lives was past and there was little time now to lose. This can only have heightened the emotional temperature and in an age when prudery had little place in personal lives it must have been clear to the curious girl that sex and love were powerful, transformative things. They could also prove to be most dangerous if you were a young woman and a princess, without wise counsel or family elders to protect you. Events started to become unsettling, and in the end alarming, for Elizabeth when the good-natured horseplay, which in the beginning gratifyingly had included her, turned more serious. Seymour began to focus his boisterous sexual energies on his wife’s young stepdaughter sometime during Catherine’s pregnancy. Elizabeth’s loyal governess Mrs Ashley had always been very taken by Seymour’s charm and even maintained that before Henry’s death he had all but obtained the old king’s approval for a marriage between himself and Princess Elizabeth: ‘that if the King’s Majesty, that Dead is, had lived a little longer, she should have been his wife’. (#litres_trial_promo) This was rather unlikely and, although Seymour surely considered the advantages of his marrying either one of the royal sisters, he knew that once his astute elder brother had become Lord Protector any such political advancement for himself would be strongly resisted. The idea persisted, however, not least with Catherine Ashley who, in her limited way, felt such a marriage would be a good one for her much-loved charge. She lost no opportunity to talk of Seymour to Elizabeth, who blushed, with a ‘Countenance of Gladness, when he was well spoken of’. (#litres_trial_promo) But Elizabeth’s governess was also foolishly fuelling romantic fancies and the natural rivalry which any girl might feel for an older woman who had prior claim on a man they both desired: ‘Kat. Ashley told me’, Elizabeth admitted under later cross-examination, ‘after that my Lord Admiral was married to the Queen, that if my Lord might have his own Will, he would have had me, afore the Queen.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Even if the young princess at that time had not considered Seymour in a romantic light, given such a provocative piece of information by her trusted governess, it is unlikely that Elizabeth could continue to view Seymour neutrally. But it was a respectable marriage for Elizabeth for which Catherine Ashley hoped, and the Lord Admiral seemed to her the most eligible suitor: ‘I would wish her his Wife of all Men living,’ (#litres_trial_promo) she had declared. However, when Seymour, as a married man, began behaving over-familiarly with the girl, risking her reputation, Mrs Ashley exhibited all the fierce protectiveness of a mother. On one occasion Seymour had attempted to kiss Elizabeth while she was still in bed and been roundly told off by Mrs Ashley, who ‘bade him go away for shame’. (#litres_trial_promo) The relationship between the Lord Admiral and the young princess was a gradual progression from playful affection to something intrusive and oppressive, denying her a necessary privacy and sense of safety in her home. In all there was an element of sexual attraction that Elizabeth felt for this flashy man of action, the first of a particular type who, throughout her life, would capture her romantic imagination. But for a young and inexperienced girl, this emotional complicity merely added confusion and guilt to the already potent combination of fear and desire his attentions aroused in her. At first, Seymour would appear in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, before she was up and dressed, and tickle her in bed, sometimes slapping her ‘upon the Back or on the Buttocks familiarly’. Other times he would open the curtains of her bed and wish her good morning, ‘and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the Bed, so that he could not come at her.’ It is not clear whether Elizabeth’s shrinking from his threatened embrace was through excitement or alarm, or whether a confusing mixture of both. Certainly Catherine Ashley told of occasions when Elizabeth, wishing to avoid these early-morning incursions, rose earlier from her bed, so that Seymour then found her dressed and at her books rather than vulnerably half-dressed. On another occasion, Elizabeth, caught out and hearing the lock on her door open, rushed from her bed to hide with her women of the bedchamber until Seymour, having tarried a while, gave up and left the room. Mrs Ashley remonstrated with him on this occasion and on another when he came to bid Elizabeth good morning in a state of semi-undress himself, ‘in his Night-Gown, barelegged in his Slippers’. (#litres_trial_promo) He answered the governess’s warnings with anger and self-justification; he meant no harm and to suggest otherwise was to slander him. The whole confused business was further clouded by the unexpected involvement of the Dowager Queen Catherine herself in some of her husband’s excesses. There was an episode in the garden at Hanworth when Seymour remonstrated with Elizabeth over something and then cut to ribbons the black gown she was wearing, revealing her undergarments. Elizabeth explained later to her horrified governess that she could do nothing to protect herself because the queen had been holding her down during the whole process. A possible explanation of Catherine’s implication could be that newly married, just pregnant and very much in love with her husband, she was careful to indulge him, afraid of reproving him. Perhaps she harboured some anger at Elizabeth for the continued flirtation between her stepdaughter and him. It was a historic and religious tradition that sexual attraction between a man and woman was invariably seen as the woman’s responsibility, even if she be just a girl and he a much more experienced man, old enough indeed to be her father. There came a point, however, when Queen Catherine recovered her confidence and good sense and brought this difficult situation to an end. She had come upon Elizabeth and her own husband in an embrace. This was a traumatic debacle for the young princess and was vividly related by her treasurer, Thomas Parry: ‘I do remember also, [Mrs Ashley] told me, that the Admiral loved [Elizabeth] but too well, and had so done a good while; and that the Queen was jealous of her and him, in so much that, one Time the Queen, suspecting the often Access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, (he having her in his Arms:) wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral, and with her Grace also.’ (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, although the queen did not fall out with either husband or stepdaughter for long, this episode propelled Elizabeth and her retainers out of her stepmother’s house. As Parry continued in his confession: ‘as I remember, this was the Cause why she was sent from the Queen; or else that her Grace parted from the Queen: I do not perfectly remember whether … she went of herself, or was sent away.’ (#litres_trial_promo) It was sometime in the summer of 1548 and late in Catherine’s pregnancy and the queen’s tolerance and patience had run out. She certainly lectured Mrs Ashley on her responsibilities in keeping Elizabeth’s behaviour within bounds and her reputation free from scandal. It is evident that she also pointed out to Elizabeth the necessity of guarding her good name and the dangers of indiscreet behaviour giving rise to unwelcome talk. It was a humiliating and unhappy situation for the fourteen-year-old princess. She had betrayed her stepmother’s kindness and trust and her pride was wounded. Her own feelings for Seymour were distressing and confusing, with elements of fear and desire, of longing and recoil. The chastened girl replied in a letter to Catherine: ‘truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. And albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me; for if your grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Thus in exile from her stepmother’s house for her own unseemly behaviour, Elizabeth was denied any further exposure to this lively intellectual household, where her cousin Lady Jane Grey had also spent some time. Instead she was sent to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire to stay with Sir Anthony Denny and his wife. It was not a particularly lively household for Sir Anthony was a scholar and had been a loyal chief gentleman to her father but now was very near the end of his life. Elizabeth turned increasingly to the consolation of study. At the beginning of 1548 her tutor Grindal had died of the plague. This young man had been an inspirational tutor to the princess since she was just eleven years old. The excellence of her grounding in Greek, Latin and foreign languages was so outstanding that his mentor Roger Ascham admitted he did not know ‘whether to admire more the wit of her who learned, or the diligence of him who taught’. (#litres_trial_promo) The commonplace but tragic death of someone so young and close to Elizabeth stripped more security from her life. Both Ascham and Elizabeth’s step-parents had other suggestions for a successor for the talented Grindal, but she insisted, against some resistance, on replacing him with his friend and teacher, Roger Ascham himself. This was the first example of another interesting pattern in Elizabeth’s life. Lacking parents, lacking close family, unmarried as she would remain, and childless too, Elizabeth when queen surrounded herself with brilliant men, loyal advisers and favourites whom she made as close as family to her. When they became too old, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley, or died, like Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, she took on their sons. Although for the old queen, Leicester’s stepson the Earl of Essex was a less happy replacement as favourite, the young princess’s insistence on replacing Grindal with his own mentor and tutor was inspired. This was to prove a most successful marriage of teacher with pupil, with the princess impressing the scholar from the start with her native intelligence, diligence and remarkable aptitude for learning. During those difficult months after her banishment Elizabeth’s health suffered ‘an affliction of my head and eyes’ (#litres_trial_promo) and she did not like either her governess or her tutor to leave her side. This suggested a kind of nervous collapse; perhaps these familiars provided the only security and family feeling left to her in an increasingly menacing world. On the last day of August, Catherine Parr’s difficult pregnancy came to an end with the birth, not of the expected son, but of a daughter, Mary. However the relief and happiness at a safe delivery were short-lived. Instead a commonplace tragedy was set in motion. Almost immediately the queen started to sicken with a fever. She became delirious as the infection took hold and within six days was dead of puerperal fever. Apart from Catherine Ashley’s passing mention that she was sick in the period immediately after the queen’s death, we have no further record of how Elizabeth took this latest loss. She had left her stepmother’s company only a few months before, when she was healthy, hopeful of the birth of her first baby, the ‘little Knave’ (#litres_trial_promo) as she called it, full of life and love. But Catherine’s death showed just how dangerous love could be to life. To a clear-sighted logical young woman like Elizabeth there was no denying the evidence that if a woman’s destiny involved sex it was fraught with pain and danger. Her own mother had survived Elizabeth’s difficult birth only to die because the baby was the wrong sex; her brother’s mother, Queen Jane, had died in giving birth to him; now Catherine, the closest the young princess had come to having a mother and a female intellectual mentor, was dead herself, in the process of giving life. Given the general sacrifice of young women to their reproductive functions it was understandable that the gods, and even God Himself, was seen to value women less highly than men. Men died prematurely in war as a result of man’s will but the risks to women’s lives through childbirth seemed inextricably bound up with some divine plan. It was not surprising if any clever, perceptive girl came to the conclusion that women were more expendable than men, but only if they succumbed to sexual desire and the usual consequence, childbirth, with its handmaidens of pain and possible death. But sexual desire was dangerous for a woman too if it compromised her reputation. Catherine Howard, one of the more racy and fleeting of Elizabeth’s stepmothers, had lost her life for her sexual incontinence and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s own mother, had been vilified with terrible accusations of immorality and incest. Trumped up as they almost certainly were, such charges were enough to merit her death. Princes could be murderous, mad, licentious, fathering bastards at any opportunity, and still continue to rule. Princesses had to be very careful. We cannot know what factors contributed to Elizabeth’s decision to remain celibate, despite the stirrings of her own heart and the most telling pressure from her advisers throughout her life. We only know that by the time she ascended to the throne at the age of twenty-five this revolutionary decision had already been made. It is not too fanciful to think that in her mid-teens, steeped in her classical and religious texts, drawing conclusions from sharp observations of society around her, this thoughtful girl was pondering her fate and deciding what she wanted to make of her life. There was danger too for Elizabeth in Catherine’s death. Almost immediately Seymour reprised his ambitions to marry her, thereby dragging the young princess into a scandal which rapidly evolved into treason, with all the peril that entailed. Seymour’s jealous politicking against his brother, the Lord Protector Somerset, had alerted the Privy Council to his reckless schemes: ‘the World beginneth to talk very evil favourable of him, both for his Slothfulness to serve, and for his Greediness to get, noting him to be one of the most covetous Men living’. (#litres_trial_promo) It transpired that Seymour had tried to undermine King Edward’s confidence in his elder uncle. He had bribed the boy, who resented how short he was kept of funds, with gifts of money. He corrupted an official at the Bristol Mint fraudulently to raise thousands of pounds in readiness for any possible uprising. He put into action his ambitious wooing of the Princess Elizabeth. To be so indiscreet in his rapacity was suicidally risky, for all these activities could be interpreted as treason. Nicholas Throckmorton, in conversation with one of Seymour’s servants, spelt out the danger. ‘My Lord is thought to be a very ambitious Man of Honour; and it may so happen that, now the Queen is gone, he will be desirous for his Advancement to match with one of the King’s Sisters.’ Then in confirmation of the servant’s response that seeking to marry Elizabeth without the consents of the King and his Council would bring upon his master ‘his utter Ruin and Destruction’, Throckmorton replied: ‘it is most true, for the Desire of a Kingdom knoweth no Kindred’. (#litres_trial_promo) When Thomas Seymour was arrested and sent to the Tower of London in January 1549, Elizabeth’s natural feelings of guilt, fear and shame were intensified: the whole business of the Lord Admiral’s intentions towards her were extracted under oath and spread before the Privy Council. The first she knew of how serious the situation had become for her was when her governess Catherine Ashley and her treasurer Parry were arrested at Hatfield. Elizabeth was left alone to be interrogated by Sir Robert Tyrwhit, an agent appointed for this purpose by the Privy Council. On learning that her two loyal servants had been incarcerated in the Tower too, Elizabeth was momentarily very afraid. ‘She was marvellous abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long Time, demanding of my Lady Browne, whether they had confessed any Thing or not.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth was not just frightened for her life, at this point her reputation was almost as precious to her. If she wished to safeguard her place in the succession, or even continue to be considered eligible for a good marriage, she had to remain virtuous and be seen to be virtuous. This was of particular sensitivity in her case because of the traumatic history of her mother’s downfall. These rumours of lascivious relations with a stepfather were too close an echo of the accusations of incest brought against Anne Boleyn and her own brother. Elizabeth had been caught unawares. The Lord Protector and the council had their suspicions that Elizabeth herself, aided and abetted by her servants, had been complicit in some of Seymour’s plans, not least the one secretly to marry. Elizabeth needed time to collect herself and edit the story that would best protect her from these serious allegations. At this first interview she was unprepared and alarmed and could not hide her agitation. Tyrwhit reported back to the Lord Protector: ‘in no Way she will not confess any Practice by Mistress Ashley or the Cofferer [treasurer], concerning my Lord Admiral; and yet I do see it in her Face that she is guilty’. (#litres_trial_promo) Catherine Ashley and treasurer Parry were even more afraid. On facing arrest, Parry had rushed into his wife’s room and said to her in great distress that he wished he had never been born ‘for I am undone, and wrung his Hands, and cast away his Chain from his Neck, and his Rings from his Fingers’, (#litres_trial_promo) as if he expected then and there to be beheaded. The following day, Tyrwhit interrogated Elizabeth again, but by now she had composed herself. She appeared to be wholly cooperative but gave only careful, anodyne answers: she could not be certain what Parry or Catherine Ashley had been induced to reveal but she kept her own hand as close as possible to her chest. Tyrwhit thought her calmness and reason meant he was getting round her with his subtle questioning but he did have the intelligence to realize that he was up against a fifteen-year-old girl who was already a formidable advocate: ‘I do assure your Grace’, he wrote to Somerset, ‘she hath a very good Wit, and nothing is gotten off her, but by great policy.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Although Elizabeth’s servants talked more fully as Tyrwhit’s tactics frightened or tricked them, they never revealed anything that could be construed as a conspiracy between their mistress and Seymour. Any marriage involving the princess, they declared, was always dependent on the knowledge and approval of the king, the Lord Protector and the Council. Tyrwhit was suspicious that there was much more to be confessed, but he was frustrated in his investigations by the consistency of their blameless story: ‘They all sing one Song, and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the Note before.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The fear of torture and the discomfort of the conditions in which Elizabeth’s servants were held cannot be underestimated. It was winter and Mrs Ashley had been moved into a windowless dungeon to induce her further to talk. Here during freezing February she could neither sleep at night, the cold was so intense, nor see by day where no light could penetrate. Always too was the ever present threat of death. In fact it was remarkable that everyone managed to keep that one song in tune, despite the threats, cajolery, forged letters and invented confessions which were flung at them during that chilling start to 1549. Eventually Tyrwhit gave up disgruntled. As far as he was concerned Elizabeth was the architect of this resistance: ‘I do believe that there hath been some secret Promise, between my Lady, Mistress Ashley, and the Cofferer, never to confess to Death; and if it be so, it will never be gotten out of her.’ (#litres_trial_promo) After her initial discomposure, Elizabeth’s confidence had grown as the interrogations proceeded. Indeed, she was able to summon a tone of remarkable self-righteousness, an attitude which was to become one of her favourite and most effective stances in negotiations throughout her life when she felt she was on dubious ground. In a letter to the all-powerful Lord Protector Somerset she alternated her tone between imperiousness and submission to achieve her effect: ‘Master Tyrwit and others have told me that there goeth rumours Abroad, which be greatly both against my Honour, and Honesty, (which above all things I esteem) which be these; that I am in the Tower; and with Child by my Lord Admiral. My Lord these are shameful Slanders.’ She then requested urgent permission to come to court and show herself ‘as I am’, distinctly signing herself with the poignant reminder of her youth, her vulnerability and his responsibility, as protector of the realm, towards her, ‘Your assured Friend to my little Power, Elizabeth’. (#litres_trial_promo) Here was a girl, just turned fifteen, without any powerful guardian to protect her interests, or even her life, reminded in her interrogation that ‘she was but a subject’, (#litres_trial_promo) and how perilous her situation had become. She was bullied, threatened and lied to but had managed to keep her wits about her to such an extent that she was able to get the better of her inquisitor and make demands of him and his master, the Lord Protector. When the council decided they would replace Catherine Ashley with Robert Tyrwhit’s wife, who would keep a closer eye on the young princess, Elizabeth threw a fit: ‘She took the Matter so heavily, that she wept all that Night, and loured all the next Day.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Tyrwhit was no match for such a dramatic display of grief. He did allow her to write to Somerset and argue her case (although he grumbled that she would take none of his advice). Through sheer force of will, emotion and logic, Elizabeth got her way. Eventually Tyrwhit’s wife was withdrawn and Mrs Ashley reinstated. Tyrwhit was nonplussed by many things about Elizabeth, not least her devotion to her governess. ‘The Love yet she beareth her is to be wondered at,’ he wrote. (#litres_trial_promo) His own job as interrogator was done and he himself withdrew from the fray, relieved no doubt and uneasy at the thought that somehow he had been forestalled by a mere girl. It is impossible to know just how far Elizabeth compromised herself with Seymour, although there is plenty of evidence that she found him attractive, as well as how troubling she found that attraction. But Tyrwit may well have been right that her servants’ loyalty and courage and her own intelligence and coolness under fire prevented something more damaging to Elizabeth’s prospects, even her life, from emerging. Elizabeth was distressed by the fact that even by March, Catherine Ashley was still imprisoned in the Tower and, despite her fears that this might implicate her in any of her governess’s perceived guilt, she wrote another impassioned letter to the Lord Protector: My lord: I have a request to make unto your grace which fear has made me omit till this time … I will speak for … Katherine Ashley, that it would please your grace and the rest of the Council to be good unto her … First, because she hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty. And therefore I ought of very duty speak for her, for Saint Gregory sayeth that we are more bound to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them – that is, bringeth us into this world – but our bringers-up are a cause to make us live well in it. (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth never forgot the sacrifices of these partners in her first ordeal. On her accession and throughout their lives she treated both with great favour, knighting Parry and making him treasurer of the household and visiting Catherine Ashley on her deathbed in July 1565, mourning her deeply. Elizabeth and her servants escaped further punishment but the Lord Admiral Seymour was tried for treason, found guilty and beheaded on 20 March 1549. The whole lethal business had taken just three months. Through this treacherous time Elizabeth had learned some lessons as to the value of circumspection over spontaneity, the necessity of will and intellect ruling the heart. She also learnt about loyalty, the depths of her own, and how her very life could depend on the loyalty and love of her servants, her people. Nothing would make her join in the vilification of Seymour even when she was still under some suspicion herself. ‘She beginneth now a little to droop,’ the disliked Mrs Tyrwhit noted when Elizabeth heard that Seymour’s lands were being divided up and dispersed, but she then added, ‘She can not hear him discommended.’ (#litres_trial_promo) However, at fifteen, Elizabeth already had absorbed a wisdom that at forty had eluded the ambitious, swaggering Seymour. On the day of his execution she is reputed to have made the possibly apocryphal comment, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’ (#litres_trial_promo) From that day on, Elizabeth would ensure that no one could ever say that of her. While Elizabeth, exiled from safety, protection and power, endured her baptism of fire, her cousin Mary was embarking on her own more literal exile with a cheerful heart. Her mother, Mary of Guise, had got her way at last: her daughter was to be taken to safety, contracted to marry the dauphin to become eventually Queen of France. The marriage treaty was signed on July 7 1548 and with it the alliance with France was strengthened. Mary hoped that now the French would give her much-needed aid in her struggles to protect her daughter’s kingdom from the English. These marauding English had seized the town of Haddington, John Knox’s birthplace, in the eastern Borders. The Scottish troops, reinforced with some five thousand or more Frenchmen, were attempting to wrest it back again when Mary, intrepid as ever, just two days after signing the marriage treaty for her daughter, rode to the town to exhort the troops to greater resistance. Accompanied by her entourage of lords and ladies she headed for the nunnery on the edge of town, from there to gain a better vantage point. But unfortunately her party arrived just as the English gunners were perfecting their range. In an immense explosion of dust and smoke sixteen of her accompanying gentlemen and others of her party were mown down, along with their horses, in a scene of terrible carnage. Even for a woman of her fortitude and experience this horror was too much to bear; the dowager queen fainted with shock. Nothing could have convinced her more graphically of the wisdom of the imminent dispatch of her daughter. The French fleet sent to spirit the young Queen of Scots away had sailed around the north coast of Scotland to elude the English and finally came to moorage at Dumbarton. To accompany her to her new life in France she had a bevy of Scottish children, among them the subsequently celebrated ‘Four Maries’ – Mary Fleming, Mary Livingston, Mary Seton and Mary Beaton – all daughters of noble Scottish families. Her adult court included the lords Erskine and Livingston and Lady Fleming, her stepaunt and governess. Also accompanying the young queen was her eldest illegitimate half-brother James Stewart and two younger, Lord Robert and Lord John. Seventeen years old, educated and adventurous, Lord James was to spend some time at the French court in the entourage of his young sister, and it is quite probable that during this time Mary forged her strong affection for this brother, a trust she found hard to relinquish even when he, as Earl of Moray, was made regent in her place years later. Mary’s mother was grief-stricken at sending her only daughter from her, on a journey which was inherently hazardous, and made all the more so by the threat of intervention from the aggressive English fleet. By the beginning of August the French galleys bearing their important cargo eventually sailed down the Clyde and out to sea. There was every evidence that the Queen of Scots was blessed with an adventurous spirit which was to be one of the main motivating characteristics of her life. While others faded with homesickness or seasickness, Mary thrived. The journey around the west coast of England was plagued with storms and fears of an English attempt at ambush and kidnap, but nothing seemed to sap her robust health and merry temperament. Her mother meanwhile was overcome with sadness: ‘The old Queen doth lament the young Queen’s departure, and marvels that she heareth nothing from her.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The French commander de Br?z? had in fact sent a series of letters to console the grieving queen mother and in them consistently asserted that Mary, alone of all the party, remained cheery of temper and free of seasickness, despite the terrible storms that almost overwhelmed them off the coast of Cornwall. ‘Madam,’ he wrote on 18 August 1548, ‘in the belief that it will be a comfort to you to have news of the Queen, your daughter … she prospers, and is as well as ever you saw her. She has been less ill upon the sea than any one of her company, so that she made fun of those that were …’ (#litres_trial_promo) In these leviathan seas they had broken their rudder but Providence, he claimed, came to their aid and the essential steerage was mended without loss of life. After almost a week at the mercy of the sea, the royal entourage arrived at Roscoff on the dramatic coastline of Finist?re. There were members of that party whose suffering would have made them think it well named as ‘the end of the world’. Mary’s charm, high spirits and adventurousness had already impressed the whole company who had shared her eventful voyage. The kind de Br?z? wrote again on 1 November, ‘I believe, madame, that [the king] will find her as pleasing and as much to his fancy as all those who have seen her and found her pretty and of clever wit.’ (#litres_trial_promo) In the middle of the sixteenth century, the French court was the most magnificent and sophisticated in Europe. When Mary arrived in 1548 it was dominated by two women, Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henri II, and Diane de Poitiers, his mistress. These women were indeed powerful but it was power exercised covertly, through influence and manipulation, through persuasion and pillow talk, bribery and possibly even poison. While Henri lived, Catherine appeared to be eclipsed by the phenomenon of Diane de Poitiers. Preternaturally beautiful, seductive and socially skilled, she was nearly twenty years his senior, a woman whom age could not diminish. But it was Catherine who was the more remarkable. Patiently willing to bide her time, wily, pragmatic, treacherous, she was to prove herself the ultimate stateswoman in utter control of herself and the dynasty through control of her children. Diane had been the king’s mistress since he was about nineteen. The story went that Fran?ois I, in despair at the death of his eldest son, had been complaining to Diane, widow of the Grand S?n?chal of Normandy, of the melancholic nature and uncouth manners of his second son, who had so tragically become dauphin and heir to his throne. Diane had laughingly replied ‘he must be made to fall in love, and that she would make him her gallant’. (#litres_trial_promo) Her plan worked so well that not only did she civilize him but, in introducing him young to the charms of her company, she ensured he was incapable of ever replacing her as the most influential woman in his life. For the following twenty-one years until his death Henri spent up to a third of each day in Diane’s company. Catherine had none of her advantages of beauty or facile personality. She was a neglected scion of the Florentine merchant family of Medici, and had never been popular in France. Married at fourteen, she had to countenance very early her husband’s evident preference for his mistress and faithfulness to her until death. After ten miserable years of barren marriage, Catherine became sullen in her unhappiness and sinister in her superstitions and suspected occult powers. It had seemed to Catherine only supernatural intervention could save her from humiliation, and the threatened repudiation by her husband. The fact that she then managed to produce ten children, four of them sons, in a twelve-year flurry of miraculous fecundity explained some of her preoccupations with the occult and her subsequent absolute control over her family. Once Henri II died in 1559, however, the true power of the Medici sprang forth from its long incubation. Catherine’s motto could well have been that genius is a long patience. With the successive reigns of her sons came her chance to show the world how they had underestimated this disregarded queen. What Catherine lacked in beauty she made up for in intelligence, cunning and family ambition. After years of silence and antipathy her time at last had come. But it was not vengeance so much as power which she desired. From that point on, the interests and fortunes of her children were her main concern. Through the youth and inadequacy of her sons as kings she became the real power driving the French monarchy for the last thirty years of her life, as omnipotent queen mother throughout three reigns. The France that Mary first encountered in 1548 was a country increasingly riven by religious dissent. Calvinism and evangelicalism were well established among the lower clergy and the urban bourgeoisie and were already infiltrating into the higher strata of society. Fran?ois I’s intellectual sister, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, was strongly evangelical in her faith, although she never broke definitively with the Catholic Church. Everywhere, heresy was enthusiastically rooted out with threats of torture, banishments and public burnings. Banned books were placed on an index and booksellers who defied these proscriptions risked being burnt along with their heretical volumes. The court, however, seethed with its own factions and intrigues and increasingly was drawn into the religious wars. In the sixteenth century it was a lavish self-contained community, of king and queen and their families, the nobles from the provinces and their entourages, the foreign ambassadors and the princes ?trangers, who, although with territories outside the kingdom, nevertheless attended the French court. This huge superstructure, centred on the glorification of the king, needed an even more vast army of workers, with priests, soldiers, officials, tradesmen, domestic servants, huntsmen, grooms, entertainers, poets, teachers and musicians. It was a largely peripatetic court, just as it had been in the Middle Ages, on the move between a series of ch?teaux, driven as much by the royal passion for hunting and the desire for new forests and new animals to kill, as by the more pragmatic need to clean the residences every few months or so, find new sources of food having exhausted the immediate hinterland, and display the king to his people. To give an example of the logistics involved during Fran?ois I’s reign, stabling was required for somewhere in the region of 24,000 horses and mules needed for transportation and recreation alone. His son’s court was no less prodigal. Wagons carried the plate, tapestries and furniture and when the roads became too difficult the court and all its entourage and equipment took to the water. Most of the favourite royal ch?teaux sat beside the mighty River Loire basking in its pleasant, hospitable climate, bordered by lush forests filled with animals, often artificially stocked for the king’s pleasure, sometimes even with imported exotics. Mary was a fine horsewoman all her life, as was her mother, and Diane de Poitiers looked particularly picturesque acting out one of her many roles as Diana the huntress. But it was Catherine de Medici who was the most fearless of all the court women. She rode as fast and recklessly as any man, and in order to facilitate her speed and manoeuvrability, had invented a way of riding side-saddle that was much closer to the modern technique, and much more effective than the old-fashioned box-like affair in which women were meant sedately to sit. Everywhere was evidence of Fran?ois I’s passion not only for hunting but for building, and the appreciation of art. This he had expressed actively, acquisitively, by collecting masterpieces for his royal palaces, particularly for Fontainebleau. Excellence in all things was the mark of an extrovert Renaissance king. Naturally, it was to the Italian masters that he turned. The king’s greatest coup was to persuade Leonardo da Vinci at the end of his life to come and live at court. He arrived in 1516 with La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa), The Virgin with Saint Anne, and Saint Jean Baptiste in his luggage, and settled at Amboise. The great sculptor Benvenuto Cellini also spent some time at court and sculpted for Fran?ois in 1544 his Nymph of Fontainebleau. On the walls of the bathhouse, situated immediately under the library, Fran?ois hung his da Vincis and Raphaels and a magnificent portrait of himself by Titian, portraitist of the age to popes and kings. Although by the time Mary arrived in France, the first Fran?ois was dead, the visual richness and cultural diversity of his legacy lived on in every royal palace. She would grow up amongst these treasures and then, as queen to the second Fran?ois, a pygmy shadow of his grandfather, she would fleetingly inherit it all. However, aged not yet six and newly arrived in her adopted country, Mary first had to meet the royal children, among them the dauphin, and her own Guise relations. She had been placed by her mother under the guardianship of her maternal grandmother, the remarkable Antoinette de Bourbon, Duchesse de Guise. Antoinette and her husband Claude de Lorraine had founded the Guise dynasty with their brood of ten, tall, strong and mettlesome children. Antoinette had proved a wise and rigorous mother and adviser to her impressive daughter: she would endeavour to pass on the same family pride and courage to her granddaughter. The little Scottish queen was welcomed into this rich and glamorous court with sentimental excitement: had she not just been rescued from their mutual enemy, the brutal English? Had not French courage and nobility of purpose snatched this innocent child from the ravening beast? But there was real fascination too. She was their future queen, a pretty and spirited girl with the novelty of her Scottish tongue and the mystique of her distant mist-wreathed land to charm them. Although there was a long historic relationship between Scotland and France, and some intermixing of the countries’ nationals, Scotland was still considered by the French to be barbaric in climate, terrain and the character of its people. Mary’s beauty and charm of manner was celebrated all the more because of this piquant contrast. Most important for the development of Mary’s character was the fact that her future father-in-law, Henri II, decreed pre-eminent status for the Queen of Scots. She was to grow up with his own sons and daughters but on any official occasion she was to precede the French princesses, a visual reminder to her companions and to the child herself of her unique importance even among the elite of the French court. Two months after her arrival on the smugglers’ coast of Brittany, Mary was introduced to the grandeur of the French monarchy, which was now to become her own. By easy stages her party proceeded via Morlais and Nantes to St Germain-en-Laye, once a medieval fort but subsequently domesticated and decorated by Fran?ois I to befit a great renaissance king. King Henri was away on progress through his kingdom and so at the palace she was greeted by his children, the family amongst whom she was to live until she was an adult. They were all younger than she was, and with her Guise inheritance she would remain taller and handsomer, even as they grew. Her own betrothed, the Dauphin Fran?ois, was not yet five and having been rather sickly since birth was much smaller and frailer than the Queen of Scots, but their friendship seemed to be forged immediately. Montmorency, the Constable of France, writing to Mary’s mother reported, ‘I will assure you that the Dauphin pays her little attentions, and is enamoured of her, from which it is easy to judge that God gave them birth the one for the other.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Fran?ois’s sister Elizabeth, just three and a half years old, was to become a real friend and as close as a sister to Mary. Claude, another sister, was just a baby, while Catherine de Medici was pregnant again with her fourth child, due the following February. Mary was entering a nursery full of much-doted-on children, to whom Catherine was to add another seven, her last pregnancy in 1556 producing twin girls, who died almost immediately. Given Catherine’s unhappy decade of childlessness and the rigours she had gone through in attempting to conceive, these children were not just precious, semi-miraculous creatures, they were immutable proof to her enemies of her own fitness to be queen. No minutia of their health and wellbeing was too trivial for her concern. They were fussed over and indulged, the darlings of their parents and the court. Due to this odd conjugation of circumstance, Mary was introduced into, what was for the time, an unusually child-centred world, in which she was the star. Even the king, the most important personage in the land, was interested in meeting this five-year-old. He congratulated the Duc de Guise on his niece and said how much he was looking forward to seeing her: ‘no one comes from her who does not praise her as a marvel’. (#litres_trial_promo) Despite her later antipathy, there is no evidence that Catherine de Medici was anything other than kind to Mary when she was a child. But there was no doubt that she and the factions around her, who opposed the rapidly ascendant power of the Guises, were unhappy with the proposed alliance of the Valois monarchy with Mary Queen of Scots. Seen as merely a Guise in Scottish disguise, Mary, in marrying the dauphin, would be delivering the most terrific coup for the family. To complicate these political antagonisms further, Catherine’s arch rival, Diane de Poitiers, was an influential supporter of the Guises (her elder daughter was married to the third Guise brother, Mary’s uncle Claude) and Madame, as Diane was known, exercised the most influence of all with the king. Diane de Poitiers’s charm and her interest in the young queen attracted Mary’s confidence and affection. Writing to Mary’s mother in Scotland, Diane recognized the young girl’s pre-eminent status and promised to extend to her a motherly care: ‘As to what concerns the Queen, your daughter, I will exert myself to do her service more than to my own daughter, for she deserves it more.’ (#litres_trial_promo) This seductive and cultivated courtesan was to become one of the poles of female influence on the growing girl. The other was Mary’s austerely devout and authoritative grandmother, Antoinette, Duchesse de Guise. A few of her letters to her daughter, Mary’s mother, remain and in their psychological insights and human responsiveness they speak across four and a half centuries of timeless affections and concerns: ‘I was more glad than I can say to learn of the arrival of our little Queen in as good a health as you could wish her to have.’ The duchess wrote to Mary of Guise on 3 September 1548, just before introducing her granddaughter to her new family. I pity the sorrow that I think you must have felt during her voyage, and I hope you had news of her safe arrival, and also the pain that her departure must have caused you. You have had so little joy in the world, and pain and trouble have been so often your lot, that methinks you hardly know now what pleasure means. But still you must hope that at least this absence and loss of your child will at least mean rest and repose for the little creature, with honour and greater welfare than ever before, please God. I hope to see you yet sometimes before I die … But believe me, in the meanwhile I will take care that our little Queen shall be treated as well as you can desire for her. I am starting this week, God willing, to meet her and conduct her to St Germain, with the Dauphin. I shall stay with her there for a few days to arrange her little affairs, and until she grows somewhat used to the Dauphin and his sisters. Lady Fleming will, if the King allows it, remain with the child, as she knows her ways; and Mademoiselle Curel will take charge of her French education. Two gentlemen and other attendants are to be appointed to wait upon the little Queen, and her dress and appointments shall be fitting for her rank. (#litres_trial_promo) To her son, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Antoinette conveyed her first impressions of her little granddaughter, ‘I assure you, my son, she is the prettiest and best at her age you ever saw.’ (#litres_trial_promo) And when Henri II eventually met his prospective daughter-in-law in early December, he was as charmed as everyone else: ‘I have no doubt that if the Dauphin and she were of age, or nearly so, the King would soon carry the project [of their marriage] to completion. They are already as friendly as if they were married. Meanwhile he has determined to bring them up together and to make one establishment of their household, so as to accustom them to one another from the beginning. He has found her the prettiest and most graceful Princess he ever saw, as have also the Queen and all the court.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The conversion of this charming Scottish girl into a French princess was considered the overriding purpose of her education from this point on. Apparently she had arrived speaking Scots and not much else – although very soon was speaking French with great facility and learning Latin. As French culture was universally judged to be far superior to Scottish, and her Scottish entourage already had attracted some unfavourable comment for their roughness and lack of personal hygiene, it would be unlikely that there was much attempt by her new family and tutors to keep the young Queen of Scots’ own culture alive. Her sovereignty over Scotland was always considered to be secondary to her potential as consort to the King of France. Although Mary retained some of the original household who had accompanied her from Scotland, within two years all but Lady Fleming were superseded by French men and women. The ‘Four Maries’ remained part of the young Queen of Scots’ circle of acquaintances in France and were to return with her to Scotland in 1561, where their association with her continued more intimately. There is not much evidence, however, that they were included in her immediate life at the French court. It was possible that for a time they were educated in nearby convents or visited occasionally other French noble families, in the peripatetic way of aristocratic life then. All of them, apart from Mary Fleming, had mothers or stepmothers who were French, and therefore some connections already of their own in France. Mary’s mother, Lady Fleming, added French zest to her thoroughly Scottish blood by becoming a mistress of Henri II and, rather scandalously, bearing his child. The four Maries, although of Scottish noble families, were not of high enough social status to be considered ideal companions for Mary now that she was being groomed as a princess of France. Almost immediately, Mary was sharing the bedchamber of the dauphin’s young sister, Elizabeth de Valois. Such was the importance of precedence and hierarchy these girls invariably were given the best room on the strength of Mary’s pre-eminent status. They were both prizes in the European marriage stakes. England was to continue to press both the Scots and the French for the return of Mary to fulfil the marriage treaty with Edward VI. The last formal offer of marriage was made in the presence of Henri II and Mary herself in June 1551, when Mary was not yet nine but already happy with the idea of marrying her French prince instead. Failing Mary, it was suggested that her newly adopted sister, Elizabeth de Valois, would make a substitute bride for the English king. But this young woman was to end up married at fourteen to an even greater potentate, Philip II of Spain, only to die at twenty-three giving birth to her third child. In years to come, both she and Mary were to exhibit individually to their supporters a kind of tragic glamour that was to fuel rumours and fantasies which confused and inflated the posthumous reputation of each. Physical beauty helped, but prerequisite were extreme circumstances and strange congruities in life or death. For the young Queen of Spain, to die so young in childbirth was a common enough occurrence in the sixteenth century, but her tender (and almost certainly chaste) affection for her stepson – exactly her age – the physically deformed and psychologically tormented Don Carlos, inspired through the centuries a profusion of rumours and tragic romances. (#litres_trial_promo) Despite Catherine de Medici’s reliance on the prognostications of astrologers and fortune tellers, these two girls as yet knew nothing of the lives they were to live as women. There were, however, the immutable facts that one was already a queen and the other might well, through marriage, become one. At the end of 1548, Mary was six and Elizabeth de Valois was nearly four. Their interest in each other had been cemented in a court and at a time when royal children were most pampered and lavishly entertained. Mary’s Guise grandmother, writing to her daughter in Scotland, gave a lively picture of a happy and attractive young girl, revelling in the attention and affection that surrounded her: ‘It is impossible for her to be more honoured than she is. She and the King’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, live together, and I think that this is a great good thing, for they are thus brought up to love each other as sisters. It is not enough to say that they do not trouble each other in the least, for she [Mary] never works at night or sleeps in the daytime, and is very playful and pretty, and the two children are as fond as they can be of each other’s company.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Not just a doting grandmother but even her prospective father-in-law, Henri, King of France, set apart by pomp and the amour-propre of one chosen by God, indulged the little Scottish queen as readily as everyone else. He declared he had never seen a more perfect child, a remark reported back to Mary’s anxious mother in Scotland, and he and his courtiers smiled on benignly as the diminutive dauphin danced with his intended bride at the wedding in December 1548 of Mary’s eldest uncle, Fran?ois, Duc de Guise. Surrounded by doting adults, Mary had her own instant family of brothers and sisters. Apart from the Dauphin Fran?ois and his sister Elizabeth, there was the baby sister Claude and then three infant brothers were added in quick succession before Mary had reached nine years old. But it was the eldest three children to whom she was closest. When Elizabeth de Valois left France, while still just a girl, to live with her husband Philip II, Mary felt the loss so keenly she claimed in a letter to the Spanish king to be ‘the person who loves her the most in the world’. (#litres_trial_promo) This childhood intimacy with her sister-in-law was most influential in shaping Mary’s personal female relationships and, as this letter showed, her spontaneous warmth of feeling was already well in evidence. Mary, throughout her life, sought her friendships with women. She was attracted to sisterly relationships where she, a queen since birth, was naturally deferred to, and elicited much devotion from the women who knew her. But this made her ill-equipped to deal with a woman like Elizabeth Tudor, a woman who looked to men, not her own sex, for the great friendships of her life. Although proud of family and naturally loyal, Elizabeth refused to be seduced by intimations of female solidarity and any play on the natural bonds of sex and blood. In the early years of their direct relationship, this was Mary’s main method of approach to her, and on the whole it gained her very little. She was to be most frustrated, however, by Elizabeth’s obstinate evasion of any projected meeting, for this forced Mary into an unnatural role as supplicant for another’s favour, and disarmed her potent weapon of charm. Mary was surrounded in her childhood by powerful women: the French queen, Catherine de Medici; the king’s lover, adviser and friend, Diane de Poitiers; Mary’s grandmother, Antoinette de Guise, and finally her own mother, the dowager queen of Scotland. In direct contrast, Elizabeth’s earliest experiences were of the transience and impotence of women. Her mother had no real existence for her, her life snuffed out when she was no longer useful to the king. Stepmothers came and went, powerless in the grip of fate or the terrifying whim of her autocratic father. Even Catherine Parr, who inspired in the young Elizabeth a certain affection and admiration, was prematurely erased from life by the scourge of puerperal fever. The only constant image of power in Elizabeth’s growing years was the once magnificent, but increasingly mangy and irascible old lion of England, her father, the king. In the childhood of Mary Queen of Scots the opposite was true. Her father through death was absent and unknown to her. Her father-in-law, Henri II, a shade of the magnificent Fran?ois I, was an unimpressive figure, lacking in confidence and ruled by women. Mary’s husband, loved as he was by her, was weaker both physically and intellectually than she, and dominated during his short reign by her Guise uncles and his mother, Catherine de Medici, the dowager queen. Apart from the Duc de Guise and Cardinal of Lorraine, whose ambitions and guile powered the family’s rise, in Mary’s immediate experience, those who controlled events were women. These women got what they wanted through force of will and character, disguised by charm, beauty and artfulness. No woman in her acquaintance exhibited the undisguised authority of her own mother in her role as dowager queen and regent of Scotland. It was to Mary’s eternal detriment as a queen herself that her mother’s true work and effortful sacrifice were unknown to her daughter, hundreds of miles away in her adopted kingdom. Rather than return to a pampered life with her children and extensive family in France, Mary of Guise had bravely battled on in an inhospitable land to try and gain some peace and prosperity for the kingdom of Scotland on behalf of her daughter. But despite the hardships and loneliness of her task, she obviously relished the challenge for herself too. A devout woman, she believed she was fulfilling God’s purpose by remaining in Scotland. A Guise, she was also being true to her proud genetic inheritance of seeking and wielding power to the advantage of one’s family. Scotland represented the only chance she would ever have to exercise real power so she determined to take the regency for herself. But her daughter never experienced firsthand the daily grind of the dutiful ruler, the astute strategic reasoning of the political mind. The fact that her mother was such an excellent example for her was largely lost to Mary, cocooned in her royal fantasy in the court of the Valois kings. In order to effect the transference of the regency from the Earl of Arran, who had been rewarded with the French dukedom of Ch?telherault, Mary of Guise needed some support from France. A visit to her homeland was mooted in the summer of 1550, for Mary also longed to see her daughter again, and the son she had left behind when she had set sail for Scotland and marriage to James V, twelve years before. The young Queen Mary was overjoyed at the thought of a reunion with her mother. Writing to her grandmother she passed on ‘les joyeuses nouvelles’: to see her again Mary claimed ‘will be to me the greatest happiness that I could wish for in this world’. In her enthusiasm, she promised her grandmother she would work particularly hard at her studies and ‘become very wise, in order to satisfy her [mother’s] understandable desire to find me as satisfactory as you and she could wish’. (#litres_trial_promo) In fact this was to be a significant period in Mary’s development. She was nearly eight years old by the time her mother arrived in France in September 1550 and nearly nine by the time she left. Mother and daughter were never to see each other again, and so this year together would gain a certain lustre in memory. The sixteenth century was still a world bounded by order. Hierarchies were essential in every area of the spiritual and temporal worlds, the animate and inanimate; and these intricate relationships were created and maintained by an overarching power. The monarch in his court and country was like the sun in its solar system, there by the grace of God, pre-eminent among his satellites, but responsible too for sustaining the universe. This sun, the king, was inevitably male. So, to have before you the example of your mother as a successful ruler over men might inspire any young queen looking to understand her role. But during this time together in France, Mary was not to see her mother in any executive role. Instead the full extravagance of court life was amplified. The spectacle of grand ceremonial whirled on. The young Queen of Scots accompanied her mother on her journeys and listened and watched. Mary of Guise remained in her homeland for more than a year, much of the time with her daughter and the court in its magnificent progresses from royal palaces to hunting ch?teaux. She was welcomed with the full honours of this most lavish state. In a financial crisis caused by its European wars, and France’s support of Scotland in its resistance to the English, the king’s spending seemed to become more extravagant as the exchequer teetered towards bankruptcy. Pageants, masques, balls, hunting expeditions, were organized at every opportunity. The pageant which welcomed the dowager queen and her young daughter, at Rouen, involved elaborate constructions of unicorns, to signify Scotland, pulling a chariot, followed by elephants transporting various nymphs and goddesses, along with representations of monarchy and the Virgin and Child. The French monarchy were aiming to ally themselves with the divine, while aggrandizing their secular kingdom. There was a reason and a grandiose purpose behind such display. Henri II and the Guises had imperial ambitions that extended far beyond Scotland and her borders. Now that the young Scottish queen was safely in their hands, and the English had been repulsed from their ‘Rough Wooing’, these ambitions could begin to be worked out. In an extraordinarily revealing letter to Suleiman the Magnificent, the grand sultan at Constantinople, the French king in September 1549 outlined his vision of empire: ‘I have pacified the Kingdom of Scotland which I hold and possess with such command and obedience as I have in France. To which two kingdoms I have joined and united another which is England of which by a perpetual union, alliance and confederation I can dispose of as King … so that the said three kingdoms together can now be accounted one and the same monarchy.’ (#litres_trial_promo) This whole bold scheme centred on Mary and her invaluable claim on the throne of England. The English were uneasily aware of these ambitions. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and Lord Robert’s father, had asked the French ambassador to Edward VI’s court, whether Henri II referred to the little Queen of Scots as his daughter. When told that he did, Dudley caustically replied: ‘After his Majesty has eaten the cabbage I fancy he wants to have the garden also.’ (#litres_trial_promo) The full extent of the French king’s intent was exposed to the light of day on the accession of Elizabeth I when he made clear Mary’s implicit rights, and so instigated the deadly rivalry between the two cousins. The continued alliance between France and Scotland was the first piece of this ambitious plan and Henri’s enthusiastic appreciation of Mary’s mother’s efforts to maintain order and repulse the English was expressed in extravagant hyperbole and spectacular celebrations: as the English emissary sourly reported, ‘in this court she is made a goddess’. (#litres_trial_promo) The eight-year-old Queen of Scots could only enjoy the pageantry and wonder at the magnificence of her family’s celebrations, but she would never know the daily struggles, danger and frustrations that were companions to her mother’s duties in Scotland. She was never to see at first hand the extent of the strategic planning, responsibility and diplomacy of government. Indulged within the hothouse of the royal nursery, flattered and celebrated more than was good for her outside it, Mary was given little chance to see any of the day-to-day workings of the French monarchy. In fact her Guise uncles encouraged the dauphin and their niece in their pursuit of pleasure, mostly in the form of the daily chase, rather than acquiring the arts of kingship. This was partly due to the fact that Fran?ois was a physically weak and wilful child who showed little aptitude for study, but it also suited the Duc de Guise and the cardinal to maintain the dauphin’s fecklessness and indifference to matters of state. Thereby they assured the reins of power could be grasped by their ready hands when fate made Fran?ois king. Mary was naturally more intelligent and competent than the dauphin and she was fortunate in being a central figure in a cultured court where education mattered. But she was educated to be an accomplished consort to a great nation’s king, rather than to be a ruler in her own right. She seemed naturally to excel at dancing and music making, playing the zither, the harp and the harpsicord, and able to accompany her own singing voice in songs. In the early part of 1553 when Mary was ten and staying with the royal children at the Ch?teau of Amboise, the cardinal found her a credit to his proud line and reported such to her mother: She has grown so much, and grows daily in height, goodness, beauty and virtue, that she has become the most perfect and accomplished person in all honest and virtuous things that it is possible to imagine … I can assure you that the King is so delighted with her that he passes much time talking with her, and for an hour together she amuses him with wise and witty conversation, as if she was a woman of twenty-five. (#litres_trial_promo) It was not just her family members, however, who sang the young queen’s praises. Capello, the Venetian ambassador to France, described Mary when she was just into her teens: ‘she is most beautiful (bellissima), and so accomplished that she inspires with astonishment every one who witnesses her acquirements. The Dauphin, too, is very fond of her, and finds great pleasure in her company and conversation.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Mary was also a horsewoman of style and energy, and was as enthusiastic in the chase as even the most fanatical of the French court. She had arrived in France as a very young child, capable from the start of handling her own hunting hawk, much to the admiration of the French courtiers. She would continue to display her love of hunting and outdoor pursuits all her life, her energetic nature suffering keen frustration when she was constrained or thwarted in any way. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jane-dunn/elizabeth-and-mary-cousins-rivals-queens/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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