by David Cohen
The triumphant Somerset now treated Elizabeth harshly. She was sent to Hatfield Palace but the conditions were very different from before. In many of the letters that she wrote from there she signed herself ‘prisoner’. Six months before her sixteenth birthday, she had lived through the execution of her mother, the hostility of her half-sister, the death of her father, a few months when her stepmother’s new husband tried to seduce her, the death of that once-loved stepmother and then the execution of Thomas Seymour, the step-father who had tried to seduce her. Such a hailstorm of life events should have crippled her, but she coped. Psychology can at least offer some explanation: her glittering intelligence probably allowed her to make some sense of the flow of events around her.
Perfect sibling rivalry: Edward and his sisters
As soon as Edward became King, Mary’s fervent Catholicism again became problematic. She refused to submit to her brother’s diktats on religion and for months retired to her estates in East Anglia. Edward’s regency council then imposed its ideas through the Act of Uniformity of 1549, which required church services to follow Protestant rites. Catholic ‘smells and bells’ became illegal.
Edward could have allowed Mary to worship n the Roman Catholic way she liked in the privacy of her estates but he refused to do so. Nevertheless, brother and sister did make some attempt to mend their differences. The second Christmas of Edward’s reign, the boy King invited Mary to join him and Elizabeth at court but the festivities became tense because of religious arguments. Edward embarrassed Mary, and reduced both girls to tears in front of the court by attacking Mary for ignoring the Act of Uniformity. She repeatedly refused to abandon her Catholic faith, though her brother put her under intense pressure. After Christmas, Edward had three members of Mary’s household arrested. For her, it echoed the days when her father removed her servants – and their gold liveries.
The history of England would have been different if Edward had been healthy and had children. By February 1553, however, the Imperial ambassador, Scheyfve (who had succeeded Chapuys) reported: ‘the King suffers a good deal when the fever is upon him, especially from a difficulty in drawing his breath, which is due to the compression of the organs on the right side ... lapine that this is a visitation and sign from God.’
Edward was determined that Mary should not succeed him. However, lawyers told him that he could not disinherit only one of his sisters and so he composed ‘My devise for the succession’, which excluded both girls. Instead, the boy King decreed his first cousin once removed, the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey, should succeed him. Of course, it is perfect sibling rivalry to do your siblings out of their inheritance and Edward himself was being done out of life.
On 15 June 1548, Edward summoned judges to his sickbed to witness that he was changing his will so that Lady Jane Grey would inherit his throne. Two historians suggest the dying King was on a mission. Diarmaid MacCulloch has suggested Edward was motivated by ‘teenage dreams of founding an evangelical realm of Christ’. That seems much like his father’s narcissism. ‘Edward had a couple of co-operators, but the driving will was his,’ another leading historian, David Starkey, judges.
Finally exhausted by his illness, Edward died on 6 July 1553.His death provoked a political crisis that lasted a feverish month. Gambling as usual, Mary did not delay on her estates to mourn her brother, but gathered a small force. On 9 July, she wrote to the Privy Council, ordering it to proclaim her as Edward’s successor. The next day, however, in accordance with Edward’s will, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen. That very same day, Mary’s letter reached the Privy Council. Two days later, she assembled soldiers at Framlingham Castle, less than 100 miles from London, and prepared to march into the city. Lady Jane Grey’s father could not gather enough troops to fight against Henry’s daughter and so his daughter, who had never been a very willing conspirator, was deposed a week later. There was now a delay of nearly two weeks. Finally, on 3 August, Mary rode triumphantly into London but she did not ride alone: Elizabeth was at her side.
Mary has often been portrayed as a hysterical and unattractive woman. When she became Queen, however, she made a good impression as even her enemy John Foxe, the author of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, admitted. Mary came to the Guildhall and addressed a crowd: ‘When she had ended her oration, (which she seemed to have perfectly conned without book.) Winchester, standing by her, when the oration was done, with great admiration cried to the people, “Oh how happy are we, to whom God hath given such a wise and learned Prince!”’ But Mary was not so wise nor so emotionally secure she could overcome her troubled past – and especially the rivalry often fuelled by Henry between herself and Elizabeth.
Again, it might be useful to compare the British royal family and that of Sigmund Freud. Soon after he was born, his mother became pregnant again. She and her husband called their second son Julius. At the age of two, Freud was too young to appreciate that his brother was named after the great Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. The baby was constantly ill, however, and died when he was eight months old. Freud ‘discovered’ forty years later when he started to analyse his own dreams that he had been delighted (unconsciously, as well as unconscionably) when Julius died: he did not want to compete for his parents’ love with another boy. The stakes in royal families are even higher and can intensify such jealousies.
For the first sixteen years of her life, Mary was an only child but she then had to fight her half-sister for their father’s favour, as well as her bastard half-brother, the Duke of Richmond. Henry was as inconstant a father as he was a husband. Once Mary became Queen, she found it hard to be kind or even sensible about Elizabeth. Mary’s hatred of Protestantism was also an expression of her love for her mother, it might be argued. Her feelings were not just those of daughter. The detested Anne Boleyn was a Protestant and, in fact, far more Protestant than the King. During Mary’s five-year reign, hundreds of Protestants were burned at the stake. Often Mary did not even attempt to prevent her Catholic advisers from trying to implicate Elizabeth in some of the rebellions against her, such as that of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Instead, she encouraged a form of Inquisition.
From the start of her sister’s reign, Elizabeth knew Mary was having her watched and that she was in danger. She was meticulously careful to worship in the now approved Roman way, but even that did not help their relationship much. Mary suspected Elizabeth – who was known as the hope of Protestant England – was being insincere.
In 1554, Mary married Philip of Spain but Elizabeth was not invited to the wedding. The Wyatt rebellion gave the new Spanish ambassador a perfect excuse to chivvy Philip to encourage Mary to execute Elizabeth. However, Elizabeth was saved by the fact that she was desirable. Mary was besotted with her husband, but Philip was far from besotted with her. In fact, the Spaniard, like Thomas Seymour, seems to have been attracted to Elizabeth and so he had every reason to make sure she lived, ready to marry him when her sister died. He persuaded his wife just to imprison her sister in the Tower. To please her husband, Mary agreed. Before Elizabeth was taken there, she begged her sister ‘to remember your last promise and my last demand that I be not condemned without answer and due proof which it seems that now I am’. She would be ready to die ‘the shamefullest death’ if there was any truth in the allegations that she had conspired with Wyatt. Elizabeth begged to speak with her sister from the ‘humbleness of my heart’.
When Mary received this letter she was furious. On Palm Sunday ‘554, on the orders of the Queen, Elizabeth was rowed to the Tower. ‘Here landeth as a true subject, being prisoner as ever landed at these stairs,’ she protested. It does not take much imagination to guess at Elizabeth’s anxieties when she entered the fortress where her mother had been executed. She told her household that she might never return.
In the Tower, Elizabeth came under the control of Sir John Williams, who was awed by her. When Mary discovered that he was being kind, she moved her sister out to Woodstock. The Queen gave the new jailer instructions that
she did not wish ‘hereafter to be molested with her disguised and colourable letters’. As much as possible, she wanted to forget Elizabeth even existed.
Elizabeth’s new jailer, Sir Henry Benifield, ‘showed himself more hard and strait unto her’, Foxe said and concluded it was ‘a singular miracle of God that she [Elizabeth] could or did escape, in such a multitude of enemies, and grudge of minds so greatly exasperated against her.’ Foxe was being unfair. Benifield wrote letters to Mary and the Council, protesting as forcefully as he dared, about the restrictions placed on Elizabeth. His pleas did not sway the Queen. It is not surprising that in Woodstock Elizabeth wrote one sharp poem reflecting her predicament. It was inscribed in her French psalter:
No crooked leg, no bleared eye,
No part deformed out of kind,
Nor yet so ugly half can be
As is the inward, suspicious mind.
Throughout 1516 Mary refused to see Elizabeth when she begged for audience, but then, on 28 November, the sisters met. At first, Mary was angry when Elizabeth refused to beg for forgiveness, but they managed to compromise and get on. The reconciliation only lasted until Mary told her sister that she wanted her to marry the Duke of Savoy. Elizabeth had no intention of leaving England or of submitting to a husband. After she refused to even consider marrying Savoy, she was sent back to prison.
When Mary became seriously ill in 1518, her husband refused to return to England, though she implored him to do so. Feria, the Spanish ambassador, did hurry back from France as he hoped to be able to influence Elizabeth, but she had no intention of being dominated by any man, having seen what her sister and most of her father’s wives had suffered.
The survivor
After Mary’s death, this time there was no hesitation about the succession. Robert Cecil, the Secretary of the Council, rode to Hatfield and the new Queen was acclaimed. She was just twenty-five years old – the same age, by a strange coincidence, as Elizabeth II when she succeeded.
The first Elizabeth had had many traumatic experiences, which should have made her insecure and vindictive. Her father had loved her when he loved Anne Boleyn, then abandoned her, then stripped her of her titles, then reinstated some of her titles and then become much warmer when he married Catherine Parr. Catherine had tolerated her next husband making sexual advances to her stepdaughter. Precisely because historians have tended to ignore psychology, they have not begun to explain why Elizabeth coped so well. It would be absurd to suggest there are clear answers, but the love of Catherine Parr was certainly a factor. The good stepmother was never as close to Mary as she was to Elizabeth. By the time Catherine married Henry, Mary was in her early twenties and set in her ways and her faith. The two women were also divided by religion: Catherine was not just a Protestant but a radical one.
A ‘meta-study’ that pools the results of a number of studies together offers some insight into Elizabeth’s strength. There are methodological problems with the statistics involved but also a clear trend. Intelligent children who suffer cruelty, abuse and post-traumatic stress deal with this better than less intelligent youngsters. In sum, intelligent children tend to be more emotionally intelligent, too. One study of 718 children by Naomi Breslau found, for example, that those with a higher IQ were better able to deal with trauma and argued the reason is ‘the way that people explain to themselves what happened to them, how it fits in with their lives and whether it is their fault or not their fault’. It may appear strange to use a study of 2006 to explain Elizabeth’s reactions some 450 years earlier, but it seems a useful, if not especially surprising, explanation.
Some degree of religious tolerance would benefit the country, Elizabeth realised, and she saw the wisdom in not prying too deeply into the souls of her subjects. As long as they did not parade any disobedience, they could believe what they liked in private. Her tolerance did not extend to those who plotted against her, nearly all Catholics, but it did to her jailer, Sir Henry Benifield. Foxe noted ‘the uncivil nature and disposition of that man’, and compared it with the graciousness of the Queen. Elizabeth ‘showed herself so far from revenge’ that she did not restrict his liberty, though she banned him from court with ‘scarce a nipping word; only bidding him to repair home, and saying, “If we have any prisoner, whom we would have sharply and straitly kept, then we will send for you.”’
Like most educated people of her time, Elizabeth believed in astrology and asked the great scholar John Dee to cast a horoscope for her. She wanted him to pinpoint the best day for her Coronation, an auspicious time on an auspicious day. Dee picked well. On 15 January 1559, Elizabeth was crowned at Westminster Abbey. As she walked out, the Queen was greeted by a deafening cacophony: organs, fifes, trumpets, drums and bells all blasted out their joy. Elizabeth assumed the throne as a much-loved Princess and became a much-loved Queen. One of Britain’s greatest monarchs, she reigned from 1558 to 1603 and saw off many plots against her, as well as defeating the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth chose not to marry, as seen. As a result, we will never know what kind of mother she might have been.
History books say that Elizabeth’s death marked the end of the House of Tudor but her successor, James I, was in fact her second cousin. He could also trace his family back to Henry, the butler’s great-grandson, who refused to call himself Tudor. James was the great-grandson of Henry VIII’s rather forgotten sister, Margaret. How James I became a good father is one of the many mysteries of the long case history.
4
The Stuarts (1603–1714)
Another traumatic childhood
Mary, Queen of Scots was extremely striking, being very tall for a woman. Since her death, she has inspired many plays and novels, including a masterpiece by the German dramatist Schiller. That is not surprising as her life was full of sex, intrigue and murder.
When she was five years old, Mary was betrothed to Francis, son of the French King. In 1548 she was sent to live in Paris. Though Francis was much shorter than she was, they liked each other. When Mary was fifteen, they married. Francis inherited the throne, but he died in December 1560. Eight months after that, Mary returned to Edinburgh. At the age of seventeen, she was already a widow and a widow who liked and needed men.
In Scotland, Mary set about finding a new husband. She married her cousin Lord Darnley, who became the father of her only child, James. Darnley was very unstable and jealous, however. In 1565, when Mary was six months pregnant, he and some friends burst into her apartments and killed her secretary, an Italian called David Rizzio. Darnley believed the Italian was Mary’s lover, which he may well have been. While Rizzio was being murdered, Darnley placed a pistol against Mary’s belly; she claimed she was sure he was going to kill her too. Though she managed to calm him down, she never forgave him. She seems to have hated being without a lover and turned for consolation to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Together they plotted to kill her husband.
Darnley died dramatically. His house was destroyed in an explosion and his body was found in an orchard together with that of his valet. Different accounts claim he was smothered, stabbed or, in an unlikely coincidence, died of smallpox at the very moment his residence was being blown up. Bothwell was put on trial for the murder but not convicted; the fact that he was the Queen’s lover helped.
The suspicion that Mary was guilty of murder caused outrage. She was captured, imprisoned and forced to abdicate and flee south, leaving her baby son with the Earl of Moray. The Scottish nobles then forced her to abdicate in favour of the child. Mary expected to return to Scotland quickly to reclaim her throne, but made the mistake of throwing herself on the mercy of her cousin Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was only too aware of the dangers of having a Catholic female relative in the country who might plot against her and kept Mary a prisoner for nineteen years. Mary never saw her son again. James became an orphan boy, in effect.
The long case history makes it necessary to raise the question of willpower. Many psychologists have found it hard to accept that we are not conditioned or s
haped by our early experiences. The Jesuits claimed that, if they educated a child until he was seven years old, he was theirs for life. Freud insisted our childhood experiences affect us profoundly. The school known as behaviourists disagreed with him on many points – they had little interest in dreams or our inner life and instead concentrated on the objective study of behaviour – but they too insisted every human being was made or marred by what happened in their first years. If we are determined by our early experiences, individual willpower does not matter – I am what my experiences have made me. James I, like Elizabeth I and, much later, Prince Philip, should have become a neurotic catastrophe after a traumatic childhood. The truth would be very different.
James I became one of the most intellectual monarchs ever to sit on any throne. In 1604, he commissioned the famous translation of the Bible and took part in the debates surrounding this work as a perfect equal with bishops and professors of divinity. He also wrote four lively tracts – Daemonologie, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (he hated the stuff), Basilikon Doron and The True Laws of Free Monarchies, as well as two books on the art of poetry. The orthodox view has been that James defended the Divine Right of Kings and that his son, Charles I, provoked the Civil War because he clung stubbornly to his father’s ideas. This is something of a misconception because James’s ideas about kingship were more flexible than is usually admitted.
