Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  To placate the zealously Catholic queen, Elizabeth adopted a submissive posture and requested instruction in her sister’s faith so that she “might know if her conscience would allow her to be persuaded.” Mary was at first delighted by Elizabeth’s apparent willingness to convert, but soon she saw how halfhearted it really was. Before her first mass, Elizabeth complained loudly all the way to church that her stomach ached, Renard reported, “wearing a suffering air.”

  Mary was furious that her sister would prevaricate on a matter as essential as faith, and grew even more hardened in her mistrust. The queen confided to Renard “that it would burden her conscience too heavily to allow Elizabeth to succeed [her on the throne], for she only went to mass out of hypocrisy, she had not a single servant or maid of honor who was not a heretic, she talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to all their evil designs, and it would be a disgrace to the kingdom to allow a bastard to succeed.”

  Given her sister’s hostility, Elizabeth requested permission to leave court and retire to the country. While she was away, a massive rebellion broke out in opposition to the queen’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain. London was nearly taken over before the rebels were finally subdued. How much Elizabeth knew about the plot to place her on the throne remains a mystery, but as far as Mary was concerned, she was the prime mover. The queen ordered her sister back to London. Elizabeth refused, claiming she was too ill to travel. This only served to heighten Mary’s suspicions, and Elizabeth was practically dragged back. Swollen and pale, she arrived in London on February 22, 1554, less than two weeks after the execution of her cousin Lady Jane Grey. “It was Renard’s fervent hope,” wrote biographer Anne Somerset, “that Elizabeth would shortly suffer the same fate.”

  Despite the intensive interrogations of the uprising’s leaders, no evidence against Elizabeth emerged. Still, she was ordered to the Tower as the investigation continued. The queen was convinced of her sister’s culpability in the attempted coup and determined to prove it. Elizabeth’s character, Mary told Renard, “was just what she had always believed it to be.”

  Before she was escorted away to the place where her mother had met her doom, Princess Elizabeth begged leave to write her sister, permission for which was reluctantly given by the two peers charged with her removal. It was a letter upon which Elizabeth was certain her life depended. In it, she swore to the queen that she had “never practiced, counseled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person in any way, or dangerous to the state by any means. And therefore I humbly beseech your Majesty to let me answer afore yourself.”

  Two specific allegations had been laid against Elizabeth: that she had corresponded with one of the rebel leaders, Thomas Wyatt, and also with the king of France. Both charges she hotly denied. “As for the traitor Wyatt,” Elizabeth declared, “he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him. And as for the copy of my letter sent to the French King, I pray God confound me eternally if ever I sent him word, message, token or letter, by any means. And this truth I will stand in till my death.”

  Elizabeth appealed to Mary to remember her promise—delivered as Elizabeth prepared to remove herself to the country—that she would never condemn her “without answer and due proof, which it seems that I now am.” And she reminded the queen of a situation with which they were both very familiar—that of the Seymour brothers and their lethal conflict during the reign of Edward VI.

  “I have heard of many in my time cast away for want of coming to the presence of their Prince,” Elizabeth wrote, “and in late days I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered [allowed] to speak with him he had never suffered; but persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived, and that made him give consent to his death.”

  As historian David Starkey noted in his study of Elizabeth’s struggle, Simon Renard was persuading Mary of the threat her sister posed the same way Somerset had been turned against his brother. Indeed, Renard had just written to Charles V: “If [the council] do not punish [Elizabeth] now that the occasion offers, the queen will never be secure.”

  Elizabeth was quick to minimize the Seymour parallels. “Though these persons are not to be compared to your Majesty,” she wrote, “yet I pray to God the like evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other, and all for that they have heard false report, and the truth not known.”

  Queen Mary was utterly unmoved by her sister’s plea. Her throne, indeed her very life, had been threatened by the rebellion, and now her hatred for Elizabeth was implacable. She refused to see her sister and was angered that the time given to Elizabeth to write her letter had delayed her imprisonment.

  On March 18, 1544, in the midst of a drenching rain, Elizabeth Tudor was conveyed by boat to the Tower. Upon arriving, she refused to disembark, glaring defiantly at those who would dare force her. Then suddenly she stood, made her way to the steps leading into the forbidding complex, and declared dramatically, “Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs.” With that, she plopped down on the cold, wet flagstone and refused to budge. “It is better sitting here than in a worse place,” she answered in response to the pleas for her to come out of the rain. When the affecting scene reduced one of her servants to tears, Elizabeth asserted fiercely that she sat not out of fear or despair but in protest of the injustice she endured. The princess proclaimed that “she knew her truth to be such that no man would have cause to weep for her.” She then rose and swept inside—her Tudor pride intact.

  For nearly seven weeks Elizabeth lingered within the Tower walls, constantly in fear that any minute she would be taken away and beheaded. Yet despite her most earnest wishes, Mary could find no way to legally kill her sister. The council and judges were not prepared to take such a drastic step. Furthermore, no evidence against Elizabeth was uncovered, and Wyatt even exonerated her on the scaffold before his execution.

  Yet while there was no reason to keep Elizabeth in the Tower, Mary was not willing to let her go. Instead, she would be kept under house arrest at a crumbling manor the queen owned in Woodstock, near Oxford. Sir Henry Bedingfield, who had been placed in charge of the princess, arrived to escort her there, accompanied by one hundred soldiers. The strength of this force led Elizabeth to believe that the time had come for her to die. Anxiously she asked “whether the Lady Jane [Grey’s] scaffold were taken away or no?” The response that she was merely being moved to Woodstock did little to soothe the young woman’s worry. There was still the fear of assassination.

  After leaving the terrors of the Tower, Elizabeth was warmly welcomed by the common people on her way to Woodstock. The princess had always been held in high regard, now all the more so for having survived the persecution of her increasingly unpopular sister. Large crowds gathered in London to wish her well on her journey, while enthusiastic villagers along the route tossed fragrant herbs and other goods into her litter, shouting, “God save Your Grace!” as she passed.

  But once she arrived at Woodstock, the popular acclaim Elizabeth enjoyed on the way was replaced by the maddening restrictions of her home confinement. Far from being the assassin she had feared, Bedingfield was instead a rigid bureaucrat fixated on following Mary’s instructions precisely. In the name of the queen, he made Elizabeth’s life hell. She was kept isolated from the outside world, with very little personal freedom—even to possess the Bible of her choice.

  In exasperation, Elizabeth wrote a howling letter of protest to her sister. Gone was the humble obsequiousness she had shown the queen in her plea before being remanded to the Tower. Now she had the temerity to address Mary throughout as “You,” a gross breach of etiquette, and insisted upon reaffirming her innocence. The queen was not pleased. She reiterated the grounds for her suspicions about Elizabeth and reminded her sister that she had been treated with “more clemency and favour … than [those] in like matters hath
been accustomed.” Mary then stated that in the future she did not wish to be “molested by such her disguise and colourable letters.”

  Bedingfield took his cue from the queen and made Elizabeth’s life even more miserable. She would no longer be allowed to write the council, a ban, Elizabeth insisted, that was contrary to her basic rights and that left her “in worse case than the worst prisoner in Newgate.” In such a state, she continued, “I must needs continue this life without all hope worldly, wholly resting to the truth of my cause.”

  Redemption for Elizabeth came from the unlikeliest of sources: Philip of Spain, the same king who would one day launch the Spanish Armada against her. His protection was based solely on self-interest, for if his wife, Mary, should die childless, he would need Elizabeth as an ally. With that in mind, Philip encouraged the queen to bring her sister to court and treat her gently. Mary agreed, but most reluctantly. Her ill feelings had not abated at all.

  Elizabeth waited for three weeks at Hampton Court before Mary finally deigned to meet with her. The queen had hoped that the suspense and anxiety leading up to the interview would make Elizabeth crack, but the Tudor princess was made of sterner stuff than that. She bowed humbly before her sister, whom she had not seen in a year, but conceded nothing. Mary was livid. “You will not confess your offence but stand stoutly in your truth,” she growled in her deep, almost manly voice. “I pray God it may so fall out.”

  The rest of the interview went no better, with Mary insisting that Elizabeth would proclaim to the world that she had been unjustly punished. “I must not say so, to you,” Elizabeth answered.

  “Why then, belike you will to others,” Mary retorted.

  “No,” said Elizabeth, “I have borne the burden and must bear it. I humbly beseech Your Majesty to have a good opinion of me, and to think me to be your true subject, not only from the beginning hitherto, but forever, as long as life lasteth.”

  Far from satisfied, Mary dismissed her sister “with very few comfortable words.” Elizabeth remained at court, isolated, while the drama of the queen’s false pregnancy played out. Then she was permitted to retire to her childhood home at Hatfield.

  Though the queen seethed over her inability to move against Elizabeth, she remained absolutely determined that Anne Boleyn’s daughter would never succeed her. It would be an abomination, wrote the Venetian ambassador, for Mary “to see the illegitimate child of a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet on the point of inheriting the throne with better fortune than herself, whose descent is rightful, legitimate and legal.”

  Yet as much as the queen chafed at the prospect of Elizabeth’s one day wearing the crown, the inevitability of it became increasingly apparent. Mary proved barren and, in the wake of her fanatical persecution of Protestants, deeply unpopular. Almost as a coda to her disastrous five-year reign, Calais was lost in an ill-advised war. Sick, tired, and in despair, Mary I died quietly on November 17, 1558.

  When the news of her sister’s demise arrived at Hatfield, Elizabeth fell to her knees. “This is the doing of the Lord,” she gasped, “and it is marvelous in our eyes.” The Elizabethan age had begun.

  * Margaret Tudor’s daughter by her second husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus (see Tudor family tree, this page).

  6

  Elizabeth I (1558–1603): A Clash of Queens

  The poor foolish woman will not desist until she loses her head.

  —CHARLES IX OF FRANCE

  The reign of Elizabeth I was a triumph, a golden age in which the last Tudor monarch pursued policies of moderation and maintained relative peace within her kingdom. However, the queen’s own tranquility was shattered by her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, who arrived in England as a fugitive from her own subjects and spent the next two decades as virtual prisoner there—all the while plotting against Elizabeth’s life.

  She may have been Henry VIII’s daughter—“the lion’s cub,” as she called herself—but she was Anne Boleyn’s as well. And that made Queen Elizabeth I a bastard in the minds of Europe’s Catholic powers, who refused to recognize the validity of the late king’s second marriage. Mary, Queen of Scots, was among those monarchs who rejected her cousin Elizabeth’s right to rule, claiming the English crown for herself as Henry VIII’s nearest relative.* Of course such blatant designs on her throne were bound to arouse the wrath of Elizabeth, who, after years of danger and deprivation, held her sovereignty most dear. The result was an escalating conflict between the two queens that would have in the end devastating consequences for both of them.

  By the time Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, when she was twenty-five, her cousin and future rival, Mary Stuart, had been queen of Scotland for nearly sixteen years—her entire life, really, since she inherited her father James V’s crown when she was just six days old. The young monarch had spent little time in her own kingdom, however, having been sent to France as a child of five to be raised there as the future bride of Henry II’s son, the dauphin Francis, whom she wed when she was fifteen. A year after her marriage, Mary became queen consort of France when her father-in-law was killed in a freak jousting accident and her husband succeeded him as Francis II.

  It was while in France that Mary began to aggressively assert her claim to the English crown—a pretension encouraged first by Henry II and then by her maternal uncles from the powerful, fanatically Catholic House of Guise, who controlled Francis II. She had the audacity to incorporate the royal arms of England into her own coat of arms, which Elizabeth found galling enough. But even more egregious was Mary’s refusal to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, which, among other provisions, called for the Scottish queen to relinquish her claim to the English throne and to acknowledge Elizabeth’s right to it.†

  In retaliation for her younger cousin’s impudence, Elizabeth refused Mary’s request for safe passage through England as she prepared to return to her native kingdom after the untimely death of Francis II in 1560.‡ It was an intemperate response to what should have been a basic courtesy, and it reflected poorly on the English queen. Mary, in an interview with England’s ambassador to France, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, made the most of Elizabeth’s rudeness. “It will be thought very strange amongst all princes and countries that she should first animate my subjects against me,” Mary scolded, “and now being a widow to impeach me going into my own country.”

  The Queen of Scots then concluded the interview with a melodramatic declaration: “I trust the wind will be so favorable that I shall not need to come on the coast of England … for if I do then … the Queen your mistress shall have me in her hands to do her will of me and if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end, she may do her pleasure and make sacrifice of me.”

  Elizabeth, however, was eager to put the unpleasantness of the safe-passage debacle behind her and extend her hand to her cousin and fellow sovereign. They were now neighbors, after all, and peace between them was far preferable to discord. Accordingly, Elizabeth wrote to Mary, asking her to accept her friendship and “bury all unkindness.” Past disagreement would be forgotten, she assured her, and the queens would “remain good friends and sisters,” since “you shall see we require nothing but justice, honor and reason.”

  Mary seemed responsive to Elizabeth’s overtures, but there remained that pesky Treaty of Edinburgh lurking as a barrier to friendship. The Queen of Scots still refused to ratify it unless it was modified to at least designate her as Elizabeth’s heir. That, however, was not something the English queen was prepared to do. In fact, the idea of naming her successor was abhorrent to her. She was well aware from her own experience as her sister’s heir how rebels and malcontents rallied in her name.

  “I know the inconstancy of the people of England,” Elizabeth told Mary’s secretary of state William Maitland, “how they ever mislike the present government, and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.”

  Mary’s Catholic faith, as well as her close proximity, would make her particularly dangerous as the de
signated heir to the Protestant Elizabeth. Therefore, the English queen remained adamant that “the succession of the crown is a matter I will not mell [meddle] in.”

  Elizabeth believed that a face-to-face meeting with Mary would get them beyond the impasse over the succession issue. The Queen of Scots was delighted by the idea. Not only was she intensely curious about her cousin (as Elizabeth was about Mary), but she was convinced that her celebrated charm would win over the English queen as it had so many others.

  William Maitland was not so sure. According to the English ambassador in Scotland, Thomas Randolph, Maitland feared his young queen would be out of her depth in any negotiations with the wily Elizabeth, for “he finds no such maturity of judgment and ripeness of experience in high matters in his mistress, as in the Queen’s Majesty, in whom both nature and time have wrought much more than in many of greater years.”

  Despite Maitland’s reservations, Mary was ecstatic over the prospect of seeing Elizabeth in person. “I see my sovereign so transported with affection, that she respects nothing so she may meet with her cousin,” Maitland reported ruefully, “and needs no persuasion, but is a great deal more earnestly bent on it than her counselors dare advise her.”

  Elizabeth’s counselors were no more enthusiastic about a meeting than Mary’s were. France was on the brink of a religious civil war prompted by the aggression of Mary’s ultra-Catholic uncle (and Elizabeth’s sworn enemy), the Duke of Guise, toward the nation’s Protestant or Huguenot minority, and it was felt that the queen’s attention should be focused on helping her fellow religious across the Channel. Elizabeth disagreed. Unless the situation in France broke down irretrievably, she would meet her cousin as planned.