Tudor Women Queens & Commoners

by Alison Plowden

  From the point of view of what she was hoping to achieve, her policy was a total failure. The fires which consumed the Protestant bishops Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, who, with Thomas Cranmer, were virtually the only sufferers of note, did indeed light such a candle in England as, with God's grace, never was put out. In the political climate of the time, Catholicism was becoming ineradicably associated with foreign oppression, and the Marian persecution sowed the seeds of an implacable fear and hatred of Rome and all its works. The Queen, naturally enough, could only see that the forces of darkness were more powerful even than she had feared, and together with Cardinal Pole, a high-minded, middle-aged scholar who understood as little as the Queen that politics was the art of the possible, she squandered the last of her strength in a useless struggle against the tide of history.

  The Cardinal's sympathetic support gave Mary a little comfort in her loneliness, but she pined for Philip, who sent only promises - promises which were repeatedly and cynically broken - in response to her anguished, self-abasing pleas that he should come back, not just because she loved and needed him but so that their marriage might be fruitful. The months since his departure lengthened into a year, and Mary could only rage and despair by turn as time passed and her stubborn, unquenchable hopes of bearing children were mocked by her husband's absence.

  Then, at the end of March 1557, Philip did come back. It was for a brief visit only, with only one objective - to drag England into the everlasting Franco-Spanish feud, just as the more thoughtful opponents of the Spanish marriage had always predicted he would. By July he was gone and, knowing perhaps that she would never see him again, Mary went with him to Dover, down to the water's edge. Philip was too busy now, with the renewal of the war and all the business of taking over from his father (the old Emperor was retiring to spend his last days in a monastery), to have time to spare for English affairs, but one piece of unfinished business continued to nag at the back of his mind. The Princess Elizabeth, now rising twenty-four, was still unmarried, still unfettered to the Spanish interest. It should have been a simple matter, and yet, to Philip's annoyance, the Tudor sisters were proving surprisingly difficult to manipulate. Elizabeth was saying flatly that she had no intention of marrying anyone, which of course was nonsense, but she was in too strong a position now to be easily coerced; and Mary, usually so amenable to her husband's commands, had turned stubborn. Philip wanted the Queen to recognize Elizabeth as her heir without further delay and, at the same time, to arrange her marriage to the Duke of Savoy, a reliable pensioner of the Imperial family. He sent his confessor, Francisco de Fresnada, to explain to Mary how essential this was for the safety of the realm, for the future of the restored religion (despite Elizabeth's dutiful attendance at Mass, no one believed in the sincerity of her 'conversion') and to prevent her from making some quite unsuitable choice of her own. But de Fresnada came up against the blank wall of Mary's bitter, obsessive jealousy. The Venetians heard that he found the Queen 'utterly averse to giving the Lady Elizabeth any hope of the succession, obstinately maintaining that she was neither her sister nor the daughter of the Queen's father, King Henry. Nor would she hear of favouring her, as she was born of an infamous woman, who had so greatly outraged the Queen her mother and herself.' Philip, to whom the old feuds of the Tudor family were a tiresome irrelevance, was profoundly irritated, but Mary, although miserable in the knowledge of his displeasure, refused to budge. A sad, sick woman, faced with the realization that her beloved husband was thinking only of a future in which she would have no share, she was being asked publicly to concede that Anne Boleyn and her daughter had won the battle. She would not do it, not even for Philip, not even for the Holy Catholic Church. Poor Mary, if only things had been different, how she would have enjoyed finding a husband for her sister, fussing endlessly over the details of her trousseau, giving her good advice and standing godmother to her first child. But while Mary Tudor had been called upon to bear many sorrows in the course of her life, many disappointments and humiliations, perhaps the one thing she could not have borne would have been to see Elizabeth make a successful marriage and have the babies Mary herself had craved with all the force of her starved and passionate nature.

  Philip had not abandoned his plans for the Princess's future, but it looked as if they would have to be shelved until he had a moment to push the business through in person. Somehow that moment never arrived. By the following summer the Queen was obviously failing, and by the autumn the news was sufficiently grave to make the King send Count de Feria over to England in a last effort to make her see sense. But when he arrived, on 9 November, it was to find that Mary had already suffered her last defeat. Three days earlier the Council had gathered at her bedside and spoken to her 'with a view to persuading her to make certain declarations in favour of the Lady Elizabeth concerning the succession', and Mary had given in, too tired to struggle any longer. A deputation had hurried down to Hatfield with the news, and the Queen was left in peace. She was unconscious for long periods during those last weeks, but once, when she drifted to the surface and saw her ladies in tears, she is said to have comforted them by telling them what good dreams she had, seeing many little children singing and playing before her. Mary had always loved little children, had revelled in weddings and christenings and new clothes, taking a passionate interest in those small domestic matters which filled the lives of ordinary women. She was herself a very ordinary woman at heart, made to be a busy, devoted wife and mother, happily ruling the small kingdom of the home. In the great world where she had been forced to live she could only do what she believed to be her duty, what she believed to be right. She had done her best, and it had not been good enough.

  The Queen died at six o'clock in the morning of 17 November 1558, and later that same day Reginald Pole, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, lying ill in his palace just across the river at Lambeth, also slipped away, thus closing a chapter with unusual tidiness. There was little pretence of mourning. The church bells pealed and bonfires illuminated the streets, while the Londoners 'did eat, drink and make merry for the new Queen Elizabeth'.

  But although everyone, or nearly everyone, rejoiced at the ending of an inept and unlucky reign, there were those who felt misgivings about the future. After their recent unfortunate experience of petticoat government, there were those who wondered rather uneasily if that uncompromising Scot, John Knox, could perhaps be right in his recent assertion that 'it was more than a monster in nature that a woman should reign and have empire above men'. The new Queen was young and healthy and, in the opinion of the great majority of her subjects, by far the most valuable service she could render them would be to marry without delay and bear sturdy sons to secure their own and their children's future. This, as the Speaker of the House of Commons was soon to assure her, 'was the single, the only, the all-comprehending prayer of all Englishmen'. The new Queen, however, showed no immediate disposition to gratify this very reasonable desire. On the contrary, she continued at every opportunity to reiterate her settled preference for the single life, much to the exasperation of the men around her who found all this coy talk about perpetual virginity thoroughly tiresome.

  In the society in which she lived, Elizabeth's outspoken aversion to the holy estate of matrimony and her stubborn refusal to accept her natural role of wife and mother seemed both incomprehensible and more than a little shocking. As she herself once remarked: 'There is a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married, or at all events that if she refrains from marriage she does so for some bad reason.' That Elizabeth Tudor's innermost reason for refraining from marriage was rooted in childhood traumas seems at least a plausible theory. Had not her father killed her mother and her mother's cousin for causes perhaps only dimly understood and yet demonstrably connected with sexual guilt? It would surely not be surprising if a conviction that physical love, shame and violent death were inextricably connected had formed in her subconscious mind by the time she was eight years old - a convic
tion which could only have been strengthened by her own adolescent experience at the hands of Thomas Seymour. On a less speculative level, Elizabeth had seen marriage bring unhappiness and death to her good friend Katherine Parr and had watched the degrading misery of unrequited love ravage her sister, another reigning queen. Of one thing she could be certain - that to surrender to physical passion, to give herself to a man, to any man, would diminish if not destroy her power both as a woman and as a queen, and Elizabeth lived and throve on the exercise of power. Within a month of her accession it was, noted that she seemed 'incomparably more feared than her sister, and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did'.

  Elizabeth was, of course, a phenomenon by the standards of any age. 'Her intellect and understanding are wonderful,' wrote the Venetian ambassador in the year before she came to the throne, and he went on to praise her ability as a linguist. Latin, still the universal language of diplomacy and culture, came as naturally to her as breathing. Her Italian was fluent, and she had 'no slight knowledge of Greek'. In the midst of all her other preoccupations, the Queen kept up her studies, reading with her old tutor Roger Ascham, who said of her during the early sixties: 'L believe that, besides her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week.' Elizabeth maintained this habit of daily study throughout her life, and her capacity for sheer concentrated hard work was always immense.

  No one who ever had anything to do with her could doubt the quality of her trained and formidable intelligence, but from the first weeks of her reign she also demonstrated that she possessed the precious attribute of personal magnetism. 'If ever any person had either the gift or the style to win the hearts of people, it was this Queen,' wrote the historian John Hayward, and Elizabeth's continuing love-affair with her subjects remains one of the wonders of the age. It was certainly one of her greatest sources of strength.

  She was a born ruler and above all a born politician, shrewd, cautious and subtle. In circumstances where Mary had floundered unhappily, Elizabeth moved sure-footed and confident. Instead of meekly accepting her sex as an inescapable infirmity in a male-dominated world, she used it brilliantly and deliberately as a weapon in her life-long battle to avoid domination. Her private resolve to stay single did not for a moment prevent her from zestfully exploiting the advantages attached to being 'the best match in her parish', and for twenty years the Queen's various marriage projects provided her with an invaluable card in the diplomatic poker game. Her subjects would, of course, have preferred her to marry an Englishman but, fortunately for Elizabeth, there was no Englishman available of sufficiently high rank to make him acceptable to his peers. If Edward Courtenay had been still alive, even she might have found it impossible to resist the pressure which would have been brought to bear on her, but Edward Courtenay had died of fever in 1556, and there was no one else. Abroad, virtually every suitable prince was a Catholic, and the Queen at least knew very well that to attempt to introduce another Catholic consort into what had once more become a Protestant country would be asking for trouble of the most lurid kind - especially as the ideological warfare between the two creeds grew fiercer. But since nobody, not even those closest to her, could ever be quite certain what the Queen meant to do (the Queen, always a consummate actress, took care that they should not), negotiations with foreign powers were conducted with every appearance of serious intent and prolonged until they had served their purpose.

  While she enjoyed being sought after as much as the next woman, the Queen's famous courtships were political ploys first and last. She found her friends nearer home. Elizabeth was no sexual deviant, at any rate not in any obvious sense. She never lost her eye for an attractive man and enjoyed male company, so long as it was on her own terms. Her obvious preference for the company of Robert Dudley was a cause of acute concern in the early years of the reign, and many people were seriously worried that the Queen might be wasting her time and spoiling her chances by having an affair with a married man. When Robert's wife died in mysterious circumstances, fear that she meant to throw herself away in a demeaning and disastrous marriage reached panic proportions in some quarters.

  I wish I were either dead or hence [wrote Nicholas Throckmorton, English ambassador in Paris], that I might not hear the dishonourable and naughty reports that are made of the Queen.... One laugheth at us, another threateneth, another revileth the Queen. Some let not to say: What religion is this that a subject shall kill his wife and the Prince not only bear withal but marry with him? If these slanderous bruits be not slaked, or if they prove true, our reputation is gone forever, war follows and utter subversion of the Queen and country.

  There was one man prepared to disregard gossip and slander - a man prepared to disregard everything but the one urgent and fundamental reason for the Queen's marriage. Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, like most of his contemporaries, detested Robert Dudley, but he wrote to Secretary of State William Cecil in the month following Amye Dudley's death: 'I wish not her Majesty to linger this matter of so great importance but to choose speedily; and therein to follow so much her own affection as by the looking upon him whom she should choose, her whole being may be moved by desire; which shall be the readiest way, with the help of God, to bring us a blessed Prince.' If the Queen really loved and desired Robert Dudley, then Sussex, for his part, would be ready to sink his prejudices and love, honour and serve his enemy to the end. But the Earl found no supporters in this humane and generous attitude. Not even for the sake of a blessed prince would the nation stomach a wife-murderer, the upstart son of a notorious traitor, as their king, and pretty well everyone with an opinion on the subject agreed with Nicholas Throckmorton that the result of a Tudor-Dudley marriage would be 'the Queen our Sovereign discredited, condemned and neglected; our country ruined, undone and made prey'.

  Robert was publicly exonerated by a coroner's jury, which returned a verdict of misadventure on the unhappy Amye, and he returned to his usual place at the Queen's side. But she did not marry him. Although he was to remain her constant companion until his death twenty-eight years later, Elizabeth always insisted that they were 'just good friends', and no evidence to the contrary has ever been produced. Most probably she was speaking the literal truth. In Robert Dudley she had a good-looking, amusing, sophisticated escort, an old friend who already shared memories with her, an ideal crony now to share her leisure moments. He was, moreover, no mere lapdog but a man of initiative, able and talented, who could hold his own in any company. Yet he was still her creation, dependent in the last resort on her favour. Robert may well have been the only man Elizabeth ever loved, perhaps the only man she ever did seriously consider marrying; but, apart from the obvious political imprudence of such a step, in the end it always came back to one thing, to the basic principle which governed Elizabeth's life: T will have here but one mistress and no master.'

  As time passed, the English people gradually became accustomed to the novel idea of a virgin Queen - of a Queen married to her kingdom and belonging to it alone - and most people found they preferred it that way, or would have done if only it had not been for a perpetual nagging worry about the future. No one who thought about the matter at all could fail to be aware that everything they most valued, their newly-established Protestant church, their freedom from foreign interference, the country's growing prosperity and prestige, all depended quite literally on the fragile thread of one woman's life. Fortunately for everyone's peace of mind, Elizabeth normally enjoyed excellent health but not even she was immune from the accidents of fate. At Hampton Court in the autumn of 1562 she succumbed to a virulent strain of smallpox and very nearly died. Not surprisingly the result was a renewed onslaught by a badly frightened Parliament beseeching the Queen to marry, or at least to name her successor.

  Out of the dozen or so persons of royal descent who had survived into the 1560s, there were really only two with serio
us claims to the position of heir presumptive - one was Lady Katherine Grey, sister of the tragic Jane, and the other was Mary, Queen of Scots. Katherine Grey might have commanded quite an influential body of support - she was, after all, a staunch Protestant and an Englishwoman born - but she had unfortunately turned out to be a common-place and foolish young woman and had ruined herself with the Queen by making a clandestine marriage, only discovered when her pregnancy could no longer be concealed. Elizabeth had never thought much of Lady Katherine, and now, King Henry's Will regardless, it was clear that her chances of recognition were nil.

  Margaret Douglas, child of Queen Margaret Tudor's marriage to the Earl of Angus, who had married into a collateral branch of the Stuart family and borne two sons - Henry, Lord Darnley and Charles Stuart - was favoured by some English Catholics who regarded her as 'devout and sensible'. According to the Spanish ambassador, her claims had been canvassed during that terrifying day when Elizabeth was thought to be dying of smallpox. But Margaret, an indefatigably ambitious mama, who was twice to incur the Queen's severe displeasure for her match-making activities, was never really a serious contender in the succession stakes. Her niece, the Queen of Scots, had an undeniably superior hereditary right, and in private conversation Elizabeth was perfectly prepared to concede that she regarded her Scottish cousin as her 'next kinswoman' and natural heir. She would not, however, make that concession official. She knew, none better, that the heir to the throne inevitably became a focal point for discontent, and in this case the danger would be of a special kind. There remained in England a minority of committed Catholics who could honestly look on Mary Stuart not merely as the rightful heir but as the rightful Queen, ousted by a bastard and heretical usurper. To recognize her would, therefore, not only alarm and infuriate many loyal Protestants but give the Catholics new hope and even perhaps tempt some among them to hasten the processes of nature. In any case, nothing would budge Elizabeth from her absolute determination never to live in the shadow of her successor, never to risk being 'buried alive' as her sister had been. She was well aware of the other risk she was taking in a society where 'upon the death of princes the law dieth', but her instinct was still to do nothing, to wait and see if the problem would in time resolve itself and, in the meantime, to go on gambling on her own survival. And Elizabeth Tudor, a woman isolated in a world of men, was always ready to back her instinct and her judgement, against every masculine argument of prudence, expediency and plain common sense.