by Helen Castor
In a young life that had already had its share of danger, this was a moment of overwhelming terror. And this time her physical collapse was real. She was brought from Ashridge to London, a journey of thirty miles that, in her weakened and vulnerable state, took eleven days to complete. It was reported that she was refusing to eat. All the same, when she arrived in the capital she had the curtains of her litter thrown back so that the Londoners could see her – not pregnant, as scurrilous rumour had it, but pale-faced, dressed in virginal white, with the proud composure that befitted Henry VIII’s daughter. She was held under guard at the palace of Whitehall while the queen’s councillors established that Wyatt had hoped to place Elizabeth on the throne, perhaps married to Courtenay, and that Elizabeth had known something of his plans, even if she had taken care not to respond in writing or with any other kind of irrefutable self-incrimination. Caught between the threats to her position under her sister’s regime and the appalling risks of rebellion, Elizabeth had hoped, once again, to wait on events before showing her hand. Instead, the net was tightening around her.
By 17 March, Mary had decided that Elizabeth should be taken to the Tower. In horror, Elizabeth asked for time to write to her sister, begging for a personal audience. Surely if they met face to face, she could convince Mary of the innocence she protested so strenuously? ‘I have heard in my time of many cast away for want of coming to their prince’, she wrote. If she was thinking of her mother’s fate, she knew better than to mention it. The example she offered was more recent, that of Thomas Seymour and his brother Somerset, the last time she herself had been under suspicion: ‘in late days I heard my lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him, he had never suffered. But the persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if [his brother] lived, and that made him give his consent to his death.’ She had never received a letter from the rebel Wyatt, she declared, nor corresponded – as she was suspected of doing – with England’s enemy, the King of France, ‘and to this my truth I will stand in to my death’. She filled the rest of the page with diagonal lines, to prevent the addition of forged material once the letter left her hands, before adding one last sentence: ‘I humbly crave but only one word of answer from yourself.’11
It did not come. The time the letter had taken to write bought Elizabeth one more night outside the Tower’s walls, but the next morning she was escorted through its massive gates to the same royal apartments where her mother had spent the night before her coronation and her last days before her death. To the political danger in which Elizabeth stood, therefore, was added intense psychological pressure, which may not have been incidental to her sister’s plans. Elizabeth’s position as her next heir and greatest rival had reanimated Mary’s old loathing of her heresy, bastardy and ‘characteristics in which she resembled her mother’, the Spanish ambassador had reported months earlier; ‘and as her mother had caused great trouble in the kingdom, the queen feared that Elizabeth might do the same’.12
As her days in the Tower became weeks, and weeks became a month and then more, Elizabeth could resist only by enduring. Her health was not good and she never found sleep easy, but – even when confronted by members of Mary’s council, come to question her on formal charges of involvement in Wyatt’s rebellion – she kept a haughty composure, relying on the same defence that had brought her through the Seymour affair. She was innocent of conspiracy. If the queen and the council believed otherwise, they must prove it. She could not deny that, before the revolt, she had been planning to move from Ashridge to her castle at Donnington in Berkshire, and circumstantial evidence suggested plans had been in train to muster men and arms there. But, as she had told Somerset five years earlier, she was staking out her ground ‘no more than I trust the truth shall try’.13 And the truth was that, as the Spanish ambassador admitted through gritted teeth on 17 April, ‘there is not sufficient evidence to condemn Elizabeth’.14
Mary remained utterly unconvinced by her sister’s professions of loyalty, but was left struggling with the conundrum of what to do with her. Elizabeth had popular support, not just because she looked so much her father’s daughter (to those Englishmen and women who had had the chance to see her), but because she represented his religious legacy. Few of England’s people had wholeheartedly adopted Edward’s hot Protestantism, and few – it was now becoming clear – still clung wholeheartedly to Rome. Elizabeth attended Mass because her sister required it but, as Mary fretted, many of her allies and servants were ‘heretics’, and she herself could never be mistaken for a devoted adherent of papal authority. And the queen’s difficulty was that support for Elizabeth extended to the Privy Council, to those of Mary’s advisers who had served her father and brother and whose obedience to her own religious reforms was founded in realpolitik rather than faith. In the circumstances, Elizabeth could not be destroyed, either politically or personally – even supposing Mary felt able to countenance the elimination of her own sister – without risking more turmoil than she was already causing.
By the middle of May, therefore, the decision was taken to move Elizabeth from the Tower to house arrest at the palace of Woodstock in Oxfordshire. There, over the course of the next year, she played a game of cat and mouse with her hapless gaoler, Sir Henry Bedingfield. Woodstock was not physically secure enough to keep her cut off from all contact with the outside world, even had the household not been staffed (on the instructions of Mary’s cash-strapped administration) with Elizabeth’s own attendants and paid for with her own money. As it was, Bedingfield was no match for his prisoner, who began once again to flex her political muscles. She continued to protest her innocence, heaping pressure upon Bedingfield and lobbying the divided council, while her servants kept open clandestine channels of communication with sympathizers and supporters. All the same, her position remained acutely precarious. As she wrote during those dragging months, scratching the words with a diamond into a windowpane:
Much suspected [of] me,
Nothing proved can be.
Quoth Elizabeth, the prisoner15
Meanwhile, Mary hoped that her sister would soon become a political irrelevance. In July 1554, Philip of Spain arrived in England to become Mary’s husband and England’s king (albeit in the unprecedented and confusing form of a king consort). On 28 November, the queen’s first pregnancy was announced, on the same day as papal authority was formally restored in her kingdom. Mary’s new confidence in the future softened her hostility to Elizabeth, who was summoned from Woodstock to court in April 1555. In May, the sisters met for the first time in a year. It was a tense stand-off, Elizabeth – as always – studiedly refusing to admit any kind of guilt, and Mary frustrated by her immovable resistance.
But already, subtly, the balance of power between them was beginning to shift. By the time they met, the expected delivery of the queen’s child was overdue. As the weeks went on, it became clear that her ‘pregnancy’ was not real, but instead some unhappy combination of psychosomatic and pathological symptoms. And if thirty-nine-year-old Mary were not, after all, to bear a child, then Elizabeth took on a vital new importance for the queen’s husband. Philip wanted a Catholic England; but, even more than that, he wanted England kept out of the arms of France, with whom his father’s Habsburg Empire was at war. The next Catholic heir to his wife’s throne was the young Mary, Queen of Scots, currently living at the French court as the intended bride of the dauphin. If support for the bastard heretic Elizabeth as England’s next queen was what it took to prevent the kingdom being subsumed into a new French empire, then that was a price Philip was willing to pay.
Elizabeth remained at court while her sister faced the devastating humiliation and double loss of her failure to give birth and her husband’s departure to attend to his responsibilities on the continent. Then in October the queen gave permission at last for Elizabeth to return to her home at Hatfield. With Kate Ashley and Thomas Parry back at her side, she resumed her
studies with Roger Ascham. It was to all appearances a virtuous and blameless life, which allowed Elizabeth to occupy a still centre of deniability while dangerous intrigue continued to swirl around her. Another conspiracy in 1556, intended like Wyatt’s to depose Mary in favour of Elizabeth and Courtenay, was traced deep into Elizabeth’s household – so deep that Kate Ashley, among others, was again arrested and interrogated in the Tower. But, on Philip’s instructions, Mary professed to believe that her sister knew nothing of the would-be rebels’ plans.
By 1558 nothing was certain. Nothing, after all, was ever certain; but the dawning realization that Mary would never give birth to an heir was gradually transforming Elizabeth’s position. Over five threatening years, she had played a weak hand with skill and impressive sang-froid. Now, for the first time in her political life, she held aces. Intense pressures remained. Philip assumed she would repay his support by marrying his nominee, the Duke of Savoy, thereby maintaining England within the Habsburg sphere of influence even should his wife die. Elizabeth’s refusal infuriated both Philip and Mary, despite the fact that the queen did not share her husband’s willingness to accept that Anne Boleyn’s bastard should one day inherit her throne. Mary could only hope that she herself would live long enough to build a Catholic England within which Elizabeth’s freedom of future action could be constrained. Elizabeth, in turn, once again had to balance endurance with self-protection, and it is clear that by the autumn of 1558 she was surreptitiously courting and retaining support, both political and military, throughout the country.
She was doing so because the critical moment was approaching. The queen’s health was failing. In early November, Mary at last bowed to the inevitable, sending to Hatfield to acknowledge Elizabeth as her heir, and asking her sister to maintain the Catholic faith in England. But no monarch could control a kingdom from beyond the grave. Power was already slipping from Mary’s fading grasp, and Elizabeth, in the end, had no need of the armed forces she had readied to assert her right to the crown. When the queen died on 17 November, the road north from London was already busy with great men seeking to offer their service to her successor.
Elizabeth was the last survivor of her immediate family and of the glorious dynasty her father had hoped to found. She was a twenty-five-year-old unmarried woman in a world that assumed power was male. She was a Protestant – of what kind was not yet clear – in a country and a continent beset by religious division. And now she was Queen of England.
2
‘Time hath brought me hither’
1558–1570
On Saturday 14 January 1559, Elizabeth emerged from the royal apartments in the Tower of London. An open litter decked in yellow cloth of gold was waiting, but before she stepped into it she raised her eyes to the heavens and spoke, in a voice strong enough for the watching crowd to hear:
O Lord, almighty and everlasting God, I give thee most hearty thanks that thou hast been so merciful unto me as to spare me to behold this joyful day. And I acknowledge that thou hast dealt as wonderfully and as mercifully with me as thou didst with thy true and faithful servant Daniel, thy prophet, whom thou deliveredst out of the den from the cruelty of the greedy and raging lions. Even so was I overwhelmed and only by thee delivered.1
This – as always with Elizabeth – was rhetoric and reality fused into a performance that was at once immediately legible and utterly unreadable. Politically, it was flawlessly pitched: calling attention to her escape from danger and ascribing her triumph to God both enacted the proper humility of a monarch whose sovereignty was divinely ordained, and positioned Elizabeth herself, like the prophet Daniel, as an agent of God’s will. Was it also heartfelt? Her mother had known the Tower first as queen, then as prisoner, and had lost her life within its walls. Elizabeth too had been imprisoned there, and had feared the same end. Now, she was queen – and, unlike her mother, a queen whose power was her own. It seems likely that the emotion was real, but the public mask she had developed over the two decades since Anne’s death allowed the private Elizabeth to hide in plain sight. There were more impromptu theatrics as she was carried from the Tower to Westminster through the streets of the city, where a series of pageants celebrated the new queen and the peace and prosperity her rule would bring. Told that one of them represented Time, Elizabeth paused. ‘Time’, she said. ‘Time hath brought me hither.’2
The following day – Sunday 15 January, a propitious date chosen by the astrologer John Dee – Elizabeth was anointed and crowned, a vision in gold and silver, in Westminster Abbey. The cheers were loud and the smiles broad, including that of the new queen herself (so much so that the Venetian ambassador commented disapprovingly on her lack of decorum). But, for all the palpable optimism, the challenges she faced were daunting. After a decade of almost continuous religious revolution – in which the pendulum had swung from evangelical Protestantism to restored Roman Catholicism, enforced with the burning of heretic flesh – England stood in need of the impossible: a religious settlement that would unite its people in peaceful service to God and their sovereign. And then there was the troubling fact that their sovereign was a woman wearing a crown made for a man. England had had five years to acclimatize to that particular test: at Mary’s funeral, for the first (and only) time in the kingdom’s history, the heralds cried, ‘The queen is dead; long live the queen!’3 But, as London’s coronation pageants made clear, the experience of those five years had not been a happy one. Now the task of squaring the circle was Elizabeth’s: most urgently, how to give England an heir – the security of an undisputed legitimate succession – without allowing her choice of husband to compromise her own power or her kingdom’s autonomy.
These were challenges no monarch could tackle alone, and Elizabeth – whose gift for sharp-eyed observation made her an astute judge of the talents of those around her – had begun to assemble her administration within hours of Mary’s death. The key appointment was her Principal Secretary: thirty-eight-year-old William Cecil, a politically experienced, pragmatic, hardworking and unshowily brilliant man whom she had known for at least ten years through her tutor Roger Ascham and her cofferer, Cecil’s kinsman Thomas Parry. Cecil was already with Elizabeth at Hatfield when her sister died. Three days later, at the command of the new queen, he was at the helm of a new, streamlined Privy Council which included politique members of Mary’s government while dispensing with the service of diehard Catholics, and recruiting Protestants who had been excluded or exiled under the old regime. Meanwhile, the queen’s domestic establishment – a key component of the political architecture because of its immediate proximity to her person – was also beginning to take shape. As well as being appointed a privy councillor, the loyal Parry became Controller of the new royal Household. Kate Ashley was named Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber. And as Master of the Horse – the man responsible for the transport of queen and court, who would therefore be at Elizabeth’s side whenever she travelled, hunted or rode out in public – she chose Robert Dudley, son of the dead Duke of Northumberland, who had been a prisoner in the Tower at the same time as Elizabeth herself.
The new queen made clear what she required from her closest advisers in the few words she addressed to Cecil when his appointment was formally endorsed at Hatfield on 20 November 1558. ‘This judgement I have of you: that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best, and if you shall know anything necessary to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only.’4 Integrity; duty; trust. Unlike her father, Elizabeth knew the value of counsel that told her what she did not want to hear. Like her father, however, she expected the final word to be her own – this, despite the fact that she was ‘of a sex which cannot becomingly take more than a moderate part’ in government, as Venice’s ambassador to England had remarked to the doge and senate the year before.5 It remained to be seen how Elizabeth’s belief in her own au
thority would dovetail – or not – with her leading subjects’ assumptions about its feminine limitations.
The first major test of the queen’s ability to make policy in her kingdom came at her first parliament, which opened ten days after the coronation in January 1559. Its central task was the thorny and dangerous issue of a religious settlement. Over the last five years Elizabeth had outwardly conformed, more or less, to the Catholicism her sister had restored in England. But her personal history – and, in the weeks since her accession, the use of English in parts of the coronation Mass, the queen’s withdrawal from that service during the elevation of the host, and the fact that only the junior figure of the Bishop of Carlisle among Mary’s episcopate could be persuaded to perform it – already indicated that Catholicism would not be England’s future. The unresolved and deeply contentious question was what form of Protestantism would take its place.
So far, Elizabeth had not shown her hand. Even the title by which she had been proclaimed queen elided her own intended status in relation to the English Church: where her father and brother had been ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England’, Elizabeth substituted an elegantly obfuscatory ‘etc’.6 Now, however, she spoke, through her parliamentary mouthpiece, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Nicholas Bacon. Her faithful Lords and Commons were to consider the ‘well-making of laws for the according and uniting of the people of this realm into a uniform order of religion’.7 And what that meant, it turned out once her government introduced Bills of Supremacy and Uniformity, was a middle path in some ways more reminiscent of her father’s idiosyncratic modified-Catholicism-without-the-pope than it was of her brother’s fiercely reformed faith.
