Elizabeth I

by Helen Castor

  By May, the settlement painstakingly hammered out was this. Elizabeth was named Supreme Governor, rather than Supreme Head, of England’s Church. This was a move designed less to appease Catholics, for whom any breach with papal authority remained deeply problematic, and more to accommodate those hotter Protestants who objected to anyone but Christ being named head of his Church, let alone a woman. (Less than a year earlier, the Anglo-Scots Calvinist John Knox had published his First Blast of the Trumpet, a tract which fulminated against the ‘monstrous regiment’ – the unnatural rule – of women as ‘repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally … the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’.8 Although, when he wrote in early 1558, Knox’s fire and brimstone were principally targeted at what he saw as Mary’s papist tyranny, the essentials of his argument were universally framed, and reflected deep-rooted strains of Protestant thought.)

  Liturgically, meanwhile, the nods were all in the other direction. Catholic relics, rosaries, pilgrimages and images were discarded, but much of what one reformer disappointedly called the ‘scenic apparatus of divine worship’9 was retained, including clerical vestments, ornaments, altars, communion wafers rather than plain bread, and a broad acceptance of ritual rather than the pared-down practice of evangelical Protestantism. Not only that, but one vital adjustment was made in the wording of the new Elizabethan prayer book, to allow the queen’s subjects room for conscientious manoeuvre concerning the doctrinal heart of the formal act of worship. Generally, the proposed new Book of Common Prayer followed the Edwardian prayer book of 1552. When the bread and wine were offered up for communion, that text read: ‘Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.’ This had been a radically Protestant formulation, making clear that the bread and wine simply commemorated Christ’s sacrifice, rather than embodying it through the mysteries of consubstantiation or transubstantiation. But now another line was added from Edward’s first, more moderate prayer book of 1549: ‘The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.’10 Here, crucially, could be found the real presence of Christ’s body and blood, for those among the faithful who wished to look for it.

  All in all, the resulting Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were a careful attempt to construct a broad Church that not only reflected the queen’s own faith, so far as it could be ascertained from her public gestures, but offered a framework of religious practice within which as many of her subjects as possible could offer her their devotional obedience. However, that was not to say it was easy to achieve. The proposals met obdurate opposition from Mary’s Catholic bishops in the House of Lords. Mary herself had made sure that Edward’s Protestant bishops were safely incarcerated or exiled before she had embarked on her parliamentary restoration of Catholicism; Elizabeth, by contrast, preferred to require that her opponents participate in due parliamentary process. Her choice was fraught with risk: not only was she providing a platform for public argument against her reforms, but, in the end, a staged theological debate was required to ‘justify’ the arrest of two bishops before the voting figures in the Lords could be guaranteed to go her government’s way. Still, once the acts were passed the Lord Keeper, Bacon, could, on the queen’s behalf, point out that the ‘weightiness of the matters’11 had been given full consideration in the making of these new laws, while the bishops – all of whom had voted against – could not claim that their views had been silenced or that the settlement had been reached by overtly tyrannical or illegitimate means.

  Yet Elizabeth’s middle ground remained treacherous rather than easy terrain. Leading Protestant theologians, including many who had waited out Mary’s reign in Calvinist Geneva, expected the settlement of 1559 not in fact to be a settlement at all, but an opening salvo in an ongoing campaign to purge the Church of any hint of popery. Later in the year, the weapons at their disposal were vastly increased: once all but one of Mary’s Catholic bishops had been deprived of their sees for refusing to take the required oath to uphold Elizabeth’s supreme governorship of the Church, the queen was forced to appoint many of these Protestant exiles to take their place, for want of suitably eminent clerical candidates who backed her own more conservative position. The most notable non-exile among her nominees was Matthew Parker, who had once been her mother’s chaplain and now became Archbishop of Canterbury – but he too was a reformer, albeit one prepared to be what he later described as ‘earnest in moderation’ in the cause of gradual change.12

  Pressure for further reform was therefore embedded in Elizabeth’s Church from its inception, and at the highest level. Her determination to resist was equally clear. The first shot across the reformers’ bows had come at the closing of the 1559 parliament when Bacon, once again speaking on the queen’s behalf, declared that compliance with the new acts would be required from all her subjects, including ‘those that go before the law or beyond the law’ just as much as ‘those that will not follow’.13 Now, she was as good as her word, insisting that her new bishops must wear the rich vestments they hated in order to participate in the ceremonial they wanted to abolish. She made clear her impatience with preaching, an activity on which Protestants placed great emphasis as a means of both teaching and salvation, but which Elizabeth saw as an irritation, an unhelpful means by which her people might be exposed to unsanctioned clerical views. And, unlike all her royal predecessors, she appointed not a single cleric among the members of her Privy Council.

  In other words, her position on England’s faith as expressed in the settlement of 1559 was a stance deliberately taken. She had established a degree of continuity in outward forms of worship, as well as a vital element of ambiguity in doctrine and a low-key mechanism of enforcement – low-key, at least, compared to the punitive regimes of her father and sister – which enabled the majority of her people to comply with the requirements of her Church, despite the diversity of their views and the violent upheavals of the last decade. If there were few theologians who would explicitly endorse the particular construction of this portmanteau edifice, it troubled her little. After all, as she noted in a prayer published in 1563, God had ‘chosen me thy handmaid to be over thy people that I may preserve them in thy peace … Under thy sovereignty, princes reign and all the people obey’.14 But still, it meant that her chosen position had to be defended – for example, at the convocation of 1563 which produced the Thirty-Nine Articles outlining in detail the doctrines and practices of the new Church – not only against the threat of Catholic resistance, but against her own bishops’ attempts to reshape or, in Elizabeth’s eyes, derail it.

  Defending a vulnerable position – a task that had by now become second nature to Elizabeth – was also her response to the other great matter raised at her first parliament in 1559: the question of her marriage. Her loyal subjects were in no doubt that their new queen required a husband. England, after all, needed an heir. Beyond that unarguable imperative, there was the question of her sex. Elizabeth herself was prepared on occasion to gesture, rhetorically at least, towards the frailties of her ‘unwarlike sex and feminine nature’, as she put it in another prayer in 1563.15 In 1560 even her right-hand-man Cecil wished a messenger had not discussed a report from the English ambassador in Paris directly with the queen, ‘being too much, he said, for a woman’s knowledge’.16 When John Aylmer, a Protestant scholar and Jane Grey’s former tutor, sought to answer Knox’s trumpet-blast in print in 1559, he found himself unable to defend the concept of female rule in general, given that women were ‘weak in nature, feeble in body, soft in courage, unskilful in practice’.17 An exceptional woman, however – one such as Elizabeth – might by God’s providence be appointed to the office of kingship, just as Deborah had been a lone female Judge in Old Testament Israel; and in any case, Aylmer added reassuringly, government in England would be conducted not so much by the queen in person as
by her male councillors and judges in her name.

  Unsurprisingly, the queen herself took a decidedly different view of her need for male assistance. Her response in February 1559 to a House of Commons petition that she should marry was quintessential Elizabeth: by turns warmly beneficent and icily sharp, playing magnificently to the gallery, and seeming somehow to promise everything and nothing at the same time. She thanked her subjects for their loving care of her and of their country. She took the manner of their petition in good part, she explained, since it made no attempt to specify who in particular her husband should be; but the Commons were left in no doubt that they had had a lucky escape. ‘If it had been otherwise,’ she said, ‘I must needs have misliked it very much and thought it in you a very great presumption, being unfitting and altogether unmeet for you to require them that may command … or to take upon you to draw my love to your liking or frame my will to your fantasies.’ She could assure them, she went on, that any husband she did ever choose would be someone with whom they would not be discontented, and who would have their best interests at heart. But if she did not marry, she was certain that God would provide an heir of another kind to safeguard the kingdom’s future. And as for herself, she added, ‘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’.18

  Elizabeth had spoken; but if she meant what she said, no one was listening. The question of her marriage had been a topic of breathless conjecture from the moment of her accession: ‘nearly every day some new cry is raised about a husband’, the Count of Feria reported to his master Philip of Spain in December 1558.19 Everyone was sure that she would take one, but no one could agree who he should be. There were plenty of candidates. Philip hoped to continue his alliance with England against his greatest enemy, France, either by marrying Elizabeth himself or, failing that, by advancing the suit of one of his nephews, the Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles of Austria. However, he faced plausible rivals in the shape of the Protestant princes of northern Europe, who believed themselves a better match for this ‘heretic’ queen than Catholic Spain. The German Dukes of Holstein and Saxony threw their hats into the ring, but Elizabeth’s most assiduous suitor was Eric XIV, King of Sweden, who sent first declarations of love, then his brother, then ships full of rich gifts – including piebald horses and ‘massy bullion’ – in an attempt to convince her to become his wife.20

  Still, ‘everybody thinks that she will not marry a foreigner’, wrote Feria in frustration.21 And so Elizabeth’s court was convulsed with speculation about which Englishmen might have a chance of becoming England’s king. In 1559 rumours flew, and the names of the Earl of Arundel and Sir William Pickering gained currency. The queen, it was noted, enjoyed the company of handsome men, and the cosmopolitan Pickering was certainly that. Yet marrying one of her own subjects would confront Elizabeth with the same difficulties that had led her sister to reject the proposition out of hand: how could a queen offer wifely obedience to a man who was already bound in obedience to her? In fact, amid all the dallying and diplomacy, Elizabeth’s own responses were remarkable in their consistency. When Feria was granted an audience in February 1559, she ‘began to answer me by keeping to her old arguments for not wishing to marry’, he reported almost in passing.22 The following summer she explained to the Austrian Archduke Charles that she had ‘no intention of abandoning the single life. Her age and position may possibly make this appear strange, but it is no new or suddenly formed resolution on her part.’23 And even Pickering told the Spanish ambassador that ‘he knew she meant to die a maid’.24

  This time, it was not only Elizabeth’s public mask that enabled her to hide in plain sight. Certainly she was mercurial and capricious, blowing hot and cold from moment to moment in her treatment of the suitors who surrounded her. But she was also simply not believed: ‘for that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable’, as one German diplomat wrote.25 A woman ruling alone was unthinkable, and the future security of her kingdom required an heir, as her parliament reminded her in intense alarm after she had suffered a dangerous bout of smallpox in 1562. The case, it seemed, was clear – except that, for Elizabeth, it was not clear at all. Every argument for the security to be achieved through her marriage could be met by an equal and opposite one suggesting that insecurity would instead be the result. A foreign husband would lock England into an international alliance that, because it was irrevocable, might one day jeopardize the kingdom’s interests rather than defend them. An English husband might provoke discord rather than peace, through the elevation of one of her subjects above all the others. And the getting of an heir was a process that directly threatened her physical safety: two of her stepmothers, after all, had died in childbirth. Meanwhile, the one person to whom the prospect of a woman ruling alone seemed entirely credible was the queen herself.

  This was a field of play within which Elizabeth could find space by refusing to move. Every diplomatic approach for her hand was valuable in itself, as an endorsement of her disputed legitimacy as Henry VIII’s daughter and England’s queen; and in each gracefully choreographed negotiation, saying no – inaction in the present – served to maintain her freedom of action for the future. That was true of decision-making within her own government, where Cecil was finding her private will frustratingly resistant to his own best counsel, just as much as it was within the treacherous cross-currents of international politics. As a strategy, however, inaction carried risks of its own. A young and nubile queen insisting on her wish to remain chastely unmarried could not help but draw public attention to her moral and physical conduct. And by the summer of 1559, the freedom of action Elizabeth so valued included a degree of intimacy with her Master of the Horse which gave rise to spreading scandal.

  Robert Dudley had known Elizabeth since they were children. Like her, he had only narrowly survived the political turmoil of Mary’s reign that had killed his father, the Duke of Northumberland, and his brother, Jane Grey’s husband Guildford. He was tall, charismatic and handsome, with a striking physical resemblance to the dead Thomas Seymour. The office to which Elizabeth appointed him in November 1558 made him the only man publicly permitted to touch the queen, when he helped her mount and dismount her horse. Only five months after that, Feria was reporting to Philip of Spain that ‘Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs and it is even said that her majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.’26

  Given what else the rumours were suggesting, the obvious attraction between Elizabeth and Dudley would undoubtedly have marked him out as a front-runner among her suitors, had it not been for the inconvenient fact that he was already married. By 1559 it was a marriage in name only – his wife Amy lived in the country, while Dudley was constantly in attendance on the queen – but, since the Church did not sanction divorce except when there were grounds for annulment, even a marriage in name only was a marriage that could not be undone. Many assumed that Elizabeth would have wed her ‘sweet Robin’ if she could, but the queen’s own intentions were much harder to read, not least because his unavailability as a potential husband made his companionship in some senses safe, even while insinuating gossip raced through England’s towns and villages and out across the continent. Safe for Elizabeth’s determination to preserve her own authority, perhaps; but not safe enough for Cecil, who by the summer of 1560 was so infuriated by the disruptive influence of the queen’s favourite that he considered resigning from his post.

  That autumn, however, their relationship became suddenly not safe at all. On 8 September Amy Dudley was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs at her country home. Her neck was broken. There was no way of telling whether she had fallen, or deliberately sought to harm herself, or if she had been pushed; and as a result the rumours about her husband took a sinister and deeply ugly turn. Dudley was now a free man, but so profoundly tainted by his wife’s death that it was impossible – whether
or not the queen had previously let herself entertain the possibility – for Elizabeth to consider marrying him. Not that that put an end to the speculation, or Dudley’s ambitions, or their obvious pleasure in each other’s company. (As Elizabeth had said in 1559 when Kate Ashley begged her to be careful of the harm this dalliance might do to her reputation, ‘in this world she had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy. If she showed herself gracious towards her Master of the Horse she had deserved it for his honourable nature and dealings …’)27 But among the causes of Elizabeth’s sorrow and tribulation, both personal and political, was the fact that her father had married her mother for love and lust, and then killed her. The connection between sex and violent death was inscribed deep in her history, and here, in Amy Dudley’s end, was another variation on the theme. As the new Spanish ambassador remarked in 1566, ‘the queen would like everyone to be in love with her, but I doubt whether she will ever be in love with anyone, enough to marry him.’28

  Instead, she offered Dudley up as a husband for another queen. Remarkably, in a world where female rule remained a startling anomaly, Scotland as well as England now had a female sovereign. So far, the life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, seemed almost an opposing pair for Elizabeth’s, a mirror image with each feature in reverse. A devout Catholic and her royal father’s only legitimate child, Mary had been undisputed Queen of Scotland since she was six days old. Her mother, Marie de Guise, a French noblewoman, had governed the kingdom on her daughter’s behalf, while Mary herself, at the age of six, was sent to France to marry the heir to the French throne, a union that promised to turn the ‘auld alliance’ between the two countries into a new Scots–French empire. That was the theory – but in December 1560, after only seventeen months as France’s queen, Mary was widowed just before her eighteenth birthday. In 1561 she returned to her own kingdom, a fellow sovereign on Elizabeth’s doorstep, and one who, as granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, had a good claim to be Elizabeth’s heir. More troublingly for Elizabeth, many Catholics – including Mary herself – believed she should rightfully be Queen of England in her Protestant cousin’s place.