Elizabeth I

by Helen Castor

  In Mary’s absence, however, Scotland had changed a great deal. Her mother was now dead. Over the course of 1559–60, a powerful coalition of Scots nobles had moved to reject both Catholicism and the French alliance, driving out the French garrisons stationed in the kingdom and establishing a new Protestant regime – all with help from England, masterminded by Cecil despite Elizabeth’s initial reluctance to commit to the risks and the costs of military intervention. On her return to Edinburgh, Mary therefore had little choice but to work with her Protestant Privy Council and its ally, the English queen. During two years of uneasy negotiations, Mary renounced her current claim to the English throne in the hope of securing formal recognition instead as Elizabeth’s heir. Elizabeth herself, however, showed no greater inclination to commit herself on the question of the succession than she had done on the subject of her own marriage. But if Elizabeth would not marry, Mary might; and in 1564 Elizabeth proposed an English husband for her Scottish cousin to cement the brittle friendship between the two kingdoms. She elevated Dudley to the peerage as Earl of Leicester (and was seen to tickle his neck during the ceremony of investiture), before offering him to Mary, hinting that recognition for Mary as her heir might accompany the wedding.

  When Dudley received his earldom, the Scots ambassador had made diplomatic noises about his qualities as a man and a royal servant, but Elizabeth, in response, had been sceptical. ‘You like better of yonder long lad’, she said, pointing to the young Henry, Lord Darnley, who was attending on the new earl.29 As so often, the queen’s caustic quip was even sharper than it seemed. Darnley – a tall, pretty eighteen-year-old – was the son of Margaret Douglas, daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret by her second, non-royal marriage. He was therefore first cousin to Mary of Scotland, with a claim to the English throne to parallel hers. And in 1565 it was Darnley, not Dudley, whom Mary decided to marry.

  Once again Mary was treading an opposite path to Elizabeth, and at first it seemed that her choice was demonstrating all the advantages of the route her cousin refused to take (albeit at the cost of the détente between the two kingdoms). As an Anglo-Scots lord of royal blood, Darnley – with whom Mary had been smitten from his first arrival at her court – was a king consort who neither rendered Scotland the satellite of a foreign power, nor compromised the queen’s sovereign status too egregiously. Within a couple of months, Mary was pregnant, and in June 1566 she gave birth to a boy, named James after her dead father. Scotland’s queen now enjoyed the future security provided by a male heir, while Elizabeth, at thirty-two, was still toying with offers for her hand and simultaneously disavowing any interest in marriage, in the same way she always had.

  But by the time this new Scottish prince was born, Mary’s present security was unravelling at alarming speed. Darnley, it turned out, was weak, immature and spoilt, a narcissistic drunk whose vainglorious ambitions made him both a destabilizing force and an easy mark amid the religious and political faction-fighting of the Scots court. In March 1566 Mary’s Catholic secretary David Rizzio was dragged from her side and stabbed to death by a group of Protestant noblemen with Darnley in their company. The murder served only to deepen the increasingly venomous rifts within Scottish government. An already toxic situation spun out of control, until in February 1567 a gunpowder blast ripped through the Edinburgh house in which Darnley was staying. Darnley himself was found dead in a garden forty feet away, his corpse intact and unmarked by the explosion. Two months later, with Mary’s reputation already stained by whispers suggesting she might have been involved in her husband’s assassination, she was abducted by the chief suspect in the murder, the Protestant lord James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Three weeks after that, Mary and Bothwell were married. With this incendiary union, Mary’s reign entered a death-spiral. Bothwell’s enemies armed against him. In June they captured Mary, while her husband fled into exile. A month later, having just miscarried Bothwell’s baby, Mary was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son. And then in 1568, after a botched attempt to retake her throne, she escaped south, across the border to England.

  For Elizabeth, the playing-out of this bloody melodrama was – in some senses at least – a horror story. In only three years, an anointed queen had lost her crown as a result of two disastrous marriages: sex and violent death in terrifying iteration. Back in 1564, Elizabeth had required the Scots ambassador to compare her own appearance and accomplishments with those of the woman she called her ‘dear sister’,30 and he had negotiated the treacherously thin diplomatic ice with admirable tact – but, if the queen of caution and delay had triumphed in this political rivalry over the queen of impulse and entitlement, Elizabeth’s vindication came at the price of a graphic reminder that her position as a lone female sovereign remained as convoluted as ever.

  More so, perhaps, now that Mary was her prisoner. What was to be done with her? Elizabeth was sympathetic to Mary’s sovereignty – a monarch forced into abdication by her own subjects could hardly be a pleasing precedent, after all – but not to the twin threats of her Catholicism and her past claim to be rightfully queen in Elizabeth’s stead. In 1569 swirling political currents at the English court threw up a proposal that Mary should be married to the Duke of Norfolk, England’s premier peer and, though a faithful adherent of Elizabeth’s reformed Church, a man with Catholic affiliations and sympathies. The idea was that the couple should make a negotiated return to the head of government in Protestant Scotland, and eventually succeed Elizabeth in Protestant England, while in the process defusing the threat of hostility to both kingdoms from the Catholic powers of Europe. However, the plan had the support of neither Cecil, whose influence it was partly designed to undermine, nor Elizabeth herself who, when she was finally informed, was incandescent with anger. Norfolk was sent to the Tower. The Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland responded by raising open rebellion in the north. The revolt was quickly put down – the earls escaped into Scotland and almost 800 of their followers were hanged – but the shock of this sudden violent challenge to Elizabeth’s authority was palpable.

  Just eighteen months after the arrival in her kingdom of her Catholic rival, Elizabeth had faced armed insurrection for the first time. She was clear that it was no coincidence. As she wrote, pointedly, in a poem shortly afterwards:

  The daughter of debate

  That discord aye doth sow

  Shall reap no gain where former rule

  Still peace hath taught to know.31

  But it was not easy to solve a problem like Mary. And the ramifications of the Scottish queen’s presence in England became infinitely more dangerous on 25 February 1570, when Pope Pius V chose to speak from St Peter’s chair in support of the failed northern rising. The papal bull Regnans in Excelsis formally pronounced a sentence of excommunication against Elizabeth, declaring ‘the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime’ to be a usurper, depriving her of her title to the throne, and ordering her subjects to renounce their allegiance.32

  It remained to be seen whether Elizabeth’s pursuit of security through watchful inaction could survive this declaration of religious war.

  3

  Continue Her Delays

  1570–1587

  Elizabeth found it difficult to sleep. She always had, even as a girl when her daily routine was dictated only by her schoolbooks. Now, in her late thirties, she lived at the centre of a confection of courtly ritual, a gilded cage that both displayed and imprisoned her. It took her several hours each morning to prepare to face the day. The Gentlewomen of her Bedchamber applied cosmetics to enhance the whiteness of her skin, combed and elaborately curled her auburn hair, laced and pinned her into the stiffly jewelled gowns that made up a queen’s wardrobe. Only then, armed with the apparatus of her majesty, did she emerge from the female environment of her private rooms into the male arena of public politics. She was never alone but always isolated, set apart from those around her by her sovereignty.

  From time to time, within the narrow constr
aints of this royal life, she was immobilized by depressive moods and debilitating headaches. Usually, however, her days were marked by a restless energy. She ate little (albeit with a taste for sugar that was already damaging her teeth) and, most mornings, took a brisk walk in her private garden. She enjoyed hunting and dancing and playing the harpsichord and virginals – which helped, she said, to ‘eschew melancholy’1 – as well as exercising her intellect by writing prayers and poems and translating classical texts. She took comfort in the attendance of her female servants, although two of her closest companions, her beloved Kate Ashley and her maternal cousin Katherine Knollys,2 had died in 1565 and 1569, both before reaching their fiftieth birthdays. She relished Dudley’s charismatic presence – and, as time went on, other male courtiers proved almost equally diverting. Dudley she called her ‘Eyes’, but Sir Christopher Hatton was her ‘Lids’.3 An attractive, intelligent young man from a relatively modest background – the second son of a Northamptonshire gentleman – Hatton caught the queen’s eye in the late 1560s, and by the early 1570s was playing the game of courtly love to perfection. (‘Bear with me, my most dear sweet Lady’, he wrote in 1573 when kept from her side by illness. ‘Passion overcometh me. I can write no more. Love me; for I love you.’)4

  Distractions she could find, but relaxation was elusive. Her world had never been safe, or not since she was too young to remember. Now she was imperious, adamantine, terrifying in her demands and expectations. (Tyrannical, even, in what she required of those around her: Katherine Knollys had been mother to sixteen children but had seen little of them, since Elizabeth required her return to her post in the royal bedchamber only weeks after each birth.) This insistent claim to constant, devoted attention served the queen’s need for reassurance, both personally and politically. At the same time, her authority had to be actively asserted from moment to moment, precisely because she could never take it for granted. That was true within her own government, where her councillors chafed at having to submit their wise advice to her womanly judgement; it was also, now, frighteningly apparent within the shifting configuration of international affairs.

  When she had come to the throne in 1558, Philip of Spain had been graciously prepared to overlook the unfortunate fact of Elizabeth’s heresy in the hope of continuing the alliance with England that had been sealed by his marriage to her sister. Elizabeth, for her part, was willing to spend several years discussing the possibility that she might marry one of Philip’s nephews, but had no intention of committing English soldiers to fight in Spanish wars, as Mary had done – a decision which, to English horror, had led to the loss of Calais, England’s last remaining foothold in mainland Europe. The military action in which English forces did engage during the 1560s was narrowly limited, given Elizabeth’s aversion to unnecessary risk, and carefully focused on the interests of England as a Protestant kingdom in a continent dominated by Catholic powers. Only twice did English soldiers take the field: once in 1559–60 to help the rebel lords establish their new Protestant regime in Scotland; and a second time in 1562, with much less success, in the attempt to hold the Channel port of Le Havre for the French Huguenots, the Protestant faction battling their Catholic rivals for control of the government of the young King Charles IX.

  Towards the end of the 1560s, however, the religious conflicts convulsing Europe were growing bloodier and, to English eyes, a great deal more unnerving. By the time the diplomatic dance with Spain over the idea of a Habsburg husband for Elizabeth was finally abandoned in December 1567, Philip had already despatched 10,000 Spanish troops to his territories in the Netherlands to suppress a rebellion by Dutch Protestants. With a Catholic army just across the water from England’s shores, and from 1568 a Catholic queen, Mary of Scotland, under lock and key on English soil, tension was rising at Elizabeth’s court and among her subjects about the security of her kingdom. And then, in 1570, the twin threats of attack from abroad and subversion from within were made nightmarishly real by her excommunication, which gave any Catholic – ruler or conspirator – papal authorization for the project of removing her from the throne.

  Some of the pope’s flock, however – the moderate Catholics within the embattled regime in France – saw the presence of a Spanish army on their Dutch doorstep as a greater evil than Elizabeth’s heresy. In late 1570, therefore, the delicate process began of opening negotiations for a possible marriage between the English queen and the French king’s brother, Henri, Duke of Anjou. It was apparent to all that the match had implausible elements: not only the thirty-seven-year-old queen’s frequently expressed disinclination ever to marry, but also the nineteen-year-old Anjou’s determined Catholicism, together with his taste for flamboyant cross-dressing and the company of male favourites. Still, it was a proposition which, through the Anglo-French détente it represented, offered immediate political advantages for both sides. Cecil allowed himself to believe that, ‘if I be not much deceived, her majesty is earnest in this’,5 and despatched an able protégé named Francis Walsingham to Paris to open talks with the power behind Charles IX’s throne, the king’s mother Catherine de’ Medici.

  All the same, it was clear that the most pressing Catholic threat to Elizabeth’s position was currently living in England, at Sheffield Castle, under the watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Mary of Scotland was an anointed sovereign who had lost her crown after a lifetime – twenty-five years – during which she had never once doubted her right to wear it. Even now, in the dark days of what was so far a royally luxurious house arrest, she conducted herself with a kind of baffled entitlement, apparently unable to comprehend why the world was not correcting the transparent wrong of her deposition and imprisonment with greater speed. The assumption that any means by which she might be restored to her throne could be justified by that righteous end led her into simultaneous pursuit of all possible strategies that remained within her reach, however mutually incompatible they might be: professing loyalty to Elizabeth and appealing for her help as a sister sovereign; bargaining with her for a return to Scotland and eventual succession in England; and plotting to overthrow and supplant her.

  Even if the last could not be declared openly, the incoherence of the pleas and demands which Mary did address directly to the queen produced a parallel bafflement in Elizabeth. ‘In your letter I note a heap of confused, troubled thoughts,’ she told her in February 1570, ‘earnestly and curiously uttered to express your great fear and to require of me comfort, concerning both which many kinds of speeches are diversly expressed and dispersed in your letter, that if I had not consideration that the same did proceed from a troubled mind, I might rather take occasion to be offended with you than to relent to your desires.’6 Mary was a danger to her; on that the queen and her councillors could agree. But to Elizabeth, Mary was also a profound frustration, because she would not conduct herself with the protective intelligence and caution that had shaped Elizabeth’s own actions as the prisoner, rival and heir of a sovereign sister. And Elizabeth – the daughter of an executed queen, and a monarch whose own throne was far from invulnerable – did not want to be responsible for destroying her.

  In that reluctance, Elizabeth herself was a profound frustration to her closest advisers; acutely so, once Cecil and his increasingly close associate Walsingham had unravelled an ambitious plot against her life in the spring and summer of 1571. At its centre – as arch-conspirator or perhaps agent provocateur – stood a Florentine merchant named Roberto di Ridolfi, whose grandiose plans reached deep into the English state and far across Europe. On his travels between London, Rome and Madrid, Ridolfi orchestrated a scheme by which Philip of Spain’s army would cross the sea from the Netherlands to liberate England from its heretic queen. With the support of these Spanish soldiers and the blessing of the pope, England’s Catholics would then rise up under the leadership of the Duke of Norfolk, who would depose Elizabeth, marry Mary and, with her, take the throne. In practice the conspiracy did not come close to fruition but, for Cecil and his allies, he
re was proof that Mary was, as Members of Parliament thundered in 1572, a ‘most wicked and filthy woman’, not only ‘a killer of her husband, an adulteress’ but ‘a common disturber of the peace of this realm, and for that to be dealt with as an enemy’.7

  But Elizabeth could not be persuaded to agree. Procrastination was etched into her very being: waiting to see what delay, rather than action, might bring. (As she had told parliament in 1563 on the subject of her marriage, ‘I am determined in this so great and weighty a matter to defer mine answer till some other time …’)8 And although Mary was wildly unguarded in all her dealings – ‘I will live and die with you’, she declared in a letter to Norfolk in 15699 – she had not, quite, endorsed plans for Elizabeth’s death in writing. Norfolk was found guilty of high treason in January 1572 and beheaded in June, only after the queen had spent five months either refusing to sign the warrant for his death or, three times, signing and then cancelling her own order. Finally, Elizabeth had been persuaded of the need to kill the most senior peer of the realm, her maternal cousin, the first nobleman to die on the scaffold since the turmoil of her sister’s reign almost twenty years earlier. But in Mary’s case she was immovable. She would neither execute her, nor formally exclude her from the succession. To repudiate Mary’s rights as heir to the throne would, after all, require Elizabeth to acknowledge publicly that she had in fact been heir to the throne in the first place. Cecil was both exhausted and deeply alarmed. ‘If her majesty will continue her delays for providing for her own surety by just means given to her by God,’ he wrote to Dudley in November 1572, ‘she and we all shall vainly call upon God when the calamity shall fall upon us.’10