A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  This time, biology was her friend. Concerned that Mary’s pregnancies might herald not life but death, her husband King Philip took prudent steps to become reconciled with Elizabeth, dissuading Mary from any thought of excluding her from the succession and, in fact, persuading the queen to set her at liberty. A Protestant England, Philip hoped, might better be pre-empted by marrying Elizabeth off to a suitable Catholic prince, but grateful though she was for her freedom, Elizabeth was not about to surrender it. Writing to Mary she protested:

  I so well like this estate [spinsterhood] as I persuade myself there is not any kind of life comparable unto it . . . What I shall do hereafter I know not but I assure you upon my truth and fidelity and as God be merciful unto me I am not at this present time otherwise minded than I have declared unto you, no though I were offered to the greatest prince of all Europe. And yet percase the Queen’s Majesty may perceive this my answer rather to proceed of a maidenly shamefastedness than upon any certain determination.

  By the autumn of 1558 it was obvious to everyone except Mary that her swollen abdomen was a tumour not a baby. The heretics were still going up in smoke, but the roads to Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, where Elizabeth now lived, were jammed with traffic as the loyal English nobility overtook each other to trade allegiance. The Spanish ambassador, Count Feria, who went to see her amid the throng, was disconcerted by the difference between the two Tudor half-sisters. ‘She is a very vain and clever woman. She must have been thoroughly schooled in the manner in which her father conducted his affairs and I am very much afraid that she will not be well-disposed in matters of religion . . . There is not a heretic or traitor in all the kingdom who has not joyfully raised himself from the grave to come to her side. She is determined to be governed by no one.’

  On 17 November 1558 a messenger arrived from London with the long-awaited news. A cherished tradition has it that Elizabeth was standing or seated beside an ancient oak when she heard of her sister’s death, taking the ring that had been removed from Mary’s finger and slipping it on her own. Kneeling beneath the tree she then spoke in Latin a verse from Psalm 118: ‘A domino factum est mirabile in oculis nostris’ (This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes).

  It is one of the most familiar and cherished tableaux in all English history: the golden girl beneath the oak, about to inaugurate the nation’s great age. But the supporting role taken by the tree is crucial to the mythical effect. So much of English history is oaken. Ancient Britons were thought to have worshipped them; righteous outlaws are sheltered by them; kings on the run hide in them; hearts of oak go to sea and win empires. It would only be in the next century – in, for example, John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664) – that ancient trees would be explicitly seen as symbols of national durability. But the Hatfield oak – knotty and gnarled, storm-struck but standing – is Elizabeth’s first loyal supporter. It was, in effect, England bringing the strength and weight of its tradition to the proclamation of a momentous rebirth.

  But did the English really feel like this? There’s no doubt that many, rich and poor alike, looked to the new monarch for desperately needed relief. The last years of Mary’s reign had brought brutal winters, pitiful, sodden harvests and soaring food prices; there were armies (so it was said) of vagabonds on the road; the plague had returned; and Calais had been humiliatingly lost (the direct result of fighting a war for King Philip). When Elizabeth made her formal entry into London before the coronation (the date, 15 January 1559, decided by her astrologer John Dee as the most auspicious), there was snow on the freshly gravelled roads but, according to one contemporary, ‘nothing but gladness, nothing but prayer and nothing but comfort’. Of course, the celebrations and pageants were elaborately staged propaganda events, paid for by the corporations of merchants who were eager to see an end to Mary’s wars and the recovery of prosperity. And they were carefully designed to inaugurate a scripture of the young queen as the personification of wisdom, piety and justice: the new Deborah. Although it was customary for all monarchs to stay in the Tower of London before their coronation, Elizabeth’s second journey there by water, of course, took on personal meaning, both for herself and for the people, erasing painful memories of her captivity and replacing them with festive anticipation. In the very first speech of her reign she compared her own history to that of the prophet Daniel, brought safely out of the lion’s den (and there were lions in the Tower) by God’s miraculous deliverance. Each stage of the planned route was carefully designed to distinguish her reign from that of her sister. In another obviously rehearsed move, Elizabeth graciously received an English Bible from the allegorical personification of Truth and, according to the official eulogistic book of The Queen Majesty’s Passage, ‘reverently did she with both her hands take it, kiss it and lay it upon her breast to the great comfort of the lookers on’.

  For the most ardent Protestants, however, this charade of piety was not enough to compensate for the misfortune of having another woman on the throne, at best a hazardous state of affairs and at worst a wholly unnatural reversal of the divinely sanctioned relation between the sexes. The stock description of women as ‘the weaker vessel’ had first appeared in Tyndale’s 1526 English Bible, and Protestant manuals on the proper household regimen routinely repeated it together with the necessary subservience of women to men. And what was the kingdom, after all, but a household writ large? To John Knox, the Scottish Calvinist preacher, Marian exile and author of The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), the reign of so many women – Mary Tudor, Mary of Guise in Scotland, Catherine de’ Medici in France – was a ‘monstriferous abomination’, a species of plague. It was, in fact, the obvious explanation why the times were so manifestly out of joint. Women, Knox wrote, echoing the commonplaces of the day, ‘ought to be constant, stable, prudent and doing everything with discretion and reason, virtues which women cannot have in equality with men . . . Nature I say doth paint [women] further to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish and experience hath declared them to be inconstant, variable and cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment . . . in the nature of all women lurketh such vices as in good governors are not tolerable.’

  Learning of Elizabeth’s accession, Knox was concerned enough not to damage the chances for a Protestant government in England to write to William Cecil, the queen’s new secretary of state, and explain (though not retract) his diatribe. Like many other critics of female rule, Knox was prepared to concede that Elizabeth might be considered a special case, sent by God to fulfil his purposes of restoring the gospel. But his insistence that she must nevertheless acknowledge that womanly rule was ‘repugnant’ to the Almighty’s proper order was not calculated to endear him to the young queen. There was, however, plenty of support for Knox’s views within England itself. The Homily of the State of Matrimony, read from the pulpit in Protestant churches, reiterated the litany of failings lodged in female flesh, ‘all weak affections’. John Aylmer, later to be Bishop of London, whose An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects (1559) was supposed to be a refutation of Knox’s tract, nonetheless felt obliged to write that God’s otherwise bewildering selection of another woman, ‘weak in nature, feeble in body, soft in courage, unskilful in practice, not terrible to the enemy’, to be ruler could only be explained as a test of his ability to work miracles.

  Everyone in the ruling class (and beyond) knew the remedy for this misfortune: matrimony. To the objection (perhaps felt by Elizabeth herself) that she could not in good conscience subject herself to a husband without compromising her magisterial authority, Aylmer neatly invoked the convenient doctrine of the prince’s two bodies. As a natural woman, he observed, Elizabeth might, indeed, be subordinate to her husband, but as ruler she would be subject to no one but God. With the husbandly authority problem taken care of, parliament was petitioning the queen to marry as early as February 1559. And Elizabeth may not have been as marriage-averse as most biographers have assumed. When Prince
Erik of Sweden had offered himself during Edward’s reign, it is true that she had asked her half-brother if she might not ‘remain in that estate I was which of all others best liked and pleased me’, her maidenhood. And she had said something of the sort again in Mary’s time. But now the security of the realm and the fate of the Protestant settlement depended on her capacity to give the country an heir. And Elizabeth, who always had a steely grip on political reality, knew just what was required of her. The famous response to parliament’s petition, always invoked as evidence of her reluctance to be married, was, in fact, put into her mouth by William Camden many decades later. Its great peroration, that ‘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’, sounds more like a prospective epitaph than a declaration of intent. It was surely part of the propaganda of the later part of her reign, when the queen’s perpetual virginity was turned from a liability into a patriotic cult. But it was not what Elizabeth said at the time. Instead, she concentrated not on whether she should marry (which was all but taken for granted), but on the credentials of the likely candidates. In particular, she promised that: ‘Whensoever it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life, ye may well assure yourselves my meaning is not to do or determine anything wherewith the realm may or shall have just cause to be discontented. And whomsoever my chance shall light upon I trust he shall be as careful for the realm and you.’

  In other words, Elizabeth would not make Mary’s mistake of marrying a prince whose ambition and religion would damage, rather than sustain, the interests of England. Better take some time to find the right man than to hurry along to the altar and to disaster. Others, though, felt the queen did not have the luxury of leisurely selection. For Secretary Cecil nothing could be more urgent. He and his Edwardian Protestant colleagues on the council, like his brother-in-law Nicholas Bacon, and Francis Knollys, had all personally suffered through the years of Mary’s counter-Reformation, either as exiles or banished to the political wilderness. They knew perfectly well that the majority of the country was still Catholic, either actively or passively. The compromise religious settlement of 1559, with its conciliatory demotion of the sovereign from ‘Supreme Head’ to ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church, had barely passed through parliament and then only over the opposition of all the bishops and seven lay peers. For that matter, there must have been times, even early in the reign, when Cecil wondered just how much of a good Protestant the queen actually was. For although she had stormed out of the Chapel Royal when a priest attempted to celebrate mass at Christmas, she later made it known that she would like a crucifix there. Elizabeth was also prepared to allow wafers (though unornamented) in communion, had communion tables moved up to the chancel where stone altars had been positioned and positively insisted on traditional vestments for the clergy. For Cecil, this may all have been a distasteful holding operation, needed to keep English Catholics loyal while very gradually evangelizing the country, but he was uneasily aware that no one was really satisfied by the compromises, except possibly Elizabeth herself.

  The dilemma faced Cecil every day at council. Even though he had drastically reduced the size of the council, the better to monitor its loyalty, he still had to sit across the table from a number of Mary’s councillors, like Sir William Petre and the Marquis of Winchester, whom the queen had hoped to neutralize by co-option. Many of the great magnates of the country – the Percys and Dacres, as well as Pembroke and Arundel – were still very much Catholics, and all this only heightened Cecil’s sense of insecurity. He and his colleagues knew just how little it took for everything to be undone. Elizabeth might fall victim to the plague, the sweating sickness or smallpox, the last of which did, indeed, bring her close to death in October 1562, or she might be assassinated, like so many other princes of high estate who vainly imagined themselves impregnable to the knife or bullet.

  So although the queen kept telling parliament and the Privy Council that in good time she would see to the matter of her marriage but that it was her, not their, business, Cecil and the others could hardly forbear from reminding her of England’s desperate need for an heir. As a New Year’s gift in 1560 Sir Thomas Chaloner gave the queen a book singing the praises of her father, adding in the dedication the hope that she would ‘bestow the bonds of your modesty on a husband . . . For then a little Henry will play in the palace for us.’ She may well have bridled at the implication that her own reign was nothing more than an unfortunate interruption in the proper continuity of kings and that her principal duty was to make good the deficiency by supplying another one.

  The emphasis that she was more than a ‘mere’ woman began early. But if a candidate came along who fitted all the proper criteria – high station, pragmatic in confession, impeccable lineage, massive wealth – the young Elizabeth was certainly prepared to give him a look. Between 1559 and 1566 there was no shortage of suitors. The most powerful, Philip II, had virtually begun his courtship before his wife’s death, but since Elizabeth had gone to such lengths to dissociate herself from her half-sister’s reign and insisted so often that she would never compromise the country for the interests of a foreign prince, his candidacy was never a real possibility. Philip’s crime, in the sight of English opinion, had not, in fact, been the burning of heretics so much as the loss of Calais in a war believed to have been fought for Spanish interests. Other possibilities, such as the Archduke Charles of Austria, were also handicapped by their ardent Catholicism. Elizabeth and even some of the Protestant members of council could see their way to having a Catholic consort, provided that he could be expected, in due course, to convert, provided that he observed his rituals in private and provided that he agreed to children being brought up in the Reformed Church. But these were precisely the concessions that none of the serious Catholic candidates, either Habsburg or French, was prepared to make.

  There were some Protestant suitors in the long line for her attention. But like Sir William Pickering, whose name was being bandied about early in the 1560s, they were generally thought (not least by Elizabeth herself) to be embarrassingly beneath her station and dignity. And there was one more painful headache for Cecil. If he pushed the queen too hard, too soon, she might just plump for the man everyone assumed she really loved. He was Protestant and he was English. Unfortunately for Cecil, he was also Robert Dudley.

  Dudley was everything Cecil was not. His line did not, in fact, go back very far, but he gave himself the airs of ancient aristocratic pedigree. He was flashily gallant rather than sober and temperate; impetuous rather than judicious. He was exuberant, impassioned and, not least, incredibly good-looking, especially on a horse. To a queen who more than once dismissed from her presence those (of either sex) she thought physically unpleasing, this mattered a lot. They would make, undeniably, a handsome couple. What was more, she and Robert Dudley shared a lot of past. His father, John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, had ousted Protector Somerset from power and sent him to the block before he, in turn, had been executed for attempting to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. So Robert and Elizabeth were, in some sense, both orphans of the scaffold. He had been educated with her half-brother Edward, and had shared the formidable Ascham with Elizabeth. In the grim years of Mary’s reign, he had sympathized with her troubles and, more importantly, he had done something about it, selling some of the Dudley lands to make Elizabeth’s life a little easier at a time he could ill afford it. Things like that she never forgot. Whatever else they were, there was a sense in which they thought of each other as soulmates, almost brother and sister. Her nickname for him was ‘Eyes’, and he signed his letters to her ‘OO’. No one at court watching them dance the volta thought they had eyes for anyone else.

  How much of a couple were they? It’s not just Hollywood movie-makers who have thought that Elizabeth and Dudley were lovers. The demonstrative physical affection they showed startled contemporaries and had gossips all over Europe, including the
Spanish ambassador in England, convinced they must have been sleeping together. Rumours abounded that the queen was pregnant by Dudley, and long into her reign stories circulated in popular culture of their bastards, sometimes two, sometimes four, spirited away by ships or even killed in infancy. An English spy caught in Madrid in 1587 told King Philip’s English secretary that he was really one ‘Arthur Dudley’, the illegitimate son of Robert and Elizabeth. At least one country priest was reported to have called Elizabeth a whore because she was a dancer and as far as he was concerned one was the same as the other. Their intimacy was all the more shocking given that it seemed to pay no account to Dudley’s marriage to Amy Robsart. Elizabeth, of course, was well aware of Amy, but she also knew that Dudley’s wife was very ill, probably of breast cancer, and unlikely to survive for much longer. Sleeping with your intended was not unusual in Tudor England. Close to one in five brides were pregnant on their wedding day, and given low rates of conception this suggests that a lot more than 20 per cent of engaged couples were having premarital sex. And of course it was not only common but expected for male sovereigns to keep themselves healthy by the regular expulsion of sperm, courtesy of a mistress.

  But what passed as matter of fact among the people, or among male princes, would still have been seen as outrageous for a queen who had displayed the unshorn tresses of the virgin at her coronation. Given the history of her mother and the Seymour scandal (however innocent Elizabeth’s part in it), she would hardly need reminding that as far as many of her subjects were concerned, her body natural and her body politic were one and the same, and she was not free to do with either what her heart desired. When pressed about the innuendos, however, she reacted with defensive vexation, informing the busybodies that while the rumours were a disgraceful slander, should she ever choose to lead the ‘dishonourable life’ there was no one she knew of who had the authority to stop her.