by Lisa Hilton
I cannot tell how naturally the mother loveth the child, for I was never mother of any. But certainly, if a prince and governor may as naturally and earnestly love her subjects, as the mother doth the child, then assure yourselves that I being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly and tenderly love and favour you.9
Here, in Mary’s greatest speech, is the rhetoric which Elizabeth made her own. She is martial prince and authoritative governor, she is mother, but she is also, suggesting the language of chivalry, “lady and mistress,” an appeal for protection in the language of courtly love. This was the language which was to coalesce in Elizabeth’s reign into such a crucial apparatus for the function of the Queen Regnant’s majesty. Nor did Mary neglect to brandish her coronation ring, which wedded her to the nation. And the nation kept its vows. After considerable alarm when Wyatt reached London, when some of the rebels came close to the palace of Whitehall itself, he found the ancient gates at Ludgate barred against him. One week after Mary’s speech, he was in the Tower.
If indeed it was Thomas Wyatt senior whose confession had sealed Anne Boleyn’s fate, then the interrogation of his son almost finished the life of her daughter. Questioned on 25 February and again at Westminster on 15 March, Wyatt confirmed that he had written to Elizabeth, but only to advise her to “get away” for her own safety. Elizabeth had written nothing down but had sent a verbal message by a servant, William St. Loe, that she thanked Wyatt for his concern and would proceed as she thought best. This studied neutrality was supported by St. Loe, who, despite the “marvelous tossing” given by the interrogators, roundly denied any more damning communication. But there was more. While at court the previous autumn, Elizabeth had been observed in a lengthy conversation with another conspirator, Sir William Pickering, and according to the French ambassador, Antoine de Noailles, was “highly familiar” with yet another, Sir James Crofts. Elizabeth had written to Mary in late January, when the government knew of the rebellion, refusing a summons to court on the grounds of ill health, and somehow a copy of her letter had turned up in that same ambassador’s papers. (The French, anxious to prevent Mary’s marriage to Philip, were believed to support the rebels.) St. Loe, defend his mistress as he might, had compromised himself by appearing alongside two more rebels at Tonbridge. And then there was the fact that Crofts, whose mission had been to declare the Welsh March for Elizabeth, had paused en route there at Ashridge and tried to persuade Elizabeth to remove to Donnington, which could be defended better. Elizabeth had refused, again claiming illness, but her initial reluctance to join her sister was seen as evidence of her involvement with the plot.
Was Elizabeth guilty of treacherous conspiracy in the Wyatt rebellion? Mary certainly believed so. Once the immediate threat from the rebels was quashed, she again ordered her sister to court. The illness of which Elizabeth had spoken does not appear to have been a feint—the pains in her arms and legs and the swollen appearance of her face suggests nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys often caused by deficiency in the immune system. Given that Elizabeth later suffered from androgenic alopecia, or female-pattern baldness, which is associated with the production of the stress hormone androgen, it is possible that this illness was also brought on by extreme anxiety, as the immune system can also give way under psychological pressure, making the sufferer more vulnerable to infection. Androgen is one of the hormones associated with nephritis. Anne Boleyn also suffered from sudden illnesses at times of tension, and Elizabeth was periodically afflicted in the same manner. Certainly, she had every reason to be appallingly tense. Her reluctance to attend court may also have been simple fear. Now the gloves were off, it was quite possible that she would “disappear,” as the inconvenient York princes had done within (almost) living memory. In a Lenten sermon, Bishop Stephen Gardiner had just preached that the queen would be “merciful to the body of the commonwealth,” but that this could only be accomplished if “the rotten and hurtful members of that were cut off and consumed.” Lady Jane had gone to the scaffold an hour after her husband, Guildford Dudley, on 12 February; her father’s support for the rebels had exhausted Mary’s clemency. Elizabeth had every reason to believe, when she finally entered London on the 23rd, that she would be next.
Nonetheless, ever aware of the importance of appearances, Elizabeth made a good, if rather pathetic, show. Renard had disseminated a rumor that the swelling in her body was due to pregnancy, a slander for which Elizabeth showed her scorn by dressing in white and having the curtains of her litter drawn open, so that her suffering countenance might give the spiteful ambassador the lie. As the interrogations went on, Elizabeth was effectively imprisoned at Whitehall, where Mary refused to see her. After Wyatt had delivered his testimony at Westminster, she was finally visited on 16 March, charged with engagement in the conspiracy, and informed that she would be sent to the Tower for questioning. Guards were stationed outside her chamber and many of her servants sent away. On Saturday, 18 March, the Earl of Sussex and the Marquess of Winchester arrived to accompany Elizabeth to the Tower. She pleaded for time to write to her sister, so winningly that Sussex gave in to her request. One imagines that she had already rehearsed what she was going to say in those long hours behind a barred door, but she wrote extremely slowly, so slowly that the tide which was to take her downriver turned. (The last opportunity for her to have departed in daylight that day would have been about 1 p.m.; we can therefore surmise that the “Tide Letter” was composed at about midday.) When she had finished, having bought another night of relative freedom, Elizabeth hatched in the remaining space on the paper, to prevent any other hand tampering with her words.
In terms of the evidence which has survived, Elizabeth had done virtually nothing to incriminate herself. She had remained aloof from the conspiracy, but what exactly she knew is uncertain. As queen, she consistently tended to avoid action until the last possible moment, refusing to intervene until she was required to do so. She prevaricated, but not passively. Had Wyatt’s coup in 1554 succeeded, she could have ridden to her coronation with a clear conscience; when it failed, she was theoretically free of any taint. And yet not now, not quite. The papers of the French ambassador confirm that he was in contact, if not with Elizabeth herself, then with the rebels. On 26 January, he reported that Elizabeth was to remove to Donnington and that the castle was being fortified. Elizabeth had refused Sir James’s request to leave for Donnington on the 22nd. Had she planned to go to Donnington and wait, well-defended, to see how events fell out, and been prevented by illness? Or had the rebels merely hoped that she would go there? Either way, Mary knew that men and munitions had been gathered. So how far what Elizabeth wrote to her sister now was true no longer mattered. What she wrote was a direct appeal to her sister’s majesty, to the justice required of a prince. Her words had to give Mary pause, at least for long enough to allow Elizabeth to gain a purchase on her freedom.
If any ever did try the old saying that a king’s word was more than another man’s oath I most humbly beseech your Majesty to verify it in me … that I be not condemned without answer and due proof which it seems that now I am for that without cause provided I am by your counsel from you commanded to go unto the tower, a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject.
She roundly denied the two principal charges, of communicating with Wyatt and the French ambassador: “As for the traitor Wyatt he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him. And as for the copy of the letter sent to the French king, I pray God confound me eternally if I ever sent him word, message, token or letter.” Elizabeth recalled Thomas Seymour’s pleas to see his brother: “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,” adding that it was the “persuasions” of others which had persuaded the Duke of Somerset otherwise, and that such persons “are not to be compared to your majesty.” Such “persuasions,” she argued, should not set two sisters at odds.
The “Tide L
etter” was a superb performance, but it did no good. Mary still refused to see Elizabeth and berated Sussex for permitting her to write. The next day, Palm Sunday, Elizabeth entered the Tower.
The hagiographic account of her arrival given in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments has Elizabeth playing to the crowd as only she knew how. Landing at “Traitors’ Gate,” Elizabeth supposedly announced, “Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs.” She then staged an impromptu sit-in and refused to get up from the flagstones, remarking that she was better off there “than in a worse place.” When one of her attendants broke down at the sight of his mistress so demeaned, she informed the onlookers that there was no need, since “she knew her truth to be such that no man would have cause to weep for her.”10 In fact, Elizabeth landed at Tower Wharf and walked across the wooden bridge on the St. Paul’s side of the Tower. The only drama was the fright she got from the roaring of the lions in the royal menagerie. And while her prison was not the dank dungeon of romantic legend, her lodgings were a particularly spiteful choice on Mary’s part, as the four rooms allotted to Elizabeth in the royal apartments of the Tower were those used by Anne Boleyn for her coronation and occupied once again before her death.
Elizabeth was just twenty-one years old. She had no access to counsel, much less a lawyer. She knew when she entered the Tower that it was only her own words, in response to the forthcoming interrogations, which would save her life.
Elizabeth’s only weapon was her wits. She was examined on Good Friday, five days after her arrival. She recalled rather grandly that she did indeed possess a house at Donnington, but that she had never slept there. She admitted that Crofts had tried to persuade her to go but pointed out that going to her own house could hardly be construed as a crime. The crucial issue was that since the house had been furnished with “arms and provisions,” did Elizabeth know of it, or agree to it? Mary’s original letter to Elizabeth summoning her to court in early February hinted at the possibility of Elizabeth’s going to Donnington, but Elizabeth had not taken the bait and confirmed it. The first encounter could be judged a draw. Renard was still pushing Mary to declare Elizabeth guilty, but divisions had now emerged in her council. For Elizabeth’s enemies, there was still the possibility that Wyatt might confess something more, but he went to his death on 11 April affirming that neither Elizabeth nor Courtenay “was privy of my rising or commotion before I began.” Next day, the interrogators confronted Elizabeth again, and once more found no new evidence. As Wyatt’s pickled entrails were nailed up at Newgate, two men were put in the pillory for claiming that it was he who had cleared her name. Elizabeth, though, remained fearful. When Sir Henry Bedingfield appeared at the Tower on 4 May at the head of a hundred guards, she asked, startled, if the scaffold erected for the beheading of Jane Grey had been dismantled. The only relief she could find from the unbearable uncertainty was to pace the privy garden and the chamber of her lodgings, circling again and again like the caged beasts in the menagerie close by. On the sixty-second day of her imprisonment, Elizabeth finally learned that she was to be released, but that Bedingfield would be, in effect, her new jailer.
6
ELIZABETH’S NEW HOME was to be Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. Her journey there took her through the divisions of a divided country. Mary Tudor’s early policy of religious toleration would collapse within two years of her accession, and from February 1555 the fires of Smithfield would be stoked with Protestants prepared to die for their faith. Three hundred men and women burned for their beliefs during Mary’s reign, and beyond London, the country in 1554 was already beginning to split into confessional enclaves. From Richmond, where she had remained for only a night after leaving the Tower, Elizabeth passed through Windsor, West Wycombe, and Rycote, accompanied everywhere on her route by cheering crowds. Bedingfield reported nervously that “Men betwixt London and these parts be not good and whole in matters of religion,” as resistance to Rome remained strong in villages which rang their bells as Elizabeth’s litter travelled by.1 So many gifts of flowers and cakes were offered at High Wycombe that the princess had to beg the kind local ladies to stop, as the scent of sugar and spice was so overpowering. Sir Henry encountered a farmer named Christopher Cook outside Woburn, who had waited to catch a glimpse of the princess, and their conversation, he noted disapprovingly, proved Cook “a very Protestant.” Oxfordshire, where the university remained a bastion of the Old Faith, was more reassuring. After four days, the party arrived at the dilapidated but serviceable manor house of Woodstock, most recently improved by Elizabeth’s grandfather. The size of the property, with its two huge courtyards, presented an immediate problem to Bedingfield, who fretted that there were only three lockable doors.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Bedingfield. His account of his term of duty as Elizabeth’s keeper reads like a chamber farce. An honest, dogged, but poorly educated man, his mind was no match for the quicksilver temperament of his charge, and his task, to watch Elizabeth closely while treating her “in such good and honourable sort as may be agreeable to … her estate and degree,” was not lightened by the fact that most of the household were Elizabeth’s adherents.2 Thomas Parry was no longer an official part of the princess’s retinue, but he hovered at the Bull Inn at Woodstock, whence Bedingfield could not dislodge him, as it was Elizabeth herself who paid the bills for the household’s maintenance, and she therefore required her cofferer nearby. One senses a euphoric insolence in Elizabeth’s treatment of Bedingfield; perhaps it was having escaped with her life that made her tease him so mercilessly, yet she remained aware of her status as prisoner, and, as the weeks dragged on, she fell into a sullen depression.
Bedingfield found it almost impossible to keep track of the comings and goings of his prisoner’s insurrectionary household. Parry was holding court at the Bull, receiving as many as forty visitors a day. Suspicious gifts of books and potentially seditious pheasants arrived for Elizabeth, who complained vociferously about everything—her rooms, the air, the exile of one of the most Protestant of her women, Elizabeth Sandes, the lack of an English Bible, that her cloth of estate was not erected. Elizabeth knew that only by applying to her sister could she hope for some mitigation of her condition, but Mary refused to be “molested by such her disguise and colourful letters.”3 She petitioned Bedingfield constantly to be permitted to write to Mary, but another request, to be allowed to come to court in July, was merely ignored. In September, Bedingfield announced grudgingly that he had received permission from the council for her to write once more, a permission which, having sought it so long, Elizabeth now chose to ignore for a week before demanding the requisite materials. Then she complained of a headache. Then she washed her hair. Then she announced that she required a secretary to write to the council, and, since she was not permitted one, Bedingfield himself must do it. Bedingfield complied but took back his writing desk. Elizabeth stole one of his pens. When Bedingfield sneered at the airs of this “grand lady,” Elizabeth told him bluntly that he was a joke of a jailer. This sort of petty sniping ground on for almost a year.
While Elizabeth’s world had been reduced to the boundaries of Woodstock, with little diversion beyond baiting Bedingfield, Mary had married her Spanish king on 26 July. In November, the queen’s first parliament as a married woman immediately called for the return of Cardinal Reginald Pole, the exiled papal legate, and on the 30th of the month, after both Lords and Commons had passed a resolution to return the country to Catholicism, Pole formally absolved England from the taint of heresy and schism. Although considerable propaganda efforts were deployed to present the Marian Church as a “national” one (precisely the strategy employed so much more successfully under Elizabeth), Mary’s marriage and her fervent joy at the restoration of her faith left little doubt in most minds that, in religion, England once more belonged to Rome. The crowning triumph for Mary was her conviction that she had felt a child “quicken” in her womb. The queen was pregnant, and whatever threat her sist
er had presented could now be seen as negligible.
At last, on 17 April 1555, Elizabeth received the summons she had been hoping for. Bedingfield was even instructed that he need not trouble himself with reinforcing her guard for the journey. Elizabeth set off with a set of baby linen which she had embroidered in red as a gift for the next Tudor heir. She arrived at Hampton Court by the end of the month, though she was obliged to remain in her lodgings, which had been built for her brother Edward, for a further two weeks, until she received a visit from Bishop Gardiner. Elizabeth was required to submit “to the Queen’s grace.” Recognizing this as a tacit admittance of guilt, Elizabeth refused. After a further week of waiting, Elizabeth was conducted to Mary’s apartments by torchlight at ten in the evening. Elizabeth knelt before her sister, averring that she was a true subject, but when Mary scolded her for her refusal to confess, Elizabeth would only concede that she would not say she had been wrongfully punished before the queen. Mary was exasperated. Elizabeth had captured her sister’s feelings in the couplet she had scratched with a diamond onto one of the window panes at Woodstock: “Much suspected by me / Nothing proved can be.” It was infuriating. Mary was convinced of Elizabeth’s guilt, yet she felt obliged to restore her to some measure of favor, perhaps because of the influence of the third party at this nighttime interview, her husband, Philip of Spain. According to one source, Philip was lurking behind a tapestry during the encounter between the sisters, and it may have been at his desire that Mary eventually brought herself to exchange a few “comfortable words” with Elizabeth.
