Elizabeth

by Lisa Hilton

  11

  SHORTLY AFTER ELIZABETH’S accession, the Hapsburg ambassador, Baron Pollweider, summed up the conundrum which was to preoccupy not only the queen’s own ministers and the royal houses of Europe but every generation of historians since—“For that she would wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.” The bald facts are that she did, and she did. Why Elizabeth never married, despite her repeated public declarations of her willingness to do so, is the intriguing question.

  At a wedding masque towards the end of her life, in 1600, Elizabeth was asked to join the dancing by one of her ladies, Mistress Fitton. What role should she take? asked the queen. “Affection,” replied Mistress Fitton. “Affection is false,” answered Elizabeth. And yet she rose and danced. It is a very Elizabethan response, both playful and cynical. Did Elizabeth mean that all affection was not to be trusted, or that she, as Affection, was false? She performed her role, dancing at the wedding nonetheless.

  Elizabeth proved that she did not believe that marriage for love was a possibility for her, no matter what sentimental gestures she occasionally indulged. Love was sport, marriage among the sixteenth-century ruling classes was business. In an age when all politics was dynastic politics, that is, family politics, no royal woman could expect that erotic attraction would have a role in her marriage. She was lucky if she was able to meet the bridegroom first. Betrothals, counter-proposals, and the eventual bestowing of a woman’s dowry, cognatic kinship network, and person were among the tools of diplomacy, to be proffered or withdrawn according to political exigency. Like the majority of royal women, Elizabeth had been on the marriage market practically since birth, and she stubbornly remained there until her late forties, an age when many of her contemporaries were grandmothers. Courtships were a part of statecraft; they were also flattering and amusing, yet from an early age Elizabeth never intended them to be anything more.

  Recalling his charge in the schoolroom, Elizabeth’s teacher Ascham wrote that “in her whole manner of life she more resembled Hippolyte than Phaedra. Which observation I then referred, not to the graces of her person, but wholly to the chastity of her mind.” In classical mythology, Hippolyte was killed after rejecting the sexual advances of his stepmother, Phaedra. Since he had rejected her rival Aphrodite, the goddess of virginity, Artemis (Diana) took pity on him and brought him back to life, which he then devoted chastely to hunting.

  As soon as she was old enough to speak for herself, Elizabeth made her aversion to marriage perfectly apparent. Several suitors had been suggested during her brother’s reign, including the Earl of Pembroke and Prince Frederick of Denmark, while the imperial ambassadors muttered darkly about the intentions of two Dudleys (Robert Dudley’s father and his elder brother, Ambrose) to put aside their wives and take the princess for themselves. And, of course, there had been the terrifying scandal of Seymour. However, serious gestures towards her betrothal were not made until it became apparent in the next reign that Mary Tudor would have no child. Philip of Spain proposed his nephew, the Archduke Ferdinand, or even his own eleven-year-old son by his first marriage to Maria Manuela of Portugal, Don Carlos, but Philip’s favored candidate was Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy. Despite considerable pressure for her during 1556 to accept the latter match, Elizabeth declared that she would rather die than have him, pointing out cruelly to Mary that “the afflictions suffered by her” had vanquished any wish she might have had to take a husband, and that as for Don Carlos, she would not marry “even were they to give her the King’s son or find any greater prince.” This is fairly unequivocal, but the reasons for Elizabeth’s objections to marriage were to evolve over time. That she had a personal dislike of marriage she made clear, though she was never precise as to exactly why. She knew of her mother’s end, and of that of her stepmother Katherine Howard, as well as the deaths after childbirth of Queen Jane and Katherine Parr and the horrible consequences of her attraction to Thomas Seymour. Perhaps, then, she was terrified of sex, but equally she had observed Mary throw away her people’s goodwill on a loathed foreign marriage to a man who patently had no feelings for her beyond courtesy. Mary’s obsession with bearing a son had resulted in appalling humiliation; moreover, since Mary was now unlikely to bear a child, Elizabeth knew that she stood to become queen. It was irrational to marry at this juncture, particularly a Catholic candidate, and quite unnecessary when in a short time she might be able to choose for herself. Or perhaps, as she herself said, she had no desire to marry at all.

  As queen, having turned down her former brother-in-law, Elizabeth’s hand was sought by Charles, Archduke of Austria, but the only person who was seriously interested in the marriage was the Spanish ambassador, Alvarez de Quadra. A prospective visit never came off, and religious differences were politely supplied as the reason why the match could not go forward, but no great enthusiasm was shown on either side. A more suitable, and determined, contender was Erik of Sweden, who spent practically his whole reign in pursuit of Elizabeth. In 1556, Erik had made a gaffe by sending an ambassador directly to Elizabeth, rather than Queen Mary, who still had another six months to live. Another delegation appeared after the accession, but despite the fact that Erik himself was very much a prince of the Renaissance, a skilled singer and lutenist, a composer and collector of fine manuscripts, his ambassadors’ behavior was less polished—“those of most consequence at Court speak derisively of them, inasmuch as the envoy can only speak ridiculously and has no sense of decorum… . They spend much money and are yet held as naught.”1 Undeterred, Erik sent his younger brother, John, Duke of Finland, to London in 1559, but Elizabeth was unimpressed by the duke’s scattering of silver coins in the streets and his claim that his brother would turn them to gold if he could marry the English queen. “The barbaric King of Sweden went to great expense for this marriage,” she admitted, “but how could we have agreed with such a difference in manners?” She later sent Erik a rather heavy-handed gift, a copy of Castiglione’s manual Il Cortigiano. Poor Erik was desperate to come to England to persuade Elizabeth, but was detained in 1560 by the business of being crowned, so he sent yet more ambassadors and more gifts, two ships’ worth in 1560 (including eighteen horses), and twice set sail in 1561, only to be turned back by storms. His determination was such that royal souvenir sellers had already prepared woodcuts of the happy couple, and Elizabeth was obliged to write to the mayor of London in 1561 to have them suppressed. Erik continued to write elegant Latin letters to Elizabeth, and in September 1565, his sister, Princess Cecilia, Margravine of Baden-Rodemachern, arrived at court. The excitement of her visit was much increased when she gave birth to a son shortly after landing, and Elizabeth gave her a splendid welcome, but relations turned sour when the Swedish princess got herself into dreadful debt and had to retire to the Continent to evade her creditors.

  In many ways, Erik would have been a highly suitable husband for Elizabeth. He was young and decent looking, and, better still, Protestant. Swedish dominance of the Baltic trade routes secured by the marriage would have been of great advantage to both nations, and Swedish politics were to remain of much interest to Elizabeth later in the reign. Unfortunately, Erik’s family, the Vasas, tended to run mad. By 1567 Erik had grown so paranoid about imagined plots against him that he personally murdered several high-ranking courtiers and was deposed and imprisoned by his brothers. He died in 1577, poisoned with arsenic in a dish of pea soup.

  Erik’s courtship left two legacies in England. The first was the musical manuscripts known as the Winchester part books, one of the most significant artifacts in the history of English music. They are very much Renaissance productions: French chansons set to Italian madrigals printed in Antwerp, a great center for Italian music. Erik was trying to show Elizabeth that he was endowed with at least some of the courtier’s qualities demanded by Castiglione; three of the villanelle tunes from the manuscript were used by Philip Sidney as settings of his Certaine Sonnets in 1570, a plaintive echo of the Swedish king’s hopeless romance.
The second was Helena Snakenborg, an exceptionally beautiful maid of honor to Princess Cecilia. During her visit, Katherine Parr’s brother, William, the Marquess of Northampton, fell in love with Helena, and Elizabeth gave her a place in her own household to permit their marriage to go ahead. Helena and Elizabeth grew close, so much so that when the Marchioness of Northampton was widowed after her sadly brief marriage of five months, she returned to Elizabeth’s chamber and remained there for forty years.

  Helena Snakenborg’s marriage was that extraordinary thing, a love match, yet all that concerned Elizabeth’s ministers was that she do her duty, settle on a candidate, and produce a son as rapidly as possible. “God send our mistress a husband,” wrote Cecil shortly after her accession, “and by him a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession.” In 1564, at a point when Elizabeth’s court was beset by scandals and overshadowed by the question of the succession, he grumbled, “God give Her Majesty by this chance a disposition hereof that either by her marriage or some common order we many subjects may know where to lean.”

  In between these two complaints came Robert Dudley. That Elizabeth loved him could hardly be doubted—certainly she was prepared to make a fool of herself over him and assuredly many people believed that she would marry him, but did she ever have any real intention of doing so? The crown was barely on Elizabeth’s head before her government was petitioning her to marry. During her first parliament she responded to a motion that she should take a husband quickly with a further iteration of her preference for the single state. She would have married already, she explained, if she had desired to obey her sister, or from fear, or from ambition. Yet she had not. She had been “constant” in her “determination.” She concluded with one of her most famous statements: “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.” Of course no one believed her. What woman would not wish to marry? What woman could imagine governing alone? Yet this was never how Elizabeth saw herself. It was twenty years before she convinced her ministers into the grudging acceptance that she had meant what she said. It is surprising that Elizabeth is so often characterized as a fickle, mercurial ruler. In this instance, she set and maintained a course with perfect clarity; it took rather longer for the rest of the world to catch up.

  If Elizabeth is taken at her own word, then her relationship with Robert Dudley might rather be characterized as a passionate and compromising flirtation than an affair which teetered on the brink of marriage. In 1559, Dudley was the perfect choice for a romantic friendship, given that he had been married to his wife, Amy Robsart, for nine years. Yes, he was young and dashing and handsome, a splendid dancer and a wonderful horseman; yes, Elizabeth knew and trusted him; and, yes, there was within them both the trauma of the Tower; but above all, Robert was safe. And Elizabeth, whose youth had been marred by so many constrictions, who had had to negotiate her way through such a maze of conflicting loyalties and temptations, did what any young single woman who suddenly found herself free and rich and happy would do. She enjoyed herself.

  Robert had another function for Elizabeth. As they hunted and danced their way through the first summer of her reign, the possibility, already mooted by gossiping ambassadors, that he would find a way to divorce Amy and marry Elizabeth kept her numerous other suitors conveniently at bay. The Duke of Norfolk and the Earls of Arundel and Westmorland were proposed as husbands, though only Arundel, who spent a good deal of time and money currying favor for the match, seemed to think he had a chance, and there was also talk of Sir William Pickering, whom Elizabeth was reputed to find attractive, though he himself confirmed that he was aware of her intention to remain unmarried. The Earl of Arran, the Protestant successor to the Scots crown after Mary Stuart, was also in the running, and Archduke Charles had revived his lukewarm suit.

  That Elizabeth would show favor to the Dudleys was not remarkable. On her accession, Robert’s brother Ambrose Dudley followed his father into the post of Master of the Ordnance, while Robert’s sisters Mary Sidney and Katherine, Countess of Huntingdon, became ladies of the bedchamber. As Master of the Horse, Robert was responsible not only for Elizabeth’s stables but for the stage management of her public pageantry, while his physical proximity to the queen when they rode out not only created a rare and delicious private intimacy but gave him power, as one well placed to put suits or ask for favors. What troubled Elizabeth’s ministers was the pattern of favoritism the queen now began to show. She granted considerable lands to Dudley, and in April 1559 made him a Knight of the Garter, along with the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquess of Northampton, and the Earl of Rutland, all of whom were considerably higher ranking than he. In November, she granted him the Lord Lieutenantship of Windsor, which provoked a quarrel with the anxious Duke of Norfolk. No one was quite sure what it would mean if Elizabeth were to marry a commoner. English queens had done so before—as far back as the twelfth century, Adeliza of Louvain had married William d’Aubigne and Isabelle of Angoulême had married Hugh de Lusignan. Catherine de Valois had married one Owen ap Maredudd, which was the reason the grandson of a Welsh servant came to ascend the throne of England—however, these women were remarrying as royal widows. The only precedent for a Queen Regnant’s marriage was Mary’s to Philip of Spain. Philip had been granted the title of king but was never crowned and anointed, as the marriage treaty stipulated that, though he was to aid his wife in governance, sovereignty remained vested in her. This had caused personal tension between the couple, and in the realm at large, when Mary submitted her sovereign will to her husband’s in the disastrous affair of Calais.

  Another example might be the marriage of Edward IV to a commoner, Elizabeth Woodville, whose huge family aroused enormous resentment, and arguably another round of civil war, by their incursions into the established aristocracy. Mary Tudor’s marriage had been wildly unpopular, but might not the factionalism which would come about from the elevation of a dubious magnate dynasty prove equally divisive and damaging? The imperial ambassador Baron Bruener thought so: “If she marry the said my Lord Robert, she will incur so much enmity that she may lay herself down one evening as Queen of England and rise the next morning as plain Mistress Elizabeth.”2 The only other precedent for a queen co-ruling as anything other than a royal spouse or mother was the scandalous regime of Isabelle of France, the widow of Edward II, who, during the minority of her son, had made her lover, Roger Mortimer, de facto king. Sex and favorites, as Edward II had shown with Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser, could be a deadly combination, and while English kings had always taken mistresses as a matter of course, the idea of an unchaste female ruler was appalling. In September 1560, Cecil confided to the Spanish ambassador that he perceived “the most manifest ruin impending over the Queen through her intimacy with Lord Robert. The Lord Robert had made himself master of the business of the State and the person of the Queen.”

  From other sources, Feria reported, he had heard that Elizabeth even visited Dudley in his bedroom at night. Elizabeth’s First Lady of the Bedchamber, Katherine Ashley, formerly her governess, dared to plead with Elizabeth herself, on her knees, about such scandalous rumors, warning of the “evil speaking” around the pair and consequent damage to Elizabeth’s reputation. Elizabeth responded rather sadly that such talk was absurd, but that she wanted Robert close to her because “in this world she had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy.” Elizabeth herself knew that the gossip was false—as she pointed out to Mistress Ashley, was she not always surrounded safely by her ladies?—yet the poison had already spread far beyond the court. Writing from Brussels, Sir Thomas Challoner confided that “these folks are broad mouthed of one too much in favor,” adding that he himself considered the “scandal most false.” The Swedish ambassador felt obliged to defend the queen from allegations that she was sleeping with Dudley, writing to his master that he saw “no signs of an immodest life, but I did see many signs of chastity, virginity an
d true modesty.” The fact that he had to make such protestations at all showed that the damage Mistress Ashley feared had already been done. It grew worse with the sudden, mysterious death of Amy Dudley.

  A quarter of a century after Amy Dudley was found dead at the foot of a staircase at Cumnor Place, near Oxford, on 8 September 1560, a Catholic propagandist tract, Leicester’s Commonwealth, claimed that Robert Dudley had ordered the murder of his wife. Rumors that he had been planning to do so, and that Amy herself was fearful of being poisoned, had been current for some time. The writer of the most comprehensive history of Amy’s end concludes that Dudley’s dealings in the case are “but conjecture,” and Dudley was exonerated from all blame, yet the disappearance of his wife provided an abrupt caesura in the relationship with Elizabeth.3 The queen had carelessly ignored the gossips until now, but Amy’s death could not be so easily dismissed. Dudley’s reputation was severely compromised, and she felt it necessary to send him away from court while an inquest into Amy’s accident was conducted. The verdict was finally pronounced at Cumnor Assizes in August the following year, long after Dudley had been reinstated, when the jury concluded that “the aforesaid Lady Amy … accidentally fell precipitously down the aforesaid steps … and then broke her own neck, on account of which fracture of the neck the same Lady Amy there and then died instantly … and was found there … without any other mark or wound on her body.” In fact, Amy had also sustained two deep wounds on her head, which may well have been caused by the fall; the jury brought in a verdict of “misfortune.” This did not hold back a wave of international outrage.