by Lisa Hilton
In September 1561, William Maitland, the Queen of Scots’ envoy, rode south to Hertford Castle on embassy to Elizabeth. His mistress had been in Scotland for just thirteen days, and her place in the English succession was among her priorities, so ingratiating herself with Elizabeth was, to Mary, natural. Had she not remarked to the Duke of Bedford that “We are both in one isle, both of one language, both the nearest kinswoman that each other hath and both Queens?”2 Only the last of these considerations ever carried any weight for Elizabeth; for the rest, it is a measure of Mary’s stupendous political naivety that she even thought she had a hope. Charm was no substitute for submission, and beneath the niceties lurked the adamantine issue of the English succession. Maitland found Elizabeth in a state of obvious anxiety, “to all appearance falling away … extremely thin and the colour of a corpse.”3 Her irritation at his mission, that she should recognize Mary as her heir, was equally obvious. Elizabeth told Maitland she had expected quite another message from the new court in Scotland, that is, Mary’s readiness to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. She concluded their interviews with an explanation to Maitland as to why his own “Device for the Succession” was impossible. Princes, she said, could never trust even their children in matters of succession. Moreover, “I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed on that person that is next to succeed, and naturally men be so disposed: plures adorant solem orientem quam occidentem [more men worship the rising than the setting sun].” Her final remark suggested that this maxim applied as much or more to the young woman in the Tower as to the one in Edinburgh; there was “more matter hid” in Katherine’s marriage, she confided to Maitland, “than was yet uttered to the world.” Two days after Elizabeth was greeted by adoring crowds as she returned to London, Katherine Grey gave birth to a son.
To have the weakness of the Elizabethan succession thus exposed was agonizing for the government. For William Cecil it was also a personal embarrassment. His brother-in-law William was married to Katherine’s cousin, the daughter of Lord John Grey of Pyrgo. Both Lord John and the Earl of Hertford’s mother petitioned the Secretary to appease Elizabeth, to no avail. Mary Stuart’s response to Elizabeth’s frank conversation with Maitland had been to have her Parliament question the validity of the clause in Henry VIII’s will which excluded the Stuarts. This occurred a month after the baptism of Katherine’s son, Edward, Lord Beauchamp, who was under the terms of that will the Protestant male heir which the nation so urgently required. The queen would simply not countenance the baby’s legitimacy, thus Cecil, despairing, wrote to Throckmorton that Christmas:
I do see so little proof of my travails by reason her Majesty alloweth not of them, that I have left all to the wide world. I do only keep on a course for show, but inwardly I meddle not, leaving things to run in a course as the clock is left when the barrel is wound up.
Elizabeth never forgave Katherine Grey. She and Hertford somehow contrived to get another son while both were imprisoned, but Elizabeth never even considered acknowledging the claim of Edward Seymour or his younger brother, Thomas. Hertford was fined an astronomical £15,000 and remained in the Tower for nine years. Katherine was released after Thomas’s birth and for the last four years of her unhappy life was moved from custodian to custodian, dying of tuberculosis at age twenty-seven in 1568 at Cockfield Hall in Suffolk, exacerbated by several years of self-starvation.
Hertford managed to rehabilitate himself in 1591, when he gave a three-day entertainment at Elvetham for the queen that may have cost as much as his fine. Featuring poetry by John Lyly; three artificial islands; a specially constructed withdrawing room in the garden; a water pageant where Nereus, prophet of the sea, delivered a speech to “Fair Cynthia, the wide Ocean’s Empress” as a warship with a cargo of jewels sailed towards the queen; a banquet off a thousand pieces of plate; a fireworks display; and a fairy-tale castle with the royal arms all built in sugar, Hertford’s effort achieved the remark, as Elizabeth departed, that “hereafter he should find the reward thereof in her especial favor.” Even after thirty years of disgrace, Hertford could not resist a subtle dig at Elizabeth’s own lack of an heir. As the elderly queen rode through the park towards the house, to the sound of verses proclaiming her “a great Goddess whose beams do sprinkle heaven with unacquainted light,” six virgins carried blocks away from her horse’s path. The barriers had supposedly been laid by “Envie.”
ELIZABETH’S REFUSAL TO settle the matter of the succession had consequences beyond the wretched fate of Katherine Grey. So long as England had no confirmed Protestant heir, the realm would remain vulnerable to Catholic incursion. This threat was brought into sharper relief by the events in France of March 1562. Much attention has been given to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre which occurred in Paris a decade later, when the Huguenot magnates of France were murdered in a killing spree which engulfed the populace of the city, but the wars of religion which were to bloody Europe for thirty-six years might properly be said to have begun in the spring of 1562, in a small town in what is now the province of Haute-Marne. It was as a result of Wassy that “massacre,” previously used to indicate the chopping block used by French butchers, took on a much more sinister connotation.
On 1 March, Mary’s uncle, the Duc de Guise, was travelling through the town from his seat at Joinville when he stopped so that his men might hear Mass. Hearing bells in the streets, the duc was informed that the town’s Protestant community were proceeding to Sunday service. The village of Wassy comprised part of Mary Stuart’s royal dower, with Guise holding its lordship in protection of his niece’s rights. He felt both challenged and outraged when it appeared that the Protestants, who in theory were permitted to conduct their own services beyond the town walls, were usurping his right to hear Mass by worshipping within Wassy’s precincts, within sight and jurisdiction of the royal castle. Guise later claimed that he had invaded the Protestant gathering in order to reprove the congregation with their infraction, but his men lost control, or he lost control of them, with the result that fifty people were put to the sword.
Guise later dismissed the event, accounts of which were soon streaming off the printing presses in all European languages, as an “accident,” one not motivated by religious sectarianism but by the “arrogance” of “vassals” who ought to have known better than to challenge his—and his niece’s—authority. His assessment was just in that the religious conflict which came so powerfully to shape Elizabeth’s reign had its birth in the interconnection between faith and authority, most particularly royal authority. The massacre at Wassy had two profound implications for Elizabeth’s government. First, Protestants were being openly slaughtered by a Catholic power. Second, the massacre was conducted, at least in terms of the feudal understanding of politics which the wars of religion would sweep away, in Mary Stuart’s name. Mary’s French allies, notably her Guise relatives, had proved the extent of their ruthlessness in quashing reformed religion, and it is important to consider this as a background to the relationship between Elizabeth and Mary in the 1560s. Woodcuts depicting the massacre were widely disseminated in London; their inked silhouettes were a reminder to Elizabeth of the extent to which her cousin in the north might be prepared to go in her pursuit of her claim to the throne.
IN SEPTEMBER 1564, Elizabeth received Mary Stuart’s envoy, Sir James Melville, in London. At a first reading, she does not come off well in Sir James’s recollections of their encounter. Frankly, she showed off. “Who was fairer?” she demanded. They were respectively the fairest of them all in their own countries, replied the diplomat, conceding that Elizabeth’s complexion was whiter but that Mary was equally lovely. And which of them was taller? Melville was obliged to admit that Mary, at a model-like five feet eleven, had the advantage. “Then,” crowed Elizabeth, “she is too high, for I myself am neither too high nor too low.” Did Mary read, did she hunt, Elizabeth asked nosily, and what about music? Was Mary an accomplishe
d performer? Melville replied that his mistress was reasonably skilled, for a queen. That evening, the Scots envoy was conducted to a gallery overlooking a chamber, and there Elizabeth was, beavering away on the virginals. Naturally, Melville was ravished at his “accidental” intrusion and confessed the English queen’s musical superiority. The next evening Elizabeth exhibited herself on the dance floor, obliging Melville—who had extended his visit by two days in order to have the honor of watching the queen dance—to remark that Mary’s steps were not so “high” nor well-disposed as her own.
Why would Elizabeth comport herself so foolishly? Certainly she was vain and certainly she was curious, but she was also quite aware that a great deal more was at stake than her skill at dancing. This retreat into femininity reads like a deliberate ploy, a presentation of herself as unthreatening, preoccupied with how well her “Italian” dress set off her hair, for example, which was an effective distraction from, and a barrier to, Sir James’s need for more penetrating inquiries. It is characteristic of Elizabeth’s behavior towards Mary that she consistently invoked models of the feminine when it suited her, to evade the more hard-headed realities in play. Indeed, in the entirety of her relations with Mary throughout the long Anglo-Scots crisis (and especially, as we shall see, at its conclusion), Elizabeth deployed the three main strategies of invoking contemporary clichés of femininity, arrogating masculine qualities, and referring to the masculinity of her “mystical body,” which she had established, and employed according to circumstance, since her accession. Reconsidering her encounter with Melville, it can be cast as a masterpiece of diplomatic choreography, not least because of its actual use of dance as a means of communication.
In 1589, one of Elizabeth’s gentlemen of the chamber, John Stanhope, wrote to Lord Talbot on the state of the fifty-nine-year-old queen’s health, observing that “six or seven galliards of a morning, besides music and singing is her ordinary exercise.” Elizabeth had been noted dancing with the Duke of Norfolk “splendidly arrayed” at her coronation, and references to dancing at Elizabeth’s court are abundant throughout her reign—from the Venetian ambassador Paolo Tiepolo in 1559, through Sir Thomas Smith on the Christmas balls in 1572, to approval of the “magnificently robed women” of the 1585 Christmas court, to the curmudgeonly remark by a visiting Spaniard in 1599 that he had witnessed “the head of the Church of England and Ireland dancing three or four galliards.” Yet dancing meant much more to Elizabeth than a pleasant and healthy pastime. As recent scholarship has shown, dance in the sixteenth-century court was a signaling system, deeply integrated into any celebration or cultural event.4 Status could be indicated during a court masque or ball by who danced with whom and in what order, and the position of the monarch within that space. Authorities such as Castiglione, the Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini, and Thomas Elyot concurred that dance was both a virtue and a means to virtue, Elyot terming it “a model of prudence in action.”5 For the courtier, dance was a means of exhibiting the innate nobility which merited advancement and favor. A good dancer could achieve political and social success. Witness, for example, Sir Christopher Hatton, who “came to the court by the galliard,” his prowess referred to in Ben Jonson’s 1603 masque The Satyr:
They came to see and to be seen
And though they dance before the Queen
There’s none of these do hope to come by
Wealth to build another Holmby [Holmby being Hatton’s grand country estate].
For a monarch, dance was a part of their political apparatus. Henry VIII was an accomplished dancer—the Milanese ambassador depicts him in 1514, in a sort of Renaissance Saturday Night Fever, barefoot and in his shirt, “leaping like a stag” and spinning the girls intoraptures. Dancing was one of the few means of physical display available to a female ruler (Catherine de Medici also employed it effectively), and as such, it was also a virile, “princely” activity, as the Duke of Alençon observed in 1581, declaring himself impressed with Elizabeth’s conduct in “matters of princely pleasure, as dancing, music, discoursing … and perfection of many languages.” The association of language and dance, the language of dance and the dance of language, is interesting here. Diplomatic conversations, such as those between Elizabeth and Melville, proceeded with the same stately measures as a dance—first the mutual reverence, then the courtesies offered and returned, then the movement through prearranged steps, with allowance for judicious improvisation on either side, then concluding as it began in a bow. Recast as a dance, linguistic and actual, Elizabeth’s reception of Melville looks rather different.
The subtext of the interaction between Elizabeth and Melville glares, but never surfaces. Elizabeth’s remarks may have been confined to competitive feminine trivialities, but the agenda both knew themselves to be discussing was whether or not Elizabeth was prepared to concede a serious conversation to the Scots ambassador on the urgent issue of the succession. She was not. After the interval of musical comedy when Melville had duly admired her performance, he attempted to use the “occasion to press his dispatch.” Elizabeth was having none of it. Persuading him to remain at court for a further two days to watch her dance involved a loss of status for Melville, an admission that he was weak enough to have to attend on the queen’s pleasure. Thus Elizabeth used her dancing to invoke the practice of courtly love, forcing Melville into the role of attendant swain: “Elizabeth’s dancing is a key element in these conversations… . She clearly incorporates her actual dancing or musical abilities as well as the discussion of her dancing in a maneuver that presents her as superior.”6 When Melville grants that Elizabeth’s “Italian” manner of dancing is finer than that of his mistress, he admits a surrender. His “dispatch” will not be pressed this time.
Elizabeth used dance on several similar occasions to make a diplomatic point. Roger Aston, a later messenger from the Scots court under James VI, was treated to a similar “impromptu” performance, “placed in the lobby, the hanging being turned him, where he might see the Queen dancing to a little fiddle.”7 This was interpreted by Aston as meaning that he might “tell his master by her youthful disposition how likely he was to come to the crown he so thirsted after.” In 1597, the ambassador of Henri of Navarre, André de Maisse, came “accidentally” upon Elizabeth playing the spinet in her chamber on Christmas Eve. When he had praised her execution of the piece, they watched her ladies dance, during which Elizabeth casually remarked that she had convened her council (which de Maisse had been unsuccessfully pressing for since his arrival) and suggested he attend. Only when the courtesies of diplomatic choreography had been observed was Elizabeth prepared to turn her attention to actual politics—assuming, of course, that her partner had performed with due “honor, prudence and decorum.” In 1599, the Danish ambassador observed Elizabeth dancing with the Earl of Essex on Twelfth Night, “very richly and freshly attired”—again, an important signal of favor towards an individual who was presently at the center of much discord. In 1601, when Elizabeth entertained the Russian and Barbarian ambassadors along with the Duke of Brachiano, Virginio Orsini, she accorded him the great (if not quite truthful) honor of stepping out with him for the “first time in fifteen years.” Orsini, a nephew of the grand Duke of Tuscany and a cousin of the Queen of France, was the most significant Italian figure yet to have visited Elizabeth’s court. It was necessary to impress him, and Elizabeth did so, prompting him to write that he “seemed to have become one of those knights travelling in enchanted palaces.”8
IN 1563, ELIZABETH made the distinctly peculiar proposal that Mary Stuart should marry her own favored dancing partner, Robert Dudley. Melville’s visit the following year was, in form at least, a pursuance of this bizarre alliance. To render the man whom Mary had once dismissed as her cousin’s horse-keeper more attractive, Elizabeth took the opportunity to ennoble Dudley as the Earl of Leicester on 29 September, demonstrating their familiarity to a rather shocked Melville by stroking his neck above his collar as he knelt to be dubbed. It was a bal
letic gesture, at once girlishly unqueenly and also a reminder, given their physical postures at the time, of the threat incipient in regal favor. Since Elizabeth had no intention of marrying Leicester herself, the plan is not so strange as might first appear. Scotland would have a reformist consort, and Elizabeth herself would have a loyal servant in Mary’s very bed. Moreover, if Elizabeth settled the succession as Mary so ardently wished, Leicester’s son might one day be king, the greatest reward Elizabeth could bestow for his service. When representatives of the two queens met at Berwick in November, Mary’s envoys made it plain that she would not countenance marriage under any other condition. And Elizabeth stepped back.
