At this time, the kingdom was in difficulty. Royal finances had been depleted by war with Scotland and France, and in 1549, social unrest at home culminated in several armed revolts spurred by religious and agrarian issues. The blame was placed on the government of the Protector, Edward Seymour. On 22 January 1552, he was executed, and the leader of the Council, John Dudley, became the major force in the English Court. Before long, he was granted the title of 1st Duke of Northumberland and, although he never took up the title, he became Protector in all but name.
Dudley gave Edward VI more apparent freedom than his predecessor had, letting him take part in ‘manly’ pursuits such as hunting and jousting, and was better liked by the King. But Edward’s new liberty would be brief. In April 1552, he fell ill with measles, and then recovered. He spent a strenuous summer, and by late autumn was ill again. By January 1553, he was bedridden with a terminal illness, probably tuberculosis.
Now Dudley was faced with a dilemma. If Henry VIII’s will was followed to the letter, the heiress to the throne was to be Princess Mary, a formidable Catholic who would doubtless put an end to the Protestant Reformation in England. He considered the option of Elizabeth as a viable alternative to the next queen, perhaps even with himself as the power behind the throne. Sources indicate that Dudley was considering marrying Elizabeth to his eldest son or even ‘that he might find it expedient to get rid of his own wife and marry Elizabeth himself.’13
However, Dudley may have suspected that if Elizabeth was monarch, she would be unlikely to play the puppet; she would choose her own ministers and marry whom she wanted, with the result that he would cease to wield any real power. An even more bizarre plan by Dudley was alleged in a book published around 1584. A passage suggests that Dudley intended to wed Mary to seize power: ‘… the Duke of Northumberland had strange devices in his head … for bringing the crown to his own family. And among other devices it is thought that he had most certain intention to marry the Lady Mary himself ...’ As to the fact that John Dudley was married at the time: ‘These great personages, in matters of such weight as is a kingdom, have privileges to dispose of women’s bodies, marriages, lives and deaths, as shall be thought for the time most convenient.’14
Another alternative was to find Elizabeth a husband outside of England, getting rid of her so that she and Mary could be removed from the succession more easily. Dudley considered the possibility of Elizabeth marrying Francesco d’Este, Prince of Massa Lombarda and son of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara and Lucrecia Borgia. There was, however, little support for the marriage.
Early in 1553, Dudley opted for a different approach and began working to persuade the King to change the succession. Edward VI was reminded that Mary and Elizabeth were both illegitimate, and more importantly, that Mary would bring Catholicism back to England. Dudley reasoned that if Mary were to be struck out of the succession, how could Elizabeth, her equal, be left in? Futhermore, he argued that both the princesses would seek foreign husbands, jeopardizing English sovereignty.15
As part of his plan, Dudley determined to keep the dying Edward away from Elizabeth, in case he decided to exclude Mary but insist on making Elizabeth his heir out of love and respect. Dudley made sure Elizabeth’s and Edward’s letters to each other were never delivered. A letter survives from Elizabeth to Edward, showing that she was on her way to visit him when she heard he was seriously unwell, but was turned back by a messenger who said he had been sent by the King:
Two chief occasions moved me much and grieved me greatly – the one, for that I doubted your Majesty’s health – the other, because for all my long tarrying I went without that I came for. Of the first, I am relieved in a part, both that I understood of your health … Of my other grief I am not eased … For if your Grace’s advice that I should return (whose will is a commandment) had not been, I would not have made the half of my way the end of my journey …16
By April, Edward was vomiting phlegm, black bile and blood, and Dudley’s desperate search for a Queen he could control and manipulate intensified. He persuaded the dying Edward to name his cousin Lady Jane Grey (Henry VIII’s great-niece, who also happened to be married to Dudley’s youngest son, Guildford Dudley) as his successor, thereby excluding his two half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. Finally, after months of agony, the 15-year-old Edward VI died on 6 July 1553, leaving the throne to the Protestant Lady Jane and her sons.
Dudley immediately put his plans into action, withholding the official notification of the death of the King and sending messages to Mary and Elizabeth to summon them to London, presumably to take the two princesses into custody. But the luckless Lady Jane, proclaimed Queen on 10 July, would rule for only nine days.
As Elizabeth avoided trouble by taking to her bed at Hatfield and claiming to be too ill to travel, Mary set off for London, but was warned of the plot at Hoddesdon and fled to Kenninghall to plan her strategy. So loyal were the people of England to Henry VIII’s daughter, she was able to raise an army from her base at Framlingham and march on London. With her base growing, Parliament proclaimed Mary as Queen, and Lady Jane was placed under arrest.
The Catholic Mary I (Queen of England and Ireland 1553–58) acceded to the throne on a wave of popular support. Catholics, who had suffered under the rule of Edward VI’s ministers, welcomed her with open arms. They expected that she would re-establish the Catholic Church, give back the monastic lands and effectively turn the clock back 20 years. Many Protestants also supported her right to rule, but hoped the Council would keep her from bringing back the Catholic religion and from punishing the growing numbers of Protestants. As the daughter of Henry VIII, everyone was prepared to support Mary.
By 24 July 1553, Dudley’s power base had crumbled and he was arrested. Mary I was able to disband most of her army, safe in the knowledge that she had the support of the vast majority of the nobles. She moved slowly, arriving in London on 3 August. Elizabeth, once she had received confirmation of Mary’s success, left Hatfield on 30 July for London, staying at Somerset House. She rode out to meet Mary with an entourage of 1,000 horsemen, knights and ladies. The sisters met at Aldgate, embraced, kissed, and rode into London together. Mary I, dressed in purple and gold and laden with jewels, was 37 years old; Elizabeth was 20. The cortege proceeded to the Tower, where prisoners including John Dudley and Jane Grey were held. Dudley would be beheaded on 22 August, charged with high treason.
At first Mary and Elizabeth’s interactions were friendly. Mary, who at the age of 20 had been responsible for the household of the 3-year-old Elizabeth when Anne Boleyn was executed, seems to have had great affection for her younger half-sister, whom she possibly at one stage may have viewed as a surrogate child. The relationship, however, was never straightforward. In spite of her reconciliation with Henry VIII after Anne Boleyn’s death, Mary always blamed Elizabeth’s mother for the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and Catherine of Aragon’s subsequent miserable death in poverty and loneliness.
At times, Mary could put this aside and enjoy the company of her younger sister, sending her small gifts, giving her pocket money and exchanging letters. The feeling seems to have been mutual, with Elizabeth writing to Mary in 1552 to commiserate with her for another bout of a longstanding illness. This may refer to Mary’s migraine headaches, or to the monthly period pains that she had suffered from the time she was about 16 years old:
Good sister, As to hear of your sickness is unpleasant to me, so is it nothing fearful, for that I understand it is your old guest that is wont oft to visit you, whose coming, though it be oft, yet is it never welcome … Good sister, though I have good cause to thank you for your oft sending to me, yet I have more occasion to render you my hearty thanks for your gentle writing, which how painful it is to you, I may well guess by myself. And you may well see by my writing so oft, how pleasant it is to me. And thus I end to trouble you, desiring God to send you as well to do as you can think and wish or I desire or pray … Your loving sister, Elizabeth.17
; The letter is light, cheerful and lacks the heavy formality of Elizabeth’s letters to her father, stepmother and brother – and her later letters to Mary as Queen. At the time of Mary’s accession, Elizabeth counted her sister a friend.
At Mary I’s coronation, Elizabeth enjoyed a prominent role, riding in the procession in a carriage draped with silver cloth together with Anne of Cleves (as part of her divorce settlement, Anne of Cleves, the King’s ‘sister’, was acknowledged to rank only below Mary and Elizabeth, the King’s daughters), and sitting at the Queen’s table during the banquet in Westminster Hall.
However, when Mary’s rule began in earnest, her relationship with Elizabeth changed. She became obsessed with restoring Catholicism to England and soon fell under the influence of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King of Spain, and his Imperial Ambassador Simon Renard, who had replaced Eustache Chapuys at the English Court. From the outset, Renard advised Mary that Elizabeth was not to be trusted, that she had ‘a spirit full of enchantment … clever and sly’, and that she should be watched as she would prove disloyal.18
Mary’s Council, which comprised both previously serving and new members, found itself sidelined in favour of Spanish advisers. Mary sought to restore Catholicism immediately, even wanting to bury the Protestant Edward VI with Catholic rites. Renard persuaded her against this, and so the King had a Protestant funeral ‘with scant ceremony’ after remaining unburied for more than a month.19 Within weeks of her accession, the significant changes that Mary instigated, such as the reintroduction of Catholic priests and ceremonies, resulted in violent protests on the streets of London.
Amongst this religious upheaval, Elizabeth found herself in an extremely delicate position. She did not wish to throw herself wholeheartedly into Catholic worship, partly because she had been brought up as a Protestant, but also because she knew that by allying herself too closely with the Catholic faction she would destroy the support she had from the kingdom’s large number of Protestants. She endeavoured to walk a fine line, just Catholic enough to please Mary, but not so much as to alienate the Protestant faction. She explained to Mary that it would take time for her to assimilate and accept the different faith, and asked for books and instruction.
On 8 September 1553, Elizabeth attended her first Mass, although on the day she was suffering from a severe stomach upset that meant she was unable to enjoy the service, as Renard noted.20
The angry French Ambassador, who found himself marginalized by the Spaniards, wrote to Henri II (King of France 1547–59), ‘everyone believes that she is acting from fear of danger and peril from those around her than from real devotion.’21 However, it should be kept in mind that the French had ulterior motives in portraying Elizabeth in a bad light and in encouraging plots that might implicate her: if Elizabeth was removed from the succession, the next lawful heir was another Catholic Mary (Mary, Queen of Scots), who just happened to be married to the French Dauphin, François.
Apart from the religious turmoil, one of the first priorities of the English Council was the marriage of the new Queen, who was 37 years of age. The most obvious English candidate was Edward Courtenay, Mary’s second cousin, who had recently been released from the Tower after a 15-year imprisonment following his family’s implication in a Catholic uprising in 1538. Courtenay was the last of the legitimate York bloodline, and their union would reunite the Royal Houses, as the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York had done previously, in 1486. There was some support for this among the English nobles, and particularly among Mary’s ladies-in-waiting, who included Courtenay’s mother, the Dowager Marchioness of Exeter.
The problem with this plan, however, was twofold. Firstly, on his release from the Tower, Courtenay set about making up for all the years he had spent in prison. He began drinking, wenching, and generally behaving so badly in public that it became an open scandal. Secondly, Mary did not find him attractive, despite his fair good looks and his Catholicism.
Another potential English candidate was Reginald Pole, the son of Mary’s Governess, Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury. Unfortunately, he was living in Rome, had taken holy orders and had been elected a Papal Cardinal.
At this timely juncture, Renard showed Mary a portrait of Philip, the son of Charles V, and suggested that this handsome young prince might make a good husband. Charles V also dissuaded potential suitors from making Mary marriage offers, using his immense influence to win the throne of England for his own son. On 10 October 1553, a formal proposal of marriage was submitted to Mary, and on 28 October she accepted. Although some Councillors tried to discourage her, and the House of Commons formally requested that Mary take an English husband, it was to no avail. On 16 November, Mary publicly announced that she would take Philip as her husband.
Now that the question of marriage was settled, Renard could concentrate on alienating Mary from her sister. The Queen’s Spanish advisers fuelled her suspicions of Elizabeth’s dishonest intentions, asserted that she should be removed from the succession and even suggested that Elizabeth be executed. Allowing her hatred of Anne Boleyn to surface and encouraged by Elizabeth’s detractors, Mary said to Renard ‘that it would be a scandal and a disgrace to the kingdom to allow Elizabeth to succeed, for she was a heretic, a hypocrite and a bastard.’22
In one of her more paranoid ramblings about her sister, Mary claimed that Elizabeth was not Henry VIII’s child and that she looked exactly like Mark Smeaton, the lowliest of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers. Elizabeth, however, was said to resemble Henry VIII greatly – more so, it was sometimes said, than Mary I.
Elizabeth quickly became aware of Mary’s mounting hostility, and after the coronation she requested permission to retire from Court. Mary responded by reducing her status (as had been done to Mary when Elizabeth was born), openly indicating that she considered Elizabeth, her legal heir, to be of no importance. In official state processions, Elizabeth would no longer walk directly behind the Queen, but instead behind Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox (the daughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s elder sister) and Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk (the mother of Lady Jane Grey, who had been convicted for high treason and was imprisoned in the Tower).
This was a terrible slight. Elizabeth did the only thing she could to retain her dignity and stayed in her rooms as much as possible. With this stalemate in place, in December, Mary allowed Elizabeth to leave Court for Ashridge in Hertfordshire. This was not only to remove her from Court, but also to allow Elizabeth the illusion of freedom and become embroiled in the plots that the Spanish advisers so wanted her to become involved in and they hoped that would lead to her eventual downfall.
One such plot was already forming. The French Ambassador de Noailles, who had his ear to the ground and had noted the English people’s horrified reaction to the Queen’s plans for a Spanish marriage, wrote, ‘From what I hear, it only requires that my Lord Courtenay should marry her [Elizabeth], and that they should go together to the counties of Devonshire and Cornwall. Here it can easily be believed that they would find many adherents, and they could then make a strong claim to the crown, and the Emperor and Prince of Spain would find it difficult to suppress the rising.’23
Indeed, Courtenay, who thought Mary would wed him, had been furious when she had chosen Philip, and rumours suggested that he was already preparing a revolt against the new monarch. However, as a conspirator he was a disaster. Even de Noailles, who would have loved such a plot to come to fruition, said of him, ‘Courtenay is of such a fearful and timid disposition that he dare not make the venture … There are many, of whom I know, who would be ready to give him encouragement and all help in carrying out some plan to his advantage, and I do not see what should hinder him, except his weakness, faint-heartedness and timidity.’24
As for Elizabeth, she had survived the Seymour enquiry and she would never allow herself to be linked to so feeble a co-conspirator when she had so much to lose. She was also wise enough to realize that any plots against Mary’s
reign had little hope of success, and if it could be proved that Elizabeth had supported any of them, she would most likely lose her life.
On 2 January 1554, Charles V sent his envoys to London to undertake negotiations, and on 12 January a treaty of marriage was signed. Protestants fearing Catholic repression planned a rebellion, with simultaneous risings in Devonshire, led by Sir Peter Carew; in Kent, by Sir Thomas Wyatt; and in Wales, by Sir James Crofts. However, Courtenay, displaying his usual vacillation, went to his mentor Bishop Gardiner and told him everything. With Courtenay out of the equation, the rising in Devonshire was doomed to failure. Sir Peter Carew backed out and fled to France, followed by Sir William Pickering, another conspirator and a friend of Elizabeth’s. Sir Thomas Wyatt, believing that the revolt would unleash a popular uprising in opposition to the Spanish marriage, went ahead. His rebellion was crushed and he surrendered.
At Ashridge, Elizabeth had her usual reaction in time of crisis: she took to her bed with a serious illness. False rumours flew to London – that Elizabeth had fortified Ashridge to withstand a siege, or that she was on her way to the more easily defended Donnington Castle. In fact, she stayed put, suffering from blinding headaches and swelling in her face, arms and legs, which might have been nephritis or, perhaps, inflammation of the kidneys.
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