Great Bastards of History

by Juré Fiorillo

  The Inca ruler Atahuallpa begs Pizarro for his life. When Atahualpa offers him a room full of gold, Pizarro spares his life, only to go back on his word once the riches are delivered. Getty Images.

  When projected into the future, greed can become limitless. The wealth on display at Cuzco was astounding, and the Spaniards set about reducing the tons of Incan artifacts into bullion with gusto, much of which was shipped back to Spain. All of a sudden, the Pizarro brothers and Almagro, who was also an illiterate bastard—he didn’t even know who his parents were because he had been dumped on the church door as a baby—were some of the richest men in the world. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. Tensions soon began to appear between the two business partners over which part of the Inca empire belonged to whom.

  Pizzaro’s route over land and sea to the conquest of the Incas is shown in red. Courtesy of University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin

  The legitimate and thus best educated Pizarro, Hernando, was sent to Spain to handle relations between the Pizarros and the Spanish court. Partly this was to make sure that the Almagrists, as they became known, did not exact preferential conditions from Charles V. Spain was several months’ journey away from Peru, and news was slow to travel. Rumors, however, were rife. One of them was that Charles had split Peru in two: The northern part was to go to the Pizarros, and the southern part, including the capital of Cuzco, was to go to Almagro.

  This rumor particularly upset Juan and Gonzalo Pizarro, who, at the time, were happily camped in the city, destroying its treasures and raping women. When they heard of this division they protested, and even though Francisco must have known that his two half-brothers were thuggish and troublesome, his new status as pater familias caused him to take their side. Trouble was averted by another rumor, of an even richer civilization farther to the south in what is today Chile. Partly funded by Francisco, Almagro put together an expedition to conquer this rumored civilization. After eighteen months and 3,728 miles (6,000 kilometers) of hard travel, Almagro returned to Cuzco in early 1537 without having found a society on par with the Incas or Aztecs to conquer.

  When Almagro returned, he was surprised to discover that the Inca had revolted against the Spanish. The Pizarros and the underlings who copied their swinish behavior had insulted the Incas to the extent they had decided it would be better to die fighting against the Spanish than submit to them. In a speech to his subjects, the Manco Inca said of the Spanish:

  They preach one thing and do another. They have no fear of God, and no shame, they treat us like dogs. Calling us no other names. Their greed is such that there is no temple or palace left they have not plundered. Indeed if all the snow turned to gold and silver it would not satisfy them. They keep our daughters and sisters as their concubines, behaving in this like animals. They have already begun to divide the provinces among each other so that they can loot them. They will enslave us and reduce us to the point where we are only fit as a source for livestock, women, and precious metals.

  The Inca revolt was fiercely fought, and for a while it seemed that the Inca had the upper hand. Juan Pizarro was killed in the siege of Cuzco, and Francisco was forced to send for reinforcements by sea. However, the rebellion eventually failed. European microbes and weapons proved too strong for the Indian forces, as they did in many other parts of the world. The Pizarros were also helped by the mass of reinforcements from Spain, new conquistadors keen to cash in on the riches of Peru.

  Eventually, the Manco Inca was forced to flee over the Andes toward the Amazon basin. He hoped to maintain his civilization where the Spanish wouldn’t follow. In 1539, Gonzalo Pizarro chased the Inca down to the jungles of Vilcabamba, but failed to catch him; the Incan society survived there independently until 1572, although the Manco Inca was assassinated in 1544. Francisco was furious at the failure of his half-brother Gonzalo, but rather than punish his own blood, he engaged in a cruel and selective massacre of the Inca elite who had remained in the territory under his control.

  With the Incan threat out of the way, the Pizarros and Almagrists were free to resume their struggle for control of Peru. This time there were no diversions, and the struggle soon became a war, which effectively ended in 1538 at the Battle of Salinas, where Almagro’s forces fought against Gonzalo and Hernando Pizarro for control of Cuzco and lost. On the orders of Hernando, Almagro was tried for treason and beheaded.

  This action would have grave consequences for his older brother. By 1540, with most of the crucial battles for control of Peru seemingly fought and won, Francisco had returned to his house in Lima, the port city he had built to facilitate maritime connections with Spain. His attention increasingly turned to governance rather than battle. It was an area in which his illiteracy put him at a distinct disadvantage, and Francisco was forced to rely heavily on his secretary, Antonio Picado, a prickly and arrogant character, who took this opportunity to enrich himself by taking advantage of his boss. His actions caused considerable disenchantment, particularly among the remaining Almagrists, whom Picado was fond of goading.

  Francisco paid a high price for his dependence on his secretary. Although warned on several occasions that the son of Almagro was planning to kill him, Francisco failed to adequately protect himself. One Sunday afternoon after lunch, he was at home with a half dozen friends when twenty men led by Almagrist Juan Herrada rushed his house. In the fracas, Pizarro’s half-brother Martín was killed. Although Pizarro drew his sword and held off the attackers for some time, his defense was foiled when his assailants pushed one of his allies onto Francisco’s sword. With a man weighing down his blade, Pizarro was rendered defenseless and was slaughtered where he stood.

  CHAPTER 4

  ELIZABETH I

  FROM BASTARD DAUGHTER TO VIRGIN QUEEN

  1533–1603

  BORN A PRINCESS BUT LATER CAST OUT BY HER FATHER, HENRY VIII, AND BRANDED A BASTARD, ELIZABETH PATIENTLY TAUGHT HERSELF THE ARTS OF WISE GOVERNMENT AND SELFLESS LEADERSHIP, THUS EARNING THE LOVE AND LOYALTY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE AND TRANSFORMING HER NATION FROM A BACKWARD ISLAND REALM INTO A GLOBAL EMPIRE.

  THE WORLD INTO WHICH ELIZABETH TUDOR WAS BORN IN 1533 PICTURED fortune as a great wheel. Depending on which spoke you happened to occupy, one day you were on top, the next on the bottom—about to be crushed.

  Did the twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth see the turning of the wheel when the men sent by her half-sister, the queen known as Bloody Mary, came to take her from the spacious country manor that had been her home to a dark, damp cell in the Tower of London? Terrified, Elizabeth became so ill that her doctors told Queen Mary she could not, without risking her life, be moved, but Mary would not relent. The distance to London from Ashridge was 30 miles (48 km), and Elizabeth was so ill that the journey was frequently interrupted for rest, so that the progress spanned February 12 to February 22. She was lodged in the palace as a prisoner for nearly a month, before she was carried in an enclosed litter through the London lanes down to the Thames. The young woman, in a gesture of high theater, drew back the curtains of the conveyance so that all who thronged the narrow, filthy streets could see how brutally this pale, sick, and frail girl was being treated.

  Known as The Rainbow Portrait, this painting by Taddeo Zuccari depicts Elizabeth in a cloak embroidered with eyes and ears—emblematic of the Virgin Queen’s formidable reputation for having eyes and ears everywhere and for seeing and hearing everything. Elizabeth I (1533-1603) (colour litho), Zuccari, Taddeo (1529-66) (after) / Private Collection / Ken Welsh / The Bridgeman Art Library International

  But this drama was no stage play. In what now became a hard rain, Elizabeth was deposited on a river wharf and transferred to a boat that would ferry her to the Tower’s infamous Watergate, traditional portal of the condemned. She was painfully aware that she followed the very course her mother, Anne Boleyn, who had traveled on her way to the Tower eighteen years before to await an appointment with the headsman’s axe. As the miserable Elizabeth stepped from the boat into the rain
and onto the flagstones before the Watergate and water’s edge, she held back any tears, protests, or plaints, and declared instead with calm composure, “Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs.”

  With these words, she seated herself on the stones in the prison’s looming shadow, made all the darker by the lowering clouds, and let the torrent pour down upon her. To the plea of the Tower lieutenant that she come in out of the rain, Elizabeth answered: “It is better sitting here than in a worse place.”

  The sight of the pale beauty drenched and seated at the entrance of the place of her almost certain execution drove one of the “gentleman ushers” who had accompanied her to tears. She turned to him sharply and admonished the tearful guard that she “knew her truth to be such that no man would have cause to weep for her.” That said, she consented at last to be shown to the cell that was only the latest of many cruel and abrupt changes in her fortunes. For she had not been born a bastard, without family and loyal friends. Her father, Henry VIII, and his Parliament made her one. That was the first turn of the great wheel.

  A TWISTED TALE

  Elizabeth’s story begins more with her father than her mother. Shortly before he succeeded Henry VII to the English throne in 1509, Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon, widow of his brother Arthur. For nearly twenty years, it was a happy union between the cultivated Spanish infanta and the strappingly handsome English king, who was learned in English, Greek, Latin, theology, and philosophy; a poet and a fine musician, he was a strikingly athletic horseman and hunter of renown. Although Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Mary (the future Queen Mary I), in 1516, the marital landscape darkened beginning about 1527, as Henry despaired over what he pronounced her failure to give him a male heir.

  The king’s eye wandered and then lit upon Anne Boleyn—probably in her late twenties (the year of her birth is not known for certain) when he met her—a tall and slender huntswoman with auburn hair, a fine aquiline nose, and full lips the color of rose petals. The attraction between the two was powerful and carnal, and Henry saw in her the fresh fertility Catherine no longer possessed.

  The king summoned his lord chancellor, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, and pointed to a page in the Old Testament, Leviticus 20:21, which forbids as a form of incest a man’s taking his brother’s widow as a wife. Arguing that the Lord would never allow a future monarch to be born of so obviously sinful a union as his with Catherine, Henry commanded his lord chancellor to petition Pope Clement VII to annul the marriage, thereby making way for him to marry Anne. When the Pope refused (after all, the Holy Roman emperor on whom he relied for protection was also Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, the king of Spain), Henry nevertheless proceeded with a divorce trial in 1529. Absent a papal decree, the trial ended without a decision, and a wrathful Henry removed Wolsey from office and then summoned him to answer royal charges of high treason. Wolsey had the good fortune to drop dead before suffering the consequences of those accusations.

  This painting by an unidentified artist shows Henry VIII on his deathbed designating his son, Edward VI, already enthroned, heir to the kingdom. Among others pictured are the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Pope is depicted crumpled impotently at the feet of the England’s second Protestant monarch.

  In 1532, Henry elevated to his circle of advisors the masterfully devious Thomas Cromwell, who proposed that the king solve his dilemma by altogether breaking with Rome and creating a Church of England, replacing the authority of the Pope with that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a figure beholden to the king and therefore certain to grant the divorce. By this solution, Henry cast off Catherine the following year and acquired his new bride. The establishment of the Church of England, however, was destined to propel the realm to the precipice of civil war.

  A WRATHFUL HENRY VIII REMOVED LORD CHANCELLOR THOMAS CARDINAL WOLSEY FROM OFFICE AND THEN SUMMONED HIM TO ANSWER ROYAL CHARGES OF HIGH TREASON. WOLSEY HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE TO DROP DEAD BEFORE SUFFERING THE CONSEQUENCES OF THOSE ACCUSATIONS.

  Anne Boleyn became pregnant in the shortest possible time and, between three and four in the afternoon on September 7, 1533, in the Chamber of Virgins at Greenwich Palace, brought into Henry’s world the terrible disappointment of a daughter. The king nevertheless proclaimed the newborn—she was christened Elizabeth—heir to the throne in place of Catherine’s daughter, Mary. That marriage having been annulled as sinful and illegal, Mary was also summarily declared a bastard by act of Parliament.

  As for Anne Boleyn, her failure to deliver a male heir appeared to the king all the proof necessary that she was suffering God’s punishment for the sin of adultery, an act of treason under English law. Tried on the flimsiest of evidence—for there was in fact none—Elizabeth’s mother was sent to the Tower of London and, on May 19, 1536, to the block. The night before her execution, she remarked to Anthony Kingston, constable of the Tower, “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.” With that, according to Kingston, she encircled her throat with her hands and laughed, he reported, “heartily.”

  Following Anne Boleyn’s execution, Parliament passed a law making Elizabeth a bastard and reducing her from princess to lady. She was two years, eight months old. On May 20, the king was betrothed to Jane Seymour, another young noblewoman in her late twenties, whom he married ten days later.

  Elizabeth would spend most of the rest of her childhood in Hatfield Palace, which Henry had seized from the Catholic Church; situated 21 miles (34 km) north of London, it was remote from the royal court. As for the king’s latest wife, Jane became pregnant early in 1537, delivered a son on October 12, and died less than two weeks later. The infant, Edward, was sickly and not expected to live long. Determined, therefore, to gain a sturdier male heir, the widower married on January 6, 1540, a bride Cromwell had recruited, the German princess Anne of Cleves. As soon as she arrived, however, Henry moaned that she was “nothing so fair as she hath been reported” and quickly persuaded her to accept an annulment on July 9, 1540. (Cromwell’s flawed taste in women prompted the king to contrive a charge of treason, and the lord chancellor was duly tried and beheaded.)

  Nineteen-year-old Catherine Howard, whose youthful beauty appealed greatly to Henry, became his fifth wife on July 28, 1540. Not surprisingly, she strayed from the aging and increasingly corpulent monarch and was beheaded for the treasonous crime of adultery on February 13, 1542. Catherine Parr, whom Henry wed on July 12, 1543, was destined to achieve what none of the previous five wives had: widowhood. Her husband the king died on January 28, 1547, but for the nearly four years of her marriage, Catherine welcomed Elizabeth back to the court and proved a kind and caring stepmother. Shortly after Henry died, however, she married England’s dashing lord high admiral, Thomas Seymour, who secretly embarked on a plot to oust his own brother, Edward Seymour, whom Henry had appointed “protector” (regent) over Edward VI, just ten years old at the time of his succession to the throne. Always wary of his brother, Edward Seymour waited until the death of Catherine Parr in January 1549 to charge Thomas with a long rap sheet of high crimes, foremost among them a plot to marry Elizabeth in a conspiracy to gain control over the realm. Thomas Seymour was quickly convicted and executed, leaving Elizabeth vulnerable to the suspicions of all and sundry at court, many of whom believed she had actively colluded with Thomas Seymour, who, they also believed, had been her secret lover. The complete absence of actual evidence did nothing to dispel the dangerous cloud that hung over Elizabeth, and her every move and utterance was closely observed. After all, as a bastard by law, she had little to lose (other than her life) and much to gain from scheming with the wily lord high admiral.

  STAYING ALIVE

  Elizabeth adapted to this latest climate of peril. She learned to give voice only to those thoughts she wanted others to hear. She learned to win friends among the influential, but never to give herself wholly to any one friendship. And because the people of greates
t power in court circles were men, she learned to ingratiate herself with them, for she was growing into a beautiful woman, who was also the product of Europe’s finest tutors and therefore full of charming conversation that showed wisdom beyond her tender years. Yet she refused to give herself wholly to any man.

  THUS ELIZABETH THE BASTARD, WITH NEITHER PARENT NOR ROYAL LEGACY TO PROTECT HER, LEARNED TO PROTECT HERSELF, TO SURVIVE, AND EVEN TO FLOURISH.

  Thus the bastard, with neither parent nor royal legacy to protect her, learned to protect herself, to survive, and even to flourish. But on July 6, 1553, fifteen-year-old Edward VI, after a brief life of chronic suffering, having been feverish since the beginning of the year, wracked with a cough that brought up thick, discolored gouts of blood, whispered to his kindly tutor John Cheke “I am glad to die,” and died.

  An unidentified English artist painted England’s treacherous and dashing Lord High Admiral Thomas Seymour, executed for the certain crime of plotting against his brother to obtain the regency over young Edward VI and for the highly improbable offense of plotting to marry Elizabeth to gain absolute control over the English realm. Portrait of Thomas Seymour (1508-1549) Baron Seymour (oil on panel), English School, (16th century) / National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library International

  Aware that Edward was not destined to a long life, Henry VIII in 1543 had prevailed on Parliament to pass a new law restoring both Mary and Elizabeth to the line of royal succession (the act did not explicitly alter their legal status as bastards, however). Young King Edward, before he died, had expressed fears that Mary would undo the Reformation by restoring Roman Catholicism to England if she ascended the throne; he wanted, therefore, to disinherit her, so that Elizabeth, who embraced the Protestant faith, would be certain to succeed him. Informed that the Succession Act barred removing one sister from the line without also disinheriting the other, Edward was talked into backing a dark horse candidate, Lady Jane Grey, daughter-in-law of the influential 1st Duke of Northumberland, to succeed him. She assumed the throne on July 10, 1553, but was deposed just nine days later, leaving Mary, as Henry’s eldest daughter, the new queen of England.