by Susan Ronald
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What the Spanish ambassador hadn’t known was that Elizabeth had made a complete volte-face on her “hasten slowly” policy. On Palm Sunday, March 19, the queen received word that a peace treaty had been signed at Cateau-Cambrésis between Spain, England, and France. Relieved of the uncertainty regarding the peace negotiations, William Cecil made his true feelings known to Elizabeth and, along with Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Francis Knollys, and others advising the Privy Council persuaded her that now was the time to strike in all religious matters—including the uniformity of churches in England and their prayer book. What most likely sealed their success was the argument from Cecil that though history repeats itself, it seldom does so in precisely the same way. The challenges that Elizabeth faced differed from those in her father’s or her brother’s or her sister’s reigns and needed to be treated with an independent solution. The following morning, Elizabeth gave her assent to a disputation between nine Protestant and nine Catholic divines to determine the questions of supremacy and uniformity.
With only days to go before the originally intended deadline of March 24, Elizabeth ordered instead that Parliament be adjourned until after Easter, when the disputation could take place. Of the nine Protestant voices, only one had not been exiled during Mary’s reign. As feared, pandemonium broke out, and the disputation was adjourned. The clerk of the Commons made only one entry in his Journal noting that some members of the House met, read part of a bill, and “adjourned to hear the disputation between the bishops … and other Englishmen that came from Geneva.”20
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Timing in the religious settlement was everything. Elizabeth had been won over to the Protestant side by an improvement in her international fortunes, irrespective of the debates in Parliament. The Commons, in the main the strong Protestant voices of the “hot gospellers,” charged forward and appended another bill to restore to the crown any monasteries or chantries revived under Mary. The only point on which both sides of the religious divide were united was that a woman could not be the Supreme Head of the Church. Elizabeth gave an indication of royal assent if the Commons would consider a compromise. The “hot gospellers” assented, and Elizabeth agreed to adopt the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England instead. Both sides were relieved and further agreed quickly on one final amendment: that nothing done by this particular Parliament should be judged heresy or schism later. The bills as amended passed the Lords with all the Catholic spiritual peers and one lay peer dissenting.21
By Easter 1559, England had a combined Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity, and a legitimate queen. Only time would tell if Elizabeth—naturally imperious, formidable, self-willed, and calculating, but nonetheless a politically untested twenty-five-year-old woman—would prove a strong enough sovereign to bring England through its social, economic, political, and religious crises with any degree of diplomacy, vision, and aplomb.
Few outside the corridors of power understood Elizabeth’s need to have her people obey her command regardless of their religious beliefs and for no other reason than they were loyal English men and women. Even fewer understood that she valued freedom of speech in Parliament and elsewhere.22 From Elizabeth’s viewpoint, the outpouring of love expressed by Londoners during her coronation procession had made it clear that they saw her as the Protestant savior providing the nation with new hope, prosperity, and independence from the foreign influence that rankled so during her sister Mary’s reign. To succeed in their expectations, she would need all of the powers of diplomacy, tact, and even dissimulation that she could summon.
Failure was simply not an option.
THREE
Determined to Be a Virgin Queen
It is hoped that the Queen will not long continue to temporize so much in regard to her marriage, and many think that she will not be so very uncompliant with the wishes of the King [of Spain] who greatly fears lest your Holiness should make some pronouncement [of bastardy] … against the said Queen to the advantage of the King of France.
—Coded intelligence from London to Pope Paul IV, April 24, 1559
Hand in hand with the Act of Uniformity was the preoccupation that haunted the entire Tudor dynasty: the succession. Elizabeth’s advisers were frankly stumped as to who would make a suitable husband to strengthen the Protestant settlement. Love, of course, never entered into the equation. The issue of who would be England’s monarch after Elizabeth, and whom she could marry to give England the son and heir to ensure a Protestant succession, was a top state priority. Ancillary worries like what would happen if she died while that son was in his minority or, worse, if she, too, only gave birth to a girl, were not foremost in the minds of those urging her to wed. Yet despite the huge significance surrounding the succession, Elizabeth herself seemed to be uninterested in the marriage question at all.
By the spring of 1559, Elizabeth had bestowed her distinct favor on her dashing Master of the Horse, Sir Robert Dudley. Elizabeth had known Dudley most of her life, significantly sharing her time with him while they were both prisoners in the Tower, where their bond of friendship grew. However, as the son and grandson of men who had been executed as traitors, and the brother-in-law of poor Lady Jane Grey, executed by Mary for usurping her throne, Lord Robert could have only been termed, at the best of times, a poor choice of consort. Dudley was further disqualified as a possible husband on other, more substantial, grounds. He was already a married man. His wife of some years, Amy, was safely tucked away in the country reportedly dying of a “lump in her breast.”
Count de Feria wrote to Philip II that spring, “Lord Robert has come so much in favor that he does whatever he likes with affairs, and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that … the Queen is only waiting for her [his wife] to die to marry Lord Robert.”1
Never one to be deterred from a desire to control Elizabeth, and thereby England, de Feria suggested to Philip that it might “be well to approach Lord Robert on your Majesty’s behalf, promising him your help and favour and coming to terms with him.”2 What terms, if any, could those possibly be?
When William Cecil got word of de Feria’s plotting, he was livid. He had been bewildered by the queen’s sudden girlish flirtation with Dudley and was determined to get her married off and into safe hands before it was too late. Memories were long when it came to certain matters, and none had forgotten that while still a princess, Elizabeth had nearly lost her reputation and perhaps more through her scandalous association with Thomas Seymour, her stepfather. It was one thing for a young princess to act flirtatiously but quite another matter altogether for a queen of England to behave so indecorously.
Still, Elizabeth was queen and felt that Cecil was the one behaving unreasonably. Given Elizabeth’s lifelong expertise at playing one faction against another, it’s quite possible that the more Cecil protested, the more she sought to bring him to heel by ignoring him, but that is not to take anything away from what would become a deep and lasting devotion to Dudley. Her daily outings with her Master of the Horse, hunting from morning until night, were the steamy stuff melting all diplomatic missives. The French, Venetian, Spanish, and papal envoys speculated madly, and incorrectly, about Elizabeth’s intentions. It seemed to Cecil that the longer the affair continued, the less marriageable Elizabeth would become, potentially endangering her reputation and the realm beyond repair.
So Cecil gambled that he knew the queen’s mind. He prompted her directly and obliquely that the people looked upon her relationship with Dudley as unsuitable. When that didn’t work, he threatened to resign unless Elizabeth came to heel. Just in case she didn’t believe him, Cecil announced his purpose to anyone who would listen, including the notoriously loose-lipped Spanish envoy de Feria. Unless Cecil could wrest Elizabeth away from the clutches of Lord Robert, he predicted, “the extreme injury of the realm” and the ruination of the young queen would ensue.
Nonetheles
s, Elizabeth was not prepared to have her secretary of state dictate terms to her. Though Cecil admired the queen in many ways, in keeping with the times, he regarded Elizabeth in biblical terms as a “weak and feeble woman” unable to govern a vulnerable England on her own. There was nothing astounding in this condescending attitude to the queen for a Tudor man. It was simply the honest truth as known in their day, and as her first minister and secretary of state, it was his duty to limit the queen’s exuberance (as he saw it) for her Dudley. Cecil felt duty bound to draw the proverbial line in the sand where the queen’s potential loss of reputation weakened England’s already fragile political and spiritual position. So he spread the word that he would resign, even if it meant being sent to the Tower. He let it be known that England by and large was outraged by any proposed match with Dudley. He even went so far as to say that such a marriage could lead to deposition of the queen or revolt, and that the French would aid such civil unrest. Naturally, his intention was that this would shock Elizabeth into seeing reason and thereby abandoning her Dudley.
Cecil’s ploy wasn’t as big a gamble as it might seem. He knew Elizabeth craved the love of her people more than anything else. He had been advising her on her landholdings since she was in her teens and knew just how far he could push her. No matter how much she claimed she didn’t want to marry for reasons of state, the fact remained that it was expected of her. After all, her half sister, Queen Mary, had accepted this reality, reasoning that the only way to keep England in obeisance to the Holy See of Rome was to have a child and heir.
Yet despite all the gossip and Elizabeth’s evident desire to simply amuse herself with Dudley, there is every indication that she had no intention of marrying, ever. For Parliament and the Privy Council, it was simply unthinkable that England’s twenty-five-year-old handsome, inexperienced, and fiery queen not only desired but actively sought spinsterhood—particularly in light of the Dudley scandal that was brewing.
In part this was because in Tudor England, all men believed that women lived for the estate of holy wedlock, and it was disbelieved that a queen of England would set herself above this rule of God. Procreation was their reason for existence, so the Bible taught. “Eve” was the root word of “evil,” and Eve the cause for the downfall of Man from the Garden of Eden. Religious thought and marriage were dangerously intertwined among all Christians, with muddled belief systems about women permeating popular art and literature. Women were sometimes portrayed as maternal, while at other times they were seen as a wicked source of disease and the cause of the sexual debasement of society.3 After all, hadn’t Henry VIII himself become the victim of the charms and bewitchment of women—most notably Elizabeth’s own mother—who had debased his reign?
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Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, there had been a male fascination with the female form; a male need to understand the maternal body’s secrets and how a woman could represent both the innocent nourishment of maternity and man’s bestial sexual desire. Anatomists like Charles V’s physician, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, tried to explain this dichotomy by stealing the bodies of prostitutes or female criminals in direct violation of religious decency and papal decree. It was only by dissecting the female body that he could reveal the secrets it held, Vesalius claimed.
Yet the anatomist himself became like a man possessed in his quest, frequently allowing himself to be locked out of the city gates to “look for the bones” of executed criminals. Vesalius’s own account of his body-snatching borders on the sensual: “So great was my desire to possess those bones that in the middle of the night, alone and in the midst of all those corpses, I climbed the stake with considerable effort and did not hesitate to snatch away that which I so desired.”4
Significantly, in Vesalius’s Letter on the China Root, published in 1546, he waxes lyrical on the lasciviousness of the monks and how the monasteries are a microcosm for the corruption within the Catholic Church. At the heart and soul of the monk’s fall from grace is the female form—the nun whose virginity cannot be taken on trust unless “anatomized.”5 Even earlier than Vesalius, the charismatic and libidinous scoundrel Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), who popularized erotic poses of lovemaking, reveled in clerical and political gossip among the literati close to the papacy by making the rich and famous “infamous” with his observations on the papal sex scandals of his day.
In fact, the popular trend to anatomize, or dissect, the female form in print was well established by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The title page of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, first published in 1543, shows a dissection of a woman posing as if in a pagan sacrifice. Yet the female form was only one feature of a woman’s imperfections, and queens, so it seemed, were no exception.
The woman’s mind was not highly valued either. In his influential work written in 1528, The Book of the Courtier, Baldesar Castiglione explains that men steadfastly held the view that women were “the most imperfect creatures, incapable of any virtuous act, worth very little and quite without dignity compared with men.”6
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Imperfect or no, being an effective woman ruler was a nearly impossible task when viewed through the eyes of Tudor man. To marry and have children—heirs—unlocked her realm to the unwanted interference of the husband or king consort, just as it had done with Mary I and Philip of Spain. To not marry opened a queen regnant to possible scandalous criticisms by religious extremists that she sought to satisfy her sexual desires outside of wedlock, as with Elizabeth and Robert Dudley.
Tudor men hardly considered that having children held its own risks, though childbirth itself claimed both mother and child in alarming numbers until the twentieth century. Besides, marriage was no guarantee of giving birth to a boy. What if the queen could only give birth to a girl? Then, even if she had a son, would that son—and Elizabeth—live until he was old enough to rule? Even well-loved heirs, too, could drain power away from a reigning queen, just as Elizabeth had done with her sister. Would Elizabeth’s heir do the same to her? Muddying the picture even more was the added complication of Elizabeth’s parentage and moves by the French king to have her declared a bastard by Pope Paul IV.
As the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth was despised as the offspring of an “incestuous” marriage and suffered at the hands of those who should have cared for and loved her.7 Elizabeth knew the twisted fate of most women and had known a husband’s cruelty through a daughter’s eyes: witnessing Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, pulled from the palace by her hair and fearing the demise of Henry’s last wife, Catherine Parr, over the writing of her Protestant religious tracts. Elizabeth had seen male domination at close quarters throughout her life. She had experienced the terror of the unknown that pregnancy represented, as in the case of her sister’s phantom pregnancies or the deaths of two of her stepmothers after childbirth.
Yet when it comes to her most private reasons for steadfastly refusing marriage—despite playing along with the pretense of it myriad times in her life—we shall never truly know if she ever held hopes of a husband and family. Was her enforced celibacy because she could never marry the one man she surely loved, Robert Dudley? Or did she regard the overzealous need for her to conform to the image of a queen as conceived by Parliament—to beget an heir—tantamount to an anatomization of her body and soul? Did she fear being unable to conceive a child, like her sister? Did she fear dying in childbirth? Or giving birth to a deformed child as her mother reputedly had done? Or did she see her own imagined child, the beloved and coveted heir apparent, as stealing away the prerogative that she had at long last inherited?
Perhaps she saw a husband—who must dominate her because he was a man—as an unnecessary by-product and the ultimate usurper of her own newfound power? Or did Elizabeth simply seek from the outset to create a pure, chaste image of herself not only as queen but as virgin queen, defying popular literature and art; to be loved as England’s mother, freeing it from the bewitchment an
d superstition of the Catholic Church? Perhaps at different times it was all these things. Then again, perhaps not. It is a secret that Elizabeth took with her to her grave.
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Though Elizabeth eventually gave in to Cecil’s blackmail, she would have recalled the evangelizing voices of the Calvinists through the words of the fire-breathing Scots vicar John Knox, who had already blown a steady tempest against all women—and women rulers in particular. Having returned to Scotland in the spring of 1559, Knox had to face the great displeasure of England’s new queen for his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in Geneva a year earlier. Elizabeth refused to see Knox or admit him to her realm. William Cecil tried to make Elizabeth see the political imperatives of remaining on friendly terms with the pugnacious Scot and the significance of the Scottish Protestant movement Knox represented, particularly in light of the French king’s unreliable friendship, but Elizabeth was not for turning.
Knox protested in writing that he was not Elizabeth’s enemy, nor the enemy “of the regiment of her, whom God hath now promoted.” His tract of the previous year had been directed against Mary Tudor, Mary Stuart, and her mother, Mary of Guise—all of whom had had devastating effects on Scotland, he claimed. While mildly conciliatory, Knox couldn’t help but stick his proverbial foot in it with a letter to Cecil, directed at Elizabeth. “If,” Knox droned on, “Queen Elizabeth shall confess so that the extraordinary dispensation of God’s great mercy maketh that lawful with her which both nature and God’s law doth deny all women, then shall none in England be more willing to maintain her lawful authority than I shall be. But if, God’s wondrous works be set aside, she ground, as God forbid, the justness of her title upon consuetude [custom], laws and ordinance of men, then as I am assured, that evil foolish presumption doth greatly offend God’s supreme majesty, so do I greatly fear that her ingratitude shall not long lack punishment.”8
