The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  If the alienation of her own people was one grave consequence of Mary’s marriage, the implied rejection of France was another. To tie herself to the empire was at best to relegate France to the role of secondary ally, at worst to involve the English and French in open hostility—whereas, as de Noailles compellingly argued, by marrying an Englishman she might have become the most fortunate princess in the world, committed to neither of the great rival houses of Europe, and therefore continually sought in friendship by both. The empire and France were then at war, and though the marriage treaty might provide clauses to safeguard England from becoming involved in imperial wars, King Henry II of France pointed out to Mary’s ambassador, in a long and gloomy interview, “If the Queen shall marry with him that is my chief enemy, and even during this wartime, although I know it is not my part to appoint her where, nor with whom, nor when she shall marry, yet it must needs be a grief unto me to consider what advantage mine enemies will think thereby to have upon me.” Englishmen at the French court found, gallingly, that they were being pitied “that we shall now become subjects to Spain,” and, even more irritatingly, that the French “take it to be a great punishment that God hath sent upon us.”

  Early in January 1554 the Spanish embassy arrived to conclude the marriage treaty. They were met at the Tower wharf with a mighty salute of guns and greeted by a glittering deputation, among which Courtenay, as Earl of Devonshire, was prominent, but their retinue had had a very different reception the day before; as they rode through the streets of London they had been pelted with snowballs by jeering boys. Mary’s publicly expressed wish, that “like humble subjects, for her sake,” the people would receive Philip with “all reverence, joy, honor,” was in vain. What followed was open rebellion.

  It was very much as de Noailles had forecast, a month before, when Elizabeth left court. He had written to Henry II:

  This said Lady Elizabeth is very closely watched, for I can assure you, Sire, that greatly she desires to free herself from control; and from what I hear it only requires that my Lord Courtenay should marry her, that she should go with him to the counties of Devonshire and Cornwall . . . they could then make a strong claim to the throne, and the Emperor and the Prince of Spain would find it difficult to suppress this rising.

  His information was suspiciously accurate in that the rising did indeed begin in Devon, and its primary purpose was to put Elizabeth and Courtenay on the throne together. But though de Noailles was of course right in assuming that Elizabeth longed to be free from control, he misjudged her if he believed that she would willingly forfeit her freedom by marriage to a dissipated young man “of such a nervous and timid disposition” as Courtenay, when the throne would rightfully be hers alone if Mary were ousted.

  Courtenay was far too weak and volatile to conduct his own courtship of Elizabeth and the crown; ironically, it was upon Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of the poet who had loved Anne Boleyn, that the leadership of the armed wooing devolved. While Wyatt’s men were boldly mustering in Kent, Courtenay was saying petulantly in London that “he had been spoken to about a marriage with the Lady Elizabeth, but he would rather go back to the Tower than ally himself to her.” At Ashridge, Elizabeth was ill with anxiety. Though it was to her advantage to see Mary’s marriage, and chance of producing heirs, prevented, she had warily avoided giving any direct support to the rebels’ cause. But innocent as she was of active participation, she was at the center of the storm; if the attempt were to fail, Renard would surely have his way at last, and see her imprisoned or executed. Mary wrote her a softly menacing letter, bidding her “for the security of your person, which might chance be in some peril if any sudden tumult should arise where you now be,” to travel to court at once, but Elizabeth, sick and frightened as she was, felt safer at a distance, and sent word that she was too ill to travel. She had her house fortified, and stayed where she was to await the outcome of the rebels’ rough wedding plans.

  Wyatt came near to success. So great was the general antagonism to Queen Mary’s choice of a foreign consort that peaceable Englishmen flocked to take up arms against their sovereign. Forces sent to fight Wyatt chose instead to support him; under the stirring cry “We are all Englishmen,” they marched on London. “Much noise and tumult was everywhere” as the fighting raged through the streets of the city. But the attempt to “resist the coming-in of the Spanish King” ended in failure. In the evening of February 7, 1554, Wyatt and his chief supporters were taken to the Tower, where, as they entered, they were greeted with manhandling and taunts; Wyatt, “holding his arms under his side, and looking grievously with a grim look upon the said lieutenant, said, ‘It is no mastery now.’ And so they passed on.”

  The mastery was Mary’s. “It seems to me that she ought not to spare Courtenay and the Lady Elizabeth on this occasion,” Renard urged, “as while they are alive there will always be plots to raise them to the throne, and they would be justly punished, as it is publicly known that they are guilty, and so worthy of death.” On February 12, 1554, Courtenay was committed again to the Tower from which he had so recently been released, and Elizabeth, now very ill indeed, was obliged to set out on the thirty-mile journey to London. The emperor was informed: “Wyatt cannot be executed until he has been confronted with the Lady Elizabeth, who is so unwell that she only travels two or three leagues a day, and has such a stricken conscience that she refuses meat or drink. It is taken for certain that she is with child.” It was as though all the austerity and caution of her years since the Seymour affair had been to no purpose. A week later Renard reported triumphantly that French plots had been uncovered involving Courtenay and Elizabeth—“who, they say, has lived loosely like her mother, and is now with child.” The flirting, giggling, bleeding specter of Anne Boleyn must have traveled with Elizabeth on the jolting journey from Buckinghamshire to London and the Tower.

  “The Lady Elizabeth arrived yesterday, dressed all in white, and followed by a great company. She had her litter opened to show herself to the people, and her pale face kept a proud, haughty expression,” Renard reported. Even at such a moment of despair, Elizabeth was intensely conscious of what the people should think of her; the white dress of purity, and the air of regal dignity, may have suggested haughtiness to Renard, but even he could not describe her appearance as being that of a pregnant wanton. In the desperate, stricken letter that she wrote, a month later, when Mary’s deputation came to remove her from Whitehall to take her to the Tower, care for her reputation was an anguished theme, as she begged her sister to let her answer the charges before being imprisoned—“that thus shamefully I may not be cried out on as now I shall be,” being “condemned in all men’s sight before my desert known.” Thomas Seymour pressed upon her memory as she begged Mary to see her, and the words spilled from her pen like unchecked tears: “In late days I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him he had never suffered but the persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived and that made him give his consent to his death. . . .” Her pleas were ignored, and on the following day, Palm Sunday, she was taken by barge down the Thames to the Tower of London. In pouring rain she was rowed through the dark arches below London Bridge, to where the water slapped against the slippery steps of the Privy Stairs, at which her mother had landed before her.

  A group of Mary’s leading councillors came to interrogate Elizabeth, but she was as alert and elusive as she had been six years before during the Seymour investigation, and more experienced in self-preservation; and the evidence against her was scanty. There was even a moment when she had the mastery—when the dark-bearded Earl of Arundel suddenly dropped to his knees, and exclaimed: “Your Grace saith true, and certainly we are very sorry to have so troubled you with so vain matters!” Something of her “spirit full of enchantment” must have beguiled him, and perhaps in her need for an ally Elizabeth gave him surreptitious encouragement, for when she came to the throne
, the middle-aged widower Arundel was strangely prompt to present himself as a suitor for her hand.

  “The lawyers find no sufficient evidence to condemn her,” Renard reported, with bitter frustration. Bishop Gardiner, in his eagerness to protect Courtenay, served as a shield for Elizabeth too; he conveniently mislaid a valuable letter, intercepted from de Noailles’s dispatches, which was said to prove “that Courtenay was to marry the Lady Elizabeth, while the Queen should lose her crown and her life.” Renard claimed it would have served to convict Courtenay and Elizabeth, but without firm evidence Mary steadfastly refused to condemn her half sister, and before long, to Renard’s annoyance, Elizabeth was granted the privilege of walking in the Tower garden.

  From those walks, restricted, but precious to a prisoner, arose a little incident that was at once touching, pleasurable, and dangerous. A small boy, the son of one of the warders, took to bringing her bunches of flowers in which, it was said, messages were concealed. The council heard of it, and forbade it; Renard at once took the improbable view that Courtenay was involved, and reported that he had chosen this means to “present his commendations to Elizabeth.” Courtenay had neither the inclination nor the ingenuity to send his regards to Elizabeth by such a method, but there was another old acquaintance of hers then captive in the Tower who might well have done so—Robert Dudley.

  His father, Northumberland, had gone groveling to the scaffold soon after Mary’s coronation, and the pitiful young husband and wife Guildford Dudley and Jane Grey had been executed just before Elizabeth was brought to the Tower, but Robert, though sentenced to the horrible death of hanging, drawing, and quartering, was still a prisoner in the Beauchamp Tower with his three remaining brothers. For active young men the Tower offered little occupation; they composed an elaborate poem and design based on their own names, and began to carve it on the wall of the octagonal chamber, but gave up, as though bored, before it was finished; it was quite likely that the resourceful Robert, who always enjoyed dabbling in intrigue, should have whiled away some time in devising a means of communicating with his attractive young fellow prisoner the Lady Elizabeth. “Youth must have some dalliance,” and even the most closely guarded inmates of the Tower might find opportunities for clandestine relationships, as was proved in Elizabeth’s own reign, when Lady Catherine Grey, a dangerous claimant to the throne, managed to conceive a child by her husband while both were straitly confined in separate prisons within the Tower. To have been near one another and in furtive correspondence, at the darkest moment in both their lives, may have given Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley a sense of affinity from which later developed their lifelong bond of loving intimacy. Perhaps Robert Dudley’s resolute pursuit of the future queen could truly be said to have begun in that walled and sunless spring of 1554.

  “The question of the day is: what shall be done with her?” wrote Renard. “Some people have said the best thing would be to marry her to a foreigner.” On May 19 she was taken from the Tower and sent into less grim confinement in the shabby palace of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, where she could be strictly guarded until a solution to “the question of the day” should be found. Disposal by marriage seemed to be the obvious solution—as Paget observed, if there was not enough proof for her to be put to death, the best alternative would be to send her out of the kingdom to be married to a foreigner. The foreigner whom he and many others proposed for her husband was the impoverished royal soldier Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont. Commander of the emperor’s army against France, he was the first cousin and friend of Mary’s betrothed husband, Philip of Spain.

  The emperor had given his nephew Emmanuel Philibert responsible military posts from an early age, but as commander of the imperial forces in 1554, the valiant twenty-six-year-old prince was fighting on his own behalf, as well as that of the emperor, since the French had occupied his lands and dispossessed him of his patrimony. A marriage with the sister and heir of the Queen of England offered him obvious material advantages in terms of status and possible financial and military support, and it was with considerable hope that he made the arrangements for his visit to London in January 1555. There were, however, certain obstacles lying half-submerged in the path of the stocky, athletic half-Habsburg prince’s pursuit of Elizabeth. She was under grave suspicion of heretical convictions. She was a bastard—her illegitimacy reaffirmed by Mary’s Act of Parliament that rescinded Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, making the marriage with Anne Boleyn incontestably illegal. And she was, above all, passionately determined not to marry.

  I have always been told that she will not hear of it, unless forced. To strengthen her in this opinion I have bribed one of her mother’s near relations, who has promised to make her understand what wrong she would do to her self by marrying a disinherited prince, whom the Emperor merely wishes to use as a tool by which to deprive her of her hopes of the crown. But she is being so badly treated that I am very much afraid she may submit, to regain her liberty thereby.

  So de Noailles informed the King of France in June 1554. But his fears were unnecessary—nobody was more aware than Elizabeth herself of the damage that marriage with a dependent of the emperor would do to her future independence and hopes. Such a marriage would be no “liberty,” but rather a more permanent and subjugating form of capture. In that dark year of 1554, when Lady Jane Grey’s forced political marriage had ended at the scaffold, and Queen Mary’s willing political betrothal had already brought rebellion, division, and hostility at home and abroad, Elizabeth could not have contemplated the prospect of diplomatic marriage with anything but anxious distrust.

  “I am going not to a marriage feast but to a fight,” Philip of Spain had said before embarking to take possession of Mary and England, in July 1554, and it was as a soldier for Catholicism and his glorious empire that he arrived to marry the earnest, plain little woman, eleven years older than he, whom he had previously respectfully regarded as an aunt. At twenty-seven Philip was already a widower with a ten-year-old son, Don Carlos, but the incompatibility between himself and his virgin bride must have been obvious, however much the admiral, Lord William Howard, tried to ease the situation by making the customary bawdy innuendos as the ill-matched pair sat together at their first meeting—Philip, fair haired and gray eyed, a slight but regal figure beside the thin, elderly queen. Obedient to his imperial father’s instructions, he showed none of the notorious Spanish hauteur, but was all affability and conciliation; he drank beer, and smiled a great deal, and was charming to his wife, and kissed her ladies according to the English custom, to such an extent that his company of Spaniards were infuriated that their mighty prince should so stoop before the insignificant and uncivilized English. They were already discontented at the terms of the marriage treaty, which had been carefully drawn up so as to exclude the empire from gaining overt control of English affairs. Philip was to have no active power in England, and his connection with his wife’s throne was to cease absolutely if she were to die childless. However, as King Henry II shrewdly pointed out, “A husband may do much with his wife, and it shall be very hard for any wife to refuse her husband anything that he shall earnestly require of her.” His forebodings were particularly justifiable in Mary’s case, for she came to love her fine young husband with the pathetic dependent devotion of a dutiful woman who has been repressed and unloved for twenty years.

  Elizabeth met Mary’s husband for the first time in the spring of 1555, when she was summoned from her captivity at Woodstock to the redbrick river palace of Hampton Court. The visit of Philip’s cousin Emmanuel Philibert at the New Year had passed without major difficulty for Elizabeth; though he was lodged at her London residence, Somerset Place, she was not brought from confinement to meet him, and after three weeks of “great cheer” in the court, during which he made himself very agreeable to Philip and Mary, he left for the wars again. But a still greater threat to Elizabeth’s future was looming when she arrived in April—Mary believed herself to be p
regnant, and the country was waiting for news that its three-quarters-Habsburg heir had been born. That event, if ever it took place, would finally debar Elizabeth from the throne; yet a trace of hope still remained, for there were curious undercurrents of uncertainty surrounding Mary’s condition. De Noailles scoffed at the notion that the queen was with child, and the fact that Elizabeth should have been summoned to court at that moment might have been a sign that Philip himself was not entirely confident about his wife’s state of health. If Mary, elderly and frail, were to die, and the pregnancy prove to be illusory, it would be of the utmost importance to Philip to be on good terms with the heir presumptive, the Lady Elizabeth.