The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  When, late in February, he tried to broach the matter more forcefully, the queen at once began to make for cover by “keeping to her old arguments for not wishing to marry,” and so he impatiently cut her short, guessing what she was about to say—“namely, that she did not think of marrying, and so to shelve the business with fair words.” They talked at length of the peace negotiations that were still in progress at Cambrai, but always the subject of the marriage hung in the air between them. Once Elizabeth artlessly happened to mention that her commissioners, having encountered such difficulties in treating with the French, were “proposing certain means of agreement such as marriages and so on,” but she only said it casually, and “appeared to make small account” of the suggestions. She expressed deep gratitude to Philip for his support in the negotiations, and proceeded to work herself up into a furious state about the French and “the pretentions of the Queen of Scots,” which was all very satisfactory for Feria, but when, after much discussion, she chose to sit down, and he realized that she was waiting for him to introduce the subject of Philip’s courtship again, he refused to humor her; he merely told her that “all these difficulties could be overcome if only Her Majesty would do certain things,” which she seemed to understand. As he had observed to Philip, the two towering issues of religion and this marriage were “really only one.”

  Though Catholics, in Spain and in England, viewed Elizabeth with gloomy distrust, the Protestant exiles returning from abroad found her to be proceeding at a very slow pace with the great work of restoring the reformed religion. Dr. Jewel, later Bishop of Salisbury, wrote to his former host in Strasbourg:

  The Queen, meanwhile, though she openly favours our cause, is wonderfully afraid of allowing any innovations; this is owing partly to her friends, by whose advice every thing is carried on, and partly to the influence of Count Feria, a Spaniard and Philip’s ambassador. She is, however, prudently, and firmly, and piously following up her purpose, though somewhat more slowly than we could wish.

  Elizabeth had long ago learned not to show her hand, she had become experienced in the art of remaining uncommitted for as long as possible, and while the situation demanded that Philip should be kept expectant, she would only proceed by “a little and little” down the Protestant path.

  Her political dalliance with the King of Spain, the greatest of all her suitors, came to an end in March. With the signing of the peace with France in sight she began to treat Feria less archly, and she quoted to him the reasons she could not wed Philip, which he carefully listed in a memorandum. Significantly, she started with the almost petulant reminder that she had no desire at all to marry, “as she had intimated from the first.” No one, least of all the skeptical ambassador, took that very seriously, but part of her argument seemed more weighty; she could not marry Philip, she said, since he had been the husband of her sister. Normally in such tenuous cases of consanguinity a papal dispensation was all that was required, but now, to Feria’s great disquiet, she “denied point-blank the Pope’s authority, which she had previously only pointed out indirectly.” There were other reasons as well, which Feria recorded for Philip to read, such as the fact that her people did not want her to marry a foreigner, and as though to forestall the most powerful argument in favor of the match, she announced defiantly that it was by no means so clear as Feria made out that Mary, Queen of Scots, was next in line for the English throne. It seemed, incredibly, that Elizabeth was enjoying flouting the will of Spain; as she produced her final argument, that people were saying that Philip would only stay with her for a very brief time and would then go straight back to Spain, she laughed so much that Feria, unnerved, began to wonder whether his correspondence dealing with this very point had been intercepted and seen by her. He kept his composure, however, and managed to turn the conversation so that her remarks did not seem to have amounted to a conclusive refusal, but there was now no doubt in his mind as to what her final answer, when it came, would be. A further interview a few days later only served to confirm his misgivings. This time there was no laughter; Elizabeth told him flatly that Philip could not marry her, for she was a heretic.

  Elizabeth seemed very wrought up at this meeting, “disturbed and excited,” Feria described her, and it was clear that she was resolved to restore the reformed religion to England. Feria tried to say that he did not believe her to be a heretic, nor that she would dare to change the country’s religion, and he told her impressively that Philip “would not separate from the union of Churches for all the kingdoms of the earth,” but to this she gave the unbecoming rejoinder, “Then much less would he do it for a woman.” Trying to introduce a note of pleasantry, Feria replied “that men did more for a woman than for anything else,” but it was not the moment for the kind of heady gallantry that she usually enjoyed. Not only was the Act of Uniformity, which Feria called “the abominable decree,” about to be signed, but the French danger had been temporarily reduced. As a citizen of London wrote in his diary, “The eighth day of April there was a proclamation of peace between the Queen’s Grace and Harry the French King and Dauphin the King of Scots, for ever, both by water and land; and there was six trumpeters and five heralds of arms, Master Garter and Master Clarenceux, proclaimed it.” Philip’s suit had served its purpose, and the time had come for the pretense of wooing to be converted into a credible friendship.

  The rejected suitor bore his disappointment with an equanimity that bordered upon relief; within a matter of days Elizabeth learned that Philip had contracted to marry another. His bride was to be Elisabeth of France, the ravishingly pretty eldest daughter of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici. She was to have married Philip’s son, the deformed and violent Don Carlos, but the recalcitrance of the Queen of England had made the King of Spain change his mind and decide to take the fourteen-year-old French princess for himself.

  The prospect of such a Catholic league was a threatening one, but all was not lost. When Feria went to see Elizabeth to condole vindictively with her over “what she had lost,” and to make sure she was suitably troubled by the prospect of Philip “in close alliance and relationship with the King of France,” he found she was in one of her moods of perverse gaiety. Elizabeth “began to say she had heard Your Majesty was married, smiling, saying your name was a fortunate one, and now and then giving little sighs which bordered upon laughter.” Feria tried to chasten her by saying coldly that he could not rejoice to see Philip married to anyone but herself, “nor at her refusing to believe all my importunities and assurances of how desirable it would be for her to marry Your Majesty,” but Elizabeth was incorrigible. She retorted that it was Philip’s fault, not hers, that the marriage had fallen through, because she had not given any definite answer yet, and when Feria reprovingly said that “she knew very well what the facts were,” she observed wistfully that Philip could not have been so much in love with her as Feria had pretended, since he had not had the patience to wait four months for her, “and many things of the same sort.” The hostile ambassador must have felt that his justifiable triumph was somewhat diminished by her cheerful reception of the news that he had hoped would shock and grieve her, but he was sure that she was really very displeased at heart, and having exchanged some terse words with mild, careworn Secretary Cecil (“who is a pestilent knave, as Your Majesty knows”) on the subject of whether or not Philip would care to continue the war against France for England’s benefit, Feria was able to conclude with evident satisfaction, “In short, I left them that day as bitter as gall.”

  The mighty King of Spain had withdrawn his suit, and Elizabeth had laughed. For more than three decades Philip and Elizabeth were to face each other across the globe, frowning, smiling, threatening, as they passed from youth to maturity to old age, until the portly galleons of the Armada sailed with their freight of long-hoarded hostility, and beyond. But the enmity of half a lifetime had begun with these few formal steps of courtship, and though Elizabeth had defied Philip in marriage as she would afterwards defy him in war
, she never forgot that, had she been so inclined, she might have had him for her husband. Through her childhood and youth, for most of her twenty-five years, she had been a bastard, a pawn, and a prisoner; that she was now in a position to dally with and deny the King of Spain himself was exhilarating proof of her power.

  Those little spurts of laughter that she hardly troubled to conceal may have welled up from a sense of relief that it was Philip and not she who had been guilty of finally breaking off the marriage negotiations. Now instead of shying away she was free to sigh out her affection for her Spanish brother monarch, and to make a confidant of his ambassador—and to indulge in hours of chat and speculation about his cousins the archdukes, so that the wrath of Spain and Rome might continue to be held at bay by the hope that an orthodox Habsburg would yet become King of England. “If Ferdinand is a man,” as Feria brusquely put it, “backed up as he will be by Your Majesty, he will be able not only to reform religion and pacify the country, but, even though the Queen may die, to keep the country in his fist.”

  As Elizabeth and Cecil were aware, despite his marriage with la fille de France, there was still good reason for Philip to maintain a protective attitude towards England—“namely, the just claims of the Queen of Scots, and the great ease with which the King of France could take possession, owing to the miserable state in which England now is.” It was as central as ever to the interests of Spain that Henry II should not sweep across the Channel to place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne of England, as joint ruler with her husband, his sickly eldest son, the dauphin Francis. “To let him take the country, which he will do with so much ease that I dread to think of it, would be to my mind the total ruin of Your Majesty and all your states,” Feria pronounced impressively. Though Philip himself had retired early from the hunt, faced with obstacles that prevented him from capturing Elizabeth as he had Mary, by marrying her himself, the saying about his imperial house, “Others make war: you, fortunate Austria, marry,” would still hold good if one of his cousins the archdukes should, under his patronage, woo and win the headstrong new Queen of England.

  He now enlarged upon this in his instructions to Feria, seeing it as the ideal solution to the question of her marriage. Since the archduke had no country of his own to rule he could always remain at Elizabeth’s side, helping her to bear the burden of government, yet, unlike any of her contemptible English suitors, he would at the same time be in a position to call upon Philip or his own father to “aid and defend her with all the power of the Empire” in time of need. The match would bring her “so many connections and of such strength and power that none will dare to offend or vex her, whereas just the reverse will happen if she marry a subject.” Philip the husband had given way to Philip the loving brother, anxious for her welfare, gravely instructing Feria to “banish any shadow of doubt she may have that because she did not marry me and I have entered the French alliance I shall take any less interest in her affairs.” In time those words would prove grimly ironic; for the next three decades King Philip of Spain would never cease to take the utmost interest in Elizabeth’s affairs.

  Everyone, everywhere, seemed to be talking of Elizabeth’s marriage in that first year of her reign. More and more suitors, old and new, entered the field, while the advantages of one match and the drawbacks of another were constantly weighed up and disputed; some of her Privy Councillors, eager for an English marriage, favored Pickering, while others pressed for the great foreign alliance that the archduke would bring; only Elizabeth herself stood a little apart from it all, like a pale flame in the heart of a blaze. But almost no one seemed to find anything significant in that. It was remembered that her sister, Mary, had been nearly forty when she was made queen, a devout old maid, yet she had been betrothed within six months, and with every sign of eagerness, whereas Elizabeth was only twenty-five, an elegant young woman, and by “age and temperament” she was far more fit than Mary to be a wife and mother, as Feria discreetly pointed out. She tended to make modest references to her preference for the virgin state whenever marriage was seriously discussed, it was true, but there was no doubt that she enjoyed the company of men; and diplomacy, or, as her warder Sir Thomas Pope had suggested in the last reign, maidenly modesty, could account for a certain delicate reticence on her part when the matter of her marriage was broached with any forcefulness. It was generally assumed that marriage and childbearing must be her destiny, both as a woman and as a queen. Only the wordly Sir William Pickering said with conviction that she would laugh at them all and die a maid, and his opinion did not carry much weight.

  To her first Parliament, which assembled at the beginning of the year, Elizabeth had given a fair but flexible answer when they “made request for marriage.” Her reply, written and revised in her own handwriting, was read out in the lofty Parliamentary House, where Thomas Seymour had once sworn to bring about “the blackest Parliament that has been seen”; her references to the past, to her sufferings in Mary’s reign, still so recent, surely stirred her hearers’ sense of chivalry. The literary tradition of the distressed virgin was still vivid in a society whose most popular reading included Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

  If the eschewing of the danger of mine enemies or the avoiding of the peril of death, whose messenger or rather continual watchman, the Queen’s indignation, was no little time daily before mine eyes . . . could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me.

  So Elizabeth wrote proudly. Neither the fear of Mary’s wrath nor ambition for a fine marriage had been able to move her then to change her maiden state, she declared, and she was still of the same mind now. But people were not to think there was anything final about that. Smoothly she proceeded to introduce promising phrases such as “whensoever it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life,” and “whomsoever my chance shall be to light upon,” so that it should be quite plain to her subjects and the world that she was ready to consider matrimony with an open mind. As for the succession question, her response was that if God should wish her to remain in the single state, she believed that he would make provision for an heir to the kingdom—a reminder perhaps that Mary’s childlessness had had the happy result of bringing her, Elizabeth, to the throne.

  The conclusion and climax to her speech came with the simple yet dramatic force of a vow. “And in the end,” rang her words, in what perhaps she already knew to be prophecy, “this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.” The speech was a masterpiece of subtle diplomacy. Elizabeth was left free to flaunt herself before the desiring eyes of the world, for her own delight and for political gain, but at the same time, with her characteristic gift for creating strengths out of her weaknesses, she had provided herself with an unassailably honorable means of retreat.

  “So many loose and flighty fancies are about,” Feria sighed, when spring came and Elizabeth was still as uncommitted as ever. With Philip’s suit at an end he had now to begin the irksome process of wooing this “baggage” of a young woman all over again, on behalf of the unfamiliar archdukes, which promised long-drawn-out negotiations while other rumors, other ambassadors, jostled him for the queen’s attention. There had been a good deal of talk about the King of Denmark’s brother Duke Adolphus of Holstein, a devout Protestant who was also said to be remarkably good-looking, and though Feria had done his best to thwart this contender, by putting it about that he was really “a very good Catholic, and not so comely as he is made out to be,” it was said that he intended to come over in person to plead his suit. Pickering had arrived, and was lounging about the court with a supercilious air, spending a fortune on clothes and entertaining, and receiving an inordinate degree of attention from the queen; and meanwhile the Swedish ambassador was still trying to win her for Crown Prince Eric. The Swede tried to profit from having brought her a proposal when she was unsought and out of favor in Mary’s reign, but he was
as maladroit now as then; when he “told the Queen that the son of the King his master was still of the same mind, and asked for a reply to the letter he brought last year,” Elizabeth gave him the curt reply that “the letter was written when she was Madam Elizabeth, and now that she was Queen of England he must write to her as Queen.” Then, with splendid imperiousness, she added that “she did not know whether his master would leave his kingdom to marry her, but she would not leave hers to be monarch of the world, and at present she would not reply either yes or no.” Unpromising though that may have sounded, it elicited another magnificent present from the hopeful King of Sweden, and although Elizabeth and her court laughed more and more openly at Prince Eric’s lavish wooing, his ambassador continued to scatter money and presents in hopes of eventual success. It was with some justification that Feria observed acidly, “If these things were not of such great importance, and so lamentable, some of them would be very ridiculous.”

  As he had envisaged, the archduke’s suit proceeded very haltingly. “It is very troublesome to negotiate with this woman, as she is naturally changeable, and those who surround her are so blind and bestial that they do not at all understand the state of affairs,” he wrote, profoundly exasperated. His idea was to drive her into the arms of Philip’s candidate by first scaring her thoroughly, showing her the terrible weaknesses and danger of her position, and then soothing her by offering the remedy of marriage with the archduke, which would entitle her to the boon of Philip’s protection. But Feria could see that she was as empty headed as ever. “Sometimes she appears to want to marry him, and speaks like a woman who will only accept a great Prince,” he reported, but “for my part I believe she will never make up her mind to anything that is good for her.” It was with undisguised relief that Feria left his post at Elizabeth’s court at the end of May, and handed over his thankless duties to the suave, supple-tongued Bishop de Quadra. To the end, Feria was taken in by Elizabeth’s air of willfulness and inconsequential posturing. Had he known her over the years, observed her progress from difficult childhood through stormy youth to the position she now held, had he been present at Hatfield ten years before, when, as a friendless girl of fifteen, she had triumphed over all the art and experience of her interrogator Tyrwhitt, he might have seen something more than imprudent waywardness behind her present dealings. As it was, he left England with the conviction that the young queen was not merely heretical but an irresponsible minx, who deserved only to be dealt with by force.