The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  When she heard that the ominous meeting between the Queens of France and Spain was about to take place at Bayonne, her behavior to de Foix could not have been more sweetly encouraging. The reunion of Catherine de’ Medici and her darling daughter Elisabeth, Philip of Spain’s wife, threatened to result in the Catholic league that loyal Englishmen most feared; at such a moment it behoved Elizabeth of England to show great interest in the possibility of marrying the King of France. Almost girlishly she told de Foix that she wished she had had the good fortune to be present at Bayonne as a third queen, then passing to the subject of the marriage she observed that there was really only one difficulty, that of age. But she went on to say that in her ambassador’s last report he had written that Charles was so wonderfully grown that after a mere absence of three weeks he had been scarcely recognizable, and it seemed he would become as tall as his father had been. At dinner de Foix was seated at the queen’s side; she seemed full of happiness, and drank to the king’s health. After dinner she kept the Frenchman by her, and chattered to him about France, its glories and its court—“like someone,” de Foix recorded, “who is relishing things they expect to possess one day.” Catherine de’ Medici was shrewd and guileful, but she was not so accomplished an actress as the Queen of England.

  At Bordeaux, in April, the English ambassador Sir Thomas Smith had an audience with Catherine, in which she told him plainly that there were only three serious objections to the match. The first was the age of her son, but she assured him that if Elizabeth would put up with that, she herself would put up with Elizabeth’s age. At this point the young king Charles broke in, exclaiming eagerly, “I find no fault. I would she could be as well content with me as I am with her age.” The other difficulties that Catherine spoke of were the question of Elizabeth having to reside in France at times, and the discontent of the English people and nobility that might result, but she pointed out that England and France united would be so strong that they would have nothing to fear from anyone. Smith answered discreetly that his limited instructions did not permit him to give a reply to that, but he had a few dry words for the youthful suitor. “If the King had three or four years more, and had seen the Queen’s Majesty, and were fallen in love with her,” he observed, “then I would not marvel at this haste.” “Why, I do love her indeed,” protested Charles, to which Smith answered blightingly that he did not yet know what love was, but he would soon go through it; “It is the most foolish thing,” said Smith, “the most impatient, most hasty and disrespectful that can be.” Understandably, the young king blushed, and Catherine intervened on his behalf, saying, “This is no foolish love.” Smith courteously assented, but he added some weighty comments about the serious nature of such a marriage, with a degree of conviction that was generally lacking from the tone of the negotiations.

  As the Bayonne meeting drew nearer, Catherine pressed for an answer, while Elizabeth played for time, offering evasive protestations of friendship and then expressing doubts about Catherine’s sincerity. All such doubts were amply justified, since, ironically, both she and Catherine had entered into marriage negotiations with the House of Austria. A match between one of the emperor’s daughters and Charles IX was being discussed, while Elizabeth was complaisantly receiving the renewed advances of the emperor’s brother the archduke Charles. The matrimonial game was a complex one, but Elizabeth was an experienced player. The Habsburg archduke was the suitor with whom she desired to dally at length; the immature King of France was a welcome, but dispensible, makeweight.

  “She is so nimble in her dealing, and threads in and out of the business in such a way that her most intimate favourites fail to understand her,” the Spanish ambassador wrote vexedly in the following year. Though the archduke’s suit seemed to be prospering, Charles IX was still talked of, while Elizabeth herself veered between appearing resolved to marry some great prince for the sake of her country and declaring herself resolved never to marry at all. The most intimate favorite of all, Leicester, by no means confident that his own suit would ever succeed, was smiling and scheming between the lodgings of the rival ambassadors. He made a convincing show of supporting the Austrian match at first, but his serious dealings were with the French. While Cecil, Norfolk, and the weight of reason were giving strong support to the Habsburg suit, Leicester was endeavoring to thwart it by encouraging the French; it was in his interests as well as theirs to hinder Elizabeth from concluding a marriage with the archduke. In the spring of 1566 Cecil’s learned, intelligent wife told de Silva that in her opinion, “the Queen will never marry Lord Robert, or, indeed, anyone else, unless it be the Archduke, which is the match Cecil desires.” It was with the intention of altering that situation that Leicester had joined forces with Catherine de’ Medici’s ambassador, to lend some heat to Charles IX’s tepid wooing while it lasted and thereby to acquire France’s support for his own suit when they should need a new candidate with which to counter the archduke. As de Silva remarked to Cecil, “These Frenchmen are in a fine taking when they see the Archduke’s own suit progressing, and at once bring their own King forward to embarrass the Queen. When they see that this trick has hindered the negotiation they take up with Leicester again, and think we do not see through them.” Amid the tensions and rivalries that accompanied Elizabeth’s first French courtship a note of farce was discernible.

  Elizabeth herself seemed well aware of the absurdity of a match with so young a suitor as Charles IX. In the summer of 1567, when she was nearly thirty-four and the boy king of France just seventeen, de Silva reported, “The Queen told me this afternoon on my introducing the matter as a joke that it was true the French had again addressed her, but it would not result in people seeing such a comical farce as an old woman leading a child to the church doors.” In similar tones she observed that people would say she was marrying her son, just as they had said King Philip was marrying his grandmother when he took her half sister, Mary Tudor, for his wife. Though she could speak lightly of that grim marriage it was obvious that it haunted her still, as a vivid warning of the ills that a wrong choice of consort might bring to herself and her realm. “She knew very well how the King of Spain had cursed the painters and envoys when he first beheld Queen Mary,” she told the Archduke’s ambassador; to be emotionally rejected as Mary had been by her fine young husband was a prospect that Elizabeth, with her craving for constant male admiration and attention, could not endure. To marry a young consort, and above all a young French consort, would be to invite disillusionment. It was delightful to her to be courted by eligible men of almost any age, but to put their professed adoration to the test of a lifetime of marriage she neither dared nor desired to do.

  “She seems to regard it as profitable to create delays somewhere or somehow in order to gain an advantage, and this we have long suspected on the logic of facts,” wrote the emperor that summer, in a private letter to his brother the archduke. He was finding Elizabeth more perplexing than ever to treat with over “this most difficult affair” of marriage. The Earl of Sussex had arrived in Vienna, to present the emperor with the insignia of the Order of the Garter that Elizabeth had encouragingly conferred upon him, and also to pursue the subject of the marriage; to the emperor’s disquiet, Sussex “spontaneously laid stress upon the fact that should these negotiations lead to no result, the illustrious Queen, who is still being wooed by many others, is firmly resolved to marry the Most Christian King of France, in spite of the disparity of age.” Uncertain though he was of Elizabeth’s real intentions, the emperor had no wish to see the great matrimonial prize fall to the young French king, and in his note to his brother he repeated his earnest hopes that the archduke would at last “contract this honourable and splendid marriage, which without doubt will redound to the great profit of the entire glorious House of Austria”—and, he might have added, to the great loss of the rival House of Valois. But the archduke’s own skepticism extended further than the emperor’s. “If the English Orator threatens that should the marriage negotia
tions with me make no progress his Queen would marry the King of France,” he wrote back, “I take this to be but an attempt to accelerate the negotiations.” Doubt and distrust were in the air, and Elizabeth’s long dalliance with the Habsburg archduke was drawing to an end.

  She found an effective shelter in the very real obstacle of the archduke’s religion. He was too conscientious a Catholic to doff his faith for worldly gain, and Elizabeth, the head of the English church, would not recall the dark days of her sister’s reign by inviting a Catholic Habsburg to share the throne of England. “I prize quietude of conscience and the continuance of the peaceable reign which I have begun and desire to pursue higher than all the favours which princes of the world and all kingdoms can confer upon me,” she wrote proudly to the emperor. It was one of the few clear sentences in a letter which the emperor irritably described as “most obscure, ambiguous, involved and of such a nature that we cannot learn from it whether the Queen is serious and sincere, or whether she wishes to befool us.” The archduke showed no great regret at the prospect of losing the glorious prize that had been held out to him for nearly eight years. “My opinion of the affair is that it will result in nothing,” he wrote judicially to his brother in January 1568, and could not resist adding, albeit respectfully, “and may it please Your Majesty to remember that this opinion always deterred me.” The courtship was dead, though not buried.

  The noble, loyal Earl of Sussex came back to England from the imperial court full of grieved disappointment at the failure of the match, and convinced that Leicester’s malevolent influence was responsible for it. “If it should ever please God to put into my dear mistress’s heart to divide the weeds from the grain . . . she may, if she will, make a happy harvest,” he sighed, his devotion to the queen unimpaired by his bitter dislike for her favorite. It was partly out of dogged loyalty to her that he was led to hold Leicester accountable for her apparent errors of judgment; for those who, like Sussex, sincerely longed to see Elizabeth conclude an honorable marriage alliance, and could not understand her continuing failure to do so, ambitious, devious Leicester made a convenient whipping boy. The blame for the queen’s neglect of what they regarded as the country’s urgent need of a king-consort and an heir could convincingly be attributed to his influence. Certainly Leicester welcomed the disappearance of the archduke from the field, and there was no doubt that he had done all he could to thwart the match in the face of its formidable supporters, Cecil, Norfolk, and their adherents on the council. But in the last resort he was as powerless as they to force the queen’s hand when it came to the final irrevocable step of marriage. His self-seeking maneuvers and their sincere advice could influence the course of a courtship, but no conscious persuasions in the world could have any real bearing on Elizabeth’s decision not to marry, for that was the product of her own unreasoning instincts. Sussex did not perceive that her emotional dependence on Leicester was not a cause of that decision, but an effect.

  Elizabeth’s deep-rooted antipathy towards marriage, however advantageous, her fear of tying herself to one man, however attracted she might be to him, could only have been strengthened by the horrifying outcome of Mary, Queen of Scots’s marriage to Lord Darnley. Never was Cecil’s observation that “carnal marriages begin in gladness and end in strife” more vividly proved; the “long lad” with the delicate features and royal blood whom Mary had found so irresistible had degenerated into a vicious, physically repulsive nuisance to the Scottish queen, and in February 1567 had ended his short life as a strangled corpse in the garden of a blown-up house. There were parallels with the early days of Elizabeth’s affair with Robert Dudley, when Amy Robsart had met her mysterious, violent death amid whirling rumors, but Mary did what Elizabeth had not done—promptly married the principal suspect, Lord Bothwell. The storm rose higher; the Scottish crowds roared “Burn the whore!” as Mary was hustled through the streets of Edinburgh under guard; battle, imprisonment, escape, flight followed, and then the ominous stillness of captivity in England, where she was to remain a prisoner for the rest of her life. “The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow,” Elizabeth called her in verse, but loyal Protestant Englishmen were blunter. She was “a killer of her husband and an adulteress,” as well as “a common disturber of the peace of this realm.” The list of queens whose marriages had ended in shame, grief, and death had grown longer; Elizabeth’s mother; her stepmothers; her cousin Lady Jane Grey; her half sister, Mary; now her lovely cousin Mary Stuart. The woman who had cried as a child of eight, “I will never marry!” had been given little cause to change her mind as an adult.

  The threatening situation that had made Elizabeth’s marriage seem so necessary at the time of the Parliament of 1566 had taken on a different aspect by 1568, when the archduke’s courtship was finally abandoned. In February of that year Lady Catherine Grey died. Her two sons had been declared illegitimate, and her only remaining sister, Mary, was a stunted little creature who had so far forgotten herself as to marry—without the queen’s permission—a burly sergeant porter. She was not a prepossessing figure to put forward as a successor to the throne, and nor, in the eyes of loyal subjects, was Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned as she was under suspicion of the gravest of crimes. “The Queen expresses sorrow to me at Lady Catherine’s death,” wrote de Silva, “but it is not believed that she feels it, as she was afraid of her, so that both on this account and on the Scotch side she is now without misgiving.” The relentless pressure on Elizabeth to name a successor lifted, and in the coming months the whole question of marriage was laid aside for a time, for the Habsburg and Valois rulers had more pressing affairs to deal with than courting the elusive Queen of England. Spain was beset by the problems of the discontented and rebellious Netherlands, while France was again rent by bloody civil war. Elizabeth too was occupied at home, with the first grave bouts of Catholic plotting, as supporters of the troublesome Scottish queen rallied to Mary’s cause, and even the Duke of Norfolk turned traitor. It was a period of “manifest danger” such as Elizabeth had not faced since the darkest days of her sister’s reign, and the seriousness of the threats to her life and England’s peace made her appear more precious than ever in the eyes of loyal Englishmen. By 1570, when she was nearly thirty-seven, a perceptible change was taking place in their attitude to her; the members of the first two Parliaments of the new decade showed themselves to be concerned rather with protecting and cherishing her all-important existence than with harassing her to name a successor or provide heirs by marrying. In comparison with the villainies attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots—“as vile and naughty a woman as ever the earth bore”—Elizabeth’s virtue gained in luster. Significantly, a member of the Parliament of 1572 chose to refer to Mary in the symbolism of chivalric legend, calling her “the monstrous and huge dragon.” It was an early hint of the powerful psychological importance that Elizabeth’s virgin state was to acquire in the years to come.

  Though she was well past her youth in 1570, the Queen of England remained the most eligible woman in Europe, and her advancing middle age in no way deterred her from exploiting that advantage to the utmost. As France’s civil wars of religion came to an uneasy halt in the spring of that year, Elizabeth’s thoughts turned again to marriage, or rather to courtship. Young Henry Cobham was sent to the imperial court as Sussex’s successor, to see whether the archduke Charles could be induced to renew his suit, but the emperor’s patience had been tried too far already, and Elizabeth’s new overtures did not meet with a warm reception. The suspicion that the dignity of the House of Austria had been trifled with gave a chilly tone to the emperor’s response; since Elizabeth had allowed three years to elapse, he explained, his brother the archduke had not taken her to be in earnest, and he was accordingly negotiating to marry another princess, the Duchess of Bavaria, “with whom,” the Emperor said pointedly, “there could be no differences on the subject of religion.” The archduke himself offered courteous professions of regret and brotherly esteem, but Elizabeth was
piqued. It was said that she declared with great spirit that if she had been a man she would certainly have challenged the emperor to a duel. She could no longer turn to Charles IX as an alternative suitor, for he too was married in that year, to a daughter of the emperor. But Charles’s two brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Alençon, were still available, and just as Elizabeth had need of France’s friendship now, so Catherine de’ Medici had much to gain from allying one of her sons to Elizabeth. It was the turn of the Duke of Anjou to become a suitor to the Queen of England.

  Dissolute, homosexual, sinisterly good-looking Anjou was Catherine’s favorite son, and she rejoiced in the prospect of his wearing the crown of England. But there was more than maternal love to recommend the match. With the ending of the recent eruption of France’s internal religious wars, concessions had been made to the Huguenots, and a moderate coalition government was now in power; the presence of Anjou, who was a figurehead of the extreme Catholic Guise faction, could only be a disruptive force, and it was highly desirable that he should be removed from France by the magnificent expedient of making him King of England. Though Elizabeth had no intention of thus sharing her throne, still less did she wish to see Anjou share it with Mary, Queen of Scots. The powerful Guise family were Mary’s near relations, and she had been their protégée since her childhood and marriage with the dauphin, Anjou’s eldest brother who had died young; by enmeshing Anjou in negotiations with herself Elizabeth might keep French intrigues on behalf of the captive Scottish queen at bay. At the same time she would be securing France as an ally against the increasing menace of Spain. Though the Spanish ambassador wrote sourly in January 1571, “Her matrimonial intentions are of no use any longer for deceiving people,” Elizabeth proved herself well able to sustain the fiction that she was seriously contemplating marriage, for quite as long as it suited her to do so.