The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  In May the Spanish ambassador reported that there had been an unpleasant scene involving the Privy Council and Simier. Elizabeth had ordered the council to discuss the marriage, he wrote, and after objections had been raised on such grounds as the “great confusion” that might be raised by the “coming hither of Catholics, and above all Frenchmen, who were their ancient enemies,” Simier was eventually summoned and informed that Alençon was making exorbitant demands—“such things have never been proposed by any prince who treated for marriage with the Queen.” According to the Spaniard’s information, Simier became extremely angry at the councillors’ opposition, and flung himself out of the door, “which he slammed after him in a great fury.” When the queen learned of this she was full of regrets, he went on, and that night she said twice, “They need not think that it is going to end in this way; I must get married.” But however brightly she smiled on Simier, however tenderly she wrote to Alençon, she still continued to insist on her customary stipulation; she would never marry a man she had not seen. On this occasion, when the suitor in question was reputed to be so remarkably unattractive, her freedom to see and refuse was particularly important to her. Somewhat maliciously, the Spanish ambassador reported that Elizabeth was “largely influenced by the idea that it should be known that her talents and beauty are so great, that they have sufficed to cause him to come and visit her without any assurance that he will be her husband.” Whether it was for the Queen of England’s talents and beauty, or for hope of political advantage, Alençon, unlike her previous royal suitors, was prepared to hazard his dignity to gain his desire, and even without a firm promise of eventual success he was ready to cross the seas to woo Elizabeth in person.

  For weeks the English court stirred with anticipation of his coming. Londoners were laying bets; the odds were given as two to one against Alençon’s coming and three to one against his marrying the queen. But the atmosphere throughout the country was not by any means festive. “Alençon’s coming may cause disturbances in this country,” the Spanish ambassador had prophesied in June. The hatred of the English for the French had lost none of its bitterness in the seven years that had elapsed since the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve—“If they went up to the knuckles in French blood, they will up to the elbows in English blood,” a fervent English Protestant was to warn. The Huguenot leanings of the youngest Valois prince counted for less than his close kinship with those who bore the responsibility for the massacre, and as heir presumptive to the French crown he was, despite his flexible conscience, officially a Catholic, “a prince and good son of Rome, that anti-Christian mother city.” At court the atmosphere was strained by Leicester’s opposition to the match, though his resistance was based on personal, rather than religious, motives. When he heard that Elizabeth had finally signed the passport that would bring her suitor over to England, Leicester was filled with despondency, and he retired to his house at Wanstead, determined to win her sympathy. It was a trick that always worked. Missing him sorely, anxious about his health, Elizabeth hastened to his side; she made the journey to Wanstead and stayed there for several days, consoling him. It was a moment of stillness before a mighty storm in their relationship.

  Some weeks previously, while Simier was on the Thames with Elizabeth and Leicester, shots had been fired at the royal barge. The shooting was judged to have been accidental, but now, while the queen and her favorite were away at Wanstead, there was another incident, and this time it was unmistakably an attempt on Simier’s life; he was fired on while walking in the grounds of Greenwich Palace. Again he escaped injury, but he was shaken and angry. The whisper ran around the court that the jealous, dangerous Earl of Leicester was behind the murder attempt, and Simier, knowing Leicester’s reputation and well aware of his hostility to the French marriage, was ready to believe it. It was time for him to fight back, and for this he had the ideal weapon—he had found out Leicester’s guilty secret. Simier, “sage and discreet” indeed, with a talent for undercover dealings, had found out an item of information about his opponent’s private life that could debar Leicester forever from the queen’s favor; now, in the interests both of his master’s wooing and his own personal vengeance, the time had come for Simier to reveal what he knew. He told the queen that Leicester was married.

  It must have been one of the most agonizing moments of Elizabeth’s life. All her greed for compliments and flattery, her love of hectic dalliance, and her vain posturing, signified not a secure, confident woman, but one who craved affection and dreaded being unloved and unsought after. She needed endless reassurances of her own ability to inspire love, and to old friends who provided her with a sense of stability she clung almost blindly—so that as a young girl she had not only kept her dear, fallible Kat Ashley with her after the affair of the admiral, but had even welcomed back to her household the informer Parry. Robert Dudley had been by her side throughout her reign, almost her lover, always her dearest friend; he had sworn he would die for her, and she had believed him; through the twenty years of their relationship neither scandal nor jealousies nor quarrels had been able to part them for long, and her Robin’s devotion had given Elizabeth the greatest emotional security she would ever know. She had carried on her political courtships confident in the knowledge that he was always close at hand, fuming with desire to marry her himself and gratifyingly jealous of those whom she seemed to favor. Of late he had appeared to accept the fact that he never would be her husband, but his position as her helpmeet had seemed to be unshakable. He had put on weight over the years, his handsome face had become florid, and his graying hair had receded, but Elizabeth’s emotional dependence on her beloved Robin went far beyond physical attraction. For twenty years she had relied upon his love—and now, with a few whispered words from sly Simier, the relationship was ruptured and her security was shattered. For nearly a year, ever since the autumn of 1578, Leicester had been deceiving her. He had become the husband of another woman, the sensuous redhead Lettice Knollys, and then, while concealing the unforgivable fact of his own marriage, he had done all he could to hinder Elizabeth from taking a consort. It would have been a painful revelation for any woman; for one as emotionally demanding as Elizabeth it was almost unbearable.

  In her first reaction she awoke echoes of her father Henry VIII—she cried that she would have Leicester committed to the Tower. Love was transformed into hate, and she wanted to hurt him as he had hurt her. But she was prevailed upon to modify the punishment, since lawful marriage was not a crime, and he was instead confined at Greenwich and then banished to his own house at Wanstead. It was not only Elizabeth’s heart that was wounded; her pride had taken a painful blow. But, as Simier had probably calculated when choosing the moment for his disclosure, consolation was at hand. Alençon would know how to soothe and flatter the queen into good spirits again, and if all went well, he might take Leicester’s vacated place by her side, not as favorite, but as husband.

  On August 17, 1579, a great foreign prince at last arrived to pay court to the Queen of England. She had always longed to be wooed in person by her illustrious suitors, and she found the experience every bit as sweet as she had expected. Alençon was not hideous at all, he was delightful; delicately built and somewhat scarred indeed, but with so much sex appeal that his imperfections were hardly noticeable. He was the embodiment of grace and charm, his manners were captivating, and, most appealing of all, he made it plain from the start that he was almost beside himself with passion for the forty-six-year-old queen. Here was balm indeed for Elizabeth’s bruised feelings.

  Lacking normal relationships, she had always attached inordinate importance to the preliminaries and rituals of romance, so that the element of playacting in her love dealings was very strong. Now at last she had a noble suitor who was happy to enter into the spirit of the game, with enough conviction to make the pretense seem real. Officially Alençon’s visit was supposed to be secret—the clandestine rendezvous that Elizabeth had so often suggested to her former suitors,
without success. The news leaked out but remained unacknowledged, thus adding a further layer of make-believe to the drama. “On Sunday 23,” wrote the Spanish ambassador, “there was a great ball where the Queen danced much more than usual, Alençon being placed behind a curtain and she making signals to him.” That was a scene after Elizabeth’s own heart. To know that the heir presumptive to the throne of France, a young and charming prince, was watching her with apparent adoration from among the hangings as she gaily leapt in the volta, or paced daintily through a galliard, was like a delightful dream come true for Elizabeth. She loved to show off, she was thrilled by the pretense of disguise, and it was delightful to her to send little signs to him as though in lovers’ intimate communication, while the court looked on. Alençon had to have a pet name, as did all her favorites; she promptly christened him her “Frog.” A “Frog Galliard” was written for her to dance to, high and disposedly. A Frog he would a-wooing go, and it seemed that he had gone a-wooing with success.

  Alençon’s stay at Elizabeth’s court was brief, but two weeks of his presence were sufficient to arouse a variety of strong emotions in many people. “Leicester is much put out, and all the Councillors are disgusted except Sussex,” the Spanish ambassador Mendoza wrote with evident satisfaction. It was a bad time for the queen’s former favorite. Towards the end of August, Mendoza reported, “Leicester, who is in great grief, came hither recently, and when he came from his interview with the Queen, his emotion was remarked.” Leicester was not alone in “cursing the French.” Among Elizabeth’s lesser subjects, discontent was growing as the likelihood of the French marriage increased. The old specter of Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip of Spain was raised again, and the atrocities committed in France in the name of religion lent an edge of truth to anti-Catholic propaganda. Mendoza gave it as his opinion that revolution was in the air. Loyal Englishmen did not want a Catholic king and they did not want a French king; in Alençon they would have both.

  For once Elizabeth seemed to be in earnest in her marriage negotiations. Alençon’s wooing was exactly calculated to win her confidence and tempt her to take the step that she had resisted for so long; his protestations of passion combined the appeal of humble worship of her divine perfections with that of titillating eroticism, both of which delighted her. His courtship could not have been more ardent if she had really been a young and desirable woman, and since she was neither his words were doubly pleasurable to her. Simier bore witness to the prince’s feelings, informing Elizabeth that Alençon had hardly slept at all after leaving her, sighing and crying all night, and waking him, Simier, early in the morning to talk of her divine beauties and his pain at departing from her. Alençon wrote her four letters on August 30 and two more the next day, although just before the embarkation he was almost unable to write at all, he told her, on account of the copious tears that were flowing ceaselessly from his eyes. However, he managed to stop weeping for long enough to assure Elizabeth that he was “the most faithful and loving slave on earth,” and to conclude, “As such, from beside the cruel sea I kiss your feet.” The young prince was happy to offer such flattery for as long as Elizabeth was eager to receive it; though more than twenty years lay between them, they were well-matched partners in this splendid game of romance.

  Love was in the air in that month of August, but so were hostility and fear. Even while Alençon was sighing out his passion to the queen at Greenwich, a pamphlet was being published and distributed in which very different passions were expressed. Entitled The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage if the Lord forbid not the banns by letting Her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof, it was a long, vivid tract inspired by a combination of religious fervor and patriotic zeal, in which the appalling nature of the queen’s intended marriage was exposed in “bitter scoffing style.” It sprang from the “honest affectionate heart” of one who was “Her Majesty’s loving true servant,” and who, loving his native England and idolizing his queen, dreaded the prospect of Elizabeth’s being “led blindfold as a poor lamb to the slaughter” in shameful marriage with a French prince, a ruler of that race whose minds were known to be as diseased with Catholicism as their bodies were rotten with syphilis. Through many pages of historical and biblical allusion the writer warned against the coming of Alençon, “the old serpent in shape of a man,” who would so vilely corrupt “our dear Queen Elizabeth” and despoil “this English paradise,” bringing with him his train of “needy, spent Frenchmen” who were “the scum of the King’s Court, which is the scum of all France, which is the scum of Europe” to suck upon the poor honest English like horseleeches. The gravest aspersions were cast on the prince’s moral character, and his motives for wishing to marry a woman so much older than himself were discussed with a frankness that cared nothing for compliments to the queen. “Not one in a thousand of those younger men that seek their elder matches but doth it in side respects,” the writer pronounced, and went on baldly, “It is quite contrary to his young appetites, which will otherwise have their desire.” The pamphlet was offensive, it was subversive, it was a monstrous encroachment on Elizabeth’s royal prerogative; the queen was enraged.

  Copies of the publication were rounded up as swiftly as possible, before they could do further harm, and possession of them was strictly prohibited. The clergy were warned not to “meddle with such high secular matters” in their sermons, “nor intrude themselves into the Queen’s affairs”; the Archbishop of Canterbury was specially charged to quell any tendencies to subversive sentiments among the preachers, while the lord mayor was ordered to organize the confiscation of the pamphlets from members of “the companies of the city” such as the Ironmongers’ Guild and Grocers’ Company. The author of the Gaping Gulf was soon apprehended—he proved to be a lawyer of strong Puritan affiliations named John Stubbs. The devotion to the queen that shone through his writings won him no mercy, and under a law passed in the previous reign to protect Mary Tudor’s hated husband, Philip of Spain, from similar calumnies, he was condemned to lose his right hand. It was a barbarous punishment, from which Mary expected him to be reprieved; that he was not did nothing to ease the stormy atmosphere gathering around the Alençon marriage. Nor were the mutters of discontent quieted by the scene that took place at the scaffold. In three blows Stubbs’s right hand was severed; he raised his hat with the left, cried, “God save the Queen!” and fainted. Alençon, whom Stubbs’s tract had so foully insulted, wrote to Elizabeth to express sincere sorrow at the man’s punishment. As he well knew, the association of his name with public severities would not endear him to the resentful English.

  Elizabeth’s measures for suppressing the Gaping Gulf did not have the effect of silencing opposition to her marriage. According to the Spanish ambassador, the proclamation that she issued, “instead of mitigating the public indignation against the French, has irritated it and fanned the flame.” Puritan feelings against her projected marriage found expression in a jingling little ballad:

  The King of France shall not advance his ships in English sand,

  Nor shall his brother Francis have the ruling of the land:

  We subjects true unto our Queen the foreign yoke defy,

  Whereto we plight our faithful hearts, our limbs, our lives and all,

  Thereby to have our honour rise, or take our fatal fall.

  Therefore, good Francis, rule at home, resist not our desire;

  For here is nothing else for thee, but only sword and fire.

  Stubbs had in truth plighted one of his limbs in what he regarded as the service of the queen. The danger of England falling under “the foreign yoke” as a result of the match seemed very real; as Stubbs had somewhat insultingly pointed out, childbirth might well prove fatal at Elizabeth’s age—“the very point of most danger to Her Majesty for childbearing”—and if she were to die giving birth the realm would be left under a French regency, with an infant half-Valois king or queen. For years Elizabeth had been
under relentless pressure to take a husband, yet now that she was at last entertaining thoughts of marriage she found herself faced with resistance from her subjects and discouragement from her councillors. With characteristic perception she had foreseen this situation years before; when pressed to marry by the presumptuous Parliament of 1566 she had observed angrily that many of those who were urging her to wed would be equally vociferous in criticizing whomever she chose for her consort—“as ready to mislike him with whom I shall marry as they are now to move it” had been her bitter expression. Now, thirteen years afterwards, the truth of her words was becoming apparent.

  Ultimately, Elizabeth’s aversion to marriage and the realities of sex was too profound to permit her to accept Alençon or anyone else as a husband, but in the autumn of 1579 she had strong reasons for wishing to dally with the idea of marrying her charming French suitor. Leicester’s faithlessness in abandoning his fruitless courtship of her for a normal marriage with another had lowered her morale, and left her, for the time being, without the sense of near-partnership that her relationship with him had given her for so long. But the illustrious prince’s impassioned wooing had both provided flattering evidence of her desirability and held out the tempting prospect of intimate companionship with a man who was her equal in blood and power. The idea of entering her old age as the cherished wife of an adoring young prince was very beguiling; even if at heart Elizabeth acknowledged the truth of her past observations about the likelihood that she would be courted for her possessions and not for herself, Alençon’s protestations of disinterested love were ardent enough almost to be convincing, and the forty-six-year-old queen found it very sweet to indulge in fantasies of accepting him. It was undoubtedly the last chance she would have of taking a husband and bearing children. After Alençon there would be no more serious suitors to the Queen of England, and she knew it.