The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  Elizabeth appeared wrought-up and emotional at this time; the tensions experienced by any woman approaching menopause were heightened for her by the mingled excitements and anxieties of her final courtship. At the beginning of October she ordered her council to discuss again the question of the Alençon match and give her their opinion of it. Meeting after meeting was held and on one occasion they were closeted in strict secrecy from eight o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock at night, which was most unusual, but all “without proceeding to any full resolution.” Their final decision was that the queen should “do what best shall please her.” It should have been a safe enough verdict, but Elizabeth’s mood was not what it had been at the time of the Parliament of 1566. She did not want her councillors to maintain a respectful neutrality, leaving the decision to her, she wanted them to override her doubts and persuade her that it would be right for her to marry Alençon. She “uttered many speeches,” Burghley recorded, “and that not without shedding of many tears” in her disappointment that her councillors should have shown “any disposition to make it doubtful whether there could be any more surety for her and her realm than to have her marry and have a child of her own body to inherit, and so to continue the line of Henry VIII.” She snapped that she must have been a fool to have entrusted them with debating the matter, “for she thought to have rather had a universal request made to her to proceed in this marriage than to have made doubt of it.” The Spanish ambassador reported that after the interview she “remained extremely sad” and “was so cross and melancholy that it was noticed by everyone who approached her.” She told Walsingham, the arch opponent of the match, to get out of her sight, vowing that “the only thing he was good for was a protector of heretics.” There were, indeed, good grounds for believing that he had been involved with the publication of the Gaping Gulf. To the Treasurer of the Household, who asked how she could contemplate marriage with a Catholic, she retorted angrily that “he might pay dearly for the zeal he was displaying in the cause of religion, and it was a fine way to show his attachment to her, who might desire, like others, to have children.” The doubts and tacit discouragement of her ministers told her what she least wished to hear—that she was not “like others.” She was not the radiant embodiment of femininity that Alençon’s hot wooing implied, but a fading old maid almost past childbearing, whom an eligible foreign prince would only court out of sinister motives. It was not surprising that she should have appeared “cross and melancholy” at this time.

  Several times she declared defiantly that she was determined to marry Alençon, and the Spanish ambassador began to think optimistically that God might have ordained this marriage as a means of plunging England into civil war. On November 20 she instructed a select group of Privy Councillors to draw up the conditions of the marriage contract with Simier, and he left England four days later with an agreement. But the negotiations were by no means concluded. Elizabeth insisted that she must have two months in which to win her subjects over, and Simier had to sign a certificate before he departed, acknowledging this stipulation and agreeing that if she could not placate her subjects the marriage articles should be considered null and void. It was a loophole of which Elizabeth intended to take full advantage.

  When Simier had gone, the heady romance of her last courtship began to loosen its hold over Elizabeth. The Gaping Gulf had sneeringly called it “a very French Popish wooing, to send smooth-tongued Simiers to gloss and glaver,” but it had been a very successful kind of wooing. While Simier remained at her court he had provided a personal link with Alençon, staying by Elizabeth’s side to flatter away her doubts with assurances of his master’s passion for her, to remind her of all the prince’s charms, and to tempt her with talk of future joys; once he had departed, the sensual and emotional warmth went out of the affair. He continued to “gloss and glaver” from a distance, in the lavish letters adorned with pink seals and lovers’ knots that he sent Elizabeth day after day, but soon expressions of reproachful uncertainty began to appear among the compliments. Towards the end of January 1580, Simier wrote anxiously that he could tell that the queen’s change of heart had been brought about by the interference of those who wished to prevent the marriage, and in a meaningful reference to Leicester, whose coat of arms contained the bear and ragged staff, he begged Elizabeth to protect her monkey from the paw of the bear. He tried to play upon her pride, as well as her affection, musing provokingly, “Who would have thought that a queen of the heavens and the earth, a princess of all the virtue in the world, could be mistaken in her knowledge of certain people who feel neither love nor affection otherwise than ambition for power impels them”—another aspersion on Leicester. But the situation had changed in Simier’s absence. Without him beside her to plead Alençon’s suit, Elizabeth was turning once more to her former favorite for admiration and companionship. As Leicester returned to her good graces, so did Walsingham, the other great opponent of the match. Lacking the persuasive presence of her suitor’s representative, Elizabeth lost her desire for Alençon.

  She still had need of her Frog, however, and it suited her purposes to have him poised, breathless with anticipation, on the brink of marriage with her. Philip of Spain was soon to acquire the throne of Portugal, and that increase in his dominions and power would make hostile Spain a still mightier threat to the security of Elizabeth’s Protestant kingdom. It was ominous for the French, too, and caused Catherine de’ Medici to wish to draw nearer to England, to redress the balance of power; however, marriage with Elizabeth was not the only means by which the House of Valois might be fortified. An alternative was “the alliance of the Duke of Alençon with the King of Spain by marriage, and the joining of their forces to help each other.” If Alençon were to marry one of Philip’s daughters, the combined weight of Spain and France, blessed by the pope, might crush England in a triumphant crusade. Walsingham set little store by this threat, pointing out, with justification, that it had caused great fears before, in 1559, when King Philip had married Alençon’s sister Elisabeth, la fille de France, yet nothing had come of it then, when England was so much weaker and more vulnerable than now. There was, however, no gainsaying the fact that Elizabeth’s need for an ally against the rising menace of Spain in the 1580s was very great, and to this end she was fortunate in having an ardent French suitor to entice or rebuff as circumstances required.

  She had asked for two months’ grace, and before this period elapsed she produced an obstacle to the marriage—religion. In a letter full of verbal caresses she explained tenderly to Alençon that, though there was no prince in the whole world to whom she would rather give herself than him, her treschère grenouille, or with whom she would rather spend the years that were left to her, her people were adamant on the subject of religion; they would not tolerate a king-consort who openly worshipped according to the Roman rituals. If he were insistent on that point, Elizabeth wrote, they would have to give up the idea of marriage altogether, and agree to remain faithful friends. The truth was that she knew full well the negotiations would not end at this stage; she could continue to dally for many months more, but with her customary prudence she was establishing a solid obstacle behind which she could take shelter from the pursuit whenever it should become necessary. Alençon was not ignorant of her tactics, but there was little he could do against her pose of duty and conscience. Somewhat stiffly he wrote back that people were saying the Queen of England was merely using religion as a pretext for dismissing him, and that it was well known that her subjects were eager to see her married. In a brief postscript, referring to Elizabeth’s envoy Stafford, he showed a measure of his displeasure: “I find Sir Edward Stafford as cold as ice,” he wrote reproachfully.

  Although Elizabeth was anxious to remain technically uncommitted, she wanted the negotiations to prosper. The first flame of her excitement over Alençon had died, but she still felt a tendresse for her charming French prince, so that pleasure was mingled with politics. In February 1580 Mendoza reported
a discussion among the Queen, Cecil, and the Archbishop of York, during which Elizabeth had asked for advice on her marriage, saying that she was between Scylla and Charybdis; “If I do not marry him I do not know whether he will remain friendly with me; and if I do, I shall not be able to govern the country with the freedom and security I have hitherto enjoyed.” The archbishop, knowing Elizabeth’s inflammable moods where marriage was concerned, left the decision entirely in her hands, but Cecil, more forthright, advised her to accept Alençon if she wished, and if not, to put an end to the affair. He had not given the answer the queen wished to hear. “That,” she retorted, “is not the opinion of the rest of the Council, but that I should keep him in correspondence.” Throughout her reign she had profited from a policy of keeping her suitors “in correspondence,” and now she intended to do the same with her dear Frog prince. “For God’s sake, Madame, lose no more time,” Simier wrote beseechingly, in April, but envoys and ambassadors had been begging Elizabeth for more than twenty years to lose no more time in taking a husband.

  When, later that year, the civil warfare in France was brought to a halt, Henry III turned his thoughts again to forming an alliance with England by marrying his brother to the queen. While he was fighting the Huguenots he could not have encouraged Alençon to become the husband of Elizabeth and master of a Protestant kingdom, but with the French at peace once more he welcomed the opportunity of passing the turbulent prince, with his costly enterprises in the Netherlands, over to Elizabeth. If Alençon were her husband, England would be bound to stand with France against Spain, whose acquisition of Portugal had cast a shadow across Europe. Elizabeth had no intention of becoming irrevocably bound to any person or any course of action, but she had every reason for wishing to cultivate the friendship of the French. Preparations were made for the coming of an immense French embassy, which, with the envoys’ trains, would consist of some five hundred people, and shortly before they arrived, in April 1581, Elizabeth paid a symbolic compliment to the Valois when she asked the French agent Marchaumont to perform the act of knighting Francis Drake, on board his little ship The Golden Hind, at Deptford. It was on this occasion that Elizabeth’s garter slipped down, and was claimed for Alençon. The queen coyly demurred, saying that she needed it to hold her stocking up, and she readjusted it on her leg in full view of the envoy. But afterwards it was sent as a love token to her suitor, and he gave her endless thanks for the belle jartière, vowing that it brought him luck.

  Elizabeth enjoyed any performance that focused attention on her beauty and desirability, and she was in her element in the spring of 1581, when the French mission arrived in England to settle the marriage terms. A fantastical program of merrymaking had been arranged for them, with the most sumptuous spectacles and diversions the English court could offer. A banqueting hall had been specially built, on the southwest side of Whitehall Palace; the huge edifice, gorgeously painted and decorated, was hung with greenery, the ceiling was painted with stars and sunbeams, and the walls were draped with cloth of gold and silver. The English nobility and members of Parliament were charged to remain in London, and as the time for the visitors’ arrival approached, tensions began to mount. People had not forgotten that the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve had begun with a great gathering for a state occasion. Mendoza reported that the nobles were summoning all their kinsmen and followers together, partly for show, partly for protection, and that Leicester was endeavoring to collect the largest band of all. The queen issued a special proclamation ordering her subjects to show great honor to the foreign visitors, and prohibiting any display of violence towards them on pain of death. Londoners who had hated Philip of Spain’s Spaniards resented the impending arrival of hundreds of Frenchmen, and the prevailing mood was one of sullen distrust. But the visit went ahead in magnificent style; two hundred guns pounded out a salute as the envoys’ barges came gliding up the Thames, and soon the round of extravagant festivities was in progress.

  On St. George’s Day, April 23, a banquet was held in the new hall, and for the occasion Elizabeth was bedecked as gorgeously as the surroundings, in a golden dress studded with glittering jewels. The canvas outer walls of the hall were painted to represent stonework, and the queen’s elderly face was painted to represent beauty. Some of the highest members of the French nobility, with hundreds of their servants, had come to the English court for a mighty masquerade—a great expenditure of time and money for a marriage that would never take place. Leicester, who, with his fondness for the arts, would have been familiar with the English poets of the previous generation, might have echoed Wyatt’s bitter words:

  Who list to hunt, I put him out of doubt,

  As well as I may spend his time in vain.

  Alençon, like many suitors before him, was spending his time in vain, pursuing the Queen of England.

  A broad hint to that effect was given in a “Triumph” that was enacted for the visitors on May 15, in the tiltyard. In this chivalrous spectacle Desire and his foster children, one of whom was young Philip Sidney, endeavored to storm the Fortress of Perfect Beauty, using “pretty scaling-ladders” and “flowers and such fancies.” They addressed the queen, pleading with her to render up her beauty to the forces of desire, but at last they were driven back by Virtue, leaving the maiden fortress intact. The challengers were rebuked by an angel, who proclaimed: “If in besieging the Sun you understand what you had undertaken, you would destroy a common blessing for a private profit.” The symbolic reference to Alençon’s wooing was unmistakable.

  The envoys found their mission almost impossible. Their mouths were stopped with sweetmeats; they tried to talk business and were given entertainments. Elizabeth was anxious for an alliance with France, but she would not be tied to a marriage pledge—she would only discuss that with Alençon himself, she told them. A treaty was drafted for the marriage, but Elizabeth was adamant that it should have no force as yet, and that it was merely being drawn up for future use. Considering the “growing greatness of Spain” it seemed necessary that “some straiter league should be made between the two crowns whatsoever became of the marriage,” but the nature of that league could not be agreed on while the envoys were insisting that the basis for any alliance must be marriage. Henry III knew that no paper treaty would bind the Queen of England; he wanted her held fast in the arms of a Valois. Walsingham stated Elizabeth’s attitude succinctly in a letter he wrote from France in August: “The principal cause why I was sent over,” he reminded her, “was to procure a straiter degree of amity between the King and you without marriage, and yet to carry myself in the procuring thereof, as might not altogether break off the matter of the marriage.” It had been a difficult undertaking, he added, “considering the determination they had put on here not to yield to a league without marriage, so long as there was hope of marriage.”

  The “hope of marriage” that Elizabeth had so successfully exploited throughout her reign was still very strong in Alençon’s breast, even though the queen was approaching her forty-eighth birthday. The prince’s love letters shamelessly ignored reality, and in their eroticism they added a new dimension to the fiction of Elizabeth’s personal desirability. “Kissing and rekissing all that Your beautiful Majesty can think of,” Francis the Constant, “he who burns with desire,” waited for “the sweet consummation that I desire more than my life.” It must have given this elderly maiden who so craved admiration a delicious frisson to read that one of the greatest princes in Christendom was almost beside himself with desire to be her husband, “in bed between the sheets in your beautiful arms,” after which happy event he had no doubt that she would soon be nursing an infant Prince of Wales, “made and forged by the little Frenchman who is and will be eternally your humble and very loving slave.” Alençon apologized charmingly for the liberty of his style, but the frankness with which he expressed his passion was excitingly novel for the queen. A Valois prince could be permitted freedoms that no lesser person might assay. The fact that Elizabeth no longer ha
d any intention of marrying her Frog and sharing her great bed with him did not detract from her pleasure in contemplating the prospect.

  A gift of £30,000 helped to keep Alençon’s desires at fever pitch during the summer of 1581, and in October, after raising the siege of Cambrai, he returned to England to pursue his quarry in person once more. Catherine de’ Medici had again been talking of a Spanish bride for him, which called for the appearance of great interest in her suitor from Elizabeth. Alençon scarcely knew what to expect as he made the stormy crossing to England. He needed money for his Netherlands venture; whether or not he would obtain it by marrying the Queen of England remained to be seen.

  “The principal object of his visit is to ask for money,” Mendoza stated baldly, but Elizabeth’s intense pleasure in being courted ensured an atmosphere of romance for the Prince’s visit. Alençon left his first interview with the queen with his spirits high and his hopes rekindled. He was Elizabeth’s ardent young lover again, sighing out the raptures that her aged face and figure inspired in him, whispering of the joys he longed to know in her withered arms, eager to hear her call him her Frog and tease him about the smallness of his fingers in her most archly coquettish manner. Scandal found fresh fuel in reports that the queen had taken to visiting Alençon in his bedchamber, carrying little cups of soup to him while he was still in bed—“There goes much babbling” ran a contemporary letter, “and the Queen doth not attend to other matters, but only to be together with the Duke in one chamber from morning to noon, and afterwards till two or three hours after sunset. I cannot tell what a devil they do.” What a devil the queen and her last suitor might or might not have done together, it certainly did not include sexual intercourse. Elizabeth’s purpose was, as it had ever been, to provoke desire, not to satisfy it.