The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  "My Lord," she went on in her letter, "these are shameful slanders, for the which, besides the great desire I have to see the king's majesty, I shall most heartily desire your lordship that I may come to the court after your first determination, that I may show myself there as I am." 6

  Before the Protector could reply to this bold request, however, the interrogators at the Tower stretched Parry's endurance to the breaking point, and it snapped. Silent until now, he finally broke down and confessed to his meetings with Seymour, their conversations about Elizabeth's properties, his asking Elizabeth about her willingness to marry the admiral. He admitted too what he knew about the familiarities between the two while Catherine Parr was alive, telling much that Kat Ashley had made him swear on his honor—"I had rather be pulled with horses, than I would," he had promised—never to reveal.

  Kat was confronted with the cofferer's written testimony, but refused to either confirm or deny it until she and Parry were brought face to face. Then, seeing that he asserted it in her very presence, she exploded in fury. "False wretch!" she cried. He had promised "never to confess it to death!" Though she must have balked at the thought of repeating the cofferer's treachery, the confrontation had broken her will to resist further, and she too wrote a detailed confession.

  Both documents were rushed by swift messenger to Hatfield, wheie Tyrwhitt gave them to Elizabeth to read.

  Kat's confession at first unnerved her completely. She was "much abashed," Tyrwhitt noted with satisfaction, "and half breathless, before she could read it to an end." Could it be forged? She looked at Kat's signature, and Parry's. Both were genuine; she knew them "with half a sight." Her heart pounding, she completed her reading, realizing as she did so that, embarrassing and dishonoring though the revelations were, they did not

  make her a traitor. Neither Kat nor the cofferer had incriminated her, nor had they accused one another of anything more grave than bad judgment and thoughtlessness.

  Tyrwhitt was telling her how Kat had resisted until the last moment, how she had called Parry a "false wretch" and claimed he had betrayed her. No doubt he expected an outburst from Elizabeth as well. Instead, having mastered herself, she answered coolly. "It was a great matter," she said, weighing her words as if reciting before her tutor, "for him to promise such a promise, and to break it." 7

  In the end Tyrwhitt and those who were interrogating Ashley and Parry decided, or were ordered, to be satisfied with what revelations they had forced into the light. Elizabeth wrote a confession that dovetailed neatly with those of her servants, convincing Tyrwhitt that all along there had been "some secret promise" among the three "never to confess to death." "They all sing one song," he wrote irritably, "and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the note before." 8

  Maybe they had agreed among themselves on exactly what to say and what to conceal; maybe there had been a well-developed conspiracy or plans for one, with Elizabeth agreeing to gamble her future on Seymour's hoard of money and soldierly appeal.'At the very least the two servants cannot have been overly scrupulous in reiterating the need for the council's approval in any suggestion of marriage, and were probably guilty of enticing Seymour to marry Elizabeth in order to enrich and advance themselves. How much Elizabeth was an actor in all that had gone on, and how much a prudent spectator, cannot be known, but her key role in safeguarding herself and Kat Ashley—and Parry too though to a lesser extent—ought not to be underestimated. At fifteen years of age Elizabeth had held out for weeks against the relentless, probing examination of a highly skilled interrogator, with no one to advise or support her, knowing that the fate of the woman she loved best in the world might turn on the answers she gave.

  And what of Seymour? Did she worry over him as well or did she assume, wrongly, that either his brother or the king would spare him? If so she found she was mistaken about the middle of February, when she heard that his properties were being dispersed. The news made her noticeably disconsolate, and now for the first time since the crisis began she allowed herself to show some feeling for the admiral. When he was criticized in her hearing she was "ready to make answer therein," and came quickly to his defense.

  But her loyalty could not aid him now. Toward the end of February a bill of attainder was brought against him, among its accusations the charge that he had sought the king's sister in marriage contrary to law. He waited in his Tower cell, expecting a delegation from the council to appear to hear

  his defense. But none came; instead there was only his jailer, who listened patiently and somewhat sympathetically to Seymour's grandiloquent affirmations of innocence. 'There was never poor knave truer to his prince than I am," he swore, "and to all his succession, both my lady Mary and my lady Elizabeth." All that was said against him was falsehood and fabrication, and none of it could be proved. "If there be any man in all England to accuse me," he insisted righteously, "that I should be a false knave to the king or his succession, or to the realm, I will wish no life. For if I had, I thought the stones will rise against me." 9

  Meanwhile Elizabeth's punishment had been meted out—minor punishment, in view of the danger she had stood in until recently, but exceedingly irksome to her even so. A letter arrived from the council, announcing that because Mistress Ashley had "shown herself far unmeet" to supervise the "good education and government" of a king's sister, a new mistress had been appointed: Lady Tyrwhitt.

  Elizabeth rebelled. "She had not so demeaned herself, that the council should now need to put any more mistresses unto her," she said. Kat Ashley was her mistress; no other was necessary.

  Having accepted Mistress Ashley, Lady Tyrwhitt responded, Elizabeth "need not be ashamed to have any honest woman" to be in charge of her.

  But Elizabeth would hear none of it. She grew morose, then hopeless. She wept all that night and was sullen and moody the next day. Two things weighed on her, Tyrwhitt judged. First, she clearly hoped that, when the crisis was fully past, she could have Kat back as before. ("The love yet she beareth her is to be wondered at," he wrote in an aside.) And second, she was distressed for what was left of her good name, telling Tyrwhitt that "the world would note her to be a great offender, having so hastily a governor appointed her." (And Tyrwhitt added that in his opinion she needed two governors rather than one.) 10

  And there was another cause of anxiety. Lady Tyrwhitt, Catherine Parr's stepdaughter and confidante, had watched the late queen's happiness slip away as her husband became preoccupied with Elizabeth. She had seen Catherine through her endless, painful pregnancy, then through her final agonizing hours when, near delirium, she had made Seymour's cruelties public. She was not likely to prove a sympathetic or well-disposed mistress for Elizabeth, and the prospect of spending her days under Lady Tyrwhitt's contemptuous eye must have been exceedingly unpleasant.

  Soon after Lady Tyrwhitt's appointment Elizabeth wrote to the Protector again, explaining succinctly why she found the prospect humiliating ("because that I thought the people will say that I deserved, through my lewd demeanor, to have such a one") and replying, in remarkably argumen-

  tative language, to the Protector's charge that she put too much faith in her own judgment.

  "And as concerning that point that you write, that I seem to stand in mine own wit, it being so well assured of mine own self, I did assure me of myself no more than I trust the truth shall try," she insisted. It was not that she wanted to "rule herself," merely that she was following the Protector's own expressed desire that she "be plain with him in all things."

  Her letter was full of counterargument and reasoned, orderly self-justification. And bold requests—for a proclamation to be issued to "refrain the tongues" of the talebearers who were spreading lies about her, and for the council to "be good" to Kat Ashley, for Elizabeth's sake. 11 In time both requests were granted. A proclamation went out denouncing the rumors concerning Elizabeth as slanderous and the rumormongers as culpable, and finally, in a gesture of vindication, both Ashley and Parry were released and r
eturned to her service.

  With the eclipse of Seymour's electrifying yet baleful influence the episode was finally closed. On March 19, 1549, he went to his execution, unreconciled to death and disconcerted that his final scheme—treasonous letters to Elizabeth and Mary written from prison—had been discovered and foiled. He died "very dangerously, irksomely, horribly," Latimer told his congregation. "Whether he be saved or no, I leave it to God, but surely he was a wicked man, and the realm is well rid of him."

  Nine months later, in mid-December, Elizabeth was received at her brother's court "with great pomp and triumph." Her arrival was widely heralded, and crowds gathered to watch her as she passed into the court precincts, a regal yet ladylike figure, proud without being aloof, whose understated dress made her translucent white skin and flowing red hair doubly striking.

  Her appearance, and the evident regard in which she was held by the king and his courtiers, did much to confound the recent murmurings against her. Was this unadorned, maidenly young lady with the sweet face and pure, milk-white hands the one accused of being Thomas Seymour's wanton mistress and the mother of his child? She was too chaste, too obviously virginal for that, and though she looked out over the crowd with the attractive, level-eyed gaze of a princess she had the air of the gospel about her as well.

  In fact Elizabeth was cultivating an image of innocent, sober piety both to counteract the recent slanders against her and to align herself unmistakably with the new, zealously Protestant tone of Edward VI's court. She was cultivating a reputation for devout simplicity, for shunning adornment in order to rise above the transitory vanities that ensnared young women. At

  a court where women curled and double-curled their hair, or plaited it in elaborate coils, Elizabeth wore hers long, thick and free, as her mother had years earlier. In place of the fretted golden cauls and bejeweled "biliments" that framed the face she wore only the plainest of headdresses, or none at all. Her simply cut gowns, often of black velvet, put the rainbow silks of the other ladies to shame, while her natural coloring seemed more attractive than the over-ruddy painted lips and leaden-white complexions produced by cosmetics.

  It was said that Elizabeth's aversion to extravagance in dress had made her scorn her inheritance. "The king her father/' wrote the churchman John Aylmer, Jane Grey's tutor, "left her rich clothes and jewels, and I know it to be true that in seven years after his death she never, in all that time, looked upon that rich attire and precious jewels but once, and that against her will; and that there never came gold or stone upon her head." 12 This austerity had an influence on the more godly of the young women at court, though others continued to be "dressed and painted like peacocks." Jane Grey, Aylmer wrote, belonged to the former group, rejecting color and glitter for the simplicity of "my lady Elizabeth, which followeth God's word."

  For as long as she stayed at court Elizabeth continued to be feted and honored, and was said to be continually with the king. "It seems," the imperial ambassador wrote, "that they have a higher opinion of her for conforming with the others and observing the new [religious] decrees, than of the lady Mary, who remains constant in the Catholic faith, and stays at her house twenty-eight miles from here without being either summoned or visited by the council." 13 In fact, Mary too had been invited to court for Christmas, but had refused, knowing that Edward would have insisted that she attend Protestant sermons and forgo the mass. "I would not find myself in such a place for anything in the world," she said flatly, and excused herself on account of indisposition. 14

  Mary, who like Elizabeth was identifying herself more and more staunchly in confessional terms, saw the situation through a biblical lens. "He hath hardened the hearts of the councilors as he did Pharaoh's," she commented dourly, and fortified herself for the religious struggle she foresaw by increasing to three or four the number of masses she heard each day in contravention of official Protestantism.

  The atmosphere of renewed religious dedication was only one sign of a more fundamental shift in political power. In recent months the protectorate—and, for the moment, the Protector—had been swept away, and Dudley had emerged as actual, though untitled, ruler of the council and the king.

  The challenges to rulership Edward Seymour had faced as Protector were unparalleled in scope. In the countryside, a variety of forces had converged to produce widespread poverty and the perception of catastrophe. Common fields and parklands used by the peasants for centuries had been fenced off, or "enclosed," by hard-pressed landowners who could no longer live on their rents and were forced to turn to sheep-raising. At the same time, the vast expanses of land once owned by the monasteries were being turned over to noblemen determined to make profitable use of the spoils of the church, no matter what dislocations resulted.

  By the 1540s the familiar landscape of agrarian England had been permanently altered, and villages which had once housed a hundred laborers and their children now held ten or fewer. Many were entirely deserted, their roofless huts in ruins and their gardens overgrown, their fields overrun by the hated sheep. To the thousands displaced by these changes the Protector's attempt to halt enclosures, while welcome, came too late and brought little real relief. Nightmare inflation put even the coarsest bread beyond their means, while the few coins that came to them were made almost worthless by Seymour's ruinous decision to continue Henry VIII's policy of debasement.

  To this economic ferment was added religious instability on an unprecedented scale. The unsettling of the traditional faith by King Henry in the 1530s, and the subsequent alterations in doctrine—the most recent of these the introduction in 1549 of the Book of Common Prayer, a rendering into English of the missal and ritual of the Catholic breviary—brought relatively moderate doctrinal change. But they ushered in a climate of radical theological speculation and rampant hostility to the old faith that took public and violent form. Edward Seymour, who tended toward the more radical of the reformed doctrines, repealed Henry VIII's doctrinal legislation, inviting noisy controversy over the nature and meaning of the sacraments, and reformers from the continent came to England in large numbers in expectation that the realm's official faith would soon move further to the left. Radical preachers sprang up to harangue excited audiences, and ballads, pamphlets and printed argument in every form poured forth from the London booksellers.

  "Lent is buried in rhyme," Bishop Gardiner complained, and mockery soon gave way to anger, then destruction. In a fury of anticlericalism every sort of ecclesiastical fixture was thrown down—statues smashed and broken, chalices and pyxes melted down, carved crucifixes burned. Paintings and tapestries were slashed, and the vestments, liturgical books and illuminated manuscripts of the clergy were seized and torn to shreds. Churches were scenes of devastation, spiritual battlefields where in their

  zeal to purge idolatry the reformers wrecked much fragile, irreplaceable medieval art.

  And with violence in the name of faith came the nameless lawlessness of crime. The savage restraints against disorder which had held the country dwellers in check under Henry VIII were relaxed by the Protector for the sake of humanitarian rule; the result was enthusiastic lawbreaking. Every district suffered, but the northern borderlands were especially hard hit. "For want of justice/' a royal official wrote from Berwick, "robberies [are] being committed without restitution, murder without punishment, open lechery without shame." 'The country is in such murmur and disobedience," he concluded, "that it is exceeding needful to be reformed." 15

  Then in the summer of 1549 nearly half of England broke into open revolt. In the west, there was armed resistance to the new prayer book and demands for a return to the mass and for restoration of the old images and symbols. Devon and Cornwall were out of control, and rioting in Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire and elsewhere in the south threatened to kindle into a general rising against the crown. There was rebellion in Yorkshire, and scattered turmoil in other areas as well, but the most serious unrest was in East Anglia, where rebels by the thousands broke down the hedges and
fences that enclosed the common lands and gathered in a huge encampment on Mousehold Heath two miles from Norwich.

  At this dangerous juncture the underlying weakness of the Protector and his government had become clear. The county levies entrusted with the task of restoring order were too few in number to suppress such widespread disorder; paradoxically it was the foreign mercenaries Edward Seymour had assembled in England to fight the Scots that prevented massive, unified revolt. The Protector himself failed to take the initiative, and left it to the military men on the council to direct the resistance. With a core of tough, experienced Italian mercenaries Lord Russell put down the western rising while Dudley, his men backed by fearsome German landsknechts, crushed the rebels on Mousehold Heath and left more than three thousand dead. At the height of the revolt a troop of German cavalry had to be brought to court to guard the king—and so distrustful were they of the solvency of the regime that they demanded to be paid in advance. 16

  In the aftermath of the rebellions the men who had led the armies inherited political leadership as well. Seymour had proved himself incapable. In October he was committed to the Tower, and when Elizabeth made her conspicuous return to court the following December Dudley, the "faithful and intrepid soldier of Christ," was firmly in command of the council and the protectorate was no more.

  From now on there would be a new alignment of forces. Dudley, not

  Seymour, would rule through the twelve-year-old king, and Elizabeth would come more and more into prominence as the king's favored sister. With the tensions and harrowing strain of the past two years behind her, Elizabeth was once more finding her equilibrium, fitting herself for the role she was expected to play. "Sweet sister temperance," Edward called her, and from now on she would incarnate staid moderation in all things, her life a model of poise and judicious self-control. Yet the lessons of the recent past would inform her every move on the chessboard of court politics, and beneath her sedate exterior would roil the cunning wit of a burgeoning politician.