But other voices demurred. One was that of Paget, seasoned councilor of Henry VIII and Edward, who opposed the over-hasty elimination of the heir to the throne and argued that, given Elizabeth's popularity, her execution might rather guarantee rebellion than forestall it. Another was the booming, good-natured voice of Lord William Howard, Elizabeth's great-uncle, who had won Mary's undying gratitude (and a barony) for his heroism during the rebellion. A mettlesome soldier and diplomat and currently admiral of the fleet, Howard's protests against harsh treatment of Elizabeth could hardly be ignored—especially not now when every royal ship was needed to safeguard the wedding fleet that would soon be on its way from Spain.
So, as Elizabeth waited at the palace, the debate over her life continued, while the chancellor did his best to extract incriminating confessions from his prisoners and his agents scoured their goods and estates for some scrap of written evidence of Elizabeth's guilt. Gardiner was an excellent lawyer; by an irony of history he had been Henry VIII's principal advocate at the papal court in the days when the king was attempting to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. But three weeks of ransacking and interrogation and torture brought to light no proof of Elizabeth's complicity, and even Gardiner's expertise was inadequate to create evidence where there was none. The circumstance that had made Elizabeth look worst—the discovery of her letter in the diplomatic pouch of the French ambassador—the chancellor could not afford to emphasize,
for reasons of his own: the ambassadorial dispatch had described a compromising meeting between Gardiner himself and Edward Courtenay.
Winnowed to its essence, the case against Elizabeth was slight. Some of her familiars were conspirators, but all denied her involvement in their conspiracy. To the messages she received from the ringleaders—messages she could hardly have prevented from reaching her—she had given courteous but utterly undirected replies. Even under torture Wyatt himself, who might have expected he had everything to gain by telling the royal examiners what they wanted to hear, refused in the end to implicate Elizabeth. (Contrary evidence given at a later Star Chamber hearing has never been substantiated.) "I assure you," Wyatt said to the crowd when he had mounted the scaffold on the day of his execution, "that neither they [Elizabeth and Courtenay] nor any other now in yonder hold of durance [the Tower] was privy to my rising." A shouted attempt by one of Mary's advisers to twist Wyatt's last words angered the crowd. The traitor had told them what they needed to hear, that the queen's sister, their favorite, had preserved her honor intact.
Long afterward Elizabeth wrote her own epilogue to this dangerous passage. She admitted having "tasted of the practices against her sister," having "had great occasion to hearken" to the designs of the conspirators, whose full "knavery" had never been revealed. Evidently there was more to Wyatt's rising than the royal judges ever discovered, and Elizabeth carried it on her conscience throughout her ordeal, knowing the full gravity of her burden. "I stood in danger of my life," she said simply, "my sister was so incensed against me." 1
By mid-March a decision had become critical. Mary was due to leave for Windsor for the Easter holidays, then to go on to Oxford where her second Parliament would be held. Weeks of debate had not led to a consensus among the council; on the contrary, alignments were shifting and new factions forming in the aftermath of the rebellion, leaving even that astute judge of political maneuver, Renard, baffled as to the motives and goals of the courtiers. Once the queen left the capital there could be no question of leaving Elizabeth in informal custody in one of the royal palaces; the danger of a rising was too great. Once Mary left, London would be vulnerable, for the royal army consisted chiefly of the bands of fifty or a hundred soldiers that each of the councilors had under his command, and the council would follow the queen. Mary had promised to "make strict order and provision for the safety of the Tower" before she left, but what was she to do with her sister?
Renard suspected Gardiner of ambivalence, if not duplicity, in his handling of Elizabeth and Courtenay. Certainly Courtenay was "most gravely
implicated and guilty": he had been an active conspirator, he had intrigued with the French king, and had sent treasonable messages by means of a "cipher cut upon a guitar." Yet the men Gardiner had chosen to be his keepers in the Tower were the earl's known partisans Southwell and Bourne, with the result that he was given special privileges and even a large and relatively comfortable room—without the council's approval. 2 And Gardiner seemed to have grown cool about Elizabeth's punishment, leading Renard to suspect that the chancellor now hoped she would not have to be put to death after all.
Yet what reason could Gardiner have—other than to foment unrest— for sparing the princess? The restive Londoners were eager for an opportunity to show their preference for her. Any clever rabble-rouser could draw them into the streets by the thousands. Early one morning, while the council deliberated and Renard knitted his brows over the unpredictable English, a tumult arose in the city. Word spread among the people that in one of the great houses a man and a woman were in direct communication with an angel.
The angel spoke through a wall, and could not be seen, but its oracular utterances proclaimed it divinely inspired—and Protestant.
"God save Queen Mary!" the man and woman cried out to the wall. No answer came.
"God save the Lady Elizabeth!"
"So be it," was the solemn reply.
"What is the mass?" the two interrogators went on.
"Idolatry," said the angel—to the cheers of the crowd gathering outside the house.
By mid-morning the phenomenon had drawn thousands of people, and Admiral Howard, together with Paget and the captain of the guard, had to bring a troop of horsemen to keep the crowd from becoming a mob. The man and woman who had claimed to communicate with the angel were seized, and with that the voice too silenced itself. It seemed clear that the instigators had hoped to agitate on behalf of Elizabeth and Courtenay, and to "excite the people against the queen, raise the heretics, and trouble the kingdom." Elizabeth knew of it, saw its obvious purpose, and hoped, though hope now dimmed, that Mary would not be irrevocably turned against her. 3
The time for Mary's departure had come. Elizabeth must, at least, be taken into private custody by one of the nobles. To a man the councilors shrank from the task. She was too powerful a magnet for treason. No one could guard her and come away unscathed. After impassioned discussion the choices narrowed to one: Elizabeth must be imprisoned in the Tower. 4
There was no formal charge of treason—indeed, there was no formal charge of any kind—but when the news was brought to her it must have been nearly as fearsome as news of a sentence of death.
Gardiner himself came to make the announcement, flanked by nineteen others of the council. He began by laying before her what circumstantial proof there was that she had been entangled in the plot, while she, remarkably resilient after three weeks of stress and illness, asserted her complete and unclouded innocence of every accusation he made. Then, "after long debating of matters," he informed her that it was the queen's will and pleasure that she should be taken to the Tower. 5
She protested, even as the waves of shock passed over her, making her heart beat violently and her chest constrict. She was a true woman, she said. She trusted her highness would not conceive her to be otherwise, and given her high station and her honor, she did not deserve to have her fidelity rewarded so ungraciously.
There was no remedy, she was told. The queen was adamant; she should be taken to the Tower. The delegation left, "with their caps hanging over their eyes."
The machinery of degradation in rank went immediately into effect. Four of the councilors herded Elizabeth's servants into one room and sealed them there under guard. Six of them were allowed to continue to serve her —along with six new attendants hand-picked by the queen—but the rest were forbidden to go near their mistress, and were soon dismissed.
Guards poured in from all parts of the palace, t
aking up their stations in her apartments, watching her servants, installing themselves throughout the gardens and grounds. That night, as Elizabeth waited for the final summons to imprisonment, an enormous fire blazed in the great hall, warming the soldiers who had gathered there, while outside the windows a hundred guardsmen in white coats—tall, burly northerners—stood in their long rows to keep watch over the princess until she could be removed to her imprisonment the next day.
In the morning two councilors, Winchester and Sussex, came to escort her to her dread destination. In the long night hours she had had time to think. Had this been Mary's doing, or had her sister merely given in to the soft-spoken, dangerous ambassador of Charles V or, more likely, to the overbearing chancellor? She needed to see Mary, to confront her, tenderhearted as she knew her to be, with the enormity of what was being done in her name.
When the two councilors announced that the barge was waiting below and the tide ripe, Elizabeth surprised them by asking to be taken to the queen instead. Mary could not possibly know of this cruel and unjust order;
it had to be Gardiner's doing, motivated by spite and anger. The request was refused. Well then, Elizabeth said, if she could not see her sister, she must write to her. Winchester denied this request too, but Sussex, who through his Howard mother was Elizabeth's uncle, was lenient. Pen and paper were sent for, and the slow procedure of drafting a readable letter in a courtly hand got under way.
Historians have always pointed to the cleverness Elizabeth showed in composing this letter so slowly that, by the time she ended it, the river had fallen to its ebb and the bargemen waiting to convey her downriver to the Tower would not hazard the rushing waters under the bridge until it rose again with the next tide. But delaying, if possible, her delivery to the Tower was at most a minor goal; a few hours' postponement meant little in view of the peril she faced.
To emphasize the small triumph of the delay is to miss the larger purpose of the letter, which was to persuade Mary to see her, and to spare her life. All the carefully honed articulacy of her education was tested now as Elizabeth prepared her pen and, with the two councilors looking on, composed her first sentences.
"If anyone ever did try this old saying," she began, " 'that a king's word was more than another man's oath,' I most humbly beseech your majesty to verify it to me, and to remember your last promise and my last demand —that I be not condemned without answer and due proof." She meant to call to Mary's mind their last meeting, when on leaving for Ashridge Elizabeth had made Mary promise never to believe anything said against her sister without first giving her a chance to defend herself in person. It was a strong appeal to Mary's fair-mindedness, and to her conscience. "Without cause proved, I am by your council from you commanded to go unto the Tower—a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject —which though I know I deserve it not, yet in the face of all this realm appears that it is proved."
The injustice of her situation stung the more sharply in view of her complete innocence, which she asserted in the most heated terms. "I never practiced, counselled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person any way or dangerous to the state by my means," she insisted. "I pray God I may die the shamefullest death that ever any died before if I may mean any such thing." God would judge her veracity, she wrote—and Man* could as well, by letting her answer in person the accusations brought against her—"and that before I go to the Tower, if it be possible."
"If it be possible"—there was wistfulness mixed with her assertive tone, and midway through the letter it occurred to Elizabeth that her sister might
take offense at her forthright, argumentative language. "Let your conscience move your highness to pardon this my boldness," she went on, "which innocency procures me to do." Mary was too kind, she knew, to allow her to be "cast away" undeserving—yet how could she judge her deserts if she heard only one side of the story? A recent parallel came to mind—a particularly painful one.
"I have heard of many in my time cast away for want of coming to the presence of their prince; and in late days I heard my lord of Somerset [Edward Seymour] say, that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him he had never suffered. But the persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the admiral lived, and that made him give his consent to his death." The similarities were indeed striking: brother turned against brother, as sister was turned against sister now, the nagging councilors, exaggerating danger, inventing guilt, working relentlessly on the better nature and compassion of the ruler.
And yet Thomas Seymour had gone to his death, and Elizabeth might soon go to hers.
There was little left to say. Deflated, perhaps, by the grim recollection of Thomas Seymour's fate she fell back, for her final paragraph, on phrases she had learned in early childhood, formulas of submission meant to appease a parent's displeasure.
"Therefore, once again, kneeling with humbleness of heart, because I am not suffered to bow the knees of my body, I humbly crave to speak with your highness, which I would not be so bold as to desire if I knew not myself most clear, as I know myself most true."
Almost as an afterthought—and realizing, even as she wrote, that there was only a slight chance that Mary would agree to see her—Elizabeth added a brief response to the two most serious allegations of her guilt. Wyatt, she said, might have written her a letter, but she never got it; as to the letter found in the French ambassador's bag (which Gardiner had decided to suppress, claiming it had been mislaid), she had no idea how it got there, having never sent the ambassador any word or message of any kind.
The letter covered all of one sheet and part of a second. Rather than leave a blank space, she filled the blank area with diagonal lines. There must be no malicious tampering with this document, no attempt to turn an exoneration into a confession. She handed it to the councilors, who left to deliver it and, by failing to return soon, confirmed her hope that she had, after all, managed to outlast the tide.
Once the letter reached Mary there was an explosion of royal anger. How could the spineless councilors have let Elizabeth manipulate them so clev-
erly! Furious that her authority had been thwarted—and furious too, no doubt, that the distasteful order committing her sister to the Tower had to be given once again—Mary chastised Winchester and Sussex like wayward children. They would never have dared to disobey this way if her father were still alive, she declared angrily. She would not tolerate it any more than he had.
The eloquent, carefully worded letter lay unread during this tirade, its persuasions powerless in any case to mellow the queen's temper. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, far from moving Mary to pity her tactic had fed her sister's deep distrust, the unshakable distrust of a literal-minded, gullible and honest woman for a cleverer and far less scrupulous one. Mary had learned something of dissimulation (and a good deal about tides) during her brother's reign, when she had schemed to escape by sea and had suffered all the persecution that went with being the second person in the kingdom. In those days she herself had learned such trickery as Elizabeth was relying on now, and had reacted with sarcasm and assertive hauteur when confronted.
It was all familiar—and sordid. There would be no reconsideration. The two councilors were ordered to return the next morning and carry out their responsibility. (It was decided not to take advantage of the midnight tide; in the dark, with the riverbanks deserted, it would be too easy for the queen's enemies to kidnap Elizabeth.)
The next day, Palm Sunday, dawned dark and cheerless. There were religious solemnities throughout the city, the people having been ordered to "keep to the church, and carry their palms" to divert attention from the passage of the royal barge. But the palm fronds wilted in the rain, and the queen, who was taking part in one of the processions, had her pleasure spoiled by the weather.
This time Elizabeth went with Winchester and Sussex without argument, entering the barge at the water stairs along with the servants in h
er diminished household. As the boat moved downriver London Bridge loomed ahead, its expanse of shops and houses broken at intervals by poles surmounted by the decaying heads of traitors. Because of the rain the river was more hazardous than usual, the swift current frothing into treacherous rapids between the bridge's nineteen broad piers. The bargemen hesitated, backing water, fearful that their fragile craft would be overturned or sucked under or dashed to pieces as they shot the narrow passage. Finally they attempted it—only to find themselves in peril. 'The stern of the boat struck upon the ground, the fall was so big, and the water was so shallow, that the boat being under the bridge, there stayed again awhile." But they
negotiated their way through at last, earning the bonus that was always awarded "for a barge beneath the bridge."
To Elizabeth, dejected by frustration and by her sister's tacit rejection of her appeal for clemency, drowning might have seemed preferable to the imprisonment she faced. At twenty she was retracing the sorrowful way her mother had taken at twenty-nine, living out the unhappy fate frowning courtiers had predicted for her in childhood. That she had not been able somehow to outwit the enmity of the queen and her council made Elizabeth miserable, and robbed her of the courage to make a dignified entrance into the Tower.
The barge stopped before the water stairs of the fortress, where it had stopped, seventeen years earlier, to let Anne Boleyn disembark at her last moment of freedom. The servants and warders of the Tower were assembled to watch the princess's entrance, and some of them, the Protestant hagiographer John Foxe wrote, wept to see Elizabeth there and knelt and prayed for her preservation. According to Foxe, she deflated the solemnity of the occasion by complaining peevishly about wetting her shoes on the stairs, and then by sitting down in the rain and refusing to go farther, observing snappishly to her custodians that "it was better sitting here, than in a worse place, for God knows, I know not whither you will bring me." 6
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