But her chagrin matched the finality of the proceedings, and could not disguise her dread. Once inside, with the massive iron doors locked and bolted behind her, she was "not a little discomforted and dismayed," as if the clanging metal tolled the hopeless passing of the life she had known.
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung; The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves be green; My youth is gone, and yet I am but young; I saw the world, and yet I was not seen; My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun; And now I live, and now my life is done.
S
oldiers, guardsmen, black-robed officials and prisoners on their way to trial or execution filled the Tower compound in the last week of March, 1554. Armorers at the White Tower attended to the heavy guns and harness that had been brought out for use against Wyatt and might at any moment be needed again. Carts laden with ordnance, shot, or provisions for the soldiers and their horses rumbled over the stones, their clatter competing with the ringing of carpenters' hammers and the shouts of workmen making repairs.
No one could remember when the Tower had held so many prisoners. Hundreds of Wyatt's followers had been arrested, dozens of them executed. Conspirators from Devon and elsewhere who had not marched on London were being hunted down and brought to justice daily, along with witnesses who could speak against them. Many of the chief plotters, among them Crofts and Throckmorton, who had had direct dealings with Elizabeth, and Wyatt himself, still lay in confinement awaiting judgment. The number of prisoners, though, had been reduced by two. Guildford Dudley, Northumberland's son, had been executed shortly after Wyatt's entry into London; his brothers, including Elizabeth's childhood intimate Robert Dudley, still lay at the queen's mercy. And Guildford's wife Jane Grey, a proven danger to Queen Mary, had also been judged too dangerous to live.
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A special scaffold had been erected on Tower Green for Jane's execution, on the site reserved for royalty where Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard had suffered in Elizabeth's childhood. Jane had died piously, pitiably; Mary had not pardoned her. Had the scaffold been taken down, Elizabeth asked anxiously, or was it still in place, ready for the queen's sister?
For the next two months Elizabeth was confined with her ladies in a damp, airless stone chamber in the Bell Tower whose high painted windows let in more cold than light. Once again she had been placed near the river, prey to the mist and fog that the physicians had advised her to avoid, and the fire in the high stone hearth (when she was allowed a fire) could not drive back the chill. Twenty years earlier Henry VIII had confined the aged Bishop Fisher in this room, and the old man had lain here, ill and neglected, until his clothes were in rags and his body a wraithlike waste. In the room immediately below Thomas More had spent his imprisonment, passing his hours praying for his misguided sovereign Henry, who had decided to proclaim himself head of the church so that Anne Boleyn's child and not Katherine of Aragon's should be heir to the throne. Both Fisher and More had died on Tower Hill, yet Katherine of Aragon's daughter had after all become queen; would Anne Boleyn's child now suffer as her mother had?
In those grim quarters, a prisoner among doomed prisoners, certain now that she had failed to move the queen to clemency, Elizabeth must often have thought on death. No doubt she turned the concept in her mind, recalling passages from Cicero or Jerome or the Bible, remembering classical metaphors, exhausting the store of teaching her tutors had instilled in her before she allowed herself to feel at the pit of her stomach the chilling reality of her danger. Then, her imagination engaged, she must have called up images of death: of condemned criminals mounting the scaffold, of last thoughts, last looks, of headless bodies, of eternity. Years later she confided to a French nobleman that the thought of the headsman's axe biting with butcherly strokes into her neck had so alarmed her that she made up her mind to request a French executioner, as her mother had, who would slice through her neck with one clean stroke of a sword.
But of course she might not die. She might simply be allowed to live on in perpetual confinement, for as long as Mary lived and longer, if Mary had a child. This dank room and the stinking garderobe with its three latrines might become home to her, until she learned to chart the months and seasons by the way the shadows fell across the walls and to ponder her passing youth as she waited, day after empty day, for the queen to die or the Spaniards to invade or another rebellion to break out in her name.
These speculations aside, there was little to occupy her thoughts. There were no visitors, and no news came. No books or letters got past her jailers,
and if she asked old John Gage, the chamberlain and her immediate custodian, for any favor or privilege that might break her monotony she got nowhere. Gage, she judged, was "a good gentleman, yet by age and other his earnest business, he hath occasion to forget many things." 1
After several weeks Elizabeth received an unexpected boon. She was given permission to walk along the battlements between the Bell Tower, where she was confined, and the Beauchamp Tower. The walkway was three feet wide and some seventy feet long, and offered the most dismal of views: Tower Green. Yet it meant fresher air and sunlight, and exercise. As often as it was permitted, Elizabeth paced the narrow leads in thoughtful silence, preceded and followed by the guards who never left her, taking watchful note of all that went on below her and trying to guess the meaning of what she saw.
There were executions. Wyatt died on April 11, Lord Thomas Grey, Jane Grey's uncle, on April 24. In May William Thomas, a scholar and writer whose works, in particular a history of Italy, Elizabeth had read as a young girl, was beheaded for plotting to assassinate the queen. But many of the other leading conspirators still lived, or so Elizabeth had no reason to doubt, among them her own servants and familiars. One of these, Nicholas Throckmorton, had actually been acquitted. To the astonishment of the queen and her councilors the jurors ("all heretics," Renard said) brought in a verdict of not guilty, and when Throckmorton was brought back to the Tower after his acquittal "the people with great joy raised shouts and threw their caps in the air," cheering not only for Elizabeth's servant but for Elizabeth's cause.
The triumph was not without its aftermath. "Proofs of collusion and ill affection" were discovered against the jurors, who were jailed for six months and heavily fined. 2
But the tide of vengeance was turning. Renard might continue to frighten Mary with warnings of danger to her Spanish fiance and predictions of a new rebellion, stouter than the first—he gave her Thucydides to read, in French, to toughen her attitude toward the rebels—yet during Holy Week she yielded to the entreaties of some council members and pardoned more than a dozen of the gentlemen who had taken part in the rising, and shortly afterward it was noted that Elizabeth's portrait, taken down at the time of her disgrace, had been restored to its place beside the queen's own. 3
Barring new evidence, or a more widespread rebellion, it now seemed certain that Elizabeth would not be put to death, even though Mary had reason to believe, from the most recent reports of her unsparing interrogators, that her sister had actually gathered arms and provisions at a fortified
house "for the purpose of rebelling with the others." 4 There were new proposals for putting Elizabeth out of the way, removing her as a threat to Prince Philip while avoiding continued harsh imprisonment: she should be sent to the court of Charles V's tough, athletic sister Mary, regent of the Netherlands; she should be sent to Pontefract Castle in far-off Yorkshire, scene of the imprisonment and murder of Richard II; she should be married, either abroad, as Renard urged, or in England, to Courtenay, who had been freed from imprisonment in May and taken under guard to a castle in the north, distant from London. 5
In the second month of Elizabeth's captivity Mary's authority collapsed as a vocal minority of her people began unmercifully to mock her and open warfare broke out among her councilors. Angelic voices supporting the Protestants, seditious pamphlets in the streets (one flung into the palace kitchens), loud and violent outcries over the restoration of the mass and c
ontinued mutterings that Elizabeth would be preferable to her sister—all these helped to reduce the queen "to a state of perplexity." Wyatt, despised and reviled when he was brought in chains to the Tower in February, had become a macabre hero since his death. People ran forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood that flowed at his beheading, and afterward, when his head was set up for display with those of his convicted fellow-conspirators, someone snatched it from its pole and spirited it away, in defiance of the queen's command.
At the council table all trace of unity had evaporated. Mary's explicit orders were stiffly carried out; for the rest, all the needful work of government was forgotten amid private quarrels. Paget and his allies were arming themselves, and scheming, so Renard heard, to kidnap their bitter enemy the chancellor. Gardiner, for his part, was trumpeting danger and insisting that Mary send Paget and the others to the Tower, meanwhile (as rumor had it) raising an armed force of his own and turning one of his castles into a fully armed fortress. Day by day soldiers of indeterminate allegiance rode into the capital, took lodgings, and strode up and down in the streets as if waiting for an imminent call to war. They were not the soldiers of the queen; whose they might be, and what havoc they might create, gave Mary much distress. 6
Then in mid-May someone at last was found to take private charge of Elizabeth. He was Sir Henry Bedingfield, governor of the Tower, knight marshal of the army, captain of the queen's guards and a privy councilor as well. Loyal, stolid, completely unimaginative, Bedingfield was a reliable soldier and an old-fashioned Catholic gentleman besides. Mary had done much for him, for in addition to his offices he had been given some of the lands Wyatt had forfeited on his imprisonment. Clearly Bedingfield owed
the queen a favor, yet when Gardiner approached him to ask that he undertake the heavy responsiblity of guarding the heir to the throne he hung back. It took all Gardiner's persuasiveness and glib eloquence— markedly inarticulate himself, Bedingfield was much in awe of those who spoke well—to win him over. But in the end, Bedingfield wrote later, "by words of marvelous effect, comprising both the queen's commandment that I should enter into it, and his earnest request," Gardiner won him over, and on May 19, nearly two months after she entered the Tower, Elizabeth left, escorted by a hundred of her keeper's blue-coated guardsmen. 7
Though exceedingly deferential in manner toward the princess Bedingfield kept a nervous eye on her from the moment they embarked for Windsor, where they were to rest on the first night of their journey. They traveled by water in order to attract as little attention as possible, yet no sooner had they started upriver than a deafening explosion shattered the quiet and sent Londoners running out into the streets to see what was going on. It was the gunners of the Steelyard signaling their support for Elizabeth by the most disruptive means at hand, and it had the result of turning the unobtrusive, unannounced exit of the princess from the Tower into a noisy parade.
To Bedingfield's dismay, the festive atmosphere grew in intensity the farther they got from the capital. Elizabeth rode in an open litter, and as she passed along the country lanes, bordered by flowering hedges and sweet-smelling May roses, crowds gathered to watch her pass by. Villagers harvesting hay in the fields paused in their labor and came eagerly to see the princess. Only the boldest shouted "God save your grace!" in open defiance of Bedingfield and his soldiery, but the ringers in nearly every village pulled a joyous peal of bells and everywhere people came forward with gifts in great abundance: flowers, sweets, cakes and sugary biscuits. At Rycote, where Lord Williams of Thame showed Elizabeth and her party hospitality, there was feasting and celebration more suited to a reigning monarch than to a suspected conspirator on her way to further confinement. Bedingfield glowered disapprovingly, but did not interfere. It was for the queen's councilors to dictate the restrictions on her sister's activity, and they had not foreseen this; he would write to them about it, but nothing more.
At last they reached their destination: the dilapidated medieval palace of Woodstock, a monument of crumbling stone and creaking casements rising from a marshy riverbed.
It was an historic place, a hunting lodge for the Norman kings and the site of a famous romance. Henry II had kept his mistress Rosamund
Clifford at Woodstock, and the ruins of Rosamond's Bower—"many strong and strange walls and windings, and a dainty, clear, square-paved well," as one seventeenth-century visitor described them—were still to be seen in the palace grounds. But Woodstock was as undesirable as it was old. 'The place is unwholesome," Robert Cecil wrote half a century later, "all the house standing upon springs. It is unsavory, for there is no savor but cows and pigs." 8 The unique distinction of the site, a prodigious echo which could boom back two shouted lines of Vergilian poetry (or half a round), was no compensation for the mud and swamp grass and stench. Bedingfield must have blanched slightly at the sight of the old lodge. How would he make the imperious princess comfortable here?
More important, how would he make her safe? If he was her keeper, ensuring her continued captivity, Bedingfield was also Elizabeth's guardian. She was as vulnerable to assassination or other harm as the queen was, and it troubled Bedingfield that in all the house he could find only four heavy locks to fasten to the doors.
The palace itself proved to be so far decayed that it could not be used. Only the gatehouse, built in the reign of Elizabeth's grandfather Henry VII, was fit to house her. Of its three rooms besides the chapel, one was taken by guardsmen, leaving only a decorated gothic council chamber and one other room for Elizabeth and her servants. Here, amid furnishings and tapestries supplied by Queen Mary, under an ornate carved ceiling of Irish oak, painted blue and gilded, like the ceiling of the great banqueting hall at Hampton Court, Elizabeth was to spend an indeterminate—and seemingly interminable—imprisonment. 9
Her day began as the morning light fell on her sister's tapestries and lit the gold stars painted on the ceiling. She rose, was dressed, attended a morning service in the chapel and then sent for either Bedingfield or his deputy Lord Chandos to guard her as she walked in the garden. Her dinner —the main meal of the day—was brought in at mid-morning, and eaten in some state, though when her gentleman usher Cornwallis asked Bedingfield for permission to drape a cloth of estate (symbol of royalty) over her dining table the keeper refused. There had been no word about a cloth of estate from the privy councilors.
During the long, often wet afternoons Elizabeth talked with her attendants, especially Elizabeth Sands, a favorite companion who had been with her in the Tower and now shared her restricted life at Woodstock. Then she read (though very few books passed Bedingfield's suspicious scrutiny), or did embroidery, or retreated into private thoughts. Contemporary tradition records that in her idleness, brooding on the queen's lack of evidence
against her, Elizabeth took a diamond and scratched out a couplet on a windowpane:
Much suspected, by me Nothing proved can be Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner
But though nothing could be, or had been, proved against her as yet she had not been found innocent either, and bore the weight of suspicion. At the very end of the sixteenth century, when the story of Elizabeth's captivity had entered into the popular mythology of her reign, a German visitor to England recorded some Latin lines in sonorous dactylic hexameters— Vergilian meter—which, he was told, Elizabeth had written on a shutter. They bemoaned "wavering fortune," which had snatched all joys from her and left her in wretched bondage. She, though guiltless, had no liberty while others, criminals deserving death, ran free. The last line was a challenge, almost a curse: Father Jove, she prayed, blunt the weapons of my enemies, and let them feel the sting of my lance in return! 10
An English translation of Saint Paul's Epistles that belonged to Elizabeth at Woodstock has been preserved. In it, in a blank space, she wrote a passage that gave a glimpse of her meditative life. "I walk many times into the pleasant fields of the holy Scriptures," she wrote, "where I pluck up the goodlisome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by r
eading, chew them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory, by gathering them together. That so having tasted the sweetness, I may the less perceive the bitterness of this miserable life." 11 On the silken corners of the book mottoes are embroidered in gold thread: "Heaven my Fatherland," "Christ the Goal of Life," "Blessed is He Who, Reading the Riches of Scripture, Turns Those Words into Deeds." On one side a star has been worked in gold, and in a circle surrounding it, the words "Vicit omnia pertinax virtus E. C. [Elisabetha Captiva ]." "Tenacious Virtue Overcomes All. Elizabeth the Captive." 12
At five each afternoon it came to be Elizabeth's custom to summon Bedingfield and walk in the garden or orchard again, he keeping a respectful distance while she strolled, sometimes moodily, sometimes with a preoccupied air, through the grounds. On her return from her walk Elizabeth ate a light meal and, most likely, attended vespers. Then she retired for the night, her women setting aside the underclothes she had worn that day for the laundress. (The princess's underwear was the only thing to enter or leave the gatehouse that was not "viewed and searched" by Bedingfield or one of his brothers, who formed part of the guard. The regulations called for "all linen brought to her grace clean by the laundress to be delivered
to the queen's women. And they to see all the foul linen delivered to the said laundress." 13 )
In the first days of this regimen danger disrupted the entire household. A fire broke out in the ceiling of the chamber immediately below Elizabeth's, and though her grooms rushed to put it out, and no harm was done, Bedingfield became alarmed. Had an arsonist got past his guards? A "worshipful knight of Oxfordshire" who happened to be present thought so, and the keeper took warning.
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