Yet if Pole was avoiding Elizabeth, so were the dozens of councilors, royal officials and other courtiers who congregated nervously in anterooms to exchange news and to speculate about the queen's condition. They had become accustomed to the presence of the Spaniards—though resentment continued to flare, and swordfights were not infrequent—and to having a Spanish consort for their queen. Yet they were still wary of foreign tyranny, and even as they fawned on Philip they gathered in fevered knots to hatch plots against him; the boldest among them had from time to time cherished hopes of marrying their sons to Elizabeth, in case chance should after all bring her to the throne. Mary's pregnancy had disconcerted these hopes, and though their plotting continued, the courtiers, taking their cue from Pole and from the notable absence of ceremony and attention paid to Elizabeth, kept their distance from the princess.
Their wariness was well advised. A new and oppressive religious climate was abroad in England in the spring of 1555, and marital and political alignments with Protestants (or crypto-Protestants, as Mary believed Elizabeth to be) came under added scrutiny. For if some welcomed the rigorous and brutal suppression of Protestant heresy, as they did the imminent arrival of a Catholic heir to the throne, as the consummate vindication of Mary's reign and of her faith, others felt chill anger as the dark pall of religious violence descended.
In February the first burnings of Protestants had begun. Men and women who disputed the teachings of the Roman church and denied the authority of the pope were brought from prison, tied to stakes, and burned alive as crowds of onlookers watched in horrified sorrow. Most of the
victims were young—a few far too young to fully comprehend the opinions they were accused of holding—yet many of them died, so their coreligionists said, with a transcendent dignity that made the tragedy of their deaths sublime. Nothing, not the slow agony of death by fire, not the spectacle of blackened limbs and charred faces, not even fearsome torture could tarnish the sanctity of these martyrs. And the longer the burnings continued, the more staunch English Protestantism became.
And it was no secret that the Protestants looked to Elizabeth as their ultimate deliverer. Pamphlets proclaimed her the rightful queen, and denounced Mary for her persecution of the true church. Ballads, scurrilous libels, broadsheets and political writings of every kind set forth the usurped power of the queen and her husband and prayed earnestly for Elizabeth's delivery from her captivity at Woodstock. Nightly meetings were held at which, after the performance of ''heretic rites," believers would "pray for Elizabeth's freedom and prosperity." 1 The believers were seized and imprisoned, yet the meetings continued, and as the queen's pregnancy approached its term the Protestant campaign increased in intensity and shrillness.
The streets of the capital were littered with printed indictments of Mary —portrayed as a monstrous matron suckling a brood of parasitical Spaniards —and optimistic poems anticipating Elizabeth's accession.
False rumors were given out: that Mary was dead, that King Edward was still alive and had been seen in Kent or Surrey, that the queen was not pregnant after all, or that her ill-omened pregnancy had come to a grotesque end, with the delivery of a lifeless "mole or lump of flesh" too gruesome to be described.
The propaganda (and the burnings) bred seditious talk, and not talk alone but violence, for there were assassins and arsonists among the Protestants as well as martyrs. As always, Elizabeth was implicated, for one of the most widespread of the libelous pamphlets was attributed to her Italian master Castiglione, a resolute opponent of Queen Mary who had been imprisoned at least once before for a similar crime. A thousand copies of this pamphlet had been gathered in the city and brought to the lord mayor, and suspicion pointed to the Italian, and through him to Elizabeth's circle of servants and confidants, and finally to the princess herself.
All this and much more weighed on Elizabeth as, within a day or so of her arrival at court, word spread that her sister had been delivered. Almost before the news reached the courtiers it was known in London, where cheering crowds built bonfires in celebration and the bells of the city rang an enthusiastic welcome to the prince. In their eagerness to believe the report even the royal officials were quick to confirm it—though none of
them had actually seen the queen or her child—and by midday the clergy of London had begun to process through the streets singing hymns of thanksgiving, while ships embarking for Flanders carried the good news to the imperial court. 2
It was all a mistake, of course—not a hoax, exactly, or if so not a hoax emanating from the queen's chamber or her council board. The false rumor was corrected, and the truth spread slowly through the court and capital, leaving the celebrants long-faced and irritable. The waiting began again.
For Elizabeth the stress, the unsettling excitement of the false rumor was compounded in the following week by other pressures. She was the subject of much discussion among the queen's councilors, who urged her, as much (they said) for her own safety as for the good order of the realm, to leave immediately for Flanders. Her continued presence in England could only give rise to further trouble, for once Mary's child was born the Protestants, robbed of their hope for Elizabeth's accession, would surely rebel.
Prince Philip, though, thought otherwise, wanting Elizabeth near at hand in case Mary died in childbirth or in case the baby was born dead or defective. Whatever happened, she was more useful to him nearby, with the hundreds of guardsmen at the palace and in the vicinity as a cordon between her and the rebels.
Philip's view prevailed, though what might happen after Mary's delivery was much in doubt. Glad as she was to be released from captivity (as was her captor Bedingfield, who called his discharge "the joyfullest news he had ever heard"), Elizabeth must have been fearful of the reasoning behind it. Had she been brought to court merely as a means of keeping her out of rebel hands until the Catholic succession was assured, only to be returned to straiter imprisonment, perhaps in the Tower, once the queen and her child were out of danger? Should she flee to the continent (as many of her supporters were demanding of her), joining the widening stream of Protestant exiles leaving England and trusting that, once she was out of sight, Mary might grant her a tacit pardon?
Or was all hope vain, in light of what had gone on at Woodstock in recent months? Since January the dilapidated old hunting lodge had been riddled with conspiracy. Every month a servant of Elizabeth's was arrested for plotting or seized for questioning about "seditious words" or suspicious behavior, and spies, agents of the French and other nefarious personages haunted the vicinity. Elizabeth did her best to maintain an appearance of pious, maidenly innocence as plots swirled about her, attending mass faithfully every day, obtaining the papal indulgences made available to the faithful of England by the pope after the reunion with Rome, and spending long secluded hours in prayer. Yet as Bedingfield reported, her solitary
devotions offered a pretext for secret conferences with her treasurer and purveyor, through whom, he felt certain, she maintained close contact with those who sought to overthrow the queen in her name. 3
Until now, Elizabeth knew, she had enjoyed some measure of immunity by the mere fact that Mary had no other apparent successor. But once a son was born to Mary—or even a daughter, with the hope of sons to come in the future—Elizabeth would lose all protection. She would become expendable. More than that: she would become a dangerous rival to the royal infant, a rival who would have to be eliminated.
The days passed, and the midwives and physicians shook their heads in disbelief. The ninth of May, the latest day they had predicted for the birth, came and went uneventfully, and they hurried to make fresh calculations. Evidently there had been an error. The child, they said now, would be born either on May 23 or at the time of the new moon on June 4 or 5.
Pale and sickly, Mary sat on a cushion on the floor of her chamber for hours at a time, unwilling to see any but her attendant women, dejected by the peculiar course her pregnancy was taking. She had all the usual signs of app
roaching motherhood, yet now her belly was beginning to deflate, and though one of her doctors assured her that this too was normal, and meant that delivery was near, doubt began to nag at her.
Meanwhile Elizabeth lost no time in cultivating her princely brother-in-law, knowing, or guessing, that her best chance of protection against her sister lay with him.
After nearly a year in England Prince Philip of Spain had resigned himself to the drawbacks of his adopted kingdom: to his delicate role as prince consort, to the English nobles and courtiers, who seemed to him by turns churlish and groveling and treacherous, to the coy spinster he had married and somehow managed to impregnate. He bore these indignities —as he did the painful bowel disorders that harassed him nearly every day —with little outward complaint, but there was a melancholy cast to his fine features, and the inordinate delay in his wife's delivery was trying his patience sorely and upsetting his sour stomach.
The pleasing company of his attractive, redhaired sister-in-law was a delightful diversion for Philip as he waited for news of the queen's labor. At twenty-one Elizabeth was nearer his own age of twenty-eight than his careworn, middle-aged wife, and though he took full cognizance of her cleverness and capability for deceit, Philip allowed himself to savor the charm which she, in turn, lavished on him and on his Spanish favorites 4
For even to Philip's dull eyes Elizabeth seemed unique. Mercurial, waiflike in her slightness and in the faint look of alarm that hovered around her eyes, she was at the same time a hoyden, an imperious royal brat of
incorrigible arrogance. She was blunt, unladylike, impatient with the rounded edges of gentility. Yet she was anything but unfeminine; she had a grace and sensuality all her own, focused in the long, fine hands and thin fingers she wafted about conspicuously as she talked.
Her face had too much character, too much alertness to be called beautiful, yet so strong was her fascination that the pliant, unimaginative beauties of the court paled beside her. One imperfection marked Elizabeth's appearance throughout her sister's reign. Her smooth complexion took on a yellowish tinge—a sign of the jaundice which plagued her—and the Venetian ambassador Michiel called her "olive-skinned." 5
But the defect was forgotten as soon as she spoke, for then the full force of her intellect was revealed, dazzling in its virtuosity and startling in its breadth. Unlike Mary, who had channeled her outstanding mental gifts, as she had all her other energies, along personal and confessional lines, Elizabeth had never ceased to cultivate her mind, and the schoolgirl pedant she had been was becoming replaced by a brilliantly learned young woman.
Elizabeth's exceptional attainments as a linguist were beyond the understanding of the thick-tongued Philip, whose only fluent language was his native Spanish and whose few lumpish words of English drew wan smiles from the English courtiers. But he could see as clearly as anyone how easily and how well she spoke Italian, and how "from vanity" she invariably addressed Italians only in their own tongue. And he had it on good authority that Elizabeth's Greek, which she studied assiduously, was on a much more advanced level than the queen's.
But what most struck Philip, and indeed everyone who saw the princess, was her resemblance to her father Henry VIII. "She prides herself on her father and glories in him," Michiel wrote of Elizabeth in 1557, and she loved to hear people say (as they often did) that she was much more like him than Mary was. 6 Likenesses of the old king were everywhere—in portraits, in images painted on jewelry or furniture, or woven into hangings, in the nostalgic recollections of the courtiers who had served him. Hampton Court was his monument; so were Greenwich and Richmond and, in its overturreted way, so was Henry's last palace of Nonsuch, which Mary avoided. A decade after his death the bloody horrors of his later reign were fading into myth, while the confusions and hobbled leadership of his successors made him seem enviably strong and decisive by comparison.
In associating herself closely with her father Elizabeth was tapping a popular longing. Throughout her childhood the English had loathed Henry VIII; now they yearned for him, or for the mellowed image of him they carried, and when they looked at his strong-willed tall daughter they thought they saw a way to bring him back.
Elizabeth's proud association with her father served another purpose. It gave her a firm identity, counteracting once and for all the uncertainties about her parentage that had shadowed her early childhood. A new version of her childhood story arose. King Henry, it was said, always liked Elizabeth, however he might have hated and mistreated her mother. For this reason, and because of her resemblance to him, he had given orders that she be brought up as a king's daughter and not as the daughter of the dishonored traitor Anne Boleyn. In his will he had left her well provided for; had the engorging inflation of Edward's reign not eroded her annuity, she would be well provided for still. 7
Elizabeth had also come to terms, at least on the surface, with what it meant to be her mother's child. She affirmed to whoever would listen that she was no less legitimate than Mary was, and of equal rank in blood. As for the potential stigma left by Anne Boleyn, there was none; Anne, she felt certain, would never have lived with King Henry except as his wife, "with the authority of the church, and the intervention of the primate of England." Anne's conscience had been clear, and in the last analysis nothing else mattered. She had acted in good faith, as the king's true Protestant subject; even if she was deceived about the validity of her marriage (as adherents of the Roman faith were quick to claim), the fact that she had lived and died in the church which had legitimized it left her blameless. And left her daughter Elizabeth, born into that same church, without any taint of bastardy. 8
By mid-June the midwives were sulking. The royal chaplains led solemn processions around the palace grounds each day, as they did in times of plague or drought, begging God to relieve the queen of her burden and to give her kingdom a prince. Councilors and court officials processed along with the clergy, pausing below the windows of Mary's chamber to acknowledge her gracious bows and smiles of thanks. Yet their earnest prayers went unanswered, and to heighten the tension the burnings of Protestants escalated, with eight more men and women executed by fire in the first two weeks of June. The queen, it seemed to some, had decided that her child could not be born until every Protestant in prison was burned alive. 9
For Elizabeth each day of delay was another opportunity to cultivate the Spaniards, whose growing uncertainty about Mary's condition made Elizabeth herself seem all the more important. A new strategy was in the air. Should Mary die, the Venetian ambassador wrote, Philip might "not improbably" marry Elizabeth, and she might just possibly accept him. 10
The thought must have been present in both their minds as they met and exchanged the curtsies, bows and kisses that courtly ritual demanded. They would have made an odd pair, he short and compact, with the natural
languor of a sometime invalid, she tall and slender and uncommonly vigorous. Both were more than capable of calculating the political usefulness of the match; as to the chemistry between them, we have only Elizabeth's boast in later years that during his stay in England Philip had been in love with her.
The thought that her husband might marry Anne Boleyn's daughter must have darkened Mary's spirits as her doubts about her fruitfulness continued to grow. She sat on her cushion, her knees pulled up to her chin, squeezing her deflated abdomen. Her chief consolation was her worn prayer book, with its prayer for the safe delivery of a woman with child; the page was stained with the mark of her tears.
Philip had been a courteous, dutiful husband to her, a grave and gentlemanly presence at her side at daily mass and vespers, an amiable, if not exactly jovial, companion at banquets and jousts, a correct and occasionally tender spouse. But if she was unable to present him with a son, duty would oblige him to subordinate his marriage to interests of state. Elizabeth would become the all-important figure at court. Either Philip would have to find a suitable husband for her, or, if he should become a widower, marry her himself.
July was cold and rainy, and the ladies who had come to Hampton Court cheerful and hopeful in April were bored and housebound, and wished they could go home. Like the diplomats and councilors and midwives—and the people at large—they had given up all speculation about the birth and simply waited for a miracle.
The French ambassador Noailles found the situation ludicrous. One of his spies claimed to have wormed the truth out of two of Mary's female intimates: the queen, they admitted, was deceived about her condition, and the other midwives were too fearful to tell her that she was not pregnant after all. 11 Elizabeth had been from time to time in communication with the French, and may well have heard this story. If it was true, it added one more fold to the involuted mystery.
For three months the court had been suspended in time, while the queen waited for a miracle that never came. By the end of July the overcrowded halls and chambers of the palace stank of unclean floors and rotted expectations. Philip and his retinue of intimates were making ready to embark for Flanders, and the business of government, which had never entirely ceased, despite Mary's seclusion, now required her constant attention.
The announcement came without fanfare: the court was moving to Oatlands, so that Hampton Court could be cleansed. This gave tacit permission for the courtiers to depart for their homes in the country, for there was no room for them at Oatlands. Though the myth of Mary's pregnancy
was never officially dispelled, the message was clear, adding the sting of humiliation to the queen's deep and inconsolable sorrow. Somehow she had lost the child she had mistakenly hoped for, and soon she would lose the company of her beloved husband. The one person she could not seem to lose was her despised sister, who stood arrogantly by, waiting for her opportunity to supplant Mary. Only a few weeks earlier a group of Elizabeth's partisans had been discovered in London, making the most of popular bewilderment about the queen, and no doubt helping to spread the rumor that she was dead. The plotters had been threatened and dispersed, yet in Mary's more fearful moments it seemed as if each nest of conspirators she uncovered somehow brought Elizabeth one step closer to her throne.
The first Elizabeth Page 18
