She did not, however, begin to fulfill them right away. She continued to hear daily mass, and her household with her, and commanded "that no one was to dare to molest sacred places nor religious persons, nor to alter the present state of the religion." To all outward appearances Mary's dying wish, that her sister would maintain the Catholic faith in England, was being honored. Nor did her subjects, as might have been expected, vent their anger on the churches or the clergy. For the time being it was enough that the burnings ceased and the mood of repression lifted; the queen would surely act to restore the church of King Henry and King Edward in time.
Besides, for the moment more immediate matters clamored for attention. By an oversight Henry VIIPs act of Parliament barring Elizabeth from the throne had never been repealed, even though his later statute had restored her to the succession. Lest this hinder her now she was advised to obtain legal advice at once. She had to give thought, too, to the epidemic of lawbreaking that had begun in the vicinity of the capital. The thieves and cutpurses and murderers that lurked in London alleyways and in the shadow of Westminster Abbey had become bolder than ever, in anticipation of the general pardon they knew would be issued on coronation day. To forestall the thievery and assault Elizabeth gave formal warning that the pardon would not apply to crimes committed after her accession, and that no outlaw or burglar would be pardoned at all.
Preparing for the ancient, intricate ritual of the coronation absorbed much of Elizabeth's time. A churchman had to be found who would be
willing to preside, and with Cardinal Pole dead (he had survived Mary by only a few hours) and Heath, archbishop of York, wary of the new queen's private beliefs the search was not an easy one. In the end an obscure suffragan of Heath's, Owen Oglethorpe of Carlisle, was agreed on. Then there were the coronation claims to be settled, with the nobles vying for positions of importance during the ceremonies, and the coronation furnishings ordered.
A whole industry sprang up overnight to supply the robes and ornaments and trappings for this most ostentatious of regal occasions: tailors and seamstresses to stitch the costly gowns and embroiderers and haberdashers and feather-makers to trim them, skinners to provide furs and mercers rich velvets and silks. Upholsterers were ordered to cover the queen's new litter in cloth of gold and the coronation chair in the abbey in cloth of silver. Saddlers and bit-makers prepared gorgeous finery for the horses, while cutlers looked after the ceremonial swords and other arms traditionally worn on coronation day. The queen's tailor supervised the outfitting of the entire court, not only the officials and the queen's ladies but the heralds, henchmen, musicians and guardsmen, many hundreds in all, who would attend her as she rode in procession. No one was overlooked, not even the purveyors of food for the palace kitchens or the queen's laundress, who had a new red dress, or the royal fools, who were to be conspicuous in orange velvet with purple tinsel. 3
Everywhere, as she plunged into the maelstrom of administrative and ceremonial detail, Elizabeth encountered the ghost of the dead queen. There were bills from Nonnius, Mary's deathbed physician; Philip had sent him to her from the Low Countries, but had never paid him. There were letters of petition and recommendation to Mary, and gifts from her subjects and others to be acknowledged—including eight handsome falcons sent from Albert, duke of Prussia, which Elizabeth gladly inherited. There were the debts which, during her last days, Man- had begged her sister to pay, and wages to be distributed among her hundreds of servants. Her guardsmen were particularly costly, their ranks swollen to four hundred (Henry VIII had had only fifty) because she so feared for her life. Elizabeth let at least half of them go. 4
One ghoulish incident involving the late queen caused much inconvenience. In Mary's last hours vital documents needed by the peace commissioners negotiating with the French over Calais had been brought to her to sign. She was far too ill to read them, so they lay unattended by the bedside until she died. Now they could not be found anywhere, and the negotiations could proceed only haltingly without them. Mary's chief wait-
ing woman Susan Clarencieux was consulted. The documents had been taken by the embalmers, Mistress Clarencieux announced; the long rolls of parchment had been found useful for wrapping the corpse. 5
The loss was critical, for the peace talks were England's only defense— and a transitory, fragile defense at best—against the looming menace of the French. Fear of the French overrode all else in the first months of the new reign, "the French king bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland," as the clerk of the council put it. 6 Calais, for centuries an English port, now threatened to become the launching point of an invading army. Mary's loss of the town had meant more than a jolt to English sentiments and severe economic disruption to the vital wool trade; with Calais in French hands England lost control of the Narrow Seas, making it easier than before for the French to send arms and men into Scotland.
For Scotland, in recent years, had become a French stronghold. The ruler, Mary Stuart—successor to her father James V and, as a grandniece of Henry VIII, Elizabeth's cousin—had recently left Scotland to marry the heir to the French throne, the dauphin Francis. Her mother, Mary of Lorraine, was regent for her, surrounded by French advisers and supported by French arms. What lay behind this buildup of power to the north was all too clear: Mary Stuart had a vitally strong claim to the English throne and the Catholic French meant to support her militarily against the Protestant Elizabeth, in Catholic eyes a bastard and a heretic.
Thus as the peace talks went on, Elizabeth and her advisers sent couriers northward with urgent orders to fortify the border fortresses, count and evaluate their ordnance and initiate musters of the fighting men—honest musters, not the fraudulent, inflated numberings that captains usually turned in to make their companies look more impressive. And agents were dispatched to Flanders for the munitions and furnishings of war—hackbuts, helmets, corselets, sulfur and saltpeter.
To be sure, England had in Philip an ally to look to—he was King Philip now, king of Spain and ruler of much other territory besides—so that in theory at least the might of Spain and her dominions broadened England's arsenal. Yet the price of Philip's support was his dictatorship, and further costly involvement of English arms in Spanish wars. At worst, England might become the next forum of conflict between Hapsburg and Valois— a circumstance that would surely, and quickly, reduce the house of Tudor to insignificance and ruin. To show just enough gratitude for Philip's brotherly allegiance to keep the French at bay, yet not enough to invite his active interference in English affairs: that was the narrow course the queen
and her advisers must navigate. And everything, including the religious settlement at home, depended on the adroitness of their navigation.
The councilors Elizabeth chose restored the personnel, if not the tone, of her brother's government. Most of them were Protestant—Archbishop Heath, a prominent exception, was before long replaced as lord keeper by Nicholas Bacon—and most of the peers among them were from recently ennobled families. (Arundel, a devout Catholic from an ancient lineage, stood out as unique.)
There were eighteen councilors at first; later the number was reduced to twelve. At their head was William Cecil, Elizabeth's former steward who had long since won her complete trust and reliance. Other councilors were said to be very close to the queen—among them John Mason, whom Feria called "her great confidant," and portly Thomas Parry, since childhood a trusted, if not always trustworthy, intimate—but Cecil alone combined extraordinary intelligence and ability with what Noailles called "a sensitive understanding of his mistress." For four decades he was to serve that mistress, and her kingdom, with an indefatigable competence bordering on the superhuman.
An energetic man in his late thirties, Cecil seemed to take every facet of government as his personal responsibility. As royal secretary he was expected to command detailed knowledge of a wide variety of topics, from foreign and military affairs and secret intelligence to the activities of the chur
ch, royal household and local government. But this was only a beginning. Cecil desired to know, and to a remarkable extent managed to know, everything of consequence that happened to anyone of importance throughout the length and breadth of England.
And he displayed that knowledge in the innumerable papers and letters and memoranda he produced—scores of thousands of documents testifying, in their bulk alone, to his tireless labors. Cecil combined the detailed conscientiousness of a meticulous clerk with the comprehensive grasp of a "prying steward"—as one nineteenth-century historian called him—overseeing the estate of England. Yet he was much more than this. He had impressive personal breadth, humanist learning, and much experience of government gained in the two previous reigns. He had, in addition, a remarkable ability to avoid those clashes of public duty and religious conscience that wrecked so many careers in the sixteenth century.
While remaining true to his Protestant opinions he had managed to make himself indispensable to both Mary and Pole, especially Pole, even though both were fully aware of Cecil's obligations to Elizabeth. A few days before he died the cardinal remembered his Protestant co-worker and
friend and sent him a beautiful silver inkwell as a last token of his affection. But though Cecil thought it his duty to uphold the reigning sovereign, no matter what her faith or policies, he did not for a moment suppress his private opposition to those policies. Throughout the second half of Mary's reign he recorded in his diary the names of those the queen put to death for heresy, and a bitter chronicle it must have been to him.
A portrait of the secretary at the outset of Elizabeth's reign shows a cool, stern dignitary dressed in sober black with only the smallest of decorative ruffs at the neck. Alert, aloof, he is the picture of self-confident officialdom with his high brow, strong chin and discerning eye. Although Cecil had served his apprenticeship among the corrupt and self-advancing councilors of Edward VI, he had none of their rapacity or dishonesty, and his personal life was notably wholesome. From the sturdy, unostentatious house he leased at Wimbledon he could see the spire of old St. Paul's in the City; the surrounding pastures and fields yielded the beef and grain to feed his twenty-five servants and eight family members. But if Cecil was unusually temperate and humane in his private life he was shrewd, devious, even pitiless when it came to public matters, and it was precisely this Janus-like temperament that made the secretary so valuable to his royal mistress.
She needed, after all, a man of compatible personality, for she had no intention of abandoning her authority to her advisers and letting them rule for and through her. She meant to play the commanding role in her government, and to play it with all the refinements of deceit and misrepresentation she had acquired in Mary's reign, when her life depended on her ability to lie convincingly. Elizabeth and Cecil would conjoin in deception, as they would in every other maneuver of governing, and they complemented one another exceedingly well.
From the start Elizabeth overawed those nearest to her, for she seized the reins of power at once, and boldly. She and she alone ruled. She made all decisions, great and small, though she expected her councilors to advise her exhaustively beforehand and blamed them vociferously when any decision proved ill-advised. The council met daily. The queen did not normally attend its sessions, but did keep herself informed of the substance of its debates. Her preferred method of receiving advice, however, was to meet with individual council members in private, one at a time. These penetrating, no doubt grueling meetings allowed her to examine rigorously varying points of view, to sift and weigh information and arguments, and, perhaps most important, to assess the adroitness of each of her advisers and the degree of his commitment to his point of view.
For Elizabeth, like her father Henry VIII, was determined never to allow her councilors to unite against her. Taking advantage of their ambitious
self-seeking and of the personal rivalries that inevitably arose to divide them, she used her exquisite political instincts to play off factions against one another, relying on her ability to gain intimate knowledge of each partisan's character and abilities. Her councilors, a seventeenth-century writer claimed, always "acted more by her own princely rules and judgements, than by their own wills and appetites, which she observed to the last." She took each man's measure, calculated his strengths and weaknesses, and then proceeded to play on these to keep him under control even as she took the utmost benefit from his counsel.
Her tactics baffled everyone, including her principal adviser Cecil. Indeed she was so successful in concealing her own political opinions as they took shape in her mind—while manipulating and intuiting those of others —that modern historians are often at a loss to disentangle her authentic ideas and policies from the false scents and smokescreens and political persiflage with which she surrounded them.
But if Elizabeth's political and intellectual skills served her well, though hardly infallibly, in dealing with her councilors she relied on her volatile, imperious temperament and on her inbred capacity for duplicity and deceit to keep them at bay. She was dangerously unpredictable in her moods. She blustered one minute and beguiled the next. Now coaxing and cajoling, now spitting out ringing oaths and insults, she kept her advisers off balance and perpetually astonished them by the range and mutability of her passions. Beyond this, they came to know that, with Elizabeth, nothing was ever what it seemed. Beneath her surface emotions were layer upon calculating layer of secondary reactions, ploys and schemes. She took pleasure in laying traps for her unwary ministers and ensnaring them later with their own words. Even the wittiest of them were sometimes left tongue-tied and flatfooted in her presence, while all of them, however fleetingly, were on occasion dazzled by her youthful, radiant femininity and sexual magnetism.
Elizabeth had more than enough courage, subtlety and aggressiveness to plunge boldly into the tasks of queenship. She had everything, in fact, but experience.
That she was a novice at foreign affairs could not be disguised. She dismayed her councilors and Feria by asserting that her sister's declaration of war against France was not binding on her—an assertion which, when she found it to be groundless, she quietly dropped. She had at first the overdeveloped suspiciousness of the amateur diplomat; when Feria brought her news that Spain and France had agreed to a truce she assumed at once that King Philip was betraying her, and had to have her fears allayed by Cecil. 7
But if she was not yet surefooted in the intricacies of diplomacy, her
aptitude for statecraft was unmistakable, and she more than made up in strength of personality whatever she lacked in experience of rule.
Feria, in England to safeguard Spanish interests and to try to preserve the influence Philip had enjoyed while Mary lived, has left a portrait of the new queen in the first weeks of her reign. She was extroverted, assertive, masterly. "A very strange sort of woman," he wrote of her in exasperation; she was as uninhibited and free in manner as her father had been, utterly lacking in the passivity and propriety he expected from a noblewoman. She spoke to Feria, as she did to the other ambassadors, candidly and in his own tongue; she complained of her poverty, shone with unabashed pleasure when he presented her with a costly ring ("she is very fond of having things given to her," he observed), and showed herself inordinately fond of disputation. On the whole Feria despaired of her. It was bad enough that she was a woman, but she was worse than that, "a young lass, sharp, but without prudence." In one respect alone she was an improvement over Man 1 : Elizabeth was likely to bear children once she married. But in even- other way she "compared unfavorably" with her sister, from the Spanish point of view. 8
Yet even Feria had to admit that Elizabeth seemed to him "incomparably more feared" than Man' had been, and that she "gave her orders and had her way absolutely as her father did." Absolutely, that was the key. Elizabeth clearly expected to be obeyed, and was. Her sense of command extended into the privy bedchamber, where she "made a speech to the women who were in her service," ordering them "never to speak to her on bu
siness affairs." The royal bedchamber, in the past a locus of much petitioning for offices and favors, became a political wilderness.
Elizabeth did well to keep her wits about her in these early weeks, for the court was in the utmost confusion. Most of Man's officials and sen-ants had been turned out, and their jobs were left undone or, when finally filled, were given to eager young replacements with more energy than experience. "The kingdom is entirely in the hands of young folks," Feria wrote, "heretics and traitors." The older generation and the staunch Catholics looked on in horror but kept their peace, at least in public; in private they called their new queen "flighty." and applied to her ancient cryptic prophecies predicting that her reign would be short, and that King Philip would soon return to rule again. 9
Feria found the chaos that surrounded all court business disconcerting in the extreme. When he went to the presence chamber to speak to the queen he found it "crammed with people," all of whom were thrusting gifts at her or otherwise imploring her attention so that she was quite "carried away" by the excitement. If the Spaniard expected to find a peaceful haven
in the council chamber he was disappointed. There too all was noise and interruption, with messengers and petitioners crowding in at the doorway and doing their best to listen at the keyhole or peek through cracks in the walls. 'Things are in such a hurly-burly and confusion," Feria wrote, at his wits' end, "that fathers do not know their own children."
Elizabeth seemed to rise above the temporary disruptions, and indeed to revel in the chaos, perhaps because it reassured her that all was new and formless, and that she could set her own stamp on her court. One thing she went out of her way to make clear. Whoever had displeased or discomfited her sister, she meant to exalt. Elizabeth was "as much set against her sister as she was previous to her death," and saw to it that everyone realized it. Riding through the streets of the capital she caught sight of William Parr, marquess of Northampton and Protestant opponent of the late queen, watching out of a window along the street. She reined in her horse at once and shouted out a hearty greeting to him, asking after his health (he was convalescing) "in the most cordial way in the world." Parr deserved no special treatment, save that he had been a "great traitor" to Mary, Feria wrote sourly. "He who was most prominent in this way is now best thought of."
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