The intensity of this climate of revenge is clear from a story the Spaniard told concerning one of the physicians attending Mary in her final days. He was "a young fellow, a harebrained busybody" scorned by his colleagues, and Feria had reason to suspect that he had administered "something noxious" to Mary to hasten her death. He wanted to have the young physician arrested, but hesitated. "I am afraid," he explained, "that if anything is said to the queen about it she would be more likely to reward than to punish him." 10
But if the courtiers and councilors were taken aback by the flamboyance of their ebullient young sovereign, they reminded themselves that her personal ascendency was bound to be short-lived. For she would surely marry, and soon. On the continent it was taken as a matter of course that Elizabeth would simply step into her dead sister's shoes, presiding over Mary's kingdom, continuing, with a few changes, to be governed by Mary's advisers and marrying Mary's husband. The courteous protection Philip had offered to Mary would now be offered to Elizabeth—indeed it would be ungentlemanly of him not to offer it—and the unbecoming burden of rule would be lifted from Elizabeth's slender shoulders. "It would be better for herself and her kingdom," Philip wrote to his sister-in-law, "if she would take a consort who might relieve her of those labors which are only fit for men." 11 Even Cecil, who was in a better position than anyone to vouch for Elizabeth's mental capacity, was overheard to scold an envoy who had
been discussing an important ambassadorial dispatch with the queen. He should never have brought up with her a "matter of such weight," the secretary said, "being too much for a woman's knowledge." 12
By far the most articulate exponent of the universal abhorrence of women rulers was the Scot John Knox, who in his seething anti-feminist First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women cursed female rulership as unnatural and repugnant. Though the treatise was directed against Mary Tudor, the Scots queen Mary Stuart and her mother, the regent Mary of Lorraine, and not against Elizabeth personally, she took highly personal offense at it and refused to admit Knox into her realm—a notable break with her current policy of rewarding everyone who had worked to undermine her sister. Knox, who badly needed Elizabeth's support for the cause of Protestant rebellion in Scotland, was caught in his own trap.
He wrote to Cecil, attempting to exonerate himself in a way that would mollify Elizabeth. In his letter he made what must, to him, have seemed an enormous concession. Elizabeth, he said, was an exception to the unalterable principle of female unfitness—a miraculous exception, placed on her throne by God himself to serve his own unsearchable ends. And as long as she admitted that her authority represented an "extraordinary dispensation" from God, and was not grounded in human law or, heaven forbid, in any claim to equality with men ("which both nature and God's law doth deny to all women"), then he, Knox, would be more willing than anyone to "maintain her lawful authority." 13
Such questions of principle aside, there were good and practical reasons for Elizabeth's household staff, its lower echelons in particular, to look forward expectantly to her marriage. Her consort would have to be supplied with a household of his own, once he came to England, and that would mean hundreds of new jobs; eventually each of their children too would require its own officials, and grooms and other servants, in an endless cycle of burgeoning employment.
The celebrations that accompanied Elizabeth's first Christmas as queen were edged with the special excitement of matchmaking. Since Mary's death the tone of the court had been subdued, its pleasures private, but in mid-December "they began to dance a little before supper," and with the holidays the merriment increased. The queen was said to have her eye on Francis Talbot, son of the earl of Shrewsbury, as well as on Arundel, who was recently returned from his duties as peace commissioner in France. The latter was every inch a suitor, strutting about the presence chamber in new silks and furs and "carrying his thoughts very high." He had borrowed
heavily from an Italian merchant in London, telling the man that he would repay once he was married to the queen, and was scattering the money among Elizabeth's most confidential servants—her waiting women shared some two thousand pounds—in hopes that they would speak well of him to her.
Snow was falling lightly over London on the morning of January 14, 1559, the eve of the coronation. The weather had been bad for days, with heavy rain and snow turning to slush and then to deep mud that choked the streets and spattered against the houses and shopfronts as horses passed by. Since before dawn servants had been at work filling in the worst of the puddles and trenches and covering the roadway with gravel and sand, so that when the queen's procession passed it would not bog down in the mire. Through the morning hours the courtiers assembled at the Tower, taking their assigned places in the line of march, all of them ''so sparkling with jewels and gold collars that they cleared the air," though the snow continued to fall.
By two o'clock the City was congested with impatient crowds, kept back from the streets by wooden barricades and by liveried whifflers and garders of the city companies. For an hour and more they had watched an interminable parade of harbingers, gentlemen ushers, squires and civic dignitaries, churchmen, judges, knights and peers. The spectacle was splendid—there were a thousand horses, one eyewitness wrote, all as bravely trapped as their glittering riders—but it was only of momentary interest: the people wanted to see the queen.
Then she came, and it was as if the clouds lifted and the sun came out. A great shout went up as her litter rose into view in the distance, gleaming in its gold brocade, and escorted by a host of red-coated footmen whose uniforms, studded in ''massive gilt silver," bore the royal arms and the intertwined letters ER, for Elizabetha Regina. "Prayers, wishes, welcom-ings, cries, tender words" greeted the queen, resplendent in "very rich cloth of gold," as stiff and heavy as armor, and she, "by holding up her hands, and merry countenance to such as stood far off, and most tender and gentle language to those that stood nigh to her grace," responded in kind.
"God save your grace!" they cried out.
"God save you all!" she shouted back in a strong, ringing voice. "I thank you with all my heart!"
She seemed to hear every word called out by every well-wisher; she spoke not so much to the crowd as to each individual within it. She had the gift, as her father had in his time, of making everyone within the sound of her voice believe she was speaking to him or her alone.
It was a moment of pure joy, of passionate affection between the queen and her subjects. In that moment, a watching pamphleteer wrote, "there was nothing but gladness, nothing but prayer, nothing but comfort." 14
So it went throughout the procession route. At each stopping point along the way there was a pageant or a brief concert or a recitation, and Elizabeth, knowing that all eyes would be on her and not on the performers, responded so theatrically—albeit sincerely—that she became an integral part of the show. At Fenchurch, where a child greeted her by speaking a long poem, she reacted with rapturous smiles to every verse of the sentimental doggerel. There was not only "a perpetual attentiveness in her face," but "a marvellous change in look, as the child's words touched either her person or the people's tongues or hearts." Her "rejoicing visage" told all; she was engraving every word on her mind. The queen's heartfelt pantomime was no less a performance than the child's recitation, and when both ended the onlookers burst into cheers and applause.
Elizabeth, concerned throughout to grasp the meaning of every pageant, sent men ahead to find out the theme and import of each display and to quiet the crowd so that she could hear the music and poetic oratory clearly. She commented on the profundity and appropriateness of the presentations, which represented her genealogical descent, the virtues of good governance, the triumph of Time, which had at length brought the realm out of the darkness and idolatry of Mary's reign into the light of divine truth. During this pageant of Time that favorite symbol of Protestants, the English Bible, was "delivered to her grace down by a silken lace" from out of the stage, and
she, to the delight of the crowd, clasped it in her arms and kissed it, and cried out that "she would oftentimes read that book," before moving on.
To both the queen and her subjects the pageant of Time had more than a touch of irony about it, for five years earlier, when Queen Mary had ridden through the streets of the capital on her coronation procession, one of the pageants had illustrated her favorite motto, "Truth, the Daughter of Time"—a motto made even more familiar to her people through her coins and devices. Mary's truth had been the falsehood (to Protestants) of Catholicism; Elizabeth must have taken great satisfaction in seeing Mary's motto turned on its head.
At the upper end of Cheapside the city recorder presented the queen with a purse of coins, and she thanked him and the Londoners with a hearty speech.
"I thank my lord mayor, his brethren, and you all," she began. "And whereas your request is that I should continue your good lady and queen, be ye ensured, that I will be as good unto you as ever queen was to her
people." The listeners drank in her words, impressed not only by her eloquence but by "hearing so princelike a voice, which could not but have set the enemy on fire." "No will in me can lack," she cried, "neither do I trust shall there lack any power. And persuade yourselves, that for the safety and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if need be, to spend my blood. God thank you all."
The speech drew tumultuous cheers, and as the queen's litter made its way along the remainder of the route onlookers forgot that they were seeing a twenty-five-year-old girl, slight and somewhat delicate, her long red hair flowing unbound and maidenly below the circlet of a princess. In their eyes she became that princely being, a woman ruler.
The final pageant portrayed Elizabeth as Deborah, "judge and restorer of the house of Israel," represented as a "seemly and meet personage, richly apparelled in Parliament robes, with a scepter in her hand, as a queen, crowned with an open crown." It was a worthy riposte to the dour fulmina-tions of Knox, and an omen for the future. Elizabeth was moved. "Be ye well assured," she told the crowd when the pageant oratory had ended, "I will stand your good queen," and whatever else she may have said was drowned out by the "crying and shouting of the people" as she passed on through Temple Bar toward Westminster.
From first to last the procession had been a personal triumph, and not only for Elizabeth but, in a sense, for her pitied mother, restored to honor in the genealogical pageant and portrayed with scepter and diadem, surmounted by her title. And for her tremendous father, who loomed so large in popular memory as the new reign began.
"Remember old King Henry the Eighth!" a voice called from the crowd as Elizabeth's litter rested at Cheapside, and it was noted that she broke into a broad smile. Her father, she knew well, would have laughed with pleasure had he lived to see Anne Boleyn's child, the child of his fondest hopes and deepest disappointment, come into her own at last.
Now Besse bethinke thee, what thou hast to doe. Thy lover will come presently, and hardly will he woo:
I will teach my Gentleman, a tricke that he may know, I am too craftie and too wise, to be ore-reached so.
I
n April of 1559, three months after Elizabeth's coronation, Robert Dudley came suddenly, and alarmingly, into prominence. The queen's tall, athletic master of the horse—by common agreement "an extremely handsome young man," perhaps the handsomest man at court—had been in evidence, though without any particular notoriety, since the start of the reign. He had cut a brave figure in the coronation procession, riding directly behind the queen's litter in solitary magnificence and leading her riderless horse, and it was to be expected that his attractive person would be lent to adorn the tilts and masques and pageants that were the staple of court entertainment. But no one could have predicted at the outset of the reign that Elizabeth would take Lord Robert for her lover.
"During the last few days Lord Robert has come so much into favor that he does whatever he likes with affairs," Feria wrote disapprovingly. "And it is even said that her majesty visits him in his chamber day and night." 1
Feria's claim, though imprecise, was damning enough, but before long the tales told about the dalliance of the queen and her horse master were so explicit and conclusive that no foreign envoy dared repeat them. "Many persons say things which I should not dare to write," the Mantuan II Schifanoya told his Venetian employers. De Quadra, who replaced Feria
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as Spanish ambassador in May, recorded that he heard "some extraordinary things about this intimacy," things he would have found impossible to believe if it weren't for the fact that nearly the entire privy council "made no secret" of the shocking truth. 2
The love affair between Elizabeth and Dudley was common knowledge, and because everyone knew about it, there was little or no need to write about it. And there was a powerful inducement to silence besides: it would have been extremely dangerous to commit details of the queen's indiscretions to writing. As a result we are left with an abundance of circumlocutions and broad references whose general import is unmistakable, yet on the vital, central issue—whether or not the virgin queen lost her virginity in 1559 (if indeed she had not lost it to Thomas Seymour years earlier)—the records are silent.
To look to Elizabeth's own words for a hint at the truth is frustrating and inconclusive, for in addition to being habitually untruthful the queen took a perverse delight in outraging people. She was much inclined to speak, if not exactly without thinking, then without always thinking very far, and she showed little hesitation when it came to gratifying her everpre-sent desire to tease, befuddle and generally confound the grave personages who surrounded her.
Thus it would be foolish to put much faith either in her protestations of innocence and chastity or in her coy "confession" to De Quadra in 1561 that she was "no angel" and that she had some affection for Dudley. Had she denied her affection for him her actions would have belied her words, for it was no small part of the scandal that she fondled Dudley like a lover in public.
Then too she may have taken him as her lover out of sheer exultant rebelliousness. For in the first year of her reign—and beyond—Elizabeth was stridently, aggressively self-willed. "Like a peasant on whom a barony has been conferred," an imperial envoy wrote, "she, since she came to the throne is puffed up with pride, and imagines that she is without peer." 3 She had never been educated for her role as queen, and if she had an overabundance of charisma she was woefully lacking in self-restraint. To thwart her own will for the good of her realm was a lesson no one had ever taught her; on the contrary, having been thwarted most of her life, she was now more determined than ever to break free and follow her own desires absolutely. She was, reportedly, "so stubborn and headstrong that she acts regardless of her own welfare and that of the kingdom." 4
No more explosive arena for self-assertion offered itself than marriage and sex, the time-honored ground of conflict between young and old,
parent and child. Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry had stood in lieu of parents to Elizabeth since childhood, and it was no coincidence that her behavior with Dudley was the cause of severe tension between them now.
Parry was said to be grieved and distressed that Elizabeth should act as she did, and this, plus his excessive girth, helped to put him in his grave early in 1561. Kat Ashley, who as mother of the maids presided over the royal bedchamber and no doubt bore the brunt of a good deal of accusatory gossip, made a desperate, and highly affecting, plea for her mistress to come to her senses and see reason.
She began by falling at Elizabeth's feet in abject silence. What was it? the queen asked her, unleashing by her question a long and carefully rehearsed chain of entreaties.
In God's name, Kat begged, Elizabeth ought to marry and put a stop to all the terrible things that were being said about her. The way she treated Dudley led everyone to believe that they were as good as married—or rather as sinful as adulterers, since the horse master was married already. The talk was expanding, and as it spread Elizabeth was making it worse by open
ly displaying her excessive fondness for Dudley, lowering herself in everyone's eyes and rapidly losing the respect due her as queen.
Could she not see where all this would lead? Kat asked Elizabeth, warming to her subject and perhaps realizing as she went on that she alone could speak as she did, that Elizabeth would tolerate such arguments from no one else. Could she not see that before long her subjects would withdraw their affection, then their allegiance, and that finally there would be warfare between rival claimants to the throne she was no longer worthy to hold? The bloodshed would be on the queen's own head and no one else's; God would call her to account for it, and her erstwhile subjects would curse her name.
It was a calamitous scenario, an unthinkable and ignominious end to a reign that had begun in such joyous celebration. Rather than that all this should happen, Kat concluded, "she would have strangled her majesty in the cradle." Having said that she held her peace.
Elizabeth, who had at the tip of her tongue a well-rehearsed speech of her own in defense of her unmarried state, at first responded with gracious condescension, acknowledging that she knew Kat's words were the "outpourings of a good heart and true fidelity," and that she was, of course, willing to marry if only to set Kat's mind at ease and to console the rest of her subjects. Yet marriage was a weighty matter requiring much reflection, and Mistress Ashley must always keep in mind that up to this time the queen had "had no wish to change her state."
The first Elizabeth Page 22
