For Elizabeth the course of events had had an unexpected, and unfortunate, sequel. Since she chose not to marry, went one line of reasoning, it must be because she was incapable of bearing children. Her refusal to marry Dudley was seen by some as a conclusive argument for this; beyond it, one had only to remember Mary Tudor's grotesque false pregnancies—not to mention the curse of childlessness that, so people said, had fallen on Elizabeth after her sinful involvement with Thomas Seymour—to realize that Elizabeth was more than likely barren.
To be sure, contradictory rumors flourished. While some were saying the queen was dropsical, others said her swellings were those of approaching motherhood; to some she looked as though she had just risen from childbed, while others swore she could never conceive. Amid the confusion two things seem clear. First, Elizabeth was susceptible to illness, especially in the aftermath of emotional shock. And second, no one among her immediate advisers ever doubted her ability to bear children—or if they doubted it, no record of their doubt remains.
In October of 1562 a crisis brought the problem of the succession into
sharp relief. Elizabeth was at Hampton Court and, "feeling unwell," decided to take a hot bath. After her bath she caught a chill and, soon afterward, took to her bed with a high fever.
There had been a minor epidemic of smallpox at court in recent weeks; a number of highborn ladies had been gravely ill, and several, including the countess of Bedford, had died. The survivors remained out of sight, anguished in their convalescence by the deep, angry scars left by the disease, scars that, no matter how assiduously they were treated with creams and herbs and medicinal plasters, refused to heal. Disfigurement was the chief bane of smallpox, when the disease was not fatal. Handsome men became repulsive; beautiful women with clear, glowing complexions were left almost as hideous as lepers, their skin discolored and aged and their features distorted by the pits and chronic sores left behind when the contagion was past.
Evidently the queen had contracted the disease, and it was officially announced at the palace that she had taken to her bed with smallpox. For the next few days, though listless and ill with fever, Elizabeth kept an eye on affairs from her sickbed, leaving to others—chiefly to Dudley—the supervision of the English fighting force that was en route to France.
Just as she had sent an army into Scotland in support of the Protestant rebels there, so Elizabeth had determined to come to the aid of the French Protestants, or Huguenots, in their struggle against the French regent Catherine de' Medici. French political fortunes had shifted once again, and Elizabeth, ever hopeful of regaining Calais, had seen her opportunity. The regent Catherine was weak, and growing weaker as religious warfare became widespread. Huguenot raids and plundering invited murderous Catholic retaliation, and the government seemed powerless to halt the spreading chaos.
By the summer of 1562 warfare and governmental crises combined to make English intervention overwhelmingly attractive to Elizabeth, and when her offers of personal mediation were refused by the regent she ordered her diplomats to negotiate a secret treaty with the rebels. In return for English money and troops, the Huguenots agreed to turn Calais over to the English once it was surrendered, in the course of the war, by the French crown.
With this agreement concluded, three thousand English troops had left Portsmouth and Rye late in September for the French coast, and on October 11, the day after the onset of the queen's illness, three thousand more were to embark. It was a large and costly undertaking, and the councilors were noisily divided in their attitude toward it. Elizabeth's indisposition was inconveniently timed, to say the least; they must have
shaken their heads and resigned themselves to several weeks of inconvenience while the disease ran its course.
But it did not take its normal course. The physicians expected the fever to abate on the fourth day, a Wednesday, when the red marks that were the characteristic sign of smallpox would appear and the disease would pass into its second stage. But Wednesday came and went, and the queen's fever only grew higher; there were no red spots, and no sign of the usual transition to the next stage.
Elizabeth lay still and pale in her darkened chamber, her narrow face pinched by pain, her undernourished body thin and bony. At her bedside was Mary Sidney, Dudley's sister, who braved contagion to keep her vigil. There was little enough to be done for smallpox: red cloth at the windows to filter the light and, with luck, prevent scarring; a warm fire; red cloth to swaddle the patient in. The physicians were all but helpless. Either the queen would recover or she would die; her fate was in God's hands. 4
Since the start of the reign it had been predicted that Elizabeth would die young. She was twenty-nine, and had reigned nearly four years already; it was time for the prophecies and astrological calculations to be fulfilled. Even as she lay in her sickbed at Hampton Court two Catholic conspirators, relatives of the late Cardinal Pole, were being interrogated about their scheme to land troops in Wales and seize the English throne for Mary Stuart. They had not conspired against Elizabeth, the Poles insisted; an astrologer had assured them months before that she would be dead long before their plan went into effect. 5
No one dared to repeat the predictions about Elizabeth's mortality; everyone thought about them. The courtiers calculated the likeliest heirs to power in the event of her death and hastily aligned themselves accordingly. The devout prayed, the shrewd negotiated. Everyone clamored for the latest news from the council chamber, where the succession was being debated. Everyone, that is, but Robert Dudley, who amassed "a large armed force under his control," some six thousand strong, and waited for events to take their course.
The councilors had been summoned as soon as there was grave concern about Elizabeth's condition. With the country at war and no successor designated, they alone stood for an orderly transition of power should the worst happen. Cecil, in London, learned of the crisis at midnight; he rode upriver to Hampton Court in the early hours of the morning, full of apprehension. Soon the others were assembled, and three long days and nights of argument and advocacy began.
Eaced with choosing among the various candidates for the throne the councilors must have struggled to weigh the religion, personality, military
strength or weakness of the candidates—not to mention the abstruse legal issues of legitimacy and statutory right. Minor candidates apart, there were two genealogical factions vying for preeminence: the Stuart line, descended from Henry VIII's elder sister Margaret, and the Suffolk line, heirs of Henry's younger sister Mary, who when she married Charles Brandon became duchess of Suffolk.
The Stuart claim appeared at first glance to be the stronger, given Margaret Tudor's seniority in age, but the leading Stuart claimant, the Scots Queen Mary, was not English and had not been born in England. In law she could not inherit property in England, and even if these difficulties were somehow cleared away there would still be the bar of her Catholicism and the incontrovertible fact that the will of Henry VIII had excluded the Stuarts from the throne.
The leading Suffolk claimant, on the other hand, was in the Tower, along with her infant son. Catherine Grey was Protestant, English-born, and demonstrably fertile—no small advantage. She had King Henry's will on her side, and she was nearby, just a few hours downriver from Hampton Court, while Mary Stuart was hundreds of miles away to the north. But Catherine had the disability of her precontract with Pembroke's son, her treasonable marriage, and other obscure legal disadvantages arising from her grandfather Charles Brandon's marital entanglements. And Elizabeth was known not to favor her.
Then there was Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, who belonged neither to the Stuart nor to the Suffolk camp but was a Yorkist, a descendant of Edward III. The Yorkist claim had been effectively moribund for several generations, and Huntingdon was not in himself a strong enough personality to bring it to life. But he had married Catherine Dudley, Robert Dudley's sister, and the troops Dudley was bringing together at the palace, it was said, would be committed to the
earl's cause in any succession dispute. De Quadra believed that both Elizabeth and Cecil favored Huntingdon over the female claimants (though there was some evidence to the contrary), in large part because he was a man. But like Mary Stuart, Huntingdon was not named to the succession in Henry VIII's will, and was at a disadvantage, as an ardent, radical Protestant, in religion. 6
Hour after hour the beleaguered councilors met, hounded by the anxious courtiers, dogged by prolonged tension and lack of sleep, working against a nearing deadline as Elizabeth's remaining strength ebbed. Three points of view emerged. One party favored the most straightforward course of action, to follow King Henry's will and recognize Catherine Grey as queen. Another, including Dudley, Norfolk, the soldierly Pembroke and a number of other pragmatists, favored Huntingdon. A third group cautioned against
any hasty choice and urged that the entire succession issue be placed in the hands of the leading jurists in the realm—ostensibly a wise and statesmanlike solution, but in fact, so the Protestants believed, a Catholic ploy. The leading jurists were conservatives in religion, and were certain to pronounce in favor of a Catholic. Worse still, their pronouncement would be slow in coming, giving time for military intervention by one of the Catholic powers, France or Spain.
The hours passed, and the wrangling continued. From the queen's apartments word spread that Elizabeth, having lost her power of speech several hours earlier, had slipped into unconsciousness. She had burned with fever for seven days. This was the final crisis. Reluctantly, with as much excitement as apprehension, the court prepared to go into mourning.
Then suddenly there was another bulletin. The queen had regained consciousness, eaten a little jelly, and fallen asleep—to all appearances a normal, healthy sleep—and her fever had broken. By the time she woke again, in the middle of the night, there were red marks on her hands and face, and she had enough appetite to eat a light meal. The next morning, though swollen and covered with blemishes, she had just enough strength to meet with her indecisive councilors.
She called them to her bedside and told them her preferred plan for the succession. Her beloved Dudley was to rule, she said; he could not be king, but he could be Lord Protector, as Edward Seymour had been nearly fifteen years earlier. Dudley should have a noble title and an annuity of twenty thousand pounds. And lest anyone should try to challenge his authority by slandering his honor, she swore solemnly that he had never been her lover.
''Although she loved and had always loved Lord Robert dearly," De Quadra reported her as saying, "as God was her witness, nothing improper had ever passed between them." 7
Then, taking advantage of her lucidity, Elizabeth made the oral bequests customary at royal deathbeds. Everyone in her household was to receive a grant of money, and she named the staff members one by one and specified the amounts they were to be given. Tamworth, a groom who slept in Dudley's chamber, was to have an income of five hundred pounds a year. And her cousin Hunsdon too was singled out for special recognition and recommended to the council's favor.
None of the councilors thought to argue with these dispositions; Elizabeth was assured that everything, including Dudley's protectorate, would be instituted according to her request.
Clearly she did not expect to live, and it was with as much surprise as relief that the councilors and courtiers learned each day that, though afflicted with severe pain and itching from her blistered skin, the queen was
coming through her ordeal, and was not likely to succumb as so many others had. Mary Sidney had come down with smallpox too, but like the queen she was expected to recover.
By October 29 Cecil was reporting that Elizabeth was "out of all peril to come by her disease." She was shut away in her chamber, treating her complexion, and was not expected to appear in public for some time "owing to the disfigurement of her face." Dudley and, less often, Norfolk were the only councilors permitted to confer with her; had the councilors not insisted, it would have been Dudley alone.
The danger was past, for the moment, but the court and, no doubt, the queen had been badly shaken. Even Cecil seemed to have lost his composure. When in conference he spoke "excitedly, confounding and mixing the various points" of his discourse, and he was for a time uncharacteristically preempted in visible leadership, if not in actual stewardship, by Dudley and Norfolk.
It was Dudley more than anyone who had come out ahead. To his informal influence had been added the official sanction of membership in the royal council. He had demonstrated his military resourcefulness, and his raw armed might; anyone who hoped to make a bid for the throne would from now on remember his six thousand men, and reconsider. Most of all, Elizabeth's true regard for him and loyalty to him had come out in her dying declaration. She believed him to be her most capable successor; she had intended to bequeath him her most precious possession, her kingdom. Her feeling for him clearly went far beyond flirtation, far beyond passion (though only the most gullible can have accepted her urgent denial of their intimacy). Wisely or not, she had conferred on Dudley as on no one else her complete, trusting and heartfelt love.
Conduct thy learned company to Court, Eliza's Court, Astraea's earthly heaven.
I
ames Melville, Mary Stuart's ambassador and sharp-witted diplomat, arrived at Westminster at the end of September, 1564, and took up lodgings near the court. Melville was twenty-nine, a Scots gentleman who had spent the better part of his life abroad—first as a page at the French court, then later in Italy and the German-speaking lands of the Hapsburg emperor. He was a man of the world, calculated to appeal to the urbane but ill-traveled Elizabeth. Or so Queen Mary hoped.
Relations between the two queens had recently turned sour. For two years and more there had been plans for a face-to-face meeting between them, yet each time an obstacle had arisen and at the last minute the meeting had been called off. Then, in recent months, the issue of Mary's marriage had led to "inward griefs and grudges" which their letters to one another had only made worse. Melville's journey was intended to patch up the quarrel.
Reconciliation was important, for Elizabeth now appeared to prefer Mary to all the other succession candidates and had in mind a brilliant, if involuted and somewhat perverse, plan to make her heir to the throne.
Everything hinged on Mary's marriage—to Dudley. The idea was so startling that the Scots representative who first heard of it, early in 1563, could not bring himself to take it seriously. Yet Elizabeth was indeed
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serious, acknowledging in a secret dispatch to her own agent in Scotland that the man she had in mind for her cousin to marry was "such as she could hardly think we would agree unto." That Elizabeth should send her lover away to a distant court and marry him to a younger and—by repute at least —a more beautiful woman who coveted her throne seemed sheer self-punishing madness, yet there was a ruthlessly exacting logic behind the plan.
There were very few men whom Mary Stuart could safely marry, from Elizabeth's point of view. If she married one of the leading Catholic princes —Philip II's son Don Carlos, for example, or the ever-available Archduke Charles of Austria—then her claim to the English throne would give her husband the pretext he needed to make war on Elizabeth. A minor foreign match might be less hazardous militarily, yet would offer the disadvantage that in time the Tudor crown would pass to Mary's heirs, who would have almost no English blood at all. And such minor figures often became allied to major powers, a dangerous probability in this case.
With a husband chosen from among the Scots or English nobility, on the other hand, there was the hazard of rebellion—unless the nobleman selected was known to be unswervingly loyal to the English monarch. And who was more loyal than Robert Dudley?
So Elizabeth offered him to Mary, wincing as she did so at the recollection of Mary's derisive remark when she heard of Amy Dudley's death: 'The queen of England is going to marry her horsekeeper, who has killed his wife to make room for her."
The sacrifice Elizabeth was making was a measur
e of her frustration and weariness, for over the last six years she had been hounded and harassed by the overriding urgency of her own marriage. Dire emergencies apart, every governmental issue took second place to this, and as the years passed Parliament, the councilors, the ambassadors and the princes they served, the people at large all grew more and more strident in their single reiterated demand: whom would Elizabeth marry, and when?
Parliament she bullied, or at least outtalked; the councilors, since she had to live among them day after day, were less easy to combat. They were restive and quarrelsome, never exactly out of control yet nearly always out of temper. They were accustomed to dealing with men, to being surrounded by men, ordered by men, giving orders to men. Having a woman at the head of things offended the immemorial propriety of kingly rule; it was an anomaly to be tolerated only if it was to be temporary. And after six years Elizabeth was threatening to make it permanent. Privately they spoke their resentment, publicly they were irritable and impatient, and the level of tension was so high that they sometimes came to blows.
Crotchety Arundel, his dignity wounded by Elizabeth's rejection of his suit, picked a quarrel with Admiral Clinton one day in the presence chamber. They were discussing the appropriate punishment of religious dissenters, with Clinton arguing for severity and Arundel countering that harsh punishment could lead to a counterreaction ''unfavorable to the queen's interests." So they argued on, heatedly, until they insulted one another with "rough words" and "fell to fisticuffs and grabbing each other's beards." Large as the presence chamber was, and no doubt crowded with people, Elizabeth could not help but notice the brawling; she ended it by calling the courtiers to her and, pretending she hadn't seen anything, inviting them to "play before her," and so forcing them to make peace. All the same the incident was unseemly, and embarrassing to visitors who saw it as "a great sacrifice of the queen's dignity." It would never have happened in the presence of a king, or even a prince consort. 1
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