She possessed a huge illuminated genealogical roll, some thirty yards long, meant to be hung on the wall of a long palace gallery. It depicted England's kings "from the creation to Queen Elizabeth," marching in relentless chronological urgency toward the present reign. 2 The roll made of the jumbled, often historically incoherent past an ordered destiny— Elizabeth's destiny. It served as a counterweight to the forces of disorder and criticism in the kingdom and at court, though it may also have been read as a mockery or a warning to a ruler who had so far failed to designate or give birth to a successor.
To keep those around her in fear of her Elizabeth cultivated—or perhaps simply unleashed—a capricious temper. One hour amiable and approachable, she was peevish and ill-humored the next. Her "terrible fancies" were dreaded, when she "gave no one a gracious answer" and, if even slightly provoked, laid about her with words that cut as cruelly as swords.
Anything could bring on an outburst of royal fury—losing at cards, a slow-witted officer stumbling over his phrases, a hint of defiance in a subordinate. She took action direct and uninhibited, and her words often carried the threat of violence. Finding certain pages in the privy council register offensive to her dignity, she ripped them out. Hearing how the unspeakable Darnley had murdered his wife's beloved secretary almost before her eyes, she remarked that, had she been in Queen Mary's place, she would have taken her husband's dagger and stabbed him with it.
If "God's death" was her favorite oath, beheading was becoming her favorite metaphor. Elizabeth sent a warning to the Scots queen through the Spanish ambassador in 1569 advising her "to bear her condition with less impatience, or she might chance to find some of those on whom she relied shorter by the head." Her councilors too were admonished that she would make them "shorter by the head" if they disobeyed or disregarded her.
Yet even at her most strident and vituperative, Elizabeth was vulnerable, for she was physically frail, and her anger was a menace to her constitution. While flinching from her scolding tongue, the council members and officials she shouted at watched her with concern, anxious for her health. In October of 1569, when she heard that Norfolk, whom she knew to be plotting against her, had defied her summons to court and gone to his estate at Kenninghall, she "became so angry that she fainted, and they ran for vinegar and other remedies to revive her." There were other episodes of mild hysteria, overwrought nerves, spells of illness which, considering their frequency and the queen's delicate physique, gave rise to nearly constant worry.
The only thing worse than an unmarried queen was an unmarried queen in fragile health. Elizabeth suffered from stomach pains, catarrh, pains in the head, and fevers which sometimes held her in their grip for days at a time. Her teeth bothered her, and so did one of her legs; now and again she walked with a limp. Rumors of female disorders persisted. If she refused to marry, people said, it must be for the obvious reason that she could not have children, no matter what she herself or her physicians asserted to the contrary. 3 And most worrisome^ of all, she was becoming so thin and emaciated that everyone who saw her wondered that so fleshless a body could support so fierce a temperament.
She had always been slight and delicate, with a paper-thin complexion almost transparent in its ivory fineness. But the older she grew the more her cheekbones and neckbones stood out sharply in that fair skin, and her body became gaunt and skeletal. In the spring of 1566 a physician examined her. Beneath the stiff layerings of kirtle, farthingale and petticoats he saw an underweight and enfeebled frame, and detected signs of new illnesses to come. The queen was so thin, he reported, that "her bones may be counted." And she was developing a kidney stone, and becoming consumptive. The doctors who customarily attended her, reluctant to take responsibility for keeping such a poorly creature alive, let it be known that in their opinion her constitution was weak and she was not likely to enjoy a long life. 4
No one had forgotten Elizabeth's terrifying brush with death in 1562— least of all the queen herself. When some children living near the palace of Westminster developed smallpox, she instantly left the palace out of fear of the disease, and generally avoided any areas where infection had been present. Her grave illness had come on her at Hampton Court, and though she did not avoid the palace entirely, "not wishing it to fall into decay," she was decidedly superstitious about it, and made her stays there as brief as possible. 5
The urgent consideration of the queen's physical frailty overshadowed the Parliament of 1566, however much her robust and colorful defense of her prerogatives during that session belied her delicacy. This was only the third Parliament of the reign. The principal achievement of the first, summoned in 1559, had been to cooperate with the queen in sweeping away Mary Tudor's Catholicism and in defining crown power over the clergy. The second, summoned in 1563, had been called for the purpose of granting taxation but both houses had had the temerity to petition their sovereign on the subject of the succession and had earned her displeasure as a result.
Now, in 1566, exasperation over the unsettled succession was emboldening the members to use what leverage they had to try to force the queen to act. Yet their scope of action was exceedingly narrow, for Parliament, in the mid-sixteenth century, had limited rights and a highly subordinate governmental standing. Parliaments were summoned and dissolved at the queen's sole and absolute discretion; the bills they passed became valid only with her approval. The council, not Parliament, was the locus of power, for the latter met only briefly and irregularly, its proceedings guided and constrained by the royal councilors who sat in its midst.
Elizabeth had so far held Parliament in check by exercising her extensive prerogatives. She vetoed bills, she made certain that the man chosen as speaker of the Commons would be reliably on the side of the crown on any controversial issues, she granted freedom of speech to members only on condition that they remain "neither unmindful nor uncareful of their duties, reverence and obedience to their sovereign." At the first hint of undutiful or irreverent talk, she summoned the speaker and blamed him severely, always having behind her words the implicit threat of withdrawing the right of free speech and making the MPs fear the terrible consequences of any treasonable words they might utter.
Yet though the queen had relatively little to fear from Parliament she did rely on her Lords and Commons to supply her, as their obedience required, with revenue for all her extraordinary expenses, and the members who gathered in the fall of 1566, determined, indeed adamant, about ending the suspense over the succession, had decided to pursue what financial leverage they possessed.
Only a few months earlier they had been frightened yet again when Elizabeth had suffered another illness. She had been "so sore visited with a hot fever," a contemporary wrote, "that no man believed any other but death to be the end of it, all England being thereto in a great perplexity." She had recovered—but for how long? To prevent disaster the queen must provide for such an emergency, by naming either her husband or her
successor. So thought the members as they assembled, firm in their purpose to withhold a grant of taxes, if need be, in order to compel the queen to do what had to be done.
The situation was all the more urgent in that, by 1566, all of the three leading candidates for the throne had married—unwisely. Mary Stuart had married Darnley, Catherine Grey had married Edward Seymour, and only the year before, in 1565, the "very short, crookbacked and very ugly" Mary Grey had married the "biggest gentleman in the court," the sergeant-porter Thomas Keyes. It was, as Cecil remarked, "an unhappy chance and monstrous," and added the insult of ridicule to the injury of clandestine marriage.
Elizabeth, furious at the marriage, had thrown her little cousin Mary into one prison and the hulking sergeant-porter into another. (Mary would stay there until she was widowed, then would be released to live out her last years in poverty, still, in law, in line for the throne under the will of Henry VIII.) The queen's anger at her other Grey cousin had not mellowed with time. Catherine, her husband and her two babies lived at the T
ower, in surreptitious cohabitation, their cold and forbidding apartments meanly-furnished with the few broken chairs and frayed bedclothes Elizabeth provided. When the plague was at its most deadly in London the family was moved for the sake of their health, but their ordinary Tower quarters were far from hygienic. Catherine insisted on keeping her monkeys and dogs with her, and her keeper complained that they tore her gowns into tatters and befouled the floors. 6
Even before the formal opening of Parliament the members began making trouble, scattering leaflets on the streets intended to rouse public ire against the queen and Cecil. On the first day of the session, they fought among themselves over what strategy to adopt, actually coming to blows. Elizabeth ordered her councilors to speak to the delegates and reassure them of her good intentions, in an effort to defuse their excitement and prevent a confrontation. But the fiery Commons would not be pacified, and in fact they succeeded in persuading the Lords to join them in their campaign to force the vital succession issue.
Hearing this Elizabeth exploded. If there was disloyalty in the House of Lords then the leading peer, Norfolk, must be to blame. She was caustic with the duke, and ended by calling him a traitor. Pembroke blustered in Norfolk's defense. She ought not to treat the duke badly, he told her, "since he and the others were only doing what was fitting for the good of the country, and advising her what was best for her, and if she did not think fit to adopt the advice, it was still their duty to offer it."
Elizabeth told Pembroke he "talked like a swaggering soldier," and
silenced him. She turned to Leicester, knowing that he had failed to defend her in the Lords.
If all the world abandoned her, she said to him accusingly, she had thought he, at least, would not. He would gladly die at her feet, Leicester answered limply. Dying at her feet had nothing to do with the matter at hand, she told the earl, and turned sharply to Northampton, who had the misfortune to be present.
Him she disposed of with a well-aimed personal blow. Why mince words with her over her failure to marry when his own marital affairs were an obvious embarrassment? He had a wife living, yet he wanted to marry someone else—which required an act of Parliament to accomplish. Let him look to his own domestic problems, and leave hers to her. 7
Before any of the buffeted peers could recover themselves she had left them, swearing to herself that she would see them all arrested and confined to their homes. Later she had second thoughts about this extreme measure —after all, she was very fond of all three men, and knew that they were desperately trying to maintain their own credit with their parliamentary colleagues while doing their best to keep her favor. But for some time Leicester, Pembroke and Northampton were forbidden entrance to her privy chamber, and the storm in Parliament went on.
Elizabeth summoned a deputation from both houses and harangued them, leaving no doubt how incensed she was over their presumption in threatening to meddle with the succession. What had she done, she demanded to know, to deserve such trespass against her privilege?
"Was I not born in this realm?" she asked rhetorically. "Is not my kingdom here? Whom have I oppressed? Whom have I enriched to others' harm? What turmoil have I made in this commonwealth that I should be suspected to have no regard to the same?"
She had the succession as much on her mind as they did, she told her audience, but it was a complex matter without an easy solution, since to name an official heir apparent would be to invite conspiracy. She warmed to her subject, and her sentences became diffuse and inelegant. She fell, as usual, to boasting about her own courage and resourcefulness, sounding even more like a "swaggering soldier" than Pembroke had.
"As for my own part, I care not for death; for all men are mortal, and though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom."
Her bravado was provocative, but not definitive. "Since the queen would
not marry," came the parliamentary response, "she ought to be compelled to name her successor." Her refusal to do so could only proceed "from feelings which could only be entertained by weak princes and fainthearted women."
To be called a fainthearted woman was one thing, but a weak prince! That she could not allow. Those she scornfully referred to as the "Protestant gentlemen" in the Commons—those "unbridled persons whose mouth was never snaffled by the rider"—had gone too far. They were "inexperienced schoolboys" handling matters far beyond their competence. They were "devils" intent on bedeviling their sovereign, who deserved better from them. As for the Lords, their collective stupidity hardly needed to be pointed out. The succession, she announced archly, "is an affair of much too great importance to be declared to a knot of harebrains."
In the end, Elizabeth won. She made her usual absolute, and absolutely unconvincing, assurances that she meant to marry, and that was the end of it. She did, however, have to lower the tax burden for that session in order to get her way—and she had to admit that, in practice, she lacked the authority to forbid debate on the succession in the Commons.
The delegates went home, having been bested once again by the tall, spare woman who ruled them—a frail woman whose commanding voice seemed to originate in a reed-thin chest and whose determination was evidently rooted in some power beyond sheer animal vitality. She was amazing, infuriating, intimidating. Her success disturbed them, and not only because it meant prolonging their anxiety over the future security of the realm. She was living proof that, in the phrase of a Venetian ambassador, "statecraft is no business for ladies."
The irony was that, in 1566, Elizabeth had in fact made up her mind to marry the Austrian archduke Charles, and her summoning of Parliament was directly linked to that decision. The diplomatic wooing had been rekindled, with exchanges of envoys and portraits and cautious queries about religion and about the archduke's willingness to come to England to allow Elizabeth to approve him in person. Certainly he seemed personally acceptable; despite old stories about his deformity Elizabeth's envoy Sadler found him to be entirely pleasing in face and physique, a suitable consort in every way. His imperial lineage appealed to Elizabeth's vanity, to that side of her that saw herself as last in a line running "from the creation to Queen Elizabeth." She had once told the French ambassador that, though she loved Leicester, she could not marry him because he had no high name or rank to offer her. "The aspirations towards honor and greatness which are in me," she had said, "cannot suffer him as a companion and a husband." And besides, their relationship had soured.
A really serious and bruising quarrel had arisen between them. Elizabeth had begun to flirt, in her customary heavy-handed and obvious way, with an otherwise inconsequential young chamber gentleman named Thomas Heneage. Leicester was injured; she flirted more industriously than ever. Leicester snubbed and insulted, and lashed out at Heneage, who retaliated in kind. The queen stepped in, and pointedly took the younger man's part. Leicester, never a very strong man emotionally, retired to his chambers adjoining Elizabeth's and did not come out for four days.
Abandoned by the queen, the earl was easy prey, and his enemies crowded quickly in. Sussex took to stalking him with a large armed bodyguard, so that Leicester had to surround himself with an even larger one to protect himself. There might have been bloodshed had the queen not intervened to prevent it. During the holiday season of 1565 the factions declared themselves sartorially. The followers of Norfolk—and his allies Sussex, Heneage and others—were all conspicuous in yellow laces, while Leicester's men wore blue ones. At a court where no detail of dress went unnoticed, the massing of matched laces was tantamount to a declaration of war.
But a more fateful blow was being prepared. The scandal over Leicester's dead wife Amy Robsart had been allowed to slumber while Elizabeth protected her favorite. But now that she had turned away from him the ea
rl's ugly past was revived. Amy's half-brother knew more than he had so far told about the mysterious death, or so he said. It was murder after all, and he had concealed the fact for Leicester's sake. His testimony could send the earl to the block, and Norfolk, Heneage and the others threatened to reopen the case and charge Leicester formally with murder.
Yet Leicester had a potent weapon of his own, calculated to wound Elizabeth cruelly. He began a flirtation with Lettice Knollys, the dazzling, auburn-haired daughter of Francis and Catherine Knollys, universally praised as "one of the best-looking ladies of the court." Lettice was a stunning beauty, more vivid in her coloring than her second cousin Elizabeth and with none of the queen's aloof intellectuality to blunt her allure. Her creamy skin was youthful and unlined, her rich, dark-red hair as thick and lustrous as a young girl's. Lettice was everything Elizabeth had once been and was no longer: young, ripe, nubile. And she was Leicester's sweetheart.
The disloyalty cut deep; so too did the loss of the earl's constant, affectionate presence. Elizabeth was humiliated, her vanity punctured. They quarreled openly, in front of the whole court. She had the last word. "If you think to rule here I will take a course to see you forthcoming. I will have but one mistress and no master." She won the shouting match, but
suffered nonetheless. They wept and made up—after a fashion. Yet the good looks of Heneage and Lettice Knollys continued to be a distraction, and Cecil at least believed that the passionate royal romance had decidedly cooled. He was greatly relieved. Now at last she would marry, he thought, and sensibly. There would be no more talk of Leicester as a husband.
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