by John Guy
A significant number of the sources used in this book have not been properly read and digested, or even adequately catalogued, since the archives were first imperfectly arranged in the 1850s and 1860s. Among them are some thirty of Elizabeth’s unpublished letters – and drafts of many more – which offer new or hidden insights into both her methods of working and, often, her private thoughts. The policy documents illustrating Elizabeth’s profile as a war leader are scarcely better explored, even though her involvement in a fast-moving, pan-European crisis is absolutely central to establishing the frame in which any real understanding of her character and qualities as a ruler must be set.
Some aspects of this book will seem strangely unfamiliar to readers of Camden, Froude, Neale or Strachey. For that I make no apology. The last thing I wanted to do was to perpetuate the false or incomplete images of Elizabeth coming from their well-thumbed classics. Instead, the woman who will emerge from the pages of this book is an Elizabeth rarely glimpsed before. She was never the unstoppable juggernaut whose orders could not be challenged simply because she was queen, but nor, as Froude imagined, were her decisions the result of a masterful exercise in political ventriloquism. She was neither a triumphant Gloriana, a Hollywood heroine who saved her country single-handedly from the might of Spain, nor was she Strachey’s sexually frustrated spinster, governed by lust, jealousy, passion, vanity. Notably, she was not Neale’s ‘affable prince’, the woman who intoxicated country and Court alike with her regal intimacy and the intensity and effervescence of her spirit.
Such simplistic, diametrically opposed views of the same woman turn her into a caricature. The reality is more complex.
Introduction: A Virgin Queen
Henry VIII divorced his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, in the 1530s and married Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, for love and for sons. Anne was the love of his life. He simply adored her. She was his ‘darling’, his ‘own sweetheart’. To her, he penned soul-baring letters; for her, he sacrificed his chief minister Cardinal Wolsey. He then broke with the pope and sent Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, and his close friend and ally Bishop John Fisher to shameful deaths – all because they believed that what he was doing was morally and profoundly wrong.1 In return, he expected Anne to produce the legitimate male heir he craved. Instead, she gave birth to Elizabeth.
So utterly convinced was Henry that Anne would give him a boy, he chose Edward and Henry as the child’s names and ordered dozens of letters to be written in advance, ready to dispatch to foreign rulers and the nobility, announcing the ‘deliverance and bringing forth of a prince’. When the news came that the baby was a girl, these had to be altered one by one. There was a hurried, improvised attempt to change the word ‘prince’ into ‘princess’, but there was only enough room to squeeze in a single ‘s’.2 Thus, even as she took her very first breath, the future Queen Elizabeth was considered to be second best.
Henry never attempted to conceal his views on female monarchy.3 With his yearning for a son topping his agenda, he cautioned that if a woman ‘shall chance to rule, she cannot continue long without a husband, which by God’s law must then be her governor and head, and so finally shall direct the realm’.4 To him, power was quintessentially masculine and a female ruler dangerously vulnerable. An unmarried woman would be unsuited to be a war leader, he believed, and when, later, he did finally concede that a female might succeed him, he sought to dictate precisely how she would be permitted to marry.5
He expected his only legitimate son, Edward, born in 1537 to his third wife, Jane Seymour, to live to a ripe old age. Just in case, however, he made provisions for the succession of his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, in his last will. If Edward were to die without an heir, each might, in turn, succeed him, but each would lose her place if she chose a husband who lacked the ‘assent and consent’ of certain privy councillors.6 If both were to be disqualified by virtue of an unsanctioned marriage or to die, then the throne would pass to the so-called ‘Suffolk’ line, the descendants of Henry’s nieces Frances and Eleanor Brandon. Frances and Eleanor were the daughters of his younger and favourite sister, Mary, the widow of Louis XII of France, who had taken the much-married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, as her second husband.7
Edward VI was a thoroughly healthy child until, at the age of fourteen, his immune system was shattered by a severe attack of measles. The following spring he succumbed either to tuberculosis or, more likely, given the description of his symptoms, to a feverish cold, leading to bronchial pneumonia. Keen to spend as much of his time as possible on astronomy, hunting, archery and other martial sports, and on rebuilding the English navy, Edward was wary of women and even more determined than his father not to be succeeded by one. He convinced himself (or perhaps was convinced by others) that his half-sisters’ illegitimacy – both had been bastardized by Act of Parliament – disqualified them.8
When Edward first began to jot down a template for his own succession settlement, he still envisaged that, before his death, Frances Brandon might have a son: only at the last moment did he decide to make her eldest daughter, Jane Grey, queen. In June 1553, when he knew he was dying, he put aside his scruples and ‘devised’ the Crown ‘to the L[ady] Jane and her heirs male’, followed by her sisters, Katherine and Mary, and their heirs male, and, finally, by the eldest son of their cousin Margaret Clifford, daughter of Eleanor Brandon.9
But for all Edward’s efforts to make Jane Grey the lawful queen, she would never be crowned. Ruling for only nine days, from the moment her accession was proclaimed until her imprisonment in the Tower of London, she was easily toppled when Henry VIII’s elder daughter, Mary, led a swift and effective counter-coup. Capturing the throne at the age of thirty-seven, Mary Tudor was England’s first female monarch. The only other woman to come close to ruling in her own right had been King Henry I’s daughter Matilda, to whom he had tried to bequeath the Crown in 1135, but she had been forced to flee from London on the eve of her coronation, when the citizens turned against her. She had lost the throne to her cousin Stephen, leading to a long and bitter civil war.
Passionately committed to reversing her father’s break with the Catholic Church, Mary, who, as Katherine of Aragon’s daughter, keenly felt her half-Spanish identity, quickly engineered a marriage to Philip, the son of her powerful cousin the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Already ruling as regent in Spain for his gout-stricken father, Philip would shortly succeed (as King Philip II) to the sovereignty of Spain, the Netherlands and the Spanish-Habsburg lands in Italy and the New World. By choosing a husband early in her reign, Mary hoped to deflect the attacks of those who opposed female rule on principle. But her choice badly backfired. According to the marriage treaties, Philip was supposed to be nothing more than a king consort. He was not to exercise independent rights of patronage or to interfere in defence or foreign policy, to make appointments or to spend the Crown’s money. In practice, he was soon doing all of these things, despite living for much of the time in Brussels.10
Styled ‘King Philip I of England’, Mary’s husband was to all intents and purposes co-ruler. In official portraits he was painted seated in the more powerful position, at his wife’s right hand, under a floating crown.11 Despite the marriage treaties, Mary repeatedly deferred to him, out of what she described as ‘wifely duty’. Although this worked tolerably well in years of peace, once Mary’s much-vaunted pregnancies proved false and Philip had dragged England into an unpopular war against France, which he directed from the Continent, her authority collapsed. When she died in November 1558, from a prolactinoma, a non-cancerous tumour of the pituitary gland which causes pseudo-pregnancies, migraines, depression and the onset of blindness, she was mourned only by her innermost circle.
• • •
Upon hearing that his wife’s last hours had come, Philip sent his roving ambassador and Captain of the Spanish Guard, the Count of Feria, to England to sound out Elizabeth in an effort to salvage Spanish inte
rests. After a relatively brief audience, the shrewd Feria judged the incoming queen to be ‘a very vain and clever woman’:
She must have been thoroughly schooled in the manner in which her father conducted his affairs, and I am very much afraid that she will not be well disposed in matters of religion, for I see her inclined to govern through men who are believed to be heretics and I am told that the women around her definitely are . . . She puts great store by the people and is very confident that they are all on her side – which is certainly true. She declares that it was the people who put her in her present position . . . She is determined to be governed by no one.12
Elizabeth meant to show her steel from the outset. The trouble was this was easier said than done. To assume that a woman ruler could exercise power simply by being crowned is a fundamental mistake. As the first unmarried queen of England, Elizabeth quickly found herself occupying the hinterland between a man’s and a woman’s world. Often it took a battle royal to impose her will on even her most loyal privy councillors.13 When John Aylmer, once Jane Grey’s tutor, published a defence of female monarchy in 1559, his main argument was that a queen was acceptable as a ruler despite her gender, chiefly because she did not call the shots. Aylmer prefaced his remarks with the general observation that women rulers were ‘weak in nature, feeble in body, soft in courage, unskilful in practice, not terrible to the enemy’. He (or his printer), remembering Philip and Mary, then added a pithy one-liner: ‘A woman may rule as a magistrate, and yet obey as a wife.’14
Those biographers who have tried to argue that Elizabeth was accorded the status of an honorary man by virtue of her royal rank, or that monarchy as an institution is androgynous, have ducked the issue. England in the sixteenth century was a highly patriarchal society in which women, including royal ones, were viewed as subordinate to men. None of Elizabeth’s contemporaries, other than a few Italian intellectuals such as Torquato Tasso, believed that a woman’s high rank could trump her gender. Deeply entrenched psychologically, such attitudes would find their most vehement expression in Elizabeth’s military commanders, who would seek to ignore or deliberately misinterpret her orders.15 At no time was a woman ruler’s vulnerability more exposed, they maintained, echoing Henry VIII’s starting point, than when she was beset by a hostile power or when national security or the succession were in doubt. On such matters, Elizabeth could not rely even on Burghley, her chief minister, to take her side: ‘God send Our Mistress a husband and by him a son that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession’ was his nagging, infuriating refrain.16
One weapon Elizabeth did have was language. No ruler has ever better understood the relationship of words to power. From the moment her first Parliament was summoned, she would seek to insulate herself from criticism by invoking the rhetorical trope that she had the support of the people. As she had informed Feria, ‘it was the people who put her in her present position’ and she ‘is very confident that they are all on her side’. Much of her self-belief and all of her presentational skills came from studying classical oratory as a teenager with brilliant wordsmiths such as the famous Roger Ascham, not from mingling with the real-life ‘people’, for whom she did not have much time and whose name she regularly took in vain.
And yet, for all her powers of persuasion, not even her kinsfolk trusted her to rule on her own when she first came to the throne. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a cousin of her stepmother, Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and last queen, had known Elizabeth since she was a teenager. ‘You must’, he cautioned her in 1559 or thereabouts, ‘beware of womanish levity, for where the king [sic] governeth not in severity and prudence, there doth emulation and ambition sow their seeds.’17
Using honeyed words and skilful political chicanery, Elizabeth’s advisers tried to convince her that she had to play the game by their rules, and of all the men who surrounded her and sought to bend her to their ways, there was no greater master than William Cecil, Lord Burghley – this in spite of his many protestations to foreign ambassadors that he was no more than the queen’s ‘humble servant’. Turning thirty-nine in her coronation year, he had a pink complexion and was short and wiry with a thin face, grey eyes, brown hair and a beard and moustache already flecked with grey. Three warts were visible on his right cheek. The son of one of Henry VIII’s yeomen of the wardrobe, who had profited from favourable grants of ex-monastic lands and founded an ancestral estate near Stamford in Lincolnshire, Burghley was a Cambridge graduate with a small army of highly educated protégés at his disposal, all, like himself, steeped in classical learning and the teaching of the Protestant reformers. Marinated in the ways of the Court since Edward’s reign, when he first was made a privy councillor, he had offered his services to Elizabeth as her backstairs fixer and had become the surveyor of her estates. Once she was queen and she had made him her principal secretary, he coaxed the then highly inexperienced twenty-five-year-old into a decidedly more Protestant Religious Settlement than she would later have countenanced, doing so simply by packing the committee responsible for drafting it with his own nominees.18 That same year, 1559, he got his way again by threatening to resign if she refused to send ships and troops to Scotland to help expel an occupying French garrison at the port of Leith and to assist a group of insurgent noblemen who, fired by the Calvinist ideologue John Knox, were seeking to bring about a full-blooded Protestant revolution in the country. He even had the cheek to tell her that ‘to serve Your Majesty in anything that myself cannot allow must needs be an unprofitable service’. That phrase speaks volumes for his working methods. And Elizabeth had no real choice but to swallow her pride, because by then he was far too valuable to lose.19
The next year, Burghley would severely reprimand Robert Jones, Nicholas Throckmorton’s secretary, for talking privately with Elizabeth about matters touching on religion. ‘He wished I had not told the Queen’s Majesty a matter of such weight,’ Jones reported, ‘being too much for a woman’s knowledge.’20 Although a Protestant in her private devotions since her early teenage years, a position that had put her life in danger when her half-sister Mary returned the kingdom to Catholicism, Elizabeth was not sufficiently zealous for Burghley. She loathed the pope and rejected the Catholic doctrine of the Mass. But she found just as abhorrent the Calvinists’ claims – Burghley secretly admired them – that Catholics could or should be excluded from the throne as idolaters. Just as vehemently, she insisted that representative assemblies such as Parliaments should have no voice in such matters.21
While England had a Protestant queen for the moment, when Elizabeth suffered a near-fatal attack of smallpox in October 1562, a panic ensued. It was a watershed, reminding everyone that she was mortal. She survived, but the following year, and again in 1566, Burghley covertly masterminded a pressure group inside and outside the House of Commons in a thinly veiled attempt to force her into marriage or into naming an heir, so that the succession of a Protestant candidate would be assured. Determined to gain control on this critical question, Elizabeth’s chief minister threatened to deny her the funds she needed in taxes if she refused. He even began making plans for Parliament to create a statutory mechanism by which, if she suddenly died, the throne would pass only to a Protestant, excluding all Catholics from consideration, however exalted their rank.22
Furious at his brazen attempt to overstep his authority, Elizabeth drafted a closing speech for use at the end of the 1566 session of Parliament, denouncing the ‘wrangling subjects’ who had tried to force her hand. Except, when it was time to deliver the speech, she lost her nerve and sent Burghley’s brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon, to deliver it on her behalf, handing him a version that left out the word ‘wrangling’, as the final manuscript of her speech makes plain.23
• • •
The psychological difficulties Elizabeth faced as a ruling monarch are thrown into a sharper focus when the physical setting of her Court is understood. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII had greatly en
larged the monarch’s personal living spaces. While still giving audiences and dining in state in the Presence Chamber, Henry VII had added a new series of rooms known collectively as the Privy Chamber to his principal palaces to create a more intimate and secure environment for himself. Henry VIII later expanded these spaces in a massive programme of building works financed by the confiscation of abbey lands, turning them into a labyrinthine sequence of rooms and galleries filled with art treasures.24 Their respective wives lived in completely separate, self-contained ‘sides’ of the royal palaces staffed by their own officers.
As he steadily aged, Henry VIII had gradually retreated from the Privy Chamber into the still more intimate world of the inner Bedchamber, otherwise known as the ‘secret lodgings’.25 There, largely defying the tradition that he should dine in state, he ate his meals informally, followed events occurring at home and abroad intently, even during his last illness, and dictated and signed his letters. Policy was settled only after he had summoned and closely questioned his advisers on the underlying issues. On matters he cared most about, such as religious policy or foreign affairs, he would read the key documents himself thoroughly before making a final decision.26
When Elizabeth moved into Whitehall Palace shortly after Mary Tudor’s death, she inherited her father’s almost bewildering hierarchy of interconnecting rooms and galleries.27 After the Great Hall, where plays and entertainments were staged in the late afternoons or early evenings on days of festival, the sequence continued with the ceremonial Presence Chamber, then the Privy Chamber, with its crystal fountain and stupendous dynastic mural frescoed by Hans Holbein the Younger, followed by the outer and inner Bedchamber.28 Access was controlled by guards and ushers operating under the overall control of the Captain of the Guard, the Lord Chamberlain and the two chief gentlemen of the Privy Chamber. Superficially, little had changed since her father’s time, except that, unless Elizabeth was holding audiences there, her Privy Chamber and Bedchamber were predominantly feminine spaces, the inner Bedchamber exclusively so.
