After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  Harington arrived at court having completed, on 18 December, his Tract on the Succession to the Crown—a subject on which the pulse of the nation was now said to “beat extremely” but which was strictly forbidden. As Harington had recorded in his tract, Elizabeth had “utterly suppressed the talk of an heir apparent” in the year of his birth, 1561, “saying she would not have her winding sheet set up before her face.” Her concern, he explained, was “that if she should allow and permit men to examine, discuss and publish whose was the best title after her, some would be ready to affirm that title to be good afore hers.”8

  Forty years earlier there had been those who had claimed that Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, had a superior claim to the English throne; others asserted that it belonged to her Protestant cousin Katherine Grey. Both claimants had since died: Katherine in a country house prison in 1568, Mary on the executioner’s block in 1587. But their sons, James VI of Scotland and Lord Beauchamp, had succeeded them as rivals to her throne, together with more recent candidates such as James’s cousin Arbella Stuart and the Infanta Isabella of Spain. The dangers to Elizabeth were such that the publication of any discussion of the succession had been declared an act of treason by Parliament only the previous winter. Her advancing age meant, however, that an heir would soon have to be chosen, if not by her, then by others.

  Harington had dedicated his tract to his preferred choice, James VI, the Protestant son of Mary, Queen of Scots. As the senior descendant of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, and her first husband, James IV, he was Elizabeth’s heir by the usual dynastic rules of primogeniture, but James was far from being the straightforward choice that this suggests.

  The Stuart line of the Kings of Scots was barred from the succession under the will of Henry VIII, which was backed by Act of Parliament. James was also personally excluded under a law dating back to the reign of Edward III precluding those born outside “the allegiance of the realm of England.” His hopes rested on the fact that the claims of his rivals were equally problematic. Elizabeth had declared Katherine Grey’s son, Lord Beauchamp, illegitimate, and, as men had delved ever deeper into the complex question of the right to the throne, the numbers of potential heirs had proliferated. By 1600 the sometime writer, lawyer and spy Thomas Wilson had counted “twelve competitors that gape for the death of that good old princess, the now queen.” 9 Spain, France and the Pope all had their preferred candidates, while the English were divided in their choice by religious belief and contesting ambitions.

  Courtiers feared that the price of Elizabeth’s security during her life would be civil war and foreign invasion on her death—but the future was also replete with possibilities. A new monarch drawn from a weak field would need to acquire widespread support to secure his or her position against rivals. That meant opening up the royal purse: there would be gifts of land, office and title. Harington’s tract was a private gift to James made in the hope of future favor. The gamble was to invest in the winning candidate—for as Thomas Wilson observed, “this crown is not likely to fall for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted.”10

  The Palace of Whitehall, built by Cardinal Wolsey and extended by Henry VIII, sprawled on either side of King Street, the road linking Westminster and Charing Cross. On the western side were the buildings designed for recreation: four covered tennis courts, two bowling alleys, a cockpit, and a gallery for viewing tournaments in the great tiltyard. Up to 12,000 spectators would come to watch Elizabeth’s knights take part in the annual November jousts held to celebrate her accession. When the jousts were over the contestants’ shields were hung in a gallery, where that summer the visiting German Duke of Stettin-Pomerania had been directed to admire the insignia of Elizabeth’s last great favorite, Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex. He had broken fifty-seven lances in the course of fighting fifteen challengers during the Accession Tilts of 1594. There was, however, much more to Essex than his prowess at the tilt. He had represented the aspirations of Harington’s generation, born after Elizabeth became Queen and kept from office by her stifling conservatism.

  Elizabeth is still remembered as the Queen who defied the Armada in 1588, and as the figure of Gloriana encapsulated in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene the following year. But as one court servant warned, this was to see her “like a painted face without a shadow to give it life.”11 Elizabeth had reached the apogee of her reign in the 1580s. Thereafter came a decline that lasted longer than the reigns of her siblings, Mary I and Edward VI, put together. Her victory over the Armada was tarnished by the costs of the continuing war with Spain and the woman behind the divine image had grown old. To Essex’s vast following of young courtiers Elizabeth was a dithering old woman, dominated by her Treasurer, Lord Burghley, and his corrupt son, Sir Robert Cecil. Her motto, “ Semper eadem” (I never change), once perceived as a promise of stability, came to be taken as a challenge.

  When Burghley died in August 1598, Essex hoped to become the new force in Elizabeth’s government but within weeks a long-simmering rebellion in Ireland turned into a war of liberation. Essex, as Elizabeth’s most experienced commander, was made Lord Deputy of Ireland and sent to confront the rebel leader, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Instead, in September 1599, in defiance of royal orders, Essex arranged a truce and returned to court. Elizabeth was furious, and as Essex fell into disgrace he turned his hopes to finding favor with the candidate he hoped would succeed her. In February 1601 he led 300 soldiers and courtiers in a palace revolt to force her to name James VI of Scotland her heir and overthrow Robert Cecil together with his principal allies, Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh. The revolt quickly failed and the Earl was executed, but Essex remained a popular figure in national memory. Stettin’s journal records that ballads dedicated to Essex were being “sung and played on musical instruments all over the country, even in our presence at the royal court though his memory is condemned as that of a man having committed high treason.”12 They mourned England’s “jewel . . . The valiant knight of chivalry,” destroyed, it was said, by the malevolence of the Cecil faction.

  Brave honour graced him still,

  Gallantly, gallantly,

  He ne’er did deed of ill,

  Well it is known

  But Envy, that foul fiend,

  Whose malice ne’er did end

  Hath brought true virtue’s friend

  Unto his thrall.13

  Beneath the smiles of the courtiers as they played cards that Christmas lay the deep bitterness of old enemies: those who had admired Essex and those who had rejoiced in his downfall.

  The gallery above the tiltyard where Essex had jousted was linked to the second group of buildings through a gatehouse over King Street. Here, in the Privy Gardens, thirty-four mythical beasts sat on thirty-four brightly colored poles overlooking the low-railed pathways. The buildings had a similar fairy-tale quality. They were decorated in elaborate paintwork, the Great Hall in checkerwork and the Privy Gallery in black and white grotesques. The theme of these distorted animal, plant and human forms extended into the interior, where they were highlighted with gold on the wood pillars and paneling. The visiting Duke of Stettin thought the ceilings rather low and the rooms gloomy. Elizabeth’s bedroom, which overlooked the Thames, “was very dark” with “but little air.” Nearby in Elizabeth’s cabinet, where she wrote her letters, Stettin observed a marvelous silver inkstand and “also a Latin prayer book that the queen had written nicely with her own hand, and, in a beautiful preface, had dedicated to her father.”14

  Harington had been granted an audience with the Queen soon after his arrival at Whitehall. As usual, he was escorted from the Presence Chamber, where courtiers waited bareheaded to present their petitions, along a dark passage and into the Privy Chamber, where his godmother awaited him. 15 A mural by Hans Holbein the Younger dominated the room. The massive figure of Henry VIII stood, hands on hips, gazing unflinchingly at the viewer. H
is third wife, Jane Seymour, the mother of his son, Edward VI, was depicted on his left; above him was his mother, Elizabeth of York, with his father, Henry VII. The mural boasted the continuity of the Tudor dynasty, a silent reproach to the childless spinster Harington now saw before him. Contemporaries remarked often on Elizabeth’s similarity to her grandfather. When she was young they saw it in her narrow face and the beautiful long hands of which she was so proud. As she grew older she developed her grandfather’s wattle, a “great goggle throat” that hung from her chin.16 But she did not now look merely old. She appeared seriously ill.

  Harington was shocked by what he saw and frightened for the future. Elizabeth had been increasingly melancholic since the Essex revolt, but he was now convinced that she was dying. He confided his thoughts in a letter to the one person he trusted: his wife, Mary Rogers, who was at home in Somerset caring for their nine children.

  Sweet Mall,

  I herewith send thee what I would God none did know, some ill bodings of the realm and its welfare. Our dear Queen, my royal godmother, and this state’s natural mother, doth now bear signs of human infirmity, too fast for that evil which we will get by her death, and too slow for that good which she shall get by her releasement from pains and misery. Dear Mall, How shall I speak what I have seen, or what I have felt?—Thy good silence in these matters emboldens my pen . . . Now I will trust thee with great assurance, and whilst thou dost brood over thy young ones in the chamber, thou shalt read the doings of thy grieving mate in the court.17

  Elizabeth received Harington seated on a raised platform. Her “little black husband,” John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose plain clerical garb contrasted so starkly with her bejeweled gowns and spangled wigs, was beside her. 1 It was believed that Elizabeth used her glittering costumes to dazzle people so they “would not so easily discern the marks of age,” but if so, she no longer considered them enough. Increasingly afraid that any intimation of mortality would attract dangerous speculation on her successor, she had taken to filling out her sunken cheeks with fine cloths and was also “continually painted, not only all over the face, but her very neck and breast also, and that the same was in some places near half an inch thick.”18 There were some things, however, that makeup could not hide. When Elizabeth spoke it was apparent that her teeth were blackened and several were missing. Foreign ambassadors complained it made her difficult to understand if she spoke quickly. But during Harington’s audience this was not a problem; her throat was so sore and her state of mind so troubled that she could barely speak at all.

  The rebellion in Ireland that had cost Elizabeth so much in men, money and peace of mind was near its end. The archrebel Tyrone was offering his submission, but it brought Elizabeth no joy; memories of Essex’s betrayals were crowding in. She whispered to Whitgift to ask Harington if he had seen Tyrone. Harington had witnessed Essex making the truce with Tyrone in 1599 and later met him in person. He still trembled at the memory of Elizabeth’s fury with him about it when he had returned to England, and he now answered her carefully, saying only, “I had seen him with the Lord Deputy.” At this, Elizabeth looked up with an expression of anger and grief and replied, “Oh, now it mindeth me that you was one who saw this man elsewhere,” and she began to weep and strike her breast. “She held in her hand a golden cup, which she often put to her lips; but in sooth her heart seemed too full to lack more filling,” Harington told his wife.

  As the audience drew to a close Elizabeth rallied and she asked her godson to come back to her chamber at seven o’clock and bring some of the lighthearted verses and witty prose for which he was famous. Harington dutifully returned that evening and read Elizabeth some verses. She smiled once but told him, “When thou dost find creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters. Thou seeest my bodily meat doth not suit me well; I have eaten but one ill-tasted cake since yesternight.”19 The following day Harington saw Elizabeth again. A number of men had arrived at her request only to be dismissed in anger for appearing without an appointment: “But who shall say that ‘Your Majesty hath forgotten’?” Harington asked Mall.

  No one dared to voice openly the seriousness of Elizabeth’s condition but Harington did find “some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get.”20 He told his wife that he had attended a dinner with the Archbishop and that many of Elizabeth’s own clerics appeared to be “well anointed with the oil of gladness.” But the spectacle of Elizabeth’s misery amid the feasting pricked Harington’s conscience. In his Tract on the Succession he had wasted no opportunities to dwell on the unpopularity of her government and to contrast her failings as an aged Queen with James VI’s youth, vigor and masculinity. Now he could not suppress memories of all the kindness she had shown him; “her watchings over my youth, her liking to my free speech and admiration of my little learning . . . have rooted such love, such dutiful remembrance of her princely virtues, that to turn askant from her condition with tearless eyes, would stain and foul the spring and fount of gratitude.”21

  Harington’s eyes, however, tear-filled or not, remained as fixed on the future as those of everyone else, and he was comforted by the realization that his examination of the succession issue had been completed with exquisite timing.

  The question of the succession had dominated the history of the Tudor dynasty and would shape events to come. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, had been a rival claimant to a reigning monarch until his army killed Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victory came at the end of a long period of civil strife in which Harington’s great-grandfather, James Harington, was allied with the losing side—an error that cost the family much of their land in the north of England. Henry was fearful that such families would rise against him if a rival candidate for his crown emerged and so he worked hard to achieve a secure succession. He had two sons to ensure the future of his line and he bolstered his claim by creating a mythology that anchored the Tudors in a legendary past.

  Henry VII claimed that his ancestor Owen Tudor was a direct descendant of Cadwallader, supposedly the last of the British kings. This made the Tudors the heirs of King Arthur and through them, it was said, Arthur would return. 22 Henry even named his eldest son Arthur, but the boy died at age fifteen, not long after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was thus his second son, Henry VIII, who inherited the crown, as well as his brother’s bride. Henry and Catherine had a daughter, the future Mary I, but no sons. Henry saw this lack of a male heir as an apocalyptic failure, fearing that the inheritance of the throne by a mere queen regnant could plunge England back into civil war. He became convinced that God had punished him for having married his brother’s wife and sought an annulment from the Pope. When the Pope, under pressure from Catherine’s Hapsburg nephew, Charles V, denied it to him, he made himself the head of the Church in England. Justifications for Henry’s new title were found in the various “histories” of Arthur, but his actions had coincided with the revolution in religious opinion in Europe begun by the German monk Martin Luther. One of Henry’s chief researchers was a keen follower of Luther’s teachings, and although Henry had once written against Luther he chose to reward Thomas Cranmer’s service in “discovering” the royal supremacy by making him Archbishop of Canterbury. Centuries of Catholic culture and belief were to be overturned in favor of new Protestant ideas as Henry divorced Catherine, declared Mary illegitimate and married “one common stewed whore, Anne Boleyn,” as the Abbot of Whitby called her.

  The Reformation changed England forever. The simple fact that the country was no longer part of the supranational Roman Church encouraged a stronger sense of separateness from the Continent and enabled Henry to develop a full-blooded nationalism to which his dynasty was central. Elizabeth, the child of this revolution, was not, however, her father’s heir for long. Anne Boleyn was executed before her daughter was three years old and Elizabeth, already a bastard in the eyes o
f the Catholic Church, was declared illegitimate by her father in order that any children of the marriage to his new love, Jane Seymour, should take precedence over her, as Elizabeth had once done over her sister, Mary. When Jane Seymour had her son, Edward, in 1537, it seemed to Henry that the question of the succession was answered. As Henry had no further children by the three wives who succeeded Jane Seymour, he eventually restored Elizabeth and Mary in line to the succession after Edward, in default of Edward’s issue or any further children by his last wife, Catherine Parr. His decision was confirmed in the Act of Succession in 1544–the year before Elizabeth made her father the gift of the prayer book that the German Duke later saw on her desk.

  The Act of Succession allowed the King to alter the succession by testament, that is, in his will. This was significant, for Henry’s will wrote into law who Elizabeth’s heirs should be if all his children died without issue. Henry had sought Elizabeth’s heirs among the descendants of his sisters, Margaret of Scotland and Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. Margaret, the eldest, had married James IV of Scotland, who was killed fighting the English at Flodden in 1513. Their son, James V, died after losing a later battle against the English and left his infant daughter, Mary Stuart, as Queen of Scots. She should have been Elizabeth’s heir under the laws of primogeniture, but Henry’s will disinherited the Stuart line in favor of that of the Suffolks in vengeance for the Stuart enmity to England and the Scots’ refusal to marry their Queen to his son.