All the Queen's Men (3 page)

Sir James Croft and Sir William St Loe both survived their ordeal to take up important positions in the royal household when Elizabeth became Queen. She invariably rewarded those who had shown loyalty to her during her formative years, particularly in such desperate circumstances as her incarceration in the Tower. Sir James Croft was made Captain of Berwick, the key frontier town on the border with Scotland and later promoted to the Court post of Comptroller of the Household. He remained with Elizabeth for many years and in 1588 he was one of her negotiators with the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands, vainly trying to avert war with Spain. Sir James Croft, however, was always considered pro-Spanish and was even suspected of being an informer. Sir William St Loe was subsequently given the highly prestigious position of Captain of the Queen's Guard and later became the third husband of the formidable ‘Bess of Hardwick', the builder of Hardwick Hall, one of the greatest of all Elizabethan houses situated just north of Derby.

Lord William Howard's support during her hour of need was rewarded by Elizabeth – she retained him as a Privy Councillor when she acquired the throne, while his son Charles was subsequently given command of the English Fleet against the Spanish Armada and later became the 1st Earl of Nottingham, one of relatively few peers which the Queen created throughout her reign. Edward Courtenay had also been confined in the Tower at the same time as Elizabeth. He was released in 1555 and went into exile on the continent but died in Italy the following year.

After a couple of very anxious months confined within the Tower, Elizabeth was taken to Woodstock in Oxfordshire to reside in a small house belonging to Queen Mary which stood in grounds now occupied by Blenheim Palace. Here Elizabeth found herself in the strict custody of the highly conscientious Sir Henry Bedingfield, a hitherto obscure country squire who was to take his duties so seriously that he would follow the princess around everywhere like a persistent guard dog. While this drove Elizabeth to distraction it was infinitely preferable to life in the Tower. The princess subsequently bore Sir Henry no malice whatsoever, for when he appeared at Court after she became Queen she would jokingly greet him as ‘my gaoler', teasing him that if she ever had an important prisoner who needed close observation then she would know where to come!

After nearly a year in confinement at Woodstock, Sir Henry was commanded by Queen Mary to bring Princess Elizabeth to Hampton Court. Elizabeth's audience with the Queen was considerably delayed in the wishful hope that the princess might find the suspense unbearable and confess all. When summoned after several weeks of waiting, Elizabeth knelt meekly before the still suspicious Mary and was able to achieve an uneasy reconciliation in spite of giving no confession or even the vestige of an apology. This was a vital and anxious moment for Elizabeth and one she needed to handle extremely carefully to avoid being returned to the Tower, but finally Elizabeth was permitted to return to Hatfield where she spent the last three years of Mary's reign. While further plots against Queen Mary were frequently mounted, they always failed and numerous heretics were burnt at the stake at Smithfield in London, Oxford and elsewhere. Among those to perish amid the flames at Oxford in 1555 were the two ultra-Protestant Bishops Latimer and Ridley, to be followed the subsequent year by the aged and very frail Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who had been godfather at Elizabeth's christening at Greenwich more than twenty years earlier and had survived the turbulent reigns of both Henry VIII and Edward VI.

‘Be of good comfort Master Ridley, and play the man,' cried Latimer as the flames began to engulf him, ‘we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'
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Bishop Latimer's death was mercifully quick but Ridley's suffering proved long and agonizing. Both the elderly Nicholas Ridley, formerly Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, whose bishopric had been Worcester, were tried for heresy after publicly preaching against Catholicism. Ridley had denounced both Mary and Elizabeth as bastards before a congregation which included the Mayor of London.

Thomas Cranmer had been Henry VIII's Archbishop of Canterbury and embodied that bewildering blend of idealist and opportunist so often prevalent in the Tudor era. He had originally ingratiated himself with Henry, when, as an unknown lecturer in divinity at Cambridge and friend of the Boleyn family, he had come up with the ingenious idea of submitting the King's claim for divorce from Queen Catherine to the major European universities. When the majority of these august seats of learning surprisingly told Henry exactly what he wanted to hear, the delighted King appointed the young Cranmer first as ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire and shortly afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He had been married twice, and since marriage of the clergy was illegal in England at that time, Cranmer's second marriage had to be kept well hidden – it was even rumoured that when the archbishop was on the move his wife accompanied him as part of the luggage in a large trunk!
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It was Cranmer who pronounced Henry's marriage with Queen Catherine null and void, supported the break from Rome and the king's desire to make Elizabeth rather than Mary his legitimate heir. Not surprisingly, when Mary became queen, Cranmer's days were numbered, particularly as he had introduced the Book of Common Prayer in English among a welter of Protestant reforms during the short but eventful reign of Elizabeth's half-brother Edward VI.

By the time Mary came to the throne, Cranmer was an old man, white-haired and bearded. The Protestant flame within him seemingly dimmed, he initially recanted and declared all other Protestants should renounce their faith and revert to Catholicism. However, Cranmer recovered his courage to preach a final sermon at St Mary's, Oxford, which bravely denounced the Pope as the enemy of Christ. When the time came for him to die, he stumbled to the stake and thrust the hand that had signed his recantation into the fire so that it burnt first.

Cranmer had been Elizabeth's godfather and chaplain to her mother Anne Boleyn. Had it not been for his death at the hands of Queen Mary, he could well have lived to be Elizabeth's first Archbishop of Canterbury. However, the princess was in a precarious position herself at the time and unable to help him in any way. Cranmer lived on in the hearts and minds of the Elizabethan age as a man of almost saint-like qualities, a man to inspire Elizabeth's successful efforts in the lasting establishment of the Church of England, one of the major achievements of her reign and something of which Cranmer would have whole-heartedly approved had he lived to witness it.

The barbaric deaths of prominent clergy such as Cramner, Latimer and Ridley together with some three hundred other Protestant martyrs during Mary's reign of terror ensured the hatred of Catholicism in England that was to follow, with unfortunate consequences for Catholic citizens who were loyal to their country, regardless of their faith. Mary unwittingly created a public perception in England that identified Roman Catholicism with foreign interference, ruthless persecution and traitorous practice. It was an image that was to haunt English Catholics for centuries to come.

Public burnings would rightly be condemned as appalling atrocities in today's society. In the context of a far more brutal sixteenth century, they were regarded as a fitting penalty for the crime of heresy and a large number of Catholics were burnt at the stake during the second half of that century when the Protestants were once more in the ascendancy. So-called ‘Merrie England' had its dark side: other forms of execution included the horrific sentence of being ‘hung, drawn and quartered', and the severed heads perpetually displayed on London Bridge were a gruesome reminder of a less compassionate age.

Queen Mary must surely go down in history as one of the saddest queens, suffering humiliation and deprivation during her childhood just like Elizabeth, but without any of the subsequent glory. She saw her mother, Catherine of Aragon, callously cast aside for Elizabeth's mother, the younger Anne Boleyn, while Mary was declared a bastard and no longer welcomed at Court. She and her mother were banished from the royal palaces and separated; they never saw each other again and were forced to live in much humbler circumstances in the country. Mary was sixteen years old at this time and therefore much more aware of events around her than Elizabeth, who had been a baby when Henry tired of Anne Boleyn. Catherine died of cancer at the age of fifty, her chaplain and Mary's tutor were both burnt at the stake and Mary's best friend, the Countess of Salisbury, was also executed, leaving Mary to an even lonelier existence.

By the time Mary acquired the throne in 1553, she was nearly thirty-eight, ten years older than Philip of Spain whom she chose to marry shortly after becoming queen, thereby making herself deeply unpopular with her subjects, many of whom were highly suspicious of both Catholics and foreigners. Philip later became King of Spain and Elizabeth's greatest foe.

A portrait of Mary by the Flemish artist Antonio Mor, possibly painted to enable Philip to preview his prospective bride, depicts a woman of no great beauty with a short-sighted stare and a faintly disgruntled expression, the mouth small and thin-lipped. Mor was known for his realistic likenesses, an artistic quality not to be appreciated by Elizabeth following her succession. A portrait of Mary by Hans Eworth, Mary's official court painter, which can now be seen in the National Portrait Gallery, conveys a similar image. In reality, England's last Catholic queen was short and to Spanish eyes, rather dowdy. She had a disconcertingly masculine voice, low-pitched and rather hoarse. Hardly surprisingly, it was not long before Philip left England never to return. The only man in the whole of her life who meant anything to Mary had quickly deserted her. Abandoned by both her husband and the people of her realm, Mary was to die at the age of forty-two from the same disease that had killed her mother. Having waited many years to ascend the throne, she achieved little of note during her short reign apart from acquiring the nickname ‘Bloody Mary', the term by which posterity most remembers her.

The reigns of both Edward and Mary were a disastrous period for England, eleven years of further rapid decline in the nation's financial fortunes, leaving the treasury severely depleted and the country plunged deeply in debt. The windfall provided by the dissolution of the monasteries had long since disappeared through economic mismanagement, necessitating heavy borrowing at prohibitively high interest rates on the Antwerp money market. It was written of Edward's days on the throne: ‘The misery of the people and the moral and social anarchy by which the nation was disintegrated . . . the government was corrupt, the courts of law were venal. The trading classes cared only to get rich. The multitude were mutinous from oppression.' Circumstances were not to improve appreciably in Mary's time.

In the meantime, Spain was reaping huge financial benefits from the exploits of the conquistadors in the New World. Colonizers such as Cortés and Pizarro had subdued the Inca and Aztec Empires in Central and Southern America and discovered untold riches. This resulted in vast amounts of gold and silver being shipped across the Atlantic by Spanish galleons, enabling Spain to appear at face value, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the whole of western Europe. England had achieved nothing remotely similar and had to exist within its own meagre internal resources.

Meanwhile, France was enjoying a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity following the end of the Hundred Years War and had enthusiastically embraced the full flowering of the Renaissance. Nowhere was this better reflected than in the magnificent châteaux that were appearing along the length of the Loire Valley in the first half of the sixteenth century. Masterpieces were constructed such as Chambord and Amboise where King François I of France had employed Leonardo da Vinci as his architect, Blois where he was married and Chenonceaux, which was given by Henry II of France, the son of François I, to his mistress Diane de Poitiers, only to be recovered by Henry's wife, the all-powerful matriarch Catherine de Medici, when Henry was killed in a jousting tournament in 1559, the year after Elizabeth had inherited the English throne from Mary. Catherine then became Regent of France and was destined to have considerable diplomatic dealings with Elizabeth.

No equivalent architecture appeared in England during this glorious period of creativity across the Channel. Thus England was outstripped both economically and culturally by its principal western European rivals and was in grave danger of becoming an irrelevant backwater, an offshore island of no great consequence to its richer and more sophisticated neighbours in continental Europe.

England had become a sad and bewildered nation, its citizens frightened and confused, ruled by Mary, an embittered and discontented monarch whose husband, having grown quickly disenchanted with her, left England and went first to the Netherlands and then returned to Spain. The Netherlands had become a Spanish possession when Philip's father, Charles V, decided to retire to a monastery in 1556 and abdicated in favour of his son. Charles was an expert linguist, reputed to speak to God in Spanish, to women in Italian, converse with men in French while addressing his horse in German.

Mary imagined herself to be pregnant, but her hopes proved groundless; in reality she had a tumour from which she eventually died. She suffered another devastating setback when Calais, the last fragment of a once extensive English Empire in France that had stretched from the Channel to the Pyrenees, surrendered to French troops in January 1558. The town had been an English possession for many centuries and its loss represented yet another major blow to England's dwindling international reputation. It seemed that Mary could do no right. She had lost her husband and her people's affection, she had forfeited the nation's pride and was losing the will to live.

All this time, Elizabeth watched and waited, careful to do nothing provocative yet remaining attentive to anything of material significance. It was during this long period of waiting at Hatfield that Elizabeth had first become acquainted with William Cecil, the man who was later to become her Chief Minister. She had learned the importance of maintaining control of herself and all of those around her and to trust only in her own judgement. In the future she was determined that nobody should control her in any way, even if this meant sacrificing her own personal happiness.