The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (33 page)

For the Archbishop of York and the rest of the Bishops refused to perform the Office, out of a suspicion and jealous fear of the Romish Religion, which both her first breeding up in the Protestant religion had stricken them into, and also for that she had very lately forbidden the Bishop in saying Mass to lift up the Host to be adored, and permitted the litany, with Epistle and Gospel, to be read in the vulgar tongue; which they held for the most heinous sins.
³

Ignoring this slight, Elizabeth was triumphant and showed her delight to the crowds that lined the route of her Coronation procession, laughing and speaking with those who wished her well.
⁴
Her cousin Catherine Carey and her husband, Sir Francis Knollys, were also able to be present to wish her well.

Catherine returned to England with her family shortly after Elizabeth’s accession. The affection between the cousins was unaffected by their separation, with Elizabeth appointing Catherine as the chief lady of her Privy Chamber on 3 January 1559.
⁵
On 19 January Francis was appointed to the Privy Council, whose role was to advise the queen, as well as becoming Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household. That same month the queen also appointed Catherine’s daughter, Lettice, as a gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, while a younger daughter, Elizabeth, and Catherine’s niece and namesake, another Catherine Carey, were made maids of the court.
⁶
Philadelphia, another daughter of Elizabeth’s cousin Henry Carey, also received an appointment as a maid of the queen early in the reign.
⁷

On her accession, Elizabeth’s England was a Catholic country, something which she found unacceptable. While Elizabeth was no religious fanatic, she was committed to Protestantism, albeit seeking to create a Church that incorporated aspects of both Catholicism and Protestantism, something that would not have pleased the more staunch Sir Francis Knollys and, perhaps, also his wife. Francis’s letters display the formality of a puritan; he commonly addressed his children by both their Christian names and surnames, even in letters to his wife, for example, referring to ‘Henry Knollys’ when discussing his eldest son with Catherine.
⁸
Elizabeth, on the other hand, was determined to tread a middle way, with her first parliament passing the Act of Supremacy on 29 April 1559, which confirmed the queen as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

Religion was not the only item of business in Elizabeth’s first parliament. At the time of her accession she was twenty-five years old and unmarried. It was unheard of for a woman to rule alone and it was believed that she would quickly marry, as her sister had done, and, hopefully, settle the succession. In February 1559 Parliament presented the queen with a formal petition, requesting that she choose a husband. To this, Elizabeth responded with a long speech setting out that she had no inclination to marry and that she wished to remain a virgin. She ended this speech saying, ‘Lastly, this may be sufficient, both for my memory and honour of my name, if when I have expired my last breath, this may be inscribed upon my tomb: Here lies interred Elizabeth, A virgin pure until her death.’
⁹
This speech caused very little comment simply because nobody believed it.

Elizabeth’s reply to the petition of February 1559 was not, in fact, the first time that she had sworn never to marry. In 1558 she had turned down an offer of marriage from the Prince of Sweden, claiming that she wished to remain a virgin.
¹⁰
Throughout her lifetime, Elizabeth flirted with the idea of marriage: she was clearly a woman who liked male company. However, she never wavered in her refusal to marry. There are probably a number of reasons for this. In the sixteenth century, wives were subject to their husbands, a rule that applied even when one spouse was a reigning queen.
¹¹
This was perhaps not the only reason for Elizabeth’s refusal to commit herself to marriage. There were few examples of happy marriages in her immediate family, with her own mother, as well as her stepmother, Catherine Howard, being put to death by their husband, while Catherine Parr suffered at the hands of her last husband. In fact, the only really happy examples of marriage in Elizabeth’s immediate family were those of her Carey cousins, with Catherine Carey’s being the most obvious to her. Elizabeth was prepared to entertain proposals of marriage from foreign suitors when politically necessary, with her brother-in-law, Philip of Spain, proposing in January 1559, for example, something that he saw as his duty given the need to maintain the Catholic religion in his deceased wife’s kingdom. Elizabeth was able to keep negotiations open until March 1559, by which time she had concluded a peace with France and Philip’s continuing friendship was no longer crucial.

Soon after she rejected Philip, Elizabeth received a proposal from his cousin, the Archduke Ferdinand.
¹²
This match soon foundered, and Ferdinand’s younger brother, the Archduke Charles, proposed marriage himself. Without an empire of his own to inherit, Charles proved considerably more enthusiastic about the English queen than his brother, with his name mentioned in negotiations for over seven years, until he too finally lost patience with Elizabeth.
¹³
Elizabeth always insisted that she could not marry a man that she had not seen. That this was a delaying tactic is clear from her alarm when she heard, in October 1559, that John of Finland had arrived in England to woo her. Elizabeth was always relieved when marriage negotiations failed, although she professed herself insulted when the Archduke Charles married another woman, after waiting for her for the best part of a decade. Elizabeth persisted with her courtships with foreign princes until well into her fifties.

It was not only foreign princes who sought Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. She received proposals from several English candidates, including the elderly Earl of Arundel, who optimistically showered her with gifts.
¹⁴
No one but the earl himself took his candidacy seriously. The queen also did not countenance the wealthy Sir William Pickering, who was pleased to offer his hand.
¹⁵
Instead, her affection was mostly directed towards Robert Dudley, a close friend of her cousin, Catherine Carey, for whom Catherine’s youngest child was named in 1562.
¹⁶

Robert Dudley was almost exactly the same age as Elizabeth and she had known him since childhood. As the son of the Duke of Northumberland, he was a prisoner in the Tower while Elizabeth was there, and this served to forge a common bond between them. On her accession, the queen appointed Dudley as both her master of horse and a Knight of the Garter. Dudley was far from being universally popular and Elizabeth’s preference for him mystified her contemporaries, with her biographer, William Camden, summing up the general confusion when he wrote that people asked ‘whether this [favour] proceeded from any virtue of his, whereof he gave some shadowed tokens, or from their common conditions of imprisonment under Queen Mary, or from his Nativity, and the hidden consent of the stars at the hour of his birth, and thereby a most strait conjunction of their minds, a man cannot easily say’.
¹⁷
Dudley was tall and handsome and Elizabeth found him very attractive. He was not, however, a true suitor in the early years of her reign as he had, by 1558, been married for some years. This unavailability may have been part of his charm for Elizabeth, ensuring that here at least was one man who did not hope to persuade her to marry him. By early 1559 there were rumours that the queen and her handsome master of horse were lovers, something that was dangerous to a queen. Elizabeth’s conduct towards Dudley only served to inflame the rumours, with foreign ambassadors openly courting him as a future king, in spite of his wife. Dudley is reputed to have asked the Spanish ambassador to assist him in persuading the queen to marry him, for example.
¹⁸

Dudley’s wife, Amy, was not encouraged to come to court by the jealous queen and she stayed with friends near Abingdon during her husband’s long absences. On the morning of 8 September 1560, Amy, who was in ill health, insisted that all her servants visit a fair, leaving only her and two other women in the house. When everyone returned that evening, they were horrified to find Amy Dudley dead with a broken neck at the foot of a shallow flight of steps.

When news of Amy Dudley’s death was brought to Elizabeth, she was so shocked that she was almost speechless. She immediately ordered Dudley to leave court while the death was investigated. Elizabeth knew that unless she fully investigated the circumstances of the death, both she and Dudley would be tainted with suspicion of murder. The enquiry returned a verdict of accidental death, holding that Amy had fallen down the stairs, but most people believed that Dudley arranged her murder. Amy Dudley’s death has never been satisfactorily explained, but the evidence of her ladies and her own conduct points towards suicide. It has also been suggested that she may have suffered a spontaneous fracture due to breast cancer. Whatever the cause, the suspicion under which Dudley was held meant it was impossible for the queen to ever contemplate marrying him, even if she wished to.

Dudley was not Elizabeth’s only favourite and she continued to attract male attention until the end of her life. She was never a beauty, but she knew how to make the most of herself and was considered pretty early in the reign, with one contemporary recording that

she was a lady, upon whom nature had bestowed, and well placed, many of her fairest favours; of stature mean, slender, straight, and amiably composed; of such state in her carriage, as ever motion of her seemed to bear majesty; her hair was inclined to pale yellow, her forehead large and fair, a seeming set for princely grace; her eyes lively and sweet, but short-sighted, her nose somewhat rising in the midst; the whole compass of her countenance somewhat long, but yet of admirable beauty.
¹⁹

In her colouring, Elizabeth resembled her father, but facially she was her mother’s daughter. As she grew older she became acutely aware of her fading appearance and took to wearing wigs and heavy make-up in a bid to maintain the appearance of youth. She continued to enjoy the fiction that her suitors were in love with her well into her old age.

With her failure to marry, the English succession was uncertain throughout Elizabeth’s reign. Under the terms of Henry VIII’s will, in which he gave priority to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, over his eldest, Margaret, Catherine Grey, the younger sister of Lady Jane Grey, was heir to the throne. Alternatively, by strict heredity, Mary, Queen of Scots, the only child of Margaret Tudor’s only son, was heir. Since she was born outside of England, there were others who considered that Mary’s Catholic aunt, Lady Margaret Douglas, who was Queen Margaret’s younger, English-born child, should be Elizabeth’s successor. Still others, who sought a male candidate, looked towards the Earl of Huntingdon, who was descended from the Plantagenets. Elizabeth’s lack of an heir was dangerously demonstrated in October 1562 when, one evening, she felt unwell and decided to have a bath.
²⁰
It was soon clear that the queen was suffering from smallpox and, after falling unconscious, she was thought to be dying. In a brief moment of lucidity, she begged her council to make Robert Dudley Protector of England, swearing that, although she loved him, nothing improper had ever passed between them. With no clear successor Elizabeth’s council were divided, with some seeking to send for Catherine Grey, who was currently in disgrace for contracting a secret marriage, while others favoured the Earl of Huntingdon.

The uncertainty over the succession was further complicated by the return of Mary, Queen of Scots, to Scotland in 1560 following the death of her husband, Francis II of France. Against Elizabeth’s wishes, the Scottish queen took Henry, Lord Darnley as her second husband, a teenager who had a strong claim to the throne himself as the eldest son of Lady Margaret Douglas. The marriage proved to be a disaster, with events coming to a head on 9 March 1566 when Darnley accused Mary of having an affair with her secretary, David Rizzio. Darnley and his accomplices then stabbed Rizzio to death in Mary’s presence. Mary did not take any action at first and, on 19 June 1566, bore a son whom she named James, news that Elizabeth reacted to in grief, declaring that while the Scottish queen was the mother of a son, she remained barren. The members of Elizabeth’s court may have privately thought that it was within the queen’s power to do something about this. Elizabeth was, however, soon justified in her wariness to marry. A few months after the birth of her son, Mary and the rest of Edinburgh were awoken by a large explosion. Upon investigation, the house in which Darnley was staying was discovered to have been blown up with gunpowder. Darnley was found in the orchard next to the house, strangled rather than killed by the explosion.

A few days after the murder, Elizabeth wrote to Mary expressing her condolences. Remembering the death of Amy Dudley, she also counselled Mary on how best to protect her reputation, telling her that she must be seen to avenge the murder:

My ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my hear so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my killed cousin that I scarcely yet have the wits to write about it. And inasmuch as my nature compels me to take his death in the extreme, he being so close in blood, so it is that I will boldly tell you what I think of it. I cannot dissemble that I am more sorrowful for you than for him. O madame, I would not do the office of faithful cousin or affectionate friend if I studied rather to please your ears than employed myself in preserving your honour. However, I will not at all dissemble what most people are talking about: which is that you will look through your fingers at the revenging of this deed, and that you do not take measures that touch those who have done as you wished, as if the thing had been entrusted in a way that the murderers felt assurance in ding it. Among the thoughts in my heart I beseech you to want no such thought to stick at this point.
²¹