The Spanish Armada (3 page)

During her incarceration, Elizabeth wrote this prayer; its bleak words eloquently describing her feelings of isolation and hopelessness:

Her despairing cry in the dark was seemingly heard as her trials and travails were now about to be eased. Sir Thomas Wyatt was taken
in chains to a
scaffold at Hay Hill beside Hyde Park on 11 April, and there he was hung, drawn and quartered, along with three other rebel leaders. Portions of his torso were hung up at the approaches to the City
of London as an awful demonstration of the fate of traitors.
²³
He went to his death adamantly refusing to implicate the princess in his
conspiracy.

Despite strenuous efforts, no solid evidence proving Elizabeth’s involvement in the rebellion was ever uncovered to warrant her following him to the executioner’s block. Much to
Gardiner’s chagrin, she was released on Saturday 19 May
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and taken to the royal hunting lodge at Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where she remained
under house arrest. During those tedious, listless days, she used one of her diamond rings to scratch this verse on a pane of window glass there:

Mary had meanwhile married Philip of Spain, enveloping him with a love of unexpected passion. After he ascended the Spanish throne on his father’s abdication in 1556, the
couple assumed the extravagant style and title of ‘Philip and Mary, by the Grace of God, King and Queen of England, Spain, France, Jerusalem, both the Scillies and Ireland,
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Defenders of the Faith, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Burgundy, Milan and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol’. Mary not only became Queen
Consort of Spain but also ‘Queen of the Spanish East and West Indies and of the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea’.

Mary’s bridegroom regarded his marriage as a loveless match of mere diplomatic convenience. The queen was eleven years older than him; had been betrothed briefly to his father in the 1520s
and her love was unfortunately unrequited. His eyes may have roved lasciviously over his wife’s ladies at court: tall and blonde Magdalene Dacre whispered that the king had reached through a
window and tried to fondle her breasts as she was washing herself one morning. She grabbed a conveniently placed stick (was this something always kept handy indoors by Tudor ladies in
déshabille
?) and struck his outstretched arm to cool his ardour, prompting his polite praise for her modesty.
²⁷

Both Philip’s heart and head had no roots in England and he stayed just long enough in his new dominions for appearances’ sake. There were hopes that he had
begat a child and in April 1555 Elizabeth was recalled to Hampton Court to witness the happy birth of Mary’s heir.

She was not yet wholly rehabilitated in the queen’s affections and was patently a despondent and reluctant prospective aunt. It did not help that her household had a reputation as a hotbed
of Protestant subversion: in July 1554, one of her servants had been imprisoned for sedition; a second followed him into gaol in April 1555 and the following month, Elizabeth’s Italian tutor,
Battista Castiglione, was sent to the Tower on suspicion of distributing treasonous literature in London. However, he maintained stoutly that he was in the city only to buy new strings for his
mistress’s lute
²⁸
and was grudgingly released. The princess was therefore still held under arrest – ‘the doors being shut upon her,
the soldiers in the ancient posture of watch and guard’.
²⁹

Mary did not produce her heir, having suffered a phantom pregnancy, and her grief and humiliation were deepened by her husband’s departure from England soon afterwards. Beforehand, he had
urged the queen to offer Elizabeth better treatment as her heiress presumptive and had dissuaded her from yet again declaring Elizabeth a bastard – or exiling her abroad. Behind
Philip’s outward kindness lay a hard-nosed pragmatism: if Mary’s half-sister did not succeed her, the French would certainly press the claims to the English throne of Mary Queen of
Scots, who had been betrothed to François, Dauphin of France, the son of King Henri II . Under no circumstances could Spain ever countenance an England in the thrall of France.

Elizabeth was sent back to Hatfield, where she rejected several offers of marriage suggested by her half-sister over the coming years as a means of ridding this troublesome cuckoo from
Mary’s uncomfortable nest.

In August 1558, the queen, now aged forty-two, was afflicted by bouts of fever and those around her began, hesitantly and tentatively, to consider the thorny problem of her successor. Others
were voting with their feet. The Venetian diplomat Michiel Surian told the Doge in November that ‘many personages of the kingdom flock to the house of my lady Elizabeth, the crowd constantly
increasing
with great frequency’.
³⁰
Although these consultations were carried out covertly, it was plain as a pikestaff
that plans for her accession were being quietly drawn up. The Spanish envoy Renard observed that she was ‘honoured and recognised’ [as heiress to the crown] and it would be almost
impossible to debar her. He urged Philip to find her a husband overseas – perhaps the Duke of Savoy, ‘a man true to God and your majesty’.
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Even Mary knew deep down of the unspoken reality that she would never conceive a child and that she should grasp the nettle of the succession to the throne. But she still shied away from naming
her half-sister as heir apparent. On 28 October she signed a codicil to her will that acknowledged that ‘God has hitherto sent me no fruit nor heir of my body’ and requested her
‘next heir and successor’ to honour the terms of her will, particularly those relating to religious houses and the founding of a military hospital.
³²
The successor’s name was conspicuous by its absence.

Time was running out for Mary and she began to suffer frequent bouts of delirium. On 6 November, the Privy Council finally convinced her to name Elizabeth to succeed her. Jane Dormer, one of the
queen’s ladies, took some of her jewels to Hatfield with her fervent request that the Catholic religion should continue in England. Years afterwards Jane remembered that Elizabeth had
promised ‘that the earth might open and swallow her up alive’ if she was not a true Catholic – but others recalled a very different, less explicit pledge: ‘I promise this
much, that I will not change it, provided only that it can be proved by the word of God, which shall be the only foundation and rule of my religion.’
³³

Another visitor was a special Spanish envoy, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Fifth Count de Feria, who, on behalf of his king, wanted to sound out Elizabeth’s views on continuing
England’s alliance with Spain. When he suggested that her brother-in-law Philip was responsible for her belated recognition by Mary, she immediately retorted that she ‘owed her crown
not to Philip . . . but to the attachment of the people of England’. The envoy told his master:

The new queen, Feria concluded, was ‘determined to be governed by no one’. She was ‘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 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 all the women around her definitely are,’ he ruefully reported.
³⁴

In Flanders, Philip, who had lost his title as King of England under the terms of his marriage treaty, jotted down his reactions to his wife’s passing, almost as a footnote to the business
of his day: ‘I felt a reasonable regret for her death. I shall miss her even on this account.’
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He seemed more exercised about the
potential loss of gold, jewels and resplendent robes belonging to the Order of the Garter that he had left in England ‘packed in a trunk that was . . . deposited, locked, in the late
Queen’s chamber’ in the Palace of Whitehall and in his own hand, amended two lists of those items to be reclaimed.
³⁶

Elizabeth joyfully grasped the levers of power. She charged her new council always to offer ‘good advice and counsel’ and required ‘nothing more than faithful hearts in such
service as . . . shall be in your powers towards the preservation of me and this commonwealth’. She appointed Sir William Cecil, formerly the administrator of her estates, as her secretary of
state, telling him:

He was to serve his queen faithfully for forty years until his death in 1598.

There were some scores that had to be settled. Count de Feria was aghast at the immediate and radical changes: ‘The kingdom is entirely in the hands of young folks, heretics and traitors,
and the Queen does not favour a single man whom her majesty, who is now in heaven, would have received. [She] will take no one into her
service who served her sister when
she was Lady Mary.’ The elderly and the Catholics were dissatisfied ‘but dare not open their lips’.

He added: ‘What can be expected from a country governed by a queen, and she a young lass, who although sharp, is without prudence and is everyday standing up against
religion more sharply.’
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Elizabeth was crowned queen at Westminster Abbey on Sunday 15 January 1559, tartly ordering its monks to remove the popish altar candles as ‘she had enough light to see
by’.
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Sir John Hayward wrote admiringly of the new queen:

With the Tudor dynasty’s recurrent nightmare about succession in many people’s minds, Elizabeth was soon beset with questions about her marrying. Philip instructed
de Feria to formally throw his own feathered and bejewelled cap into the ring as a suitor for the hand of his sister-in-law. He admitted to some troublesome doubts about Elizabeth; he believed her
unsound in religion ‘and it would not look well for me to marry her unless she were a Catholic. Besides . . . such a marriage would appear like entering upon a perpetual war with France,
seeing the claims that the Queen of Scots has to the English crown.’ Philip also fretted about having to pay for ‘the costly entertainment necessary’ in England when his own
exchequer was so depleted. But on the whole, it was more important that England remained Catholic and he was prepared to ‘sacrifice my private inclination’ and marry Elizabeth, if only
in the service of God. Confronted by the prospects of such a marriage, Philip ‘felt like a condemned man awaiting his fate’. These were scarcely the words of an eager, blushing
bridegroom.
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Elizabeth kept the Spanish envoy waiting on tenterhooks for her
answer to this less than munificent offer of marriage. In February, she discovered an important
impediment to her acceptance – the fact that she would be marrying her half-sister’s husband. There was more than a little piquancy in suggesting this as a stumbling block; the queen
was deploying the Biblical arguments contained in Leviticus 20:21, ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing. He hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they
shall be childless.’ This was the self-same argument used by Henry VIII to justify the annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. How could she therefore marry Philip? It would
dishonour the memory of her father. Moreover, no dispensation from the Pope could be sought, as ‘she denied point-blank’ the authority of Rome.

How she must have savoured the irony of this response! In addition, she had been warned that after marrying Philip, he would return to Spain ‘directly’. The Count told his master:
‘This she said with great laughter as if she could read [my] secret thoughts. She is so well informed about this it looks as if she has seen your majesty’s letters.’
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At last that March, Elizabeth gave her final and definitive answer. It teetered on the coquettish; whilst she had no wish to offend ‘her good brother’ she could not marry him because
she was a heretic. The queen, reported de Feria, was ‘disturbed and excited and resolved to restore religion as her father left it . . . [She said that] so much money was taken out of the
country for the Pope every year that she must put an end to it and the bishops were lazy poltroons.’
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The envoy was horrified: ‘This
country . . . has fallen into the hands of a woman, who is the daughter of the Devil, and the greatest scoundrels and heretics in the land.’
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Instead, a doubtless relieved Philip the following year married the French princess, Elizabeth of Valois, eldest daughter of Henri II of France and his wife Catherine de Medici, in yet another
union of diplomatic advantage.
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