The Tudors (67 page)

Philip might never have received English help if not for an act of pure folly. Among the young rakehells and soldiers of fortune who had gone into exile in France after Mary won the crown was her twenty-four-year-old relative Thomas Stafford, who had inherited royal blood through both his father and his mother, regarded himself as entitled to the Dukedom of Buckingham (which had belonged to his family until his grandfather was executed by Henry VIII), and was an ardent Protestant in spite of being a nephew of Cardinal Pole. Lured by fantastic visions of glory, and drawing on mysterious sources of support that probably included Henry of France, Stafford came ashore at Scarborough in the north of England on April 25 at the head of a mixed force of English, French, and Scottish followers who numbered at least thirty but no more than a hundred. Taking possession of a poorly defended and half-ruined castle, he issued a proclamation calling upon the people of England to join him in deposing Mary and establishing a protectorate. So far as is known, he failed to attract a single recruit. Stafford was in custody within four days of his landing, and before the end of May he was, to little public notice, executed for treason. At court his adventure was interpreted as the latest French outrage. It brought the council around to supporting Philip and the queen.

As preparations got under way for assembling an army and transporting it to the continent, efforts were made to dissuade the pope from recalling Pole. The English ambassador in Rome begged the pope to reconsider, Mary and Philip sent appeals of their own, and at last even the diffident Pole wrote to say that the feeble state of the church in England required the presence of
someone
authorized to represent Rome. All of it availed nothing or less than nothing. It appears, rather, to have thrown Pope Paul into a fresh rage. He placed one of Pole’s oldest friends and fellow reformers, Cardinal Giovanni Morone, under arrest on a variety of heresy charges of the kind that probably would have been brought against Pole himself had he been in Rome. Like Pole, Morone had lost the trust of the archconservatives with his willingness to
deal with the Lutheran reformers on respectful terms and acknowledge that not all blame for the breakup of the church lay on the Protestant side. The pope made malicious use of Pole’s letter by replacing him as legate with Friar William Peto, the same Observant Franciscan who decades before had denounced Henry VIII to his face for seeking to discard Catherine of Aragon. Peto was now back at his old monastery at Greenwich—Mary herself had restored it—and was serving as confessor to the queen. The situation deteriorated into a ridiculous tangle. Pole, loyal as always, would have traveled to Rome as ordered but was forbidden to do so by Mary, who insisted that he was entitled to defend himself in England. Peto, eighty years old and in bad health, protested that he was neither able nor willing to serve. The nuncio bringing official notification of Peto’s appointment was intercepted at Calais and prevented from crossing the Channel, and his mission was soon rendered pointless by Peto’s death. The pope wanted to declare that Philip was no longer legitimately king of anything but was dissuaded by cooler heads. He contented himself with refusing to transact any business with the English church. Mary’s (and Pole’s) nominations for vacant bishoprics were ignored, and the number of vacancies mounted.

After three consecutive crop failures and widespread hunger, a weakened population was being ravaged by an influenza epidemic that would in a few years claim hundreds of thousands of lives. Nevertheless an army of seven thousand men was somehow pulled together, and by July it was on the continent ready to join Philip’s thirty thousand Spanish, German, and Flemish troops in the war with France. Philip, too, was back on the continent, but neither he nor the English army was on the scene when, in September, the main Hapsburg force inflicted a devastating defeat on the French at St. Quentin. Fully half of the French army was killed or taken prisoner, and upon receiving the news, the pope abandoned his hopes for Italy and signaled his willingness to make peace. Henry II then ordered the army that he had sent to the pope’s assistance to return home and asked its commander, the Duke of Guise, to find some way to avenge the shame of St. Quentin. When around the turn of the year Mary announced that she was once again pregnant, no one including her husband paid serious attention. Philip sent congratulations, but they were little more than a formality. It was, after all, nearly six months since he had last seen her.

January 1558 brought the crowning calamity of Mary’s reign: the loss of Calais, the last of England’s once-vast holdings on the European mainland. The Duke of Guise, having received reports of the sorry state of Calais’s defenses from French ambassadors passing through the town after their expulsion from England, knew that no one would expect a midwinter assault. He positioned his army in such a way as to appear to be preparing a move against St. Quentin, wheeled it around for a surprise advance on Calais, and extracted a surrender from its garrison so quickly that neither Philip nor the English had any chance of responding. Though the loss would prove to be of no strategic importance—the English figured out in time that holding Calais had produced no benefits commensurate with the costs—it came as a shock to England’s nascent national pride and a humiliation for Mary. Philip, inevitably but unfairly, was blamed. He had warned the council in advance of Guise’s offensive and offered to provide Spanish troops for the defense—an offer that was rejected because of groundless suspicions that Philip wanted Calais for himself. Afterward, when he offered to match whatever number of troops England made available to retake Calais, he was again rebuffed. A sense of things coming to an end, a miasma of something like death, was beginning to hang over Mary and her court. A Parliament was called but quickly prorogued after showing itself unwilling to help the government with its financial problems, and by May the queen was no longer talking of an expected child.

Mary was ill that month, and again in August, and yet again in October. In September Charles V died, removing whatever small hope Mary might still have had of Philip’s return to England. Finally, knowing that Reginald Pole, too, was seriously ill, resigned to her own impending death and to the certainty that she would be succeeded by her half-sister, she sent a maid of honor to Elizabeth with a letter in which she asked for three things. First, that upon becoming queen she, Elizabeth, would deal generously with the members of Mary’s household. Second, that she would repay the debts that the Crown had incurred under Mary’s Privy Seal. And third, that she would continue to support the church in the form that Mary had reestablished. Elizabeth had only recently repeated her assurances that she was a believing Roman Catholic, politely complaining of the queen’s difficulty in accepting her word on that score. There was no opportunity for her to do so again. On the morning
of November 18, Mary quietly expired while hearing mass from her bed. Pole died hours later. The English Counter-Reformation was dead too.

Mary at the end was worn out and thoroughly defeated. She seemed somehow to have lived for a long time, and her reign, too, seemed to have lasted too long and to have grown sterile. It is startling to realize that at the time of her death she was all of forty-two years old, and had ruled for only five years.

Yet Another New Beginning

I
t is an hour or two past midnight on March 24, 1603. In the deepest recesses of Richmond Palace the fireplaces are ablaze, the light from shoals of candles dancing in the drafty air. In the shadows at the rear of the palace’s innermost chamber Queen Elizabeth lies in bed, her face turned to the wall. Her physicians have made it known that she is dying. Everyone with access to the court has come to bear witness to a momentous event.

Despite the hour the atmosphere is electric: the death of the monarch is certain to bring enormous changes—good things for some, disappointment for others. People bundled up in hats and furs whisper together in little clusters, disperse, gather again in new combinations: the grieving and the hopeful, the worried and the merely curious. Among them is Sir Robert Carey, the queen’s cousin, the ambitious grandson of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary. Like the others he keeps his face stern and his voice low, but he is excited and impatient and struggling not to show it. A fast fresh horse awaits him outside, and he has arranged to have other horses posted all along the four-hundred-mile route from Richmond to Edinburgh. He is determined to give himself a leg up with the next regime by being the first to inform the king of Scotland that Elizabeth is dead at last, and that England is now his.

Tudor medicine being the tangle of butchery and superstition and sterile tradition that it is, not even the doctors have any real idea of why
the queen is dying. A bronchial infection that has turned into pneumonia, perhaps. Possibly streptococcus, or the failure of some vital organ. Whatever the root cause, it appears to have been aggravated by depression; one thing even her physicians can see is that Elizabeth has been seriously depressed for months. It is possible that she has been poisoned—that she has, inadvertently, poisoned herself. For forty years, ever since smallpox nearly took her life and ravaged her fine fair skin, she has refused to leave her privy chamber without first having her face, neck, and breast caked with the most prized cosmetic of her day, a mixture of white lead and vinegar known as ceruse or spirits of Saturn. Even painters who use brushes to apply white lead not to their own skin but to walls often fall victim to poisoning. That Elizabeth has remained vigorous to such an age while living under a thick coat of such a toxic concoction is little less than astonishing.

By the standards of the day her age is ripe indeed. Ninety-four years have passed since her father Henry VIII became king, 118 since her grandfather won the crown at Bosworth Field. Elizabeth herself, next to Henry VII the Tudor who overcame the longest odds in coming to the throne, has reigned for four and a half decades. This is nearly twice as long as the first Henry Tudor, nearly a decade longer than the second, nine times as long as either her brother or her sister. Her next birthday would be her seventieth.

Longevity in fact is the dying queen’s supreme achievement, and that is fitting. Longevity, survival, is all she ever really aspired to. There is no reason to believe that at any point she had high dreams for her kingdom, her people, or herself. Like her father she has always been a master of political theater, creating a jewel-encrusted image with which to awe the whole world and concealing herself behind it. But even in fabricating the persona of Gloriana, the strong, wise, and good Virgin Queen, even in projecting that persona in every direction near and far, she has been driven by defensive impulses—by the determination to make herself
seem
strong, invulnerable, indispensable. Always the aim was to preserve her life and her rule and the status quo. If it is possible to argue that she never accomplished much else, she has unquestionably accomplished that. Therefore she has succeeded in everything that mattered to her—no small achievement for any ruler. In the process, simply by staying in power as the earth made forty-five trips around the sun and forces beyond
anyone’s control swept over her kingdom, she has also presided over much of England’s evolution into a modern nation-state. This is the ultimate irony of her story, because there rarely was a monarch who wanted change less.

One wants to know, as Elizabeth draws her last breaths, what she has been thinking during these strange final days. Her decline began with a refusal to speak, to eat, even to sit down until at last she was too weak not to. Then, seated on cushions with a finger in her mouth, she passed days and nights gazing blankly at the floor or something beyond the floor, locked in a stony solitude. Only when she had lost all power to resist or even complain was she finally put to bed. Has she been asking herself if it was worthwhile, the long drama that is now drawing to a close? Does she wish she had played her part differently? Does it seem enough, looking back, that she has survived this long? Does the price she paid seem acceptable—or to have been necessary?