Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (46 page)

The presence of Mary Stuart in the French court emphasized the larger diplomatic problem with which Elizabeth and her council had to deal. Mary was now queen of France, her husband having ascended to the throne as Francis II in 1559, and she also styled herself queen of England. In her absence Scotland was ruled by her mother, Mary of Guise, who had asked for more troops from her home country to defy the Protestant lords of Scotland. French troops had been assembled in Normandy, while the French forts on the north bank of the Tweed were in offensive or defensive array. Invasion was to be feared.

The French court was supposed to be alive with plots to assassinate the English queen. It was claimed that Mary’s uncles, the brothers Guise, had devised a scheme ‘to poison her by means of an Italian named Stephano, a burly man with a black beard, about forty-five years of age, who will offer his services to the queen as an engineer’. Stephano did not arrive. She was in any case surrounded by precautions. No dish arrived at her table untasted, no glove or handkerchief could be presented to her without being carefully examined. She was dosed every week with antidotes against poison.

Another Scottish complication presented itself. The Protestant lords had sent an envoy to the court of Elizabeth, asking for an army to help them remove the French from their country. Elizabeth did not like war. Since the rebellion would effectively injure
the status of Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland, it was not necessarily to be assisted or even welcomed. Elizabeth, naturally enough, supported very strongly the claims of a rightful queen. It was not proper to renounce an anointed sovereign. She also had no real affection for the Protestantism of the Scots. The people of that faith were led by John Knox, the reformer who had aimed a cannon of vituperation and malice against the idea of a female sovereign.

William Cecil was a more ardent Protestant and a bolder statesman. He set out a policy that included the invasion of Scotland by an English army and, if necessary, the removal of Mary Stuart from the throne. ‘Anywise kindle the fire,’ he wrote, ‘for, if quenched, the opportunity will not come in our lives.’ It was clear to him that the forces of European Catholicism might now be confronted and defied. He feared a French conspiracy to subvert the English state and the English religion.

The queen hesitated and resisted. She told her council that ‘it was a dangerous matter to enter into war’. Cecil, declaring that the faint hearts and the flatterers were supporting her policy of prevarication, threatened to resign. The leading faint heart, Sir Nicholas Bacon, had asserted ‘safety in moderation’. Secretly she sent money; then she sent a fleet into the Firth of Forth. Eventually, by the end of the year, she was persuaded to send a force of troops into the territory of her northern neighbour; much to the fury and resentment of the queen it failed in its attack upon the French fortress of Leith. The scaling ladders had been too short. The English settled down to a siege, a most unsatisfactory state of affairs. ‘I have had herein such a torment with the Queen’s Majesty,’ Cecil wrote, ‘as an ague hath not in five fits so much abated.’

It was Cecil who had supported the war; it was Cecil who would be obliged to conclude it. The queen ordered him to arrange a peace with the Scots and the French. Much to his dismay he was obliged to obey. The eventual Treaty of Edinburgh, signed in the summer of 1560, was an honourable truce. Both sides agreed to withdraw their troops from the country, with the additional promise that Mary and Francis would surrender their claim to the English throne. England had confronted France and survived the ordeal. This was the lesson which all parties adduced from
the affair. Such was the rivalry between Spain and France, also, that Philip was in a certain sense obliged to support the heretic Elizabeth in any rivalry with her neighbour. It could be said that his benign inaction helped to ensure the triumph of the Protestant cause in England.

The treaty was perhaps more than Cecil and Elizabeth had expected, but it had one serious imperfection; Mary herself never signed the document. Mary of Guise had died in that same summer and, with the removal of the French troops, the parliament of Scotland professed the Protestant faith; again the decision was not ratified by the queen, and the dispute between doctrines continued as before. Mary Stuart might have been forgiven for thinking that the rival queen, by means of the treaty, had tried to rob her of the allegiance and loyalty of her subjects. Yet her ushers at the court in Paris still called out, as she passed, ‘Make way for the queen of England!’ Her claim to the throne of England would become the single source of the calamities that would one day descend upon her.

The question of Elizabeth’s marriage remained the most important matter of the realm. The pursuit of Philip II for her hand was copied by other great men of Europe. It was always an advantage to marry a queen. By the autumn of the year ten or twelve eminent suitors were in contention. Two kings, two archdukes, five dukes and two earls vied for mastery. Principal among them were archdukes Charles and Ferdinand of Austria; gambolling up in the rear was Eric of Sweden, the Swedish king’s eldest son. Elizabeth did not disguise the fact that she enjoyed the attention, but she always fell back upon coquetry and dissembling. She had never said that she would
never
marry but, still, she proposed to remain a virgin. What she said she wanted, she did not want; her stated intentions were always at odds with her real designs. Her settled policy was that of delay and prevarication. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘you will see what a pretty business it is to have to treat with this woman, who I think must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, notwithstanding that she is forever telling me
that she yearns to be a nun and to pass her time in a cell praying’. It was of course always useful, in an uncertain and dangerous world, to have the grandees of several nations competing for her charms.

In the autumn of the year a Scottish theologian sent to her an account of the fall of her mother, including the scene where Anne Boleyn held up the infant Elizabeth in supplication to her irate husband: a timely reminder of the perils of matrimony. It is likely that it was always her desire to remain single. Had she not already said that she was married to her parliament and to her nation? This was the mystical marriage of state, in which she was made whole by incorporating the male world. It might be termed the body politic. Yet in the circumstances of the age it was a brave and even astonishing decision. It was inconceivable that a woman, let alone a queen, would not choose to marry. Great social prejudice was directed against unmarried females. It flouted the divine, as well as the human, order. An unmarried queen would be subject to ‘dolours and infirmities’ attendant upon the celibate condition. At a later date the archbishop of Canterbury, together with the bishops of London and York, sent her a pastoral letter in which they feared ‘this continued sterility in your Highness’s person to be a token of God’s displeasure towards us’. It imperilled the safety and even the existence of the nation.

There was another player in the pack. Robert Dudley, master of the horse, was part of her close entourage. He was handsome and flamboyant; it was clear that the queen had a great liking and affection for him. In the spring of 1560 it was rumoured that she was visiting his chamber both by day and by night, and the rumours were soon fashioned into a scandal that was even being reported by the foreign envoys at the court. It was whispered that if Dudley’s wife were to die, Elizabeth would marry him. A woman from Brentford was arraigned for claiming that the queen was pregnant with his child. On a progress in the summer of that year, just after the success in Scotland, she travelled along the southern bank of the Thames. Dudley was her constant companion, riding and hunting with her every day. Cecil, seeing that his influence had declined, was considering his position. He told the Spanish
ambassador that ‘the queen was conducting herself in such a way that he was about to withdraw from her service. It was a bad sailor who did not make for a port when he saw the storm coming . . .’

Then, on 8 September 1560, Amy Dudley died in a mysterious manner. She had broken her neck after falling down a staircase. The convenient death of Dudley’s wife provoked ‘grievous and dangerous suspicion and muttering’. Had she been pushed? Had she, perhaps, committed suicide? The queen sent Dudley to his house in Kew, where he seems to have lingered in a state of shock and anxiety. He told one of his servants, Sir Thomas Blount, that ‘the greatness and suddenness of the misfortune doth so perplex me . . . as I can take no rest’. He knew well enough what ‘the malicious world’ would make of the affair.

When a coroner’s jury was convened to consider the evidence, the verdict was one of death by misadventure. The judgment did not of course silence the rumours of conspiracy, and even of the queen’s participation in a plot to murder Amy Dudley. The rumours were most unlikely. It would have been politically impossible for the queen to have married Dudley after such an event. Those who favour conspiracies might even speculate that Cecil arranged for Amy Dudley to be killed, thus wrecking any chance of marriage and damaging the reputation of Dudley himself.

The nature of the relationship between the favourite and the queen is unknown. Elizabeth had been formed by experience and adversity; she was always cautious and ever watchful. Would she have courted disaster by engaging in a love affair with one of her subjects? The queen was rarely, if ever, alone. She was surrounded by the ladies of her bedchamber and her maids of honour even as she slept; any departure from the rigid ceremonial of her life would have been instantly observed. ‘My life is in the open and I have so many witnesses,’ she said, ‘I cannot understand how so bad a judgement can have been formed of me.’

At this juncture Cecil drew up a memorandum for his own use, in which he summarized the relative attractions of Archduke Charles of Austria, still the favourite candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, and Robert Dudley, master of the horse. The balance sheet is all on the archduke’s side. He reports that ‘in wealth’ Charles
had ‘by report three thousand ducats by the year’ whereas Dudley has ‘all of the queen, and in debt’. In ‘friendship’ the archduke had the emperor and the king of Spain as well as various dukes; Dudley had ‘none but such as shall have of the queen’. In reputation Charles was ‘honoured of all men’ whereas Dudley was ‘hated of many. His wife’s death.’ As far as Cecil was concerned, the case was closed. But, as he said, ‘what the queen will determine to do, God only knows’.

At the beginning of 1561 a close companion of Dudley approached the Spanish ambassador with a proposal. He suggested that if Philip II were to approve and assist the marriage of Dudley and the queen, Elizabeth herself might look more favourably on reunion with Rome. On hearing of this manoeuvre Cecil reacted swiftly by discovering a popish conspiracy; he arrested and imprisoned several Catholic priests and gentry on suspicion of attending Mass. The public enthusiasm for his measures was so great that it sent an unmistakable message to Dudley that any proposals for a papal reconciliation would be rejected. ‘I thought it necessary,’ Cecil wrote, ‘to dull the papists’ expectations by discovering of certain Mass-mongers and punishing them.’ A projected visit from the papal nuncio was refused.

It seems most unlikely that Elizabeth herself was party to Dudley’s plan; she had more than enough wit and common sense to know that such a course would be foolish in the extreme. It was in fact in this period that she expressed her most vehement comments about the married state. The archbishop of Canterbury told Cecil that the queen had spoken with such ‘bitterness of the holy estate of matrimony that I was in a horror to hear her’. The context may have been a proposal for the possibility of married clergy, but her wider purport is clear enough. ‘I will have here but one mistress,’ she declared, ‘and no master!’ In her married state she would be a queen; unmarried, she was both king and queen. When an ambassador from one of the German states referred to marriage as a ‘desirable evil’, she laughed. ‘Desirable?’ she asked him. She would rather be a beggar-woman and single than a queen and married.

A further complication had arisen over the succession. Lady Katherine Grey was a younger sister of the unfortunate Jane Grey;
as such she could be considered a legitimate heir to the throne if her cousin, Mary Stuart, was denied any claim. But in November 1560 she entered a clandestine marriage with Edward Seymour, son of the late Lord Protector Somerset. As possible heiress and lady of the privy chamber, she had a double duty to ask permission from the queen before any wedding could take place. In fact she had concealed her affair with Seymour, no doubt fearing that Elizabeth would prohibit any further contact. The queen was harsh in matters of the heart, let alone of the succession.

Her reaction, when the news inevitably reached her, was predictably furious. She consigned the young husband and wife to the Tower, to be detained indefinitely. When Katherine Grey gave birth to a son while in confinement, her anxieties increased; the possibility of a male heir materially weakened Elizabeth’s position. She was determined to declare the infant as illegitimate, thus debarring him from the crown. In a display of alarming incompetence, Katherine Grey had in fact lost the marriage documents and had forgotten the name of the cleric who had married them; the one witness to the ceremony had recently died. Fate, or providence, was against her. The child was declared to be a bastard, and Katherine was taken from the Tower and placed under house arrest until her death seven years later. The queen herself believed that ‘there had been great practices and purposes’ behind this dynastic marriage, and it was rumoured by some that Katherine Grey and Edward Seymour were being set up as a possible alternative to her rule.

When Katherine Grey’s younger sister, Mary, also married without official permission she was placed under house arrest; her husband was incarcerated for some years in the Fleet. The marriage was at the time a subject of ribaldry as well as consternation. Mary Grey was a dwarf who was ‘crookbacked and very ugly’ while her husband was 6 feet 8 inches in height and a commoner. They posed no true threat to the queen. Yet it was said at the time that she resented those natural pleasures of others which she denied to herself.