15

One Mistress and No Master

AS KING AND QUEEN both, it is hard to see how Elizabeth could accommodate a husband; yet as a queen and as a woman in post-Reformation England, it was unthinkable that she should not marry and produce an heir – preferably male. The Imperial ambassador echoed the universal male view when he said, ‘For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.’

Elizabeth had already given several indications before she came to the throne that she was personally disinclined to marry. When her sister had sent Sir Thomas Pope to sound her out on a proposal from a foreign prince, she reminded him that when her brother had been king she had asked permission ‘to remayne in that estate I was, which of all others best liked me or pleased me … I so well like this estate, as I perswade myselfe there is not anie kynde of liffe comparable unto it.’ After she became queen, she confided to the Spanish ambassador, da Silva, that marriage ‘is a thing for which I have never had any inclination’, adding with almost modern insight: ‘There is a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married, or at all events that if she refrains from marriage she does so for some bad reason.’ Over the next twenty years or so, she was to say repeatedly that she preferred the virgin state. Men found this perplexing. Even taking into account the conventional protestation of maidenly modesty, it is likely that Elizabeth was expressing her true preference.

When her first Parliament petitioned her to marry in 1559 her response was probably the most honest revelation of her feelings on the subject she was ever to give publicly. As she came under increasing pressure to marry – for instance, in 1563 and 1566 Parliament’s demands had turned from solicitous enquiry to outright hectoring and blackmail – subsequent statements probably reveal not so much what she felt about marriage, as what was politic to say about it.

She began by confirming that from her earliest years she ‘happily chose this kind of life in which I yet live, which I assure you for mine own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God’. Neither ambition nor fear of death at the hands of her enemies had persuaded her otherwise. Her life is in God’s hands to decide. She is confident that He who has ‘preserved and led me by the hand, will not now of His goodness suffer me to go alone’. She promises that whenever it should please God to ‘incline my heart to another kind of life’, she will not choose a husband who will be displeasing to her people.

If it should please God that she remain unmarried, she assures them that He will not leave the realm destitute of ‘an heir that may be a fit governor’. Indeed, the heir God provides might be ‘more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me’. A child of her body might ‘grow out of kind and become, perhaps, ungracious’. It was an uncannily accurate prediction of events and she even provided her own epithet: ‘And in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.’

A second version of the speech, which appeared in Camden’s Annales in 1615, contains a scene in which Elizabeth is described stretching out her hand to display her coronation ring, telling them: ‘To conclude, I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England, and that may suffice you … And reproach me no more that I have no children: for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children and kinsfolks.’ Camden probably picked up the anecdote from his patron, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to whose papers he had access, but it does not necessarily belong here in Elizabeth’s first response to the parliamentary petitioners in 1559, when the mood was conciliatory, less confrontational than it was to become. Elizabeth might well have made the gesture on some subsequent occasion, as she came under increasing pressure to marry or name an heir. Certainly she used the image in conversation with the Scottish ambassador, William Maitland of Lethington, when she told him: ‘Once I am married already to the realm of England when I was crowned with this ring, which I bear continually in token thereof.’

In this first answer to Parliament, Elizabeth was very careful to leave the door open. It was one thing to profess a preference for the virgin state as a private person, another as queen, when her person became the embodiment of the monarchy. Elizabeth probably tried to retain an open mind, prepared to do her duty to the state if necessary. As her father’s daughter, she believed that it was her prerogative alone to decide the questions of marriage and the succession. While gently expressing her right as ‘an absolute princess’ to marry or not as she chose, she promised ‘to do nothing to the prejudice of the commonwealth’. It was clever to assure them that she would only marry a husband who met with their approval, because, in the event, no candidate would satisfy everyone, leaving her unencumbered.

Many of Elizabeth’s biographers have attributed her unwillingness to marry to some psychological barrier. Her mother and one stepmother were executed on her father’s orders; two stepmothers had died in childbirth; her first foray into the world of adult sexuality had ended in the death of her would-be seducer. It would not be surprising, therefore, that somewhere in the recesses of her mind she associated marriage and sex with death.

It is more likely, however, that she had a well-founded aversion to the loss of power, to the loss of control over her person and sovereignty which marriage would inevitably entail. It was all very well for John Aylmer in his An Harborowe for Trewe and Faithfull Subjectes to try to reconcile the contradictions between being a queen and a wife – ‘I graunte that, so farre as pertaining to the bandes of marriage, and the offices of a wife, she must be a subjecte: but as a Magistrate she maye be her husbandes heade’ – but the theory was a long way from practice.

Her sister Mary’s marriage treaty had been designed to give her autonomy as sovereign, leaving her husband in a subordinate position, but the treaty had provided few safeguards against human fallibility. A treaty only worked in so far as the characters concerned allowed it to. Mary had proved malleable, finally giving way to Philip’s entreaties to bring England into a disastrous war. As a married woman, she had also lost control over her body, becoming physically, mentally and emotionally incapacitated for months by a phantom pregnancy, reducing her ability to govern effectively. If the example of her sister was not enough to warn Elizabeth off marriage, the subsequent marital adventures of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the 1560s would certainly serve to reinforce Elizabeth’s very strong survivalist instincts that to remain single was the better option.

Elizabeth was intent on identifying with Tudor strengths – in particular, with her charismatic, powerful father – and realized that this would be fatally compromised by her participation in the institution that had revealed Tudor weakness. She had no wish to re-enact her father’s and sister’s desperation in trying to produce a male heir or make herself vulnerable to failure.

There has been speculation that Elizabeth knew she had some physical impediment that would prevent her having sexual relations, but this is unfounded. Foreign ambassadors would bribe her laundresses, Anne Twiste and Elizabeth Smithson, to discover whether she was ‘normal’; she had an irregular menstrual cycle. Cecil, who made it his business to know the details of the Queen’s ‘bodily functions’, was confident that if only she would marry, she would have no difficulty in having a child. The physicians were equally convinced of her childbearing capacity, although they were ignorant of the fact that the nephritis she might have suffered in her twenties would probably have caused miscarriage after miscarriage.

Elizabeth was a pragmatist. Just as she was wise enough to keep her options open in her response to Parliament’s petitions that she marry, so she was quick to appreciate the diplomatic mileage that could be gained from protracted courtships with foreign suitors. She found her natural inclination to prevaricate and change her mind – which accorded with the prejudiced male view of ‘womanly behaviour’ – a useful tool in the marriage game. The unmarried twenty-five-year-old Queen was the greatest match in Europe. It satisfied her not inconsiderable ego to have kings and princes all vying for her hand. She enjoyed the whole ritual of courtship, so much so that it became an addiction. As the Spanish ambassador de Silva reported, ‘She is vain, and would like all the world to be running after her.’ No amount of flattery from her suitors would be too excessive. Endless talk of marriage became a substitute for the reality. Elizabeth was such a consummate actress that she could convince even the most sceptical that she was genuine, stringing out proposals for years, alternating between cool and eager, as diplomatic necessity prompted her.

Her former brother-in-law, Philip of Spain, was less inclined to take her at her word than most, cynically advising a Habsburg negotiator who believed the prize was within his grasp to ‘get it in writing’. After her sister’s death he had gone through the motions of proposing to her himself, but only out of duty, to keep England within the Habsburg alliance and to save it from heresy. Such lack of ardour would never have won Elizabeth, who expected her suitors to put on a convincing performance. His suit quickly foundered, but not before she had fully exploited it. Until she was crowned and anointed she had needed his support, although there was little chance at this stage of his backing the rival claimant, Mary, Queen of Scots. Conscious that she could not afford to alienate the powerful King of Spain, who was still England’s ally pending the completion of negotiations ending the war with France, Elizabeth had moved cautiously, until the time was ripe for the pretence of courtship to be converted into more credible friendship. When he lost patience and married Elisabeth of France, Elizabeth – who had already acquired a taste for this game – teased the Spanish ambassador that Philip could not have loved her very much, since he had not waited even four months for her.

As queen, Elizabeth was careful not to let her heart rule her head. She was never a creature of impulse. As a woman she was passionate and emotionally needy, but suppressed her desires in the interests of her role as monarch. The cost to her private happiness might be measured in the outrage with which she greeted news of the less than queenly behaviour of Mary, Queen of Scots, in her sexual escapades with Bothwell, or in the foolish behaviour of her cousin, Lady Catherine Grey, who so far forgot herself as to marry without the Queen’s permission and proceeded to give birth to two sons whose legitimacy was thrown into doubt by their mother’s carelessness in losing the written proof of her marriage. Or of the youngest of the Grey sisters, the dwarf-like Mary, who made a preposterous misalliance with an enormously tall palace flunkey. In putting their emotions and lusts before their duty and failing to take account of the consequences of their actions, none of these women, in Elizabeth’s opinion, was worthy to wear her crown.

Elizabeth was very good at compartmentalizing her life, but the wills of the Queen and the private woman were sometimes in conflict. Nowhere was this more evident than in her relationship with Robert Dudley, the love of her life. They had known each other since childhood and their friendship rested on a deep, long-standing affection. They had in common their experience of imprisonment in the Tower during Mary’s reign, and they shared an interest in books and intellectual pursuits, dancing, riding and hunting. In the first heady months of her reign, Elizabeth’s indiscreet passion for her Master of the Horse riveted, shocked and horrified onlookers and fed the reports of foreign ambassadors. So dark he earned the nickname ‘The Gypsy’, handsome, tall, with an excellent physique and that promise of sexual vigour, Dudley was the sort of swaggering charmer reminiscent of her first love, Thomas Seymour. He was equally unsuitable, since not only was he married, but he was the son and grandson of executed traitors.

As a married man, Dudley was ‘safe’. Elizabeth might have felt she wanted to marry him, but she must have known in her innermost mind that it was not possible. And even if Dudley managed to divest himself of the encumbrance of his wife, Elizabeth knew that the Council would never agree to her marriage with a Dudley, the son of the usurper, the Duke of Northumberland, and the grandson of a mere lawyer and tax collector. Her cousin, the premier nobleman, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, looked down on him as an arrogant upstart who treated the Queen with unacceptable familiarity. Dudley was almost universally unpopular. Cecil disliked and distrusted him, but concealed his feelings behind a mask of amiability, until the opportunity presented itself to check his overweening ambition to marry the Queen.

Dudley’s neglected wife, Amy Robsart, proved his Achilles heel. They had married for love when Dudley was still in his teens and she had remained loyal to him when he had lost everything – title, wealth and position – when his father had tried to usurp the crown in the name of another daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, and ended up on the scaffold. As soon as Elizabeth came to the throne, Dudley rushed to court, determined to restore his family to its former rank and fortune. As Master of the Horse, he was constantly by the Queen’s side whenever she rode out in public or to hunt. There can be no doubt that she was sexually attracted to him, so much so that at times it seemed she was in danger of losing her head.

Elizabeth was a striking-looking woman with a charismatic personality; she was a most engaging and lively companion and when she smiled, according to one of her godsons, it was pure sunshine. But her main attraction for Dudley lay in the fact that she was Queen. He must also have been drawn by her elusiveness – the fact that she was unobtainable – for there can be little doubt that despite the intensity of their relationship, she stopped short of consummation. Tempting as it might be, Elizabeth is unlikely to have surrendered her most valuable asset, her virginity, or given such an ambitious man as Dudley that hold over her. To keep his passion for her alive without ever allowing him to gain mastery over her was for Elizabeth a heady form of power. Controlling men was half the fun for her.

Damaging rumours of improper behaviour between the Queen and Dudley persisted, so much so that Kat Ashley begged Elizabeth on her knees to be more careful of her reputation. Elizabeth truculently argued that she lived surrounded by her ladies, so how could anything dishonourable occur between her and her Master of the Horse. Then, working herself up into a state of righteous indignation, she told Kat: ‘If she had ever had the will or had found pleasure in such a dishonourable kind of life, from which may God preserve her, she did not know of anyone who could forbid her.’

The lovers’ idyll was abruptly shattered by the death of Amy in mysterious circumstances. The Dudleys still had no home of their own and, shy and not invited to court to join the Queen’s ladies, Amy had been forced to rely on the hospitality of others. It was while she was living with friends at Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire that the worst happened. There had been rumours at court about Amy’s ill health and she seems to have been in the advanced stages of breast cancer. On 8 September 1560 – a day when her husband was absent as usual, hunting with the Queen at Windsor – she had urged the whole household to go to Abingdon to enjoy the fair, leaving her alone in the house. When two of the servants returned, it was to find Amy lying at the bottom of a short flight of stairs with her neck broken. Curiously, her headdress had not been dislodged by the fall, suggesting to contemporaries that she had been tidied up by an unknown assailant.

Modern medical knowledge, however, indicates that her death was an accident. Amy’s spine was probably so brittle from metastasized cancer that even the act of stepping down a stair or two – especially if she stumbled – could have caused her neck to snap. The obvious inference – which Dudley’s enemies eagerly seized upon – was that Amy had either been murdered, or had been driven to suicide by his neglect and the rumours that reached her that he was intent on marrying the Queen.

An inquest was ordered immediately, with Dudley understandably anxious to get to the truth of the matter and clear his name. Cecil’s part in the whole business was suspect. He had recently drawn the Spanish ambassador, Bishop de Quadra, aside and told him that he was in such despair that the Queen was going to marry Dudley that he was about to tender his resignation. According to the ambassador, ‘He ended by saying that Robert was thinking of killing his wife, who was publicly announced to be ill, although she was quite well, and would take very good care they did not poison her.’ If it is true, it is a very odd remark for Cecil, whose spies must have kept him fully informed of Amy Dudley’s state of health. It could only have been made with the intention of casting an irredeemable slur on Dudley’s reputation, giving Elizabeth no option but to distance herself from her favourite, or the excuse to extricate herself from a relationship that was getting out of hand. Perhaps prompted by Cecil, Elizabeth also made an apparently ill-timed remark to de Quadra that Dudley’s wife was at death’s door, making it look as if she had prior knowledge of it before the news reached court.

It looked very bad for Dudley. At the very least, it reflected poorly on him that one of the witnesses at the inquest recalled hearing Amy praying to God to deliver her from desperation. Although he might have wished his wife dead, there is no proof whatsoever that he had sent someone to kill her. The inquest exonerated him, but he could never quite shake off the suspicion that he was somehow implicated in her death. ‘The Queen of England is about to marry her horse keeper who has killed his wife to make room for her,’ sneered Mary, Queen of Scots, at the French court, where the English ambassador, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, was mortified by the scandal. On the contrary, there could be no possibility now of Dudley ever marrying the Queen, although this did nothing to quench his ambition to do so. Unlike Mary in a similar situation a few years later, when she married the suspected murderer of her husband, Elizabeth kept her head and her distance. Dudley was banished from court until a thorough investigation could be carried out.

Elizabeth never ceased to love Dudley. He remained the favourite. The two would quarrel and make up like lovers and she would not be able to resist showing her affection for him publicly. When she created him Earl of Leicester, she tickled his neck familiarly while he knelt before her, which ambassadors felt was most unseemly behaviour. She knew she would never marry Dudley, caring more for her survival and the peace and unity of her realm than for him, dear as he was to her. His continuing devotion and attention gave her the emotional sustenance she needed, while withholding her commitment kept him keen.

Elizabeth did not hesitate to slap him down when necessary. On one occasion, he had an altercation with one of her servants who had, rightly, barred one of his men from access to the Privy Chamber. When the servant cleverly appealed to Elizabeth, asking her if she was still Queen, or whether Dudley was King, she had rounded on Dudley, reminding him that she could undo him as rapidly as she had made him: ‘God’s death, my Lord, I have wished you well, but my favour is not so locked up in you that others shall not participate thereof … and if you think to rule here, I will take a course to see you forthcoming. I will have here but one mistress, and no master.’ It was not until the mid 1570s that Leicester finally gave up his pursuit. In the meantime, his presence was felt in Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations as he intervened whenever he could to hinder them, pitting the French against the Habsburgs as he intrigued with their rival ambassadors.

In a bid to keep Philip of Spain and the Habsburgs onside, Elizabeth entered into a long period of negotiation to marry the Emperor Ferdinand’s younger brother, Charles, who was also Philip’s cousin. His Habsburg connections would guarantee England the friendship of Spain and security against France. As a second son, he would not have Philip’s disadvantage when married to Mary, namely, that his attention was divided between England and his own territories. Charles was not even bad-looking. The stumbling block was always religion. There was no way that an ardent Catholic would consent to practise his religion in secret or attend the services of the English Church. For Elizabeth, there was a further consideration. Perhaps remembering the farce of her father’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, based on his falling in love with Holbein’s flattering portrait of her, she could never be induced to marry a man she had not met. Might not the archduke come to England in disguise, she suggested. It was to no avail. Habsburg princes did not offer themselves for inspection.

Parliament’s patience was wearing thin with Elizabeth’s prevarication. By 1563 the Lords had become so desperate that they were begging her to marry anyone: ‘where it shall please you, with whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you’. Some reasoned that she would be more likely to bear a child if she married a man to whom she was sexually attracted, such as Leicester, even though in one of his memoranda listing the pros and cons of Leicester versus the Archduke Charles, Cecil noted that ‘Nothing is increased by Marriadg of hym either in Riches, Estimation, Power.’

Failing marriage, the Lords were urging Elizabeth to name her successor. It was something she categorically refused to do, even when she was dying in 1603. Indeed, she had nearly died of smallpox in 1562 and the incident had demonstrated the precariousness of the situation. Her counsellors could not agree who her successor should be. Some thought Lady Catherine Grey, others Henry, Lord Hastings, a descendant of Edward IV. No one suggested Mary, Queen of Scots, for the obvious reason that she was a Catholic and would undo the religious settlement, but also because she was a foreigner, born out of the realm.

There was no obvious successor, even if Elizabeth had been willing to name that person, which she was not. She was furious when a joint delegation of the Lords and Commons in 1566 had the presumption to press the succession question, which was her prerogative to decide when she judged the time was right. She resented their implication that her reluctance to settle the succession showed her careless of the safety of the realm. On the contrary, she told them, it was for precisely this reason that she declined to name a successor. None of them had been a ‘second person’, as she had in her sister’s reign. ‘I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me … so shall never be my successor.’

Elizabeth was at pains to remind Parliament that ‘I am your anointed queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything.’ Yet she knew how to be gracious. She would not be forced to marry or declare her successor, but she could deflect their anger by turning a negative into a positive, for instance by voluntarily remitting a third of the Subsidy Bill which Parliament had been asked to vote. This was skilled management.

By 1569, Mary, Queen of Scots, was a prisoner in England and Spain was busy exploiting this Catholic threat to Elizabeth, supporting plots against her in England itself. A rapprochement with the French was in order. Elizabeth was now approaching her late thirties. She was physically fit. She could stand for hours, while those in audience with her wilted. Regular physical exertion, riding, hunting and dancing, and a careful diet meant that she had retained her trim figure, so that from a distance, with her fine posture and natural elegance, red wig and mask-like leaded make-up covering skin only slightly pitted by smallpox, she gave the illusion of a woman younger than her years. The Spanish ambassador might sneer that the game was up, that she could no longer maintain the fiction of her courtships, but the fact remained that she was still the most politically desirable match in Europe. Realizing that courtship could serve just as well as marriage in making alliances, Elizabeth played the game with aplomb for another ten years.

The degenerate brood of Catherine de Medici and Henri II of France had been too young to enter the lists as Elizabeth’s suitors in the first decade of her reign. When Catherine’s eldest surviving son, the immature, fourteen-year-old Charles IX, had first been raised as a possible suitor in 1565, Elizabeth had pretended interest but privately dismissed the suggestion as absurd. She had no wish to look a fool, an old woman leading a boy to the altar. But now the international situation had altered. The Pope had finally excommunicated Elizabeth and Spain had become a looming threat. The Habsburg negotiations with Archduke Charles had fizzled out in 1568 and England was looking increasingly isolated. Only by reviving discussions about a French match, holding out the tantalizing possibility of the English crown for one of Catherine de Medici’s younger sons, could Elizabeth hope to prevent the alarming possibility of a Catholic, Franco-Spanish alliance against heretic England.

Catherine proposed her second and favourite son, Henri of Anjou. Eighteen years Elizabeth’s junior, he was unpromising material. Dissolute, homosexual, unstable and sinisterly handsome, he was a pawn of the Catholic Guise relatives of the deposed Mary, Queen of Scots, who were now leading the pro-Spanish party in France. As Elizabeth’s worst nightmare was of Mary, Queen of Scots, sprung from confinement, married to Anjou and sitting on her throne, she was willing to make a play for Anjou. Inevitably, the negotiations foundered on religion.

By 1572 Catherine’s third son, Francis, Duke of Alençon – who was to take his elder brother’s title of Anjou after the latter’s accession to the French throne as Henri III in 1574 – had turned eighteen and was offered to Elizabeth as a more compliant candidate. She began reluctantly and the negotiations dragged, until in 1578 Anjou sent a gentleman of his household, Jean de Simier, to woo her by proxy. He overwhelmed her with French gallantry and they quickly established a rapport. It was Simier who turned the tables on Leicester when, as usual, he tried to scupper negotiations, by revealing that Leicester had married in secret. It was no coincidence that Elizabeth’s rejected suitor chose as his second wife Lettice Knollys, the widowed Countess of Essex. Lettice was the daughter of Elizabeth’s beloved cousin, Catherine Carey, and Sir Francis Knollys. The stiff Elizabethan portrait of her cannot conceal her vibrant sensuality; she had Elizabeth’s red hair and the dark, mischievous Boleyn eyes. Elizabeth, who would brook no rivals, was absolutely furious. Leicester was banished from court, while she began to pursue her negotiations with Anjou with a vengeance.

The young Anjou had already championed the Huguenots’ cause in France and had become involved in the Netherlands, which were in revolt against their ruler, Philip of Spain. It was this that piqued Elizabeth’s interest. She could not possibly stand by and watch the Flemish ports along the Channel – England’s traditional trading partners – swallowed up by a French duke.

When Anjou came to England incognito in August 1579, Elizabeth entered on the performance of her life. He was the only one of her illustrious foreign suitors to court her in person and he came closest to winning her. The forty-six-year-old Queen and the French Prince twenty years her junior made an oddly assorted couple. Anjou was small of stature with a big nose and a skin badly pitted by smallpox, but it seems he had so much sex appeal that these imperfections were soon overlooked. He was the embodiment of charm and good manners. Elizabeth, who had never seen a relationship through to fulfilment, placed inordinate importance on the rituals of courtship and Anjou did not disappoint. During the thirteen days they spent together at Greenwich and Richmond, entertained by balls, parties and banquets, he played the game with conviction, showering her with praise and compliments, declaring his passion with all the appearance of sincerity. Elizabeth appeared enraptured and, with her penchant for giving nicknames, affectionately labelled him her Frog. For the middle-aged Elizabeth who had never surrendered to sexual passion, it was a delicious fantasy and she revelled in it.

The courtship was balm to Elizabeth’s bruised feelings after Leicester’s betrayal – all the more satisfactory as he was back at court and watching the very public courtship with mounting jealousy and agitation. He was so taken in by Elizabeth’s adroit performance that he actually had the temerity to ask her if she was still a virgin. Having pressured Elizabeth unremittingly since she came to the throne to marry, loyal Englishmen began expressing reservations. Now that the candidate was actually here and Elizabeth was showing every sign of being in earnest, they decided they did not want a Frenchman and a Catholic for their king after all. They could not forget the French royal family’s encouragement of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots in Paris seven years before. Nor, now Elizabeth had reached the end of her childbearing years, was the game worth the candle any more.

Their anxieties found voice in a series of letters, ballads and pamphlets, of which the most notorious was John Stubbs’s The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage if the Lord forbid not the banns by letting Her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof. It was likely that the two arch-opponents of the match, Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham, were behind this diatribe. Elizabeth was outraged at the insult to Anjou, a royal prince and a guest, and the criticism of her intentions. Stubbs and the publisher were condemned to suffer the full vigour of the law for the crime of seditious libel, having their right hands chopped off before a horrified crowd. Afterwards, Stubbs defiantly raised the other hand, crying ‘God save her Majesty!’ and fainted. It was a rare public relations disaster for Elizabeth.

Elizabeth’s great strength as a ruler was her ability to listen, her sensitivity to public opinion, and an awareness of what was politically possible. Deciding that she would not go ahead with a match that bitterly divided her Council and was so displeasing to her people, she moved towards the grand finale of her last courtship. She had to extricate herself from the marriage carefully while leaving in its place friendship with France. When the French envoys arrived in London to ratify the marriage treaty, they were splendidly entertained, but found they could not get the Queen to discuss business. In July 1581 she wrote Anjou a loving letter, explaining that she could not marry him; she had already warned him that the match might founder on his insistence on practising his religion privately.

In rejecting Anjou’s suit, she still needed to find a way of binding him to her. A second visit from her ardent suitor in November of that same year provided the opportunity. Confronted when she was walking with him in the gallery at Greenwich by the French ambassador with an ultimatum from the French King to declare her intentions regarding his brother, Elizabeth had no hesitation in telling him, ‘You may write this to the French King, that the Duke shall be my husband.’ With that she took off a ring and placed it on Anjou’s finger, kissing him on the lips. In this way, she convinced Anjou of her personal good intentions, even if, as inevitably happened, she was prevented from realizing them by the disapproval of her Council, Parliament and people. Unlike her sister, Elizabeth was too wise to force the issue. Anjou was sent off with a consolation prize of £60,000 – a loan for his adventures in the Netherlands, where he was to be Elizabeth’s champion.

When Anjou departed, Elizabeth put on a moving display of grief, although the Spanish ambassador’s spies told him that in the privacy of the Privy Chamber ‘she danced for very joy at getting rid of him’. Elizabeth might well have wept in the silent hours of the night, however. As a queen, she had played her role to perfection. She had strung out her courtships for over twenty years, as a brilliant ploy in the game of international diplomacy. She had given every appearance of acceding to demands to marry, while managing to avoid what was personally distasteful to her and possibly ruinous. But the cost to her personal happiness had been great. If she had ever harboured hopes of having a husband and children, those hopes were now irredeemably dashed. She was facing a lonely old age.

To the consternation of her Council, Elizabeth had actually broken down and wept when it had become clear that the marriage with Anjou could never proceed. Something of the strain of her divided personality, the dual role she was forced to play as queen and woman, is captured in her poem, ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’:

I grieve and dare not show my discontent;

I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;

I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.

I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,

Since from myself another self I turned.

There was nothing left but to re-invent herself as a Virgin Queen.